NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL
2010 – 48th Festival
The 2010 NYFF
ended on10 October. It was marked by
refreshing, new, positive feel, reflecting the leadership of the Film Society’s
new Executive Director, Rose Kuo. It is not clear just how this new atmosphere
has communicated itself to the general public, but it clearly has: people coming to the NYFF this year seemed to
feel more included and to feel like the experience was a more welcoming,
friendly one; and young people were coming in significant numbers, utilizing
the last minute program of rush tickets (and, especially, the Twitter
tickets). For those of us more
intimately connected to the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the fact that the
Film Society is under new leadership was also wonderfully reflected in the
return to the Festival of old, beloved former staff members who had been driven
away by the prior regime.
There were many completely wonderful films that we saw: Certified
Copy by Abbas Kiarostami, Carlos
by Olivier Assayas, and Okie’s Movie by
Hong Song-soo being foremost among them.
And, as always, there was the array of incredibly beautiful, moving films one
would never have the opportunity to see anywhere else which we have come to
expect from the NYFF—the most wonderful of these being Le Quattro
Volte by Michelangelo Frammartino. There were premieres of
a number of great, more popular films, like David Fincher’s The Social Network, and Mike Leigh’s Another Year. There were
some fabulous Special events, including a wonderful talk by our dear friend Kent Jones, who presented A
Letter to Elia, the loving and beautiful film he and Martin Scorcese did about the life and
work of Elia Kazan. All-in-all, it was
another great Festival.
We were scheduled to see 16 of the
films in two weeks of this year’s NYFF and four of the Special Events. We only got to 15 of the films, as we decided
not to see Charles Ferguson’s
documentary on the financial crisis, Inside Job, since I found it rather
offensive, knowing what I did about the film’s perspective, that Ferguson was
representing it as a “balanced treatment” of what had gone on (I don’t mind
seeing strongly one-sided accounts, but I am disturbed by a denial of
perspective); and we also only went to three of the Special Events, since we
decided we did not wish to hear Julie
Taymor after having seen her film, The
Tempest (q.v., below). Meanwhile, there was one film I very much
would have liked to see but couldn’t for scheduling reasons: Aurora,
which was written and directed by Romanian Cristi
Puiu (and who also plays the lead role), who did the marvelous Death of Mr. Lazarescu (which was in the
2005 NYFF). There was also one film we
knew was well-thought of and was much liked by friends who saw in the Festival,
but chose not to see: Uncle Boonmie Who Can Recall His Past Lives,
which we avoided because, while we have been impressed by Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s technical
skill and cinematographic vision (as in his Tropical
Malady from the 2004 NYFF), I have been put off by his world view—and, in
particular, the kind of mystical spirituality I greatly dislike, and which was
very much in evidence even in the title of this new film.
For those who are interested, the
entire 2010 NYFF program and the Film Society descriptions of each film can be
found at www.filmlinc.com/nyff/2010 . My reviews of past years of the NYFF can be
found at www.RLRubens.com/nyff.html.
For those of you who over the years
have not noticed my subtlety in this—and who can be blamed for not looking for me to be subtle about my judgments about
anything—I thought I might mention again that I have always placed my reviews
of these films in approximately descending order of how much I liked them.
All films are dated 2010 unless
otherwise noted.
THE FEATURE FILMS IN THE FESTIVAL
Certified Copy.
(Copie conforme)
Carlos
Oki’s Movie (Ok hui
ui yeonghwa)
The Social Network
Le Quattro Volte
Meek’s Cutoff
Another Year
The Robber. (Der
räuber)
Robinson in Ruin
Film Socialisme
Old Cats (Gatos
Viejos)
LENNONNYC
The Tempest
Revolucíon
Hereafter
Certified Copy. (Copie
conforme).
(France/Italy, IFC Films) We have
enjoyed the films of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami in prior NYFFs
(as writer and director, Ten in 2002, and Taste of Cherry in 1997; as writer of films directed by another
favorite Iranian director of ours, Jahar Panahi, Crimson Gold in 2003, and The
White Balloon in 1995), but Certified
Copy, written and directed by Kiarostami, is his first shot outside of
Iran, and it is far and away my favorite of his works—and my favorite of the
entire NYFF this year. Juliette
Binoche was at her wondrous best as Elle (she won Best Actress at Cannes this year for her portrayal), an antiques dealer in
Florence, who
brings her early adolescent son to a lecture at the Uffizi by an English
writer, James Miller, effectively played by William Shimell. There were those who felt Shimell’s
performance was too stilted and unnatural; but I believe that whatever his
flaws in this unaccustomed role as a film actor (Shimell’s career has been as
an operatic baritone), he was perfect for this character—whose fiery
(operatic?) emotionality is supposed
to exist deeply covered and restrained within the confining rigidity of his
obsessive intellectual personality. In
fact, I think there actually is a subtle symmetry here: while I very much love Juliette Binoche in
many roles, I actually find her acting somewhat flawed by an overly
emotional—often almost cloying—quality that often creeps in; but, in this role,
it is perfect for the character she
is portraying, in much the same way as Shimell’s reputed shortcomings as an
actor are perfectly suited to his role.
In the wonderful and amusing opening sequence of the film, James is
delivering a lecture—to which Elle arrives late, and her son even later—based
on his recent book, Certified Copy. His thesis, while never fully articulated,
seems to revolve around the question of what is real in art, and what the
relationship might be between that reality and the assumed realities of the
perceptions of art—as, for example, the status of a work that was revered for
centuries as real, that turns out to have been a copy or forgery. (A key moment later in the film involves a
story about a woman talking to her young son in front of the well-known copy of
Michelangelo’s David in front of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence.)
