New York Film Festival 2014

[Chris Knipp]

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Click here for Filmleaf NYFF 2014 comments thread. (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3792-Nyff-2014&p=32570#post32570)

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NYFF signage outside Alice Tully Hall, September 2014 [Photo: Chris Knipp]

Links to reviews:

'71 (Jann Demange 2014) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3800-New-York-Film-Festival-2014&p=32745#post32745)
Beloved Sisters/Die geliebten Schwestern (Dominik Graf 2014) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3800-New-York-Film-Festival-2014&p=32759#post32759)
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtues of Ignorance) (Alejandro G. Iñárritu 2014) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3800-New-York-Film-Festival-2014&p=32843#post32843)
Blue Room, The/La Chambre bleue (Mathieu Amalric 2014) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3800-New-York-Film-Festival-2014&p=32805#post32805)
Citizenfour (Laura Poitras 2014) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3800-New-York-Film-Festival-2014&p=32837#post32837)
Clouds of Sils Maria (Olivier Assayas 2014) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3800-New-York-Film-Festival-2014&p=32829#post32829)
Eden (Mia Hansen-Løve 2014) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3800-New-York-Film-Festival-2014&p=32786#post32786)
Foxcatcher (Bennett Miller 2014) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3800-New-York-Film-Festival-2014&p=32836#post32836)
Gone Girl (David Fincher 2014) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3800-New-York-Film-Festival-2014&p=32800#post32800)
Goodbye to Language/Adieu au langage (Jean-Luc Godard 2014) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3800-New-York-Film-Festival-2014&p=32751#post32751)
Heaven Knows What (Josh & Benny Safdie 2014) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3800-New-York-Film-Festival-2014&p=32770#post32770)
Hill of Freedom 자유의 언덕/Jayuui Eondeok (Hong Sang-soo 2014) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3800-New-York-Film-Festival-2014&p=32758#post32758)
Horse Money/Cavalo Dinheiro (Pedro Costa 2014) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3800-New-York-Film-Festival-2014&p=32789#post32789)
Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson 2014) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3800-New-York-Film-Festival-2014&p=32822#post32822)
Iris (Albert Maysles 2014)--Spotlight on Documentary (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3800-New-York-Film-Festival-2014&p=32818#post32818)
Jauja (Lisandro Alonso 2014) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3800-New-York-Film-Festival-2014&p=32796#post32796)
Life of Riley/Aimer, boire et chanter (Alain Resnais 2014) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3800-New-York-Film-Festival-2014&p=32785#post32785)
Listen Up Philip (Alex Ross Perry 2014) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3800-New-York-Film-Festival-2014&p=32832#post32832)
Maps to the Stars (David Cronenberg 2014) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3800-New-York-Film-Festival-2014&p=32791#post32791)
Merchants of Doubt (Robert Kenner-Spotlight on Documentary (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3800-New-York-Film-Festival-2014&p=32830#post32830)
Misunderstood/Incompresa (Asia Argento 2014) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3800-New-York-Film-Festival-2014&p=32744#post32744)
Mr. Turner (Mike Leigh 2014) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3800-New-York-Film-Festival-2014&p=32820#post32820)
National Gallery (Frederick Wiseman 2014)--Spotlight on Documentary (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3800-New-York-Film-Festival-2014&p=32810#post32810)
Pasolini (Abel Ferrara 2014) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3800-New-York-Film-Festival-2014&p=32782#post32782)
Princess of France, The/La principessa de Francia (Matías Piñeiro 2014) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3800-New-York-Film-Festival-2014&p=32783#post32783)
Red Army (Gabe Polsky 2014)--Spotlight on Documentary (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3800-New-York-Film-Festival-2014&p=32819#post32819)
Saint Laurent (Bertrand Bonello 2014) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3800-New-York-Film-Festival-2014&p=32806#post32806)
La Sapienza (Eugène Green 2014) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3800-New-York-Film-Festival-2014&p=32769#post32769)
Seymour: An Introduction (Ethan Hawke 2014)--Spotlight on Documentary (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3800-New-York-Film-Festival-2014&p=32777#post32777)
Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait/ماء الفضة/maa' al-fiḍḍa (Ossama Mohammed, Wiam Simav Bedirxan 2014) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3800-New-York-Film-Festival-2014&p=32790#post32790)
Tales of the Grim Sleeper (Nick Broomfield 2014) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3800-New-York-Film-Festival-2014&p=32827#post32827)
Timbuktu (Abderrahmane Sissako 2014) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3800-New-York-Film-Festival-2014&p=32812#post32812)
Time Out of Mind (Owen Moverman 2014) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3800-New-York-Film-Festival-2014&p=32795#post32795)
Two Days, One Night/Deux jours, une nuit (Jean-Pierre, Luc Dardenne 2014) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3800-New-York-Film-Festival-2014&p=32787#post32787)
Two Shots Fired/Dos disparos (Martin Rejtman 2014) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3800-New-York-Film-Festival-2014&p=32752#post32752)
Whiplash (Damien Chazelle 2014) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3800-New-York-Film-Festival-2014&p=32799#post32799)
Wonders, The/Le meraviglie (Alice Rohrwacher 2014) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3800-New-York-Film-Festival-2014&p=32760#post32760)


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GONE GIRL: ROSAMUND PIKE, BEN AFFLECK

The opening, closing, and centerpiece films for the fall festival:

OPENING NIGHT: Gone Girl (David Fincher)
CENTERPIECE: Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson)
CLOSING NIGHT: Birdman or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance (Alejandro G. Iñárritu)

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JOAQUIN PHOENIX IN INHERENT VICE
(NYFF 2014 CENTERPIECE FILM)

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[Chris Knipp]

http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/nyff52smalllogo.jpg (http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff2014/blog/new-york-film-festival-2014-main-slate-lineup)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/nyff52advert.jpg (http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff2014)

All of the 2014 NYFF Main Slate list has now been announced. See below; with the FSLC's blurbs. For the FSLC's filmlinc
site for further info on NYFF52 click on the image above.

The 52nd New York Film Festival (2014) Main Slate (http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff2014/blog/new-york-film-festival-2014-main-slate-lineup).

(See also Noel Murray's fuller, richer individual summaries of the films for The Dissolve.) (http://thedissolve.com/news/2968-the-new-york-film-festival-line-up-has-been-announ/)

GONE GIRL
Director: David Fincher
Opening Night - 145 mins.
World Premiere
David Fincher’s film version of Gillian Flynn’s best seller (adapted by the author) is one wild cinematic ride, an intensely compressed portrait of a recession-era marriage contained within a depiction of celebrity/media culture.

INHERENT VICE
Centerpiece
World Premiere 148 mins.
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
The first adaptation of a Thomas Pynchon novel, is a time machine placing viewers in the world of the paranoid, hazy L.A. dope culture of the early ’70s.

Closing Night Gala Selection
BIRDMAN OR THE UNEXPECTED VIRTUE OF IGNORANCE
Director: Alejandro G. Iñarritu
Closing Night 119 mins.
One-time action hero Riggan Thomson (a jaw-dropping Michael Keaton) stages his own adaptation of Raymond Carver’s "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" while contending with a scene-hogging narcissist, a vulnerable actress, and an unhinged girlfriend for co-stars; a resentful daughter; a manager who’s about to come undone... and his ego, the inner demon of the superhero that made him famous, Birdman.

BELOVED SISTERS (Die geliebten Schwestern)
Director: Dominik Graf
North Armerican Premiere 170 mins.
Romantic sentiment runs high but aristocratic decorum holds sway in this beautiful and thoroughly modern rendering of the real-life 18th-century love triangle involving German poet Friedrich Schiller and two sisters of noble birth, Charlotte and Caroline, whose strikingly intense relationship and profound mutual devotion verge on symbiosis.

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Amalric shows Georges Simenon crime novel La Chambre bleue

THE BLUE ROOM (La chambre bleue)
Director: Mathieu Amalric
North American Premiere 76 mins.
A perfectly twisted, timeless adaptation of a Georges Simenon domestic crime novel in which an adulterous man (Mathieu Amalric) and woman (Stéphanie Cléau) meet in a country hotel’s blue room... but have very different visions of their future.

CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA
Director: Olivier Assayas
U.S. Premiere 124 mins.
Juliette Binoche plays an aging actress and Kristen Stewart her personal assistant in Olivier Assayas’s brilliant new film, a close meditation on the passage of time.

EDEN
Director: Mia Hansen-Løve
U.S. Premiere 131 mins.
Mia Hansen-Løve’s fourth feature is based on the experiences of her brother (and co-writer) Sven—one of the pioneering DJs of the French rave scene in the early 1990s—and plays in the mind as a swirl of beautiful faces and bodies, impulsive movements, rushes of cascading light and color, and music, music, and more music.

FOXCATCHER
Director: Bennett Miller 133 mins.
'A vivid portrait of a side of American life that has never been touched in movies, Bennett Miller’s meticulously crafted new film deals with the tragic story of the the fatally dissociated billionaire John E. du Pont (Steve Carell) and the brothers and championship wrestlers (played by Mark Ruffalo and Channing Tatum) recruited by du Pont to create a national wrestling team on his family’s sprawling property in Pennsylvania.

GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE (Adieu au langage)
Director: Jean-Luc Godard 70 ins.
Jean-Luc Godard’s 43rd feature, shot in 3-D and "starring" his beloved dog Roxy, is a work of the greatest freedom and joy, as impossible to summarize as a poem by Wallace Stevens or a Messiaen quartet.

HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT
Directors: Josh & Benny Safdie
U.S. Premiere 94 mins.
Harley is madly in love with Ilya. She’s sure he loves her just as much, if only he could express it. Both of them are heroin addicts, kids who wander around New York trying to scare up money for a fix. The Safdie Brothers’ toughest movie, it’s not romantic but it will break your heart.

HILL OF FREEDOM (Jayuui Eondeok)
Director: Hong Sang-soo
U.S. Premiere 66 mins.
Kwon is given a packet of undated letters from Mori, who has come to Seoul to propose to her. As she walks down a flight of stairs, they are dropped and scattered. While reading them, she must make sense of the chronology… and so must we, in Hong Sang-soo’s daring new film, made up of a series of disordered scenes based on the letters.

HORSE MONEY (Cavalo Dinheiro)
Director: Pedro Costa
U.S. Premiere 103 mins.
Pedro Costa’s astonishing new film, which "takes place" in the soul-space of Costa regular Ventura, is a self-reckoning, a moving memorialization of lives in danger of being forgotten, and a great and piercingly beautiful work of cinema.

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Lisandro Alonso at Cannes

JUAJA
Director: Lisandro Alonso
U.S. Premiere 108 mins.
A work of tremendous beauty and a source of continual surprise, Alonso’s first period piece stars Viggo Mortensen as a Danish military engineer who traverses a visually stunning variety of Patagonian shrub, rock, grass, and desert on horseback and on foot in search of his teenage daughter.

LIFE OF RILEY(Aimer, boire et chanter)
Director: Alain Resnais
U.S. Premiere 108 mins.
The final work from Alain Resnais, based on British playwright Alan Ayckbourn’s Relatively Speaking, is a moving, graceful, and surprisingly affirmative farewell to life from a truly great artist.

LISTEN UP PHILIP
Director: Alex Ross Perry 108 mins.
For his sly, very funny portrait of artistic egomania, Alex Ross Perry draws on literary models (mainly Philip Roth and William Gaddis) to achieve a brazen mixture of bitter humor and unexpected pathos.

MAPS TO THE STARS
Director: David Cronenberg
U.S. Premiere 111 mins.
Cronenberg takes Bruce Wagner’s script—a pitch-black Hollywood satire—chills it down, and gives it a near-tragic spin. The terrible loneliness of narcissism afflicts every character from the fading star Havana (Julianne Moore) to the available-for-anything chauffeur (Robert Pattinson) to the entire Weiss family, played by John Cusack, Olivia Williams, Evan Bird, and Mia Wasikowska.

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Asia Argento at Cannes

MISUNDERSTOOD (Incompresa)
Director: Asia Argento
North American Premiere 103 mins.
As preteen Aria shuttles between the well-appointed homes of her divorced showbiz parents, a large affectionate cat her only companion, she elaborates her walks into sometimes life-threatening adventures. Blurring the line between imagination and actuality, Asia Argento’s irrepressible projection of young female subjectivity is ingenious, direct, and utterly real

MR. TURNER
Director: Mike Leigh 149 mins.
A portrait of the great painter J.M.W. Turner and his time, but also an extremely clear-eyed film about art and its creation, and the great human problem of sharing a life with other people. Featuring a remarkable performance from director Mike Leigh’s frequent collaborator, Timothy Spall.
Read more

PASOLINI
Director: Abel Ferrara 87 mins.
U.S. Premiere 87 mins
Abel Ferrara’s new film compresses the many contradictory aspects of his subject’s life and work into a distilled, prismatic portrait, with a brilliant Willem Dafoe in the title role.

THE PRINCESS OF FRANCE (La Princesa de Francia)
Director: Matías Piñeiro
U.S. Premiere 70 mins.
Matías Piñeiro’s dazzling fifth feature, which follows a group of young people involved in a radio production of Love’s Labour’s Lost, doesn’t transplant Shakespeare to the present day so much as summon the spirit of his polymorphous comedies.

SAINT LAURENT
Director: Bertrand Bonello
North American Premiere 146 mins.
Focusing on a dark, hedonistic, wildly creative decade in Yves Saint Laurent’s life and career, Bertrand Bonello toys deliriously with biopic rules and limitations.

LA SAPIENZA
Director: Eugène Green
U.S. Premiere 100 mins.
In Eugène Green’s exquisite new film, an unhappy married couple travel to Italy so that the husband can research the Baroque architect Francesco Borromini. There they encounter a brother and sister, whose friendship helps to restore their own sense of inner balance.

'71
Director: Yann Demange
A riveting thriller set in the mean streets of Belfast over the course of 24 hours, ’71 brings the grim reality of the Troubles to vivid, shocking life as a squaddie (Jack O’Connell) finds himself trapped and unarmed in hostile territory and the lines between friend and foe become increasingly blurred.

TALES OF THE GRIM SLEEPER
Director: Nick Broomfield 105 mins.
Four years after the arrest of the Grim Sleeper serial killer in South Central Los Angeles, filmmaker Nick Broomfield interviews friends, neighbors, and community activists to unravel the chilling story, while giving voice to his victims and illuminating the racial divide that still exists.

TIMBUKTU
Director: Abderrahmane Sissako
U.S. Premiere 97 mins.
A serenely composed vision of the humiliation and terror wrought by foreign Islamic jihadists who occupy the ancient Malian city of Timbuktu. A film by turns wondrous and terrifying.

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Richard Gere playing a homeless person

TIME OUT OF MIND
Director: Oren Moverman
U.S. Premiere 117 mins.
As George, a man forced onto the streets, Richard Gere may be the "star" of Oren Moverman’s haunting new film, but he allows the world around him to take center stage, and himself to simply be.

TWO DAYS, ONE NIGHT (Deux jours, une nuit)
Directors: Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne 95 mins.
A factory worker on the verge of being laid off (Marion Cotillard) has 48 hours to convince her co-workers to forego their bonuses so that she might keep her job. At once an unforgettable drama and a tough ethical inquiry, from Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne.

TWO SHOTS FIRED (Dos Disparos)
Director: Martn Rejtman
U.S. Premiere 105 mins.
Martín Rejtman’s seventh feature, about a family’s curious methods of coping with their 16-year-old son’s inexplicable suicide attempt, is an engrossing, digressive comedy with the weight of an existentialist novel.

WHIPLASH
Director: Damien Chazelle 106 mins.
A pedagogical thriller and an emotional S&M two-hander, Whiplash is brilliantly acted by Miles Teller as an eager jazz drummer at an unnamed New York music academy and J.K. Simmons as the teacher whose method of terrorizing his students is beyond questionable, even when it gets results.

THE WONDERS (Le meraviglie)
Director: Alice Rohrwacher
North American Premiere 110 mins.
Alice Rohrwacher’s sophomore feature, a vivid yet mysterious story of teenage yearning and confusion, conjures a richly concrete world that is subject to the magical thinking of adolescence

52nd NYFF SELECTION COMMITTEE: Kent Jones, chair, with Dennis Lim (FSLC Director of Programming), Marian Masone (FSLC Senior Programming Advisor), Gavin Smith (Film Comment Editor), and Amy Taubin (Film Comment and Sight & Sound Contributing Editor).

PRESS & INDUSTRY SCREENINGS. These run from September 15th through October 11trh 2014. Reviews will be appearing in this thread regularly during this time.


NYFF52 REVIVALS « Main Series Listings

Burroughs: The Movie
HOWARD BROOKNER | 1983 | 86 MINS
An evocative and one-of-a-kind portrait of William Burroughs, built around a series of encounters with the great American writer himself and interviews with many friends, including Allen Ginsberg, Terry Southern, John Giorno. and Brion Gysin. A true New York movie.

The Color of Pomegranates
SERGEI PARAJANOV | 1968 | 88 MINS
A cine-poem of the life of the 18th-century Armenian/Georgian poet and singer Sayat-Nova by Sergei Parajanov, which Michelangelo Antonioni once called a film of “stunningly perfect beauty,” now impeccably restored.

Hiroshima Mon Amour
ALAIN RESNAIS | 1959 | 90 MINS
This debut feature from Alain Resnais, written by Marguerite Duras, a story told in two tenses about the aftereffect of the atomic bomb as experienced by two lovers in Hiroshima, is one of the great masterworks of modernist cinema, now fully restored.

Once Upon a Time in America
SERGIO LEONE | 1984 | 251 MINS
Sergio Leone’s final and perhaps greatest film, a New York gangster saga housed within an intricate construction that shuttles through time, with Robert De Niro, James Woods leading a remarkable cast. This restoration, including material previously unseen in the U.S., preserves the director’s original structure.

Click here for festival news. (http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff2014)

REVIEWS BEGIN BELOW.

[Chris Knipp]

ASIA ARGENTO: MISUNDERSTOOD/INCOMPRESA (2014)

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Charlotte Gainsbourg, Giulia Salerno in Misunderstood

Growing up ignored and mistreated, with rich and famous parents: Asia Argento's boisterous, loud, semi-autobiographical effort is endlessly vivid but lacks real substance

Asia Argento, daughter of Dario, was seen on the screen in person in the 2007 New York Film Festival's colorful and amusing Main Slate selection, Catherine Breillat's costume drama The Last Mistress (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?2317-The-Last-Mistress&p=20331#post20331), where she played the lead role. This is a semi-autobiographical piece by Asia (the lead character, a young girl, only has one letter different in her name), where she has only a brief cameo. It's a more convincing directorial effort than her first two pictures, which have been characterized as "punk melodrama" (Lee Marshall, Screen Daily) (http://www.screendaily.com/reviews/the-latest/misunderstood/5072420.article). Actually, though Misunderstood certainly has trappings unique to itself, in doing a tumultuous Italian language period coming-of-ager (set in the early 1980's), Asia Argento is competing with an entertaining and accomplished, if not radically original, spate of such films in recent Italian cinema including Giovanni Veronesi's The Fifth Wheel (starting in the Sixties), Daniele Lucchetti's Those Happy Years (about the Seventies), and Pierfrancesco Diliberto's The Mafia Only Killes in Summer, about growing up on Sicily in the past few decades. These films included in the FSLC Open Roads: New Italian Cinema (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3742-Open-Roads-New-Italian-Cinema-At-Lincoln-Center-2014&p=32326#post32326) series of June 2014, are just as entertaining and contain more historical context.

But the choice of Misunderstood as a New York Film Festival Main Slate film has the logic of a pedigree in cinematic history. Dario Argento, Asia's father, is the master of the Seventies horror film subgenre known as giallo, and she is his colorful offspring. Perhaps it's not any one thing Asia does, but how all her efforts, as actress, personality, model, singer, director, feed into a vivid and defiant life, fulfilling the supposed Italian renaissance concept of la vita come opera d'arte, of life itself as a work of art. Misunderstood is a vivid gesture, even if as autobiography or as cinema it may be a little more gesture than substance.

After seeing the film one wants to suggest Abused and Neglected as a better title than Misunderstood. The spectacularly egocentric and dysfunctional father and mother played by mostly-TV-actor and "heartthrob" Gabriel Garko and French icon (and herself daughter of a dysfunctional famous artistic person) Charlotte Gainsbourg take time out from their self-absorption mostly only to be mean to sweet, durable young Aria (Giulia Salerno) to the extent of frequently kicking her out or forcing her to leave their very soon separate households. The signature image this loud, punk, boisterous and colorful (but also sometimes underlit) movie leaves you with is the often-seen one of nine-year-old Aria dragging suitcase and cat-carrying cage as she tramps from one household to the other, or is temporarily homeless, hanging out with druggie street people and learning to smoke.

As Aria, Giulia Salerno is appealing enough, making for a lonely center of humanity amid the parents, their hangers-on, and Aria's unhelpful sisters, notably the chubby pink-obsessed Lucrezia (Carolina Poccioni), who goes to live with daddy when the parents split and lounges endlessly in her pink bedroom like an odalisque. Salerno's stand-in for Asia herself however lacks more emphatic qualities she has exhibited in real life as a feisty jack-of-all-trades with tons of attitude. Acquisition of that attitude is something that apparently hasn't happened yet; or maybe Asia has simply chosen the somewhat confused aim in this movie of choosing to make rejection and lovelessness cute. This girl may have a childhood like the director's was, but she's not the same person. The director posed at Cannes just recently defiantly flexing her biceps and showing off unusual tattoos. Nine-year-old Aria is a long way from such gestures.

These unappealing parents are a bit one-note, to say the least. Daddy, with his bleach-highlighted hair and fancy outfits, is merely an actor, not a notorious director, and we rarely hear anything about his work. Mommy is confusingly conceived. She is a classical pianist who annoys the neighbors with Rachmaninoff (you'd think the neighbors would be used to that, if she ever practices); later, she consorts with riotous punk musicians (a step too far from Rachmaninoff). Asia Argento's real life mother, Daria Nicolodi, was an actress.

This beleaguered girl in the film is skinny, short-haired, noncommittal, and always bounces back, sort of like the little boy in The Mafia Only Kills in Summer. The filmmaker's legendary feistiness and ambition lie on the cutting room floor. The "miserablism" of Asia's first two directorial efforts may have been turned to comedy here, but this ain't no bildingsroman. The young protagonist has survived, but you don't know where she is going. All we're left with is those dreadful parents, those useless sisters, and mom's fun and simpatico American punk boyfriend, the too-soon-discarded Ricky (Justin Pearson). Much better biopic: Joann Sfar's rolicking, phantasmagoric 2010 Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life. Eric Elmosnino is a perfect adult Serge Gainsbourg; Kacey Motet Klein is a hilarious boy Serge. Why didn't Asia try to be more accurate? But while Sfar might not have been a filmmaker, he's more of one than Asia.

Misunderstood/Incompresa, 103 mins., debuted at Cannes in May 2014, and was screened for this review as part of the 52nd New York Film Festival.

