New York Film Festival 2023

[Chris Knipp]

MICHAEL MANN: FERRARI (2023)


ADAM DRIVER IN FERRARI

Adam Driver and other cast members impeccable in the slightly bloodless 'Ferrari'

A sports action film with an Italian setting directed by 80-year-old Michael Mann, Ferrari is based on a biographical book, but it isn't a biopic. Even though some critics think it lacks emotion and only "toodles along," that's quite unfair. It is beautiful and teems with energy, and focuses on a critical moment in the life of luxury and racing car magnate Enzo Ferrari (addressed by everyone as "Commendatore") in 1957 when everything is at issue for him. It's a movie teetering impeccably between triumph and disaster, beautiful to look at, wonderfully edited, but a bit old fashioned.

Everything is at issue for the Commendatore. That includes business, his reputation as owner of, with Maserati, Italy's most prestigious racing car team; his marriage, and also his partnership, because his volatile wife Laura (a wound tight, go-for-broke Penélope Cruz, in top form), handles the books; and last, but not least, his relation to his illegitimate son, Piero, son of Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley), whom he loves, and needs as a successor.

Laura doesn't know about Piero, or want to know about Lina. She instead merely shoots a real bullet into the wall next to Ferrari's head for returning one morning after the maid has come in. The shame of it! And this silly, if dangerous, incident shows the film, on the verge of tragedy, is also not without humor.

This is Adam Driver's second turn as a rich and important Italian businessman. It is not really such a good idea - though Driver seems able to play any role, or a lot of them anyway; but this is a considerably better film than House of Gucci.

But herein lies the problem: because American movies in which Italians or Frenchmen all speak English with fake Italian or French accents are an item past its sell-by date. We have become more sophisticated about language, even if the average educated Yank still lacks fluency in other languages. Gone is the day when a great movie like David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, which is all about going native in the Arab world, could contain in its long run only two little spots of semi-Arabic dialogue, "Allahu Akbar" and (though perhaps the latter is better described as camel language) "Hut-hut-hut!" It is certainly okay for the central driver on Ferrari's team, Alfonso de Portago, to speak English: this risk-taking aristocrat was born in London with an Irish mother. But everybody in Modena, Italy, in Michael Mann's lovingly recreated 1957 images? No. This will not fly.

So when we begin to accept this outmoded convention, we are slipping back into a movie world of fifty years ago. Or maybe twenty. Michael Mann is an octogenarian, and this project of his goes back at least as far as the year 2000; in fact he is recorded as thinking about it as far back as 1993. (He has also not put out a movie in eight years.)

Ferrari has two main strands: mounting a major team to compete in the then hugely famous 1,000-mile cross country Forumla One race, the Mille Miglia, to jumpstart the Ferrari luxury car business, which is on the brink of bankruptcy - a competition that ends in the spectacular death of the most glamorous driver in history, his navigator, and nine innocent Italian spectators, with the driver's body split in two, the whole event depicted with neatness, color, and precision, but not dwelt over. This quick moving on seems in the spirit of the protagonist. Enzo Ferrari, himself originally a racing driver, who, despite having recently lost his young legitimate son to kidney disease, seems to possess the extreme sportsman's mixture of awareness of danger and indifference to it.

Despite its moments of operatic emotion - and real opera, intercut, dubiously, with shiny red Formula One cars tearing up the road - and Laura Ferrari, the wife's jealous cursing and threats (she will not allow Enzo to recognize Piero while she is alive), there is a certain coldness and dryness to this movie. Maybe it's too beautiful. Maybe it was planned too well and too long. The immaculate, dramatic cinematography of Erik Messerschmidt, the neat editing of Pietro Scalia, the spot-on costume design, the evocative and accurate mise-en-scène, all contribute to a sense of perfection that both satisfies and shuts down emotion. One is satisfied on multiple levels, but cut off. And despite the screenplay's focus on family and the contradictions of Ferrari's glamorous and difficult life - as if he is driving a Formula One car through his own existence, it is, as with most movies about car racing, the racing itself, the gleam of the red bodies and satisfying roar of the purebred engines and sight of the long tree-lined roads being torn up, the cars vying for position at a hundred miles an hour on tricky curves - that stand out in the mind.

Ferrari, 130 mins., premiered at Venice Aug. 31, 2023; also shown at Toronto and in the New York Film Festival, where it was screened for this review, as the Closing Night film Oct. 13, 2023 at 6 p.m., the US premiere, featuring a Q&A with Michael Mann, Adam Driver, Penélope Cruz and Gabriel Leone. Metacritic rating: 74%.

