New York Film Festival 2019 (forum)

[Chris Knipp]

THE WILD GOOSE LAKE 南方车站的聚会 (Diao Yinan 2019).

Found this somehow insufficiently moving in terms of classic noir, but the mise-en-scène, score, sound design, glowing neon, young men in gaudy T shirts, busy rain machine, and snappy action conspire to make this an arty Asian B picture to beat all. And the mostly young Chinese audience in Alice Tully Hall seemed to be enjoying it very much too and make this American premiere of the Cannes Competition film a festive occasion. Current Metascore 72%.

[Chris Knipp]

COMING NEXT (probably): SYNONYMS (SYNONYMES) (Nadav Lapid 2019)

This Main Slate NYFF film is the third feature from the Israeli director of Policeman and The Kindergarten Teacher. It's about a young Israeli who rejects his country and goes to France to become French. Ir won the Golden Bear at Berlin and is being distributed by Kino Lorber and it's coming to selected US theaters October 25th.


Tom Mercier in Synonymes

[Chris Knipp]

SYNONYMS/SYNONYMES (Nadav Lapid 2019)

Synonymes is an explosive and theatrically stunning film that is delightful and surprising until it starts to go too far and a certain emptiness appears. Lapid, who's taking off from his own experience doing this same thing, depicts a youthful Israeli (amazing acting school find Tom Mercier) who goes to France wanting to forget or deny where he came from, speak only French, and become French. He loses everything at the outset, and is adopted by a rich young French couple.

[Chris Knipp]

OH MERCY!/ROUBAIX, UNE LUMIÈRE (Arnaud Desplechin 2019)

The great French director Arnaud Desplechin returns to his declining hometown of Roubaix on the border with Belgium for a slow-moving police procedural that has no element of mystery other than why he chose this material. The treatment is grand and sumptuous in many ways, with a cast headed by Roschdy Zem, Léa Seydoux and Sara Forestier, and the picture of the town is soaked in atmosphere, but it drags. Better received by French critics (AlloCiné press rating 3.7) than by anglophone ones (Metascore 51%).

[Chris Knipp]

FIRST COW (Kelly Reichardt 2019)

Set in 1820 on the Oregon frontier, this is a dreamy, cramped, primitive, sad scene of hostile people scrambling... slowly... to survive. It focuses on a cook and an educated Chinese man who start living together and sell cakes, which turns out to be dangerous. One of Reichardt's tough, minimalist films that held me, even if sometimes it bored me. The hushed, smothering intensity of this situation haunts and lingers.

[Chris Knipp]

MARRIAGE STORY (Noah Baumach 2019)

Performances by Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson that are virtuoso yet engaging and real. Here Baumbach takes up the subject of divorce from the point of view of the couple that he treated from the kids' POV in The Squid and the Whale, which was in the 2005 NYFF (the first one covered on Filmleaf). This adult angle also reflects a larger-spirited, more generous view of things (he's looking at his own divorce, where before he was looking at his parents'), and also a more relaxed, confident filmmaking style. Sharp turns by Laura Dern and Ray Liotta. Some think this harrowing and shrill, but it's just honest and emotionally raw: wonderful. One of the year's best American films.

NYF Centerpiece Film, shown first 6 p.m. Friday, October 4, 2019 at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center.

[Chris Knipp]

SIBYL (Justine Triet 2019)

A former successful writer turned psychiatrist returns to writing, cannibalizing confidential patient's sessions for her fiction, with success, but the complications cause her to return to her alcoholism. With the director's beautiful In Bed with Victoria star, Virginie Efira, plus Adèle Exarcholopulos, Gaspard Ulliel, Niels Schneider, and Sandra Hüller. The festival audience and the French critics found this funny. I didn't. To me, a great disappointment after the charming and sometimes hilarious Victoria. I have to side with the Anglo critics on this one.