2013 NYFF Main Slate is a Grand Showcase of Cinema

Details

Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Reviews

Published on Monday, 14 October 2013 23:23

Written by Jack Angstreich

The main slate of this year's New York Film Festival, sponsored by the Film Society of Lincoln Center from September 27th to October 13th, presented a host of local premieres of outstanding new works. What follows is a roundup of what I saw.

Jia Zhang-Ke's accomplished, unsettling narrative feature, A Touch of Sin, is an omnibus film that explores in four separate episodes the emergence of a new kind of violence attendant upon the emergence of capitalism in today's China. This is the first time that I have encountered any relationship to genre in the director's work but the shooting and editing of the carnage here reveals an understanding, if oblique, of action-film stylistics even as most of the storytelling is in accord with Jia's formal approach in several of his previous films. (It seems significant that Jia was about to direct a martial arts epic before switching to this project.) The filmmaker's mise-en-scene is impressive throughout while the impact of A Touch of Sin is intensified by many striking performances as well as the cinematography of the masterly Yu Lik-Wai. What reservations I have about this film on a first viewing include an impression of a certain diffuseness in the screenplay coupled with a seemingly programmatic commitment to the doom of the protagonists — however, a unexpectedly luminous and mysterious epilogue goes a long way to reversing this perception.

Arnaud Desplechin is another veteran of the Film Society and the New York Film Festival and returns here, in relatively unfamiliar territory, with Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian, based on the true story of the treatment of a tormented Blackfoot at the Menninger Clinic in 1948. If the film appears to lack much of the exuberance and creative urgency of the director's extraordinary earlier work, he remains fully in command of the medium and manages to achieve a memorably moving ending. Benicio del Toro is touching as the titular protagonist but Desplechin axiom Mathieu Amalric steals the film as the erratic, Romanian anthropologist, Georges Devereux. (The supporting cast, including Larry Pine as Karl Menninger, offers fine support.) The transfer to a digital intermediate diminishes the visual impact of the work but Howard Shore delivers a powerful, often haunting score.

Philippe Garrel's Jealousy, about a tempestuous love affair between two actors, is very much a characteristic film. Although many of the director's high-contrast, monochrome images are arresting, the digital format again blunts the force of his vision, fostering the impression that the screenplay is under-developed with respect to the filmmaker's strongest works. Louis Garrel, in the lead role, drivers a fine performance, although all the actors are excellent as always in Garrel's films.

Tsai Mingliang's enigmatic but also baffling Stray Dogs is so strange that I don't feel competent to evaluate it — or even describe it — after only a single viewing. The film is no departure in terms of style for the director — indeed, it's a formally stunning work in terms of camera placement and rhythm suggesting that the filmmaker is at the height of his powers as a stylist, although the loss of contrast and resolution in digital weakens the impact of the compositions considerably. Tsai draws uniformly strong performances from his actors, especially from his alter-ego, Lee Kang Sheng, in one of his most impressive roles to date.

Agnieszka Holland's Burning Bush is a four-hour miniseries about the aftermath of the self-immolation of Jan Palach in 1968 Prague in protest of the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia. The work is fluid and consistently absorbing with a style strongly reminiscent of many Eastern European films in the early 1980s. It is a pleasure to watch such an attractive cast even if the cost is a certain glamorization of the material while the relative conventionalism of approach here renders the result less resonant than that of the director's strongest works, especially as the evident humanity and subtlety of the filmmaker seems to be at the service of a rather familiar anti-Stalinist narrative that has hitherto received abundant rehearsal in the cinema.

Catherine Breillat's Abuse of Weakness is a semi-autobiographical tale of a film director's dalliance with a celebrity thug who she engages to star in her next film. This turns out to be one of Breillat's most immediately accessible and entertaining films, largely because of the dazzling comic performance of Isabelle Huppert, one of the greatest, and bravest, actresses of our time. Visually, however, Abuse of Weakness seemed to be of slight interest, rendering this one of the director's less remarkable works.

Joel and Ethan Coen's brilliant Inside Llewyn Davis, about a nightmarish week in the life of a fictional folksinger (partly inspired by Dave Van Ronk) in New York City in the late 1950s is another instantiation of these filmmakers' Kafkan mode so pronounced in several of their earlier works such as Barton Fink and A Serious Man. The writer-directors display unerring judgment on almost every front, e.g., camera-placement, art-direction, casting, direction of actors, lighting, dialogue, the selection of music, etc. Relative newcomer Oscar Isaac is perfect as the title character and there are brilliant turns by Carey Mulligan, Justin Timberlake, Stark Sands, John Goodman, F. Murray Abraham, and others. The soundtrack, supervised by T-Bone Burnett, is magnificent.

