Assorted Screenings in NYC: February-March 2010

1. I've gotten in the habit of looking at online trailers for upcoming screenings in NYC - admittedly an iffy way of deciding whether to see a film, but better for me than all the other iffy ways. In case you're interested in sharing the iffiness, here are trailers or clips that piqued my interest:

• Make Yourself at Home, in the Korean American Film Festival: Sunday, February 28 at 4:30 pm at the SVA Theatre at 333 W 23rd St. (The screening is sadly opposite A Brighter Summer Day at the Walter Reade that afternoon.)

• Le bel âge (Restless), in the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema Series: Tuesday, March 16 at 7 pm at the IFC Center; Wednesday, March 17 at 1 pm at the Walter Reade; and Thursday, March 18 at 8:45 pm at the Walter Reade.

• Polytechnique, in the Canadian Front Series: Friday, March 19 at 4 pm and Sunday, March 21 at 12:45 pm at MoMA.

2. I caught the Larrieu Brothers' Les derniers jours du monde (Happy End) at Toronto 2009, and it seems even more audacious and appealing upon reflection than it did at the time. It's one of the lower-profile entries in this year's edition of Film Comment Selects at the Walter Reade: screenings are at Monday, March 1 at 3:30 pm and Tuesday, March 2 at 6:15 pm. Here's what I wrote in my Toronto 2009 wrap-up for Senses of Cinema:

"Presented in Locarno's Piazza Grande ten days before its French theatrical premiere, Arnaud and Jean-Marie Larrieu's Les derniers jours du monde, which witnesses the destruction of Europe via virus, nuclear attack, and assorted other implements of destruction, was sensibly programmed on TIFF's last night. As usual in this genre, we are allocated an identification figure (Mathieu Amalric) - but this audience surrogate is not quite standard issue, in that he has lost an arm as a result of his adulterous sexual fixation on an androgynous sex worker (Omayrah Mota), who cannot be dislodged from the top of his priority list even as death rains down around him. The end of the world according the Larrieus is light on exciting violent spectacle, but full of beanballs thrown at our delicate psyches: sometimes via the wholesale abrogation of sexual barriers, sometimes by confronting us with unsettling evidence of the fragility of the body. For the characters as well as the filmmakers, the apocalypse is about freedom, about the falling away of social and psychological constraints - and if the Larrieus sometimes treat the apocalypse rather casually, they take sex very seriously. Among the film's many pleasures is the best role in years for the admirable Karin Viard, as the protagonist's abandoned but not forgotten wife."

3. Catherine Breillat's excellent Barbe Bleue (Blue Beard) has a preview screening on Wednesday, March 3 at 7:30 pm at Anthology Film Archives (as part of their Bluebeard on Film series) before its March 26 opening at the IFC Center. Once again Breillat dissolves the gap between a literary property (this time Perrault's fairy tale) and her own sensibility, effortlessly finding a paradoxical emotional angle on every primal event. A modern-day framing story, featuring two sisters reading the tale in their attic, provides a running comic commentary while simultaneously delving into life-and-death conflicts of its own. One can perhaps argue that the fairy tale's focus on the anxiety of disobedience, which requires creating a monster, is somewhat at odds with the sympathy that Breillat characteristically extends to all her sexual combatants. Still, it's fascinating to watch her erase distinctions between mundane and mythic subject matter.

4. Hilary Brougher's distinctly underappreciated 2006 drama Stephanie Daley returns for a one-off screening at 92Y Tribeca on Friday, March 5 at 7 pm, with the filmmaker in attendance. There is a faintly metaphorical aura to the film's story - a teenage girl (Amber Tamblyn), in denial about her belatedly terminated pregnancy, perplexes a forensic psychologist (Tilda Swinton), herself pregnant - that probably led to it being pigeonholed as a topical work. Easier to miss is the unusual density of Brougher's filmmaking: she seems determined to cut out all the ordinary moments in life and move briskly from one insight to another. And she seems to have a lot of detailed observations up her sleeve about both teenage anguish and pregnancy. It's rare to see an American film that adopts a familiar investigation/mystery format and yet comes across as a continuous stream of personal expression.

5. The surprise of last year's Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, Sylvie Verheyde's Stella, is screening at Symphony Space on Saturday, March 6 at 7 pm and Saturday, March 13 at 8:45 pm at as part of the New York International Children's Film Festival. The story of a tentative but self-sufficient young girl (Léora Barbara) trying to transcend the restrictions of her déclassé upbringing, Stella has few formal chops, doesn't look so great, overuses its effects - and I loved it anyway. Verheyde is a wizard at not letting fictional forms get in the way of facts about people, and she effortlessly generates compelling complexity while dodging every bullet of the coming-of-age genre. The film's scale is so modest and human-centered that one doesn't tote up its achievements immediately: nearly every scene is a standout, nearly every performance is incisive.