[Chris Knipp]

PIERRE CRETON: A PRINCE/UN PRINCE (2023)


SCENE FROM A PRINCE

French art piece about a botanically-inspired gay love triangle

Lee Marshall in Screen Daily described A Prince as "surely one of the most kookily unclassifiable films ever to have screened in Director’s Fortnight". A Prince follows a horticultural student, Pierre-Joseph, whose sexual encounters with his botany teacher and mentors lead to a unusual hybrid tale of science, sex and meditation.

This film drops us into a dry, elegant, and nerdy upper middle class white French world of strange contradictions. the protagonist is attracted to posh meat-noshing hunters, as well as botanists, while disapproving of guns and hunting.

All the while events or tableaux are staged, but we rarely hear the amateur actors speaking. Instead there are voiceovers for them spoken by actors Mathieu Amalric, Françoise Lebrun and Grégory Gadebois It is as if those on screen they are "models," in the Bressonian sense.

This film is at once graphically sexual, verbally at least, and totally unsexy. There is a French country house atmosphere, and the food, the fires, and the dogs are appealing, the people not so much.

Gadebois lend their voices as narrators of the film’s poetic sequences. A Prince was penned by Mathilde Girard, Cyril Neyrat and Vincent Barre.

The film features a striking soundtrack – part Baroque courtly dance, part Doors-like instrumental – by Dutch lutenist Jozef van Wissem best-known for scoring Jim Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive.

I feel the influence of somebody like Eugène Green here, but the US distributor, Strand, felt some gay interest tie-in, which may be reflected in future LGBTQ festivals.

A Prince/Un prince, 82 mins., debuted at Cannes Directors' Fortnight, and won the SACD Prize from France’s Writers’ Guild for the best French-language film in the section. Screened as part of the New York Film Festival (NYFF61) where it was a Currents feature.

[Chris Knipp]

MARTÍN REITMAN: LA PRÁTICA (2023)


ESTEBAN BIGLIARDI IN LA PRÁTICA

Called a "leading light of the New Argentine Cinema," Martín Rejtman is back here with his first film in nine years (following Two Shots Fired, NYFF/2014), "a shrewd deadpan comedy that provides further evidence that few directors are as adept at dramatizing the absurdity of the mundane. Gustavo (Esteban Bigliardi), an Argentinean yoga instructor living in Chile, has recently separated from his wife. . ." runs the festival blurb.

Two Shots Fired, however, seemed to me at the tme "first flat, then absurdist, finally simply pointless," and seemed "like some inexplicable instructional film or the work of a deranged amateur," though I received the impression from various reviews of other Reijman films that his absurdist method sometimes really worked, at least for some.

[Chris Knipp]

PAUL B. PRECIADO: ORLANDO, MY POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY (2023)

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ONE OF 27 ORLANDOS IN ORLANDO

Embracing Woolf's sex-changing history as a bible of trans lore

Preciado, a writer and philosopher, opens with narration about how Virginia Woolf's novel "Orlando" – where an English poet lives over centuries and, at one point, changes genders from male to female – doubles as his own biography. Since Woolf wrote his biography before he was born, Preciado decided to construct his directorial debut as a correspondence to Woolf after her death. He recruits 27 trans and non-binary people, including himself, to play the eponymous role while talking about their own lives. The revolving door of subjects allows Preciado to use an episodic structure that lets him change things up on a scene-to-scene basis.

Preciado says Virginia Woolf's Orlando is his biography, and takes this famous work of English fiction as a kind of bible of trans life. The film doesn't go very deeply into Woolf's book; it's the idea of it that counts for Preciado. Viewers of this film, which is in French, with one extended speech in Spanish, will remember it as a procession of different young and old (but mostly young) trans people who announce themselves as appearing in the film to play the role of Orlando, and donning a big ruff collar - a feature of seventeenth-century dress worn, notably, by both men and women - as symbolic "costume" for their. . . audition?

They don't tell much about themselves, either. But what is striking is the merry procession of trans people, some with light voices, some with deep voices, taling about their lives, the wonder of hormones and injections and changes they are for the most part happy about.

The imortant thing is that this is a happy and even celebratory film that trans people can identify with and rejoince in.

[Chris Knipp]

HAYAO MIYAZAKI: THE BOY AND THE HERON (2023)



GENERAL FILM FORUM REVIEW

The celebrated Studio Ghibli auteur or "anime maestro" signs his last animated film. More self-identified than his more usually girl-centric tales, this one focuses on Mahito, a 12-year-old misfit, and the gray heron he discovers flapping about his new home - a bird that turns into a little bald gnome-like creature with a red bulbous nose and big teeth. Peter Debruge in his Variety review assesses this as "a worthy but mid-range addition" to the Miyazaki oeuvre.

