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New York Film Festival 2023
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MENUS PLAISIRS-LES TROIGROOS (Frederick Wiseman)
FREDERICK WISEMAN: MENUS PLASIRS-LES TROIGROS (2023)
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CHEESE RIPENING PLANT SHOWN IN MENUS PLASIRS-LES TROIGROS
A great French restaurant gets the Wiseman treatment
The meticulous observational documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman has lived in France lately, and since the nineties made films in France - where it turns out he developed a connection living for two years when quite young, after military service. Is he, in his early nineties, going to defect, like Eugène Green? The most memorable Americans who appear in this four-hour film about the legendary three-star Michelin restaurant Maison Troigros in Roanne, near Lyon, are an absurdly pretentious group of youngish men holding forth about wine with adjectives the French don't use.
But there is no rancor here, and this is a quietly admiring portrait of a social institution one can't but admire: in French there is a saying, "À bien manger, le sage met sa gloire." Roughly, it means, For the wise man, eating well is a big deal." Eating chez Troigros, or any restaurant like that, which will set you back in the vicinity of four hundred dollars per person per meal, not counting wine or the fee for a room at the posh adjoining inn, is a very big deal. But eating is also one of the most fundamental human pleasures. At best, eating at such a place is a wonderful experience, worth the time, attention, and financial outlay. The presence of many return customers is evidence of this. But it is also a great luxury, an outrageous self-indulgence. Such restaurants are very costly and labor-intensive to run; the bill is not actually a ripoff. I at least however, toward the end of the four hours, began to long for a hot dog, in a crisp roll, with a dash of mustard, and a Coke. You may remember that the way high-end dining can tilt toward the absurd, even the nightmarish, was exploited in Mark Mylood's recent feature The Menu.
This is, naturally, being from Wiseman, an intensive account of its subject, to the point at times even of being a bit repetitive. "Menus Plaisirs" means "small pleasures" but also was the rather ironic name for a department of service to the French king in the ancien régime, besides punning on "menu" (not the French word for that, which is "carte.") This reminds one of an earlier documentary about a similarly elite and fanatical and impressive French Michelin starred restaurant, Paul Lacoste's 2011 Entre les Bras, also a punning title, since it refers to passing on control of the establishment but also to the name of the family, Bras. (The English title achieved a pun too with Step Up to the Plate.)
Lacoste's film is austere, but more focused. It defines the plant-based focus of the dishes, focused on fresh herbs and edible flowers, and also delves in depth into the personalities of the father and son chefs and carefully details the difficult process of passing on responsibility for running the Bras restaurant - almost like pulling teeth. There is a hint of that, but only a hint, when Michel Troigros, the father and current scion of the restaurant here, tells a customer, a retired vigneron who has completely turned over independent control of his winery to his sons, that he doesn't find it so easy to do that, even though one son is officially in charge of the kitchen.
Like Lacoste's film, this one begins with buying fresh food in the local market. It is a truism that the quality of what goes on the plate of a restaurant begins with the local, seasonal freshness of ingredients. The film then focuses on many aspects of the restaurant. A lot of time is spent on such things as briefing servers on the day's menu; the importance of draining the blood from brains before cooking; creating new dishes and debating their combination of ingredients and sauces; the somelier's discussion of new wine stock, presold bottles for up to 15,000 euros, very high prices of even recent vintages for prestigious labels; coaching staff to treat other employees more fairly and equally and avoid teasing and using mocking names; the open design of the kitchen (a very interesting aspect), which Michel says means César, his son, can therefore control activity without shouting, because everyone is in sight.
An engrossing side issue is the suppliers. There are informational meetings with several livestock farmers who explain their natural and earth-preserving methods, free of fertilizer and pesticides. For me the most surprising digression is a visit to a cheese-ripening center. Who knew that many of the famous (and not so known) cheeses of France, soft and hard, large and small, offered on a big cart to diners, are skillfully ripened not at home where produced, but in this hand work factory where they are washed, scraped, chilled, and moved about to the exact point when they need to be sold.
The cheese ripening plant is an enlightenment, but departs from Wiseman's "fly on the wall" style, since we are simply following around a man providing a tour of the place. Wiseman's own editing of the sometimes jumpy camerawork of James Bishop, which gives a vérité effect, leads us from one sequence to the next, hypnotically. This is a talky film, relying very much on explanatory scenes. And yet its best moments are wordless. We are inspired and informed by the sight of the deft, graceful manipulation of tools, the flipping of meat in pans, the folding and smoothing out of sauces, the wordless tap on pieces of meat to assess their consistency. This is where we see how much all this is done carefully by hand, and where cooking enthusiasts and pros may learn things even Escoffier and Larousse Gastronomique, may not cover.
Something that seems new (or risen to a new extreme) is more elaborate catering to whims and needs of diners, whose allergies, intolerances, and preferences are gone into in tireless detail. Hours before the meal, the servers are briefed oh customers, which tables they will be at and which servers will be assigned to them, and all those special needs. This may seem an odd development in a world where the chefs are famous and thought to call the shots. The Triogros family were influential in the development of the "nouvelle cuisine" movement starting in the sixties which revolutionized French cooking style. Now however it seems they must rearrange deserts because someone doesn't like cream, and these special requirements seem to be very numerous indeed. One customer, more down to earth, declares the only thing he's allergic to is the bill.
Something old fashioned that emerges is how male-dominated this whole scene is. Women are there, but very under-represented in key kitchen positions. Mostly they are seen serving at table or making up rooms of the inn (which Michel's daughter, however, runs). Conversations between Michel and customers are man-to-man; any women customers are observers, or just put in a word here and there as the men do the talking. But they talk politely. We see a strong hand, but no tyranny, abuse of underlings or substance, no tirades. Everyone is dedicatedly at work. Professionalism reigns, which is impressive, and suits Wildman's focus on social organisms. But only Michel Troisgros gets enough attention to seem colorful, eating too much of a new dish while repeating the same thing over and over, striving to explain his ideas to American customers and finding his English falls short of the task.
That key fact about Troigros and nouvelle cuisine you will find if you look up the restaurant elsewhere. You will not get it from Wiseman's film. He relies rather heavily here on people explaining things - the farmers describing their methods, the tour guide in the cheese ripening plant, Michel Troigros talking about himself and his sons to customers. It's through the latter that we learn the main current restaurant, known as Le Bois sans feuilles (The Wood Without Leaves), dates only from six years ago, and is in the country, replacing the old one in town - a big shift in style, look, and experience. The look of the new place, more casual than formerly, without white linen, with big windows opening up to landscape and grazing animals, resembles that of the Bras family, and may show its influence.
Watching this film after Paul Lacoste's one can see that Troigros is more "conventional" in serving up lots of meat and fish of many varieties. We learn it departs from old style French cooking in such things as Japanese influence (pioneers in that, Michel Troigros says), use of hot spices and passion fruit. But what distinguishes the Troigros style doesn't emerge. This is a film that has a lot to give us, but still leaves us hungry - as fancy restaurants themselves do.
Menus Plaisirs-Les Troigros, 240 mins., debuted at Venice Sept. 3, 2023, also shown at Toronto, followed by New York. It was screened for this review as part of the NYFF, where it had its US premiere Oct. 7 and 9, with Q&As with Frederick Wiseman. US theatrical release Nov. 22, earlier screenings at Film Forum, Nov. 7, with Wiseman Q&A; Nov. 14. Metacritic rating: 88%.
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ALL OF US STRANGERS (Andrew Haigh)
ANDREW HAIGH: ALL OF US STRANGERS (2023)
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ANDREW SCOTT AND PAUL MESCAL IN ALL OF US STRANGERS
A powerful gay ghost story from Haigh
All of Us Strangers, a propulsive and intense film about loneliness, loss, and love, was adapted by Haigh from the Japanese novel Strangers by Taichi Yamada, translated into English by Wayne Lammers (already filmed in Japanese), "possibly tilting away," Bradshaw wrote at Telluride, from the the original’s "tone of disturbing possibilities towards a melancholy sweetness." (Also translating from straight to gay.) Well, you can take this picture of a middle-aged gay screenwriter in London, played with his usual relaxed intensity by the Irish born Andrew Scott (of "Fleabag" and "The Pursuit of Love") either way - as sad and disturbing, a nervous breakdown, or simply as a man coming to terms with both the saddest and the most hopeful thinking and feeling of his highly imaginative and emotionally vulnerable self.
There is a certain amount of return by Haigh to the wonderful sense of gay connectedness he achieved in his first film, Weekend, to which this has been called "a companion piece." Bradshaw calls this a "mysterious, beautiful and sentimental film." Or it is an overweening episode of "Black Mirror." Though I was thrilled by Haigh's fluency, I could not fully relate with the film's in-your-face intensity and was following one step behind. But I had a feeling it would come to get me later. The young New York audience at a press screening watched raptly, but seemed withdrawn at the end - and the ending is a bit much to take. Haigh remains a powerhouse filmmaker. And once again he has brought wonderful performances out of a quartet of the best actors in the business.
In The new feature Adam (Scott), a screenwriter, lives in a new building that's not occupied. An intense, handsome younger man, Harry (Paul Mescal), approaches him when he is drifting, uneasily at work on a screenplay based on his life with his lost parents, who died in a car accident when he was twelve. Harry comes to the door with a bottle, already plastered but inviting fun. He anticipates that Adam is "queer" - the different word denotes younger years, but Adam cautiously but politely declines the offer and closes the door.
What happens after that I'm not certain; and finding out should be left to the viewer anyway. Adam goes to his old home in the country outside London (Dorking) and meets - his parents, Dad Jamie Bell and Mum Claire Foy. The most arresting sequence is the one in which he carefully informs her that he's gay. she does not take it well; later, his dad is much more understanding, and later declares Harry, with whom now Adam has a relationship, to be "a handsome fella." Whatever elseis going on here Haigh eventually works through the experience of being gay and dealing with AIDS and post-AIDS attitudes as a young gay man; going over Harry's own approach to coming out,
Haigh goes over the ways the experience is, and is not, different now. We can also say as PEter Debruge does that All of Us Strangers "is therapy for the audience," or "at least that specific segment of us" who "desperately need" our fathers to apologize for not coming into our room when we were crying. This is also mainstream gay emotional therapy for a younger generation than the ideal one for Brokeback Mountain (mine). As a gay writer, Haigh writes for the LGBTQ person who knows that "everything is different now," yet is also aware that in some ways, in some places, it is not different. To say this is a "ghost story" (a very likely kind of tale to come from Japan) is to say this is a movie about dealing with people and emotions that have changed or gone and yet are still present in our hearts and minds.
Despite the "Black Mirror" comparison, which is there, Andrew Haigh works like nobody else. He paints with a broad brush, and has ways of using events with utmost simplicity to deliver visceral, intense cinematic experience. Not only the Guardian's Bradshaw but Variety, The the Hollywood Reporter, Screen Daily, and the Los Angeles Times'Justin Chang have delivered absolute raves. Awards consideration, especially on the UK side, is assured.
All of Us Strangers, 105 mins., debuted at Telluride Aug. 31, 2023. Screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, where it showed Oct. 1 abd 2; it will also scheduled for London BFI and Chicago. Theatrical release scheduled for Dec. 22 in the US and Jan. 26, 2024 in the UK. Metacritic rating: 98%.
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ANATOMY OF A FALL/ANATOMIE D'UNE CHUTE (Justine Triet 2023)
JUSTINE TRIET: ANATOMY OF A FALL/ANATOMIE D'UNE CHUTE (2023
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SANDRA HÜLLER IN ANATOMY OF A FALL
A woman is tried on suspicion of her husband's murder, and their blind son faces a moral dilemma as the sole witness. (Cannes: Palme d'Or, 2023.)
You will see no more warmly engaging and beautifully well made new film this year than Justine Triet's Anatomy of a Fall. Nothing radically new here. In fact Park Chan-wook's Decision to Leave from last year starts with the same ingredients: a man falls to his death in the mountains and his wife is suspected of pushing him. Only there the point was the police detective falls in love with the woman suspect. Here, the focus is on the woman, notably played by the great Sandra Hüller, who's also featured in another of the year's best films, the German-language The Zone of Influence. And it's a courtroom drama in which the couple's young vision-impaired son Daniel (the stunningly good Milo Machado Graner) winds up playing a key role in the trial.
The cast also includes the under appreciated Swann Arlaud as Maître Vincent Renzi, the chief defense attorney for Sandra Voyter (Hüller), also a friend, and somethihg more.
"Something more" applies to this whole movie. Even the family dog, Snoop (Messi) - an engaging, funny name - a guide for the son, winds up playing a far greater role than you'd expect, though that role manages to feel perfectly natural. Nothing seems contrived here - not at the moment, anyway: courtroom dramas are inherently stylized films, because they are dramas. The thing is to play that drama well, and this Anatomy of a Fall achieves.
This latest accomplishment makes French director Justine Triet a major player. Her evolution over a decade has been remarkable. She showed ambition and prowess in her debut with The Age of Panic in 2013, which combined relationship drama with complex street action. Her hilarious 2016 comedy In Bed with Victoria was a triumph for her and for her stars Virginie Efira and Vincent Lacoste - though the anglophone critics didn't think so, and equally panned Triet's Sibyl , featuring Efira, on which I agreed. Anatomy of a Fall has even more intensity and complexity than these comedies and much more seriousness, without losing the earlier warmth and an undercurrent of humor that flavors the courtroom histrionics. This time while digging into the deepest emotional pain anyone can feel, the loss of a parent and a spouse, with a mother and her son's lives and futures uncertain, this winds up in a strange way being a kind of feel-good movie.
Literally "feel-good" because focused on the senses of seeing and hearing. One of the outstanding features seems to be the in-your-face intensity of its sound. The action begins at a mountain chalet in the Frenc hAlps, where Sandra, a successful writer, a is having a jokey chat with a younger woman who's come to interview her. Music gets played so loud that after a struggle Sandra calls off the interview, even though they were enjoying a drink and having fun. It was more than an interview. That is why her musician husband, in his studio on the attic floor, has jealously turned up the volume.
We find out early that Daniel can't see. His optic nerve was damaged beyond repair in an accident with his father at age eight. This is true even though he runs around freely with Snoop as his guide on the snow-covered slopes and paths surrounding the chalet. Then he discovers his father's fallen, bloody body and cries for help.
But we learn more about this sequence later, of course, in the over-and-overing of events that follows when a death leads to an investigation and the trial of Sandra Voyter for the murder of her husband. It's suspected that she may have struck him and pushed him out the window.
Language plays a distinctive role here. Sandra is German; her husband was French. They spoke English, and Daniel learned both. Early on, as Sandra and Maître Vincent Renzi walk around the chalet and he questions her about events leading up to her husband's death, she says she has to speak English because her French isn't good enough to convey the complexity of what she's trying to say. In the courtroom the trial is conducted in French but testimony flips back and forth between French and English when Sandra speaks. This helps give us a sense of how unstable the situation is for her, not to mention for Daniel.
Speaking of sound, a major moment late in the trial is the playing of a recording the dead man made of a big fight between him and Sandra the day before his death. It's very loud, and played with the text of it shown on a screen above. Daniel, who had a habit of leaving when his parents argued, has heard none of it. It's disturbing, and he hears it all, because he has insisted on being present in the courtroom for it. It's as if we hear it with the hyper-sensitive auditory sense the boy's early blindness has developed in him. Retrospectively we hear that extra-loud music in the opening sequence that way too, causing us to feel the traumatic events sympathetically. Sympathy is part of Anatomy's sense of warmth. The film keeps us on our toes.
The essence of the courtroom of course is the theatricality of the proceedings, with a flamboyant, shaven-headed attorney for the prosecution in flowing red robes (Antoine Reinartz} who is a real piece of work, and brings in several experts to present information that is damning, at least when bolstered by their theories. We are discovering about the dead man, Samuel Maleski (Samuel Theis), who turns out to be a work in progress, a musician who wants to write a novel but is blocked, and saddled with a restoration of the chalet he took on himself but can't complete. The boy is discovering things about his father he didn't know. Some of this may feel contrived, at least in retrospect, as if the screenplay is making up the dead man and the prosecution case as it goes along. But the spirit of discovery keeps the action alive and riveting from first to last.
This is where young, floppy-haired Daniel comes in to play a decisive role - aided by Snoop (though Snoop doesn't get to testify, not in person anyway). Daniel is, after all, the primary witness, his blindness only intensifying the sense we always have that everything is uncertain in any trial, particularly the most crucial and life-threatening ones. Daniel doesn't really khow what happened to his father, but he has to do some serious thinking about whether his mother could be guilty: this is why some viewers consider this very emotional film to be a think piece. But it's much more about feelings, words, and performances throughout.
This is a richly entertaining film. Like all courtroom dramas it's very like a sports movie. All events lead up to the big final "game," i.e., testimony - here, by Daniel - where the team wins or loses. But Triet and her cowriter and regular collaborator Arthur Harari burst the chains of this convention by carrying the action beyond the trial. The real finale comes when Sandra sees Daniel again back at home. The point wasn't after all winning or losing, but delving deep into these lives. What a nice contrast this is to the absorbing but frustrating recent French courtroom drama, Mati Diop's Saint Omer. Triet never forgets the audience's need to be entertained that Diop chooses to ignore.
Anatomy of a Fall is one of the year's best films, and Sandra Hüller likewise is guaranteed attention at awards time.
