New Directors/New Films and Film Comment Selects 2014

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FEBRUARY 17-27 2014 PUBLIC SCREENINGS

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MARCH 19-30 2014 PUBLIC SCREENINGS

As before I expect to attend screenings of all the New Directors/New Films series and a few of the more elusive Film Comment Selects. A link index of the reviews will come here.

A General Film Forum discussion-access thread will begin here.

Links to the reviews:

20,000 Days on Earth (Ian Forsyth, Jane Pollard 2013)--ND/NF
Babadook, The (Jennifer Kent 2014)--ND/NF
Buzzard (Joel Potrykus 2013)--ND/NF
Cherchez Hortense (Pascal Bonitzer 2012)--FCS
Dear White People (Justin Simien 2014)--ND/NF
Double, The (Richard Ayoade 2013)--ND/NF
Felony (Matthew Saville 2013)--FCS
Fish & Cat (Shahram Mokri 2013)--ND/NF
Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, A (Ana Lily Anirpour 2013)--ND/NF
Japanese Dog, The (Tudor Cristian Jurgiu 2014)--ND/NF
Me and You/Io e te (Bernardo Bertolucci 2013)--FCS
Mouton/Sheep (Gilles Deroo, Mariane Pistone 2013)--ND/NF
Obvious Child (Gillian Robbespierre 2013)--ND/NF
Of Horses and Men (Benedickt Erlingsson 2013)--ND/NF
Our Sunhi (Hong Sang-soo 2013)--FCS
Quod Erat Demonstrandum (Andrei Gruzsnetczki 2014)--ND/NF
Return to Homs, The (Talal Derki 2013)--ND/NF
Salvation Army/L'Armée du salut (Abdellah Taïa 2013)--ND/NF
Salvo (Fabio Grassadonia, Antonio Piazza 2013)--ND/NF
She's Lost Control (Anja Marquardt 2014)--ND/NF
Spell to Ward Off the Darkness, A (Ben Rivers, Ben Russell 2013)
Stop the Pounding Heart (Robert Minervini 2013)--ND/NF
Story of Fear/Historia del miedo (2013)--ND/NF
Story of My Death/Historia de meva mort (Albert Serra 2013)--ND/NF
Strange Color of Your Body's Tears, The/L'Étrange couleur des larmes de ton corps (Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani 2013)--ND/NF
Strange Little Cat, The/Merkwürdige Kätzchen, Das (Ramon Zürcher 2013)--ND/NF
To Kill a Man (Alejandro Fernándo Almendras 2013)--ND/NF
Trap Street/Shuiyin jie (Vivian Qu 2013)--ND/NF
Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga, The (Jessica Orneck 2014)--ND/NF
We Come As Friends (Hubert Sauper 2014)--ND/NF
Youth (Tom Shoval 2013)--ND/NF


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Entrance, Elinor Bunin Monroe Film Center, Film Cociety of Lincoln Center
[Photo by Chris Knipp]

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NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS 2014: EARLY SELECTIONS

As before the FSLC/MoMA selection committee has announced some "early selections." The whole program will come later. (Feb. 14, 2014)

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THE DOUBLE


The Double | Richard Ayoade
UK | 2013 | 93min
Richard Ayoade has built a loyal following with his hilariously off characters, notably the one he plays in the TV series The IT Crowd and those that inhabit his 2010 directorial debut, Submarine. Starring Jesse Eisenberg as both Simon James, a humdrum worker drone, and his gregarious doppelgänger, James Simon, the film is set within both the claustrophobic confines of Simon’s bureaucratic workplace and his paranoid mind.

Of Horses and Men | Benedikt Erlingsson
Iceland | 2014 | 80min
The debut feature by celebrated stage director Benedikt Erlingsson announces the arrival of an innovative new cinematic voice. Set almost exclusively outdoors amid stunning Icelandic landscapes, the film features in equal parts a cast of exquisite short-legged Icelandic horses and human characters—including the terrific Ingvar E. Sigurdsson and Charlotte Bøving as meant-for-each-other but put-upon lovers—illuminating with great inventive flair the relationship between man and beast.

Salvation Army (L'armée du salut) | Abdellah Taïa
France/Morocco/Switzerland | 2013 | 81min
Like the book it’s based on—Abdellah Taïa’s own 2006 landmark novel—the Moroccan author’s directorial debut is a bracing, deeply personal account of a young gay man’s awakening that avoids both cliché and the trappings of autobiography. With a clear-eyed approach, devoid of sentimentality, this wholly surprising bildungsfilm explores what it means to be an outsider, and with the help of renowned cinematographer Agnès Godard, Taïa finds a film language all his own: at once rigorous and poetic, and worthy of Robert Bresson in its concreteness and lucidity.

A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness | Ben Rivers and Ben Russell
Estonia/France | 2013 | 98min
As collaborators, Ben Rivers and Ben Russell, two intrepid and nomadic talents of experimental film and art, have created one of the most bewitching cinematic experiences to come along in a great while. In A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness, Robert A.A. Lowe, the celebrated musician behind Lichens and Om, gives a strangely affecting, perhaps even trance-inducing performance as the film’s Parsifal figure, a quixotic man who embarks on a quest for utopia—the holy grail of infinite truth, self-knowledge, and spiritual connectedness.

Stop the Pounding Heart | Roberto Minervini
Belgium/Italy/USA | 2013 | 100min
Sara (Sara Carlson, playing herself) is part of a devout Christian goat-farming family with 12 children, all home-schooled and raised with strict moral guidance from the Scriptures. Set in a rural community that has remained isolated from technological advances and lifestyle influence—no phones, TVs, computers, or drunken teen brawls—the subtly narrative film follows Sara and Colby, two 14-year-olds with vastly different backgrounds who are quietly drawn to each other. By presenting an authentic, impartial portrayal of the Texas Bible Belt, Minervini allows for the humanity and complexity behind the stereotypes to show through.

Story of My Death (Història de la meva mort) | Albert Serra
Spain/France | 2013 | 148min
No one else working in movies today makes anything remotely like the Catalan maverick Albert Serra, a cerebral oddball and improbable master of cinematic antiquity. Known for his unconventional adaptations of Cervantes’s Don Quixote (Honor of the Knights) and the Biblical parable of the Three Kings (Birdsong), Serra here stages the 18th-century passage from rationalism to romanticism as a tussle between two figures of legend, Casanova and Dracula.

Trap Street (Shuiyin Jie) | Vivian Qu
China | 2013 | 94min
Notions of surveillance and observation are turned inside out in Trap Street, producer Vivian Qu’s first turn as a director. Noir in tone, and a great representation of the newest generation of Chinese filmmakers, the film is a bold story of who is really watching who that, while firmly embedded in the current cultural context of China, could happen to any one of us.

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Complete New Directors/New Films 2014 slate (20 Feb.)

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DEAR WHITE PEOPLE

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
Ana Lily Amirpour, USA, 2014, DCP, 107 min.
This super-stylish and spellbinding Persian take on the vampire genre doubles as a compact metaphor for the current state of Iran. Ana Lily Amirpour’s debut feature guides us on a dreamlike walk on the wild side, into the nocturnal and sparsely populated underworld of “Bad City,” an Iran of the mind that nevertheless rings true. In a cool and brooding scenario that involves just a handful of characters, an alluring female vampire stalks potential victims with a judgmental eye—but isn’t immune to romantic desire when it presents itself in the form of a young hunk who’s looking for a way out of his dead-end existence. With to-die-for high-contrast black-and-white cinematography and a sexy cast that oozes charisma, horror has seldom seemed so hot.
Persian with English subtitles
Wednesday, March 19, 7:00pm & 8:00pm – MoMA

20,000 Days on Earth (Closing Night)
Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard, 2014, U.K., DCP, 95 min.
This unclassifiable immersion in the twilight world of polymath musician Nick Cave is a portrait worthy of a great self-mythologizer. In their feature debut, artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard combine footage of Cave and the Bad Seeds recording their 2013 album Push the Sky Away with alternately telling and teasing scenes that fall somewhere between fact and fiction. As Cave visits a shrink, digs into his archives, and reminisces with friends (like Ray Winstone and Kylie Minogue) who pop up in the backseat of his Jaguar, 20,000 Days on Earth evokes Godard’s One Plus One and Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There in its playful deconstruction of stardom and identity. This enthralling film offers a glimpse of an icon at his most exposed, even as it adds another layer to his legend. A Drafthouse Films release.
Sunday, March 30, 7:00pm, 9:30pm – FSLC

Obvious Child (Centerpiece Film)
Gillian Robespierre, USA, 2014, DCP, 83 min.
A girl walks into a bar…and starts telling jokes about her vagina and her boyfriend. But it turns out the joke’s on her: the boyfriend’s been sleeping with her friend, and he takes advantage of her public, extremely off-color verbal antics to dump her. Basting in misery (she’s also about to lose her job) and alcohol (with a gay wing-man on hand to enable her), she attempts to find solace in family, friends, more stand-up, and ultimately a casual hookup. What comes next (no spoilers here) represents a brave new frontier in comedy, and director Gillian Robespierre tackles it head-on, with side splitting results. Truly a “choice” comedy, the film features a star-making lead performance by Jenny Slate, who allows herself to laugh along with the joke called life. An A24 release.
Thursday, March 27, 9:00pm – MoMA PS1
Saturday, March 29, 3:00pm – FSLC

The Babadook
Jennifer Kent, Australia, 2014, DCP, 95 min.
Young widow Amelia lives with her seven-year-old son, Samuel, who seems to get odder by the day. His father’s death in an accident when driving Amelia to the hospital to give birth to him may have something to do with the boy’s unnerving behavior, which scares other children and perhaps even his own mother. But when a sinister children’s book called Mister Babadook mysteriously appears—and keeps reappearing—Amelia begins to wonder if there’s a presence in the house more disturbed than her son. Jennifer Kent’s visually stunning debut genuinely frightens us with the revelation that the things that go bump in the night may be buried deep inside our psyches, not just in the basement. An IFC Midnight release.
Satuday, March 22, 9:30pm – FSLC
Sunday, March 23, 9:00pm – MoMA

Buzzard
Joel Potrykus, USA, 2014, HDCam, 97 min.
Winner of the Locarno Film Festival’s 2012 Best Emerging Director award for his debut feature Ape, Joel Potrykus makes a brazen leap forward with his sophomore effort, Buzzard, a darkly comical look at a slacker office temp who gets by on cold SpaghettiOs while getting off on stealing refund checks from his employer. Filmed on a shoestring budget, often guerrilla-style, in the writer-director’s native Grand Rapids and Detroit, Michigan, Buzzard stars an unforgettable Joshua Burge as an angry young man who, through a series of small, increasingly unhinged mutinies, sticks it to corporate America on behalf of the great unsung 99%. Citing Alan Clarke, Jim Jarmusch, Michael Haneke, and Kelly Reichardt among his influences, Potrykus offers a barbaric yawp for truly independent regional American cinema.
Screening with:
Person to Person
Dustin Guy Defa, USA, 2014, HDCam, 18 min.
A man is baffled when he finds a beautiful woman sleeping on his floor the morning after a party—and becomes even more so when she refuses to leave.
Sunday, March 23, 6:15pm – FSLC
Monday, March 24, 8:30pm – MoMA

Dear White People
Justin Simien, USA, 2014, DCP, 108 min.
Welcome to Winchester University where, in the name of diversity, the all-black residence hall Parker/Armstrong is about to be dismantled. In the middle of an Ivy League campus, all racial hell breaks loose: Samantha White (Tessa Thompson) uses her campus radio show to call out the administration as well as her fellow students, while Afroed geek Lionel (Tyler James Williams) writes for the all-white college newspaper hoping to expose hypocrisy campus-wide. No one is safe in the culture wars that follow. In his feature debut, Justin Simien riffs on groundbreaking films of the black experience of a generation ago (yes, really) to playfully explore the gray areas of race in America, and his satirical take challenges our ideas of identity in our supposed post-racial world.
Friday, March 21, 9:00pm – FSLC
Sunday, March 23, 6:00pm – MoMA

The Double
Richard Ayoade, U.K., 2013, DCP, 93 min.
Richard Ayoade has built a loyal following with his hilariously “off” characters, notably the one he plays in the TV series The IT Crowd and those that inhabit his 2010 directorial debut, Submarine. His cerebral, visually arresting follow-up, The Double, based on Dostoevsky’s 1846 novella, enters slightly darker territory, and recalls the stylizations of Terry Gilliam. Starring Jesse Eisenberg as both Simon James, a humdrum worker drone, and his gregarious doppelgänger, James Simon, the film is set within both the claustrophobic confines of Simon’s bureaucratic workplace and his paranoid mind. Aided by a stellar supporting cast (including Wallace Shawn, Mia Wasikowska, Sally Hawkins, Paddy Considine, and Chris O’Dowd), The Double firmly establishes Ayoade as a leading voice in contemporary cinematic comedy. A Magnolia Pictures release.
Monday, March 24, 9:00pm – FSLC
Saturday, March 29, 6:30pm – MoMA

Fish & Cat (North American Premiere)
Shahram Mokri, Iran, 2013, DCP, 134 min.
A bold experiment in perpetual motion with an enigmatic time-warp narrative, Fish & Cat plays out as one continuous shot, with the camera moving among a host of characters at a remote forest and a nearby lake. Gradually subverting a gruesome premise drawn from a real-life case of a backwoods restaurant that served human flesh, the film builds an atmosphere of tension as a menacing pair descend on a campsite where a group of college kids have gathered for a kite-flying festival. But as the camera doubles back and crisscrosses between characters in real time, subtle space-time paradoxes suggest that something bigger is going on. Brilliantly sustained, Fish & Cat is further evidence of a new generation of filmmakers emerging in Iran.
Persian with English subtitles
Thursday, March 27, 6:00pm – MoMA
Friday, March 28, 9:00pm – FSLC

History of Fear (Historia del miedo) - North American Premiere
Benjamín Naishtat, Argentina/Uruguay/France/Germany/Qatar, 2014, DCP, 79 min.
How strong does a fence need to be, or how loud must an alarm blare, or how brightly should an open field be lit for us to feel safe? The impossibility of a definitive answer to these kinds of questions lies at the heart of Benjamín Naishtat’s unsettling feature debut. Set in an economically destabilized Argentina, the film weaves stories of characters from multiple social strata into an interlocking narrative of paranoia and fear. The isolation of wealth and detachment from neighbors causes insecurities to fester, feeding a “security consumption” culture and all its incumbent paraphernalia. As we begin to recognize and sympathize with the situations depicted, the most troubling realization of all arrives: we are doing it to ourselves.
Spanish with English subtitles
Friday, March 21, 9:00pm – MoMA
Sunday, March 23, 9:15pm – FSLC

The Japanese Dog
Tudor Cristian Jurgiu, Romania, 2013, DCP, 86 min.
Offering a striking departure from the gallows humor of the Romanian New Wave, Jurgiu’s Chekhovian The Japanese Dog instead pays loving homage to the tender and gently comical family dramas of Yasujiro Ozu, Late Spring and There Was a Father in particular. Victor Rebengiuc, a legendary veteran of stage and screen, imbues the elderly Costache Moldu with a stoic, yet fragile dignity as he reunites with his estranged son after losing his wife and home in a devastating flood. Exquisitely attuned to the rhythms of nature and rural life—and the melancholy beauty of transient things—The Japanese Dog comes by its emotions honestly and poignantly.
Romanian with English subtitles
Friday, March 21, 6:30pm – FSLC
Sunday, March 23, 1:00pm – MoMA

Mouton (Sheep) - U.S. Premiere
Gilles Deroo & Marianne Pistone, France, 2013, DCP, 100 min.
Mouton (“Sheep”) is the nickname of Aurelien (David Mérabet), who at 17 is granted independence from his troubled family and goes off to live on his own in a seaside town. Hired as a chef’s assistant, Sheep fits in well with his coworkers and makes new friends. Life is finally good. Shot in 16mm, Gilles Deroo and Marianne Pistone’s first feature studies the quotidian aspects of Mouton’s life through his eyes as well as those of the town’s residents. Though fiction, the story is filmed as if it were a cinéma vérité documentary, the camera wandering from scene to scene, character to character. And just when audiences get into the groove of this town, something happens that changes things irrevocably. So two acts, not equally divided, bring us closer to the reality of living than many other films do, simply through small moments and gestures. Winner of two prizes at the Locarno Film Festival, Mouton is a lovely evocation of the pleasures and pain of small-town existence.
French with English subtitles
Thursday, March 20, 9:00pm – MoMA
Saturday, March 22, 6:30pm – FSLC

Of Horses and Men
Benedikt Erlingsson, Iceland/Germany, 2013, DCP, 80 min.
The debut feature by celebrated stage director Benedikt Erlingsson announces the arrival of an innovative new cinematic voice. Set almost exclusively outdoors amid stunning Icelandic landscapes, the film features in equal parts a cast of exquisite short-legged Icelandic horses and human characters—including the terrific Ingvar E. Sigurdsson and Charlotte Bøving as meant-for-each-other but put-upon lovers—illuminating with great inventive flair the relationship between man and beast. Several narrative strands defined by the way each character relates to their horse recount a variety of situations according to the particulars of the seasons, resulting in a surprising and sometimes humorous symbiosis between horses, humans, and nature.
Icelandic, Swedish, Spanish, Russian, and English with English subtitles
Saturday, March 22, 6:15pm – MoMA
Monday, March 24, 6:30pm – FSLC

Quod Erat Demonstrandum (North American Premiere)
Andrei Gruzsniczki, Romania, 2013, DCP, 107 min.
Romania, mid-1980s. Sorin (Sorin Leoveanu), a gifted mathematician whose career advancement is blocked because he is not a member of the Communist party, comes to the attention of the security services after he secretly arranges for an academic paper on his new theorem to be published in an American journal. With practiced insidiousness, the Securitate start their investigation, led by Voican (Florin Piersic, Jr.), who sets about pressuring Sorin’s friends and colleagues to inform on him. Making a strong and engrossing addition to a body of films from the New Romanian Cinema that delve into the years of dictatorship, Andrei Gruzsniczki’s low-key but quietly tense drama of compromise and betrayal re-creates the period with painstaking accuracy and captures both the atmosphere of mistrustful cautiousness and resigned discontent of its populace and the petty banality of the regime’s methods of surveillance and control.
Romanian with English subtitles
Thursday, March 20, 9:00pm – FSLC
Saturday, March 22, 3:30pm – MoMA

Return to Homs
Talal Derki, Syria/Germany, 2013, DCP, 90 min.
As immersive a documentary of active war as has ever been made, this unsparing account of the struggle for Homs follows—from August 2011 to August 2013—two close friends whose lives are completely altered when their beloved city is bombed into a ghost town. We witness Basset, a charismatic 19-year-old soccer player and iconic performer of protest songs, and Ossama, a 24-year-old media activist who captures the revolution with his camera, transform from peaceful protesters to armed resistance fighters. Derki’s camera, placed inside bombed-out buildings, records insurgents defending their city under siege as battles intensify, panicked civilians run for shelter, and a rising number of comrades are injured or killed. The soundtrack features Basset’s songs interrupted by gunfire and the occasional comment from the director. The images speak for themselves.
Arabic with English subtitles
Tuesday, March 25, 6:15pm – MoMA
Wednesday, March 26, 9:00pm – FSLC

Salvation Army (L’Armée du salut)
Abdellah Taïa, France/Morocco/Switzerland, 2013, DCP, 81 min.
Like the book it’s based on—Abdellah Taïa’s own 2006 landmark novel—the Moroccan author’s directorial debut is a bracing, deeply personal account of a young gay man’s awakening that avoids both cliché and the trappings of autobiography. First seen as a 15-year-old, Abdellah (Saïd Mrini) habitually sneaks away from his family’s crowded Casablanca home to engage in sexual trysts with random men in abandoned buildings. A decade later, we find Abdellah (now played by Karim Ait M’hand) on scholarship in Geneva, involved with an older Swiss professor (Frédéric Landenberg). With a clear-eyed approach, devoid of sentimentality, this wholly surprising bildungsfilm explores what it means to be an outsider, and with the help of renowned cinematographer Agnès Godard, Taïa finds a film language all his own: at once rigorous and poetic, worthy of Bresson in its concreteness and lucidity.
Thursday, March 27, 6:30pm – FSLC
Friday, March 28, 6:15pm – MoMA

