Film

The Best and Worst of the 45th Annual New York Film Festival

By Daniel Montgomery

Monday, October 15, 2007

At the 45th Annual New York Film Festival, I discovered films that surprised and delighted me, that challenged my intellect, or just challenged my patience. The prestigious program included films that have not yet secured distribution, as well as others that were picked up as the festival progressed, like children being adopted from the orphanage. The following are the highlights and lowlights of the festival not already covered here on Skuawk!

WOMEN ON THE VERGE

A recurring motif at this year’s festival was female protagonists on the brink, and the best among these character studies was Chang-dong Lee’s ‘Secret Sunshine’, which warrants comparisons to ‘Sophie’s Choice’ for how well it demonstrates the intractable agony of grief. In one of the year’s very best performances, Do-yeon Jeon plays Shin-ae, a recent widow who now must contend with the murder of her young son. Jeon evokes mourning as almost a seismic physical event, which shakes her apart from the core. Few actors have the talent or fortitude to reach so deeply into emotions so raw. This is an unforgettable film.

Jeon won the Best Actress prize at the Cannes Film Festival. The winner of the Palme d’Or for Best Picture was Cristian Mungiu’s ‘4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days’, also a fine film, about a pregnant woman and her roommate who attempt to secure an illegal abortion in 1980s Romania. The film focuses on the roommate, Otilia (Anamaria Marinca, whose nuanced performance is pivotal to the film’s success), and its strength is in how it shows the strain on her psyche over the course of the day, the mounting anxiety, how the experience brings to light her own fears, and how it changes her.

Other films don’t fare quite as well, but they’re all distinguished by strong leading performances. Aleksandr Sokurov’s ‘Alexandra’ is about a Russian woman (Galina Vishnevskaya) who visits her soldier grandson stationed in Chechnya. It’s a poignant look at a beleaguered country and its soldiers on the front lines, and if you view Alexandra as a personification of Mother Russia, then the interactions take on even more import. However, it’s not very accessible. I had to read the press notes just to understand much of the context, and any film that requires supplemental information has done an incomplete job of telling its story.

Ludivine Sagnier (‘Swimming Pool’) is terrific in Claude Chabrol’s ‘A Girl Cut in Two’, playing a TV weather girl torn between two men who treat her badly — a middle-aged author and a sociopathic playboy. The actress expresses sadness underneath her character’s beguiling charm, but the film never convinces us why this smart girl would want to be with either man, so we’re left with a hole in the character and the film that Sagnier can’t completely fill.

I’m at a loss to explain the meaning of ‘Actresses’, directed and co-written by its star, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi. She plays a neurotic, 40-year-old stage actress who longs to start a family before it’s too late. For a while the film has an eccentric charm, but eventually it goes off the rails. There are hallucinations, hauntings, and underdeveloped subplots including a downbeat co-star who may or may not be suicidal. At a certain point, it just doesn’t make sense.

AND THE MEN WHO LOVE THEM

‘Go Go Tales’ isn’t a romance, per se, but Ray Ruby (Willem Dafoe) certainly loves the women who work for him — in his own way. Writer/director Abel Ferrara’s comedy works in the way it shows the absurd sense of family that develops around Ruby and his cadre of strippers, whose dreams exceed their potential. Unfortunately, the male characters are unlikeable, and Ferrara lavishes too much attention on sex and nudity, which puts the emphasis on exploitation instead of on the striving of the characters. I found it creepy.

But it isn’t nearly as bad as Eric Rohmer’s ‘The Romance of Astree and Celadon’. Based on the 17th Century novel by Honoré d’Urfé, it’s a tale of young lovers separated by a presumed death, but really it’s about stupid people who do stupid things for stupid reasons. To call it an idiot plot would be an insult to idiots and plots. And it looks conspicuously amateurish; the story is set centuries ago, but it could as easily have been shot in Central Park yesterday. But maybe I just didn’t get it. Maybe it’s a sophisticated meta-commentary on … something. Maybe its seeming ineptitude is some kind of deliberate style. Or maybe it just sucks.

&Carlos Reygadas*’s ‘Silent Light’ is about a devout Mennonite husband and father who falls in love with another woman. And that’s about all there is; I estimate about 30 minutes of story in the entire 127 minute running time. It opens with a long, breathtaking shot of the sunrise, but it’s downhill from there. The shots are beautiful but interminable, and restlessness sets in quickly. I don’t think it’s much of a film, but on the plus side it’s probably the world’s best screen saver.

