New York Film Festival 2019

[Chris Knipp]

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New York Film Festival 2019 (Sept. 27-Oct. 13). Opening, Centerpiece, closing night films.

FILM FORUM THREAD (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4678-New-York-Film-Festival-2019-(forum)&p=37796#post37796)

Links to Reviews:
Atlantics/Atlantique (Mati Diop 2019) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4679-New-York-Film-Festival-2019&p=37930#post37930)
Bacurau (Kleber Mendonça Filho, Juliano Dornelles 2019) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4679-New-York-Film-Festival-2019&p=37988#post37988)
Beanpole Дылда (Kantemir Balakov 2019) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4679-New-York-Film-Festival-2019&p=37926#post37926)
Fire Will Come (Oliver Laxe 2019)
First Cow (Kelly Reichardt 2019) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4679-New-York-Film-Festival-2019&p=37917#post37917)
Girl Missing, A (Koji Fukada 2019)
I Was at Home, But. . . (Angela Schanelec 2019)
Irishman, The (Martin Scorsese 2019) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4679-New-York-Film-Festival-2019&p=37977#post37977) Opening Night Film
Liberté (Alberto Serra 2019)
Martin Eden (Pietro Marcello 2019) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4679-New-York-Film-Festival-2019&p=37928#post37928)
Marriage Story (Noah Baumbach 2019) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4679-New-York-Film-Festival-2019&p=37920#post37920) Centerpiece Film
Moneychanger, The (Federico Veiro 2019)
Motherless Brooklyn (Edward Norton) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4679-New-York-Film-Festival-2019&p=37939#post37939) Closing Night Film
Oh Mercy!/Roubaix, une lumière (Arnaud Desplechin 2019) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4679-New-York-Film-Festival-2019&p=37915#post37915)
Pain and Glory/Dolor y gloria (Pedro Almodóvar 2019) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4679-New-York-Film-Festival-2019&p=37906#post37906)
Parasite 기생충 Gisaengchung)(Bong Joon-ho 2019) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4679-New-York-Film-Festival-2019&p=37938#post37938)
Portriat of a Lady on Fire/Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (Céline Sciamma 2019) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4762-PORTRAIT-OF-A-LADY-ON-FIRE-PORTRAIT-DE-LA-JEUNE-FILLE-EN-FEU-(C%E9line-Sciamma-j2019)&p=38112#post38112)
Saturday Fiction 兰心大剧院 (You Lee 2019) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4679-New-York-Film-Festival-2019&p=37929#post37929)
Sibyl (Justine Triet 2019) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4679-New-York-Film-Festival-2019&p=37922#post37922)
Synonyms/Synonymes (Nadav Lapid 20190 (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4679-New-York-Film-Festival-2019&p=37913#post37913)
To the Ends of the Earth (Koyoshi Kurosawa 2019) (https://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=4565)
Traitor, The/Il traditore (Marco Bellocchio 2019) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4679-New-York-Film-Festival-2019&p=37925#post37925)
Varda by Agnès (Agnès Varda 2019)
Vitalina Varela (Pedro Costa 2019) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4776-VITALINA-VARELA-(Pedro-Costa-2019)-at-Lincoln-Center-(on-line)&p=38184#post38184)
Wasp Network (Olivier Assayas 2019) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4679-New-York-Film-Festival-2019&p=38742#post38742)
Whistlers, The/Gomera (Corneliu Porumboiu 2019) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4679-New-York-Film-Festival-2019&p=37927#post37927)
Wild Goose Lake, The 南方车站的聚会 (Diao Yinan 2019) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4679-New-York-Film-Festival-2019&p=37907#post37907)
Young Ahmed/Le jeune Ahmed (Jean-Pierre, Luc Dardenne 2019) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4763-YOUNG-AHMED-LE-JEUNE-AHMED-(Jean-Pierre-Dardenne-Luc-Dardenne-2019)&p=38113#post38113)
Zombi Child (Bertrand Bonello 2019) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4679-New-York-Film-Festival-2019&p=38202#post38202)

[Chris Knipp]

The 57th New York Film Festival Main Slate

(Officially announced August 6, 2019)

Opening Night
The Irishman
Dir. Martin Scorsese

Centerpiece
Marriage Story
Dir. Noah Baumbach

Closing Night
Motherless Brooklyn
Dir. Edward Norton

Atlantics: A Ghost Love Story/Atlantique
Dir. Mati Diop

Bacurau
Dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles

Beanpole/Dylda
Dir. Kantemir Balagov

Fire Will Come
Dir. Oliver Laxe

First Cow
Dir. Kelly Reichardt

A Girl Missing よこがお
Dir. Koji Fukada

I Was at Home, But…
Dir. Angela Schanelec

Liberté
Dir. Albert Serra

Martin Eden
Dir. Pietro Marcello

The Moneychanger/Así habló el cambista
Dir. Federico Veiroj

Oh Mercy!//Roubaix, une lumière
Dir. Arnaud Desplechin

Pain and GloryDolor y gloria
Dir. Pedro Almodóvar

Parasite 기생충
Dir. Bong Joon-ho

Film Comment Presents
Portrait of a Lady on Fire/Portrait de la jeune fille en feu
Dir. Céline Sciamma

Saturday Fiction
Dir. Lou Ye

Sibyl
Dir. Justine Triet

Synonyms/Synonymes
Dir. Nadav Lapid

To the Ends of the Earth 旅のおわり世界のはじまり
Dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa

The Traitor/Traditore
Dir. Marco Bellocchio

Varda by Agnès
Dir. Agnès Varda

Vitalina Varela
Dir. Pedro Costa

Wasp Network
Dir. Olivier Assayas

The Whistlers/La Gomera
Dir. Corneliu Porumboiu

The Wild Goose Lake 南方车站的聚会
Dir. Diao Yinan

Young Ahmed/Le jeune Ahmed
Dir. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

Zombi Child
Dir. Bertrand Bonello

NYFF Special Events, Spotlight on Documentary, Convergence, Shorts, Retrospective, Revivals, and Projections sections, as well as filmmaker conversations and panels, will be announced in the coming weeks.

Tickets for the 57th New York Film Festival will go on sale to the general public on September 8. Festival and VIP passes are on sale now and offer one of the earliest opportunities to purchase tickets and secure seats at some of the festival’s biggest events, including Opening and Closing Night. Learn more at filmlinc.org/NYFF57Passes. Press and industry accreditation for NYFF57 is open now and closes August 16th; apply here.BEA


http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/NY57FF.jpg

[Chris Knipp]

PEDRO ALMODÓVAR: PAIN AND GLORY/DOLOR Y GLORIA (2019)

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ANTONIO BANDERAS IN PAIN AND GLORY/DOLOR Y GLORIA

Bright moments: Almodóvar's beautiful summing up

My sense of Almodóvar has always been overwhelmingly visual. Does anybody make more bright-colored movies? In content Pain and glory is darker and more self-absorbed than usual, more of a summing up. Yet the surface is as much cheerful eye candy as ever, its visual delight acquiring the special poignancy of the clown suicidal behind his ludic mask. The utensils on a kitchen counter are all bright red. When somebody pulls out a cell phone, it's red, or wrapped in red. Each shirt the protagonist wears is a different multicolored pattern, except for the robin's egg blue polo shirt he starts out with. But this is a man whose life has gone stale and who has run out of inspiration.

His name is Salvador, he is a illustrious filmmaker in a creative crisis. He's blocked, he's in all sorts of pain, and he's doing heroin to deal with his sufferings, physical and mental. He chokes all the time, and for that, nothing helps. This is caused by an unusual ailment, detected later, to do with his vertebrae.

Salvador is played by a deliberately worn and aged-looking Antonio Banderas, in a low-keyed performance that won the Best Actor award at Cannes. Alberto Iglesias won the Cannes soundtrack award. This is one of the director's most important films, even if it may truly please only his most ardent fans, and yet displease some of them because it's atypical.

Pain and Glory is the segmented picture of a complicated life. From the way Almodóvar started out in the provinces you'd never have known he'd become Spain's most famous movie director and the darling of the Madrid cultural scene. And here, it is hard to see the moody, blocked filmmaker in the small son of impoverished parents who wind up living in a cave house.

Hardship is downplayed in a masterful opening scene of little Salvador (Asier Flores) with his mother (Penelope Cruz) and other women singing as they do the wash by a stream, wishing they were men so they could swim naked. This luminous sequence is like a musical. Even the cave house the poor family moves into turns out to be flooded with sunlight - a part of it has no roof. The boy gets sunstroke - or is he just love-struck? - reading while he sneaks looks at Eduardo (César Vicente), his "first object of desire" - a ready-made Almodóvar movie title.

Eduardo is a handsome, strapping young workman who's illiterate, till little Salvador, who loves books and writing, is called in to give him lessons. The exchange is that Eduardo puts up tiles (bright colored) and whitewashes the cave. He gets so dirty doing that one day he asks Salvador, while his mother is away, to let him take a bath in a tub, and hence the boy gets treated to a spectacular display of beefcake. Eduardo probably knows what he's doing. Handsome young men are usually aware when they're being admired.

Creating what will become a kind of Rosebud, Eduardo, who's artistic, does a drawing of young Salvador reading that long gets lost but then turns up by chance many years later and is bought by the blocked, or perhaps now unblocking, filmmaker. Isn't he unblocking, since he's making this film? Pain and Glory eventually begins to reflect back on itself - another Almodóvar trademark being deft plot construction that, like psychedelic color, delights despite, or even because of, its artificiality.

A voiceover sequence very early in the film where the mature Salvador lists his multiple ailments, which include back trouble, tinnitus, and depression, to name only a few, is illustrated by a dazzling series of bright-colored diagrams and symbols. If he's sad, he doesn't let us see it in his choice of visuals. If only Power Points were like this, students would stagger out of lectures high on imagery. (Even the opening credits sequence of this film is memorably elegant, simple, and gorgeous.)

The movie's sketch of the family side concludes later with the grownup Salvador sweetly caring for his aged mother (Julieta Serrano), a sequence among the film's most mundane yet most poetic. There is no detailed, practical picture of the protagonist's creative life or his love life except in reference to his most famous film, Sabor, from thirty years ago, the lead actor he's been estranged from all those years, and a long lost lover who was a heroin addict. The grownup portion of the film is about Salvador's lingering unease, hypochondria, troubling physical ailments, and writer's block. Hope appears through reunions with the actor and the lover. Salvador finds the actor Alberto Crespo (Asier Etxeandia) and they collaborate on a new performance called "Addiction." By coincidence (Almodóvar's plots also have a fairy tale aspect) the former lover, Federico (Leonardo Sbaraglia), long a resident in Argentina but in town to collect an inheritance, sees "Addiction," realizes it's about him, and seeks out the author, even though it was presented anonymously.

Alberto, the actor, and Salvador seem two egocentric basket cases when a restored print of Sabor is shown and they can't manage to show up for the post-screening Q&A and only answer some questions for the emcee on the phone broadcast to the audience. It's an enthusiastic crowd, an ego boost to the director, and at the end he is about to have the choking problem solved. Somehow this ending seems hopeful, happy, sad, and scary all at once: it's overwhelmingly emotional, and satisfying if you want a good cry.

In his Hollywood Reporter review (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/pain-glory-review-1195284) Jonathan Holland complains repeatedly that Pain and Glory isn't funny enough, hardly funny at all. This is true. But the surface of the film is continually pleasing. And Banderas' low keyed performance gets to you. In my case I have always liked best when Almodóvar was quiet and magical, especially in Talk to Her. Perhaps the giddy comedy he developed so fluently in the Eighties was a mask to hide whatever was going on inside. Anyway after 36 films the director has a right to be serious. Yet at the same time, Pain and Glory has Almodóvar's distinctive look and structure. It may take repeated viewings to perceive that it's a triumph. But obviously there were inklings at Cannes.

Pain and Glory/Dolor y gloria 113 mins., it opened in Spain Mar. 22, 2019, then as mentioned debuted in Competition at Cannes in May, winning Best Actor and Best Soundtrack awards. Other festivals included Sydney, Melbourne, Taipei and Munich, Toronto. Showing today at the NYFF. US theatrical release from Oct. 4, 2019. Current Metascore 82%.

[Chris Knipp]

DIAO YINAN: THE WILD GOOSE LAKE 南方车站的聚会 (2019)

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FROM DIAO YINAN'S WILD GOOSE LAKE

Noise, color, romance and doom

With this new film, which was in Competition at Cannes, Diao Yinan establishes himself as some kind of Asian B-noir master, I suppose, yet while he touches all the bases, something feels missing, or he is just trying too hard. Nonetheless there are pleasures in The Wild Goose Lake (whose Chinese title means something different, South Station Gathering), pleasures of the senses above all, sight and sound.

In her Variety review (https://variety.com/2019/film/reviews/the-wild-goose-lake-review-1203219296/)Jessica Kiang rightfully credits Dong Jinseng, the cinematographer, with visual beauties that are almost but not quite as gloriously artificial as Wong Kar-wai's films and Chris Doyle's work. She notes the "whole sequences in neon pinks and garish reflected blues." And the sound design and score are just as essential, making the images "throb with particular sleaze" behind "B6’s clanging, dramatic score." This score isn't crudely obtrusive, like a modern American comic book thriller, but selective - though there are clangs and bangs like a John Cage symphony that filled the Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln center cranked up to the max, all the more to be appreciated from my front balcony seat. Sound design and set design are also top notch.

What the movie's all about logically comes second, though unlike Diao's Berlin prize-winning previous film Black Coal Thin Ice (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3937-San-Francisco-International-Film-Festival-2015&p=33474#post33474), there is a well-worked-out and clear plot line. There's a - noisy, vivid - fracas at a gathering to train a gang of motorcycle thieves and assign them districts to work in. It's infiltrated by cops and one gets shot. This basis provides plenty of action and noise. The shooter becomes a police fugitive. His flight bookends the whole, and a soulful prostitute who comes to get, or rescue him. He plans to turn himself in so his wife can get the reward - though I never quite saw how that could work. The meeting of the wanted Zhou Zenong (Hu Ge), to the with Liu Aiai (Gwei Lun Mei, the Black Coal, Thin Ice star as well) in heavy rain, just one cluster of intense but renewed noir clichés, sets the tone of romantic doomed B-gangster movie artiness Diao strives for, and mostly achieves.

Some devices, or genre routines, are so enthusiastically worked as to be almost silly, perhaps intentionally so. The largely young and Chinese Alice Tully Hall audience laughed a lot, but not too much; they were having a good time, not scoffing. How often does somebody ask for a light so we can her the clack and click of the classic Zippo lighter? A unique running joke is the colorful T-shirts worn by the (often doomed) young men, which are pointed to when an undercover cop is called out and told to switch his designer T for something drabber. See Kiang's review (https://variety.com/2019/film/reviews/the-wild-goose-lake-review-1203219296/) for a listing of all the other wonderful things that go on, including Zhou Zenong's twisty dance to bandage his wounded torso without help.

But this points to an artificiality and lack of what classic noirs have, emotion. It's impressive how Diao renders both intimate and (tackily) epic-scale sequences with equal panache, but the stars aren't quite charismatic (or even good looking) enough. This relationship can't match the doomed romance of Jia Zhang-ke's superb Ash Is Purest White, nor can Gwei Lun Mei quite match Jia Zhang'ke's wife and muse Zhao Tao in that and other films. Diao's well-developed plot leaves no room to breathe, to pause and savor the doom. Still, there is a lot for us to savor, and one walks out with pleasingly intense visions of glowing neon and clanging noises in one's head.

The Wild Goose Lake 南方车站的聚会, 113 mins., debuted at Cannes in Competition, with seven other top festivals (some to come) listed on IMDb. Reviewed here as part of the Main Slate of the New York Film Festival (Sept. 29, 2019). Theatrical debut to be in France Nov. 27. Current Metascore 74%.

[Chris Knipp]

NADAV LAPID: SYNONYMS/SYNONYMES (2019)

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QUENTIN DOLMAIRE, TOM MERCIER, LOUISE CHEVILLOTE IN SYNONYMS

Nationality malaise as a form of madness

Synonyms is a bracing, invigorating film with an explosive young star (found in acting school) and a series of astonishing high-energy, highly-verbal set pieces. They only begin to pall toward the end when things go on a bit too long and as you realize Lapid isn'g going anywhere, that the astonishment hides a certain emptiness. It's surprising to learn the movie's autobiographical because its protagonist is borderline crazy, maybe full-on crazy. But Lapid's treatment of his own experience is free and fanciful and riffs off the distinctive abilities of the lead who's little like him. He has reimagined himself as an idealistic superhero.

Yoav (Tom Mercier, a 26-year-old Israeli* whose actual father is French (http://frenchmania.fr/tom-mercier/)) arrives in Paris from Israel, enters a large unoccupied apartment and takes a shower. The movie revels in Mercier's well-built, well-hung young body throughout: he has a background as a judo champion and dancer. One of his main assets is his intense physicality and boldness (no apparent hesitation about frontal nudity), which in fact is the picture. Once out of the shower, he discovers that his clothes and his whole big sack of possessions are gone. He runs around frantically from one big empty room to the other naked, freezing. There seems to be no heat. Was there hot water? The movie is vague about details, including how the protagonist speaks French so well.

The movie will return to the fact that Yoav, though he goes out and bangs on other apartment doors, begging in French in vain for help, he never descends to the street and instead returns to the bath tub. Cut to a young (very) French couple who discover him lying there asleep or unconscious. Émile (Quentin Dolmaire of Desplechin's My Golden Days) and Caroline (Louise Chevillotte), partially revive him and carry him out to the big posh nearby apartment they share. The situation that develops may remind you of Bertolucci's The Dreamers, but without the period flavor and graceful ménage à trois interactions of Eva Green, Louis Garrel, and Michael Pitt. In its deliberate unreality, its young seekers, and its eccentric declarations Synonyms suggests Godard films like La Chinoise. The shock-value set pieces also somewhat resemble Ruben Östlund's 2017 The Square (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36218#post36218).

