New York Film Festival 2024

[Chris Knipp]

PEPE THE HIPPO IN PEPE

NELSON CARLOS DE LOS SANTOS ARIAS: PEPE (2024)

Dying thoughts of Pablo Escobar's escaped Hippopotamus

Writer/director/editor/composer Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias has many ideas flying around in his head when he unreels this high-concept film, which takes the idea of the banished Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar's dispersed ménage of exotic African animals and in particular, one hippo who escaped from the herd and was shot down. Coming from Namibia, Southwest Africa, one of four, to South America and then, like an escaped slave hunted down: this seemed to Carlos de los Santos Arias too good an idea not to run with it with ideas of colonialism and eco-tourism dancing in his head.

But his symbolic protagonist cannot not run too far, because "Pepe", a name the locals gave the unfortunate beast, is dead when the film begins. We see him, but the deep voice we hear is his disembodied post mortem spirit, pondering. The part that appealed to me was the voice. There are several. Jhon Narváez, Matjila Fareed, Harmony Ahalwa, and Shifafure Faustinus voice Pepe in Spanish, Afrikaans, and Mbukushu, successively, but the sequence begins in an indigenous dialect. This is meant to reflect alternate colonized people and the capturing of a hippopotamus "herd" (or was it more like a posse?) made Pepe a colonized animal person.

Among these voices there was a very deep one that maybe was speaking in Mbukushu, which has an archaic ring to it, but the Afrikaans, I guess, sounds good too. Unfortunately the filmmakers did not think to indicate in their subtitling which language was being subtitled.

A similar playing-around took place with this film in the images, because they are rendered alternately between Super 16mm film-stock, digital RED cameras, and night-vision surveillance footage. I'm indebted to POV Magazine's article about the film, which adds that "The wide array of formats and aspect ratios are interwoven within the languid chronology."

Languid chronology. Hmmm. Well, I fell asleep, but then, I was tired. I was wide awake when there was careful coverage of a provincial fair in which very local, very naive and well-meaning "beauty queens" came forward and expressed their halting plans for improving the local region, to wild applause by their mothers. Whatever this had to do with the spirit of an escaped former captive, then liberated hippo was a question lost in the languid chronology.

Another format came from the director's rather small square showing what POV somewhat laboriously explains by saing that "The implementation of a fictional Hanna-Barbera inspired cartoon also comments on the mythologization of the hippopotami phenomenon." So there's that.

That chronology also warped into a small tour bus, apparently in Namibia, or South Africa (who knows?) where a guide was addressing the group in German about sight-seeing local wildlife and how to deal with the local "natives" (be friendly but keep a distance), referring to his black local guide, also present, who addressed him ending each sentence with "Boss." Hmmm, and again hmmm. At the end my screening companion's comment was "I don't know what I've just seen." Nor did I. But I liked the deep archaic hippo voice, regardless of anything it uttered.

Jessica Kiang in her Variety review calls this film "a sometimes fascinating but more often frustrating head-trip." The review heading also calls the film "An Opaque, Experimental Odyssey." It's opaque for us because it stays stuck inside the filmmaker's head.

Pepe, mins., debuted at the Berlinale Feb. 20, 2024, showing also at Beijing, Hong Kong, IndieLisboa, Shanghai, Sydney, Karlovy Vary, Poland, Torontok, BFI London, and the NYFF, where it was screened for this review. Metacritic rating: 59%.

[Chris Knipp]

SUSAN CHARDY IN THE OPENING SHOT OF ON BECOMING A GUINEA FOWL

RUNGANO NYONI: ON BECOMING A GUINEA FOWL (2024)

The truth comes out when a man dies in Zambia

What's notable in Rungano Nyoni's new film focused on a big family funeral is the seamlessly assumed eccentricities of the numerous family, which includes relatives of the poor widow, who seems to wind up blamed for her late husband's dramatic flaws, if she's not careful. Again as in her debut I Am Not a Witch (seen but due to embargo not reviewed here) the Zambian-born, Welsh-raised filmmaker unfolds a misogyny fable focused basically on the harsh abuses faced by young girls even in ttoday's African society.

Driving home from a party still wearing an elegant surreal mask, protagonist Shula (Susan Chardy) comes across her uncle Fred lying dead, eyes open, in the middle of the road, in a location near what turns out to be a brothel. Dealing with this Shula retains some of the dry restraint her helmet and big shades implied. Quick flips between English and Zambian language also convey both detachment and sophistication, qualities doubtless needed to deal with breathtaking provocations and giddy contrasts between modern and traditional attitudes among family members encountered, particularly male ones, who often issue demands and make denials.

Somewhat inexplicably Shula gets assigned to organize a crowded family funeral for uncle Fred. We soon learn that Fred was not only a drunk who often didn't come home but a serial sexual abuser of young female family members: he got one pregnant when she was eleven. Why not, then, just put Fred away discretely and quietly, the less said the better? But that is not the family way. Maybe people don't know or, worse, they don't care. Even one of the victims brushes off her victimization, saying "Never mind; he's dead now, and that was years ago." Later however, she is found collapsed in tears.

Family warfare also applies, and thus it is that there's an attempt from hostile factions to blame the widow for the depredations of Fred and punish her by leaving her with no possessions. Is this democracy, or chaos? Anyway, because this is Africa a lot of what happens seems lively and funny and all of it is full of energy. Nyoni's film captures everything. It's modern, elegant, and brilliantly accomplished, though it meanders a bit toward the middle and could have used some heightening and trimming.

At one point in the wake a large group of family members seamlessly break into sweet, harmonious song: an exquisitely executed moment and a high point of this continually enjoyable and eye-opening film.

Peter Bradshaw noted the "unsettlingly playful surrealism" of this film at Cannes. But there is naturalism too, and fluid camera work and the varied interiors, which morph from primitive to hip, with lumpy furniture and big elongated wood sculptures, help contribute to making what might seem just a filmed play become something that could not have such fluidity on a stage.

