New York Film Festival 2009

[Chris Knipp]

New York Film Festival 2009
http://www.broadwayworld.com/columnpic/nyff09.jpg

Welcome to the Festival Coverage thread for the 47th New York Film Festival, fall 2009, put on by the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

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ANDRE DUSOLLIER IN RESNAIS' WILD REEDS
(OPENING NIGHT FILM NYFF 2009)

The full schedule of public screenings with thumbnail descriptions of the 28 official selection films will be found on the Film Society of Lincoln Center's website here. (http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff/nyff.html) Press and industry screenings begin September 16.

The FilmLeaf open comments thread for the NYFF is here, (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?s=&threadid=2633) starting with the list of films. Below are links to the Festival Coverage thread reviews.


INDEX OF LINKS TO REVIEWS

Antichrist (Lars von Trier 2009) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?s=&postid=23009#post23009)
Around a Small Mountain (Jacques Rivette 2009) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?s=&postid=23051#post23051)
Art of the Steal, The (Don Argott 2009) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?s=&postid=22982#post22982)
Bluebeard (Catherine Breillat 2009) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?s=&postid=23071#post23071)
Broken Embraces (Pedro Almodóvar 2009) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?2644-New-York-Film-Festival-2009&p=23094#post23094)
Crossroads of Youth (An Jong-hwa 1934) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?s=&postid=23075#post23075)
Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl 2009) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?s=&postid=22998#post22998)
Everyone Else (Maren Ade 2009) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?s=&postid=23022#post23022)
Ghost Town (Zhao Dayong 2009) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?s=&postid=22943#post22943)
Hadewijch (Bruno Dumont 2009) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?s=&postid=23026#post23026)
Henri-Georges Clouzot's 'Inferno' (Bomberg, Medea 2009) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?s=&postid=23078#post23078)
Independencia (Raya Martin 2009) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?s=&postid=23073#post23073)
Kanikosen (Sabu 2009) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?s=&postid=22942#post22942)
Lebanon (Samuel Maoz 2009) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?s=&postid=23012#post23012)
Life During Wartime (Todd Solondz 2009) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?s=&postid=23054#post23054)
Min Ye; Tell Me... (Soulaymane Cisse 2009) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?s=&postid=23056#post23056)
Mother (Bong Joon-ho 2009) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?s=&postid=23067#post23067)
Mummy, The (Shadi Abdel Salam 1969) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?s=&postid=23086#post23086)
Ne Change Rien (Pedro Costa 2009) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?s=&postid=23062#post23062)
Pier Paolo Pasolini The Rage of Pasolinii (Pasolini, Bertolucci, 1963, 2008) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?s=&postid=22935#post22935)
Police, Adjective (Porumboliu (2009) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?s=&postid=23034#post23034)
Precious (Lee Daniels 2009) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?s=&postid=23069#post23069)
Room and a Half (Khrzharnovsky 2009) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?s=&postid=22985#post22985)
Sweetgrass (Barbash, Taylor 2009) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?s=&postid=22937#post22937)
Sweet Rush (Andrzej Wajda 2009) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?s=&postid=23020#post23020)
To Die As a Man (Rodrigues 2009) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?s=&postid=23000#post23000)
Trash Humpers (Harmony Korine 2009) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?s=&postid=23064#post23064)
Vincere (Marco Bellocchio 2009) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?s=&postid=22961#post22961)
White Material (Claire Denis 2009) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?s=&postid=23048#post23048)
White Ribbon, The (Michael Haneke 2009) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?s=&postid=23092#post23092)
Wild Grass (Alain Resnais 2009) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?s=&postid=22939#post22939)

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PENELOPE CRUZ IN ALMODOVAR'S BROKEN EMBRACES
(CLOSING NIGHT FILM NYFF 2009)

[Chris Knipp]

PRESS SCREENINGS CALENDAR


Thursday, September 24
9:00am - 10:39am:
Sweet Rush / Tatarak
Andrzej Wajda, 2009, Poland, 84m
SCREENING WITH
The Hardest Part
Oliver Refson, 2009, UK, 13m

11:00am - 1:00pm:
Everyone Else / Alle Anderen
Maren Ade, 2009, Germany, 120m

Thursday, September 24 (continued)
1:30pm - 3:31pm:
Hadewijch
Bruno Dumont, 2009, France, 105m
SCREENING WITH
Lili's Paradise
Melina Leon, XXXX, Peru, 16m

TENTATIVE - SUBJECT TO DIRECTOR AVAILABILITY
4:00pm - 6:09pm:
Vincere
Marco Bellocchio, 2009, Italy, 129m
6:10pm - 6:30pm:
Press Conference: Marco Bellocchio


Friday, September 25
10:00am - 12:01pm:
Police, Adjective / Politist, adj.
Corneliu Porumboiu, 2009, Romania, 115m
SCREENING WITH
The Funk
Cris Jones, 2008, Australia, 6m
12:05pm - 12:25pm:
Press Conference: Corneliu Porumboiu

1pm - 2:44pm:
Wild Grass / Les herbes folles
Alain Resnais, 2009, France, 104m
2:45pm - 3:05pm:
Press Conference: Alain Resnais, Andre Dussolier, Mathieu Amalric


Monday, September 28
11am - 12:55pm:
White Material
Claire Denis, 2009, France, 100m
SCREENING WITH
Chicken Heads / Roos Djaj
Bassam Ali Jarbawi, 2009, Palenstine/USA, 15m

2:00pm - 3:43pm:
Around a Small Mountain / 36 vues du Pic Saint-Loup
Jacques Rivette, 2009, France, 85m
SCREENING WITH
Plastic Bag
Ramin Bahrani, 2009, USA, 18m


Tuesday, September 29
10:30am - 12:16pm:
Life During Wartime
Todd Solondz, 2009, USA, 96m
SCREENING WITH
Socarrat
David Moreno, 2009, Spain, 10m

1:30pm - 3:45pm:
Min Yu... (Tell Me Who You Are)
Souleymane Cisse, 2009, Mali/France, 135m


Wednesday, September 30
11:30am - 1:19pm:
Ne Change Rien
Pedro Costa, 2009, France/Portugal, 103m
SCREENING WITH
Final Cut Template #2: Hollis Frampton
Doug Henry, 2009, USA, 6m

TENTATIVE - SUBJECT TO DIRECTOR AVAILABILITY
2:00pm - 3:18pm:
Trash Humpers
Harmony Korine, 2009, USA, 78m
3:20pm - 3:40pm:
Press Conference: Harmony Korine


Thursday, October 1
10:00am - 12:08pm:
Mother / Maedo
Bong Joon-Ho, 2009, South Korea, 128m

1:00pm - 2:49pm:
Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire
Lee Daniels, 2009, USA, 109m
2:50pm - 3:10pm:
Press Conference: Lee Daniels, Gabourey Sidibe and PRODUCERTK


Friday, October 2
TENTATIVE - SUBJECT TO FILM AVAILABILITY
10:30am - 11:54am:
Bluebeard / La barbe-bleue
Catherine Breillat, 2009, France, 78m
SCREENING WITH
Love Child / Karleksbarn
Daniel Wirtberg, 2008, Sweden, 6m

1:30pm - 3:08pm:
Independencia
Raya Martin, 2009, Philippines/France/Germany/Netherlands, 77m
SCREENING WITH
A History of Independence / Nziri Nin Kera Yeremahoronya Waati Ye
Daouda Coulibaly, 2009, France/Mali, 21m
3:10pm - 3:30pm:
Press Conference: Raya Martin

Monday, October 5
TENTATIVE - SUBJECT TO DIRECTOR AVAILABILITY
10:00am - 11:49pm:
Ne Change Rien
Pedro Costa, 2009, France/Portugal, 103m
SCREENING WITH
Final Cut Template #2: Hollis Frampton
Doug Henry, 2009, USA, 6m
11:50pm - 12:10pm
Press Conference: Pedro Costa

TENTATIVE - SUBJECT TO DIRECTOR AVAILABILITY
1:00pm - 3:15pm:
Min Ye... (Tell Me Who You Are)
Souleymane Cisse, 2009, Mali/France, 135m
3:15pm - 3:35pm:
Press Conference: Souleymane Cisse

Tuesday, October 6
TENTATIVE - SUBJECT TO ACTOR AVAILABILITY
11:00am - 12:43pm:
Around a Small Mountain / 36 vues du Pic Saint-Loup
Jacques Rivette, 2009, France, 85m
SCREENING WITH
Plastic Bag
Ramin Bahrani, 2009, USA, 18m
12:45pm - 1:05pm:
Press Conference: Jane Birkin and Sergio Castellitto

Wednesday, October 7
10:30am - 12:54pm:
The White Ribbon / Das weise band
Michael Haneke, 2009, Germany/Austria/France/Italy, 144m
1pm - 1:20pm:
Press Conference: Michael Haneke

2:30pm - 4:38pm:
Broken Embraces / Los abrazos rotos
Pedro Almodovar, 2009, Spain, 128m
4:40pm - 5:00pm
Press Conference: Pedro Almodovar and Penelope Cruz

Thursday, October 8
TENTATIVE - SUBJECT TO DIRECTOR AVAILABILITY
10am - 11:55pm:
White Material
Claire Denis, 2009, France, 100m
SCREENING WITH
Chicken Heads / Roos Djaj
Bassam Ali Jarbawi, 2009, Palenstine/USA, 15m
12:00pm - 12:20pm:
Press Conference: Claire Denis

1:30pm - 3:16pm:
TENTATIVE - SUBJECT TO DIRECTOR AVAILABILITY
Life During Wartime
Todd Solondz, 2009, USA, 96m
SCREENING WITH
Socarrat
David Moreno, 2009, Spain, 10m
3:20pm - 3:40pm
Press Conference: Todd Solondz

Friday, October 9
TENTATIVE - SUBJECT TO DIRECTOR AVAILABILITY
10:00am - 11:24pm:
Bluebeard / La barbe-bleue
Catherine Breillat, 2009, France, 78m
SCREENING WITH
Love Child / Karleksbarn
Daniel Wirtberg, 2008, Sweden, 6m
11:25pm - 11:45pm
Press Conference: Catherine Breillat
[/QUOTE]

[Chris Knipp]

GIUSEPPE BERTOLUCCI, PIER PAOLO PASOLINI: THE RAGE OF PASOLINI (1963, 2008)

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Loving recreation, of great interest to students of Pasolini

Rage/La rabbia is a 1963 film commissioned by documentarian Gastone Ferranti in which gay Italian poet, novelist, filmmaker, and leftist filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini uses found documentary and magazine images for a mournful, arbitrary, and poetic 53-minute rumination on the joys and sorrows of the postwar period. The story goes that due to Pasolini's controversial nature and his strong Marxist bent, the popular "Don Camillo" novelist Giovanni (or Giovannino) Guareschi was asked to present a "right-wing" counterpart to Pasolini's film, and this annoyed Pasolini so much, he cut out a large early segment of his own film to "make room" for the Guareschi segment. Guareschi's film was a "reply" to and debunking of the original Pasolini segment. Pasolini wrote a fiery response in the paper Il Giorno saying of the Guareschi segment: "If Eichmann were to rise from the grave to make a film, he would make a film like this."

This augmented and restored film shown as part of the "VIEWS FROM THE AVANT GARDE" sidebar section of the NYFF is a restoration of the whole Pasolini segment (not including Guareschi's), with an effort to recreate the lost first part Pasolini cut out and to provide some context on Pasolini's thought and his difficult position in Italy. Everything Pasolini did was censored and blocked and he had to go to court to get each of his films released.

Details are given by an Italian IMDb contributor (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1289430/#comment), and more can be found in Italian on the website Cinemafrica (http://www.cinemafrica.org/spip.php?article678). And there's a brief interesting note in the French Wikipedie. (http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Rage)

Giuseppe Bertolucci is the brother of Bernardo, and the latter worked on the crew of Pasolini's Accatone. The restoration was sponsored by the Film Archive of Bologna, Pasolini's birthplace (though he grew up with his mother in Friuli). Another Italian IMBd Commenter (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057442/usercomments) on the film as issued in 1963 with both the cut Pasolini and Guareschi segments writes:
Pasolini stages such a dismal representation of the world and its sufferings, that even the liberation of Cuba from the dictatorship of Batista is represented in sadness and mourning. I would have expected a bit more depth from this brilliant director. His representation of Marxism is religious to say the least. Guareschi too is disappointing, he is way too biased - he defends the atrocities of France in Vietnam and Algeria! - and his traditional sense of humor is almost absent. Some footage is quite interesting from historical point of view, but I would suggest to watch without audio, the commentator is simply too dull and rhetorical. There is truth in this. The writer is not unjustified in referring to Pasolini's "dismal representation," though there are also passages that soar and are moving. His comments on Guareschi's segment are worth noting. Pasolini is particularly concerned in his film with Algeria, with the joy of the Algerians at winning independence; with Vietnam; and he celebrates the Cuban revolution even if his vision of it is sad. Where this writer is absurd is in suggesting we watch "Rage" without audio, because the chief interest of the film is in how it illuminates the mind of Pier Paolo Pasolini and displays his poetic language. The poetic passages are read by novelist Giorgio Bassani; the prose ones are read by the artist-designer Renato Guttuso. Some additional voiceover passages retain the voices of the original source documentaries or newsreels, with implied irony in the new context Pasolini creates.

Particularly fascinating -- and non-political, and presumably unironic -- is a passage that pops up almost out of nowhere in which Pasolini poetically celebrates Marilyn Monroe, recently dead, as a sad little girl, with striking, rhythmic use of stills from magazines.

At the end following the Pasolini "La rabbia" film there are several segments showing how cruelly the filmmaker and intellectual was attacked and lampooned for being gay, for repeatedly using sometimes some of the same people in is films who were rough-looking and not famous or pretty, and for being a leftist. Finally there is a passage from an interview in which Pasolini talks about being "arrabiato," angry, and explains why he thinks (because its bourgeoisie is too "small") that Italy has not produced a group of Angry Young Men and he stands along as a unique angry man of Italy. The greatest angry man, he says, was Socrates.

Pasolni was always fascinating, always stimulating, always brilliant and passionate. Let's hope he is more recognized in Italy now as what the novelist Alberto Moravia called him: the greatest Italian artist-intellectual of the twentieth century.

The film, alas, fails to speak to us very much as relevant today other than as a valuable document of its moment and of the mind and art of Pasolini as a postwar European intellectual torn between hope and pessimism. The difficulty in responding to this as a contemporary statement goes back to two main things: the overly familiar found documentary footage; and the fact that we are used to documentaries being enlightening sources of new information. In his partly lyrical, partly prose written texts to accompany Rage, Pasolini gives virtually no specific information and does not identify the footage, and some passages, such as one depicting women in scarves, are impossible to identify. This in spite of the fact that he chose the figures and events to be included in the images very carefully, as is indicated in the "case study" by film critic and curator of the Bologna Pasolini study center Roberto Chiesi. Chiesi has written a book about the history of "La rabbia" in addition to oveseeing this production. This film provides rich material for scholars. For the general viewer, it remains somewhat remote even in this excellent restoration.

Shown as a "VIEWS FROM THE AVANT-GARDE" sidebar in the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, September 2009.

[Chris Knipp]

ILISA BARBASH, LUCIEN CASTAING-TAYLOR: SWEETGRASS (2009)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/grass.jpg

Last of the American mountain shepherds

Barbash and Taylor are Harvard ethnographers and anthropoligists; she is from New York and he's English. They are an energetic couple who have made films about the African art trade (In and Out of Africa 1992) and L.A. garment sweatshops (Made in U.S.A. 1990) and are involved in interactive media, photography exhibitions, and innovative combinations of aesthetics and ethnography. They were living in Colorado in 2001 when they learned about a Norwegian-American family that had been herding sheep long distances up into Montana public lands for summer grazing for four generations, all on the hoof, over 150 miles. Word got around that this might not be happening much longer and somebody ought to film it. Becasue the trek was too arduous to do otherwise, Barbash stayed at home with their two small children and Taylor did the DV filming and recording.

The 101-minute film, without narration, takes the viewer deep into the land, the herd movement, and the hard, solitary life of the shepherds. The visuals are beautiful and intimate. Taylor gets close to the sheep and to the men. The pace is measured. There's slowness and monotony, but there's excitement and stress too. The filming was done mostly in 2001, some additional in 2003, and editing wasn't completed till early 2009.

Hollywood Reporter reviewed (http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/festival/film-review-sweetgrass-1003942178.story) the film in connection with the Berlin festival and notes, "Slow-paced documentary on sheep, shepherds and their environment needs further shearing." The writer remarks on one hired hand's lengthy recorded outburst up in the mountains when he's had anough, remarking that his "Frustrations are vented in an extended, entertainingly expletive-studded rant, the vehemence of which would make Christian Bale blush."

This one long unguarded rant is possible because the sound involved wireless recording devices (they cost more than the camera) that enabled Taylor to hear conversations or monologues spoken a mile or two away. At first the emphasis is on the sheep in the herd and one by one. Later the film shows herders at the ranch shearing the sheep, helping them give birth, sorting lambs. On rare occasions when there is dialogue and not just a man talking to his horse or the sheep, it's sometimes laughably monosyllabic. A young man tells a joke about brains for sale where the cowboy's is the most expensive because it's 'never been used."

This is indeed specialized festival material. Omitting commentary or any intertitles to structure time or identify individuals has its plusses and minuses. As I've noted, the film takes you deep into the landscape and the experience. The anguished rant of a hired hand talking on a phone to his mother about his damanged knee, intractable dogs and sheep,and lack of sleep is an excellent reality check for viewers who might want to make this a "Home on the Range" idyll in their minds.

But if you want to find out the facts, as apart from the sights and sounds, of the world depeicted here, you have to go somewhere else. Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor were present for a Q&A with Richard Pena, FSLC director. Taylor in particular provided a lot of useful facts and figures. His data made clear that the disappearance of sheep herding isn't due to agri-business takeover so much as to environmentalists who strangely consider shepherds an alien invasion of nature, and the fact that Americans wear less wool and more artificial fiber and eat a hundred times more beef than lamb meat.

