Gratitude was in the air at this year’s press screenings of the New York Film Festival (NYFF) — and joy, at being back in a movie theater, especially one with perfect sight lines, perfect sound, an audience of people passionate about film, and the chance to see the best films of the year as they were made to be seen.
“Bergman Island,” on the first day of screenings, was for me a perfect beginning, about two filmmakers doing obeissance to perhaps the greatest filmmaker of all. This is a quiet film, and easy to overlook, by a French director I have particularly liked, Mia Hansen-Love. Her terrific last film, “Things to Come,” starring Isabelle Huppert as a middle-aged professor whose husband has just left her and who has to find her way, was shown at the last Film Festival. Hansen-Love also made a haunting and memorable earlier film, “The Father of My Children,” about a film producer (based on a real person) who keeps difficult films alive at great cost to himself and his own life.
“Bergman Island” is about a married couple, Tony (Tim Roth) and Chris (Vicky Krieps), who go to Ingmar Bergman’s island, Faro, off the coast of Sweden, to work on their own projects, hoping to get inspiration from the late master. We arrive with them through billowing clouds in the film’s delicious first image (Chris’ delicacy already conveyed by her feeling upset and leaning on Tony as their plane runs into turbulence). There’s a theme park atmosphere around the place, a Bergman cottage industry — laughable, given the great director was so dour, so protective of his privacy. But despite the Bergman tours, the film conveys the depth of feeling that Chris especially has for the Swedish director, and the reverence with which they both look at the houses Bergman lived in, the closeness of the sea, his beautiful simple workspace, his film-viewing room, his special chair. But the couple themselves are the real subject, and as Bergman made perhaps the most powerful film ever about a troubled marriage —”Scenes from a Marriage” — these two aren’t doing well, either. They go separate ways, she seeming to flirt with her guide. She turns to her husband — much older than she is, and clearly much more famous — for help with her own film, not knowing how to end her screenplay, but he is continually interrupted by phone calls, and seems remote. She talks a lot about her relation to film writing, how hard it is for her, what anguish, and seems full of insecurity.
Hansen-Love’s films feel deeply personal, with a lovely truthfulness about the struggles of high-achieving women, at the same time as they are playful and spontaneous. The narrative jumps around, no careful plotting here. Well into the film we find ourselves watching a second film, the one Chris is making, about another troubled couple. Hansen-Love has lived for many years with another French director I’ve especially admired, Olivier Assayas. The two broke up several years ago after having a daughter, and there is clearly an autobiographical basis for the plots here. If the whole does not cohere in any very clear way, I don’t see that as a problem here. I value the thoughtfulness this director’s work always gives off, the intelligence, honesty, surprise, delicacy. The meandering finally culminates in the arrival of a very young daughter, brought to Chris in her workspace, mother and child coming together with delight, to me a perfect ending. Hansen-Love’s previous film about an older woman professor losing her marriage, ends again with the delight of holding an infant, a grandchild, consolation and hope in the midst of the pain and losses of life.
It’s testimony to Israeli director Nadav Lapid’s skills as an explosive filmmaker that in his “Ahed’s Knee” he can keep us engrossed and distressed by his protagonist’s anguished rants. All the time one asks oneself to what extent is his a justified horror of Israel’s having fallen far from its ideals, or does it suggest a personal neurosis so intense it verges on madness. Similar questions arise from Lapid’s previous film “Synonyms,” in which a young Israeli man moves to Paris in a desperate effort to erase what is Israeli about him.
Here the fictional director (played very sympathetically by Avshalom Pollak) is appearing with one of his films in a desert town in Israel, and being asked to sign an agreement to restrict what he speaks about in his talk. He’s infuriated by what he sees as censorship but his turbulence would also seem to derive from the fact that his mother is dying. He calls her several times, tells her “You’re my treasure.” Lapid’s own mother, who worked closely with him as an editor of his films, in fact died of lung cancer during the making of this film.
It should be noted that the two films by Israeli directors chosen for this Festival — this one and a documentary called “The First 54 Years,” which is an equally brutal indictment of Israel by Avi Mograbi — saw both directors receive major support from Israel for the making of these severe critiques, and both continue to live in Israel. Not many other countries could that be said of.
