Hey folks, Harry here with Dirk Calloway... an uptown super-genius from the burgs of New York. He studied Reed Richards' vocabulary and has put it to great use for the following, which is a look at a great many of the films that have been playing during the New York Film Festival...
Dirk Calloway reporting here. I’ve been attending most ofthe NY Film Festival. I know that Mr. Beaks has given you detailed reviews ofalmost all of the films, but I’m gathering that he went to press screenings sodidn’t get the filmmaker q & a’s etc. I wanted to weigh in on the filmsI’ve seen thus far, plus give my two cents about two of the best American filmsthis year – David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and the Coen Brothers’ The Man WhoWasn’t There.
The first film I saw at the fest was Tsai Ming Liang’s WhatTime Is It There? I haven’t seen Tsai’s other films (The River, The Hole, ViveL’Amour, Rebels of the Neon God), but I’m well aware of his reputation forcreating stark, bleak riffs on alienation and dislocation.
In my rudimentary understanding of Taiwanese geopolitics andhistory, it’s clear that identity is a crucial and slippery issue for thiscountry. Taiwan has had to fend off Japan and mainland China along with theWest to create its own unique identity. I’ve noticed that Taiwanese films tendto take their time in their pacing and employ longer shots and takes. Here’s mysociology-aesthetics for dummies analysis – perhaps the complicated, convolutedsense of cultural/historical identity has led Taiwanese filmmakers to employ amore patient approach to filmmaking. Perhaps, having struggled to maintainautonomy through several different cultural influences, Taiwanese are more aptto take a reflective tone? Add to that,a sense of personal/ geopolitical/cultural isolation and you’ve can jump to yourown conclusions.
Tsai Ming Liang explained in the Q & A that he was bornin Malaysia and thus feels somewhat like a stranger in Taiwan (and doesn’t feelentirely Malaysian either) further complicating his Taiwanese sense ofdislocation. Tsai also admitted his affection for the French New Wave and thework of Francois Truffaut in particular. In fact, Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel(Jean-Pierre Leaud) makes a humorous and oddly poignant cameo as himself. Tsaihas chosen his own alter ego in the form of actor Lee Kang-Sheng (whose actualcramped apartment appears in the film). However, this film isn’t all bleakness.It’s filled with oddball humor and a fastidious attention to mundane details.Ultimately, Tsai resembles Wong Kar-Wai in his fixation on missed connectionsand characters interacting with each other but ultimately remaining isolated.One of the subplots involves a Taiwanese woman (played by Chen Shiang-Chyi) whotravels to Paris and only to find her loneliness amplified on a greater level.She attempts to connect romantically with a Hong Kong woman but is rejected.There’s a quietly devastating moment late in the film when Shiang-Chyi’sloneliness comes to a head and she breaks down in tears by herself.
Tsai’s film was shown with a short from Singapore calledGourmet Baby about a bon vivant’s search for the perfect dining partner in theform of his niece. It’s unclear whether the main character is a gay man or justan eccentric. But there’s a weird tension created by both the huge age gapbetween the man and his niece and the fact that they’re related. Ultimately,the short suffers from somewhat stiff acting – especially from the young girlplaying the niece in her pre-adolescent incarnation.
Next up was Todd Solondz’s Storytelling that plays like apoisonous response to Solondz’s critics – yet ends up confirming most of hisshortcomings. Solondz has been accused of condescending to his characters –exploiting their weaknesses and perversity for cheap laughs and hiding his owninsecurity behind bitter, mean-spirited humor. I think this is all true to somedegree, but it doesn’t entirely diminish my enjoyment of his work. At the sametime, Solondz does have a gift for making wickedly funny barbs and exploringmoments of social discomfort. Storytelling is divided into two short films:Fiction and Non-Fiction. The first story involves a fiction-writing class at acollege where a female student who’s slavishly attached to notions of politicalcorrectness gets sexually involved first with a fellow student who ishandicapped (out of pity) and then with her African-American professor – whoturns out to be an abusive lout famous for militant, confrontational fiction.The film has some funny moments satirizing writing class commentary, butultimately is a pretty shallow piece of work. It also makes the unappetizingmistake of hiding racism through irony. Just because the racist stereotyping isin quotes and being mocked, it doesn’t make it any less hateful. The secondsection is a thinly veiled self-portrait of a talent less documentary filmmakermaking a documentary about a brain-dead suburban New Jersey teen. There aresome witty and incisive moments of self-loathing & Solondz takes awell-deserved shot at American Beauty’s hollow self-aggrandizement in one hilarioussequence. However, ultimately the film doesn’t leave much to chew on afterwardsbesides acrimony for the world.
