46th New York Film Festival
By: Kevin Filipski |
Thursday October 09, 2008 |
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September 26–October 12, 2008 |
| Born in 1963, the New York Film Festival is now well into a mellow middle age. With films from veteran directors like Clint Eastwood, Olivier Assayas, Mike Leigh and Jerzy Skolimowski to newer names like Kelly Reichert and Steve McQueen, the festival continues to showcase international cinema at its most passionate–if not its best. (Opening Night) The Class – In the space of three features (Human Resources, Time Out, Heading South), Laurent Cantet has marked himself as an astute chronicler of socially relevant character studies. With The Class–top winner at Cannes last spring–Cantet enters a Parisian classroom to fashion a richly detailed, intelligent film about one teacher’s attempts to get through to his inner-city students. An actual teacher, Francois Bégaudeau–on whose book The Class is based–plays a fictionalized version of himself, as do other adults and students. Closely resembling a documentary, the film is an ultra-realistic exploration of the shifting of morals and mores in French culture. Regrettably missing is a personalizing of these people, since we only see them at school–if we had gotten into the personal life of this teacher (as we do in Bertrand Tavernier’s far superior It All Starts Today), The Class would be classic–instead, it’s merely another fine film from a first-rate director. (Opens December 12 from Sony Pictures Classics) 24 City – Bouncing back from last year’s Useless—a deadly dull glimpse at the fashion industry that played the 2007 festival—Jia Zhangke returns with 24 City, exploring the dichotomies between Communist and Capitalist China, specifically targeting a small town factory that has given jobs and community pride for generations, and how the locals deal with the fact that new high-rise apartments are going up where the factory currently stands. Jia combines fiction and documentary techniques fluidly, showing those still working, the ongoing razing and construction, and emotional interviews with those most affected by what’s happening. Typically uninsistent, Jia has created an affecting document taking the pulse of a country we’re still learning about. (A Cinema Guild release) Hunger – This devastating account of IRA prisoners in a Belfast prison–culminating in the hunger strike and death of Bobby Sands–is dragged down by director Steve McQueen’s insistence on fetishizing everything, from the brutality rained down on the prisoners by their guards to the mundane aspects of their existence. Making his feature debut, British artist McQueen has an undeniable visual sense, creating stunning shots and unique points of view. Yet he shows the guards’ deadly force with a bluntness that too often slides into simple crudeness, which blunts what he’s trying to say about how these men use their bodies as weapons of last resort (which is why the guards try destroying their bodies). He also overuses recurring shots (a guard smoking outside as snow flurries fall, or the same guard putting his bloody knuckles in water after beating a prisoner), failing to transform them into meaningful leitmotifs. Hunger is a well-meaning, well-acted, well-made film that fatally overreaches. (An IFC Films release) Wendy and Lucy – After her acclaimed debut feature Old Joy, Kelly Reichert returns with another minimalist melodrama about a young woman passing through small-town Oregon on her way to Alaska with her beloved dog. Through a series of implausible events, Wendy not only loses her pet Lucy but also her car and her self-respect. Although Reichert terrifically paints this milieu and shows, through precise camerawork and editing, nicely-observed details about her heroine’s travails, the director stumbles by manipulating the poor girl, starting with her own stupidity: why steal dog food when she has enough money to buy it? Again, when the cops take her away after she’s caught shoplifting, she only murmurs from the back seat of the police car that her dog is still in front of the store; at the station, she says nothing about the dog, and is the only one surprised that her pet’s gone when she returns later in the afternoon. Such shortcuts to drama stick out precisely because the entire film is predicated on behavior–but such irrationality makes us lose sympathy very quickly. Happily, Michelle Williams gives a wonderfully modulated performance, and Reichert’s own dog gives one of the finest canine portrayals ever committed to celluloid. (An Oscilloscope Films release) Happy-Go-Lucky – Mike Leigh has created his least believable character since the silly geese who were the focus of his worst film, the insufferable Career Girls. Our happy-go-lucky gal is the eternally optimistic Poppy Cross, who feels positive about everything and everybody, no matter how downward her life is spiraling. As played by the gifted Sally Hawkins, the preposterous Poppy seems to be a walking metaphor for our ability to reject the pessimism of such a dark world. But in her daily life, Poppy comes off as deranged, getting herself into