Wild River

Elia Kazan's Wild River, considered by many critics to be his greatest film, is playing for one week at Film Forum in a beautiful new CinemaScope print. The performances of Lee Remick and Montgomery Clift are among the finest and most moving I've ever seen in a Hollywood film. Jonathan Rosenbaum calls it “The most complex and finely detailed love story in Kazan’s work…a fusion of long scenes with a broad vision that creates the director’s achieved masterpiece.” Clift, an employee of the New Deal-sponsored Tennessee Valley Authority, has the challenge of forcing Remick's grandmother (Jo Van Fleet) to leave the small island property on the Tennessee River that has been her lifelong home. Through his developing love for Remick, he comes to appreciate and sympathize with Grandma's position, although he has no choice but to clear the island (and hasten the old woman's death) to make way for the inevitable flooding caused by the nearby dam. This seemingly irreconcilable conflict between "progress" and tradition is at the heart of the film, and the back-and-forth dynamic of the Clift-Remick relationship becomes incredibly moving as Remick alternates between trying to resist her attraction to Clift and trying to get past his stoic facade and make him admit his love for her. Scenes of Remick singing a hymn as she rides the ferry to the island, or returning to the home where she lived with her late husband, are radiantly shot and powerfully performed, perhaps the richest in a film full of beautifully realized scenes. Just as the success of Clift's assignment means displacing Van Fleet from her home, the success of his relationship with Remick requires displacing her from her home and disrupting his own isolation. The final image, as Clift and Remick are flying back to their new life together in Washington, is an iris-in to an overhead shot of the all-important dam reduced to insignificance in a corner of the wide screen.

Sátántangó

Béla Tarr's Sátántangó, accent marks and all, is playing tomorrow at MoMA in all its 7 1/2-hour, black-and-white, 35mm, long-take, dark, moody, rainy, overlapping-time-structure, whisky-soaked, accordion-accompanied glory. UPDATE: The film looked beautiful, but the sound was distractingly wobbly throughout, and Tarr did not appear to introduce the film as promised. Nevertheless, it was an opportunity for me to finally see this epic masterpiece in its entirety in a single day.

NYFF - Everything Else I Saw

Jacques Rivette's Around a Small Mountain (36 Vues du Pic Saint-Loup)

Claire Denis's White Material

Souleymane Cissé's Min Ye

Todd Solondz's Life During Wartime

Maren Ade's Everyone Else (Alle Anderen)

NYFF - Mother

Bong Joon-Ho's Mother was a last-minute addition to my NYFF schedule and the most pleasant surprise of the festival. The more I read about this film, and its great lead performance by Kim Hye-Ja, the more I realized it was a must-see. Bong is in total control of the mood and mise-en-scene of this mystery/police procedural/perverse family dramedy, framed by two strange, wonderful shots of Kim dancing. In between is a captivating story of a monstrous mother's all-consuming love for her mentally challenged son when he's accused of murder.

NYFF - Ne Change Rien

I'm suffering a bit from post-festival depression now, but still trying to catch up with the flurry of films I saw in the final weekend of the NYFF. Pedro Costa's gorgeous Ne Change Rien provoked far more walkouts than any other film I saw this year at Alice Tully Hall, and I can sort of see why, although I was enthralled from first frame to last. This is a film unlike any other music documentary in its single-minded focus on the work involved in one artist, Jeanne Balibar, recording, rehearsing and performing music. This involves a great deal of repetition of a limited number of songs, so if you can't appreciate the rigorous beauty of Costa's black-and-white compositions and the inherent fascination of the painstaking artistic process depicted, you will indeed become bored at some point. I guess that qualifies Ne Change Rien as the most avant-garde feature in the festival's main slate this year, although it's anything but abstract. One of the best scenes involved cutting back and forth between shots of Balibar with headphones on in which we only hear her singing voice, to the recording booth where we hear the full music and voice together. After the film, Costa and Balibar held a fascinating Q&A which filled in some behind-the-scenes information about the making of the film.

NYFF Masterworks - Pyaasa

Guru Dutt's 1957 film Pyaasa (Thirst) was the opening selection of the NYFF Masterworks retrospective Guru Dutt: A Heart as Big as the World. This was my introduction to the work of the Indian auteur and is considered by many to be Dutt's masterpiece. I found it to be a work of remarkable visual intelligence, with expressionistic, almost Wellesian play of light and shadow. It's also a fiercely angry condemnation of the values of a world that shuns artists except in death, when their posthumous fame is exploited as an opportunity to cash in. This is a very dark vision of a society whose most admirable character is a prostitute, Gulab, who acts purely out of love and admiration for the poet Vijay, played by Dutt himself.

The 1950's was basically the beginning of the Hindi musical film industry that came to be known as Bollywood, and despite my near total lack of familiarity with the genre, I would have to assume that Pyaasa represents the pinnacle of Hindi cinema. There are several wonderful songs throughout the film, but the most powerful and beautiful is a lament by Vijay about the prevalence of prostitution, seeing it as a stain on the honor of the relatively new state of India. The top photo above shows Vijay, with Christlike pose and lighting, returning from presumed death to condemn the hypocritical mourners at his memorial ceremony. There is a sort of compromise happy ending in which Vijay is reunited with Gulab, but they are forced to leave town and head off to an uncertain future together.

