New Directors/New Films and Film Comment Selects 2014

[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.

[Chris Knipp]

ROBERTO MINERVINI: STOP THE POUNDING HEART (2013)--ND/NF


SARA CARLSON IN STOP THE POUNDING HEART

Docudrama -- or propaganda?

If Roberto Minervini's Stop the Pounding Heart, last in a Texas trilogy the US-based Italian has been making, were a documentary, as it at first appears to be, it would be very remarkable indeed since it has access to some intimate moments. But eventually we realize this film is "staged" by "people playing themselves." And that's a lot different from either documentary or drama, and, since the Carlson family are the main focus and their Christian piety is held up to the light, this starts to seem like a "Christian film," and therefore a kind of propaganda. The film is supplied with simplified English subtitles, presumably for an international Christian audience -- though director Minervini himself, a graduate of the New School in NYC, is a Buddhist.

The family chiefly depicted in the film is certainly a remarkable one, living simply and productively off the land and providing many children with the upbringing they want them to have. Except for a couple of harsh words from the father, the Carlsons put their best foot forward, and many details are missing. (The Carlsons and some others appeared in the two other films.) What's stressed is the austere life of the huge Carlson family (two parents, 12 children, by reports) -- get up, feed the goats -- they run an artisinal farm that sells goat milk, cheese, and yogurt at farmers' markets -- then Bible-study, breakfast, work.

The alternate theme is of blond 14-year-old Sara Carlson's occasional meetings with Colby Trichell, an amateur bull rider about her age from another large (though not quite so large) Christian family in the same community. Though darkly handsome and slightly rakish (too reedy yet to be a successful rider himself), Colby is polite and restrained and this "courtship" is so subtle as to be almost imperceptible. In the Carlsons' version of Christian ethics as explained by Sara's mother, dating is frowned upon, since it only shows a mate who is available for "fun." What about the un-fun times? Performance during those is what counts in a mate, Sare's mom says.

But how then is a mate chosen? This is not explained. Nothing is explained. At the end, after Sara's mother has soothed her girl who's going through a time of worry and fear she does not explain (stopping, presumably, the pounding of her heart), Sara is dressed in a tight girdle and what looks like a 19th-century-style wedding dress and goes out. Is she going to marry Colby? At the age of 14? Or is this old-fashioned dressup just to reinforce the girls' allegiance to traditional women's roles, since their mother has coached them on the great values of being submissive and putting the men in their life first?

Sara's mother's counseling of the girls is wonderful, but rather generic, as is Sara's counseling of some younger daughters. As one of the oldest children, she does part of the home schooling.

But the home schooling we see is only vague Bible lessons, no other teaching.

The cinematography of Stop the Pounding Heart by Diego Romero Suarez-Llanos is handsome, and blond heads are often attractively back lit, with cute baby goats coming up to nuzzle Sara Carlson's hand. She knows their names and calls them "sweetie." The film shows a number of bull-riding sessions, involving young boys, including Colby. Colby gives lessons to Carlson boys and encourages them to try real bull-riding. The actual full-sized bulls seem terrifying and dangerous, and Colby gets hand and arm injuries. At times it seems that the film is more interested in the bull riding than in the Christian lessons, perhaps because they are livelier to film than hand-milking goats. Another bit of excitement comes from target practice with guns in the back yard in which the Carlson girls participate.

The film includes a childbirth at which Sara observes in a doorway. The mother is on the floor, Sara's mother attending, a midwife, and the mother's husband helping out. Sara seems a bit uneasy.

And we are uneasy after watching this attractive, so natural-seeming film, which seems to advertise a pure Christian way of life that it does not delve into deeply enough for anyone but the converted to be satisfied with. Admiration for this film when it showed out of competition at Cannes seems to show that you can get away with a lot nowadays with festival critics if you use documentary elements attractively.

Stop the Pounding Heart, 100 mins., was screened for this review as part of the FSLC-MoMA 2014 New Directors/New Films series showing Friday, March 21, 6:15pm at MoMA and Sunday, March 23, 3:30pm at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

[Chris Knipp]

JOEL POTRYKUS: BUZZARD (2014)--ND/NF


JOSHUA BURGE IN BUZZARD

Slacker crook in the Midwest

Joel Potrykus's 2012 Ape (Best New Director Award at Locarno), set in the filmmaker's home ground of Grand Rapids, presented a pyromaniac and failing standup comic whose greatest pleasure is in burning his worst jokes. The Voice called Ape "an unnerving hybrid of Harmony Korine's Gummo and Frank Whaley's overlooked The Jimmy Show." Joshua Burge, who has been Potrykus' chief collaborator in all his films short and long, stars in Buzzard as Marty Jackitansky, an office temp scam artist. For half of Buzzrd, set in Grand Rapids again, Marty focuses on redeeming stuff he hasn't bought and cashing third party checks cut at the bank where he's working. Most of the time he hangs out with, though he has his usual contempt for, coworker Derek (Potrykus himself). But fear that his check gambit has got him in trouble at the bank makes Marty flee to Detroit, where he at first celebrates by overnighting at a nice hotel and gobbling "a $20 plate of spaghetti" from room service, then switches to a ghetto dive and sinks into more sinister and illegal behavior, using a homemade "Power Glove" as a weapon and barely eluding homelessness.

