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New York Film Festival 2024
Last edited by Chris Knipp; 10-10-2024 at 06:48 AM.
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NICKEL BOYS (RaMell Ross 2024)
ETHAN HENRISSE, BRANDON WILSON IN NICKEL BOYS ]
Warm reception at Telluride (Playlist, Gregory Elwood)
RAMELL ROSS: NICKEL BOYS (2024)
A radical reshuffling for POV emphasis
Award winning documentary filmmaker Ramell Ross has chosen to make his feature debut, an A24 film, a stylistically bold film, that radically rearranges Colman Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Nickel Boys on which it is based, using an evocative, poetic method reminiscent of Terrence Malick's Tree of Life. The story is about Elwood (Ethan Henrisse), an intelligent, motivated, college-age black boy inspired by Rev. King living in the Jim Crow South in 1962 who, hitching a ride unknowingly in a stolen car that gets apprehended by cops, gets sent to a brutal reformatory where many have been beaten and died and been buried on the property, disappeared. His best friend there becomes the more experienced boy, Turner (Brandon Wilson). The reformatory has white and black boys, segretated and given different treatment.
This place immediately brought to mind for me Sugarcane, the recent documentary revealing Catholic-run Native residential schools across Canada where native people where brutalized and eliminated also (in the US too). The high profile choice of this film reminds one of two other NYFF films. Two years ago Elegance Bratton's autobiographical The Inspection, of being queer and rejected by his mother and joining the U.S. Marines: it was featured as the Closing Night Film as Nickel Boys is the Opening Night one.
Given the radical-POV-shot nature of most of Nickel Boys leads one to wonder if Ross, whose 2018 doc Hale County This Morning, This Evening was admired in New Directors/New Films, may have attended the 2015 NYFF and saw Lazlo Nemes' ,Son of Saul (presented as a NYFF Special Event), where a brief period at Auschwitz is depicted entirely through the eyes of a prisoner. Is the Nickel Academy and Auschwitz too extreme an equivalency? Maybe; but in both cases the films are shot in a way to make the terrifying experience of brutal incarceration more visceral through shooting from the POV of a prisoner. Perhaps the NYFF jury was drawn to these three films for similar reasons.
The contrast between Whitehead's book and the screenplay by RaMell Ros and, Joslyn Barnes is stark, because the book except for shifting back and forth in time is strighbforward and linear, so deliberately understated and in such surprisingly correct standard English it reads a bit like a Young Adult novel, until thihgs go brutally wrong. Peter Debruge in his Telluride Variety review poses the obvious question; do Ross' radical devices, as he puts it "turning a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel into a minimalist tone poem," not perhaps achieve identificiton at the loss of a plot you can follow - unless you've read the book before hand?
But Ross' super-empathic POV method avoids over-familiarity, because as Debruge points out citing films as diverse as Boy A, Zero for Conduct, Scum and Sleepers, brutality in boys' reformatories has been done so often for the screen it would seem clichéd to transfer Whithead's book literally to the screen, even though in novel form, the details are impactful. In the film, Ross gets around the problem of the invisibility of his main POV protagonist Elwood (Ethan Herisse) when at the Nickel Academy he befriends Turner (Brandon Wilson), and we get Turner's POV too. But whether seeing actor Herisse's face conveys much additional emotional depth is uncertain, and the boy's idealism, made clear in the book's narrative, is lost also. In addition the film, as Debruge puts it, gets "lost in digressions," including flash-forwards, arthival footage of NASA missions, and later forensic excavations at Nickel Academy that revealed the many unmarked graves.
Nickel Boys, based on Colson Whithead's The Nickel Boys, 140 mins., debuted at Telluride Aug. 30, 2024, showing also at the NYFF late Sept. and Loondon BFI mid-Oct. Reviewed here as part of the NYFF, where it is the Opening Night Film, presented Fri., Sept. 27, 2024. US theatrical release Oct 25, 2024 by Amazon MGM Studios. UK Nov. 8. Metacritic rating 86%. (Now 84%.)
Last edited by Chris Knipp; 09-28-2024 at 09:15 PM.
