Film Comment Selects
February 18-28, 2013
Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York, NY
http://filmlinc.com
The 13th annual Film Comment Selects series comprises a
selection of films that haven’t been seen yet in New York or not in awhile.
Alongside new films by Marco Bellocchio, Manoel de Oliveira, Michel Gondry and
Kiyoshi Kurosawa are lesser-known or forgotten films by Ingmar Bergman, James
William Guercio and Howard Zieff.
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| Isabelle Huppert in Marco Bellocchio's Dormant Beauty |
Easily the most anticipated film
of the series is Dormant Beauty, the latest from Marco Bellocchio, whose
late-career resurgence began with the masterly My Mother’s Smile, which premiered at the 2002 New York Film Festival.
Since then, he’s made such gems as Good Morning
Night, The Wedding Director and Vincere,
which showcased the great Giovanna Mezzogiorno as a woman literally driven
insane after her affair with Benito Mussolini.
Another film showing that Bellocchio—a
grand master whose 1965 debut was the still potent and blackly comic Fists in the Pocket—is unafraid to court
controversy (especially in deeply Catholic Italy), Dormant Beauty stars Isabelle Huppert and Toni Servillo in a dramatization
of a real-life case that, like Terry Schiavo, forced Italians to address the right-to-die
movement.
Of the series’ other new films, Gebo
and the Shadow proves that, at age 104, Portuguese director Manoel de
Oliveira still makes static, undramatic and colossally vacuous movies, this
time adapting a surrealist play by Raol Brandao to no noticeable point. From
Uruguay comes Pablo Stoll’s 3, which studies the individual
lives of an estranged family—separated mother and father, and typically
confused teenage daughter—with glimmers of humor and insight.
Miss Lovely, director Ashim
Ahluwahlia’s feverish portrait of low-rent Bollywood filmmaking, scores points
for slippery visual and narrative ploys but ends up being scattershot and unnecessarily
drawn-out. Conversely, Call Girl, based on a 1970s Swedish government
scandal, is a riveting thriller-cum-psychological portrait of a teenage girl
recruited into prostitution to service some very important men. Director Mikael
Marcimain, who creates a credible ‘70s atmosphere, smartly shows events unfolding
through the eyes of his young protagonist, Iris (the superb Sofia
Karemyr).
Of the “revivals,” if James
William Guercio’s 1973 Electra Glide in Blue is a dated but
intriguing curio, Howard Zieff’s Hearts of the West (1975) is a
delightfully subtle comedy that features such wonderful then-young actors as
Blythe Danner and Jeff Bridges. Finally, there’s From the Life of the Marionettes,
a dark, brooding psychodrama that Ingmar Bergman made in Germany during a
self-imposed tax exile from his native Sweden. If this 1980 film pales next to his
best work, it’s still a daring attempt to enter the mind of a murderer.
Film Comment Selects 2013
http://filmlinc.com
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