This film has a huge wild energy, opening with jarring sounds of a sinister motorcyclist, the hero’s plane makes a violent descent, the camera moving up and around wildly, whirling, harsh and distorting, he looking small and increasingly broken in a vast desert that is totally bleak. The young woman in charge — though a great reader of books and sympathetic to his position — is willing to serve oppressive forces to hold her job. Anyone who dissents is crushed, she tells him. But as he rages against the hypocrisy, the lies, the vulgarity and dumbing down, the tyrannical corruption he sees, he says in his anguish that he is tied to the country by an unbreakable bond. Lapid makes films that are powerful to look at, super-intense, with a unique style, and his agony weighs heavily on one watching the film. On a much lesser level, it’s a recognizable pain, because for me — with my own large family having been destroyed in the Holocaust, and with what I know of the haven it became for survivors — that commitment to Israel is also unbreakable, despite what is heinous, and despite dilemmas that at this point may never be resolved.
“In Front of Your Face” is a really appealing film by the prolific Sang-soo Hong. It happily focusses not on his usual situation — older film director meets beautiful young thing — but on an older woman, handsome and compelling to watch, who was an actress, moved from Seoul to Seattle, and is now back in Korea years later. From the start, she speaks of the blessing that each new day is, in a way that suggests that despite the serenity and acceptance she articulates, something more dire is happening to her. Though we begin with her younger sister’s good dream, the film turns out to be built on disappointments all around, for the sister who wishes the actress was more present in her life, for the central character, who we discover still has acting hopes, and for the director who has a glowing memory of her 25 years ago. The director weeps for her, but the actress laughs; dreams are what the film starts and ends with. Images — even of the soul-less Seoul modern architecture — are beautifully constructed and a pleasure to look at. And the mixture of light and dark emotional tones in the film is a delicate pleasure to savor.
“Passing,” British actress Rebecca Hall’s directorial debut, in gorgeous black and white, from a 1929 novel by Nella Larson, begins with blurry dark figures hurrying through a light gray background, and then focusses on an elegantly dressed woman entering a fancy hotel dining room, the wide brim of her gauzy hat hiding her face, which is edgy and nervously alert. Irene, the beautiful Black central character played by Tessa Thompson, is in the dangerous white world, where she rarely ventures. She lives a very comfortable life in the Black world of Harlem as a respected doctor’s wife, in a fine looking brownstone, raising two sons. A chance encounter in that hotel dining room with a friend from the distant past now based in Chicago, Clare, gives the film its contrasting subjects, with Clare passing as white, even to her wealthy racist white husband.
Each woman subtly desires what the other has. Clare feels the loneliness of her isolation from her source, and starts to move in on Irene and her world, envying her commitments, her engagement. At the time of the Harlem Renaissance in New York, she goes along to parties and dances, where her freedom and boldness are charismatic, even to Irene’s husband. Irene, who is artistic, literate, and respectable, and whose sex life with her husband seems troubled, feels not only jealous but drawn to someone who acts on her desires ruthlessly if necessary. There are lovely piano riffs that mark periodic pauses — often accompanied by flashes of a lyrical green leafy world — and bursts of a jazz horn very nicely folded into the flow of the film. And continually interesting visual shots, blurs, focusses on parts of bodies, constant mirrors since the subject is identity, and repeated lovely images of the two women walking along Strivers Row brownstones.
The danger built into the racial division and the blurring of that division in this country makes tragedy a not unexpected conclusion in 1929, as it still is a century later. Rebecca Hall comes to this material in no arbitrary way, since her grandfather — a light-skinned Black man — passed as white and married a Dutch woman. Her renowned opera singer mother was evasive when questioned, and lived as white, though photos of her tell a different story. Rebecca speaks about the confusion she always lived with, and how important to her was David Bowie’s giving her Nella Larson’s book, which made everything make sense — and his encouraging her to make a film of it.
