New York Film Festival 2022

[Chris Knipp]

MARIA SCHRADER: SHE SAID (2022)


CAREY MULLIGAN AND ZOE KAZAN IN SHE SAID

'Times' Harvey Weinstein investigation story feels flat

A two-woman reportorial team at The New York Times broke the October 2017 story about film producer and distributor Harvey Weinstein's three-decade history of sexual harassment and rape. Weinstein, head of Miramax and his own company, became gthe most notorious example of the abuse of women, particularly in Hollywood, which spearheaded the #MeToo movement that has altered the balance of power of the sexes. She Said is a journalistic procedural film in the manner of All the President's Men or Spotlight.. It is an essential story. Unfortunately, it winds up being a more dutiful and less exciting watch by a fair margin than those other films. As the Austin Chronicle review put it, She Said" is a respectful, serious-minded effort that works so hard not to sensationalize the material, it works against its dramatic impact."

This isn't the fault of the core cast of Carey Mulligan as the tough, elegant senior reporter Megan Twohey, Zoe Kazan as her eager, weepy ingenue partner Jodi Kantor, Patricia Clarkson as their suave senior supervisor Rebecca Corbett, or Andre Braugher as Dean Bequet, their forceful, confident boss. Their performances are fine. So are those of the numerous other actors playing secondary roles, especially the key ones of women abused by Weinstein, including one, Ashley Judd, who briefly plays herself.

The story's importance is hard to overstate. Not only was Weinstein a notorius, outrageous case, a flagrant, serial abuser, but he was a really important figure in the world of movies. Some of Mr. Weinstein’s films include Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Pulp Fiction (as well as other Tarantino films) and Good Will Hunting - and many of the notable films of the past thrity years; Forbes lists 81 Oscars his films won. She Said has been praised for not showing Weinsein doing his ugly business, though his modus operandi is frequently described. He had young female assistants. They were often thrilled to have this job, because they wanted a career in the film industry, and it put them close to one of the most famous and powerful figures in movies. It has since emerged, by the way, that Weinstein was as crude, crass, and manipulative in his handling of a lot of the films he distributed, especially Asian ones, as he was with his human victims, ruthlessly cutting and rearranging them sometimes so that they would be more mainstream or sell more tickets, in his belief. One should add that he was a big, physically imposing, ugly man. Sometimes one wishes this movie provided a more vivid sense of his physical presence, his bullying menace.

Weinstein routinely had these young women working for him report to posh hotel rooms he was staying in in New York or abroad. He would come to greet them wearing a bathrobe, force them to sit near him, appear semi-nude or naked, ask them to watch him shower, and persuade them to massage him and otherwise be intimate with him. This sometimes led to forced sexual intercourse. If the young woman fought, protested, or fled in tears, as they often did, he would threaten them to keep them quiet. He or his company paid millions, we learn to buy their silence, having them sign binding agreements never to speak of their experiences even to family members. When they fled from him, these young women were blocked from getting other work, left traumatized and robbed of their career hopes. The damage done was incalculable. Moreover, though this is only mentioned, it's reported that such behavior in some form or other was commonplace in the American movie industry. It's not over, and we can only guess to what extent the exposures and #MeToo have improved male behavior in the film industry and beyond.

Most of the time of She Said is spent following Megan and Jodi, who are shown to be mothers with husbands and children, as they go on numerous trips and make countless phone calls and interviews and known on doors to ferret out who Weinstein's victims were and contacting them and trying to persuade them to speak on the record. They also importantly deal with Weinstein's lawyer and accountant and persuade them to bend. The signature moments are ones in which Megan and Jodi slowly gain confidence, or the happy time when a witness changes her mind and promises to go on record. Endless effort, ultimately tiresome, is spent seeking to find out how many verifiable silence agreements Weinstein there had been and how much was paid out.

The story the Times published is long and detailed. If you read it you understand why the lengthy period of investigation depicted in the movie was necessary. If the movie drags, despite the significance of the subject matter, the causes are twofold. This story is a shocking and imortant one but it's not as complex as Watergate or sexual abuse among Catholic priests, but instead focuses on the repetitious behavior of a single man. One might contrast François Ozon's 2018 By the Grace of God/Grace à Dieu. By successively entering into the experiences of three very different men who all suffered sexual abuse by priests as boys, the film gives us a sense of exploring a whole range of society. Spotlight follows the work of multiple Boston Globe reporters discovering the abuse of multiple priests.

The other issue with She Said is simply the screenplay and the direction, which are equally flat and uninspired. (See Keith Watson's Slant review.). They make the action seem more repetitious than exciting. She Said winds up feeling dutiful. German director Maria Schrader's 2021 satirical sci-fi movie I'm Your Man was witty, thought-provoking, and enjoyable. She may have been rather out of her element here.