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THE. SEED OF THE SACRED FIG (Mohammad Rasoulof 2024)
The Seed of the Sacred Fig (Persian: دانه*ی انجیر معابد, romanized: Dane ye Anjir e Maabed; French: Les Graines du figuier sauvage; German: Die Saat des heiligen Feigenbaums)
MOHAMMAD RASOULOF: THE SEED OF THE SACRED FIG (2024)
The undoing of an Iranian family
Rasoulof begins wonderfully with a family, whose conflicts reflect neatly enough the turmoil of the brutal Iranian theocratic regime at a real recent moment when the young people are ready to risk evrything to revolt against it, for a while anyway. The father, Iman (Missagh Zareh) is on the way to becoming a judge. His wife Najmeh (Soheila Golestani), the most interesting character because she changes, is religious, like her husband (who's seen praying at home several times), and very loyal to the machine of the regime in which he is a part as a lawyer who is working his way up to the Revolutionary Court. He becomes an interrogator, and the next step is to be a judge.
Their two young daughters Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki) harbor the critical ideas of Iranian youth, and this causes them to rescue a classmate, Sadaf (Niousha Akhshi), who has been caught in a demonstration and gotten buckshot in the face. Gradually we see the stresses grow, and production values are excellent all down tthe line, with particularly striking use of Iranian music. The torments and conflicts of living under the Iranian regime have never been so closely wedded to the day to day experiences of a family.
Unfortunately, Rasoulof isn't able to work within these limits and instead turns the movie into a mystery and then a thriller, and then almost a series of conceptual games at a historic ruin Iman takes the family to after he has been doxed by anti-regime forces and they are in danger. Something that seemed very real, while it may remain engrossing in its way, seems to go haywire, starting with the theatrical device of a missing pistol.
Nonetheless, students of the Iranian situation and of Iranian film will have to see The Seed of the Sacred Fig. And a lot of it is a pleasure to look at and listen to. The often flat closeup cinematography is subtly striking. There is a scene where tending a bloody wound feels like a sacred rite. The actresses seem very real. The father becomes a bit shrill later on, but he's powerful in the more successful first half. Mohammad Rasoulof fled his home country to avoid an eight-year prison sentence, and so he is another one of the major Iranian filmmakers, with Asghar Farhadi, Jaafar Panahi and the late Abbas Kiarastomi who have memorably depicted their country without being able to be there or, if there, to move about freely.
The Seed of the Sacred Fig, 168 mins., debuted May 24, 2024 at Cannes (Special Jury Prize and FIPRESCI Award), showing at numerous other international festivals including Sydney, Locarno, Melbourne, Telluride, Torontok and the NYFF, where it was screened for this review. Metacritic rating (15 reviews): 84%. A NEON release.
Last edited by Chris Knipp; 10-05-2024 at 09:19 PM.
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THE BRUTALIST (Brady Corbet 2024)
ADRIEN BRODY INTHE BRUTALIST
BRADY CORBET: THE BRUTALIST (2024)
Brady Corbet's enigmatic portrait of an emigré Jewish architect strives for grandeur
Reviewing actor-turned-director Brady Crobet's second film Vox Lux in 2018, (his first, still the most interesting, was the flawed but haunting 2015 THe Childhood of a Leader), I wrote: "He's already scheduled to shoot a third film, tentatively titled The Brutalist. It is to be the thirty-year saga of a great Hungarian-born Jewish architect struggling for recognition in America. Sounds like Louis Kahn, and his could be a very good story, though his son Nathanial's memorable documentary homage My Architect will be a hard act to follow."
Numerous critics say of The Brutalist "They don't make 'em like this anymore." But one could see that with Childhood of a Leader Corbet was already thinking on a grand scale. The Brutalist, which has met with wide acclaim, dramatically shows the ambition of its maker, who was under thirty when he started work on it. As such, it seems to excite young film fans like the crowd at the NYFF press screening, though even so reaction was mixed. The person sitting next to me, a gradaute of the Yale School of Architecture, declared of the film at the end that it had "lost" him. The fifteen-minte intermission mid-film, contributing to the effect of grandeur perhaps (or of an old fashioned Italin movie showing) gave people a chance at the crowded screening to share views.
Everything rests on the shoulders of Adrien Brody, as László Tóth, the Hungarian Jewish Holocaust survivor. Brody's tall, angular frame, lined features, and memorably deep, rasping impersonation of a Hungarian accent dominate every scene. His essential foil is Guy Pearce, as Harrison Lee Van Buren, the rich Pennsylvania man who discovers and adopts him working in anonymity at a furniture store run by his American cousin. It is a relationship that is a mix of adversarial and supportive from the start. Hardly anyone knows that in Europe, before Naziism came, Toth was a well known modernist architect and had designed substantial buildings. After designing a surprise birthday-gift library for Van Buren's mansion, a gift of his son, which initially infuriates him, Van Buren hires László to design a whole development, a sort of designer city in suburban Pennsylvania.
