New York Film Festival 2022

[Chris Knipp]

PAUL SCHRADER: THE MASTER GARDENER (2022)


JOEL EGERTON AND SIGOURNEY WEAVER

Familiar ground

There's a certain danger for reviewers to write about this film as part of a trilogy and not look at it too closely for itself. It's certainly a must for fans of the writer-director who've seen the much admired First Reformed and the less so Card Counter. (For the record I admired the second just as much as the first, and enjoyed it considerably more.) They're all about tormented and "lonely" men who are looking for expiation and revenge for a burdensome past, Ethan Hawke's Toller in an old church, Oscar Isaac's Tillich in a succession of gambling casinos, now Joel Egerton's Narvel Roth as chief horticulturalist of the ancestral garden of a southern mansion. All three actors give terrific performances. Egerton is so tightly wound you tense up watching him.

Norvel, as cunningly crafted by Egerton, is great as a singular object. But the last prong of the trilogy doesn't work as well as either of its two predecessors. One trouble is that by now there is more to the trilogy than there is to this film. This despite Sigourney Weaver's being terrifyingly off-putting as Roth's boss lady-mistress, Miss Haverhill (or Norma), and Quintessa Swindell being beguiling as Maya, the young biracial woman, Norma's grandniece brought in as a gardening trainee by Norma's command and soon very close to Norvel. Queen, knave, pawn? These seem like chess pieces, the grand colonial mansion and its grounds like the board, the action magnificently assured but artificial, the finale murky, like much of the photography of the dp for the whole trilogy,Alexander Dynan. Why must the scenes, except for some tacked-on shots of flowers in bloom, be so dark? And while we're at it, why must each protagonist in the trilogy wind up seated at a desk tormentedly writing into a journal every single night? Does Schrader get to be as mannered and repetitious as Bresson? There's a risk of self-parody here. I understand there was laughter when the first tormented-journal-writing shot came on screen at the New York Film Festival.

There's still plenty of excitement in Master Gardener. Norvel seems about to explode, Norma is haughty and sexy, and we begin to see what's going on when Norvel takes his shirt off and reveals a perfectly sculpted torso covered over with beautifully executed fascist tattoos. Yes, he's a recovering racist (and we actually dip into a 12-step meeting) - though I, at least, never quite got what his special relation with his parole officer was or what he actually has done. Instead, we get constantly lectured in voiceover by Norvel about the history of gardening, which is boring and repetitious and feels like filler. Whatever Schrader's relation to horticulture (or not) he makes it seem a tacked-on element here, whether Norvel is teaching his pupils to snort loam to get the ancestral feel of soil or brandishing stem-clippers menacingly at poor white southern baddies. But there is tension, every time Norvel climbs up on Norma's palatial porch and pets her family pooch, or sits down for lunch with Maya. Eventually there will be the obligatory violence, and also retaliation, redemption, and love. But though Egerton is utterly convincing as a fierce repressed personality the writing doesn't work out Norvel's sin and salvation with enough diligence and at the end there wasn't, for me, enough emotion, or enough that felt real going on.

Master Gardener, 111 mins., debuted at Venice Sept. 3, 2022 and showed next month in the Main Slate at the NYFF, featuring also in two dozen other international festivals. Limited US theatrical release began May 19, 2023. Metacritic rating: 63%

[Chris Knipp]

PIETRO MARCELLO: SCARLET/L'ENVOL (2022)


JULIETTE JOUAN, LOUIS GARREL IN SCARLET

Prince charming falls from the sky

TRAILER

The respected, eccentric Italian documentarian Pietro Marcello garnered further fame and admiration through his large-scale 2019 Italian language adaptation of the Jack London novel Martin Eden. Now for a second feature, set a little later in the early twentieth century right after World War I, he switches to the French language, and a smaller canvas. L'envol ("flying away"), is freely adapted from Scarlet Sails, a 1923 Russian novel by Alexander Grin. Described as a fairy tale for adults and children alike, it is two stories, both earthy and fanciful: the coming of age tale of Juliette (Juliette Jouan, in a striking debut, with four younger actresses), a girl of peasant origins who rises to higher things and finds a romantic boyfriend who literally falls from the sky; and the travails of Raphaël, her soulful, earthbound dad, who "works with wood," but never gets his due as a fine craftsman.

