New York Film Festival 2017

[Chris Knipp]

PHILIPPE GARREL: L'ENFANT SECRET (1979) - NYFF REVIVALS


ANNE WIAZEMSKY IN L'ENFANT SECRET

Sad couple, lost child, cinematic poetry

L'Enfant secret/The Secret Child is a late Seventies example of Philippe Garrel's typically moody autobiographical explorations of the depredations of artistic life. Though it's one of the most famous of them, winner of the 1982 Prix Jean Vigo, it was long impossible to find. Except for a DVD produced in Japan, it was available only in a copy in the hands of Garrel himself. Now a handsome, restored print has been made, with clear images and sharp sound, and it's being shown at the Metrograph Theater in New York and as part of the Revivals section of the 2017 New York Film Festival.

L'Enfant secret concerns a man, a woman, and a gradually abandoned child named "Swann." Like Garrel's other films that I've seen, it's stark, harsh, and poetic, this quality emphasized by contrasty black-and-white images further heightened (or restored to original intent) in the remastered print, along with (also intentional) complete fall-outs of sound, alternating with spotty dialogue and a warm keyboard score. This is vintage Garrel, stoical, arbitrary, moody. It's like a telegraphic diary, not very good storytelling, not very good entertainment, rudimentary in style, but capable of leaving a viewer feeling devastated with its ruthless depiction of life full of promise and life thrown away.

A summary supplied on IMDb describes L'Enfant secret as "four chapters based on the birth of a 'secret child', or a film, with chapter titles: 'La séction Césarienne' (Caesarian section: a descriptive detail introducing the mother); 'Le dernier guerrier' (the last warrior: how the father sees himself); 'Le cercle ophydique' (the serpent's closed circle: the couple reunites at the psychiatric ward); 'Les forêts désenchantées (unfairy [sic] forests: the film in the making)."

But if this is indeed what this cryptic, stoical film is actually about, it's not what an unprepared viewer sees, which isn't filmmaking and career development but moments in the lives of Élie (Anne Wiazemsky) a young woman who has a child by an actor who doesn't show up to be the father, and who later begins to use IV drugs. She becomes involved with Jean-Baptiste (Henri de Maublanc). He is a filmmaker, or a man who wishes to make films. In scenes of him, or Élie, or the two of them, Jean-Baptiste suffers depression, or brain damage from on overdose of LSD, or both, and he winds up in a sanatorium, where he suffers the damaging effects of shock treatments those close to him learn about only later.

Perhaps one can't or oughtn't be an "unprepared viewer" of Garrel's films, because they are heavily autobiographical, so some rudimentary knowledge of his life is a necessary subtext, and Jean-Baptiste can be understood as a version of himself. Note that Maurice Garrel, Philippe's father, was an actor, who appears in his 2005 Sixties epic of a doomed poet, Les amants réguliers/Regular Lovers (NYFF 2005) starring Philippe's son, Louis Garrel, uniting three generations of this French cinematic dynasty. I was struck in L'Enfant secret by how much Henri de Maublanc, with his big stylish mop of dark hair, resembled Philippe's now 34-year-old son. It's as if Philippe brought up his son to take over the key role in his endless autobiographical sagas - except that Louis has developed quite a varied career on his own, apart from playing in no less than seven of his father's films. He has played in more of Christophe Honoré's, besides co-starring in his own debut aa director a couple of years ago and playing in films by a number of other directors. Louis's fame has become more mainstream than his father's. But his father, whose greatest recognition always has come at the Venice Film Festival, retains an unspoiled avant-garde cachet.

At the point when he made L'Enfant secret, however, Garrel had made a conscious decision to turn away from the focus in his films on his great love, the German singer-songwriter Nico, with whom he had been involved for ten years, ending in 1979, and if not to cease being autobiographical in his movies, at least to approach his life in them in a new way, aided by a new collaboration with the Belgian-born scenarist Annette Wademant. This was Garrel's fifteenth film, and he's made seventeen since.

L'enfant secret begins with Élie and a young man, and the implied conception of her child, whom she names Swann, evidently after Proust's character. It's only later that Jean-Baptiste enters the scene when he and Élie exchange their first kiss in a villa outside Paris. She goes on tour as an actress, and Jean-Baptiste has his depression. She reappears, and so does the now grown up Swann, a toddler who can walk fast, and Jean-Baptiste has regained hope and struggles to regain his memories. But she gives up the child, who she doesn't want and she says doesn't "doesn't love me anymore." Now, it seems it's she who needs help, as we see her brandishing a needle and suggesting to Jean-Baptiste that the drug is "good," and that he may like to try it.

