New Directors/New Films and Film Comment Selects 2013
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Index of Filmleaf reviews of ND/NF 2013
THE ACT OF KILLING (Joshua Oppenheimer 2012)
ANTON’S RIGHT HERE (Lyubov Arkus 2012)
BLUE CAPRICE (Alexandre Moors 2012)
BURN IT UP DJASSA (Lonesome Solo 2012)
LES COQUILLETTES (Sophie Letourneur 2012)
THE COLOR OF THE CHAMELEON (Emil Christov 2012)
DIE WELT (Alex Pitstra 2012)
EMPEROR VISITS THE HELL (Li Luo 2013)
A HIJACKING (Tobias Lindholm2012)
JARDS (Eryk Rocha 2012)
JISEUL (O Muel 2012) 109min
KÜF (Ali Aydin 2012)
LEONES (Jazmin Lopez 2012)
L’INTERVALLO (Leonardo Di Costanzo 2012)
OUR NIXON (Penny Lane 2013)
PEOPLE’S PARK (Libbie D. Cohn & J.P. Sniadecki 2012)
RENGAINE (Rachid Djaïdani 2012)
THE SHINE OF DAY (Tizza Covi & Rainer Frimmel 2012)
SOLDATE JEANNETTE (Daniel Hoesl 2012)
STORIES WE TELL (Sarah Polley 2012)
THEY’LL COME BACK (Marcelo Lordello 2012)
TOWER ( Kazik Radwanski 2012)
TOWHEADS (Shannon Plumb 2013)
UPSTREAM COLOR (Shane Carruth 2012)
VIOLA (Matías Piñeiro 2013
Forums comments and notifications thread for these two series is here.
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Still from A Hijacking
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Film Comment Selects (February 18-28, 2013) and NewDirectors/NewFilms (March 20- 31, 2013) are two important separate series put on early in the year 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 lately has not had a program of press screenings. In between these two every year is the FSLC-UniFrance series, Rendez-Vous with French Cinema (February 28-March 10, 2013). If I can I will provide thorough coverage of all the films of both the Rendez-Vous and New Directors, or all the new ones anyway.
Manohla Dargis has an introduction to Film Comment Selects 2013 in the NYTimes. (Feb 18, 2013).
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From the New York Times online "Arts Beat" of 16 Jan. 2013:
Seven Features Announced for New Directors/New Films Series
By DAVE ITZKOFF
Quote:
Sarah Polley’s documentary exploration into her own family and Shane Carruth’s followup to his 2004 debut, Primer, are among the features that will be presented at this year’s New Directors/New Films series, the annual program presented by the Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the organizations said on Wednesday.
Among the seven films announced so far for the program, which will run from March 20 through 31, is Stories We Tell, a nonfiction feature directed by Ms. Polley (Take This Waltz, Away From Her) that combines home movies, re-creations and interviews with family members to tell the story of her mother, Diane. The series will also present Upstream Color, a new film written and directed by Mr. Carruth, and which is described in a news release as "a love story embedded in a horrifying kidnap plot whose full import isn’t revealed until the final, poignant moments."
The five other selections for New Directors/New Films that were announced on Wednesday are The Color of the Chameleon, a darkly comic spy film by the Bulgarian director Emil Christov; A Hijacking, a thriller by the Danish director Tobias Lindholm; Hold Back, by the French director Rachid Djaïdani, about a black Christian man who becomes engaged to marry a Muslim Arab woman; Peoples Park, by J.P. Sniadecki and Libbie Dina Cohn, which explores a Chinese public square in a single tracking shot; and Viola, in which the Argentine director Matías Piñeiro updates the story of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night in modern-day Buenos Aires.
Alexander Moors: BLUE CAPRINCE (2013)
ALEXANDRE MOORS: BLUE CAPRICE (2013)
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Blue Caprice
New angles on a killing spree
Based on the 2002 Beltway sniper attacks (but with a tighter timeline) in which over a period of several weeks ten random victims were killed and three were wounded by a pair of snipers hidden in a Chevy Caprice (the "Blue Caprice" of the story) in Washington D.C., Alexandre Moors’s feature debut is a semi-road movie that looks at the two killers' stories prior to the event. The film follows the elder John and 17-year old Lee as they eventually prepare to carry out their acts of gun violence. Isaiah Washington and Tequan Richmond play the duo killers, the older John Allen Muhammad and the young and largely silent Lee Malvo, respectively. Abandoned by his mother for the last time on the island of Antigua, where they live, Lee is alone and hungry. He seeks out John, first seen with his three children, and is taken in by him, partly because he is barred from seeing the children again. John becomes a mentor for Lee preaching hate and teaching marksmanship in what develops into a powerful if warped father-son style relationship. Blind loyalty grows, and death becomes mundane and necessary. Alexandre Moors, who grew up in the suburbs of Paris, has chosen to focus on the relationship more than on the acts, though they indeed do come in the tense final segment of the film. Moors and his screenwriter R.F.I. Porto present the killings somewhat indirectly, focusing more on its sources than its physical trappings, though at once point we are hidden in the trunk of the Caprice with Lee as he targets people in a grocery story parking lot. More importantly we hear John's ultimately grandiose scheme to create widening mayhem, starting with random killings following no discernible pattern.
Some viewers at Sundance were troubled that Blue Caprice makes the two killers "sympathetic." It does not make them sympathetic. It explores a little of their lives immediately before they meet and during their brief period together before their rampage. This provides a narrative structure. It doesn't provide an explanation, let alone a justification.
We first see John, it's true, not as a murderer but a seemingly ordinary man playing nicely with his three children. Young Lee arrives similarly with initial sympathy because his mother has abandoned him. He is a lost boy. As time goes on, it also becomes clear that he's smart. In time Muhammad's inner sickness begins to show, and he begins to seem bent on turning Lee toward hate and cruelty. Moors doesn't avoid the final violence. He merely does not revel in or exploit it. It arrives after a period of growing tension. John Muhammad and Lee meet in the early scenes on the island of Antigua. Then they go together to Washington state. Introducing Malvo as his son, Muhammad falls in with old army pal Ray (Tim Blake Nelson) and his wife Jamie (Joey Lauren Adams). As time goes on Muhammad reveals the he feels deep rage over his own divorce and his separation from his children by his ex-wife. We never really know what Lee feels. When he shows a natural talent as a marksmen when shooting in the woods with military buddies Ray and John. This inspires John to use him as a shooter. We can only guess what moral confusion and desperate need on Lee's part would lead him to become an assassin to please his adopted "dad."
Blue Caprice is notable for its crabwise entry into the world of a pair of killers. Some will feel something is missing -- a fuller explanation of the origins of these acts; a more climactic development of the acts themselves. When the time comes for the two to be caught, nothing could be more low-keyed. You have to take your satisfaction in the blind mystery of the relationship, which has a certain clarity and beauty -- and being taken into the car, even taught how to drive it, that is going to be a frightening hidden weapon terrorizing citizens.
The film owes a lot to its excellent cast, cinematography that makes good use of constantly changing venues, and a sharp, pared-down screenplay by promising first-timer R.F.I. Porto, who was signed with UTA (United Talent Agency) at Sundance after the screening of this film. The Irish cinematographer Brian O'Carroll does some classy work with color and light. Isaiah Washington and Tequan Richmond both do outstanding work. Washington has the extraordinarily difficult task of showing John's bitterness, anger, and hatred without making him a mere villain, and Richmond does something at least equally tricky, showing motivation and emotion in a character who rarely spells out his feelings. A useful innovation of the filmmakers is to have Lee find and periodically read aloud from a military sniper manual. If Blue Caprice works, which I think it does, it's because it leaves you with memories you can't digest, and also can't get out of your mind.
Raffi Asdourian wrote a helpful short review of the film at its Sundance debut and Ty Cooper provides another. David Rooney's Hollywood Reporter review goes into a bit more detail.
Blue Caprice was screened for this review as part of the New Directors/New Films series presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and MoMA, New York, in which it is the opening night presentation. The film originally appeared as part of the ten-film Next series at the January 2013 Sundance Festival.
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Isiah Washington, Alexandre Moors and Tequan Richmond
at Sundance
Li Luo: EMPEROR VISITS THE HELL (2012)
LI LUO: EMPEROR VISITS THE HELL (2012)
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Emperor Visits the Hell
Old tale performs new function
Winner of the Dragons & Tigers Award for Young Cinema at the October 2012 Vancouver Film Festival, Li’'s film Emperor Visits the Hell is a film adapting three chapters of the Ming Dynasty novel Journey to the West to a modern Chinese setting. The new film has been called one of the more promising recent works from an independent Chinese filmmaker. In it, Emperor Li Shimin is transformed into a bureaucratic boss in a big city, where the crooked Dragon King’s attempt to change the weather has backfired and led to a death sentence. Li pulls the rug out from under everyone, from the audience to those whose power has gone to their heads. Or so says the festival blurb. For me this film did not work. It's mundane sequences might make ironic sense if one knew the old stories very well, but even so, they would not make this into a good film. Yes, it has strange, dreamlike moments. But Li does not seem to know where he is going with all this, as indicated by a final drunken scene that has no relationship to "Monkey" and is just self-indulgent blather about the future of China.
Richard Schieb, who reviewed the film at Vancouver, points out the story has been filmed frequently. These include the Japanese film Monkey Sun (1940); the Chinese animated film Princess Iron Fan (1941) based on a partial segment of the story; the Japanese film Songoku: The Road to the West/The Adventures of Sun Wu Hung (1959); the Japanese anime Alakazam the Great (1961); the Chinese animated film The Monkey King/Havoc in Heaven (1965); the popular Japanese tv series "Monkey" (1978-9); a South Korean television series called "Journey to the West" (1982); a Japanese TV series with the same title (1993); director Jeffrey Lau’s two-part Hong Kong film A Chinese Odyssey Part 1: Pandora’s Box (1994) and Part 2: Cinderella (1995) with Stephen Chow as Monkey; a Japanese anime TV series "Monkey Magic" (1998), and so on and on including another remake by Jeffrey Lau, a US-made Jackie Chan vehicle, and more.
Sheib thinks the new story resembles Cocteau's Orphee and Black Orpeheus in turning a classic "myth" into a new form in a modern setting. Li Luo doesn't change the magical aspect of the original story, the voyage between heaven and hell including encounters with traditional gods and legends. But in order to make the setting contemporary, the director makes the emperor into a traditional calligrapher whose court is just some corporate offices, while the Dragon King is turned into a petty mobster running his operations out of a bar-cum-pool hall.