Anatomy of a Fall/Anatomie d'une chute, 150 mins., debuted in competition at Cannes wher it won the Palme d'Or and the Queer Palm, as well as the Dog Palm for Messi as Snoop. It has shown in many international festivals through the rest of 2023. It was screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival where it shows Oct. 7. It will be released in the US by Neon Oct. 13. Metacritic rating: 88%. Released Aug. 23 in France, the film received an AlloCiné critics rating of 4.4 (also 88%).
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STRANGE WAY OF LIFE /EXTRAÑA FORMA DE VIDA Pedro Almodóvar (2023)
PEDRO ALMODÓVAR: STRANGE WAY OF LIFE/EXTRAÑA FORMA DE VIDA (2023)
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ETHAN HAWKE, PEDRO PASCAL IN STRANGE WAY OF LIFE
Almodóvar's polished short gay English-language "Western" is too talky and fails to ignite
This is a short film "Western" in English by Pedro Almodóvar with a gay theme. One of the stars is Ethan Hawke. It premiered at Cannes. Perhaps the best (and most generous) criticism of of this unsatisfying work is to say as Michael O'Sullivan does in his Washington Post review that it's "both too good and not long enough." The film is made up of a present day moment many years later between the two men who in youth had a brief fling, plus a lengthy flashback to that earlier moment. More specifically in his analysis O'Sullivan points out that too much time is lost in expository dialogue.
"There is so much exposition of past and present," writes O'Sullivan, "that Jake (Ethan Hawke) and Silva’s (Pedro Pascal) love story "gets crowded out by conversation that’s only meant to bring us, and not the main characters, up to speed."
The actors (including and José Condessa and Jason Fernández as the young Silva and Jake) do well and look good and the cinematography is polished, however. It's just the writing (and the whole structural conception) that doesn't take off, and it's over before it really gets started. As has been known to happen, a great director has scored a misfire when he swithed to another language.
Strange Way of LIfe/Extraña forma de vida, 31 mins., debuted at Cannes May 17, 2023, opening in various European and Spanish speaking countries. Its US debut was Sept. 30, 2023 at the New York Film Festival, where it was screened for this review (Q&A with Pedro Almodóvar on Sept. 30), and it opened in limited release in the US Oct. 6;
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THE ZONE OF INTEREST (Jonathan Glazer 2023)
JONATHAN GLAZER: THE ZONE OF INTEREST (2023)
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The surreal made real
This is about the cozy family of the man who runs Hitler's worst extermination camp, at Auschwitz, in Poland. With Sandra Hüller, whose other starring role at Cannes this year was in Justine Triet's Anatomy of a Fall, winner of the Palme d'Or, making her, Sandra, at 45, this year a European cinematic "it" girl. Zone of Interest was adapted, very freely, from the eponymous novel of Martin Amis, who sadly died on May 19, the very day of its premiere in competition at Cannes, where it won the Grand Jury Award and FIPRESCI Prize. An excellent review is the one by Robbie Collin for The Telegraph.
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As the family eats dinner together, the rumble of industrialised murder can be heard faintly in the background, sometimes punctuated by a pistol crack. Later, as Rudolph contentedly smokes a cigar in the garden, the glow of its tip mimics the flames which claw at the night sky from the crematorium smoke stack behind.
That is good; but it's difficult to describe Zone of Interest in a review because Glazer's film has its own unique skin-crawling oddity and spot-on specificity -- a combination hard to convey.
The premise, almost but not quite a violation of the rule against directly representing the Holocaust, is to focus primarily on the household of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of the Auschwitz camp. Sometimes the best way to show the un-showable is to approach it crabwise, shine the light on what's next to it, which is just what is done here. English director Jonathan Glazer (in his first film since the admired but off-putting sci-fi film Under the Skin in 2013) conveys the death camp from the commandant's house - and gardens, and greenhouse, and stable; it's a luxurious spread - though thrown up only three or four years ago, right on the other side of the 12-foot barbed-wire-topped wall surrounding the camp. We see the tops of buildings, but mostly we see nothing, we hear.
The film begins even further away. First there is the long din of an ominous droning score behind a faintly glowing blank screen, then a scene of the family bathing at a wooded river nearby. There are attendants, the wife Hedwig Höss (Sandra Hüller) and Rudolf (Christian Friedel), and five children: when they return home down the sylvan road, it's in two shiny little black forties cars.
At the swim, the roar of the death camp seems inaudible, but this is a beginning of the film' spot-on conveyance of period in clothes and mannerisms, even the unathletic German forties body of Höss himself, and his hitched-up black swim briefs, his white skin. The house is luxurious, if seen through the ample grounds, the well-tended garden, and the staff; but it's also rinky-dink, no ancestral mansion. Everything looks chintzy seen from the viewpoint of 21st-century manufacturing amplitude, and we realize Nazi officers probably wore uniforms of not-so-good cloth.
The space next to the unspeakable place is made more contained and intense in Glazer's film through having every room in the house as Robbin Collin describes it "rigged with multiple static cameras which coolly survey the family’s daily routine." Their black dog rambles around among them. Their behavior too seems quite random at times, making the rectilinear spaces the more dominant. The clothes, the bedding and the uncomfortable looking beds, the generous German-made "oriental" rugs, the boys' room and their toy soldiers and toy "Heil Hitlers," the garden bare and empty out of season - everything conspires to strengthen our sense of this place, and by that indirection the ominousness of the other space right on the other side of the wall.
By not talking about the elephant the elephant is made present for us as something that could only exist because so many pretended it didn't. By depicting an "ordinary" family next door, it has shown how surreal, impossible, and inhuman Auschwitz was.
Our sense of the sleazy and impoverished grows when Hedwig's mother comes for a visit, her first time. She extravagantly admires the big room she's to sleep in, and the flowers in the vase, the garden outside. "You've really landed on your feet," she tells her daughter. We learn she used to clean the house of a rich Jewish woman: she wonders if the latter is now on the other side of the wall, and wishes they had gotten hold of the lady's lovely curtains. Hedwig jokes about how friends misunderstood when she told them her nice new fur coat came from "Canada." "Canada" was the name for the warehouse where Jewish seized possessions were stored. Hedwig and her mother are up from poverty. They are lowly thieves or would-be thieves enjoying the fine possessions whose owners, their betters, are being exterminated.
Hedwig's mother disappears, leaving a note, tossed by Hedwig into the stove without explanation. One gathers she may have turned out to be more sensitive to the crackling gunshots and roaring crematoriums than her daughter; realized she "landed on her feet" at too great a cost.
Through its precise period detail the whole aim of this movie up to a point is simply to convey the queasy, sick-making Gemütlichkeit of this house next to Auschwitz with maximum surreal intensity. But the bureaucratic focus of Martin Amis' source book comes through too, starting with a phone call in which Höss learns he's to be transferred.
When she first gets word of this a week later, Helga freaks out, running after him to insist he go right to Hitler to request he keep the house for the family even if himself working elsewhere. This security, the comfort for the children, this stolen fur coat, mean more to her than her husband's status - and when Rudolf says a farewell to his horse, it's clear the latter means more to him than his wife - or than his long-haired mistress, doubtless an attractive female prisoner.
More of the bureaucratization of evil comes when some time later we see a huge meeting - the number of camps and their commandants now staggering, and seen from above around a huge table - where it turns out Höss has actually been promoted and will return to Auschwitz to run a greatly enlarged "Hungarian" operation. It is such good news he excitedly calls his wife to tell her of it. But as he climbs down the stairs to leave the government building, he repeatedly retches. Either he is dying or the enormity of what he's involved in has finally gotten a grip on his body. There have been other stunning pauses of ominious sound and a blank screen, and a glimpse of attendants cleaning the displays for the present-day Auschwitz museum, with its shoes piled high. The crabwise echo of enormity will haunt us in a new way after Zone of Influence . An original and thought-provoking stunner full of controlled passion and great mastery of detail. One of the year's best films.
Zone of Influence, 105 mins., debuted at Cannes May 19, 2023 winning the Grand Jury award and FIPRESCI Prize; also Telluride, Toronto, Deauville, Zurich, Mill Valley. Screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival, Sept. 29-Oct. 15, 2023. Showing in the NYFF Oct. 8 and 9; Q&As with the director and stars. Other festivals. Coming in limited US release Dec. 8, 2023. Metacritic rating: 95%.
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THE BEAST/LA BÊTE (Bertrand Bonello 2023)
BERTRAND BONELLO: THE BEAST/LA BÊTE (2023)
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LÉA SEYDOUX AND GEORGE MCKAY IN LA BÊTE
A man (George McKay) and woman (Léa Seydoux) meet across three eras of time and three moods.
Mise-en-scène is class through all eras, the 2044 one, the 2014 one, and the 1910 Paris flood one. The turn of the century dress-up for McKay an Seydoux is a delight to the eye. There is a disaster in a 1910 doll factory that is quite dazzling - both spectacular and elegant and not like anything one has quite seen before. It is the mixture of eras and storylines (all, frankly, rather fragmentary; perhaps fortunately) that lead to a sense of slicing-and-dicing that ultimately is wearying, at least in the setting of a long day of press screenings. This will be a must-see and one to linger over cultishly for Bonello fans (of whom I am one), but may not win a lot of new converts.
Bonello achieves elegance wherever he ventures. All the scenes where Seydoux and McKay are in 1910 dress and have polite, tentative, Last Year at Marienbad exchanges, which dominate the early part of the film, when things haven't become too complicated, are at least eye candy, at best haunting, and, incidentally, would more obviously relate to Henry James, the author of the film's freely riffed-off book.
That theme presents a "beast" as a menacing future that haunts the protagonist, Gabrielle; and in their sci-fi dance toward and away from each other through time Louis (McKay) also is inhibited, desirous and yet holding himself back.
Apparently in 2044 post-apocalyptic Paris - the setting and era that's hardest to follow, Gabrielle (Seydoux) consents to surgery to remove her feelings - and make her more like a robot - and while she's under for this, has flashbacks (that we see) to other lives and experiences.
Because I'm all-in for McKay, the place where I most differ with Jordan Mintzer's critical assessment in his Hollywood Reporter review is in finding McKay's new identity in the last quarter of the film as Louis-something in LA the most "overblown" aspect of all. It creates a quiet menace that's much needed by this last segment of the film, and the depiction of an incel man, whlle blatant, is carried off by McKay with a spot-on impersonation of a messed-up young American. The contrast between McKay's 1910 Paris identity and this one is shocking and thought-provoking. It seems to be what the film is "about," along with Babrielly-Seydoux's identity fluidity-uncertainty. McKay is just right in giving off an air of repressed, intense sexuality. He has a strange, ageless face. He also can look like a boy, which plays well in his scenes as the incel, Louis. The film is built around McKay, and Seydoux's variablity as an actress. She blends seamlessly in each of the three eras.
At the same time I do agree with Mintzer that in depicting a weirdly warped America Bonello doesn't have the knack David Lynch had. Though structurally Bonello is doing something different from Lynch, presumably, one still at moments feels that this is Lynchan territory with not quite the edge.
Still, what a gorgeous, classy piece of weird, disturbing eye-candy. I want to watch it again when I can, to understand it better and wallow in its memorable images. As Minter says, "Bonello doesn’t want us to simply watch The Beast, but to pay attention to it." It's a film that calls for rewatching and rethinking, and it will be better seen without the annoying loud giddy laughter of some audience members at the press screening.
Léa's costar was to have been Gaspard Ulliel, but he died following a ski accident in January 2022.
The Beast/La Bête, 146 mins., debuted at Venice, also showing at Toronto and at the NYFF, as part of which it was screened for this review Sept. 25, 2023. Showing Oct. 8 and 9 at the NYFF, with Bonello for a Q&A. Also to show at London BFI. French theatrical release Feb. 28, 2024. Metacritic rating: ̶8̶3̶%̶.̶ 80%.. AlloCiné press rating 3.7 (73%).
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ABOUT DRY GFASSES (Nuri Bilge Ceylan 2023)
NURI BILGE CEYLAN: ABOUT DRY GRASSES (2023)
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DENIZ CELILOGLU IN ABOUT DRY GRASSES
Teaching in the boonies
About Dry Grasses is even more rich and exciting than Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan's other films, and probably more accessible. Typically it settles in, and is in no hurry. The location is the middle of nowhere. The snowy landscapes alternate between scenic and off-putting. The opening shot, all white but for a small van in the middle, is striking, but underlines how overwhelming this landscape is. The middle school teacher protagonist, Samet (Deniz Celiloglu), makes no bones about the fact that he hates the place. Now that he's been here four years he can apply for a transfer and he's hoping for Istanbul. As Samet, Celiloglu is almost a blank slate. He can be nice, obnoxious, sweet, aggressive.
The landscape is off-putting, but the film feels cozy. Interiors are dark and protective-feeling places where people gather continually for ritually prepared and consumed tea and for getting warm, or drunk. Samet is often with his colleague, Kenan (Musab Ekici), who's a bit younger. They start going together to a hill where they get spring water, and during the slow fill-up of their big plastic bottles, have chats.
Samet is a little too cozy and affectionate with his girl students, particularly a tall one with specially thick long brown hair called Sevim (Ece Bagci). He gives her a cosmetic box. He puts his hand on her waist, her arm. He calls her "dear." There is no doubt that this is seriously inappropriate and, in today's world, pretty stupid. And yet it seems harmless, something that goes no further than affection. Except, of course, apart from the fact that particularly in the post-#MeToo world it's dangerous, even actionable behavior, here in the boonies where #MeToo may not have penetrated (but maybe it has: there is cellphone reception, surprisingly), it's wrong because of the effect it will have on Sevim. It will encourage her to develop a crush on her teacher and feel that her crush is returned.
Which evidently happens. But we are not to think the film is all about this. And it gets complicated because it's Samet's (seemingly pointless) refusal to return a mash note seized when the school does a shakedown on both boys and girls, a mash note whose addressee is unknown, but probably him, that apparently angers Sevim and leads her to get her teacher in trouble.
But that's complicated too because Kenin gets hauled in before authorities along with Samet for inappropriate behavior, and seems to be more guilty of it than Samet, something Samet had no idea of.
And before we start to think Samet is a pedophile or Humbert Humbert type, Nuray (Merve Dizdar) emerges - a teacher at another, perhaps better, school who becomes a temporary lover for Samet. Nuray is as fully realized a character in this film whose milieu and people are already very believable. She is the survivor of a terrorist attack which has caused her to lose part of one leg, a fact that is provided in calm detail, even to how the prosthetic limb works and is fitted on. It seems likely Merve Dizdar is disfigured this way in real life, which would make her character especially memorable; in any case she received the Best Actress award at Cannes for her lively, intense performance. Nuray and Samet have a long argument about politics that is the film's most strident moment. One can't help thinking about the two actors memorizing all of this material, which shows this is one place where the intimacy and authenticity flag a bit. Testy intellectual debates like this are a feature of Ceylan films; this one has the virtue of having sexual undertones. "This is Ceylan at his most limber and mischievous, the filmmaking exhibiting a generosity and curiosity that belies the script’s defense of individualist, even isolationist, living, at whatever cost to one’s own happiness," wrote Guy Lodge in Variety, seeming to refer to Samet's part in this debate.
It's hard to convey in a review how rich and beautiful this film is, and it has other facets not yet mentioned, such as the use of still photographic portraits and the classroom scenes, and the scenes of kids playing outside in the snow, which linger in the mind.
It's essential to note that while the controversy over Samet's behavior and his quarrelsome relationship thereafter with Sevim keep on developing elaborately as the film draws to a close - there is no "conclusion" here. This feels like an unusually detalled slice of life, but it may best be seen as one. Instead of a climax, the schol year ends. This provokes a visit to the little closet-like hideaway Samet uses as an office in lieu of the collective faculty room. Maybe this is Nuri Bilge Ceylan's way of saying that things aren't ever as simple as people nowadays like to try to make them.
About Dry Grasses/Kuru Otlar Üstüne, 197 mins., debuted in competition at Cannes winning the Beast Actress award. Screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival where it shows Oct. 9 and 10, 2023. US theatrical release begins Feb. 23, 2024 at Film Forum, NYC. Metacritic rating: 8̶2̶%̶ now 88%.
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ECE BAGCI IN ABOUT DRY GRASSES
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FALLEN LEAVES KUOLLEET LENDET (Aki Kaurismäki 2023)
AKI KAURISMÄKII: FALLEN LEAVES/KUOLLEET LENDET (2023)
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JUSSI VATANEN AND ALMA POYSTI IN FALLEN LEAVES
Two lonely people who meet each other by chance in the Helsinki night and try to find the first love of their lives.
The two people this time are shy, blonde Ansa (Alma Pöysti) and tall, long-faced Holappa (Jussi Vatanen). Both work in factories. Holappa is an alcoholic. The vicissitudes of their tentative, yet somehow determined relationship involve Holappa's reaching a bottom after being fired from a good factory job and then from a not quite so good construction site job and winding up in a halfway house, after which Ansa and Holappa go off, as it were, into the unset. For those familiar with the mechanisms of addiction and recovery, the treatment of this process by Kaurismäki leaves out too much to be of value.
