“Each film is a miracle,” said Souleymane Cissé, and in his 40-year career, the filmmaker has made about a half dozen of them. Min Ye… (Tell Me Who You Are) is the Malian director’s first feature in over a decade, and it comes to us, as do many films from contemporary Africa, partly due to European funding and technical support. But the film also draws on the resources of Mali’s best-funded and most popular visual media—television—to present its take on the culturally entrenched practice of polygamy. Unlike in other parts of West Africa, where the video market comprises the bulk of visual culture, television production and broadcasting receives healthy state funding in Mali, where Malian cinema struggles for financing from abroad and wide release at home. Originally planned as a ten-hour miniseries, Min Ye seems to take some of its form and idiom from Malian television serials, with their lurid, twisting plotlines, expressive soap-operatics from their performers, and functionality as a popular platform for social debate. Click here to read the rest of Leo Goldsmith’s review of Min Ye.
Reviewing Gang of Four for Cahiers du cinéma in 1989, the late philosopher Gilles Deleuze wrote that Jacques Rivette’s project is “a cinema that opposes its theatricality to that of theater, its reality to that of the world, which has become unreal.” That’s as succinct a formulation of the great director’s body of work as we are likely to get, and one that applies just as well to his latest drama, a whimsical eulogy of sorts to the New Wave icon’s treasured theme of life-as-performance. Modestly scaled and terse by Rivettian standards at 84 minutes, 36 vues du Pic Saint-Loup is a playfully oblique, often melancholy study in love, mortality, and the mysteries of grief. Yet compressed within the bantam framework of the film—which concerns people inhabiting a world all their own, a family of clowns and aerialists—is a banquet of ideas about cinema and life, the truth of art and the sorrows of imagination. Click here to read the rest of Damon Smith’s review of 36 vues du Pic Saint-Loup.
Never one to shy away from controversial subject matter or to give audiences an easy ride, Bruno Dumont willingly walks into an ideological minefield for his latest, Hadewijch. Though the term “provocateur” has undoubtedly derogatory connotations these days in critic speak, perhaps from the omnipresence of directors selling volatile wares (many dare not call an admired filmmaker a provocateur, whether it’s Breillat, von Trier, or God forbid, Korine, for fear of reducing him or her to the level of trickster), it’s neither wrong nor reductive to name Dumont as such. This is because in the past decade Dumont has proven time and again, from his maddening Bressonian murder mystery L’Humanité to his road-movie horror show Twentynine Palms (a far more precise and frightening depiction of male-female relations as bloody nightmare than Antichrist) to his gender-war war film Flandres, that he’s undoubtedly, unashamedly more interested in who’s watching, and how they’re watching, than who’s on screen. Eliciting a viewer response is paramount to this philosopher and professor turned filmmaker. The result of of course, has been constant audience alienation and ultimate resentment; he’s been accordingly targeted as misanthropic, detached, and rigid.
That I find Dumont’s work to be the opposite of all of those easily tossed-about adjectives matters little since everyone will take away something different from his purposely obtuse, narratively ambiguous works, in which character motivation is muffled and catharsis is severely complicated. Click here to read the rest of Michael Koresky’s review of Hadewijch.
Raya Martin does not lack for ambition. A rising young star of Filipino cinema with seven films chronicling the history of his country already under his belt, Martin initially received laudatory notices for 2005’s A Short Film About the Indio Nacional (or the Prolonged Sorrow of the Filipinos), has completed the first two parts of a planned “Box Office Trilogy” (Now Showing and Next Attraction), and now with this year’s Independencia can claim to be the first filmmaker to represent the Philippines in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard competition. He’s all of 25 years old. Independencia is obviously the work of a promising filmmaker, yet even while it displays confidently sumptuous imagery in the service of a cleverly ironic critical indictment of cultural colonialism, it also betrays an incoherence and incompleteness that a more seasoned talent would most likely not commit to celluloid. Click here to read the rest of Michael Joshua Rowin’s review of Independencia.
Four years ago, in one of its most notorious episodes, The Tyra Banks Show found its host on a mission to enlighten her audience on the issue of anti-obese bigotry. America’s top model did so by placing the burden upon herself, taking her fat-suit to the streets, onto buses, and into blind dates—and arriving at the conclusion that she had hit upon “the last form of open discrimination that’s O.K.” The idea of the show was for Tyra to heroically assert the dignity of a marginalized group, but her histrionic response to a few hours walking around in disguise only led us down the familiar paths of sensationalism. Director Lee Daniels’s second film, Sundance favorite Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire, brings this daytime-TV construction of the ultimate oppressed subject to the big screen, and again the purpose is a universal, self-ennobling empathy. As the film asks us to dream ourselves into the skin of society’s least-loved (here, a 300-pound, illiterate black teenager named Precious, who lives on welfare with her abusive mother), we are encouraged to project our own struggles onto her victimization: as the film’s website address informs us, “We are all Precious.” Click here to read the rest of Andrew Chan’s review of Precious.
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