The plot reality, as introduced in an early conversation between Elle
and her son, is that Elle has just met James for the first time at this
lecture, and she is accused by her son
of looking to pick James up, not to interact with him professionally, and that
the son has witnessed this sort of performance from her before. Everyone who has looked carefully at
marriages and other deeply personal relationships knows that each participant
in a relationship has a separate view of the reality of the events of that relationship—even to the extent of having a
different sense of the facts of what has occurred between them. Thus, a story in which a wife experiences her
husband to be emotionally distant from her and an absent father to their
children, while the husband experiences his wife to be overly emotional and
needy and never satisfied with all that he provides demonstrates a level of
divergent realities that is completely par for the course in relationships—even
to the extent that the participants can have separate views of the facts of
their joint history. In this film,
however, the marital relationship in question is that of Elle and James. Elle
takes James for an afternoon drive outside Florence, and, early in the drive, a waitress
at a café mistakes the pair for a married couple, and Elle pretends they
are—with gusto and deep emotional response.
This pretense continues through a series of meetings with other
people—often couples in different stages of their own marriages, but always (as
was the case with the waitress) people who have something meaningful to offer
in terms of what marriage means—and at times James joins in the pretense, and
at times he opposes it. The pair
alternately connect and bicker as the outing progresses, certainly appearing
like a married couple; and progressively it sounds like they are arguing about
past events in a history they have shared—or, at very least, may have shared;
and James becomes every bit as involved as Elle at times in the reality of
their marriage. [SPOILER ALERT: I
liked this film so much, and it is so
unclear whether you’ll have a chance to see it, that I’m going to say more
about what happens than I usually like to do in my reviews. The “plot” is not the point in this film, so
it probably won’t matter in any event; but, if you like to discover how a film
plays out without any foreknowledge, DO NOT READ FURTHER. Just accept that it is a fabulous, fun film,
and see it if and when you can.]
Progressively, it becomes clearer that the discrepancies in their
different experiences of their relationship are not merely different
perspectives, but substantially alternate realities. The conflicting realities of Elle and James
in the end are irresolvable—actually raising questions about whether there is
any objective reality at all. The film
was reminiscent in the most wonderful ways of Alain Resnais’ marvelously
reality-bending Last Year at Marienbad—although Certified
Copy is played, as it were, in a much lighter and more enjoyable
register. Suffice it to say, this was my
favorite film of the NYFF; it was a complete joy; and it ended perfectly—something I often feel films
fail to do. In addition to everything
else, the scenery of my beloved Florence
and the Tuscan countryside outside it made the film an even more rewarding
treat.
Carlos. (France/Germany, IFC Films; currently
playing in a limited engagement at the IFC Center in Manhattan, through the beginning
of November) Directed and co-written
(with Dan Franck) by Olivier Assayas (Summer
Hours, in the 2008 NYFF, and Irma Vep,
in the 1996 NYFF), Carlos is the
dramatization of the career of the Venezuelan, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, who
founded a worldwide terrorist organization and who, known to the public as
Carlos (or, Carlos the Jackal), carried out many high profile capers, including
the sensational kidnapping of all of the OPEC oil ministers from their meeting
in Vienna in 1975. The film is a masterpiece
of suspense, action, sex, character study, and just plain gripping
entertainment. I, who have been known to
rail at any director who makes a film over two hours in length, was totally
riveted by this 5½ hour marathon of filmmaking.
(It was filmed in three parts and was originally shown on French
television in three installments; but—believe it or not—I firmly believe it is
best seen in a single sitting: it is that compelling.) Venezuelan actor Edgar Ramirez (who
played Ciro Redondo Garcia in Che: Part
One) does an incredible job in the title role. Nora von Waldstätten is terrific as Magdalena
Kopp—one of Carlos’s beautiful women.
(There is a fair amount of nudity in the film: we see several prolonged shots of Carlos
completely naked, including one in which his narcissism is on full, meaningful
display as he admires himself in front of a mirror; and we see a lot of the
naked bodies of the multiple beautiful women in his life—including several of
the best naked breasts I’ve seen on screen in a long time.) All of the acting is powerfully effective,
the cinematography is incredibly well-done, the multi-national settings add
rich texture to the background of the story—but, most of all, Assayas moves the
story-telling forward in a totally engaging, powerfully effective way. This was simply one of the very best films of
the NYFF. Try to find a way to see it!
Oki’s Movie (Ok hui ui yeonghwa). (South Korea) Written and directed by Hong Song-soo
(a favorite NYFF director: Night and Day in 2008, Woman on the Beach in 2006, Tales of Cinema in 2005, Woman is the Future of Man in 2004, and Turning Gate in 2002), the film consists
of four separate vignettes, each involving the same main characters: Moon
Sung-keun as Professor Song, a teacher in a film school; Lee Sun-kyun
as Jin-gu, a student and later junior faculty member at the school; and Jung
Yumi as the film student, Oki, who loves both of these men. The four segments are out of chronological
order and from different perspectives, but they are interrelated in virtually
every other way—including the bizarre fact that each has “Pomp and
Circumstance” playing on and off throughout.
In the first segment, Jin-gu, as junior faculty member, is screening his
film in a festival and appears there and does what must be the funniest Q&A
session ever put on film: the moderator
begins by asking a long, intellectual question, and Jin-gu stares blankly,
laughs, and says he cannot answer that question because he is very drunk—which,
indeed, he is. A young woman audience
member then says she wants to ask him a personal question and proceeds to tell
everyone that Jin-gu had an affair with her friend and ruined her life, and asks
how he could have done that. He denies
it, and says he’s married; and the woman says, yes, he was married, but he did
it anyway. And this torment humorously
continues for a hilariously unbearable length of time. Oki’s
Movie is imbued with the wonderful comic spirit of its director, and this
spirit allows the film to explore the emotions and meanings of relationships
and filmmaking in great depth while remaining at all times fun
entertainment. It is a real treat, and I
dearly hope it finds distribution.
