Not Coming to a Theater Near You
What do you think she meant when she said “a huge black monster with giant claws”?
What do you think she meant when she said “a huge black monster with giant claws”?
As film festivals continue to spring up all over the globe, furiously brainstorming new ways to draw celebrities into their fold, there’s something to be said for the New York Film Festival’s steadfast resistance to glitz. It is in many ways the purist’s film festival, drawing audiences more likely to salivate over the new offering by Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien than any of the Academy Award fodder that will jam the arthouses over the next couple of months. Now approaching its 43rd year, its reach is more global than ever, with an unprecedented three films from South Korea on tap as well as offerings from Denmark, Palestine, Japan, Romania, and France, among others.
Although the festival’s program does not appear to have any breakout hits in the vein of last year’s closing night film, Sideways, it kicks off on a high-profile note with Good Night, and Good Luck, George Clooney’s sophomore feature which recounts the public face-off between Senator Joseph McCarthy and CBS newscaster Edward R. Murrow. Given the nation’s current political climate, it seems likely to inspire debate.
The rest of the programming, save for Sundance favorite The Squid and the Whale and writer biopic Capote, verges refreshingly off the beaten path, featuring challenging works from the likes of Michael Haneke, Hong Sang-soo, Philippe Garrel, Lars von Trier, Park Chanwook, Michael Winterbottom, and Aleksandr Sokurov. The centerpiece film is Breakfast on Pluto, directed by Neil Jordan, and closing the festival will be Haneke’s Cache, which has already proved divisive amongst critics. As always, many of the offerings are plucked from the Cannes line-up, and a number will be making their U.S. debuts.
One of the festival’s highlights, however, is a film that has been around for 20 years but remains underappreciated, Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger. Starring Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider, the movie has acquired a reputation as one of the director’s masterpieces, but has languished in a shoddy VHS format that does no credit to its stunning cinematography.
Those hoping to rediscover other gems from the past would be advised to check out The Beauty of the Everyday: Japan’s Shochiku Company at 110, a vast retrospective running as a festival sidebar. Featuring works by Yasujiro Ozu, Kenzo Mizoguchi, Nagisa Oshima, and Yoji Yamada, among many others, the sidebar is fashioned as a tribute to Shochiku, the groundbreaking film company that nursed their talent over the years.
Over the next couple of weeks, please check back for regular reviews of each festival film. The 43rd New York Film Festival will run from September 23 to October 9, 2005.
Introduction by Beth Gilligan
There are some typical horror-movie tropes, as in the occasional and wholly unnecessary loud burst of music that accompany brief shots of mangled viscera. But Haze is most effective when it is at its quietest, or when it is mining its seemingly bottomless reservoir of inspired sadism.
The realistic style of the film is close to becoming a film festival and art-house cliché, marked by a perpetually tripod-less cinematography, scenes that play out in real time, and a somewhat wearying duration. But as familiar as these devices are, the style is never bludgeoning, and in any case, it is hard to imagine that this film could have been constructed in any other way.
Given the relevancy of Murrow’s damning statements nearly fifty years after they were first uttered, it makes sense that Clooney and Heslov choose to deprive their audience of a Hollywood ending, recognizing the hollow note it would inevitably ring. And yet, to consider Good Night, and Good Luck a pessimistic critique of the media would be missing the point.
The Dardennes are less interested in their characters’ actions than the motivations behind them. As in their previous feature, The Son, they use long takes, naturalistic lighting, and handheld cameras to bring a sense of immediacy to their observations. In place of a musical score to cue emotions, they allow the sounds of everyday life to seep through and inform the action at hand.
Although the documentary features a couple of success stories, Negroponte makes it clear that road to recovery is by no means an easy one. With a mournful (and occasionally overbearing) jazz score playing throughout, he follows the lives of a group of addicts desperately trying (and in most cases failing) to clean up.
Like Aki Kaurismaki’s The Match Factory Girl, which Soderbergh has cited as an influence for this film, Bubble is a slow burn culminating in a punch to the gut. And as in the Kaurismaki film, it is the events leading up to the action that deliver the most.
The Squid and the Whale revels in the specificity of its setting, lovingly cataloguing local subway stops and long, verdant blocks, but it does so with a distinct ambivalence. In charting the effects of a divorce on the two adolescent sons of literary parents, Baumbach revisits the time, place, and events of his young adulthood in a manner that is at once sentimental and a little sneering.
Lars von Trier’s latest offering seemed to have gotten lost in the shuffle when it debuted at Cannes last May. Whether this tepid reaction was a reflection of critic and audience fatigue towards the director’s controversy-courting or of their general dislike of the film itself remains to be seen, but given von Trier’s stature and the movie’s unabashedly provocative message, it seems deserving of a second look.
For my money, Manderlay is probably von Trier’s best film. Without juggling chainsaws or sawing his lead actress in half, the director has fashioned a work that presents a deeply disquieting allegory about power (and a distinctly American form of power at that), one that earnestly demands consideration, debate, and counterarguments.
