New Directors/New Films and Film Comment Selects 2011

[Chris Knipp]

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Isild Le Besco: Bas-Fonds (2010) -- FILM COMMENT SELECTS

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NOÉMIE LE CARRER, VALÉRIE NATAF AND GINGER ROMÀN IN BAS-FONDSa

Bad girls

Actress Isild LeBesco's fourth directorial effort, Bas-Fonds ("The Lower Depths," or, better "The Dregs"), is a series of appallingly violent, apparently improvised scenes mostly set in a trashed suburban flat inhabited by three young women who are living a sub-human existence dominated by occasional lesbian sex, physical and verbal abuse, and alcohol. After a while a squat, heavy-looking black dog is brought in. Magalie (Valérie Nataf), Stéph-Marie (Noémie Le Carrer), and Barbara (Ginger Romàn) live a squalid and insensate, violent and inward-turning life on the barest fringes of human civilization. Trash litters the floors of their barren apartment. In their day-to-day life that consists of little more than eating, sleeping, drunkenness, violent squabbling and getting off, with a little watching of soaps and what sound like porno films on a big box TV, they are lost to all but each other.

Magalie, the lumpish leader, rules with a mixture of male power and animal charisma. Stéph-Marie, her little sister, is a self-effacing simpleton. Barbara, bleach-blond, unaware that she's prettier than the other two, is employed as a night cleaner at an office building. She also acquires a "lover," whom she met at a cafe and has regular sex with. Already estranged from her biological family, she has unwittingly joined the pack out of an attraction to Magalie, met at a dance club, who has sex with her and beats her. One day at the instigation of Magalie and out of sheer boredom they hold up and trash a small bakery at closing time, killing the young baker (Benjamin Le Souef) with a shot from a rifle and terrorizing his wife (Ingrid Leduc). They return to their meaningless life but nothing is the same. Magalie beats Barbara so brutally that one day she goes to the police and this nightmare ends with imprisonment and a trial.

Le Besco's "Dregs" is a film for devotees of X-rated raunch or cinephiles who scoff at entertainment-seeking and seek to be shaken and disturbed by what they watch. This is the film school of deliberate and none-too-subtle provocation, that, however it may annoy, has commitment behind it, if not great skill. Its cruelty and meanness make Harmony Korine's Trash Humpers , which after all has its humorous side, seem like Singing in the Rain by comparison; Philippe Nahon in I Stand Alone is a polished sophisticate compared to Magalie, and it's impossible to speak of von Trier's Antichrist in the same breath because that film's even more cinematically sophisticated than von Trier intended it to be, and if it goes too far, it also offers much visual beauty. Bas-Fonds isn't technically crude in the camera department, but its acting and directing are, and Leslie Ferperin of Variety has commented with reason that while the second half is "not without grace notes," the " first part is so tacky, histrionic and wannabe-outrageous it feels like an early John Waters movie in French, but without the laughs."

In between violent closeups of these poor creatures, who communicate only in shouted obscene taunts, there are passages of voice-over with poetic musings, finally, with a recitation of the 23rd Psalm. At the end Barbara has been released and has a job, but she seems disconnected from life, and longs for the bestial suburban cave she used to live in with the two sisters and muses that she would go back to it, sooner or later, if she could.

The periodical moments of soft, poetic voiceover (Le Besco's own quite beautiful voice) with dappled water and sky shots are meant to and to some extent do establish a humanistic context. These too, they are saying, are God's creatures, poor little lambs who have gone astray. But patched-in comments are too easy and gratuitous. What Bas-Fonds succeeds in doing is both in keeping us at one remove from its characters, and throwing their invective and lurid squalor so much in our faces we can't analyze and think. When we look closer we see that there's more gesture than context and more noise than narrative. We get stunning shtick: scantily clad (but occasionally laundered) young woman going wild on each other and dispensing with the amenities. But dialogue consists mainly of brief shouts, obscene epithets, accusations. "More hootch!" You forgot such and such! (Visits to the supermarché are included). "The bottom on the can is cold!" (Their meals consist of canned food heated in a pan of boiling water and eaten from the can.) A script consisting of barbaric yawp can't develop relationships or history or context. It's only by a flashback that the way Barbara and Magalie met is established. By suggesting that Magalie does a lot of sleeping LeBesco avoids having to give her much else to do. The Guignol of the bakery and its aftermath provide the film's narrative arc. Le Besco seems to do a lot of showing, but in fact her showing doesn't tell, and she has to spell things out with voice-overs to get any ideas across.

Le Besco aligns herself with a French cinema of desperation to which Bresson, Pialat, Godard, Noé and Dumont also belong. Her context seems more petulant and childish than those others but she may make up for that with a passionate intensity that makes her films, as one French commentator remarked, "more lived than seen."

Bas-fonds was released in France by Ciné Classic and opened in Paris December 29, 2010. It was seen (and painfully lived) and reviewed as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center's series Film Comment Selects (http://filmlinc.com/films/series/film-comment-selects). The series, now in its eleventh year, includes 26 films this year and they are shown between Feb. 18 and March 4 at the Walter Reade Theater at 65th Street near Broadway.

FCS screenings of Bas-Fonds:
Fri Feb 18, 2011: 9:00 pm
Sat Feb 19, 2011: 4:00 pm |

[Chris Knipp]

For the Fillmleaf Forum discussion thread linked with this series, please go HERE. (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3031-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects&p=25767#post25767)

INDEX OF LINKS TO REVIEWS IN THIS SECTION:

At Ellen's Age (Pia Marais 2010) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3032-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2011&p=25886#post25886)
Attenberg (Athina Rachel Tsangari 2010) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3032-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2011&p=25951#post25951)
Belle Épine (Rebecca Zlotowski 2010) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3032-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2011&p=25917#post25917)
Black Power Mixtape: 1967-1975, The (Göran Hugo Olsson: 2011) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3032-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2011&p=25892#post25892)
Cairo 678 (Mohamed Diab 2010) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3032-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2011&p=25891#post25891)
Curling (Denis Côté 2010) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3032-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2011&p=25907#post25907)
Destiny of Lower Animals, The (Deron Albright 2010) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3032-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2011&p=25945#post25945)
Gromozeka (Vladimir Kott 2011) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3032-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2011&p=25936#post25936)
Happy, Happy (Anne Sewitsky 2010) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3032-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2011&p=25885#post25885)
Hit So Hard (P. David Ebersole 2011) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3032-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2011&p=25916#post25916)
Hospitalité (Koji Fukada 2010) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3032-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2011&p=25927#post25927)
Incendies (Denis Villeneuve 2010) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3032-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2011&p=25880#post25880)
Majority (Seren Yüche 2010) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3032-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2011&p=25881#post25881)
Man Without a Cell Phone (Sameh Zoabi 2010) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3032-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2011&p=25926#post25926)
Margin Call (J.C. Chandor 2010) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3032-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2011#post25870)
Memory Lane (Mikaël Hers 2010) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3032-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2011&p=25876#post25876)
Microphone (Ahmad Abdalla 2010) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3032-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2011&p=25922#post25922)
Octubre (Daniel, Diego Vega 2010) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3032-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2011&p=25939#post25939)
Outbound (Bogdan George Apetri 2010) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3032-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2011&p=25877#post25877)
Pariah (Dee Rees 2010) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3032-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2011&p=25908#post25908)
Tyrannosaur (Paddy Considine 2010) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3032-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2011&p=25923#post25923)
Winter Vacation (Hongqi Li 2010) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3032-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2011&p=25873#post25873)

The press screenings schedule for the 2011 New Directors/New Films is as follows. I will be watching as many of these as I can and reviewing all that I see.

Monday, March 7
10:00am MARGIN CALL (109 min) – MoMA, Titus 1
12:15pm ONE and WINTER VACATION (10 min + 91 min) – MoMA, Titus 1

Tuesday, March 8
10:00am MEMORY LANE (98 min) – MoMA, Titus 2
12:00pm OUTBOUND (87 min) – MoMA, Titus 2

Wednesday, March 9
10:00am INCENDIES (130 min) – MoMA, Titus 1
12:30pm MAJORITY (111 min) – MoMA, Titus 1

Thursday, March 10
10:00am HAPPY HAPPY (85 min) – MoMA, Titus 1
11:45am AT ELLEN’S AGE (95 min) – MoMA, Titus 1

Friday, March 11
10:00am 6,7,8 (100 min) – MoMA, Titus 1
12:00pm THE BLACK POWER MIX TAPE 1967-1975 (100 min) – MoMA, Titus 1

Monday, March 14
10:00am CURLING (96 min) WRT
12:00pm PARIAH (86 min) - WRT
2:00pm CIRCUMSTANCE (107 min) – WRT

Tuesday, March 15
10:00am BUKOWSKI and COPACABANA (10min + 107 min) - WRT
12:15pm HIT SO HARD (101 min) - WRT
2:15pm BELLE EPINE (80 min) - WRT

Wednesday, March 16
10:00am MICROPHONE (120 min) – MoMA, Titus 1
1:00pm SOME DAYS ARE BETTER THAN OTHERS (93 min) - WRT
3:00pm TYRANNOSAUR (91 min) - WRT

Thursday, March 17
10:00am NIGHT HUNTER and SUMMER OF GOLIATH (16min + 76 min) - WRT
12:30pm MAN WITHOUT A CELL PHONE (83 min) – MoMA, Titus 1
2:10pm MIYUKI and HOSPITALITÈ (9min + 96 min) – MoMA, Titus 1

Friday, March 18
10:00am GROMOZEKA (104 min) – MoMA-Titus 1
12:00pm MILA CAOS and EL VELADOR (18min + 72 min) – MoMA, Titus 1
2:00pm OCTUBRE (93 min) – MoMA-Titus 1

Monday, March 21
10:00am THE DESTINY OF LESSER ANIMALS (87 min) – MoMA, Titus 2
12:00pm MATCH and ATTENBERG (11min + 95 min) – MoMA, Titus 2
2:00pm FWD: UPDATE ON MY LIFE and SHUT UP LITTLE MAN! (28min + 85min) – MoMA,Titus 2

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[Chris Knipp]

J.C. Chandor: Margin Call (2011)

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KEVIN SPACEY IN MARGIN CALL

A cooler drama of financial meltdown

Margin Call is a dark, elegant-looking, well-acted and very focused film that takes a more realistic look at Wall Street's 2008 crash. Sometimes you may wish for more fantasy, for the glitz and drama of Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko. Or for the drive and desperation of Ben Affleck and Giovanni Ribisi in Boiler Room. J. C. Chandor's feature film debut, which he also wrote, has a real sense of atmosphere, but not quite such a good sense of how to tell a story. You would think a moment so climactic and urgent would fuel a movie of great suspense. Instead there are longeurs, and a sense of slow wind-down, a giving up. The Variety review calls it "methodical, coolly absorbing." But the cool gets in the way of the absorbing sometimes.

But there is commentary. This is clearly a world of men only pretending to know something (and this is realistic, we have to believe) when they barely have a clue. The highest officer on the sales floor can't read charts on screens, and the CEO asks the explainer of what's gone wrong to "Speak to me as you would a small child, or a golden retriever." Too believable. Margin Call has been described as a thriller but also a comedy. Things would be desperate if they weren't so pathetic, tragic if they weren't so tinged with stupidity and greed. You'd weep for these people if so many of them were not reptiles. These are smart people but they're not fully using their brains or their moral sense because their eyes are on the money.

Details have been freely altered but the unnamed setting is a firm like Lehman Brothers. It's a kind of vast gilded glass-bound cage with beautiful faraway views of Manhattan. A couple of employees go on a fast early morning drive to Brooklyn Heights, but otherwise for 36 hours hardly anybody leaves the building.

The action is simple. Heads roll aplenty, but that happens all the time. This time it's different because it emerges that for the past two weeks (and really a long time before that) the firm's holdings have become so shaky that it's going to go under. ( It's credit default swaps and the real estate crisis that are bringing down the store values, but such details are not delineated.) The decision is made to dump all the firm's mortgage securities in a single day for whatever they can get on a dollar per sale as the day wears on. It's the end of the firm and the first big step in the end-of-2008 financial meltdown.

Chandor gets things going through a risk manager Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci) who's part of a sudden purge. As he's escorted out of the building he presses a flash drive upon one of his underlings. It's something he was in the middle of, he says, that looks very important. "Be careful." The underling, Sullivan (Zachary Quinto, the new Spock in Star Trek and a producer of this film), who along with a star trader, Will Emerson (Paul Bettany) and his pal Seth (Penn Badgley), is among those not let go that day, stays in the office till late at night completing Eric Dale's research. He calls back Seth and Sullivan and Will, and they call in Will's boss Jared Cohen (Simon Baker), and when the information has been dumbed down enough for all to understand they call upon the CEO himself, John Tuld (Jeremy Irons). They must bring back Eric Dale, but in the interests of "security" his mobile was cut off, and he has not come home. Also present now: the head risk manager, responsible for Eric Dale's demise, Sarah Robertson (Demi Moore).

Once Tuld gets his golden-retriever-level summary from Sullivan, he knows this is The End. It falls to the trading-floor manager, Sam Rogers (Kevin Spacey) to pep-talk the sales floor into selling out the company, knowing most of them are also going to lose their jobs when it's done, but with a million-plus bonus for axing themselves, the company, Wall Street, and the world economy.

Special kudos go to Kevin Spacey for delivering a performance that is restrained and real this time. He even looks right, and he is the most genuinely complex and conflicted character. Irons too is riveting, managing to be both chatty and Olympian, quick-witted and clueless. Tucci is workmanlike as usual. Bettany is convincing and a little raw in the Ben Affleck role, the aggressive, risk-taking, Nicorette-chomping salesman who's blown a two-million-plus year's earnings mostly on luxuries, a $150,000 sports car (which sounds better than it looks; it's the one that gets driven to Brooklyn Heights to corral Eric Dale), and over $75,000 on call girls and cocaine. The other actors, though carefully chosen, are not as interesting, and this is not an ensemble piece. It doesn't depict a world where people cooperate. There is too much dithering in the script and there are not enough memorable lines, except for almost everything Jeremy Irons says. There's the one about the golden retriever, and the signal line of the piece: "It's not called panic if you're first out the door."