[Chris Knipp]

TRIÂN ANH HÙNG: THE TASTE OF THINGS/LA PASSION DE DODIN BOUFFANT (2023)




Grand meals, controlled passions

Director Trân Anh Hùng of the 1994 The Scent of Green Papaya (NYFF) won the Best Director award at this year's Cannes for his bravura, scrupulously deployed feat of epicurean cinema. The Taste of Things, grand and beautiful "food porn" though it is, feels a little pale and conventional in 360º human, emotional terms - not the breathtakingly engaging filmmaking of Justine Triet's Cannes Golden Palm-winning Anatomy of a Fall. But Taste won out over the latter as France's entry into the best foreign Oscars. And one can reluctantly see why. What could be more French for foreigners than a period haute cuisine extravaganza with a touching romance woven in played by arguably the country's two biggest movie stars of the day, Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel? It's a mild irony that something so conventionally iconic would be directed by someone not French, from a former colony.

The cooking here is of the 1880's, a baroque period for the French kitchen far, far away from the Nouvelle Cuisine of the 1960's. Menus include course after course piled high with fish or meat covered with elaborate sauces and injected or doused with multiple ingredients. A show-offy meal could take as long to consume as eight hours. Nonetheless there is much charm here. It turns out the protagonist chooses his virtuoso version of humble pot au feu as a signature dish. We see a talented young trainee sample dishes with three-star Michelin discernment (and mild disdain), and we learn, with her, that the French for Baked Alaska - a desert we see prepared in incredible detail - is "a Norwegian omelette."

The long opening sequence, in which Eugénie (Binoche) and several young women, attended by Dodin (Magimel), work in a big grand, sunny country kitchen, apparently of a chateau (though details are vague) prepare a lavish meal for half a dozen bigwigs of the local village. It's all done in trimmed-down real time, and the best stoves and equipment of the period are used: notably most of the pots and pans are traditional copper vessels lined with tin. The big old fashioned but beautifully built stoves are fueled by red hot coals. The appearance of grand cuisine being prepared in the period setting and with period equipment and in the hands-on period way is most impressive, a tour de force that manages to feel effortless and natural.

The human drama winds up feeling more self-conscious and also a bit undercooked, and a major plot point is revealed very early on, robbing the film of the element of surprise. I personally didn't understand very well what the setup here was. Descriptions suggest Dodin is a gourmet and Eugénie is working for him. But they seem to be collaborating. And its still not clear that this is a private kitchen since it is maintained at such a high level as to seem almost commercial. And while Dodin wants nothing more than to marry Eugénie, a chateau owner doesn't usually marry his cook, especially not in 1885, one should think.

One strain that makes sense is the teenage girl, Pauline (Bonnie Chagneau-Ravoire), the daughter of local farmers perhaps, who has been hired as an assistant, but winds up being a rather grand protégée of Dodin and ultimately a taster, whose virtuoso palate is shown off early on. When Eugénie is no longer available and Dodin is having replacement candidates prepare test dishes, the girl evaluates them along with him. The girl's cool sensuality shows us cuisine is an art whose practitioners, as with music, begin with innate talents and start early, even though Dodin says a cook only comes into their own at forty. As a chef, Eugénie seems tireless, fluid, cool, a slightly remote virtuoso. Dodin provides the emotions, loving her, loving her cookery.

But it emerges that over the twenty years they have worked together in this way a mutual warmth has developed and it's the routine that from time to time - though not always - she admits him to her bedroom in the evening. She resists his repeated proposal that they marry - until, finally, she gives in. The film, following the more prudish tendencies of the period depicted, never follows them into her bedroom. The only porn is the food porn.

The food is grand and impressive. In that opening sequence we necessarily find it glorious - until we begin to realize it is over-elaborate and heavy, and that the small group of men who consume it are overweight and unhealthy.

The romantic relationship between Eugénie and Dodin is outweighed by their working relationship. He is pleased after, when questioned, she says she thinks of herself as his cook, not as is wife. The screenplay plays with this conflict. But the ambivalence does not serve the film. Binoche is buttoned up and brave here. Magimel is a ceaseless outboard motor of energy, with a couple of scary outbursts.

Some things are timeless. When Dodin celebrates Puligny Montrachet and Chambolle Musigny as the most sublime of white and red burgundies, respectively, this was a profoundly resonant moment for this writer.

The Taste of Things/La passion de Dodin Bouffant, 145 mins., debuted at Cannes where it won the Director's Prize in competition. It was originally titled in English "The Pot-au-Feu." Also shown at numerous other festivals, including New York, as part of which it was screened for this review. Showing in the NYFF Oct. 5 and 7l, 2023. Limited US release by IFC and Sapan Studio in Feb. 2024 starting Feb. 9.

