From February 16th through the 28th, Film at Lincoln Center presented a retrospective of the works of the celebrated Canadian director, Denis Villeneuve—along with a selection, curated by him, of fourteen films that have influenced and inspired him—as a prelude to the much anticipated release of his latest feature, Dune, Part Two.

 

For me it is still too early to assess the true stature of Villeneuve within world cinema—and whether or not his style indeed expresses a unique vision of the world—but I am fully persuaded that he is one of the most exciting directors working in Hollywood today. (Unfortunately, he does not seem to have yet attracted the attention of many distinguished critics.)

 

The earliest of his films to be screened in the series was the English-language version of the powerful Polytechnique from 2009, a fictionalization of the École Polytechnique mass shooting in Montreal in 1989. Compellingly photographed in black-and-white widescreen, the confident and abundant reliance on the Steadicam is in the service of a visual dynamism that is a hallmark of the director’s style. Although Villeneuve has the perpetrator state in voiceover his rationale for the killings, the director intelligently resists fully endorsing this explanation for his actions. A slightly complicated flashback structure is another example of Villeneuve’s unconventional approach to his material, while the aspects that recall American thrillers prefigure the filmmaker’s subsequent engagement with genre cinema.

 

Villeneuve fully embraced the thriller genre with his first Hollywood film, the astonishing Prisoners from 2013, which is summarized in Film at Lincoln Center’s program note: “Two young girls are abducted in the fictitious Pennsylvania city of Conyers; when a detective (Jake Gyllenhaal) arrests and then releases the lone suspect (Paul Dano), the father of one of the girls (Hugh Jackman) seeks to find out the truth regarding his daughter’s disappearance by any means necessary.” The film is brilliantly photographed by the now legendary Roger Deakins and is effectively scored by the late Jóhann Jóhannsson. Villeneuve is immeasurably aided by his outstanding cast that also includes Viola Davis, Maria Bello, Terrence Howard, Melissa Leo and David Dastmalchian.

 

The remarkable Enemy from 2013—described by the Encyclopaedia Britannica as “about a man who discovers that a minor actor is his exact double and seeks him out”—an adaptation of José Saramago’s novel, The Double, reveals unexpected dimensions within Villeneuve’s talents, with its effective surrealistic elements and an assured recreation of a Lynchian atmosphere. (The eminent literary critic Harold Bloom asserted that he regarded Saramago “as our planet's strongest living novelist, beyond any contemporary European or any of the Americans, whether they write in English, Spanish, or Portuguese.”) Gyllenhaal, who plays the protagonist and his double, again displays a surprising range, going well beyond his terrific performance in David Fincher’s amazing Zodiac from 2007. The fine supporting cast includes Mélanie Laurent, Sarah Gadon and Isabella Rossellini. More conventional but no less engrossing is the director’s next feature, Sicario from 2015, a thriller about the Mexican war on drugs. Villeneuve again elicited superb work from Deakins and Jóhannsson as well as an incredible cast that includes Emily Blunt, Benicio del Toro, Josh Brolin, Daniel Kaluuya, Jon Bernthal and Victor Garber.

 

The director has essayed the science-fiction genre with his subsequent four motion pictures, beginning with Arrival in 2016, which unfortunately I have not yet seen. The following year’s Blade Runner 2049–a long awaited sequel to the classic Ridley Scott film from 1982 that was also screened in this series—seems to me, on a first viewing, to be Villeneuve’s greatest achievement to date. Working from an intriguing script by Hampton Fancher, who co-wrote the original, the director exhibits a real understanding of Scott’s movie, and with his cinematographer—Deakins again—fashioned a visually breathtaking re-imagining of a dystopian future. Harrison Ford wonderfully reprised his role as Deckard, and another extraordinary cast features Ryan Gosling, Ana de Armas, Sylvia Hoeks, Robin Wright, Mackenzie Davis, Carla Juri, Lennie James, Dave Bautista, Jared Leto and Edward James Olmos.

 

Dune, from 2021, after Frank Herbert’s enormously popular novel that was enchantingly adapted by David Lynch in 1984, was a major commercial and artistic success. In Villeneuve’s version, the approach to narrative is unexpectedly slow-moving but this proved to be aesthetically effective. Again, the director assembled a marvelous cast, including Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Brolin again, Stellan Skarsgård, Bautista, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Zendaya, Chang Chen, Sharon Duncan-Brewster, Charlotte Rampling, Jason Momoa and Javier Bardem. The director also continued a productive collaboration with the superior composer of film scores, Hans Zimmer, that began with Blade Runner 2049. The recently released sequel, Dune, Part Two, only confirms Villeneuve’s stature as an enthralling filmmaker, in what is much more of a traditional action movie than its predecessor. The exceptional new cast-members include Austin Butler, Florence Pugh, Christopher Walken and Léa Seydoux.