The fairytale simplicity and dry humor that have made Kaurismäki a cinephile delight since the eighties are there. The bright colored images, the somehow engaging dreariness of the urban locations and the karaoke and loud toe-tapping rock and roll music bring the Finnish night to life. But this is a meal that leaves one feeling rather a little hungry, compared to delights like Shadows in Paradise, Ariel, Leningrad Cowboys Go America, The Match Factory Girl, The Man Without a Past, Lights in the Dusk and the more upbeat recent Le Havre and The Other Side of Hope - mainly because of the superficial way Holappa's alcoholism is dealt with, but also a lack of memorable incident. Owen Gleiberman in Variety calls Fallen Leaves "a nice but exceedingly minor movie" that "leaves little imprint." For Kaurismäki devotees this will have to be watched; newcomers should look elsewhere for an introduction to this unique filmmaker. The rapture at Cannes for this film that baffled Gleiberman must be due, we must agree, for the nostalgia that his very consistent style awakens in fans.
The couple's first date goes well as can be expected for two lonely, shy people. After a meal and a film, Holappa asks Ansa for her phone number which she jots on a piece of paper. The paper immediately blows away. They don't know where each other lives and haven't even exchanged names, so they go searching for each other. Holappa stands a long time in front of the retro cinema where they saw Jim Jarmusch's The Dead Don't Die, which she had found hilarious. Ansa waits sadly by her telephone.
Scenes of Holappa show that he is never without a flask and drinks at work and everywhere else, all day long. (Considering this, he seems remarkable free of signs of drinking.) An invitation to dinner chez Ansa is a disaster: it reveals Holappa's heavy drinking to her. She declares that both her father and brother died of alcoholism and she cannot have another drunk in her life. She throws in the kitchen trash the extra table setting she had bought to serve dinner for two.
Through the film there is the thread of music. The first meeting was at karaoke wwhere Holappa was taken by an older friend with a rich baritone voice and a comically exaggerated sense of his own musical talent and prowess with women. Another thread is Russia's war on the Ukraine. Ansa listens to news of it on an old fashioned looking radio on her kitchen table, then shuts it off. A modern note in Kaurismäki's unchanging world is acknowledgement of the existence of computers with internet. Ansa rents the use of one for ten euros a half hour to look for work after being fired from her grocery store job for giving expired food to a homeless person. (No good deed goes unpunished.)
But in Kaurismäki the humble working class drones whose fates are depicted with deadpan tenderness hold out some kind of hope, and the simplicity of the style is a reassuring gesture toward better days. Peter Bradshaw noted that he found himself "rooting for the hero and heroine" in Fa hllen Leaves "in an uncomplicated way" that he hadn't "for any other film at Cannes," and that is another way of seeing how festivals still welcome this movie despite it's not being up to his best. But for me the obstacle to my previous admiration for his work is the too-easy solution to Holappa's alcoholism. This time the director has bitten off more than he can swallow without chewing.
Fallen Leaves/Kuolleet Lendet, 81 mins., debuted at Cannes May 23, 2023. It was screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival. Metacritic rating: 7̶9̶%̶ 86% (3/14/2024). In France the AlloCiné press rating is 4.1 (=82%).
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THE SHADOWLESS TOWER 白塔之光 (zhang lu 2023)
ZHANG LU: THE SHADOWLESS TOWER 白塔之光 (2023)
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YAO HUANG, XIN BAIQING IN THE SHADOWLESS TOWER
Slow developer
The Shadowless Tower is an ambitious film, striving for a novelistic complexity through a rambling, episodic structure on a limited budget. The writer-director Zhang Lu is Korean-Chinese and grew up in China's Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture, which partly borders on North Korea and Russia. The main character here, however, is thoroughly Chinese in culture and speaks Mandarin but can be amused by Cantonese. Formerly a writer and academic, Zhang Lu was led by film success in the 2000's to become a full-time director. The main action is set in contemporary Beijing, where the ancient "shadowless tower, " a Yuan Dynasty White Pagoda, is a symbol of stability for the protagonist - a middle-aged food critic, divorcee and former poet, Gu Wentong (Xin Baiqing). Preparing an article on a small traditional restaurant, Gu is assisted (evidently not for he first time) by a young woman photographer with the odd name of Ouyang Wenhui (Yao Huang) - a cute gamine type, a little like Faye (Wong) in Wong Kar-wai's Chungking Express with an extra fuck-you vibe. She continually challenges and mocks Gu but he likes it.
Gu may be much older than the girl but he's tall, cuts a good figure, and is a good dancer. His flaw is to be excessively polite, allegedly the cause of his divorce. Ouyang Wenhui is drawn to him and they go on various jaunts.
More of Gu's food critic work might have been interesting; so, of course would be more depth in exploring this odd couple. But as David Rooney says in his review of this film for The Hollywood Reporter, Zhang's people are cut off, "orphaned, disconnected, separated from the roots that give them an emotional and spiritual mooring." Both Gu and his father, Gu Yunlai (Tian Zhuangzhuang), from whom he has been cut off for decades, live alone in small rooms. Since this is the case, the film can't develop any relationships in much depth; it only plots the belated beginnings of them.
Gu also has a small daughter whom he sees regularly. He has arranged, with his wife's consent, for the six-year-old to live with his sister and her husband. She is a smart bundle of joy (known as "Smiley") and leaps into his arms, challenging him (like xOuyang Wenhui?) and showing off - in short, a powerful distraction. The opening sequence - it takes thirty-two minutes to get to the opening title - is a visit to his mother's grave with his daughter, sister, and brother-in-law. Yes, Gu is cut off from his family, just not out of touch with them. He is leading up to finally seeing his father, an old man, of course, who likes to fly kites alone on the beach, an amusement he began at thirty with his son, now practiced alone.
There is a strange scene where Ouyang Wenhui and Gu rub together affectionately standing in a crowded bus, when that is interrupted by a furor over a inappropriate touching of a women by a man who is chased and caught. Ouyang Wenhui and Gu get off and he reveals that his own father was punished for such an act years ago, and in the aftereffect of that, his mother cut off relations with him and he was never seen again. In the aftermath of his mother's death Gu is led to seek out his father after so many years.
Gu has learned that his father has long lived in Beidaihe, a resort town, but working as an "abacus man" (an accountant), he made it a practice twice a year to ride a bicycle - he eschews public transportation - on the long 300-km. distance from there to Beijing to see his two children. His brother-in-law has stuffed a piece of paper into Gu's hand with his father's phone number on it, and this is when he starts calling it from pay phones, but not speaking.
This film about disconnectedness contains neat connections. A link-up with the Yuan Dynasty White Pagoda, comes when Gu's new young girlfriend books a room for them in a hotel that adjoins it. She also connects with both him and his father because he effectively lost his dad at age five, the time when his father was banished by his other. She was orphaned and adopted at age five from Beidaihe, and that is where his father has been living. It's a natural for the girl, who still identifies with Beidaihe despite being raised elsewhere, to go to Beidaihe with Gu [I ]fils[/I] for her to revisit her place of origin and for him to reconnect with his father. To describe this makes it sound contrived, but the plot line unfolds in a way that feels offhand, a process of discovery.
Rooney calls this film a "minor-key drama" and says it's "too muted and elusive to break beyond festivals," but admits that its "melancholy spell" nonetheless "stays with you." It's cunningly but also confusingly constructed; better to watch it twice, or after careful study of a plot summary or press kit. It's interesting, but I can't recommend it to everyone. I will recommend it to any fans of contemporary Chinese film and followers of Asian film festivals. There, Zhang Lu will be a name to watch for.
The Shadowless Tower 白塔之光, 134 mins., debuted at the Berlinale.; also Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing and El Gouna (Egypt). It was screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival where it shows Sept. 30, a North American premiere including an Q&A with Zhang Lu.
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IN OUR DAY 우리의 하루 (Hong Sang-soo 2023)
HONG SANG-SOO: IN OUR DAY 우리의 하루 (2023) (2023)
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PARK MISOO, SONG SUNG-MI AND KIM HIM-HEE IN IN OUR DAY
Short scenes going back and forth between two situations
A Cannes review calls this film "less substantial and approachable" than the prolific Korean auteur's The Novelist's Film and Walk Up from last year, and called this one "fragile" and "fragmentary." All honor to those Hongists who in the press and intensity of a film festival can find the leisure and calm to contemplate this collection of short episodes in the light of the œuvre and make sense of it, and turn its minimalism and outright silliness and superficiality into profound meaning and art. This writer has tended to come up a bit short.
The spisodes are various. In the first, several women admire and feed treats to a cat and talk about acting as a profession. They are Sangwon (Hong muse Kim Min-hee, an actress who has been out of the country and has lost interest in aacting, and her hostess, Jung-soo (Song Sunmi), whose furry cat "Us" she is admiring. The third woman who comes in later is Sangwon's cousin Jisoo (Park Misoo), who has recently made the decision to focus on an acdting career. Much time is spent on the cat, whom Sangwon over-feeds treat pellets.
In another segment, a grey-bearded poet, Hong Uiji (Ki Joo-bong) talks to a young man, Jaewon (Ha Seong-guk), who has come to interview him while being filmed by a female a arts student, Kijoo (Park Miso)Th. He is having a hard time obeying orders from the doctor due to a heart ailment. He was known for smoking and drinking a lot and now he must give up both alcohol and cigarettes. He and the young interviewer exchange philosophical generalizations.
These two segments are connected through rhyming moments - climbing into single beds, guitars, and consuming ramyen with added red pepper hot sauce, declared to be a delicacy (while the relative lack of nutritional value of ramyen compared to other foods is noted.
Jonathan Romney in his Screen Daily review notes that in Hong sometimes the slightest episodes yield up interpretive riches; that he is playing with structure like a minimalist poet; that the title has no clear explanation except that the segments may all take place in a single day, and that the role of poetry - perhaps diminished - "in our time" is under consideration in the scenes with the poet-sage Hong Uiji.
There are thoughts about life here when the poet and young seeker converse. Also among the actors and would-be actors there arise big questions about art, questions of performance, reality and self-knowledge. These things are deemed to replace an actual plotline, since less is "happening" in the traditional screenplay sense in this film than normally, even for Hong. Nonetheless, devotees will delight in whatever they find here. Skeptics - among whom I count myself at the moment (though I've been all-in for Hong in the past) are more likley to feel this is a sign the Korean auteur ought to cut back on production, and wait till he has more solid material to film. Sometimes a snoert time can seem a long time and sometimes a long time can pass quickly, when it comes to film. For me the reliance on improvisation for material of such slight content led to moments of supreme vapidity.
In Our Day 우리의 하루, 83 mins., debuted at Cannes Directors Fortnight; also Hamburg, Busan, a Paris premiere, and the New York Film Festival, where it was screened for this review. Walter Reade Theater Oct. 11 & 12, 2023.
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IN WATER 물안에서 (Hong Sang-soo 2023)
HONG SANG-SOO: IN WATER 물안에서 (2023)
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Hong's second film for 2023, 61 mibutes, and intentionally out of focus. A young filmmaker prepares to shoot at an off-season island retreat. Debuted at Berlin.
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RADU JUDE: DO NOT EXPECT TOO MUCH FROM THE END OF THE WORLD (2023)
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Another tirade from he Rumanian author of the timely and entertaining but scattershot filmmaaker of Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021). (Locarno.)
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CLOSE YOUR EYES/CERRAR LOS OJOS (Victor Erice 2023)
VICTOR ERICE: CLOSE YOUR EYES/CERRAR LOS OJOS (2023)
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MANOLO SOLO IN CLOSE YOUR EYES
Worlds within worlds; a brilliant late interrogation of memory and cinema
Cerrar los ojos begins with a scene that's deceptive: set in 1947 Paris, it's really a long segment of a film called The Farewell Gaze/La mirada del adiós that was never finished, because its lead actor (Jose Coronado) disappeared. And it's a scene where a big bearded man wearing a turban that's almost a crown - and he refers to "the sad king" and the chess piece of the white king: he's a kind of giant chess piece himself - asks this man to find his lost daughter, who must be 14 now. When the film itself begins it focuses on the search for this lost actor.
So a film within a film with a search within a search. At the end, twenty years later, the director of the unfinished film (Manolo Solo) goes to find the lost actor. The two men were friends. In their youth, they joined the navy together: there is an old photograph in their uniforms, in their "silly hats." The director appears on a TV show about the "lost actor", and when the show appears, someone calls in who recognizes the actor. He is in an "asilo" where she works. The film ends with the director's moving into the "asilo" and attempting to reawaken his lost actor friend's apparently long paralyzed memory. Amnesia seems to have been the cause of his disappearance; or perhaps he disappeared and then got amnesia, we don't know the order of events.
The character in the clip who was sent to find someone "disappears," that is, the actor does. And then he is found. Is the last part of the film real? What is clear is that this work by the noted Spanish filmmaker, member of a generation that included Carlos Saura, itself on the verge of disappearing, represents Erice's first feature film in three decades. What has he been doing? Has he been lost? He does have an unfinished film: there are autobiographical elments in this new, completed one.
Certainly Victor Erice has not lost the gift for resonant cinema he showed in his few earlier notable works - El Sur (1983), The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) and Dream of Light (1992). And in the closing sequence of this film he also focuses on and cherishes cinema. (As pointed out by Jordan Mintzer in his admiring <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/close-your-eyes-review-victor-erice-1235498587/">Hollywood Reporter</a> review, Erice's films have always included strong references to "cinema’s powers to captivate and transform," and those are very much present here too.) The early part of the director-investigator's process involves meeting with a librarian of old celluloid film - including the unfinished one. When the actor is found, this custodian is summoned to play the unfinished film in an old cinema near the "asilo." There are a few people in the audience including the lost actor, the director, the TV interviewer, the lost actor's daughter, and others.
This is a specific story, though it is as symbolic and resonant as, say, a short story by Jorge Luis Borges. The whole film is filled with a meditative, sweetly melancholy quality that is very beautiful. Erice moves at his own studied pace. Arguably the early sequences, when the whole situation is being set up, are slow and unnecessarily lengthy; but there may be riches in the Spanish dialogue that elude this reviewer. There is no doubt that the whole builds to a delicate, thought-provoking conclusion. Sadly, this film may be a little too quiet for theatrical audiences. But it will remain as a treat for fans of Spanish cinema, evidently a final, late-arriving cap on the limited but distinguished career of a director who, at 83, may not have another film, since thirty years from now he won't be around.
Close Your Eyes/Cerrar los ojos, 169 mins., premiered at Cannes in its Cannes Première section May 22; also shown at Toronto, San Sebastián, Taiwan and BFI London. Screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival, where it is shown Oct. 4, 2023. Opened at Film Forum Aug. 23, 2024, coming to California in Sept. Metacritic rating: 86%. (Now risen to 88%, Aug. 2024)
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KIDNAPPED/RAPITO (Marco Bellocchio 2023)
MARCO BELLOCCHIO: KIDNAPED/RAPITO (2023)
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PAOLO PIEROBON AND ENEA SALA IN RAPITO
Bellocchio recounts a true incident when a Jewish child was kidnapped by the Vatican in the 1850's and converted to Christianity. Cannes in competition.
In 1858, in the Jewish quarter of Bologna, the Pope’s soldiers burst into the home of the Mortara family (who appear to be wealthy; and there are seven children). By order of the cardinal, they have come to take Edgardo, their seven-year-old son. He turns out to be secretly baptized by his nurse as a baby and the papal law is unquestionable: he must receive a Catholic education - except whether the Vatican can seize the boy at this age is dubious.
Controlled chaos reigns in these early scenes. The Catholic officials coming first to inform Mortara, making it seem like there is danger, but there can be delays. Then the sudden seizure of Edogardo, the innocent boy.
Edgardo’s parents will do anything to get their son back - but they make one big mistake: they fail to work through the Jewish community of Rome, whose ghetto is the oldest in Europe and one of the largest. This angers the Roman Jews, who in turn anger the Pope.
This incident is almost too good to be true, and Bellocchio makes a spectacular, operatic explosion of images and story out of it that has been called one of his best films - made when he is in his early eighties now.
Bellocchio is one of the great Italian directors since the early sixtes, when he became famous with Pugni intasca/Fists in the Pocket (1965) and China Is Near/La Cina è vicina (1967). He is still making major films half a century later, including the 2019 The Traitor/Il traditore (2019), starring Pierfancesco Favino, about the major witness against the mafia, which was very important in Italy and featured in the 2019 New York Film Festival.
Bellocchio has almost made himself the director of kidnappings, with two memorable examinations of the most notable such event in modern Italian history, the Aldo Moro kidnapping: Good Morning, Night/Buongiorno notte (2003) telling the story from the kidnappers' viewpoint, and a recent TV series treatment in Exterior, Night (2022), where multiple other points of view are represented.
Kidnapped highlights the boy (Enea Sala as a child; Leonardo Maltese as Edgardo in his twenties). But Bellocchio moves around to other viewpoints, frequently focusing on Salomone Mortara, the boy's father (Fausto Russo Alesi) or his aggrieved mother (Barbara Ronchi). Most notably he focuses on the perpetrator of all this, Pio Nono - Pope Pius IX (Paolo Pierobon), who seems sometimes an ogre, sometimes a buffoon, sometimes a fading dictator frantically trying to maintain power. The film is bold in its unflattering depiction of the Catholic Church and bends toward Jewish family liturgy in an unusual way for an Italian film.
