New Directors/New Films and Film Comment Selects 2014

[Chris Knipp]

GILLES DEROO, MARIANNE PISTONE: MOUTON/SHEEP (2013)--ND/NF


DAVID MÉRABET IN MOUTON

The randomness of life, as seen in the Norman fishing town of Courseulles-sur-Mer

An experimental film that may be experimental enough to gain cult status but may gain indifference from many viewers uses documentary realism and minimal camera movements to focus on one character and then more than half-way through to switch away from him to minor characters.

We start with Mouton, real name Aurelien (David Merabet), 17, who is granted legally independent status from his alcoholic mother (seen unwillingly signing off on this in the opening scene) and he goes to live at the inn and seaside restaurant where he's a prep chef, which includes several other very young kitchen workers. The scenes, camera always a a distance, light natural, focus on kitchen routine till Audrey (Audrey Clement), a young woman, comes to be a waitress and almost immediately becomes Mouton's girlfriend. Mouton doesn't talk much. He smiles a lot. The camera shows him and Audrey undressing to have sex, and zeroes in on him sucking her nipple. It's that kind of camera.

The film creates the rhythm of the almost purely and mindlessly physical life of a worker who enjoys work, meals, sex, cigarette breaks. He is excited about sharing a big local event with Audrey, the Feast of St Anne. But when it comes, with the long day on the pier dancing, making out, and eating seafood dishes, a man who has made a pass at Audrey and been rejected suddenly attacks Mouton with a power saw and cuts his arm. He looks a goner, but now a voiceover comes in to tell us he was saved, but lost his arm. His career as a kitchen worker is over. He disappears from the film.

Later there is a trial, its final decision shown with the camera high up, and the attacker is sentenced to ten years. But Mouton has wanted life or more, and other friends and family declare this a travesty. Mouton has gone away to live with an uncle in another town. Audrey marries another guy and in a year has a baby. She writes Mouton a short note about her life now ending "I will always remember you." A scene shows two twin brothers (Emmanuel and Sebastien Legrand) using a prostitute in a van. The originally restrained, now nosey camera looks long at her crotch. Other former associates of Mouton get coverage. Mimi (Michael Mormentyn) works at a dog kennel. His wife is Louise (Cindy Dumont).

And then it ends. This style here oscillates between a keen affirmation of life and the homme moyen sensuel, such as one gets in Henry Green's Living, and a kind of Seventies kitchen sink brutality of realism, symbolized by the group of male friends who come up and spit into Mouton's face, apparently a gesture of friendship or initiation, and his sudden maiming and the prostitutes's hairy crotch. There are times when, certainly, it is difficult to tell the people in the film from what they must be in real life. For example, David Merabet does appear to be a non-actor who does prep work at a seafood restaurant. There are funny, ultra-natural scenes. But the effect overall, for this viewer, was offputting and alienating, at least once Mouton had lost his arm and disappeared from the film. One retains, however, a sense of the small town, seen off-season, and the filmmakers have stayed close to their milieu and people, certainly. But this kind of naturalism risks seeming condescending toward its subjects. And the brutal gesture eliminating Mouton from the story seems crude and arbitrary beyond reason.

Mouton/Sheep, 100 mins., shot in 16 mm, won two prizes at Locarno 2013. Screened for this review as part of the FSLC-MoMA series New Directors/New Films, 2014. Viewing times Thursday, March 20, 9:00pm – MoMA; Saturday, March 22, 6:30pm – FSLC

[Chris Knipp]

JUSTIN SIMIEN: DEAR WHITE PEPLE (2014)--ND/NF



Sundance satire on racial issues at US college

This film proports to deal with a controversy at an "Ivy League" college called Winchester University in which the black students are united by the opposition of most of them to a white student Halloween party where partiers are to dress up as Negroes. (Such parties are taking place at US colleges, end credits show.) Or that is one issue. Another is that an all-black residence hall called Parker Armstrong is going to be "dismantled" or made multi-racial. Various characters predominate in a cast and plot as busy and complicated as a John Waters movie. These include (to name a few) Samantha ("Sam") White (Tessa Thompson), who has a radio show whose gibes begin "Dear White People," 'Fro'ed intellectual Lionel (Tyler James Williams) who writes for the "all white college newspaper" (whatever that means) writing articles about racial controversies on campus; and the college president and dean and their sons, and the more volatile and purely ambitious Coleandra “Coco” Conners (Teyonah Parris of "Mad Men"), with her sulky looks and silky weave.