situations from which she is extracted due to God’s will or good luck (or Leigh and Hawkins’ inability to make anything authentic, rather than forced). Individual scenes and supporting bits occasionally work, but much is merely obnoxious, including a strange subplot of Poppy being given driving lessons by a xenophobic, anti-social instructor who snaps at her long after most of us would have. (Opens October 10 from Miramax Films) The Northern Land – In 1988 at the Toronto Film Festival, I squirmed through Hard Times, a dismal black and white adaptation of the Dickens novel by Portuguese director Joao Bothelo, which was also featured at the New York Film Festival. After 20 years, Bothelo is back with The Northern Land, his excruciatingly slow adaptation of a novel by Agustina Bessa Luis (the press notes tell—or warn—us that the novelist is also a great favorite of another Portuguese director, Manoel de Oliveira). Set among the imposing vistas of the island of Madeira, the story concerns a young woman’s search for facts about a scandalous female ancestor, which allows Bothelo to move back and forth among a few centuries’ worth of boring exposition and stiffly-acted melodramatics. In fact, the leading lady, Ana Moreira, who plays no fewer than five women, has a painfully limited range—why Bothelo saw fit to inflict her on us in so many different roles is unimaginable. Even visually, the film lacks punch—the impressive Madeiran landscapes and seascapes are rendered flatly and colorlessly by cinematographer Joao Ribeiro, and strained allusions to Caravaggio’s magnificent Judith Beheading Holofernes only underline the film’s emotional and dramatic emptiness. At least there’s the soundtrack, where Bothelo has included nicely-chosen chamber music by Schubert and Dvorak. Summer Hours – Olivier Assayas has directed a superior soap opera about a trio of siblings who must decide whether to sell the family estate–famous paintings, antique furniture, and all–after their 75-year-old mother unexpectedly dies. Skillfully juggling these disparate characters (oldest brother, who’s most conservative; middle sister, a free spirit living in New York and engaged to an American; youngest brother, working with a shoe company in Shanghai, his wife and three kids in tow), Assayas gives us glimpses into their lives with a single line of dialogue or a brief shot of subtle body language or minute gestures. The director even daringly frames the film with sequences showing the next generation–these characters’ children and (at the end) their friends. The parallel doesn’t completely come off, because it’s feels tacked on, but it’s a valiant attempt, nonetheless. There’s seamless acting across the board from Charles Berling, Juliette Binoche, and Jerémie Rénier as the siblings, and Edith Scob as the benevolent family matriarch. (An IFC Films release) Four Nights with Anna – Jerzy Skolimowski’s latest film has been touted as his “comeback” to the heights of his highly-praised early films like Deep End. I for one never believed in Skolimowski’s earlier mastery, and I found Four Nights with Anna resolutely nonsensical and inscrutable. It mostly follows a middle-aged loner who once witnessed the rape of a young woman but was convicted of it; a few years later, he returns to her apartment nightly to do various loving things while she sleeps, including painting her toenails, giving her a ring for her finger, and repairing her cuckoo clock. When Skolimowski–whose own comments paint his film as a non-linear, metaphorical journey, deftly disposing of any criticism about its failed surrealism–is not busy recording the meanderings of this cipher (showing him getting buggered over a sink while he’s doing dishes for the cops, I guess to parallel the raping of Anna he witnessed), he concentrates on a house fly, a daddy-long legs, and a bloated, dead cow floating down the river. So when he decides to cease making films about the human species, the director may yet have a career in nature documentaries. (Festival Centerpiece) Changeling – Angelina Jolie gives an accomplished, emotionally nuanced performance in this true story of Christine Collins, whose nine-year-old son disappeared from their Los Angeles home in 1928 and she spends years fighting police corruption to discover his whereabouts. Clint Eastwood’s leisurely-paced film recreates the Depression era unerringly, and he gets impressive acting from a cast filled with familiar faces but unfamiliar names (with the exception of John Malkovich as an ally of the grieving mother’s). A particular standout is young Eddie Alderson, who steals the movie’s best scene confessing to his role as the accomplice in a gruesome series of killings. The movie’s biggest problem is its Hollywood trappings—an absorbing true-life tale is turned into a manipulative, David vs. Goliath melodrama, as Christine is first spurned by the cops, then thrown into a psych ward that makes a potboiler like The Snake Pit look like a Bed & Breakfast by comparison. It’s unfortunate that Eastwood sabotages his own material with minimal subtlety and maximum sledgehammering. (Opens in October from Universal Pictures). |