There's a business about Sam Rogers' dying dog that isn't used forcefully enough to justify its being dragged in. There are also one or two gaps in continuity: but this film was reportedly shot in three or four days. Excellent use is made of steel and glass, of night shots of Manhattan, men (few women) in good suits, and a shot of Tuld (Irons) eating alone by a sweep of windows (On the World?) in the company dining room, a moment that nails the man's sublime indifference. Chandor's own father worked in the industry for forty years, and one thing he brings to this film, well received at Sundance and a creditable, even flashy, first effort, is fairness. We pay attention to these men even if we don't like them. There is sympathy if not psychological depth. These are not caricatures. Chandor deserves credit for bringing in such a good-looking, complicated picture for just a little over three million and delivering a swirl of financial events in only 109 minutes. The Red camera cinematography of Frank G. DeMarco does much to contribute to the film's cool elegance.

Seen and reviewed as part of New Directors/New Films, presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and MoMA and the series' opening night film. Picked up at Sundance by Lionsgate, it opens in US theaters in the autumn -- October 2011. It was also at Sundance and Berlin.

ND/NF OPENING NIGHT SELECTION.
Wednesday, March 23rd 2011 | 7 & 7:30 PM | MoMA
Thursday, March 24th 2011 | 8:30 PM | FSL

[Chris Knipp]

Hongqi Li: Winter Vacation (2010)

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Much ado; but then, not so much

Hongqi Li, who has been a hit at the Locarno festival, reminds me of the ultra-dry Swedish director Roy Andersson, but without the production values, the variety of settings and characters, or the momentum. As with Andersson's You the Living (http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=927&view=next), which was in the Rome festival in 2007, the scenes are a series of vignettes with no strong connecting storyline. (Jim Jarmusch and Aki Kaurismäki are also kindred spirits.) Winter Vacation focuses on a group of teenage boys in a generic nowhere land of modern China -- it's Inner Mongolia, but the director deliberately chose shots that could be almost anywhere -- who are frozen in boredom and inertia so stylized it is, occasionally, quite funny. But this is Beckett (one can't help thinking of him too) without the wit or eloquence. Hontqi Li's people stand and stare at each other for a long time before they speak. Very often they just stare into space rather than at each other. There are always, always very long pauses between lines of dialogue.

These kids have no radio, video games, no iPhones or MP3, no TV -- except one that keeps showing Hongqi Li's previous feature (this is his fourth), Routine Holiday (2008). A fun thing to do is to stand over one of their pals (he's their sort of ring leader) and watch him sleep. And he does a lot of that. To make it really exciting someone holds a small pinwheel in front of the boy's mouth so as he sleeps his exhalations make the wheel spin round.

A girl brings one of the boys a cap she has knitted for him. Four or five of his friends are standing around and he's on his bed. He turns the cap over in his hands, manipulates it, pulls it, flips it again. Then he passes it on to another boy, who does the same, and so on, around the room, and then back to the boy the cap was made for. "I'm too young to need a cap like this," he says.

A town market in a desolate square. A long range of tables are sparsely arranged with vegetables of various kinds. A woman comes up and goes over every cabbage at one table. The seller challenges her to buy or go away, and she goes away. Off behind, she comes to another table full of cabbages and again goes over them, taking up one and stripping it of most its leaves. Then she hands it to the seller. They haggle over the price, based on the weight. She cheats him by saying she hasn't the right change. Then as she puts the cabbage in her bag, she adds all the leaves she stripped off earlier, saying it would be a shame to let them go to waste.

A little boy sits in the living room with his grandfather. He asks him why he doesn't go to work and he says he's retired. What does that mean? asks the boy. That I don't have to go to work any longer, says the grandfather. Then am I retired? asks the boy. And so on. He says that when he grows up he wants to be an orphan. Cute little jokes, but with a feeling of déjâ vu.

Other scenes are harder to remember. They're Marty-like moments where the boys stand around out in a courtyard wondering what to do, exchanging grave, long-delayed comments about each other, their families, the limited possibilities for amusement. Vacation ends and the first day of school comes.

"One day after another, it seems as if life never ends," one boy comments as they sit outside on abandoned furniture in a light snow. Another friend imagines himself hitching up with his "stupid and average-looking" girlfriend to produce others like himself who will do the same. "It's the endless fruit of my loins," he sums up. Another boy thinks that their "muddling along" in school leads to a "mentality" that will not contribute to the future of socialism. Their learning is by rote, and so is their politics.

This may be a commentary on the new China. It is certainly a commentary on life in the provinces. These boys are beyond the stimulus of true urban life. They are dullards, but it's the world they live in. The director's minimalist style asks us also whether life should make us laugh or cry. He seems to lean toward laughter (as Roy Andersson also does), but there's sadness and much boredom along the way.

Hongqi Li's filmmaking has been called "mesmerizing," "scorchingly funny" and "corrosively subversive." I did not see anyone scorched from the funny in my audience, or corroded by subversion. As for mesmerizing, yes. The man next to me fell asleep for some time. Then he left, saying this director has a stunning visual sense. That's true. There was something about the arrangement of figures and objects in the long horizontal frames that was striking and original. Sometimes the color or the light verge, ironically, on the sublime. Of course Hongqi Li has something. Has not Locarno said so? There is another kind of mesmerizing: the kind that comes from watching objects move very slowly in front of one's eyes. It's a kind of hypnosis, and you can do it to a chicken. But this kind of film is a tough watch. It's not the way I want to spend a lot of my time, even though I know that's just the very kind of thing that was said when Beckett's Waiting for Godot first appeared.

When I first saw You the Living (slow, but not as tough a watch) I expressed admiration, but also wrote that Andersson's sequences sometimes seemed like "the work of a Saturday Night Live writer in need of Prozac." I commented that "Since some scenes plainly move you or draw a laugh, it's obvious that others fall a little flat." One can offer the same criticism of Hongqi Li. Roy Andersson is not for everyone but he has gained an admiring audience of fans. Li may not ever gain that wide an audience. But his success reflects the increasing focus on Asian cinema in the world. And his long shots and unmoving camera positions are a very Asian way to shoot a film.

Hongqi Li's Winter Vacation was seen and reviewed as part of the New Directors/New Films, presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and MoMA March 23-April 3, 2011.

ND/NF screenings:
Sunday, March 27th 2011 | 6:00 PM | FSLC
Tuesday, March 29th 2011 | 6:00 PM | MoMA

[Chris Knipp]

Mikaël Hers: Memory Lane (2010)

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THIBAULT VINÇON IN MEMORY LANE

Summer and this and that

Memory Lane is the first feature of La Fémis Paris cinema school grad Mikhael Hers, a loose, unfocused film about seven twenty-somethings who return to their old middle class suburb to the southwest of Paris one summer and spend a few days together. The aimless result might be considered Éric Rohmer without the intelligent conversation. Though they like each other and have little else to do, it still takes the whole movie for fellow band members Vincent (Thibault Vinçon of Emmanuel Bourdieu's Poison Friends (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?1851-Ny-Film-Festival-2006&p=15995#post15995), NYFF 2006 ) and Christelle (Dounia Sichov) to get it on. Sisters Muriel (Lolita Chammah) and Celine (Stephanie Dehel) must deal with the recent diagnosis of their father François (Didier Sandre), but his symptoms remain mild and he, like others, is available for nice meals and walks in the park. Raphaël (Thomas Blanchard, also in Bourdieu's film) has depression problems, but they don't seem serious enough to keep him from hiking around with the others toward summer's end.

Vinçon has a charming manner combined with a soulful look that has an edge of sadness around it -- qualities well used for his key role as the university students' con-man leader in Poison Friends. Alas, this is a mere walk-through for him that offers ample opportunity to show his pleasant side but nothing more. Vincent is only vaguely the central figure (and occasional narrator) and the subject is a young generation whose youth ends with the fading of summer, thus changing them all from who they were and dooming them never again to be a band of pals.

What has happened when the last reel spins out other than some discussions, some partying, some swimming, some sex, some outdoor meals, a few songs performed by the group (who sing in English)? Unlike Rohmer, Hers provides no amorous dilemmas to be resolved. He may deserve credit for naturalism since in everyday life very often nothing much happens. But a director with the magic touch can transform that nothing much into quite a lot, and that, here, doesn't happen. Like Rohmer, the director does have an attractive young cast, and the cinematography of Sébastian Buchmann keeps them bathed in warm, natural light.

Memory Lane opened in Paris November 24, 2010, receiving fair reviews (Allociné press rating 3.0) including favorable ones from respected sources (Le Monde, Libération, Les Inrocuptibles, Télérama, L'Humanité). Some French critics however found it "flat," "anecdotal," and "without flavor." Seen and reviewed as a part of the New Directors/New Films series presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and MoMA, March 23 through April 3, 2011.

ND/NF screenings:
Friday, March 25th 2011 | 8:30 PM | FSLC
Sunday, March 27th 2011 | 1:30 PM | MoMA

[Chris Knipp]

Bogdan George Apetri: Outbound (2010)

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ANA ULARU IN OUTBOUND



A long day's desolate ride

Romanian director Apetri's powerful Outbound has some of the tragic intensity, at least in its ending, of De Sica's Bicycle Thief or René Clément's Forbidden Games. First-timer Apetri, aided on the screenplay by a trio of experienced writers, has made one of the best films to come out of the new Romanian cinema. It takes place when a woman prisoner who's served two years of a five-year sentence gets a one-day pass to attend her mother's funeral. She has no intention of turning herself back in. Her day is a chronicle of desperation and hope, beginning with her brother and ending with a doomed train ride. Whatever the crime was, it seems the sullen-faced Matilda (Ana Ularu) wasn't the perpetrator but instead has taken the hit for Paul, the father of her 8-year-old son Toma and a thoroughly sleazy character. Matilda and Paul made a deal, but just see if she can hold him to it. But she has other scores to settle and hard knocks to take.

The Romanians show a penchant for methodical real-time intensity and Apetri is no different, though a key to the power here is a willingness to elide unnecessary details, even maintain a degree of mystery, in the interest of focusing, as the great Italians did, on a few powerful scenes. Even if Matilda is out of jail and some key scenes are enacted in a wide, desolate open space designated by the original title, Periferic, she still seems to have the bars around her, holding her in the claustrophobia of a life that went wrong early. The actress, with a face as simple as a boy's, has a fixed, sullen glare that sticks in your mind.

The narrative is in three parts focused on three names: Andri, Paul, and Toma. We find out very vividly who they are. In a prologue Matilda (Ana Ularu) leaves prison on a 24-hour pass to attend her mother's funeral. Right outside the gate she meets up with a fat trucker (Ion Sapdaru) in a sleeveless shirt: it's summer, and everybody is sweaty. Her plan is to collect money to pay this man later to drive her to the port of Constanta, where she will catch a ship to smuggle her out of the country.

The first stop is Andri (Andi Vasluianu), Matilda's handsome brother. He's not pleased to see her, though he can't entirely hide fraternal feeling. She has disgraced the family, and also ill used him. His wife Lavinia (Ioana Flora) is even more openly hostile. Nonetheless they reluctantly take her to the funeral, and in that ride we feel Matilda's determination and toughness. Lavinia's insults only make her smile. She ingratiates herself with no one, smoking a cigarette outside the cemetery and walking away from the table at the al fresco dinner afterward. Andri is shocked, maybe pleased, to learn he has an 8-year-old nephew, but he's not willing to take Matilda's son in, and Matilda leaves.

The next meeting is with the abusive, self-indulgent Paul. He will give Matilda only a fraction of the payoff, saying it's not due till five years are up. He has brutal sex with her, then reveals that their son, Toma (Timotei Duma), whom he was supposed to be caring for, is in an orphanage. So that becomes an additional stop before the truck ride to the ship, and it turns into a train ride, with more brutal surprises and the shattering finale, which yet has a poetic rightness about it.

The tight schedule Matilda must follow -- she has to meet the trucker by evening and must escape before the prison knows she's missing -- heightens all the action, but Apetri's directing never feels rushed and makes every minute count. Ularu may seem one-note at times, but her unwavering drive is the key to Outbound's urgency.

Cristian Mungiu of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days co-wrote the original story. Marius Panduru of Police, Adjective did the warm, brown-tinged photography.

Outbound has shown at Locarno, Warsaw and Toronto. Seen and reviewed as part of New Directors, New Films, the series co-presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, from March 23 through April 3, 2011.

ND/NF screenings:
Thursday, March 24th 2011 | 9:00 PM | MoMA
Saturday, March 26th 2011 | 5:30 PM | FSLC

[Chris Knipp]

Denis Villeneuve: Incendies (2010)

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LUBNA AZABAL IN INCENDIES

"Fire," "burnings," a strange family history and a parable of sectarian war

When you watch the French Canadian director Denis Villeneuve's Oscar-nominated film Incendies -- and it is worth watching – prepare for something long, literally dark, and shocking. The film, adapted from a play by the celebrated young Canadian-Lebanese playwright Wajdi Mouwawad but expanded into a film rich in Middle East location (and in Arabic as well as French dialogue) delves deeply into the hidden past of a family of Lebanese origin. A mother from Lebanon, Nawal Marwan (Lubna Azabal) dies at 60. Her twin son Simon (Maxim Gaudette) and daughter Jeanne (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin ) go before a notary for whom their mother also worked, Jean Lebel (Rémy Girard) and they receive instructions in the form of two sealed letters, one for a brother and one for a father. This is incredible news for the twins. They thought their father died a heroic death and they knew nothing of a brother. Nawal also requests that she be buried naked in the ground, face down, without a coffin. Simon is angered by all this and rejects it. Jeanne wants to comply with their mother's wishes.

