New Directors/New Films and Film Comment Selects 2012

NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS and FILM COMMENT SELECTS 2012

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MoMA'S FILM ENTRANCE ADVERTISES NEW DIRECTORS 2012

Film CommentSelects and NewDirectors/NewFilms are two separate series put on by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, FCS a series chosen by staff members of the Film Society of Lincoln Center's in-house monthly, New Directors in collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art. I will cover the press & industry screenings of New Directors/New Films, which generally include all the selections. Of Film Comment Selects I will see only a few. That series is spread out and this year did not have a program of press screenings.

Links to the reviews:

5 Broken Cameras (Emad Burat, Guy Davidi 2011)--ND/NF
Ambassador, The (Mads Brügger 2011)--ND/NF
Breathing (Karl Markovics 2011)--ND/NF
Crulic: The Path to Beyond (Anca Damian 2011)--ND/NF
Donoma (Djinn Carrénard 2011)--ND/NF
Faust (Aleksandr Sokurov 2011)--FCS
Found Memories (Júlia Murat 2011)--ND/NF
Generation P (Vincent Ginzburg 2011)--ND/NF
Gimme the Loot (Adam Leon 2012)--ND/NF
Goodbye (Mohammad Rasoulof 2011)--ND/NF
Hemel (Sacha Polak 2012)--ND/NF
How to Survive a Plague (David France 2012)--ND/NF
Huan Huan (Song Chuan 2011)--ND/NF
I Wish (Hirakazu Koreeda 2011)--FCS
It Looks Pretty from a Distance (Anka, Wilhelm Sasnal 2011)--ND/NF
Las Acacias (Pablo Giorgelli 2011)--ND/NF
Minister, The (Pierre Schöller 2011)--ND/NF
Oslo, August 31st (Joachim Trier 2011)--ND/NF
My Own Private River (James Franco 2012)--FCS
Neighboring Sounds (Kleber Mendoça Filho 2011)--ND/NF
Now, Forager (Jason Cortland, Julia Halperin 2012)--ND/NF
Omar Killed Me (Roschdy Zem 2011)--ND/NF
Oversimplification of Her Beauty, An (Terence Nance 2012)--ND/NF
Porfirio (Alejandro Landes 2011)--ND/NF
Rabbi's Cat, The (Joann Sfar, Antoine Delesvauz 2011)--ND/NF
Raid, The: Redemption (Gareth Evans 2012)--ND/NF
Rebellion (Mathieu Kassovitz 2011)--FCS
Romance Joe (Lee Kwang-kui 2011)--ND/NF
Teddy Bear (Mads Metthieson 2011)--ND/NF
Twilight Portrait (Angelina Nikonova 2011)--ND/NF
Where Do We Go Now (Nadine Labaki 2011)--ND/NF



Click on the title below for the YouTube video (4 mins.).
Ken Burns on New Directors/New Films

"It was like a union card that says, 'Yes you can.' And yes, we all did."
"That afternoon at New Directors cemented what it meant to be a filmmaker for me."

Filmleaf General Forums thread for ND/NF and FCS 2012 here.

film comment selects

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The full program is below. I plan to review Sokurov's Faust, James Franco's My Own Private River, Hirakazu Koreeda's I Wish and Mathieu Kassovitz's Rebellion. I have already reviewed Joshua Marston's The Forgieness of Blood, Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret, and Nanni Moretti's We Have a Pope.


A Stoker
Alexei Balabanov, 2010
Sat Feb 25: 5:30 pm
An elderly, not-all-there Afghan war veteran known as “the major” feeds the murder victims of cops and mobsters into an apartment building furnace while working on an epic historical novel in the latest nihilistic crime drama from Russian provocateur Alexei Balabanov (Cargo 200).

All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace
Adam Curtis, 2011
The BBC essay filmmaker behind 2007’s The Power of Nightmares is back with a new three-part work on mankind’s dependency on computer technology. Compulsive viewing.

Almayer’s Folly
Chantal Akerman, 2011
Sun Feb 26: 1:00 pm
Chantal Akerman updates the first novel by Joseph Conrad from the late 1890s to the 1950s, and uses it as a springboard for an examination of the bankruptcy of colonialism through the struggle between a European father and Malaysian mother for possession of their daughter.

Alps
Yorgos Lanthimos, 2011
Thu Mar 1: 9:30 pm
In the latest warped and absurdly funny exploration of unnatural doings from the director of Dogtooth, a secret society consisting of four members offers a unique service: the recently bereaved can hire them for a few hours a week to act as surrogates for deceased loved ones, in order to help them adjust to their loss.

Altered States
Ken Russell, 1980
Fri Feb 24: 9:30 pm
Fearless scientist William Hurt plumbs the unborn soul of mankind through psychedelic freak-outs in a sensory-deprivation tank. In memory of Ken Russell, who died in November.

Despair
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1978
Thu Feb 23: 1:30 pm | Wed Feb 29: 4:30 pm
Based on a novel by Nabokov, scripted by Tom Stoppard, and starring Dirk Bogarde, Fassbinder’s first English-language film, a black comedy about a chocolate manufacturer plotting the perfect murder, is a must-see for all, not just Fassbinder completists.

Face to Face
Ingmar Bergman, 1975
Wed Feb 22: 3:30 pm | Fri Feb 24: 1:30 pm
Liv Ullmann is front and center in this underseen Bergman film, playing a disturbed psychiatrist who has an affair with a fellow doctor (Erland Josephson), only to succumb to a nervous breakdown seemingly triggered by haunting memories from her past.

Faust
Aleksandr Sokurov, 2011
Tue Feb 21: 3:15 pm | Tue Feb 28: 9:00 pm
Winner of the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion, Russian master Aleksandr Sokurov’s idiosyncratic and playful reinvention of Goethe’s play positions Faust’s craving of knowledge and power (i.e., the Enlightenment) as the source of 20th-century evil.

Headhunters
Morten Tyldum, 2011
Thu Feb 23: 6:30 pm | Fri Feb 24: 4:15 pm
A slick, charming corporate recruitment specialist leads a double life as an art thief in this twisty and fast-paced thriller that heralds the arrival of an exciting new directorial talent—and will keep you guessing all the way to its finale.

I Wish
Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2011
Wed Feb 22: 1:00 pm
Japan’s answer to Truffaut, Hirokazu Kore-eda, returns with a truly sweet, low-key film about two brothers trying to reunite their parents. Starring comedy duo Koki and Ohshiro Maeda.

Land Passion War of the Dead Christ Worlds
Special Event! J. Hoberman in person!
Based on 25 years of stunt projections and class presentations at NYU and Cooper Union, it’s Doomsday USA, starring Asia Argento, Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning, Dennis Hopper, and the mind of Mel “Mad Max” Gibson. With subtitles!

Le sauvage
Jean-Paul Rappeneau, 1975
Tue Feb 21: 9:00 pm
The Film Society’s 2012 Gala honoree Catherine Deneuve and Yves Montand co-star in this unlikely, lightning-paced screwball farce set in Venezuela, restored and presented in the 2011 Cannes Film Festival’s “Classics” section.

Life Is Sweet
Mike Leigh, 1990
Categories:Don't Miss Mon Feb 20: 6:30 pm
In Memoriam: Bingham Ray.
A rare chance to see Mike Leigh’s breakthrough film in the U.S., unavailable here on DVD. Presented in memory of the late Bingham Ray, the man responsible for this film’s U.S. distribution, as the first release of his fledgling company October Films.

Man at Sea
Constantine Giannaris, 2011
Wed Feb 29: 7:00 pm Buy Tickets | Thu Mar 1: 1:00 pm Buy Tickets |
A tale of the transnational now in which characters rarely speak in their native tongues and everybody’s an alien. An ocean tanker picks up a boatload of refugees in the Mediterranean, only to find itself unable to locate a country willing to take them in.

Margaret
Kenneth Lonergan, 2011
Sat Feb 25: 7:15 pm Standby Only |
Director Kenneth Lonergan and cast members in person!
The film maudit of last year and in some critics’ estimation, one of the best, writer-director Kenneth Lonergan’s years-in-the-works second feature is a fascinating and often wrenching drama of moral crisis in post 9/11 New York.

Mortem
Eric Atlan, 2010
Tue Feb 21: 1:15 pm
Director Eric Atlan in person!
A woman checks into a deserted hotel and finds herself unable to leave her room in this crepuscular trance film that takes inspiration from Bergman’s Persona and Lynch’s Mulholland Dr., but casts an uncanny spell that’s all its own.

My Crasy Life
Jean-Pierre Gorin, 1992
Sun Feb 26: 3:30 pm Buy Tickets |
Winner of a special jury prize at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival, the concluding chapter in Gorin’s SoCal trilogy finds the filmmaker intrepidly venturing into the world of the West Side Sons of Samoa, a Long Beach street gang.

My Own Private River
James Franco, Gus Van Sant, 2011
Director James Franco in person! Music by Michael Stipe! Pre-reception for ticket holders 8-9pm!
Actor-director James Franco creates a dreamlike portrait of actor River Phoenix and his iconic character in Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho, combining footage from the original film and unused outtakes.

Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii
Adrian Maben, 1971
October 1971: the prog gods give a spectacular concert to an audience of ghosts on the volcanically desolate stage of a Roman amphitheater.
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Poto and Cabengo
Jean-Pierre Gorin, 1980
Sun Feb 26: 7:15 pm
Erstwhile Godard collaborator Jean-Pierre Gorin’s first American feature is a beguiling documentary about the case of twin San Diego girls believed to be communicating in a language of their own invention.

Rebellion
Mathieu Kassovitz, 2011
Thu Feb 23: 8:45 pm Buy Tickets | Wed Feb 29: 1:45 pm Buy Tickets |
A compelling and tightly directed thriller about a team of elite counter-terrorism hostage negotiators who attempt to resolve a standoff between political separatists and the French military in the Pacific island of New Caledonia.

Role Models
David Wain, 2008
Wed Feb 22: 8:45 pm
David Wain’s inspired third feature turns Hollywood’s pious, “be yourself” genre deservedly on its ear with the cheerfully irreverent tale of two disillusioned energy-drink salesmen (Paul Rudd and Seann William Scott) serving out a community service sentence in a youth mentoring program

Routine Pleasures
Jean-Pierre Gorin, 1986
Sun Feb 26: 5:30 pm
Gorin’s unclassifiable second American feature begins as an affectionate group portrait of devoted model-train hobbyists in the San Diego suburb of Pacific Beach (filmed in lustrous black and white), detours through the painting studio of artist-critic Manny Farber (at work on two of his bustling, crowded canvases), and pauses for ruminations on Thelonius Monk, William Wellman, and Howard Hawks—yet somehow, wonderfully, feels all of a piece. The subjects are all miniaturists of a sort, and so too is Gorin, treating us here to another lyrical, inimitable vision of his shoebox America.


Silent House
Laura Lau, Chris Kentis, 2011
Thu Feb 23: 4:00 pm | Sat Feb 25: 10:45 pm
Directors Laura Lau and Chris Kentis in person for Q&A after February 25 screening!
In this perfectly executed real-time thriller from the directors of Open Water, Elizabeth Olsen finds herself trapped inside the dilapidated cabin her family is readying for sale. With no contact to the outside world and no way out, panic turns to terror.

Sleepwalk
Sara Driver, 1986
Wed Feb 29: 9:00 pm
A beguiling and enigmatic nocturnal adventure set in New York’s no-man’s land, at the intersection of SoHo, Chinatown, and Tribeca, Sara Driver’s first feature begins in mundane daily life but imperceptibly drifts into the dreamlike realm of the trance film.

Snowtown
Justin Kurzel, 2011
Arguably the most disturbing, least sensationalistic serial killer movie since Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, director Justin Kurzel’s stark, enormously accomplished debut feature recounts the horrifying crimes discovered in Snowtown, Australia in 1999, where police found dismembered bodies rotting in barrels.

Target
Alexander Zeldovich, 2011
Fri Feb 24: 6:30 pm | Thu Mar 1: 3:00 pm
In the year 2020, a Russian oligarch, his wife, a handsome TV host, and a champion equestrian fly together from Moscow to Central Asia in search of a modern-day fountain of youth... only to discover that eternal life has its downside.


The Forgiveness of Blood
Joshua Marston, 2011
Director Joshua Marston, stars Tristan Halilaj, Refet Abazi, and Sindi Lacej, and co-writer Andamion Murataj in person!
In his long-awaited follow-up to 2004’s Maria Full of Grace, director Joshua Marston focuses on a modern-day blood feud in a rural village in Northern Albania. Winner of the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay at the 2011 Berlin Film Festival.

Transfer
Damir Lukacevic, 2010
Mon Feb 20: 4:15 pm | Mon Feb 20: 8:45 pm
In this post-colonial spin on John Frankenheimer’s Seconds, the Menzana Corporation offers its elderly, white German clientele the chance to live new lives inside the bodies of young African refugees who willingly lend out their corporeal residences for 20 hours a day.

Wanderlust
David Wain, 2012
Wed Feb 22: 6:15 pm Standby Only |
David Wain, Alan Alda, Paul Rudd, Kerri Kenney, and Ken Marino will attend and participate in a post-screening Q&A!
When on-the-go Manhattanite George (Paul Rudd) is downsized out of his job, he and wife Linda (Jennifer Aniston) hit the road for Atlanta, detouring en route at a modern-day commune where free living reigns. From the director of Wet Hot American Summer.

We Have a Pope
Nanni Moretti, 2011
Mon Feb 20: 2:00 pm Buy Tickets |
In Nanni Moretti’s latest comedy, Michel Piccoli plays a newly elected Pope who gets cold feet and is put under the care of a shrink (Moretti).

Whores’ Glory
Michael Glawogger, 2011
A non-exploitative, matter-of-fact study of the world’s oldest profession, Austrian documentarian Michael Glawogger’s film travels from Thailand to Bangladesh to Mexico, allowing the harsh realities and professional hazards of the trade to speak for themselves.

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ALEKSANDR SOKUROV: FAUST (2011)--FCS

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JOHANNES ZEILER AND ANTON ADASINSKY IN FAUST

Sokurov's very strange and visually remarkable version of 'Faust'

Aleksandr Sokurov's Faust won the top prize, the Golden Lion, at the Venice Film Festival in September 2011. Gavin Smith, the editor of Film Comment, introduced the FCS series and this film at the Lincoln Center Walter Reade Theater by saying that this was probably the only chance audience members would get to see it on the big screen. Indeed other than his big US art house success, the tour-do-force one-long-take trip through a museum with music conducted by Valery Gergiev film Russian Ark, Sokurov's films have rarely gotten theatrical releases Stateside. And Faust is not a likely candidate. The grubby opening sequence included hoisting up a naked cadaver whose guts fell out, which sent half a dozen people from the theater. When giving the Golden Lion, Darren Arronovsky announced that it was the kind of film that could change your life forever. Sokurov's films are remarkable as they are off-putting and strange. Most are haunting and hypnotic. Alexandra, (NYFF 2007)about an old woman who visits her soldier son at the front, is moving. The Sun (NYFF 2005), an incredibly sensitive portrait of the Emperor Hirohito in the time up to and after the Japanese surrender, is a hypnotic, revealing, and extraordinary touching portrait. Father and Son is as sensuous and homoerotic and strangely beautiful as any film about men ever made. Like many of Sokurov's films it exists in a foggy hyperreal dreamworld that is complete but only partly parallel to our own.

Faust, which like Sokurov's Moloch, is in German, announces in its opening titles that it is based on the work by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, but interprets the legend of the man who trades his soul to the devil to gain knowledge in a very peculiar manner. This Heinrich Faust (Johannes Zeiler), who follows the traditional pattern in being a learned scientist, is linked up with a strangely annoying and grinning busybody of a devil with a pear-shaped body and scraggly reddish hair. He is a moneylender (Anton Adasinsky). Faust has become attracted to Margarete (Russian actress Isolda Dychauk), a pure young woman with pale skin and flaxen reddish hair, and it seems that his bargain is to give up his soul for a little time spent with her. Some "Faustian bargain."

The mood of Sokurov's Faust, as Variety reviewer Jay Weissberg has emphatically noted, is different from most of his other films in its ceaseless nattering verbosity. Mostly Sokurov's mood- and image-centric films contain few words but this one never stops talking. What with its voiceover from Faust or conversation between him and the moneylender, or the rambles of the moneylender, the soundtrack here keeps a constant chattering rhythm going like an outboard motor continually running. Sokurov thus creates and maintains a kind of peculiar energy and a sense of a world that is going on just beyond us, inside the screen so to speak. Sokurov has done this before, but this time the sense of a world that we can't quite penetrate is a little different. In other films we feel swept away (Russian Ark) or enveloped and hypnotized (Father and Son, The Sun). Here we are more alienated.

He counts this as the last in his tetrology about the corrupting effects of power. Those that I have seen (I'm missing Taurus, about Lenin) have little in common with each other. Moloch (1999) deals with Hitler in 1942, in Bavaria, and focuses on a visit to Eva Braun by Hitler, Goebbels, Goebbels' wife and Martin Bormann in which they sit around for several days talking about politics. The Sun, as mentioned, is an intimate portrait of the Emperor Hirohito.

What distinguishes Faust, which seems otherwise one of Sokurov's brilliant misfires, are the images and the mise-en-scène. Weissberg comments that the photography echoes Flemish painting and also folk art about witches. This may be so, but what seems even more striking is the way the director has recreated the look and feel of early photography. One could also not help but be reminded in the early sequence of Faust's laboratory of the photographs of Joel-Peter Witkin. And this gives a sense of how rich and elaborately staged and photographed the interiors and exteriors are and how convincing the people and costumes are in their sense of period. Beyond that, the framing of exteriors, the peculiarities of aspect ratio and focus, and the complex "gray" tonalities all build up the nineteenth-century look. Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man is an analogy, but here the effect is richer -- and stranger.

