Day 3 of the NYFF consisted of Michelangelo Frammartino's contemplative Le Quattro Volte and Lee Chang-Dong's followup to Secret Sunshine, the powerfully resonant, masterfully written and acted Poetry.
Before these two films, however, was the HBO Directors Dialogue with Apichatpong Weerasethakul and selection committee member Dennis Lim. There were well-chosen clips from his three most recent features as well as the short video/installation piece Primitive, which I had never seen before. To top off this event, I was able to get Joe to autograph my copy of James Quandt's essential book Apichatpong Weerasethakul. He was extremely gracious as he inscribed the pink inside front cover "For Jim with Love, Apichatpong W." which I will treasure forever. My last glimpse of him came later that evening as I spotted him walking to dinner with Richard Peña and other festival guests just after having dinner myself. It was a Zenlike convergence worthy of an Apichatpong film.
This is Day 2 of the NYFF but Day 1 for me. Apichatpong Weerasethakul's exquisite Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, winner of the Palme d'Or this year at Cannes, is the hands-down winner of my own Palme d'NYFF although I've only seen 5 of my 20 scheduled films thus far. I can't find words adequate to describe the experience of being immersed in Joe's world of wonder, where uncanny ghosts and reincarnations are part of the natural order of life in this remote region of northeastern Thailand (and a bit of modern urban life in the final section for good measure). The sound design, mixing a myriad of animal, bird and insect sounds with an eerie ambient drone familiar from Syndromes and a Century, is even richer than in that previous masterpiece. As in Tropical Malady, the contrast of extreme darkness and radiant light is wondrous (for instance, no one films a canopied bed more beautifully than Apichatpong). Rather than the bifurcated structure of his previous three features, in Uncle Boonmee Apichatpong applies six different visual strategies to the roughly six acts of the film. The most stunning is a playful evocation of a Thai royal costume drama involving a princess and a catfish; this section temporarily abandons the family drama of the rest of the film while maintaining the spirit of mysticism and transcendence evident throughout. Holding it all together is a deeply moving love story between Uncle Boonmee, dying of kidney failure, and his wife Huay who died 19 years earlier but has returned as a ghost to share his last moments and lead him to the next world. They are joined by other family members including Boonsong, a son who has returned after a long disappearance in the form of a monkey ghost. The embrace of Boonmee and Huay, pictured above, takes a triangular form matched by the inverted triangle of the bed canopy above them; this harmonious composition adds immeasurably to the poignance of this scene. One other detail which I found extremely powerful is the moment in the cave shortly before Boonmee's death when the tube attached to his kidney is opened to release a flow of urine onto the ground, as if draining his last lifeblood. Then there's a very erotic scene in which Tong, Boonmee's nephew (Apichatpong regular Sakda Kaewbuadee), takes off his orange Buddhist monk's robes and takes a shower. And once again Joe uses a catchy pop tune at the end simply because he likes it, and why not celebrate the joy of continuing life in just this way? I can't wait to see this film again and to see where my favorite contemporary film director goes in his next work.
Xavier Beauvois's Of Gods and Men was an excellent fictionalized recreation of the massacre of a community of monks in Algeria in 1996, aided by great performances from Lambert Wilson and Michael Lonsdale. Finally Michael Epstein's John Lennon documentary LENNONYC, although fairly conventional in approach, benefited from a great subject (Lennon's post-Beatles years in New York with Yoko Ono) and access to some terrific audio and video of recording sessions, radio shows and concert appearances. A special bonus was the post-screening appearance in the guest box of Yoko Ono, waving a peace sign to the cheering audience.
BONUS UPDATE: Here is the video of that "catchy pop tune" mentioned above, titled Acrophobia:
BAM Cinematek will be presenting a retrospective of João Pedro Rodrigues's three features and two of his short films in October. Unfortunately my NYFF schedule conflicts with two of the screenings, for Odete and To Die Like a Man, but I will be seeing his remarkable debut, O Fantasma (above) plus a short, Happy Birthday!, and there will be a discussion with Rodrigues after the films. Why BAM perversely decided to program these films at the same time as the New York Film Festival is a mystery to me.