What follows intermixes flashbacks to the early life of Nawal with sequences about Jeanne's quest, which Simon eventually joins. For reasons not entirely clear to me, the name "Lebanon" is never mentioned, though it is clear that violent fighting between Christians and Muslims and a country where educated Arabic-speaking people also tend to speak French mark the setting as Lebanese. (Actual location shooting was mostly done in Jordan.) Here it is meant to be a fictional country called "Foad," though it could still have been universal, at least for countries of long war and savage factional conflict, without the fiction that it was not what it plainly is. Rape, torture, genocide and dislocation dominate this world, whose distance from the experience of Jeanne and Simon we can only guess at. Incendies is powerful and absorbing and while the images of war are familiar from many films, what holds them together is the detective-story trajectory that we cannot reveal and is a discovery even Nawal herself does not come to until shortly before her death.

In flashbacks to her decades-earlier life we see Nawal watch her lover shot in front of her; then give birth to a child who's immediately taken from her; later become the sole survivor of a bus shot up by Christian militiamen; still later be imprisoned for many years and repeatedly raped. It's all a bit much, but it's so stunningly staged and shot that you rarely question it. You only wish the two siblings investigating their mother's secret, violent past were more interesting or more involved.

One of the first flashback sequences reveals what the twins will only realize later: that the heroic father who died in a moment of strife, a Muslim refugee despised by Nawal's Christian siblings, was actually the father of their older brother, not them, and that older brother was taken away from Nawal because born out of wedlock, but tattooed with three dots on the heel so she might be able to recognize and find him again some day. Those dots are duly connected. It might be better if they weren't.

More flashbacks show Nawal going in search of her lost son, sent to a Christaian orphanage burnt in reprisal by Muslim militias,though the orphans were saved -- somewhere. Nawal volunteers with a Muslim militia in hopes of finding the boy, and is jailed, for 15 years, where she is known as "the woman who sings" and is so resilient no cruelty, including rape, causes her to crack. Informants' accounts of Jeanne alternate with images of Nawal herself. I couldn't help being reminded of Ana Ularu, in the Romanian film Outbound, just seen, who also is a spare, stony-faced young woman in search of a young boy who's been put in an orphanage. But Nawal must endure greater tests.

As Peter Debruge explains in his Variety review (http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117943471?refcatid=31), Villeneuve "excises entire blocks of text" in the transfer from play to film. Instead there are many striking images, often in a soft semidarkness that underlines the mystery the twins are unraveling. Debruge further suggests that Villeneuve lets us draw our own conclusions and speak our own words where the playwright Mouwawad spelled everything out in long monologues. Whatever one may think of the thorny tragic and tendentious plot whose final revelation strains credulity, and however excessive the measured pace of the 130-minute film is at times, Villeneuve has realized the play on film in a bold and richly cinematic manner and his accomplishment has already gained festival kudos and the justified admiration of cinephiles.

Incendies could have been a better film if it allowed itself to breathe and curbed some of its drawn-out and less necessary sequences. Perhaps it could have taken a moment to smile, yea, even in the world of near-biblical suffering. Ultimately the source play shakes you up while lecturing you and the film does the same. One is fascinated by the plot twists and can see their poetic justice without consenting to believe them all. Some of the truths of war and sectarianism might ring truer if they were not all so neatly tied into the detective-story search for family origins. I think often in this kind of context of Claire Denis's 2004 The Intruder (http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=514) and Arnaud des Pallières 2003 Adieu, (http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=363)multi-level films about family and wrongdoing whose failures to connect all the dots make them richer and more memorable and perhaps even more truly cinematic. Perhaps only a disturbing and never-explained opening sequence in Incendies of boys having their head shaved to the tune of Radiohead's "You and Whose Army" has that quality of boldly evoking inexplicable but dangerously real worlds.

Director Villeneuve has thrice before been put forth as Canada’s pick in the Best Foreign Oscar category — for his first three films: Cosmos, August 32nd on Earth and Maelström — but has never won the award (this year it went to Danish director Susanne Bier's In a Better World). Incendies was also shown at Venice, Telluride, Toronto and Sundance. With it he may have moved up a notch as an international artist and even this time a more commercially viable one. Incendies goes into limited US release April 22, 2011. Incendies was reviewed (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3015-Incendies) in January in Filmleaf's Forums section by Howard Schumann at the time its Canadian release.

Seen and reviewed as part of New Directors/New Films, the series co-presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and MoMA, New York March 22-April 3, 2011.

ND/NF screenings:
Friday, March 25th 2011 | 6:00 PM | MoMA
Sunday, March 27th 2011 | 8:30 PM | FSL

[Chris Knipp]

Seren Yüce: Majority (2010)

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ESME MADRA AND BARTU KÜÇÜKÇAGLAYAN IN MAJORITY

Indecision and ethnic issues in Istanbul

Seren Yüce is a young Turkish director who deserves credit for dealing with the situation of the most ordinary and unglamorous of characters. Mertkan (Bartu Küçükçağlayan) is a paunchy, unambitious, bored 21-year-old who lives with his mother Nazan (Nihal G. Koldas) and father Kemal (Settar Tanriogen). His father is the macho, aggressive owner of a construction company, for whom Mertkan is little more than an errand boy. His older brother is married and lives on his own and is therefore, in Mertkan's eyes, free. Mertkan is in thrall to his dad. His mother is disappointed in him and her husband, whom she calls "insensitive." We see in an opening sequence that Mertkan as a young boy was unthinkingly abusive to their housemaid, and even then he was psychologically bullied by his condescending father. The family's life isn't luxurious, but they don't suffer either, and when there's a problem, dad's money can fix it. Mertkan drives a late-model SUV. He hangs out with pals, all with gelled hair, whose idea of a good time is to drink tea in the mall, scarf hamburgers, or drive around quaffing beer.

Unfortunately the film seems as unmotivated and listless as its protagonist, and while it has realistic and occasionally humorous moments, it utterly lacks flair or the ability to make its scenes pop.

Into Mertkan's demeaning, dull and senseless existence as an homme moyen sensuel, spineless version, comes Gül (Esme Madra), a young, slim, darkly pretty Kurdish woman (though the word "Kurdish" is never spoken) who works in the fast-food joint where Mertkan bolts hamburgers to assuage his humiliations from his father. She begins to show interest in Mertkan and since he has nothing better to do, he goes along. If he's not a virgin at least he may not have had sex for free before, with kissing. This seems as much as is going to happen to stir things up, and writer-director Yüce's main point seems to be highlighting the ways in which bourgeois prejudices plug into the Turkish-Kurdish split. The prejudices are shared by Merkan's mall rat pal Ersan (Ilhan Hacifazlioglu), who refers to Gül as a "gypsy," which is either slang for "slut" or a Turkish code word for "Kurd." In fact these subtleties are hard to judge by an outsider, and a Turkish viewer of the film has questioned the casting of Gül, saying the actress speaks Turkish with too perfect an Istanbul accent to have come not so long ago from Van, as designated in the story. Given the fact that she's studying sociology at a good university, the viewer also questioned Gül's telling Mertkan her greatest dream (he can think of none himself) is to find a handsome man and marry him.

This seems not so surprising: Gül is away from her family, and short on money. The fast-food job is necessary to pay for school and her digs are humble and shared. Gül escaped from a suffocating, traditional home life and she needs some security. She's not unaware that Mertkan has money in his pocket. Marriage could indeed be high on her list of priorities, even though it means risking entrapment in a situation that will not allow her to use her education to full advantage.

After Martkan brings Gül home for dinner (which at least he has the courage to do), Kemal very quickly tells him to dump her. People from Van are communists, he says, and this woman represents the people who want to break up the country. This is Mertkan's chance to show some cojones. But will he? Unfortunately Yüce has no excitement up his sleeve, though from scene to scene he keeps it realistic, and sometimes slightly funny.

Yüce has been assistant director on films like Akin's Edge of Heaven, but Akin's brilliance and ambition have not worn off on him. However, the casting is good. Despite his schlubby appearance and lack of energy, as Mertkan Bartu Küçükçağlayan manages to be somebody you can identify with, and the other three principals are quite real. Yüce just needed to write a script that made something more telling happen. Majority doesn't make sufficient dramatic use of its issues and conflicts.

Yüce's first feature, Majority/Çoğunluk won a number of awards in Turkey and the Lion of the Future prize at Venice. It was also shown at Thessaloniki and Rotterdam. Seen and reviewed as part of New Directors/New Films, the series jointly presented by MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York from March 22 through April 3, 2011.

ND/NF screenings:
Friday, March 25th 2011 | 9:15 PM | MoMA
Sunday, March 27th 2011 | 12:30 PM | FSLC

[Chris Knipp]

Anne Sewitsky: Happy, Happy (2010)

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JOACHIM RAFAELSEN, AGNES KITTELSEN, MAIBRITT SAERENS, HENRIK RAFAELSEN IN HAPPY, HAPPY

Danish couples comedy with cringe-worthy giggles

Anne Sewitsky’s directorial debut Happy, Happy (Sykt lykkelig, which means "sickeningly happy") is a dark little satire of sex and manners with musical interludes and an ugly little subplot that seems tasteless and pointless. Two couples, each with a little boy, are thrown together in an isolated piece of the Norwegian countryside as into a Petri dish. Into the world of Kaja (Agnes Kittelsen) and Erik (Joachim Rafaelsen) and their young son Theodor (Oskar Hernæs Brandsø) come tall Liam Neeson-lookalike Sigve (Henrik Rafaelsen), his blond Danish wife Elisabeth (Maibritt Saerens), and their adopted African son Noa (Ram Shihab Ebedy). The writer, Ragnhild Tronvoll, wastes no time. The one couple is renting the house to the other and they've close together. A joint dinner is staged the first evening. Kaja's neediness is embarrassing. She seems to have no social outlets and Erik seems to have no social skills.

The second night the landlords dine chez the new tenants. This time a couples game causes Kaja to blurt out more. She and Erik haven't had sex for a year! Drunk, she rushes from the table crying, and in comforting her Sygve reveals the embarrassing reason for their coming to the country: Elisabeth has just had an affair. Sygve and Kaja embrace, and the loosened-up kaja gives Sygve a quick blow-job.

This only leads to more in the days to follow. Sex with Sygve is much better for Kaja than it ever was with Erik. Erik, it turns out, has told Kaja she isn't attractive anymore. He'd rather go moose hunting. Actually (this emerges more gradually) he may never have liked women that much, and his hunting trips are a probable excuse to indulge his sexuality "on the down low." This comes out when Erik and Sygve go on a run, and afterward in a rush of emotion and misunderstanding Erik tries to kiss Sygve. Kaja turns out to have long feared Erik is gay. He may have married her out of pity because when they dated she was so unhappy and unlovable.

Elisabeth is a cold, unpleasant woman, hardly the "perfect" creature Kaja sees. For a while, Sygve may believe he's in love with Kaja, who definitely thinks she's never been happier in her life than Sygve has made her. A (possibly reformed?) Erik attempts sex with both women, but his technique is comically crude and pleases neither.

Meanwhile Theodor and Noa enter into a sick master-slave relationship involving beatings and confinement brought about by Theodor's reading about African slavery. Erik finds out about his wife's infidelity and, having been a good wrestler in his youth, tries to beat up Sygve out in the snow -- where one day Theodor comes upon Kaja and Sygve cavorting in the nude. Maybe the boys' unhealthy role-playing is an expression of their emotional confusion about their parents' misbehavior.

The narrative arc leads up to a somewhat weak climax as Christmas comes and Sygve, Elisabeth and Kaja have joined the local glee club and Elisabeth, who knows about Sygve's affair with Kaja pushes Kaja to sing the soprano solo in "Amazing Grace," which looks like it's going to lead to huge embarrassment. In the end it turns out at least one of these marriages is over, but there's no follow-through.

A young male quartet in suits and ties sings American songs in interludes staged in a studio that both break up segments of the film and add to the comic distancing and neatly dovetail with the musical theme of the glee club and classics that underline sexual moments. Dennis Harvey of Variety calls (http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117944442) the quartet "a Greek-chorus device that restores good humor at the darkest moments." And there are dark moments. Harvey acknowledges that the writing sometimes "risks pushing the envelope farther than the feature's lightly farcical emphasis can handle."

Happy, Happy is an accomplished comedy -- if you can call it a comedy. It is hard sometimes to see Kaja's unresolved personality -- she turns out to be an orphan raised in foster homes -- and Erik's sexual confusion as funny, and it is quite impossible to see the Norwegian boy's continual abuse of the African boy as in any way risible. A playing with the squirm-worthy slips into the tasteless there. Noa isn't developed as a character either. Is the slavery-play just good fun for him? He never interacts with his parents, and barely speaks.

There are gaps and implausible elements in the writing too. How come this young couple owns two houses in close proximity? Kaja is a schoolteacher and Elisabeth is a lawyer, but what do Erik and Sygve do? The direction is sure enough to keep the scenes moving energetically, but Sewitsky can't manage the various tonal shifts in the script. The actors, particularly Rafaelsen and Kittelsen, do good work, with Rafaelsen providing the subtlest moments.

Sykt lykkelig, not to be confused with Henrik Ruben Genz's droll Jutland Danish comedy Frygtelig lykkelig (http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=1432) (Terribly Happy), won the World Cinema Jury award at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, which shows how well the setup works for audiences. There is some talk of a Hollywood remake. Seen and reviewed as part of New Directors/New Films, presented by MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center March 23-April 3, 2011.

