NYFF 62 Wrap

I loved it such much last year, I went back for more

Last year I attended the New York Film Festival for the first time, and had such a great time that I went back again this year—and again had a wonderful time. My batting average wasn’t quite as perfect as it was last year, when I at least liked every film I saw. But I at least liked most of the films I saw this year, and some of them I truly loved. And I was more adventurous this year than I was last year. Last year I saw six films, all but one by directors whose work I already admired from multiple instances, and the sole exception, Janet Planet, was the film directorial debut by a playwright whose work I have long admired. This year, of the nine films I saw, only two were by directors I’d admired multiple films by, and four were by directors I was entirely unfamiliar with. And I saw more films that I knew would be taking formal risks as well.

As it happens, my least-favorite film was by one of the veterans I’ve long admired, and my favorite film of all was by a director I’d never encountered before, and was part of the festival’s “Currents” section, which complements the Main Slate by focusing on films that are more formally innovative. In consequence, while last year I came away with a feeling of “filmmaking is as assured as ever,” this year I came away more with the feeling that artists are still taking risks, risks that don’t always pay off, but when they do, they take you somewhere you’ve never been. And that was, if anything, even more reassuring.

Here’s my rundown of what I saw, saving the best for last.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig: This Iranian film had to be made surreptitiously because of its subject matter, and writer/director Mohammad Rasoulof had to flee the country after it was released. It appears at first to be about an investigator working for Iran’s criminal courts who has just been promoted, and is anxious about both the new scrutiny and the new responsibility that the job will bring. He’s right to worry: the first thing his new boss does is give him a handgun for self-protection, and to warn him not to let anyone know what his job is, lest he become a target. And the second thing that happens is that he’s asked to rubber-stamp a recommendation for a death sentence without even reading the prisoner’s file. I settled in for a story about moral compromise and the way that a repressive regime will destroy a man of conscience even (perhaps especially) if he honestly believes in the regime’s ideals. But the film’s focus moves fairly quickly from the investigator to the women in his life: his wife and his two daughters, and the context moves from the “normal” operation of the regime to the stepped-up tempo of repression in the context of the spreading protests sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini. The film turns out to be about the replication of the regime’s repressive process within the family and, by the same token, the way the regime is itself a reflection of pre-existing repressive dynamics in the domestic sphere, and consistently surprised me with the way the moral center of the film shifted from one character to another. Structurally creative, cinematographically gorgeous, and engaged with essential questions of our time—what more do you want from a film?

Dahomey: I loved director Mati Diop’s previous feature film, Atlantics, a romance and a ghost story with the illicit trans-Mediterranean migration wave as background. I have more mixed feelings about Dahomey, which is billed as a documentary about the repatriation of twenty six royal treasures from the kingdom of Dahomey to the modern day country of Benin. My mixed feelings revolve largely around whether this is truly a documentary. On the one hand, the repatriation actually did happen, and a significant chunk of this unhurried film depicts the careful packing up of these enigmatic artifacts—several of them sculptural representation of Dahomey’s kings in hybrid human-animal form—their installation in their African home, and the reactions of the Beninese to their returned patrimony. My favorite image of this beautifully-shot film is of a Beninese man standing before his ancestors’ shark-man-king, managing to look while also lowering his eyes, moving his lips inaudibly in prayer or perhaps just talking to the statue. But Diop has chosen to give one of these treasures a voice, in a language out of antiquity, giving the dead king’s own perspective on his repatriation, and unfortunately the king doesn’t have anything terribly compelling to say. By contrast, a group of students who debate the repatriation for the camera have a great deal to say, much of it interesting—but these students were recruited specifically for the film, cast for the purpose of staging this debate, and that didn’t sit well for me in a work purporting to be a documentary of events rather than a narrative film.