Manohla Dargis has commented on a shot as unforgettable. It's one where Faust is united with Margarete and he embraces her and they flip over together into a river. It's a dream-image, symbolic rather than real. And the whole film is best understood as what Dali and Bunuel might have done if they'd gone on working together and done their version of Faust. But there's just a gutted corpse here, no dead donkeys lying inside a grand piano. I still remember the late Graham Leggett introducing Sokurov's The Sun at a press screening for the 2005 New York Film Festival saying this was one of the world's great directors: the sheer boldness and conviction with which Leggett made the statement left a lasting impression. And somehow it still rings true.

Seen for this review as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center's series, Film Comment Selects. Screening times:

Friday, February 17 at 8:15PM, Tuesday, February 21 at 3:15PM and Tuesday, February 28 at 9:00PM.

JAMES FRANCO: MY OWN PRIVATE RIVER (2012)--FCS

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A chance to see a lost actor at work

James Franco was fifteen when Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho came out. He has said that it is his favorite film, it moved him, it helped shape him as a teenager. After he worked on Milk he went to see Van Sant and learned that he had kept 25 hours' worth of film footage shot at the time of My Own Private Idaho. Franco has written about the experience.

"We spent two days in Portland watching as much as we could. While we were watching, we discussed how Gus’s movies have changed in the intervening decades. His films now are much more spare in story and dialogue; they involve longer takes and fewer cuts. We were naturally led to wonder what Idaho would be like if he made the film now, and Gus offered to let me make my own cut."

Franco seems to have made three films, or maybe two that were combined. They've been shown at Toronto and put in an installation in LA at Gagasian Gallery, when Franco got Gucci to pay the cost of digitalizing the many hours of film Van Sant turned over to his use and the gallery agreed to present Franco's piece. The Gagasian installation is described in a Guardian blog, "James Franco brings River Phoenix back to life,"and now appeared at the gallery across from the entrance to the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center in New York where the Film Comment Selects series is shown. This was a shabby-chic version of an AA meeting, with scattered mismatched camp chairs and romantically tacky hanging gold and orange drapery, a table with a coffee urn and paper cups, a color film projected on a big screen at one end of the room and a small screen at the opposite end high up with a film in black and white on a monitor. (The latter turns out to be the Shakespeare material that Franco chose to leave out.)

I did not go to the Film Comment Selects' late evening event at which these were handsomely projected in their combined form on the really big screen with a Q&A by Franco at the end, because this was sold out. But I got the feeling from the faux AA meeting installation, which was one of sadness mixed with respect for the talent of River Phoenix. Van Sant's film gives us fragments of a lost life, love, hope, comical sad hustles, love and disappointment. River Phoenix delivered other notable performances. At a memorial service after his death Sidney Poitier, who worked with him on one of his films, called him "incandescent." It's surprising to see that what would seem to be a child role, Stand by Me, comes only two years before Phoenix played a precocious, gifted youth in Running on Empty, and a mere five years before the layered complexity of My Own Private Idaho.

It's interesting that James Franco has done these pieces and Van Sant let him do them. Whether or not there are more long takes in Franco's edits, Idaho was a highly improvisatory production with a lot of people hanging out and living approximations of the dissolute lives the film chronicles. (This is brought out more because Franco stressed the documentary aspect of the film footage.) Rumor had it that there were a lot of drugs and some said the atmosphere gave Phoenix a push toward the downward path (his death from an overdose came two years later). But what the extra takes and footage show of Phoenix is of him living the sensibility of his character, Mike, the narcoleptic gay street hustler. Phoenix had in some sense lived on the street, since he and his siblings reportedly entertained on the sidewalk to make money when very young, and this is how River became a performer, as a street singer and busker. We can see Phoenix turning talk about nothing into seamless rifs on Mike's sad aimlessness and longing for home and love. We can see him turning stage business over pasta at the table in Italy to an expression of his jealousy and sense or rejection. He is so expressive you hardly need the movie, or the dialogue.

In a page Franco published in The Paris Review he talks about the many alternate takes that go into any movie. Mostly the ones not used are thrown away. But "sometimes—as when they feature an actor like River Phoenix in a film like My Own Private Idaho, the best of his generation giving his best performance—every scrap is gold." So here simply we have some scraps of gold gathered by James Franco with the collaboration of the original filmmaker, Gus Van Sant.

The interest for students of acting is to see a gifted actor "in character." It's playacting so good you can't see when it starts and stops.

While the installation went on for several days, My Own Private River was a one-time event of Film Comments Selects at the Walter Reade Theater of Lincoln Center.

Sunday, February 19, 2012 at 9:00PM.
James Franco attended and participated in a post-screening Q&A.

There is a Film Comment Q&A with Franco avaiable online . Franco says Phoenix in the film (and rushes) often seems like "a cross between James Dean and Charlie Chaplin."

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Visitoers hanging out in the "My Own Private River" installation, Walter Reade Theater Feb. 2012, seem like
Gus Van Sant characters.

HIRAKAZU KOREEDA: I WISH (2011)--FCS

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Oshiro and Koki Maeda in I Wish

Watching bullet trains, choosing the world

In 2004 Koreeda made a wonderful but sad film about children, Nobody Knows. I Wish is another one, nearly as fine, but much happier -- though again it has children dealing with unreliable parents (just not as bad). There are superb scenes in which kids are charming and real. But I Wish moves around much more than Nobody Knows. In that one, four siblings are abandoned together by their radically irresponsible mother and must try to survive in their apartment on their wits. This gives Nobody Knows, perforce, unity of place. I Wish skips around, as it must, because this time there are two brothers who are now living with separate parents. At one or two points I Wish says a little bit too much in the mouths of babes, but it also contains moments of such beauty you wish they would never end. Probably some of the magic comes from the fact that the film stars real-life brothers Koki and Ohshirô Maeda who already had their own sibling comedy act, Maeda/Maeda.

Are Japanese kids cuter and happier than other children? Sometimes it seems so. Whatever the case, these qualities feed into the magic moments that abound in Koreeda's new film. I Wish isn't an unqualified success. It may ride too much on its cuteness and its magic. Or Koreeda may have been too reluctant to cut any of the cute or magical moments, which -- due to his success as a director of children and documentary filmmakers and the charm of his young cast -- kept multiplying. As a result his film meanders and sprawls. But it's possible meandering and sprawling are Koreeda's way no matter what his subject is. He isn't a director who likes to move fast. Note how patiently he wanders through the long summer day in his 2008 Still Walking. The meandering is deceptive. The film builds, and when it's got all its force together it hits you with a quiet emotional wallop. Koreeda creeps up on you.

But I Wish is deceptively random-seeming and deceptively simple and "accessible." There is as much order here as there is complexity. This may be Koreeda's most accessible film but it's up with his best and most original work. And what it's all about may not become clear till later.

The story focuses on a child's urban legand: the idea that if you can see two new bullet trains crossing paths the wish you make then will come true. The two brothers talk on the phone. They're apart now because their parents couldn't get along. Their mother Nozomi (Nene Ohtsuka) found their musician father Kenji (Joe Odagiri) totally unreliable, so she moved back in with her grandparents (Isao Hashizume, Kirin Kiki) to work in their little supermarket as a cashier, taking the older brother, Koichi (Koki Maeda), a sixth grader. The small but lively Ryunosuke (Ohshiro Maeda) goes to the big city of Fukuoka with his dad, a rock musician who's never quite successful enough to do without other work but can't stick to a conventional job. We get a few looks at the parents' former squabbles, but mostly we focus on Koichi and Ryo. It seems as though it's Koichi who most wants to get back together. A chubby, perhaps more staid chap, Koichi may be a bit jealous of Ryo's new friends, who include the prettiest girl in class, Emi (Kyara Uchida). He chafes at life with the grandparents, and is annoyed by the volcanic ash of Kagoshima, where he now lives. Obviously life with their laid-back dad and his band-mates is cooler, even if life with mom is more reliable.

Koreeda is skillful at managing three plots: the life of Ryo, the life of Koichi, and their project to meet midway to observe the two bullet trains and make their wishes, which finally takes over as a group "road picture" with a subtle kind of "resolution" that avoids conventional feel-good aspects with moments that may make you cry but none of the saccharine tear-jerker outcome ordinary filmmakers would have made with this plot outline.

Part of the time is spent following Koichi and his classmates and their dislike of a teacher (Hiroshi Abe) and crush on a school librarian (Masami Nagasawa). Meanwhile Ryo becomes the pet of a group of girls including an aspiring young actress s (Kyara Uchida) whose failed actress mom (Yui Natsukawa) keeps telling her daughter she will fail. Back with Koichi, grandma is learning hula dancing and grandpa and his cronies drink and tweak an old-fashioned (comically tasteless) cake recipe which some think can be sold as a novelty tie-in with the new bullet train.

None of this matters so much in dramatic terms except for the way it all creates a three-dimensional world going in various directions linked by the bullet trains and the boys' bullet train project. The scenes of the children are particularly sprightly and winning, and the progress of the film is punctuated by the linking cell phone chats between the two brothers. The wish-making meeting involves fellow classmates, money-raising (the tickets are expensive), permissions for a 24-hour absence from school, and a lot of logistical planning. The wish-making project takes on a metaphorical meaning: the journey becomes the destination. Making the wish as the bullet trains cross paths turns into one of those childhood myths, like the tooth fairy. In the event, the boys find themselves discovering a new outlook, or choosing "the world," as Koichi puts it. But that thought and those final sequences are just something to hang your hat on. I'm sure the deepest truths of I Wish are buried in the laughter of classmates, the cell-phone conversations, or Ryo's fava bean-growing. This is film that will obviously profit from repeated viewings.

The score by the soft rock group Quruli may seem more ingratiating than necessary, but it helps underline the youthful good spirits that prevail; maybe Koreeda is consciously creating an antidote this time to the deeply downbeat feel ofNobody Knows. The reassurance of I Wish is that parents in modern urban society can part without the children's being left abandoned or desperate. These kids are good at fending for themselves but they also have good adult support.

I Wish (128 minutes, cinematography by Yutaka Yamazaki) debuted at Toronto September 2011 after a June theatrical release in Japan, and has been at numerous other festivals, including Rotterdam. It enters French cinemas in April 2012. It was also included in the Film Society of Lincoln Center's 2012n Film Comment Selects series shown at the Walter Reade Theater, where it was screened for this review. It showed to the public as part of the series at these dates and times:

Sunday, February 19 at 6:15PM and Monday, February 20 at 8:45PM.

Koreeda's I Wish is being distributed in the US by Magnolia Pictures and will open in New York at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas and Angelika Film Center May 11, 2012.

MATHIEU KASSOVITZ: REBELLION (2011)--FCS

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Kassovitz's smart actioner

Mathieu Kassovitz's Rebellion, which he directs and stars in, is about the revolt and hostage-taking that occurred in 1988 on the tiny Pacific island of Ouvea in New Caledonia that was put down by its French rulers. This is an intense action film about shocking historical events -- one that effectively goes beyond the action format to show how politics trumps military and diplomatic considerations. Kassovitz has to that extent made a war movie for smart people. and this isn't a crude polemical piece but a deftly executed film with high production values full of elaborate set pieces and showing a superb and natural sense of place. Note however the limitations of personal POV: this is the arguably one-sided account of one man, a main player (as he saw it anyway) and based on his published memoir of events. The good man surrounded by military puppets is a well-told tale that provokes thought -- and one of the best new political films from the French in some time as well as a great leap forward for Kassovitz as a filmmaker -- even if it is not a work of sublime complexity.

We begin with the violent finale. Then we go back to the beginning, from the narrator's point of view when GIGN (French national police intervention group) Captain Philippe Legorjus was sent out to New Caledonia with his personal team because locals who rebelled independently (separate from the French-branded "terrorist" independence insurgents, the FNLKS -- Le Front de libération nationale kanak et socialiste) -- had taken some hostages in two places and killed a few people in the process. Negotiation in such crises is Legorjus' job, and he is sent the 23,000 kilometers with his own team. As he sees it since New Caledonia is French territory the rebels are French, and should be treated with the respect accorded French citizens. The action is limited and he has no doubt -- this remains true to the bitter end -- that it can successfully be contained by negotiation.

But it's 1988 -- in the middle of the 12-year socialist presidency of François Mitterand when opposition from the right is virulent. An election is coming very soon. Right-wing PM Jacques Chirac leads a conservative cabinet. The Ouvea revolt and hostage-taking becomes a tool of their conflict. Both sides must take a strong position on it. And this will be fatal for Legorjus' negotiations.

Kassovitz's film shows excerpts from a debate between Mitterand and Chirac that took place in the middle of the events. The two politicians take opposing views, but the film overlaps their remarks after a while depicting them as merely a political blah-blah-blah. The point is that the issue has to be resolved before the election and to do that, negotiating would take too long. Politics intervenes and negotiating is doomed. He doesn't quite know it yet, though Legorjus and his team arrive to find the French army already deployed in alarming numbers, for a tiny rebellion (ten to one, anyway): heavily armed intervention by special assault troops is already a foregone conclusion.

It's a tribute to Kassovitz's well-executed film that it tells a complicated step-by-step story over a ten-day period with great clarity and including action on many levels. And this involves meetings with the main leader, the hostages, and many communications back and forth by Captain Legorjus with the local military in charge, the government minister sent to New Caledonia, the general to whom he must report, and CIGN government liaison in Paris. He also meets with the leader of the insurgent Kanaks FLNKS. The leader of the rebel hostage-takers, Alphonse Dianou (Iabe Lapacas) is depected perhaps as too gentle and sweet to be true. But you have to grant that Kassovitz is making a smart person's action movie but still an action movie, and this is not a mini-series: he turns in the whole story in a fast-moving 135 minutes, so there is come simplification. The complexities of the New Caledonian independence moviement are left aside. A newcomer to the topic might think what had gone on for a century had just arrived last year.

Advocates of the government or even of the CIGN, who might wish to argue they acted correctly and not simply under pressure are not so pleased with Kassovitz's anti-colonialist analysis, but the basic principle is a universal one. Issues are crudely resolved to satisfy the needs of an election. White soldiers quelling a non-white rebellion 23,000 kilometers from home are not likely to be gentle. They tortured. They massacred. Captain Philippe Legorjus fought a desperate race against time to carry out negotiations before the attack and almost got killed doing it, but -- spoiler alert! -- in the end (it's where the movie begins) he didn't get to do the job he had been trained to do. As Legorjus, Kassovitz has that same neutral, easy-to-identify-with quality ha had in his iconic early role as the young con man in Jacques Audiard's early A Self Made Hero/Un héros très discret. Other good cast members: Malik Zidi as JP Perrot as Legorjus' second in command; Alexandre Steiger as Jean Bianconi, a local negotiator; Sylvie Testud as Legorjus' wife; and a host of Kanak people and Frenchmen who make the scenes come alive and look right.

Rebellion is a misnomer. The French title is L'ordere et la morale, Order and Morality, an ironic tag that leaves us with a tonic dose of frustration instead of the usual catharsis. This is Kassovitz's most significant directorial effort since his important 1995 film about class in France, Hate (La Haine), and this time he is working with a bigger concept and a bigger budget and project.

Rebellion is a film that debuted at Cannes and also showed at other festivals, including Toronto and London. It opened in Paris November 16, 2011 to very good, if not great, reviews (Allociné 3.2); some critics understandably see the film as fine, but flawed; perhaps some did not see how much is done well here, but they did see that Kassovitz produced a creditable effort after serious missteps and the entertainingly lurid The Crimson Rivers. Rebellion was also included in the Film Society of Lincoln Center's series, Film Comment Selects, where it was screened for this review (Feb. 29, 2012).

NADINE LABAKI: WHERE DO WE GO NOW?--ND/NF

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NADINE LABAKI IN WHERE DO WE GO NOW?

A nice fantasy

Lysistrata with song and dance and hashish cookies is what Nadini's sophomore effort is, a benign fantasy of how a Lebanese village might stop its deadly Muslim-Christian clashes if all the women just switched religions and hid their men's weaponry after getting them very stoned. The film is a charmer -- it's sort of as if the gut-wrenching Incendies were redone as a Don Camillo tale directed by De Sica with help from the Taviani brothers -- and it's the kind of movie you get if you mix up handsome young men, pretty women, lusty old ladies and chubby geezers in a grab bag of different physical and personality types located in a quaint hillside town. Labaki herself is one of the stars and she's a looker. (Her star-crossed would-be Muslim beau is played by Claude Baz Moussawbaa.) There's able cinmatography by dp Christophe Offenstein and plasing music by Khaled Mouzannar. The screenplay is from Thomas Bidegain, who collaborated with Jacques Audiard on the script of The Prophet.

Everybody gets together, plays together, sits in the localcafe together, watches a scratchy TV together. Just outside town there is the village cemetery, full of handsome young men, with the Christians on one side and the Muslims on the other. Though the women have taken over there's still a pair of corpses to be buried at the end, one Christian and one Muslim, and that's what the title is about. Since they women have switched religions ("I'm on the other side now"), which side do the coffins go to? it is a nice fantasy.

Where Do We Go Now? has hectares of charm and local color. Its Lebanese Arabic is the saltiest language imaginable, especially what comes of those feisty old dames' mouths. There is some Russian and English too, which comes from a totally unnecessary, and not at all glamourous, little troup of Russian women brought in to entertain and distract the men. As if we needed another distraction. Labaki likes to keep new stuff happening. She showed that in her debut, Caramel, which was less ambitious and a little more successful, and told a ronde of love and family stories centered on the employees and customers of a Beirut Beauty parlor. The only trouble with this method is that the audience never identifies much with any one person. In this new film we may have trouble even identifying members of the ensemble at times, especially with the young men, who don't wear outfits to tell us which religion they belong to.

The lack of strong emotion is more evident when the sectarian strife built into the Lebanese DNA takes its toll and the tone turns tragic. As Alissa Simon of Variety wrote, this "genial and at times genuinely inventive" film tickles the funny bone' but never quite 'taps the emotions.' She also notes "problems of tone, pacing and performance." Nonetheless when it played in Paris last fall (as Maintenant on va où? it was well received (Allociné 3.7, with even more enthusiasm from the public), and the charm goes a long way. This was also Lebanon's entry into the competition for the Best Foreign Picture Oscar, but not a finalist.