The opening is shot with vigorous handheld photography whose deliberate brutality conveys a sense of Yoav's dislocation, and is marked by Mercier's sheer exhibitionism. He's a dazzlingly confident , go-for-broke actor whose skill is only undermined by a certain blankness. He's as much a performance artist as a dramatic actor. But is his whole nature perhaps symbolic of Israel itself, bold, brave, intense, but essentially rudderless and heedless? Underlying the whole film there is the implied sweeping, if superficial, critique of Israel. Yoav turns out to have come to France intending to abandon his native country though a decorated soldier. He has no other real plan but to cease being Israeli, stop speaking Hebrew, and become French. He calls Israel "nasty, obscene, ignorant, idiotic, crude and mean-spirited" (méchant, obscène, ignorant, hideux, vieux, sordide, grossier, abominable) and a string of other expressive derogatory adjectives he pronounces with pleasure in the poetic sound of the French words.

"It can't be all those at once," Émile says. "Choose." All this is in French, and Yoav refuses to speak Hebrew throughout except for one humiliating "artist's model" gig and declares his intention to become French. However he gains no other French friends besides Émile and Caroline, though he bonds with a tough, violent Israeli security guard called Yaron (Uria Hayik). He goes to live in a tiny chambre de bonne where he survives on ultra-cheap meals of pasta and canned tomato sauce, whose preparation is dwelt upon almost fetishistically. Eventually Caroline comes there and sleeps with him, overlapping Émile's decision that she should marry Yoav so he can become a French citizen. Godardian, absurdist scenes of a citizenship class follow, along with sequences of semiviolent macho Israeli encounters, some involving the Israeli embassy, and meetups by Skype and in person with Yoav's parents, whom he directs with polite firmness to leave him alone.

The movie presents one scene after another featuring Yoav, in no particular order. Émile, the son of a wealthy industrialist, and his girlfriend Caroline, who plays the oboe in a local arrondissement orchestra, adopt Yoav and want to protect him. One of the movie's most obvious weaknesses is the thinness and wanness of the two French characters. Émile is a would-be writer, who has written 40-odd pages of a novel, but lacks energy and invention. Caroline's main character trait is that she plays the oboe. Yoav begins spouting stories in his odd but curiously fluent French, to augment which he acquires a "good, but light" French dictionary at a bookstore. The film is dominated not only by Mercier's physical presence but by his harsh, confident male Israeli voice, spouting French. He often recites series of words he likes with similar sound, or similar meaning - hence the title. Sexy, graceful, strong, and somehow sensitive, Mercier is always attractive, though with his pointed nose and little mouth he's not handsome.

Instead of mal de pays, longing for homeland, Yoav has the opposite, a kind of nationality malaise. The specific details of why one might be discontented with his native land, its racism, its chauvinism, its militarism, its brutal repression of the Palestinian people, are things Yoav never goes into, though there is a telling scene in French citizenship class where the teacher proudly vaunts the "laïcité," the secularity of France. But this lack of detail reenforces Synonyms' Godadian, Brechtian fable quality. Yoav repeatedly tells Émile how his father told him as a boy the story of Hector and Troy, but refused to reveal to him how it ends. He tells other stories of his life, in an intense, fable-like style, and announces he "gives" these stories to the story-deficient would-be fabulist Émile, who accepts them gratefully.

Yoav becomes increasingly crazy as the oddball distinctiveness of Tom Mercier's personality and thespian skills is slowly but surely ramped up. When asked a profound question about Israel, redemption through nationality vs. inner change at a NYFF Q&A, Lapid answered "Sometimes I just have to say I am only a filmmaker." This movie is notable for its effective theatricality and gritty cinematic qualities - as well as the spot-on editing by the director's mother that's so breathtakingly flashy at times you don't know whether to cheer or jeer. It's not noted for its calm and thoughtful exploration of ideas, or for a meaningful plot line beyond the stunning initial premise.

I enjoyed this film - it's fresh, has an unforgettable opening, and holds your attention much of the way - but in the end I was left wanting more. It may be best discussed by Israelis: its theme is one worth their taking seriously. But it has reminded me that I found Lapid's first two films, both of which I reviewed as part of Lincoln Center film events, were similarly bold and striking yet crude, vague, and lacking structural coherence.

Synonyms/Synonymes, 123 mins., in French with some Hebrew and English, premiered at the Berlinale, winning the Golden Bear top feature prize. Opening a fortnight later in Israeli cinemas, it was slated for nearly two dozen other festivals, including Toronto, New York, and Mill Valley. Watched at a NYFF screening Oct. 1, 2019. It opened in France in March with a fair critical reception (AlloCiné press rating (http://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm-261649/critiques/presse/) 3.4, but top praise from Cahiers du Cinéma and Les Inrocks). Coming to US theaters Oct. 25, it has a current Metascore of 85%.
_____________
*See more about Mercier in Haaretz (https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-synonym-for-instant-movie-star-israeli-tom-mercier-1.7020353).

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NADAV LAPID AT NYFF Q&A [CK photo]

[Chris Knipp]

ARNAUD DESPLECHIN: OH MERCY!/ROUBAIN, UNE LUMIÈRE (2019)

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SARA FORESTIER AND LÉA SEYDOUX IN OH MERCY!

A sumptuous but pointless detour for Desplechin

The director departs from bourgeois intellectual families and love affairs to focus on a slow police procedural focused on the death of an old woman, set n his poor, crime-ridden hometown of Roubaix near the Belgian border, and made in declared admiration of Hitchcock's The Wrong Man.

Everything here is beautifully done - yet misguided. The main focus is on the sordid murder of a helpless old woman by a lesbian couple, Marie (Sara Forestier) and Claude (Léa Saydoux), and the captain in charge of the investigation, Commissaire Yacoub Daoud, played by the estimable Roschdy Zem. There is the obligatory rookie detective on the case, Louis Cotterel (Antoine Reinartz). The first hour is spent on other things, a half drunk man caught out in a fake insurance claim, a house fire seen to be arson, cocky young men evading he police, Daoud's angry nephew in prison and his love of horse racing, which Cotterel turns out to be good at betting on.

And still the process of getting Marie and Claude to confess to their murder takes an hour that seems very long. We see the cops work in threes separately on each of the two suspects, a woman and a good cop-bad cop, with Daoud always playing the quiet, restrained good cop. Earlier he has confirmed to Cotterel the rumor that he always knows who is innocent and who is guilty. But such a sixth sense is hardly needed for Marie and Claude because there is so much evidence of murder and of their presence before they[re brought in for questioning. So there is no mystery and nothing interesting to discover. Then when they have separately and together both confessed, with the tougher Claude holding out longer, we have to watch them taken to the crime scene to act it out in more detail. I found this scene, which is gruesome yet trivial, a true banality of evil moment, particularly hard and unrewarding to watch.

This would seem to misunderstand what makes us interested in dramas that depict detailed police investigations. Who cares whether both women had their hands on the poor old lady's neck as she was strangled? This is indeed a detailed introduction to French police methods, but not in a way that holds our interest. It is true that Desplechin departs from the conventional, but only in minuscule ways. Jay Weissberg observed in his Variety review (https://variety.com/2019/film/reviews/oh-mercy-review-1203223481/) that Daoud is the interesting character, not the women (both actresses rather wasted, especially Seydoux). There's a hint of more to come (as if this were a series pilot) in the news that all Daoud's family have all returned to the "bled", to North Africa, while he's chosen to stay here where he grew up. There could be more about Cotterel, perhaps an emotional trajectory of the relationship between rookie and oldtimer as in Xavier Beauvois' moving The Little Lieutenant (http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=556&view=previous) .

At the same time the film excels in its rich cast details, nuanced depiction of Roubaix at and just after Christmstime (with a memorably drab shot of street decorations coming down). But somehow this doesn't read as any kind of portrait of Roubaix beyond what we're told at the outset of its former vigor and present poverty and decline.

Desplechin is one of the best and most distinctive contemporary French directors when he's got the right material. The 2015 My Golden Days (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4022-New-York-Film-Festival-2015&p=33973#post33973) was great; last time's Ismael's Ghosts (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4375-New-York-Film-Festival-2017&p=36273#post36273) was a misfire. This is another of the latter: so much good work, with the wrong material.

Oh Mercy!/Roubaix, une umière,/ 119 mins., debuted in Competition at Cannes, released in France in Aug. 2019, with very good reviews (AlloCiné press rating 3.7); apparently only in four other festivals, including New York and Vancouver. Screened for this review as part of the NYFF, Oct. 2, 2019. Metascore 51%.

[Chris Knipp]

KELLY REICHARDT: FIRST COW (2019)

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JOHN MEGARO AND THE COW IN FIRST COW

A particularly intense study in Reichardt's taut minimalism

Set in 1820, 25 years before the time of the director's Meeks Cutoff (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?2875-New-York-Film-Festival-2010&p=25170#post25170)(NYFF 2010), First Cow, about what would become Oregon and beavers and men on the frontier, is a dreamy, cramped, primitive, sad scene of hostile people scrambling... slowly... to survive. Two men cling to each other, the temporary trappers' cook Cookie Figowitz (John Megaro) to King Lu (Orion Lee), a well-traveled Chinese man fluent in English Cookie finds naked fleeing angry Russians.

He helps him and they part, but meet again later, which leads to their sharing a tiny cabin. Together they quietly enter into a business venture to sell tasty buttermilk biscuits laced with honey to the locals in the market. But this tasty, lucrative trade, a hot success in this wild uncivilized place where home cooking is so missed, depends on a supply of milk poached at night from the newly-arrived sole cow in the region, which belongs to the British trapping firm overseer known as the Chief Factor (Toby Jones). This theft is a dangerous game that poses a looming threat over the rest of the tale. The partnership and cohabitation, intensified by the risky venture that makes it feel delicate and doomed, makes us ponder the film's epigraph from William Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell: The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship. Is it even more, a desperate, lonely love?

The scene is full of vague but intense class strictures: the shyness of Cookie, his secondary status to the macho trappers; the outlier Chinese man he feels safe with, the pompous Chief Factor, the local grandee.

One is continually struck with a sense of things missing, the intentional minimalism of Reichardt's style, the boxy 4:3 aspect ratio, eschewing wide horizons, the many scenes in such low light you can barely make things out. The cakes Cookie bakes, using ingredients King Lu assembles, such a tiny thing to make their fortune, in small batches. This is Slow Food cinema too, a thing not for everyone, but a delight to the devotee.

I kept thinking of Jarmusch's Dead Man, for some reason: it must be set much later, but it evokes raw frontier primitivism too. . . differently, though, with lots of snappy dialogue, humor, and a richer narrative. Yet in the end First Cow wins out in this comparison in certain important categories: sincerity, genuine pathos. I also thought of Young Adult novels. Perhaps too tilted toward the tragic, but this has that quality of showing boys what the frontier life was like, how a man can cook, that it's wrong to steal.

It is in fact difficult to imagine the ideal audience for Kelly Reichardt, which may change from film to film. I respected the subtlety of her debut Old Joy, but seem to have most enjoyed her most conventional film, the 2014 almost-thriller about terrorists, Night Moves (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3761-NIGHT-MOVES-%28Kelly-Reichardt-2013%29&p=32468#post32468). Actually, she can appeal to any fan of uniquely crafted independent films. It's like enjoying being smothered, or at least that's the feeling this time. This is a particularly intense, intimate version of her style, though you know where it is going, and toward the end it moves toward conventional suspense - nicely ending in the air, with an unmistakable but hopefully not too neat visual rhyme with the opening.

First Cow is again freely adapted with the writer Jonathan (or Jon) Raymond, her collaborator for most of her features, this time from the first work of his she read and his debut, The Half-Life. But that book is composed of two stories 150 years apart, and this is just the earlier one, plus a contemporary opening of the finding of two old skeletons shallowly buried side by side, a foreshadowing. Besides, in the book the joint venture is extracting castoreum, a beaver musk highly prized in China. I have not read the book, but I think I would still prefer the simpler version of this film. The minimalism strains the patience at times, but through it Reichardt creates a mood here that haunts and lingers.

First Cow, 121 mins., debuted Aug. 30, 2019 at Telluride, showing also at the New York Film Festival (where Reichardt, Megaro, and Lee were present at Lincoln Center Oct. 3 for a Q&A - watch it HERE (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1SukKUVCYE) - with festival programming director Dennis Lim); it comes to US theaters, distributed by A24, Mar. 6, 2020. Metascore went from 76% at the time of this review to 89% since its US theatrical release.

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KELLY REICHARDT AND CAST OF FIRST COW INTERVIEWED BY DENNIS LIM AT NYFF Q&A [CK photo]

[Chris Knipp]

NOAH BAUMBACH: MARRIAGE STORY (2019)

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SCARLET JOHANNSON AND ADAM DRIVER IN MARRIAGE STORY

A dramedy for all seasons

This is not just a shift from looking at divorce from the kids' to the parents' point of view, but a dramatic example of how far Baumbach has come as a writer-director since fourteen years ago when his early feature The Squid and the Whale (http://www.filmleaf.net/articles/features/nyff05/squidandwhale.htm), also about divorce, debuted at the New York Film Festival. He seems so much more fluent, powerful, and at ease here. Squid was witty, snide, subtle, keenly observed. It also seemed a bit snobbish and parochial. It was content with being minor. It was also very "East Coast." Though the battle between the coasts is dramatized here, with the husband, Charlie (Adam Driver) struggling throughout to have his disintegrating nuclear family defined as New York-based, not only is this a battle that he is continually losing, but most of the movie action actually takes place in L.A.

Beyond that, this is a warmly accessible and insanely enjoyable as any American film this year. Quite possibly Baumbach's best work, certainly in some sense the stars', Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver's best. There is a double aria knockdown verbal yell-fest that's the mother of all marriage squabbles, also a stunning combined tour de force for Driver-Johannson , the director and the crew. The two and a quarter hours go by swiftly. Never before has Baumbach better melded humor and emotion.It's particularly exciting, not to say thrilling, to encounter a film that's at once so accessible and so well-made and specific. Hopefully this time Baumbach can be enjoyed by his widest audience yet, and this can be appreciated by many as one of the best movies of the year. It's the director's tenth feature, and it's a ten out of ten.

The structure is simple and forceful. It's bookended by two statements where Charlie, then Nicole (Johansson), describe what they like and admire about each other - an activity done at the directive of a mediation coach. Charlie is a successful New York theater director, Nicole is an actress. They are breaking up. Things are going to get heated, painful, maybe hostile. This list-making is to ground them in a sense of the good things, the reasons they got together in the first place. The film returns to these lists at the end in a neat and touching way. Throughout, neatness may overwhelm Baumbach's usual subtlety, but there is plenty of wit, and raw emotion trumps sentimentality - the rawness often reflected in the intimacy, sometimes calculated roughness, of the visual style, enhanced by shooting on 35mm.

Any sense of the generic is avoided by the specific focus on the bicoastal issue and the custody and divorce law questions tied to it, while the comedy and the pain are jointly grounded in the work, equally hilarious and cruel, of the divorce lawyers Nicole and Charlie eventually engage. When they're splitting (but still friendly) Nicole goes to Los Angeles to star in a TV series and takes their eight-year-old son Henry (Azhy Robertson) with her.

The balance of sympathy seems to lean toward the male side here. Nicole's TV series remains sketchy. Charlie's theater group comes more to life, with Wallace Shawn highlighting colorful scenes. A play Charlie has developed, a version of Euripides' Electra, is about to go on Broadway. Charlie has to go back and forth to California. During this time he gets a MacaAthur "genius" award totaling $625,000 over five years in quarterly installments.

The divorce threatens to be disastrous for Charlie and his company. He may throw a lot of the grant money to the divorce lawyers, which he wants to use to pay credit card debut and expenses of the company. All the trips to California - and setting up additional residence there - he blames for the failure of the Broadway Electra.

The original plan was for just the two of them, Charlie and Nicole, to sit down and work things out. But Nicole's ditsy former actress mother (Julie Hagerty) talks her into seeing an ace divorce lawyer, Nora (a lean, mean Laura Dern). This means Charlie has to get one and he winds up with the very human but slightly over-the-hill Bert (Alan Alda), because he thinks the high powered lawyer he sees at first (a splendid Ray Liotta) is too expensive and too aggressive.

Public and private, monetary and emotional: the sparring of the lawyers, finally seen in the dreaded divorce court, is a simultaneously hilarious and frightening objective correlative of the squabbling of the couple whose love has turned to hostility or indifference. If the hotshot lawyers miraculously don't finally quite prevail, we see how destructive the mechanism they represent can be.

There is raw emotion and raw language here, but it's wonderful how often Marriage Story evokes some updated version of a screwball comedy. While there's an illusion to Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage that implies Charlie's company may have put on some version of that, this movie plainly isn't directly about the agonizing emotional breakdown of a relationship - except in the moments when it is. It shows the emotional pain more subtly, perhaps more touchingly, mostly by indirection, or by proxy.

This is specifically about American divorce. The title might have been "Divorce Story"; it might even better have been simply "Custody." Because a lot of the focus is on whether the family is defined as California- or New York-based, and what visitation rights Charlie gets with Henry. The Squid and the Whale focuses on teenage boys beginning to see through their pretentious intellectual father played by Jeff Daniels. Here sympathy is with the father. But the spotlight is often on little Henry, who quickly starts liking his California school and classmates, which were supposed (Charlie thought anyway) to be temporary. But while Henry leans toward the new location, it's balanced: he still loves his dad too.

In fact balance describes Marriage Story throughout and is what's so remarkable about it. Baumbach isn't always the most economical of writers. There are details of Henry, or of Nicole's family, that seem unnecessary. But what stands out is how painful, real emotion and hilarious satire coexist in the writing - and the always enjoyable and honest acting. This seems unusual, till you realize it's the mark of classic comedy. It's almost Shakespearean. Can one bestow a higher complement than that? And there are even musical elements, with both principals performing from Sondheim's Company. It's a dramedy for all seasons.

Marriage Story, 136 mins., debuted at Venice 29 Aug. 2019, featured in 8 or 10 other festivals including Telluride and Toronto; showing as the Centerpiece Film at the NYFF Fri., Oct. 4, 2019. Theatrical release Nov. 6, 2019, followed by digital streaming by Netflix Dec. 6. Metascore currently 95%.