There is some more detailed information about the filmmakers in the blog,"Cinema and Social Sciences." (http://cdermen.blogspot.com/2008/01/cinema-of-robert-gardner.html) The film also has its own website (http://www.sweetgrassthemovie.com/index.htm) which provides press kit information. [These are defunct but there is a 2007 book of essay (http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1472586X.2013.801650?journalCode=rvst20#.VTE6K9zF_ hc)s on Robert Gardner collected by Barbash and Taylor.--2015]

Sweet Grass (name of the country in Montana where the ranch was; it's now defunct after 105 years, and the family has bought land 30 times cheaper in Canada) is an official selection of the New York Film Festival 2009.

This film had a US theatrical premiere at Film Forum in New York January 6-19, 2010. In her review (http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/01/06/movies/06sweet.html) of the film in the New York Times Manohla called the film "wonderful" and said it was "the first essential film of this young year."

[Chris Knipp]

ALAIN RESNAIS: WILD GRASS (2009)

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ANDRE DUSOLLIER AND MATTIEU AMALRIC

Resnais adapts novel "L'Incident" by Christian Gailly

The 87-year-old French New Wave veteran directs his longtime star and companion Sabine Azema (27 years his junior) and regular co-star Andre Dusollier in this adaptation of an idiosyncratic novel by Christian Gailly about a man and a woman who become fascinated with each other when the man finds the woman's stolen wallet.

The essence of the piece is that the principals are hesitant, indecisive, and a mite crazy. Their experience is the kind that falls through the cracks of well-ordered existence. Hence the new title replacing Gailly's "The Incident," to "Les herbes folles," "crazy grasses." There's a recurrent image of wild grass growing high among stones.

The comfy suburban house of Georges (Dusollier) feels rather like that of Jean-Louis Trintignant outside Geneva, and like Kieslowski's Red, this film is about trying to connect, and has a protagonist who's both respectable and an outlaw. Georges is paranoid about being recognized by police, as if he's done something wrong or been in jail. Yet he has two charming grown children (Sara Forestier, Vladimir Consigny), and a loving and equally appealing wife, Susanne (Anne Consigny, familiar to US French film fans from Schnabel's Diving Bell and Desplechin's Christmas Tale). Georges never acquires a full back-story, but Dusollier is brilliant at depicting his mercurial temperament, and a continual pleasure to watch, as is the equally live-wire Azema.

Marguerite Muir (Azema) is a dentist who shares an office with the offbeat French film diva Emmanuelle Devos. Another big French film actor, Matthieu Amalric, plays the cop in the station to whom Georges delivers the found wallet. Strong newcomer Nicolas Duvauchelle, a former boxer, plays Georges' daughter's boyfriend, and he invites Georges to come watch him fight, as well as to use the familiar "tu" with him, but Georges doesn't do either.

Muir has put off till tomorrow reporting the purse-snatching that happened after she bought an expensive pair of shoes. Georges looks up Marguerite and has her phone number and address, but can't bring himself to call her.
Georges and Marguerite wind up stalking each other, and the police become involved to call Georges off.

One can see how this could be a quirky, amusing novel, and the innumerable missteps, oversteps, and hesitations would work well verbally. This kind of convoluted mental quirkiness is hard to translate, which is why idiosyncratic literary masterpieces like Sterne's Tristram Shandy have defied the impulse to adapt them cinematically, though Michael Winterbottom made a sporting try (shown in the 2005 NYFF and reviewed (http://www.filmwurld.com/articles/features/nyff05/tristramshandy.htm) by me here). Resnais' task is to find a visual equivalent. The highly mobile camera of Eric Gautier is a considerable asset. On the other hand the jazzy music of Hollywood composer Mark Snow is sometimes merely obtrusive, as at a family gathering where the sax pointlessly overwhelms the scene. But on the other hand it's warm and enveloping in an old-fashioned way in the opening sequences when the two main characters are introduced and we're meant to be charmed and drawn in, and we are.

Resnais and Gailly did not collaborate, at Gaillys' request; he wanted to be left alone to work on his next novel. One of the ways Resnais portrays confused intentions is to show cameos of imagined actions in frames where the character is doing something else; and anoher is that most obvious interjection of the literary into the cinematic, the use of frequent voiceovers. The production is expensive for a French art film, involving fairly lavish sets and scenes involving small airplanes. One of the links between Georges is that his father wanted to be a pilot and he loves aviation, while Marguerite actually has a pilot's license.

Though Assistant Director Christophe Jeauffroy may have done a lot of the work for the aging master, there are many of the latter's familiar touches, including a lot of rapid cutting early on that recalls his 1963 Muriel ou Le temps d'un retour. A director but not a writer whose early fame was due to adaptations of Marguerite Duras (Hiroshima mon amour) and Alain Robbe-Grillet (Last Year at Marienbad), which represent totally opposed sensibilities Resnais here tries on yet another one. The result is far more conventional than those Sixties films, and on the glossy and mainstream side, veering between farce and melodrama. Wild Grass is full of assurance, and engages from the start. It may disappoint viewers in search of something more profound, more meditative, or funnier, but it's still a work of considerable accomplishment and doubtless may reward repeat viewings by devotees.

Shown as an official selection of the NYFF 2009 at Lincoln Center as the opening night film. Sony Pictures Classics is the US distributor. The NYFF opening night showing is the US premiere, but it showed at Toronto two weeks earlier.

[Chris Knipp]

SABU: KANIKOSEN (2009)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/crab.jpg
STILL FROM KANIKOSEN

A proletarian novel of the Twenties turned manga turns film tragi-comedy

Mark Schilling writing (http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/ff20090710a1.html) in the Japan Times of July 10, 2009, asks: "Why does a novel about exploited workers on a crab cannery boat, published 80 years ago by a young communist writer, later tortured to death by the police, become a hot movie property now?" Well, he explains, last year a store poster based on a proletarian novel became a sensation in Japan -- maybe because the declining middle class arouses class war feelings? -- and somebody adapted the book into a film. Takiji Kobayashi was the author, killed for his advocacy of communism, and his book, whose title literally means "Crab Factory Ship," was originally published in 1929. More details about the book can be found in an article (http://www.seekjapan.jp/article/1638/Kanikosen:++a+proletarian+literature+classic+comes +back+to+life) on "seekjapan.jp" by Matthew Ward, where the poster is also reproduced. It's a comic-book style drawing of the revolting cannery workers. There are manga versions of this book.

The original novel, by reports, is a doctrinaire dramatization of a workers' revolt. The ship-cannery is a hellish place. The workers are anonymous, often alcoholic and violent. They have families they want to bring back money to, but the pittance they receive goes to gambling or drink. Their life is a kind of slavery. They work near Russia, and when two escape, they get onto a Russian boat and find the workers, whose foreman treats them as equals, are happy. They decide that the idea of competing like ants to outdo Russia and serve the Japanese Emperor is nonsense and they bring back the communist message to their ship. The theme may sound like simplistic agitprop, but the book's lasting importance is signaled by the fact that it has been translated into English by the great Japanese scholar Donald Keene.

But in transforming the story to film Sabu (perhaps inspired partly by the colorful manga versions?) has produced something more tongue-in-cheek than the original, as Mark Schilling explains, making it "into a stagy, ironic postmodern statement that puts air quotes around its characters' righteous anger, while blithely tossing in anachronisms (such as present-day language, T-shirts and a battery-powered bullhorn)."

This is true, though the anachronisms are less prominent than Schilling implies, and the ironies don't prevent the characters' plight from being touching--even as the drama ripples with comic moments. When initially the lower-depths workers attempt mass suicide by hanging, thinking they'll be reborn as whatever nice life they've thought of at the moment of death, and they merely fall on the floor choking in a heap, the tone of tragic-comedy is set. Some of the young actors are quite handsome and appealing.

Matthew Ward actually worked on a fish-processing ship off the Alaskan coast in his younger days and points out that in his experience, which he attests was hellish, the violence was all among the workers. In Kamikosen, it is done by the brutal foreman on the workers; and the captain of the ship is a wimp who does whatever the foreman wants.

The movie has an intricate set that in part evokes Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times with its giant wheels pushed by exhausted sweaty men, and a cave-like network of tubes in which the men sleep: that set may remind viewers of Akira Kurosawa's stark film of Maxim Gorky's The Lower Depths . The fishermen are always in long shiny mackinaws. The scene on board the Russian boat consists of a comical man explaining things in bad Japanese to the escapees, and joyous Cossack dancing in which they happily join.

On their return the revolt turns dark and brutal, and the film blends its tragi-comedy with elements of horror. It all goes on a little too long, and Kanikosen is a cultural phenomenon of more significance in its original Japanese context than in the larger world. Nonetheless for its mixed genre, its curious blend of appealing pathos and comedy, and its surprisingly strong leftist message, this film may not make it beyond the festival circuit, but is still a pretty good watch and a fairly unique experience.

Sabu (Hiroyuki Tanaka, according to IMDb) has already directed five or six films. The direction is competent, the staging ingenious, and the acting, especially by Ryuhei Matsuda as Shinju, the revolt leader, engaging. Hidetoshi Nishijima is suitably reptilian as the foreman, a delicate, epicene sadist rather than a rough bully.

An official selection of the New York Film Festival 2009.

The director So Yamamura filmed a version of 'Kanikosen' in 1953.

[Chris Knipp]

ZHAO DAYONG: GHOST TOWN (2009)

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A slow ramble through a Yunnan squatter village

This DV documentary, the Chinese entry into the NYFF, has so far flown below the radar. Scott Foundas, of the NYFF selection committee, has commented that Zhao Dayong seems like another Jia Zhang-ke.

Jia's work, certainly outstanding for his generation of Chinese filmmakers, has not been uniformly excellent, but it's an overstatement to link this overlong, unselective filming with such perceptive auteur film-making as Jia's -- though they have a common subject: the ravages of modern Chinese "progress."

Ghost Town is a bit of a misnomer, to begin with. A ghost town is usually empty. This one, high up in the Yunnam mountains in a region of considerably physical beauty, isn't void of people, just cut off from the mainstream of booming Chinese capitalism, and one of the people filmed predicts that in a couple of years the remaining population will probably be expelled because they live on property owned by the state.

The website (http://www.cidfa.com/modules/project.php?aid=42) "Chinese Independent Documentary Film Archive describes Zhang's subject matter better than I can (and the whole web page sets it in the context of a general documentary project):
Zhiziluo is a ghost town full of life. Lisu and Nu minority villagers squat in the abandoned halls of this remote former communist county seat, where Cultural Revolution slogans fade into the shadows of the old city hall, and a blank white figure of Chairman Mao gazes out silently to the wild mountain wilderness of the Salween River Valley in China's southwest Yunnan province.
The film, which runs to nearly three hours, is divided into three parts. Their titles, "Voices," "Recollections," and "Innocence" aren't very descriptive -- a sign of the main failing of the film, that it's simply not organized or structured well enough. The first concerns a Christian minister and his father and focuses on their monologues to the camera about their experiences. The old man was imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution, he explains, under conditions that caused 90% of the prisoners' deaths. His son, who spends some time researching the issue of whether music is forbidden in the Bible, says that his father no longer treats him like a son. He thinks that may be the result of the horrors he suffered.

The second part ostensibly focuses on a young couple whose romance is threatened by the fact that outsiders want to purchase the girl from her parents as a bride, as well as the boy's discontent with his hardscrabble existence as a driver and desire to leave to seek better work, which he eventually does. But though the boy and girl evidently do like each other, there's little evidence of romance or even much time spent together. And Zhao seems too willing to let his camera follow whatever random events come in front of it, from an recalcitrant ox to wandering roosters and dogs across the dirt main street to a town drunk whose mother hates him and whose sister runs an empty-looking restaurant.

The third part concerns a boy who has been abandoned by his father and spends his time fantasizing and playing games.

Clearly Zhang Dayong excels in his patience and ability to gain the confidence of his subjects. His willingness to keep in moments when they talk to him or note the presence of the camera are not unwelcome Brechtian wake-up calls. The subtitles are excellent, not only idiomatic but unusually clear and readable. If you remember the subtitles for Hong Kong movies (even Wong Kar-wai's) in the Eighties, which were ungrammatical and flickering, you will appreciate this. Zhang (not alone in this) is troubled by the way the rapacious march of economic progress in China, following upon the destruction of lives wrought by the Cultural Revolution, is causing cultures to vanish.

The director is quoted as saying, "I wanted to explore the idea of these lost histories and ravaged cultures, and by extension my own cultural identity, by delving into the lives and spirit of the abandoned city." Hopefully he will move on to explore this subject to more effect. The division into three parts this time implies more structure and more focus than the film really has. Randomness has its place, especially in depicting aimless lives. But so does sharp editing.

This official selection of the 2009 New York Film Festival does point into a new direction: contemporary Chinese documentaries. Of course Asian filmmaking in particularly today often involves a lot of documentary elements. Take for example the festival prize-winner, Liang Ying's 2006 Taking Father Home, which seems very overrated, but is a masterpiece of taut storytelling compared to Ghost Town Anyway, as a piece (http://dgeneratefilms.com/critical-essays/ghost-town-a-new-chapter-for-chinese-cinema-at-the-new-york-film-festival/) on the website of dGenerate, distributors of the film, notes about the inclusion of Zhang Dayong in the 2009 NYFF: :
Zhao's depiction of contemporary China in Ghost Town will provide a stark counterpoint to the Festival's special showcase: a retrospective of classic Chinese films from 1949-1966 to mark the 60th anniversary of the People's Republic of China. (This is the third major retrospective of Chinese cinema to be showcased by the Film Society of Lincoln Center in the last five years, following the NYFF tribute to the Shaw Brothers Studios in 2004, and the FSLC celebration of Chinese cinema's centennial in 2005.)As noted, an official selection of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center for 2009.

[Chris Knipp]

MARCO BELLOCCHIO: VINCERE (2009)

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GIOVANNA MEZZOGIORNO, FILIPPO TIM IN VINCEREI

Mussolini's fascism as seen by a wronged woman

Six years after his intimate reimagining of the Aldo Moro kidnapping that rocked Italy in the Seventies in Buongiorno, notte, Bellocchio has made another haunting and even more sweeping and iconic historical film. Vincere is about Benito Mussolini's secret first wife and son, who were hidden away and both died in insane asylums. Vincere depicts a strange, distorted period in Italian history, and skillfully melds stock footage with recreations, black and white with color (rich in reds, alternating with ashen grays), public tumult with private torment. Visually lush and full of chiaroscuro, Vincere is also a showcase for the talents of Giovanna Mezzogiorno as Ida Dalzer, the woman who met Benito Mussolini when he was the editor of Avanti, an ardent Socialist with strong populist, anti-monarchical, anti-clerical views, who dramatically dares God, if He exists, to strike him down.

Opening sequences alternate between 1907 when Ida first meets Mussolini (Filippo Timi) in Trent, and 1914 in Milan. She is a respectable middle-class woman with a beauty salon. On the eve of WWI, he shifts from pacifist liberal to pro-war rightist. Deathly afraid of ending in mediocrity, he is ravenous for power. Ida intensely supports him whatever his direction, and sells all her possessions, including jewels, furniture, and her business, to support his newspaper. This leads to the founding of the paper "Il Popolo d'Italia," which becomes a fascist rallying-point. The film makes clear that she is madly in love but never mad. It also makes clear that though he declares his love of her and fathers a son named Benito, born just before he goes off to the front, whom he acknowledges, and they evidently marry, he keeps a certain distance.

In WWI Mussolini is wounded in the army and is pleased to be congratulated by the king. When Ida finds him he is being tended in hospital by a new lover, a woman named Rachele (Michela Cescon). This is the last time Ida sees him in person.

As Mussolini rises to power and becomes the dictator known as "Il Duce," linking himself with the ancient Roman emperors and dreaming of world domination, Ida is more and more kept away from him, and appears as a figure on the outskirts of power, at the center only of a sporadic and operatic encounters during which she pleads for recognition and attention, only to be swept aside. She has a marriage certificate but it becomes lost. All her papers are taken. Mussolini remains with Rachele, is married to her, and fathers children by her. He conceals that he was married to Ida.

Ida, who calls herself Ida Mussolini and her son Benito or Benitino Albino Mussolini, is a woman obsessed, whom others urge to move on, but will not give up her pursuit of her idol and the man she believes to be the love of her life. For a while she is put under a kind of house arrest with her sister, then confined in one insane asylum and then another, while her son is taken away and sent to boarding school. She writes letters of protest to everyone, including the king and the pope; this of course only makes her seem crazy, but in a hearing it's evident that she is tragically obsessed, but lucid, and in fact she is never declared insane. A psychiatrist (Corrado Invernizzi) vows to help her, but she is taken elsewhere before he can do so.

The film is rife with operatic passages featuring bright lights, dark shadows, violent storms and heavy rainfall, and yet retains its own kind of lucidity; it's clear that the country and not Ida is mad, and Il Duce is the head madman. The most haunting scene shows an actual speech by Mussolini at the height of his power in which the gestures and facial contortions are not only ugly and strange but unmistakably those of a dangerous madman. Cut to the now grown son of Ida, doing an imitation of Mussolini's speechifying and himself appearing genuinely deranged. Records show both mother and son received treatments that were akin to torture, and Ida was incarcerated for eleven years. The son died at the age of 26; Ida Dalser died at 57, 30 years after she first met Mussolini Italy's eventual fascist dictator.

Since the film's protagonist is on the periphery, it makes sense that eventually we know Mussolini only through the newsreels she occasionally sees, which are brilliantly integrated into the film; it's hard to convey how striking and integral these images are. There are also haunting still portraits of Ida, showing her at progressive stages of suffering. The film's sense of pictorialism is augmented by a sense of the visual language of the period, heightened by a scene in which Mussolini is introduced to the Italian Futurists and their paintings, and excellent use is made of Futurist and Fascist graphic design and fonts. The sound track is powerful but muted.