The title takes us to a children's TV show about animals Shula is haunted by memories of, particularly an episode focused on a guinea fowl whose loud squawk was a warning of approaching predators - something she wished had been available to ward off uncle Fred.

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, 95 mins., debuted at the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes May 2024, receiving the best director award. Also shown at Karlovy Vary, Durban, Poland, Melbourne, and the NYFF, where it was screened for this review. A coming A24 release Stateside - a sign that Rungano Nyoni has jointed the top rank of young African filmmakers. Metacritic rating: 80%.

[Chris Knipp]

RICHARD GERE, UMA THURMAN IN OH, CANADA

PAUL SCHRADER: OH, CANADA (2024)

Schrader's reportedly very personal second Russell Banks adaptation is a confusing misfire

The novel Foregone by Russell Banks, who died last year, that forms the basis for Oh, Canada, concerns an accomplished documentary filmmaker at the end of his life who's sitting for a documentary to celebrate him. This is Schrader's second Banks-derived fllm after the troubling and much more successful 1998 Affliction. In the book the new Banks adaptation is based on that protagonist, Leonard Fife, hijacks this project from the students and acolytes working on it to focus it exclusively on a confession of his past sins, to air a lifetime of ugly secrets and demythologize himself. In Schrader's version, this reversal gets somewhat lost, and thus the film loses much of the book's point as well as the logic that holds the story together. This despite good performances headed by the rarely seen Richard Gere, and, playing the young Fife, Jacob Elordi. It is said that this film is perhaps Schrader's most personal story yet,and perhaps that is part of the problem, because Banks was not writing about Schrader in his book.

Amid much that is muddled, What emerges clearly is that Fife, who has terminal cancer, is in bad shape now: he describes for us some of he ugly details of his present condition, though it doesn't seem to stop him from relentlessly pursuing the shooting, repeatedly refusing to take breaks or resume next day. And as he has some of his former students to film him, he wants to have control. He also insists that his wife and former student Emma (Umma Thurman) always be present because his revelations are for her.

In this Schrader version of the story the editing into nonlinear flashbacks makes the unfolding of chronology and recounting of events constantly confusing. It's suggested that Fife himself is confused. And perhaps he is indeed to some extent delirious. But we do not know, because the point is he is telling things Emma doesn't know about him. And whether the stories are correct or not, Fife leaves many of his narratives uncompleted. It is a dubious decision by Schrader sometimes to have Gere enter into the flashbacks of the young Fife replacing Elordi. At one point old Fife converses in bed with young Fife's pregnant second wife (Kristine Froseth), a dubious choice.

While the topic of guilt and confession is something forever germane to Paul Schrader's interests, he strays markedly in this film from the hotheaded moral absolutism of much of his work. But multifaceted grays ill suit him. He lacks the nuance and precision required. As can sometimes happen with film adaptations, this is a case where the film might be a suggestive supplement to a reading of the book but certainly not a substitute. Watching the film ignorant of the book, one is constantly being led astray or left dangling.

We learn that Fife is noted for exposés of subjects including Agent Orange, sexual abuse in the clergy and illegal seal-hunting, but we never get a picture of him working on these projects that came after in the Sixties he moved to Canada. This movie too is a source of convusion because, it seems, if that sequence is true, that he did not flee the Vietnam War draft with the thousands of others who did so, but reported to a draft board and fooled the examiner into deferring him for being homosexual. Or is this a fantasy, since he thinks of going to Cuba but gets no further than Florida? Apparently the interview takes place in Montreal, but an early flashback shows when Fife first went to Canada he was told not to stay there, in Montreal, because his one year of high school French leaves him quite unprepared for Québecois life.

This is one of the more confusing and jumbled films Schrader has made. It cannot be recommended.

Oh, Canada 91 mins., debuted at Cannes May 2024, also showing at Toronto, San Sebastián, Baltic Film Festival, and at New York, where it was screened for this review. Also Woodstock. Opening in the US Dec. 6, 2024. Metacritic rating: 59%. A Kino Lorber release.

[Chris Knipp]

NAOMI WATTS, BILL MURRAY IN THE FRIEND

SCOTT MCGEHEE, DAVID SIEGEL: THE FRIEND (2024)

Of grief and a Great Dane

This is a book by Sigrid Nunez that won a 2018 National Book Award. The story explores grief for a friend through the inheritance of his dog, a 180-pound Harlequin Great Dane called Apollo. He is a pedigreed animal whom the friend found abandoned and had become very dear to him. The preparing and casting of the great Dane Bing for this role I'd already read about in a New Yorker article and is a story in itself.

Essential to the film is also the human cast, Naomi Watts as the protagonist, iris, and Bill Murray as her friend Walter who takes ill and suddenly commits suicide. Watts never ceases to be engaging and real. She gives her complete attention to a role that is detailed and specific but not particularly spectacular. This film is all about nuance, and it requires patience of the viewer. Nothing flashy happens. Murray appears only briefly but we don't need a lot of Bill Murray to believe Walter is a real and lovable man. He is the ultimate veteran and his turn is witty, natural, and complex.

The main interest is Iris' difficulty in coping with her inheritance of Apollo. She didn't expect to be chosen and the news from Walter's widow and third wife, Barbara (Noma Dumezweni) is a surprise. She is more a cat person. Anyway it's academic because her rent-controlled apartment, which has been in the family before her and by the looks of it is in a beautiful building in lower Manhattan, does not allow pets.

Nonetheless Iris gets Apollo from the pound and brings him to her apartment. He plants himself on her bed and takes it over. He won't eat at first and it emerges that he is grieving. "How do you explain death to a dog?" asks Barbara repeatedly, but you don't need to: obviously Apollo knows Walter is gone and feels the absence more acutely than anyone since he was his whole world. Apollo is a quiet, mournful presence, and writers have delighted in saying that Bing is the best actor in the film. Let's not try to compare human and animal performances. Naomi Watts is quietly fantastic.

