New York — The last week of press screenings at the 2015 New York Film Festival was true to form in coming up with a major surprise — the unexpected riches of “The Assassin,” by the Taiwanese director (born in China) Hou Hsiao-hsien. This was a film I had dreaded, expecting a bloody mindless action-packed martial-arts film. I went to see it only out of a sense of duty, to cover this festival as fully as I was able. What I encountered was an exquisite, amazing piece of work that in some mysterious way was also deeply moving – ultimately, I think, the most powerful film I saw in the whole of the Festival.
There are many familiar examples of martial arts films, like Ang Lee’s “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”(2000). And this film is not unique in casting a woman as the killer. Shu Qi, a very striking looking actress, dressed all in black, plays Yinniang, who is called upon to kill in order to get rid of those who are evil and corrupt. Set far in the past in the 9th century Tang Dynasty, extensive archives allowed the director to research the smallest details while permitting his imagination full reign. The action involves conflicting interests, the court, the town of Weibo — but the complexities of the plot are not essential to follow.
The film is intoxicating visually, settings are thrilling, landscape — mostly mountains and fields — in every kind of beautiful light, interiors hung with gorgeous colors of silk, torches of fire against the night’s blackness, clusters of candles. A lot of stillness, here and in other films from this director. Even when two characters or more are present, the camera sits unmoving and leaves us too sitting in the silence. A lurking figure is glimpsed through the silk layers, or glimpsed among many white birch trunks, and then startling bursts of unexpected action, the short knife that she uses slashing, the long sword of the adversary. Yet the director spares us all sight of blood; the movements of the battling characters are choreographed but still tethered to realism (no flying figures); and there is no glee at all in violence, resorted to only for justifiable reasons.
Most important, in the end the heroine — having already killed several people — refuses to kill her cousin despite the pressure placed on her by the dramatically white-clad nun who took her from her parents at age 10 and raised her. The nun sees it as a defect that Yinniang is unable to kill, a flaw that gets in the way of pure vengeance and justice, but Yinniang is warmly welcomed into the human community at the film’s end for her refusal, and we also agree with her humane decision.
So this is a kind of counter- or anti- martial arts film, urging compassion in the end, not the severe code that the nun whom she answers to urges on her. Whether any of this has any relation to current day Chinese politics, I can’t say. Directors who want to stay safe and keep making films do best to side-step or disguise issues as the past — or retreat to the past altogether, where they can’t get into trouble.
As opposed to this exquisite epic drama, Laurie Anderson’s “Heart of a Dog” is intimate and personal, like a diary, but more like poetry, loose and freeform, herself doing the voiceover. The visuals are a pleasure to look at, old movies, childhood memories, her own drawings and paintings, homages to other artists she knows. The ostensible subject is her beloved dog Lolabelle, who has many funny skills, like playing the piano. But death is very present here, the experience of 9/11 in downtown New York, the dying of dog, and of mother, none of these dealt with in expected ways. And when we read the film’s final dedication, it’s clear that more than anything, the film is an act of grieving for the death of Anderson’s husband, renowned singer Lou Reed. But there’s no conveying the humor and charm and poignancy of this special work, and how full of life and surprise it is.
Equally full of life is Michael Moore’s “Where to Invade Next,” a very funny and disturbing documentary about all the ways other countries handle things so much better than we in America do. Moore visits factories in Italy and school cafeterias in poorer parts of France, he travels to Finland and Slovenia, he talks to Prime Ministers and to kids who love eating vegetables, his own lumbering massiveness somehow giving a humorous edge to his probing and his passionate urging us to do better than we have about a wide variety of matters. And if he simplifies by making other countries much better than they really are, the issues he raises about life here are all valid and deserve having attention paid to them. Full of moral decency and a huge lot of fun as well. Here’s hoping the Triplex brings this up here.
An extraordinary integrity and humanity is at the core of a stirringly understated French film about unemployment, “The Measure of a Man,” directed by Stephane Brize. The film stars (and is really made by) the extraordinary actor Vincent Lindon, who plays a laid-off factory worker. We watch the various useless struggles he goes through to retrain, to present himself differently, to hold on to what he has worked for his entire life. With a minimum of means, this actor takes you into a world of humiliation and pride and empathy for the pain of others, done without a wasted word or gesture. Not oppressively earnest or depressing either. A wonder.
