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NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS 2025 (April 2-April 13)
GENERAL FILM FORUM THREAD
THE NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS series at Lincoln Center April 2-13, 2025: LINKS TO REVIEWS
Last edited by Chris Knipp; 03-19-2025 at 05:00 PM.
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THE ASSISTANT (Wilhelm Sasnal, Anka Sasnal 2025)
PIOTR TROJAN, ANDRZEJ KONOPA IN THE ASSISTANT
WILHELM AND ANIKA SASNAL: THE ASSISTANT (2025)
Surreal life with an early 20th-century inventor
This strange, slow-moving piece set in the very early twentieth century is adapted from the well-known 1908 novel by Swiss-German author Robert Walser Der Gehülfe that is a masterpiece of calculated unease and very dry humor. But does the film capture these qualities? I'm not so sure, though it tries hard. It is the work of a Polish married couple, Wilhelm a painter and visual artist who is the cinematographer and Anka who is an editor and writer. But the film's nominal editor was Aleksandra Gowin, and she could have used a stronger hand.
The novel, described as "breathtaking" by Good Reads, follows a man called Joseph Marti (Piotr Trojan), who quits his job at a bookbinding shop after being abused for a poorly glued volume, and gets hired by an inventor whose projects are doomed. Marti doesn't at first know this, but we're made uneasy in the best early segment of the film by the suspicoiusly odd pampering he receives, fine food, freedom to smoke on the job and come and go, a flirtatious wife (Agnieszka Żulewska), while a previous assistant is just in the process of being sent packing. Debts multiply.
Is this a great job or just a very weird and crazy-making one? A lot is expected of Joseph yet his duties are never clearly defined, and he's not paid. The actor is muscular and well-built and seen a lot shirtless at first, to show he might be ready for anything, though any potential affair with the wife is held in check.
Walser, who would up penniless and forgotten and institutionalized after a mental collapse, apparently experienced the same mix of jobs as his protagonist here.
An inheritance has led "Technical Engineer Karl Tobler" to take up residence in a grand hilltop mansion, set himself up as an inventor, and create a goofy project of "advertising clocks" to be used in public places and on trams all to tell the exact time. But when a potential investor comes and Marti has to greet him since Walser is away, the sample clocks are all set at different, wrong times, and the investor leaves laughing. Good Reads summarizes the novel: "Joseph is at once pleased and terribly worried, a state soon followed by even stickier psychological complexities. He enjoys the beautiful view over Lake Zurich, in the company of the proud wife, Frau Tobler, and the delicious savory meals. But does he deserve any of these pleasures?" No, and why does he get them?
There is no Pinteresque reversal of roles or Beckettian degeneration, just a gradual disorder and decline. The film does capture the surrealism of the situation: and though 1908 is before 1917 when the actual surrealist movement began, the surreal spirit seems to hover around Engineer Karl Tobler's posh but off-kilter world, and incidentally there are knockoffs of School of Paris modernism hanging on the walls of Tobler's villa. This is also a story of a victim, and has vague affinities with Kafka, especially The Trial and The Castle, and indeed Kafka is said to have admired Walser.
There is a lot going on in this film. There is the economic and class element, but Marti is exploited in other ways, sometimes as a factotum or front man, often as an amenuensis, sometimes given the lead, treated like a member of the family, or a live-in butler. He doesn't know what he is or where he stands, and he sticks by Tobler in hopes the latter will succeed and thus pay him. Beside the clocks, midway Tobler begins to tinker with a can opener, which Marti, in a moment of foreseeing the two world wars when millions of soldiers woult be issued can openers, predicts this is a good idea. Tobler also makes giant ugly objects that look like bad soap sculptures. These are displayed backed up by fireworks at a big party when the central cast all gets drunk and naked, Marti and his past and present bosses and the women, and they all dance nude in a drawn-out sequence. A man who has played beautiful Bach on the keyboard now, at the party, turns to cacophonous modernistic banging. Is this the trimph of modernism, a harbinger of World War I? Or just another inexplicable digression?
Olivia Popp, in her Rotterdam CIneuropa review, says the best part of the film is its anachronisms, in some of the costumes and sets (and zooms?) but especially the use of contemporary rock music, and wishes that had been done more. But she also acknowledges the film runs on too long. It might have been better if it was tightened up and unified, and instead of rock provided with period-appropriate modernist music, like early Stravinsky. A review by Carmen Gray is also admiring of the film's "eccentric flashes of avant-garde dance and performance" for infusing "wild energy" and the mood of "risk-taking." The whole trouble is that this film, better at mood than narrative, goes haywire, then fizzles out, as uncertain of shape as its giant soap sculptures. But The Assistant's premonition of how crazy the twentieth century was going to become so very early is a haunting one.
The Assistant/Czlowiek do wszystkiego (Polish: "A Man for Everything"), 129 mins., debuted at Rotterdam Jan. 31, 2025. Included in New Directors/New Films, for which it was screened for this review. ND/NF showtimes:
Saturday, April 5
8:30pm at FLC, Walter Reade Theater
Sunday, April 6
6:15pm at MoMA, Titus Theater 2
Last edited by Chris Knipp; 03-24-2025 at 02:19 PM.
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CYCLEMAHESH (Suhel Banerjee 2024)
During Covid a young man became stranded far from home so he rode a bike across the country
Cyclemahesh won the Best First Feature award at IDFA, the world's largest documentary film festival and one can see why. This is a charming film. It's almost about nothing. Most of the time we're just watching a young man (three young men play the role, including the one who originally performed the feat) just riding along a dirt road in the middle of nowehre. yet it leaves you with a feeling of happiness and peace, secured by sublime classic Indian music. In the end what starts as a simple effort to set a record in getting from here to there takes on almost the air of a spiritual quest, and the film about it is playful and original.
It's not all dirt roads. There are some pretty patches of greenery, some strking sights. There is a spooky spirit guide, man with a large mask strapped ovder his back who speaks in a stentorian voice. He is the mask-wearing, poetry-reciting Khanderao, a mythical sprite, who describes their existence as part of a continuous gyre. "In the beginning there was only water," he tells Mahesh. "then came the forests. Then you came, and me! Then came fire, then again, water. Then you, then me, the king of this wilderness."
THe film is in Hindi as well as Odia and Marathi. Mahesh was a construction worker - sometmes they call him a plumber, but when he returns to the plumbing at the end you see it's part of a construction project. They say he became "a national sensation" by managing to cover 1700 kilometers in seven days to cross the country to arrive at his home. The film is docu-fiction. It recreates Mahesh's exploit, though it's depiction, not reenactment. How far anybody actually cycled in making the film we don't know.