She Said, 129 mins., premiered Oct. 13, 2022 at the New York Film Festival, showing at 19 other mostly US and some international festivals listed on IMDb. Metacritic rating 73%. US release in theaters from Nov. 18, 2022.

[Chris Knipp]

LUCA GUADAGNINO: BONES AND ALL (2022)


TAYLOR RUSSELL AND TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET IN BONES AND ALL

Almost enchanted, one still asks "Why?"

Luca Guadagnino's new film Bones and All is dangerous to describe because if it succeeds at all it's unclassifiable. The director here films a kind of teen romance road picture, featuring a girl, Maren (Taylor Russell) and a boy, Lee (Timothée Chalamet), who are cannibals. Fine young ones? I don't know. There is a big part of them that wants to be just people, though that of course is impossible. Their dilemma encourages us to identify or at least sympathize with them. Their world is in flux. They don't know who they are or where they're going from one minute to the next. The best aspect of this often disturbing and distasteful film is an authentic sense of danger and unpredictability, the excitement of youth at risk. If Guadagnino can keep the action on the screen feeling strange and unpredictable, it may feel real.

That said, it's disappointing that a major monkey wrench in the well oiled romance is the appearance before Maren and Lee even meet, but after Maren's father (André Holland) has skipped out on her leaving her, age eighteen now, to fend for herself, of Mark Rylance in full-bore character mode as folksy (but creepy) older cannibal Sully. Sully is explanatory. He informs the newly-on-her-own Maren they refer to themselves as "eaters," that the need will only grow as she ages; they can go for long periods without, but they will always need to dine again. He also points out that they can smell each other. Consuming a whole human "bones and all" is a special treat. He has his own rules. He does not kill, or he says not. Eaters do not eat eaters, or at least by his rules they don't.

Rylance is a great actor and delivering such conversation in cornpone tones must have been a pleasure for him, but it distances us, whereas Maren and Lee have their own specificity and, yes, humanness.

For followers of Guadagnino there are points of contact to begin with. Timothée Chalamet was the linchpin of the director's most appealing and successful film, Call Me by Your Name. There are a few brief but memorable moments involving Chloe Sevigny, as Maren's mother, whom she has never known, and now tracks down: Sevigny figures prominently in the director's engaging, enveloping one-season HBO series, "We Are Who We Are." It also seems as if Taylor Russell is akin somehow to Jordan Kristine Seamón as Caitlin in "We Are Who We Are," who enters into a sort-of-but-not teen romance in the series. Guadagninino again shows a penchant for teen experience, this time not misfit schoolkids, but a sort-of Bonnie and Clyde.

It might be tempting to say cannibalism is just incidental in Bones and All, or a stand-in for something else - being a misfit, addict, foreigner, gay - except for the considerable amount of gore we see in this film. In making the compulsive, bloody lust to consume human flesh and blood intense and vivid, the film stands with the best of them. It makes the ugly act more real. This in spite of the fact that, as David Rooney puts it in his Hollywood Reporter review, Guadagnino is "far less interested in the shock factor" than in "the poignant isolation of his young principal characters and the life raft they come to represent to one another..." That doesn't mean the shock factor isn't there. But our identification with the "poignant isolation," condemned to live wrong as dangerous, forbidden enfants maudits, a tragic and romantic situation we're rudely awakened from when a new scene of gore bursts with shock onto the screen. "Twilight" is one of the many implied references, but these rootless cannibals seem sadder than suburban middle class vampires whose pallor so much becomes them.

Taylor Russell is a new face and it's hard to define her or her character except to say she fits so seamlessly we accept her. The device is used of a cassette tape her father leaves her that plays through half the movie, where he describes their life together, how he protected her (running from one identity and location to the next like the revolutionary fugitive family in Lumeet's Running on Empty), but can't do it anymore.

Lee, Chalamet's character, comes with something of a family life, including a sister who reproaches him for too often being away. Chalamet is, to his advantage, deglamorized here. True, when the falling sunlight is at a good angle, his reddened hair is fluffed and his profile is turned the right way and the Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross score soars, he's a perfect gutter pretty boy. But dp Arseni Khachaturan's camera isn't always friendly to him, shows wrinkles and strain, his mouth is twisted, and Chalamet becomes the most interesting character he's ever played.

Many would agree with what A.O. Scott says in his New York Times review, that Bones and All is "a ragged hybrid of genres and styles, an elevated exploitation movie, a succession of moods." You might say that's always true when horror or genre are done well. The difference from some examples, like, say, Near Dark, is it all seems less a lark, and nothing is a laughing matter here.