Ghosts out wandering the grounds of a palace now look like just people out for an evening stroll. Li Luo has created something quite unlike all the earlier adaptations of the traditional stories, turning toward the everyday and mundance, with a special difference. He brings out an innate humor in the material, by presenting it in a very toned down manner.
Li presents a world dominated by small-tim gangsters, corporate stiffs, and petty bureaucrats -- a satirical version of contemporary China. Or just a realistic one? But in the context of the ancient stories, these characters merely seem like odd stand-ins.
When the character representing the monk Xuanzang/Tripitaka (the hero of "The Journey to the West") arrives toward the film's end, he must get an exit visa to leave China. The film's finale is self-referential, a filming of the wrap part of the film itself. The actor playing the emperor, presumably now just being himself, drunkenly begins to complain about how hard it is to get funding for the arts in contemporary China. And so forth.
Emperor Visits the Hell was screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films at Lincoln Center, March 2013.
Emil Christov: THE COLOR OF THE CHAMELEON (2012)
EMIL CHRISTOV: THE COLOR OF THE CHAMELEON (2012)
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Ruscen Vidinliev in The Color of the Chameleon
The crazy scheming of a nonentity in the almost-post-communist world
Blurb: "Batko Stamenov (Ruscen Vidinliev) is the ideal secret agent. Orphaned at an early age, he was adopted by his aunt, who later confessed to having been his real mother. But when she passes away and the doctor informs Batko that she died a virgin, it becomes clear to him that lying is a family trait. So when he’s approached by a member of the secret police who wants to recruit him as a spy, he’s more than happy to oblige. For his first mission, he is assigned to infiltrate the so-called "Club for New Thinking." This subversive student group meets to discuss a pseudo-philosophical novel called Zincograph, which tells the story of a raving lunatic who works at the Royal Zincography by day, and by night creates an ever-expanding — and wholly fictional — web of spies and saboteurs that bamboozles the country’s actual secret police." I might add that Batko winds up doing much the same himself, learning zinc litho printing, and reporting on the book club's members to his security boss.
Christov's Color of the Chameleon/Tsvetat na hameleona is a deliberately surreal -- and elaborately droll -- depiction of the simultaneous breakdown and perpetuation of the practices of the communist security and espionage bureaucracies after the fall of the Soviet empire focusing on the odd career of one ostensibly vacuous and unimportant man, albeit one with a zest for life and his semi-imaginary espionage roles -- who attempts to seize significance, as it were, from the jaws of nonentity. All this is in a scenario adapted by Vladislav Todorov from his own 2010 novel Zincograph, centers on young misfit/perfect fit Batko Stamenov (Ruscen Vidinliev a generally appealing tongue-in-cheek protagonist). This is an elaborate, ingenious, and beautiful film, something of which Bulgaria, which hasn't dominated the international film festival circuit of late, may be justly proud -- or might be, if it did not all seem so trivial, somehow. That is perhaps the fault of Comrade Todorov. It all seems like a droll game to him. And one does see its absurdity. But then one remembers Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's devastating study of the secret police in East Germany The Lives of Others, also just a few years before the fall of communism, and one realizes that this stuff was pretty serious and pretty awful, and Christov's and Todorov's farce seems a tad insensitive. And some of the archness seems heavy-handed from the outset: how funny can you find the protagonist's excessive masturbation, or the State's theory that it can lead to epilepsy? Still, there is fun to be had, and this is an awfully good-looking film much of the way.
Unfolding in the years just before and just after the fall of Communism, this black comedy about an irrelevant but enthusiastic secret police informant "goes down a rabbit hole into a realm of twisted absurdity," says a festival blurb -- a description that could easily be the opening of a damning review. Another blurb enticingly, if over-enthusiastically, suggests Christov has made "a black, absurdist riff on the dank literary labyrinths of Kafka, Le Carré and Don DeLillo, by way of the cinematic influence of David Lynch and Bernardo Bertolucci." Well, now. Actually Le Carré is mentioned in the dialogue, but not those other guys. And the thing is, Le Carré has had some interesting things to say about the post Berlin Wall world. If Todorov is trying to make his way from Le Carré to DiLilllo by way of Kafka, that may be his problem. But all this makes more sense than some viewers seem to have thought, even though the basic idea is a little too easy: that cold war paranoia was so absurd, after the time passed it made just as much sense to invent new security games of nothing. Hence when Batko Stamenov is fired by his state security boss for his irrelevant and self-indulgent reports, he invents his own agency of "SEX" and hires young intellectuals he knows from the book club, whose rituals mimicking his rituals with them from those of his own former boss.
By this point and indeed long before -- Todorov could have done a good deal more paring down of his novel's elaborate details -- things are becoming an intricate network of absurdist filigrees, creating an effect that some viewers find wonderfully hip, while others see it as increasingly devoid of sense. In either case, Bulgaria is back with its first film at at New Directors/New Films in New York, it's reported, in thirty-five years. Reviews by from Toronto came from David Nosair, who loathed this film (and seems not to have understood it), and James McNally, who found a number of things to admire, but not all. An online review by Joe Bendel provides some insights too. Add one to the cinematic chronicles of communist nuttiness.
The Cholor of the Chameleon, (2012) 114mins., was shown at various festivals, including Toronto. It was screened for this review at the New Directors/New Films series, a joint presentation of FSLC and MoMA, New York, March 2013.
Kazik Radwanski: TOWER (2012)
KAZIK RADWANSKI: TOWER (2012)
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DEREK BOGART IN TOWER
Not so young any more
For his (ultra-short) feature debut set in suburban Toronto Kazik Radwanski trains his camera on a character lacking much center or direction, perhaps even much identity, considering he's thirty-four. Still living at home with his parents, Derek (Derek Bogart) struggles to make a small animation about a green creature building rock towers. He proves unskilled at maintaining friendships or romantic involvements, until he encounters Nicole (Nicole Fairbaim), who offers a glint of promise, but that's quite temporary. Derek does part-time construciton work for his uncle, but seems more preoccupied with his slow attempt to create his Shrek-like digital animation on the home computer, though there is no sign he's really worked much on it. On weekends Derek goes out to local nightclubs to drink and dance and trawl for dates. One success, Nicole (Fairbairn), which only makes him more awkward and uncomfortable, is only temporary. Radwanski's film, like its protagonist, doesn't really amount to much. Not only do its vérité methods lead to little enlightenment or structure; the character of Derek himself seems somehow unconvincing, as if Derek Bogart were not good enough an actor (if he is even acting) to make his character's nerdiness and inadequacy convincing. Underneath, Derk Bogart just seems like a pretty average, cheerful, goodnatured young Canadian guy. It is hard to find a movie here.
The conception of the character and various plot elements are very reminiscent of Todd Solondz's 2012 feature Dark Horse, and the age and social and psychological underdevelopment of the man living with his parents are similar (except that Solondz's character is New Jersey and Jewish and Derek is Toronto). The occupations, such as they are, are a bit different. Derek resembles Solondz's Abe (Jordan Gelber) in being obnoxious and egocentric, despite his lack of accomplishment. However every aspect of Abe's story is developed more fully and interestingly than Derek's. Some fans of Radwanski's film feel it shows great control and precision in its portrait, but the action doesn't develop Derek, only shows him speaking in a series of vignettes, in which the camera is annoyingly close up on Derek so that there is no visual context. Dark Horse picks up a wealth of meaning through its relationship with Doldondz's oeuvre and his skill as an auteur which Tower at this stage lacks. This may best be considered a long short that may lead eventually to a more complete and accomplished feature.
Some viewers seem capable of reading a great deal into Tower. Here's an excerpt from a more positive, if not particularly convincing, description from the TIFF by Fernanco F. Croce: “'Just sort of fading in and out here,' he murmurs under the sheets as his not-quite-girlfriend stares at him. Often framing a stubbly, balding face against a galaxy of out-of-focus abstractions, Radwanski’s camera reveals an ability to lose itself in visceral action—a dip into a bathtub filled with ice cubes, a late-night rush of head-banging beats and popcorn—even as its gaze remains as vacant as the protagonist’s. Part deadpan theater of evasion and confrontation, part acrid retort to mumblecore celebrations of the arrested man-child, it’s a sustained accumulation of anxiety that’s capped by an intriguing anticlimax involving a hissing, scavenging raccoon."
"Intriguing anticlimax" certainly puts a positive spin on it. Concluding the film with the capture of a raccoon is about is feeble a device as can be imagined. Maybe Radwanski is the real Derek. This sub-mumblecore effort hardly deserves your attention.
Tower, 78 mins., debuted at Locarno, and was also at Toronto and several other festivals. It was screened for this review at the FSLC-MoMA series, New Directors/New Films, March 2013.
Tobias Lindholm: A HIJACKING (2012)
TOBIAS LINDHOLM: A HIJACKING (2012)
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PILOU ASBAEK in HIJACKING
Negotiations with modern pirates
Danish director Tobias Lindholm (who has worked with Thomas Vinterberg on a lot of writing, including the admired 2012 Mads Mikkelsen film The Hunt and penned the "Borgen" TV series) gives us in Hijacking an intense process-story based on a real events -- several recent hijackings of Danish ships by Somali pirates. About to head home, the Danish cargo ship MV Rozen is seized in the Indian Ocean. But in the film, the actual moment of the hyjacking is bypassed. Instead the film begins by establishing ship's cook Mikkel Hartmann (Pilou Asbæk) as a warm and human guy with wife and young daughter back home by showing him call them from the ship. Then the story skips ahead to when the hijacking has actually happened. It divides its focus between the Rozen and the shipping line's Copenhagen head-office. Originally Lindholm thought of depicting everything from shipboard. But in an interview he recounts how his mother was a classic socialist and so he decided it would give him some sort of extra maverick son pleasure to look at things also particularly from the capitalists' point of view. We get plent of long looks at the raw, ragged, scary events on board as well. The result is a peculiar kind of procedural that balances the naturalistic with the traditionally suspenseful, bosses with the grunts. Lindholm and his fine cast have produced a very authentic-feeling story and a fine feature, his second, his first working solo (his debut was the 2010 prison drama R, co-directed and co-written with Michael Noer).
