New Directors/New Films and Film Comment Selects 2015

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FEBRUARY 29-Narch 5, 2015 2014 PUBLIC SCREENINGS
Full FSLC program here.

GENERAL FILM FORUM discussion and announcement thread HERE.

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MARCH 18-29 2015 PUBLIC SCREENINGS

As before I will 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 is below. All but Theeb were shown in the press screenings and are covered in this thread.

Links to the reviews:

Christmas, Again (Charles Poekel 2014)
Screening with Going Out (Ted Fendt 2014, 8 mins.)
Court (Chaitanya Tamhane 2014)
The Creation of Meaning/La creazione di significato (Simone Rapisarda Casanova 2014)
Diary of a Teenage Girl, The (Marielle Heller 2014)
Dog Lady (Laura Citarella, Verónica Llinás 2015)
Entertainment (Rick Alverson 2015)
Fool, The/Durak (Yuriy Bykov 2014)
Fort Buchanan (Benjamin Crotty 2014)
Screening with Taprobana (Gabriel Abrantes 2014, 24 mins.)
Goodnight Mommy (Severin Fiala, Veronika Franz 2014)
The Great Man (Sarah Leonor 2014)
Haemoo (Shim Sung-bo 2014)
High Society/Le beau monde (Julie Lopes-Curval 2014)--FCS
Los Hongos (Oscar Ruiz Navia 2014)
K (Darhad Erdenibulag & Emyr ap Richard 2015)
The Kindergarten Teacher (Nadav Lapid 2014)
Screening with: Why? (Nadav Lapid 2015, 5 mins.)
Line of Credit (Salomé Alexi 2014)
Listen to Me Marlon (Stevan Riley 214)
Mercuriales (Virgil Vernierj 2014)
Ow (Yohei Suzuki 2014)
Parabellum (Lukas Valenta Rinner 2015)
Screening with Colours (2 mins.) (Evan Johnson 2014)
Phoenix (Christian Petzold 2014)--FCS
SHORTS Program 1
SHORTS Program 2
Theeb (Naji Abu Nowar (2014)
Tired Moonlight (Britni WesT 2014)
The Tribe (Miroslav Slaboshpitsky (2014)
Tu dors Nicole (Stéphane Lafleur 2014)
Violet (Bas Devos 2014)
Western (Bill, Turner Ross 2015)
White God (Kornél Mundruczó 2014)
SURVEYING THE SERIES.

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March 18-29, 2015
Dedicated to the discovery and support of emerging artists, New Directors/New Films has earned an international reputation as the premier festival for works that break or re-cast the cinematic mold. Celebrating its 44th year in 2015, the festival takes place March 18-29 and is presented jointly by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and The Museum of Modern Art.

Tickets go on sale to FSLC and MoMA members on March 3. Tickets go on sale to the general public on March 10.

Early selections.

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Christmas, Again | Charles Poekel
USA | 2014 | 79 min.
Writer-director Charles Poekel has transformed three years of “fieldwork” peddling Christmas trees on the streets of New York into a sharply observed and wistfully comic portrait of urban loneliness and companionship, shot on 16mm by acclaimed cinematographer Sean Price Williams (Listen Up Philip, Heaven Knows What).

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Court | Chaitanya Tamhane
India | 2014 | 116 min.
Marathi, Gujarati, and Hindi with English subtitles
Chaitanya Tamhane’s absurdist portrait of injustice, caste prejudice, and venal politics in contemporary India won top prizes at the Venice and Mumbai Film Festivals and features a brilliant ensemble cast of professional and nonprofessional actors who capture the rich complexity and contradictions of Indian society.

The Creation of Meaning / La creazione di significato | Simone Rapisarda Casanova
Canada/Italy | 2014 | 95 min.
Though its title arcs toward grand philosophical inquiry, the stirring power of Simone Rapisarda Casanova’s documentary-fiction hybrid—winner of the Best Emerging Director prize at Locarno—lies in its intimacy of detail and wry political observation, filmed with a painterly Renaissance beauty in Tuscany’s remote Apennine mountains.

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Entertainment | Rick Alverson
USA | 2015 | 110 min.
The Comedy director Rick Alverson teams with comedians Gregg Turkington (better known as Neil Hamburger) and Tim Heidecker for a hallucinatory journey to the end of the night. A washed-up comic on tour with a teenage mime works his way across the Mojave Desert on a one-of-a-kind odyssey that is by turns mortifying and beautiful, bewildering and absorbing.

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Goodnight Mommy | Severin Fiala & Veronika Franz
Austria | 2014 | 100 min.
German with English subtitles
The dread of parental abandonment is trumped by the terror of menacing spawn in Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz’s exquisite, cerebral horror-thriller. Produced by Ulrich Seidl, Goodnight Mommy is a heartbreaking tale of love and loss wrapped in one of the scariest films of the year.

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The Great Man | Sarah Leonor
France | 2014 | 107 min.
French with English subtitles
The intrinsic struggle between paternal/fraternal responsibility and unfettered mobility takes on a deeply moving dimension in Sarah Leonor’s by turns heartbreaking and empowering sophomore feature, which follows two French Legionnaires at the end of their posting in Afghanistan.

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The Kindergarten Teacher | Nadav Lapid
Israel/France | 2014 | 119 min.
Hebrew with English subtitles
Nadav Lapid’s follow-up to his explosive debut, Policeman, is a brilliant, shape-shifting provocation in which a fortysomething teacher in Tel Aviv becomes obsessed with one of her charges, a 5-year-old poetry prodigy, yielding a perversely romantic work whose underlying conviction seems to be that in an ugly world, beauty still has the power to drive us mad.

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Theeb | Naji Abu Nowar
Jordan/Qatar/United Arab Emirates/UK | 2014 | 100 min.
Arabic with English subtitles
Classic storytelling at its finest, this quietly gripping adventure tale, set in 1916 in a desert province on the edge of the Ottoman Empire, follows the younger brother of a Bedouin guide, tasked with helping a British Army Officer and his translator, as he learns to survive and becomes a man amidst the violent and mysterious agendas of adults.

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The Tribe | Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy
Ukraine | 2014 | 132 min.
Set it in a spartan boarding school for deaf and mute coeds and told entirely through un-subtitled sign language, Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s Cannes Critics’ Week Grand Prize–winning feature debut overcomes what may sound like impossible obstacles to tell a grim but uncannily immersive story of exploitation and brutality in a dog-eat-dog world, delivering a high-school movie you won’t forget.

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White God | Kornél Mundruczó
Hungary | 2014 | 119 min.
Hungarian with English subtitles
Kornél Mundruczó’s shocking fable, which won the Un Certain Regard prize in Cannes, captivatingly weaves together elements of melodrama, adventure, and a bit of horror in order to pose fundamental questions of equality, class, and humanity, as an outcast mutt and an army of fellow canines set out to take their revenge on the humans who have wronged them.

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ND/NF 2015 full series:

The Diary of a Teenage Girl | Marielle Heller
USA | 2014 | 100 min.
Winner of a Special Jury Prize for Excellence in Cinematography at Sundance, this adaptation of Phoebe Gloeckner’s graphic novel, set in 1970s San Francisco, features stunning newcomer Bel Powley as a 15-year-old girl whose sexual awakening involves having an affair with her mother’s boyfriend (Alexander Skarsgård). Opening Night!

Entertainment | Rick Alverson
USA | 2015 | 110 min.
The Comedy director Rick Alverson teams with comedians Gregg Turkington (better known as Neil Hamburger) and Tim Heidecker for a hallucinatory journey to the end of the night. A washed-up comic on tour with a teenage mime works his way across the Mojave Desert on a one-of-a-kind odyssey that is by turns mortifying and beautiful, bewildering and absorbing. Closing Night!

Christmas, Again | Charles Poekel
USA | 2014 | 79 min.
Writer-director Charles Poekel has transformed three years of “fieldwork” peddling Christmas trees on the streets of New York into a sharply observed and wistfully comic portrait of urban loneliness and companionship, shot on 16mm by acclaimed cinematographer Sean Price Williams (Listen Up Philip, Heaven Knows What).

Screening with:
Going Out | Ted Fendt
USA | 2014 | 8 min.
Liz thinks she’s going on a date with Rob to see RoboCop, but things take an unexpected (and inexplicable) turn.

CourtCourt | Chaitanya Tamhane
India | 2014 | 116 min.
Chaitanya Tamhane’s absurdist portrait of injustice, caste prejudice, and venal politics in contemporary India won top prizes at the Venice and Mumbai Film Festivals and features a brilliant ensemble cast of professional and nonprofessional actors who capture the rich complexity and contradictions of Indian society.

The Creation of Meaning / La creazione di significato | Simone Rapisarda Casanova
Canada/Italy | 2014 | 95 min.
Though its title arcs toward grand philosophical inquiry, the stirring power of Simone Rapisarda Casanova’s documentary-fiction hybrid--winner of the Best Emerging Director prize at Locarno—-lies in its intimacy of detail and wry political observation, filmed with a painterly Renaissance beauty in Tuscany’s remote Apennine mountains.

Dog Lady
Dog Lady | Laura Citarella & Verónica Llinás
Argentina | 2015 | 95 min.
This indelible and quietly haunting study of an enigmatic, nameless woman living with a loyal pack of stray dogs in silent, self-imposed exile on the edge of Buenos Aires follows her across four seasons with an attentive and sympathetic eye, culminating in an unforgettable extended final shot.

The Fool | Yuriy Bykov
Russia | 2014 | 116 min.
An engineering student discovers two massive cracks in a decaying provincial housing project but is stymied in his attempts to avert a catastrophe in this stinging rebuke to the endemic corruption of the Russian body politic, which earned writer-director-actor Yuriy Bykov four awards at the 2014 Locarno Film Festival.

Fort Buchanan | Benjamin Crotty
France/Tunisia | 2014 | 65 min.
Shot in richly textured 16mm, Benjamin Crotty’s queer soap opera chronicles the tragicomic plight of frail, lonely Roger, who seeks comfort and companionship from the sexually frustrated army wives of a remote military post in the woods while his husband carries out a mission in Djibouti.

Screening with:
Taprobana | Gabriel Abrantes
Portugal/Sri Lanka/Denmark/France | 2014 | 24 min.
A sensuous and debauched portrait of Portugal’s national poet Luís Vaz de Camões teetering on the borderline between Paradise and Hell.

Goodnight Mommy | Severin Fiala & Veronika Franz
Austria | 2014 | 100 min.
The dread of parental abandonment is trumped by the terror of menacing spawn in Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz’s exquisite, cerebral horror-thriller. Produced by Ulrich Seidl, Goodnight Mommy is a heartbreaking tale of love and loss wrapped in one of the scariest films of the year.

The Great Man | Sarah Leonor
France | 2014 | 107 min.
The intrinsic struggle between paternal/fraternal responsibility and unfettered mobility takes on a deeply moving dimension in Sarah Leonor’s by turns heartbreaking and empowering sophomore feature, which follows two French Legionnaires at the end of their posting in Afghanistan.

Haemoo | Shim Sung-bo
South Korea | 2014 | 111 min.
First-time director Shim Sung-bo distills a gripping drama from a real-life incident and delivers a gritty, brooding spectacle of life and death on the high seas. This tense, hair-raising nautical thriller was produced by Bong Joon-ho—whose second feature, Memories of Murder, was written by Shim.

Los HongosLos Hongos | Oscar Ruiz Navia
Colombia/Argentina/France/Germany | 2014 | 103 min.
Full of vibrant color and great music, Los Hongos is a charming and surprising coming-of-age film that follows Cali street artists Ras and Calvin, good friends from disparate class backgrounds who band together with other artists to paint a tribute to the student protestors of the Arab Spring.

K | Darhad Erdenibulag & Emyr ap Richard
China | 2015 | 88 min.
At once familiar and strange, this reimagining of Kafka’s The Castle is utterly specific to its striking Inner Mongolia setting, and totally faithful to is origins in portraying faceless bureaucracy as a timeless and universal frustration. Produced by Jia Zhang-ke, K is the rare literary adaptation that honors the source material even while reinventing it.

The Kindergarten Teacher | Nadav Lapid
Israel/France | 2014 | 119 min.
Nadav Lapid’s follow-up to his explosive debut, Policeman, is a brilliant, shape-shifting provocation in which a fortysomething teacher in Tel Aviv becomes obsessed with one of her charges, a 5-year-old poetry prodigy, yielding a perversely romantic work whose underlying conviction seems to be that in an ugly world, beauty still has the power to drive us mad.

Screening with:
Why? | Nadav Lapid
Israel | 2015 | 5 min.
A filmmaker is asked by Cahiers du Cinéma to choose the image that made him believe in cinema.

Line of Credit | Salomé Alexi
France/Georgia | 2014 | 85 min.
Nino is a forty-something woman with a small shop in Tbilisi who grew up without thinking about the complexities of finance. But when the money gets tight, Nino goes about taking loan after loan, but even as the situation grows reckless, Salomé Alexi maintains a beautifully light, comedic tone in her feature-film debut.

Listen to Me Marlon | Stevan Riley
UK | 2015 | 100 min.
Documentarian Stevan Riley explores the on- and off-screen lives of Marlon Brando, using a vast trove of audio recordings made by the actor himself to allow Brando to tell his own story, filled with bones to pick, strong opinions, and fascinating traces of one of the most alluring figures in the history of cinema.


Mercuriales | Virgil Vernier
France | 2014 | 100 min.
This freely inventive breakthrough work from ambitious young French director Virgil Vernier is a radical experiment in form that also lavishes tender attention on its characters. As two young receptionists in the titular Paris high-rise drift from one situation to the next, Vernier’s visual style grows ever more surprising and beautiful.

OwOw | Yohei Suzuki
Japan | 2014 | 89 min.
Jobless young Tetsuo and his girlfriend Yuriko are inexplicably immobilized after laying eyes on an orb-like object that appears out of nowhere, setting into motion an enigmatic chain of events and an obsessive investigation by journalist Deguchi in this deadpan mystery that just might be a comment on the social malaise and inertia of 21st-century Japan.

Parabellum | Lukas Valenta Rinner
Argentina/Austria/Uruguay | 2015 | 75 min.
In the midst of riots and social unrest, a Buenos Aires office worker puts his life on hold and departs for a vacation with a difference—think hand-to-hand combat and homemade explosives training in place of yoga and nature walks—in Austrian filmmaker Lukas Valenta Rinner’s carefully composed, minimalist end-of-days tale.