NYFF - Independencia

Raya Martin's Independencia is the young Filipino director's seventh film in only five years, and the second in a planned trilogy about the history of the Philippines, each filmed in a style representative of the period it depicts. Thus in Independencia, which takes place during the period of American colonization, Martin creates a highly artificial, obviously studio-set but remarkably beautiful jungle and films in the lush, high-contrast style of some late silent/early sound Hollywood films. In the Q&A Martin discussed the influence of a couple of Murnau's films, Sunrise being the most obvious. There is a brief prologue of a mother and son preparing to flee the imminent arrival of American soldiers. The remainder of the film takes place in the jungle, except for the sudden interruption of a fake newsreel in the middle of the film showing an atrocity committed by the Americans. The film has a bare minimum of story and relies mostly on the power of its sounds and images to present an archetypal Filipino family resisting the American occupation. It's basically a 77-minute avant-garde work, slowly paced, certainly lacking subtlety in the presentation of its villains, but creating a dazzling soundstage world if you're willing to immerse yourself in it.

NYFF - Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno

The documentary L'Enfer d'Henri-Georges Clouzot is film historian Serge Bromberg's look at the troubled production of an unfinished film Clouzot worked on in 1964. Starring the radiantly beautiful Romy Schneider and Serge Reggiani, L'Enfer was to be an experimental drama showing the increasingly insane jealousy of Reggiani's husband toward his wife by filming Schneider in all sorts of distorted ways, switching from black-and-white to color and using various color filters, purple lipstick (!), superimpositions, and other optical effects to present a subjective view of madness. Bromberg gained access to a huge amount of footage from the film, but the soundtrack is lost, which led him to use actors to recreate crucial dialogue scenes. Along with interviews of key crew members from the aborted film, Bromberg has skillfully assembled a fascinating behind-the-scenes story. He's also a very funny and charming person, as evidenced in his lively introduction and Q&A at Alice Tully Hall.

NYFF - Antichrist

I don't have much to say about Lars von Trier's Antichrist that hasn't already been said. Charlotte Gainsbourg's performance is indeed remarkable, a fearless and courageous portrayal of a woman's grief descending into madness. This is also probably the most visually accomplished of Von Trier's films, which alone would make it worth seeing. I think the extremely graphic violence, which actually provoked a seizure in the audience at Friday's screening, verges on the ridiculous and tends to make the last portion of the film fall apart for me. Up until that point, however, there's no denying that von Trier has made a powerful, beautifully textured drama and deserves still to be considered a major filmmaker.

Views from the Avant-Garde - Pier Paolo Pasolini and Apichatpong Weerasethakul

I saw the first and second programs of this year's Views from the Avant-Garde section of the NYFF. La Rabbia di Pasolini (above left) is a fascinating recreation of a film that Pier Paolo Pasolini made in 1962-63 following completion of his first two films, Accatone and Mamma Roma. Pasolini created a feature-length political essay film using the newsreel archives of Italian documentary company Mondo Libero and other sources. Against Pasolini's wishes this was cut to 50 minutes and paired with an extreme right-wing documentary by Giovanni Guareschi. Giuseppe Bertolucci has made an attempt to recreate the missing footage using the same archives and Pasolini's original notes, allowing us to see both the surviving portion and the circumstances surrounding its making. Pasolini's radical vision of historic events from the postwar period up to the early 60s (wars, postcolonial transformations, the distractions of celebrity) is scored to Albinoni's mournful Adagio and accompanied by a fiercely angry poetic commentary that gives us the essence of Pasolini's worldview. After the original La Rabbia, Bertolucci presents some newsreel clips that show the extreme hostility and homophobia that Pasolini provoked in his time. This fascinating context doesn't diminish the power of Pasolini's film but serves to illuminate it.

Apichatpong (Joe) Weerasethakul's A Letter to Uncle Boonmee (above center) may be, frame for frame, the most beautiful film I've seen yet in the festival. This 17-minute digital video short, to quote from Joe's program notes, "is part of the multi-platform Primitive project which focuses on a concept of remembrance and extinction set in the northeast of Thailand. Boonmee is the main character of the feature film of the project. This short film is a personal letter describing my Nabua to Uncle Boonmee. The film comprises of shots of house interiors in the evening. The houses are all deserted except for one, where there is a group of young soldiers, played by some teens of Nabua. Two of them impersonate me by narrating the film."

The repetition of the narration follows the pattern of the doubled or split narrative of his last three features, while looking ahead to the themes of his next feature. The slow, graceful camera movements accompanied by a slightly ominous, droning score, the exquisite textures of light and shadow on various objects, give a sense of exploration, of haunted memories. The result is a profoundly mysterious beauty, a mix of narrative and abstraction, that is the hallmark of Joe's cinema. I can't wait to see his next feature.