New York Film Festival 2023

[Chris Knipp]

WIM WENDERS: PERFECT DAYS (2023)


KOJI YAKUSHO, ARISA NAKANO IN PERFECT DAYS

Humble joy of the quotidian

Beginning with a chronicling of the daily routine of a middle-aged Tokyo toilet cleaner called Hirayama (Kôji Yakusho), Wim Wenders' film, which blends four short stories for its screenplay, gradually develops something more, building to a quiet climax that is a bittersweet affirmation of life. It accomplishes this with the help of the famous actor who plays the lead, whose performance is a marvel of understatedness.

You will see Hirayama get up and fold away his traditional bed on the tatami-mat floor multiple times, wash his face, trim his mustache, dress, put on his work "TOKYO TOILETS" overalls, get coffee from a machine, drive off in his van, start to work. The public city toilets, let us note, are beautiful, modern places, housed in external architecture that is varied and handsome. The toilets and sinks are state of the art, probably the world's best. Japanese toilets have long had heated seats and gadgets inside that squirt warm water.

Hirayama is not incapable of speaking, but his style is not to speak much, especially when questioned.

All well and good. But this is not some Bressonian depiction of grim daily routine. It is routine. But it is not grim. Hirayama is happy. Getting in his van, he selects from his collection of vintage, mint condition tapes of Seventies rock and pop classics, which include (a partial list): "Redondo Beach" by Patti Smith, "Sleepy City" by the Rolling Stones, "Pale Blue Eyes" by The Velvet Underground, "Dock of the Bay" by Otis Redding, "Sunny Afternoon" by The Kinks, "Brown Eyed Girl" by Van Morrison), "Feeling Good" (Nina Simone), and last but not least "Perfect Day" by Lou Reed. Hirayama's impetuous young coworker Takeshi (the comical Tokio Emoto) admires and covets these tapes and insists on taking Hirayama to show some of them to the clerk at a big shop for assessment and finds. As he's suspected, they turn out to be worth hundreds of dollars and Takeshi wants Hirayama to sell them. Of course he won't.

Hirayama loves trees, and at lunchtime he sits below an urban forest and takes a snapshot or two with ahn old film camera, of a favorite tree. Every week, a regular ritual, he goes to a camera shop where he loads a new roll in the camera, picks up a set of prints, and leaves off the latest roll to be printed. At home he goes through the new prints, throws out the bad ones, and files the new ones in a whole storage space of them.

When his work is done, Hirayama goes to a public bath were he gets clean and thoroughly soaks. Every day he does this. It's obviously a fulfilling and enjoyable experience - as well as a traditionally Japanese one.

Hirayama is a reader. There are many racks of books in his bedroom, and he makes visits and weekly purchases at a bookstore where he is known. He favors books that cost a dollar; the bookstore clerk approves his choices, such as Patricia Highsmith. He is reading Faulkner, and later Eleven Stories. He always reads before he goes to sleep, by the light of a reading lamp.

It seems like a perfect life, for Hirayama. He likes the work. It's the kind of job where you get immediate results. It's satisfying that way. Not only are the toilets pleasant, clean, modern ones. It may be in a shabby location (as is implied later), but Hirayama lives comfortably, in a house, on several floors, and drives a shiny van. He lacks for nothing. He looks fit. This appears to be a good job. It satisfies him, anyway. He eats out after work: he food is reasonable and tasty, and the faces are familiar.

Hirayama lives alone and barely speaks but he turns out to have daily friends and companions, at the places he frequents, the restaurants, bars, and the like, where he is a regular and is known and greeted in a friendly fashion.

But at this point, if not long before, we may begin to wonder: despite the air of the happy worker, isn't this an empty existence? Has Hirayama no family?

This is where the last quarter of the film's two-hour length comes through key breakthroughs, notably the sudden appearance of a neice Niko (Arisa Nakano), who has run away from home. This home turns out to be posh, as indicated by the luxurious chauffeured car in which her mother comes to collect her after a few days. And this in turn, though nothing is explained, suggests that Hirayama's job, which is news to his sister, may be a choice, like the priesthood.

Even after all this, and more interesting scenes where he talks, we still may not know why this life works for Hirayama or why he has chosen it, But we feel that we know Hirayama so well that his simple joy, in the van, after working, listening to his favorite music, brings a swell of emotion we never expected watching him wield his toothbrush and mustache clippers early on. Wenders' Perfect Days is a perfect example of a slow burner of a movie, in its way complete and fulfilling in and of itself, a "perfect film," in its deceptively modest way. Wenders may have thought of one of my favorite movies of all time, Akira Kurosawa's famous Ikiru, which builds slowly from the life of an unprepossessing man to a finale of deeply moving, luminous transcendence. We don't get that here, but Hirayama's life turns to have more to it than meets the eye.

Perfect Days, 123 mins., debuted May 25, 2023 at Cannes in competition, winning the rize of the Ecumenical Jury and the Best Actor Award for Kōji Yakusho. It became Japan's entry for the 2024 best foreign Oscar. Screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival Oct. 11, 2023. Metacritic rating: 72%.

[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%. (Later 73%.)

[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.