New York Film Festival 2010

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Bryce Dallas Howard, Matt Damon, Hereafter, Closing Night

New York Film Festival 2010

Welcome to the Festival Coverage thread for the 48th New York Film Festival, fall 2010, put on by the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Filmleaf's General Film Forum discussion thread for the NYFF begins here.

INDEX OF LINKS TO REVIEWS

Another Year (Mike Leigh 2010)
Aurora (Cristi Puiu 2010)
Autobiography of Nicolae Ceauşescu, The (Andrei Uticǎ 2010)
Black Venus (Abdellatif Kechiche 2010)
Carlos (Olivier Assayas 2010)
Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami 2010)
Film Socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard 2010)
Hereafter (Clint Eastwood 2010)
Inside Job (Charles Ferguson 2010)
LennonNYC (Michael Epstein 2010)
Letter to Elia, A (Scorsese, Jones 2010)
Meek's Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt 2010)
My Joy (Sergei Loznitsa 2010)
Mysteries of Lisbon (Raúl Ruiz 2010)
Of Gods and Men (Xavier Beauvois 2010)
Oki's Movie (Hong Sang-soo 2010)
Old Cats (Sebastián Silva, Pedro Peirano 2010)
Poetry (Lee Chang-dong 2010)
Post Mortem (Pablo Larraín 2010)
Quattro Volte, Le (Michelangelo Frammartino 2010)
Revolución (ten short films from Mexico, 2010)
Robber, The (Benjamin Heisenberg 2010)
Robinson in Ruins (Patrick Keiller) 2010
Silent Souls (Alexei Fedorchenko 2010)
Social Network, The (David Fincher 2010)
Strange Case of Angelica, The (Manoel de Oliveira 2010)
Tempest, The (Julie Taymor 2010)
Tuesday, After Christmas (Radu Muntean 2010)
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weeresethakul 2010)
We Are What We Are (Jorge Michel Grau 2010)

These reviews have also been published on Flickfeast.uk.

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Clint Eastwood directing Hereafter in London

Screenings/Q&A's scheduled - August 30, 2010.
(Also printed on the General Forums thread for the NYFF 2010 here)

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POETRY - LEE CHANG-DONG

Mon Sep 13
Noon - 5pm
Credential pick-up only

Tue Sep 14
9am - PRISONERO 13 (76m)
10:30am - EL COMPADRE MENDOZA(85m)
12:30pm - LET'S GO WITH PANCHO VILLA (92m)
(Masterworks: Fernando de Fuentes' Mexican Revolution Trilogy)

Wed Sep 15
9am - PALE FLOWER Masterworks Elegant Elegies: The Films of Masahiro Shinoda (96m)
11am - SILENCE (129m) [?]
2pm - CAMERAMAN: THE LIFE AND WORK OF JACK CARDIFF Craig McCall, 2010, UK; 86m[/B] (83m) (Nyff Special Event)

Thu Sep 16
9 am THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF NICOLAE CEAUSESCU Andrei Ujic, 2010, Romania; 180m
Noon - press conf VIA SKYPE
1pm - NURENBERG [The Schulberg/Waletzky Restoration] (80m) (Nyff Special Event, "Masterworks" series )
2:30pm - press conf

Fri Sep 17
9am - CARLOS, Olivier Assayas, 2010, France, 319 min

Mon Sep 20
9am - POETRY (Shi), Lee Chang-dong, 2010, South Korea, 139 min
11:19am - Poetry - press conf VIA SKYPE
12:30pm - LE QUATTRO VOLTE, Michelangelo Frammartino, 2010, Italy, 88 min
2pm - press conf VIA SKYPE
2:30pm - OKRI'S MOVIE (Ok hui ui yeonghwa), Hong Sang-soo, 2010, South Korea, 80 min

Tue Sep 21
9am - ROBINSON IN RUINS, Patrick Keiller, 2010, UK, 101 min
10:40am - press conf VIA SKYPE
11:45am - UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL PAST LIVES (Lung Boonmee raluek chat),
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010, UK/Thailand, 113 min
1:30pm s - press conf
2:30pm - CERTIFIED COPY (Copie conformé), Abbas Kiarostami, 2010, France/Italy, 106 min
France, 120 min
4:30pm - press conf

Wed Sep 22
9am - LENNON NYC, Michael Epstein, 2010, USA, 115 min
11am - press conf
Noon - A LETTER TO ELIA Martin Scorsese & Kent Jones, 2010, USA; 60m (Special Event, Masterworks)
2:30pm - TUESDAY AFTER CHRISTMAS (Marti, dupa craciun), Radu Muntean,
Romania, 99 min
4:15pm - press conf VIA SKYPE
5:15pm - THE ROBBER (Der Räuber), Benjamin Heisenberg, Austria/Germany, 90 min
6:45pm - press conf
7:30pm - SILENT SOULS (Ovsyanki), Alexei Fedorchenko, Russia, 75 min
8:45pm - press conf

Thu Sep 23
9am - MY JOY (Schastye moe), Sergei Loznitsa, 2010, Ukraine/Germany, 127 min
11:08am - press conf VIA SKYPE
12:30pm - OF GODS AND MEN (Des homes et des dieux), Xavier Beauvois, 2010,
2:30pm - press conf OF GODS AND MEN

Fri Sep 24
9am - THE SOCIAL NETWORK, David Fincher, 2010, USA, 120 min
11am - press conf
Noon - FILM SOCIALISME, Jean-Luc Godard, 2010, Switzerland, 101 min
2pm - Views from the Avant-Garde (sampler)

Mon Sep 27
9am - AURORA, Cristi Puiu, 2010, Romania, 181 min
Noon - press conf
1pm - THE STRANGE CASE OF ANGELICA (O estranho caso de Angélica), Manoel de Oliveira,
Portugal, 97 min
(tentative) press conf

Tue Sep 28
9am - BLACK VENUS (Venus noire) , Abdellatif Kechiche, France, 166 min
(tentative) press conf
12:30pm - POST MORTEM, Pablo Larrain, 2010, Chile/Mexico/Germany, 98 min
2:10pm - press conf VIA SKYPE

Wed Sep 29
9am - INSIDE JOB, Charles Ferguson, 2010, USA, 120 min
11am - press conf
1pm - BOXING GYM Frederick Wiseman, 2010, USA; 91m (Nyff Special Event)
(tentative) - press conf

Thu Sep 30
10am - WE ARE WHAT WE ARE (Somos lo que hay), Jorge Michel Grau, Mexico, 90 min
Noon - THE TEMPEST, Julie Taymor, 2010, USA, 110 min(110m)
2pm - press conf

Fri Oct 1
NO PRESS &INDUSTRY SCREENINGS OR PRESS CONFERNECESF

Mon Oct 4
9am - ANOTHER YEAR, Mike Leigh, 2010, UK, 129 min
11:10am - press conf
12:30pm - MEEK'S CUTOFF, Kelly Reichardt, 2010, USA, 104 min
2:15pm - press conf

Tue Oct 5
9am - FOREIGN PARTS Verena Paravel & J.P. Sniadecki, 2010, USA; 80m (Nyff Special Event)
(tentative) press conf
11:30am - REVOLUCIÓN, Mariana Chenillo, Fernando Embecke, Amat Escalante, Gael Garcia
Bernal, Rodrigo Garcia, Diego Luna, Gerardo Naranjo, Rodrigo Plá, Carlos Reygadas,
Patricia Riggen, 2010, Mexico, 110 min
1:15pm - press conf VIA SKYPE

Wed Oct 6
9am - OLD CATS (Gatos viejos), Sebastian Silva, 2010, Chile, 88 min
10:30am - Old Cats - press conf
Noon - Shorts program (compilation - 123m)

Thu Oct 7
9am - MYSTERIES OF LISBON (Misterios de Lisboa), Raul Ruiz, Portugal/France, 272 min
1245p - press conf

Fri Oct 8
10am HEREAFTER (Clint Eastwood,2010, USA, 126, 126 min

MARTIN SCORSESE, KENT JONES: A LETTER TO ELIA (2010)

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SCORSESE AND KAZAN AT THE OSCARS IN 1999

Scorsese's very personal tribute to a film master

This 60-minute documentary is a love-letter, really, from Martin Scorsese, perhaps the most celebrated major American filmmaker of today, to his controversial hero, artistic model, and emotional influence, once the greatest American filmmaker (they called them directors back then) of his day, Elia Kazan. Kazan of course is the author of three great movies of their time, On the Waterfront, A Streetcar Named Desire (the latter not much discussed here), and East of Eden, showcasing the Actors Studio talents of Marlon Brando and James Dean. Kazan was a co-founder of the Actors Studio. But Kazan's favorite film was his black and white immigrant epic, America America, which opens this film (in a gorgeous pristine restoration), and emerges as deeply significant to Scorsese too.

A celebration of the films of Elia Kazan (very selectively considered), Letter to Elia goes over Kasan's personal history, his rise as an actor on Broadway, then as a theatrical director, finally as a maker of what at first were mostly filmed plays in Hollywood. The reach of Kazan's whole career is considered. And that includes his very questionable "outing" of 8 fellow leftists to HUAC Congressional witchhunters in the Fifties. Scorsese describes this, which meant even the Academy's very late lifetime achievement award was much questioned; but he doesn't justify or even explain it. Why did Kazan do that? How could he do it? The only implication is that for Scorsese, Kazan was too important an early influence to become a fallen idol, so he straddles the fence. This is a panegyric, not a cool-headed analysis. Interestingly enough, Kazan did do his best film work after this betrayal. But where his films may seem dated today, Scorsese prefers to see them as he did when young, vibrant, exiting, and personally significant. Scorsese's later personal friendship with Kazan is documented with many stills and his loyalty and support movingly shown by their embrace at the Academy Awards honorary Oscar time, when many refused to stand to celebrate the old man in 1999 when he was 90. He died in 2003.

This is also very much a spoken and illustrated tribute to Scorsese's lonely cinephile youth and to the old classic New York movie houses, now all gone, where he sat alone after buying a ticket for 12 or 15 cents and sighed and sobbed with the family conflicts of Brando and Steiger in Waterfront and Dean in Eden. Scorsese goes over specific scenes in some detail, playing the whole speech by Brando that leads up to "I coulda been a contenda." The director is talking about love of movies, but first and foremost he recounts how these films were personal psychodramas for him, and also in the case of On the Waterfront significantly drew realistically on the "mean streets" world he himself grew up in, in Little Italy. It's only later, the director suggests, that he went back and studied the technical aspects, the camerawork and editing of these for him seminal films. It's not noted by Scorsese, but where Kazan made stars of Brando and Dean, he created idols himself like Di Nero and DiCaprio.

My own favorite is America America, whatever the social or artistic significance of Kazan's better known films; so it's nice to know it was the one that mattered most to him, and to understand why. It was based on the life of an uncle, and he, and Scorsese too, he says, as (in Kazan's case) from a Greek family out of Turkey, always saw the world as an outsider.

Made as one of the American Masters series for American public television. Narrated, written and directed by Martin Scorsese. Co-authored and co-directed by Kent Jones, a former member of the selection committee of the New York Film Festival and the Film Society of Lincoln Center and Associate Director of Programming there. Jones has collaborated with Scorsese on other documentaries, including My Voyage in Italy. The voice of Kazan in dramatized quotations is performed by Elias Koteas. Seen and reviewed as a sidebar item, a Masterworks series Special Event, as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center. Debuted simultaneously Sept. 4 at Venice and Telluride, scheduled for Sept. 27 at the NYFF.

RADU MUNTEAN: TUESDAY, AFTER CHRISTMAS (2010)

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MIMI BRANESCU AND MARIA POPISTASU IN TUESDAY, AFTER CHRISTMAS

A man with two women, and a daughter who needs braces

Romanian director Radu Muntean's 99-minute Tuesday, After Christmas (Marti, dupa craciun) is a scrupulously mondane study of an adulterer with a wife and 10-year-old daughter whose orthodontist girlfriend happens to be responsible for correcting the little girl's slight under-bite. When dad takes daughter for a consultation about braces, mom unexpectedly shows up. This unnecessary encounter at her workplace upsets the girlfriend, which leads the husband to confess his infidelity later to his wife. She wants an immediate divorce and her husband moves to his love nest. And yet, it's Christmas, and when the time comes, the couple still has to show up for the in-laws and play Santa to their daughter. The moral is that marital ruptures don't mean you're excused from decorating the tree and wrapping the presents.

Like other Romanians whose stock is high in the international festival market these days, Muntean specializes in precise, scrupulously unhurried observation of ordinary life. Sometimes there's an important issue brought up. Sometimes there's a darkly ironic message. This time there's mainly just a voyeuristic feeling. We're actually spying on Paul Hanganu (Mimi Branescu), a schlub with some sort of loan office job, as he alternates between his blond girlfriend Raluca (Maria Popistasu), who makes him feel like a stud, and his dark-haired, bespectacled wife Adriana (Mirela Oprisor), with whom he's just a spouse. Muntean's nearly 10-minute opening scene depicts Paul and Raluca nude together on a bed kissing and chatting. They are exceptionally natural and relaxed, but the scene runs too long. It's a miscalculation. It's not what the film is about and just seems included because somebody liked it.

The next scene shows Paul with Adriana sifting through hideous blouses and snow boards at a shop. All these two sequences reveal is what you'd expect. Paul's affair is fresh and sexy for him. His life as a husband is routine. The little girl, Mara (Sasa Paul-Szel), is chirpy, chatty, borderline annoying. All the scenes show off Haganu's stiflingly bourgeois existence. His parents shower Mara with junk. There is much talk of gifts and what they cost; of winter resorts. What is child orthodontistry but a middle-class luxury denied to the working class? The scene in the orthodontistry office might have been rich in irony, but instead is a tedious exercise in pediatric dental terminology.

Finally Tuesday, After Christmas has two good scenes, or two moments when Muntean gets to his point. When Paul subsequently spills the beans -- tells Adriana he's "very much in love" with someone he's met, and she responds with anger and tears -- the Romanian penchant for lovingly examined banality finally pays off, because the emotions are intense enough to make the dialogue thought-provoking. Paul's confession seems extremely unwise as well as ill-timed, but Adriana's response is, as he says, nastier and uglier than what he's been doing. Is Paul's relationship with Raluca worth trashing his marriage? If marital infidelity is wrong, aren't some responses to it from spouses also questionable?

There's also a beautiful irony (though it might have been much subtler and wittier) in the final scene with little Mara's paternal grandparents, when Mara is pushed forward to watch passing carolers so Paul can rush "Santa's" presents into the other room, while Adriana smoothly slips him a present out of her purse to put back there too. This complicity, despite Adriana's earlier clenched-teeth warning that she's not staying for long, is a clear sign that the marriage-and-parent game trumps the adultery drama. And that is a message worth the wait. As with other Romanian films, I am annoyed, I feel the scenes have been dragged out too long (and may even be poorly arranged, as here), and yet there is always something. The acting of the principals is very good here. The camerawork by Tudor Lucaciu has been justifiably commended (especially in the nude scenes). And yet I'm not the only person who is asking if this was worth making a movie about; if Paul, in particular, warranted so much of our attention.

Tuesday, After Christmas was in the Un Certain Regard segment at Cannes, and included in other festivals. Seen and reviewed as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center.

BENJAMIN HEISENBERG: THE ROBBER (2010)

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ANDREAS LUST IN THE ROBBER

What's the rush?

Austrian director Benjamin Heisenberg's sophomore effort The Robber (Der Räuber, 90 min.) is the taut, minimal, intentionally fun-free story of an ex-con from a good family whose endorphin/adrenalin addiction has led him to be both a champion marathoner and a guy who robs bank for a hobby. Far-fetched? Maybe, but it's based on actual events.

Andreas Lust gives a committed and convincing performance as the runner/robber. Essential to the commitment is that he looks the part -- and during the shooting was in serious running shape. (The source novel author and screenplay co-writer Martin Prinz, who once ran a race with the real runner-bank robber, was Lust's trainer.) Long distance running isn't something you can fake. Though the film may be five minutes or so longer than it needs to be, there's no excess fat on Lust's body or slackness in his muscles. And the film itself is seriously well constructed, as lean in its cool existential minimalism as its main character.

This is a protagonist who's a rather unique combination. The logic that unifies his personality is his essential solitude. As Dr. George Sheehan memorably argued in Running and Being and other books, the distance runner, and for that matter the endurance athlete, is not primarily a social being. He resolves his issues with people by putting a lot of space between himself and them out on the roads and hills. The long hours of training appeal to one who prefers to be alone. But the aloneness of Johann Rettenberger (Lust) is greater than that. The preoccupations and goals of the ordinary world mean nothing to him. Not to mention the laws.

Appropriately, because he lives locked inside a small world in his own mind, the film begins when Rettenberger is in prison finishing a six-year sentence for bank robbery. In the yard, he doesn't socialize. He runs around it, racking up mileage in circles. He has managed to get a running treadmill installed in his little cell, and he continues the workouts there. He's an obsessively well-trained, driven, and talented long distance runner. If fact he's so good, he comes from behind to beat all the favorites and win the Vienna Marathon a short time after he's been released from prison. Ironically, he has gone from his prison cell to a tiny hotel room that for his purposes is less useful and perhaps no more appealing. Where is the freedom?

There are only two people in Rettenberger's life; he has not connected with his family upon release. There is the parole officer, Bewährungsbeamter (Markus Schleinzer), whom he's met with before release and to whom he has pointedly made no promises. He says only that he'll be glad not to run in circles any more. The parole officer wants him to avoid coming back in. He's supposed to get a job. At an employment office he runs into a former acquaintance from a good family, Erika (the poised, centered Franziska Weisz), who now works there. Johann meets up with Erika later and till he "settles down" she lets him live in a room of her big family apartment, now empty since her immediate relatives have all died; she's isolated too. (A snapshot of the large family now departed becomes a symbol of isolation.) After going to a cinema and watching a violent movie, which greatly amuses her and he watches with sphinx-like approval, they drift into a sexual affair.

Rettenberger has gone back to bank robbing right away. His routine rarely varies. He steels a car, always playing loud music as he drives. He wears a hoodie and a mask (which doesn't look much different from his pale, expressionless face), brandishes a machine gun, fills a duffle bag with cash, drives off, leaves the car in a wood and runs away. He puts the cash in plastic bags and stuffs them under his bad at Erika's place. He's rapidly racking up robberies, faster than he's winning races. The cash, not spectacular but much more than his race winnings, means little to him.

Meanwhile the fussy, well-meaning and dogged parole officer is not pleased. He follows Rettenberger to races and demands that attempts be made to find a job. He gets in return more and more hostility and silence. Rettenberger has little to say. In fact this could largely be a silent movie. It will appeal to those who like being challenged to make an effort; it makes no overtures to the audience whatsoever. Rettenberger is compelling but unappealing as a character.

The link between competitive athletics and bank robbing is an interesting one some may feel the film insufficiently develops. The Variety reviewer comments that Rettenberger seems to get no visible rush from either running or crime. He does smile very broadly once, when he wins the Vienna Marathon. He also carefully monitors his heart-rate in both processes. His effort may grow from some anti-social Nietchiean self-image. As a former marathoner myself, I found the idea of carrying ultimate conditioning into challenges to human as well as natural law intriguing and not impossible, especially if you buy into Dr. Sheehan's mystique of the anti-social distance runner. I was also reminded of Kathryn Bigelow's classic Point Break, with its athletic surfer-bank robbers and their mystical leader nicknamed Bodhi (the late Patrick Swayze). Those looking for conventional crime thriller material here will be sadly disappointed. It's essential to Heisenberg's protagonist that he's not at all a working- or criminal-class person or part of the criminal world but an amateur crook, without the resources of prison networking. Bank robbing as he performs it is an artisanal craft mostly requiring just cojones and speed.

In the end running becomes, of course, running away; and the beauty of The Robber is that it is a metaphor for itself throughout.

Shown at various international festivals beginning with Berlin, where it was nominated for a Golden Bear award, The Robber/Der räuber was seen and reviewed as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center.