Screening with:
Colours | Evan Johnson
Canada | 2014 | 2 min.
A compact, chromatic visual essay on our way of seeing by Guy Maddin collaborator Evan Johnson.

Theeb
Theeb | Naji Abu Nowar
Jordan/Qatar/United Arab Emirates/UK | 2014 | 100 min.
Classic storytelling at its finest, this quietly gripping adventure tale, set in 1916 in a desert province on the edge of the Ottoman Empire, follows the younger brother of a Bedouin guide, tasked with helping a British Army Officer and his translator, as he learns to survive and becomes a man amidst the violent and mysterious agendas of adults.

Tired Moonlight
Tired Moonlight | Britni West
USA | 2014 | 76 min.
Britni West’s Slamdance-winning directorial debut, photographed on Super-16mm and featuring a mostly nonprofessional cast in semi-fictionalized roles, discovers homespun poetry among the good folk of her native Kalispell, Montana, yielding a sui generis slice of contemporary naturalism.

The Tribe
The Tribe | Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy
Ukraine | 2014 | 132 min.
Set it in a spartan boarding school for deaf and mute coeds and told entirely through un-subtitled sign language, Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s Cannes Critics’ Week Grand Prize–winning feature debut overcomes what may sound like impossible obstacles to tell a grim but uncannily immersive story of exploitation and brutality in a dog-eat-dog world, delivering a high-school movie you won’t forget.

Tu dors Nicole
Tu dors Nicole | Stéphane Lafleur
Canada | 2014 | 93 min.
This disarmingly atmospheric comedy, following the summer (mis)adventures of a band of utterly unique characters and shot in lush black-and-white 35mm, is Québécois director Stéphane Lafleur’s ode to the wry tradition of Aki Kaurismäki, Fernando Eimbcke, and Jim Jarmusch.

VioletViolet | Bas Devos
Belgium/Netherlands | 2014 | 82 min.
Writer/director Bas Devos’s feature debut is a muted but harrowing portrayal of aimless, maladjusted youth. With an uneasy yet entrancing atmosphere, Violet is a continually surprising exploration of pain and guilt, an interior voyage that only grows tenser and more affecting as it arrives at darker, less comprehensible regions of the soul.

Western
Western | Bill & Turner Ross
USA | 2015 | 93 min.
Drug cartel violence and border politics threaten the neighborly rapport between Eagle Pass, Texas, and Piedras Negras, Mexico in Bill and Turner Ross’s trenchant and passionately observed documentary, which firmly positions the brothers at the frontier of a new, compelling kind of American vernacular cinema.

White God
White God | Kornél Mundruczó
Hungary | 2014 | 119 min.
Kornél Mundruczó’s shocking fable, which won the Un Certain Regard prize in Cannes, captivatingly weaves together elements of melodrama, adventure, and a bit of horror in order to pose fundamental questions of equality, class, and humanity, as an outcast mutt and an army of fellow canines set out to take their revenge on the humans who have wronged them.

Opening Night
MARIELLE HELLER: DIARY OF A TEENAGE GIRL (2015)

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WIIG, SARSGARD, ET AL. IN DIARY

Growing up bold and hedonistic in Seventies San Francisco

In The Diary of a Teenage Girl, first-time director Marielle Heller succeeds admirably in adapting Phoebe Gloeckner’s semi-autobiographical graphic novel—about sexual and drug experimentation in 1970s San Francisco. This is due primarily to the discovery of young English actress innie Bel Powley, whose precocious 15-year-old character Minnie Goetze, Gloeckner's alter ego, is in every scene and voice-over narrates in a facsimile of Minnie's cassette-taped diaries. "Oh my God, I had sex today!" she breathlessly declares at the very outset. And she's had sex, for the first time but by no means the last, with her mother (Kirsten Wiig's) boyfriend Monroe (Alexander Skarsgård), a handsome, slightly goofy, beer-quaffing almost-hippie. For a while, this titillating and ostensibly shocking material is wholly absorbing and almost delightful. It may go on a few minutes too long, but Heller & Co. have got it right.

Without being sticklers for accuracy, the filmmakers have used their faded sepia cinematography and authentic locations to recreate the mood and look of 1975 San Francisco beautifully. This is still going on, and works pretty well for those of us who were there, all the way to the end of the film when its lack of a strong story line has caused interest in Minnie to fade. For young women looking for experiences to identify with, there may be no fading. Kirsten Wiig keeps her edge as the hard-partying mom, though the role isn't one quite worthy of a comic of Wiig's caliber. For those young women, Skarsgård's generic attractiveness and almost perfect replication of an ineffectual young American male may stay interesting, even if it's clearly no more than skin-deep.

The important aspect of the film, for sophisticated and broad minded audiences, is that it manages to show a 35-year-old adult male deflowering (at her instigation) and repeatedly bedding an underage girl, without seeming shocking or in bad taste. It's a situation that fits in perfectly with semi-boho 1975 San Francisco while it might feel decadent or repellant shown in another milieu. Gloeckner was putatively depicting the environment where she actually grew up. This is an era of hedonism: Minnie is unabashedly hedonistic. And as Bilge Ebiri wrote at Sundance for The Vulture, "the earthiness that Heller and Powley bring to Minnie’s experimentation with sex, drugs, and independence is refreshingly amoral, funny, and poignant."

The Diary of a Teenage Girl is one of those cute-bold-offbeat indie films Sundance dreams of, one that convinces, that has a point of view, and flows. Ideally, it will appeal to an audience beyond young women or nostalgia seekers. Another element that makes it worth watching is the most specifically autobiographical one. Minnie (so brightly and compellingly embodied by Bel Powley) is wide eyed and naive but also boldly experimental and gloriously enthusiastic about sex (some little animations, adding to the post-Flower Child era feel, embellish this). But she's also a budding Crumb-style cartoonist and graphic artist, filling sketchbooks with drawings and comic page layouts on a daily basis. As with so many coming of age stories about a young artist, the main event is that becoming -- going out into the world with her drawings. This too the film effectively portrays, thus giving the film a little wider context.

The Diary of a Teenage Girl, 100 mins., debuted at Sundance 2015. Now a Sony Pictures Classics release. Screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films, a series of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and MoMA.

BAS DEVOS: VIOLET (2014)

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Still from Violet

Belgian bike boy suffering vivid loss

In Bas Devos' mute, artful feature, Jesse (Cesar De Sutter) is a blond Belgian teenager who is forced to watch his pal Jonas knifed to death in a mall (an event the viewer also sees helplessly, playing off on CCTV surveillance monitors); and he spends the rest of the film trying to process this loss. A lot of things happen (and it has a vérité feel that can't be entirely faked). Not much is said. The sometimes avant-garde-feeling cinematography speaks volumes, to our aesthetic sense, at least.

Clearly, the material in Devos' Violet closely matches Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park, though Jesse is less overtly guilty, just appeals complicit to his friends, who don't understand why he was there but couldn't stop Jonas from getting killed, or why Jonas got killed and he didn't. The slim, inarticulate boys are much the same, with BMX bikes and a forested bike playground reached by car replacing the questionable "Paranoid Park" of Van Sant's skateboarders. I am obliged to Boyd van Hoeij, reviewing Violet at the Berlinale for Hollywood Reporter, for the reminder that Paranoid Park was shot by Wong Kar Wai's eccentric and brilliant cinematographer Christopher Doyle. This film turns out to have been done, in 65mm. and with the digital Alexa by Nicolas Karakatsanis, perhaps an equal ace behind the camera and who has recently also been the dp for not only Bullhead, the extraordinarily talented Matthias Schoenaerts' breakthrough film directed by Michaël R. Roskam, but for Roskam's The Drop (with Schoenaerts as well as Gandolfini) and The Loft, another Belgian-directed film with Schoenaerts and American actors. But all these are guaranteed to be more accessible than the mute and withholding Violet, which challenges its viewers to stay tuned and put things together into a coherent tale. Van Sant did however do much the same thing in Paranoid Park, if more accessibly.

One could go on at length about the special beauties of Karakatsanis' images. As van Hoeij puts it, the 65mm images, which provide a wealth of shallow focus in closeup portraits -- lingering long on De Sutter's head from above, for instance, right after the crime, as he stares down for a long silent stretch waiting for his mother to comfort him and clean the blood off him -- everything but the long blond swath of hair a beautiful blur. Images contrasty like this seem to sing but also, more to the point here, can seem to shriek at us. Or there is Jesse's family's house seen from a distance in the twilight, with colors quietly intense and everything in the rooms clearly visible, though small. Meanwhile the academy ratio images feel intimate but confined, like the uptight sensibility of the inarticulate boys, who seem to re-bond with Jesse only by riding bikes beside and around him; and the confinement of his (again inarticulate) grief. It's not clear every viewer will grasp any of this; for anybody it may take some effort, and for those out of tune it will seem just willful artiness. But we'd like to see more collaborations between Devos and Karakatsanis. Their use of actors and milueux as well as images is pro.

But this film risks seeming little more than an arty remake. Mike D'Angelo saw it as part of ND/NF too, and has tweeted: "Gave up on a moody ND/NF film, shot in 1.33, about a teen dirt biker who witnesses a death. Aren’t filmmakers aware of other major films?" and "What I saw was almost exactly PARANOID PARK, except with fewer dialogue scenes and even more shots of kids flying through the air."

Violet, 82 mins., debuted at the Berlinale February 2014; over a dozen other festival showings since then, including Edinburgh, Karlovy, Sarajevo and Toronto. Screened for this review as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center-Museum of Modern Art series, New Directors/New Films of March 2015.

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Cesar De Sutter in Violet

BRITNI WEST: TIRED MOONLIGHT (2014)

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Tired viewer

The New Directors blurb about Britni West's directorial debut says it "discovers homespun poetry about the good folk of West's native Kalispell, Montana. . . a small town populated by lonely hearts engaging in awkward one-night stands, children with starry eyes and bruised knees, stock-car drivers, junkyard treasure hunters, and bighorn sheep." "Rarely," the blurbist enthuses, "has Big Sky Country ever cast such a sweetly comic and tender spell." The spell eluded me in this sloppy docudrama, which reads more like a poorly edited collection of random footage than a film. West edits as if he had ADD, jumping from one subject to another randomly over and over with no buildup of meaning, though indeed, the kids, drivers, junk hunters, clumsy youthful suitors and oddball couples keep recurring.

"Photographed in Super-16mm by Adam Ginsberg," the blurb points out, "(who shot Alex Karpovsky's Red Flag (SFJFF 2013)and featuring a mostly nonprofessional cast (with the exception of indie favorite Alex Karpovsky) in semi-fictionalized roles, Tired Moonlight is a sui generis sliceof contemporary naturalism." That is a nice way of putting it.

This film makes most sense when regarded not as a movie but as someone collecting still images (without yet editing them) using a motion picture camera. There is something of Robert Frank's frumpy but iconic photo classic The Americans here. Something of Stephen Shore's semi-urban, not-quite-random American cross-country, crossroads landscapes. Something of Lee Friedlander. Since this is color, often bright color, there is or may need to be something of William Eggleston. But whether Adam Ginsberg and Britni West are aware of these borrowings or they are unconscious is uncertain. More likely the latter, since aesthetically this film is as ugly as any documentary could be that had the justification this lacks of solid content. In any case, West and Ginsberg have not found a mood or a focus. They have not found a story to tell. Or, to put it differently, they have found too many stories to tell, and needed to narrow them down. This is rural Americana. But what does that mean now? How is it different from the heyday of Frank, Friedlander, or Eggleston? West and Ginsberg need to transcend the traditions in their own fresh way. Here they have given us material for a film, but not a film. Winding up with the Fourth of July and a lot of fireworks does not make a conclusion.

Tired Moonlight, 76 mins., debuted simultaneously at Slamdance and Rotterdam. Screened for this review as part of the March 2015 FSLC-MoMA series New Directors/New Films.

SIMONE RAPISARDA CASANOVA: THE CREATION OF MEANING/LA CREAZIONE DI SIGNIFICATO (2014)

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Italy past and present viewed from the mountains

Despite its pretentious-sounding title,* Casanova's hybrid documentary, his second, is a down to earth portrait of a segment of the Apennine mountains of Tuscany. And unlike Micheelangelo Frammartino's Le quattro volte, with which it's been compared and to which it bears a passing resemblance, this doesn't take much figuring out. It's about a place and its relation to modern history as seen glancingly through an individual.

There are various discussions of what this region was like during the War, when Germans were around and also partisans to fight them: it was a theater of conflict, divided by the Gothic Line, as a group of school-kids discuss. And there is a view of one man's life, sixty-something Pacifico Pieruccioni. He's tall and thin and healthy-looking, sort of late Henry Fonda. He maintains a limited farm but has run out of money, so it's going to be sold. He asks one guy to buy it so it doesn't fall into the hands of a scoundrel ("mascalzone"is one word he uses). But it's a friendly German, with a little blond boy named Benjamin, an Italian speaker living in Pisa, who is the buyer.

Along the way there are various chats, Pacifico doing chores in summer shorts, and a crowded table of outdoor diners who sing a rousing song with the full-throated, melodious voices only Italians have.

A more extended conversation that concludes the film deals with the pros and cons of German vs. Italian life. conversation between this gent and Pacifico concludes the film. The German can't understand how the Italians can have consented to be badly governed for twenty years. But he sees the bad government itself as a source of freedom, the lack of tight rules that for him is the appeal of the country compared to is well-run native land. The ugly side of contemporary Italy comes through when Pacifico flips on his radio upon rising and gets a talk show full of nasty political invective that makes Fox News commentaries sound mild.

Neil Young of Hollywood Reporter reviewed this film from Locarno.A follow-up to 2011's first film set in Cuba, The Strawberry Tree. The Sicilian-born filmmaker is based in Montreal.

The Creation of Meaning/La creazione di significato, 95 mins., a Canada-Italy production, debuted at Locarno 2014 (Best Emerging Director prize there), also showing at Vienna and Rotterdam. It was screened for this review as part of the March 2015 FSLC-MoMA series New Directors/New Films.
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*Casanova explains it: "To make sense of the world that surrounds us we tell stories, even if we know that they are ephemeral as our lives. My film tells a simple story where the viewer is invited to seek out the narrative threads running between past and present and in thus doing so partake in an ephemeral creation of meaning."

