Mengedegna Reviews

Terrestrial Verses (2023)

Out of Iran Yet Another Masterpiece

[10/10 · 27 April 2024]

Not for the first time, out of oppressed Iran comes a thrilling, almost life-changing film. Dodging censors and taboos, Ali Asgari and Alireza Khatami, have managed to pull off a 77-minute masterpiece in the heroic tradition of Iranian underground cinema, which constitutes a genre in its own right. Its subtle, often whimsical satire is of course deeply subversive of the Ayatollahs' regime and all its minions, but it would be a serious mistake to see this film merely as a polemic against the Islamic State (though it is that, triumphantly), rather than as a cri de coeur against banal, quotidian tyranny, against the pettily personal abuse that all power relationships in all societies generate as a matter of course.

The film's central character is Tehran itself, shown in a gloriously extended opening panorama, shot by an unmoving camera, in which the city, with its ambient noise as the only background, shifts from night to morning to full daylight. That is the only exterior shot (making a virtue of what were surely security constraints), though the film closes on much the same view, seen through the window of a high-rise, in a shattering climax the details of which should not be revealed here.

The rest of the film consists of a series of short sequences, all interiors, in which ordinary citizens of the city are filmed in long takes by a fixed camera, alone on screen but in dialogue with the petty gods of the system, who remain unseen, usually sitting behind a power-enhancing desk or something like it (partially seen in the foreground), who torment them in the heads-I-wind-tails-you-lose snakes and ladders of bureaucracy and ideology, preventing perfectly normal needs and requests from being met.

In these sequences, none of which goes on for more than 10 or 11 minutes, we witness a character, always sympathetic (or, in the case of a little girl, adorable), as they cautiously try to frame their modest request in as deferential a way as possible and then react as elaborate structures built upon absurdities, callousness, and sometimes outright abuse are piled up by the unseen interlocutors. Each solo performer proceeds to give us a masterclass in the actor's art as she or he shifts from caution to carefully masked irritation, to abject hopelessness as whatever it is they care about is ground to a pulp, and their dignity with it. In each case (save for that little girl's), there comes a moment when the victim snaps, when they can no longer endure the cruel gibberish they're facing, only to quickly retreat into self-defensive caution and deference, knowing as they do (and, through sheer acting alchemy, showing us, heartbreakingly, that they know) that things could otherwise only get far worse. Each sequence ends in soul-searing defeat, and the effect upon us as spectators is devastating, with the devastation expanding cumulatively with each sequence. And if you think that this stuff only happens in the Islamic Republic and that it doesn't happen, in only slightly different form, here, there and everywhere else, you are truly a fool.

In a lively Q&A at NYC's Film Forum, Alireza Khatami revealed that, in keeping with the underground nature of the project, the actors were all recruited without being given any idea of the overall structure of the film, so that each sequence is in effect a discrete short subject. The actors, he said, all knew they were taking a risk, and subsequently each was indeed interrogated by the authorities about what had gone on. The creation of the film, in other words, required heroism and defiance from all involved. And yet I wouldn't have needed any of that background to conclude that this small yet major masterpiece is, for me, the film of the year so far, and I seriously doubt that it will be displaced. It is a must-see for every serious, engaged citizen of whatever nation, state or territory. May the gods of film distribution make it available to as many such viewers as possible.

Io Capitano (2023)

Garrone abandons the uncompromising grimness of "Gomorrah" for something more feel-good

[7/10 · 25 February 2024]

Matteo Garrone's 2008 "Gomorrah" was an unflinching look at Naples' nihilistic underworld, and in particular at the lives of youngsters who are swept up into it. It had the advantage of being based on the reporting and a related novel of Roberto Saviano (who also was credited as a co-screenwriter), and it offered little in the way consolatory bits of good-news optimism - it was this unwillingness to sugar coat a human disaster, but rather to portray it in all its relentless horror, that gave that film its strength.

In "Io Capitano", Matteo Garrone takes as his subject the calvary of African clandestine migration toward Europe, a journey that -- like the parallel journey toward the southern border of the U. S. (only more perilous, as it involves sea crossings) -- leads to appalling suffering and, too frequently, to horrible and wasteful deaths. That many do make it and manage to grab on to mostly marginal existences in Europe should not divert our concern from the tens of thousands who die somewhere along the way, or from the gratuitous suffering of all who attempt the journey, something that rational and more generous formal immigration policies could instantly alleviate.

Yet Garrone in this case turns his back on "Gommorah"'s rigorous realism and gives us instead an over-esthetized, gorgeously portrayed Issue film that takes us through the stages of the journey from Sahelian Africa to Libya and beyond as we know them from the many accounts that reach us through the news media, packages them, and presents them as boxes to be checked, interspersed with sudden (and generally implausible) feel-good plot twists. Some of the episodes (in particular the crossing of the Sahara from Mali to Libya) are indeed portrayed as harrowing, but the beauty of the imagery and some of the fantasy devices that Garrone uses (very lovely in their way) soften the reality.

And much of the tale is downright inaccurate, based on what we know. To begin with, these days most would-be clandestine migrants from Senegal don't travel via North Africa, but instead sail off into the Atlantic in small boats, heading toward the Spanish Canary Islands. This crossing is even more dangerous than that of the Mediterranean, but at least you don't have to run the gauntlet of the gangs of kidnappers, extorters and enslavers who line the Sahara-North Africa route and who are depicted here in cursory (and often barely plausible) segments that give way to longer, more heart-warming episodes. And were the film's climactic sequence to occur in real life as it is depicted here, with the protagonist triumphantly raising his fist and crying out "I am the Captain!", he would most likely be arrested on the spot by the Italian authorities and charged with human trafficking, as many in exactly his situation have been in Italy and more recently in the UK.

There is much to admire in purely cinematic terms, starting with the gorgeous, color-saturated photography (as opposed to the appropriately grim, washed-out look of "Gomorrrah") and the lovely depictions of family life in Dakar (along with an admirable refusal to show it as an unrelenting misery that the protagonists have no choice but to flee), and, above all, wonderful performances by the two teenage boys who are those protagonists, whose bond is central to the plot and touching in its affectionate naturalness. Seydou Sarr and Moustapha Fall are hugely talented and I hope to see more of them soon.

For all my reservations, I'd welcome a sequel that picks things up from where they leave off here - there is, inevitably, a whole further chapter to be written.

So by all means go to see "Io Capitano" for all this very good stuff. But know that this film is about as credible a depiction of modern migration from Africa as "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas" is of the Holocaust. The topic deserves something more uncompromising - the equivalent of "Gomorrah", for example.

Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara (2023)

An honorable effort to grapple with a complex subject, and a visual treat

[8/10 · 4 October 2023]

Seen at NYFF61.

As with "The Traitor", another broad-brush panorama of a changing world, Marco Bellocchio's political sympathies are not hidden, but the dilemmas and perplexities facing his characters can often be oversimplified. Here in "Kidnapped", he recounts a shameful episode in the waning days of Papal secular power prior to the unification of the Italian state, in which a 6-year-old Jewish boy is ordered by the authorities (they of the "Holy Office" of Inquisition infamy) to be yanked from the arms of his parents because of an alleged furtive and illicit baptism performed when his was an infant, making him a Christian who, for the protection of his immortal soul, could no longer be raised in a Jewish family. He is taken to Rome, to be raised in an institution for converted boys destined for the priesthood, while his case becomes an international scandal, seized upon by anti-clerical circles throughout Europe and beyond, to the immense irritation of the Pope and the Curia.

The notion of dogma is central to Bellocchio's account (he co-wrote the screenplay), with those of both the Church and of the Jewish community leaving the boy, Edgardo, yanked between the two, emotionally crippled. (To be sure we get the point, Edgardo innocently recites a rote definition of the word during a visit by the Pope.) And the annexation of the Papal States by the anti-clerical Kingdom of Italy, which should have brushed aside religious impediments to the by-then young adult Edgardo's resumption of a relationship with his family, also fails the cause of secularization and human agency through the intercession of the dead hand of yet another dogma, this one of the secular-legal kind. Any chances of putting aside impediments to loving human relationships are thus dashed.

The narration is uneven and at times a bit paint-by-numbers, but the screenplay, while over-the-top is some places, elsewhere shows self-restraint, for example in not seeking to caricature Edgardo's treatment at the hands of the Church as brutal (beyond, of course, the brutality of the kidnapping itself and of the ongoing separation from his family). While clearly putting institutional self-interest first, the priests and nuns are shown as acting with kindness and even a form of love for the boys in their care. Despite moments of rebellion, Edgardo is shown as being irrevocably absorbed into their world, even as change swirls all around them. The psychological evolution here might have been treated with greater precision and subtlety, but Bellocchio in the end makes his point, which I take to be that there is no going back on the forces that shape us, however perverse.