Hany Abu-Assad's accomplished and highly cinematic Omar, about a Palestinian militant in the occupied West Bank who is forced to collaborate with the Israeli police, surpasses in stylistic excitement the director's fine Paradise Now, previously shown at the New York Film Festival. Abu-Assad's brisk pacing, precise camera movements and crisp editing, with the aid of good actors, maximize the resources of a forceful screenplay. The film's only liability is the digital format, unsuitable for capturing the bright sunlight that dominates the region.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa's typically mournful Real is a science-fiction thriller about a manga artist in a coma contacted by a type of telepathic communication called "sensing". The director's films have arthouse connections but also bear a consistent relation to genre, here invoking horror and monster movies. Some mechanical construction in the film's final act prevent this from matching Kurosawa's best work. The digital format is appropriate for the futuristic aspects of the story and the digital effects are first-rate but the film lacks the visual power of some of the director's previous creations. This must be the first narrative feature to explicitly cite the concept of a "philosophical zombie", popularized by the prominent philosopher of mind, David Chalmers.

Inspired by Giacomo Puccini, an aria from whose La Rondine is sung in the film, James Gray, in what may be his most ambitious film to date, crafts a redemptive melodrama with echoes of D.W. Griffith and Frank Borzage with The Immigrant, about the painful experiences of a young, poor, Polish woman — effectively played by the beautiful Marion Cotillard — who comes to New York in 1921 with her tubercular sister. Gray's confidence as a filmmaker is evident throughout and he is assisted with moving performances by Joaquin Phoenix — who has been in every feature by the director except his first — and Jeremy Renner. The extraordinary Darius Khondji photographed The Immigrant in 35-millimeter and the image is quite handsome in digital by virtue of shooting in overcast skies in daylight and in gaslight indoors.

Claire Denis is another remarkable filmmaker who betrays little uncertainty in her directorial decisions and her new Bastards, a revenge-drama about a ship captain — played by the superb Vincent Lindon — who comes to shore after his niece is brutally raped, is ultimately mesmerizing. Michel Subor, Chiara Mastroianni, and Alex Descas provide significant support as does the soundtrack by the Tindersticks and the camerawork of Agnes Godard. This is the director's first film shot in digital but unfortunately the format is not sufficiently adequate here for a consistently attractive image.

Steve McQueen's third feature, the intense 12 Years a Slave — a dramatization of the true story of a free black man kidnapped and sold into slavery in the antebellum South — is being presented within the festival's Main Slate, under the rubric of "Film Comment Selects". On a formal level the film is consistently controlled and frequently brilliant, with imaginative compositions and expert use of focus effects. The screenplay is intelligent and well-structured, with stylized dialogue, while the cast is simply outstanding, featuring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender (who has started in all three of the director's features), Brad Pitt, Paul Dano, Alfred Woodard, Sarah Paulson, Paul Giamatti and Benedict Cumberbatch. However, it is unfortunate that the bright sunlight of the American South proves to be a liability for the digital format here with the image falling far short of the intensity attained in McQueen's debut feature, Hunger.

Alexander Payne's bleak and hilarious comedy, Nebraska — a road-movie about a son (Will Forte) who drives his elderly father (an extraordinary performance by Bruce Dern) from Billings, Montana to Lincoln, Nebraska to collect what he thinks is a million dollars in prize-money — is one of the most entertaining movies in the festival. Bob Nelson's dialogue is perfectly judged and there are many marvelous performances in the supporting cast, including June Squibb, Stacy Keach and Mary-Louise Wilson. The monochrome cinematography is often handsome but in digital lacks the sharpness and range of contrast that it would have had on film.

Jim Jarmusch's poetic, melancholy Only Lovers Left Alive is a story of two vampire-lovers, played by Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton, hiding out from the world in contemporary Detroit. Shooting for the first time in digital, Jarmusch (and his cinematographer, Yorrick Le Saux, who has several times collaborated with both Olivier Assayas and François Ozon) nonetheless manages, by shooting exclusively in low light (as is appropriate, after all, for a vampire story), to recreate the extraordinary, subtly luminous palette of his early color films such as the similarly nocturnal Night on Earth (which also was originally screened at the New York Film Festival). However, the director's career since Dead Man seems to have mostly settled into a minor mode, generally lacking the urgency and brilliance of his earlier work and his new film does not break this pattern — one wonders if Jarmusch might not benefit from a project where he was in greater tension with his material, rather than able so unrestrainedly to indulge his personal affections. The acting, as usual, is characteristically good, though, with pleasurable support from John Hurt, Jeffrey Wright, and especially Mia Wasikowska. (The film also features an excellent soundtrack largely performed by the filmmaker's own rock band, Sqürl.)

To learn more, go tohttp://www.filmlinc.com/nyff2013/

The 51st New York Film Festival
September 27 – October 13, 2013

The Film Society of Lincoln Center

• < Prev
• Next >