ANDREI UJICǍ: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF NICOLAE CEAUŞESCU (2010)

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NICOLAE CEAUŞESCU VISITS KIM JONG IL IN THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Life at the top

In The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceauşescu, Andrei Ujică has put together a film that lasts three hours, composed almost entirely of government footage of the Romanian dictator who ruled (officially as Secretary General of the Romanian Communist Party and President of he country) from 1965 to 1989, when he was deposed in a coup. There are also some slightly more personal home movies. Three hours is too long, but that is precisely the point: that makes the film a festival film, for festival devotees take watching the unwatchable or unendurable to be a badge of honor, and excessive length conveys a specialness an ordinary film doesn't possess. Moreover, with this length Andrei Ujică is also making several points of his own. He's showing what the Romanian people had to endure, and for how long -- and what Ceauşescu had to endure too, the boring rituals of playing the role of head of state. The film is book-ended by a few minutes of rough videotape of Ceauşescu and his wife Elena when the government has been taken over, and he is being held hostage and stonewalling all efforts to make him explain his brutal efforts to repress the revolts in Timişoara and Budapest.

Ceauşescu allowed himself to be routinely photographed for an hour every day of his regime, and Ujică has culled his film from that vast official accumulation, editing it in his own way. This is an "autobiography" by someone else, like those of Malcolm X by Alex Haley and Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein. The title, and the means of presentation, without commentary, of this for the most part bland, impersonal footage, express in some Orwellian sense the idea that Ceauşescu is barely a real person; that there was never any real difference between his public and his private self; that he was a cipher standing for a repressive regime. He is the state with no face.

This regime is shown by endless footage of public events, parades of shiny black limousines, tanks, troops marching, party officials high up on rostrums reviewing; on visits to China or the Korea of Kim Jong Il, thousands of costumed citizens moving smartly in unison; giant blown up photographs of Ceauşescu and his wife; drives along vast boulevards with no trees, only government buildings, stage sets where human beings have no extra-ceremonial function.

This Autobiography is enigmatic, yet revealing. It's grand, yet boring and mundane. Its subject is repellent -- or at best unappealing -- but after spending so much time with him we, like Andrei Ujică by his own admission, come to feel a certain sympathy. How can he endure the boredom of all the peasant handicraft fairs, the dances, the handshakes, the parades, the conversations with Eastern Bloc leaders about the weather, the ceremonial meetings with Nixon, Carter, Queen Elizabeth? He must be a very brave and patient man -- in some odd way, a good sport. (Rumor has it that he was ill-humored in later years, but not in public.)

Andrei Ujică points out in an interview that Ceauşescu was a peasant who spent a full seven of his earliest years in prison, which strengthened his intense, simple belief in communist ideology (he changed the country's official title from "socialist" to "communist." His pep talks about communism's virtues are without depth but enthusiastic, and he always has then at the ready. In speech-making he holds a sheet of paper up in the air in front of him but speaks without looking at it. This also reflects the fact that he can say whatever he wants. He is repeatedly renominated and reelected by the party by acclamation. Once, toward the end, an official manages to protest before a large party audience at the boss's being nominated for the central committee and thereby guaranteeing his own releection, but there is a roar of disapproval, a standing ovation, chants of Ceauşeacu's name: "Reelect! Reelect!" Where are the dissenters? Where are the planners of the coup? We don't get to see them. They're behind a wall of propaganda and monuments of Stalinist wedding-cake architecture. This film mesmerizes us with that wall. But we don't believe it. We know this is a long, careful charade.

A charade bought into by East and West. Besides state visits to China, some gleeful, Nixon came calling, and so did De Gaulle (in a Caravalle), and Ceauşescu stayed at Buckingham Palace and when Jimmy Carter received him in one of his four visits to Washington he called him "a great leader of a great country." His regime was more open toward the West than other communist countries, and we get glimpses of that.

When on domestic official tours, Ceauşescu often surveys wreckage, floods, acres of mud; but indoors, he gazes on vast miniaturized models of perfect, pastry-white cities. On indoor tours, he visits big food shops packed with goods and picks up loaves of bread. "The crust is too thick," he says, or "the quality is better outside the capital." The packed shops are a front. The empty ones aren't photographed. By what we see, we know what is hidden. The indifference to what was really going on in the country was going to catch up with Ceauşescu and lead to his execution (not included here).

Ceauşescu, Ujică says in the interview, was "like a peasant who suddenly became a great landlord." In private life he was exemplary, except for avarice: in his last years he kept up to 30% of the country's GNP for himself when the country was barely growing. All he was doing was hunting deer and bears and building palaces. Informal footage shows he and his wife were both terrible at volleyball and she was a sloppy swimmer. Could he do anything well? Yes, he could endure. He looked good in suits and overcoats and scarves and hunting tweeds. His hair was combed. His speeches were sprightly. He stayed there.

The minor Eastern Bloc regimes were vast events that were essentially non-events. Ujică celebrates that fact in this aesthetically pure exploration of the vast, epic emptiness and empty-headedness that is the life of a tyrannical head of state.

Shown at Cannes, where it had its world premiere, and other festivals, this was seen and reviewed as a Special Event of the New York Film Festival 2010 at Lincoln Center. I dare you to sit through it.

OLIVER ASSAYAS: CARLOS (210)

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ÉDGAR RAMÍREZ IN ASSAYAS' CARLOS

Cool revolutionary terrorist mercenary seducer dude

The French director Olivier Assayas, former husband of the Hong King diva Maggie Chung, has made films as widely separated in style as Irma Vep, demonlover, Clean, and Summer Hours (fantasy, scifi, rehab, family drama). This year he has turned his talents successfully to the TV miniseries. Carlos, which is in three segments totaling 5 1/2 hours, is about the Venezuelan revolutionary Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, whose daring exploits made him into the media star who later became known as Carlos the Jackal. And the result is thrilling, informative, and fun.

Carlos has the many layers and multiple languages of the British series Traffik, but its subject matter, a succession of terrorist exploits with like-minded cohorts followed by flight and eventual capture, is closer to Uli Edel's recent feature The Baader Meinhof Complex. Except Assayas' focus is on one guy. And what a guy. Carlos, AKA Ilich, speaks Spanish, English, French, German and Arabic. He's dashing, super-macho, good-looking, brave, smart, and catnip to the ladies. He knows how to take charge, and he knows how to have a good time. The excellent cast is headed by Venezuelan actor Édgar Ramírez, who is more than equal to the task, as forceful with annoying cops and security officials as he is with OPEC honchos and pretty women. Much of the pleasure of the film is watching Ramírez in action.

Another pleasure is the authenticity. There are over a dozen national venues involved including France, Hungary, East Germany, Austria, Lebanon, South Yemen, Tunisia, Libya, Algeria, and Sudan, nine languages spoken, and there's never a false note. Though English is the main language heard, unlike the Hollywood version of such proceedings, Carlos is a film where Arabs play Arabs, and they have the right accents. It's enjoyable to see Ramírez sliding smoothly back and forth from German to French to Spanish to Arabic to English as the occasion arises. Ramírez' Carlos if not the coolest dude ever, comes pretty darn close. (Of course he is also a killer, and he suffers a decline.) This actor played in Soderbergh's Che but he didn't get to play Che, and that was a steal. What Todd McCarthy wrote was "Édgar Ramírez inhabits the title role with arrogant charisma of Brando in his prime." That's only a slight exaggeration.

Speaking of Soderbergh, though this sprightly study has none of the vanity project air of his Che, there is a similar problem of a format too unwieldy for theatrical viewing. This should be seen and is best enjoyed as TV drama in three spaced-apart segments. Instead it came out first at Cannes and was watched and reviewed there as a film. IFC in the US is to make it available in its full length and in a 2 1/2-hour shortened version. Critics who have to spend more than half their day watching one film, no matter how good, are likely to complain, and it's not surprising that some have knocked Assayas' extremely accomplished foray into the miniseries genre. Main points: that Carlos' ideology isn't subtle and gets cruder as he ages in the film; that he's crude with women too. Manohla Dargis wrote (from Cannes) that this Carlos is "a militant pinup" (she speaks of his leather and beret outfit for the OPEC caper) but at bottom is "a mercenary, a thug."

Yes, and one might add that the film could benefit from a few less scenes that begin with men lighting up cigarettes -- or cigars, even ones from Fidel's private Havana stock (as Carlos boasts at one point). The nicotine, not to mention the booze, consumption in this movie will wear you out.

I too had to watch the series in basically one long sitting, and that can leave you limp. It's still obviously great stuff; but being able to take a break of a day or a week between segments would make it work a lot better. Maybe in any format the free-lance revolutionary's life ultimately becomes repetitious and fatiguing. But this is a story full of panache. The Jackal has fed into many films already and is reputed to be a source of the Bourne concept, but it seems likely Hollywood will be moved to draw on the character anew after this dashing recreation, and Ramírez might get some plum roles.

Apart from his perhaps simplistic Marxist ideology and sexist dealings with Seventies women's liberationists, Carlos can be accused of being a grand-stander in tireless pursuit of personal fame. Various governmental adversaries or Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) handlers accuse him of such behavior. But despite his self-promotion, womanizing, and love of good whiskey and good cigars, the Venezuelan had lots of training, in economics as well as fighting, and his politics were sincere. He supported the Palestinian cause, and early on is reluctantly accepted by the PFLP's Wadie Haddad (Ahmad Kaabour) to carry out terrorist acts against Israel. This becomes his main focus, and leads to his pursuit by many national security services.

The film's first major scene is one in which Carlos is caught with a group of Latin American leftist friends in an apartment in Paris when two French DST counterintelligence agents come in looking for him. He shoots his way out and kills the two agents. This is the crime that leads to his incarceration in La Santé prison two decades later.

The second and longer big sequence is Carlos' most celebrated exploit, in which he and a group of German and Arab cohorts take OPEC's main delegates hostage at a meeting in Vienna in 1975 and try to fly them to Baghdad. The trip is cut short and is seen by the PFLP as a failure , but Carlos takes $20 million in ransom money and the exploit makes him famous. Ramírez's revolutionary outlaw shtick is at its most glamorous and sexy in these scenes. When he talks to the likes of the Saudis' Sheikh Ahmad Zaki Yamani as an equal, it's a pleasure.

Carlos is more effective than some of the other Seventies terrorism films at showing the range of human skills involved; they vary from the German nutcase Nada (Julia Hummer) to faithful allies like Johannes Weinrich (Alexander Scheer), to brilliant leaders like Carlos himself. Seeing this maligned profession from the viewpoint of a practitioner as bold, brave, and talented as Carlos allows one to understand better what it means to live this way. Carlos sees himself as a soldier of the revolution who exists only for his mission and his fellow soldiers. He is not a martyr but serves best by surviving for the next mission. He goes downhill in the end however, as he is rejected by one former Eastern Bloc and Arab ally after another.

The film contains the startling revelation that all countries use terrorists for their own ends. Carlos is traded back and forth from Yemen to Hungary to East Germany to France to Syria to Lebanon to Sudan. In the end he is abandoned by everyone, used up, and sold to the highest bidder. The process leading up to Carlos' delivery to the French is slow and torturous, but it is true. Assayas' Carlos is as instructive as it is entertaining.

Shown first at Cannes out of competition, later on French TV (Canal+). It was bought for US distribution in both short and full length formats by IFC. Seen and reviewed as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center. For more details see the Wikipedia articles Carlos (TV miniseries) and Carlos the Jackal. A.O. Scott has an profile of Assayas in the NY Times Magaine, "A New King of Cineaste," Sept. 24, 2010, which sets Carlos in the context of the director's whole body of work and personal identity.

LEE CHANG-DONG: POETRY (2010)

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YOON JEONG-HEE IN POETRY

A drowned girl, an elegant old lady, a search for beauty

As in his last film, Secret Sunshine, Lee Chang-dong has drawn an exceptional performance from an actress playing the role of a single woman raising a child under difficult conditions. Mija (Yoon Jeong-hee, a veteran actress in her sixties who had not made a film in sixteen years) is raising her teenage grandson Jongwook (Lee David). Her daughter has moved to another town after divorcing.

Three things are going on. And they are serious things, a death, a crime, and a fatal illness. A girl is found in the river. She was a student at Jongwook's school and committed suicide after being repeatedly raped by five students. One of them turns out to be Jongwook. Mija is an elegant woman who sets off her slightly ravaged beauty by dressing nicely. She has had a fascinating past, and evidently was once a beauty. Now, however, she is reduced to working as a housekeeper for M. Kand (Kim Hira), a well-off shopkeeper who is damaged from a stroke. Visiting a doctor for a prickly feeling in her arm, she is instead diagnosed as probably being in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease. Instead of pursuing treatment or telling her daughter -- about the Alzheimer's or, later, her son's crime -- she impulsively joins an adult poetry class.

Throughout the film, Mija struggles to produce a poem, taking out a notebook to jot down ideas whenever she eats a fallen apricot or sees a pretty flower. She also attends meetings of a poetry group whose contributors are alternately maudlin, kitsch, or bawdy. The bawdy one turns out to be a policeman, and that becomes significant later. And what is maudlin or kitsch comes across as colorful artifact, not in any way spilling over into a story that could so easily have succumbed to treacle but instead remains tart and keenly observed. Still, one wonders if the poetry class theme needed to be so exhaustively explored: at 139 minutes, the film is again too long, as was the 142-minute Secret Sunshine.

The crime is only revealed later after much time has been spent following Mija's daily routines, which include a relation with the post-stroke man that verges on the intimate, and a growing sense of her openness, patience, and ability to cope -- but also a tendency to walk away from unpleasantness. The rapes are to be kept secret but four fathers of the other boys corral Mija to contribute to pay off and silence the mother, a rough woman from a poor rural family, to the tune of 30 million won (about $30,000). She wants to contribute but hasn't got the money. The idea of a legal settlement and cover-up seems repugnant and Mija's solution is hardly above reproach either. Ultimately there is poetic justice, however, in more ways than one in writing by Lee Chang-dong, who began as a novelist, that is both subtle and ingenious.

Meanwhile Jongwook is never anything but oafish and lazy when at home with his grandmother, disrespectful, dirty, the basic teenager from hell -- but quite believable and never overstated. She is sometimes severe with him but still in some ways indulgent. And at moments he can be cowed into submission and still seem just a boy. Occasionally they play badminton in the evenings in front of the apartment building; she's rather good at it. Later she gives an awesome performance at karaoke. Eventually Mija will find surprising solutions to all her problems, and will be the only student who comes up with a poem at the end of the session as the teacher had requested. It is a poem linking her with the drowned girl.

Poetry has moments that are obviously pushed and manipulative and it is sometimes predictable, but it is also neat in its dovetailing explorations of morality, social justice, and the search for meaning and beauty in life. I tend to feel uncomfortable in Lee Chang-dong's films, as if something isn't quite right. However, watching Yoon Jeong-hee is a continual pleasure. Not only are her scenes delicate and subtle, but she is a wonderful example of how an older woman can be beautiful and elegant -- and dignified even under great duress. And sometimes manipulativeness is forgivable when the arrangements make as satisfying a pattern as they do here. And the best moments, like the visit by Mija to the drowned girl's mother, when she does not do what she was expected to do and instead the delicacy of the character portrait is enhanced, have an unexpected and quite wonderful quality.

Seen as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center in September 2010. Shown at Cannes, where it was awarded the Best Screenplay prize, and at Telluride and Toronto with many other festivals to come. A Kino International release.

MICHELANGELO FRAMMARTINO: LE QUATTRO VOLTE (2010)

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GIUSEPPE FUDA IN LE QUATTRO VOLTE

Pythagoras, transmigration, and Calabrian goats

Frammartino was born in Milan but again returns to his family's native Calabria, to which he had often traveled in his youth, for this second feature. He realized a dream: exploring the intersection of documentary and fiction, culture and history. Le Quattro Volte is a formally beautiful, rather abstract, almost wordless visual poem. The filmmaker visited the Serre, a mountainous region of the Calabrian outback in the province of Vibo Valentia. He found there communities of shepherds and coalmen and decided to make a film, having found his elements but not yet determined how they would fit together. He made a film about an old goatherd, a baby goat, a big pine tree, and an ancient process of making charcoal, the four "volte" or "times" referred to in the title.

The intellectual framework of the film is more elaborate and high concept than that. For Frammartino it's important that Pythagoras lived in what is now Calabria in the 6th Century BC, and that his school taught the doctrine of the transmigration of souls. Pythagoras wrote: "Each of us has four lives inside us which fit into one another. Man is mineral because his skeleton is made of salt; man is also vegetable because his blood flows like sap; he is animal inasmuch as he is endowed with motility and knowledge of the outside world. Finally, man is human because he has the gifts of will and reason. Thus we must know ourselves four times."

Open-minded viewers may enjoy just watching the handsome photography of a little-seen part of the world, with medium and long shots of landscape and villagers, and closeups of goats, nimble, pretty, ometimes comical, the sense of a quiet, seemingly unspoiled land, not unlike the Aquila of Corbijn's recent The American. On the other hand, notwithstanding the debt to Raymond Depardon and Robert Bresson, one may find Le Quattro Volte's total absence of plot or dialogue, the preponderance of inarticulate, neutral framing, either offputting, or just boring.

We begin, anyway, with the Human. The Shepherd (Giuseppe Fuda) herds his goats up in the hills and slopes above his village. He is ill, with a chronic cough. To treat it every night he drinks dust gathered from the floor of the local church mixed with water. Dirt not being an effective remedy for respiratory disease, the Shepherd dies: dust to dust. But in a striking shot from inside the marble tomb, there is still a heartbeat as it is sealed. The film moves immediately to the animal world, as a white baby goat is seen dropping from his standing mother's womb and slowly scrambling to his feet (an arresting sequence by any standard). Eventually a number of baby goats head out of the village following the herd up into the surrounding hills, but the little white one gets stuck in a long trench and becomes isolated. Eventually it runs up a slope and finds refuge under a big fir tree. From the Human we have moved to the Animal and now Plants take center stage.

Next, villagers are seen coming and cutting down the tall tree. Frammartino has explained that this is part of a local custom called Pita. They strip the tree, set it upright in the center of the village, and someone rides it over onto the street. A very long and typically static shot by excellent cinematographer Andrea Locatelli with his 35mm camera stationed high above a street shows men in costumes with the tree, a dog comically chasing back and forth around them and later causing a small truck to slip down a hill and bash down a fence. What the ceremony means is not explained, but we see Good Friday celebrations, with villagers recreating the Stations of the Cross, suggesting Resurrection.

Later the fir tree's cut into pieces and taken out of town to where the coalmen build wooden domes in which the wood is fired and turned into light, crispy black charcoal. Thus Human has gone to Animal, thence to Plant, now to Mineral. No dialogue, no music through all this, only the sounds of daily life, the tinkling of goat bells, roar of small engines.

As Jay Weissberg points out in his Variety review of this film, it's quite manipulative, making use of three villages to represent one, never showing signs of the presence of modern life -- pop music, television, cell phones. Things found in the remotest human habitations today are edited out to give a sense of primitivism and quietude. If this is truth, it's truth of a highly predetermined and honed-down kind. Due to the film's highly experimental nature its US box office potential may be dubious; but then Philip Gröning's nearly wordless 2005 monastery documentary Into Great Silence had a good US art house run. Le Quattro Volte's festival success is indicated by its winning the Europa Cinemas Label for Best European Film in the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes, and it received glowing reviews in Italy and went on to Telluride and Toronto, as well as the NYFF. US theatrical release will begin at Film Forum in NYC in March 2011. According to IMDb, it opened on eighteen screens in Italy March 28.

Seen as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center in September 2010, this 88-minute Italian-German-Swiss coproduction is a Lorber Films release from Kino Lorber Inc. in the US.

HONG SANG-SOO: OKI'S MOVIE (2010)

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JUNG YUMI AND LEE SUN-KYUN IN OKI'S MOVIE

Shuffled film school triangle

Hong Sang-soo means philandering drinkers, egocentric filmmakers, pretty women, winter weather, and endless self-reflectiveness. This can lead him to good character studies, ironic laughs, keenly observed almost-real-time flirtations -- and to a light intellectualism and energetic use of dialogue that owe a clear debt to the French New Wave. This time, due to dividing the film into four short segments with the same triangle in rearranged situations, the repetitiousness and self-absorption are carried to an almost geometric extreme, and the situations, despite a Rashōmon-esque multiple examination, come through as thoughtful in a film-school sort of way, but otherwise only superficially delved into. Hong Sang-soo fans, who include myself, will still not want to miss this because it explores further themes already richly dabbled in by the filmmaker. Others may fail to be entranced.

