New Directors/New Films 2017

New Directors/New Films 2017

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/uyyt.png

March 15-26, 2017

For updates and discussion go to the General Film Forum HERE

Links to the reviews
4 Days in France/Jours de France (Jérôme Reybaud 2016)
Albüm (Mehmet Can Mertoglu 2016)
Arábia (João Dumans, Affonso Uchoa 2017)
Autumn, Autumn/Chuncheon, Chuncheon (Jang Woo-jin 2017)
Beach Rats (Eliza Hittman 2017) Centerpiece Film
By the Time It Gets Dark/Dao khanong (Anocha Suwichakornpong 2016)
Boundaries/Pays (Chloé Robichaud 2016)
Challenge, The (Yuri Ancarani 2016)
Diamond Island (Davy Chou 2016)
Dreamed Path, The/Der Traumhafte Weg (Angela Schanelec 2016)
Future Perfect, The/El Futuro Perfecto (Nele Wohlatz 2016)
Giant, The/Jätten (Johannes Nyholm 2016)
Happiness Academy/Bonheur académie (Kaori Kinoshita & Alain Della Negra 2017)
Happy Times Will Come Soon/I tempi felici verranno presto (Alessandro Comodin 2016)
Lady Macbeth (William Oldroyd 2016)
Last Family, The/Ostatnia Rodzina (Jan P. Matuszynski 2106)
Last of Us, The/Akhar Wahid Fina 2016)
Menashe (Joshoa Z. Weinstein 2016)
My Happy Family/Chemi Bednieri Ojakhi ((Naa Ekvtimiishvili, Simon Gross 2017)
Patti Cake$ (Geremy Jasper 2017) Opening Night Film
Pendular (Julia Murat 2017)
Person to Person (Dustin Guy Defa 2017) Closing Night
Quest (Jonathan Olshefski 2016)
Sexy Durga (Sanal Kumar Sasidharan 2017)
Strong Island (Yance Ford 2017)
Summer Is Gone/Ba yue (Zhang Dalei 2016)
White Sun/Seto Surya (Depak Rauniyar 2016)
Wound, The (John Trengove 2017)
Wùlu (Daouda Coulibaly 2016)

Here is the whole program of features with the FSLC blurbs:

New Directors/New Films 2017 (15-26 March)

The Film Society of Lincoln Center has announced the following 2017 program of New Directors/New Films (in collaboration with MoMA). Reviews of the films follow in the rest of this thread.

For dates and times of the films at Lincoln Center and MoMA go HERE.

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/ppol.jpg
PATTY CAKE$

FILMS & DESCRIPTIONS
All films are digitally projected unless otherwise noted. A fuller list of short films will follow. For the Film Society of Lincoln Center (Walter Reade Theater) and Museum of Modern Art show schedules for each film go HERE.

Opening Night
Patti Cake$
Geremy Jasper, USA, 2017, 108m
New York Premiere
Make way for the year's breakout star: newcomer Danielle Macdonald is Patti Cake$, aka Killa P, a burly and brash aspiring rapper with big plans to get out of Jersey. Patti lives with her mother (Bridget Everett), a former singer who drinks away her daughter's wages, and ill grandmother (an epic Cathy Moriarty); meanwhile Patti is assisted in realizing her dreams by her hip-hop partner and BFF Hareesh (Siddharth Dhananjay) and their mysterious new collaborator Basterd (Mamoudou Athie). This raucous and fresh tale from first-time writer-director Geremy Jasper—a musician and former music video director from Hillsdale, NJ—follows Patti from gas station rap battles to her shifts at the lonely karaoke bar, while empathetically portraying the aspirations and frustrations of three generations of women. With homegrown swagger and contagious energy, Patti Cake$ announces Jasper and Macdonald as major talents. A Fox Searchlight release.

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/PPLLO.jpg
BEACH RATS

Centerpiece
Beach Rats
Eliza Hittman, USA, 2017, 95m
New York Premiere
Eliza Hittman follows up her acclaimed debut It Felt Like Love with this sensitive chronicle of sexual becoming. Frankie (a breakout Harris Dickinson), a bored teenager living in South Brooklyn, regularly haunts the Coney Island boardwalk with his boys — trying to score weed, flirting with girls, killing time. But he spends his late nights dipping his toes into the world of online cruising, connecting with older men and exploring the desires he harbors but doesn’t yet fully understand. Sensuously lensed on 16mm by cinematographer Hélène Louvart, Beach Rats presents a colorful and textured world roiling with secret appetites and youthful self-discovery. A Neon release.

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/PLPL.jpg
PERSON TO PERSON

Closing Night
Person to Person
Dustin Guy Defa, USA, 2017, 84m
New York Premiere
This understated yet ambitious sophomore feature by one of American independent cinema’s most exciting young voices follows a day in the lives of a motley crew of New Yorkers. A rookie crime reporter (Abbi Jacobson of Broad City) tags along with her eccentric boss (Michael Cera), pursuing the scoop on a suicide that may have been a murder, leading her to cross paths with a stoic clockmaker (Philip Baker Hall); meanwhile, a precocious teen (Tavi Gevinson) explores her sexuality while playing hooky, and an obsessive record collector (Bene Coopersmith) receives a too-good-to-be-true tip on a rare Charlie Parker LP while his depressed friend (George Sample III) seeks redemption after humiliating his cheating girlfriend. With Person to Person (exquisitely shot in 16mm by rising-star DP Ashley Connor), Defa matches the sophistication of his acclaimed shorts and delights in the freedoms afforded by a bigger canvas.

4 Days in France / Jours de France
Jérôme Reybaud, France, 2017, 141m
French with English subtitles
North American Premiere
An erotic road movie like no other, Jérôme Reybaud’s fiction feature debut begins in the dark, as Pierre (Pascal Cervo) uses his smartphone to snap photos of his lover’s sleeping body. Then, as if in a trance, he hits the road without any clear destination, drawn this way or that only by the connections he forges with strangers on a hookup app. Soon, his lover will set out in hot pursuit of Pierre across four long days and nights, crossing paths with a succession of curious characters. In the sophisticated angle he takes on the state of modern Eros, Reybaud evokes the work of Stranger by the Lake director Alain Guiraudie, imbuing the proceedings with mystery, humor, and a restrained yet pronounced sensuality.

Albüm
Mehmet Can Mertoglu, Turkey/France/Romania, 2016, 105m
Turkish with English subtitles
New York Premiere
In this shrewd and visually accomplished social satire from Turkish filmmaker Mehmet Can Mertoglu, a taxman named Bahar (Şebnem Bozoklu) and his history teacher wife, Cüneyt (Murat Kiliç), adopt a child, only to find they feel no emotional connection to the kid. Further complicating their own situation, the self-involved couple initiates an elaborate ruse, with the assistance of contemporary social media, to alter the facts about how they came to have a family. Stunningly photographed on 35mm by Marius Panduru (DP of Romanian New Wave cornerstone Police, Adjective), Mertoglu’s debut feature uses biting black humor to lampoon present-day Turkish society, capturing in equal measure the absurdity of reality and the reality of the absurd.

Arábia
João Dumans & Affonso Uchoa, Brazil, 2017, 97m
Portuguese with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Arábia begins by observing the day-to-day of Andre, a teenager who lives in an industrial area in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. After a local factory worker, Cristiano, has an accident on the job, he leaves behind a handwritten journal, which the boy proceeds to read with relish. The film shifts into road-movie mode to recount the story of Cristiano, an ex-con and eternal optimist who journeys across Brazil in search of work, enduring no shortage of economic hardship but gaining an equal amount of self-knowledge. Invigorating and ever surprising, Arábia is a humanist work of remarkable poise and maturity.

Autumn, Autumn / Chuncheon, chuncheon
Jang Woo-jin, South Korea, 2017, 78m
Korean with English subtitles
North American Premiere
With a surprising structure that recalls the work of both Hong Sang-soo and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, this delicate sophomore feature by Jang Woo-jin is a tale of human connection and searching for one’s place in the world. It begins simply enough, with a young man sitting next to an older couple on a train from Seoul to the city of Chuncheon. From there, we follow the man as he copes with the anxiety of trying to find a job, and then the couple, who, as it turns out, don’t know each other as well as it seems. With funny and moving scenes that play out in understated yet bravura long takes, Autumn, Autumn is as attuned to the passage of time and fluctuations of light as it is to everyday human drama.

Screens with
Léthé
Dea Kulumbegashvili, 2016, France/Georgia, 15m
Georgian with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
A lonely horseman wanders past the river of forgetfulness and through a rural Georgian village where both children and adults explore life's more instinctual pleasures.

Boundaries / Pays
Chloé Robichaud, Canada, 2016, 100m
English and French with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Chloé Robichaud’s sophomore feature centers on three women trying to square their political careers with complicated personal lives. Besco, a fictitious island country off the eastern coast of Canada, possesses vast natural resources that foreign companies would love to tap into, which occasions negotiations between Besco’s president (Macha Grenon) and Canadian government reps (including Natalie Dummar as a junior aide from the Ottawa delegation), mediated by a bilingual American (Emily Van Camp). As these three suffer through endless condescensions and mansplanations, they must also contend with an array of outside threats, from lobbyists, terrorists—and their own families. The performances are impeccable, and Robichaud stylishly renders the often absurd mundanity of her heroines’ political ordeal.

By the Time It Gets Dark / Dao Khanong
Anocha Suwichakornpong, France/Netherlands/Qatar/Thailand, 2016, 105m
Thai with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
In the beguiling, mysterious second feature by Thai director Anocha Suwichakornpong, the story of a young film director researching a project about the 1976 massacre of Thai student activists at Thamassat University is just the beginning of a shape-shifting work of fictions within fictions, featuring characters with multiple identities. Drifting across a dizzyingly wide expanse of space and time, By the Time It Gets Dark offers a series of narratives concerning love, longing, the power of cinema, and the vestiges of the past within the present. Asking quietly profound questions about the nature of memory—personal, political, and cinematic—this self-reflexive yet deeply felt film keeps regenerating and unfolding in surprising ways. A KimStim release.

The Challenge
Yuri Ancarani, Italy/France/Switzerland, 2016, 69m
Arabic with English subtitles
New York Premiere
If you have it, spend it: Italian artist Yuri Ancarani’s visually striking documentary enters the surreal world of wealthy Qatari sheikhs who moonlight as amateur falconers, with no expenses spared along the way. The Challenge follows these men through the rituals that define their lives: perilously racing blacked-out SUVs up and down sand dunes; sharing communal meals; taking their Ferraris out for a spin with their pet cheetahs riding shotgun; and much more. Ancarani’s film is a sly meditation on the collective pursuit of idiosyncratic desires.

Diamond Island
Davy Chou, Cambodia/France/Germany/Qatar/Thailand, 2016, 101m
Khmer with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
In this stylish coming-of-age story, an 18-year-old from the Cambodian provinces arrives at Diamond Island luxury housing development outside Phnom Penh to work a construction job transporting scrap between building sites. He makes friends and courts a local girl, but things grow ever more complicated when his long-estranged brother resurfaces. Making his feature-length fiction debut, Chou (whose documentary Golden Slumbers explored the vanished past of Cambodian cinema) creates an intoxicating blend of naturalism and dreamy stylization, rendering the ecstasies and agonies of late youth with remarkable attention to detail.

The Dreamed Path / Der traumhafte weg
Angela Schanelec, Germany, 2016, 86m
English and German with English subtitles
New York Premiere
The Dreamed Path traces a precise picture of a world in which chance, emotion, and dreams determine the trajectory of our lives. In 1984 in Greece, a young German couple, Kenneth and Theres, find their romantic relationship tested after his mother suffers an accident. Thirty years later in Berlin, middle-aged actress Ariane splits with her husband David, an anthropologist. Soon, these two couples’ paths cross in unexpected ways, short-circuiting narrative conventions of cause and effect as well as common conceptions of the self. Angela Schanelec, part of the loose collective of innovative German filmmakers that came to be known as the Berlin School, puts her signature formal control to enigmatic and subtly emotional ends in a film of mesmerizing shots and indelible gestures.

The Future Perfect / El Futuro perfecto
Nele Wohlatz, Argentina, 2016, 65m
Spanish and Mandarin with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Winner of the Best First Feature prize at the 2016 Locarno Film Festival, Wohlatz’s assured debut is a playful, exceptionally idea-rich work of fiction with documentary fragments. Seventeen-year-old Xiaobin arrives in Argentina from China unable to speak Spanish. Employed at a Chinese grocery store, she saves up enough money to pay for language classes, and enters into a secret romance with a young Indian man, Vijay. As she begins to grasp the Spanish language’s conditional tense, she imagines a constellation of possible futures.

Screens with
Three Sentences About Argentina / Tres oraciones sobre la Argentina
Nele Wohlatz, Argentina, 2016, 5m
Spanish and Mandarin with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Nele Wohlatz transposes archival footage of Argentinian skiers into prompts for language exercises in this short made as part of an omnibus feature for the Buenos Aires Film Museum.

The Giant / Jätten
Johannes Nyholm, Sweden/Denmark, 2016, 86m
Swedish with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Rikard lives to play petanque (a kind of lawn-bowling played with hollow steel balls). But his severe physical deformity, coupled with autism, makes communication with the world beyond a very small group of family, friends, and petanque teammates nearly impossible. As Rikard’s team gears up for a prestigious tournament, his fantasies—some involving his mother, who lives in squalor with her pet parrot, and some imagining himself as a giant stomping across a kitschy, romanticist landscape—transport him beyond the confines of the long-term care facility where he lives. Nyholm’s debut feature is a true original: a provocative, grittily realist sports movie, suffused with compassion and humor.

Happiness Academy / Bonheur Academie
Kaori Kinoshita & Alain Della Negra, France, 2016, 75m
French with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Uncannily melding fiction and documentary, Happiness Academy transports us to a hotel retreat for the real-life Raelian Church, a religious sect devoted to the transmission of knowledge inherited from mankind’s extraterrestrial ancestors. As the new candidates for "awakening" (two of whom are played by actress Laure Calamy and musician Arnaud Fleurent-Didier) spend time together at meals, out by the pool, at bonfires, and participating in new age-y group exercises, an unexpected humanism emerges amid the absurd spirituality. Humorous and moving, direct and enigmatic, this singular film meditates on the peculiar ways in which people strive to give their lives meaning.

Happy Times Will Come Soon / I Tempi felici verranno presto
Alessandro Comodin, Italy/France, 2016, 102m
Italian with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Two young fugitives out in the wild, a series of talking heads recounting a local legend about a wolf on the prowl, a loose dramatization of that same myth… With a narrative that enigmatically leaps from one hypnotic passage to another, Alessandro Comodin’s sophomore feature, set deep in the northern Italian woods and drawing on local folklore, is the work of a true original. This beautiful and haunting meditation on the relationships between imagination, desire, and violence is a dreamlike fable with the weight of documentary reality.

