New York Film Festival 2019

[Chris Knipp]

BONG JOON-HO: PARASITE 기생충 (Gisaengchung) (2019)


LEE SON-KYUN AND JO YEO-JEONG IN PARASITE

Crime thriller as social commentary? Maybe not.

I've reviewed Bong's 2006 The Host ("a monster movie with a populist heart and political overtones that's great fun to watch") and his 2009 Mother which I commented had "too many surprises." (I also reviewed his 2013 Snowpiercer.) Nothing is different here except this seems to be being taken more seriously as social commentary, though it's primarily an elaborately plotted and cunningly realized violent triller, as well a monster movie where the monsters are human. It's also marred by being over long and over-plotted, making its high praise seem a bit excessive.

This new film, Bong's first in a while made at home and playing with national social issues, is about a deceitful poor family that infiltrates a rich one. It won the top award at Cannes in May 2019, just a year after the Japanese Koreeda's (more subtle and more humanistic) Palm winner about the related theme of a crooked poor family. Parasite has led to different comparisons, such as Losey's The Servant and Pasolini's Theorem. In accepting the prize, Bong himself gave a nod to Hitchcock and Chabrol. Parasite has met with nearly universal acclaim, though some critics feel it is longer and more complicated than necessary and crude in its social commentary, if its contrasting families really adds up to that. The film is brilliantly done and exquisitely entertaining half the way. Then it runs on too long and acquires an unwieldiness that makes it surprisingly flawed for a film so heaped with praise.

It's strange to compare Parasite with Losey's The Servant, in which Dick Bogarde and James Fox deliver immensely rich performances. Losey's film is a thrillingly slow-burn, subtle depiction of class interpenetration, really a psychological study that works with class, not a pointed statement about class itself. It's impossible to speak of The Servant and Parasite in the same breath.

In Parasite one can't help but enjoy the ultra-rich family's museum-piece modernist house, the score, and the way the actors are handled, but one keeps coming back to the fact that as Steven Dalton simply puts it in his Cannes Hollywood Reporter review, Parasite is "cumbersomely plotted" and "heavy-handed in its social commentary." Yet I had to go to that extremist and contrarian Armond White in National Review for a real voice of dissent. I don't agree with White's politics or his belief that Stephen Chow is a master filmmaker, but I do sympathize with being out-of-tune, like him, with all the praise of Boon's new film.

The contrast between the poor and rich family is blunt indeed, but the posh Park family doesn't seem unsubtly depicted: they're absurdly overprivileged, but don't come off as bad people. Note the con-artist Kim family's acknowledgement of this, and the mother's claim that being rich allows you to be nice, that money is like an iron that smooths out the wrinkles. This doesn't seem to be about that, mainly. It's an ingeniously twisted story of a dangerous game, and a very wicked one. Planting panties in the car to mark the chauffeur as a sexual miscreant and get him fired: not nice. Stimulating the existing housekeeper's allergy and then claiming she has TB so she'll be asked to leave: dirty pool. Not to mention before that, bringing in the sister as somebody else's highly trained art therapist relative, when all the documents are forged and the "expertise" is cribbed off the internet: standard con artistry.

The point is that the whole Kim family makes its way into the Park family's employ and intimate lives, but it is essential that they conceal that they are in any way related to each other. What Bong and his co-writer Jin Won Han are after is the depiction of a dangerous con game, motivated by poverty and greed, that titillates us with the growing risk of exposure. The film's scene-setting of the house and family is exquisite. The extraordinary house is allowed to do most of the talking. The rich family and the housekeeper are sketched in with a few deft stokes. One's only problem is first, the notion that this embodies socioeconomic commentary, and second, the overreach of the way the situation is played out, with one unnecessary coda after another till every possibility is exhausted. This is watchable and entertaining (till it's not), but it's not the stuff of a top award.

Parasite 기생충 (Gisaengchung), 132 mins., debuted in Competition at Cannes, winning the Palme d'Or best picture award. Twenty-eight other festivals followed as listed on IMDb, including New York, for which it was screened (at IFC Center Oct. 11, 2019) for the present review. Current Metascore 95%. It has opened in various countries including France, where the AlloCiné press rating soared to 4.8.


PARK SO-DAM AND CHOI WOO-SIK IN PARASITE

[Chris Knipp]

EDWARD NORTON: MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN (2019)


GUGU MBATHA-RAW AND EDWARD NORTON IN MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN

Edward Norton's passion project complicates the Jonathan Lethem novel

The NYFF Closing Night film is the premiere of Edwards Norton's adaptation, a triumph over many creative obstacles through a nine-year development time, of Jonathan Lethem's 1999 eponymous novel. It concerns Lionel Essrog (played by Norton), a man with Tourette's Syndrome who gets entangled in a police investigation using the obsessive and retentive mind that comes with his condition to solve the mystery. Much of the film, especially the first half, is dominated by Lionel's jerky motions and odd repetitive outbursts, for which he continually apologizes. Strange hero, but Lethem's creation. To go with the novel's evocation of Maltese Falcon style noir flavor, Norton has recast it from modern times to the Fifties.

Leading cast members, besides Norton himself, are Willem Dafoe, Bruce Willis, Alec Baldwin, Cherry Jones, Bobby Cannavale and Gugu Mbatha-Raw. In his recasting of the novel, as Peter Debruge explains in his Variety review, Norton makes as much use of Robert Caro's The Power Broker, about the manipulative city planner Robert Moses, a "visionary" insensitive to minorities and the poor, as of Lethem's book. Alec Baldwn's "Moses Randolph" role represents the film's Robert Moses character, who is added into the world of the original novel.

Some of the plot line may become obscure in the alternating sources of the film. But clearly Lionel Essrog, whose nervous sensibility hovers over things in Norton's voiceover, is a handicapped man with an extra ability who's one of four orphans from Saint Vincent's Orphanage in Brooklyn saved by Frank Minna (Bruce Willis), who runs a detective agency. When Minna is offed by the Mob in the opening minutes of the movie, Lionel goes chasing. Then he learns city bosses had a hand, and want to repress his efforts.

Gugu Mbatha-Raw's character, Laura Rose, who becomes a kind of love interest for Lionel Essrog, and likewise willem Dafoe's, Paul Randolph, Moses' brother and opponent, are additional key characters in the film not in the Johathan Lethem book. The cinematography is by the Mike Leigh regular (who produced the exquisite Turner), Dick Pope. He provides a lush, classic look.

Viewers will have to decide if this mixture of novel, non-fiction book and period recasting works for them or not. For many the problem is inherent in the Lethem novel, that it's a detective story where, as the original Times reviewer Albert Mobilio said, "solving the crime is beside the point." Certainly Norton has created a rich mixture, and this is a "labour of love," "as loving as it is laborious, maybe," is how the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw put it, writing (generally quite favorably) from Toronto. In her intro piece for the first part of the New York Film Festival for the Times Manohla Dargis linked it with the difficult Albert Serra'S Liberté with a one-word reaction: "oof," though she complemented these two as "choices rather than just opportunistically checked boxes." Motherless Brooklyn has many reasons for wanting to be in the New York Film Festival, and for the honor of Closing Night Film, notably the personal passion, but also the persistent rootedness in New York itself through these permutations.

Motherless Brooklyn, 144 mins., debuted at Telluride Aug. 30, 2019, showing at eight other festivals including Toronto, Vancouver, Mill Valley, and New York, where it was screened at the NYFF OCT. 11, 2019 as the Closing Night film. It opens theatrically in the US Nov. 1, 2019. Current Metascore 60%.

[Chris Knipp]

[Found also in Filmleaf's Festival Coverage section for the 2019 NYFF]

MARTIN SCORSESE: THE IRISHMAN (2019)


AL PACINO AND ROBERT DE NIRO IN THE IRISHMAN

Old song

From Martin Scorsese, who is in his late seventies, comes a major feature that is an old man's film. It's told by an old man, about old men, with old actors digitized (indifferently) to look like and play their younger selves as well. It's logical that The Irishman, about Teamsters loyalist and mob hit man Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), who became the bodyguard and then (as he tells it) the assassin of Union kingpin Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino) should have been chosen as Opening Night Film of the New York Film Festival. Scorsese is very New York, even if the film is set in Detroit. He is also a good friend of Film at Lincoln Center. And a great American director with an impressive body of work behind him.

