55th New
York Film Festival
Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York, NY
September 28-October 15, 2017
filmlinc.org/nyff
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| JR and Agnes Varda in Faces Places |
An unusually strong lineup of documentaries was front and center at this
year’s New York Film Festival, led by the two-week event’s best film, Faces
Places (now playing), which shows that, at age 88, French director
Agnes Varda continues to make beautiful, humanistic films that display real
people. Varda has been joined by 33-year-old photographer and provocateur JR,
who shares her indomitable spirit, and the result is a joyful, lovely valentine
to humanity. The movie is funny, thoughtful, touching, and makes viewers yearn
for more from these kindred souls.
There were several other notable documentaries, like The Rape of Recy Taylor, about
the brutal assault in 1944 Mississippi on a young black mother by several white
teenage boys who were never brought to trial. The horrible crime and its
aftermath are recounted by director Nancy Buirski in her incisive and
non-polemical (but justifiably angry) film that displays an America anything
but enlightened, and virulently racist. Stanley Kubrick’s famously obsessive
personality dominates Tony Zierra’s Filmworker, an engaging portrait of
Leon Vitali, who gave up an acting career—he was in Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon in 1975—to become the
director’s closest and most trusted assistant, famously discovering little
Danny Lloyd for The Shining. Vitali
comes across as ingratiating and unquestionably loyal to Kubrick’s vision for a
quarter century—even after his boss’s death, as Vitali ensures how the films look
onscreen, on DVD and Blu-ray.
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| Leon Vitali in Filmworker |
In Hall of Mirrors, sister directors Ena Talakic and Ines Talakic
have a fascinating subject in legendary reporter Edward Jay Epstein, who has intrepidly
worked on a half-century of investigations into such subjects as the Warren
Commission and Edward Snowden. Epstein comes off as resolutely non-partisan,
and although he might go to extremes, the Talakics definitively show that, more
than ever, America needs someone of his fearlessness to dig for dirt others
won’t. Myles Kane and Josh Koury’s Voyeur (on Netflix December 1) shows
how veteran writer Gay Talese—who wrote a book about a man who spied on his
hotel visitors for decades—discovered that his reporting and writing are
brought into question when it’s revealed on the eve of the book’s publication
that it contains untruths. In recounting the 85-year-old’s storied but
checkered career, Voyeur allows
Talese to give his side of what’s become an increasingly sordid story.
Cramming the 45-year career of Hollywood’s most successful director into
2-1/2 hours isn’t easy, so credit Susan Lacy—director of Spielberg (on HBO)—for not
making a banal overview of the artist who began with Duel and The Sugarland
Express and continues today with Bridge
of Spies and The BFG. An in-depth
interview with the man himself provides pertinent details about how his
difficulties growing up informed several of his films. Joan Didion: The Center Will Not
Hold (on Netflix) is actor Griffin
Dunne’s personal and touching portrait of his aunt, writer Joan Didion, tracking
her career as essayist and novelist along with her tragic personal life, which
saw the premature deaths of her husband and adopted daughter (which begat her
most intimate books, The Year of Magical
Thinking and Blue Nights). We
hear from literary colleagues like the always amusing Calvin Trillin and family
members who discuss her personal and professional legacy.
Too bad the features making up the main slate were, with a few exceptions,
disappointments. The Other Side of Hope (opening
December 1) by Finnish prankster Aki Kaurismaki is—even by his hit-or-miss
standards—forgettable fluff. Riffing on the topical theme of refugees flooding Europe,
Kaurismaki’s hero, Syrian refugee Khlaed, deals with Finnish bureaucracy and,
through a series of extraordinarily lazy coincidences, finds a good job, thanks
to an altruistic gambler turned restaurant owner. The director’s usual deadpan
comedy fails here, with clunky performances matching the overarching
pointlessness. Even the usually reliable Isabelle Huppert can’t save Serge
Bozun’s Mrs. Hyde, a ham-fisted update of Dr. Jekyll and Mrs. Hyde with Huppert as a mousy teacher who
becomes a brand new, (literally) fiery woman. Huppert maintains her usual
flair, but Bozun telegraphs everything—she teaches mainly foreign and minority
students, helping a handicapped one reach his potential despite his own insults
toward her—and the scenes of Mrs. Hyde’s otherworldly powers soon become
risible, infecting the entire film.