Guadagnino takes himself very seriously, which may seem a bit much. But after being softened up by thoroughly loving Call Me by Your Name like almost everybody else, I became a fan binge-watching and binge-repeating the eight very rich hours of "We Are Who We Are." Those hours have showed how satisfyingly detailed and empathic this filmmaker's sense of a world can be and how much he cares. That explains how seriously he takes these young cannibals, and I thank him for that. I also became aware of his use of music. Music is so important in "We Are Who We Are" the whole final episode is devoted to Fraser and Caitlin's attending a concert by the composer of the series' score, Dev Hynes, aka Blood Orange. There are several splendid musical moments this time too, and the Reznor/Ross score is powerful without ever seeming to intrude.

It's also worth commenting how somehow it appears this movie effectively manages to use the environs of Cincinnati to create the feel of eight or ten different states, a brilliant stay-at-home road picture effect, with memorable seedy interiors by Khachaturan and the set dressers throughout. Guadagnino is fascinated with trailer park Americans - a tradition, like the trailer park RV vampire killers in Kathryn Bigelow's 1987 B picture classic Near Dark, which has been billed as a Western.

I still can't help asking: Why? But I think the answer is there somewhere. I ask that more pointedly for Claire Denis' Trouble Every Day, because this is a better movie, its principal characters easier to almost-like.

Bones and All, 130 minutes, debuted September 2, 2022 at Venice. It was shown also at Telluride, Zurich, Austin, Bergen, Vienna, Brisbane, São Paulo, Leiden, Taipei, Stockholm, and other international festivals. It was presented in the Spotlights section of the NYFF. Metacritic rating: 72%. Limited US theatrical release Nov. 18, 2022.

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"Bones and All is a ragged hybrid of genres and styles, an elevated exploitation movie, a succession of moods — anxious, horny, dreamy, sad — in search of a metaphor. Or maybe the metaphor is obvious. Neither raw nor fully cooked, it might make you lose your appetite, but it’s more likely that you’ll still be hungry when it’s over." - A.O. Scott.

[Chris Knipp]

HONG SANG-SOO: THE NOVELIST'S FILM 2022)


KIM MIN-HEE, LEE HYE-YOUNG, AND HA SEONG-GUK IN THE NOVELIST'S FILM

Turning to another medium in a dry spell

In this latest variation on his themes of revolving encounters, drinking and talking and self-reflective examinations of the creative life and the vagaries of relations between the sexes, Hong Sang-soo introduces Junhee (Lee Hyeyoung), a well known and once prolific woman novelist who has become unable to write. We find her arrived on a trip away from Seoul to a small town to visit a woman friend (Seo Young-hwa) who, unbeknownst to many, according to her, is now running a bookstore (also a cafe and local gathering place). She is herself a writer whose well seems to have run dry; in fact that seems to be why Junhee has come to seek her out. Here the novelist also encounters Gyeongwoo (Ha Seong-guk), a young film student who knows and admires her very much. She also, at a modern lookout tower, meets Hyojin (Kwon Haehyo), a director she seems not to think much of, who it turns out had intended to adapt one of her novels, till the project was squelched due to lack of funding. She is unimpressed.

After several chance meetings, Junhee winds up lunching with Kilsoo (Hong's muse and partner Kim Minhee), a well-known actress who claims to be fed up with the thespian life. Junhee has not met Kilsoo before but loves and admires her work, as Kilsoo loves and admires Juhhee's.

So it is that sitting there Junhee gets the idea of trying her hand at cinema, for the first time making a short film that she proposes will star Kilsoo, with the aid of Gyeongwoo, an idea to which Kilsoo somewhat tentatively agrees. It won’t be like other films. It will be the novelist’s film. Ir at least so runs the festival blurb: novelists have been known to dive into movie-making, but the idea may be new in Hong's world.

The action here, not for the first time in this director, is meandering and sociable. It involves people meeting old friends, or persons they have long admired, and finding ways to spend time with them in different groupings that fill up the whole day. Sociability that might seem more time-wasting for artistic people in dry spells, is seen here as necessary and restorative and leading to ideas. There is also a warm plug for the joys of reading, but only what one really likes. At a group drinking scene at the bookstore after Junhee has made friends with Kilsoo over a ramen lunch, the novelist finds herself next to a bewhiskered older poet, Mansoo (Gi Joo-bong), whom she used to drink with, too much, she thinks now, but he totally disagrees. (There is some cultural discomfort in hearing the way drinking is mindlessly extolled as a good in itself in Hong's films.) Everybody should drink a lot sometimes, says the washed up poet. Kilsoo drinks so much she falls asleep.