To be honest, I am not a fan of Scorsese's feature films. I do not like them. They are unpleasant, humorless, laborious and cold. I admire his responsible passion for cinema and incestuous knowledge of it. I do like his documentaries. From Fran Lebowitz's talk about the one he made about her, I understand what a meticulous, obsessive craftsman he is in all his work. He also does have a sense of humor. See how he enjoys Fran's New York wit in Public Speaking. And there is much deadpan humor in The Irishman at the expense of the dimwitted, uncultured gangsters it depicts. Screenwriter Steven Zaillian's script based on Charles Brandt's book about Sheeran concocts numerous droll deadpan exchanges. It's a treat belatedly to see De Niro and Pacino acting together for the first time in extended scenes.

The Irishman is finely crafted and full of ideas and inspires many thoughts. But I found it monotonous and overlong - and frankly overrated. American film critics are loyal. Scorsese is an icon, and they feel obligated, I must assume, to worship it. He has made a big new film in his classic gangster vein, so it must be great. The Metascore, 94%, nonetheless is an astonishment. Review aggregating is not a science, but the makers of these scores seem to have tipped the scales. At least I hope more critics have found fault with The Irishman than that. They assign 80% ratings to some reviews that find serious fault, and supply only one negative one (Austin Chronicle, Richard Whittaker). Of course Armond White trashes the movie magnificently in National Review ("Déjà Vu Gangsterism"), but that's outside the mainstream mediocre media pale.

Other Scorsese stars join De Niro and Pacino, Joe Pesci, Harvey Keitel. This is a movie of old, ugly men. Even in meticulously staged crowd scenes, there is not one young or handsome face. Women are not a factor, not remotely featured as in Jonathan Demme's delightful Married to the Mob. There are two wives often seen, in the middle distance, made up and coiffed to the kitsch nines, in expensive pants suits, taking a cigarette break on car trips - it's a thing. But they don't come forward as characters. Note also that out of loyalty to his regulars, Scorsese uses an Italo-American actor to play an Irish-American. There's a far-fetched explanation of Frank's knowledge of Italian, but his Irishness doesn't emerge - just another indication of how monochromatic this movie is.

It's a movie though, ready to serve a loyal audience with ritual storytelling and violence, providing pleasures in its $140 million worth of production values in period feel, costumes, and snazzy old cars (though I still long for a period movie whose vehicles aren't all intact and shiny). This is not just a remake. Its very relentlessness in showing Frank's steady increments of slow progress up the second-tier Teamsters and mafia outsider functionary ladders is something new. But it reflects Scorsese's old worship of toughs and wise guys and seeming admiration for their violence.

I balk at Scorsese's representing union goons and gangsters as somehow heroic and tragic. Metacritic's only critic of the film, Richard Whittiker of the Austen Chronicle, seems alone in recognizing that this is not inevitable. He points out that while not "lionizing" mobsters, Scorsese still "romanticizes" them as "flawed yet still glamorous, undone by their own hubris." Whittiker - apparently alone in this - compares this indulgent touch with how the mafia is shown in "the Italian poliziotteschi," Italian Years of Lead gang films that showed them as "boors, bullies, and murderers, rather than genteel gentlemen who must occasionally get their hands dirty and do so oh-so-begrudgingly." Whittiker calls Scorsese's appeal to us to feel Sheeran's "angst" when he's being flown in to kill "his supposed friend" (Hoffa) "a demand too far."

All this reminded me of a richer 2019 New York Film Festival mafia experience, Marco Bellocchio's The Traitor/Il traditore, the epic, multi-continent story of Tommaso Buscetta, the first big Italian mafia figure who chose to turn state's witness. This is a gangster tale that has perspective, both morally and historically. And I was impressed that Pierfrancesco Favino, the star of the film, who gives a career-best performance as Buscetta, strongly urged us both before and after the NYFF public screening to bear in mind that these mafiosi are small, evil, stupid men. Coppola doesn't see that, but he made a glorious American gangster epic with range and perspective. In another format, so did David Chase om the 2000-2007 HBO epic, "The Sopranos." Scprsese has not done so. Monotonously, and at overblown length, he has once again depicted Italo-Americans as gangsters, and (this time) unions as gangs of thugs.

The Irishman, 209 mins,. debuted at New York as Opening Night Film; 15 other international festivals, US theatrical release Nov. 1, wide release in many countries online by Netflix Nov. 27. Metascore 94%.

[Chris Knipp]

KLEBER MENDOÇA FILHO, JULIANO DORNELLES: BACURAU (2019)


SONIA BRAGA (CENTER) IN BACURAU

Not just another Cannes mistake?

This is a bold film for an arthouse filmmaker to produce, and it has moments of rawness and unpredictability that are admirable. But it seems at first hand to be possibly a misstep both for the previously much subtler chronicler of social and political unease as seen in the 2011 Neighboring Sopunds and 2016 Aquarius, Kleber Mendonça Filho, and for Cannes, which may have awarded novelty rather than mastery in giving it half of the 2019 Jury Prize. It's a movie that excites and then delivers a series of scenes of growing disappointment and repugnance. But I'm not saying it won't surprise and awe you.

Let's begin with where we are, which is the Brazilian boonies. Bacurau was filmed in the village of Barra in the municipality of Parelhas and in the rural area of the municipality of Acari, at the Sertão do Seridó region, in Rio Grande do Norte. Mendonça Filho shares credit this time with his regular production designer Juliano Dornelles. (They both came originally from this general region, is one reason.) The Wikipedia article introduces it as a "Brazilian weird western film" and its rural shootout, its rush of horses, its showdowns, and its truckload of coffins may indeed befit that peculiar genre.

How are we to take the action? In his Hollywood Reporter review, Stephen Dalton surprises me by asserting that this third narrative feature "strikes a lighter tone" than the first two and combines "sunny small-town comedy with a fable-like plot" along with "a sprinkle of magic realism." This seems an absurdly watered down description, but the film is many things to many people because it embodies many things. In an interview with Emily Buder, Mendoça Filho himself describes it as a mix of "spaghetti Western, '70's sci-fi, social realist drama, and political satire."

The film feels real enough to be horrifying, but it enters risky sci-fi horror territory with its futuristic human hunting game topic, which has been mostly an area for schlock. (See a list of ten, with the 1932 Most Dangerous Game given as the trailblazer.) However, we have to acknowledge that Mendonca Filho is smart enough to know all this and may want to use the schlock format for his own sophisticated purpose. But despite Mike D'Angelo's conclusion on Letterboxd that the film may "require a second viewing following extensive reading" due to its rootedness in Brazilian politics, the focus on American imperialists and brutal outside exploiters from the extreme right isn't all that hard to grasp.

Bacurau starts off as if it means to be an entertainment, with conventional opening credits and a pleasant pop song celebrating Brazil, but that is surely ironic. A big water truck rides in rough, arriving with three bullet holes spewing agua that its driver hasn't noticed. (The road was bumpy.) There is a stupid, corrupt politician, mayor Tony Jr. (Thardelly Lima), who is complicit in robbing local areas of their water supply and who gets a final comeuppance. The focus is on Bacurau, a little semi-abandoned town in the north whose 94-year-old matriarch Carmelita dies and gets a funeral observation in which the whole town participates, though apart the ceremony's strange magic realist aspects Sonia Braga, as a local doctor called Domingas, stages a loud scene because she insists that the deceased woman was evil. Then, with some, including Carmelita's granddaughter Teresa (Barbara Colen), returned to town from elsewhere, along with the handsome Pacote (Tomaso Aquinas) and a useful psychotic local killer and protector of water rights called Lunga (Silvero Pereira), hostile outsiders arrive, though as yet unseen. Their forerunners are a colorfully costumed Brazilian couple in clownish spandex suits on dustrider motorcycles who come through the town. When they're gone, it's discovered seven people have been shot.

They were an advance crew for a gang of mostly American white people headed by Michael (Udo Kier), whose awkward, combative, and finally murderous conference we visit. This is a bad scene in more ways than one: it's not only sinister and racist, but clumsy, destroying the air of menace and unpredictability maintained in the depiction of Bacurau scenes. But we learn the cell phone coverage of the town has been blocked, it is somehow not included on maps, and communications between northern and southern Brazil are temporarily suspended, so the setting is perfect for this ugly group to do what they've come for, kill locals for sport using collectible automatic weapons. Overhead there is a flying-saucer-shaped drone rumbling in English. How it functions isn't quite clear, but symbolically it refers to American manipulation from higher up. The way the rural area is being choked off requires no mention of Brazil's new right wing strong man Jair Bolsonaro and the Amazonian rain forest.

