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.