In looking through the short films accompanying some of the features at this year's NYFF, I found two which immediately caught my attention.
Before the screening of Pablo Larrain's Post Mortem, there's a new short film by the great Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, The Accordion, described as "Two child beggars learn a lesson in class solidarity." Panahi was released from prison earlier this year, but although his new short just premiered at Venice, he was denied permission to attend by the Iranian regime. And preceding Hong Sang-Soo's Oki's Movie is a new 13-minute film by Tarnation director Jonathan Caouette, All Flowers in Time. According to the festival website it's "a guided tour through the shattered remains of memory and identity. With Chloë Sevigny."
On his blog today Jonathan Rosenbaum posts some brief comments on and images from Antonioni's L'Eclisse which nicely summarize my own feelings about this modernist masterpiece:
"The conclusion of Michelangelo Antonioni’s loose trilogy about modern life at mid-century (preceded by L’avventura and La notte), this 1961 film is conceivably the greatest in Antonioni’s career, but perhaps significantly it has the least consequential plot. A sometime translator (Monica Vitti) recovering from an unhappy love affair briefly links up with a stockbroker (Alain Delon) in Rome, though the stunning final montage sequence — perhaps the most powerful thing Antonioni has ever done — does without these characters entirely. And because these two leads arguably give the most nuanced and charismatic performances of their careers here, the shock of losing them before the end of the picture is central to the film’s devastating final effect.
"Alternately an essay and a prose poem about the contemporary world in which the “love story” figures as one of many motifs, this is remarkable both for its visual/ atmospheric richness and its polyphonic and polyrhythmic mise en scène. Antonioni’s handling of crowds at the Roman stock exchange is never less than amazing, recalling the choreographic use of deep focus employed in the early features of Orson Welles, where foreground and background details are juggled together in brilliant juxtapositions.
"But it is probably the final sequence, which depends on editing rather than mise en scène, that best sums up the hope and despair of the filmmaker’s vision."
I'll have more to say after I've seen Miguel Gomes's Our Beloved Month of August. In the meantime, here's a lovely image from the film which has received rapturous reviews. From all indications Gomes would appear to be a major emerging director of the Portuguese New Wave, if there is such a thing (Pedro Costa, João Pedro Rodrigues).
UPDATE 9/9:Our Beloved Month of August more than lives up to its advance praise. Roughly the first half of the film, shot in and around the annual music festival in Arganil, takes the form of a documentary about the festival, the local residents and visitors, the natural beauty of the mountainous region, and Gomes’s inability, due to lack of financing, to make the fiction feature he originally planned. After we’ve been immersed in the leisurely pace of the music and conversations for some time, a narrative suddenly begins to emerge, performed by actors who had previously appeared to be “real people” talking about their lives. However, the film’s structure is built on layers of ambiguity between what is fiction and nonfiction, and the soundtrack involves a constant layering of natural sounds, conversations and bits of music recorded at various times. If I’m not mistaken, there is even an audio clip from a film by the late Portuguese filmmaker João César Monteiro, reciting a speech as his screen alter ego João de Deus. Gomes himself appears from time to time as the director of the film within the film, in playfully scripted conversations with his producer, his soundman, and in one instance a delightful scene where a couple of girls try to audition for parts in the film. It’s all shot in a beautiful, often long-take style. The result is a unique hybrid of music doc, travelogue, domestic drama and personal essay about the process of making a movie.
Madam Butterfly
Another essential screening next week in New York is MoMA's Contemporasian program of short films by four of the greatest contemporary Asian directors. Included are two films I've seen previously, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's A Letter to Uncle Boonmee and Jia Zhangke's Cry Me a River, and two others I'm especially eager to see, Tsai Ming-Liang's Madam Butterfly and Hong Sang-Soo's Lost in the Mountains.