This becomes a struggle with lesser talents, such as an American archhitect hired to save money. But also with Laszló's own demons, his inability to connect with his wife and his strange niece and his association with drugs enabled by a poor man he has rescued, Gordon (African-French actor Isaach De Bankolé, underused).
Whether his architecture is "brutalist" or not is one of the lost threads. In fact, the film, in all its three hour and thirty-five minute length, gets rather lost in the relationship of Thoth with local magnate Harrison (a ruddy, somewhat bland Pearce), and how the lives of Thoth's wife Erzsébet (an underwhelming Felicity Jones) and his Sphynx-like niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) eventually are woven in and out of this relationship, which is marked by moments of noisy melodrama, especially in the second half. Perhaps "brutalist" refers to the egocentric Van Buren, or to the sometimes enigmatic Thoth, or to the throbbing drama itself, with its thunderous theme music insisting that it is epic, and a masterpiece. It makes a catchy, memorable title.
The beauty of the film is that it's enigmatic, especially László Tóth. But the weakness of the film is this quality, because there isn't enough about this fictitious but brilliant architect's creations or his genius, until the very end, and not enough about the work of being an architect - and not enough else from the somehow underused and ineffective secondary characters to justify this shortcoming or the claim of significance the movie makes for itself.
Still, they don't make them like this anymore. This film is grand and makes an impression, for sure, and for some its evocation of[i] Citizen Kane and the Paul Thomas Anderson of There Will Be Blood and The Master will be considered positive. It doesn't quite live up to those heroic models. but you can't help admiring Brady Corbet for dreaming big.
The Brutalist, 3 hrs., 35 mins., debuted at Venice Sept. 1, 2024, and was snapped up by A24 for distribution. Also shown at Toronto, and at the NYFF, where it was screneed for this review. Metacritic rating: 89% (18 reviews).
Last edited by Chris Knipp; 10-13-2024 at 10:10 AM.
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GRAND TOUR (Miguel Gomes 2024)
LANG KHĘ TRAN IN GRAND TOUR
MIGUEL GOMES: GRAND TOUR (2024)
A 'dreamy Asian travelogue' is poetic cinema and exoticism
There is almost no fixed pretext for the constant traveling in Gomez's Grand Tour, and that, as it were, is the point. This is a journey whose theme is "Let's get lost." We are immediately plunged into exoticism, or orientalism, but in a gentle sense, plunging into the Far East at its most bizarre, a mondo cane where the cane is a pedigreed shiatsu.
The one dodgy low-level pretext is escape, because Edward (Gonçalo Waddington), a frumpily movie star-handsome man with good hair and variable outfits, doesn't want to get married, and he's fleeing his fiancée, Molly (Crista Alfaiate), who somehow finds out where he's going and sends a telegram to say she's on the way, whereupon he snaaks off somewhere else. Telegrams, because this is 1918. But Gomez is not too pinned down by that, or by plot developments. There are period images and contemporary ones. He is more interested in providing a living, on-scene cabinet of wonders as Edward flees quietly from Mandalay to Bankok, thence to Shanghai and beyond, with imagery swinging back and forth betwen then and now and from mostly black and white to occasional color. It is sometimes simply documentary, but even then the film's characters appear in the scenes.
Memorable moments: We get a good look behind and in front of the scene of Thai shadow puppets; a sweeping Strauss waltz is played not as in Sokurov's Russian Ark for ballroom dancers at the Hermitage Museum, but for a busy square full of sweeping, undulating motorcycles moving in slow motion. Molly develops an intriguing friendship with the beautiful French-speaking Ngoc (Lang Khę Tran) in South Vietnam, and their traveling together begins as if it were the most natural thing in the world
The limitation, but also the beauty, of Gomes' method is that during the filmmaking process he allowed the locations to determine where things would go as he went along, as Wes Anderson partly did when making The Darjeeling Limited (NYFF 2007) in India. But Gomes, unlike Wes, is traveling through numerous countries. And this is another beauty of the film, its languages, because it constantly shifts from its home tongue of Portuguese within a conversation or from scene to scene, to Thai, Vietnamese, French, Japanese, and Chinese. And the voiceover - and there always is one - in whatever country is spoken in the location language and is constantly shifting. Remember: "Let's get lost" is the organizing principle. All this is very similar to Gomes' 2012 Tabu, in whose second half the director also improvised as he changed from one exotic location to another. But the structure is stronger and the mood more unified here.