The new movie is thick with Marcello's documentary atmosphere, hybrid use of new 16mm footage and (ever more skillfully) blended-in archival film background, and elaborated with some musical numbers à la Jacques Demy with songs by the Lebanese-French composer Gabriel Yared. A lot to chew on, at times a bit much but sometimes impressively original and rich in texture - if not enough to hide the conventional storyline and some corny romantic moments, or the fact that despite vivid surfaces, there are lacunae in the narrative. Flaws aside, you don't normally get anything this rich and unique at the cineplex, and if you can see it in a theater, you my all means should.

The opening half hour is dominated by two well-weathered and salty adults. First is Raphaël (Raphaël Thiéry, the ogreish father in Giradudie's Staying Vertical) who looks like John C. Reilly only squatter and uglier and with a limp that's sometimes more of a jaunty hobble. He wanders into the village, apparently left over from the Great War, and meets Madame Adeline (actress-director Noémie Lvovsky, in earth-mother mode and having a grand time). She is the landlady of his former house, living in it now and caring for a little girl she tells him is his daughter, all that's left him since his wife, it appears, is dead.

Why and how that happened and whether the child is really legitimate, since the gone wife was violated by someone in town, are things to be hashed over in those opening segments when the the only music is Raphaël's plaintive but vigorous little accordion. A lot of this may not matter so much later - sometimes Marcello seems to lose sight of the big picture - but it's all thoroughly absorbing while it's going on. We're in that mix of authenticity and high camp of Claude Barri's 1980's Pagnol remakes, with Marcello's own documentary edge added and Marco Graziaplena's closeup-intense and lushly colorful 16mm cinematography heightening Thiéry's and Lvovsky's compelling if slightly hammy performances.

There's a fairytale element throughout in addition to the down-to-earth tone, traced through magic along with the film's feel-good storyline. Madame Adeline practices necromancy and "seeing" and draws little Juliette into it. This strain sounds a deeper note in the white-haired worker of spells (known as "La magicienne") who dwells in the forest and river, played by French cinema's no. 1 earth mother, Yolande Moreau, who as it happens played Noémie Lvovsky's mother in Lvovsky's own Camille Rewinds a decade ago. Contrast these kinds of women's rural spell-weaving with the practical magic Raphaël can simply work with his hands, repairing and tuning an old piano and making finely crafted dolls he sells in the city, when his carpentry skills aren't appreciated locally. But whether or not the spells work, Raphaël is doomed to have a hard time. Eventually as the years go by the dolls go out of style, replaced by metal and electrical toys. What happens to Juliette is harder to pinpoint and her character, though cherished, is less fully developed. She flourishes, sings, plays the piano, swims, and is happy, although she is scorned as a "witch", not entirely explicably, by the villagers.

These problems remain - Juliette's low reputation, Raphaël's struggle to earn a livelihood - but the focus shifts in the second half to romance. Juliette's prince charming appears in the dashing, handsome form of Jean (a mustachioed Louis Garrel, charming as always), a young "adventurer" who comes out of the sky when his one-engine prop plane is brought down by a carburetor problem. He says in his defense that he is not an adventurer but works, using his plane. But what he actually does is never explained.

Jean and Juliette first meet in a studied romantic set piece while both are bathing alone in the river, with her singing. She takes the lead and kisses him. He is smitten. He learns in the village later how they mock and exclude her and her family. Why she has this reputation is as unclear as what has become of her earlier intellectual promise, except that when Raphaël gives her a choice as a young girl whether or not to go away for a better education she decides to stay.

Much later Raphaël, still desperate for work after all these years, is awarded the challenging job of making the figurehead for a boat, painstakingly hand-carving it out of a large block of wood. It's admittedly an archaic ornament, a last sad hope of proving to the village wood craftsmen, as he's tried to for years, that he's gifted at "working with wood" and worthy of employment. But he is at the end of his tether and his physical strength and this turns out to be too much for him.

Though Juliette is first to kiss Jean, she drives him away - and then regrets it. All this haas something to do with red sails that appear beyond the forests, and magic, or hexes, that will bring Jean back to Juliette in a downed plane, and Madame Adeline's muscular spells get Jean's smashed legs working quickly again, after his second, rougher descent from the sky. Jean and Juliette are united now. Marcello's film remains true to its earthy fairytale style.