YURY BYKOV: THE FOOL/DURAK (2014)

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ARTYOM BYSTROV (CENTER) IN THE FOOL

A dark and bitter view of contemporary Russia

The Fool isn't as grand a Russian film as Zvyagintsev's recent Leviathan. But it's more openly bitter and vituperative, full of indignation. With its long night sequence and glitering dark urban landscapes and its moral passion it reminds on of Krzysztof Kieślowski. The plot hinges on the discovery by Dima (Artyom Bystrov)-- a young man, a zealous plumber, engineering student, and future building inspector -- of big ground-to-roof fault lines on two sides of a "dormitory," a project-like building outside a town. It's also leaning over 10%, and he predicts its collapse is imminent. It's occupied by 820 people, and they have to be evacuated immediately. Many of the occupants are poor and out of work, with deadbeats and dissolute youths around the edge. But Dima cares about them just the same, whatever his family or the local city officials think.

When Dima brings his bad news to a big, drunken late-night birthday party for the lady mayor, Nina Galaganova (Natalya Surkova), the various bureaucrats' siphoning-off and general corruption begin to be so enthusiastically exposed, it looks for a while as if Bykov is going to turn the rest of the film into a lecture. But though there is plenty of talk, the delay for it rachets up the tension level, and down to the end the action also remains exciting. And bitterly ironic down to the very dark and visually powerful finale.

Reviewing for Hollywood Reporter, Boyd van Hoeij called The Fool "Extremely bleak and depressing even by Russian standards," but suggested that "the third film of writer director Yury Bykov. . .is also his best" and "will undoubtedly be [his] biggest hit to date." It's a stunning effort, and should put Bykov on the international cinematic map.

Directed, written, edited by Yury Bykov. Camera (color, widescreen), Kirill Klepalov; music, Bykov; production designer, Stanislav Novak; costume designer, Olga Pogodina; sound (Dolby Digital), Arkady Noskov.

The Fool/Durak, 116 mins., debuted at Locarno August 2014, where it won four awards; showing at over a dozen other festivals thereafter. Screened for this review as part of the March 2015 FSLC-MoMA series New Directors/New Films.

US theatrical release begins Wed. Sept. 16, 2015 at Film Forum, NYC.

SHIM SUNG-BO: HAEMOO (2014)

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Human trafficking and on board craziness

Things get a bit out of control in more ways than one in the directing debut of Shim Sung-bo, screenwriter of Memories of Murder, debut of his producer here, Bong Joon-ho. The story of a human trafficking disaster that leads to on-board chaos is well-directed as pure action, but it turns into a horror movie, and the multiple characters are hard to tell from each other, except for a romantic couple whose relationship is itself the stuff of purest fantasy.

The story begins calmly and normally enough, which is a plus: the captain of a fishing trawler who's losing money due to the financial downturn and bad luck agrees to carry a load of illegal Korean-Chinese immigrants to South Korean for a substantial fee. Only the boat is a decaying rust bucket, and neither the captain nor any of his crew has any experience of dealing with such a cargo.

Central to the action is the rookie fisherman Dong-sik (Park Yu-chun), who takes an immediate shine to the attractive young Hong-mae (Han Ye-ri) and hides her in the engine room. After a tense coast-guard inspection, things go horribly wrong for the rest of the human cargo, and as the sea fog to which the title refers rolls in, the captain goes bloodily berserk and everything gets really, really crazy and ugly.

Shim Sung-bo’s directorial debut played in competition in San Sebastian’s Official Selection and became the South Korean candidate (but not a finalist) for 2015's Best Foreign Oscar.

The screenplay is reportedly based on real events (and even relates in general terms to last November's Korean Sewol Ferry Incident), but as Shim ramps up the action, verisimilitude falls by the wayside. As a kind of unique cult-horror film with a new and all-too-close-to truth theme, however, it works, and as another example of brilliant over-the-top Korean filmmaking, Haemoo deserves passing attention.

Haemoo ("Sea Fog"), 111 mins., opened 13 August 2014 in Korean, showing at the Toronto Festival Sept. 2014, and nine or ten other festivals. Screened for this review as part of the March 2015 New Directors/New Films series jointly sponsored by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art.

STÉPHANE LAFLEUR: TU DORS NICOLE (2014)

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JULIANNE CÔTÉ IN TU DORS NICOLE

Girl drifts through a Quebec summer heatwave

Nicole (Julianne Côté) is spending the summer in the family's ample, ordinary house -- marble floors; walls like Baltimore row house Formstone -- while her parents are away on vacation. She sleeps around a little (no second night), pilfers from the charity clothing store where she works, and hangs out with her best girlfriend Véronique (Catherine St-Laurent), with whom for a while she plans a trip to Iceland.

Québécois director Stéphane Lafleur delivers his third feature in Tu dors Nicole ("You're sleeping, Nicole"), a depiction of a young woman's transitional summer. Aki Kaurismäki, Fernando Eimbcke, and Jim Jarmusch are mentioned as sources, but while the action is dry and aimless, the characters and situation are more nearly mainstream. These are less extreme French Canadians than Xavier Dolan's; they seem mostly just Canadians who speak French. The action consists of short vignettes that are connected by fades to black; the well-crafted visuals are in black and white shot on 35mm film. As Mike D'Angelo, an early advocate in The Dissolve, who compares Tu dors to (the also black and white) Frances Ha, put it, "Tu Dors Nicole doesn’t have anything much on its mind past a series of amusing riffs. That’s fine, though. Pleasure is pleasure."

Be fully prepared for whimsy and pleasure is what you'll have. There is no other agenda to be met, and if you insist upon one you may wind up wondering what the festival raves are about. As in Kaurismäki, there are running gags, notably little Martin (Godefroy Reding), who Nicole used to babysit for, a small blond kid whose voice has dropped -- way down-- prematurely (courtesy of Alexis Lefebvre), and wants her as his girlfriend and is willing to wait; a forever-tricky bike lock; a man who circles around the neighborhood at night trying to lull his baby to sleep, a ploy that works for him (he carries a large take-out coffee) but not the baby.

Early on the equation alters when Nicole's older brother Rémi (Marc-André Grondin) turns up to use the house's living room and basement for his garage band to record an album. Nicole may be interested in his attractive new drummer, JF (Francis La Haye), a possibility threatened because Rémi is always alienating his band members. She is stuck, symbolized, as Alissa Simon points out in Variety, by the way her bike lock is so hard to undo. Things aren't going well. Aside from having been dumped at graduation by her boyfriend for getting very drunk, she gets fired, and Véronique reneges on the Iceland trip, leaving Nicole feeling betrayed. No progress with the drummer. That she's the best pants-cuffer in the country doesn't quite make life matter. Thanks to others' unfair judgments, her life seems paved with missteps. Like many young people, Nicole defines being slightly disgruntled as, for now, the best way to look at life.

The dialogue is well written and each short scene is nicely paced and nicely shot. Montreal musician Remy Nadeau-Aubin and the group Organ Mood make the music pleasant to listen to. Stéphane Lafleur is clearly another young French Canadian filmmaker to watch.

Tu dors Nicole ("You're Sleeping, Nicole"), 93 mins., debuted at Cannes May 2014 and has since been shown at Toronto and nearly two dozen other festivals. Screened for this review as part of the March 2015 FSLC/MoMA New Directors/New Films series. A Kino Lorber release in the US (29 May at Lincoln Center), it opens in Paris 18 March. (AlloCiné press rating was a very good 3.7; Les Inrocks liked it, Cahiers typically not as much.

KORNÉL MUNDRUCZCÓ: WHITE GOD (2014)

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STILL FROM WHITE GOD

Doggy revolt; family trouble

When the strangely ambitious Hungarian film White God begins, the feisty 13-year-old Lili (Zsofia Psotta)) has been left with her father Daniel (Sandor Zsoter). The parents are divorced, and Daniel is irritable with Lili and rejects having Lili's "mutt" Hagen in his apartment; in fact it seems illegal. Hagen, though an amiable canine, causes no end of trouble, and Lili's standing up for him causes her trouble too. She is ousted from the youth orchestra where she plays trumpet when Hagen turns up. Her father drops Hagen on the street, when she will not accept his admittance at the pound. And then begins an adventure that blends Lassie with sci-fi and the politics of revolution. Hagen gets sold into Amores Perros-style bondage and brainwashed into temporarily, but horribly, becoming a vicious pit bull. (The footage in this sequence is grim and bloody enough to offend any animal lovers.) By chance he escapes from this to lead a revolt of dozens of fellow canines through the streets.

Kornél Mundruczcó's epic ambition in this sixth feature leads to a series of grand scenes notable for the remarkable CGI-free use of animal-wrangling. However, if you you are sold b y this, you are more easily won over than I am. All the action seemed to me poorly motivated and often inexplicable and the plot is full of holes. I have to side with Mike D'Angelo again as I did on Tu dors Nicole, this time with a pan. D'Angelo calls this film "stupid," admitting it's "slightly less so" if viewed "allegorically" with the dogs representing minorities. That doesn't compute very well in detail. The idea that the whole city was terrorized by a pack of dogs running through the street isn't made convincing. All we can say is that Mundruczcó makes the most of the running dogs in the street -- except, as D'Angelo points out, it "isn't remotely scary," and the ending resolving the doggy revolt is "laughable." He's also right that the cuts back to Lili and her dad during the climatic chase waste our time, and the film's 119 minutes wind up seeming not remotely justified.

White God has material that might have worked as a short film -- with the dog-run shots used sparingly at the end (not as à la "bad television" as -- D'Angelo again -- "a surreal flash-forward 'grabber' at the outset"). Mundruczcó plays his gimmick for all it's worth and then some. The admiring reviews (there's a current Metacritic rating of 82) suggest this ploy has worked. Time will tell whether this film, with its poorly motivated human behavior, stays on to be a classic like the best animal-human dramas. The wrangling is skillful, and it's well filmed -- though there is too much annoying hand-held shaky-cam imagery throughout. Sequences could be offensive to dog-lovers.

White God, 119 mins., in Hungarian with English subtitles, debuted at Cannes in Un Certain Regard and since showed at over two dozen international festivals including Sundance January 2015. Screened for this review as part of the March 2015 FSLC/MoMA series New Directors/New Films. In the US, a Magnolia Pictures release is scheduled for 27 March 2015 (limited). (Showing at a Landmark Theater in San Francisco starting 3 April 2015).

SHORTS PROGRAM 1

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BLUE AND RED

San Siro
Yuri Ancarani, Italy, 2014, DCP, 24m
This portrait of Milan's famed stadium is both clinical and otherworldly, casting gametime
preparation as the subliminal, collective ritual of our day.

Boulevard’s End
Nora Fingscheidt, Germany, 2014, DCP, 15m
Venice Pier, where L.A. meets the ocean, draws people to play, flirt, and dream. Two
immigrants recount their long journeys to this place shared by so many. North
American Premiere

Blue and Red
Zhou Tao, Thailand, 2014, DCP, 25m
From anti-government protests in Bangkok to rural areas in China, the march of human
life is bathed in vibrant colors as if under a microscope, in what the artist dubs an
“epidermal touch.” World Premiere

Nelsa
Felipe Guerrero, Colombia, 2014, DCP, 13m
An obscure, trance-like tour of a place as menacing as it is incomprehensible. North
American Premiere

The Field of Possible
Matías Meyer, Mexico/Canada, 2014, DCP, 10m
A single shot charts a Montreal residential building over the course of four seasons,
deriving poetry from observation. World Premiere

NAJI ABU NOWAR: THEEB (2014)


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JACIR EID AL-HWIETAT AND HUSSEIN SALAMEH IN THEEB

A desert tale of a boy has a unique flavor and a quiet sweep

This film is a marvel of lean storytelling and authentic atmosphere, cast in a strange bedouin dialect of Arabic and set at the pace of bedouin custom -- bedouin time, bedouin distance, laconic bedouin conversation. Though slow to ignite, it's an intense action tale, the more scary and chilling for happening in a world of sand, vast space and silence.

Theeb is a film from the point of view of a young bedouin boy in 1916; the title is his name and it means "Wolf." He and his older brother have recently been orphaned by the death of their father, a tribal chieftain. Theeb is played by Jacir Eid Al-Hwietat, son of the film's producer, inexperienced in acting, but he delivers a subtle, convincing performance, along with Hussein Salameh Al-Sweilhiyeen as Hussein, his brother. Theeb has been compared to a Western and to David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia and has a few elements of both, but possesses more unique qualities of its own, notably a much more narrow and specific take on WWI and the desert. There is no eccentric English leader grabbing the spotlight here, only a gruff young blond English soldier who asks some bedouin help in finding an oasis, and then gets killed. Oxford-born Joradnian filmmaker Naji Abu Nowar, who has a distinguished father, recruited and trained a cast that was made up exclusively of real bedouin men.

Theeb hovers between boy and man: he cuddles up playfully when his big brother Hussein is showing him how to fire a rifle, which he is nonetheless eager to learn. There will be plenty of rifle fire to come, but not much time for cuddling. That evening Edward (Jack Fox), the English officer, arrives with a guide, Marji (Marji Audeh). The stranger is received with traditional bedouin hospitality. When the Englishman asks Hussein to be his guide, hospitality requires the request be complied with, despite the danger. When Theeb gets a moment with him he asks him in Arabic (which he seems sometimes to understand but sometimes chooses not to) just two questions: "Are you a prince?" and " How many men have you killed?" When they set out for the oasis, Theeb follows without permission.

When they get to the well, there is horror: pulling up the leather bucket, it's red with blood. There is a corpse below polluting the water, a harbinger of evil. Attackers are hiding on the edges of a canyon to ambush the travelers, killing Marji and the soldier. Hussein and Theeb have to abandon their camels and climb to higher ground where they have a vantage point. The unseen enemies terrorize them all night calling out rude taunts in the darkness hour after hour, the voices bouncing around, their direction indeterminate. Yet they are other bedouin, apparently, like Theeb. And like his people they may have been formerly pilgrim guides turned to marauding after gradually being robbed of their function by the railroad that takes the faithful to Mecca more safely and four times as fast as the old desert camel route. (Like Westerns in which railroads also pose dangers, this film is a tense actioner that hints at historical changes happening.) When they're camped for the night, a slow gun battle to the death ensues.

This is World War I, and the British are working toward the defeat of the Ottoman Empire by destroying their railroad, as Lawrence was doing. But Theeb knows nothing of the war, has not much idea what an Englishman is, and becomes locked into is own struggle for survival and honor. The boy wakes the next day up to a world in which he is virtually alone, struggling for survival alongside a dubious character garbed in black, a mercendary (Hassan Mutlag) who lies slumped over his camel near the well with an arrow in his back and is only able to crawl. It's a Beckettian situation of painful survival where two beings in extremis make slow progress feebly helping each other: the wounded mercenary has the camel, Theeb has the mobility.

