The New York Film Festival has very few surprises to offer cineastes this year. A week in, and it is hard to find much to be excited about. It seems like a greatest hits compilation of all of the big spring/summer festivals. Many of the films being screened at the Lincoln Centre during the fortnight premiered at Cannes, and others – Almodovar’s Broken Embraces, Haneke’s The White Ribbon – hardly need to have their profile lifted by a spot at an international festival. But I suppose it’s enough that the well-dressed burghers of the Upper West Side get to see them at the revamped Alice Tully Hall before they are released nationwide.
36 Vues du Pic Saint Loup is exactly the sort of film you would expect to be at the NYFF. A slight piece of whimsy directed by Jacques Rivette, it loosely tells the story of a circus troupe touring the south of France and the characters that populate it. Not much happens and what does is rarely explained in any great depth, but it is beautifully shot and occasionally amusing, although almost entirely disposable – the sort of film that people who like any film so long as it’s in a foreign language will find utterly charming. Much the same could be said about Alain Resnais’ Wild Grass, inexplicably the festival’s opening night film, which similarly sacrificed emotional truth for quirky cinematic tricks.
Harder and far more successful than Wild Grass or 36 Vues, was White Material (main picture), the latest from French auteur Claire Denis, which shows the beginnings of a civil war in an unnamed African country. Where Haneke and others have dealt with French post-colonial guilt through carefully wrought subtext, Denis brings it to the forefront of her film, with Isabelle Huppert as the French heiress of a coffee plantation desperate to keep things running while the country collapses around her. Even though her metaphors are writ in fairly bold text, Denis expertly captures the shabby facade of modern Africa and the alienation of the white colonialists who exist there. Despite some unconvincing plot twists featuring Huppert’s son it is arty enough to enjoy critical examination, but tense enough to operate as a thriller; with great performances from the veteran actress and, in an uncredited role, Highlander star Christopher Lambert. There is also a fantastically sinister baroque soundtrack by British band Tindersticks.
Music plays an equally large part – in fact, more or less the only part – in Pedro Costa’s Ne Change Rien, described as a documentary on the French singer Jeanne Balibar, but actually more of an artistic rumination on creativity. Filmed entirely in black and white on fixed cameras, the film shows Balibar rehearsing songs with her band, and practising music for an operetta. Her rehearsals, mistakes, frustrations and retakes are shown in full, making this an honest examination of the nature of creating music. The film is lit like a film noir; all long shadows and expressionist gloom. Unfortunately, by showing that creativity can be dull and repetitive, the film did not quite manage to avoid being so itself. One for the art gallery rather than the cinema, I think.
An art gallery might be the best place too for Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, which prompted the usual round of broadsheet hand-wringing in New York, just as it did in the UK when it was released over the summer. For all its moments of haunting beauty, it is still a deeply cynical joke of a movie. You have to wonder if von Trier made it just to shock bourgeois film festival-goers at the likes of Cannes and the NYFF. Also shocking, but in a less satisfying way, was Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers, an extended piece of gonzo performance art that came across like Jackass directed by David Lynch. Filmed on VHS the film is intended to resemble a “found artefact”, according to Korine, showing three latex-masked tramps wandering around vandalising stuff and – yes – dry-humping trash cans. Childish and meaningless, it was a mystery to me how it was selected for the festival. Generations of pretentious art students have made better and more interesting films.
You might have expected yet more depravity from Life During Wartime, Todd Solondz’s bizarre sequel to Happiness, that blackest of black comedies. I say bizarre because Solondz has entirely recast the parts for this follow-up. For example, the sweaty pervert played by Philip Seymour Hoffman in the first film is now played by The Wire’s Michael K.Williams, better known as Omar. Other casting choices are not as far-fetched, but certainly as jarring. Carrying on ten years after the first film ended, Life During Wartime is more melodramatic and less bleak than Happiness, but shares its warped concept of the American family. Allison Janney almost steals the film as the fussy, dimwitted Trish, while a brief, electric cameo from Charlotte Rampling nearly brought the house down.
There was another phenomenal performance from Kim Hye-Ja as the title character in Joon-Ho Bong’s Mother. The director is probably best known for his monster movie The Host, but this is in an entirely different vein. Set in rural Korea, it documents a mother’s efforts to clear the name of her mentally disabled son, unfairly blamed for the murder of a schoolgirl. Captured in beautiful anamorphic 35mm, Mother is a handsome film noir style thriller with a killer twist and a stand-out performance from Hye-Ja, who is reportedly something of a legend in Korean cinema. While it is slightly more histrionic than we like our thrillers to be, the payoff is so satisfying and the technical accomplishment so masterful, I would thoroughly recommend tracking it down. The opening shot, showing Hye-Ja slowly dancing in a panoramic cornfield to the film’s jumpy, twisted soundtrack, is a majestic piece of filmmaking.
Next week: Breillat’s Bluebeard, Haneke tells New Yorkers about The White Ribbon and the Pedro and Penelope show hits town. Also, reviews of the best short films showing as part of the festival.