This may float your boat, or it may not. I was all in early on, absorbed by Thiéry and Lvovsky's gnarly vividness and the hybrid recreations of period. Later the narrative was marred somewhat by what reviewer (in Playlist) called a "muddled pace." In the love of vivid moments, narrative links are forgotten. But Marcello has produced another wholly sui generis film, which at its best moments is headily atmospheric and a delight to the eye and ear and Garrel and newcomer Jouan make a lovely couple.

Scarlet/L'envol,, 100 mins., debuted in Cannes Directors' Fortnight May 18, 2022. Also Rome, Vienna, Seville, Stockholm and other festivals, Metacritic rating: 74%.AlloCiné press rating 3.2 (64%). US theatrical release by Kino Lorber beginning June 9, 2023. Now playing in New York (IFC Center) and in Los Angeles from Jun. 23, 2023. Coming to the Bay Area July 7.

[Chris Knipp]

HONG SANG-SOO: WALK UP (2022)


HAE HYO-KOWN AND JEONGSU IN WALK UP

TRAILER

A director, his women, and a building

The clever and impossibly prolific Hong Sang-soo's Walk Up is the second of two films included in the Main Slate of last year's New York Film Festival. It's distinguished from many similar Hong joints by its use of a small "tower" building of flats that seems to provide a lot of the structure of the screenplay. The sequences of scenes run through time from the bottom to the top floor of the building. Walk Up shows the director in top form. Walk Up is restricted as usual to static scenes, with fixed camera, of talking, mostly sitting at a table sipping alcoholic beverages, but (as has been pointed out) this time with a great deal happening in the plot line - just not on screen. This is an even more clever and inventive film than usual - but beware: it's disorienting and confusing, the little tower building almost becoming a puzzle palace.

It undercuts the entertainment value how surreal and disorienting Walk Up is. As more than one critic has said, you don't know at the end if any of it happened. You also may not be sure of the time sequence. There's too little to hold onto. At least that's how it was for me. Other experienced Hong-watchers may not be bothered, and may enjoy the familiar skewering for male (and female) ego and the playing around with the familiar Hong theme of a (successful, festival-darling) movie director whose life and career may or may not be in serious trouble but whose promiscuous flirtations with women never flag. However, the sudden leaps forward in time (and to another floor, and the male protagonist's being with another woman) took away from the ordinary human value of the experiences on offer, for me at least.

Walk Up is more purely enjoyable at first because the confusing leaps and lack of guidelines haven't yet begun. We are watching at first several women, and later one man, the director, who assumes a central position. The man is the movie director Byungsoo (Hae-hyo Kwon, a handsome grey-haired actor, seen before in Hong films but not in the lead till now). We meet the tall Ms. Kim (the long unseen star Lee Hye-yeong, also featured in Hong's recent Novelist's Film and In Front of Your Face), the building's landlady, and, some writers have argued, rather a villain as her manipulative actions and lack of respect for the privacy of her tenants play out.

Ms. Kim is also an interior designer, and Byungsoo brings his shy, previously estranged daughter, Jeongsu (Park Mi-so), who was studying painting bur wants to shift to Ms. Kim's more practical field and study with her. He arrives in an immaculately tended old Morris car, which becomes another character, like the building. The conversation goes on after Byungsoo gets a phone call and abruptly goes off for an "important meeting" and never comes back in that sequence. This and the sequences after it differ from the usual Hong scenes in that wine is drunk in fine glasses rather than beer or soju in cups, though it's replenished from a convenience store and eventually Byungsoo, seeking comfort, winds up back to beer and soju. Needless to say, whatever the tipple, the ladies in the first sequence get tipsy while they discuss art, business, and life.

Upstairs is a small, reservations-only restaurant run by Sunhee (Song Seon-mi). Another sequence is a long conversation, later in time, up there between her and Byungsoo, who is not at all displeased by the fact that Sunnee turns out to be a total, adoring fan of his movies - though the audience may see a tongue-in-cheek element in her professed way of watching his films at home: drinking, and rolling around on the floor. It becomes obvious that Sunnee and Byungsoo click, and are about to become an item. It turns out now that Byungsoo's career isn't going so well, as his big project of two years has just been rejected by investors. He considers whether, during an artistically static period, it might be unseemly to attend festivals celebrating one's own work.