6. Just in case you need recommendations for Film Forum's Victor Fleming series: 1935's The Farmer Takes a Wife (on Tuesday, March 9 at 1, 4:45 and 8:30 pm) and 1938's rather Hawksian Test Pilot (on Wednesday, March 10 at 1, 5:30 and 10 pm and Thursday, March 11 at 1 pm) are both pretty good. Also Red Dust (on Friday, March 5 at 1, 4:30 and 8 pm, and Saturday, March 6 at 2:50 and 8 pm), but you probably know that one already. (Too bad Film Forum couldn't get 1935's Reckless, which is probably my favorite.) Fleming isn't always able to show his talents, but he's a smart director, with distinctive visual habits: he likes short lenses, slightly depressed angles, and characters approaching and leaving the foreground on diagonals. He favors exaggerated acting and action, has an interesting taste for violence and iconoclasm, and likes visual overcrowding and excess.

7. I haven't seen anything in this year's Rendez-Vous series, but I'm very much looking forward to Alain Guiraudie's Le roi de l'évasion (The King of Escape): playing Saturday, March 13 at 9 pm at the Walter Reade; Monday, March 15 at 3:45 pm at the Walter Reade; and Tuesday, March 16 at 9:30 pm at the IFC Center. On the basis of 2001's Ce vieux rêve qui bouge (That Old Dream That Moves) and 2003's Pas de repos pour les braves (No Rest for the Brave), Guiraudie seems one of the most inspired filmmakers on today's scene. He's not exactly unknown, but none of his films have gotten US theatrical distribution as far as I know. The new film sounds like light comedy (a gay middle-aged salesman has an opportunity with Hafsia Herzi, and decides to go for it), but Guiraudie can blend light and heavy tones in the oddest ways. I'm also interested in Philippe Lioret's Welcome, which got some attention on the festival circuit: Lioret's Je vais bien, ne t'en fais pas (Don't Worry, I'm Fine) marked him as a talent to watch. It plays Friday, March 12 at 1:15 pm at the Walter Reade; Saturday, March 13 at 6:30 pm at the IFC Center; and Sunday, March 14 at 3:30 pm at the Walter Reade.

8. Gianni Di Gregorio's wonderful Pranzo di ferragosto (Mid-August Lunch), which I wrote about when it played New Directors/New Films last year, gets a theatrical premiere at Film Forum on March 17. The film presents itself as one of those life-affirming films with lovable eccentrics and lots of cooking scenes, and I guess that's true enough. But it's also pure personal filmmaking.

9. MoMA's Canadian Front series is looking pretty hotsy-totsy this year. The most exciting title is Bernard Émond's sublime La Donation (The Legacy), which plays Thursday, March 18 at 4 pm and Saturday, March 20 at 8 pm. Here's what I said in my Senses of Cinema Toronto 2009 wrap-up:

"Though a notch lower in prestige than Venice, Cannes and Berlin, the Locarno Film Festival, which takes place a month before TIFF, provided a disproportionate number of my favourite films this year. At the top of the list is La Donation, the high point to date of Quebecois filmmaker Bernard Émond’s career. Set in the small town of Normétal in the Abitibi-Ouest region of Quebec, and haunted by the clear gray skies and dark wooded areas that seem ready to reclaim the settlement at a moment’s notice, La Donation is the continuing story of Jeanne Dion (Elise Guilbault), the embattled doctor of Émond’s La Neuvaine, whose search for meaning leads her to a trial period as the impoverished region’s only physician. Casting a number of residents of the area, and directing his professional actors to match the quiet stoicism of the amateurs, Émond arrives at an uncanny evocation of the mood of Bresson’s Journal d’un curé de campagne (Diary of a Country Priest, 1950), in which the performers are less documented for their reality than enlisted as principles of existence. As a follower of Émond since his first feature La femme qui boit (2001, also starring Guilbault), I had begun to fear in recent years that he was settling into a reflex solemnity that was yielding diminishing returns. To my delight, La Donation recasts Émond’s art in new terms, not so much dispelling his heaviness as offering it to us, contextualising it with brisk pacing and a strong narrative hook, exposing it to the skies and cold winds. Now would be the perfect time for programmers worldwide to give Émond greater exposure."

