Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York, NY
September 27-October 13, 2019
filmlinc.org/nyff
The 57th edition of the New York Film Festival had so many sidebars—including documentaries, revivals and special screenings—that it’s no longer the “boutique” festival that former director Richard Pena used to call it. Here are my impressions on the handful of festival features I saw:
Opening Night Film
The Irishman (now playing in theaters and streaming on Netflix)
Martin Scorsese’s 3-1/2-hour adaptation of the book about Frank Sheehan, a Philly mobster who claimed to murder Jimmy Hoffa in 1975, is a deliberately paced, excruciatingly intimate and controlled study of how violence destroys a man by degrees from within—and could be seen as a corollary to Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, which demonstrated the breakdown of young men by the army from without. Although the CGI used to de-age the actors doesn’t completely work—in a few sequences, the movements of the 70-ish Robert DeNiro don’t match his decades-younger face—the acting is so brilliant throughout that it ultimately doesn’t matter. DeNiro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci are extraordinary—DeNiro’s phone call with Hoffa’s widow is a master class of underacting—and Scorsese makes masterly use of quotidian moments that most other directors would leave out: random, seemingly mundane conversations and situations that make up real lives. The Irishman—whose onscreen title is the book’s title I Heard You Paint Houses—is far more than just another mob movie.
Closing Night Film
Motherless Brooklyn (now playing)
Ed Norton takes on far too much in his triple-threat debut as a writer/director/actor, adapting Jonathan Lethem’s 1999 novel and setting it in 1950s New York, when the fight over razing lower-class neighborhoods to make way for highways was at the center of city government. But grafting a fictionalized version of the Robert Moses-Jane Jacobs fight onto the plot of an autistic private eye investigating his boss’ murder makes for a fitfully satisfying but uneasy blend of historical fiction and mystery. Period New York looks unerringly right, and Alec Baldwin (as the Moses stand-in, named Moses), Cherry Jones (as the Jane Jacobs stand-in, not named Jacobs) and Gugu Mbatha-Raw (as the hero’s unlikely partner) are excellent. While Norton lacks the writing/directing chops to pull off this gamble, he’s still a formidable actor, and his tic-laden hero is less enervating than charming.
63 Up (now playing)
Michael Apted has been making fascinating documentaries revisiting several people every seven years since 14 Up in 1970 (7 Up was directed by Paul Almond). Seeing them is like running into old friends after too long a time away, and Apted knowingly and cannily edits the film to give us glimpses of them during other times in their lives to comment on or simply show how much they’ve changed—or haven’t. One sad note is that, among 14 original participants, there’s the first death: Lynn died six years ago after a short illness. A couple of others aren’t involved any more, but for the rest, they provide a uniquely illuminating journey into the lives of people just like us.
Oh Mercy
French director Arnaud Desplechin’s first police procedural is as dense, knotty, intelligent and satisfying as many of his other films. Set in the small town of Roubaix (Desplechin’s own hometown?), Oh Mercy—the French title is the more euphonic Roubaix, une lumière—follows detectives investigating a robbery-murder and how they slowly evolve their theories on who did it and why. The actors are superb: Lea Seydoux and Sara Forestier as the main suspects are complicatedly unsympathetic, while the lead investigator is superbly enacted by Roschdy Zem, and with Desplechin’s exacting direction, this policier is consistently engrossing.
The Whistlers
In Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu’s latest pseudo-whimsical drama, a shady police inspector travels to a remote island to learn a local whistling language in order to entrap criminals who are doing things even shadier than he is. There’s a lot of chutzpah involved in building a shaggy-dog story around such a ludicrous concept, but Porumboiu runs with it thoroughly and, to a certain extent, admirably, although he takes it only so far before the seams begin to show. Luckily, the pace doesn’t lag, the film is fairly short, and there’s a fine cast committed to bringing it home, especially Romanian model turned actress Catrinel Marlon, who makes a formidable femme fatale named—winkingly, for those who remember Rita Hayworth—Gilda.