Basically we get an older director and teacher and a younger one, and a pretty young woman film student; sometimes the younger director is just a student. In the first episode, A Day for Incantation, the tall, deep-voiced younger filmmaker Jingu (boyish Korean star Lee Sun-kyun, 35 now and so able to straddle the fence) is experienced and married; in later episodes he will revert to mere student status. Here, he has supposedly quit smoking and drinking but is slipping back, to his wife's disapproval. He discusses the decline of filmmaking in a bad economy with older film professor Song (Moon Sung-keun). He gets drunk and annoys Song with questions about a rumor that he's bought his tenure. Then he goes, drunk, to a Q&A following showing of a short film he's just made and he is called to task by a young woman for jilting her best friend -- in an affair even though he's married.

In the second episode, King of Kisses, Jingu is purely a student, pursuing Oki (Jung Yumi), another student, who rejects him for drinking and notes his classmates call him "psycho." But he proves himself a good kisser, and after staying up all night in the cold outside Oki's flat, she takes him in and has sex with him and agrees she's his girlfriend. She is probably having sex with Song, the professor and older man, at this time.

The very short episode After the Snowstorm is from the viewpoint of Song, here a disillusioned film teacher whose classroom after the snowstorm is completely empty. Finally just two students, Jingu and Oki, show up, and he engages in a question and answer session with them about life and love, firing off rapid, arguably superficial answers.

The fourth and titular episode Oki's Movie purports to be a movie made by and narrated by Oki, the girl film student, in which she depicts her two lovers, Song and Jingu, whom she accompanies on the same walk up Acha mountain in the wintertime a year apart, going back and forth between the two lovers and showing what the two lovers and she said and did at various points, the parking lot, the entrance, the pavilion, and how many times they went to the restroom on the way up. The gist is that she was very involved with both men at the same time, and felt herself to be equally in love with them both, but later dropped the older one.

There is a certain almost mathematical interest in the recombinations here, but the cutting up of the film into the four segments keeps any scene from being played through to the point of developing depth, a danger that has arisen in earlier Hong films, which are often divided into two or three parts set in different locations. I confess to a weakness for Hong Sang-soo through multiple Lincoln Center viewings, and can forgive him his greatest self-indulgence. But though aspects of the first and last parts of this film are memorable, I'm afraid this has the weakness of his earlier films in even greater measure: that they will be most enjoyable to watch for an hour or so, but afterward all that may remain are vague memories of blowhard movie directors getting drunk or laid -- usually both -- or standing talking on the beach.

Oki's Movie (Ok-hui-ui yeonghwa), a film of 80 minutes from South Korea, was seen and reviewed as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, September 2010. It premiered at Venice several weeks earlier and also was shown at Toronto.

PATRICK KEILLER: ROBINSON IN RUINS (2010)

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An unsentimental journey around the south of England

Vanessa Redgrave voices the narration of this intriguing, intelligent film that hovers between historical analysis and geographical essay while traveling in an ellipse around the south of England with a series of static shots of locations that illustrate ecology, history, and politics in a world marked by the collapse of late stage capitalism, privatization of public lands (from the 16th century onwards), the emptying of the countryside, and planetary ecological disaster.

The framework is a fiction, separating Keiller (for whom this is the third in a series, the first two being London and Robinson in Space) from his observations, because purportedly the film is constructed from footage recorded by an alter ego, the wandering researcher Robinson. Robinson was not his real name, the narrator says. He had lived in Germany, though he was not German. The allusion is to the late W.G Sebald, a German writer long resident in England whose 2001 book Austerlitz this film resembles. At the end of the film, Robinson is said to have disappeared, but his footage found in a shed.

Striking images of nature and marginal sites (military bases, opium fields, lichen growing on a traffic sign) and sometimes contemplative, other times apocalyptic, observations are delivered in Ms. Redgrave's measured, pleasant, posh-sounding voice. As Keiller explained in an interview with Dennis Lim and other members of the press at the New York Film Festival, the filmmaking comes first in his process, and took some time. Then comes the writing, which weaves together (and paces apart) the different shots and interweaves information about little known historical facts and detailed accounts of the ownership of certain ostensibly public spaces. It's a given of Keiller's working method as a filmmaker and a thinker that he is simultaneously exploring the intersection of enclosures, lichen, the 2008-2009 global financial crises, while we may be looking at a marker showing 58 miles from London or a small ruined castle with a railway speeding by or a spider going round and round repairing its web.

Comparing Robinson in Ruins with London and Robinson in Space, Leslie Felperin of Variety feels the new film "hasn't quite got its predecessors' breathtaking range of reference or their spritely wit." He later describes the first film enticingly: "In the first, London (1994), an unnamed narrator voiced by the late Paul Scofield (whose droll, honeyed tones enhanced both pics so deeply) describes how he and his lover Robinson explored the burg of the title, from Downing Street, the prime minister's residence, to Ikea in deepest suburban Brent Cross, all part of a quest to map the 'psychic landscape' of the capital, with digressions about Baudelaire, H.G. Wells, and Laurence Sterne, among many others." That indeed sounds poetntially sprightlier than Robinson in Ruins, which does not much develop the Robinson character as it goes along or include digressions about quite such a range of authors but instead dwells a lot on US companies' and the American government's ownership or control of missile bases and other installations, sometimes in ruins, or abandoned after the recent expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars. It seems agreed that viewers of Keiller's two previous Robinsons will get what's going on better, that there's less offhand wit this time, and that the replacement of the late Paul Scofield's rich, plummy, ironic voice by Vanessa Redgrave's is another loss. Nonetheless, though perhaps more downbeat than the earlier films and best taken in segments (which Keiller wants it to be via DVD, cued to a map), Robinson in Ruins offers lots of mental stimulation to the thoughtful viewer.

Keiller is a lecturer who took 13 years e to get from the last Robinson film to this one. He studied at the Royal College of Art, and has often presented his ideas and observations about architecture and landscape in gallery installations. Those, of course, could not include a narration as detailed as this one but are normally restricted to visuals. It takes a while to get used to the format. Clearly Keiller's films are avant-garde in nature. Felperin says these are essentially "radio plays with pictures." Thus the pictures distract from the words. But after one adjusts, the pictures provide a resting place for the eye while the mind is stimulated by the words. The images are coldly handsome: 35mm HD -- and suggest that despite the narrated decline of the UK and the planet, there remains much unspoiled beauty in England's green and pleasant land.

Seen and reviewed at the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center in September 2010. It was shown earlier at Venice.

APICHATPONG WEERASETHAKUL: UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES (2010)

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Dying as a gathering of spirits

The 40-year-old Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who studied filmmaking in Chicago, is more and more celebrated in the festival circuit. His latest film, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, received the Golden Palm, the top honor, at the Cannes Festival this year. Shot in the environs of the director's hometown of Khon Kaen in Thailand’s rice-growing and poor northeastern plateau, Uncle Boonmee is a strange film that slides back and forth between present and past time and between dreamlike sequences involving visits from the dead and everyday silliness like a truant young Buddhist monk who says "Let's go to the Seven Eleven" or a dead son who comes back in the form of a wooly critter with red eyes that glow in the dark. Spiritualism, reincarnation, out-of-body experiences, visits from the dead, even sex with a fish come and go with a quality of dreamlike abandon that entrances those who surrender themselves to the director's vision -- and makes rational types go into total reject mode.

In one sequence Weerasethakul says is a homage to old Thai films a princess carried through the forest on a litter draped in diaphanous curtains walks into a stream beneath a waterfall casting off jewelry and clothing to be sexually possessed by a jumping (and hitherto talking) catfish that throbs between her legs.

Uncle Boonmee (Thanapat Saisaymar) is a character the director has used more than once. This time he is suffering from kidney failure, is obviously in need of dialysis treatments, and has left a hospital and come back to the family farm to live out his last days among relatives and caretakers, including his sister-in-law Jen (Jenjira Pongpas). Conversation is desultory, concerning Boonmee's need for care, a Laotian male nurse, and other topics. At a long dinner table sequence the phantom relatives begin to appear: Boonmee expects to depart this world, and they apparently come to see him off. First is his late, much-beloved, wife Huay (Natthakarn Aphaiwonk) in ectoplasmic form, a grayish image. Then comes his disappeared son, whom we've already seen as red glowing eyes in the forest. He's a furry "monkey ghost," a life-sized wooly mammoth. Everyone present sees these visitors. There's a contrast between the everyday chatty flavor of the dialogue and the supernatural, borderline horrific nature of the visitations. No one screams or shouts. Conversation is deadpan. This somehow works to create a surreal atmosphere in which anything may be possible, though to unsympathetic eyes the result may just feel peculiar and silly, or as one IMDb contributor said, "bizarre and little more." That viewer complained of losing two hours out of his life. Maybe so. But they may be two hours worth giving, because what Weerasethakul provides isn't something is best understood by description and analysis but rather must simply be experienced -- and in that it is distinctively cinematic.

The director's two previous films, Tropical Malady and Syndromes and a Century, were both divided into two parts with the second acting as a kind of commentary on the first. This just has sequences that move jerkily forward in chronological progression, sort of. How they connect isn't always wholly clear, particularly not in the case of the old Thai movie homage. Apart from the dinner table and the princess-and-the-catfish sequence there is a lengthy, later, climactic one, accompanied with an ominous throbbing sound, in which Uncle Boonmee and others explore a cave, their flashlights darting over its odd formations to create a succession of naturally spooky and mysterious images. This leads up to Uncle Boonmee's death. Somewhat anticlimactic is a closing episode of a funeral ceremony in a temple with flashing neon lights and female relatives in what may be a hotel room sorting funeral cash gifts and receiving the young monk, who sheds his robes, showers, and wants to go out and eat. The food run happens out-of-body. Uncle Boonmee also makes stunning use of suddenly introduced stills, some of them showing young men in camouflage-cloth fatigues gathered around the "monkey ghost" as if for a snapshot of comrades on an outing.

The world of Apichatpong Weerasethakul (or as some non-Thais call him, "Joe") seems largely not only alien and strange but also fey and self-indulgent, but nonetheless you have to grant that the director has natural cinematic gifts and his work is sui generis. His sense of composition, image and sound is very distinctive. Working with cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, he provides many haunting images, especially in night photography. The sound here is a feast of powerful and rapid contrasts, between a chattering jungle and silence, a rippling waterfall and a saccharine Thai pop song. Somehow with rather limited means he creates effects that are rich and strange. This is not surprising. People can be spooked or scared or mesmerized better with limited means than the elaborate CGI of films like Inception. The costliest studio gimmicks merely call attention to themselves; the simple, cheap, but inventive ones focus on what the filmmaker wants to convey. This is why The Blair Witch Project was such a success. "Joe" is at heart a Blair Witch Project kind of guy. His weirdness is all the more weird because its framework is matter-of-fact, its means simple and DIY.

Weerasethakul's style appeals to a host of currently prevailing festival tastes. Glacially slow scenes shot with a stationary camera mostly with long and medium shots are much in vogue. So are fictions that are barely distinguishable from documentary. The more exotic the world thus evoked the better. And if the material provided is utterly puzzling, not much more is required. Especially when the gift for melding image and sound is personal and strong. Then we get a result that is not adaptable to mainstream general box office tastes. But what are festivals for if not to present films tailored to a very special audience, quite clearly distinct from hoi polloi?

Seen and reviewed as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, September 2010. Winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes. There is also a 17-minute opening pendant film (like the one for Wes Anderson's Darjeeling Limited) called Letter to Uncle Boonme. The longer film is loosely based on a book by a Thai Buddhist monk. It is having some European theatrical releases. Also shown at Toronto, and the London and other festivals will show it. An article in the NY Times by Thomas Fuller, "Laurels at Cannes and Battles at Home," fills out the picture of the film's cultural context and the director's uneasy relationship with the mainstream Thai audience.

Uncle Boonmee will be Thailand’s Official Selection for Best Foreign Language Film for the 84th Annual Academy Awards. It opens in New York on Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011 at the Film Forum. Strand Releasing is the distributor.

ABBAS KIAROSTAMI: CERTIFIED COPY (2010)

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The game of marriage, game of love

Kiarostami, the most honored of the contemporary "Iranian New Wave" directors, told an English journalist last year that he would never move from his native country. However, he has now directed an international film, produced in France (by MK2), starring a French actress (Juliette Binoche) and an English opera singer (William Shimell), shot in Tuscany, with dialogue in English, French, and Italian. And while the director, who made more than forty films at home in Iran and received many awards for them abroad, has been noted for unusual camera positions and confusing narrative gaps as well as harsh themes of politics and death, this new film is more of a glossy chamber piece. Except for a sequence shot into a car like ones he did in several earlier films, it's shot in a smooth, straightforward manner and depicts the story of a man and a woman who meet and spend a few hours together. She drives him to a touristy town called Lucignano. They argue, they drink coffee, they talk, perhaps they make love. And that's all there is too it.

Except that Certified Copy (Copie conforme is the original French title) is a teasing puzzle film that plays games with the theme announced in the title -- also the name of a book-length essay by James Miller (Shimell). He is giving a lecture (in English) celebrating the publication of the book in Italian. His thesis is that a good copy is as valid as the work of art it's based on and can give as much pleasure.

The weakness of this entertaining film, which includes a suave, if neutral performance by the opera singer Mr. Shimall (who never had a purely spoken part before), and a richly histrionic one by Binoche, who received the Best Actress prize for it at Cannes this year, is that it is all simply a conceit -- about identity. Viewers with a long memory will remember Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad, in which a man meets a woman and claims they met there the previous year. The question is repeated over and over, and never resolved. The film, with its setting at an austerely grand old European spa, is a series of aesthetic delights, of pleasing abstract geometries. Certified Copy is something different -- but not entirely. Though superficially much warmer and without the austere elegance, it too is only a riddle.

The couple seems to be playing a game. There are many hints at the talk that She/Elle (Binoche) is a visitor who has heard of and seen this English writer and wants to meet him. She has seen and read his book, and so has her sister Marie. Her young son, to whom she speaks in French, seems to know she is interested in this Englishman and teases her about it. He too attends the man's talk, but is bored by it, perhaps doesn't even understand. (But does the audience? They are Italians.) She sends a note to Miller, and after an awkward meeting at her antique shop in the town -- later it emerges she has lived in Italy for five years -- she is soon driving him off to Lucignano in her car while he signs six copies of his book for her.

When they get to a cafe and Miller leaves to take a phone call, the mistress of the cafe has a conversation with her, in Italian, about marriage, assuming Miller is her husband. She takes up this game, saying they have been married for fifteen years. When Miller comes back she tells him, in English, about this. For the rest of the film she and Miller pretend to be a married couple. And they do it so well that we, the viewers, become increasingly confused. What is the game? That they are married, or that they were not married and are now playing at being married? And, in the terms set up (a little too neatly) by Miller's essay book, mightn't a fake marriage be as good as a real one? They seem to evoke the accumulated resentments and ill reproaches and indifference of fifteen years of marriage so convincingly. Little things cast doubt on the original situation, for example the fact that now, Miller speaks a lot to her in French, whereas at first they spoke only English. Shimell may be less of an actor than Binoche (one would expect so), but his mellow voice sounds like Cary Grant's and he has nice wavy gray hair. He's a nice posh fake husband -- or disappointing real one; take your pick.

The trouble with this, other than its being entirely contrived to puzzle the audience, is that it falls back on the essential fakery of conventional filmmaking, where well-trained (and well-directed and rehearsed) actors are able to play out emotional little scenes in a convincing way even though they often don't know who their characters are or where the scene will go in the final sequence of the edited film. Unfortunately films are too often just a game anyway; this is not particularly different. And Certified Copy seems false also in the way of an international production directed by a famous filmmaker from far away, with French, English, and Italian actors, glamorous accoutrements (a posh antique shop, nice car; a well-known writer who's just won a prize in Italy), posh voices, multi-lingual conversation -- so that, with the help of subtitles, we can enjoy feeling how international and sophisticated we are. Certified Copy is pleasant enough. Binoche, acting with equal fluency in English, French, and even Italian, gives a dazzling performance with emotional moments. But since the point is to puzzle us rather than move us, none of it seems to matter much.

Certified Copy/Copie conforme was seen and reviewed as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center. It premiered at Cannes, and opened the next day, May 19, 2010, in Paris; two days later in Italy. It opens theatrically in the US in March 2011.

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MICHAEL EPSTEIN: LennonNYC (2010)

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John Lennon's last nine years

LennonNYC is a documentary included in the PBS American Masters series about the nine years the Beatle John Lennon spent living with his family in New York City during the 1970's. The period ends with Lennon's assassination in December 1980 two months after his 40th birthday. A long struggle to avoid deportation and obtain his Green Card has been won. In NYC Lennon has been happy, productive, enjoying his young son Sean, reunited with his wife Yoko Ono after a painful period of separation. He has played Madison Square Garden with Elton John and received a huge ovation. He and Yoko have recently made the Double Fantasy album. This film, which is richly illustrated with footage and tapes of its subject, includes some taste of nearly all the music he recorded at various times in America, including some unusual outtakes.

LennonNYC is a good-looking film with handsomely formatted subtitles and hip little black-and-white animations dividing sections and filling in image when only sound is available. The film makes use of plenty of footage of Lennon -- he must be one of the most fully recorded humans in history -- some of it very informal, seamlessly conveying a sense of Lennon's presence. Important talking heads include friends and musicians and producers he worked with closely, including photographer Bob Gruen, producer Roy Cicala, David Geffen, and members of the New York band Elephant's Memory. A centerpiece is an interview with Yoko Ono. Evidently this film has her imprimatur. Without that it would not be much of a film. On the other hand, Yoko is controlling how we perceive John in death as in life. The film doesn't go into much detail about the assassination, and doesn't even mention the name of his convicted killer, Mark David Chapman. Nor do we hear from Lennon's two sons, Julian and Sean.

The positive aspects of Lennon's choice of New York are fully covered: the way people left him alone so that, unlike the situation in London, he and his wife could go to a movie or restaurant, buy clothes, or take a taxi without being mobbed. NYC felt like a freer place for the couple in simpler ways, because of the city's melting-pot identity. But the other reason for leaving England, the fact that Yoko was strongly disliked there for intruding into the life of the Beatles and being instrumental in the group's breakup, is barely touched on.

In some ways this is also a strangely mixed story. John Lennon loved New York and was very happy there. But he was also at his most unhappy. After a night of infidelity Yoko kicked him out of the Dakota where they lived. They had been inseparable, 24 hours a day; to be apart was difficult for both of them. She eventually became very productive, and was enjoying the separation. He went to LA and did some recording and a lot of drinking. This was not a good period for him. He called the time his "lost weekend." With Harry Nilssn and others he got blasted every night, usually in the company of May Pang. Yoko says that she had arranged for Pang to take John in tow, feeling he would be lost on his own. Elsewhere, not here, it is said that Lennon had an affair with Pang. In LA Lennon consumed huge quantities of alcohol. In his own words he "fell apart." He and Yoko spoke very day, but she wouldn't take him back. Not until a thunderous reception Lennon received when he played with Elton John at Madison Square Garden in 1974 and Yoko was there, and she and Lennon sat eye to eye in a little dressing room, pulled together again.

In the period that followed, their son Sean was born and John became a house husband, focusing exclusively on raising the boy, cooking, baking bread, and happy in this role. All this sweetness notwithstanding, Lennon's activism against the Vietnam war lhad earlier led to the FBI's tracking him, and a lengthy attempt to have him deported that went on throughout the New York residence. Through the help of immigration attorney Leon Wildes, somewhat miraculously the attempt was finally dropped and residency was granted.

What emerges from the film overall is a generally positive and appealing picture of what John Lennon was like, his humility, clarity and humor, his scrupulous matter-of-fact honesty -- and what the often awestruck musicians who worked with him in the American years see as his remarkable creativity. He is described by musicians as an artist who even in ostensibly fallow periods had times when the words and the music flowed from him almost like magic. Despite testimony from people then present of serious drunkenness and an episode of violence and obscenity during the Los Angeles "lost weekend," LennonNYC is a very positive spin on John Lennon. The film doesn't go into detail about the specifics of Lennon's drug use. It also does not describe how or where he and Yoko lived after the small apartment in the Village when they first came to the city. Details of the ex-Beatle's considerable wealth are omitted, though there's a quote from John about how Yoko did the accounting because he didn't have the knack for it. Such lacunae notwitstanding, obviously this 115-minute documentary, which contains plenty of archival footage, including newly-digitalized concert films, is a must-see for Beatles and/or purely John Lennon fans, especially New Yorkers.