Emilia Pérez: A story about a drug lord seeking surgery to complete a gender transition and the lawyer she hires to facilitate her rebirth into a new identity—and it’s a musical. It sounds insane, but in this case form and content are perfectly suited to one another. When your emotions are operatic in scale, you should break into song; when your actions are absurdly dramatic and self-dramatizing, you should dance them. Spanish actress Karla Sofía Gascón grabs the spotlight as the titular character, both before and after her transition, and I’m particularly glad that the character is just as megalomaniacal after as she was before. But the moral center of the film is Zoe Saldana as the lawyer, Rita Moro Castro, whose life is also completely transformed by her relationship with Emilia Pérez, and it’s notable that while typically in musicals a character bursts into song to give voice to their deepest longings (as other characters do here as well), Castro breaks into song to give voice to the cynicism she feels deep down about everyone else’s behavior, and also about her own. I give writer/director Jacques Audiard all the credit in the world for making this crazy film, and his backers all the credit for financing it. I hope they reap an ample reward for the risks they took.

Hard Truths: I’ve been a fan of Mike Leigh’s films for a long time; if there’s any filmmaker whose career I envy more, I’m not sure who they are. Actually, probably Mike Nichols beats him out. But what they have in common is an exceptionally wonderful way with actors, though their ways had almost nothing in common. I don’t think anyone works like Leigh does, sitting down with the actors before there’s even a script, with just a general idea of the characters, themes and rough story arc, and then playing with them to find and refine these people, and their relationships with each other, creating scenes, then going off to write, re-write and perfect a proper screenplay based on that work, and finally reconvene to rehearse and shoot. And I don’t know whether I wish they did, but I’m glad he does because the results are consistently engrossing. This film, about two middle-aged London sisters of Caribbean origin, one of them profoundly alienated from everyone around her and quite possibly mentally ill, reminded me at times of Secrets and Lies (Marianne Jean-Baptiste played central roles in both films), at times of All or Nothing, at times of Another Year, and always of why Leigh is a unique treasure.

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl: Zambian writer/director Rungano Nyoni’s previous feature, I Am Not a Witch, was both crazy and harrowing, but it was also somewhat loose and thematic. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, by contrast, is as tight as a drum. Shula (Susan Chardy), a Zambian woman who now works between Zambia and the UK, is driving home from a party when she comes upon the corpse of her Uncle Fred lying in the road. She calls her father to get him to deal with the body, but he sounds like he’s at a party and though he promises to come he never shows. A cousin appears next, driving by, but she is drunk and of no use. Though Shula tries to avoid getting entangled in the process of burying and mourning for her uncle, the older women of the family—her mother and her many aunts—will not let her escape. She is pressed into the traditional female role assigned her, putting up endless relatives, making food to serve the older men of the family, and putting Fred’s young widow in her decidedly subordinate place (this last task she refuses to do), all the while oppressed by the knowledge of the terrible wrongs that her uncle committed, and that were known, but never prevented. The film builds its tension masterfully, its revelations are never dropped unnaturally, and I found myself simultaneously fascinated and appreciative of the thick traditional culture of the Zambian women and horrified by its dark side.

Oh, Canada: I’m not going to say much about this one, because it was the only film that I disliked so much that I was outright baffled by it. It’s the latest from Paul Schrader, many of whose films I admire greatly, none more so than Mishima: A Life In Four Chapters, to which Oh, Canada bears a superficial resemblance in its temporal fragmentation and its use of multiple cinematographic styles. But unlike Schrader’s masterpiece about the great Japanese author and far-right agitator, Oh, Canada never gives the audience any reason to care about its central character, Leonard Fife (Richard Gere), a documentarian facing the end of his life and determined to confess his sins to his wife by means of another documentarian’s camera. Though based on a Russell Banks novel, I found the writing consistently wooden, and with Gere as the sole exception I found the acting equally so. I don’t think those are the primary reasons why I felt nothing all through the film, though; I think the reason is that the film simply presumes an old man with profound regrets is inherently compelling. But if attention must be paid to such a person, it’s the job of the filmmaker to compel that attention.