Lady Macbeth
William Oldroyd, UK, 2016, 89m
New York Premiere
The debut feature by accomplished theater director William Oldroyd relocates Nikolai Leskov’s play Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District to Victorian England. Florence Pugh is forceful and complex as Lady Katherine, who enters into an arranged marriage with the domineering, repressed Alexander (Paul Hilton), and must contend with her husband’s even more unpleasant mine-owner father (Christopher Fairbank). In this constrictive new milieu, she finds carnal release with one of her husband’s servants (Cosmo Jarvis), but there are profound consequences to her infidelity. Boasting deft performances by an outstanding ensemble cast, Lady Macbeth is a rousing parable about the price of freedom. A Roadside Attractions release.

The Last Family / Ostatnia rodzina
Jan P. Matuszynski, Poland, 2016, 124m
Polish with English subtitles
New York Premiere
This sort-of biopic of Polish surrealist artist Zdzisław Beksiński, renowned for his stark, unsettling, postapocalyptic paintings, focuses as much on the rest of the funny and reclusive Beksiński family: his religious wife Zofia, a perennially steadying presence; and his son Tomasz, a DJ/translator always on the verge of spiraling out of control. Jan P. Matuszynski’s fiction feature debut renders Beksiński’s home life as a vivid and affecting succession of near-death experiences and psychodramatic blowouts, and shows the brilliant artworks that emerged from all the sturm und drang.

The Last of Us / Akher Wahed Fina
Ala Eddine Slim, Tunisia/Qatar/UAE/Lebanon, 2016, 95m
North American Premiere
Two men silently traverse a vast, flat landscape; they get in the back of a smuggler’s truck, and soon after they’re attacked by men with guns; one of them escapes to sea, perhaps headed to Europe. He soon then finds himself in an endless forest, where a kind of spiritual journey unfolds. In Ala Eddine Slim’s mysterious, entrancing, dialogue-free film, the political significance of the unnamed protagonist’s journey is given a metaphysical twist. Urgent and evocative, The Last of Us speaks powerfully about both contemporary migration and the ancient struggle between man and nature.

Menashe
Joshua Z. Weinstein, USA, 2017, 79m
Yiddish with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Something like Woody Allen meets neorealism in Borough Park, Brooklyn, Menashe follows its titular hapless protagonist through a host of existential, spiritual, and familial crises. In the wake of his wife’s recent death, Menashe must care for his ten-year-old son—despite the fact that he knows bupkis about parenting—at the same time that he finds himself straying from the rigid norms of his Hasidic community. His friends and family insist that he remarry as soon as possible, but since he can’t get over his deceased wife or make enough money to feed his son, an uncle attempts to intervene. Joshua Z. Weinstein’s fiction feature debut is a poignant and funny parable about the tension between our best intentions and our efforts to make good on them. An A24 release.

My Happy Family / Chemi bednieri ojakhi
Nana Ekvtimishvili & Simon Gross, Georgia/France, 2017, 120m
Georgian with English subtitles
New York Premiere
The second feature by Ekvtimishvili and Gross subtly and sensitively follows a middle-aged woman as she aims to leave her husband and escape from the multi-generational living situation she shares with her aging parents, the aforementioned husband, her son, her daughter, and her daughter’s cheating live-in boyfriend. Lacking both personal space and free time, she breaks out on her own, building a new life for herself piece by piece while contemplating the family structure she has left behind. My Happy Family is a funny, perceptive, and sociologically rich work about the myriad roles we play in life and the obligations we endlessly strive to fulfill.

Pendular
Julia Murat, Brazil/Argentina/France, 2017, 108m
Portuguese with English subtitles
North American Premiere
A male sculptor and a female dancer live and work together in their big, barren loft, a mere strip of orange tape serving as the boundary between his atelier and her studio. Here, the stage is set for a low-key psychosexual drama centered around the couple’s erotic, artistic, and everyday rituals. This absorbingly intimate third feature by Julia Murat (her second, Found Memories, was a ND/NF 2012 selection) is a moving portrait of a couple caught between rivalry and the desire to build a future with each other.

Quest
Jonathan Olshefski, USA, 2017, 105m
New York Premiere
Jonathan Olshefski’s documentary chronicle of an African-American family living in Philadelphia is a powerful and uplifting group portrait rooted in today’s political realities. Beginning at the dawn of the Obama presidency, the film follows the Raineys: patriarch Christopher, who juggles various jobs to support his family and his recording studio; matriarch Christine’a, who works at a homeless shelter; Christine’a’s son William, who is undergoing cancer treatment while caring for his own son, Isaiah; and PJ, Christopher and Christine’a’s teenage daughter. A patient, absorbing vérité epic, Quest covers eight years filled with obstacles, trials, and tribulations.

Sexy Durga
Sanal Kumar Sasidharan, India, 2017, 85m
Malayalam with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Sasidharan’s third feature, main competition winner at this year’s International Rotterdam Film Festival, is a wildly tense nocturnal thriller with a razor-sharp political message. Late one night, Kabeer and Durga, a young couple on the run, are picked up by two strange men in a minivan who offer them a lift to a nearby train station. However, these men reveal themselves to be anything but benevolent, and so begins a long, claustrophobic drive that feels like Funny Games meets The Exterminating Angel. Sasidharan renders this bad trip with precision and an economy of style.

Strong Island
Yance Ford, USA/Denmark, 2017, 107m
New York Premiere
A haunting investigation into the murder of a young black man in 1992, Yance Ford’s Strong Island is achingly personal — the victim, 24-year-old William Ford Jr., was the filmmaker’s brother. Ford powerfully renders the specter of his brother’s death and its devastating effect on his family, and uses the tools of cinema to carefully examine the injustice perpetrated when the suspected killer, a 19-year-old white man, was not indicted by a white judge and an all-white jury. As a work of memoir and true crime, Strong Island tells one of the most remarkable stories in recent documentary; as a political artwork, its resonance is profound.

The Summer Is Gone / Ba yue
Dalei Zhang, China, 2016, 106m
Mandarin with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Dalei Zhang’s atmospheric debut feature is a portrait of a family in Inner Mongolia in the early 1990s that doubles as a snapshot of a pivotal moment in recent Chinese history. As the country settles into its new market economy, 12-year-old Xiaolei stretches out his final summer before beginning middle school, while his father contends with the possibility of losing his job as a filmmaker for a state-run studio, and his mother, a teacher, worries about her son’s grades and future. Beautifully shot in shimmering black-and-white, The Summer Is Gone is intimate and far-reaching, creating ripples of uncertainty from the microcosm of one family’s everyday life.

White Sun / Seto Surya
Deepak Rauniyar, Nepal/USA/Qatar/Netherlands, 2016, 89m
Nepali with English subtitles
New York Premiere
The second feature by Nepalese filmmaker Deepak Rauniyar sensitively explores the damage done to the fabric of Nepalese society by the decade-long civil war between the Maoists and Nepal’s monarchical government. On the occasion of his father’s funeral, Chandra returns to the village he left years earlier to join the Maoists, and finds himself united with the daughter he never met and revisiting uneasy relations with family members and neighbors. Past traumas return and cause tensions to boil over. Finding the political within the everyday, White Sun uses one village’s complex tribulations to speak to an entire national history. A KimStim release.

The Wound
John Trengove, South Africa/Germany/Netherlands/France, 2017, 88m
Xhosa with English subtitles
New York Premiere
In a mountainous corner of the Eastern Cape of South Africa, an age-old Xhosa ritual introducing adolescent boys to manhood continues to this day. This is the backdrop for this stark and stirring first feature by John Trengove, in which Xolani, a quiet and sensitive factory worker (played by musician Nakhane Touré), guides one of the boys, Kwanda, an urban transplant sent against his will from Johannesburg to be toughened up, through this rite of passage. In an environment where machismo rules, Kwanda negotiates his own identity while discovering the secret of Xolani’s sexuality. Brimming with fear and violence, The Wound is an exploration of tradition and masculinity. A Kino Lorber release.

Wùlu
Daouda Coulibaly, France/Mali/Senegal, 2016, 95m
Bambara and French with English subtitles
New York Premiere
A gangster picture with political resonance, Wùlu tracks the rise to power of Ladji, a 20-year-old van driver in Mali who takes to crime so that his older sister can quit a life of prostitution. He calls in a favor from a drug-dealer friend and soon finds himself deeply involved in a complex and illicit enterprise; as he discovers his knack for his new profession and his lifestyle ostensibly improves, the stakes grow higher and deadlier by the day. Set during the lead-up to 2012’s Malian Civil War, Wùlu is more than an exciting and superbly made thriller—it offers a powerful glimpse at the complexities of a particular historical moment.

FILMLEAF REVIEWS OF THE SERIES FOLLOW BELOW.

GEREMY JASPER: PATTI CAKE$ (2016)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/ppol.jpg
PATTI CAKE$

Plus size white girl from Jersey as a rising rapper

Patricia Dombrowski (Australian find Danielle Macdonald) is a fat girl in New Jersey who pursues a challenging role as a rap artist with her best friend and co-star Hareesh (Siddharth Dhananjay), who works as a pharmacist assistant. Patti, aka Killa-P, aka to her macho competition Dumbo, works at part-time catering jobs, where she pushes her CD when she can. One big chance is a famous black rapper's spread, but when she demonstrates her style he puts out his cigar on the disc and tells her to stick with her day job, along with some cruel put-downs. A love interest appears in a black outsider death metal guitarist-singer who calls himself "Bastard - The Anti-Christ" (Mamoudou Athie): he lives in a shack with elaborate sound equipment and when he finally speaks turns out to be named Bob and have a dad who's a lawyer. The director lights up many scenes with humor and visual excitement and the actors have fun - this was a Sundance hit.

Patti's home life revolves around her disabled, cigarette smoking Nana (Cathy Moriarty) and her potty-mouth alcoholic mom Barb (Bridget Everett), who had singing aspirations in her youth and still has a good voice. Even Barb puts Patti's rap aspirations down. She gives up hope midway. But then she comes back to Hareesh and they enter a competition even Barb comes to, and shares in - a climactic performance that redeems this movie's hitherto spotty progress - it seems more interested in rap and music video-style moments and wallowing in down and dirty New Jersey white trash atmosphere to advance the plot much - with a galvanizing musical moment that makes you walk out humming along with Hareesh's melodious obligato.

Patti Cake$ may arouse comparisons with Precious - at least the haters call her "white Precious" - and various other films and worlds. It's of the flashy editing-surreal-bright colored style of filmmaking and might remind you of Tangerine in that regard, or the gay coming-of-age movie Closet Monster. Geremy Jasper, for whim this is the feature debut, has directed music videos, and many of the scenes sparkle with ADD editing and lurid colors - though paradoxically, Macdonald's rap performances shine most when she performs a cappella and the words are really clear. She lacks the precise diction, though she occasionally echoes the rhythms, of Eminem (Marshall Bruce Mathers II), the preeminent white rapper. Another comparison must be to the 2002 white rapper battle to recognition movie 8 Mile, written by Scott Silver and directed by the late Curtis Hansen. Though less dazzling visually, that one is more fantasy - after all, Eminem did become a famous rapper, and it has rap duels that are fascinating and real; Patti Cake$ lacks a sense of the creative process. But here there are multiple themes, rising from low life poverty inspired by MTV; recognition for other-sized ladies. This is the time of the underdog Millennials who have their day in the limelight.

Patti Cake$, 108 mins., debuted and was a hit at Sundance. It was screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films (Film Society of Lincoln Center-MoMA) 2017, at is the Opening Night Film in the series. Ir is a Fox Searchlight release.

JAN P. MATUSZYNSKI: THE LAST FAMILY/OSTATNIA RODZINA (2016)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/iiuj.jpg
ANDRZEJ SEWERYN, ALEXANDRA KONIECZA, DAWID OGRONIK, CENTER, IN THE LAST FAMILY

Tame craziness

This Polish film is actually a true story. It recounts the lives and deaths of a family of three. First is the highly respected painter Zdzislaw Beksinski (Andrzej Seweryn) - and the works on view in their digs, of which there are many, look very interesting though, perhaps for copyright reasons, we never get a very close look. Second, there is his strange but talented son Tomok, or Tomasz (Dawid Ogrodnik, of Ida), who became a well known music critic, translator, and radio broadcaster. Spoiler alert: things do not end well for either of them. In the middle, a patient, stabilizing element, is the wife and mother, Zofia (Aleksandra Konieczna), who surprises Beksinski by predeceasing him due to a fatal heart condition. The movie takes us along with this trio for about 25 years. Most of the action transpires in the artist's and his son's apartments. They are located in one of those looming blocks of flats surrounded by empty space we know so well from Krzysztof Kieślowski's masterful Dekalog.

The film charms initially with its intelligence and its composure. Tomok, obviously, is a strange and maladjusted personality. There is a funny, yet troubling scene in which he sits talking to a bearded, pipe-puffing psychiatrist, begging him to say something. He needs help, but doesn't get it. He seems dangerous, but his father is never worried. It isn't indifference: it's a close-nit family, and an indulgent one for Tomok - but that may be the problem. Later in life he wishes that his father had punished him, even once, to give him a sense of structure. He has been indulged, and ignored, and on his own, he does not fare well.

One of the film's problems is figuring out whether it's about Tomok or his father. There is much about interviews with the painter, who expresses many views, and a sense of the stylistic periods he goes through is provided. But the crises all come from Tomok. It is a continual surprise that Tomok becomes successful at things - though hardly with women, a field in which he is a very late and spotty developer. Or with acceptance of life, since he is constantly thinking of ending his.

The sets are characters. The artist has a great collection of records, books, and tapes; he is always taking pictures, first with a 35mm camera, later with a video recorder, a large, solid, dark one, that looks like a small artillery weapon. How neatly his collections are arrayed along the walls, with his paintings! And Zofia has her collection of the paintings, and Tomok, who moves into his own place, has a larger, and an eager collector things, better, collection (he wants to buy it; neither wife nor son will do so). Tomok's collections are a little different. He has more records, more tapes, more videos. When he brings a woman in on a date, she wants to make out; he wants to show her his collections. They are his life; which is to say, in a sense, that he has no life.

These three people are famous, and interviewed and written about, but they have no social life, and this makes the action seem a little hollow. The film is also too caught up in the details of the lives, and never quite gets around to organizing them into a movie with dramatic highlights that would grab non-Polish viewers not acquainted already with this family's biography. When the artist finds his son lying dead in his apartment, he says "Congratulations, you finally succeeded." Is it surprising that we feel no more involvement, if the father's reaction is so cold?

The film was scripted by Robert Bolesto, who also recently penned the surreal horror version of "The Little Mermaid," The Lure.

The Last Family/Ostatnia rodzina, 124 mins., debuted at Locarno, Aug. 2016, and opened theatrically in Poland a month later; also showed at a dozen international festivals, including the Film Society of Lincoln Center-MoMA 2017 New Directors/New Films series, as part of which it was screened for this review.

