NYFF Wrap
A much-needed infusion of hope for the art of film
Koji Yakusho in a Tokyo public bath in Wim Wenders’s film, Perfect Days
I didn’t go to the Austin Film Festival this year, as I have the past two years. (Some notes from my 2021 visit are here.) But I did attend the New York Film Festival for the first time in my life. I’m quite embarrassed to admit that—I’ve lived in New York City for decades, and I love film, write about film, have even made films. How could I never have been to this most august showcase for the cinematic arts.
Honestly, I have no excuses. But now I have been there! And I can report that the six films I saw there left me feeling so much more hopeful about the state of film as an art than I have felt in a long time, that I sincerely hope I go back every year.
Film festivals have distinct personalities. Sundance is an enormous marketplace and showcase for American independent film; I was there in 2014 with a feature film whose producing team I was on, and the anxious vibe of “who’s getting in to which parties” was everywhere—but also the giddy vibe of filmmakers who were finally making it. The Austin Film Festival takes place in conjunction with an enormous screenwriters’ conference; the parties feel much more democratic, but that’s partly because we’re all wannabes eagerly hobnobbing with each other, trading stories and tips and promising to form writing groups and wondering how anybody ever gets in the room where it happens.
The New York Film Festival is for film snobs. It’s up at Lincoln Center, and it’s late on the festival calendar, coming after Berlin and Cannes and Venice and Telluride and Toronto. They can survey the entire world of cinema in a given year, and select what they think is the best of the best. Then they present those films in venues like Alice Tully Hall. I can tell you now from personal experience, the best way to see virtually any film is on an enormous screen in a concert hall with impeccable acoustics surrounded by over a thousand other people who are all there because of how much they love film, followed by a genteel and informed conversation with its creators.
No wonder my faith in the art of cinema has been bolstered.
For all that the framing helped, though, I do think the films themselves deserve the bulk of the credit. I enjoyed all six films greatly. Here are some brief thoughts about each, arranged in the order in which I saw them.
All Of Us Strangers: I’ve enjoyed every Andrew Haigh film I’ve seen, from Weekend, a visually and sexually very frank indie drama about the possibility of romance between two gay men, to 45 Years, an quietly desperate drama about a woman who’s been married the titular length of time discovering her husband, who she thought she knew, may have been an iceberg all this time, with most everything of importance submerged; to Lean on Pete, a heartbreaking story of loneliness and devotion of a boy for an animal that, in a rare departure from cinematic cliches, is never anthropomorphized. The commonality between them all is tone: all of Haigh’s films are sad, and All of Us Strangers is emphatically no exception. It’s a ghost story, adapted from a Japanese novel from which it departs very substantially, and like the best ghost stories it’s about dealing with loss, in this case the loss of one’s parents, and with that loss the loss not only of childhood but of the opportunity for them to get to know you as an adult, and to change thereby. But I’ve rarely seen a ghost story that was simultaneously so filled with warm pathos for the grieving and so ruthless about pulling the rug out from under us once we’ve finally settled in to a level of comfort with sadness, yet does so in a way that never betrays the emotions it elicited. The acting, particularly by Andrew Scott in the lead role but also by Paul Mezcal as his would-be lover, and Claire Foy and Jamie Bell as the ghosts of his parents, is subtly extraordinary; the cinematography is gorgeous; and the soundtrack will make anyone for whom ‘80s British synth-pop is the preferred music to cook by (like yours truly) absolutely melt.
Evil Does Not Exist: I was floored by Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Oscar-winning film Drive My Car, and I was very impressed by his other feature from the same year, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy. Since then I’ve been meaning to explore the director’s earlier films, but before before I got around to it, he made another one! And what a strange and unusual film it is. It appears to be another film about grief and loss, centered on a reclusive man in a small Japanese town raising his school-age daughter alone, living in harmony with the land and saying very little. But then it seems to turn into a small-town political drama, with the rural community as the protagonist, as a Tokyo company plans to build a glamping resort nearby that may negatively affect the environment, and the town gathers to object. Then the film’s center of gravity shifts again, to the people who work for the glamping project, who seem to find inspiration in this community and the quiet man at its heart—perhaps they are the protagonists in a story about making an unlikely change? But then it takes a turn again, toward the fantastical and the horrific, ending as an environmental fable as enigmatic as its title. I confess, I have a soft spot for films that shift in this way (see, for example, my comments on The Power of the Dog), but I admit I was still hoping the Q&A would help unravel the film a bit. No such luck. Hamaguchi seems to have come to the story by feel rather than by careful design; as he explained in the Q&A, the film was originally inspired by a piece of music that the composer brought to him to serve as its score. That’s an origin story that raises more questions than it answers given how unusually that score is used. I’m not sure I understand the film yet, but I absolutely loved seeing it.