There are several more stages, levels, sequences to come. In the next one Byungsoo is living with Sunnee, and not doing any work. His daughter Jeongsu turns out to have rather rapidly quit the training program in interior design with Ms. Kim for something else and effectively disappeared. Earlier, a young waiter for Sunnee who likes to be called "Jules" (Shin Seok-ho) has told Jeongsu what a tough customer Ms. Kim is, and Ms. Kim's sporadic appearances and lack of cooperation over leaks, etc. show she's indeed far from the landlady you'd want or the kind of person you'd trust.

Later still there is a conversation between Byungsoo and Jiyoung (Cho Yunhee), an estate agent who may be a new relationship for him or possibly Jeunsu's mother. By this scene, time sequences have become disorienting. In this sequence Jiyoung provides Byungsoo with supportive, affectionate care and gemütlichkeit: she grills meat for him and serves him soju, feeds him expensive wild ginseng with honey, and buys him special expensive cigarettes. He is unwell now, but never till this been so well cared for.

Jonathan Romney, in his Screen Daily review, notes how the black and white camerawork, which like the writing, directing, and editing, is all done by Hong himself, takes moments to linger on the all white walls, stairwell, and an interestingly shaped kitchen curved like something by Frank Lloyd Wright, and suggests that this intimacy with interiors makes this Hong film the one most closely linked yet with the work of the Japanese master Yasujirō Ozu. (Mayabe he's just showing off what is clearly an architecturally interesting building.) Romney names the theme of Walk Up as that of a director trying "to find a place to truly belong," which does indeed make sense of this film's shifting sequences.

It remains to refer to the enthusiastic Variety review by Jessica Kiang, one of the best writers covering festivals these days. Kiang, whose review is highly recommended as an adjunct to watching this film if you like reading reviews, suggests that Walk Up satisfies the urges of those of us who walk around streets at dusk and long to enter into the living rooms that glow in front of us as lights go on inside: we are peeking into people's living rooms. It is Kiang who particularly emphasizes and details what a "villain" Ms. Kim is. She is not bothered by the fact that when the film's over we're not sure how much of it's really "true" and how much is "just Hong, through Byungsoo, trying on different lives for size." After all one should grant that there is and perhaps has always been and element of the inexplicable and contradictory in Hong's films. It's in the improvisatory and rapid way he works. And while he thrives chiefly in the festival world and not that of (dwindling) commercial cinemas, he remains a unique and fascinating filmmaker to watch.

Walk Up 97 mins., debuted Sept. 15, 2022 at Toronto; NYFF Oct. 2; opened in Korean cinemas Nov. 3, 2022. US release Mar. 24, 2023. Starts at the Roxie, San Francisco, Fri., May 5, 2023. Metacritic rating: 86%.

[Chris Knipp]

HONG SANG-SOO: WALK UP (2022)


HAE HYO-KOWN AND JEONGSU IN WALK UP

TRAILER

A director, his women, and a building

The clever and impossibly prolific Hong Sang-soo's Walk Up is the second of two films included in the Main Slate of last year's New York Film Festival. It's distinguished from many similar Hong joints by its use of a small "tower" building of flats that seems to provide a lot of the structure of the screenplay. The sequences of scenes run through time from the bottom to the top floor of the building. Walk Up shows the director in top form. Walk Up is restricted as usual to static scenes, with fixed camera, of talking, mostly sitting at a table sipping alcoholic beverages, but (as has been pointed out) this time with a great deal happening in the plot line - just not on screen. This is an even more clever and inventive film than usual - but beware: it's disorienting and confusing, the little tower building almost becoming a puzzle palace.

It undercuts the entertainment value how surreal and disorienting Walk Up is. As more than one critic has said, you don't know at the end if any of it happened. You also may not be sure of the time sequence. There's too little to hold onto. At least that's how it was for me. Other experienced Hong-watchers may not be bothered, and may enjoy the familiar skewering for male (and female) ego and the playing around with the familiar Hong theme of a (successful, festival-darling) movie director whose life and career may or may not be in serious trouble but whose promiscuous flirtations with women never flag. However, the sudden leaps forward in time (and to another floor, and the male protagonist's being with another woman) took away from the ordinary human value of the experiences on offer, for me at least.

Walk Up is more purely enjoyable at first because the confusing leaps and lack of guidelines haven't yet begun. We are watching at first several women, and later one man, the director, who assumes a central position. The man is the movie director Byungsoo (Hae-hyo Kwon, a handsome grey-haired actor, seen before in Hong films but not in the lead till now). We meet the tall Ms. Kim (the long unseen star Lee Hye-yeong, also featured in Hong's recent Novelist's Film and In Front of Your Face), the building's landlady, and, some writers have argued, rather a villain as her manipulative actions and lack of respect for the privacy of her tenants play out.