The surprise twist of the story of course is that the boy, both bright and cooperative, goes from making the best of his new life in the uniform of the papal school with its flashy big white bow to outright enjoying his new life because he is smart, has a prodigious memory, and becomes the best student. Jesuit teaching may be intensely doctrinaire, arguably brainwashing, bit it is famously full of intellectual stimulation, a magnet for fine minds. Edgardo's "calvary" comes to seem rather like being suddenly sent off to a posh boarding school, with a guaranteed secure future with options of upward mobility: Edgardo will grow up to become a novice for the priesthood in the bosom of the Vatican itself.
Meanwhile the boy's father continues to struggle to oppose this situation, and it is made clear at one point that Edgardo remains distantly ambivalent toward the Pope and never stops missing the warmth of his big family, the rituals of Hebrew chanted en famille morning and night. (Too bad the English subtitles don't indicate what language they're translating, when they go from Italian, to Yiddish, to Hebrew, and to Latin: but this is not the fault of the Italian film.)
As usual with Bellocchio the film is full of chiaroscuro red and black eye candy: it is gloriously visual. A great deal of its operatic style is also due to the grand, surging score by Fabio Massimo Capogrosso.
This was a lengthy time of turbulence in Italy's Risorgimento (1848–1871) whose details will tend to elude all but Italian viewers, since the war between the waning Vatican and secular forces located elsewhere will be unknown to most non-Italians. To fully understand the background of Kidnapped we need to know about that, and the film does provide at least quick background notes with frequent onscreen titles (in big red letters). Is the Pope operating outside the law? we may ask. But the answer has to be "whose law?" since things were not to be sorted out until later.
Rapito is like a string of arias, whose flow never stops till the end. It's a wonderfully satisfying film, not afraid to be conventional - obviously best enjoyed on the big screen in a theater with a good sound system, like that of the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center, where it was presented for the press of the New York Film Festival. To be shown to the public Oct. 3 and Oct. 8 with a Q&A with Bellocchio Oct. 8. Some critics have raved, but the general response has been lukewarm: Jessica Kiang in Variety calls it "just a little too tradition-bound for its own good."
Kidnapped/Rapito, 134 mins., debuted in competition at Cannes May 23, 2023. Also shown at Toronto, Vancouver, BFI London and numerous other festivals including New York, as part of which it was screened for this review. Metacritic rating: 68%.
US release May 24, 2024.
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THE SETTLERS/LOS COLONOS (Felipe Galvez 2023)
FELIPE GALVEZ: THE SETTLERS/LOS COLONOS (2023)
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Massacre of indigenous tribes at the hands of Spanish landowners in in 1901
The vast area of Tierra del Fuego is owned by wealthy rancher José Menendez (the great, and busy, Alfredo Castro). Under Menendez's authority three men – Scottish army captain MacLennan (Mark Stanley), American mercenary Bill (Benjamin Westfall) and young mestizo tracker Segundo (Camilo Arancibia) ride out through the land with the zsskin a safe route to the coast. Given free rein, the men embark on a wild killer rampage, persecuting and slaughtering the indigenous Selk’nam people.
Galvez' Cannes prizewinner may fall short as narrative, where it is fragmentary, but it is stunning filmmaking, using square format and closeups and percussive sound to shock us with the ugly violence of early white invasion of Chile and neighboring regions. Wendy Ide calls this film "savage if tonally uneven" in her Screen Daily review; but that is the point: the total disconnect between one minute and the next, in depicting a world in which morality and logic are missing; where there are no rules so atrocities prevail, and they're only a faint memory back in the capital.
This film relates to Lucrecia Martel’s Zama (2017) and Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja (2014), audacious and influential recent depicting the brutality of colonialism in an offbeat way.
The Settlers/Los colonos. 97 mins., debuted in Certain Regard at Cannes, receiving the FIPRESCI Prize, the first Chilean production to do so. Screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival. OCT. 2 & 4, Q&As with Galvez.
Limited US release in Jan. 2024 has been announced by Cinema Tropical.
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MAY DECEMBER (Todd Haynes 2023)
TODD HAYNES: MAY DECEMBER (2023)
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NATALIE PORTMAN, JULIANNE MOORE IN MAY DECEMBER
Seamy, steamy, funny scandal-dredging
Haynes' layered drama, which has been called his warmest and most accessible, consciously has things in common with Ingmar Bergman's Persona, where a nurse (Bibi Anderson) and her mute famous actress patient (Liv Ullman) find themselves converging. We've got two similarly famous actresses mirror-converged here, sometimes consciously posed on-screen à la Bergman: they are Julienne Moore and Natalie Portman, who are seen sharing makeup methods, mirrors, and stares into each other's eyes. This movie offers Oscar prospects for both Moore and Portman, because both get a chance to chew up a lot of scenery and both have juicy, borderline lurid roles. The film seems rather a mixed bag, very watchable certainly, but so complex and multi-directional it leaves little clear impression, better perhaps in post-watching analysis than in the viewing - though such analysis may reveal lacunae or anomalies.
The creepy-weirdo element here not found in Persona (apart from Bergman's usual highly wrought emotional intensity) is the central tabloid source, May December being loosely based on the story of Mary Kay Letourneau, the Seattle teacher who went to jail for having sex with a 12-year-old boy and subsequently had two daughters by him and married him.
In Todd Haynes' film, actress Elizabeth Berry (Portman), known for a popular TV series called "Norah’s Ark," is going to be in a film about a woman made famous by tabloid romance, played by Moore; and comes to stay with Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Moore) and her family; Gracie hopes this new film will tell her story better than a crude version published back in the day. (The movie doesn't reveal the background story all at once, letting it out bit by bit.) The seventh-grader Gracie had sex with at 14 and later married (as we eventually learn) is now 33 and known as Joe (Charles Melton). Their various children (it's hard keeping track of them) are grown, but around. Elizabeth bakes cakes. What does Joe do? Much of the attention is on Portman's character, though Gracie may seem to be just as much a star, of the tabloid kind. It is hard not to think frequently of both women in the film primarily just as actresses. (But that's fun, to be sure.) There is something very campy about this glossy cinematic bringing together of two prima donnas. This is another of Haynes' gay films, one of the gayest.
Hayes goes for a hothouse atmosphere ripe for love from the start with lots of hazy cinematography, implying actual heat, sometimes perhaps merely air pollution, with the action set in Savannah, Georgia in a big house that makes you think of a cotton plantation. Where the Atherton-Yoo family would get the dough for their comfortable lifestyle is unclear. Maybe there is family money somewhere; maybe the tabloid scandal proved lucrative.
There is a musical theme, and it's a powerful reworking of Michel Legrand's score for The Go-Between. Joe raises Monarch butterflies, and early images are of fuzzy germination and flight. (The film was originally to be set in Camden, Maine; the switch must have changed the tone. The original cinematographer was to be Edward Lachman, changed to Christopher Blauvelt due to a Lachman health problem, and this must have changed things too.)
The scene is set well. The action is a mixture of elements that perhaps intentionally clash. Gracie seems hysterical, and may not have much of a life. She has a prolonged crying jag, comforted by Joe, when one of her pastry clients cancels her business. There are Gracie's kids by Joe, and older ones by her first husband. Joe, a handsome hunk with impressive cheekbones and bee-sting lips and an ethnic look (Melton, a former model and "Riverdale" actor, is part Caucasian American, part Korean, part Cherokee). He simply is, also is interviewed by Elizabeth, comforts Gracie, and flirts with someone in daily text message exchanges. In one memorable scene he's out on a roof and seems for a moment likely to fall off.
The presence of Elizabeth upsets whatever apple carts there are in this complicated hothouse. We may wonder if she herself may be a bit off to take on such a role as this. She is seen being inappropriately detailed in talking about how to do sex scenes to a junior high acting class. Checking out online candidates to play the boy her character will seduce or be seduced by - in a late exchange Gracie reminds Joe "You seduced me - Elizabeth says the boy actors aren't "sexy enough." She flirts more and more with Joe.
We don't always know how we are to take matters or how they are being taken; not always exactly sure where the funny melds into the icky, or when the fraught fades into the mundane. Haynes and his writer Samy Burch choose not to have a single overt interpretation or moral position on central events of this story. Some of us might prefer a film that did have that, but the fascination, even if the matter gets blurred, is that this way they keep it complicated, so one doesn't know where things are going from one scene to the next. The many layered, however, may get confused with the blurry, as signalled by the opening shots.
May December , 113 mins., debuted at Cannes May 2023. It is included in dozens of other festivals, including the NYFF, where it was the Opening Night film Sept. 29. Opening theatrically in the US Nov. 17, 2023. Metacritic rating: 8̶3̶%̶ 85% (upgraded DEc. 2023).
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POOR THINGS (Yorgos Lanthimos 2023)
YORGOS LANTHIMOS: POOR THINGS (2023)
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EMMA STONE AND MARK RUFFALO IN POOR THINGS
Bawdy, supremely visual period genre exploration of human possibility, and triumph for Emma Stone
Lanthimos' latest film, the big winner at the Venice Film Festival, is a sort of bonkers reworking of the Frankenstein myth with a female re-creation. This is even more of a critical success than its predecessor, The Favourite, maybe not more of a popular success. It's more offensive to common taste and values than the latter. But it demands attention and delights the eye with its beautiful and distinctive mise-en-scène and use of locations, and it lives and breathes though an adept and go-for-broke performance by Emma Stone in the lead role. It's ultimately wearying, too much of a good, or delightfully bad, thing, but it has a "look" that never falters in being impressively consistent throughout. Lanthimos has grown in skill and appeal from film to film and this is a peak, a fluent and bold tour de force that astonishes and delights as much as it offends and provides a gloriously visual realization of an interesting tale.
Everything is set in the nineteenth century when there were carriages: one of them early on is memorably drawn by a what is only the stuffed head of a horse, one of many signals that everything is a little bit off-kilter. This is a time, it is assumed, when science and medicine are at liberty to play wildly with nature. Hence a well-off woman drops off a bridge and drowns and Willem Dafoe's doctor-surgeon Dr. Godwin Baxter, with a heavily scarred face (an elaborate feat of prosthetics and makeup) and a seemingly plausible Scottish accent (perhaps an homage to the late Alastair Gray on whose book this film is based) reanimates the drowned lady's body with the help of a lot of electricity together with surgical insertion of a fresh baby's brain. Voilà! A mature woman with long raven tresses and the unformed mind and undeveloped motor skills of a child.
What follows is a sort of around the world in a crazy eighty days during which Bella Baxter, as the doctor has named his creation - and he has her call him "God" - grows with astonishing rapidity from a rude, balletic non-person who spits out food, boxes people and babies in the face, and is as dependent and worshiping toward him as an Irish setter to its master, to a lady who reads books and thinks and manipulates men as she likes.
The panache with which Emma Stone performs in this role is a delight, beginning with her inventive and original choreography of a body learning to balance and move. A lot of Lanthimos' action however, and often The writing attributed to Alasdair Gray and The Favourite coscriptor Tony McNamara, is as much gratuitously crude and silly at times as it is bold. The childish provocations sometimes distract from what might be possible insights.
And yet we should begin with the settings and look, which in turn begin with the use of a fisheye lens that rounds and expands everything, whether interior or exterior, providing a quaint, painterly, and quite beautiful look, sometimes in black and white, more often in color.
Meanwhile Bella's development is largely framed around sex. She discovers early the delights of self-pleasure, and couples with one man who uses, and then repentantly loves, her, Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo, whose posh English accent is tongue-in-cheek), and another man, a student of the doctor, who reveres and is betrothed to her, Max McCandless (Ramy Youssef). Bella is a free woman though, and even her experiences of a Parisian brothel - elaborately realized, including a memorable interior seen from above, is an energetic, cooly intellectual exploration of possibilities, and way of making money.
Lanthimos has graduated from "dour, deadpan little tales," as Stephanie Zacharek puts it in her understandably admiring Time review, that show how wicked men can could be as if we needed to know, to things that are "more wickedly cheerful and bawdy." This may still be seen as a mixed blessing, except that he has also simply grown enormously as a filmmaker along with the opening up of mood. Poor Things is more challenging as a project and frankly magnificent - you can call it show-offy if you like - than anything he has done before. Movies are about visuals, after all; this film is very much that, and also has a plot. It could have done with less vulgarity, tempered its violence, and edited out twenty to thirty unnecessary or repetitive minutes. But one no longer cringes at the prospect but instead now anticipates with pleasure what Lanthimos will do next.
A standout of the year and Oscar-worthy in many categories, as pointed out by YouTube's "The Oscar Expert," "brother bro," and a female Lanthimos fan guest in their Oct. 18, 2023 review. It now may rank with and even exceed Oppenheimer in awards season.
Poor Things,141 mins., debuted at Venice Sept. 1, 2023, where it won the Golden Lion for best film. It was subsequently scheduled for a great many international festivals, including the NYFF, where it was screened for this review and shown Sept. 30, 2023. Metacritic rating: 9̶4̶%̶ - now 87%.
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EMMA STONE IN POOR THINGS
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LA CHIMERA (Alice Rohrwacher 2023)
ALICE ROHRWACHER: LA CHIMERA (2023)
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JOSH O'CONNOR IN LA CHIMERA
Etruscan treasures that tempt and cloy
Alice Rohrwacher, whose older sister Alba is a famous Italian actress, has received much favorable recognition for her earlier films, Corpo Celeste (2011), The Wonders (2014), and Happy as Lazzaro (2018), all of which were included in the New York Film Festival, like this one. Her new one, set in the Tuscan countryside in the nineteen eighties, centers on a young British archaeologist who gets involved in an international network of stolen Etruscan artifacts during the 1980s.
La Chimera was greeted at Cannes as "enchanting" (Guy
Lodge inVariety) and "uproarious" and "captivating" and as a film that "teems with life," receiving one of only two five-star ratings from Bradshaw at this year's Cannes. It's a rollicking fantasy that features Josh O'Connor as the rather disheveled English archeologist now teamed up with a Felliniesque gang of grave-robbers who falls in love with the gone daughter of Isabella Rossellini. Watch the TRAILER and see if it's your kind of thing. (Rohrwacher has evoked the colorful, populist chaos of classic Italian directors before, De Sica, Zavattini and the Taviani brothers, as well as Fellini.) She also recently directed the series of Elena Ferrante's "My Brilliant Friend" ("L'amica geniale") for Italian television, with her sister Alba as the narrator.
The fantasy of supernatural element survives here in that Arthur (O'Connor's character) uses dowsihg rods to find Etruscan tombs. He is treated by the local artifact thieves or tomb robbers as a wise man, a magical savant. On the other hand when he arrives by train, coming from jail tlme, a ride when he is "outed" as a bad man by passengers who leve him alone in a compartment b himself, sporting a rough prison haircut and a dirty (though well cut) white linen suit, he looks generally scruffy and that only grows throughout the film. He finds what may be a rundown castle, a big room presided over by Flora (Isabella Rossellini) in a wheel chair, feeling "old," (and occasionally speaking English to Arthur. There are young women including Italia (Brazilian actress Carol Duare), and an unseen presence, Beniamina, Flora's daughter and allegedly Arthur's lost love, somehow lost from the world of the living. As usual Alice's sister Alba is present as Frida.
What Rohrwacher does here is similar to her last feature: she has us pass the time with her people and join their world. It is a warm and engaging, it's Italian, friendly, intimate, aided by square format and 16mm images; but not much is happening. One persistent image is of Arthur smoking a lot of cigarettes and continually searching for an "accendino," which is Italian for lighter. O'Connor functions well in Italian, suggesting he's been here for a while, though it's pointed out that he could use Italian lessons: for instance he misstates the ending of "occhi," the word for eyes. He has picked up the accent well. We see him and the mismatched miscreants - including a bawdy transvestite gang straight out of Fellini, seen in a street parade - who serve (or use?) him, finding little Etruscan objects and selling caches of them to a wholesale buyer who will sell them to collectors.
It's only after a lot of desultory messing about that this film develops a plot. Rohrwacher is more about situation and atmosphere here. But it's at such atmosphere, at sublimely intimate chaos, that Rohrwacher excels. When something happens, it involves finding Etruscan tombs, particularly a large untapped one, another world that redefines Arthur's relation to reality or to time and space, to his function in life.
The trouble is, backgrounds are patchy. How did Arthur wind up leading this seedy existence? who was Beniamina? The director is wonderful at surface detail but leaves out connective tissue. What she is talking about here, though, is clear, and has resonance with the whole Italian dilemma: living, as Tuscans do, and Romans, and Italians all over the country, with a cultural wealth so rich you can just plunge a shovel in the ground and you find it. As the always perceptive Peter Bradshaw puts it, "It can be plundered for the present day artefacts and spirits raised from the dead, but at the cost of incurring a terrible sadness: a feeling of surrounding yourself with ghosts." Italians live off their past and are weighed down by it.
La Chimera, 130 mins., debuted at Cannes in competition. Screened for this review as part of the Main Slate of the New York Film Festival, where it shows Oct. 7 and 8, 2023 with Q&A's with Alice Rohrwacher. It will be released in the US by Neon Nov. 23, 2023. Metacritic rating: 88%.
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HIT MAN (Richard Linklater 2023)
RICHARD LINKLATER: HIT MAN (2023)
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GLEN POWELL IN HIT MAN
A philosophy professor moonlights as a dummy hit man for the New Orleans cops, then it gets more complicated when he gets personally involved with one of his seedy targets.
A premise so good you have only not to get in the way of it, and Linklater mostly doesn't. This movie gives off the vibe of a neo-noir, but is too mild and has too much of a feel-good, harmless ending to live up to that. Nonetheless this is a very enjoyable, loosely-slung yet exciting confection that will be giving pleasure for a long time to come.