DEEPAK RAUNIYAR: WHITE SUN/SETO SURYA (2016)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/uuhy.jpg
DAYAHANG RAI IN WHITE SUN

The personal and the public

It's not so often that you see a movie set in Nepal, and the Nepalese director Eeepak Rauniyar and his cowriter David Barker have created an involving, palpably real tale that skillfully interweaves the country's turbulent recent warfare with intimate, local, personal events. Chandra (Dayahang Rai) comes back to his remote village for the first time in years on the death of his father. He has been fighting in the Maoist army that defeated Royalist government forces in the 1996-2006 conflict, with 16,000 lives lost along the way. Chandra carries the wounds of this war.

Things get complicated, and Chandra has to deal with both his past and traditional customs to which the generations have different degrees of loyalty. To begin with a homeless war-orphaned kid among the boys jostling to carry Chandra's bags up the hills, Badri (Amrit Pariyar), attaches himself to him and claims to others to be his son. (Maybe he is.) He remains a touching presence throughout; we worry what will happen to him. Durga (Asha Margranti), Chandra's ex-wife, is a fiercely independent lower-caste woman who is cursed by the elders for touching the corpse. Durga has problems of her own. She has a daughter, Pooja (Sumi Malla), not Chandra's, but she wants Chandra to sign paternity papers so the girl can be legal and attend school.

The large body of the father, a village elder and a staunch royalist, has to be removed from an upstairs window because it's against custom to take it out the front door. Only males can attend the funeral. The only men qualified to carry the body down to the river are his sons, Chandra and his royalst brother, Suraj (Rabindra Singh Baniya), but they have a fight and Suraj goes off, leading Chandra on a meandering trail to find somebody else, while the village elders cluster around the corpse, stuck there for hours. No one can touch it unless the old priest (Deepak Chhetri), an absolute stickler for traditions, allows it.

Pooja and Badri, who at first are at odds, join forces and begin taking steps on their own. The arrival in the area of Chandra's former commander, with Maoist troops at hand, will also alter the course of things. All this is symbolic, of course, but it seems emotional and circumstantial because it all happens in such a relaxed, natural way, with - to the outside eye, at least - such authentic locations and performances, that we can't help getting emotionally involved. The 10-year-old newcomer Amrit Pariya, as Badri, is particularly convincing. Dayahang Rai, a locally well-known actor, inhabits his role profoundly, and exudes an inner sadness that is expressive of the country's long turbulence and troubles. This is an outstanding example of vernacular naturalism. It's exotic, for sure, but Depak Rauniyar has achieved some of the intimacy of Satyajit Ray.

White Sun/Seto Surya, 89 mins., debuted Sept. 2016 at Venice in the Horizons section; seven other festivals so far, including MoMA-FSLC's 2017 New Directors/New Films series, as part of which it was screened for this review.

A KimStim release. It's now been announced that it begins limited theatrical release 6 Sept. 2017 at MoMA (NYC) and 29 Sep t. at Laemmle Music Hall (LA).

YURI ANCARANI: THE CHALLENGE (2016

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/ijkl.jpg
التحدي

At play and at play

Italian documentary filmmaker Yuri Ancarani's film The Challenge is a matter of access. He had it, but he also keeps his distance. He shot wealthy Qatari men at play - serious play, that costs serious money. It is a rare and special scene, but Ancarani isn't seeking to tell you all about it; it's simply material he works with visually. His interest is in ritual, and repeated gestures, and odd customs, and surreal situations.

The main focus is their pursuit, now utterly altered by the introduction of modern gadgetry such as lightweight cameras and SUVs, of the ancient Arabian gentleman's sport of falconry. We also see a man driving a Lamborghini with a leopard in the passenger seat; and we see a group riding gold Harley Davidson bikes, dressed for once not in white thawbs and kufiyas but jeans and biker jackets. The falconers buy their special birds for up to 87,000 riyals ($24,000) via an auction they view on flatscreen TV as they bid by smart phone. We fly inside a posh private plane fitted with not passenger seats but rows of perches for flacons. We see men share a tasty meal of meat, rice, and side dishes in the traditional way, with the right hand only, the fingers molding the rice into a ball.

There are closeups of men's faces, young, dark, handsome, ancestrally Arabian, with perfectly trimmed short beard. Do they trim it themselves or, more likely, have a barber come in every morning? But for all this intimacy, there is no sense of entering the personal lives of these men. Ancarani's film is more like an art piece, shifting from scene to scene in a distancing way, occasionally bringing in soaring music, often offering nothing but ambient sound or the childish, repetitious dialogue of the 'sportsman' or buyers, saying nothing but 'that's a good one,' 'it's worth the price,' or most often the phrase 'ma shaa' Allah', which in this context is just a muslim way of saying 'wow!'

Mike D'Angelo wrote in Letterbox'd: "My kind of documentary: utterly devoid of exposition (or even basic contextualization), formally adventurous, offhandedly witty (love the sharp cut to a tranquil landscape shot that happens mid-car accident, just as a dude witnessing the vehicle roll over clutches his hands to his head in shock), confident enough to let viewers intuit the film's meaning/intention/big idea."

It is a confidently accomplished film and an elegant one. It's also an alarming one that makes its very rich subjects look like morons. But they look good too. Their cars and their hooded birds and they are handsome, and surreal. Jonathan Romney of Film Comment wrote: "the film is so elegantly shot, with heightened attention to staging and symmetry, that at first thought I was watching a gallery-art fabulation à la Matthew Barney. But no. . ." Material to play with, too good to be true. And in a sense itself making this film is as idle a kind of play as the "shaykhs'" with their dangerous SUV races, their falcons, and their Lamborghinis. And the photographs from the camera attached to a bird of prey on the hunt for a pigeon: the cinema of the future!

The Challenge, 69 mins., debuted at Locarno where it won the Special Jury Prize and was nominated for the Golden Leopard. Ten other international festivals, including the FSLC-MoMA New Directors/New Films (NYC), as part of which it was screened for this review.

ZHANG DALEI: THE SUMMER IS GONE/BA YUE (2016)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/ollo.jpg
ZHANG CHEN, KONG WEIYI IN THE SUMMER IS GONE

About a boy

The style of Zhang Dalei's excellent debut feature links it both to Edward Yang and Jia Zhang-ke: it's a nostalgic, restrained study - far from gaudy coming-of-ageers, of a boy of twelve in the Nineties in the director's hometown in Inner Mongolia, Hohhot, a place and time so quiet it feels sometimes like the Fifties (but trouble is on the way). Unlike Yang's and Jia's early panoramas, here the focus is more modest: a summer before the boy starts middle school. His rather nervous and fussy mother (Guo Yanyuan) is a teacher and wants him to get into an elite school, requiring a good test score, or maybe a bribe as in Mungiu's recent Graduation (NYFF 2016). His father (Zhang Chen) doesn't see the point. His own very real concern, shared with a close group of coworkers who gather socially to drink beer and talk, is that he'll lose his state-run filmmaking job - and his career dreams - in the growing wave or privatization. The film matches public and private: a big transition for the Chinese economy comes with the boy's big jump from elementary school to junior high.

Zhang Xiaolei (Kong Weiyi) is a scrawny kid with matchstick limbs. He always, always has his nunchucks around his neck, and a Bruce Lee poster is his inspiration, but despite a moment of showing off with them in his bedroom, this is a bit of a joke. He is a scrawny kid with matchstick limbs. He is a pensive, but cocky boy.

Xiaolei, as embodied with charm and serenity by Kong Weiyi is a quite ordinary, nondescript boy, but that makes him see more real. He is without discernible ambition, though he goes along - for a while - with his mother's push for him to try to get into an elite school. He is close to his father, physically, even though his dad sometimes loses patience with him. They regularly go to a local - vanishingly - state run cinema where they can in free and watch classic Chinese movies. As Clarence Tsui points out in his Variety review, when the free entry ends is when Xiaolei and his dad try to get into "The Fugitive, the first-ever US film to receive an official release in China back in 1994" - another milestone of the several ones Zhang's meditative screenplay alludes to.

Zhang works quietly (like Yang) but with a full social canvas, using amateur actors throughout, with marvelous social scenes at a restaurant, pool hall, swimming pool, and of tough kids on the street - and a particular tough kid called Saner, a misfit Xiolei admires and, unwelcomely, attaches himself to. The camerawork by Lv Songye quietly soars too. Watch the scene when Xiaolei comes out into a rainstorm at night and watches cops handling some of those toughs: the long corridor of street with bright light at the end silhouetting the action a block away is gorgeous, but because it's black and white it doesn't seem too showy. The only color is at the end when Xiaolei's father has gone away to work on a film, because there's now work for him at home anymore. We have seen his father grouse and worry, and watch foreign videotapes at home.

A moment symbolizing dad's giving up artistic and job hopes comes when he grabs his grainy tape of Scorsese's Taxi Driver - he's been watching the famous "Are you talking to me?" scene over and over - and pulls out the tape in anger. At the end of the summer - which wasn't as peaceful and happy as Xiaolei or his father would have wanted - father boards a bus and rides away to seek work on photo shoots elsewhere. He eventually sends a videotape showing the shoot and him. The grainy video is in color. And that's the end.

Perhaps Tsui is correct: the reality and the changes going on at the time of the film are "certainly much more harsh than the sepia-tinged stories unfolding here." But this is a lovely restrained and slow-building study in childhood and change. here is an awful lot here, and it all fits together subtly and seamlessly.

The Summer Is Gone/Ba yue/八月 (August), 106 mins., debuted 23 July 2016 at the FIRST International Film Festival Xining, also showing at Tokyo, Taipei, Rotterdam, Groningen, and New Directors/New Films, screened at the latter for this review under the auspices of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Showtimes:
March 16, 9 pm, Walter Reade Theater FSLC
March 17 6:45 pm, Titus Theater MoMA

DAOUDA COULIBALY: WÙLU (2106)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/pplm.jpg
IBRAHIM KOMA IN WÙLU

A dangerous success

Wùlu, Ladji, a young Malian who's continually on the screen, switches from bus driving to drug trafficking and earns himself and his sister a lot of money. They rise to the top of Bamako society and Ladji gets into more and more danger - right to the edge of doom. A posT-film title explains that the cocaine boom in Mali brought vast sums into the country, and that was a large factor in the political crisis of the past five years. So, a thriller that is topical and political, confident and brightly colored and full of energy from first to last. This is an unusually accomplished and great-looking first film from Africa whose mise-en-scène, from hovels to mansions, town squares to desert shootouts, is impeccable.

As Ladji, Ibrahim Koma (who was actually born in Paris) is impressive, confident too, a dark, burnished statue who rarely shows fear or uncertainty. He is continually on the screen and we are asked to care about him, but so great is his impassivity and remoteness it may be a bit hard to care about him. We understand his logic and his motives. He's driven cross-country busses for five years and we see him at first explaining to a novice who to let on board. No fatties: they take up too much space. No sexy women: too distracting. No old people: too slow. He's got it aced, but when a nephew of the boss takes over his driving job and, absent the expected promotion he angrily walks off the job and to Driss, a drug dealer who owed him a favor and presto! he's transporting pot the Senegal on busses and bringing back cocaine. He innovates, suggesting small passenger vans, which customs passes because they'r too much trouble to check. Except there's a dangerous contretemps the very first run, and when he gets back, Driss is murdered.

From then on it's success following success and as the ante increases, just like Scarface, the hero flies closer to the sun. Ladji and his two pals and cohorts Houphouet (Jean-Marie Traoré) and Zol (Ismaël N’Diaye) start working for Driss's boss, Jean-François (Olivier Rabourdin). So much money is coming in, they're sent further afield, to Timbuktu, with weapons. And they need them.

Intermixed with the intense, accelerating narrative of the drug trafficking, which gets more dangerous and more profitable all the time, is the story of himself and his sister Aminata, a prostitute when we meet her, later a professional party girl (played by Malian singer Inna Modja). Ladji has so much money he buys land and builds a big house with a large pool. He's not happy - the danger of his criminal operations is matched by financial risks, and realization that his liaison with the high class Assitan (Mariame N’Diaye), which Aminata first pointed him to, is shaky, because he not respectable - and the high living has put him in heavy debt, which hits the fan when political disintegration in a neighboring country forces his French drug boss to check out and banish him. Again he goes higher, to Assitan's father, for more risk and more profit. Again Coulibaly has surprises in store for us.

Wùlu is well-written and skillfully plotted. It has constant excitement. Its scenes or social excess are as colorful as those of crime. It merely suffers from that familiar problem of actioners. It never stops for breath. The non-stop intensity holds our attention. But it also makes every moment equally tense, thus reducing some of the force of climactic moments - and leaving little room to set mood or develop character. There is nothing wrong with making Ladji a kind of Camus Stranger, an empty man, although this story hasn't the style of a movie by Jean-Pierre Melville or the philosophical underpinnings of Camus. But it's damn good stuff for an African debut film, it looks great, and its cast is excellent.

Wùlu, 95 mins. (in Bambara and French), debuted at Angoulême Aug. 2016; in at least nine other international festivals including Toronto, Hamburg, London, Gothenburg and the Film Society of Lincoln Center-Museum of Modern Art New Directors/New Films festival, as part of which it was screened for this review. See the highly favorable reviews from Toronto by Pamela Pianezza in Variety and Boyd van Hoeij in Hollywood Reporter.
New Directors showtimes:
Saturday, March 18 1:30 pm MoMA
Sunday, March 19 6:45 pm Walter Reade Theater FSLC

JOÃO DUMANS, AFFONSO UCOA: ARÁBIA (2017)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/wsx.jpg
ARISTIDES DE SOUSA IN ARÁBIA

The wanderer

Arábia is storytelling. It's about a wanderer, who worked at all kinds of laborer jobs imaginable in Brazil. So it's also about labor, pretty explicitly. Neil Young in Hollywood Reporter called it a "political road movie." But it's not so much a tract (or a "road movie") as a meditation about loneliness and rootlessness, while at the same time full of manly togetherness and music - a lot of music, which helps mitigate the sadness. This is a unique thinking man's film, rather like a novel - though its interest isn't so much in the content as in the meditative structure and the moody atmosphere. For some reason - the philosophical voiceover, partly - it reminded me of Wong Kar Wai's Happy Together.

Arábia takes its time getting started, in the manner of old-fashioned adventure tales. It's a full 20 minutes before the title even appears. First there isa long shot (arguably longer than necessary), of a youth, Andre (Murilo Caliari), riding a bike, then a song, and up to the title it looks like this movie is going to be about Andre. Then news that a man named Cristiano (Aristides de Sousa), who lived nearby in this industrial neighborhood in Ouro Preto, Brazil in the southern state of Minas Gerais, near an old aluminum factory, where he, Cristiano, worked, has been in an accident and is in the hospital. Andre is sent to Cristiano's flat to get clothes for him and his ID. When there, Andre comes across a notebook with a journal in it. Writing about "important events in his life" turns out to have been a project of a factory theater group, which Cristiano joined to be more among people. Well, Andre begins to read the journal. . .

