This year's NYFF offers a treasure trove of cinematography. Here are some highlights. In a lovely scene from
The Darjeeling Limited, the camera pulls back like a swoon from the train's caboose bearing the 3 brothers, who become a blur, along with the train, which travels right, off the screen. The moment reads like a half-remembered dream.
In the City of Sylvia by
Jose Luis Guerin follows a handsome dude who trolls Strasbourg for a woman named Sylvia whom he met there six years ago. At first you wonder if he's slightly bonkers, or a goopy romantic of the 19th century school, and also how he makes a living. But once you make peace with the film's non-eventfulness, it flowers into a parable about the power of longing, no matter the object. To want – and want and want -- is the human condition. Also, the man's voyeuristic gaze doubles our own as we watch him watch. Guerin skillfully co-opts ambient sound: footfalls, fountains gurgling, children's cries. His D.P. likes to plant the camera in a single spot and allow the city's inhabitants, criss-crossing streets from all directions, to score the screen, like knife cuts on wood.
At the public screening at Frederick P. Rose Hall of
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Richard Pena aptly introduced
Julian Schnabel as a "great amateur of cinema, in the original sense of a lover of cinema." The opening credits usher us right into the world of this film, based on real events. French golden oldie
La Mer plays over sinister-looking X Rays of vertebrae, femurs, and parts of yourself best kept in the dark, the soundtrack doubled by the beat of a heart or pulse. Voila, Schnabel has put us right in the hero's head. In fact, the entire film is a visual tour de force conveying the universe through the occluded, intermittent vision of
Jean-Dominque Bauby, who at 43 was totaled by a massive stroke that left him with a single working eye. Fades to black signal Bauby's blinks; rooms and faces wobble in and out of focus, precisely as he might perceive them.
A comrade in misfortune counsels him, "Hold fast to the human inside you." This helps liberate Bauby from his diving bell into the landscape of memory and imagination, and, ultimately, the creation of the book on which the film is based. Images of his earlier robust, high-living, womanizing self collide shockingly with his present vegetative state. There's some cheesy art-director's stuff -- like Bauby's one-time g.f.
Marina Hands lounging in Alpine pastures -- but hell, a lot of Europe looks like that.
At the public screening, this brave and harrowing film was greeted by audible groans, gasps, and tsk tsk's (especially at the medical horrors), which if you ask me, impinge on other viewers' space. (At press screenings people get that it's only a movie, for pete's sake.) It must be said, though, that "Diving Bell" triggers in viewers acute discomfort of the there-but-for-the-grace-of-God variety. Like some latter-day Morality Play, the opening credits say it all: "La Mer" and the joy of living, played over our mortal bones.
Correction to blog of 9/29:
The number of films in the NYFF that were also in the Cannes Competition: 10.
The number of films in the NYFF from any section in Cannes (Competition, Director's Fortnight, Un Certain Regard, Critics Week): 15
# posted by Erica Abeel @ 10/03/2007 03:43:00 PM
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