Salvo
Fabio Grassadonia & Antonio Piazza, Italy/France, 2013, DCP, 104 min.
In their supremely assured debut feature, writer-directors Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza breathe new life into the time-honored genre of the Mafia thriller. While hunting down a rival who has ordered a hit on him, the titular gangster (a smoldering Saleh Bakri) invades a Palermo home, only to discover his prey’s blind sister, Rita (Sara Serraiocco), in the basement. The nail-biting, magnificently orchestrated game of cat-and-mouse that ensues, with its evocative use of sound, darkness, and offscreen space, sets the tone for the rest of this richly atmospheric work. When Rita’s sight is restored—from shock or perhaps some kind of miracle—Salvo is left to determine the fate of his prisoner turned love interest. Winner of the top two prizes at the 2013 Cannes Critics’ Week, Salvo tweaks the conventions of its genre without betraying them and, in the grand tradition of Jean-Pierre Melville, wrings blindsiding depths of emotion from the sparest of means. A Film Movement release.
Saturday, March 29, 9:00pm – MoMA
Sunday, March 30, 4:00pm – FSLC

She’s Lost Control
Anja Marquardt, 2014, USA, DCP, 90 min.
In a world of increasing layers between people, intimacy is perhaps the most elusive ingredient of human interaction. A person can either take the plunge and emotionally connect with their OS (à la Spike Jonze’s Her) or, in the case of She’s Lost Control, psychotherapists can refer patients to sex surrogates. Engaging in that line of work, NYC-based Ronah (fearlessly played by Brooke Bloom) puts to use her considerable psych-studies experience, as well as her natural solicitous warmth, to engage in close but professional relationships. Until, that is, she meets Johnny, and her already fraying control dissolves the thin line between professional and personal intimacy. First-time feature director Anja Marquardt, however, never loses control, delivering a stylish, deeply unnerving, and profound film on an intangible modern issue.
Saturday, March 29, 9:00pm – FSLC
Sunday, March 30, 4:30pm – MoMA

A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness
Ben Rivers & Ben Russell, Estonia/France, 2013, DCP, 98 min.
As collaborators, Ben Rivers and Ben Russell, two intrepid and nomadic talents of experimental film and art, have created one of the most bewitching cinematic experiences to come along in a great while. In A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness, Robert A.A. Lowe, the celebrated musician behind Lichens and Om, gives a strangely affecting, perhaps even trance-inducing performance as the film’s Parsifal figure, a quixotic man who embarks on a quest for utopia—the holy grail of infinite truth, self-knowledge, and spiritual connectedness. He finds some measure of it in three seemingly disparate contexts: in a small collective community on a remote Estonian island, in isolation in the northern Finnish wilderness, and onstage fronting a black metal band in Norway. While his experience seems to be a perpetual one of home, exile, and return, for us, it is purely magical. A KimStim release.
Saturday, March 22, 9:00pm – MoMA
Tuesday, March 25, 6:30pm – FSLC

Stop the Pounding Heart (U.S. Premiere)
Roberto Minervini, Belgium/Italy/USA, 2013, DCP, 100 min.
Sara (Sara Carlson, playing herself) is part of a devout Christian goat-farming family with 12 children, all home-schooled and raised with strict moral guidance from the Scriptures. Set in a rural community that has remained isolated from technological advances and lifestyle influence—no phones, TVs, computers, or drunken-teen brawls—the subtly narrative film follows Sara and Colby, two 14-year-olds with vastly different backgrounds who are quietly drawn to each other. In Minervini’s intimate documentary-style portrait—the third in the Italian-born filmmaker’s Texas trilogy—Sara’s commitment to her faith is never questioned. It’s the power of the director’s nonintrusive handheld-camera style that reveals his protagonist’s spiritual and emotional inner turmoil about her place in a faith that requires women to be subservient to their fathers before becoming their husbands’ helpers. By also presenting an authentic, impartial portrayal of the Texas Bible Belt, Minervini allows humanity and complexity behind the stereotypes to show through.
Friday, March 21, 6:15pm – MoMA
Sunday, March 23, 3:30pm – FSLC

Story of My Death (Història de la meva mort) - U.S. Premiere
Albert Serra, Spain/France, 2013, 35mm, 148 min.
No one else working in movies today makes anything remotely like the Catalan maverick Albert Serra, a cerebral oddball and improbable master of cinematic antiquity. Known for his unconventional adaptations of Cervantes’s Don Quixote (Honor of the Knights) and the Biblical parable of the Three Kings (Birdsong), Serra here stages the 18th-century passage from rationalism to romanticism as a tussle between two figures of legend, Casanova and Dracula. Against a backdrop of candlelit conversation and earthy carnality, Serra sets in motion contrasting ideas about pleasure and desire, alternating between winding philosophical dialogue and wordless passages of savage beauty. Winner of the top prize at the 2013 Locarno Film Festival, the film is both a painterly feast for the eyes, abounding with art-historical allusions, and an idiosyncratic, self-aware revamping of the costume melodrama.
Catalan with English subtitles
Wednesday, March 26, 9:00pm – MoMA
Saturday, March 29, 5:30pm – FSLC

The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears
Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani, Belgium/France/Luxembourg, 2013, DCP, 102 min.
Deepening and amplifying their super-fetishistic remix of Italian giallo and horror tropes in Amer (ND/NF 2010), Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani here create a delirious and increasingly baroque pastiche of the trance film and cinéma fantastique—and then push it to breaking point. Returning home from a business trip, Dan (Klaus Tange) finds that his wife has disappeared. When the police are of no help, he begins to obsessively investigate their singular and increasingly surreal art deco apartment building in search of clues to her whereabouts. Traditional narrative dissolves into mise en abyme in this kaleidoscopic, vertiginous adventure in sound and image, sadism and eroticism, and the real and the imagined. The unwary may be shaken up by the Belgian duo’s overpowering and percussive stylistic shocks, but in this haunted-house movie, one thing’s for sure: the eyes have it. A Strand Releasing release.
French and Dutch with English subtitles
Friday, March 28, 9:00pm – MoMA
Sunday, March 30, 1:15pm – FSLC

The Strange Little Cat (Das merkwürdige Kätzchen)
Ramon Zürcher, Germany, 2013, DCP, 72 min.
In the hands of masters like Jacques Tati, Lucrecia Martel, and Chantal Akerman, cinema that at first appears to merely observe and record is in fact masking intricately constructed commentaries, built from seemingly mundane experiences. In the case of The Strange Little Cat, an extended family-dinner gathering becomes an exquisitely layered confection ready for writer-director Ramon Zürcher’s razor-sharp slicing. A mother, desperately trying not to implode, and her youngest daughter, who explodes constantly, form the poles between which sons and daughters, aunts and uncles, cats and cousins weave in and around each other in the tight domestic space of a middle-class Berlin flat. Fans of Béla Tarr and Franz Kafka will find much to love, as will devotees of the Berlin School, of which this film represents a third-generation evolution. This comedic examination of the everyday has been captivating audiences since its premiere at the 2013 Berlin Film Festival. A KimStim release.
German with English subtitles
Tuesday, March 25, 9:00pm – MoMA
Wednesday, March 26, 6:30pm – FSLC

To Kill a Man
Alejandro Fernández Almendras, Chile/France, 2014, DCP, 82 min.
Bullying is a phenomenon that doesn’t just take place in the schoolyard. In Alejandro Almendras’s raw, unnerving psychological thriller, bullies and their victims live side by side in a working-class neighborhood. Passive Jorge tries to ignore the cruel taunting of some local thugs who would be considered juvenile delinquents if they weren’t full-grown adults. But when the worst of the bunch steals Jorge’s insulin syringe, and his son winds up in the hospital with a gunshot wound after attempting to get it back, Jorge and his wife seek redress legally—to no avail. The family is humiliated again and again, and when his teenage daughter is sexually threatened, Jorge, pushed over the edge, decides to take matters into his own hands. A Film Movement release.
Spanish with English subtitles
Thursday, March 20, 6:30pm – FSLC
Sunday, March 23, 3:30pm – MoMA

Trap Street (Shuiyin Jie)
Vivian Qu, China, 2013, DCP, 94 min.
Notions of surveillance and observation are turned inside out in Trap Street, producer Vivian Qu’s first turn as a director. While surveying city streets for a digital-mapping company, engineer Qiuming catches sight of Lifen, a beautiful young woman. Immediately smitten, he follows her to a street that doesn’t appear on any map or even a GPS. In between his other gigs—installing security cameras, sweeping hotel rooms for electronic bugs—he tries to get to know this alluring stranger. And he does—sort of. But as he tries to learn more about her, events take on disturbing overtones, and the mystery, as well as the paranoia, deepens from there. Noir in tone, and a great representation of the newest generation of Chinese filmmakers, Trap Street is a bold story of who is really watching who that, while firmly embedded in the current cultural context of China, could happen to any one of us.
Mandarin with English subtitles
Friday, March 28, 6:30pm – FSLC
Saturday, March 29, 4:00pm – MoMA

The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga (World Premiere)
Jessica Oreck, USA/Russia/Ukraine/Poland, 2013, HDCam, 73 min.
Deep in the forest, wedged in cracks in the bark and under moss-covered rocks, memories and myths are hidden. These subconscious tales and reminiscences, drawn from the natural world, inform the societies we build. Jessica Oreck’s fantastical work combines animation, traditional storytelling, and contemporary nonfiction filmmaking styles to recount the Slavic folktale of the frightful Baba Yaga, a witch said to live in a woodland hut perched on chicken legs who roasts her guests for dinner. But as modern conflicts and scourges encroached, and their refugees fled to the forest, the implications of her presence began to shift. An impressive contemporary allegory on progress, the past, and the power of nature.
Saturday, March 22, 1:30pm – FSLC
Monday, March 24, 6:15pm – MoMA

We Come as Friends
Hubert Sauper, France/Austria, 2014, DCP, 110 min.
Hubert Sauper’s masterful exploration of modern colonialism, with war-ravaged Sudan as a focus, offers devastating insights into the most premeditated, casually insidious ways of taking possession of Africa today. The scenarios of clueless Texan missionaries, shallow UN case workers, and Chinese oil-company CEOs living in gated communities while polluting the local drinking water are like a collage of postcards from hell. It takes a particularly gifted filmmaker to construct from these horrors something that can also engage one’s sense of beauty; with an air of science fiction aided by otherworldly scenes captured from the self-manufactured flying machine in which Sauper and his co-pilot arrive in Africa, the documentarian has created an indelible and righteously alarming second film in a planned trilogy that began with the Oscar-nominated Darwin’s Nightmare.
English, Chinese, Arabic, Ma’di, and Toposa with English subtitles
Thursday, March 20, 6:15pm – MoMA
Saturday, March 22, 3:45pm – FSLC

Youth (U.S. Premiere)
Tom Shoval, Israel/Germany, 2013, DCP, 107 min.
Tom Shoval’s gripping, haunting feature debut depicts the ill-advised kidnapping scheme of two Israeli brothers (real-life siblings Eitan and David Cunio) from preparation to aftermath. With their father’s unemployment threatening the stability of their comfortable middle-class existence, older brother Yaki takes advantage of his recently acquired assault rifle, courtesy of his compulsory military service, to put into action a plan inspired equally by desperation and a lifelong diet of violent mainstream American cinema. But the brothers might have bitten off more than they can chew: it’s Shabbat, and their victim’s wealthy orthodox family won’t pick up the phone to take the ransom call. This sharply observed study of familial attachment and fraternal psychology broadens into a tough-minded generational portrait that subtly addresses many aspects of contemporary Israeli life, from the role of the military to the recent economic protests to the enduring fault lines of class and gender.
Hebrew with English subtitles
Screening with:
Shlomo X (שלמה איקס)
Ruth Patir, Israel, 2013, HDCam, 9 min.
A car mechanic is at the nexus between fictional and real-life stories.
Tuesday, March 25, 9:15pm – FSLC
Wednesday, March 26, 6:00pm – MoMA

ND/NF Shorts Program 1 (76 min.)

At the Door (An den Tür)
Miriam Bliese, Germany, 2013, DCP, 5 min.
A divorced couple rediscovers a long-lost intimacy via an apartment-building intercom.
German with English subtitles

You Can’t Do Everything at Once, But You Can Leave Everything at Once (Man kann nicht alles auf einmal tun, aber man kann alles auf einmal lassen)
Marie-Elsa Sgualdo, Switzerland, 2013, DCP, 15 min.
Archival footage stands in for childhood memories, with family history unfolding like a tall tale.
French with English subtitles

Face in the Crowd
Alex Prager, USA, 2013, HDCam, 12 min.
Characters appearing in intimate interviews and ethereal crowd scenes seem both anonymous and oddly familiar.

Afronauts
Frances Bodomo, USA, 2014, HDCam, 14 min.
The story of the first Afronaut, a 17-year-old Zambian girl training for a moon launch.

The Island (La isla)
Dominga Sotomayor and Katarzyna Klimkiewicz, Chile/Poland/Denmark, 2013, DCP, 30 min.
The mood of a family gathering on a beautiful island darkens when one of the guests fails to show up.
Spanish with English subtitles
Saturday, March 22, 1:00pm – MoMA
Sunday, March 23, 1:15pm – FSLC

ND/NF Shorts Program 2 (72 min.)

Landscape (Paisaje)
Matias Umpierrez, Argentina, 2013, DCP, 13 min.
In the aftermath of tragedy, a woman seeks solace in nature.
Spanish with English subtitles

The Wild (Wildnis)
Helena Wittmann, Germany, 2013, DCP, 12 min.
The quiet home of an elderly couple comes alive through projections of animals-in-the-wild footage shot by the husband.
German with English subtitles

Greenland Unrealised
Dania Reymond, France/Taiwan, 2012, HDCam, 9 min.
An unlikely collision of animation, the Arctic, and Antonioni.
Bunun with English subtitles

Pieces (Anacos)
Xacio Baño, Spain, 2012, DCP, 7 min.
A young man assembles fragments of his mother’s life.
Galician with English subtitles

Three, Two
Sarah-Violet Bliss, USA, 2013, HDCam, 2 min.
A mother and daughter come home to a disturbing surprise.

The Reaper (La Parka)
Gabriel Serra, Mexico, 2013, DCP, 29 min.
An exploration of a man’s relationship with death, and what one must do to live.
Spanish with English subtitles

Film Comment Selects 2014 slate

From the Film Society of Lincoln Center, NY. "The 14th edition of Film Comment magazine’s essential and eclectic feast of cinephilia presents 22 discoveries and rediscoveries, 17 of them New York premieres, and nine without U.S. distribution, handpicked by the magazine’s editors after scouring the international festival circuit in 2013. "--Mindy Bond, Flavorpill.

This is concurrent with the Redez-Vous and New Directors screenings, so hard to attend but I may see one or two. I'd like to see the Petzolds and the Moodysson but it depends on my schedule.

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WE ARE THE BEST (Lukas Moodysson)

A.O. Scott in the NY Times offers a preview of Film Comment Selects with thumbnails of some of the films.

Our Sunhi
Hong Sang-soo | 2013 | 88 mins
A former film student awakens romantic longing in three men who cross her path in this acutely observed take on misread behavior, indecision, and awkward interchanges between the sexes from one of cinema’s undisputed masters of moral comedy.
Monday, February 17
9:00pm
Thursday, February 20
4:45pm

Me and You
Bernardo Bertolucci | 2012 | 103 mins
A teenager from a well-to-do-family tries to escape the outside world by shutting himself in his mother’s basement, but finds himself sharing the space with his heroin-addicted older half-sister in Bertolucci’s first Italian-language feature in 32 years.
Thursday, February 27
8:30pm

Betrayal
David Jones | 1983 | 95 mins
Jeremy Irons, Ben Kingsley, and Patricia Hodge star in this rarely screened adaptation of one of Harold Pinter’s greatest plays, a semi-autobiographical portrait of an adulterous affair.
Read more »
Tuesday, February 18
8:45pm

Blood Glacier
Marvin Kren | 2013 | 98 mins
Scientists researching climate change at a research base in the German Alps discover a mysterious substance leaking from a glacier containing micro-organisms that can infect multiple hosts, and soon do, in this over-the-top creature feature for the Global Warming age.
Saturday, February 22
10:00pm

Cannibal
Manuel Martín Cuenca | 2013 | 116 mins
The blunt title of this quietly disturbing, creepily atmospheric, and deeply perverse character study of a small-town tailor who forms a connection with his “masseuse” neighbor won’t prepare you for the slow and mesmerizingly deliberate experience in store for you.
Saturday, February 22
3:20pm
Wednesday, February 26
3:30pm

Cherchez Hortense
Pascal Bonitzer | 2012 | 100 mins
Jean-Pierre Bacri and Kristin Scott Thomas are together at last in this old-school relationship movie by frequent Rivette and Ruiz screenplay collaborator and ex–Cahiers du cinéma critic Pascal Bonitzer, an underrated filmmaker in his own right.
Tuesday, February 18
6:30pm
Tuesday, February 25
4:45pm

City of Pirates
Raúl Ruiz | 1983 | 111 mins
Funny, frightening, and enigmatic, this rarely screened film by the late Raúl Ruiz is like a cross between Peter Pan and Friday the 13th as told through a wildly baroque visual style that suggests a collaboration between Georges Méliès and Sergio Leone.
Wednesday, February 26
9:50pm

Enemy
Denis Villeneuve | 2013 | 90 mins
In his second collaboration with Villeneuve, Jake Gyllenhaal gives his best performance to date as both Adam, a reserved and humorless history professor, and Anthony, an animated and cocksure bit-part actor who catches the academic’s eye due to their alarming resemblance.
Thursday, February 27
6:30pm

Fat Shaker
Mohammad Shirvani | 2013 | 85 mins
In this singular and cryptic film from a subversive new voice in Iranian cinema, an obese con man uses his attractive deaf-mute son to extort money from predatory women looking for a boy-toy—until one of his marks makes herself at home, with unexpected consequences.
Saturday, February 22
1:30pm

Felony
Matthew Saville | 2013 | 105 mins
Moral dilemmas abound in this tense police drama starring Tom Wilkinson and Joel Edgerton, who also wrote the screenplay, another knockout from the Australian production collective behind Animal Kingdom.
Monday, February 17
6:30pm

Flesh of My Flesh
Denis Dercourt | 2013 | 76 mins
Director Denis Dercourt in person for Q&A!
An unsettling and strikingly oblique psychological horror film that gives new meaning to the term “motherly love,” Flesh of My Flesh takes us into the schizoid reality of a woman whose young child has a rare medical condition that requires a highly unusual diet.
Saturday, February 22
5:45pm

Ghosts
Christian Petzold | 2005 | 85 mins
Petzold’s third film interweaves two intersecting storylines to explore the spectral existences of three female outsiders—a pair of late adolescent girls and an unstable middle-aged woman—who struggle to reconnect with “normal” society and find a place to belong.
Wednesday, February 26
8:00pm

Healthcare Mayhem: The Carey Treatment + The Hospital
Blake Edwards | Arthur Hiller | 1971 & 1972 | 204 mins
Suspicion abounds in this month’s Film Comment Double Feature of two early-1970s medical gems: The Carey Treatment, an elaborately plotted mystery thriller starring James Coburn, and The Hospital, a blackly comic drama by Network writer Paddy Chayevsky.
Tuesday, February 25
7:00pm

The Hypnotist
Lasse Hallström | 2012 | 122 mins
Hallström returns to his native tongue for the first time in 25 years for this twisty, visually striking Nordic noir about a psychologist (the great Mikael Persbrandt) who’s lured back into hypnotism—a practice he’d sworn off—to help solve a horrific crime.
Friday, February 21
3:30pm
Sunday, February 23
8:00pm

