New York — As the New York Film Festival press screenings began again this fall with three to four films a day daily for more than three weeks (some days with screenings from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.), it suddenly seemed daunting to submit oneself to so total an immersion, pinned to a seat for such a length of time, super-saturated. And yet I came away from the very first day deeply moved, and feeling yet again full of love for this art form in all its variety and power.
That first day as it happened offered three imperfect but engaging films: “Her Smell,” about a charismatic rock singer played by Elisabeth Moss, who, good as she is, couldn’t quite convince me that she is on the edge of self destruction a la Amy Winehouse, Courtney Love or Janis Joplin. Made by a director known for very quiet films, this one tries for flamboyance and whirling, nervous energies, but I found it becoming tedious and repetitious until the last third when the film transcends itself in a wonderful way. The second film was actor Paul Dano’s (the boy in “There Will be Blood”) “Wildlife,” which explores the falling apart of a family through the son’s anxious, intensely seeing eyes. They’ve recently relocated to Montana — the mother played by Carey Mulligan, the father by Jake Gyllenhaal — both good parents but obstacles arise and, while this is quiet — you could say modest — filmmaking, it is sensitive and feelingful. And then there was “Monrovia, Indiana,” Frederick Wiseman’s take on a Midwestern town in Trump country, Indiana. This long, low-key documentary stays away from politics, just opens with puffy, white clouds in vast blue skies, panoramic, flat country horizons. It watches corn being planted, growing, getting harvested, stalks yellowing and dried, a lengthy funeral oration and a cemetery — again under beautiful blue skies with clouds, ending as it began. The filmmaker — now in his late 80s! — notes the everyday behavior of ordinary people in the town’s barbershop, beauty parlor, as they chat in diners, gun store — “Our Town” redux, reminding one of the older, no-doubt romanticized America of memory, the one that was evoked in Capra films and Guthrie-Seeger songs. Is this film a call to our common humanity, lost in recent years? Or, despite noovert political message, a comment on the gap between appearance and reality? Or a puzzled inquiry into what has happened to America? The intent of Wiseman’s films (42 of them!) has never been spelled out and is not spelled out here, but somehow this film was deeply affecting and, in all, a thrilling initial immersion into the festival.
What followed then were some not very exciting films and, after that, a group of films that felt really important. So instead of aiming for full coverage, it’s the ones I valued most that I will address, even those that will never play anywhere but in New York City. I was, in fact, surprised by the unexpectedness of what moved me most. “Three Faces,” which will never show up here, was written and directed by the Iranian director Panahi, who made a series of powerful, passionate, feminist films about women’s plight and demand for freedom — and paid dearly for doing so. He has beenbanned from filmmaking by the current Iranian regime for 20 years. Over the last eight years, he has managed tomake small, confined films with an iPhone,but this latest one has the richness of real filmmaking. It begins with an anguished girl speaking desperately on the screen of an iPhone, talking about how important movies have been for her all her years, how hard she worked to become an actress, and how all that has fallen apart and she sees no way out but suicide. No doubt part of the film’s power comes from the personal source of Panahi’s own story, intensified in this #MeToo time, as we hear a brother, unseen behind walls, howling in destructive rage, ready to tear the young girl apart for her desire to be an actress. The film perhaps borrowed from the late, great Iranian director Kirostami the idea of riding on a road up into the mountains through the entire seemingly meandering movie — the director himself and, with him, the famous actress that the girl turned to to save her before her apparent suicide. They go to her village to see if she truly is dead and we get an odd, humorous, and painful view of a very different world, as do the two urban sophisticates in the car — funny jokes about macho potency by way of a bull’s golden balls and the magical powers of foreskins removed from circumcised boys, along with the horrific demands for women’s submission, as all the little girls in the most remote mountain villages crowd around, shrouded in their hijabs and scarves.
The other early offering that I really was surprised to be quite taken with is also unlikely to reach you unless you come to Manhattan to see it: an Argentinian film by Marino Llinas called “La Flor,” hugely long — 14 hours in fact, shown in three parts. Inventive, it features the same four core actresses in six different stories, different styles and genres, akin to Latin American telenovelas, using pop forms to sometimes deliver what seemed to me some important gender commentary. The first section, science fiction/horror, has to do with an archeological find, an ancient female mummy mysteriously infecting animals and then infecting one of the women scientists with mad killer rage. Part Two, a kind of musical, features a couple — the woman a singer, the man her performing and life partner — battling: the woman’s dreams, the man’s sense of defeated submission. There is suggestiveness of all kinds; unusual use of camera; a wild, very loud soundtrack like the most hyped-up Bernard Herrmann/Hitchcockian music running throughout in an exaggerated, sometimes very effective way. I found Part Three so stupefying, though, that I stopped there, though I’ve been told by braver critics that the last partswereworth sitting through another 10 hours for. It was striking to me that, though this year’s festival had lamentably few films directed by women (only three in the Main Slate — or 4, if you include one from Documentary also shown with the Main Slate offerings), still, a sizable number of films directed by men focused heavily on women.