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| Juliette Binoche in Let the Sunshine In |
Juliette Binoche: that’s all you need to know about Let the Sunshine In, Claire
Denis’ thin melodrama masquerading as an incisive character study of a
middle-aged woman looking for love in all the wrong places. Denis’ usual
cinematographer Agnes Godard shoots with her typical finesse, but the script
and characterizations are banal, especially when the camera holds on faces for
long, arid stretches. Even so, Binoche holds the screen like the movie star she
is. The
Square (now playing), Ruben
Ostlund’s excruciatingly repetitive and meretricious farrago, somehow won the
Palme d’Or at Cannes. Ostensibly an assault on political correctness and liberalism’s
failure, it’s just a collection of visual, verbal and narrative non-sequiturs
piled up as haphazardly as the gravel in one of the film’s trendy modern-art
exhibits at a museum which is the film’s main locale. Ludicrous happenings with
no rhyme, reason or context are seen and forgotten about as the film stumbles
on, singlemindedly trying to be cool and detached simultaneously. The Square is the most obnoxiously
self-satisfied film I’ve seen since Toni
Erdmann, which is saying a lot.
Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa’s A Gentle Creature shares a title
with Dostoyevsky’s short story but little else in this snail’s-paced, occasionally
astonishing but often hellishly tedious account of a young wife—looking for her
husband, jailed for a murder he didn’t commit—who finds that corruption taints
both government bureaucrats and regular citizens who have become inured to its
effects. Nearly 2-1/2 gorgeously directed but meandering hours are climaxed by
a colossal miscalculation of a dream sequence that must be seen to be
disbelieved. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) (on Netflix) is the latest portrait of self-absorbed Manhattan
lives from Noah Baumbach, who has parlayed his third-rate Woody Allen forgeries
into a career. This is the kind of movie where Dustin Hoffman, Emma Thompson,
Elizabeth Marvel and Adam Sandler, as members of the same family, recite their
dialogue as if they’ve just met for the first time. Only Grace Van Patten as
Sandler’s precocious daughter has the presence and vitality of a real person.
Ravishingly shot in the Polish countryside, Spoor—which veteran
Agnieszka Holland co-directed with Kasia Adamik—is an allegorical environmental
thriller in which heartless hunters are being offed in the local woods, and the
culprits might just be the animals themselves. For much of its two-hour length,
the movie is cracklingly good, goofy fun, but by the time of the big reveal, it
becomes unfortunately mundane. Holland’s eye never wavers, however; even when
the drama is sidetracked, there’s continuous visual ravishment. Thelma
(opens Nov. 10), the latest from Danish director Joachim Trier, is an often
dazzling dramatization of an ultra-religious family’s bizarre history,
following a young woman (a transfixing Eili Harboe) whose seizures are a
manifestation of her own supernatural powers which come to the fore when she
finds herself attracted to another young woman, which horrifies her sense of
morality and of God. Trier’s intelligently realized thriller cruises
brilliantly for over an hour until cracks begin to show—when it suddenly lurches
and drags itself to an inevitable, if predictable, conclusion.
If it wasn’t for Saoirse Ronan, Greta Gerwig’s lumpy writing-directing
debut, Lady Bird (now playing) would seem even more like a barely
competent vanity project. Based on Gerwig’s own teenage years in central
California, Lady Bird follows a high
school senior through the usual travails—teachers, boys, family, herself—with navel-gazing
and self-absorption typical of millenial studies. It’s the kind of movie whose
references to Sept. 11 and the Iraq War appear shoehorned in, as if someone
said to Gerwig, “why doesn’t anyone acknowledge what’s happening outside of
their little community?” Ronan, unsurprisingly, is magnificent, investing her
underwritten character with the false bravado, massive insecurity and empathy
that her writer-director forgot to give her.
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| Marion Cotillard and Matthew Amalric in Ismael's Ghosts |
I’ve saved the festival’s best features for last. Ismael’s Ghosts (opening in 2018) is the latest from
French director Arnaud Desplechin, whose films are so crammed with detail,
incident, characterization and location that they resemble cinematic versions
of long novels. But they’re not simply visualizations of literature; instead,
they are gloriously filmic (his two-plus hour-long films fly by faster than
anything by most other directors). Ghosts
centers on a director making a film about his estranged—and politically
shady—brother, and brilliantly and effortlessly moves along separate but
equally absorbing paths, both real or fake. The intrigue is especially
delicious, especially when it’s served up by a formidable cast headed by
Mathieu Amalric, Marion Cotillard and Charlotte Gainsbourg—who gives what may
be her best screen performance.
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| BPM—Beats Per Minute |
Finally, there’s BPM—Beats Per Minute (now playing), a
galvanizing, vital docudrama by director Robin Campillo, which explosively re-examines
the early days of the French chapter of ACT UP—the AIDS advocacy group whose
protests included physical mayhem and disruption—through an unabashedly
emotional look at the close relationships among those who made it their life’s
work to ensure the future of those suffering from the disease. Sometimes intentionally
difficult to watch, BPM is a full-on
fuck-off to anyone and any organization that stood in the way. Nearly 2-1/2
hours long, there is not a sequence, line of dialogue or frame that’s
superfluous; incendiary performances by a mainly unknown cast contribute to the
ultra-realistic atmosphere.
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