ND/NF screenings:
Friday, March 25th 2011 | 6:00 PM | FSLC
Sunday, March 27th 2011 | 4:30 PM | MoM

[Chris Knipp]

Pia Marais: At Ellen's Age (2010)

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JEANNE BALIBAR (LEFT) AND STEFAN STERN (RIGHT) IN AT ELLEN'S AGE

A woman poised on the edge -- very poised

Pia Marais grew up in South Africa, Sweden, and Spain, studied in London and Germany. At Ellen’s Age (Im Alter Von Ellen) is an international film, a film aware of but at ease with dislocation. Jeanne Balibar is a famous French movie actress, who here acts in meticulous German. Arnaud Despleshin, Jacques Rivette, Olivier Assayas, Benoît Jacquot, and Christophe Honoré love Jeanne Baibar, and you can see why. Here, as Ellen, she is a woman at the end of her tether who never loses her implacable cool. That's Jeanne Balibar: a poise and neutrality, that is at the same time amused, present, intelligent. Here, as Ellen, she is an international person by occupation: an airline stewardess, who has a panic attack and walks off the job just as the plane is ready for takeoff because she sees a leopard on the runway.

That's one reason. But she is slightly unhinged already. Her longtime companion, Florian (Georg Friedrich) has left her. Or his relationship with another woman has made theirs too unstable. He is about to be a father -- of the other woman's baby. He seems to want a kind of ménage à trois. Without the placebo of the formerly stable "home" to return to, the instability of Ellen's job becomes simply aimlessness. She learns that her walk-off will force her superiors to fire her, and she wanders off. She walks in on a gay colleague at an airport hotel and spends the night, sleeps over and is taken up by a woman who stages a drunken sex party to amuse and distract her -- or perhaps just make us think of the drawings of Otto Dix.

Ellen's aimlessness is a kind of distracted chutzpah. She won't put out her cigarette in a taxi, and the driver evicts her -- and drives off with her suitcase in the trunk. She hitches a ride in a van to catch the taxi, but instead, still wearing her flight attendant uniform, the only clothes she has, becomes the somewhat out of place guest of a commune of young long-haired animal activists. They are a hippie and punk German version of the anti-poachers she saw after the leopard appeared on the African runway and delayed takeoff. A little African boy lighting a handmade cigarette said they were "professionals." "We are the only ones who shoot the poachers," he had said.

Marais' film, following Horst Markgraf 's screenplay, has an admirable dreamlike quality that creates a sense of captured reality. The young German activists are attractive. They argue about all their actions. They are vegans. They are a commune, so they find a temporary place for Ellen. Her maturity and sense of order might help them. But in one of their demos she won't strip naked as they do so she doesn't get full voting rights, and later she is not allowed to live in the guest room.

Florian, who has been desperately searching for her, finds Ellen in a furniture store, finally not in her stewardess uniform any more. "I live here," she says. He wants to take her back, but she won't go. She has him come and see her with Karl (Stefan Stern), a young man in the commune who finds her beautiful. She has Karl pretend he's her boyfriend to show Florian she no longer needs him. Later Karl proposes marriage to her, because it may exempt him from military service. She marries him but will not have sex with him -- till she does. There is a good scene in a bathtub. Karl makes one realize that Ellen has bravado. He has it too, but he admits he's not as confident as he seems. "I know," she says.

The German activists stop a truck and release a load of chickens, and later let loose a lot of white lab mice. Memorable moments: Ellen with a monkey on her shoulder; in the dark with a horde of white mice scurrying away. The message (to us) is clear: this is foolishness. The sexy young activists are not helping the animals. Suddenly, we're in Africa, and Ellen has found the anti-poacher group again and the African boy who rolls cigarettes. In the final scene, when she has been given a bed and made it up, the boy says, "I think you need a new set of clothes. . . or maybe you just need to come with me for a walk." And they go off into the African haze, her dawn. We don't know if this will be her life or is just a stepping stone, like Karl.

In this second film by Marais (her first won four prizes for a promising beginning) Ellen has come to a mid-life crisis that's a crisis of age but also a kind of rebirth into an age of reason. Viewers who find the script aimless or think the film establishes too little distance from its protagonist can enjoy Balibar's sublimely improvisational, self-possessed performance as a woman stripped of everything and therefore free. They may also enjoy the convincing and detailed scenes of the German animal rights commune, and the flavorful moments in Marais' home continent of Africa. The transfer from 16mm to 35 is handsome and the sound is atmospheric.

This picture debuted at Locarno just before a JetBlue employee walked off in very similar circumstances, life imitating art. At Ellen's Age was also shown at Toronto. Seen and reviewed as part of the New Directors/New Films series presented by MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center from March 23 through April 3, 2011 in NYC.

2010. Germany. 95 minutes. In German.

Series showing times:
2011-03-24 | 6:00 PM | MoMA
2011-03-26 | 3:00 PM | FSLC

[Chris Knipp]

Mohamed Diab: Cairo 678 (2010)

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A campaign against Cairo gropers

The title stands for a crowded Cairo bus where women are routinely harassed sexually by men. The story is one of self-empowerment. Thus it fits in well with the post-January 25 moment in which Egypt lives today. The film reads at first like an a lesson and consciousness-raiser for Middle Eastern women. But it's done with such vividness and humor it quickly becomes involving and thought-provoking for any audience. 678 follows three women who become connected because of shared anger at the way Egyptian men habitually feel up and assault women in public places. If it was noted that it didn't happen in Tahrir Square during the demonstrations, that reflected the new revolutionary spirit.

Each of the thee women suffers from different assaults -- gropers, grabbers, feelers, lone and group. A wealthy young woman is felt up by a dozen men who press upon her at a crowded football match. She isn't raped, but she feels violated. Another is a "muhaggiba," a veiled women who's constantly bothered on buses, which limited income forces her to ride to her job at a government registry office. The third is a free-thinking young lady -- she aspires to doing stand-up, like her fiance -- who is grabbed and pulled along by a man driving a pickup truck through a public square.

Fayza (Bushra), the "muhaggiba," gets groped daily. Her husband Adel (Bassem Samra) is a crude dude who works two jobs just to pay the rent. Their two kids are being forced out of a tuition school. He wants a little loving when he gets home, but Fayza is so turned off by men she pushes him away. A TV appearance by Seba (Nelly Karim) leads Fayza to attend her class in self-defense for women threatened with male groping. She keeps coming back to the class again and again, but is too ashamed to tell Seba what's been happening to her.

Seba is the one who was assaulted at the soccer game. What's worse, when it happened her husband Sherif (Ahmed El Fishawy) was more concerned about himself than her. He claimed to be so disturbed by Seba's "defilement" that he had to stay away from home for weeks. This meant he wasn't around when she had a miscarriage, for which she can't forgive him.

After Fayza keeps coming to Seba's class, Seba tells her she doesn't need to learn self-fefence. She points to a pin she's wearing and says that's all she needs. Fayza takes this advice and after she stabs several perpetrators with sharp objects, she tells Seba. They both know it's wrong but still feel pleased.

Nelly (Nahed El Sebai) is the would-be comedian engaged to marry a standup comic (Omar El Saeed). She wants to take the pickup truck driver to court in a sexual harassment case, but Omar's family says it she does that, he can't marry her. Another issue is he must give up standup and become a banker to be able to afford to marry -- the crippling cost of weddings and the low incomes of college grads being big issue in Egypt.

The stabbings lead to all three women being questioned by a wry and rotund cop, Essam (Maged El Kedwany), who eventually figures what's going on (and also stands in for various segments of the Egyptian male audience). El Kedwany is especially good as a classic Egyptian figure who yet is complex and unpredictable and has tragedies of his own to deal with. When the tension grows to a peak, the women temporarily turn on each other, Fayza accusing the more modern women of provoking assaults while they blame her traditional outlook for perpetuating male chauvinism. Nelly's case refers to the first actual presentation of a sexual assault case in an Egyptian court. After-titles point out that there are still very few such cases. But both Fayza's counter-attacks and Nelly's daring in court evidently reflect shifting attitudes.

His directorial debut, this is Diab's fifth screenplay, and the writing skill shows in the earthiness of some of the characters and the street, police station, standup audiences, domestic scenes of different social levels and bus scenes, all written and directed to deftly convey the texture of Egyptian daily life. Ahmed Gabr's handheld camera could have been toned down a bit. Cairo 678 is distributed by Fortissimo Films (Jean-Michel Basquiat: the Radiant Child; Winter's Bone).

2010. Egypt. 100 minutes. In Egyptian Arabic. (The title was mistakenly given as "6,7,8" in the ND/NF series program and has now been revised to Cairo 678. The original film title is 678.)

678 was shown at the Dunbai festival, where it won the Muhr Arab award and Bushra and Al Kedwany won best actress and best actor prizes. The film opened in Cairo to acclaim and notoriety in December 2010. Seen and reviewed as part of the New Directors/New Films series presented March 23-April 3 by MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, NYC.

Screening times and dates for ND/NF:
2011-03-26 | 3:30 PM | MoMA
2011-03-28 | 9:00 PM | FSLC

NOTE: This film, under the title Les Femmes du Bus 678, is being released in France May 30, 2012.

[Chris Knipp]

Göran Hugo Olsson: The Black Power Mixtape: 1967-1975 (2011)

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VINTAGE COLOR FROM THE BLACK POWER MIXTAPE

A Swedish look at the Black Power era

What can Göran Hugo Olsson, a Swede born in 1965, add to our understanding of the Black Power movement in America? The answer is not a lot, really, other than a "clean and clear" point of view uncolored by American emotions or prejudices of the movement's radical rise and importance as a new generation's break from the passive resistance of Dr. King leading up the its decline under violent attack from US law and the FBI and the government-induced drug epidemic. But to tell the story, Olsson had access to some rich and beautiful newly unearthed footage shot by Swedish journalists. And by "mixtape" he means that he added new commentary by Black Americans who were around at the time and have lived to tell their tale -- or, more accurately, to reassess the significance of events in the light of today. In the discovered footage, in particular there is more than usual of Stokely Carmichael (including him interviewing his mother), an interview with Kathleen Cleaver when she was in jail, a full-dress interview with Lewis Farrakhan on the eve of his rise to power, and, perhaps best of all, much lovely and atmospheric old 16mm color footage of life on the streets off Harlem.

A peculiar interlude concerns how TV Guide, oddly described as "the most popular magazine in America," published a cover story by the editor that lambasted Sweden's depiction of American politics. Emile De Antonio is shown putting the magazine in its place as idiotic and read by idiots.

The Swedish descriptions of Harlem treat it as if it were some third world country. There is a Marxist slant that's not out of place in describing the demographics there and the radical aims of the Black Panther Party of Oakland, whose free breakfasts where children are led in empowerment chants are shown, and which were famously described by J. Edgar Hoover as the most dangerous activity in America. It doesn't always come together. Though Last Poets member Abiodun Oyewole is one of the contemporary "mixtape" voiceovers, the Swedes can't give a full sense of the American context, and the American present time speakers, like Erykah Badu, Harry Belafonte, Cleaver, Angela Davis, Talib Kweili, Bobby Seale, and Ahmir-Khalib Thompson, discuss 1968 as if it only happened in America. Oddly, a world-wide picture of the Sixties political upheavals is never drawn.

Göran Hugo Olsson has made commercials, shorts, documentaries, and music videos. This is his first documentary feature. It won the World Documentary Editing award at Sundance in January and was also shown at Berlin in February and will be shown at Miami, Istanbul, and San Francisco. Sundance Selects is distributing the film. Seen and described as part of New Directors/New Films, presented March 23-April 3, 2011 by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

ND/NF screenings:
2011-03-26 | 9:00 PM | MoMA
2011-03-28 | 6:00 PM | FSL

[Chris Knipp]

Denis Côté: Curling (2010)

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EMMANUEL BILODEAU IN CURLING

Overprotective dad and a pileup of corpses

In Denis Côté's miserabilist mock-thriller a French Canadian bowling alley handyman develops increasing mental problems while keeping his 15-year-old daughter out of school and away from much contact with the outside world. An opening scene shows she hasn't even had her eyes examined before. With glasses, she wanders out one day and comes upon a pile of frozen corpses. Later her dad hides a corpse himself -- that of a neighbor boy he finds dying by the highway -- in an abandoned motel where he used to work. Emmanuel Bilodeau plays the borderline-autistic dad Jean-Francois, and his real life daughter Philomène plays Jean-François' daughter, Julyvonne. The names may be fun, but the action decidedly isn't in this feature, the director's fourth, which has little to recommend it other than a Beckettian alienation, without the eloquence.

Curling takes place, we're told, in a "rural Quebec town," but we see only desolate settlements. The bowling alley, where Jean-Francois Sauvageau, the man with the mustache and the the Aznavour stare, cleans up; a deserted motel called "Mistral" where he also cleans up, until its owners shut it down; his own house, where he keeps his 15-year-old daughter Julyvonne a virtual prisoner; and thin strips of wind-and-snow swept highway in between. The father-daughter acting collaboration isn't a very fruitful one: the two Bilodeaus have little chemistry or presence; both maintain sad-sack stares. A visit to wife and mother Rosie (Johanne Haberlin) in prison leads to an outburst. Rosie knows Jean-François is keeping the girl isolated and declares with fury that she's "borderline retarded" and that threatens that she'll get revenge for this wrongdoing when she gets out.

Left all day by herself, Julyvonne seems strangely content with sitting outside staring into space. When she finds the group of frozen corpses, she runs from them at first, but then goes back in the daytime to join them now and then. They might represent the evil outside world her father has tried in vain to shield her from, but for her in an odd way for her they represent life, the existence of other people. Côté doesn't really do anything but drop vague hints as to what anything may mean. When Jean-François hides the little boy's corpse, it's apparently because he doesn't want to deal with cops. Since the motel lady also says not to call the cops when he finds puddles of blood on the bed and floor of a room recently vacated by a trucker, Jean-François emerges as only marginally odder or more secretive than the other rural characters in Côté's oddball world.

