46th New York Film Festival
26 Sep - 12 Oct, 2008
It’s wonderful to attend a major international film festival in your home town. The New York Film Festival is a unique, sensibly curated event where every selection has a passionate advocate in the film community.
This year, I managed to see half of the 28 films in the festival’s main slate, focusing on movies that didn’t have a U.S. distributor at the time of selection.
Ziegfeld Theatre
Because of the construction chaos at Lincoln Center, all main-slate films were screened at the Ziegfeld Theatre, perhaps the last of Manhattan’s grand movie palaces. I hope the festival committee can continue to use this beautiful, large theater for selected screenings. A perennial complaint about the festival is how quickly popular selections sell out, so a partnership with the Ziegfeld could be a win-win-win for the NYFF, the Ziegfeld, and audiences. The Berlin Film Festival makes particularly good use of beautiful cinemas throughout the city in its presentations, and I hope the NYFF can take the initiative to help support the best screens in our city.
Strangely for a major international festival, two of the screenings (24 City, Tulpan) had significant projection snafus that necessitated multiple restarts. Festival-goers who stayed in their seats were rewarded with important cinematic experiences, but audiences and visiting directors deserved better quality control.
In 二十四城 (24 City), a huge Chengdu munitions plant is slated for conversion into high-rise luxury apartments and three generations of Chengdu natives give their perspectives on the change in the city and their lives. The surprise of this movie for me was how much I identified with the half-dozen employees and their children, as I grew up in similar circumstances as a child of a Lockheed machinist in Marietta, Georgia. From the NYFF program:
“The dean of Chinese independent cinema, Jia Zhangke is a poet of facts. Jia’s latest bulletin on the state of the world’s most rapidly expanding economy is more obviously documentary than the director’s previous fiction films — or perhaps more obviously fictional than his documentaries….
“Jia’s framing is, as always, impeccable. His oral history of post-revolutionary China (and subversively old-fashioned hymn to industrial production) is artfully composed, rich in offbeat details and punctuated with pop songs, including the Internationale. An ambivalent exercise in Communist nostalgia as well as a moving collective portrait.”
Voy a explotar (I’m Gonna Explode) follows a child of privilege and his transcendent working-class girlfriend in their desperate struggle to discover friendship and even make true love in the suburbs of Mexico City. Heartbreaking and brilliant. From the program:
“Mexican director Gerardo Naranjo hits his stride and promptly accelerates with this boldly hectic youth film.
“I’m Gonna Explode is a mood-shifting mock epic that channels Pierrot le fou complete with Georges Delerue music [mashing up Mahler and a great pop playlist], albeit transposing the myth of the Last Romantic Couple to an upper middle-class Mexico City exurb.”
In a series fixated on morality, Tony Manero hit all the notes. Violence, disgust, commerce, and art combine in the person of a Pinochet-era “50-something psychotic with inextinguishable dreams of disco glory.” Taxi Driver in reverse.
“Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larrain’s second feature is a spiky whirling dervish of a movie, filled with deadpan humor and unexpected moves….
“The unsmiling protagonist is an Al Pacino look-alike who has named himself after John Travolta’s character in Saturday Night Fever, a movie he revisits as devotedly as others attend mass. Oblivious to curfews, police searches and even his colleague’s anti-regime activities, this wannabe — played with majestic determination by stage actor Alfredo Castro, who also co-wrote the screenplay — will stop at nothing in his quest to stage a scaled-down version of his beloved film in a grungy Santiago cantina.”
Questions of family, identity, and the relativity of time multiply in Corte do Norte (The Northern Land). Gorgeous painterly cinema spanning three generations in a surreal Portuguese landscape, echoing Emily Brontë, ever returning to Judith Beheading Holofernes. Exquisite.
“Portuguese director João Botelho returns to the festival with this magnificent adaptation of a novel by Agustina Bessa Luis (also a great favorite of Manoel de Oliveira).
