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    New York Film Festival 2021

    New York Film Festival 2021 (Sept. 24-Oct. 10). Opening, Centerpiece, closing night films.

    GENERAL FILM FORUM THREAD


    Links to Reviews:
    The Tragedy of Macbeth (Joel Coen 2021) Opening Night Film
    The Power of the Dog (Jane Campion 2021) Centerpiece Film
    Parallel Mothers (Pedro Almodóvar 2021) Closing Night Film
    A Chiara (Jonas Carpignano 2021)
    Ahed’s Knee (Nadav Lapid 2021)
    Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (Radu Jude 2021)
    Benedetta (Paul Verhoeven)
    Bergman Island (Mia Hansen-Lřve 2021)
    Il Buco (Michelangelo Frammartino 2021)
    Drive My Car (Ryűsuke Hamaguchi 2021)
    The First 54 Years (Avi Mograbi 2021)
    Flee (Jonas Poher Rasmussen 2021)
    France (runo Dumont 2021)
    Futura (Pietro Marcello, Francesco Munzi, Alice Rohrwacher 2021)
    The Girl and the Spider (Ramon and Silvan Zürcher 2021)
    Hit the Road/Jadde Khaki (Panah Panahi 2021)
    In Front of Your Face (Hong Sangsoo 2021)
    Întregalde (Radu Muntean 2021)
    Introduction (Hong Sangsoo 2021)
    Memoria (Apichatpong Weerasethakul 2021
    Neptune Frost (Saul Williams, Anisia Uzeyman 2021)
    Passing (Rebecca Hall 2021)
    Petite Maman (Céline Sciamma 2021)
    Prayers for the Stolen (Tatiana Huezo)
    The Souvenir Part II (Joanna Hogg 2021)
    Titane (Julia Ducournau 2021)
    Unclenching the Fists (Kira Kovalenko 2021)
    The Velvet Underground (Todd Haynes 2021)
    Vortex (Gaspar Noé 2021)
    What Do We See When We Look at the Sky (Aleksandre Koberidze 2021)
    Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (Ryűsuke Hamaguchi 2021)
    The Worst Person in the World (Joachim Trier 2021)
    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 08-12-2022 at 07:25 PM.

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    THE POWER OF THE DOG (Jane Campion 2021)

    JANE CAMPION: THE POWER OF THE DOG (2021)


    BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH, JESSE PLEMENS IN THE POWER OF THE DOG

    Machismo challenged

    This is an assured and austerely beautiful movie, whether its striking New Zealand landscapes work as stand-ins for the ranges of Montana or not. It has an elegant sense of period, 1925 (in its look). Jonny Greenwood's score, like the ones he did for Paul Thomas Anderson and Lynne Ramsey, is distinctive. This is first-rate stuff. And yet it unmistakably falls just a little flat at the end with a finale that's surprising, but too abrupt. The test comes in the work it evokes, George Stevens' Giant and Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven. Though its landscapes and scenes of cowboys at work are breathtaking and painterly, the film has neither the epic sweep of Giant nor the lyrical flights of Days of Heaven. It comes off as a very classy study in gender role-playing, with distinctive trappings of the Western - or anti-Western, as Anthony Lane suggests (it's almost as quirkily authentic as Jarmusch's Dead Man). It seems woefully underlit till one grasps how authentic that is. At times the cast members appear to be rattling around in the magnificent settings with too little to do, hampered by an action that moves a little too slowly. "Slow burn," yes; but for that the pacing must really burn. And yet this delights the eye and ear and lingers in the mind.