Seeing Marty rapidly put away an entire heaping plate of spaghetti and meatballs in real time exemplifies the Burge-Potrykus team's ability to go the whole way in scene after scene. Clearly Potrykus and Burge work well together, and all the secondary characters -- store, bank, and motel clerks mostly -- do good work. At times the film seems like a series of schticks, but as Marty Jackitansky Burge is a character who never runs out of gas or backs down, even when the cops are coming. The madcap dark humor Potrykus and Burge weave is fresh and engaging as well as slightly macabre.

Buzzard, 97 min., was picked up by the new punk distributor Oscilloscope at the SXSW festival. Screened for this review as part of the 2014 Film Society of Lincoln Center-Museum of Modern Art series, showing alsong with an 18-mins. short, Dustin Guy Defa's Person to Person. ND/NF showtimes: Sunday, March 23, 6:15pm – FSLC and Monday, March 24, 8:30pm – MoMA.

Buzzard got limited US theatrical release 6 March 2015. See review by Armond Wite for National Review.

[Chris Knipp]

RICHARD AYOADE: THE DOUBLE (2013)--ND/NF


JESSE EISENBERG IN THE DOUBLE

Shoved aside by one's doppelganger

Richard Ayoade, already popular in the UK for his "The IT Crowd" TV participation, made a great impression with his distinctive debut feature, the charming period coming of age flick Submarine. His new one, which a colleague warned me was "a mind fuck," is a pleasure too, as handsomely produced as Submarine but darker. (It may be a disadvantage that the field is crowded with cinematic doubles, with the more soulful and handsome Jake Gyllenhaal duplicated in the starring role of Denis Villeneuve's Enemy and Annette Benning in a double movie currently showing, The Face of Love.) Based on Dostoevsky's novella, coadapted with Harmony Korine's brother Avi, Ayaode's The Double, which stars Jesse Eisenberg, is, by its maker's admission, much indebted for its mood and style to Terry Gilliam's Brazil and Orson Welles' version of Kafka's The Trial. The director would have badly failed in his aim if this film could be described as remotely charming, but there are moments when one would like to take up the protagonist, Simon James, as played by Eisenberg, and soothe and pet him.

Simon is a faceless corporate drone, whose lazier but more aggressive duplicate is first spookily glimpsed by Simon in the subway. Looking and dressing exactly the same, Simon's alter ego arrives at the company and is at once hailed by everybody as the bright young thing, especially by company manager Mr. Papadopoulos (Wallace Shawn). (Up above everything in this Orwellian world styled via Gilliam is The Colonel, a barely glimpsed James Fox, lending an aura of legend. Ayoade knows how to use casting resonantly, and gives a number of his Submarine actors memorable walk-ons.)

The wilier, more politick version of Simon James is James Simon. To simplify matters we'll call the wimpy self Simon and the new more testosterone-rich one James, as in Franco. But when James and Simon began flitting back and forth in the same frame one grasps the relevance of the term "mind fuck." When the self and its doppelganger get in touch and start helping each other and taking each other's appointments, like deceitful twins, even though Eisenberg does play James with a confident glow and Simon with a pitiful falter, it remains confusing.

What's certainly clear without a diagram is that James quickly overshadows Simon and makes him virtually disappear, stealing his girl, or the girl he dreams of making his, Hannah (Mia Wasikowska), and snitching his arcane research for the company, which Mr. Papadopoulos ignored but now greets, coming from James, as brilliant. While Simon has never been recognized by anybody even after seven years at the company, and constantly gets his ID vetted, James is instantly persona grata.

The first half hour of The Double is its best of times, when the well-oiled physical business, delivered thorough finely honed mise-en-scene and precise editing, elucidates Simon's manifold frustrations -- every transaction is interrupted, every door shuts automatically in his face -- so neatly that each failure almost seems like a triumph for its hapless victim, who becomes the star of an intricate dance. Every gesture, every interruption, shows what Simon is up against, even before James arrives to complicate his life.

That complication also opens up an awareness of new possibilities for Simon. If somebody who looks just like him can be confident and successful and attractive to the ladies, well, why can't he? This message is a trite one hidden behind all the visual and narrative ingenuity. But that has to compete with the more doctrinaire maxim that corporate life crushes the ego -- or, in the more Dostoevskian extreme, drives one mad. What are these truisms, though, but a rack on which to hang Ayoade's playful exercises in style and character?

