It's been noted that with Tribeca nipping at its heels and film fests sprouting like kudzu, the New York Film Festival might be losing its relevance and lustre. Well, to judge by the 45th edition, such concerns are premature. From Sept. 28 to Oct. 14 the NYFF — the 20th with Richard Peña at the helm — rolled out a wide-ranging lineup of mostly exhilarating films. If they reflect, in Pena's words, "the state of cinema," one piece of the cultural landscape is in rude good health.

The selection struck a happy balance between marquee names, art house auteurs, and lesser known talents. Included, too, were folks, such as Brian De Palma and John Landis, whom you might not expect to encounter in this venue. Absent but not missed was such trendy fluff as last year's Marie Antoinette from Sofia Coppola.

The fest flung open its doors to the embattled planet, and political consciousness loomed front and center (more than in the 44th edition, with the exception of Abderrahmane Sissako's Bamako.) The Axe in the Attic, a doc from Ed Pincus and Lucia Small, used cinema vérité to record the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, culling from the devastation harrowing stories of human survival and bureaucratic red tape. More resonant than the standard-issue hand-wringing, Axe voices the suspicion that bearing testimony with the best intentions may not be enough.

Brian De Palma's Redacted [pictured above] is a gut-punch that felt ripped from cable news. It's a fictionalized account of a 2006 atrocity committed against a teenaged girl and her family by American troops in Mahmoudiya. This portrait of a dazed, confused, and vengeful platoon, complete with resident video diarist, reveals with cold fury how a misguided war causes soldiers to lose, in the anemic phrase, their "moral compass," turning them into marauding beasts.

Harking back to his countercultural roots, De Palma marshalls his indictment of American policy with technical brio: a soldier is making a video about the war (hoping it will get him into film school), while another films him making the video; then the narrative is passed to a French doc; then to TV footage; then to a surveillance camera complete with running time, and so on. A collage of the ways we process information in the video age, yes - but also a vehicle to convey De Palma's rage, as if he were continually stepping back to refocus his lens in order to comprehend the horror.

Based on the graphic novel of the same name, Persepolis, co-directed by Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, is a rara avis: a film that dares to tackle big topics — history! politics! Western imperialism! — but by canting the narrative through the POV of a feisty young girl named Marjane also becomes a crowd pleaser. Using groundbreaking animation, the film takes Marjane from childhood in Iran, through adolescence under the oppressive Khomeini regime, to expat life in Vienna. An added pleasure is Danielle Darrieux voicing Marjane's wise but outrageous grandmother (who needed toning down, Satrapi told me, to be credible). The filmmakers chose stark black and white animation instead of real life actors, they stated in the press conference, because the abstract nature of the drawings provided something that all people could easily relate to. Interwoven with Marjane's sentimental education, the critique of Anglo-American designs on mid Eastern oil goes down easy — and would delight Noam Chomsky.

Tales of family dysfunction arrived, not surprisingly, courtesy of the American contingent. Noah Baumbach feels almost like a project of the NYFF: his first film, Kicking and Screaming, was a selection, followed by painful/funny The Squid and the Whale. Margot at the Wedding is more lateral step than advance. When the toxic Margot (Nicole Kidman) arrives for the nuptials of her sister (Jennifer Jason-Leigh) to husky-size underachiever Jack Black, she acts as a catalyst that tips this shaky bark into the brink. Baumbach is a master of breathless editing that lends psychological drama the pace of an action movie. But Margot swims in a murky light that often obscures the actors' faces, a puzzling esthetic choice. Baumbach shines here as a writer, less as a filmmaker.

The Darjeeling Limited from Wes Anderson, another NYFF regular, was probably, on reflection, not a bad choice for opener. It offered marqee names to walk the red carpet; lightness and brevity; visual delights; armchair travel; contagious music (I still hear that catchy Peter Sarstedt song from the Darjeeling prelude, Hotel Chevalier). But I was not alone in finding this spiritual quest by three brothers jejeune, as well as culturally clueless. Yes, Anderson creates a unique world; you either like the vibe or you don't. For me the film played like Rich White Boys Do Rajasthan.

