Whither primary sources? Here’s what I have in front of me, in case you’re interested: on the desktop sits the laptop, the phone, the book, the headphones. On the laptop’s desktop, the news, the blog, the review, the video, the work. On the phone, the music, the number, the same review as on the laptop, a different source of news, and some text. I’ve got headphones in. I’m tuned in to everything. There’s this feeling that something’s being lost, and so I wonder: what’s everyone else thinking? I cross-check my own opinion with reviewers or reviewer-aggregates, I navigate, looking for commentary or interviews, anything to make the experience more “special,” I call, I comment, I search. I do just about everything but sit in the dark and let the goddamn movie
I just saw sink in.
The notion of steady work as a paid film critic, the kind of work that existed maybe a few years ago, is officially “quaint.” It’s bad enough out there to make one envy the sick-making whirligig that is the independent film industry for its intrigue and glamour, even if that glamour’s about as convincing as tinsel on a Christmas tree in mid-January. For the young ones, writing on film can only be a hobby, a passion certainly but also an unpaid and under-read time-suck. Press screenings look more and more like carousels for the smart and poor, turning round in the wafting carnival aroma of one more free screening in the morning, one more free cup of coffee, one more chance to dent and be dented.
Don’t get me wrong: there are worse ways to spend your time.
But that this carousel’s not only turning but sinking is a hard feeling to shake. Forgive the nail-biting, but to a worrywart like myself—a worrywart filmmaker, no less, whose investment in the future of cinema is more than theoretical—it’s hard not to notice that the theaters are getting emptier, the conversations are dwindling, the gap between independent film and studio slop is, incredibly, stretching even wider. Depending on your capacity for optimism, moviegoing’s always typified either a bleak or a romantic kind of dark isolation, the appeal of which is still plenty strong. But the specialness is looking more and more like scariness: we’re so screen-oriented now, dedicating eight to ten hours a day Coming to the Light, that the very notion of The Movies and their attention-demanding primary-ness—long, prickly, character-based, thirty feet high—starts to feel as comforting as boiled Brussels sprouts. “You wanna watch a movie? But I watched three at work!”
So there went the 47th New York Film Festival (Sept. 25 - Oct. 11), a hand-picked autumn bushel of primary sources, and it’s all over but the bitching. Unlike some high-profile American festivals who shall go nameless—they rhyme with “Funpants” and “My Schlecka”—the New York Film Festival takes its adult attendees’ seriousness about, um, film, pretty much for granted. There’s blessed little sophomoric reassurance and sloganeering—no buttons admonishing us to “Focus on Film,” no eye-rolling plays on “reel” or “take,” no (or not much) egregious sprocket-hole imagery.
A model of sobriety, programmed by genuine lovers of the medium, the festival flatters its attendees with a notable lack of falderal, letting the films more or less speak for themselves. Honestly, this recession-haunted year had almost
too little circus: it was the soberest in my short memory, and the least special, with the misguided, head-scratching, depressingly corporate decision by new management to shift the Opening Night party from the lantern-lit, openhearted mazes of Tavern on the Green—with its goofy crusty-mascara charm, the party was a quarter-century-old tradition—to more hushed VIP-friendly digs at the luxuriously renovated Alice Tully Hall. And the outright redaction of the cozy bacon-and-eggs Directors’ Party at O’Neals’ Restaurant? Makes you feel bad for the invited filmmakers, bumping around on Broadway for a true-blue New York shindig. Still, though, reliably awkard question-and-answer sessions, a handful of red carpets, Directors’ Dialogues, a boutique main slate, a life-saving new $10 rush ticket system, and adventurous sidebars: this is a festival whose clarity and respect impresses even the most mole-like of cinephiles. It’s both a glimpse back to a Jurassic Age when films lumbered the earth big and loud, and a glimpse forward to a closer-than-we-want time when “going to the movies” will be thought of as something like an old-timey event, like sledding or making popcorn balls.
As happens in every other year of its existence, much has been written this go around about the festival’s “elitism” and penchant for misery, so I won’t bore you with my two cents—and make no mistake, the snobs-versus-populists debate is way past dull. For all the talk of the selection committee’s monocle-and-top-hat rejection of more “open” (read: middling, comforting, fleeting, commercial) fare, I couldn’t help but notice the very healthy and enthusiastic crowds for, to name some,
Police, Adjective,
Life During Wartime,
The White Ribbon,
White Material, and
Bluebeard, all of which are downbeat, off-tempo, and more or less unkind. Even the screening I attended of Pedro Costa’s numbing/hypnotic and typically uncompromising Diary of a Chanteuse
Ne change rien scored a half-full house (before the walkouts): not bad in this economy! Some years are better than others, nobody’s perfect, and so on. (Okay, here’s two cents: Did they miss a few? Maybe, but get over it, will ya?) Whether or not you agree with the slate is beside the point: one might take it on faith that the members of the selection committee—Lion of the Senate Richard Pena, Jim Hoberman, Scott Foundas, Melissa Anderson, and Dennis Lim—are choosing the very best films out there.