"They're not going to kill a kid," I said as a group of local children gather, the most normal, best dressed Bacurauans on screen so far, and play a game of dare as night falls to tease us, one by one creeping as far as they can into the dark. But sure enough, a kid gets shot. At least even the bad guys agree this was foul play. And the bad guys get theirs, just as in a good Western. But after a while, the action seems almost too symbolically satisfying - though this is achieved with good staging and classic visual flair through zooms, split diopter effects, Cinemascope, and other old fashioned techniques.

I'm not the only one finding Bacurau intriguing yet fearing that it winds up being confused and all over the place. It would work much better if it were dramatically tighter. Peter DeBruge in Variety notes that the filmakers "haven’t figured out how to create that hair-bristling anticipation of imminent violence that comes so naturally to someone like Quentin Tarantino." Mere vague unexpectedness isn't scary, and all the danger and killing aren't wielded as effectively as they should be to hold our attention and manipulate our emotions.

Bacurau, 131 mins., debuted in Competition at Cannes, where it tied for the Jury Prize with the French film, Ladj Ly's Les misérables. Many other awards and at least 31 other festivals including the NYFF. Metascore 74%. AlloCiné press rating 3.8, with a rare rave from Cahiers du Cinéma. US theatrical distribution by Kino Lorber began Mar. 13, 2020, but due to general theater closings caused by the coronavirus pandemic the company launched a "virtual theatrical exhibition initiative," Kino Marquee, with this film from Mar. 19.

[Chris Knipp]

BERTRAND BONELLO: ZOMBI CHILD (2019)


LOUISE LABEQUE AND WISLANDA LOUIMAT (FAR RIGHT) IN ZOMBI CHILD

Voodoo comes to Paris

If you said Betrand Bonello's films are beautiful, sexy, and provocative you would not be wrong. This new, officially fifth feature (I've still not seen his first one, the 2008 On War), has those elements. Its imagery, full of deep contrasts, can only be described as lush. Its intertwined narrative is puzzling as well.

We're taken right away to Haiti and plunged into the world of voodoo and zombies. Ground powder from the cut-up body of a blowfish is dropped, unbeknownst to him, into a man's shoes. Walking in them, he soon falters and falls. Later, he's aroused from death to the half-alive state of a zombie - and pushed into a numb, helpless labor in the hell of a a sugar cane field with other victims of the same cruel enchantment. In time however something arouses him to enough life to escape.

Some of the Haitian sequences center around a moonlit cemetery whose large tombs seem airy and haunted and astonishingly grand for what we know as the poorest country in the hemisphere.

From the thumping, vibrant ceremonies of Haitian voodoo (Bonello's command of music is always fresh and astonishing as his images are lush and beautiful) we're rushed to the grandest private boarding school you've ever seen, housed in vast stone government buildings. This noble domaine was established by Napoleon Bonaparte on the edge of Paris, in Saint Denis, for the education of children of recipients of the Legion of Honor. It really exists, and attendance there is still on an honorary basis.

Zombi Child oscillates between girls in this very posh Parisian school and people in Haiti. But these are not wholly separate places. A story about a Haitian grandfather (the zombie victim, granted a second life) and his descendants links the two strains. It turns out one of those descendants, Mélissa (Wislanda Louimat), is a new student at the school. A white schoolgirl, Fanny (the dreamy Louise Labeque), who's Mélissa's friend and sponsors her for membership in a sorority, while increasingly possessed by a perhaps imaginary love, also bridges the gap. For the sorority admission Mélissa confesses the family secret of a zombi and voodoo knowledge in her background.

Thierry Méranger of Cahiers du Cinéma calls this screenplay "eminently Bonellian in its double orientation," its "interplay of echoes" between "radically different" worlds designed to "stimulate the spectator's reflection." Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times bluntly declares that it's meant to "interrogate the bitter legacy of French colonialism."

But how so? And if so, this could be a tricky proposition. On NPR Andrew Lapin was partly admiring of how "cerebral and slippery" the film is, but suggests that since voodoo and zombies are all most white people "already know" about Haitian culture, a director coming from Haiti's former colonizing nation (France) must do "a lot of legwork to use these elements successfully in a "fable" where "the real horror is colonialism." The posh school comes from Napoleon, who coopted the French revolution, and class scenes include a history professor lecturing on this and how "liberalism obscures liberty."

I'm more inclined to agree with Glenn Kenny's more delicately worded praise in his short New York Times review of the film where he asserts that the movie’s inconclusiveness is the source of its appeal. Zombi Child, he says, is fueled by insinuation and fascination. The fascination, the potent power, of the occult, that's what Haiti has that the first wold lacks.

One moment made me authentically jump, but Bonello isn't offering a conventional horror movie. He's more interested in making his hints of voodoo's power and attraction, even for the white lovelorn schoolgirl, seem as convincing as his voodoo ceremonies, both abroad and back in Haiti, feel thoroughly attractive, or scary, and real. These are some of the best voodoo scenes in a movie. This still may seem like a concoction to you. Its enchantments were more those of the luxuriant imagery, the flowing camerawork, the delicious use of moon- and candle-light, the beautiful people, of whatever color. This is world-class filmmaking even if it's not Bonello's best work.

Bonello stages things, gets his actors to live them completely, then steps back and lets it happen. Glenn Kenny says his "hallmark" is his "dreamy detachment." My first look at that was the 2011 House of Tolerence (L'Apollonide - mémoires de la maison close), which I saw in Paris, a languorous immersion in a turn-of-the-century Parisian brothel, intoxicating, sexy, slightly repugnant. Next came his most ambitious project, Saint Laurent(2014), focused on a very druggy period in the designer's career and a final moment of decline. He has said this became a kind of matching panel for Apollonide. (You'll find that in an excellent long Q&A after the NYFF screening.) Saint Laurent's "forbidden" (unsanctioned) picture of the fashion house is as intoxicating, vibrant, and cloying as the maison close, with its opium, champagne, disfigurement and syphilis. No one can say Gaspard Ulliel wasn't totally immersed in his performance. Nocturama (2016) takes a group of wild young people who stage a terrorist act in Paris, who seem to run aground in a posh department store at the end, Bonello again getting intense action going and then seeming to leave it to its own devices, foundering. Those who saw the result as "shallow cynicism" (like A.O. Scott) missed how exciting and powerful it was. (Mike D'Angelo didn't.)

Zombi Child is exciting at times too. But despite its gorgeous imagery and sound, its back and forth dialectic seems more artificial and calculating than Bonello's previous films.

Zombi Child, mins., debuted at Cannes Directors Fortnight May 2019, included in 13 other international festivals, including Toronto and New York. It released theatrically in France Jun. 12, 2020 (AlloCiné press rating 3.7m 75%) and in the US Jan. 24, 2020 (Metascore 75%). Now available in "virtual theater" through Film Movement (Mar. 23-May 1, 2020), which benefits the theater of your choice. https://www.filmmovement.com/zombi-child

[Chris Knipp]

OLIVIER ASSAYAS: WASP NETWORK (2019)


GAEL GARCÍA BERNAL AND PENELOPE CRUZ IN WASP NETWORK

Spies nearby

The is a movie about the Cuban spies sent to Miami to combat anti-Castro Cuban-American groups, and their capture. They are part of what the Cubans called La Red Avispa (The Wasp Network). The screenplay is based on the book The Last Soldiers of the Cold War by Fernando Morais, and it's mainly from the Wasp, Cuban point of view, not the FBI point of view. Unlike the disastrous Seberg, no time is spent looking over the shoulders of G-men, nor will this story give any pleasure to right wing Miami Cubans. But it won't delight leftists much either, or champions of the Cuban Five. The issues of why one might leave Cuba and why one might choose not to are treated only superficially. There's no analysis of US behavior toward Cuba since the revolution.