I originally reviewed Where Do We Go Now? when I saw it in Paris (Oct. 27, 2011). As I pointed out, reviewers with several of the more sophisticated French publications were cunimpressed at Sept. 14 release time, though though did play in a lot of locations (and Caramel had had a French run in 2007 and a US one several years later). This is a feel-good movie with enough likability to carry it through a theatrical run, and may be enjoyed for years to come, but though it has lots of color, many of even the best scenes are derivative and not memorable.

Where Do We Go Now is included in the March 21-April 1, 2012 New Directors/New Films series, put on in New York by the Film Society of Lincoln Center jointly with the Museum of Modern Art. It's the opening night film. Showtimes:

Wednesday, March 21st | 7 PM | MoMA
Wednesday, March 21st | 8 PM | MoMA

(Where Do We Go Now? has been picked up by Sony Pictures Classics for US release, as has the other press screening of today, Garth Evans Indonesian-language martian arts action film The Raid.)

GARETH EVANS: THE RAID: REDEMPTION (2012)--ND/NF

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The ultimate fight picture?

The Raid runs for 100 minutes. Be prepared. Most of it is violent fighting in a dark ghetto building 15 stories high. Fighting with automatic weapons and pistols but mostly with machetes and knives and hand-to-hand, to the death, on and on, to the last man. This is as dark, intense, violent, and extreme a movie as you will ever be likely to see. And for about 90 minutes you are trapped in the halls and apartments of that grey, dingy building with vicious and desperate men. If that appeals to you, have at it. If not, please don't come to watch this movie.

A SWAT-style attack squad of policemen comes to rout makers of illegal drugs housed on the top floor of a tall building. But some of the squad are tyros, inexperienced in such raids. And they are expected. The building is dark and dingy but fitted with a full system of security cameras. It also has a speaker system. And it seems to be crawling with lithe, long-haired men in loose, greasy T-shirts, carrying long machine guns and out to kill anything that moves. Not only are many of the policemen quickly killed, but for the rest, the escape route seems blocked. When the cops have been decimated and only the strongest survive, the lithe bad buys keep coming on one floor after another, carrying knives and out to kill. They keep on coming and coming. Only a handful of cops survive and make it to the top floor. And their fight is the longest.

"I am the guy that makes stunt performers take multiple kicks to the head for what I hope is a captivated audience," says Gareth Evans, a Welshman who as a child wanted to be Jackie Chan. He was later a fan of Die Hard and Assault on Precinct 13 -- "films that used a single building for unyielding cinematic geography while creating feature-length tension." Then he went to Indonesia and learned about Pencat Silat, a traditional kind of martial arts fighting using the body and blades and teamed up with Iko Uwais, a young, almost baby-faced champion of the sport. He first starred in Evans' debut, Merentau. The Raid will seal Evans late-night martial arts movie cult status. In The Raid, Uwais plays Rama, a young cop with a pregnant wife. And then there is Joe Taslim, who plays Jaka, and Yaya Ruhian, who plays Mad Dog.

The aim is to bring down the calm, sinister drug lord on the top floor, Tama (Ray Sahetapy). He watches the battle with Andi (Doni Alamsyah) and Mad Dog on his battery of screens. A complication, besides the fact that a lot of the cops are unfit for this kind of urban warfare, is that the raid instigator, Lt. Wahyu (Pierre Gruno), is corrupt and may have devious motives that can lead to the failure of the operation.

While Tama's ragtag army has downed most of the cop squad, it emerges that Rama is a relentless superman. After a while the focus is on his continual downing of opponents. There is also a wounded cop whom a building resident with a sick wife takes in, hiding him and Rama till Mad Dog breaks in.

Evans skillfully structures the action (which was created interactively, the stunt men and martial artists creating their fights according to what he calls "a D.I.Y. method of fight choreography," with the film team, cameramen, and editors) so that it rises and falls, with changes in rhythm and what he calls "breathing space" -- calculated pauses so the audience can catch its collective breath. For the faint of heart this is simply unpleasantness, but for those who like martial arts movies, this is a new kind of pleasure. The fight choreography is superb. Pencat Silat is a rough kind of fighting, with running and tackling and improvisation of weaponry. There is also some judo, where brawn is more a feature. There are leaps and twists. Moti D. Setyanto's production design makes use of the building, where holes are punched so men can jump or climb between floors, and there is the feel of an endless but inescapable labyrinth.

It's awesome, it's relentless, and toward the end it's a bit absurd, how several guys can get beaten up, then untied, and fight tirelessly in a threesome for endless minutes, then run away. The most tireless bad guy fights for minutes with a candle driven into his throat. There is a satisfying finale involving capture of the crime boss, punishment of the corrupt cop, and a reunion of brothers who are on opposite sides. All ready for Berandal ("Thug"), the sequel, which is coming, with Uwais again as Rama. The director sees The Raid now as the first of a trilogy. Obviously Evans, whose team for shooting, editing, sound design and two music tracks for Indonesian and western audiences is crack, is in deep debt to Hong Kong. This would not exist without that. But the dark Kafkaesque ironies of the action evoke Park Chun-wook and the Korean revenge film of recent decades too.

The Raid: Redemption or Serbuan Maut presented at Toronto, followed by Sundance and SXSW. It has been picked up by Sony Pictures Classics. US release will be March 23, UK May 18, 2012. It is included in the MoMA/Film Society of Lincoln Center New Directors/New Films series, to be shown:

Thursday, March 22nd | 6 PM | MoMA
Thursday, March 22nd | 11 PM | FSLC

MOHAMMAD RASOULOF: GOODBYE (2011)--ND/NF

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LEYLA ZAREH IN GOODBYE

Another quintessential Iranian picture

Mohammad Rasoulof, who has done intriguingly poetic films like Iron Island (2005) and The White Meadows (2009), has come down grimly close to home with this claustrophobic, cold study (everything is blue gray and nearly everything is close up and indoors) of a woman lawyer trying to get out of the country. Like Rasoulof himself, she is having visa problems. Like the woman in Asghar Farhadi's recent much honored A Separation, she wants to leave Iran. Her life has been shut down by the regime. Her right to practice law has been taken away and she has lost her cases. Her husband, a journalist, has had his newspaper shut down and is operating a crane on an industrial construction project in the south of the country. She has gotten pregnant. She was told to by a man we never see, who takes money to help people leave. And it turns out late in the film that her child will have Down Syndrome. What a nightmare! But she only cries once, and that is muted, her shoulders shaking as she lies face down on the bed.

Leyla Zareh, as the lawyer, with her beautiful long-suffering face, looks like Ingrid Bergman. It's good that she's beautiful, because we have to spend a lot of time looking at her. Her little apartment contains nothing but her and a turtle. Across from it is the airport, and that and the turtle who escapes after she puts it in a larger container and apparently dies or disappears, are blatant in a way that Rasoulof has not been before. His experience has robbed him of his detachment and his cinema has lost its poetry.

Goodbye is a punishing film, impeccably made, perhaps, with its clean looking digital images, with a few nice shots and enough specific detail to make you, if you can stand it, pay attention. But it's basically very thin on artistry, though the stress on chilly office putdowns make this seem another quintessential contemporary Iranian film. After seeing it at Cannes Mike D'Angelo gave it only a 49 and wrote: "More political statement than movie. Even as a movie it’s on shaky ground, with the symbolic turtle and so forth." But it is a movie, a conventional movie, almost an instructional film. (If it were only that it would be a notable one, because instructional films don't usually get actors as good-looking as Leyla Zareh). No, it's a little more than that but a lot less than Jafar Panahi's This Is Not a Film, which was also at Cannes, and linked with it because they were both smuggled in and added to the festival at the last minute. Both men were arrested with more than a dozen others at the same time, and jailed, but unlike Panahi, Rasoulof has not been officially banned from making films. Ironically, Panahi, banned from filmmaking, made a film that is self-referentially witty and ironic and strong. Rasoulof, not banned, has made someting blatant and obvious and tedious. Farhadi, well, he has made a film that to me is annoying, but it is intricate and neatly constructed and a picture of Iran's problems that is, relatively, warm and full of life, but to say that is to see just how chilly and empty Goodbye is.

Commenting from Cannes on mubi's online Notebook, Daniel Kasman seems to share my dissatisfaction. He finds Goodbye repetitious, lacking in deput, "a cyclical dirge," and sees it as "cloaked and variably choked by both the clandestine nature of the film's production and the hushed and desolate story it tells." Yes, we must applaud both Panahi and Rasoulof for their smuggled-out cries of protest against their country's repression. But Panahi's film is intriguing and this one is numbing. Simon Abrtams calls it "too literal and pat." Nonetheless, predictably, there were raves, and Alissa Simon in Variety predicted that "fest and niche arthouse play can be expected."

Goodbye was also released in France in September and shown at Toronto and in other festivals. It was watched for this review at a press screening for the MoMA-Film Society of Lincoln Center New Directors/New Films series.

Goodbye (Bé omid é didar, in Farsi, 104 min.)
Thursday, March 22nd | 8:30 PM | FSLC
Saturday, March 24th | 1:00 PM

TERENCE NANCE: AN OVERSIMPLIFICATION OF HER BEAUTY (2012)--ND/NF

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NAMIK MINTER AND TERENCE NANCE IN AN OVERSIMPLIFICATION OF HER BEAUTY

Seduction through analysis of seduction

Terence Nance is a charming young African American man with big hair and a big heart. He wanted to give the latter to a young lady called Namik Minter, and this feature film, said to have been 3 hours long at one point, then honed down to 94 minutes through help from Sundance, was designed to woo Namik by delineating the nature of his romantic affection for her (he tends to fall into flowery formal language when talking about his feelings and his romances). The many, sometimes too many, voiceovers, often in the second person, describe and analyze. The topic may seem repetitive, but Nance makes it interesting by the appeal of his looks and personality and by the constantly varying visual styles, by interrupting and subdividing his visual texts, and by including by way of further description and analysis many animated film passages, these executed differently too by a variety of hands, following his storyboarding. If Terence Nance didn't succeed in wooing Namik, he may very well seduce you with this highly original first feature, which is bursting with ideas, human warmth and creative energy.

Terence grew up in (by his own account in the film) an exceptionally warm and healthy family -- which (though he does not mention this) was in the strong black community of Dallas. He thereafter received his undergraduate degree from Northeastern University in Boston, Mass., made his first film while studying at Cape Town University in South Africa and received his MFA from New York University in 2007. He also lived in Paris for two years, 2007 to 2009, and now lives in Brooklyn. Some of the action, including the meetings with Namik, appear to take place in NYC. He shows himself working as a street musician with a guitar and describes himself as having a hard time waking up to get to work on time.

But the central event is an evening when he had been expecting Namik to come to his place after work, when he learns she isn't coming. In an interview online with an LA blogger called Rinny Riot he says, "I had what I thought was a complicated situation with a woman, that inspired me to write the film. So my original intentions probably amounted to some sort of need to consecrate or validate a dying romance." The original smaller film-within-the-film was called "What Would You Feel?" It visually, in multiple alternate versions, restages the expeience of rushing home from work and learning that his would-be beloved (who turns out to be Namik) is not coming that evening and each time ends with the rhythmically repeated question, "What would you feel?"

He got Namik to play herself. And somehow this takes her by surprise, or the experience of seeing the reenactments on screen before an audience of a hundred people, including many of her friends, is a bit of a shock to her. He interviews her about this experience during the course of the larger film. All of this and the complex animated films-within-the-film can be seen as wooing Namik, but in the end he sums it up by saying "in simple English, 'I got friend-zoned.'" He has already discussed at length how little a young man wants a young woman in whom he is interested to consider him a "friend."

The Variety interview suggests Terence adds "vaguely New-Wave style" to his arsenal of seductive techniques, and this is true even if unintentional (the two years in Paris may contribute). At any rate the force of this young filmmaker's potential surely comes from the "omni-directional creative energy" he describes having when in film school he was spray stenciling "FLY" all over the city, making T shirts, and making music, and the fact that he doesn't pigeonhole himself as a director.

In the film he moves on from the incident, which he thought he could depict in five minutes but ran to three hours and took up years of his time, to (justifying the time spent) a film that analyzes an archetypal "romantic-ish" relationship, and also to goddess-worship, to the valuing and use of "emotional memory," in other words, to romanticism itself.

In MissRiot's blog interview Terence Nance is articulate and righteously concerned about strengthening the creative role of African Americans in film. "Learn your craft to competency but learn your voice to mastery," he says, addressing aspiring filmmakers of color. He seems to be doing that, and for all we know he might be the next Spike Lee. This also reminded me of another strong memorable young black film about romance, Barry Jenkins' 2008 Medicine for Melancholy (SFIFF 2008).

An Oversimplification of Her Beauty debuted at Sundance, then was shown at Rotterdam. In March it shows in the MoMA-Film Society of Lincoln Center series New Directors/New Films on the following dates:

Saturday, March 24th | 4:15 PM | FSLC
Monday, March 26th | 9 PM | MOMA

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TERENCE NANCE PROMOTIONAL PHOTO

Teaser for the film: here .

ROSCHDY ZEM: OMAR KILLED ME (2011)--ND/NF

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NACER CHERNOUF, SAMI BOUJILA IN OMAR KILLED ME

Injustice to an Arab in a French court

Omar Killed Me/Omar m'a tuer is a good but not great film about a familiar theme: a man framed for a crime he didn't commit, whom people struggle to exonerate. There is an angle of class and racism because the man rushed to a conviction in a French court is a poor Moroccan immigrant, illiterate in Arabic as well as French and hardly able to speak or understand French. The most vivid message is how helpless an inarticulate person must necessarily be in a courtroom, despite in this case having famous lawyerrs. He is put away for the murder of a wealthy widow for whom he worked as a gardener. The veteran French actor Roschdy Zem, himself the son of Moroccan immigrants, chose this theme for his very creditable, but not dazzling directorial debut. One can see why he chose this subject, but one wishes he had waited for something better. Sami Boujila, another big French actor of Arab descent (in his case Tunisian) plays the role of Omar Raddad, the protagonist with great understated power. The costar is the ubiquitous Comédie Française star Denis Podalydès, cast as the slightly oddball writer Pierre-Emmanuel Vaugrenard, who does a muckraking book about the case that helps get Omar early release from prison -- though he has still not been proven innocent, because the court won't allow the case to be reopened. DNA checks might exonerate him, as it has US death row prisoners in recent decades. It's a story that does not end with a bang.

There is something iconic about Sami Boujila in this film, with his erect posture, his pompadour, his broad-shouldered, cheap suit jacket, his blank, stoical stare. The challenge of the role is that Omar Raddad isn't initially at all an interesting character. He's quite inarticulate in French at first, and tight-lipped in Arabic too. He emerges slowly. So does the case, and its secrets never come out. Yes, it's obvious that Omar isn't proven guilty. The blood-message, "Omar m'a tuer," in ungrammatical, probably written by a strong, untutored murderer rather than the wealthy, well-read lady victim. No fingerprints were taken; there is no real forensic evidence. The murdered woman was inexplicably cremated (probably against her wishes) so further investigation of the murder could not be done -- and so on.

As we would expect, Zem's gets good performances. Boujila is quietly charismatic. Raddad's torments and his desperation in prison, his relations with his father and his family during visits and on his release, provide the main human interest. Vaugrenard is a mildly interesting character, with individual touches, including relations with his working-class girl assistant (Salome Stevenin) that have an edge: but this is a sideshow. The lawyers are important in getting Raddad's pardon too, but they don't get in-depth treatment. The main one, Maitre Verges (Maurice Benichou), one of France's most famous defense lawyers, hardly needs filling out here since his work was examined in Barbet Schroeder documentary Terror's Advocate.

There are lively courtroom scenes. But the weakness is that the effort to prove Omar innocent isn't made suspenseful enouugh. The story itself has this weakness: that Raddad has not been provben innocent, so there's no final payoff, like the accuser's draw-dropping court recantation in another current French miscarriage of justice film, Vincent Garenq's Guilty (Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2012). Omar Killed Me feels like a great story -- only it's not quite. Zem's "pacing of a thriller" doesn't quite work because this isn't quite a thriller. It's muddled. The film approaches Omar with total empathy, but the failure to prove his innocence conclusively spoils the story of injustice. And the empathy clouds the sense of a mystery to unravel.

A collaborator on the screenplay was Rachid Bouchareb, who co-wrote and direced all the big French-Arab movie actors in Indigènes/AKA/Days of Glory, the 2006 film about the Arabs who fought for France in WWII. The film is based on several books, including Omar Raddad's memoir, Pourquoi moi? (Why Me?). The many cooks did not enhance the broth.

Omar Killed Me opened in France June 22, 2011, to good review (Allociné 3.3); however some key publications, Le Monde, Libération, Télérama, Cahiers du Cinéma, Les Inrockuptibles, were less favorable. It has been in several festivals, including Toronto and Glasgow.

Omar m'a tuer (85min.) is included in the 2012 MoMA-Lincoln Center New Directors/New Films series shown as follows:


Saturday, March 24th 2012 | 6:45 PM | FSLC
Sunday, March 25th 2012 | 7:30 PM | MoMA

ADAM LEON: GIMME THE LOOT (2012)--ND/NF

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TASHIANA WASHINGTON AND TY HICKSON IN GIMME THE LOOT

Girl-boy graffiti duo wander the summer city

Malcolm and Sofia are two young graffiti artists from the Bronx. The novelty is that they're a girl and boy team. There's a potential romance here that never flowers and remains at the teasing level of friendship. Nothing else quite gets fully off the ground either in this good-natured, naturalistic film ramble through a couple of days in the heat of a NYC summer when the pair are trying to raise $500 for their project to write on or "bomb" a giant apple that is used in Mets games. They figure if they can "bomb" it when it pops up to signal a Mets score, it will be the ultimate coup. Together and apart the pair try various ruses, trying to steal stuff and sell stuff to raise the dough.