However successfully the film captures the book, it works on its own very well.There are not the immense complications, say, of Schrader's adaptation of Russell Banks in the still-born Oh, Canada. The magic of the tale is how the practical details of taking care of an absent friend's unwieldy pet become seamlessly interwoven with the process of grieving. This is blended with other details of Iris' life as a writing teacher and writer (like Walter), flashbacks to show or explain Iris' relationship with Walter (only momentarily ever anything but friendship, but intense on that level), and other friends and places. An important figure is the super of Iris' building (Felix Solis) who must convey the bad news and the good news.

Cate Erbland of IndieWire calls The Friend "the sort of witty, wise, and warm character study we seem to be running out of these days," and I'll go along with that. This is an unusually deliberate exploration (two hours) of what might normally work better in a short book, but it takes time for Apollo (Bing) to emerge, for Iris' relationship with him to stabilize, and for the subtle elements of grief and reconciliation in the story to marinate. Recommended, and not just for dog lovers.

The Friend, 120 mins., debuted at Telluride Aug. 30, 2024, showing also at Toronto and the Hamptons, and New York, where it was screened for this review. Metacritic rating: 69% (based on 7 reviews).

[Chris Knipp]

MARIANNE JEAN-BAPTISTE IN HARD TRUTHS

MIKE LEIGH: HARD TRUTHS (2024)

Starts hilarious and ends deeply sad

This brilliant film by the great Mike Leigh starts out hilarious and ends up deeply sad.

These are black working class Brits who live in bright, shiny new houses in a clean neighborhood. In fact cleanliness is an obsession of the protagonist, Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), whose outspokenness about finding everything and everyone unsatisfactory is, initially, killingly funny. Leigh operates on the edge between parody and tragedy.

Leigh works as he has often done through a series of detached skit-like scenes with some different characters and some recurring ones. They visit a job workplace, a social gathering, home, a psychiatrist, a dentist, and a hairdresser's and we meet different people, usually in the company of Pansy. Some of the others tend to express themselves with the rancid forthrightness of Pansy, but none of them are as angry and unsatisfied as she is or so outrageously provocative and aggressive in speech. Words are a weapon with which she lashes out in every direction, indiscriminately.

Pansy goes over the edge, but Leigh chooses to keep her safe. No matter how much she insults her husband or people she meets, she gets away with it. But then on a visit to family, her unhappiness and desperation come to a head and the whole group is affected, especially her husband Curtley (David Webber). Later, it appears their desperate and aimless 20-year-old son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) may fall into a chance of normality when, while he sits in a great square of London, a young women sidles up to him.

Leigh's writing is blindingly brilliant here, ruthless, extreme, and absolute. It may seem to push the very limits of the surreal. But it also adeptly captures the vernacular so each line springs to rapid life. And strange though it may seem, there are moments here that awakened vivid memories of desperate moments of my own youth, so clearly Leigh touches an emotionally valid nerve.

No other filmmaker working in English today comes this close to the edge. Recommended for Mike Leigh fans and for the emotionally hardy. This is one of Leigh's best late efforts but not a warm one.

Hard Truths, 97 mins., debuted at Toronto Sept. 6, 2024. Shown also at the NYFF where it was screened for this review Oct. 2, 2024. Also shown at San Sebastián. Metacritic rating: 87%.A Bleecker Street release.

[Chris Knipp]

ZHAO TAO AND LI ZHUBIN IN SCENE REWORKED FOR "ANGUISHING VIOLENCE" (DEBORAH YOUNG) IN CAGHT BY THE TIDES

CAUGHT BY THE TIDES 风流一代(Jia Zhang-ke)

CLIP FROM THE FILM

A kind of summation reviews many themes while resuming a favorite storyline

Jia Zhang-ke's symphonic, career-summarizing new film Caught by the Tides begins with a pre-title interlude in an enclosed space where women, shyly, then enthusiastically, show off their singing skills, then join together. This is followed by an enthralling sequence evoking Chinese collectivity, a vast space, singing, crowds gathered together: the editing has a brilliant, swirling flow. It's enthralling.

Then, we begin a return to the theme of a failed twenty-year-old romance where a man goes off in search of his fortune, featuring muse Zhao Tao as the lover left behind who belatedly goes off on a journey in search of him. He sends her a message saying he has gone to another province where he hopes for more action and promises to come back for her when he is successful. He never comes back. Long later they meet again. Neither has done well, despite the country's enormous growth.

The storyline encapsulates the time of most tumultuous change in China, with the Three Gorges dam and the displacement of millions of people that also includes Jia's career and growth as a director depicting all that.

In fact the way the career and the country and the story encapsulate, embrace, and illuminate each other in Caught by the Tides is so cosmic one can imagine blissfully watching this ilm forever, though it may also make one want to go back to the raw freshness of Jia's first few films, which are favorites of fans like me.

The plot line begins 2001, in the northeastern Chinese city of Datong. A working class woman named Qiao Qiao (longtime muse Zhao Tao) has a romantic relationship with her manager Guao Bin (Zhubin Li) as she hustles to make a living as a singer, model, and club girl. Guao Bin leaves Datong to try earning his living in another province. When she goes looking for him years later, her journey takes her through regions being displaced by the Three Gorges Dam, as well as Guangdong Province. We see Guao Bin trying his hand at various businesses, including involvement with a shady politician. When Quao finally finds Guao Bin, she breaks up with him. Later in the covid era they reunite, considerably aged. This trajectory may reflect Jia's view of the fortunes of much of the Chinese population, where individuals have not fared as well as the economy.

When the film debuted in Competition at Cannes Deborah Young called it "dazzling" in of The Film Verdict, though she observed that "its ravishing poetic beauty tends to obscure the story." Indeed story takes second place to the film's symphonic collectivity; but there has always been that quality in Jia's work.