On the plus side, the film is made in an impeccable, clear style (with one big qualification: see below) and there's an excellent cast with as leads Edgar Ramirez (of the director's riveting miniseries Carlos), Penelope Cruz (Almodóvar's muse), Walter Moura (Escobar in the Netflix series "Narcos"), Ana de Armas (an up-and-comer who's actually Cuban but lives in Hollywood now), and Gael García Bernal (he of course is Mexican, Moura is Brazilian originally, and Ramirez is Venezuelan). They're all terrific, and other cast members shine. Even a baby is so amazing I thought she must be the actress' real baby.

Nothing really makes sense for the first hour. We don't get the whole picture, and we never do, really. We focus on René Gonzalez (Édgar Ramirez), a Puerto Rican-born pilot living in Castro’s Cuba and fed up with it, or the brutal embargo against Castro by the US and resulting shortage of essential goods and services, who suddenly steals a little plane and flies it to Miami, leaving behind his wife Olga and young daughter. Olga is deeply shocked and disappointed to learn her husband is a traitor. He has left without a word to her. Born in Chicago, he was already a US citizen and adapts easily, celebrated as an anti-Castro figure.

We also follow another guy, Juan Pablo Roque (Wagner Moura) who escapes Havana by donning snorkel gear and swimming to Guantanamo, not only a physical challenge but riskier because prison guards almost shoot him dead when he comes out of the water. Roque and Gonzalez are a big contrast. René is modest, content with small earnings, and starts flying for a group that rescues Cuban defectors arriving by water. Juan Pablo immediately woos and marries the beautiful Ana Marguerita Martinez (Ana de Armas) and, as revealed by an $8,000 Rolex, is earning big bucks but won't tell Ana how. This was the first time I'd seen Wagner Moura, an impressively sly actor who as Glenn Kenny says, "can shift from boyish to sinister in the space of a single frame" - and that's not the half of it.

This is interesting enough to keep us occupied but it's not till an hour into the movie, with a flashback to four years earlier focused on Cuban Gerardo Hernandez (Garcia Bernal) that we start to understand something of what is going on. We learn about the CANF and Luis Posada Carriles (Tony Plana), and a young man's single-handed effort to plant enough bombs to undermine the entire Cuban tourist business. This late-arriving exposition for me had a deflating and confounding effect. There were still many good scenes to follow. Unfortunately despite them, and the good acting, there is so much exposition it's hard to get close to any of the individual characters or relationships.

At the moment I'm an enthusiastic follower of the FX series "The Americans." It teaches us that in matters of espionage, it's good to have a firm notion of where the main characters - in that case "Phillip" and "Elizabeth" - place their real, virtually unshakable loyalties, before moving on. Another example of which I'm a longtime fan is the spy novels of John le Carré. You may not be sure who's loyal, but you always know who's working for British Intelligence, even in the latest novel the remarkable le Carré, who at 88, has just produced (Agent Running in the Field - for which he's performed the audio version, and no one does that better). To be too long unclear about these basics in spydom is fatal.

It's said that Assayas had a lot of trouble making Wasp Network, which has scenes shot in Cuba in it. At least the effort doesn't show. We get a glimpse of Clinton (this happened when he was President) and Fidel, who, in a hushed voice, emphatically, asserts his confidence that the Red Avispa was doing the right thing and that the Americans should see that. Whose side do you take?

Wasp Network, 123 mins., debuted at Venice and showed at about ten other international festivals including Toronto, New York, London and Rio. It was released on Netflix Jun. 19, 2019, and that applies to many countries (13 listed on IMDb). Metascore 54%.

[Chris Knipp]

NEAL DHAND: DARK MY LIGHT (2024)

From SCREEN ANARCHY

Writer/director Neal Dhand's neo noirthriller features Mindhunter's Albert Jones as Mitchell Morse, a troubled detective whose grip on reality is loosening every day, as a new partner assigned to help him foil a serial killer, and his marriage is falling to pieces. Morse must find a way back to reality or risk losing everything in the process.

[Chris Knipp]

SABRINA JIE-A-FA AND LOUIS TOMEO IN EGGEHEAD & TWINKIE

SARAH KAMBE HOLLAND: EGGHEAD & TWINKIE

Road trip

TRAILER

Premise: After coming out to her parents, mixed race Asian American teenage girl Vivian, aka Twinkie, goes on on a road trip to meet her online girl crush "BD" with the help of her nerdy straight white male best friend, Matthew, aka Egghead, who's bound for Stanford in the fall. This becomes a voyage of self discovery and is a candy-colored delight for young audiences about sexuality, race, and coming to terms with who you are.

As Twinkie tells it, she and Egghead have been friends since childhood. It turns out he has been in love with her for ages, though to save face after she now rejects him, he tells her it's only been recently. Why didn't he know she's lesbian? How well does he really know her? Presumably because, though she's been aware of it since fifth grade, she has been hiding her sexuality from everybody else up to now, including from him, her best male friend.

But best male friend he is. "I saw him Naruto running in the front yard ohe morning and the rest is history," is how Twinkie describes their friendship. He lives across the street. Naruto running is a meme from anime. It means running bent forward at a 30º angle with arms extended straight behind you. Some people actually showed up to "practice" Naruto running in Central Park recently. Anime is a passion Egghead and Twinkie share. Actually, Twinkie wants to become an anime artist. They also have shared tastes for slushies, pretzels, and bike-riding. They attend school together. And they work for the same company, holding promotional signs by the side of the road, Egghead being the one brave enough to wear his upper body encased in a giant sun costume.

This movie declares its youthfulness and cuteness and its Instagram origins aggressively with its chirpy cheer, bright colors, pop tunes, and frequent use of animated words like "SLURP" or "CRUNCH" or other on-screen text messages. Like the hit British teen gay TV series "Heartstopper," it likes to show that love is in the air by having little animated hearts floating around the in-love people. The film also pops rapidly back and forth in time in the first half, using energetic editing to fill us in on its several layers of backstory. None of this does too much harm, though the essential, warmest moments remain the simple ones filled with unadulterated feeling that could have occurred in a more conventional movie.

The leads, Louis Tomeo of Nickelodeon's "Every Which Way" as Egghead, and Sabrina Jie-A-Fa of "Will Trent," are able and appealing and have good chemistry. The moments when their bickering and kidding turn to fun really sing. As often happens, the two actors are older than their teen parts - she's supposed to be 17 and he 18, but he's 21 and she's a ripe old 27 - yet the more emotional scenes still play authentically, break free of the busy teen-friendly graphics and can appeal to any age.

This is a film about identity, focused mostly on that issue as faced by Twinkie. Both she, whose parents call her Vivian and Egghead, whose name is Matthew, have embraced insults with their adopted nicknames. He is accepting that people think he's a nerd. She has taken on the derogatory term for an assimilated Asian who's "yellow on the outside, white on the inside." Twinkie is adopted, and her white parents are separated, though trying to get back together (and perhaps to lose weight). She is Chinese but not so sure even of that: a fellow Asian spots that she "looks mixed" and all she's clear about is that she came from Miami. Egghead may have identity issues too. After all, he's a teenager. It may have been destabilizing to hang out all your life as best buds with a girl you've actually always been in love with. Being about to go from ordinary highschooler to student at a prestigious university may make him feel challenged. The two of them need to go beyond the typecasting expressed in their nicknames and realize just how important their friendship has been, and this is what their adventure does.

Egghead & Twinkie moves at an assured and rapid pace. First the pair go to a movie and he tries to kiss her. Her strong negative reaction to this gesture is a reality check for Egghead. She says she is lesbian, but might not like him "that way" even if she wasn't. Afterward Twinkie tells her parents her repugnance to Matthew's attempt to kiss her is solid proof she's "a raging homosexual." Her dad (J. Scott Browning) insists she is much too young to know that. At her age, he says, he wanted to be a marine biologist. "And now look at me: I'm in real estate." The parents go into denial mode.

Twinkie talks the rejected Egghead, who routinely chauffeurs her everywhere, into stealing her dad's cheesy real estate business car and driving the two of them from Florida all the way to Dallas. This is to attend LezDance, a big lesbian event and there to meet "B.D.," her online gf (or who she thinks is that), but Twinkie doesn't tell Egghead this at first. She tells him a series of lies to conceal this true aim till they're well on their way, saying her goal is to investigate an art school. En route, they have an argument and she drives off 50 miles in the car on her own. It breaks down, her credit card bounces, and he loses his wallet. Flash-forwards assure us all this sorts out in the end, and she starts being more truthful, Egghead's enumeration of Twinkie's lies being benchmarks of her coming-of-age and self-acceptance.