The
Social Network. (Opening Night, USA, Columbia Pictures; in theaters now) The
Social Network, David Fincher’s
eagerly awaited and much ballyhooed fictionalized account of Mark Zuckerberg,
the young man who started Facebook, had its world premiere as the Opening Night
film of the NYFF. (Fincher directed Zodiac in 2007, and Fight Club in 1999.) While I did not think it was as great as many
are saying, it is
totally enjoyable, well-made, and well worth seeing. The screenplay was written by Aaron Sorkin
(who wrote The West Wing for
television, and the 2007 film, Charlie
Wilson’s War), and it effectively moves one though the story of the
creation of Facebook, creating an understandable, reasonably nuanced version of
the events and, even more, of the characters involved—from its prehistory at
Harvard in the online antics of Zuckerberg, through its development there as an
on-campus phenomenon, to its unparalleled success and subsequent legal
entanglement. After the initial Harvard
story, the film moves back and forth from a later point in time where
Zuckerberg is seen with most of the other major characters at a legal
deposition Although the film is
unrealistic in many of its details (e.g.,
the scenes of the deposition bear little relationship to anything that would
ever occur in such settings—including, of course, the fact that multiple
characters from multiple legal actions are all together in the same
deposition), it works to move the story along in a quite believable and
successfully dramatic way. It is not
profound, but it works—which may be more important to success of a film
experience..
For the most part, the acting is excellent: Jesse Eisenberg (perhaps best remembered
for his portrayal of the elder son in Noah Baumbach’s 2005 The Squid and the Whale) turns in a spectacular performance as Mark
Zuckerberg; Andrew Garfield is terrific as Eduardo Saverin; and Armie
Hammer is extremely good playing both
of the Winklevoss twins. The Director of
Photography, Jeff Cronenweth, does an excellent job of capturing all
this visually—and actually manages to make Harvard College look like the dreary
place it must have seemed to the socially awkward, interpersonally challenged
misfit, Zuckerberg (not an easy feat).
The film is also quite funny at moments:
my favorite line was when one of the Winklevoss twins says in
explanation of why an opponent should be intimidated, “Because I'm 6'5",
220 pounds, and there are two of me.”
Le
Quattro Volte. (Italy/Germany/France, Lorber
Films) Written and directed by Michelangelo
Frammartino, this is a four part (thus the title) meditation on rural
village in Calabria, in southern Italy. There are no subtitles to this Italian
film…because there are no words! Giuseppe
Fuda plays the only central human role, an aged shepherd, in obviously
failing health, who never utters a word.
There are some other significant individual human characters—an old lady
who sweeps up the village church and sells the shepherd the “holy” dust from
the church floor, upon which he relies to deal with his horrible cough (mixing
it with water as medicine he drinks each night at bedtime; and upon which he
seems totally dependent); two charcoal makers, whose primitive labors bookend the
film, and whose deliveries move in and out of the fabric of the whole story—but
the remaining humans always appear in the film only at a distance, and usually
moving in groups. The other main
characters of the film, who also speak no words, are the goats tended by the
old shepherd. The goats appear both in
groups and as individuals (one of whom we follow right from the moment of its
birth); and, although they speak no words, their bleating is the most
expressive audible part of the film. The
two other main characters that figure in the film, both without words, are a
dog that gives an incredibly riveting performance, and an amazingly stately fir
tree which is also a commanding presence.
But do not be misled: this is a
totally engaging, deep, emotional, lyrical film. It has plot, action, drama, humor, and
pathos—and achieves a remarkable level of philosophical insight into the human
condition. It is unbelievably expressive
and meaningful—a fact that it only heightened by the absence of language.
Meek’s Cutoff. (USA) Kelly Reichardt (whose Wendy and Lucy was in the 2008 NYFF) has
directed this most unusual tale of the Old West. Set in 1845, it is the story of three
families who have been persuaded to leave a wagon trail heading west along the
Oregon Trail in order to take their covered wagons on a shortcut through part
of Oregon’s Cascade
Mountains. The story begins
with our being introduced to the players at the very time they are becoming
distrustful of Stephen Meek, the man who persuaded them to hire him to take
them via this “cutoff.” At very least,
it has been established that Meek, a gruff, surly, unshorn, and basically
brutal character of the wild west, is not nearly as familiar with this
territory as he led them to believe. It
is clear they are lost, but they are beginning to worry that it may not be
accidental: some among them are fearful
that Meek is one of those people trying to discourage the influx of settlers,
and may actually be purposefully leading them to their deaths. The tensions rise as they wander lost across
the high desert
of Oregon, running out of
food, water, and eventually hope. At one
point they encounter a lone Native American, who becomes for a while a
background presence in the journey—and eventually becomes an unwilling
participant, in that he is captured and forced to become their guide in their
desperate search to find water. Michelle
Williams is good as Emily Tetherow, the positive center of Reichardt’s
complex story. On the opposite side,
there are the two figures who provide the pressing
questions of the story: are they evil, or are they good? Are they to be
trusted, or are they to be feared and attacked?
On this end of the spectrum, Bruce Greenwood as Meek and Rod
Rondeaux as the Indian do a somewhat less good, albeit quite adequate job,
with Rondeaux being the better actor of the two. To be fair, all the characters are rather
caricatures, and the actors do not have fully developed personas to
inhabit. The real drama is played out on
the level of the larger movement of the storyline, rather than in the
personalities of the characters—and, on that level,
the film works powerfully and beautifully.