There is a breaking down of the fourth wall several times. Once, the filmmakers simply stop shooting and walk into the frame. Another time, we see a policeman try to stop the filming, saying it can't be done without a permit. They beg and plead and apparently talk him down from this position. Or is this itself a ficton, as is the case in Quentin Dupieux's The Second Act, included in the current FLC series, Rendez-Vous with French Cinema?
The film takes us through, the blurb says, "wheat fields, river valleys, and raging fires complemented by gorgeous sunrises and sunsets" and compresses into scarcely over an hour formal invention and original ideas "worthy of a film three times as long." So watch this instead of The Brutalist!
What the blurb doesn't mention is the use of three different young men to play the role of Mahesh, with Mahesh himself coming in at the end, playing the game of Todd Haynes' filma about Bob Dylan using six different actors, [] I'm Not There[/I] (NYFF 2007)
THe film isn't a dogged depiction of the ride. It shows two flat tires, and the very humble, artisanal solutions found. It mentions that after you ride a bike all day, your butt feels like hell. But it never shows Mahesh eating, or sleeping, or going to the bathroom, or goes further into the physical issues of the ride. It's indeed more a meditation on a long bike ride than a depiction of it. This in cinematic terms becomes much more interesting.
CycleMahesh, 61 mins., debuted at IDFA (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam), Nov., 2024, winning the Best First Feature award. Screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films, MoMA and Film at Lincoln Center. Showtimes:
Wednesday, April 9
6:00pm at MoMA, Titus Theater 2
Thursday, April 10
9:00pm at FLC, Walter Reade Theater
Last edited by Chris Knipp; 03-24-2025 at 10:53 AM.
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GRAND ME (Atiye Zare Arandi 2024)
ATIYE ZARE ARANDI: GRAND ME (2024)
A child of divorced parents decides who she wants to live with
We who have watched Iranian films, maybe known some Iranians, know they're complicated people, that their greatest skill is in making life difficult for each other. This short documentary by Atiye Zare Arandi about her neice and focused on her famnily and their tense discussions of her custody is, therefore, excruciating. But it is curiously satisfying, because there is something like a resolution, even a happy ending. The question is answered. No cusody court: the child, nine-year-old Melina, does not want to reject her father's claims on her and opt for living with her motner. She wants to continue living with her maternal grandparents in Isfahan. She certrainly does not want to go and live with her father (Ramin) in Tehran. But she finds her mother (Atefeh) "irritating sometimes" and doesn' want to live with her either. But with her grandparents after all she is happy, and in the final footage of a trip to the country and playing in the snow, happy she seems to remain. What was all the fuss about? Well, they are Iranians: how can you even ask?
In the possibily Kiarostami-inspired car scene, segments of which are intereperced through the film, Mama is driving and Melina is sitting beside her and they dialogue. Melina delivers a fiery, devastating critique of her mother. She aays neither her father nor her mother should have divorced. At the end she says in any case they are all alone. Everyone in the world, the "dunya," is always alone. This from a nine-year-old! It's astonishing, both the maturity but also the fire and energy of delivery from this skinny tyke. When they come back to her grandparents Melina says from the car, smirking, "I taught her a lesson," and adds, "I slaughtered her." And she did.
But of course: Melina is almost frighteningly precocious and smart. We learn that she has gotten excellent grades in all her subjects. Her grandmother teases her about this at first, saying it was bad news and holding the report away from her. Also, we see a set of drawings of big-eyed creatures the girl has made, which show variety and rich color and reveal an impressive ability, at nine, to work in series and even mount the seies neatly on her bedroom wall. We may also note that though she is dissatisfied and fearful about her father, she never gives in to emotion or breaks into tears. In these difficult, tense days she remains a tough cookie.
But despite Melina's apparent right to decide in court who she wants to live with, she can't travel to Turkey with her mother because her father controls her right to a passport and won't let her have one.
In the car we stare at the beautiful but sad face of Atefeh, her mother, which has something helpless about it. She despairs of ever winning back her daughter's love and trust.
All this footage the aunt has shot also shows well off, roomy apartments - glimpses of comfortable middle class Iranian life. A litlte music has been judiciously added by Naïma Joris. The editing has been done by Katarina Türler in a way that provides order and economy and a measure of pacing to the film.
The biggest shocker is a conservative muslim coming-of-age ceremony in which Melina, at her ninth birthday, is filmed in identical nun-like costume with two dozen other just-turned-nine girls, who are charmed and lectured by a slim, handsome young imam in gray who charms them while coaxing them always to wear hijab with their hair covered and never appear before men with "thin tights." At home, we notice women continue to wear hijab (except when as young as Melina) while the men are fat and badly dressed and one even goes shirtless in the kitchen with a repulsive hairy back on view.
The father is never seen, and Melina avoids answering when he calls. Sometimes she doesn't answer when her mother calls either, which she lies to cover up. Once her father comes for her and there is fear that he may not bring her back. He keeps her for four days instead of one, and when she returns she runs into her grandmother's arms looking stricken but doesn't speak. Ominously, we have learned that her father has thought twice about having her live with him because he has an adult son. . . and she is not bad looking. (In fact one of the best scenes staged into the camera by Melina is one in which, posing as a pretty person, she gives a mock lesson, using herself as the model, on how to do makekup for a party. ("The next time I will show makeup for mourning.") This is a film that comes to seem more than it does at first as the complexity of the people and especially of this precocious girl emerges.
Grand Me, 80 mins., debuted Mar. 18, 2024 at CPH:DOX (Copenhagen) and won the Next Wave Award there., also showing at Taipei (Golden Horse), DMZ (South Korea), and DocPoint (Helsinki). Screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films, MoMA and Film at Lincoln Center. Showtimes:
Saturday, April 12
2:00pm at MoMA, Titus Theater 2
Sunday, April 13
1:15pm at FLC, Walter Reade Theater
Last edited by Chris Knipp; 03-24-2025 at 02:26 PM.
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THE HEIGHT OF THE COCONUT TREES (Du Jie 2024)
SOICHIRO TANAKA AND MINAMI OHBA IN THE HEIGHT OF THE COCONUT TREES
THE HEIGHT OF THE COCONUT TREES (Du Jie 2024)
Love and suicide and ghosts in Japan from a Chinese cinematographer turned director
Du Jie is a cinematographer from China. He has chosen to set his directorial debut in Japan, and its festival debut was at Busan, in Korea. It reminded me initially, with its use of voiceover and still photos, of Chris Marker's haunting classic French 1962 sci-fi time loop story short, La Jetée. This time the words and stills feature a discussion of suicide. But the body of the film is more a piece of overlapping storytelling, with two couples who slightly connect, a lost ring that is threaded through, and the ideas of the artist Kenji Chiga, all in service of the themes of suicide and ghosts. The effect is unconventional and enigmatic and can really be quite confusing. At this point there are only two reviews, neither of which summarizes the plot thoroughly. Even a 37- minute interview with Du Jie clarifies little.