    With this "mysterious and menacing" "Gothic Western Jane Campion makes one of her best films, set in Montana in the 1920's and based on Thomas Savage's eponymous 1967 novel about a man lost "in the veneer of his masculinity." That's a description used in an interview by Benedict Cumberbatch, who plays the lead character, Phil Burbank, a wealthy rancher who lives alone in a vast house with his milder, plumper brother George (Jesse Plemons). George disrupts this safe masculine world when he abruptly marries Rose (Kirsten Dunst, Plemons' real-life spouse), a widow who runs a frontier inn, and brings her to live in the big house. Her late husband, a doctor, committed suicide. Her son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee) disturbs and maddens Phil with his seeming effeminacy when George and Phil meet them by taking the ranch hands to dine at the inn to celebrate roundup time. The story is of that uncomfortable meeting and the disruption that follows when things are rearranged at the ranch house.

    The casting is a work of art. Benedict Cumberbatch is awesome as Phil Burbank, the ill-humored Marlboro man brother who thrives on dispensing cruel mockery and is just barely warding off homosexual panic. If his stinky cowboy pose feels rather fake, that's the point, since as we soon learn he's a Phi Beta Kappa in Classics from Yale. Phil has learned the wrangling and tough cowboy talk and the one-handed ciggy rolling, wearing chaps all the time and never washing from a deceased, still obsessed-on mentor called Bronco Henry dead at 50 who himself didn't learn to ride till he was, well, abut the age of Peter. Smit-McPnee, who plays that role, is more important than Kirsten Dunst as Rose, his mother, because this story is about masculine roles, not about women, and Peter is a major provocation for Phil, and perhaps an attraction. Kodi and Benedict are both beanpoles, Kodi slightly the taller and the more unique looking. Kodi has said he liked the role of Peter because his character is more secure about being the way he is than he is himself, which is to say "very feminine." McPhee may seem daunted momentarily as Peter, but the character is notable for his total inner stillness and self-possession, even when challenged.

    Jane Campion may have been derailed by #MeToo into making this film, especially since she hasn't done a feature in 12 years. Is a film critiquing masculine roles a feminist film when its women are this unimportant? From the masculine point of view, feminism like this can seem strained.

    There are two women working in the house, the housekeeper Mrs Lewis (Campion regular Genevičve Lemon) and a young attractive maid, but they aren't noticed, except to make Rose uncomfortable at being waited on. (A lustier young lad would have gone for the maid.) Rose does not thrive. She has been greeted as an adventuress by Phil, he has already made her weep by mocking her son on first meeting, and unlike her unflappable offspring she is deeply shaken and takes to drink, hiding bottles of bourbon round the house. Phil points this out in the rudest and most explicit terms. George may have ways of coping with this, but he tends to fall by the wayside as the action focuses at the end on Phil and Pete.

    Phil will have a change of heart toward Pete and start to train him in cowboy-ing, though it will be short-lived since the young man is a now medical student and only there for summer vacation. This film is divided into chapters, like a book. But several of these seem to go by before we notice them; the fluid time-scheme moves swiftly. One thing that lingers in the mind is the bad evening set piece early in the marriage when George invites Mom and Dad and the governor of the state (Keith Carradine) and his wife (Alison Bruce) to dinner, and Rose chokes when asked to play the baby grand piano George has bought her, even though she used to play in a dance hall. Phil shows up only at the end because he refused to wash. Yale seems to have worn off pretty thoroughly. But what's really left?

    Power of the Dog seems to both drag and skip swiftly toward its abrupt plot twists. But those supremely awkward moments gendered by Phil, and almost all the big scenes, stand out vividly, including the time when Phil takes the boy, whom he now calls "Pete-my-pal," up into the hills. The finale, as mentioned, is abrupt, as is the explanation of where "the power of the dog" comes from and how it enters the story. But there is another dog, an unexpected one that links Phil and Pete and gives them an almost mystical bond - and hints at more in the original novel that may be lost here. The finale, as Owen Gleiberman says in his Variety review, needs a more "bruising catharsis" and "becomes too oblique."

    The Power of the Dog, 126 mins., debuted at Venice Sept. 2, 2021 and showed at over two dozen major international festivals including Telluride, Toronto, New York, Mill Valley, Busan, the Hamptons, and London. US limited release Nov. 17, 2021; an Netflix Dec. 1. Screened for this review at Shattuck Cinemas, Berkeley CA, Nov. 29. Metacritic rating: 88%.