“Cold War,” a Polish film that impressed people at Cannes, was, to me, engaging but less than what I expected, given the brilliance of Pawlikowski’s last film, “Ida.” Gorgeous cinematography, exquisite opening with snow, an interesting subplot of Polish folk culture being turned into a Stalinist slick commodity (that involves a lot of lively song and dance), but the film is, above all, a love story about two people who can’t stay together and can’t live apart. That kind of passionately romantic, all-or-nothing film is rare in the West these days, and the central characters here are beautiful to watch, but the urgency that drives them is not ever made clear enough and the woman is simply not sufficiently interesting despite her beauty and life force.
“Happy As Lazzaro”is one of those three films (out of 30) in the Main Slate made by a woman, Alice Rohrwacher, a young Italian director who has won awards in Cannes this year for the writing of “Lazzaro,” hence expectations around this film were high. Fable-like with a strong sense of the communal, the film uses many ordinary, poor non-actors as exploited workers on a kind of timeless plantation, working hard for no recompense, practices outlawed in Italy decades ago. Themes of economic injustice and gaping inequality couldn’t be more timely and should resonate with us, as should greedy, mean, rich people in control and the symbolic wolf prowling the city — but does it resonate?The film’s central character Lazzaro, himself gently misused in turn by the peasants for his simplicity,is an odd innocent who ismeant to be seenas saintly, though his total obeisance to any request made of him could feel disturbing, shades of authoritarian or fascistic acquiescence. What is glorious in Bresson’s films (I know the comparison to such a master is totally unfair!) is uncomfortable here. Still, gorgeous images stay in your mind — children running through massive green tobacco leaves, strange striated folds of landscape, much beauty, an extraordinary feeling for the natural world, ancient forms of farming — seen as oppressive but very pleasing aesthetically, the ugliness and dangerous impersonality of the modern city. The religiosity of the film — a mysterious light momentarily flashing through a nighttime tree, Lazzaro never growing older, people bowing down to him, church organ music following him down the street — these and other miracles and mysteries may be applauded by some and seen as off-putting by others. So, too, the reaching for something magical that we remember from earlier beloved Italian cinema. Yet, impressively, this young woman director is someone struggling with an original and unusual vision, in itselfa good reason to see and find much in this film, even though (at least for me), ultimately, it doesn’t quite work.
Returning to the subject of love, that is at the center of Barry Jenkins’ new film, “If Beale Street Could Talk,” again with a very appealing and lovely looking pair of lovers struggling with tensions within a black world (mother-in-law who is uppity and horrifically church religious) and with evil white police who imprison an innocent man. The film, from a not-so-good novel by James Baldwin, works with the joy of courting, lovemaking, childbirth, the unfailing support of sister and parents, the bitterness of a black history of harm—and will certainly be of interest to many. The critics loved it. For me, it seemed a dropping off from the brilliant, concise, totally original poetry of the same director’s “Moonlight.”
Yet another film about romantic love, a fine French film, Christophe Honore’s “Sorry Angel,” deals with a gay world a couple of decades ago in Paris. It features a lot of love, a lot of sex, beautiful male bodies, promiscuity but also great tenderness and caring, intelligence and wit. It focuses mostly on an older, very attractive writer and the young man he takes up with, until they are both much more deeply attached than they expected to be. In the process we see the whole gay scene of the time, where men go for pickups, even a bit about the desire to be hurt, and, above all, the sadness of tragically curtailed lives of beautiful people.
The great French film industry has also given us this year the smartest film around, Assayas’ “Non-Fiction,” so very French with its focus on art and literature and a touch of politics. There’s a huge amount of talk by intellectuals mulling over the plight of publishing these days — declining even in France, though Paris seems to have a bookstore on every block — the triumph of computers and other devices, how to accommodate, what the losses are, book people as custodians of a humanistic idea. The talk is urbane, nuanced in interactions,witty; it is full of cultural allusions, as to Bergman’s “Winter Light” — and the ever gorgeous Juliet Binoche is effortlessly at home in a world of such conversations. Assayas, a director I admire greatly, beautifully gets the hypersensitivities of a writer — resentments and envy and the settling of scores—and, of course, there’s the illicit bed-hopping romances in this group of married friends. The film is funny, it’s ever lively with a camera that swoops and flows, and it’s pleasurably full of language and intelligence in addressing some important ideas of our time.
Part Two of this overview of the New York Film Festival will follow shortly. The public screenings began Sept. 28 and run till Sunday, Oct. 14.