Intruders
Noh Young-seok | 2013 | 99 mins
Director Noh Young-seok in person on February 20!
This twisty, blackly comic suspense thriller from South Korea follows a screenwriter who rents a winter cabin in a remote country backwater to concentrate on his latest project, but finds himself surrounded by a colorful and noisy cast of characters.
Thursday, February 20
6:45pm
Thursday, February 27
4:15pm

Metro Manila
Sean Ellis | 2013 | 115 mins
In this Sundance Audience Award winner, a family of poor rice-farmers travels from the desolate mountains to bustling Manila in the hopes of making some money, only to discover that the exploitation they faced at home is nothing compared to what greets them in the big city.
Friday, February 21
6:00pm

The Sacrament
Ti West | 2013 | 95 mins
Director Ti West in person for Q&A!
Indie horror specialist Ti West adopts a first-person found-footage approach, with his usual flair and assurance, for this story of a Jim Jones–type religious cult that will stick in your mind long after the credits roll.
Friday, February 21
8:30pm

Top of the Lake
Jane Campion | 2013 | 350 mins
Twin Peaks crossed with The Killing—and that isn’t the half of it. Mad Men’s Elisabeth Moss stars in this thrilling seven-episode television series, the toughest, wildest picture Jane Campion has ever made.
Sunday, February 23
1:00pm

We Are the Best!
Lukas Moodysson | 2013 | 102 mins
The director of Together and Lilya 4-ever is back on form with an energetic rough-and-tumble story of three rebellious teenage girls who form a punk rock band to defy the stifling conformity of early-1980s Stockholm.
Saturday, February 22
7:45pm

The Weight
Jeon Kyu-hwan | 2012 | 107 mins
This exquisitely shot, one-of-a-kind tale centers on a sickly hunchbacked mortician who takes pride and pleasure in cleaning and dressing the dead and his burdensome younger stepbrother, who wants nothing more than to be a woman.
Thursday, February 20
9:30pm

Wolfsburg
Christian Petzold | 2003 | 90 mins
Petzold’s first collaboration with Nina Hoss, star of his art-house hit Barbara, is a slow-burning thriller that uses the relationship between a hit-and-run driver and the victim’s mother to examine the role of chance in people’s lives and the existential malaise of modern Germany.
Wednesday, February 26
6:00pm

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Hedvig (Liv LeMoyne), Bobo (Mira Barkhammar), and Klara (Mira Grosin)

preview

We Are the Best!
Lukas Moodysson | 2013 | 102 mins
The director of Together and Lilya 4-ever is back on form with an energetic rough-and-tumble story of three rebellious teenage girls who form a punk rock band to defy the stifling conformity of early-1980s Stockholm.
Saturday, February 22
7:45pm

In the event, the staff at the Walter Reade Theater was unable to get this film to play on Wed. night, despite 200 people waiting to see it. We'll see if it will be shown again later or if I can get hold of a screener to comment on it. Mike D'Angelo liked it and gave it a 64 (high for him and putting it in his top ten for Toronto) but seemed to think it might just be a "charming trifle," I notice on checking back on his Toronto reporting. The VARIETY critic reviewing the film at Venice considered it a return to form, to Moodysson's original inclusive warmth, an unusual depiction of young female friendship that avoids Mean Girls and Disney-sweet extremes.

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THE FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER AND THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
43rd ANNUAL NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS, MARCH 19 - 30, 2014

**PRESS & INDUSTRY SCREENING SCHEDULE**

MONDAY, MARCH 3
10AM
A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE (107m) - FSLC
12PM
WE COME AS FRIENDS (110m) - FSLC
2:15PM
OF HORSES AND MEN (80m) - FSLC

TUESDAY, MARCH 4
10AM
MOUTON (100m) - FSLC
12PM
DEAR WHITE PEOPLE (108m) - FSLC
2PM
THE BABADOOK (95m) - FSLC
4:15PM
HISTORY OF FEAR (79m) - FSLC

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 5
10AM
THE JAPANESE DOG (86m) - FSLC
11:45AM
QUOD ERAT DEMONSTRANDUM (107m) - FSLC
1:45PM
SHORTS PROGRAM 1 (76m) - FSLC
3:15PM
VANQUISHING OF THE WITCH BABA YAGA (73m) - FSLC

THURSDAY, MARCH 6
10AM
TO KILL A MAN (82m) - FSLC
11:45AM
A SPELL TO WARD OFF THE DARKNESS (98m) - FSLC
1:45PM
STOP THE POUNDING HEART (100m) - FSLC
3:45PM
BUZZARD (97m) + PERSON TO PERSON (18m) - FSLC

FRIDAY, MARCH 7
10AM
THE DOUBLE (93m) - FSLC
REMINDER: ALL SCREENINGS MOVING FORWARD WILL TAKE
PLACE AT THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

MONDAY, MARCH 10
10AM
RETURN TO HOMS (90m) - MOMA
11:45AM
THE STRANGE LITTLE CAT (72m) - MOMA

TUESDAY, MARCH 11
10AM
YOUTH (107m) + SCHLOMO X (9m) - MOMA
12:15AM
STORY OF MY DEATH (148m) - MOMA

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 12
10AM
FISH AND CAT (134m) - MOMA
12:30PM
SALVATION ARMY (81m) - MOMA
2:15PM
OBVIOUS CHILD (83m) - MOMA

THURSDAY, MARCH 13
10AM
TRAP STREET (94m) - MOMA
12PM
THE STRANGE COLOR OF YOUR BODY’S TEARS (102m) - MOMA
2PM
SHORTS PROGRAM 2 (72m) - MOMA

FRIDAY, MARCH 14
10AM
SHE’S LOST CONTROL (90m) - MOMA
11:45AM
SALVO (104m) - MOMA
2PM
20,000 DAYS ON EARTH (95m) - MOMA
T

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JACAPO OLMO ANTINORI AND TEA FALCO IN ME AND YOU

BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI: ME AND YOU/IO E TE (2012)--FCS

A reviving retreat

As Mike D'Angelo noted in his 2012 Cannes AV Club report, Bertolucci's first film in a decade and first one in Italian in thirty years is enjoyable and well made. "Pleasurably inconsequential," he called it, but the now wheelchair-bound filmmaker, logically returning with a movie shot mostly in one small space, could be a small shot in the arm for Italy's currently lackluster cinema world. Anyway it is enjoyable. It starts with Lorenzo (Jacopo Olmo Antinori), an antisocial 14-year-old with a pimply wild-eyed face. He tricks his mother into thinking he's gone off on his class's week-long ski trip, while actually holing up in the large basement under their apartment, having stocked up on a meticulously organized week's worth of supplies. These include canned goods, soft drinks, books, even an ant colony and a big magnifying glass to observe it; he's into insects and animals and probably prefers them to people. In occasional phone chats with his mom, he successfully maintains the pretense that he's up in the mountains with his teacher and classmates.

But in the event Lorenzo is not alone in his basement hideaway, because he's soon joined by his older half sister Olivia (Tea Falco), who has come here to go cold turkey from heroin. It's the only place where she can do this in secret, she says. Lorenzo, it should be noted, as played by the engaging and vivid Antinori, isn't as nerdy and strange as his behavior might imply. Though he's immediately horrified that the flamboyant Olivia will give them away and he'll be "dead," Lorenzo's behavior toward her is uniformly sweet and kindly, and their parting when she is done and he's about to go back is loving. He also has a nice relationship with his bedridden grandmother, whom he visits even while hiding. Antinori has an obvious comic flair, so while Lorenzo's behavior is self-protective it's also humorous, and lighthearted, and future integration into the urban teenage population seems (perhaps for some disappointingly) quite conceivable. But in the film as written, Olivia steals a lot of our attention away from Lorenzo. This too may disappoint some viewers, but the point of the story seems to be that these two solitaries, by being set close together, are humanized, developing a capacity for caring and affection.

Me and You mostly works to develop, without psychological clichés, a close-up of how the rapprochement of Lorenzo and Olivia takes place. An older man comes to visit Olivia and gives her money, apparently for an artwork; we see her sophisticated, witty installations or photo pieces that Lorenzo finds on the Internet. The basement seems to have wi-fi and includes a dingy shower and loo, furniture, and trunks containing the wardrobe of a deceased countess who previously occupied the family apartment. And there's music, including several David Bowie songs, headphones -- and the ants. Olivia is a considerable disruption but things would be pretty flat if she had not shown up. Robinson Crusoe gets his Girl Friday and then some. Falco is vigorous and quirky, Antinori more a natural. It's to be hoped both their talents will be on view again soon.

There's a parallelism between this film and the director's flashier 2002 The Dreamers, with it young, almost incestuous ménage à trois, also confined to one place, though not a basement storage area but a grand Haussmannian Paris apartment. Maybe in this more cramped space, without the contrived and dubious references to 1968, we get to know these characters better. But while it's nice to see Bertolucci working again, it's not yet at all certain what he'll do now will be up to his best earlier work.

Me and You/Io e te, 103 mins., debuted at Cannes May 2012. It opened in Italy 25 Oct. 2012, but in other countries not till 2013. In France (18 Sept. 2013 release) its Allociné press rating was 3.3, the same as The Dreamers got in 2002. It was in the May 2013 SFIFF. Screened for this review as part of the Feb. 2014 Film Comment Selects series at Lincoln Center, New York. It showed Thurs. 27 Feb 2014.

US theatrical release began 4 July 2014 at Lincoln Plaza, Broadway at 62nd Street. Metacritic rating (as of 4 July) 56%.

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HONG SANG-SOO: OUR SUNHI (2013)--FCS

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EX-STUDENT SUNHI (Jung Yu-mi) SEDUCES PROFESSOR CHOI
(Kim Sang-joong IN OUR SUNHI TO GET A BETTER RECOMMENDATION LETTER

More good Hong Sang-soo

As Scott Foundas notes in his enthusiastic Variety review at Locarno, the prolific and ultra-consistent Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo has always focused on and celebrated (attractive, young) women, but Our Sunhi and his previous film Nobody’s Daughter Haewon signal a subtle shift to more of an actual femme POV; and Our Sunhi is one of Hong's most enjoyable efforts in a while, if less emotional than Haewon. As usual, there's a movie director, there's talk of film school, and there are endless complicated and sometimes comical flirtations to be observed, with people getting drunk and overstating things.

It all begins when Sunhi returns to film school to get a letter of recommendation from Professor Choi so she can get into graduate school in America. She runs into ex-boyfriend Munsu, and they drink. Munsu's declaration of undying love (an excellent and hilarious Lee Sun-kyun here) she rejects, leading Munsu to seek out Jaehak, another faculty member, and film director, and get drunk with him (more hilarity from Lee Sun-kyun). Munsu's absurd ramble about how one must dig deep and go all the way (did he get it from Sunhi, echoing a platitude from Professor Choi?) is rejected by Jaehak, who says digging deep will only reveal one's shortcomings.

Professor Choi gives Sunhi the recommendation letter he has dashed off, which he has made "honest," in other words ambiguous and niggling, with some good comments but also some unfavorable ones. She is smart, it says, but he's not sure if she has talent or not. She was shy in class. It was evident the professor didn't want Sunhi to go abroad. This leads Sunhi to invite the professor to lunch so she can get him to write a more positive letter. He admits she was his favorite student, and not only that, that he has always been in love with her. When she gives him the nod, he is ecstatic. He drinks with Jaehak, admitting he's excited about a young woman.

But now it's Jaehak's turn to run into Sunhi, and they go drinking in the same bar, with fried chicken again ordered in by the proprietress. (Thrice now the same old nostalgic love song is played, to ironic effect.) Sunhi gets quite drunk this time, and caresses Jaehak, saying sometimes he is "lovely." As they stumble to Jaehak's building (he has left his wife), it seems they will sleep together, but they don't.

By now it's clear that all three men are in love with Sunhi, and all are fools. Sunhi is a bit of a fool herself. A recurrent issue is: if you want to make films, why waste your time in film school, either as a student or a teacher? And why all this talk, when you should be doing things? That's the biggest irony, since Hong's movies are all talk.

As has been his wont of late, Hong creates a succession of similar scenes, with drunken sessions at a bar or restaurant table predominating, and he likes making lines and themes of successive dialogues overlap or recur -- though the parallelism isn't quite as dreamlike and confusing as in the 2011 The Day He Arrives, and the theme of going abroad isn't as poignant as in the 2013 Nobody's Daughter Haewon .

Sunhi sure gets drunk a lot, but she keeps these three men at arm's length. The situation resembles one in Eric Rohmer, as in A Summer's Tale (1996), where Melvil Poupaud must choose between three young women and -- the classic pattern, found in Jane Austen -- insists on picking the least appropriate. But especially here, Hong is more minimalist and cool than Rohmer. Sunhi is't picking anybody. She's more interested in the recommendation letter than in the three men. Hong is also more of a formalist than Rohmer. He is fascinated with parallels and repetitions of patterns. But this doesn't keep there from being some terrific acting in this movie. As Sunhi, Jung Yu-mi, in her fifth outing with the director, is a combination of sexy, innocent, flirtatious, and mysterious. But the prize must go to Lee Sun-kyun as Munsu: his drunken act with a condescending Jeong Jae-yeong is real, unexpected, hilarious, a triumph. Though the POV may be Sunhi's, in a way, some of the best interactions are between the men.

Playing with patterns isn't just formalism. It's what playwrights do when they construct a well-made farce. It's certainly a new pattern when all three men meet at last at the palace park, but it's also a comic climax.

Our Sunhi, 88 mins., debuted at Locarno, where it won Best Director and was nominated for the Golden Leopard. Other important international festivals including Toronto, London, and Vancouver. Screened for this review as part of the Film Comment Selects series at Lincoln Center, where it was shown 17 and 20 February 2014.

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"A TWO-SHOT BECOMES A THREE-SHOT": JAEHAK (Jeong Jae-yeong),
PROFESSOR CHOI (Kim Sang-joong AND MUNSU (Lee Sun-kyun)

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PASCAL BONITZER: CHERCHEZ HORTENSE (2012)--FCS

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CLAUDE RICH AND JEAN-PIERRE BACRI IN CHERCHEZ HORTENSE

A harried grown son gradually becoming a mensch

Cherchez Hortense/Look for Hortense, Pascal Bonitzer's busy, meandering, oddball French film, was included in Lincoln Center's eclectic winter series "Film Comment Selects" precisely because it doesn't fit in anywhere. It was a movie that virtually went straight to video. It opened in September 2012 ("La Rentrée, best time to open a film), got decent reviews, and was forgotten. But someone at the Film Society's house publication found and rescued it. In his series survey A.O. Scott of the New York Times said it's "an exemplary Film Comment selection in that it is a solid, satisfying movie that might too easily have been overlooked." Indeed, but Scott says nothing more, because it's hard to know what to say.

On the surface, Cherchez Hortense is an example of polished French bourgeois cinema. You have the beautiful interiors, nice locations, cool people, cafés, cigarettes. In this case it's a world above all notable for its elegant disarray, comfortably inhabited by familiar and well-loved actors from France's incestuous insider cinema world. The central couple is falling apart. She is distraught and unfaithful. He is haggard and has lost his self respect. Their little boy Noé (Marin Orcand Tourrès), curses and leaves the cap off the toothpaste tube. But they live in the middle of Paris, in a spacious apartment whose colors delicately harmonize. A bemused sadness should fill one as one walks out of the cinema.

It is the present day. Damien (Jean-Pierre Bacri), a professor of Chinese civilization at a high level business school, lives with his longtime companion Iva (Kristin Scott Thomas), a theater director, and Noé. The love has gone out of their relationship, lost in dull routine. One day, Iva persuades Damien to intercede with his distant father Sébastien (Claude Rich), a high level official with the Council of State, to save an undocumented foreign resident of mixed Balkan origins called Zorica (AKA Aurore, Isabelle Carré) from possible arrest or deportation that could happen now she's divorced from her French husband. This risky mission plunges Damien into a series of events that turn his life upside down. So the theme of Pascal Bonitzer's new film is stated. At the center of every scene is Jean-Pierre Bacri, an actor who wears exhaustion and despair like an Armani suit. Look at him and the glamorous ever-beautiful aging woman who is Kristin Scott Thomas and you'll see the still-strong preference of traditional French cinema that the women be lovely and the men hideous. The key relationship is the fanciful one between Damien and Aurore, who grew up in France and looks and sounds French (and is French, since the actress is).

To begin with, Antoine (Arthur Igual), the handsome young lead in her new play, makes a pass at Iva in a car. Guess where that leads. Sébastien is a pig, cutting Damien off at every turn. Worse, he turns out to be gay, as revealed by his saccharine interactions with the Japanese waiter, Satoshi (Masahiro Kashiwagi). If you remember anything from this film it will be the bland, smiling stonewalling of Sébastien: Claude Rich, along with Scott Thomas and Bacri, is a French cinematic monument.

Damien has a small group of cronies who hang out at a local bar and play chess. When one of them, Lobatch (Jackie Berroyer) turns suicidal Damien is the one who goes to see him and take away the pistol he's nursing.

Damien's strength is that he keeps on and that, after a lot of lying, he tells the truth -- to Aurore herself -- about his failure to guarantee her security in France. In the end it doesn't matter. Damien is pursued by his own good fortune. The "Hortense" of the title (Philippe Duclos) is the VIP whom Sébastien refuses to approach about Aurore. In the event, Damien, slowly becoming a mensch after all, goes to Hortense by himself. He, like the head of the police station when Damien gets arrested to protect Aurore, defers to Damien because of his expertise about China -- the place where world power is going. This is as if to say all this French stuff is irrelevant. But it still matters.

But does it matter? Does this film matter? It does if you admire what one critic, for the weekly Positif, called "comfortable, Parisian, leftist French comedy." And this is a rather special genre, one found, of course, only in France. The main faces may be familiar, but they provide nothing but class all the way. Some of these people one would enjoy watching read from a telephone book. Bonitzer has been a Rivette, Ruiz and Téchiné collaborator, mostly in the writing category, as well as a former critic for Cahiers du Cinéma, but this is his seventh film as a director. Agnès de Sacy is the cowriter.

Cherchez Hortense, 101 mins., debuted at Venice out of competition 31 August 2012. It opened in in France in September 2012 (Allociné press rating 3.5). Screened for this review as part of Film Comment Selects at Lincoln Center where it showed 18 and 25 February 2014.

ANA LILY AMIRPOUR: A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT (2013)--ND/NF

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SHIELA VAND IN A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT

A self-conscious vampire movie, in Farsi

In striking black and white, the American-based Iranian director Ana Lily Amirpour's debut future is an unusual vampire picture heavy on the downbeat hipster atmosphere. This got plenty of favorable mentions and some raves when it debuted at Sundance 2014. However it is really a very modest beginning, though a stylish one, and it surely is overshadowed by Jim Jarmusch's lush, atmospheric, beautiful (if ultimately uninvolving) Last Lovers on Earth. To me A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night seemed somewhat like a music video without the music, or an introduction that dragged on too long. The molasses-in-January movement in scenes may seem hypnotic, or just dragged-out. Much sympathy for the genre twisting is a prerequisite for appreciation.

The film does have faith in its convictions, never fails to compose its shots carefully, and makes the most of its key characters and props, notably a beautiful vintage Ford Thunderbird and a cat. In keeping with the early Sixties look the boy interest, Arash (Arash Marandi), owner of the car, wears wavy dark hair, jeans and a tight white T shirt. The car is taken away by evil tattooed drug dealer Saeed (Dominic Rains) to pay for product supplied to the boy's addict father Hossein (Marshall Manesh).