The film in fact is most satisfying visually, and despite Giovanna Mezzogiorno's dedication to her performance as the independent, yet long-suffering woman, there is a lack of three-dimensionality in the characterizations: the figures are monumental but not quite human. The focus becomes a bit distant even on Ida as her torments increase, and there is nothing about the private life of Il Duce. Finally there is not the intimacy Bellocchio achieved in Good Morning, Night, except in the first intimate scenes between the young (still hairy) Benito and Ida. Nonetheless, the effect of the whole film is both sick-making and scary.

Though Bellocchio's style here is operatic, it's a swift-moving, elegant, contemporary kind of opera, and it works.

An IFC film, Vincere, 128 mins., was shown at Cannes, Toronto, Telluride, and reviewed here as part of the New York Film Festival. Metascore 85%.

[Chris Knipp]

DON ARGOTT: THE ART OF THE STEAL (2009)

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DEMONSTRATION IN FRONT OF THE NEW VENUE FOR THE BARNES COLLECTION

A history and a polemic

The Art of the Steal is a documentary that chronicles the long and dramatic struggle for control of the Barnes Foundation, a private collection of Post-Impressionist and early Modern art valued at more than $25 billion.--Film publicity.

Actually, it's $25-$35 billion. The value is really incalculable. Albert C. Barnes (1872-1951) was a Philadelphian of working-class origins who used his fortune from an antiseptic compound called Argyrol to collect: 181 Renoirs, 69 Cezannes, 59 Matisses (including his commissioned, unique, Art of the Dance murals), 46 Picassos, 21 Soutines, 18 Rousseaus, 16 Modiglianis, 11 Degas, 7 Van Goghs, 6 Seurats, 4 Manets and 4 Monets. And these are quality, not just quantity: they include some of the named artists' best works. For Renoir, Cezanne, and Matisse, this collection is unique, and there may be no other private collection of such work of this magnitude.

Barnes was a great collector. He was also famously cranky and opinionated. He deeply and lastingly resented the fat cats of the city of Philadelphia who mocked the work in his collection when it was first shown. He chose to keep the collection away from those Philadelphian fat cats. A friend of the philosopher and educational theorist John Dewey, he built a museum in Merion, Pennsylvania (five miles from Philadelphia) on his own land, a 12-acre Arboretum, and restricted visits, running the Foundation as a teaching institution, which was his main focus in life from the Twenties till his death in a car accident in 1951. The collection was displayed as in a house, arranged with furniture and decorations, in aesthetically pleasing (if rather overly-symmetrical) groupings, rather than in the contemporary museum's open-space, white-wall style.

Barnes' will specified that the collection must never be loaned out or sold. His will put Lincoln University, a small black college, in charge of the collection after his death.

For a long time the Foundation was run by a close follower of the Barnes spirit, Violette de Mazia. But after she died in 1988, gradually, and recently quite rapidly, the will has abrogated, the trust broken. In the Nineties an ambitious man named Richard H. Glanton, who was then in charge of it, loaned the collection to various major venues, including the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, and ending, ironically, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, ostensibly to raise money. More recently a powerful nexus of politicians (the governor and the mayor of Philadelphia), the Annenbergs, the Philidelphia Museum, and rich charitable organizations, mainly the Pew Foundation, have worked not only to get control away from Lincoln University but to move the whole collection to a new building in the city of Philadelphia, where Barnes emphatically did not want his collection to be.

The documentary focuses on and sides with the opposition to this development. There was a court challenge to Judge Ott's decision allowing the move, but he opted not to consider it and the opposition has not appealed this decision.

That's the focus of the film. I confess to somewhat mixed feelings about these complex issues. I grew up in Baltimore, where the Cone sisters gave their extraordinary (if smaller) collection of similar work to the Baltimore Museum of Art in the Fifties, so anyone could look at it. But in those years, it was hard to get to see the Barnes collection, and even after it was opened up (against Barnes' will) it remained out of the way and so I've never seen it. In some sense it seems better that it may now be viewed by a lot of people in Philadelphia. Barnes shouldn't have made a collection of this magnitude so difficult of access. On the other hand, the fat cats have raped Barnes' will and ignored his intentions. It has now been stolen away from its original administrators and all Barnes' wishes have been willfully violated. Two wrongs don't make a right. There was a problem, but this is not the proper resolution.

Emotions run high among the talking heads; most of the principals responsible for the latest, final takeover declined to be interviewed. Biased though this film is, it has law and the rights of collectors on its side. And it reveals some political funny business that would make Michael Moore salivate. It's an ugly picture of art being turned into a battle for power and money and exploited for political luster and tourist potential. Instructive and disturbing.

Shown at the TIFF and an official selection of the NYFF, The Art of the Steal now has a distributor. It has just been picked up by IFC.

[Chris Knipp]

ANDREY KHRZHARNOVSKY: ROOM AND A HALF (2009)

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GRIGORY DITYATKOVSKY AS EXILED POET JOSEPH BRODSKY

Collaged poetic portrait of the exiled poet Joseph Brodsky

This film by 70-year-old Khrzharnovsky, an award-winning animator and documentary filmmaker, his feature debut, is an imaginative exploration of the life of exiled Russian Jewish poet and Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky that wonderfully weaves actual footage and restagings, artfully distressed film in the manner of Guy Madden, color and black and white, animation, dramatized scenes and scenery, childhood, adulthood, and one sentimental but very touching scene between Brodsky and his parents after all have died, sitting in the cramped Soviet era room and a half where Joseph spent his youth and his parents lived out their days. We see the mature Brodsky as an exile in America, dreaming of returning to his homeland (he never actually did). It's all woven together with readings of Brodsky's poetry and prose, recollections of his development, and meditations on the journey back he took only in his imagination.

Some of the early scenes of Brodsky trying to get to second base with girls and sampling jeans and vinyl records are reminiscent of Karen Shakhnazarov's recent film of a Sixties Moscow youth, The Vanished Empire (2008), except that here, with the setting moved to Leningrad, the sequences are more stylized. Before that we see Brodsky as a little boy coddled by parents and exploring his immediate surroundings. Throughout, Alisa Freyndlih and Sergei Yursky are excellent as Brodsky's mother and father.

And as Brodsky grows up he becomes a confident intellectual, declaring his to be the last generation that will truly value culture and extolling the virtues of cigarettes as a wellspring of poetic creativity. He is outspokenly political, and this leads to exile to a remote village. A letter asks for a care package from home of mustard, cheese, and other delicacies, but says that he is fine. After he has been expelled from Russia and become a professor in he USA, first at the University of Michigan, later at colleges on the East Coast, he's seen drinking and partying, and recurrently calling his parents, who in turn are seen struggling with the bureaucracy to get permission to leave Russia to visit him; they never could. There's nothing about Brodsky's American family life. Focus is on his relationship with Russia.

Though a bit long at 130 minutes, Room and a Half is an enchanting work of the imagination and remarkable for its blending of different visual and filming styles and engaging and beautiful animated sequences, often making use of blackbirds and cats. As a portrait of Brodsky, despite the rich actual Brodsky material, it's not to be taken literally, and hence stands more as a study of the theme of the artist in exile. This provides rich material that one would certainly love to show students if one were teaching a course in Brodksy's writing. (He came to the US in 1972 and was naturalize in 1977; died in 1996 at the age of 55.)

The full title is Room and a Half, or a Sentimental Journey to the Homeland; the Russian title, transliterated, is Poltory komnaty ili sentimentalnoe puteshestvie na rodinu .

Shown as an official selection of the New York Film Festival.

[Chris Knipp]

MANOEL DE OLIVEIRA: ECCENTRICITIES OF A BLOND HAIR GIRL (2009)

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Old-fashioned storytelling, stylish but odd

This measured-paced tale (Singularidades de uma Rapariga Loura) by the Portuguese master, who's now over 100 years old, is from a short story by 19th-century 'realist' Eca de Queiroz. In De Oliveira's treatment, the story gains a surreal feeling and its basic structure makes it seem rather like a fairy-tale or fable. In the frame setting, the protagonist, Macario (Ricardo Trepa) sits next to an elegant middle-aged lady (Leonor Silveira) on a train to Algarve and tells her he's unhappy, and that he'll tell her why. She's all ears, and the tale unfolds.

In Lisbon, Macario had an orderly, somewhat pampered existence, living with his uncle Francisco (Diogo Darria) and working as the accountant upstairs above the uncle's attached textile business.

And then one day Macario sees a beautiful blond woman in the window opposite, waving a Chinese fan, and he falls hopelessly in love with her. She is Luisa (Catarina Wallerstein), and she lives with her mother (Julia Buisel). Macario goes to some trouble to be introduced to Luisa, and is tongue-tied, but she immediately responds and takes him in tow.

Very shortly Macario asks Tio Francisco's permission to marry. But his uncle refuses point blank. Macario says he'll marry anyway. "Then you're fired," Francisco says, "and get out of my house. Now." The hero moves to a tiny room and soon runs out of money, unable to get a job with anyone he knows, because they don't want to displease his uncle. Macario seizes an opportunity to go and work in the Cape Verde islands and comes back with a fortune. Luisa has waited for him, but his generosity to a friend causes him to be duped and he loses his whole Cape Verde nest egg. Though his uncle reverses his positions and asks him back, a desire for independence forces Macario back to the islands for another lucrative stint. But after all this he ends by discovering Luisa was not worthy of him in the first place.

The film-making here is elegant and beautiful, and the abruptness and cruelty of events call to mind Patrice Chereau's stunning 19th-century tale Gabrielle (2005) -- which, however, has far more emotional power, richer mise-en-scene, and more three-dimensional characters.

We are clearly in the Old Europe in Eccentricities, with its old-fashioned interiors, spacious, geometrical street scenes and big windows with well-lit views. One particularly lovely shot shows a large mirror with a stairway and rooms behind it, all suffused in a golden light. The simplicity and austerity of the film are enhanced by having no music, except for a harp played at a chamber concert at the home of a wealthy man (a scene again somewhat reminiscent of Gabrielle).

The word "eccentricities" is ironic, but the film has its own eccentricities, since the action has a distinct 19th-century quality but prices are in euros and clothes and accoutrements are 21st-century (if not obtrusively so). Also strange is much of the behavior; motivations are never clear. Why does Macario fall in love so fast? Why is he in his uncle's charge? Why does his uncle refuse -- but later reverse himself? Nothing is revealed about Luisa, except for her superficial appeal and coquettish allure. Her perpetual Chinese fan makes her more a symbol or a motif than a real young woman. All of this might make more sense if set more distinctly in the period of the writer, but it is still stylized storytelling, rather than Zola-esque 19th-century realism. What does it mean then to say Eca de Queiroz was a 'realist' writer? Though fascinating for its composure and elegance, the film seems largely a curiosity.

[Chris Knipp]

JOAO PEDRO RODRIGUES: TO DIE AS A MAN (2009)

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FERNANDO SANTOS AS TONIA

Dogs, aquariums, killer sons, druggie lovers, and a sex change

You can't help thinking there's a good movie here somewhere. But things get out of hand from the start. Two young soldiers on maneuvers in camouflage outfits have anal sex in the woods. It's too dark to see which is which, but shortly afterward one shoots the other dead, apparently in an extreme form of homosexual panic. That's before the opening titles. But it's a plotline that's largely dropped.

Morrer Como Um Homem, a film from Portugal, is a bizarre patchwork of scenes, some of which resort to spins or whiteouts or extreme blue or red filters, and it doesn't need to do all this, because its account of a would-be transsexual who lives with a young drug addict and shelters her assassin son is quite bizarre enough. And ought to be interesting. And as the drag queen, Tonia, Fernando Santos is watchable. But the 138-minute running time makes this quite another kind of drag. You could easily excise 30 or 40 minutes; but the story line would still ramble too much.

A drag queen who's getting too old and is asked to leave the show. Haven't we seen that before somewhere? That's Tonia. She has competition from a younger black performer, Jenny (Jenni La Rue). That sounds familiar too. The hesitating to get the sex change operation: done. The young druggie lover: done. The haughty ex-drag star met by chance who struts her stuff, reciting German poetry: done.

But despite the familiarity of themes, there's life here. Drag queens are so camera-ready. And Rodriguez has a gift for odd or arresting moments, like the switch blade snapping into a transparent shower curtain, a chicken bone and a high-heeled shoe dropped into the aquarium, a man committing suicide on the beach seen only from behind. There is a welcome willingness to experiment and take risks. Despite the camera tricks being out-there campy, the visuals are generally very nice. Only director Rodrigues keeps killing things by stopping the action for a lengthy song or musical number, or going off on some new tangent and losing the momentum. Or sinking into subject matter that seems too derivative.

I lied: the killer soldier theme isn't completely dropped. He lies waiting for Tonia in her house one night, and turns out to be her long-lost son Ze Maria (Chandra Malatitch). Tonia agrees to hide Ze Maria, who destroys her aquarium. But she's more interested in helping her young boyfriend Rosario (Alexander David, who's pretty convincing) stay off drugs. And more than that, she's interested in her little dog.

One or two moments that have nothig to do with AIDS, or Christianity, or sexuality, like the time when Tonia and Rosario wander in a woods and find wild forget-me-nots, seem more natural than anything else. It is possible to care about these people. And wish they were in a better movie.

This will play well to the some specialized LGBT cinema audiences. Jason Anderson of Eye Weekly speaks of "searing melodrama with great moments of formal audacity" and says that Rodrigues' "three features to date are throwbacks to a far more radical era for queer cinema and To Die Like a Man is no less extraordinary than its predecessors."*

Shown as a part of the main slate of the New York Film Festival 2009. In October 2010 Strand Releasing announced that it will open in spring 2011 in US theaters. Strand also says the film is Portugal’s Official Selection for Best Foreign Language Film in the Academy Awards, 2010 (83rd).

___________________

*Sympathetic Cinema Scope article (http://www.cinema-scope.com/cs39/spot_lim_rodrigues.html) on the film and Rodrigues' work by Dennis Lim and an interview with Rodrigues.

[Chris Knipp]

LARS VON TRIER: ANTICHRIST (2009)

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Authentic horror? Stunner from Lars

It's been said (and he confirms) that the Danish cinematic provocateur and master always makes essentially the same film, but Von Trier's Antichrist differs from the others in various ways. It has only two characters, a husband (Willem Dafoe) and wife (Charlotte Gainsbourg). As he tells it, Antichrist was his way of finding out, in the wake of the first severe depression of his life, whether he even had the strength to make another film. If he had less control than usual, he counted himself lucky to be able to work. And he was pleased with the result, which he declares to be more instinctive and less calculated than previous efforts. Another new thing is that the cinematography by Anthony Dod Mantle has a glossy, non-Dogme look. And the whole film reads, partly anyway, as coming from a new genre he hasn't played with before: it's a very arty -- psychological and philosophical -- horror movie.

The title "came early," but what it means other than to allude to the fact that von Trier does not believe in God, is uncertain; he insists that Nietzsche's Antichrist has been on his bedside table for 40 years but he has never read it. He points rather to his debt to Strindberg, whose combative couples fascinated him early on. And this is a combative couple, that's for sure.

Also unusual is a Prologue in black and white and slow motion accompanied by a baroque aria, Handel's "Lascio ch'io pianga" ("Let me weep"), during which the couple has sex. Their little boy, Nic, escapes from his crib, opens the door and sees them making love, then walks over to a window and falls out and is killed. Four chapters follow, Grief, Pain (Chaos Reigns), Despair (Gynocide), and The Three Beggars; then an Epilogue. The action takes place in the Pacific Northwest (though it was shot in Europe).

Much of the story is about dominance and submission. The man is a psychotherapist. His wife collapses at the funeral and is hospitalized and sleeps for a long time. The man can't accept the doctor's methods, his use of medications, and insists, against professional principles, on treating his own wife. He takes her through a series of "treatments" that von Trier may think of as forms of "cognitive therapy," but the methodology is fanciful and erratic. At her urging they resort to sex to ease her suffering, which he thinks a bad idea.

Her grief continues, but turns to fear. He persuades her to pinpoint her fear, and its locus seems to be the outdoor, grassy part of a summer cottage in the woods that they call "Eden" where in the year before she was with Nic working alone on a thesis about gynocide, a history of the oppression and killing of women.

In a discussion of this, she tells him she had started to see that women, while wronged by men, contain evil themselves, because they contain nature, and nature embodies evil. The Pain, Despair, and Three Beggars chapters take place out in the woods, where the husband takes his wife, ostensibly to work out her fear and overcome it, in a highly symbolic, beautiful, and terrifying nature in which birthing deer, ravens, a fox, hail, and falling acorns menace and signify. "Nature is Satan's church" is a line the wife speaks, and in some sense the Pacific woods become von Triers' sexual Purgatory and Inferno. Early in the approach to the woods there is a particularly haunting and scary distant shot in extreme slow motion in which the woman is seen crossing a little bridge onto the property where the cabin is, a place that terrifies her.

Despite his persistent voice of reason, it's clear that the husband is something of a sadist and a fool; she says at one point that he was never really interested in her till now, as a patient, an object to toy with. Again they resort to sex as a grim palliative. Eventually she rebels, and takes extreme measures against both her husband and herself. This is where the film swerves toward horror and gore and the masturbation and mutilation that led to boos and walkouts at Cannes. But there were no boos at all and scant walkouts at the Lincoln Center NYFF press and industry screening I watched.