Jessica Kiang in Variety called the film "an epic, lyrical drama that is both Chinese master Jia's career-retrospective reinvention and a defining portrait of modern China." That is indeed how the film looks, thought the portrait is vdery miuch Jia's own, since it relies on many images from his own bank of them. Bradshaw awarded Caught by the Tides 4/5 stars and offered ut high praise. He notes that the theme will sound familiar to Jia fans"and that the encapsulated modern Chinese history includes breathtaking economic progress alongside some "very old-fashioned state coercion" as well as the successes of "mobster-businessmen," the "patriotic ecstasy" of Beijing hosting the 2008 Olympics, and all the "unacknowledged pain" caused by the displacement of communities for the Three Gorges hydroelectric dam covered by Jia's Golden Lion winning 2006 Still Life.

Bradshaw finds "a kind of epic power " in the final scene when the aging couple reunites.

Deborah Young that the whole film is constructed from scenes and outtakes of previous work, which can be done because those two actors played related roles in [I]Unknown Pleasures, Still Life[/I, and A Touch of Sin. Young suggests Jia's films have always been n "strong on music and wordless images but thin on storylines, pacing and emotional expression." Well, that is not always true. Even if nothing has ever been quite up to Jia's first four films, yet he remains a powerful and distinctive filmmaker whos is central to contemporary Chinese cinema, and that is resserted here, even though for all the impressiveness of this new compilation, we look forward to a new direction.

Caught by the Tides 风流一代 (Fēngliú yīdài: "Romantic Generation"), 111 mins., debuted in Competition at Cannes May 18, 2024, showing also at Munich, Two Riversides (Poland), Jerusalem, Melbourne, Toronto, Vancouver, Busan and at New York, where it was screened for this review. Metacritic rating: 80.

[Chris Knipp]

VINCENT CASSEL, DIANE KRUGER IN THE SHROUDS

DAVID CRONENBERG: THE SHROUDS (2024)

Excruciating, precise necrophilia may not be your thing; it's not mine

In Competition at Cannes. The titular cloth is fitted with dozens of tiny cameras so the bereaved can watch the decomposition of the beloved in detail after he or she or they is or are buried. The purveyor of these shrouds is one Karsh (Vincent Cassel, standing in for the director), who runs a restaurant with a hi-tech cemetery attached. Diane Kkruger plays the bereaved Karsh's wife, her sister, and a virtual AI avatar. Giving it his respectful but reserved rating of 3/5 stars, Peter Bradshaw in his GUARDIAN review describes THE SHROUDS as another example of the filmmaker's "eroticised necrophiliac meditation on grief," with his "now very familiar Ballardian fetishes," and lots of "intriguing and exhausting" details in the elaborate plot-line. Hollywood Reporter's Scott Roxborough and Patrick Brzeski talk about how respectful the Cannes audience was, and reserved. The director is 81; his own wife died six years ago. They say Cronenberg's is seventh film in Competition at Cannes, and his body horror genre "casts a long shadow on the Crousette," reflected recently ih Julia Ducournau's 2021 Palme d'Or Titane and this year in Coralie Fargeat’s' The Substance, "one of this year’s hottest competition titles," starring Demi Moore, Dennis Quaid and Margaret Qualley.

Cronenberg has gone very dark before: think of Dead Ringers. But in a man of 80 thinking about death this took on a special grimness and sadness. A little too close to home, shall we say?

I can only say I wish I had seen The Substance instead. It may be relatively frivolous and simplistic, but while watching The Shrouds I felt I was choking for air and enclosed in darkness. A stifling work that felt interminable. The idea that anyone would want to watch their loved ones decompose in the grave through a hi-tech visualizing device seemed as far-fetched as it was repulsive. The absorption in elaborate precision about details of the whole business became excruciating. The efforts of this distinguished cast were wasted on me - though Vincent Cassel certainly has an elongated, gray, muscular, sepulchral look that is memorable and appropriate. Not recommended.

The Shrouds, 119 mins., debuted at Cannes May 20, 2024, showing also at Jerusalem, Melbourne, Toronto, Saõ Paolo, Hamburg, and New York, where it was screened for this review.
Metacritic rating: 57%.

[Chris Knipp]

JULIANNE MOORE, TILDA SWINTON IN THE ROOM NEXT DOOR

PEDRO ALMODÓVAR: THE ROOM NEXT DOOR (2024) NYFF Centerpiece Fiim

SOURCE

Almodovar turns to end of life for a first feature in English drawn from Sigrid Nunez

The Room Next Door is Pedro Almodóvar's first English-language feature film. Last year he showed at the NYFF a thirty-minute film in English, Strange Way of LIfe/Extraña forma de vida,. This is the second of two Sigrid Nunez novel adaptations in this year's NYFF. The other is Scott McGehee and David Siegel's low-keyed, engagingThe Friend, with Naomi Watts and Bill Murray. A Time Magazine article talks about the author in relation to the two films, which debuted at Venice and also showed at Telluride and Toronto. (The subjects relate; she is pleased with how they turned out.)

The Friend has a light touch. It approaches death and grieving, you might say, by indirection. Almodóvar, and Nunez, on the other hand, are approaching death more directly. The trouble in this case is the Spanish filmmaker's glossy, beautiful, artificial approach, arguably heightened by his working in a second language. There is no question about the beauty and elegance of The Room Next Door, or the delicacy of the performance by longtime Almodóvar friend John Turturro as Damian Cunningham, a man who at separate times has been the lover of both women.

But despite the glamorous actresses and the beautiful settings and cinematography, including a showcase rented modernistic house in the country where Martha (Tilda Swinton) goes to end her life accompanied by Ingrid (Julianne Moore), and an initial meeting at Lincoln Center, a place dear to the director for many years of recognition, The Room Next Door falls short of the kind of depth and conviction the Spaniard achieved in his searching 2019 life summary Pain and Glory,, or masterful earlier films he made during the Movida Madrileña period like Law of Desire (1987), Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), or things of beauty like All About My Mother (1999) and Talk to Her (2002) - one could go on and on.

