A committee selects the titles it deems worthy of inclusion in the New York Film Festival. Besides two retrospectives and many avant-garde programs this year, the fest is comprised of only 30-odd films. Picking collectively usually means a lot of compromise, which in turn leads toward safe choices, the model being some French movie with an American distributor that will open at the Lincoln Plaza soon after it plays Lincoln Center.
Surprise, surprise! In the first half of the fest (I’ll cover the second next week), not only is there but one French film, there are also a number of movies that break barriers and/or do not pretend to sate the highbrow crowd. What a relief, especially because Tribeca, the other major New York festival, opts more and more for mainstream fare.
Three of the films are truly transgressive. Danish Dogma founder Lars von Trier may focus on an haute bourgeois couple in
Antichrist, but you know the moment their baby falls to its death in the first sequence (one of the most haunting in recent memory) that this film is going to take you to some extreme places. Psychiatrist Willem Dafoe and his inconsolable wife Charlotte Gainsbourg grieve and attempt to recharge at their weekend shack in the country, but something goes wrong, very wrong: She flips out, and their sex life shifts from constant passion to a nonconsensual sadomasochism that involves genital mutilation. Definitely not for the dilettantes.
Neither is the American enfant terrible Harmony Korine’s
Trash Humpers. Nearly plotless, it is really a compilation of scenes of twisted behavior by three heavily made up and pretty unlikable characters. Korine films (he is his own cinematographer) human behavior that is conveniently left out of movies, such as masturbation, defecation, and pelvic thrusting, as well as crude dialog that rarely makes sense. To me this is less a film per se and more an art event, exploring, as an artist should, the unconscious at its raunchiest.
Portuguese director Joao Pedro Rodrigues would like
To Die Like a Man to be more transgressive than it is. The plight of an aging drag queen in danger of losing her job and enthralled by a troubled, much younger man is not without interest, but it’s nothing new. When she is near the end of her battle with an immune deficiency that has led to her silicone implants becoming infected, she asks to be dressed in a man’s suit for eternity, to become a man again. That is a creepy end to a, well, ballsy life, not to mention completely out of synch with the rest of the story.
Antichrist is one of four films that center on females, three of them about highly disturbed ones. I do not care for Italian director Marco Bellocchio’s
Vincere, which has the trappings of a RAI tv production: that feeling of falseness, most noticeably in the Mussolini-era sets. Yet Giovanna Mezzogiorno gives a fabulous performance as Ida Dalser, Mussolini’s wife when he was young, handsome, and not a Fascist.
Adele H-like, she becomes more and more obsessed with him, especially after he dumps her. She ends up in a mental institution. Much has been written, deservedly, about Sundance winner Lee Daniels’s
Precious: Based on a Novel by Sapphire, but it breaks new ground with its protagonist, a huge, illiterate young black woman living in poverty, with a cruel, jealous mother and a father who rapes her regularly. The viewer is not spared from the horror of her situation, even if she does try to improve her prospects. The fourth is the character of Marguerite, played by the annoying Sabine Azema, gallic filmmaker Alain Resnais’s muse, in the opening night movie,
Wild Grass, which will in fact open at the Lincoln Plaza (or a comparable venue). She is rather long in the tooth to portray a single dentist/aviatrix who is the object of desire for a bored older man, but the problem is that, as beautifully made as it is, the film is really about nothing more. There is little here to offend anyone.
Besides
Vincere, a several of the films are set in the past. I don’t want to infer from this that the directors are unwilling to address contemporary issues, but you do wonder why they go back in time. The best of these is
A Room and a Half, by Russian filmmaker Andrey Khrzhanovsky, a well-regarded animator. The premise is a hypothetical return to his homeland by the Nobel Prize-winning Jewish poet Joseph Brodsky, who was exiled in 1972 and lived the rest of his life in the U.S. We accompany the old man as he revisits his youth in his parents’ home in St. Petersburg, then his early adulthood. The director’s light touch suits the memories of a nostalgic poet. He intercuts the live action with animation and archival footage.
In
Lebanon, Israeli filmmaker Samuel Maoz returns to his own past, the time he spent inside an army tank during his country’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. The project is obviously cathartic, and Maoz does a fine job of replicating the claustrophobia endured by four men in a tiny enclosed space. They see much of the outside action through a telescope. Civilians are killed. The men react differently, but all go nuts in some way or other. Lebanon won the Golden Lion at Venice, though for me
Waltz With Bashir made a stronger impact.
Kanikosen, by the Japanese director Sabu, feels more like theater than film—odd, because his films
Postman Blues and
Monday were electrifyingly cinematic. Based on a 1929 novel about mistreated workers who catch, and can, crabs on a boat, it is so fake that you can’t even empathize with their situation. The boss is a stick figure, the embodiment of cruelty and exploitation. I do not have a clue why the committee chose it.
Police, Adjective, by the Romanian filmmaker Corneliu Porumboiu (
12:08 East of Bucharest), is contemporary but could have been set in almost any year since the fall of Communism and deposing of the dictator Ceausescu. In a provincial town, an undercover cop follows a teenager suspected of dealing marijuana. Porumboiu uses long takes, taking his time to develop the narrative. The political system may have changed, but the mentality has not: He is unable to convince his dogmatic superiors to ease off the boy so that the rest of his life is not ruined.
Police, Adjective may require some patience, but it’s well worth it. The final sequence, a monolog about the concept of the conscience, is brilliant.
Three documentaries are included in the first half of the festival. The most impressive is
Sweetgrass, an American doc by Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor. The duo visits a sheep ranch in Montana, then accompanies two veteran cowboys while they take the large flock 150 miles across gorgeous mountains to let the animals feed the old-fashioned way. The rhythms of the pasturing are as alluring as the rhythms of the film itself. This is gorgeous ethnography that successfully makes a relatively simple subject interesting for those of us who are completely foreign to its setting.
I wish I were more predisposed to American director Don Argott’s
The Art of the Steal. Yes, it’s a well researched expose on how the impressive Barnes collection of post-Impressionist art was moved to Philadelphia from the exurban home-turned-museum of the collector who specified clearly in his will that it should stay there. Politicos, corporate socialites, and large charity heads joined forces in order to be able to use the invaluable works as rah-rah objects to promote tourism. Argott skews the Pew Trust, in particular. The problem is that formally, the film is nothing, which makes me wonder why it is in the festival. I imagine it’s because the topic is so compelling.
I looked forward to seeing the Chinese documentary
Ghost Town, by Zhao Dayong, because I saw in Cannes one of the best docs I’ve ever experienced,
Petition, by Zhao Liang, a powerful indictment of the so-called petition system of registering complaints against regional authorities in a Beijing office. It had style, and much of the material was obtained with hidden cameras. Unfortunately,
Ghost Town is just boring. The filmmaker clearly has spent a lot of time shooting the minority villagers in a town that is still living in the past, untouched by the economic boom and accompanying transformation of traditional values. Many are Christian. They are just not all that interesting. The look is fine, but nothing special. And since the NYFF prides itself on an elitism born of having so few selections, each choice should be
extra special.
--Howard Feinstein
# posted by Howard Feinstein @ 9/23/2009 11:50:00 PM
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