The terrain is beautifully filmed by Chris Blauvelt, with
gorgeous barren daytime scenes enhancing the growing sense of arid desperation,
and rich nighttime ones added a feeling of vastness and wonder. The film certainly captures the life and
death tensions of the choices and issues facing these pioneers of the country’s
westward migration, and it takes up—if only in dramatic and rather oblique
form—some of the moral questions facing these people. There are those who have seen the film as an
allegory about the current political climate (viz., a “cowboy” leader moving his followers onto a disastrously
wrong path, and the distain for the foreign “other” [read Muslim instead of
Native American] who is a danger to be viewed as not human and requiring
destruction). I hope that was not
Reichardt’s intention, as I think the film would be rather stupid on that
level; but I do not believe it was.
Actually, its success lies in precisely the opposite direction: as a
much more general exploration of the trials and dilemmas of human strivings,
against the very specific dramatic context of the strivings of these early
pioneers. The irresolvable uncertainty of the monumental choices they
had to make in their daily existence—and the moral and personal consequences of
their making them— weigh most powerfully and meaningfully in a specific human
context, not a politicized one. And, on
this level, the film is an enormous success.
Toward the end, I found myself thinking (apropos of my comments about
film endings [q.v., in the review of Certified Copy above]), “Please let
it end here. Please let it end here!”; and it did! Brava.
Another Year. (UK, Sony
Pictures Classics) Written and directed
by Mike Leigh (whose
Happy-Go-Lucky was in the 2008 NYFF, Vera
Drake in the 2004, and Topsy-Turvy
in the 1999), Another Year is yet
another of his wonderfully done textural slices of London life, capturing the mood, tone, feel of the characters as
well as of the city which they inhabit. Jim
Broadbent is very good as Tom, as is
Lesley Manville as Mary—a middle-aged married couple, happily
sharing together a low-key, but apparently fulfilling life, including their
joint gardening, socializing, cooking, vacationing, and family, as well as
their separate respective professional lives.
They seem to have a good relationship with their 30 year old bachelor
son, Joe, played
by Oliver Maltman. Two friends
repeatedly enter Tom and Mary’s relationship:
Gerri, a co-worker of Mary’s is very effectively portrayed by Ruth
Sheen; and Tom’s very old friend Ken, played with disgusting accuracy by Peter
Wight. The relationship with Gerri
is full of warmth and humor, but increasingly those elements are overshadowed
by the emptiness of her life and her drunken dependence on Tom and Mary. Ken, on the other hand, is a pitiful drunk,
infantile in his needs and his actions—repulsive on most every dimension. There is the sub-plot concerning the question
of whether Joe will eventually find a mate; there is the sub-plot around Tom
and his family; but, for the most part, these just function as devices to
extend the story about Tom and Mary’s relationship with their two friends—and,
even there, most of that is subordinated to their relationship with Gerri. The interactions between
the characters engages us in an absorbing and often humorous fashion;
but, in the end, it is not clear how rewarding it has been to enter the world
into which we have been drawn. Leigh’s
vision is definitely a comic one, in the classic sense of that distinction: we look at the characters in the drama from
the outside (as opposed to indentifying with them from the inside), and the
movement of the story (consistent with Northrop Frye’s notion about comedy
[similar to similar to that of Plato in the Philebus])
focuses on characters’ consistent lack of self-knowledge, rather than on any
growth in it. If anything rises above
the empty, drunken, meaninglessness of much of what transpires, it is Tom and
Mary’s relationship; but there really isn’t too much we can get inside there,
either. This is a Mike Leigh comedy, and
a successful one, at that. It is nothing
more…but it is nothing less, either. It
is beautifully executed, and richly well-done.
It is entertaining, and absorbing.
The Robber. (Der räuber).
(Austria/Germany) Directed and
co-written (with Martin Prinz) by Benjamin Heisenberg, is based
on a novel by Prinz, which, in turn, was based on the true story of a
champion marathon runner, Johann Rettenberger (marvelously portrayed by Andrera
Lust), who, in 1980s Austria, had a second career as a bank robber. As the Film Society description put it
“Johann is defined almost exclusively by his two obsessions. He runs and he robs, therefore he is.” The only other meaningful presences in his
schizoid existence are that of his parole office and that of the woman Erika
(played well by Franziska Weisz) who is rather enigmatically part of his
existence. It is one of the most unusual and well-done action/thrillers you are
likely to see. I found myself almost
completely and satisfyingly absorbed in the weird intensity of this film for
80% of it length; but then I started to get the uncomfortable awareness that
there was really nowhere for it to go—and that progressively made me
retroactively uncomfortable with where it had been. Of course, it turned out that there was no place for it to go; and, in the
end, I felt that I had watched an extremely well-made film with no point. It was a very hollow feeling to have after
what had mostly been a very engaging experience, and it very much detracted
from my ultimate enjoyment of this film.
Robinson
in Ruin. (UK)
WARNING: Patrick Keiller’s newest film is definitely not for everybody; in fact, it is for very few
people—both Nancy and my mother were in complete agreement about how much they
had disliked it (although Nancy had liked the visual images). I must say up front, however, that I really
liked it. Robinson in Ruin is an extremely odd film. It purports to be a documentary based on the
“recently discovered” records of a scientist named Robinson, who had been
journeying about Britain
in 2008, following oil and gas pipelines, looking to discover the sites of
ancient meteor strikes and signs of ancient civilizations. The mock documentary quality is reinforced by
the droning, flat, pseudo-scientific/historical narration provided by Vanessa Redgrave. There are no people in this film, nor is
there any action. We merely are led from
one beautifully photographed scene to another (it is worth mentioning that Patrick Keiller was also his own DP for
the film)—sometimes flowers (which Robinson at times took to be evidence of
extraterrestrial life), sometimes industrial sites (which he took to be ruins
from ancient civilizations), sometimes quarries (ancient meteor strikes), often
the vents from an oil or gas pipeline—with the camera lingering for extended
periods of time on each. The most
repeated image was that of a road sign, with some lichen growing on it, filmed
in ever increasing close-up—with the assertion that this lichen was one of
Robinson’s main channels for communication (whatever that means). One of the phenomena Robinson seemed drawn to
was the opposition of capitalism and the individual assertion of public will,
which he seemed mostly to focus on in the minutia of a 16th century
confrontation in a small village between landowners and some local citizens who
had torn down the enclosures the landowners had erected to demarcate their
property rights. This interest played
out against the distantly and vaguely recognized parallel issues of the world
financial collapse that was going on contemporaneously with his journeys. I completely loved the wildly oscillating
perspectival distance of Robinson’s viewpoint—intellectually varying
unexpectedly from minute close-up micro-analysis to sweepingly cosmic overview,
much as the visual focal length of the photography similarly was irrationally
and extremely varying—and the complete confusion of scale, similar to the
complete confusion of time, in which distant past and immediate present were
not distinguishably different. As I
said, Robinson in Ruin is not for
everyone; but I thought it was terrific.