[Chris Knipp]

ERROL MORRIS: THE PIGEON TUNNEL (2023) - NYFF 'SPOTLIGHT'


DAVID CORNWELL/JOHN LE CARRÉ IN ERROL MORRIS' THE PIGEON TUNNEL

A last interview with the prince of spy novelists, John le Carré (David Cornwell)

"I look at you as an exquisite poet of self-hatred," Errol Morris says to Cornwell, known as John le Carré and the celebrated the author of over two dozen matchless works of spy fiction including The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Constant Gardener, with many film adaptations and TV series including the timeless Alec Guinness performance as le Carré's central figure, George Smiley.

Le Carré/Cornwell does not take this Morris sally amiss. He smiles his quick twinkle and says, "I would go with that." It's a disarming exchange indeed toward the end of a long string of them in what is one of Morris' most amiable, rich, and free-flowing of his famous studies of men. Though the time has been short, in ninety minutes the writer has made a searching exposition of his life and career, notably of the most seminal aspect: growing up as the son of the endlessly duplicitous, double-dealing Ronnie Cornwell, who's been described as "an epic con man of little education, immense charm, extravagant tastes, but no social values."

Le Carré describes here how even after he had become a rich and famous author, at the Sacher Hotel restaurant in Vienna Ronnie still essentially attempted to con him out of an outrageous sum of money, ostensibly to set up a pigs and cattle farm in Dorset - and how, when le Carré flatly refused, offering only a property and a stipend, Ronnie threw a terrible scene, letting out repeated loud howls of anger and protest that could be heard halfway down the street.

It's an extraordinary story, and certainly not the only one. The son had to grow up living in constant uncertainty, sharing in the deceptions, going on the run with his father who was always escaping from discovered deceptions and mountainous debts. Ronnie, le Carré says, came within a hair of great success, but always managed to slip into financial trouble again, seeming to thrive on risk and danger - just as, he also says, spies do.

Those of us who have read le Carré's own book about his life and his father know this story. But it's better to hear it in the master's own voice. Those who have listened to the author's masterful audio performances of his own books, especially the last ones - he seemed to get better and better, well into his eighties - know how good that voice is, the range of accents and voices - perhaps a hint at what a master of deception father Ronnie may have been, transferred to the master of invention and storytelling the son became.

There are reviewers who describe this interview as "contentious." There is no truth in this. In fact compared to other Errol Morris portraits this is a harmonious one. There is a sweet complicity, an understanding. Le Carré puts himself willingly in Morris' hands from the outset, declaring himself willing to tell all and be as honest as he can, and there is no reason to think this insincere. Le Carré has grown milder by this time, near the end of his life, than he was earlier in the two decades after 9/11, when he could be harshly critical in public both of England, which he'd come to see as a pathetic little empire hiding from its own decline, and America, the belligerent and dominant world empire. Here, instead, he chooses to talk about himself, about his father, about the schools that gave him upperclass manners and accent but never the will to think himself upperclass. He speaks also of the inspiration for his work that he found in the traitor, Kim Philby, and his path from working for espionage organizations to being suddenly a writer about espionage whose first book sold 12 or 13 million copies worldwide.

This film may not really tell us anything significant that is new. But it serves as a rich live-voice valedictory self-portrait. It serves a kind of ceremonial, farewell purpose. What it does also do is to tell us a little more each time, or more vividly, about what we already knew, with the filmmaker illustrating everything elegantly, with seamlessly introduced short reenactments of moments from the life, illustrated by an astonishing number of actual photos and film clips, thought none of these are ever intrusive and each of them always comes at the right moment. Morris sometimes speaks to le Carré, but never seems to be doing so too often. The whole thing is splendidly done, a treat for fans.

There is also a little more: because subtly Morris teases out, or partly just witnesses, le Carré's awareness that in his fertile inventions he was somehow always to some extent exploring his own pain, and each time he invented a new story or a new character he was discovering something new in himself. It's obvious, perhaps, but worth the sense it gives of pulling tings together as a wonderful life and impressive body of work are quietly summed up. And yet with an edge, as of one never at home anywhere, never knowing himself, finding the "inmost room is bare," as with the hidden safe of the head of MI5, where nothing but a pair of trousers is found. This rich exploration still leaves us haunted, hungry, ready to go for the real treasures, which are the books. David Cornwell died in December 2020 at eighty-nine, but his books will be alive for as long as English books are read. Wikipedia sums him up as "a sophisticated, morally ambiguous writer" - you better believe it! "he is considered one of the greatest novelists of the postwar era." And now he is.

The Pigeon Tunnel, 93 mins., debuted at Telluride Sept. 1, 2023, also show at Toronto, Camden, Aspen, New York Sept. 30, Palm Springs, BFI London, and Chicago. Released on the internet in many countries Oct. 20, 2023. Metacritic rating: 81%.