[Chris Knipp]

YANN DEMANGE: '71

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Demange's incredible Irish Troubles film gives new meaning to the phrase, "caught in the crossfire"

Yann Demange's incredibly intense Troubles film gives us twenty-four hours in the life of English squad member Gary Hook (Jack O'Connell), suddenly stationed in Belfast (he thought he was going to be sent to Germany) and thrown into a violet, Intifada-like fray his green, patrician commanding officer and sergeant are not prepared for. A teenaged orphan with a kid brother (Harry Verity) whom we meet at the outset, Hook finds himself on the run and wounded after a comrade is killed by his side in a street clash and his unit bolts, accidentally abandoning him. He is rescued and treated by Irish allies. But he's in hostile territory -- everyone is. This non-stop historical action movie is an authentic recreation of a hot, lethal slice of the Troubles. It doesn't break things down or make them easy for us (some subtitles might have helped). From the Ulster Protestant side are the Unionists and loyalists, and on the mostly Catholic side are the Irish nationalists and republicans, and there are the Privisional IRA, and those originally on their side who have turned against them because of their brutality. And to complicate matters there are the undercover Brits of the MRF, whose officers regard themselves as outranking the English soldiers. Caught in between, Hook is told he is "just meat" -- to his government, to the Army, and to his Irish enemies.

An initial chase scene with Hook running break-neck along back alleys and in tiny spaces behind tight houses pursued by two enemies is breathtaking, intense filmmaking. The sense of Hook's abandonment as he sits panting in a tiny space is real and vivid. From there on the film settles down into some of the machinations and mood of James Marsh's 2012 Shadow Dancer (http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=2415), which deals with the Troubles but in the Nineties. Except where Marsh's film stagnates at times, Damange's maintains a world-class actioner clip that never cease to impress you, grip you, and horrify you as you watch, always with the spotlight on Gary Hook to keep the action centered, despite its constant ambiguity and danger. No film has better shown how dangerous Northern Ireland at this period was or how bitter and lethal the hostilities among people were.

And the hostility even includes those ostensibly setting out to save Hook, because there is dissension between the regular army and the intelligence officers who consider themselves and their undefined mission more important than Hook or his comrades. And what betrayals lie in wait on the Irish side? In fact while the physical suffering and danger are clearly defined, the politics and the loyalties remain lurking and ambiguous, all this amplified for an American viewer by the sometimes hard-to-decipher accents. For its sense of everything gone wrong, of war as no good for anybody (a point written into the dialogue but succinctly enough to avoid didacticism), the succinctly named '71 almost deserves comparison with a stunning anti-war film like Bernhard Wicki's 1959 The Bridge/Die Brücke ("In 1945, Germany is being overrun, and nobody is left to fight but teenagers"), which also has a long devastating action sequence.

Yann Damange is a French-born filmaker in England who has worked largely in TV, gaining admiration and awards. In 2011 he was directing the flavorful BBC drama miniseries "Top Boy" about inner-city London estate teenagers involved in risky drug dealing. '71, his first feature, has mostly gotten deserved raves; it establishes its director as a master of understated technique and muscular, riveting action. He falters in a few lesser respects. Some might think a final shootout far-fetched or overly drawn-out; and the concluding moments are a nice enough calm-down but fairly routine. But these are minor quibbles. In his Variety (http://variety.com/2014/film/reviews/berlin-film-review-71-1201090449/)review Guy Lodge describes Jack McConnell as a "rapidly rising star," and indeed intense as his role is here, one easily imagines him capable of more. He is also seen in the much-talked-about new prison drama Starred Up (which I have not seen). Guy Lodge compares this film with Paul Greengrass' benchmark 2002 docudrama of the Troubles set in '72, Bloody Sunday, which indeed it brings to mind. Tat Radcliffe’s fine widescreen cinematography shifts from 16mm. for daytime and digital for razor sharp night images. All the tech aspects are aces as are all the performances. See for yourself; this is a film not to be missed.

'71 debuted at Berlin, and showed at Telluride and Toronto. It was screened for this review as part of the 52nd New York Film Festival, where its excellence clearly merited its inclusion in the Main Slate. It opens theatrically in the UK 10 October and in France 5 November 2014. Roadside Attractions owns its US distribution rights.

US theatrical release begins 27 February 2015. Metacritic rating now 80% (26 Feb.).

[Chris Knipp]

JEAN-LUC GODARD: GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE (2014)

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"ROXY" IN GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE

Godard touches on old themes and does some neat tricks with 3D

To call a post-Nineties Jean-Luc Godard's film "accessible" would be a stretch. But his new one, Goodbye to Language, is discernibly more appealing and less of a slog (70 minuets instead of 104) than his Film Socialisme (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?2875-New-York-Film-Festival-2010&p=25139#post25139) (NYFF 2010). The latter occasioned Todd McCarthy's angry-sounding assertion that Godard is mean-spirited and exhibits "the most spurious sort of anti-Americanism or genuinely profound anti-humanism, something that puts Godard in the same misguided camp as those errant geniuses of an earlier era, Pound and Céline." This is less visible in Goodbye to Language, which spends a lot of time with a naked middle-class white couple in an apartment, and with Godard's own dog, Roxy, and is playful enough to be shot in 3D, of which it makes some good use. I do not see that use as "revolutionary," as Mike D'Angelo did in a Cannes bulletin (http://thedissolve.com/features/postcards-from-cannes/580-day-8-reinventing-the-format/) for The Dissolve. I think in the face of a rote-acknowledged "master" (and Godard really did seem exciting and revolutionary back in the days of Breathless and La Chinoise) whom one can't make head nor tail of, it's natural to pick out elements one enjoys and blow them up into something important. Thus one notes that the distorted color in Goodbye to Language is sometimes gorgeous. And one wishes that more mainstream films dared to do such things more often, with one excuse or another.

Goodbye to Language, like Film Socialisme, is divided up into parts with portentous titles, which one would remember if they seemed to illustrate their titles in any relatable way. The NYFF festival blurb calls this "a work of the greatest freedom and joy," but it's not. It's didactic, full of general nouns (like "freedom" and "joy") thrown out with the verve of a French university student. It cites fifteen or twenty famous authors whose names were dropped or lines quoted; and ten or twelve classical composers, snippets of whose compositions are folded in to add flavor and importance. But when Mike D'Angelo says "it doesn’t constantly seem as if he’s primarily interested in demonstrating his own erudition," he's saying this because other Godard films have constantly seemed to be primarily interested in that, and this one just barely avoids it.

Here's what D'Angelo observes in the film's 3D that he thinks revolutionary (and this one moment is indeed remarkable): "Turns out he’d had the camera pan to follow an actor walking away from another actor, then superimposed the pan onto the stationary shot, creating (via 3-D) a surreal loop that, when completed, inspired the audience to burst into spontaneous applause. " It's hard to describe, and strange, and indeed original. I'd very much like to have watched this sequence -- which you do have to take off your 3D glasses to appreciate the transformative nature of -- with an audience keen enough to have noted its cleverness and applauded it. The audience I was with applauded at the end, but that just felt like an obligatory gesture, not the "olé" of connoisseurs noting a visual coup.

As D'Angelo says, since the Nineties Godard has been "a full-bore avant-garde filmmaker." This means his films are the kind of thing you might see showing in a loop in a darkened room of a museum. When any film makes no rational sense I remember my museum experiences of that kind of art film and am calmed. Such films have their place. They are like complex decorative objects. Yes, and Godard's references to Nietzsche (pronounced "NEETCH" by French-speakers) or Solzenitzen are like gilding on a frame. And offhand gibes like the man in the hat who says Solzenitzen didn't need Google (which also sounds funny in French) to make up the subtitle for a book, as D'Angelo puts it, "ranks high among the dumbest things a smart person has ever said." Godard is a smart person who in a long career has said plenty of dumb things. He would have been a lot better as a filmmaker if he'd done more showing and less telling, from a long way back.

But parts of Farewell to Language are bold and visually stimulating, and ought to be studied by conventional filmmakers, editors, or cinematographers to get some more original visual ideas. I also like another D'Angelo's Dissolve note (and he himself says this is his favorite Godard film since Weekend): "According to my Twitter feed, Goodbye To Language has reinvented cinema again—one dude went full Pauline Kael and compared it to Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon." Unfortunately, some after the screening I saw, with bunch of ostensible film writers, out in the lobby some were pronouncing that this was "the future of cinema." Not Marvel Comics?

Goodbye to Language/Adieu au langage, 70 mins., debuted at Cannes, where Godard was given a special prize. It's his 43rd feature. And he's 83.

[Chris Knipp]

MARTIN REJTMAN: TWO SHOTS FIRED (2014)

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Still from an early sigment of Two Shots Fired

One inexplicable thing after another, in and around Buenos Aires

In his recent Toronto coverage for The Dissolve (http://thedissolve.com/features/postcards-from-tiff/741-day-3-men-women-children/), "Day 3: Men, Women, Children," Mike D'Angelo lists the Frenchman Laurent Cantet and the Argentinian Martin Rejtman as "two auteurist favorites" who "haven't done their best work this year." He describes Cantet's Return to Ithica (which I haven't seen) as " a laborious Havana-set Big Chill" he sees as a string of repetitious conversations dwelling on good old days. He goes on: "Rejtman’s Two Shots Fired, by contrast, serves up a placid series of largely unrelated vignettes, indulging in drollery for drollery’s sake. Two shots do in fact get fired, into a head and a stomach at point-blank range; it’s typical of the film’s ultra-low-key approach that the bullets do no real damage." In his running Twitter "reviews" D'Angelo gave the film a 48 rating, ranking it 23rd out of the 36 he saw at Toronto. Even so, his description seems kindly, but this may be explained by the fact he gives in his Tweet that he previously "really liked" Rejtman's The Magic Gloves.

Without any prior experience of Rejtman's apparently admired previous work, Two Shots Fired seems first flat, then absurdist, finally simply pointless in its succession of one studiously bland narrative moment after another. Rejtman, as Jay Weissberg puts it in Variety, (http://variety.com/2014/film/reviews/film-review-two-shots-fired-1201284370/) "picks up on various family members and their extended circles, dropping storylines and characters with studied disregard for narrative arcs," but "doesn’t really go anywhere with the concept, yet there’s enough skill and amusement to hold fest audiences." This conclusion of festival-friendliness seems a little generous: the "skill and amusement" are difficult to discern.

Festival-friendly, no; auteurist-friendly, perhaps. It's often the case that one work by a filmmaker makes much more sense within his or her whole oeuvre; even unsuccessful efforts may be an interesting variation or shed light on other work that's more worth our attention. This makes the interest of Two Shots Fired restricted to those who know -- and like -- its maker's work. Weissberg also points out that Two Shots Fired is a return to feature filmmaking after a ten-year hiatus. Perhaps Rejman is having trouble getting back up to speed.

For a while the conversations in Two Shots Fired have the bright, neutral banality and lack of affect of Fifties absurdist drama, a touch of the idiotic logic Eugene Ionesco discovered in English language textbooks and translated into his play La Cantatrice Chauve. But nothing Rejtman provides here has the brilliance or ringing absurdity of Ionesco. Instead, his movie begins to feel like some inexplicable instructional film or the work of a deranged amateur. One can see from Leslie Felperin's review for Variety (http://variety.com/2003/film/reviews/the-magic-gloves-1200539908/)of Rejtman's 2003 The Magic Gloves that the director employed a similar series of interlocking absurd plots, but they seem to have gained unity and point in the earlier film from a focus on economic problems. Felperin describes Rejtman as "Laconic and deadpan in the tradition of Aki Kaurismaki or early Jim Jarmusch." That quality is lacking here, but one might also note Felperin's warning, "Some of the patter will play better to auds fluent in Spanish." And Argentinian Spanish, to boot.

Two Shots Fired/Dos disparos, 104 min., debuted at Lucarno. It was screened for this review as part of the Main Slate of the 52nd New York Film Festival, 2014. US theatrical release Wed. 13 May 2015.

[Chris Knipp]

HONG SANG-SOO: HILL OF FREEDOM (2014)

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More play with narrative and personal themes in a little charmer from Hong

A cinematic bagatelle just over an hour long, Hont Sang-soo's Hill of Freedom may be among the most amusing and accessible of the Korean auteur's many treatments of his familiar themes. The action focuses on Mori (assured Japanese star Ryô Kase), who has returned to Seoul to look for Kwon (Seo Young-hwa), a Korean woman he's in love with. His conversations with everybody are perforce in English since he speaks no Korean. The foreign language makes their conversations come out as disarmingly frank, sometimes a bit gauche, and often quite funny.

Mori taught at a language institute during a stint in the country a couple of years ago, and his life was miserable but he's back now because he realizes Kwon, whom he met at the institute, is who he wants to spend his life with. He stays at a guest house located very near where he knows Kwon to have lived, and leaves notes for her, hoping to connect. Along the way there is time to protect a girl from a rude, abusive man, for a drunken friendship established with the broken nephew Sang-won (Kim Ui-seong) of the guest house owner Gu-ok (Yun Yeo-jeong), as well as an unexpected romance with cafe owner Yeong-seon (Mun So-ri), also fueled by alcohol, that proves too tempting to cut off immediately.

But before we get to all this, it's necessary to explain the framework. Kwon turns out to have been out of town, and when she returns she's given a packet of letters (all from Mori) sent while she was away. Recovering from an illness, she stumbles on a stairway, dropping the letters, and when she picks them up they're out of order. She reads the shuffled letters while sitting at a cafe, and as she reads them one by one, we see the adventures of Mori recounted, out of order, in each. We have to guess what the correct order is. Clues include his checking into the guest house; meeting Yeong-seon, the owner of a cafe called "Jayuui Eondeok" (Hill of Freedom), to which he returns; restoring her lost dog and becoming her lover; various conversations about why he's in Korea, "politeness" and "cleanliness" as dominant traits of the Japanese; and characteristics of Korean women ("Big and strong").

A running theme is "time," which Mori is reading a little book about. It's an illusion, the book argues, though one that humans abandon at their peril. Does the order of the events matter? Anyway, they end happily. Perhaps as in other recent Hong films the confused time-frame is not only to play with themes of time and memory, but simply to keep viewers on their toes. The disarming, and sometimes quite funny, directness of the English dialogue remains this by some accounts "slight" and "fluffy" Hong effort's most enduring charm. He has rarely put together anything so cute and sweet; but in its minimalist way, it's as profound as anything he's done.

Derek Elley has a point when he says in his review on Film Business Asia that Hill of Freedom has "a marginally fresher feel than his past three titles — In In Another Country 다른 나라에서 (2012), Nobody's Daughter Haewon (http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=2507) 누구의 딸도 아닌 해원 and Our Sunhi (http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=2664) 우리 선희</a> — without actually reinventing himself in any way." One can grant that the pared-down format and English dialogue spoken by Asians have led to unusual freshness and vividness here, without sharing Elley's opinion that Hong was growing stale in those three previous films.

Hill of Freedom/자유의 언덕/Jayuui Eondeok, 66 mins., Hong Sang-soo's sixteenth feature, debuted at Toronto 9 September 2014. Ir was screened for this review as part of the Main Slate of the 52nd New York Film Festival. This is the eighth Hong Sang-soo film to be a NYFF Main Slate selection. The other seven were Turning Gate (NYFF 2002), Woman is the Future of Man (NYFF 2004), Tale of Cinema (http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=477&view=next)(NYFF 2005), Woman on the Beach (http://www.cinescene.com/knipp/womanbeach.html) (NYFF 2006), Night and Day (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?2339-New-York-Film-Festival-2008&postid=20821#post20821)(NYFF 2008), Oki's Movie (http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=1583&view=previou)(NYFF 2010), and Nobody's Daughter Haewon (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3583-New-York-Film-Festival-2013&p=30943#post30943) (NYFF 2013). Hong's Like You Know It All (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?2808-Film-Comments-Selects-And-New-Directors-New-Films-2010&p=24152#post24152) and Our Sunhi (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3686-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2014&p=31868#post31868) were included respectively in the 2010 and 2014 Film Society of Lincoln Center Film Comment Selects series. I've reviewed all these from 2005 on. Hong's work is consistently enjoyable and enjoyably consistent: he may be the ideal Asian auteur to study and compare the tightly interrelated works of. He has become even more prolific recently, his films have become more witty and subtly self-referential and narratively playful, and they have also happily begun to get US releases.

[Chris Knipp]

DOMINIK GRAF: BELOVED SISTERS (2014)

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CONFURIUS, STETTER AND HERZSPRUNG IN THE BELOVED SISTERS

A love trio at a turning point in European cultural and political history

Caroline von Lengefeld (Hannah Herzsprung) and her younger sister Charoltte (Henriette Confurius) were beautiful, elegant, free-spirited sisters living from the late 18th into the early 19th century whose well-born mother was a widow of diminished fortune and they were pledged to be intimate and loyal forever. When they met the poet and revolutionary Friedrich Schiller (Florian Stetter), he fell in love with both of them. This made for a complicated but very interesting life about which Dominik Graf, filmmaker returning to features from television after a ten-year hiatus, has made a beautiful, action-packed, unusually lively historical film that is so rich and lush and smart it's hard to get your head around, especially since the full version is 170 minutes and could almost have been a mini-series. The time passes quickly. The storytelling, full of cultural and social history and psychology and specifics about publishing and printing and contemporary politics (naturally including the French Revolution), is breathless as Joyce Cary's in his narrative tour-de-force A Fearful Joy, which skips through years in a paragraph. Look away or blow your nose and you risk missing a whole series or incidents and reversals of fortune, many of which were made up within the historical context by Dominik Graf for his screenplay, because specifics of the relationships are not fully known.

This is still the golden age of letter-writing and in a way Beloved Sisters is an unusually richly elaborated and dramatized and "opened up" epistolary novel (the sound of quills scratching across paper and the images of distinctly different and real-looking 18th-century handwritings are constants), and at first the trio's exchanges are written in elaborate code. There is also a breathless serial novel written anonymously by Caroline and supervised by Friedrich and published in cliff-hanger segments, like Dickens, using new mass printing techniques suitable for a growing audience. Schiller tells Caroline, his real soul-mate (despite his marrying Charlotte), that the French Revolution wouldn't have happened without new faster typesetting methods. allowing pages to be set up in blocks.

This is the birth of German romanticism, with Goethe still around and he and Schiller facing off awkwardly. (Goethe and Charlotte's lively godmother, played by Maja Maranow, were intimates.) It's a time when the picturesque was big news and the Force of Nature was a huge discovery and intellectuals are national celebrities. When Schiller is given a lectureship at the University of Jena, and the topic is a blend of history, philosophy, and poetry, he is greeted by a packed house like a rock star. This is a scene so profusely realized that it was painful to have to be distracted from all the detail by reading subtitles, but that's what happens when you forgot to learn German. Ultimately the two sisters are at each other's throats. Being married and always involved with Schiller and having children and not perhaps knowing whose they are is too complicated for even the most symbiotic of relationships. But Graf, despite being a visually showy filmmaker (and the landscapes, interiors, and architecture -- mostly using real locations -- shot by Michael Wieswig are a consistent pleasure Scott Foundas has compared t (http://variety.com/2014/film/reviews/berlin-film-review-beloved-sisters-1201093035/)o Barry Lyndon), manages to bypass melodrama and conventional tragic interludes in his modern and relaxed approach to history.

As Charlotte, Henriette Confurius at first seems the purer beauty, with her blooming skin, but then, by God, as time goes on you realize that Hannah Herzsprung, who has the more important role, is equally beautiful and has a more complex face. Both give powerful performances, and as Schiller Florian Stetter has all the authority and dreamy romantic glamor you could want, though this is an unusually smart and rich amalgam of lots besides swooniness. Once seen, it seems one film it would have been a crime not to include in the choosy New York Film Festival.

The Beloved Sisters/Die geliebten Schwestern, 170 mins., written and directed by Dominik Graf, debuted at Berlin 2014. It was screened for this review as part of the 52nd New York Film Festival. Opening in NY on December 24, 2014 at Lincoln Plaza Cinema (Music Box Films).

[Chris Knipp]

ALICE ROHRWACHER: THE WONDERS (2014)

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LUNGU AND ROHRWACHER, TOP, IN THE WONDERS

Italian fantasies and Italian realities in Liguria

For her second film Italian, part-German filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher has rooted her story more deeply in a specific milieu, that of an impoverished family of beekeepers but again as in her debut Corpo Celeste (http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=1882)(NYFF 2011) focuses on young girls and refers to a Felliniesque fascination with folk mysticism, kitsch, and media distortion. The "Wonders" is a low-budget TV regional publicity scheme called "Il paese delle Meraviglie" (Land of Wonders) designed to improve bee-keeping while providing touristic publicity for the Etruscan background of Etruria, where the depicted family lives. There's a whisper of Matteo Garrone's Reality (http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=2350) here (a recent big prize winner for Italian cinema: it, like The Wonders, won the Grand Prix at Cannes) only this time the dreamer isn't a naive man but a young teenage girl, Gelsomina (Maria Alexandra Lungu). There's a whisper of neorealism in the multicultural, mostly non-actor cast (which Rohrwacher wrangles excellently). And there's more than a whisper of autobiography in the sisterly rivalries, the German father, the beekeeping. The parents speak French when they want the kids not to know what's being said. All this creates an air of disorienting, slightly miraculous disorder, enhanced by the strangeness of the beekeeping itself, and certain borderline magic realist moments, like the one when Gelsomina lets bees walk over her face and a German boy whistles to make them drop off.

Rohrwacher plunges viewers at once into the intense life of the beekeeper family. They are dominated by bossy, borderline boorish babbo Wolfgang (Belgian actor Sam Louwyck), who rejects modern, commercial life (he thinks the world "is going to end") and vaunts the organic simplicity of the family's product, cursing local hunters at the outset, driving the four sisters and another female relative (Swiss actress Sabine Timoteo) to help with the livestock and the beekeeping, with Gelsomina, the first-born, his chief protege. The honey is always being collected into a bucket that might overflow, and "avete cambiato il secchio?" ("Have you changed the bucket?") is the constant worrying question. One gets a sense that Wolfgang is better at throwing his weight around than conducting practical business; the family can barely make ends meet, and mamma Angelica (Alice Rohrbacher's sister Alba) is the one who puts food on the table and tends to practical matters. Wolfgang's impracticality is signaled by his giving the girls the present of a circus camel. Such goofs lead Angelica to threaten to separate from Wolfgang.

The accomplishment, but for some perhaps the annoyance, of Rohrwacher's film is its amiable, hippieish chaos, which blends into the cheesy publicity scheme speerheaded by a white-wigged TV "fata bianca" or fairy godmother played by Monica Bellucci. A very young German juvenile delinquent called Martin delivered to the family for "reeducation" is the catalyst for Gelsomina's final coming-of-age. All he can do is spectacularly whistle. A beautiful, slightly odd little boy, he does not speak. Odd casting, because he looks more Italian than anyone else in the cast; but even this adds to the special feel of this sui generis effort, whose Felliniesque climax is the "paese delle Meraviglie" awards show in an Etruscan grotto offshore, with local peasant farmers, including Gelsomina's family and a tamed Wolfgang, in tacky pseudo-historical costumes, and a disappearance and a search.

This is a more realistic (as well as pseudo-miraculous) movie than Rohrwacher's debut, and its achievement of a world seemingly too complicated to be merely imagined and all the success with the young actors (who learned beekeeping techniques) must explain the enthusiasm of the Cannes reception leading to the Grand Prize. But while others liked Corpo Celeste far less, I liked it more, and await Rohrwacher's number three.