While derailed away from Egghead and waiting for a local amateur mechanic to fix the car for her, Twinkie meets a friendly Japanese American girl, Jess (Asahi Hirano), who turns out to be bi, and they have a great time. When Twinkie is reunited with Egghead and they arrive in Dallas by night for LezDance where BD (Ayden Lee) is DJ-ing, the other thing doesn't work out, which is the movie's big, sad, emotional moment (not counting Egghead's rejection by Twinkie at the movie).

But the other things do work out, and most of all this sprightly charmer is a celebration of friendship and a look at finding out which relationships hold up and which ones don't. Egghead & Twinkie teaches not to believe somebody who says "I love you" unless you know how many people she says that to. This assured and promising debut from filmmaker Sarah Kambe Holland, who is mixed-white British and third gen Japanese heritage born in Japan who grew up in Texas (See director interview), is a movie for LGBTQ+ teens about racial identity, sexuality, coming out, and knowing who you can trust. It's lighthearted and fun, but also enlightening and smart.

Egghead & Twinkie, 87 mins., debuted Mar. 1, 2023, internet and Redwood City, CA (Cinequest: Best Comedy Feature), included also at BFI Flare London LGBTQIA+ Film Festival Mar. 16, 2023, Cleveland Mar. 29, Seattle May 19, Outfest L.A. Jul. 17, Orlando (Best Narrative Feature), Reeling LGBT+ Chicago (Best Narratiive Feature), Toronto (Next Wave), Seattle, Austin, Woods Hole, and more fests. Available on demand in the U.S. and Canada Apr. 29, 2025. Rotten Tomatoes: 96%.

[Chris Knipp]

WARWICK THORNTON: THE NEW BOY (2023)


CATE BLANCHETT AND ASWAN REID IN THE NEW BOY

Warring magics

TRAILER

As we well know, residential schools in the Australian Outback, like those for native people in North America, had as a major purpose wiping out the cultural and racial identity of the indigenous inhabitants. There are plenty of movies and books about this. Warwick Thornton isn't telling that simple story but rather approaching cultural imperialism and racism from a gentler, subtler angle. This beautiful little film, starring the great Cate Blanchett as a nun called Sister Eileen and remarkable young newcomer Aswan Reid as the new boy, takes place in a magic realist world loosely based on the residential schools (and on the director's own experience) but otherworldly. Some critics however seem not to feel the magic.

The "new boy" is a student for the school brought in the evening. He's a small but sturdy aboriginal boy with glossy gold hair, clad in G-string only. They put him in a pair of the school uniform shorts right away, but he doesn't get sandals (made specially for him) for a while and dons a shirt only toward the end. He also comes so free of white culture he knows not a word of English (as well as we can tell), and he utters only one word through the whole film, "Amen." And he never gets a name. "Lets just call him 'the new boy' for now, says Sister Eileen .

That Warwick Thornton won the Cannes "Caméra d'Or" award for his 2009 debut film Samson and Delilah seems suitable as we enter the even more beautiful and golden visual world of The New Boy. First of all what the film has going for it is its haunting, glowing imagery and magical mood. The New Boy goes its own way to weave its own spell.

The new boy has magical powers that seem to explode and evaporate when they smash into spiritual Christianity, so that a new wooden Christ in the chapel sweats, winks, and blinks, and the boy develops stigmata, but after a period of intense spirituality, once he is baptized, his powers vanish and he is ready to be turned into a slightly grotesque clone of a good boy, attending classes dutifully and with his beautiful but unruly aboriginal hair slicked back and his body covered by the school uniform.

And the uniform, mind you, looks nice. The senior boy who is sent out on his own departs with weeping all around. The boys bend willingly to their tasks, whether singing and chanting Christian texts or doing heavy work outside, appear content. Thornton has said of being thrust into a Spanish school a thousand kilometers away from home that "boarding school was good for me" because he "needed stability and structure" and "the building of your inner respect." He explains his own shock at the crujcified Christ as an aboriginal boy "made its way into the film."

The new boy kind of takes over, and that's why this is a very fanciful version of a residential school. Several critics have accused the film of moving at too slow a pace and of going in a wobbly, uncertain direction "in the second half." It looks like many just don't get what Thornton is doing. This feels like an old fashioned film and some classic models hover over it, including Nicolas Roeg's great Walkabout. Rather than preaching or telling a sociological and political story, this is more in the realm of pure cinema, and a metaphorical exploration of both personal and collective expereince. Maybe it will gain more positive recognition in time, when people recognise the unique spell the film weaves.

Thornton has said this is "a really funny movie and it's a war movie" as well as "very open-hearted in an unexpected way." In an interview he granted it "brings with it the weight of a certain pocket of Australian history" that "as a filmmaker, you always reference. . .in some way," but the film "is by no means a history lesson or a lecture." We seem to love those and some think one was needed here. It was not.

In fact in a sense you can say the new boy is on his own kind of walkabout, in the wilderness of white Western religious culture. It's a feeble version of that: There are only two nuns, two men, and a mere handful of boys, who move around not saying much, doing what they're told, saying the prayers and singing the hymns when directed by Sister Eileen. This takes place toward the end of World War II, which makes the place feel even more remote. There's an air of peace about its small wooden buildings and desolate land. But not too desolate, because one activity is harvesting the olives, and the boys are recruited to work machinery to draw out the olive oil. The new boy takes a taste of an olive and makes a face, spitting it out.

For this kind of place, the school is remarkably liberal, especially toward the new boy, who is said in summaries to be "bullied" but is actually allowed to wander around freely, which the riveting Aswan Reid does with utter self possession, unafraid, unimpressed, but not disrespectful.

He may be confident and apart from the others because he has secret powers, being able to conjure small balls of light with his fingers and to heal sick animals and humans,powers he practices for himself. In turn he isn't mocked by the other boys, even when he drags away his blanket and sleeps not on but under his assigned bed, on the bare floor.

Sister Eileen is now the sole person in charge, but she fakes the signature and even the voice of the former head of the monastery, Father Peter, who has recently died, to work her own will. She is supportred by two aboriginal adults, George (Wayne Blair) and Sister Mum (Deborah Mailman). This charade too, like the spit-out olive, must have some symbolic meaning. Sister Eileen has been called "alcoholic" by some critics, but she often handles wine in a sacred, ritual way, so the two are confused. In this remote outpost, things seem ripe for a vanishing of culture. Or for playing with ambiguities.

Warwick Thornton tells his own story here in his own way,but he may seem curiously out of touch given current mindsets. People are more aware than ever of how residential schools brutalized their pupils, eradicated their cultural identiies, and hidden them in unmarked graves. IMDb has a list of twenty films about this topic. In depicting the real horrors of a residential school, the recent documentary Sugarcane received raves. RaMell Ross' even more admired Nickel Boys, with its distorting POV style and radical rearranging of Colson Whitehead's novel, is closer to Thornton's crabwise approach, except that Thornton is working on his own, not scrambling a borrowed source, and he's not lecturing us.

The New Boy shows the eradication of native culture and native magic as another kind of magic, but bad magic, using its songs, idols, and holy water to enchant and disarm innocents. All that isn't "embedded" in Thornton’s story, as Brian Tellerico puts it in his review; it is his story.

Nick Cave and Warren Ellis' score contributes to the spell of this impeccable and original film.

The New Boy, 116 mins., debuted at Cannes Un Certain Regard,, May 19, 2023, also showing at Sydney (as the Opening Film) and Woodstock and showed at New Zealand, Toronto, BFI London, Mumbai, Thessaloniki, Miami, Luxembourg, Haifa and Taiwan, and was nomninated for numerous awards. It opened theatrically in the UK and Ireland Mar. 15, 2024. It opens in the US May 23, 2025. Metacritic rating: 62%.