Visually, the film is a treat. Bellocchio, the well-named "beautiful eye", treats us to color-saturated, painterly sequences - some of the interior shots seem downright, if self-consciously, Vermeerish. And Bellocchio has always a gift for casting - "Kidnapped" may in the end be worth watching just for the tremendous performance of Paolo Pierobon as Pius IX, the last Pope to reign over the Papal States, whose bone-headed, unflinching self-certitude (it was he who formalized the doctrine of papal infallibility even as his political actions demonstrated its opposite) served as an accelerant of his ultimate downfall. (Pierobon's physical resemblance, in different ways, to both the late John-Paul II and Benedict XVI is surely not accidental.) So many other, smaller roles, are ideally taken and vividly portrayed. Like "The Traitor", this is very much an ensemble performance, and all the finer for it.

"Kidnapped" is an honorable effort to grapple with a complex subject, and even if it settles in the end for some facile exposition, it is well worth seeing. At a time when so many films are so narrowly focused, often hermetically so, on issues of self-realization and personal relationships, it's nice to see a project with some ambition and scope, even one that, as here, doesn't completely meet its promise.

Biosphere (2022)

A post-apocalyptic Odd Couple. Fun for awhile.

[7/10 · 16 June 2023]

Two Gen X guys are isolated in a biosphere and may be the last humans alive: this is surely one of the oddest bromance set-ups to come along in a long time. We learn their shared backstory progressively, though never in much detail. The little we know, both about their backgrounds and about the technological underpinnings of their habitat, doesn't make much sense when you stop to think about it, but clearly the idea is that you're not supposed to.

The two survive on a limited supply of before-times foods, both of the edible (in cans) and cultural kinds (Nitendo, pop music on vinyl, some books, some old videos and a set of Shakespeare sitting unread on the shelf stand in for all that is left of world civilization), and by keeping up a steady stream of humorous-aggressive banter that builds up to the breaking point and then (since they are apparently doomed to live together in a Sartrean, or Beckettesque, no-exit dyad until their deaths) recedes, in carefully-timed, almost operatic, waves of aggression and affection . They have, we learn, been close since childhood. That they are both American (very) is obvious, yet that one of them (the smarter one) is Black and the other (the more successful one, of course) is white is never mentioned or explored -- it just is, like so much in this odd, but affecting, film.

It helps that the Sterling K. Brown and Mark Duplass (a co-writer and the originator of this baroque and perhaps overwritten screenplay) have a lot of the chemistry and verve (if not always the perfect timing) of Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, the original Odd Couple, and so the many terrific jokes (against the grimmest possible backdrop) are brought off with real brio, keeping things mostly light (interspersed with those moments of tension) and the audience laughter flowing.

Needless to say, the sexual discomfort of two straight American bros flung into claustrophobic intimacy will lead into dangerous challenges to gender assumptions. Calling each other "dude" serves as a talisman, the crucifix and holy water that ward off the unthinkable, until things take a turn for the immensely bizarre. Since the filmmakers are hugely sensitive about spoilers and desperate that those who have seen the film keep the actual plot lines secret, I'll say no more about that side of things, but what happens does allow for some serious reflection on those themes, if you care to look beyond the gags. Even though, again, what actually happens doesn't make a lot of sense if you think about it very hard or even not very. (Nor does what happens to the very important fish with which the two share their little world, and which all are given well-deserved credits, as does their wrangler.)

A two-actor, cast in a sealed environment, would perhaps lend itself better to being a stage play. As a film, it is plenty diverting, but it probably goes on a little longer (through at least a couple too many of those waves of tension and release) than is ideal. Using a single set also poses cinematographic challenges, though these are on the whole quite well handled, making the film perhaps more watchable than you might expect. The ending is a bit arbitrary -- it's like the dynamics between the two are a kind of perpetual-motion machine that can only be stopped by, well, simply stopping it. But it's all great fun while it's happening. Even though, if you do stop and think about it, having these two guys be (maybe) the last humans is a also a pretty depressing thought.

Fireworks (2023)

A gay Cavalleria Rusticana? Yes, but a very powerful one

[9/10 · 2 June 2023]

In the words of its director, Giuseppe Fiorello, a veteran actor here making his first film as director, "Fireworks" is a reimagining of a true, and tragic, event that occurred in a an emotionally straitened Sicily in the early 1980s. At the U. S. premiere this afternoon at Film at Lincoln Center, he stated that he made it not from any generic ambition to become a director, but from an urgent need to tell this specific story, and to tell it sincerely and without any genre encumberments - there is no post-facto investigation of the events, and no trial of the accused - only the events themselves, as seen mainly through the eyes of the two young protagonists, Gabriele Pizzuru and Samuele Segreto, who are both magnificent in their openness and spontaneity. Fiorello wanted, he said, to make this film to be about, above all, the "delicacy of adolescence" ("and we all have been adolescents," he added), and in achieving this, he chose well.

The tale unfolds in small-town Sicily, at a time of Vespas, lire, and bellbottoms, with the 1982 FIFA World Cup as background (Italy's victories, played out locally on ancient TV screens, punctuate the action). While there are a few lovely seashore settings, this is not the Sicily of postcards, of the streets and cathedrals of Palermo or the majesty of Mt. Etna. This is a place where the earth is bruised by a huge quarry and where there is constant censure and bullying by a community of small minds, the better to enforce a stifling conformity, drawing on Mafia thugs to beat it into errant neighbors if all else fails. All this is portrayed by an ensemble cast that includes what seem like quite a few local amateurs. (For greater authenticity, the film is in the Sicilian language, with only occasional, and brief, code shifts into Italian - even the original title, "Stranizza d'amure", is in Sicilian. I assume the film must have been shown in Italy with subtitles.) In the Q&A, the still very boyish leads emphasized how working as part of such a collective of more experienced actors was deeply enriching.

There are sequences that seem a bit overstaged (again, this is a début film), but this matters less and less as the boys meet by accident (literally, in a motorbike collision - too cute? Possibly, but very nicely done), and form an instant friendship that moves on to what,, in this setting, becomes far more perilous. Gianni is absorbed into Nino's welcoming extended family, and eventually joins Nino in his father's fireworks business (hence the English title). The intensity of all the many intersecting relationships increases bit by bit, reaching an almost unbearable level, until the hammer blows of local reality strike unforgivingly.

Bring plenty of Kleenex for this one, but, with its powerful social and dramatic subtext, the film is something far more moving and meaningful than any simple weepy could ever be. Is it a bit operatic? Yes, for sure, but, as at the end of any decent performance of Mascagni's Sicilian masterpiece, you wipe away your tears and jump up to shout Bravo - as the audience this afternoon indeed did. May the fickle gods of U. S. distribution get this terrific gem onto as many screens as possible!

The Night of the 12th (2022)

A police procedural of uncommon wit and subtlety

[8/10 · 26 May 2023]

In its bones, this is a police procedural of a pretty classic sort, albeit with an overlay of social awareness, But it's done with enough style and restraint to make it a very satisfying example of the genre, in an excellent French tradition that goes back to Quai des Orfèvres and the outstanding 2005 film Le Petit lieutenant, to name just those. It involves a group of cops from the Grenoble branch of France's Police judiciaire, the equivalent of the criminal-investigation side of the FBI (vs. The latter's national-security functions, which are handled elsewhere). The P. J. takes over from the local police or (in this case) the gendarmerie, in really tough and complex investigations, as it does in the real-life murder case that is re-enacted here. Operating in tandem with an investigating magistrate, it has, as is demonstrated here, awesome investigative powers.

Not that they are of much use in this frustrating case, where, as the chief investigator points out, any of a whole range of suspects could easily have been the murderer of an attractive, charismatic young woman as she returns home on foot from an evening with her pals, even though there's no convincing evidence against any of them. It's no spoiler to say that the case, which eats away at the investigators, remains unsolved -- we're told this before the film even starts. So there are no triumphs of police work, and all seeming breakthroughs lead nowhere, all of which gives the film unusual texture. The agents are smart, determined, well-trained, and sensitive, and the film is as much about how they deal (not always well) with the limitations they come up against as it is about the more explicit, and perhaps overemphasized, theme of male abuse of women.

Some of the usual tropes of the genre are present. There are tensions within a group of policemen (the one woman appears later, to welcome effect) of contrasting personalities, with arguments over procedure and over basic philosophies, and there's a digression into the marital difficulties of one of them, Marceau, played powerfully by the Belgian actor Bouli Lanners. All this is handled with uncommon deftness and understatement. Add to this the spectacular mountain scenery of the Grenoble area, and La nuit du 12 drew me in and held me.

Much of the film is carried on the shoulders of the strikingly youthful lead investigator, Capitaine Yohann Vivès, played very convincingly by relative newcomer Bastien Bouillon, for whom I hope this will be a breakthrough. Both the character and the actor himself are given tough assignments. In the actor's case, the screenplay calls for him to communicate via long silences, during which he is required to react through only the subtlest shifts of expression, something he does remarkably well. He's also very convincing in his handling of the smart, slangy dialogue that the excellent screenplay assigns to him. Not all the sharp wordplay can make it into the subtitles, but the laughter around me this evening made it seem like not that much is lost, either.