Pepe: A film told from the perspective of an escaped hippo from Pablo Escobar’s private zoo? I’m there for it. And writer/director Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias has the basis for a really cool film here, about an animal cut off from his own kind and his own habitat, striking terror into the hearts of the human beings who happen upon him, when all he wants to do is find his way home. Unfortunately, the hippo makes an awkward protagonist because he won’t take direction. We hear his voice, in Spanish, Afrikaans and a Namibian language whose name I do not know, and we see him, and his fellow hippos (and we see his parents among their herd Namibia, before being implausibly by helicopter), but I never got a clear feeling from his appearances on camera. There’s plenty of amusing material around the periphery, particularly the bits involving a philandering fisherman and his hectoring wife, and there are some beautiful images, but the absence of a strong lead leaves an emotional hole at the heart of the film.

April: I found this film from writer/director Dea Kulumbegashvili, about an OB/GYN who performs illegal abortions in post-Soviet Georgia, disturbing without being moving. There’s a brutality to how Kulumbegashvili uses the camera, draining ordinary interactions of human emotion, forcing us to look at people in deep distress without letting us connect with them. A man gives a hug to the woman he used to be involved with, but the scene is shot with such a wide-angle lens that they seem lost is actually quite a small room. We watch an abortion being performed, and the frame centers on the woman’s torso, cutting off all the characters’ heads, so that we see her shudder, hear her whimpers, hear the doctor trying to calm her, but never get a sense of them as people. The doctor, Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), engages in compulsive and self-destructive sexual behavior while shunning any genuine emotional attachment, and while this characteristic connects with the emotionally alienating style of the cinematography, I never understood whether it was intended to be a response to her work, constantly encountering young women in trouble, or whether we were supposed to see this work as her effort to turn her own alienation to some social use as she sees it. Nina is also haunted by a doppelgänger who wanders the screen naked with sagging breasts and buttocks and a brown mask over her face, looking like a refugee from The Substance; again, I sensed that some point was being made about the body and time, but I never knew what. In the end, I found the film less enigmatic than simply withholding.

Universal Language: I said I saved the best for last, and oh be still my beating heart. I adored this film, the latest from writer/director (and actor) Matthew Rankin, which is fascinatingly enigmatic and not at all withholding, hilariously deadpan, incredibly sure-footed, visually compelling despite having the blandest palate imaginable, and maybe the most Canadian film I’ve ever seen despite of being populated mostly by Persians. (The Persian title is “Song of the Turkey.”) The film takes place mostly in Winnipeg and partly in Montreal, and follows a series of interconnected stories: about two sisters trying to liberate money the find trapped in the ice on the sidewalk; about a middle-aged man (played by Rankin) heading home to Winnipeg to see his mother after decades away in Montreal; about a French teacher who hates his students and a tour guide who loves his beige city and a turkey butcher who sings to his birds, and professional lachrymologists who stalk the cemeteries offering tissues (from specialty stores that sell nothing but Kleenex) and encouraging mourners to cry. But the money in the ice is 500 Iranian Riels, and the primary language these motley characters speak is Farsi (except in Quebec where they speak French), even if they aren’t Persian. Signs are in Farsi as well, but there is no explanation for how this situation came to be or why. We are apparently in a cinematic world drawn from Iranian cinema (I recognized the influence of Abbas Kiarostami long with Rankin’s fellow Winnipeg native Guy Maddin), and we aren’t intended to think too much about the location as being anywhere but the director’s mind, and simply enjoy that minds odd, sad and humorous meanderings. Which I did, emphatically so—but I couldn’t help thinking about the grand conceit of the film as a metaphor as well. Rankin plays a man who has left home, and comes home to find that his mother no longer knows him, and is in fact living as a guest in a Persian family’s home, convinced that the husband of the couple is in fact her son rather than (as he actually is) the man who once shoveled her sidewalk. I couldn’t help but read this as a parable of mass immigration from the perspective of an “old stock” Canadian. Everything has changed, even his mother has assimilated to the new culture—indeed, even he has changed, as by the end of the film the actor has switched places with the actor playing the snow-shoveler, who is also the tourist guide. And yet . . . nothing has. Tim Horton’s may look like an Iranian tea shop, but it’s still Tim Horton’s. The sense of humor of the film, in particular, is quintessentially Canadian, simultaneously bleak and gentle. There was something profoundly sad but also profoundly comforting about that, and I believe that only this weird and wonderful film could have gotten me to feel that way.