New Directors/New Films and Film Comment Selects 2014

[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.

[Chris Knipp]

ALEJANDRO FERNÁNDEZ ALMENDRAS: TO KILL A MAN (2014)--ND/NF


DANIEL CANDIA IN TO KILL A MAN

Points of no return

To Kill a Man-- the title gives away the climax -- is a slow-burning, cooly observational neorealist Latin American revenge story whose beleaguered‎, emasculated pater familias winds up murdering a brutal ghetto tormenter who claims just to be a "prankster." Guy Lodge of Variety suggested this film has links to Pablo Laraín's films (Almendras like Larraín being Chilean) -- presumably their creepiness and moral ambiguity, but Almendras' method is more meandering and dogged, with a bare-bones mise-en-scene and a straight-on middle distance camera that makes every facade and interior look equally drab and khaki. A story that might be mind-bending and suspenseful if told by Patricia Highsmith winds up being numbing and sickening. But no doubt amateur killers often do such things in these kinds of agonizing dragged out clumsy ways. And no doubt though the storytelling here is unsatisfying and opaque, that's the way, in the interests of realism, Almendras means it to be. What the film is good at showing is how people become trapped in their actions. And a trap is, well, something you can't get out of no matter what you do.

Jorge (Daniel Candia) is a tranquil, middle-class family man who's a diabetic with a shrewish wife, a son, and a daughter, who live near the projects. He works as a maintenance man at a distant research project and comes home tired every night on the train. Some of the local toughs menace him one such evening as he returns with groceries ordered by his wife, and rummage through his pockets and steal his insulin needle. From then on war begins. His son Jorgito (Ariel Mateluna) goes over to retaliate and is shot by the leader of the ghetto men (the only one who stays in the picture), who shoots himself to make it look like he fired in self defense. Jorge's wife Marta (Alexandra Yanez) blames him for all this: Jorge's manhood is challenged from all sides. The tough, known as Kalule (Daniel Antivilo) goes to jail for a year and a half, and then when out again, steps up his intimidation. By this time Jorge and Marta are no longer together, though they remain in contact. Finally when Kalule assaults and sexually menaces Jorge's daughter despite a restraining order -- after much bureaucratic stalling by police -- has been issued against him, Jorge gets serous.

He has a rifle at work to defend the property he maintains; we see he will use it when a camper refuses to remove his fire. He takes the rifle to the projects and lures Kalule out by setting off the alarm on his car, then forces him into the refrigerator truck his son operates. Kalule begs to be let out, shouting a mixture of pleading and curses that gradually turns to vicious threats. Heedless, Jorge drives the truck far out of town. After he has done away with Kalule, after teasing and tormenting him a bit, it is we, the audience who are teased and tormented, perhaps, as Jorge seems unclear about what to do with the body. Eventually, it appears that guilt overcomes him, and he is already a suspect and has been visited by police at work. Despite Almendras' relentlessly undramatic method, the post-murder atmosphere created by following a killer as events gang up on him still has some of the classic edge. But Jorge is a blank protagonist whom one may despise as well as pity and cannot ultimately sympathize with -- or even have much of a sense of. The music, heavy on the loud, eerie woodwinds, helps awaken a thriller vibe -- but seem to go agains the low -keyed style of everything else.

To Kill a Man/Matar a un hombre, 82 mins., debuted at Sundance Jan. 2014, also showing at Rotterdam. Screened for this review as part of the FSLC-MoMA series, New Directors/New Films, March 2014. A Film Movement release. ND/NF showings: Thursday, March 20, 6:30pm – FSLC; Sunday, March 23, 3:30pm – MoMA.

[Chris Knipp]

BEN RIVERS AND BEN RUSSELL: A SPELL TO WARD OFF THE DARKNESS (2013)--ND/NF


ROBERT A. A. LOWE IN A SPELL TO WARD OFF THE DARKNESS

This may bring on the darkness as much as ward it off

Ben Rivers and Ben Russell are experimental art film makers. Rivers is from the UK, Russell from the US; this is their first collaboration, though they previously toured together, in a program combining their short 16mm. films. This film is conceived and presented as a full-length feature in three parts. The first is shot of a small collective community on an island off the coast of Estonia. The second is in Finland, where there is a sauna. The third is in Norway, where a howling heavy-metal style concert is performed in heavy makeup in a small club. There are some pure landscape sequences, one of the musician Robert A A. Lowe in a boat and camping, and earlier one of a woodland lake at night, accompanied by an original A cappella performance, which is quite lovely. Making sense of this film, which is really three short films tacked together (except for the carryover of Lowe) is not aided by the failure to identify the locations or sections during the film. This Spell can only be enjoyed with those who see cinematic experience as non-narrative going with the flow.

How all these three segments fit together thematically is anybody's guess, but in some ways they all flow together as part of the same world. Oddly, the communitarians on the island sound an awful lot like American hippies, circa 1968; and since the people in the Finnish woods running in and out of the sauna speak English, they might be from the same group. The final concert might take place in Seattle, if Metallica was a grunge group and went in for imitating the sound of wild animals in heat. A KimStim release.

A Spell to Ward off the Darkness, 98 mins., debuted at Locarno, Aug. 2013. Screened for this review as part of the FSLC-MoMA New Directors/New Films series, March 2014, where it shows Saturday, March 22, 9:00pm – MoMA;Tuesday, March 25, 6:30pm – FSLC.

Reviewed for Hollywood Reporter by Boyd van Hoeij.