People are interested in how Du Jie wound up directing (and filming and editing) his own feature in Japan and not China. Evidently he found more artistic freedom in his adopted country, but still goes back to China for work as a cinematographer to support himself. This film very much shows the lack of constraint he may have wanted: it's quite experimental.
Du Jie wants to draw a connected line between elements of his film that are disjointed. Partly this hinges on a lost ring. It seems a man with a bowler hat (whom we enounter at the end) loses his wedding wing, which falls off while he is playing with a child by the sea. The ring is swallowed by a fish. The main couple are a pet shop worker Aoki (Minami Ohba) and her fish factory worker boyfriend Sugamoto (Seita Shibuya). Shibuya, with his height and stylish hair, looks like a Japanese movie star, and Miami Ohba is very pretty and has beautiful long hair, making for an unlikely working class couple, if that's what they are meant to be. Anyway, cleaning a fish, Sugamoto finds a ring, which he gives to Aoki. They both get tattoos, she a tiny one of Mount Fuji on her neck. They plan to marry, and, apparently, arrange a honeymoon, ending at a resort spot, the southernmost part of Shikoku island.
But after a ride filmed on a roller coaster with unusual thoroughness, though showing the ride, not the couple, Sugamoto tells Aoki that maybe the tattoos were not a good idea. He has changed his mind and is not ready to marry, and they're over. She gets the tattoo removed, then decides to go on the honeymoon trip by herself, without her boyfrriend. A lot of the second half of the film is this trip. You sort of suspect she might intend to commit suicide, especially when, on preparing to leave, Aoki takes her big suitcase on wheels and leaves it with the building trash, taking only a backpack. Later we are shown that the trash collectors leave the suitcase. Of course, it's not packaged properly. BUt the truly Japanese touch is that the trash men leave a little neatly printed note explaining why the suitcase was not collected.
Aoki apparently isn't going to kill herself, and she is going to run into some ghosts, or thunder at the resort that is ghost voices she does not yet recognize. This town is known to be a suicide hotspot, a place where the spirits of those who took their own lives roam around without finding a way to the afterlife. The guy who checks Aoki in at the hotel is played by Soichiro Tanaka, who has appeared inn earlier scenes, only now he is without a mustache. He seems to be everywhere. But Du Jie has said his starting point was a woman who went on a trip that made people think she was going to commit suicide, as appears to be the case with Aoki.
There are scenes early in the film involving the other couple. A young man with chisled fatures and striking hair (Soichiro Tanaka) has lost his keen photographer girlfriend (Mado Karasumori) to suicide. But on the trip to Shikoku island, Minami Ohba's character also seems to be using a similar-looking camera. It is Sichiro Tanaka who checks her into the hotel.
Regrettably, I've so far found it impossible to pin down what happens in the film any better than this. (Amber Wilkinson of Screen Daily understands it better.) What Du Jie is trying to do is interesting, as the early segment's reminding one of Chris Marker shows. Certainly the images are very nice here, as everybody has noted. Perhaps another time the dp-turned-director will find ways make his basic narrative elements more readable without losing his thoughtful, suggestive approach.
The Height of the Coconut Trees 椰子の高さ, 100 mins., debuted at Busan Oct. 5, 2024, also showing at Tokyo FILMeX. Screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films, MoMA and Film at Lincoln Center. Showtimes:
Tuesday, April 8
8:30pm at FLC, Walter Reade Theater – Q&A with Du Jie
Thursday, April 10
6:00pm at MoMA, Titus Theater 2 – Q&A with Du Jie
Last edited by Chris Knipp; 03-24-2025 at 03:32 PM.
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HOLY ELECTRICITY (Tato Kotetishvili 2024)
NIKOLO GHVINIASHVILI, NIKA GONGADZE, CENTER, IN HOLY ELECTRICITY
TATO KOTETISHVILI: HOLY ELECTRICITY (2024)
Gems from junk
TRAILER
This film from Georgia makes such good use of documentary elements and authentic locales it's tempting to think what's going on is simply real. Sometimes the documentary elements take over, and sometimes a scene is extravagant and unexpected. All through there is humor and warmth and a sympathy for the eccentric and humble, like a cute kitten, or an old lady who has a bunch of cats and dogs.
We begin with a scrapyard, and this is a fast introduction to director Kotetishvili's point of view, because it's looked at with wide open and sympathetic eyes. There are groups of people too, and some Tblisi street scenes. Sometimes orange seems to be the dominant color.
The scrapyard, in an old car, is where Gonga (Nikolo Ghviniashvili) and Bart (Nika Gongadze) live and sleep, the odd couple who will dominate the narrative. Gonga is a tall, lanky, long-haired boy. His father has recently died, and he has joined his cousin, the short, chubby, debt-ridden Bart, who in a later conversation we learn is trans. Going through a pile of metal, Gonga finds a big box of rusted crosses that they clean and paint and equip with multi-colored LED lighting and sell successfully from door to door, making money to pay off Bart's debts.
This part ends when Gonga leaves Bart in disgust he gambles away all their money following a drunken party. Gonga winds up with a Roma girl for a while. We witness a string of dialogues where he struggles with expressing an interest in her. Either he's too shy or he's just not sure what he feels, and eventually she disappears. Along the way they go selling crosses, and when we constantly gliimpse bigger lighted crosses along the road, we reealize the Gonga-Bart ones are part of something bigger and glamorous, halfway between religous kitsch and the art of Dan Flavin. They are elegant objects. But a goldmine? Not quite.
While Gonga is endlessly questioning the Roma girl about her family and her preferences, Bart's debtors are getting tough, and one of the most memorable scenes, handsomely framed and centered, shows two of the latter questioning an upside down Bart hanging by his feet, begging to be let down, while one of them is scrutniizing the contents of his wallet and finding that he's listed as Gender: Female.
There's a hanging scene a bit earlier with Gonga, who's long and physical, and has hair that never loses its long sleek dangle. He's seen on hanging from a large crane at the scrapyard. The next time you see him he's wearing a light cast on one arm, and it's not cosmetic. He fell off the hook of that crane and lightly fractured, he tells the gypsy girl, his radius.
This is a meandering tale that takes detours like that, and dips on the wild side mildly enough. It makes me think back, for no reaason, perhaps, to two gypsy movies. First is Frank Pierson's glamorous 1978 Hollywood saga,King of the Gypsies, Eric Roberts' impressive screen debut, with Susan Sarandon and Brooke Shields. Maybe it was corny but it drew me in and I can remember where I was sitting and who with, a sign it was a memorable impression. Exqctly ten years later there was a bigger, more authentic-seeming saga, Time of the Gypsies, which also absorbed me, almost wore me down, wartching it at home at home. At Cannes, it won Kusturica the Best Director award.