The Girl (Sheila Vand), the lonely street-wandering, skateboard-riding, hijab wearing vampire or Nosferata of Bad City, a location Guy Lodge in Variety called "an imaginary Iranian underworld" (there might be livelier real ones), is destined to take care of Saeed posthaste. He makes the mistake of assuming he can abuse her as he does the aging prostitute (Mozhan Marno) whom he occasionally pimps out on the dark empty streets. Subsequently The Girl and Arash develop a love interest -- thus as in the Twilight series constituting a mixed normal and undead couple whose future is uncertain. Their tender relationship is shown coming into being when out in the darkness instead of baring her teeth at Arash, The Girl lets him pierce her ears so she can wear earrings he has given her -- possibly an oddly traditional female, passive scene given the vampire girl's previous gestures for women's rights.

Unlike Let the Right One In, which Lodge mentions as a vampire movie that has more mainstream potential (and did get a decent Hollywood remake), this new film doesn't cross over from its genre mashup ponderousness, which mixes self-conscious mood with feminism, David Lynch, and spaghetti Westerns. It seems sometimes about to launch into a schtick out of early Jarmusch at some points, and its use of loud musical transitions could owe something to Tarantino; except that there is not enough use made of dialogue for that, and all the talk is, besides, in Farsi.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is an odd mixture culturally and geographically. It is set in Tehran, its dialogue is in the language of that country and it clearly has an interest in the changing status of women there. But it was shot in California, with cramped interiors and cold industrial streets and an electrical power station that do not look at all like Iran. Doubtless Amirppour shows courage and independence in welding together such a unique mixture and getting it shown at Sundance, and the number of major publications that have published favorable reviews indicates that we'll hear from her again. Part of her promise is indicated by her ability to put together a polished looking and sounding package marked by the striking cinematography of Lyle Vincent and sound design by Jay Nierenberg that's precise and enjoyable.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night 107 mins., debuted in the Next series at Sundance January 2014. It was screened for this review as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center-Museum of Modern Art series, New Directors/New Films, scheduled there for Wednesday, March 19, 7:00pm & 8:00pm at MoM. Elijah Wood is a producer.

HUBERT SAUPER: WE COME AS FRIENDS (2014)--ND/NF

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Sauper looks at new variations on colonization and exploitation in South Sudan

We Come As Friends, Hubert Sauper's followup to his stunning, controversial, Oscar-nominated 2004 documentary Darwin's Nightmare about Tanzania, is deceptive. It seems casual and disorganized, rambling from Chinese to Americans to UN peacekeepers to Christian missionaries from Texas. It makes Sauper look like a harmless crank, coming from France and traveling around Sudan in a small homemade airplane that is little more than a tin can with an outboard motor. He talks to no high level officials or experts, and consults, among others, some pretty scruffy and uneducated locals. But all this hides how searching this films is. Focusing this time on a wider topic than the pollution of a like -- the split-up of Sudan and the various colonizers and exploiters of the new South Sudan -- Sauper considers this new upbeat, yet by implication dark, development as a case study in what has been happening to Africa since the white man came there centuries ago. At the end of We Came As Friends one feels exhausted. The plane and Sauper's vivid, artful photo images make his scenes feel other worldly. When we hear Africans say the Americans have colonized the moon we realize this is, for them, and now for us, a nightmare dream, We Come As Friends a message on a postcard from hell -- one it took the filmmaker six years to write. And the plane isn't a wild gesture, except for signaling the lengths the Austrian-born, French-resident Sauper goes to to make his films. He built it "to be able to land on small fields in military-controlled areas where" he "never would have been able to go by invitation," he has explained.

There are men in the new Christian South Sudan who fought the Muslim Arabs in the north for thirty years, and now they are "leasing" huge tracts of land for a pittance, or nothing, for 99 years to outside countries who come to exploit their mineral wealth, and they think they are getting a good deal. Exploitation of resources by corporate entities at the expense of the local inhabitants happens in Europe and the United States, but it seems cruder and easier here. A blatant example is the Chinese who've come to take out oil. Their methods are poisoning the water for the locals. That happens in the US, but in South Sudan, the Chinese are total outsiders, indifferent to Africans. Sauper got candid talk from the Chinese. They say environmental protection is the local people's responsibility: they blame the victims.

It is true that this film is a little too long; if unnecessary repetitions were trimmed it could be 15 or 20 minutes shorter. But some situations are so devastating that it's important not only to learn a lot, but to feel nauseated by what one learns. And again, as in Darwin's Nightmare, this is an individual and impressionistic film that makes no claim to be "objective." This is the second in a planned trilogy that began with Darwin’s Nightmare. Each of these is a worthy starting point for controversy, debate, and study. This is a film to be studied, analyzed, rebuffed, explained. And he plans his third film in the trilogy will be an explanation, justification, and followup on Darwin's Nightmare and all the controversy and opposition from the Tasmanian government it gave rise to.

We Come As Friends, 110 mins., which is in English, Chinese, Arabic, Ma’di, and Toposa with English subtitles, debuted at Sundance, where it won the Special Jury Prize in World Documentary. In Feb. 2014 it was at the Berlinale, where it won the Peace Film Award. It was screened for this review as part of the FSLC-MoMA New Directors/New Films series (March 2014).
Thursday, March 20, 6:15pm – MoMA
Saturday, March 22, 3:45pm – FSLC

BENEDICKT ERLINGSSON: OF HORSES AND MEN (2013)--ND/NF

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KJARTAN RAGNARSSON AND SIGRIDUR MARIA EGILSDOTTIR IN OF HORSES AND MEN

Horses and woes in an Icelandic valley

Of Horses and Men is a movie rooted in a special place and makes much good use of the people and the horses found there. And so it's a feature that has a strong documentary element. But like others of this genre, it also has elements that are purely fanciful. We may doubt that a Latin American (Juan Camillo Roman Estrada) got lost here in a snow storm and saved himself by killing his short-legged local horse, gutting it, and hiding inside it till he was found desperate but alive the next day. It seems rather unlikely what happens to the middle-aged farmer Kolbeinn (Ingvar E. Sigurdsson). Courting a respectable horse-owning lady called Solveing (Charlotte Bøving), he is about to leave her dressed in fine riding clothes when she is mortified to see one of her young stallions break loose from a fence and mount Kolbein's pretty young white mare while he he is mounted on her about to ride away.

There are several other events involving the local horses that are equally vivid, equally dire, and also slightly implausible, though each of these incidents doubtless brings in aspects of local life, such as a tendency to drunkenness and disputes over fences and the freedom to traverse public spaces, not to mention great skill at wrangling horses. Here and there a death occurs as a result of these adventures, or mishaps. And the gathering of the community in a small wood church for the farewell, with a few words spoken about the deceased, could be from a film by Bergman, but is equally rooted in all traditional Nordic life.

Each incident involves a horse, and begins with the camera peering into its eye and finding the main character of the tale reflected there. The film doesn't seek to penetrate into the mind of horses. It does show the close integration of these people's lives with their horses.

Bright exterior light and a sense of wide open space contribute to the feel of this film, in which nature itself is a stage. A certain staged artificiality is indicated at the very outset when Erlingsson archly and insistently shows us neighbors on far-flung sides of the valley viewing events with binoculars to see Kolbeinn trot smartly on his white mare to visit Solveing. Also stagy and a strong hint of Erlingsson's background in making short films are the vivid use of tableaux and the minimalism of the dialogue. The series of incidents shows that this is, basically, a set of related short films loosely linked together by location and the horses. Having everything happen with a horse is a little gimmicky, though, and doesn't truly unify the narrative in human terms. This segmented, and simplistic, overlying aspect of Of Horses and Men keeps it from being anything but a novelty as a feature film, however arresting and at several points shocking it may be. Nonetheless Erlingsson has conceived and executed each segment with the mind and eye of a fine storyteller, worthy of a Nordic Boccaccio. In its special way this is still a good film, exhibiting remarkable ingenuity in the staging, good acting, and striking use of locations. But it remains a film with oddities and limitations that withhold if from developing mainstream potential.

Of Horses and Men/Hross í oss 80 mins., in Icelandic, Swedish, Spanish, Russian, and English with English subtitles, debuted at San Sebastián in September 2013 after an August Icelandic release. It has won a number of nominations and some awards, notably Best Director at Tokyo, Best New Director at San Sebastián, and two FIPRESCI Awards elsewhere. It is the director's feature debut and was Iceland’s 2014 Oscar submission. It was screened for this review as part of the FSLC-MoMA New Directors/New Films series in March 2014. Showings at ND/NF: Saturday, March 22, 6:15pm – MoMA
Monday, March 24, 6:30pm - FSLC.

GILLES DEROO, MARIANNE PISTONE: MOUTON/SHEEP (2013)--ND/NF

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DAVID MÉRABET IN MOUTON

The randomness of life, as seen in the Norman fishing town of Courseulles-sur-Mer

An experimental film that may be experimental enough to gain cult status but may gain indifference from many viewers uses documentary realism and minimal camera movements to focus on one character and then more than half-way through to switch away from him to minor characters.

We start with Mouton, real name Aurelien (David Merabet), 17, who is granted legally independent status from his alcoholic mother (seen unwillingly signing off on this in the opening scene) and he goes to live at the inn and seaside restaurant where he's a prep chef, which includes several other very young kitchen workers. The scenes, camera always a a distance, light natural, focus on kitchen routine till Audrey (Audrey Clement), a young woman, comes to be a waitress and almost immediately becomes Mouton's girlfriend. Mouton doesn't talk much. He smiles a lot. The camera shows him and Audrey undressing to have sex, and zeroes in on him sucking her nipple. It's that kind of camera.

The film creates the rhythm of the almost purely and mindlessly physical life of a worker who enjoys work, meals, sex, cigarette breaks. He is excited about sharing a big local event with Audrey, the Feast of St Anne. But when it comes, with the long day on the pier dancing, making out, and eating seafood dishes, a man who has made a pass at Audrey and been rejected suddenly attacks Mouton with a power saw and cuts his arm. He looks a goner, but now a voiceover comes in to tell us he was saved, but lost his arm. His career as a kitchen worker is over. He disappears from the film.

Later there is a trial, its final decision shown with the camera high up, and the attacker is sentenced to ten years. But Mouton has wanted life or more, and other friends and family declare this a travesty. Mouton has gone away to live with an uncle in another town. Audrey marries another guy and in a year has a baby. She writes Mouton a short note about her life now ending "I will always remember you." A scene shows two twin brothers (Emmanuel and Sebastien Legrand) using a prostitute in a van. The originally restrained, now nosey camera looks long at her crotch. Other former associates of Mouton get coverage. Mimi (Michael Mormentyn) works at a dog kennel. His wife is Louise (Cindy Dumont).

And then it ends. This style here oscillates between a keen affirmation of life and the homme moyen sensuel, such as one gets in Henry Green's Living, and a kind of Seventies kitchen sink brutality of realism, symbolized by the group of male friends who come up and spit into Mouton's face, apparently a gesture of friendship or initiation, and his sudden maiming and the prostitutes's hairy crotch. There are times when, certainly, it is difficult to tell the people in the film from what they must be in real life. For example, David Merabet does appear to be a non-actor who does prep work at a seafood restaurant. There are funny, ultra-natural scenes. But the effect overall, for this viewer, was offputting and alienating, at least once Mouton had lost his arm and disappeared from the film. One retains, however, a sense of the small town, seen off-season, and the filmmakers have stayed close to their milieu and people, certainly. But this kind of naturalism risks seeming condescending toward its subjects. And the brutal gesture eliminating Mouton from the story seems crude and arbitrary beyond reason.

Mouton/Sheep, 100 mins., shot in 16 mm, won two prizes at Locarno 2013. Screened for this review as part of the FSLC-MoMA series New Directors/New Films, 2014. Viewing times Thursday, March 20, 9:00pm – MoMA; Saturday, March 22, 6:30pm – FSLC

JUSTIN SIMIEN: DEAR WHITE PEPLE (2014)--ND/NF

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Sundance satire on racial issues at US college

This film proports to deal with a controversy at an "Ivy League" college called Winchester University in which the black students are united by the opposition of most of them to a white student Halloween party where partiers are to dress up as Negroes. (Such parties are taking place at US colleges, end credits show.) Or that is one issue. Another is that an all-black residence hall called Parker Armstrong is going to be "dismantled" or made multi-racial. Various characters predominate in a cast and plot as busy and complicated as a John Waters movie. These include (to name a few) Samantha ("Sam") White (Tessa Thompson), who has a radio show whose gibes begin "Dear White People," 'Fro'ed intellectual Lionel (Tyler James Williams) who writes for the "all white college newspaper" (whatever that means) writing articles about racial controversies on campus; and the college president and dean and their sons, and the more volatile and purely ambitious Coleandra “Coco” Conners (Teyonah Parris of "Mad Men"), with her sulky looks and silky weave.

The movie founders in TV sit-com-land, because it is overly subdivided. It opens with the issue of the importance of having the minority organization represented by an all-black residence hall, introducing some of its main characters. But these lead to other issues, notably the separation between the white college president and his son and the black dean and his son, all of whom are at Winchester. And wouldn't you know it, the white president's son has a black girlfriend and the black dean's son has a white girlfriend. This is further complicated when other characters come into play, none of whom has anything essential to do with the black residence hall issue, though so many arguments have been advanced about that at the outset.

But then the storyline moves back to the issue of the white students' "black" costume party -- which is now about to take place, as a climactic sequence, and some of the black students infiltrate it, not to undermine it so much as simply, it appears, to enjoy it. This party is disrupted, but in the end is treated as a non-issue (because "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery"?). Wouldn't such parties be racist? Are they not an outrage, comparable to minstrel shows and whiteface/blackface in the old days? Turning the white students' "black" party into a chaotic extravaganza seems like a missed opportunity for the kind of intelligent satire and racial commentary the film seems initially headed for.

All this is weakened by a lack of sophistication about college, starting with the lack of credibility in claiming Winchester to be either Ivy League or a university. Surely that would not matter in itself, but the general lack of sophistication about anything collegiate or intellectual or young adult might matter. This movie seems like a complete missed opportunity in many ways. It lectures us, but doesn't make enough clear and intelligent points, and it makes jokes, but, worst of all, it is not often funny. Those who were delighted by Dear White People at Sundance were responding more to what it meant to be than what it is. As Justin Chang wrote in Variety, Dead White People is better at "rattling off ideas and presenting opposing viewpoints than it does squeezing them into a coherent narrative frame," and "it veers toward smugness and self-satisfaction at times." Nice try; better luck next time. Meanwhile this movie may score well with its ideal audience, young educated black Americans. I'll wait and see what Armond White says about it.

Dear White People, 108 mins., debuted at Sundance, and was screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films 2014 (Lincoln Center and MoMA).
Friday, March 21, 9:00pm – FSLC
Sunday, March 23, 6:00pm – MoMA

JENNIFER KENT: THE BABADOOK (2014)--ND/NF

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NOAH WISEMAN IN THE BABADOOK

A child's story book that turns into a haunting

This is an Australian movie (Jennifer Kent's debut feature) and the Australians are known for having a wild side, so though it's a conventional horror tale, it does ramp things up to a higher pitch. The premise is that into this single parent home with weird six-year-old son Samuel (Noah Wiseman) and harried mother Amelia (Essie Davis) there comes a really scary children's book that is more like a series of threats of a haunting. And the haunting comes. The "Babadook" invades the mother, who turns against the child. Things are complicated by the fact that the boy not only misses his dead father. His father died in a car accident that took place when he drove the mother Amelia to the hospital to give birth to the boy. And in the days leading up to the unearthing and reading of the fatal "Babadook" book, Samuel has been acting weirder and weirder, to the point where his school wants to separate him from the other students and have him taught and guarded by himself.

After reading the "Babadook" book, Amelia hurriedly puts it out of sight, because it has a threatening ending. Later, when the haunting begins, the banks and knocks and shakes, she rips up the book. And when they continue, she pours gasoline over the book and burns it. None of these attempts to still its power workd, and the mother and the boy must go through a prolonged ordeal. Which you may share with them, if you choose. Though this is not up to the violence level to suit Saw fans, it will please those who like horror movies of a more cerebral but still vigorous kind. The sound effects are terrific.

The Babadook, 95 mins., debuted at Sundance, where it was well received and snapped up by IFC Midnight. Screened for this review as part of the FSLC-MoMA 2014 New Directors/New Films series, February 2014. US theatrical release IFC Center NYC Fri. 28 November 2014; also Internet. Reviewers greatly admire this well-crafted if monochromatic example of the horror genre, as revealed by its Metacritic rating: 83.

BENJAMÍN NAISHTAT: THE HISTORY OF FEAR (2014)--ND/NF

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JONATHAN D ROSA, TATIANA GIMÉNEZ IN HISTORY OF
FEAR/HISTORIA DEL MIEDO (2013)--ND/NF

Summer discomfort, and it's not the heat

Benjamín Naishtat's auspicious debut History of Fear/Historia del miedo is a Hanake-esaue tour of Buenos Aires, a study of repression, discomfort, rage, tension, and perhaps above all a sense of danger related to class. Throughout this atmospheric meandering among a group of partly interconnected people -- masters and servants, guards and property owners, parents and children, lovers or "novios" (fiances) there is a pervasive sense of resentment and, as the title signals, fear. Of what, we never know. We also never know who these people are, so it is hard to identify with them and sometimes puzzling who they are. Explosions and light -- the latter's presence and absence, as the electricity goes off every now and then -- come and go as unifying punctuation.

There is a feeling here of potential disorder growing from social unrest that can be found in other recent Latin American films. In Marcelo Lordello's They'll Come Back (from Brazil, ND/NF 2013), siblings are left on a highway in the middle of nowhere because of a quarrel with well-off parents. In Kleber Mendonça Filho's Neighboring Sounds (again from Brazil, ND/NF 2012), well off people in a block of flats are "protected" by a security company that turns out to have deep resentments. in Celina Murga's highly original A Week Alone/Una semana solos (Film Comment Selects 2009), children go a little wild when they are completely abandoned by their parents in a posh gated community. Unfortunantely Naishat's film is perhaps the least effective of these four because of the vagueness about identities and backstories mentioned earlier.

However, Historia del miedo has the power to haunt. It makes effective use of mysterious surveillance tapes shown on home screenes, as well as grainy films of what appear to be troops running around a building where an armed insurrection (of youths?) is in progress, whose nature they are not fully aware of. Also strong is the long final sequence at a celebration outdoors. Again, there is separation, as well as vague uncertainty and fear. A family is sitting around a table dining. No one speaks a word -- a recurrent theme, since a young working class character is constantly criticized for his troubling silences -- but then a youth proposes a game where each person says what he or she would like to be and have.

Then the lights go out, and most of the family go to look for the children they excluded earlier as punishment for throwing firecrackers in the pool. Now it's realized that they children might be in danger. The scene where some of the adults wander across the park of the housing estate, which they now know is vulnerable, is disturbing. Earlier, the working class young man with his girlfriend go "wading" in a polluted, reuse-strewn stream -- one of the creepiest moments in a film that strives for varieties of creepiness. Interestingly, all four of these films are set in times of hot summer weather.

As Peter Debruge points out in his Berlin review for Variety , Naishtat operates here by showing the various characters' unease without specifying it. How well it works depends on how inherently sick-making the surroundings are at that moment and how much we as viewers happen to be able to bring to the scene, which varies. It might not have hurt to have worked in more specific plot threads. But good editing and excellent, often irritating and troubling sound design contribute to the success of this semi-experimental debut.

History of Fear/Historia del miedo, 79 mins., debuted at Berlin. Screened for this review as part of FSLC/MoMA's joint series New Directors/New Films 2014.
Sunday, March 23, 9:15pm – FSLC

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TUDOR CRISTIAN JURGIU: THE JAPANESE DOG (2013)--ND/NF

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VICTOR ROBENGIUC IN THE JAPANESE DOG

Old man after a flood

Tudor Cristian Jurgiu's debut feature is quiet gem, a Romanian film that is contemporary and timeless. It steps aside from the current Romanian school, whose films are often grim, ironic an gray, with a portrait that's humanistic and literally and figuratively in delicate color. The focus is on the elderly Costache Moldu , who lives in a village, and his reunion with his estranged so, an engineer, who has been living and working in Japan and brings a Japanese wife and young son. With wonderful observational patience Jurgiu thoroughly establishes Costache's milieu before the visitors arrive. The Japanese Dog is all about atmosphere, character, and quiet developments among family members. In the context of the new Romanian cinema, it's a quite triumph that may open things up. Use is made of documentary-style neorealism with a precise sound design, but the heart of the film is the acting. As Costache, legendary actor Victor Rebengiuc is a miracle of confidence and restraint, his performance utterly lived-in. You never question it.