It appears the only character who is clearly not going through a creative dry period is the film student, Gyeongwoo - and maybe the bookseller's assistant, a shy young adept at sign language (Park Miso). Gyeongwoo however is a useful mechanism rather than one of the interesting, sympathized-with characters. There is a plethora of characters this time, but in exchange the chronology is more linear than usual except for a leap forward at the end with an excerpt from the completed short film.

Great admirers of Hong tend to like nearly everything he does and the New York Film Festival twice in a row has included two new Hong films in their annual Main Slate. But in this film the thrill is not as much there as in Hong at his best. Nonetheless the central idea is nice: a whole gathering of artistic types out of ideas or suffering creative blocks happens partly deliberately and partly by chance one day, with the result that two of them collaborate together with the essential help of a young man with a camera to make a short film, starring the actress, written and directed by the novelist.

This interesting but less that top-tier effort is marred by a repetitiousness in the dialogue in the way characters in various combinations fawn on each other, alternately gushing vague and sweeping compliments or giddily giving thanks for them. Could there not have been at least one character who is sarcastic or niggling with praise? Or are there bat squeaks of disapproval or jealousy lost in the subtitles?

One returns to a favorite idea expressed by the celebrated American abstract expressionist Robert Motherwell, that an artist's less successful works are necessary stepping stones to the good ones.

The Novelist's Film 소설가의 영화, debuted at the Berlinale Feb. 15, 2022, winning the second-place Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize, also showing in over two dozen other international festivals, including Taipei, Toronto, Busan and New York. French title: La Romancière, le film et le heureux hasard. Metacritic rating: 82%.

[Chris Knipp]

CLAIRE DENIS: STARS AT NOON (2022)


JOE ALWYN, MARGARET QUALLEY IN STARS AT NOON

Two Anglos in lust and in danger in central America

Issuing a second film in one year, Claire Denis has made a movie in English, with quite a bit of Spanish, appropriately enough since it's set in an updated version of of the uneasy, dangerous Nicaragua of the 1980's in the eponymous Denis Johnson novel. The updating seems to have drained much of the political logic from the story, adding real-life scenes related to the COVID pandemic in a steamy, rain-drenched Panama where this was shot starring Margaret Qualley and Joe Alwyn as two drifters turning into fugitive, alcoholic lovers, and Benny Safdie, who interprets a CIA agent as a kind of insidious buffoon.

Under the circumstances, though at Cannes, where this was Denis' only second time being selected afteer her debut Chocolat it did win the Grand Prix, many Anglophone critics have panned the film (Metascore 64) because the erotic political thriller is mostly not really there, only the erotic part and the sense of danger and malaise without much interest in a plot. But they're missing out how wonderful the atmosphere is, the sense of hopelessness and danger two unexpected lovers seek to escape from with drink and sex. Only Denis could do this with such sensuous ooze. I liked the spiky, nutty go-for-broke performance of Qualley and was taken by the classy, glamorous English blond good looks of Alwyn, whom I'd liked in another movie the critics liked even less, Ang Lee's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (NYFF 2016). Alwyn has so much glamour and sexiness he does't have to do much. Robert Pattinson was the first choice and he would have made the character more appealing: but is that desirable? It's essential that this man is somewhat dicey and out of reach.

Denis seems to be thinking of a country that's being taken over by a dictatorial regime like the one in her White Material (NYFF 2009): elections are being postponed for the second time, and armed guards of several different kinds are everywhere. Costa Rican heavies have also infiltrated. Trish (Qualley) knows more about these and also is fairly fluent in Spanish, which Daniel (Alwyn) doesn't and isn't, so she has more insider knowledge than he, when they come together. But she has been discredited and worn out her welcome by doing articles about bribery and kidnapping in the country. She Skypes a magazine editor (John C. Riley in another misjudged, tonally jarring American cameo) begging for work and he tells her she's no journalist and to fuck off. Qualley's skinniness and extreme youthfulness make it easy to accept that her journalistic knowhow hasn't gone very far despite her knowing her way around.

Trish is living a desperate, wild life, sleeping with men for $50, cash, US, regularly with a subteniente (Nick Romano) and a Vice Minister of Tourism (Stephan Proaño), and she meets Daniel, who claims to work for an energy company, in the bar of the posh hotel he's staying in, the kind of place where she steals shampoo and toilet paper to take back to her sleazy dive room. He wants to see her again and she likes him much better than her regulars, as well she might: she notes his skin is "so white it’s like fucking a cloud" (you had to be there). Before that she has seen him with a slick looking guy (Danny Ramirez) he claims is something legitimate and she warns him is a Costa Rican cop. Does he really not know he's in danger?