“The Velvet Underground” is a labor of love by Todd Haynes, a piecing together of images and sounds from a rock group built around the brilliance and charisma of singer-song writer Lou Reed, with Andy Warhol as presiding spirit. Haynes also sees the Velvet’s story as the story of New York in the ’60s, a time of amazing creative activity, and the footage he pieces together in this film adds up to a spirited, beautiful to look at evocation of a special time in the city. Ed Lachman’s terrific cinematography adds to that beauty. Along with the final credits, the film concludes with lists — of the titles of all of Warhol’s paintings, films and other work, of Reed’s songs, Jasper Johns’ work, and others — so much material produced. For all the playing with heroin and destruction, a remarkable work ethic flourished, as did a gay culture. Haynes has written a brilliant examination of and homage to that and to the whole period — anyone interested should read it. But ultimately the film is where he’s celebrating this world, and at the end one is left with a sad sense of loss, of all that vivid life pretty much gone now.
Bruno Dumont’s “France” brings the main character before us as the film opens, bold yellow hair, very lipsticked, bright clothing, looking and speaking directly to us but presumably really on a device speaking to her son — in keeping with her remoteness from him through the film, and also announcing the omnipresent digital media subject of the film. It’s an exciting opening and an exciting film to watch, impressively acted by Lea Seydoux as France de Meurs, a famous TV talk-show host and war journalist. We see her in action in a place a bit like Afghanistan, one of several amazing and beautiful settings through the film: gorges, massive rock formations, soldiers everywhere. She asks the native fighters how they feel about the French army’s supporting presence, before cameras that record every word and gesture, and then repeats the question, editing the exchange right there. She tells the terrifying looking fighter how to stand with his gun, he does just what she says, and we see her turn what seems a violent and very dangerous place into theater, with herself as director — literally shouting “action.”
So, from the outset, the film asks the question: What is real? The most extreme situations over and over again turn out to be staged, including France’s reactions. When she goes to apologize to the modest family of the boy she hurts in a car accident, they are abjectly starry-eyed and dazzled by her celebrity, and we have to ask ourselves if her tearfulness is real, a question that comes up again and again — with a touch of Sirkian soap opera, and a little Fellini. She lives on the most elegant Place de Vosges in Paris, in startlingly huge rooms with giant paintings on the red and green walls — looking like Renaissance masterworks, maybe Tintoretto — hyper culture, hyper wealth. She and her husband argue about her making far more money than he does. Ultimately she seems to break down, the unreality and the non-stop fame and recognition making it hard for her to live. But in the end, she’s back, joining a boat full of migrants, interviewing a woman who lived with a child murderer for 20 years. People trust her, and she moves them around like a director. Only a persistent lover, death itself, and destructive madmen in the street are out of her control. Does it all add up to a clear statement about our media-filled contemporary world and how to think about it? Or about those who maneuver in that world — full of deception, disdain, endless need for praise, but still human and capable of hurt for having done wrong? There is no clarity, and even more unclear is Dumont’s garbled jargon-filled unreadable writing on the subject. But he does catch some important truth about our constantly manipulated world, and with his very skilled entertaining talent, creates a film well worth seeing.
“Memoria,” made by Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, is a film that I was totally dazzled by but that perhaps only film devotees will see, at the two or three great theaters that show such films. There are very long takes, often in gray spaces, the camera just sitting there, on and on, sometimes with a stationary figure whose back is turned to us. The main character, Jessica, played by Tilda Swinton, looks and moves like a sleepwalker and it takes us a long time to understand what is happening. She is afflicted with a loud sound — like a gunshot or explosive — in her head, and tries to get understanding from a sound expert. But it’s not only in her head. When she is crossing a street in Bogota, the sound explodes and one of the passers-by throws himself on the ground, presumably to avoid what he thinks is a shot — or maybe in the re-enactment of a previous trauma. Is the trauma linked to the explosive sound a personal one, or political, or both? Political, as part of Columbia’s brutal history, or of the whole world itself? The power of the film is such that the metaphor is not pinned down.
It’s hard to describe this fascinating film, but from its beginning — and increasingly — you feel something apocalyptic is alluded to. There is a short scene early in the film when the camera moves, with no explanation, from a darkened room to an outdoor parking lot — dark gray and rained on. A car alarm goes off, and then another, car lights blink on and off as ever more car alarms join in the frightful cacophony, until after a long while the alarms stop one by one. It’s a poetry of calamity, searing yet done with such limited means — given a great and strange imagination. Jessica later wandering into a green primitive place makes discoveries about the channeling of history, the traumas of others, and, in the final scene you hear that loud burst of sound amplified and extended, sounding now like the earth is falling apart, is tearing itself to pieces. As indeed it is. This is an extraordinary film –you breathe differently after it.