Film Socialisme. (Switzerland) I have long been a fan of Jean-Luc Godard; of course I loved his
old films (e.g., Contempt [1963], Breathless
[1960]), but I am also someone who has enjoyed his more recent, artier films,
like, In Praise of Love, from the
2004 NYFF, and, somewhat less so, Notre
Musique, from the 2001. But, I am
afraid that his latest effort, Film
Socialisme, rather lost me. There
were many wonderful moments, and lots of visually interesting sequences. I suppose one could linger over its imagery,
and parse it like some elaborate, visual poem.
But it just never quite worked for me:
I could sense the richness and artfulness, but I could only occasionally let
myself go with it. And, in truth, I
feared a simplistic political meaning within it that I simply did not wish to
go along with. (I have had a growing
feeling that while I enjoy Godard as a visual artist, I find him shallow and
tedious as a philosophical or political thinker—and I have had a sense that
these intellectualized elements have been unfortunately ascendant in his own conception
of himself and his work.) Since I do
believe there was much in this film that I did not resonate fully to, I am
taking the unusual step of inviting a guest reviewer to step in on this one. Our good friend Fred Utley and his wife
Valerie accompanied Nancy and me to the Festival screening of Film Socialism, and afterwards Fred
emailed me his reactions. With his
permission, I am including them here for your pleasure and edification, as they
are quite wonderful (and, actually, I agree with his observations, even if I
did not share his enthusiasm):
From its title, Jean-Luc Godard's
film could be a political tract or a documentary. As it turns out, it is
a fantastic collage of rapidly cut scenes in a Fellini-esque fable about
modern society and world-wide atrocities.
It starts with lush filming
(vibrant, deep and hard-edged colors) from the decks and interiors of a large
cruise ship in the middle of a vast sea - the camera pans to the
steep glistening walls of the ship's sides, to its night-lit rain-soaked
decks, and, inside, to the day and night partying of its
easily-labeled bourgeois passengers. We see the syncopated scenes and
hear the music - they are color soaked and sound blasted riffs- a
parody of cruise ship parties. But woven through the scenes of
the painted, foolish cruise ship world are intermittent sinister
scenes, where carnival-like ghoulish personages try to lure their passenger
companions to some undefined evil end. Throughout the cruise ship phase
of the film, we never see the whole ship - we see waves crashing into the
ship's eerily white sides and their white foam, black troughs, and surging
and crashing movement - truly lyrical. We see the seas, the horizons, the
waves, the decks, the clubs - but never the whole ship filmed as an
entirety. The ship is the world - with no other points
of reference.
Midway, the film shifts to a farm
house, also a self contained world, where a family appears to
by carrying on its life, but the parents also appear to be running
for some sort of office. A set of journalists arrive and try to get interviews
with the family, to be frustrated by the evasive moves of them and their
children. The children make up games to tease and distract the
journalists - for many such scenes, a dirty white llama and a jet black donkey
are in one side of the scene, tethered to the scene, observing it, but
trying to turn away. Here Godard is in full imagining on a large rural
canvas. The journalists' attempts at interviews evoke the Sartre interview by
Jean Seberg in his classic "Breathless". The deep
color filming of the farm, coupled with the childish
hide and seek of the family and the journalists, evoke many visions
from Godard's own "Week End", another attack on the destructive
values of modern society. The scenes become increasingly punctuated by
black, brown and white documentary videos of historic carnage scenes, including
the Holocaust and the Odessa
steps. Who knows the message - it is perhaps the total impossibility that
the local elections and the farm house couple's attempt to join the local
bureaucracy can possibly address the serious issues of the world and
that journalists often flock to inane stories while ignoring or failing to
comprehend the serious issues in the world.
Whether the film is a lusciously
disguised political commentary or a series of visual and mental dreams can
legitimately be discussed. The film making
is a given - its scenes snap from one set of images to another with
abrupt cutting. Equally, the narrator's deadpan monotone
in French describing or commenting on each scene abruptly shifts from
one focus to another.
In French one can understand the
full sense of the absurdist commentary, jolting
as it may be, but the English subtitles - giving only nouns and selective adjectives
- contribute to making the film incomprehensible to the non-French
speaking audience.
This is a rich and evocative film.
One could discuss each one of the vignettes at length and draw meaning or
pretention out of each. Its central message seems to be that the current
pan American, pan European middle class and upper class societies seem
incapable of dealing with - or even to try to summon the collective will to
address - the presence of terrorism, famine, and other evils in the modern
world. Yet we surmise these readings out of a pastiche of images and
narration that is supposedly to be profound,
but is over the course of the film at best confusing and at worst
annoying. The wonderful fragments that comprise this film address so
many themes and images that no central force carries it, except the
sophisticated film making. It goes from lyrical images of waves and
coasts to ghoulish Expressionist figures to slapstick comedy. The images
and messages are there for all to see and hear, but there is no visual,
thematic or other sustaining movement.