[Chris Knipp]

EUGÈNE GREEN: LA SAPIENZA (2014)

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LUDOVICO SUCCIO AND FABRIZIO RONGIONE IN LA SAPIENZA

Green's beautiful but stilted Italian travelogue about couples and architecture is weighed down by its lugubrious dialogue

An American who has adopted France as his country, Eugène Green (the accent grave evidently part of his acclimatization) is an accolyte of the venerable Portuguese auteur Manoel de Oliveira; he's even gone so far as to shoot a film (his 2009 The Portuguese Nun) on Oliveira's home turf. La Sapienza, which has a lot about space, light, and baroque architecture, particularly that of Francesco Borromini, has plenty to offer if you're looking for handsome photography of seventeenth-century Italian buildings. But the people, simpering sourpusses who stare at the camera and slowly mouth lugubrious inanities at each other, have considerably less to offer. Green also owes debts to Rivette and Resnais, and this film could be taken as a variation on Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad -- only one where instead of remembered trysts at a haunting chateau, the focus is on couples therapy for a Swiss architect and his wife, which comes about through meeting young Italian siblings near Lago Maggiore, where Alexandre (Fabrizio Rongione) and Aliénor (Christelle Prot Landman) go so Alexandre can study the aforesaid Borromini.

The couple meets 19-year-old Goffredo (Ludovico Succio), coincidentally himself an aspiring architecture student, as he's holding up his sister Lavinia (Arianna Nastro), who's just collapsed from one of her periodic fits of weakness. Aliénor befriends Lavinia and has daily chats with her in French while the girl recuperates, and Alexandre takes Goffredo for a day or two on an architectural study trip to Turin. Goffredo winds up being Alexandre's teacher, explaining to him that architecture is all about space and light. And light has something to do with love: it sounds like Green has dipped into Dante's Paradiso. Reference is also made to the idea of "sapienza," which in theology is an attribute of God that manifests itself in the creation and governing of the world. The name also refers to one of Borromini's masterpieces, the Church of Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza in Rome.

The film offers hints throughout about how architecture might be better integrated with society and readapted for humane use. When Eliénor is by herself one evening a ruddy-faced man with long gray hair (Green himself) appears on a bench speaking French with an odd accent (and the same lugubrious tongue in slo-mo of everyone else) with a monologue about how he is a Chaldean from Iraq who speaks Aramaic and whose people and culture are disappearing. At the beginning and end of the film in its only music an a capella choir sings some lovely baroque compositions. The promise to reveal mysteries behind the couple's failed marriage is fulfilled, and it's hinted that the hitherto symbiotic Goffredo and Lavinia will fare better apart. In an Italian essay online Roberta Scorranese e (http://marilyn.corriere.it/2014/08/04/la-sapienza-nietzsche-e-borromini-a-locarno/)xplains that this process refers to an idea of Nietzsche's about how one must not remain too attached to another person, even whom one loves. Obviously the intellectual underpinnings of Green's new film are elaborate. It's too bad the film itself is so stilted, slow, and irritating. Despite the architectural travelogue Green overwhelmingly tells rather than shows; he often seems outright to be delivering a lecture. Despite its stylistic homages to those masters, La Sapienzal lacks the elegance of Resnais and Rivette, or Oliveira's ability to bemuse and enchant. One can apply to this new film what Jay Weissberg said of The Portuguese Nun in Variety ("http://variety.com/2009/film/reviews/the-portuguese-nun-1200475580/): it "uses a distended artificiality likely to produce far more giggles than intended."

La Sapienza, 100 mins., debuted at Locarno 9 August 2014, and is also included at Rio, Toronto, Vancouver, and London, represented at Toronto by Kino Lorber. It was screened for this review as part of the 52nd New York Film Festival.

[Chris Knipp]

JOSH & BENNY SAFDIE: HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT (2014)

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Caleb Landry Jones and Arielle Holmes in Heaven Knows What

Druggie street kids' New York romance realistically dramatizes the mess, lacks depth or context

Judging by their semi-autobiographical Daddy Longlegs (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?2838-DADDY-LONGLEGS-%28Josh-and-Benny-Safdie-2009%29), the New York indie filmmakers Josh and Benny Safdie just don't do "calm." In their new feature Heaven Knows What the young street heroin addicts live hour-by-hour, not day-by-day, and never take a break. They always have "a lot to do." All this energy: they could be working on Wall Street. And high stakes stock brokers do lots of drugs too! There is intensity and a lot of accomplishment observable in Heaven Knows What. The lingo is right, the milieus are real, many of the "actors," including Arielle Holmes, whose serial Apple Store outpourings of jotted memoirs this is based on, are playing grimly accurate versions of themselves. The grayish cinematography with extensive use of long lenses creates a vérité intimacy that sucks you in. Yet compared to work like Martin Bell's '84 documentary classic Streetwise, this docudrama feels like a blitz tour, a drug variation on poverty porn, a choppy collection of riffs that follow its street addict crew, Harley, Ilya, Mike, Skully, Isaac and a few others, around and around -- without penetrating deeply into personalities or lives. The film drags our noses in the dirt, but we are not enlightened or touched.

Streetwise grew out of more than a year's work by Bell's wife Mary Ellen Mark getting to know the Seattle street kids. Those black and white images stay etched on one's mind; the documentary brought them to life. The result may fill you with sadness but there is no sense of an effort to shock. Watching Heaven Knows What, one feels this is an artifact that, if not purposely designed, nonetheless is ideally suited, to épater la bourgeoisie, but not shock them with poetry like the French 19th-century decadents. To shock them with mess, with lives carelessly thrown away. This is voyeuristic stuff Larry Clark would have made sexier, KIds with less plot and colder weather. Heightening the harshness, it all happens in a few days in the dead of winter.

The film came from a chance encounter the Safdie brothers tell of with a pretty girl named Arielle Holmes working as a temp in the New York diamond district. They talked to her, tried to get her a job in a video, thenn learned she was homeless and a heroin addict. They got her to write about her life and decided to make a movie out of it with their collaborator Ronald Bronstein, with Arielle playing herself. The center of the story was her romance with Ilya, a self-centered, mean loner whose provocations and rejections apparently only fueled her devotion. The film begins with a reenactment of Harley's (Arielle's) suicide attempt. She slashes her wrist in a kind of protest at Ilya's indifference. The opening scene is shot in the New York Public Library using long lenses. Instead of being pushed to care, Ilya only dares Harley to do it. So she does, and goes to the psychiatric hospital.

To play Ilya, because the Safdies thought he was a self-dramatizing character, they found a professional actor, Caleb Landry Jones, who took on the job with potentially dangerous risk-taking commitment to authenticity. Another character, Skully, who goes around with Haley after she's released with her wrist stitched, is played by an underground rapper, Neecro. Most of the others are non-actors.

There is a kind of shape that emerges: the doomed love story. Harley (Arielle) even writes long poetical declarations of eternal devoction to Ilya. The real Ilya was around as the shooting went on and OD'ed and had to be revived in a fast food restaurant; Caleb Landry Jones's Ilya OD's too, and is revived by Harley. She goes around with him again, and he hides her duffle bag for laughs. They kiss, and they take a bus to go south, but he abandons her. She has taken up with drug dealer Mike (Buddy Duress, a real street person, and the most articulate character), and after all the shooting up, the begging for money ("spanging"), pilfering and reselling stuff from drugstores, sleeping in shared apartments, and all the rest, Harley winds up back with Mike, and the togetherness of the street addicts, who fight but hug and call each other "bro."

Apart from the committed performances, in Arielle's case reenactments, there are certainly things that work: the Safdie brothers may be being more misguided or superficial than in the case of their richer, more complex and autobiographical Daddy Longlegs, but they are still strongly committed to honing their craft. Even if it would have been better to step back to take a breath and provide perspectives, Heaven Knows What does have a clean, tight structure, the "miracle of economy" in editing and storytelling noted by Noel Murray in The Dissolve (http://thedissolve.com/news/2968-the-new-york-film-festival-line-up-has-been-announ/). The first great thing you notice about the film is Sean Price Williams’s cinematography, with its cloudy pale ugly-beautiful capturing of the street that is very consistent and very limber. What is not so great is the much-admired-by-some and sometimes -- even from the first minutes -- extremely obtrusive electronic synthesizer Debussy by Isao Tomita, sub-Philip Glass at best.

Heaven Knows What, 93 mins., debuted at Venice. It was screened for this review as part of the 52nd New York Film Festival. US theatrical release 29 May 2015 (Landmark Sunshine NYC). Metacritic rating 76% (based on only 7 reviews).

[Chris Knipp]

NYFF SPOTLIGHT ON DOCUMENTARY

ETHAN HAWKE: SEYMOUR: AN INTRODUCTION (2014)

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Seymour Bernstein in recital at 85 in Seymour: An Introduction

A film that fell into Ethan Hqwke's lap turns out to be a master class in classical piano and living an integrated life

Actor, director, and writer Ethan Hawke's debut as a documentary filmmaker focuses on a classical pianist turned teacher, the preturnaturally calm and highly articulate 85-year-old Seymour Bernstein, who played piano as a little boy, and began teaching it at fifteen, then after a successful career of touring and playing as a classical pianist, in disaffection with the pressures and commercialism, retired at fifty to devote himself to teaching and composing. He has also poured his wisdom into two books, With Your Own Two Hands: Self-Discovery Through Music (1981), and Twenty Lessons in Keyboard Choreography (1991).

Hawke chose Bernstein as an exemplary man, one with balance in his life, and seeks to show this in his loving portrait. This film portrait lays out aspects of Bernstein's present and past life, his working methods, memories of studying piano with Clara Husserl, serving in the US Army during the Korean War; richly informative moments with piano students. Hawke even persuaded him to play a private concert, which he took very seriously, practicing for many hours in preparation. The film is meant as a tribute, but as Justin Chang put it in his admiring Telluride review for Variety, (http://variety.com/2014/film/reviews/telluride-film-review-seymour-an-introduction-1201294939/) "happily sidesteps any vanity-project pitfalls." It does, because it is cannily edited.

Hawke's project grew out of meeting him at a private dinner party. He was struck by the older man's instant grasp of his career anxieties and painful stage fright, and getting to know him better, knew a film should be made about him. Bernstein, who had suffered from performance nerves himself, helped coach Hawke on how to deal with them and at the same time come to understand them as an inevitable part of the seriously committed performer's life. Seymour isn't very much in favor of the high-speed classical solo touring life. He thinks it warps people. Somewhat illogically, since Glenn Gould retired early from concertizing himself, he comments that Gould was a total neurotic -- but a genius of enormous technical skill. But he thinks it odd Gould is famous for Bach because when he hears Gould play Bach he hears Gould, not Bach (others would differ).

Most importantly, Seymour speaks for, and emerges as an example of, music as a part of an integrated emotional life.

While Hawke admits he had no desire to make a documentary, and this topic just fell into his lap, and while superficially it is much like many another New York music and arts film that might be shown on PBS, it's a classical piano fan's delight. Watching Seymour coach numerous students, and particularly doing a master class at NYU, one learns far more than usual about the art of piano -- the way Seymour coaches students to craft a musical line shows he is a splendid teacher. When he consents to play a recital for Ethan Hawke's LAByrinth Theater Company, it's given at the rotunda of Steinway Hall and we see Seymour chose the right piano. (This may recall a long-ago film about the young Gould doing the same thing.), and the film climaxes with excerpts of the recital, cunningly edited to show Seymour practicing for the performance and commenting in detail on several passages.

Reminiscences by Seymour fill in background about his studies with Sir Clifford Curzen (whose knighthood he may have helped bring about); his early life in a musicless home, with a father who did not understand his becoming a pianist; and moving recollections of his stint as a soldier (and performer) in the Korean War. Conversations with special friends like New York Times writer and pianist Michael Kimmelman help to dot the i's and cross the t's about Seymour's ideas about performing, music, and life. Justin Chang: "The great classical pianist ... is as graceful a speaker as he is a musician, and his voice rings out with wondrous depth and clarity."

The title is an unacknowledged reference to J.D. Salinger's late Glass family short story of the same name.

Seymour: An Introduction, 81 mins., debuted at Telluride last month, and showed shortly thereafter at Toronto. Sundance Selects acquired the US distribution rights. Screened for this review as part of the 52nd New York Film Festival, where it shows 27 Sept. 2014.

Opens in theaters starting 13 March 2015 in NYC (Lincoln Plaza and IFC Center) and in LA..

SPOTLIGHT ON DOCUMENTARY.

Seymour: An Introduction is presented as part of the NYFF's accompanying "Spotlight on Documentary" sidebar series, which also includes Scorsese and David Tedeschi's The 50-Year Argument, about The New York Review of Books; recent MacArthur Foundation Award winner Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Look of Silence (a sequel to his The Act of Killing); the Maysle brothers' Iris, about a fashion maven; and Frederick Wiseman’s first film about a museum, National Gallery. The NYFF is strong on documentaries this year, including additionally in its Main Slate both Nick Broomfeld's Tales of the Grim Sleeper; and, as a late addition, the world premiere of Laura Poitras' Citizenfour, an inside account of Edward Snowden's NSA spying revelations. Seymour: An Introduction holds its own very well among these titles.

(At the Q&A after the press screenin the film's subject, now 87, proved to be as calm, wise and articulate as he was on screen.)

[Chris Knipp]

ABEL FERRARA: PASOLINI (2014)

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WILLEM DAFOE IN PASOLINI

Tragedy by the beach: Ferrara films the genius, politics, and tragedy of Pasolini

Legendary Italo-American indie rebel Abel Ferrara and his career, some think (http://filmup.leonardo.it/pasolini.htm), slipped into in a black hole some years ago. His dubious end-of-the-world film 4:44 Last Day on Earth (NYFF 2011 (http://filmleaf.com/?p=309)) might have stood as his only decent effort in a decade. His 2004 Go Go Tales (NYFF 2007 (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?2121-New-York-Film-Festival-2007&p=18551#post18551)), the same blasphemous Italian critic holds, is be remembered chiefly for featuring Asia Argento French-kissing a rottweiler. Welcome to New York, Ferrara's very recent straight-to-Internet reenactment of the DSK scandal by Gérard Depardieu, scarcely gets mentioned. Given all that, Ferrara's Pasolini is a surprisingly class act. It comes with high level government sponsorship from Italy, France, and Belgium. Its tech credts are quality, its look spare and formally elegant. It's both thought-provoking and touching. Its tragedy creeps up on you, through an uneven, more conceptual first half to a more conventional but still haunting conclusion. Ferrara avoids biopic conventions, but he provides the ritual depiction of the last days and death, and Pasolini's murder is an essential moment, brutal, sudden, premature, and perhaps inevitable, as well as long investigated, debated and puzzled over, a death that is more than usually part of the life.

"Prismatic portrait," the festival blurb calls this short "non-linear" film about Pier Paolo Pasolini's last days. That is one way of explaining the somewhat disjointed and puzzling jumble of early sequences, requireing intimate knowledge of the biography and history to decode. Particularly puzzling to non-initiates might be scenes of Pasolini's fictional double from a novel, the “Carlo” character (Roberto Zibetti). But this is also a film which settles down into a fairly powerful finale of the writer/poet/filmmaker's doomed, violent end and those who mourn it whose elegiac final moments, enhanced by a soaring rendition of Rossini's "Una voce poco fa" by Maria Callas in her prime, take one seamlessly from squalor to grandeur. (Pasolini had filmed Callas in his not wholly successful Media. This film does not mention his brilliantly innovative late triumphs, the storytelling trilogy of The Canturbury Tales, Decameron, and Thousand and One Nights, preferring to refer straight off with clips of his last cinematic work, the shocking (and horrifying) Salo. Willem Dafoe, speaking mostly English (in scenes where others speak Italian) is restrained and convincing, given that it's hard to play a genius and a cultural icon. With many references to Pasolni's unfinished novel Petrolio, we also get a (partly) dignified and touching appearance from Pasolini's friend and star, Ninetto Davoli, and a current actor he'd probably have liked to film, the ice-blue-eyed heartthrob Riccardo Scamarcio. Davoli plays Epifanio, character in a dreamed-of film Pasolini never got to make. Scarmarcio plays the young Davoli. They appear in a visionary finale combining a gay and lesbian "Sodom" and a fruitless climb to Paradise.

Meanwhile, Pasolini, depicted by the equally craggy-faced and darkly spectacled Dafoe, lives with his mother (the extraordinary and legendary Adriana Asti), and gives interviews. Outside, Ferrara frames Rome with striking (if heavyhandedly repeated) images of sky and Fascist architectural monuments and heroic sculptures, while providing hints of lurking fascist and homophobic street toughs. Pasolini spent the last hours of his life with an angel-faced apprentice mechanic he picked up among "ragazzi di vita" on the street. He takes him to dinner (spaghetti and chicken) in a favorite trattoria where he is known and welcomed at all hours, then he drives him in his Alfa Veloce to the beach at Ostia, where he performs fellatio and then they walk to the beach for more sex and then the toughs come and beat the poet and beleaguered cultural hero to death, with the boy he picked up joining in. It has been debated whether this was a spontaneous act of brutish homophobia or a paid-for execution by right-wing elements made to look like that.

If fellatio and a brutal murder can be tasteful this film is tasteful, but there is much to question too, particularly the dubious sub-Caligula Sodom sequence with sex to the chant of “Cazzo! Figa! Vaffanculo!” and departures from accurate representation of Pasolini's actual biographical details. Italian viewers have difficulty accepting the shifts back and forth between English and Italian and the American actor in the key role. And not just Italians: Peter Debruge (who much admires the orgy scene) wrote in Variety (http://variety.com/2014/film/reviews/venice-film-review-pasolini-1201297416/) that "The brilliance of stunt casting Willem Dafoe as the controversial Italian director backfires when he opens his mouth to speak." But open-minded Italian viewers can appreciate the Italo-American Ferrara's having the boldness to tread where an Italian could not even in representing Pasolini -- as well as his focusing much, as Federico Gironi (http://www.comingsoon.it/news/?source=cinema&key=35804)noted in a recent review, not on Pasolini and the past but Pasolini as he would view the future, and us. (Pasolini opens in Italy 25 September 2014. It debuted at Venice, and was screened for this review as part of the 52nd New York Film Festival.)

Pasolini, 86 mins., will also be shown at Toronto, Deauville, San Sebastián, Busan, and London.

[Chris Knipp]

MATÍAS PIÑEIRO: THE PRINCESS OF FRANCE (2014)

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The Shakespeare game

Young Argentinian filmmaker Matías Piñeiro is fond of stories with multiple young women and plots in which events in a Shakespeare play and everyday cast interact. This is his third; the first was Rosalinda. In The Princess of France, his typically short fifth feature, he continues to work the same themes and gestures with proto-auteurist intensity (and even greater repetitiveness). Alas, the "jolt" I spoke of in reviewing his last film, Viola (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3441-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2013&p=29843#post29843) (ND/NF 2013), hasn't come -- that a writing fellowship at NYU might jar him out of his hermetic, self-indulgent -- if unquestionably smart and internally consistent -- world; that he would stop being (as Mike D'Angelo put it speaking of Viola) "content to merely float a few intriguing ideas rather than diligently follow through on any aspect in particular"; that he might produce something with appeal outside the cozy limits of festival admiration.

Alas, this doesn't appear to have happened. If anything The Princess of France may be even harder to follow and to like than Viola. It revolves around Victor (Julián Larquier Tellarini), a young director (he still looks pimply, and his deep voice sounds like it recently changed) who comes back to Buenos Aires after a year away following his father's death and some time in Mexico. A bevy of young woman, conveniently all actresses, are both linked with Victor through theater work and personally interested in him; and there's one poor underused male actor, and perhaps rival for the women, Guillermo (Pablo Sigal). Given Victor's very unappealing looks, it's puzzling how fascinating all the women find him, and how often they let him kiss them on the mouth. Bu then they, members of Piñeiro's regular company of players, are no great beauties themselves. Anyway meet Victor's girlfriend Paula (Agustina Muñoz), who's pledged to be loyal; his sometime lover Ana (María Villar), who's not convinced he loves her; his ex, Natalia (Romina Paula), who thinks he still loves her; his friend Lorena (Laura Paredes), who hopes he will come back to her; and newly hired Carla (Elisa Carricajo), a complete stranger who might be his real next love. Victor has gotten a commission to do a radio version of Love's Labor Lost. Everyone is involved.

The dialogue is loud and rapid-fire, particularly when Victor is on screen, which is mostly. Piñeiro likes several things going on at once, as when in this film and Viola, the line between the action in a Shakespeare play and the interaction of the players is blurred. The film begins with a loud rendition of a composition by Felix Mendelssohn while we are made to watch a football match on a cement court from high above, so it looks like a diagram or a computer game. Piñeiro is also fond of alternate takes, where, for instance, Victor and one of the women treat each other quite differently the second time than they did in the first. He also provides a short alternate ending, in which Victor tells a woman "I love you," and they have a long kiss. This kind of thing can be amusing in the right context, but it can also make one think the filmmaker is only playing with his characters, and with us.

The repetitions can simply seem annoying and pointless, as when Victor has his only male actor for the radio play repeat the same short passage of Shakespeare (translated into Spanish, of course, and read with an Argentinian accent) five times, and each reading sounds exactly the same as the last. And the extremely verbose rapid-fire dialogue, requiring non-Spanish speakers to spend most of their time struggling to keep up with the subtitles, many of them translating Spanish translations of Shakespeare back into English, adds to the challenge but not to the pleasure. An oddity in the radio play, fruit no doubt of the director's tendency to work from a small casting pool, is that the women's voices all sound rather alike.

Piñeiro is enormously clever and academy-friendly: the scenes are readymade for film students armed with DVDs to pour over and write analyses of. But his work seems increasingly repetitious -- overall, as well as in part -- and ultimately cold. It begins to feel mechanical, self-satisfied, and unappealing. The reward is puzzlement rather than delight. This is not very solid stuff; Piñeiro provides themes, echoes, and tropes, but his plot line is a will-o-the-wisp. Yet this is also material that, with a few alterations, in the hands of a director with a gift for comedy like Frank Capra or George Cukor could be light, charming and accessible. It doesn't look like that's going to happen with this filmmaker, however.

The Princess of France/La Princessa de Francia, 70 mins., debuted at Locarno and has played or is scheduled for Rio, Toronto, Vancouver, Chicago, and it was screened for this review as part of the 52nd New York Film Festival where it plays on 5 and 6 October 2014. Cast list. (http://www.cinenacional.com/pelicula/la-princesa-de-francia) Dp: Fernando Lockett.

[Chris Knipp]

ALAIN RESNAIS: LIFE OF RILEY/AIMER, BOIRE ET CHANTER (2014)

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ANDRÉ DUSSOLLIER IN LIFE OF RILEY/AIMER, BOIRE ET CHANTER

Farcical intrigue pursued right up to a lighthearted death

Alain Resnais' last film -- the prolific French director died six months ago at 92 -- is adapted from a British comedy by the equally prolific Alan Ayckbourn called Relatively Speaking. This is Resnais' third adaptation of an Ayckbourn play, after the 1993 Smoking/No smoking and the 2006 Private Fears in Public Places (Coeurs), and seems the most sparkling and accessible and enjoyable of the three. It is not a final testament or film farewell, even though it revolves around an unseen main character, George Riley, who has cancer and has been given six months to live. Even if the director knew he would soon die, as he well might, at 91, this is simply light entertainment; and Resnais was working on another film before he passed away. If may seem mildly avant-garde to shoot a play so it looks so much like a play; Resnais courted artificiality and spliced avant-garde formalism onto popular culture in much of his work. He does so particularly entertainingly here. As adapted, the play feels like a French boulevard comedy (but as theTélérama (http://www.telerama.fr/cinema/films/aimer-boire-et-chanter,488973.php) critic points out, without the slammed doors), with its farcical confusion of wives of friends and ex-wife and girlfriend all of whom Riley convinces he's inviting on a vacation to the Canary Islands, when he actually goes with a sixteen-year-old girl, Tilly. That action is kept simple but it's offset by the wit of the other situation: everyone is rehearsing the amateur production of a play, which George is enlisted to play in too -- they calculate that he will live to perform in it. In the first scene, the breakfast conversation between Colin and his wife Kathryn is bizarrely artificial, and we learn they are actually rehearsing their lines in the play.