The movie founders in TV sit-com-land, because it is overly subdivided. It opens with the issue of the importance of having the minority organization represented by an all-black residence hall, introducing some of its main characters. But these lead to other issues, notably the separation between the white college president and his son and the black dean and his son, all of whom are at Winchester. And wouldn't you know it, the white president's son has a black girlfriend and the black dean's son has a white girlfriend. This is further complicated when other characters come into play, none of whom has anything essential to do with the black residence hall issue, though so many arguments have been advanced about that at the outset.

But then the storyline moves back to the issue of the white students' "black" costume party -- which is now about to take place, as a climactic sequence, and some of the black students infiltrate it, not to undermine it so much as simply, it appears, to enjoy it. This party is disrupted, but in the end is treated as a non-issue (because "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery"?). Wouldn't such parties be racist? Are they not an outrage, comparable to minstrel shows and whiteface/blackface in the old days? Turning the white students' "black" party into a chaotic extravaganza seems like a missed opportunity for the kind of intelligent satire and racial commentary the film seems initially headed for.

All this is weakened by a lack of sophistication about college, starting with the lack of credibility in claiming Winchester to be either Ivy League or a university. Surely that would not matter in itself, but the general lack of sophistication about anything collegiate or intellectual or young adult might matter. This movie seems like a complete missed opportunity in many ways. It lectures us, but doesn't make enough clear and intelligent points, and it makes jokes, but, worst of all, it is not often funny. Those who were delighted by Dear White People at Sundance were responding more to what it meant to be than what it is. As Justin Chang wrote in Variety, Dead White People is better at "rattling off ideas and presenting opposing viewpoints than it does squeezing them into a coherent narrative frame," and "it veers toward smugness and self-satisfaction at times." Nice try; better luck next time. Meanwhile this movie may score well with its ideal audience, young educated black Americans. I'll wait and see what Armond White says about it.

Dear White People, 108 mins., debuted at Sundance, and was screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films 2014 (Lincoln Center and MoMA).
Friday, March 21, 9:00pm – FSLC
Sunday, March 23, 6:00pm – MoMA

[Chris Knipp]

JENNIFER KENT: THE BABADOOK (2014)--ND/NF


NOAH WISEMAN IN THE BABADOOK

A child's story book that turns into a haunting

This is an Australian movie (Jennifer Kent's debut feature) and the Australians are known for having a wild side, so though it's a conventional horror tale, it does ramp things up to a higher pitch. The premise is that into this single parent home with weird six-year-old son Samuel (Noah Wiseman) and harried mother Amelia (Essie Davis) there comes a really scary children's book that is more like a series of threats of a haunting. And the haunting comes. The "Babadook" invades the mother, who turns against the child. Things are complicated by the fact that the boy not only misses his dead father. His father died in a car accident that took place when he drove the mother Amelia to the hospital to give birth to the boy. And in the days leading up to the unearthing and reading of the fatal "Babadook" book, Samuel has been acting weirder and weirder, to the point where his school wants to separate him from the other students and have him taught and guarded by himself.

After reading the "Babadook" book, Amelia hurriedly puts it out of sight, because it has a threatening ending. Later, when the haunting begins, the banks and knocks and shakes, she rips up the book. And when they continue, she pours gasoline over the book and burns it. None of these attempts to still its power workd, and the mother and the boy must go through a prolonged ordeal. Which you may share with them, if you choose. Though this is not up to the violence level to suit Saw fans, it will please those who like horror movies of a more cerebral but still vigorous kind. The sound effects are terrific.

The Babadook, 95 mins., debuted at Sundance, where it was well received and snapped up by IFC Midnight. Screened for this review as part of the FSLC-MoMA 2014 New Directors/New Films series, February 2014. US theatrical release IFC Center NYC Fri. 28 November 2014; also Internet. Reviewers greatly admire this well-crafted if monochromatic example of the horror genre, as revealed by its Metacritic rating: 83.

[Chris Knipp]

BENJAMÍN NAISHTAT: THE HISTORY OF FEAR (2014)--ND/NF

[
JONATHAN D ROSA, TATIANA GIMÉNEZ IN HISTORY OF
FEAR/HISTORIA DEL MIEDO (2013)--ND/NF

Summer discomfort, and it's not the heat

Benjamín Naishtat's auspicious debut History of Fear/Historia del miedo is a Hanake-esaue tour of Buenos Aires, a study of repression, discomfort, rage, tension, and perhaps above all a sense of danger related to class. Throughout this atmospheric meandering among a group of partly interconnected people -- masters and servants, guards and property owners, parents and children, lovers or "novios" (fiances) there is a pervasive sense of resentment and, as the title signals, fear. Of what, we never know. We also never know who these people are, so it is hard to identify with them and sometimes puzzling who they are. Explosions and light -- the latter's presence and absence, as the electricity goes off every now and then -- come and go as unifying punctuation.