“A young woman searches for the true story of a distant ancestor, a noblewoman who scandalized society when she first moved to the island of Madeira. Through interlocking stories that cross centuries, classes and lifestyles, the film links her story to those of several other of the island’s women, all of whose frustrated passions played out in well-appointed manor houses set along magnificent, ocean-swept landscapes. They’re also united as each is incarnated by the same amazing performer, Ana Moreira….”
In another exploration of morality, Cztery noce z Anna (Four Nights with Anna) presents us with a shy crematory worker who falls in love with a woman as he witnesses her rape in a derelict building. Both characters are drawn with full and complex humanity, and we are left with a modern tragedy on par with Woyzeck.
“The first film in 17 years by the great Polish auteur Jerzy Skolimowski is more than worth the wait. Reminiscent of the director’s 1971 masterpiece Deep End, the meticulously realized Four Nights with Anna centers on an introverted crematorium worker (brilliantly played by Artur Steranko) who shows his growing affection for a beautiful nurse by repeatedly breaking into her apartment while she sleeps and fixing her clock, cleaning up and occasionally spending the night by her side.
“From this potentially creepy scenario, Skolimowski crafts a darkly romantic tale of obsession that courses with surprising tenderness, perverse humor and ravishing surrealist images not soon to be forgotten - including a cow floating downstream under bleak midwinter light. The work of a master at the top of his form.”
Max Ophüls’s classic Lola Montèz reminds me it is time for me to re-read Betsy Priouleau’s history, Seductress: Women Who Ravished the World and Their Lost Art of Love (Viking, 2003). Queue up your Netflix list with this film and Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge!, Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, and Mika Ninagawa’s Sakuran. The human toll of celebrity, yes, but also the everlasting power of female sexuality. From Priouleau’s book:
“Lola Montez would be a couples’ therapy nightmare today. With her, men shot the rapids – one minute, pitched to paradise; the next, plunged into an inferno of white water. She played rough. She sent lovers sachets from her vagina and ravished them in bed, then emptied their coffers, threw their possessions out the window, and took them to task with guns and knives. But passion she knew. By far the greatest seductress of the nineteenth century, she was adored to madness by the cognoscenti and never discarded or forgotten….”
A companion summed up Bam guan nat (Night and Day) well: “He’s a dog!” He is also a Korean artist on the lam in Paris, revealing previously unexplored cultural fault-lines with humor and humanity. From the NYFF program:
“Hong Sang-soo (Woman on the Beach, NYFF 2006) creates a beautifully observed, characteristically wry chronicle of Sung-nam’s attempt to savor his wandering year even if it’s come 20 years too late. Not speaking a word of French, Sung-nam joins a floating group of Korean ex-pats and exchange students. When he meets art student Hyun-ju and her roommate Yu-jeong, it could be that love is in the air—or is it just Paris?”
东邪西毒: 终极版 (Ashes of Time Redux). Nothing I can say, except see it on the biggest screen available to you. Viva Ziegfeld! From the program:
“Ashes of Time is a movie of slow-motion action sequences and ecstatic poses. Wong Kar-wei treats a well-known wuxia (martial arts) tale of medieval warriors and the women who can’t forget them as a delicate succession of privileged moments.
“As avant-garde as it is pop, evoking the delirious aestheticism of Once Upon a Time in the West as well as the cool formalism of Last Year at Marienbad, Wong’s time-tripper is a movie to swoon for. And the cast is stellar. Among the beautiful losers: Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung, Brigitte Lin and the late Leslie Cheung.”
Co-producer Pedro Almodóvar warned us - La mujer sin cabeza（The Headless Woman) will invade our dreams. Something terrible has happened, but people only tell our heroine how well her hair color suits her. The struggle to remain/become human while acting the bourgeois life story.
“A middle-aged woman (Maria Onetto) is driving alone on a dirt road. Suddenly, she hits something - perhaps a dog, perhaps a boy, perhaps something more mysterious. Her phantom accident jars her and Lucrecia Martel’s challenging, hyper-acute third feature onto a different perceptual plane: Everything about the ordinary world feels new, disconnected, and very, very strange, to her and to us….