In the center of the film, Jean-Baptiste may seem to take over. But the egocentrism of Garrel's films may be countered by his collaboration with Annette Wademant on the writing. Anne Wiazemsky arguably continues to affect the viewer more than de Maublac, with her sad, soulful face: she is pure emotion, while he, even when he's smashing a window and cutting his hand, is a little more like a fashion model.

But that's okay, because one of the things that makes you want to go back to Garrel's films is their link with the powerful rudiments of film, with early movie history. The impressionistic - and favorable - 1982 review of L'Enfant secret in Cahiers du Cinéma by Serge Daney doesn't translate very well - it reduces to a network of jottings and allusions - but one thing holds true: his comment that at some moments, like the one when Jean-Baptiste struggles to light a butt he's found under a bench, this film reminds us of Griffith or Chaplin.

L'Enfant secret, 92 mins., premiered in France 1979 but had French theatrical release 2 Dec. 1982 and showed at the Berlinale 26 Feb. 1983. A few other later festival showings. Now digitally remastered version begins theatrical premiere at the Metrograph (NYC) 18 Oct. 2017, also showing in NYFF Revivals section 10 Oct. at 6:00pm, with Garrel in person at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center (Lincoln Center). Screened for this review at the Metrograph 23 Sept. 2017. The Metrograph is staging a two-part retrospective of Philippe Garrel's films; Garrel will be on hand for part of that too. For the program of Part 1 (13 films) go here. Philippe Garrel's new film, L'amant d'un jour/Lover for a Day, is part of the Main Slate of the 2017 NYFF. Anne Wiazemsky died 5 Oct. 2017 in Paris at 70 (Garrel is 69).

[Chris Knipp]

RUBEN ÖSTLUND: THE SQUARE (2017)


TERRY NOTARY IN THE SQUARE

Östlund's new film is a prizewinning dazzler, but lacks clear focus

Östlund'S The Square is a crisp and thrilling festival film, full of drama, shock, and hilarity, and with a terrific soundtrack - but contents one has some difficulty imagining a mainstream audience putting up with or having the patience for, since it's weird and two hours and twenty-two minutes long. Nonetheless it has a US distributor, Magnolia. It's a good-looking film, notable for a powerful use of music and ambient sound. It was great to watch it at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center, surely the best place to watch, but also particularly to hear, a movie in New York City, if not the whole country (even if it could use some new seats).

How did this film win the Palme d'Or at Cannes? Perhaps first of all for being intense, entertaining, and unclassifiable. It's like a performance piece and also about a performance piece. Its main character, Christian (the suavely awkward and watchable Claes Bang), is the director of the hippest major art museum in Stockholm. Not wholly unintentionally, the movie confuses him with an artist and he - and the public - confuses art with attention-getting PR.

The Square is cool, but too diffuse to deserve being called the best of Cannes. Östlund crams miscellaneous anecdotes into the film from here and there. It's an omnibus film, curiously scattershot after the intense focus of the director's previous one, Force Majeure, though it's got a morally weak protagonist, like that one, as well as a malevolent child, like in Östlund's more clinical and troubling Play (NYFF 2011). It's got too much going on. In that, it's just the opposite of Force Majeure, which focussed relentlessly on one man's moment of cowardice and its drawn-out consequences. Christian is a morally weak man too, like Force Majeure's Tomas, but he's high-profile, powerful, and experienced at putting on an elegant, sophisticated front, which is very different from Tomas.

Force Majeure had one dramatic natural set piece, but just one. The Square has several, and Östlund winds things up with a spectacular set piece, of a motion capture artist (Tarry Notary) as a wild man terrorizing a glittering crowd of the rich in a gilded, palatial hall. This is more and even better performance art, dazzling and rather scary - but it doesn't tie things together. It's just one more impressive, stylish attention-getter. The Square sure is strange stuff coming from a Swede. It does vaguely remind one of Michael Haneke. Some of its barbs at the expense of contemporary (earthworks, conceptual, and performance) art are well deserved, but in their blanket quality there's an air of philistinism about them, too, a weakness of the scattershot methods.

In the first set piece, Christian gets cleverly mugged in a big public square in initially scary, disorienting circumstances. There is some kind of big fracas in a crowd and Christian thinks he's helping a guy who seems terrified and menaced by persons unknown. When they separate, he finds his wallet, phone, and even cufflinks have been deftly lifted. It's actually a conventual ploy, but it's staged dramatically - with Östlund's good use of loud sound effects and mockingly soothing music throughout - so it fools us, because we're not clued in on what's happening. Anything could have been going on, including performance art. Is robbery a kid of performance art: performance art a form of robbery?