So: La Nuit du 12 may not be a great classic for the ages, but, for its thoughtfulness, its wit and sincerity, and some very fine acting by all concerned, it is a very satisfying entertainment.

The Eight Mountains (2022)

A sensationally good, an thus rare, film about male friendship

[9/10 · 11 May 2023]

These days, when the emphasis in so many independent films is (for completely understandable reasons of prior neglect) on the feelings and relationships of women, here is a film that strides unapologetically into unusual territory - the complex emotional ties of two straight men who (with sometimes lengthy absences) have been close friends since boyhood. This is not to be confused with banal bromance films, with their pat tropes and (in too many cases) their uneasy joking about (yuk!) gayness. This is about two guys who sincerely, deeply love each other, even as they seek out and experience sexual intimacy with women. Could it be that the subtlety with which their relationship is portrayed was made possible by the many fine woman-centric films we have seen of late and that explore similar themes? Whatever, because it avoids clichés and cheap high-emotion plot twists (there are so many sequences when I braced for these and then, blessedly, they don't come), the film is deeply moving, and this avoidance of the explicit and the obvious places it, for me at least, on a higher plane than other recent efforts that cover similar territory (the recent, and in its own way excellent, Belgian film "Close", for example, in which the sexual pull between two early-adolescent boys is more fully developed, or the comparatively overblown "Banshees of Inisherin", which hammers away at you with cheaper, plot-driven superficiality).

The story is made all the more powerful by its examination of the complex relationships of the two boys, and later young men, with their respective fathers, and particularly with the father of Pietro, the narrator, (masterfully played by Filippo Timi) who, we eventually understand, became a central influence in the lives of both. The father of Bruno, the other protagonist, remains an unseen, malign presence -- though he does seem to have appeared in earlier cuts, since IMDB lists a credit for him. (Though the film in its present form clocks in at 2h27min, one does get the sense that there's a lot that ended up on the cutting room floor, which possibly accounts for how the later Nepal-located episodes seem somewhat underdeveloped and undermotivated. I would love to see a director's cut - I imagine it would be even richer and more rewarding.)

The acting throughout is on the highest level, including in the roles of the two protagonists as boys and as grown men. Luca Marinelli, in particular, who plays Pietro as a young adult, gives a stunning, understated, totally credible and moving performance. (He bears a striking resemblance to the young Gael Garcia Bernal, although, on the evidence of this film, his gifts as an actor may be greater.) The majesty of the mountain scenery (in the alpine Aosta valley) is stunningly portrayed and acts a glue to the film, grounding it in a specific reality and binding the characters to each other.

The one false note (if you will pardon the pun) lies in the soundtrack, which unaccountably draws on the English-language bleatings of a Swedish singer/songwriter named Daniel Norgren, who makes great, and to my mind cheesy, use of the organ. When the latter swells up at key moments, some of the air gets sucked out of the film's emotions. In a film of such delicacy and acuteness of observation, these moments seem like intrusions. This is one of those films that doesn't need music to make its impact, and the directors should perhaps have had the courage to leave well enough alone, as demonstrated by a few, hugely powerful shots that occur in near-total silence. But, with something this fine overall, that is a quibble.

Other People's Children (2022)

A rom-com à la française is still a rom-com

[4/10 · 27 April 2023]

A rom-com à la française is still a rom-com, and this is a particularly poor one. Why it's currently being shown with the imprimatur of Film at Lincoln Center I cannot fathom. The film involves some talented performers, particulalrly Roschdy Zem. I'm even willing to believe that Virginie Efira, the protagonist, is in fact talented. But director Rebecca Zlotowski's obsession with her is carried to such a a discomforting extreme that 80% of the film (I may be exaggerating just a little) is made up of tight shots of her face striking different attitudes, without a lot of the kind of background or build-up that would justify most of them. And one of the more interesting plot lines - she's Jewish, he's named Ali and is thus presumptively Muslim - goes totally unexplored. You get a lot of performative Jewish observance, but nothing about his heritage, whatever it may be (the niceties of French republicanism allow this to pass without comment). Like his excessively cute daughter, Ali isn't a full- blown charcter, he's just a plot device. All the attention is on Efira'a character, her concern over what may be premature menopause, and her poorly backgrounded neuroses. None of which is developed to the point where this viewer, at least, was particularly interested. More romantic views of Paris are inserted than are justified, other than for marketing purposes - compare and contrast with the current and far better, more substantive Everything Went Fine, a film set in Paris in which there is not a single shot of the Eiffel Tower or any other hint of Paris la romantique, but that is rigorously set in the Paris that people actually live in.

To go one would be cruel, and pointless, like the film itself, which is a real dud. Good music score, though.

Stars at Noon (2022)

Hunh??? What was that all about?

[4/10 · 4 October 2022]

Claire Denis is a major, indeed cult-level director. Her films are always challenging and often enigmatic (as well as always full of sensuality), but" Stars at Noon" (screened at the 2022 NY Film Festival) is a little too much of all that -- enigmatic is one thing, but this one is outright flummoxing. It's a film about two people who seem to meet anecdotally (but, we soon realize, maybe not so much) in, apparently, Nicaragua (within Panama standing in for it), amid a dirty war. She's American, he's a Brit, and they instantly develop a passionate attraction (she's been turning tricks, and so their first engagement is transactional, but things go on from there). They each seem to have LOTS of secrets, which complicates their relationship (and befuddles viewers) no end, especially since these seem to be to cause a lot of bad guys coming, or at least seeming to come, after both of them, or maybe just after him, for reasons that remain frustratingly unspecified.

Claire Denis' ability to fill a screen with intensity is often here, but I was expecting a more textured expression of her lifelong engagement with the asymmetries of North-South interactions, so acutely deployed in films like "Chocolat" and "Beau travail". Perhaps because she's working in English (why?) and working in Central America instead of in the African settings in which she grew up, there is a disappointing lack of specificity here -- everything is generic and , surprisingly for this director, much of it verges on cliché. (And, just to make things even more frustrating, much of the dialogue, though in English, is indecipherable, especially that of Margaret Qualley, the high-intensity She in this She/He tale -- she slurs and garbles a lot of her lines, sounding almost like a non-native speaker with some slight but unidentifiable accent, though she's supposed to be an American -- something a native-speaker director might have been at greater pains to correct.)

In the Q&A this evening, Mme Denis emphasized how much she admired. Denis Johnson's novel, making it clear that this project had been in gestation for a long time (longer still due to all the well-known barriers to getting anything done during pandemic times). Though Johnson was dead before the screenplay was written, he is given a screen-writer credit -- Mme Denis was a pains to point out that much of the dialogue was lifted verbatim from the novel. That may be part of the problem -- she speaks reasonably good English, but she perhaps lacks the ability to spot (as surely she would in French) how wooden some of the lines are, and how unnatural much of the speech.

So, despite some trademark striking Claire Denis sequences, the applause at Alice Tully Hall was pretty perfunctory (for the film -- much more enthusiasm, deservedly, for her), and I'm guessing that, of the 1,000, more or less, people there, many, like me, left scratching their heads and wondering what that had all been about, and who was doing what (onscreen and in the opaque background) to whom, and why. Despite its Grand Prix at Cannes, this, alas, will probably not go down as a masterpiece, which, coming from her, has to be a disappointment.

Nope (2022)

"Nope" is very watchable

[8/10 · 29 July 2022]

"Nope" is in very wide release, including at my neighborhood local, and it has been reviewed favorably by A.0. Scott and Anthony Lane, so I thought I'd give it a try. It's a crazy mishmash of a sorta sci-fi thriller + some other stuff (think Westerns via "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood") and, as is the way with such films, it makes progressively less sense as the end approaches and the screenwriter/director, Jordan Peele, has to find a way to wrap it all up, but even then it's enjoyable. There are unspecified aliens involved (who have their moods -- they -- or perhaps It -- can be petulant) but it does remain earthbound.

In contrast to the much-ballyhooed "Dune", for example, "Nope" is visually very engaging, and it actually has lots of wit and a sense of humor. The characters are a bit flat -- written in soapoperatic mode, which means that they more the sum of their individual, instantly-identifiable tics than well-rounded humans, but most of he actors actually transcend this at many points, if not throughout. Daniel Kaluuya, a British newcomer (at least to me), in particular, is remarkable. Particularly remarkable is how unremarkably he is (and asserts himself as) the lead, as a Black man who, in complete unselfconsciousness (and with help, I would guess, from a world-class dialect coach), makes no concessions to whiteness. To see a wide-distribtuion commercial film whose lead is Black, with a White sidekick/subordinate, should not be so startling (and refreshing), but there it is, and should be noted. And I certainly hope we'll be seeing lots more of Kaluuya going forward.