There is a feeling here of potential disorder growing from social unrest that can be found in other recent Latin American films. In Marcelo Lordello's They'll Come Back (from Brazil, ND/NF 2013), siblings are left on a highway in the middle of nowhere because of a quarrel with well-off parents. In Kleber Mendonça Filho's Neighboring Sounds (again from Brazil, ND/NF 2012), well off people in a block of flats are "protected" by a security company that turns out to have deep resentments. in Celina Murga's highly original A Week Alone/Una semana solos (Film Comment Selects 2009), children go a little wild when they are completely abandoned by their parents in a posh gated community. Unfortunantely Naishat's film is perhaps the least effective of these four because of the vagueness about identities and backstories mentioned earlier.

However, Historia del miedo has the power to haunt. It makes effective use of mysterious surveillance tapes shown on home screenes, as well as grainy films of what appear to be troops running around a building where an armed insurrection (of youths?) is in progress, whose nature they are not fully aware of. Also strong is the long final sequence at a celebration outdoors. Again, there is separation, as well as vague uncertainty and fear. A family is sitting around a table dining. No one speaks a word -- a recurrent theme, since a young working class character is constantly criticized for his troubling silences -- but then a youth proposes a game where each person says what he or she would like to be and have.

Then the lights go out, and most of the family go to look for the children they excluded earlier as punishment for throwing firecrackers in the pool. Now it's realized that they children might be in danger. The scene where some of the adults wander across the park of the housing estate, which they now know is vulnerable, is disturbing. Earlier, the working class young man with his girlfriend go "wading" in a polluted, reuse-strewn stream -- one of the creepiest moments in a film that strives for varieties of creepiness. Interestingly, all four of these films are set in times of hot summer weather.

As Peter Debruge points out in his Berlin review for Variety , Naishtat operates here by showing the various characters' unease without specifying it. How well it works depends on how inherently sick-making the surroundings are at that moment and how much we as viewers happen to be able to bring to the scene, which varies. It might not have hurt to have worked in more specific plot threads. But good editing and excellent, often irritating and troubling sound design contribute to the success of this semi-experimental debut.

History of Fear/Historia del miedo, 79 mins., debuted at Berlin. Screened for this review as part of FSLC/MoMA's joint series New Directors/New Films 2014.
Sunday, March 23, 9:15pm – FSLC

[Chris Knipp]

TUDOR CRISTIAN JURGIU: THE JAPANESE DOG (2013)--ND/NF


VICTOR ROBENGIUC IN THE JAPANESE DOG

Old man after a flood

Tudor Cristian Jurgiu's debut feature is quiet gem, a Romanian film that is contemporary and timeless. It steps aside from the current Romanian school, whose films are often grim, ironic an gray, with a portrait that's humanistic and literally and figuratively in delicate color. The focus is on the elderly Costache Moldu , who lives in a village, and his reunion with his estranged so, an engineer, who has been living and working in Japan and brings a Japanese wife and young son. With wonderful observational patience Jurgiu thoroughly establishes Costache's milieu before the visitors arrive. The Japanese Dog is all about atmosphere, character, and quiet developments among family members. In the context of the new Romanian cinema, it's a quite triumph that may open things up. Use is made of documentary-style neorealism with a precise sound design, but the heart of the film is the acting. As Costache, legendary actor Victor Rebengiuc is a miracle of confidence and restraint, his performance utterly lived-in. You never question it.

Costache has recently lost his wife and house in a flood. He has not told his son this. Though he could call from the mayor's phone in town, he has not been in touch. He has virtually no possessions, but what he has is dignity and patience. The camera follows him around his daily rounds, getting necessities, greeting neighbors. Panhandlers who come to him show that though stripped, he is not poorest of the poor. In fact he owns some hectares of land he's offered 6,000 euros for. He refuses to sell for now: "What would I do with all that money?" Later he reveals he wishes his son would come back and use it.