This isn't a film I'm eager to watch again right now but it is perhaps his most beautiful, and one of his strongest, provocations. Obviously there are themes of sexuality, gender roles, dominance and submission, and nature. The apparent (and largely convincing) narrative sequence is partly a ruse. The slo-mo prologue introduces the Primal Scene, but the guilt is the couple's. And the guilt extends to unease about sex itself. The wife assumes it as hers, but may eventually shift the blame to her husband. The child's death may be a pretext for introducing the theme of melancholy, the emotion the director himself was working out of. The action in the woods may seem to result from the husband-therapist's efforts to "cure" his wife of her grief and fear, but turns into an enactment of more primal and inexplicable fears and horrors. In a Q&A conducted long distance via Skype (Lars hates flying; anyway avoids coming to the US) the director seemed extremely candid; but can one really believe him? and also sometimes wicked and playful. He is justifiably grateful to Gainsbourg and Dafoe, who do excellent work. Interestingly, he said the slickness of the images wasn't quite what he had wanted -- the dialogue scenes in particular he'd wanted to have more a "documentary" look to distinguish them from the more symbolic animal and nature scenes -- and he's somewhat apologetic about taking the old device of slow motion photography from the "toy box," but he typically pretested that he was just glad he'd been able to make a film. And so should we be.

Typically, a viewing of a Trier film immediately leads one into lively speculations about what he's up to and how the themes dovetail or conflict. But this time they're particularly well embodied in a host of lush visuals and intense scenes with the actors that are as aesthetically satisfying as they are disturbing, like a panorama by Hieronymus Bosch. Von Trier's problem is that he's so manipulative and intellectual that even his most emotional moments feel too detached and premeditated to be convincing, but to some extent the look and feel of Antichrist allow it to escape that pitfall. In any case according to his own account his mental state made this film less calculating than previous ones and more instinctive and drawn from dreams.

Shown at Cannes, Toronto, and other festivals, seen as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center 2009. IFC will distribute it. Gainsbourg got the Best Actress prize at Cannes, and von Trier was nominated for Best Director there.

[Chris Knipp]

SAMUEL MAOZ: LEBANON (2009)

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MICHAEL MOSHONOV

Visceral, but not the "best" of the Israel Lebanese war films

In the Variety review (http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117940974.html?categoryid=31&cs=1) Derek Elley writes:
Visceral, torn-from-the-memory filmmaking that packs every punch except one to the heart, "Lebanon" is the boldest and best of the recent mini-wave of Israeli pics ("Beaufort," "Waltz With Bashir") set during conflicts between the two countries. Ironically, writer-director Samuel Maoz's pic, 99.9% of which is set within an Israeli tank, actually has the least to do with Lebanon per se. The film is based on Maoz's own experience in the tank corps, the "proletariat" of the army, as he puts it, combined with an incident he knew about in which an Israeli tank got lost in a dangerous Syrian-controlled area.

"Viscceral" and "torn-from-memory" Lebanon definitely is, and it does pack "every punch except one to the heart." Why is that? Perhaps because the four young men and the others whom we encounter in the tank appear as the operation begins; it all takes place in a few hours, and there is no time to provide back-stories for trigger-shy rookie gunner Shmulik (Yuav Donat), crew leader Assi (Itay Tiran), obstreperous gun loader Hertzel (Oshri Cohen) and terrified driver Yigal (Michael Moshonov), the crew; mean outside commander Jamil (Zohar Staruss); or their exhausted Syrian captive (Dudu Tassa); and the several others.

The film presents a concentrated and specific indictment of war through presenting innocent and unwilling young men who are unquestionably brave under fire, but doomed through ill fortune and inexperience in a dicey and deteriorating situation. Such an anti-war arc is more effectively used in Bernard Wicki's extraordinary 1959 German anti-war film Die Brucke, also about a doomed squad of young men. The difference is that a large early segment of Die Brucke is devoted to exploring the lives of each young man of an underage German late-WWII squad in detail before they come together, so we know very well who they all are and where they come from as one by one they meet their tragic fate. The effect is devastating in a way that the entrapment of a group of appealing but somewhat generic young Israelis can't quite be. The young actors are vivid and believable, though some of Maoz's writing, despite his personal experience (25 years ago) in the 1982 war, falls prey to cliches of the oversensitive rookie, the brusque superior officer, the insistence of bodily needs, and so on. A lot of the dialogue seems stagy, even though this staging trumps anything you could do in a theater.

Lebanon is nonetheless a superb piece of filmmaking and no mere tour de force, because it all takes place within a tank, but DP Giora Bejach, as Maoz puts it, was "two photographers," depicting the events inside but also shooting through the tank's sights so we see the world outside as the crew sees it, including several devastating scenes in which Lebanese civilians are ravaged, humiliated and killed -- in particular a mother (Raymonde Ansellem) keening over her dead little daughter whose dress catches fire, leaving her naked. This is far more shocking than any of the provocations in Lars von Trier's Antichrist, which seem contrived and calculated in comparison. Lebanon is very fine in its resolution of the problem of the claustrophobic setting.

The film exposes the Israeli violation of international law. The tank crew is told that a town has been bombed, and their job is to accompany troops who are going in to wipe out anyone left alive in it. The commander repeatedly orders the bomber to use white phosphorus bombs, but says they're illegal so they will call them "flaming smoke."

Action in the tank is specific and compelling. These guys are little more than boys. The newest member is the gunner. He admits he's shot only at "barrels" before this, and when the time comes to shoot, he can't pull the trigger, with disastrous results. What happens when you're in a tank and can't leave it, but it becomes disabled in enemy territory? In Lebanon you find out.

Nonetheless I differ with Mr. Elley's view that this film is superior to Beaufort and Waltz with Bashir, both of which provide a larger context on the war; the "visceral" vividness of the young men's experience doesn't compensate for this lack. On the other hand, despite the events' realistic "grunt's"-eye view of war, in which mysterious orders have to be clumsily obeyed without understanding the scheme of things, it's absurd and insensitive to say the film "has the least to do with Lebanon per se," and "The story could be set in any tank, any country." Mr. Elley seems to have forgotten about the Lebanese civilians as well as Arabic-speaking "terrorists" (the IDF term for the enemy) who are very vividly seen in this film, and not in the two others, both of which, however, are excellent films. They're all good, and all have severe shortcomings as views of the Lebanese war.

Maoz won the Golden Lion in Venice for this directorial debut. Sony will distribute the film in the US. Seen as a part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center 2009.

[Chris Knipp]

ANDRZEJ WAJDA: SWEET RUSH (2009)

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WAJDA DIRECTS SZAJDA AND JANDA

Two stories and a memory and a tribute

Famous since the Fifties when he made Kanal and Ashes and Diamonds, 83-year-old filmmaker Andrzej Wajda has made two complex films in the past two years; the previous being the 2007 historical film Katyn, about the repressed slaughter of Polish officers by the Russians. Here he has combined four elements. "Tatarak" ("Sweet Rush") is a postwar story by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz about a mature woman who becomes involved with a simple, sexy young man, and Wajda augments it by combining it with another story about a women whose doctor husband discovers as summer approaches that she has a terminal illness, but doesn't tell her.

Marta, the woman (who becomes the protagonist of both stories) is played by the great Polish actress Krystina Janda. But at the time the film was to be shot, Janda was grieving over the recent death of her own husband of a sudden, terminal illness. He was Edward Klosinksi, a d.p. responsible for the cinematography of two well-known films, Man of Marble and Man of Iron," both directed by Wajda and starring Janda. Wajda weaves together fiction and real life, interspersing scenes of Marta's life with her doctor husband (Jan Englert) and her encounter with the young man, Bogus (Pawel Szajda), with Krystina Janda's actual recollections of her husband's last days, spoken dramatically in a darkened room looking away from an unmoving camera. There are also brief sequences in which the camera draws back to show a filmmaking crew, so that the line between fiction and meta-fiction blurs.

The layered but rather slow-paced tale is mostly of value for Janda's fine performance. This is a showcase for her art, a tribute to her and her long relationship with the director, also indirectly a tribute to Janda's late husband, as well as to the notable Polish writer Jaraslaw Iwaszkiewicz, whom Wajda has long wanted to celebrate through an adaptation. "Sweet rush" (tatarat) is a tall marsh grass with several scents -- redolent of fresh life, but when pressed deeply, giving off the smell of death -- and it's used for Pentecost as a celebration of the coming of summer. To impress or please Marta, with whom he (rather too quickly, in the film) has developed a lively, warm May-December relationship, Bogus dives into the water and grabs a lot of it when a tragic accident happens. This is the most vivid and troubling moment of the film.

Marta's husband has pointed out to her that death can come at any time, and a reminder of that is the bedroom of the couple's two young sons who died years ago during the war, which is kept locked. Marta has been living in the past, longing for the more blissful prewar period, when Bogus suddenly comes along to make her focus on the present just when, unbeknownst to her, her own days are numbered.

The filmmaking segments don't quite work, and the monologue by Janda, however interesting in itself, isn't integral to the two intertwined short stories by Iwaszkiewicz, which would work quite well on their own. Wajda seems to be trying to do too much with this "portmanteau" film, but Sweet Rush is a fascinating document of a master filmmaker, which not only has interesting camerawork, good acting, and luminous lighting, but a few memorable scenes.

Shown as an official selection of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, 2009.

[Chris Knipp]

MAREN ADE: EVERYONE ELSE (2009)

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BIRGIT MINICHMAYR, LARS EIDINGER IN EVERYONE ELSE

Couples therapy

German director Ade's All the Others (Alle Anderen) is very much a women's picture (in the most positive sense). Her story might be the kind Jane Austen would write if she lived today, when a young couple must learn about each other by living together -- but with the old problem of weighing themselves and their values against other people's and theirs. Ade focuses on the relationship between a young architect and his publicity agent girlfriend as they think about how to be together as a couple while spending the summer at his parents' villa on the island of Sardinia. Wonderfully natural acting by the two principals as well as action that shows off the mercurial twists in man-woman roles through day-to-day events make this film continually interesting to watch even though it lacks big dramatic payoffs. But when the calibration is subtle, as with Jane Austen, little matters like buying a dress or deciding what to carry on a hike become matters from which much is to be learned. But what's unlike Austen's world is that man and woman are playing with roles, and there are no fixed rules.

Gitti (Birgit Minichmayr) and Chris (Lars Eidinger) seem to have a lot of fun together. Gitti shows her eccentricity when she tells the little daughter of visiting friends to be up front if she doesn't like her. She even lets the girl pretend to shoot her, then does a mock death and falls into the pool. Chris seems a little insecure about himself; his talent as an architect has yet to pay off; he's uncertain about a competition he's entered, and Gitti is worried that he's a little wimpy. Perhaps to be more assertive, he insists they spend time with his fellow architect Hans (Hans-Jochen Wagner) and pregnant wife Sana (Nicole Marischka), whom he'd initially avoided, switching gears and now considering them as role models. Eventually Chris acknowledges this wasn't such a good idea; that he and Gitti are happier and better off being who they are. Though there's a somewhat failed hiking expedition, and Chris (off-camera) meets with a promising local client and his future suddenly brightens up, it's primarily the couple's weighing themselves against the seemingly more fortunate pair that embodies the film's life lesson.

The quirky redhead Gitti, given to fits of laughing, has insecurities too. She doesn't like it when she asks Chris if he loves her and he answers only by kissing her. She's continually afraid he may stop loving her. Both of them in fact are in love and grateful that they ever met. This is unusual in being about a happy couple, who are not headed toward tragedy or betrayal or other dramas. But the screenplay is nothing if not proof that "happy" isn't any more a fixed reality than "confident" or "grown-up."

There isn't much more to the action than that, but it's all in the details as Ade spins out one scene after another in which Eidinger and Minichmayr run through a range of emotions together.

Some male viewers of this two-hour film find it self-indulgent and interminable. There's lilttle doubt that the second evening spent with Hans and Sana doesn't have to be allowed to run so long to make clear they're bores, and the film could have done with some trimming. It also seems that Gitti's moodiness is allowed to go too far; you begin to wonder if she may need help. However when one thinks of how natural and real the two actors are throughout, it's impossible not to conclude that Ade is doing something right, and has trod familiar paths but avoided cliche. She just needs to develop more faith in the value of the cutting room.

Seen as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center 2009. Awarded the Silver Bear at Berlin this year and Minichmayr won Best Actress.

[Chris Knipp]

BRUNO DUMONT: HADEWIJCH (2009)

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JULIE SOKOLOWSKI IS HADEWIJCH (CELINE)-Indiewire

Tha Fatiha and the Lord's Prayer, side by side

Dumont, who has dealt most successfully with brutish country people in Bailleul, the bleak part of northern France he comes from, makes some big changes here. He focuses on a religion-obsessed girl from an upper-class Paris background who gets mixed up with Muslim Arabs from the projects (banlieue), and an ex-con. The focus is on religion and activism, and on love of God carried too far.

As the film begins the 20-year-old Hadewijch (Julie Sokolowski), not yet fully invested as a nun, is asked to leave the convent because she is excessive. She refuses to eat and stands out in the cold and rain without a coat. The sisters find she is confusing abstinence with martyrdom. Her concept of being the "bride of Christ" is also too literal, and is to remain so. She goes back to being Celine and living with her father, a government minister, on the Ile St. Louis, in a palatial residence in the most elegant part of Paris.

But she quickly befriends unemployed, untrained ghetto boy Yassine (Yassine Salime), who tries to pick her up in a local cafe. Yassine, a rather sweet little guy, is a bit of an oddball himself. He steals an expensive motorcycle and races around town with her on the back running red lights because he doesn't like the way the owner of the bike looked at him. She fails to respond to his taste in music, a kind of punk-meets-Satie band by the Seine, and goes by herself to a baroque concert in a church. But Yassine accepts that Celine considers herself the bride of Christ and wants to remain a virgin: they agree to be friends, and after he's dined with her remote, clueless father and mother on the Ile St. Louis and stolen the bike, he takes her to his home on the outskirts to meet his brother, David (Karl Sarafidis), a devout Muslim who does his own backstreet religious teaching.

David invites Celine to a class he gives about the concept of "the invisible" ("al-ghayb") in Islam, but she flees when a strapping young Arab eyes her hungrily in the class. David follows her to discuss this, and they become friends. Eventually David convinces Celine to consider "action" and even the necessity of violence as a focus for her troubled sense that God is not present despite her passion for Christ. She goes with him to visit the West Bank, or somewhere like it, such as Lebanon (where the sequence was shot) where her decision is translated into Arabic and she's welcomed by radicals. Back in Paris, she's present at an explosion.

Later Celine is back at the nunnery, when, in a dreamlike sequence, she flees the police and walks into a stream where she's embraced by the young ex-con.

Dumont works, as anyone who follows such things knows, outside any mainstream of French filmmaking ("self-taught," some say) and is the subject of controversy, despite winning two grand prizes at Cannes and expressing a continuing desire to win a wider audience. This film had its premiere however at Toronto and doesn't open in France till November 25th.

In an essay (http://cinema-scope.com/wordpress/?page_id=1001) for Cinema Scope, Scott Foundas says this film is "in part, a continuation of [Bruno Dumont's] career-encompassing study in the origins and varieties of human violence," but we note that there is no cruelty, and no sex, bestial or otherwise. Several writers (such as the skeptical Variety (http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117941038.html?categoryid=31&cs=1) reviewer) have been troubled by the somewhat extraneous way the con (eventually ex-; David Dewaele) is threaded through the film only to appear as a workman at the convent and then in the final faintly redemptive moment.

Another question is why either a young Muslim teacher or what may be "terrorists" in the Middle East would be interested in the passion of a wayward Christian nun, though Elley of Variety considers the discussions between Nassir and Celine the most touching scenes in the film. What one can agree on is that the filming is intense and beautiful and full of Dumont's typically memorable awkwardness, the blue-tinged images heightening Celine/Hadewijch's pallor. Her face has the luminosity of some saint in a medieval panel. As before in Dumont, the non-actors are arresting and convincing, the scenes, odd and sui generis, are fresh and thought-provoking, but this for me was not as gripping or as emotionally intense a film as Dumont's previous Flandres (http://www.filmwurld.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&postid=16917#post16917), though there is a new sweetness about it that's welcome, even as it comes with provocative hints that ecstatic Christianity and violent jihad are cousins.

Seen as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, 2009. A few weeks earlier, Hadewijch won the FIPRESCI Special Presentation Prize at Toronto, where it was the opening film. It has been picked up by IFC. Also included in the SFIFF and shown May 5 and 6, 2010.

[Chris Knipp]

CORNELIU PORUMBOLIU: POLICE, ADJECTIVE (2009)

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DRAGOS BUCOR IN POLICE, ADJECTIVE

Realism and didacticism in the new Romanian cinema

Young director Porumboliu, whose 2007 12:08 East of Bucharest has been much admired, is having fun here, but the audience may not be. The rigor with which Politist, Adj. explores a minor moral issue in terms of definitions and uses of words may be interesting, but the emphasis on the dullest aspects of police work leave one numbed. This is a film that makes you realize why Hollywood makes police procedurals the way they do. Paint takes a long time to dry. We don't have to watch the whole process.

The virtually real-time narrative follows young undercover cop Cristi (Dragos Bucur) in the little Romanian town of Vasliu on a surveillance of a teenage student, Viktor (Radu Costin) who's known as a pot user. His superior Nelu (Ion Stoica) wants to arrest the boy. Cristi would prefer to wait and find the dealer, and feels arresting Viktor will ruin the kid's life for nothing, especially since European trends toward decriminalization of marijuana suggest that soon this won't be illegal in Romania either.

Cristi's recently married to Anca (Irina Saulescu), a schoolteacher, and his encounters with her at home consist mainly of debates about word use and grammar. Since Porumboliu shows two of Cristi's surveillance reports in their handwritten form so we can read through them word for word, he's obviously interested in how police work is partly shaped by a sense of how it will be mapped out in words for superiors to peruse.

Porumboliu likes following the (perhaps Asian-influenced) fixed-camera approach. This is realistic enough in following a surveillance, and a lot of Crist's time is spend standing around waiting. It's firmly emphasized that even to get reports from other parts of police HQ he must wait and haggle over delivery times. A young woman who has access to files wants to leave early to see her boyfriend. Another who deals with ID photos is busy and resents being rushed. The film is definitely accurate and realistic in depicting low-level police work. Cristi is dogged and patient; he has to be.