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    PARALLELMOTHERS (PedroAlmodóvar 2021)

    PARALLEL MOTHERS (Pedro Almodóvar 2021)


    PENELOPE CRUZ IN PARALLEL MOTHERS

    Almodóvar scores high with slightly mix of feminism and earnest Spanish Civil war account-settling.

    Parallel Mothers is a wonderful role for Penélope Cruz, her eighth in a series of great outings with the director. She plays a convincing late-thirties though in real life is actually forty-seven. But her glowing looks at this age, though astonishing, are only the beginning of her wonderfulness. The film combines two unrelated tales, of two women of very different ages who bond in a hospital bedroom giving birth as single mothers and run into telenovela complications with the babes thereafter; and an effort, successful at the end, to exhume the remains of a relative, and others, murdered by Falangists and buried in a mass grave near the family pueblo during the Spanish civil war. Otherwise the plot is unusually simple for Almodóvar and may be the Spaniard's most widely appealing film in a long time, though, not for the first time, I felt left hanging at the end because only the second story seems resolved. The double plot-line combines two of his favorite things, hospitals and death. As usual, thanks to coordination of the director's superb team of editor, cinematographer, composer, and set designer, the film looks and sounds great, glows with glossy color like the work of no other filmmaker, and flows like silk, even when the plot developments are shocking or disjointed.

    Janis (Cruz) is a top-level photographer who has a fling with an attractive forensic archeologist, Arturo (Israel Elejalde), whom she meets by shooting him for a magazine. Note the oddity of Almodóvar's method: a long passage of expository dialogue between the two characters that methodically sets up the theme of the exhumation of the Falangists' victims is followed by a few seconds of sex between them, immediately followed by Janis and Ana (Milena Smit), hugely pregnant and sharing the hospital room about to give birth. The sequence would seem strangely perfunctory if the director's method were not so smooth and artful that you accept it. But the storytelling arbitrariness - long expository dialogue, quick sex, jump to the maternity ward - stuck in my mind through the rest of the film. That Almodóvar wastes no time, is part of his distinctive method: this film was shot in a month.

    Despite this odd coolness that characterizes the director, reviewers justifiably talk about how warm this picture is and how suffused with love it is, even for potentially unappealing characters like Teresa (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), Ana's mother, a career-centered actress who is just getting her big chance in her late forties in a play that's starting in the provinces so she can't be in Madrid to help take care of the baby. Teresa later gets a chance to explain herself to Janis and to admit that she always wanted bo be an actress and never cared about being a wife or a mother. To call her "narcissistic" as one prominent American critic has done is unfair in the feminist context.

    Almodóvar has always been a woman's director, like the gay Old Hollywood helmer George Cukor (1899-1983), but this particularly is a movie saturated with sympathy for women's roles, both career and family. There is a spectrum of feminine views here. Janis is 100% behind following up on her unexpected pregnancy, against the wishes of Arturo, who is married and whose wife is terminally ill: let's have one later, he says. No, I am going to keep this one, she says. Ana is still a teenager and her pregnancy is something she has reason to be depressed about. She is scared, she's young and unformed, and the cause of pregnancy was a brutal experience when she was coerced into sex with more than one boy. Janis, named for Janis Joplin by her hippie mother who herself died of a drug overdose at 27, is the third generation of single mothers and is proud to continue the tradition. Janis is a hotshot at her profession; her steadfast rock is her agent and dear friend the vibrant Elena, played by the director's dynamo Eighties discovery Rossy de Palma.

    This movie is all about women. As Jessica Kiang wrote in The Playlist, "Janis' 'We Should All be Feminists' T-shirt is entirely redundant – considering how sidelined they are, 'Men are people too' would be the more provocative slogan in this context."

