NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS 2018 (March 28–April 8, 2018) - Festival Coverage

[Chris Knipp]

SHIREEN SENO: NERVOUS TRANSLATION (2018)



A childhood vision from the Philippines in the late Eighties

A meditative, and rather repetitive, but nonetheless haunting, depiction of a childhood in the Philippines in the lae Eighties dominated by what now seem quaint technologies, especially audio cassette tapes played on an aging boom box - it needs to be cured of its habit of "eating" the tapes; and VCR tapes. This is a film that celebrates the way old means of reproduction can evoke lost memories from the times when they were used. This film is a strong evocation of Shireen Seno's childhood in the Filipino diaspora focused on Yael, an eight-year-old, primarily when she is at home by herself after school and in a few family gatherings.

This is partly a secret world, as Yael (Jana Agoncillo) plays tapes that were sent to her mother, Val, by her father from a Persian Gulf country where he is working. When a tape gets broken, Yael repeats her father's words, which by now she has memorized. But Yael gets in trouble for accidentally erasing precisely the "private" part of a tape made for Val. She secretly plays and replays these tapes. And at other times she pursues "happiness" as touted by a TV advertisement. All this constitutes evocation of loneliness and longing of a child for her overseas Filipino employee father, missing during her childhood.

At other moments, in sequences worthy of the artist Laurie Simmons, Yael enters the world of a doll house, an immersive, meditative one, and works in the dollhouse kitchen. Perhaps the most memorable scenes are ones in which Yael painstakingly cooks toy meals in tiny pots and pans over a toy stove, using real, painstakingly chopped food,the stove fueled by a small candle; she pours the resulting, tasty traditional dishes into tiny doll containers. They take so much effort, but would provide only a mouthful even for a child. The mood is one of patience and loving care. The meals are prepared in response to her father's longing expressed on the tapes for traditional Filipino food. This is a labor to preserve memories of memories of memories. In another sequence of touching childish longing Yael goes to a shop looking for an advertised pen labeled a pen whose tagline is "for a beautiful human life" as if that can remedy her longing and resentment.

Seno sticks close to the childhood world, offering only fleeting clues of the late-Eighties turmoil in Marcos' Philippines or from the late-eighties outside world, hinting at societal turmoil following Ferdinand Marcos's ouster and complicated adult relations, in which men loom large and mysteriously.

This depiction is faithful to its childhood point of view, so much so that it seem sometimes stunted, and above all repetitious and confused. But the vision here is distinctive, certainly.

Nervous Translation, 90 mins., opened in the Philippines Nov. 2017. It showed at Rotterdam Jan. 2018 and later at Groningen. Screened for this review as part of the MoMA-Film Society of Lincoln Center 2018 edition of the New Directors/New Films series.

ND/NF showtimes:
Saturday, April 7, 8:45pm [MoMA]
Sunday, April 8, 1:00pm [FSLC]

[Chris Knipp]

HELENA WITTMANN: DRIFT (2017)



Helena Wittmann, Germany, 2017, 96m
German with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Filmmaker-artist Helena Wittmann’s subtly audacious first feature follows friends Theresa, a German, and Josefina, an Argentinian, as they spend a weekend together on the North Sea, taking long walks on the beach and stopping at snack stands. Eventually they separate— Josefina eventually returns to her family in Argentina and Theresa crosses the Atlantic for the Caribbean—and the film gives way to a transfixing and delicate meditation on the poetics of space. Self-consciously evoking the work of Michael Snow and masterfully lensed by Wittmann herself, Drift is by turns cosmic and intimate.
Thursday, April 5, 6:30pm [FSLC]
Saturday, April 7, 4:00pm [MoMA]

[Chris Knipp]

THIERRY DE PERETTI: A VIOLENT LIFE/UNE VIE VIOLENTE (2017)


JEAN MICHELANGELI IN A VIOLENT LIFE

Diffuse drama mixes crime and ideology in Corsica

Thierry de Peretti's debut, Les Apaches (R-V 2014)was a movie about an act of group vandalism that goes very wrong, an incident on Corsica where young outsiders clash with rich property owners. The filmmaker tackles a more ambitious subject the second time around and it's less of a success. The topic is a group of men who carry out large scale vandalism in the name of Corsican independence - from France, from the mafia, and the trajectory of a young man from a good family who enters this world.

The resulting melange of gangsterism and political idealism is one less familiar in a modern day story like this than in the Seventies. Here, the the scruffy and slightly remote protagonist Stephane (Jean Michelangeli), is a kind of GQ revolutionary, a good-looking young bourgeois whose Corsican origins lead him to carrying out crimes at first only to please cousins and without any caring. These get him two years in prison, and the prison is like a spartan school in nationalist politics, after which Stéphane is not just a member of a gang but ideologically committed.

But all that is in flashback. The present moment is the funeral of a childhood friend and gang member that Stéphane comes back for despite having a target on his back.

De Peretti has his own way of working, as was evidenced in his debut feature, Apaches. It doesn't work as well this time, because the mixture of revolutionary and gangsterish themes here - this somewhat limp and meandering movie - can't evokes genre expectations the filmmaker isn't capable of satisfying as do directors like Uli Edel in The Baader Meinhof Complex or Marco Bellocchio in Good Morning, Night/Buongiorno notte or Olivier Marchal in the 2011 A Gang Story/Les Lyonnais (Rendez-Vous 2011). And De Peretti makes his story unreel in a too-complicated manner that keeps momentum from building and confuses the viewer and diffuses the effect.

Sme Anglophone critics have felt this as I did, that De Peretti's film lacks strength of organization and drive. But it did well enough with home (French) reviewers. For example Thomas Sotinel of Le Monde Wrote (as quoted in AlloCiné) that "Thierry de Peretti creates out of political and criminal violence in Corsica a remarkable intimate tragedy."

A Violent Life/Une vie violente, 107 mins., debuted at Cannes May 2017, releasing theatrically in France 9 Aug. 2017 (AlloCiné press rating a strong 3.7). Also shown at Caborg and Reykjavik. It was screened for this review as part of the MomA-FSLC 2018 New Directors/New Films series. A Distrib Films release.

ND/NF showtimes:
Monday, April 2, 6:15pm [FSLC]
Tuesday, April 3, 6:00pm [MoMA]