Costache has recently lost his wife and house in a flood. He has not told his son this. Though he could call from the mayor's phone in town, he has not been in touch. He has virtually no possessions, but what he has is dignity and patience. The camera follows him around his daily rounds, getting necessities, greeting neighbors. Panhandlers who come to him show that though stripped, he is not poorest of the poor. In fact he owns some hectares of land he's offered 6,000 euros for. He refuses to sell for now: "What would I do with all that money?" Later he reveals he wishes his son would come back and use it.

As the film begins, a lovely long shot shows many people gathering detritus from marshland left by the flood. Next in the morning we follow Costache as he hauls the detritus of his ruined house in a cart to the other house (sans water and electricity) that he's been allocated by the town. A few gestures establish that he is firm, but generous,and without self-pity. When his son Ticu (Serban Pavlu) arrives from Japan with his wife Hiroko (Kana Hashimoto) and son Koji (Toma Hashimoto), he welcomes them quietly, taking particular interest right away in Koji. Perhaps it's his natural joy at having a grandson; but he may also prefer not to get into discussions with Ticu. Turns out there is rancor over Ticu's bowing out of marrying local girl Gabi (Ioana Abur) and skipping off to Japan, which seems to have touched off the estrangement. In a drunken night this is hashed out, but this is a sequence the film largely elides. What's clear is that Ticu's return has changed things.

The beauty of this film, which has been likened to Ozu, is its gentle understatement, the way it speaks through milieu and gesture, without elaborate speeches. Ticu, Hiroko, and Koji return to Japan, where Ticu wants Costache to come and live with them. As they leave Koji gives his grandad an English-speaking robot dog, the canine of the title, to "take care of" him. At the end, grandad and son and grandson have been in friendly communication on the mayor's phone and Costache has sold his land and he leaves with a suitcase, evidently for Japan. To live there? We don't know, Nor do we know all the details of feelings and events but we walk out with a sense of knowing much.

[]]The Japanese Dog/Câinele Japonez[/i], 86 min. (listed on IMDb as Câinele Japonez), debuted in San Sebastián Film Festival — New Directors; also at Santa Barbara and Warsaw (Competition 1-2 Award at the latter). Screened for this review as part of the FSLC-MoMA 2014 New Directors/New Films series, March 2014. Showing Friday, March 21, 6:30pm – FSLC and Sunday, March 23, 1:00pm – MoMA.

ANDREI GRUZSNICZKI: QUOD ERAT DEMONSTRANDUM 2013)--ND/NF

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OFELINA POPII AND SORIN LEOVEANU IN QUOD EST DEMONSTRANDUM

The personal and the intellectual in communist Romania

Andrei Gruzsniczki's Romanian film, Quod Erat Demonstrandum, concerns the depredations of life in the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War, specifically in the mid-Eighties, when the Berlin Wall was not down yet but citizens were straining at the bit to be released from the iron control of Russia and the Communist Party. There have been plenty of films about this topic before. It would be hard to make anything richer, more atmospheric, or more fascinatingly plotted than Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others. But this new film's existence has plenty of justification. It has its own particular story to tell. It has its vivid lead character, a brilliant mathematician held back because he isn't a loyal communist or eager informer. And shot on film in beautiful black and white, it captures the looks and manners of its time and place with unusual precision.

Quod Est Demonstrandum has its own story to tell, but what underlies that story is how the communist system of repression, intimidation, informing and bribing weaves its way into relationships and stifles intellectual progress. In the foreground at first is the problem faced by Sorin Parvu (Sorin Leoveanu), the most talented mathematician of his Romanian generation, whose associates called him "Einstein." He has plans for wave motion research that plainly can lead to a whole panoply of important practical applications. But earlier in his career he was blocked from going far in work with Fourier analysis because he couldn't get hold of the books. He is in his 40's and still hasn't finished his Ph.D. Lucian (Dorian Boguta), a lesser colleague who tows the ideological line and begins helping state security to spy on Sorin, gets the trips abroad Sorin has been denied and lives in a posh apartment and has the books.

As Parvu, Sorin Leoveanu makes an interesting protagonist. He's balding, not conventionally handsome. He lives with his mother. But he has a keenness, energy, and mystery about him. He is involved with Ducru, a mathematician friend who has escaped to France, and Sorin sees a lot of Ducru's' wife Elena Buciuman (Ofelia Popii), who works with computers, and her son David (Marc Titieni). Sorin's relationship with Elena is a little ambiguous; she's obviously more of a friend of a friend to him -- something else that may be used against him, along with his too great independence as a thinker and dodging of rules.

Alecu Voican (Florin Piersic Jr.), an overeager and frustrated agent of Securitate (the Romanian spy network) is put on Sorin's case when it's learned that he's published a paper in the US -- without getting prior approval. Even though the theorem in it has no practical or strategic application, a big fuss is made over this breach by the authorities. Alecu enlists Lucian to look into Sorin. Then he decides to get at Sorin through Elena. Alecu's ploy is to pose as an officer of the passport office specially assigned to Elena's case. Securitate is very exercised over Ducru's de facto defection to France. Alecu makes it look hard for Elena to get to France to rejoin her husband -- hard enough so she may become willing to betray her friend Sorin. Things don't, however, turn out as expected.

Several memorable scenes are the one of cars in line being pushed by hand up to a gas station; lights going out during a bridge game; Alecu having ice cream twice, with two different women; David trying out his French and taking Latin lessons; the hideous patterns of Sorin's mother's dress and armchair. Director Gruzsniczki may seem to meander a bit, but he builds up to excitement in the final minutes in the airport, which are climactic, yet leave things ambiguous. There should be no clear resolution of a situation or a life in a Cold War Eastern Bloc story set in the mid-Eighties, and there is none.

Everything about this film looks and feels authentic, and the way the film stock captures gray shadings digital can't is a pleasure to see. But what's most important is how the viewer gets to feel the way the system makes betrayal of one's values and one's intimates inevitable.

Quod Erat Demonstrandum, 107 mins., debuted at Rome (Nov. 2013), where it won the Jury Prize. Screened for this review as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center-Museum of Modern Art 2014 New Directors/New Films series where it shows Thursday, March 20, 9:00pm – FSLC; Saturday, March 22, 3:30pm – MoMA.

JESSICA ORNECK: VANQUISHING OF THE WITCH BABA YAGA (2013)--ND/NF

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STILL FROM OREK'S THE VANQUISHING OF THE WITCH BABA YAGA

Visual meditation may be in need of further editing

"The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga is, at times, something of an inscrutable film," writes Daniel Walber of nonfics.com; "Loaded with philosophical voiceover and weighty poetic quotations, scenes of profound silence and a great many enigmatic images, its most immediate impact is one of bewilderment." And Clayton Dillard of The House Next Door on Slant Magazine waxes rhapsodic. "Jessica Oreck's The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga, Dillard says, "is a staggeringly polymorphous documentary that often suggests a collaboration between Carlos Reygadas, Godfrey Reggio, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Part meditative nature film, part urban observational, part fairy tale, these seemingly disparate parts consistently juxtapose throughout to form not just an evocative mood piece, but a larger, discursive work that achieves something resembling Sergei Eisenstein's concept of dialectical montage. . . To call Oreck's film 'hypnotic' would be too easy, as it would neglect the content of her ravishing images, which cohere into a rather precise essay film."

Well, I'm sorry to report that personally I could not perceive the "precise essay film" Dillard promises. I might also suggest that any collaboration between Carlos Reygadas, Godfrey Reggio, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul would be likely to produce a shapeless mess -- which each of those artists have risked producing occasionally on their own: together there would be a work of no discernible style. And this is what happens in Oreck's film. There are gorgeous woodland scenes and glowing landscape skies. Then there are roaming panoramas as a camera rushes by roadways in the periphery of a city or past blocks of flats downtown. Then again there are shots of conventional Eastern Bloc art illustrations for a "Witch Baba Yaga" children's tale (a kind of nastier Slavic version of Hansel and Gretel) while it is read in voiceover by an older woman in -- what language? Polish, Ukrainian, Russian?: these segments are strewn through the film, interrupted by the philosophical musings, whose import seems to be, life is mysterious and the woods are lovely, dark, and deep. There is too much going on here, and it all adds up to rather little. Part of the problem is that the image quality -- lensing, color correction, the eye itself in the cinematography by Sean Price Williams -- is not up the the best technical standards of Reygadas, Reggio, or Weerasethakul. Some further editing and post-production may be needed to bring this film up to the concept it aspires to. The illustrations for the Baba Yaga story are disappointingly conventional stuff, quite unimaginative.

An underlying thesis stated at the outset is that modern civilization is opposed to wilderness, but we "have" our own wilderness inside us, and any attempts to repress it will only cause it to burst out. This is the kind of experimental, open-ended film that some will find inspiring. Others will just see it as a long slog. Look up Walber's and Dillard's comments for more favorable angles on the film. But I warn you: they speak in very vague and general terms.


The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga, 73 mins., was shown in early March 2014 at the True/False documentary festival in Columbia, Missouri (where the Walber and Dillard saw it). It debuts at the New York Film Society of Lincoln Center-Museum of Modern Art joint New Directors/New Films series, where it was screened for this review. Showing Saturday, March 22, 1:30pm – FSLC; Monday, March 24, 6:15pm – MoMA.

ALEJANDRO FERNÁNDEZ ALMENDRAS: TO KILL A MAN (2014)--ND/NF

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DANIEL CANDIA IN TO KILL A MAN

Points of no return

To Kill a Man-- the title gives away the climax -- is a slow-burning, cooly observational neorealist Latin American revenge story whose beleaguered‎, emasculated pater familias winds up murdering a brutal ghetto tormenter who claims just to be a "prankster." Guy Lodge of Variety suggested this film has links to Pablo Laraín's films (Almendras like Larraín being Chilean) -- presumably their creepiness and moral ambiguity, but Almendras' method is more meandering and dogged, with a bare-bones mise-en-scene and a straight-on middle distance camera that makes every facade and interior look equally drab and khaki. A story that might be mind-bending and suspenseful if told by Patricia Highsmith winds up being numbing and sickening. But no doubt amateur killers often do such things in these kinds of agonizing dragged out clumsy ways. And no doubt though the storytelling here is unsatisfying and opaque, that's the way, in the interests of realism, Almendras means it to be. What the film is good at showing is how people become trapped in their actions. And a trap is, well, something you can't get out of no matter what you do.

Jorge (Daniel Candia) is a tranquil, middle-class family man who's a diabetic with a shrewish wife, a son, and a daughter, who live near the projects. He works as a maintenance man at a distant research project and comes home tired every night on the train. Some of the local toughs menace him one such evening as he returns with groceries ordered by his wife, and rummage through his pockets and steal his insulin needle. From then on war begins. His son Jorgito (Ariel Mateluna) goes over to retaliate and is shot by the leader of the ghetto men (the only one who stays in the picture), who shoots himself to make it look like he fired in self defense. Jorge's wife Marta (Alexandra Yanez) blames him for all this: Jorge's manhood is challenged from all sides. The tough, known as Kalule (Daniel Antivilo) goes to jail for a year and a half, and then when out again, steps up his intimidation. By this time Jorge and Marta are no longer together, though they remain in contact. Finally when Kalule assaults and sexually menaces Jorge's daughter despite a restraining order -- after much bureaucratic stalling by police -- has been issued against him, Jorge gets serous.

He has a rifle at work to defend the property he maintains; we see he will use it when a camper refuses to remove his fire. He takes the rifle to the projects and lures Kalule out by setting off the alarm on his car, then forces him into the refrigerator truck his son operates. Kalule begs to be let out, shouting a mixture of pleading and curses that gradually turns to vicious threats. Heedless, Jorge drives the truck far out of town. After he has done away with Kalule, after teasing and tormenting him a bit, it is we, the audience who are teased and tormented, perhaps, as Jorge seems unclear about what to do with the body. Eventually, it appears that guilt overcomes him, and he is already a suspect and has been visited by police at work. Despite Almendras' relentlessly undramatic method, the post-murder atmosphere created by following a killer as events gang up on him still has some of the classic edge. But Jorge is a blank protagonist whom one may despise as well as pity and cannot ultimately sympathize with -- or even have much of a sense of. The music, heavy on the loud, eerie woodwinds, helps awaken a thriller vibe -- but seem to go agains the low -keyed style of everything else.

To Kill a Man/Matar a un hombre, 82 mins., debuted at Sundance Jan. 2014, also showing at Rotterdam. Screened for this review as part of the FSLC-MoMA series, New Directors/New Films, March 2014. A Film Movement release. ND/NF showings: Thursday, March 20, 6:30pm – FSLC; Sunday, March 23, 3:30pm – MoMA.

BEN RIVERS AND BEN RUSSELL: A SPELL TO WARD OFF THE DARKNESS (2013)--ND/NF

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ROBERT A. A. LOWE IN A SPELL TO WARD OFF THE DARKNESS

This may bring on the darkness as much as ward it off

Ben Rivers and Ben Russell are experimental art film makers. Rivers is from the UK, Russell from the US; this is their first collaboration, though they previously toured together, in a program combining their short 16mm. films. This film is conceived and presented as a full-length feature in three parts. The first is shot of a small collective community on an island off the coast of Estonia. The second is in Finland, where there is a sauna. The third is in Norway, where a howling heavy-metal style concert is performed in heavy makeup in a small club. There are some pure landscape sequences, one of the musician Robert A A. Lowe in a boat and camping, and earlier one of a woodland lake at night, accompanied by an original A cappella performance, which is quite lovely. Making sense of this film, which is really three short films tacked together (except for the carryover of Lowe) is not aided by the failure to identify the locations or sections during the film. This Spell can only be enjoyed with those who see cinematic experience as non-narrative going with the flow.

How all these three segments fit together thematically is anybody's guess, but in some ways they all flow together as part of the same world. Oddly, the communitarians on the island sound an awful lot like American hippies, circa 1968; and since the people in the Finnish woods running in and out of the sauna speak English, they might be from the same group. The final concert might take place in Seattle, if Metallica was a grunge group and went in for imitating the sound of wild animals in heat. A KimStim release.

A Spell to Ward off the Darkness, 98 mins., debuted at Locarno, Aug. 2013. Screened for this review as part of the FSLC-MoMA New Directors/New Films series, March 2014, where it shows Saturday, March 22, 9:00pm – MoMA;Tuesday, March 25, 6:30pm – FSLC.

Reviewed for Hollywood Reporter by Boyd van Hoeij.

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ROBERTO MINERVINI: STOP THE POUNDING HEART (2013)--ND/NF

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SARA CARLSON IN STOP THE POUNDING HEART

Docudrama -- or propaganda?

If Roberto Minervini's Stop the Pounding Heart, last in a Texas trilogy the US-based Italian has been making, were a documentary, as it at first appears to be, it would be very remarkable indeed since it has access to some intimate moments. But eventually we realize this film is "staged" by "people playing themselves." And that's a lot different from either documentary or drama, and, since the Carlson family are the main focus and their Christian piety is held up to the light, this starts to seem like a "Christian film," and therefore a kind of propaganda. The film is supplied with simplified English subtitles, presumably for an international Christian audience -- though director Minervini himself, a graduate of the New School in NYC, is a Buddhist.

The family chiefly depicted in the film is certainly a remarkable one, living simply and productively off the land and providing many children with the upbringing they want them to have. Except for a couple of harsh words from the father, the Carlsons put their best foot forward, and many details are missing. (The Carlsons and some others appeared in the two other films.) What's stressed is the austere life of the huge Carlson family (two parents, 12 children, by reports) -- get up, feed the goats -- they run an artisinal farm that sells goat milk, cheese, and yogurt at farmers' markets -- then Bible-study, breakfast, work.

The alternate theme is of blond 14-year-old Sara Carlson's occasional meetings with Colby Trichell, an amateur bull rider about her age from another large (though not quite so large) Christian family in the same community. Though darkly handsome and slightly rakish (too reedy yet to be a successful rider himself), Colby is polite and restrained and this "courtship" is so subtle as to be almost imperceptible. In the Carlsons' version of Christian ethics as explained by Sara's mother, dating is frowned upon, since it only shows a mate who is available for "fun." What about the un-fun times? Performance during those is what counts in a mate, Sare's mom says.

But how then is a mate chosen? This is not explained. Nothing is explained. At the end, after Sara's mother has soothed her girl who's going through a time of worry and fear she does not explain (stopping, presumably, the pounding of her heart), Sara is dressed in a tight girdle and what looks like a 19th-century-style wedding dress and goes out. Is she going to marry Colby? At the age of 14? Or is this old-fashioned dressup just to reinforce the girls' allegiance to traditional women's roles, since their mother has coached them on the great values of being submissive and putting the men in their life first?

Sara's mother's counseling of the girls is wonderful, but rather generic, as is Sara's counseling of some younger daughters. As one of the oldest children, she does part of the home schooling.

But the home schooling we see is only vague Bible lessons, no other teaching.

The cinematography of Stop the Pounding Heart by Diego Romero Suarez-Llanos is handsome, and blond heads are often attractively back lit, with cute baby goats coming up to nuzzle Sara Carlson's hand. She knows their names and calls them "sweetie." The film shows a number of bull-riding sessions, involving young boys, including Colby. Colby gives lessons to Carlson boys and encourages them to try real bull-riding. The actual full-sized bulls seem terrifying and dangerous, and Colby gets hand and arm injuries. At times it seems that the film is more interested in the bull riding than in the Christian lessons, perhaps because they are livelier to film than hand-milking goats. Another bit of excitement comes from target practice with guns in the back yard in which the Carlson girls participate.

The film includes a childbirth at which Sara observes in a doorway. The mother is on the floor, Sara's mother attending, a midwife, and the mother's husband helping out. Sara seems a bit uneasy.

And we are uneasy after watching this attractive, so natural-seeming film, which seems to advertise a pure Christian way of life that it does not delve into deeply enough for anyone but the converted to be satisfied with. Admiration for this film when it showed out of competition at Cannes seems to show that you can get away with a lot nowadays with festival critics if you use documentary elements attractively.

Stop the Pounding Heart, 100 mins., was screened for this review as part of the FSLC-MoMA 2014 New Directors/New Films series showing Friday, March 21, 6:15pm at MoMA and Sunday, March 23, 3:30pm at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

JOEL POTRYKUS: BUZZARD (2014)--ND/NF

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JOSHUA BURGE IN BUZZARD

Slacker crook in the Midwest

Joel Potrykus's 2012 Ape (Best New Director Award at Locarno), set in the filmmaker's home ground of Grand Rapids, presented a pyromaniac and failing standup comic whose greatest pleasure is in burning his worst jokes. The Voice called Ape "an unnerving hybrid of Harmony Korine's Gummo and Frank Whaley's overlooked The Jimmy Show." Joshua Burge, who has been Potrykus' chief collaborator in all his films short and long, stars in Buzzard as Marty Jackitansky, an office temp scam artist. For half of Buzzrd, set in Grand Rapids again, Marty focuses on redeeming stuff he hasn't bought and cashing third party checks cut at the bank where he's working. Most of the time he hangs out with, though he has his usual contempt for, coworker Derek (Potrykus himself). But fear that his check gambit has got him in trouble at the bank makes Marty flee to Detroit, where he at first celebrates by overnighting at a nice hotel and gobbling "a $20 plate of spaghetti" from room service, then switches to a ghetto dive and sinks into more sinister and illegal behavior, using a homemade "Power Glove" as a weapon and barely eluding homelessness.