The film is a kaleidoscope - with
many richly colored and many gray moments - that takes us to too many
places or to nowhere. Having had a visually wonderful experience, we are left
with a great film maker's reveries - wondering what we have seen.
Old
Cats (Gatos Viejos). (Chile) Sebastián
Silva (whose The Maid was
featured in the 2009 New Directors/New Films Festival) and Pedro Peirano
are two young, talented Chilean filmmakers co-wrote and co-directed this comedy
about an aging family. Enrique
(convincingly played by Alejandro Sieveking), and his wife Isadora
(wonderfully played by Bélgica Castro, who played the title role in
Silva’s other film) live together—as the metaphoric “old cats”—in a nice
apartment left to Isadora by her deceased former husband—and which is inhabited
by a literal old cat, as well. There is a warmth to their relationship and a positive sense of their
caring for each other which pervades most of the film. In a comic, but loving way, we see this
couple taking their endless morning medications, and dealing with each other’s
idiosyncrasies and failings. Slowly,
however we become aware that not only is Isadora’s health declining, she is
becoming demented. Meanwhile, we are
introduced to Isadora’s ridiculous, conniving, cocaine snorting daughter (by
her former husband) Rosario, and Rosario’s butch girlfriend “Hugo,” whom
Isadora persists in calling by her given name, “Beatrice,” much to Rosario’s
consternation. These characters are such
grotesque, unnatural caricatures, unfortunately, that it is impossible to know
whether their acting is as bad as it seems, or whether it is just the function
of bad writing. Rosario, with Hugo’s assistance, is trying to
swindle the elder couple out of the mother’s apartment. Despite their extremely shallow
characterization, the film remains reasonably good for a long time: it is engaging, funny, and entertaining. Nevertheless, it eventually trails off toward
an extremely a trite—and I felt—unsuccessful ending, which sorely diminished my
enjoyment of the movie as a whole. But
these two filmmakers are really young (Silva is 31), and it is reasonable to
assume from how well they did with most of Old Cats that we can look to them for more sophisticated work in
the future.
LENNONNYC. (USA; premieres on Thirteen’s American
Masters on 22 November) I was so looking forward to this documentary film
by Michael Epstein about John Lennon’s years in New York: the promise of rarely-seen footage of his
time in our city, with much of it in
our neighborhood (Nancy used to run
into John and Yoko on 72nd Street a lot, back in the day), was
extremely promising—and John Lennon is a musician I greatly respect. Unfortunately, it did not live up to my
expectations. It started well, and I
enjoyed the footage of his early years in the City. Nevertheless, rather than almost exclusively
being focused on his time in New York, much of
the film deals with his unhappy sojourn in California.
Having been caught by Yoko Ono cheating on her by having sex with
another woman at a party they were both attending, his wife throws him out and
places him in exile—which he chooses to serve out in California.
The focus on his miserable time there made me uncomfortably aware of
things I’d just as soon not have needed to focus on: in the first place, it made me painfully
aware of how psychologically unhealthy John was—how infantile and dependent
(and I am not referring primarily to his substance abuse and alcoholism at this
point), not to mention depressed he was; it also reminded me of how much I
always disliked Yoko Ono’s presence in his life back then—something I had
ceased to focus on in later years. Now,
I cannot fault her for throwing the rascal out; but it is not exactly as if she
actually ended her relationship with him:
she basically let him twist pathetically in the wind, in a way that the
film made me feel was horribly sadistic and cruel—only eventually to reunite
with him once his degradation and dependent surrender was complete. Yuck.
Anyway, there was far less of the good stuff I was hoping to find, and
far more stuff I’d rather not have spent my evening watching. Nancy
was disappointed, but disliked it less than I, however; and my mother, whom we
brought to the screening with us, actually enjoyed it. Go figure.
It was not a bad documentary; it was just disappointing.
The
Tempest. (Centerpiece, USA, Touchstone) After suffering through the 1999 Titus (Taymor’s film rendition of Titus
Andronicus—the choice of which alone being more than mildly off-putting), I
was deeply worried about seeing Julie
Taymor do more Shakespeare. I had
basically liked her 2002 film, Frida, except where she had felt the
need to indulge in what I certain she considers her signature elements—a
stylized, psychedelic sort of animation.
But Shakespeare…and Shakespeare’s The
Tempest, no less: I very much like
the play, and I have only ever seen one production that I thought was any good,
but have suffered through many that I found to be drivel. Well, Julie Taymor’s film was a better movie
than I had feared it would be. Helen Mirren was wonderful, as usual—and
the film worked fine with the questionable, gender-crossing premise of turning
the main character into her as “Prospera.”
Alan Cumming was good as
Sebastian, Tom Conti was reasonable
as Gonzalo, Felicity Jones OK as
Miranda, and Ben Wishaw was interesting,
transformed into whatever Tinkerbelle-inspired, hermaphroditic creature Taymor
was thinking of Ariel as being. (In the
other direction, David Strathairn,
whom I usually love, was simply flat as Alonso, Alfred Molina, whom I usually like was terrible as Stephano, Russell Brand was horrid as Trinculo,
and Djimon Hounsou beyond horrid as
Caliban.) But Taymor succeeded in moving
the whole thing along as an easy-to-understand story, a straight-forward
narrative that worked in a coherent, linear way in this film. Well…that is, as long as you don’t connect it
to Shakespeare. “Ah, there’s the
rub”! One of the most striking facts
about Shakespeare’s The Tempest is
that it is almost completely not plot
driven. The reason that there are so few
good productions of this play is that it is exceedingly difficult to generate a
meaningful interpretation of the nuances of its meanings. It richness and its intensity—even its very
meaning—come from the very complexities that Taymor has excised from her
film. Taymor’s The Tempest reminds me of Mel Brooks’ idea in his 1983 film To Be or Not to Be, in which the main
actor does a compilation he entitles, “Highlights from Hamlet”—a very funny
idea in that film, a very disturbing association here. So, if you have no interest in Shakespeare’s
play, feel free to go see this wonderful performance by Helen Mirren in
whatever this story is; it is a very watchable film (although it does still
suffer from Taymor’s damnable tendency to fill things with meaningless, self-indulgent
animation; and the use of music is horrendous—particularly offensive in the
pop-ballad version of the play’s epilogue); but please do not go and think you
have witnessed even a decent Classic Comics version of Shakespeare’s play.