As Sofia and Malcolm, Tashiana Washington and Ty Hickson are attractive and natural. It's a pleasure to watch them interact and riff off each other. But the overall action is only so-so. This is like the Larry Clark of Kids and Wassup Rockers without the sex, the edge, or the variety of colorful characters -- in short without much of what makes those Larry Clark films watchable. Malcolm's encounter with a rich girl (played by Bowdoin student Zoe Lescaze) is the most interesting and Clark-esque digression. Viewers may be less willing to put up with the constant profanity without the Clark edge. The slightly faded-looking photography by Jonathan Miller does the job well, and it's particularly impressive in such a low-budget enterprise how smooth the soundtrack of dialogue is as the characters move through crowds, ride subways, and so forth, and even when they are off in the distance.

Adam Leon has said that the greatest challenge he faced was in the casting and that once that was done, he was halfway home. And indeed Washington and Hickson are attractive, winning, and natural. Because of the hot summer NYC 'hood setting and the teen romance in the air I was fleetingly reminded of Peter Sollett's Raising Victor Vargas , but that coming of age tale, deeply rooted in the Dominican community, with family and romance, has more to offer.

Leon has mentioned the naturalistic 1953 NYC picture Little Fugitive as an inspiration. Another good one might be Shane Meadows' 2008 London 'hood ramble Somers Town, which sings and charms. Maybe Leon will get there next time.

Gimme the Loot debuts at the SXSW festival in Austin March 15, 2012. It is also included in the MoMA-Film Society of Lincoln Center series, New Directors/New Films, in connection with which it was screened for this review. The ND/NF showtimes will be:


Friday, March 23rd 2012 | 6:30 PM | FSLC
Sunday, March 25th 2012 | 2:30 PM | MoMA

ANCA DAMIAN: CRULIC: THE PATH TO BEYOND (2011)--ND/NF

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A meaningless death, in animation

Claudio Crulic was a Romanian in his early thirties who was jailed twice in Poland for thefts he apparently did not commit, and the second time he went on a hunger strike that led to his death months later. Despite letters and appeals to the Romanian consul and government and repeated medical examinations, Crulic was ignored by everyone and allowed to deteriorate to a point of no return. It was a scandal that the authorities didn't prevent him from dying in this way, and a minster resigned. The purpose of this 73-minute animated feature is to tell this strange, sad story. The hand-drawn look and the collaged photos plus voice-over first-person narration from beyond the grave by the actor Vlad Ivanov (of 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days and Pollice, Adjective) contribute to a poetic, Kafkaesque quality. One is charmed (and horrified). and one can identify. A documentary would not have the same effect -- you'd not get the dark humor.

As the voice tells Crulic's tale he seems doomed. For example he says his whole life can be told in a hundred photos. We see the photos, from baby through adolescent raised by female relatives to young adult who quits school early to provide family support, ending with a couple of seaside shots in Italy with his sister. This viewpoint seems reductive. He lists, for example, all the objects that were with him when he died. Before that he lists the objects people bought from outside in Romania. He made a living by purchasing things in Poland and bringing them back to sell. This seems to have something to do with his being considered a thief. The materiality of the account underlines the Kafkaesque absurdity of the life.

After the handling of the body after death and the span of the life have been told, English narration by Jamie Sives, describes the effect of his fast, step by grim step, and the bureaucratic ignoring of his ordeal. The interjection of English as well as the heavy Scottish accent of Siven create a somewhat jarring effect. Animation shows Crulic's last days and death. By the time doctors finally acknowledged the danger his body was in and sought permission to intervene it was too late. A needle punctured his lung, which was already damaged by pneumonia. A long sequence shows his shroud floating away, as if it were his soul. At the end there are some clips from TV about the story covered in the news, the scandal, and the resignation of the government minister.

One might contrast this with the more realistic and physically enacted story of a hunger strike to the death in Steve McQueen's Hunger, in which Michael Fassbender plays the Irish political prisoner Bobby Sands. That was one nation repressing another's independence struggle. This is merely bureaucracy crushing a low income foreign national protesting his false imprisonment. The tragedy of an ordinary man.

Damian deserves credit for treating her subject in a distinctive and artistic way. Hopefully this is a fairly unique incident, but the way a powerless man can be chewed up and spit out by the modern bureaucratic machine is hardly unusual.

Crulic: The Path to Beyond/Crulic - drumul spre dincolo debuted at Locarno and has shown at several other festivals. It was screened for the press for New Directors/New Films (MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, March 21-April 1, 2012) and is scheduled for public viewings:

Friday, March 23rd | 6:30 PM | MoMA
Saturday, March 24th | 2:00 PM | FSLC

SACHA POLAK: HEMEL (2012)--ND/NF

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HANNAH HOEKSTRA IN HEMAL

Dutch girl finding herself, mainly through sex

She is young, she is beautiful (but too thin), she is rich (or her father is), she's annoying, and she's sex-crazed, and did I mention she's annoying? This is Hemel (Hannah Hoekstra), a Dutch girl, and her name means Heaven. She is close to her father Gijs (Hans Dagelet), who's in the art auctioning business, apparently, and maybe Hemel's promiscuity competes with her father's, because he has had a series of affairs all Hemel's life, sometimes with women not much older than she is now. Her mother died shortly after she was born. This is an accomplished film, a beautiful film, and a film that should put its Dutch director Sacha Polak on the international sexy art film map. Hemel seems sex-obsessed and scenes show plenty of frontal nudity and other body-realism, including her peeing standing up, something you may not have seen in a non-porn film up to now. But this isn't a female Shame, though at first it might seem so. Hemel is also looking for a grown up man (another, better father?), and this film unlike McQueen's, at least passingly alludes to a network of complex familial relationships. There is something short of depth here, partly through the limitations of the (annoying, did I say?) protagonist's point of view, partly through the stylish but narratively stunting organization of the film into eight disparate titled segments.

Polak's method, especially initially (she gains greater credibility as time goes on) is too easy and too obvious. She opens with two very white naked bodies lying in plain daylight. This is her first of a series of pickups, the white man (Ward Weemhoff) who shaves Hemel's pubic hair (with the stand-up peeing scene as a bonus). This is not, as in a certain Romanian film, a sequence of effective character development or interesting conversation, though Hemel is annoying, right away. What is developed is the sense that the film is trying hard to seem bold about sex and to show that its protagonist is experimenting in that area. A little obvious variety: she picks up, screws, and dumps an Arab man (Abdullah El Baoudi), who is annoying in his own right (he declares Algerian men, of which he is one, to be the worlds' best lovers), and to whom she behaves in a crudely racist manner, and then kicks him out of bed when he wants to make out after sex. Next comes an S&M guy, who chokes her and knocks her around a bit. And that about does it except for a sexy Flamenco singer in Spain, but she only gets to dance with him. (Contractual obligations, since this is a Netherlands-Spain co-production?)

After the establishment of the sexual obsession, what follows is the "Father and Daughter" segment, which establishes that Hemel and her dad have a solid relationship, if one that is too like a platonic marriage. When Gijs introduces Sophie (Rifka Lodeizen), a Christie's colleague he seems really serious with, Hemel shows jealousy and discomfort. It is at this point if not long before that it becomes clear that, as Variety put's it, "Helena van der Meulen's screenplay is a tad too schematic." More than a tad. Variety is right that the scene when Hemel barges in on a brithday party for her "ex-stepbrother" Teun (Maarten Heijermans), a devout Protestant with a fiancee who's a virgin, they having pleged not to have premarital sex, this adds an interesting, unexpected note and is "well-observed." But Heijermans somehow seems a "tad" too pretty for his character, the whole film leaning too much toward the visual -- helped, naturally, by the beautiful camerawork by Daniel Bouquet.

The next key piece in the not-so-puzzling puzzle is the scene in which Hemel is first in bed with and then walking on the beach with a more grown up, nicer, bearded, married, tight-lipped lover (Mark Rietman) whom she wants to "get inside" and "know about," etc. In other words, she has found a guy who might be of interest outside of bed. Much of the film is about Hemel's close relationship with her father, whose girlfriends she is sometimes close to and sometimes jealous of. Due to the sex obsession and the closeness, for a bit we may be forgiven for expecting an incest scene. Instead, coming in out of a chilly rain, there's "only tea," with an older woman, perhaps an earlier lover of her fathers' -- this relationship is confused -- who seems to have known Hemel when she was very young.

Hoekstra does remarkably for a recent acting school graduate who's never been in a film, just as Polak does well for a director who's never made a feature. This could be straight to video stuff it it were merely sexy and ravishing to look at, but I realize that -- though penetrating analysis of relationships and psychology seem a way off still -- we should cut Polak some slack here. Maybe she and her next protagonist will grow up next time or she will develop more distance between the two. New director, new film: yes; this may be promising. It holds the attention.

Hemel (Netherlands, Spain, 80 min.) debuted at Rotterdam and showed at the Berlinale. It opens in cinemas in the Netherlands March 29, 2012. It was screened for this review as part of the Museum of Modern Art-Film Society of Lincoln Center New York series, New Directors/New Films, where it will show at these times and places:

Friday, March 23rd | 9 PM | FSLC
Sunday, March 25th | 5 PM | MoMA

PIERRE SCHÖLLER: THE MINISTER (2011)--ND/NF

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OLIVIER GOURMET AND SYLVAIN DEBLÉ IN THE MINISTER

Previously reviewed in Paris, Oct. 27, 2011.

The inside/outside of politics and government

The Minister is a fabulously exciting and smart French film about politics, though its politics are so deeply French that aspect of the film may partly be inaccessible to American viewers, despite the otherwise rich human content, the outsider-newcomer role the minister plays and the stresses and shocks he endures. It's obvious for the French to compare it to The Conquest, the rich and well-produced, but conventional, biopic about Sarkozy's rise to power that came out earlier in the same year in France. And it emerges at once that The Minister is the more probing and original film. The Conquest is only about externals. The Minister is by design about both how government works internally, its inner workings, how decisions are really made and carried out -- on the one hand -- and -- on the other hand -- from the protagonist's point of view, how it feels to be new in a high position of government (ministerial level). The latter, in France, I'm feeling, is more visible and sensitive responsibility than in the US, because a government minister is out there in the public eye nowadays than their American counterparts currently are. But besides The Conquest the French also compared The Minister to The Ides of March with Clooney and Gosling, because it came out in Paris in the same week. The Ides of March is a good but not great political thriller whose focus on an election limits its scope to a miniature version of what The Conquest is about. It's superficial. And its stars are in all ways more flashy, and have less depth in these roles than Olivier Gourmet and Michel Blanc. The French critics liked The Ides of March better than the merely workmanlike and unoriginal The Conquest, but they saved their raves for The Minister.

The French title of The Miister is more expressive of the director Pierre Schöller's purpose in making his film. It's L'Exercice de l'État, literally "the exercise of the state," which alludes to carrying out the actual inner workings of national government -- how and by whom decisions get made and carried out. This is why in the film the ministry PPS (principal private secretary) Gilles, played by Michel Blanc, is just as important a character as the Bertrand Saint-Jean, the Transport Minister played by Olivier Gourmet. Both are powerful and selfless actors, Olivier Gourmet of an energy and conviction that are unmatched, Blanc projecting competence, integrity and class. Because politics is conducted by insiders and political aristocrats, it's important that Gilles (Blanc) is a political aristocrat and insider. When, in a totally insiders' decision, Woessner (Didier Bezace), another old-timer and insider, is chosen to figurehead as a PPS the new project to privatize the railway stations, it's Gilles, an old friend of Woessner, who has him over in the evening for a meal of eggas and bacon that he cooks himself and serves with a bottle of the best white burgundy.

But the film isn't just an affairs of state story. It centers on the issue of privitization of stations, but it begins with a terrible bus accident up in the mountains. This shows how tense and demanding the Minister's work is. It also shows how media and image are as important as action. It is obvious though the minister must face the dead children and the grieving parents, it's his public statements and who picks them up and where and how they spin hem that count most on this evening. Before that, in the first image of the film, comes the naked lady who crawls inside the crocodile's mouth, the nightmare of the minister, which shows the way his work pursues him even in his dreams.

But most of all the film is given a unique shape by the theme of the unpreditable in another strain. This comes into play through the "chaumeur inconnu," the "unknown unemployed man," Martin Kuypers (played by an unknown non-actor, Sylvain Deblé). He is the guy hired for a month so the minister's regular driver can go on leave to be with his newborn baby. Perhaps because he needs to connect with somebody -- his phone list has flashed on the screen and he's said he has 1500 contacts but no friend -- Satint-Jean bonds with Kuypers, going to his trailer home and getting drunk with him and his outspoken wife Pauline (Zabou Breitman).

A while later there comes the shocking accident where Kuypers crashes the official car and it turns over multiple times with a horrifying sound, with Saint-Jean's publicity secretary with him, and Kuypers is thrown from the car and dies, and Saint-Jean is with him when his soul leaves his body. The event changes Saint-Jean forever. His survival is a miracle, and strengthens him with the public. Even this is a matter of public relations, because a speech is written about Kuypers, and then Pauline requests a low profile, and the speech must be jettisoned. When Saint-Jean speaks the speech to himself in a whispier at the memorial serivce were the whole main government is present, it underlines the minister's personal, private relationship with this faceless man. It's a brilliant scene underlining the inner and outer aspects of the narrative.

Pierre Schöller isn't a new director but this film is so different from his last one, the 2008 Versailles, that he seems reborn with this long-gestating fim. The Minister debuted at Cannes May 19, 2011, and opened in Paris October 26, 2011 and I reviewed it then (see link above). It was screened for thIs new review as part of the 2012 Museum of Modern Art-Film Society of Lincoln Center series New Directors/New Films series, when it will be shown to the public at the following times and venues:


Friday, March 23rd | 9 PM | MoMA
Sunday, March 25th | 1:30 PM | FSLC

©Chris Knipp 2012

PABLO GIORGELLI: LAS ACACIAS (2011)--ND/NF

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GERMAN DE SILVA AND NAYRA CALLE MAMANI IN LAS ACACIAS

Sweet little uneventful road trip across Argentina

Pable Giorgelli, an editor and documentary filmmaker, has chosen for his first feature the quiet matter of a woman and her five-month-old daughter riding from Paraguay to Buenas Aires with a lonely truck driver and a load of lumber. In this very slow burner, there is hardly any conversation for a long time, and when there is some, it's laconic. But the seemingly gruff driver, who lives alone and hasn't seen his own son for eight years, turns out to have a kind heart that begins to throb a bit for his two passengers. A more conventional, less art-house film would end with wedding bells. This only finishes with a vague promise of meeting to ride together again. Dry though this is, under the surface there's a layer of saccharine. The pair are played with understated but pitch-perfect appealingness by Germán De Silva, as Rubén, the driver, and Hebe Duarte, as Jacinta, the Guarani-speaking mother. The baby girl performs perfectly too. The camera caught the right moments.

Not much external scenery, though, in this road picture -- if there were any to catch -- because the camera spends most of its time inside the cab of the truck. The lensing by Diego Poleri is smooth and unobtrusive. Music is locally occurring only. The smiles are slow to appear but very natural. The virtue of the long time taken for the two adults to warm up a bit and start talking (a bit) is that when they do there is the feel of actual shy people slowly unwinding in real time. But I found myself longing for what I would consider the much more distinctive Patagonian understatedness of the little films of Carlos Sorin. Maybe Giorgelli, who is doubtless well acquainted with Sorin, will open things up more next time; what he gives us on this outing may be smoothly executed and a very mild charmer but it's pretty thin soup. The impression one comes away with is of perfectly managed modulation from tepid to lukewarm.

Not everything feels naturalistic here, either: baby Anahi (Nayra Calle Mamani) goes for an awfully long time before needing to be changed. Practical details (other than Rubén's sit-down meal at a way-station and a couple of showers) are ignored as rigorously as the scenery out the window.

Others have been more enthusiastic. Las Acacias debuted at Cannes in May 2011 and received the Caméra d'Or award for Best First Film. It has subsequently been shown at a dozen other festivals. It has had commercial releases in Spain, Argentina, the UK, Ireland, France and Greece. The French critics were highly receptive (Allociné 4.0). However there are those who feel as I tend to that in this particular example of minimalism there is not enough passion or ambition, almost no there there. Or at least hardly any. But mind you, there are no wrong notes. Giorgelli's feature debut was screened for this review as part of the March 21-April 1, 2012 MoMA-FSLC New Directors/New Films series, where it will be shown to the public at these locations on these dates:


Thursday, March 22nd | 6 PM | FSLC
Saturday, March 24th | 4 PM | MoMA

Las Acacias opened theatrically in the US September 7, 2012 (Quad Cinema, New York). It received generally favorable reviews (Metacritic: 72).

LEE KWANG-KUK: ROMANCE JOE (2011)--ND/NF

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DAVID LEE AND KIM CHO-HUI IN ROMANCE JOE

A plot that mocks plot

Romance Joe/Lo-maen-seu Jo, an intricate 115-minute puzzler written and directed by young Korean filmmaker Lee Kwang-kuk, has an interconnected plotline. It begins with the parents (Kim Su-ung, Park Hye-jin) of a longtime assistant director coming to Seoul to see him but learning from his friend Seo Dam (Kim Dong-hyeon) that he has become depressed by the suicide of the actress actress Wu Ju-hyeon and has disappeared. He recounts the plot of his own screenplay and tries to sell it to them. Meanwhile filmmaker Lee (Jo Han-cheol), maker of the hit film The Good Guy, has been dumped by his producer Gwon (Baek Ik-nam) in the countryside Mt. Godong Motel to force him to finish his next script. Lee is blocked, so when he gets into conversation with the tea-house "hostess" Re-ji (Shin Dong-m) when she brings coffee, he takes up her offer to tell him some good stories if he will hire her for the night.

Re-ji tells about coming upon a guy known as "Romance Joe" (Kim Yeong-pil), a longtime assistant director who became depressed as the result of the suicide of popular actress Wu Ju-hyeon and has come to her little town to commit suicide himself. She stops him. He in turn recalls to her when he was a young boy (David Lee), rescuing a schoolmate, Kim Cho-hui (Lee Chae-eun) who had been about to slit her wrists in the woods after sleeping with a classmate. He later spent time with Kim and fell in love with her.

