In 1987, Rozema made her feature debut with I Saw the Mermaids Singing, a lightweight, alternately enervating and charming comedy about Polly, an aimless young woman who latches onto her new boss Gabrielle, an elegant gallery owner, discovering new things about herself along the way. Although Sheila McCarthy makes a winning heroine, the unfocused film’s literal flights of fancy and narrative tangents are more cutesy than witty.

 

 

With her next film, Rozema would find her own voice, even though she calls it an “abject failure” (whether jokingly or not I don’t know). 1990’s White Room, which has never been released in the U.S., is an unnerving neo-noir about naïve garderner Norm, who witnesses the murder of rock star Madelaine X (an all too briefly seen Margot Kidder), then gets involved with the mysterious Jane, whom he meets at the funeral. Maurice Godin is a wooden Norm, but Kate Nelligan gives one of her best performances as Jane, a sensual and maternal presence that dominates the movie—shot, as many of her films are, in an always photogenic Toronto. 

 

 

In 1995, Rozema made When Night Is Falling, a trenchantly observed study of the intimate relationship between Camille, a married philosophy professor, and Petra, a traveling circus performer. Although it sounds like mere softcore titillation, Rozema’s direction and writing as well as the first-rate acting from her cast—Pascale Bussières as Camille, Rachael Crawford as Petra, and Henry Czerny as Camilla’s professor boyfriend Martin—makes it one of the more memorable of the mid ’90s entries into lesbian drama.

 

Also part of the Roxy retro are Rozema’s first two films made outside Canada, unsurprisingly featuring formidable heroines—and stellar performances—at their center. Mansfield Park (1999) remains one of the most original Jane Austen adaptations, with Frances O’Connor at her most winning as Fanny. And Rozema’s contribution to the 2000 omnibus series Beckett on Film, the one-woman play Happy Days, stars a mesmerizing Rosaleen Linehan as one of Beckett’s greatest creations, Winnie, who’s buried up to neck in sand.

 

 

Too bad that Rozema’s most recent feature, 2018’s Mouthpiece, does little with the conceit that Norah Sadava and Amy Nostbakken brought to their original play—both enact aspects of the metaphorically named Cassandra, a woman dealing with her mother’s death. Only an admittedly perfect final image redeems this otherwise one-note film, but that shouldn’t detract anyone from seeing the other titles in this long-awaited retrospective.

 

 

Back for its 29th edition, Film at Lincoln Center’s long-running annual series included 21 new films. Here are my reviews of a half-dozen of those entries.

 

In Thomas Cailley’s dystopian drama, some humans have started mutating into wild animals including some who have developed large wings and try to fly; is civilization unraveling, or is it a new type of evolutionary leap into the future? François (Romain Duris), worried about his afflicted wife, moves with his teenage son Émile (Paul Kircher) to be close to her, and they enter a world of hybrid humans. Calley’s conceit is certainly a high-wire act—eye-popping makeup, effects and photography vividly bring this bizarre but all too real new universe to life—yet his film often wavers, whether in the obvious metaphors for the fear of outsiders or in a wan subplot featuring Adèle Exarchopoulos, an actress incapable of a false note, but who is hamstrung by her role as a sympathetic cop. She and Duris deserve better scenes than Cailley gives them. 

 

Vanessa Springora’s soul-baring 2020 memoir created a sensation in France as she described a nonconsensual relationship with writer Gabriel Matzneff, who was 50 when he groomed her as his lover at age 13, and now Vanessa Filho—who adapted the book with Springora—has made a daring, often difficult to watch adaptation that clearly details how the self-admitted pedophile (who wrote quite openly about his scandalous sexual behavior with young boys and girls but was shielded by a literary establishment that looked askance at the real-life consequences) stealthily to her under his wing, emotionally and sexually. Jean-Paul Rouve is creepily persuasive as the destructive Matzneff, Laetitia Casta is scarily pathetic as Vanessa’s complicit mother and the great Elodie Bouchez has a magnificent cameo as the adult Vanessa. But it’s the simply spectacular Kim Higelin, as Vanessa from ages 13 to 18 (Higelin is 24 in real life), who is the beating and bleeding heart of the film, a dynamic piece of acting that is also emotionally shattering to watch.

 

Writer-director Valérie Donzelli pairs with current French cinema It Girl, Belgian actress Virginie Efira, for a twisty thriller that begins as a whirlwind romance when Blanche (Efira), still hurting from a recent breakup, falls for the charming Grégoire (Melvil Poupaud). They immediately marry, but it’s not long before she realizes he’s not the man of her dreams: yet it takes several years and two children before she finally takes action to escape his emotional and physical abuse. Efira is her usual powerhouse self, both as Blanche and her suspicious twin sister Rose, but not enough is made of the siblings’ relationship (or with that of their mother) to justify the amount of screen time it receives. Surprisingly, this routine feature was co-written with Audrey Diwan, who wrote and directed last year’s memorable abortion drama, Happening, doubling the disappointment.