Holy Electricity isn't like these. Apart from only being glancingly about gypsies, it's a scrapyard production, made of bits and pieces found here and there. The filmmaker shows both humor and sympathy in unusual measure in choosing his scraps. But this strength is also a weakness, because at several points the narrative seems to dissolve, and with it our patience may fray and our attention wander. But it's a promising beginning, and it won an award at Locarno to prove that. His work here is notable for a nice combination of catholicity of taste and the careful composition of every shot.
Holy Electricity/Tsminda Electroenergia, 95 mins. debuted at Locarno Aug. 11, 2024, winning the Golden Leopard in its Filmmakers of the Present section. Later it showed at Thessoloniki,Tallinn Black Nights, Mannheim-Heidelberg, and Montreal International Documentary Festival. Screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films, MoMA and Film at Lincoln Center. Showtimes:
Saturday, April 12
5:00pm at FLC, Walter Reade Theater
Sunday, April 13
3:00pm at MoMA, Titus Theater 2
Last edited by Chris Knipp; 03-24-2025 at 04:02 PM.
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LESSON LEARNED (Balint Szimler 2024)
PAUL MÁTIS, ANNA MESZÖLY in LESSON LEARNED
BALINT SZIMLER: LESSON LEARNED/FEKETE PONT (2024)
TRAILER
Life at school
This is a docudrama, very much an ensemble piece, about life in a school, focusing on a couple of teachers and a new student in fifth grade. The film is most remarkable simply for its strong, specific focus on the classroom and the daily atmosphere of a school, though some critics have said it is not as authentic as it thinks: for one thing, different scenes were shot at different schools. There are episodes of a rebellious boy, a sensitive new teacher, and the case of a large broken window that just fell out and proves hard to replace.
Lesson Learned is only the English title of this film (the Hungarian one means "Black Point"). Indeed it is difficult to see what "lesson" is "learned" in this film. The director has said simply "We wanted to capture the essence of being a child." Some Hungarians commenting on the film and some summaries read more into it, suggesting the film is a critique - which they utterly reject, or strongly endorse - of an outmoded school system; of the Hungarian school system in general. Many elementary school systems lag behind the times but it's hard to see anything uniquely Hungarian here, or any devastating picture of a school system.
If there is any theme here, it's that rebels and outliers, whether teachers or students, don't fare very well in a mainstream elementary school. This is a universal message. Perhaps the fresh life Balint Szimler has captured will survive and satisfy, in its small way, generations of future viewers.
In an interview, the filmmaker, who is 37, explains that like Palkó (Paul Mátis) in the film, he came back with his Hungarian parents to Hungary at 9 or 10 (Pálko is in time to enter fifth grade, I believe); only Pálko comes from Berlin, and the director had been living in the US, and "always felt like an outsider" (in Hungary, presumably). So that is the situation of Palkó, but it's hard to tell if he's a winner or a loser early in the film. He is good looking, calm, and confident. He breaks rules unintentionally. Later he seems to be a rebel. And finally a symbolic outsider.
The director used improvisation, with mostly non actors and no set script, using real students and real teachers, and then of course editing to bring out an effect or a meaning desired: for instance, he says scenes where Palkó talked more were cut to create the effect of his being almost always silent. He says he "always wanted to shoot a film with children and go back to the sensation of being a child – how free, intense and playful, but also sometimes horrifying, it was." There are moments, especially of the teachers in their faculty room but of students in the classroom too, that are terrific ensemble acting - and directing.
Juci (Anna Mészöly), the rather beautiful young literature teacher, is also a new arrival at the school. With her gentle manner she nonethelsss does radical things from the start, encouraging her class to express their hates, stand up and scream, and sit on the floor, where she, sitting there too, reads them a poem that seems to convert them to her and to poetry - the most subtle and touching moment in the film. It is a prizewinning performance.
Later, as can happen, a teacher takes a strong dislike to a rebelious student, and it's the PE guy Akos (Akos 'Dadan' Kovács). Palkó rebels in his class and won't play ball. Akos orders him to gather up the balls afterward, he won't, and Akos manhandles him trying to get him to run torturous chicken-jump laps around the gym. Juci sees this, knows Akos has crossed a line, and wants to report him. She has already suffered harsh criticism in private from the father of one of her students for the "crime" of teaching a poem that wasn't in the textbook. This parent becomes an agent of the kind of repression I myself once experienced from the nuns who ran a small Catholic college. If you are a teacher, you will be reported on and criticized from many directions.
Before this, one of the most experienced teachers, Kornél ((Gábor Ferenczi), is suddenly, summarily fired by authorities for an unspecified violatioh and told to vacate at once. Colleagues, who sypathize but do nothing to stick up for him, assume this is because he is connected to an NGO. This is bureaucratic, administrative, or governmental repression, something Americans have seen then and now. All part of the picture of the school Szimler is sketching, but the film isn't about this.
Or is it? A Hungarian website Valasz online, says, "Black Dot confronts our inaction, the gesture that for decades millions of people have made to defy the powers above us - be it a teacher, a boss, a school district director, a minister or an entire regime." The writer, Sashegyi Zsófia, notes the film avoids identifying with any specific period - there are no cell phones - it's obvious from what she says that Hungarians feel this film intensely and personally. There are a number of other lengthy revirews in Hunrarian online.
The festival blurb notes that Szimler's film, "just his second feature," has "all the intricacy and pleasure of a campus novel," ranging from "the shame-tinged tedium of detention lessons" (seen, like most of the moments, primarily through Palkó and Anna), to "a dazzling school-play sequence" (of Cervantes' tragedy The Fall of Numantia), whose central theme is the need to resist.
It is perhaps not a fault that the film overall is a bit enigmatic, both the young teacher and the beleaguered new student, both of whom from the look of them ought to be winners, but they are silent, tabulæ rasæ, and we can read our feelings and childhood (or teaching) memories into them. The film's weakness as a conventional film may be a strength. It hasn't quite the distinctive shape or compelling trajectory it could have had (that relates partly to being improvised, not written), but this makes it better able to capture, with its vivid 16mm look, the lightening in a bottle of everyday school life and what it feels to be a new kid or a new prof in a traditional, conventional, controlling, and student-unfriendly system where an older teacher, typically cynical, advises Anna it's always the kids' fault, whatever happens, not hers.
What about that window? What about that school trip? These are threads deliberately left dangling in this memorable and original film.
Szimler's Emmy-winning cinematographer Marcell Rév, who now works in Hollywood, is a longtime collaborator. He has done TV series, a short that got him to Cannes, and a music documentary. This should bring him international recognition.
Lesson Learned/Fakete pont, , 119 mins., debuted at Locarno Aug. 9, 2024, winning the Best Performance prize (for Anna Meszöly) and Special Mention in Locarno’s Concorso Cineasti del Presente. Screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films, MoMA and Film at Lincoln Center. Showtimes:
Thursday, April 10
6:00pm at FLC, Walter Reade Theater
Friday, April 11
5:45pm at MoMA, Titus Theater 2
Last edited by Chris Knipp; 03-24-2025 at 05:59 PM.