Of the three films chosen for opening night (Joel Coen’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth“), centerpiece (Jane Campion’s “The Power of the Dog“), and closing night (Pedro Almodovar’s “Parallel Mothers“), I have to say that those three directors, above most others, have mattered hugely to me. They produced masterpieces or just wonderful films that I loved and would list — after so much film-going over so many years — as on my list of special favorites: Coen’s “A Serious Man,” “LLewelyn Davis”, “Fargo,” “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs”; Campion’s “Sweetie,” “The Piano,” and the three-part “Angel at My Table”; and Almodovar’s “All About My Mother,” “Talk to Her,” “The Skin I Live in,” “Pain and Glory.” So it is a very happy thing to see the three of them rewarded by this prestigious festival, and rewarded at the creative height of their productive lives. But to speak with total honesty, there was for me more than a little disappointment.
Coen’s “Macbeth” scores high for its ambition — on taking on a great work about ambition and power-lust — and it was visually striking from the opening on. It aims for an abstraction signaled by a landscape recalling German Expresssionist design, a sandy foggy encampment (the fog of war, where the line between right and wrong is no longer visible); bleak no-man’s-land; stone walls; burnt nature, suggesting something apocalyptic; a castle all stylized long corridors, arches and rounded doorways, dramatic stairways, light and dark in stark black and white geometric shapes. Coen’s attempt to keep the play a play as well as a movie, and his maintaining Shakespeare’s language intact, though stripping away a great deal for clarity and power’s sake, were commendable choices to make. However, I who have had a lot of experience with Shakespeare, both in classrooms and in British productions where the great words are bell-clear, found the very compressed language and imagery less adeptly delivered here, having too much intensity without conveying enough nuance.
It also seemed to me the role of Lady Macbeth (Frances McDormand) feels reduced since she is here less the hard-driving force that holds her guilt-ridden husband from collapse. Lady Macbeth’s ferocity in pushing a faltering conscience-stricken husband, so important to the play, is toned down in this production, perhaps to make Macbeth himself seem more in control, more “manly” — the word Shakespeare repeatedly evokes. Certainly Denzel Washington inhabits this Macbeth with full regal gravitas, and it’s striking and hugely to his credit to find a Hollywood icon, after a lifetime’s highly successful career in commercial films, set himself such demanding later-life projects as Shakespeare (and August Wilson). British actors do that all the time; no matter how famous or moneyed, they come back to the difficult heart-breaking Lear as a late-life challenge, or reward. But though Washington is competent in his delivery, for me there is too much roaring and not enough of the subtlety and internality of the actual words — this production could have tried harder for an internal sense of that power lust. I also thought the film might resonate in some way with our own current bitter and frightening political experience with lust for power gone haywire, but it does not extend beyond itself somehow. But this is not to discourage anyone from seeing it. It’s a striking piece of work, and the critics (and everyone I talked to) had nothing but good to say about it.
“The Power of the Dog,” Jane Campion’s take on “toxic masculinity,”was similarly less than I expected it to be, though again praised sky high on every side. Beautifully photographed, the stunning natural setting — the opening images of the herding of vast numbers of cattle, lovely old ranch buildings — were made in far off New Zealand to look like 1925 Montana as presented in the 1967 novel by Thomas Savage. Terrific an actor as Benedict Cumberbatch is, I found the character he plays to be strained, without subtlety, without the shock of truth and wayward imagination that this director elicited continually in her early work. Phil, the mean hypermale, seems created by the numbers; I watch him act but find it difficult to believe him as a person. The contrast between him and his gentle brother George is interesting, and Kirsten Dunst does well as the woman George marries, though she has too little to do. Her delicate, probably gay son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is a compelling character that one does care about, as he is abused dangerously by Phil. But the background music by Jonny Greenwood creates a constant and mounting sense of foreboding, useful for effective storytelling, and appropriate because bad things happen to two of the main characters, though we are misleadingly prepared by the soundtrack for an explosion that never happens. Campion chooses to tell her tale more quietly, and that all-pervasive menacing sound ends up heralding destruction from an unexpected source.