“The result is an excitingly splintered cinematic mosaic, at once a portrait of a family, a social universe, and, thanks to Onetto’s stunning performance, a woman in a state of believably disoriented distress.”
I confess, I left after part 1 of Che (The Argentine) to catch the second debate between Barack Obama and John McCain. But my plan is to see both parts again, in release. Worth a second look - perhaps more for the perspective on Cuba than on Che. Such a courageous country. Part 2 (Guerrilla) follows Che to his assassination in Bolivia.
“At once boldly simplified and massively detailed, this didactic, dialectical and dazzlingly choreographed combat film challenges us to confront a figure as relevant to our times as he was to his own.”
Tokyo Sonata documents the world of the discarded, unemployed salaryman through a fantastic series of unfortunate events involving children, wives, schools - and even the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
“Kiyoshi Kurosawa delves into a different kind of horror with his surprising and exquisitely crafted new film. Based on a story by Australian writer Max Mannix, Tokyo Sonata follows the progress of a family as it comes undone.
“A Tokyo husband and father is laid off from his job and finds that he is now a soldier in a vast army of unemployed men, ashamed of divulging their situations to their families. He takes out his frustrations at home, and his proud refusal to allow his gifted youngest son to take piano lessons is the first step on a strange trip into violence, temporary madness — prompting a guest appearance by Kurosawa regular Kôji Yakusho — and possible regeneration…. “
Okay, I liked all of this year’s movies. But Tulpan left me more disoriented and happier than any film I’ve seen this year. Maybe it was the animals. No, it had to be the children. Or maybe the yurt. The steppe? Oh, it must have been the back of the sailor’s collar. A miracle! (I am glad I saw 圖雅的婚事 [Tuya’s Marriage] first. Thank you, Berlinale!)
“Celebrated Kazakh documentarian Sergey Dvortsevoy won the Prix Un Certain Regard for this, his first dramatic feature — an astonishing ethnographic drama-cum-wildlife movie. As comic as it is awe-inspiring, Tulpan is set in the vast emptiness of southern Kazakhstan’s Hunger Steppe.
“Having completed his military service, a young nomad named Asa returns home to his brother-in-law’s yurt with hopes of becoming a shepherd. But is such a life any longer possible in the modern world? First, Asa must win the affections of his beautiful neighbor, Tulpan.
“Dvortsevoy gives us the bleak beauty of the steppe’s windswept landscape: the endless sky, the camel stampedes, the raucous behavior of a reggae-loving teamster, and one of the most remarkable animal birth scenes ever captured on film.”
Recording a disastrous day to surpass any episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Parlez-moi de la pluie (Let It Rain) plays with class, race, family, and urban/rural political distrust to make great universal comedy.
“The urbane social satirist Agnès Jaoui (The Taste of Others, NYFF 2000; Look At Me, Opening Night, NYFF 2004) is at the height of her powers, both as a filmmaker and as an actor, in this deftly structured comic study of self-delusion set in an unexpectedly rainy southern France….”
Kudos to the selection committee! I seriously considered walking out during the first three-quarters of Tiro en la cabeza (Bullet in the Head), convinced that the movie was bullshit. Unremarkable people leading unremarkable lives, until something happens in the last 20 minutes, and suddenly it all makes terrible sense.
“Someone is watching – all the time - as a middle-aged Spanish man buys a newspaper, meets another man in a cafe, attends a dinner party, has sex with a woman, listens to music in a CD shop, makes a payphone call.
“Like the unseen voyeur of Catalan director Jaime Rosales’s claustrophobically intense, avant-garde thriller, we too see and hear everything from a distance, forced to assemble the movie’s disparate narrative pieces for ourselves as we go along, like detectives on the trail of a dangerous conspiracy. Who is this man and who are his associates? And what are they plotting?…”
Along with a strong list of shorts and the twelfth annual “Views from the Avant-Garde,” this year’s festival also screened, in meticulously selected prints, all 23 fiction films by the Japanese master Nagisa Oshima in a revelatory program, “In the Realm of Oshima”. [Read the New York Times article.]
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