[Chris Knipp]

JUSTINE TRIET: SIBYL (2019)

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VIRGINIE EFIRA IN SIBYL

An embarrassment of riches

Sibyl is a disappointment after Victoria, Triet's highly amusing previous film with the same star, Virginie Efira. I was surprised to find people consider Sibyl a comedy. It's more like an account of how a woman in recovery from alcoholism returns to drinking, and why: is that a funny subject?

Too much is going on here, and it's hard to know how to take it. There's a good basic topic (if this can be said to have one): a psychiatrist who steals from a patient's life to turn it into successful fiction. A simpler, more conventional treatment of this could have been interesting enough. But Triet and cowriter Arthur Harari pile on the complexity and obscure this theme. On top of that there's a surreal back-and-forth-flashback-montage editing technique of very short clips (a bad new fad) that's pretentious and adds confusion.

Sibyl (Efira) was a bestselling author but a painful breakup with her former boyfriend Gabriel (Niels Schneider), with whom she has a child, led her to quit writing and turn to psychotherapy (go figure). She is happy now (it would seem) with a new man, Etienne (Paul Hamy) by whom she has had another child, a little girl. She is going to meetings to conrol her alcoholism and isn't drinking. (Just wait.) Of course she goes on seeing her own shrink too.

She has a younger sister, Laure Calamy (from the Netflix French TV hit Call My Agent), who appears several times, most notably to give the little girl a quick lesson in emotional manipulation: she tells her mother she "lacks the tools to deal with life." An amusing, but gratuitous, moment.

As the film begins - but it is full of flashbacks to the affair with Gabriel, including a gratuitous full-on sex scene (eschewed in Victoria) - Sibyl can no longer resist the temptation to go back to writing and to that end is dismissing her patients. There is a crudely comic scene of a patient royally pissed off at this. Tellingly, he says he has given her his whole life. Soon we will learn that she's quite likely to use it.

At least she does when she takes on a new patient who forces herself upon her for an emergency. She is Margot Vasilis (Adèle Exarchopoulos, in full hysteria mode), an actress on contract for a film to be made on and around the island of Stromboli (evidently a homage to the 1950 Bergman-Rossilini film). She is pregnant by her costar, Igor Moleski (Gaspard Ulliel), but he's involved with the film's German director, Mika Saunders (Sandra Hüller of Toni Edrmann). The emergency is that she can't decide whether to have the baby or not, and she can't bear to tell Igor she's pregnant.

Sibyl is never any discernible help in this matter, and Margot goes back and forth. Meanwhile Sibyl - who has none of the qualities of the wisdom of that name, or even any moral compass - is furiously writing a manuscript based on Margot's sessions, and presumably other stuff cribbed from people's lives. As time goes on, publishers turn out to be very pleased with the results. She's also having play-therapy sessions with a little boy grieving for his dead mother. (These seem gratuitous, and not that interesting, but that goes for much of the material that crowds this over-stuffed film.) Flashbacks frantically depict intense encounters between Sibyl and the handsome Niels Schneider.

Soon - and here is when we enter into farcical territory, though it seemed heavy-handed to me - Sibyl winds up with the film crew on Stromboli, because Margot is even more confused and desperate, but the filmmaking must go on, so she, Sibyl, is called in to hep Margot function. But due to the emotional complications with Igor, Margot, and Mika, Mika also is nearing a meltdown, her directing becoming ever more neurotic and extreme. (I couldn't help wondering if the way Mika's directing is handled might make future actors hesitate to take on Triet as a director.)

In a series of heavy-handed filmmaking sequences, Sibyl emerges for a while as the only competent person around, except perhaps for Igor, who mostly holds his temper. (This is a long-suffering and selfless role for Gaspard Ulliel and one of his most unflattering.)

In a way Victoria was a wild, disorderly mess too, with Efira in a ditsy but sexy role. A hilariously absurd courtroom sequence toward the end, the charm and suavity of the great Melvil Poupaud, and the sweetness of Vincent Lacoste as a babysitter enamored of Efira, make that movie charming and fun. That doesn't happen here.

Eventually the responsibility - or the succession of inappropriate roles, not to mention the inappropriate behavior in assuming them, all the while breaking all the rules of medical ethics - causes Sibyl to meltdown, and her return to alcoholism is spectacular. It's also embarrassing, clumsily staged, and profoundly unfunny. While I sided with French critics on Victoria against the Anglo ones who trashed it, this time I have to agree with the Anglos, and hope that Triet will have more success with her material in her next feature.

Sibyl, 100 mins., debuted in Belgium and France May 24 and the same day at at Cannes, Justine Triet's first film in Competition there. It played in four other festivals including Toronto and New York, screened at the latter for this review, Oct. 5, 2019. AlloCiné press rating 3.7 (butI Victoria was 3.8, La bataille de Solférino 4.0), Metascore (same as for Victoria) 57%.


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JUSTINE TRIET AT NYFF Q&A [CK photos]

[Chris Knipp]

MARCO BELLOCCHIO: THE TRAITOR/IL TRADITORE (2019)

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PIERFRANCESCO FAVINO AS TOMMASO BUSCETTA IN THE TRAITOR

For the Italians, a national epic; for us, a sprawling gangster movie with a weird trial sequence

Marco Belloccio's The Traitor seeks to depict the real life of Sicilian gangster Tommaso Buscetta, the so-called "boss of the two worlds." He is important because he was the first major mafia informant in Italy in the 1980's. The movie dramatizes with mind-blowing accuracy Bruscetta's trial as "il primo grade pentito di Mafia," the first high ranking Mafioso "penitent one" or state's witness, or traditore, ("traitor") in the eyes of the Cosa Nostra. This film is very highly regarded in Italy (see Paolo Casella in MyMovies (https://www.mymovies.it/film/2019/il-traditore/) or Federico Girone in ComingSoon (https://www.comingsoon.it/film/il-traditore/55760/recensione/), two big Italian movie sites) and was in Competition at Cannes. Anglophone critics have found it impressive in scope, but in some ways underwhelming. To us it seems somewhat bogged down from the start by an over-abundance of detail, such as a long initial sequence of horrific, loud, violent moments showing assassinations, accompanied by a roll call of flowery Italian names.

Because this is different, more "documentary," though not in the least lacking in the elements of gangster grand opera, The Traitor may seem, to Anglos, ultimately lacking in the flair of the director's other works, such as his muted, haunting 2003 Aldo Moro kidnapping drama Good Morning, Night or his energetic and beautiful fascist biopic Vincere (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?2644-New-York-Film-Festival-2009&s=&postid=22961#post22961) (NYFF 2009). And this is not to mention possible overshadowing by the famous early career-making Belloccio films of the Sixties, Fists in the Pocket and China Is Near, the latter celebrated by Pauline Kael as "one of the most astonishing directorial debuts in the history of movies."

The Traitor covers twenty years, skipping most of Bruscetta's early career as a Mafia princeling. It falls into sections, dominated by its make-or-break testimony and trail segment. After the assassinations sequence shows off Cosa Nostra violence, we see Bruscetta move to Brazil, to get away from that and to run crime operations in Rio with his family and Brazilian wife. He leaves behind his two adult sons, one of whom is a heroin addict; it's a decision he regrets after they are both killed by his enemies. But in Brazil he is arrested and tortured. A flashy scene shows him in one helicopter and his wife dangling from another as the cops try to loosen him up by threatening to drop her.

He goes back to Italy and reluctantly, more to save his family than out of any "repentance" (and he rejects all titles for what he's doing), he begins testifying to Judge Giovanni Falcone (Fausto Russo Alesi). This happens in a series of private sessions and is the film's key relationship. Pierfrancesco Favino, the longtime character actor who plays Bruscetta with enigmatic grandeur, made a point in the NYFF Q&A of repeatedly insisting (in his excellent English) that Falcone is the hero of this story, not Bruscetta; that the men of the Cosa Nostra are evil, stupid fellows. Bruscetta himself hereafter cherishes his relationship with Falcone - whose courage in pursuing this case will lead later to his death in an explosion in a car (duly depicted). In time Bruscetta is given a roommate in his spacious prison accommodations, Totuccio Contorno (an excellent, low-keyed Luigi Lo Cascio), another high-ranking mafioso joining the ranks of pentiti.

Next, after Bruscetta is provided with his choice of tailored suits (with a chance meeting at the tailor's with the soon-to-be-tried "Il Divo" Giulio Andreotti), comes the trial. This is what makes The Traitor special. It seems to a non-Italian operatic, chaotic, absurd: but it not only follows transcripts and extensive films of the events, but was able to be shot in the actual huge courtroom where the trial took place. The "cross-examinations" where mafiosi abuse and accuse each other are wild, crazy macho stuff. Bruscetta, this first time (he will return from witness protection later for a repeat performance), is in a glass cage in the middle, while lesser prisoners are in metal cages along the side.

After this, which results in the sentencing of hundreds of mafiosi, Bruscetta joins his family in the US, in witness protection in various locations from Florida to New England to Colorado. This is interesting too, for its detail, the taste of danger he always felt, though, we learn, he died in his bed as he had wanted, at 71 - but this is also anti-climactic, the stuff of documentary, not of drama.

For Italians we have to remember the story of Tommaso Bruscetta is a great national epic, some kind of partial rite of purification from a long, dark past. For us the movie is more of a mixed bag, with too many digressions to make well-structured drama. The craft and the acting are impeccable, though, and often impressive.

Another important point noted by Bellocchio in his NYFF Q&A (speaking in crystal-clear Italian) but lost to anglophone-only viewers, is that much of the dialogue of the film is in Sicilian dialect that is subtitled in Italian when the film is shown in Italy. He can't understand Sicilian himself. Most Italians can't. This important alienation effect is lost for the US audience, since the Sicilian dialogue simply gets the same English subtitles as the Italian. Bruscetta tries to elevate himself by speaking a mixture of Sicilian and Italian (with some Portuguese, which he speaks always with his wife), but Contorno repeatedly points out that he cannot speak Italian. Awareness of this might help us understand a little better that Cosa Nostra is an alien empire, a strange and powerful cancer on the Italian state.

The Traitor/Il traditore, 145 mins., debuted in competition at Cannes with simultaneous Italian release; nine other festivals listed including Toronto and New York, screened at the latter for this review. Bought by Sony it's scheduled for US release Jan. 31, 2020. Current Metascore based on eight reviews: 57%. Highly regarded in Italy. Released in France Oct. 30, with an AlloCiné press rating of 4.3, equivalent to 86%.

[Chris Knipp]

KANTEMIR BALAGOV: BEANPOLE/Дылда (2019

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VIKTORIA MIRONSHNICHENKO IN BEANPOLE

Vibrant grimness

Kantemir Balagov is only 27 years old and this is his second feature; Jessica Kiang calls him in her Variety review (https://variety.com/2019/film/markets-festivals/beanpole-review-1203215728/) a "blazing" talent. This is a long, agonizing study of two battle-scarred young woman working in a hospital in Leningrad, and those around them, just after the end of the War, showing how Russia and its people were ravaged then. The titular figure is Iya (Viktoria Mironshnichenko), whose height, pallor, and strange nervous and muscular condition got her that nickname.

The glowing look and the closeup intensity reminded me at first of Hungarian Laszlo Nemes' amazing debut feature Son of Saul (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4022-New-York-Film-Festival-2015&p=33994#post33994) (FCS/NYFF 2015). Balagov fools you, showing you a gallery of hopeless cases but then seeming to focus on cheer and life with Beanpolel's relationship to a cute little boy, then he delivers a rude shock. The plot is a tangled web of associations, manipulations, and disappointments. But if I understood Balagov correctly, the movie grows wholly out of his fascination with a book he discovered about PTSD among Russian woman after WWII, The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich.

From early on, the action is almost too much to bear and too hard to watch. Yet all the characters, played by non-actors, are vivid, and the images glow with yellows and ochres. The cinematography by Ksenia Sereda is great. As ugly and depressing as the events are, they look beautiful, and the director's youthful enthusiasm makes this contradiction seem not cynical but right. This is a film about youth - youth sabotaged. The rickety, minimal trappings - long trolley cars, ornate but ancient automobiles - still seem very alive, if, like the people, likely to collapse and die at any moment. One old but elegant vehicle is driven by Sasha (Igor Shirokov), who comes one night looking for fun, and his hilariously clumsy frolic with Iya's friend Masha (Vasilisa Perelygina) leads to a tenacious connection. He is homely but he turns out to be rich. He can woo Masha with fruit, salt, and other goodies she shares with Beanpole.

I didn't altogether buy into the action, even though I remained open to being astonished. It's all too much, and the main characters are too fluid. When Shasha takes Masha to meet his mother in a grand house, it's a typically jaw-dropping sequence, an opening up of the action that typically soon closes down. Like everything, it all feels improvised, but in some ways all the more real for that. I salute this wunderkind's remarkable talent and invention.

Balagov hit the Russia film scene by surprise only two years ago with his debut feature, Closeness, which also unexpectedly made it into Un Certain Regard at Cannes, where it won the FIPRESCI Prize. At the time even Russians hadn’t heard of the young director, a disciple of the great Alexander Sokurov, whom he gave a nod to in his NYFF introduction of the film as "my teacher." A great deal may be understood by exploring this connection, but obviously Galagov has made what he learned from Sokurov his own as any master pupil does. It seems beyond the point to say this is one to watch. This is a brilliant, unforgettable film.

Beanpole/Дылда (Dylda), 130 mins., debuted in Un Certain Regard at Cannes May 2019, winning its Best Director award. Seven other festivals followed, including Toronto and New York, screened at the latter for this review. US theatrical release is planned for Jan. 29, 2020. Current Metascore 81%.

[Some of my information is drawn from this site: Russian Beyond (https://www.rbth.com/arts/330436-beanpole-movie-balagov).]

[Chris Knipp]

CORNELIU PORUMBOIU: THE WHISTLERS/GOMERA (2019)

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STILL FROM THE WHISTLERS

The trappings of a crime caper don't make for much entertainment

Corneliu Porumboiu is one of the most admired of the new generation of Romanian directors, whose Police, Adjective (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?2644-New-York-Film-Festival-2009/page2&s=&postid=23034#post23034) I reviewed in the 2009 NYFF, and his The Treasure (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4022-New-York-Film-Festival-2015&p=33970#post33970) in the 2015 one. He has his admirers, no doubt. I am not particularly one of them, and even less so after this latest effort.

Porumboiu provides the trappings of a unique crime story here with an unusual Canary Islands setting, but it's all tongue in cheek, and kind of by-the-numbers, so it's not fun and ultimately makes little sense. If conceptual genre flicks are your thing, go for it. Otherwise, stay away from The Whistlers.

"Corneliu Porumboiu's deadpan, daffy noir has a cop caught in a labyrinthine plot involving women, whistling and a mattress full of money" says Jessica Kiang, in her Variety (https://variety.com/2019/film/reviews/the-whistlers-review-1203219289/) review. Reviewing this film for the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/may/20/the-whistlers-la-gomera-review-corneliu-porumboiu) at Cannes, Peter Bradshaw calls it a "elegant and stylishly crafted piece of entertainment," with "a nifty plot" that is "quite involved" but "hangs together well."

There are however essential things missing from the start in this film and they are never supplied: what is this all about, and what are these different players' parts in it? There are mattresses full of cash, yes: where did the cash come from? Cristi (Vlad Ivanov), the stolid, corrupt cop who's the main focus throughout is involved in this business. But what is the business? How did he get involved in it?

Instead of providing details of the crime or personal touches about the characters, Porumooiu gets involved in motifs and peculiar local color. There is a hotel called "Opera" where the proprietor, who's in on the crime, constantly plays opera, on vinyl, loud in the reception area. He has a particular penchant for the Barcarolle from Offenbach's Tales of Hoffman. (This gets old after a while.) Most of all, Porumboiu has discovered Gomera, in the Canary Islands, where a code language to communicate with whistles is part of the local culture, and actually taught. Cristi gets lessons and eventually he is able to communicate this way across a considerable distance to the lovely Gilda (Catrinel Marlon). (Why if this is the local culture it's claimed that police would think the whistling was bird calls is unclear. I guess not on Gomera.)

I enjoyed the tightly organized edit of the film, the flashy cars, the pretty if repetitious music, and the beautiful Catrinel Marion. There is a dazzling music-and-lights show at an Asian entertainment park that's used for the final sequence. It's pretty. But it was impossible to enjoy or even understand the rest of the film.

The Whistlers/Gomera, 97 mins., debuted at Cannes in Competition and was scheduled for 13 other festivals including New York, where it was screened for this review Oct. 7, 2019. Metascore 74%.


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CORNELIU PORUMBOIU AT NYFF Q&A [CK photo]

[Chris Knipp]

PIETRO MARCELLO: MARTIN EDEN (2019)

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LUCA MARINELLI (CENTER) IN MARTIN EDEN

Jack London translated into Italian

This is director Pietro Marcello's half-terrific, half-off-putting Italian adaptation, with previous collaborator Maruizio Braucci, of the 1909 American novel by Jack London about a proletarian intellectual who decides to become a writer despite lack of education and is troubled by an upperclass girlfriend, becoming too successful too soon, then despairing. Though there was a 1942 film (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0034431/?ref_=tt_urv) with Glenn Ford in the lead, the book is well known in Europe but now largely forgotten at home. In America London's dwindling fame rests on his north woods tales and he seems like a YA writer; I had no idea he had this philosophical side.

Pietro Marcello's movie is intermittently engaging, and grabs you from the start, thanks to the charisma and intensity of the rangy Italian star, Luca Marinelli, who proclaims his lines and stares out at us with his big blue eyes. Because Eden is a seaman the protagonist's home base has been shifted to Naples, and despite some lingering American names, Marcello has thoroughly Italianized this material.

Some of Marcello's avant-garde methods can be a bit distracting as we go along. Chief among these is indifference to what era of the twentieth century the action is taking place in, a freedom with period detail he doesn't handle with the same convincing panache as Derek Jarman. An initially intriguing use of edited archival footage also comes to seem distracting and arbitrary, though it's nice that he prefers film and worked with 16mm., and the use of archival footage is something he is particularly wedded too.

