NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS 2025 (April 2-April 13)

[Chris Knipp]

ZHENGFAN YANG: STRANGER (2024)

People come, people go

This film, focused on a series of hotel rooms, made me think, perhaps illogically, of Edmund Goulding's wonderful 1932 film Grand Hotel, were an impresario repeatedly says "People come, people go, nothing ever happens." The cast includes Greta Garbo, John Barrymore, Joan Crawford, Wallace Beery, and Lionel Barrymore, and those are not the only stars. Things very much do happen: it's a lively, even tumultuous film that takes place in public spaces. Chinese filmmaker Zhengfan Yang, in his feature directorial debut, has set himself the task of filming seven unrelated scenes in different hotel rooms. It's a generally rather grim film, a tough watch pretty much lacking in the ebullience and sociability of Grand Hotel. On the contrary this Chinese film conveys a sense of a hotel room as a place of confinement, loneliness, and transitoriness, "modern life" as a downhill trajectory.

It's not that nothing happens, but not much does. Most of the sequences are dreary or lonely, fearful or hostile. But in their sense of confinement, some of the are quite intense.

SCENE 1 shows only a hotel employee, a slim young woman in a nice uniform cleaning up a room while receiving constant messages to her and other employees on a her handheld radio from her supervisor. The room is decently appointed, and features a frosted wall separating bedroom from bath, so the camera can show the cleaner working in the bath without moving from the bedroom.

SCENE 2 shows two nondescript men lined up in front of a wall in their hotel room being questioned by police. They are tourists, they say, and the police say the questioning is due to suspicion of an unlawful gathering in the area. We never see the police. The two men are unfriendly and uncooperative. One man will not even give his name, insisting that they have it on the ID he has handed them. One says they have the right to reman silent: the police person says that is a foreign, not a Chinese law. A review suggests the reason for questining is the two men are suspected of being homosexual, but this is not revealed.

SCENE 3, on a cheerier but still rather stiff and impersonal note, focuses on a wedding photography gathering in a much larger hotel space. First the bride and groom line uip stiffly to pose. Then they stand for shots with two bridesmaids, then with family in different arrangements, then with many other people, constantly regrouping to have their pictures taken, mostly from the POV of the photographer. No dialogue.

SCENE 4 is nothing but dialogue, that of a husband and wife talking in a hotel room. But we only actually see the pregnant wife, who is preparing for a four-month trip to the US, where she plans to have her baby, in Los Angeles, because she thinks it friendlier, because there are many Chinese people there. We learn this when husband and wife practice a template dialogue where a US customs and immigration official, with the husband taking his part, questions the wife on arrival about her trip and her plan to give birth on her US stay, and then return to China. Incidentally she puts on a mask (perhaps for a skin facial) for this dialogue. She brags that she runs a huge online sales company comparable to Amazon. But she seems a little scared, and a grim note is that the husband is not allowed to leave the country. She tells the customs man that her husband too is a customs officer which will generate, they agree, "empahty" or "sympathy."

SCENE 5 shows a lonely girl in a small messy hotel room who turns out to have been held in quarantine due to covid after returning to China from abroad for so long she has lost track of the number of tacked-together 14-day periods. She is constantly on her smartphone announcing her "showroom and hotel room," but nothing happens except that we learn the details of her dreary, confined existence. She smokes a cigarette in the bathtub with a big window above it, the only one we see. She picks up two plastic bags and addresses them: "Which kind of trash are you, foreign trash or local trash?" Then says, "Whatever kind of trash you are, at least you can leave." .

SCENE 6: shows a small, shirtless man with a goatee, middle-aged but fit, sitting in a hotel room eating packaged ramen and smoking. A sign on the door and his collection of dollars indicates this hotel room is in the US. He then dresses in gold and an animal mask so crude I could not tell if it was a monkey or a lion (it's a monkey), and goes out. He is a street performer.

SCENE 7: takes the camera outside, rambling around from a room to a highway and trees, then to the side of a hotel where we seem to see a dozen rooms, mostly with people in them. But this is ain't Hitchcock and if something exciting happens, I missed it. This is, however, another illustration of the impersonality of hotel rooms, each a little different, each much the same. Nothing ever happens. Or, as in Edmund Goulding's movie, so much happens that we lose track.