 

 

Co-writer-director Anna Novion has created pulse-pounding suspense from the seemingly mundane subject of math: a grad school numbers whiz, Marguerite (a superlative and complex turn by Belgian actress Ella Rumpf), sees her academic life fall apart when it’s discovered that the theorem she has worked on for years has a fatal error. Novion’s brilliantly observed character study follows a young woman who realizes that her life can consist of much more than mere numbers and proofs on a blackboard; director and actress make Marguerite one of the most compelling characters I’ve seen onscreen in some time, and it’s easy to share in her triumphs (her first orgasm is particularly wittily shot) and cheer for her ultimate mathematical—and personal—redemption.

 

 

In a very distinguished career, French documentarian Nicolas Philibert has made insightful films about subjects ranging from French national radio to rural schooling—in his latest, he aims his sharp eye and lens on the Adamant, a barge on the Seine that serves as a mental health daycare center for adults and provides nurturing activities with a dedicated staff. Philibert, in his usual discerning way, records the interactions between the patients and the doctors and other staff members, along with perceptive and touching interviews, making for another in a long line of generously humane portraits.

 

 

Robin Campillo’s most recent film, 2017's BPM: Beats Per Minute, was a feisty, angry and absorbing chronicle of ’90s AIDS activism in France and the formation of ACT UP. His latest, equally autobiographical, feature returns him to childhood, growing up on a French military base on the island of Madagascar. The young protagonist, Thomas, feels left out of family activities and often passes his time daydreaming about a superhero comic book—whose adventures are amusingly visualized by Campillo—and then finds a fellow friend in a young Vietnamese girl, Suzanne. Campillo has made a moody if diffuse work that shows a sympathetic eye but also too often a preference for visual audacity over depth.

 

 

The 33rd edition of the New York Jewish Film Festival comprises the usual enticing mix of features, shorts and documentaries for its annual two-week stay at Lincoln Center. This time around, I saw only documentaries, starting with the fest’s bittersweet closing night film, Ron Frank’s Remembering Gene Wilder, a lovely and ineffably sad valentine to the beloved actor, who died of Alzheimer’s in 2016. Letting Wilder himself narrate his own life story (thanks to an audiobook he’d recorded years earlier), Frank adroitly mixes film clips, vintage interviews and on-set tomfoolery as well as poignant talking-head reminiscences from many people including Wilder’s widow, Karen; Richard Pryor’s daughter, Rain; writer Alan Zweibel; and—of course—Mel Brooks.

 

 

Laura Bialis’ Vishniac (opens Jan. 19) chronicles the rich and complicated life of Roman Vishniac, a Russian-born photographer known for his historic images of 1930s Jewish communities that became important documents after so many of them were destroyed by the Nazis, through the nuanced testimony of his daughter Mara (who died in 2018). Although Bialis relies rather too heavily on reenactments—they’re usually a distraction in any documentary—she has put together a worthy tribute to a man who will be remembered for his photographic and scientific work long after his occasional tall tales about himself will be forgotten.

 

 

In Adam Low’s James Joyce’s Ulysses, the greatest book by a 20th century author in English takes center stage; in a fleet 90 minutes, Low provides an illuminating look at the genesis of Joyce’s  massive novel, which spends one day (June 16, 1904) in Dublin with protagonist Leopold Bloom as he interacts with others in a parody of the classic Greek myth. Along with informative commentary by a variety of Joycean experts, Low does misstep by showing sequences from Joseph Strick’s rather wan 1967 film adaptation to illustrate various moments from the book. Otherwise, anyone interested in Joyce or the back story to his greatest creation will find much to ponder.

 

 

 

What makes Claude Bredenbrock and Jascha Hannover’s The Books He Didn’t Burn so disturbing is not that it takes on the difficult task of exploring what literature Adolf Hitler loved, had in his library and drew his fascist and murderous influences from but that there’s an unspoken undercurrent that there’s a distinct possibility that it can happen again, a lot closer in time or place than we might think. 

 

 

 

Isabelle Cottenceau’s engaging Looking for Chloé brings back to life a nearly forgotten trailblazer, Gaby Aghion, a Jewish woman from Egypt who founded the Parisian fashion house Chloé and who is credited with inventing the concept of pret-a-porter. Cottenceau not only shows rare archival footage of Aghion and the fashion industry milieu but also cannily recreates an interview with her that demonstrates how she overcame prejudices to make her mark and flourish artistically.

 

 

 

In Matthew Mishory’s incisive Fioretta, Randy Schoenberg, a genealogist and attorney who specializes in recovering artworks stolen by the Nazis, takes a journey with Joey, his reticent teenage son, to discover Fioretta, their long-lost European ancestor. Mishory follows Randy and Joey (who have a very famous ancestor, composer Arnold Schoenberg, Randy’s grandfather) to the Jewish Ghetto in Venice, as they discover nearly half a millennium’s worth of family history.

 

 

 

Lastly, there’s Heather Dune Macadam’s piercing 999—The Forgotten Girls, which revisits the harrowing memories of several survivors of the cruel 1942 Nazi roundup of nearly 1000 young Jewish women in Czechoslovakia who were sent to Auschwitz. Macadam hears stories from the anguished women’s remembrances, 80 years later, about how their friends and family members died in such squalid conditions, but much of her powerful film records the incredible resilience that allowed them to survive for nearly three years.