It's also true that the character of Martin Eden becomes increasingly shrill and unsympathetic, but that is intended and part of the Jack London novel. This is not meant as a stirring intellectual bildingsroman so much as a disturbing cautionary tale, though that isn't clear until later. It's astonishing when Martin, pushed by his provocative older friend Russ Brissenden (Carlo Cecchi), addresses a socialist rally and attacks their ideology with nihilistic declarations, declaring socialism a "slave mentality." Later at an author lecture he simply sounds crazy. He gets out of control and starts to turn ugly.

As Lee Marshall writes in a Screen Daily review (https://www.screendaily.com/reviews/martin-eden-venice-review/5142449.article), Marcello is best known for his "unclassifiable arthouse documentaries" that "hover" between "reality" and "a cinematic fugue state." I found this a bit hard to take in the one previous film of his I'd seen, his 2015 Lost and Beautiful/Bella e perduta (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4120-New-Directors-New-Films-2016-Film-Comments-Selects&p=34485#post34485) (ND/NF 2016). He has gone much more mainstream here, and with a bigger budget, though he ultimately makes no concessions to conventionality. Martin Eden is innately a strong, accessible story. We're grabbed by the protagonist's naive passion, his discovery of poetry and books through Elena Orsini (Jessica Cressy), the upperclass girl he meets through rescuing her little brother from a bully. The sympathy will dwindle rapidly later on.

It turns out that in the terms of Italian education, Martin is so lacking in general information that he needs to go back to primary school, which he's too poor to do, even if he could face the humiliation. Conventional education just isn't what he wants. He simply reads and reads and writes and writes and sends his stories and poems to magazines, which all come back marked "return to sender" - until one doesn't, he's paid an enormous 200,000 lire, and the tide turns toward wealth and fame.

The relationship with Elena is ambiguous. It stands for Eden's ambiguous relationship toward class, conventionality, maybe even toward life. She pledges her undying love, but wants Martin to let her father set him up in some kind of office job. Instead when he needs money he goes to the sea, or takes brutal work on a foundry, and he gets into fights. When he becomes known, and turns into an ideologue, expounding the brutal Darwinian theories of Herbert Spenser, Elena rejects him. Eventually he seems also to reject himself - and when she comes back, he rejects her too.

There is something grand but flawed about Eden as played by Marinelli, grand and flawed also about this film. Pietro Marcello's boldness and freedom engage at first, even with the random found footage and the mixing of 1900's clothes and modern cars. Something grand and revolutionary seems afoot, as with Martin Eden himself: one can see how this filmmaker, with his glut of ideas and penchant for breaking genre barriers, would like this class-hopping anti-hero who breaks all the rules and succeeds - till he crashes. Eden's half-cracked plunge into ideology seems cool for a while. It's something so rare in American movies.

Eden's transformation into a rich, spoiled, self-absorbed superstar author happens too fast, especially given how well the film has depicted some of the proletarian settings, Eden's naivete, his affection for the little family he lives with in the suburbs, his speaking of Neapolitan dialect whenever required. (As with Bellocchio's The Traitor, English subtitles fail to reveal the constant shifts from Italian to dialect to the Anglophone audience.) Suddenly Marinelli has bleached hair combed differently, he lives in a grand house, and he wears fussy collars and neckties. It doesn't really compute. Pietro Marcello's plunge into more conventional storytelling is promising but he might do better to pare down some of his avant-garde methods. This is a memorable if flawed experiment.

Martin Eden, 129 mins., debuted at Venice, where Marinelli won the Best Actor prize. It's in seven other listed festivals, including Toronto, New York, and London, and it was screened for this review as part of the NYFF (Oct. 7, 2019). The film received many wards and nominations at Rome. Metascore (https://www.metacritic.com/movie/martin-eden) 57% (when this review was written, which seemed extreme; it's better than that; now at US release time, Oct. 2020, it's grown to 73%). US release date: Oct. 16, 2020.

A Toronto Q&A with the director HERE (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNxOu4a2Gak).

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PIETRO MARCELLO AT NYFF Q&A [CK photo]

[Chris Knipp]

LOU YE: SATURDAY FICTION 兰心大剧院 (2019)

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GONG LI IN ISATURDAY FICTION

Exploded atmosphere

Lou Ye's elaborate new black-and-white spy film, a showcase for the still glamorous and beautiful Gong LI set in Shanghai in the week before the December 7, 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor, is glamorous and atmospheric. One revels in the rainy streets, the big heavy black cars, the men and women dressed to the nines, the public rooms and suites of the elegant "Cathay Hotel" and a puzzling theater stage that seems like a dance hall perpetually in motion.

If I told you that I never quite understood exactly what was going on, that might not differentiate this movie from Casablanca or The Big Sleep. But something is lacking in the characterizations and the dialogue that those classics have. When it is all over and more than two hours have passed, there has been a lot of mystery and finally a lot of noise and blood, but there is not much satisfaction.

The action takes place in the cosmopolitan "French Concession," a place apart in the "solitary island" that the city of Shanghai has been since it was occupied by Japan in 1937 and a privileged neutral zone. Here, Jean Yu (Gong Li, as a famous actress, not a stretch) has come to join Tan Na (Mark Chao), the lead actor and director, in a play, to be staged at Shanghai's Lyceum Theatre, and they are former lovers. This much is clear.

But the scene in which they first meet here blurs the line between reality and theater, and it keeps getting repeated. I never quite understood why. (It almost seems the director of the film has mistakenly left in alternate takes, an effect that's intriguing, but also distracting.) The action begins in murkiness. And while there are continually moments in the light as various characters, French, German, Japanese, and Chinese, come and go, that murkiness continues and floods our perception of the proceedings. We are trapped in ongoing rehearsals, interrupted by double-crosses, surprised by furtive sendings of encrypted messages, and stunned by fatal shootouts. And yet the murkiness triumphs.

Toward the end, the on screen audience assembles for the play, entitled, yes, Saturday Fiction. But Jean Yu cannot perform because she is in too much danger. Her role is taken, temporarily, by Bai (Huang Xiangli), a reporter, spy operative, and acting hopeful who has infiltrated herself early on into Jean Yu's life. Switcheroos and multiple roles are the essence of this piece.

Jean Yu, who's been in Hong Kong a while, is ceremonially greeted as she arrives in the French Concession by the Cathay Hotel's manager Saul Speyer (Tom Wlaschiha of "Game of Thrones"). He turns out to be spying for the Allies, and will report also on all her activities. She has come not only for the play but to locate her ex-husband, and get him out of the hands of the Japanese, who have captured him. She has been a spy operative herself, hence Saul Speyer's special interest. But she's here also for a third reason. She's been summoned by Frédéric Hubert (Pascal Greggory), a French book dealer who reveals his possession of a rare copy of Sorrows of Young Werther signed not only by the author, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, but by Friedrich Nietzsche. M. Hubert walks with a cane, but it's just an elegant accoutrement. He's quietly natty dresser who's also a spymaster who has looked over Jean Yu over the years while running her espionage missions for some years.

This is a movie that goes a little too slow for quite a while, until it goes too fast. It steeps itself in rich period atmosphere (though with a few touches that are plainly anachronistic), and lingers over Jean Yu's meetings with various men, and has to take time to introduce us to the puzzling play, the Cathay Hotel's labyrinthine passages, and the cast of characters. The latter include Mo Zhiyin (Wang Chuanjun), the Lyceum's untrustworthy and malicious producer, and importantly, Captain Saburo (Joe Odagiri), a Japanese military intelligence officer who has come to Shanghai to distribute to his operatives the updated Japanese operational codes. These M. Hubert is extremely keen on learning. It so happens that Jean Yu may be able to help him pry them out of Saburo, because she closely resembles his dead wife. (Several people get slipped a sleeping potion that helps unlock their secrets.)

Once all this gets set up, the Japanese come in, violence breaks out, and Jean Yu, in the semi-darkness, becomes a nearly indestructible superhero on the Chinese side, capable of wielding a pistol and an automatic weapon with equal pinpoint accuracy. After the long scenes of dreamy dialogue, I confess I found this sudden turn to violence bewildering. After all, it's Gong Li. All that lovely, if somewhat draggy, atmosphere, exploded, thrown away in a prolonged shootout? It seems modern directors love doing period but lack insight into the genres that go with it. Watch, though, to see what happens to The Sorrows of Young Werther, in a memorable sequence when M. Hubert slips away.

Saturday Fiction 兰心大剧院 (Lyceum Theatre), 125 mins., debuted at Venice Sept. 2019, also in five other festivals including Toronto and New York, screened at the NYFF for this review. Slated for US release by Kino Lorber. Metascore: 51%.


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[Chris Knipp]

MATI DIOP: ATLANTICS/ATLANTIQUE (2019)

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MAME BINETA SANE, WHO PLAYS ADA IN ATLANTICS

Economic desperation, drowned African refugees, a love story and a ghost story

Atlantics is a refugee drama, transformed into magic and mystery and revenge by possession, that focuses on the women left behind by a group of men suddenly lost at sea when desperation in their work leads them to try to sail to Spain in an open boat. It focuses on a popular suburb of Dakar, poor but vibrant with youth, where workers on a construction site with a futuristic (CGI) tower have striven for months without pay. Among them is Souleiman (Traore), the tall, handsome young lover of Ada (Mame Bineta Sane), who is to marry the well-off Omar (Babacar Sylla) in ten days. A French reviewer called this film "an emotional, visual, and sonorous poem." As the action plays out, the real gives way to dream: the young women take back their power through being possessed by the spirit of their men. The busy trailer for the film uses the tag line DF Wallace's biographer DT Max links to him, "Every love story is a ghost story."

Despite its grand prize, a few French critics found the 36-year-old Diop's film mix of genres lacked mastery; resorted too often to shots of the sea or the full moon. Mike D'Angelo was bothered by the fact that Soleiman possesses the notably fit and young police inspector Issa (Amadou Mbow) instead of Ada and can't agree with Jay Weissberg's interpretation that in his Variety review (https://variety.com/2019/film/reviews/atlantics-review-1203217085/) that this switch is to "avoid any same-sex 'awkwardness' towards the end." Maybe what both writers really object to is resorting to the supernatural to resolve socioeconomic issues in the first place. That is what bothers me - while nonetheless Diap's choice to focus on the bereaved women, partly a practical one, seems justified as a way of examining the tragedy of drowned African refugees.

The main force of the action is that grief is transformed into righteous anger when a group of the women turn milky-eyed at night and go several times to haunt the crooked building project boss, Mr. N’Diaye (Diankou Sembene) and eventually force him to pay them all the lost men's back wages. But there is also the brief return of Soleiman in the body of the fit Issa to make love once with the bereaved Ada. Soleiman's entering the body of Issa is emotional logic, the only kind that prevails here.

This is a film that makes great sense overall but has shortcomings in the details. You can find fault with various plot elements. Another is that though Ada has the conservative friend, Mariama (Mariama Gassama), who berates her for not being nice to her new rich husband she doesn't love, Omar, it would have been better to include severe hijab-wearing friends, and not just fun-loving ones. D'Angelo certainly has a point that Inspector Issa's investigation of the fire of the marriage bed and persecution of Ada is repetitious and inexplicable. The repeated shots of the sea are indeed repetitious, though they do serve as a reminder of its devouring maw and the loss of all the fine young men.

But all this is beside the point in a way because what is enchanting and strong is the way Mati Diap captures the vivacity and physical beauty of the Senegalese people here. This is Africa, and the film shows us what that means. Soleiman is a gorgeous young man, tall, pretty, with the long, loose, forward stride they all have, which conveys a sense of optimism, strength, confidence: you can imagine how they'd think they could sail to Spain in a little open boat. Ada is equally beautiful, slim, supple, forward-striding, charming, coquettish. In their brief afternoon scene when they kiss and long for more, and there is never a goodbye and Soleiman (like all the men) never tells his beloved he is going to sail away, is yet a bright and memorable moment full of sensuality and lost promise.

Likewise all the scenes of the women afterwards glow with color and energy. The action sparkles. The whole film flashes and pops, underlined by Fatima Al Qadiri's music and Claire Mathon's cinematography that is somehow vivid and rough, in-your-face yet pleasing, a palette that's "muted," as Weissberg says, emphasizing the people, and the (bright and often hazy) light. Even the repetitious full moon and sea horizon shots underline the sensual simplicity of the style. The vigor of the young men is so well conveyed in the opening scenes that their temporary survival after death in the night-possessed women feels possible. This is about the beauty of African youth and an energy and strength that can live on after death. Even if Diap's story choices seem alien to you, you can feel that they come from somewhere profound. This is a film bold in its ambition and imagination, so much so it skips over certain details of logic or consistency.

Atlantics/Atlantique, 104 mins., debuted in Competition at Cannes May 16, 2019, and subsequently was awarded the Grand Prix. Mati Diop is the first woman of African descent to have a film showing in Competition at the festival or win an award in its 72 years. The film opened theatrically in Dakar in Aug. Eight other festivals are listed including London, the Hamptons, Chicago and New York. It was screened at the NYFF for this review Oct. 9, 2019. AlloCiné press rating 3.4 from 28 review (though many admired it, a good number of French critics also found it seriously flawed), while the Anglophone critics response was apparently much more glowing, given a Metascore of 81% (based on 14 reviews).

[Chris Knipp]

BONG JOON-HO: PARASITE 기생충 (Gisaengchung) (2019)

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LEE SON-KYUN AND JO YEO-JEONG IN PARASITE

Crime thriller as social commentary? Maybe not.

I've reviewed Bong's 2006 The Host (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?1851-Ny-Film-Festival-2006&p=16019#post16019) ("a monster movie with a populist heart and political overtones that's great fun to watch") and his 2009 Mother (https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2135898/?ref_=tt_urv) which I commented had "too many surprises." (I also reviewed his 2013 Snowpiercer (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3775-SNOWPIERCER-%28Bong-Joon-ho-2013%29&p=32507#post32507).) Nothing is different here except this seems to be being taken more seriously as social commentary, though it's primarily an elaborately plotted and cunningly realized violent triller, as well a monster movie where the monsters are human. It's also marred by being over long and over-plotted, making its high praise seem a bit excessive.

This new film, Bong's first in a while made at home and playing with national social issues, is about a deceitful poor family that infiltrates a rich one. It won the top award at Cannes in May 2019, just a year after the Japanese Koreeda's (more subtle and more humanistic) Palm winner about the related theme of a crooked poor family. Parasite has led to different comparisons, such as Losey's The Servant and Pasolini's Theorem. In accepting the prize, Bong himself gave a nod to Hitchcock and Chabrol. Parasite has met with nearly universal acclaim, though some critics feel it is longer and more complicated than necessary and crude in its social commentary, if its contrasting families really adds up to that. The film is brilliantly done and exquisitely entertaining half the way. Then it runs on too long and acquires an unwieldiness that makes it surprisingly flawed for a film so heaped with praise.

It's strange to compare Parasite with Losey's The Servant, in which Dick Bogarde and James Fox deliver immensely rich performances. Losey's film is a thrillingly slow-burn, subtle depiction of class interpenetration, really a psychological study that works with class, not a pointed statement about class itself. It's impossible to speak of The Servant and Parasite in the same breath.

In Parasite one can't help but enjoy the ultra-rich family's museum-piece modernist house, the score, and the way the actors are handled, but one keeps coming back to the fact that as Steven Dalton simply puts it in his Cannes Hollywood Reporter review (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/parasite-review-1212755), Parasite is "cumbersomely plotted" and "heavy-handed in its social commentary." Yet I had to go to that extremist and contrarian Armond White in National Review (https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/movie-review-parasite-laughs-at-family-and-social-ruin/) for a real voice of dissent. I don't agree with White's politics or his belief that Stephen Chow is a master filmmaker, but I do sympathize with being out-of-tune, like him, with all the praise of Boon's new film.

The contrast between the poor and rich family is blunt indeed, but the posh Park family doesn't seem unsubtly depicted: they're absurdly overprivileged, but don't come off as bad people. Note the con-artist Kim family's acknowledgement of this, and the mother's claim that being rich allows you to be nice, that money is like an iron that smooths out the wrinkles. This doesn't seem to be about that, mainly. It's an ingeniously twisted story of a dangerous game, and a very wicked one. Planting panties in the car to mark the chauffeur as a sexual miscreant and get him fired: not nice. Stimulating the existing housekeeper's allergy and then claiming she has TB so she'll be asked to leave: dirty pool. Not to mention before that, bringing in the sister as somebody else's highly trained art therapist relative, when all the documents are forged and the "expertise" is cribbed off the internet: standard con artistry.

The point is that the whole Kim family makes its way into the Park family's employ and intimate lives, but it is essential that they conceal that they are in any way related to each other. What Bong and his co-writer Jin Won Han are after is the depiction of a dangerous con game, motivated by poverty and greed, that titillates us with the growing risk of exposure. The film's scene-setting of the house and family is exquisite. The extraordinary house is allowed to do most of the talking. The rich family and the housekeeper are sketched in with a few deft stokes. One's only problem is first, the notion that this embodies socioeconomic commentary, and second, the overreach of the way the situation is played out, with one unnecessary coda after another till every possibility is exhausted. This is watchable and entertaining (till it's not), but it's not the stuff of a top award.

Parasite 기생충 (Gisaengchung), 132 mins., debuted in Competition at Cannes, winning the Palme d'Or best picture award. Twenty-eight other festivals followed as listed on IMDb, including New York, for which it was screened (at IFC Center Oct. 11, 2019) for the present review. Current Metascore 95%. It has opened in various countries including France, where the AlloCiné press rating soared to 4.8.

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PARK SO-DAM AND CHOI WOO-SIK IN PARASITE

[Chris Knipp]

EDWARD NORTON: MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN (2019)

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GUGU MBATHA-RAW AND EDWARD NORTON IN MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN

Edward Norton's passion project complicates the Jonathan Lethem novel

The NYFF Closing Night film is the premiere of Edwards Norton's adaptation, a triumph over many creative obstacles through a nine-year development time, of Jonathan Lethem's 1999 eponymous novel. It concerns Lionel Essrog (played by Norton), a man with Tourette's Syndrome who gets entangled in a police investigation using the obsessive and retentive mind that comes with his condition to solve the mystery. Much of the film, especially the first half, is dominated by Lionel's jerky motions and odd repetitive outbursts, for which he continually apologizes. Strange hero, but Lethem's creation. To go with the novel's evocation of Maltese Falcon style noir flavor, Norton has recast it from modern times to the Fifties.