What counts here is the rain, the hotel rooms, the sense of being, as Trish now is, both an insider-foreigner and persona non grata, with too many córdobas and never enough American dollars, no phone and her passport in the hands of the subteniente . Both now feel a desperate need to escape the country while the means to do so are slipping ever further out of reach. Daniel and Trish are drawn to each other, she is a lush and he drinks along with her, though going more for beer while she's guzzling rum, the sex is good and the danger seems to turn them on. The signal image is of a taxi driver Daniel has given his burned cell phone to murdered at the wheel of his cab with the phone in his mouth. The ending is chilly and ironic. I was reminded of Robert Stone. If this is one of Claire Denis' bad movies, it may be the one I like best.

Stars at Noon, 135 mins., debuted in Competition at Cannes in May 2022 winning the Grand Prix, showing also at Sydney, Melbourne, Deauville, New York and Vienna. US limited release Oct. 14, 2022. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. Opening in France in May 2023, where they will probably dig the sensuality more. Metacritic rating: 64%.

[Chris Knipp]

ELEGANCE BRATTON: THE INSPECTION (2022)


JEREMY POPE IN THE INSPECTION

A Black gay man goes through Marine boot camp successfully but doesn't gain mother's acceptance

Elegance Bratton has declared his A24-released feature film debut to be autobiographical. He like Ellis French (Jeremy Pope, himself a queer Black actor) in The Inspection, is a gay Black man who joined the Marine Corps following ten years living on the streets in Trenton, New Jersey after his mother kicked him out at 16 for being gay. The tormented, still loving mother-son relationship is as central to this movie as the boot camp experience that fills most of the run time; shortly after graduation from the camp. the film ends, but not before a highly fraught meeting between mother and son. However rough in spots, this movie is vivid, intense, and felt.

Marine boot camp paradoxically treats recruits as non-beings and the training platoon Ellis is in is presided over by an aggressive Black training officer, Sgt. Laws (Bokeem Woodbine), who says he hates recruits and seeks to break them down, but when they're turned into Marines they become precious. Reluctantly, or with much hesitation, the very Christian but clearly tormented Inez (a powerful Gabrielle Union) attends her son's Marine graduation. The Marines, after a struggle, despite discovering that he is gay during this "Don't ask, don't tell" period (1994-2011) have somehow made Ellis one of their own, and once you're a Marine, you're golden. But when Ellis has to explain to the hopeful, delusional Inez who envisions his having a string of girlfriends now, "Mom, boot camp didn't make me straight," she withdraws her invitation to come back and stay with him for his month before reporting for service, and they are back where they started. Maybe the dedication to Bratton's mother at the end of the film, along with the information that Bratton indeed served in the Marines from 2005 to 2010, indicates some kind of truce between mother and son came about before her passing; alas, he says not.

The Inspection is a strong movie but despite its autobiographical origins, doesn't always seem real. Maybe it doesn't matter: it has an emotional reality. Screen versions of military boot camps tend to seem like mechanical ritual or absurd fantasy. Moreover, Ellis' personal gay sexual fantasies of the other men in boot camp are tormenting and as important perhaps, as his daytime challenges. (See Benjamin Lee of the Guardian for the review with a fuller queer perspective on this film.)

Bratton's need to work through his own experience of boot camp and his mother's rejection sometimes seems stronger than his desire to tell a story. Starting to write the screenplay in film school his memories of five years in the Marines may have been pushed out sometimes by movies. The representation of Sgt. Laws tends to be overwhelmed a bit in our minds and perhaps Bratton's by Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket and its classic boot camp sergeant Hartman played by R. Lee Ermey, who, under Kubrick's master hand, seems too good to be true, though Ermey was a ten-year Marine veteran as wall as an actor. Sgt. Laws isn't as enjoyably absurd, but his excessiveness, up close as seen here, is very theatrical. Ellis is also tormented by the chosen recruit squad leader (McCaul Lombardi), up close all the time too, who tries to get him disqualified but fails. (An Officer and a Gentleman is another classic training movie that will come to mind, and probably eclipse, this one.)

There are new wrinkles, like Muslim recruit Ismail (Eman Esfandi), who is forced to attend a Christian service conducted by a caricatural Southern chaplain (Wynn Reichert) with non-believing Ellis, and rushes out and is comforted by Ellis weeping in the latrine because he has realized the Marines will just equate him with the killers of their comrades in Desert Storm or Iraq. Sgt. Laws shows the recruits a video of Sam Mendes' Jarhead (which would have been new then), saying it perfectly shows their experience in Desert Storm. Well, that would not be a Marine recruitment film, and neither would this. It may be true, truth is stranger than fiction, but it also seems a bit implausible that Ellis would be spotted as gay because he gets an erection in the shower naked with other recruits. Tough luck if so, since showers are obligatory and collective activities. It's Bratton's skewed impression of the straightness of his fellow recruits that mail brings a bible with girlie photos crammed into it and that night they are all busily masturbating.

