New York Film Festival 2024

[Chris Knipp]

A SCENE WITH A PLYMOUTH FURY STATION WAGON FROM SUBURBAN FURY

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, only 17 days after Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme tried to kill President Gerald Ford, Sara Jane Moore made another attempt on the President with a pistol she'd bought that morning, in Union Square, in San Francisco. She missed with her first shot, and a bystander who tackled her stopped her from making a second shot. The pistol turned out to have had a faulty sight, and she was aiming from 40 feet away. Moore was sentenced to life and served 32 years, which is standard, from age 45 to age 77. Filmmaker Robinson Devor's choice was to interview Moore, who is now in her nineties, and the interview runs through this film, which has other unseen speakers and a wealth of archival material. One of their inspirations is to stage the interview partly in the middle of a posh looking room and partly in the back seat of a Plymouth Fury station wagon, after which the film is named.

Whatever age she was when interviewed by the filmmakers (Devor reports being at work on this film since 2010), Sara is a lively and feisty lady, in possession of her faculties, who sometimes loses patience, finding their questions repetitive or clueless. It is retrospectively somewhat astonishing that at her advanced age, and after 32 years in prison (with one brief escape after several years), she is so self possessed and sure of herself. She may have been nutty, certainly unwise, but she stands by her past decisions, at least here. There is a book about her, Taking Aim at the President, that was published in 2009 by Geri Spieler, the author reportedly having been in correspondence with her for 28 years. In the Wikipedia article about her, Sara is quoted as having first stood by her action, and then decided it was unwise.

The film revolves around and is anchored by Sara Jane Moore's failed assassination attempt, but but one can argue that its real subject is the radicalism and general mood of chaos and experimentalism of that period, of which this is a colorful but none-too flattering picture. There is a moment in Moore's very checkered and patchwork career that she does volunteer work for the Black Panthers in Oakland. A wealth of archival footage flows by - so much it may slip by you. One thing that seems to have influenced Sara was the kidnapping of Patricia Hearst, and Sara somehow was acquainted with the Hearst family. She was no doubt impressed by Patty Hearst's joining up with her radical captors of the Symbionese Liberation Army, who persuaded her wealthy family to donate $2 million worth of food to the poor of the Bay Area for one year in a project called People in Need. Radical politics still reigned at Berkeley. Nixon resigned in 1974 in disgrace from the Watergate scandal, and President Ford granted him a full pardon. It did not escape notice that neither Ford nor his plutocrat Vice President, Nelson A. Rockefeller, had been democratically elected.

Things seem to unfold in no particular order other than chronological in the film, a randomness that is effective after a stalling of the pace early on. Sara Moore had become an FBI informant. How she was recruited we don't know. What she informed isn't very clear, but we hear the voice of an anonymous FBI officer who may have been in charge of her. She talks about being lured into attraction to agents while the agent remained cold and businesslike. she learned to write up everything she did and everyone she saw, even the food she ate, in daily FBI reports that went on even after she was no longer officially serving the Agency.

The filmmakers are little concerned with Sara Jane Moore as a private person. Do they mention that she was trained as an accountant? Only some way through we hear her describe having received military training. You must go to Wikipedia to learn that she had already been divorced five times and had four children before her involvement with the FBI and radical politics began. Though the portrait of seventies radicalism is suggestive, since this is after all grounded by an interview with Sara Jane Moore, shouldn't there be as rounded and complete a picture of her as possible? In particular, one would like to know more about her social origins. Had she been upwardly mobile? What about her education? Her earlier behavior? Do other people remember her? In trying to do something artful, which it is - and one can imagine a feature film inspired by this one - the filmmakers have fallen a little short on some of the basics of documentary, the providing of full information. This is background on the period and a record of Sara Jane Moore in the flesh, but there seems to remain lots more to know.

A SFIFF summary (for DOC Stories, coming October 17—20, 2024) suggests it’s the intention of this film to keep it "impossible to separate fact from fiction here," and to showcase a "teasingly unreliable narrator and thus "ruminate" upon the "very idea of documentary portraiture." Okay; but it's still a documentary portrait and it could be a more thorough one.

Suburban Fury, 115 mins., is premiering at the NYFF, where it will be screened for this review. There was a Q&A for the press with the filmmakers. This was also scheduled as closing night film for DOC Stories in San Francisco Oct. 20.

Showtimes
Wednesday, October 9
6:15 PMStandby Only
Thursday, October 10
9:00 PMBuy Tickets
Sunday, October 13
9:00 PMBuy Tickets


SARA JANE INTERVIEW IN SUBURBAN FURY

[Chris Knipp]

SAORISE RONAN IN BLITZ

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

A tour de force depiction of London under seige

Steve McQueen's new film is a stunning recreation of London's blitz, as the eight months of WWII Nazi blitzkrieg bombardment of the English capital, from Sept. 7, 1940 to May 11, 1941, is called. Providing a panorama of this period is what he's primarily doing, with some significant events and a good look at English racism. The foreground plot of a 9-year-old mixed race boy called George (Eliott Heffermann) who is separated from his mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan) when put on a train to be evacuated to the country, and then is reunited with her a day later, may seem both flimsy and conventional as a frame on which to hang what unfolds as a truly epic collection of explosive moments and significant themes. The criticism that this is more conventional than the director's other films (Bradshaw in the Guardian typically calls it an "unashamedly old-fashioned wartime adventure") is superficially valid. But it's a little ironic and somewhat beside the point given the level of realistic recreation achieved here, which is not at all ordinary and makes use of means that are thoroughly modern. This is a highly accomplished film and is one of the best modern cinematic celebrations of the city of London.