The cast consists of Resnais regulars, all actors with a lot of experience on the French stage as well as in films. The emphasis is on their skillful work. This is really just a filming of rudimentary sets. Jerry-built houses are fronted by draped cloth in place of windows and doorways. Films of English landscape near York, the play's setting, are shown, with dissolves into clever and more complete drawings of the houses of the various characters, which then dissolve into closeups of the simple sets with two or four actors speaking. Sabine Azéma (Resnais' wife) is married to doctor Hippolyte Girardot; Caroline Sihol is married to George's childhood friend Michel Vuillermoz, who has become rich; Sandrine Kiberlain has left George and gone to live with a farmer, André Dussollier (underused here). Sandrine Kiberlain and Caroline Silhol are experienced thespians but welcome new faces in the Resnais "troupe," the rest are longtime regulars.

Life of Riley/Aimer, boire et chanter, 107 mins., debuted at Berlin in February 2014 and opened in France in March (AlloCiné press rating: 3.7), playing at many international festivals. It was screened fort this review as part of the 52nd New York Film Festival. Showing at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas NYC from 24 October 2014.

[Chris Knipp]

MIA HANSEN-LØVE: EDEN (2014)

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FÉLIX DE GIVRY IN EDEN

Drugs, women, and song: a subtle hymn to rave music that's a bit too much

Mia Hansen-Løve’s fourth feature, technically her most ambitious yet, takes her pursuit of the personal a bit far in its beautiful but exhaustive and incident-and-character-rich but major-plot-poor decade-plus saga of her brother (and co-scripter) Sven's experience (he's called Paul here and played by Félix de Givry) as a pioneer DJ of the Paris rave scene, specializing in Garage music. Paul and his friends, including Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter (otherwise known as Daft Punk) are riding a dream of ecstasy (and for a while at least also the drug by that name) in their pursuit of the DJ life. Eventually as the Nineties meld into the 2000's and beyond, Paul, whose girlfriends are too numerous to keep track of (an early one is played by Greta Gerwig), begins to question if he wants to spend his life as a DJ. He also has developed a decade-long problem with cocaine, and encounters financial problems with unprofitable bands and clubs so his mother's checks and his trust fund administrators' generosities dry up. Along the way there are trips to New York and Chicago and visiting black singers who demand suites in five-star hotels and changes in musical tastes.

It's all in a gorgeous gray haze in the widescreen photography of Denis Lenoir: visually this film is a pleasure from first to last and right at the end there are some scenes of poetic beauty. Hansen-Løve is always a class act, and she and her brother show a full awareness that the world they are remembering was a feast (as well as an overdose) for the senses. Even the intertitles are pretty and tasteful. But she might have been too close to the story of her brother's experience to envision a fully independent film here that might have soared off on its own or had a simpler, more defined narrative shape. Recommended mostly for fans of discotheques and raves and the kind of music they offer.

The taste includes a certain restraint in the sound: we don't get our brains damaged or our ears blasted. Not that Hansen-Love's DJ world isn't complex and subtle in its awareness of contradicitons: as the Guardian's (http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/sep/06/eden-review-heaven-is-midnight-in-paris-dancing-to-electronica)Paul McInnes says, "Glamour is twinned with mundanity, beauty with boorishness and friendship with selfishness, while artistic endeavour is undercut by self-indulgence." But I longed to see Whit Stillman's The Last Days of Disco again. For me, though Hansen-Løve’s 2007 first film All Is Forgiven is precocious and elegant, her 2011 memory of teen romance Goodbye First Love/Un amour de jeunesse is poetic and lovely, her 2009 Father of My Children/Le père de mes enfants remains her finest, richest film. Critics seem impressed by the complexity of Eden though, and it has gotten raves. It does not detract from the director's luster as among the most gifted of the young French directors.

Eden, 131 mins., debuted at Toronto, with big festival showings including San Sebastian, Busan, and London. Screened for this review as part of the 52nd New York Film Festival (its US premiere). It opened in French cinemas 19 November 2014 to a fair critical reception (AlloCiné presds rating 3.1). Les Inrocks was very admiring, Cahiers disparaging.

Limited US theatrical release 19 June 2015.

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STILL SHOWING FILM LOOK, FORMAT; THIS FACE IS HANSEN-LØVE IN FOREGROUND

[Chris Knipp]

JEAN-PIERRE, LUC DARDENNE: TWO DAYS, ONE NIGHT (2014)

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Marion Cotillard in Two Days, One Night

The profound humanism of the Dardennes meets the sublime beauty of Marion Cotillard

What can we add to our appreciation of the Dardenne brothers' profound humanism and grasp of working class poor hard knocks? The sublime beauty of Marion Cotillard as a woman recovering from debilitating depression who must visit a dozen-plus co-workers to beg them to vote for her instead of a €1000 bonus. Two Days, One Night dramatizes how in modern labor situations if the firm is too small for a union, management pits one worker against another. Hence when Sandra (Cotillard) is about to return to work, she learns owner M. Dumont (Batiste Sornin) and his supervisor Jean-Marc (Olivier Gourmet) have forced her coworkers to choose between the bonus and keeping her on, as if it had to be one or the other. This is a study in courage. It dramatizes the everyday struggle to stay where you are; how, minute by minute, the poor must fight just to hope. Probably in the post-Great Recession world this is a situation more people can relate to, when homelessness or a steep dive from a formerly comfortable lifestyle can lie in wait even for members of the middle class.

Even by Dardennes standards, Two Days, One Night thrives on its ordinariness and specificity. One by one, with support from her husband Manu (Dardennes regular Fabrizio Rongione, seen also in the 2014 NYFF in Green's very different Sapienza), Sandra visits or calls the others, and each is particular, each much the same. Each in the multi-ethnic crew needs the extra money, feels for her, but must look to themselves. Different only are Timur (Timur Magomedgadzhiev), a spare time soccer coach, who feels so guilty and indebted to Sandra for her covering for him when he messed up as a newbie, met by the soccer field, he bursts into tears; and Alphonse (Serge Koto), not yet hired on full time, tracked down at the laundromat, who simply fears reprisals from the other workers if he votes for her, though doing so is what God tells him to do.

Otherwise the narrative stays close to these similar one-by-one meetings, avoiding surges of drama -- though there is drama in Sandra's sorrow and emotional pain. She claims to all she is "en forme" again now, but to Manu she constantly pleads she can't go on, feels like nobody. A possible wrong note: she pops too many pills, and when it turns out apparently to be Xanax, you wonder if this would be possible. Then she recovers from a suicide attempt perhaps too fast, too easily.

Cotillard is the most high-profile actor the Dardennes have used but proves a perfect fit. Their meeting with her near the set of Audiard's Rust and Bone was love at first sight. They could "not stop talking about her, her face, her look." And she was thrilled; had thought working for them was "beyond my reach." Her style is to hide dramatics, and so harmonizes perfectly with their way of working, and her dedication met the challenge of "becoming Belgian." Their last film, The Kid with the Bike, also featured a beautiful woman star, Cécile de France, but she is Belgian (and not the international star Cotillard has become). Cotillard is an actress who can make anything moving. Her presence here deepens an almost unconscious identification one feels, even as the action of Two Days, One Night may be less of a blow to the stomach than films like The Child, The Son, or La Promesse and less high-speed than Rosetta or The Kid with the Bike. Yet I think Two Days, One Night, which compares well with other powerful French-language films about work like Laurent Cantet's Time Out and Human Resources, has an unobtrusive beauty that will slowly creep into your heart and stay there.

Two Days, One Night/Deux jours, une nuit, 95 mins., debuted at Cannes in Competition and opened the next day in France and Belgium (Allociné press rating: 4.0). Many other festivals and international releases; Telluride, Toronto, Vancouver. Screened for this review as part of the 52nd New York Film Festival. US theatrical release by IFC 24 December 2014, in NYC at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas and IFC Center.

[Chris Knipp]

PEDRO COSTA: HORSE MONEY (2014)

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More of Costa's aestheticized dream world of memory, poverty, exile, and loss]

I reviewed Costa's previous feature, the nearly three-hour 2006 Colossal Youth (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?1999-San-Francisco-International-Film-Festival-2007-%2850th-anniversary%29&p=17694#post17694), as part of the 2007 San Francisco Film Festival -- my first experience of Costa and a "challenging" and "numbing" one, to use words from Justin Chang's (http://variety.com/2006/film/reviews/colossal-youth-1200515905) review for Variety. This time the Variety review of Costa's new film Horse Money is by Scott Foundas (http://variety.com/2014/film/reviews/film-review-horse-money-1201283386/) and it is glowing. Foundas calls the film Costa's "most striking" view yet of the Lisbon Cape Verdean underclass in the slum neighborhood known as Fontainhas and his "muse," the aging former construction worker Ventura, that he has long depicted.

In between, there was the 2009 New York Film Festival screening I reviewed of Costa's handsome and relatively short musical feature about Jeanne Balibar, Ne Change Rien (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?2644-New-York-Film-Festival-2009/page2&s=&postid=23062#post23062), in intense contrasty black and white. This film was much easier to take. It also showed clearly that Costa is a filmmaker who likes his documentary elements heavily laced with visual beauty and aestheticism.

He has outdone himself this time, producing a livelier and more handsome work focussed on the Cape Verdeans of Lisbon than Colossal Youth ( and with a more manageable run-time) -- not that this means Horse Money has appeal to anyone but particular fans and well-primed festival audiences. But if you are patient, there is much to delight the eye and puzzle the mind. Working in color now, with patches of cool sunlight and occasional burnt siennas and bright reds and dark crimsons, and still using the Academy ratio, Costa shows off his keen eye and fine sense of composition within this almost-square space in every shot. The "action" is dreamlike, repetitious, more in the order of tableaux than scenes.

"Where does [Costa's] astonishing new Horse Money 'take place?" asks Noel Murray in The Dissolve (http://thedissolve.com/news/2968-the-new-york-film-festival-line-up-has-been-announ/). And he answers: "In the soul-space of Ventura, who has been at the center of Costa’s last few shorts and his 2006 feature Colossal Youth. It is now, a numbing and timeless present of hospital stays, bureaucratic questioning, and wandering through remembered spaces… and it is then, the mid ’70s and the time of the Carnation Revolution, when Ventura got into a knife fight with his friend Joaquim. A self-reckoning, a moving memorialization of lives in danger of being forgotten, and a great and piercingly beautiful work of cinema."

Costa is expert at using abandoned or unpromising spaces. Initially there is a seeming series of caverns leading to an elevator in a hospital, and at the end there is a long dialogue staged in that elevator space between Ventura and a military man painted gray like a street performing "statue." When Costa shows interior dwellings, they too look like caves, dank, weathered, forbidding and powerful presences. Another sequence is in a small abandoned factory, always with that signature patchy sunlight and shadow, where Ventura's godson, saying he has waited 20 years for his paycheck, has imaginary conversations on out-of-commission telephones, and drags one with him from one room to another, staging a scene in the boss's office. Spaces invade memory and memory invades space. And always there is the striking use of patches of pale sunlight alternating with rich shadows. A group of younger men visit Ventura in bed in hospital and tell him their tales of poverty and exploitation. They may be real visitors, or ghosts. An old woman, Vitalina (Vitalina Varela), speaks about returning to Lisbon from Cape Verde for the funeral of her husband. But there is no plot, no action as such, and the repeated retailing of mumbled biographical details of work, marriage, and immigration is wearying.

Above and beyond his dwelling upon his special and specific impoverished, used-up people and place, Pedro Costa aestheticizes poverty, sadly, hopelessly, enigmatically, but with decided flair. The world he depicts or creates is claustrophobic and depressing. The etched, well-composed chiaroscuro in which it's filmed is an ironic, finally inadequate compensation. It was particularly thought-provoking to see this film right after watching the Dardennes' Two Days, One Night. The Belgians give us hope. Costa wallows in nostalgia and despair. But he is an artist and an original.

Horse Money/Cavalo Dinheiro, 103 mins., DCP, in Portuguese and Creole, debuted at Locarno, where it won the Directing prize. Watched for this review as part of the 52nd New York Film Festival, its U.S. premiere (Wednesday, September 24, 2014).

[Chris Knipp]

OSSAMA MOHAMMED, WIAM SIMAV BEDIRXAN: SILVERED WATER, SYRIA SELF-PORTRAIT (2014)

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In Homs Omar collects flowers and amid snipers in Silvered Water

Horrors of war in Syria from found footage and a Kurdish woman's camera

Silvered Water, Syrian Self-Portrait is a powerful film, and not for the squeamish, about the civil war in Syria. It's not a conventional documentary, of which a very fine one related to this subject is Talal Darki's Return to Homs (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3686-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2014&p=31894#post31894) (ND/NF 2014). It's a combination of horrific found footage, collected off social media by Syrian exile in Paris Ossama Mohammed, and foootage made in Homs by Wiam Simav Bedirxan, a young Kurdish woman who contacted Mohammed for advice on what to film around her. Mohammed has bonded the whole together with many subdivisions, in Arabic, and his own sometimes formal and poetic Arabic musings. The film is also edited to remind us constantly that much of the found footage (some of it could have come from Al Jazeera Arabic) was shot with cell phones, and that he and Wiam apparently were in touch with each other in live Facebook chats. We also hear her voice. The torture footage Mohammed shows one would like to forget. One can never forget Wiam's film journal, made during the Homs uprising when large segments of the city were destroyed and there was sniper fighting from building to building and street to street. Wiam's footage includes things one has never seen before. Girls who have lost many family members gathered in an impromptu "school" she started, where they smile and laugh. Cats wandering amid rubble with legs shot off, or faces burnt away. A little boy called Omar who has lost his father gathering flowers to place on his father's grave, talking to his father as if he were alive, walking with Wiam through the rubble and saying "We should not go that way: there is a sniper," then climbing a ladder to gather leaves.

For more detail, I recommend Jay Weissberg's sensitive and eloquent review for Variety (http://variety.com/2014/film/reviews/cannes-film-review-silvered-water-syria-self-portrait-1201183212/) from Cannes. I find Silvered Water leaves me speechless, the atrocities collected by Mohammed, the torture of youths, the killing and beating of protesters by government soldiers, hard to describe or comprehend. Return to Homs is perhaps easier to watch (though shocking and visceral too) because it tells a coherent story of a charismatic revolutionary leader. Mohammed's film creates a sense observing of the chaos and hell of war from a distance that can leave one feeling as helpless and depressed as he himself reportedly became after sifting through and editing his vernacular footage films from "1001 Syrians." As with Return to Homs, an understanding of Arabic, with its shifts from the formal and poetic to the colloquial and direct, will add substantially to the appreciation of the spoken narration.

Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait/ماء الفضة/maa' al-fiḍḍ,a, 92 mins., debuted at Cannes (Special Screenings). It was watched for this review in a press screening as part of the Spotlight on Documentary series of the 52nd New York Film Festival.

Arabic TV news item about the film's presentation at Cannes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwV2Tm7-VyQ.

Excerpt from the film and article in Arabic: http://www.alaraby.co.uk/miscellaneous/c2ed9654-9e2c-4758-bc59-db3dfaa74a58

[Chris Knipp]

DAVID CRONENBERG: MAPS TO THE STARS (2014)

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Evan Bird in Maps to the Stars

"Maps" lacks a compass, moral or narrative

I don't think Evan Bird has anything to be ashamed of in future for his performance in Cronenberg's Maps to the Stars. He plays (with cool aplomb) a nasty little boy TV star who is also the son of a perverted couple, and his lost sister (played by an unappealing Mia Wasikowska) appears, and is temporarily hired as a "chore whore" (the charming term for a Hollywood dogbody/assistant) for the frustrated, declining star played by Marianne Moore. Moore received the Best Actress award at Cannes for this performance. But nonetheless it is a pathetic, melodramatic turn and one might wonder why she committed to it. Because the film was directed by Cronenberg, no doubt. Actors do not always know what they are getting into. Richard Pattinson plays a Hollywood limo driver who picks up Wasikowska when she arrives from Florida and then becomes involved with her. His chauffeur character is a naive would-be writer and would-be actor: the inside joke is that Cronenberg's previous film, a spot-on adaptation of Don DiLillo's Cosmopolis, starred Pattinson as a youg billionaire who rides in the back of a limo throughout. Pattinson brings charm and subtlety to his performance here. As Evan Bird and Wasikowska's mother and father, Olivia Williams and John Cusack are workmanlike. But that doesn't mean this glossy movie works.

All you can say when you watch Maps to the Stars is "What's the point of this?" The whole movie, whose plot is so nonsensical as to be puzzling, is a misstep. Everyone is egocentric and isolated, but so what? Though the production has a fine polish and the camerawork is smooth, Bruce Wagner's so-called "pitch-black Hollywood satire" has a moldy, pointless quality, despite being updated with references to iPads and "Mad Men." As a neurotic ronde, this pales to nothing much compared to P.T. Anderson's masterful Magnolia. As a busy Tinsel Town gossip film it can't match Altman's richly referential The Player. There's something off-key about the Canadian's sense of spoiled movie people. But most of all the problem is not in the direction but in the screenplay, which just doesn't hang together, doesn't make sense. The glitz is there, but not the meaning. The movie has no point, few laughs, and no narrative thrust. It leads through a serious of devious and nasty gestures, to several successively more violent acts, to a senseless and inexplicable ritual, and fizzles away.

The two main households, both palatial, cold modern -- a clear sign, as we know from Los Angeles Films Itself, that evil dwells therein, are indistinguishable: you barely know whose house you're in. That's a bad sign.

Bruce Wagner's previous effort to skewer L.A. is the lame Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills (1989) -- another bad sign, a movie that in his Cannes review of Maps for The Dissolve (http://thedissolve.com/features/postcards-from-cannes/570-day-5-follow-the-map/) Mike D'Angelo calls "dismally unfunny." According to D'Angelo, this screenplay actually dates from around the same time. If true, this explains why the whole concept seems out of sync, despite the contempo references. This is also the director's first film shot in the U.S. Like his curiously Classics Illustrated Jung-Freud film A Dangerous Method, Maps will no doubt make sense to some, but not to others. To me, it seemed off-key and inexplicable from the first scene. If for some reason the peculiar plot-line makes sense to you, you may enjoy the action, however crude its satire.

No matter: as Motherwell said of his paintings, the works that don't succeed are the necessary stepping-stones to the ones that do, and Cronenberg, a filmmaker of much daring and flexibililty, will live to map better stars another day.

Maps to the Stars, 99 mins., debuted at Cannes, and played at Toronto and other festivals, opening quickly along the way in various countries, including France 21 May (Allocine press rating a very good 3.7). It was screened for this review as part of the 52nd New York Film Festival. No US release date yet.

See also Bill Chambers' review (http://www.filmfreakcentral.net/ffc/2014/09/tiff-14-maps-to-the-stars.html): "time does not sharpen pop-culture commentary."

[Chris Knipp]

OWEN MOVERMAN: TIME OUT OF MIND (2014)

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Richard Gere, Ben Vereen in Time Out of Mind

How a star can go unrecognized: panhandling at Astor Place

As a director the accomplished Israel-born, New York resident movie writer Oren Moverman (he penned the script for the inventive Bob Dylan biography I'm Not There) had hitherto relied on aggressive performances by Woody Harrelson (in The Messenger and Rampart). He chooses a gentler star and a more vérité approach in Time Out of Mind, using the glamorous, sexy Richard Gere (who also produced) as a homeless person. It's stunt casting that in practical terms pays off. The homeless are so faceless Gere "auditioned" successfully by panhandling at Astor Place for forty minutes. Nobody gave him a cent and nobody recognized or really even saw him. Does Gere disappear into the role for us? Not quite. But there's a message in this performance: all homelessness is a reduction, a fall from the grace of a stable life. And there's no doubt Gere loses himself in the role, and in the street and shelter life his character is forced to live in the first scene, when a no-nonsense building manager (Steve Buscemi) throws him out of the trashed Brooklyn apartment an ex-girlfriend has been evicted from. From then on, George Hammond (Gere) is the victim of circumstance, striving merely to get food and drink (he has an alcohol problem) and some place to sleep.

Unlike the odd romantic couple of young New York street junkies in the Safdie brothers' Heaven Knows What (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3800-New-York-Film-Festival-2014&p=32770#post32770), George is not part of a readymade street culture, but a newcomer. He is defensive every step of the way, trying to get back into any place he's kicked out of (including the initial apartment), and at first we think he's a regular guy who's fallen on sudden hard luck. Only later we realize that George in his own words is "just a fuck-up. Probably always was," has lived off various women for years, has had no job for years either, and is not even quite all there mentally.

While Moverman hardly develops a plot, Gere gradually builds a character -- out of nothing, because a clearcut backstory is studiously avoided. Time Out of Mind is a fine picture in its way. There is the old problem here of how you depict boredom and monotony without being boring and monotonous. George Hammond (Gere's character) has drunken afternoons and long nights on benches and in ER waiting rooms that bring distinctive longeurs for the viewer. Long subway rides don't have the benefit of our knowing the fugue will end as in the recent Asperger's boy drama Stand Clear of the Clsing Doors (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3749-STAND-CLEAR-OF-THE-CLOSING-DOORS-(Sam-Fleischner-2013)). Nor is there the complex plot that develops behind the homeless shelter meeting of father and son Robert De Niro and Paul Dano in Being Flynn (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3251-BEING-FLYNN-(Paul-Weitz-2012)). If there can be no back-story there can be no plot history: we must live in the moment -- the life struggling for daily survival forces on a person.

But there are scenes (encounters with a homeless woman played by Kyra Sedgwick who tells her story, a prolonged relationship with a homeless black jazzman played by Ben Vereen) that add considerable color, besides the documentary realism of depicting a number of nights at the old Bellevue, formerly the city mental hospital, now New York's biggest men's shelter, that provide milieu and human interest. Dixon (Vereen) is a motor-mouth. He becomes annoying (particularly to George) but is also a buddy for George and entertainment for us who brings humanity and laughs to a dreary survival scene. But George is on his own, as is most vividly depicted in his spacey encounters with the bureaucracy seeking to go from nowhere man and nobody to someone with an I.D., a birth certificate, and rights to public assistance. By now we know he needs it.

The movie is a constant battle between narrative and non-narrative elements, and this is a battle Moverman, whose script is based on a story by Jeffrey Caine, author of the film adaptation of John Le Carré's The Constant Gardener, finally surrenders to narrative. Story arc takes over when George's repeated brief encounters with his estranged daughter Maggie (Jena Malone) lead to a final hint of possible rapprochement. Moverman just couldn't leave his star completely out in the cold. In Time Out of Mind pros like Sedgwick, Vereen, Gere, Geraldine Hughes, and others blend into the documentary-style milieu, but things still tend to feel scripted, and, remembering the pleasure of Being Flynn's intricate narrative, one half wishes narrative had won out earlier here.