It’s interesting to consider that film next to the Steven Spielberg big American studio film, “Bridge of Spies,” set in 1954 when both Russia and America were very actively spying on one another. The focus of the film is the decency and humanity of the Tom Hanks central character, Jim Donovan, a good man, a lawyer, who is pressed into service to defend a man charged as a spy for Russia, Rudolph Abel (Mark Rylance). Despite the hysteria of anti-Soviet feelings all around him, he stands firm in his humanity, and his placing the American Constitution above the man’s guilt as a spy. When an exchange situation arises, with an American spy plane shot down piloted by Gary Powers, Hanks’ character negotiates the exchange, also including a second American, though he is just a man without government secrets who accidentally gets caught up in this. While Americans can look monstrous in this film — shooting into the lawyer’s home — in the end America as embodied by the heroic and courageous Jim Donovan is on the side of the angels, as the Russians look brutal and untrustworthy. A kind of innocent in a desperate divided Germany, he comes home to a family that looks exactly like the Life magazine advertisements of the ’50s. Well done as the film is, it feels sentimental, simpleminded, mawkishly patriotic — as the music on the soundtrack swells to make our eyes fill with tears, and to make us to cheer this good man without a single flaw.
Whatever are the sardonic Coen brothers doing as screenwriters on this project? Maybe they had a hand in the characterization of Mark Rylance’s Russian spy, seemingly a grey little man, but also a “stand up man” — a man who when asked if he doesn’t worry, answers the same way each time — Would it help? Perhaps Spielberg hoped the Coens’ mocking dry humor would be an effective foil for Jim’s bottomless warmth, his concern for the spy, his respect for this supposed enemy for NOT cracking, for keeping his self-respect and being faithful to his cause.
Perhaps partly because my film tastes were shaped by the great European art films of my youth, the sleek sentimental films of a director like Spielberg, I must say, make me cringe. The slickness, the underlining, the idealized goodness that makes the man a saint and his family generic-all-American-nice, and America itself a sanctuary of the good even as he shows it as rabid. BUT Hanks is a solid actor and Rylance can be a stunning one, the camera work serves the action well, the plot is exciting, the music does its work on you, and audiences everywhere, and in the Berkshires, too, will love it.
“Brooklyn,” made from Colm Toibin’s book, screenplay by Nick Hornby, is the story of a young girl leaving Ireland to settle in New York in 1952, and through her to reflect some part of that Irish American immigrant experience. It follows Eilis (played by Saoirse Ronan) from homesickness and uncertainty — on the boat over, the rooming house, night school, shop girl job — to mastery and confidence, largely due to her connecting up with a young Italian-American plumber.
At the press conference afterward, director and writers were very defensive when people asked about this film’s sentimentality or whether some of the grit of the novel had been left out for something softer (the heroine’s encounters with a Jewish refugee teacher and Jewish students in night school, and with Black customers in the department store she works in, could have added richness to her American experience — and the sense of Ireland as a place where her sister’s life dries up — is also trimmed. Nor does the mother-daughter relation have any depth in either book or film).
For me, there is not enough there to give the film layering and make it more than generic. But the filmmaker and writers all talked as if they were on the cutting edge, on the barricades, risking all for a film that never raises its voice, no violence, no predictable clichés (a default position). That may be true, and again I think this is a film that will get wide distribution and that many will enjoy. But for me, not enough individuation or complexity, too simple and easy.
There were a number of other films that DID aim for complexity and the hands-on feeling of art films — that I don’t have the space to elaborate on, but that some around me loved, though again I often had less than full enthusiasm for them. “Experimenter,” the Michael Almereyda film about the famous Milgrim experiment in getting decent people to obey instructions to inflict pain on others, for me seemed to subordinate characterization to the exploration of a single idea — a too familiar idea, and a study I have heard about for decades, given no extra resonance here.
A Japanese film “Journey to the Shore” about the dead moving among the living (a traditional genre in Japan) was handsome to look at and poignant to me because in my mind it also connected to the destruction Japan has suffered in recent years from earthquakes, devastating tsunamis, nuclear meltdowns, floods –an unbelievable series of disasters — so it really has become a country haunted by the dead.
A Chinese film, “Mountains May Depart,” by Jia Zhangke, deals with the too rapid growth of modern China through a story of a woman who is courted by two men, one a weathy business man, the other a coal miner — and the complications that follow from 1998 to the future. For me that film only partly worked, though the director is much respected. Ditto a S. Korean film, “Right Now, Wrong Then,” about a somewhat older director of art films who encounters and is tempted by a beautiful young art student he meets in a place he has come to to introduce one of his films. The film focuses on the complexity and awkwardness of the couple’s interactions, again for me not very effectively, but for many, it had a Woody-Allen-like humorous sensitivity.
“My Golden Days,” a French film by Arnaud Desplechin, I found a somewhat messy but attractive study of the ecstatic and anguished swings of young love, looked back on from middle age and a melancholy distance of loss by the always wonderful actor Matthieu Almaric.
