First Look

Almayer's Folly

That Summer

 Life Without Principle

Buenas Noches, España

I have some catching up to do as there is an exhaustingly rich selection of new and repertory films available to see this January in New York. Besides the subject of this post, there is the near-complete Robert Bresson retrospective at Film Forum (which I hope to cover soon), a mini-Raj Kapoor series at MoMA (a filmmaker completely new to me), and some new releases such as Tran Anh Hung's Norwegian Wood and Lynne Ramsay's We Need to Talk About Kevin, all in just the first two weeks. This will involve some creative subway shuttling and schedule juggling to try to keep up.

Museum of the Moving Image's great roundup of recent festival films, entitled First Look and curated by the museum's Dennis Lim, Rachael Rakes and David Schwartz, is bookended with personal appearances  by Chantal Akerman with Almayer's Folly and Raya Martin with Buenas Noches, España and two short films. Other films in the series that sound especially worthwhile include Johnnie To's Life Without Principle, Philippe Garrel's That Summer (Un été brûlant), Andrei Zviyagintsev's Elena, Mark Jackson's Without, and a new short by João Rui Guerra da Mata and João Pedro Rodrigues (director of the great To Die Like a Man). If time permits I will try to see even more of the 13 programs crammed into two weekends at MOMI.

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)