Time Out of Mind, 107 mins., debuted at Toronto. It was screened for this review as part of the 52nd New York Film Festival. At the post-screening Q&A, it emerged that the whole project was begun by Gere, who has long been involved with an organization to aid the homeless. Like the Safdie brothers' Heven Knows What (also in the 2014 NYFF Main Slate), this film is steeped in New York City atmosphere.

Opening in US theaters Wed., 9 September 2015.

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RICHARD GERE @ P&I Q&A
[CK Photo]

[Chris Knipp]

LISANDRO ALONSO: JAUJA (2014)

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VILLBJORK AGGER MALLING, VIGGO MORTENSEN IN JAUJA

In Patagonia, chasing a wayward daughter

Scott Foundas points out in his Variety (http://variety.com/2014/film/reviews/cannes-film-review-jauja-1201193594/)review that Lisandro Alonso's new feature, a costume piece set in the 1880's, contains more dialogue in its first reel than all of his preceding four films, but there is still a great deal of aimless and wordless wandering around by Viggo Mortensen in the rocky Patagonian wilds. And the words actually distract us, but only temporarily, from a less powerful narrative structure than Alonso provides in his masterful and haunting Los Muertos. There's nothing more satisfying and neat than when a single final shot caps off a film without words. It happens in Daniel Schechter's recent film of Elmore Leonard's Life of Crime, and it happens in Los Muertos. Jauja has a lot of fancy stuff at the end, but it doesn't satisfy. It begins with a Danish military engineer called Gunnar Dinesen (a homage to the glamorous writer-adventurer Karen Blixen's pseudonym, perhaps ). He's all dressed up in a fancy cavalry dress uniform and has the rank of Captain and he's supervising an engineering probject involving deep trenches. There's a very dicey local lieutenant with him, Pittaluga (Adrián Fondari) -- when first seen he's sitting in a pond masturbating, and a young soldier, Corto -- who is going to run off with Dineson's daughter Ingborg (Viilbjørk Malling Agger). Dinesen says she's fourteen. She looks older; maybe it's the 19th-century clothing. What is she doing there? Obviously, waiting for trouble. Dineson seems uncomfortable with the Argentinian men, as well he might be. Their talk hints of a genocidal campaign by the local military against the aboriginal population, whom they call "cabezas de coco" ("coconut-heads").

Jauja is in a nearly square format (full-frame 4:3 aspect ratio) with curved corners, which reminded me of Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff, a similarly formatted and similarly oddball avant-garde 19th-century western where people get lost. Meek's Cutoff has an ambiguous ending, but it does have an ending. I was hoping -- and it would have seemed Alonso-ish, and true to the way this film was going -- if Jauja had had a totally bleak ending à la Paul Bowles, where a white man winds up up shit's creek without a paddle, like the linguistics professor in "A Distant Episode" who is badly beaten and gets his tongue cut out and is chased away with tin cans tied to his ass. Instead Alonso settles for a fairy-tale meeting with an old Danish woman (Ghita Nørby) living in a cave (but we're still in Patagonia), with a mumbo-jumbo confab confusing whether the old lady is Dineson's mother or his daughter, and he's led there by a lean scruffy dog that rises from another pond, seen from behind and motionless, appearing like a sphinx. That's a stunning visual trick, and clearly Alonso and his dp (the Finn, Aki Kaurismäki's cameraman Timo Salminen) can do striking, sometimes gorgeous things with images here when they choose, apart from the forbidding, lunar beauty of the Patagonian landscape itself.

And then we inexplicably leap forward to the present day, to a totally different but pretty and summery landscape, a fabulous castle in Denmark World of Interiors must be drooling to do an article on, and a bedroom where a very pretty young girl (prettier than Dineson's daughter by a mile), waking up and going outside to the sun-dappled lawn and garden, finds a little toy soldier that had been in the hands of Ingeborg. What's it mean? You've got me. The only link between the Patagonia finale and the tacked-on Denmark one is dogs, and the toy. (A dog is probably Ingeborg's avatar; she asks for a dog in her first dialogue with her father.)

Jauja is a polarizing puzzle picture, a dazzler and a snooze young cinephiles and Alonzoites can enthuse over and debate the meaning of. For others it's just an annoying head-scratcher, a waste of 108 minutes of our time. Yes, maybe as Noel Murray said in his Dissolve (http://thedissolve.com/news/2968-the-new-york-film-festival-line-up-has-been-announ/)summary, "Alonso’s style reaches new heights of sensory attentiveness and physicality" in Jauja, but this film's elaboration loses the magic and mermerizing sotrytelling the director achieved earlier with much simpler means. He seems in danger of the same hubris and hermeticism that have led astray that other young Latin American master, Carlos Reygadas. But fans of auteur boldness must watch each new film by either for the times when that doesn't happen and something amazing emerges. Even misfires are not to be missed.

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JAUJA STILL SHOWING ACTUAL FILM FORMAT

Jauja premiered in Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the FIPRESCI Award. It’s also an official selection of the Toronto and New York Film Festivals. Screened for this review at the NYFF, where Alonso has been named this year's filmmaker in residence. Jauja will will open theatrically in the US 20 March 2015 (limited); in the UK 10 April; in France 25 April.

[Chris Knipp]

DAMIEN CHAZELLE: WHIPLASH (2014)

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MILES TELLER and J.K. SIMMONS IN WHIPLASH

Suffering for their art: a sadistic music teacher

The 29-year-old Damien Chazelle's simple, effective, technically savvy second feature (his first was the 2009 Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench) is so zippy with its slam-bang editing and shocker moments it goes right through you, but then maybe after an hour or so you may question some of its powerful effects. Would a modern day music teacher at a New York conservatory something like Juliard smack a pupil repeatedly hard on the face in front of several dozen other students and throw a chair at him? Would he repeatedly yell homophobic epithets at the whole band at every session? Would a student playing with a band at the JVC Jazz Festival steal a very prolonged solo when it's only by chance and at the last minute that he's been included in the show? These things, I guess, are not meant to be taken literally. Chazelle, who has based his screenplay (loosely, we hope) on experience of a severe music teacher in his own high school, is exaggerating to get his points across and to make us think. But with things screwed up to such a pitch as this, can we think?

Anyway, Whiplash, the name of a band composition (featured in the film) that Chazelle hated because its rapid tempo changes are a drummer's nightmare, poses the question: is brutality necessary to bring out musical genius? The filmmaker and crew tossed around the phrase "Full Metal Jacket at Julliard" during the (brutally short) 19-day shoot. Simmons is like the sergeant featured in Kubrick's movie. With his gnarly, muscular body, shaved head and aggressive voice all he needs is a training field and a uniform to evoke the tests and humiliations of combat training. In other ways this is like a conventional sports movie, with the thrills of victory and agonies of defeat leading up to a grand finale when the goal is achieved against all obstacles. Chazelle simplifies and overdoes everything, but does so with such a sure touch and with such economy that it all works brilliantly. And J.K. Simmons as Terence Fletcher, the morally dubious but efficaciously sadistic instructor, and Miles Teller, as Andrew Neyman, the ambitious fledgling drummer, play their respective parts with impressive assurance.

Andrew is a newbie at the Schafer School. His passion is to become a great drummer worthy of comparison with Buddy Rich, whose solos he studies. (Chazelle doesn't reference subtler greats like Art Blakey and Max Roach: Andrew wants to be a showoff.) Everyone is afraid of Terence Fletcher but wants to study with him and please him. Ironically, he repeatedly tells Andrew and the band to have "fun." Mostly, Andrew's practice and his sessions with Fletcher lead to bloody hands, exhaustion, and a body drenched in sweat. Where's the "fun"? In masochism? Fletcher tells Andrew that Charlie Parker was inspired to try harder and become a transcendently great saxophonist by having a cymbal thrown at him and being kicked off the stage. Would he really not have become the "Bird" without that humiliation? Is "good job" really the worst thing you can tell a beginner, as Fletcher says?

The brutality of Fletcher's teaching works well, visually at least, for drumming, when the player is beating on his instrument. To help a classical pianist or a violinist one might need a more gentle hand, such as that of the octogenarian New York teacher Seymour Bernstein, chronicled in Ethan Hawke's new documentary Seymour: An Introduction. From watching Seymur we learn things about fingering, selecting the best Steinway, posture, modulation of sound levels. In Whiplash, we don't learn many specific details about music beyond that it involves tempos and bars, and that a musician can spoil the sound of an ensemble by playing off key. (We already knew that.) Since this film is all about Andrew and his ruthless, lonely struggle, there's not much sense of the social life at the school, if there is any.

Other things are skewed or exaggerated. Andrew's desire to be on time for a performance leads him to pull himself together after an event that should have left him in the hospital. And yet this effort only brings about the dismissal from Fletcher, "You're done!" Andrew is so obsessed with his music that he breaks off a realationship with a girl (Melissa Benoist) that he has barely begun. To show that most of the world's population, in the relentless view of those who pursue excellence, is mediocre, Andrew's dad is branded as an amiable loser, a a would-be writer who has wound up teaching high school and munching popcorn and M&M's while watching movies with his son.

Whiplash, whose unrolling appropriately shows a precise sense of timing, is full of music, and most of the musicians are real ones. Simmons studied conducting at one time. Miles Teller, a fluid and confident young actor who came to the movie with experience as a rock drummer, shows both deftness and commitment in his depiction of Andrew's many and grueling drum sessions, which finally end in pleasure and triumph. But just as an arts or music student must apparently endure pain and sacrifice and even humiliation on the way to accomplishment, Whiplash sacrifices subtlety and nuance in the interests of presenting its moral dilemma with brutal theatrical effectiveness. It works, but at a cost. Nonetheless it is turning up on many annual best lists, and Simmons is sure to get a deserved Best Supporting Oscar nomination.

Whiplash, 105 mins., debuted at Sundance, and was made with Sundance assistance based on a short film that previewed the subject. It has shown at other festivals including Toronto and was screened for this review as part of the 32nd New York Film Festival. US theatrical release began 10 October and reviews have been raves (Metacritic 88%).
__________________


Whiplash, 105 mins., debuted at Sundance, and was made with Sundance assistance based on a short film that previewed the subject. It has shown at other festivals including Toronto and was screened for this review as part of the 32nd New York Film Festival. US theatrical release began 10 October and reviews have been raves (Metacritic 88%).

[Chris Knipp]

DAVID FINCHER: GONE GIRL (2014)

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ROSAMUND PIKE IN GONE GIRL

Tidy chaos: David Fincher's skillful blend of murder, deception, living in public, and hiding everything

David Fincher's fascination with America's criminal underbelly and domestic deception makes for a richly detailed and constantly entertaining mystery thriller in his adaptation of Gillian Flynn's 2012 bestseller. What an elaborate, precision twittering machine this movie is! And it blends the director's fascination with police investigation explored in Se7en, Zodiac, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, with more about the media circus' invasion of US bedrooms. This is rich, juicy schlock that, as Eric Kohn said on Twitter, in other hands might be "super campy or super trashy," but in Fincher's becomes classic Hollywood cinema. Underpinning it all is a complicated but tightly constructed screenplay by Flynn herself with a back-and-forth timeline and an overlapping narrative full of jaw-dropping revelations. This is a big movie with an original and well-chosen cast headlined by Ben Affleck (stepping back from his directorial role again after his Oscar for Argo last year) as NIck Dunne, gem-like Brit Rosamund Pike as his ice-queen wife Amy who disappears, Carrie Coon as Nick's comradely twin sister Margo, Kim Dickens as Detective Rhonda Boney, Tyler Perry as ace criminal lawyer Tanner Bolt, and Neil Patrick Harris as Amy’s creepy and rich one-time beau Desi Collins.

The plot is a borderline indigestible mix of material from horror, noir, mystery story trickery, and Fox News scandal-mongering that is both preposterous and absolutely true to life. Fincher, Flynn, and the well-managed cast conspire to make it all clear and fun. We can't tell too much: like the post-Fourth of July wedding anniversary puzzle treasure hunt Amy constructs for Nick (and for the police and the public) to hide-reveal her plotting, this movie's a game of hide-and-seek and gradual pop-up revelations. But we begin with the day of Nick and Amy's fifth wedding anniversary. Nick returns to the couple's rented McMansion from a walk to find a living room coffee table smashed and Amy missing. He calls the police. And the story, in its various versions, begins getting told, first from Nick's and the public's point of view, and later on in the film from Amy's. When we get to Amy's, the dateline chronology starts back all over again. Flynn just uses a grab bag of old familiar thriller tricks, but they work. This becomes an inventive variation on the mystery story's final revelations of what really happened that instead of being poured out at the end, is, for maximum pleasure, spread all through. When Fincher, in discussing the film, mentions that he thought of Desi as sort of like Claire Quilty in Lolita, you realize Nabokov might have indeed liked the ironic complexity of Gone Girl.

Amy, however, isn't Nabokov's kind of girl. We don't know who or what she is; she doesn't either. Her life has been warped by growing up with a mother who used her girlish experiences as fodder for "Amazing Amy," a highly successful and lucrative children's and young adult's book series, cannibalizing and improving upon the things she did, so her "reality" (a word Nabokov scorned) was a flimsy simulacrum of her mother's profitable fantasies. When Nick and Amy meet (in flashbacks) it's all romantic playacting and pledges always to be honest. Their married life is nothing but lies, a neurotic nightmare. Both are writers in New York when they meet, but soon after they marry they lose their jobs; and when Nick's mom gets fatally ill, they move back to Missouri and use her trust fund. But money runs low because Amy's mother's book sales dwindle, her parents are strapped, and teaching and running a bar aren't bringing in a lot of dough for the now increasingly unfun couple.

As the police investigation proceeds, suspicion falls more and more on Nick; the disappearance seems faked. There is a public "find Amy" initiative that feels a little like a political campaign, with Nick a very iffy candidate. Tidbits from a diary kept by Amy are constantly flashed at the audience, contrasting with Nick's completely different versions of the marriage. And then we finally get to what was actually going on with Amy when she disappeared, and after.

Gone Girl is destined to be popular and critically acclaimed movie, and by no means undeservedly: I've hardly begun to describe its many pleasures. It's sure to emerge as one of the best American films of the year. But in general I am an occasional David Fincher admirer rather than a big fan and that remains true here. His Zodiac is a remarkable piece of precise cinematic obsessiveness. But only when he united with Aaron Sorkin for the much more brightly lit and smarter The Social Network did he provide me with unmitigated and total pleasure. Though Gone Girl, despite its indulgent two-and-a-half-hour length, is very enjoyable to watch, I'd have preferred something more pared down and film noir-ish. This is too much of a muchness. In particular it works the media circus theme too hard. The way Fincher juggles everything is impressive. But then juggling is just an act. What you'll most remember is the dark heart of this warped, strange woman, which Pike chillingly evokes, and her husband's appealing but cheesy good-old-boy machismo, which Affleck comfortably embodies -- and the frightening prospect of the two of them together in that house.

Gone Girl, 150 mins., had its world premiere 26 September 2014 as the opening night film of the New York Film Festival, where it was screened for this review. A glowing review appeared 11 days earlier by Justin Chang in Variety (http://variety.com/2014/film/reviews/film-review-gone-girl-1201308847/). Worldwide release by Fox is set for 2 October, 3 October in the US, days later in some countries (8 October in France).

[Chris Knipp]

MATHIEU AMALRIC: THE BLUE ROOM (2014)

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LÉA DRUCKER, MATHIEU AMALRIC IN THE BLUE ROOM

A chilly, claustrophobic Simenon adaptation

The French actor Mathieu Amalric is so busy, active, and good (with 92 current thespian credits) it's hard to see why he even bothers to try his hand at directing, but his (reportedly) pretty faithful adaptation of the eponymous Georges Simenon short crime novel is his fourth time as réalisateur. And while his previous, On Tour/La tournée (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3054-San-Francisco-International-Film-Festival-2011&p=26067#post26067) (SFIFF 2011) was a big long blowsy ensemble piece The Blue Room/La chambre bleu is as tight and economical as you could imagine. And it has pleasures, in its claustrophobic 1.33:1 aspect ratio images shot brightly with a fine eye for composition by Christophe Beaucarne; in its sometimes Bernard Hermann-esque use of Ravel in Gregoire Hetzel's movie music; in the clinical precision of the fussy investigating magistrate/juge d'instruction -- because this is a crime, in fact a murder, story -- played with pale obsessiveness by Laurent Poitrenaux. But in this short 76-minute quickie production (shot in three weeks, with the director costarring) there's the feel of a rapid exercise by a crack crew who, however, could just as well have been doing something else. Despite the neatness and elegance -- and in its way this is a brilliant shattered-mirror puzzle-piece -- something gets lost: what's meant to be an erotic thriller with strong sexual and emotional content comes out in Amalric's version as fragmented set of memories intercut with a police procedural. The two are neatly intertwined. But the film is uninvolving in the stingy way it unreels its mysteries.

If it ever does: one may walk out wondering what actually happens. Amalric pares down the story to action elements and the wild passion gets lost. As Guy Lodge puts it in his Variety (http://variety.com/2014/film/reviews/cannes-film-review-the-blue-room-1201183218/) review, Amalric has adapted "Georges Simenon’s slender mystery novella with fidelity to its bleak narrative but indifference to its disquieting erotic and psychological subtext." The effect, despite a crack crew at work on the film, feels chilly and academic, though in its French release Blue Room got excellent reviews (AlloCiné press rating 3.9).

What does happen? We begin with a pair of childhood friends who've been suddenly reunited as adulterous lovers, Julien Gahyde (Amaric), a married local businessman involved with agricultural equipment, and Esther Despierre (Stéphanie Cléau), wife of a pharmacist who's not at all well. When they're seen early on in the titular Blue Room of a travelers' hotel that's the site of their several months of trysts (only briefly shown), she says something telling to him: "If I were suddenly free, could you free yourself too?" He's typically noncommittal, but obviously not only Esther's pharmacist husband but Julien's wife Delphine (Léa Drucker) is in the way of their love (if he cares).

We get it. But from then on, in the busy account via memories and elaborately documented questioning by the examining magistrate, it gradually emerges what happened, except that Esther and Julien are rarely seen together again except wearing handcuffs, and Julien hardly says anything. Did he do anything, and if so does he know what he did? Definite possibilities only emerge toward the end, though it's soon clear Stéphanie is suspected of poisoning her husband while the town doctor is away and making it look like heart failure. As Guy Lodge points out, in general the setting is updated, but some elements from the 1964 book, notably the crucial role played by letters, are out of sync with today.

The Blue Room/La Chambre bleue, 76 mins., debuted at Cannes in the Un Certain Regard category. French theatrical release the next day 17 May 2014 with fine reviews, as noted. Various other festivals, including the 52nd New York Film Festival, as part of which it was screened for this review. US release 3 October.

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AMALRIC @Q&A [CK Photo]

[Chris Knipp]

BERTRAND BONELLO: SAINT LAURENT (2014)

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Gaspard Ulliel in Saint Laurent

Bonello's freer, sexier, more original angle on the couturier genius' life

Bonello's sumptuous previous film House of Tolerence/L'Apollonide, souvenirs de la maison close (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3165-Paris-movie-report-%28oct-2011%29&p=26924#post26924) (2011) promised lush decadence for his dip into biopic. And decadence is what Saint Laurent has lots more of than Jalil Lespert's authorized but limp Yves Saint Laurent (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3777-YVES-SAINT-LAURENT-(Jalil-Lespert-2014)&p=32510#post32510)-- plus an amazing cast. Free, hallucinatory, and original it is, but you can't say this film escapes from the limits of biopics -- it jumps forward to old age and death and looks at a loft lock of baby hair -- but the choice of only one key (and druggy) period from 1967-76 for the main action helps make for a dreamy and successively dreamier interlude. Whether or not Gaspard Ulliel looks more like the designer than Pierre Niney is debatable, but he's sexier, a more attention-grabbing actor; and getting Louis Garrel to play YSL's lover Jacques de Bascher was a coup, as was having Jérémie Renier selflessly play Pierre Bergé, the business partner/lover, another one, and having Léa Seydoux as Loulou de la Falaise, yet another. The legendary beauty Dominique Sanda plays the couturier's mother. The interesting actors just keep on coming, like champagne at a posh party. One mustn't forget to mention the casting of the striking blonde Aymeline Valade as YSL model Betty Catroux.

Bonello soaked himself in information about the designer, and then improvised freely. Thus we get some wonderful sequences devised just to get across a point, or liven up the data. Thus, knowing YSL had a series of French bulldogs all called Moujik, he created a scene where Moujik gobbles down spilled pills from the piles of them the designer was always taking, and dramatically died: hence the need to find lookalike Moujiks II, III, and IV. In another iconic scene, YSL discovers Betty Catroux in a disco, letting down her long blond hair and flailing about, and then begs and begs her to leave Chanel and come to him. (In the next scene she has.) And there's a marvelous sequence with former real life Louis Garrel girlfriend Valeria Bruni Tedeschi as a wealthy client Yves has dressed in a suit. She's uncomfortable, but in a few minutes just by adding and moving around a necklace and letting down her hair he remakes her, and teaches her to enjoy her new image.

Bonello is quietly shrewd and decisive, and using Helmut Berger for the older YSL, with the aging actor's own associations with drugs and decadence and with Visconti, was a cool and effective way of avoiding the artificiality of heavy "aging" makeup on a lead actor that stars the makeup man instead of the star. Making a virtue of necessity, since he was not authorized to use the museum-piece YSL dresses Lespert was given access to by Bergé, he set up a period-style dressmaking workshop and made new creations that are fresher and livelier than the perfect artifacts in the other film. This particularly comes out after a long fugue of drugs and depression from which Yves emerges with a flood of multicolored drawings, and the result is a salon of turbaned exotic models in a show that is prismatically displayed on screen in a set of rectangles mimicking Mondrian, and effect that's more original than Lespert's display of the YSL Mondrian-inspired dress show.

Though there is nothing exactly overtly sexual, there is a semi-erect frontal nude of Ulliel, and various scenes of homoeroticism involving mainly YSL, Jacques de Basher, and miscellaneous rough trade in the bushes. This too, the "official" YSL film could not have. The sometimes sad and disturbing Saint Laurent has many felicities, and its free-form second half and lack of rigid biopic formalities makes the reels drift by smoothly, though its two-and-a-half-hour run-time could have used some cutting. A musician himself, Bonello did the music for this film, and its use of soul, Beethoven, and Callas is unusually rich and intense, another bold stroke. Quality of personnel is further indicated by the co-screenwriter being Thomas Bidegain of Audiard's A Prophet and Rust and Bone.

Saint Laurent, 146 mins., debuted at Cannes in May. Screened for this review as part of the 52nd New York Film Festival Main Slate. It opened in France 24 Sept., receiving fine reviews (AlloCiné (http://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm-207652/critiques/presse/#pressreview40015792) press rating 4.0 vs. Yves Saint Laurent's of 3.0). Bonello's film was purchased by Sony Pictures Classics before its Cannes debut, and has been selected as the French entry in the Oscars Best Foreign competition. But it seems unlikely to fare well with the Academy: judging by Metacritic, neither this (51%) nor Lespert's film (51%) register on the radar for Anglo critics, and they miss the dramatic difference that French reviews note.