Leading cast members, besides Norton himself, are Willem Dafoe, Bruce Willis, Alec Baldwin, Cherry Jones, Bobby Cannavale and Gugu Mbatha-Raw. In his recasting of the novel, as Peter Debruge explains in his Variety review (https://variety.com/2019/film/reviews/motherless-brooklyn-review-1203320042/), Norton makes as much use of Robert Caro's The Power Broker, about the manipulative city planner Robert Moses, a "visionary" insensitive to minorities and the poor, as of Lethem's book. Alec Baldwn's "Moses Randolph" role represents the film's Robert Moses character, who is added into the world of the original novel.

Some of the plot line may become obscure in the alternating sources of the film. But clearly Lionel Essrog, whose nervous sensibility hovers over things in Norton's voiceover, is a handicapped man with an extra ability who's one of four orphans from Saint Vincent's Orphanage in Brooklyn saved by Frank Minna (Bruce Willis), who runs a detective agency. When Minna is offed by the Mob in the opening minutes of the movie, Lionel goes chasing. Then he learns city bosses had a hand, and want to repress his efforts.

Gugu Mbatha-Raw's character, Laura Rose, who becomes a kind of love interest for Lionel Essrog, and likewise willem Dafoe's, Paul Randolph, Moses' brother and opponent, are additional key characters in the film not in the Johathan Lethem book. The cinematography is by the Mike Leigh regular (who produced the exquisite Turner), Dick Pope. He provides a lush, classic look.

Viewers will have to decide if this mixture of novel, non-fiction book and period recasting works for them or not. For many the problem is inherent in the Lethem novel, that it's a detective story where, as the original Times reviewer Albert Mobilio said (http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/99/10/17/reviews/991017.17mobilot.html), "solving the crime is beside the point." Certainly Norton has created a rich mixture, and this is a "labour of love," "as loving as it is laborious, maybe," is how the Guardian's (https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/sep/12/motherless-brooklyn-film-review-edward-norton) Peter Bradshaw put it, writing (generally quite favorably) from Toronto. In her intro piece for the first part of the New York Film Festival for the Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/26/movies/new-york-film-festival.html) Manohla Dargis linked it with the difficult Albert Serra'S Liberté with a one-word reaction: "oof," though she complemented these two as "choices rather than just opportunistically checked boxes." Motherless Brooklyn has many reasons for wanting to be in the New York Film Festival, and for the honor of Closing Night Film, notably the personal passion, but also the persistent rootedness in New York itself through these permutations.

Motherless Brooklyn, 144 mins., debuted at Telluride Aug. 30, 2019, showing at eight other festivals including Toronto, Vancouver, Mill Valley, and New York, where it was screened at the NYFF OCT. 11, 2019 as the Closing Night film. It opens theatrically in the US Nov. 1, 2019. Current Metascore 60%.

[Chris Knipp]

[Found also in Filmleaf's Festival Coverage section for the 2019 NYFF]

MARTIN SCORSESE: THE IRISHMAN (2019)

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AL PACINO AND ROBERT DE NIRO IN THE IRISHMAN

Old song

From Martin Scorsese, who is in his late seventies, comes a major feature that is an old man's film. It's told by an old man, about old men, with old actors digitized (indifferently) to look like and play their younger selves as well. It's logical that The Irishman, about Teamsters loyalist and mob hit man Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), who became the bodyguard and then (as he tells it) the assassin of Union kingpin Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino) should have been chosen as Opening Night Film of the New York Film Festival. Scorsese is very New York, even if the film is set in Detroit. He is also a good friend of Film at Lincoln Center. And a great American director with an impressive body of work behind him.

To be honest, I am not a fan of Scorsese's feature films. I do not like them. They are unpleasant, humorless, laborious and cold. I admire his responsible passion for cinema and incestuous knowledge of it. I do like his documentaries. From Fran Lebowitz's talk about the one he made about her, I understand what a meticulous, obsessive craftsman he is in all his work. He also does have a sense of humor. See how he enjoys Fran's New York wit in Public Speaking. And there is much deadpan humor in The Irishman at the expense of the dimwitted, uncultured gangsters it depicts. Screenwriter Steven Zaillian's script based on Charles Brandt's book about Sheeran concocts numerous droll deadpan exchanges. It's a treat belatedly to see De Niro and Pacino acting together for the first time in extended scenes.

The Irishman is finely crafted and full of ideas and inspires many thoughts. But I found it monotonous and overlong - and frankly overrated. American film critics are loyal. Scorsese is an icon, and they feel obligated, I must assume, to worship it. He has made a big new film in his classic gangster vein, so it must be great. The Metascore, 94%, nonetheless is an astonishment. Review aggregating is not a science, but the makers of these scores seem to have tipped the scales. At least I hope more critics have found fault with The Irishman than that. They assign 80% ratings to some reviews that find serious fault, and supply only one negative one (Austin Chronicle, Richard Whittaker (https://www.austinchronicle.com/events/film/2019-11-08/the-irishman/)). Of course Armond White trashes the movie magnificently in National Review (https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/movie-review-the-irishman-martin-scorsese-cliched-gangster-tale/) ("Déjà Vu Gangsterism"), but that's outside the mainstream mediocre media pale.

Other Scorsese stars join De Niro and Pacino, Joe Pesci, Harvey Keitel. This is a movie of old, ugly men. Even in meticulously staged crowd scenes, there is not one young or handsome face. Women are not a factor, not remotely featured as in Jonathan Demme's delightful Married to the Mob. There are two wives often seen, in the middle distance, made up and coiffed to the kitsch nines, in expensive pants suits, taking a cigarette break on car trips - it's a thing. But they don't come forward as characters. Note also that out of loyalty to his regulars, Scorsese uses an Italo-American actor to play an Irish-American. There's a far-fetched explanation of Frank's knowledge of Italian, but his Irishness doesn't emerge - just another indication of how monochromatic this movie is.

It's a movie though, ready to serve a loyal audience with ritual storytelling and violence, providing pleasures in its $140 million worth of production values in period feel, costumes, and snazzy old cars (though I still long for a period movie whose vehicles aren't all intact and shiny). This is not just a remake. Its very relentlessness in showing Frank's steady increments of slow progress up the second-tier Teamsters and mafia outsider functionary ladders is something new. But it reflects Scorsese's old worship of toughs and wise guys and seeming admiration for their violence.

I balk at Scorsese's representing union goons and gangsters as somehow heroic and tragic. Metacritic's only critic of the film, Richard Whittiker of the Austen Chronicle (https://www.austinchronicle.com/events/film/2019-11-08/the-irishman/), seems alone in recognizing that this is not inevitable. He points out that while not "lionizing" mobsters, Scorsese still "romanticizes" them as "flawed yet still glamorous, undone by their own hubris." Whittiker - apparently alone in this - compares this indulgent touch with how the mafia is shown in "the Italian poliziotteschi," Italian Years of Lead gang films that showed them as "boors, bullies, and murderers, rather than genteel gentlemen who must occasionally get their hands dirty and do so oh-so-begrudgingly." Whittiker calls Scorsese's appeal to us to feel Sheeran's "angst" when he's being flown in to kill "his supposed friend" (Hoffa) "a demand too far."

All this reminded me of a richer 2019 New York Film Festival mafia experience, Marco Bellocchio's The Traitor/Il traditore (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4679-New-York-Film-Festival-2019&p=37925#post37925), the epic, multi-continent story of Tommaso Buscetta, the first big Italian mafia figure who chose to turn state's witness. This is a gangster tale that has perspective, both morally and historically. And I was impressed that Pierfrancesco Favino, the star of the film, who gives a career-best performance as Buscetta, strongly urged us both before and after the NYFF public screening to bear in mind that these mafiosi are small, evil, stupid men. Coppola doesn't see that, but he made a glorious American gangster epic with range and perspective. In another format, so did David Chase om the 2000-2007 HBO epic, "The Sopranos." Scprsese has not done so. Monotonously, and at overblown length, he has once again depicted Italo-Americans as gangsters, and (this time) unions as gangs of thugs.

The Irishman, 209 mins,. debuted at New York as Opening Night Film; 15 other international festivals, US theatrical release Nov. 1, wide release in many countries online by Netflix Nov. 27. Metascore 94%.

[Chris Knipp]

KLEBER MENDOÇA FILHO, JULIANO DORNELLES: BACURAU (2019)

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SONIA BRAGA (CENTER) IN BACURAU

Not just another Cannes mistake?

This is a bold film for an arthouse filmmaker to produce, and it has moments of rawness and unpredictability that are admirable. But it seems at first hand to be possibly a misstep both for the previously much subtler chronicler of social and political unease as seen in the 2011 Neighboring Sopunds (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3246-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2012&p=27538#post27538) and 2016 Aquarius (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4198-New-York-Film-Festival-2016&p=35022#post35022), Kleber Mendonça Filho, and for Cannes, which may have awarded novelty rather than mastery in giving it half of the 2019 Jury Prize. It's a movie that excites and then delivers a series of scenes of growing disappointment and repugnance. But I'm not saying it won't surprise and awe you.

Let's begin with where we are, which is the Brazilian boonies. Bacurau was filmed in the village of Barra in the municipality of Parelhas and in the rural area of the municipality of Acari, at the Sertão do Seridó region, in Rio Grande do Norte. Mendonça Filho shares credit this time with his regular production designer Juliano Dornelles. (They both came originally from this general region, is one reason.) The Wikipedia article introduces it as a "Brazilian weird western film" and its rural shootout, its rush of horses, its showdowns, and its truckload of coffins may indeed befit that peculiar genre.

How are we to take the action? In his Hollywood Reporter (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/bacurau-review-1211067) review, Stephen Dalton surprises me by asserting that this third narrative feature "strikes a lighter tone" than the first two and combines "sunny small-town comedy with a fable-like plot" along with "a sprinkle of magic realism." This seems an absurdly watered down description, but the film is many things to many people because it embodies many things. In an interview (https://nofilmschool.com/bacurau-movie-interview) with Emily Buder, Mendoça Filho himself describes it as a mix of "spaghetti Western, '70's sci-fi, social realist drama, and political satire."

The film feels real enough to be horrifying, but it enters risky sci-fi horror territory with its futuristic human hunting game topic, which has been mostly an area for schlock. (See a list of ten (https://www.fandom.com/articles/10-great-humans-hunting-humans-movies), with the 1932 Most Dangerous Game given as the trailblazer.) However, we have to acknowledge that Mendonca Filho is smart enough to know all this and may want to use the schlock format for his own sophisticated purpose. But despite Mike D'Angelo's conclusion on Letterboxd (https://letterboxd.com/gemko/film/bacurau/) that the film may "require a second viewing following extensive reading" due to its rootedness in Brazilian politics, the focus on American imperialists and brutal outside exploiters from the extreme right isn't all that hard to grasp.

Bacurau starts off as if it means to be an entertainment, with conventional opening credits and a pleasant pop song celebrating Brazil, but that is surely ironic. A big water truck rides in rough, arriving with three bullet holes spewing agua that its driver hasn't noticed. (The road was bumpy.) There is a stupid, corrupt politician, mayor Tony Jr. (Thardelly Lima), who is complicit in robbing local areas of their water supply and who gets a final comeuppance. The focus is on Bacurau, a little semi-abandoned town in the north whose 94-year-old matriarch Carmelita dies and gets a funeral observation in which the whole town participates, though apart the ceremony's strange magic realist aspects Sonia Braga, as a local doctor called Domingas, stages a loud scene because she insists that the deceased woman was evil. Then, with some, including Carmelita's granddaughter Teresa (Barbara Colen), returned to town from elsewhere, along with the handsome Pacote (Tomaso Aquinas) and a useful psychotic local killer and protector of water rights called Lunga (Silvero Pereira), hostile outsiders arrive, though as yet unseen. Their forerunners are a colorfully costumed Brazilian couple in clownish spandex suits on dustrider motorcycles who come through the town. When they're gone, it's discovered seven people have been shot.

They were an advance crew for a gang of mostly American white people headed by Michael (Udo Kier), whose awkward, combative, and finally murderous conference we visit. This is a bad scene in more ways than one: it's not only sinister and racist, but clumsy, destroying the air of menace and unpredictability maintained in the depiction of Bacurau scenes. But we learn the cell phone coverage of the town has been blocked, it is somehow not included on maps, and communications between northern and southern Brazil are temporarily suspended, so the setting is perfect for this ugly group to do what they've come for, kill locals for sport using collectible automatic weapons. Overhead there is a flying-saucer-shaped drone rumbling in English. How it functions isn't quite clear, but symbolically it refers to American manipulation from higher up. The way the rural area is being choked off requires no mention of Brazil's new right wing strong man Jair Bolsonaro and the Amazonian rain forest.

"They're not going to kill a kid," I said as a group of local children gather, the most normal, best dressed Bacurauans on screen so far, and play a game of dare as night falls to tease us, one by one creeping as far as they can into the dark. But sure enough, a kid gets shot. At least even the bad guys agree this was foul play. And the bad guys get theirs, just as in a good Western. But after a while, the action seems almost too symbolically satisfying - though this is achieved with good staging and classic visual flair through zooms, split diopter effects, Cinemascope, and other old fashioned techniques.

I'm not the only one finding Bacurau intriguing yet fearing that it winds up being confused and all over the place. It would work much better if it were dramatically tighter. Peter DeBruge in Variety (https://variety.com/2019/film/reviews/bacarau-review-1203215347/) notes that the filmakers "haven’t figured out how to create that hair-bristling anticipation of imminent violence that comes so naturally to someone like Quentin Tarantino." Mere vague unexpectedness isn't scary, and all the danger and killing aren't wielded as effectively as they should be to hold our attention and manipulate our emotions.

Bacurau, 131 mins., debuted in Competition at Cannes, where it tied for the Jury Prize with the French film, Ladj Ly's Les misérables. Many other awards and at least 31 other festivals including the NYFF. Metascore 74%. AlloCiné press rating 3.8, with a rare rave from Cahiers du Cinéma. US theatrical distribution by Kino Lorber began Mar. 13, 2020, but due to general theater closings caused by the coronavirus pandemic the company launched (https://www.cinematropical.com/cinema-tropical/brazilian-hit-bacurau-is-now-available-in-a-virtual-theatrical-streaming) a "virtual theatrical exhibition initiative," Kino Marquee, with this film from Mar. 19.

[Chris Knipp]

BERTRAND BONELLO: ZOMBI CHILD (2019)

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LOUISE LABEQUE AND WISLANDA LOUIMAT (FAR RIGHT) IN ZOMBI CHILD

Voodoo comes to Paris

If you said Betrand Bonello's films are beautiful, sexy, and provocative you would not be wrong. This new, officially fifth feature (I've still not seen his first one, the 2008 On War), has those elements. Its imagery, full of deep contrasts, can only be described as lush. Its intertwined narrative is puzzling as well.

We're taken right away to Haiti and plunged into the world of voodoo and zombies. Ground powder from the cut-up body of a blowfish is dropped, unbeknownst to him, into a man's shoes. Walking in them, he soon falters and falls. Later, he's aroused from death to the half-alive state of a zombie - and pushed into a numb, helpless labor in the hell of a a sugar cane field with other victims of the same cruel enchantment. In time however something arouses him to enough life to escape.

Some of the Haitian sequences center around a moonlit cemetery whose large tombs seem airy and haunted and astonishingly grand for what we know as the poorest country in the hemisphere.

From the thumping, vibrant ceremonies of Haitian voodoo (Bonello's command of music is always fresh and astonishing as his images are lush and beautiful) we're rushed to the grandest private boarding school you've ever seen, housed in vast stone government buildings. This noble domaine was established by Napoleon Bonaparte on the edge of Paris, in Saint Denis, for the education of children of recipients of the Legion of Honor. It really exists, and attendance there is still on an honorary basis.

Zombi Child oscillates between girls in this very posh Parisian school and people in Haiti. But these are not wholly separate places. A story about a Haitian grandfather (the zombie victim, granted a second life) and his descendants links the two strains. It turns out one of those descendants, Mélissa (Wislanda Louimat), is a new student at the school. A white schoolgirl, Fanny (the dreamy Louise Labeque), who's Mélissa's friend and sponsors her for membership in a sorority, while increasingly possessed by a perhaps imaginary love, also bridges the gap. For the sorority admission Mélissa confesses the family secret of a zombi and voodoo knowledge in her background.

Thierry Méranger of Cahiers du Cinéma calls this screenplay "eminently Bonellian in its double orientation," its "interplay of echoes" between "radically different" worlds designed to "stimulate the spectator's reflection." Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times (https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2020-02-19/zombi-child-review-bertrand-bonello) bluntly declares that it's meant to "interrogate the bitter legacy of French colonialism."

But how so? And if so, this could be a tricky proposition. On NPR (https://www.npr.org/2020/01/23/798864658/zombi-child-when-the-real-horror-is-colonialism) Andrew Lapin was partly admiring of how "cerebral and slippery" the film is, but suggests that since voodoo and zombies are all most white people "already know" about Haitian culture, a director coming from Haiti's former colonizing nation (France) must do "a lot of legwork to use these elements successfully in a "fable" where "the real horror is colonialism." The posh school comes from Napoleon, who coopted the French revolution, and class scenes include a history professor lecturing on this and how "liberalism obscures liberty."

I'm more inclined to agree with Glenn Kenny's more delicately worded praise in his short New York Times review (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/23/movies/zombi-child-review.html) of the film where he asserts that the movie’s inconclusiveness is the source of its appeal. Zombi Child, he says, is fueled by insinuation and fascination. The fascination, the potent power, of the occult, that's what Haiti has that the first wold lacks.

One moment made me authentically jump, but Bonello isn't offering a conventional horror movie. He's more interested in making his hints of voodoo's power and attraction, even for the white lovelorn schoolgirl, seem as convincing as his voodoo ceremonies, both abroad and back in Haiti, feel thoroughly attractive, or scary, and real. These are some of the best voodoo scenes in a movie. This still may seem like a concoction to you. Its enchantments were more those of the luxuriant imagery, the flowing camerawork, the delicious use of moon- and candle-light, the beautiful people, of whatever color. This is world-class filmmaking even if it's not Bonello's best work.

