Nine films at the New York Film Festival

1) The Loneliest Planet

My reac­tions to this film are unavoid­ably colored by the fact that it’s based on a short story by Tom Bissell, who aside from being in my estim­a­tion an unim­peach­able great writer is also a very dear friend of long stand­ing. (Back in 2002, Tom and anoth­er pal who shall remain name­less were kind enough to stage The World’s Smallest Intervention on my behalf, which did­n’t take at the time but for which I’ve become grate­ful.) So I just walk in to the screen­ing feel­ing chuffed that a tal­en­ted and dis­tinct­ive screenwriter/director, Julia Loktev, decided to adapt Tom’s story, “Expensive Trips Nowhere” (fea­tured in his won­der­ful col­lec­tion God Lives In St. Petersburg) in he first place. 

The tale is not a com­plic­ated one; it’s an account of a young Western couple’s hik­ing trek across a part of Kazakhstan, and an incid­ent that sheds a glar­ing light on their char­ac­ters and their rela­tion­ship. And then there’s their rela­tion­ship to the guide. Lotkev takes Tom’s story and makes it her own; she mostly jet­tis­ons the ele­ments of social cri­tique (Tom lays out a lot of the couple’s First-World-Problems metic­u­lously through­out; in his story, they’re also mar­ried, while in the film, they’re engaged to be) and, most cru­cially, renders inde­term­in­ate the res­ult of the event that in the story pretty much sunders…well, I don’t want to give away too much. 

My friend The Self Styled Siren isn’t the first per­son to weigh in on the film with some frus­tra­tion over the fact that the film’s couple, played by the very appeal­ing Gael Garcia Bernal and Hani Furstenberg (seen above with Bidzina Gujabidze, who plays their guide), nev­er verbally address the ele­phant in the room after it shows up. “The movie explodes if one char­ac­ter turns to the oth­er on one of the many ardu­ous hikes and says ‘What the hell…?’ ” If I may be allowed to play dev­il’s advoc­ate and rep­res­ent what Hitchcock might be grat­i­fied to note as an anti-Plausible pos­i­tion, the fact that neither of the char­ac­ters does utter any such thing might just be pre­cisely the point. I’m only say­ing. In any case, what works like crazy here is both Loktev’s pictori­al sense and abil­ity to ratchet up ten­sion in dis­tinctly unshowy ways; while dun­der­heads and the eye­less might be under the impres­sion that noth­ing is hap­pen­ing when she cuts away to a rav­ish­ing long shot of the scenery and lets Richard Skelton’s gor­geous, oth­er­worldy eth­no­lo­gic­al not-quite-forgery music have its way with the movie, the rest of us will get the feel­ing, for sure. (And how’s that for a Kael-like lunge at SPEAKING FOR THE “RIGHT” PEOPLE, huh? Um, maybe not.) Its nar­rat­ive open-endedness seeks, I think, to engage the intu­ition of the view­er, which is some­thing that I’m noti­cing cer­tain view­ers are com­ing to resent. But that’s anoth­er issue for anoth­er piece. 

2) You Are Not I

Sarah Driver’s long-kind-of-lost 45-minute 1981 adapt­a­tion of a Paul Bowles short story, shot in Vampyr-inflec­ted black-and-white by Driver’s fre­quent col­lab­or­at­or Jim Jarmusch, and fea­tur­ing a delib­er­ately bugging-the-hell-out-of-the-back-of-your-brain-like-an-alarm-clock-you-can’t-shut-off elec­tron­ic score by Phil Kline, often plays like the New York Underground answer to Carnival of Souls, which I mean entirely as a compliment. 

3) Le Havre

2006’s Lights in the Dusk was a real rut in Aki Kaurismaki’s path to sweet-and-quirkily-warmhearted-old-fogeydom, but this very sat­is­fy­ing quasi-caper is an exhil­ar­at­ing rebound that places him squarely and touch­ingly in that ter­rit­ory. The story of a fairytale com­munity in the title burg that ral­lies round to help a delight­fully tacit­urn and well-mannered young undoc­u­mented African immig­rant reach his des­tin­a­tion across the chan­nel, its sure pace and con­sist­ent com­ic under­state­ment nicely set up some of the dir­ect­or’s most cas­u­ally dar­ing absurd­ist tropes in years. Filtering a genu­ine con­tem­por­ary European social con­cern through his wry and slightly addled (by what I have no idea, I’m sure) sens­ib­il­ity seems to have charged Aki’s bat­ter­ies up a bit. Nice going. 