This experience of being robbed while thinking he's being helpful is why later Christian commissions a public artwork called "The Square," to be a space, in a public place, that's guaranteed to be honest and safe and free, for those who choose to make it so. This is a symbolic reference to the social contract, also a reference to the world of Östlund's father's or grandfather's times when you could leave a child in a public square and know he'd be safe. Ironically, that's now reduced to an art concept.

Christian also has two young men who seem journalists, but apparently are hired to do PR for the museum. If they're a comedy team, they're a dangerous one, since they later create a promotional video online to attract interest in "The Square" that is so violent and tasteless it causes public outcry. The two young men are shock artists themselves, and Christian's mistake is to let them act without supervision.

Claes Bang is great doing a combination of clumsy foolishness and experienced coverup, but the editor needed to cut out some of this stuff. And why is there all this running up and down the parallel stairs of two apartment buildings, Christian's posh one and the poor banlieue one? Why must Christian drag his two young daughters back there? After a while the humor wears thin and the mockery of contemporary art is, as mentioned, far too heavy-handed. The send-up of today's art in the age of Banksy and Ai Weiwei as hard to distinguish from advertising or propaganda is valid, but there's no distinction made between frauds and authentic artists of the last fifty years.

One of the major episodes is Christian's effort, with his museum assistant Michael (Christopher Læssø), to scam the robber into coming forward and returning his wallet, phone, and cufflinks: they go in Christian's Tesla to a ghetto-ish development on the edge of town he's tracked his phone to, where Christian distributes threatening letters to all the apartments in the building. (This apparently is something that once worked, in Östlund's hometown of Göthenberg:* it might work less well a town that's 50% bigger. The episode isn't helped by being implausible. ) This shows up Christian's fear of the poor, one supposes. Only isn't that perfectly normal, to be uncomfortable doing this? Naturally, Michael, who is black, finds a Tesla not a very comfortable place to sit and wait in a ghetto area. Christian winds up having an aggressive kid, aggrieved by the letter, on his case - one of his endless problems.

The film ends with Christian's resignation, due to the offensive publicity video he shouldn't have let happen. Only it doesn't end, because it drags on and on. Bang's manipulation of art world bureaucratese is convincing, but enough is enough.

The humor is at the expense of the privileged, like Christian, who cater to the hyper-rich. But men are also a target, and Östlund can't resist working in Elizabeth Moss as an American journalist, who does a short interview with Christian and later has sex with him, then gets on his case about it. All good fun? But also a bit embarrassing. Östlund uses threats of, or actual, violence and loud noises skillfully to keep us viewers on our toes, and various well-staged scenes have theatrical panache, but in the end they begin to seem like an enjoyable smokescreen to cover up the lack of unity and focus of this overlong but otherwise enjoyable and original film. One knows Östlund will go on making interesting and increasingly ambitious films, hopefully leaving out the kitchen sink next time.

The Square, 2 hrs. 22 mins., debuted at Cannes 20 May 2017, winning the Palme d'Or. Nearly two dozen other international festivals. Screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival, showing 19 Sept. 2017. Limited US release by Magnolia Pictures to begin 27 Oct. 2017.
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*He said so in a festival Q&A.


CHRISTOPHER LÆSSØ, CLAES BANG IN THE SQUARE

[Chris Knipp]

AGNIESZKA HOLLAND, KASLA ADAMIK: SPOOR/POKOT (2017)


AGNIESZKA MANDAT IN SPOOR

Admiration for a crazy lady

From a novel, this new movie by Agnieszka Holland and her daughter expresses an intense, boisterous, and rather disturbing admiration for a vigorous nut case of a lady in late middle age, Janina Duszejko (Agnieszka Mandat) - she has to tell people not to put an "n" in the name and insists they just call her "Duszejko," never "Janina" or "Ms." A great admirer of the doctrines of William Blake, she lives in Kotlina Kłodzka, a virtual nature preserve on the Polish-Czech border that's not a preserve at all: its bristling with birds, wild boar, deer and other wildlife, but the macho local culture involves constant hunting and poaching - killing out of season that "Duszejko" abhors. Correspondingly, the story is punctuated by hunting rules, with title cards showing what animals are in season month by month and what ones aren't, through winter to summer and back to winter again.

This looks like the chronicle of an eccentric woman in her sixties who becomes the suspect/ad hoc investigator of a crime story as a series of murders occur, but it turns into an animal activist drama whose hero gets away with murder. It's suggested, in passing, that astrology, a big hobby of Duszejko's, is a good thing too. This is impressive, boisterous filmmaking, full of noise, action, and life. It's also sprawling and troubling in its apparent advocacy of questionable strategies. Spoor is an oddball work by a famous director, a curiosity, a genre-bender, that may find and hold its own niche.

