NYFF - To Die Like a Man

One of my two or three most eagerly anticipated films in this year's New York Film Festival, Portuguese director João Pedro Rodrigues's To Die Like a Man, premieres tonight. I'll post my thoughts tomorrow but I wanted to put up some photos ahead of time. The top image (reportedly from the latter part of the film), set in a forest and bathed in that eerie red light, tells me that this will be a drag queen movie like no other I've ever seen.

UPDATE: To Die Like a Man far exceeded my expectations. It constantly surprises the viewer with a succession of beautiful scenes and images inspired, as Rodrigues said in his post-screening Q&A, by melodramas such as Minnelli's Home from the Hill (which I had coincidentally just seen the day before) and those of Sirk and Fassbinder, but also by war movies like Raoul Walsh's Objective, Burma! and by Busby Berkeley musicals. On top of these influences, there are traces of the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Tsai Ming-Liang and Jacques Nolot. If this makes To Die Like a Man sound derivative, it is anything but.

In his third feature, Rodrigues has achieved a formal mastery hinted at in O Fantasma! and Odete. The film follows a sort of dream logic all its own, beginning with a closeup of a soldier in the woods applying camouflage makeup (the theme of drag artifice and illusion beginning in a hypermasculine context), but this leads to a scene of graphic sex between two of the soldiers, one of whom turns out to be the estranged son of Tonia, the hero(ine). Nothing is quite what it seems in this movie.

There are certainly similarities to Fassbinder's masterpiece, In a Year of 13 Moons, although Rodrigues shows much greater compassion and forgiveness for his troubled characters. The film alternates scenes of great pain and suffering with hilarious, campy interludes and moments of remarkable peace and serenity. Tonia's journey begins to take on religious overtones, sort of a Stations of the Cross in drag, as in the gorgeous red-tinged scene above where the characters sit still for close to 5 minutes as we, and they, listen to Baby Dee's haunting song, "Calvary."

The title lets us know the final tragic outcome of Tonia's story, but it's impossible to predict just where it will lead along the way, and hard to do justice to Rodrigues's masterful use of color (especially blues and reds), design, camera movement, music, and performances, above all Fernando Santos as Tonia. The last two long takes of the film are connected by a cell phone call from a resurrected Tonia to her dead boyfriend Rosario, as a lovely fado song accompanies the camera as it cranes from the cemetery to a tranquil view of Lisbon harbor. It's one of the film's many transcendent moments.

There's a fine interview of Rodrigues by Michael Guillén at The Evening Class (http://theeveningclass.blogspot.com/2009/09/tiff09-to-die-like-man-evening-class.html).

NYFF - Police, Adjective

Corneliu Porumboiu's Police, Adjective, one of the most highly regarded films at Cannes this year, is a funny, sharply-observed study of a young policeman, Cristi, in a small Romanian town over the course of several days as he stakes out a high-school student on a minor drug-possession case that he clearly thinks is a waste of his time. The long takes convey a sense of the real space, duration and tedium of this surveillance without being the least bit tedious to an observant viewer. As Porumboiu said after the screening, there is always something happening in these shots, even though the film is edited in arthouse rather than multiplex style. The same deliberate pacing is maintained throughout, including scenes of paperwork in the office or at home with his wife in the evening. One of the most interesting structuring elements of the film is the detailed reports he prepares following each day's stakeout, where what we've just witnessed is summed up in meticulous detail. This concern for precise language carries over into hilarious domestic scenes where he questions his wife, a teacher, about the meaning of the words in a silly pop song she listens to repeatedly, and she corrects the grammar in one of his police reports.

When Cristi dares to refuse his boss's request to wrap up the case by arresting the kid on such a petty charge because it goes against his conscience, he is forced to read dictionary definitions of the words "conscience," "law," "moral," "police," on and on until he ultimately relents. The scene is both comic and harrowing, with Vlad Ivanov brilliantly portraying the bureaucratic mindset of this character. The new post-Communist Romania, it's implied, still has quite a ways to go to catch up with Western Europe.

NYFF - Ghost Town

This shot of a statue of Mao standing in the middle of the "ghost town" of Zhizilou comes in a coda sequence at the end of Zhao Dayong's remarkable, nearly 3-hour documentary Ghost Town. Mao's cheerful, waving presence in the middle of an empty town square, seen from several angles, stands in mocking contrast to the harsh realities of life in this remote, abandoned town which we've just witnessed.