[Chris Knipp]

AUSTIN BUTLER IN THE BIKERIDERS

C H R I S__K N I P P'S__2 0 2 4__M O V I E__B E S T__L I S T S

FEATURE FILMS
All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia)
Anora (Sean Baker)
Beast, The (Bertrand Bonello)
Bikeriders, THe (Jeff Nichols)
Blitz (Steve McQueen)
Challengers (Luca Guadagnino)
Close Your Eyes (Victor Erice)
Conclave (Edward Berger)
Goldman Case, The/Le Procès Goldman (Cédric Kahn)
Real Pain, A (Jesse Eisenberg)
Sing Sing (Greg Kwedar)

RUNNERS UP
The Damned (Roberto Minvervini)

BEST DOCUMENTARIES
Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressberger (David Hinton)
Merchant Ivory (Stephen Soucy)
New Kind of Wilderness, A (Silje Evensmo Jacobsen)
No Other Land (Basel Adra, Rachel Szor, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham)
Sugarcane (Emily Kassie, Julian Brave NoiseCat)

UNRELEASED FAVORITES
Afternoons of Solitude/Tardes de soledad (Albert Serra)
Caught by the Tides/ 风流一代 (Jia Zhang-ke)

NOT SEEN YET
Babygirl (Halina Reijn) Dec. 25 release
Complete Unknown, A (James Mangold) Dec. 25 release
Misericordia (Alain Guiraudie) (also unreleased)
Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross) Dec. 13 release

LESS ENTHUSIASTIC ABOUT THAN SOME
Brutalist, The (Brady Corbet)
Civil War (Alex Garland)
Emilia Pérez (Jacques Audiard)
La Chimera La chimera (Alice Rohrwacher)
Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola)
Queer (Luca Guadagnino 2024)
Room Next Door, The (Almodóvar)
Substance, The (Coralie Fargeat)
____________________________

COMMENTS (Dec. 1, 2024)

Just a first draft; a work in progress. But I can guarantee that "Best Features" is a list only of new movies I have watched this year with a lot of pleasure and admiration and think you would enjoy. I'll be working on it. I tend to forget things, and there are late arrivals. I also may make it numerical but for now it's alphabetical. I'm expecting a lot of Babygirl, and as always there are buzz-worthy 2024 films I have not yet seen, notably Nickel Boys. I stive to focus on movies available to everyone to watch, but that's less a problem now that there are so many eventual releases on platforms. As for the "Less Enthusiastic" list, I recommend that you watch them too, because people are talking about them - a lot, especially The Brutalist, The Substance, and Emilia Pérez.
And then there's Megalopolis. Whether or not they are as great, or for that matter as awful, as some people are claiming, they will be talked about during awards season.

Enjoy - and try to get out to see all you can in a movie theter!

[Chris Knipp]

DANIEL ROBBINS: BAD SHABBOS (2024)24)


THE CAST OF BAD SHABBOS

Holy day togetherness

"As if their weekly shabbat gathering wasn’t already a reason for them to all start kvetching, imagine what happens when a Jewish family from Manhattan’s Upper West Side accidentally murders one of their dinner guests. Or when their future and very goy-ish in-laws try to pronounce the word “chutzpah.” Or when the Wu-Tang Clan’s Method Man shows up wearing a yarmulke." - Jordan Mintzer, [I]The Hollywood Reporter.[/I]

In this raucous comedy of would-be crime, a well-off Upper West Side New York Jewish family is pushed to the extreme of complicity on Shabbos, the holy day gethering at the posh parental apartment when the younger black sheep's prank causes the sudden death in the bathroom of his sister's boyfriend. His older brother's non-Jewish fiancee Meg (Meghan Leathers) is there and her parents from Wisconsin are coming to meet the family. The assumptiion (there always have to be those, don't there?) is that the cadaver has to be placed elsewhere, or the death will be traced to the substance Adam (Theo Taplitz) put in Benjamin (Ashley Zukerman)'s drink. The very friendly black doorman Jordan (versitile Cliff "Method Man" Smith) has to be called in. He's very assimiliated - to a fault - and pals with head of the household Richie (veteran actor-producer-director David Paymer), but Richie's self-help formulas don't serve him now. Nor do the judgmental tendencies of his wife Ellen (Kyra Sedgwick), wo finds Meg's conversion ix just a watering-down of the line. But really this is about a lot of laughs, and it has those, once you adjust to the Jewish Addams family.

This was the audience favorite at Tribeca recently, but not everybody can adjust and there are some very negative reactions. You either love this or you loathe it, and when it's all over you may realize this is fun without being wither neither great art nor great comedy. Some devout an observant Jews may find it crossed the line. Some Gentiles hose acceptance of Jews hangs by a delicate thread may find it uncomfotable to watch. Those looking for sharp social satire may wish the interfaith prejudices had been more sharply deneated. My own first reaction was very negative. But the laughs start to flow easier after a while and you settle in.

Ben, the unintentionally offed boyfriend, turns out to be a two-timer, and Abby (Milana Vayntrub) has been wanting to break up with him for ages, so the family, who all eventually become aware of the corpse in the bathroom, isn't so cut up about young loser Adam's major boo-boo.

Susspense is created by having an on-screen countdown till the arrival of Jordan's unfreindly replacement in the lobby Cano (Alok Tewari), which is a matter of minutes. Then Beth (Catherine Curton) and John (John Bedford Lloyd), the Midwestern, Gentile parents, arrive unexpectedly at the apartment door because Jordan was away from the lobby woerking on this problem and didn't announce them. The decision has been to move Bed's body to his flat in Brooklyn for a "New York death" - to be found dead days later. But that job of physical conveyance turns out to be harder to carry out than Jordan thought.

Perhaps the business with the body have been more ingenious. But "Method Man" is a very smooth actor who conveys the role of Jordan so confidently it appears to hold everything together. As with any such comedy, we have an ensemble here, and its various parts interact in a lively and entertaining manner, with a feel-good finale. If this is murder, they all get away with it. That's comedy.

Bad Shabbos, 84 mins., debuted at Tribeca Jun. 10, 2024 winning the audience narrative feature award. It was shown also at the San Francisco, Miami and Charlotte Jewish film festivals, and at Hamptons, Virginia, Palm Springs, and Minneapolis St. Paul. Limited US release May 23, 2025, wider Jun. 6.

[Chris Knipp]

CATHERINE DENEUVE, DENIS PODALYDÈS IN THE PRESIDENT'S WIFE (BERNADETTE)

THE PRESIDENT'S WIFE (Léa Domenach 2023)

Hard to figure where this comedy of Jacaues Chirac's wife is going

THe Conquest (Xavier Durringer 2011) I reviewed in Paris. That was a political drama about the French presidency, specifically Sarcozy's dramatic seizure of power. We are in similar territory here, except that this is a depiction of the 1995-2007 French President Jacques Chirac and his wife Bernadette (Bernadette is the French title) as the drama of a squabbbling husband and wife, who are often jockeying for power, which Chirac has, but then seems to lose to his wife, who becomes a media darling, and for a while his popularity plummets.

The film, part comedy, part feminist manifesto, part arch political drama, becomes the portrait of a woman who emerges from the shadow of her illustrious husband to become a liberated force. Note that, as French viewers would well know, Bernadette is already active in local politics and comes from an older and more illustrious family than her husband. When he becomes President of France, he wants to make sure she doen't draw too much attention and so has assigned to her her own Director of Communications, Bernard Niquet (veteran Comédie Française actor Denis Podalydès, who played Sarkozy in The Conquest).

Niquet is supposed to tone Bernadette down, but when he sees how much political savvy and moxy she has, he turns into more of a campaign manager. Her predictions, against the polls, repeatedly turn out to be right. Rather than overshadowing her, Chirac's presidency provides a springboard for her, set off also by the regiional offices she's already held. Niquet, who at first was mocked as "Mickey," also grows in stature. Chirac, as played here by Michel Vuillermoz, is perpetually pouting and trying to squelch Bernadette. That is the running joke, which may become a bit worn: he perpetually trues to shush her, and she keeps gaining nationwide attention. The unkindest cut of all comes when he loses to Sarkozy and she comes on stage, in a glittering dress, to shake Sarkozy's hand when he takes over the presideency from her husband.

As the titular Bernadette, aka President's wife, Catherine Deneuve as usual glitters and glows, delivering her lines with dry aplomb. In an endless successon of public appearaces she wears apparently glamorous outfits that are criticized as being ringard or out of fashion, like her. Saint Laurant complains that they're from his past seasons. Karl Lagerfeld (Olivier Breitman) arrives to create one chic new outfit for her trimmed in brown fur. (Why not more?)