Sibyl (opens early 2020)
For the first hour of Sybil, director Justine Triet is in complete control of this engrossing and often hilarious study of a therapist who gradually and willingly finds herself drawn into the world of moviemaking after neurotic actress Margot demands she become her therapist for her on-set difficulties with her costar and onset lover Igor and their director (who’s Igor’s real-life lover). The cast, which includes Virginie Efira as Sibyl, Gaspard Ulliel as Igor and Sandra Hüller as the director—the latter of whom overdoes it, ruining many would-be funny and piercing sequences—is led by the exquisite Adèle Exarchopoulos as Margot; she breathes such luminous life into what is after all a caricature that she dominates the movie, especially when it takes a bizarre turn into increasingly implausible territory that any therapist worth her salt wouldn’t be dragged into. It’s too bad that such a promising set-up is ruined by such a copout ending.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (now playing)
After several impressive and insightful films about young women, identity and gender—Water Lilies, Tomboy and Girlhood—French director Céline Sciamma has consolidated the many facets of her artistry into a powerful and strikingly original exploration of a relationship between two women, one a painter the other her subject, in the 19th century—which was definitely not a prime time for a same-sex romance. Under Sciamma’s merciless but sympathetic eye, that extraordinary actress Adèle Haenel joins with the equally riveting Noémie Merlant to touchingly dramatize a loving couple discovering that the boxing-in of their relationship by the era’s mores can’t fully erase what they had together. Claire Mathon’s glistening cinematography and Julien Lacheray’s sharp-eyed editing further illuminate Sciamma’s unique development of these ultimately unforgettable women.
Varda by Agnès (now playing)
In her valedictory film, Agnès Varda—who died earlier this year at 90—distills her occasionally bumpy but mostly brilliant career into a lovely, self-effacing cinematic memoir that unfolds like a combined essay and talk, as Varda often speaks to the camera or in front of groups of people about her own history behind and in front of the camera. There are precious moments, visual puns, serious insights and a touch of whimsy in this look at a Jane of all trades—director, writer, cinematographer, photographer, narrator—who shared her beguiling dreams throughout a six-decade career spanning film and new technologies.
A Girl Missing (opens summer 2020)
In Japanese director Koji Fukada’s slowly evolving drama, Mariko Tsutsui gives a performance of supreme restraint as a woman who is tangentially connected to a young man who abducted a young woman (herself related to our protagonist’s employer). Fukada’s film, while makes several pungent observations about media hysteria, spirals slightly into a messy and inelegant conclusion, but much of the time the drama is diverting and at times even spellbinding.
Pain and Glory (now playing)
Pedro Almodovar, now 70, has made his own version of Fellini’s great 8-1/2, which—as truthful and innovative as it was—has had the deleterious effect of allowing other directors to make self-serving autobiographies, of which Bob Fosse’s dazzling All That Jazz and Woody Allen’s downbeat Stardust Memories are the most memorable. Almodovar’s alter ego is a once-fashionable middle-aged director without a hit in decades who latches onto an upcoming screening of his long-ago breakthrough film to reconnect with his estranged lead actor. With body and mind falling apart, he gets a temporary reprieve from said actor’s heroin—smoked, not snorted. From there we get several flashbacks to the director’s boyhood, not particularly well-integrated into the narrative, such as it is. (Almodovar is no Fellini when it comes to narrative sleight-of-hand.) The protagonist’s personal and artistic problems are the usual whiny digressions, for which Antonio Banderas’ laconic performance does no favors. Penelope Cruz is fine as the director’s mother, but Almodovar seems to have saved all his energy for the clever but superficial “reveal” of a final shot.