    The plot surprises, which we can't go into here, are conventional/telenovela/melodrama material. We see some of them coming well ahead of time. They're also partly weird and shocking in the Almodóvar style. But even if they are grotesque, they are still plausible; and Almodóvar remains in the later, more serious mode he has mostly grown into since the 2000's (not counting the popular but slapdash 2013 airplane comedy I'm So Excited!). Thus these surprises read as examples of the hard stuff women have to be able to deal with. In th middle of them Penélope Cruz's Janis is a model of forbearance, generosity, and sacrifice. Ana has grown up markedly through the process of motherhood, dealing with some very hard stuff herself; though she also seems to be becoming a bit clingy as as the plot thickens.

    Toward the end, the almost-forgotten political plot reappears and exactly where the relationships between Ana, Janis, and Arturo are going seems left dangling while the forensic archeology project, which has taken many months, as it was explained, to acquire official approval, can move forward in a matter of "three or four days" once the site of the Falangists' collective burial of victims has been identified by Janis. The happy finale is a neatly arranged pile of scattered and numbered human skeletons. An odd way to end a romantic feminist melodrama, perhaps, but the way the director drags this for him unusual political theme onto the screen is another one of his shocks and surprises, this time a solemn and historical one from Almodóvar, who is now seventy-two, with an eye to awakening the younger generation. Those skeletons are just a handful of the more than 100,000 victims of the Falangists who still lie in unmarked graves, the film tells us. It's quite possible that Spanish teenagers like Ana are unaware of their country's brutal modern history.

    Las madres parallelas/Parallel Mothers, 123 mins., debuted as the opening film at Venice Sept. 1, 2021. It premiered in Madrid in early Oct., then playing in 20 international festivals starting with New York. US limited release Dec. 24, 2021, on Netflix streaming in early 202l. Metacritic rating: 87%.

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    BAD LUCK BANGING OR LOONY PORN (Radu Jude 2021)

    RADU JUDE: BAD LUCK BANGING OR LOONY PORN (2021)


    KATIA PASCARIU IN BAD LUCK BANGING OR LOONY PORN

    A provocative and effectively messy Romanian film about the injustice of internet (sex) scandals

    The important thing to note is that Radu Jude's film, set during the pandemic with masks and social distancing, is in raucous bad taste throughout, but its provocations are scattershot and sometimes score and others bore. "Its critique of misplaced moral panic around sex instead of more pressing political issues will likely strike a more damning note in religiously conservative countries like Romania than elsewhere," Stephen Dalton noted in a Hollywood Reporter review penned at the Berlinale, where the film won Jude his second Golden Bear. Nonetheless, if this is a "bad film," it's a damn good one and a highly original and quite earnest one that will wake you up.

    The outset is the biggest provocation, the starting point of all the action: a short but exuberant, joyful, and totally explicit cell-phone-filmed sex tape shot by a married couple with fellatio, anal sex, dirty talk, and a pink fright wig, and a real erection and real penetration. It was shot, in the film's story, that is, by Eugen (Stefan Steel) the partner of Emilia Cilibiu, known as Emi (Katia Pascariu), who happens to teach Romanian history at a quality Bucharest high school. Eugen, we later learn, puts it on a "private" fetish site, which means it rapidly goes onto the internet at large and thence into the startled eyeballs of Emi's school's administrators, faculty, students, and their parents, with immediate dire consequences for Emi.

    This opening pre-title segment is a shocker: you've never seen a full-on sex tape in a movie made for general or arthouse consumption and probably won't soon again.Though under three minutes, the lively, real hardcore action is hard to take in a mainstream context and hence seems, well, pretty long It would have been perfectly possible for Jude not to have shown a second of the actual tape; but his game is provocation. (I don't know his eight other films but gather he is usually a provocateur, much focused on such issues as Romanian anti-Semitism and Holocaust complicity, but this is his most clearly outrageous film yet.)

