Edward Yang

 A Brighter Summer Day

Taipei Story

The complete Edward Yang retrospective at the Walter Reade Theatre, coupled with the week-long premiere run of A Brighter Summer Day at the Elinor Bunin Monroe Film Center, gives me something to truly be thankful for this long Thanksgiving weekend. Last night Yang's widow, Kaili Peng, kicked off the series with a brief, moving introduction before a screening of Yang's third film, The Terrorizers (1986). It's a complex, tragic and masterfully composed meditation on narrative structure in the context of various troubled relationships. Volumes could be written on how Yang frames characters and events in relation to apartment walls and windows, mirrors, city streets and other elements of Taipei's (or in the case of Yi Yi, also Japan's) modern architecture. In the midst of this striking visual design, emotional and physical violence is constantly threatening to erupt.

Yang's Antonioniesque urban modernism is transposed to the 60s in his 4-hour masterpiece A Brighter Summer Day, which focuses on a group of alienated young people. As Jonathan Rosenbaum describes the film, "It has a novelistic richness of character, setting, and milieu unmatched by any other ‘90s film...What Yang does with objects—a flashlight, a radio, a tape recorder, a Japanese sword—resonates more deeply than what most directors do with characters, because along with an uncommon understanding of and sympathy for teenagers Yang has an exquisite eye for the troubled universe they inhabit. This is a film about alienated identities in a country undergoing a profound existential crisis—a Rebel Without a Cause with much of the same nocturnal lyricism and cosmic despair."

A Confucian Confusion

Mahjong

Happy Together

One of the greatest films of the 90s and rivaled in Wong Kar-Wai's oeuvre only by In the Mood for Love, Wong's 1997 film Happy Together screened Friday at MoMA to kick off a series of films from distributor Fortissimo Films. This is one of the saddest, most achingly beautiful films ever made, with brilliant performances by Tony Leung and the late Leslie Cheung (both at their most gorgeous) as a tormented, constantly bickering gay couple, with cinematography by Christopher Doyle that switches between black and white and color to suggest the shifting moods, and a soundtrack brimming with music that complements the haunting images. After the screening Chris Doyle did one of his typically irreverent Q&As that managed to illuminate some of the creative process behind his collaboration with Wong Kar-Wai on this masterpiece.

A Hong Kong film with only one shot (upside down) actually shot in Hong Kong, it strands its characters in Buenos Aires, with side trips to Iguazu Falls and a poignant finale in Taipei. This dislocation creates an overwhelming mood of lonely exile from Hong Kong in the crucial transition year of 1997. The pain would be almost unbearable if not for the brilliance of the filmmaking on display here.

In the Family

In the Family, written and directed by and co-starring Patrick Wang, is the most remarkable gay-themed American independent film I've seen in many years. Wang has created a labor of love here, telling a powerful story about a gay family in Tennessee torn apart following the death of one of the partners and the custody battle that follows. It is told at a leisurely pace, almost three hours, which allows the story to take hold in a series of gripping dramatic scenes that play out in natural time, with a modern long-take style that lets the writing and the acting achieve their full impact. Brian Murray's climactic deposition cross-examination, followed by Patrick Wang's beautifully modulated scene defending his right to custody of his son, cap an emotional drama that avoids all the pitfalls of melodrama.

I'm in awe of Mr. Wang for committing so fully to telling this very personal story without compromise. Unable to find film festivals willing to screen the film, he has rented the Quad Cinema in New York for a week to self-distribute the film, a strategy which seems to have paid off with mostly glowing reviews (including Paul Brunick in The New York Times) and very positive audience reaction, judging from a well-attended Saturday afternoon screening at which the film received a round of applause, a rare event in my experience for an ordinary screening of this type with no announced special guests. In fact Mr. Wang and some of his family and friends happened to be at that screening, and I briefly told him I thought it was a great film on my way out of the theater. Perhaps I will have more to add to my analysis as I think more about the film.