This is World War I, and the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, through destroying their railroad, as with Lawrence. But Theeb nows nothing of the war, has not much idea what an Englishman is. His struggle is private, in accordance with bedouin values, which are threatened, but timeless.

Reviewing this film in the Orizzonti section at Venice this year, Variety's Jay Weissberg called it "classic adventure film of the best kind, and one that’s rarely seen these days." Young first time filmmaker Naji Abu Nowar, whose accomplishment has given the hitherto negligible Jordanian film industry a shot in the arm, had to fight to get funding, He lived with the bedouin for eight months soaking up atmosphere, also staged acting workshops to develop a qualified cast. Ulrich Seidl's cinematographer Wolfgang Thaler shot the deser, in on Super 16 with an anamorphic lens, so that it seems intimate and breathing with the emotions of the Arab inhabitants. The shooting was done at Wadi Ram, a safe place where the endangered bedouin live in Jordan, standing in for the Hijaz (now Saudi Arabia) as it did in David Lean's epic, and the cast came from this region.

The film has been criticized with some reason for taking too long to get to its main action. But the spare writing feels right nonetheless and the use of setting and authentic leaves a haunting, intimate and intense feeling that would not begin to work if young Jacir Eid Al-Hwietat and his cohorts were not remarkably able to hold our attention. Abu Nowar has worked skillfully with all the human and natural elements of his desert, bedouin palette and it is not surprising he plans a sequel.

Theeb/ذيب (pronounced "Dheeb"), 100 mins., debuted at Venice, winning Best Director in the Orizzonti section Sept. 2014, and played at some other big international festivals in 2014 and 2015 including Toronto, London, Abu Dhabi, Singapore and Miami. Numerous other nominations and awards. It was included in New Directors/New Films at Lincoln Center March 2015 but could not be included in press screenings.It was released theatrically in NYC at Lincoln Plaza Cinema 6 November 2015. In the Bay Area (San Francisco, San Raphael, San Jose) 13 Nov. Metacritic rating 80%. Could not be included in the New Directors 2015 press screenings, so not originally reviewed here. This review was written in November at the time of the theatrical release.

DARHAD ERDENIBULAG, EMYR AP RICHARD: K (2015)

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BAYIN AND JULA IN K

Kafka's "The Castle" literally transposed to Mongolia

"If Jia Zhangke produced it, it has to be good," wrote a writer for the online GBTimes surveying the stingily titled K among Berlin Festival offerings. But this turns not to be somewhat overoptimistic for this purely academic translation of Kafka's unfinished novel The Castle/Das Schloß to a Mongolian setting by Mongolian arts graduate and TV documentary filmmaker Darhad Erenibulag and Inner-Mongolia-based Welsh screenwriter Emyr ap Richard, who collaborated on this pared down version set in a dingy hotel with an indigenous cast.

As longtime film critic Derek Elley comments on Film Business Asia, this largely literal Kafka adaptation winds up feeling "pointless" because the way it is staged is so "dramatically flat": it "lacks any sense of tension," redeemed by only a slight "strain of dry humor." Ap Richard and Erenibulag have done little more than used a minimal location and transposed their pared-down version of the story and characters to an different country and an unusual language. It may appeal to students of the exotic, but it will disappoint because the exoticism is skin deep, with no special penetration into the Kafkaesque experience or perception of its special relevance to this new milieu. Fans of Orson Welles' brilliantly imaginative 1962 screen adaptation of Kafka's The Trial will find it unchallenged.

The cast list gives only one name for the actors. Bayin, whose Seventies-style big hair is an inexplicable indulgence, plays K, the stranger who arrives in a town announcing he has been hired by the Castle as a land surveyor. He is told there's no job for him, and lingers on working as a school janitor and taking the barmaid Frieda (Jula) as his mistress, and so on and on. Among the more flavorful cast members, Zandaraa and Altanochir, as as Jeremias and Artur, K's "assistants," with slick hair and leather jackets, have a louche sleaziness. Nomindalai is striking-looking as Barnabas.

In an effort to build atmosphere, the filmmakers make use of claustrophobic shots of narrow hallways lined by closed-off rooms, lobbies and hazy, smoke-filled bar-lounge in various shades of white, green and blue. Much use is made of tinny old swing band records, cigars, and cigar smoke. The jumble of different period indicators include telegrams, a dark orange rotary telephone, and a large plane soaring overhead. French cinematographer and editor Matthieu Laclau delivers some surprising jolts. Best of these are times when K has been having sex with Frieda and awakes to find his snickering assistants, and others, sitting there in the same room. Laclau achieves nice color and his camerawork shows off the actors and the claustrophobic settings with a neutral attractiveness. There are even a couple of nice dream-like sequences. The filmmakers choose to make the intricate, shabby network of hallways and rooms deliberately confusing, eschewing Kafka's sense of looming, menacing spaces signaled by the novel title The Castle. They never show anything comparable to a castle or even a village: nearly everything is shot indoors.

K, 88 mins., made in China, debuted at Berlin February 2015. Screened for this review as part of the FSLC-MoMA series New Directors/New Films March 2015. A Hong Kong Festival showing is also scheduled. The film is available open-source via Facebook on Vimeo. There seem to have been no major reviews.

BILL & TURNER ROSS: WESTERN (2015)

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Life along the border gone tragically wrong

The Ross brothers, Bill and Turner, have focused in their third documentary feature on something very important and terribly sad -- the decline of life along the U.S.-Mexican border. Eagle Pass, Texas is across from Piedras Negras, Coahuila, Mexico, and the two towns' friendly relations and peaceful existences go back many generations. No border necessary, apparently. And during the course of the tragic and elegiac film, we see this go gradually and undeniably wrong, the narco-trafficking violence of Mexico finally penetrating Piedras Negras, and a directive from Washington to temporarily cut off cattle trading across the border disrupting livelihoods, the whole shared way of life apparently disappearing, criminals and haters winning out over peaceful life and honest work.

The Ross brothers' film has a classic look and a natural, organic flow. It begins with patriotic celebrations between the two towns and social gatherings to move on to more intimate looks at its two key personalities, 3rd-term mayor and fluent Spanish-speaker Chad Foster of Eagle Pass, and cattle rancher Martín Wall, who knows some Spanish himself, though he's more fluent in F-words, especially when the USDA cuts off his lifeline over imagined danger to cattle inspectors that he and his cohorts consider just a product of DC politics. As is the multi-billion-dollar border fence that is under constant construction. Such things were never needed between Piedras Negras and Eagle Pass. Time and again the film, which focuses on community through individuals, shows dances, celebrations, even a bullfight, that illustrate how intermingled the two cultures are here.

Silver-haired, mustachioed, and elegant, Chad Foster has constant friendly interchange, always in Spanish, with Piedras Negras mayor Jose Manuel Maldonado and other Mexican colleagues. But in a key scene Foster reads in his office from a rabid Meican-haters website that has attacked him as a traitor. The wall, the shutdowns, and the strengthening of borders and deportations are the darlings of a rabid rightwing element that will do whatever it can to end the kind of peace that exists between these two cities, this film hints.

There is no doubt about the drug cartel violence in Mexico, with its bribing or threatening police and murdering and disfiguring citizens and marking their bodies with admonitory signs. Both Foster and Wall pooh-pooh worries about such things in their region. But then stories of violence in Piedras Negras come, and Foster himself has been caught in the crossfire in a Piedras Negras restaurant -- though he has survived. After a violent wave of rainstorms causing wide damage, Maldonado is then killed in a plane crash that some hint might be a narco killing. Again Wall scoffs, but the fear is there. And finally, Foster retires.

Just as it shows the barrel-chested, usually gruff and foul-mouthed Wall playing joyfully with his feisty little daughter Brylyn, the film also repeatedly returns to show the usually immaculate Mayor Foster in beat-up, torn cowboy hat driving his little pickup along the river border, looking out over open country in all directions. The implication is that the border is still safe, despite the rumors, news stories, USDA, and rightwing determination to ramp up security and cut off interchange. But there are many signs that the drug violence has infected everything, and is growing.

On the surface the Rosses' film seems a conventional documentary. But it has an intimacy and a passion to it that set it apart and make it matter. It's a fine piece of work about important issues.

Western, 93 mins., debuted at Sundance January 2015 in competition. It was reviewed at IFC Center, NYC by Scott Foundas in Variety; Foundas sets this film in the context of the Rosses' two other ones. Screened for this review March 2015 as part of New Directors/New Films (Lincoln Center, MoMA).

US theatrical release began Fri., 25 Sept. 2015.

SHORTS PROGRAM 2

Blurb descriptions in italics are followed by my comments.

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HEARTLESS

Icarus
Nicholas Elliott, USA, 2014, DCP, 16m
Desire and emotion pervade this enigmatic hangout film in which a procession of
mystery men emerge ex nihilo and seek shelter in a young woman’s cabin. World
Premiere This seemed like a self-indulgent, opaque film whose symbolism of naked men out in the snow and bags with mens' names on them, men kissing, etc., made no sense. Tiresomely arty.

The Chicken
Una Gunjak, Germany/Croatia, 2014, DCP, 15m
Bosnian with English subtitles
Six-year-old Selma is forced to confront the realities of life during wartime after she
decides to let go of her birthday present. Set in Sarajevo in 1993, this does make sense and is well edited for movement, if with unnecessarily shaky camera. It concerns two women and a little girl in a war-torn city trying to enjoy a meal, though holding onto the main course could be life-threatening. This does tell a story. Promising material.

Heartless
Nara Normande & Tião, Brazil, 2014, DCP, 25m
Portuguese with English subtitles
These sun-kissed fragments of a coming-of-age tale follow a boy who, while on vacation
at a fishing village, finds himself entangled with an enigmatically nicknamed local girl.
U.S. Premiere The rough coverage of semi-feral boys at the beach (effective kid-wrangling) reminded me of the French-Algerian film Bloody Beans shown in the FSLC's Art of the Real last summer. But this is more conventional, if also at one point needlessly vulgar. Just okay.

I Remember Nothing
Zia Anger, USA, 2015, DCP, 18m
A student, unaware that she is epileptic, tries to get through another day. Structured in
five sections after the phases of a seizure. World Premiere
This has needless distractions and makes little sense. The lecture on stages of epileptic seizures is interfered with by pointless extra material. Annoying.

Discipline
Christophe M. Saber, Switzerland, 2014, DCP, 11m
French, German, Arabic, and Italian with English subtitles
In this biting comedy of manners, it really does take a village. Set in a Swiss convenience store run by an Egyptian, with another Egyptian, a Moroccan, and others. A well-off woman starts a fracas because a man slaps his little girl for disobeying him, and things get crazy. Comedy of cultural cross-currents and jumble of action in a small space is amusing, but pushed too far eventually so it becomes simply a mess.

We Will Stay in Touch About It
Jan Zabeil, Germany, 2015, DCP, 8m
After the shock of impact, reality suddenly seems out of reach. North American
Premiere Yes, this is haunting, if the spooky music and panning camera bit has been done a million times before. Accomplished.

Odessa Crash Test (Notes on Film 09)
Norbert Pfaffenbichler, Austria, 2014, DCP, 6m
An iconic moment from Battleship Potemkin, remixed and reimagined. U.S. Premiere This takes a great sequence in the history of cinema and reduces it to a sliding baby carriage and a falling baby, carried to a terrifying and sadistic, but basically repetitions and annoying, extreme. Avoid and watch Eisenstein's classic film instead.

CHAITANYA TAMHANE: COURT (2014)

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VIRA SATHIDAR IN COURT

A cool, yet humanistic, look at "justice" in India

Indian director Chaitanya Tamhane's distinctive debut revolves around the legal case of a 65-year-old folksinger and political activist called Narayan Kamble (Vira Sathidar), who sings socially aware songs in working class districts. He is arrested on the preposterous charge of inciting a sewage worker to kill himself after listening to one of his songs. The film doesn't so much stay with Narayan as with his defense attorney, Vinay Vora (Vivek Gomber), and even the state attorney, Nutan (Geetanjali Kulkarni), a woman, and the judge, whose cut-rate vacation ends the film, underlying its ironic, neutral eye, which may owe something to the new Romanian cinema. I was reminded both of Crisiti Puiu's The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (NYFF 2005) and of Corneliu Porumboiu's Police, Adjective (NYFF 2009). Like the Romanians, Tamhane's work is a tough, unyielding watch, but it constitutes a devastating critique of India, even while showing its richness and complexity and its ordinary people's ability to have a good time. Vira Sathidar, performing two songs as Narayan, proves a terrific singer, by the way.

Working with a well organized ensemble of professional and nonprofessional actors, Tamhane delivers a cool succession of perfectly authentic-feeling scenes. His signature moments are of courtroom routine (the camera always with its eye first on the whole crowded spectacle), in which the prosecution lawyer reads off archaic laws and uses 40-year-old "offenses" of the leftist defendant, who has been jailed and tried for one trumped-up charge after another, plainly just a victim of government bullying.

As Jay Weissberg points out in an enthusiastic review in Variety, this film gains its dimensionality (and its style) from the way it looks at Vora and Nutan, showing Nutan to be a mindless right-winger who can't wait to be a judge, while Vora is "firmly a member of India’s globalized elite," doubtless with the connections to have a far better-paying position and choosing to be a public defender for idealistic reasons. There is also the aforementioned final glimpse of the judge's shabby group summer holiday trip, and at one point even a look at the wife of the man whom Narayan is accused of inciting to suicide, a man who was a victim not of Narayan's songs but his own awful life, who probably succumbed to toxic fumes while drunk, working in the sewers. Her dull stare tells a tale of miserable poverty too sad to contemplate.

The Indian legal system as glimpsed here is archaic, quaint, and laughably cumbersome, as well as pretty primitive, with the official court record consisting only of what the judge periodically chooses to dictate. And it is designed for gridlock, so that Narayan's current case, constantly put off another month or two to consider some minor detail, is likely to go on for years. This is very bad for the defendant since his health is shaky and it's hard to get him out on bail. When Vora does get him out, Narayan doesn't take his advice to lay low. Instead he performs and writes a pamphlet about his mistreatment, leading him to be arrested again.