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LISTEN TO THE VOICES (Maxime Jean-Baptiste 2024)
MELRICK DIOMAR
MAXIME JEAN-BAPTISTE: LISTEN TO THE VOICES/KOUTÉ VWA (2024)
Grieving and revenge in French Guyana
Melrick Diomar is a boy who gets to come from France and spend summer with his grandma in French Guyana, in the upper right corner of South America, no longrer since 1946 a a colony but still an "overseas department" of France. Melrick is cool and so is his grandmother, Nicole, both good looking, casually stylish, and relaxed. They're easy also with each other: he gets to cook with her and tells her she could be his "girlfriend." Outside, through a friend of his late father, who died when he was very young, he gets to play football and play drums in a street band. He tells local boys Guyana is cooler than France, and tells his grandma he wishes vacation could be extended through the year. His home is in Stains, just north of Paris Saint-Denis. He calls it "lame" ("nul"). He may uinderstandably feel freer and more of a person here.
A Variety article explains that Jean-Baptiste has made all his films about his family, and this one grows from the vry sad fact that his cousin, Lucas Diomar, was brutally killed in 2012, an event that the family is still reeling from,
The film records "stages of grief" surrouding this traumatic death. Melrick is the director's nephew and at the time of filming was 13. The boy is little touched because he was only two and too young. HIs grandmother Nicole has cons contientiously sought to move on. Another adult relative, Yannick, is "stuck in time," and still bursts into tears, as we see here, whenever he is reminded of the death of Lucas. Jean-Baptiste says he tried to make a film that would help heal the wounds.In doing so, he article says, he found that making semi-fiction from his relatives helped distance them protectively from the grief and made Niocole more comfortable than being interviewed on cameara like a conventional doc, which she didbn't wat, he explained. But Nicole tells Yannick on camera that he can never recover from his grief.
The Variety acticle comments that colonialism too can be seen as a wound, one from which French Guyana as a. whole will never fully heal. In fact Jean-Baptiste thinks French overseas departments are really still colonies, though Nicole disagrees about that.
Melrick is seen praying by his bed for the health of his grandma, and to stay in Guyana and complete high school there. But immediately after we see a clip of him him playing a computer game online with friends who are in France, when he talks about coming back home again and and seeing them. Later,with young Guyana friends, Melrick is putting up a poster for a concert by Mayouri Tchò Nèg in honor of Lucas in which he will play bass drum, his first such performance.
On the road driving therre with his grandma he tells her he is "not nervous," but "can't wait" to play. He is in the back of the car; she is at the. They travel alone together (with the camera on them, of course). Itis a significent, and very serious, conversation that summarizes this film. On the ride she explains how, talking to a priest and judges, she has formally forgiven the killers or her son, his uncle.
Melrick, sitting in back, disagrees at first. He says the killer is out of prison and that isn't right: he should die. Then she tells how once, it happened that from her car she happened to see the leader of the killers, his time served, drinking beer and having fun. Har car was just a few meters away, quite close, and she was so strongly tempted to run him over that she called the police and reported herself and after a "bon moment," some solid discussion, he convinced her to think of her children and give up this idea and go home. And this she did. Now Melrick changes his position and agrees with her position now: she is right, vengeance "sert à rien," serves no purpose.
Clips of the street concedrt with Melrick playing several drums followk as a coda. But it is that conversation in the car that expresses the meat of this thoughtful little fllm rich in French Guyana atmosphere, youth, age, and meditation upon violence. Has it halped the families involved cope with their rage and grief? That we dod not know.
Though the title is in Creole French, Kouté vwa, the dialogue of the film is in standard French. Jean-Baptisste's films about his family have been shorts up to now; thisis his first feature film.
Listen to the Voices/Kouté vwa, 77 mins., debuted at Locarno, winning the special jury prize and special mention from the first feature jury in the Cineasti del Presente competiton. Screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films, MoMA and Film at Lincoln Center. Showtimes:
Saturday, April 5
4:00pm at FLC, Walter Reade Theater
Sunday, April 6
1:45pm at MoMA, Titus Theater 2
Last edited by Chris Knipp; 03-12-2025 at 06:18 PM.
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NO SLEEP TILL (Alexandra Simpson 2024)
ALEXANDRA SIMPSON: NO SLEEP TILL (2024)
People, Americans, a Florida hurricane, explored visually, eavsdropping on quiet amid chaos
In her highly visual, seemingly random documentary film, but actually "part fiction, part real," projections of the director, Alexandra Simpson's fantasies upon them and a particular small town in Florida, surrounding a major hurricane in the state, Simpson captures the imagery of the great Ameriican color photographers of Sally Eauclaire's 1981 classic, The New Color Photography - William Eggleston, Joel Meyerowitz, Neal Slavin, John Pfahl, Michael Bishop - the list goes on and on. Here, under the eye of dp Sylvain Froidevaux, we see car lots and swimming pools, little night clubs and highways, skateboarders and bike riders and a motel aglow with colored neon. The unifying element is a hurricane that is going to devastate part of Florida, but has soon passed one piece of it by. The filmmaker has a great sympathy for this small Atlantic coastal Florida town, but possesses a European point of view. She was born in Paris and grew up there, but spent summers in Neptune Beach, Florida, where the bulk of the film was shot. She has said in interviews that Claire Denis is her greatest inspiration, and Denis' skill and blending intimacy and mystery can indeed be felt as an influence here.
As with the still photographs, people and situations are introduced randomly, but the filmmaker, like the still photographer, has a unifying vision forming and changing as she goes. There are certain people the film comes back to, particularly a pair of young black man, Mark and Will, but they are friends from childhood from the sound of it, who play as a tricky comedy team where one comes into the act seemingly as a heckler. The standup guy delivers food by bike as a day job, we seem him there at first. Later he lures his partner, knowing the storm is going to upend everything for a while, ("But we'll come back to our lives, man"), to take a trip to DC and Philly to see friends and check out acts and opportunities.
Another locus is the youhg man with long red-blond hair who's a "storm chaser" by game, with lots of gear, ready to follow the hurricane, watching, watching, to see wheere it's going to head. Sitting at the wheel of his white truck he narrates the storm's progress with appreciation, for himself and for us. A third locus is a woman who's been left behind by a skateboarder. There's a couple notes, one that leaves her a video clip of him riding and falling and waving, another that says "We knew it was over from that night at the restaurant when..." Which reminds us at the outset some older people were let go from their jobs by a boss who tells them when this is over, they won't be coming back. They can start putting their lives together now. A theme: a lot of people are going to put their lives together after this weather event. And this town is, like so many places, a victim of gentrification.