Films about childhood run the gamut from sugar-coated, whimsical tales to painful, unsentimental coming-of-age stories. Unsurprisingly, Hollywood tends to look on the brighter side of things, while Europe takes a more jaundiced view. In I Am, Polish director Dorota Kedzierzawska adopts the latter approach but makes the fatal error of transforming the trials and tribulations of childhood into a melodrama so relentlessly downbeat that it risks becoming a parody of itself.
Throughout the film, Mograbi juxtaposes footage of Palestinians being humiliated by Israeli guards with scenes of Jewish tourists being regaled by tales of their ancestors’ historical struggles for freedom. Focusing on the oft-retold stories of Samson and Masada, the director highlights the hypocrisy of his fellow countrymen for celebrating these ancient tales as they simultaneously condemn the Palestinians for acting out in a similarly violent manner.
Stories of infidelity in film usually come in one of only a handful of prescribed forms. Woman realizes her husband is a shit who has been cheating on her and leaves him; woman realizes her husband is a shit who has been cheating on her, but decides to remain with him for the sake of her child, mental or financial stability, or because she is noble; woman realizes her husband is a shit and decides to cheat on him with someone younger and hunkier.
The characters in Bohdan Sláma’s new film, Something Like Happiness, wear an expression of grim resignation across their faces. Mired in a dingy industrial town in the Czech Republic, they seem utterly lacking in hope or ambition. This may sound dire, but Sláma is careful to allow humor to filter into these scenes of everyday dreariness, crafting a portrait of a society that owes much to the British kitchen-sink dramas of the postwar years.
For the past three decades, Truman Capote the celebrity has overshadowed Truman Capote the writer. Bennett Miller’s new biopic Capote may not do much to redress this balance, but it nevertheless offers insight into the dueling sides of his personality. As incarnated by Philip Seymour Hoffman, Capote’s character shifts from compassion to self-absorption in the blink of an eye. Fortunately, the film does not share this tonal inconsistency, unfolding in a steady, straightforward manner.
Jean-Paul Civeyrac’s latest feature, Through the Forest is composed of ten meticulously crafted shots, each running for six or seven minutes. Despite this formal rigor, the narrative has a free-flowing, dreamlike quality, taking twists and turns that may leave audiences occasionally puzzled, but also deeply absorbed.
In its portrayal of a young Irishman’s single-minded desire for female impersonation amid the chaos of 1970s Northern Ireland, Neil Jordan’s new film has garnered comparison to a film about a certain Southerly, sweet-toothed naïf. The picaresque nature of the film’s narrative has perhaps a cursory resemblance to the wayward fortunes of Tom Hanks’ history-prone Vietnam vet and ping-pong enthusiast.
After the critical pillory that followed the release of Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point six years earlier, audiences and reviewers were approaching Antonioni’s new film with a mixture of hope and trepidation. And now that the long-unavailable film is being re-released to American audiences on the occasion of its 30th anniversary, this ambivalent mix of expectations seems wholly justified.
In his adaptation of Laurence Sterne’s 18th century novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, director Michael Winterbottom has embraced the chaos of this famously digressive text, fashioning a movie about making a movie of a novel about writing a novel. Appropriately, snippets from the score for Fellini’s 8 ½ can be heard throughout, though the film’s warm, playful tone gives it more in common with Truffaut’s Day for Night.
Although suicide bombers occupy a depressingly regular spot on the nightly news, little effort has been made to understand the motivations of individuals who resort to such tactics. In Paradise Now, Palestinian writer-director Hany Abu-Assad attempts to shed light on this touchy subject, telling the story of two young men who are recruited for a bombing in Tel Aviv.
Like Day For Night, the film focuses on the dalliances and falling-outs of filmmaking. But if most of the film emphasizes the lightness of these situations, the film also offers its share of dark and spectral moments as art insinuates itself into reality in unsuspected ways.
The third of Aleksandr Sokurov’s films of conjectural biography, The Sun is an idiosyncratic portrait of Emperor Hirohito, narrowly focused on the days leading up to and following Japan’s surrender to Allied forces at the end of World War II. Like his previous films, Moloch and Taurus, The Sun depicts its central figure as a rarefied and slightly buffoonish person who is physically and mentally cut off from the world.
Having been filmed roughly 35 years after the failed student uprisings of May 1968, it carries with it a sense of historical perspective, but at the same time, unfolds with an immediacy that belies its more recent origins. Unlike The Dreamers, Garrel employs a more subtle means of evoking the era.
Park Chanwook’s Sympathy for Lady Vengeance is the latest in his “Vengeance trilogy,” a series of kinetic and morally baffling tales of rage and revenge. Following upon Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Oldboy, Park’s new entry in the series continues the director’s careful dissection of the agony and ecstasy of vengeance, but here the waters are muddied with more than the usual ethical quandaries.