The key apparently lies in the source novel by Olga Tokarczuk, her 2009 Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead. Tokarczuk is a both critically acclaimed and commercially successful writer who seems to have a strong bent for provocation. Speaking of her more recent 2014 The Books of Jacob, bluntly depicting Polish treatment of the Jews, the Economist reports how she has had abuse heaped upon her by the country's new conservative patriots. Drvive Your Plough is likewise described in a Polish lit website in English as having caused a good deal of "consternation among Polish readers" for "turning to popular literature" with a novel in the "crime genre," focusing on a "central character" who's hard to take, and by the additional claim that the book is a "metaphysical thriller" and therefore somehow resonant with prfound meaning. Judging by this film, there's kookiness where that profundity should be.

One reviewer of the film pointedly claims that the lead actress, Agnieszka Mandat, looks like Aileen Wuornos. But she may as much resemble the director herself, as her daughter rather resembles her. Duszejko admits she's unqualified to teach but is a part-time instructor to school kids in English to keep busy. She lives off by herself in a rough but rangey cottage with two big female dogs. She starts breaking the rules when the dogs disappear by bringing out her class in the middle of the night to hunt for the dogs. She is bereaved, and doesn't get over it, and rails against all the men in authority and power around town - the richest man, the mayor, the chief of police, the local priest. We get the message pretty bluntly when the priest condemns Duszejko's pet cemetery, firmly declaring that animals have no souls.

Killings are dotted through the year. When the hot weather comes, Duszejko meets up with an entomologist doing research in the woods(Miroslav Krobot) and they have a lively and vigorously physical late-blooming affair that's also a union of activists against the world. The entomologist rails against the loggers who are killing off the larvae of insects that are essential to the ecology of the region - of the planet.

Mandat is impressive, alternately scary and beautiful, and carries the action well. Spoor's energy and flow are fun and impressive. At its best moments, the film effortlessly conveys a sense of burgeoning nature and human events out of control. But it feels out of control too, its police procedural element never providing the pace and backbone it might. Filmmaking skills come to feel wasted in the repetitiousness and excessive length. Spoor frequently harangues the viewer with its - or Tokarczuk's - feminism and ecological activism. The score by Antoni Komasa-Lazarkiewicz, typically, is hard-driving and energetic but a bit monotonous too. Peter Bradshaw is on target when he calls Spoor "watchable in its quirky and wayward way, with some funny moments – [but] shallower than it thinks." Its provocations only weaken its arguments and one wonders if in their enthusiasm Holland and her daughter-collaborator have lost whatever subtlety the novel source may have had.(Metacritic rating: 61%/)

Spoor/Pokot, 128 mins, debuted at the Berlinale; a dozen-plus other festivals. Screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival, 30 Sept. 2017, with a Q&A by the filmmakers afterwards.

[Chris Knipp]

VALESKA GRISEBACH: WESTERN (2017)


MEINHARD NEUMAN IN WESTERN

Portrait of an estranged loner

One should be wary of a filmmaker's expressed intentions when watching her film: so with Valeska Grisebach's Western, whose title, both explicit and playful, it's best to ignore. The main character looks a bit like a cowboy hero, and there's macho competition, even a horse, but different things are going on from what you'll find in the Hollywood genre. These are Germans working on a water system construction project in a rural part of Bulgaria. The "newbie" in the group is Meinhard (Meinhard Neumann), a tall, grizzled non-actor with a moustache somewhat resembling Sam Elliott, who, despite little knowledge of Bulgarian spends a lot of his time connecting with the locals, with complicated consequences that have more to do with the European Union than with the Wild West.

In the end the genre aspects do come to life, but in a highly original, contemporary way, and without the satisfying resolutions of the traditional genre - a difference that has both good and bad aspects. There are many specific, interesting scenes here, but it might have helped to locate them within a more focused dramatic structure. Despite its several interesting characters, Western winds up feeling patchy and diffuse. It's hard to say what this is all about - it's left unresolved, but the fascination is with the joys and shortcomings of communicating without language and stuff that happens when strangers are planted in a place like this.

Meinhard is the main focus, along with several Bulgarian women he connects with (Veneta Fragnova, Viara Borisova); Adrian (Syuleyman Alilov Letifov), the Bulgarian male who becomes his local "best friend;" and the boorish German crew boss Vincent (Reinhardt Wetrek). Meinhard is wordlessly repelled by Vincent and his coworkers at the outset and seems to spend much of his time exploring: in fact a weakness of the film is that it conveys little sense of the actual work done by the Germans or for Meinhard's part in it.