As the film begins, a lovely long shot shows many people gathering detritus from marshland left by the flood. Next in the morning we follow Costache as he hauls the detritus of his ruined house in a cart to the other house (sans water and electricity) that he's been allocated by the town. A few gestures establish that he is firm, but generous,and without self-pity. When his son Ticu (Serban Pavlu) arrives from Japan with his wife Hiroko (Kana Hashimoto) and son Koji (Toma Hashimoto), he welcomes them quietly, taking particular interest right away in Koji. Perhaps it's his natural joy at having a grandson; but he may also prefer not to get into discussions with Ticu. Turns out there is rancor over Ticu's bowing out of marrying local girl Gabi (Ioana Abur) and skipping off to Japan, which seems to have touched off the estrangement. In a drunken night this is hashed out, but this is a sequence the film largely elides. What's clear is that Ticu's return has changed things.

The beauty of this film, which has been likened to Ozu, is its gentle understatement, the way it speaks through milieu and gesture, without elaborate speeches. Ticu, Hiroko, and Koji return to Japan, where Ticu wants Costache to come and live with them. As they leave Koji gives his grandad an English-speaking robot dog, the canine of the title, to "take care of" him. At the end, grandad and son and grandson have been in friendly communication on the mayor's phone and Costache has sold his land and he leaves with a suitcase, evidently for Japan. To live there? We don't know, Nor do we know all the details of feelings and events but we walk out with a sense of knowing much.

[]]The Japanese Dog/Câinele Japonez[/i], 86 min. (listed on IMDb as Câinele Japonez), debuted in San Sebastián Film Festival — New Directors; also at Santa Barbara and Warsaw (Competition 1-2 Award at the latter). Screened for this review as part of the FSLC-MoMA 2014 New Directors/New Films series, March 2014. Showing Friday, March 21, 6:30pm – FSLC and Sunday, March 23, 1:00pm – MoMA.

[Chris Knipp]

ANDREI GRUZSNICZKI: QUOD ERAT DEMONSTRANDUM 2013)--ND/NF


OFELINA POPII AND SORIN LEOVEANU IN QUOD EST DEMONSTRANDUM

The personal and the intellectual in communist Romania

Andrei Gruzsniczki's Romanian film, Quod Erat Demonstrandum, concerns the depredations of life in the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War, specifically in the mid-Eighties, when the Berlin Wall was not down yet but citizens were straining at the bit to be released from the iron control of Russia and the Communist Party. There have been plenty of films about this topic before. It would be hard to make anything richer, more atmospheric, or more fascinatingly plotted than Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others. But this new film's existence has plenty of justification. It has its own particular story to tell. It has its vivid lead character, a brilliant mathematician held back because he isn't a loyal communist or eager informer. And shot on film in beautiful black and white, it captures the looks and manners of its time and place with unusual precision.

Quod Est Demonstrandum has its own story to tell, but what underlies that story is how the communist system of repression, intimidation, informing and bribing weaves its way into relationships and stifles intellectual progress. In the foreground at first is the problem faced by Sorin Parvu (Sorin Leoveanu), the most talented mathematician of his Romanian generation, whose associates called him "Einstein." He has plans for wave motion research that plainly can lead to a whole panoply of important practical applications. But earlier in his career he was blocked from going far in work with Fourier analysis because he couldn't get hold of the books. He is in his 40's and still hasn't finished his Ph.D. Lucian (Dorian Boguta), a lesser colleague who tows the ideological line and begins helping state security to spy on Sorin, gets the trips abroad Sorin has been denied and lives in a posh apartment and has the books.

As Parvu, Sorin Leoveanu makes an interesting protagonist. He's balding, not conventionally handsome. He lives with his mother. But he has a keenness, energy, and mystery about him. He is involved with Ducru, a mathematician friend who has escaped to France, and Sorin sees a lot of Ducru's' wife Elena Buciuman (Ofelia Popii), who works with computers, and her son David (Marc Titieni). Sorin's relationship with Elena is a little ambiguous; she's obviously more of a friend of a friend to him -- something else that may be used against him, along with his too great independence as a thinker and dodging of rules.

Alecu Voican (Florin Piersic Jr.), an overeager and frustrated agent of Securitate (the Romanian spy network) is put on Sorin's case when it's learned that he's published a paper in the US -- without getting prior approval. Even though the theorem in it has no practical or strategic application, a big fuss is made over this breach by the authorities. Alecu enlists Lucian to look into Sorin. Then he decides to get at Sorin through Elena. Alecu's ploy is to pose as an officer of the passport office specially assigned to Elena's case. Securitate is very exercised over Ducru's de facto defection to France. Alecu makes it look hard for Elena to get to France to rejoin her husband -- hard enough so she may become willing to betray her friend Sorin. Things don't, however, turn out as expected.