    Jude's images are tasteless in other ways, simply in being crude. There is nothing pretty about the first of the three parts that follow the intro sex tape, which depicts Emi in a frumpy suit and messy hair walking across Bucharest on a hot summer day to her school where a hearing will be held to vote on whether she can stay at her job. The point here is to show dozens of incidents where people are rude, provocative, or obscene, even to an old lady who utters a sexual slur to the camera in a third-wall interruption. The camera repeatedly pans away from Emi to focus on posters or ruined facades or other city scenes. One point is that the language of public discourse is pornographic. Maybe another key one is that people are strung out and angry from the persistence of the pandemic, whose presence is indicated by the many stages of mask-wearing on display in Bucarest's streets.

    Jude again provokes by presenting a second part that drops the narrative for a 26-minute A to Z "short dictionary of anecdotes, signs and wonders.” Jumping around in Romanian history and folklore, this segment lists multiple samples of sexism, child abuse, racism, antisemitism, Communist-era corruption and fascist collaboration, including his major concern of Romania's collaboration in the Holocaust. This segment is a key element in establishing Jude's radical structure. But it's also meandering, sometimes boring, scattershot. It maintains energy only through the suspense it arouses since we want to know where the sex tape controversy will go. No one way, as it turns out. That the issue isn't, perhaps can't be, seriously resolved is a natural outcome of Jude's Brechtian audience-provocation: he will poke us, but not satisfy us.

    Part three is Emi's "hearing" before a motley gathering of covid mask-wearing priests, military men, parents, teachers who accuse or attack her and only occasionally defend her, though in one of the three alternative final votes that come at the end she wins. Again, a wild mixture here because Emi's earnest self defenses, which can be taken quite seriously, come from a different movie. As the opening of the actual sex tape shows, Jude believes we should not be shocked by it or bar anyone from their job for making such a tape. But as the attacks grow more racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic as well as obscene (while also prudish), they may amuse but are too surreal to bring to life the very real issue of someone of probity otherwise being in such a dilemma.

    The film's inclusion of the words "bad luck" in its title hints at an inevitable aspect of situations like this: however you may sympathize with Emi, evidently a teacher admired by all up to now; however she may be right that whatever she and her husband dd in bed, including filming themselves doing it, is their own business and not lewd nor is she a whore for acting "dirty" to excite her husband in private sex; however she may be innocent of broadcasting the tape herself; however it has been wrong, and not Emi's responsibility, that the kids have been able to see it (and however they did so), this exposure irrevocably taints her as a public figure, i.e. a schoolteacher. The film's third part brings out various arguments about all this in an interesting way. But then the other people present - except for the headmistress (Claudia Ieremia), who wants Emi to be allowed to stay on - become more and more slapstick, and a hand-to-hand fight between women even breaks out. A final short segment shows Emi using a giant dildo to wreak violent fantasy-revenge on her accusers.

    bRadu Jude seems to me an acquired taste, but his appeal ranges from the relentless provocateur Armond White, who calls Loony Porn, a film "that both Godard and Makavejev might approve," to the New York Times' much more mainstream chief film critic A.O. Scott, who in his review runs through Jude's oeuvre approvingly and makes this new film a Critic's Pick. Evidently for the people of the Berlinale, the Radu Jude taste has become addictive. But look: he clearly undercuts some of his best stuff here with his tonal imbalances, scattershot organization, and adolescent humor. Nonetheless, he brings out the issue of private life encroaching horribly on one's public one so vividly I was immediately moved to write this review.

    Bad Luck Banging or Loojny Porn/Babardeala cu bucluc sau porno balamuc , 106 mins., in Romanian, debuted at Berlin where it won the Golden Bear. It was shown at over 40 international festivals, including the New York Film Festival, and has been released in at least 17 countries. It was Romania's submission for the International Feature Film Oscar, but not among the fifteen finalists. US limited release by Magnoilia was Nov. 19, 2021. Wider US release Jan. 22, 2022. At Roxie Theater, San Francisco, Opens Virtually Jan. 21, 2022 at Roxie Theater Virtual, with in-person screenings at the Roxie Sat., Jan. 22 at 9:15 p.m., Fri., Jan. 28, 2022 at 9:25 pm and Tues., Feb. 1, 2022 at 9:15 p.m. Metacritic rating: : 7̶5̶%.̶ 74%.
    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 03-23-2024 at 03:12 PM.