The Room Next Door is based on What Are You Going Through, Nunez's novel about euthanasia, where (spoiler alert) Ingrid, a good friend (Moore) is prevailed upon to help Martha (Swinton), an older woman and former American international war correspondent with terminal cancer. Ingrid is to do this simply by being present, as Martha ends her life using an illegal pill she has acquired via the Dark Web. In the book Nunez references Chantal Ackerman's No Home Movie, which approaches a similar subject, in documentary form, and so you could say Nunez was thinking of, even inspired by, a film when she began her book.

Almodovar explains his movie also focuses (more indirectly) on a "very imperfect mother" (Martha) and "her resentful daughter" who are tentatively rekindling a relationship that has been suspended for some years. In the background there is this unseen daughter, who appears only toward the end (surprise novelty casting).

Almodóvar this time translates his lifelong fascination with mothers (one of his best films was "all about" his) and with women (another depicted them "on the edge of a nervous breakdown," or "al borde de un ataque de nervios") to English, and the American idiom - except that Tilda Swinton isn't American. But she has played a mother twice for Joanna Hogg, incliuding, in The Souvenir: Part II, with her own daughter, Honor Swinton Byrne, as her daughter. And there isn't much the versatile Tilda hasn't played or can't play. However, as this brash American, she is less at lease than with Joanna Hogg, and her Martha performance with its brash American accent at times seems pushed.

The biggest flaw with The Room Next Door is euthanasia, which leads Ingrid into a relationship with Martha that is not only uncomfortable (closer friends have already refused) but illegal. It seems slightly implausible that a sometimes estranged friend could ber lured into something not only unpleasant but risky, and the glossy, pretty affair Almodóvar makes of it at the handsome country retreat. All this has been initiated when Martha has learned that the experimental treatment she had agreed to turns out not to be working, and her cancer is spreading to her other organs. The film seems to forget this as Martha and Ingrid, out in the country, go on enjoyable outings and revel in the beautiful setting and nice weather.

After the death there is a hassle with the local police. Suddenly this seems perhaps the most important part of the film, but it is rushed through. This invites comparison with François Ozon's witty, slightly oddball, but also very practical 2019 film about this same subject Everything Went Fine (Tout s'est bien passé), which approaches euthanasia in France. There, a practical, legal solution is found, by going to Switzerland, where it is legal. In The Room Next Door no legal solution is found, and the fact that it is not isn't dealt with satisfactorily. Morally and legally the film leaves things up in the air.

This is not to say that Almodóvar doesn't ponder interestingly on end of life issues and that this film isn't beautiful and sometimes well acted; it does and it is. But the foray into another language (at age 75) is, as often happens, a dilution and a distraction as well.

With this Centerpiece Film at New York, Almodóvar nonetheless sets a record here with his fifteenth NYFF selection, nine of which have been featured "gala" presentations. The Spaniard has had a glorious and friendly history at Lincoln Center which is being celebrated this season with his reception of the Chaplin Award. Almodóvar's New York debut was in 1988 with Los mujeres al bordo...etc.(NYFF26) as the Opening Night selection.

The relationship flowered after Richard Peña's debut as director of programming, and this was a felicitous marriage , and there was a special fluency of Peña and Almodóvar together on stage, since the former was a fluent Spanish speaker as well as a fluent host and interviewer. The next opener was 1999's All About My Mother , on to Bad Education (NYFF42) and Volver (NYFF44) were selected as Centerpieces, and Live Flesh (NYFF35), Talk to Her (NYFF40), Broken Embraces (NYFF47), and Parallel Mothers (NYFF59) were Closing Night selections. Additional NYFF selections include The Flower of My Secret (NYFF33), The Skin I Live In (NYFF49), Julieta (NYFF54), Pain and Glory (NYFF57), The Human Voice (NYFF58), and Strange Way of Life (NYFF61).

The Room Next Door, 110 mins., debuted at Venice Sept. 2, 2024, showing also at many international festivals including the NYFF, where it was screened for this review. Metacritic rating: 70%.

[Chris Knipp]

DANIEL CRAIG AS "WILLIAM LEE" IN QUEER

LUCA GUADAGNINO: QUEER (2024)
NYFF Spotlight Gala Screening

A dramatization of William S. Burroughs' autobiograpical 1953 novel (published in 1985)

1950. William Lee (Daniel Craig), an American expat in Mexico City in his early 50s, spends his days alone save for a few other members of the American expat community. His encounter with Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), a newly arrived ex-serviceman who was with the Counter-intelligence Corps in Germany, leads to an infatuation and hope for intimacy. Lee (Burroughs), whose followup to Junky this is, is off heroin now, with resultingly raw emotions and newly aroused sexual desires. In his 1985 introduction to Queer Burroughs wrote, "In my first novel, Junky, the protagonist 'Lee' comes across as integrated and self contained, sure of himself and where he is going. In Queer he is disintegrated, desperately in need of contact, completely unsure of himself and of his purpose." The novel wasn't published till over thirty years later because at the time Burroughs found it unineresting, the experience it evokes too painful, besides which the overt homosexuality of it would have made it scandalous, even illegal, at the time of writing.

This film is a creditable effort by Guadagnino, Craig, and his costars. They make the action involving, even engaging, though the latter parts are weaker then the early ones.. I'm not sure it is meant to be by Burroughs, and I'm still not sure after watching the film why Guadagnino chose to make it. It would seem to me that rather than the warmth of personality that Daniel Craig, cast spectacularly against type, brings to it, what would have made a film of Queer come to life would have been a recreation of the raucous, raunchy world of late Forties Mexico City, which might have been impossible to do, but anyway vanishes here because of the choice to shoot everything in the studios of Cinneciittà.

The city must have had some of the same qualities, wide open, drug-friendly, extralegal, that drew Burroughs later on to Tangiers. It is obvious in the film that the backgrounds are not real, just painted props. As for the warmth of Daniel Craig, it goes so strongly against everything one has ever known of William Burroughs, how can it be suitable?

There is understandably much praise for Daniel Craig's performance. But if fidelity to the novel source is any concern (and with me it always is whenever, as here, I've read the book and know something about the author), it's worth an immediatre shout-out first off to Cronenberg's over 30-year-old but still very watchable Naked Lunch, a witty and creditable effort to film the unfilmable and what is by far Burroughs' masterpiece, by comparison with which Queer is a drab apprenticeship piece, a warmup worth our attention chiefly because of what Burroughs became later.