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Bonello at P&I Q&A [CK Photo] ]

[Chris Knipp]

FREDERICK WISEMAN: NATIONAL GALLERY (2014)

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A lot of rich old paintings and a lot of wordy gallery talks from Wiseman off Trafalgar Square

Last time he turned his cool eye on the University of California in At Berkeley. This time Frederick Wiseman goes to London's National Gallery on Trafalgar Square. Founded in 1824, this great palace of art, originally funded, one docent points out, with money from the slave trade, houses over 2,300 paintings that date from the mid-13th century to 1900. The rest of art history is in the British Museum (for the ancient part) and the Tate Gallery and Tate Modern (for post-1900 and modern art). So in the world of art, this first look by the octogenarian documentarian is only a glimpse, and winds up being a verbose one. As Jay Weissberg says in his Cannes review for Variety (http://variety.com/2014/film/reviews/cannes-film-review-national-gallery-1201185929/), Wiseman "studies paintings and bears witness to staff meetings, curatorial discussions and gallery talks." Lots and lots and lots of gallery talks, some better than others, and lectures by experts and curators, ranging from highly articulate (by a master restorer) to stumbling (by a frame-builder talking about ebony frames). It's a mixed bag, and the view offered of the 2,300 paintings is limited and somewhat arbitrary.

The National Gallery's most famous works include Da Vinci's Virgin of the Rocks, Holbein's The Ambassadors, and Turner's The Fighting Temeraire. These are featured in filmed gallery talks recorded here. Van Gogh's Sunflowers is briefly mentioned by a lecturer to teachers, and the articulate restorer (he's the American Director of Restoration Larry Keith, though in Wiseman's non-obtrusive method, nobody is identified on screen) talks interestingly about varnishes and under-painting and ground color and restoration in relation to Rembrandt’s Portrait of Frederick Rihel on Horseback and Caravaggio's famous Boy Bitten by a Lizard. Stubbs's Whistlejacket is discussed in some detail, appropriately because Stubbs is such an English painter and this is the masterpiece of his remarkable equestrian paintings. Michelangelo's Entombment gets a quick look for its bold frontal nudity of Christ.

Wiseman misses some notable works in the museum, Van Eyck's iconic Arnolfini Portrait., for instance, another painting among the museum's most famous. One might have liked more of a look at the museum's works by Uccello, Piero della Francesca, Botticelli, Bellini, Pollaiolo or Bosch. But Wiseman ends with a silent series of Rembrandt portraits as if they are the culmination of the whole show. Are they? That's perhaps his taste, which seems to run to the Germanic and the blowsy (Rubens), or what docents have something colorful to say about. One older docent tells a joke about Moses bringing the tablet with the ten commandments and saying: "There's good news and there's bad news. The good news is I got Him down to ten. The bad news is Adultery is still there." There is a long and interesting docent talk about the painting Samson and Delilah, identifying with Delilah as experiencing the conflicts of an espionage agent. No mention, though, of the fact that the attribution of this to Rubens, and the painting's merits, have been contested since it was acquired in 1980. A website (http://www.afterrubens.org/home.asp)presents evidence against the attribution. It's an interesting painting, but it does't look like a Rubens. These gallery talks lean heavily on the paintings' storytelling side. It's even hinted that a painting "must" tell a story. It would all be different at Tate Modern.

It is good to be taught to look and look, cooly, withholding judgment. But in this film Wiseman comes off at times as a somewhat naive and uncritical observer. The material he gives us is, as Weissberg also notes, repetitions, more so than in the longer but more varied At Berkeley (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3583-New-York-Film-Festival-2013&p=30936#post30936) (NYFF 2013). Mere length in any case isn't proof of thoroughness. In At Berkeley, about a great university, students were never shown in an informal setting, studying, drinking beer, in their dorms. Wiseman seems to like giving an institutional impression that is on the chilly side. In both films there are administrative meetings where policy is discussed. But the life of the museum goers' experience is missing here. A great museum comes through more as a living, throbbing thing in Jem Cohen's fine film Museum Hours (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3470-San-Francisco-International-Film-Festival-2013&p=30019#post30019), admittedly only semi-documentary; but that is its beauty. Cohen's film takes us to Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum, where we get to know one of the guards, and he befriends one of the visitors, a Canadian woman temporarily in the city to visit a sick friend. Museum Hours gives us a sense of the Kunsthistorisches Museum as a living place, and of the individuality of its staff, and its visitors.

I waver back and forth on Wiseman. Sometimes he seems a diehard and a bore, and sometimes he draws me in and I'm fascinated. The latter effect happened with the four-hour At Berkeley, even though it left those key things out. With National Gallery, despite the beautiful paintings and the (half the time) interesting talk, he becomes a bore again. There's one thing about this new film that's great, though. Wiseman photographs the spectators a lot, showing them often in closeups and in small groups, and the more we see them, the more we realize they could be the people in the paintings, and the people in the paintings could be them. Faces have not changed. But the world has, and that's why an important topic in the film is how to make the public aware of the National Gallery's contents and their worth.

National Gallery, 180 mins., debuted at Cannes' Directors' Fortnight. It was screened for this review as part of the Spotlight on Documentary sidebar series of the 52nd New York Film Festival. It's included in many other festivals. US theatrical release in NYC 5 November 2014 (Film Forum). San Francisco Landmark Opera Plaza 19 Dec. Released in France 8 October, it received excellent reviews (AlloCiné press rating 4.2).

[Chris Knipp]

ABDERRAHMANE SISSAKO: TIMBUKTU (2014)

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Toulou Kiki, Ibrahim Ahmed, and Layla Walet Mohamed in Timbuktu

Sissako's intimate, poetic look at the jihadist takeover in northern Mali

Abderrahmane Sissako, born in Mauritania and educated in Mali, is an African director whose concerns and outlook are broader and loftier than most. In Timbuktu, when he looks at the way the temporary jihadist takeover of northern Mali by the Ansar Dine group in 2012 quickly undermines the human dignity and way of life of the people, he does so with a surprising serenity that is at once poetic, gently ironic, ferocious, all-encompassing, and brave. Timbuktu is a political thriller with philosophical overtones and soaked in cultural awareness. The violence and devastation are here, but in a muted form that respects the dignity of the various victims and avoids demonizing the foreign invaders, who are, in the end, neighbors who've gone wrong. We see them up close. They are destroyers. They symbolically violate cultural artifacts in the opening sequence, shooting up wooded statues. But they are also fallible and foolish. One of the Ansar Dine leaders Abdelkrim (Abel Jafri) is reminded by his son that he's not perfect: he can't learn to drive a truck properly. And they pose as Islamists, but can't speak Arabic properly either.

Timbuktu is a film of many languages. Tamasheq is spoken by the Tuareg Berbers, with their wrapped heads, quiet nomads living in tents. One of them, Kidane (Ibrahim Ahmed), is a modest cattle and goat herder whose tragedy is at the center of the film. He tells the orphan boy Issam (Mehdi A.G. Mohamed) whom he parents and who helps with the herding that the reason he's alive is that he's a musician and not a warrior like Issam's father. Kidane's greatest joy in life is his daughter Toya (Layla Walet Mohamed), and his relations with his wife Satima (Toulou Kiki) are placid. Issam loses control while watering the cattle and a most prized cow, "GPS," damages the net of the fisherman Amadou, and in a rage Amadou spears GPS and she slowly dies.

This leads to a partly inadvertent act of violence by Kidane, and he falls into the custody of the jihadists and subject to their ruthless, arbitrary interpretation of sharia law. His wife had said they should move away to be closer to other people. His friends have. Others have been killed. Not it's too late. When he is "tried" by the jihadist elder (Salem Dendou) the conversation has to be translated back and forth between Tamasheq and the sometimes shaky Arabic of the Ansar Dine men. The Tuareg are pan-African people, ranging between Mali, Niger, Algeria, Libya, and Burkina Faso. Arabic too is of course a pan-national language, a much more widespread one. And yet the elegant Qur'anic Arabic of the local imam (Adel Mahmoud Cherif) is in quietly stark contrast to the jihadists' clumsy approximation. His words of disapproval over everything the jihadists do are couched in language that is a living reproach to these fools of God.

As in Sissako's Bamako (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?1851-Ny-Film-Festival-2006&p=15959#post15959) (NYFF 2006), Timbuktu is choral, moving around among different people. There is the flamboyant eccentric woman Zabou (Kettly Noel), who wanders about. Her days of freedom are numbered as the jihadists bellow warnings over a loudspeaker in French and Bambara, the Malian language, that women must cover their heads and wear gloves -- an absurdity for a woman fishmonger -- and there is no music, no singing, no standing around outside: hardly anything is allowed. “We are the guardians of all deeds,” says one jihadist to the imam, wiping away the balance and logic of Islamic teachings. The jihadists try to make commitment videos but the younger ones lack real commitment and their effort is comically feeble. In a scene both beautiful and heartbreaking, boys forbidden to play football run around a playing field enthusiastically mime the game without a ball.

This is, fundamentally, a fable of despotic rule but set not in the bureaucratic mazes of Kafka or with the ironies of Nabokov but in a land of soft robes, yellow desert, sand hills and small lakes, a place of gentle ways and lovely music. Music hovers around, and the jihadists are tracking it down, finding four playing and singing at night. They're arrested and the singer, Fatou (Fatoumata Diawara), is sentenced to 40 lashes. This is a typical Sissako scene: Fatou draped in a black abaya, suffering and softly singing as she's whipped, tears pouring down her face. The sequence recalls the iconic poster image of the singer with tears streaming down her face in Bamako, but this is a film that's more "showing" than "telling," likely to appeal to some for being far less polemical than but quite as political and thought-provoking as the previous film. While Bamako was a remarkable ensemble piece, both serious and funny, Timbuktu has a memorable poetic beauty that suggests the already profound and thoughtful Sissako has reached another level of maturity.

Timbuktu, 97 mins., in Arabic, Bambara, French, English, Songhay, and Tamasheq, debuted in Competition at Cannes, where it won the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury and the François Chalais Prize. It has been selected as the Mauritanian entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 87th Academy Awards. Though set in Mali it was filmed in Oualata, a town in south-east Mauritania. Sissako's starting point was a shocking video he saw of a couple being stoned to death for adultery by jihadists in Aguelhok, in eastern Mali, an incident he dramatizes and briefly glimpses here. Eighteen other international festivals are listed on IMDb. Theatrical release in France is set for 10 December. Release in Germany, Belgium, Norway, Portugal and the UK are also scheduled. In his eloquently admiring review Jay Weissberg of Variety (http://variety.com/2014/film/reviews/cannes-film-review-timbuktu-1201181839/)predicted that "The film’s Cannes berth and critical acclaim will translate to strong Euro arthouse play with niche Stateside appeal." Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian's (http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/may/14/cannes-film-festival-review-timbuktu) enthusiastic review has some interesting different angles.

Screened for this review as part of the 52nd New York Film Festival. Screened for this review as part of the 52nd New York Film Festival. The film opens 10 Dec. 2014 in France, to excellent reviews (AlloCiné (http://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm-225923/critiques/presse/#pressreview40017876)press rating 4.2; though Cahiers du Cinéma reduced it to a cliché). US release 28 January 2015, New York (Lincoln Plaza Cinema & Film Forum) and Los Angeles; 22 May in the UK.



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Abderrahmane Sissako at P&I Q&A [CK Photo]

[Chris Knipp]

ALBERT MAYSLES: IRIS (2014)

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Style never grows old

As the percentage of citizens who are older increases, more attention is drawn to their activities, one of which appears to be dressing up. Hence there is a new film by Lina Plioplyte called Advanced Style, about Ari Cohen, a blogger and photographer who focuses on older women he finds stylish. A couple of years ago there was Bill Cunningham: New York, about the tireless octogenarian New York Times lensman with the old-fashioned Bostonian accent who snaps stylish men and women on the streets of Manhattan and at chic galas, as he has done for decades. Cunningham makes several fleeting appearances in the New York Film Festival's documentary sidebar film Iris, which not only spotlights the remarkable eighty-something fashionista Iris Apfel and her loving husband, who celebrates his hundredth birthday in the film, but is shot by the veteran documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles, who himself is eighty-seven.

Iris is about style as flamboyance. Nothing understated; nothing modest, but asserted by a simple pin, in Iris' looks, which involve bright-colored ensembles, mixing clothes from the famous designers with secondhand finds. But the key to her effects is something she says her mother taught her: accessorize, accessorize, accessorize. And does she ever. Iris piles on heavy necklaces and bracelets that must weigh as much as her small frame. She's a slight woman, with close-cropped white hair and signature big round glasses. Their shape never varies, though the frame colors do and the lenses shift from dark to clear.

Albert Maysles (whose brother and filmmaking partner died in the Eighties) chose a good time to cover Iris Apfel, because she seems to move from being known in the fashion trade to becoming downright famous during the period documented. In the film, we find that a show put on about her by the Metropolitan Museum, which went on tour to other locations, each in her view better than the last, is as a result living the life of a celebrity, despite her husband's increasing age and her own health problems (a broken hip, which she conceals from her husband). She is frequently interviewed, is photographed by the likes of Bruce Weber (a longtime admirer) leactures to young women about fashion, and is seen shopping and bargaining for clothes and accessories, including in Harlem. More about this than about Iris and her husband's business careers, though passing mention is made of her company making reproductions of old fabrics, and her interior designing. These must have been profitable? At least they have impressive, richly jumbled digs on Park Avenue and in Palm Springs, in addition to a huge storage warehouse for her endless accumulations in Long Island City.

It is a basic principle for Iris that being "pretty" isn't important, and is ephemeral. Though images of her earlier in her sixty-six year marriage show she was quite a good-looking woman, she is an eccentric peacock rather than a swan. Style (and ego) are excellent preservatives. The other message of the film is positivity. Iris's good humor and wit are evident in her every utterance, and also in her husband's. Clearly their attitudes and their loving marriage have added life to their years that anyone would envy, or take as a role model.

As Maysles documentaries go, this is a minor one, enjoyable though it is. The Maysles are most famous for Salesman (1968), Gimme Shelter [/i](1970) and Grey Gardens (1975)[/i]. They beautifully documented Christo's Valley Curtain (1974) and Running Fence (1977) and Christo in Paris (1990). There are several films showing the older Horowitz, The Last Romantic (1985) and Horowitz Plays Mozart (1987) But there are many others. Not to be confused with D.A. Pennebaker (which I was doing), who is famous for the iconic 1967 Boy Dylan movie Don't Look Back, as well as Monterey Pop.

Iris, 73 mins., was screened for this review as part of the Spotlight on Documentary series of the 52nd New York Film Festival, the film's world premiere; it subsequently showed in nearly two dozen film festivals. Albert Maysles passed away in March 2015 and this was his second-to-last film; the final one is In Transit, a coming documentary that explores the stories of passengers aboard the long-distance train The Empire Builder. Iris opened in US theaters Wed., 29 April 2015.

[Chris Knipp]

GABE POLSKY: RED ARMY (2014)

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The "Russian Five," Fetisov top right

A quick and personal history of Russian hockey and hockey players from the Cold War through Glasnost and beyond

Anyone interested in the nexus of sports and politics during a key period of the modern era must want to watch Ukrainian-American Yale hockey player and filmmaker Gabe Polsky's Red Army. But bear in mind: archival footage and hockey reels, tight editing, and humor notwithstanding, this is a standard talking-head documentary.

The story is interesting and the principal talking head is an impressive guy. At 56 Viacheslav "Slava" Fetisov, who takes over the film in the first few minutes, has led a richer life than most. For thirteen years 1976–89) he played for the Red Army Russian national ice hockey team, the best of the best. Then he quit the team because of conflicts with the coaching, and played in the US with the NHL (1989–98), pioneering in this sports immigration process that had been strictly forbidden under Soviet rule. Former teammates came to the NHL, which enabled him for a while to play again as part of legendary Russian Five, one of the most powerful units in hockey history, including himself, high-scoring right-winger Sergei Makarov, left-winger Vladimir Krutov (AKA "the Tank”), tough and wiry center Igor Larionov (“the Professor”) and fellow defenseman and best friend Alexei Kasatonov. He helped win two Stanley Cups in '97 and '98. Then he coached for four years (1998-2002) -- leading his American teams to great successes. In 2002 he returned to Russia with his wife, going on on to coach the Russian national team in the totally different post-Soviet world, under Putin serving (till 2008) as the Russian Minister of Sport.

The villain of the piece is coach Viktor Tikhonov, a cruel task-master who hardly treated his players as humans, insisting on having them live apart from family eleven months a year and forbidding Fetisof from visiting his father on his deathbed. Tikhonov was brought in after the notorious defeat of the Russian national team by a group of relatively green US college players in the Winter Olympics at Lake Placid in 1980. The benevolent, and more complex, spirit of the film is legendary coach Anatoly Tarasov, who introduced metaphors from chess and ballet into play, along with imaginative and fun training methods that were at the same time rigorous and grounded in socialist concepts of placing teamwork over individualism. The great players were like brothers and somehow fundamentally the same.

A shortcoming of this fast-moving film is that despite describing the unique features of classic Russian hockey style -- intricate, complicated, inventive, balletic, relying a lot on passing back and forth -- this is never satisfactorily contrasted with American (or European) style, not in a manner than anyone not thoroughly familiar with the game would perceive. A major strength and a key to its warmth and life is the friendly, humorous, almost father-son relationship between young Polsky and big shot Fetisov -- whose gently Russian-accented but articulate English dominates the film and who tends to use talking on his cell phone as an excuse when Polsky asks him an uncomfortable question. Fetisov never defected, and he represents Russia, despite his years in the US. He is critical of the chilly Tikhonov, but never of the Russian system. He has been involved recently in managing the many hirings of Russian hockey players abroad, but seems even more proud of having supervised establishment of a wide infrastructure of hockey stadiums throughout Russian during his Sports Minister tenure. In some ways he is clearly nostalgic about a Soviet system that pointed him, as an anointed national athlete from age 16, toward an illustrious career. Back in the day, after that freak 1980 defeat, his team smashed Gretsky and his Canadian team.

Red Army, 85 minutes, debuted at Cannes, and has played in over a dozen international festivals. Screened for this review at the 52nd New York Film Festival as part of its Spotlight on Documentary series. At the Q&A Fetisov and Polsky were both present, and Fetisov began by calling Polsky "a good boy." A Sony Pictures Classics release. Releases are set for 14 Nov. 2014 (NYC) and 22 Jan. 2015; 9 Feb. in San Francisco and 19 June 2015 in the UK.

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Fetisof at the 52nd NYFF
[CK Photo]

[Chris Knipp]

MIKE LEIGH: MR. TURNER (2014) ]

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Timothy Spall in Mr. Turner

Leigh's beautiful non-biopic J.M.W. Turner biopic skirts convention so closely viewers may miss it

In his Topsy Turvy-like movie about the great English working-class-origins landscape painter Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851), Mike Leigh flirts dangerously closely with conventions and emerges with a sense of originality so subtle it's not certain audiences will get what he's doing. What could be cornier than a picture about a landscape painter that's full of mimicry of his classic uses of sunlight and haze? With the help of cinematographer Dick Pope, this is just what Mr. Turner does, yet it's repeatedly breathtaking. The "Fighting Temeraire," the boat on the way to demolition in the celebrated painting, is added in by CGI; but the water and the light were captured by Pope. Nothing could capture the magic of the painting in the National Gallery (no reproduction can) but with his color widescreen images Pope delivers beauty on top of beauty without seeming heavy-handed or conventional.

What would be more obvious than a sky above-mud below portrait of an artistic genius who produces gorgeous and etherial images yet is a crude, inarticulate boor? Mr. Turner delivers that kind of obvious contrast too. Yet thanks to the subtle, meandering specificity of Leigh's action (influenced no doubt by his working methods of a long period of improvisational character development rehearsing leading up to the shoot), and due also to Timouthy Spall's complexly enigmatic character portrayal, a mass of downward looks and a symphony of communicative grunts, this standard contrast comes to seem both inevitable and unique.

J.M.W. Turner, as seen here with his father, his ex-mistress, his housekeeper-cum-lover of convenience and his naive Margate final mistress Mrs. Booth (Marion Bailey), is a classic obsessive type, whose fascination with color and light and originality in manner and media of painting (later mocked by his enemies in a music hall skit), is depicted not by any declarations or debates, but through moments of action. (Spall has explained that he spent several years learning how to paint before the making of the film.) Turner is hardly a high liver. We barely even see him eat (there's a bit of crude sex with the housekeeper, and initiation of relations indicated with Mrs. Booth). But we see pigments ordered and his father mixing them. We see canvases set up. We see morning and evening light contemplated. We see Turner rushing from one place to another. He does not acknowledge having any children (he had several by the earlier mistress, played by Ruth Sheen); he has no use at all for the ex-mistress. He is abrupt with the housekeeper. He seems hard on his father, though they are like brothers, and kiss on both cheeks when they meet.

In everything Turner is a man illustrating the first and sacrosanct rule of an artist: "The important thing is to be doing the work." It's all that matters. All else is secondary. This may go against the bourgeois artist pattern of those, like Magritte, who go off to their studio every morning as to a desk job, and come home punctually at night. But how many serious artists are like that? Ultimately Turner's obsessiveness in Leigh's film isn't a romantic cliché, but more a no-nonsense representation of artistic practice of all artists whose genius and commitment make their work great and their private lives a bit of a shambles.

The other element of course is the setting and the period feel, which also risk seeming merely conventional. These Leigh has said are as thorough and authentic as they could make them, however inadequate that may turn out to be. We begin with a standard costume-drama street scene, with a horse-drawn carriagte tooling along an elaborate period-authentic street. And this is where Mr. Turner runs the greatest risks -- because the film may seem to look very much like a Masterpiece Theater TV drama, and the 2 1/2 hour run-time may make you think it ought to be a mini-series. Look more closely, though. Because Mike Leigh films, even the most Masterpiece Theater-ish, are essentially maverick, sui generis works, playing their Englishness for all they've got, using typically excellent English actors, but going their own way.

It's been said that some of the most memorable moments of Mr. Turner are those of the artist with other artists, notably the "problematic" loser of an biblical painter Hayden (Martin Savage) , and the whole row of other painters at the Royal Academy (a magnificently realized setting). This is not so certain. Turner's run-ins with the annoying and pathetic Hayden are examples of Leigh's liking for colorful and funny bits. They also show Turner not suffering fools gladly. As for the Royal Academy encounters with other artists, well-staged though these are visually, they feel perfunctory, a costumed reading-off of an indexed list of names. They show how the outer edges of Leigh's films at times can seem unnecessary. Like so many 2 1/2 hour films, even this one could have lost 15 or 20 minutes without pain and with more focus. But Leigh treasures his sense of naturalism and his sense of milieu, and these are superbly rich, not only in human detail but in historical atmosphere.

Would one have liked to cut out the highly satirical representation of a young, spoiled, lisping, slightly nelly John Ruskin (Joshua McGuire), the budding critic who champions Turner's proto-impressionist, increasingly abstract work at a time when the pre-Raphaelites are gaining center stage? No, that's another one of Leigh's funny bits, and another sign of Turner's total independence and focus. He doesn't promote himself. He hides his identity (at first with Mrs. Booth). And he does not care if he is being promoted. (He rebuffs Ruskin's dismissal of Claude Lorrain with a comparison so crude the young snob doesn't seem to get it.)

