51 Birch Street, which opens today at the Cinema Village here in New York City, is a marvel. I was fortunate enough to see the film at last year's Toronto Film Festival and after talking with Director Doug Block at the festival, I was able to have the film and the film's subjects, Mike and Kitty Block, at the Sarasota Film Festival this past spring. I am so excited that audiences will be able to see the film on the big screen because it is a really rewarding cinematic experience; Bravo to Doug and Truly Indie for getting this wonderful film in theaters where it belongs.

Wedlock: Mike and Mina Block in Doug Block's 51 Birch Street

From my 2005 write-up:

"Block uses his camera to document his parent's marriage and, after his mother's death and his father's quick re-marriage to a former secretary, to uncover the hidden secerts of his parent's lives. This film should become a huge hit because its central question is universal; if you could learn everything about your parents' lives, would you really want to know? Block confronts this issue head-on when, upon his mother's sudden death, he discovers 20 years worth of her highly detailed journals which expose her unhappiness in her marriage to Block's father. The film is structured around the central mystery of the parent-child relationship, of our tendencies to idealize out parents, and Block's editing ends up making the film play almost like perfect fiction; by the time the movie has ended, our alliegances to the characters, our understanding of own desires, our opinion of Block himself have all shifted significantly."

Essential documentary filmmaking. Go and see for yourself.

Friends and family have long been the source of compelling stories; We all have both, don't we? This year's NYFF is chock full of the social units that we all know and love, and any discussion of the festival program should include a look at this year’s biggest trend; the social and familial obligations that drive us all to distraction. And I’m not even going to talk about The Queen !!!

Onward with the capsule reviews…

Poison Friends by Emmanuel Bourdieu

Emmanuel Bourdieu is responsible for co-writing one of my favorite films of all-time, Arnaud Desplechin’s My Sex Life… (or how I got into an argument), so I entered the Walter Reade theater for a screening of his new film, Poison Friends, with a great deal of anticipation. Reports out of Cannes, where Poison Friends won the Critic’s Week Grand Prize, were strong and I knew going in that the world being examined in the film was not unlike that in My Sex Life; the intellectual Parisian set, navigating the shark infested waters of university life. What I wasn’t expecting, and what Poison Friends ultimately delivers, was the highly conventional storytelling which makes the film much more accessible (and ultimately less imaginative) than My Sex Life….

Poison Friends tells the story of an arrogant fraud named André (Thibault Vincon), a writing student who undermines the intellectual confidence of his friends in order to maintain his own position as class sage. There is no subtlety about André’s machinations as he criticizes his classmates’ ambitions, takes profoundly arrogant and nonsensical intellectual positions (‘Do not write what is not essential,’ he oozes) and schemes behind the scenes to destroy the lives and loves of his colleagues. André’s classmates, all young men who take their intellectual work very seriously (only in France… An American movie set in a university that shows education and creative life as important? C’est impossible!), are charmed by the rogue, and the film charts the long road to social disillusionment; Alexandre (Alexandre Steiger) is a dramatic writer and actor working on plays, Eloi (Malik Zidi) is the son of a famous writer who has promised not to write (while secretly working on a novel), and the humble Edouard (Thomas Blanchard) is an aspiring writer who is the first of the group to publish. As André criticizes his way to the top of the social food chain, feeding on their humility and creative self-doubt, Bourdieu shows him as a true charlatan; While we always see Eloi and Alexandre at work, André is rarely shown doing anything at all.

School For Scoudrels: Eloi (Malik Zidi) meets Andre (Thibault Vincon) in Emmanuel Bourdieu’s Poison Friends

Ultimately, Poison Friends charts André’s fall from grace, and I can’t say anyone in the entire theater will feel an ounce of pity for him. Instead, the slow disillusionment that the young artists come to feel toward their colleague becomes the dramatic thrust of the film; Like Hitchcock showing us the ticking bomb underneath the desk, the thrills in Poison Friends all come from the anticipation of the ominous disaster on the horizon. As a portrait of very serious young men, Bourdieu’s film is a solid, engaging and entertaining piece of filmmaking for adults, but I couldn’t help but missing the randy, novelistic messiness of a film like My Sex Life…; Gone are the long diversions, the wonderfully illuminating subplots and the foul-mouthed pleasure of truly witty and engaged creative types. Instead, Poison Friends is almost too serious for its own good and maybe that is the point. Either way, I really enjoyed the film, highly recommend it and look forward to Bourdieu’s career as a director. A terrific movie.