NYFF 2011 Preview

 The Turin Horse

 Dreileben

 A Separation

Shame

                                                             This Is Not A Film

I have tickets for 16 films so far for this year's New York Film Festival (18 if you count the German trilogy Dreileben as 3 separate films, which it is). Nearly all the films on my wish list from Cannes (except for Tree of Life and Drive which have already opened) were selected for the NYFF. Some films from Venice and/or Toronto which I would like to have seen in the lineup are missing, including Golden Lion winner Faust by Aleksandr Sokurov, and new films by Chantal Akerman, Todd Solondz, Terence Davies, Ann Hui and Johnnie To. However, I'm very pleased that I got tickets for the following films, in chronological order of their appearance in the festival (from the Main Slate unless otherwise noted):

Dreileben (Christian Petzold, Dominik Graf and Christoph Hochhäusler) (Special Screening)

A Separation (Asghar Farhadi)

Miss Bala (Gerardo Naranjo)

Le Havre (Aki Kaurismäki)

We Can't Go Home Again (Nicholas Ray) (Masterworks)

Melancholia (Lars von Trier)

Invasión (Hugo Santiago) (Masterworks)

You Are Not I (Sara Driver) (Masterworks)

Shame (Steve McQueen)

The Kid With a Bike (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)

The Student (Santiago Mitre)

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)

The Turin Horse (Béla Tarr and Agnes Hranitzky)

Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory (Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky) (Special Screening)

This Is Not a Film (Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb)

Goodbye First Love (Mia Hansen-Løve)

I also plan to get tickets for Kenji Mizoguchi's Hometown, part of the sidebar salute to Japan's Nikkatsu Studio, and Peter von Bagh's Sodankyla Forever Parts 3-4. I saw Part 1 of Sodankyla at Film Comment Selects and look forward to the continuation of this loving compilation tribute to the eponymous Finnish film festival. I also have a work-related connection to one of the filmmakers of Paradise Lost 3 which will enable me to meet the directors, whose previous installments of the Paradise Lost series are riveting documents of the miscarriage of American justice. And if I don't succumb to exhaustion I may also add Julia Loktev's The Loneliest Planet and James Benning's Twenty Cigarettes.

The Week Ahead



I've been a bad blogger, too lazy to write anything about the films I've seen in the last two months. I've had no new posts since the Cannes Film Festival in May, so I thought I would at least take a sneak peek at the films I'm planning to see in the week ahead. Topping the list is Raoul Ruiz's exquisite 4 1/2-hour masterpiece, The Mysteries of Lisbon. Seeing it for the second time, I expect to be caught up in its hypnotic camera movements, lush settings and costumes, and dazzling narrative games all over again.

MoMA is offering a one-week premiere of Pietro Marcello's highly praised docu-fiction The Mouth of the Wolf, about the city of Genoa and an unconventional true love story between a tough ex-con and a transgender ex-junkie. It's been described as Jean Genet meets Pedro Costa. What's not to like?

And then there's a double feature Tuesday in Film Forum's Essential Pre-Code series, Alfred E. Green's Union Depot and George Cukor's Girls About Town (with Kay Francis and Joel McCrea!). And if I can find time for it, I hope to see Andy Warhol's dual-screen film Inner and Outer Space starring Edie Sedgwick. I love New York.

Cannes 2011

Le Havre (Aki Kaurismaki)

Melancholia (Lars von Trier)

The Tree of Life (Terence Malick)

Unforgivable (Andre Techine) 

The Kid with the Bike (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)

Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn)

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)

Miss Bala (Gerardo Naranjo)

Above are my picks of the must-see films screened so far at Cannes 2011 (in or out of competition, and in no particular order of preference). The festival ends and awards are announced on Sunday. And finally, a gorgeous shot of Faye Dunaway in one of the Cannes Classic entries.

Puzzle of a Downfall Child (Jerry Schatzberg)

5 Japanese Divas

Above, top to bottom,
3 of the 5 Japanese divas in lead roles for Mikio Naruse:
Hideko Takamine in Yearning,
Setsuko Hara in Repast,
Kinuyo Tanaka in Mother

The essential 3-week series titled "5 Japanese Divas" is now playing at Film Forum. As Adrian Curry noted at MUBI, "there are more masterpieces per square foot in this retrospective than in any other theater in town." The eponymous divas are Setsuko Hara, Kinuyo Tanaka, Isuzu Yamada, Machiko Kyo and Hideko Takamine, and thus the series is packed with some of the greatest films of Mizoguchi, Ozu, Naruse and Kurosawa. There are 5 Mizoguchis and 6 Ozus, but I'm especially delighted that no less than 6 films by Mikio Naruse are included, as he is the most neglected and rarely screened of the three major Japanese auteurs.