Ignoring the advice of hired hijacking expert Connor Julian (played by actual corporate security officer Gary Skjoldmose Porter), the company's CEO, Peter C. Ludvigsen (Søren Malling), makes the decision not to use a professional negotiator but do his own dealing by phone -- and occasionally by FAX -- with the hostage-takers, represented by Omar (Abdihakin Asgar), a multilingual translator/middleman hired by the pirates, who seem to speak no English, certainly no Danish. It is the cool but arrogant Omar with whom Peter, in consultation with Connor Julian, must constantly deal, carrying out a traditional bargaining process that starts at $21 million requested by the hijackers and $210,000 offered by the company. As the Somalis slowly go down and the CEO slowly goes up, the days turn into weeks and then months, Mikkel and his shipmates aboard the Rozen must endure rapidly deteriorating conditions and increasingly harrowing psychological pressures. The film provides a growing sense of the dangerous responsibility Peter has taken on himself (there are other partners who pressure him) as well as the suffering of the family members at home.
Hollywood Reporter's Neil Young called A Hijacking "One of the more unheralded standouts at this year's Venice," and it has qualities of mainstream appeal, even if its being Danish and conveying most of its excitement through talk (negotiation) rather than action (armed encounter) make it partly a hard sell internationally. There are some choices that are limitations. The film provides good authentic feel in the shipboard and boardroom scenes, but does not expand secondary characters in depth, showing the ordeal primarily through Peter and Mikkel.
A Hijacking/Kapringen debuted in Venice's "Orizzonti" sidebar and continued at Toronto and other international festivals, opening in Denmark Sept. 20, 2012. It has UK, France, and several other country openings in summer 2013. It was screened for this review at the FSLC/MoMA March 2013 series New Directors/New Films in New York. A Magnolia Films release in the US.
Lonesome Solo: BURN IT UP DJASSA (2012)
LONESOME SOLO: BURN IT UP DJASSA (2012)
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African urban tragedy
Created with minimal means by a collective in Abijan, Ivory Coast, Lonesome Solo's film tells a schematically tragic story concerning a family divided by poverty. The dialogue is the local urban street slang of Nouchi, with a lot of French. It was all shot in eleven days with a lot of improvisation in the ghetto (or "djassa") of Wassakara where it all takes place. In the story, the mother took Tony Abdoul Karim Konate) and Ange (Adélaïde Ouattara) out of school so their brother Mike (Mammadou Diamandé) could go to school, and Mike has become a relative success, serving as a police officer, while Tony, also known as Dabagaou. Mike has gotten Ange a job working at a hairdressing salon, but she doesn't like it. Recently she has begun working secretly at night as a prostitute. As for Tony, he has been scraping by as a walking cigarette salesman on the high life pathway called Princess Street. With a jaunty step, he takes a naive pleasure in entering the gangsterish world. But he gets involved in card games in the street and loses his money and his cigarettes. Later in a public place where he hears Ange accused of theft by what turns out to be one of her johns, Tony gets into a knife fight. When Mike is called in later to investigate, he makes a horrible discovery.
The action is periodically interrupted by a narrator (Mohammad Bamba) who recounts events before they are enacted on screed, giving the narrative the feel of traditional village storytelling. There are also some lively moments of urban African popular music.
Burn It Up is direct, vibrant filmmaking. The acting is sincere and the story is intense but both are quite lacking in nuance. It is fortunate that this film could be made under what are obviously difficult conditions, and it may breathe life into the film industry of a country where it is said cinemas have been closed and turned into churches. Cinematography is unsubtle but decent. The title, Le djassa a pris feu, reminded me a little of Jean-François Richet's 1997 sophomore feature's title, Ma 6-T va crack-er ("My Project's Going to Blow Up").
Burn It Up Djassa/Le djassa a pris feu, 70 mins., was screened for this review as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center-MoMA series New Directors/New Films, March 2013. It is also going to be included in the New York African Film Festival, also presented by the FSLC, April 3-9, 2013.
Rachid Djaïdani: RENGAINE (2012)
RACHID DJAÏDANI: RENGAINE (2012)
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SABRINA HAMIDA AND STÉPHANE SOO MONGO IN RENGAINE
Witty, inventive Parisian guerrilla ghetto movie
In the first scene of Rengaine ("Refrain"), a Parisian ghetto Romeo and Juliet story, black Christian struggling actor Dorcy (Stéphane Soo Mongo) and his girlfriend of one year, the Arab Muslim girl Sabrina (Sabrina Hamida), decide to get married. Sabrina's eldest brother Slimane (Slimane Dazi) learning of this promptly begins contacting the 39 “brothers” in their extended clan to prevent this taboo union. Just what the "39 brothers" means isn't specified; partly, it's a joke mocking tight all-male clans. And that turns out to be even more tongue-in-cheek when a missing older eldest brother turns up, who is gay. Eventually it turns out that Slimane himself secretly dates a Jewish singer called Nina (Nina Morato). Shot largely in the streets and somewhat on the run, this film is a rapid-fire series of very short vignettes, many of which are meant to surprise and amuse. Rengaine is a celebration of the multicultural life of Paris's less posh neighborhoods and a mockery of old-fashioned ideas from traditional cultures lingering on in modern urban settings, specifically, the City of Light. What it lacks in polish the film makes up in inventiveness and promise.
"This film," says a festival blurb, "is part love letter to the irresistible energy of Paris, part call for interracial tolerance." Said to have been a nine-year project and bearing a French completion date of 2010, as its Allociné page will show (it got a very high press rating of 4.0). Rengaine, which means "Refrain" but whose English title is Hold Back, is rapid-fire guerrilla filmmaking that plays with ideas and situations in an inventive way that brings to remind a similar recent product, Djinn Carrémard's Donoma (ND/NF 2012). These films are remembered for certain moments and for their energy, and their value will come in how much they manage, if they do, to penetrate into and fertilize French mainstream filmmaking.
In the case of Rengaine, the love story of Sabrina and Dorcy seems almost an afterthought at first. Many other scenes intervene, usually of Slimane meeting with a panoply of different "brothers," but also of Dorcy's uneven attempts to be an actor and at one point a singer, before enough scenes of the loving couple appear on screen to develop their relationship a bit. The notable thing about them is that they are neither young nor particularly pretty. Dorcy is mellow and a bit goofy. His motivation as an actor seems uncertain, though towards the end, in a deliberately deceptive sequence, he seems to be giving his all. Sabrina is a thoroughly modern lady, very firm in the lack of any need to justify her ecumenical affections to family members. But when Slimane expresses this notion to his Jewish girlfriend Nina to explain his unwillingness to introduce her to his mother or father or any other kin, the statements ring completely false. Of such ironies is the ingenious patchwork of Rengaine composed.
Djaïdani partly uses the forty brothers idea to present a kaleidoscopic society of Arab men, not a single one of whom is old or bearded but who seem all other ages and all occupations. He doesn't actually photograph them with their occupational accoutrements, but one is reminded of August Sander's portraits. The undertone is to say that there can be no unanimity here, but that Slimane's conservative closed-mindedness to Sabrina's marrying "out" will no longer wash with the majority of them, not in Paris.
If this was made with "no money" as is reported that explains the fact that the cameras used are rudimentary, but the one negative element is that the images are very rough and jerky, absurdly so at times. It's out of keeping with the sophistication of the concept and the richness of the scenes otherwise.
The 38-year-old Rachid Djaïdani has a lively provenance. Of Mixed Algerian and Sudanese descent, he began as a production assistant on Matthieu Kassovitz's groundbreaking Hate in 1995, then became famous as writer of a 1999 banlieue-set novel, Boumkoeur, which became a bestseller (he now has three novels published by Éditions Seuil). He then was a TV and stage actor and for five years a member of Peter Brooks international touring company. On top of all that he's been a champion boxer. He previously made a 55-minute documentary called Sur Ma Ligne (2006).
Rengaine (sometimes called Hold Back in English) debuted at Cannes in 2012 as part of Directors' Fortnight. It won the FIPRESCI Prize there, and later the French César for Best First Film. It has showed at a series of other festivals, opening in Paris cinemas November 14 to very favorable reviews, as mentioned above. Screened for this review as a part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center's and MoMA's New Directors/New Films series in March 2013.
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RACHID DJAÏDANI
A French article on the filmmaker by Ollivier Pourriol, "Rachid Djaïdani : la révélation cannoise," appeared in Marianne.
Tizza Covi, Rainer Frimmel: THE SHINE OF DAY (2012)
TIZZA COVI, RAINER FRIMMEL: THE SHINE OF DAY (2012)
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Two contrasting characters in search of a plot
Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel are now becoming known in the film festival world for their semi-fictional, semi-documentary films focused on circus performers. I saw their 2010 debut feature La Pivellina ("Little Girl," ND/NF, also SFIFF), though it seemed too desultory an effort for me to write about. This new one has more warmth and momentum, though exactly what the point of it all is seems harder to say. The focus is on two relatives, a famous and highly active stage actor (wiry, hyper 39-year-old Philipp Hochmair) , and his uncle (bewhiskered, mellow 62-year-old Walter Saabel), a vagabond carnival performer, especially with performing bears, who turns up unexpectedly and latches onto his nephew for a while, first in Hamburg and then in Vienna. We get a chance to compare the two men's lifestyles and world views, and the uncle comes to play a helpful role both to the actor and his harried Moldavian neighbor. Then events drift off, with a the success of a major project left dangling. But along the way the interactions of the two men, if making for as desultory a story as the of La Pivellina, provide engaging duo personality studies. The two men are playing ore or less themselves, except that they are not really related, and the specific events of the film are invented for the film.
It's an intentional part of the way he is depicted, or depicts himself, that Philipp is almost never "himself," if he even has a self -- a point dramatized by having him made up in character as a bald man when Walter first finds him. Philipp freely admits he revels in acting as if it were a compulsion and an addiction, as well as a way of releasing his "rage," which he points out Walter admits he has a store of he'd like to release. Outdoors, indoors, for children, for adults, and in various cities Philipp rushes around, playing everything from Mephisto to Woyzeck to a children's fairy tale, with little time for friendship and just the occasional liaison. Walter, who was once married (and says that's "a beautiful experience of life") was a performer in Italy, especially throwing daggers and dancing and wrestling with bears, but he is as laid back as Philipp is driven, living from day to day, missing the first rehearsal Philipp invites him to because he gets involved drinking and having fun in a bar.
Philipp is sometimes taxed with having to learn many challenging new parts rapidly; in this, Walter, who has turned up after Philip shifts back to his home town, turns out to be helpful as a prompter or corrector. Meanwhile Victor, Philipp's Moldavian neighbor, a non-citizen carpenter, has been left with the care of his little boy and girl since his wife went back to see her mother and was barred from returning to Germany, so Walter steps in and begins babysitting for the kids nearly full-time. Obviously Walter is cast as the good guy, and Philipp as the workaholic, though the two men have an affinity as artists that is contrasted with Philipp's unseen father, a businessman later revealed to be only Walter's half-brother, not his brother -- as if this were an afterthought of the writers, when it became clear how different Walter was from the other man. On the other hand because he is so driven and competitive, Phlipp can be seen as the artistic offspring of an executive.