Zhengfan Yang provides a hard series of nuggets here, "uneven," as some have said, not an easy watch, as I have said, but an experiment some have found interestng, bold and experimental. Note: I am not a fan of Chantal Ackerman, to whom this has been compared. I have respect for Béla Tarr. Is this worthy of comparison with the work of the Hungarian auteur? However successful he is here, Zhengfen Yang shows the ability to carry out a demanding task, and he's a sharp cookie.

Stranger (Ju Wai Ren), 113 mins., debued at Karlovy Vary, winning the Grand Prix of the Proxima Competition. It also showed at El Gouna (Egypt), Norway and the San Diego Asian film festival. It was screened for this review as part of the 2025 MoMA-Film at Lincoln Center New Directors/New Films series. Showtimes:

Sunday, April 6
2:45pm at FLC, Walter Reade Theater – Q&A with Zhengfan Yang

Tuesday, April 8
8:45pm at MoMA, Titus Theater 2 – Q&A with Zhengfan Yang

[Chris Knipp]

JUNE JOÃO

PAULA MARQUES: TWO TIMES JOÃO LIBERADA (2024)

Gendered exorcism: Paula Tomás Marques uses a fictional history to critique modern filmmaking conventions and show trans people enacting their own history

Wendy Ide, Screen Daily: "A project that walks the line between biographical drama and conceptual art piece, the experimental Portuguese LGBTQ+ project Two Times João Liberada challenges the conventions of the biopic and takes on the patriarchal structures that still hold sway over much of cinematic storytelling. It is about the making of a misguided film about a fictional historical character, João Liberada, a gender non-conforming shepherdess who was targeted and imprisoned by the Inquisition in 18th century Portugal, and is likely to be of niche appeal.

"The project is the feature debut from Paula Tomás Marques, who has made several short films exploring gender and sexuality, including 2019’s In Case Of Fire, which won Best Student Short at San Sebastian, and 2024’s Dildotectónica. Two Times João Liberada is a film that was clearly made on a limited budget, and the ambition of a project that involves period details, special effects and a supernatural visitation should be applauded. That said, the picture’s modest production values and unpolished performances will likely limit its reach to audiences who share the film’s prominently displayed politics."

The story is of João Liberada, a fictional protagonist pieced together from archives reporting on the ostracism of gender non-conformists and the practices of punishing gendered sinners by the 18th-century Portuguese Inquisition. From the outset the film shows the director Diego (Andre Tecedeiro) becomes mysteriously paralyized and the film has to be suspended or done differently. Diego, as Wendy Ide says, is "a mbit of a thankless role for Tecedeiro, who is basically the fall guy and punching bag." From the start the lead, June João, objects to the way he is going with the story of her character. Eventually, the original martyred trans person appears to June to critique the film in comically down-to-earth and modern vernacular terms as totally in the wrong key.

From a POlish review by Tomasz Paborca: "The newly established section of the Berlin festival could not lack a piece that looked at the titular perspectives with a critical eye. After all, Tomás Paula Marques addressed the marginalization of queer optics in source documents and the reproduction of inequality through the apropriation of historical figures' biographies. She also made her own arguments for considering the LGBTQ+ community as haunted."

We know that an antique period can be evoked in unusual and radical means. There are Albert Serra's recent films about Casanova in 2013 and his 2016 La mort de Louis XIV. Rossellini was a master in his 1966 Louis XIV: la prise de pouroir and other historical films. His charmingly naiveand pure evocation of Saint Francis of Assisi Francesco, giullare di Dio, which gathers some of the anonymous "Fioretti di San Francesco" may be closer to what Paula Marques's film is grasping for. But Marques is more interested perhaps in pointing to how a cis-male filmmaker might tend to misunderstand a female, not to mention a transfemme, point of view in making a movie. The ficttional director of Two Times João Liberada expresses a great admiraiton for Bresso. But does the hint of brutality in his direction an allusion to Bresson? June João, the lead in his film, points out he is focused too much on the violent aspects of the trans martyr they are depicting, instead of the times when she was happy among the nuns.

I liked the moments of deliberate anachronoism, and especially the series of "antique" woodcuts that depict the life of João Liberada as depicted in the film, with the modern film crew standing by.

Two Times João Liberada/Duas Vezes João Liberada, 70 min., debuted at the Berlinale Feb. 18, 2025. Screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films. Showtimes:

Monday, April 7
8:30pm at MoMA, Titus Theater 2

Tuesday, April 8
6:15pm at FLC, Walter Reade Theater