Almodovar’s “Parallel Mothers,” which closed the public festival, is the dessert at the end of the meal, thoroughly satisfying and a total pleasure to watch. The bulk of the film goes in one direction — a near soap-opera about mothering, two women in labor at the same time and their babies and lives afterward. The older Janis, with Almodovar again using luscious looking Penelope Cruz as the protagonist, and young Ana (Milena Smit) — agonize with choreographed labor pains, and experience much joy in the infants, and much suffering, as well.
The film’s last part goes in what seems a totally different direction: a group of townspeople, mostly the women, walk solemnly to the site of a mass burial from the Spanish Civil War, and look at the unearthing of the skeletal remains of 10 kinsmen, one of whom is Janis’ great grandfather, killed by the Fascists and dumped there. The film ends with a resounding warning — that history is not mute, that nothing is lost, that no matter how much they lie about it, history will always reveal the truth in the end. It’s a passionate and moving conclusion. So there’s life’s beginnings and endings — adding a new generation and returning to earlier generations of memory. Besides, Almodovar is such a lively storyteller that, what would feel like a non-sequitur for anyone else, he can get away with.
Similarly, there’s a scene thrown into the film of Ana’s mother, so eager to get an acting job and finally getting her chance, on stage as a middle-aged spinster, with the theater director watching her raptly, as she says lines such as “He grows and changes. I am the same, with the same trembling. They leave me behind. Nobody will be bothered with me now.” The words are stunning, though not really connected to anything, and I think Almodovar is remarkable for being able to tap into such power this way. As work is everything for the actress, so we see Janis first in beautiful shots of her working as photographer, firmly directing Arturo, the archeologist she is shooting. He will do the unearthing of the dead townspeople, whose faces (often wonderful, no doubt real) and names she shows him, computer and mouse clicking aways. (I’m struck by how many of this year’s NYFF films contain reflexive elements, featuring directors or lenses of some kind.) This film begins and ends with the credits mounted on witty takeoffs of photographers’ contact sheets.
While the film is about mothering, it’s very much about a passion for work. There is a fluid sexuality in the film, and also fluid family. Janis in the end is flanked and supported by her best friend Elena (played by Rossy de Palma, a warm figure who has appeared in so many of Almodovar’s films), a shared baby, Arturo and Ana, and the promise of a new baby coming. All this humanity functions as a balm in the face of the horrors of the Spanish Civil War remembrance. On the side of life always, Almodovar’s work has been deepening as he has aged, and his last — “Pain and Glory” — was so good in its evocation of aging and illness, and ultimately the lifeward push to keep working as a filmmaker wins out, in a most lyrical way. Vive Almodovar’s humanism and his big heart.
There were a number of other films that I will write about briefly. “Futura” is a rambling documentary by three directors, questioning young Italian teenagers about how they feel about their lives in Italy, and finding that they don’t see a future there for themselves. Looking at the range of young faces was quite touching and distressing, for those of us who think only glorious thoughts about the great Italian cities, the art, the films. On the other hand, a ramble through Kutaisi entitled “What do We See When We Look at the Sky” just seemed very very long, sort of sweet, and purposeless. “A Chiara” offers a fresh take on Southern Italian Mafioso life — an adoring daughter discovers her father’s secret life — but the girl is not given enough of an interesting character, and though the film does create some sense of Calabria, especially the closeness of family, that part too is not rich enough.
“The French Dispatch” may charm Wes Anderson fans, but while its first half hour — on French life and the functioning of a New Yorker-like magazine — is hilariously right-on, the fastidious cleverness becomes airless, tedious, hard to stay with. British director Joanna Hogg’s “The Souvenir Part I” is static austere minimalism to no end that I could see. Its Part II is more animated, though the heroine is still the very inexpressive upperclass Julie, studying to be a filmmaker, played by Tilda Swinton’s daughter, again built around the sudden death by heroin overdose of Julie’s boyfriend. For me this heroine remains remote, her grief of no impact, and even her becoming a real director — taking charge despite being too odd for her film school to accept — is not the exciting thing it should be. I think of Jane Campion’s life of a young woman becoming a writer in “Angel at my Table,” and how much more moving that was. Hogg gets accolades in England, but I think they would better be given to Mike Leigh, by far their best (and rather neglected) master of a filmmaker.