There's time for some mockery of Philipp's pretensions when he's given a sculptor's larger-than-life portrait in the form of a wall plaque that will go up in a main theater of Hamburg, and Walter, unimpressed, uses it for knife-throwing practice. The two men clash more than once, but they also cooperate, Walter seeming to serve as a more simpatico second father for the younger man.
Unfortunately though there is more energy and momentum and a neater central contrast here than in La Pivellina, many scenes have no other purpose than to round out the two contrasting personalities and it seems odd, yet perhaps somehow typical of Covi and Frimmel, that when Walter is embarking on a trip to clandestinely retrieve Victor's wife from Moldavia, the film abruptly ends. It is never clear all along the way where any of this is headed, and as soon as the film finds a goal, it stops. Defenders of the fiction-nonfiction blend Covi and Frimmel represent might insist the aim is to capture life, where all is a muddle. But muddles have a way of making for pretty ho-hum films, which is a pity in view of how lifelike and appealing Walter's and Philipp's are at playing themselves.
Der Glanz des Tages , 90 mins., debuted at Locarno, where Walter Saabel got the Best Actor award and the directing duo were nominated for the Golden Leopard for Best Director. It was shown at several other festivals, and was screened for this review as part of the FSLC-MoMA joint series New Directors/New Films in New York in March 2013.
Joshua Oppenheimer: THE ACT OF KILLING (2912)
JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER: THE ACT OF KILLING (2012)
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ANWAR CONGO AND HAJI ANIF IN THE ACT OF KILLING
Revisiting mass murder in Indonesia as kitsch pageant and therapy
The US-born and London-educated Joshua Oppenheimer reveals exceptional rapport with his grizzly subjects, the perpetrators of Indonesian mass murders of communists in the mid-Sixties, in his complicatedly self-referential documentary, The Act of Killing. Culminating a seven-year documentary process, Oppenheimer, who is fluent in Indonesian language, chose to focus on the killers rather than their victims he'd begun by studying, and to draw them into a more revealing place by cooking up a movie about the events for them to both consult on and act in. The creepy experience of watching the mostly unrepentant (and unpunished) gangster death squad bosses ham it up relishing and feebly repenting their youthful exploits as government killers is stunning, but would be more effective if the film were better organized and not so long and repetitive. It's not necessary to be told a dozen times, for instance, that the Indonesian word for "gangster" comes from the phrase "free men"; and seeing mass killer Anwar Congo, essentially the "star" of the show, almost repent three times is not more effective than seeing him do it once, and begins to convince one that he's just playing the role Oppenheimer has set him up for. One also begins to wonder if the horrendous bad taste that pervades most of the scenes is just Indonesian cinema, or owes something to the filmmaker's own lack of distance from the material.
Who is Anwar? When Sukarno was overthrown by Suharto following the tragic 30 September Movement in 1965, Anwar and his friends were promoted from small-time gangsters who sold movie theatre tickets on the black market to death squad leaders. They helped the army kill more than one million alleged communists, ethnic Chinese, and intellectuals in less than a year. As the executioner for the most notorious death squad in his city, Anwar himself killed by his own admission on screen as many as a thousand victims with his own hands. The right wing paramilitary group, Pancasila Youth, that grew out of Anwar's massacre, is prominent today and has government ministers involved in it: the vice president is shown giving a speech touting it and its violence against communists. So here is another appalling thing: the massacres of 1965 are still okay with the Indonesian government and general public. A TV show featuring Answar and his new movie shows this.
The film oscillates between horror and gruesome comedy, especially when it becomes clear Anwar and his cohorts, who apparently started out scalping movie tickets and resented the communists for (Taliban-like?) closing cinemas, are obviously more interested in how sharp they used to look or look now in costume (with prosthetic teeth, died hair, rakish hats) than how culpable they were -- though there's much emphasis on piano-wire garroting, adopted as a "cleaner" (less bloody) way to kill their victims. Some weird connection between the "gangster" identification with "free men" leads to an even weirder and more kitsch outdoor pageant with pretty girls in pink costumes performing the song "Born Free." What a finale! But what does it mean? It all boils down to Anwar Congo's reminiscences. But the restaging of a village massacre, witnessed approvingly by a current government official, is so intense it leaves an old lady stunned, children in tears, and Anwar himself emotionally exhausted. He seems also to identify with his victims to life-changing effect when he plays a scene in which he is the communist interrogated and then killed. It feels as though even in the more honed-down theatrical version of his film, Oppenheimer provides too much undigested and indigestible material for most audiences, though certainly as a record of man's inhumanity and moral blindness, this just about takes the cake.
A key question is whether the official interpretation of Oppenheimer's story arc is valid. Is the fimmaking pocess truly an unexpected emotional journey for Anwar, from arrogance to regret as he begins to act out and thus more directly face the impact of what he did? Or is that just something he puts on as part of the film-within-the-film?
In any case, Oppenheimer has produced a remarkable, if both undigested and indigestible piece of work. Most of it was shot in Medan, North Sumatera, Indonesia between 2005 and 2011. The result was powerful enough to bring Werner Herzog and Errol Morris on board as executive producers after they'd seen preview footage.
The Act of Killing , 115 mins., debuted at Telluride August 2012 and has been shown at other festivals including the Berlinale. Screened for this review at the FSLC/MoMA series New Directors/New Films, March 2013. Both the theatrical version and the 158-minute director’s cut of the film will be screened at ND/NF, but only the theatrical version was watched for this review. Also included in the June 2013 Lincoln Center Human Rights Watch Festival. A Drafthouse Films release coming to cinemas in NYC 19 Juoly 2013.
Daniel Hoesl: SOLDATE JEANNETTE (2012)
DANIEL HOESL: SOLDATE JEANNETTE (2012)
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Paring down and running off
The young Austrian director Daniel Hoesl's debut feature Soldate Jeannette (or "Soldier Jane") has a lot going for it, though, alas, not quite enough, due mainly to shortcomings in the scenario department. One can't quarrel with the austere, elegant look throughout, the witty conceptual coolness, the nice use of wide aspect ratio by cinematographer Gerald Kerkletz, the cool urban interiors in the earlier sections, and then, when Fanni (Johanna Orsini-Rosenberg) runs away from her posh life, the soft images of a farm up in the hills and a luminous forest. It may be that Herr Hoesl, an eccentric dandy in dress, mistakes style for substance. The nose-thumbing eccentricity of his protagonist and her life-changing radicalism have caused Jeannette to be mentioned in the same breath with the rigorously strange films of Giorgos Lanthimos. But there isn't enough here. It's fun (and aesthetically pleasing) while it lasts; but that isn't long enough.
Fanni (is she Jeannette?) is a forty-something woman who belongs, from talk with female relatives, to a wealthy family, resides in a beautiful flat in Vienna she's lived in for twenty years. She buys chic designer frocks and frequents spas and martial arts classes. Something causes her to run off the rails, but unfortunately we don't know what. In fact we don't know how normal her behavior was in the past. All we know is that she buys a fancy dress and pops it in the trash on her way out. Agents come to inform her that due to her non-payment of rent for three months (isn't that rather extreme after twenty years?) she must sign an agreement and has a week to move her things out. She is only interested in serving them macha tea and getting to her martial arts class, too busy to sign anything. In a short time she is on her way to the country in a car she's taken on a test drive from a car dealer and not returned, carrying with her an impressive pile of cash she''s gotten from her bank, with which she stages an evening forest potlatch. Later she meets up with Anna (Christina Reichsthaler), a young woman working on a farm tending hogs. Anna brings her along and she's taken on at the farm, but both Anna and Fanni soon both become impatient with farm life, and anyway Fanni's various misdeeds are about to catch up with her if she stays.
Is it wrong to expect more than this from the writing than this outline? I've said the film is lovely to look at, and the nice package includes strong electronic music, the credits are set in a format that's very Bauhaus. James Greenberg of Hollywood Reporter describes this film as "an elliptical experiment more consumed with form and ideas than telling a comprehensible story" and that's one way of putting it. Hoesl delights in inserting little things like a scene of Fanni/Jeannette (before she flees) snoring loudly in an art house showing Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc. All the earlier sequences are sharp statements about the modern urban world's fetishizing of things; Fanni and Anna may be chooosing saintly denial of all that. But apart from these ideas, the story is really perfectly comprehensible; there just isn't enough to it. Hoesl's focus on matters other than "story" has led him to give us elegant imagery and a palpable physicality, but too little sense of an ending. Or not enough. Nonetheless there is great assurance here, and this is a first-timer who may yet give much pleasure.
Soldate Jeannette/Soldier Jane, 80 mins., debuted at Sundance January 2013 where it was nominated for a Grand Jury prize, also showed at Gothenberg; and at Rotterdam, where it was nominated for the Tiger award. It was screened for this review as part of the FSLC-MoMA series, New Directors/New Films, in New York, March 2013.
Sophie Letourneur: LES COQUILLETTES (2012)
SOPHIE LETOURNEUR: LES COQUILLETTES (2012)
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Thirty-something French "girl" groupies boy-hunt at a film festival
Sophie Letourneur and several co-filmmakers film themselves in this blithely frivolous round of days at the Locarno Film Festival partying and boy-hunting. Yes, it's even more self-referential: the background is a film festival, the other people a gallery of personalities or wannabes. Lest you think this might tread on Hong Sang-soo territory, let me set you straight: these ladies don't think or talk about filmmaking for a minute, and they're groupies, not industry people. The well-known Swiss film festival is just a pretext and a background. When they get to Locarno cinematic ambition is on hold and the exclusive focus is on possible romances or one-nighters with guys they meet over drinks. Letourneur's film is rough, lacking the usual French gloss, but it bubbles and flows quite well. And though Sophie (Letourneur), Camille (Camille Genaud), and Carole (Carole Le Page) are in search of a connection, a romance, or just a fuck, the real focus is on girl talk and girl-interaction, contemporary French style.
Les Coqillettes has been dubbed a French "Girls," paralleling the crude talk and blunt focus of Lena Dunham's currently in style US TV series. Only the "Girls" girls are twenty-somethings, and the "Macaroni-ettes" -- they so-dub themselves because at their apartment they most often chow down on pasta -- are a decade older, and we thought the French were more grown up and more sophisticated than this. If you want to hang onto an old-school picture of France, avoid Les Coquillettes. As the blurb says, this is a "comedy of arrested development," and it indeed deserves credit for being so calmly "self-mocking." Indeed we must hope Letourneur and her cohorts Camille and Carole are not playing themselves, that if they can depict one among them as having a ridiculous crush on Louis Garrel, it's because they know Louis Garrel and have his respect (he does appear very briefly on screen and sends the girl a couple of Facebook messages).