Would one cut the sequence where Turner has a daguerreotype made, asking the photographer many questions and then saying, with throwaway fatalism, "Then I think I'm finished"? Of course not, because it's another poignant bit of art history. Turner isn't seeing himself out-dated, but seeing the world change. Mr. Turner is made up of this collection of segments, sacrificing strong narrative, while not avoiding biopic conventions (death scene and bequeathment declaration). This, besides the subtle skirting of conventions, is another reason why conventional audiences may not embrace this film, or if they do, will do so for the wrong reasons. But for me its magic remains in its overriding sense of a man whose life more than anything else is a passionate pursuit of shimmering luminosity.

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DP Dick Pope at P&I Q&A..................... Mike Leigh [CK Photos]


Mr. Turner, 149 mins., debuted in Competition at Cannes, where Timothy Spall won the Best Actor prize. Many other international festivals, including Telluride and Toronto. Screened for this review as part of the 52nd New York Film Festival. US theatrical release (Sony Pictures Classics) 19 December.

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"The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last berth to be broken up" (1838)

[Chris Knipp]

PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON: INHERENT VICE (2014)

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Katherine Waterston, Joaquim Phoenix in Inherent Vice

Thomas Pychon's stoner SoCal private eye novel gets a worthy if perhaps too-faithful adapter in P.T. Anderson

As Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice begins it's 1970, in an LA beach enclave called Gordita Beach. Things start off when an old girlfriend, Shasta (Katherine Waterston) turns up at the pad of mutton chop, straw hat wearing stoner private detective Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) to beg him to help protect her new lover, millionaire real estate developer Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts), from being thrown into the "loony bin" by his wife to seize his money. Then Shasta and her lover both disappear, and Doc is led to a boat called "Golden Fang," which is also perhaps a drug ring, or a dentists' investment scheme. Things get more and more complicated and goofy. More and more characters, subplots, and suspicions arise, the film becoming, in the words of Todd McCarthy in Hollywood Reporter (http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movie/inherent-vice/review/738136), a "dazed journey through the mash of corrupt cops, druggies, new age cultists, hookers, Nazi bikers, Black Power toughs, real estate tycoons, Nixonian politicos and free love chicks that was L.A. forty-four years ago." Over and over, Doc runs into ambitious, aggressive, but not entirely unfriendly LA cop Detective Christian "Bigfoot" Bjornsen (Josh Brolin), a kind of pal-cum-nemesis for him. The action is continuous and humorous, though also sometimes dark.

This is an accomplished film, as one would expect from P.T. Anderson, but a big departure from what he has done before in tone and look. Certainly a remarkable artifact, it's also something of a disappointment. The comedy is ultimately muffled, the point is obscure -- other than multiple homages to the period and to the noirs and neo-noirs that celebrate it, like Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye. Chinatown, and Night Moves. The Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker film comedies are also mentioned among PTA's many sources and inspirations, not to mention Kiss Me Deadly, The Big Sleep, and Cheech and Chong's Up in Smoke. (Not, evidently, James Elroy, and not really much of a film as beautifully constructed as Chinatown, despite its mention.) Though word is there was plenty of improvisation on set, the basic plotline is faithful to Pynchon. In fact that seems to be the main problem: it's not clear what the director is doing other than playing around with his source material a bit. And having a bit of fun doesn't seem enough for a filmmaker this intense and this brilliant. Note also that those many sources are not noted for their good storytelling (The Big Sleep's action notoriously incomprehensible even to the cast and crew). A pity someone noted for neat and tidy construction, like Elmore Leonard, didn't serve as a model.

This is the first movie adapted from a Thomas Pynchon novel, and for you statisticians out there, it's also PTA's first literary adaptation and his seventh feature, based on Pychon's seventh novel. This is a film that could conceivably yield endless pleasures to the obsessive cultish re-watcher. First time through, for someone who hasn't read the novel (or any Pynchon novel) -- well, I have to say it's the most disappointing PTA film I've encountered, and I even managed to like Punch Drunk Love; I'm a pretty big fan. At two and a half hours, with bevies of characters with funny names played by interesting but sometimes not that well-known or easy-to-recognize actors (Eric Roberts, for instance: I didn't guess it was him). -- and involved in (stoned) film noir plot(s) that interconnect but keep spinning out and out and out, introducing new characters and possibilities in every scene or two, it's crazier than David Fincher's Gone Girl. Gone Girl felt crazy and over-inventive too, but on a more modest scale. I have a feeling that surely Inherent Vice is "better" than Gone Girl, that it comes from a more distinguished literary source, at least. But Gone Girl is more conventional and accessible movie fun, with the kind of surprises and climaxes you can latch onto and enjoy. Basically these two big long much-hyped new American movies are almost equally shapeless, or lacking in strong, satisfying narrative structures. Minute to minute and scene to scene, Inherent Vice is fun, but one starts feeling one isn't in on the joke.

Before I watched Inherent Vice the person next to me, another attendee of the 52nd New York Film Festival in which it was featured, told me that every good, smart movie has to have a subtext, and that (in her view) Gone Girl had fallen short because it lacked one. This is probably true. Fincher's new effort, accomplished as it is, is still basically just clever, expensive cinematic playing around with skillful schlock. What about Inherent Vice? Does it have a subtext? You would think that anything by a famous, certifiable post-modern novelist would, even sub-text on sub-text on sub-texts. But more than one of the reviewers of the book when it came out in 2009 noted that it's unironic, embracing SoCal's most stoner days of the late Sixties and early Seventies with nostalgic enthusiasm and looking on its bumbling (but not dumb) hero, the pothead, acid-dabbling private dick protagonist Doc Sportello with kindly indulgence. As Doc (the greeting "What's up, Doc?" is used once too often), Joaquin Phoenix, on mellow autopilot, seems much at ease. But he also seems unfocused, and lacks that intensity and precise timing he displayed in Anderson's previous film, The Master.

Mind you, as I said, the re-watching potential of this movie is high, and Anderson's brilliant use of actors makes for some amusing cameo-like moments. Martin Short is delicious as a cokehead dentist. It's fun watching Benicio Del Toro, Jena Malone, Reese Witherspoon, and the others come and go. Joanna Newsom’s readings of Pynchon's narration as voiceover provide a nice extra layer of nostalgia and irony -- or perhaps just adds sexy spice to the confusion.

Anderson may be having fun here. Actors in the film report a sense of chaos, but a pleasant atmosphere, on the set. This is Anderson letting go, easing up from the epic intensity of previous films. But there is not much in its place. There are funny moments, yes, but the humor becomes muffled. Jokey moments do not make comedy. And if timing is essential for comedy, and it usually is, Phoenix undercuts the humor when he's on screen. The film grinds to a halt with the stoner mood he carries around. Anderson jolts the film awake by introducing new incidents and new characters in every successive scene. But that's not enough. It's fun to be challenged, not much fun to be befuddled.

Inherent Vice, 149 mins., debuted 4 Oct. 2014 at the 52nd New York Film Festival, where it was screened for this review. Presented as the NYFF Centerpiece film, and its world premiere. Opens (limited), 12 Dec., and 9 Jan. 2015 (wide) (Warner Bros.)

[Chris Knipp]

NICK BROOMFIELD: TALES OF THE GRIM SLEEPER (2014)

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NICK BROOMFIELD AND PAMELA BROOKS

Serial killing of women in South Central Los Angeles

Nick Broomfield has made a clean, forthright documentary about dirty, ugly material: sex-related serial killings in the L.A. ghetto, and the cruel indifference of the L.A.P.D. to the welfare of black women and murders of prostitutes. Making himself an understated but ever-present character in his film, Broomfield focuses on two interrelated topics. First is his personal and revealing investigation of the life of Lonnie Franklin Jr., arrested in South Central Los Angeles in 2010 for the serial killing of who knows how many women. In this Broomfield and his two-man crew are materially aided by Pam (Pamela Brooks), a lively local former crackhead and prostitute ("crack whore") he hires on as navigator and source of contacts. (He's not so bad himself at getting three male neighbors to talk, and open up as they talk more.) The second topic is sociological: sexism, the economic and racial divide, politics, police corruption. There's an organization of black women pushing back at the police and the city's long indifference to this case, the Black Coalition Fighting Back Serial Murders. Its leader, Margaret Prescod, is much heard from. (This might hijack the film, but Pam and Broomfield's investigation is too vivid and intense to allow that to happen.) It seems the cops had a practice of identifying murdered prostitutes as non-human, and some thought Franklin was doing good by eliminating them. The mayor, police chief, and soon-to-become governor again Jerry Brown congratulate themselves for capturing Franklin. But the murders go back to the 1980's. If they had bothered to investigate then and questioned prostitutes and crack addicts, the cops could have apprehended Franklin and cut short the killings twenty years ago. They didn't want to. They deliberately let it slide. This may be the "message" of the film, which one writer calls Broomfield's "magnum opus." But Kurt & Courtney (1998), Biggie & Tupac (2002), Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (2003) and the docudrama Battle for Haditha (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?2282-Nick-Broomfield-The-Battle-for-Haditha-(2007)&p=20171#post20171) (2007) seem equally worthy examples of Broomfield's skill at taking walks on the wild side and unearthing ugly truths. What is nice about Tales of the Grim Sleeper is that it seems to follow more or less the chronology of Broomfield's investigation, and reads like a juicy muckraking magazine article for Rolling Stone or Vanity Fair whose sources are always clear. But this has some uncensored bits, crude language and disgusting images of perverted sexual practices that are too unpleasant for many viewers. Cinematography by Nick's son Barney, who worked on Hubert Sauper's recent We Come As Friends (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3686-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2014&p=31872#post31872)(ND/NF 2014).

Tales Of The Grim Sleeper 105 mins., debuted at Telluride, also shown at Toronto. Screened for this review as part of the 52nd New York Film Festival, where it was the New York premiere and the only documentary included in the Main Slate of the festival. NYC theatrical release begubs 19 December 2014 (Quad Cinema). To be shown on HBO 27 June 2015.

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NICK AND PAM @ NYFF P&I SCREENING
[CK Photos]

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[Chris Knipp]

OLIVIER ASSAYAS: CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA (2014)

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JULIETTE BINOCHE AND KRISTEN STEWART IN CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA

A well-made film that never seems as sophisticated as it thinks it is

Clouds of Sils Maria is an accomplished, well acted, but labored and self-conscious film created by Olivier Assayas for Juliette Binoche. Maria Enders, her character, is a famous forty-year-old actress who's asked to take on the role of the older woman in a revival of a play called Maloja Snake, in which twenty years earlier she played the younger one, Sigret, a springboard to fame for her then. In the play, the young woman is an assistant to the older one, and a lesbian affair develops and the cruel, manipulative Sigret dumps her boss, driving her to suicide. As she debates taking on this less flattering role, Maria practices her lines with her twenty-something personal assistant Valentine (Kristen Stewart), with whom she has a relationship not lesbian, but perhaps too familiar and competitive to be properly professional. Meanwhile the actual part of Sigret in the revival is offered to a cocky and controversial young media superstar, Jo-Ann Ellis (Chloë Grace Moretz, the only actor who brings any humor to the screen). While issues of today's even more media-dominated world press upon Maria with interviews, awards ceremonies, fashion shoots and the like, Chloë Grace Moretz's Lindsey Lohan-like character turns out to be both scandalous and smart, if not necessarily wise: she's dating a hip, handsome young English writer called Christopher Giles (Johnny Flynn) whose wife attempts suicide as a result.

Most of the action takes place in the Swiss Alps. Both "Sils" and "Maloja Snake" refer to the alpine region from whence comes the author of the play, understandably an idol of Maira Enders', whom she and Val were coming to a ceremony in honor of, but then dies just before they arrive. Assayas has said he originally thought of using Fassbinder's The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant as the play, then decided to use a simpler version of the story of his own invention.

Clouds of Sils Maria has a great deal of gloss, but its over two hours' length could have used some cutting. There is much drinking and smoking and forced laughter between Val and Maria, yet their dialogue isn't as sharp or as revelatory as it might have been, despite being over-explanatory. Binoche's slightly artificial manner when acting in English underlines this. Some of the alternations between acting and being are cool, though.

The revelation of the film, however, is Kristen Stewart. Hitherto branded as a mere pop-culture creation for her part in the mostly execrable "Twilight" series movies, she's the best thing here, articulate and smart, her naturalness in interacting with Binoche making Binoche look better. Who knew that, if given material as intelligent as this, she would take it on with such ease and fluency? This should open up Stewart's career to more sophisticated roles now, including more European ones.

Mike D'Angelo points out in his Cannes review in The Dissolve (http://thedissolve.com/features/postcards-from-cannes/583-day-9-life-and-art/) that this brings together elements of two of Assayas's (key?) previous films: the "knowing film-world milieu" of Irma Vep, and the "poignant juxtaposition of generations" of Summer Hours. D'Angelo calls Sils "a typically smart, incisive, beautifully crafted analytical exercise" for Assayas, but notes that it's "too carefully worked out to be particularly intuitive." More than that, it's too pleased with its own cleverness and more heavy handed and self-important than it ought to be, and it relies on a plot structure whose parallelisms are overly self-conscious.

Some other elements aren't quite right. For all Assayas' elaboration of dialogue (and the line practice between Val and Maria goes on and on), the film's structure feels in some ways clumsy. Binoche isn't forty as Maria's supposed to be but fifty, of an age past the middle-age self-doubt of her character. Toward the end, Stewart's character simply disappears after an incident in the mountains: there's no transition. Among the excesses (too much of some secondary characters, like the play director) there are glimpses of the play revival, with an over-elaborate, ultra-modern set inexplicably and unnecessarily containing a bevy of minor characters -- or are the stagehands? This film is (in current parlance) "layered," but its self-reflexiveness and dark-mirror parallelisms aren't particularly subtle. As in Kiarostami's Certified Copy, also starring Binoche in self-conscious English, this is a European art house film reveling in its literary contrivance but only momentarily (when Stewart or Moretz are talking in some scenes) coming to life. Apart from all the travelogue shots of mountains, fog, and clouds to surging music, for the most part this feels more like a stage play than cinema.

Clouds Of Sils Maria , 124 mins., debuted at Cannes, shows at various other festivals. Screened for this review as part of the 52nd New York Film Festival. At the Q&A for press, Kristen Stewart again showed herself to be notably confident and smart. It was disappointing to find Binoche and Assayas seeming to refer to Summer Hours, a lovely, humanistic work, as if it somehow wasn't a real movie but Sils Maria is. Sils does certainly attempt to delve more into the world of women's feelings, which is what Binoche wanted. But the media stuff (and particularly all the references to tablets, smart phones, social media and paparazzi) adds little profundity or relevance, though. The film came out in France (as Sils Maria) 20 August 2014 and got good reviews (AlloCiné press rating 3.8): the interplay of "art" and "life" was approved of. This may be a better film to talk about than to watch, but ambitious it certainly is.

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BINOCHE, ASSAYAS @ NYFF P&I Q&A

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KRISTEN STEWART @ NYFF P&I Q&A

[Chris Knipp]

ROBERT KENNER: MERCHANTS OF DOUBT (2014)

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The PR guys -- "pundits for hire" -- behind climate change denying

Robert Kenner is a muckraking documentary filmmaker of the anti-corporate kind. He is known for the 2009 Food, Inc. (http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=1287), a film showing that US food production is a virtual monopoly of a small number of corporations. In Merchants of Doubt, he fixes his sights on shills, think tanks, and lobbyists whose aim is to debunk global warming, in the interests of producers of "dirty" energy, mostly petroleum and coal. His first discovery and perhaps most important revelation is that many of these people previously worked to debunk the danger of tobacco smoking. This failed; nobody can credibly claim that smoking doesn't kill you and that nicotine isn't addictive. So they moved on to the far more important cause: climate change. Kenner's metaphor, his frame-image, is of the professional magician or card manipulator. The "merchants of doubt," the agents of climate change deniers, use similar tricks, he suggests. Only a magician is honest about what he is doing. These guys aren't.

This is a conventional "issue" documentary. The issue is important, but the style of the film, a mix of talking heads and perky visual aids, is nothing unusual. In fact, much of the material is familiar too: if you watch "issue" documentaries, from An Inconvenient Truth on, you're aware of global warming as depicted in films. A stunnng example is Jeff Orlowski's 2012 Chasing Ice, (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3389-CHASING-ICE-(Jeff-Orlowski-2012)&p=28875#post28875) which documents the disappearance of glaciers. Chasing Ice, made over time by a then Stanford student, little more than a kid, which popped up at Sundance two years ago, is a stunning proof of what the heating up of the planet is doing. It might be more powerful to raise awareness.

Kenner's film is a partial explanation of why nothing substantial is being done by the US to reverse or slow down global warming. Perhaps the biggest explanation is that to control this process requires, as Merchants of Doubt mentions toward the end, requires changes in our way of life all over the planet that it's virtually inconceivable. The more specific obstacle is the oil companies. These are the richest and most powerful corporations on the planet. How do you stop them from manipulating the situation to go the way they want? Merchants of Doubt focuses on the agents of these corporations, their PR men.

The specific interest of Kenner's new film is that it identifies a number of people on both sides and presents their stories. Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway are people who have documented the anti-climate change hype-purveyors. Various lobbyists or spokesmen (some scientists, some mere lobbyists or spin doctors) are also named and chronicled in the film. For anyone interested in fighting in the cause of saving the planet, there is useful information here not only about who the main opponents like Exxon Mobil and the Koch brothers are, and who their agents are, but the kinds of arguments they present and the venues in which they typically present them. But the film isn't a shocker like Chasing Ice or comprehensive and basic like An Inconvenient Truth, and ma tend to function more (though not entirely: newcomers to the issues can be shocked by this too) as preaching to the converted. It might even cut the other way though: as Justin Chang points out in his Telluride review for Variety (http://variety.com/2014/film/reviews/telluride-film-review-merchants-of-doubt-1201297810/), this film is so "intrigued by its designated villains that it almost conveys a perverse form of admiration, and the fascination proves contagious." They're slicker than scientists, who, Kenner shows, though the ones who know the subject are not always best at conveying what they know. This film is also a detailed study of lying and deception for money, a practice that can be observed in other fields.

This film was screened for this review as part of the Spotlight on Documentary sidebar of the 52nd New York Film Festival.

Merchants of Doubt, 96 mins., debuted at Telluride and was purchased by Sony Pictures Classics.

[Chris Knipp]

ALEX ROSS PERRY: LISTEN UP PHILIP (2014)

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Elizabeth Moss, Jason Schwartzman in other roles

Portrait of the artist as a destructive young prick

Listen Up Philip, a mordantly witty 2014 Sundance hit, must be taken for what it is, its faults meshing with its strengths. It has an insufferable rising young writer protagonist no one will like, but this is what makes it fresh and unique work: his rapidly delivered caustic and narcissistic brutalities are the film's most delicious moments. The film's style is a mixture that makes a virtue of necessary roughness: set in a recent digital-free time with visual touches of French New Wave and Cassavetes shaky-cam. long-lens 16 mm. images, it embraces the indie no-budget roots from which writer-director (and in his last film, star) Alex Roth Perry is also beginning to emerge. Hollywood producers who came on board for this third feature permitted him to pick his dream cast: Jason Schwartzman, Elizabeth Moss, Jonathan Pryce, Dree Hemingway; for the protagonist's latecomer French academic adversary-girlfriend, Joséphine de La Baume; and for the voice-over narrator, Eric Bogosian.

This is a movie whose slightly over-written, fast-delivered dialogue a young Aaron Sorkin might have scripted for Noah Baumbach: the opening scene, in which newly successful young novelist Philip (Schwartzman) kisses off a former girlfriend recalls The Social Network's motormouthed Harvard date opener. Listen Up's central narrative device, borrowed from William Gaddis' mega-novel The Recognitions, is one that almost sinks it: the articulate asshole main character, Philip Lewis Friedman (Schwartzman, whose small stature, neat attire, and soft manner do much to make the character's egocentric meanness palatable) disappears for a big chunk of the middle of the movie. Moss and Pryce are eminently watchable in Schwartzman's absence, but the change of tone seems dubious even if this is what justifies the festival blurb's phrase celebrating Listen Up's "brazen mixture of bitter humor and unexpected pathos." Brazen, or simply awkward? Perry isn't yet as ready-for-prime-time here as Baumbach was when The Squid and the Whale (http://www.filmleaf.net/articles/features/nyff05/squidandwhale.htm) got its celebratory 2005 debut at the 43rd New York Film Festival, but maybe he doesn't want to be. Anyway, Listen Up Philip (if this is about a persnickety writer, how come the comma is missing?) was the first film added to the 2014 NYFF's Main Slate. And it means to be, as was Squid, a quintessentially New York movie.

New York residents Alex Ross Perry, NYU Film School grad and Listen Up writer/director and his mostly-documentary collaborators dp Sean Price Williams (who also shot two other 2014 NYFF films, Iris (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3800-New-York-Film-Festival-2014&p=32818#post32818)and Heaven Knows What (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3800-New-York-Film-Festival-2014&p=32770#post32770)) and editor Robert Greene are young cinephiles and pals with skin already in the game. The trio met working at the legendary (and just recently defunct) East Village movie nerd destination Kim's Video. This is Perry's third feature, though he admits his previous one, Color Wheel, where he plays a grumpy writer himself, was on the "scrappy" side. Perry wants both to capture a New York state of mind and majorly evoke his literary idol Philip Roth. "Philip" is not only in the title. After he has hilariously alienated all those who might have helped him promote his second novel, Obidant, Jason Schwartzman's young novelist finds a friendly older mentor clearly based on Roth (or his books) and with the Rothian alter ego name Ike almost-Zuckerman (Zimmerman) -- the character played with sublime ease by Shakespearean actor and UK TV vet Jonathan Pryce. The movie's title even borrows its title font and end title invented jacket images from Portnoy and other Roth books. The plot borrows from Roth's The Ghost Writer and The Human Stain. Zimmerman, who adopts Philip during a dry spell and invites him to his woodsy country retreat, is the mature older model of the writer personality Philip has already become in fledgling form, a man who has discarded most of the friends and women in his life on the way toward lonely literary fame. “Don’t make yourself any more miserable than you need," Ike advices Philip. "Leave that to the women you love. That’s pretty much what they’re there for.” And there's lots more where that came from. Philip is on his way here, and happy to be so. Perry's "hero" is bravely austere. He keeps him a schmuck through and through. But neither Ike nor Philip is verbally crude or abusive, nor do they visibly destroy lives. The girlfriends Philip loses survive him, and Ike's daughter Melanie (Krysten Ritter) finally gives up on him and moves on too.

Zimmerman gets Philip an adjunct professorship in creative writing at a nearby college, extending his stay away from the city and from Ashley. On campus and in depressing faculty housing, he's lonely and alienates everybody -- though in a rare upbeat turn of events, that ends. People begin to like him and he starts sleeping with his self-declared departmental enemy, Yvette (de la Baume). He keeps missing Ashley and wanting to go back to her: Perry seems to be working and reworking the theme of failed relationships, with a heartless guy and a brave girl who eventually realizes he isn't worth getting back. Listen Up Philip, with its hole-in-the-middle, seems a patchwork at times, but the parts are often brilliant and original, and the academic moments and Zimmerman's pontifications are as good as anything in the first scenes, even if style seems to trump structure.

Listen Up Philip, 108 mins, also played, after its hit Sundance debut, at Locarno, Rio, Vancouver and London. It was screened for this review as part of the 52nd New York Film Festival October 9, 2014, a kind of apotheosis for Perry, Williams and Greene, with their New York friendship and declared love of the Press & Industry screening site, the Walter Reade Theater. It has a limited theatrical release coming 17 October and VOD 21 October.