Hit Man is all about Glen Powell, an actor some of us were quite unaware of, and besides being one of Linklater's most accomplished and entertaining pictures in years, should make this engaging, sexy actor widely known. His sizzling costar the Puerto Rican born, Mexican raised Adria Arjona is another present but hitherto unnoticed actor, and this is essential to our feeling that we're spying on a startling situation. Powell is bland, but also big and hunky. As a sometime college lecturer plus fake hit man who assumes various disguises, he's a tabula rasa who can be made dangerous and sexy, and has a potential edge to him. In short, he's ideal for this role.
The capper is that Gary Johnson is a real guy who actually did these things. It's stated in the occasional voiceovers spoken by Johnson/Powell that the hit man is a myth, though understandably, hiring somebody to kil somebody else is a crime (though one a good lawyer can get you off of in court, apparently). So that makes it odd that according to Time, there are four new hit man movies this fall: Linklater's self-titled one and David Fincher's well received pro assassin tale The Killer, both successes at Venice, plus two others, Harmony Karine's "infrared" one Aggro Dr1ft and Michael Keaton's hitman-with-dementia movie Knox Goes Away. But then--is the hit man really a total myth? Surely in the mafia it hasn't been?
The basic element here in the New Orleans-based action has nothing to do wih the mafia. It's a guy who teaches college - here philosophy and psychology, urging his charges to see their identities as constructs capable of refashioning - who first starts moonlighting doing tech work on taping and wiring for sting operations and then is drawn in to replace the police department's fake hit man when he's suspended. The linchpin of this Hollywoodization of Gary Johnson's life is that the suspended cop returns and wants his job back, but the police keep him working on backup because he's too much of a wild card ((basically an asshole). And that of course means he's a wild card also in the romance that develops between "Ron" (Gary's fake hit man name) and Madison (Adria Arjona), the hotheaded and beautiful dame who comes to him to get her repressive, horrible husband killed. She is lovely and nice, and the version of "Ron" Gary has adopted for her is simply a sexier version of his real self (he uses various disguises to suit the hit applicants). He talks her into using her hit money simply to walk away from her abusive hubby and live a new life.
She does that. But of course the abusive hubby won't just go away.
This violation of protocol on "Ron"/Gary's part signals the mutual attraction of Ron and Madison, which bears the fruit of a hot affair that geets going once "Ron" checks back to see how Madison is doing. Then there's excitement of things threatening to get messy. Gary's police department handlers aren't happy with his violation of the rules of entrapment. (By the way, despite the philosophizing about identity, which relates to Gary-Ron's use of disguises and double life, this movie never considers the ethics of luring people into committing to a crime in order to arrest them - sting operations.)
What's good, and noirish of a sort, is that there is plenty of plot here, and with that, plenty of good dialogue. There is lots of talk (including the voiceover) and very little violence, only the threat of the latter, and none onscreen. Linklater and Powell, who previously worked with him on Everybody Wants Some!! and [I]Apollo 10 1/2[/I, cowrote the script based on an article of the same name about Gary Johnson by Skip Hollandsworth in Texas Monthly. The spirits of Quentin Tarantino and the early John Dahl hover around this tasty confection.
Hit Man, 113 mins., debuted at Venice Sept. 5, 2023, also sowing at Toronto, New York, and BFI London. Screened at this review as part of the NYFF where it shows Oct. 3 and 4. Coming on Netflix, to whom it reportedly sold at Toronto for $20 million. Metacritic rating: 83%. (Later 82%.)
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MUSIC (Angela Schanelec 2023
ANGELA SCHANELEC: MUSIC (2023)
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The baffling art film drama of this Sophocles-based contemporary German Berlinale Silver Bear winner starts with a romance between a prisoner and a prison guard
Jessica Kiang (Variety) calls this, Schanelec's tenth film (but the first one I've seen), a "riff" on Oedipus Rex that's "rewarding" but "radically mystifying." (She is, ultimately, very appreciative.)
But Shanelec rings changes on Sophocles, not least of which is that the Oedipus character avoids lasting repercussions from his grievous mistake, committed due to being abandoned as a baby and never knowing his origin, or his connection to the prison guard he falls in love with after being jailed for manslaughter.
She (Shanelec) is an "uncompromising formalist" whose work is another "beautiful and strange deep-niche arthouse artifact," Kiang writes. You have to know Shanelec is interpreting Sophocles going into this film to make sense of it, Kiang says, and makes clear that while Shanelec is caviar to the general, she has an enthusiastic cult following.
Jordan Mintzer (Hollywood Reporter) wrote about Music, reviewing the director's career. "While [I]Home[/I" (her previous feature)]"walked away with Berlin’s Silver Bear award in 2019," Mintzer said, "it’s hard to see Music doing the same, even if it will probably appeal to Schanelec’s admirers." He turned out to be partly mistaken: Music did win a Silver Bear, for its screenplay.
Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian also wrote about Music at the Berlinale. But while he describes its accomplishment as cinema favorably, and watched it to the end, he admits that Schanelec's refusal to render up meanings has defeated him in the past, and did so again this time.
Music can be seen as a palate-cleanser, or a challenge for cinematic puzzler-solvers. Readers are advised to consult these three cited reviews for more detailed descriptions of the film, which takes place mostly in Greece, starring French actors speaking fluent Greek. There are many long, still shots; much action takes place around the sea. The mentioned prison meeting recognizably occurs, and a car accident in which someone is killed. The leaps forward in time the reviewers describe can be observed. This is a world of sunshine, not darkness. Most shots are silent, many scenes with people lacking dialogue, but there are moments of uplifting baroque music and also live musical performances taht are very pleasant, including a short concert at the end. There is assurance in the images and editing, though it's hard to conceive of this as telling a story without consulting a shot-by-shot explanatory program as one watches. She knows what she is doing; we may not. It's a rather soothing, but baffling, watch. Music is an art film for its own self-defined audience of conoscenti.
Music, 108 mins., debuted in competition at the Berlinale Feb. 21, 2023, winning the Silver Bear for best screenplay. Also shown at Hong Kong and Istanbul. Screened for this review as part of the NYFF. Oct. 4 and 5, Q&A's with Shanelec. Metacritic rating: 72%.
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MAESTRO (Bradley Cooper 2023)
BRADLEY COOPER: MAESTRO (2023)
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CAREY MULLIGAN AND BRADLEY COOPER in MAESTRO
The greatness, gay dalliances, and loving but fraught marriage of Leonard Bernstein in Cooper's classy followup to 'A Star Is Born'
Bradley Cooper's Maestro is a glitteringly elegant, precise portrait of the multitalented director, composer, and educator, with world-class, Oscar-worthy prosthetics and makeup. If there's hubris in the actor's directing himself as such a great American cultural figure, he nonetheless carries it off with panache.But in a sense the movie's not about him. It's about Felicia Montaleagre, Bernstein's elegant Chilean actress wife, and Carey Mulligan's brilliant performance in the role, elegant, tasteful, never mannered as she sometimes has been. This is a film with the limitations of its biopic elements, but it transcends that genre, and is very fine work, justifying the promise of Cooper's A Star Is Born remake directorial debut, justifying his alleged anointment by Marty or Spielberg to take on this project, for which they've given their producer blessing, their judgement proven right here.
This is the portrait of a marriage, a marriage at the heart of American and New York culture (if they can be said to coincide) lasting from 1951 to Felicia's early death of cancer in 1978. The burden of this marriage is obvious. It is not only a fame and performing life for Lennie that overshadowed Felicia's being and accomplishments, but his dalliances with men. The film achieves a weariness and excitement that linger in the mind (perhaps also in the heart). There is glorious energy, thrusting, confident mise-en-scène to match the bold simulacrum of makeup and voice and the recreation of boisterous joie-de-vivre of Leonard Bernstein that Cooper achieves.
Sometimes it feels like the picture is shying away from the main burden of its subject that clouded the marriage, as timid and closeted about gayness as the forties and fifties when the story begins. Yet this is not fair or true, because the complexity is there, and one winds up making excuses and learning to understand the repressiveness of a period and why this film is true to it. Owen Gleiberman's admiring Variety review is a good post-viewing place to begin in understanding Maestro. Gleiberman provides both a thorough description and a magnificent apology. He makes us understand how well all the things Leonard Bernstein, as "the first American conductor on a level with European legends like Arturo Toscanini," operated on so many levels, and his wild exuberance - expressed by the natural glow and sparkle of Bradley Cooper's eyes, no prosthetics needed for that - was part of a breaking of barriers that took him, with his oversize personality, beyond great musical gifts to superstardom. The film is too sophisticated to bother showing it, but Lennie became as much a household word as Albert Einstein. If Maestro works as it's well-programmed to do, it will provide hints to virgin youthful viewers of why this man remains an icon.
The movie begins in color, then goes to black and white (such binary visuals being the useful cliché of our moment now), also framing in intimate square ratio. The opening is a melancholy strain on solo piano, Bernstein's own composition like most of the film, heard before we see Lennie as a low-lit figure bent over the keyboard, it's after Felicia's death, it's a filmed interview, and he's saying how much he misses her, and his head bows down in silence after the playing. It's a great, unexpected way to begin . It declares this is not a biopic but the portrait of a marriage. But next we go to a virtuoso black and white sequence when Lennie, who hasn't met Felicia, is in his bedroom with his dreamboat lover David (Matthew Bomer), and runs through the apartment and right into Carnegie Hall. Age 25, he has gotten the big break, called in as an assistant conductor to replace maestro Bruno Walter who's taken sick, and he makes a brilliant debut, with no practice, and gets immediate recognition.
From this we go not to "West Side Story," but "a backstage riff on 'Fancy Free,' the 1944 ballet created by Bernstein and Jerome Robbins." Gleiberman points out how Cooper's screenplay written with Josh Singer (who seems to have cut his teeth on "The West Wing") continually avoids the obvious bio beats while still painting a rich, complete portrait, hardly even showing Lennie conducting until a grand, full-bore scene of Mahler in a cathedral after Felicia is dead showing how absolutely go-for-broke and magnificent Bernstein still was in his late years, the big mane of hair still shaking turned to gray, one hand still perpetually holding a lit cigarette, even when conducing a rehearsal. (This is painful to watch, but true.)
My enthusiasm is influenced by lifelong admiration of the man, not so much as a great conductor, though technically he was one, departing from the stick-figure metronome and showing how leading a symphony orchestra could be balletic and inventive, but as a great musical personality, communicating his enthusiasm and making things like his difference with Glenn Gould over the tempo of a Brahms concerto a matter of humorous but insistent controversy. The man was a force of nature, and made for great television. He communicated to all ages and persuasions. He was a public art intellectual, if there can be such a thing, in contrast to the testy political kind.
It was also an influence to see this film in what may have been the most eagerly and fully attended press screening of the New York Film Festival so far, with the audience, for a change, as pin-drop silent as attendees of a Paris cinema or theater would be. This is not a gushy crowd; it provides no ovations. But attention was paid. And this benefitted the tense moments like the big Thanksgiving argument, when Lennie has gotten sloppy, cruising his next young man openly at a party, and Snoopy both inside and outside in the parade signal the outsize egos and tragicomic mess this fraught marriage - not just of convenience, but of persistent love - has become. This, and so much more, are contained in this artful and sophisticated film.
One of the year's best American movies and a must-see.
Maestro, 129 mins., debuted at Venice, also showing at New York, Zurich, also at the New York Film Festival where it was screened for this review. Shown in the NYFF Oct. 2, 13, shown at both Walter Reade Theater and in the David Geffen concert hall, current home of the New York Philharmonic of which Bernstein was the director from 1958 to 1969. It was produced by Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Cooper, among others, it is destined for multi-nation internet release by Netflix (Dec. 20). Metacritic rating: 80%.
(See Bernstein himself in a late interview here.)
And here is a collection of a wealth of audio-visual material entitled "Leonard Bernstein's New York, New York."
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GREEN BORDER (Agnieskza Holland 2023)
AGNIESZKA HOLLAND: GREEN BORDER (2023)
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STILL FROM GREEN BORDER
Refugees treated as pawns by brutal authoritarian leaders across the Polish-Belarus borders
Agnieszka Holland's harrowing new film is a closeup of a piece of the world refugee crisis from multiple viewpoints. Helped by two other directors, Kamila Tarabura and Katarzyna Warzecha, she crafts a docudrama focused primarily on a Syrian family, father, mother, grandfather, kids, young sister, and a single bespectacled Afghan woman who speaks English, not Arabic. We meet them on a Turkish plane and the Arabic speakers naively think they can go through Poland to Sweden, where the family have a relative living. The Afghan lady wants instead to be given refuge in Poland. Instead they become pawns in a brutal game.
When they get to Belarus, and take a taxi prepaid from Sweden to Poland, they wind up first extorted, then tossed back and forth across a barbed wire line camping precariously in the woods - the "green border." The two ultimate villains behind their cruel treatment are Alyaksandr Lukashenka, the dictatorial leader of Belarus, and the no more admirable Polish leader Andrzej Duda. The brutality with which they are treated by the guards on both sides, the suffering of the young children and older man, are difficult to watch. In an omnibus review from Toronto, Brian Tallerico calls this film "a movie that many people probably couldn’t get through, but they probably should."
Holland and her cowriters Maciej Pisuk and Gabriela Lazarkiewicz have more up their sleaves, and they shift their focus for a while, after the mistreatment of the refugees has become impossible to watch any more, to others in the equation. There is the young Polish guard, Jan (Tomasz Wlosok)and his pregnant wife (Malwina Buss). The parallelism is a little too obvious since there are several pregnant women among the refugees subsequently shown, one of whom, an African woman, gets particularly brutal treatment. We see the young Polish guard with his wife. Then Jan is present for a pep talk from an officer who says the refugees are being used as weapons by Belarus’ President Alexander Lukashenko and Russia’s Vladimir Putin; he encourages the guards to treat them as objects and regard them as scum. But Jan starts to drink heavily and suffers psychological torments from this job, though he refuses to quit, thinking thework a national duty.
Another of the fragmentary "chapters" takes us to "activists," who seek to help the refugees in the "green border" forest interzone without breaking laws. But we also follow a woman shrink Julia (Maja Ostaszewska), a recent widow whose two dogs are her main emotional contacts. She joins with the activists, but her conditioned empathy, and perhaps a sense of privilege and the lack of immediate family she needs to protect, lead her to break the rules and take outsized risks, causing her own temporary arrest and making her too visible to provide haven for refugees in her ample hous.
There is a memorable sequence where some young French-speaking African boys are taken into a posh Polish house and sing rap with a Polish kid. Showering and dressing beforehand, they realize they "smelled bad," but, once cleaned up, they have enough juice left to enjoy themselves and bond. However in another brutal episode, some of the original group get mired in a swamp and children die - a sequence as painful to witness as the brutal beatings earlier.
It sometimes feels that this intense, well-staged, well-photographed film has attention deficit disorder. Boyd van Hoeij, writing from Venice for The Verdict, is not happy with the film's structure. He considers Green Border to be "hindered by" both "extremely predictable character development" and "a mosaic-like approach to narrative," that impairs our ability to "really get to know" or "emphasize with" any of the characters.
Krzysztof Kieślowski's "Three Colors" trilogy shifts around somewhat this way to compelling effect: it's just hard to do and requires a certain panache. Another multiple plot composition that succeeds impressively is that of the 1989 British miniseries "Traffik," where action switches back and forth between Afghan and Pakistani growers, dealers and manufacturers, German dealers, and British users. "Traffik" does this with a sense of drama, of art, and of entertainment. The writing of Green Border isn't on that level; isn't equal to its authenticity of mise-en-scène and casting, its awareness of current politics, and its moral sense. We feel deeply for the suffering of these abused and toyed with human beings, and we wish Green Border were as well made as it is urgent.
Recent Holland films I have reviewed are Burning Bush, Spoor, Mr. Jones, and Charlatan. An earlier favorite is the one about Rimbaud, Total Eclipse, for its go-for-broke performance by the young Leonardo DiCaprio; and, of course Europa Europa. Recently she has done a lot of television, including several episodes of "The Wire." Green Border is a TV series hastily assembled into a feature film.
Green Border/Zielona granica, 147mins., debuted at Venice (where it received the Special Jury Prize), also featured at Toronto, AFI, New York (where it was screened for this review Oct. 4, 2023) and Chicago. At the NYFF is shows Oct. 4 and 5, including Q&A's with Agnieszka Holland. Metacritic rating: 8̶5̶%̶ 83%.
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PICTURES OF GHOSTS/RETRATOS FANTASMAS (Kleber Mendonça Filho 2023)
KLEBER MENDONÇA FILHO: PICTURES OF GHOSTS/RETRATOS FANTSMAS (2023)
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INTERIOR OF A RECIFE PICTURE PALACE IN ITS HEYDAY FROM PICTURES OF GHOSTS
Haunting images and haunted places: the Brazilian director explores the sources of his inspiration
Menconça Filho memorably and spookily followed a world of menace and disorder in new Recife buildings fictionally in his 2011 debut feature Neighboring Sounds (ND/NF 2012). This time he crafts, with old footage, much of it his own, a personal documentary about fading remnants of culture in downtown Recife since the picture palaces, once idyllic places, went dark, preceding this by a pictorial review of family apartments, where he has shot his films over the years. Thus he flows from thoughts on his own movie-mad youth and his own family above to an eelegy for the lost communal culture of shared moviegoing - and what cinema owed to cinemas, and has lost as film "going" goes electronic and digital and solitary.