What hooked me particularly was how so much of the film, in mood and approach (and even, in places, in its sound world), is reminiscent of the great Apichatpong Weerasethakul-- I would refuse to believe that Peele had not seen "Memoria" before making this one. It's Apichatpong for general distribution, so those long, nearly-silent takes are foreshortened, and it has a very effective score, which you'd never find in an Apichatpong film, and the allusive metaphysics are, uh, simplified. But so much of "Nope" is so strikingly evocative of his work that this cannot be a coincidence.

Lost Illusions (2021)

"The Rules of the Game" for our times?

[10/10 · 13 June 2022]

Xavier Gianolli's breakthrough film may at first glance to seem like, ho-hum, another period costume drama. But that's before you realize that the source is Honoré de Balzac (as with his hero here, the aristocratic "de" was self-attributed), the merciless dissector of society's corruption and malice.

The period in question (one that isn't often seen in films or novels) is that of France under the post-Napoleonic Restoration of the monarchy, likely during the reign of Louis XVIII, who allowed a measure of post-revolutionary freedoms to persist until pressure from the ultra-royalist faction became irresistible and led to a crackdown. Physical details and social relations are, as far as I can tell, depicted with rigorous fidelity, including in the musical background, drawn from that period and from the preceding century - Vivaldi and Rameau to Mozart and Schubert.

The story line, based faithfully on one of Balzac's greatest works, follows a well-trodden path: provincial boy dreams of turning his good looks and his modest gifts as (in this case) a poet into a life of love, fame and fortune. External forces conspire bring him to Paris, where he plunges into a snakes-and-ladders ascension, casting aside caution and ever more scruples until his presumption (both social and artistic) is, inevitably and crushingly, exposed. (Coincidentally, the Metropolitan Opera has just ended a brief run of Stravinsky's marvelous opera "The Rake's Progress", whose basic plot line, taken from what today we would call a graphic novel of the same name by the XVIIIth century engraver William Hogarth, tracks eerily with Balzac's - but of course with so many others' as well.)

The film is dazzlingly well acted by everyone involved, starting with the handsome Benjamin Voisin as Lucien Chardon, a callow pharmacist's son (who assumes the name Lucien de Rubempré, thus signalling his pretension to an aristocratic background that the real aristocrats quickly catch on to and do not forgive), whom others play like a violin to achieve their own, usually foul, aims. His sudden transformation from innocent, awkward, likeable provincial into an absurd fop is stunning to behold. His moral innocence is washed away just as quickly, but he is never clever nor evil-minded enough to keep up with those with power and far greater experience who, for an array of reasons, pull puppet strings to ensure his destruction.

Paris, both among bohemian (but always cynical) littérateurs and unscrupulous journalists and publishers (with a scenery-eating cameo by Gérard Depardieu as a successful publisher who can neither read nor write but who has an unfailing sense of what will sell), is shown to be a machine for crushing innocence, ambition, and talent - a place where all that matters is your connections, your ability to please, and your willingness to achieve your ends by whatever means. Prostitution is universal, and everyone, not just the city's many overt sex workers, is prostituted in one way or another.

It's a wonderfully gifted cast, including the particularly wonderful Cécile de France as the aristocratic deus ex machina whose lust for Lucien sets the plot in motion; the earthy Salomé Dewaels as Lucien's true love (she will surely be going places after this); and a host of journeymen and women from the deep well of French acting talent. All take their roles with gusto and real depth. Every face, even in crowd scenes, is expressive, every nuance (so important amid such highly codified social constructs) is pitch perfect.

Jeanne Balibar as the Marquise d'Espar is the terrifying arbiter of all the nuances and proprieties by which everyone else is assessed as belonging to proper Society, or, in most cases, not. And special notice must be taken of a stunningly understated performance by the young Canadian wunderkind actor and director Xavier Dolan, not until now known for understatement. Yet here he is, a darkly recessive, chillingly alert and watchful presence -- and, boy, does he nail his role as the agent of Lucien's nemesis. Kudos also to Vincent Lacoste, until now only seen in unambitious soap operas and telefilms, who does a wonderfully engaging turn as the Lucien's hash-smoking mentor, initiating him into the dark arts of journalistic prostitution, revealing to him the ease with which, if one is only willing to be unscrupulous and clever enough, one can use the dark arts of fake news to casually destroy lives and careers while gaining wealth.

Beautifully filmed, perfectly paced, this takes the best of the Jane Austin films, for example, and gives them a Gallic (and so, of course, cynical) twist. Balzac's is a world of endless fake news and mindless ambition, in which there are no happy endings, and in which the tragedies of others are merely the subject of tight self-satisfied smiles. Jane's world, in which an ambitious young woman can in the end become the master of at least part of her fate, is far away. This one is a lot closer to ours, and this film might just be "La Règle du jeu" for our times.

PS on accents: For perhaps understandable reasons, the historical verisimilitude is cast aside when it comes to speech. Thus not only does Xavier Dolan completely drop his Québecois accent (so pronounced in his own films), but he and everyone speaks the French equivalent of the King's English -- in this case perfect, modern Parisian. I must go back and see if Balzac says anything on the subject, but Lucien is from the Charentes, in southwesstern France, and would have arrived in Paris with a very pronounced accent which would instantly have exposed him as a provincial (to the literary world) and a commoner (to the aristocratic one). Understandably, the film doesn't go there, but it's worth reflecting on why.

Great Freedom (2021)

Be True to Yourself. No compromises.

[9/10 · 7 March 2022]

In 1980 Frank Ripploh gave us "Taxi zum klo", a raunchy, rather self-satisfied (albeit slightly mocking) look at the gay scene in Berlin of that time, with a singular focus on the bulimic sexual doings of Ripploh, playing himself as one of its committed denizens. With his terrific Austro-German "Great Freedom", Sebatian Meiser takes us back to that period and to all that had gone before and gives a corrective, eschewing all the clichés about gay life, prison life, German life, or just-plain life and love that you can think of. Freedom, he seems to be telling us, comes from within and must be conquered individually, against the massive odds that society puts up against it. Toward the end of this new film, we are given a glimpse of the pseudo-freedom in which Ripploh gloried. Meiser tells us that this Great Freedom is not the real thing at all, and that affirming your sexuality alone, without an understanding of your whole self and the constraints of the world you live in, is meaningless.

At a Q&A at NYC's Film Forum last night, Meiser stated that he had had Franz Rogoski in mind as the protagonist as he was developing the project, and that if Rogoski had turned him down he didn't know what he would have done. Since Hans, Rogoski's character, is present in almost every frame of this picture (including ones shot in total darkness), we are never left in doubt as to why Meiser felt this: Rogoski gives us what has to be one of the most intelligent, committed, uncompromising performances of that past decade, at least. Hans, we learn (or are led to infer), had been convicted of lewd homosexual acts by the Nazis and thrown into a concentration camp (details of all that, and of how he survived, are left to our imaginations) only to be imprisoned again in 1945 under the post-war Allied occupation, to serve out the balance of his sentence. From then onward, his life largely unfolds behind bars, as the German penal code's Paragraph 175, outlawing gay sexual activity, ensures that whenever he gets out of jail and asserts his right to be himself, an unapologetic gay man hungry for connection, he ends up back in prison. Which is where most of the film takes place, within a perfectly realized, relentlessly grim carceral world which differs from the grim outside world only in its details and rituals.

Forget any notions you've gained from redundant genre films about gay people (tormented and/or triumphant), or of any prison film you have ever seen, or of any love story you can think of, or indeed any expectations at all. Rogoski's realization of Meiser's uncompromising vision is note perfect, and therefore harrowing. He has been compared to Joachim Phoenix, and I see the point, but, much as I admire Phoenix when he's in the right hands, Rogoski goes farther and deeper into his character than I have seen Phoenix do. (Though perhaps Phoenix has never gotten to work with a director of Meiser's talent.)

There's plenty of violence here, physical and psychological, but it is treated as being the in the natural order of things: we are not invited to be shocked, or scandalized, but rather to reflect on how banal it is, and on how little prison differs from life outside. In this way, "Great Freedom" (has any movie title ever been as ironic?) takes us back to the existentialists: to Sartre's "Hell is other people", to Camus' Dr. Rieux in Oran under quarantine.

This is a film about being true to yourself, in life and in love, set against a world that has other ideas about who you are and who you are expected to be and that will grind you down every chance it gets. It' a masterpiece.

Memoria (I) (2021)

It's all about those long takes

[9/10 · 2 January 2022]

Tilda Swinton has been having an astonishing few years. Since her breakthrough as the gender-nonspecific Orlando (1992, Sally Potter), she has been steadily busy, but, with 17 titles listed in IMDb just for 2020 through those still in post-production, this has to have been a frenzied period for one of our most accomplished actors. And two of those titles, The Human Voice and, now, Memoria, are projects built around her by a couple of the most prestigious directors in the business, Pedro Almodóvar and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, respectively - directors that many actors would kill for just to get cast in one of their productions. (Swinton is credited as executive producer of Memoria.)