In the physical part of boot camp, the sit-ups and pushups and runs and obstacle courses, despite every effort to throw him off Ellis does fine. His relations with the other recruits are uneasy after the shower revelation. He performs at least adequately, perhaps well, in the crucial final rifle marksmanship test but his enemies try to falsify his failure. This is where it's clear he has some advocates, including an instructor (Raúl Castillo) who has confided in him, another person Ellis comforts, though when he interprets kindness as an opening to physical intimacy, he gets in trouble.

Having gone through Basic Training in the Army in earlier days, it was surprising to me how much these recent Marine recruits talk to the sergeants, always shouting out and prefacing all remarks with, "Sir, this recruit..," speaking of themselves in the third person. The progress of boot camp doesn't come through as a fixed set of training goals so much as a series of vivid memories, like eating with violent appetite (which I also remember; food never tasted so good and there was never enough of it). Sometimes the personal interactions feel contrived, heightened or condensed from real experience. But each test passed is a validation, and while the friendliness of the other recruits seems a bit sudden, Ellis' sense of accomplishment is something the viewer shares. Jeremy Pope has a jutting jaw and mouth, and his own special way of smiling that morphs back and forth into a frown. If the process sometimes seems contrived, his transformation seems real, the sense of identity in desperation achieved.

The Inspection 95 mins., debuted at Toronto Sept. 8, 2022 then New York Oct. 14, showing in a dozen other festivals, mostly domestic, but including London BFI. Limited US theatrical release from Nov. 18, 2022. Metacritic rating: 73%.

[Chris Knipp]

JOANNA HOGG: THE ETERNAL DAUGHTER (2022)


TILDA SWINTON IN THE ETERNAL DAUGHTER

A trip north

The Eternal Daughter may be categorized as a film of horror or the supernatural, but devotees of either will doubtless be disappointed. Numerous critics describe it as "a distinctly minor work" by the director, whose 2019 The Souvenir brought her to wide attention, and to mine. It's worth going back and watching all her three earlier features, Unrelated, Archipelago and Exhibition: they're not fun watches, but the unfun-ness is distinctly her own, uppermiddleclass British constraints and torments that will seem to grow out of, not lead into, the autobiographical film student with the unfortunate posh boyfriend of The Souvenir. The underimpressed critics also say The Eternal Daughter, which serves as a sequel to The Souvenir II, the end of a trilogy, that it is "slooow."

Well, The Eternal Daughter is unique, and while I'd agree it has its longeurs, and is almost Beckettian in its uneventfulness, it's also subtle and beautiful, and the performance at the center of it by Tilda Swinton as both Julie Hart, a filmmaker, and Rosalind Hart, her mother, whom the hyper-attentive Julie takes to a big old, apparently empty hotel for her birthday, is remarkable. The double performance is not just a stunt. It's also a brilliant idea central to the film's themes and ideas, which magnify and unfold over time like the old Japanese paper flowers that grew when you dipped them in water. And all this isn't just cleverness. It serves to deliver hard emotional honesty that characterizes Hogg's best moments in the other films. After the slow passages, as I watched, the emotion grew, and at the end I was devastated with a still unfolding sense of sorrow too deep for tears.

Hogg makes much use of the horror vibe and genre ticks throughout - a pale face in a window; knocks in the night; Rosalind's setter Louis (the canine companion an important character in many a family), brought along, disappearing and then popping up back in the room; the odd, unfriendly "staff;" the confounding corridors and rooms; the fog outside - and all these events and things allow for the general feeling we have that something strange is going on. Many will doubtless guess the film's secret early on. That's unimportant. It's all in the very distinctive nuance of the film and the interchanges between Julie and Rosalind. It's very important that until the end, a two-shot doesn't occur. You see Julie saying something, then you see - or will you see? You never know - Rosalind. And yes, you're very aware that both are Tilda Swinton in two different sorts of drag. The Rosalind drag includes peculiarly subtle aging makeup. She's not made to look very old. (A very old woman is seen toward the end, in a kind of coda and subtly spooky jolt.) You're marveling at the costumer's and makeup artist's art and the acting, but you're very aware that you're watching Tilda Swinton.