Some are deep in the storm, some are escaping it, some have nowhere to go, even though in an area in the outside of the film is receiving an over-and-over "advisory," meaning they are supposed to evacuate the area. And driving along, the young black guys, the comedy team, drivng north, see a whole landscape around them turn dark as the elecdtricity goes out, and they're scared, and the guy who's driving starts going around in circles, not going north at all now. But the point is there are as many different relationships to the hurricane that "unites" them as there are places and people. Some choose not to "evacuate," including the storm chaser with the red-blond hair. A guy rides a small bike around in a lot, doing wheelies and circles: the evacuation alarm screeches, and with a jolt, he does a very fast spin. But the cop is on a loudspeaker asking him to leave. The storm chaser is hiding.
And toward the end of this round of gentle, subtle impressions, a small family is roused to leave in the a.m., little boy in PJ's with teddy bear, but they line up and smile for photos, with firework going off, and the kid saying, "cool!", and then we see people partying, as we learned at the outset some like to do, in a big storm, if they think they're safe.
The Sally Eauclaire analogy notwithstanding, viewing this film requires a different level of concentration from looking at a book or a show of still photographs. You cannot scan through these places and people and images, but must wait for them to go by at their own various different paces, which takes patience and discipline. It is fun, it is a meditation, but it is hard because it requires concentration. This is not a conventional narrative. You must put it together for yourself. We may not be ready for it, but if feels new.
No Sleep Till, 93 mins., debuted at 2024 Venice Critics' Week, winning a jury special mention, also shown at Monterrey, Poland, Stockholm,Belfort (France), Marrakesh, and Los Angeles. Screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films, MoMA and Film at Lincoln Center. Showtimes:
Wednesday, April 9
8:00pm at MoMA, Titus Theater 2 – Q&A with Alexandra Simpson
Friday, April 11
6:00pm at FLC, Walter Reade Theater – Q&A with Alexandra Simpson
Last edited by Chris Knipp; 03-13-2025 at 07:00 AM.
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KYUKA. BEFORE SUMMER'S END (Kostis Charamountanis 2024)
KOSTIS CHARMOUNTANIS: KYUKA. BEFORE SUMMER'S END (2024)
Playful squabbling by a Greek island
The yacht, the vomiting, the view of spoiled people's ugly side in the first fifteen minutes smacked, unmistakably, of Ruben Östlund and his 2022 Cannes hit, Triangle of Sadness. A Screen Daily review by Amber Wilkinson does not mention this nor, despite this filmmaker's experimental bent, does she allude to Poor Things auteur Yorgos Lanthimos. Charmountanis is called the enfant terrible of Greek cinema on the basis of his shorts: this is his feature film debut, which incorporates parts of one of the recent ones. Amber concludes her review: "The unruly nature of Charamountanis’ approach means not all of his ideas work all of the time. But this is a filmmaker with faith in his own rhythms and a muscular enough plan of attack to encourage us to fall in step with this family summer, which plays out at the meeting point of nostalgia and something new."
Screened for this review as part of the 2025 MoMA-Film at Lincoln Center New Directors/New Films series. Showtimes:
Sunday, April 6
8:45pm at FLC, Walter Reade Theater
Monday, April 7
5:45pm at MoMA, Titus Theater 2
Last edited by Chris Knipp; 03-24-2025 at 05:44 PM.
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SAD JOKES (Fabian Stumm 2024)
FABIAN STAMM, JONAS DASSLER IN SAD JOKES
FABIAN STUMM: SAD JOKES (2024)
A film about a screenplay nobody likes, which might be this one
The opening jokes - "What do you call a sad coffee? - Depresso," is one that sticks - sort Of fizzle, but maybe they're supposed to (or maybe you need to be German-speaking). They are cut into each other so their punch lines and rhythms are interrupted. In Sad Jokes director Fabian Stamm plays Joseph, the main character who is a director, and somehow that works; he seems loose and relaxed. Still I felt indifferent much of the way. But Herr Stumm saves his best for last, besides which there is the LGBT angle, gently introuced, which adds another dimension.
The meetup late in the film between Joseph and his ex Marc (Jonas Dassler), without much being said, is touching. The private performance by the Swedish life drawing teacher Elin (Ulrica Flach) for Joseph of the final monologue of Joan of Arc that she learned when she was young and wanted to be an actress is stunning. These two highlight scenes, one clumsy, one eloquent, toward the end give Sad Jokes emotional heft.
Joseph from the outset is a director working on the screenplay for a film that people don't get. Later after receiving a devastating critique of it by Gero (Godehard Giese), a prospective producer of the film (or is he a psychotherapist?), Joseph tells Elin his film "is dead." The idea of an absurdist comedy that also is quite sad and real is a tough one. Presumably Stumm wants us to feel that while the film is saying it doesn't work, it's working. Whether or not he carries this off, there is something fresh and confident about this film. Jonathan Romney review wrote at Munich that it "sustains a light accessible touch alongside its stylistic rigour." And it has those touching final scenes.
A special element in the film is Joseph's child, Pino (Justus Meyer) whom he's had with his best friend Sonya (Haley Louise Jones), whom they are raising together. If since Marc he hasn't sought another romantic partner, that's less surprising when he's both working on a screenplay and taking care of a small child, which quite enough to drain anybody's energy. Sonya can't have been fully engaged in raising Pino, because she has developed a severe depression and been in a clinic. Her temporary "escape" by checking herself out of the clinic leads to the extended dramatic scene (with fixed camera) that grabs an early sequence, where Joseph and her mother Conny (Hildegard Schroedter) try to calm her and she grows increasingly agitated.
Joseph has several successively less promising meetings with Gero. He doesn't have a snappy elevator summary but grapples with words like "comedy" and "absurdist." Romney suggests that the incident in which Joseph catches his middle finger in a vending machine is meant to suggest the mixed tone he has been trying to describe. It is painful and scary and leads to injury and a hospital stay. But when a plump woman bystander is called in to help, jarring piano music plays such as used to accompany silent comedy, and it becomes absurd, maybe funny. This is one of several places, Romney suggests, where music tests us to show how it can "affect, or subvert, our emotional reaction to a scene." But this is the aspect of the film where Stumm most lost me, becuase these musical choices are so distractingly trite and clichéd.
Other drole moments follow. Anneke Kim Sarnau is funny as a woman next to Joseph in the hospital with two broken arms. (I wondered why he would be put to bed with a broken finger: the hospital isn't handled realistically.). In a life drawing class the nude male model (Knut Berger) eventually asks Joseph for a date but since this takes place at his house with Pino wailing, making out is cut short. The reception for Joseph's premiere, when he has, after all, finished his film, descends into a bad row between the two lead actresses after revelations by one during the Q&A.