And what follows in the rest of Arábia is a narrative - the journal - in De Sousa's voice of Cristiano's many wanderings, in his voice over the past decade, all over the country working at all kinds of jobs, a one-man tour of the world of physical labor. We see him as the story unfolds in many diverse scenes. The filmmakers make no secret of their focus on the subject of manual labor. One memorable scene has Cristiano discussing with a companion of the time - people come and go in his life, including his one true love Ana (Renata Cabral)- a an older man who is shortly to die of diabetes - what contents are best and worst to load onto a truck: cement, tile, potatoes, etc. And at the final factory he starts working the night shift and explains why it's bad.

But Aristedes deSousa, with his strong, rough voice and lean features, is never a metaphor, always real, and so are the situations and settings. This is also a story of hard knocks. Cristiano does jail time, and another thing happens that could have led to jail. The story with Ana is suffused with sadness. And loss of best friends, when circumstances force a sudden departure. And constant change of venue every few months or year or so. There is a sense of sampling, of exploration, and one may think of Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London.

It is the combination of its contemplation and filtering of experience along with, through images, the retaining of the experience in very specific and vivid form that gives this film its special quality. Through the film we live life and examine it at the same time, and this is what is novelistic and not like most films.

Arábia, 97 mins, debuted at Rotterdam 1 Feb. 2017. It was screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films (Film Society of Lincoln Center, MoMA).
Showtimes:
SATURDAY, MARCH 18 4 p.m. Walter Reade Theater FSLC
SUNDAY, MARCH 19 6:30 p.m. MoMA

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/hhbg.jpg
ARISTIDES DE SOUSA IN ARÁBIA

ANOCHA SUWICHAKORNPONG: BY HE TIME IT GETS DARK/DAO KHANONG (2016)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/IIJN.jpg

A cinematic experiment of great elegance, all in the head

Anocha Suwichakornpong is a made-to-order film festival darling. Her films are exquisite, hushed, and conceptually complex. Their visual debt to her more famous countryman "Joe" Apichatpong Weerasethakul is obvious. The point of departure of By the Time It Gets Dark, is a film, or film within a film, related to the 1976 massacre of Thai student dissidents at a university. The settings are beautiful - perhaps too beautiful: this seems like a brochure for a decoration magazine. The people are too beautiful too, including the young men whose regular features - and, at one point, smooth naked thighs - are lovingly dwelt upon. When anything serious happens, like the death of a leading cast member in a car accident, it goes by with such a tiny scintilla of emotion that you don't wonder that the massacre doesn't build up much heat either.

A brace of art-film critics, excerpted by Critics Roundup, have penned enthusiastic comments on the film. Jay Kuehner (from Toronto, Sept. 2016), for instance: "To call what happens in By the Time It Gets Dark a 'plot' is to do it a disservice of sorts, such is the beguilingly self-reflexive nature of Anocha Suwichakornpong’s becalmed, trippy, historically conscious fungus of a film." Which is to say it vanishes up its own arse, seduced by its own cleverness and elegance. Perhaps it is "deeply felt," as a festival blurb claims. Certainly a massacre, with thousands injured and at least 50 to 100 killed by royalists and right wing troops, is something to do more than merely ponder but also to be angry and disturbed about.

Suwichakornpong presents protagonists who regularly change identities and scenes that play through twice in different ways with different actors. Such gestures resemble Rivette's methods in Last Year at Marienbad - except that film was clearly enigmatic and made no claim to be about an historical event. Even the favorable Film Comment comment by Jonathan Romney acknowledges that this film is in an "incongruously lyrical style, given the theme of state violence." That is the basic problem. The other is that what happens on the screen, while beautiful, is becalmed, and ultimately unengaging, except as an exercise in style and self-reflexive cinematic experimentalism. Experimentalism can be gutsy. This version is cool and weightless. Like the visitors to immaculate apartments repeatedly shown removing their shoes, this film handles everything with kid gloves, and never gets its feet wet or engages our emotions. I was not in the mood for it, and the use of a massacre as the starting point for a cinematic art piece offended me in such a way that I don't think I ever would be.

By the Time It Gets Dark/dao khanong, 105 mins., debuted at Locarno, followed by over a dozen festivals including Toronto, London, and Rotterdam. Screened for this review as part of the FSLC-MoMA series New Directors/New Films of March 2017.

NANA EKVTIMISHVILI, SIMON GROSS: MY HAPPY FAMILY/CHEMI BEDNIERI OJAKNI (2017)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/CKMF.jpg
MERAB NINIDZE, BERTA KHAPAVA (LEFT), IA SHUGLIASHVILI (RIGHT) IN MY HAPPY FAMILY

Going non-traditional

One can understand why there are two directors of Ekvtimishvili and Gross's My Happy Fmily. There's a lot of complicated people-wrangling going on here. First of all in the family of Manana, a middle-aged schoolteacher (singer and stage actress Ia Shugliashvili), who do a lot of vociferous squabbling in the crowded, noisy Tbilisi flat all seven of them inhabit. It's fun to watch - until maybe it isn't any more. This is rather like a play, at first anyway. It also "opens up," and most impressive perhaps is Manana's encounter with an old school friend in a local market, the way people keep pushing through them and by them and crowding around them. It's a fine bit of choreography. If New Directors/New Films had an Ensemble Acting prize, My Happy Family would be a prime contender. (This wrangling reminded me of Asghar Farhadi's in The Salesman.)

The second reason why it's good two people directed this film: they're a couple, and this is basically a story about couples - Manana and Soso (Merab Ninidze), their daughter an her husband, and their son and the young pregnant bride he surprises everybody with later on.

Manana and Soso live with her family, which she's sick of (and we can see why). They consist of her querulous and bossy mother (Berta Khapava), her brother, her grandfather, her husband, son Lasha (Giorgi Tabidze) and daughter Nino (Tsisia Qumsashvili) and daughter's husband, augmented on occasion by aunts, uncles and other relatives, as needed. The big squabbles concern Manana's decision to move into a cheap apartment on her own, leaving her husband and all the rest, but the squabbles themselves show us why Manana would want to take this liberating step. It's not that she can't get along with her husband. She can't breathe.

Her departure is against the wishes of everyone over 25. But it's a foregone conclusion we're aware of from the first scene, when she views a sunny if shabby flat in an unfashionable but quiet neighborhood. The price is right, and the decision is made. The objections confirm its validity. But will Manana stay with this decision? Will the tomatoes she plants on the balcony bear fruit? Stay tuned - though the film ends with a question mark, as it should. The conflicts here depicted between traditional and nuclear families, couples and independence, aren't easily resolved.

This is Georgia, where the language has a special lilt, and where any festive gathering means people will sing, in a rich, resonant chorus. The most interesting chapter comes when Manana meets that old friend in the market, who's got her own farm and sells cheese. She tells about a reunion of their school, 35 years out. At this reunion Manana gets some surprise news that deeply upsets her. Though she's in a state, she's prevailed upon to sing for everyone. It's beautiful, and it relates so well to the news she's just gotten this begins to seem a little like a musical. The long takes with ensemble squabbling, the ensemble singing, the surprises, the boisterous well-wrangled small crowds: these are the charms of My Happy Family. The new apartment is nicely conveyed, with sunlight, open doors onto the balcony, Manana sitting quietly (or cleaning up the mess) and listening to Mozart. Scenes of Manana at school are few, but help flesh things out: one session with a girl who's missed classes, and turns out to have left her young husband, is an obvious parallel and link to Manana's departure. All these are aspects of this film's good staging and construction.

Its defects? None really, except that the ending is a little underwhelming (as Jordan Minzer said in his Hollywood Reporter review), and that it is a little too long. After a while it feels like this is, or ought to have been, a miniseries; or, that to be a well made film it needed better editing. It is best in its individual scenes, but some of the less necessary ones could have been shortened or cut out.

My Happy Family/Chemi bednieri ojakhi, 120 mins., debuted at Sundance Jan. 2017, then played at the Berlinale. It was screened for this review as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center-Museum of Modern Art series, New Directors/New Films 1 Mar. 2017. Released 10 May 2017 in France as Une famille heureuse to excellent reviews - AlloCiné critic rating 3.6. English language reviews are raves - Metacritic rating 86%.

YANCE FORD: STRONG ISLAND (2017)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/UUHY.jpg

A searingly intense and complex film about a brother's killing and a family's pain

Strong Island is a documentary not of the kind that cooly informs us but of the autobiographical and otherwise intensely personal kind. A somewhat incongruous comparison might be with Nathaniel Kahn's My Architect, his exploration of his famous father, Louis Kahn. Yance Ford is exploring his family, and a single event that changed, perhaps destroyed it: the murder of his brother William a quarter century ago, when he was 23 and Yance was 18 and a sophomore at Hamilton College, by a 19-year-old white man, a mechanic in a Long Island body and "chop" (illegal spare parts) shop whose vehicle William had crashed into some time before. The events that followed are an example of racism in America and the difficulty and danger of being African American. This is a searing, powerful film.

This is also the story not just of a murder that went unpunished by a white grand jury that brought no charge but of a family, and of being gay, or being black, and how these things intertwine. Yance, one of two sisters who has since become a transgender male, is exploring his own identity. He goes through many snapshots that record the early lives of his parents - handsome, promising, and happy people, and of himself, his sister, and his brother (who never learned that he was gay). The most powerful speaker is their mother, Barbara, a teacher who became a principal and then started her own school for young women at Riker's Island, where his brother William eventually taught for a while. This experience he thinks altered William's sunny nature in the realization that there were others like him who were not yet free, still slaves.

His mother did not survive for the release of the film. His father had a stroke after William's death and not long later died. This was a peaceful black family unfamiliar with jail sentences and violence and this tragedy was devastating.

Interviews with close friends of William, including the one who was with him when he died, suggest that William drank and went to strip clubs and perused Playboy but he never got into real trouble. He was a gentle giant, a large and slightly overweight young man whose last project, detailed in his journal, which Yance shows and reads from, was to lose enough weight to qualify to train to become a corrections officer. He failed, but appealed the decision, and an irony of this scrupulously detailed film is that saved documents show six weeks after his death his appeal was granted and he was reclassified as qualified - too late.

The three Ford siblings' parents, who met in high school (but Barbara was aware of and in love with William Sr. long before), came from the Jim Crow South and lived in Brooklyn, among elderly Jewish women, which Barbara loved. She was disappointed when they moved to a nice, pleasant and inexpensive house in Long Island because it was in a black part of Long Island that was in effect a ghetto, but it pleased William Sr. to escape New York City because in his work as a train driver he saw the ugliest parts of it and wanted to get out.

There are many other ironies in this rich account. William might have been a fine correctional officer. We hear about an ADD (Assistant District Attorney) who was robbed and shot at an ATM; William chased the killer and brought him down. The ADD was gravely wounded, but was saved. The Brooklyn Bridge was shut down so he could be rushed to emergency care. When William was shot, police and hospital negligence due to his race insured that he was not saved.

At William's funeral Barbara felt convinced that William's killer would be punished, but she was to be powerfully disabused of this notion. Her appearance at the grand jury, where some of the all white group were reading magazines and ignoring her testimony, convinced her otherwise and she concludes, on camera, that her teaching of her children to be race-neutral in judgment was wrong. By implication, they ought to have been taught that the white man is the enemy. It seems also that William made a grievous error to begin with with Mark Reilly. He hit Reilly's car. Reilly said that if he would not report the accident he would repair William's car for free. He should have had nothing to do with Reilly and realized that he was on dangerous ground with him from the start.

Another irony of the film is that while it may seem to viewers that Yance Ford is setting out to show his brother's innocence this is not what happens. His brother secretly told him how he had menaced Mark Reilly, the mechanic, with a car door and a vacuum cleaner, and Yance should have told him he was being stupid but instead rejoiced that he was being a bad-ass. Yance counts himself as therefore sharing in the guilt of William's death. The implication is that, as a police investigator reveals to Yance, evidence shows William was sufficiently provocative and threatening to suggest, to the white grand jury at least, that Mark Reilly may have been in danger, even if shooing William was not necessary. Nevertheless that William and his friend became the principal suspects in William's death was a typical absurdity of an unjust, racially biased system.

,Strong Island, 107 mins., debuted at Sundance and has been in other festivals including the Berlinale, True/False, and New Directors/New Films, and it was as part of the latter that it was screened for this review.

KAORI KIINOSHITA, ALAIN DELLA NEGRA: BONHEUR ACADÉMIE/HAPPINESS ACADEMY (2017)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/PPKL.jpg

A superficial picture of New Age togetherness

The trouble with Bonheur Académie/Happiness Academy, a docudrama about a Raëlian summer gathering at a hotel complex in Croatia, is how superficial it is. And because it's sort of faked, we only get to "know" a handful of "participants" who are cast members: the movie doesn't look in on a wide spectrum except where they introduce themselves on mike at an early gathering.

And what do they all do? Listen to Raël, Claude Vorilhon, the white-bearded, Geneva-based 70-year-old cult leader, the "man in white," talking from a remote hookup on two big flat screens to the gathered participants. This gentleman, who likes laughing and happiness and has been at this for over 40 years, allegedly talked to outer space creatures who set up planet earth. But there is only passing reference to these beliefs. Most of what we see are rituals you might find in various New Age-y gatherings, people playing get-together games, talking about themselves in a New Age-y way, declaring their love of each other, stripping and touching, humming, singing, dancing and swimming, having a supervised good time if you like this kind of feel-good summer camp. It's sort of like a commune without the hard work and poverty.

A peculiarity of Raëlianism is it favors sex. There are several unusual wrinkles. Participants are encouraged to wear one of a whole line of colored wrist bands to show what they're up for, from red (open for lots of all kinds of sex) to white (prefer to abstain from sex altogether). In between are gay or bi, cuddle but no sex. Raël gives a pep talk encouraging men to open up to their feminine side and women to their masculine one - and this time they really mean it literally: that night everybody disguises in his or her own particular version of the opposite sex, and dancing, or flirting, at a party they mix in gay or reverse-sex play-unions. The next day they talk about the experience. The characters who emerge include , Lily and Dominique, who seem to be vying for the favours of a Parisian singer, Arnaud Fleurent Didier. But these are not vivid portraits, just people who are in the limelight for a while.

Moments like the sex-switch night show this film might have been interesting: this activity seems genuinely transformative for some participants, perhaps quite troubling for others, suggesting this aspect of Raël-think could be controversial or revelatory. But for some reason, whether through mere ineptness or our of a need to stay on the right side of the Raëlians, who were somehow the filmmaker's hosts, this is a timid effort and it never gets deep enough either into the ideas or experiences touched upon. And while this feels like a giant singles event, we don't see any sex happening.

