Not Coming to a Theater Near You
You know him?”
“Not socially. His name’s Jaws, he kills people.
The 42nd New York Film Festival
The 43rd New York Film Festival
Waking dreams were in mind when programmers selected films for this year’s New York Film Festival. Opening with The Queen, Stephen Frears’ portrait of Queen Elizabeth II coming to terms with her royal persona during the nightmare of Princess Diana's death, and closing with Guillermo del Toro’s Pan's Labyrinth, the journey of a young girl through a fantastical underworld, paralleled with the reality of fascist 1944 Spain, the program at the 44th Annual New York Film Festival shifts effortlessly between myth and reality, horror and historical epic, anime and documentary.
The selection stretches the theme globally. Also from Spain is this year's centerpiece film, Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver, a supernatural piece from the ever-popular director and his typically incredible ensemble of talented actresses. The United States offers two highly anticipated entries: David Lynch’s guarded and long-awaited Inland Empire, a piece of digital delirium of which little detail is known, save its three-hour running time; and Sofia Coppola’s highly stylized interpretation of Marie Antoinette’s illustrious and cocooned lifestyle, well before the crash of reality – and fall of the axe – known as the French Revolution. (Reportedly booed at Cannes, the film has been touted as the controversial postmodern piece of the year.) South Korea debuts NYFF-favorite Hong Sang-soo’s new film, Woman on the Beach, as well as Bong Joon-ho’s The Host, a huge blockbuster at home, a hit at Cannes, and cited as the best monster movie of the decade. Finally – and reliably – France screens a few entries from its native (and expatriated) masters: Resnais’ new Alan Ayckbourn collaboration, Private Fears in Public Places; the latest from Russian-born filmmaker Otar Iosseliani; and Oliveira’s Belle Toujours, which revisits the characters of the celebrated and surreal Belle du Jour, by that other expatriate filmmaker, Luis Buñuel.
Although not necessarily in the spotlight, favorite directors return to the festival, including Hong Kong’s Johnnie To, Iran’s Jafar Panahi, Africa’s Abderrahmane Sissako, Thailand’s Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Austria’s Barbara Albert in retrospective, the main program includes Warren Beatty’s Reds in celebration of the film’s silver anniversary, and a rare screening of Filipino director Lino Brocka’s Insiang from 1976. Festival goers unable to attend sold-out screenings in the main program may want to venture into the special sidebar program featuring 50 Years of Janus Films. Focusing on the landmark importer’s contribution to cinematic history, the Film Society of Lincoln Center presents brand new 35mm prints of classics such as Rules of the Game, High and Low, Days of Wrath, and Wild Strawberries.
After a cinematic year deemed somewhat disappointing, New York closes out the major festival circuit with the possibility of undiscovered gems, in a program both ambitious and richer than recent years. The New York Film Festival commences on Friday September 29th and will run through Sunday, October 15th.
Introduction by Leo Goldsmith and Jenny Jediny
Sofia Coppola has assuredly eradicated any notion of Marie Antoinette as untouchable historical figure; the Queen nurses a hangover, loves her dog, gets guilt trips from Mom, and finds stress release through shopping. A lot of shopping. Coppola, whose niche has become the trials of female youth, clearly conveys that Antoinette really was “just a girl” but accomplishes and explains little else in this disappointing film.
Apichatpong’s patient, observant camera seems to be lying in wait for the moments in which desires break through the surface, when the interior reveals itself externally, when the spiritual greets the mundane, much like a monk in a doctor’s office, complaining of bad dreams and an excess of uric acid.
The rediscovery of the simple life by the middle aged is a common topic in cinema and literature, a renewed appreciation for a past that may have been forgotten in the pursuit of money or power. Director Otar Iosseliani’s depiction of this status transition is styled in the likeness of famed French director Jacques Tati. Although the humor is mildly amusing, the work has neither the wit nor the incredible playfulness so deftly pulled off by Tati, instead melding into an odd blend of antics that do not so much criticize this bourgeois version of an unencumbered lifestyle as find it endearing.