Seeing this movie is like watching a train wreck. You can't look away from its display of the power of class and the intentionally life-mangling effects of drawn-out judicial incompetence, but you just go on watching, no matter how painful, even excruciating, it is to do so. Weissberg suggests this is "Possibly too cerebral for the Lunchbox crowd," in need of more festival exposure to make its way "onto speciality screens." All the romance has been drained from our vision of India by the time we've experienced this complex, mind-boggling, convincing film.

Court, 116 mins., from India and in Marathi, Gujarati, and Hindi, debuted at Venice (Horizons series Best Film and Luigi De Laurentis Award) in Sept. 2014; with top prizes also at Mumbai, Singapore and Hong Kong; included in ten other festivals. Screened for this review as part of the FSLC/MoMA New Directors/New Films series, March 2015.

US theatrical release began Wed., 15 July 2015 in NYC at Film Forum.

LUKAS VALENTA RINNER: PARABELLUM (2014) + EVAN JOHNSON: COLOURS (2015)

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Ordinary people prepare for post-apocalyptic life

Michael Haneke meets Carlos Reygadas in this post-apocalypse how-to film about a motley crew of middle-class folk taken out to a survivalist training program in an undisclosed location. Blindfolds worn on the trip in, breakfast served to everyone with optional morning classes in camouflage, botany; classes for all in firing and assembling weapons, hand-to-hand combat, constructing handmade explosives. This is an Austrian shooting in Argentina, in Spanish. It's an odd combination, and makes for an intriguingly dislocated, disorienting film. It doesn't fully engage with the viewer, but that is the point, if you want to take it that way. Is there more or less here than meets the eye? That's not easy to say.

There's a certain shock value in the lack of glamor. The people are mostly out of shape and un-chic. This could be Lonely Plenet/Rough Guide version of Club Med. But all signs are the world is actually going apocalyptic, so if they really are acquiring extreme survivor skills (the demos are a bit superficial), they're going to need them.

Writing about this film in Variety from Rotterdam Jay Weissberg noted how Rinner shifts "from comically surreal to absolutely serious" but "is something of a one-trick pony." He's referring to the irony of a depicting middle class people thinking they can pay their way to survival taught by "experts," while real cataclysm is rapidly approaching. But the serious turn comes when the trainees have to throw away "ethical constraints" (and at least one goes batty). But still the film is "pleasingly unpredictable." It's extra clear cinematography, cast in a pale gray-green that favors the many widescreen shots of lush leafy wilderness, alienates us effectively. Weissberg spells out what's indeed obvious about the opening sequence: that its starry sky, dawn, panning camera over the horizon with animal sounds, echoes Reygadas' openings of both Silent Light and Post Tenebras Lux, though less striking then either, in keeping with the film's generally deadpan manner. Take as you will Weissberg's comment that the film's short running time is "a plus." Ultimately it's all suggestion. And there's something to be said for merely provoking thought. However the DIY half-jokiness of the training camp action sits ill with the portentous interpolated quotes (on flaming red backgrounds) from the invented Book of Disasters -- the Little Red Book for survivors after The End? How serious is he, and should we be worried?

Parabellum, 75 mins., debuted at Gothenberg Jan. 2015; also Rotterdam Feb. Screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films, joint series of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and Museum of Art, New York, March 2015.

JULIE LOPES-CURVAL: HIGH SOCIETY/LE BEAU MONDE (2014)

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ANA GIRARDOT, BASTIEN BOUILLON IN HIGH SOCIETY

Film Comment Selects

Limits of social mobility

High Society/Le beau monde has been described as Blue Is the Warmest Color without the lesbianism or the sex. This is more delicate and refined French art house cinema, with some nice specific observations, but surprisingly generic, and generally lacking a pulse. The story is a traditional one: a provincial Frenchman (here, French 20-something girl) succeeds in Paris, but at a price (here, an emotional one). A girl from unimpressive origins, Alice (Ana Girardot, who plays Sophie, the serial killer's friend in the R-V The Next Time I'll Aim for the Heart) gets involved with a boyfriend from a well-off family, Antoine (Bastien Bouillon), and they are uncomfortable with each other and their families. Antoine's elegant mother, Agnès Barthes (Aurélia Petit), helps Alice get into a sophisticated fashion trades school. Antoine drops out of business school to become a photographer.

Alice and Antoine are continually uncomfortable with their own families and each other's, and with each other, and with their careers, or at least the shy, insecure Alice is with hers. An obvious guide for her is an associate of Antoine's mother, Harold (Sergi López), a perfume maker she meets up with from time to time who offers a lecture on the Bayeux tapestry (Alice comes from Bayeux, in Normandy), and advice as one who, like Alice, comes from unprepossessing origins yet has found a career in "le baau monde," the French title of the film, which suggests as much elegance as social status. But the film is also about how hard it is to "make it" at a snobby school. We have to listen to Alice's snooty teacher's repeated pompous dismissals of her embroideries in class. Does she listen to an audio book version of Proust while doing her embroideries to refine her sensibility? These high-culture references do not make up for the anaemic scenes.

Alice's mother Christiane (Stéphane Bissot) is earthy, and pretty too, but overweight, and her ten-year battle to get compensation for being unjustly laid off seems pathetic to Alice. Her stepfather has a stall in the town market. Alice used to "détricoter" (unravel) old sweaters and redye them and make her own special sweaters and scarves. She is wearing such a sweater in a beautiful blue when she first meets with Antoine's mother about her CV, and gives her a scarf she has made, which, typically, the insecure girl is then ashamed of.

Antoine is annoyed and whinny twoard his mother for her intrusion and helping out, her noblesse oblige; and indeed she is blatantly intrusive; a conversation between her and another woman is heard where they are cruel and condescending toward Alice and her mother, a moment where the film makes its social points extremely bluntly. But when Antoine, with breathtaking speed, turns into a serious photographer -- and a surprisingly successful one; but of course he is well connected -- he particularly excels at shooting working class women and neighborhoods. In the first show of his photographs a portrait of Christiane is central, but he neglects to invite her to the opening. This show is the scene of a decisive fight between Alice and Antoine.

Lopes-Curval is keen on showing social, artistic, and emotional details -- the snobbism, jealousy, and shame that have been the stuff of such stories since Balzac and Stendhal. She is not so good as they at telling a story. And though Antoine is made out to be very into Alice -- he is always grabbing her and kissing her, which the big, boyish Boillon, with his broad shoulders and floppy hair, makes dramatic -- it's not even clear what they're feeling, other than awkward. The film resorts to a 3-years-later postscript of the couple, no longer one, again on a deserted French beach handsomely photographed by DP Céline Bozon as at the outset (Bozon's landscapes, the Barthes' casually elegant residences, and other Paris interiors are eye candy throughout) -- to do a post mortem explaining Alice was crazy about Antoine but couldn't show it. We should have known.

A most admiring description of this film by Amy Taubin appeared in ArtForum. Gavin Smith, editor of Film Comment, felt it was one of the highlights of 2014's Toronto Festival. Their enthusiasm was not shared by many of the French critics, who could appreciate the social details but also observed that the contrasts were schematic and obvious and the love story was flat. AlloCiné press rating: 3.2.

High Society/Le beau monde, 95 mins. Watched for this review at a public screening of Film Comment Selects at the Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center. Introduced by Gavin Smith.

CHRISTIAN PETZOLD: PHOENIX (2014)

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Film Comment Selects

What the war made of us

Using his muse Nina Hoss for the sixth time, Christian Petzold takes on a Forties or Fifties genre picture topic that's ridiculously far-fetched, but his treatment is so brilliant, weighty, and haunting, that doesn't matter. A woman arrives in Berlin in a car, a Nazi death camp survivor, evidently, with her face all wrapped in bloody bandages. She is accompanied by her friend Lene (Nina Kunzendorf), a clerk in the Hall of Jewish Records. Later she has reconstructive plastic surgery where she's given the option to be made to look like a popular actress, but chooses to look like her old self. Facial bones were shattered with bullets. When Nina Hoss's face emerges it doesn't look much different, just darkly bruised around the eyes. She seeks out her husband, Johnny (the soft, sensuous, pretty Ronald Zehrfeld). It seems she was a known cabaret singer, Jewish, he a pianist. She finds him at a nightclub in the American zone called Phoenix, working as a busboy. We are to believe he thinks she looks like his wife, Nelly Lenz, but does not know it is really her. He wants to exploit her to claim Nelly Lenz's now substantial accumulated wealth. This in spite of the fact that he may have betrayed her to gain his own freedom just before she was taken away.

As Scott Foundas suggests in his Variety review, Petzold likes to take us into the complexities of German contemporary history through American genre films, and does so this time through "the rich strain of doppelganger psychodramas (A Woman’s Face, Vertigo, Seconds)." We might think of Franju's Eyes Without a Face too. Not much is made of the miracle of reconstructive surgery. Nelly looks at a photo of herself and others. She is there. Some survived, others are dead. We follow her. Though there are always noises -- voices, shuffling, vague music -- around in the background, every scene is of Nelly. And there is not much movement. Johnny is brutal, strange. He wants to keep Nelly a virtual prisoner, to reappear on a train coming into Berlin, surprising everyone. He wants her in a red dress and Paris shoes, despite the absurdity of arriving from Auschwitz in such attire.

The point is, neither Johnny nor Nelly is in possession of her self. Nor is it sure if she is alive or dead. What happens later to Lene clarifies this point. Lene has plans to live in Palestine; there's even an apartment in Haifa. But she is not sure if she is closer to the future or to the past, to the living or the dead. To strengthen this feeling, Nina Hoss moves with preternatural stillness, almost a zombie. The actress always maintains a Zenlike focus, immobile, ineloquent, yet radiating emotion and intelligence. This is a film that doesn't have to say anything. It ponders the imponderable: the radical alterations that occurred to Germans and Jews in the War. The mystery of Nelly's attraction to Johnny, despite the fact that neither has a fix on their own identity or the other's. There's a desperate grasp for meaning, or simply security, in a world that has lost all meaning.

Petzold directs Zehrfeld, Hoss, and an eccentric period-looking group of secondary actors representing friends and associates of the couple in a final sequence, and a final scene, and a final shot, that sums up all the mystery in a moment of hypnotic solemnity and shock that shows what a serious and masterful filmmaker this man is. Foundas thinks Phoenix (which refers to Johnny's nightclub but also the theme) is "the fiercely talented Petzold’s most broadly accessible work to date, and should reach his largest international audience."

Phoenix, 98 mins., debuted at Toronto 2014, and showed at twenty-odd other international festivals. It opened in Paris 28 January 2015 to rave reviews (AlloCiné press rating 4.2). Screened for this review during Film Comment Selects at the Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center, 28 February 2015. IFC release in US theaters via Sundance Selects Friday, 24 July 2015. Metacritic rating 91%.

CHARLES POEKEL: CHRISTMAS, AGAIN (2014)

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Christmas, Again, a wistful and sweet piece of midwinter sadness, is a small observational film that's unambitious but well-constructed. Charles Poekel calls "Method writing" his creation of a scenario out of his own direct personal experience doing just what his protagonist does. He spent three years "hustling evergreens to hipsters in Greenpoint, Brooklyn," as Peter Debruge puts it in his Variety review -- and the setting is exactly at the tree lot Poekel himself ran. These are the last days before Christmas as lived by Noel (Kentucker Audley), a tight-lipped construction worker from Upstate who's spent the pre-Christmas season this way for five years. Only this time his girlfriend isn't with him. So he is lonely, cold, sleeping in a trailer, and a bit strung out: he keeps taking pain killers and stimulants to get him through the 12-hour night shift that's his task. A young couple takes the day shift, another reminder that Noel's solo. A lesson in how unjoyful the season to be jolly can be if you're not actually jolly and are a young man out on your own, not in the bosom of a family any more (if you once were).

What Christmas, Again gives us as much as anything is a realistic and knowledgeable look at the Christmas tree-selling process. The kinds and sizes of trees, the big and little wreathes, decorated and plain, the stands, lights, the way to water them -- and how clueless or irritating some of the people are. Noel is polite to them, but harsh with the couple working the day shift, obviously not in the best of moods. Once he goes for a swim, and he goes on taking the pills. There is no drama about this, just a sense that he's making it through the days bundled up sleeping in the trailer and the nights awake.

All that happens is this: Noel rescues a pretty girl passed out drunk on a park bench (Hannah Gross). He brings her to the trailer to sleep through the night. This has plusses and minuses. She bakes him a pie in thanks, then when he speaks too loosely to her boyfriend later without knowing who he's talking to, he winds up getting socked in the jaw. And then she returns again and accompanies Noel on some Christmas Eve deliveries. Surprise: the flirty woman is actually running a retirement home. A few little other touches provide a wistfully romantic finale. As Debruge puts it, the film "offers modest, VOD-scale pleasures, but is probably best viewed in the warmer months as the curious indie-movie anthropology study that it is." This is a first feature introduction for Poekel, and another example of the 16 mm. color craft of cinematographer Sean Price Williams (who recently shot among other things Listen Up Philip and Heaven Knows What (both in the 2014 New York Film Festival) and editor Robert Greene (who cut Listen Up).

Screening in ND/NF with: Going Out
Ted Fendt, USA, 2014, 35mm, 8m. ND/NF blurb: "Liz thinks she’s going on a date with Rob to see RoboCop, but things take an unexpected (and inexplicable) turn. World Premiere." (Inexplicable indeed.)

Christmas, Again, 79 mins., debuted at Locarno. Screened for this review as part of the 2015 FSLC-MoMA series New Directors/New Films. Theatrical release (NYC) and VOD (iTues) from 4 Dec. 2015.

YOHEI SUZUKI: OW (2014)


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Be careful where you look

Like pater familias Ryûhei in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Tokyo Sonata, the dad in Yohei Suzuki's Ow has been hiding he's out of work, and the rest of the family has no options. But director Suzuki plays more abstractly with Japanese stasus. Within the first few minutes the slacker son Tetsuo Suzuki and his girlfriend Yuriko Tsuda become immobilized by looking at a large round alien object floating on the ceiling in an upstairs bedroom that causes all who look at it to freeze. Ironically just then father Jun comes up to reveal his secret to Tetsuo and gf and, being too embarrassed to look at them, doesn't notice their frozen condition. But then he looks where they're looking, and freezes, standing up.

Suzuki doesn't have, or seem to need, a great deal of plot to offer after this. Events just keep spinning out of the original ones. Another family member gets zapped, then cops come and a police captain freezes. This causes a Detective Nakagawa to go a bit berserk and blood and subsequently scandal follow.