Modern cinematic recreations of war can be breathtaking.* McQueen proves it with a prologue that plunges us into a burning, bombed block of London as firemen try desperately to point fire hoses at buildings engulfed in flames. Hoses fly in all directions, giant hunks of buildings are everywhere, all is afire, and the clatter is deafening. As an introduction this is warming that there's a danger the physical will overwhelm the human story. But what follows, anchored by the camera on the feisty, unusually brave boy alternating with scenes of his equally plucky mother, is nonetheless very human and colored by the working class accent of foreground action.

There are, accordingly, street scenes around where George lives, both at the beginning of his momentous experiences and at the end of it; remarkable recreations of the armaments factory Rita works in with a whole complete plot line; the trip on the steam engine train out into the country and George's adventure as a train jumper; a key episode when George is taken under the wing of a Nigerian Air Raid Warden, Ife (Benjamin Clémentine), based on a real person, who gives a stirring lecture to white Londoners in in the air raid shelter on forgetting their differences, perhaps the film's main teaching moment, when George in pride of identification learns to acknowledge and embrace that he is black.

There is a ghoulish and revelatory episode of looting and corpse robbing by an evil band George is forcefully recruited to for a while. Bradshaw comments that these "Dickensian" figures with their "gargoyle faces," played by Stephen Graham and Kathy Burke,"come very close to stealing the whole film" for a while.

These are great events seen by ordinary people. Rita and George live with grandpa Gerald (Paul Weller) in an ordinary block of Stepney, east London. She now works in an armaments factory, and this, as well as the women workers' revolt, is richly recreated, as every location will be, and the steam engine train, the clothes, the women's gaudy forties makeup. And the continual casual and not-so-casual racism of white people around people of color.

What did you do if you were poor and in the middle of blitz-bombed London? Well, you could send your child in a group by train to be housed in the country where it was safe. This is the turning point. Rita does put George on such a train, but he submits only angrily and unwillingly. His sullen reaction, which he later regrets, foreshadows what he will, astonishingly, do: he will jump off the train with his little suitcase, and thereafter endeavor to hop on a train back to London. As he does this, he has a series of adventures that fill up the rest of the action.

Emily Zemler in the Observer as well as other writers point to various other real-life details and figures touched on in McQueen's rapid-fire panorama. There is the private air raid shelter run by social activist Mickey Davies (Leigh Gilljk where Rita volunteers at night). We see how many took shelter in Tube stations (memorialized in drawings by sculptor Henry Moore), some of which collapsed and were flooded: such a one almost traps George. There is a chic nightclub, Café de Paris, where revelers in evening clothes dripping with jewels sip champagne and ignore the reality outside, till it is bombed and destroyed and turned to a charnel house: this is stunningly recreated too, and George must escape from the domination of the pillagers there.

While George is lost and wandering in London, Rita has learned of his disappearance from the train to the country and is rushing around madly in search of him, sometimes helped by a neighbor who is a firefighter, Jack (Harris Dickinson). This excellent actor is, as has been commented, underuse, and doesn't get to have a memorable moment as some do. Not surprising: this is primarily a faceted portrait of a massive event, as other great war films have been.

It's all seamlessly, and explosively, bound together not only by editor Peter Sciberras but by the score of Hans Zimmer, who is still capable of an original touch. This is a remarkable film. I am an admirer. But I also felt blitzed myself. Perhaps it can't be otherwise. We become citizens, feeling the helplessness and smallness together with the beauty and warmth of so many little moments. Nonetheless one can grant Leslie Felperin's point in her Hollywood Reporter review that for all its vivid realism and razzle dazzle, Blitz may not have the subtlety of McQueen's best work. But for its panoramic, bravura portrait of the city (and England) under the Blitz, together with its picture of the population's multi-racial identity often overlooked in WWII narratives, this is an important film, one of the year's best. Recommended, but bring ear plugs and dramamine.
__________
*Notable examples are Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk (2017) and Sam Mendes's 1917 (2019). Robbie Collin of The Telegraph says Blitz has a "scale and depth" that "hasn't been seen since Dunkirk." McQueen in Blitz focuses exclusively on the civilian receiving end of war, a viewpoint we get too seldom.

Blitz, 120 mins., premiered at BFI London Oct. 9, 2024, US debut as the closing night film at the NYFF, where it was screened for this review. It will open in US and UK. theaters Nov. 1, 2024, followed by a streaming release on Apple TV+ Nov. 22,. Metacritic rating: 76%.

NYFF showtimes:
Closing Night · North American Premiere · Steve McQueen, Saoirse Ronan, and Elliott Heffernan in person at Oct. 10 screenings at Alice Tully Hall
Q&A with Steve McQueen, Saoirse Ronan, and Elliott Heffernan on Oct. 10 at 6pm screening at Alice Tully Hall.
Introduction by Steve McQueen, Saoirse Ronan, and Elliott Heffernan on Oct. 10 at 9pm screening at Alice Tully Hall.


ELIOTT HEFFERMANN AND SAORISE RONAN IN BLITZ

[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)

TV story says he is friends with Spanish royalty, moves in a world of celebrities, lives on an finca with horses and bulls, and is "cute, flirtatious, and fun to be with."

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 new Afternoons 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