I saw a double bill of Naruse's Repast (featuring the exquisite Setuko Hara in one of her most nuanced roles as a disillusioned wife) and Yearning (with Hideko Takamine, who appeared in most of Naruse's great films of the 50's and early 60's). I posted about the latter film back in December and was eager to see it again just 4 months later. Yearning deserves to become part of the canon of Japanese cinema for its final movement, which begins with a lyrical depiction of a train ride that brings Takamine's character Reiko progressively closer to the forbidden love she feels for the younger brother of her dead husband, only to end the next morning with a shattering closeup after her rejection of him leads to inevitable tragedy.

Among others, I'm looking forward to as many of the other Naruse films as I can see, as well as Ozu's very dark Tokyo Twilight (with Setsuko Hara and Isuzu Yamada) and the rare Keisuke Kinoshita film Carmen Comes Home (Takamine).

New Directors/New Films

Curling

Winter Vacation

 Attenberg

Octubre 

 

I'm finally getting around to posting on the 2011 New Directors/New Films festival a day after it wrapped up. The two best films I saw, Denis Cote's Curling and Athina Rachel Tsangari's Attenberg, are very different looks at a father-daughter relationship which exhibit striking formal qualities while not sacrificing deep emotional resonances. Attenberg intercuts a semblance of a story with delightful improvised shots of the two girls doing Monty Pythonesque "silly walks" or walking slowly arm-in-arm a la Fassbinder's Katzelmacher (a reference the director acknowledged in her Q&A). Curling makes stunning use of its bleak wintry Quebec landscape to tell a mysterious tale of an emotionally shut-down father and his lonely teenage daughter, played by a real-life father and daughter who appeared at the film's MoMA screening.

Li Hongqi's Winter Vacation uses long, still takes beautifully to depict the aimless despair of a group of young Chinese kids in a remote small town with deadpan humor. And Daniel and Diego Vega's Octubre also uses wry humor to show a reluctant relationship between a lonely moneylender and the woman who helps take care of the baby he is suddenly saddled with as the result of one of his many visits to prostitutes. The sense of community in this poor neighborhood of Lima is wonderfully developed.

New Korean Cinema

Hong Sang-Soo's Hahaha and Lee Chang-Dong's Poetry

A few brief thoughts about two great recent Korean films: Hong's Hahaha reflects his increasing formal mastery, and it's also one of his funniest films. The film is told in complexly interlocking flashbacks told by two narrators who are presented only in black-and-white still photos. Each of their recollections is set off by the sound and the still image of the men toasting each other during a long drinking session.

Lee's Poetry, which I just saw for the second time, has a haunting concluding sequence which draws great emotional force from revisiting locations seen earlier in the film, but now highlighting the absence of some or all of the major characters. This is a motif which runs through some of my favorite films of all time: Antonioni's L'Eclisse, of course, but also Resnais's Muriel (playing this weekend at Museum of the Moving Image) and Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise. I don't know whether Lee was influenced by Antonioni's film in this sequence, but he starts with the structural absence of L'Eclisse's famous conclusion and subtly reverses it by introducing the dead girl, absent throughout the film but suddenly given life through the poetry of the main character.

Fritz Lang in Hollywood

The Big Heat

Human Desire 

Film Forum kicked off its indispensable 2-week “Fritz Lang in Hollywood” series last Friday with a great Glenn Ford/Gloria Grahame noir double feature, The Big Heat and Human Desire. I’ve seen both films many times on TV, but neither has ever looked as good as they did in these pristine 35-millimeter prints. I was particularly impressed by Gloria Grahame’s performances in both films, especially by her sympathetic mob mistress to Lee Marvin in The Big Heat. The script is full of classic lines, including her comment to the crooked cop's widow played by Jeanette Nolan, "We're sisters under the mink." Her sacrificial death at the end, cradled in that iconic mink by Glenn Ford as he tries to comfort her in her final moments, moved me as deeply as any noir ending I can recall.