Tetsuo and gf sometimes budge slightly, and the hangdog female family members scoop them up and push them around in wheel chairs. Journalists are called in to report on the events, one of whom, Ryuichi Deguchi, becomes obsessed. He cannot believe the frozen people aren't just pretending, only later confessing he has realized how "really serious" the situation is.

The virtue of Ow (Maru) is its uniquely bizarre Japanese atmosphere, which covers the spectrum from the spooky and strange to the comical and seems able to spin out a seemingly endless series of tiny non-events without ever breaking the spell. Sparingly dished out music from Samon Imamura is a great help. Stay tuned for a late confrontation between journalist Deguchi and Tetsuo, who comes menacingly to life and identifies himself with the manga figure and Shinya Tsukamoto cult movie subject "Tetsuo the Iron Man."

The gimmick of something that's dangerous or fatal to look at is a regular feature of Japan horror, such as the videotape in the "Ring" films. Because the victims in Ow are semi-alive (at times), there is an aura of the zombie about them too. There seems to be a consensus among viewers that Suzuki, whose first feature this is, has delivered a brilliant first act, but gets tangled in a dead-end plot maze thereafter of scandal, police controversy, and journalistic competition while the family stumbles along and we know what originally happened better than the characters do, though we don't know the explanation. The only pleasure of the film's final act is its sheer grotesque absurdity, and how all this happens in the messiest, most humdrum of Japanese houses.

Ow was reviewed in the sci-fi horror review Moria based on a Vancouer viewing. David Bordwell commented on dp Yohei Kashiwada's shrewd use of camera positions. But it is not yet listed on IMDb.

Cast: Kaoru Iida, Masatoshi Kihara, Shu Ikeda, Sari Kaneko, Hitomi Karube, Rock Murakami, Shoji Omiya, and Shigeko Tanaka.

Ow/丸(Maru="nothing"), 89 mins., premiered at Osaka 14 March 2013, rebooted March 2015 at Vancouver IFF. Screened for this review as part of the MoMA-Lincoln Center New Directors/New Films series, March 2015.

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NADAV LAPID: THE KINDERGARTEN TEACHER (2014)

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Sarit Larry and Avi Shnaidman in The Kindergarten Teacher

Dangerous child

The child is dangerous for the kindergarten teacher in Nadav Lapid's second feature. She loses all restraint in the face of five-year-old Yoav Pollak's ability to compose strange gnomic "poems." She becomes envious and adoring and possessive toward the boy and his productions (drawn from the director's own childhood compositions). Lapid's first film, Policeman (NYFF 2011), was assured and powerfully staged but its separate parts didn't cohere. No such problem here, with all the focus on Sarit Larry as Nira, the teacher, and Avi Snaidman as the boy. People and events are so vivid and so over-the-top that it's hard to say if he means them to be taken literally. But he goes for a hyper-real effect from the start, shooting faces of Nira's schoolchildren in extreme closeup, and close to her. Set in Tel Aviv and the resort of Eilat to which she takes the boy when she kidnaps him, the images are bright and sunlit.

It turns out Yoav's father is a powerful, important and busy man, and the boy is under the care of a nanny, Miri, who is also an actress. For this role Lapid has enlisted the talented Ethiopian-Jewish Israeli singer Ester Rada. Miri performs Yoav's poems for auditions, claiming them as her own. Meanwhile Nira is in a poetry class, and starts doing the same thing, turning Yoav's poems in as her compositions -- getting generally favorable responses.

You can tell when Yoav is about to enunciate one of his compositions. He will begin pacing back and forth. Nira runs with notebook in hand to copy them down. Once she gets a longer poem from him over the phone. From time to time she takes the boy aside and once at the beach she gives him a lesson on Ashkenazi vs. Sephardic Jews. He always seems preternaturally calm and bright (Avi Shnaidman excellent in the role, natural and understated). Along the way there are scenes with a writer uncle of Yoav; with Nira's husband, an engineer with a good salary (solid and macho like the super cop in Policeman); at her writing class; and a scene of Miri emerging from the water and singing one of Yoav's poems (quite beautifully).

Things reach the tipping point when Nira takes Yoav to an evening adult poetry performance attended by her poetry teacher and gives away her previous deception by having Yoav perform. Yoav's father has already expressed his complete lack of interest in the boy's presumed special talent -- part of the theme all along that this is an age when poetry is not appreciated. Nira seems to want Yoav treated as a genius and a national treasure; his dad wants him to grow up as a normal boy. Her unprompted use of the boy at the poetry slam leads to severe consequences and her most erratic behavior. Lapid pushes his plot into thriller territory.

The power of Lapid's film and its ability to disturb is that it's never quite clear if poetry is a good thing (even assuming the boy's utterances are "poetry," harder still to tell relying on English subtitles) or if it is something dangerous, since it seems to be driving Nira mad. Is the film an assertion of the importance of poetry and of the arts generally -- within the context of a war- and military-obsessed nation focused on technology and machismo -- or is it presenting such things as dangerous and disruptive? One has the impression that Lapid works impressionistically, that he's an instinctive writer and not a rational one. Anyway, he has narrowed down his scope here from Policeman but produced something more troubling. Jay Weissberg in Variety calls this new film "more artificial than the helmer's debut" (certainly true) and "a cool-headed denunciation of crass contempo life," and indeed its absurd, grotesque dancing, loud disco-style music, and jingoistic chants in kindergarten surely must be taken as ironic. But if this is a defense of poetry, why does it feel so harsh and insensitive? This film is vivid but also crude. Its success seems dubious; it makes one wonder about Policeman. Nonetheless there's no doubt it's powerful, vivid work.

The Kindergarten Teacher, 119 mins., debuted at Cannes May 2014; 8 or so festival showings since. Theatrical release in France received universal acclaim (AlloCiné press rating 4.0). Screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films (Lincoln Center and MoMA), March 2015.

Screening at New Directors/New Films with: Why? -- Nadav Lapid, Israel, 2015, DCP, 5 mins. French and Hebrew with English subtitles. A filmmaker is asked by Cahiers du Cinéma to choose the image that made him believe in cinema. North American Premiere. [i]He depicts how he was deeply impressed by Pasolini while doing military service. US theatrical release 2015 (Kino Lorber): 31 July Film Society of Lincoln Center; and 6 Nov. 2015 at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco and the Rafael Film Center in San Rafael, CA.

LAURA CITARELLA, VERÓNICA LLINÁS: DOG LADY/LA MUJER DE LOS PERROS (2015)

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VERÓNICA LINÁS IN DOG LADY

Ms. Robinson Crusoe?

In Argentinian co-director Laura Citarella and Verónica Llinás' Spanish-language (but almost wordless) film Dog Lady, actress Llinás apparently becomes her character in this observational study of a woman with eight or ten dogs living on the pampas at the edge of Buenos Aires through four seasons. She occupies a shack composed of found objects, covered with sheets of discarded plastic -- if this shows anything, it's that the world's detritus is dominated by plastic -- curled up with her friendly canines, and survives somehow on the fringes of society. Identifiable as a cousin of the protagonist of Agnès Varda’s much better and more complexly plotted Vagabond (memorably embodied by Sandrine Bonnaire), this unnamed character forages for and sometimes steals food, and candles from a church (during a service), has sex with a gaucho she may or may not know who fumbles at reading his own makeshift poetry. She goes to a hospital for an unexplained problem and is given two prescriptions that she throws away, presumably because she has no money to pay for the meds. The nurse-practitioner has advised her, amusingly, to get more exercise (we see her constantly on the go) and avoid fatty foods.

With a pleasing, sparing bass-heavy musical soundtrack by Juana Molina and handsome, mostly unobtrusive fly-on-the wall (or dog's back) cinematography by Soledad Rodriguez, this is in its way a satisfying and atmospheric film, frequently beautiful in its general avoidance of urban mess in favor of a life in nature -- though designed only for the more patient moviegoer, for sure. But it should not go unquestioned as a vision of anybody's reality. It neither explains things about a self-sufficient existence in the wild (as Dafoe's Robinson Crusoe so elaborately does, or as Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild describes the failure of) nor does its wordless showing convince us that the co-director, camera, and backup crew aren't always there making the illusion work. This is drama that is immersive, but still not totally convincing or complete. How does she feed the dogs? Doesn't she ever talk to them? In the interest of artiness, the Dog Lady is kept wordless, and many necessary details of her existence omitted.

Jay Weissberg's Rotterdam Festival Variety review describes this film as "an observational arthouse study from the collective El Pampero Cine (Extraordinary Stories" that's "notable for its understatement and a sterling lead turn by co-helmer Llinas (Mount Bayo)." But the understatement also means that a hundred details go unexplained that, in a realistic study of such an existence by a non-actor, would need explanation.

Dog Lady/La mujer de los perros, 95 mins., debuted at Rotterdam. Screened for this review as part of he FSLC-MoMA series New Directors/New Films. Citarella's second directorial effort and Llinás' first. Neil Young also reviewed the film at Rotterdam for Hollywood Reporter.

BENJAMIN CROTTY: FORT BUCHANAN (2014)

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ANDY GILLET AND ILIANA ZABETH IN FORT BUCHANAN

The woes of being a military wife, gay version

Fort Buchanan is the feature directorial debut of an American who lives in Paris and it's a French production, marked by the idiosyncrasy French financing can make possible for small films; this one is based on a short made two years earlier. More idiosyncratic than most, in fact, this feels like a series of spirited jottings, using pretty people. How pretty they are makes up to a degree for the fact that the jottings don't evolve into a much of a story. A mood is set, of sensuosity and budding sexuality, as well as sexual frustration. And then Crotty goes off on an interesting but abrupt tangent, with a new character, and things just come to an end, with a funeral, and a new flirt from a hunky guy who had been there all along.

The frustration is that of Roger (Andy Gillet, the porcelain beauty of Rohmer's The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (NYFF 2007), the husband left behind when his mate Frank (David Baiot) is sent off to Djbouti, in the Horn of Africa. He consults with other military brides, Justine (Mati Diop), Pauline (Pauline Jacquard), the ruby-lipped Judith Lou Lévy, the more mature expatriate American Nancy Lane Kaplan, and others who offer more experienced and sometimes ribald advice to Roger about how to deal with horniness, though he, at first, is bent on being faithful. Roxy (Iliana Zabeth of Bonello's House of Telerance, who has a Vie d'Adèle aura), Frank and Roger's buxom, overblown 18-year-old 'daughter', is a temptation for the horny ladies, who all seem gay in this "deliciously queer utopia," as a Slant reporter from Locarno, James Lattimer, calls it.

Then when Frank is back, he gives Roger the brush-off even when Roger tries ruses suggested by Les Girls -- a new short haircut and short shorts -- and is emboldened for the first time to take the sexual lead with Frank. No dice. There is a dance sequence.

The story from left field is that of Trevor Levy (Luc Chassell of Nicolas Klotz's experimental Low Life (R-V 2012). Chassell, who plays Trevor, has a haunting, sexy face. Someone tells his character that even when he smiles, he looks sad, and it's true. And so perhaps it's no surprise when he tells his young son he's going to California, and it's a euphemism. Trevor is seen, in (says Lattimer) one of "the oddest, most striking images in the entire film, as it wordlessly watches a solitary man in the forest" (Trevor) "climbing to the top of the tallest tree." It is indeed an odd and rather terrifying image, one of the throwaways of this very sui generis effort.

The hunky replacement who was there from the first pugnacious scene is played by Guillaume Palin, member of a rugby team. Lattimer says Crotty's film "does stumble somewhat in the third act, briefly leaving the main characters behind as if bored by its own comparative conventionality." That's one way of putting it. Crotty throughout has a situation, not a story. With Trevor perhaps he has an interesting character. These are all sketches, done with bold strokes and the bright color of 16mm film.

Fort Buchanan, 65 mins., debuted at Locarno. It was screened for this review as part of the 2015 iteration of the joint Film Society of Lincoln Center-Museum of Modern Art series, New Directors/New Films.
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Screening with: Taprobana Gabriel Abrantes, Portugal/Sri Lanka/Denmark/France, 2014, DCP, 24m. Portuguese and French with English subtitles. "A sensuous and debauched portrait of Portugal’s national poet Luís Vaz de Camões teetering on the borderline between Paradise and Hell. U.S. Premiere." A witty costume drama with beautiful baroque music. One learns who Camões is and his importance in Portuguese language and culture, thought how seriously this is to be taken is uncertain.

SALOMÉ ALEXI: LINE OF CREDIT (2014)

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NINO KASRADZE (RIGHT) IN LINE OF CREDIT

Road to financial disaster paved with wishful thinking

Salomé Alexi's Line of Credit is a drama of financial ruin and it tells a story, one that is both classic (it has tinges of Dostoyevsky and Chekhov) and contemporary: it refers to the 2008 financial meltdown. The film is shot in bright, flat digital imagery with interiors so stark they seem like stage sets, the dry approach perhaps influenced by the new Romanian cinema, but the artificial look undercutting the deadpan realism of the Romanian style, with touches of humor. Alexi focuses on Nico (Nino Kasradze), an attractive forty-year-old woman, formerly resident in Russia, now returned to her native Tbilisi, capital of post-Soviet Georgia, who tries to deal with her and her family's financial woes in a time of financial crisis from which there is no hopeful way out. Day after day she pawns, sells, or borrows to pay bills, help relatives, pay off debts -- and then spends money on entertaining or an expensive pocketbook, as if pretending to be well off would make the erosion of her family's economic base go away. She suffers a death by a thousand cuts that ends in ruin, and the seizure of the comfortable family house and all its contents by authorities. This happened recently to 14% of the homeowners of the country, end notes tell us, following mortgages, some of which, surely, as in the US, were bad or fraudulent ones.

The trouble with Line of Credit is its repetitiousness. Alexi is telling a story. But does she know what a story is? As Vassilis Economo, writing from Venice, pointed out, Line of Credit deals with "a key issue," with a potentially disastrous "impact on Georgian society," but she does not "evolve her initial idea." That's to say, her protagonist just keeps doing variations of the same thing day after day. There's not much suspense or narrative drive. The story also is universal, but wastes its universality by adopting a foolish protagonist. Or if Alexi wanted to focus on her protagonist's tragic foolishness she should have made that aspect more dramatic. However, despite the stark style, Alexi does keep returning us to the post-Soviet Tblisi's rows of sleazy money lenders, pawn shops, and other exploiters of the round of debt, borrowing, and more debt that has characterized the life of the new poor.

