By: Henry J. Fromage –
My first NYFF was one to both catch up on some of best from earlier festivals this year and make some new discoveries.
537. Who By Fire
This French-Canadian drama may be my biggest discovery of the fest, actually. Director Philippe Lesage directs with an iron grip on tone as the polite society of former filmmaking partners and their children and friends becomes increasingly less so in a remote Quebec cabin they’re vacationing in. It combines superb character-building with an increasing sense of dread as past slights and new bad decisions compound to presage a conflagration. Two Beers.
538. Pepe
I appreciated what director Nelson Carlo De Los Santos Arias is attempting here conceptually, as he tells the story of a descendent of Pablo Escobar’s hippos narrating his life just as it’s ending. He’s chock full of ideas and captures some near-miraculous nature photography of hippos both in their native land and the far less so rivers of Colombia, as well as an interesting ethnographic portrait of the fishing community that discovers this strange beast in their waterways. Some ideas, though, like the ear-splitting blank screen walkie-talkie conversations of the soldiers hunting our Pepe simply don’t work and even grate in their execution. Four Beers.
539. April
This was another film I admired more in the thought behind it than the execution. Déa Kulumbegashvili is quickly carving out a space among the most exciting arthouse voices, and the way she combines a bit of magical realist horror with the realistically depicted portrait of a Georgian obstetrician (who performs abortions for the rural poor in a country where it is legal but societally repressed) is certainly ambitious. Man, it’s a hard watch, though, entirely devoid of hope and joy as true to life as that may be. Three Beers.
540. The Damned
You can tell that director Roberto Minervini was a documentary filmmaker prior to making his fiction debut here. His film may be set in 1862 on the far frontiers of the Civil War, but it feels like somebody was able to bring a camera back in time to examine this small unit of soldiers as they carry out mundane tasks and wait for or hope against coming across the enemy. The few action scenes are shot just as realistically, full of confusion and terror in equal measure. It gets a bit draggy at times, but even that is arguably true to life. Three Beers.
541. Grand Tour
Miguel Gomes won Best Director at Cannes for this inventively anachronistic story of a British civil servant (never mind that he only speaks Portuguese) in Rangoon who skips town just as his fiancée is arriving. What ensues is a tour of Asia as his spurned wife-to-be follows hot on his tail, one clearly shot in modern times but full of period signifiers and design. It’s a wry commentary on colonialism and the long tail of its after-effects, but also a creative and comedic odyssey through some beautiful places and cultures. Two Beers.
542. The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire
Another film that prioritizes the head over the heart, or at least did for me. This is a very meta film about making a film about Martinican writer and revolutionary Suzanne Césaire, who also dabbled heavily in surrealism. You can see how this heady brew of interests informs the approach of the filmmakers here, but despite the big ideas and beautifully saturated cinematography, I can’t help but feel I learned roughly zilch about Césaire the woman or the famous figure by the end. Three Beers.
543. The Friend
In other hands, this story of a New Yorker (Naomi Watts, excellent) who inherits an enormous Great Dane when her famous writer mentor and friend (Bill Murray, doing a lot with very little screentime) commits suicide could have been unbearably schmaltzy. Scott McGehee and David Siegel locate the complicated feelings of grief in both woman and beast within the broader shenanigans (of course she lives in a small apartment that doesn’t allow dogs, and the dog takes over the bed the minute he gets in there). Three Beers.
544. Pavements
I definitely took more chances on idiosyncratic visions here than in Toronto (there’s just too many damn films and so much buyer’s remorse possible at TIFF). This one sees mumblecore maven Alex Ross Perry tackle a documentary about 90s indie rockers Pavement, but with the thought of, ‘what if they were the biggest band in the world?’, which opens up nigh-mockumentary creative possibilities like a high profile musical biopic starring folks like Joe Keery and Alex Wolff, a Broadway musical, and an art museum (all of which where actually created for real). You probably need to know a hell of a lot more about Pavement than I do to fully “get it”, but it’s admirably chock full of conceits galore. Two Beers.