All the more amazing, then, that she was able to slow down and enter the intense, time-nonspecific and, frankly, difficult world of Weerasethakul, the Thai director known as a master of the enigmatic long take. The cool understatement around which she has built her career serves her well here, and, through her presence and her commitment, she creates a level of emotional involvement for at least this audience member that is, frankly, not what Weerasethakul is known for, even if his Tropical Malady (2004) and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) each has deeply intense and moving moments.

But you don't go to a Weerasethakul film for the excitement. This one was made in Colombia, although, again typically, you don't get a lot of explanation for what Swinton (or indeed Weerasethakul himself) is doing there. In a Weerasethakul film, you know that back stories will be hinted at sketchily, and that it's best not to try to identify too much of a sequential plot line. Who precisely the characters are in relation to each other, or to anything else for that matter, is left mysteriously imprecise, and what you have instead is a dream world in which interior sensations and objective elements of lives are mingled without anything specific to distinguish them. While there is some very fine acting indeed in this film, both from Swinton and from a superb actor, presumably Colombian, named Elkin Díaz ( about whom IMDb , at least, has no inofrmation) this is a Weerasethakul film, meaning that meaning is carried principally by those extremely long, nearly silent shots, usually of nature (though the streetscapes and parks of Bogotá seem to work just as well), in which the only sounds are natural (wind, rain, birds, insects, traffic, voices off). These either move you deeply and transport you into another dimension (as is certainly the case for me), or they drive you crazy with boredom, as I know they do for many viewers. For these sequences, the Colombian countryside works just as spectacularly well as does that of Thailand: both are lushly tropical, where rain on leaves almost becomes a character in its own right, and that's all he needs to work his magic.

Beyond that, what to say? The meeting between the Swinton and Elkan Diáz characters may appear to be totally random, yet it is the crucial episode of the film, and everything that has gone before has built up to it. It has both a deep metaphysical dimension and a powerful eco-scifi aspect that should astonish you but that may leave many viewers puzzled and frustrated. But for Weerasethakul fans like me, it is transporting, and I'm not alone: last night, at the last screening in the all-to-brief awards-qualifying run the film had the IFC Center, the venue was packed, despite omicron, and the stillness in the room during the final sequence (a long shot of a naturescape, of course), and beyond, through the credits (with the natural soundscape extended) was intense and, in itself, moving. It takes time to come out of a trance like that., Few viewers left before the lights came up, despite the extraordinarily long listing of supporters and contributors, Weerasethakul is the director we need for these times, and this film is a deeply meaningful masterpiece, or very nearly.

PS: At one point, as she's wandering around the University of Colombia campus, Swinton happens onto a performance by a jazz combo anchored by a pianist who looks astonishingly like the young Martha Argerich, the great Argentinian virtuoso. It's a wonderful performance. I covet their next album.

Licorice Pizza (2021)

Not one of Anderson's best efforts

[6/10 · 25 December 2021]

I am among the many admirers of Paul Thomas Anderson, and had been sitting through all the carefully-calibrated buzz for Licorice Pizza in eager anticipation of seeing something marvelous. Alas, this is not his finest effort.

One "Once Upon A Time in Hollywood" was enough. Tarantino's elbow-in-the ribs unfurling of industry insider jokes was done with more flair. "Licorice Pizza" covers some of the same ground, minus the Manson murders and without performances that come close to matching Brad Pitt's virtuosity in "Once Upon a Time". Like Tarantino, Anderson focuses his tale on an implausible pairing of characters, in this case a precocious, overgrown teenage boy and a woman in her twenties who seems to have missed out on being a teenager and is, through her mostly platonic relationship with the boy, regressing, rather (she tells of her sisters) in ways that puzzle her (and us). Anderson, who can be masterful in getting you to believe in implausible characters and relationships, doesn't quite hit the mark here.

The two young stars are clearly talented. Playing Gary, Cooper Hoffman displays many of the physical attributes and much of the wonderfully understated talent of his great, lamented father Philip Seymour, and he will, I hope, soon find his way into parts with more subtlety and depth. Playing the role of Alana Haim, Alana Haim is, as the critics have all been pointing out, a real find, although including her real-life nuclear family as characters is probably a bit too much information, and has to have been constraining for her. And the ensuing overuse of Jewish in-jokes (especially one that is both unamusingly vulgar and far too obvious - something out of a cheap sitcom, not a film by a major director) seems to me gratuitous.

The pair wanders through a series of incidents that seem mostly to have been invented to give purpose-recruited big (or biggish) names some way to strut their stuff. Though there are some good laughs to be had, none of these make much sense or relate convincingly to one another. The fun made of early-seventies cultural accoutrements, from water beds to those glunky plastic in-flight headsets the airlines used to give out (not to mention the Salisbury steaks they once served) is all well-observed and funny for those of us who were there, though much of this must be merely amusingly puzzling for those who weren't.

So much of this, though, is just a bit too arch. It's sort of like going to a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta : you are being encouraged to laugh at things that might not, in fact, be all that funny to you, because other people, from a social or historical milieu to which you may not belong but to which you might aspire, would find them funny - coyly knowing references to long-vanished Victorian society in the case of G&S, or to the denizens and wannabes on the margins of Hollywood (or, indeed, to intra-Jewish humor) in this one . The sequences with Sean Penn and Tim Waits, or with James Kelly, derive from this dynamic, not from some organic connection to the film. Penn and Waits, stars in their ways, playing blow-hard, pathetic Hollywood has-beens? This viewer, at least, had the distinct sense of being patronized. And for the real-life equivalents of their characters, it is downright cruel. Rather than being asked to laugh with some measure of self-recognition (which is what real comedy is usually about), we are being invited to gawk at successful insiders satirizing their lessers, and to share in their self-congratulatory amusement while, in their own minds (I guess) poking fun at themselves.

Some of the best, and most unselfconscious, laughs derive from the doings of the film's actual teenagers - the kids among whom Gary lives, albeit (in size, attainments, and attributable age) as a Gulliver. Here, Anderson's gifts for off-base humor comes into its own and we at last encounter some credible characters, their doings most often captured fleetingly, in the margins of the frame or in quick takes. These off-center, offhand moments give the film what richness and substance it possesses, reminding us that Anderson can, in fact, be a great director. Can we hope that he'll put this one behind him and go back to giving us masterpieces like "The Master" or "There Will Be Blood"?

Illustrious Corpses (1976)

Brilliant and gripping for the first 2/3, then not so much....

[7/10 · 14 October 2021]

The opening sequence and what follows are breathtaking -- every frame a jewel, and the messaging completely in sync with what Italy was going though during in the anni di piombo, the years during which life was controlled by the Christian Democratic party, the Mafia and the Catholic Church and when everyone else who mattered was more or less on the take.

Based on a novel by Leonardo Sciascia, the Sicilian bard of those years, the early sequence actually has the feel of a Simenon novel -- crimes are being committed, judges are being shot, and the best detective in Italy is being sent to investigate, landing in Sicily (unnamed, but clearly identified) as on a remote planet, The detective is played by the tremendous Italo-French actor Lino Ventura (who appears in just about any French film noir of the 60s and 70s that you can think of), whose face (like so many in this face-focused film) is almost a novel in itself. Nobody does faces like Francesco Rosi, and what faces he has to work with here, including not just Ventura's, but Fernando Ray's, Max von Sydow's, and many others that are at least as compelling, if not as instantly recognizable.

So for the first two-thirds of the film, the Simenon-like parts, with the Ventura character, Ispettore Rogas, trying, like Commissaire Maigret, to parse an alien environment and figure what's going on, the film is gripping. Then Rogas returns to Rome, and the plot becomes much more confusing. Suddenly we're no longer dealing with the crime Rogas thinks he has pretty much figured out, if not completely solved, but with a huge conspiracy -- we're suddenly thrust into a political thriller, more Costa Gavras than Simenon, and into what seems uncomfortably like agitprop. The Communist party, the hard-line PCI, seems for a time to be the path to salvation, but in the end, not. Youthful protestors seem to offer hope, but the basic message seems to be that the neo-fascists are always there, ready to turn whatever seeming threat they face into an opportunity. Sound familiar? The release is timely, but in the end I found the message kind of muddled.

The 4K restoration is fantastically vivid, but, until the later parts, with its huge crowd scenes, the original material was already brilliant. The English subtitles are incomplete and at times distorting...nothing new there.

The restoration, now showing at NYC's indispensable Film Forum, must be seen, even if it can be frustrating in parts. I assume it will go out on the art-house circuit, and any film lover who can should grab the opportunity, even if that is only through streaming or the DVD that I assume will come out soon if it hasn't already. The first 2/3 will knock your socks off, and maybe it's me only who finds the rest a bit indecipherable. Guess I'll just have to go back and see it again.