Seeing Marty rapidly put away an entire heaping plate of spaghetti and meatballs in real time exemplifies the Burge-Potrykus team's ability to go the whole way in scene after scene. Clearly Potrykus and Burge work well together, and all the secondary characters -- store, bank, and motel clerks mostly -- do good work. At times the film seems like a series of schticks, but as Marty Jackitansky Burge is a character who never runs out of gas or backs down, even when the cops are coming. The madcap dark humor Potrykus and Burge weave is fresh and engaging as well as slightly macabre.

Buzzard, 97 min., was picked up by the new punk distributor Oscilloscope at the SXSW festival. Screened for this review as part of the 2014 Film Society of Lincoln Center-Museum of Modern Art series, showing alsong with an 18-mins. short, Dustin Guy Defa's Person to Person. ND/NF showtimes: Sunday, March 23, 6:15pm – FSLC and Monday, March 24, 8:30pm – MoMA.

Buzzard got limited US theatrical release 6 March 2015. See review by Armond Wite for National Review.

RICHARD AYOADE: THE DOUBLE (2013)--ND/NF

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JESSE EISENBERG IN THE DOUBLE

Shoved aside by one's doppelganger

Richard Ayoade, already popular in the UK for his "The IT Crowd" TV participation, made a great impression with his distinctive debut feature, the charming period coming of age flick Submarine. His new one, which a colleague warned me was "a mind fuck," is a pleasure too, as handsomely produced as Submarine but darker. (It may be a disadvantage that the field is crowded with cinematic doubles, with the more soulful and handsome Jake Gyllenhaal duplicated in the starring role of Denis Villeneuve's Enemy and Annette Benning in a double movie currently showing, The Face of Love.) Based on Dostoevsky's novella, coadapted with Harmony Korine's brother Avi, Ayaode's The Double, which stars Jesse Eisenberg, is, by its maker's admission, much indebted for its mood and style to Terry Gilliam's Brazil and Orson Welles' version of Kafka's The Trial. The director would have badly failed in his aim if this film could be described as remotely charming, but there are moments when one would like to take up the protagonist, Simon James, as played by Eisenberg, and soothe and pet him.

Simon is a faceless corporate drone, whose lazier but more aggressive duplicate is first spookily glimpsed by Simon in the subway. Looking and dressing exactly the same, Simon's alter ego arrives at the company and is at once hailed by everybody as the bright young thing, especially by company manager Mr. Papadopoulos (Wallace Shawn). (Up above everything in this Orwellian world styled via Gilliam is The Colonel, a barely glimpsed James Fox, lending an aura of legend. Ayoade knows how to use casting resonantly, and gives a number of his Submarine actors memorable walk-ons.)

The wilier, more politick version of Simon James is James Simon. To simplify matters we'll call the wimpy self Simon and the new more testosterone-rich one James, as in Franco. But when James and Simon began flitting back and forth in the same frame one grasps the relevance of the term "mind fuck." When the self and its doppelganger get in touch and start helping each other and taking each other's appointments, like deceitful twins, even though Eisenberg does play James with a confident glow and Simon with a pitiful falter, it remains confusing.

What's certainly clear without a diagram is that James quickly overshadows Simon and makes him virtually disappear, stealing his girl, or the girl he dreams of making his, Hannah (Mia Wasikowska), and snitching his arcane research for the company, which Mr. Papadopoulos ignored but now greets, coming from James, as brilliant. While Simon has never been recognized by anybody even after seven years at the company, and constantly gets his ID vetted, James is instantly persona grata.

The first half hour of The Double is its best of times, when the well-oiled physical business, delivered thorough finely honed mise-en-scene and precise editing, elucidates Simon's manifold frustrations -- every transaction is interrupted, every door shuts automatically in his face -- so neatly that each failure almost seems like a triumph for its hapless victim, who becomes the star of an intricate dance. Every gesture, every interruption, shows what Simon is up against, even before James arrives to complicate his life.

That complication also opens up an awareness of new possibilities for Simon. If somebody who looks just like him can be confident and successful and attractive to the ladies, well, why can't he? This message is a trite one hidden behind all the visual and narrative ingenuity. But that has to compete with the more doctrinaire maxim that corporate life crushes the ego -- or, in the more Dostoevskian extreme, drives one mad. What are these truisms, though, but a rack on which to hang Ayoade's playful exercises in style and character?

The Double is certainly not an example of sophomore slump. It's far too brilliantly produced, well acted, and handsome to look at for that. Every minor character is a pleasure to watch, amped up almost to Kubrickian levels. But one misses the warmth and charm of Submarine, which was also I guess funnier and more fun. Ayoade has absorbed his new stylistic influences almost too well; he needs to get his own groove back. And with this degree of accomplishment and skill, he likely will.

The Double, 93 mins., which is a Magnolia PIctures release, debuted at Toronto in fall 2013, followed by London and Glasgow. It was screened for this review as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center-Museum of Modern Art series New Directors/New Films, with showings Monday, March 24, 9:00pm (Lincoln Center) and Saturday, March 29, 6:30pm (MoMA). It has theatrical openings coming in the UK 4 April 2014, then the US 9 May and France 11 June.

TALAL DERKI: THE RETURN TO HOMS (2013)--ND/NF

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ABDEL-BASSET AL-SAROUT DURING A PERIOD OF EXHAUSTION IN RETURN TO HOMS

Rebel war in Syria up close

Talal Derki's Return to Homs is the most visceral and personal documentary about urban siege warfare one is likely to see, the narrative of the ravaged yet still defended city of Homs and one of its natives, a fiery young rebel leader. Neatly editing rough immediate footage in bombed-out buildings and rubble-filled streets, Derki, voicing-over in elegiac, composed classical Arabic, pulls together an otherwise very rugged and vernacular narrative of 2011 to 2013 from the point of view of young rebels engaged in a struggle to hold onto the city of Homs that was considered the capital of the anti-Assad revolution -- and hence was besieged by government forces till its apartment buildings and streets are nothing but concrete Swiss cheese with a scattering of cemeteries and mosques where the rebel martyrs are celebrated.

Derki follows two young Syrians. The main one is Abdel-Basset al-Sarout, a 19-year-old soccer goalie ranked second in the country. Handsome, charismatic and with a spark in his eyes, he could be an Arab Errol Flynn with a touch of James Franco. Basset, a blacksmith, emerges as a firebrand leader during early peaceful demonstrations. He becomes both a creator of rebel songs and, later, when convinced the revolution must fight back with arms, a street fighting leader. As a contrast to Basset, there is one of his close friends who sticks with him, Osama al-Homsi, a quiet 24-year-old university student-turned-media activist. Later Osama, who has been wounded but recovered, has been picked up at a checkpoint, his friends learn, and not heard from again.

Most of Basset's other closest friends get killed. Often they are trapped in one of two Homs neighborhoods, digging tunnels, firing from disintegrating buildings, and for a time forced out of the city altogether. Basset is wounded twice, in the leg and foot, and goes through several periods of exhaustion and near despair and starvation that show on a face that after two years has visibly aged. But when Derki returns after several absences of a month or so, the wounded, limping Basset is back on his feet again. We see him often invent chants and songs and inspire men, smiling his charming smile. At one point we see him losing the will ("I can't do this anymore"). We see him after being wounded, half-raving and praying for the Bashar al-Assad regime to be defeated and for himself to die a martyr's death. Then he is back again, as if risen from the ashes and rubble.

Half of the merit of this film is the way it is able to stick to the continually failing, but never abandoned, efforts by rebels to defend the city of Homs. The other is its tenacious ability to give the narrative an appealing face by following Basset for this three-year period -- even when it's very dangerous where he is, so dangerous rebels are getting killed and wounded right in front of the camera. The action is so intense there's no time to be scared. Xian Brooks is right in his Guardian Sundance review. It would have been nice to get more of a look at the few non-rebel survivors, women and old men, who are still in the city, as well as "a little more structure, context and analysis," but "The director's relentless, claustrophobic approach is surely an accurate reflection of the tragedy itself. There is no wider picture; the world has largely turned its back." Return to Homs is what it is, and what it is is remarkable enough: a vivid snapshot, a poetic memoir, an impassioned plea -- a concentrated essence of all the hope, passion, and despair of the Arab Spring.

We follow Basset, we are at his side, and we feel his revolutionary charisma with his followers. But it's also clear -- Derki's voiceover says so, that this Homs rebel defense lacks coordination at some key moments. Brave and defiant though they are, their numbers and equipment are too limited to win. Yet while Basset expects to die more than once, as the narrative ends he is still alive and fighting.

Highly recommended, but only for the stout of heart: there are painful and disturbing images.

The Return to Homs/العودة إلى حمص [Al-3awdah ila Homs], 90 mins, exclusively in classical and colloquial Arabic with English subtitles, debuted at the Amsterdam documentary festival (IDFA) and won the world cinema jury documentary prize at Sundance January 2014. Screened for this review as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center-Museum of Modern Art series New Directors/New Films, showing Tuesday, March 25, 6:15pm at MoMA and Wednesday, March 26, 9:00pm at Lincoln Center.

RAMON ZÜRCHER: THE STRANGE LITTLE CAT/DAS MERKWÜRDIGE KÄTZCHEN (2013)--ND/NF

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Leon Alan Beiersdorf and the cat in The Strange Little Cat

Kitchen life: choreographed poetry and zaniness of the quotidian

The quiet magic and lurking humor of the quotidian are subtly dramatized in this seamless film about several generations of a good looking family puttering around the kitchen of a Berlin apartment. Two dozen people and creatures come and go, including a black dog, an orange cat, and a moth (which keeps coming back). A rat is also mentioned. Comparisons with Jacques Tati, Michel Gondry, and François Ozon have been made. Zürcher is only 30; the film is only 72 minutes long. Accomplished filmmaking, though conventional expectations are frustrated and the hilarity of Tati is certainly missing. My memory is the sort of obligato of the presiding figure of the kitchen and the film, the unnamed mother played by Jenny Schily, whose Sphinxlike face reminded me of Charlotte Rampling's. For those who can't tune in -- and small English subtitles that vanish in a millisecond may undermine those efforts -- this may seem much ado about nothing. But the originality of the conception and the precision of the execution are unmistakable and critics at the Berlinale ranked this film high.

First a cat loudly whines to be let in, and then that seamlessly morphs into the voice of the youngest child, Clara (Mia Kasalo), who likes to screech at kitchen appliances. Zürcher works with what there is, so there are electric blackouts, a noisy espresso machine, a bottle that magically spins in a pan, and a washing machine, briefly menacing, repaired by a handsome neighbor with whom Schilly's character has a wordless sexual chemistry. There is a shopping list whose orthography is much discussed as a recurring family record of childhood, and people come and go. Zürcher's art is in the smooth choreography of the many people moving around and dodging each other (or kissing later when another group visits for the long-prepared-for dinner that evening), constantly talking, sometimes seen from below, constantly in action, as if naturally, yet with a perfection, a geometrical rhythm, that suggests preparatory diagrams and many rehearsals -- but the effort never shows.

There are recurrent motifs: the moth reappearing, the ginger cat slinking in and out, the dog coming and going, arguments over buttons and shirts, "grandmother's sleeping!" said to quiet noisy children. Cheery music by San Francisco rock trio Thee More Shallows ("a shiny chamber-orchestra affair in sub-Michael Nyman vein" explains Stephen Dalton in Hollywood Reporter) helps keep things light and smooth.

Zürcher is interested in interrelationships and overlappings, both familial and physical. Sometimes people briefly recall a recent incident, which bears this out. For instance Schilly's character recalls going to a movie with grandmother, when a man who sat beside her put his right foot over her left one. She didn't know that it was intentional: maybe he was just too engrossed in the movie to notice he'd done it. When she didn't pull her foot out right away, she was stuck and had to leave it there, as grandmother fell asleep and breathed heavily, making her fear she'd snore. Finally grandmother woke up with a start and she could retract her foot. Zürch sees his scene and perhaps life as a kind of "Twittering Machine" like a Rube Goldberg gadget only less eccentric. He has been for some time and still is a student at the DFFB Berlin film school, and made this film reportedly as a result of a seminar with Béla Tarr, whom he thanks in the credits.

Zürcher was "The first-timer with perhaps the most distinctive sensibility" at Berlin this year, wrote Dennis Lim in the NY Times. His unmistakable talents may show to even better effect in future if he relaxes a little and lets things get simpler, but it seems essential to his effect to give equal weight to everything, people, animals, and objects, "such that nobody and nothing is sidelined," as Charles H. Meyer writes for Cinspect.

Das Merkwürdige Kätzchen, 72 mins., in German, debuted at Berlin. The Swiss-born filmmaker, now resident in Berlin, has made videos. This is his first feature. Originally screened for this review as part of the 2013 San Francisco International Film Festival (25 Apr.-9 May 2013), since the Berlinale this film has been shown in an exceptional number of festivals, at least three dozen, including Cannes and Toronto. This review is republished here as part of coverage of another special event in which the film is included, the Film Society of Lincoln Center-Museum of Modern Art series New Directors/New Films, where it is showing Tue. 25 Mar. 2014 at 9:00pm at MoMA and Wed. 26 Mar. at 6:30pm at Lincoln Center.

TOM SHOVAL: YOUTH (2013)--ND/NF

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DAVID AND EITAN CUNIO IN YOUTH

Good Israeli family boys turn into criminals

Israeli writer-director Tom Shoval's debut feature Youth brings up hot national issues like economic injustice, alienation, violence, sexism, and diminished expectations, but that wouldn't count for much if he had not crafted an intense, suspenseful story about a crime that is all the more visceral and shockingly physical for being done by a pair of young testosterone-fueled amateurs. What also makes this movie interesting is that it stars two first-timers who are brothers of slightly different age but so similar-looking they seem twins. Their real-life, instinctive blood intimacy is immediately and palpable: they make an explosive and riveting pair. In the story the brothers are Shaul Cooper (Eitan Cunio), the younger, and the older one, Yaki Cooper (David Cunio). Both are in their late teens and still live at home in the family apartment in Petah Tikva, a satellite town of Tel Aviv. But home is crumbling, despite their mother's effort to keep things together. Their father has lost his job, and they're losing their hold on their middle-class life, with ownership of their apartment a matter for immediate concern. But we learn this gradually. What we're watching almost right away is a kidnapping by two tough and determined young amateurs hyped by American action movies and perhaps their own country's casual militarism. Yaki, who's 18, has just joined the army, and is in uniform on leave and in possession of an assault rifle, which never leaves his shoulder and which will power their crime.

In the wordless opening sequence Shaul, still a high-schooler, follows a girl from his school to her apartment house. We think maybe he's a shy admirer, but his manner comes to seem too purposeful to be amorous. The way figures in space are shot by Yaron Scharf (Seven Days, Footnote) throughout Youth is almost sickeningly intense. After Shaul goes back and meets Yaki at home, they prepare their action, moving a mattress into a basement bomb shelter with heavy metal doors they secure with a newly purchased padlock. Shaul also tries out adhesive eye patches he's gotten for blindfolds. We learn he works ushering at a cinema showing American blockbusters, a feeble effort to augment family income like the envelope-stuffing he does with his mother (Shirli Deshe). The shadow is their depressed, anxious father Moti (Moshe Ivgy), who has gone back to smoking. Cigarettes become an apt symbol of panic in the movie.

The cruder the kidnapping the more shocking and real it is to watch. What's jaw-dropping first off is that the brothers grab Dafna Edelman (Gita Amely), the rich girl Shaul was following, in plain daylight, pull her over to behind a wall, tie and blindfold her, with masks quickly on and off, and man-handle her onto a bus. Sunglasses hide that she's blindfolded. Yaki's rifle is poked into her leg, but he's in army uniform: he's sacrosanct. Still somebody gets suspicious so they jump off and walk most of the way -- to their own apartment building. A lot of the time, though not on the bus, Dafna protests loudly. When she's tied in the basement she continues to do so.

All images of the girl's imprisonment are intense and real. And events that unfold are deeply ironic. Yaki shoots images with Dafna's cell phone of her tied up on the mattress and them poised over her with the rifle and in masks to dramatize their act and her situation, and sends the best shot to her parents with a text message demanding $152,000 for her release. But, big problem: nobody answers. Turns out not only are Dafna's parents so orthodox they strictly avoid picking up a phone on the Sabboth but they're used to the rebellious girl's making herself scarce on holy days, so won't be worried by her absence. And Yaki must soon return to his basic training.

A further fly in the ointment is that their mother, wanting to put a positive front on things and reenforce family ties, has unexpectedly set up a big holiday dinner for immediate relatives. The central scene is this special dinner Shaul and Yaki, to keep up their part of the front, attend upstairs with the whole family, including granddad who palms over holiday gelt to both brothers. Playing very schizophrenic roles while morphing into sociopaths, they behave politely even with a spoiled little girl at the dinner who makes big trouble for them, then rush down to the basement to see if the tighter wrap they've put on the girl's head hasn't suffocated her. (They manhandle and verbally abuse her, but Yaki is also clearly attracted to her.) Shoval skillfully ramps up ironies, contradictions, and suspense here. The way things play out is as brutal and unexpected as the beginning. Israeli cinema has been producing a string of powerful movies in recent decades and this is another to add to the list. Recommended.

Youth (U.S. Premiere), 107 mins. debuted in the Panorama section of the Berlin film festival in Feb. 2013. It was screened for this review as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center-Museum of Modern Art joint series New Directors/New Films, where it has its US premiere, showing at Lincoln Center Tues., Mar. 25, 9:15pm and at MoMA Wed., Mar. 26, 6:00pm. US theatrical release begins Friday 21 August 2015.

ALBERT SERRA: STORY OF MY DEATH/HISTÒRIA DE LA MEVA MORT (2013)--ND/NF

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VINCENÇ ALTAIÓ IN STORY OF MY DEATH

Hanging out, then dying

In speaking of an earlier film about (ostensibly) the journey of the Magi, Birdsong (Three Kings), which by some odd chance I happen to have watched at New York's showplace of the cinematically arcane, Anthology Film Archives, former Village Voice critic J. Hoberman commented that Catalan oddball filmmaker Albert Serra had chosen to depict Don Quixote and Sancho Panza (in his previous film) as "little more than the knight and his squire hanging out." Well, that is a key to Serra's new one, awarded a grand prize at Locarno: Story of My Death treats Cassanova the same way, basically just mostly hanging out with his two servants, the main one of whom is a round type who himself could play Sancho.

There are films about history in which actors dress up in the clothes of another century and hang out, and this can sometimes perhaps, in a sort of a way, more effectively make us feel we're experiencing another time than a busy, conventionally plotted historical film. This I think is partly what happens in Rossellini's wonderful The Taking of Power by Louis XIV (1966). Being Louis XIV isn't so much evoked there by Rossellini through his exercise of power as by the way he is served food. He isn't exactly just hanging out. Rossellini does include much specific historical information. However Serra does have a point: just showing Cassanova browsing through some books with his servant or taking a crap may evoke for us -- since he looks and dresses like Cassanova, but is otherwise being so ordinary and normal -- what it was to be Cassanova, better than conventional historical films.

But hanging out can lead to longeurs, and in the French journal Cahiers du Cinéma Jean-Philippe Tessé is by no means expressing a minority opinion when he describes Story of My Death as "two and a half hours of deadly (we insist, deadly) boredom." Hollywood Reporter calls it "dead on arrival." A friend of mine who saw it in the London Film Festival told me watching it made him begin to feel his was experiencing his own death.

In me it induced a trance-like state. My blood pressure seemed to go down. I almost ceased to breathe. Perhaps I was nearly dead myself. At the end of Cassanova's travels, more spoken of than shown, he arrives in the film in the Carpathian mountains, and apparently he runs into Dracula. Note: the name "Cassanova" is mentioned only once toward the end, and that of "Dracula" is mentioned only in the closing credits. When watching the film I thought of him only as "Who is that old man with the pointed head and the beard?"