[Chris Knipp]

BENNETT MILLER: FOXCATCHER (2014)

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Steve Carell in Foxcatcher

A monotonous but memorable epic of crime among the rich

Bennett Miller's Foxcatcher is a big, important, epically slow movie. And rather excruciating. It certainly makes an impression. Viewers may want to compare it to Barbet Schroeder's Reversal of Fortune. Both are films about murder in the claustrophobic world of the very rich. But Schroeder's film, of course, is a complicated mystery. In Foxcatcher, the stiff, deluded mommy's boy John E. Dupont played by Steve Carell simply plays his crazy mind games with poor Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum), the champion wrestler he takes under his wing, and then becomes enraged at his older brother Dave (Mark Ruffalo), a wrestler and a coach, and shoots him to death with a pistol with an employee and Dave's wife (Sienna Miller) watching. In both films, though, one has the sense of greater danger because money insulates these people from reality and from a moral sense.

While Reversal of Fortune is drolly creepy and fascinating in its complexity and ambiguity, Foxcatcher is annoying and drags. It is repetitious. How do you make an interesting story about a neanderthal (Tatum's character) and a stiff madman (Carell's)? The film is well directed in that it gets the maximum effect out of these two characters and the setting. Their sick father-son relationship is deeply disturbing, wrong from the start. Both characters are wooden, but great use is made of their physicality. It seems the decision was made that because John Dupont was an ornithologist, he should be given a beak like a bird: hence the big artificial nose, which stands out a mile and makes the usually comic Carell's unaccustomed dark and serious role seem like a stunt. He speaks in a slow, stifled voice, seeming to mimic the accents of the Kennedys. His body is stiff; he looks into space, his face (and beak) held aloft. It's an imploded performance. Tatum's hulking body certainly convinces us he could be a wrestler, and Mark's vulnerability gradually emerges as pitiful. We're in the realm of Of Mice and Men. (His trajectory is left a bit up in the air.)

Mark's mistake in coming to Dupont's estate to train for the USA tournament and the Seoul Olympics, Dupont's fake wrestling expertise, his rigid notions of training and patriotism, are oppressive elements that weigh powerfully on the viewer. It's heavy-handed, and each point, each scene, runs quite a bit too long: half an hour could easily have been cut to make a sharper, more energetic film. Nonetheless it does work, beating viewers over the head with its significance till they begin to surrender.

If we go from Capote (http://www.filmleaf.net/articles/features/nyff05/capote.htm) (NYFF 2005) to Moneyball (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3155-MONEYBALL-(Bennett-Miller-2011)&p=26815#post26815)to Foxcatcher, Bennett Miller's films have grown in complexity and viewer involvement, going from just interesting; to thoroughly engaging; to provocative and disturbing. (Whether he has grown equally as a director is another question.) Capote is just a character study: even though Hoffman's performance is a technical marvel the film is a little bit by-the-numbers. Moneyball is a suave and entertaining process film, highlighted by Brad Pitt's relaxed turn and the wit Aaron Sorkin may have added in. Now Miller has turned to this oddball, ugly piece of American history with its many implications. Foxcatcher touches on warped notions of dynasty, jingism and American exceptionalism, megalomania, absent parents and oppressively present ones who won't go away even when the child is in his forties or fifties. Even America's excessive presence of firearms raises its head most visibly: the Duponts, we learn, owed their original fortune to explosives. In telling his story, Miller uses all the physical trappings, the peculiar look of Carell, the hulk of Tatum -- and Ruffalo's more flexible and skillful but less heralded and thankless depiction of a wrestler who's also an actual human being. Outwardly, there's the grand house and horse farm estate in Pennsylvania, the training facilities, the private planes and helicopters. These aren't particularly used with subtlety (again, compare Schroeder). They're effective, like everything else. Dupont's craziness seems much the same at the end as at the beginning. Carell doesn't give us character development, if the screenplay even allows for it. But what does it matter? Foxcatcher is a movie you wish you could get out of your head, but you can't.

One wonders if this effect is justified by any profundity in Miller as a filmmaker, though, any resonance beyond his reliance on "real events." Mike D'Angelo wrote from Cannes in The Dissolve (http://thedissolve.com/features/postcards-from-cannes/570-day-5-follow-the-map) that "his films suffer from a failure of imagination, skimming lightly (but often self-importantly) over the surface of the verifiable." With Foxcatcher, it's beginning to look even more that way.

It's somewhat disheartening, therefore, that Variety (http://variety.com/2014/film/reviews/cannes-film-review-foxcatcher-1201185646/)called Foxcatcher "perhaps the sole credible awards-season heavyweight to have emerged from this year’s Cannes Film Festival." Perhaps help can come from abroad. Mike Leigh's Mr. Turner, for instance, is a lovely and nuanced picture, and grand in its own way.

Foxcatcher, 135 mins., debuted at Cannes, showing around the festival circuit, including Telluride, Toronto, Vancouver and London, and was screened for this review as part of the 52nd New York Film Festival. It has already acquired a host of raves, with some dissenters. It opens in the US 14 November, in the UK and France 9 and 21 January, respectively.

[Chris Knipp]

LAURA POITRAS: CITIZENFOUR (2014)

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Smpwden, Greenwald in the Hong Kong hotel room in Citizenfour

Film about Edward Snowden NSA revelations provides intimate footage

For those who have been following the news over the past sixteen months, Laura Poitras' Citizenfour contains little that is new in the way of revelations about NSA and the seizure of data about citizens worldwide by the US government. But what it provides is a concise picture of how these revelations got into the world's media and what they mean. And more vividly and humanly, if you will, it provides a seamlessly edited close-up look, intimate and in sharp focus, at one of the most famous men of our time: Edward Snowden. Poitras's film shows Snowden up very close for the key days of his June 2013 revelations in the hotel room in Hong Kong, talking to Glenn Greenwald and sometimes Ewen MacAskill, a Scottish Guardian correspondent, being photographed by Poitras, who remains invisible. Snowden is as calm, cool, and collected all the time as he was in his famous interview with Greenwald revealing his identity and stating his business.

This is rare and intimate footage of huge news in the making. It also prompts a thought: when will John Le Carré write a book about this subject? The Hong Kong hotel scenes are definitely from the pages of an as yet unwritten Le Carré novel, about a brave new world where "freedom" and "liberty" have been replaced by the word "privacy," and for anyone with a cell phone, including Angela Merkel, "privacy" has ceased to exist.

Just a man sitting in a room. But with today's electronic media, that's all you need to make big news.

Snowden clearly had the stuff to put his life on the line as he did, giving up contact with his family and leaving his girlfriend behind in Hawaii with only a note to say he'd be away a while. He clearly understands why he was doing what he did. What brings one man to do this and not others is a mystery. He hopes his action will bring many more whistleblowers.

The story begins with a series of emails (with the "citizenfour" identification) to Poitras with hints of revelations to come and a lot about incription. (Perhaps he knew she had been working for several years on a documentary about surveillance in the post-9/11 era.) The film then shifts to Greenwald in his home in the woods outside Rio where he lives with his partner and a lot of big dogs, connected by wire with world news media. Greenwald was then a Guardian correspondent. He now is a cofounder of a new truth-to-power news outlet, The Intercept, funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, with a 12-person team including Poitras and Jeremy Scahill of the film and book Dirty Wars (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3521-DIRTY-WARS-(Rick-Rowley-2013)&p=30418#post30418). Greenwald was to be the essential conduit of Snowden's revelations to the world's news media.

The footage providing context is important, but what matters most in Poitras' film are the dialogues in Snowden's hotel room. (Eventually he moves to her room in the hotel when he's been tracked down, to avoid calls.) As the dialogues go on, Greenwald's articles begin and major media coverage happens. And as it happens, we see Snowden watching CNN broadcasts about his revelations on his hotel room TV. (You could not make this up: the coverage is seamless and pefrectly paced, though telescoped in time.) Then the time to leave comes. Snowden packs up, apparently in a couple of plastic bags, spritzes his hair, shaves, and is whisked away. Hong Kong human rights lawyers consult with him at an unrevealed location. How he gets to Moscow is not revealed, though later we see him, joined by his girlfriend there, preparing food in a kitchen. After Snowden is away, in limbo, his communications with Poitras are shown, but they are guarded. The film ends with a scene in Russia between Snowden and Greenwald. Greenwald writes information about lines of communication going up to "POTUS" (President of the US) and Snowden says "You're fucking kidding!" With this cryptic final set of hints about a new whistleblower to come with even more explosive revelations, the film ends.

Citizenfour is produced by Stephen Soderbergh. It had its premiere as a late addition to the Main Slate of the 52nd New York Film Festival. It is a beautifully made film, filling in context and conveying a sense of place as it shifts from Brazil to Hong Kong to Berlin to Russia to US government and former CIA or NSA men who spoke up about the current collective electronic surveillance of everybody, everywhere before. To these men Snowden's revelations were not surprising. Only the extent and volume of the data collection was new to them. In fact information about these data collecting programs was already out there. But Snowden's willingness to come forward and risk his life to dramatize them has had great significance.

To the US government, Snowden is at least guilty of crimes, at most a traitor. To civil libertarians he is a hero. The latter will find this film inspiring. The former will find it repugnant.

Poitras considers Citizenfour to be the third and concluding film in a trilogy about the post-9/11 era. The first film, My Country, My Country, about the Iraq war, was nominated for an Academy Award, while 2010’sThe Oath (http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=1472) (ND/NF 2010) won the excellence in cinematography award at Sundance. Citizenfour isn't just a hot news story, though it is that, but also an elegant documentary.

For more details see the Indiewire (http://www.indiewire.com/article/review-edward-snowden-doc-citizenfour-is-a-bracing-look-at-nsa-whistleblowers-impact-20141010) review by Eric Kohn, "'CITIZENFOUR' is a Bracing Look at NSA Whistleblower's Impact." AV Club (http://www.avclub.com/article/nyff-2014-birdman-closes-fest-edward-snowden-suppl-210381)also has a review of the NYFF finals with Citizenfour and Birdman.

Citizenfour, 114 mins., debuts at the 52nd New York Film Festival 10 October 2014, which has excelled in its documentary offerings. Watched for this review at a press and industry NYFF screening at Bow Tie Chelsea Cinemas, W. 23rd St., 10 October. Laura Poitras will discuss the film in a free HBO Directors Dialogues at Lincoln Center on October 11. Venues: Walter Reade Theater, Alice Tully Hall. US theatrical release begins 24 October. [It subsequently received extremely high critical ratings -- Metacritic 88% and rottontomatoes 97%.]

[Chris Knipp]

ALEJANDRO G. IÑÁRRITU: BIRDMAN, OR (THE UNEXPECTED VIRTUES OF IGNORANCE) (2014)


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MICHAEL KEATON IN BIRDMAN

Everything and more, in single takes

His space opera Gravity turns out not to have been Iñárritu's most technically challenging project with his whiz dp Emmanuel Lubezki, who again uses flowing virtuoso single-shot tricks he first learned filming Children of Men. No, the greater feat would be Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtues of Ignorance), whose whirlwind tour-de-force structure follows a cast-off comic book movie superstar (a motormouthed Michael Keaton) all around a Broadway theater where he is attempting to mount a vanity project that's to be a comeback and assertion of his literary seriousness and acting chops. It's a theatrical adaptation of Raymond Carver's short story, "What We Talk Abut When We Talk About Love." Hold your breath. There's lots more.

The trick? There are many. First of all the film is made to look shot in a single take, with the camera following Riggan Thomson (Keaton) seamlessly all around the long narrow corridors and nooks and crannies of the the complicated theater, up to its roof, even out into the crowds of Times Square and beyond. The main musical accompaniment, which is nearly incessant, is drums. And there's crazy stuff going on. Riggan can float in the air, and he has powers of teleportation, though he hides these from others, or maybe just imagines he has them. Also when others are not around, he is guided/plagued by a deep-resonant-voiced alter ego (actually Keaton's own voice, delivered at a booming lower register). With the long takes and the hyperbolic, apoplectic dialogues between Riggin and himself and each of three women in his life -- Lesley (Naomi Watts), Laura (Andrea Riseborough) and Sam (Emma Stone), all on the scene; his absurdly "method" costar in the play Mike Shiner (Edward Norton); his sycophantic producer (comic Zach Galifianakis, in mostly serious mode); even a key Broadway critic, Tabitha (Lindsay Duncan) who vows to "kill" his play -- Birdman never, ever stops for breath.

The effect is exhilarating if a bit exhausting, and the feel is unlike any other movie, though for some reason I was reminded of Leos Carax's transcendently weird Holy Motors (NYFF 2012). This isn't as original as Carax's film: its messages about love and being true to yourself and avoiding media frenzy are too easily summarized. But it, like Holy Motors, is a "trip" movie, spinning out continual surprises and about personal transformation and the magic of cinema, the wonder of playacting. The scene where Riggin gets locked outside the theater and walks through Times Square in his skivvies feels right out of Carax's film, and Keaton's current gnarly transformable face is not unlike Carax's muse Denis Lavant's.

While Gravity had little complexity in terms of human life stories and moral issues, Birdman, feeding on its literary inspiration Raymond Carver's human depth, does nothing but go over and over themes of career backlash, addiction and recovery, guilt and responsibility, Hollywood vs. legitimate stage, superman roles vs. serious acting, and career choices -- notably Riggin's long ago (like Keaton's own to play Burton's Batman) to play a high-flying "bird" superhero that's Icarus-like (though the pretension of the mythical analogy is mocked), a role that leads average folks to recognize him on the street and ask for fan photos and autographs. The irony is that he's a has-been, but he's loved.

Needless to say this is a Norma Desmond-like role for Keaton, who's playing an actor whose dilemma is not unlike his own, of never quite having gotten beyond the decades-ago Faustian bargain of taking on a big comic book superhero role that made him famous and, in sequels, made him big bucks, but then made it hard for him to get serious parts thereafter, or, when he got them, to be taken seriously in them. Against this theme is that of how Broadway nowadays keeps using movie stars to draw in the tourist audience and make money, and the serious theatrical fans' contempt for this current practice. And yes, Iñárritu and his everything-and-the-kitchen-sink cowriters Nicolas Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris Jr., and Armando Bo also insist on making much of social media and the younger generation whose concept of fame is "going viral." But if such editorializing is obvious, contemporary references to Michael Fassbender, Robert Downey Jr. and Jeremy Renner, not to mention Justin Bieber and Roland Barthes, add to the smart contemporary satire. If this were all a play (though it's too cinematic to to be just that), it might be a reasonably complex and clever one.

Riggin has not only written his play adaptation of Carver's story (which in the event we don't see all that much of) but is directing it and starring in it, with a bathetic speech to bring down the house before intermission and blowing his brains out just before curtain time at the end. The movie plays around with reality and illusion from the first scene, where Riggin is meditating in a yoga pose floating in the air in his dressing room. It also plays with "acting" vs. "feeling." Riggin stages an accident to eliminate a costar he doesn't think worthy and in comes Shiner (Norton), who mysteriously kows all the lines, and also insists on rewrites. Some line reading moments are so strange we don't know if the actors are improvising, or just very good, or it's not a play at all. The play previews are disasters the public seems to like.

The single-take format focused on Riggin is readymade for a portrait of egocentrism: the movie literally revolves around its star. There may be desperation in Riggin's behavior, and absurd overconfidence in Shiner's, but both Keaton and Norton are wonderfully at ease. It's a pleasure to see them play off each other, and everybody in the cast seems to be enjoying the tight restriction of the shooting methods, which required that everything follow a strict predetermined plan as to movement, lighting, camera placement, etc.

In the circumstances, the women are somewhat slighted. For the play, Riggin has chosen to use a respected old friend (Naomi Watts) and a much younger actress he's having sex with (Andrea Riseborough); their moments with him, as the film's whirlwind whirls, are relatively brief, and their intensity doesn't register over the intensity of everything else. Daughter Sam, just out of rehab, is a somewhat cliched figure, and Stone, tattooed and scrawny, is intentionally less engaging than usual. Nonetheless Sam has better moments than the two older women and is allowed to be both her father's friend and his most outspoken critic -- other than the newspaper critic Tabitha, who plans to pan him for no other reason than that he is in her view just a "celebrity" and not a real actor. Needless to say, Keaton disproves this.

Whether all this is digestible is a good question, but Iñárritu & Co. have delivered a quite marvelous and original package nonetheless, moving into something unified, witty, and lively that relates more to the early parts of Amores Perros than to what Variety's (http://variety.com/2014/film/reviews/venice-film-review-birdman-or-the-unexpected-virtue-of-ignorance-1201287921/) Peter Debruge harshly called the "phony, contrived melodramas" that were the Mexican director's 21 Grams (http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=201), Babel (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?1892-Alejandro-Gonzalez-Inarritu-s-BABEL&p=16343#post16343) and Biutiful (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?2995-BIUTIFUL-(Alejandro-Gonzales-I%F1%E1rritu-2010)&p=25495#post25495). I too was unmoved by those overwrought efforts, and thought Gravity (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3605-GRAVITY-(Alfonso-Cuar%F3n-2013)&p=31047#post31047)overrated, a film that wasted its spellbinding setup. Birdman is overwrought too, but pleasingly different and wild fun.

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtues of Ignorance), 119 mins., debuted at Venice, in other festivals, and a fitting virtuosic end as the closing night film of the 52nd New York Film Festival, where it was screened for this review. US theatrical release is a week later (limited), 17 October. Other countries have release dates in early 2015.

[Chris Knipp]

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ROUNDUP: 52nd New York Film Festival 2014

As usual, the New York Film Festival had depth and high quality. If there wasn't anything to sweep me away like Amour and Holy Motors, an amazing trip like Life of Pi, anything as smart and witty as The Social Network or as profound as Sokurov's The Sun, this isn't the selection committee's fault, because this year seems a bit light on dazzlers. Personally I wasn't deeply impressed by any of the American features, but New York-related films came through strong with the street drug story Heaven Knows What, Gere's stunt as a homeless person Time Out of Mind, Perry's smart and mean Listen Up Philip, and Mexican director Iñárritu's Broadway theater tour de force Birdman.

Then we come to "foreign" films that were various kinds of delight. '71 is an intense historical thriller set in Bellfast at the height of the Troubles, and with it the French-born Yann Demarge, who works in England, emerges as a world class filmmaker. The Film Society favorite Hong Sang-soo's Hill of Freedom is another disarmingly slight-seeming little gem. Mike Leigh's Mr. Turner is both grand and quiet, a marvel of acting and the recreation of period the Brits can do so well. Abderrahmane Sissako shows himself to be one of the world's great filmmakers in the serene, beautiful, memorable Timbukto, which, almost surprisingly, is about jihadist brutality and violence in northeastern Mali. It still seems like a visual poem. There were a number of smart and elegant French films (nothing great from Latin America, nor anything else from Asia): the one I liked best is Bertrand Bonello's dreamy and beautiful Saint Laurent, for which he was able to assemble some tolerably cool actors, to say the least. Graf's German historical film Beloved Sisters was rich and beautiful. It's almost a miniseries though. And why are so many features over two hours? Assayas' Clouds of Sils Maria is an example of a serious art house film with ideas that overstayed its welcome because its editor put away his scissors too early.

The three "major" films idea, opening, centerpiece, and closing, is a bit phony from the cinephile POV, burt the Film Society's choices this year made sense. Fincher's big glitzy Gone Girl was an entertaining opener. I don't know what P.T. Anderson was doing with Inherent Vice, but he is a director I get excited about whose work gets into cineplexes. The closing film, Iñárritu's Birdman, is a welcome change of pace for him and a wild tour de force, if not as profound as it may think it is.

Below is a list I made up for a poll. Don't take it too seriously: five is an arbitrary limit, and I forgot to mention some things I liked, like the Hong Sang-soo, and made up the list before seeing Iñárritu's Birdman, which clamors for award consideration in various categories. So apparently does Bennett Miller's Foxcatcher, but I found that film very unsatisfying, far too long and too one-note, despite how uneasy it makes you. Something of the same could be said of Cronenberg's Maps to the Stars, which is clever and slick but makes no sense and misses its targets, its satire probably out of date. But as with some other choices (compare PTA), it's a film by a filmmaker whose failures you still have to see .

Another late item was Poitras' Citizenfour, which makes sense to include in the Main Slate though a documentary because of the outstanding importance of its subject, Edward Snowden at the moment of his NSA revelations in Hong Kong, and their meaning, but is also an exceptionally cleanly made film. The Festival had a lot of Spotlight on Documentary sidebar films and there were press screenings of some that showed merit, though mostly documentaries are something you watch if you're interested in the material, and they're rarely moving and unique as for example Man on Wire, To Be and To Have, or My Architect happen to be. Doc masterpieces are scarce as hen's teeth but "interesting" (to somebody) docs are very common and very available nowadays (a good thing, but a cause for festival jury reserve: for example, "Spotlight" NYFF film Merchants of Doubt was "interesting," but there are many films on closely related topics and the technique and look were boilerplate. Wiseman is an icon, like Maysles in his eighties still making documentaries, and everything he does demands festival attention. But what a bore he can be sometimes! Let me mention Ethan Hawke's doc debut Seymour: An Introduction, a charming and informative film about a remarkable elderly New York piano teacher (another New York film!), very well made and not to be dismissed just because its maker is a kind of celebrity.

BEST NARRATIVE FEATURE
1. '71 (Jann Demange 2014)
2. Mr. Turner (Mike Leigh 2014)
3. Timbuktu (Abderrahmane Sissako 2014)
4. Two Days, One Night/Deux jours, une nuit (Jean-Pierre, Luc Dardenne 2014)
5. Saint Laurent (Bertrand Bonello 2014)
[6. Beloved Sisters/Die geliebten Schwestern (Dominik Graf 2014)]

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE
1. Citizen Four (Laura Poitras)
2. Tales of the Grim Sleeper (Nick Broomfield 2014)
3. Red Army (Gabe Polsky 2014)
4. Seymour: An Introduction (Ethan Hawke 2014)
5. Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait/ (Ossama Mohammed, Wiam Simav Bedirxan 2014)
[6. National Gallery (Frederick Wiseman 2014)]

BEST DIRECTOR
1. Mike Leigh, Mr. Turner
2. Abderramane Sissako, Timbuktu
3 Yann Damange, '71
4. Jean-Pierre, Luc Dardenne, Two Days, One Night
5. Bertrand Bonello, Saint Laurent

BEST LEAD PERFORMANCE
1. Marion Cotillard (Two Days, One Night)
2. Timothy Spall (Mr. Turner)
3. Jack O'Connell ('71)
4. Richard Gere (Time Out of Mind)
5. Ibrahim Ahmed (Timbuktu)

BEST SUPPORTING PERFORMANCE.
1. Kristen Stewart (Couds of Sils Maria)
2. Hannah Herzsprung (Beloved Sisters)
3. Ben Vereen (Time Out of Mind)
4. Mark Ruffalo (Foxcatcher)
5. Carrie Coon (Gone Girl)

BEST SCREENPLAY
1. Timbuktu
2. Mr. Turner
3. Listen Up Philip
4. Gone Girl
5. Saint Laurent

BEST ENSEMBLE
1. Mr. Turner
2. Saint Laurent
3. Heaven Knows What
4. Two Days, One Night
5. Birdman [originally Foxcatcher]

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FSLC's NEW FILM COMMENT FEATURES GONE GIRL