Several memorable scenes are the one of cars in line being pushed by hand up to a gas station; lights going out during a bridge game; Alecu having ice cream twice, with two different women; David trying out his French and taking Latin lessons; the hideous patterns of Sorin's mother's dress and armchair. Director Gruzsniczki may seem to meander a bit, but he builds up to excitement in the final minutes in the airport, which are climactic, yet leave things ambiguous. There should be no clear resolution of a situation or a life in a Cold War Eastern Bloc story set in the mid-Eighties, and there is none.

Everything about this film looks and feels authentic, and the way the film stock captures gray shadings digital can't is a pleasure to see. But what's most important is how the viewer gets to feel the way the system makes betrayal of one's values and one's intimates inevitable.

Quod Erat Demonstrandum, 107 mins., debuted at Rome (Nov. 2013), where it won the Jury Prize. Screened for this review as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center-Museum of Modern Art 2014 New Directors/New Films series where it shows Thursday, March 20, 9:00pm – FSLC; Saturday, March 22, 3:30pm – MoMA.

[Chris Knipp]

JESSICA ORNECK: VANQUISHING OF THE WITCH BABA YAGA (2013)--ND/NF


STILL FROM OREK'S THE VANQUISHING OF THE WITCH BABA YAGA

Visual meditation may be in need of further editing

"The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga is, at times, something of an inscrutable film," writes Daniel Walber of nonfics.com; "Loaded with philosophical voiceover and weighty poetic quotations, scenes of profound silence and a great many enigmatic images, its most immediate impact is one of bewilderment." And Clayton Dillard of The House Next Door on Slant Magazine waxes rhapsodic. "Jessica Oreck's The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga, Dillard says, "is a staggeringly polymorphous documentary that often suggests a collaboration between Carlos Reygadas, Godfrey Reggio, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Part meditative nature film, part urban observational, part fairy tale, these seemingly disparate parts consistently juxtapose throughout to form not just an evocative mood piece, but a larger, discursive work that achieves something resembling Sergei Eisenstein's concept of dialectical montage. . . To call Oreck's film 'hypnotic' would be too easy, as it would neglect the content of her ravishing images, which cohere into a rather precise essay film."

Well, I'm sorry to report that personally I could not perceive the "precise essay film" Dillard promises. I might also suggest that any collaboration between Carlos Reygadas, Godfrey Reggio, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul would be likely to produce a shapeless mess -- which each of those artists have risked producing occasionally on their own: together there would be a work of no discernible style. And this is what happens in Oreck's film. There are gorgeous woodland scenes and glowing landscape skies. Then there are roaming panoramas as a camera rushes by roadways in the periphery of a city or past blocks of flats downtown. Then again there are shots of conventional Eastern Bloc art illustrations for a "Witch Baba Yaga" children's tale (a kind of nastier Slavic version of Hansel and Gretel) while it is read in voiceover by an older woman in -- what language? Polish, Ukrainian, Russian?: these segments are strewn through the film, interrupted by the philosophical musings, whose import seems to be, life is mysterious and the woods are lovely, dark, and deep. There is too much going on here, and it all adds up to rather little. Part of the problem is that the image quality -- lensing, color correction, the eye itself in the cinematography by Sean Price Williams -- is not up the the best technical standards of Reygadas, Reggio, or Weerasethakul. Some further editing and post-production may be needed to bring this film up to the concept it aspires to. The illustrations for the Baba Yaga story are disappointingly conventional stuff, quite unimaginative.

An underlying thesis stated at the outset is that modern civilization is opposed to wilderness, but we "have" our own wilderness inside us, and any attempts to repress it will only cause it to burst out. This is the kind of experimental, open-ended film that some will find inspiring. Others will just see it as a long slog. Look up Walber's and Dillard's comments for more favorable angles on the film. But I warn you: they speak in very vague and general terms.


The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga, 73 mins., was shown in early March 2014 at the True/False documentary festival in Columbia, Missouri (where the Walber and Dillard saw it). It debuts at the New York Film Society of Lincoln Center-Museum of Modern Art joint New Directors/New Films series, where it was screened for this review. Showing Saturday, March 22, 1:30pm – FSLC; Monday, March 24, 6:15pm – MoMA.