Speaking of apartments, Mendonça Filho's second, and more widely known film was Aquarius (NYFF 2016), which is about an imperious woman, magnificently played by Brazilian superstar Sonya Braga, who won't give up her apartment to developers. In speaking of this film, less structurally inventive than Neighboring Sounds, I said the film "shows how the apartment has acquired through decades of human use the quality of baraka as Robert Graves defined it in his Oxford Addresses on Poetry."
Mendonça Filho does this in even more detail, with lots of film illustrations, in talking about the family apartment, which remained occupied by him for forty years, and went through two major. remodelings, but still doubtless retained the underlying baraka from decades and decades of family use. Initially, when we see the old interior of the apartment, it's dark and cozy. We keep going back over it, people in it, his mother, siblings, the balcony and people watering the plants outside. We see and hear a lot about the apartment next door, with its swimming pool. It was invaded by termites, which caused the roof to collapse and got into the director's family apartment too. Off in the distance is the sea, and the big apartment buildings that have grown up as Recife has grown. All this is narrated in Mendonça Filho's own voice. And he tells us how he made movies here, with this apartment as the location, not just juvenile efforts but also mature work.
The film's second part shifts to Recife's city center, now in decline, and the handsome cinemas that once were important places of entertainment there. This section of the film is partly about cinema, partly about urban decline, partly fond memories of specific places, homes away from home if you like, inspirations and almost places of worship for young cinephiles and cineastes. Detailed visual explorations of the places, some archival, some Mendonça Filho's own footage shot over years, also include his visual records of Mr. Alexander, chief projectionist of one of the biggest theaters, whom the director filmed prior to his death two decades ago. While old movie palaces in America, most of them gone, tended to the baroque, those of Recife seem to have been of later vintage and more clean and modern-looking. Many were torn down and replaced by other buildings, some were converted into shopping centers - one, even while it was still a movie theater.
Mendonça Filho's skill is in creating magic, mystery, and fearful haunting out of the ordinary - a neighborhood or a long-inhabited family apartment. He does something like that in a coda to this evocative, richly personal documentary in which he takes a ride with a driver who tells him he has discovered a superpower: the ability to become invisible in place. And voilà! he finds himself in a driverless car. But no! The driver is still there, you can hear his voice. Simple, artisanal movie magic is the best way to haunt the viewer and plant lasting memories.
Mendonça Filo has crafted a most personal and original set of recollections. This splendid documentary confirms and elucidates his distinctive vision and whets the appetite for another feature, while providing one of the best guides to his work future students will ever see.
Pictures of Ghosts/Retratos Fantasmas ("Ghost Portraits," "Phantom Portraits"), 93 mins., debuted in May 2023 at Cannes Special Screenings. It was screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival, where it shows Oct. 9, 2023 at 5:30 pm.
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JANET PLANET (Annie Baker 2023)
ANNIE BAKER: JANET PLANET (2023)
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JULIANNE NICHOLSON AND ZOE ZIEGLER IN JANET PLANET
"Once again, A24 gambles on an unproven filmmaker, and once again, the indie studio comes away with an incredibly specific and personal glimpse into the mysteries of childhood." Peter Debruge, Variety. (Telluride.)
It has understandably received raves from reviewers for the major trade journals, but there are things that work and things that don't in this quirky and original directorial debut by the Pulitzer playwright Annie Baker in this portrait of a single mother and her perceptive but clingy 11-year-old daughter as they share summer '91 in Western Massachusetts - which hints at autobiographical elements. The intimate, precise little details of dialogue and boogers, hair lumps or a captured and executed tick and the score-free and pause-rich pace capture this world. But The Wrap's review by Tomris Laffly sums things up when it states that this A24 movie is "textured but wearisome." Janet Planet, as Peter Debruge writes, "is oddly structured and a bit flat (there’s no score, and the camera rarely budges)."
The odd structure is various, but starts with the question: who is this movie about? It's as if Baker couldn't (or wouldn't?) decide. At first all the focus is on the little girl, and you assume she must be Janet. But the little girl is plain, red haired, gold-rim-spectacled Lacy (Zoe Ziegler, spot-on). She gets taken out of summer camp early, apparently, because she thought nobody liked her, but as she waits to get picked up by Janet, who is her freckled mother (Julianne Nicholson), two girls are waiting to say goodbye and Lacy has got friends after all and would like to stay. But mom says no, because, for one thing, the camp has "agreed to return part of the deposit." (Janet is way off in the distance in this shot, by the way.)
The rather dry humor of this moment, which typically involves notable waiting and silences (and the aforementioned fixed camera position and lack of score), impresses for its own sake: it's a little showoff-y. It establishes the almost adult rapport of Lacy with Janet. This continues when Janet asks what she should do about her current boyfriend, Wayne (Will Patton), whose weird nighttime interpretive dancing (if that's what it is) and his prima donna behavior around a migraine, can't be cured by Janet's acupuncture treatment (use of curative needles being her livelihood, we learn). Janet asks Lacy what to do about Wayne. Lacy immediately advises to get rid of him. So again: whose planet it this? Maybe we should just say this is Annie Baker's planet and be done with it.
But it is "Janet's Planet" in that people come (and soon go) to be with Janet. This is signaled by inter-titles. Thus comes "WAYNE END." Then comes "REGINA" followed by "REGINA END." Regina (Sophie Okonedo) is an old friend Janet hasn't seen for years, who's out of dough and needs a job. Regina is met at a colorful, oddball group performance (tall, giraffe-like fantastical human-powered puppets; choral chanting) by a sort-of-cult led by a man called Avi (Elias Koteas), which Regina leaves to avoid Avi's clutches, to stay for a while with Janet and Lacy. But then, Regina gone after a spat, there is an inter-titled arrival of Avi himself in "Janet's planet," and he gives a little lecture (typically to Lacy as well as Janet) about the origin of the universe in Buddhist terns, something you could get in fuller form from an Alan Watts lecture recording. Janet, with Lacy's permission, goes on a walk and a country picnic with Avi. Hey presto! Avi vanishes in the middle of reciting a poem. AVI END.
A square dancing gathering is "a great way to meet people," so Janet goes to one, another seemingly authentic local event included in the film. Poor Lacy sits on the sidelines, refusing to dance and so lonely she wants to cry.
If you want to know where all this is going, perhaps the best answer is back to school for Lacy, whose entry into the sixth grade (with the "nice" homeroom teacher, we are happy to hear) is temporarily delayed when she gets sick. She almost throws up; yes, she's scared about going back to school but that isn't what made her sick. She lies on the floor and on the ground outside for a while. She refuses to take antibiotics and then apparently does take some.
This is a movie that seems almost to diminish in the mind afterward. Its slow scenes demand attention. It's observations are precise. Its style is distinctive enough to warrant adjectives like "exquisite" and "indelible" from prominent critics. But its episodic structure and lack of clear central focus leave one feeling it seem to collapse into itself and vanish, the way Avi does. Janet's periodic self-analysis, with conclusions that she's self-sabotaging, yet can easily captivate people, seem uninteresting, and not even true. But remember, this is an original and keenly observed film.
Janet Planet, 113 mins., debuted at Tellluride Sept. 1, 2023. Screened for this review Oct. 5 prior to the New York Film Festival Oct. 8 showing. Metacritic rating: 92%.
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PRISCILLA (Sofia Coppola 2023)
SOFIA COPPOLA: PRISCILLA (2023)
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CAILEE SPAENY IN PRISCILLA (JACOB ELODI PLAYS YOUNG ELVIS) ]
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The protected world of Elvis Presley's child bride.
Sixteen months ago we had Baz Luhrmann's lively but flawed Elvis with Austin Butler. This is something less obvious: the woman's angle, Elvis seen crabwise and through jaundiced eyes from the point of view of the child bride, with two excellent unknowns in the leads, breakout young Australian Jacob Elordi as Elvis and Missouri-born Cailee Spaeny as Priscilla. This, like Bradley Cooper's Maestro, is a portrait of a famous musical artist's flawed marriage, but this time all the spotlight is on the wife.
The thing that's most striking about Priscilla is how immaculate it is, how correct and polite everyone is. This film was shot in Canada, not on the biggest budget, in thirty days, and it's neat, tidy, with no rough edges, and so much the better for it - but do not look for grand scenes; some have complained that it's about nothing happening, a Waiting for Godot celebrity marriage, as it were. There are a couple of fights, when Priscilla has gotten too fed up with her situation to repress it, and Elvis is rough with her once when she seems uncooperative. But from the start he calls her "darlin'," and is sweet and tender. Warning: he is delicately objectifying her.
Sofia Coppola's elegant, restrained film lets things creep up very slowly, and even Priscilla's departure when she leaves Graceland for good in the film's final moment is quiet and discreet. All this shows how well Coppola's collaboration with her subject works. The film is based on Elvis and Me, Priscilla’s 1985 memoir of the marriage, but also on recent communications, and notably the living Priscilla, who was in touch with the director, was tearfully present at the Venice premiere and gave her blessing and said the filmmakers had "done their homework."
The two future lovers meet in 1959, a time of uniforms and dazzling big cars. Elvis arrives in a long black wing-tailed Cadillac that is to die for. Priscilla was 14, a ninth grader, and Elvis is 24, famous, already the world's number one rock superstar, with a constant entourage, but in the US Army. Both are in Germany, where Priscilla's stepfather, like Elvis, is stationed nearby, with the Air Force. Elvis, entranced by the girl's prettiness and the hometown Americanness he misses, arranges for the girl to come again, against the objections of the stepfather, who is carefully persuaded.
Jacob Elordi, who plays Elvis, is soft-voiced, often in shadow, as if to show the quietness of his menace, or to emphasize that this is not his story but hers. He is very tall (the actor is 6'5"), hovering above, pale, immaculately coiffed. Unlike Austin Butler, he doesn't get to do any leg-wobbling, hip-shimmying showoffs. No performing. He is just Priscilla's rich and incredibly famous husband who is dominant, controlling, and mostly away. Hie Elvis is as subtle and elegant as Austin Butler's is giddy and crowd-pleasing.
The dating period is sweet and tender. Priscilla falls in love. Elvis tells her she is special, "from back home," a comfort to him. But then when he goes back to the States and she remains in Germany there is a period when she thinks he has forgotten her. He has not, though. Again, true to the style of this film, what stands out is how smoothly everything goes; and how, astonishingly, he gets her stepfather, again reluctantly, to allow her to go and live at Graceland, continuing her schooling there. His bedroom is dark and elaborate (the filmmaker's invention: they found few records of Graceland's early interiors).
Priscilla now has a strange status that Peter Bradshaw describes in his Venice Guardian review as "infant sacrifice, bobbysoxer concubine," she is on hold, tenderly spoiled and cuddled - but no sex, at least not the "penetrative" kind, or any that we see - awaiting her moment to become the "child bride." Sofia Coppola's delicate staging defines this slowly evolving, rather strange status, strange to see so clearly defined in a movie, probably still much experienced in more traditional cultures even today, but far from the rom-com world. This is were Priscilla excels, and is memorable. It is also made clear even from Priscilla's first installation that Elvis is taking a lot of pills, uppers and downers, and sharing them with her. (The first time he gives her a downer, she sleeps for two days. He miscalculated.)
Priscilla goes to a Catholic girls school taught by nuns to finish high school. She is not a good student: she is too distracted by Elvis' nocturnal existence and she is warned by the head nun that she's in danger of not graduating. But when Elvis comes and visits the school - in one of the movie's few laugh-out-loud scenes - the nuns crowd around him, big fans like everybody else. Priscilla has persuaded him to wait outside for her graduation because his presence would have drawn all the attention.
It's only after a considerable time in this ongoing "bobbysoxer concubine" status that Elvis is ready to marry Priscilla. It's not stated but she is by then twenty-one, he, thirtyish, and right away there is a baby. But, of course, Elvis has been away much of the time: this was the period when he was making a lot of movies, whose kitsch B-picture quality he complains of; it's known that he had quite good taste in film, and he always wanted to study at the Actors Studio and seek a serious movie career like Brando and James Dean.. But Priscilla has a different complaint about Elvis' time in Hollywood: his wildly publicized affairs, notably Ann Margaret and Nancy Sinatra, which he pooh-poohs. Bradshaw says Priscilla has become "Memphis’s very own Lady Diana," with female Hollywood stars "in the Camilla Parker-Bowles role." Whatever is going on in Hollywood, Priscilla isn't a part of it.
Coppola's film is immaculate and delicate, but it will only be succeeding if it makes you uncomfortable. Most of all it will make you feel the frustration, the claustrophobia, the boredom of Priscilla Presley's confined life. She is never allowed to go on the bus to Hollywood, or performances, with the gang of male sycophants: she watches as it departs. She is not even allowed to play outside on the lawn. All her llfe is waiting, waiting, as she first got as strong taste of when Elvis left Germany and for a long time he didn't call or write.
For this reason this movie is not for everyone, and Austin Butler's jazzy performance in an inferior but entertaining movie will be an Elvis that's more fun and more the Elvis you want to remember. But this, like Cooper's Maestro, is a classy and unexpected portrait of an artist celebrity marriage. Priscilla is more critically acclaimed. But Maestro is a richer, more complex story and more intellectually stimulating. This film however is very germane to Coppola's interests. It has strong ies with Marie Antoinette and with her 2010 portrait of urban celebrity anomie and isolation, Somewhere. But Priscilla is more successful and has more mainstream appeal. It's up there, but not on the level of Lost in Translation or The Virgin Suicides.
Priscilla, 113 mins., debuted at Venice, where Cailee Spaeny won the Best Actress award. It was also shown at Zurich, New York, London BRI, Mill Valley, and some other festivals. Featured as the Centerpiece Film at the New York Film Festival, where it was screened for this review Oct. 7. US theatrical release is scheduled for Nov. 3. Metacritic rating: 82%.
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neosora: RYUICHI SAKAMOTO (Neo Sora 2023)
NEO SORA: RYUICHI SAKAMOTO | OPUS
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A filmed solo concert with the artist, who died at 71 in March of cancer. Venice.
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Lisandro Alonso 2023)
LISANDRO ALONSO: EUREKA (2023)
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IMAGE FROM LISANDRO ALONSO'S EUREKA
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Three stories of indigenous people, at different times and places
With VIggo Mortensen and Chiara Mastroianni in the first section, featured in the neutral Premieres category at Cannes (not making it into Competition there), this is a bit of a puzzler. Though each of the segments is interesting - or contains interesting - and suspenseful - elements, it's hard to figure out how they connect, which they seem to be meant to do, since each one merges into the one that follows.
"The Argentine slow-cinema formalist explores tensions between Indigenous culture and the modern world in a languid curio that will delight his acolytes and bemuse others," write Guy Lodge in Variety at Cannes. A review by Savina Petkova for Playlist, perhaps best states the case when she says "there’s too much" here "to make it really work." But it's exciting to try, and I like this better than his much admired last film and find much to admire in it.
Lisandro Alonso's 2005 Los Muertos is one of my favorite Latin American films, favorite films ever seen in a film festival, so I have enormous respect for this director and know the power he wields. Los Muertos is a film that is almost wordless. It;s perhaps right to say that here, in this new film, Alonso has too much going on. It's the opposite of Los Muertos, which is one man, no dialogue, no score, just a camera and a jungle journey to a violent finale whose meaning we understand without explanation. I was disappointed by Alonso's more mainstream (but also quaintly formatted) 2004 Jauja, his last film and his biggest "hit" so far. It was accomplished and that academy ratio format with curved edges gave it an art house elegance, but it lacked his earlier edge.
The opening of Eureka is oddball and amusing. It's rough-hewn black and white Western opening with a scrawny, ancient Native American delivering a thrilling cry to the elements; then featuring Viggo Mortensen as a lonely traveler çalled Murphy, whom others seem to have it in for, searching for his kidnapped daughter: he is dumped off a coach by a surly driver dressed like a nun. They speak English, anachronistically, since it's the nineteenth century and she talks about having to get to her kid." In a saloon, Chiara Mastroianni - you won't see this again - sits down with him and says he can call her "El Coronel". Apparently, she runs the unruly town. There's something of the off-key air to this stylized Western passage of Jum Jarmusch's Dead Man, without being quite as authentic or as brilliantly weird. Then the camera pulls away to reveal a big boxy TV with the last image on the screen: hey presto! We've been watching a TV movie.
What follows at first features a Native American girl called Sadie (Sadie Lapointe), neice of Alaina (Alaina Clifford), a Native American cop in the Pine Ridge Reservation. We follow Alaina around as she carries out bureaucratic white people police duties like arresting a (pregnant, 15-year-old, drunk) Native American girl fighting with a knife, and rescuing a stranded European motorist called Maya (Mastroianni again). Alonso plays with the slow-cinema possibilities of cop routine, the calls back dnd forth to HQ - where Alaina apparently disappears after going to the casino to investigate the remains of a brawl.
This artfully segues into Sadie going to the station/jail to visit her brother, whom she seeks to motivate. She first appears as a basketball player and coach, and seems full of energy and hope. But she goes to her granddad, and reveals she wants him to carry out a promise he made to her long ago: she wants, it seems, to disappear, or to fly away in the soul of a giant stork. Mays's question to Alaina about teenage suicide may have been gauche, but desperation reigns even among the apparently motivated, on this American Indian reservation.