4) We Can’t Go Home Again

What’s that guy in back of Woody Allen say about the new Fellini, that it’s “very indul­gent?”  Yeah, that’s what he says. One would not, hon­estly, need to be for­giv­en if those very words, and with the exact same inflec­tion yet, flashed through one’s own mind at vari­ous points at this film signed by “Us,” super­vised by Nicholas Ray when he was a film­mak­ing instruct­or at SUNY Binghamton in the early 1970s. I mean, how IS one to char­ac­ter­ize a film in which the one-time Hollywood dir­ect­or is depic­ted ineptly attempt­ing sui­cide? (Although admit­tedly the attempt does pro­duce one of the film’s biggest laughs, when the mages­teri­al white-haired wreck Ray, fum­bling with some rope, grumbles “I’ve made thir­teen Westerns and I still have no idea how to tie a noose.”) But again, I think the indul­gence is the point. A multi-frame expect­or­a­tion of foot­age of him­self and his stu­dents inter­rog­at­ing them­selves and him and each oth­er mixed with rumin­a­tions on the polit­ic­al upheavals of the pri­or years mixed with reflec­tions on the increas­ingly bit­ter real­ity that home/America/a sense of belonging/what have you is dis­solv­ing into the cor­ros­ive acid of ever-mounting cul­tur­al and sexu­al and polit­ic­al frag­ment­a­tion, Home is both an effort to find coherence/community and an avow­al of the pos­sible impossib­il­ity of doing so. So of course it’s going to be indul­gent. It is also fre­quently kind of tedi­ous, and fre­quently kind of dazzling, and fre­quently kind of infuri­at­ingly self-pitying. It’s quite a few pro­voc­at­ive things, but many of its qual­it­ies won’t be imme­di­ately dis­cern­able to any­body who’s not already a Ray-head, so con­sider this a warning. 

5) Tahrir

One of those pic­tures that one could look at and say, “Well, sure, of course, with the time, the place, and the people, any­body could go in and make a good film.” Of course, if you’ve seen enough docs that had the time, the place, and the people, and the film­makers STILL man­aged to fuck things up, you know that’s a glib assess­ment. So all praise to dir­ect­or Stefano Savona, who’s assembled an incred­ibly enga­ging and pro­voc­at­ive mov­ing snap­shot of a Cairo’s square’s chant­ing, rock-throwing, cell-phone-and-computer-checking, social-media-enabled con­tri­bu­tion to Arab spring, fea­tur­ing con­ver­sa­tions between young firebrands and mono­logues from old blow­hards who are still hugely touch­ing for all their blow-hardedness. Not a com­pre­hens­ive sur­vey of polit­ic­al per­spect­ives and ten­sions nor a pro­spect­us on what’s ahead for Egypt or what the West is in store for, but rather the vital story of some people gathered togeth­er, and their cru­cial pas­sions, and how they united under those passions. 

6) The Turin Horse

I’ve always looked at the anec­dote about Nietsche and that poor horse as an exem­plary para­dox­ic­al par­able about how once/if you reach total consciousness/compassion over all the over­whelm­ing point­less suf­fer­ing in this world, the only pos­sible reac­tion is not that you become a better/nicer per­son, but that you fall into the grip of an abso­lutely para­lyz­ing mad­ness (which can some­times be helped even fur­ther along by demen­tia cour­tesy of [maybe] ter­tiary syph­il­is). And those are the breaks. Aiiee. In any event, my biggest prob­lem with Bela Tarr’s appar­ent cine­mat­ic swan song is that its per­spect­ive does­n’t quite jibe with my own above inter­pret­a­tion of the whole equine ker­fuffle. Still and all, I found this cine­mat­ic­ally vir­tu­osic, nar­rat­ively min­im­al, and genu­inely, albeit pecu­li­arly, grip­ping almost-two-and-a-half-hour black-and-white account of the end of the world as dis­af­fected fath­er and daugh­ter and horse know it, abso­lutely superb. Even though it did­n’t gal­van­ize me as much as some pri­or Tarr films, even includ­ing the rather more overtly prob­lem­at­ic The Man From London, have. I think maybe it was­n’t meant to; there’s a pecu­li­ar serenity at the cen­ter of all its con­sid­er­able dread. I should like to see it again soon. 