In the event nice visuals can't be enough, but it should also be noted that Serra has some lovely scenes outdoors in the evening in this film that evoke 17th-century painting, and like everything else here, that go on for quite some time. Why does Cassanova laugh and laugh and laugh while he is relieving himself and at several other times? Perhaps best simply to quote here Neil Young's comment in Hollywood Reporter that in the film we find "the goatish debauchee's jaded decadence offset by a wacky, almost childish sense of humor." Les Inrockuptibles notes (with approval) "There are long scenes of animal sacrifice by firelight, still lives evoking Flemish painting, a play of shadows and this profound black" that constitutes the durable charm and magic, the writer says, of Albert Serra's cinema.

My previous experience of Serra's visual beauties had been distinctly mixed too. His Birdsong consisted largely of distant shots in black and white of small figures moving across a horizon. When seen up close they resembled the Three Stooges. In a his detailed, respectful review J. Hoberman called the black and white "almost gorgeous" (but is it or isn't it? plainly not quite). One must call Story of My Death "almost gorgeous" -- in places. Some use of candlelight and firelight is beautiful, but some night images are just murky. The control Kubrick achieved in Barry Lyndon is missing.

And apart from the salutary effect of just "hanging out" with a famous historical figure, and the occasional visual beauties on view, let's note the flaws Vincent Ostria of L'Humanité (who didn't finish watching) lists: "Lack of historical-geographical relevance. Series of over-composed tableaux without visible continuity; no dramatic progressions. Monopolizing of dialogue by Casanova. Other characters nonexistent." (All of them are played by non-actors, by the way. Vicenç Altaió, playing Cassanova, who delivers his lines in an easy-going ramble matched by others in the cast, is a poet and cultural curator.)

Serra has a right to do what he does, and there are those who love it. But there are other ways to lower your blood pressure. Aerobics, swimming, yoga, running, tennis, sex. Transcendental meditation.

Story of My Death/Història de la meva mort , 148 mins., the title inspired by Cassanova's memoir Histoire de ma vie, debuted at Locarno where it received the grand prize, and showed at a dozen other festivals including London and Toronto. It opened in cinemas in France 23 October 2013; French critical response was very mixed (Allociné press rating 3.0 with only 11 reviews). Screened for this review as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center-Museum of Modern Art joint series New Directors/New Films which is the fim's U.S. premiere, Wed. 26 Mar 2014 9pm at MoMA and Sat. 29 Mar. 5:30pm at Lincoln Center.

MATTHEW SAVILLE: FELONY (2013)--FILM COMMENT SELECTS

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TOM WILKINSON, JAI COURTNEY, AND JOEL EDGERTON IN FELONY

Moral agonies of a compromised Aussie cop

The Australian film Felony begins with a big drug raid where one officer, Malcolm Toohey (Joel Edgerton, who stars and wrote the script) emerges as a bit of a hero, taking a bullet that lodges in his protective vest. There's a bar party of the cops to celebrate their exploit. Mal drives home alone drunk. He dodges an alcohol road test using a police password and his badge. Further on, out of it, he grazes a boy on a bike. The boy falls and hits his head on the road. Mal stops and reports the boy, who lies unconscious, but conceals that it was his car that caused the injury. Other police details that follow, about a pedophile case and more drug arrests, are local color from here on: the main topic becomes the boy, Mal's guilt, and a coverup. Edgerton's screenplay uses familiar trappings to delve into new, thoughtful territory. Mind you, though Edgerton was a player in the awesome Aussie crime movie Animal Kingdom and the same production collective is involved, this is milder, more conventional stuff than that. But its issues and debates are tense and exciting in their way.

Mal faces a terrible choice because he is guilty of a crime but if he confesses to it he'll likely do jail time and lose his career, and he has a wife and little boy. The issues are complicated by the arrival of Detective Carl Summer (Tom Wilkinson, the outstanding cast member here, doing an Aussie accent), an alcoholic on the wagon and a cynic, who immediately posts his new young straight-arrow partner Jim Melic (Jai Courtney) on the periphery so he can talk turkey with Mal. He sizes up the situation (later we learn all was spelled out in more detail than is shown us at first) and urges Mal to stick to his story of being a witness, concocting a car paused at the scene that pulled away when he drew up.

But later Jim proves a fly in the ointment. A single man with no close ties to Mal or Carl, he visits the boy in a coma and meets his mother Ankhila (Sarah Roberts), to whom he feels an attraction. (He violates police ethics himself in trying to get involved with her.) Jim increasingly feels that Mal got off too easy, and wants him thoroughly questioned and a forensic test done on his car. He does not hesitate to face Carl about this issue. This leads to repeated confrontations between Jim and Carl. Meanwhile Mal feeks increasingly tormented by guilt, to the point where he confesses to his wife (Melissa George), who supports him, but also condemns him. Ironically, Ankhila remains grateful to Mal, as well as to Jim.

Carl, whose rage when a judge releases his pedophile on parole leads him to go back to drinking, tells Mal he's just going to feel a little guilt for a while, but the tradeoff will make it worth it. He'll suffer, but he doesn't need to let down the force and his family by going to jail. "Prison is for pricks that don't have their punishment here," he says, pointing to his head. But wait a minute, mate. You've committed a felony. If Carl were considered the voice of the movie, it would seem to be going in a dangerous direction. And things get a bit too complicated toward the end, Edgerton throwing in one too many plot twists. Felony ends with a muddle that's not entirely satisfying. This likely was Edgerton's aim. But while his face expresses a world of pain, he may go a little too easy on his own character and may imply cops have options other mortals don't get. Clearly the director Matthew Saville has worked well with all these actors. This film looks more ordinary than it is

Felony, 105 mins., debuted at Toronto Sept. 2013. It was screened for this review as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center series Film Comment Selects Monday, Feb. 17, 2013. US theatrical release 17 October 2014.

SHAHRAM MOKRI: FISH & CAT (2013)--ND/NF

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Gray one-take meander by a Caspian lake

In this arcane tour-de-force done in a long single take like Sokurov's Russian Ark (but without the beauty, glamor, history, and art), we begin with cannibals and end up at a little kite "festival" made up of university students camping at a Caspian lake in the grayest, gloomiest time of winter -- good for cinematography based on harmonies of dun with occasional highlights of color. Things start out very creepy and wind up meandering, time-warpish and strange. The total may appeal to those looking for new cinematic experiments. But a majority of viewers will find it a struggle to make it to the end, which is not arrived at till two and a quarter hours have passed. Mind you, all this is pretty strange and original in its way, but what it all means isn't remotely clear.

The young Iranian filmmaker Shahram Mokri, whose production values -- the smooth cinematography by dp Mahmud Kalari of A Separation, the one-take seamlessness, nice music (including a Serge Bozon-esque live lakeside performance at the end) -- show he has something going on, still seems to base most of the content on not-quite-fully-digested university student musings and jottings about dreams, memory, déjà vu, lost girlfriends, and news stories about menacing criminals (dead-end restauranteurs who may serve up human flesh). The students' wanderings never converge and the menace never delivers: the plot never develops a center or a focus.

Basically there is too much going on here at the plot level. Perhaps Mokri is interested in patterns of motion beyond the human, like Ramon Zürcher in his festival-celebrated intricate home movie, The Strange Little Cat. In contrast to the lack of foreground point, Mokri overstuffs the screen. First there is the non-stop camera movement. Then there are the overlappings, multiple encounters between new characters in which one of them engages in a voice-over about something unrelated to what the dialogue's about. Two things are gong on before we've grasped the point of the first thing.

And there is a succession of scenes that don't quite connect. First there are the evil restauranteurs, who regard lost car travelers as possible victims, but decide not to bother. Then you get the father who has a weird obsession with a girl from his youth he never connected with, who can't bear his son to be more than 100 meters away. Their parting goes on and on, with the two evil restauranteurs hovering nearby, and then the boy goes to the campground. There various university students turn up or are already present, wandering back and forth, some of them caught in repetitive loops of looking for a lost backpack or lamp or registering a newcomer's kite. Later in one of the evil weirdos approaches a girl and lures her out of her car and into the (dull, bramble-strewn) woods on some made-up pretext of a valve and a key and flooding. But she leaves him and goes back.

On and on it goes, with a gathering web of information about this kite flying event's history and some of the student's associations. But no theme emerges, other than providing fodder for repetitions of scenes/sequences/dialogue that suggest a time-loop. It's a purgatorial trap. Maybe Julia Loktov of The Loneliest Planet could have done something explosive with it. Gray, twiggy, rocky, boring, this sodden, lightly-fogged lakeside is not a place where you'd want to be stuck. Ultimately the perpetual motion of the camera becomes the most interesting thing, but you may wish it would hop a helicopter and fly someplace else. This is a busy, busy movie in which nothing really ever happens.

Fish & Cat/Mahi va gorbeh, 134 mins., in Farsi with English subtitles. Debuted at Venice. Screened for this review as part of the joint Film Society of Lincoln Center-Museum of Modern Art series, New Directors/New Films, where it is the North American premiere, showing Thursday, March 27, 6:00pm at MoMA and Friday, March 28, 9:00pm at Lincoln Center.

ABDELLAH TAÏA: SALVATION ARMY (2013)--ND/NF

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KARIM AID M'HAND IN L'ARMÉE DU SALUT, IMAGE BY AGNÈS GODARD

Harsh Bressonian coming-of-age of a gay Moroccan

Young Moroccan filmmaker Abdellah Taïa's semi-autobiographical, fragmentary gay coming-of-age story (based on his own 2006 novel), handsomely shot in blues and grays by Claire Denis's cinematographer Agnès Godard, is very, very austere, a young life seen in stony cold brutal terms. No horrific ordeals here, though. Just discipline, denial, humility, patience. This has some of the harsh qualities (with a nod or two at witchcraft) of the stories of Paul Bowles or his protegé Mohammed Mrabet. But this isn't storytelling. It's the schematic unfolding of a life in a few impressively drab scenes, ending in the longed-for achievement of every young, poor Moroccan male: escape to the most first-world of havens, Switzerland. The harsh Bressonian style is so unyielding the story's beauty comes through only when one thinks back on it.

As a teenager, Abdellah (Saïd Mrni), hard-faced, not handsome or pretty, lives in a large very poor family mostly of women in his father's traditional Casablanca house. There is his small brother, his big brother, and his father, who beats their mother, in a scene where the other males, with all the other females hovering by, break into the room where the beating is going on, and the mother comes out, seemingly unscathed despite many screams.

In warm weather Abdellah slips away to town to fetch bread where men pull him off for sex in the street; his father seems to recognize and condone this. It's a first escape for the very poor. Once, when a younger, good-looking man caresses Abdellah, he allows himself a smile. Abdellah seems to worship and eroticize his older brother Slimane (Amine Ennaji), whom his mother is afraid of losing, and when Slimane takes him and his younger brother to the seaside he abandons them and runs off with a waitress. Abdellah calls his mother and reports: her amulet didn't work, she needs to cast another spell. But Slimane has urged Abdellah to improve his French, essential for his escape.

Fast forward ten years: 25-year-old Abdellah (Karim Ait M’hand, with prettier eyes, but still the short street-boy hair) now has a Swiss seaside lover (Frédéric Landenberg). They're taken in a rowboat, and the oarsman sniggers knowingly in Moroccan Arabic to Abdellah about his good luck. Abdellah seems, as before, unenthusiastic about his older lover, a professor in Geneva. When Abdellah himself comes to Geneva, it's confusing. It appears he's there for graduate work, but he's arrived a month before his scholarship is to begin. It seems to have been all arranged with help from his professor, but he goes to see the man and says he is through with him. They have words, "You're a whore," the professor tells him. "Yes, I'm a whore," Abdellah answers.

Abdellah has come to the promised land, and he has a visa and scholarship, but he still seems like a refugee. He stashes his suitcase in a locker, washes in a public restroom, sleeps on a bench, and winds up at L'armée du salut (the Salvation Army), where he's in a tiny room with another Moroccan, from Maknes, Mustapha (Hamza Slaoui), who sings him a song by Abdel Halim Hafiz, the Egyptian matinee idol of the Sixties, which he and his siblings loved when he was a youth. It's a plangent memory, a melancholy nostalgia without regret, and there the film ends. It seems a little abrupt, but feeling a film is too short is an unusual and sweet pleasure.

Salvation Army/L'Armée du salut, 81 mins., debuted at Venice Sept 2013 and played at other festivals, including Toronto. It opens in France 7 May 2014. Screened for this review as part of the FSLC-MoMA New Directors/New Films series. Opens in New York on January 23, 2015 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

GILLIAN ROBESPIERRE: OBVIOUS CHILD (2013)--ND/NF

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JAKE LACY AND JENNY SLATE IN OBVOUS CHILD

Foul-mouthed girl comic gets sweet hunk

The vulgarity, sexual explicitness and compulsive personal honesty of female standup comic Donna Stern (Jenny Slate) protagonist of Obvious Child, which may suggest neurotic, self-destructive behavior, are in contrast to the movie's straightforward upbeat outcome. The movie, set in Brooklyn and Manhattan, begins with vagina and penis jokes, but turns out to be a rom-com whose denoument is a feel-good abortion sequence. Though Obvious Child has twists along the way, the oddest note may be the suggestion that a girl can still meet a Mr. Right, and on the rebound too. But what recommends the movie isn't so much its storyline as its appealing central character, sold by the from-the-heart style of its good looking, smooth talking star, Jenny Slate, a Saturday Night Live vet whose standup here becomes (within the film's storyline) strictly autobiographical.

Her first lines about her vagina onstage lead to describing her boy friend as "having a working penis." Perhaps working overtime, since as soon as the act's over this individual announces to Donna that he's leaving her for her best friend. When she gets drunk aided by her gay comic friend Joey (Gabe Liedman), she's joined by a tall, hunky, super-straight and "Christian" (Donna being very self-consciously Jewish) young businessman called Max (Jake Lacy).

When she goes home with Max, who is never turned off by any of her frank talk, they dance, act wild, and have sex. Next thing she knows, helped through the drama of a first pregnancy test by her friend (Suzanne Lenz), Donna indeed discovers she and Max didn't actually properly use a condom, and she's pregnant. As an extra, her place of work, a bookstore, is suddenly about to close. Dumped, pregnant, out of work.

Today's Apatow-style comedies are usually about young men avoiding responsibility. Here, where the woman is at the center, this is a non-issue. Max simply keeps coming around. He turns out to be a favorite student of Donna's business-school-prof mother (Polly Draper - from thirtysomething!), so Donna sees him not only at the bookstore but by chance at her mother's. Donna wants to tell him she's pregnant, but can't quite. She reveals it finally when Max turns up for one of her comedy routines, where she announces she is having an abortion, on Valentine's Day (there's a reason). Max neither advocates nor apposes this; it's not his decision. At first he bolts but he is soon back, and is simply present for the event to support it. Likewise Donna's mother is a breeze about the whole thing. She is just relieved the news is an abortion and not a move to Los Angeles; turns out she had an abortion once herself.

One obvious interval is an abortive evening at a fancy loaned apartment with Donna's comedy club boss Sam (David Cross), who is going to Los Angeles. What was just to be a drink is obviously an attempt to take her to bed, and she bolts. Sam is yucky, a clearcut Mr. Wrong. He makes the already appetizing Max look even more perfect. But Donna doesn't leap into the arms of Max either. Again belying the rules of rom-com that require making all the wrong moves, Donna simply does the sensible thing under the circumstances and accepts Max.

For conservatives about religion or childbirth the film's embracing of a possible mixed (Jewish-Christian) union and wholehearted acceptance of abortion might be doubly offensive. Certainly Max is a woman's fantasy of a knight in shining armor (who obligingly keeps his opinions to himself, except to approve). But Obvious Child's standup comedy dirty talk is combined with grownup attitudes and good sense and free of the usual sickly rom-com mix of of snide jokiness and sentimentality. There's not much to Obvious Child. It lacks the stars or the punch to be a big hit at the box office. But on the whole it's a pleasant surprise. It's a Sundance hit (which A24 paid a good price for there) that succeeds by not setting its sights too high, yet going its own way.

Obvious Child , 83 min., debuted at Sundance. It was screened for this review as part of the FSLC-MoMA New Directors/New Films series, where it is the centerpiece film, showing Thursday, March 27, 9:00pm at MoMA's PS1 and Saturday, March 29, 3:00pm at Lincoln Center.

VIVIAN QU: TRAP STREET/SHUIYIN JIE (2013)--ND/NF

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LU YULAI AND HE WENCHAIO IN TRAP STREET

Romance in the world of total documentation

One of the beauties of Trap Street, a quietly auspicious debut by Chinese former producer Vivian Qu, is its genre-jumpiing. It begins as a rom-com with coming-of-age overtones, then moves into noir-thriller territory, and winds up with strong hints of ominous sociopolitical sci-fi. And it's all flowing and natural thanks to seamless storytelling and editing, handsome cinematography, and cast members who act their heads off, without the effort showing. There's plenty to think about afterwards in this fresh, subtle film that has Hitchcockian overtones with its trapped innocent man theme. The young but experienced star Lu Yulai is excellent here, and we can only hope to see more very soon from this new director, Vivian Qu.

The very young Li Quiming (Lu Yulai) is working at several main jobs. He moonlights installing security cameras for a somewhat unsavory pal, and also at testing for bugs in hotel rooms. But his main gig is as a trainee for a private surveying company that tracks the ever-changing city. Quiming, whose mother (Xiang Qun) works in a mall stall and father (Zhao Xiaofei) is a woman's magazine editor, seems barely out of his teens. Video games are his favorite pastime, but he's also looking for girls and makes excuses to linger in a neighborhood he and his partner Zhang Sheng (Hou Yong) have been surveying when he glimpses the pretty, stylish Guan Lifen (He Wenchao). They stay for dinner to avoid rush hour and get caught in a downpour -- and Quiming spots her stranded under an umbrella and they give her a ride.

From then on Quiming is smitten by the mysterious LIfen. She is a bit out of his league, and also turns out to work at a secret lab on "Forest Lane," a street not on any map or GPS system. Lifen leaves a card case containing computer index data in the survey company car, which leads Quiming to her, though when he dresses all up to meet her her supervisor (Liu Tiejian), or so he calls himself, turns up instead -- a hint of trouble to come.

The film focuses wholly on Quiming, the buddies he shares a flat with, the parents he sees now and then, his various jobs, and captures his innocent youthful spirit. Typically when he and his survey partner rush into the car out of the downpour, the first thing he does is arrange his hair. And each of his few but key "dates" with Lifen is memorable, yet light-hearted (despite the dark undertones coming). She may be fancy, but he takes her to the zoo to look at monkeys; riding bumper cars; to a pool hall and dancing; they share soft drinks. His gesture of grasping her hand and reading off his latitude/longitude watch reading and saying"Quiming first held the hand of Lifen here" is a gesture out of the romantic novels cannibalized so skillfully at one time by Wong Kar-wai. Life seems to partake of Quiming's lighthearted spirit, or feed off it. But his innocence is his alone.

That innocence is shattered when on a date after a mysterious break (when Lifen's cell phone has been out of the system), we stay with Lifen, and Quiming seems to have disappeared. Hereafter Qu takes us down a dark and Orwellian road, one that may fit the age of Edward Snowden and whatever China's NSA is. Mystery and paranoia and worse seem ahead, but Qu wisely doesn't really explain anything, leaving Lifen's work and her role or the lack of it in what happens as mysterious as she was to start out with. She could be the future; she could be an angel of doom. She could be as innocent as Quiming.

A "trap street" in cartography terms is nonexistent street mapmakers hide on a map to protect copyright. But here it has an additional meaning, since the off-the-map street where the alluring Lifen works proves a dangerous lure for the young protagonist.

Highly recommended.

Trap Street/水印街 [Shuiyin jie], 94 mins., debuted at Venice 1 Sept. 2013 and was at Toronto and at least 18 international festivals, and was screened for this review as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center-Museum of Modern Art series New Directors/New Films, showing Fri. 28 Mar. 2014 6:30pm at Lincoln Center and Sat. 29 Mar. 4:00pm at MoMA.