Revolucíon. (Mexico) To commemorate the centenary of the Mexican
Revolution, Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna produced this compilation of
short films, each done by one of Mexico’s hot young directors: Mariana
Chenillo, Patricia Riggen, Fernando Eimbcke, Amat Escalante, Gael García
Bernal, Rodrigo García, Diego Luna, Gerardo Naranjo, Rodrigo Plá,
and Carlos Reygadas. There was enormous variation in the type,
quality, and success of these films—half of them were quite good, and half were
quite bad (and most of the six of us who saw it together were fairly consistent
in our reactions as to which were which).
I wish I had access to the names of each segment and who directed each
one. I am going to make the perhaps
unwarranted assumption that the list of the directors above (which I copied
from the Film Society’s write-up of the film) is in the order the segments
appeared—but don’t hold me to it or count on it! My very favorite piece (it was everyone’s) was
the second, so I am going to assume it was made by Patricia Riggen. The
Mexican-American female lead is first seen in a hospital, at the deathbed of
her immigrant father, whose last words to her are the request to bury him in Mexico. She is appalled by the idea, and cannot
afford the cost—which she learns from a mortuary/travel agent who has an entire
business providing just this service—even by pawning his most treasured
possession, a pistol used by his grandfather, who had been an officer in the
Revolution. She also cannot understand
why her father would have wanted this, nor why it
could be meaningful in any way; but, encouraged by her Mexican aunt, she
eventually decides to have him embalmed and drive him to Mexico. The entire beginning of the piece is
wonderfully funny, especially the drive with the corpse. The emotional dénouement, however, comes with
the tender caring greeting she finds in her father’s old village, where she
discovers things about her father, rural loyalties, and ties to a country and a
history that move her, and the audience as well. There is a later segment (by a director I
cannot begin to guess at, as it was neither at the beginning or the end of the
film) in which a local politician has invited the elderly grandson of Poncho
Villa to come to a series of speaking engagements; the grandson, who has
nervously prepared his remarks, is repeatedly trotted out before the crowds,
but never allowed to utter a word; finally, realizing that he, the descendent
of the great revolutionary, has simply been being manipulated and used by the
sort of politician that his ancestor might
have fought to overthrow, he asks to be sent back to his village. It is a touching and surprisingly powerful
political tale, told in such a gestural and subtle fashion. The last sequence in the film, which I am
supposing was by Carlos Reygadas,
and was a parade down a Los
Angeles street in slow motion photography. Interspersed with the LA
fire trucks and marchers and largely Mexican people watching the parade were
Mexican rebels from the 1910 revolution—some on horseback, some walking, but
all representing a past that somehow was a presence in modern day Los Angeles. It was a surprisingly moving and effective
piece. As a whole—with some of the
segments as good as they were, but also with some as bad as were—the overall
effect was not all that satisfactory.
Hereafter.
(Closing Night, USA, Warner
Bothers) Let me begin by saying I do not
like Clint Eastwood as a
director. I thoroughly disliked Changeling,
his film in the 2008 NYFF, and Mystic River,
from the 2003 NYFF; and I felt the same way about his 2004 Million Dollar Baby. In
fact, he has not directed any film I’ve found even vaguely tolerable since the
relatively good ones he did in the 70s (The
Gauntlet in 1977, Outlaw Josey Wales
in 76, and The Eiger Sanction in 1975). I
found Hereafter, which closed the
NYFF this year, similarly objectionable—albeit for somewhat different
reasons. I don’t know whether Eastwood
believes the drivel upon which this piece of trash was based, or whether he is
merely venally pandering to the fact that much of the American public does and
is going to lap this up—and I am not sure which I think would be worse; but
this film panders to exactly the kind of impoverished, flawed thinking that is
causing the decline of American society.
I was struck by the fact that it makes the case that one does not have
to be religious in order to be stupidly superstitious or to trust in ridiculous
magical thinking. Manipulating various
maudlin melodramatic possibilities—the resuscitation of a beautiful French
woman (played in a beautiful but empty way by Cécile De France, probably due to the nature of the part), swept
away by the tsunami in Indonesia (while out buying gifts for the children of the
man she is having an affair with, no less); the misery and anguish of an early
adolescent boy whose more successful but beloved twin brother has just been hit
by a truck and killed while trying to escape some older juvenile delinquents
who were chasing him while he was on the London streets doing an errand for
their mother—the film attempts to draw the viewer into the desire for contact
with the recently dead, and a belief in an afterlife in which they are still
mercifully present. I must admit, Matt Damon does a masterful job playing
George Lonegan, the blue collar worker who is a “real” psychic (as opposed to the numerous “phony” psychics we see
during the desperate attempts of the bereft characters to connect with the
afterlife—who are, of course, not the real thing, but help us to accept the
“legitimate” item when we encounter it).
Lonegan has left the psychic biz, and he is now a worker in a sugar
factory, trying to avoid making money from his “gift”—which, of course, had
been a very heavy burden for him to bear.
