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.