New York — The Film Festival screenings have just drawn to a close. As the first two weeks featured strikingly strong films by talented Black filmmakers (see my first report), so this last part of the Festival was striking for the centrality of women. Women have long complained, for good reason, of the absence of female directors at the Oscars, and in the industry generally, or the slim pickings in some seasons for actresses. This time a number of the very best films were made by women directors (though still far fewer than is fair or than one would wish) and numerous films are centered on complicated and arresting women characters and — even better and more unusual — often on older women. What a pleasure, in a business so dominated by men and therefore, men’s stories.
Kelly Reichardt is someone whose films I eagerly wait for, and in my view — which will not be shared by everyone — her new film “Certain Women” is beautiful. Like all of her work, it is very quiet and with its strong sense of human loneliness, it is as sad as it is satisfying. Each of its three sections is built around a different woman character: a lawyer (played by Laura Dern) with a trapped and desperate client; a wife in an implicitly troubled marriage (played by Michelle Williams), bent on acquiring sandstone rocks; and a young isolated woman (Lily Gladstone) attracted to a teacher (played with twitchy complexity by Kristen Stewart). Excellent actresses, and all the quiet human dramas are played out against a remarkable Montana landscape of great vistas to distant mountains, empty fields and roads, vast skies and changing light — a space of great beauty but also underlining the loneliness of the women’s lives. The lighting and framing of images is always exciting, and the camera lingers again and again, staying on a face long after a commercial director would have moved on, a pace that some may find difficult but I find exactly right. Everything feels unexpected and fresh. The pain of unanswered longings, never to be resolved, builds in us even as we look with pleasure at the handsome ranch structures, the doing of this or that task, the lovely comings and goings of horses.
Pedro Almodovar’s “Julieta” begins with an image, as the opening credits come on, of a dramatically folded red something — a body organ? — moving in and out like the human heart itself. The breath. So minimal this image is, but like a poem. The camera eventually pulls back to reveal an older woman wearing red, looking through and discarding papers, and packing, but the film itself is a discourse on her heart. Red is also one of the director’s main colors, and he loves color. As he loves women and usually places them at the center of his work. This film derives from three Alice Munro stories which Almodovar adored and connected, a strange pairing — of this so passionate and sometimes flamboyant Spanish gay man and the most low key Canadian writer of the quietest of lives. At the press conference Almodovar talked about working hard for restraint here, though his love of melodrama is as present as ever. The film is most centrally based on Munro’s devastating story about a mother, Julieta, whose daughter at 15 leaves to go to a retreat and then disappears, choosing not to return and not to communicate over years, as the desperate mother waits, walks, waits. There are flashbacks to the young Julieta, and to the love that produces the daughter, the train ride when the couple comes together after a terrible event. The stories in the film are full of loss and pain and at the same time is deeply romantic, deeply committed to love and family, with surging emotion underlined by surging music, beautiful images and enchanting camera work.
Almodovar at his best is one of the really great directors working today, his art getting stronger and deeper as he ages, and his strangest films (like “Talk to Her” and “The Skin I Live In”) are his glorious ones, that seem to come from the ocean-bottom depths of the soul. Julieta is not one of those, but is totally appealing and wonderfully made.
We are on a totally different level with “Bright Lights,” a delicious documentary that will be coming out on HBO, about Debbie Reynolds and her daughter Carrie Fisher. This was a surprise; it had more substance than I expected, and far more pleasure. The attachment of the daughter (herself now not young, and careless about appearance) to the famously driven, tottering glowing mother is poignant, as is Fisher’s sense of her own screwed-up life. But most affecting for me is the irrepressible drive of the very old Debbie, who can hardly walk, but yet again turns on all her glamorous lights for any audience that will receive her, with the sardonic voice-over of the very funny Fisher commenting so knowingly on all this, with a mixed tone of sorrow and joy, of love and affection as much as burden and pain. I loved the way mother, daughter and son all drop in a second into playful mockery as they sing “Hollywood.” This evocation of the pop culture of an earlier Hollywood, is all the more apt in choosing a performer like Debbie Reynolds who — unlike Judy Garland or Fred Astaire — was a kind of skillful generic singer-dancer, all cheerfulness and energy and very hard work, and giving off nothing more — though at the same time an icon. Having all this evoked In the midst of a three week Film Festival movie immersion seemed to take one to the heart of the old Hollywood beast, the source of everything film-related, the good and bad of it, the playful joy of it — and ultimately, a distillation of the celebration and the curse of being “A Performer.”