And all this is kind of creepy, if not what you'd call "horrible." Or maybe it is; maybe you can anticipate a Hitchcockian shock coming. It's not like that. It's more like the air goes out of the tire. (Or tyre.) The more overt horror-supernatural vibe comes from the great aristocratic house in Wales that Julie and Rosalind are staying at. It is a place, then in private hands, where Rosalind, as a young girl, was sent with other family members to escape the bombing during the War. But Julie doesn't know much about this. She has devoted much of her life to caring about and loving her mother - she has a husband, but no children - but her mother remains largely a mystery to her. Other later visits to the house turn out to have occurred later, and things happened, not happy memories, that Julie didn't know about. The place is beautiful, in a mournful way. The accoutrements of the rooms, even the keys at the front desk, are handsome. the ornate, formal landscaping outside, shrouded often in cinematic fog, is beautiful in its layers of green. The exterior shots look like subtle color lithographs.

The place isn't particularly friendly. Julie and Rosalind are greeted by a grumpy receptionist (Carly-Sophia Davies), who also reappears as the waitress at the dining room (and there are only four dishes on the menu). Is Harold Pinter an influence? This is in some ways like a magnificently visually expanded play, a chamber drama, a drama in the head. A warmer character is a groundskeeper (Joseph Mydell) who talks to Julie a few times and comforts and shares an understanding of loss. He says his wife died a year ago.

Julie is here to celebrate Rosalind's birthday - or is she? The birthday celebration turns out to be grotesque and sad, family happiness gone wrong, though a bottle of champagne is uncorked and poured from and a birthday cake is brought in. Julie chooses to bring it in herself. But whenever Julie and Rosalind are seated talking together at meals, Julie surreptitiously sets her smartphone out to record the conversation. Early on she's said she's here to work, on a new film presumably, and she goes to a special place to do so, but she can't sleep, she's uncomfortable, and she goes day after day without getting any work done. The other use of the smartphone is to try to talk to her husband. This she has to do out in front of the hotel pacing about near a hedge trying to get reception, which isn't good. And the wi-fi is patchy in the building as well.

These descriptions sound ordinary enough. But in Joanna Hogg's skilled hands and the meticulous, complicated interchanges of Tilda and Tilda, they resonate with meanings you go on pondering long after the film is over. The heart of the matter is the confrontation of lives and family relationships, the permanent, difficult, mysterious, inescapable ones. The daughter is "eternal" because filial relationships never end. Imagine making a movie about your mother and its turning out to be a sort of horror film. Others would make a story that's joyous and celebratory. But where is the truth? I remember the priest who Malraux talks about in his Anti-Memoirs who, questioned on what he had learned about people from thirty years of hearing confession, gave two ideas; there is no such thing as a grownup person; and people are much less happy than they appear. But the scenes we have watched have been an expiation. And the end Julie has come thorough and is typing away on her laptop: the new film has come to her. This one.

If any of this sounds intriguing, you are urged to see The Eternal Daughter. It's a marvelous film, a study of grief, memory and family relationships that cuts to the bone. A minor work? Remember the little Fragonard painting in the Wallace Collection in The Souvenir. That whole film grows out of it.

The Eternal Daughter, 96 mins., debuted Sept. 6, 2022 at Venice, showing at nine or more other international festivals, including Toronto, Zurich, London, New York (Main Slate), Vienna, Seville, AFI, Thessaloniki and Marrakech. Limited US theatrical release and on itnernet Dec. 2, 2022. Metacritic rating: 79%.

[Chris Knipp]

MIA HANSEN-LØVE: ONE FINE MORNING (2022) - NYFF


MELVIL POUPAUD, CAMILLE LEBAN MARTINS, LÉA SEYDOUX IN ONE FINE DAY

Joys and sorrows of life on life's terms

Mia Hansen-Love's new film certainly is a return to form after several that were harder to understand and lacked the direct emotional impact of her best work. This one doesn't have the before and after structure of All Is Forgiven (2007), The Father of My Children (2009), and Things to Come (2016), three of her great ones, but instead seems to plod along, weaving its way through joys and sorrows toward a quietly bittersweet finale. It's a weepy (I guess), a bit on the soap-melodrama side - but executed with such sincerity, specificity and class that you're with it every step of the way. Three of the finest and most appealing French movie actors star, with the young Camille Leban Martins as the child of one very well carrying her own. (I forgot a fourth French big name, Nicole Garcia, a tad too brittle fo my taste but adding a leavening touch that way.)