Meanwhile, to pass the time, as mentioned Seo Dam is telling his friend's parents the story of a script he's working on, It tells about a boy (Ryu Ui-hyeon) who came looking for his long-lost mother Cho-hui at the Arirang Teahouse run by Re-ji. Meanwhile, in Re-ji's story to director Lee, Romance Joe and she meet again when drunk one night and end up in bed together. Romance Joe also ran into a feisty kid who is looking for his mother, having been for some time raised by a relative. In a restaurant the boy meets a small-town hooker, Re-j, who slightly knew his mother. Romance Joe eventually learns that the boy's mother is his first love, Cho-Hee (Lee Chai-eu). I'm telling this badly. The various scenes and stories interconnect, but perhaps not quite. They intentionally leave one somewhat puzzled. (I'm indebted to former, recently fired, Variety film critic Derek Elley, whose knowledgable summary in Film Business Asia clarified plot details for me.)

The movie director decides to turn Romance Joe's story into a movie, but the story doesn't turn out the way he expected.-- a festival blurb.

It may come as no great surprise to hear that Lee Kwang-kuk worked as first assistant director with Hong Sang-soo, on such films as Tale of Cinema, Woman on the Beach, Like You Know It Al, and Hahaha, from 2005 to 2010. The focus on heavy drinking and love affairs and on film directors with ego, writing, and women problems is familiar from Hong. So is the focus on talking indoor scenes that are mostly one-on-one, and the straightforward shooting (in this case by Jee Yune-jeong). And, more importantly here, so is the use of what Gavin Smith, of Film Comment, in a Rotterdam comment on this film, calls "Hong’s blindsiding structural gambits." Smith says Lee "takes them at least one step beyond into a mise en abyme of nested stories and characters. . . The beauty of this playful kudzu-like proliferation of story strands," Smithh concludes, "is that while there are obvious links and connections to be made, it leaves the viewer pleasurably dangling in a no-man’s-land of irresolution in which the remembered and the made-up can’t quite be reconciled into a coherent whole. It’s a shaggy-rabbit-hole story, so to speak."

Certainly Lee carries things narratively further than Hong. In describing his process in making Romance Joe, he asks (in the press notes) why we need stories, why we're so dependent on them. In this film he seems to seek to abolish stories by telling stories. While Hong Sang-soo's narrative lines sometimes seem rambling and unexpected, Lee's here are, in the words of Jeon Chan-il, the programmer at the Pusan International Film Festival, in his commentary on Romance Joe, "monumentally complex" and "even more disjointed, even more abstract, than his teacher's" (Hong's). Jeon finds "severe irony" in Lee's questioning of the need for story while doing nothing but playing with storytelling. Jeon also notes the similarity to Hong in the meta-film approach of a film about a filmmaker seeking to write or complete a screenplay. But he concludes that this film "doesn’t really come across like ‘an imitation of Hong Sang-soo’." Indeed this is fair to say. Lee is not a mere copycat. Hong has given Lee a ready-made vocabulary and grammar, but the sentences Lee forms using them are his.

The scenes in Romance Joe are lively and engaging, for example the ones with the waitress and the filmmaker, who seem to achieve instant intimacy, and the feisty boy looking for his mother. Despite the liveliness of individual scenes, it may be harder than with Hong to watch the film with an overarching comprehension, hard to understand the relation between them, and I'm not the only one who thinks so, if Pusan programmer Jeon Chan-il finds the plotting "monumentally complex" and "even more disjointed, even more abstract" than that of Hong Sang-soo. In fact it's hard not to think that Lee is trying to baffle the viewer, and probably make fun of the viewer's desire for a coherent plot line. But he doesn't seem to have quite achieved that. One Rotterdam commenter felt the film appeals to the mind too much and not to the heart. Lee's effect is arguably even more intellectual than Hong's. Hong's greater narrative consistency lets one develop more feelings toward main characters, ironically viewed though they may be.

But Derek Elley, an astute critic, thinks just the opposite. He thinks that though "the game element is still present" as in Hong, Romance Joe "resonates on an emotional level much more than many of Hong's lighter films, thanks to a tip-top cast that manages to draw characters who are not simply marionettes in an elaborate directorial game." Elley acknowledges that Romance Joe "often requires major concentration to keep all three interlocking stories in one's head as the film freely cross-cuts between them." But he insists (and has proven, pretty much) that "it does all (kind of) finally make sense, and Lee's direction matches the precision of his writing." Elley wants to emphasize his interpretation that Lee's film is rigorously logical and interconnected and so he calls the last sequence, which casts doubt on the reality of what's gone before, "throwaway" and "unnecessary in the circumstances."

That is a bit arbitrary on Elley's part. It seems to me the "meta" element is primary to Lee, and though his scenes are clear, lively, and emotional, what he's doing with them is very much meta-fiction, narrative about narrative -- something that happened in literature in the Sixties, and has come to cinema later in this kind of sophisticated and dense form.

Is Lee's film radical, or just a screenplay in need of further editing? In any case, Lee seems to know very well how to work with actors (including the boy) and the individual scenes are entertaining to watch. They would just be more entertaining if they developed a more coherent rhythm or followed a more meaningfully interconnected structure -- a structure that could be better perceived as one watches. Hong Sang-soo's last couple of films have seemed increasingly self-indulgent, as if he is reaching a self-referential dead end. Lee Kwang-kuk may have taken a flying leap beyond that dead end, if he can sustain the local audience's interest, as the audience prize at Pusan suggests he did this time.

Romance Joe debuted at Pusan in early October 2011 and was shown in the Tiger series at Rotterdam in January 2012. It is also part of the joint MoMA and Film Society of Lincoln Center series, New Directors/New Films, where it was screened for this review. The public ND/NF screenings of the film are scheduled at these two places and times:

Saturday, March 24th | 6:15 PM | MoMA
Monday, March 26th | 8:30 PM | FSLC

JOANN SFAR, ANTOINE DELESVAUX: THE RABBI'S CAT (2011)--ND/NF

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A talking cat and a wandering story set in 1920's Algiers

This charming and benignly crazy tale about the adventures of an unorthodox rabbi, his cat, his daughter, and assorted other characters comes to us from a popular French comic strip. The creator, Joanne Sfar, bases people and events, set in the 1920's, on his own family background. He comes from Algeria and is a Jew of dual Sephardic and Ashkenazi heritage. This must first be seen as a lovingly executed work of visual art. The images are delightful and colorful. And there are many witty incidents. But the film suffers from the same weakness as Sfar's debut live action feature, the Serge Gainsbourg biopic, Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life. Wonderful, inventive episodes, but an inability to meld them into a coherent whole. It comes from forming his sense of structure while working in the comic strip format, perhaps.

The soon-to-be talking cat (voiced by François Morel), first of all, is an African breed with a long gray body and pointed snout and big pinted ears. He looks like a king-size comic strip mouse. The first scenes are the best, in which we meet rabbi Sfar (Maurice Benichou), a lusty roly-poly, quite unlearned chap with a white fringe beard and an ancien-régime look unlike the conventional image of a Jewish cleric. His daughter Zlabya (Hafsia Herzi, Kéchiche's discovery in The Secret of the Grain) is voluptuous, and adored by the rabbi's cat, which jealously devours a pet parrot, whereupon he begins to speak.

The cat's conversations with the rabbi are droll. He wants to become a Jew, so as to be sure of remaining with Zlabya, and if he can't be circumcised, he'd at least like a bar mitzvah. This doesn't sit well with the rabbi's rabbi (Daniel Cohen), who's as mean and severe as rabbi Sfar is easy-going. This is 1920's Algiers, and Algeria is under French colonial rule, so it turns out rabbi Sfar has to take a dictation test to prove his French is up to par. The cat is better at spelling, and wants to take it for the rabbi. The cat invokes the Almighty to get the rabbi a good grade, but in doing so loses the power of speech again himself. It all sounds silly, but it's congenial to watch.

Later when Sfar & Co. introduce other characters, a Russian lady, a blond guy escaped from a pogrom, and they all go off in a Citroën truck to find the Abyssinian jews, getting into a fight with a desert prince (Mathieu Amalric) along the way, the narrative starts seeming more and more pointless. I wanted to loe this -- I really did. I'd been looking forward to it for over a year since I heard about the project, and more so after June 2011 when it opened in France to rave reviews (Allociné 3.6). I couldn't really see (as Eric Loret wrote in Libération) that this "like its comic strip original" is a "didactic poem" that is "both ecumenical and anti-religous." This tendency appears in the early discussions between the cat and the rabbi and the rabbi's rabbi, and the rabbi's relationships with muslims show a benign and ecumenical mood, but the episodic meanderings across Africa keep this from cohering into "a didactic poem." After its great beginning this animation (shown in pointless 3D, which adds nothing since the images are flat) unfortunately goes nowhere. But don't forget: the images are rich and individual, which stood out after having just watched the musically fine Chico & Rita, whose animation drawing (despite some nice detail in its period backgrounds) is too generic. Here the images are a continual pleasure even when the narrative begins to lose its grip. And the voicings and music are fin.

Le chat du rabbin (100min.) was released in France June 1, 2011, after winning a Crystal award at the 2011 Annecy animation festival for best animated feature; it won the equivalent award at the 2012 Césars. It was screened for this review as part of the MoMA-Film Society of Lincoln Center series New Directors/New Films. It will be shown during that March 21-April 1, 2012 series at the following places and times:
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Sunday, March 25th | 11 AM | MoMA
Tuesday, March 27th | 6 PM | FSLC

KLEBER MENDOÇA FILHO: NEIGHBORING SOUNDS (2011)--ND/NF

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IRMA BROWN, W.J.SOLHA AND GUSTAVO JAHN IN NEIGHBORING SOUNDS

Menace and isolation in a Brazilian city

This new film about class, disorder, and environment in Brazil reminded me of Celina Murga's very original study of children abandoned completely by their parents in a wealthy compound in Argentina, called A Week Alone/Una semana solos (Film Comment Selects 2009). Those children are in a gated community, and they are the ones who gradually take the law into their own hands. Kleber Mendonça Filho's film takes place mostly in contemporary Recife, the fifth largest city in Brazil, whose exploding economy has led to increasingly luxurious but soulless tower apartment buildings clumped in the built-up downtown. And they are in protected areas. Filho skillfully builds up a sense of menace and disorder, skipping around among various inhabitants of such a building, some of them from the same well-off family; their servants; and a newly arrived security firm whose real aims are clearly suspect, though the reason for their presence remains dark -- until the final frames. Kleber Mendonça Filho, has done a number of related short films, going back to a video in 1997. In this first feature, he succeeds in integrating many separate sequences because he knows his milieu so well.

Mendoça neatly pulls everything together, as the title warns, with "neighboring sounds." These can be an invasive stereo playing loud music, a dog's persistent howling which one of the main characters battles throughout (using drugs, a high-pitched electronic device, and firecrackers), or the scary drumbeats of the soundtrack warning of hostility or a strange interloper around the corner. Obviously Filho has used sound and music, as well as skillful editing and a narrative line that seems to ramble but knows very well what it's dong, to draw his portrait of city, society, and neighborhood that is rooted in the problems and dark history of a single family. Servants in some scenes seem intimate members of the families they work for, but the rooms the new apartment houses still provide for them are still hot and dark, and they can be dismissed or abused with ease. Plus there are layers of resentment because their parents were even worse used.

At least half the street belongs to the handsome, silver-haired Seo Francisco (W.J. Solha), who lives in a luxurious duplex. When a private security team arrives headed by Clodoaldo (Irandhir Santos), Francisco coldly gives him the brush-off, annoyed that they already know who he is, and saying that his main interest now is in his plantation in the country, which appears ruined but is evidently the source of the family wealth. Francisco warns Clodoaldo to steer clear of his grandson Dinho (Yuri Holanda), evidently a young, directionless bad boy who steals things for kicks. His other grandson, João (Gustavo Jahn), has spend the night with a new girlfriend, Sofia (Irma Brown), and Sofia's car CD player turns out to have been stolen during the night by Dinho.

A central figure of the film to whom it keeps returning is Beatriz (Maeve Jinkings), who is always in her apartment, not as nice as Seo Francisco's by a long sight but comfortable. Her family, a young son and daughter who have Chinese and English private lessons besides school and a hardworking husband, is firmly middle class. Mother has her little helpers. A water delivery service man brings her her regular supply of marijuana, and she uses a loudly spinning washing machine as a giant motorized dildo. We keep returning to Beatriz. She isn't going anywhere. Of the film's characters, as Jay Weissberg of Variety points out, only Seo Francisco gets far afield, going down to the nearby shark infested ocean waters for a night swim, and relaxing in the country plantation. João also goes to the country place with Sofia and they wanter aimlessly in an abandoned school and a now grass-filled cinema. This sequence shows the ruins of a time when the underclass was exploited, as is hinted in a series of old black-and-white stills shown as the film begins. The way João and Sofia wander aimlessly recalls the upper bourgeois uselessness of the couple in Antoinioni's L'Avventura. Sofia lived in an apartment nearby the Recife building that is now about to be demolished to build another highrise tower. She and João visit it and its empty swimming pool. It's no surprise that Sofia disappears from João's life: she seems obsolete (though Francisco urges them to marry when they visit him in the country).

While all this is going on, the little private security company brought in by Clodoaldo is setting up shop under a canopy down on the corner. With just a few men at the periphery and cell phones (which also are video cameras), they turn out to have the area very well covered indeed. But are they interested in protecting the well-off inhabitants, or do they have a more sinister aim in view?

Plainly Filho has built up a richly thought-out sense of this world, its class strictures, and its people from his earlier short films, elements of which, according to Weissberg, are seamlessly incorporated here. This is another socially astute, hauntingly assembled, highly original film from Latin America, and a thoroughly contemporary view of Brazil in which the word "favela" is used only to point out that this is not that. And while the director in a Statement for the film has spoken of an aspect of class relations being "a crippling fear of urban violence," no such generalizations are ever overtly or crudely made.

Neighboring Sounds/O som ao redor won the FIPRESCI International Critics Prize at Rotterdam, where it debuted. It has been picked up by Cinema Guild for US distribution, and will have its North American premiere at the MoMA and Film Society of Lincoln Center New Directors/New Films series March 21-April 1, 2012 (where it was screened for this review), with the following showings:

Saturday, March 24th | 9:15 PM | MoMA
Sunday, March 25th | 7:15 PM | FSLC

DAVID FRANCE: HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE (2012)--ND/NF

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ACT-UP ACTIVIST AND TAG FOUNDER PETER STALEY IN HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE

An important film about the AIDS struggle in its early, key years

France's documentary, which is intense, passionate, but clearheaded, concerns the fight in the US to get research and treatment for AIDS and HIV. It focuses on two organizations, ACT-UP and TAG. The fight was in New York, when in 1987 a group of HIV-positive gay men, gay women, and others teamed up to do something about the lack of urgent action to provide medication to prevent people from dying of AIDS. This story has been told before, but France neatly organizes old footage to present a historical picture that is clearer than ever before and follows through to the point when medication and care were being provided to enable people to live with AIDS, a point first reached in the late Nineties. The key development was the move to protease inhibitors shifting from monotherapy to combination therapy, bringing a massive decline in AIDS-related deaths in the U.S. and transforming HIV into a manageable chronic illness.

A key activist element in this development was TAG. TAG, the Treatment Action Group, founded by young former bond trader Peter Staley, developed when there was a period of disenchantment and split in which some Act-Up members moved away from street demos and entered highly technical fields of medical and scientific research to force an end to the disorganized, slow, and limited progress among medical and governmental organizations responsible for dealing with AIDS.

France, a journalist who has been following the AIDS crisis since the beginning, uses ACT-UP footage to follow some of the leading activists, who include Peter Staley, Jim Eigo, Garance Franke-Riuta, Mark Harrington, Spencer Cox, Larry Kramer, Bill Bahlman, David Barr, Gregg Bordowitz, Gregg Gonsalves, Derek Link, and Iris Long. The film leaves to the end the answer to the question of which HIV-positive men involved in the fight survive to today, though in some cases their appearance as present-day, talking heads answers that question. Of course the film fills in the background of lousy initial NIH support, a President Reagan who did not even mention the name of the disease, a Bush Senior who claimed the government was doing just fine, a Jesse Hems who said it was God's punishment for evil behavior. But the living, strong part of this film is its depiction of how a group of activists fought successfully to change the whole way the plague was being fought. The notably included activists and patients' being on boards of organizations and consulting directly with drug companies.

How to Survive a Plague captures the revolutionary fervor of the early ACT-UP period with particular energy and vividness. It was a time when desperation and anger were turned into effective action. There was excitement in the air. People were dying left and right, life was tragic, but people had a palpable sense of the need to go for broke, and the leaders were heroes who were the best they could be. As the Hollywood Reporter review puts it, this serves as "a sequel of sorts to seminal AIDS works like Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart or Randy Shilts’ And the Band Played On." The film has been picked up by IFC Films sister division Sundance Selects for US distribution. It debuted at Sundance in January 2012 and is included as part of the New Directors/New Films series of MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. It was screened in connection with ND/NF for this review. Public ND/NF showings of this documentary at Lincoln Center and MoMa were held March 24 and 26, 2012.

How to Survive a Plague opens in the US Sept. 21, 2012 in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco.

JÚLIA MURAT: FOUND MEMORIES (2011)--ND/NF

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THREE VILLAGERS POSE FOR RITA'S PINHOLE CAMERA IN FOUND MEMORIES

Memories that smell of old age and magic

In her Found Memories/Historias Que So Existem Quando Lembradas Brazilian Júlia Murat has woven a visual poem, delicate, meditative and beautifully tinted in sepia yellow. It's part enhanced documentary, part magic realism. A young woman comes briefly to invade the life of an old lady living in the country. It's a place that declined long ago in the last century due to a coffee crisis. The train doesn't come there any more. Everything is in a photogenic state of natural decay. Which is fine, because Rita (Lisa E. Fávero) is a photographer. She has brought two cameras, one modern with buttons and lights and the other a pinhole camera that is just a tin can. (She seems to favor the latter for the rough hewn effect it gives.)