Sorry, no press kit was provided so I cannot supply the names of the actors who play the guys the girls flirt with, except for Louis-Do de Lencquesaing (of The Father of My Children), as an older actor who proves a bit too kinky when he goes to bed with one of the girls, so they agree just to sleep together, and she sleeps in because she's tired. Another one, known as Martin, a chain-smoker in a tight jacket, french-kisses one of the girls at a club, and she has the hots for him forever after. But when he reverses his initial distain and brings her to his hotel, she freezes up. Those are the only bedroom scenes, both flops. There's another guy who's part of the girls' scene, a big Italian in shades so taciturn and non-committal they start to think he's gay, but when he beds one of the girls -- reported, not shown -- she said it was great. So one for three ain't bad.
A feature of Les Coquillettes is its up-to-date-ness, not only the slightly-more-crude-than-usual girl talk for French cinema but the very liberal use of social media, electronic devices, and texting. The cute, pastel-y opening and closing credits have a bright funny "texto" quality, so bright and witty in fact that the stuff that follows, a mixture of Fellini's Dolce Vita and vintage Cassavetes, is a bit of a letdown, even though it flows and has good moments. But hey, you go, French girls!
Les Coquillettes was shot at the 2011 Locarno Film Festival, where Sophie Letourneur's short Le Marin masqué was being shown, and debuted at Locarno 2012. In fact Locarno Festival director Olivier Pere makes a cameo appearance, as himself. The events are framed by introductory dialogues of the girls gathered in a bedroom back in Paris afterward remembering everything that happened.
Les Coquillettes/Macaroni and Cheese, 75 mins., opens in France March 20, 2013. After its Locarno August 2012 opening it also showed at Bordeaux. It was screened for this review as part of the MoMA-Film Society of Lincoln Center series New Directors/New Films, in which it will be shown March 25, five days after the Paris reviews come out.
Jazmin López: LEONES (2012)
JAZMÍN LÓPEZ: LEONES (20120
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Antonioni-esque forest ramble is haunting, but has too many endings
It's become impossible now to watch a film about you people wandering out in the wild without having Loneliest Planet premonition: what kind of portentous non-event is going to come along to change everything? So when we watch director Jazmin López's film about five young people, three boys and two girls, taking a meandering, poetic walk through an Argentinian forest, listening to them make up meaningfully nonsensical haiku-like six-word (or five, or seven) phrases, teasing each other, kissing, fussing over a tape recorder, fiddling with a map, we just know something's going to come along and turn things topsy-turvy. Sure enough it comes -- and comes -- and comes again. López has unfortunately chosen to tack her outtakes and alternative endings onto her short film, making it 80 minutes long. With a more pointed script and better editing, she had material for a pretty haunting 60 minutes here. There's a lot of stuff after what ought to have been the ending that would be better as bonus material on the DVD. Julia Loktov's laurels are safe. But that ending -- the one that ends nearly twenty minutes before the film does -- is mysterious, mind-bending, powerful stuff. So there is a lot of promise here, if it doesn't just turn out to be pretension and confusion. I hope not.
López is giving us sophisticated material, and her five middle class urban young people, who came in a BMW, play sly, allusive games with each other, and with us. First we have to guess relationships. Two are a loving couple. Another two, maybe. The odd boy out may be gay (in a tacked-on sequence he says so). They are looking for a house. But they seem curiously indifferent to which way they're going and what guidelines they should follow. That cassette tape someone plays: it has a Bach keyboard concerto, and their voices, in the car apparently, talking about how they'll find their destination. Maybe there's a key to everything in this tape. The haiku game shows they're familiar companions, all five of them. In their casual idleness, their lack of direction the hint that one of them may be about to disappear, one is reminded of Antonioni's classic, L'Avventura. The mimed volleyball game might remind you of the great Italian's Blow-Up.
The menace is constant, but dreamlike. There is a pistol. Is it loaded or not? It seems it is. But the rule of postmodern storytellers seems to be that a pistol once introduced need not be used, as before, only toyed with. They go swimming, and there are underwater shots, and we can't help being afraid someone will vanish in the water. They find the house, and you will be surprised at what happens then. By that stage the mood has shifted imperceptibly but irrevocably from dream to nightmare.
The more I think about it the more this seems like great stuff -- but in potential, more than the final product. If only so much of the early sequences didn't seem aimless and repetitive, and if only there weren't all those confused alternate endings. The 28-year-old Jazmín López is better known as a visual artist and has shown video installations. If she is serious about feature filmmaking, she might be a talent to watch. That remains to be seen. The learned Richard Scheib, who watched this film at Vancouver, has pointed out that the "deathdream" (into which this film arguably fits) is a device that has been considered "tired and hackneyed" of late, though he thinks the arthouse and festival crowd is "blissfully unaware" of this. But of course in the right hands "tired and hackneyed" tropes can always be brought back to life.
Leones ("Lions"), 80 mins., debuted in the Orizzonti section at Venice 2012. In 2013 it has been shown at Rotterdam and Creteuil. Screened for this review as part of the MoMA-Film Society of Lincoln Center series New Directors/New Films, March 2013.
Marcelo Lordello: THEY'LL COME BACK (2012)
MARCELO LORDELLO: THEY'LL COME BACK (2012)
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GEÓRGIOS KOKKOS AND MARIA LUIZA TAVARES IN THEY'LL COME BACK
Privileged girl left on her own encounters Brazil's social clashes and life's possibilities
As the new Brazilian film They'll Come Back begins, seen from a distant panoramic perspective, Cris (the very distinctive Maria Luiza Tavares, who carries the film from beginning to end) aged 12, and her slightly older brother Peu (Geórgio Kokkosi) are abruptly dropped off at the side of a country highway by their parents. Then we see them up close, with cars roaring by. There they are, in the middle of nowhere. They have apparently been banished for fighting with each other. Very quickly the punishment that the two kids assumed would be only temporary turns into something vast and open ended. Against Cris's protests, Peu walks off to find a gas station he thinks is not far, leaving Cris so one of them will be at the place where their parents know they left them. From then on the film follows Cris by herself as she endures a surprising adventure, conceived, according to Marcelo Lordello's sly and original script to be at once much more boring and more unexpected and original than one would have expected. She's led in the successive days passively through a series of different worlds, guided more by the people that inhabit them than by herself. Cris is passed from one person to another, confronting realities quite different from any she's ever known. Nothing is as it might seem, but the heart of the experience is the openness to alternate worlds Cris learns to have, which becomes subtly clear when she's finally returned home and finds things transformed not just to her mind but materially in astonishing ways. Writing, filming, and acting are original and seamless throughout.
At the beginning Cris sleeps on a roadside bench that first night. She won't talk to a dark youth who comes by on a bike, but the nest day she lets him take her to his family living in a squatter farming community, where she waits for mom and pop to return. And then is taken to the police, and passed on to a woman who cleans rich people's seaside houses. The film’s class-conscious agenda is transparent but made convincing through a steady accumulation of detail, particularly in a revealing surprise encounter at a resort between Cris and a lazy, reclusive young relative intentionally on a flight from family and city life. They seem kindred spirits, and maybe Cris, having escaped servitude with the housecleaner, might like to linger in this resort house herslef for a while, but she knows she needs to be driven back to Recife.
They'll Come Back represents another promising feature film debut from the group working out of the Brazilian coastal city of Recife, also soure of last year's strong New Directors/New Films feature, Kleber Mendonça Filho's Neighboring Sounds. Other Recife filmmakers well received at Rotterdam of late are Cláudio Assis, Gabriel Mascaro, and Marcelo Gomes. This is Lordello's first fiction film after several documentaries. In both the sense of class confrontation and parental abandonment one may be also reminded of Argentinian Celina Murga's provocative 2007 film A Week Alone/Una semana solos (Film Comment Selects 2009).
They'll Come Back/Eles Voltam, 105 mins., debuted at Brazilia Sept. 2012 where it won awards for Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Film. It also showed at Rotterdam January 2013 and was nominated for a Tiger Award. It was screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films, the New York series jointly sponsored by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, a program presented to the public from March 20 to 31, 2013.
Alex Pitstra: DIE WELT (2012)
ALEX PITSTRA: DIE WELT (2012)
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ABDELHAMID NAOUARA IN DIE WELT
Coming of age in the Arab Spring
Die Welt ("The World") wittily and pointedly begins on what's been called a Tarantinoesque note when its good looking young protagonist Abdullah's directly addresses to the camera at length -- he is, like Tarantino, a clerk in a video story -- on how the "Transformers" series, some of whose sequences he damningly summarizes, is a pure expression of western imperialism. He strongly recommends the customer choose Syriana instead. But the customer still asks for "Transformers" -- an early hint of the film's cynical, ironic vision. This is a film that's rough and unwieldy at times, but it does what it sets out to do with boldness and invention in defining a young Arab of today in a world of no future, despite the Arab Spring.
In this first feature Dutch-Tunisian filmmaker Alex Pitstra adopts a smart, partly humorous, sometimes simply documentary or anthropological approach in examining the dreams and disappointments of its young Tunisian male protagonist before, during, and just after the 2011"Jasmin" uprising that drove out the dictatorial Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. As a festival blurb puts it, Pitstra uses "an arsenal of cinematic techniques to explore a life he imagines he could have lived." Though the whole film is set in Tunisia, Pitstra was raised by his Dutch mother in Holland and took his mother's name. He did not meet his father till he was 25;. The film is a fantasy about how his life might have been if he'd grown up in Tunisia instead, like his father. Only in this version, he doesn't get to Holland.
Everything is pushing the 23-year-old Abdallah (Abdelhamid Naouara, heading a cast of non-pros) to quite his video shop job and escape illegally to Europe; actually. Circumstances push him further in that direction. He takes a break from the store, and when he returns, his job is gone. What follows is even less satisfactory. The film's hip touches includes its ironic parts signaled by inter-titles, some actual home footage of the director's family as flashbacks to Abdullah's youth, shots of an authentic traditional family to introduce a family wedding, and the bold casting of the writer-director's real father Mohsen Ben Hassen as Abdullah's dad. Though a non-pro like the rest, Hassen is a trilingual charmer and a natural on screen. As a dad, however, he is relentlessly unsympathetic, never helping or encouraging Abdullah or even letting him watch what he wants to on TV.