In the Q&A following the Film Festival screening, Zhao said that he lived with the residents of the town and filmed them for about a year. The way he decided to structure this material is what makes the film so powerful. It's divided into three sections: 1) "Voices" deals largely with the pastor of the town's Christian church and his father, filling in a great deal of background information about the government's past suppression of religion and showing how central a role the church plays in holding the town together; 2) "Recollections" shows a young couple coming to terms with the dismal economic choices they face, and also poignantly shows a divorced man who has become a pathetic alcoholic now excluded from the church; and 3) "Innocence" follows a 12-year-old boy, Ah Long, who was abandoned by his family and now lives on his own, surviving by trapping and eating small birds or begging for flour to make fried cakes. This final section brings the film full circle with a concluding scene in the church. After we've witnessed the daily struggles he faces, we see Ah Long, with his grimy face, sitting in the back of the church with his eyes tightly shut in prayer, when suddenly his eyes spring open and he glances around like a frightened animal, his innocence long gone. It's an image I will remember for a long time.

NYFF Opening Night - Wild Grass

For the start of this year's NYFF I thought I'd change the design of this blog to something a little easier to read and, I hope, more aesthetically pleasing than the previous bright green.

Opening Night at the New York Film Festival was Alain Resnais's beautiful Wild Grass (Les herbes folles). Richard Pena introduced the producers, composer Mark Snow, actors Andre Dussollier and Mathieu Amalric (it was great to see them from the sixth row center), and finally Resnais himself, who received a standing ovation and gave a brief, charming introduction. This film will probably separate the hardcore Resnais admirers like myself from casual French filmgoers who may see it as a lightweight romantic comedy. It's really much more than that.

A simple story of a stolen purse and wallet that brings together five major characters, in Resnais's hands becomes a richly detailed study of l'amour fou, romantic obsession, cinema and memory. Resnais's graceful camera movements, bright colors and unmistakable editing rhythms are the work of a playful master. Frequent inserts of Sabine Azema's stolen yellow purse flying through the air and of Dussollier's hand picking up her bright red wallet serve to link them together almost against their conscious will. Resnais has expressed admiration for director Arnaud Desplechin, evident here in his use of Mathieu Amalric and Emmanuelle Devos as young sidekicks in the wacky love story of Resnais veterans Azema and Dussollier (with Anne Consigny as Dussollier's younger wife who has no choice but to go along on this strange ride).

This is also an homage to American movies, as Azema and Dussollier first meet outside a cinema and we hear the famous 20th Century Fox fanfare. The fanfare returns in a later romantic scene between the two, with the word fin appearing onscreen as they finally embrace. It's a false ending, however, as they are about to take off in Azema's private plane for a looping daredevil flight which becomes a dazzlingly subjective aerial view, ending in a child's bedroom with a baffling non sequitur line. This time the fin is real. It reminded me of the astonishing ending of Mon Oncle d'Amerique and parts of Providence in its formal daring and beauty.

NY Film Festival Countdown

Just three days to go until the 47th New York Film Festival starts this Friday with Alain Resnais's highly-anticipated (by me at least) Wild Grass. I've added a link on the right to Slant Magazine's annual film-by-film coverage of the festival. While I expect to disagree with many of their assessments, the Slant team is a highly knowledgeable group of young cinephiles (several of whom are openly gay) who do a great job of covering this and other festivals, with a full review (new ones added daily) of each film in the NYFF Main Selection.

The Village Voice used to offer full coverage in the past, but they've been much more spotty in recent years as the Voice has scaled back all of its arts coverage. Voice writers Jim Hoberman, Scott Foundas and Melissa Anderson are all on the festival's selection committee, so I'll be eagerly reading their NYFF section tomorrow. [UPDATE: The Voice's coverage is pretty good, including an overview by Hoberman, a Resnais interview piece by Scott Foundas, an interview of Charlotte Gainsbourg by Melissa Anderson (and a great cover photo of Gainsbourg), plus a roundup of the festival's documentaries by Nicolas Rapold. Consensus is building that the Chinese doc Ghost Town is going to be a fascinating film. I'm curious to see the NY Times's coverage on Friday.]

The other essential source of NYFF coverage is of course David Hudson's Auteurs Daily pieces. He's done a great job of collecting news and critical opinion from Venice and Toronto, and certainly will do the same for New York.

Max Ophüls - Only Superficially Superficial

Recent re-viewings of two Max Ophüls films, Madame de... and The Reckless Moment, prompted me to think about why I love his films so much and return to them so often. I read Molly Haskell's wonderful essay about Madame de... on Criterion's website (http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/547) and found this paragraph that encapsulates the genius of Ophüls: "Ophuls was so famous for his fluid cinematography that James Mason wrote an affectionate poem beginning, “A shot that does not call for tracks is agony for poor old Max.” But the roving camera and the visual glissandos were never virtuoso flourishes for their own sake; instead they were always attached to the movement of characters and revelatory of the movements of their souls."

