Film Comment Selects Series Premieres the New and Resurrects the Old

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Reviews

Published on Tuesday, 04 March 2014 22:34

Written by Jack Angstreich

The Film Comment Selects series, running at the Film Society of Lincoln Center form February 17th to the 27th, is a showcase for premieres of exciting new films by directors both known and unknown, as well as for unearthing a select few neglected classics. This year’s program is no exception.

The opening night selection, Hong Sang-soo’s Our Sunhi, chronicles the encounters over a few days of a pretty young film student with three men for whom she is an object of romantic attraction. With early works such as The Turning Gate, Hong emerged as one of the most promising filmmakers in the world, a powerful and rigorous stylist. Subsequently, the director’s films have proven to be consistently enjoyable but relatively slight. 

Our Sunhi is very pleasurable on a scene-by-scene basis but ends up as something insubstantial as a whole.The tone here is subtly comic, with a quasi-Rohmerian irony, shot in long takes with minimal cutting within scenes; the style is observational and the acting is naturalistic. The director’s reliance on inelegant zooms across his last several films remains an unsolved puzzle for me. Shot in a high-definition format, the image is attractive but somewhat attenuated in its sensuality relative to the director’s work in 35-millimeter.

In the stunning, unexpectedly moving Felony, directed by Matthew Saville, an inebriated police officer accidentally runs over a nine-year-old boy, ensuing in a fraught cover-up. Felony is remarkable for its visual storytelling — brilliantly photographed, the film looks terrific in the DCP format. All the actors here are superb but the one star performance, by Tom Wilkinson, is absolutely extraordinary. Felony is a remarkable discovery that deserves wide exposure.

The closing night selection is Bernardo Bertolucci’s touching Me and You, about a fourteen-year-old boy who hides in his basement for a week and is unexpectedly joined by his estranged junkie half-sister who has decided to go cold turkey. Bertolucci has been working in a more minor mode since around The Sheltering Sky, producing lovely films that don’t quite command the intense excitement of his major phase and this latest feature is no exception to the pattern. However, Bertolucci’s mastery as a technician is visible in nearly every shot here, demonstrating his seemingly effortless ability to create visual excitement with sinuous, mobile long-takes — if the director has had less to say in the past couple of decades, he still says it eloquently.

Along with local premieres, the series features a handful of retrospective titles including the film adaptation of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, Arthur Hiller & Paddy Chayefsky’s dark satire, The Hospital, the ultra-rare The Carey Treatment by the magisterial Blake Edwards, and the simultaneously baffling and mesmerizing 1983 City of Pirates by the late, great Raul Ruiz. The baroque murder plot of this film can scarcely be easily summarized while the work blends, and alludes to, a range of genres such as legend, fantasy, mystery, horror, and even film noir, all the while punctuated by moments of absurdist comedy.

Ultimately, it is the endlessly playful inventiveness of Ruiz’s mise-en-scène that has enshrined this as one of the most esteemed works in the director’s canon. The print screened for the press is considerably worn and slightly warped but the color has not faded and the gloriously transcendent qualities of 35-millimeter could be perceived not infrequently during the film’s projection.

For more information: www.filmlinc.com/films/series/film-comment-selects-2014

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