Still, I found myself questioning my faith, if only a little. I suspect Lincoln Center loyalty (and the promise of a flashy red carpet) may have been an irresistible factor in the inclusion on Closing Night of Pedro Almodóvar’s
Broken Embraces, a lollipop-dipped-in-Campari noir celebration of art, love, and, well, Almodóvar. This is Pedro spinning his wheels, tarting up his preening, artsy-Ezsterhas plot mechanics with soapy line readings, pointless self-reference, and heaps of shallow-focus close-ups that will doubtless be described in some quarters as “luscious” or “sumptuous” or some other food word. Also in minor mode, if more intriguingly so, was Jacques Rivette, whose
Around a Small Mountain has a disarming vulnerability, but ends up a stitched-together and half-baked experience, its warmed-over themes (life as performance, past as performance) explored with greater perception by the eighty-one year-old director in earlier, better films. By no means painful, but still: consider before you start your Rivette fixation here.
At least a decade away from hindsight and with an impaired view—I managed to see only fifteen films from the main slate not including such loud-shouting titles as Lars Von Trier’s
Antichrist, Harmony Korine’s
Trash Humpers, and Alain Resnais’s
Wild Grass—I’ll venture to say it was not, alas, a vintage year for the New York Film Festival. Marquee names putting out admirable work with trademarked themes and not much jazz. Compared to last year’s festival, which introduced New Yorkers to
A Christmas Tale,
The Headless Woman,
Summer Hours, and
Hunger, there was less to gorge on, less to fight over. Mighty nourishing, but, yeah, thanks, I do have room for dessert.
That said, this is a world full of options, and in the interest of air-clearing, let’s just get it over with. Okay:
“MISS WITH A CLEAR CONSCIENCE.” All have virtues, but still:
Life During Wartime, directed by Todd Solondz. His broad swipes at imponderable selfishness are by now stale (his fault!), and his shot selection is alarmingly uninspired, even amateurish. A funny, provocative, plunked-down debate over the capacity to “forgive or forget” late in the game left me fighting to do the former.
Min Ye..., directed by Souleymane Cissé. As with
Life During Wartime, a by-now-veteran loses control of the frame. Loads of
Guiding Light-style close-ups and unshaped squabbles are almost redeemed by an off-kilter, very funny central performance by Sokona Gakou. Unfortunately, rounding the thing off at a woefully bloated 135 minutes, Cissé has done his best to shoot himself in the foot.
Precious: Based on the Novel Push
by Sapphire, directed by Lee Daniels. What’s with the title? Did someone lose a bet with Sapphire? Propelled by social issues, dreams, and overwrought Gloom, this is a grab bag about perseverance, and finally, backflipping redemption. Visually, Daniels enters each scene like he forgot the last, but there’s no getting around the dedication of his performers. It’s a little much to see a
Harlem social worker drop a tear at her desk, but still, that was Mariah Carey, and I barely recognized her, I actually bought her, and that’s some kind of trick.
“YEAH. IT WAS GOOD. I MEAN...YES. YES, IT…I LIKED IT.” Like the American Southwest, this territory comes with a certain number of reservations:
Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl (pictured), directed by Manoel de Oliveira. How old is Portuguese master Manoel de Oliveira, really? I heard he punched Thomas Edison in the face once for showing up late to set. Someone else told me he was seven when
The Birth of a Nation came out. Can either rumor possibly be true? In any case, his sixty-four minute cut glass perfume bottle of a film feels like it was carefully transported, in a velvety pouch, from a different age. I wouldn’t say it compares so favorably to late-era Buñuel, but Oliveira’s visual scheme, falling somewhere between drab and fancy, is odd, refreshing, even exhilarating. I hope that when I’m 101 I’ll remember the film’s stunning last frame: the titular object of desire, seated, her legs open, her head down, beast-like, slipped off.