Seen and reviewed as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center in September 2010. Also presented at the Woodstock Festival. The film's television premiere date is November 22, 2010.

ALEXEI FEDORCHENKO: SILENT SOULS (2010)

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YULYA AUG IN SILENT SOULS

Smoking, burning, and buntings on a doomed road trip

In Alexei Fedorchenko's exploration of Slavic melancholy Silent Souls, two glum, hulking middle-aged men go on a sad ritual journey. Aist (Igor Sergeyev), who was burdened by an "odd" poet father ( Viktor Sukhorukov), and his recently widowed friend Miron (Yuri Tsurilo) -- as much a friend, anyway, as their glumness allows -- get together to take the body of MIron's dead wife Tanya to the edge of Lake Nero in West-Central Russia to stage a do-it-yourself cremation and drop her ashes in the water nearby where the couple went on their honeymoon. It's a custom of the old, and vanishing, Finno-Ugric tribe from which the two men are descended.

The voiceover by Aist, who brings along his recently purchased pair of caged buntings on the trip, tells us a lot, but Fedorchenko doesn't show us much. It's all about the dying rituals of Merja culture. Aist and Miron are both Merjan. They also look very much alike. It would be nice if you could tell them apart better. Flashbacks do give them separate experiences: but how are they any different now? Miron liked to bathe his young wife Tanya (Yulya Aug) in vodka before sex (her body and especially her breasts are impressive in this ritual). Before he and Aist take the now-deceased Tanya on her last journey (no word as to how and why she died), Miron wipes her naked body with a cloth as Aist does further preparations to one side. How can one help just wondering how Ms. Aug put up with this, and made her body look floppy enough to be that of a woman recently dead? (Rigor mortis she doesn't attempt.) Custom also requires tying multicolored strings on the dead wife's pubic hairs, as is done for a bride in Merjan culture. And then we get a look at young women thus preparing a bride.

Sex continues to be a focus on the trip when Miron "smokes," local lingo for the custom, as Aist again helpfully explains, of revealing intimate details about the couple's love life, okay, even somehow desirable, to do, now that her soul has departed. What would Tanya say? But the women in the film are stolid. Aist is a photographer at the factory where Miron is a manager, and we see a succession of blank female faces early on as he snaps ID photos of new employees. One or two screw up their faces a bit, but unlike the chirpy buntings, they emit not a peep. Fedorchenko likes head-on shots: he gives us a lingering one of a blond boy (Ivan Tushin), the young Aist (though it is impossible to see traces of him in the older one), who listens to his father's poems and accompanies him on an inexplicably penitential water burial -- of his most prized possession, a small typewriter, sacrificed in midwinter. The boy pulls the typewriter out on the ice on a little trolley. Another ritual, this one presumably however not time-honored Merjan custom but the whimsy of scenarist Denis Osokin, or of Aist Sergeyev, whose novel The Buntings Osokin adapted for the film.

Then there's more sex after the cremation. Aist and Minon stand on a desolate bridge, and two women come up with the opening line, "Do you want us?" They do.

The film drops hints of excitement and revelation -- of a sudden storm out of nowhere full of jealousy, discovery, and sudden violence. When Aist's voiceover says "Little did we know that this was a trip from which we would never return," there seems, for a while anyway, real hope that Fedorchenko will stop lecturing us on Merjan folklore and tell a good story. There is a hidden menace in the similarity of the two men and their lack of a real connection. Aist might be some ectoplasmic enemy, a doppelgänger along to punish Minon for being such a dolt. Instead, alas, what happens is that the buntings who have been chirping in their cage, cooperative actors ready for any role, turn into the trigger of a final, sodden tragedy. It's all very mournful, and very Russian, I guess. But it just seems like photography with rambling talk, atmosphere waiting for the show that never starts. The 35mm Scope photography is handsome, but Leslie Felperin's verdict in Variety that the film is "beautifully assembled, but emotionally inert" is totally justified. Felperin is also right to note that Andrei Karasyov's "wailing strings sections," constitute "a solid but not desperately original score." In fact this film threatens to fade quickly in memory into other less-than-memorable recent Russian arthouse films, most of which at least had more appealing central characters.

The 75-minute film Silent Souls (entitled Ovsyanki or "Buntings" in Russian, like the novel) was seen and reviewed as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, September 2010. This is Fedorchenko's third feature, and was a selection shown a little earlier at Venice and Toronto.

SERGEI LOZNITSA: MY JOY (2010)

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OLGA SHUVALOVA AND VIKTOR NEMETS IN MY JOY

Into the maelstrom of Russian road travel without a compass

The Belarus-born documentary filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa has produced a frustrating first feature in My Joy, a film that joins together a series of mostly violent and increasingly repugnant anecdotes he was told during a decade of wandering the Russian provinces making his documentaries. When you have seen this film, you will cross visiting Russia forever off your "to-do" list. The trouble is, Loznitsa doesn't abandon narrative -- a sacrifice that can work very well when a filmmaker knows how to spin out visual poetry. He simply violates all the rules of narrative, which is quite another thing.

Mike D'Angelo at AV Club writes of My Joy: "For about an hour I was sure I was witnessing an exciting new talent, even though I wasn’t entirely sure what the hell was going on. Following a nondescript truck driver en route to deliver a load of flour, My Joy (WARNING: titular irony) initially has an engaging shaggy-dog quality, as the trucker's encounters with folks along the road — an elderly hitchhiker, a scarily young hooker — spin off into unrelated mini-narratives of their own... About an hour in, however, the film goes well beyond discursive and becomes almost completely random, abandoning the trucker entirely (in a startling way) and flitting around without even that vague semblance of a narrative skeleton."

Actually, the opening shots do not bode well because they show clumsy editing, a series of images of unappetizing landscapes and a work site drainage ditch in which a body is dumped, then covered with cement. A hand on the body has what looks like a Russian Mafia tattoo on it. Fine. A story to be revealed later? But later there are so many bodies, and this one could be any of them. The young trucker D'Angelo speaks of -- Georgy (Viktor Nemets) -- could be and at first is the connecting thread, obviously. His unsolicited "elderly hitchhiker" (Vladimir Golovin) -- is indeed elderly, since the anecdote he tells is of World War II. In it, the teller is an army officer stopped by police in a station. They take him aside, entertain him with tales of the loot they've collected, let him go -- and then stop him again. They seize his suitcase. The revenge he quickly takes makes him into a fugitive. He admits "losing" his name, and his fiancee.

Fine. Ugly, violent, but fine. And intriguing enough is the truck driver's detour, when the highway is blocked by an accident, led by a teenage prostitute (Olga Shuvalova) to a village. The camera wanders magically among the crowd in the center square, exploring a series of faces that could be by Paul Strand, had he visited contemporary Ukraine. Eventually the driver gets stuck in a field, where a trio out of Beckett coax him out of his cabin -- and, after serving him some baked potatoes, bash him on the head.

Here is where Loznitsa stops playing by the rules of story-telling, because the next morning we wake up back in World War II watching two figures crawling in the grass. No link, no explanation. Okay, the elderly hitchhiker, at a moment in time somewhere after his previous story, is one of the figures. But there is no logic. And from there on the people and incidents just get uglier and more incomprehensible. There was trouble even back in the village, because when the camera abandoned the truck driver one had the feeling that he was the film's only anchor, and that without him one would be lost. And it was finally true: lost one was, abandoned by Loznitsa, and very eager to get out of there.

One or two writers when this film showed at Cannes described it as a horror movie; others called Loznitsa an "original director with strong potential." Probably the secret to the film's festival success is that it's so unpleasant it leaves an impression. Its disjointedness is intellectually stimulating in one way: My Joy is a puzzler. Eventually one may figure out who all the people are, and though the rules of narrative have been broken, and the oscillation back and forth between eras causes much confusion, the puzzle can be solved. But so what? The events depicted have no redeeming social value. They have no meaning (other than that one should stay away from the Russian provinces) . But film buffs like being "challenged," even if the challenge is not rewarding. My Joy evokes little emotion, only repulsion. If that is "promising," it promises only further repulsion.

"A devastating critique of Russian society"? Well, not quite. It's a devastating representation of Russian society, a totally negative one. To be a critique it needs to recognize and show positive aspects of the country and show us why they aren't adequate compensation for the bad stuff.

My Joy is, nonetheless, the work of an experienced filmmaker who has found convincing actors for every role (though their meanness or violence sometimes almost defy belief), seamlessly blending actors with non-professionals so that rather than horror or fantasy the scenes feel quite realistic, and the steady widescreen cinematography of of Moldovian d.p. Oleg Mutu (who has done some of the new Romanian films, including The Death of Mr. Lazarescu) maintains the realism and provides a pleasing clarity in the landscapes. If Loznitsa would settle down and not try to film every horrifying true story he's been told but just one good one, he might make a more satisfying feature.

Seen and reviewed at the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, September 2010. Also shown at Cannes where at least one critic thought it "an outside bet for the Palme d'Or." Other festivals, including Melbourne and Hamburg.

XAVIER BEAUVOIS: OF GODS AND MEN (2010)

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A triumph of acting and atmosphere

Xavier Beauvois' last film was a little cop story, a "policier," but it hit hard. This one, based on true events in Algiers in the 1990's, hits harder, though its impact is a mixture of intellectual and emotional. It poses a life and death ethical issue. When radical Islamists (الجماعة الإسلامية المسلّحة , the Armed Islamic Group, GIA) terrorize the Algerian countryside, eight French Cistercian monks have to decide whether to accept military protection and let the government evacuate them, or stay and continue to serve the terrorized locals they've always provided with necessary clothes, food, and medical treatment.

Criticisms of the film up front are: that it's an action movie about deciding not to do anything; that where it's going is never much in doubt; that at two hours, those two points considered, it's too long; and that it covers its protagonists with sainthood a little too easily. Some critics complain that the second prize (Grand Prix) at Cannes rewarded the monks rather than the film. But these are weak objections. Accepting almost certain death is hardly not doing anything. It's not so often these days that one gets to see such personal and deeply felt moral decisions being made. Decision-making is the highest form of action; all the rest is running around in circles or following instinct. When one observes how agonizing the decision is for several of the monks, the conclusion hardly seems foregone.

The film's two-hour running time is necessary to establish how complex and difficult the decision is; moreover, the events telescoped in the film actually took place over a period of four years. The GIA had actually ordered all foreigners to leave two and a half years before they come for the monks of Tibhirine. And the film is not inferior to the monks. Typically for him, Beauvois tells a story that is both complex and essentially simple, unified by a single issue. Eventually the monks' decision comes to seem inevitable but it's not easily arrived at for some any of them.

Some of the monks have big families and ordinary occupations they might return to. Others have no one and can imagine no other life, but are afraid and don't want to die. They all are here because it is where they were meant to be. They became Cistercians to live, not to die, however: how and who and what will they be serving by dying? And how then can they make a decision that is likely to mean their death? Of Gods and Men is a meditation, a harmonious blend of practical activity, singing prayer, and turbulent encounters with the locals and the Islamists. And all the while the monks are periodically meeting among themselves under their leader Brother Christian (Lambert Wilson) to decide what to do. (Christian insists from the start that they must remain, but it's not till much later that they all come around to this point ov view.) Beauvois' accomplishment is that he handles the sublimely monastic, humbly everyday, and terrifyingly violent moments with an equally authentic feel.

Brother Luc (the venerable and monumental Michael Lonsdale) treas villagers with salves and kisses. He is old and asthmatic, but he is seeing 150 patients a day now, because they are suffering from stress. Shielded as they are, the monks know the whole country is in turmoil. Anyway, early on the GIA leader Ali Fayattia (Farid Larbi) confronts Christian, demanding medical treatment for one of their wounded. Christian manages to put him off, quoting the Qur'an. Fayattia comes across as religious; he repeats back in Arabic the Qur'anic lines Christian has quoted in French, and he's respectful of the fact that, unbeknownst to him, it is Christmas.

In the past, and still in Hollywood, a story of this kind would never be depicted so authentically. Though Beauvois by intention isn't following events literally, the people, the language, and the locales look, sond, and feel right. The monk's knowledge of and respect for local custom and a fair smattering of Arabic are established. So is their naiveté. When their Peugeot station wagon breaks down on the road, a group of local women restart if for them; they haven't a clue. There are dozens of details establishing the monks' rootedness in the place and their interaction with the people.

But this doesn't answer the question: why are French Christian monks in this strictly Muslim country? Notably, Croatian workers get their throats cut. The monks have a more important status. Doing peaceful work in a place of conflict always seems crazy or impossible, whether the doers are religious or secular. This is a question the film doesn't answer. But by the end one comes to respect the monks on their own terms. A decision can't always be judged by its consequences. This is a remarkable film because is confronts issues and beliefs in real-world terms within the otherworldly milieu of monastic life. Music consists mostly of the a capella singing of verses by the eight monks in a little chapel; toward the end, when their decision has finally been made, there is a kind of celebration where Luc opens bottles of wine and turns on a radio playing Swan Lake, which takes on a remarkable sacramental air Tchaikovsky may never have imagined. This is one of a number of bold and original decisions by Beauvois who manages almost magically to do something new within the format of classical filmmaking. He has justifiable confidence in his actors, both very individual and very much an ensemble, whose every gesture seems special and human. Yes, this is serious stuff, and the eight monks are painted in saintly colors. Is their something wrong with dignifying human courage? Caroline Champetier's photography, beautiful throughout for its clarity of light, evokes the Last Supper, and the director, in a French pun at a Q&A, connected metteur en scène, film director, with La Cène, The Last Supper.

The monks refine their decision to the point of purity. But the situation wasn't simple. The villagers seem to love the monks, but authorities see them as as colonial remnants, protecting them only out of duty. A military officer has an unfriendly look. Recent findings show when taken hostage the monks may have died by military error rather then the hand of the as yet unidentified hostage takers.

Des hommes et des dieux, 122 minutes, in French and Algerian Arabic, was seen and reviewed as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center 2010. It premiered at Cannes, where it received the Grand Prix, and opened September 8, 2010 in Paris, where it has received high praise from critics of all stripes.

DAVID FINCHER: THE SOCIAL NETWORK

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EISENBERG AND TIMBERLAKE IN THE SOCIAL NETWORK

Algorithms and power

The Social Network, David Fincher's brilliant and timely new movie based on Ben Mezrich's book The Accidental Billionaires, begins with a huge irony: The young founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, isn't social. And he isn't nice either. Not so indirectly, the film suggests that perhaps the brave new world of programming and Internet personal revelations is a corruption and downgrading of human interaction (as well as a systematic invasion of privacy). If computer nerds rule, our moral compass may be out of whack. The opening scene, packed with Aaron (West Wing) Sorkin's nasty-smart rapid-fire dialogue, shows both Mark Zuckerberg's steel trap intelligence and his total lack of human warmth. He's so coldly condescending toward his Boston U. girlfriend Erica Albright (Rooney Mara, who's to be the US Dragon Tattoo girl) that she decides right then to break up with him. She demolishes him with the closing lines: "Listen. You’re going to be successful and rich, but you’re going to go through life thinking that girls don’t like you because you’re a geek. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won’t be true. It’ll be because you’re an asshole."

Facebook grows out of this insult. Stung, Mark rushes back to Kirkland house, his Harvard dorm, drunk, and begins blogging his resentments toward Erica and simultaneously writing Facemash, a website onto which he hacks Harvard girls' ID photos and puts them in pairs so students can pick which one they prefer. (Mark abandons an earlier idea of comparing girls with farm animals.) He has gotten the site completed by using an algorithm provided by his well-off friend Eduardo Savarin (Andrew Garfield), who will emerge as the most likable character in the film. In hours Facemash goes locally viral. It's October 28, 2003. This breach of Harvard security gets Mark six months' academic probation. It also makes him famous at Harvard. The patrician, rowing champion, final club member Winklevoss twins Cameron and Tyler (both played with panache by Armie Hammer) decide Mark is the man to construct the Harvard social network they have dreamed up. Mark is flattered at being invited to talk to what he later calls "the Winklevi" at Porcellian, Harvard's most elite club (though he was only allowed in the bike room). He's also impressed that the tall, godlike twins "work out." In the verbal sparring with Erica he has talked about the desirability of entering an exclusive Harvard club. (Note: the real Mark Zuckerberg has denied that he ever wanted to join such a club, and the film omits mention that he not only graduated from an exclusive Eastern prep school, Phillips Exeter, but was captain of the fencing team there.)

The twins ask Mark to build their site and he agrees. But Mark thinks bigger -- and tells no one. He strings the twins and their pal Divya Narendra (Max Minghella) along for weeks with stalling emails. (We start getting this through inter-cut scenes of legal meetings when the principals in the events are deposed.) But he has realized the idea is too good not to steal. Facemash is replaced by what is at first called "The" Facebook. Eduardo remains Mark's business partner, but Mark does not share everything with him.

All this happens very fast, almost too fast to think -- this is the smart, competitive world of East Coast colleges where the pace is brutal and the stakes are high. There are juicy images of Ivy League party times. "The" Facebook spreads to other colleges. Eduardo's story is a foil for Mark's. He's Facebook's chief financial officer, but he's a nice guy, a guy who reaches out. He gets into some trouble, while punching for another final club, Phoenix, exposed in the Harvard Crimson for feeding a chicken chicken meat in a restaurant as part of club initiation. Later Mark's accused of tipping off the Crimson to discredit Eduardo. The friends eventually aren't.

There are many actors, including producer Douglas Urbanski as Harvard president Larry Summers, who haughtily rebuffs the Winkelvoss's request to intercede on their behalf for what they see as Mark's stealing their idea. Mark says the twins don't deserve recognition as co-creators of the site and are just upset because once in their life things haven't gone their way. The other major figure in the movie is Sean Parker (a lively Justin Timberlake), Napster's bad boy creator. As Sorkin's screenplay depicts it, Parker is a main cause of Eduardo's greatly reduced role and eventual expulsion and humiliation. But Parker is an ally and protector of Mark's interests. He knows Mark is onto something huge, and gets him bigger funding and dreams of moving Facebook not only beyond colleges and out into the rest of the USA, but to other continents. All this while Mark is still working with a mere $19,000 investment. It's Parker who, at a sushi lunch, with two sexy girls who've latched onto Eduardo and Mark, stuns them with the word "billionaire" -- and also says Mark has got to move to California, to Silicon Valley, home of the young Web rich. The big split comes when Eduardo spends a summer in New York ostensibly as a financial intern, and Mark moves out to Palo Alto.

The final focus of the movie, which makes much of the conflicts between Zuckerberg and the twins and Savarin through the deposition scenes where they confront each other at various stages, is on Mark's loneliness. He has millions of "friends," but nobody likes him. He's gained the whole world and lost his own soul -- if he ever had one. Yet he's not unsympathetic. And partly his loneliness is the loneliness of genius. He has not only gained the whole world -- which he doesn't care about: both the movie Mark and the real one are indifferent to money -- but he has changed it.

The settlements are various. No one present at the creation of Facebook has wound up a pauper. Though Mark's lack of connectedness is a theme, he's neither Machiavellian nor cruel, just cut off from people. On a Facebook page (!) about Eduardo Savarin, we learn that, "He owns a 5% share of Facebook, worth US$1.1 billion as of May 13, 2010." The twins, their father, and their partner Divvya Narendra, one source says, received a settlement that including Facebook shares is now worth around $121 million. The twins also came in sixth in the last Olympic rowing competition, and are still in training.

The movie has a subtly distinctive look that can best be called muted. Without forcing anything, Fincher and his crew bring dialogue to life without any artificial jazzing up. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's music blends nicely with ambient sound, which is often important. Great skill is exercised in conveying young people talking in loud party or club settings while still keeping tricky dialogue audible. Needless to say, Eisenberg anchors the piece amazingly. He showed in Holy Rollers that he could give life to a nerdy, peculiar guy; that ability explodes here, with an impersonation that is creepy, funny, stunning, and sometimes appealing. Garfield is equally good as a kind of foil, an innocent, but warm and when needed, combative. Timberlake creates a character that is not only wild and dangerous but smart and relatively worldly wise.