The two films on my final day at the Festival’s press screenings have made the potential of film to do magic, to enrapture, glow for me in a special way. “Hit the Road,” the debut film of Panah Panahi, son of the great Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi (imprisoned and then banned from making further movies), takes place largely in a car. The relations of those within to one another and where they are headed slowly become clear, all the while our eyes are on a phenomenal little kid with a very big and witty mouth, saying amazingly sophisticated things, and making outrageous demands, for which the older man (at first we think grandfather, but no, father) calls him terrible names — “Little shit, we’ll throw you out of the car without pants.” This older man is really beautiful to look at, though — bearded, with intensely sorrowful eyes and clearly toughened by his life, as well as humorous, leg in a cast from some mishap. (A fall, he says, a fall from grace.)
The mother is a gorgeous woman under her hijab — she keeps stopping the little son from kneeling on the ground, presumably how he was taught to pray — and in the end takes care of most everything that needs to be done. The older son, who is the driver, and keeps aloof of the rest of the family, as if ready to go off on his own; we gradually discover he is headed to a border crossing, trying to leave the country with the help of someone the father keeps invoking as upright and trustworthy, though the enterprise is clearly full of danger and terror. When they think the car is being followed at one point, everyone is terrified. Iphones can’t be carried, lest they be tracked. There’s a funny philosophical exchange with a biker who they fear they have hurt — and they care about people enough to not run away in self-protective fear.
This long journey through fascinating looking land masses is beautiful — starkly desert-like or richly green mountains full of grazing sheep sounding their bells; and the way the stops are managed is beautiful — the shadows of leaves on a stone wall, so simple. These are very attractive people, the quick give-and-takes are full of high intelligence — with a bohemian sort of freedom (a lot on peeing) — that reminds one of all the great Iranian films one has seen and admired, before the current regime shut the industry down or major directors died and newer ones dared not be outspoken, given the consequences. The gap between the boy’s comic wildness and the actual tragic circumstance, the grief and anxiety of the family and of what is really going on, makes the film quite brilliant. Also brilliantly, Panahi has them all sing along with pop songs to say things about what is happening, about loving, about losing. I don’t know if these are real pop songs in Iran, but they sound like poetry, with lines like “Who will throw seeds to the birds of love?” There’s a truly beautiful moment of film poetry as the father and the boy rise up into the black star-filled night sky as if flying away from the anguish below. And the words of the final song say everything (in an inexact rendering, roughly noted from one screening): “We were proud of our land, which you gave away. . . Distraught we wait for Spring. . .Get together so the sun can rise again. . . Birds crossing night waiting for day.” You weep when you leave this film, at least I did, but you bask in the richness of it, all very rare these days.
“Jane by Charlotte” was my final film and I didn’t expect much from it, a famous daughter interviewing her famous mother, famous at least in France, where they have had very active careers and where the late Serge Gainsbourg was a hugely loved popular figure — Jane’s husband, Charlotte’s father. Jane Birkin figured long ago in my work on Agnes Varda — a lanky, cropped-haired, androgynous-looking and stunning young woman — so I found myself surprised and stirred by the honesty and depth of the exchanges between the two women, and the painfulness of Birkin’s aged looks when her earlier self is so fixed in one’s mind. (Otherwise, she’s a handsome older woman.) She talks at length about the changes in her looks that age brings and how she has felt about them. They go to various places, Charlotte constantly photographing Jane and clearly trying to connect more deeply to her mother, to New York where they perform, to Birkin’s house in Brittany, to Japan at the start of the film, to Serge’s apartment, kept as he left it because Charlotte felt he might come back. They talk about performance anxiety, and about why Jane treated Charlotte differently from her other children. Jane says she has thought a lot about what she could have done differently. It’s all very genuine-feeling and engrossing. The final image — of Jane walking on a beach with Charlotte, hugs, deep loving embrace on camera, and then in the midst of this, Jane removes her hearing aid which she fears she’ll lose. That is the final moment of the film. How can you not like a film that permits that, that leaves that in?
Both of these last two films, though on very different levels, left me with a big embrace of the human, and of really good movies, so precious to our lives.
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