If you want to find out something about Raëlians, see Wikipedia. It points out that they used to favor a symbol that combines the Star of David and the swastika, but the obvious offense this causes multiple groups has led them to switch to a star-and-swirl combination.

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/998n.jpg

But here, in the middle of the two big screens Raël booms forth from, the symbol is the swastika-Star of David one.

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/990l.jpg

Is this a parody or pro-Raëlian propaganda? It never really quite makes up its mind, or maybe it is propaganda, but the whole thing plays as parody anyway. As apprentice film critic Lucille Manent says in her critique from the Bordeaux festival on the French-language festival review website ACCRÉDS (http://www.accreds.fr/), the filmmakers' neutral stance just doesn't work because of the aforementioned superficiality.

This film comes out in France 28 Jun. 2017. It's classified on AlloCiné as a mixture of documentary and "comédie dramatique."

Happiness Academy/Bonheur Academie, 75 mins., debuted at the Festival of Independent Film of Bordeaux 2016. It will have a French theatrical release 28 Jun. 2017. It was screened for this review as part of FSLC-MoMA's New Directors/New Films series (15-26 Mar. 2017).

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/009m.jpg
ONLINE PHOTO OF A RAËLIAN CELEBRATION

SANAL KUMAR SASIDHARAN: SEXY DURGA (2017)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/HHB.jpg

Long ride

This rough but visually lush and successfully disquieting film rubs some usually open-minded film critics the wrong way. Jay Weissberg of Variety its "Unremitting sadism," which he said "is the hallmark of this unpleasant impressionistic mood piece meant to draw attention to the degradation of women and man’s cruelty to man." Neil Young reviewed in in Hollywood Reporter with little more enthusiasm. He said "Sexy Durga is in the end just another exasperatingly elaborate illustration of Jean-Paul Sartre's timeless dictum, 'Hell is other people'." Maybe so. But Sexy Durga delivers a vivid and persistent and occasionally beautiful nightmare that will etch a little place on your brain. The use of improvisation without a script leads to a grating monotony that's all too real.

Sexy Durga starts out and is briefly bookended by an (actual, filmed) Indian folk ritual event where young men, observed by a big crowd (some filming with their smart phones) go into trances and are hoisted up above the people by hooks through the flesh of their backs and legs. It begins in daylight just as the sun's setting and goes on into the night. Later there are fires and running over hot coals.

While this is going on, a young couple hit the road hitchhiking to a railway station to go to Madras, so they say (we never quite know who they are or what their plan really is). They are picked up by two men in a van who become their psychological tormenters, mocking them and playing with them. All through the night they try to escape and get out briefly only to be picked up again. They cannot get away for long. Early on the van is stopped by cops - or are they? - who turn out to be more abusive to the abusers than the abusers are to the innocent couple.

It's a nightmare, a variation of one many of us have had where we keep trying to get somewhere but continually are frustrated. The tension is unrelenting and the couple is more and more helpless and frightened, especially the young woman (who can't speak the local language, adding to her helplessness). Toward the end, the van comes back once more and picks up the couple (who can't get a ride at this hour from anybody else: they keep getting in because it's even more frightening to be out on the dark road). This time, the van lights up inside and out like a flashing pinball machine while loud heavy metal music plays, and the men are wearing wild full-head masks. The eye candy of this sequence matches the exoticism and shock value of the men with hooks in their flesh. The critics call this flesh-piercing ritual masochism. But that's a simplification, because it's a traditional ritual. If they're in a trance, aren't they feeling no pain? The greater masochism may be the couple's reentering the van.

Sasidharan's cinematographer Prathap Joseph is skillful, seeming to fly through the air, riding on top of the van, staring down the luminous dividing line along the rural highway, flipping into the van from above. Some of the tricks he performs are mystifying. Those who describe this picture as directred in social or political terms toward mistreatment of women (or hooliganism or male sexual predators) doubtless are right, have a point but they risk missing its overriding nature as direct experience and transfixing dream.

This film debuted at Rotterdam, where it won the $43,000 Tiger Award. It was screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films (FSLC-MoMA series, NYC, Feb. 2017).

JOSHUA Z. WEINSTEIN: MENASHE (2017)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/UUH.jpg
MENASHE LUSTIG AND RUBEN NIBORSKI IN MENASHE

A grieving Hasidic widower in Brooklyn

The setting is a very particular one, the Yiddish-speaking Hasidic community of Borough Park, Brooklyn. Mehashe (Menashe Lustig, playing a variation on his own life experiences) is a widower with a ten-year-old son named Rieven (Ruben Niborski). In the community, children are not supposed to be in the care of single men, so Rieven is living with Menashe's judgmental brother-in-law Eizik (Yoel Weisshaus). Another factor is that Menashe, who has a menial job at a kosher supermarket where the boss is as disapproving as Eizik, is impoverished, not a winner; Eizik sells real estate, and does well. Menashe very much wants to have Rieven with him. He does get Rieven for a while, but it's a tug of war. The fact is, Menashe seems a mess. He's urged to get a new wife as soon as possible, but he's disinclined, and this big sloppy man is no dreamboat.

There is a burlesque, comical aspect to this little tale. But it's also notable for its warmth and humanity. Essentially this is a story of love and loss. Documentary filmmaker Weinstein uses simple, no-nonsense methods,* and it seems uncertain where things are going for a while. But at the end, Menashe has gained some recognition - particularly from us, the viewers, and we realize that this is about grieving. Menashe is going through a process. He struggles to have the memorial service for his wife not at his brother-in-law's but at his humble abode, and, despite disasters, he succeeds. The event ends with the approval of the Rabbi (Meyer Schwartz)and the other men who come. When we see him standing tall walking down the street finally dressed in a proper Hasidic long coat and hat, no longer the sloppy shirt sleeves he's been in all through the film, we realize he is working through the grief and turning a corner toward self-possession and self-respect. He's becoming a mensch in his own eyes and acceptable material for a matchmaker, and we feel a lift.

Menashe is not only a culturally distinctive tale with documentary particularity but also a story with real slow-building emotional heft. Much is owed to the scenes of Menashe and Rieven together. Rieven is a lively boy, playful, unpredictable, unscholarly, a bit of a handful. He is happier with his father, but also wary when his father messes up, repeatedly. On the other hand Eizik is prissy and mean as well as judgmental. This film isn't simplistic, though. The Rabbi and Eizik come to recognize Menashe's emotional sincerity and turn out not to be as mean as they first appeared, as playing by the Hasiidic rule book made them look. Hasidic values are strict, but there is also warm-heartedness and joy.

This film shot among actual Hasidic people in Brooklyn, which is tricky, since the Hasidics don't even watch movies, let alone approve of acting in them. It had to be made somewhat on the sly. How Weinstein persuaded real Hasidic people to play all these roles is a bit of a mystery, but he spent several years making the film, and as a documentarian was familiar with ways of fitting in. This is one of those films where using non-professionals pays off. You could never make these people up, or recreate them with makeup.

One does't feel here the wholesale admiration of Jewish ultra orthodox life you get in Rama Burshtein's Fill the Void (NYFF 2012), but one's not getting a sense of tragic consequences as with the gay orthodox butchers in Haim Tabakman's bold and devastating Eyes Wide Open. When you read accounts like Lutser Twersky's Huffington Post article, "I Escaped Hasidic Judaism..." you wonder, and there are hints here, like a young woman complaining that she's being prevented from going to college. But, of course, every story need not directly critique the society it depicts. It's complicated.

Menashe, 79 mins., debuted at Sundance; also shown at Berlin and Cleveland, and screened for this review as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center-Museum of Modern Art 2017 series New Directors/New Films. It's Weinstein's debut as a feature director. An A24 release: starting July 28, 2017.
_______________
*L.A. Times article by Steven Zeitchik describes making of the film.

NELE WOHLATZ: THE FUTURE PERFECT/EL FUTURO PERFECTO (2016)


http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/KIOU.jpg
XIAOBIN ZHAN IN THE FUTURE PERFECT

"Apprendre une langue, c'est vivre de nouveau"

This film reminded me of Ionesco. He's said to have been inspired to write his Theater of the Absurd plays by reading dialogues in language textbooks. Nele Wohlatz creates a delicately surreal atmosphere by following newcomers to Argentina, a Chinese girl and an Indian man who have a romance while communicating only in Spanish, of which they have a limited knowledge. At the same time I also thought of the folksy approach to immigrant interaction we get in the classic story by Leo Rosten, "The Education of H*Y*M*A*NK*A*P*L*A*N." This is a charming and original film.

Fired from a deli because she doesn't know enough Spanish words to serve customers, Xiaobin finds work at a different Chinese grocery store where her knowledge of mandarin is sufficient to make her useful. There she meets a young Indian man called Vijay (Saroj Malik). She's pretty and young, and Vijay is immediately interested. Xiaobin goes against her relative, who says they're going back to China and studying Spanish is a waste of time. Xiaobin saves up enough money from her job to pay for language classes. For her it's an opportunity to break away from the restrictions of her traditional family, to expand her future possibilities and break free of the more dire restrictions of being a foreigner.

Vijay comes a courting, a role that's defined largely just by body language, because while his Spanish is limited, Xiaobin's is even more rudimentary. Vijay almost at once declares to Xiaobin that he loves here and wants to marry her. He is barred by limited Spanish on both sides from conducting an elaborate courtship, but he's also under pressure from his family to find a wife. She knows this is going too fast, but she also lives in the fantasy. Speaking a new language makes it all feel like just a game and things move fast because there are no linguistic complexities to slow them down.

The blurb calls this an "idea-rich work." Indeed: the subjects of simple language and complicated situations, and simple situations complicated by language, lead inevitably down the road of linguistic philosophy. Do we know more than we can say? Because we can say something does it mean that we know something?

The conceit of this short feature grows out of moving along to better knowledge of the target language. It's that as the student moves toward conditional verbs, she also moves into consideration of multiple possibilities in her own young life. The film is made up of a series of short scenes with dialogue after the manner of language learning texts. A special guest is the talented and multilingual young actor Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, who arrives speaking fluent and very convincing mandarin. But he says he's just acting. Apprendre une langue, c'est vivre de nouveau, goes the saying: speaking a new language is a performance, taking on a new role and a new life.

There are many opportunities for drollness and for romantic hints. At the same time it's hard to sustain these things for very long. And the pastel-pale color processing of the film gives it a kind of wanness. But this little film is as original as it is universal.

The Future Pefrect/El futuro perfecto, 65 mins., debuted at Locarno 2016, winning the Best First Feature prize. It was screened for this review as part of the Mar. 2017 FSLC-MoMA New Directors/New Films series.

JÉRÔME REYBAUD: 4 DAYS IN FRANCE/JOURS DE FRANCE (2017)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/POyt.jpg
MATTHIEU CHEVÉ and PASCAL CERVO IN 4 DAYS IN FRANCE

A French gay road movie with oddballs and Grindr

Gay viewers who expect this film to be a round of hot erotic encounters - or an intense melange of mystery and explicit sex like Giraudie's Stranger by the Lake - will be disappointed. Filmmaker Jérôme Reybaud has made a road movie with a decidedly gay focus, but his scope is more varied and bemused. His protagonist, 36-year-old Pierre Thomas (Pascal Cervo), though well primed for a tour of gay France with an attractive new white Alfa sedan and a smart phone loaded with Grindr, the worldwide gay hookup app, is as much as anything on a "fugue," as the French call it, an escape and a wild ramble. He's run off in the night from his Paris lover Paul (Arthur Igual) and gone wandering. After he fails to show up for a production of Cosi fan tutte for which Paul got them €150 seats, Paul goes in frantic pursuit of Pierre, using Grindr in turn as a search tool. As for Pierre, he goes where chance takes him, running into oddballs and old ladies more than hot men. This movie is whimsical, elegant, pretty, literary, a little too pleased with itself - and not really all that sexy. It requires some patience. In compensation it has humor, variety, poetry. And some sex.

Grindr is a geographical-locator app gay men list themselves on: options pop up wherever you go, and the use of it makes this look for a minute like an updated French country-wide version of John Retchy's pre-AIDS novel Numbers, in which a narcissist a tad past prime goes on a frantic sex tour of gay L.A., racking up as many sweaty, sperm-soaked encounters as possible in a ten-day period. Pierre starts out promisingly with Matthieu (Mathieu Chevé), a cute young guy in Bourges, who wants Pierre to pick him up on his way back and take him to Paris. But Pierre has no plan to return to Paris. He has no plan. He tells Matthieu to go to Paris on his own.

Pierre himself isn't wholly on his own. He calls his aunt, a theatrical grande dame, who cites Breton: "Hit the road." As someone else, a salesman (Bertrand Nadier) whom Pierre kisses, then masturbates thinking of through a wall, says, "only a car can give you certain sensations" of the land. Pierre becomes an automotive flaneur, a leisurely wanderer. When Matthieu gives him a package and a note for a lady up in the mountains, he later delivers it. Later he encounters a series of people, including a petty thief (female, Lætitia Dosch) who takes some of the most prized possessions he has with him; a fat old barkeep who wants only wordless, impersonal sex. He has a pretty, odd young godson, obviously gay, who haunts public toilets and memorizes facts about French towns. Pierre comes across a former teacher, now a mere provincial bookseller (Nathalie Richard). There are various ladies of a certain age - no young pretty ones. But Paul, hot on the trail, gets a blow job from a plain woman (Corinne Courège) working for a roadside fast food joint called Happy Dough (La Pâte à Bonheur) - out of kindness, because she won't take the mere €5 she's asking as a gift without the service.

4 Days in France has handsome cinematography, rich in painterly landscape, by Sabine Lancelin; the editing includes jump cuts expressive of Pierre's rudderless travels. The score includes classical excerpts, some opera. And a happy ending.

4 Days in France/Jours de France, 141 mins., debuted in the directors series at Venice. It opens in French cinemas 15 Mar. 2017. (It scored high with critics: <a href="http://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm-246427/critiques/presse/">AlloCiné</a> 3.6.) Screened for this review as part of the New Directors/New Films 2017 series (Lincoln Center/MoMA). [Mike D'Angelo gives this film a 71, and has wound up putting it at number 10 in his favorite films list for 2016.]

JANG WOO-JIN: AUTUMN, AUTUMN/CHUNCHEON, CHUNCHEON (2017)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/674h.jpg
WOO JI-HYUN, YANG HYUNG-JU, AND LEE SE-RANG IN AUTUMN, AUTUMN

Disappointment and awkwardness in a provincial town

Not unlike Hong Sang-soo, who surely must be something of an influence, Jang Woo-jin's film is about a trip to a new place, with a lot of conversations. It's divided up into two story lines, which don't connect except that the three characters involved, a couple on a travel date who met on the Internet, and a young guy returning home after failing to get a job he sought in Seoul - and hey go to some of the same places without running into each other. The three are sitting next to each other in a train compartment heading from Seoul to the provincial town of Chuncheon, a shit hole, the disappointed young guy Ji-hyun (We Ji-hyun) says, but a spot notable for its pretty landscapes to Hyung-ju (Yang Hyung-ju) and Se-rang (Lee Se-rang); she used to live here and has pleasant memories of the place. The Korean title of the film, "Cuncheon, Chuncheon," signals its bipartite structure: it's two Chuncheons, that of the would-be couple, a liaison that ultimately doesn't work; and that of the sad and frustrated Ji-hyun, whose high school dreams are crushed.

