2021 New York Film Festival Roundup

59th New York Film Festival 

September 24-October 10, 2021

filmlinc.org

At the 59th annual New York Film Festival, opening night’s The Tragedy of Macbeth by the Coen brothers, Pedro Almodovar’s closing night entry, Parallel Mothers, and the festival centerpiece, Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, will be released by year’s end. I did catch several other films in the main slate as well as the “Revivals” and “Currents” sections. 

Petite Maman

Best among the main slate selections was, unsurprisingly, Petit Maman (Neon), French director Celine Sciamma’s emotionally precise and ingenious followup to her brilliant Portrait of a Lady on Fire, the best film of the 2019 festival. In this understated but shattering chamber piece, an eight-year-old girl, whose beloved grandmother has just died, meets and befriends a familiar-looking young girl while accompanying her parents to clean out the grandmother’s house. Sciamma, possibly the most accomplished and confident filmmaker working today, has created a movie that’s almost impossible to describe: The Twilight Zone meets Ponette gives a broad outline, but Sciamma works on such a fragile, delicate canvas that the effect is of a master miniaturist working at the very height of her powers, like Vermeer or Fauré. 

Ahed's Knee

The films Policeman (2011), The Kindergarten Teacher (2014) and Synonyms (2019) consolidated Nadav Lapid’s position as a formally challenging director, and his latest, Ahed’s Knee (Kino Lorber; opens early 2022), follows suit; it’s about an Israeli filmmaker who, while in a village for a screening of his new film, must deal with the usual personal and professional problems in his art. Made while Lapid’s own mother (his editor on his earlier films) was dying, Ahed’s Knee is shot through with scathing anger against a government that its protagonist—and his creator, most likely—considers the height of self-righteous hypocrisy and censorship.

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (Magnolia Pictures; opens Nov. 19 at Film Forum, NYC), Romanian director Radu Jude’s latest provocation, announces its intentions at the very start: a long sequence in which the female protagonist—or her body double (she’s wearing a mask)—enagages in enthusiastic sex with her husband, which he records. This opening prepares us for the masks to follow (after all, this was shot during the pandemic last year) as well as the in-your-face filmmaking of the director, who delights in showing the hypocritical, self-serving attitudes of nearly everyone in the film; then there’s the tongue-in-cheek documentary-style section, which is as audacious as the opening, in its own way. The endings—all three of them—are not as clever as they could be, which leaves us with a shaggy-dog feeling despite Jude’s and his lead actress Katia Pascariu’s fearlessness.

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy

In Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (Film Movement; now playing), a triptych of stories about women dealing with the shifting dynamics of their relationships, Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi develops, with an almost casual mastery, the perfect form for character studies that are alternatingly amusing and unsettling while shuddering with palpable tension throughout. 

The Velvet Underground

The Velvet Underground (Apple Films; now playing/streaming on Apple TV), director Todd Haynes’ documentary about the seminal ‘60s rock band, is a litmus test: for those who already love or appreciate or are simply familiar with the group, it’s engaging and witty about its genesis, career and legacy. For those unfamiliar, this might not be the place to start, since Haynes takes it for granted that the viewer already knows about Lou Reed, John Cale, et al. There are glorious vintage performances and interviews alongside new comments by Cale, Mary Waronov, Maureen Tucker, and Sterling Morrison, among others, who provide an insider’s look not unlike a longish episode of Behind the Music.

Hit the Road

In Hit the Road (Kino Lorber; opens early 2022)—which is, astonishingly, his debut feature—director Panah Panahi, son of Iranian master Jafar Panahi, takes the familiar road movie and transforms it from diverting amusement into tense drama without telegraphing his intent. The foursome—father, mother and sons (one a mainly silent adult, the other an irrepressible, often irritating, six-year-old)—that we see together for 90 minutes has singalongs, movie discussions, arguments, disagreements, moments of caring and tenderness, and a subtle sense of family dynamics, all subtly managed by Panahi with the same humane warmth and observation of his father, at the same time that he moves off in his own direction.

Chameleon Street

As usual, the "Revivals" section included films ripe for rediscovery in new restorations. Chameleon Street (Arbelos Films; opens Oct. 22), which won the grand prize at the 1990 Sundance Festival, is an alloyed triumph for writer-director-star Wendell B. Harris Jr., who plays William Douglas Street Jr., a real-life con man who took on many roles (rather like Frank Abagnale of Catch Me if You Can fame), thereby lying bare the racism, bias and structural inequalities of our society. Not much has changed in three decades, unfortunately.

The Round-Up

Hungarian master Miklós Jancsó’s 1966 international breakthrough, The Round-Up (Kino Lorber), is still a fresh, invigorating and voluptuous B&W study of a low point in 19th century Hungarian history—the rounding up of suspected rebels into prison camps—that uses Jancsó’s intricately choreographed camera movements (his singular long takes would come later) to bring this sordid episode to expressive and ultra-realistic life.

Hester Street

Hester Street (Cohen Film Collection; now playing) somehow gained Carol Kane a 1975 best actress Oscar nomination as a newly-arrived Jewish immigrant in 1896 Manhattan whose husband, already assimilated, has little patience for what he sees as her inadequacies. Joan Micklin Silver’s amateurish, threadbare drama does well depicting—in evocative black and white—the Eastern European culture of the Lower East Side (with much authentic Yiddish dialogue), but the characters are less than compelling.

Prism

An adjunct festival section, "Currents" comprised new films not included in the more prominent main slate. Prism (Icarus Films; now playing/streaming), directed by Eléonore Yameogo, An van. Dienderen and Rosine Mbakam, dives deeply into the racism inherent in the actual cinematic image, with formidable philosophical arguments concerning the very act of lighting skin on film—it’s whitecentric, and has been for generations. Intelligent discussions about the bias that’s baked into every component of filmmaking (as art, craft and technique) complement the elegant filmmaking that challenges such perceived realities. 

All About My Sisters

Equally shattering is All About My Sisters (Icarus Films; now playing), Wang Qiong’s brutally honest reckoning with China’s “one child” policy which, especially during the 1980s and ’90s, made abortion—even late into the third trimester—a deeply discomfiting fact for many families. Wang records her family for three hours of intimate, emotionally devastating reminiscences and confessions, showing how the thoughtless and irreversible edicts of Communist leadership played havoc with the very definition of family, and how Wang’s siblings, parents, and other relatives have come to terms with what decades of deceits, denials and admissions have wrought.