 

One of the greatest films that Villeneuve selected for the series was Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai—it was screened in a beautiful 35-millimeter print and apparently was an influence upon Dune, Part Two—which was acclaimed by the realist critic, André Bazin:

 

The Seven Samurai itself might not be the very best Japanese production: in the ratings given to Japanese films by Japanese critics, for example, The Seven Samurai was rated third in 1954, even as Rashomon was rated fifth in 1950. There is undoubtedly more reason to prefer, over Kurosawa, the tender lyricism and subtle musical poetry of Kenji Mizoguchi. Like Rashomon, The Seven Samurai exhibits a too-facile assimilation of certain characteristics of Western aesthetics and the splendid blending of them with Japanese tradition. Moreover, there is in this instance a narrative structure of diabolical cleverness. For its progression is arranged with an intelligence that is all the more disconcerting because it respects the romantic approach at the same time as it spends perhaps too much time and labor on the blossoming of the narrative itself.

 

Still, The Seven Samurai is one of the best films from the Japanese school ever to have arrived in the West. Even though for several years now I have been waiting for my admiration for Akira Kurosawa to wane, finally to expose my alleged naïveté of the preceding year, each new film of his conf rms the feeling that I am in the presence of everything that constitutes good cinema: the union of a highly developed civilization with a great theatrical tradition and a strong tradition in plastic art, as well.

 

As its title indicates without ambiguity, this picture belongs to the traditional, historical vein that has already given us Teinosuke Kinugasa's remarkable The Gates of Hell. Every cross-cultural transposition being performed, The Seven Samurai is a sort of Japanese Western, but one worthy of comparison with the most glorious examples of the genre produced in the United States, especially the films of John Ford. For the rest, this reference gives but an approximate idea of the film, whose scope and complexity largely go beyond the dramatic boundaries of American Westerns. Not that The Seven Samurai is a complex story in the way that Kurosawa's Rashomon is—in fact quite the opposite is the case, its narrative line being as simple as possible. This general simplicity is enriched, however, by the fineness of the film's details, their historical realism and human veracity.

 

He added:

 

The beauty and skill of this narrative arise from a certain harmony between the simplicity of the action and the wealth of details that slowly delineate it. This kind of narrative reminds one of Ford's Stagecoach and Lost Patrol, but in The Seven Samurai there is more romantic complexity as well as more volume, and variety, in the historical fresco. As we can see, these points of reference are very “Western.” The same holds true for the otherwise extremely Japanese images, whose depth of field is reminiscent of the cinematographic effects of the late and much-lamented Gregg Toland.

 

In conclusion, I cannot do any better than allow Akira Kurosawa to explain his artistic ambitions himself: “Normally, an action movie can only be an action movie. But how marvelous it would be if an action film could at the same time paint a portrait of humanity! That has always been my dream, ever since the time I was an assistant director. And for the last ten years I have been wanting to reconceive historical drama from this new point of view.” Suffice it to say that The Seven Samurai itself is not unworthy of such an aim.

 

The major modernist critic, Noël Burch, in a footnote in his important book on Japanese cinema, To the Distant Observer, seriously underrated the film, saying that “The Seven Samurai, in part because of its exceptional length and consequently leisurely pace, is certainly the finest of Kurosawa’s minorjidai-geki.” The most judicious assessment of the work I have read is by the auteurist critic, Dave Kehr:

 

Akira Kurosawa’s best film is also his most Americanized, drawing on classical Hollywood conventions of genre (the western), characterization (ritual gestures used to distinguish the individuals within a group), and visual style (the horizon lines and exaggerated perspectives of John Ford). Of course, this 1954 film also returned something of what it borrowed, by laying the groundwork for the “professional” western (Rio Bravo, etc) that dominated the genre in the 50s and 60s. Kurosawa’s film is a model of long-form construction, ably fitting its asides and anecdotes into a powerful suspense structure that endures for all of the film’s 208 minutes. The climax—the battle in the rain and its ambiguous aftermath—is Kurosawa’s greatest moment, the only passage in his work worthy of comparison with Mizoguchi.

 

And near the end of his life, Robin Wood included it in a list of his ten favorite motion pictures, noting that, “For me, three films stand out in Kurosawa’s uneven career (the other two being Ikiru and High and Low): one of the cinema’s greatest ‘action’ movies, thrilling and sublime.”

Santtu-Matias Rouvali conducts the NY Philharmonic. Photo by Chris Lee.