We hear Hyung-ju and Se-rang talk on the noisy train, but don't gather what's going on with them till later. We follow Ji-hyun as he stands that night on a bridge, then next day ferries to a temple to pray and then works in a friend's restaurant. From them he gets the phone number of a friend, Min-jung (Kim Min-jung), whom he's run into earlier, whose mother's funeral he was to attend, but couldn't because he missed the ferry back to Chuncheon. In what seems the most arresting scene in the film, Ji-hyun talks to his friend with the cell phone sitting on the ground. He remembers old times and weeps. His friend tells him he's given up singing as a career; he didn't have what it takes. But Ji-hyun begs him to sing a song for him, which he does, despite saying he doesn't usually sing for guys. It's a surprisingly emotional moment, despite there being nothing but Ji-hyun and a cell phone in the scene. The actor playing Ji-hyun, charming and sad, impresses.

Hyung-ju and Se-rang are harder to watch. They go to some of the same places as Ji-hyun, the temple and a couple of restaurants, and a hotel, very awkward, like Ernest Borgnine and Betsy Blair in the 1955 Marty. When they go to a hotel, Hyung-ju has to go outside while Se-rang takes a bath, because the bathtub is right out in the room. As time goes on, the somewhat older Hyung-ju declares himself well leased with Se-rang, but it emerges that she doesn't return the feelings, even though, by the time they admit the food at an outdoor restaurant she remembers isn't very good, and wasn't in the past either.

Michael Sicinski, in his review on Letterboxd, suggests that Jang's aim is "humanizing embarrassment," a process by which we "become invested in gradually [accruing] disappointment." (This fits with the comparison to Marty.) In his Berlinale review, D.Kat Griggs focuses on the way the landscapes and locations work in relation to mood and action and holds that the film's message lies in its "visual representations, the sounds, the expressions, and the feeling of the interaction." Both these interpretations may be valid, and clearly Autumn, Autumn is sophisticated and conceptually ambitious. But this is a low-budget film, and its cheap, grainy look I found off-putting, the filming of most of its scenes (except perhaps Ji-hyun's phone call) unattractive and plodding. Jang Woo-jin was only around 30 when he made this film, however, and he could move on to more successful and polished work.

Autumn, Autumn/Chuncheon, Chuncheon/ 춘천, 춘천, 78 mins., debuted at the Berlinale Forum. Screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films (FSLC/MoMA) 2017.

ANGELA SCHANELEC: THE DREAMED PATH/DER TRAUMHAFTE WEG (2016)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/PLQS.jpg
MIRIAM JAKOB AND THORBJÖRN BJÖRNSSON IN THE DREAMED PATH

Couples troubles

This Berlin School film of two couples who intersect somehow thirty years apart at first satisfies with its formal rigor and narrative clarity - until it becomes hard to follow and largely lost me. I did think of Godard but there is a harsh German severity. Its people treat each other cruelly, it treats the audience cruelly.

The film starts in Greece with a couple roughing it in the Eighties (the fall of the Berlin Wall will come up). They are Theres (Miriam Jakob), who's German, and Kenneth (Thorbjörn Björnsson), who's English (though the actor isn't). They sing "Wimaway" ("The Lion Sleeps Tonight") as seated buskers for cash, and he uses change to call home, learning his mother is deathly ill. He goes home, where he and his blind father (Alan Williams) mercy-kill his mother using a large dose of morphine (Kenneth has been a heroin user, and so knows where to get drugs). Theres gets a scholarship to study in Berlin. When he turns up in Berlin, she walks past him. He disappears, leaving his dog chained in the rain in a square. She is now involved with a young German man who works in a hospital.

The Dreamed path is shot in tight 4:3 ratio, and its shots are similarly often pared down eschewing back-and-forth coverage of conversation, showing often one person and only part of the body of the other, with head-on shots of faces and a lack of affect and a several-second delay of response in dialogue. This gives an effect of clarity and focus.

Speaking of clarity and focus, that comes even in the blind father. "Are you completely blind now?" Kenneth asks, and his father says no, and explains exactly what he can see. No colors, but forms moving, and himself as a spot in the mirror. "I recognized immediately that it was you," he tells his son.

There is an odd, haunting scene of kids bathing in an indoor pool. The opening shot is of a couple dozen kids clustered together at the edge of the pool - no preparation. It's arresting. Then starting with one bolder boy they all lower themselves (not diving) into the water. Then, we see a boy in a wheelchair in the distance. He unlocks himself from being hooked into the wheelchair, slides forward - and flops boldly into the water. Later he's helped out and there's a spot like a wound on one leg. "Use spit, that will disinfect it," says one kid, and a girl licks the wound.

In the main second plot section middle-aged actress Ariane (Maren Eggert) splits with her husband David (Phil Hayes), an anthropologist. There is a little girl (Anaïa Zapp) who hurts her left arm and it's put in a cast by a doctor who asks her if she likes sports. She says she liked football. At the end she is by herself kicking a ball around. Theres appears wearing the same red top and black and white skirt she wore in the first scenes. Kenneth has come to Berlin, and it's raining. They look the same.

What gives? Is Schanelec telescoping time? I could not parse these latter sequences. The early ones between Theres and Kenneth and Kenneth and his father and dying mother are clear and memorable. In a longer piece about the director by Blake Williams in Cinema Scope Online, he calls this "perhaps the freshest and most profoundly emotional film that [Schanelec has] ever made." Vadim Rizov says he ilked Schanelec's earlier Marseilles, and The Dreamed path is "a hilariously severe film, The Marble Index of Bresson-damaged High European Art Cinema, in which Schanelec sort of gives you enough information to get oriented at the start before systematically adding more and more characters and incidents for whom all context has been elided."

The Dreamed Path/Der traumhafte weg, 86 mins., debuted at Locarno 9 Aug. 2016.Seven other international festivals including Toronto, Hamburg, Vancouver, Cologne and Mar del Plata. It was screened for this review as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center-Museum of Modern Art 20117 New Directors/New Films series, Mar. 2017.

ALESSANDRO COMODIN: HAPPY TIMES WILL COME SOON/I TEMPI FELICI VERRANNO PRESTO (2016)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links//phpEc189qAM.jpg
SABRINA SEYVECOU AND ERIKAS SIZONOVAS IN HAPPY TIMES WIIILL COME SOON

Of wolves and men

The Italian film avant-garde may have a penchant for local legends and roughing it on the land. One might see those elements in Micheelangelo Frammartino's much admired Le quattro volte (NYFF 2010) and also in Simone Rapisarda Casanova's The Creation of Meaning (ND/NF 2015)]. The same goes for Alessandro Comodin's Happy Times Will Come Soon/i tempi felici verrranno presto - but this time ingredients are thrown down, but don't fit together. Clarence Tsui puts it politely when he says in his Hollywood Reporter Cannes review that Comodin is "an innovative filmmaker yet to master the art of combining wildly diverse ideas into a cohesive whole."

The elements are a couple of young men hiding out in a forest, a local legend of a wolf that adopted a pretty girl, and a young women in the area who gets lost. There is also digging holes and going down into holes. And narrative logic is regarded lightly. The two young men are Tommaso (Erikas Sizonovas) and Arturo (Luca Bernardi). They trap a rabbit (by digging a hole and perching a big rock over it), find a dead man and take his rifle. Perhaps all this is meant to be happening at an earlier time. It somewhat looks like it - except that the guys are wearing modern day charity shop clothes and good, up-to-date hiking shoes. They play around foolishly with the rifle. With this turn, Comodin tips his hand. We know things won't go well. Tommaso and Arturo are soon surrounded and shot. All this action is staged and filmed in an effectively visceral style. Tommaso and Arturo's exhausting run through wood and hill, followed by a dogged shaky cam, is pure physicality. But the lack of explanation or context limits our engagement.

In a more documentary-style passage, several men recount for the camera versions of a local tale about a wolf that adopted a lost girl and took her away to the woods and protected her. She was however, pale and unhealthy and eventually died, and the wolf pined for her. This storytelling is obviously an inspiration for the film but its literalness disrupts the spell cast by the rough action.

Later we return to the woods and follow Ariane (Sabrina Seyvecou). After riding on a tractor with a pipe-smoking older dude, she sets out on her own and gets lost in the woods. Like the two guys on the run, she also strips and takes a dip in the muddy lake; only she mucks about in the mud; they just dove off a rock.

Then, to our surprise, Ariane finds Tommaso, hiding in a hole. They have sex. Then it looks as if he may have killed her. He winds up in a nice prison - and Ariane comes to visit him. They touch through a separation grill that, final titles say, was constructed for the film and isn't the real one.

In the second half, Tommaso has presumably become the wolf's avatar and Ariane a version of the folk tale girl, but the film's lack of connective tissue leaves these equivalences hanging. After this film's Cannes Critics Fortnight debut Variety ran a review by Guy Lodge where he called it "an elegantly mounted but effortfully cryptic foray into narrative filmmaking. . ."

The film was shot in Cuneo, in the sparsely populated Val d'Aosta, northwestern Italy, where according to the 35-year-old Comodin, there indeed are wolves. Comodin's first feature, the 2011 docudrama Summer with Giacomo, won the Golden Leopard at Locarno.

Happy Times Will Come Soon/I Tempi felici verranno presto, 102 mins., debuted in Critics Week at Cannes; also other festivals including Rio, Vienna, and Rotterdam; at Mexico City it won the Puma Prize for Best Film. Screened for this review as part of the FSLC-MoMA 2017 New Directors/New Films series.

JÚLIA MURAT: PENDULAR (2017)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/iiuuy.jpg

Hazards of cohabitation for an artist couple

Júlia Murat's previous film, the 2011 Found Memories, was a delicate semidocumentary meditation about a fading town and its customs and people. It would be nice to think of her new feature, Pendular as a "huge leap forward," as Mike D'Angelo says he does in his Letterboxd discussion. But to begin with while D'Angelo walked out on Found Memories, I liked it; it's low-keyed, but that's the point: it seemed to me haunting and beautiful.

Pendular certainly is a very different kind of film, a straightforward drama about a heterosexual relationship. Ele (Rodrigo Bolzan), a sculptor, and Ela (Raquel Karro), a dancer/choreographer, are an artistic couple who cohabit a huge live-work space in a semi-derelict industrial building, and while their relationship is sexy and relaxed, it's also by implication and inevitably uneasy and competitive: they work where they live (the spaces never seem to me very clearly defined; it's only half-way through that it's clear they have a bedroom away from the open spaces).

Murat struggles with the old problem of showing us what can't be shown - the creative process. There's an imbalance perhaps because Karro is a "more forceful" screen presence (as D'Angelo says). But aggressiveness isn't the only way of getting our attention. Bolzan holds his own a lot of the time with his sad and gloomy looks. Murat likes to show her dancing, and his sculptures and sculpture-making never really come to life. But that's intentional. He's supposed to be having a dry period or a personal crisis. Maybe he doesn't like that she is always having intimate, touchy-feely dances with a younger male partner. And then, Ele wants to "give" Ela a baby, and she doesn't want one. Maybe it's just pretty obviously not a good idea for two artists to be working in the same open space, especially when they're a couple.

The film goes through meandering and repetitive efforts to show us "artists". This includes the couple's bohemian friends, who periodically get together for mixed games of soccer in a courtyard. The friends aren't developed as characters, except, slightly, the plump man who's the critic "friend" to whom Ele foolishly confides that he doesn't know where in the hell he is going with his new work, and the critic tells him he's going nowhere. Is Ela's dancing going anywhere? There is nothing special to prove that, really, other than the fact of those sexy dances with the young male partner. Would it have been too obvious to show Ele noticing this?

With all the junk and sculptures (though what Ele's style is isn't ever clear except that he works big) and Ela's props for her dances it seems Murat is trying to tell by showing, rather than to act out a narrative. The sculptures show Ele is ineffectual because he's not getting them right, not putting together a body of new, consistent work. The big space that Ela's filling with dancing is a mockery to him, who's stuck. But here's another problem: if it's hard to show creativity, it's even harder to illustrate creative blockage.

I frankly found this movie grating. And as so often with movies about artists it makes one wonder if they know what they're talking about, and they're falling into cliché. This is of course also a war of the sexes, and while frontal nudes scenes show Bolzan is perfectly well endowed, there's no doubt his character is pussy-whipped and D'Angelo is right: lots of passive-aggressive stuff is going on. Pendular is flailing, and lacks economy.

Pendular, 108 mins, debuted at the Berlinale, where it won the FIPRESCI Award for the best film in the Panorama section. Screened for this review as part of the 2017 FSLC/MoMA series, New Directors/New Films.
Showtimes Walter Reade Theater 24 Mar. 6:30 p.m.; MoMA 26 Mar. 6:45 p.m.

CHLOÉ ROBICHAUD: BOUNDARIES/PAYS (2016)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/ooipp.jpg
MACHA GRENON IN BOUNDARIES/PAYS

French Canadian women-in-politics film is dutiful, a bit flat

Chloé Robichaud, a French Canadian filmmaker, wants to show us women in politics. In her film Pays ("Countries"), called Boundaries in English, the focus is on three women at a conference about a mining contract involving Canada and a fictitious nearby island country called Besco. The women are: Danielle Richard (Macha Grenon), Besco's distinguished-looking woman president; Emily Price (Emily VanCamp of the Captain America movies), an impressive and cute blonde bilingual moderator; and Félixe (Nathalie Doummar), a promising and - in her case especially important - pretty young intern with the Canadian ministry, who's just helped manage a successful political campaign.

The men are shits, terrorists, or sex partners. The shits are the high government officials and the fat lobbyist who try to force Besco to accept the mining company and its crooked, polluting ways because the country needs the jobs and money the mining will bring. The terrorist is a rural nationalist and anti-vegetarian who momentarily paralyzes everyone near the film's end. The sex partner is primarily Vincent (Alexandre Landry), a tall, fit young member of the bargaining team who, on a drunken night, Félixe takes to bed. The women do their power things and also women things. Félixe's woman thing is to get laid (and sick drunk); the lady president's is to have to tend to a young daughter who gets a broken leg; and Emily Price has it the toughest: she must cope with a soon-to-be ex who's negotiating to get total custody of her adorable little long-haired blond son.

We are told at the end that Danielle Richard's effort to exclude the mining corporation and develop a mining coop à la Brazil was successful, and she was reelected; Félixe went into independent charitable work and was successful; and Emily became part of a global team doing good things and was successful. Nice outcomes, but a little bit generic, to put it mildly.