A tougher sell is Sherry White's Crackie, about which I wrote in the same article:

"Labrador-based director Sherry White premiered her film Crackie at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival in July before bringing it home to TIFF and a subsequent Canadian theatrical run. Set in a rural part of Newfoundland that seems dominated by scrap yards and garbage dumps, Crackie is the story of 17-year-old Mitzy (Meagan Greeley), suspended between her tough, practical grandmother/caretaker (Mary Walsh) and the worthless mother she idealises (Cheryl Wells). The film is a bit broad and schematic around the edges, but subtle and affecting at its centre: Greeley’s wonderfully simple performance scales the girl’s reactions down so that both her vulnerability and her inner strength seem in harmony with her hardscrabble environment. White portrays Mitzy’s first sexual experiments frankly and without sentiment, and gets emotional mileage out of her turbulent relationship with the eponymous dog who figures in her transition to adulthood."

Amoureuse

My piece on Jacques Doillon's little-known and amazing 1992 film Amoureuse is up at the Auteurs' Notebook.

The Youth of Chopin: Walter Reade, Sunday, January 10, 2009

Polish director Aleksander Ford is one of those names who pop up in film history books, but rarely appear on American screens to take the test of time. His 1952 The Youth of Chopin, which screens once more on Sunday, January 10 at 3 pm in the Walter Reade's brief celebration of Chopin's bicentenary, has everything going against it: not only the unrewarding conventions of the biopic, but also an apparent governmental mandate to cast Chopin as a people's revolutionary. And it's a knockout anyway, a film that only gradually reveals how unorthodox and experimental it is. The project's central problems are confronted by writer-director Ford with unusual intelligence and formal transparency. The historical narrative is not so much blended with great-man mythology as juxtaposed with it, with self-aware cuts and tracking shots shifting Chopin and the class struggle from foreground to background and back again. Even more strikingly, Ford embraces the episodic aspect of biography, and the film often takes the form of a series of dazzling, disconnected set-pieces, with supporting characters bearing much emotional weight, then vanishing like comets. In some ways, Ford calls to mind the great French director Jacques Becker, in that his visual skill and sensitivity to ambiance is in the service of sharp but unbiased social observation. I could easily have been persuaded that Becker was responsible for the beautiful scene where Chopin attends a Paganini concert, or for an orgiastic party scene in which a political assassination is counterpointed with frenzied dancers ripping off their shoes. Still, Ford is somewhat more inclined to symbolism than Becker, more likely to turn the flow of reality into coolly observed friezes. I've never seen anything else by Ford, but it's hard to believe that a director who is at once so analytical and so instinctive could not have made many other worthwhile films.

2009 Manhattan One-Week Theatrical Premieres

Here are my favorite films that received their first one-week theatrical run in Manhattan during 2009. (I exclude films that were made too long ago to feel contemporary.)

1. Night and Day (Hong Sang-soo)
2. Sita Sings the Blues (Nina Paley)
3. C.R.A.Z.Y. (Jean-Marc Vallée)
4. Desert Dream (Zhang Lu)
5. Gomorrah (Matteo Garrone)
6. Broken Embraces (Pedro Almodovar)
7. Me and Orson Welles (Richard Linklater)
8. Chelsea on the Rocks (Abel Ferrara)
9. Paradise (Michael Almereyda)
10. Medicine for Melancholy (Barry Jenkins)

More than half of these films received no national distribution, barely squeaking out one-week runs at NYC specialty venues. Which underlines the arbitrariness of a Manhattan premiere list...but whatever. (I keep a running list of my favorite films by date of international release.)

Honorable mentions (in alphabetical order): Beeswax (Andrew Bujalski); I'm Gonna Explode (Gerardo Naranjo); Liverpool (Lisandro Alonso); Lorna's Silence (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne); Tokyo: "Merde" (Leos Carax); Two Lovers (James Gray); The Vanished Empire (Karen Shakhnazarov).

Films with a lot going for them: California Dreamin' (Cristian Nemescu); Extract (Mike Judge); Frontier of Dawn (Philippe Garrel); The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow); Il Divo (Paolo Sorrentino); Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino); The International (Tom Tykwer); The Merry Gentleman (Michael Keaton); Perestroika (Slava Tsukerman); Pontypool (Bruce McDonald); Revanche (Gotz Spielmann); A Single Man (Tom Ford); Tokyo Sonata (Kiyoshi Kurosawa); Treeless Mountain (So Yong Kim); Tulpan (Sergey Dvortsevoy); The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke); You, the Living (Roy Andersson).