The best short I’ve seen at the Festival preceded Solondz’sfeature. It’s a French short called Superhero concerning a mean-spirited partygame where guests insult each other. Guests put up cards over their foreheadsthat others can read, but that they can’t see. Not only is the short (I’vefound that like the majority of feature films, most shorts could use someshortening) the perfect length, it’s also wickedly funny.
Shoei Imamura’s latest film Warm Water Under a Red Bridge ishis latest exploration of the lower classes and the lower half of the humanbody. His last two films, The Eel and Dr. Akagi were both mordantly funnyexplorations of morality. This time Imamura has made a somewhat lukewarm film.The perversity gets a tad tedious (the main conceit is a woman who spraysfountains of water from her loins when she orgasms) and the social observationdoesn’t seem particularly fresh. Still, it’s not a bad film. Just not up tosnuff for Imamura.
Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl is a dark, candid explorationof female adolescent sexuality that plays like a feminist rebuke to LarryClark’s Kids. However, it’s not a strident tract on sexual politics, Fat Girlis also perversely funny and oddly tender (though the many explicit scenes ofunderage girls engaged in sexual activity are bound to make even progressivelibertines more than a tad uncomfortable). I haven’t seen other Breillat filmsaside from Romance (which didn’t do much for me), but she clearly has her pulseon sexuality and specifically female sexuality. The “performances” of the twoadolescent sisters (one – a slender nymphet & the other – the eponymous“fat girl”) are pitch-perfect. However, I kept wondering if they weren’t beingexploited due to their extreme youth and inexperience. The film takes ashocking turn with some late in the game violence. But it’s clear that Breillatis positioning the entire film as some sort of darkly perverse fairy tale orwaking dream.
Asylum, the heavy-handed short preceding Fat Girl is adidactic, poorly acted tract about how religion constrains and liberates thelives of a young black boy and his mother. It didn’t help that the directormade a little speech about how deep he thought the film was – especially withcurrent struggles.
Damian Odoul’s Deep Breath (Le Souffle) is the freshest filmI’ve seen at the fest so far. It’s equal parts Robert Bresson, Bruno Dumont(Life of Jesus and L’Humanite) and Harmony Korine (in particular Gummo).However, what’s most impressive is that it feels like a piece of genuinepersonal expression. It was shot in gorgeous, high-contrast b & w in theFrench countryside and centers on a few days in the life of a restless 15-year-old boy staying with his rustic relatives. Odoul’s style is equal partshyper-naturalism and poetic surrealism. We get painfully explicit details offarm life – including the graphic slaughter of a lamb and then suddenly arethrown into vivid dream imagery. I can’t remember being thrown in the midst ofa character’s stream-of-consciousness with this much imagination since Gus VanSant’s My Own Private Idaho.
Just every film I’ve mentioned until now has been, at thevery least, interesting & different. One of the great pleasures ofattending film festivals is the broad exposure to a wide variety of films fromall over the world that don’t get mainstream exposure. Every so often, youdiscover a hidden gem or a fresh new voice. Plus, there’s the added bonus ofseeing the director talk about the work afterwards. I was glad to see all ofthese films, but none of them stood out as major revelations (Deep Breath mightbe an exception) or profoundly affecting experiences.
Then, I saw the extraordinary Mulholland Drive, which quitesimply showcases David Lynch in top form. This film justly selected as thefestival’s centerpiece – but a cousin’s wedding in Pittsburgh prevented me fromseeing it there (I also had to miss The Royal Tenenbaums…I’m still crying aboutthat one).
In the great Lynch tradition, Mulholland Drive is a filmthat bypasses traditional narrative logic and instead follows intuitive dreamlogic. However, each sequence is mapped out with pristine clarity and there’sless affect and coyness than usual for Lynch. For the first two hours or so, wefollow a series of relatively linear (though completely disconnected) plotlines that each make sense more or less on their own – but don’t seem to fitinto an overall pattern. Yet, we trust Lynch entirely because his sense offormal and tonal control is so masterful. The two main female characters areetched with so much warmth, that by the time the narrative goes completelypsychotic – we’re already deeply attached to the characters that we’ll followthem almost anywhere.