If he were seeking an adaptation true to the text, Guadagnino might seem to be breaking a butterfly (or a drab moth) upon a wheel. It's worth remembering that in Cronenberg's bold adaptation of Naked Lunch William Lee is played by the blandly neutral Peter Weller, and that might be closer to the character and the fleedgling Burroughs himself than the overwhelming Craig. But that would not work, because this story is about William Lee, whereas in Naked Lunch he is just a reflector. See Owen Gleiberman's excellent and favorable Variety review, which makes clear that Guadagnino makes this film better and deeper than the book, as well he might, while also showing more of both strength and vulnerability in Burroughs than he ever revealed in Queer or in his wryly emphatic later public persona as what Gleiberman calls a "punk icon in the ’80s." See also Fionnuala Halligan's wry and knowing review in Screen Daily,, which concludes that Guadagnino's Queer "has all the provocation but none of the haunting power that Naked Lunch still holds, almost 35 years later." Her math is more generous than mine, but otherwise we're in agreement.

Halligan notes that the film was shot not in Mexico but in the closed studios of Cinecittà in Rome, with some interesting and resonant effect but also an artificiality that will help contribute to its feeling alienating to today's LGBUQ+ audience. Despite the importance of its author, one of the key figures and a kind of elder doyen of the Beat era, Queer is a peripheral work, its choice by Guadagnino a somewhat odd one. (Mind you, in Queer Burroughs already has his "routines" and all his ideas about hypnotism, mind control, especially telepathy - hence the yage; but within the framework of a relatively conventional novel.)

The novel is unfinished. It is not, like this film, in two distinct parts. In the novel Lee persuades Allerton to accompany him on a trip south in search of yage, also known as ayajuasca, the psychedelic plant, and agree to periodic sex. But that is not a psychedelic writing episode, as the film shifts in cinematic style. Most of all, there is no special coming together in the novel, because there can't be, because in the frustrating real life experience Burroughs was trying to expiate there wasn't one.

Currently there is a free online PDF text of Burroughs' Queer here. Recommended particularly for the introduction, describing Mexico City, explaining why Burroughs was there, and declaring that the killing of his wife was what turned him into a writer. If Guadagnino and Justin Kuritzkes has woven details about Burroughs into the film as Cronenberg does into his film Naked Lunch, that would have added interest.

Queer, 151 mins,, debuted Sept. 3, 2024 at Venice, showing also at Toronto, Mill Valley, and the NYFF. The film will be released Oct. 6, 2024.Metacritic rating: 75%.

[Chris Knipp]

WALTER SALLES: I'M STILL HERE

Dramatic recreation of the destruction of a family by a dictatorship

Six years into Brazil's 22-year military dictatorship, in 1971, government critic and former congressman Rubens Paiva was taken away and "disappeared" from his loving family. This is the story of his family's experience of this deprivation and attempt to see to the bottom of it. Jessica Kiang points out that filmmaker Salles has a personal stake, adapted from the son Marcelo Rubens Paiva's memoir. Salles knew the family as far back as the Sixties and spent much time at the "lovely house" near the beach that appears, in person, in the opening sequence of this film.

One afternoon in 1971, Rubens Paiva, a former congressman and outspoken critic of Brazil’s newly instituted military dictatorship, was taken from his home in Rio de Janeiro by government officials, told nothing more than that he must give a “deposition” to authorities, and disappeared. Adapted from his son Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s memoir, this overwhelming, richly realized political drama from Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) stays tightly wedded to the perspective of Rubens’s wife, Eunice (a shattering Fernanda Torres), whose indefatigable search for the truth about her husband would stretch out for decades. A devastating true story, I’m Still Here is exhilarating in its portrayal of human tenacity in the face of injustice. Featuring a deeply affecting appearance from Fernanda Montenegro, Oscar nominee for Salles’s Central Station. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

I'm still Here, 136 mins., debuted at Venice Sept. 1, 2024, showing also at Toronto, San Sebastián, São Paulo, Hawaii, London BFI and at the NYFF, where it was screened for this review.

[Chris Knipp]

ROBINSON DEVOR: SUBURBAN FURY (2024

"Suburban Fury" examines the 1975 assassination attempt on U.S. President Gerald Ford by Sara Jane Moore, a conservative, middle-aged, single mother from the San Francisco suburbs who became radicalized while working as an FBI informant. World premiere at the NYFF.

On September 22, 1975, 45-year-old Sara Jane Moore took a revolver out of her purse and fired two shots at President Gerald Ford on a crowded sidewalk in San Francisco’s Union Square. This failed political assassination was destined to become a strange historical footnote, yet Moore is revealed as an extraordinary subject in this expansive, fascinating new documentary by the protean Robinson Devor (The Woman Chaser, NYFF37). Having served more than 30 years of a life prison sentence, Moore tells her own story, from FBI informant to would-be assassin, all of which Devor dramatizes against the backdrop of the era’s prevalent political unrest and militancy, of Attica, the Black Panthers, the U.S.-backed Chilean coup, and the Symbionese Liberation Army. A pugnacious and unapologetic interview subject, Moore holds the center of a fleet and compelling nonfiction drama with the feel of a 1970s thriller.

Suburban Fury, 115 mins., deebuted at the NYFF, where it will be screened for this revieiw.