Along the way Die Welt lightly sketeches in political details of Tunisia i with background sounds of Arabic news broadcasts about attempts at an election, hinting that the Jasmine revolution will bring about nothing new with the departure of the dictatorship -- no decrease of unemployment, reduction of poverty, or greater sense of freedom. The transition from the family oligarchy is stagnated in a state of painful purgatory that leaves the country's future completely uncertain. An exchange among men in a barbershop shows it's up in the air whether the new society will be under religious or secular rule, but the biggest vote has been received by the religious party, El Nahda.
In a pivotal (if slightly vague) sequence, Abdullah has a night with a visiting Dutch lady when his father invites her and her friend to their a family wedding at a hotel. This one night stand plants a recurrent dream of the western life as he imagines it -- brand new house by the sea, fridge stocked with soft drinks, blond girlfriend. It's presumably these fantasies, along with his uneasy job situation, lack of support from his father, and post-revolutionary disillusion that lead Abdullah to turn up where people he knows arrange to smuggle men out of Tunisia and across the Mediterranean to Italy. One of the film's best segments, headed "Die Welt," is a musical journey by night accompanied by a requiem mass and an onboard singer who heralds their destination, "Lampedusa" -- though the actual finale is as bitter and downbeat as anything that came before.
Throughout Die Welt maintains a mostly documentary-style hand-held camera look provided by Pitstra's fellow Dutch director and co-writer Thijs Gloger, sometimes alternating the bleaker urban visuals with softer, dreamier sequences of the European seaside to focus on the more beautiful world Abdullah aspires to. The film combines a great variety of kinds of scene and image, which makes it seem a grab-bag at times, but condenses a great deal of cultural data and experience into its short running time.
Stephen Dalton of The Hollywood Reporter describes Die Welt as "an absorbing debut that ultimately feels a little too slight to fully explore its rich jumble of themes. Even so, it pulls off a crucial trick for a first-time feature by leaving you wanting more." Obviously the blend of American and European hipness with an awareness of the Arab emigré experience and intimate access to lower middle class Tunisian locals is a fresh one. One hopes to see ore of Pitstra's dry, vivid emigré vision.
Die Welt, 80 mins., debuted at the Doha Tribeca Film Festival. It was screened for this review as part of the joint Museum of Modern Art and Film Society of Lincoln Center series New Directors/New Films, which runs this year from March 20 to 31, 2013.
Matíass Piñeiro: VIOLA (2012)
MATÍAS PIÑEIRO: VIOLA (2012)
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VIOLA
A magical theatrical world of art, outside politics and the quotidian
Piñeiro, who is only 31, is described as one of a group of graduates of the national cinema academy, the Universidad del Cine, who operate outside the government funding system and are resolutely artistic and non-commercial, working in a distinctive style in his case, that involves a focus on a kind of hermetic society or "a secret aristocracy," mostly of women (the cast mostly a team of regulars), among whom "nothing very dramatic ever happens." He makes use of open air settings, loose style, but also elaborate fluid tracking shots and placements of figures and cameras, kept always in motion by the filmmaker's regular cinematographer, Fernando Lockett. Piñeiro has been heralded in some circles as one of Argentina's "most sensuous and sophisticated new voices." His latest film Viola, which incorporates animation with live action, uses the basis of Shakepeare’s Twelfth Night to fashion a roundelay among young actors and lovers in present-day Buenos Aires. Mixing melodrama with sentimental comedy, philosophical conundrum with matters of the heart, the film bears such signature traits, it is said, of a Piñeiro film besides those serpentine camera movements as slippages of language, elliptical narrative and a constant playful confusion of reality and artifice. Piñeiro's methods in this and his earlier films are explained at some length by Quentin in an article in the online journal Cinemascope.) According to Quentin, Piñeiro, "despite three features (El hombre robado, 2007; Todos mienten, 2009; Viola, 2012) and a 40-minute film commissioned for the Jeonju Digital Project (Rosalinda, 2011), remains overlooked." Well, not at festivals, clearly, since this film has had favorable mentions and admiring reviews at each of its fest appearances, though not all are entranced with the lack of an action you can put your finger on.
According to Quentin, Piñeiro has, by indirection, a political element despite his largely experimental and abstract style. He rejects the authoritarian politicized Argentina of the Kirchners and admires Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, the writer, politician, fourth president and bête noire of the populist Kirchners. His cinema is political precisely in aspiring to an apolitical world of art and artists, eschewing the everyday world. "There is no daily life in Piñeiro’s films, because daily life is connected to family, to politics, to social issues, to regular jobs," and these are tainted with the authoritarianism and populism of the post-Kirchner Argentina. Most of Piñeiro's characters are actors, who at the same time live their roles. "Shakespearean comedies fit perfectly into Piñeiro’s system." Just as Viola is based on Twelfth Night, Rosalinda was based on As You Like It. But Piñeiro's use of Shakespeare is completely playful, actors freely interchanging roles and even sexes, flowing in and out of each other, just as the camerawork flows seamlessly and fluidly.
But when all is said and done, Piñeiro's Viola is surprisingly monotonous, flat, and repetitious. Two women say the same few lines of Shakespearean dialogue over three or four times without stopping. It seems as if they and the film are stuck, till finally a man knocks on the door and comes in, and the film jerkily moves forward again, still not progressing much, because, as Quentin writes, in this filmmaker's work "nothing much dramatic every happens." Nothing much undramatic happens either. Piñeiro is said to be at New York University now on a fellowship to work on his writing. Maybe this experience will jolt him out of his safe little hermetic world of festival art pieces into producing work of wider appeal.
Viola, 63 mins., showed at Toronto and Berlin and won the special jury prize at Valdivia, Chile. It is a Cinema Guild release. Viola was screened for this review as part of the joint MoMA-Film Society of Lincoln Center series New Directors/New Films (March 20-31, 2013).
The film was preceded by the 9-minute black and white short, The Search for Inspiration, which looked like a quirky British mixture of a TV advert and an old silent film.
Viola was released theatrically by the Film Society of Lincoln Center Frid., July 12, 2013. It has gotten rave reviews (Metacritic 85), though AV Club (Mike D'Angelo, oft an independent) gives it B-. It shows promise and a distinctive point of view, were the jolt to come.
Sharon Plumb: TOWHEADS (2012)
SHARON PLUMB: TOWHEADS (2012)
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Frustrated "housewife" turns to stunts
According to the festival blurb, Penny (writer-director Sharon Plumb) is Brooklyn mother of two boys, Cody and Walker (AKA Code and Walk) and wife of a "harried" theater director, and "barely has time to stay sane, much less create art." So she finds "comic relief from domestic drudgery by inhabiting the world in guises—drag king, pole dancer, Santa Claus." Well, I missed "drag king," but saw her turn up in a football uniform to spaghetti dinner fixed for the family by dad. His disapproval was the most convincing part of this otherwise contrived movie.
Plumb is a video and performance artist, and this move is an excuse for her to stage a long series of her routines blown up into a feature film, with her towhead boys and her faceless husband as props. The stunts have a Keatonesque or Tati-like edge at times, but they might not make a good stage routine, as shown. And the pretext is artificial. There is no indication that this little Brooklyn family is anything but well off or that she would have to do all the housework. We see a babysitter and a maid hired. The falsity of the claim that Penny (or Plumb anyway) "barely has time to stay sane, much less create art" is this film. She made, it, didn't she? A really harried mother and housewife would never have been able to do all these stunts, and would be carted off to the booby hatch if she did half of them.
On the plus side Code and Walk are cute as the dickens and on-screen naturals, and seem very at ease with their mom's nutty routines. Their forte is food fights. Dad is played by Plumb's real life hustand, Derek Cianfrance, the director of the much-admired film Blue Valentine. Whatever you may think of that love-gone-wrong drama's arty reverse-chronological structure, the lead performances, by Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams, are of an exceptional conviction and intensity. Cianfrance's new film is The Place Beyond the Pines , a thriller about a motorcycle stunt rider who turns to crime. Starring Gosling again, it sounds like a Drive knockoff, but with Gosling, I'd still want to see it. Why not watch that, or Blue Valentine -- and forget about Towheads? Plumb's debut is watchable for a while and might have made a good half-hour film but at an hour and twenty-five it long overstays its welcome.
Towheads, 86 mins., debuted at Rotterdam in January 2013. It was screened for this review as part of the FSLC-MoMA series New Directors/New Films, in which it shows to the public March 27, 2013. Interview with Sharon Plumb in Filmmaker Magazine at Rotterdam.
Libbie D. Cohn, J.P. Sniadecki: PEOPLE'S PARK (2012)
LIBBIE D. COHN, J.P. SNIADECKI: PEOPLE'S PARK (2012)
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A busy Chinese park, all on a summer's day, filmed by ethonographers as a single tracking shot
People's Park is another product of the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab and Harvard Film Study Center, which produced Sweetgrass (NYFF 2009), made by Lucien Castaing-Taylor, who directs the lab, with Ilisa Barbash, and the recently much admired Leviatan (NYFF 2012; in limited US theatrical release from Mar. 1, 2013), which Castaing-Taylor produced with Vérena Paravell using tiny digital video cameras affixed to fishermen's helmets and planted under water on a Massachusetts fishing vessel. Another film out of Harvard's documentary ethonography factory was Véréna Paravel’s and J. P. Sniadecki’s Foreign Parts (ND/NF 2010), a people-centered depiction of the endangered junkyard neighborhood in Willets Point, Queens known as "The Iron Triangle." Now Sniadecki has teamed wiith Libbie D. Cohn for another kind of documentary portrait, composed like Sokurov's Russian Ark in the form of one long tracking shot, but focused not on fine art but everyday performance -- and, alas, hopelessly boring and flat. If a great crowd of uninteresting and unattractive Chinese people wandering around aimlessly, singing, dancing, sitting, or dozing for hour after hour interests you, this is the film for you. On the plus side, the park is larger and more beautiful than you might have expected, well maintained and beautifully landscaped, the steady-cam tracking is smooth -- and as seems usual with such camerawork curiously soothing and hypnotic. The massive collective sound of the crowd seems exaggeratedly loud, and become part of the exhaustion that eventually sets in when you've watched the same sights for half an hour, then an hour, then longer still. One thing you can say: this saves you from having to go there.