Set in the 1940s, Married Life by Ira Sachs is an impeccably acted roundelay about the pathologies of marriage, but never quite finds its tone. You could call Go Go Tales a family comedy, even if this gang inhabits the Paradise Lounge, a place of twirling tassels, pole dancing. and Asia Argento hilariously bouncing off walls en route to her act. Abel Ferrara's engaging sleaze fest follows the travails of club owner Willem Dafoe, who needs to win the lottery to pay his back rent and keep the joint rockin'. Tales features riotous cameos by landlady Sylvia Miles, threatening to sell to Bed, Bath and Beyond; Matthew Modine, in blonde bangs, as king of Staten Island beauty salons; a cook selling gourmet free range hot dogs. The thump of porn music fades in and out and everyone talks in phlegmy growls. Shot over 21 days in Cinecittà, the films builds to a comic delirium, playing like an extended single take.

A tragic family saga, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead from Sidney Lumet follows Ethan Hawke and Philip Seymour Hoffman as two brothers who hope to solve their money woes by robbing a mom-and-pop jewelry store owned by… their mom-and-pop. But the foolproof plan misfires horribly, creating a series of disasters that sweeps through the family like a rolling blackout. Lumet juggles time in intriguing fashion, revisiting earlier scenes to open fresh persepctives on the characters. But who are these people? They walk, talk, and wear suits, but seem some species of Neanderthal loose in the city. Especially despicable is Hoffman's opportunistic wife (Marisa Tomei), secretly having it on with his younger brother. What will resonate for more than a few viewers is the desperate need for cash that drives these losers. Ethan Hawke as the beleaguered younger brother only continues to grow as an actor, both onstage and in film.



A cluster of films dealt with existential crises in formally innovative ways. Paranoid Park by Gus Van Sant (who was awarded a special 60th anniversary prize at Cannes for his body of work) plumbs the ordeal of a teen skateboarder who has accidentally caused the death of a security guard near a skate park. Van Sant conveys the boy's turmoil through a severely fractured narrative, layering over it a soundtrack combining Nino Rota and musique concrete by the brilliant Leslie Schatz.

Alexander Sokurov's Alexandra is a flat-out masterpiece. During the fest it got picked up by Cinema Guild; let's hope they have the wherewithal to get the film before the public it deserves. Sadly, much of the public suffers from media-induced ADD and may not cotton to the stately elegaiac pace of Sokurov's tale of a Russian grandma who travels to a military camp near the Chechnyan border to visit her grandson. Offering a more conventional narrative arc than in his recent films, Alexandra is both a meditation on the futility of war, as well as a love story as big as the steppes.

In The Diving Bell and the Butterfly American painter-filmmaker Julian Schnabel weighed in with a French-language film about one-time Elle editor and bon vivan Jean-Dominique Bauby, who was leveled by a catastrophic stroke that locked him in the title's diving bell, leaving him to communicate with one eye-lid. A harrowing story, but the film converts one man's appalling fate into a visual tour-de-force, taking the viewer into the world according to Bauby.

The French presence included two tart, worldly-wise films from renowned auteurs. Claude Chabrol's A Girl Cut in Two continued his ongoing vivisection of the bourgeoisie through a nasty tale of a light-weight weather girl, who becomes the battleground for two male egos duking it out. Adapated from a novel by 19th century bad boy Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, Catherine Breillat's The Last Mistress expanded the fearless auteur's inquiry into female desire onto the larger canvas of a period piece. In its insistence on the primacy of desire over just about everything else, it's, well, the most romantic film I saw in the festival.

Finally, a couple of lovely surprises from left field. A hit in Cannes, The Orphanage from Juan Antonio Bayona eerily reworks the blurred lines between fantasy and the real in the manner of Henry James in The Turn of the Screw. What begins as a supernatural thriller veers into darker terrain about debts owed the dead by the living. It's also scream-out-loud scary. And after all the gravitas and angst and feel-bad ladled out by NYFF 45, what could be more welcome than a dollop of laughter. That was provided in spades by John Landis with his doc Mr Warmth: The Don Rickles Project, an overview of the insult comic's life and times. At 81, Rickles has lost none of his timing, or skill with equal-opportunity insults. Landis's film offers up not only a grand slice of Americana — it's also formally stunning. An artfully fragmented meditation on a life and period that interweaves Rickles' live performance with talking heads, raucous roasts, quiet backstage moments, managers in comb-overs and sharkskin suits — and visions of a flamboyant mob-run Las Vegas that's now the stuff of legend.

Labels: Festivals

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 10/17/2007 05:48:00 PM Comments (0)