To leave the female beat for a minute, and to give a sense of how extremely varied the Festival offerings were, I must mention Albert Serra’s “The Death of Louis XlV,” starring Jean-Pierre Leaud, utterly beautiful and made from nothing — indeed, watching the king die, with suggestions of royal richness, subtleties of lighting, comings and goings around the bedside of doctors and courtiers, and an extraordinary portrayal by Leaud, who said in the press conference that followed that he felt like he was enacting his own death. It’s a miracle of poetic cinema that you come away moved and satisfied by such a full aesthetic experience. And it is additionally deeply moving because film lovers will never forget the young beautiful unloved boy of “400 Blows,” the film with which Francois Truffaut launched Leaud’s career. To see him now, with time having done its cruel work on him even without makeup, adds hugely to the poignancy.
Back to women stars, the film “Aquarius,” directed by Kleber Mendonca Filho, posits a familiar situation — gentrification, old tenants pushed out of apartments they have lived in for many years, this time in Recife, Brazil. Clara, a 65-year-old retired music critic and widow, refuses to leave and fights, despite a series of harassments from the landlord and his smoothly smiling son, and the sense of Brazilian corruption. The woman at the center of this film — and boy is she at the center of it! — the camera and director (and us in the audience) can’t take their eyes off her — is played by Sonia Braga, a beautiful very well-known Brazilian iconic actress. Actually, Filho when asked if he wrote the part with her in mind, has said no, he was looking for the perfect Clara in the supermarket aisles, until he realized the part was so demanding he needed a professional. On one level, Braga’s charisma and seductiveness are pluses for the film, and her reputation and following should help bring in audiences. But I would have loved to see the film Filho originally had in mind. At a certain point there’s just too much of looking at Braga, and too little internality, the film unable or uninterested in showing us any real depth in the character. Though there’s a range of secondary figures and scenes of some subtlety, and side glimpses — from the working women who serve, to comments made to Clara about her origins and skin color — that suggest whole worlds of Brazil that we don’t otherwise see here. But the other women of Clara’s age and class, the “real” older women, look disturbingly like creatures from another planet. So though it’s terrific, and very unusual, to find a good serious film built around an elderly woman character, “Aquarius” is more built around a star.
Of the films I had high expectations of but ended up not loving, I must note that the Festival committee strongly believed in every film it chose, and the press and film industry audience were enthusiastic. I mention below the films that disappointed me on the good possibility that others will find much more in them than I did. I am always struck by how wildly film tastes vary from person to person. And also, given the nature of this assignment, judgments here are arrived at from a single viewing and hasty writing, and no matter how seasoned a critic one feels oneself to be, no matter how reliable one feels one’s critical faculty to be, there’s always the possibility of something important having been overlooked.
The most touted film by a woman director this year was the comedy “Toni Erdmann,” from the unknown German director Maren Ade, which came trailing the highest praise from Cannes and recently from the New York Times. The idea behind it is terrific: an ambitious daughter in the corporate power world is completely enmeshed with her wild, white-haired hippy-ish father who keeps creating upheavals and pranks, taking on different characters, making up stories, always going against what is appropriate. He is clearly meant to stand in for the human — as does the daughter’s finally presenting herself naked at a party for her work colleagues.
But for me none of it was very funny or telling; the father’s behavior just seemed increasingly silly, his expression of love banal. So the daughter’s willingness to put up with his nuisance presence everywhere she goes seemed inexplicable. Nor does the daughter relate to other women — her mother rendered essentially non-existent, and her women colleagues counting for little. I think of one of the films I most value, Jean Renoir’s “Boudu Saved From Drowning,” and how much loving feeling is invested there in both the disruptive force of Boudu and also in the bourgeois world of order and hypocrisy that he disrupts and soils. This German film may lend itself to an elaborate construction of ideas but for me, neither the father nor the daughter nor their relationship mattered enough.
“Personal Shopper,” almost entirely focused on one of the most interesting actresses around, rising star Kristen Stewart, was another film I had big expectations of, by the extremely interesting director Olivier Assayas, maker of such wonderful films (so different from one another) as “Carlos,” “Summer Hours,” “Something in the Air,” and “The Clouds of Sils Maria.” But this new one is a ghost story, a young woman trying to make contact with her dead brother, mostly in an old creakily atmospheric house. Linked perhaps to other Assayas films (like “Summer Hours”) marked by the presence of those who are gone, and the haunted places they leave behind?
At the same time, Stewart’s character is a personal shopper for a client who wants the most beautiful and expensive women’s clothes in London and Paris. The film is beautifully shot, stylish and eerie, diverting, always intriguing to look at, but for me not adding up to enough from such enormously talented people. Assayas said in the press conference after the film that unlike his usual practice of starting shooting with a full script, here he started with nothing, allowing himself and his actress to collaboratively improvise. You can understand a first-rate director deciding to work a different way for a change, and placing such trust in an actress, and in his intuitive bond with her. If I much prefer his scripted work, again some critics loved this one, and you may, too.