One scene that calls much attention to itself shows Cristi eating a dinner Anca has prepared in front of the fixed camera while Anca sits behind a wall, watching her computer and listening to an inane love song that they then debate. The restrained irony of the scene is subsumed in a sense that life is a matter of drudgery and dry debates. In the two scenes between Cristi and Anca, it's all about words.

When he's told repeatedly that he must carry out a "sting operation" (perhaps not the right term?), that is, set up a police arrest with backup, hidden cameras, and well-planned logistics, Cristi refuses point-blank. That is, until a prolonged session with a colleague and the Captain, Anghelache (Vlad Ivanov, the hard-hearted abortionist of the much-celebrated 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) during which the superior has a Romanian dictionary brought in and orders Cristi to read from it the definitions of "conscience" and "moral" and "law."

Perhaps due to the convincing naturalism of earlier sequences, this somewhat far-fetched scene, the most dramatic, in a sense, of the film, goes unquestioned by the audience, though it seems extremely far-fetched; or, at least, like everything else, drawn out far longer than necessary. One can't help thinking that a good police officer would simply tell Cristi what he has to do and not conduct a class in semantics and etymology. It seems the cops in Vasliu aren't very busy. Word is that a lot of the Romanian gangsters have transferred operations to Italy.

Cristi's desire to avoid arresting a minor teenage drug offender because of anticipated future liberalization of Romanian law understandably doesn't go over with his superiors. In fact his repeated insubordination in word might be expected to call for threats of discipline or expulsion, but such is not the case here. Nor is it clear why the cops don't want to catch a bigger fish. Police, Adjective has its own special point of view that may appeal to some, but for this viewer it is yet another illustration that the widespread anointment of the "new Romanian cinema" as experiencing a "renaissance" is a little premature.

Shown as part of the New York Film Festival 2009 at Lincoln Center. IFC Films has picked it up for US distribution.

[Chris Knipp]

CLAIRE DENIS: WHITE MATERIAL (2009)

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ISABELLE HUPERT

Back to Africa

Denis returns to an undefined African country to explore colonialism and revolution in this film that has more in common with her wonderfully mysterious The Intruder (2004) -- though it's less successful -- than with her warm-hearted family story 35 Shots of Rum (2008).

At the center here too is a family, the Vials, French colonial types who own a coffee plantation, or did own one. And at the center of this family is the scrawny, determined Maria (Isabelle Huppert), as brave as she is heedless. Everything is falling apart, but she simply won't give up -- or even acknowledge that there's any danger.

But here, as in various African countries, government forces are at war with rebels and schools are closing and children are turning into dangerous, thrill-seeking warriors popping pills and wielding pistols, machetes, and spears. The plantation workers are fleeing just at harvest time, and the Vials themselves are warned by a helicopter flying overhead that it's time to get out. The rebel army's missing leader, known as "the boxer" (Isaach de Bankole' of Jarmusch's Limits of Control and of Denis' original Africa film Chocolat) has reappeared, wounded, hiding out in the plantation, which makes it a double target.

The family itself seems to have fallen apart some time ago, though as usual in Denis' films, the relationships and family histories aren't meant to be immediately clear. Maria's ex-father-in-law, Henri (Michel Subor of The Intruder) is mysteriously sick; he seems to know more than the others, but he is powerless; he reigns over nothing -- except that he is the real owner of the plantation. Maria's ex-husband Andre Vial (Christophe Lambert) has a son by a new young black wife, Lucie (Adele Ado). Maria and Andre have an older son, Manuel (Nicolas Duvauchelle), who has turned into a sluggard, and seems deranged. Later after being attacked and humiliated by two black boys (they rob him naked and cut off a lock of his blond hair), he shaves off the rest of his hair, takes a rifle and his mother's motorcycle, and becomes a wild rebel himself.

Meanwhile Andre has made a deal with the wily black mayor (William Nadylam), presumably to get money to escape, and the mayor now owns the plantation, and feels whatever happens he'll be okay because he has his own private army. All the while there are messages over the radio broadcast by a disc jockey playing reggae and saying the rebels are coming. But soldiers in gray uniforms are coming to kill almost everyone, including some of the child soldiers, and some members of the Vial family after Manuel goes over to the rebels.

None of this matters as much as the fact that Maria, a kind of foolish Mother Courage or life force, fights on till the end, even when the new workers she recruits flee, a sheep's head turns up in the coffee beans signifying doom, the power is cut, the gasoline runs out, and family members disappear or are killed. Maria repeatedly says she can't go back to France; to a young black woman she admits it's probably because she can't give up her power. She also says in France she couldn't "show courage." In short, she's useless anywhere else. She has contempt for the fleeing French soldiers, calling them "dirty whites" that never belonged here. This is her element. Unfortunately, her element is disintegrating. "White material," in English, is a phrase used variously by the African locals to denote possessions of the whites and the whites themselves. A child rebel comments that "white material" isn't going to be around much any more.

Denis is good at creating a sense of the many-layered chaos. Her mise-en-scene is vivid and atmospheric. Yet something isn't quite right. The casting feels wrong. Butor is a relic from a better movie, Lambert is unnecessary. Duvauchelle, who has played rebels but determined, disciplined ones, seems out of place with all his tattoos as a youth born in Africa and a good-for-nothing. Nobody can play an indomitable woman better than Isabelle Huppert, but for that very reason it would have been a welcome surprise to see a completely new face in this role.

As Variety reviewer Jay Weissberg notes, the images by the new d.p. Yves Cape are less rich than those of Denis regular Agnes Godard, but may suit the violent action situation better, and the delicately used music is wonderfully atmospheric. This is definitely a Claire Denis film. What's unique is its sense of foreboding. You feel Maria is somehow bulletproof and yet you also fear that at any moment she'll walk into something she can't get out of.

Still, after the wonderful warmth of 35 Shots of Rum and the haunting complexity of The Intruder, there doesn't seem as much to ponder or to care about here, and even if this is a fresh treatment of familiar material, it's a bit of a disappointment. From another director it might seem impressive and exceptionally original, but from Denis, is seems to lack something, some more intense scenes, some grand finale.

Shown as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center 2009.

[Chris Knipp]

JACQUES RIVETTE: AROUND A SMALL MOUNTAIN (2009)

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JANE BIRKIN, SERGIO CASTELLITTO

Intervention and redemption in a traveling circus

Being far from an expert on the French master Jacques Rivette, I can do no better than to quote extensively from an essay on this film by the French critic Helene Frappat.
Around a Small Mountain/36 vues du Pic Saint Loup [Frappat writes (http://www.cinemas-de-recherche.com/soutien_fichefilm.asp?id=4003) ] "casts a novel, unprecedented, never seen before" light [un eclairage 'inoui, inedit, jamais donne' jusqu’a maintenant'] on Jacques Rivette's oeuvre. The quote is from Vittorio (Sergio Castellitto), a new, Italian incarnation of of the mysterious character of guide/savior/intercessor whose mission, since Va savoir, consists in releasing a princess from her spell -- in other words, her past or her grief. This gracious princess inconsolably mourning her late love by a graveside (like John Wayne talking to his departed wife in She Wore A Yellow Ribbon), is Jane Birkin.

Having played the ingenue in L'Amour par terre and the great painter's former model in La Belle Noiseuse, Jane Birkin strips bare, in Around a Small Mountain, the enigma of all Rivette's heroines: confined behind the bars of the Rue de Rivoli, in a moment of distraction snatched from the film's Cevennes mountains, she brings to mind Anna Karina, imprisoned in a convent in La Religieuse, haunted by a mistake she didn't make her heart aches like Sandrine Bonnaire's in Secret Defense; madly in love with a ghost, like Pauline (Bulle Ogier) in Out 1, she moves like a tightrope walker in an intermediate state between life and death similar to the coma from which Louise (Marianne Denicourt) emerges at the start of Haut Bas Fragile.

Yet Around a Small Mountain introduces a novel space-time that changes the rules of the game: the circus. Despite appearances, the circus is not the continuation of theater by other means. Jacques Rivette makes it a synthesis: it's a magic circle of light, surrounded by banks of empty seats, occupied after nightfall by whispering ghosts closed in by crinkled walls of blue canvas.

Since Paris nous appartient, the theater has constituted an acid test for Rivette's heroines, each novice actor becoming herself through the words of someone else : her role. For the traps of theatrical language, the circus substitutes clown's masks and acrobats' death-defying feats: 'It's the most dangerous place in the world where anything's possible, where eyes are opening and my eyes were opened.' Like Lola Montes, fully aware that she risks her life in the ring, Kate (Jane Birkin) must perform the whip number in order to be excised of her grief. 'I feel like I've had an operation. I'd become used to my sickness, to my grief.' Interpreting Rilke's advice to a young poet, Vittorio, who stages the risky number designed to free Kate of the memory that stops her from living (the tragic death fifteen years earlier of the man she loved), provides one of the keys to the puzzle: 'All the dragons in our lives are perhaps princesses in distress asking to be released.'

In Jacques Rivette's oeuvre, the circus becomes the images of the peril that art compels us to confront in order to release our fears. Unlike the heroines of Haut Bas Fragile who develop 'terrifying games' because 'there's no bigger thrill than fear,' Vittorio, the accidental stage director, gives himself the mission of saving princesses.

In this respect, Around a Small Mountain is an encapsulation or even, to employ an expression rarely used today, poetic art: Jacques Rivette provides his audience with a stunning opportunity, in 84 magical minutes, to experience the existential test to which art (occasionally) raises us.

All it took him was a few blue-dyed clothes floating on the surface of a river, a makeshift table where the fruit stands out like a still life, lovers looking for or dodging each other in the undergrowth, a clown looking us in the eye ('All's well that ends well!') a circus tent framing the trees' green foliage, a full moon over the mountains, watching over our dreams. All is well that ends well: as Jacques Rivette allows us to discover today, 'it's art that makes life' and not the contrary. This is very short for a Rivette film, and its delineation of his themes is correspondingly clear, simple, skeletal -- suited to the simplicity of the little dying circus, whose director has himself recently died, and whose remaining members say this is its last tour. Castellitto's character encounters Birkin's on the road when the vehicle she's driving, which pulls the circus tent, has broken down. He arrives in a shiny German sports car like the deus ex machina that he is -- the present equivalent of Cocteau's motorcycles. Ms. Frappat doesn't mention it, but he falls in love with Kate from then on, and yet, after lingering around the circus for a week or two, he is called on to Spain on business and leaves her. By participating in a reenactment of the dangerous whip trick that had accidentally killed the most important person in her life 15 years earlier, Kate is purged of the lingering sorrow and guilt she has been feeling. She may now presumably return to her Paris occupation of dyeing cloth for designers.

I tend to agree with Variety reviewer Boyd Van Hoeij, that Jane Birkin's performance is more emotionally rich and her character is more rounded than Sergio Castellitto's. Castellitto is a versatile pro, and it's a bit surprising -- perhaps he's over-awed? -- that he doesn't endow Vittorio with more nuance. As Van Hoeij also notes, Rivette uses a lot of improvisation, and potentially the most fun are the clown "numbers", intentionally "threadbare" at the outset, then enriched at Vittorio's presumptuous suggestion in subsequent performances. The artificiality of the film is underlined by the fact that during the circus acts the audience is almost never seen.

The film may provide a kind of skeleton key to Rivette, as Castellitto's quoted remark suggests, and thus may specially appeal to students of his work. On the other hand, it lacks the richness of the director's preceding three films, the 2001 Histoire de Marie et Julien/The Story of Marie and Julien, the 2003 Va savoir, and the 2007 Ne touchez pas la hache/The Duchess of Langeais. But in its simplicity, clarity, and its sense of resolution, this is very much an enlightened artist's late work, and resembles Shakespeare's late Pastoral romances.

Nominated for the Golden Lion at Venice (which was won by Samuel Maoz's Lebanon). Shown as a part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, 2009.

[Chris Knipp]

TODD SOLONDZ: LIFE DURING WARTIME (2009)

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ALLISON JANEY IN SOLONDZ'S LIFE DURING WARTIME

Laugh-to-keep-from-crying

There's not much that Todd Solondz doesn't excel at as a filmmaker in this new work, perhaps making up titles. Life During Wartime doesn't tell you much, except it means all life is wartime. Above all it's about the screenplay, and this one is as dazzling, shocking, and packed with riveting dialogue as Pulp Fiction's, but without the violence. (The violence is repressed, as in ordinary life.) From the first scene between Allen (Michael Kenneth Williams of The Wire) and Joy (English actress Shirley Henderson), a one-year wedding anniversary dinner in a restaurant when she discovers the man she's married is still a pervert (she flees back to her mother and sisters in Florida and California), the dialogue is cranked up as in A Clockwork Orange to an acid-trip intensity. Solondz gets the maximum from his actors, and has assembled a fascinating cast. Even the brief turns are memorable, such as those of Charlotte Rampling as Jacqueline, a desperate woman in need of sex, and Paul Reubens, of Peewee Herman fame, as Joy's deceased former suitor Andy, who reappears to her for several troubling conversations.

The images, bright and yellow-tinged, are heightened but not caricatural versions of everyday Americana, ranging from a middle-class Florida kitchen to a fab Hollywood pad. The sense of precise control the director achieves overlays and contrasts with the edge of hysteria in the characters' emotional lives. If the casting is virtuoso, the beautifully modulated cinematography of Ed Lachman (Far from Heaven, I'm Not There, Virgin Suicides) is one more illustration of Solodnz's mastery of the whole production of making a film.

Most of the characters are freely carried over from Solondz's previous triumph, Happiness some ten years older but some more, some less, with different actors. This is a family that suffers from dysfunction -- but there is also normality. Trish (Allison Janey) has three children, and has met a very "normal" man, a lonely divorcee, Harvey (Michael Lerner), and they're in love and want to marry. Her 13-year-old boy Timmy (Dylan Snyder), a composed, preternaturally articulate boy, is about to be bar mitzvahed. Joy is Trish's sister, and turns up. She also sees their mother, Mona (Renee Taylor). Later she goes to California and sees their other sister, Helen (Ally Sheedy). These scenes are skillfully interwoven with the central ones directly or indirectly involving Timmy.

Harvey is truly "normal," but then there's Bill (Irish stage actor Cieran Hinds), who is just being released from prison, where he has served a long sentence for pedophile acts. Bill is the father of Trish's three children, but she has told everyone he's dead. After Allen visits older brother Billy (Chris Marquette) at college, to assure himself the sex crime gene hasn't been passed on, Timmy finds out about his father.

Solondz is exceptionally good at dialogue, and it can be jaw-dropping and hilarious, but Life During Wartime is further strengthened by the ingenious ways the characters and their conversations interlock. If there is a theme, and at one or two points this is presented almost too didactically, it is forgiveness (which was the original working title). Picking up Bill in a hotel bar Jacqueline (Rampling), who's hardened and brutal, says "Only losers ask for forgiveness. Only losers expect to get it." But Timmy and Harvey's pessimistic son Mark (Rich Pesci) discuss seriously whether you can forgive and forget, and how it might be necessary to forget without forgiving. As for Bill, Trish's view is "Once a perv, always a perv."

Those who find Solondz's material too shocking or bitter need to consider that confronting such horrors as pedophilia head-on with grim but sometimes hilarious humor may be a kind of provisional forgiveness of humanity's worse faults. The movie seems to skirt on the edge of the difficult question of what's forgivable and what's not. And thus in Life During Wartime an already brilliantly original filmmaker has moved perceptively (but subtly) in the direction of maturity and mellowness. There's still a lot of specific stuff that's topical and funny, more than you can put into any review.

Timmy (not present in Happiness) is really the central character, in the best position to change and change others. Because his Bar Mitzvah is coming, he considers himself to be almost "a man." He is horrified to learn both of his father's true identity and his mother's lying about it, and terrified that he might be a "faggot" too, and now, thanks to his mother's warning, terrified of the idea of being "touched" by a (big, grown up, old) man. Bill provides a shadowy, haunting counterpart to the brighter scenes of Trish and Timmy. His encounter with his older son Billy is surprisingly intense, perhaps the most real moment, because its emotional content is more wordless. Again and again and in many different ways the film astounds with its dialogue scenes, especially one-on-one. The operative technique is not wit but surprise. Not all the moments work equally well; Bill as a character may be too heavy-handed, a bit of a waste of the brilliant actor Cieran Hinds (who has played a pedophile murderer on stage). But the way the screenplay interlocks and flows keeps this from mattering too much, and all the scenes work separately (another link with Tarantino).

Joy's encounter with successful, but completely unhappy and mean Hollywood sister Helen is an illustration of how people aren't who they seem, but more than that is another spot-on illustration of subtle sisterly in-fighting. The threat of bodily harm with an Emmy statuette is one of many laugh-to-keep-from-crying moments in the movie. Todd Solodnz achieves mastery here, and has made one of the best American films of the year.

Shown and reviewed as part of the main slate of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, 2009. Also shown at the Venice, Telluride, and Toronto festivals.

Limited US release came July 23, 2010.

[Chris Knipp]

SOULEYMANE CISSE': MIN YE: TELL ME WHO YOU ARE (2009)

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SOKONA GAKOU AS MIMI IN MIN YE

Boorish Bovary

Cisse', a mature (67-year-old) African director more known for folkloric village tales, veers off in a completely new direction in this lengthy (135-minute) exploration of marital conflict in an upper-class couple involving an overbearing courtesan-like woman and two polygamous men. It's a direction that has been favorably heralded locally by the Malian audience, but isn't likely to win admirers in Europe or America.

The setting is the capital of Mali, Bamako, and the scenes wander from one palatial house to another. The action involves repeated encounters, arguments, legal consultations and divorce proceedings, but as it grows more and more repetitious and -- dare one say it? -- annoying, the chief amusement becomes admiring the ladies' colorful hair, turbans, and matching dresses, which as in Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love (which probably shouldn't really be mentioned in the same breath with this disaster) never change style but always vary in color and material. Interest in the European and American film markets seems unlikely, especially since dialogue is not in the official language, French, but the local patois, Bambara.