Her debut feature saw the light in the 2014 Venice Festival's Orizzonti series ("The new trends in world cinema"). She studied at the prestigious Paris film school La Fémis and has made her film in the Georgian language, like the Oscar-nominated Tangerines (2013), Corn Island , Brides-- indeed Google provides a whole surprising row of colorful recent film posters of Georgian films. Whether this is a wave or a style remains to be seen. See a well-informed review by Arsaib Gilbert in Letterboxed that expresses a much more positive view of this film than mine and suggests a wave may indeed be on the way. She sees a link between Alexi's dry depiction of Nino's failing day-to-day financial strategies and the sardonic humor (and whimsy?) of French-based Georgian cinematic master Otar Iosseliani's films. She notes that many of the new Georgian directors are women, and that Alexi herself is even the third in a line of female directors beginning with her grandmother, Noutsa Gogoberidze, the first female Georgian director. So whether or not Alexi's film is a complete success, her pedigree and its topicality recommend it for festival audiences.

Line of Credit/ლიმიტი კრედიტი/Kreditis limiti, 85 mins., the first feature of Salomé Alexi, debuted at Venice in its Horizons series. Screened for this review as part of the FSLC-MoMA 2015 New Directors/New Films series.

VIRGIL VERNIER: MERCURIALES (2014)

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ANA NEBORAC, PHILIPPINE STINDE IN MERCURIALES

Nubile young women wandering in search of . . . something

Virgil Vernier works with interesting documentary elements and exceptional access to intimate situations to put together a sketchy fiction that ultimately does not cohere in Mercuriales, a film that starts out with a big twin tower high-rise apartment building in the Parisian suburb of Bagnolet, and fans out from there to a sex club, a mall, employment-hunting by several nubile young women, Eastern Europe and a romance that gorws out of working as receptionists at the high-rise.

Vernier's venture into feature length is enhanced by beautifully processed 16mm images by cinematographer Jordane Chouzenoux and an original electronic score by James Ferraro. Vernier claims to have taken a cue from Godard’s 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967). But that was a long time ago and times have changed, and these soulless, aimless young women looking for jobs, status, and a purpose in life but showing no signs of finding them are little like the youth discovering a wealth of new possibility in the Sixies. This is a festival film for those who will find something in it. Potentially rich material fails to cohere. A disappointment, and Vernier's male fascination with nubile female bodies, even a young girl's, verges on the voyeuristic and exploitive, the more so in view of the failure to generate a meaningful narrative context.


Mercuriales, 100 mins., was screened for this review as part of the 2015 New Directors/New Films series, jointly sponsored by the FSLC and MoMA.

SARAH LEONOR: THE GREAT MAN/LE GRAND HOMME (2014)

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RAMZAN IDIEV AND SURHO SUAIPOV IN THE GREAT MAN

A wild leopard, a boy, and two fathers

Sarah Leonor is a gifted and idiosyncratic director. This is her second film. Her first, A Real Life/Au voleur, featured the fascinating, tragically short-lived son of Gérard Depardieu, Guillaume. Here arguably she tells more of a story, one of friendship, heroism, loyalty, fatherhood, and a boy's search for his father, in the context of being an immigrant without papers. It's a richly emotional tale that's told both in a fable-like, poetic way and in the terms of a breathless thriller. Seen as part of an edition of New Directors/New Films disappointingly thin in good stories, The Great Man/Le grand homme is a tale and slice of life that offers meaty rewards. It's no harm that the terrific Jérémie Renier gives un unusually vigorous and committed performance here as the bosom Foreign Legion war buddy who becomes a surrogate father for the boy who's cut off by the crossfire of global politics, war, and bad luck.

Jordan Mintzer reviewed the film at Toronto for Hollywood Reporter, speaking of the way it evokes memories of Claire Denis’s Beau Travail "with its stylistic flourishes and hardworking French Legionnaires," and also "Michael Haneke’s 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance with its splintered portrait of illegal aliens scraping by in the big city."

It's hard to get one's head around the events that Leonor skillfully weaves together in her film -- sometimes in a crabwise fashion that evokes Claire Denis further. We begin with the voice-over spoken by a youth. He turns out to be the Chechen boy, Khadji (Ramzan Idiev) son of Markov (non-actor Surho Sugaipov). It is clear he is idolizing his father. The background event, almost legendary, is when Markov and his fellow Foreign Legionaire Hamilton (Jérémie Renier) are tracking a wild leopard in a desert war zone, at the end of their posting in Afghanistan. When there's an ambush, Markov saves Hamilton, but this is considered an abdication of the Legion's rigid code, which Markov later recites to Khadji. An ambush results in an abdication of duty—despite it stemming from an act of fidelity. Hamilton is sent to France for treatment, and Markov is mustered out, though both are encouraged to reenlist.

We jump forward to France, where Hamilton is recovering from two bullet wounds and Markov finds Khadji, whom he hasn't seen for five years. Perhaps the best sequence in the film is the one where Markov, speaking first Chechan, then French, struggles to win back Khadji's trust, while the angry boy refuses to speak anything but French, as they ride a Seine Bateau Mouche. The film is shot through with the mystique of the French Foreign Legion, through which Markov, Hamilton, and eventually Khadji, share: macho idealism and hope that provides a substitute for the lost mother and homeland, presumably. If these ideas don't feel quite digested, and Renier's acting seems a bit overemphatic at times, it all fits with the film's primary loyalty to the unrealistic but passionate sensibility of the young boy who has lost, regained, and then again lost his father, and then found another. In these circumstances and with this point of view, the film can be a melodrama that's over-the-top, and yet seem perfectly right for the devastating, touching subject matter. Surho Sugaipov is touching as the Chechan father, Ramzan Idiev even more so as the boy, who quietly shoulders the film's central role. A compass, a motorcycle, a deluxe hotel, train rides, a tent, and trips inside and outside Paris are skillfully used to build up the boy's picture of events and the 24 hours of urban thriller that are the film's key third act.

The Great Man/Le grand homme, 107 mins., opened in Paris 13 August 2014 to very favorable reviews (AlloCiné press rating 3.4). It debuted at Toronto's Discovery section in September 2014. Screened for this review as part of the 2015 FSLC-MoMA series, New Directors/New Films. A Distrib Films release.

MYROSLAV SLABOSHPYTSKIY: THE TRIBE (2014)

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Yana Novikova and Grigory Fesenko in The Tribe

School of hard knocks for the deaf seen in gestural tableaux

Those looking for movie novelty will certainly find it in Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy'snew Ukrainian film The Tribe, a hit at Cannes 2014 and with festival reviewers. The initial gimmick, and it's a strange and original one, is that all communication in the film takes place between predominantly young deaf people presumed to be at a boarding school who speak only in sign language. In Ukrainian. And there are no subtitles provided. I say "presumed," because this is like no boarding school you've ever seen, not even the borstals of Alan Clarke's realistic films. After a new boy Sergey (Grigory Fesenko) arrives following some sort of (silent) graduation ceremony, he's sent to a class where the government's pre-Maidan anti-EU decision seems to come up. After that, Sergey is not seen in a class. He's much too busy being hazed and tested; then being involved in the school's drug and prostitution activities, which seem to involve a wood shop teacher (Alexander Panivan), and two girls, Anya (Yana Novikova) and Svetka (Rosa Babiy), who are taken to work at a truck stop. Sergey pays for a session with Anya, and then they become lovers. The girls seek visas to Italy, which becomes complicated. The plot gets quite complicated after that, in a series of events leading up to a violent finale.

Writers about this film have called its events "shocking" and "vivid," and perhaps they are if taken literally, notably a series of brutal murders and, before that, a crude anesthetic-free abortion suffered by Anya, during which she cries out long and pitifully in pain -- an ugly moment all the more striking because the actors rarely make sounds in this film. The trouble is that the young deaf non-actors enlisted by Slaboshpytskiy for the film's scenes, who are enthusiastic, to say the least, seem to be miming rather than literally enacting events. The sex scenes are obviously faked. The other scenes are much the same, except that the boys do hit each other pretty hard at times when acting out fights or physical abuse. But they seem to be exaggerating everything, and sign language seems itself to involve much over-emphatic gesturing.

It is not that such activities as these couldn't take place in a school; only the film fails to establish and maintain the atmosphere of a functioning school, focusing on the sex and moving of drugs (a lot of plastic bags stuffed with littler bags), the mugging of locals for money and booze, the beating up of one or two boys, and Sergey's quick ascent from newbie nobody to functioning unit in the "school's" bad behavior. These events often happen at night. But when does the school happen?

It therefore ultimately seems a stretch to call this a school, because it is only partially established as one. But it likewise seems a bit over-imaginative to refer to what goes on here, as Justin Chang, writing from Cannes for Variety, does, as "a violent cesspool of organized crime." It's just not realistically enough staged to seem that. One of the key elements, and a serious limitation, is that Slaboshpytskiy stages his action in the middle distance, without closeups. He doesn't get close to his actors, or delineate his characters. Images that appear sensuous and beautiful in stills never emerge as such in the actual film. This puts us at a further emotional distance from events that we're already cut off from us due to never understanding any of the things that are said. To argue that "actions speak louder than words" or say this returns us to the power of silent film is to forget that silent film (which did have title cards) was deeply emotional but simpler and cruder than sound, and things are being said in every scene here that the filmmaker's stylized choice makes mute for us. Chang is surely right in saying The Tribe would be "a significant conversation-piece at every festival it plays," but that leaves in doubt how these two hours and twelve minutes of Ukrainian sign language without subtitles will play for the larger art house audience, and whether ultimately this will seem anything other than a vivid curio.

The idea of The Tribe stimulated the imagination. The film itself proved to be the biggest disappointment of the March 2015 New Directors/New Films series.

The Tribe/Plemya племя), 132 mins., debuted at Cannes 2014 winning the Critics Week prize. It opened in Paris in October to good reviews but with some strong dissenters (AlloCiné press rating 3.5). Set for US theaters as a Drafthouse Films release.

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STEVAN RILEY: LISTEN TO ME MARLON (2015)


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Well rounded but not ground-breaking documentary portrait of Marlon Brando

Making use of all sorts of conventional documentary material, Listen Up Marlon has so much archival footage, including interviews, and newly unearthed tapes Brando made extensively for himself, it has no need for the boring convention of talking heads. It is as well-rounded, complex, and fair a portrait as he might have wanted. It's just a shame that it feels so conventional in some aspects, worst of which is the use of loud and ordinary background music in a hundred places where it is not needed, or should be downplayed.

Riley incorporates all kinds of previously unseen errata, including behind the scenes, promotional, and TV appearance videos, home movies, early snapshots, and other personal memorabilia to fill out a portrait of the man and artist. There are news reports and tabloid headlines about the more scandalous and unfavorable moments of Brando's life.

But most of all there is a portrait of the fabulous but uneven career, and of the difficult and troubled personality, with explanations of the early family history that explains why Brando was troubled, angry, untrusting, a bad father, unable to love and, in his own words, seeking love "in all the wrong places," because he was never loved by his alcoholic and unavailable mother and alcoholic and abusive father -- who sent him off to military school.

There are beautiful clips of Brando's films, and first of all of his performance, which looks like the greatest of his career (as well as the one that made him famous) as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire on stage. The good and the bad are here: not only the famous lines from On the Waterfront (the Oscar-winning role he later thought embarrassing), The Godfather, and so forth, but also bad, cheap, or failed projects like the Chaplin-directed The Countess from Hong Kong.

When you watch Brando's onstage Kowalski, which he says made him feel "like a million dollars" every night, but also took an immense amount out of him, following the principles form his teacher (whom he moved in with) Stella Adler of the New School -- you see the hunkiest, sexiest, most vibrant, most exciting, most astonishing actor ever on a 20th-century American stage. You understand why Brando was called "the greatest actor of his generation," though this is an estimation the bright, self-conscious, initially very shy Brando always dismissed or dodged.

When you see Brando's first Hollywood screen test, when he simply smiles and turns around showing all angles of his head to the camera, he looks like Warren Beatty, and more. He had that kind of irresistible handsomeness, that beauty, that charm, that sex appeal, that glittering smile. When he was young, he had it all.

When you see him talking to Dick Cavett, you realize Brando's intelligence, how articulate he could be, what a good vocabulary he had, and how angry he was. And you gradually learn the focus of his anger, doubtless inspired by the meanness of his father and the lovelessness of his childhood, on political injustice in America, and notably on the mistreatment of Native Americans, signaled when he "very regretfully" turned down the Best Actor Oscar for The Godfather, sending the Native American actress Sacheen Littlefeather to do so, protesting Hollywood's portrayal of Native Americans in film.

Riley's documentary is successful particularly in its organization and its arc. (It is a work of skillful compilation, not innovation.) It interrelates Brando's acting career and his complicated, troubled personality, and it shows the up, down, and up of his career. It shows how his early poor self-image connects with his frequent deprecating of the acting profession (but also his acknowledgment that acting was the best thing he could ever have done: he said his becoming an actor was a stroke of luck, and if he'd not been an actor he'd have become a con man). Best of all while redeeming the character of the man through a fair depiction of his political activism -- despite his poor performance as a father and troubled family life -- the documentary also shows how Brando redeemed his acting career after a period of trashing it with bad, commercial films and indifferent roles, with the brilliant, rich, and career-capping roles of the Godfather films, Last Tango in Paris, and Apocalypse Now. The genesis of Brando's performances in each of these films is well shown in Brando's own words. Coppola doesn't come through well here, since he's depicted as blaming Brando for production problems of Apocalypse Now that were his own fault, and Brando says he rewrote the entire script.

Listen to Me Marlon (the title comes from a self-hypnosis tape Brando made to calm himself) was reviewed at Sundance for Variety by Dennis Harvey and in Hollywood Reporter by Todd McCarthy. They point out what is new or notable in the footage here. McCarthy points out that shots of the interior of Brando's demolished Mulholland Drive house are false, studio recreations, but perhaps, he suggests, "the only things 'false' here."

In the end, given the impressive (if in style conventional) coverage of Brando's complex and important career, the "new" element of the private Brando tapes (not to mention the digitalized face of Brando speaking some of these taped words) comes across as the least important element, adding not so much that is substantial and also, incidentally, marred by poor sound quality that makes some words difficult to distinguish. However, for the record, Todd McCarthy summarizes: "What comes across is a man with identifiable and specific psychological issues, which, thanks to both extensive psychotherapy and even self-hypnosis, he was able to articulate better than anyone else could. Yet he was never able to conquer other demons and baggage." We know that, but this film is as impressive a review of the great career and complex man as you could get in 100 minutes.