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    BERGMAN ISLAND (Mia Hansen-Lřve 2021)

    MIA HANSEN-LŘVE: BERGMAN ISLAND


    VICKY KRIEPS IN BERGMAN ISLAND

    A misfire for the director, despite the critical admiration

    In Hansen-Love's new film she more directly than before references her former relationship with the much older director Olivier Assayas in a frame tale of an "American" couple (actually Tim Roth is English and Vicky Krieps is Luxembourgish) who go to Farö, the island that became the Swedish director's refuge, on a kind of double artist residency. It seems like a terrible idea, and it makes the marriage go wrong, apparently. The film seems to avoid becoming too obviously autobiographical by taking refuge in fourth-wall games. It's a filmmaker's film about filmmakers writing films about filmmakers writing films - in the shadow of one of the 20th century's most admired filmmakers. If that sounds cool to you, this is the film for you.

    Critics have gushed and waxed lyrical about this film since its debut in Competition at Cannes this year. They are right to admire Hansen-Lřve; she's made some lovely films. This isn't one of them. Despite its intended complexity, it's both lightweight and cloying. And lightweight not in the way of displaying, as Hansen-Lřve's other films do, a light touch, but by beating around the bush and rarely getting to the point.

    The man, Tony (Roth) is a successful writer-director and his wife Chris (Krieps) is a fledgling one. She sets up uneasily to write in a nearby mill, while Tony sets up shop and blithely moves rapidly ahead working in the very bedroom where Bergman shot "Scenes from a Marriage," the work that a local employee says launched a thousand divorces. While reviewers are thrilled about the multi-layered screenplay here, they overlook what a bore it tends to be from the start. Much time is wasted getting the couple from point A to point B, with every detail of the ferry and the programmed-in GPS, and then once they're settled - uneasily in Chris's case - on Farö, we are bombarded with tourist lectures about the place in relation to its famous Swedish theater director, filmmaker, and serial philanderer who, we learn (in case we have no access to Wikipedia), had nine children by six different women and produced a prodigious amount of work by never changing any diapers.

    The "Bergman Safari" that Tony goes on, a bus trip around the island, is avoided by Chris, who gets a private tour from a tall young man with Prince Valiant hair called Hampus (Hampus Nordenson), who, except for the hair, looks a bit like the Norwegian actor Anders Danielsen Lie, who appears later, in the film "The White Dress," which Chris will summarize to Tony while in progress as she agonizes, you may be surprised to learn, over how to end it. Tony is somewhat inattentive. So was I.

    The Bergman Safari is presumably a sendup of such affairs, especially their male-dominated artist-worship aspects, and so is the event where Tony's film is shown and he gives a lengthy Q&A that causes Chris to wander off, just as he will excuse himself to take phone calls while she's summarizing her scenario. It seems they are both bored with each other's careers - though while Chris is moody all the time, Tony seems perpetually cheery. This is one indication of the fact that while there is a superficial complexity in the film-within-film structure, all the effort expended on the layering of characters with versions of themselves makes them wind up relatively one-dimensional.

    By the time Bergman Island gets to Chris's summary of her scenario, which we see (partially) enacted in rich detail, the texture has finally become interesting, especially with the introduction of Mia Wasikowska and Anders Danielsen Lie. But all the schlepping to and around the island and tourist information about Ingmar Bergman has gone on so long it's too late. There is a lot of play with flash-forward and flashback, of characters suddenly replaced by their avatars. But by that time though I hate to say this about anything, especially a Hansen-Lřve film, what's happening on screen has become too boring to care. Please rent instead copies of her other films like All Is Forgiven, The Father of My Children, or Things to Come, or, speaking of Anders Danielsen Lie, by all means watch the two superb Joachim Trier features he stars in, Reprise and Oslo, August 31. Stay off that island.