Fincher's movie relies heavily on Aaron Sorkin's writing, which makes characters and events come to life. A criticism is that the witty dialogue is so infectious all the characters begin to talk the same "Sorkin-speak." But Sorkin has a great knack for depicting power struggles among rapidly changing and spreading events. This is above all a series of riveting scenes with great, memorable dialogue. Erica's initial put-down is just one of a host of zingers. This is a classic story of greed, jealousy, and rapacious free enterprise. It may metastasize faster in the world of x's and o's, but it's old-fashioned Americana. Besides this we get character studies of boys growing into men that is a whole set of coming-of-age tales, but above all an ensemble piece. This is not a "biopic." Actually, we don't know who Mark Zuckerberg is, or who any of the main players are. That means some controversy, but that only tightens the movie's vice-grip on the zeitgeist. The Social Network is not only one of the best American films of the year but one of the most significant.

Seen and reviewed as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, where it was the Opening Night film September 24, 2010. The Social Network opens wide in US and Canadian theaters October 1, 2010. Facebok is everywhere, and this film will open in at least 29 other countries over time. It's probably going to make Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, and Justin Timberlake (already famous anyway) as well known as Mark Zuckerberg, or more so.

YouTube videos (5) of NYFF Q&A begin here.
See also David Denby's eulogy in The New Yorker calling it "a brilliantly entertaining and emotionally wrenching movie," "a work of art" and "an extraordinary collaboration."

See further Filmleaf discussion of this movie here.

JEAN-LUC GODARD: FILM SOCIALISME (2010)

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Difficult watching

Godard is nearly eighty now, but Clint Eastwood is six months older; and of course festival-goers know Manuel de Olivera has just completed a film at nearly the age of 102, which the Variety review calls "an especially accomplished example of the helmer's favorite theme of impossible love expressed in precise, comic terms." Yet there is a weariness in Godard's work we don't feel in the work of the other two directors, perhaps because Godard is an avant-gardist, and nothing ages like the radical, and pessimism tires out the pessimist. Another reason is that Godard doesn't work by conventional full-bore filmmaker's means; his work still has a DIY quality; he does a lot of it himself. This time he is working entirely in video. Unlike David Lynch, whose Inland Empire is all shot with the same non-professional camera, Godard, and three other cameramen, used a range of cameras from professional HD that produced pristine images of a luxury cruise ship in bright gleaming color to a cell phone that yielded harsh blurs when flashed on the big screen. This according to Amy Taubin, whose article about Film Socialisme for Film Comment was written in connection with the New York Film Festival presentation.

It is easy enough to point out, as Taubin does, that the film is divided into three parts like a sonata with a fast movement, a longer, slower one, and a faster final one shorter than the first. The first, as Taubin puts it, "takes place on a huge ocean liner cruising the Mediterranean, with brief side trips in various ports of call." "Takes place" is one way of describing it; I'd have said simply "was shot." Due to the extreme fragmentation and shortness of the edits, there isn't much sense of anything "taking place." Nor are the non-ship moments identifiably "ports of call," though that makes sense of it. The second section focuses on, let's say, a house and nearby gas station in the south of France. The last "movement" goes back over the Mediterranean capitals of western civilization alluded to in the first, but this time making much use of archival footage of atrocities -- something Godard has done before, I believe in his 2004 Notre musique.

The first part is full of gnomic utterances, and everything is in fragments, in a variety of languages, mostly French with German next, also including some Russian, Arabic, Hebrew, and a dash of Latin and Greek. References are made to various writers and thinkers, and there's a guy on board the ship who gives a lecture on geometry to an empty hall. Sometimes the dialogue fits the image, often not. Along with this are "subtitles" in English, mostly just for the French, in what Godard whimsically calls "Navaho." They are just a few words out of the sentence spoken in the film. Most of the French is comprehensible, not that together it makes much sense, but reading the "Navaho" subtitles could only distract you. Words are often run together, as in “nocures noblood” and “Digdeep Communist archives." If Godard is trying to illustrate the failure to communicate, he succeeds in not communicating.

The second part is a bit more coherent, but also visually less interesting. It focuses on a family called Martin, made up of the parents, a boy of ten, and a teenage girl. They have a donkey and llama tethered at the gas station. The wife decides to run for local office and a medic crew shows up. Tauabin theorizes that this section is about Godard as a little boy,and says that's confirmed by the boy's doing a copy of a Renoir painting. Here the images are less "flashy," without all the shifting of formats and with longer more stationary shots.

As almost anybody who writes about this film cannot fail to say, we watch it first of all because it's by Godard, who is one of the French masters of that fertile period of the late 1950's and 1960's, and whose Breathless one can still watch with pleasure, and, if one knows if from its first appearance, with nostalgia. (One can watch plenty of his other films too, up to 1970, when he parted company with the larger art house audience.) In his discussion of Film Socialisme on his blog "Deep Focus," Todd McCarthy comments that in contrast to other film artists, particularly French ones (he mentions Truffaut) who stayed close to the warm openness of Renoir, Godard is, or has turned, mean-spirited, linking himself with those whose anti-Americanism in his view is part of their anti-humanism -- the "same misguided camp as those errant geniuses of an earlier era, Pound and Céline." This, McCarthy thinks, is borne out by Godard's recent failure to appear at Cannes to discuss his latest work. As an innovator who contributed to new film language in his time of creative flowering, Godard also can be compared, McCarthy suggests, to James Joyce, whose Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses and short stories are triumphs, but whose Finnegans Wake descends into what can be seen as a stubborn, hermetic, ivory tower elitism -- "l'art pour l'art," art for the chosen few. There are always "die-hard Godardians," McCarthy goes on, happy to be included in that chosen few, but McCarthy says that at Cannes none of them could be of much help with Film Socialisme. Amy Toubin's article is a description, not an explanation or a justification. At the New York Film Festival the resident Godardian was New Yorker film writer Richard Brody, who has written a 720-page tome on the director, Everything Is Cinema.

Any careful observer can describe the contents. Devotes can say what cinephiles like to say when they can make no sense of a film, that they "need to see it again." And a Godard film like this one can add luster to a film festival, the way a literature buff might add tone to his shelves by displaying a copy of Finnegans Wake. Parts of Finnegans Wake are lovely to listen to, notably the long "Anna Livia Plurabelle" monologue, which I used to listen to a record of Joyce reading when I was young. And Finnegans Wake, though nearly impenetrable, is coherent and has "skeleton keys" that explain it For a film buff, it's worth while to watch at least some of Film Socialisme; Amy Taubin's applying the adjective "ravishing" to the film makes some sense, if referring to the look of some of the HD segments, and their occasional effective contrast with the rough video. But for most of us, time is spent better watching films that make more coherent use of their documentary footage, their image and sound than this bulletin from Godard's dotage.

Seen and reviewed at the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, October 2010. Planned in France as VOD. Recommended for Godardians. I am sorry now that I did not refer to French criticism of the film, which was generally favorable, rather than relying on a few English discussions. But what I wrote above is true to my viewing experience, and I am not of the opinion that a film that is repulsive or opaque will open up its secrets if I "need to see it again." Again I am in agreement with Todd McCarthy on this point.

CRISTI PUIU: AURORA (2010)

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Cristi Puiu in Aurora

Murder and other daily activities

New Romanian Cinema leader Cristi Puiu stars in and directs this three-hour film, his second, about a man whose four murders seem only blips in a host of minutely observed quotidian events -- observed, but not explained. Puiu is more interested in the what than the why. Or the who: the film doesn't reveal who some of the people are, and motives are still unrevealed even at the end. All that's clear is that Viorel, the protagonist, is full of muted anger. Compared to Puiu's absorbing and critically admired debut, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, about an aging man who dies because he's shifted from hospital to hospital on a holiday weekend, there is no sense of moral outrage or dark humor in Aurora. What prevails is a sense of the meaninglessness of it all. The combination of meaninglessness and complication is a difficult one. None of the stark poetic simplicity here of Camus' Stranger. Puiu's vision of man is of the numbing ordinariness of evil, violence as a quiet, inexplicable reflex. One leaves the film convinced of the originality of its vision, but dreading the thought of seeing more. One feels chilled, baffled.

There's almost a real-time feel as the film follows Viorel from one dawn into a second day. He wakes up with a woman who has a little girl. She is Gina (Clara Voda), apparently his girlfriend. Even at coffee he is stony-faced and withdrawn. He goes to the metallurgy plant where he may have been fired or demoted, and collects two firing pins made for him by an employee to fit a shotgun. That he must test the pins with calipers and insists on paying shows his reflexive distrust and desire to separate himself from others. Puiu the actor is impressively composed, contained, and mundane. He's nobody you'd particularly notice, except that he's not quite there.

Viorel's life is mired in detail, and we get to watch dozens of tasks slowly performed, before and after the murders (there are four, two and two). He leaves things with his mother Puşa (Valeria Seciu), who gives him some of his shirts she's ironed; much argument about the size of the bag. He confronts his stepfather Stoian (Valentin Popescu) for entering his jumbled room (he still has one in the flat, apparently) and tells him he has never liked him: "It's just chemistry. I can't help it." (That may explain the whole lead-up to the murders.) He watches people from his car. His flat is being redone, and he supervises men who remove boxes and other things for the walls to be scraped and painted. (His resentment even toward these men is clear.) He puts together the shotgun, and tests it, firing into a duvet. And so on.

The first murders are observed in a long shot in a hotel parking garage so the victims, a man and a woman, can't be clearly seen. The second two, which happen hours later, take place in a suburban house later identified as that of his "ex-mother-in-law," Rodica (Catrinel Dumitrescu). After a long conversation, he follows her up the stairs with a knife. The stabbing isn't shown. We see Rodica's legs on the floor later from another room. Puiu the director is master of the excruciating delay. Nothing happens with much dispatch. Viorel gets coffee and has conversation with his mother-in-law before he stabs and later shoots her. He hesitates long just deciding what to say when she asks him if he wants one lump or two.

After the murders is when the viewer's ordinary cinema expectations are shocked. Viorel does not run. He simply goes about his business. He has other chores to complete. In the end, he takes his older daughter, a first-grader, out of class and, because his mother is out, leaves her at the next-door neighbors'. Here as always the viewer is plunged into a world of irrelevant, but richly observed, detail: an eager-to-please wife; a husband arguing with his nephew who wants to sell him a fitted kitchen; a preening adult son. And then he goes and turns himself in at the police station. The bored cops interview him as if he were reporting a noisy neighbor.

At one point Viorel terrorizes three women at a chic men's clothing shop. The well-dressed manager never loses her cool. He's looking for a woman they say no longer works there. It's never clear who she is. Puiu's performance is memorable. In retrospect one is struck by the repressed rage and irony of his character. He has created a killer who is close to lots of people, tipped just a little over the edge. The glare in his eye as he looks at his mother-in-law cutting up potatoes gradually tips us off that he is going to use the knife on her.

This is the second in Puiu's planned series of "Six Stories from the Outskirts of Bucharest." The beginning in "aurora," dawn, he has said signals an answer to F.W. Murnaus's warmer vision in his famous film Sunrise. Images by Viorel Sergovici are in harsh color when there is bright light, often under-lit and tinged with blue. A lack of background music, apart from occasional dimly heard songs, adds to the impression of realism. A Louis Moreau Gottschalk piano piece during the opening and closing credits adds an ironically pleasant note. But none of this is truly at all pleasant, unless for the pleasure to some of satisfying festival fashions: a glacial pace, a preponderance of stationary long or middle distance shots, an intermingling of documentary and fictional techniques, and a screenplay that leaves much to puzzle over, and in this case, belies all conventional genre expectations in which, as Puiu has commented, murder is more commonly "glamorized."

Cristi Puiu's 181 film, in Romanian, was shown in the Un Certain Regard series at Cannes and was seen and reviewed as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center in September 2010.

MANOEL DE OLIVEIRA: THE STRANGE CASE OF ANGELICA (2010)

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Love and death and the transmigration of souls

Oliveira's reputation may be more widespread than knowledge of his eclectic output. Now 102, he began sporadically after being an athlete, film actor and farmer, and has only been making features almost every year more recently. Last year he completed Eccentricities of a Blond Haired Girl, and this year he again tells the tale, The Strange Case of Angelica (O Estranho Caso de Angélica) this time more magical, of a young man who falls hopelessly in love with a beautiful young woman. Again Oliveira straddles epochs. Blond Haired Girl was a 19th-century short story transposed to the 20th century. Angelica is an original idea of Oliveira's from the Fifties transposed -- partially -- to now. The interiors, which this time are more austere, have nothing modern about them, and the young Sephardic Jewish photographer, Isaac, uses a Fifties Leica camera. Ricardo Trêpa, who takes the role of Isaac, also played Macário, the disillusioned protagonist of Blond, only now he is pale and beardless.

Macário and his girl loved each other, only he was repeatedly frustrated in his attempts to marry her, finally discovering that she was not worth marrying in the first place. Isaac falls in love with a dead girl, and his love-longing follows the classic pattern of the Arabic and medieval platonic mythology of insane sublimated passion. His behavior becomes increasingly disturbed and strange, and he finally collapses under a grove of olive trees. (If this links him with Oliveira, as the director admits, he also denies any Jewish family ties.) Ultimtely Isaac winds up flying through the sky linked with his beloved, Angélica (Pilar López de Ayala).

She has died shortly after being married, and her wealthy family calls upon Isaac to take the picture of her in death, more famous photographers being absent at the time. As he is taking the photographs with his Leica, he looks through the rangefinder to focus and sees Angélica's face come to life, and she smiles, he is electrified, and he is henceforth obsessed.

Isaac lives in a rooming house by the side of the Douro river, subject of the director's first short, Labor on the Douro River (1931), and he crosses the river to photograph men digging in a vineyard because working by traditional methods interests him. There are other threads. The rich family is somewhat dominated by a "pretentious" servant (Isabel Ruth). At key moments, including the night of Isaac's photographing the dead Angélica, it is raining heavily. Two well-dressed old men and a mostly silent woman sit at the table at the boarding house at breakfasts, where the landlady worries about Isaac's working too hard, and then his acting more and more strangely. But there is a visitor, a designer from Brazil, and they discuss such contemporary issues as global climate change, economic collapse, and antimatter. The landlady's caged sparrow dies from eating egg, and this disaster causes Isaac to run out of the house. The conversation is stilted and repetitious. Isaac rarely speaks. He has strange dreams and howls at night. When he flies off with the spirit of Angélica in amorous metempsychosis, the image is reminiscent of many Chagall paintings. Music throughout is successive excerpts from Chopin, mostly a sonata, in a restrained performance by Maria João Pires. The film is pleasant to watch, but a little slow, and a little repetitious. Even at only 95 minutes it feels somewhat long. But it captures a mood, and the restrained F/X works for the soaring souls with sublime simplicity. But I should add that this F/X, as various writers have noted, is of a sort that might have seemed crude in the earliest days of film.

The lines between necrophilia and spiritual love or between insanity and sublime passion are thin in The Strange Case of Angélica, which, as many have noted, could as well or better be called The Strange Case of Isaac. The mise-en-scène is simpler and creates an air of fable or dream rather different from the worldly storytelling of Eccentricities of a Blond Haired Girl. This is utterly different from Oliveira's absorbing, but somehow unsuccessful sequel to Buñuel, Belle toujours; but to speak of only a trio of films by a director who's made some 60-odd, short and long, over an 80-year period, is to say little. Not many of us have a grip on the oeuvre of this long-lived cinéaste but for one who has you may consult an article by Jonathan Rosenbaum, "The Classical Modernist," available online from the Film Comment of July/August 2008.

Shown in the Un Certain Regard segment at Cannes, and seen and reviewed by this writer as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center 2010. It opens in theaters in New York and Los Angeles in November. The distributor is Cinema Guild.

ABDELLATIF KECHICHE: BLACK VENUS (2010)

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Yahima Torres in Black Venus

True dilatory history of an epically abused woman

Tunisian-born, French-resident filmmaker Abdellatif Kechiche has focused on French-born Arabs in his acclaimed earlier films (two of them swept the French Oscars and he has won top prizes at Venice and elsewhere). This time he has turned to an historical study of brutality and intolerance. It's the story of Saartjie Baartman, the so-called "Hottentot Venus," a women born in South Africa and brought to Europe in the early 19th century to be paraded as a carnival wild woman because of her measurements. She was pursued by racist French scientists, who could not get her to show them her genitalia but made casts of them and her body and kept her skeleton on display on the pretext that "Hottentots" were proven through her to be closer to monkeys than Europeans and therefore of an inferior race. These relics were displayed at the Musée de l'Homme in Paris until the Seventes, and finally, in response to protests, returned to Saartjie's native South Africa in 2002 and buried close to where she was born.

A brave performance by Cuban-raised Yahima Torres anchors the film, which shows exhaustively how Saartjie was humiliated in performances first in London, where she and her minders are taken to court for slavery or abuse, but her testimony leads to dismissal. The trial is shown in detail -- too much detail, like everything else. Then she is taken to Paris for similar performances. Kechiche reports having extensively studied the records, but much is not clearly known; in some cases where it is known, such as her age, he has made changes. In his imagining, Saartjie is abandoned by her erstwhile protector, Caezar (André Jacobs) for lack of cooperation, and turned over to an animal trainer associate, Réaux (Olivier Gourmet), who uses her for "sex slave" shows to aristocratic French libertines along with a rough carnival woman and whore, Jeanne (Elina Löwensohn). It is at one of these, which rival Pasolini's Salo for shock value, that she is spotted by anatomist Georges Cuvier (Francois Marthouret), who decides her negro head shame and facial features and her steatopygic thighs (much exploited in the shows) make her good material for his racist studies. When the French sex show opportunities dries up, partly due to the old suspicion that Saartjie or "Sara" is being abused, Réaux turns her into a simple prostitute. Eventually, Saartjie, who has continually taken refuge in drink, is turned out of the brothel on suspicion of venereal disease, and dies, probably of that and pneumonia, whereupon the scientists get her body to dissect and make a cast of -- also shown in detail.

This is essentially a period, costume biopic, and while Kechiche's work is still strong in the many ensemble scenes -- the French scientists in the prologue; the English and French carnival crowds; the particularly disturbing French libertine sequences -- and in directing the hitherto inexperienced Torres in a performance full of strength and forbearance, there is, overall, little to set this apart from other films about exploited performers, circuses, and sleazy manipulators except for the excessive length of Kechiche's repetitious sequences, which are all allowed to run to two or three times the necessary length to get their point across, and then get it across again. Kechiche seems out of his element here, and despite the intensity and richness of scenes there is a generic quality his films never had before.

It also seems that Kechiche crosses the line in too bluntly showing the "Hottentot Venus'" cruel objectification, or, if you grant that may have been necessary, he blunts the point by illustrating this objectification too repetitively. Is the film painful to watch because it needs to be, or because the filmmaker didn't know how to present his information with economy and true force?

Abdellatif Kechiche has won extraordinary acclaim in France and internationally since 2000, the year of his first film, Blame It on Voltaire (La faute à Voltaire, 2000). His second film, Games of Love and Chance (L'Esquive, 2005) won Césars for best film, best director, and best scenario. His third, The Secret of the Grain (Le grain et le mulet, 2007), again won Césars for best film, best director, and best scenario. And there have been other awards at Venice and elsewhere. Black Venus/Venus noire was received with less enthusiasm at Venice this year. It was recognized as a brave and important project that went astray. Despite much disturbing and raw material, the film is likely to be widely seen, and its complicated message about racism, human degradation, and exploitation of women can't fail to make an impact. But coming from Kechiche it is a disappointment and seems a wrong turn. I hated this film.

Introduced at Venice September 2010. Seen and reviewed at the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, where it was scheduled for one showing October 7. Released by MK2, Venus noire is scheduled for release in France October 27.