A white horse wanders wild and free, and Meinhard manages to ride it bareback. As a sign of local conflicts and implied "colonialism" or at least condescension and economic nationalism, Vincent plants a German flag on top of a tall pole at the work site - which quickly disappears. Some of the Bulgarians harbor old resentments, while the Germans talk about finally being back "after seventy years." Meinhard emerges as a "legionnaire" who did unexplained stints in Afghanistan or Iraq, with no home to be homesick about, no family, no wife, no kids, lonely, longing for connection, his estrangement from his fellow Germans on the work crew a sign he may not be good at really connecting for long. He puts on nice shirts in the evening and goes into town, spruced up, ready to charm and make nice - for a while. In the end, Adrian gives back the knife he's gifted to his son, Wanko (Kevin Bashev) saying "He doesn't need this," and asks pointedly, "What do you want here?" (Subtitles translate both languages for us, somewhat blurring the effect of the non-verbal communications.)

The film has a documentary realism and often seems real, disturbingly so in an incident that occurs with a horse. Mostly this reads as an unusual study of how people communicate when they have hardly any language in common; or long-held national prejudices; of conflicts between outsiders and locals. And it's a somewhat enigmatic study of Meinhard, a loner searching for connection - who makes remarkable progress in making local friends that comes in handy when the Germans encounter hostilities, but winds up still a stranger to everyone, though we share with interest in his bold and intriguing little adventures.

Western 120 mins., debuted in the Un Certain Regard series of Cannes 2017. Screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival shown at 8:30 pm 1 Oct. 2017 at Elinor Bunin Theater, Lincoln Center. The director and actor Syuleyman Alilov Letifov were on hand for a Q&A with Programming Director Dennis Lim. The film will be released later by Cinema Guild.

[Chris Knipp]

LUCRECIA MARTEL: ZAMA (2017)


DANIEL GIMÉNEZ CACHO IN ZAMA (THE ACTOR'S PARENTS WERE EXILES FROM SPAIN)

A strange and inventive slow burner, long awaited and long delayed

Based on a 1956 novel by Antonio Di Benedetto, which in her country is a cult classic, this is Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel's first feature in nine years, since The Headless Woman (NYFF 2008), which had followed the much admired 2001 La Ciénaga and 2004 The Holy Girl. The story set in the late eighteenth century focuses on a petty official of the Spanish crown, Diego de Zama (Daniel Giménez Cacho), living in a remote outpost on the Paraguay river, endlessly awaiting transfer to Buenos Aires that never comes. "While not much happens (star Daniel Giménez Cacho largely wanders around, perplexed, under a three-cornered hat), when it finally does, it’s violently unsettling. This hallucinatory work vaguely suggests a stoned, swampy relative of 1970s Werner Herzog, but invents its own cinematic language," wrote Jonathan Romney in the Guardian from Venice when the film debuted. And that's an understatement. The ending is apocalyptic and deeply ironic, a sort of "don't ever go to live where there are natives" message. The film is slow going much of the way, but nobody can complain it lacks drama at the end. It's jazzed up with periodic popular music that reminded me of Wong Kar-wai's Happy Together.

Zama is full of enigmatic and inconclusive scenes and colorful, made-up period details and it revels in exoticism; the cinematography is handsome, the color gorgeous. Martel has explained that since the novel source supplies little physical detail, she immersed herself in a lengthy book by an eighteenth-century writer, but would up making much of the detail up. Much is made of wigs, and men are constantly seen taking them off and putting them back on. A governor has red painted nails and wears, supposedly, the ears of an executed wrongdoer on strings around his neck; a tall black slave wears a long blue dress coat and a loin cloth. In the opening scene, richly conveying a sense of strangeness, Zama lies in the bushes watching a group of naked white women by the water covered with mud who yell "voyeur" at him. When he beats a retreat one runs up and grabs his leg. He smacks her away, very hard This is intended to convey that he is not a nice man. Though he's a victim, it's not certain he doesn't deserve his fate. He has a wife, and kids who are growing up without him, in Buenos Aires, but maybe they're better off without him. Maybe colonialism and macho sexism deserve purgatorial sufferings.

An English translation of the book by Di Benedetto was recently published by The New York Review of Books, and there is a 5,000-word review of it by J.M Coetzee in the 19 Jan. 2017 issue of the magazine. From Coetzee's summary I learned details that weren't clear in the film, notably why Zama has been demoted and is always longing for the earlier days when he was a corregidor addressed as "Doctor" with his own district to run. It's because Spain has instituted a new, tighter and more centralized administrative system requiring that officials be Spanish-born, and Zama is an americano, born in the New World, so he is now doomed to be forever second in command.