Special mention has to be made of a painful film from Hungary, “Son of Saul,” directed by Laszlo Nemes, which looks at Auschwitz through the eyes of a Sonderkommando, a Jew who did the horrible work of getting other Jews into the gas chambers and cleaning up afterward. The film offers a brilliant and devastating vision of the horror of the death camps without recreating the actual realistic details. Both director and central actor speak in interviews eloquently and movingly about losing their own grandparents and others in the camps, and feeling they will live forever with a “shadow family.”
As The Walk was given the honor of being the Opening Night film of the Festival this year, so the honor of the Closing Night film is bestowed upon “Miles Ahead,” about the great Black jazz musician Miles Davis at the time in his life when he took five years out of his career, and then attempted a comeback with the help of a journalist. It is Don Cheadle’s first directorial attempt, all the more ambitious since he plays the difficult musician’s role himself.
And the film given the honor of being the Centerpiece film is “Steve Jobs” with a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin (of “Social Network” fame), directed by Danny Boyle. Again a difficult man who did great things but at a large cost. “Steve Jobs” is a very skillfully turned out film, very smart-talking, fast-talking. The camera work involves a wild kind of jumping around –darting from present to memory, then back. For a film that confines itself to the rooms and corridors where Jobs does his work, all the hurried walking also keeps things from ever seeming static. The huge amount of nervous energy the film gives off is amplified by quick percussive beats and taps on the soundtrack.
Many liberties were taken with Jobs’ real-life drama if they served what were felt to be the demands of narration and entertainment. Kate Winslet, playing Joanna Hoffman, is made omnipresent to give us access to the main character’s mind, and to provide the Jobs character with someone to plot and explain and emote to — and of course to add some female glamour. So too Sorkin builds each of the three product launches that structure the film, around the constant presence of Lisa, the daughter Jobs refused to acknowledge as his child, from the 5 year old at the beginning of the film, to the young college student at the end.
One of the main themes of the film, its indictment of Jobs as a failed human being, becomes increasingly insistent and Lisa serves that theme. On the second major trajectory of the film, Jobs’ work failures reverse to huge successes, and the Apple ad campaign images of those who thought differently — Einstein, Picasso, Martin Luther King — roll off as though to put Jobs in that company. (Surely not so, though, no matter how much we have loved our Macs and how much our lives have been altered by them.)Â As the Apple successes mount, so according to the film do very damaging confrontations with people he has hurt, who have felt betrayed by him — Steve Wozniac, Scully, Andy Herzberg, others. What you make is not supposed to be the best part of you, one of them shouts, plainly the moral here. The daughter Lisa is offered as the personification of his human failing; and his final reconciliation with her is made a marker of his inner growth toward a happyish ending.
But all this is a contrivance, to create conflict and easy blame and a neat tying-together upbeat ending. Sorkin omits the fact that Jobs DID tell Lisa he was her father when she was 3, and that Jobs was married through most of this time, and had three children in that marriage, none of which is ever mentioned in the film, leaving us to assume he is unmarried. Lisa, in fact, lived with Jobs, his wife and his children for some years. Why call the film “Steve Jobs” if you are going to distort so fundamentally who the man was? Especially since the book by Walter Isaacson about Jobs reveals a life that is far more interesting and poignant than Sorkin’s neat construction. Yet this kind of film is generally regarded as the best of the mainstream Hollywood studio products. The enormous publicity machinery, as for all the blockbusters, is plastering “Steve Jobs” on every bus and wall in New York City. With certainty it will be shown up here and greatly enjoyed.
Such blockbusters constitute a sizable proportion of the “Main Slate” festival films shown, and as noted, their positioning gives them places of honor. Not so the original festival 53 years ago (and for many years after). These corporate products manipulate, they try to reach the biggest audience and are willing to make all the compromises that entails. One wishes the most discerning of Film Festivals didn’t feel a need to highlight or even include them.
Hou Hsiao-hsien (of “The Assassin”) says he follows his own intuition as he works, and you feel he never tries to pummel you to respond a certain way. But the Hollywood films in the festival are strategically created, with an eye on the Oscars and the box office. They are entertaining for many, even for knowing audiences. But what satisfies my soul are films like “The Assassin” (which won the Best Directors award at the Cannes Film Festival — that other holy site for films) whose beauty made me swoon; “The Measure of a Man,” in which human dignity and compassion feel far more real than in the sentimentality of “Bridge of Spies”; and “Heart of a Dog,” where imagination needs no help from hi-tech, 3D, or any other mechanical source but the connections made by an artist’s eye and heart.