I've always been fascinated by films with long, Bazinian takes, especially those involving elaborate, fluid camera movement (obvious arthouse examples such as Mizoguchi, Jancso, Bela Tarr, Tarkovsky, but also Orson Welles in what I consider his greatest film, The Magnificent Ambersons, or Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise/Before Sunset, or the ending of Tsai Ming-Liang's Vive L'Amour, or Dreyer's final masterpiece, Gertrud). If Mizoguchi and Ophüls represent the pinnacle of this type of filmmaking, it's because their fluid camera style is inseparable from their consistent themes about the position of women in their respective societies.

Whether making a film noir set in postwar L.A. or a lush costume drama in turn-of-the-century France, his camera follows these women relentlessly as they play out their destinies. As a character in Madame de... says, they're "only superficially superficial."

Claire Denis

White Material

35 Shots of Rum

The thing that makes Claire Denis's films so extraordinary is that she expects her viewers to fill in the narrative gaps and ellipses through the accumulated power of her sensual images (almost all shot by the great Agnès Godard, though not her latest, White Material, because Godard was unavailable), evocative music (by the rock band Tindersticks, plus a few perfectly chosen pop songs), and sensitive performances by actors who develop resonances across multiple Denis films (Isaach de Bankolé, Alex Descas, the gorgeous Grégoire Colin, Béatrice Dalle, Michel Subor, Vincent Gallo). How Isabelle Huppert, star of White Material, will fit into Denis's world remains to be seen. 35 Rhums, based in part on Ozu's Late Spring, has its belated premiere today at Film Forum. I saw it originally at Rendez-Vous with French Cinema back in March. I'll have more to say about this great film after a second viewing.

UPDATE 9/19: A second viewing of 35 Shots of Rum confirmed for me Claire Denis's extraordinary ability to tell a story through hints, indirection, glances and small gestures, while seducing you with the beauty of her images, music and performances. The striking parallels to Ozu's Late Spring are evident to me in two brief scenes: the sequence of the daughter (Mati Diop here, recalling Setsuko Hara in Ozu) looking stunningly beautiful in her wedding outfit, after which her character disappears from the film with the wedding taking place completely offscreen; then, in place of Ozu's famous image of Chishu Ryu alone, peeling an apple, Denis gives us a comparable scene of the father (Alex Descas) alone, finding the rice cooker that his daughter had bought and hidden after he bought one for her the same day, taking it out of the box and putting on the lid. The End. This conclusion gave me chills both times I saw it, both for the resonance with Ozu and the way it perfectly summed up the nature of this particular father-daughter relationship with a simple image.

Another extraordinary scene, which most critics have rightly singled out, takes place in a small restaurant where the characters take refuge after their car breaks down in a rainstorm on the way to a concert. The father and daughter are dancing to the song "Siboney" (for me an echo of Wong Kar-Wai's 2046) when the music changes to the Commodores' song "Night Shift," and suddenly her fiance (Grégoire Colin) cuts in, as if compelled by the music, and begins an extremely intimate, erotic dance which is observed with fascinating, jealous glances by her father. There is so much else going on in this film, but the remarkable soundtrack and the richness of the images complement a very personal story which demands multiple viewings.

The Cloud-Capped Star

I had the rare privilege of seeing Ritwik Ghatak's The Cloud-Capped Star as part of the Walter Reade Theater's Watershed series of films from the period 1958-60 that comprise a sort of international New Wave. Although I had seen Ghatak's masterpiece a few years ago on DVD, it didn't prepare me for the overwhelming power of this film's impassioned social critique, told with an extraordinarily delicate and controlled visual style combined with a radically original use of sound. Ghatak mixes music, dialogue and sound effects in quite unpredictable ways that Jonathan Rosenbaum has rightly described as expressionistic. A train will suddenly burst across the image and the sound of its whistle will completely drown out a conversation mid-sentence. An emotional revelation will be accompanied by the repeated sound of a whip while the music replays obsessively as if the record is stuck. A mysterious rainfall sound seemingly out of nowhere recurs several times. Music and sounds start and stop abruptly a la later Godard.

These radical aural experiments are matched by a visual style that features amazing deep focus compositions (note the three planes of activity in the train image above) or subtle shifts in focus, remarkable use of light, contrast, camera movements and dissolves. Ghatak is long overdue for a New York retrospective, and fully deserving of inclusion with such other Watershed films as L'Avventura, The 400 Blows, Cruel Story of Youth and Shadows.