The White Ribbon, directed by Michael Haneke. By now, Haneke has amassed quite the flock of hairshirted admirers, and until I got to the end of this long and scolding communal mystery, I counted myself unquestionably among them. Startlingly precise imagery in the service of…what, exactly? Haneke has left out the answer to his own painstaking equation; the love story at the center is tender and honest, but the moral ugliness swirling around it feels like Halloween decoration. He’d be easier to shake if he weren’t so goddamned talented.
Ne change rien, directed by Pedro Costa. If I’d walked out on this, would it have ceased to exist? Costa, a hardcore formalist and unapologetic descendant of Straub/Huillet and late-era Godard, chronicles the actress-turned-chanteuse Jeanne Balibar, as she, well, tries to get the beat right. Like his countryman Oliveira, Costa knows exactly where to put the camera—far but close—and relishes limitation, but your engagement might rely not on his placement, but hers. Forgive me for this, but is Balibar any good? Is she worth all this? In any case, Costa’s getting the Eclipse treatment soon from Criterion, and I can’t wait to wait.
Police, Adjective, directed by Corneliu Porumboiu. Hard not to envy the young Romanians. The continuity in their collected work—from
The Death of Mr. Lazarescu to
4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days... to this one—is astounding. Just about guilty of art-film collusion, or an excess of bone-dry orthodoxy, the directors share a deep respect for quotidian timeframes and the ways in which bureaucracies degrade us all. Porumboiu’s new film is, in parts, genuinely funny, and in other parts, needlessly patient. There’s a good idea here, however drummed through, that language hides as much as it exposes, but too much effort is spent toward what is by now a stone-cold festival cliché: torturing the audience for the sins of the state.
“90% OF MY LOVE.” Masterpieces? Maybe none of them. But they deserve your $12:
White Material, directed by Claire Denis. One of the few films at the Festival without a reliable agenda, and one of the very, very few to express itself through rhythm. I was enchanted by the movie-movieness, the assured fusion of color, sound, composition, and performance. Denis’s characters are puzzling—does she lack confidence in language itself, or just her own dialogue?—but their convictions are never less than razor-sharp. Even with the willfully wackadoodle ending, this French-colonial action movie threw me into a pleasure-tizzy. The image of boy soldiers, scattered at rest, picking pills from the dirt—at once horrifying, sensual, alien, rapturous—is locked away in my noodle for good.
Mother, directed by Bong Joon-ho. The impressive, cloying opening shot—a lilting crane floats down to a sad middle-aged woman, as she starts to dance—had me worried. But in the end, it’s Joon-ho’s honking imagination that makes this convoluted whodunit hum. A master of tone and point-of-view, Joon-ho guides his audience through one convoluted scene after another toward a remarkably humane portrait. A structural tour-de-force, and appealingly whimsical: if things were right in the world, Joon-ho would be a household name here.
Bluebeard, directed by Catherine Breillat. Speaking of getting things right, could someone please throw Breillat a budget? A little shabby in design—unnecessarily lame video photography and unconscionably lame costuming—this feminist reexamination of the grisly Charles Perrault bedtime story is nevertheless a cold-filtered beauty. Contemporary to her core, Breillat teases out yearnings and dynamics that Perrault never dreamed of, and stamps the story with her own darkly funny, achingly proper moral. Ogres have rarely been so appealing.
“I DARE YOU NOT TO LOVE THIS MOVIE, FRIEND.” Heaven can’t wait for this lone angel:
Everyone Else, directed by Maren Ade. As someone who makes his living (or “living”) as a filmmaker, I’ll cop to an often foggy POV, and a complicated relationship with new cinema. Like many of my filmmaker friends, I’m bringing baggage into the theater with me—that day’s unfinished writing, the call unanswered, and, hardest to shake, the diamonds-and-granite conviction that, when all is said and done, movies should be made my way. (Oh, and there’s some jealousy.) Maren Ade, young, on only her second feature, has made a deceptively straightforward, plainly episodic portrait of a couple slowly unraveling. And the film gets so many tiny things right, it gives me palpitations. This isn’t an expressive work, really; her mise-en-scene blazes no trails. But how many directors—Pialat? Cassevettes?—have so convincingly tracked the minute directions of the human heart, so brilliantly modulated the tiny fears of an on-screen couple (Birgit Minichmayr and Lars Eidinger)? Never less than uncanny, adroitly avoiding the pitfalls of squishy romanticism and arty mopiness, Ade’s film cashes Mumblecore’s check. The scenes fall like dominoes, until we’re left screaming for our loved ones.
This is a primary experience. What will Maren Ade do next? Can she keep it up?
Who knows? I’m too excited to worry.
Labels: Festivals
# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 10/14/2009 11:35:00 AM