Bonello stages things, gets his actors to live them completely, then steps back and lets it happen. Glenn Kenny says his "hallmark" is his "dreamy detachment." My first look at that was the 2011 House of Tolerence (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3165-Paris-movie-report-%28oct-2011%29&p=26924#post26924) (L'Apollonide - mémoires de la maison close), which I saw in Paris, a languorous immersion in a turn-of-the-century Parisian brothel, intoxicating, sexy, slightly repugnant. Next came his most ambitious project, Saint Laurent(2014), focused on a very druggy period in the designer's career and a final moment of decline. He has said this became a kind of matching panel for Apollonide. (You'll find that in an excellent long Q&A (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsfj9vOZ0HY) after the NYFF screening.) Saint Laurent's "forbidden" (unsanctioned) picture of the fashion house is as intoxicating, vibrant, and cloying as the maison close, with its opium, champagne, disfigurement and syphilis. No one can say Gaspard Ulliel wasn't totally immersed in his performance. Nocturama (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4282-Rendez-Vouz-with-French-Cinema-2017&p=35290#post35290) (2016) takes a group of wild young people who stage a terrorist act in Paris, who seem to run aground in a posh department store at the end, Bonello again getting intense action going and then seeming to leave it to its own devices, foundering. Those who saw the result as "shallow cynicism" (like A.O. Scott) missed how exciting and powerful it was. (Mike D'Angelo didn't (https://letterboxd.com/gemko/film/nocturama/2/).)

Zombi Child is exciting at times too. But despite its gorgeous imagery and sound, its back and forth dialectic seems more artificial and calculating than Bonello's previous films.

Zombi Child, mins., debuted at Cannes Directors Fortnight May 2019, included in 13 other international festivals, including Toronto and New York. It released theatrically in France Jun. 12, 2020 (AlloCiné press rating 3.7m 75%) and in the US Jan. 24, 2020 (Metascore 75%). Now available in "virtual theater" through Film Movement (Mar. 23-May 1, 2020), which benefits the theater of your choice. https://www.filmmovement.com/zombi-child

[Chris Knipp]

OLIVIER ASSAYAS: WASP NETWORK (2019)

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GAEL GARCÍA BERNAL AND PENELOPE CRUZ IN WASP NETWORK

Spies nearby

The is a movie about the Cuban spies sent to Miami to combat anti-Castro Cuban-American groups, and their capture. They are part of what the Cubans called La Red Avispa (The Wasp Network). The screenplay is based on the book The Last Soldiers of the Cold War by Fernando Morais, and it's mainly from the Wasp, Cuban point of view, not the FBI point of view. Unlike the disastrous Seberg, no time is spent looking over the shoulders of G-men, nor will this story give any pleasure to right wing Miami Cubans. But it won't delight leftists much either, or champions of the Cuban Five. The issues of why one might leave Cuba and why one might choose not to are treated only superficially. There's no analysis of US behavior toward Cuba since the revolution.

On the plus side, the film is made in an impeccable, clear style (with one big qualification: see below) and there's an excellent cast with as leads Edgar Ramirez (of the director's riveting miniseries Carlos (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?2875-New-York-Film-Festival-2010&p=25088#post25088)), Penelope Cruz (Almodóvar's muse), Walter Moura (Escobar in the Netflix series "Narcos"), Ana de Armas (an up-and-comer who's actually Cuban but lives in Hollywood now), and Gael García Bernal (he of course is Mexican, Moura is Brazilian originally, and Ramirez is Venezuelan). They're all terrific, and other cast members shine. Even a baby is so amazing I thought she must be the actress' real baby.

Nothing really makes sense for the first hour. We don't get the whole picture, and we never do, really. We focus on René Gonzalez (Édgar Ramirez), a Puerto Rican-born pilot living in Castro’s Cuba and fed up with it, or the brutal embargo against Castro by the US and resulting shortage of essential goods and services, who suddenly steals a little plane and flies it to Miami, leaving behind his wife Olga and young daughter. Olga is deeply shocked and disappointed to learn her husband is a traitor. He has left without a word to her. Born in Chicago, he was already a US citizen and adapts easily, celebrated as an anti-Castro figure.

We also follow another guy, Juan Pablo Roque (Wagner Moura) who escapes Havana by donning snorkel gear and swimming to Guantanamo, not only a physical challenge but riskier because prison guards almost shoot him dead when he comes out of the water. Roque and Gonzalez are a big contrast. René is modest, content with small earnings, and starts flying for a group that rescues Cuban defectors arriving by water. Juan Pablo immediately woos and marries the beautiful Ana Marguerita Martinez (Ana de Armas) and, as revealed by an $8,000 Rolex, is earning big bucks but won't tell Ana how. This was the first time I'd seen Wagner Moura, an impressively sly actor who as Glenn Kenny says, "can shift from boyish to sinister in the space of a single frame" - and that's not the half of it.

This is interesting enough to keep us occupied but it's not till an hour into the movie, with a flashback to four years earlier focused on Cuban Gerardo Hernandez (Garcia Bernal) that we start to understand something of what is going on. We learn about the CANF and Luis Posada Carriles (Tony Plana), and a young man's single-handed effort to plant enough bombs to undermine the entire Cuban tourist business. This late-arriving exposition for me had a deflating and confounding effect. There were still many good scenes to follow. Unfortunately despite them, and the good acting, there is so much exposition it's hard to get close to any of the individual characters or relationships.

At the moment I'm an enthusiastic follower of the FX series "The Americans." It teaches us that in matters of espionage, it's good to have a firm notion of where the main characters - in that case "Phillip" and "Elizabeth" - place their real, virtually unshakable loyalties, before moving on. Another example of which I'm a longtime fan is the spy novels of John le Carré. You may not be sure who's loyal, but you always know who's working for British Intelligence, even in the latest novel the remarkable le Carré, who at 88, has just produced (Agent Running in the Field - for which he's performed the audio version, and no one does that better). To be too long unclear about these basics in spydom is fatal.

It's said that Assayas had a lot of trouble making Wasp Network, which has scenes shot in Cuba in it. At least the effort doesn't show. We get a glimpse of Clinton (this happened when he was President) and Fidel, who, in a hushed voice, emphatically, asserts his confidence that the Red Avispa was doing the right thing and that the Americans should see that. Whose side do you take?

Wasp Network, 123 mins., debuted at Venice and showed at about ten other international festivals including Toronto, New York, London and Rio. It was released on Netflix Jun. 19, 2019, and that applies to many countries (13 listed on IMDb). Metascore 54%.

[Chris Knipp]

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RALPH FIENNES AND STANLEY TUCCI IN CONCLAVE

EDWARD BERGER: CONCLAVE (2024)

A thriller about electing a new pope

Ralph Fiennes' best film role, some say, is this one about a Cardinal who becomes the mediator at the Roman curia when a new Pope must be chosen. Edward Berger, the German director of latg year's Best-Foreign Oscar winning All Quiet on the Western Front (2022), has helmed this tightly-woven, thought-provoking drama about the papal"conclave," the locked-in secret meeting of the College of Cardinals to elect a new pope from their number. The movie, lush and quietly intense, is based on the Robert Harris novel which Guardian reviewer Ian Sansom, apologizing for the cliche, called "unputdownable." That quality of holding our rapt attention has been preserved.

The base line of the story is the slow, ceremonial procedure, a series of votes held in the grandest of surroundings (the Sistine Chapel is their meeting room), speaking ritual words of Latin or Italian (though English and Spanish are heard at key points), dressed in their red outfits, wearing their tall hats - and roiling with conflicting emotions, hostilities, suspicions, and rivalries. This is after all one of the most powerful and visible positions on earth, like being half an emperor, half a god.

It's basically a simple process, just a series of votes on handwritten paper ballots, placed in a large urn and counted, then burned, with a smoke signal to the faithful outside, black smoke for every inconclusive vote, white smoke for that celebratory moment when the time to say "Habemus papam" arrives. This dry process is anything but. The leaders shift with every vote. And between those votes are many discussions, rumors, and worse. This movie, which unfolds very like a play, a very glittering one, proceeds through a serious of bombshells, which each time bring about a total about-face.

Who deserves to win, and who will? And who wants it? Cardinal Lawrence, though highly visible, strongly professes not to. He is troubled by a crisis of faith, not in God but in the Church, and claims a need to retire from the office of Dean of the College of Cardinals and join an order far away from the Vatican. Is this false modesty?

Rivalries quickly emerge that are more clear. The tall, rather shrill Canadian, Cardinal Tremblay (John Lithgow, studiously unappealing) wants it; but can he be trusted? Does he deserve it? We will hear more about that. Cardinal Lawrence wants Cardinal Bellini (a vociferous, nicely contained Stanley Tucci) to take the job. Lawrence makes lovely little speech, much needed in our "awakened" era, about questioning: "If there was only certainty and no doubt," he says, "there would be no mystery and therefore no need for faith. Let us pray that God grants us a pope who doubts." Is it a surprise that with this plea for openness and liberalism at its center, the film critic for Catholic Review (https://catholicreview.org/movie-review-conclave/) finds Conclave not to his liking and warns the faithful against it?

But there are other elements at play in the voting. Perhaps it's time for a non-white, African Supreme Pontiff, and Cardinal Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati) rapidly emerges as their favored representative. But there is also a conservative, Italian element led by a menacing éminence grise, Cardinal Tedesco (veteran Italian actor Sergio Castellitto). If Tedesco wins, Bellini warns Lawrence, his papacy will shift rapidly into reverse, erasing all the progress of the last forty years. The most conservative elements will take power.

There are some rumors and revelations. There are intense discussions between Cardinals Lawrence and Bellini. Lawrence tries to maintain a neutral stance. Fat chance. There is too much at stake. And there's a dramatic wild card, an unexpected newcomer, Cardinal Benitez (Carlos Diehz), Cardinal of Kabul of all places, who makes his mysterious presence felt. Benitez, weathered veteran of hotspots, now of Afghanistan, produces documentation that the late pontiff appointed him to the cardinalate in pectore, keeping the matter secret. He has the voice of one who has fought in today's wars, and that earns notice.

The surprises are good right up to the end. And finally a woman, in the person of Sister Agnes, a nun who was very close to the deceased Pope (a brilliant but sadly underused Isabella Rossellini, who doesn't get to speak a word of Italian), gets a wee small voice with a revelatory speech, followed by a mocking curtsey. Her sole presence is a reminder that in the Catholic Church, women still don't matter much.

Peter Straughan's screenplay from Robert Harris' novel creates the rumble of a conflict among multitudes, yet when you think about it all at the end, Cardinal Lawrence (Fiennes) tends to dominate every scene as if Conclave is somehow all about him and the rest is decoration, spice - though it's spice for our thoughts, if we have them, which hopefully we do.

There are distractions. The images seem murky at times. A climactic speech is in Spanish: do the cardinals all know it too, as well as Latin, Italian, and English? Knowing that filming is strictly forbidden at the Vatican, we are constantly distracted by wondering how they made all these lavish settings up at Cinecittà. Volker Bertelmann, who also did the score for All Quiet on the Western Front, does something more subtle here. Cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine and costume designer Lisy Christ do fine work, though everything is so conventional, it may not be noticed at awards time.

Quibbles aside, this is a handsome and well-crafted movie with a first-rate cast and a stunning look. It's one of the year's best and an Oscar contender. Try to see it in a movie theater - hopefully, unlike me, not one seat away from someone munching popcorn and slurping Coka all the way through.

Conclave, 120 mins.,debuted at Telluride Aug. 30, 2024, showing also at Toronto, San Sebastien, Vancouver and Zurich, followed by a dozen other festivals and releases in numerous countries, in the US Oct. 25, 2024.

[Chris Knipp]

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FLORENCE PUGH, ANDREW GARFIELD IN WE LIVE IN TIME

JOHN CROWLEY: WE LIVE IN TIME (2024)

Much ado

Andrew Garfield returns to the Irish director of his 2007 feature debut Boy A. The new film was for this new film written by Nick Payne, whose plays have been successful on the West End and Broadway. Not so much luck in his three produced screenplays, the first one of which got a Metascore of sixty, the next two in the fifties. The flaw this time is not in the excellent actors, Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield.

I'd have quite liked watching a movie with Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield together. She's only 28 and alive wire. He's 41 and has mellowed. He used to be boyish butnow he's maturely boyish. There is great chemistry here, and in an on screen duo publicity appearance they seem to be having a very good time together. I was a fan of Andrew from Boy A to Spider Man to The Social Network HacksawRidge and I've seen them all, except maybe Breathe. He does seem to have a propensity for weepies sometimes, and that's what We LIve in Time certainly is. Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle (https://datebook.sfchronicle.com/movies-tv/we-live-in-time-review-19836718), who tends to be blunt, calls it "death porn." And he warns you not to see it. I can't recommend it, and need not, since it seems to be doing very well for an indie film at the box office.

The film and Payne's screenplay go for the big noisy moments. No time for lying down here, except for sex, but no time for that either: only the aftermath is shown. Almut (Pugh) even has a baby standing up, and when she's got stage 3 uterine cancer, she goes jogging in Italy and enters and appears to win a high-pressure, high-speed culinary competition. The laurels go not to the most exquisite taste here, but to who can set up complicated fancy-cuisine dishes fastest. So she's a chef. But she and her assistant both address each other as "chef." Very democratic. The chopped-up chronology causes pregnancy and the onset of cancer to get confused, which is rather awkward, don't you know? When Almut bends over with pain at the restaurant we're not sure if it's labor pains or cancer coming on. Awkward.

Whether Almut is very brave, or selfish, or foolhardy (in a selfish way) is highly debatable. But this. is mainly a woman's picture. We get a look at Almut's profession, though she's barely ever in the kitchen because of the culinary competition; but all we get to know is that Tobias is recently divorced and spends a lot of his time with Almut, and when he shows up to be an executive for a cereal company is hard to say.

The early sequences play around with chronology, getting the choppy-editing treatment. The couple (Almut and Tobias, as Garfield is called) are dealing with her disease, then they meet; that kind of thing. (The meet cute is violent: she hits him with her car.) The filmmakers don't care where we are (we are in time, though, remember!), so long as it's a high adrenalin moment. Perhaps the most memorable scene is one in which Tobias explains, with terribly awkward hesitations (British ones, since he's in his Brit mode), that the fact that she's 34 and can find nothing interesting about having a baby will be quite a sticking point for him because , well, he's not sure, but I probably does want to have one. She goes off on him and the F-words hit the fan; he walks out.

But we've already seen them tenderly together as she learns about a recurrence of cancer so serous that they cannot operate before a course of chemo. The scene about having a. baby is a good scene, or would be in a film that presented it in a meaningful context. Here there is no context, only big scenes, with yelling, crying, and mumbling. (Not much time, happily, for smartphones.)

This becomes a how-to film for situations under stress. How to have a baby in the loo of a convenience store when the door jams. How to approach the end of life when you don't think you've done enough (though you're a chef at a fancy restaurant in your early thirties and you've got a nice husband and a kid). How to take part in a European culinary competition when the cancer and the chemo are making you throw up.

At one point Almut and Tobias are considering how to break it to the kid that she may very well by dying, and she thinks of getting a dog. You don't really want to kill a dog?? he says. No, but we could just get a very old one, she replies. Never heard that one before.

So there you are. Every scene of this film matters intensely, and when you add them all up, altogether nothing really matters at all. The film doesn't take the time to create a convincing, relatable context. The actors, as good actors do, play their individual scenes very well. Garfield is his sensitive, soulful self, with a new level of maturity and confidence. Pugh is a firecracker. She's fascinating tow watch. She's a terrific actress. People remember from LIttle Women and Midsommar but I remember her William Oldroyd's sui generis 2016 [[/URL], which shows how dangerous and powerful she can be. That makes you realize We Live in Time is too busy being a weepie to make Almut a well rounded character.

Andrew Garfidld has a weakness for weepies sometimes, as with the creepy Never Let Me Go. I've liked it when he has taken on something challenging, like Red Rider or Hacksaw Ridge or even Scorsese's handsomely made slog, [URL="https://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=3544"]Silence (https://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=3612), for which he and the other principals lost dangerous amounts of weight. He is always worth watching. But sometimes what he's in, not so much.

IndieWire's (https://www.indiewire.com/criticism/movies/we-live-in-time-review-tiff-1235044957/) David Ehrlich, who loves this film, explains that it " futzes with time in order to shrink the distance between happiness and heartache," which enables it to be, in a grand genre he links with Brief Encounter, a " heaving sob of a movie." That explains what the film is doing pretty well. But when I feel toyed with, I can't be convinced.

We Live in Time, 108 mins., debuted Sept. 7,m 2024 at TIFF; also San Sebastien, Rio, and BFI. US theatrical release Oct. 18. Watched at Cinemark Century Hilltop 16, Richmond, Calif., Oct. 29, 2024. Metacritic rating: 58%.

[Chris Knipp]

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JULIO RUBIO: THE TRUE STORY OF TAMARA DE LEMPICKA AND THE ART OF SURVIVAL (2024)

A plea for greater recognition of the art of Tamara de Lempicka

The first few minutes of this film include the announcement that Tamara de Lempicka is one of the great European portraitists of the twentieth century, and that she's underappreciated. A Christie's auction sale is shown in which a painting by de Lamprika goes for $5 million, a sign that things are turning around. She's also described as a representative of women's liberation or what is now called "the female gaze" (very female or not-so-female, depending how you see her bisexual, lesbian point of view). A big exhibition of her work is currently showing in San Francisco at the De Young Museum. This year a Broadway musical was mounted celebrating her. This film does everything it can to promote the importance of the art of Tamara de Lempicka, an effort of benefit to experts, dealers, and museum directors who want the artist's work to become more admired. Many talking heads, often people with a stake in the desired success come forward, and the film showers us with images of the paintings, often multiplied over and over in a single frame or in tricky arrangements. But while as a standard documentary biopic, this haas some interest, the claim that this is a great, neglected artist fails to convince.