Every morning the old lady, Madalena (Sonia Guedes) receives an old man, Antônio (Luiz Santos) and they engage in Beckettian ritual squabbling as he fixes coffee and she lays out the rolls she has baked the night before. Sitting on a bench out in front of Madalena's big old ramshackle former shop and house, they squabble like an old couple, talking of loss and rain. But they are not married. They're both widowed.

Rituals continue. Antônio and Madalena go to a service conducted by a grizzled Padre (Josias Ricardo Merkin) and attended by other old people, perhaps a dozen in all, who inhabit this lost, sealed-off village. Later they have a communal lunch, preceded by a long silent prayer. Madalena tends flowers at the entrance of the cemetary -- which is padlocked.

Though it's not spelled out, this was inspired by the director's once coming upon a town whose cemetary really had been sealed off, so that when people died they had to be taken on a long trip down river to be buried elsewhere. Murat toys with the notion that here, due to the cuttoff of names of deceased persons and the locked burial ground, the old people linger on, unable to die. Toward the end Madalena tells Antônio she's afraid of dying, and he snaps back, "Then don't die." But then Rita, who has won Madalena's confidence and affection, photographs the old lady naked from the waist up. Soon afterward, as if this naked photo was preparation for the hereafter, Madalena dies. It's not clear what this means or how it's handled. (Where will she be buried? Has a spell been broken?) Antônio just says, "Now there's nobody to bake bread."

The beauty of Found Memories is that, like the films of Lisandro Alonso (whom this picture's dp Lucio Bonelli has worked for) or Carlos Reygadas, Júlia Murat uses unusual authentic settings to weave a special magic. Plotwise, the film is a little thin. Any more morning squabbles between Madalena and Antônio over rolls and coffee and we might go bonkers. But it's amazing how introducing a new young character with a project changes everything. The everyday things, the dark corners, lamp lights, kitchen objects, that seemed merely accoutrements of decline now suddenly as subjects of Rita's camera are beautiful and picturesque. Or at least artsy: Rita's pinhole photos don't seem like masterpieces. But that may be just as well, because when drawings, paintings, or photographs done by a character in film are too professional, they just seem fake. Rita seems a little smug and annoying, but at least she is real. And Madalena greatly brightens, after an initial stonewalling period. with Rita around.

Being young, Rita has a nightlife, even here. She goes and drinks with an old but still feisty black man, Carlos (Antônio dos Santos), and she even dances out there with iPod music. When all the old people dance one evening to the music of an ancient gramophone, that is "magic", not real. When Rita announces she's leaving, Madalena insists she can't -- and perhaps it's by virtue of Rita's visit and departure that Madalena becomes ready to die.

Found Memories is a beautiful slow film, a genre increasingly rich in Latin America. Viewers with patience will find much to enjoy here. It is like a staged photograph, using existing elements judiciously to create a new reality. But its picture of old age as repeated rituals, though not far from the mark, is not quite the whole story. Nor in this first feature does Murat manage a story that is as as specific or as profound as it might have been. With its weathered buildings and locals and its chiaroscuros it's a pretty picture, but it doesn't make much of an impression. It risks not being remembered, and therefore not existing. Though not a direct translation, Found Memories is a good title for the film. But it reminds us of something: memories that are found somewhere and appropriated may not always feel as authentic as one's own.

EMAD BURNAT, GUY DAVIDI: 5 BROKEN CAMERAS (2012)

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GIBREEL AND SETTLEMENTS IN 5 BROKEN CAMERAS

A boy grows up with village protests

This film -- by a Palestinian videographer whose images are collected and narrated by him here -- tells much the same story as Julia Bacha's awarded 2009 documentary Budrus, only in a more personal and rather sadder way. Both films are about Palestinian villagers protesting against Israeli settlements, walls, encroachment of their land, destroying their olive groves, ruining their lives in piecemeal fashion year after year. Emad gets a video camera when Gibreel is born, his youngest of four sons. Then he gets the habit and becomes a documentary filmmaker, covering marches and protests and endless encounters with the Israeli army in which friends and brothers are arrested, wounded, and finally killed -- and the shooting is so rough, five of the cameras he's using get destroyed in the space of five years.

Budrus, which focuses on another town and its actions and activists, provides more information about the community organization that went into the protests, the negotiations, the identity of the Israeli soldiers engaged in protecting settlements or walls, the effect of the involvement of Israeli and foreign activists in the demonstrations, and the dimensions of the non-violent struggles, which over a period of several years joined together from town to town.

The unique feature of 5 Broken Cameras is that it literally depicts events that Emad Burnat himself covered with his cameras, which generally lasted less than a year before they were wrecked in a demonstration. This is a sort of DIY documentary filmmaking manual: if you've got a camera and what's happening in your world is as significant as the Palestinian-Israeli struggle, and you haven't much else to do (Emad was robbed of any livlihood other than olive cultivation), you become a filmmaker. He covers the shooting, the wounding, the tear gas. He shows how spirited demonstrators Phil and Adib inspire others to maintain hope and keep returning to protest. But at the same time he is still using his cameras to record Gibreel, whom we see learn to walk, and talk and grow up. It seems his first words include "wall" and "army." Gibreel has enormous innocent dark eyes and an open spirit. He sees and experiences everything. He grows up in a world of encroachment and protest. It's all he knows..

Emad's narration is simple and direct. He doesn't provide an elaborate historical picture or fill us in on the politics of protest as Budrus does. But on the other hand he gives us a more direct sense of what it's like to be an average guy in a Palestinian village on the edge of the Israeli settlements, المستوطنات الإسرائيلية (a personal note: I followed the narration closely; it was unusually easy for a student of Arabic to follow, showing how simple, direct, and forthright it is). This film conveys a sense of Palestinian robustness. Their situation is demoralizing beyond words but in the eye of Emad's cameras they remain hardy and vigorous -- and they keep on coming. Emad speaks of anger, of how it deepens as the sorrow sinks in for example when one of the village's inspirations is killed, the man whom the children loved to gather around. But his spirit is determinedly non-violent -- and as Budrus shows, that's an approach that works.

Guy Davidi is an Israeli filmmaker who collaborated with Burnat in producing this film. They were much helped by the editor Memmo Borema, and the film is gently enhanced by the music of Trio Joubran, an oud group. French television gave its support, and the finishing touches on the final edit were done by Véronique Lagoarde-Segot. Thanks to this expert help Burnat's "amateur" camerawork becomes brilliantly effective. The simple narrative preserves the filmmakers' aim of avoiding "traps" and clichés. Needless to say, the chronology of the five cameras, plus the first five years of young Gibreel's life, with "Happy Birthday" and ritual cake-blowing included, provide not only a neat structure, but a sense both of how personal and of how dangerous the circumstances of this film's progress were.

5 Broken Cameras debuted at Sundance. It won the World Cinema Documentary Directing award there and was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize. It has recently been part of festivals in Mexico, Sweden, and Greece. It is also included in the MoMA-Film Society of Lincoln Center series, New Directors/New Films, in which it was screened for this review. Public showings at ND/NF will be:

Monday, March 26th | 6:00 PM | FSLC
Tuesday, March 27th | 8:30 PM | MoMA

JASON CORTLAND, JULIA HALPERIN: NOW, FORAGER (2012)--ND/NF

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TIFFANY ESTEB AND JASON CORTLAND OF NOW, FORAGER

Man finds mushrooms, loses wife

This serious foodie feature is anchored by its focus on the problematic marriage of a thirty-something couple, both of whom are more than capable of playing a key role in the kitchen of a hip restaurant. The wife would like to do just that, take over a kitchen when she can. The husband, who is a mushroom specialist, is more of a counter-cultural persuasion. He would rather live by foraging alone, if he could, and selling the findable eatable wild American fungi he knows so well, giving up apartment and car if necessary to follow that pursuit. This clash over lifestyle and material goals ultimately causes the somewhat reluctant breakup of the couple, leaving them in the spring with the wife working in a restaurant in Manhattan and the husband housesitting a 35-minute drive from Brooklyn and -- planning to gather some portobellos that afternoon.

The subtitle is "A Film About Love and Fungi." It's really a slow-food and slow-film movie, an intelligent little American indie that's ironic and knowing and notable for the sharp specificity of its people, places, and specialities (casting and settings are tops, and so are details about food), shown off in a series of carefully located scenes.

That the filmmakers know whereof they speak shows all the way through, but there are two excellent sequences in particular that make this film worth watching. And they provide a nice contrast. The first occurs when wife Regina Echevarría (Tiffany Esteb) takes an opportunity found for her by Mas (Almex Lee), the hot chef whose octopus restaurant she's been working in, to become chef of a Basque restaurant "outside of Providence." "That's the whole state," says the often grumpy Lucien (Jason Cortland) when awakened in the middle of the night to hear this news. (Both are of Basque origin.) This sends Regina off to Rhode Island, where the restaurant turns out to be a real dump where hamburger balls with rice and thousand island dressing are key menu items and the "Basque" designation is meaningless. Her Rhode Island chef-ing gig is a disaster: the unsophisticated restaurant regulars can't accept her authentic Basque substitutes.

The second great sequence comes when, with Regina away, Lucien decides as it turns colder to drive down to gather wild mushrooms still growing south of New York State. Life is harsh for Lucien away from Regina. In a Maryland forest his afternoon's foraging is robbed from him by a couple of gangsterish Russian rivals (possibly courtesy of the Polish co-production on the film). But real fun happens when -- following another dicey reference from a restaurant friend -- he tries to cater a big party for a fabulously demanding and rich DC lady with a "think tank" husband. The pinioning of the spoiled and the overly well funded here is truly delicious, and as the insufferably bitchy hostess, April Garrison, Gabrielle Maisels is insanely annoying. Casting is spot-on throughout.

Except that in his review in Variety Jay Weissberg has a point when he claims "zero chemistry between the leads." The couple's splitting up doesn't so much carry a high emotional charge as seem an excuse for the separate sequences they act in thereafter. Consequently Weissberg's also right, good though the episodes are, in saying the film plays "like a compilation of episodes rather than a flowing narrative." Pleasure is to be derived more from the technical details, which are exceptional. Mas's hip restaurant and Mas himself, the unsophisticated Rhode Island restaurant folks and their setup, as well as all the details of kitchen prep work and mushroom-hunting (plus details of looks, taste, texture, and how to prepare each species) are done with a sense of accuracy and detail such as one rarely sees in a feature film -- not to mention one of those warm fuzzy Mostly Martha -type food sentiment-fests. But this is so much true that the details may have taken up space that should have gone to character and story. Cortland shows his passion for fungi with what The Hollywood Reporter calls "additional fungi cinematography, [himself, in addition to writing, starring, and editing] crafting the beautifully immaculate close-ups of choice mycological specimens that punctuate a season-hopping narrative." Clearly this is destined to be the ultimate mycophile movie.

This seems a slightly new kind of "precision" small indie American film that, despite the somewhat downbeat turn of this feature, has great possibilities for precise satire if Cortland and his co-director Julia Halperin want to continue in this vein but lighten it up a bit. And turn to other topics. There is probably room for only one cult feature on mushroom gathering.

This 93-minute American indie film, first feature for the directors, debuted at Rotterdam. It is also included in New Directors/New Films (a series from March 21-April 1, 2012 co-sponsored by MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center), and in was in this connection that it was screened for this review. The ND/NF public screennigs of Now, Forager (the name humorously adapted from Walt Whitman) :

Friday, March 30th | 9 PM | FSLC
Sunday, April 1st | 4:30 PM | MoMA

SONG CHUAN: HUAN HUAN (2010)--ND/NF

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DR WANG AND HIS WIFE CHUNFENG DINE IN HUAN HUAN

Having a child in rural China

The story told here is of a young woman, Huan Huan, who is having an adulterous affair with a boyish-looking married doctor called Wang. Huan Huan herself is married to a fat, brutish gambler, Yue Lin, a squirmy little man who sits around smoking cigarettes. Dr. Wang is married to Chunfeng, who can't seem to produce a child. Yue Lin winds up taking bribes from Wang for keeping mum about Wang's affair with his wife. Wang also gives Huan Huan pocket money and pays a large fine to the local family planning committee so Huan Huan's brother can return to the village.

When Yue Lin is humiliated by the police and Wang's clinic is shut down by the local government so he has no more money for payoffs, Yue Lin beats Wang to death. Now Huan Huan is pregnant, evidently by Dr. Wang. As the film draws to a close Chunfeng and Huan Huan are out by the local lake talking about Chenfeng raising Huan Huan's baby as her own. All along Huan Huan has wanted to leave her village to work in a big city, but it's looking as if she won't.

This first feature feels like student work of a rather stiff kind. The choppy editing and lousy acting reminded me of Ying Liang's Taking Father Home (SFIFF 2006). If the latter looked even cruder that's because video cameras keep getting better. While static camera setups are poetic in the hands of Asian artists like Tsai Ming-liang or Hou Hsiau-shen, they just seem like the easy way out here.

Song Chuan's version of rural China is a place of petty corruption, mutual blackmail, a life without beauty or grace. People ignore the "one child" law, and the local police exact bribes for having this overlooked, and for other things. Punctuating the film are excerpts from very curious song and dance videos (real, not made by the filmmaker) in which men and women apparently advertise prostitution, or maybe just sex. These are shown at public gatherings that include not only old folks, but kids. The characters of Huan Huan often use obscene and abusive language.

You wouldn't think any of this, which by the way has none of the style or penetration of the films of Jia Zhang-ke or his generation, was the sort of thing the Chinese government would want shown as part of contemporary reality, and yet this was shown at the UCCA (Ullen Center for Contemporary Arts) in Beijing, and was supplied to the Film Society of Lincoln Center by the Chinese Consulate General in New York. The 32-year-old Song's film was nominated for best feature at the second China (Hangzhou) Youth Digital Film Contest. And he is a graduate of the National Academy of Chinese Theater Arts, has worked in films and TV since 2006 and worked on his own films since 2002.

Huan Huan may have been chosen for festival showing as an artifact of the modern China and again, as with the (far more accomplished) filmmakers from Iran, some films are sought by international festivals to encourage underground work challenging the status quo in their repressive country of origin, regardless of artistic accomplishment.

Huan Huan was watched for this review among screenings for the MoMA-Film Society of Lincoln Center March 21-April 1, 2012 series New Directors/New Films, and will be shown to the public in ND/NF at these times and places:

Tuesday, March 27th | 9 PM | FSLC
Wednesday, March 28th | 6 PM | MoMA

JOACHIM TRIER: OSLO, AUGUST 31ST (2011)--ND/NF

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ANDERS DANIELSEN LIE AND HANS OLAV BRENNER IN OSLO, AUGUST 31ST

Last voyage home

In this wonderfully accomplished second film Trier attempts something that's different from the generational portrait of his debut, Reprise, but also has many points in common, starting with the star, Anders Danielsen Lie, the protagonist Anders here, and a key figure in Reprise, (SFIFF 2007) whose arc has a strong point in common. Again Trier's inspiration in the French New Wave is clear: this is an adaptation of the novel by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle that was the basis for Louis Malle's The Fire Within. And there's a lightness of touch and imaginativeness of camerawork and editing that invoke the New Wave. The big difference is in focus, a turning inward. Reprise was more an ensemble piece, about a generation of young men on the rise. Oslo zeros in on one man, a doomed thirty-something who's finishing drug rehab, who once had everything going for him, but now doesn't seem like he's going to make it.

Lie is an extremely watchable actor, not handsome exactly but sexy somehow (his character defined here as a magnet for women), a live wire with a quality both chiseled and sensitive. In Reprise he is the first of several young writers and best friends who becomes a big success, but then has a psychotic episode from which he does not completely recover. Anders begins this last day with what the Variety reviewer calls "an unsuccessful morning of the Virginia Woolf variety." He is at the rehab center, in a big house out in the country. Today he has a job interview and in an early recovery-type group session he expresses uncertain feelings, or no feelings, about that appointment. The film takes us through his entire day, to the bitter end. There are no flashbacks. A lot of background comes from conversation with Thomas (an appealing, complex Hans Olav Brenner), Anders' best friend, whom he has time to visit because he gets to Oslo early. He and Thomas used to party wild together, but Thomas is a respectable family man now with kids and a wife and a solid academic career.

The talk goes from that table at Thomas' to a stroll through a park and this might seem too talky except that Trier's dialogue is so interesting and his editing and shooting are too fluent for that to matter. Anders makes clear to Thomas that he's suicidal; Thomas argues and pleads with him and yet when he sums up his own life frankly none of the negatives are left out (he admits he and his wife waste evenings playing "battlefield" -- a game that comes up ironically during Anders' long night).

Trier's shooting seems more straightforward here than in his first film, but there are great little touches, like a quick repeat-frame as Anders and Thomas part, that sum up the complexity and uncertainty of the two men's relationship with wonderful subtlety. Likewise a "virtuoso" (Variety) passage as Anders sits in a big modern coffee shop and hears snatches of a lot of conversations, which the camerawork skillfully weave in and out, keeping focus on the protagonist, so the triviality and ordinariness of what's said show both Anders' alienation from quotidian life and the way life seems to him: pointless and silly.

In the interview for a magazine editing job, sharply handled like every scene here, the editor quickly melts from cold to sympathetic and even though Anders levels and admits the 6-year blank in his CV is due to being a drug addict, he has the editor in the palm of his hand but walks out and throws away his application. The blade cuts deeper when he goes to meet his sister and is met by her girlfriend, and learns she is unwilling to see him. His parents have left the big family house and are selling it, because of financial problems his addiction caused. He will go to it later. He goes to a birthday party he initially rejected when Thomas mentioned it. He pours himself a glass of wine.

We know with a kind of sinking feeling where this is going, but the trajectory is never obvious because Trier's scenes are so specific and well realized. And notably, things have a light touch. Anders is going under, but with a flourish, because when he begins to party, he is natural and in his element, never showing excess, enjoying the company of beautiful women, and while in the back of his mind there may be desperation, he frequently flashes his winning smile. When he goes to a kind of rave Trier not surprisingly finds a new way to shoot this dangerously hackneyed kind of sequence, using fast white flashes that are of an almost brain-damaging intensity.