George’s brother, meanwhile, is doing everything imaginable to coerce
George into returning to the business (because he feels no compunction at all
about trying to make money off his brother’s “gift”)—including sending one of
his clients for a “reading” (what these mini- séances with the recently deceased are called in this
film). The client, Christos (if you’re
ready for that), played extremely
convincingly by Richard Kind, is
completely satisfied, beyond even what he is willing to admit to George: in one of the many tricks used to induce the
audience to go along with the hocus-pocus premise, George seems to have been
mistaken about a time or date which Christos’s dead wife repeatedly tried to
communicate to him but which seems to have had no temporal significance;
Christos later confesses to George’s brother that the “April” his wife was
referring to was not a date, but actually the name of his wife’s nurse during her protracted illness, and a woman
with whom Christos had had a long affair during that illness. There is one cute theme when George begins a
relationship with Melanie (played refreshingly by Bryce Dallas Howard), whom he meets in a cooking class, and which
results in the one rather good, psychologically interesting scene in the film
(which, expectably, does not require anything supernatural whatsoever to make
it work). Although maudlin, melodramatic, and cheesy, the film is quite
well-done from a visual and cinematographic point of view; but I found
everything good about it technically to be even more disturbing because of its
pernicious potential to serve as reinforcement for the kind of idiocy the film
is selling. I hated this film, and I
found it offensive that it was in the Festival at all, no less in a position of
honor.
SPECIAL EVENTS
Every year the NYFF has a rich
array of Special Events.
We attended three of these Special
Events. Two were talks by
directors: Cinema Inside Me: Olivier Assayas, in this
dialogue with NYFF Selection Committee Chairman Richard Peña, Assayas, who is the director of Carlos (q.v., above), guided his audience on a
marvelous tour through some of the history of cinema that has influenced his
own filmmaking; and Mike Leigh: Shooting
London, in this dialogue with Adrian
Wootton, CEO of Film London (a municipal organization set up to support
filmmaking in that city), Leigh, who is the director of Another Year (q.v., above), examined the way the city of London has
played an essential role in his filmmaking and gave an insightful understanding
of how importantly the urban environment figures into the textural fabric of
his films—even when that environment is artificially created. The third event was the screening of A Letter to Elia, a truly wonderful film by Martin Scorcese and Kent Jones,
followed by a wonderful dialogue between Kent and Todd McCarthy,
and then a screening of Elia Kazan’s
rarely available 1963 masterpiece, America, America.
A Letter to Elia is a loving
tribute to a very controversial man who made some extremely wonderful
films. In this film, Scorcese gives a
deeply personal account of why Kazan was so
deeply important to him, and what is so deeply wonderful and artistically
powerful about Kazan’s
films. It deals directly with the
central controversy about Kazan: the fact that in 1952 he caved in to pressure
from the House Un-American Activities Committee and became a friendly witness,
“naming names” in the process that created the despised blacklist of the
period. The film wishes to make the
point that this event, despite its importance, does not constitute the whole of
this man—and certainly does not invalidate all of the art he created. These contentions are clearly valid; and the
film successfully goes on to give deep insight into what was so special about Kazan’s cinematographic
vision. Whatever he was as a person, he
created great art: A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), On the Waterfront (1954), East
of Eden (1955), Wild River (1960), Splendor
in the Grass (1961), America,
America
(1963)—this is an impressive oeuvre!
(And I believe that a person’s art stands apart from his personality and
his personal actions. I can respect
someone’s art even when I cannot respect his actions: my love for the writing of Thomas Mann is not
affected by his flirtation with the Nazi party; Wagner’s politics would not
keep me away from his operas [it’s actually the fact that I do not like his
music that does that! {cf., Mark
Twain’s famous quip: “Wagner’s music is better than it sounds”}]; and the fact
that Picasso was a womanizer and generally not a nice person does not diminish
my affection for his art.)
Nevertheless, the greatness of his films does not obviate the problem of
dealing with the personal implications of Kazan’s
actions. As someone whose first arena of
political activism was the opposition to the HUAC—which, many people do not
know continued to function long after
the corresponding Senate committee which had been led by Joseph McCarthy ceased
to operate (after the disastrous Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954)—I am afraid I
cannot be so quick personally to exonerate Kazan for his actions. It is not primarily that he caved into the
pressure; many people did, and it is hard to condemn someone for not being able
to resist the terrible pressure and personal threat that the Committee
imposed. The real problem is that Kazan, unlike many who
gave in to that pressure, was never repentant.
In fact, he staunchly defended the virtuous correctness of his actions
right to his death. As A Letter to Elia suggests, we should
appreciate the fabulous art Kazan
made; but this does not mean we necessarily should honor the man. I was not in favor of awarding him a life
achievement Academy Award, and, I must confess, I still think it was a mistake,
and I am not happy with those, like Scorcese, who supported that move. Having seen this film, I understand and
appreciate the personal importance that Kazan
had for Scorcese. That does not,
however, mean I am willing to honor Kazan himself.
There are short films shown with some of the main screenings
of the Festival. Very occasionally there
have been some wonderful ones; far more often there have been many simply
dreadful ones; and, mostly they have just not been particularly good. It is my strong opinion that they simply
should not be part of the NYFF programming in the future: it just does not seem worth it, and it
certainly is not necessary. This year
there was nothing special, only two vaguely good ones that we saw: Protect the Nation by Candice Reisser, and Day
Trip by Zoe McIntosh; and
there were a couple of distressingly bad ones:
the worst being the usurious, contrived Translating Edwin Honig: A Poet’s
Alzheimer’s by Alan Berliner,
followed by the somewhat less terrible All Flowers in Time, by Jonathan Caouette; and one that wasn’t
too bad, but rather was just pointless: Mary
Last Seen by Sean Durkin.
During this year’s NYFF, there
was a NYFF Masterworks series,
Elegant Elegies: The
Films of Masahiro Shinoda. This NYFF Masterworks series, screened at the Film
Society’s Walter Reade Theater.,
consisted of 12 films by this Japanese master filmmaker. As much as we should have loved to see these
films, we simply did not have the time this year.
We were also unable to attend any
of the annual Views from the
Avant-Garde series, which is always so wonderful.
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