Pays is neatly constructed, taking place during only a few days. And the austere, pristine locations of St. John's in Newfoundland and Fogo Island, Labrador that stand in for Besco are beautiful. But as Stephan Dalton politely points out in his Toronto Hollywood Reporter review, this movie is "an interesting idea let down by lukewarm execution." It's "underpowered and unfocused," and "not the strong sophomore film it might have been."

The political negotiation sessions are sometimes downright boring: you so much wish, particularly in depicting the stuffy and boorish males, that Robichaud had not written this to be so much by-the-numbers - that she had ramped up the humor and the excitement. She could have tweaked the plot to make those negotiations really intense and suspenseful like the recent Wall Street films - one of which, Meera Menon's Equity, like J.C.Chandor's great Crash film Margin Call (ND/NF 2011), is a smart intense step-by-step thriller - but in the case of Equity, has women as its main characters. Boundaries is (mostly) watchable, but it lacks the pizzaz, wit, and smarts a subject like this has got to have to make a good movie. Interesting to watch French Canadians operating 95% in French in a story like this, though.

Boundaries/Pays, 100 mins., debuted at Toronto; it failed to get into Cannes in rough cut form, Dalton reports. Screened for this review as part of the 2017 Film Society of Lincoln Center-Museum of Modern Art joint series, New Directors/New Films.

ELIZA HITTMAN: BEACH RATS (2017)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/olmn.jpg
HARRIS DICKINSON AND NICOLE FLYUS IN BEACH RATS

(NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS 2017 CENTERPIECE FILM)

A double life

In Eliza Hittman's Beach Rats, the main character, Frankie (the excellent young English actor Harris Dickinson) is largely a blank, to himself and us. But the film is precipitous and intense and Dickinson has a powerful physicality. To the gay men he approaches online, he is a delicious young hunk - tall, well-muscled, with emphatic pecs, a tapered torso, and a pretty, fresh, choirboy face. Frankie is in every scene, and Hélène Louvart's 16 mm. photography is up so close you'd see his pores, if his skin wasn't so smooth and perfect. This movie is skin-deep, but it's risky and vivid. It made me think of Patrice Chéreau's L'Homme blessé, Jean-Hugues Anglade's searing debut. Before the days of the Internet and a long, long way from Coney Island where Frankie hangs out with his posse, Anglade's Henri rushes out of his lower middle class parents' dreary apartment and over to the train station to find sex, and he never goes back. His newly discovered homosexuality explodes in his face and almost destroys him and it sweeps us away. There's something of that here, but none of the wonderful lurid, operatic poetry of Chéreau's iconic film. Hittman achieves a vérité sesuality and depicts a troubling, druggy confusion. Frankie is as ready to take risks as Henri. But he isn't committing himself the same way, and this movie doesn't have the mythic power of L'Homme blessé.

For one thing, there is Frankie's mother, Donna (Kate Hodge), who reigns at home, though she does not know what he's up to. His father is in hospice care dying of cancer (an event dutifully sketched in) - providing opioids for Frankie, who is doing a lot of drugs with his straight buddies. The members of this posse are not differentiated except visually but they are his constant companions, to whom he plays straight. He lives the beginnings of a double life. (How long has this been going on? We don't know, and one of the weaknesses of this in-the-moment approach is he has no background, no psyche, really.) Frankie stages a whole dating game with a girl (Nicole Flyus) to put up a front for them and for home and perhaps for himself. Chéreau's Henri never has these possibilities. Like Frankie, this movie has everything to offer and nothing to give; it's drenched in atmosphere and short on story. It is, however, of this moment, particularly as to the online video sex connections. In the short time covered in the movie, Frankie begins, and makes sex connections. All of a sudden he is moving fast and entering danger and risk.

Season 3 of the global hit Norwegian teen TV series "SKAM," focuses on Isak (Tarjei Sandvik Moe), a cute, popular 17-year-old Oslo high school student who's discovering, or finally admitting, that he's gay; he too goes online to gay sites, but doesn't connect to anybody. He has something better, an upperclassman who's interested in him. When he and Even have "a thing," he reluctantly, piecemeal, comes out to his posse of three straight guys. (They're not macho and generic, like Frankie's pals. One is black, and one is a virgin; the previous season was all about the third.) They're okay with it, and even give him tips on how to make sure Even treats him fairly. "SKAM" director Julie Andem has fashioned an iconic gay coming of age story with all the nuance and humor lacking here, and a positive outcome. The sad thing is that Frankie lies to everybody, including his buddies, making up a drug story to explain connecting with gay guys. How long would they believe that? We don't know, because Beach Rats stops up in the air, with Frankie staring into the sky, filled with fireworks. This is an easy, weak ending that betrays the limitations of Hittman's bold and able film. It's almost as if Beach Rats ends where L'Homme blessé begins. Beach Rats is compelling and intense, and yet is seems almost more the idea for a movie than a movie

Beach Rats, 95 mins., debuted at Sundance, and is included in New Directors/New Films (the Film Society of Lincoln Center-Museum of Modern Art series) in which it's the Centerpiece Film. A Neon release.
Fri., Mar. 17 6:45 Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center
Sat. Mar. 18 6:30 Titus Theater, MoMA.

WILLIAM OLDROYD: LADY MACBETH (2016)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/plmm.jpg
FLORENCE PUGH IN LADY MACBETH

A wild young lass

William Oldroyd's elegant, arresting and economical film is based on an 1865 Russian novella, Nikolai Lescov's Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, whose strong links with Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, Lady Chatterley, and other rebellious women make it eternally contemporary. (Lady Macbeth explains the extra gore.) In its new English setting it seems quite strange. But how could it not, in any setting, since it depicts a young woman who has a raging affair with her husband's groom while he's away, poisons her father-in-law, then bludgeons her husband to death, smothers his young ward, and pins the murder on the groom and a woman servant? But such is its boldness of execution and the adeptness of the actors, especially the spirited 21-year-old Florence Pugh, we simply watch with astonishment, amusement, then horror.

There is a new strain of color introduced into this version of the story. Anna (Naomi Ackie), who's the personal maid to Katherine (Florence Pugh), is black; the groom who's beaten by her husband, Sebastian (songwriter Cosmo Jarvis), looks mestizo, and her husband Alexander (Paul Hilton) turns out to have fathered a black child, Teddy (Anton Palmer). This helps to give the story a contemporary edge. The fact that events aren't quite period-appropriate is a strength, causing us to take everything on its own unique merits. The source, like the German 19th-century novel used as the source for the musical Spring Awakening, was lurid and radical to begin with. It also was the basis for an opera that got Shostakovich into trouble with the Soviets, and has had other treatments on film and TV.

Much depends on Florence Pugh, and the simple, attractive staging of the action, which was shot (on a relatively tight budget) at an estate in rugged Northumberland (with the cast deftly mimicking the local brogue). The house is austere yet grand, with lovely wild views out the big windows, and seems filled exclusively with big Victorian furniture that fits the cruelty and distance of young Katherine's husband, whose sex habits are creepy and dried up. Katherine is pressed to stay indoors, but constantly lured to walks in the rugged meadows and hillsides: there's a pull between the solid, often symmetrical framing of indoor shots and the fluid, shaky cam shooting of the external wilds. We see Anna strap Katherine into girdles and braces and undo them, showing how she's both controlled and unbridled. This movie is buttoned up and in control of itself too, but in close touch with madness and sensuality. By letting the house and the outer landscape speak for themselves, first time filmmaker and theatrical veteran Oldroyd keeps things fresh and distinctive-feeling.

Oldroyd and his cast have plenty of action to keep our attention and the forward thrust is constant. This version leaves the wrongdoing unpunished, adding a provocative modern note. After it's all over you may need some time to get your mind around what you've seen. There is a recurring image of Katherine sitting on a sofa, in various full-dress outfits, staring directly into the camera, as if taking stock, and letting us see what further stage of outrageousness she has reached. This is the one essential moment when the action stops for breath. Pugh keeps her character's enormous capacity for revolt and violence just below the surface most of the time in a performance that shows the beginnings of a star. In its way Lady Macbeth is really quite exhilarating.

Lady Macbeth, 89 mins., debuted at Toronto Sept. 2016, playing in at least 17 other international festivals including San Sebastian, Zurich, London and Sundance. Screened for this review as part of the 2017 New Directors/New Films.

June 6: NYC, LA releases scheduled for July 14, 2017.

JOHANNES NYHOLM: THE GIANT (2016)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/PQHC.jpg
CHRISTIAN ANDREN IN THE GIANT

This freak's too normal

This freak's if not cuddly, at least pleasant, and that explains more or less the limits of what the Swedish director Johannes Nyholm is out to do. Be it noted that the tiny, severely deformed, perhaps autistic, at least inarticulate Rykard is an actor (Christian Andren), and the tumors that swell one side of his face and blot out one eye are prosthetic, not real. Rykard, who has fantasies of lurid landscapes that he strides like a colossus (hence the title), is a devotee of the southern French version of boules called pétanque; there's a local Swedish pétanque club to which he belongs and there are international competitions. Rykard and his best friend in the pétanque club, Roland (Johan Kylén, a benign but not particularly notable presence) team up on their own calling their team "Zughi," one of the only words, besides "Mom," that Rykard can say, and Zughi goes to the international (Nordic) pétanque competition, and do well. This makes The Giant one of the year's weirdest underdog sports movies - but not one that is likely to play well outside the festival circuit. This is a good-natured movie. But it might creep people out, and might not please disability advocates given its falsifying and cutesifying of its disabled lead character. When you see Rykard up close, he smiles quite a lot, and the parts of his face you can see seem like an ordinary person.

Rykard gets hit in the head with a pétanque ball and goes to the hospital. This is where a doctor shows him off to medical students as an odd case, and we learn that his birth led his mother to go from neurotic to psychotic. We see her from time to time, living in a bright but cluttered mess of a house with a large white parrot's that's often loose, with a raft of pétaque trophies Rykard has won - but for some reason mother and son are estranged and only meet briefly and sadly. Yet besides living for pétanque, Rykard lives for his mother, and carries a wallet-sized photo of her with him at all times.

Rykard lives in a care center for down syndrome and other mentally disabled people where he is given a magnificent thirtieth birthday party. He is insulted and belittled from time to time, but is in a loving environment. The Giant is not sad. It is also not real. The climactic Pétanque tournament is perhaps the most memorable part of the movie, but it's not the most original. One might like to have seen this, or a richer variation on it, as filmed by Nyholm's more talented and more original fellow Swede Roy Andersson. This movie is nice, and harmless, but somehow wrong.

Variety review at Toronto by Nick Schrager: "While unique, this lumbering crossbreed never truly gains melodramatic traction, and beyond festival bookings in Toronto and San Sebastian, seems unlikely to get very far outside its homeland." John DeFore on Hollywood Reporter said "An oddly delicate fable in which heartbreaking scenes of rejection sit alongside easy laughter."

The Giant/Jätten, 86 mins., debuted at Toronto Sept. 2016, playing in at least 11 other festivals including San Sebastian, Vancouver, Busan, London and Warsaw. Screened for this review as part of the 2017 iteration of the Film Society of Lincoln Center-Museum of Modern Art series, New Directors/New Films.

DUSTIN GUY DEFA: PERSON TO PERSON (2017)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/ijy.jpg
MICHAEL CERA, ABBI JACOBSON IN PERSON TO PERSON

Several short films don't make a long film

This seems like an odd corruption of Mumblecore: the same kind of minor topics and low-keyed acting - but no mumbling. And strangely, we miss that, because Mummblecore's quirky naturalism is lacking, really, and the plots are artificially crisp and neatly resolved, if not particularly interesting. Philip Baker Hall, Abbi Jacobson and Michael Cera add recognizable faces.

The main plots, if you can call them that, are a possible murder covered by two New York Post reporters, or a reporter with a camera (Michael Cera) and an intern (Abbi Jacobson) who he's hoping to date as a result of impressing her; and a vinyl record scam suffered by a guy (Bene Coopersmith) who thinks he's found a rare Charlie Parker disc but discovers it's a reprint with a fake label. A subplot offshoot is Bene's depressed black friend who has fatally alienated his girlfriend by posting nude shots of her on Facebook as revenge for her sleeping with another guy. The possible murder was reported as a suicide by the dead person's wife. She has taken her husband's wrist watch to be repaired. Philip Baker Hall is the watch repairman, who refuses to speak to police or to the journalists.

It must be admitted that Defa has exercised a certain amount of ingenuity in constructing and resolving these stories. But while their separate unreeling alternates through the film, the journalists' story and the vinyl record scam story do not connect, except everything takes place in New York City.

I almost forgot my favorite character, Wendy (Tavi Gevinson), a preternaturally articulate young woman with a prettier, more outgoing best friend. Wendy may be a lesbian, or has simply not tried men, though she starts trying in one scene. Gevinson is the opposite extreme from Mumblcore (though actors in Mumblecore weren't really so inarticulate, very often, as the name implied): she talks like an earnest, punkish version of a Jane Austen character - or someone in Whit Stillman's Metropolitan. If only everyone talked like her, we could dispense with all this running around, which in the case of Bene is carried to an untoward extreme. Bene chases and beats up the man who cheated him, and dresses down the record dealer who said this man was probably okay. This story line, of two young women, the boyfriend of one, and the boy who might like to become Wendy's boyfriend, is reasonable material for a rom-com. Perhaps that could be incorporated with the lovelorn Facebook poster's débâcle.

The murder story probably is beyond the filmmaker's powers to develop on a full scale.

The vinyl record scam is too trivial for anything but a short film. Defa is moving up from shorts to a feature film here, not with total success. Each subplot is handled with adequate detail, but the combination is underwhelming.

Reviewed in Hollywood Reporter by John DeFore in the Next section of Sundance, and at the same screening by Dennis Harvey for Variety. Both acknowledged Defa's evocation of indie films of an earlier time. DeFore seemed to find the effort appealing, its use of Kodak film the equivalent to the story's implied celebration of the "warmer" sound of the older technology of vinyl records. But Harvey found the film not just small scale but "just too damned little," and a "familiar brand of shaggy-comedy-with-pathos that has very little edge." This is true. Defa takes up our time with these details and provides no overriding takeaway. (By the way, Defa has done a lot of acting and is very appealing in that role, as is shown in his performance as the TV producer in Caveh Zahedi's new feature about a TV series, The Show About the Show.)

Person to Person, 84 mins. was screened for this review as part of the 2017 iteration of the FSLC-MoMA series New Directors/New Films, for which it was selected to be the Closing Night Film.