The Double is certainly not an example of sophomore slump. It's far too brilliantly produced, well acted, and handsome to look at for that. Every minor character is a pleasure to watch, amped up almost to Kubrickian levels. But one misses the warmth and charm of Submarine, which was also I guess funnier and more fun. Ayoade has absorbed his new stylistic influences almost too well; he needs to get his own groove back. And with this degree of accomplishment and skill, he likely will.

The Double, 93 mins., which is a Magnolia PIctures release, debuted at Toronto in fall 2013, followed by London and Glasgow. It was screened for this review as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center-Museum of Modern Art series New Directors/New Films, with showings Monday, March 24, 9:00pm (Lincoln Center) and Saturday, March 29, 6:30pm (MoMA). It has theatrical openings coming in the UK 4 April 2014, then the US 9 May and France 11 June.

[Chris Knipp]

TALAL DERKI: THE RETURN TO HOMS (2013)--ND/NF


ABDEL-BASSET AL-SAROUT DURING A PERIOD OF EXHAUSTION IN RETURN TO HOMS

Rebel war in Syria up close

Talal Derki's Return to Homs is the most visceral and personal documentary about urban siege warfare one is likely to see, the narrative of the ravaged yet still defended city of Homs and one of its natives, a fiery young rebel leader. Neatly editing rough immediate footage in bombed-out buildings and rubble-filled streets, Derki, voicing-over in elegiac, composed classical Arabic, pulls together an otherwise very rugged and vernacular narrative of 2011 to 2013 from the point of view of young rebels engaged in a struggle to hold onto the city of Homs that was considered the capital of the anti-Assad revolution -- and hence was besieged by government forces till its apartment buildings and streets are nothing but concrete Swiss cheese with a scattering of cemeteries and mosques where the rebel martyrs are celebrated.

Derki follows two young Syrians. The main one is Abdel-Basset al-Sarout, a 19-year-old soccer goalie ranked second in the country. Handsome, charismatic and with a spark in his eyes, he could be an Arab Errol Flynn with a touch of James Franco. Basset, a blacksmith, emerges as a firebrand leader during early peaceful demonstrations. He becomes both a creator of rebel songs and, later, when convinced the revolution must fight back with arms, a street fighting leader. As a contrast to Basset, there is one of his close friends who sticks with him, Osama al-Homsi, a quiet 24-year-old university student-turned-media activist. Later Osama, who has been wounded but recovered, has been picked up at a checkpoint, his friends learn, and not heard from again.

Most of Basset's other closest friends get killed. Often they are trapped in one of two Homs neighborhoods, digging tunnels, firing from disintegrating buildings, and for a time forced out of the city altogether. Basset is wounded twice, in the leg and foot, and goes through several periods of exhaustion and near despair and starvation that show on a face that after two years has visibly aged. But when Derki returns after several absences of a month or so, the wounded, limping Basset is back on his feet again. We see him often invent chants and songs and inspire men, smiling his charming smile. At one point we see him losing the will ("I can't do this anymore"). We see him after being wounded, half-raving and praying for the Bashar al-Assad regime to be defeated and for himself to die a martyr's death. Then he is back again, as if risen from the ashes and rubble.

Half of the merit of this film is the way it is able to stick to the continually failing, but never abandoned, efforts by rebels to defend the city of Homs. The other is its tenacious ability to give the narrative an appealing face by following Basset for this three-year period -- even when it's very dangerous where he is, so dangerous rebels are getting killed and wounded right in front of the camera. The action is so intense there's no time to be scared. Xian Brooks is right in his Guardian Sundance review. It would have been nice to get more of a look at the few non-rebel survivors, women and old men, who are still in the city, as well as "a little more structure, context and analysis," but "The director's relentless, claustrophobic approach is surely an accurate reflection of the tragedy itself. There is no wider picture; the world has largely turned its back." Return to Homs is what it is, and what it is is remarkable enough: a vivid snapshot, a poetic memoir, an impassioned plea -- a concentrated essence of all the hope, passion, and despair of the Arab Spring.

We follow Basset, we are at his side, and we feel his revolutionary charisma with his followers. But it's also clear -- Derki's voiceover says so, that this Homs rebel defense lacks coordination at some key moments. Brave and defiant though they are, their numbers and equipment are too limited to win. Yet while Basset expects to die more than once, as the narrative ends he is still alive and fighting.

Highly recommended, but only for the stout of heart: there are painful and disturbing images.

The Return to Homs/العودة إلى حمص [Al-3awdah ila Homs], 90 mins, exclusively in classical and colloquial Arabic with English subtitles, debuted at the Amsterdam documentary festival (IDFA) and won the world cinema jury documentary prize at Sundance January 2014. Screened for this review as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center-Museum of Modern Art series New Directors/New Films, showing Tuesday, March 25, 6:15pm at MoMA and Wednesday, March 26, 9:00pm at Lincoln Center.