"Fun" (the Canadian French word for, in fact, fun) is offered by the bowling alley boss, who brings in a bright-haired goth girl to mind the snack bar, and by Jean-François' former motel employers, who take him to a commercial location where people play the Canadian variation of the game of curling -- where big polished granite stones are slid over ice in a competition that combines aspects of bowls, boule and shuffleboard. Jean-François takes his daughter, eventually, to these activities. After he hides the boy's body, he has a mental meltdown, though, and goes off in his car leaving his daughter to her own devices. A brief encounter with a rural call girl seems to soften him up, however, and as the film ends he calls Julyvonne, declaring love and affection, and returns to her again.

In constructing his bleak tale, which is not enlivened by music (save a few CD's played for Julyvonne as rewards for being good) or by any humor, Côté has provided some of the trappings of a murder mystery, namely the group of adult corpses the girl finds -- and for all we know the boy might be victim of the same feud or gang fight. He has also created an emotional crisis in his protagonist. However both of these are red herrings. The emotional crisis is deflated, or turned around. The bodies -- well, the cops are coming, but it's a while till spring thaw time. Côté is intentionally careless in spinning his yarn.

Shown at Locarno in compettion, the film won the Best Director prize there. Seen and reviewed as part of New Directors/New Films presented March 23-April 4, 2011 by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and MoMA, New York. In French-Canadian dialect. 92min. In 35mm.

ND/NF screening times:
Sat Mar 26: 6:15 pm - MoMA
Sun Mar 27: 3:30 pm - FSLC |

[Chris Knipp]

Dee Rees: Pariah (2011)

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AASSHA DAVIS AND ADEPERO ODUYE IN PARIAH

Gay soul sister comes of age

"If Aliki, a sassy 17-year-old New Yorker, knows anything it’s that she’s gay and she badly wants a girlfriend," the blurb of this movie starts out. "However, there’s a problem— her middle-class Brooklyn family," her macho dad and her religious mom.

Dee Rees' semi-autobiographical first film is a young black lesbian's breezy, fast-moving New York coming-of-age story. This is a brightly colored, appealing, ultimately upbeat little film that fills a welcome niche. There are plenty of white male gay coming of age films (two of the best of them Edge of Seventeen and Get Real), but the LGBT audience has not had many about black girls who considered suicide when a girlfriend was enuf. Actually Aliki, who most people call Li, is too strong a girl to consider suicide.

The word "pariah" is a bit misleading. At school, Alika's orientation is perfectly cool. In fact when some fine young ladies talk about her, it turns out one of them finds her attractive. And she changes into butch attire that she wears at school, and switches back into earrings and combed out hair and takes off the baseball cap when she returns home.

As the story begins, Aliki (a very convincing and warm Adepero Oduye), is a 17-year-old who gets taken to lesbian clubs by her older butch best girl friend Laura (Pernell Walker). Aliki does dearly want to find a girlfriend to give her her first girl-to-girl kiss and become her first lover. But she's too bashful and uncomfortable with the overt song lyrics she hears and overly role-defined styles on display at the clubs to seek that girlfriend there. Meanwhile at school -- the camera using indirection to show her eavesdropping as well as switching outfits -- Li sees the delicious girls who might be interested -- and also might not be the kind you meet at clubs. Meanwhile her uptight, over-stressed mother Audrey (Kim Wayans) is buying her feminine sweaters and complaining about the way she dresses. Obviously Audrey knows what is going on, but just can't accept it.

In the course of the movie Aliki experiences heartbreak both at home and out -- and comes out at home with the usual difficulty. Audrey objects to the dyke-like Laura in no uncertain terms. She turns her away rudely when she comes to the door. Instead she foists a classmate whose mother she works with on Aliki as someone to walk to and from school with. This is Bina (Aasha Davis), who turns out to know where Aliki's coming from. But when Bina kisses Aliki, she jumps away at first. Later Li has a night to remember with her new friend -- only to be rejected the next morning and told it was only playing around. Li runs to Laura -- who was hurt by being left out of the loop and rebuffs her. Meanwhile Li's mom and her cop dad Arthur (Charles Parnell) are constantly fighting. Arthur's pretense of working double-time is beginning to be an obvious cover for a double life. Aliki's only solution is to escape from home, and she gets early college admission on the West Coast through her writing talents -- the usual bittersweet happy ending of coming of age tales.

Rees does not entirely steer clear of cliche or of routine exposition; this may have been a little too self-consciously a Sundance Workshop project at times. There are some unnecessary or too-generic student-teacher moments, there's a bit too much of the fighting parents, and the hand-held camera swings back and forth a bit too much in closeups of conversations. But the look of the film is still a pleasure, especially the color filters for several key moments, through Bradford Young's rich use of 35mm and the costuming, ranging from Laura's and Li's butch outfits to the stylish many-colored gear worn by Bina that expands Aliki's world into something more expressive and gender-complex. Beyond the warm, lively look, above all the scenes of the young women are acted with refreshing naturalness. Cornell grad Odepero Oduye has been hailed as a breakout star.

Debuted at Sundance January 2011, Pariah has been picked up by Focus Features. Seen and reviewed as part of the New Directors/New Films series presented from March 23 through April 4, 2011 by MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York.

ND/NF showtimes and locations:
Sat Mar 26: 8:00 pm FSLC
Mon Mar 28: 9:00 pm - MoMA

[Chris Knipp]

P. David Ebersole: Hit So Hard (2011)

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AUF DER MAUR, ERLANDSON, SCHEMEL, AND LOVE IN HOLE'S HEYDAY

A rock musician felled by drugs who recovered

The Seattle grunge look came from the style of butch lesbians. That's one of the nuggets we get from P. David Ebersole's rocumentary Hit So Hard: The Life and Near-Death Story of Drummer Patty Schemel. Schemel was the drummer for Courtney Love's group Hole from 1992 until 1998, replacing the original drummer, Caroline, Rue but then herself had to be replaced. Love declares that for her Patty will always be Hole's drummer. But in fact the feisty, good-humored but sensitive lesbian drummer was downed by drugs, left the band over a recording issue, and for a while was living on the streets of LA addicted to crack. Today Patty Schemel has been clean and sober for six years, is married to a woman and raises a child with her, and has her own dog day-care center, while giving serious drum instruction to young girls. Schemel isn't one of the rock giants people go out to see movies about. But Ebersole and Schemel do tell a hopeful story -- about someone who did not die of an overdose or some other kind of rock suicide but has lived to tell the tale with spirit and a sense of humor. And this movie incidentally takes us back to some intimate moments in the world of Seattle rock's most celebrated casualty, Kurt Cobain.

Patty shared an apartment in LA with Cobain and Courtney Love shortly after the birth of their baby daughter, Frances, and not long before Cobain's suicide. She has provided a wealth of video footage of Cobain, Love, and touring with Hole. The unpublished Kurt Cobain footage is the most newsworthy part of the film. It was an effort to preserve that footage and Schemel's show of skill as a raconteur while film was being re-recorded that decided Ebersole to make a movie all about the drummer and her context. Over a dozen major talking heads contribute to the portrait besides Patty Schemel herself, but most important among these are Patty's mother, Terry; her brother, Larry; Courtney Love, the leader of Hole; Melissa auf der Maur, who was bassist for Hole for five years; and Hole's co-founder, Eric Erlandson.

Schemel grew up in Marysville, a farm town outside of Seattle. At 15 she formed her first band. She worked her way up through high school-era bands, playing with her brother Larry. Many picturesque fliers for her early aggregations are displayed onscreen. Eventually she entered into the world of grunge royalty, when she was considered to replace the departed drummer of Nirvana and became a close friend of Curt Cobain. She was always drinking, and drugs of all kinds, notably heroin, were rife on the Seattle scene. The Pacific Northwest was a pretty druggy place, and the Nineties were a time of "heroin chic." Patty realized that neither heroin nor alcohol gibe with keeping a hard beat. It was her job to provide her band's structure, its backbone. She cleaned up her act and stopped performing high. It was Courtney Love whose wild onstage behavior constantly caused disruption at concerts. But a recording session with producer Michael Beinhorn proved Patty's downfall. Beinhorn was known for undermining and replacing drummers for his dates. He set things up so that Patty failed, and after a couple weeks of exhausting solo recording sessions, he pushed her out and brought in a man with an Italian name who duplicated all her performances. She felt so humiliated by this experience that she went back to drugs and alcohol with a vengeance and withdrew from the band and from everybody. Eventually she wound up living with a shopping cart on the corner of Temple and Alvarado streets in LA. Patty's account of her descent into hell is vivid and good humored.

The film focuses on the idea of women drummers and on Schemel's sexual orientation, and also on her drug problems and subsequent clean life. It doesn't recount her musical career since she left Hole. You can find more about those details in a discussion of the film in the blog Jestherent. (http://jestherent.blogspot.com/2011/03/sxsw-2011-hit-so-hard.html)

Ebersole has said he used the Maysle brothers as his model in working with a bare minimum team so the interviews would be more relaxed. Hit So Hard is a well-made documentary that tells its story forcefully and clearly, but it will not interest everybody. Likely to be entertained are fans of Seattle rock, Cobain, Hole, Courtney Love, and anyone interested in a musician who overcame the ravages of drugs, or in female drummers. This is also peripherally the portrait of an American generation that grew up from Reagan to Bush I and a dark time when within two months of 1994 Kurt Cobain committed suicide and Hole bassist Kristen Pfaff died of an overdose of heroin. The film significance of the band and the generation is well discussed in Cindy Widener's piece (http://www.austinchronicle.com/screens/2011-03-11/killer-lifestyle/)about the film for The Austin Chronicle in connection with its SXSF screenings.

Seen and reviewed as part of New Directors/New Films, presented from March 23-April 4, 2011 by MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York. The film was shown March 15 and 18 at the SXSF festival, Austin, Texas.

ND/NF screening times:

2011-03-28 | 6:00 PM | MoMA
2011-03-30 | 9:00 PM | FSLC

June 2011: Hit So Hard was included in Frameline35, the LGBT film series in San Francisco. Poster image from Michael Hawley's Documentary Capsule Reviews (http://theeveningclass.blogspot.com/2011/06/frameline35-2011michael-hawleys_22.html) on Michael Guillen's film blog The Evening Class. (http://theeveningclass.blogspot.com/)
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[Chris Knipp]

Rebecca Zlotowski: Belle Épine (2010)

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JOHAN LIBÉREAU AND LÉA SEYDOUX IN LA BELLE ÉPINE

Nice girl seeks leather boys

The director Maurice Pialat has often been mentioned in connection with the dark, intense style of French girls' coming-of-age story Belle Épine by first-time director Rebecca Zlotowski. This nice Jewish girl whose mother has just died and whose father has gone to Canada to look into property issues is taking walks on the wild side from the first frames, where Prudence Friedmann (Léa Seydoux) is shown stripping with another girl who has also been caught shoplifting at a store, Marylene (Agathe Schlenker). Prudence refuses to grieve. She seems dead set on disproving her name and in the middle of the night she's dragging Marylene out to the periphery to join leather bikers risking their lives on motorcycles at Rungis in illegal races. Zlotowski's film takes us on a rambling, rapid journey full of shocks and contrasts -- a journey that, alas, rambles too much sometimes to keep us engaged in its action or even sometimes clear what's going on. The ambiance is often wonderful, and it's good to see a coming-of-age story about a girl that's so fraught with danger and risk. There are scenes whose howling music and dark desperation have an edge and energy rarely felt since Patrice Chéreau's 1983 L'Homme Blessé. But Zlotowski and her collaborating writer Gaelle Mace needed to construct a screenplay with more of a shape to it. A nice final scene in which Prudence begins to come to terms with a phantom of her mother almost saves things.

A member of a French movie royal family, since she's the granddaughter and grandniece of the directors of Pathé and Gaumont, Seydoux is a rising star in her own right who has been seen in movies as different as Le Belle Personne, Robin Hood, Lourdes and Inglourious Basterds. Her performance here is intense and defiantly unglamorous, though hardly unsexy, since both she and Demoustier appear bare-breasted early on. She loses her virginity to Franck, a boy from the Rungis circuit whose mother runs a small hotel and whose own job involves cleaning fish. As Franck, Johan Libéreau (Cold Showers, The Witnesses) is, like Seydoux, de-prettified for his role.

All this wild stuff is in contrast to the bourgeois Jewish life exemplified by Prudence's friend Sonia Cohen (Anais Demoustier), whose home Prudence goes to for a dinner that turns out to be a religious evening when the meaning of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are explained to her.

Back to contrast again, Prudence invites her wild-side pals to come to the family apartment -- her dad's still away -- and trash it. Most of the scenes in the film take place at night (or indoors) and (except for Rungis, seen only as a dark place of shiny roaring motorcycles) in unspecified locations. Eventually the death of someone she knows in the illegal bike racing circuit jolts Prudence back to an awareness of her own recent loss. Moments here are compelling, and Seydoux gives a good performance, but the action doesn't come together; Bell Épine seems a bit of a waste. It's atmospheric, edgily exciting, well shot, and stars several of the poutiest, sexiest young female stars in French cinema. But when you consider Chéreau's L'Homme Blessé, and why it has far greater power, apart from the greater ease of having a young man rather than a girl take a run on the wild side for their coming-of-age, and the stunning obsessive drive of Jean-Hugues Anglade's debut performance, you have the fact that the main characters are locked into a death grip with each other. In contrast the main characters of Belle Épine rarely seem truly engaged. The film is on a search; it never finds itself. Besides an attractive cast it has great music (by Rob) and atmospheric images (by George Lechaptois) -- and a theme worthy of treatment.