The Traitor (opens January 31, 2020)
In Marco Bellocchio’s bracing expose of the criminal underworld, the true story of Tommaso Buscetta, a Neapolitan Mafioso who made a great living off drugs until he became a reluctant informer who led the police to 300 arrests of underworld figures, is told with Bellocchio’s usual stylish and exacting eye. Chronicling the twin precepts of loyalty and family—and which is more important—The Traitor delves deeply into the sheer ugliness of an eye-opening lifestyle, as killings and double-crossings come when but sometimes not how we expect them, keeping viewers off-guard during a splendidly paced and often thrilling 145 minutes. Pierfrancesco Favino’s towering portrayal of Buscetta finds the nuances of this beloved Mafioso with a loving family: and don’t forget the subtle contribution of Maria Fernanda Cândido as his loyal third wife. The Traitor is Bellocchio—the master chronicler of Italy’s fraught 20th century—at his considerable best.
The Booksellers
Antiquarian booksellers were once a force in New York City: no matter where you walked, a neighborhood would have one or more such stores for browsing or buying or even just discussing books. Now that the internet and Amazon have destroyed the book business, there are fewer stores left than ever—although there are signs that some booksellers are making a successful last stand. D.W. Young’s documentary serves as a valuable wakeup call about the impending loss of such treasures and a wonderful primer on the people who ran such places amid the money and the personalities. There are delightful interviews with several sellers as well as book lovers like Fran Lebowitz and Gay Talese, both of whom mourn the losses and remember that golden age for book lovers.
Wasp Network
French director Olivier Assayas once again goes international, as he did with his film about Latin American terrorist Carlos the Jackal (Carlos, part of the 2010 New York Film Festival). This explosive subject has stayed under the radar until now: that pro-Castro spies infiltrated anti-Castro networks among Cuban exiles in 1990s Miami. Despite choppiness—the film was re-edited after its premiere in Toronto—Wasp Network conveys the urgency and excitement of people risking their lives for causes they felt were just, and if there’s too much of a docudrama look to the film, Assayas and his committed cast (including Édgar Ramírez, who played the lead in Carlos, Penelope Cruz, Gael Garcia Bernel, Wagner Moura and Ana de Armas, now getting more justified exposure in Knives Out) get the job done.
Zombi Child (opens January 24, 2020)
Bertrand Bonello’s zombie movie doesn’t comprise repetitive scenes of the undead in a stupor dragging themselves around as they rip apart defenseless humans but instead takes on history and agency by being set in 1962 Haiti and present-day Paris, where a zombie descendent (!) is at a girls’ boarding school. The problem is that, by avoiding Scylla, Bonello has ended up in Charybdis: his moderately interesting film has unusual locations and a lack of hysteria and campiness; but it becomes, for endless stretches, deadly dull, as talk about Rhianna (herself a product of the Caribbean) and white teenage girls taking a page from the colonized to rid themselves of evil spirits aren’t subjects worthy of dramatization, at least in Bonello’s hands.
The Wild Goose Lake (opens March 6, 2020)
Diao Yinan’s convoluted crime drama follows a mobster on the lam after accidentally killing a cop who discovers that even in the underworld there are no safe places to hide—or to not be betrayed. Diao does conjure up some oppressively heady atmosphere, especially in a tangent about a young woman who befriends our anti-hero, a tangent that morphs into the main plot. Still, there’s a feeling that much of The Wild Goose Lake is nothing more than a wild goose chase, however well-made.
Parasite (now playing)
In this heavyhanded and, finally, pointless black comedy/satire/drama/thriller/mystery, Korean director Bong Joon-ho has set up the most obviously allegorical story since Noah’s flood—which also makes an appearance—and tries having it both ways by playing it for laughs and completely straight. Neither approach works because tone and logic are askew: we are meant to believe that members of a rich family which a quartet of poor family members home in on, eventually take jobs in their household and soon run the place is so benighted as to allow such machinations to happen right under their noses. Then, when a disgruntled former employee returns—why would anyone allow her back in the house?—another nonsensical plot starts to play out, which culminates in a fatality after those shenanigans go too far. (But a major character, despite being pounded in the head mercilessly, makes it through to the bitter—definitely not sweet—end.) The whole thing becomes borderline imbecile, but it’s acted forcefully enough and Bong is an impressive enough technician to make this seem more than the sum of its shaky parts.
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