    Bergman Island 112 mins., debuted at Cannes and showed also at Telluride, Toronto, New York, Vancouver, London, and other international film festivals. It opened in US theaters Oct. 15, 2021. Metscaore: 81%.


    KRIEPS AND ROTH IN BERGMAN ISLAND


    WASIKOWSKA AND DANIELSEN LIE IN BERGMAN ISLAND

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    DRIVEMY CAR (Ryunsuke Hamaguchi 2021)

    RYUNSUKE HAMAGUCHI: DRIVE MY CAR (2021)


    HIDETOSHI NISHIJIMA, TOKO MIURA IN DRIVE MY CAR

    Hamaguchi garners more international attention with the second feature in one year, this one about a theater director, his fraught relationships, and an unusual production of Chekhov's 'Uncle Vanya'

    Ryunsuke Hamaguchi is gathering accolades with his films now and this one, with the Best Screenplay at Cannes and other awards and inclusion in many prestigious international festivals, is even more admired than his other 2021 feature, the charming three-part romantic tale anthology Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy. Drive My Car, like Lee Chang-dong's 2018 Burning, is an unusually fascinating adaptation and expansion of a Haruki Murakami short story, It's literary, it's complex, it's thought-provoking. The only troubles are it's awfully long and unfun. It's better in the pondering than in the watching.

    Hamaguchi likes to play around with form. This time his three-hour film has a 'prologue' that lasts over 40 minutes and is more exciting than the rest of the film. It provides sex, fantasy, intrigue, and three stunning surprises. The long later section is a lot of play line reading and a lot of driving around: a lot of dull repetition.

    The director is Yusuke Kafuku (the excellent Hidetoshi Nishijima), appearing in his own Japanese-language production of Beckett's Waiting for Godot as the action begins, and noted for his unusual preparing method, and for Uncle Vanya. He's also known for his celebrity wife, a beautiful producer of TV dramas called Oto (Reika Kirishima). Oto has an unusual method too: she develops drama material by improvising stories during and after their sex. During the prologue we see several extended scenes of the latter. An interesting, perfect, power couple, Yusuke and Oto.

    Only they don't have the skill of being able to talk things out. I wasn't sure whether Oto was deeply loyal to Yusuke in her fashion, or bored to death but unwilling to admit it. The happy couple maybe isn't so happy. Oto is a serial adulterer, sleeping with many men, probably. When he returns unannounced after a cancelled flight Yusuke spies Oto in flagrante with Kôji Takatsuki (Masaki Okada), the tall, handsome young star of her TV series. Koji is to be a major character, though he may seem more a MacGuffin than a person.

    There are several jolts besides Yusuke's discovery of Oto's affair with Koji, which he deals with in a silent, non-confrontational way, turning around unseen and going to a hotel to await his postponed flight. He has a sudden car accident on the freeway, colliding almost balletically with another vehicle; we see the two cars from high above like lego pieces. This introduces a symbolic ailment. The medical exam reveals he has a blind spot, not noticed due to the eyes' and mind's compensations, caused by approaching glaucoma in one eye. This also introduces us to my favorite 'character', Yusuke's lovingly preserved bright red Eighties Saab 9000 Turbo. Then, just when Oto was going to perhaps explain things, Yusuke comes home to discover her lying dead on the floor from a cerebral hemorrhage.