Azor (2021)

Ever wonder what private banking is really all about? This fascinating film makes it clearer than you might like

[9/10 · 14 September 2021]

This remarkable Argentine-Swiss coproduction is set in the early years of the Argentine rule-by-junta. The topic, though, is broader: the intersection of élite cupidity and brutal politics worldwide, cloaked under a veneer of high-class gentility and, of course, excruciatingly extreme discretion. The horrors endemic to the place and time in which the film is set are rendered obliquely and allusively, and all the more powerfully for that.

The film is wonderfully cast. Every character, down to the smallest non-speaking cameo, conveys worlds of meaning, often in a single frame. Most striking of all is a Catholic Monsignor who is brilliantly parodied while he acts as a searingly sinister fulcrum, lifting part of the veil that hangs over the plot, putting me in mind of the terrifying Grand Inquisitor in Verdi's opera "Don Carlos" who pushes Philip II of Spain to kill his rebellious son just as, in order to save the world, "God sacrificed his own". This sequence, set during a small gathering in one of the inner sanctums of the junta élite, tells you more about what was then going on in Argentina than could more explicit scenes set in a torture chamber or execution field, while at the same time making clear what the banker is really there to do, and what the film is really about.

The gentility and costly need for constant secretiveness (a lesson is even given in a secret argot used by Geneva bankers, including the meaning of "azor") are chillingly conveyed by the lead couple, played by Fabrizio Rongione and Stéphanie Cléau. He perfectly personifies the suave, ultra buttoned-down Swiss private banker, to the manor born, providing a master class in understated movie acting, conveying reactions with just the subtlest twitch of an eyelid or a small corner of his mouth. Her character is highly intelligent, ambitious, icily disciplined, both a judgmental antagonist and a tremendous resource for him, sussing out situations in which she is, even more (you sense) than usual in the macho world of the Argentine ruling classes (old and new), relegated to the sidelines, to the point of being more or less politely dismissed whenever serious business is to be discussed. (At one point, he is told to get rid of her prior to a key meeting: "no women".) She is perforce devoted to her husband yet bitter at the role she must play. Her greatest line, already widely quoted in reviews, comes when she is told by a tough-as-nails Argentine matriarch that she can see that "your husband loves you very much" (which is actually, you assume, a leading question), and Cléau, still smooth and icy but with just the subtlest flash of anger, responds., "Yes, he and I are but a single person. [Perfectly-timed pause.} And that person is him".

The film is in French and Spanish, with many of the Argentine characters (quite credibly, given their social standing) completely at home in French, while Rongione seems to have more than serviceable (though not perfect) Spanish. (Cléau seems to have almost none, which, if anything, serves to enhance the acuity of her observations.) The dialogue shifts constantly between the two languages, often in midsentence, none of which is flagged in the English subtitles even though, like every cue in this subtlest of movies, each shift conveys meaning.

Similarly, the film brings together two different, but intertwined and indeed interdependent, worlds. One is that of élites everywhere, but in this case of a post-putsch Latin American country among whom all are living in terror, though of what, or of whom, differs according to the person's social or political standing. The other is that of global private bankers, in this case Swiss, who provide vital services by protecting and processing wealth, whether gained by plunder by the current holders of power or inherited by established élites, presumably from plunder by their ancestors. Both worlds are scary, and their scariness is brilliantly conveyed, which is what makes this film so compelling. Though some of the in-jokes will be most amusing to Swiss viewers (outsiders will not necessarily spot the full contempt conveyed when one suave upper-class Swiss tells another that a third colleague is "from Zug"), the key structural role played by bankers worldwide in their dealings with the politically powerful and with the very rich, and the ways they help engineer mutations from one category to the other, could not be made clearer.

Without resorting to spoilers, I think it can be said that what's most striking about the film's final sequence is the sudden banality of the message it appears to convey. After all that intrigue and complexity, you wonder, it this really what it was all about? And the film's answer appears to be, "Well, of course, what did you think?"

Marriage Story (2019)

More Neil Simon than Bergman, or even Woody Allen

[3/10 · 6 October 2019]

Seen 10/07/19 at the NYFF.

As with other Baumbach films, "Marriage Story" is long on talk and short on cinema, which makes it a strange choice for a featured spot in this year's NY Film Festival, especially since it is the second film on the main slate about a director, in this case a theatre director instead of a filmmaker, but still... I, for one, have limited tolerance for films or plays about directors on novels about novelists, etc. These have a higher burden than others to meet in convincing me that I should care about them. In the case of this year's film director's film about, very transparently, himself, Pedro Almodóvar's "Pain and Passion" passes the test with ease, as it is glorious cinema. "Marriage Story", though, is more Neil Simon that Bergman (despite the aspirational allusion in the title and in a brief visual shout-out to "Scenes From a Marriage"), or even Woody Allen, who is just as wordy but makes better cinema, at least in his older and better films. With its sorta jokey NY/LA rivalry theme, and in certain LA frames, "Annie Hall" also appears to be evoked here, but the mere mention of these films highlights the weakness of this one.

There is some, passing enjoyment to be had. Scarlett Johansson is, as always, radiant and holds the screen in ways that few of today's female leads can do - she needs to find directors who can make more of that. Laura Dern turns in a stellar performance as a vicious divorce lawyer camouflaged in California unctuousness, and there are some fine cameos from Roy Liotta, Alan Alda, the great Wallace Shawn, and others. (On the other hand, Johansson's husband/foil, Adam Driver, is as bland and uninteresting to watch while he forces himself to emote as anyone I've seen lately this side of a TV sitcom.) But Baumbach remains firmly within his milieu of affluent, if not wealthy, Brooklyn and LA showbiz people and their neuroses. It's all very narcissistic and more than a little contrived -- as I say, this is more theatre, with its elborate, paced plotting intended as build-up to the leads' Big Scene, which here tears up the scenery - literally - to no great effect.

Baubach in fact makes what I'm sure is an unforced error in a courtroom scene where, for the first time, ordinary (and diverse) Angelinos are seen waiting their turn before a judge, who makes a welcome comment to the effect that he is adjourning the case around which the film revolves as there are plenty of people with far fewer resources awaiting their turn. Indeed. And so the inevitable question arises: why, in 2019, should we care about these particular white, privileged, affluent, undoubtedly smart, but politically and socially obtuse people as they go through the predictable phases in the break-up of a marriage whose reality was never very convincing to begin with? Why should we spend our time watching what amounts to a modernized version of an old-fashioned drawing-room comedy, updated to take account certain contemporary sensibilities, particularly of the feminist sort?

Like many of the other films shown this year NYFF (and of many more that are not), the main producers here are Netflix, which is rapidly carving out a place for itself in American cinema comparable to that played by the Canal+ cable network in France. Though its support to quality cinema is welcome (Scorsese's "The Irishman", but also documentaries like the terrific "An American Factory"...), there must be concern about how long it will allow its productions to run in proper cinemas before they disappear into the streaming ether. In most cases, that would be a huge loss for potential viewers, as films like these demand to be seen on a big screen. In the case of "Marriage Story", though, there will be little loss: it contains so little that is gripping from a cinematic point-of-view that it will do just fine on a flat screen on an iPhone. If you do watch this film, try to imagine what would be left if you turned off the dialogue. It would almost certainly become clear that you're dealing with filmed theatre, not cinema. A single image from the following night's NYFF feature, Joon-Ho Boong's breathtaking "Parasite" is worth 10,000 of this dreary film's many, many words.

The Irishman (2019)

A Master Class in Film-making

[10/10 · 28 September 2019]

Seen this afternoon at the NYFF.

This film will doubtless go down as "The Godfather" of its generation, with Pacino and De Niro both on hand to assure continuity. Neither of them has done anything remotely as brilliant as this in decades, and the great revelation of the film, Joe Pesci, hasn't done anything at all. It has taken Scorsese's alchemy, back at its peak, to bring the three of them together in ways that surpass the sum of their considerable parts.

Although (or because?) much of the film concerns the bleakness of old age, each of them, Scorsese included, is here restored to his astonishing peak capacity: the film's dirty little secret is that much of its substance concerns the process of human subsidence and movement toward the grave (some -- many -- more expeditiously than others, of course, with titles accompanying the first appearance of so many of the minor characters to tell us , laconically, in which appalling way this was accomplished), its principals seem to have discovered the fountain that restores, if not their youth, at least their youthful talents and energy, albeit with a world-weariness that we should all heed.

Don't worry about the film's amazing length -- it goes by at warp speed, and if if not for slowing down of its own accord (and logic) in its final half hour, you may feel deprived by how swiftly it is dispatched.

The professional reviews. out today, make much of the digital "de-aging" that allows the principals to be portrayed in early and late middle age, as well as closer to their natural ages. I confess that I don't see a problem with this, nor, I suspect, will most viewers. Under Maestro Scorsese's baton, all of them are fully convincing at each of these phases of life.