Le Belle Épine opened in Paris November 10, 2010, when it received some dissatisfied reviews ("moody and disjointed," "terribly boring"), but also some very favorable ones from good sources, like Les Inrockuptibles, which approved the film's willingness to go "beyond social realism" and "affirm the power of fantasy and of fiction" -- a valid point. They may have been welcoming qualities the film promises. The public was less favorable in its ratings. Zlowkowski, a graduate of the elite École Normale Supérieure, is only 31; she's made a promising first film and is a new director to watch. This film was reviewed (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?2939-Dear-prudence&p=25224#post25224) earlier on Filmleaf by Howard Schumann.

This film was part of Critics' Week at Cannes last year. Seen and reviewed as part of New Directors/New Films presented March 23-April 4, 2011 by MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

ND/NF sceenings:

2011-03-24 | 6:00 PM | FSLC
2011-03-26 | 1:00 PM | MoMA

[Chris Knipp]

Ahmad Abdalla: Microphone (2010)

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KHALED ABOL NAGA IN MICROPHONE

An Alexandrian expatriate finds a mélange of new arts in bloom

Everything Egyptian tends to look a bit different since the youth revolution of 25 January. So it is with this collective, multi-voice film from last year about the arts in contemporary Alexandria, the sunny, breezy port city north of Cairo. Anchored somewhat vaguely by the handsome, Mastroianni-lookalike Khaled (Cairo media personality Khaled Abol Naga ), an expatriate returning to his native Alexandria after seven years in the States, the film depicts a multiplicity of musical, rap, and hip hop artists and bands living under the radar in the city. Special credit is due to film editor Hisham Saqr for interweaving various threads in ways that are seamless and sometimes very telling. The storyline is too slight to make for a fully coherent film, but there is much life here, and certainly a different world from those whose idea of Egyptian arts is Yousuf Shaheen and Umm Kulsoum.

The wryest scenes, post revolution, are those that feature a self-important government cultural official called Saleh (Khaled pointedly can never quite remember his name), who sees music groups in his office and lays down the law about what they can or can't do if they want to be included in a sanctioned show or receive state funds. In the end he takes away whatever he has offered, all the while babbling about "democracy" and "freedom of expression" -- and finally admits that the big prize is going to go not to the best singing group we hear but to an unseen woman who does covers of Umm Kulsoum songs. For a brief moment, a particularly angry rap group actually chants about revolt, as images -- pale ones, as if a fantasy -- of an actual street demonstration are shown. That was then. Even if there still won't be funds, "freedom of expression" is not an empty phrase in Egypt now. The Salehs of the country are no longer in charge of stifling Egyptian cultural innovation.

While Khaled is looking for new music or rap groups (Masser Egbari, Mascara,and Y-crew are three that he finds), he's being filmed by a couple of lovebirds (who break up midway) pursuing a degree in film at a Jesuit college. In a parody of academic dead-ends, another film student's thesis project is simply talking into the camera, and he can't get started. One rap group's member works at a fish market where he symbolically rescues a fish that has miraculously stayed alive for hours out of water. Another rap band member is held prisoner by his family because they think he's stolen his mother's gold jewelry. He jumps off the balcony and is rescued by friends waiting with a big Egyptian festival tent to catch him. Several groups gather with sound equipment in a square and begin performing to a small audience -- but are gently nudged to move on by cops. Also omnipresent is Naseer, a long-haired young skateboarder who probably should be in school, but is another contact for Khaled for the music and graffiti underground. He and the soon to be lovelorn student filmmaker show that young Egyptian males can be as longhaired and inarticulate as any westerners. In yet another little subplot, a man is selling pirated recordings in front of a big political poster.

On the personal side, Khaled meets with his old girlfriend Hadeer (Menna Shalabi), who while he was pining for her and planning to come home, was longing to leave, and she's now going to London to get a Ph.D. Her message is a familiar one of Egyptian films. She feels that in the liberal West everyone can live in their own world. In Egypt, she feels, there is only one world hat everybody has to live in. She finds Egypt stifling and has had enough. He had only wanted to get back together with her. He smiles with that charming sadness he has as if to say, "How could this not be enough?" Since he's back everything has changed. To begin with, his relationship with his father has deteriorated. He stays with an uncle, who seems depressed till the escaped rapper takes refuge with them and he perks up.

The shifts from scene to scene are seamless and rhythmic, and nearly always herald a new sound and a new group, including several pop-folksingers (western style, but in Arabic), a woman's group that wants to wear masks and insists on singing in English (not acceptable to the government cultural official Saleh), an accordionist who plays in evocation of Umm Kulsoum's songs of the mid-Sixties, and more. In some ways Microphone reminds one of Fatih Akin's 2005 Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul (http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=613), which is a chronicle of many styles practiced in the city, notably rock, Turkish style. But Abdallah opts out of thoroughly spotlighting and identifying individual groups and styles in favor of conveying an "underground" music scene that comes across as energetic but surreptitious, in need organization and performing venues.

It thus becomes Khaled's aim to set up a studio or foundation for the unknown groups and performers. However when the government official withdraws any offer of either a venue or funds, Khaled moves to the idea of a sidewalk cafe. Then even that is withdrawn when (in a hint of Islamic repression) men say the street is their open-air mosque, and can't be used for music. Finally a scattering of the musicians moves down to the sea, where graffiti on the rocks symbolize underground expression -- and provide the closing credits. We have not particularly gotten anywhere. But we've moved with Khaled toward enthusiasm for a world of new more contemporary (if less distinctly Egyptian) performing arts.

Egypt, 120 min. In Egyptian Arabic. Hisham Saqr won a well-deserved best editing prize at Dubai for this film, which was also shown at Toronto, London, and other festivals. Seen and reviewed as part of the New Directors/New Films series presented March 23-April 4, 2011 by MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, NYC.

ND/NF screenings:
2011-03-29 | 8:30 PM | MoMA
2011-03-31 | 6:00 PM | FSLC



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POSTER FROM ABOL NAGA'S BLOG: (http://kalnaga.wordpress.com/?page=11) "In every street of my country
the voice of freedom is calling" (revolutionary song) -- "THE REVOLUTION OF 25 JANUARY"

[Chris Knipp]

Paddy Considine: Tyrannosaur (2010)

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PETER MULLAN IN TYRANNOSAUR

The actor Paddy Considine produces a powerful writing-directing debut

In Tyrannosaur, the relatively young but well-established actor Paddy Considine (he's 37) directs a group of superb British thespians in a searing drama about a rageoholic widower in the town of Leeds. Basing his protagonists on unspecified but intimate experiences, and aspects of his own mother in the dead wife, Considine has written a film that's intense, brutal, and compelling. It takes us to the deep end of violence and cruelty but leads us through to a sense of redemption. A gray, grizzled, lonely, angry pub denizen widower, Joseph (Scot Peter Mullan, a scary life-force with both violent and sensitive sides) displays nothing but drinking-fueled violence in the early scenes of the film, in which he beats his own dog to death, smashes the window of a bank, and assaults three rowdy youths in a pub when we're barely past the credits. He runs into a charity shop to hide from the youths, and it's here he meets Hannah (Olivia Colman, complex and heartrending), with whom he will be involved throughout the film. Considine strains the audience's ability to stomach violence and ugliness, but hardly strains our credulity. He has made what is very close to a great film.

When Joseph hides behind a rack of clothes in the shop, Hannah calms him and prays for him. He begins things on an honest basis with her, declaring, "My best friend's dying of cancer. I killed my dog. I'm fucked." Visits to his friend and a funeral punctuate the action and add perspective. The next day in a desperate emotional state Joseph returns to the shop again, but is abusive and nasty about Hannah's religiosity and what she later ironically calls her "cozy" life in the Manors housing estates. Now the film's point of view shifts to Hannah. We learn she too drinks whenever the bus takes her home to her suburban house. First it may seem this is to deal with the violent emotions she has absorbed from Joseph, but it soon emerges that she lives in a horribly abusive relationship with her jealous, cruel and desperately unhappy husband James (Eddie Marsan), whose return home is anything but a pleasure. There's a surprising role-reversal that gradually develops between Joseph and Hannah.

James' behavior makes Joseph's violence seem simpler. He urinates on Hannah for falling asleep on the sofa before he gets home, and other cruelties she reveals later that prevented her from childbearing are disgusting (and some of her experiences may strain credulity). James's mood swings are scary while Joseph seems his own worst enemy but not entirely a bad man. For one thing he has one warm relationship with a kid across the street (Samuel Bottomley) who must live with his irresponsible mother (Sian Breckin) and her aggressive punk boyfriend (Paul Popplewell ) but maintains good humor and friendliness toward Joseph. There's some humor if of an insensitive kind too in Joseph's explanation to Hannah of how "Tyrannosaur" came to be his nickname for his overweight diabetic wife, but the word suggests that part of him is a prehistoric raging animal. The film's final scene offers hope for both Hannah and Joseph.

Considine seems just to be establishing character and situation halfway through the film, but when Hannah and Joseph seem equally at risk of violence, inflicted on self or by others, events become tense and suspenseful, and desperate though the characters are, we care about them and wonder what will happen between Hannah and Joseph when she leaves James for the drunken widower as the safer bet. Semi-comical rants from Joseph's scraggly-haired drinking partner Tommy (Ned Dennehy) add flourishes, and the death of Joseph's friend and his funeral, with family and Hannah, now very battered and taking refuge with Joseph, provide a temporary pause before final revelations. Considine is as strong in the plotting as in the character areas, and his choice and directing of actors can't be faulted.

There is intensity and bitter truth in Considine, who steers clear of the edge of wild fantasy one finds in the Irishman Martin McDonagh. His harshness verges on the crude. But considering how well all the elements are managed here, Considine has produced a very impressive debut. He knows how to grab you and hold you all the way through. If you're looking at your watch, it's just because you're terrified. Brutal and ugly this world may be, but Considine seems to know it and love it enough to show its truth and humanity. The accomplishment here is to give us lives that seem broken and hopeless and then hold our sympathy and offer a chance of a new beginning that's far from soft and easy. Erik Alexander Wilson's images, which for a welcome change are not distractingly jerky and hand-held, have a kind of limpid clarity, and there are some songs at the funeral that are almost too rich and pretty. Peter Mullan is also a director. He and Eddie Marsan figure in the dark, intense Red Riding trilogy, as does Paddy Considine. Considine is known for his beginning with Shane Meadows, and has significant Hollywood acting credits. His 2007 Bafta-winning short, Dog Altogether, presented Mullan and Colman in the same roles, differently developed.

UK, 91 min. Tyrannosaur had its US debut at Sundance where it won acting awards for Colman and Mullan and a directing award for Considine. A Strand Films US theatrical release is scheduled for October 11, 2011. Seen and reviewed as part of the New Directors/New Films series presented from March 23 to April 4, 2011 by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and MoMA, NYC.

ND/NF screenings:

2011-03-30 | 6:00 PM | MoMA
2011-03-31 | 9:00 PM | FSLC

[Chris Knipp]

Sameh Zoabi: Man Without a Cell Phone (2010)

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BASSEM LOULOU IN MAN WITHOUT A CELL PHONE

Nowhere much to go

Sameh Zoab's genial but low-energy feature (co-written with Fred Rice) focuses on a young Israeli Arab slacker and his disgruntled father. Zoabi adopts a rambling sitcom style as the utilitarian means of showing the hemmed-in life lived by Arabs whose town long ago became a part of Israel and who must submit to the racism, limited movement, land grabs and other quiet humiliations that go with living where they do. These are topics more wittily and artistically shown in the films of Elia Suleiman, or in the case of land grab issues, more intensely worked out in Eran Riklis' Lemon Tree. Zoabi's aim however is is to emphasize the humdrum, to keep things casual. Thus Zoabi shows the everyday quality of the frustrations on view. Deeply memorable this is not, but as a young filmmaker focused on Palestinian issues, Zoabi is one to watch.

Dimply-cheeked charmer Jawdat (Razi Shawahdeh) is a non-starter at the university because he keeps failing the Hebrew exam. So he works making concrete with his cousin Muhammad (Louai Nofi) and chats up girls on his cell phone. His father is the film's spokesman of Israeli-Arab anger: Salem (Bassem Loulou) never stops remembering times when the land was beautiful and it was theirs. He points out that Palestinians like them with Israeli citizenship are treated like inferiors in a thousand ways. Salem's big focus now is the new cell phone tower the Israelis have set up on land adjacent to his olive groves, on land leased to them by a neighbor. Salem is convinced the tower radiation causes cancer.

Jawdat fails the Hebrew exam again, and can't take it again till next year. A local cop hassles him for being interested in his sister. He's blocked from visiting another girl he's particularly interested in who lives on the Left Bank. His frequent calls there have been monitored and are considered suspicious. These experiences politicize him a bit, and he gets quite involved in a petition his father started to force removal of the tower.

Don't get your hopes up. None of this goes anywhere, though it seems like maybe Jawdat may get to go to the Hebrew university and hence date the cool girl who's studying there. He also makes an excellent impression on the local Arab mayor with his ability to galvanize some of the population around a political issue. Zoabi adds another little tile to the mosaic of Arab life under Israeli domination. It its light, situational approach, this film somewhat resembles Sayed Kashua's hit Israeli sitcom about Arabs employed in Israel, Arab Work."

The film is set in Iksal, the Palestinian village near Nazareth where Sameh Zoabi himself was born. Zoabi graduated from the University of Tel Aviv in English literature and film studies and has an MFA in film directing from Columbia. His short Be Quiet won multiple prizes. Filmmaker Magazine named him one of the top 25 new faces in independent cinema. This is his first feature. Though it has some rough spots in the writing and deficiencies in the energy level, Zoabi still could be a new director to watch for his treatment of themes of Palestinian experience.