In the last 40 minutes, Lynch cavalierly re-orders realityso that all of the assumptions and conventions set up in the beginning of themovie have been radically subverted, reversed, or completely eradicated. On thenarrative surface level - things make less sense, but on a deeper, moreemotional and subconscious level – they make profound sense. Lynch’s genius isthat he is able to articulate that inchoate space in between consciousness andsleep, reason and psychosis. We may not be able to remember our dreams, but wehave Lynch’s films to provide us with a vivid record of the dream world thatexists inside all of us. What is Mulholland Drive about?
I would say it’s a poetic meditation on artifice andidentity. On how much of life consists of engaging in “performance” based onour fears and desires. We see echoes of Lynch’s past work (Eraserhead, BlueVelvet, Twin Peaks, Lost Highway) as well as shades of Vertigo and Persona. Butthis time, Lynch has inventively re-digested and synthesized his sources intoan imaginative, organic waking dream/nightmare. In fact, one could even readthis as a stunning piece of self-criticism or self-reflection by the masterfabulist.
His mastery of sound, lighting, and composition has neverbeen utilized to greater effect. Lynch isn’t just interested in fucking withour heads or freaking us out. There’s a tender, moving love story buried insidethe film. Granted, the love story turns melancholy and dark – but not beforeLynch has hit primal human chords.
I should also mention the wonderful cast of mostly freshfaces. Naomi Watts – who plays a Doris Day-type naïf named Betty (similar toSandy in Blue Velvet) gives a stunning multi-leveled performance and holds thefilm’s emotional fabric together. I won’t get into details, but she’s requiredto play multiple roles that demonstrate her virtuosic range – all the while,supplying every identity with a deeply emotional base. Her co-star LauraHarring has the less challenging role (playing the Dorothy Valens/Laura Palmerrole of the dark, disturbed female in distress), but adeptly conveys slinkysexiness, warmth, and vulnerability. There’s plenty of off-kilter humor, butultimately Mulholland Drive moved me with its tragic love story gone bad. Thisis a movie that demands to be seen multiple times & will likely spark a fewarguments and debates. But even Lynch’s detractors will have to acknowledgethat it’s of a piece and works on its own surreal terms.
Lynch shared the Best Director prize at Cannes with JoelCoen for The Man Who Wasn’t There. The NY Film Festival Selection Committeerejected the film from the fest even though the Coens are New Yorkers & TheMan Who Wasn’t There is a beautiful example of neo-classical noir andrepresents a return to tackling serious themes for the Coen Brothers. Given thelesser quality of a lot of the films that actually made the cut, their decisionis a tad shocking. A lot of critics harbor a petty grudge against the Coens.Their smart-aleck quality offends them for some reason (though most of them areprofessional smart-asses) & their virtuosic skill is perceived as tooself-congratulatory and show-offy. However, they should have recognized on purecinematic levels that ace DP Roger Deakins has done career-topping work withhis gorgeous, richly expressive b & w cinematography. Furthermore, BillyBob Thornton’s subtle, iconic performance is meticulously modulated andultimately moving. He narrates the film, and though it’s clear that he’s not asbright as he thinks he is – the Coens don’t seem to be playing down to him. Hisdilemma is that of a lot of Americans – finding spiritual fulfillment amidstthe emptiness of material success.
I admit that I wasn’t really a fan of O Brother Where ArtThou. For all of its considerable skill and design, the humor played a tad tooarch for my taste. In the end, all of the jokes rang a tad hollow for me.Admittedly the music was enjoyable, and the performances – I was especiallyfond of Tim Blake Nelson – had panache. But it wasn’t the brilliant socialsatire ala Preston Sturges or anarchic comedy that the Coens are capable ofdelivering.
Here, the Coens have returned to playing it relativelystraight and taking on their existential themes with complete seriousness. Ofcourse, their idiosyncratic, oddball humor inflects the film & prevents itfrom being stiff and self-important. Ultimately, the Coens are respecting theclassical conventions of 1940’s film noir – which makes this a uniquelysuccessful specimen of neo-noir. It’s probably the best straightforwardneo-noir since LA Confidential.
In any case, I’m miffed that the NY Film Festival excludedit. But luckily, if you live in NY or LA – it opens on October 31. Go see it. Ablack & white period genre film needs the support of true film lovers tosurvive. It’s obviously a labor of love by the Coens, and their fans shouldreturn the love as much as possible.
In my next report, INTIMACY (a film whoseemotional power deserves to be compared with Bertolucci’s Last Tango In Paris),THE SON’S ROOM, WAKING LIFE, ALL ABOUT LILY CHOU-CHOU, and Godard’s IN PRAISEOF LOVE.
Dirk