 

A strong season of orchestral music continued with three recent subscription concerts in February presented by the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall.

 

The first was the matinee on Friday, the 2nd, under the exemplary direction of Gianandrea Noseda who also admirably led the excellent National Symphony Orchestra in a superb program—reviewed here—including Ludwig van Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony at Stern Auditorium on Monday, February 12th, as part of Carnegie Hall’s current festival, “Fall of the Weimar Republic: Dancing on the Precipice.” The event began memorably with a very good performance of the Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 1786 concert aria,Ch’io mi scordi di te? ... Non temer, amato bene,sungby the wonderful soprano, Golda Schultz. The soloist Francesco Piemontesi, in his debut with the ensemble, then joined the musicians to elegantly play Mozart’s enchanting Piano Concerto No. 25 in C major, K.503, written the same year. According to James M. Keller, in his note on the program, “The composer Olivier Messiaen, in his essays on Mozart’s concertos, remarked [ . . . ] that ‘the first movement is without a doubt the most finely wrought, the most perfect of all the first movements of Mozart’s concertos.’”

 

The concert concluded marvelously with a superlative rendition of Gustav Mahler’s magnificent Symphony No. 4, featuring a fabulous Schultz in the closing movement, singling “Das himmlische Leben” from the famous anthology that inspired much of the composer’s early work, Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Conductor Bruno Walter had this to say about the piece:

 

Dream-like and unreal, indeed, is the atmosphere of the work — a mysterious smile and a strange humor cover the solemnity which so clearly had been manifested in the Third. In the fairy-tale of the Fourth everything is floating and unburdened which, in his former works, had been mighty and pathetic — the mellow voice of an angel confirms what, in the Second and Third, a prophet had foreseen and pronounced in loud accents. The blissful feeling of exaltation and freedom from the world communicates itself to the character of the music — but, in contrast to the Third, from afar, as it were. ... The first movement and the “Heavenly Life” are dominated by a droll humor which is in strange contrast to the beatific mood forming the keynote of the work. The scherzo is a sort of uncanny fairy-tale episode. Its demoniac violin solo and the graceful trio form an interesting counterpart to the other sections of the symphony without abandoning the character of lightness and mystery. Referring to the profound quiet and clear beauty of the andante [sic], Mahler said to me that they were caused by his vision of one of the church sepulchers showing the recumbent stone image of the deceased with the arms crossed in eternal sleep. The poem whose setting to music forms the last movement depicts in words the atmosphere out of which the music of the Fourth grew. The childlike joys which it portrays are symbolic of heavenly bliss, and only when, at the very end, music is proclaimed the sublimest of joys is the humorous character gently changed into one of exalted solemnity.

 

The second concert, on the night of Saturday, the 10th, was led with confidence by the Finnish conductor, Santtu-Matias Rouvali, beginning with an outstanding realization of Leonard Bernstein’s significant Serenade (after Plato’s Symposium) for Violin, String Orchestra, Harp, and Percussion, with the stellar Esther Yoo as soloist, also in her Philharmonic debut. (It is the basis of a powerful ballet by Alexei Ratmansky.) Especially beautiful are the fourth movement—an Adagio entitled “Agathon”—and the jazzy finale, “Socrates: Alcibiades.” The second half of the evening was even more impressive, a stunning version of Richard Strauss’s incredible An Alpine Symphony. About it, the composer recorded in his diary in 1911:

 

It is clear to me that the German nation will achieve new creative energy only by liberating itself from Christianity. ... I shall call my alpine symphony:Der Antichrist,since it represents: moral purification through one’s own strength, liberation through work, worship of eternal, magnificent nature.

 

Rouvali returned to rewardingly conduct the third concert—on the night of Saturday, the 17th—which opened with a laudable account of Louise Farrenc’s infrequently heard, classicizing, and remarkable Overture No, 2 in E-flat major, Op. 24, from 1834, and which after a slow, solemn introduction, becomes sprightly but with some suspenseful moments, finishing triumphantly. An extraordinary pianist, the winner of the 2021 International Chopin Piano Competition, Bruce Liu, who also was debuting with this orchestra—at Carnegie Hall last year on the evening of Friday, May 19th, I had the pleasure as well of attending (and reviewing here) his fine New York recital debut—entered the stage for a satisfying performance of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s celebrated Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. The twelfth variation was especially lovely as was the incomparable, Romantic eighteenth. Enthusiastic applause elicited two exquisite encores from the soloist: first, Frédéric Chopin’s famous Waltz No. 6, in D-flat major, Op. 61, No. 1 (“Minute” Waltz) and then Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Les Tendres Plaintes (Tender Complaints) from Suite No. 3 for Harpsichord, the latter of which he has recorded.