Listen to me Marlon, 100 mins., debuted at Sundance 2015. Screened for this review as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center-Museum of Modern Art series, New Directors/New Films. A Showtime presentation. Not exactly clear why this needed to be included in the "New Directors" series: Rilen has done four previous documentaries, and the material here is not new or presented in an innovative way. Theatrical release by Abramorama begins 29 and 31 July (NYC and LA), opening in the San Francisco Bay area 9 August at Landmark’s Opera Plaza Cinemas in San Francisco, Landmark's Shattuck Cinemas in Berkeley, Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael, and Camera 3 in San Jose.

SEVERIN FIALA, VERONIKA FRANZ: GOODNIGHT MOMMY (2014)

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SUSANNE WUEST IN GOODNIGHT MOMMY

Twins want their mommy

The Austrian film Goodnight Mommy is chilly, strange, and elegant. It's classy, even upper-class, horror. It all takes place at an expensive and original modern house somewhere out in the country (though not too far out to be visited by donation collectors from the Red Cross). It's also a film that's hauntingly ambiguous all the way through. Somebody is deluded, but who? We never really learn for sure. Perhaps it's not "so much weird as just plain disturbing," which was something that Mike D'Angelo, writing for The Dissolve from Toronto, said of the film. His report was how I first heard about this intriguing, if perhaps ultimately a little disappointing film. It's also in its final stages a nauseating film, one almost unbearable to watch, as may befit a product from the workshop, so to speak, of Ulrich Seidl, since Veronika Franz has repeatedly been his writing collaborator, and Seidl produced here.

In Goodnight Mommy there are two nine-year-old blond twin boys, Elias and Lukas (Elias and Lukas Schwarz) and their mother (Susanne Wuest). But is she their mother? She initially appears at the house, apparently after an operation, with her face bandaged like the masked heroine of Eyes Without a Face . To us, she is scary and strange. She's observed by Elias and Lukas fearfully, from a distance. At first she seems to avoid them, behaving furtively and insisting she requires rest and absolute quiet. To them she appears very strange, but also some of her behavior that we see but the boys don't is suspicious and may show her involved in deception. These mysteries are never resolved. When she begins interacting with Elias and Lukas more, she is mean to them, punishing them and restricting them, actually refusing ever to speak to Elias.

This is not the way they remember their mother behaving with them. They begin to doubt that she is their mother as she purports to be. The boys' own behavior begins to be increasingly bizarre, though always within a play world realm of little boys with the incestuous complicity of identical twins living in an isolated place. As D'Angelo puts it, "For a good long while, mere creepiness reigns." "But," he adds, "my screening saw multiple walkouts during the finale, which takes a sudden turn into prolonged torture. . ." This is as much perhaps as one should say about the direction the movie takes.

It's arguable that the Goodnight Mommy , while starting out extremely well, deteriorates from reel to reel. That nothing is ever quite as good thereafter as in its stylish, creepy, haunting opening shots. That it is less good but still original and fresh focused on the boys while the "mere creepiness" gathers. And that when the torture begins and the flashy ending comes, Fiala and Franz have moved into more conventional territory.

Still this is a horror film that is both classier and nastier than the majority of the genre, while for good and for ill avoiding most of the standard grabber devices of such films. It's not out of place to be reminded of Yorgos Lanthimos of Dogtooth: there's something conceptual and stylish going on here. (I now find Peter Debruge writing from Venice in Variety calls this "A fairy tale for Dogtooth enthusiasts." He also mentions Haneke's Funny Games.) I like the boys in bright homemade masks. I like their play with beetles. I like their frolicking -- and jumping on a big circular trampoline -- in a heavy rainstorm. I like the very stylish modern house, one so distinctive in design and decor and artwork that a series of photographs of its exterior and interiors can be found, as the boys do find them, on the internet. As the Toronto Festival blurb put it, "the family's home resembles a monumental tomb — a chillingly perfect setting for the film's story of familial disintegration."

The New Directors blurb reveals underlying themes when it starts out, "The dread of parental abandonment is trumped by the terror of menacing spawn." Now too much has been given away. But as in any good cinema, any narrative art, it is not the "what" but the "how," the style of the work, that makes it significant. This is quite a rich piece of work. Its content and subject matter mean Mommy will best appeal only to certain connoisseurs, but in the field of art house horror Fiala and Franz are clearly names to watch for in future.

Goodnight Mommy, 100 mins., debuted at Venice, showing at over a dozen other international festivals. Screened for this review as part of the March, 2015 edition of FSLC and MoMA's New Directors/New Films series. For theaters, it is slated to be a RADiUS-TWC release.

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ELIAS AND LUKAS SCHWARZ IN GOODNIGHT MOMMY

OSCAR RUIZ NAVIA: LOS HONGOS (2014)

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CALVIN BUENAVENTURA TASCON AND JOVAN ALEXIS MARQUINEZ ANGUILO IN LOS HONGOS

Youth and street art in Cali, Colombia

Los Hongos is a film from Cali, Colombia directed by Oscar Ruiz Navia, his second feature, the first being the 2009 Crab Trap. The title ("The Mushrooms") refers to its two teen leads -- flourishing like mushrooms in the rubbish of urban mess (or something like that). It's a semi-documentary coming of age drama that is notable for containing a wealth of contemporary flavor from its protagonists' environment. Scenes include family life, graffiti artists at work and conferring on a project, a raucous punk music concert, and an attack on the two young leads by cops for tagging a wall, which leads to their being handcuffed and dropped way out in the country and forced to walk back. This journey inspires them to make new plans and to do a wall mural of a big tree they saw and climbed out in the country.

Ras (Jovan Alexis Marquinez Angulo) and Calvin (Calvin Buenaventura Tascon) are buddies from different races and social classes who have been drawn together by a mutual attraction to hip hop culture. Ras, who is black, and whose mother has been forced to immigrate from the countryside, is never without his skateboard, and is forced to steal paint from the building site where he works, which gets him fired. His buddy Calvin is white, a child of divorced parents, who spends time taking care of his former schoolteacher granny, who is recovering from cancer treatments. He and Ras visit his father to ask him for money. He's a singer, as we learn from a clip from an actual appearance on a TV show. Calvin, who is a student at the local college of art, but often misses class, has a would-be girlfriend, also an arts student. In one scene, they have sex, apparently for the first time, but when Ras connects with an older woman at the punk concert, it's she and Calvin's girlfriend who pair off this time, leaving Ras and Calvin with only their friendship, and their dedication to street art.

In an early scene of Los Hongos the boys watch an intense video they find online of state violence against demonstrators in Cairo during the Egyptian revolution. Based on the power of this scene and the solidarity they feel with the revolution, they want to do a wall painting to express their feelings, and think of doing one based on a scene of women in dark veils engaged in political demonstrations. Later at a meeting at art school of other graffiti artists, other plans come up.

Los Hongos shows how widespread hip hop culture is, the skateboarding, the gliders, the graffiti, the music mixing punk, ska, rap, and other elements, and the universal Facebook culture of left and revolutionary youth sentiment. Ruiz Navia does not try to go into much depth, and his film can't compare with the hipness and complexity of such Latin American youth films as Alexis Dos Santos's Glue or José Manuel (Che) Sandoval's Te creís la más linda pero es la mas puta, or on an even higher level of cinematic sophistication the films of Fernando Eimbcke and Gerardo Naranjo. But it looks directly at local society and youth culture in a documentary manner in ways they perhaps don't.

Los Hongos ("The Mushrooms"), 103 mins., debuted at Locarno 2014. Reviewed there by Jay Weissberg for Variety. Screened for this review as part of the March 2015 Film Society of Lincoln Center-Museum of Modern Art series New Directors/New Films. It is a Columbia-Argentina-France-Germany production.

Closing Night
RICK ALVERSON: ENTERTAINMENT (2015)

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GREGG TURKINGTON IN ENTERTAINMENT

Long nasty road to despair, via unfunny humor

For those looking for a thoroughly unpleasant experience on film Rick Alverson's Entertainment is hard to beat. There are echoes of Fellini here (there's an energetic but slightly pathetic clown warmup act, played by Mud and Joe's up-and-comer Tye Sheridan), but the sad sweetness has all been replaced by mean nastiness. The film is conceived as a vehicle for Gregg Turkington or rather his two-bit washed-up performer alter ego, usually known as Neil Hamburger, whom he has reportedly played for several decades. The attempt, successful in sheer terms of screen-occupying, is to give this persona an off-stage, three-dimensional depiction.

The character is a mind-bogglingly terrible standup comic with an exceptional ability to bore and offend his small bar-club audiences and viciously and obscenely attack any members who visibly and audibly protest this assault on their sensibilities and waste of their time. He is shown touring around the Mohave desert and the empty oil-rich plains surrounding Bakersfield, California (Five Easy Pieces' setting, it's pointed out), staying in grim motels, riding in an old car, making futile nightly calls to the message machine of an estranged daughter, adding a note of pathos.

In a ritual that is shown more often than necessary, the pot-bellied, deadpan Turkington/Hamburger prepares for his "performances" by dressing in a ridiculous cheap tuxedo with outsize, outdated glasses. To enhance the unpleasant visual effect, he does an ugly comb-over that he emphasizes by making it dripping wet. He speaks to the audience in a high pitched whine, often interrupted by loud phlegm-enriched throat-clearing, and he repeats the word "Why?" gratingly. Most of his jokes are of the "What" and "Why" form, such as "Why don’t rapists eat at T.G.I. Friday’s?" and "What’s the difference between Courtney Love and the American flag?" The answers are too vulgar and offensive to repeat.

Trouble is, the chronological spaces between performances aren't always coherent, and the action is repetitious. The effect is of nails endlessly scraping across a blackboard. Cameos by John C. Riley (as the comic's supportive, but reserved cousin), Michael Cera (as a random stranger) detract from the mood rather than furthering it. The same can be said of a lecture on color theory, and a torturous moment at an optician's office (though it does provide a memorable image; Alverson may be a bit too enamored of anything that's odd and shocks).

Thus it turns out that Alverson doesn't quite wind up having the skill to build Turkington's stage schtick into the desired three-dimensional off-stage character, but as offensive, unbearable-to-watch movies go, this is up there. This will have cult appeal for hipsters in search of so-bad-it's-hilarious humor. Others need to give it a wide birth.

Perhaps the audiences are real. Doubtless the first one, in a prison, is so, and, interestingly, it is the most amused at the flat, intentionally terrible jokes of "The Comedian," as he is solely known here.

In a typically detailed review Scott Founas of Variety helps set Alverson's film in context, pointing out "The Comedian "suggests a cross between Andy Kaufman’s desiccated lounge singer Tony Clifton and Mr. Sophistication, the desperate vaudeville MC memorably played by Meade Roberts in John Cassavetes’ The Killing of a Chinese Bookie." Foundas notes besides the Cassavetes reference the film also "nods in the direction of both Two-Lane Blacktop and Paris, Texas (complete with Dean Stockwell cameo)," partly becoming a road movie.

Along the way there are far too many scenes in public restrooms. One involves a confrontation with Michael Cera as a pathetic (and not very convincing) hustler. The scene one most would prefer to forget is a horrific childbirth scene Foundas compares to Eraserhead's that may not really be happening (one certainly hopes not). By this point, the editing has become increasingly surreal, with scenes often hovering uneasily between dream, waking nightmare, and possible flashback. The road eventually leads toward Los Angeles and home, where The Comedian has a special gig for the birthday party of "a well-known celebrity." Here his existential despair leads, under pressure, to a final moment of total emotional meltdown.

Whether Alverson is one to watch or one to avoid, he clearly represents a bold and distinctive personality in the US indie film world, albeit not quite a fully formed one. As the Guardian's Jordan Hoffman writes of his feelings about Entertainment, "I’m still not sure if I should be laughing, crying, yawning or walking out of the cinema. Neither, perhaps, are the film-makers." That's not the way it needs to be.

Entertainment, 110 mins., debuted at Sundance 2015. Also reviewed by John DeFore for Hollywood Reporter. It was screened for this review as part of the March 2015 New Directors/New Films series, where it was the closing night film.

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GREGG TURKINGTON IN ENTERTAINMENT

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SURVEYING THE SERIES.

Again New Directors/New Films lives up to its name with solid offerings. And perhaps in the view of some more edgy, provocative material than before. That is, if the dog torture in White God; wicked mute youths in The Tribe; vile standup comic and Lynchian childbirth of Entertainment; chopped up immigrants of Haemoo;, 15-year-old having sex with mom's adult boyfriend in Diary of a Teenage Girl; tortured mother in the Austrian Goodnight Mommy may be so viewed. These are much talked about, not so successful as films, except that actually Fiala and Franz's Goodnight Mommy is some of the most elegant filmmaking in the series.

Debates over provocation aside, clearly outstanding films of the series are: Yury Bykov's intense, involving Russian working class-bureaucratic corruption drama The Fool (a good companion piece to Zvyagintsev's Leviathan); Chaitanya Tamhane's astonishingly richly observed judicial malpractice Indian film Court; Nadav Lapid's confusing but assured and forceful film treatment of going nuts over poetry, The Kindergarten Teacher; the Ross brothers' solid, saddening documentary study of Tex-Mex border violence Western. Despite trawling personal tapes Stevan Riley's Showtime documentary of Brando Listen to Me Marlon isn't very innovative but it is extremely informative. French director Sarah Leonor's The Great Man is a touching Claire-Denis-esque study of estrangement and fatherhood. New names to remember: Byokov, Tamhane, Leonor; Bill and Turner Ross; Fiala and Franz.

Those are more conventional successes. But it wouldn't be New Directors without more innovative or fringe discoveries like the off-kilter Québecois slacker girl picture Tu dors Nicole; the depressed yet visually stunning Paranoid Park-knockoff Violet; the cheerful French gay romp Fort Buchanan ; the Mongolian Kafka remake K; studies of Christmas-tree selling in Brooklyn and living homeless with dogs in the pampas; several others, which, though none of them really huge successes, all add just a bit to our range of the cinematically possible. Onward!

(Sorry not to have seen more of Film Comment Selects but High Society doesn't totally disappoint, while Petzold's Phoenix is superb, a strong affirmation of the German director's enormous talent. Note: we were able to view all of the New Directors films except Naji Abu Nowar's Theeb.)

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