A long conversation between Zama and a bewigged, dressed up and luridly made up lady focuses on their longing to be somewhere European, where people don't sweat all the time. This is a flirtation, but a useless one. He has a native woman and squalling child. Now he refuses to go to a brothel because he'll only have sex with a white woman; or at least so he says. His dream of a love life is unfulfilled like his dream of escape to a more civilized place - in the film, anyway.

Martel's adaptation of the book leaves out sexual details, while adding attractive visuals like a superb palm-strewn swampland and llamas around the corner in doorways. The novel is a first-person narrative, which has been dropped. In the Q&A Martel said everything that happens and all the dialogue is the first person narration of the film. But despite an impressive mise-en-scène and editing that flows with confidence, the self-conscious complexity of the central character has been subsumed into something more stoical and stolid, just as narrative action has to some extent been subsumed into exotic scene-staging in which the somewhat tricky chronology becomes only harder to follow.

At one point clearly the action jumps forward to some years later when Zama is bearded and older looking. Zama is transferred to a worse outpost, but some of the same people are sent to be with him. He has a widow as a lover now, who lives apart, and has born him a sickly son. Much is made of a young man, Manuel Fernández (Nahuel Cano) who's writing a book on, as it were, company time, and the gobernador wants Zama to read the book, and get rid of Manuel Fernández, but he's uncooperative. Much is made, in Di Benedetto's book (according to Coetzee) of the riddle of a woman, or two women, in a house where Zama takes up residence because he's low on money. But, Coetzee reports, the novel, though long in gestation (which fits with Lucrecia Martel's experience with this film), was hastily written, and this means details are confusing, especially in the third part.

It would remiss not to mention the story's mysterious, recurrent villain, Vicuã Porto (Matheus Nachtergaele), Zama's nemesis, who's mentioned early on but never appears in person - or appears to - until the final scenes. He's not just Zama's nemesis but "a bandit of mythical status—no one is even sure what he looks like—on whom all the colony’s woes are blamed." His story is somewhat simplified from the novel's version, but he's constantly referred to, and enters, in one incarnation, for a decisive encounter with Zama and others sent to combat him, at the end.

Zama is an exotic, delicious to look at, slow-moving but fast-ending film that isn't fully satisfying the first time and might require repeated viewings, preferably in combination with study of Di Benedetto's novel, now finally available to Anglophone readers and clearly requiring careful study in its own right. It's not certain that Zama the film can ever be fully satisfying, but one can revel in its imagery and ponder its meanings.

Zama, 115 mins., debuted at Venice Sept. 2017 and is Argentina's Best Foreign Oscar entry. A half dozen international festivals including Toronto, Haifa, London, Busan and the New York Film Festival, as part of which it was screened for this review in Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center 2 Oct. 2017 followed by a Q&A with Martel and NYFF programmer Dennis Lim.


A STUNNING LANDSCAPE FROM LATE IN THE FILIM

[Chris Knipp]

LUCA GUADAGNINO: CALL ME BY YOUR NAME (2017)


TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET AND ARMIE HAMMER IN CALL ME BY YOUR NAME

Summer love

Many lovers of André Aciman's intense 2007 gay romance (plus coming out and coming of age) novel set in 1983, Call Me by Your Name, are embracing James Ivory's screen adaptation, directed by Luca Guadagnino. And one can see why. The combination, along with Armie Hammer as Oliver, the 23-year-old visiting research assistant, and Timothée Chalamet as his professorial host's bright, ripe teenage son Elio, seems just about perfect - especially since the Ivory-Guadagnino adapting team have wisely chosen to keep the novel's sometimes overwrought, over-analyzing first-person intensity more on the light and "frothy" side - without tempering the sensuality. Chalamet in particular is a revelation, but his young-guy role is ably anchored in the gay love story by the 6'5", deep-voiced Hammer. Both throw themselves into the brief but intense summer romance set in northern Italy, providing the core of what turns out to be a beautiful film, Guadagnino's most straightforward effort and greatest success so far.

The romance, with its strong (yet somewhat vague) physical, sexual side, is the thing, a sort of youthful explosion both sudden and long-awaited. The delay, filled with Elio's endless questioning and self-doubt about whether he likes Oliver or Oliver likes him, when the mutual attraction turns out to have been there from the first - this is deftly conveyed by Ivory's dialogue in a single conversation, making up for all those agonizing and teasing inner monologues in the book, though in the movie as in the book it's halfway through before the two guys even kiss.