“A Quiet Passion” is an attempted rendering of the life of the important Amherst poet Emily Dickinson (Cynthia Nixon) by an English director of really great films about the British working class milieu he grew up in — Terrence Davies. But the tone didn’t seem right to me in the light of what I think I know about Dickinson and her world. Screaming anger between the poet and her father? And her brother? And raging expressions of feminist resentment? But a handsome well-made film and again, it’s been highly praised.
“20th Century Women,” directed by Mike Mills, was chosen as the Centerpiece film and I suspect will have a big success. Of all these films it’s the one most likely to arrive at the Triplex in Great Barrington. It has a bevy of good actresses led by Annette Bening, as the mother, and Greta Gerwig. But despite the title, it’s not really about the women at all, though I wish it had been. Rather it’s about everyone’s concern for the young boy and guiding him through the shoals of adolescence and sexuality, how to be a man, whether he’ll grow up to be a good man or not. It’s clearly autobiographical and it feels very self-involved.
Of course, Hollywood films have always been constructed around male lives and male comings of age. That this one is most involved with the mother-son relationship perhaps makes it different. But Annette Bening (one of the very few actors I must admit I do not like for some reason), seems to me too stolid and solid a figure to be a bohemian mom, couldn’t believe for a minute that she was flaky — and the film’s savvy about “Life” seems to me occasionally thought-provoking but mostly shallow in a Hollywood commercial way. It appears to be striving to tell truths; it invokes the music and concerns of 1979 in a way that some I spoke to felt really resonated with them, and reminded them of their own coming of age (though this takes place in Santa Barbara); it’s entertaining, and again very likely to please you. Me, I much prefer the films of Mills’ wife, Miranda July.
Finally, “Things to Come,” directed by Mia Hansen-Love, was for me one of the very best films of this crowded Festival schedule, and I am happy to see that this young German woman director, who works in France (and is married to French director Assayas), is getting better and better with each new film. This one stars the always brilliant French actress Isabelle Huppert, now in her late 60s, looking as handsome as ever in her cool but profoundly expressive way, as Nathalie a Parisian philosophy professor. And here there finally IS real depth and subtle probing of an older woman’s life and trouble and spirit.
The director says she chose the actress for her authority and intellect, and the character is wonderfully full of both. Nathalie is in constant motion through the film, with her family at the start, husband and two children; then rushing to the university classes she teaches despite students on strike; continually running to her elderly mother who can’t breathe, or who has refused to eat.
She feels very alive but at the same time the life she has known is falling apart, husband suddenly leaving for someone else, mother gone, her publisher wanting to dumb down and commercialize the very serious books she has produced with such pride and hard work. A brilliant (and very good-looking) young-man protégé whose life she as his teacher has changed, invites her to the mountains where he is living in an anarchist commune, making cheese and writing. She calls it paradise when she sees the extraordinary beauty of the place. The connection between the two — despite a huge age gap and his commitment to someone else — feels erotic as well as one of friendship and intellectual exchange, but it is not acted upon, and doesn’t need to be, and avoids obvious plot turns by that choice. Hansen-Love said in the press conference that she wanted to get a lot of the unconscious into her films and this is an instance — suggestions that linger in the air, not turned into realities but enrichments, layering the experience.
The presence of books and book talk throughout, names like Adorno and Foucault tossed about, Nathalie upset because her husband when he moved out took her precious copy of Buber, political talk of the idealism of the young versus someone who has been through it all — this is the appealing background furniture of her life as an intellectual. But the real beauty that that part of her character gives the film takes the form of quotations from the greats — Pascal, Rousseau — that she reads aloud to her class. The words chosen are remarkable and deeply moving, not distancing life as philosophy can sometimes seem to do, but concretely emotionally connecting to it. An amazing passage about desire, how we can live on hope and imagination rather than reality; and another about our walking in darkness and doubt alone in the universe, knowing too much to deny, and too little to believe — these eloquent passages are like poems, that define in the richest way both the heroine’s particular struggle at a given moment, and the human struggle.
Songs are used throughout the film in a similar manner, not as background music but almost as a more telling part of the script, apart from their beauty of sound and language. “Deep peace” someone sings, late in the film, over an image in the mountains, and then “Deep peace” repeats as the film cuts to Nathalie back in the city. This is a wonderful film, It really needs to be seen more than once to fully experience its richness, but once is enough to fully enjoy it.
So, Kelly Reichardt’s “Certain Women” and Mia Hansen-Love’s “Things To Come” make wonderful film brackets to the incredibly enjoyable privilege of sitting day after day, with people who love and know film, and watching this beautiful art form of expression in the hands of masters, even if they don’t always score. But when they do, for me it’s thrilling. And we need our physical theatres, and our cosmopolitan cities with all their odd movie houses, to keep a serious film culture alive and thriving. And when the Triplex does show good films, as it sometimes does after a long summer drought of mostly commercial junk, people need to buy tickets and make noise demanding more.