Janet Planet: Playwright Annie Baker is one of my idols. I’ve seen three of her plays (The Flick, The Antipodes and this year’s Infinite Life), and I knew (from The Flick if nowhere else) that she was a huge film nut, so I was extremely eager to see her first outing as a film director. She didn’t disappoint. Janet Planet is a coming-of-age story about a prepubescent girl, Lacy (newcomer Zoe Ziegler), whose mother (a marvelous Julianne Nicholson) is the title character. “Planet” is her last name, but it’s also an allusion to the outsized place she occupies in her daughter’s mind—and the spine of the story is about Lacy coming to see her mother less as a planet and more as a person, the begin the necessary process of differentiation so that she can become a person in her own right. The dialogue is quintessential Baker in its absurd naturalism (naturalistic absurdity?) and its deadpan humor, and the characters are portrayed with the fine subtlety that her fans have come to expect. But film is such a different medium from theater, and being a director is so different from being a playwright, that it almost doesn’t make sense to even compare Janet Planet to her prior work. Rather, it seems more fitting to me to compare it to other first films—and in that comparison what is most obvious is how extraordinarily assured Baker is. Every framing is deliberate, every detail of the design carefully considered, every cut so clearly intentional. I remain in awe of her talent. I wish I had made—that I could make—a film like this.
Perfect Days: I don’t think I’ve seen a Wim Wenders film since Buena Vista Social Club, and I don’t think I’ve seen a narrative film of his since Wings of Desire. I rewatched the latter in a theater a few years ago, though, and was reminded of what a distinctive sensibility Wenders had. His newest film—actually, he has two films out this year, the other being Anselm, a documentary about the German painter, Anselm Kiefer, which I also hope to see—reveals that his sensibility is more than intact, and in fact has evolved in interesting ways. The protagonist of Perfect Days, Hirayama (played with masterful assurance by Kôji Yakusho) is an observer of life. His job is to clean the toilets of Tokyo, and he is both meticulous about his job and exceptionally regular in his habits outside of it. He goes to the same spot for lunch every day, for example, and takes a picture of the same tree; when the pictures are developed, he culls the bad shots and stores the others in boxes that he keeps in a closet that is already full of these neatly organized mementos of life. He takes delight in his simple, repetitive life, but he also guards it carefully against the possibility of intrusion from outside, intrusions that inevitably do take place, and come to form a kind of a story, and deepen the pathos of this peculiar man. The film seems to be about many subtle and interwoven things, among them the essentially analog nature of life (Hirayama’s camera is a simple point-and-shoot, but it takes film, and the music he listens to throughout the movie—another soundtrack to warm my heart, composed of Patti Smith and Lou Reed and The Kinks and Nina Simone—he plays on vintage cassette tapes). But Hirayama is more than a little bit like the angel at the center of Wings of Desire, except that rather than him wishing to become like us, we’re now asked to appreciate the life of an observer. It’s a masterpiece, truly.
Poor Things: I cannot say that I liked Yorgos Lanthimos before he was cool, but I can say that I’ve liked him for years, and that Poor Things is his most accessible film yet, and yet I confess that I didn’t like it as much as I had hoped to. Don’t get me wrong; it’s a great deal of fun. Emma Stone is exceptionally winning as the female Frankenstein’s monster at the heart of the story, a grown woman with the mind of a child, and both Willem Dafoe as her creator at Mark Ruffalo as her roguish lover are very funny, in part because they take their outrageous roles entirely seriously however silly they are. The steampunk production design and costumes are lush and detailed and fully realize the world that Lanthimos is aiming to create. The sex is, well—there’s a great deal of it, and at least some of it is actually sexy, a rarity in film these days. But there was something missing for me, a sense that for once I was supposed to applaud rather than be appalled, while a big part of what I loved about Lanthimos was the ferocious multidirectionality of his satire. I’d love to hear someone track the evolution to this film from Dogtooth, which has some related obsessions but a wildly different tone, and press Lanthimos on what has changed for him not only as a filmmaker but as an observer of society. I’ve got a long piece coming out about this film later this year in Modern Age pairing it with Barbie—which is its doppelgänger in a way—so I won’t say more here. I certainly do recommend the film, and applaud its artistry without reservation. But it didn’t inspire me with hope in the way that so many of the other films I saw did.
The Zone of Interest: It’s hard for me to imagine anyone being inspired with hope after seeing this film—hope for humanity that is. Hope for film? Yes, actually, I think you could be inspired to that, because I was. The Zone of Interest, based on the Martin Amis novel of the same name, is a film about Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, and his family, who lived in a comfortable suburban house right next door to the death camp. I have rarely had a more surreally terrifying experience at the movies. The life of the Höss family is utterly banal—there are issues with servants, concerns about children, a visit from the mother-in-law, arguments about a promotion that will take the husband away from home, and so forth. But normal children do not play with human teeth; normal housewives do not threaten to have their maids burnt in a crematorium. And in the background, the continuous roar and glow of the furnaces, punctuated by the occasional crack of a pistol, the occasional anguished scream. None of this is played for comedy in the slightest; the film is not a satire. It almost feels occasionally like it aspires to be a documentary. The scenes inside the house are substantially filmed using stationary hidden cameras, which allows the actors to move about at will in a completely natural manner. This is a far more artful way of creating the feeling that we are eavesdropping on something real than what so many films and television shows do these days, which is use jittery hand-held photography and direct address to the camera to signify “reality.” In any event, watching The Zone of Interest was a white-knuckle experience, one which I think all of us sitting comfortably beside the horrors next door would benefit from being subjected to.
Ah well. I thought I’d take a break from thinking about Israel and Gaza to talk about something more hopeful, and I fear my own filmic reminiscences have turned around to slap me in the face. Perhaps that’s just as it should be, and yet another reason to have hope for the possibilities of film, if not for humanity.