PABLO LARRAÍN: POST MORTEM (2010)

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Alfredo Castro and Antonia Zegers in Post Mortem

An eerie horror show that evokes real political events by indirection

Alfredo Castro plays the kind of sleazy creep you'd like to scrape off your shoe. The Chilean director Pablo Larraín, who is interested in how politics seeps through to the unpolitical, has twice now made him his protagonist. In the 2008 Tony Manero Castro was a petty thief, accidental murderer, and would-be Travolta imitator during the Seventies military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. In Post Mortem, which takes place earlier, he's morphed into a morgue worker (based on a real person) named Mario Camejo, who types up autopsy reports and was present when Allende's body is brought in. The film begins with a prologue of military vehicles roaring over the rubble of wrecked streets. Larraín's cool, arresting images evoke a vaguely surreal world of dead-end spaces-- you half expect some insect creatures out of William S. Burroughs to pop out around a corner.

The world is not very different, as Larraín depicts it though Alfredo Castro, before and after Allende. Larraín was born three years after the coup, and he's only imagining the atmosphere of the time, but he revels in a uniquely clammy kind of moral rigor mortis. It may be that Mario Camejo is just coming to life at the end of the film, when he slowly constructs a barricade trapping his would-be girlfriend and neighbor with the younger man she's been hiding with. He holds with the opinion favored by the military (and the official view now), that Allende, who was shot point-blank, committed suicide: in other words, he favors the military. When Nancy prefers Victor (Marcelo Alonso), a young long-haired leftist, Mario in effect buries the couple alive, blocking them in their hiding place with the little dog he has rescued earlier.

The special pleasure of the film is the macabre alienness of its principals. Two meals Mario shares with Nancy earlier, in the period of his doomed courtship, are feasts of dry non-communication. Watch how they decide what to pick from the menu of a big Chinese restaurant, and how they share an egg fried in a little pan at Mario's grim lodgings. "Nice place you're got here," says Nancy. "I like the furniture." They sit at his table dishing up the egg, and she slowly begins to cry. Then he cries too.

Larraín's protagonist this time leads a less eventful life than the violent, striving anti-hero of Tony Manero but he conveys a full sense of the world turned upside down just outside the frame. Mario is taking a shower and barely hears when much of his street is torn apart and Nancy's house is demolished. We hear it, though Larraín need only show Mario showering, and the effect is much more disturbing that way (rich sound design is as essential as cinematography in creating the film's world). Nancy's father hosted union meetings. So her parents are never found after the coup.

This event is depicted by rubble, burned automobiles in front of the Bim Bam Bum Club from which Nancy was expelled and the piles of bodies that come to the morgue. Mario's coworker Sandra (Amparo Noguera), who does the cutting, and their coroner Dr. Castillo (Jaime Vadell), who does the autopsy reports, are instructed to speed things up and simplify. Sandra later goes haywire and the captain in charge fires into the corpses to show her rescuing people is forbidden. She and Mario had tried to save several people who arrived not yet dead.

Much of the style of both these films is due to the contribution of the cinematographer, Sergio Armstrong, who used grainy 16mm film to create a washed-out, seedy Seventies atmosphere. With his long straight gray hair, small thin frame, sepulchral pallor, and dedicated neutrality, Alfredo Castro is a memorable figure. When he's joined on screen by a vast accumulation of corpses Post Mortem comes very close to becoming a a horror film. While this, Larraín's third feature, seems less compelling than the deliciously repellent Tony Manero, he has again shown his considerable knack for crabwise depiction of Seventies Chile, and a sense of how civil disorder invades behavior and consciousness. Not exactly fun stuff; big box office is not to be expected.

Ultimately it's a narrow, limited way of seeing the world -- what about the good people? Families? -- but it's an extremely evocative one. You can't get it off your shoes, and will find it still sticking to them weeks or months later. For me, however, the creepiness of Tony Manero was greater, partly because Larraín's visual style and his use of Alfredo Castro were fresh then, partly because the focus on the coup lessens the impact of the personal realm. Larraín has a unique vision, though his sense of a low-keyed ghoulishness resembles Matteo Garrone's portrait of a man with a similar occupation in The Embalmer. Both films are dripping with vague eeriness.

Larraín was inspired by a news story mentioning an actual Mario Camejo as present for the autopsy on Salvador Allende. What might he have been like? the director wondered. And he imagined this film. Post Mortem debuted at Venice on September 5, 2010. “If you read the autopsy of Allende, which is public, it’s on the Web, you will find a very powerful text. It is the autopsy of Chile,” Larraín said in a Venice interview. Seen and reviewed as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, October 2010.

CHARLES FERGUSON: INSIDE JOB (2010)

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Eliot Spitzer in Insider Job

Bad Economics 101

Charles Ferguson's Inside Job, filled with interviews and graphic illustrations and narrated by Matt Damon, is a documentary film that describes and analyzes the world financial crisis, its roots, its key events, and prospects for the future. Anyone who saw Ferguson's 2007 No End in Sight, about the lack of planning behind the US 2003 invasion of Iraq, will expect a clear, incisive, devastating account, and that's what we get. Ferguson has established himself, along with Errol Morris of The Fog of War, Alex Gibney of Taxi to the Dark Side, Adam Curtis of The Power of Nightmares, the team of Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott of The Corporation and a very few others, among the best of the new investigative political filmmakers who lay out a large, controversial topic for us in terms so compelling and lucid that the result becomes a definitive film statement.

Some of these films might not have gotten as widely seen, or perhaps even made, without the influence of Michael Moore since his Bowling for Columbine won the big prize at Cannes, but they have a different approach. In his Capitalism: A Love Story Moore uses his by now somewhat tired shtick of bearding participants at the gates, asking them to explain what a credit default swap is, just to suggest the ordinary guy doesn't know what all this stuff means. Inside Job is for smart people who want to become a little smarter, so while it subtly confronts many of those complicit in the financial meltdown in interviews, it doesn't throw up its hands about the complexity of it all but instead sets out to help us understand. The film simply explains what credit default swaps are, as well as other things like derivatives, collateralized debt obligations, predatory loan practices, subprime mortgages and other financial terms that enable us to understand historically how the financial system post-Reagan became more and more able to feed on itself, deriving greater and greater profit even from the unwisdom and illegality (in classic terms) of its transactions, turning the entire world economy essentially into one big Ponzi scheme, till the collapse of the housing bubble brought the investment banks and the world's economies to the brink of disaster.

Ferguson, whose team assembled a wealth of material and who's said his two editors, Chad Beck and Adam Bolt, performed a more complex than usual function to make sense of it all, begins with an account of Iceland, a whole country that went under because it chose to privatize its main banks and deregulate investment. Iceland got so quickly and thoroughly into the Ponzi scheme its deregulated banks borrowed a total worth ten times the GNP of the country, and for its size as a country Iceland's banking collapse is the largest in history so it's a nice (using the word in neutral terms) illustration of the situation which in the USA makes us think more of tent cities of people who lost their homes with unemployment and predatory loan practices and of CEO's belonging to the richest tenth of a percent of a country in history who paid themselves multimillion-dollar or billion-dollar bonuses after the 2008 collapse.

Beck and Bolt and Ferguson have organized Inside Job so tightly it's hard to summarize but we can note some points of special interest. There are several devastating interviews with economics professors (Glen Hubbard, Frederic Mishkin) whose involvement in government and consulting makes their teaching suspect (the point is the universities are part of the problem: they taught that all the dangerous practices were good). These guys fall apart on camera and these interviews are coups. Certain people we don't know, like Lee Hsien Loong, current president of Singapore and Charles Morris, author of The Trillian Dollar Meltdown, show unusual wisdom. There are experts who warned us, like financier George Soros, economist Nouriel Roubini, and Allan Sloan of Fortune magazine. New York ex-governor Eliot Spitzer persecuted wrongdoers before his own high-roller pleasures forced him to resign. Speaking of which, there are details about Wall Street's involvement in drugs and prostitution, and Kristin Davis, a madam whose home base was blocks away from the big financial houses, explains how her girls' very expensive services were billed to the companies, and investigators didn't want to know the details. A shrink who services the CEO's attests that these sleazy pursuits are favored right up to the top.

Which brings us to the final, sad story: where we are now. Of course the financial markets were saved but average Americans paid for it, and millions lost their homes, and the 1999 Glamm-Leach-Bliley Act that repealed the Glass-Steagall Act and allowed banks to be investment banks, commercial banks, or insurance companies simultaneously, thus endangering everybody's money -- we're still stuck with that. Why? Because the Obama presidency is "a Wall Street administration." Obama brought back key players in the crisis to mind the store, Geitner Treasury Secretary, Summers director of the NEC, reappoints Bernanke as chairman of the Fed, and appoints many Wall Street executives to senior regulatory and economic policy positions. Guess what? With that setup nothing is essentially going to change.

Ferguson's film has an elegant restraint. Note the title, however, which denotes crime. It is not implicit but explicit that the financial world is manned by well-dressed and enormously overpaid criminals, whose errors we are all paying for, even as they are richly reworded for committing them.

The San Francisco-born Ferguson has a BA in math from UC Berkeley and a Ph.D. in political science from MIT. He has been a consultant to government and the high tech industry, founded a software company he sold to Microsoft, spent several years as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a visiting lecturer at MIT and UC Berkeley. Then he became a filmmaker. Let's hope he remains one.

Seen and reviewed as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center with public screenings of the film Oct. 1 and 4, 2010. Sony Classics release. Limited US theatrical release begins Oct. 8 (New York) and Oct. 15 (Los Angeles). The DVD will be of particular value because some of the wealth of additional material can be made available in that format. At the Q&A Ferguson wished he could have included more of the many interviews, and the press kit includes photos with brief bios of 35 people, pages of glossary, and a six-part time-line. It's a keeper.)

JORGE MICHEL GRAU: WE ARE WHAT WE ARE (2010)

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Carmen Beato, Francisco Barreiro and Alan Chávez in We Are What We Are

Guess who's coming for dinner

Mexican first-time director Jorge Michel Grau's We Are What We Are/Somos lo que hay is another movie that pumps fresh energy and rich implication into a tired genre, this time the horror film, cannibal division. The Swedish Let the Right One In comes to mind because again the ghoulish protagonists are an impoverished family, struggling just to stay supplied with their daily nutrition, and the younger ones are lonely, alienated, and confused. This time cops are investigating and there's a violent finale. It's the surprising violence and the visual flair of continually murky greenish bluish images that makes this take on flesh-eating curiously pleasurable, and the convincing focus on desperation, corrupt surroundings, and a power struggle in the family adds food for thought.

In the opening sequences two youths lose their permission to run a sidewalk watch shop because one of them attacks customers. Meanwhile the pater familias (Humberto Yanez) whose sole source of income was fixing watches wanders like a zombie -- or just a homeless man at the end of his rope -- in a posh Mexico City shopping mall. After longingly grasping at girl mannequins behind a shop window, he vomits and drops dead on the sidewalk -- and is swiftly swept away. An autopsy that reveals a human finger in his stomach leads a couple of low level cops to want to investigate, mainly in hopes of making money if this brings them notoriety. Meanwhile in the dingy cellar of the family's slum projects home, wife and mother Patricia (Carmen Beato), her self-confident and beautiful daughter Sabina (Paulina Gaitán of Sin Nombre) and two young sons Alfredo (Francisco Barreiro) and Julian (Alan Chávez) are frantic and argumentative. Dad, who they gradually realize is dead, has been the one who's brought home the human flesh, which had to be consumed according to special ritual, presumably Satanic, whose importance Patricia must continually remind the kids of. Now one of the sons has to be the new leader. The sulky, dark Julian is a loose cannon given to bursts of sudden anger and cruelty. The buttoned-down Alfredo is recessive and conflicted. Sabina has more confidence and authority. But Patricia insists it's Alfredo, as the elder son, who should take over, despite her gradually evident dislike of him.

And family dynamics are more complicated still. Alfredo turns out to be a closeted homosexual. Julian and Sabina have incestuous desires for each other. Patricia is long suffering: her husband spent all his time with whores. But didn't he bring them home to dinner, as the entree? Now she seems more concerned that the streetwalkers stay away from her sons, and she creates a kind of class hostility by depositing the corpse of a whore in front of a bunch of her colleagues as a warning.

At first the boys repeatedly fail at efforts to bring home the bacon, first clumsily attacking a gang of homeless boys under a bridge. That attempt is a washout because Julian is too violent and Alfredo is too timid. Next they lure a prostitute. Then either in a gruesomely extreme expression of homosexual panic or else an act of very bad judgment, Alfredo spends an evening following a group of young gay men and brings the boy he's most attracted to home from a disco -- thus likely to wind up as dinner. Meanwhile several opposing teams of cops are closing in.

Sometimes Grau makes nice use of a withdrawn camera, as when cops, or the family, shut a door on the lens to have a private conversation, or a long shot, as when Julian is shown from a distance on the highway moving a victim from the back seat into the trunk, as people go by unconcerned. Alfredo's sexual confusion adds a plaintive element. He can't master either his sexuality or the role of family leader being thrust on him. Julian's inner conflicts may be even greater, given his constant explosions.

The director's references to Mexico's poverty and moral corruption are clear without being overstated -- though when a guy at the morgue says "You'd be surprised how much people eat each other in this city" the social message is pretty blunt. Mostly the family members, on the other hand, are circumspect. They don't overtly say what their need is, though toward the end Patricia blurts out, "We're monsters."

The violence at the end is crazy, which is not a bad thing. However, this does not have the subtlety of the Swedish film's wonderfully scary swimming pool revenge. And there are obvious lacunae in the whole conception. What exactly did the father do? How did he go about bringing home the family meal? What is the ritual and what's the midnight rule? What was life in the family like, before things fell apart? It might help if one character were more positive and seen in more depth. However, other elements compensate. The cast is an interesting and potent combination of opposing elements: the harried Patricia; seething Julian; imploding Alfredo; serene, mysterious Sabina. Santiago Sanchez's deliciously dark widescreen compositions and smooth tracking shots are excellent. He nicely alternates static shots with hand-held closeups. Enrico Chapel's sparingly used, attractively screechy chamber music creates an original mood. Grau is also good at making the horror clear without actually showing much. His shrewd balance of understatement with clear enough references to classics of the genre means not only more sophisticated devotees but also mainstream audiences can find satisfaction in the film, just as with Let the Right One In. Jorge Michel Grau is another new Mexican director to watch.

Introduced at the 2010 Cannes Directors' Fortnight series, We Are What We Are was seen and reviewed as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center and shown to the public Oct. 7 and 8, 2010. Also already included in five other festivals. In the US IFC has the distribution rights.

JULIE TAYMOR: THE TEMPEST (2010)

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Helen Mirren in Julie Taymor's The Tempest

An overwhelming feast of sight and sound -- and fury, signifying not quite enough

Julie Taymor, who has proven her skill at exotic and spectacular staging both in theater and the movies, has said that The Tempest is Shakespeare's "most visual" play. And this, along, presumably, with the play's significance as a great final statement, is her reason for committing it to the screen (her first return to the Bard since the 1999 Titus). Herein lies both the strength and the complication of Tayor's Tempest, because if the play is Shakespeare's most visual, that's because images are most vividly conveyed in words. And if Taymor creates a dazzling visual spectacle to recreate the play, as she has done, she overwhelms the words, particularly the most important ones. Besides which, Shakespeare didn't want us just to visualize. He wanted us to think.

On the other hand, the play draws implicit parallels between its master of revels, Prospero, and the playwright himself, as a creator and simulator of marvels, and Taymor herself, with all the technical wonders at her command as a contemporary American director, successfully usurps that role. Modern stage and opera designer-directors are like some contemporary architects: in the supreme wisdom of their egos, they create works in which form dazzlingly overwhelms function, and image, to the delight of promoters, dwarfs meaning. Taymor's Tempest is a beautiful thing to watch (though there are plenty of more beautiful films), and it shows a thorough familiarity with the play, as it would, since she has directed stage productions of it. Though she has cut the text, as one must, she has not radically twisted it. She has just competed too much with it, while adding too little spin to the performances.

This is not to say that the language of the play is impossible to hear, or poorly delivered, or that the acting is dwarfed by special effects, though of special effects there are aplenty. It's hard to find fault with Ben Whishaw as Ariel. This Ariel is a creature of pale see-through imagery, who flits away and shrinks into deep space in an instant and leaves behind multiple shadowy after-images in the air as only CGI could allow, and still he is a fine Ariel, his performance as mercurial and delicate as the effects (which some think could be better, particularly in coordinating Whishaw's in-studio greenscreen acting with Mirren's). The visual airiness of Whishaw's Ariel is appropriately balanced by the earthy Caiban of Djimon Hounsou, who is coated in mottled brown and white and what looks like cracked mud, but whose powerful, vivid performance is not at all aided by CGI. Nor is there any CGI about Russell Brand's very Russell Brand Trinculo, whose garish outfit looks quite 16th-century, and yet quite like the way he actually dresses. If this is "stunt casting," still Brand has never been better, and his scenes with Hounsou and Alfred Molina as a convincingly, embarrassingly proletarian Stephano are the film's most entertaining. When these three, Caliban, Tephano, and Trinculo, are together, notably on a pretty barren landscape, fireworks happen, and it's all in the acting and the dialogue. This is only a foil to the main action, but it's an element that works.

Things get off to a bad start, however, with the earsplitting storm, which of course in Shakespeare's time could not have been staged very powerfully. In Taymor's film, we are rocked about with a floating camera that zeroes in on turbulent figures -- and so much noise of artificial tempestuousness that we can't hear a word of what they are saying. Maybe it doesn't matter. It's just prologue. (But then why are they yelling speeches at each other?) The film has done in this opening sequence what movies too often do nowadays. It overwhelms the senses and practically causes a heart attack before things have even begun. This is unlikely to have been how Shakespeare wanted to lead his audience into the calm scene of exposition that follows, where Prospero -- here (adding a superficial feminist touch) changed to Prospera (a worn-out looking Helen Mirren) -- explains to Miranda (Felicity Jones) what happened before she was conscious of things.

Felicity Jones and young Reeve Carney as Ferdinand are to be the young lovers. Carney is also to be the star of Julie Taymor's Broadway musical of Spider-Man. He is a musician who has a somewhat androgynous young ingenu quality. Neither Carney nor Jones is an actor of great distinction. A certain arbitrariness is characteristic of Taymor's usual castings. Using Mirren is the most obvious of these, but the feminism and genre-bending seem unexceptional given Mirren's universal acceptance as a great actress nowadays. Using a black man, Djimon Hounsou, as a slave was, in Taymor's view, a daring, and politically incorrect, bit of casting. But that depends on how the character of Caliban is presented in the production, whether as a savage sent packing by civilized colonists, or as a wronged native to be liberated. It's not quite clear what Taymor has in mind, but anyway, an actor as powerful as Hounsou has no trouble justifying and transcending the possible stereotyping of his casting. Whether his performance is part of a coherent concept of the character or the play is another matter. Whishaw, Hounsou, Molina, and Brand are outstanding. Mirren seems as usual articulate and intelligent, but otherwise uninspired. As the "court," the shipwrecked Alonso (David Strathairn), Gonzalo (Tom Conti), Sebastian (Alan Cumming) and Antonio (Chris Cooper) are highly competent, but not memorable.

The particular irony of Taymor's Tempest is that Shakeapeare's late romances are profound, outwardly simple in some ways, but subject to complex multilayered interpretation and rich in philosophical import. The Tempest has implications about the nature and power of art, the spiritual vs. the physical, new worlds, colonialism, the function of learning, morality and politics, and other themes, as well as perhaps being meant as Shakespeare's own swan song. Glitzing up the imagery, casting a bunch of big names, mostly from movies, and some total lightweights, and giving colorful landscapes (shot in Hawaii) and dazzling CGI free reign but not imposing much discernible interpretation in the direction is not the way to deliver material that requires serious thought. In short, Taymor has given us a very pretty, at times pleasing, at times over-loud, sometimes wonderfully and other times merely competently acted version of The Tempest that is intellectually unimpressive when it should have been the opposite. This is a Tempest for sensualists, not for smart people.

Julie Taymor's The Tempest was introduced at Venice Sept. 11, 2010. It was seen and reviewed as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, where it was presented as the Centerpiece film Oct. 2. This is a Touchstone Pictures and Miramax Films release that will open in US theaters December 10.