The filmmakers worked on July 30, 2011, a humid Saturday afternoon in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China. In a public space the many inhabitants gather for shared performances. Dances, amateur in nature, begin and end the sequence, and in between there are a few other not very impressive kinds of showing off. These include Karaoke songs, band performances, and water calligraphy on the dusty pavement (it immediately evaporates). The cameras thread also through sycamore trees past old folks dozing on benches; families chowing down in open restaurants with noisy metal chopsticks, people playing Mahjong or Go. Sometimes the people smile mildly right into the camera, making this version of the Harvard ethnographic documentary approach mildly confrontational as well as, in a limited sense, immersive. Images are accompanied with a typically busy on-scene sound track; Sweetgrass and Leviathan and Foreign Parts had their own sui generis noises, and the whole effect would be very different without the sound..
A note in one review by Daniel Pratt for Exclaim!explains that to shoot this film Cohn sat in a wheelchair holding the camera while Sniadecki pushed her around the park. The reviewer claims that the result is annoyingly jerky and some of the shots are invasive, "ranging from an elderly woman picking her pants out of her butt crack to numerous pairs of people that are quite obviously having private conversations." He exaggerates. It is hard to claim that in a place as public as this looking at anyone with a camera is invasive, and the camera movement is smooth, not jerky. Pratt also writes, "Many of the subjects openly wave and give a peace sign, while a dance party of sorts featuring Roger Meno's "I Find The Way" finds participants openly interacting with the camera." The V signs like the adjusted garment are only the briefest of moments in hundreds. What is most striking is how little all these people react to the camera, even though there are not a whole lot of other cameras in evidence. The Chinese crowd seem vaguely friendly, mostly just passive.
I confess to a certain ambivalence about all these Harvard ethnography films, wondering if what they offer, finally, given these examples, represents anything so different from lots of previous documentry films. Some of their caché may come more from the Harvard imprimatur and the theoretical context more than the material itself, as film, despite the unique sites involved in each case. In this instance, Jorge Mourinha of The Flickering Wall, reviewing the film as part of Doc Lisbon, commented that the camera's invasiveness this time (this in a sense true also of Leviathan) makes it chiefly self-referential: the camera's "sheer unusual presence unable to render it invisible and suggesting a reverse voyeurism that simultaneously underlines and undermines the technical prowess." There you have some more analysis to ponder. But it's not like cameras have not wondered among crowds (I longed for the rich faces in Eisenstein's films) ever since there have been cameras that could wander. Note: all the Harvard films are described in a collective article I've cited before, "The Merger of Academia and Art House: Harvard Filmmakers' Messy World in the NY Times of August 31, 2012.
People's Park, 78 mins., debuted with Foreign Parts at Locarno August 2012, where they co-won the "Opera Prima" awad. It was also shown at Mar del Plata. Screened for this review as part of the joint MoMA-Film Society of Lincoln Center series New Directors/New Films, which ran March 20-31, 2013.
Lyubov Arkus: ANTON'S RIGHT HERE (2012)
LYUBOV ARKUS: ANTON'S RIGHT HERE (2012)
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A documentarian: too involved?
Very often it's something unexpected that makes a documentary come to life. It's when the severely autistic teenage boy, Anton Kharitonov, whom Lybov Arkus had filmed risked being put away in a clinic for life afterhis mother and caretaker Rinata was diagnosed with cancer that Arkus (a critic and editor) decided to become for a while Anton's main caregiver. She had already documented his precarious development over a six-year period. Arkus's film is artful and passionate, qualities aided by the cinematography of Alisher Khamidkhodzhaev. That, her closeness to Anton, and her emotionally resonant voiceover all contribute to making this an unusual film, about which one can't help having mixed feelings. When it showed out of competition at Venice Francesca Fiorentino wrote that she walked out convinced she had experienced greatness. Viewers have found the filmmaker's voiceover powerful and moving. But it is also absurdly tendentious, and the film, at a full two hours, is long and meandering. Luckily it has an apparently happy ending. Anton's bus driver father, who had another family and had shied away from the whole issue, finally took over Anton from Arkus, and we see him happy again, on a farm, being told what to do, which seems to be when he functions best.
The film exposes Russia's dismal public handling of mental problems; it is also simply a personal diary of a close maternal relationship (or does Arkus imagine this? Anton hugs a lot of people: hugging those he knows and likes is what he does). Neil Young argued in a Hollywood Reporter review that certain aspects that have made the film impressive for some for others represent a lack of perspective that led to somewhat excessive length. Young is unresponsive to the visual appeal of both Anton and Arkus, finding the emotion in the voiceover and the musical background unjustified by the information provided. One sees his point. However watching Anton, which Alisher Khamidkhodzhaev's camera provides us many opportunities to do, is fascinating. Only we wish more clues to the mystery of Anton's autism and autism in general were provided. After all this screen time, we are left with little more than what we can figure out for ourselves.
Arkus became aware of Anton via an "essay" he was said to have written seven years before she actually met him, and of course before his mother's cancer diagnosis. When near the end we hear Anton read the essay, it's perhaps not so "precocious" as she says: it's disjointed and odd, though that makes it poetic, and open to deep interpretations. Anyway after knowing about and visiting Anton with her photographer, she also helped his separated parents deal with the horrendous and shabby Russian bureaucracy. We don't learn much of anything about autism, or Anton's place in its spectrum. But we do see that Anton needs a very specific kind of help the state is ill-qualified to provide. It's only during a brief period at a nicer facility when a man called David spends all his time with Anton and tells him what to do, that he seems to thrive. When David leaves, he becomes ungovernable. Arkus' by then completely lack of detachment becomes clear when she is involved in as she calls it "kidnapping" (illegally removing) Anton from one of his worst way-stations, a mental institution. But we are happy she does this. But we wish Arkus held forth less about herself and life and told us more about Anton and autism.
The absent father who overcomes his fear of dealing with his son's disability recalls Gianni Amelio's 2004 The Keys to the House.
Anton's Right Here/Anton tut ryadom, 114 mins., debuted at Venice, showed at Vienna, Gothenberg and other festivals in 2012. Screened for this review as part of the FSLC-MoMA joint series New Directors/New Films, March 2013.
Shane Carruth: UPSTREAM COLOR (2013)
SHANE CARRUTH: UPSTREAM COLOR (2013)
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SHANE CARRUTH AND AMY SEIMETZ IN UPSTREAM COLOR
Lovely creepy conundrum
For a long eight years since Shane Carruth's 2004 feature debut, the deliciously mystifying zero-budget time-travel film Primer, people have been waiting to see what would come from him next. Now it comes: Upstream Color, a love story embedded in a kidnap plot that also in the blurb's version of it explores "life’s surprising jumps and science’s strange effects," leaping "with great audacity through its sequences, a cinematic simulacrum of the way we reflect on our lives, astonished at, as in the title of Grace Paley’s fiction collection, our 'Enormous Changes at the Last Minute.'" Indeed its Carruth's rapid-fire visual storytelling that stands out. It's nothing like its predecessor except in its reliance on odd science and intentional puzzlement. It's great fun and a visual delight if you like being challenged and having a residue of mystery always kept. If not, it could seem a congeries of meaninglessness. But Primer became a cult film and this will too. In between, what has Carruth, who plays a sexy criminal lover here as well as shot, produced, directed, wrote, did the music, co-edited, and is distributing, been doing with himself? Well, for one thing he consulted with Rian Johnson on time-travel for Looper. Upstream Color is a unique visual and (slightly too loud? but rich) audio experience that's absolute catnip to younger film critics, and acknowledged as brilliant, however reluctantly, by older ones. Think Terrance Malick meets David Lynch. If you are into film as art I would consider this one of the year's musts so far, and it should become in some form available to everyone, even with limited theatrical release.
"Upstream Color certainly is something to see," wrote McCarthy, "if you're into brilliant technique, expressive editing, oblique storytelling, obscuritanist speculative fiction or discovering a significant new actress" (he refers to the female lead Amy Seimetz). Justin Chang of Variety noted it's "a warmer, less foreboding picture than Primer, not moving in any conventional sense, but suffused with emotion all the same." Elaborare summaries in their review by Rodrigo Perez in Indiewire and Todd McCarthy in Hollywood Reporter will not only spoil the movie for you but may partly, perhaps unduly, horrify you at what's in store. Upstream Color may be a readymade cult film of surpassing beauty but is is also not only more rather than less mystifying than Primer, but initially rather creepy and disgusting, whereas Primer was more scary and haunting. But if you're a cinephile, and maybe none of that will matter anyway, you'll have to see it because its sensuous beauty washes over you "like a sonorous bath of beguiling visuals, ambient sounds and corporeal textures" (Perez). And Mike D'Angelo on Letterboxed who unlike some thinks the film "almost syllogistically clear," proclaims it"a towering achievement." "Syllogistically clear" may ignore many small visual details that are hard to integrate, but the film is straight chronological storytelling. And however mystifying, it gives you such basic movie elements as mystery, thriller, crime, love story. Carruth does join the ranks of the younger American movie masters here, but less mainstream than most.
Carruth was a Texas software engineer when he made Primer for $7,000. His sound design this time won him a Special Jury Prize at 2013j Sundance (the film was nominated for the Grand Jury one): he is not a musician, but using instruments, synthesizer, and sampling (with some location sound effect recording shown as part of the film action), the audio he created as he went along is unusually dramatic and integral, almost on a Kubrick level though without Kubrick's brilliant use of received music. The rapid cutting in dialogue passages is almost hyperactive, but the scenes with Carruth and Seimetz do have a strange intimacy.
Upstream Color, 96 mins., debuted at Sundance January 2013, showed also at SXSW ant the Berlinale and was screened for this review as part of the Film Society of Lincon Center-Museum of Modern Art joint series, New Directors/New Films (which runs March 20-31, 2013) it has already received many reviews and been given a Metacritic rating of 85 (though based so far on only five reviews). It opens theatrically in New York on April 5, 2013 at IFC Center with US DVD and Blu-ray versions coming May 7. The sound track is out too, even in a vinyl version (edition: 500). After the April 5 NYC opening the film expands to 25 top US markets Apri 19, with more cities to follow in late April and early May, according the the distributor's representative. .
Sarah Polley: STORIES WE TELL (2012)
SARAH POLLEY: STORIES WE TELL (2012)
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SARAH POLLEY SHOOTING HER CAMERAMAN IN STORIES WE TELL
Revelations of family and birth from the Canadian actress and filmmaker
Sarah Polley, who is Canadian, previously starred in Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter, Doug Liman's Go, and Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. She later wrote and directed Away From Her, about a husband forced to deal with his wife's Alzheimer's, which received Oscar nominations for her screenplay and Julie Christie's performance. Her second film, a cute young people's romantic story, met with less universal acclaim. Now she has turned to documentary, focussing on material she knows well and people she has excellent access to. Stories We Tell may lay claim to more Pirandellian complexity than it deserves, but it tells a rollicking good tale of and by two sets of siblings and his Polley's discovery that her mother's widower was not her father but somebody she had a wild affair with while in a play in Montreal. A wealth of old videos and talk and writing by both "fathers" and all the extended immediate family are seamlessly edited into a very watchable film, though it isn't quite as unique as its makers seems to think.