As was said in my Tabu review for the 2012 NYFF, Gomes' way of making exotic, romantic, retro fantasies can be a bit shallow, but nonetheless the result is "evocative and very cinematic." Lean back and enjoy the ride. This man is unique, and what he's going for is the world of your dreams.
Grand Tour, 128 mins., debuted at Cannes, receiving the best director award, and showing also at Sydney, Karlovy Vary, New Zealand, Toronto, Vancouver, and other international festivals, including the NYFF, where it was screened for this review. Metacritic rating: 76%. A MUBI release.
Last edited by Chris Knipp; 10-05-2024 at 09:27 PM.
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APRIL (Dea Kulumbegashvili 2024)
IA SUKHITASHVILI IN GEORGIAN DIRECTOR DEA KULUMBEGASHVILI'S APRIL
DEA KULUMBEGASHVILI: APRIL (2024)
Struggles of a beleaguered OB-GYN
Georgian filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili's first film, Beginning, was a memorable part of the 2020 NYFF, and I concluded that despite all my questions throughout it was one of the most remarkable films of the festival and introduced the world to an exciting new filmmaker. Her style is just as harsh and provocative in this, her sophomore film. Beginning focused on a remote Georgian Jehovah's Witnesses congregation despised by the prevailing Eastern Orthodox majority and on the sufferings of the minister's wife. Dea's style and approach haven't changed here, but the focus has shifted to an OB-GYN doctor, Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), who is an outsider in another way. Working in a harsh rural area, she secretly chooses to perform abortions, which are illegal. Her colleagues know this. Furthermore, When a baby is stillborn with her officiating (depicted in an uncompromising early scene), we learn from the angry father that there are rumors of her clandestine activity. If it becomes known to officials, not only her career but those of her closest associates may be finished.
Again as with Beginning Dea uses boxy academy ratio, again there are Carlos Reygadas-style nature visuals dialed up to the max. This time, watching the film in Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater with its remarkable sound system, winds and storms were overwhelming meteorological events: the disarmingly peaceful-sounding April is exhausting as well as disturbing to watch. There is nothing like the fire in Beginning. But just a drive down a country road is harrowing, due to the sound recording, which is emphasized by the complete absence of a score. There is no conventional he-said, she-said editing for conversations. The camera rests on one person for a long eriod, then shifts to another person for an equally long one. Again there are some long silences.
We witness one abortion, shown with a fixed camera a few feet away and as the patient, a deaf mute, softly whimpers, we see only her thigh and an assistent holding her and comforting her. The procedure goes perfectly well, but the later consequences are nonetheless tragic.
Nina is beseiged from several directions. There is pressure from her colleagues to stop performing abortions and the danger of what will happen if she doesn't. The stillborn birth is also leading to investigations. Though a thorough autopsy, read out by a senior colleague in numbing detail, shows the baby had no chance of surviving anyway, Nina is repeatedly accused of being guilty of negligence for avoiding a C-section simply because the mother wanted "a natural birth." So doubt is cast that also might cost Nina her job and her career.
Nina is the portrait of an obsessive. Perhaps such people are opaque; at least she is. One might think a person who devotes her life in more ways than one to a mission to deliver babies and help pregnant young women in trouble would be a warm, caring, sociable type. Nina doesn't seem this way. In a conversation with a man she went to school with, a onetime sweetheart, she declares that she cannot marry because there is no room for anyone else in her life. The actress Ia Sukhitashvili has a severe, almost elegant look, again somewhat against expectations. There is a sexual sequence in a car at night that is utterly cold and unpleasant and leads to violence. Her life outside the work seems empty and awful.
There are also elements of an art film or museum art piece and recurring surreal imagery of a strange naked figure, seen always at some distance, almost like a sepulchral walking corpse. This corpse figure pulls April away from the etreme, punishing naturalism it sometimes has. Again as with Dea's debut film I want to protest and say this is too much and too obviously one-sidedly violent, provocation for its own sake; and again one is convinced that this is too good and has too much conviction not to admire, if grudgingly. More grudgingly this time, though, partly because the protagonist is so unappealing. But aided by Bones and All's dp Arseni Khachaturan, a key source of the blend of long-take realism and nightmarish expressionism, and a powerful sound design, this is another clear demonstration that Dea Kulumbegashvili is a powerful new cinematic voice.
April, 134 mins., debuted at Venice Sept. 5, 2024, showing also at Toronto, Donostia-San Sebastian, Hamburg, and at the NYFF, where it was screened for this review. Metacritic rating: 89% (based on 7 reviews).
Last edited by Chris Knipp; 09-22-2024 at 12:35 PM.
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