Shes being brought out again. But there are reasons why her work doesn't appeal and has not been in the foreground of museum art. A Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2004/may/15/art) piece by Fiona MacCarthy 20 years ago to introduce a show, "Tamara de Lempicka: Art Deco Icon" at the Royal Academy, clarifies. MacCarthy makes a bold declaration. She starts out by saying "In life Tamara de Lempicka was a Left Bank bisexual with an appetite for bohemian living. Her work, though, portrays the dubious glamour and discipline of fascism." MacCarthy notes the artist's style of combining traditional portraiture "astutely" with "advertising techniques," as well as "photographic lighting," and backgrounds with "vistas of the tower architecture of great cities." The film has no inkling of this. It's a revelation.

MacCarthy doesn't explain what she means by "advertising techniques" or "photographic lighting" and her piece is a bit slick and sensational (like De Lempicka herself), the way she says the artist "lived and worked" on the "bisexual fringes of a society" where "there were no rules beyond the demands of style and entertainment." But we get it: it's hard to pin this artist down. She made up her name, and when she was born, and it's not clear if her birthplace was Moscow or Warsaw, as MacCarthy says. She married an aristocratic Polish lawyer in Russia when very young. They escaped and went to live in Paris, and there she remained for the best of her art career, till, being part Jewish, she had to flee to America with World War II.

Her poverty in Paris, and the idleness of her aristocratic husband, motivated Tamara, who had shown talent very early, to work hard to succeed as an artist. She studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière (and admired Bronzino) and studied with the artist Maurice Denis, but was most influenced by the well known, if second rank, André Lhote and a toned-down cubism to which she added sensualism and provocation, lots of female nudity and women stroking each other's thighs. (The film, in its breathless admiration and chatty aanecdotal history, doesn't go much into the style, or describe it.) Provocative style plus hard work and self promotion led to exhibitions in small galleries for de Lempicka by 1923, then inclusion in the Salon des Femmes Artistes Modernes in Paris (thereby takng a stand as a woman artrist), and in 1925 a debut solo show in Milan. (This early career is not described in the film.)

Then came rich patrons like Pierre Boucard, the creator of Lacteol, the indegeston cure, who bought a lesbian nude painting called Myrto, Two Women on a Couch (https://fineartconnoisseur.com/2017/12/have-you-seen-this-painting/), long stolen but still remembered. Boucard gave De Lempicka a lucrative contract that allowed her to buy a nice house on the Left Bank and have it decorated in the deco style. (Nothing about all this in the film.)

De Lempicka's paintings are like very graphic, very stylish advertising art or commercial illustration. (This is me talking, of course, not the film.) f They have a slickness that makes them feel shallow. They can be dazzling, and cloying and also glitteringly ugly, often frightening. (There is not much about individual paintings in the film.)

And her work can be very repetitious, as the film's constant background of reproductions often vividly shows. The nudes, though a little generic, are the strongest and most enthusiastic works. Other paintings, like Lempicka's portrait of Grand Duke Gavriil Constantinovich, (https://www.russianlegitimist.org/grand-duke-gavriil-constantinovich) with its elaborate dazzlingly red military uniform, are like flashy designs for theatrical costumes (though one might long for the delicacy of a true theatrical designer of the period like Leon Bakst.)

While de Lempicka's paintings are dramatic, assured, and accomplished, what they are not is work that can be considered artistically significant. Fiona MacCarthy also points out in her Guardian piece that it after all isin't altogether consistent, since it sometimes gives way to "mawkishness: cubism or kitsch." The portraits follow the European aristocracy and, she says, are allied to the "call to order" movement, the return to monumental realism in European art; Her art "exudes the dark and dubious glamour of authoritarian discipline." This explains the unease it produces: it has the confident glow of fascism.

Wheh De Lempicka remarried up in 1933 to the very rich land owner Baron Raoul Kuffner, she lost the success-drive poverty had given her. (This is not acknowledged in the film.) She and the Baron escaped fascism in the USA and then Mexico. She lived and acted grandly, swooshing to a Houston art supplies store in a limo in a wave of cigarette smoke and self importance, as her folksy-voiced 1973-74 Houston studio assistant Nancy Couch, the most touching speaker, who reports a lesbian love affair, tells us in the film, but, though the film never overtly acknowledges this, the art work she was doing in America just didn't cut it any more. She shone in that deco Paris moment. After that she never found a niche.

The documentary, The Story of Tamara de Lempicka and the Art of Survival is promotional and uncritical. It features Matt Gould, composer of a musical, Lempica, who hypes her as a heroine of the disadvantaged. Roxana Valesqez hypes her as simply the best modern art has to offer. Then her granddaughter and great-granddaughter come in to provide more personal details, such as that her father disappeared from her well off family when she was quite young and that she had to compete for attention with older siblings. Furio Rinaldi, a curator of the De Lempicka retrospective at theDe Young Museum in San Francisco, speaks repeatedly. He says that even contemporaries who didn't like her work appreciated the "strength and power" of Tamara de Lempicka's draftsmanship. This is true: it's as confident as a "how to draw" book. Underneath the boldness of the images there is a sturdy academic conventionality in the drawing. Perhaps her great flaw is that she never transcended the drawing.

Paula Birnbaum of the University of San Francisco and Roland Weinstein, a gallerist and collector, enter to say de Lempicka would have been better treated if she had been a man and therefore (despite her well-off background and wealthy patrons) deserves more credit as a woman striving against adversity. Carson Kreitzzer, creator of the Lempicka musical, enthuses about how driven the artist was. These speakers help to promote Lempicka to the gernal pubic for events like the San Francisco exhibition. Scott Nichel, head of auctions at Sotheby's, on the other hand can be seen as promoting her as an item whose market value is rising, and presents her as the epitome of glamor, since she was compared to Greta Garbo and Bette Davis, a link in which she herself took pride.

This film has more information about de Lempicka's life in America, and inadvertently shown that she was not the artist she once was after leaving Paris, and the valuation of her work went down. Rowland Weinstein is happy to report that a painting of hers has now sold at auction for $20 million. Georgia O'Keefe is the only woman artist whose work has sold for more. And now being a time of "reckoning," as one talkng head says, when woke thinking requires affirmative action for art by women or people of color, there's another reason to emphasize Tamara de Lempicka.

A need to promote fills nearly every frame of this documentary, which never presents critical views of the work or speculates as to why it has been less appreciated than they would like. Maybe it's because the extra value they seek in the work just isn't there. Of course tastes change. But the comparison of a de Lempicka to Vermeer's Girl with Pearl Earring is a real howler.

The True Story of Tamara de Lempicka and the Art of Survival, 195 mins., premiered at the Mill Valley Film Festival Oct. 11, 2024. Screening Oct. 25 at Roxie Theater with Julie Rubio present.

[Chris Knipp]

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BEN STURGULEWSKI: CHAMPIONS O THE GOLDEN VALLEY (2024)

An idyllic wintry world that abruptly ended

This seems to be another of those documentaries that takes a left turn. It relies on an element of surprise, so it's best not to reveal what happens but if you know it's about Afghanistan in recent years, you'll already have an idea. And right at the outset you meet "Alishah the Coach," who is wreathed in shadows and in Germany, where he has become Alishah the Refugee.

Most of the film is about the Afghan Ski Challenge, which went on for nine years, and takes place in Bamyan, a region up in the mountains. The film footage of Bamyan is about innocence and happiness. The winning skier for several years is Mujtaba. He started his life herding sheep. His father talks about what a good son he is. Mujtaba's rival is Hussain Ali, who is from another ethnic group. Actually one is shia and the other Sunna Muslim. And when the kids are practicing, they hear the call to prayer and tell the cameraman they must go.

This is the most rudimentary of environments. Pleasures here are simple and strong. There's not much to do but herd animals and ski. The small boys make wooden skis. There are girls who ski too, though some of the women are not allowed to be filmed. (Later, it will turn out that most of the skiing girls have been able to leave the country, but they boys, including Hussain Ali and Mujtaba, have not, and after the regime change, when they try to restore skiiing competition, they choose not to compete but to focus on training the boys to ski.)

The Afghan Ski Challenge is a little like a marathon. There is a girls and wooden skis event, and a men's event. The competitors all rush out together in a crowd, climbing up the long slope. When they get to the top they ski down as fast as they can. Climbing up is part of the competition. The two leads climb up the slope every day to increase their strength.

It's hard to convey the purity of spirit of these Afghan Bamyan skiers, the smiles, the hi jinks: it's a joy to watch them. And that's why when this comes crashing down it's such a shock and a sadness. Collective celebration has changed to individual grieving. This is expressed by the later focus, in a passage most of which is filmed in black and white, on Alishah the Refugee in Saxony, with his wife and small kids, telling what happened and how they got out in the Kabul evacuation.

That is an event that could not be filmed. You will not find it in any documentary. The last we see of Bamyan is the Afthan Ski Challenge, with the two top competitors joyously embracing each other and the small boys laughing and playing. And let's not forget Sha Agha, the Wild Card, who for a while seems to be winning. The girls' competition in this event is an important statement to themselves and others in the society - even if it is only temporary. Now the truth is out: women can ski too.

What happened is not such a surprise, as we have been prepared in at the outset of the film for by the well-known story of 2001, when the Taliban defaced the 1500-year-old cave statues of the Buddha, which are in Banyan, where most of this story takes place. Six months later came the September 11th attacks in the US, and a month later, the Bush administration's initiation of the totally unwarranted and destructive US war on Afghanistan.

At the end of the film, Alishah and his family go to Fichtelberg 20 km from the refugee camp in Saxony, a first visit to a ski resort. Like Alishah, we're left with vivid memories of Bamyan skiing, seeming almost like a dream. It's a trip, man.

Champions of the Golden Valley, a film whose editing pointedly, perhaps sometimes too pointedly, illustrates its many surprises, is brightened by the presence of two Two scores, Joaquin Gomez's for the Afghanistan segments and Cyrus Reynold's for the Germany ones.

Champions of the Golden Valley, 81 mins., debuted at Tribeca, also showing at DC/DOX and Woods Hole, Austin, Aspen, Newport Beach, Lunenburg. Audience Choice wqrd at the Heartland Festival, Indianapolis.

[Chris Knipp]

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ROONEY MARA AND RAÚL BRIONES IN LA COCINA

ALONSO RUIZPALACIOS: LA COCINA (2024)

Ruizpalacios updates and expands "The Kitchen"

Before we talk about Ruizpalacios' fourth feature, La Cocina, there's a third onewe need to catch up on. It's Una película de policias/A Cop Movie (2021), which won the Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution at the Berlinale, and is showing to all and sundry on Netflix. Cop[ Movie is an inventive hybrid of documentary and fiction. Two actors play Teresa and Montoya, a real couple who are also road partners in the Mexico City police. But we don't know they're actors. It seems like a documentary, until they turn to the camera midway and start telling the director what preparing for their roles has felt like. Later, the real cop couple appears to address the camera. In the end you feel disoriented - and also disillusioned, not by Ruizpalacios' "engaño," but at the picture he has provided through these methods of what it's like being a Mexican cop. In A Cop Movie Alonso (as the actors call him) has been "dazzling and playful" (the words of Jonathan Romney, (https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/reviews/cop-movie-alonso-ruizpalacios-mexico-city-police-docudrama) in BFI)), in breaking down the third wall again as he did in his first two films (real favorites of mine), Gueros (https://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=3229) and Museo (https://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=4097).

It would be fine with me if Ruizpalacios went on making variations Gueros and Museo forever. I admit I somewhat miss the intimacy and wit of those earlier films in what he has been doing since. But that is not what he needed to do. He has taken on a larger subject - the public welfare, and a more collective one, in bringing the world of the police to life.

Movie number four moves outward too. La Cocina takes on a big directorial challenge of complicated people-wrangling with close to two dozen characters in a big restaurant kitchen, nearly all of them undocumented and Hispanic. Ruizpalacios he has come north, taking the long road of immigration to New York City and a big tourist restaurant called The Grill near Times Square with a very large staff who through the day rapidly grind out hundreds of very ordinary dishes, a place of whose toiling masses the customers out front see only the aproned waitresses.

This is a filmmaker whose abundant talents require him to branch out. Having run through Nouvelle Vague influences, evoking the off-kilter moods of Latin American youth films like Alexis dos Santos' 2006 Glue, Che Sandoval's You Think You're the Prettiest, But You Are the Sluttiestt (2009), and the work of Fernando Eimbcke and Gerardo Naranjo, he took hints from Errol Morris for A Cop Movie (adding a very Mexican flavor). La cocina, it's no secret, is a riff off of Arnold Wesker's 1959 play, The Kitchen.

The Kitchen has been performed all over the world continuously since is Fifteis origin. It's a template for the turmoil that goes on behind the scenes at a restaurant and it's about work, and there's a line from Thoreau that starts it, "This world is a place of business. What an infinite bustle!" It just hints that this is about, to quote David Erlich, who's more earnest than myself, "the lie of the American Dream through the exploitation of undocumented immigrants and the hustle culture of late-stage capitalism." An English critic has called The Kitchen "Wesker's metaphor for the dehumanizing impact of industrialized labour."

There's also more human interest and intimacy in the play than those words imply and there's personal experience behind this new movie. Ruizpalacios actually washed dishes in a restaurant in London for a while, and that's where he learned about Wesker's play (and the 1961 film James Hill directed). He personally experienced the humiliation, chaos, hostility and love the play finds in a commercial kitchen. Wesker's play must have made a strong impression on him. He follows its outline, scenes, even individual lines closely. It's surprising to see how similar the endings are of the main characters in both cases causing chaos and being congratulated by the owner of the restaurant: "You stopped me."

But Ruizpalacios has added a lot of buzz and Spanish to Wesker; he has considerably decorated and embroidered and spiced it up and made it contemporary. If the 1961 film, though it holds up very well, looks stagey now, La Cocina, with Juan Pablo Ramírez' soft, sometimes dreamy black and white cinematography with a few sprinkles of color, bubbles with energy, even menace. In Wesker's play, there was a fight between cooks the night before and one of them has a black eye. In Lo Cocina, there is still lively hostility, and all the upper level people now have become transparently mean and nasty.

Wesker's kitchen staff is British, Eastern European, and German, though. Ruizpalacios has expanded the dialogue about dreams during the break period, with a lengthy and impressive new monologue spoken by Motell Foster, and taken it into a side street outside. This sequence, a time of quiet that relieves the frantic intensity for a while, is one of the memorable sequences in the film. A lot of swearing has appeared tht the Fifties didn't allow. Ruizpalacios has considerably expanded and intensified the physical business, especially between Pedro, the amorous cook, and Julia, and he has expanded their plot line about a pregnancy. Raul Briones, who plays Pedro, also costarred as the cop Montoya in Ruizpalacios' last movie, A Cop Movie. Rooney Mara is the married waitress Julia, whom he's in love with and has gotten pregnant. She wants to get an abortion, and over $800 has disappeared from yesterday's take, about the cost of the procedure, arousing suspicion.

True, the Cocina doesn't seem to be really cranking out dozens of dishes any more than The Kitchen (it was impossible to simulate food-preparation on a stage, and the original theatrical production, I believe, the food was entirely imaginary). For that you have go to a documentary, and there have been some good ones by Rebecca Halpern, Frederick Wiseman, Lydia Tenaglia, Paul Lacoste, Morgan Neville, and many others. What Ruizpalacios is interested in, like Wesker, is the human relations and the exploitation of labor in this environment. And this is a totally new version of a familiar theme. Ruizpalacios noted at the Berlin press conference (https://www.berlinale.de/en/2024/programme/202408571.html) that they were aware of "toxic masculinity" but also aware that this concept wields no liberating power within the strict hierarchies even of today's of restaurant kitchens.But the differences are considerable nonetheless. Watch La Cocina, and watch The Kitchen (free on YouTube) as well. They're illuminating microcosms that become more enlightening when compared. It will be exciting to see what Ruizpalacios will do next. (We won't fall behind again.)

La Cocina, 139 mins., debuted at Berlin (like all Ruizpalacios' films), showing also at Beijing, Shanghai, Sydney, Tribeca, Jerusalem, Wrocław, Melbourne, and several dozen other festivals. It opens in the UK Dec. 26 2024. It opens in the US Oct. 25. At the Roxie, San Francisco, Nov. 1.

[Chris Knipp]

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SHIORI ITO IN BLACK BOX DIARIES

SHIORI ITO: BLACK BOX DIARIES (2024)

An impressive film by the face of #MeToo in Japan

Some nine years ago Shiori Itō, then 26, became the face of the #MeToo movement of Japan by accusing a man in a prominent media position, Noriyuki Yamaguchi, a former Washington bureau chief for the TBS network with close ties to prime minister Shinzo Abe, of raping her. She brought criminal charges and, what was unusual, she showed her face after doing so, appearing in a press conference. She was a fledgling journalist, already accomplished and ambitious. This was to become her story, her occupation, for years to come. (Her field as a journalist and filmmaker is listed as "gender issues".)

Japan is an exceptionally male-dominated society. Everyone knows this, and was aware it had to change. Many, men especially of course, reviled Shiori, while many others thanked her vocally or silently in their hearts. She became famous. As she put it, she became "the girl who got raped." Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiori_It%C5%8D) indicates how far her important spread; she became one of Time's 100 Most Influential People of 2020. Before that in 2017 she published her diaristic account of the whole experience under the title Black Box Diaries. This year, 2024, the film of the same name has appeared.

The beauty and importance of this film are considerable. It is obviously important as the headline case of male sexual aggression in Japan, a test case that goes before others. Then there is Shiori Itō herself. She bears her experience. As she appears, over years Yamaguchi's rape continues to haunt her even though it began when she was unconscious. She speaks modestly and quietly but is brave and articulate. She narrates this film on camera and posts handwritten-style inter-titles in English, making it more international. She is a modern woman, casually elegant, beautiful without contrivance.

The film takes the form largely of a diary, tracing the arduous course of Shiora's struggle to bring Yamaguchi to justice and simultaneously to be an example to the oppressed women in Japan and everywhere and and a warning to men that their free ride is over. The criminal case is dismissed, but a civil one continues, which she wins and all that is reported here. But this is also a journal recording the day to day psychological ups and downs of living as a survivor of sexual assault, a reminder that that never goes away.

At the outset Shiora warns there will be moments that may be "triggering" and that viewers may need to look away, or close her eyes and take a breath, as she sometimes does. This is an indicator of how as the filmmaker she is quietly in control throughout, but as Guy Lodge says in his Variety (https://variety.com/2024/film/reviews/black-box-diaries-review-1235888068/)review, "Ito’s vulnerabilities can be discomfiting to witness, even with her consent," and she knows that.