Ms. Kim is also an interior designer, and Byungsoo brings his shy, previously estranged daughter, Jeongsu (Park Mi-so), who was studying painting bur wants to shift to Ms. Kim's more practical field and study with her. He arrives in an immaculately tended old Morris car, which becomes another character, like the building. The conversation goes on after Byungsoo gets a phone call and abruptly goes off for an "important meeting" and never comes back in that sequence. This and the sequences after it differ from the usual Hong scenes in that wine is drunk in fine glasses rather than beer or soju in cups, though it's replenished from a convenience store and eventually Byungsoo, seeking comfort, winds up back to beer and soju. Needless to say, whatever the tipple, the ladies in the first sequence get tipsy while they discuss art, business, and life.

Upstairs is a small, reservations-only restaurant run by Sunhee (Song Seon-mi). Another sequence is a long conversation, later in time, up there between her and Byungsoo, who is not at all displeased by the fact that Sunnee turns out to be a total, adoring fan of his movies - though the audience may see a tongue-in-cheek element in her professed way of watching his films at home: drinking, and rolling around on the floor. It becomes obvious that Sunnee and Byungsoo click, and are about to become an item. It turns out now that Byungsoo's career isn't going so well, as his big project of two years has just been rejected by investors. He considers whether, during an artistically static period, it might be unseemly to attend festivals celebrating one's own work.

There are several more stages, levels, sequences to come. In the next one Byungsoo is living with Sunnee, and not doing any work. His daughter Jeongsu turns out to have rather rapidly quit the training program in interior design with Ms. Kim for something else and effectively disappeared. Earlier, a young waiter for Sunnee who likes to be called "Jules" (Shin Seok-ho) has told Jeongsu what a tough customer Ms. Kim is, and Ms. Kim's sporadic appearances and lack of cooperation over leaks, etc. show she's indeed far from the landlady you'd want or the kind of person you'd trust.

Later still there is a conversation between Byungsoo and Jiyoung (Cho Yunhee), an estate agent who may be a new relationship for him or possibly Jeunsu's mother. By this scene, time sequences have become disorienting. In this sequence Jiyoung provides Byungsoo with supportive, affectionate care and gemütlichkeit: she grills meat for him and serves him soju, feeds him expensive wild ginseng with honey, and buys him special expensive cigarettes. He is unwell now, but never till this been so well cared for.

Jonathan Romney, in his Screen Daily review, notes how the black and white camerawork, which like the writing, directing, and editing, is all done by Hong himself, takes moments to linger on the all white walls, stairwell, and an interestingly shaped kitchen curved like something by Frank Lloyd Wright, and suggests that this intimacy with interiors makes this Hong film the one most closely linked yet with the work of the Japanese master Yasujirō Ozu. (Mayabe he's just showing off what is clearly an architecturally interesting building.) Romney names the theme of Walk Up as that of a director trying "to find a place to truly belong," which does indeed make sense of this film's shifting sequences.

It remains to refer to the enthusiastic Variety review by Jessica Kiang, one of the best writers covering festivals these days. Kiang, whose review is highly recommended as an adjunct to watching this film if you like reading reviews, suggests that Walk Up satisfies the urges of those of us who walk around streets at dusk and long to enter into the living rooms that glow in front of us as lights go on inside: we are peeking into people's living rooms. It is Kiang who particularly emphasizes and details what a "villain" Ms. Kim is. She is not bothered by the fact that when the film's over we're not sure how much of it's really "true" and how much is "just Hong, through Byungsoo, trying on different lives for size." After all one should grant that there is and perhaps has always been and element of the inexplicable and contradictory in Hong's films. It's in the improvisatory and rapid way he works. And while he thrives chiefly in the festival world and not that of (dwindling) commercial cinemas, he remains a unique and fascinating filmmaker to watch.

Walk Up 97 mins., debuted Sept. 15, 2022 at Toronto; NYFF Oct. 2; opened in Korean cinemas Nov. 3, 2022. US release Mar. 24, 2023. Starts at the Roxie, San Francisco, Fri., May 5, 2023. Metacritic rating: 86%.