7) Carnage

See a bit below. I think it’s worth reit­er­at­ing that this is a satir­ic farce, and deserves to be con­sidered as such. I think it’s also worth reit­er­at­ing that People Are Fucking Stupid. I read some­where (I can­’t find it now…does the fact that I can­’t link mean that I’m Doing That Thing Again) someone com­plain­ing that the piece makes no sense because the one couple could just LEAVE and they don’t and it’s always the lamest pre­text com­pel­ling them to re-enter the apart­ment. Yeah, The Return Of The Plausibles. Someday I’d like to see some­body make a film in which all of the action unfolds in the most abso­lutely plaus­ible and true-to-life fash­ion pos­sible. Oh, yeah, they already made that film and it’s fuck­ing called Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai de Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, and I bet The Plausibles won’t like that pic­ture much either, albeit maybe for dif­fer­ent reas­ons. What is worth not­ing, although not hav­ing seen the play I can only spec­u­late rather than accur­ately cite stuff, is that Polanksi seems to have some fun com­ing up with little bits of busi­ness to nudge that char­ac­ters back into the apart­ment where the main action (such as it is) is largely set, includ­ing a sly couple of shots involving a fel­low ten­ant, or Tenant, that will evoke a chuckle in some and per­haps out­rage in others. 

8) A Separation

A very nifty piece of cine­mat­ic sleight-of-hand from writer-director Asghar Fahadi, this Iranian domest­ic drama takes a home trauma and ratchets it up to a kind of judi­cial thrill­er. If Michael Haneke were film­ing this scen­ario, he’d hold his shots in such a way as to goad the view­er into look­ing deep­er into them. (See cer­tain of the views in Caché.) If the dir­ect­or were Hitchcock, he’d fore­ground cer­tain objects in such a way as to set off the audi­ence’s intrigue about them. (See the tele­phone in Dial “M” For Murder.) Fahadi’s seem­ingly nat­ur­al­ist­ic shoot­ing and edit­ing style is decept­ively simple; he gives, or seems to give, no par­tic­u­lar weight to any giv­en object or action, and all the while he’s stow­ing away things that will be vitally import­ant later on. If the film’s second half is a very tense round of “Find What The Sailor Has Hidden,” the first half shows the, um, sail­or hid­ing everything in plain sight. Mongo impressed. Fuckin’ A, you def­in­itely need to see this. 

9) Living in the Material World

As it was for my friend Tony Dayoub, this pic­ture was an easy sell for me, whose first LP was Beatles ’65, gif­ted to me at Christmas 1964 when I was all of five years old. A sat­is­fy­ingly lengthy music­al and social and cul­tur­al his­tory as well as a bio­graphy, it’s suit­ably empathetic—if any­one can reveal George Harrison’s Jake LaMotta side, it’s the film’s organ­iz­a­tion­al intelligence/spirit Martin Scorsese—and a little more plastic­ally and con­cep­tu­ally clever/resourceful than its goes-down-easy nar­rat­ive ini­tially indic­ates. Not strictly lin­ear by any means, it gets to the many places it wants to go via dove­tails that are sim­ul­tan­eously them­at­ic and chro­no­lo­gic­al, and it accom­plishes an awful lot via implication/example, c.f. the frankly hor­rif­ic live con­cert foot­age the film cuts to right after Klaus Voorman brings up the sub­ject of cocaine for the first time. The pic­ture is some­times unusu­ally can­did and finally very mov­ing, and the sound mix is spec­tac­u­lar. As a bonus, Jackie Stewart as you’ve nev­er seen him before. No, really.