Bernadette uses canny methods to get her way, notably when Jacques won't fire his chauffeur Molinier whom she doesn't like. She gets the poor man drunk and the police take him away on one of her trips and she instead gets behind the wheel. She gains some sympathy when the Lady Di incident catches Jacques in delicto with an Italian actress, one such fling of many. Nothing here about the corruption scandals both Chriacs wound up in eventually. The elder daughter Laurence's anorexia and depresson are revealed, however.

While these are real people, a few, like the chauffeur, with names changed, and they played something like these roles, what heppens involves a good deal of comedic license. It's all good fun, though the fun (or titillation) will be greater if you have an incestuous familiarity with French politics, and also with recent French film or TV about those politics. Hervé Aubron of Cahiers du Cinéma, reviewing this film, disapproves of what he sees as its revealing "a trend towards emulsified biopics" that are "not deep but artisinal fakes" in which a public figure is played with "as a doll, unencumbered by biographical accuracy." Aubron compares this fllm unfavorably to the French Netflix series "Class Act" (also known as "Tapie") about a political figure that he calls "fairly convincing," and clearly prefers. We might too.

But, especially since Deneuve was coming back for this film after a three-year hiatus following a "helth accident," one wants to give her a pass here. We may argue that the queenly Deneuve makes the grotesqueness of the political comedy intriguing even if it's at times a bit lame. But in another distinguished film magazine, Jean-Marc Lalanne of Les Inrockuptibles indicts The President's Wife much more thoroughly. He says the director Léa Domenach attempts to "iconize" Madame Chirac into a French "Barbie," and that it is an unexpectedly "right-wing" film because it winds up mocking everyone but the decidedly conservative Madame Chirac, whom it makes "a prodigy of acuity, common sense and political acumen." It does indeed make her "an unheeded prophetess" and blindly accepts her "worst opportunistic manoeuvres (the rapprochement with Sarkozy)."

All this the anglophone viewer is little qualified to judge, but makes sense of the puzzlement one feels in watching Madame Chirac's successes unfold .

The President's Wife, 92 mins., debuted Sept. 17, 2023 at Toronto. It releases in the US Apr. 18, 2025. AlloCiné ratings press 3.4 (68%), public 3.5 (70%). Metacritic rating: 57%.

[Chris Knipp]

JOEL POTRYKUS, JOSHUA BURGE IN VULCANIZADORA

JOEL POTRYKUS: VULCANIZADORA (2024)

Sad friend

In this interesting, strange film from indie auteur Joel Potrykus, two men go on a camping trip in the Michigan woods. We begin with low-quality video of fire and arson. That lures us into the handsome 16mm shots of a rural trail. There is a lot of bickering, a lot of nervous monologuing by the leader of the trek. After an overnight, they come out overlooking a sandy beach. There, a climactic event occurs. There seems to be a joint ritual planned that goes awry. Only one of the pair comes back. He has a rendez-Vous with the law that does not turn out at all as he expected. He visits the young son of his friend. It's all like a loser bagatelle, a play with an underlying strain of sad sack gallows comedy.

Samuel Beckett might approve. In the interplay of the pair in the woods it's easy to recognize something of the humor of desperation Beckett explored in his novels and then built into the iconic tragicomedy of Waiting for Godot and Endgame. Here again there is a pair fumbling through something, on the edge at least of their own apocalypse.

Derek Skiba (played by Potrykus himself, who wrote, directed, edited, and costars) is a balding man with a goatee. He first appears weighed down with camping gear and plans. His spiky hair evokes the image of the classic clown. He keeps a line of running patter going. He is accompanied by his friend, Marty Jackitansky (Joshua Burge), unincumbrered, younger, without enthusiasm. Derek has all these plans, all this foolish cheer. But Marty is the one who has the ultimate plan. He looks gloomy, hopeless, and we start to learn why.

When low-res, mini-budget filmmaking is in the hands of an experienced practitioner, as here, there is no end of how its implications may spiral. Siddhant Adlakha attempts to suggest this in his Variety review when he says "These are men at the end of their ropes, who have now forced themselves into a symbolic purgatory. They exist, now, at the precipice of oblivion, but the result is unexpectedly funny despite this probing spiritual lens — or perhaps because of it."

There is a nice interplay of dimensions between the trek through the woods and what happens to Marty in the reckonings he faces back in town afterwards. It gives you something to think about. Ultimately Potrykus' dialogue hasn't the rich resonance the great Irishman, with his love of "the old questions, the old answers" achived. But Potrykus finds his own kind of thought-provoking tragicomedy here too nonetheless.

Musical moments achieve a considerable resonance. They range from the 20th-century European sophistication of Francis Poulenc's "La Voix Humaine" to the heavy metal violence of Christian Cooney's Vulcantera to the transcendence of "Casta Diva" from Bellini's Norma as sung by the immortal Maria Callas. See, do-it-yourselfers, what you can achieve with minimal means.

(I reviewed Joel Potrykus' Buzzard in New Directors/New Films in 2014.)

Vulcanizadora, 85 mins., debuted at Tribeca Jun. 8, 2024 and played also at two dozen other American and international festivals. Released by Oscilloscope, it opens in New York May 2, 2025 at IFC Center and the filmmaker will be present for the opening weekend.

[Chris Knipp]

JAMES MCDOWELL IN JIMMY IN SAIGON

PETER MCDOWELL: JIMMY IN SAIGON (2024)

TEASER
TRAILER

Exploring the mysterious life and tragic early death of the filmmaker's elder brother, in Saigon

In this very personal debut feature-length documentary, which Peter McDowell completed in his late forties, he explores the mysterious past of his eldest brother, James Austin McDowell, who died at 24 in 1972 in Saigon when Peter was five years old, and whose life seems to have been swept under the carpet by the family. Peter McDowell worked over the space of a decade making this film to find out the story, whose personal significance he also explores here.

Jimmy was a very young soldier drafted into the Vietnam war. "SP4 HHC 20 ENGR BGE VIETNAM," his tombstone reads. The twentieth engineers was a combat division. "The battalion was attached to the 18th Engineer Brigade for most of the war," an online site explains. "With its organic and attached special companies, the battalion constructed airfields and basecamps, conducted land clearing and route clearance operations, built roads and bridges, and supported Special Forces operations." It sounds intense and challenging, not to mention dangerous, but this film doesn't delve into that aspect of Jimmy's Vietnam experience. Vietnam came to mean much more to him than that.

What was Jimmy like when he returned to the US? We don't learn much about that either. Afer his military service ended Jimmy soon returned to Vietnam to live as a civilian. Why? For multiple reasons, apparently. As a youth in Champaign, Illinois he made a homemade movie that we glimpse called Archangel Blues, with other kids as the actors. He was also known as the source of humor in the family, it turned out from letters revealed now that he had not felt he belonged where he grew up, or perhaps the US in general. "I hate the fat, stupid, bourgeois people and the materialism," he said in one letter.

But there obviously was more to it than that in Jimmy's decision to go back to Vietnam. It turns out, perhaps not surprisingly, he had secrets. The telegram informing the family of his death gave infection and heroin addiction as causes.

Brother Peter went back to Saigon a long time after that. Without knowing Vietnamese. He went back again later, knowing much more, including some of the language.

But before we learn much about that venture, Peter describes family dynamics, then his own gay sexuality, whose central relevance gradually emerges. The McDowells were a large, comfortable middle-class Catholic family (their big suburban house is often shown) in Champaign, Illinois. There were six kids. Their mother, who is much a part of this film, as are at times the remaining grownup sisters and brothers, and she speaks very comfortably on camera at two different times of her life (wearing stylish thin red glasses frames). Jimmy, the eldest, she says probably thought there were too many, so he didn't get the attention he wanted.

Jimmy just laughed when she asked him as a teenager if he liked girls or boys. Maybe he didn't know, she says. But Peter explains here that he himself was well aware early on of his own gayness. He came out to his mother when he was only sixteen, and describes the sweet, intimate moment. She rejected the idea. She thought it impossible Peter could be gay, believing such people were alcoholic, miserable losers (a not unusual image of the fifties, when she grew up). Peter being "president of his class" and a happy, smiling individual as shown in photos of that time, couldn't be "like that," she thought. But he was sure he was. He didn't need therapy, she did, he says he told her. (Their father, who died of Alzheimer's and is not heard from here, was a music teacher who knew gay people and got it.). "To her credit," he says, his mother did go to therapy, and over time became "a really loving ally and a vocal gay rights advocate."