Interestingly, it is De Niro (who played the young Vito Corleone) to whom the elegiac moments, poignantly and all-too-realistically portrayed, are given, whereas it is Pacino, to whom those unforgettable solo moments as the middle-aged Don were given, whose role here ends as it began -- in the total intoxication and lack of self-awareness of the powerful and unscrupulous. Pesci's self-awareness and watchful, controlling understanding of the realities of power, obviates the need for introspection -- he never wavers in his understanding of where the chess pieces stand on the board, and how they must, inevitably, be moved, and only fleetingly does he seem to perceive the cost of all that. Far more than his past scenery-chomping roles for Scorsese and others, Pesci's character here is, in this sense, the most terrifying figure in the film.

The political messages are oblique (history unfolds largely in the background, on TV sets), but the core Scorsese message about the utter corruption of American life and the impossibility of combating this -- if only because the alleged watchdogs, up to and including Presidents, are , in turn, so easily corrupted -- comes through loud and clear. It's hardly an original message, but Scorsese (like Coppola before him) dissects these dynamics with exquisite precision. The message for our current politics couldn't be clearer, or scarier.

Mention must be made of the flawless ensemble cast which backs up these principals, including the amazing women, who play such important, but background roles. (In mob films, as in Catfish Row in the great revival of "Porgy and Bess" now at the Metropolitan Opera, "a woman is a sometime thing." )

I feel privileged to have been present at one of the first public screenings of a film that will certainly join the pantheon. But I must get back to see it again and again, such is the richness contained in almost every frame and sequence.

The Goldfinch (2019)

No, the critics were right. Alas.

[4/10 · 15 September 2019]

Many of the commenters here and elsewhere have been saying things like "Ignore the critics - it's a great film", and I went hoping that they would be proven right.

Alas, despite some fine acting from a few members of the cast (both Nicole Kidman and Sarah Paulson are excellent), the film cannot be recommended to those who, like me, were infatuated by the Donna Tart's novel. This seems to be due to the inherent tension between the screenplay's slavishly literal fidelity to the text, on the one hand, and to the choices it does makes (inevitably, given the book's sprawl), on the other.

Where it diverges from the novel, it does so in big and, I think, quite damaging ways (damaging, that is, to a film that presumably seeks to elicit the kind of intense involvement from its viewers that the book demanded from readers). One of these is the episodic, almost random way in which so many sequences seem to have been sliced, diced and glued back together in what seems to be no particular order. Too many of these sequences appear to be perfunctory -- brief exchanges of dialogue that serve only to fill in the backstory or to advance the plot line (assuming, under these circumstances that you can keep track of it), without any deeper meaning being conveyed by the acting or the cinematography. Much of the film thus plays like an extended trailer, edited to achieve specific effects without emotional or character-driven context. Even more damaging is the decision to portray the protagonist, Young Theo Decker, as younger than he is depicted in the book, in such a way that the Young Theo sequences are drained of much of their original meaning. In the book, Theo is portrayed as pubescent, and we are witnesses not just to events that he undergoes more or less passively, but to his sexual and emotional maturation. Oakes Fegley, the actor in question (who is not without talent - one could imagine him evolving into something along the lines of a Philip Seymour Hoffman), appears to be about that age, but, as is usual in American movies, the child he portrays is clearly meant to be younger. This unbalances and denatures his crucial relationship with Boris, the worldly-wise and thrillingly dangerous Ukrainian friend he meets in high school while exiled from New York to the outer fringes of Las Vegas. In the book, they are high schoolers; in the film, they appear to be more like middle schoolers, which distorts a lot of what is supposed to be going on. The film apparently got an R rating for its pervasive depictions of drug use and its brief episode of violence, but this is one of the ways in which, unlike the book, it stays far too safely - damagingly so - in PG-13 territory.

The leap from Young Theo to Young-Adult Theo (i.e, from Fegley to Ansel Elgort) is thus too abrupt to fit the story's time-scale. And, if it was the production team's intention to portray Young-Adult Theo as a twit (which, in retrospect, is a plausible reading of the book, though not mine), it succeeded beyond its wildest expectations. As a result, Elgort's all-too-transparently artificial emoting in the climaxes misses the mark - they never feel genuine and are, in some cases, downright embarrassing. A central character in a stem winder like this should, at the very least, have some charisma, but Elgort seems to have been told (and been costumed and bespectacled) to cool things down. Cooling seems to be the overall point, and it follows that the movie departs from the book in lacking heat.

Finally, a loud raspberry for the two Borises, Finn Wolfhard as Young Boris and Aneurin Barnard as the adult version. Both clearly had to expend a lot of effort on maintaining their would-be Slavic accents (which nonetheless slip in and out), to the detriment of their actual acting. No Russian or Ukrainian viewing this film is likely to believe in either character for one moment. This is customary in Hollywood, where the belief seems, absurdly, to be that dialect coaches can turn any actor into a credible linguistic clone. Far better to recruit genuine, in this case, Slavic actors (of whom there are plenty) and put the coaching resources into coaxing them into English intelligibility.

All these elements mean that I felt none of the involvement that had kept me glued to the book. Just as the critics had warned me.

Il posto (1961)

A subtle. probing critique of capitlism

[9/10 · 6 September 2019]

We are in the midst of the great post-war boom, the period the French call "les trentes glorieuses". during which the major Western European economies grew rich on post-war reconstruction and the arrival of new technologies, with jobs for all, however dismal. Anyone who remembers this period with nostalgia should sit down with this film to be reminded of how solidly the elements of early the 21st century alientation were already in place.

Pasolini, Rossellini and Antonioni in Italy. Godard and Rivette in France, as well as others, were saying much the same thing, but Olmi's genius is to wrap the message in some of the finest. most touching, understated comedy ever seen -- recalling the Renoir of "La Règle du jeu", but adding a more explicilty Marxist perspective, looking sympathetically at his wonderful characters (both the two principals are terrifically affecting. but so is each and every passing figure -- the most minor among them could be the subject of an entire film) while savaging the expanding world of the petite bourgeoisie.

Seen in 2019 (thank you, Film Forum!), this masterpiece seems stunningly prophetic, showing us how 1961 contained all the seeds of today's terrifying alienation. And yet, despite his clear message, Olmi makes us smile with warmth and sympathy. What a marvel.

American Factory (2019)

Anyone concerned about the effects on real people of globalization should see this film

[9/10 · 23 August 2019]

This film is an extraordinary achievement. With footage going back over the years, the directors have pieced together the saga of the establishment of a Chinese-run industrial operation in Dayton on the site of a much-lamented closed GM plant, illustrating, with total objectivity, the contradictions that ensue from the imposition of one national worldview upon another in a dynamic that it never a clash of equals. The impatience and contempt of the Chinese investors toward their U.S. workforce and the consequent cultural conflicts are highlighted to devastating effect, illustrated by what American viewers will find to be an uncomfortable dissection of their own culture, in all its fatuous self-indulgence, by amazing footage of lectures on the subject by Chinese cross-cultural consultants as they lecture Chinese workers and supervisors sent to Dayton to show Americans in how things should be done.

At the Q&A at the premiere at IFC Center, co-director Julia Reichert was at pains to stress that the film was never meant to be polemical, that this was an effort to immerse and learn. While some of the silllier aspects of both cultures, (but especially the regimented and self-congratulatory aspects of the Chinese). come through with particular acuity, you can't help buy muse on how Americans have acted with equal tin-earedness and cultural arrogance around the world, over many more decades than the Chinese have been at this game.

At the same time, America's neediness of manufacturing jobs, even if they don't pay a living wage, and the ways that so many of what we would normally consider our core values go out the window to accommodate anyone who will invest in them, come through particularly clearly. This all comes together in a fight over the establishment of a union that would protect workers' rights and uphold our eroding safety and environmental standards that is the vivid core of the movie.

A final note: This film has an extraordinarily compelling musical score by someone names Chad Cannon that propels and highlights the narrative and is amazingly effective on its own terms. Although the idiom is different, Cannon's score does for this film much of what Philip Glass's have done over the years for the films of Errol Morris, and that is high praise indeed.

Palo Alto (2013)

A not-bad film that launches two terrific actors

[6/10 · 14 May 2014]

"Palo Alto" has a lot of direct ancestors and even more godfathers. On the shared DNA side, we have, from Gia Coppola's grandfather Francis Ford, "The Outsiders"; from her aunt Sofia, the (very recent) "Bling Ring". George Lucas, Peter Bogdanovich, Gus Van Sant, and many others look on, no doubt benevolently, at the many echoes of (or direct quotations from) their work, while Larry Clark kind of peeks in from the wings, no doubt shaking his head over how the sexy parts never go all the way.

The sad news, I'm afraid, is that the sum does not reach the quality of the many appropriated parts.

Interestingly, it is above all Van Sant who seems to be channeled here. This is partly due to the cinematography of Autumn Durald, which echoes, but does not equal, the work that Harris Savides and others have done for Van Sant. The many tight shots of the talented young actors have, at their best, much of the empathy and meaning that Van Sant invests in even the slightest of his young cast members. But there is nothing in this film that can remotely touch even the most casual, off-hand exchanges of the opening moments of "Elephant", for example.