MIKE LEIGH: ANOTHER YEAR (2010)

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Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen in Another Year

The kindly ones

In a New York Film Festival 2010 "critic's notebook" survey, Manohla Dargis of the NY Times says of Mike Leigh's Another Year that it "schematically and too tidily follows, across the seasons, a late-middle-aged couple (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen) and the usual collection of Leigh twitchers (including Lesley Manville in a hate-it or love-it turn)." Traditionally it has seemed that Leigh's actors work together extensively, developing their characters' "back-stories," and then hone a series of scenes through improvisation. It is hard to believe Another Year is improvised. The dialogue dovetails too perfectly. Every word is in place, and there are no surprises or non sequiturs.

Yes, Another Year -- the title signaling both the four-season division of sequences and Leigh's spotlighting a couple who're getting older -- is well organized. But the counter to Dargis' accusation of schematic structure and excessive tidiness is the wonderful acting -- a given with Leigh, but even more notable here. Focusing on two of his finest actors, Jim Broadbent and Rugh Sheen, and giving a central role to his most frequent collaborator, Lesley Manville, is a guarantee of satisfaction. As the geologist Tom and therapist Gerri, a long-happiy-married couple, Broadbent and Sheen build a sense of ease, warmth, and mental health that is uncannily natural. One almost wants to reproach the actors for fooling us so successfully, but one also loves and admires the couple they represent.

Manville's "love-it or hate-it turn" is a splendid and complex meltdown. At first (in the "Spring" sequence) Gerri and Mary (Manville) go for a drink at a pub after work and Mary seems a fun person, just lonely, and disappointed when the man who's been staring at her is met by a girlfriend after Gerri leaves. Then Mary later on comes for dinner with Tom and Gerri and gets so drunk she has to sleep over. It begins to seem that she's not just a bit sad and lonely, but depressed and desperate.

Later (in the "Summer" sequence) we meet Ken (Peter Wight), an old friend of Tom's who comes to visit and also gets drunk, smokes too much, and is lonely and maudlin. He is an older counterpoint to Mary, and when Mary comes for a party she rebuffs Ken's overtures and instead pushes herself upon Joe (Oliver Maltman), Tom and Gerri's much younger, still unattached son, a community lawyer. Mary has been talking about buying her first second-hand automobile, and she arrives greatly flustered because now that she has bought a car she finds driving terribly stressful. The car is going to be the symbol of Mary's meltdown, a disaster from the start, ultimately taken away months later in return for only twenty pounds.

"Autumn" brings the discovery that Joe has found Katie (Karina Fernandez), a physical therapist who's the love of his life. Joe and Katie turn up to surprise Joe's parents, on an afternoon when Mary is invited for tea. Mary is horrified to find Joe paired off and is rude to Katie. And her car troubles have gotten worse. Her bad behavior alienates her from Gerri, who was her chief confidante.

In the "Winter" sequence, rather obviously shot through a blue filter, a certain dourness counterblancing the celebration of Joe and Katie is established by a sequence in which Tom and Gerri go north for the funeral of Tom's older brother Ronnie's wife. Ronnie (David Bradley) is a laconic individual, whom they take home for a while to ease his adjustment to widowerhood. While Tom and Gerri are off tending their allotment garden -- a theme throughout -- Mary comes to the door, not having been in touch for some time, and is let by in by Ronnie in a distraught, much deteriorated state. She has not slept, and got drunk on a twenty-pound bottle of champagne she drank by herself following the demise of her car. The film ends with the happy couple, Joe and Ketie, at the table with Tom, Gerri, Ronnie and Mary, with a fade-out on the face of Mary, contemplating the wreckage, it would seem, of her life.

The best parts of Another Year are the "Spring" evening when Mary is alone with Tom and Gerri and gets very drunk, and the various moments of intimacy when Tom and Gerri are alone together. When one describes the plot one realizes that in the way of working with all these characters, each with occupation, personality, back-story and relationship with the principals, a certain rigidity sets in to organize how they all fit together into the film. Curiously there is an analogy between this film and Woody Allen's. Both directors get together a group of good actors and let them do their thing, but the difference is that Leigh's attitude to life, though mature and partly rueful, is not as negative and pessimistic as Allen's has become. After one has watched Another Year one is conscious of having had a very good time, and yet somehow there is nothing crucial or climactic enough about the action to make it all truly memorable. Just as with Woody Allen. Except for the big difference that Another Year is full of homely but very warm observations about life.

The central theme of Another Year, or a central one at least, is helping people, which is obviously what Tom and Gerri do -- Gerri, even, as a profession. Because they are happy and stable they give back to the community of their friends and relatives the help they are capable of giving and that the others need. Their challenge is to decide how much to trust and how much to give. They trust Joe to find a good woman, and trust that Katie is one. They rue the decline of Ken but send him on his way. They help Ronnie when his wife dies, but they are unsure about Mary. They would like to kick her out. She has behaved badly toward Joe and Katie. But they let her stay for dinner. They are a little like Edward and Lavinia in T.S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party. Their mission is not to become martyrs in Africa like Edward's mistress Celia, but to, in effect, give a party, to welcome people and give them a little help without turning their own lives upside down in the process. The acting is wonderful, the structure is a little superficial and obvious, but the film is full of wise humanity and offers food for thought.

Another Year debuted at Cannes and played or will play at Toronto, Telluride and London. It is a Sony Pictures Classics release and opens in US theaters December 31. Seen and reviewed as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center 2010, where its public screenings were Oct. 5 and 6.

KILLY REICHARDT: MEEK'S CUTOFF (2010)

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Paul Dano in Meek's Cutoff

Native guide

Nothing new here for Kelly Reichardt, the respected Amerindie director of Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy. Meek's Cutoff, like them, is a quiet, meandering tale about people lost and confused in the Pacific Northwest. Except that this time she's made a minimalist, politically emphatic western, which labors solemnly with the issue of the white racism of the people who settled the American West in the mid-nineteenth century, while following three wagon-training Oregon Trail traveling families relying on a hirsute mountain man (and Indian killer) to lead them over the Cascade mountains. He gets lost, and they find an Indian. The kicker is that for all we ever know the Indian, who takes over guiding them, may be lost too. While Meek (veteran nasty Bruce Greenwood, a bit better than in his clunky recent turn in Mao's Last Dancer) wants to execute the Indian from the first, the sensible liberal who mends his moccasin by way of conciliation and wards Meek off is Emily Tetherow (Michelle Williams), one of three plucky, laconic young wives in bonnets, whose long cotton dresses seem like armor against the ravages of a cruel desert that progressively smudges everybody's faces with dirt because they haven't enough water to wash.

Reichardt certainly approaches the Western, or more accurately the world of American school history books, with a fresh eye. This is as startling a look at the 19th-century West as E.L. Doctorow's in Welcome to Hard Times, though instead of a verbal picture of a dead-end frontier town and a lawless destroyer, this is primarily a matter of visuals, specifically the striking 1.33 aspect ratio natural-light imagery (which lends an old-timey quality) of Chris Blauvelt, and of a cool, remote approach where the dialogue among men is often imperfectly audible in the middle distance, as if this were all from the women's point of view, which it mostly is. "What are they saying?" one lady asks another, of the men. It's a given that if the ladies are to prevail, it must be outside the posturing and debates. Nobody really lets on much how scared, desperate, or worn out they are, though the water is getting low and the prospect of ever seeing the sought-for Willamette Valley is growing remote. But it is consistently Mrs. Tetherow who first casts doubt on Meek's competency, and then defends the Indian (stunt man Rod Rondeaux). If they'd only had an interpreter. The Indian talks plenty, in his language. But there is no verbal communication possible between the whites and the Indian and little real communication among anybody.

Sometimes the stilted redundancy of Jon Raymond's dialogue seems downright silly, as in exchanges like: "I am doubtful."--"I too have doubts." And Paul Dano's habitually pompous manner (which made him well cast for P.T. Anderson's fraudulent preacher in There Will Be Blood) doesn't help any to moderate the absurdity here. Ultimately the individuals on the trip are barely delineated. There's also only bare-bones action, though there are several serious mishaps, and that is the point. The film is about the gathering dread of a journey where nobody is really in charge and nobody knows anything. Sometimes the meticulous images and the sense of a strangely confined-feeling space really are enough, and sometimes the whole fantasy threatens to vanish into thin air. Maybe a slight air of conscious absurdity, such as Jim Jarmusch achieves in the opening sequences of Dead Man, helps protect an original interpretation of period better than a deadpan manner.

You don't get close to anybody here -- Reichardt is normally at one remove from her characters -- but unlike the director's previous two films, this plays out on a broader canvas in every sense. There are many more characters in play. The wide open spaces of the desert scenery (especially dramatized in two striking shots of night sky dotted with palpable clouds) provide a sense of openness and possibility despite the harsh prospects of the travelers. There is a chance of appeal to a broader audience, and Reichardt has used ia bigger and more known and seasoned cast. Besides Michelle Williams from the last film, there is Greenwood, Will Patton, emerging newcomer Zoe Kazan, and other experienced actors, including Brit Shirley Henderson. Even 13-year-old Tommy Nelson as Henderson's son, is an acting vet.

Meek's Cutoff is an odd mixture. The images are textured and beautiful, and the feel of the pioneer experience has authenticity about it even though characters and incident are underdeveloped. But the film is heavy-handed, sometimes unintentionally comic, in its handling of nineteenth-century sexual roles and prejudices. This is not a situation for subtlety, perhaps, but when the dialogue is sparse it ought to have been better. The ending is both lame and blunt. Reichardt's stories are about people going nowhere, but this time she's approached an adventure story and drained all the excitement out of it (retaining only a touch of dread). Since the genre is so familiar, it's hard not to think of other directors who'd have made something more powerful or more subtle -- or both -- out of these raw materials. Nonetheless the whole concept is unique, the cinematography is fine, and Jeff Grace's very sparing music is one thing that really is subtle.

Debuted at Venice, included in Toronto, London, and other festivals, seen and reviewed at the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, where it was scheduled to be shown to the public Oct. 8 and 9, 2010. Oscilloscope is the North American distributor, but a US release date has not been announced.

OMNIBUS FILM FROM MEXICO: REVOLUCIÓN

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Isaac Figueroa Borquez in Gael García Bernal's Lucio

Ten short films to commemorate, and ruefully comment upon, the Mexican revolution

A collection of 10 min. short films directed by: Mariana Chenillo, Patricia Riggen, Fernando Eimbcke, Amat Escalante, Gael García Bernal, Rodrigo García, Diego Luna, Gerardo Naranjo, Rodrigo Plá & Carlos Reygadas, 2010, Mexico, 105m.

Omnibus films are hard to write about -- to be thorough, you must write eight or ten reviews just about a film that may last little over an hour and a half -- and harder still to describe when you don't get to see them all. A problem with the sound track caused the NYFF P&I screening to be halted after four segments, so as a stopgap I will summarize with quotes from Leslie Felperin's coverage from the Berlinale in Variety. I would concur with his evaluations of the first four. My comments: Eimbecke's film The Welcoming is very nicely photographed and its humor is redolent of promises not kept and rural backwardness. One might question his heavy use of long blackouts in such a short film. Riggen's Beautiful & Beloved indeed is highly conventional, though its references to a dream deferred, however obvious, are well taken. García Bernal's Lucio promises a great deal with its hint of revolution in the very young character, Omarcito, who takes down the crucifix from the wall, and his young actors are lively and attractive. The ending is a little weak, perhaps from the improvised nature of the film Felperin assumes. Amat Escalante's The Hanging Priest begins with spectral, haunting images (one is in the world of Bueñuel or Cormac McCarthy) and ends with the priest and two children appealing to real people on the street (their faces blurred out) for help and being turned away. Pretty strong stuff. This is as far as I can go from personal observation. The projection was halted a few minutes into This Is My Kingdom.

Felperin notes that the ten-film collection was initiated by the production company Canana's funders Gael Garcia Bernal, Diego Luna, and Pablo Cruz. Films by García Bernal and Luna are included. There is some unevenness in quality both artistic and technical, but "a subversive streak throughout" augurs well for the future of Mexican filmmaking. A running theme is to question what the revolution has achieved and suggest that ceremonial platitudes about it are pretty hollow at this point in the country's history. There is a considerable coherence in the unfolding of the films.

The Variety review notes that Einbecke (of Duck Season and Lake Tahoe) seems to have shot his black and white film with "proper film stock," with images in "soft, pencilly grays." The film focuses on a rural tuba player (Ansberto Flores Lopez) practicing to perform with the town band at a ceremony to welcome an honored guest who, in the event, does not arrive. The tubista has to juggle farm chores and caring for a baby with late-night solo practice. When the event comes next day and the local official gives up and lets citizens and band alike go home, the tuba player stays and waits longer, but to no avail. In what follows I am often, or wholly, summarizing from Felperin's Variety review of the collection written when it was shown earlier in the year at the Berlinale.

Riggen's Beautiful & Beloved is a "schmaltzy but well-intentioned segment about an American-reared woman (Adriana Barraza) who finds "an inventive way to get her father's corpse (Ramon Duran) across the border so he can be buried in his hometown." Felperin says the film provides "another spin on themes of family and migration at play in Riggen's feature debut, Under the Same Moon." Line deliveries are "stilted."

In contrast Gael Garcia Bernal's Lucio "appears to be improvised" -- having no screenplay credit and showing "spontaneity" in the young cast, some kids who are visited by a slightly older cousin called Omarcito (Isaac Figueroa Borquez), who startles the kids by declaring Catholic rituals undesirable (though he believes strongly in God) and at bedtime taking down the crucifix from the wall and sliding it under the bed. This is discovered by the kids' "devout grandmother (Samantha Mayer)" who punishes them. Felperin feels the "accessible tale" is "let down by patchy digital lensing."

The powerful The Hanging Priest is the narrative of a pair of lost children (Hector Cortes Barrientons and Ambar Sixto Marroquin), "whose whole village has been wiped out." They rescue a priest hanging upside down from a little tree in a desolate field. All three ride a donkey to safety; the donkey does not survive. The film was written, directed and edited by a pupil of Carlos Reygadas, Amat Escalante (The Bastards). His film carries themes of violence and despair that resonate with and set the stage for the next entry.

The next short film, This Is My Kingdom, was directed by Reygadas himself. It's a" kind of quasi-docu," Felperin notes, recording a wild rural fiesta "at which Mexicans and the odd Anglophone first get smashed, and then smash stuff up (mostly cars), while in one disturbing cutaway, a family of peasants looks on impassively from outside the party." As Felperin points out, Reygadas, the most internationally respected of the directors of this omnibus, deviates here from the tranqulity of his recent feature Silent Light (shown in the 2007 New York Film Festival), and goes back toward "his notorious sophomore outing, Battle in Heaven to again make reference to the prominent roles of violence and exces "within the nation's soul" and to point to the significance of class differences.

With The Estate Store, according to Felperin, the director Mariana Chenillo (of Nora's Will, a "local hit") fantasizes how workers in a Walmart-like big box store might behave if they were paid partly in vouchers redeemable only at the store, as in fact was "a policy in practice before the real revolution." Felperin feels the segment's screenplay "lacks subtlety" but has a good performance by its lead Monica Bejarano "as a cash-strapped store employee."

R-100 is "a taut but fragmentary mini-action film" about a man (Noe Hernandez) who "resorts to desperate measures on a remote desert highway to get help for his wounded friend" (Manuel Jimenez). The director is Gerardo Naranjo, whose I'm Gonna Explode was in the Main Slate of the 2008 New York Film Festival. I saw his rougher Drama/Mex at an earlier London Film Festival, in 2006.

30/30, by Rodrigo Plà, is a "strong" segment, Felperin writes, that suggests "with pointed irony that the Revolution's legacy is often used as a meaningless vehicle for empty rhetoric by politicians." Rodrigo Plà's previous films are La Zona and The Desert Within) Here, Francisco (Justo Martinez), the elderly grandson of Pancho Villa, is seen "arriving in a town for the centennial parade and party. The local honchos want him there only as a figurehead and never give him a chance to read his carefully prepared speech."

Felperin notes that Diego Luna's feature debut as a director, Abel, was well received at Sundance this year, but his segment here, Pacifico, is "one of the complilation's weaker contributions." It tells a "schematic story of a would-be property developer (Ari Brickman) arriving at a coastal town to find he's been conned, prompting a re-evaluation of what's really important in life." The "tech credits" are "subpar."

Variety's review concludes that the best is saved for last. This is Rodrigo Garcia's 7th Street and Alvarado, a tableau in super-slow motion without dialog, depicting a troupe of "exhausted, sad-eyed revolutionaries in period dress, riding on horseback down the colorful streets of the titular Los Angeles intersection, unnoticed by the residents walking by." The scene is accompanied by a "swelling, plangent musical score by the Newton Brothers." This is shot on "luscious color stock." The horsemen's "disappointed expressions mutely speak volumes."

The implied message of several of the films is that not only has Mexico today after a hundred years reverted to violence, corruption and chaos as bad as anything in the old days, but it all becomes rather irrelevant when so many of the breadwinners drain off to El Norte as illegals or Green Card holders supporting their families and villages by providing the backbone to the US economy. This does indeed seem like an unusually good omnibus film, and one that would introduce me to several important new Mexican directors whose work I am unaquainted with. Too bad about the sound track of the copy at the Walter Reade October 5. The film is scheduled for public showing at the New York Film Festival October 9, 2010, and was seen in part and reviewed in part at Lincoln Center.

Upadate after re-watching the whole anthology in Paris in May 2011 here.

SEBASTIÁN SILVA, PEDRO PEIRANO: OLD CATS (2010)

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Bélgica Castro, Claudia Celedón, Catalina Saavedra, and Alejandro
Sieveking in Old Cats

Growing old with a good husband and a bad daughter

Old Cats has a wonderfully lived-in setting and the cast feels right. The writing is a bit extreme and you will not be surprised to learn that the favorite plays of the screenwriter (co-director and regular collaborator Pedro Peirano) are Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Sometimes it feels as if the dialogue is an obstacle to the wonderful acting, especially of Bélgica Castro, who plays opposite her real-life husband, Alejandro Sieveking, in their apartment, with their own wise and patient and overweight cats. (The filmmakers not being beyond a bit of symbolism, we're meant to see that everybody is some kind of "old cat.")

Thirty-something Chileans Silva and Peirano have teamed up for three films, Peirano generally doing the writing and Silva the directing. They've worked with these same actors, famous in Chile. This time they turn from a upper-bourgeois family's abuse of their live-in servant in The Maid to the perils of aging along with ne'er-do-well offspring. The main focus is on an old couple. Isadora (Bélgica Castro) is becoming forgetful and having strange episodes of zoning out, mainly when she's around water. (Men dressed as bees also seem to have an odd effect on her.) Isadora and second husband Enrique (Sieveking) are visited for tea by their abusive, tiresome daughter Rosario (Claudia Celedón, the mistress in Silva's 2007 The Maid), who's just back from a trip to Peru. Understandably, they don't want to see her. Nor are they happy to receive Rosario's butch lesbian lover, who now calls herself Hugo (Catalina Saavedra, the stony-faced maid in the previous film).

Rosario, herself not getting any younger, is a perpetual freeloader. This time she wants the old couple's apartment, an unpretentious but lovely one, with many nice decorations -- and the cats. Isadora is supposed to sign the place over to Rosario and move into something smaller and at ground level. That part makes sense: Isadora has bad hips and the flat is seven flights up. When the elevator is on the blink, which it often is, she's trapped there. Isadora is not meant to be left alone with Rosario, but Enrique and Hugo run off to get some pastries, and an emotional fight between Isadora and her daughter leads to trouble, and then a kind of resolution.

It's nice to live in a small country where you can engage the services of some of the best actors in your films. Such are Claudia Celedón and Catalina Saavedra, who are even more arresting as lesbians than they were as mistress and servant; (Saavedra has a more minor role here, and Celedón a bigger one as the daughter from hell.) Bélgica Castro and Alejandro Sieveking are veritable national institutions -- Castro is an acting giant who has played great roles and established her own national theater; Sieveking is a well-known playwright as well as an actor. Their generosity in lending their own digs to the production (and those emblematic cats) is a huge contribution. When they wake up in their own bed as the film begins and take their pills, well, it's beyond authentic. The hardest thing is to play yourself, but Castro and Sieveking are equal to the task. More than that, Castro shows further generosity in so convincingly embodying an old woman who is much more challenged than she is in real life (though her trouble with the stairs, it seems, is real).