Romney finds "cool but not austere execution" here in collaboration with dp Michael Bennett and the use of "flat, neutrally bright backgrounds: to give the film a "ontemporary German art-cinema feel." He sums up the film as an "intelligent, quizzical disquisition on acting, fiction, emotion and that staple of moral comedy, the perennial danger of being misunderstood." He sees "the film as working also because of the cast's equal skill at "low-key naturalism" and wry deadpan."
Granted all this, there were for me numerous points where the film becomes implausible and this makes it hard to engage with. The producer/therapist's statement that Joseph's screenplay overall lacks empathy is a telling self-critism. There are only those three powerful moments that grab you: Sonya's meltdown, the reunion with Marc, and Elin's monologue. I did learn several new words: "gay" in German, schwul, and "automatononphobia," fear of statues, which Joseph says is a real thihg. It refers to the fear of any lifelike but inanimate figures, actually, such as store mannequins.
Sad Jokes, 96 mins., debuted at Munich Jun. 30, 2024, winning the German Cinema New Talent Award for Best Director. It also shows at TIFF, Stockholm, Tallinn Black Nights, Paris Chéries Chéris, and BFI Flare London LGBTQIA+ festival. Screened for this review as part of the 2025 MoMA-Film at Lincoln Center New Directors/New Films series. Showtimes:
Friday, April 11
8:30pm at FLC, Walter Reade Theater – Q&A with Fabian Stumm
Saturday, April 12
4:30pm at MoMA, Titus Theater 2 – Q&A with Fabian Stumm
Last edited by Chris Knipp; 03-15-2025 at 11:46 AM.
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STRANGER (Zhengfan Yang 2024) Chinese
ZHENGFAN YANG: STRANGER (2024)
People come, people go
This film, focused on a series of hotel rooms, made me think, perhaps illogically, of Edmund Goulding's wonderful 1932 film Grand Hotel, were an impresario repeatedly says "People come, people go, nothing ever happens." The cast includes Greta Garbo, John Barrymore, Joan Crawford, Wallace Beery, and Lionel Barrymore, and those are not the only stars. Things very much do happen: it's a lively, even tumultuous film that takes place in public spaces. Chinese filmmaker Zhengfan Yang, in his feature directorial debut, has set himself the task of filming seven unrelated scenes in different hotel rooms. It's a generally rather grim film, a tough watch pretty much lacking in the ebullience and sociability of Grand Hotel. On the contrary this Chinese film conveys a sense of a hotel room as a place of confinement, loneliness, and transitoriness, "modern life" as a downhill trajectory.
It's not that nothing happens, but not much does. Most of the sequences are dreary or lonely, fearful or hostile. But in their sense of confinement, some of the are quite intense.
SCENE 1 shows only a hotel employee, a slim young woman in a nice uniform cleaning up a room while receiving constant messages to her and other employees on a her handheld radio from her supervisor. The room is decently appointed, and features a frosted wall separating bedroom from bath, so the camera can show the cleaner working in the bath without moving from the bedroom.
SCENE 2 shows two nondescript men lined up in front of a wall in their hotel room being questioned by police. They are tourists, they say, and the police say the questioning is due to suspicion of an unlawful gathering in the area. We never see the police. The two men are unfriendly and uncooperative. One man will not even give his name, insisting that they have it on the ID he has handed them. One says they have the right to reman silent: the police person says that is a foreign, not a Chinese law. A review suggests the reason for questining is the two men are suspected of being homosexual, but this is not revealed.
SCENE 3, on a cheerier but still rather stiff and impersonal note, focuses on a wedding photography gathering in a much larger hotel space. First the bride and groom line uip stiffly to pose. Then they stand for shots with two bridesmaids, then with family in different arrangements, then with many other people, constantly regrouping to have their pictures taken, mostly from the POV of the photographer. No dialogue.
SCENE 4 is nothing but dialogue, that of a husband and wife talking in a hotel room. But we only actually see the pregnant wife, who is preparing for a four-month trip to the US, where she plans to have her baby, in Los Angeles, because she thinks it friendlier, because there are many Chinese people there. We learn this when husband and wife practice a template dialogue where a US customs and immigration official, with the husband taking his part, questions the wife on arrival about her trip and her plan to give birth on her US stay, and then return to China. Incidentally she puts on a mask (perhaps for a skin facial) for this dialogue. She brags that she runs a huge online sales company comparable to Amazon. But she seems a little scared, and a grim note is that the husband is not allowed to leave the country. She tells the customs man that her husband too is a customs officer which will generate, they agree, "empahty" or "sympathy."
SCENE 5 shows a lonely girl in a small messy hotel room who turns out to have been held in quarantine due to covid after returning to China from abroad for so long she has lost track of the number of tacked-together 14-day periods. She is constantly on her smartphone announcing her "showroom and hotel room," but nothing happens except that we learn the details of her dreary, confined existence. She smokes a cigarette in the bathtub with a big window above it, the only one we see. She picks up two plastic bags and addresses them: "Which kind of trash are you, foreign trash or local trash?" Then says, "Whatever kind of trash you are, at least you can leave." .
SCENE 6: shows a small, shirtless man with a goatee, middle-aged but fit, sitting in a hotel room eating packaged ramen and smoking. A sign on the door and his collection of dollars indicates this hotel room is in the US. He then dresses in gold and an animal mask so crude I could not tell if it was a monkey or a lion (it's a monkey), and goes out. He is a street performer.
SCENE 7: takes the camera outside, rambling around from a room to a highway and trees, then to the side of a hotel where we seem to see a dozen rooms, mostly with people in them. But this is ain't Hitchcock and if something exciting happens, I missed it. This is, however, another illustration of the impersonality of hotel rooms, each a little different, each much the same. Nothing ever happens. Or, as in Edmund Goulding's movie, so much happens that we lose track.
Zhengfan Yang provides a hard series of nuggets here, "uneven," as some have said, not an easy watch, as I have said, but an experiment some have found interestng, bold and experimental. Note: I am not a fan of Chantal Ackerman, to whom this has been compared. I have respect for Béla Tarr. Is this worthy of comparison with the work of the Hungarian auteur? However successful he is here, Zhengfen Yang shows the ability to carry out a demanding task, and he's a sharp cookie.
Stranger (Ju Wai Ren), 113 mins., debued at Karlovy Vary, winning the Grand Prix of the Proxima Competition. It also showed at El Gouna (Egypt), Norway and the San Diego Asian film festival. It was screened for this review as part of the 2025 MoMA-Film at Lincoln Center New Directors/New Films series. Showtimes:
Sunday, April 6
2:45pm at FLC, Walter Reade Theater – Q&A with Zhengfan Yang
Tuesday, April 8
8:45pm at MoMA, Titus Theater 2 – Q&A with Zhengfan Yang
Last edited by Chris Knipp; 03-24-2025 at 10:15 AM.