545. No Other Land
This documentary, about a multi-decade attempt to move the Palestinian communities of Masafer Yatta off of their long-inhabited land, will make you mad. It’s impossible not to get angry at the injustices visited upon these people, as even Israeli filmmaker Yuval, who befriends inhabitant and documentarian by necessity Basel, finds to be the case as they bravely film the military tear down their homes, and come back to do so again when they rebuild, then shoot live bullets when they protest. When the Settlers who’ve been allowed to occupy land that apparently is legally set aside for military use show up in masks with weapons as the soldiers stand by and watch their vigilantism, it starts to be a wonder the violence ever stops. The patience and faith of these people is to be admired, not lumped in with the terrorist actions of others. A Toast.
546. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
Rungano Nyoni has established herself as a not-to-be-missed director after I Am Not a Witch and now this film about a Zambian expat who discovers the body of her uncle on the side of the road on a trip back home. Massive and complicated funerary arrangements commence, but it’s clear in her and her younger cousins and relatives’ reactions, this was not the good Christian man his family wants to portray him as. When her family starts to become abusive to that of his way too young wife, long-buried family secrets threaten to come out to prevent further injustice. This is riveting filmmaking that is as sure-handed as it’s culturally distinct. Two Beers.
547. The Shrouds
An odd thing happened minutes into David Cronenberg’s latest film, the first since the loss of his life-long wife, about a man who creates a digital burial shroud that allows him to watch the body of his own beloved wife decay in detail- people started laughing. I was fully expecting this to be nigh-unbearably dour like the last almost two decades of his filmmaking, but these laughs were earned. Cronenberg is funny here (and was hilarious in the Q & A after) even as, yes, the body horror and weird sex abound. I’m not sure whether it’s good in every facet of the word, but it was certainly, surprisingly, enjoyable. Two Beers.
548. Hard Truths
Mike Leigh and Marianne Jean-Baptiste reunite, hopefully in similar awards-winning glory as with Secrets & Lies, with this portrait of a British woman whose clear anxiety and unrelenting nastiness has seemingly put all of her family permanently on edge. Folks have called this the mirror image of Happy-Go-Lucky, which is a fun way to look at this. Jean-Baptiste’s Pansy may be the polar opposite of Sally Hawkins’ Poppy, but just has humanely rendered if a bit more of a challenge to empathize with. The performances are extremely believable and all-around superb, another excellent result for Leigh and his cast’s extensive character-building prework process. Two Beers.
549. Oh, Canada
Time for another octogenarian’s idiosyncratic vision (or close enough- Paul Schrader is 78). This is a meditation on death and legacy that perhaps reflects Schrader’s mindspace a bit, but moreso that of his friend author Russell Banks, who Schrader has adapted before and who wrote Foregone before passing last year. Richard Gere is how you’ve never seen him as an award-winning Montreal-based filmmaker on his deathbed who agrees to sit for an Errol Morris-like documentary from his former students and proteges with an ulterior motive- he wants to tell the truth of his defection to Canada during the Vietnam War to his wife (Uma Thurman) and many infidelities, at least before her. The jumbled structure reflects that of a mind in its final days, riddled with guilt and an earnest desire to reveal the truth. Three Beers.
550. Suburban Fury
In 1975, suburban housewife Sara Jane Moore attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford, and now nearly 50 years later tells her own story in her own words (and pointedly, the film was made on the condition it was only her own words- no other interviewees). A charismatic and questionably reliable narrator, full of spunk and self-aggrandizement even at the tender age of 94, she recounts at first her work as an informant for the FBI (motivated by the Patty Hearst kidnapping) and then eventual radicalization. She’s a fascinating woman with a fascinating story to tell, although one that I now want to hear an outside account of, too, as well as director Robinson Devor contextualizes the time and climate with stock and news footage. Two Beers.
551. Caught By the Tides
Jia Zhangke’s latest was a product of COVID, a time when he finally could look back on a career’s worth of old and unused footage, and found the inspiration to create a career-spanning story for him and his muse Zhao Tao, at times recontextualizing familiar scenes with bold anachronistic music choices, and at others providing new angles and material for those well-versed in his catalogue. I do wonder whether doing a marathon of the films of is I hadn’t seen right before this was for good or ill, since this very much is a narrative with new characters (and eventually new present-day set scenes) that can be hard to recognize as such when you know who’s simply a background character in a scene is a main one in the film it was shot for, but there’s a building power to the simple story of a decades-spanning relationship and Tao’s character’s ability to break free from it nonetheless. Two Beers.