Léa Seydoux and Melvil Poupaud are at their least glamorous and never better. They are friends who start meeting up when Sandra (Seydoux), an interpreter of English and German into French for conferences whose husband died five years ago and who has had no intimacy in her life since then. She is raising her young daughter on her own, and is now beginning to cope with the tragic decline of her philosophy professor father, Georg Kienzler (Pascal Greggory, also deglamorized and very fine). Georg has been diagnosed with Benson’s syndrome, a neurodegenerative disease - a tragic mystery about which we are going to learn, by indirection, quite a lot. There is a vivid lesson in the stage he's at very early when Sandrda comes to visit him and he has great difficulty finding and opening the door to let her in.

Françoise (Garcia), Georg's ex-wife, selflessly and with no fuss takes the lead in the long struggle to arrange for Georg to get into satisfactory care, as he is shunted to other facilities and they get him finally into a nice one (right in Montmartre!). Hansen-Love's skill here, through the specificity of all this, is to steer a path, avoiding the sentimentality or manipulative brutality or the cliché movies often fall into in dealing with such situations.

Into this situation, fairly early on, comes a friend of Sandra's whom she runs into and starts hanging out with. He is Clément (Poupaud), more of an acquaintance, really, since he takes time explaining his glamorously oddball scientific specialty to her: cosmocchemistry. Studying stardust is more or less what he does. Again Hansen-Love in her script is being specific. He's not an astrophysicist, just as Georg doesn't have Alzheimer's. (Bensen's Disease is something that affects the sight and the motor control first, and only later develops dementia-like symptoms. It can attack people earlier than dementia usually does.) Meanwhile of course Sandra is coping with, and enjoying, LInn (Leban Martins), who's around nine, and takes fencing lessons at a big studio - but the toughness that implies doesn't keep her from being a sad, pouting little girl when Sandra arrives late to pick her up at the class, a moment that highlights Linn's complexity. She is strong and wants to have fun. But she has the sensitivity of a child who's missing a father.

It turns out pretty soon that Sandra and Clément are strongly attracted to each other. After a few passionate kisses they start having voracious sex. He is married and has a young son, but he's told Sandra the marriage has no love in it. But this part of the story is also very specific and complicated because he feels tied to his wife and son, responsibility visibly conflicting with need. With Sandra it's different, because after five years of celibacy and loneliness, for her it's pure need.

This creates a back-and-forth that dominates the action, along with the ongoing situation with Georg, the constant subtly devastating moments where Georg can or can't communicate or cope when Sandra sees him. There is the important subplot of Georg's books, a rich collection Françoise and Sandra and other family members have the sad task of dispersing. Sandra has to admit that the books now embody more of Georg for her than the shell Georg himself is becoming. It's a brilliant objective correlative of what it's like to experience a family member's neurodegenerative decline.

All this relates to Florian Zeller's much-admired film, from his play, of The Father, though Hansen-Love juggles more complexity here and does not attempt to put us into the point of view of the aging patient asThe Father does. The main point of view is Sandrda's. Her situation - five years of relatively empty serving of others - haas its correlative in her job of translating what other people say, often things that are not particularly interesting, rather than speaking on her own. She buries herself in the sexual passion of her affair with Clément, a tremendous outlet and comfort for her all of a sudden. She becomes very angry when he pulls away. But he's not being judged harshly. No one is being immoral or weak here - not even the staff at the not-very-good nursing homes Georg passes through.

But that's tainted by Clément's guilt and uncertainty. He's just as needy, just as passionate. He keeps starting and stopping the affair because he feels it's hurtful and wrong for his wife, to whom he reveals it. But he loves Sandra now, as she loves him. As mentioned, this has strong soap-melodrama elements. It's just so wonderfully specific and real and intelligent, and so well cast and well acted, that it transcends the genres of weepy and fraught rom-com, by dialing both genres up to the maximum and seamlessly melding them together.

This certainly competes with Hansen-Love's best work. I can't quite agree that it's sublime, or her best, as several prominent reviewers have said; but all reviews say it's very, very good, and they're right. It also takes on hard stuff with a fierceness and intelligence that put this filmmaker at a new level at the top of the game. A measure of One Fine Day is how well Linn's thread is handled throughout, the warmth of her response to Clément (and the psychosomatic ailment she develops when he pulls away): she leaves a strong impression. And this film leaves you with plenty to feel and think about.

One Fine Morning/Un beau matin, 112 mins., debuted at Cannes in the Directors' Fortnight section on May 20, 2022. It has been in other festivals including Sydney, Jerusalem, Beijing, Telluride, and Toronto. It was screened for this review as part of the Mill Valley Film Festival (Oct. 6-16, 2022). French theatrical release Oct. 5, 2022. (AlloCiné 3.7 , 74%). The US distributor is Sony. US release Dec. 9, 2022. Metacritic rating: 84%.