Films with something going for them: Adoration (Atom Egoyan); The Brothers Bloom (Rian Johnson); Cargo 200 (Alexei Balabanov); Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson); Flower in the Pocket (Liew Seng Tat); Goodbye Solo (Ramin Bahrani); The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel); Serbis (Brilliante Mendoza); A Serious Man (Joel Coen & Ethan Coen); Somers Town (Shane Meadows); Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas); The Sun (Alexander Sokurov); 24 City (Jia Zhang-ke); Up in the Air (Jason Reitman); Ward No. 6 (Karen Shakhnazarov & Aleksandr Gornovsky).

Among the films I couldn't get into: Adventureland (Greg Mottola); Afterschool (Antonio Campos); Avatar (James Cameron); Birdsong (Albert Serra); The Box (Richard Kelly); Cheri (Stephen Frears); Duplicity (Tony Gilroy); The Girlfriend Experience (Steven Soderbergh); Home (Ursula Meier); Hunger (Steve McQueen); Import Export (Ulrich Seidl); Jerichow (Christian Petzold); Lake Tahoe (Fernando Eimbcke); The Limits of Control (Jim Jarmusch); Loren Cass (Chris Fuller); Megane (Naoko Ogigami); Moon (Duncan Jones); Munyurangabo (Lee Isaac Chung); My Dear Enemy (Lee Yoon-ki); My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (Werner Herzog); Paris (Cedric Klapisch); The Pope's Toilet (Cesar Charlone & Enrique Fernandez); Public Enemies (Michael Mann); Shall We Kiss? (Emmanuel Mouret); Taxidermia (Gyorgy Palfi); 35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis); Tony Manero (Pablo Larrain); Tyson (James Toback); Unmade Beds (Alexis Dos Santos); The Young Victoria (Jean-Marc Vallée).

Sita Sings the Blues: IFC Center, through January 5, 2010

The distribution of Nina Paley's 2008 animated feature Sita Sings the Blues has famously been obstructed by music publishing copyright protection. WNET-TV broadcast the film via a loophole in the copyright laws for public television: I'm not sure whether its screening at the IFC Center (through this Tuesday, January 5) is a defiance of copyright law, or a side-effect of the WNET alliance. The film is freely available on the Internet, but it's actually a terrific film to watch with an audience: many of us in the theater interacted vocally with the screen, but at different moments and in different ways, as befits the complexity of the work. And, for a film that Paley presumably hand-crafted, it's a surprisingly spectacular big-screen experience.

Not to mention a great movie. From the first few moments, where a campy but oddly droll and restrained tableau of Indian goddess with phonograph player suddenly explodes into the dynamic credit sequence, we are in the presence of an artistic personality with so many dimensions - purely formal play, cerebral comedy, parody of popular storytelling modes, balance among personal and cultural perspectives - that we reduce it by considering any one of them at a time. Paley's Rube Goldberg postmodern conception/contraption is ultimately a demonstration of her ability to integrate an uncontrollable variety of effects into a complex but whole sensibility.

Toronto 2009

My coverage of the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival is now online at Senses of Cinema.

Uncovered

Earlier this year, I decided that Jim McBride, whom I had always considered a very good director, actually had the sensibility of a great director, if not the control over his career that a great director would hope for. And so I set out to obtain DVD or VHS copies of all his films that I hadn't seen. One of these, Uncovered (1994), instantly and improbably joined David Holzman's Diary (1967) and Breathless (1983) in the ranks of my favorite McBride movies.

McBride's career breaks up fairly neatly into three parts:

• Late 60s and early 70s: He receives critical acclaim for David Holzman's Diary and enjoys a brief period of impoverished autonomy as an independent.
• 80s: He tries making films within the commercial system, and strikes pay dirt with his second film of the decade, The Big Easy (1986). But the subsequent failure of Great Balls of Fire! (1989) seems to damage his prospects.
• 90s: He manages to string together a series of feature works, mostly television genre projects of little prestige, barely noted by anyone.

On paper, Uncovered would seem to be as unpromising an idea as any McBride had been saddled with. Based on a mystery novel by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, the script (presumably written first by Michael Hirst, then worked over by McBride and his frequent collaborator Jack Baran) is about a young art conservator named Julia (Kate Beckinsale) trying to solve a 15th-century murder by analyzing a chess game depicted in a painting. Soon people associated with the painting's restoration are being killed by someone who is using the likely progression of the chess game to select victims.

This plot has nothing and can have nothing to do with the characters except to engage their curiosity, a quality that, not coincidentally, is also the audience's hoped-for condition. McBride had just managed to make good movies from an urban-vampire comedy-thriller (Blood Ties, 1991) and a film noir retread (The Wrong Man, 1993), so we already knew that he had a way with seemingly doomed projects. But Uncovered has a nimbleness and sense of freedom that lift it above the other films of this period.