This film carries its complexities naturally because they are Shiora's life, what she does, and because everything is smoothly interwoven by the editor, Ema Ryan Yamazaki to, as Lodge puts it, show the transitions she goes through from "eminently professional journo coolly researching her own experience" to "frightened victim overwhelmed by the responsibility of telling her tale." And we feel this complexity and live it with her, which is why this film is so interesting to watch.

We learn what she has to contend with, including archaic a male-dominated Japanese law by which an assault doesn't count as one just because of non-consent, if the resistance wasn't violent - in other words punishing a woman for being a woman. Thus the police brusquely rejected Shiora's initial report of rape. All this is part of the film. So is Shiora's filmed promise that she will never commit suicide and to be suspicious if she dies, later followed by her overdosing, showing how volatile her emotions are. We know why she puts Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive" on her phone.

In the context of numerous lively developments, it packs quite a wallop when the doorman who was on duty at the Sheraton Hotel when Yamaguchi brought Shiora there, drunk but uncooperative, gets in touch with Shiora and says he is committed to testifying for her, and to use his name, no matter what. She weeps in gratitude and we weep with her. And there is footage of the Sheraton arrival, which we watch as this exchange takes place.

When the civil trial decision is announced, there's a big crowd outside, and Shiora appears and announces that though she won, it's not the end, and it's not. Yamaguchi is going to sue, and Shiora is there when he makes a press statement in English and Japanese that while he has many regrets, he is sure he did nothing legally wrong.

It's hard to end the film. But that's almost the point. This is a struggle for survival and for social and legal change that is ongoing to which this film is a splendid introduction. One of the year's best documentaries.

Black Box Diaries, 102 mins., debuted at Sundance Jan. 2024 and over thirty other festivals throughout 2024. Opening in New York (Film Forum) on Fri., Oct. 25 followed by LA, SF and Chicago on Nov. 1. Opens Nov. 1 at the Roxie Theater, San Francisco; Q&A with director Shiori Ito on Nov. 2 at 3:40pm. Nov. 3 at Rafael Film Center, Special one-time screening at 1pm followed by Q&A with Shiori Ito.
Metacritic (https://www.metacritic.com/movie/black-box-diaries/) rating: 87%.

[Chris Knipp]

DEA KULUMBEGASHVILI: APRIL (2024)

April
Dea Kulumbegashvili, 2024, France/Georgia/Italy, 134m
Georgian with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Georgian filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili follows her striking debut feature Beginning (NYFF58), which told the story of a wife and mother persecuted for her religious beliefs in a provincial village, with this tenebrous, provocative drama about the precarious social position of a woman living in an isolated community. When a newborn baby dies after an otherwise routine delivery, obstetrician Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili) falls under suspicion for negligence, her standing in the small town further jeopardized by people’s knowledge that she also provides illegal abortion services to local women. Shot by Arseni Khachaturan (Bones and All), balancing long-take realism and nightmarish expressionism, April is a complex and disquieting depiction of a caregiver in crisis, rich with haunting, metaphorical imagery that feels emanated from its maker’s subconscious. (Venice)

[Chris Knipp]

LUCA GUADAGNINIO: CHALLENGERS (2024)

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MIKE FAIST, ZENDAYA, JOSH O'CONNOR IN CHALLENGERS

Can't we just be friends?

Fundamentally Challengers qualifies as a sports movie, one centered on the game of tennis and developed in a triangular love and a three-way rivalry ending in a climactic game when everything is decided. But because it's Luca Guadagnino "back in form," it's exciting, different, and a bit of a tough watch. It may work better on the third viewing - unless you're highlyl adept at following and decoding sudden, scrambled flashbacks, because it's made up almost entirely of a network of them. Music is something this director is especially good at and attentive to, as showed very much in HBO's "We Are Who We Are." Here there is a heavy overlay of songs and blasts of loud techno music. The latter stands for two kinds of high energy, of sexual excitement or the thrill off a pro tennis match. For the sake of the movie they may be inseparable: tennis is sex, and being great at tennis is super-sexy. Sometimes the staccato dialogue is almost drowned out by the tunes, just the way sometimes in a tennis match you may not see where the ball went or what kind of shot gained the point.

There are three actors who go through their paces, and they are in championship form in both senses: they are only pretending to be tennis pros, but they are lean and fit enough to be that, and they inhabit their roles seamlessly and intensely. Though also at times with a light touch.

It begins with a big match at the New Rochelle Tennis Club in the present time between Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O'Connor). Art is a multiple grand slam whose career has declined, and this low level tournament is an attempt to relaunch him. Patrick has never done that well but he is hoping to take off from here. Most of the action comes through multiple flashback points, until the closing scene of the match when it's allowed to ride through to its rather strange end. Something decisive, if indefinable, happens in that match. But Challengers doesn't imply that winning or losing one match can dchange everything. Or does it? See what you think.

We encounter Patrick and Art as teenagers, promising tennis players and best friends. They've won an important doubles match together. (The two actors look madly young in this sequence.) The way they run around together is comical and fun, and that mood helps lighten later, more serious moments. Now they are watching Tashi (Zendaya) play, and they're in awe. They seem to want to possess her, though they have no right to.

They're more than doubles partners, boarding school roommates, and best friends. They're joined at the hip; they're like brothers, almost twins - perhaps more than that. For indefinable complex reasons, together they dive for Tashi, flirt with her, try to get her number. She knows who they are and refuses, saying she doesn't want to be "a home wrecker" (though they deny that their relationship is like that). These passages are the freshest in the film and seem where Guadagnino is most at home, with the boyishness and sexual confusion. Do Patrick and Art want Tashi or just want to play like her? Or make out with her together, which is more or less what happens?

Whatever happens thereafter, the answer to the question above is emphatically No. They can be rivals, lovers, enemies, but never friends.

Bear in mind that what follows isn't presented chronologically, but in intense flashes we have to reassemble in our minds. In sequences that follow, just when Tashi is peaking, she has a terrible (unspecified) knee injury. She tries to keep playing but her chance at being top seeded is gone, and she gets involved with, then married to, Art, and gives up playing for coaching him. But she also has an affair with Patrick. She and art have a kid, whose creation and care are barely touched on. Not a total tennis orphan, because there is a grandmother. This isn't about that - or much about anything but music, tennis, and these three people.

In several scenes just prior to the final court battle we find that Patrick no longer even has a working credit card and winds up having to sleep in his car in the New Rochelle Tennis Club parking lot prior to the match. He has never done as well as Art has done working with Tashi and now is unshaven, scruffy, sleepy, and hungry. You won't remember Prince Charles or any kind of English accent whether royal, expat, or Yorkshire. O'Connor's character is a loser but the actor is at the top of his game. He has a kind of greasy sheen here that may be the most memorable character of the three, though as Tashi Zendaya radiates a hard, lean sexiness that cuts like a knife, and as Art, Faist's physicality is commanding. Guadagnino, who excels at the sensual, here triumphantly adds that element to the athletic.

The rapid time shifts and the the loud techno keep you on your toes, and evoke the continually renewed adrenalin rush of a professional tennis match. The overwhelm we may feel parallels lives with big choices dominated by the external force of a competitive sport. The individualism and intensely competitive mood of tennis as a aport - one might say narcissism and killer instinct - are essential here. At the same time, Challengersisn't about tennis so much as about the confused allegiances and rivalries that dominate these tennis-obsessed lives. An early scene where Art and Patrick are finally in a bedroom together with Tashi has an emblematic shot where she sits at the bottom of the bed with them on either side of her. She draws them toward her and kisses them, but then she draws them toward each other to kiss each other. But they can't share her, and Patrick is excluded. Everything gets messay after that, but Guadagnino and his writer Justin Kuritzkesm who also penned his upcoming historical film Queer, pesent the mess neatly, in capsules, like the order of a tennis game. But there is a John McEnroe moment from Patrick here, and we see a record number of rackets thrown and smashed.

Everything about the tennis play in Challengers is fudged a bit, most of all the end of the final match, which goes a tad too slow and uses a smidgen too much slo-mo, though as usual in tennis dramas, the principals must look convincing on the court and in the gear and learned how to serve. As things progress, the tennis becomes more and more turbulent and abstract; at the end the camera appears to be almost attached to the balls. O'Connor and Faist and Zendaya don't have to actually play professional-quality tennis, of course, and the matches are a little twisted and abstract.

At the end, the question is which of the two men will win this final, present-time match. Will it really matter? Tennis isn't great because of who wins. The fun will be putting the pieces of this movie back together. Powerful, wildly energetic material to work with, thanks to the actors, to the director, to the score composers duo Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, and thanks to the dpSayombhu Mukdeeprom.

Challengers, 131 mins., debuted in many countries April 18, 2024 and thereafter. Watched for this review at Century Hilltop April 26. Metacritic (https://www.metacritic.com/movie/challengers/) rating: 83%.

[Chris Knipp]

TERRENCE MARTIN, DOMINIQUE BRAUN: GET AWAY IF YOU CAN (2022)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/geaw.jpg (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ledd44qY1jg)

TRAILER (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ledd44qY1jg)

Crazy couple on an island, with flashbacks

Terrence Martin previously directed the not much noticed 2009The Donner Party, with Crispin Glover. A Cinemagazine (https://cinemagazine.nl/famished-the-donner-party-2009-recensie/) review in Danish compliments Glover's straightforward lead performance and says, "The cast acts solidly, the sets look good and the soundtrack is also good. Still, 'Famished' is not recommended. The rigid narrative structure, the slow pace and the muddled editing throw a spanner in the works." (Wife Dominique Braun has no previous credits.) The Danish review says the film begins in medias res with no explanation. This one does the same, plunging us onto a small sailing yacht with an awkward couple (Martin and Braun) going somewhere, we don't know where. Domi (Braun) wants to take a day off on nearby islands. T.J. (Martin) refuses, wanting to complete the journey and saying these are known as "the Islands of Despair." While he is drunk (he is a drinker, also a surfer), she takes a rubber raft and camps on the island. As the awkward couple marinates in this untenable situation, a lot of flashbacks come along to explain how they got here.

The latter feature Marina (Martina Gusman), a Spanish-speaking woman friend of Domi's back home in South America, saying she admires her love story but Domi, who dabbles in art but is no good and seems to know it, complains that they are not having sex. These alternate with scenes featuring Ed Harris as T.J''s ultra-macho, retro father, disapproving of his planned boat trip, but also insisting he be very careful and establish he is the captain. T.J. evidently has failed at that since Domi has gone on her own in a quite crazy and dangerous way in landing alone on a deserted island. More flashbacks explain the father never liked his son's relationship with this woman and even planned with his other son (Riley Smith) to disrupt it. Domi tells Marina all her husband does is "work all day with his father." The father plans for the son to inherit his business, or did: he now declares him to be an f--ing loser.

Further flashbacks reveal Domi fleeing dinner after an ugly moment alone with the father and due to the repeatedly alluded to lack of sex and disliking the "gringo" lifestyle, packing up and returning to South America. How they got back together later we don't find out, but it's hinted T.J.'s brother has made him a lot of money and, disloyal to their father, offered him a way to win Domi back. Scenes of Marina and Domi (returned to S.A.) show Domi isn't happy back home either, and decides on her own to return to her husband.

Meanwhile back on the island - a present time nearly overwhelmed by all these flashbacks - things are progressively crazier. Domi seems to want to settle in by herself, and refuses a catch of fish T.J. offers. T.J. alternately surfs, fishes, and sits among the sea lions and rocks in a wet suit practicing loudly with a Spanish language textbook.

The surf, the rocks, the islands are dramatic and ruggedly beautiful. The couple washed up on it are a mess and it's impossible to care about them. There is an ominous percussive score that promises something menacing. It goes with the film's anguished, fumbling invention.

Get Away If You Can, 78 mins., not previously seen, will show in Los Angeles at Laemmle Monica and other select theaters and on digital for rent or purchase from Fri., Aug. 19, 2022.

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/geaw2.jpg
TERRENCE MARTIN, DOMINIQUE BRAUN IN GET AWAY IF YOU CAN

[Chris Knipp]

JOANNA HOGG: THE ETERNAL DAUGHTER (2022)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/daw.jpg
TILDA SWINTON IN THE ETERNAL DAUGHTER

A trip north

The Eternal Daughter may be categorized as a film of horror or the supernatural, but devotees of either will doubtless be disappointed. Numerous critics describe it as "a distinctly minor work" by the director, whose 2019 The Souvenir (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4646-THE-SOUVENIR-(Joanna-Hogg-2019)&p=37644#post37644)brought her to wide attention, and to mine. It's worth going back and watching all her three earlier features, Unrelated, Archipelago and Exhibition: they're not fun watches, but the unfun-ness is distinctly her own, uppermiddleclass British constraints and torments that will seem to grow out of, not lead into, the autobiographical film student with the unfortunate posh boyfriend of The Souvenir. The underimpressed critics also say The Eternal Daughter, which serves as a sequel to The Souvenir II, the end of a trilogy, that it is "slooow."

Well, The Eternal Daughter is unique, and while I'd agree it has its longeurs, and is almost Beckettian in its uneventfulness. It's also subtle and beautiful, and the performance at the center of it by Tilda Swinton as both Julie Hart, a filmmaker, and Rosalind Hart, her mother, whom the hyper-attentive Julie takes to a big old, apparently empty hotel for her birthday, is remarkable. The double performance is not just a stunt. It's also a brilliant idea central to the film's themes and ideas, which magnify and unfold over time like the old Japanese paper flowers that grew when you dipped them in water. And all this isn't just cleverness. It serves to deliver hard emotional honesty that characterizes Hogg's best moments in the other films. After the slow passages, as I watched, the emotion grew, and at the end I was devastated with a still unfolding sense of sorrow too deep for tears.

Hogg makes much use of the horror vibe and genre ticks throughout - a pale face in a window; knocks in the night; Rosalind's setter Louis (the canine companion an important character in many a family), brought along, disappearing and then popping up back in the room; the odd, unfriendly "staff;" the confounding corridors and rooms; the fog outside - and all these events and things allow for the general feeling we have that something strange is going on. Many will doubtless guess the film's secret early on. That's unimportant. It's all in the very distinctive nuance of the film and the interchanges between Julie and Rosalind. It's very important that until the end, a two-shot doesn't occur. You see Julie saying something, then you see - or will you see? You never know - Rosalind. And yes, you're very aware that both are Tilda Swinton in two different sorts of drag. The Rosalind drag includes peculiarly subtle aging makeup. She's not made to look very old. (A very old woman is seen toward the end, in a kind of coda and subtly spooky jolt.) You're marveling at the costumer's and makeup artist's art and the acting, but you're very aware that you're watching Tilda Swinton.

And all this is kind of creepy, if not what you'd call "horrible." Or maybe it is; maybe you can anticipate a Hitchcockian shock coming. It's not like that. It's more like the air goes out of the tire. (Or tyre.) The more overt horror-supernatural vibe comes from the great aristocratic house in Wales that Julie and Rosalind are staying at. It is a place, then in private hands, where Rosalind, as a young girl, was sent with other family members to escape the bombing during the War. But Julie doesn't know much about this. She has devoted much of her life to caring about and loving her mother - she has a husband, but no children - but her mother remains largely a mystery to her. Other later visits to the house turn out to have occurred later, and things happened, not happy memories, that Julie didn't know about. The place is beautiful, in a mournful way. The accoutrements of the rooms, even the keys at the front desk, are handsome. the ornate, formal landscaping outside, shrouded often in cinematic fog, is beautiful in its layers of green. The exterior shots look like subtle color lithographs.

The place isn't particularly friendly. Julie and Rosalind are greeted by a grumpy receptionist (Carly-Sophia Davies), who also reappears as the waitress at the dining room (and there are only four dishes on the menu). Is Harold Pinter an influence? This is in some ways like a magnificently visually expanded play, a chamber drama, a drama in the head. A warmer character is a groundskeeper (Joseph Mydell) who talks to Julie a few times and comforts and shares an understanding of loss. He says his wife died a year ago.

Julie is here to celebrate Rosalind's birthday - or is she? The birthday celebration turns out to be grotesque and sad, family happiness gone wrong, though a a bottle of champagne is uncorked and poured from and a birthday cake is brought in. Julie chooses to bring it in herself. But whenever Julie and Rosalind are seated talking together at meals, Julie surreptitiously sets her smartphone out to record the conversation. Early on she's said she's here to work, on a new film presumably, and she goes to a special place to do so, but she can't sleep, she's uncomfortable, and she goes day after day without getting any work done. The other use of the smartphone is to try to talk to her husband. This she has to do out in front of the hotel pacing about near a hedge trying to get reception, which isn't good. And the wi-fi is patchy in the building as well.

These descriptions sound ordinary enough. But in Joanna Hogg's skilled hands and the meticulous, complicated interchanges of Tilda and Tilda, they resonate with meanings you go on pondering long after the film is over. The heart of the matter is the confrontation of lives and family relationships, the permanent, difficult, mysterious, inescapable ones. The daughter is "eternal" because filial relationships never end. Imagine making a movie about your mother and its turning out to be a sort of horror film. Others would make a story that's joyous and celebratory. But where is the truth? I remember the priest who Malraux talks about in his Anti-Memoirs who, questioned on what he had learned about people from thirty years of hearing confession, gave two ideas; there is no such thing as a grownup person; and people are much less happy than they appear. But the scenes we have watched have been an expiation. And the end Julie has come thorough and is typing away on her laptop: the new film has come to her. This one.

If any of this sounds intriguing, you are urged to see The Eternal Daughter. It's a marvelous film, a study of grief, memory and family relationships that cuts to the bone. A minor work? Remember the little Fragonard painting in the Wallace Collection in The Souvenir. That whole film grows out of it.

The Eternal Daughter, 96 mins., debuted Sept. 6, 2022 at Venice, showing at nine or more other international festivals, including Toronto, Zurich, London, New York (Main Slate), Vienna, Seville, AFI, Thessaloniki and Marrakech. Limited US theatrical release and on itnernet Dec. 2, 2022. Metacritic (https://www.metacritic.com/movie/the-eternal-daughter) rating: 79%.