[Chris Knipp]

SAORISE RONAN IN BLITZ


STEVE MCQUEEN: BLITZ (2024) - NYFF CLOSING NIGHT FILM


Steve McQueen, 2024, U.K., 114m
North American Premiere[/B]
Blitz, an authentic and astonishing recreation of London during its blitzkrieg by the Germans during World War II, pushes the artistry of Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave, NYFF51) to ever more impressive levels. Working on a vast scale, McQueen sets things at human eye level, telling his original tale from the parallel perspectives of working-class single mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan) and her 9-year-old son, George (newcomer Elliott Heffernan), as they become separated within the labyrinth of a city under siege. Alternately overwhelming and tender, McQueen’s dazzling film offers a multicultural portrait of 1940s London too infrequently seen on screens. While Ronan and Heffernan emotionally match one another beat for beat, the supporting cast, including Kathy Burke, Benjamin Clémentine, Harris Dickinson, Stephen Graham, Hayley Squires, and Paul Weller, is uniformly superb, fleshing out a film that feels positively Dickensian in its scope and storytelling. An Apple Original Films release. (London BFI)

[Chris Knipp]

SCENE FROM HAPPYEND

NEO SORA: HAPPYEND (2024)

TRAILER

Dystopia with a light touch

The grim prospect of increasing repression and surveillance in contemporary Japanese society is lightened for the viewer in this gentle sci-fi picture of Tokyo's near future because the high school students focused upon are so vibrant and light hearted. Their spirit revolts, and we're reminded that popular rebellion never ceases to be an alternative. Meanwhile, loud, rhythmic techno never seemed so much fun.

Fun anyway for the lighthearted Kou (Yukito Hidaka) and Yuta (Hayato Kurihara), childhood friends who are linked up in high school to promote the music they love and they are talented amateur DJs. High school seniors, they're linked with a posse that includes Tomu (Arazi), Ming (Shina Peng) and Ata-chan (Yuta Hayashi),the latter a fashionista who sports a billowing skirt to go wiith everyone's uniform of a white shirt and sometimes a black blazer But then, after a prank that is not appreciated, they run afoul of their repressive and humorless Principal (Shiro Sano), who delves into the world of high tech to institute a facial recognition surveillance system that not only identifies and observes the students' every move, but detects and assigns "points" to designated "infractions", which include human things like hugging.

The film doesn't go into tedious explanations of the technology of the surveillance but presents it as a fait accompli that the students are shocked and astonished to notice in action and wryly comment upon with a mixed sense of its absurdity but also its outrageousness.

Meanwhile we see how the menace of natural disasters, particularly earthquakes, clearly one of Japan's greatest threats, can be used to plunge the younger generation into a state of hypervigilance so they have no time for themselves. They're constantly receiving earthquake alerts on their phones, and the Principal can use these warnings to restrict freedoms on the excuse that it's an emergency.

n truth, while things begin lightheartedly, they turn increasingly dark as the repression grows at the school. But the kids are determined to rebel and this reveals their hope and independence of mind. The first thing that happens is that after the repression of an unauthorized techno party, one night the boys pose the Principal's new yellow sports car on its end for all to see in the schoolyard from every floor above. The Principal calls the cops. Fumi (Kilala Inori), an activist, announces that police are "bureaucrats with weapons" just protecting the country's moneyed interests. (That's a useful angle, but Happyend doesn't get didactic on us.)

Japan's racism emerges in the investigations that follow which focus on Kou as chief suspect of the car upturning for no reason that he is of Korean descent. (We don't see much of this in Japanese movies.) Defining the car prank as "terrorism", a laughable threat, the Principal denies Kou the promised university recommendation. Atta-Chan speaks for the others when he makes a series of provocative gestures at the multiple surveillance cameras and racks up ten demerit points in an instant. But then the repression advances. The Music Research Club used by the DJs is labeled a fire hazard and the kid's equipment is ordered to be removed. Their simpatico homeroom teacher suddenly disappears and ihis place is permanently taken by a colorless, boring type.

There's a big earthquake and the Principal says this means more danger of theft, hence more surveillance and repression. His car, still upended, gets more damaged by the event. Fumi draws Kou into street protests. There is conflict with the ever-playful, smiling Yuta, who never wants to be serious and the activists therefore begin to find irresponsible. Yuta is hurt when Tomu, who is biracial, declares he's going to college in the US where he has relatives. The old unity and camaraderie of the group is being tested. Their tolerance ends when a "self-defense" instructor is brought in to give a course at the school and he orders all "non-Japanese" out of the class, which includes Kou, who repeatedly insists that he is not required to carry his permanent residency document around with him. Now it's suggested he has no right to defend his country and is friends.

As David Rooney suggests in his Venice Hollywood Reporter review, Sora combines elements subtly here. On the one hand there is the "elegiac" graduation drama and a "compassionate" depiction of growing up, but also there is the "volatile microcosm" of a school that is becoming "like a prison." And it all points to broader political implications implied by all this. This isnt as serious a film as Bonello's Nocturama, but in playing with more conventional genres it may wind up seeming ultimately more real. This is a refreshing, like Nocturama more international alternative to the usual sentimental Japanese graduation dramas. With Happyend Sora brings a fresh eye to Japanese cinema and we will look forward to what he does next.

The filmmaker debuted with a stylish tribute to his father, the late Ryuichi Sakamoto Opus (included in last year's NYFF); here he turns successfully and promisingly to feature filmmaking and his own personal focus.

Happyend, 113 mins., debuted at Venice in the Orizzonti sectioin, showing also at Vancouver, Toronto, New York, Zurich, Busan, Hawaii and London BFI. Screened for this review as part of the NYFF. To be released in Japan Oct. 4, 2024.

Showtimes
Sunday, September 29
6:00 PMStandby Only
Monday, September 30
9:15 PMStandby Only
Tuesday, October 8

[Chris Knipp]

CALEB LANDRY JONES IN HARVEST

ATHINA RACHEL TSANGARI: HARVEST (2024)

Meandering portrait of last days of a medieval English village

One tends to get lost in this well-meaning but meanderng adaptaton of an eponymous Jim Crace novel which has too little sense of economy or pace. Though the director's origins in the Greek weird wave might suggest surreal and irrational elements, mostly this film merely seems dutiful, but ineffective. For festival goers looking for an offbeat approach to the waning of the middle ages it might be worth a watch and inspire a thought, but it's not successful.