Inland Empire capsizes the narrative format that has long contained the incredibly imaginative Lynch brushstrokes, by not simply containing bizarre twists and turns, but also forcing us to watch, challenging us to some degree, in a manner and structure far more familiar to those used to the lengthy and often unapproachable work of the avant-garde.
As in any film, we receive signs and images that purportedly fit together, but here Lynch gives us the sole responsibility of assembling them into a pattern of meaning. In Inland Empire, the spectator is also interchangeable with the characters and the actors playing them.
Just as his rendering of the secondhand record shop milieu in High Fidelity was pitch-perfect, Frears’ vision of the sanctified world inhabited by the Royals is similarly on-target. The stark, untouched beauty of the Scottish countryside (where the Queen and her family are holed up when they hear the news about Diana) serves not only as a perfect contrast to London, where frenzied crowds gather to drop off flowers in front of Buckingham Palace, but also as a reminder of Britain’s past.
In each of the Spanish director’s films, life shares in both simplicity and complexity in equal measures. No trauma is too awful not to shrug off or laugh at, and yet no image or emotional response, however fleeting, passes as insignificant. This is the key aspect of Almodóvar’s melodrama, in which each detail is accorded its own degree of baroque excess, and each bend in his maze-like plotting is lent the nonchalant air of everyday life.
There is so little humanity in this film — while on a base level there is certainly a fair amount of hurt and suffering, it’s so cloaked in insincerity one could choke on it. Little Children is simply another example of superficial social commentary posing as something more, so cloying in its elegant package, and yet so easy to digest for those who would rather have such issues served to them on a silver platter.
The official midnight screening at the New York Film Festival this year, The Host already has an undercurrent of buzz built up after its premiere at Cannes. And deservedly so, as the audience reaction was an enormously enjoyable part of the viewing experience, perfectly tuned in to the film’s tongue-in-cheek attitude.
Private Fears in Public Places is well-crafted, with skillful camerawork, especially when surveying the spaces characters inhabit and those they hope to occupy. However, by its conclusion it is the minor work of an accomplished auteur, whose moniker has cast privilege on this film; the neatly presented piece feels just a tad too comfortable for the man who once gave us characters A & X.
Any newcomer to To’s films is likely to find much in Triad Election that is familiar from prior variations on the American gangster film and from Hong Kong crime films in general: loyalty and (more often) disloyalty; honor and family; power and money; and, above all, fear and respect.
The subject matter documented in These Girls is undeniably crucial, and Rached’s effort at not only finding these girls, but also gaining their trust and their stories is commendable. What remains in question is her ability to convey not only the dire situation of these women, but also the political implications involved in presenting a cultural issue that affects women on a global level.
As the film is in part a subtle exposition of the totalizing regulations of agriculture in the European Union, Geryrhalter could hardly have received the EU’s funding and imprimatur without this objective, dispassionate tone. But Our Daily Bread’s great political and social function is that this seeming objectivity, this silence in the face of the massive, hypertechnologized food industry, is itself thoroughly interrogatory and demanding.
A constant emphasis on the differences between the 1920s anthropology of the collector and the resuscitative anthropology of modern videomaking makes The Journals of Knud Rasmussen a fascinating, multifaceted historiography and autoethnography, even if its story of cultural imperialism offers few new insights.
The fuel motivating this particular group is fierce competition and conversation surrounding the Parisian literary world. For what sounds like a musty topic relegated to the Merchant Ivory label, a surprising amount of tension builds steadily in Emmanuel Bourdieu’s ode to a privileged and somewhat unattainable social clique that shines with a luster once attributed to the Vicious Circle.
Paprika is delightful in its unrestrained play, sucking in (and frequently regurgitating) familiar imagery of not only childhood, but also cinema itself. The freedom our detective finds in his dreams is very much indicative of the charm of this anime piece, stretching familiar boundaries of animation into a playground that invites play not only for its characters, but also for the audience.
The film’s lack of resolution reinforces its overall lack of ambition, something that is, in itself, mildly refreshing. But ultimately, Belle Toujours offers little expansion on the original story, little insight into the nature of sadism and masochism in film or in life, and, worst of all, almost no complement to Buñuel’s film.