Lang’s expressionistic geometry of paranoia and entrapment, frequently emphasized by overhead shots, is on view in all of his black-and-white Hollywood films, and even in his beautiful color Cinemascope period adventure film, Moonfleet. Another must-see coming next week is his moody, heartbreaking version of the Bonnie and Clyde myth, You Only Live Once.

Eternity

I was alerted to this trailer for the new Thai film Eternity by a post on Filipino film blogger Adrian Mendizabal's excellent site, Auditoire. Based on the serenely beautiful long takes in the trailer, this film scheduled for the upcoming Rotterdam Film Festival could be one of the best of 2011.

UPDATE 2/4: Just 3 days after posting this trailer, I learn that Sivaroj Kongsakul's Eternity is one of three new films to win a Tiger Award at Rotterdam. In the words of the jury, "With a great sense of cinematic duration, this film builds its own universe, finding its own pacing, so consistently, to tell its particular story. A film that seems on the surface to be about death but which is really about love, a beautiful and delicate love story."

Shanghai Express

This image from Shanghai Express, borrowed from Noel Vera's blog, is so iconically perfect a representation of classic Hollywood glamour in general, and the art of Josef von Sternberg in particular, that I felt compelled to just post it with no further comment.

Museum of the Moving Image

The day has finally arrived for the long-awaited opening of the newly renovated Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens with a special members' preview and screening of Robert Rossen's The Hustler this evening. Other notable film events in the opening month include the NY premieres of John Ford's rediscovered silent Upstream and Hong Sang-Soo's HaHaHa; Paul Fejos's 1928 masterpiece Lonesome; several notable avant-garde films including works by the Kuchars, Jonas Mekas, Andy Warhol and Gregory Markopoulos; and the current top film on my must-see list:

Manoel de Oliveira's 4 1/2-hour Doomed Love. I will have more to say about this and other films in the weeks ahead.

Best Revivals of 2010

The best revival of 2010 for my money was MoMA's presentation of the new Film Foundation restoration of Luchino Visconti's The Leopard, looking better than I've ever seen it. It was a year for epic-length revivals, beginning in February with Film Comment Selects' presentation of Edward Yang's 4-hour masterpiece A Brighter Summer Day. This year also brought the New York premiere of R.W. Fassbinder's mind-bending made-for-TV sci-fi miniseries World on a Wire, Anthology Film Archives showed Hans-Jurgen Syberberg's 7-hour Hitler: A Film from Germany, Film Forum had the New York premiere of Fritz Lang's newly-restored Metropolis, and MoMA offered Marcel L'Herbier's L'Argent and L'Inhumaine.

There were plenty of great revivals of normal length too. Perhaps the best was Mikio Naruse's Yearning starring the late Hideko Takamine, which I discussed in an earlier post. My favorite directorial retrospective was the Walter Reade's comprehensive Eric Rohmer salute. I had the chance to see The Sign of Leo, The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediatheque, Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle, A Tale of Springtime and A Winter's Tale (pictured above), none of which are currently available on U.S. DVD. The Walter Reade also had a screening of John Cassavetes's astonishing Love Streams, and I saw three more Visconti films there -- Conversation Piece, Sandra and Rocco and His Brothers. BAM had a great Jean Renoir retro which gave me a chance to see his neorealist classic Toni for the first time in nearly 40 years. (A DVD release of Renoir's long-unavailable La Nuit du Carrefour also helped to put his great run of 30s films in perspective.) BAM also had an Olivier Assayas series timed to the release of Carlos. IFC Center had wonderful retrospectives of Claire Denis (Beau Travail, Nenette et Boni) and Yasujiro Ozu (the underrated Record of a Tenement Gentleman and A Hen in the Wind).

Film Forum had gorgeous new prints of Jacques Tourneur's Nightfall and Antonioni's Le Amiche, among many others. BAM introduced me to Joao Cesar Monteiro (Silvestre), and screened Maurice Pialat's We Won't Grow Old Together and Joao Pedro Rodrigues's very queer classic O Fantasma. I will have to consult my notes for later updates, as I'm sure I'm forgetting other highlights of 2010.

Sure to be a year-long source of amour du cinema in 2011 is the soon to be reopened Museum of the Moving Image. In the first two months alone they will be showing Paul Fejos's Lonesome, John Ford's Upstream and Manoel de Oliveira's Doomed Love, followed by a major Alain Resnais retrospective.