What's lost is the emotional richness and sadness of the novel's years- and even decades-later followups that show this affair was the love of Elio's life, while Oliver moved on and (clear in the film) got married very soon after, not that the affair didn't mean a lot to Oliver too. This is where a novel - especially by an avowed Proustian, indeed Proust scholar - can provide intellectual subtlety a film lacks. But what Guadagnino can provide, as he showed in his impressive feature debut I Am Love/Io sono l'amore, is pulsating physicality. Every soft boiled egg, every cup of coffee, every dip in the lake and boyish erection is savored, while many moments are heightened by a background of Elio's intensified keyboard playing.

Chalamet arrives with a delicate beauty plus a dash of bravado, and quite a skill set. Elio, and so Chalamet, is fluent in English, French and Italian, dances with abandon, smokes with panache, makes love to a young woman, Marzia (Esther Garrel), plays piano and guitar, and has sex with a (large, ripe) peach. That last act may be his greatest challenge, but the actor is also, impressively, closeup on camera for the long final shot where he smiles and weeps and turns away, his face alone conveying the novel's last chapters' messages. Early on, he plays a Bach air on guitar and when Oliver requests a keyboard version, improvises it in three different styles. But Hammer as Oliver too is an impressive mix, hunk as smart as ephebe, casual with his trendy salutation, "Later," physically relaxed and friendly, but dazzling in his etymological knowhow.

It's an Italian but also international setting, a splendid summer and holiday house with a cook and gardener-driver, the nearby towns vague in the novel but apparently shot around Lucca for the movie, the place inherited, one gathers, by Elio's mother (Amira Casar). This is where Guadagnino comes through especially, since he is assured with the local people and atmosphere, including a comical couple arguing over politics in Italian at an alfresco home dinner party (in the novel these are nightly).

It isn't forgotten that both Oliver and Elio's family are Jewish, though Elio says his mother (for local consumption in this Italian town without minorities) - and this is 1983, after all, a fact subtly conveyed throughout - are "Jews of discretion": they don't broadcast it. A nice detail is that when the relationship gets going Elio breaks out a little gold Star of David he has like Oliver's and wears it around his neck as a token. Not that in the movie some details from Aciman's novel don't become a bit fuzzy, including the two young men's relationships with young women, Oliver's poker-playing in town, the identities of the cook, Mafalda (Vanda Capriolo) and gardener-driver, Anchise (Antonio Rimoldi) - while Oliver's scholarly accomplishments come across early on as a stunt, like Elio's keyboard acumen.

What to me seemed over-emphasized in the film's shortened context is the almost sermonizingly "understanding" speech of Elio's father (Michael Stuhlbarg) after Oliver is gone, about the relationship he and Oliver have had. It seems also unnecessary on the two guy's short final trip together to inject sequences of spectacular nature, when the novel has them in Rome. But these flaws don't keep the movie from feeling like a success that touches us and leaves one with much to ponder. This is a rather ideal novel adaptation that makes one feel why such things are worth doing.

And this one has a special resonance. I can find no better way to end than the conclusion of Jordan Hoffman's own admirably specific Guardian review: "Call Me By Your Name is a masterful work because of the specificity of its details. This is not a love story that 'just happens to be gay'. The level of trust and strength these characters share brings a richness that is not necessarily known to a universal audience. But the craft on display from all involved is an example, yet again, of how movies can create empathy in an almost spiritual way. This is a major entry in the canon of queer cinema."

Call Me by Your Name, 132 mins., debuted at Sundance and Berlin Jan. 2017, showing in at least two dozen festivals. Screened for this review at the New York Film Festival Tues. 3 Oct. 2017 at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center, with a Q&A involving Luca Guadagnino, Armie Hammer, and Timothée Chalamet and a typically enthusiastic audience. People love this movie. And so do critics: Metacritic rating 97% [4 Oct. 2017; now 93% [11 Jan. 2018). US theatrical release 24 Nov. 2017.

[Chris Knipp]

JR, AGNÈS VARDA: FACES PLACES/VISAGES, VILLAGES (2017)


JR and Agnès Varda in Faces Places

Façades


French cinematic icon Agnès Varda, as I noted about her beautiful 2008 documentary self-portrait, The Beaches of Agnès (Rendez-Vous 2009) , likes to be told what she wants to hear. So rather than a "documentary" her new film made with 33-year-old photo installation artist (or photographer/muralist) JR is best seen as aa beautifully staged presentation. It is a showcase for her and JR. In fact they work out a duo act, and a very smooth one it is. They join up to travel around France doing what he does. He has a Mercedes van painted to look like a giant camera, in which he can quickly process photographs and make very large prints suitable to be plastered on walls, which is what they do.