83 minutes. In Palestinian Arabic. Cinematography by Hichame Alaouie, editing by Simon Jacquet; music by Krishna Levy. Bidoun mobile was featured at the Doha Festival. Seen and reviewed as part of New Directors/New Films, presented from March 23 through April 4, 2011 by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and MoMA, New York.

ND/NF screenings:
2011-04-01 | 6:00 PM | FSLC
2011-04-03 | 1:30 PM | MoMA

[Chris Knipp]

Koji Fukada: Hospitalité (2010)

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With a friend like Kagawa

The oddly-titled Hospitalité (Kantai), Koji Fukada's film set in working-class Tokyo about a sudden "acquaintance" who moves in on a little family and takes over their house and business and invades with a horde of fake relatives, is a variation on the theme treated thriller-style in Dominik Moll's 2000 With a Friend Like Harry, which starred the charmingly menacing Sergi Lopez. This time the focus is on hidden secrets that backfire and an elaborate scheme to hide illegal immigrants. Fukada's droll comedy is a triumph of the deadpan that overwhelms itself with an overdone finale and a too-simple trajectory. This is one of those process tales. The alien takeover advances, proceeds, climaxes, explodes, and vanishes, leaving us with zero enlightenment about human beings or these characters, who remain opaque. So too with the mildly thought-provoking implications about Japanese xenophobia. But there is much neatness and drollery in the plotting and the acting here, and this is promising work.

The plot opens with a family of four who live over a little printing business. The production has dwindled to subcontracted government pension envelopes for the elderly (a boom business). There's the husband, Mikio Kobayashi (Keji Yamaguchi); his very young wife Natsuki (Kiki Sugino); his divorced sister Seiko (Kumi Hyodo); and his young daughter Eriko (Eriko Ono), not by the young wife, whom Natsuki "tutors" in English, though she has only an elementary knowledge of the language. Eriko's pet parakeet, Pea (Pi-chan), has escaped and they put up a notice on the local bulletin board. Seiko is thinking about leaving the country, but meanwhile is involved with a local committee to deal with the threat of foreigners, squatters and homeless people in the neighborhood.

Kagawa (Kanji Furudachi) -- that's what he calls himself, anyway -- tears down the parakeet notice and goes to the house, claiming to be the son of a man who originally financed the printing business with Kobayashi. The regular employee who operates the press has just fallen ill, and Kagawa offers to fill in. He also takes up residence upstairs, saying he's just been evicted. Without explanation he brings a foreign woman, Annabelle (Bryerly Long) who he says is his Brazilian wife. She tells somebody else she's Bosnian, but she speaks unaccented English, and little Japanese. She adds the first truly ominous and weird note.

Kagawa now proceeds to do his work, and we find out secrets as we watch. Mikio's previous wife did not die of an illness as he's told Kagawa; she left him and has remarried. Mikio runs into her while shopping, and Eriko has dinner with her -- she is, after all, Eriko's mother. Natsuki secretly meets with a seedy young guy called Honma (Naoki Sugawara) who turns out to be a relative who's getting illicit money from her. While Natsuki, Eriko, and Kagawa are out looking for the parakeet, which he pretends to have spotted earlier, Kagawa uses his binoculars to spy Mikio having sex with Annabelle. He uses this secret to force Miko to take in Natsuki's seedy relative as another assistant at the press, and he steps up production. Natsuki has an admirer, Kono (Tatsuya Kawamura), a pop singer, and she eventually has a secret with him too.

And there is more that happens and to say it eventually quite strains credulity would be to overlook, perhaps, the intentionally surreal nature of the proceedings right from the beginning. The casualness with which details about people's lives are peeled, or reeled, off, reminds one of the plays of Ionesco. And, by the way, several of the principals here have strong theatrical experience, which may help explain good timing and pointed delivery of some key lines. Fukada is good at delivering his surprises. The only problem, but it is a serious one, is that when Kagawa's takeover goes into high gear, the event and its staging become so over-the-top that one begins to lose focus on the characters and in the end one realizes that nothing of any consequence has been revealed about anybody, really.

The way the movie zeros in on a household and stays in its rooms suggests with deep irony how unlike Ozu or his more recent avatars all this is, though the film consciously alludes to him. These people like those of Morita's The Family Game are a send-up of the traditional Japanese family. They're mismatched, ill-sorted, and not what they seem. Kenichi Negishi's sharp HD photography underlines the apathy, the lack of affect, an extreme of Japanese good manners that is the essential motor behind Kagawa's takeover. He can move several dozen illegal, foreign, and homeless people into a little petit bourgeois household and the inhabitants will be too polite to object. But of course the organized xenophobic neighbors, led by Toshiko (Hiroko Matsuda), are not at all happy. At the end, the intruders have vanished like a bad dream or a rowdy party; everything has gone back to where, physically anyway, it was; and there's a fresh parakeet in the cage to replace Pea. It's not the same bird but, "She won't remember," Mitsuko says, meaning Eriko.

Koji Fukada, who is 31, and who wrote, directed, and edited, is a member of Seinendan Theatre Company. This is his fourth film. It debuted at the Tokyo Film Festival in October 2010. Seen and reviewed as part of New Directors/New Films March 23-April 4, 2011, presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and MoMA, New York.

ND/NF screenings:
2011-04-02 | 5:15 PM | MoMA
2011-04-03 | 1:00 PM | FSLC

[Chris Knipp]

Vladimir Kott: Gromozeka (2011)

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POLINA FOLONENKO AND LEINID GROMOV IN GROMOZEKA

Three characters in search of significance

The young Russian director Vladimir Kott has directed three excellent actors in this sophomore effort about three former school buddies dealing with midlife meltdowns. But despite the excellence of the leads and the movie's general competence Kott doesn't achieve the transcendence he seems to be striving for. If he's fumbling toward something like Krzysztof Kieślowski's Dekalog as his succession of characters facing grim life challenges suggests, Kott never quite marshals the depth of writing or the grandeur of overall conception to carry that off, and Gromozeka arouses hopes that it eventually dashes.

In their teens this trio of men whose intertwined narratives form Gromozeka were in a band with that same name. The film is book-ended with a reunion when the three sing with drunken enthusiasm into a video camera and take a sauna together. When they ask each other, post sauna, how they are, they all blissfully, or numbly, say "fine." But that is anything but the case, as the rest of the film shows us. Thirty years after their spirited band days they are, to begin with, in different worlds. More upscale, Eduard (Nicolay Dobrynin) is a surgeon who lacks the courage to tell his grim wife (Darya Semenova), an optician (a job used symbolically) that he’s in love with a younger woman at the hospital. It’s eating away at him; or is he just sick?

At the next level down, which is more humble in Russia, a cop or a cabbie? Well, longtime policeman Vasya (Boris Kamorzin) is about to be demoted because he hasn’t got the stuff to go out on active assignments. And his wife Larisa (Yevgeniya Dobrovolskaya) is having an affair, though he doesn’t know with whom. His son is a thug, though he doesn't really know that either. This is where two of the three plots cross over, because band alumnus number three, taxi driver Mozerov (Leonid Gromov) is so angry when he finds out his daughter (Polina Filonenko) is not a student as she claims but a porn star, he pays the mafia to disfigure her, and the cop’s son is the one sent out. The son refuses to do the job – he recognizes the daughter (lots of people do! she's in the latest Russian porn movies), and some amusing contretemps follow. When Mozerov takes things into his own hands he's almost as grimly buffoonish as one of Nabokov's cardboard villains. And Vasya, who is always posing with a pistol but unable to use one, has a truly Nabokovian moment of clumsy accidental machismo when he tries to punish his wife's lover.

Yes, this is bleak-ish Kieślowski-style essay on life and the fate we choose for ourselves does have sparks of genuine dark humor, as well as touches of supernatural symbolism. But Kott, whose debut The Fly (ND/NF 2009) about a man in the remote provinces who discovers he has an obstreperous 26-year-old daughter, was full of promise, shows here that despite good direction, performances, and cinematography, he’s not, and probably never will be, Kieślowski. Gromozeka lacks Dekalog's profound moral vision, Kieślowski's ability to look deep into the human psyche through intensely specific moments.

There is some energy and suspense in the first half of the movie as we watch to see if the surgeon and cop will man up and the cabbie will find something better to do than victimize his daughter, but the three narrative lines, however smoothly edited together, just dig the men deeper in dirt in the second half, and the musical bookend is merely an escape from the lack of resolution. As for the women, they are depicted as an unpleasant lot -- whores, cuckolds, or just mean and frigid. No wonder the only child in sight is a hoodlum. But should he really be the only fellow with cojones and a code?

Shown in competition at the Rotterdam Film Festival. In Russian. 103min. Seen and reviewed as part of New Directions/New Films, presented March 23-April 4, 2011 by MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York.

ND/NF screenings:
2011-04-01 | 6:00 PM | MoMA
2011-04-02 | 3:45 PM | FSLC

[Chris Knipp]

Daniel and Diego Vega: Octubre (2010)

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CLEMENTE'S 'OFFICE' IN OCTUBRE: CLIENT'S SEAT ON THE LEFT, HIS ON THE RIGHT

A reluctant father in a month of miracles

In this fully realized if slow-to-charm debut, the Vega brothers take us into a world of Lima that seems initially as dark as Pablo Larraín's Seventies Buenos Aires. Their protagonist is almost as dry and inhuman as the characters played by Alfrado Castro in Larraín's successive films, Tony Manero and Post Mortem. But Octubre focuses on a month of miracles and forgiveness, a middle-aged lady who lights candles and bakes sweet pastries, and a found baby girl who is rescued and thrives. At the center of things is a ghetto money lender with a heart of granite, a hard black pompadour, and a tendency to get prostitutes pregnant. He is going to change, though unwillingly, and only a little.

The middle-aged Clemente (Bruno Odar) has the dignity of a fading peacock, and everyone knows him as "the pawnbroker's son," even if his father is long gone. He lends money at high interest, and his office is as bleak as, and part of, his rudimentary house. He is mean, and deeply trained so, but the worst he does if a client doesn't pay on time is break a window pane. There's nothing in his life otherwise, no real friends, and when someone breaks into his house and leaves a baby in a basket he receives this event with scant enthusiasm. But he keeps the girl, holding it like a rag doll while seeing clients. This can't last, obviously.

This is when Sofia (Gabriela Velasquez), a motherly spinster in the neighborhood, comes in. Clemente hires her to come over and take are of he baby. This is ostensibly to give Clemente time to go looking for the mother, which involves trying, with comic lack of success, to pass a forged banknote he took because "it" (the baby) distracted him, and visiting various prostitutes, and finally getting roughed up by a cabbie he's rude to. Meanwhile Sofia has moved in, and even winds up sleeping in Clemente's bed at times. She goes on baking cakes for the local deli and participating in lottery discussions and the week-long October religious procession -- the real one is filmed -- that is a feature of the month of October, the "purple" month of miracles -- in Lima. She names the baby "Milagros," miracle.

Bruno Udar, as Clemente, anchors the piece with his deadpan puss and dry line deliveries. Eventually though the film avoids either buffoonery or excessive sweetness, it shows Clemente turning into something more of a human being. The naturalness of Gabriela Velasquez is an important element too, and all the actors read as authentic, particularly a couple of the clients and Clemente's plump, glasses-wearing favorite prostitute, who qualifies almost as a friend. A running subplot is of an old man who is finagling to get his chronically ill girlfriend out of a hospital ward into his house. We get to see, briefly, plenty of Clemente's clients.

When I said this is slow-to-charm I meant it has not quite begun to charm me yet. For one thing Fergan Chavez-Ferrer's lighting is so dim and his cinematography is so cold (though composed with great precision) that the picture takes a long time to draw you in. The "happily ever after" consists of the fact that Clemente tries to throw Sofia out, but she stays. Ultimately his scant enthusiasm is, after all, still enthusiasm. The prayers to the Land of Miracles that are a feature of Octobers in Peru have had their effect. One French reviewer compared the protagonist to Ebenezer Scrooge, but his transformation is nothing like as dramatic as Scrooge's. It's almost invisible. He remains a character who's hard to like; but he has also failed to exhibit quite a Scrooge-like cruelty. The Vega brothers have kept their charm and sweetness tart, learning by their own admission their lessons from Kaurismäki, Jarmusch and Bresson. They've also mentioned Uruguayan director Juan Pablo Rebella's Whisky as a work they admire.

Octubre was featured at Cannes in the Un Certain Regard series, winning the President of the Jury Prize, and got three other nominations. It has since been in many festivals internationally. It was released in Paris December 10, 2010. Reviews were moderately good, public response less warm. Cahiers du Cinéma thought the brothers adhered too strictly to a fixed notion of what's auteurist, and I felt that too. Whether the Vega brothers themselves will emerge as distinctive stylists still remains to be seen, but their work as anointed by Cannes is guaranteed a place on the festival circuit. Seen and reviewed as part of the New Directors/New Films series, presented by MoMA and Lincoln Center from March 23 through April 4, 2011.

Octubre got a limited US theatrical release beginning May 6, 2011.

ND/NF screenings:
2011-04-02 | 9:00 PM | FSLC
2011-04-03 | 4:00 PM | MoMA

[Chris Knipp]

Deron Albright: The Destiny of Lesser Animals (2011)

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YAO B. NUNOO (RIGHT) IN THE DESTINY OF LESSER ANIMALS

In quest of identity, and a fake passport

The Destiny of Lesser Animals (Sibo ne kra, Dabo ne kra), from Ghana, by a director from Philadelphia via the Midwest, is an earnest and well-meaning but unconvincing effort about becoming reconciled to one's homeland. This debut feature follows Boniface Koomsin (Yao B. Nunoo, who wrote the screenplay), a police inspector through a meandering, talky odyssey that starts with trying to leave Ghana and ends with deciding to stay and raise a beggar girl. Boniface was barred from the US for assaulting local police around the time of the 9/11 attacks. He is convinced his future is there, and so a decade later he is planning to return by using an expensive fake passport. Unfortuantely as soon as he picks up the passport it's stolen from him. For the rest of the film he goes looking for it pretending he's lost his police pistol and is in search of that.