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TWO TIMES JOÃO LIBERADA (Paula Marques 2025)
JUNE JOÃO
PAULA MARQUES: TWO TIMES JOÃO LIBERADA (2024)
Gendered exorcism: Paula Tomás Marques uses a fictional history to critique modern filmmaking conventions and show trans people enacting their own history
Wendy Ide, Screen Daily: "A project that walks the line between biographical drama and conceptual art piece, the experimental Portuguese LGBTQ+ project Two Times João Liberada challenges the conventions of the biopic and takes on the patriarchal structures that still hold sway over much of cinematic storytelling. It is about the making of a misguided film about a fictional historical character, João Liberada, a gender non-conforming shepherdess who was targeted and imprisoned by the Inquisition in 18th century Portugal, and is likely to be of niche appeal.
"The project is the feature debut from Paula Tomás Marques, who has made several short films exploring gender and sexuality, including 2019’s In Case Of Fire, which won Best Student Short at San Sebastian, and 2024’s Dildotectónica. Two Times João Liberada is a film that was clearly made on a limited budget, and the ambition of a project that involves period details, special effects and a supernatural visitation should be applauded. That said, the picture’s modest production values and unpolished performances will likely limit its reach to audiences who share the film’s prominently displayed politics."
The story is of João Liberada, a fictional protagonist pieced together from archives reporting on the ostracism of gender non-conformists and the practices of punishing gendered sinners by the 18th-century Portuguese Inquisition. From the outset the film shows the director Diego (Andre Tecedeiro) becomes mysteriously paralyized and the film has to be suspended or done differently. Diego, as Wendy Ide says, is "a mbit of a thankless role for Tecedeiro, who is basically the fall guy and punching bag." From the start the lead, June João, objects to the way he is going with the story of her character. Eventually, the original martyred trans person appears to June to critique the film in comically down-to-earth and modern vernacular terms as totally in the wrong key.
From a POlish review by Tomasz Paborca: "The newly established section of the Berlin festival could not lack a piece that looked at the titular perspectives with a critical eye. After all, Tomás Paula Marques addressed the marginalization of queer optics in source documents and the reproduction of inequality through the apropriation of historical figures' biographies. She also made her own arguments for considering the LGBTQ+ community as haunted."
We know that an antique period can be evoked in unusual and radical means. There are Albert Serra's recent films about Casanova in 2013 and his 2016 La mort de Louis XIV. Rossellini was a master in his 1966 Louis XIV: la prise de pouroir and other historical films. His charmingly naiveand pure evocation of Saint Francis of Assisi Francesco, giullare di Dio, which gathers some of the anonymous "Fioretti di San Francesco" may be closer to what Paula Marques's film is grasping for. But Marques is more interested perhaps in pointing to how a cis-male filmmaker might tend to misunderstand a female, not to mention a transfemme, point of view in making a movie. The ficttional director of Two Times João Liberada expresses a great admiraiton for Bresso. But does the hint of brutality in his direction an allusion to Bresson? June João, the lead in his film, points out he is focused too much on the violent aspects of the trans martyr they are depicting, instead of the times when she was happy among the nuns.
I liked the moments of deliberate anachronoism, and especially the series of "antique" woodcuts that depict the life of João Liberada as depicted in the film, with the modern film crew standing by.
Two Times João Liberada/Duas Vezes João Liberada, 70 min., debuted at the Berlinale Feb. 18, 2025. Screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films. Showtimes:
Monday, April 7
8:30pm at MoMA, Titus Theater 2
Tuesday, April 8
6:15pm at FLC, Walter Reade Theater
Last edited by Chris Knipp; 03-16-2025 at 08:13 PM.
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DROWNING DRY/SESES (Laurynas Bareiša 2024)
LAURYNAS BAREIŠA: DROWNING DRY/SESES
Watching and pondering
"Engaging," wrote Alissa Simon in Variety, "yet tantalizingly withholding." As she says, it's nonlinear and also hides central events in the lives of its fighter, the two sisters, their marriages and children, unveiling a tragedy gradually that occurs during a summer holiday. Things only become clear at the film's very end.
It's a fascinating, intriguing style, which makes one feel smart or, if one is lost, stupid as a viewer. Not for everyone. The camera is managed by the director, who favors fixed positions the actors move in and out of, or that sometimes lead to an extreme closeup on the side of a head. The actors seem captured in a variety of natural poses and moments.
At the outset, the muscular Lucas (Paulius Markevicius) wins a mixed martial arts competition and celebrates with his wife, son, and friends backstage. Then he and his wife Ernesta (Gelmine Glemzaite) and his wife's sister Juste (Agne Kaktaite) and her jokey, pot-bellied husband Tomas (Giedrius Kiela) go to a lakeside country home to celebrate his success and winnings. Lots of short scenes follow, out of chronological order, but joined by a sense of togetherness. Only there is tragedy that looms over events, and we never learn altogether exactly all the details, but by the end the main thing becomes clear.
A curious intimacy is achieved by this elliptical method, and the natural playing of the scenes.
While the rough life of Lucas might imply humble origins, it's clear the ample summer house, with its handsome wood walls, has been in the sisters' family for generations, and there is an air of comfort about the group. Yet there is some chilliness in the two marriages. Ernesta is unhappy with the physical beatings Lucas takes and steers clear of him in the bedroom. In another scene Juste ignores Tomas when he offers himself to her standing nude. Dancing and playing together, Ernesta and Juste save all their time for enjoying each other or their respective young son and daughter, who seem at ease and are about the same age.
But things are not at ease when Juste's daughter disappears under the water of the lake. Shifts back and forth never reveal what happens. But there is another scene of the girl being rushed to a hospital choking for air, but dismissed because it's "psychosomatic." And in scenes that move through later moments, Lucas is missing. The choking of the girl apparently is a psychological reaction to almost drowning called "drowning dry." As Jordan Mintzer's Hollywood Reporter review explains it, subsequent scenes explore "the ripple effects" of a "tragic event" as it hits several of the characters over several days, months, even years, then finally "looping back" to "what started things off in the first place."
In effect we are given a tool box for emotional analysis, and thus made aware how a moment of trauma - not the almost-drowning, but the much worse accident that came afterward - spirals out in its emotional effect on the people even when they were not actually there at the moment when it occurred.
The Lithouanian title of the film, Seses, means "Sisters."
Drowning Dry, 88 mins., debuted at Locarno where it won the best director and best ensemble performance awards. Later it was chosen as Lithuania's Academy Awards Best Foreign entry. Screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films 2025.. Showtimes:
Thursday, April 3
8:45pm at MoMA, Titus Theater 2
Sunday, April 6
12:30pm at FLC, Walter Reade Theater
Last edited by Chris Knipp; 03-24-2025 at 10:05 AM.
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