But Van Sant comes to mind above all because of the arrival here of Val Kilmer's son Jack, whose resemblance to the River Pheonix of "My Own Private Idaho" is startling. This cannot be coincidental: James Franco, the author of the source material of "Palo Alto" (and an actor in it), worked with Van Sant on a tribute to Phoenix, "My Own Private River", and the resemblance cannot have been missed as the younger Kilmer was being cast. In a film about teenagers, he alone (born in 1995) actually looks like one. (Though not as absurdly as in so many other American movies, all the other young actors look just a couple of crucial years older than the characters they are supposed to be playing.) And he feels like one, and projects complex emotions in ways that are attributable to one He is extraordinary, and required no help from the make-up department, I'm sure, to produce the growth of peach fuzz on his upper lip that appears in several of his scenes. (All credit to Coppola for letting it be.) I hope and trust that Uncle Gus is paying attention and will do something great with this talented kid before he grows too much older. (It should be noted, by the way, that Kilmer père plays a cameo here, as a step-parent grotesque who could have wandered in from a Judd Apatow movie. His brief, hammy sequences are embarrassingly out of synch with this film and should have been cut.)

Others are quite good, too, and Emma Roberts (niece of Julia), as the female lead, is more than that -- she is revealed here to be an extraordinary actress, perhaps even the next Scarlett Johannson. Too bad that she also, as mentioned, looks a few years too old for this particular role.Still, the camera captures her with real affection and sympathy. Oddly,though the budding romance between her character and Kilmer's is the central plot line of the movie (to the extent that there is one), neither actor is seen to best effect in their (few) actual scenes together.

Franco plays a girls' soccer coach with a dangerous glint in his eye quite well, though the camera (a recurring problem in this film) holds his reaction shots for too long, weakening rather than underlining his predatory smirk. The rest of the adults are negligible, and the other teens are more run of the mill young American actors.

Of the plot there is little to say: teenagers in yet another California town, left to their own devices by distracted adults, stumble around, get drunk and stoned out of their minds. Sex ensues, of course (rather prudishly portrayed, with everything below the belt taking place below the frame). Attractions and jealousies sprout, with some age-appropriate hints of sexual ambiguity. Friendships hit a brick wall. Something like true love seems in the end to be brewing.

The classics of the genre have all been made. This calling-card film shows Gia Coppola to have talent, and she no doubt will go on to do bigger and better things. One could question whether, had she not been a Coppola, this film would ever have been made, but that would be churlish, as it is in its way not bad at all and, at moments, is very good indeed. And we should all be grateful for its revelations of the younger Roberts and, especially, Kilmer, who should, by rights, head on from this to greater things in the hands of more seasoned directors. In this sense, "Palo Alto" might turn out to be "The Outsiders" of their generation: we saw them here first.

When I Saw You (2012)

Agitprop, but with style and realism

[7/10 · 18 January 2014]

The film is a stylish, well-acted piece of agitprop, with fine cinematography and pretty good production values overall, and with a core plot line that is deeply touching, reflecting reality as it must have been lived by millions in the times (just after the 67 war) in which it is set. Until the final sequence, which is more than over the top and breaks with the fairly rigorous realism of the rest, it avoids a lot of the overemphatic character drawing and acting that afflicts so much Arab filmmaking.

There have been Palestinian films of yet greater subtlety, but the filmmaker is to be commended for leaving the Israelis offscreen (save for some ghostly Land Rovers out on patrol). The story line starts with the intimate, day-to-day realities of life in the refugee camps, made to appear pretty much like life anywhere at first and then, progressively and with commendable restraint, shown to be unbearable. Tarek, the small boy at the center of the film, apparently both dyslexic and mathematically gifted, is perhaps just a little too adorable, but the young actor is well-directed and mostly believable in his childish obsession with returning home and finding his father, oblivious to danger or to the reality involved in getting there. His mother is superbly acted, showing devotion to her son, but a wide range of other human feelings, including fed-upness, as well, all done with great understatement.

For many, there will be some wistful nostalgia (and for others, perhaps, snorts of derision) at the depiction of a then-embryonic Palestinian resistance in which young men and women mix freely as comrades, and in which the only Book in use is the little red one of Chairman Mao. Not a hint of piety in the whole film, not even a call to prayer in the distance. Different times.

Paris Countdown (2013)

Some flashes of talent keep this from being a total flop

[5/10 · 15 November 2013]

This is French B-list stuff: overplotted, undercharacterized. In style, it seems to be aiming at a Hong-Kong shootemup look and feel as applied to a modern, globalised, cool Paris-by-night. The French title means something like "daylight can wait", which makes more sense, since the film takes place over one very long, very action-packed, high-body-count night, with the opening sequence taking place in the blinding sunshine of a Mexican desert (Spain apparently standing in, per the credits) and the closing sequence in the pale dawn.

The actors (the women are completely negligible sources of overacted hysteria)are all journeymen from film and TV. They are talented and, as always, have more expressive and care-worn faces than their American counterparts. They are supposed to be playing out, in middle age, the final stages of a lifelong bromance. The problem is that the screenplay doesn't show this so much as it tells it through stagey pieces of dialogue ("remember how great it was?", "remember how messed up we were?", and so forth). Given the desperate straits into which they are thrown, with their nemesis psyopathic enemy out to kill them as violently as possible, their odd-couple banter comes across as contrived. It is to the actors' credit that there are flashes of spontaneity and rapport despite the best efforts of the screenwriter/director.

Give credit for these moments, for an effectively creepy evocation of Paris nightlife, for the high-color-saturation direct video (some great traveling shots along some uniconic Paris boulevards), and for a great sequence involving a speedboat bobbing in the middle of the Seine. As for the blood-and-gore, well, the Hong Kong guys do it better.

The Butler (I) (2013)

Forest Whitaker saves "The Butler" from being pure, and silly, sitcom

[5/10 · 17 August 2013]

One way to judge a film like this, larded with your-are-there vignettes drawn more or less literally from recent history, is to judge how convinced you are that you are indeed there -- that the figures you are watching really are these presidents, or these Martin Luther Kings, or whoever. In this sense, things get off to a bumpy start: our first experience in the oval office, during the new butler's first day on the job, shows us Robin Williams (you never wonder "could that be Robin Williams?", of course: you know Robin Williams) playing Harry Truman and convincing us instantly that Robin Williams really was born to play Harry Truman. The problem is that he's actually supposed to be playing Dwight Eisenhower, which he does not at all convincingly. And it goes downhill from there.

From FDR on, each time a modern president is depicted in a movie as living through a Great Moment In History, anyone of a certain age will inevitably remember that particular voice and those cadences. In the case of this particular movie, none of the voices or cadences match up at all with the Real Thing -- I suppose you can give Lee Daniels and the various actors credit for not really trying, beyond a few unevenly sustained stabs at dialect and physical tic, but then neither does any of these performances rise much above the level of a mediocre SNL skit. (Well, maybe John Cusack, in one or two of his scenes, captures something real about the inner Richard Nixon, but this is not helped by there being nothing there of the exterior Richard Nixon, not even the heavy beard.) Jane Fonda gets closest with her Nancy Reagan (and what fun she must have had). Martin Luther King fares particularly poorly. We know who these guys are supposed to be only from the props and the plot cues, not because any of them is in any way convinces us that he is who he's supposed to be the way Daniel Day Lewis convinced us he was Lincoln. Of course, we don't know what Lincoln sounded like, we just think we know what he is supposed to have sounded like, which makes things easier. It's different with, say, LBJ. But, I guess the filmmakers decided, if you sit him on a toilet, we'll know it's him. (Poor Jimmy Carter, so masterfully skewered in so many SNL skits, doesn't even get a walk-on here.)

But, you might reason, the big historical figures are in this case only props. The story is about a young African American who emerges from the cotton fields to become a White House butler, serves the great and the good, but is still a member of his community at a particular time in history, the genuineness of all this certified by his being married to Oprah Winfrey. Here the verdict is more mixed. The intrusion of vignettes from the civil rights movement hurts, or at least doesn't help, the genuineness of the film, nor does the sitcom plotting of his family situation. But Forest Whitaker is an actor of such grace and fluidity that, over and over, he transcends his surroundings, giving life to scenes that would otherwise sink from their glunkiness. In doing this, he rescues the film from its otherwise suffocating literalness, and conveys what I think was always meant to be its core message, the one about the two faces African Americans have been forced by history to maintain, the ways in which so many have turned the lack of agency imposed upon them into very powerful agency. Along with talented colleagues, things come alive in the Downstairs segments of this Upstairs/Downstairs sitcom à l'américaine, and infuses parts of the film with a subtlety and multi-dimensionality it should have carried all along. For these scenes, and for Whitaker's performance pretty much throughout, this is a must-see film, even if you may need to grit your teeth through much the rest.