That's it for North America and we're transported to the Amazon basin, where the bird-soul flies, and an earlier time again, where Indigenous Brazilian natives read each other’s dreams and one of them, banished by stabbing someone in a knife fight, goes to work foraging for gold, meeting his own bizarre fate witnessed by the giant bird.
This is all magnificent, especially the haunting passage of the cop on the reservation, and it's beautifully photographed by Timo Salminen (an Aki Kaurismaki collaborator) and Mauro Herce Mira, and fluidly edited, by choice flowing seamlessly like an acid trip instad of neatly separated into chapters.
But either way, flowing or in chapters, these segments are hard to digest in one two-and-a-half-hours film. It did not seem long to me, only confusing, a piece of work of high polish with an interesting cast, both famous and unknown, a film that you can write a nice essay about but that's hard to wrap your head around, and hard to recommend to anybody but challenge-seekers or dyed-in-the-wool Lisandro Alonso fetishists. But if you are one of those two, for God's sake see this whenever you get the chance.
Eureka, 140 mins., debuted in Premieres at Cannes May 2023; also shown in festivals at Munich; Wroclaw, Poland; Lima; Melbourne; Busan; and the New York Film Festival, as part of which is was screened for this review Oct. 10, 2023. Metacritic rating: incomplete, including only one review so far. NYFF: Oct. 10 & 11, 2023, Q&A with Lisandro Alonso, Alaina Clifford, Sadie Lapointe; N.American premiere.
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THE DELINQUENTS /LOS DELINCUENTES (Rodrigo Moreno 2023)
RODRIGO MORENO: THE DELINQUENTS/LOS DELINCUENTES (2023)
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SCENE FROM THE DELINQUENTS
The disappointments
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Premise (IMDb): "Morán and Román are looking for freedom and adventure. One commits a robbery, discovering an alternative to his boring life, while the other hides money that doesn't belong to him. Their destiny as new criminals will bring them together." Cannes: Un Certain Regard. Peter Bradshaw called this a "beguilingly surreal slow-motion Buenos Aires heist tale" and said that "If Pedro Almodóvar and Eric Rohmer teamed up to compose a meanderingly long crime caper it might look like this." He gave it five stars in the Guardiah.
Jessica Kiang calls The Delinquents "banally surreal." It is that, but perhaps with more of the emphasis on the banal (and none on the beguiling), though the plot line includes coincidences and doublings that are more like a fable or fairy tale than any kind of modern film. It's buffoonery mixed with adventure and romance, certainly a promising combination in its way. The trouble is that it meanders too much. It seemed to me ultimately not to live up to expectations, and I wondered if the estimable, expert critics like Jessica Kiang, Peter Bradshaw, Jordan Mintzer and David Erlich saw the same film I did, or I was just having a bad day.
The opening has been congratulated for being an original bank robbery because it's such a low-keyed, slow-film one. (Crime, even successful crime, is certainly often duller or less suspenseful in real life than it is in movies.) The robber is a bank employee, Morán (Daniel Elías), and even a bit of a schlub. He looks like John C. Reilly. His robbery seems to consist just of shifting a lot of money back and forth between bags and metal boxes and opening and shutting vaults. When it's done, he goes home somehow with around $650,000. We know he has put one over on his employers, even if we may not really know how. It's banker stuff, gaming the system.
The scene that follows is the movie's best. Morán meets with his coworker, the leaner and more athletic (but still ordinary-looking) Román (Esteban Bigliardi) at a busy, popular Buenos Aires pizza house, where they eat and drink beer standing up surrounded by other people. The parallelism of the names, Morán-Román, underline perhaps a little too broadly that the screenplay is tongue-in-cheek. And it isn't all tongue-in-cheek by any means. Anyway, it's in this crowded room that Morán tells Román he has stollen $650,000, in dollars, and it's in a bag at his feet. When the conversation is over he will walk away leaving it at Román's feet.
His plan is to confess to the theft, with Román holding the money. Morán calculates that he will serve three and a half years, then on release will share the money with Román, and they can both retire, modestly, and never work again - instead of working for another twenty-five years and having no life.
The hapless Román can't leave the $600,000 in the pizza house. The trouble - a source of suspense - is that there is a woman in Román's life, so there's a danger she will find the bag of cash he brings home from the pizza house and stashes up high in a cupboard.
In great heist movies, like the classic Rififi, the elaborately planned and faultlessly executed robbery is always followed by the slow débâcle when somebody squeals and it all falls apart. Moreno's long denouement is a prolonged - very prolonged - two-pronged joke. It involves a lot of travel into the country, several pretty women, and some extremely implausible coincidences.
The best joke is that practically all Morán's colleagues at the bank, except Román, get severely punished - or endlessly hassled, anyway - for Morán's theft, a crime they had nothing to do with: guilt by association, and the officious and aggressive browbeating of a female insurance investigator who stays at the bank making everybody miserable for a considerable while. Román is eventually made miserable too, forced to handle both windows on a monthly pay day, with a new replacement breathing down his neck.
I did not frankly always follow what was going on in those trips to the country to stash the money that turn into meet-ups with pretty women, etc. And the horses, and the stones and mountain lakes and swims. Crime movies are a genre where construction is normally neat and efficient, free of fat. They're best kept that way. The Delinquents may prove, for you, less hilarious and cool than it's reported to be - given that it lasts for three hours and (joke again) three minutes, a lot of which consists of digressions.
The Delinquents/Los delincuentes, 189 mins., debuted in Un Certain Regard at Cannes May 2023, showed at numerous international festivals, including the Main Slate of the NYFF, its US premiere, where it was screened Oct. 10, 2023 for this review. it's Argentina's official best foreign Oscar submission. Distributed by Mubi, Magnolia Pictures International and Cinema Tropical, it opens Opens Friday, Oct. 18, 2023 in theaters by Mubi. Metacritic rating: 92%.
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PERFECT DAYS (Wim Wenders 2023)
WIM WENDERS: PERFECT DAYS (2023)
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KOJI YAKUSHO, ARISA NAKANO IN PERFECT DAYS
Humble joy of the quotidian
Beginning with a chronicling of the daily routine of a middle-aged Tokyo toilet cleaner called Hirayama (Kôji Yakusho), Wim Wenders' film, which blends four short stories for its screenplay, gradually develops something more, building to a quiet climax that is a bittersweet affirmation of life. It accomplishes this with the help of the famous actor who plays the lead, whose performance is a marvel of understatedness.
You will see Hirayama get up and fold away his traditional bed on the tatami-mat floor multiple times, wash his face, trim his mustache, dress, put on his work "TOKYO TOILETS" overalls, get coffee from a machine, drive off in his van, start to work. The public city toilets, let us note, are beautiful, modern places, housed in external architecture that is varied and handsome. The toilets and sinks are state of the art, probably the world's best. Japanese toilets have long had heated seats and gadgets inside that squirt warm water.
Hirayama is not incapable of speaking, but his style is not to speak much, especially when questioned.
All well and good. But this is not some Bressonian depiction of grim daily routine. It is routine. But it is not grim. Hirayama is happy. Getting in his van, he selects from his collection of vintage, mint condition tapes of Seventies rock and pop classics, which include (a partial list): "Redondo Beach" by Patti Smith, "Sleepy City" by the Rolling Stones, "Pale Blue Eyes" by The Velvet Underground, "Dock of the Bay" by Otis Redding, "Sunny Afternoon" by The Kinks, "Brown Eyed Girl" by Van Morrison), "Feeling Good" (Nina Simone), and last but not least "Perfect Day" by Lou Reed. Hirayama's impetuous young coworker Takeshi (the comical Tokio Emoto) admires and covets these tapes and insists on taking Hirayama to show some of them to the clerk at a big shop for assessment and finds. As he's suspected, they turn out to be worth hundreds of dollars and Takeshi wants Hirayama to sell them. Of course he won't.
Hirayama loves trees, and at lunchtime he sits below an urban forest and takes a snapshot or two with ahn old film camera, of a favorite tree. Every week, a regular ritual, he goes to a camera shop where he loads a new roll in the camera, picks up a set of prints, and leaves off the latest roll to be printed. At home he goes through the new prints, throws out the bad ones, and files the new ones in a whole storage space of them.
When his work is done, Hirayama goes to a public bath were he gets clean and thoroughly soaks. Every day he does this. It's obviously a fulfilling and enjoyable experience - as well as a traditionally Japanese one.
Hirayama is a reader. There are many racks of books in his bedroom, and he makes visits and weekly purchases at a bookstore where he is known. He favors books that cost a dollar; the bookstore clerk approves his choices, such as Patricia Highsmith. He is reading Faulkner, and later Eleven Stories. He always reads before he goes to sleep, by the light of a reading lamp.
It seems like a perfect life, for Hirayama. He likes the work. It's the kind of job where you get immediate results. It's satisfying that way. Not only are the toilets pleasant, clean, modern ones. It may be in a shabby location (as is implied later), but Hirayama lives comfortably, in a house, on several floors, and drives a shiny van. He lacks for nothing. He looks fit. This appears to be a good job. It satisfies him, anyway. He eats out after work: he food is reasonable and tasty, and the faces are familiar.
Hirayama lives alone and barely speaks but he turns out to have daily friends and companions, at the places he frequents, the restaurants, bars, and the like, where he is a regular and is known and greeted in a friendly fashion.
But at this point, if not long before, we may begin to wonder: despite the air of the happy worker, isn't this an empty existence? Has Hirayama no family?
This is where the last quarter of the film's two-hour length comes through key breakthroughs, notably the sudden appearance of a neice Niko (Arisa Nakano), who has run away from home. This home turns out to be posh, as indicated by the luxurious chauffeured car in which her mother comes to collect her after a few days. And this in turn, though nothing is explained, suggests that Hirayama's job, which is news to his sister, may be a choice, like the priesthood.
Even after all this, and more interesting scenes where he talks, we still may not know why this life works for Hirayama or why he has chosen it, But we feel that we know Hirayama so well that his simple joy, in the van, after working, listening to his favorite music, brings a swell of emotion we never expected watching him wield his toothbrush and mustache clippers early on. Wenders' Perfect Days is a perfect example of a slow burner of a movie, in its way complete and fulfilling in and of itself, a "perfect film," in its deceptively modest way. Wenders may have thought of one of my favorite movies of all time, Akira Kurosawa's famous Ikiru, which builds slowly from the life of an unprepossessing man to a finale of deeply moving, luminous transcendence. We don't get that here, but Hirayama's life turns to have more to it than meets the eye.
Perfect Days, 123 mins., debuted May 25, 2023 at Cannes in competition, winning the rize of the Ecumenical Jury and the Best Actor Award for Kōji Yakusho. It became Japan's entry for the 2024 best foreign Oscar. Screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival Oct. 11, 2023. Metacritic rating: 72%.
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FERRARI (Michael Mann 2023)
MICHAEL MANN: FERRARI (2023)
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ADAM DRIVER IN FERRARI
Adam Driver and other cast members impeccable in the slightly bloodless 'Ferrari'
A sports action film with an Italian setting directed by 80-year-old Michael Mann, Ferrari is based on a biographical book, but it isn't a biopic. Even though some critics think it lacks emotion and only "toodles along," that's quite unfair. It is beautiful and teems with energy, and focuses on a critical moment in the life of luxury and racing car magnate Enzo Ferrari (addressed by everyone as "Commendatore") in 1957 when everything is at issue for him. It's a movie teetering impeccably between triumph and disaster, beautiful to look at, wonderfully edited, but a bit old fashioned.
Everything is at issue for the Commendatore. That includes business, his reputation as owner of, with Maserati, Italy's most prestigious racing car team; his marriage, and also his partnership, because his volatile wife Laura (a wound tight, go-for-broke Penélope Cruz, in top form), handles the books; and last, but not least, his relation to his illegitimate son, Piero, son of Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley), whom he loves, and needs as a successor.
Laura doesn't know about Piero, or want to know about Lina. She instead merely shoots a real bullet into the wall next to Ferrari's head for returning one morning after the maid has come in. The shame of it! And this silly, if dangerous, incident shows the film, on the verge of tragedy, is also not without humor.
This is Adam Driver's second turn as a rich and important Italian businessman. It is not really such a good idea - though Driver seems able to play any role, or a lot of them anyway; but this is a considerably better film than House of Gucci.
But herein lies the problem: because American movies in which Italians or Frenchmen all speak English with fake Italian or French accents are an item past its sell-by date. We have become more sophisticated about language, even if the average educated Yank still lacks fluency in other languages. Gone is the day when a great movie like David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, which is all about going native in the Arab world, could contain in its long run only two little spots of semi-Arabic dialogue, "Allahu Akbar" and (though perhaps the latter is better described as camel language) "Hut-hut-hut!" It is certainly okay for the central driver on Ferrari's team, Alfonso de Portago, to speak English: this risk-taking aristocrat was born in London with an Irish mother. But everybody in Modena, Italy, in Michael Mann's lovingly recreated 1957 images? No. This will not fly.
So when we begin to accept this outmoded convention, we are slipping back into a movie world of fifty years ago. Or maybe twenty. Michael Mann is an octogenarian, and this project of his goes back at least as far as the year 2000; in fact he is recorded as thinking about it as far back as 1993. (He has also not put out a movie in eight years.)
Ferrari has two main strands: mounting a major team to compete in the then hugely famous 1,000-mile cross country Forumla One race, the Mille Miglia, to jumpstart the Ferrari luxury car business, which is on the brink of bankruptcy - a competition that ends in the spectacular death of the most glamorous driver in history, his navigator, and nine innocent Italian spectators, with the driver's body split in two, the whole event depicted with neatness, color, and precision, but not dwelt over. This quick moving on seems in the spirit of the protagonist. Enzo Ferrari, himself originally a racing driver, who, despite having recently lost his young legitimate son to kidney disease, seems to possess the extreme sportsman's mixture of awareness of danger and indifference to it.
Despite its moments of operatic emotion - and real opera, intercut, dubiously, with shiny red Formula One cars tearing up the road - and Laura Ferrari, the wife's jealous cursing and threats (she will not allow Enzo to recognize Piero while she is alive), there is a certain coldness and dryness to this movie. Maybe it's too beautiful. Maybe it was planned too well and too long. The immaculate, dramatic cinematography of Erik Messerschmidt, the neat editing of Pietro Scalia, the spot-on costume design, the evocative and accurate mise-en-scène, all contribute to a sense of perfection that both satisfies and shuts down emotion. One is satisfied on multiple levels, but cut off. And despite the screenplay's focus on family and the contradictions of Ferrari's glamorous and difficult life - as if he is driving a Formula One car through his own existence, it is, as with most movies about car racing, the racing itself, the gleam of the red bodies and satisfying roar of the purebred engines and sight of the long tree-lined roads being torn up, the cars vying for position at a hundred miles an hour on tricky curves - that stand out in the mind.
Ferrari, 130 mins., premiered at Venice Aug. 31, 2023; also shown at Toronto and in the New York Film Festival, where it was screened for this review, as the Closing Night film Oct. 13, 2023 at 6 p.m., the US premiere, featuring a Q&A with Michael Mann, Adam Driver, Penélope Cruz and Gabriel Leone. Metacritic rating: 74%. (Later 73%.)
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A PRINCE/UN PRINCE (Pierre Creton 2023)
PIERRE CRETON: A PRINCE/UN PRINCE (2023)
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SCENE FROM A PRINCE
French art piece about a botanically-inspired gay love triangle
Lee Marshall in Screen Daily described A Prince as "surely one of the most kookily unclassifiable films ever to have screened in Director’s Fortnight". A Prince follows a horticultural student, Pierre-Joseph, whose sexual encounters with his botany teacher and mentors lead to a unusual hybrid tale of science, sex and meditation.
This film drops us into a dry, elegant, and nerdy upper middle class white French world of strange contradictions. the protagonist is attracted to posh meat-noshing hunters, as well as botanists, while disapproving of guns and hunting.
All the while events or tableaux are staged, but we rarely hear the amateur actors speaking. Instead there are voiceovers for them spoken by actors Mathieu Amalric, Françoise Lebrun and Grégory Gadebois It is as if those on screen they are "models," in the Bressonian sense.
This film is at once graphically sexual, verbally at least, and totally unsexy. There is a French country house atmosphere, and the food, the fires, and the dogs are appealing, the people not so much.
Gadebois lend their voices as narrators of the film’s poetic sequences. A Prince was penned by Mathilde Girard, Cyril Neyrat and Vincent Barre.
The film features a striking soundtrack – part Baroque courtly dance, part Doors-like instrumental – by Dutch lutenist Jozef van Wissem best-known for scoring Jim Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive.
I feel the influence of somebody like Eugène Green here, but the US distributor, Strand, felt some gay interest tie-in, which may be reflected in future LGBTQ festivals.
A Prince/Un prince, 82 mins., debuted at Cannes Directors' Fortnight, and won the SACD Prize from France’s Writers’ Guild for the best French-language film in the section. Screened as part of the New York Film Festival (NYFF61) where it was a Currents feature.
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LA PRÁTICA (Martín Rejtman 2023)
MARTÍN REITMAN: LA PRÁTICA (2023)
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ESTEBAN BIGLIARDI IN LA PRÁTICA
Called a "leading light of the New Argentine Cinema," Martín Rejtman is back here with his first film in nine years (following Two Shots Fired, NYFF/2014), "a shrewd deadpan comedy that provides further evidence that few directors are as adept at dramatizing the absurdity of the mundane. Gustavo (Esteban Bigliardi), an Argentinean yoga instructor living in Chile, has recently separated from his wife. . ." runs the festival blurb.