A Malian writer has called Mimi (Sokana Gakou) "an African Madame Bovary." Okay. She has in common with the tragic French literary figure an adulterous choice that dooms her marriage. But Cisse is no Flaubert. This story is no more sharply crafted than the average telenovela. You watch one scene after another wondering if it is ever going to lead anywhere, and the resolution is absurd, because it suggests some sort of peace between Mimi and Issa (Assane Kouyate), her filmmaker husband, when it's quite obvious that she is far too inconsistent, self-indulgent, and demanding to be worth bothering with and she has ruined her marriage many times over. She comes off as both glamorous and tacky, a fifty-something African Paris Hilton. Issa comes off as dignified, ironic, but weak.

Mimi's boyfriend is Abba (Alou Sissoko), a dealer in fish (and he seems rather slippery and slimy). Also a wealthy man, Abba has two wives, who are none too pleased with his affair. Issa has another wife too. Mimi doesn't like that. But though the film clearly shows the double standard that applies in African marriages, calling this a feminist film seems a considerable stretch given that its "heroine" is so boorish. Mimi has a palatial house of her own with female servants on duty day and night, who don't need TV, since they have the dramas Mimi puts on to entertain them. They're addressed in a haughty, rude manner by their mistress.

Mimi is trained as a lawyer, and claims she makes her country billions of dollars through her work for a national development agency, but as Variety reviewer Alissa Simon says, "it's unclear when she actually works; her entire screen time is spent scheming, lying or complaining about her personal relationships." What she does do is lie about, have assignations when the whim strikes her with Abba, and model an endless wardrobe of outfits with dramatic jewelry to go with them. But work? We see her at it only once, early on.

This is one of the chief failings of the film: while it goes into wearying detail about the rows between Mimi and Issa, making this read more like a reality show than a film, there is no context of social or working life outside the marital problems, and no sense of action in any sense moving forward through work or outside events.

Reviewers have commented that the visuals are too dark and not sharp enough. In addition some outdoor shots of streets and fields are washed out and downright blurry. The darkness is not so bothersome because the people are so colorful, none more so than the super-sized Mimi, who surely must be some kind of caricature of a Malian nouveau riche type. But the prolixity of the dialogue and the lack of effective editing make her character become irritating rather than enlightening.

Inclusion of a movie this disappointing in a film festival must be explained by " the current dearth of sub-Saharan African filmmaking" Alissa Simon notes. When one considers that three years ago the New York Film Festival showed Abderrahmane Sissako's outstanding and emotionally rich political drama Bamako, this dearth seems a very sad turn of events.

Shown as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center 2009.

[Chris Knipp]

PEDRO COSTA: NE CHANGE RIEN (2009)

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JEANNE BALIBAR

Visual poetry and relaxed musical moments from Pedro Costa, Philipe Morel, and Jeanne Balibar

Ne change rien/Change Nothing (a phrase from a song) is a departure from the usual focus of Pedro Costa. The Portuguese director, who has linked himself with Tourneur, Bresson, Ozu, Lang, Hawks, Lubitsch, Walsh and Chaplin, to name a few, has acquired an very special reputation among cinephiles over the past couple of decades for his artfully non-invasive films depicting mostly natives of the Cape Verde islands, both at home and in Portugal, on digital, in black and white, with low light, and using fixed camera setups and non-actors but resorting to many takes.

This new film of French actress and Jacques Rivette muse Jeanne Balibar recording and in rehearsal singing songs by a variety of composers (French and American songs, and an Offenbach opera) with a small (and twice a larger) combo fulfills the sometime promise of the New York Film Festival or any festival to provide "documentary" material that is out of the ordinary, because Ne change rien is not merely informative but stylish, beautiful, thought-provoking, perhaps even profound.

Costa keeps to his usual visual style with fixed camera positions, digital black and white, and low light and square aspect ratio. This time the effect is sometimes elegant, like a fashion shoot. Balibar is not exactly beautiful but she has good bones and the big eyes, full lips, and lean and rangy frame of a a fashion model -- but her face isn't opaque like a model's. It's sweet and soulful, and sometimes here, fatigued, though she goes through endless repetitions, like a good actress used to many takes, without complaint. The repetitions are engineered by the musicians, though; Costa simply shoots, cutting seamlessly, almost invisibly, from one moment, venue, or camera position to another.

The main musicians identified are Rodolphe Burger, Herve' Loos, Armond Dieterdan, and Joel Thieux. The sound engineer was Philippe Morel. Sometimes the image disappears or the artists are not on camera, but the audio is always in the foreground, and powerful. The languorous French rock sound isn't always winning, but there are irresistible moments, and this film catches the always appealing magic of musicians collaborating in a format that is at once simple, "minimal" (except that less is so often more) and enormously stylish. Other credits can be obtained on Costa's website (http://pedro-costa.net/NCR-CREDITS.html). There are rock songs, love songs and ballads, and a quote from Godard, and a scene shot in a Tokyo bar, and others shot in a barn in Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines. There are subtitles, and it would have been good if they'd continued when Balibar sang in English, because the words are not clear.

The film was included in the Director's Fortnight at Cannes, where it received raves. But it does not open in Paris till January 2010. Included in the main slate of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center 2009.

[Chris Knipp]

HARMONY KORINE: TRASH HUMPERS (2009)

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Is humping a US mailbox legal?

Young provocateur filmmaker Harmony Korine, who lives in and grew up in Nashville, has made a film in trashy cheap VHS that evokes the nightmare world of degenerate southern redneck swine.

He doesn't exactly say that. He explains when talking of the film that growing up, there were some scary old people who used to peek in windows at night, particularly next door where there was a young girl. Now the underpasses and open lots that he roamed as a youth are full of trash, and looking at trash receptacles one day the idea came to him of people humping them. He couldn't get real old people to play his roles so he gathered together a group of friends earlier this year who wear old person masks in the film. A couple of weeks of warming up and a couple of weeks of wandering around and shooting as the cast improvised and the film, like a sketch made on a whim, was done. It's perhaps an antidote to the more elaborate process involved in Korine's last film, Mr. Lonely, a more straightforward film starring Diego Luna, Samantha Morton, and others.

There is no plot, just a series of random scenes. A boy tries and fails to sink a basketball in a hoop. The garbage cans get humped. A screeching old lady rides a small dirt bike around with a baby doll tied dragging behind. The boy takes a hatchet to a doll in a parking lot and tries to chop up its head. A man recites an improvised poem about a nation of trash while one of the masked oldsters sits in a wheelchair and throws out firecrackers at a bunch of balloons. There is some nakedness. There is some nasty talk. There is almost the fear Korine said his wife felt when he played a VHS tape somebody'd given him, that it was going to turn into a snuff film. Korine wanted this to look and feel like found footage, like stuff on a strange videotape found in the trash somewhere. Made by old and demented perverts living a free and aimless life.

Some of the images may evoke various sources such as Diane Arbus or Ralph Eugene Meatyard's still photos (strangeness, retardation, aimlessness, gothic vacuity), but he denies any such connections. Somebody has suggested Korine is treading on the ground of early John Waters. But Waters has a knack for plot; even Korine's structured Kids scenario rambles. And Waters has a great sense of humor. Trash Humpers is ridiculous -- it's a horror movie that's also a comedy -- but there is no wit in it. It's a kind of improvised voyeurism. It does succeed in wandering well outside the mainstream. Its use of a very primitive kind of VHS reminds us as in a far more complex way did David Lynch's beautiful Inland Empire that seeming "found" footage can be deeply evocative and scary. Even Blair Witch Project comes to mind. Not many filmmakers would have staged a series of casually revolting stunts like those encapsulated randomly and (he says) in order of staging that Korine dumps on us here. It's a statement about limits, and about freedom. And it's being acknowledged as valid. Even Variety concludes its review of the film with the line: "Across the board, tech credits are appalling -- in a good way." Korine is an odd one (and an articulate interviewee in the NYFF press Q&A) and for festival and film buff audiences he is a force to reckon with. The question is, what's next? Will he go backwards or forwards?

Dennis Lim has written an appreciative piece on the film for Cinema Scope (http://cinema-scope.com/wordpress/?page_id=998). "Can the most regressive work yet by an artist known for arrested development also be a sign of his newfound maturity?" Now there's a bit of interpretive convolution for you. And the statement implied by the question may be true. But still the question remains, what's next?

Shown as part of the main slate of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center 2009. Premiered at Toronto.

[Chris Knipp]

BONG JOON-HO: MOTHER (2009

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WON BIN, KIM HYE-JA IN MOTHER POSTER

An extra-loyal mom

Bong Joon-ho's new film is built around actors. The starting point of it is Kim Hye-ja, grande dame of Korean acting (around whom the screenplay by Bong and Park Eun-kyo is built), who gets a chance to break away from the long-suffering, boundlessly loving mother image she maintains in the long-running "Rustic Diary" TV series to embrace a juicier, darker, richer role. Likewise Won Bin, whose pretty-boy looks have gotten him gangster and perfect son casting, here becomes the slack-jawed, unpredictable Do-joon, a "retard," not taken seriously by most of the town, but zealously protected by his apothecary mom (Kim), who even sleeps in the same bed with him, though he's 27. Both the mother's and son's roles are challenging. Kim Hye-ja shows an incredible emotional range within a de-glamorized exterior, and Won Bin subtly side-steps dumb-guy shtick, managing to keep Do-joon lastingly unpredictable and mysterious.

Do-joon has a run-in with the police after he and his friend Jin-tae (Jin Gu) hassle some fat cats at the golf club after one of them hits Do-joon with his Mercedes and doesn't stop. Simple Do-joon brags about being at the police station, but then gets drunk, brooding about the way Jin-tae ribs him for being a virgin and wanting to get laid. Then that same night Ah-jong, a schoolgirl, is found with her head bashed in and Do-joon becomes the prime suspect. His case seems hopeless, but his aging mother, convinced that Do-joon would never hurt a fly, takes it upon herself to conduct her own investigation of the case, which neither the cops nor the fancy lawyer she has engaged are interested in. This story carries its mother-son relationship well beyond the usual. There is no extent to which this mom won't go to protect and exonerate her son, and some of the memories that are dredged up are troubling indeed.

In some aspects Mother reaches back to Bong's 2003 '80's-set police procedural Memories of Murder, particularly to its sensitive development of a small-town milieu. But this film is also full of comic aspects like the director's later international success The Host (2006, also a NYFf selection). The focus on mysterious, isolated people relates to the main character in Bong's top-drawer segment of the 2008 Tokyo! trilogy, "Shaking Tokyo." Cell phone cameras, autographed golf balls, and acupuncture also play key roles in the story, which is full of interesting twists and turns. A major turnaround comes from Do-joon's bad-boy friend Jin-tae, whose true role we have no idea of at first.

Bong explodes the image of the ideal mother and as usual, bends genres in this new effort. At times this might seem a twisted psychological thriller with links to Douglas Sirk and Sam Fuller, and the occasionally old-fashioned movie music by Lee Byeong-woo, traditionally surging at key points, reinforces that impression. Ryu Seong-hie, the production designer, has worked extensively with Park Chan-wook, and d.p. Hong Gyeong-pyo does a superb job in integrating the looks of a wide variety of locations. This is highly sophisticated Korean cinema at its technical best.

We can't possibly reveal the outcome: the essence of Mother is that its plot is packed with surprises. Perhaps indeed there are a few too many: the last ten minutes introduce further twists after the surprise climax that might better have been omitted. For all the great look, terrific acting, and explosive plot twists, I'm not sure this is up to the best of Bong Joon-ho's previous work. It's fun and entertaining especially at the outset and watchable throughout, but Bong and Park's screenplay meanders a bit. The film's inclusion in the 2009 New York Film Festival may owe more to timing, to the bloom that's still upon Korean cinema, and to Bong's status as an alumnus of the festival, than to the film's intrinsic merit. (Despite a new film that's received raves, Hong Sang-soo, a NYFF favorite, is omitted this year. His 2008 NYFF Paris-based entry (http://www.filmwurld.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&postid=20821#post20821) was somewhat lackluster. . .)

Bong's Mother/Madeo was included in the "Un Certain Regard" series at Cannes, and shown as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center 2009.

[Chris Knipp]

LEE DANIELS: PRECIOUS: BASED ON THE NOVEL 'PUSH' BY SAPPHIRE (2009)

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PRECIOUS (GABOUREY SIDIBE) FACES THE TAUNTS OF GHETTO YOUTHS

Dramatic depiction of a black teenage girl's horrific ghetto life

Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire (the film's awkward full title) is treacherous ground for audiences and movie reviewers. How can you be critical of a 300-pound sexually abused, illiterate 16-year-old black Harlem teenager who betters herself? Moreover the film has the warm endorsement of Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry. Oprah says "it split me open," "I've never seen anything like it. The moment I saw (it) I knew I wanted to do whatever I could to encourage other people to see this movie." The film also comes with the mixed blessing of double prizes at Sundance and the audience award at Toronto. The Weinstein brothers fought with Lionsgate for distribution rights; Lionsgate won. It almost makes you want to hate it, and there are things to criticize, but ultimately the movie is so bold, striking, eye-opening and thought-provoking that it inspires respect. The director Lee Daniels, a black man, has done respectably with tough topics before as a producer of Monster's Ball and The Woodsman but in this second outing as a director goes for a stronger impression, with colorful visuals and a host of vivid performances. It's still hard to be tough on the subject matter. But is this a great movie? I don't think so. We're meant to be awed, though, rather than to analyze the film as a film.

Clareece "Precious" Jones (excellent newcomer Gabourey Sidibe) is pregnant with her second child fathered by her own father. She is put down and ordered around by her lazy welfare mother Mary (the explosive and frightening Mo'Nique), who does absolutely nothing but smoke cigarettes and watch TV and expect Precious to cook for her and wait on her. It is the scenes between Precious and her mother that give the film its shock value. There are even brief flashbacks of her father having sex with her. Daniels says this film would "have been X-rated" if he had not introduced colorful brief fantasy sequences that come when Precious wants to escape from her life and imagines herself as a star greeting fans, dancing, escorted and adored by handsome young black men in tuxedos. Precious' voice-over, which is sharp, articulate, and somewhat detached at times, also provides a necessary distancing effect with materials that otherwise would be too harsh and Dickensian to bear -- or perhaps to believe, or take seriously. But the fantasies, in which Sidibe (who in real life is a smart college girl more like Precious' dreams than her reality) excels, also add to the slick artificiality that makes Precious feel too much like Darren Arronofsky's manipulative, stylized morality play, Requiem for a Dream.

Clareece/Precious is big, and sometimes violent, and after she hits somebody in math class who taunts her, she's sent to the principal's office. (She is relatively good at math, or thinks she is, and imagines the white male teacher likes, even loves her.) As a result of this encounter with authority she is transferred to an "alternative" G.E.D.-preparation school called "Each One Teach One," and here her fellow students, an assortment like a female ghetto equivalent of a 40's movie bomb squad, and their beautiful light-skinned black lesbian teacher Ms. Rain (Paula Patton), become a second, better, family for Precious. Under Ms. Rain's patient tutelage she also begins to learn to read and write and speak correctly.

While Precious is reading one of her journal entries, a "fantasy," she goes into labor. The baby is normal and a boy; she names him Abdu. Her previous child is retarded (or autistic?) and she calls her "Mongol" or "Mongo." The class and Ms. Rain rally round her in the hospital, and she meets a kind male nurse, John, played by Lenny Kravitz. Another piece of successful celebrity casting is singer Mariah Carey as Mrs. Weiss, Precious' welfare counselor.

Precious has a horrible clash with her mother that causes her to take Abdu, break into Each One Teach One, and throw herself upon Ms. Rain's mercy. Ms. Rain finds a halfway house where Precious can be safe with her child, but Mary contacts Mrs. Weiss and demands that she be allowed to see the baby and meet with Precious in Mrs. Weiss' office. The film's most appalling moment among many comes when Mary tells Mrs. Weiss about the father's sexual abuse, and what she did, or didn't, do. The movie has Precous say nothing except to tell her mother she never wants to see her again and walk out with her baby. Later she learns she has AIDS, but the baby doesn't. The movie is set in 1986 when this was a terrible fact, but still Precous expects to finish high school and go on to college, and Ms. Rain is encouraging her to give up the baby for adoption so she can pursue an education.

The film is more focused on depicting the girl's horrific situation than on presenting a rounded picture of Harlem life. Precious is larger than life in every sense. Emphatic closeups combine with the voice-over and the DayGlo daydreams to undercut realism further. Saying that this is "the truth" is to say it's a truth that we'd rather overlook, or that perhaps middle class African Americans might rather not think about, or white Americans might prefer not to know. But it's hard to claim as some do that Precious has "utter authenticity." Its "authenticity" is relative and highly cinematic. Lee Daniels has worked well with his well chosen cast and not gotten in the way of what they could do with the explosive material, and consequently, whether this needed another film festival boost or not, Precious seems likely to do better and get a wider audience than the previous films Daniels has been involved with. It does so much to keep you from observing its over-simplifications and artistic shortcuts that you'd be hard put to do so, even if the subject matter did not scream at you to shut up.

Shown at the New York Film Festival in October 2009. Also presented at the Cannes, Toronto, San Sebastian, Tokyo, and London film festivals. To be released by Lionsgate (limited) from November 6 2009.
______________
(NYFF selection committee member Scott Foundas, reporting from Sundance, wrote a nicely balanced short review for the Village Voice (http://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/archives/2009/01/less_money_fewe.php).)