This is the framework Peter chooses for moving into his investigation of his brother's story. And this framework is a valid one, though arguably, since he takes nearly a quarter of the film's runtime to get here, he has been, in cinematic terms, a bit coy about it. But Jimmy too obviously was coy, or, as his mother says, "protective of his privacy." He told them in letters some things, not others. He said he was working for a law firm that defended American soldiers in trouble, while writing some columns for the Overseas Weekly.

Pages of typed letters home, not reported on in full detail, suggest that Jimmy was a literate and articulate young man. Though he conceals a lot, he does report that he has "the shits," for which he says opium was "the only cure," and that now he's addicted. Describing a predicted future lifetime of wide international travel, he says he expects to return at the end to Vietnam, that letter ends, "to die with my opium pipe and harem of concubines."

On his first trip, Peter goes to Paris to meet Yves Bletzacker, a journalist who we are told was a good friend of Jim's in Saigon. AS an example of the film's adept blend of live and archival materials, we see both Peter talking to Yves, in English and in French, and the detailed letter Yves penned in French to the family after his young friend's death. He had lived in a Saigon loft with a panoramic city view that his American friend later breifly moved into, then moving out to a remote, poor neighborhood to live with a big Vietnamese family. In that family was "Lily," Luyen, who he had suggested was a romantic interest. But she, in a letter (in Vietnamese) later denied that, explaining Jimmy's friend was not she but her brother Dũng (pronounced "Dyung"), who was heartbroken when Jim died and shattered to be forbidden to visit his body in the Saigon American hospital, which, with breathtaking wisdom, forbad Vietnamese visitors. That is all Yves knows... Peter also goes to a small town in France to see Diep, Yves' Vietnamese ex-wife, who also knew Jim, and tells more. She speaks a lot about how "fragile" he was; you wanted to protect him, she says, but Vietnam was a hard place to protect people.

At last Peter goes to Saigon, 44 years after his elder brother's death there. He likes it right away, but, going around with an interpreter, winds up having a very hard time at this remove of time finding anyone who knew Luyen or Dũng. But he does find where Jim lived with them, and the very house, desite a different numbering system. Later he visits the beach where Jim posed for a photo with the one who may have been the love of his life. The American was 24, the Vietnamese guy 18. That photo appears again and again. It's enshrined by Peter and Jim's mother, as later multiple photos of Jim are enshrined next to ones of Dũng by the latter's sister "so he will not be alone."At

In the US Peter sees Dr. Robert Carolan, Jim's doctor in Vietnam, who says his death of a staph infection from a boil on his backside was tragic because it could have been prevented, had it been treated earlier. He doesn't even think his heroin use had been heavy. A friend of that time says it was.

After eight years' search on the internet, Peter finds Luyen, who immigrated to the US in the nineties, and comes to see her in Des Moines. At last she explains that yes, Jim and Dyung were in love and lived together (not with her), and they had already met when Jim was in the Army and Dyung was a moto driver. But they denied being gay because of prejudices in the country. Dyung died very young, at 40, a heavy drinker and smoker, perhaps sent into a tailspin by Jim's untimely death. And perhaps by the repression. Luyen has said the Vietnamese spit on gays. It turns out her letters to the McDowell family after Jim's death were really written by Dyung and signed with her name, as cover.

Jimmy in Saigon is at once an elegy to the lost brother and the record of a patient exploration that reveals the filmmaker's own identity, not only his gayness, but his love of family and his dedication to the task of exploring it and recording the esploration on film., The film leaves one with a sad feeling of the short life, the tragic bereived lover, and the doctor has called Jim's death "tragic." But did Jim not live his dream and his love to the hilt, leaving behind the country he found unsympathetic for one whose sensuous pleasures he embraced? "One can do a lot of living in a short time," Jim ends one letter.

For himself, Peter says he feels lightened by his research because it has removed dark secrets, casting a purifying light on them. Their mother might not agree so easily, but the impressive work of discovery around a close blood tie reminded me of that great, and personallyl healing 2003 film of family exploration by Nathaniel Kahn, My Architect: A Son's Journey, the "bastard" son's posthumous discovery of, and connection with, his famous father, the great architect Louis Kahn. In Peter McDowell's case, the filmmaker has sought to lift a cloud that hovered over his whole family, while as a gay man he has searched for lost kinship with his mysterous brother. This is a worthy effort that will resonate also with queer people wishing to understand repressive social attitudes toward sexuality that hopefully are fading, but still leave their traces everywhere. In learning about the fraught, semi-hidden gay love, I even thought of Brokeback Mountain.

Jimmy in Saigon, 89 mins., debuted as mentioned at BFI Flare Mar. 19, 2022, showing also in over a dozen LGBTQ+ festivals in 2022 the US and abroad including Frameline (San Francisco) and Newfest (New York). Theatrical release in New York April 25, 2025 and in Los Angeles May 8, 2025.


JAMES MCDOWELL AND TRAN KHANH DUNG IN JIMMY IN SAIGON

[Chris Knipp]

CAAMFEST May 8-11, 2025 Berkeley Three Muslim and Palestinian related films

PALESTINIAN LANDSCAPES
Palestinian Landscapes brings together two powerful films exploring empire, ecology, and resistance. Razan Alsalah’s A Stone’s Throw evokes dreamlike cycles of displacement and return across fragmented geographies shaped by resource and labor economies. In Foragers, Jumana Manna traces the criminalization of foraging in Palestine, revealing how colonial legal systems regulate access to land and tradition.

A Stone’s Throw, directed by Razan AlSalah
Sunday, May 11, 5:00 pm | Roxie
Amine, a Palestinian elder, is exiled twice, from land and labor, from Haifa to Beirut to a Gulf offshore oil platform. A Stone’s Throw rehearses a history of the Palestinian resistance when, in 1936, the oil labourers of Haifa blow up a BP pipeline.

Director Razan AlSalah is a Palestinian artist and teacher
*Screener available
Foragers, directed by Jumana Manna
Sunday, May 11, 5:00 pm | Roxie
Elderly Palestinians are caught between their right to forage their own land and the harsh restrictions imposed by their occupiers on the basis of preservation.
Director/Producer/Co-Editor Jumana Manna is a Palestinian visual artist

AGAINST AMNESIA: Screening & Seminar
This program, in partnership with the Berkeley-based Islamic Scholarship Fund, explores the intertwined histories and ongoing realities of displacement, colonial violence, and resistance in Palestine and Bangladesh. Through a narrative short about a Palestinian grandmother uprooted from her home and a documentary on the forgotten 1970s genocide in Bangladesh, the program highlights the the ways in which historical violence shapes mundane aspects of everyday life. A facilitated discussion will follow.

Bengal Memory, directed by Fahim Hamid
Sunday, May 11, 3:00 p.m. | AMC Kabuki 3
A Bangladeshi American explores his father’s memories of a forgotten genocide in their
native country and uncovers the controversial role the U.S. played in it.
Director/Producer/Editor Fahim Hamid was born in Bangladesh
*Screener available

Maqluba, directed by Mike Elsherif
Sunday, May 11, 3:00 p.m. | AMC Kabuki 3
Laila, a Palestinian-American drummer, visits her grandmother in her new apartment during a powerful storm under the guise of helping her unpack. But her nefarious goals slowly unfold as they delve deeper into the mystical fateful night.
Writer/Director/Producer Mike Elsherif is a Palestinian-American filmmaker
*Screener available


SHORT
Billo Rani, directed by Angbeen Saleem
Part of the Shorts Program: Centerpiece Shorts
Sunday, May 11, 12:00pm | Roxie
When Hafsa, a sparkly and impulsive 12-year-old girl, is made aware of her unibrow at Islamic Sunday School in a lesson on “cleanliness”, her eyebrows come alive and begin to speak to her.
The film is set in an Islamic Sunday School and centers around a South Asian Muslim girl
Director/Writer/Producer Angbeen Saleem is a Pakistani Muslim artist
*Screener Available


A Stone's Throw
https://vimeo.com/868181676
pw: 7aifa

Bengal Memory
https://gumlet.tv/watch/67dc1999982f3b096493d238
pw: DOC1971!

Maqluba
https://vimeo.com/998772961?ts=0&share=copy
pw: teta

Billo Rani
https://vimeo.com/1019601428?share=copy
pw: threaded
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