Two Shots Fired, however, seemed to me at the tme "first flat, then absurdist, finally simply pointless," and seemed "like some inexplicable instructional film or the work of a deranged amateur," though I received the impression from various reviews of other Reijman films that his absurdist method sometimes really worked, at least for some.
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ORLANDO, MY POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY (Paul B. Preciado)
PAUL B. PRECIADO: ORLANDO, MY POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY (2023)
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ONE OF 27 ORLANDOS IN ORLANDO
Embracing Woolf's sex-changing history as a bible of trans lore
Preciado, a writer and philosopher, opens with narration about how Virginia Woolf's novel "Orlando" – where an English poet lives over centuries and, at one point, changes genders from male to female – doubles as his own biography. Since Woolf wrote his biography before he was born, Preciado decided to construct his directorial debut as a correspondence to Woolf after her death. He recruits 27 trans and non-binary people, including himself, to play the eponymous role while talking about their own lives. The revolving door of subjects allows Preciado to use an episodic structure that lets him change things up on a scene-to-scene basis.
Preciado says Virginia Woolf's Orlando is his biography, and takes this famous work of English fiction as a kind of bible of trans life. The film doesn't go very deeply into Woolf's book; it's the idea of it that counts for Preciado. Viewers of this film, which is in French, with one extended speech in Spanish, will remember it as a procession of different young and old (but mostly young) trans people who announce themselves as appearing in the film to play the role of Orlando, and donning a big ruff collar - a feature of seventeenth-century dress worn, notably, by both men and women - as symbolic "costume" for their. . . audition?
They don't tell much about themselves, either. But what is striking is the merry procession of trans people, some with light voices, some with deep voices, taling about their lives, the wonder of hormones and injections and changes they are for the most part happy about.
The imortant thing is that this is a happy and even celebratory film that trans people can identify with and rejoince in.
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THE BOY AND THE HERON (Hayao Miyazaki 2023)
HAYAO MIYAZAKI: THE BOY AND THE HERON (2023)
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GENERAL FILM FORUM REVIEW
The celebrated Studio Ghibli auteur or "anime maestro" signs his last animated film. More self-identified than his more usually girl-centric tales, this one focuses on Mahito, a 12-year-old misfit, and the gray heron he discovers flapping about his new home - a bird that turns into a little bald gnome-like creature with a red bulbous nose and big teeth. Peter Debruge in his Variety review assesses this as "a worthy but mid-range addition" to the Miyazaki oeuvre.
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THE TASTE OF THINGS/LA PASSION DE DODIN BOUFFANT (Trân Anh Hùng 2023)
TRIÂN ANH HÙNG: THE TASTE OF THINGS/LA PASSION DE DODIN BOUFFANT (2023)
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Grand meals, controlled passions
Director Trân Anh Hùng of the 1994 The Scent of Green Papaya (NYFF) won the Best Director award at this year's Cannes for his bravura, scrupulously deployed feat of epicurean cinema. The Taste of Things, grand and beautiful "food porn" though it is, feels a little pale and conventional in 360º human, emotional terms - not the breathtakingly engaging filmmaking of Justine Triet's Cannes Golden Palm-winning Anatomy of a Fall. But Taste won out over the latter as France's entry into the best foreign Oscars. And one can reluctantly see why. What could be more French for foreigners than a period haute cuisine extravaganza with a touching romance woven in played by arguably the country's two biggest movie stars of the day, Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel? It's a mild irony that something so conventionally iconic would be directed by someone not French, from a former colony.
The cooking here is of the 1880's, a baroque period for the French kitchen far, far away from the Nouvelle Cuisine of the 1960's. Menus include course after course piled high with fish or meat covered with elaborate sauces and injected or doused with multiple ingredients. A show-offy meal could take as long to consume as eight hours. Nonetheless there is much charm here. It turns out the protagonist chooses his virtuoso version of humble pot au feu as a signature dish. We see a talented young trainee sample dishes with three-star Michelin discernment (and mild disdain), and we learn, with her, that the French for Baked Alaska - a desert we see prepared in incredible detail - is "a Norwegian omelette."
The long opening sequence, in which Eugénie (Binoche) and several young women, attended by Dodin (Magimel), work in a big grand, sunny country kitchen, apparently of a chateau (though details are vague) prepare a lavish meal for half a dozen bigwigs of the local village. It's all done in trimmed-down real time, and the best stoves and equipment of the period are used: notably most of the pots and pans are traditional copper vessels lined with tin. The big old fashioned but beautifully built stoves are fueled by red hot coals. The appearance of grand cuisine being prepared in the period setting and with period equipment and in the hands-on period way is most impressive, a tour de force that manages to feel effortless and natural.
The human drama winds up feeling more self-conscious and also a bit undercooked, and a major plot point is revealed very early on, robbing the film of the element of surprise. I personally didn't understand very well what the setup here was. Descriptions suggest Dodin is a gourmet and Eugénie is working for him. But they seem to be collaborating. And its still not clear that this is a private kitchen since it is maintained at such a high level as to seem almost commercial. And while Dodin wants nothing more than to marry Eugénie, a chateau owner doesn't usually marry his cook, especially not in 1885, one should think.
One strain that makes sense is the teenage girl, Pauline (Bonnie Chagneau-Ravoire), the daughter of local farmers perhaps, who has been hired as an assistant, but winds up being a rather grand protégée of Dodin and ultimately a taster, whose virtuoso palate is shown off early on. When Eugénie is no longer available and Dodin is having replacement candidates prepare test dishes, the girl evaluates them along with him. The girl's cool sensuality shows us cuisine is an art whose practitioners, as with music, begin with innate talents and start early, even though Dodin says a cook only comes into their own at forty. As a chef, Eugénie seems tireless, fluid, cool, a slightly remote virtuoso. Dodin provides the emotions, loving her, loving her cookery.
But it emerges that over the twenty years they have worked together in this way a mutual warmth has developed and it's the routine that from time to time - though not always - she admits him to her bedroom in the evening. She resists his repeated proposal that they marry - until, finally, she gives in. The film, following the more prudish tendencies of the period depicted, never follows them into her bedroom. The only porn is the food porn.
The food is grand and impressive. In that opening sequence we necessarily find it glorious - until we begin to realize it is over-elaborate and heavy, and that the small group of men who consume it are overweight and unhealthy.
The romantic relationship between Eugénie and Dodin is outweighed by their working relationship. He is pleased after, when questioned, she says she thinks of herself as his cook, not as is wife. The screenplay plays with this conflict. But the ambivalence does not serve the film. Binoche is buttoned up and brave here. Magimel is a ceaseless outboard motor of energy, with a couple of scary outbursts.
Some things are timeless. When Dodin celebrates Puligny Montrachet and Chambolle Musigny as the most sublime of white and red burgundies, respectively, this was a profoundly resonant moment for this writer.
The Taste of Things/La passion de Dodin Bouffant, 145 mins., debuted at Cannes where it won the Director's Prize in competition. It was originally titled in English "The Pot-au-Feu." Also shown at numerous other festivals, including New York, as part of which it was screened for this review. Showing in the NYFF Oct. 5 and 7l, 2023. Limited US release by IFC and Sapan Studio in Feb. 2024 starting Feb. 9.
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THE PIGEON TUNNEL (Errol Morris 2023)
ERROL MORRIS: THE PIGEON TUNNEL (2023) - NYFF 'SPOTLIGHT'
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DAVID CORNWELL/JOHN LE CARRÉ IN ERROL MORRIS' THE PIGEON TUNNEL
A last interview with the prince of spy novelists, John le Carré (David Cornwell)
"I look at you as an exquisite poet of self-hatred," Errol Morris says to Cornwell, known as John le Carré and the celebrated the author of over two dozen matchless works of spy fiction including The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Constant Gardener, with many film adaptations and TV series including the timeless Alec Guinness performance as le Carré's central figure, George Smiley.
Le Carré/Cornwell does not take this Morris sally amiss. He smiles his quick twinkle and says, "I would go with that." It's a disarming exchange indeed toward the end of a long string of them in what is one of Morris' most amiable, rich, and free-flowing of his famous studies of men. Though the time has been short, in ninety minutes the writer has made a searching exposition of his life and career, notably of the most seminal aspect: growing up as the son of the endlessly duplicitous, double-dealing Ronnie Cornwell, who's been described as "an epic con man of little education, immense charm, extravagant tastes, but no social values."
Le Carré describes here how even after he had become a rich and famous author, at the Sacher Hotel restaurant in Vienna Ronnie still essentially attempted to con him out of an outrageous sum of money, ostensibly to set up a pigs and cattle farm in Dorset - and how, when le Carré flatly refused, offering only a property and a stipend, Ronnie threw a terrible scene, letting out repeated loud howls of anger and protest that could be heard halfway down the street.
It's an extraordinary story, and certainly not the only one. The son had to grow up living in constant uncertainty, sharing in the deceptions, going on the run with his father who was always escaping from discovered deceptions and mountainous debts. Ronnie, le Carré says, came within a hair of great success, but always managed to slip into financial trouble again, seeming to thrive on risk and danger - just as, he also says, spies do.
Those of us who have read le Carré's own book about his life and his father know this story. But it's better to hear it in the master's own voice. Those who have listened to the author's masterful audio performances of his own books, especially the last ones - he seemed to get better and better, well into his eighties - know how good that voice is, the range of accents and voices - perhaps a hint at what a master of deception father Ronnie may have been, transferred to the master of invention and storytelling the son became.
There are reviewers who describe this interview as "contentious." There is no truth in this. In fact compared to other Errol Morris portraits this is a harmonious one. There is a sweet complicity, an understanding. Le Carré puts himself willingly in Morris' hands from the outset, declaring himself willing to tell all and be as honest as he can, and there is no reason to think this insincere. Le Carré has grown milder by this time, near the end of his life, than he was earlier in the two decades after 9/11, when he could be harshly critical in public both of England, which he'd come to see as a pathetic little empire hiding from its own decline, and America, the belligerent and dominant world empire. Here, instead, he chooses to talk about himself, about his father, about the schools that gave him upperclass manners and accent but never the will to think himself upperclass. He speaks also of the inspiration for his work that he found in the traitor, Kim Philby, and his path from working for espionage organizations to being suddenly a writer about espionage whose first book sold 12 or 13 million copies worldwide.
This film may not really tell us anything significant that is new. But it serves as a rich live-voice valedictory self-portrait. It serves a kind of ceremonial, farewell purpose. What it does also do is to tell us a little more each time, or more vividly, about what we already knew, with the filmmaker illustrating everything elegantly, with seamlessly introduced short reenactments of moments from the life, illustrated by an astonishing number of actual photos and film clips, thought none of these are ever intrusive and each of them always comes at the right moment. Morris sometimes speaks to le Carré, but never seems to be doing so too often. The whole thing is splendidly done, a treat for fans.
There is also a little more: because subtly Morris teases out, or partly just witnesses, le Carré's awareness that in his fertile inventions he was somehow always to some extent exploring his own pain, and each time he invented a new story or a new character he was discovering something new in himself. It's obvious, perhaps, but worth the sense it gives of pulling tings together as a wonderful life and impressive body of work are quietly summed up. And yet with an edge, as of one never at home anywhere, never knowing himself, finding the "inmost room is bare," as with the hidden safe of the head of MI5, where nothing but a pair of trousers is found. This rich exploration still leaves us haunted, hungry, ready to go for the real treasures, which are the books. David Cornwell died in December 2020 at eighty-nine, but his books will be alive for as long as English books are read. Wikipedia sums him up as "a sophisticated, morally ambiguous writer" - you better believe it! "he is considered one of the greatest novelists of the postwar era." And now he is.
The Pigeon Tunnel, 93 mins., debuted at Telluride Sept. 1, 2023, also show at Toronto, Camden, Aspen, New York Sept. 30, Palm Springs, BFI London, and Chicago. Released on the internet in many countries Oct. 20, 2023. Metacritic rating: 81%.
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LAST SUMMER (Catherine Breillat 2023)
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SAMUEL KIRCHER, LÉA DRUCKER IN LAST SUMMER
CATHERINE BREAILLAT: LAST SUMMER (2023)
A forbidden affair, with a big age difference
How does a 52-year-old woman, Anne (Léa Drucker) get sexually involved with her husband's 17-year-old son Théo (Samuel Kicrher, in his debut, the younger of two sons of Irène Jacob), by an earlier marriage, right in the middle of their home? Mutual attraction, of course, and the point is clearly made: young guys like older women. This is a provocative subject, somehow ideal for veteran French filmmaker Catherine Breillat.
The couple has two little adopted daughters, Anne not being able to bear children. Théo was living with his mother, but gets into trouble, is arrested for assaulting a teacher. Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin), his father, Anne's husband, brings him to live with them in their very handsome, spacious suburban house for the summer. Pierre hopes belatedly to become a good influence on the youth. Théo accuses his father of having adopted the girls out of guilt for neglecting him. Théo considers his father a "vieux con," an old fool, an asshole. He tells him so. Pierre reports this to Anne. (Drucker, Kircher, and Rabourdin all deliver admirable and convincing performances.)
Théo is uncooperative and not very polite at first. But he likes playing with the little girls. This puts him close to Anne, for whom he has contempt at first. But he quickly becomes part of the family. He playfully persuades Anne to let him give her a tattoo.
Anne is a lawyer, who deals with ironically related cases, sex, teenagers, bad parenting, custody: a serious, important job. Pierre is involved in business, something corporate and wearying. But they make love, Pierre and Anne, and she tells him, when he presses, that she finds the body of an aging man touching.
The casting of Samuel Kircher is a choice here. He is an "éphèbe," the delicate French young male type, slim, pretty, long-haired, almost like a girl, but very much an attractive guy. He is not so much the handsome, muscular, masculine type, but more a boy-toy. Nor is Théo solid and responsible as a person. He seems to have no sport to play, no books to read, no skill to practice, save being pretty and provocative. And he turns out to be larcenous. In wanting to reshape him Pierre seems clueless. But Théo is ready for love, as soon becomes evident.
One day Anne and Théo are hot and close and start to kiss, and before you know it they're making love. It's natural, physical, erotic, but not romantic, and no erotic passion, no idyll, no Lady Chatterly's Lover affiar. It starts when Pierre is on a two-day business trip.
Anne's best friend is her sister Mina (Clotilde Courau), who is always around. Théo is excited, in lust, maybe in love, and can't leave off snuggling with Anne, embracing her, kissing her at every private moment. And on the edge of one such moment, Mina sees, and knows about them. From then on Anne starts ending the affair and demanding Théo's absolute silence. She insists that they must behave as if it never happened. But it's not so easy for him to turn off. But as time goes on it becomes clear that Anne means much, much more to Théo than his girlfriend, Amanda (Nelia Da Costa). Then, Pierre decides to take some time alone with Théo in their chalet, just the two of them, to get closer. To talk. And talk they do.
All this happens in a world of luxury and good taste, in very posh surroundings. Despite his history of trouble, Théo is a bourgeois bad boy, not a delinquent. This is a world halfway between Rohmer and Chabrol, but all Breillat, because this is her kind of situation. This is a sexual chronicle, not a thriller, and there's also very little discussion à la Rohmer: everybody has their mind made up already. Except that after the affair "ends" and the negotiation and the squabbling begin, the physical passion isn't over. Anne tells Théo "You are mad" and he says "You are mad, too...mad about me" but they are mad about each other. But the family goes on.
In a review of this film the chief New York Times critic Manohla Dargis describes Catherine Breillat as "a longtime provocateur who tests the limits of what the world thinks women should do and say and be." A critic cited on the French film website AlloCiné describes the filmmaker in more general terms, as "a master in the art of distilling trouble, [who] loves transgressing morality more than anything." This is another plot that people find uncomfortable: but while it is provocative, this is smoother and more palatable than Breillat's earlier films: the beautiful, posh setting, the good-looking people. Above all Léa Drucker has the slim blonde Parisian perfection of a French female movie star. This may make everything more palatable for some, but a recent related Times article about Breillat ("A Woman Sleeping With Her Stepson? This Director Knows It May Shock.") says the French cinema world has had little use for her, and she would have had no career were it not for her Anglophone audience. This is, indeed, her first film since Abus de faiblesse a decade ago. But this one's debut in Competition at Cannes suggests her status is pretty secure now.
Breillat is a helpful provocateur with a long career, but she doesn't do nuance. The characters in Last Summer shift rapidly from indifference to love to hate with a rapid edit. They don't converse; they negotiate. Once the affair is over, Breillat and her collaborator Pascal Bonitzer provide ingenious developments, but it seems what mattered was the affair, and to make the point that it is the young man who most wants it and only for itself. The point is made: young guys like older women. Not, after all, such a radical idea. But this is a very modern approach to it in what is acknowledged to be primarily a remake of the multiple prize-winning 2019 Danish film by May el-Toukhy, Queen of Hearts, a film that Peter Bradshaw said had him on the edge of his seat. This French version does that too.
Last Summer/L'Été dernier, 104 mins., debuted at Cannes in Competition, May 25, 2023. US debut NYFF Oct. 10, 2023. US limited theatrical release (NYC, LA, San Francisco) Jun. 28, 2024. Screened for this review Jun. 29 2924.