JONATHAN OLSHEFSKI: QUEST (2017)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/yegv.jpg
PATRICIA ("PJ"), CHRISTINE'A AND CHRISTOPHER ("QUEST") RAINEY IN QUEST

The saga of a wonderful African American family in North Philly

A multiple-year documentary following a black family, the Raineys, in North Philadelphia who face poverty, hard work, and the violence of the neighborhood with inspiring spirit and courage. The father is the youthful and hip-seeming Christopher Rainey ("Quest"), who works at several jobs delivering papers and circulars to support his family as best he can and keep open his recording studio showcasing local rap artists. The matriarch, also youthful, is Christopher's wife Christine'a, who works at a day job at a homeless shelter and supports the family. She and Christopher look to have a great relationship, and it's gone on for twenty years or more. The filmmaker has described the Rainey family in an interview in Indiewire as "community builders."

The events focus is on their two children. The older son, William, is found to have a cancerous tumor just after a baby boy is born to him. He survives to be a good dad to his beautiful little boy, Isaiah. William's 13-year-old sister is PJ, the Raineys' daughter, a lively, cheerful, independent girl who spends a lot of her time on the basketball court, who is struck by a stray bullet from a far-off gunfight and loses an eye. Thanks to PJ's pluck and the warmth of her parents, she deals with this trauma, and even can still shoot hoops. In time it comes out that PJ is gay. Her parents have trouble dealing with this and "blame" each other or themselves for this happening, as if it was a choice. Olshefski began as a still photographer, not a filmmaker, planning to do a photo series about Quest, the recording studio, and the local rap artists who come there. Then he stayed and became "like a piece of furniture," filming the life of the Rainey family. The family members, and at times the neighborhood, gives themselves to Olshefski's camera and mike, serving as their own articulate narrators.

Much of the action Olsevski shot happens during the time of Barack Obama's presidency and a little more. And the Rainey parents help get people to vote, and posters and portraits in local places remind white viewers what a very special thing it was to have a black president with wife and daughters to match, in the White House, for the past eight years. But Olshefski downplays the timeline and politics: here the issues are local and the support is communal, while the problems are such as urban poor and black America faces all over the country. Price, Christoper and Quest's most promising rapper, develops an alcohol problem that keeps him from achieving his potential. Christopher also contributes to a local radio program, and PJ plays in the Quest house band for a while. It's in the nature of the Raineys that they are creative, interactive, and contributors to the community in multiple ways. Their lives and this documentary film are inspiring. Olshevski hopes that his film will inspire others to follow such communities and give back.

Quest, 105 mins., debuted at Sundance 21 Jan. 2017; will play at Cleveland; was screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films.

DAVY CHOU: DIAMOND ISLAND (2016)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/pqjd.jpg

A dreamy slow epic coming-of-age of a country boy in Pnom Penh

Diamond Island is a Cambodian coming-of-age film focused on a young man from the country who comes to a place outside Pnom Penh to work in construction on the titular big new luxury housing development. Buddies, girls, the appearance of his lost older brother figure. A very visual film, full of night lights, fluorescent neon-pastel colors, and pretty faces: considerable formal beauty, a hypnotic mood. Though it can feel a bit static at times, almost like Kabuki theater, this film features what is at once a very distinctive and personal style and moments that may bring to mind Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Jia Zhang-ke. Davy Chou, the filmmaker, is Cambodian-French, and the production has heavy French involvement.

The protagonist is Bora (Sobon Nuon), a handsome young guy from the provinces who says goodbye to his sick mother and comes to work on a new overblown resort center called Diamond Island. He falls in with three other guys including the punkish Dy (Mean Korn). Near the site are some girls, including the perfectly pretty Aza (Madez Chhem), who takes an interest in him, though he holds back at first.

Sometimes conversations are hieratic and formal, with two characters standing at some distance and addressing each other slowly, underlining the film's intentionally deliberate pace and sometimes dreamlike feel (and there are dreams, too), perhaps also to show their subservience to the encroaching urban landscape. This use of space is the case when Bora's older brother Solei (Cheanick Nov) mysteriously appears, standing in the semi-darkness. They have not met for five years and Solei is out of touch with their family. Solei has long hair tied back and is dressed in black and is taller and has a nice motorcycle, money, and his own older posse of cooler, more distant guys and their girls and bikes. His wealth is due to his American "sponsor," presumably gay lover, though this is never explained, presumably not understood by the provincial, naive Bora. Boys and girls barely even kiss, and much of the action takes place outdoors, and at night, in glowing, romantic light. Beautiful glowing urban landscapes show partly unfinished buildings.

This film is all about the images and the dreamlike, hypnotic movement of the leisurely action. One of the key events is a non-event: the news that Solei's "sponsor" will not be taking them to America, and that Solei will not keep his promise of seeing their mother again. It is all sad and frustrating except that feelings are muted too, sorrow of loss reduced to a funeral seen from a distance. A slight flash-forward shows Bora doing well working in a non-labor job and looking "cool," as one of his work site pals, now a security guard, insists.

The mincing sound of Cambodian and Thai speech and the delicacy of the young men makes one expect the handsome Bora, on whose face the camera is wont to dwell, to be part of a gay coming-of-age story, a possibility that Solei's "sponsor" hints of too. But this is averted, if it was ever there. No, Bora is ostensibly straight, but sexuality is refined and neutralized in this aestheticized world.

Jordan Minzer's Hollywood Reporter reivew sees links with Satyajit Ray’s Aparajito (for the country-to-city plot) and Tsai Ming-liang's Rebels of the Neon God, the latter obviously faster paced and more intimate in feel. He connects images of the motorcycle riders in Rebels with some beautiful shots of boys on their bikes at night seen from above here. Solei's bike has blue lights on it that glow. Minzer notes that DP Thomas Favel (Gaz de France), whose importance to Chou might be compared to that of Christopher Doyle to early Wong Kar-wai, helps the filmmaker develop "a rich palette of blues and yellows,contrasting the dusty [yellow] world of condo construction with the candy-colored [blue and pink] nightclubs and amusement parks that Bora frequents as he emerges into adulthood."

Catherine Bray in her Variety review naturally talks about the visuals too, noting the color grading pushes some scenes, particularly of a fairground, to "wildly saturated fluorescence." She also notes an original stylized aspect to the sound, so that in a nightclub "noise and music" are "mixed low and the dialogue delivered in a whisper, a counterintuitive effect given the typical club-scene reality of having to shout at people only a few inches away."

Not everything is successful, and the non-professional actors sometimes seem clumsy. But Chou sets a certain standard for stylishness in such a films. This is film as aesthetic ritual. Even as the young men and construction site action has a vérité naturalism, it is often stilled to beautiful static tableaux.

Diamond Island, 101 mins., debuted at Cannes Critics Week. It opened in French cinemas 28 Dec. 2016 and received enthusiastic reviews (AlloCiné press rating 3.8/5 based on 24 reviews). Screened for this review as part of the 2017 FSLC-MoMA New Directors/New Films series.

ALA EDDINE SLIM: THE LAST OF US/AHKER WAHED FINA (2016)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/ttff.jpg
JAWHAR SOUDANI IN THE LAST OF US

A conceptual Robinson Crusoe film that plays with the hot issue of immigration

This is a Tunisian film shot in Tunisia. It's spoken of as an immigration film. The film's own website says, "N is a young sub-Saharan man who crosses the desert in order to reach North Africa and be smuggled into Europe." But this is, as it progresses, more and more a myth with surreal, primal elements. The film website states that N "meets an altered image of himself." A lot of this film's early section feels like something Claire Denis might do - till it turns into a apocalyptic kind of Robinson Crusoe story in which the Robinson follows an ancient gnarly Friday around and takes on his role of old stancher and lone survivor - the meaning presumably of the title, The Last of Us. Props to Jawhar Soudani, who plays N, who carries the film as its protagonist, providing a sympathetic and strong presence even though he never utters a word. The Last of Us is a haunting and beautifully photographed film whose acting is impeccable and tech credits are excellent. There are several haunting landscape images worthy of Carlos Reygadas' Post Tenebras Lux.

This is a case where the festival blurb is pretty nearly perfectly accurate. Indeed two men silently traverse a vast, flat landscape. Nobody speaks, from beginning to end of the film. The two men get in the back of aa smuggler's truck, and soon after are caught in a holdup by men with guns. Only one of the men appears to escape from this melee, and we follow him for the saga that follows. He hides out near the sea for a long time, surviving on scraps, and then steals an outboard motor and attaches it to a rough derelict old boat. He sets out across the sea, but where he lands we do not know.

When lost in the heavily forested landscape, N falls into a trap and is severely wounded in one leg. He suffers the torture of the damned and it looks as thought this is the end. But a rope is thrown to him, and when he is passed out, his wound is treated with natural remedies. When he awakes he sees the large, ancient M (Fathi Akkari), a wild hermit draped in many layers of animal skins. As N heals, he follows M and depends on him. They live largely on small animals they cook. N starts to put on skins like M and his hair and beard grow out and he begins to resemble his dominant Man Friday.

The Last of Us is a beautifully made feature debut that resembles what might be a student short film in its material. It is worthy of close festival attention but would seem to have limited theatrical release potential. Ala Eddine Slim has a background in documentaries and shorts.

The Last of Us/آخر واحد فينا (Akher Wahed Fina), 95 mins., debuted Sept. 2016 at Venice International Critics Week, where it won the Luigi De Laurentiis Award for Best Debut Film. The Paris-based Still Moving acquired world sales rights to the film at Venice. Also shown at Rotterdam, Lyon, and New Directors/New Films (Mar. 201); it was screened as part of the latter for this review.

Here is the trailer.

JOHN TRENGOVE: THE WOUND/INXEBA (2017)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/ikdc.jpg
NAKHANE TOURÉ, NIZa JAY NCOYINI (FROM LEFT) IN THE WOUND

A striking if unbalanced directorial debut tackles powerful material

This movie has powerful material and a strong authentic feel to its setting of a Xhosa manhood ritual for adolescent boys taking place in a mountainous corner of the Eastern Cape of South Africa. However, director John Trengove goes astray in various ways. The theme of the two older "caregivers" who are secretly gay is not revealed gradually as it ought to be, but in our face early on, and the theme is hit over and over repetitiously. Meanwhile the Xhosa ritual is inadequately presented, when it ought to provide the strong solid underpinning for the story. However, Trengove is a promising director from South Africa with an MFA in filmmaking from NYU who already has ten years of experience in Theater and TV, and his shooting method in this feature debut is intense and engaging, if (perhaps willfully) chaotic.

The main characters are three: first the "rich" boy from the city of Johannesburg, Kwanda (Niza Jay Ncoyini); the sensitive factory worker Xolani (musician Nakhane Touré); and the more macho, married Vija (Bongile Mantsai), whom Xolani seems to be in love with. The other initiate boys barely emerge as individuals, or do the various elders and villagers. Kwanda's uncle sends him off to this event, thinking he's too soft. He may be, but he's also contemptuous of the whole thing.

And when Xolani is put in charge of Kwanda as his "caregiver," Kwanda soon guesses he is gay and senses his relationship to Vija and even warns him Vija will never really care about him. It's not clear how Kwanda knows all this. Perhaps his sexuality is similar and it's "gaydar"? However, the other young initiates' feelings toward Kwanda are differently motivated. They resent him for being a city boy and a rich boy.

The most interesting thing is that Kwanda isn't as macho perhaps as the other youths, yet is bold in setting himself apart from them. But his unwillingness to fully play along with the rituals is a risky move in this environment that will have dire consequences.

[I]The Wound/Inxeba[/I, 88 mins., debuted at Sundance Jan. 2017, and will be theatrically released in France 15 Apr. 2017. It was screened as part of the 2017 FSLC-MoMA New Directors/New Films series. To be a Kino Lorber release in the US. Releasing in France 19 Apr. 2017 as Les Initiés.

MEHMET CAN MERTLGLU: ALBÜM (2016)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/jjhk.jpg

Pointlessly elaborate subterfuges

What's clear is that this Turkish film owes something to the unpleasant bureaucracy and unpleasant people of the modern Rumanian cinema, and director-writer Mehmet Can Mertoğlu has even engaged Marius Panduru, the dp for Cornelieu Porumboliu's Police, Adjective’s to shoot the deeply drab 35mm. images. But while Mertoğlu has an unusual and strange subject, he has lost a sensible focus right from the first - a prelude about a cow giving birth and in vitro fertilization. It would have been better to get to the couple right away and stick to a clearcut tone. Is this social satire or something more surreal? Are we supposed to hate this couple or feel sorry or laugh?

When we meet Bahar (Şebnem Bozoklu), an employee in the government tax office and her husband, Cüneyt (Murat Kilic), a high school history teacher, everyone else in her offices is asleep with their head on the desk, and Cüneyt sits at his desk while his history class is preposterously disorderly, an obviously fake staging. This is bizarre. But what does it mean?

It is also clear that this couple can't have a baby, and this is shameful in Turkish culture, so they are carefully faking it. Bahar is wearing a fake pregnant stomach, and Cüneyt is constantly shooting her at the beach, at home, at a doctor's, later at a hospital, to assemble a "pregnancy album."

They won't take the first child offered, a girl they think is too dark, Syrian, Kurdish, and boyish looking. They move from the city of Antalya to distant Kayseri where later they get a boy, as they wanted. But they seem to find him merely an annoyance. He doesn't seem to sleep, but there's nothing wrong with him.

A relative, the orphanage director, every bureaucratic person they meet, is indifferent to his job, foul-mouthed, unfocused - more interested in football and mean to subordinates. The second orphanage director is still playing an online card game when the couple is already in his office. Is this meant to be funny? Or is it, again, a critique of Turkish society today?

Finally the couple is brought more brusquely into contact with authorities when a burglar (in their 11th floor apartment!) escapes by jumping out the window. Cüneyt, who by the way has a strictly well-behaved class now, as far in the other extreme, at his new Kayseri assignment, is forced to spend overnight at the police station because he's the last person who saw the burglar. From this foulmouthed and rude police chief he learns that they have all the couple's facts, including that they recently adopted a baby. They now know their relatives will find out. Nonetheless they start thinking of another reassignment, but obviously two in one year isn't possible, and the option that comes up is Chad - or Djibouti, but Cüneyt has heard things aren't too stable there.

There is a funny movie buried here - of a couple obsessed by appearances and incapable of becoming appropriate parents. A mainstream comedy would have them won over by the cute baby. In a darker comedy they'd just remain bad parents. But Mertoğlu is distracted by too much material that hopelessly muddles things. This film debuted at Critics Week at Cannes and won multiple nominations and some awards at various festivals, but it hasn't any chance of appealing to theatrical audiences.

Albüm, 105 mins., amazingly has shown at over thirty festivals, though mostly relatively obscure ones, after Cannes (where Boyd van Hoeij in Hollywood Reporter was no more pleased than I was by this mysterious and scattershot effort). I think this is one of these cases when a film gets passed from one festival to another without anyone looking beyond the enthusiastic festival blurb. I notice that the ND/NF one has confused the husband and wife's occupations: whoever wrote it doubtless had not seen the film. Screened for this review as part of the Mar. 2017 New Directors/New Films series.