The daughter is not so well conceived. It is the language of Rosario and her and Hugo's coke-snorting in the bathroom that seem strained and a little irrelevant. Her words and actions spoil the slow developing sense of what Isadora is going through. The partly ironic feel-good conclusion additionally seems a bit forced, and reminds us that so much of the talk has been unreal.

The young Silva and Peirano may have only an inkling what it's like to grow old, but they do deserve credit for knowing how to hold our attention. And a lot of us would be lying if we said our family lives hadn't been a horror show at one time or another. Whatever Became of Baby Jane? may be camp, but Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is simply heightened reality.

Seen and reviewed as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, October 2010. Details of other releases and festival screenings unknown.

RAÚL RUIZ: MYSTERIES OF LISBON (2010)

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João Luís Arrais in Mysteries of Lisbon

Romantic labyrinths, from a book of serials

Raúl Ruiz's beautiful and dauntingly complex new film, Mysteries of Lisbon (Misterios de Lisboa), which has been made up (in the manner of Olivier Assayas' current Carlos) into two versions, a four-and-a-half-hour theatrical one and a longer one of six 55-minute segments for TV, is a confounding, hypnotic series of tales-within-tales-within-tales as intricate as anything in the Arabian Nights, or a John Barth reinvention thereof. But this isn't Baghdad under Haroun al-Rashid. It's 18th- and 19th-century Portugal and France, and the original story comes from the single hand of Camilo Castelo Branco, 1st Viscount de Correia Botelho, a 19th-century Portutuese writer who penned over 260 books, and still had time to live a life as turbulent as this film, one ended by his own hand when he learned he was going blind from syphilis.

Like the young João, AKA Pedro, around whom the narrative revolves, Castelo Branco was born out of wedlock and orphaned very young. The 1854 series of back-tracking and interlocking Gothic-cum-amour fou tales of revenge, duels, revelations, changed identities, and wild, mostly adulterous romances recap some of the writer's own experiences, rearranged to fit literary motifs and historical themes. Castelo Branco studied medicine and then for the priesthood, afterward dedicating himself to writing -- and adultery, for which he was imprisoned. He eventually settled down and wrote for a living; the title of viscount was conferred on him for his writing. There are inconsistencies in the narrative because Castel Branco wrote for serials, and lost track of what he'd said earlier. However, the film, of course, is from a screenplay, by Carlos Saboga.

Though made (according to prominent freelance producer Paulo Branco) for only $2 million, Mysteries of Lisbon nonetheless has sumptuous production values, with lovely costumes, exquisite real interiors and landscapes that look like paintings wherein a cast is deployed whose named characters alone number over three dozen. It begins promisingly, like an unusually delicate and self-possessed bildingsroman, with the young Pedro da Silva (João Luís Arrais), a handsome 14-year-old at a boarding school under the protection of a priest. Pedro, then known as João, says in voiceover "I had no idea who I was." He soon learns that he is the son of a woman of noble birth. And then there is a story. And then another. And another. And that leads to another. All concern the themes mentioned above.

Unfortunately, without a synopsis in hand, and a pause button to go back and review transitions so one sees the logical connectives and understands how one tale fits into the whole, the mysteries of Lisbon, alas, remain somewhat mysterious. Perhaps they are meant to. Readers of episodes in a 19th-century serial romance might well be satisfied without the sense of a grand design. The fun was in the emotion and drama of each episode. However as one watches a long film unroll -- and one thinks in this context of Ruiz's masterful 1999 adaptation of Proust, Time Regained, as the director evidently did too, for he reportedly sought to evoke his earlier film in the mise-en-scene and cinematography (the latter by newcomer André Szankowski) -- one tends to expect to make unifying, dovetailing sense of things, something difficult with the earlier film but doable if one knows one's Proust. Ruiz does tie Mysteries up at the end, with two final scenes that are, however, intentional conundrums, but return to the character one at least wants to be central, Pedro/João, the aristocratic bastard whose desire to know his true origins is what starts the whole swirling ball rolling.

Things are clear enough at the beginning when the friar in charge of his school, Padre Diniz (Adriano Luz), introduces the 14-year-old João to Angela de Lima (Maria João Bastos). He realizes this high-born lady must be his mother. She turns out to have been imprisoned for years at his castle as punishment for her adultery by her husband, the Count of Santa Barbara (Albano Jerónimo). Padre Diniz tells the story -- in which he appears in one of three identities, because he, among others, has had a checkered career. Joáo retells the stories throughout in a puppet theater, which serves as a transitional device between tales. But it gets crazier. Another key character has multiple identities. A heavy hired to kill Angela's lover later appears as a man called Alberto de Magalhães (Ricardo Pereira) who's gotten rich in Brazil in the slave trade. Later the focus is at times on Pedro/João, (played by Alfonso Pimentel as a young adult), or on the French noblewoman Elisa de Montfort (Clotilde Hesme), or Magalhães, or Padre Diniz in another of his manifestations. Why all these shifts? Hard to say.

Ruiz, the gifted and original 69-year-old Chilean filmmaker who rose to prominence in the 1980's and lives in France, was seriously unwell when this film was undertaken and seemed on the verge of dying of liver cancer; surgery has since saved his life. It was producer Paulo Branco who originally conceived the project of turning Castelo Branco's pulpy but absorbing three volumes into a movie. Ruiz didn't initially see how to do it, but screenwriter Carlos Saboga very quickly turned out a screenplay and the project got under way. Ruiz is clearly at home with the endless whirlwind of love tales. Whether anybody at work on the project knew how the plot fit together any better then Hawks, Faulkner, and company did when they made The Big Sleep is unknown. The beauty of the images and the constant rhythm of the action and scenes are evidently vintage Ruiz, but whether this film holds its own against the director's Time Regained is uncertain. The film is in French as well as Portuguese and some well-known French actors are invloved -- Clotilde Hesme, Malik Zidi, Melvil Poupaud, and Léa Seydoux, as well as relative newcomer Julien Alluguette.

Mysteries of Lisbon is frustrating. It is too beautiful not to watch on a big screen, but it is likely to make more sense on DVD. In many ways it is like any classy European costume mini-series, and at the same time both more and less. It has the mark of an auteur's unique vision, his fascination for circular, swirling storytelling and enchanting tableaux, and in that sense it is special. It has the bustling scenes, handsome costumes, international cast of a RAI or Canal+ product -- but it lacks the essential chronological coherence. One can tell which century one's in, but one can't always remember why.

If dauntingly long watches are going to be a fixture of film festivals, where do we stop? Why wasn't the first season of "The Wire" presented at a film festival? But that would be as hard to take in during a 4-and-half hour sit as this, and as in need of a good cheat-sheet to follow the first time through. Mysteries of Lisbon bears some similarity to Catherine Breillat's Last Mistress, also a story of amour fou from a novel that straddles (more clearly) the leap between the 18th and 19th centuries. Ruiz's film may be a masterpiece in festival terms, but for the ordinary art house viewer, Breillat's is more accessible and considerably more fun.

Mysteries of Lisbon is included in the Toronto, New York, Vancouver, Vienna, Torino and London film festivals, and is scheduled for theatrical release in France and Portugal Oct. 20 and 21. Seen and reviewed as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, shown to the public there Oct. 10.

Film website.

CLINT EASTWOOD: HEREAFTER (2010)

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Cécile de France (center) flees from a tsunami in Hereafter

Here, and the beyond

Clint Eastwood moves into new territory in several ways with Hereafter and almost fully carries it off directing a screenplay by Peter Morgan (also in a new area outside British history). It tells three tales about dialoging with the dead that connect at the end. The subject is new; so is shooting in the tropics and London and Paris as well as the US (San Francisco) and in French as well as in English. The risk is sentimentality or hokiness on the one hand and the far-fetchedness of by now clichéd multiple storyline movies on the other. But the stories are interesting, and never slighted in the interests of theme or dovetaling.

In a flashy opening, Cécile de France is a French TV journalist caught with her coworker boyfriend Thierry Neuvic in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. He's back at the hotel but she's in the market and gets swept off in the water and almost drowns. In fact she has a near-death experience. The tsunami is neatly and swiftly recreated in special effects that convince without overwhelming. It's a superb sequence, epic yet disarmingly simple. Meanwhile in San Francisco we meet Matt Damon, a former psychic now working in a factory job because he found revisiting people's dead relatives too draining and strange a way to live his life. But his powers were effective and he keeps getting pulled back. And in London, two young twin brothers, played by newcomers Frankie and George McClaren, live with an addict mother (Niamh Cusack) whom they try to protect. When one of the twins is killed in a traffic accident the other is taken into foster care. Marcus, formerly the dependent brother, is on his own and wants both his mum and brother Jason back. He wears Jason's cap and occasionally talks to him.

It's safe to say the little twin is a strong presence. So is the dynamic, soulful Cécile de France. She has never been in an American film, but only speaks English briefly at a London book fair, where all three principals run into each other. And Damon is good here, striking a strange but convincing balance between flustered and grounded. There is a no-nonsense quality about the way he reluctantly wields his powers.

While de France is going through turmoil at work back in Paris due to her post-traumatic state and sense of having entered another world and not fully returned from it, Damon meets a lovely girl at a cooking class (Bryce Dallas Howard) whose jovial chef (Steven R. Schirripa) has students sample tastes blindfolded, and then loses her through being drawn into communing with her dead relatives. That brings up issues that are too intimate to share. Meanwhile Marcus, turning independent and running off temporarily from his foster parents, visits various psychics, an interlude that shows lots of them are frauds.

The film takes an agnostic stand through Damon, whose character views his special sense as a curse but who may be the real thing -- or not. The point of the story is not to focus on the "au delà" (the beyond, title of a book de France writes when on furlough from journalistic chores) so much as to suggest that reconciling one's feelings about death and lost loved ones is a key to peace and happiness in the here-and-now. Thus the finale, where characters are reunited in a way that's hopeful without being overly optimistic.

Morgan's screenplay obviously plays with the device of Guillermo Arriaga's Babel and other films where far-off individuals are implausibly and portentously brought together. The bringing-together here is not without clumsiness. But it is handled by Eastwood, as are even the most dramatic elements in the three stories, in such a low keyed way that one stays caught up in the characters and the subject matter and is left at the end with things to ponder rather than a sense of being put through an emotional wringer for dramatic effect. The fresh material and composed, old-fashioned filmmaking make Hereafter one of Eastwood's better recent efforts. This is not a great film but it's one that approaches potentially schlocky material in a classy manner, and that's unusual in mainstream Hollywood filmmaking.

The mainstream-ness is still a flaw at times. The way London and Paris are introduced is ham-fisted and conventional. Some details are dubious. Damon has sworn off being a psychic for three years yet still has a website celebrating his powers so Marcus can conveniently find it. De France on furlough proposes to write a biography of Mitterand -- unlikely. When this is dropped and the French publisher won't do her book on "the beyond," she gets an English publisher -- how? Steps are at best skipped there. Glimpses of the afterlife or the dead are signaled by a booming sound and white blurry images -- clear, but not very subtle. Dickens' novels and Derk Jacobi's readings of them are used as a transparent linking device. Flaws like this in the writing and the directing will make some condemn this as far from Eastwood's best work. However the good casting and fine acting offset these flaws, and the tsunami sequence is quite memorable, as are most scenes with de France and the English twins. (There's another action sequence that's equally well handled.) Hereafter treats its complex theme -- that of facing death, our own and others' -- in a tasteful and restrained manner that makes it suggestive and quietly haunting. But for the "MTV generation," as Eastwood has called it, it's hard, as it was earlier this year with Polanski's masterful The Ghost Writer, to appreciate the quiet virtues of traditional filmmaking.

Seen and reviewed at the 2010 New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center; scheduled as the Closing Night film, Oct. 10. Also shown earlier at Toronto, at Chicago Oct. 14; limited US theatrical release Oct. 15, more general, Oct. 22.

Comments on the NYFF and an index of NYFF 2010 reviews

Time hasn't allowed me to write a more formal summing up, but here are some general comments on this year's NYFF.


THE SCREENINGS. As usual the Press & Industry screenings are a pleasure, beautifully presented in comfortable surroundings and if not the most cutting edge series, at least the classiest and nicest to watch of my movie year. They're presented separately from the public ones, at the Walter Reade Theater, a venue that's cozier than the large, handsomely renovated public screening auditorium, Alice Tully Hall, yet has superb image and sound facilities, and a stage where Q&A's are conducted. Refreshments and coffee are provided in the spacious gallery across the lobby. There is a first-rate staff headed by theater manager Glenn Raucher, who in two and a half years in the job has emerged as more and more indispensable -- as well as a pleasure to have around. Screenings are scheduled over a longer period than the festival itself, on weekdays only, spread out so that anyone with the time in mornings and afternoons to spare can watch everything in a civilized manner.

THE FILMS. Favorites that I'd call mainstream or conventional are the brilliant, fast-paced The Social Network (David Fincher); subtle, complex Poetry (Lee Chang-dong); the thrilling biographical miniseries Carlos (Olivier Assayas); the French drama of the clash of politics and religion, Of Gods and Men (Xavier Beauvois); and an original first film, a German character study about a crook who's also a star athlete, The Robber (Benjamin Heisenberg) -- which I'd rate in about that order. These are my top picks. But not all I recommend. And highlighting them doesn't mean the festival doesn't have depth, even if there was nothing in 2010 as great as Haneke's The White Ribbon or as provocative on a grand scale as von Trier's Antichrist or on a lesser scale Precious and Trash Humpers, all included in last year's NYFF.

Movies I liked a lot that are a edgier and demanding are the dark political portrait of Seventies Chile, Post Mortem (Pablo Larraín), and the cannibal genre film We Are What We Are (Jorge Michel Grau).

Manoel de Oliveira's Strange Case of Angelica is in a class by itself. From what I've seen of de Oliveira's work, it's feather-light, but lovely. Likewise I'd put Clint Eastwood in a class by himself. He is an old-fashioned filmmaker. Hereafter deserves respect. It's not quite successful, but it has class, it's thought-provoking, and it has fine acting and terrific action scenes, unusual because they have both punch and restraint.

I'm not so happy with Kiarostami's Certified Copy, which was so well received at Cannes. It's beautifully made, but it seems a put-on, posing as something profound (and melding into polished European filmmaking, after a lifetime of working in Iran), but its game-playing by a couple who may be long married or have just met seems gimmicky. I'd not have included it. Thought art house film-goers will love this film, it left me feeling empty and a little played-with.

Another Year (Mike Leigh) is beautifully made and acted but seemed too pat and schematic. Leigh gets great performances and has a powerful working method, but his recent films seem fun yet don't leave such a strong impression. Julie Taymor's The Tempest, chosen partly to sell tickets as the Centeriece film, has some nice acting, but isn't at all an interesting interpretation of Shakespeare. Just window dressing.

Offerings from Eastern Europe and Russia or Ukraine continued familiar veins for where they came from and were quite disappointing. Cristi Puiu's slow motiveless study of multiple murders Aurora (not up to his Death of Mr. Lazarescu) and Radu Muntean's family breakdown movie Tuesday, Before Christmas, both from Romania, are very similar, slow, flat, obsessively quotidian. They have a certain quality but don't seem very memorable, perhaps due to a lack of narrative structure. Aleksei Fedorchenko's Russian folkloric tale Silent Souls wasn't very memorable either. Sergei Loznitsa's debut My Joy may seem radical to some but impresses only for its ultraviolence--and, admittedly, some fine camerawork. It makes ultimately no narrative sense and is a series of anecdotes posing as a coherent story. Nothing outstanding. The Romanians seem overrated, the Russians not living up to past performance.

Other disappointing features were Kelly Reichardt's attempt at a radical western, Meek's Cutooff, a lame misfire; and Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo's Oki's Movie. Hong, whose almost Nouvelle Vague-like studies of male-female relationships and vain movie directors I've loved in the past, seems to be repeating himself and running in circles. The followup of The Maid by Chiliean Sebastian Silva and his partner Pedro Peirano, Old Cats, seemed to ruin a good setup and actors with writing of the daughter's part that fell into caricature. The brilliant French-Arab director Abdellatif Kechiche's Black Venus was much too long; he seemed to want to punish the audience with his message of 19th-century white racism and this was a falling off from earlier work closer to his own experience.

Two greats produced works I couldn't quite tune in to. Godard's Film Socialisme's provocations seem largely incomprehensible; images are intermittently ugly -- beautiful. Raúl Ruiz's Mysteries of Lisbon is gorgeous, its mise-en-scene rich, its tales fascinating. But the tales-within-tales failed to dovetail; the long film is impossible to follow. Mysteries of Lisbon is a very fine film -- almost. A masterpiece manqué.

Festivals naturally and properly favor films that set themselves apart from mainstream fare. This means a leaning toward work that is hard to understand, glacially slow, often shot cooly, like Hou Hsiao-hsien's and some other great Asian directors', from a certain distance with a stationary camera. There's also a taste for features that merge fiction with documentary elements, especially exotic ones. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, the Thai festival darling Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cannes 2010 top prize winner, fills the bill. He has every right to go his own way. However when all is said and done he works so far out on the margins that he connects emotionally only occasionally. This study of rural spiritualism and communication with the dead has haunting and beautiful moments, but also seems disjointed, fey, and self-indulgent.

Documentaries of the festival kind similarly are ones that test an audience, are hard to follow (not a crime), without commentary or with mysterious commentary. Le Quattro Volte and Robinson in Ruins were of that kind, and The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaşescu, a valid portrait of the Romanian dictator but one that could probably have been an hour shorter. Fred Wiseman's repetitive and boring Boxing Gym did not enchant me. He has covered everything but when he takes the fun out of even ballet I balk. These sometimes haphazard documentary efforts do no honor to the work of great directors included in the festival, whose jurors might rethink their documentary selecting process. On the other hand the conventional documentaries LennonNYC and Letter to Elia (a sidebar) and the handsomely mounted financial meltdown study Inside Job were very worthwhile -- especially the latter, the important (if not unique) Inside Job, which was as smart as The Social Network. Lennon, Elia, and Inside Job are of interest, but does their aesthetic merit warrant inclusion? Docs remain a moot point for the NYFF. Maybe they should include only one really fine one and let it go at that. A doc on a level with Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke, or Philibert's To Be and to Have, and other great ones. But when you consider content apart from form, you go astray.

Unfortunately I could only see part of the Mexican short collection, but it shows Mexican filmmakers have coherence and more of a sense of commonality than directors of any other Latin American country. Latin America in general remains a source of vibrant new work, while Korea has fallen back somewhat, and Japan and Italy remain in decline from past glories.



INDEX OF LINKS TO ALL REVIEWS

Another Year (Mike Leigh 2010)
Aurora (Cristi Puiu 2010)
Autobiography of Nicolae Ceauşescu, The (Andrei Uticǎ 2010)
Black Venus (Abdellatif Kechiche 2010)
Carlos (Olivier Assayas 2010)
Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami 2010)
Film Socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard 2010)
Hereafter (Clint Eastwood 2010)
Inside Job (Charles Ferguson 2010)
LennonNYC (Michael Epstein 2010)
Letter to Elia, A (Scorsese, Jones 2010)
Meek's Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt 2010)
My Joy (Sergei Loznitsa 2010)
Mysteries of Lisbon (Raúl Ruiz 2010)
Of Gods and Men (Xavier Beauvois 2010)
Oki's Movie (Hong Sang-soo 2010)
Old Cats (Sebastián Silva, Pedro Peirano 2010)
Poetry (Lee Chang-dong 2010)
Post Mortem (Pablo Larraín 2010)
Quattro Volte, Le (Michelangelo Frammartino 2010)
Revolución (ten short films from Mexico, 2010)
Robber, The (Benjamin Heisenberg 2010)
Robinson in Ruins (Patrick Keiller) 2010
Silent Souls (Alexei Fedorchenko 2010)
Social Network, The (David Fincher 2010)
Strange Case of Angelica, The (Manoel de Oliveira 2010)
Tempest, The (Julie Taymor 2010)
Tuesday, After Christmas (Radu Muntean 2010)
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weeresethakul 2010)
We Are What We Are (Jorge Michel Grau 2010)


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The Social Network