Part of McBride's approach to projects like this is to treat the plots very lightly, to minimize weighty emotions associated with them and move them along quickly. This distance from thriller plots naturally creates a comic tone, and McBride directs genre assignments as comedies whenever possible. (The 90s McBride films that don't work well for me - The Informant (1997) and Dead by Midnight (1997) - are the ones with subject matter so grave that McBride couldn't in good faith play them for laughs.)

If McBride doesn't bother pretending that his plots are important, he turns out to be surprisingly sympathetic to other audience-pleasing genre elements. It's plain that he enjoys sex in a general, almost polymorphous way, and lacks the usual American inhibitions about taking simple sexual pleasure. (McBride came of age during that brief period in the 60s and 70s where it seemed as if American cinema might actually be experiencing a sexual revolution, and he has never lost the calling.) He dotes on romance between attractive people, and he's even got a flair for action and violence. (His Elmore Leonard adaptation Pronto (1997) contains an exceptional scene in which a somewhat comical U.S. Marshal, played by James LeGros, takes unexpected and lethal command of a threatening situation.)

More than any particular kind of story, McBride enjoys people, and no genre exercise is so contrived that he doesn't try to fill it with surprising, unpremeditated behavior. One of the prerogatives that a director almost always has, that few overseers are clever enough to prohibit, is to take characters who are designed to fulfill audience fantasies, and reconceive them so that they become the mysterious subject of our gaze as well as the receptacle for our identification.

Kate Beckinsale is at the center of Uncovered, and McBride clearly enjoys just being in the same room with her, being paid to photograph her. This Kate bears almost no resemblance to the rather formidable, shielded beauty who now graces our screens. McBride encourages her girlishness, her permeability. Her Julia occupies the role of the investigator, the problem solver, the righter of wrongs; but she lopes awkwardly through the streets of Barcelona, munching on carrots or apples; she stares at the painting she is restoring as if she were a child in a schoolyard encountering a new playmate. There is no fixity to her state of being: she comes easy to anger, easy to embarrassment, easy to fascination. Though she is smart, her connection to life seems simple and sensual, not much mediated by intellect.

McBride breaks down the boundaries between Julia's different functions and modes: he wants to mix everything together. Example: the first of the killer's victims is a former lover Julia still has feelings for. After she discovers his body and deals with the police, she returns to her apartment. This genre film will of course not treat the death with the gravity that it would deserve in life; and, in fact, the script is ready for a nude scene. To the accompaniment of atmospheric music, Julia enters the apartment and strips off her dress, so that she is naked except for panties. McBride isn't shy at all about his commercial obligations here: he pans, then tracks backwards to keep Julia in the camera's fixed, sensual gaze. Now that the film has shifted into an erotic mode, McBride and Beckinsale make a connection to the previous events: the topless girl shudders with a sob, still grieving. The scene is no longer purely an erotic set piece: it now exists between two narrative functions. At this moment, Julia looks at the painting in her living room that she has been restoring, and moves closer, as if noticing something new about it. The scene's function shifts again, back to the film's central inquiry, as Julia approaches the painting, her sorrow temporarily muted. McBride isn't fazed that Julia is still half-naked and exposed to our gaze as the mystery of the painting is evoked: Julia as sex object and Julia as driver of the narrative go together for him with no strain.

As much as the film revolves around Beckinsale's magnetism, it's an ensemble piece, and it contains at least two other memorable performances: by Paudge Behan as Domenec, the street-gamin chess expert who overcomes Julia's hostility, and by John Wood as Julia's queeny lifelong friend and guardian Cesar. Wood in particular does a terrific job of steering clear of cliché. He camps it up as hard as any gay best friend in the cinema, but he and McBride channel his exhibitionism into the character's life instead of brandishing it as a distraction for the audience: we quickly understand that Cesar must be taken seriously at all times, though he does not sacrifice his flamboyance to that end. Nearly the entire cast partakes of the film's diffuse but overt erotic vibe: man or woman, sympathetic or unsympathetic, everyone gets to strut before the camera and try to seduce it.

The plot is wrapped up tidily; the characters' lives less so. Julia's first line of dialogue, a spontaneous "Fuck me!" as she discovers the covered-up inscription on her painting, feels a touch provocative and open-ended, coming from this still slightly unformed woman-child. And her last line of dialogue is a refusal of closure: an impatient "Sssh!" to her new lover Domenec as she eats a pastry and watches with absorption the auction of the painting that had so occupied her. The impatience does not make us question the value of the love relationship: it merely suspends Julia, and us, in the eternal present.