“We are family,” sang Sister Sledge in their 1979 disco hit. “Living life is fun…We don’t get depressed.” The films playing the second half of this year’s NYFF beg to differ. Nearly every one deals with families, traditional or alternative, and these families are not fun: They are disrupted and/or disruptive. What drives the dramas are the underlying causes of the dysfunction, and how they are manifest. Not that this is a minus in my book, but these movies are depressing.
Only one is American: Todd Solondz’s
Life During Wartime.
Happiness, his 1998 satire, was a refreshing take on the American family, especially one of the Jewish persuasion. Three very different grown sisters, their divorcing parents, the psychiatrist husband who drugs, then sodomizes his Bar Mitzvah-age son’s friends, the geeky Peeping Tom neighbor: Everything, taboo or not, was played for laughs. The newer film is something of a sequel, though the time that has elapsed for each character since
Happiness varies. Solondz has never been a stickler for such details—witness the multiple actors playing the same character in
Palindromes—but the problems are more fundamental. This is rehash, it’s no longer shocking, and the more serious tone works against it (though Allison Janney’s overprotective yiddisher mama is a hoot).
The best are European: Frenchman Bruno Dumont’s
Hadewijch; Austrian Michael Haneke’s
The White Ribbon (pictured), a German production; Maren Ade’s
Everyone Else, also from Germany; and, from Great Britain, the
Red Riding trilogy, its separate sections directed by Julian Jarrold, James Marsh, and Anand Tucker.
Dumont’s films (
La Vie de Jesus,
Flanders) exemplify the cliché “less is more.” Their meaning stems from their spare but gorgeous surface and tight narrative structure.
Hadewijch is about a devout Catholic girl from a wealthy Parisian milieu who gets tossed out of a convent once her love for Christ crosses the line into…self-love. She has tried in vain to create a family of two. Back out in the world—Dumont imbues scenes of nature with transcendental beauty--she tests various ways of attaining union with her God. Dumont lingers on her scenes of self-questioning and religious anguish, but takes the elliptical route with only short shots of her brief foray into terrorism. After all, it is merely a stage in her passage toward a state of grace.
The family dynamic exhibited in
The White Ribbon is nasty and authoritarian. Set among Calvinists in a north German village just prior to World War One, the film makes a case for families, and their individual members, as precursors to nationalism and Nazism. The film is shot in an austere, pristine black and white. Like a great epic novel, it does not come together quickly or easily. You meet many characters before the relationships are clear. This is Dreyer rooted more firmly in the political climate of its time. Ade’s
Everyone Else, on the other hand, is contemporary and bourgeois. It takes place at a German family’s vacation home in Sardinia, where a young architect and his publicist girlfriend are at the point of forming their own family or dissolving their relationship. Ade patiently follows their ups and downs, their bliss and their power struggles, in a style so naturalistic that it feels as if it is happening in real time. The festival may be on to a renaissance in German filmmaking unequaled since the New German Cinema of the ‘70s.
Red Riding is British television at its very best. That is not to say this trilogy is not cinematic: It most certainly is. Tony Grisoni adapted David Pearce’s novels, based on the serial killer known as the Ripper who did his handy work in Yorkshire in the ‘70s and ‘80s. The films take place in 1974 (Jarrold), 1980 (Marsh), and 1983 (Tucker), with some characters recurring. Each section has a different focus. The family units in this working-class area are mostly dissolved, but the overriding relationship is that among a group of wildly corrupt and violent cops whose pub toast is “This is the North, where we do what we want.” For me the most striking of the films is Jarrold’s
1974. Against all odds, it manages to combine the realism of the English Ken Loach tradition with the abstraction and fragmented editing associated with music videos. A young, green crime journalist played by the talented Andrew Garfield (
Boy A) refuses to halt his investigation of bribery and favoritism that are connected to the murder of a little girl. As a result he suffers horribly at the hands of those he is trying to expose.
Some of the European selections are in a much more minor key. In
Ne Change Rien, Portuguese purist Pedro Costa films scenes from rehearsals by French actress/singer Jeanne Balibar and her backup band, a musical family of sorts—for an hour and a half? True, he plays with lighting and shoots from various angles, but who cares? In Spaniard Pedro Almodovar’s
Broken Embraces, Penelope Cruz is a hooker who moves up, and in, theoretically settling down with a wealthy but much older lover. She can’t stay still: She falls for the filmmaker her live-in has hired to direct a vanity production, with her at the center, of course. The campiness, the exaggeration, they are not as flattering at this point for Almodovar at middle age. As usual, however, the colors and the non-linear plotline are pretty fabulous.
Mother, by South Korean director Bong Joon-ho, has a delicious provincial ambience. Generically a suspense film about an old woman (Kim Hye-ja, in a remarkable performance) who goes to extremes to protect her borderline mentally-challenged twentysomething son from a murder rap, it lacks the density of Bong’s earlier serial killer story,
Memories of Murder. (He also made
The Host.) Along the way she encounters an assortment of unusual characters, but what makes the film special are the plot twists.
Only the politically correct could take a yen to Filipino Raya Martin’s
Independencia and Souleymane Cisse’s
Min Ye, from Mali. Martin takes on a twofold task: appropriating indigenous Filipino history after Spanish and American colonization, and exposing cinematic illusion. Borrowing the style of early studio talkies, he uses black-and-white footage, patently false backdrops, overacting performers, and even a false newsreel. Yet the whole enterprise is awkward and, despite the best of intentions, looks like a middle school movie project about a changing family.
Min Ye is Cisse’s first feature set not only in an urban milieu but also among the privileged class. The middle-aged wife of a polygamous husband takes a lover, in large part because she is fed up with wife number two. All hell breaks loose, of course: Men are allowed several spouses, but there’s a double standard in this conservative culture. In any case, the man who, more than 20 years ago, directed
Yeelen, a beautiful film set in an African village, has here a movie with only mediocre visuals. I wonder if the festival needed an African film for geographic balance.
-- Howard Feinstein
# posted by Howard Feinstein @ 10/01/2009 10:12:00 PM
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