HÉLÈNE CATTET, BRUNO FORZANI: THE STRANGE COLOR OF YOUR BODY'S TEARS/L'ÉTRANGE COULEUR DES LARMES DE TON CORPS (2013)--ND/NF

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More gorgeous glossy S&M from the Belgian couple

The Belgian couple Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani's 2009 Amer (ND/NF 2010) was a celebration of or stylized homage to Italian Dario Argento-style slasher-horror "giallo," and their new one, the 2013 The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears/L'étrange couleur des larmes de ton corps is more of the same, presented as a more coherent whole but also, if read carefully, maybe more offensive. This time instead of being divided into three parts that don't fit together very well, it's one continuous feature, except that again the narrative element is limited, and the material is very repetitive and often spins into the purely visual or sonar. Again this is an evocation of genre for cultists that's more lush visuals and sound than a regular film. The sound and visuals are gorgeous, with the problem that if you don't like buckets of blood and people (particularly nude women) being cut to pieces with long knives, you may find the content of the images increasingly off-putting, as time wears on.

This time rather than focusing on the weird Freudian childhood of a little girl, as Amer initially did, the film has more of a detective-story premise (and giallo, by the way, comes from a Mondadori series started in 1929 and generally refers to what is called "noir" or French "romans policiers," Seventies slasher movies being just an offshoot). Dan (Denmark’s Klaus Tange) comes back to his Brussels apartment expecting to see his wife Edwige (Ursula Bedena) ), but it turns out for some time she hasn't been answering his phone calls, and when he gets home, she is missing and the door is chained shut from the inside.

This is the time when, to add a real policier note, the police need to be called in, but that doesn't go very far, and Dan starts an investigation of his own. Dan and Edwige's place is in a small, unusually handsome apartment building, which we're later told consists of subdivisions of what was formerly a large single preivate residence. As Jay Weissberg says in his not at all admiring Variety review, what follows is as interesting for the "fabulous art-nouveau spaces" this building affords as for any narrative content, which is hard to follow at best anyway. We get an over-sexed old lady upstairs (Birgit Yew) whose husband disappeared through a hole in the ceiling. We get a raven-haired young woman in kinky red leather. We get a building manager with news of former occupants and of double walls and connections between all the apartments. And this time we get a lot more slashing and blood. And decapitations.

Visually, this largely being an experiment in imagery, as in Amer, we get pinwheels, lots of extreme closeups, particularly of eyes and mouths; split-screens, kaleidoscopic effects, keyholes, holes, wounds, Weissberg implies, standing in for predatory pudenda (which he finds offensive; women might too). Again it all combines to present murder and cruelty and S&M with the glossy glamor of a fashion shoot. Mike D'Angelo, who saw this at Toronto, explains in his personal Letterboxed review that he initially liked how each successive person Dan meets launches into "crazily stylized digressive interludes," but was disappointed that the filmmakers eventually settle into "their meaningless narrative." He is certainly right, judging by these two films, that Cattet and Forzani "can't do a sustained story" (in feature-film terms). Normal viewers watching this film uninterruptedly in a cinema find it becoming very, very long toward the end, its beauty of image and sound not enough to offset a parade of repetitiveness and gore whose pure exercise in style might disappoint Argento. It's too aesthetic to be truly scary. But Cattet and Forzani have a formidable technique to work with if they could abandon their cultism and move on to an actual narrative film.

The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears/L'étrange couleur des larmes de ton corps, 102 mins., debuted at Locarno 12 Aug. 2013 and showed at ten or twelve other international festivals including London and Toronto. It opened in French theaters 12 Mar. 2014 with a mediocre critical reception (Allociné press rating: 2.9). Screened for this review as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center-Museum of Modern Art joint series New Directors/New Films (as was Amer in 2010).A Strand Releasing release. At ND/NF it shows Fri. 28 Mar. 2014 9:00 pm at MoMA and Sun. 30 Mar. 1:15 pm at Lincoln Center.

ANJA MARQUARDT: SHE'S LOST CONTROL (2014)--ND/NF

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BROOKE BLOOM IN SHE'S LOST CONTROL

Misguided therapy

Anja Marquardt's dour first feature about a woman majoring in social psychology working as a sex surrogate is a drab exercise in middling indie style that offers fewer rewards than it might. Ronah (Brooke Bloom) takes on a small number of clients with intimacy issues who are referred to her through a therapist (Dennis Boutsikaris). Watching Ronah and the therapist consulting together on one of her clients in the therapist's office makes one suspect they, and particularly Ronah, whose face seems slow to register authentic emotion, may have intimacy issues of their own.

We don't learn much more about Ronah other than her dreary current life. Her apartment has a leak. The plumbers leave holes in the bathroom wall that make taking showers difficult. She has lonely meals in this apartment, except for one time with a female neighbor she invites over -- who later turns out to be suing her. She gives herself daily hormone injections, in order, she reveals later, to freeze her eggs in case she might later want to have a child. For reasons unexplained -- just her harried existence, presumably -- she has no time to have a boyfriend of her own. A Skype conversation with her brother in the country (Ryan Homchick) reveals their aged mother has wandered off, a worry that till the end of the film is dropped.

One skyline seen from a window indicates this is taking place in New York City. But locations, or any establishing shots, are a mere blip, part of the apparently intended coldness and colorlessness of a film that seems to partake of the problems it depicts. Any warmth or atmosphere might presumably disturb the angst-ridden mood, which may owe something to Lodge Kerrigan of Kerane (acknowledged in the end credits), though this film lacks the intensity and sense of place of Kerrigan's work. If the affection Ronah offers is intentionally generic, why should she have to seem such a blank otherwise? It's not till the title comes true that anyone breaks out of blandness, and by then the film is nearly over.

The one bright spot is Ronah's teacher and mentor (Laila Robins), who has done this kind of work herself earlier. She is a warm and spontaneous person, showing the field is not wholly filled with by-the-numbers geeks like Ronah and the referring therapist.

The trajectory is obvious. Ronah gets a new client, Johnny (Marc Menchaca), a bearded anesthetist's assistant, a particularly hard case that she feels is a challenge. Johnny is resistant at first even to arm-touching and barely willing to make eye contact. But aren't they all like this? We get no others to establish a frame of reference. "I want to crack him," she tells the therapist -- not a very warm and fuzzy way of stating her aim. Johnnny expresses dislike of Ronah and at one point says he'd like to strangle her -- a hint of danger left unheeded. Doubtless like other clients Ronah has dealt with, Johnny seems to have had bad past experiences that make him self-protective, and they keep him from wanting to have sex with anyone he knows, He won't tell Ronah who he does have sex with. (It's a sign of the screenplay's lack of clarity that it's unclear if her asking him about that is routine, or a breach of it.)

It's clear Johnny will warm up, Ronah will get too interested in Johnny, and there will be trouble. At the clinically formal first meeting when Johnny must sign an agreement and take a mouth swab sample to show he has no sexually transmitted diseases, yet he is informed that the meetings are "not for sexual gratification or entertainment." What are they for, then? This is another confusing curve ball from the script.

In the event, when they both get interested, sexual gratification clearly occurs. But that's where the trouble starts. Maybe after it's clearly all gone wrong, Ronah ought to decide to get a masters in something else, or realize social psychology doesn't require playing at sex therapy. But the ending does't take Ronah anywhere, except upstate to visit her brother.

Marquardt may intend to provide an unnerving portrait of contemporary alienation. But what we see is a film without warmth based on a screenplay that lacks clarity. There is something clumsy about She's Lost Control (even the title is gauche) that its intentionally "austere" style can't mask. If you want to see a screen treatment about a sex surrogate, better to watch Ben Lewin's superior The Sessions, an interesting, touching, and true story admirably acted by Helen Hunt as the sex therapist and John Hawkes as the needy and grateful client. Helen Hunt's character shows that performing this job with professional restraint need not mean a lack of warmth and humanity. As for She's Lost Control, it's better avoided.

She’s Lost Control, 90 mins., debuted at Berlin Feb. 2014. It was screened for this review as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center-Museum of Modern Art series New Directors/New Films, where it shows Sat. 29 Mar. at 9 pm at Lincoln Center and Sun. 30 Mar at 4:30 at MoMA.

FABIO GRASSADONIA, ANTONIO PIAZZA: SALVO (2014)--ND/NF

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SARA SERRAIOCCO IN SALVO

A new pair of filmmakers to reckon with in Italy

My sympathies were with Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza's first feature Salvo all the way, even when it disappointed expectations early on with its strange jump from a gun battle and mafia killing to an almost too close and prolonged focus on a beautiful blind girl, a relative of the assassinated man, who somewhat implausibly regains her sight. It's a wholly original mix, and the assassin, who goes into hiding in Sicily, where all this transpires, with the blind girl, has some of the chiseled, laconic mystery of Alain Delon in Jean-Pierre Melville's classic Le Samouräi. But the filmmakers are trying to pull a fast one on us, bringing out all the trappings of an Italian gangland thriller and just letting them wither away. That stuff is durable. It can't wither away. However the Sicilian interiors, overdecorated and decrepit in a Victorian-Italian way, the industrial exteriors, rusty, clanging and abandoned to mafiosi, are memorable. So is the light. And so are Palestinian actor Saleh Bakri as the assassin (who may bring Chemises Lacoste back in style), and Sara Serraiocco as the blind girl he literally loves to death. Talk about doomed romances. This is a genre-bender, with elements of noir thriller and operatic romance and some of the images, dialogue and pace of spaghetti western.

And there is the memorably odd piccolo-borghesi couple (played by Giuditta Perriera and Luigi Lo Cascio) at the first hideout, an old apartment, who serve Salvo (whose name,rather ironically, means "safe," as in "sano e salvo," "safe and sound," as well as being short for the common Sicilian name, Salvatore). And also Mario Pupella as the gnarly mafia boss who comes, in vain as it turns out, to call Salvo back to to do his duty, and kill.

But first of all Salvo (no name though till much later, when Rita, the blind girl, asks for it), a bodyguard, is cornered by some rival assassins on a road, and captures one and forces him to say who set them on him ("Renato") then executes the man. The scene shifts to Renato's house (darkened against the Palermo heat) and a long remarkable single-take sequence focused on Rita, at first sitting at a table listening to her favorite song, "Arriverà" by the Modà and Emma, and happily counting money, then gradually realizing that danger and death have invaded, and moving around gradually in growing terror. Remarkable sound design, light (dim, yet revealing), and acting by Sara Serraiocco introduce us at perhaps slightly overindulgent length to the sheer sensuality of this film and its ability to convey an unusual point of view. At this point, Renato is not there. Hence the waiting.

Then Renato comes and the killing takes place, though we don't see it, because we're still with Rita. Somehow Salvo can't bear to treat her as necessary collateral damage, and keeps her a prisoner. Boyd van Hoeij gives an excellent (and justifiably admiring) description of all this in his Cannes Variety review. It's virtuoso work that, even if Grassadonia and Piazza don't gain a wide audience with this offbeat debut, will guarantee them attention from cinephiles in future both for richness of technique and originality of concept. And when von Hoeij says, in the traditional Variety lingo, "Tech package is simply superb," these are not idle words.

However von Hoeij is unfortunately also right to suggest the second half doesn't wholly mesh with the first or match its originality. This long finale ranges between the dingy apartment and an abandoned factory warehouse where Salvo's keeping Rita prisoner, and then on to an escape when a bunch of mafiosi associates come and boss Mario Pupella orders Salvo to finish her off. This whole second half feels a bit like back-peddling, especially considering the high energy and physical intensity of the earlier section. But the finale scene is wonderfully iconic and austere.

Screening for this review as part of the New Directors/New Films 2014 series (of MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center) one had the feeling that the press and industry audience had a very mixed reaction, some obviously unsatisfied, others simply not knowing quite what to make of it. But parts of this film are clearly brilliant and highly original. Salah Bakri is riveting. He isn't as handsome as the young Delon but he has the stoical assurance, upright bearing, and ability to hold the screen in thrall. And Sara Serraiocco's blind act and transformation into a beautiful sound young woman keeps pace with Bakri's mysterious strength. Given the generally low blood pressure of contemporary Italian cinema, anything this original and assured is good news. What the directors do from here forward we'll have to wait and see.

Salvo, 104 mins., debuted at Cannes May 2013 where it won the Critics' Week grand prize. A French and Italian co-production which Jeanne Moreau had something to do with. In the US it's a Film Movement release. Released in France 16 Oct. 2013 with a good critical reception (Allociné press rating: 3.4) and Les Inrockuptibles loved it, but Cahiers thought it too showoff-y, more a directors' calling card than a film; and others argued (not without reason) that it lacks narrative backbone. It was screened for this review as part of the FSLC-MoMA series, New Directors/New Films, showing Sat. 29 Mar., 2014 at 9pm at MoMA and Sun. 30 Mar. at 4pm at Lincoln Center.

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SALEH BAKRI IN SALVO

IAN FORSYTH, JANE POLLARD: 20,000 DAYS ON EARTH (2014)--ND/NF

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NICK CAVE WRITING ON HIS TYPRWRITER IN 20,000 DAYS ON EARTH

An immersive fiction-stye self-portrait by the Australian Nick Cave

For those wanting or needing a fill-in on Nick Cave, the Australian-born, long UK-resident singer-songwriter, there will be some gaps after watching this film, but it makes up for that in a nearly non-stop visit with the man, who, collaborating with writer-directors Ian Forsyth and Jane Pollard, wisely eschews the conventional vintage tapes and straightforward bio in favor of a Shandean tale enabled by lots of talk about himself in the present time, semi-magical, noir-ish conversations with old friends (including Ray Winstone and Kylie Minogue) and wife in the light tan leather seats of his black Jaguar (as he drives around his chilly wet resort town of Brighton), expounds to a shrink, and visits his archive where attendants go through photo files and he identifies himself at various stages, in elementary school, in grammar school, in his tiny hideaway in Berlin. It's an elegant fiction-style film worthy of the man's originality, intelligence and wit. It culminates with "climactic concert footage of Cave and the Bad Seeds performing explosive renditions of 'Higgs Boson Blues,' 'Jubilee Street' and 'Stagger Lee' at the Sydney Opera House," "well timed to allow for catharsis after so much formal control and highbrow talk" (Rob Nelson, Variety). And this segment, it might be added, cunningly inserts some split-second overlap-clips showing Cave performing similarly at earlier stagesof his now considerable career.

The sessions with the shrink are artificial and expository. It may be said that nothing is more static cinematically than exposition constructed via shrink sessions; yet they were used in "The Sopranos" with success and added interest and contrast there. Cave tells the shrink his father died when he was 19. He does not say he learned of the death from his mother as she was bailing him out of jail for burglary; that it was the time in his life when he was most confused. "The loss of my father created in my life a vacuum, a space in which my words began to float and collect and find their purpose," he has said. This comes through in the film: like so many of us, he wove meaning out of confusion through writing.

He notes to the shrink that he was a drug addict, which he was told was a dangerous way to behave. He also recounts that his father read him the opening chapter of Nabokov's Lolita when he was a young boy, an important moment of rapport. He composes the lyrics to his songs tapping on a small manual portable typewriter. The results are cut out and pasted into a notebook he props up on a piano to sing them. He dresses in the same dark suits to walk around and perform on stage. His present wife when he first saw her (he recounts this as she sits in his Jaguar behind him) embodied all the movie stars and models and divas and beauties in history and paintings he'd ever seen.

There is a wealth of music in the background, but this is not a music film, rather a film about a musician and writer. (He penned the script of the striking Australian film The Proposition, though this is not mentioned.)He is shown, using the collaged notebook of lyrics, with his musicians the Bad Seeds recording their 2013 album Push the Sky Away, and here we see he composes quite interesting words. But this moment, of interest to viewers learning consciously of Cave's lyrics for the first time, does not arrive till 50 minutes into the film.

The film does not discuss the extremely eclectic nature of Cave and his various groups' music, nor name or date his earlier groups (though with his current group they mention a line he's singing sounds like Lionel Richie, which sounds plenty eclectic). It does not say when he moved to England (in 1980, when he was 23) or why. It doesn't mention that he has written novels. It mentions his twin sons born with his current wife former model Susie Blick, but it does not mention his other sons by two other women, or the six years after his time in West Berlin when he lived in São Paulo, Brazil, where he was married to Brazilian journalist Viviane Carneiro and had a son, Luke.

In short, this is not a thorough review of Nick Cave's life and work. It is, however, an artistic and engaging portrait of the man that fans and others may enjoy. But "While the film is seemingly accessible as a portrait of an artist who seems particularly attuned to his own creative process, and particularly adept at describing this attunement, it's unlikely that many who aren't already whole-hog Bad Seeds fans would be able to stomach much of Cave's self-styled pomposity" (Slant Magazine). This comment is a bit unfair: he is humorously self-aware about his self-centeredness, noting that in an old mock-last will and testament he provided that all proceeds from his estate were to go to "The Nick Cave Memorial Museum."

Some of Cave's generalizations about the creative process in the film are rather over-general and obvious. But his opening statement about how you compose a song is interesting as a talking point. "Songwriting is about counterpoint," he says, "like letting a child into the same room as a Mongolian psychopath or something." He suggests a song (the lyrics that is) brings together two unrelated and contrasting things, and sometimes a third thing. This resembles the famous definition of surrealism as "the random encounter between an umbrella and a sewing-machine upon a dissecting-table."

20,000 Days on Earth , 95 mins., is a Drafthouse Films release. It debuted 20 Jan. 2014 at Sundance. It was screened for this review as part of the FSLC-MoMA series New Directors/New Films, of which it is the closing night film showing Sun., 30 Mar at 7 pm and 9:30pm. at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. This film will be distributed by Drafthouse Films with release date 17 September 2014.

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FEBRUARY 17-27 2014 PUBLIC SCREENINGS

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MARCH 19-30 2014
PUBLIC SCREENINGS

Rating New Directors/New Films 2014; comments on Film Comment Selects

Though New Directors features some provocative and radical new work, some of the films, the best, were straightforward dramas that had resonance with our times of worry, paranoia, and economic and environmental crisis. Top marks to the two Romanian features, The Japanese Dog (Jurgiu ), the story of a father devastated by flood reunited with his expatriate son, and Quod Erat Demonstrandum (Gruzsnetczki ), a tale of Eighties intellectual repression, which are not groundbreaking in technique but simply well-made and relevant films. A sparkling Chinese debut was Trap Street (Qu), a romance with a nod to government oppression. The Israeli Youth (Shoval) is a kidnapping thriller full of economic and job desperation. The Italian Salvo (Grassadonia, Piazza), with impressive performances and virtuoso technique rings changes on the mafia thriller, blending in a doomed romance and exalted spaghetti western style, another strong debut. There were a couple of powerful documentaries: Return to Homs (Derki), following young Syrian rebels up so close the filmmaker risked his life constantly, is an absolute must-see; We Come As Friends is another important statement about the exploitation of Africa, South Sudan this time, but not as coherent as Hubert Sauper's earlier Darwin's Nightmare.

Other New Directors films were certainly worth seeking out, such as Ayoade's The Double, a polished Brazil knockoff, but not as great and warm as Ayaode'sSubmarine. Obvious Child (Robbespierre) is a successful US female comedy; Salvation Army (Taïa) is a beautifully stark, pioneering gay film from Morocco. And there are many other more radical titles of interest for various reasons that are what give the series its depth and character.

This is still a great series and it was a great pleasure and an honor to be able to watch every one of the feature-length selections. Special thanks to John Wildman FSLC Senior Publicist and David Ninh Publicist for all their help in covering the series and keeping it running so smoothly; to all the staff at the Film Society and MoMA; to Glenn Raucher of the Film Society, Theater Manager, who keeps the theaters providing world class screening quality.

I liked the Film Comment Selects titles I chose, Felony (Saville), Me & You (Bertolucci), Cherchez Hortense (Bonitzer), Our Sunhi (Hong), but can't list "best of" this series because as before, it was impossible to sample a large enough chunk of this more eclectic and chronologically free-ranging series.

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FSLC Programming Director Dennis Lim