[Chris Knipp]

CATHERINE BREILLAT: BLUEBEARD (2009)

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DOMINIQUE THOMAS, LOLA CRETON IN BLUEBEARD

Feminist angle on first serial-killer-of-women tale

Catherine Breillat, who once made provocative contemporary feminist features about women’s sexuality, has recently moved in a new direction with costume dramas. But it's not like she's cast aside her feminist outlook. In The Last Mistress/La derniere maitresse (2007) she adapted a controversial novel that straddles the 18th and 19th centuries; Asia Argento got the juicy lead role of the bold courtesan who refuses to yield to a nobleman's squeaky-clean new young wife and keeps on living a grand passion with the groom, her old boyfriend. The story dramatizes a marriage of 18th-century libertinism and 19th-century notions of romantic love. In La Barbe bleue Breillat works out her own take on the famous French folktale about the rich serial wife-killer who gets his comeuppance. Famously, the legend was transcribed by the 17th-century writer of fairy tales, Charles Perrault, and this is Breillat's source, but she rings some interesting changes on it, endowing it with more psychological depth and adding more comments on the historical subjugation of women.

In Perrault's version, though all young women are terrified of the rich old man because of his blue beard and his series of wives who've never been seen again, the younger of a neighbor's two daughters accepts to marry him.

Then he goes away for a spell and leaves the young wife the castle keys, forbidding her to use one little one. She can't resist, and in that room she finds the murdered wives hanging on the will and a puddle of blood into which she drops the key. There's a spell on the key, and she can't wash the blood off. So when Bluebeard comes home, he knows she's been in the room and decides to kill her. But her two brothers come and kill him and save her and she inherits Bluebeard's estate and remarries and lives happily ever after.

Breillat expands the story (after all, it's only three pages long in Perrault). There's also the reveling in period flavor -- the walls of a castle, the horses and carriages, the creaky floors of a nunnery, and above all the rich old fabrics sewn with semi-precious stones (the costumes were lavish and authentic in The Last Mistress too). The two sisters, red-headed Anne (Daphne Baiwir) and younger Marie-Catherine (Lola Creton) are students at a school run by nuns, and their father dies, whereupon they're kicked out of the school by a nasty (and young) head nun (Farida Khelfa). The father leaves their mother with nothing, and they're forced to sell furniture and a harpsichord out of their house to pay bills. The sisters are vocally annoyed at their mother for dyeing all their dresses black: how are they supposed to appeal to potential husbands so drably dressed? Their mother is almost as much of a damper on things (and agent of male oppression) as the head nun.

The younger sister chooses to marry Bluebeard because she is the more fearless and independent one. Bluebeard is fat and old and a little pathetic, and he seems to love his new young bride. He turns out to be something of an old softie. (A good role for Michael Lonsdale, but Breillat makes use of the less known Dominique Thomas.) There are several elaborate eating scenes at a long table, which underline the family resemblance between this film and Rossellini's super-authentic, deliberately stilted history films, especially the most famous, The Taking of Power by Louis XIV (1966). There are also several sequences of well-dressed young people dancing and celebrating, which tend to underscore Bluebeard's un-fun existence and lack of youth.

We don't know how she does it (she engineers several delays and changes of weapon) but Marie-Catherine seems to do away with Bluebeard on her own, without the help of brothers. The last shot shows her sitting proudly in front of a large plate with Bluebeard's severed head mounted on it, like Judith with the head of Holofernes (another proudly feminist story from the past).

Breillat's Bluebeard is beautiful but unlike the sprightly Last Mistress creaks and drags. It's livened up by interposed scenes throughout of two very lively (and sometimes combative) sub-teen girls of the 1950's in an attic with a copy of Perrault, Catherine (Marilou Lopes-Benites) and Marie-Anne (Lola Giovannetti), and the younger and more bumptious of the two, Catherine, reading from the tale of "Bluebeard" and mocking her older sister when she protests that it makes her afraid. That's the point, and apparently Breillat's inspiration; that young girls like to be safely "scared" for the titillation of it. And partly of course the film is about the relationship between young girls and such tales. There's a surprise twist, the 1950's kids linking the Perrault tale with 'actual" events in a haunting, dreamlike way that also lightens up the stilted, slow, and rather gloomy progress of the "Bluebeard" dramatization.

Though a classy French film in every way, this is less fun than The Last Mistress. Though this may be a cheaper production than the latter (which Breillat said cost more than all her other films combined), it does not look cheap as the Variety reviewer argues, and the DV isn't "drab" as has been said. No doubt at all that if Rossellini were working today on his historical films, DV would be his medium, and he'd work wonders with it. Breillat hasn't done badly herself.

Shown at the Berlin and other festivals, including the New York Film Festival, when it was seen in October 2009. The film was bought by Strand Releasing and opens in the US March 26th, 2010, at the IFC Center in NY.

[Chris Knipp]

RAYA MARTIN: INDEPENDENCIA (2009)

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ALESSANDRA ROSSI, SID LUCERO, TETCHIE AGBAYANI

Nostalgia vies with protest in a young experimental filmmaker's movie about colonialism

In this film 24-year-old Raya Martin, the first Filipino director to be chosen for a Cannes Cinefondation film-making workshop, shows the ambition of the very young. He takes on the entire history of colonization in the Philippines as his subject. And he comes from a country that has been colonized and dominated by Spain, then the US, then Japan, then the US again. But Independencia, whose 35 mm camera work is by the French cinematographer Jeanne Lepoirie, and which if you can really separate the two is more remarkable for its lovely evocative black and white look than for its narrative, approaches its subject indirectly. Skillfully appropriating the style of long-ago local studio films (silents, and early talkies) and reveling in their artificiality, soft focus and fixed camera positions, it depicts a young man (Sid Lucero) and his aging mother (Tetchie Agbayani), who slip off into the forest to live in hiding because they feel an invasion is coming -- the invasion of the Americans. (This is not merely symbolic, but happened during the various invasions, that Filipinos escaped and lived dangerous hidden lives in the hinterlands.)

The look evoked is of the films made during the American occupation, while the events take place during the same time. The forest/jungle that dominates the scenes is lush and gorgeous and luminous. The son and mother find an abandoned shack and live there. The son later finds a wounded and raped girl (Alessandra de Rossi) and takes her back to the shack. Later his mother dies. The story jumps forward, after the brief interruption of a segment from a mock-propaganda film justifying American soldiers shooting a boy who steals in a village market, meant to take the place of an old style cinema intermission break, to some years later when the young woman and the son are now living together as husband and wife and have a young son -- or rather, are raising the boy with whom she was pregnant when she arrived (Mika Aguilos). Since he is light-skinned, perhaps he was fathered by an American, and that indeed is indicated by a fugitive line of dialogue earlier.

There are several important sequences of oral storytelling, and a pungent speech in the film's Tagalog language in which the little boy describes exploring and seeing a golden man by a river whose hair and body are so bright he can't look at them. (A savior, or a white oppressor? The boy's father?)

The film, which is rich in insect sounds throughout (as well as intrusive music) ends with a spectacularly loud and lightening-filled typhoon when the little family is broken up. The little boy is left alone and driven over a cliff by the invaders.

At the risk of seeming superficial, one has to say that the visuals are what sing in the film; the narrative is allusive and symbolic and you can make what you want of it, but the images provide immediate rewards. As Deborah Young writes in her Hollywood Reporter review, "Though everything is obviously shot on a studio set with potted plants and a painted backdrop, the effect is to cast the characters into a magical world that can be both quaint and wondrous." Moreover the whole film shows the beauty of shooting with a lens that has a shallow depth of field, and the evocation of silent-era film-making at times is remarkable. Independencia is an experimental work (Raya Martin has spoken of being inspired by Stan Brakhage's painted images in his final shots of the boy, with the colorless landscape suddenly painted red), but visually it is stimulating to the imagination, and the apparent simplicity belies the richness of the effects. Like many a talented young artist, Martin seems self-absorbed, pretentious and naive, proclaiming at Cannes that he hoped people would get "to die for their country and for cinema." Time will tell if his talents will bear solid fruit or get lost in showy gestures. Meanwhile, he has ideas more mainstream cinematographers may want to steal.

Independencia is the second in a trilogy, following A Short Film About the Indio Nacional (2005), which dealt with the struggle for independence from Spain in the late 19th century and was made in the style of silent films.

Shown at Cannes in the Un Certain Regard series (along with a short, Manila, shown out of competition). Seen as part of the main slate of the New York Film Festival, October 2009.

[Chris Knipp]

AN JONG-HWA: CROSSROADS OF YOUTH (1934)

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Elaborate presentation of oldest known Korean film

Crossroads Of Youth (Cheongchun's Sipjaro), a melodrama about a brother and sister from the country who go to the city and must deal with its dangerous and corrupting influences, was discovered last year in its original nitrate negative by the son of a former theater owner, and is the earliest extant Korean film and the only existing film from the Korean silent era (late in the era, obviously). The Korean Film Archive, which now owns the Crossroads negative, has a Korean talkie called Sweet Dream from 1936. An Jong-hwa, according to an article about this find in Variety (http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117981856.html?categoryid=1043&cs=1), shot 12 films between 1930 and 1960. According to the Variety article, "The film stars Shin Il-seon, who was the female lead in Na Un-gyu's legendary lost classic Arirang (1926)."

In honor of this discovery, with assistance from the Korean government, an elaborate presentation of the film has been worked up with a classical combo and three costumed performers to liven things up. A young man and young woman sing songs, representing the hero and his sister. The other performer is the pyosa or live off-screen narrator, dressed in striped suit, old-fashioned spectacles, and red bow tie, and he dominates the show with his extremely dramatic narration and impersonation of the characters.

This is how the film was screened at the renovated Alice Tully Hall for the New York Film Festival, and explains, I guess, why Crossroads of Youth wasn't shown at the festival's press and industry screenings. The production was too elaborate to present more than once. In fact, it was so elaborate, it detracted somewhat from one's perception of the film itself.

At times the pyosa's narration deliberately made fun of the process. For example when he did the voices of three young women on screen, he added the line, "Why do our voices all sound so alike?" Another time he has one character say to the hero, "Did you do your eyebrows yourself?" at a moment when they particularly look painted on. This was incorporated into the modern subtitles, which may represent a combination of original titles and additions for the new performance package. Such ironies had to be applied sparingly, since much of the film concerned serious matters like saving one's sister's virginity.

What's clear is that there was a film industry in Korea in the early Thirties. The emphasis is on a series of rapid scenes involving a young man, his sister, a young women from a poor family who works in a gas station and becomes interested in the hero, and a lecherous money-lender who has one or two sidekicks. The money-lender preys upon both the youth and his sister, who have both come to the city but haven't found each other. The two young women both are seduced by the lecher, and the young hero turns to drink. All ends happily when he beats up the lecher and finds his sister.

If only they'd had cell phones none of this would have happened.

The empahsis is on poverty, sexual predators, and the corruptions of city life.

The images seemed to be out of focus a lot, perhaps due to the lenses used. Nonetheless the casting worked, and so did the use of locales and costumes.

Ultimately the presentation was more interesting than the film, and the amount that it added to the entertainment made up for the way it detracted and in part mocked the origan film.

Now, at least, we know that Park Chan-wook, Hang Song-soo, Bong Joon-ho, Kim Ki-duk, and the many other great Korean directors who have emerged to international prominence over the past decde or so, did not spring from the void.

Shown in this special production, as noted, as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, October 3, 2009.

[Chris Knipp]

SERGE BOMBERG, RUXANDRA MEDEA: HENRI-GEORGES CLOUZOT'S INFERNO (2009)

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CLOUZOT AND SCHNEIDER DURING SHOOTING OF L'INFER

Anatomy of an elaborate unfinished production

L'Enfer d'Henri-Georges Clouzot is one of those documentaries, like Fulton and Pepe's Lost in La Mancha, about a movie that never got finished. This one concerns a film of 1964. Not a suspense thriller like the director's famous Wages of Fear (1953) or Diabolique (1955), which gained him arthouse notoriety in the States and made him seem a French competitor of Hitchcock, or his earlier detective meller masterpiece Quai des Orfevres (1947), Inferno was a psychological study of jealousy, with Serge Reggiani as stricken husband Marcel and the young, but already stellar, Romi Schneider as his too-pretty, flirtatious wife, Odette (references to Proust?). But things got too complicated and the movie never happened.

In 1994, Claude Chabrol did his version of the story, having purchased the script from Clouzot's widow, Inez. In both cases, the essence of the tale is that the hotel owner's suspicions lead to paranoid delusions that overpower him. But Chabrol represents one of the primary Cahiers du Cinema branch of the French Nouvelle Vague, which was at its peak during the period of Clouzot's ascendancy, but represented new, freer, more inventive ways of working in film.

Clouzot on the contrary was old school, and was particularly noted for writing and story-boarding everything out ahead of time in the most scrupulous detail, as well as for working actors too hard. His Inferno was to have been highly inventive in one respect, at least: he shot reams of experimental, "op-art" and prismatic lens shots, even creating "optical coitus" with spinning geometry and a zoom lens, as well as on-location reverse color images, planning visual equivalents of the Reggiani character's growing madness. The latest techniques were used, though the concept seems rather more like the surrealism of the Forties and Fifties than something new.

Still, there's no way of knowing how well the film would have turned out. What is clear is that those experimental shoots took too long, and ate up funds as well as time. When it wen beyond pure optical illusion in the studio and more and more required the participation of Reggiani and Schneider, the shooting, much of it extraneous to the script, began to strain the stars as well. Clouzot was a chronic insomniac and would wake crew members at two a.m. with new ideas. He made Reggiani spend an entire day running, shooting the same sequence over and over and exhausting him. Reggiani walked off the set, pleading a mysterious illness, and never came back. Jean-Louis Tritignant was called in to interview as a replacement, but that didn't work out. Shortly later Clouzot, then 56, had a heart attack. That was it. Clouzot only made one more film, La Prisonniere, and died in 1977, aged 70.

Because the film wasn't finished, all the "preuves" were kept, and this film is interesting and unique for its lavish sampling of the experimental footage in which day-glo images spiral hypnotically or Marcek or his (imagined?) rival's faces merge, or Reggiani's or Schneider's faces are distorted as in a fun house. There's also detailed footage showing work to use color reversal to make the lake of the setting turn red when Marcel sees Odette water-skiing with Martineau (Jean-Claude Bercq), the local womanizer with whom she apparently has a fling.

The trick as Bomberg, a specilalist in cinematic history and film restoration, told it in a NYFF Q&A, was to get hold of the 185 cans of footage controlled by Clouzot's second wife, Inez. Getting caught in a stalled elevator for two hours with her convinced her that her experience with Bomberg was "special" enough to give him the rights she'd denied to many others, and she also passed the completed documentary, without cuts.

The Inferno footage is largely without sound, though there are test recordings of Reggiani uttering mad repetitious ravings as the wacked-out Marcel. Bomberg uses voice-overs to reconstruct some scenes of the film, and introduces five short scenes in which conetemporary actors Berenice Bejo and Jacques Gamblin read from the script, to extrapolate.

Though it's all a bit after-the-fact, and the value of the Clouzot film remains moot, the documentary has interviews with nine cast and crew members, including Catherine Allegret, then-production assistant Costa Gavras and assistant cinematographer William Lubtchansky. Details of the breakdown emerge, and it's due to Clouzot's employing three separate film crews unaware of each other's activities, and his endless re-shooting of simple sequences. As one talking head points out, the film might have gotten made if Clouzot hadn't been writer, director, and producer. A real producer might have speeded things up, thus saving everybody's nerves and the production.

This is a glossy, beautifully crafted MK2 production and is a must-see for film buffs, particularly those interested in French cinema history. However as Variety reviewer Todd McCarthy points out, (http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117940401.html?categoryid=31&cs=1) essential context is omitted in the failure to mention Clouzot's being out of commission throughout the Thirties in sanatoriums for mental problems. Maybe the widow wouldn't have wanted his lack of mental balance to be further discussed. McCarthy is also right that the dominant image you come away with is the radiant and obviously cooperative young Romi Schneider. Dany Carrel as "Marylou" is another pert sex kitten in the cast who shows off plenty for the camera. It's puzzling that in the Q&A the flamboyant but otherwise informative Bomberg (so chatty he who was reluctant to relinquish the mike both before and after the NYFF public screening), never once mentioned co-director Ruxandra Medrea. Anyway, this is a rich and evocative piece of cinematic documentation.

Shown as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center 2009. Also featured at Cannes, Toronto, Vancouver, and the London Film Festival. To open in France November 11, 2009.

[Chris Knipp]

SHADI ABDEL SALAM: THE MUMMY (1969)

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NADIA LUTFI AND AHMAD MAREI IN A OLD POSTER FOR AL-MUMIYYA
(N.B.: THIS IS A COLOR FILM)

A restored Egyptian "masterpiece" ponders identity and morality

The Mummy or The Night of Counting the Years, written and directed by Shadi (or Chadi) Abdel Salam (or Abdessalam, 1930–1986) is a generally handsome, if excessively self-important and ponderous, Egyptian historical film in classical Arabic that has recently been restored by the Cineteca of Bologna with support from Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Foundation. It was shown this year at the Cannes Festival as part of a new series called Cannes Classics, and carried over to the New York Film Festival. It features a brief appearance by well-known actress Nadia Lotfi. The cast also includes Ahmed Marei, Ahmad Hegazi, Zouzou Hamdy El-Hakim, Abdelazim Abdelhack, Abdelmonen Aboulfoutouh, Ahmad Anan, Gaby Karraz, Mohamed Khairi, Mohamed Morshed, Mohamed Nabih, and Shafik Noureddin.

The theme is one dealt with in other Egyptian films: the ambiguous relationship of Upper Egyptians, particularly the (three) centuries-old families of the village of Gourna, with their country's Pharaonic past; and, by vague implication, the question of modern Egyptian identity. Are the Gourna families the antiquities' custodians and guides, or are they mainly tomb robbers who live off the proceeds? This film, which has already had international recognition, stands out for its handsome actors, and for its sometimes striking cinematography, especially during the final climax, enhanced by the films's almost entirely being shot at dawn or dusk. The images of the final parade of horses and men robed in white and black carrying ancient treasure along a horizon glowing in the corpuscular haze and passing by the Colossi of Memnon are hard to forget.