 

The program ended enjoyably with an accomplished reading of Antonín Dvořák’s estimable Symphony No. 7 in D minor, Op. 7. The distinguished critic, Donald Francis Tovey, commented on it as follows:

 

I have no hesitation in setting Dvořák’s [Seventh] Symphony along with the C major Symphony of Schubert and the four symphonies of Brahms, as among the greatest and purest examples in this art-form since Beethoven. There should be no difficulty at this time of day in recognizing its greatness. It has none of the weaknesses of form which so often spoil Dvořák’s best work, except for a certain stiffness of movement in the finale, a stiffness which is not beyond concealing by means of such freedom of tempo as the composer would certainly approve. There were three obstacles to the appreciation of this symphony when it was published in 1885. First, it is powerfully tragic. Secondly, the orthodox critics and the average musician were, as always with new works, very anxious to prove that they were right and the composer was wrong, whenever the composer produced a long sentence which could not be easily phrased at sight. ... The third obstacle to the understanding of this symphony is intellectually trivial, but practically the most serious of all. The general effect of its climaxes is somewhat shrill. ... His scores are almost as full of difficult problems of balance as Beethoven’s. ... These great works of the middle of Dvořák’s career demand and repay the study one expects to give to the most difficult classical masterpieces; but the composer has acquired the reputation of being masterly only in a few popular works of a somewhat lower order. It is time that this injustice should be rectified.

 

The opening, Allegro maestosomovement begins dramatically—even portentously—with a seriousness sustained throughout, despite some exultant and pastoral passages; it closes quietly and soberly. The Poco adagio that succeeds this is largely graceful but with turbulent interludes and concludes softly. The third movement is dancelike and ebullient—with a more reflective middle section that partly has a bucolic character—finishing peacefully, and the last movement, anAllegro,begins moodily but somehow reaches an affirmative ending.

 

 

In a perceptive program note for his new play The Ally, Itamar Moses describes his feelings as a “left-wing, American Jew with Israeli-immigrant parents” when tackling important current issues. He admits that he is unafraid to say certain things, but when it came to more fraught subjects, he “didn’t know where to begin because what I had to say was too confused, too contradictory, too raw.”

 

Such honesty is present on every page of The Ally, which is also confused, contradictory and raw in its story of Asaf, a left-wing, American Jew with Israeli-immigrant parents who is not a playwright but a university professor. After he agrees to sign a petition blaming the local police for the death of a young black man, other students convince him to advise their nonpartisan group to host a controversial anti-Israeli speaker on campus. He becomes the center of a storm where he is accused of being anti-Palestinian, anti-Israeli and a white supremacist.

 

Moses incisively paints Asaf as the face of the inherent contradictions in a strain of American liberalism: he wants to get involved but doesn’t really stick his neck out while worrying about hurting the very people he hopes to help. But Moses stacks the deck dramatically (if almost surely purposely): Asaf is married to Gwen, who’s Asian; his ex-girlfriend Nakia is not only Black but author of the petition that starts Asaf’s troubles since it also uses the term “genocide” in reference to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; and Baron, the student who first asks Asaf to sign that petition, is also Black and the cousin of the cops’ victim.

 

These characters are joined by pivotal supporting roles—the students who ask Asaf to sponsor their new organization, the Palestinian Farid and the liberal Jew Rachel; and Reuven, a right-wing Jewish student who berates Asaf for his weak-kneed liberalism—who form the core arguments of The Ally.  

 

Most of the play’s scenes show Asaf with one or more of these characters, their arguments constantly colliding. It’s often thrilling to watch, as Moses’ dialogue has real bite and never condescends, while director Lila Neugebauer astutely keeps the focus on the interactions as well as the words. Take an early conversation between Asaf and Gwen as he becomes more reluctant about signing the petition:

 

 

After awhile, these discussions, however elegantly written and performed, start to sound like haranguing, like reading a particularly densely written op-ed or even the rare closely argued comment on Facebook. That’s all part of Moses’ point about responding to urgent issues, but even the two tensest scenes come off as strident and singleminded, detracting from their power: Farid’s moving climactic Act 2 speech describing his West Bank family’s hurtful losses loss and, below, Reuven’s forceful Act 1-ending explanation for why Asaf has been duped.

 

 

Yet despite its built-in limitations as living, breathing drama, The Ally remains an intelligent two hours in the theater, its superb cast anchored by Josh Radnor’s formidable Asaf. As the center of all the arguments and as Moses’ stand-in, Radnor gives a beautifully shaded portrayal that humanely embodies the raw contradictions and confusions that make up the playwright’s stalwart liberalism.