The fun of it is that Polley begins with the story of her colorful, hyperactive, never contented mom, actress Diane Polley, who met and fell in love with Michael Polley, a British actor. Her mother had had several other children by her first husband, and walking away from that marriage had lost her custody of the two eaerlier children, the first time that ever happened to a woman in Canada. An account follows of Sarah's late birth when her mother was 42 and Diane's early death of cancer only a few years later. Still later comes investigation into the rumors that Sarah's father was not Michael, but somebody Diane had an affair with when she was away from Toronto in Montreal in a play, returning to acting after a hiatus and reveling in the excitement of being away from humdrum Toronto and family life.
Once the investigation of the identity of her true father (and DNA verification) comes along, all other topics are largely dropped, or greatly subordinated. A resulting disadvantage of Polley's method is that all the siblings and half siblings get plenty of chances to talk about Sarah, but not much development as human beings on their own. Egocentric? You could say that. An advantage is that both real and assumed father are highly articulate and talkative men. Moreover after the true paternity came out Michael Polley wrote a long, well-written letter to Sarah, which he reads to the camera, a text and reading that run through the film and help to give it humanity and unity. What seems less convincing is a final segment tacked on at the end full of highfalutin ponderings about how all this shows the uncertainty of the nature of reality and of people's descriptions of themselves. It's not like illegitimate children and coverups of same were anything all that rare and unusual. Nonetheless otherwise this is a very well-made and watchable documentary, further demonstrating that Sarah Polley is a talented lady.
Actors are used for reenactments of Diane and Michael's and Sarah's earlier life, which are skillfully made to look like old amateur footage.
Stories We Tell, 105 mins., a Roadside Attractions release edited by Michael Munn and sponsored by the National Film Board of Canada, debuted at Venice and was also shown at Toronto and Telluride. It was screened for this review as part of the FSLC-MoMA series, New Directors/New Films, March 2013.
Leonardo Di Constanzo: L'INTERVALLO (2012)
LEONARDO DI COSTANZO: L'INTERVALLO (2012)
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FRANCESCA RISO AND ALESSIO GALLO IN L'INTERVALLO
Camorra moment: little birds that cannot fly away
Winner of the Critics’ Prize in the Orizzonti section of the 2012 Venice Film Festival, this portrait of two prematurely sophisticated adolescents momentarily thrown together under the eye of the Neapolitan Camorra is a sweet, low-keyed little first feature by documentary filmmaker Leonardo Di Costanzo, who also wrote the screenplay together with Mariangela Barbarnente (Orchestra of Piazza Virtorio) and Maurizio Braucci (Gomorraa and Reality). The "intermission" time comes for the shy and submissive (but tall, plump, monumental) 15-year-old ice cream and slushy (graniti) vendor Salvatore (Alessio Gallo) and the compulsively defiant and self-aware 17-year-old Veronica (Francesca Riso), two very particular personalities and previous non-actors found through a long elimination process. Salvatore and Veronica already know each other by sight because that's the nature of this remote, ugly, urban Naples neighborhood. She's being given a dramatic slap on the wrist for having wronged the local Camorra capo by having an affair with a brother from the enemy clan, given a day of quarantine with Salvatore as her jailer in a big empty building. It's a giant, long-abandoned mental institution, though that's not mentioned. Why Veronica is being punished comes out to "Toto" only late in the course of their time together and they are very, very slow to drop their guard and bond with each other on this hot summer day. L'Intervallo is of course a deliberately very crabwise way of looking at la Camorra -- one that offers the possibility of revealing differently, more subtly than any direct approach the gangster clan's impact on Naples society. Some viewers, and some Italian critics, inevitably find this little story banal and flat, unworthy somehow of its awesome and disturbing larger context of crime, exploitation, murder and ravages on the landscape and culture delineated in other films, notably Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah (NYFF 2008). But were the stories underlying De Sica's Sciuscià or Ladri di biciclette "important"? Indeed this is a slight film that takes almost 50 minutes to get going, but also a delicate, precise one, resonant in the mind afterward. There's no other picture of the Camorra quite like it.
Veronica and "Toto" both chafe at this shared confinement but accept it, like the birds in a cage that rattle the sides of it but when the door's opened stay inside, because what's outside is even scarier -- the imagine of the film's succinctly defining epigraph. In his poetically turned Venice review on the Italian website Film.it. Ludovica Sanfelice acknowledges the justice of this image. He also notes the deep sense of documentary background in the film's handheld camera work, its careful choice of shots, the precise ear of its Neapolitan dialogue, the skillful direction of the two non-actors and the just use of the mournful setting, an abandoned psychiatric hospital. These very different but equally worldly-wise young people share confessions, stories, games and travel fantasies and in so doing briefly escape the stifling domination of the gangster clans. The metaphor of the birds is further borne out because Salvatore's father is a bird fancier and has taught him secrets of their habits.
The two youth's playful bonding takes up much of the last part of the film, but of course the key moments are the two, early and late, when the gangster henchmen appear who created this moment. They are Bernardino (Carmine Paternoster) and his sidekick Mimmo (Salvatore Ruocco) and when Francesca is passive to Bernardino's caresses in the evening when he comes to set her free we know she essentially belongs to them, as Salvatore is their servant if needed when he takes money for his trouble and is safely released to return to his ice cream cart. Everything is the same, and everything is different.
L'Intervallo, 86 mins., debuted at Venice as part of the Orizzonti series Sept. 4, 2012 and opened in Italy the following day. It also showed at the London and Buenos Aires festivals. A French theatrical release is set for April 24, 2013. Screened for this review as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center-Museum of Modern Art joint series New Directors/New Films (March 20-31, 2013).
Penny Lane: OUR NIXON (2012)
PENNY LANE: OUR NIXON (2012)
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ARCHIVAL SUPER-8 IMAGE FROM OUR NIXON
Downfall of Nixon's closest aides retold with their own Super 8 footage as window dressing
As President Richard Nixon tape-recorded his conversations for posterity, so his devoted aides—H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and Dwight Chapin—shot hundreds of rolls of Super-8 film documenting the presidency. Filmmakers Penny Lane and Brian L. Frye have edited this footage—virtually unseen since the FBI seized it during the Watergate investigation—and interwoven it with period news footage and pop culture, excerpts from the Nixon tapes, and contemporary interviews. OUR¯ NIXON offers an unprecedented, insider’s view of an American presidency, chronicling watershed events including the Apollo moon landing and the path-breaking trip to China, as well as more intimate glimpses of Nixon in times of glory and disgrace.
Such is the festival blurb for Penny Nixon's new documentary film about the Nixon Presidency. But like most festival blurbs, it is advertising, and its claims of an unprecedented, insider's view are titillating, but quite spurious. Land and Frye have made a snappy new run-through of this story, with a focus on Nixon's closest aides Haleman, Erlichman, and Chapin, whose Super 8 films add a bright cheery literally square note to the old story of naivete, duplicity, and downfall. There is indeed something terminally naive as well as dangerously loyal about this little band, and the old format with its bright colors is a good way of evoking this aspect of the Nixon era. Land and Frye have created a smooth, entertaining package. But do not come to this film thinking there is anything "unprecedented" or new about the information it presents. All the footage, though indeed in a vault for 40 years, had come to reside in the National Archives, but the filmmakers found what the Archives had on view was a copied and deteriorated version. They where able to obtained original (and therefor much sharper) copies of the Super 8 footage when Haldeman's estate donated it to the Nixon Library and they offered to make high quality digital copies of it at their own expense. The Nixon Library lacked the funds to do so!
But the first thing you need to know, and the big letdown if you're looking for some kind of intimate record, is that all these aides' Super 8 films are without sound. Besides this they're very conventional, safe, formal footage, almost like a tourist's of the White House and its denizens at work and play, -- not a depiction of any kind of secret hitherto unrevealed Nixon insiders' world. The filmmakers had to find separate audio and verbal material to bind the Super 9 footage together from other sources, and they are public ones. Some of this material is is narration made for the film. Much of it consists of strategically inserted archival interviews from television as well as news reports by Walter Cronkite and other leading media figures of the period, such as Dan Rather, Barbara Walters, Mike Wallace, Phil Donahue, and Daniel Schorr. The biggest frissons come from phone or office tapes of dialogue between Nixon and one of the three aides, Haldeman, Erlichman or Chapin. "Never mind the Times," Nixon is heard saying, for instance, "let's get the prick who gave them the information," meaning Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. And so on. Subtitles for these slightly fuzzy exchanges are provided in the middle of Whilte House views from the Super 8 tapes. But the Super 8 is just bland, colorful background for these little shockers. The Super 8 material winds up not being that important. It just provides color -- window dressing -- and an initial sense of the three aides' naivete when the started out in the White house. The revealing White House sound tapes, if not always heard in these particular excepts or this context, have long been in the public domain.
In the end this is the story of the disintegration of the worlds of Haldeman, Erlichman, and Chapin, along with a very quick Nixon Presidency for Dummies -- Vietnam, China, Watergate, not much more. Only Chapin is now living. Interviews post-jail time with Haldeman and Erlichman and more recently with Chapin fill us in on how they recreated themselves in writing, real estate, and business. "Our Nixon" is a bit of a misnomer. "Their Nixon," maybe. But this film, for all its very well assembled visuals, doesn't provide material of the complexity you can get from books or articles.
Penny Lane's Our Nixon, 85 mins., was in part funded from a grant from the Jerome Foundation. IMDb information is incomplete, but it apparently debuted at the Austin SXSW (South by Southwest) Festival. It was screened for this review as part of the MoMA-Film Society of Lincoln Center series, New Directors/New Films, running from March 20-31 in 2013. It was scheduled as the closing night film. No doubt the promise of hitherto unseen private footage and a secret intimate Nixon was well calculated to sell extra festival tickets and draw a lively crowd for ND/NF's final night. There were chortles and laughter at certain howlers from the insider crew even at the Press and Industry screening and no doubt there will be more of these in a packed festival hall.
US theatrical release of Our Nixon opens in NYC at IFC Center Aug, 30, 2013.