There are many things to like and enjoy in Trier's new film starting with his generally absolute command of the medium, but what appeals most to me is the handling of the addiction, relapse, suicide theme. Nothing is conventional or obvious. Everything is balanced. Anders is or was a winner, but not spectacularly so. He was just a good writer. The script conveys with cold accuracy the effects of throwing away six years of a life, and the collateral damage to family and loved ones. Anders is not beaten down or haggard. He is sharp and healthy. The damage is inside. And as always in "real life," the problem is not the drugs. With this dangerous subject, Trier has exercised exquisite tact. And his film is a thing of beauty. Trier's first film was brilliant; this one is being called a masterpiece and a work of genius. He deserves wider exposure and recognition.

Oslo, August 31st debuted at Cannes (Un certain regard), and has shown at thirteen other festivals. The film has been picked up by Strand for US release. It was seen for this review at a screening in connection with New York's New Directors/New Films series, where is will be shown to the public at these locations and dates:

Wednesday, March 28th | 8:30 PM | MoMA
Thursday, March 29th | 6 PM | FSLC

KARL MARKOVICS: BREATHING (2011)--ND/NF

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KARIN LISCHKA AND THOMAS SCHUBERT IN BREATHING

Earning parole

Breathing is the superb writing and directing debut of Karl Markovics, the well known Austrian stage and screen actor who starred in the 2008 Best Foreign Oscar winner, The Counterfeiters. This is a coming-of-age story that's also all about breaking out of bondage. Its protagonist, Roman Kogler (a gradually more and more sympathetic Thomas Schubert) is in a juvenile prison outside Vienna, and is seeking parole after serving half his sentence. It obviously is not a short one. Later on we learn what his crime was. But Roman has never known anything but institutions. He went directly from an orphanage to here. And his way of winning the confidence of a judge is by making it as an employee in the municipal mortuary, where he is given a uniform, including shoes. In between hard days learning to deal with corpses, the youth swims laps in the prison pool, pool workouts a coming-of-age routine as in the recent Welcome and the earlier Gaspard Ulliel vehicle The Last Day. The film is full of rituals -- the laps, the body searches by a guard on return from work, the commute train, the mortuary uniforms, the time cards. Through all of this Roman is alone. He is in a solitary cell, he talks little and unwillingly to his patient but harried parole officer (Gerhard Liebmann). Working closely with his cinematographer, Martin Gschlacht, Markovics weaves all this into a mesmerizing whole, in which the few words spoken, rules broken, and schedules overridden are riveting -- important steps toward Roman's establishing an identity for himself and gaining his own respect. The film may seem grim, but it's positive, and it's ultimately quite beautiful. Its grayness can't hide its artistic perfection and its emotional truth.

"Breathing" is a theme throughout, symbolic of both entrapment and freedom: it happens under water when Roman swims his laps in the prison pool. It's done a special way when around corpses that may stink. It might have ended, as the boy's mother Margit Kogler (Karin Lischka) reveals when he finds her. (At the job he sees the naked corpse of a woman with his name and he thinks it may be his mother. But he locates the right mother and follows her into an Ikea store, where they meet.)

With his institutional life, Roman must find any escape from ritual exciting. Drinking a (forbidden) can of beer on the city commute train with an American girl is a huge thrill. So must be following his mother, who does not know him, into the store. He has never seen a corpse. But has he ever gone shopping? Ha he ever been kissed? We as viewers gain pleasure from learning the processes of the mortuary employees, which are precisely observed, as are the in-and-out prison routines. But for Roman his life is all about finding a place to breathe.

Breathing is a small, tightly woven film. It's largely wordless, and the sparse dialogue assumes greater life for this minimalism. What the American girl says on the train is comically simple ("You-going-where?") but must be outlandishly fresh for Roman. Roman hasn't much to say to the harried juvenile officer in charge of his case (Gerhard Liebmann), or to the older co-workers at the mortuary and they haven't much to say to him, but the little changes in tone as he learns the ropes and becomes more positive are big on screen. This is a simple tale, but Markovics makes every minute count. Gschlacht conveys a symmetry and lyrical beauty with the bleak settings through which he follows Roman, car, bus, train, mortuary truck, hearse. A big travel poster in a subway station is strongly used, and so is the pulling away of the train that leaves someone, importantly, still on the station bench. Breathing breaks out of its almost clinical style by making Roman Kogler's tough tests and cruel world humanize rather than harden him. Markovics avoids either a saccharine happy ending or a miserablist dark tunnel.

Breathing/Atmen won the Directors' Fortnight prize for European film at Cannes and was included in 14 other international festivals, where it won five other awards. It has had theatrical release in Austria, Germany, in France March 14, 2012 (critically very well received there: Allociné 3.5), and will be released in April in the UK April 20. It was screened for this review in previews for the MoMA-Lincoln Center New Directors/New Films series.

Released in New York August 31, 2012. It has received generally favorable reviews (Metacritic score: 71).

ANKA, WILHELM SASNAL: IT LOOKS PRETTY FROM A DISTANCE (2011)--ND/NF

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A STILL FROM IT LOOKS PRETTY FROM A DISTANCE

For rough Polish rustics, a neighbor's property is fair game

Wilhelm Sasnal is an acclaimed Polish painter and comic strip artist, who in collaboration with his wife Anka has now made a (77-min.) feature following up on several short Super 8 films and his first feature Swineherd (2008). It Looks Pretty From a Distance (2011]) is a film that up close tends to look as harsh, rude, and disorganized as its human subjects, a group of sub-trailer park people living in rural Poland who live by collecting scrap metal and scavenging for other things and swim in a nearby river. Once again fimmakers, this time a couple of them, ask us to believe that life is nasty, brutish, and short, and seen not from a distance but up close, the life depicted here, . And so it is for Pawel (Marcin Czarnik), Mother Muraw (Elzbieta Okupska), Mirek Kotlarz (Piotr Nowak), Grandfather Kotlarz (Jerzy Lapinski), and -- should I go on? But if you are not Polish you will not be able to keep track of these names. "This is a difficult, irritating and unsettling film, which is exactly how it was supposed to be. It should not be ignored,” wrote (Zdzisław Pietrasik in Polityka).

In fact Polish critics have commented that this is a necessary film, which unveils certain dark Polish secrets, such as the plundering of Jewish property after the devastation of the Warsaw ghetto. But all admit that the minimal plot leaves much open to interpretation. Indeed the Sasnals, a husband and wife team who have art backgrounds reflected in a sensual feel for the physical milieu here, seem to assume too much on the part of the viewer, which may burden non-Poles more. They have filmed their somewhat brutish cast as if we already knew them, and given the paucity of dialogue, it can be hard, particularly for non-Poles, to tell what is going on.

It seems that Paweł, a fleshy, tall, scrap metal guy, wants to live with his girlfriend but the growing senility of his mother is an obstacle. His girlfriend lives with her parents and brother with the bitter knowledge that – when her father dies – his meagre belongings will go to her sibling leaving her with nothing.

Meager the possessions are for all the locals, and there's an unwritten law, apparently, that when someone vacates premises, his possessions are fair game. When Pawel disappears for an extended period without explanation, people keep snatching his stuff here and there, and then one night come in and take out everything, and make a bonfire of most of it in the back yard. They also finish off the chickens and the dog. When Pawel comes back, they won't let him return to living in his house. At this point Pawel may have fair cause to bring in the authorities, if there are any, and so somebody has to finish off Pawel off. There are hints that murdering each other was the custom as far back as the war, when some people drowned their own children and then themselves in the river. Locals tend to be unfriendly -- to each other -- and begrudge each other swimming privileged in the ill-fated river. They also like to smoke, drink bear, and smash car windows in preparation for cutting out the metal. Car parts? That would be too subtle for them, or useless to the country.

The point of the title is that while the characters live in rural squalor, the landscape is fairly lush. To call the the lensing "sumptuous cinematography" as one review does seems, however, a stretch -- or perhaps it is just that the squalor makes it hard to see the sumptuousness. But this does have the kind of raw, intense color you get from 16mm transferred to 35 mm, which this is, with some good handheld work. But the Sasnal's might benefit from greater polish in future in their scripting and editing. If this is a diamond in the rough, it is hard sometimes to see the diamond under the rough.

To search out a similar social and moral level one might think of this as a much too real and less humorous version of Harmony Korine's Trash Humpers. Katarzyna Taras of Stopklatka wrote, "It is not a movie about frustration but about selfless evil that may reveal itself in any time and space regardless of political system. "

Their film was nominated for a Tiger award at Rotterdam, and won the New Polish Film award at the 11th New Horizons Festival at Wrocław, Poland. Zsuzsanna Kiràly's online review seems a well-informed assessment and makes some useful comments on Wilhelm Sasnal's paintings. Lawrence Boyce has a review of the film in Screen Daily.

Apart from the Rotterdam and Polish festival presentations, It Looks Pretty from a Distance/Z daleka widok jest piekny is also included in the New Directors/New Films series at MoMA and Lincoln Center in New York (where it was screened for this review), with the following public screenings:

Tuesday, March 27th | 6 PM | MoMA
Wednesday, March 28th | 8:30 PM | FSLC

MADS MATTHIESEN: TEDDY BEAR (2012)--ND/NF

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KIM KILD AND LAMAIPORN HOUGAARD IN TEDDY BEAR

Hulk leaves home

This character study by Danish first-timer Mads Mathiessen (not be to confused with international Danish leading man and villain Mads Mikkelsen of Casino Royale and Susanne Bier's After the Wedding) focuses on an unusual protagonist, Dennis (Kim Kold), a hulking 38-year-old body builder who has never had a girlfriend and is stuck in a highly unhealthy relationship with his tiny, domineering mother Ingrid (Elsebeth Steentoft), with whom he lives in a suburb of Copenhagen. Using ultra-simple methods and documentary-like settings Matthiessen gets us and Dennis out of this dilemma, through a series of cringe-worthy sequences. Non-actors predominate here, except for Steentoft, a veteran actress. Matthissen has expanded a short (entitled Dennis) into this film -- without adding quite enough for a feature. The cringe-worthiness is what makes the film hold the attention, temporarily, anyway, becaue in the moment things feel painfully real -- often like excerpts from some strange TV dating show. Linking details and subtleties, however, have been omitted and this somewhat plodding tale doesn't ultimately hold up to scrutiny.

Kim Kold is a real international body builder. No actor, no matter how dedicated, could build up those muscles and put on those tattoos for a role. His deep, gruff voice toots out like the horn of a train engine. He has no fancy lines to deliver. Dennis is shy and inarticulate. This Kold can handle, and his imposing physical presence helps us to accept him as a character. He is what he is. At the film's outset Dennis is on a date from Hell with a local girl that's a miserable failure -- which his mother nonetheless strongly objects to when she hears of it. The unhealthy intimacy is indicated by how mother and grown son use the bathroom together. When Dennis attends a celebration for an uncle who has found a bride on a trip to Thailand, he gets the same idea. But he has to hide his trip to Pattaya from his devouring mother by telling her he's going to a competition in Germany. She still throws a tantrum.

In Pattaya everyone assumes Dennis is a sex tourist, which makes for several embarrassing evenings with women for hire, arranged through a local bar owner, Scott (David Winters), who claims to have introduced his uncle to his wife. Dennis' non-performance in these setups, and his rapport with co-trainers in the body building gym, plus Thailand's gay sex trade, make you wonder if Dennis is of another persuasion, but this possibility isn't raised. All these scenes involve non-actors who provide a tacky realism. Then when Dennis goes to a local body building gym and meets Toi (Lamaiporn Hougaard), the widowed proprietress, and she takes him around town, mutual romantic feelings develop. This situation is awkward too, but Toi nonetheless winds up coming to Copenhagen to live with Dennis some time after his return home. How he is going to manage his mother's furious reaction when she sees through his deceptions is something viewers will have to wait and see.

Matthiesen manipulates us and his characters through his sequences somewhat awkwardly, but a sympathy for Dennis is inevitable. He is too simple and needy not to feel for. His mother is surreal. Details are left dangling by Matthiesen and his co-writer Martin Zandvliet, however. Dennis' financial situation and Toi's prompt move to another country when she owns a business are unexplained. How Dennis and his mother work things out also lacks credibility. For that matter Dennis is not a wholly believable character. Could he really have lived all this time with his mother and not be as twisted as she is? Writer-director Matthiesen grabs our attention, but doesn't justify holding onto it.

Teddy Bear (93 min.), whose Danish title is 10 Timer til Paridis or "10 Hours to Paradise," is in Danish and English. It debuted in January at Sundance and in Denmark. It is slated for showing at several other festivals, including the MoMA-Film Society of Lincoln Center joint series, New Directors/New Films, in connection with which it was screened for this review. Public showings at ND/NF are scheduled as follows:

Thursday, March 29th | 6 PM | MoMA
Saturday, March 31st | 8:45 PM | FSLC

VINCENT GINZBURG: GENERATION P (2011)--ND/NF

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MIKAIL EFREMOV AND VLADIMIR EPIFANTSEV IN GENERATION P

Publicity, politics, and drugs in Nineties Russia

A wealth of witty ideas, mostly from the much admired source novel by Victor Pelevin, enliven this fantasy about advertising, media, politics and business in Nineties Russia, This Brazil-like miasma is admirable for a degree of ceaseless invention in preposterous "what-if" and "wow factor" scenes that, despite deep immersion in matters locally Russian, may gain the film some western cult value. Rich period detail and elaborate production values are big pluses: some real time and substantial rubles went into this production. But this is a virtually plotless film -- except for sticking with its amiable but neutral protagonist (who narrates) and being pulled together by some far-fetched business about the worship of Ishtar. The consequent lack of clear direction tends to make P wearying, at least for non-Russian viewers.

As with many overly energetic films this one is probably most memorable at the outset, when we meet aspiring poet and recent university graduate Babylen Tatarsky (Vladimir Epifantsev) taking what advantage he can on his own from the fall of the Soviet Union. What he learned in college is useless so what this means is selling contraband cigarettes and condoms and other trinkets behind a keyhole window in a dark kiosk controlled by Chechen mafia. He learns to up his profit by short-changing customers selectively according to how he sizes them up. Into this bleak world his old pal Morkovin (Andrey Fomin) appears and introduces him to the grandiose prospects of building an advertising business reframing American product promotion and brand names for the Russian customer base. It emerges that for some reason the whole nascent free market Russian media world is controlled by followers of the cult of Ishtar.

The symbolic product inspiring the generation of nouveau-capitalists is a bottle of Russian-made Pepsi, because it was originally given to "Bab" and his generation as Soviet Young Pioneers as a symbol of the possibility of a better world coming, if the nightmare ever ended. Presumably that better world doesn't come, only a succession of governments and product knockoffs and absurd promotion campaigns for both. This is the story of Generation P (for Pepsi). In the ad world, Bab's and his colleagues' game is to get paid by their customers before they go bust, because gangsters are taking over everything and nothing lasts.

As one absurd and sometimes hilarious advertising campaign after another unfolds on screen, there is also stuff about the impeachment of Yeltsin and his attempt to take over the Russian Parliament, cleverly interwoven with alternative ad campaigns for Parliament cigarettes. An ad for a Christian church promotes it as “a first class Lord for first class people.” A funeral parlor Bab sells with the slogan, “Diamonds are not forever.” The recreation of a suitably gruesome medieval Russian beheading drives home a pitch for Head and Shoulders with the punch line, ”Keep them together.” The interweaving of ad ideas and political events is intriguing but hard to follow, and things aren't much helped by the fact that Bab consumes massive events of alcohol, mainly vodka (and a fake political candidate is marketed under the name of Smirnoff) with other mind and body altering substances including cocaine, super-strong Acid, and piles of magic mushrooms provided by another school friend, Gireev (Sergey Shnurov), which lead the hero with his oddball spiritual guide toward eastern mysticism. Acquisition of a Ouija board leads to communication with a mad Che Guevara. The cult of Ishtar being Babylonian, Babylen's odd name makes him feel a special connection -- aiding his rise in the Russian media world. Reaching the apparent peak of that world, Bab joins Azadovsky (Mikhail Efremov), head of The Beekeeping Institute (cover name for a mysterious publicity syndicate), who has the peculiar habit of appearing on the TV under different identities, and is so rich he's quite indifferent to the fact that he's wearing a $170,000 Patek Philippe watch.

The combo of tongue-in-cheek ad campaigns, politics, drugs and spirituality causes the film very quickly to lose all contact with the real world. Even rides in Mercedes Benz's and Labmorghinis can't bring it down to earth. This seems unfortunate in a story that aims to comment on recent history in some detail. Ginzburg, who partly grew up and was educated in the US, West, is tireless in recreating fantastic sequences from the novel, but the story line doesn't make enough cohesive sense, especially not to anyone non-Russian. It doesn't help that most of the cast isn't particularly memorable, including the appealing but bland Epifantsev: Ginzburg has put most of his eggs into the mise-en-scène basket, at the expense of plot, argument, and character. Given a novel source of this complexity and all the wonderfully absurd scenes to recreate, that was perhaps an inevitable compromise.

Ginzburg, who is a graduate of the School of Visual Arts in New York, has done music videos, documentaries and short films. This is his feature debut. Generation P has been shown at several festivals, including Moscow and Toronto, and it was watched for this review in a screening for the MoMA and Film Society of Lincoln Center joint series, New Directors/New Films, whose public showings for the film are:

Friday, March 30th | 6 PM | FSLC
Sunday, April 1st | 1:30 PM | MoMA

DJINN CARRÉNARD: DONOMA (2011)--ND/NF

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VINCENTE PEREZ AND SALOMÉ BLECHMANS IN DONOMA

Banlieue ronde

Djinn Carrénard'S Donoma might invite comparisons with Eric Rohmer, Andy Warhol, or John Cassavetes. He claims to have made his film for pennies, using a digital video camera and a handful of young actors who improvise their lines. Much of the film takes place in St. Denis, the ghetto-esque main "banlieu" or suburb of Paris. The cast includes Salomé Blechmans, Emilia Dérou-Bernal, Sékouba Doucouré, Laura Kpegli, Matthieu Longuatte, Laetitia Lopez, Benjamin Mayet, Amélie Moy, Marina Pelle, and Vincente Perez.