Along the way the 88-year-old but very vigorous (if fragile) Varda calls the shots. And in any case, she is the star, the little stocky woman draped in scarves with the casque of hair, half white, half dyed (this time) a reddish brown. If anyone objects to this plastering of big photos on walls for legal or personal reasons, it's not shown. If this sounds like objections to Varda or JR or their film, they're not. Visages, Villages is a charming, rather magical little film, and a portrait of French niceness. Everyone in this film is polite, good tempered, and friendly. Vive la France! This Tour de France has some of the childlike charm of Michel Gondry's films and is admirable for its purity and simplicity, a celebration of the transitory, of faces and places, of photography and the amiable and attractive defacement of property by artistic people.

The narration of Visages, Village is a running dialogue of JR and Agnès. They too are unfailingly nice - in one conversation he explains why he likes older people, and so, her - she's a little feisty, objecting to a compliment on her wrinkles (when her eyes and her hands get the giant-photo treatment, pasted on freight cars), and to a friend being called "an old friend." They visit JR's 100-year-old grandparent (she hasn't that much to say). Old age is a topic: Varda says she is ready to go and thinks a lot about death (but there's nothing gloomy about this indomitable femme).

JR has a team of assistants, but on the trip we don't get to meet them, only JR, in his hipster hat and highschooler clothes and perpetual shades, which Varda keeps nagging him to take off (eventually he does, but we see his eyes as a blur, because her vision is blurry). We see the pair traveling in the van. They may not be alone in it and surely don't sleep in it, but where they sleep isn't shown. How JR makes his prints and what kind of prints they are also isn't shown or explained. They go around pasting large photos on façades of (usually old) buildings, in the country, in "villages." Once the face of a woman who's the sole remaining inhabitant of a row of devastated houses is pasted on the façade of that house where she remains. (She is moved.)The photographic paper seems thin and it fits between the cracks of a brickwork front.

They meet a farmer who talks about how agriculture has changed. He enjoys helming a tractor with lots of computer gadgets, but misses the other farm hands, who now aren't needed. JR does his portrait, and puts it on a barn-like structure. Later JR and Agnès visit and photograph goats and goat farmers. The trend is to burn off their (the goats') horns at an early age. This means they don't fight and promotes milk production. But they find a lady who keeps the horns on her goats. They're meant to have them, she thinks. So what if they fight? JR does a giant photo of a goat with horns that goes on a wall, to remind folks goats have horns. The goat farming lady also used to use milking equipment but got rid of it. She didn't like the noise it made, and realized that hand milking was a peaceful time, not to be lost. Varda likes this independent lady. She also likes three dockers's wives met at Le Havre. One drives big rig trucks. Their giant photo portraits get pasted on tall networks of boxes and then the three women are posed up in spaces where boxes were.

These are art pieces, sometimes temporary ones, like Christo and Jean-Claude's. Such is the photo portrait Varda took of artist and photographer Guy Burdin, his full length, bent in a sitting or lying pose, blown up by JR and mounted on a fallen-down German bunker on a beach. But this time the tide, after one day, washes away the photo portrait. So this is a sign these pasted-on photos, though they look monumental, may wash away in strong weather, like so many interesting pasted-on graffiti on the walls of Paris - for JR's methodology is not unique, though his works are accomplished and impressive. Varda chose well, or they chose each other well, for her fame enhances his through this film.

This is a photographic tour, so it is fitting that the duo makes a visit to a small cemetery at Montjustin to pay homage to the greatest of French photographers, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and his second wife, Martine Franck. The finale, a surprise to JR (supposedly, anyway: some of their conversations may be staged), is a train trip to Switzerland to see Jean-Luc Godard. He gives them the cold shoulder, leaving a note but not answering the door. Agnès, who was close to him once, and saw him five years before, is angry but still says she is fond of him and recognizes his eminence as a cinematic innovator. This also becomes a ritual, because they leave a bag of pastries on the door and write a message. They pay another homage to Godard, recalling the race-through-the-Louvre scene of his Bande à part by racing through with JR pushing Agnès in a wheelchair. How it all ends I don't remember: it just ends. So it is with road trips, one thing after another, and then the end. But JR and Varda are still around and came to the NYFF to talk about their work, as they have at other festivals.

Visages, villages/Faces, Places, 89 mins., debuted at Cannes May 2017 Out of Competition and had French theatrical release 28 June to rave reviews (AlloCiné press rating 4.2); in at least 17 other international festivals including Telluride, Toronto, and Vancouver and the New York Film Festival. Theatrical release in New York 6 Oct. 2017. Screened for this review at Quad Cinema 7 Oct.