The main character is Wannis (Ahmed Marei), who with his brother (Ahmad Hegazi) learns from their father, the family (or tribal) elder, the "secret" of the mountain: the location of a large cache of sarcophagi hidden in the mountains perhaps 3,000 years earlier to protect them from the tomb-robbers of that time. Wannis is troubled by this information, and eventually he reveals the Horabat's secret to a young member of the Egyptian Antiquities Organization who has come up the Nile in a steamboat in the summer specifically to prevent tomb-robbing from taking place during the Egyptologists' off-season.

The slow-moving scenes don't always get their points across very clearly, but it is clear that the tribal elder gets killed by robbers while preparing to sell a valuable amulet. A bond develops between Wannis and a mysterious young Stranger (Mohamed Morshed) -- and perhaps with the young Antiquities official. The chief military guard on the steamboat, also young and handsome, resents and is perhaps jealous of Wannis' meeting privately with the official. There is almost a (subconscious?) homoerotic subtext here, with women only peripheral, and all these handsome, brooding, dark--skinned young men who share a mysterious bond.

There's a clearly implied conflict of values between the mountain people and the effendiyya, the westernized, educated Cairenes. whom the young Antiquities official represents. The paradox is that some of the effendiyya can read Egyptian hieroglyphics, while the Horabat, to justify their tomb-robbing, argue that nothing is known about the Pharaohs any more, that they are not related to any people, and hence their artifacts have no inheritors more logical than themselves. Wannis manages to take the amulet from the men who stole if from his murdered father, but then he's knocked unconscious. When he wakes up, he encounters the Stranger and decides to approach the steamboat and tell the Egyptologist his secret.

The result is the luminous sequence for which the film deserves to be remembered, in which the Egyptologist's men and others hired from the village spirit away the contents of the mountain cache at dawn, slipping by the Horabat, who choose not to attack them. The Egyptologist has found that the cache encompasses remains from not just one but four dynasties.

What is to happen to the Horabat, who like all the people of Gourna, have little livelihood other than from selling antiquities? An Al Ahram Weekly article (http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/1998/389/people.htm) from 1998 shows that the same dilemmas persist even today -- their lack of other livelihood apart from the antiquities; their unwillingness to move (as when architect Hassan Fathi designed a village for them in the late 1940's, but they ultimately refused to inhabit it). A Horabat elder interviewed for the article denies the validity of this film: the idea that his people knew "nothing except a road up to the mountain" is just a filmmaker's whim. He also resents the idea that the Horobat were totally ignorant of Egyptology; in fact the uneducated Egyptians who have long lived on the edges of the ancient remains are wellsprings of lore about them and take pride in their skill as guides. This film, however impressive at times, is the stuff of myth and fantasy.

Sometimes it seems a shame that Europeans and Americans admire these overwrought, moody Egyptian "masterpieces" of he 1960's and tend to overlook the more polished popular films of the 1940's and 1950's "Golden Age" of Egyptian cinema that are more representative of the culture. This is especially true since it's the Egyptians whose lively 20th-century theater pioneered in a move toward the use of more realistic colloquial Arabic rather than the stilted, formal "fusha" literary language that both ennobles and weigns down dramas like The Mummy.

Shown as part of the main slate of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center 2009.

[Chris Knipp]

MICHAEL HANEKE: THE WHITE RIBBON (2009)

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THE PASTOR'S ADOLESCENT SON: THE RIBBON REMINDS HIM HE'S BEEN BAD

A portrait of collective evil

In The White Ribbon, the masterful film that won Michael Haneke the Palme d'Or at Cannes this year, the Bavarian-born, Austrian-raised writer-director turns to a period costume drama shot in black and white. He focuses on the year leading up to the outbreak of WWI in a fictitious village called Eichwald in the northern, Protestant part of Germany where the local baron (Ulrich Tukur) employs half the population. It's a time and place where people were unusually evil: Haneke has said something like that about his setting. The story is riveting and its presentation is brilliant -- performances that are memorable and vivid; settings that are authentic-feeling; images that linger in the mind. The effect is chilling and thought-provoking.

There is a series of malicious and cruel acts. A trip-wire causes the town doctor's horse to be crippled and the doctor (Rainer Bock) is hospitalized. The baron's little boy Sigi is found tied upside down in a barn, beaten and terrorized; the Down's syndrome child of the midwife is attacked and blinded. There are efforts to chase down the culprit or culprits and at one point the schoolteacher, who narrates the film, speaking long afterward, thinks he has figured it out. But typically for Haneke, as in his widely seen Hidden/Caché (2005), it all remains a mystery. If this is a police procedural -- and county police are called in finally to investigate -- it's one that fizzles out. The focus isn't just on criminal acts so much as meanness, such as the protestant minister's harshness toward his own children (whom he torments both physically and psychologically for minor misdeeds); or the farmer's grown son who ruins the baron's cabbage patch during the autumn celebration because he blames the baron for his mother's death in a barn accident, or the doctor's verbal abuse toward his secretary, assistant, and sometime lover. Or even what the baron's wife (Ursina Lardi) says to her husband: "I can't live in an atmosphere of malice, envy, cruelty and brutality." For the misfortunes and misdeeds there is much blame, and little forgiveness.

There is a slight sense that this is some kind of artful horror movie about evil children, like John Carpenter's 1960 Village of the Damned. Particularly in the verbal harshness between couples, the film sometimes seems to go a little too far. Haneke doesn't give you a good time. Whether he's speaking of a suicidal family (The Seventh Continent), marauding killer youths (Funny Games), modern disconnectedness (Code Unknown), a sado-masochistic music teacher (La Pianiste), a world of lawlessness and chaos (The Hour of the Wolf), a paranoid bourgeois couple (Cache), there's a kind of severity and grimness about Haneke's world that, if it works for you, becomes tonic, worth the discomfort. But can we bear the thought that there can be so much nastiness in one little village? Can the elders' (and particularly the minister's) relentless morality cause the children to be more than anything filled with malice? This is why the Variety reviewer justifiably says (http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117940328.html?categoryid=31&cs=1) The White Ribbon "proves a difficult film to entirely embrace." But the way Haneke complexly weaves his spell and creates his village society out of dozens of little details is difficult not to admire. Reportedly, the German is full of flowery touches that evoke the period. Few films convey so vivid a sense of a late nineteenth-, early twentieth-century worldview and lifestyle.

The redeeming vision is that of the schoolteacher (Christian Friedel), a shy, plodding, decent fellow, and Eva (Leonie Benesch) the 17-year-old girl who comes from another town to mind the baron's young twins, who catches the teacher's eye and whom he wants to make his bride -- she too, disarmingly decent and sweet. Haneke is as good at making this couple endearing and touching as he is at making the other adults peevish or indifferent or cruel. And that helps quite a lot. As an older man the schoolteacher is the narrator (Ernst Jacobi), and his humane vision and decent voice provide a perspective on the collective evil that seems to dominate events in this unfortunate year.

The White Ribbon has an cumulative, episodic structure. One thing happens after another. Things reach a high pitch when the midwife borrows the bicycle the schoolteacher has borrowed, saying she's found out who hurt her son and is going to report it to the police, and then is never seen again. In the end, the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand changes everything, and at the church the town community recognizes that. The narrator explains that he went to war and when he came back moved to another town and never saw the villagers again.

Haneke is extraordinarily good at making his little Eichwald come to life, showing its central square in snow and summer and autumn, planting the facades of the baron's mansion as firmly in our minds as the doctor's bourgeois brick pile, showing us rooms packed with children whom a harsh father can banish with a word. He brings the church to vivid life and every face in it seems right. The children stand naturally in their old-fashioned clothes and their homemade nightgowns and in their faces we feel their emotional pain. If the lines are drawn harshly, they're also drawn lovingly. And this is another redeeming feature.

Is this the world from which Nazism comes? Not exactly, but White Ribbon shows the ugly element in the German character. But while Germans may read the film that way, it's meant to show fundamental human traits, and in particular -- the pastor is the dominant figure -- how an unrelentingly cruel and judgmental viewpoint can lead to radicalism and violence.

Shown at the New York Film Festival 2009. Das Weisse Band also won the FIPRESCI Prize and the Cinema Prize of the French National Education System at Cannes. In an article and appreciation of Haneke in The New Yorker, Anthony Lane calls the film the cirector's "most accessible," and "best" film; it's definitely his longest (145 minutes) and richest in incident. Haneke in a NYFF Q&A pointed out that the full title in German is Das weisse Band - Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte, "The White Ribbon - A German Children's Tale," but the national reference in the subtitles is deliberately not translated for the international audience.

______________
There's an interview with Haneke in the November/December 2009 issue of Film Comment (http://www.filmlinc.com/fcm/nd09/haneke.htm) that Filmleaf readers may find of interest.

[Chris Knipp]

PEDRO ALMODOVAR: BROKEN EMBRACES (2009)

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CARMEN MACHI, PENELOPE CRUZ IN FILM-WITHIN-FILM CHICAS Y MALETAS

Bright colors, shifting identities, and Penelope

Another campy plot from Almodovar, this time shifting back and forth in time and identities. It's all about a blind movie director with a tragic past and a strong sex drive (Lluis Homar). That's what we see at first anyway. And he has a good-looking twenty-something son, Diego. The director's name name? Harry Caine. But wait a minute. He's Spanish. And once upon a time his name was Mateo Blanco. Some flashbacks to fourteen years ago explain things. And there's a movie-within-a-movie, and a clash with a rich guy named Ernesto Martel (Jose Luis Gomez) whose wife (or was it mistress?) Lena becomes Mateo's lover, and who just happens to be Penelope Cruz. Artificiality abounds in this brightly-colored Almodovarian confection, which fans will love and others may view with indifference. People die and are reborn or change identities, and it's all fun, more or less, and gorgeous and shallow and rooted in a mix of genre plots of bygone decades, with references to Douglas Sirk and Jules Dassin, among others. There's the theme of "duplication" and a "noir" triangle, and a woman thrown down a marble staircase as in Leave Her to Heaven and Kiss of Death. And there are references to Minelli and Billy Wilder, Some Come Running and Breakfast at Tiffany's and Giuietta Massina and La Strada. (We know all these are in there because Almodovar says so in the press notes -- though a page seems to be missing between "Up and Down" and "Parents and Children.")

Martel's death starts the plot rolling, and Harry/s former production director Judit (Blanca Portillo), who will wear out her welcome later, seems very upset at this news. An aggressive gay guy turns up who calls himself Ray X (Ruben Ochandiano), who's really the late Ernesto Martel's son Ernesto Junior, asking Harry to help him make a movie of his life -- designed to get back at his dad (posthumously) for oppressing him. Later it turns out that earlier Ernesto was a Peeping Tom-like character with an Anton Chigurh haircut and pimply skin forced by his jealous dad to tail Harry, then Mateo, constantly at him with a video camera. And it seems Ernesto Senior was onto the fact that Lena wasn't just working for Mateo as star of his film, Girls and Suitcases (it sounds funnier in Spanish, Chicas y maletas) but was messing around with him, as a lip reader (Lola Duenas) revealed to the old man when he watched his son's surveillance videos.

Almodovar has a sense of humor. And since there's little magic here -- unless it's enchantment that's making you doze off -- it's those incidental moments of wild, pointless silliness that liven things up. For instance, it turns out that Harry, who, we eventually learn, changed his name from Mateo after a car accident that blinded him in 1992, has by the movie's beginning developed a scam of getting pretty girls to help him across the street, then inviting them up to his flat to read him the paper, and bedding them. In a NYFF Q&A, the director rather gleefully said this was his starting point for the whole film, and an idea he thought up during a period of convalescing from migraines. Toward the end, there's an early scene from a new, improved cut of Chicas y maletas with Penelope and a friend (Carmen Machi) talking about utterly silly stuff, and it's giddy fun. If only the movie was as good as the movie-within-the-movie! If only the movie-within-the-movie could be good for more than five minutes!

Almodovar can be wildly emotional or giddy or funny, and he gets them all mixed up. This time the magic isn't there, the way it was (for me) in the strange Talk to Her/Habla con ella, and Broken Embraces lacks the really crazy wildness, as in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown -- my favorite Almodovar title: Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios. Wonderful!

This time as experts will tell you (and he will tell you too) there are a lot of Almodorar's favorite themes woven in (more fathers and sons than mothers and sons this time), and the mix of genres already mentioned, as well as many of his cast regulars, most of all his diminutive sexpot Ms. Cruz. Almodovar is a New York Film Festival regular and it's fun to see him sitting next to Penelope on stage speaking half in English and half in Spanish, and having the Spanish translated by Lincoln Center Film Society Director Richard Pena. But on a day when we watched Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon, there wasn't much energy left for this relatively wan and routine (though bright-colored and elaborately plotted) Almodovar creation. This is not to deny the technical accomplishment of the whole package, the delightful bright color, and Penelope Cruz's valiant effort to emerge as a credible character through an array of wigs and personalities. But Broken Embraces is stuff for the dyed-in-the-wool Almodorar fan, not for the general audience even of art houses.

Sony Pictures Classics will distribute Los abrazos rotos in the US and it was shown as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center 2009. It was introduced at Cannes and has gotten excellent reviews in France -- sort of. Thomas Sotinel, Le Monde: "This recycling reflects a crisis of inspiration. But the advantage of a great creator over ordinary people is that he may even be inspired by the lack of inspiration, and style has not escaped along with new ideas."

[Chris Knipp]

Some summing-up of NYFF 2009

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HARMONY KORINE


My Antichrist review is also published on Cinescene. (http://www.cinescene.com/knipp/antichrist.htm) In his dismissive Cannes report Rex Reed sneered of
another loathsome barf job by Danish wacko Lars von Trier called Antichrist, in which pickle-faced Charlotte Gainsbourg, who always looks embalmed, prunes away her genitalia with garden shears. Naturally, it will show up shortly in the New York Film Festival, the official depository for movies nobody wants to see, where torturing the audience has become an acknowledged priority.
Yeah, go Rex! Have fun with it. I enjoy provocative writing even when it's a bit scattershot; but the reality of festival films and the issue of pleasure vs. pain in them is more complicated than this. It was the subject of some interesting speculation in a thoughtful article (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/07/movies/07festival.html) in the NYTimes by A.O. Scott: "The constricted and forbidding program [the NYFF] offers is not — or not only — due to pusillanimous judgment. It is, rather, a symptom of the divided, anxious state of American, and indeed of global film culture." Both Scott and Stephen Holden (also of the Times) wrote NYFF rounduop pieces discussing the grimness of the fare, and it's true, the NYFF was less fun this year than in 2005, '06,'07, and '08, and maybe not quite as good a slate, though there are blips and triumphs every time. I suggest A.O. Scott's piece for an understanding of how the 2009 NYFF main slate read to an expert.

ANTICHRIST (http://www.filmwurld.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&postid=23009#post23009) is in limited US release since October 23. Other titles that, like it, I highly recommend from the NYFF are the following. Unfortunately theatrical release is scheduled for only three out of six:
HADEWIJCH (BRUNO DUMONT) (http://www.filmwurld.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&postid=23026#post23026)--NO DISTRIB.
LIFE DURING WARTIME (TODD SOLONDZ) (http://www.filmwurld.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&postid=23054#post23054)--NO DISTRIB.
THE WHITE RIBBON (MICHAEL HANEKE) (http://www.filmwurld.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&postid=23092#post23092)--US RELEASE DEC. 30 FF. (L)
PRECIOUS (LEE DANIELS) (http://www.filmwurld.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&postid=23069#post23069)--US RELEASE NOV. 6 (L)
TRASH HUMMPERS (HARMONY KORINE) (http://www.filmwurld.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&postid=23064#post23064)--NO DISTRIB.
How could I choose such stuff as my favorites? I guess maybe in a special sense Rex Reed is right that I enjoy being "tortured," because the hardest to watch of the NYFF, and/or the most provocative, films proved to me to be the strongest and the most memorable -- though of uneven merit; I would not equate Precious or Trash Humpers with the superb craft of Life During Wartime or the absolute mastery of The White Ribbon. I was especially surprised by Life During Wartime, which though it has disturbing content, actually was for me often a pleasure to watch, and occasionally hilarious.

Not in the Rex Reed dismissable category, but NYFF films that fans of the directors and of European (and Asian) arthouse cinema will not want to miss:

JACQUES RIVETTE: Around a Small Mountain
CATHERINE BREILLAT: Bluebeard
PEDRO ALMODOVAR: Broken Embraces
MANOEL DE OLIVEIRA: Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl
CLOUZOT: Henri-Georges Clouzot's 'Inferno' (Bomberg, Medea 2009)
BONG JOON-HO: Mother
PASOLINI--The 'Rage' of Pasolini (Pasolini, Bertolucci, 1963, 2008)
ANDRZEJ WAJDA: Sweet Rush
CLAIRE DENIS: White Material
RESNAIS--Wild Grass
All of these are excellent in their way and doubtless well worth seeing, but do not represent (or in the case of the two documentaries/analyses, refer to) the filmmakers' best work. Some actually think the Rivette and the Resnais are among the directors' best work. I don't, but the films may provide useful insights into their cinema. I wish more room had been opened to younger directors, whose work might provide insights into the cinema to come. The films in my first list above, I can't get out of my head. I applaud their vigor, rigor, energy, and originality.

For exceptional cinematography, you will also want to watch out for:
INDEPENDENCIA (RAYA MARTIN)
NE CHANGE RIEN (PEDRO COSTA)
The documentaries were interesting this year; Zhao Dayang's Ghost Town was too long a slog for me but he may prove a standout documentarian nonetheless. The audience doc favorite was apparently the one about the hijacking of the Barnes Foundation collection,
THE ART OF THE STEAL (DON ARGOTT)
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EDWARD LACHMAN, DP OF LIFE DURING WARTIME
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MARCO BELLOCCHIO (VINCERE) AND ZHAO DAYONG (GHOST TOWN) AT THE 2009 NYFF