To begin with in a small, claustrophobically photographed banlieue lycée Spanish class, one student, Dacio (Vincente Perez), is disruptive and disobedient and his teacher Analia (Emilia Dérou-Bernal) behaves after class in a totally inappropriate way, rapidly masturbating him through his pants to embarrass him, which she later gleefully recounts to her young female colleagues. But who is the winer on the battlefield of love here? Dacio turns out to be on the make for Salma (Salomé Blechmans), a bourgeois girl who is not a believer but has become obsessed with religion. Salma resists Dacio's advances, though not completely. Meanwhile a black virgin, Chris (Laura Kpegli), originally from Ghana but raised by rich diplomats, now a serious photographer, decides to take as a lover the first stranger she finds in the Metro, and to bring him in to live with her, requiring that they speak only in writing and sign language. The lucky man is Dama (Sékouba Doucouré), a handsome, slim young black man, who later turns out to have just broken up with a (white) photographer, Leelop (Laetitia Lopez). In her search for religious belief Salma eventually takes up with an apparently devout young man, Raîné (Matthieu Longuatte) spotted on an inter-urban train.

This is not all, because there is a social services employee, who interviews both Salma and Dama when he was with Leelop, and Salma gets into difficulties because she insists on caring for her sister, who has terminal cancer. She also thinks she has stigmata and levitates. At a later meeting, the social worker concludes Salma is deranged and needs to be institutionalized. She rejects this and finally meets up with Raîné, in a church. In an intense and challenging encounter he puts her in her place and reveals he is a born again skinhead, who used to be a criminal but now leads a good life.

These scenes and the elaborate choral plotting are often fascinating, the young actors are remarkably vivacious, and the focus on love as couples pair off or break up has a strong link with Rohmer, though the confrontational improvisation more closely resembles Cassavetes. The sexual explicitness at some points justifies the Warhol link. So does the fact that the whole film runs on too long, and could be better if relieved of a solid chunk of its 135 minutes. It is tonally all over the map, moving from the Bruno Dumont-esque religious questioning sequences to the cringe-worthy teacher-student hand-job to the sharp satire of the social worker's polite interview with the couple Dama and Leelop who insist on pretending they're not. Whether this shows the young Haitian-born Carrénard's multiple talent or simply a lack of discipline remains to be seen but he is certainly a talent to watch. Needless to say despite the various comparisons this film isn't quite like any other, and this is why is has been heralded with joy in France.

This film was released in Paris November 23, 2011 and received raves (Allociné 3.9) from the likes of Cahiers du Cinéma, Les Inrockuptibles and Libération, and many of the French critics heralded Carrénard as a breath of fresh air in the world of French cinema. The actors are almost uniformly as talented as they are attractive. Carrénard left Haiti at 11, then after living very briefly in Togo spent two years with his family on the coast of Normandy in France, followed by four years in French Guyana, and then she came to Paris to read Philosopy but says that when "Unlimited UGC cards" arrived (allowing low cost cinema attendance) he dropped out in 2004 to focus on the "moving image," much as Chris in Donoma reports quitting the lycée to focus on using her camera. English subtitles apparently were much improved from the "misspellings and grammatical errors" reported at Pusan, but seem awfully free at times. The tech features are rough and ready: the images work, though some dialogue is marred by uneven sound quality.

Thursday, March 29th | 8:30 PM | FSLC
Saturday, March 31st | 4:15 PM | MoMA

A virtuoso passage from the film on video from which the still above is taken. A girl (Salma) is turned on by seeing a boy (Dacio) picking pockets on the Metro. She takes her valuables out of her wallet and puts in her name and address, and leaves the wallet in her bag so the boy can steal it. It's all observed by Chris, who narrates the sequence.

ANGELINA NIKONOVA: TWILIGHT PORTRAIT (2011)--ND/NF

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BORISOV AND DIHOVICHNAYA IN TWILIGHT PORTRAIT

A woman on the wild side

In Twilight Portrait/Portret v sumerkakh, a woman is left off in a bad neighborhood by her lover and breaks a heel, has her handbag stolen and is raped by policemen. This changes things. Her husband is weak, dependent on her rich father. She doesn't think much of her best friends, as she tells them at a surprise birthday party. She tells no one of the rape. By chance she runs into one of the rapists, the handsomer one, and lies in wait for him with a broken bottle outside his shabby apartment building. Instead, she kisses him in the elevator. Later they have sex in the same elevator. For a while she pretends to go to visit her mother. "You need a break," her husband Ilya (Roman Merinov) has been telling her. But instead, she moves in with the rapist, his humorous total stoner younger brother (Vsevolod Voronov), and their gaga and vaguely menacing grandpa (Alexei Belousov). The stoner brother's brief monologue is one of the only fun moments of the piece. One might also include scenes at a trashy roadside restaurant that has daytime karaoke. When the about to be brutalized woman tries to order a glass of water it recalls Nicholson at the diner in Five Easy Pieces.

I'm talking about Marina, a chic, good looking woman, played by Olga Dihovichnaya, who co-produced and co-scripted this film, and lightens its effect. Supposing the great French actress Yolande Moreau took the role. Moreau, with her inwardness and dogged intensity and lack of youthful looks, would draw our sympathy and arouse our curiosity more. But Dihovichnaya is easy on the eye, and we can understand why Andrei (Sergei Borisov), the brutal but coldly handsome cop, would take her in for a while, despite his smacking her angrily every time she says "I love you."

Marina's life is obviously at a crossroads and that's made ten times more intense by her brutal afternoon. Her motives are unclear. She is a social worker dealing with children's problems and scenes show she is losing her sympathy for her clients and her faith in her ability to help. With typical overkill, the script has her tell somebody this as well. Marina's motives with Andrei are unclear. In shacking up with him she might be planning a delayed, subtler revenge than the broken bottle would provide. Or she might be experimenting, experiencing a kind of sexual Stockholm syndrome, or have lost her self respect. Or she might be trying to atone for her loss of rapport with her clients at work, or seeking to reconnect with the less fortunate classes she used to want to help.

Given Marina's job -- which she points out she can practice because her husband has a more lucrative one -- pedophilia, incest, and child abuse are secondary themes. And boredom. That may be what is at the roots of Marina's story, and the moral decay of modern Russia, and an alienation and angst Antonioni would understand, as he would understand the desolate landscapes on the outskirts of town (Marina and her husband are blessed with an enviable downtown apartment). But in Antonioni's day, the camera might roam the edge of town, but a film didn't begin with two rapes (the cops do a roadside prostitute before they later come to the "stuck up" Marina).

Twilight Portrait refers to a setting on a used camera Marina buys in a gesture of compassion -- or stupidity: nothing is unambiguous here -- and also knowingly points to a prevailing grayness and darkness that give the film a visual style (rather successfully: two still cameras, Canon EOS II's, were used throughout, without artificial light, and Eben Bull's cinematography has won a festival prize). The film feels as if Krzysztof Kieślowski had set out to offend feminists and combined two or three of his Decalogue films into one, a longish one (135 minutes) -- and tossed out his usual profound sense of humanity. Leslie Felperin reports from a Russian festival that the audience had very mixed reactions: "some felt the film offered a daring, psychologically complex but still-credible portrait of a woman's unexpected reaction to sexual violence; others, especially Russian and older viewers, felt the pic violated core feminist tenets, or simply considered it too unpleasant or implausible."

But almost anything can be considered "too unpleasant or implausible" nowadays: that's no excuse for rejecting this strong and original first film. My main criticism is that Nikonova and Dihovichnaya have, as I've already suggested, crammed too much into their screenplay. Even when Marina goes to the airport, she encounters a set of abusive parents. The writers could have relaxed and let their story breathe a bit. They try too hard. But they keep it watchable, and the scenes at the karaoke restaurant and the cop's dump of a flat are memorable.

Twilight Portrait is set in Nikonova's native Rostov-on-Don, in the south of Russia, with some attention to the accents and flavor of that area. It debuted at the Kinotavr Sochi Open Russian Film Festival, and in Europe, at Venice. It was also shown at Toronto, Warsaw, London, and Stockholm. It was watched for this review as part of the MoMA and Film Society of Lincoln Center New York series, New Directors/New Films. Public showings of the film at the latter are scheduled for these days and times:

Friday, March 30th | 6 PM | MoMA
Saturday, March 31st | 1 PM | FSLC

MADS BRÜGGER: THE AMBASSADOR (2011)--ND/NF

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MADS BRÜGGER IN THE AMBASSADOR

"The Ambassador" is a stretch. "The fake minor diplomat" wouldn't sound so good though.

This latest exploit of Mads Brügger, whom a festival blurb described as "between Michael Moore and Borat" in connection with his (more interesting) 2010 North Korean adventure, Red Chapel, is designed to show how easy it is to assume a fake identity and get diplomatic papers in order to deal blood diamonds in Africa. And he does this, sort of. He shaves his head, dons sharp suits (sort of) with handkerchiefs, ties, starched shirts, cuff links, big ring, aviator sunglasses and riding boots, puffs on cigars and purveys caviar and champagne, and, thus accoutered, poses as a "businessman diplomat." He pays bribes and deals with government agents and the owner of a diamond mine, pretending as cover to be setting up a match factory, and all these dealings he has filmed secretly. In pretending to start the match factory he claims to encourage local industry against the exploitation of the French and the newly encroaching Chinese and employing (token) pygmies as truly local help. The match factory being a scam, probably leaves a dozen or two non-pygmies also feeling badly scammed. But his excuse is, diplomats scam people all the time. He makes some racist remarks, supposedly to lure locals into his confidence, and that may offend film viewers. But it's all part of the game. And there is always the possibility that we're being scammed too, somewhat, at least.

The process begins in Europe, where Brügger talks to two people who actually specialize in brokering diplomatic papers for African countries, Brit Colin Evans and Dutchman Willem Tijssen. That this is not legal only makes it more expensive; but it can be done because so many African governments are so dicey. The deal he settles on is to get a diplomatic passport in Liberia, and set up to do business in the Central African Republic, a place that has diamonds and gold (as well as some oil), and not much stable government or rule of law. It's open season there, apparently. Brüggers pays out a lot of cash (presumably funded by Lars von Trier as was his last film) and is promised a Liberian passport, drivers license and honorary degree, as well as a post as the Liberian ambassador to the Central African Republic. He gets the drivers license, and what serves for a while as a passport; it may not be valid, he learns later. Nor do his ambassadorial duties ever really develop. But how would they? The CAR is a lawless state anyway. Tijssen, who seems to have been the major agent in providing Brüggers with Liberian credentials, has protested his unauthorized inclusion in the film and tried to block it from being shown, but he has not proven his innocence and Brüggers has said, "If Tijssen were my PR agent, then I’d say ‘Good work!'"

Nonetheless, in the process of almost setting himself up to be a dealer in blood diamonds, Brügger, who is called "Mr. Cortzen" because his real full name is Mads Brügger Cortzen and that's on his new diplomatic passport, meets with a government functionary who also owns a diamond mine, the head of CAR secret service, who is French and later disappears, to the Indian consul, and eventually several high government officials. He visits the diamond mine, a somewhat dangerous trip on a small plane, and he arranges to have two pygmy assistants whom he declares are the only people he can trust -- because he thinks his translator is in league with the diamond mine owner. Meanwhile it turns out his Liberian passport may not be valid, and the Liberians never grant him the necessary accompanying documents, nor can the European who brokered the passport for him help. He is warned by the Indian consul that if he buys a lot of diamonds his diplomatic status won't count once word goes out and he'll be lucky to get a big fine and have the diamonds seized at the airport -- lucky to get out alive.

So this is really the kind of operation that would require more experienced, tougher, more devious, richer men than Mads Brügger, and would take years to set up. But "Mr. Cortzen" goes through the motions, and all the dealings, all the uncertainties and worries, notably about getting the necessary diplomatic papers, are filmed secretly, and in The Ambassador we get to see them. One interpretation is that Brügger aims to appear to be a sucker, to show off the veniality of those he's dealing with. And that may be true. But most of the time it merely appears he is trying to succeed at the game, only the large sum he paid to the diplomatic passport broker wasn't enough, and he doesn't have the right connections all along the line. His contract with M. Gilbert, the functionary who is also the diamond mine owner, is not accepted by the government, and vice versa. Is he trying to fail or is he just doomed to fail? It's a tough call. But we must bear in mind that if he truly failed he might meet with the same fate as the French head of CAR security, whom he secretly interviewed, but who later was assassinated -- like his predecessor, it turns out. Why did he take the job? Brügger barely scratches the surface of the craziness here.

This is an elaborate put-on, and it illustrates that such things do happen. And Brüggers has entered the world in which they do. However, this is a less interesting film than Red Chapel for various reasons. In Red Chapel, Brüggers, with several others, posing as a cultural mission, bringing an experimental theater troupe, travels around North Korea, and films a place that western journalists rarely get a chance to see. The Ambassador, on the other hand, mainly just shows Brügger himself parading around in his semi-colonial outfits, making semi-racist remarks, telling a Hitler joke, and talking to various functionaries -- and pygmies. Actually the pygmies don't say much. The world of blood diamonds is corrupt, but we kind of knew that.

The Ambassador had its North American debut at Sundance, where Red Chapel was a hit. It has also been in some other festivals. It was watched for this review as part of the MoMA-Film Society of Lincoln Center series, New Directors/New Films, and its days and times of public screening for this series are as follows:

Friday, March 30th | 9 PM | MoMA
Saturday, March 31st | 3:45 PM | FSLC

ALEJANDRO LANDES: PORFIRIO (2011)--ND/NF

http://img859.imageshack.us/img859/7895/porfirio.jpg
JARLINSSON RAMIREZ AND PORFIRIO RAMIREZ ALDANA IN PORFIRIO

Amazonian Bresson

Porfirio is a work made in the often powerful new Latin American "slow film" vein, and this time the authentic people and settings are wielded by Brazilian-born director Alejandro Landes in reference to a dramatic Colombian crime story he found in the newspaper. The details of the crime are withheld till near the end. In fact they are too much and too long withheld to integrate drawn-out quotidian prelude and final crime into a coherent whole. If Landes had achieved that integration, the result might have been something brilliant and impressive. Instead, the film is best at depicting the world of a handicapped person with vivid physicality, as a fresh mixture of sensuality and grinding monotony. The dramatic finale, the crime story, merely seems tacked on. Porfirio is a first feature that is not quite a success. It nonetheless marks Landes in the view of festival organizers as a new director to watch. The film creates a monotony that has been called "Bressonian," and it may be that fans of Bresson will be its best audience outside festivals. But this is a more tropical and steamy world than Bresson's. It's filled with the noise and clatter of a Colombian Amazonian town and dominated by its mustachioed protagonist, who despite his frustrations, sometimes wears a little smile.

If we began with the headline that attracted Landes to his story, "Paralyzed Man in Diapers Hijacks Plane to Bogotá," the experience of watching the film might be different. But nothing of that is hinted at. With a documentarian's dogged loyalty to his subject, Landes lived around his provincial cast for five months before shooting the first frame. Though he revealed his decision to do so only at the last minute, he chose the actual protagonist, Porfirio Ramirez Aldana, to play himself. In the film, Porfirio's dissatisfaction comes out gradually. He seems a strong and under the circumstances cheerful man. He is cared for by his unemployed son Lissin (Jarlinsson Ramirez, playing the role of his older brother, who was Porfiriio's actual accomplice) and a young woman, Jasbleidy (Yor Jasbleidy Santos), in a shabby, noisy quarter of the tropical provincial town. Unable to move about without a hand-driven wheelchair, Porfirio sells minutes on his cell phone to locals. We learn he was paralyzed by shots from a police weapon and he seeks redress from the state and consults a lawyer, who is never available when he calls or visits. Eventually he remedies an injustice with a crime -- which we do not actually see.

The editing, excellent at showing the physicality of Porforio's robust but limited bodily existence, doesn't try to depict time through repeated daily rituals but skips around randomly. Porfirio and Lissin are shown swimming, but mostly Porfirio does not leave the house. Porfirio plays himself without any modesty, relieving himself on camera for Lissin and having real sex with Jasbleidy.

The non-intervention of Landes is not to be taken too seriously. The entire film was story-boarded and the actors were given lines to deliver. The stylistically simple but often handsome camerawork by Thimiois Bakatakis is by no means unstudied. Head-on shots follow artfully symmetrical setups and sometimes shift position multiple times during a single scene. As noted, Landes withholds much information about his protagonist. If we knew not only hints of what's to come but more of the background, that Porfirio's injury was from police crossfire and that he was once a successful landowner and rancher in Playa Rica who was forced into these straightened circumstances in the city of Florencia in a different part of the country by civil strife, we might be more sympathetic, might understand Porfirio's growing rage better. But Landes prefers to imply that rage, bit by bit, in small daily occurrences, and only hint at Porfirio's hijacking scheme.

Porfirio has the myth-making habit of making up rhymes about himself and his life. He invents some for Jasbleidy after the sex scene. At the end, after arming himself with weapons hidden in his diapers and setting out for an air trip to Bogotá with Lissin, and then a strange, ominous scene, Porfirio recites his own rhymes poetically explaining what happened. Those and the press notes confirm that he was subsequently confined by the government to his house. This restriction must have been lifted so Landes could shoot Porfirio going into town in his wheel chair to visit a law office and a bingo hall, not to mention the airport.

Alejandro Landes has an cosmopolitan background. He was born in Brazil of a Colombian mother and Ecuadorian father, educated at Brown University and later employed as a writer for the Miami Herald. His Pofirio was included in the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes 2011 and also was shown at Toronto, Pusan, Stockholm, and Miami. It was watched for this review as part of New Directors/New Fims 2012 (jointly sponsored by MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center), where it will be shown to the public as follows:

Saturday, March 31st | 7:30 PM | MoMA
Sunday, April 1st | 3:00 PM | FSLC