Keith Uhlich in his recent Slant review describes this as a "moody-verging-on-mopish" adaptation, one that's "handsomely mounted" but in which "much of the filth feels stage-managed." The topic is the waning of a social order through the microcosm of a vaguely defined village. Its leading figure somehow seems to be a certain Walter Thirsk (a more conventional than sometimes Caleb Landry Jones), who grew up beside the local laird because his mother was his wet nurse, and he learned to read and write, a quality lacked by most cohabitants of the town. But he, especially played by Landry Jones, emerges as a strange misfit, chewing on bark.

All we really know is that the archaic equivalent of the medieval lord of the manor Master Kent (Harry Melling), is soon to be robbed of his function when his smug, manipulative cousin Jordan (Frank Dillane) comes along and tells the ineffectual Kent that he is taking over and that it's all going to be reorganized, not as a tradItional whole society any more but for purely mercantile and profitable purposes, and going to be run from town. He arranges for most of the villagers to be expelled and professional workers to come later for planting and harvesting, and then himself departs again.

But first a symbolic evidence of the little society's diSruption, a big fire of a tall barn, which seems symbolic because it has no particular effect. Walter damages his hand fighting the fire and we keep being reminded of it. It won't get any better, you know. But the film also tends to forget it. Several men, grabbed as suspects, are locked up in stocks, and the brutality of this archaic punishment is emphasized. A woman is also chosen who gets her head shaved. One of the men loses most of one leg to a hungry hog.

Another strange brutality: a local custom that seems preposterous but may have its basis in fact: many of the children are taken and their foreheads banged down on a big stone to show them the boundary line, wherein they're stupposed to stay, and to remind them of their place in the order of things. Speaking of boundaries, there is an exotic black map maker - with such an unfunctional functionary one might think Peter Greenaway was around - who is constantly working on an artisanal map of the region which is out of date well before he finishes it, and arouses suspicion and dislike.

One can sympathize with Peter Bradshaw's exasperated Guardian review penned at Venice, giving the film one out of five stars. Bradshaw describes the film as populated by a host of "smudgy-faced folk" preparing for the titular harvest who are "sporting various funny hats and Dionysiac masks" and he says the head-banging-on-rocks ritual for kids takes us "very close to Lars von Trier territory." This is supposed to be on the edge of Scotland but Bradshaw says Landry Jones' accent locates him more clearly in "the same part of Sherwood Forest as Russell Crowe’s Robin Hood."

Bradshaw points to the "ploddingly unvaried pace" and the "undirected, underpowered performances" as why this becomes an "exasperating experience" and "a directionless, shallow movie which seems bafflingly unconvincing and inauthentic at every turn." But for me what undermines the whole most surely is what a cruel and shallow bad guy the evil cousin is. Perhaps this whole thing in the end will provides some laughs. But that clearly is not what was intended.

Harvest, 131 mins., debuted at Venice Sept. 6, 2024; also shown at Toronto, Busan New York, and BFI London. Screened at the NYFF for this review. Metacritic rating: 67%.

[Chris Knipp]

Andrés Roca Rey in Afternoons of Solitude

ALBERT SERRA: AFTERNOONS OF SOLITUDE (2024)

Video of Roca Rey (not from the film)

Serra doubles down

Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra, who is now 49, has drawn special interest from the start for his distinctively slow, dreamy fictions, particularly Story of My Death (2013), a meeting of Casanova and Count Dracula, The Death of Louis XIV (2016) (2016), starring Jean-Pierre Léaud, and most of all Pacifiction (2022), a long, haunting dream of colonialism and deception that won Benoît Magimel his second of two best acting Cesars in a single year for his lead performance.

In the newAfternoons of Solitude/Tardes de solidad Serra turns to documentary with a dreamy, disturbing, brilliantly intensive study of Spanish bullfighting focused on Andrés Roca Rey. It is beautiful, relentless, haunting, and intimate portrait of this fearless and enigmatic young star of the bull ring from Peru, who now is the toast of the corrida in Spain.

It has not been much reviewed yet but response has been strongly positive. In Variety Guy Lodge wrote "This is a major work from a richly maturing filmmaker." He said it is "of a piece with his recent fiction features in its use of languid repetition and sensory saturation to pull the audience into something approaching a discomfiting dream state." David Romney in Screen Daily wrote "Its immersive intensity makes it essential viewing for Serra followers, and for anyone interested in documentary’s ability to record, and make us think about, the extremes of the real world." (See also Hayley Drake in Loud and Clear.)

By way of qualification, David Katz in The Film Sage wrote "In the interest of reservation: this isn’t Serra’s most intellectually interesting film, making it less fulfilling than his others, though it achieves the most directness of intention and rhetorical clarity of his work so far, continuing from Pacifiction in displaying how naturally his method and interests fit depicting the modern world."

Apart from essential sequences in which Roca Rey is seen being dressed and undressed and taken to and from the ring, all the sequences for two hours are of his performances in the ring. He is repeatedly gored and each time gets back up and continues. The essence of the film are the passes with the muleta, his ritual movements closer and closer to the charging bull. Perhaps the intensity of this experience may wane slightly toward the end of the two hours, but for the first half hour the viewer is singularly alone with the fear and and danger of this death defying ritual sport. This is what Serra achieves. And the sensuality of the massive animal, his horns, and the suits of light, the beautiful, tight outfits of the torero and his crew, the red of the cape, dazzle and satisfy the eye and mind.

For those who think bullfighting is a savage spectacle of blood that is an archaic ritual that should be done away with, Serra has no answer unless it is in what some think is an excessive repetitiousness of Roca Rey's bravery and the bulls' dance of death.

Afternoons of Solitude/Tardes de soledad, 125 mins., debuted at San Sebastiàn Sept. 23, 2024 where it won the top prize, the Concha de Oro, also showing at the New York Film Festival in the Spotlights section, where it was screened for this review. An HBO documentary.

Showtimes
Thursday, October 3
8:45 PMStandby Only
Friday, October 4
9:00 PMStandby Only
Friday, October 11
3:45 PMStandby Only


Andrés Roca Rey in Afternoons of Solitude