Much more successful is Ira Sachs’s richly entertaining ‘Married Life’, which features Chris Cooper in a brilliant performance as a man who plots to kill his wife (Patricia Clarkson) to be with his mistress (Rachel McAdams). Set in the late 1940s, and directed in a style fitting the era, it’s a domestic film noir of sorts; if Douglas Sirk had directed Double Indemnity, it might have looked something like this.

SOCIAL STUDIES

Masayuki Suo takes Japan’s legal system to task in ‘I Just Didn’t Do It’. I was suitably outraged at the injustice suffered by the main character, falsely accused of petty molestation, but the film is at least 45 minutes too long. Do we really need such a lengthy coss-examination about whose hand was where and which direction it moved? And then a reenactment? This isn’t JFK, people! Watching it feels like serving jury duty.

‘Useless’ is Jia Zhangke’s exploration of how Chinese culture interacts with the clothing industry. He makes interesting connections between seemingly disconnected people — the dirty clothes of mine workers contrasted against high-end fashion that uses dirt as a design element — but he doesn’t effectively communicate an idea of the world he documents, so the film just meanders.

It’s hard to criticize a film that brings much needed attention to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, but ‘The Axe in the Attic’ comes up short. Directors Ed Pincus and Lucia Small incorporate themselves into their documentary about their road trip to the Gulf Coast, which comes off as self-involved, but the film’s bigger problem is how derivative it is of *Spike Lee(’s much better film ‘When the Levees Broke’ — they even borrow a couple of Lee’s interview subjects!

BIO PICKS

Todd Haynes’s ‘I’m Not There’ may be one of the most unusual biopics ever made. He casts six actors to play Bob Dylan during various periods of his career, and his non-linear structure is extremely confusing if you’re not already familiar with Dylan’s life — which I wasn’t. But it gives a strong sense of the man, his mysteries and contradictions, and I was more and more grateful that it didn’t follow the pattern of films like Ray and Walk the Line, which reduced the lives of Ray Charles and Johnny Cash into more or less the same episode of VH1’s Behind the Music.

More straightforward is John Landis’s documentary ‘Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project’, which profiles the comic and along the way gives us an illuminating history of show business — who knew, for instance, that there was so much nostalgia for mob-era Las Vegas? The film features interviews with comedians ranging from Bob Newhart to Sarah Silverman, and it’s more unabashedly entertaining than any other film at the festival. I laughed long and hard.

Julian Schnabel won the directing prize at Cannes for ‘The Diving Bell and the Butterfly’, adapted from the book written by Vogue editor Jean-Dominique Bauby after a stroke left him a prisoner of his paralyzed body. Early portions are captivating, taking on a first-person point of view and giving us an intimate understanding of his condition. Later, it retreats to a third-person perspective, but it remains poignant, humane, and with a warm sense of humor that makes the film all the more gratifying.

SHORT CUTS

Among the short films included during the festival, my favorite was ‘Saturday’s Shadow’, about a Jewish father and son taunted and intimidated by teenagers. The anxiety of the encounter is palpable, and later we are moved by how the son loses faith in his father, and by how they finally comfort one another.

Fathers and sons are also the subject of ‘The Vulnerable Ones’ and ‘The Boxing Lesson’. ‘Vulnerable Ones’ features a father and son smuggling goods across a border, and along the way it highlights how the son struggles to live up to his old man’s example. Boxing Lesson is a funny film about a man who wants his son to learn to defend himself, but it reveals that he is largely exorcizing his own aggression.

‘Chinese Whispers’ is a three-minute charmer in which one student spares another’s feelings during an innocent classroom game. ‘Death to the Tin Man’ is something else entirely. It’s shot in eerie black-and-white and with a deadpan acting style that belies how utterly bizarre it is. It’s about a man who becomes disembodied, and in its twisted way it’s very funny.

I wasn’t terribly impressed by ‘Orishas: Hay Un Son’, which is little more than a music video. It’s an entertaining song, but the visual style — full of morphs and distortion — just looks like the cable is on the fritz. And ‘Franz Kafka’s A Country Doctor’ translates Kafka’s story into effectively nightmarish anime, but the story is so obtuse that I couldn’t put up with it.

The New York Film Festival serves as an effective palette cleanser between the typically mixed bag of summer blockbusters and the fall Oscar season, when studios roll out their best in the hopes of winning prizes next February. Several such films screened at the festival, and if they’re any indication, we have much to look forward to in the coming months.