    The prologue has provided all this lively material, including an introduction to Koji in another context and closeups of the Saab. Now it is two years later and the bereaved Yusuke is going to direct an unusual multicultural production of Uncle Vanya in Hiroshima. The film and Murakami's story celebrate the virtues of automobile driving as a place to meditate, to learn, and to get to know someone. Yusuke listens to a tape of Uncle Vanya where Oto has read all the other parts and he fills in Vanya. He stays at a hotel an hour from the theater to work on this. But the festival rules stipulate that he must have a driver of his own car because an artist ran over someone. So he gets Misaki (Toko Miura), a surly, withdrawn 23-year-old woman of somewhat shabby appearance. After balking, Yusuke gives in, and the movie's mutedly sentimental 'romance' begins as the two lonely, traumatized people gradually come together on those many hour drives. Yusuke doesn't intend to play Vanya because he thinks he can't handle any more how it brings out the heart of you, but he is forced to. This is all about looking into yourself and confronting pain. The tragedy of Oto and Yuusuke grows when we learn they lost a 4-year-old girl twenty years ago who died of pneumonia. And Misaki reveals a painful childhood of abuse ending in tragedy. Her remedies of smoking a lot and being an excellent driver aren't quite enough.

    I've delayed coming to the production of Uncle Vanya, because it doesn't seem to me as wonderful and revelatory as others find but simply strange and off-putting. It's multi-cultural in the extreme, with Japanese, Chinese and Korean actors speaking multiple languages, including sign language. Yusuke, provided with a stage manager and an interpreter, makes the cast, who can't understand each other as they read their parts in different languages, go over and over it expressionlessly, with the interpreter translating the lines. The idea is for them to know the play so well they can 'hear' all the parts even though half the time they don't understand the individual speakers.

    For the final theater audience during the short run-time following the long rehearsal period, the result might leave one pretty cold. Audience members can only make sense of the dialogue through translations projected in Japanese and English high above the stage, as in some opera productions. A roar of applause follows Sonya's final long speech given in Korean sign language. But, really? All this is extrapolation built on a mere hint in Murakami's story. It allows Hamaguchi to introduce a lot of telling lines about sorrow, faithfulness, loss and resentment, some of which Yusuki must enjoy mouthing in the safety of his classic red Saab. His interest is in the rehearsals and the car rides, not the final production.

    The Koji subplot is intriguing and one place where the huge part two of this film is still fun, and provides some schadenfreude since the young hothead gets his cumuppance. He has lost his starring TV role and is in disgrace over a sex abuse scandal but Yusuke pointedly and oddly chooses him to play Vanya. The two men repeatedly connect after rehearsals, Yosuke trying to learn more about Oto's secret life; but Koji has a tendency to attack celebrity-chasers who snap his photo, which leads him into deep trouble - and forces Yusuke to take on the role of Vanya himself, after all.

    All this is fascinating, if long and slow in the watching, but there is a lot in Drive My Car that is a bit too pointed, like the blind spot discovered through the car accident, the assigned driver leading to the relationship, the choice of the inappropriate actor leading to Yusuke's taking on the role of Vanya after all, and the many long explanatory monologues. Hamaguchi always has long monologues, but they work better when they come in an engaging context. This oddball Uncle Vanya production is just a concept too high. Even the red Saab 9000 Turbo starts to seem more concept than car.

    I agree with Stephen Dalton who in his Cannes Hollywood Reporter review wrote that this "highbrow road movie" is "an absorbing, technically assured piece of work" with "poetic depths and novelistic ambitions," but also a film that's "very slow and ponderous, motoring along in low gear for much of its three-hour runtime, with a "lethargic pace" that's "underscored" by having its "subtle opening credits" not turn up till after the opening forty minutes. Hamaguchi's cavalier attitude toward form never seems to lead to economy, wit, or emotional pungency. All of his films since he started gaining international fame with the five-hour Happy Hour have been intriguing and attention-getting, but also in some measure disappointing.

    Drive My Car ドライブ・マイ・カ, 179 mins., debuted in Competition at Cannes Jul. 11, 2021 (Best Screenplay and two other awards), showing at over 30 other international festivals including Toronto, New York, London, Vancouver, the Hamptons, Vienna and Rotterdam. It is one of the fifteen 2022 Oscar Best Foreign finalists. US theatrical release from Nov. 24, 2021. Metacritic rating : 90%. Screened at Landmark Shattuck Jan. 8, 2021.

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