When he gets to "where the money is," Accra, he runs into Chief Inspector Oscar Darko (Fred Amungi). Darko is on an armed robbery case and Boniface becomes convinced the perpetrators also nicked his fake passport. This leads the two of them to a casino hostess, Serwah Bimpong (Abena Takyi), but it's a dead end. On the way to the grave of his father, whom he often addresses in voice-over, Boniface runs across a seemingly mute Beggar Girl (Xolasie Mawuenyega) who for some reason fascinates him. Back at the casino, Boniface has a violent confrontation. An attack on an American leads Boniface and Darko back to Serwah, who fingers a drifter named Yaro.

Eventually Boniface confesses to Darko the true nature of his search and Oscar throws him off the assault and robbery case, and later he's evicted from the force. The final scenes show Boniface seeking out the Beggar Girl, who's gone missing, and eventually finding her and taking her home, hoping to send her to school. The outcome of his rambles is that he has decided his mission is to remain in his home country and, presumably, raise some kind of family.

Yao B. Nunoo, the writer/main actor, is handsome and soulful but his screenplay is more well-meaning than successful. We get the idea. His protagonist needs to realize that his place is in Ghana, not the USA. But this detective story turns into a feeble wild goose chase that never makes much sense. It's just a series of red herrings. After all, the investigation Boniface goes on with Chief Inspector Darko is never proven to have anything directly to do with his stolen passport. Besides that, going off his duties to run around looking for a fake passport is not a good idea in the first place. The Beggar Girl has nothing to do with any of this. It's just something for Boniface to focus on when his useless search peters out. The film is a series of one-on-one conversations. Despite some actual running by Boniface/Yao at the outset, there is little variety to the action.

This film is the fruit of a year that director Albright spent in Ghana recently on a Fulbright research grant. Albright is an associate professor of film/media at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia. His 2006 short film, The Legend of Black Tom, has played at festivals and won awards. He has also worked in television.

87 min. In Fante, English, Pidgin, Twi, and Ga with English subtitles. The HDCAM cinematography is serviceable and the film provides views of the Ghanan urban landscape.

Seen and reviewed as part of New Directors/New Films, presented March 23-April 3, 2011 by MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York.

ND/NF screenings:
2011-04-01 | 9:00 PM | MoMA
2011-04-02 | 6:30 PM | FSLC

[Chris Knipp]

Athina Rachel Tsangari: Attenberg (2010)

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EVANGELINA RANDOU AND ARIANE LABED IN ATTENBERG

Sex and death and primate observation

From the producer of Dogtooth comes this hip, Nouvelle Vague-influenced and largely insufferable study of a dying man and at a Greek town on the sea and his daughter's belated and self-indulgent introduction to sex. The younger man who assists in this introduction is remarkably patient with the young woman's incessant talkiness and gaucherie; indeed the dying man, reputedly an innovative architect, is remarkably patient with his daughter as well. We should be so patient. Giorgos Lanthimos' Dogtooth, which has been much admired, was highly annoying and self-conscious like this film too, but its schtick succeeded, if you didn't look too close, anyway, because of its boldness and conceptual force. The idea of adult children so isolated from ordinary life they can be fed a whole new vocabulary and set of concepts is arresting and thought-provoking, despite its artificiality.

But here Tsangari, as Howard Feinstein wrote (http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/news/2011/03/separating-the-wheat-from-the-chaff-new-directorsnew-films/) recently in a roundup of the New Directors/New Films 2011 series in Filmmaker magazine, has produced an "overly studied" film, most glaringly so in its constant inserts of symmetrical travelling shots of two young women walking arm and arm up and down a crunchy stone pathway kicking their feet in the same direction. What do these sequences mean? They mean that this is semi-feminist in its outlook, perhaps. But most of all they mean this is an art film and doesn't want you to forget it.

Attenberg is an intentionally sui generis spelling of the family name of Sir Richard Attenborough, whose intimate filming of gorillas (as dangerously up-close as Herzog's Grizzly Man) is glimpsed on the Tube, and alternates with a man and woman jumping up and down on a bed doing a passable imitation of a pair of very animated primates. A young woman also screeches like a bird while lying on a bed watching an unseen nature film, perhaps also by Attenborough. The implication is that the film examines human behavior with the detachment of an observer of animal life. This is not a claim that is justified by the film itself.

Towards the end, the film shifts to a focus on arrangements for the architect's cremation. The process cannot legally be performed in Greece, so the family must pay to have the body sent abroad, incinerated, and then returned in an urn. A scene in which the daughter makes arrangements for all this at a posh commercial establishment is rather droll, and perhaps authentic. The final boat trip with the urn when the ashes are sifted into the sea has a certain stern beauty. Not everything in Attenberg, then, is totally annoying. Obviously Tsangari is sophisticated and confident as a filmmaker, as is her colleague Lanthiomos. The Variety review of Attenberg by Boyd van Hoeij ( written when the film debuted at Sundance this January) calls (http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117943531?refcatid=31) this an "impressive" sophomore effort and explains for us that its purpose is to show how "The opposing yet strongly connected forces of Freudian buddies Eros ('passionate love') and Thanatos ('death') " are "reluctantly explored" by the "femme protagonist." Yes and of course Eros and Thanatos are Greek words and this is a Greek film. The Variety review also explains to us that some of the more manic and absurd on screen antics are explained as the way "while people intimidated by or frustrated with human social constructs revert to animalistic behavior." Van Hoeij concludes that Attenberg "certainly works as a wacky, decidedly arthouse coming-of-age narrative." Wacky and decidedly arthouse it certainly is, but "works"? It "works" if its self-indulgent mannerisms appeal to you and the Eros-Thanatos themes seem to you to cohere with the arch animal-observation theme.

The film features Ariane Labed as the daughter, Giorgos Lanthimos as the dying architect father, Vangelis Mourikis as the willing sexual initiator, and Evangelia Randou as the daughter's friend who teachers her to tongue-kiss and struts up and down the stone path with her.

Seen and reviewed as part of the New Directors/New Films series presented March 23-April 3, 2011 by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

ND/NF screenings:
2011-03-31 | 6:00 PM | MoMA
2011-04-02 | 1:00 PM | FSLC

[Chris Knipp]

New Directors/New Films: A Roundup

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STILL FROM MARYAM KESHAVARZ'S CIRCUMSTANCE (NOT COVERED IN MY REPORTS)

NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS 2011: A ROUNDUP

There are a few outstanding films this year, and a number of ones that show the directors have talent and should be watched. Then there are some uncertain cases. And some strong differences of opinion at screenings. I also missed some.*

Bogdan George Apetri's OUTBOUND
An intense, non-stop Romanian story about a young woman released from jail for one day. Its powerful ending evokes the great Italian neorealists. This is a pretty nearly flawless film, which follows the current Romanian style of focusing on a minute-to-minute saga.

J.C. Charndar's MARGIN CALL
A fresh, elegant look at the beginning of the Wall Street financial meltdown by a new American director, featuring Kevin Spacey and Jeremy Irons. It all happens in a dark steel-and-glass box but it's quite cinematic nonetheless.

Denis Villeneuve's INCENDIES
A powerful, visually rich look at a personal family heritage of Middle Eastern confict. The director is a French Canadian, whose films have four times been nominated for the Best Foreign Oscar. From a stage play but the realization is thoroughly cinematic.

Paddy Considine's TYRANOSAUR
A brilliant, harrowing portrait of English violence and alcoholism with all the focus on the superb acting. Peter Mullan is the star, with Olivia Colman. You may want to look away but you cannot.

These are the standouts. They have some flaws. Margin Call could be more engaging; it's a little too dry at times. Incendies is far-fetched; its mashup of nationalities and history may seem absurd to some from the region and its surprise final revelation strains the credulity of anyone. Tyranosaur's ugliness and violence are over the top and so it can't be recommended to the faint of heart. Outbound seems best overall precisely because it doesn't have any single notable flaw.

Notable or promising
At another level are some movies that showed a high level of competence or promise. Dee Rees' Pariah, a young black lesbian coming-of-age story, has some beginner's flaws but is warm and colorful, one of the most enjoyable of the series. Ahmad Abdalla's Micorphone, the musical mélange about Alexandria, Egypt, is also enjoyable, if rambling. Fukada's Hospitalité is very clever; this Japanese writer-director has it all together, but his film degenerated into silliness; one hopes his brilliant films come to have a bit more warmth and depth. Anne Sewitsky's Happy, Happy is an adultery comedy (from Norway) that's quite funny but a bit too condescending toward its characters. Göran Hugo Olsson's Black Power Mixtape has a wealth of new footage about the Sixties and Seventies. It may add little that's new to our basic fund of knowledge of the period, but it may yet be new for and fresh for a younger audience. The Vega brothers from Peru, whose Octubre was shown, seem already well established on the festival circuit, with a slightly derivative dry stylishness to which they have added a tiny dab of uplift. They have a style; time will tell if it's their own.

I was not enthusiastic about the French films. Copacabana, with Isabelle Huppert and her daughter, which I reviewed last year, seems lackluster, Huppert doing an "eccentric" shtick that ill-suits her. Mikhael Hers's Memory Lane, a generational reunion, is unfocused and slight. People differed on Rebecca Zlotowski's Belle Épine. I can grant that this dark girl's coming-of-ager shows promise and originality, not that the film makes any sense. People also differed on whether the searing Tyrannosaur can be recommended. I'd warn people about its ugliness and violence, but it's far too masterful not to be warmly endorsed.

Arabic language films were well represented, with four if you count Incendies, which has a lot of Arabic dialogue though it's French Canadian. Besides Microphone, there was another engaging Egyptian film, Mohamed Diab's Cairo 678, and Sameh Zoabi's mild-mannered Palestinian entry, Man Without a Cell Phone. Cairo 678 was the best received, but I found Microphone enjoyable and it was a prize-winner in the Arab world.

I will draw a veil over a few entries that were lackluster or seemed mere stylistic exercises. One can still see why they might have been included because they had previous festival champions, not totally deluded, or they fill some niche. Other films in the series didn't quite come together, but the filmmakers are worth watching.

I missed the new Iranian director Maryam Keshavarz's Circumstance, which is highlighted as the closing night film. It depicts two young women going to parties and listening to outlawed music and beginning to "explore their true feelings for each other." Several people told me this was one of the best, so I wish I'd seen it. My world was rocked anyway a couple of times, I enjoyed myself, and I became acquainted with the work of a lot of interesting new directors and several, like Denis Villeneuve, whom I ought to have known about already.

*ND/NF selections I did not see or did not review:
Circumstance (Maryam Keshavarz 2010, Iran)
El Velador (Natalia Almada 2010, USA/Mexico)
Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure (Matthew Bate 2010, USA)
Some Days Are Better Than Others (Matt McCormick 2010, USA)
Summer of Goliath (Verano de Goliat Nicholás Pereda 2010, Mexico)

http://img863.imageshack.us/img863/2140/img0929.jpg
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[Subway ad for the New Directors/New Films series 2011].

A.O. Scott's introduction to the series (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/23/movies/new-directorsnew-films-at-lincoln-center-and-museum-of-modern-art.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper), "Modest Methods, Big Ambitions," appeared in the NY Times today (March 23, 2011) as the series begins public screenings at MoMA and the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center.


INDEX OF LINKS TO ALL FILMLEAF ND/NF 2011 REVIEWS:

At Ellen's Age (Pia Marais 2010) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3032-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2011&p=25886#post25886)
Attenberg (Athina Rachel Tsangari 2010) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3032-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2011&p=25951#post25951)
Belle Épine (Rebecca Zlotowski 2010) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3032-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2011&p=25917#post25917)
Black Power Mixtape: 1967-1975, The (Göran Hugo Olsson: 2011) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3032-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2011&p=25892#post25892)
Cairo 678 (Mohamed Diab 2010) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3032-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2011&p=25886#post25886)
Curling (Denis Côté 2010) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3032-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2011&p=25907#post25907)
Destiny of Lower Animals, The (Deron Albright 2010) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3032-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2011&p=25945#post25945)
Gromozeka (Vladimir Kott 2011) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3032-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2011&p=25936#post25936)
Happy, Happy (Anne Sewitsky 2010) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3032-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2011&p=25885#post25885)
Hit So Hard (P. David Ebersole 2011) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3032-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2011&p=25916#post25916)
Hospitalité (Koji Fukada 2010) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3032-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2011&p=25927#post25927)
Incendies (Denis Villeneuve 2010) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3032-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2011&p=25880#post25880)
Majority (Seren Yüche 2010) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3032-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2011&p=25881#post25881)
Man Without a Cell Phone (Sameh Zoabi 2010) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3032-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2011&p=25926#post25926)
Margin Call (J.C. Chandor 2010) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3032-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2011#post25870)
Memory Lane (Mikaël Hers 2010) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3032-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2011&p=25876#post25876)
Microphone (Ahmad Abdalla 2010) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3032-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2011&p=25922#post25922)
Octubre (Daniel, Diego Vega 2010) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3032-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2011&p=25939#post25939)
Outbound (Bogdan George Apetri 2010) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3032-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2011&p=25877#post25877)
Pariah (Dee Rees 2010) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3032-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2011&p=25908#post25908)
Tyrannosaur (Paddy Considine 2010) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3032-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2011&p=25923#post25923)
Winter Vacation (Hongqi LI 2010) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3032-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2011&p=25873#post25873)



©Chris Knipp 2011