The Journals of Knud Rasmussin by Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn

One of the most beautiful and deeply moving films at this year’s NYFF, The Journals of Knud Rasmussin is the story of a people at a moment of supreme transformation; The arrival of Christianity among the Inuit people of Canada which, in an attempt to win the hearts and minds of the population, demands the complete erasure of the spiritual history of the community. The titular Rasmussin, a half-Greenlander, half-Danish anthropologist who speaks the Inuit language, is more or less a minor character in the story (although his actual journals are, in fact, the screenplay’s source material) and instead of showcasing a cultural encounter from an anthropological point of view, Cohn and Kunuk instead opt to tell the story from the point of view of a family in crisis; Apak (Leah Angutimarik) is a widow who recently remarried but saves her intimate feelings for the spirit of her dead ex-husband. Her father, the tribal patriarch and shaman Avva (Pakak Innukshuk), encourages her to live in the real world, but Avva has other things to worry about; As his fellow tribesmen have begun to convert to Christianity, his shamanic role (and his ability to feed his tribe) come into direct conflict with the forces of cultural change.

I won’t give away the film’s beautiful and tragic finale, but needless to say it isn’t surprising which historical and social force wins in the end. That said, the film is by no means a traditional tragedy or a cold (pardon the pun) nor tedious documentation of the Inuit community of 1922. Instead, Kunuk and Cohn have crafted a powerful and deeply moving drama that remains deeply rooted in the Inuit tradition of storytelling. As such, a lot of the reviews of the film that I have read have offered a less than favorable comparison to Cohn and Kunuk’s masterpiece Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner and maybe the source material (a Danish documentation of this cultural encounter) or 20th century context of the story has in some way altered the power of the movie, but that is a minor complaint; Journals is perhaps a more interesting look at Inuit history and culture than Atanarjuat if only because of the way this film resonates as a cultural document. I asked Cohn about the casting process at the press conference, and he delivered a goose-bump inducing description of how the actors in the film are basically playing their own ancestors, telling the story of their own culture that, until now, has basically been forbidden and hasn’t been told since it happened 84 years ago. If that’s not cinematic magic, I am not sure what is.

Frozen Moments: Avva (Pakak Innukshuk) looks for answers in The Journals of Knud Rasmussin by Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn

Ultimately, Journals is a film that rewards patience and curiosity of both the emotional and intellectual kind. The story visually fascinating, providing the details of survival in the hostile Arctic environment as the source of not only daily life but as the foundation of beliefs and spirituality, and Kunuk and Cohn are not afraid to represent the experience of faith within the literal context of how beliefs are experienced. Of all of their directorial choices, the decision to show Avva and Apak’s spiritual reality as a part of the physical reality of their world has been met with the most confusion, but it is absolutely the most moving aspect of the story. Forget the commercial prospects, as a film that understands community filmmaking at its deepest and most intellectually honest levels, The Journals of Knud Rasmussin is as beautiful a record of the process of change as you’re likely to find.

The Host by Bong Joon-ho

Family in the moment of crisis is also the subject of Bong Joon-ho’s amazingly moving and funny monster movie, The Host. When an American mortician working on a US military base orders his Korean subordinate to dump toxic formaldehyde into Seoul’s Han River, the terrible consequences aren’t felt until years later when a giant mutated tadpole with a very bad attitude (and a big appetite for human flesh) decides to come ashore and let the Korean people come face to face with their history. At the center of the terror is the small, motherless Park family who own a snack food stand near the popular shoreline of the Han River; Lazy, narcoleptic Kang-du (a hilarious Song Kang-do), his precocious and very cute daughter Hyun-seo (Ko Ah-sung), the hardworking and proud patriarch of the family Hie-bong (Byeon Hie-bong), the estranged rageaholic Nam-il (Park Hae-il) and his sister Nam-ju (Bae Du-na), the bronze medal archer who can’t win the big tournament. When the monster captures the young Hyun-seo, the family will do whatever it takes to save her from his slimy clutches.

Uh-Oh: Kang-du (Song Kang-do) Says Goodbye In The Host by Bong Joon-ho

What separates The Host from the traditional monster movie is not only the thrilling, high-quality special effects, but the absolutely hilarious interactions of the Park family; Imagine a Korean version of The Royal Tenenbaums trapped by the love child of Godzilla and Alien, you have an initial idea of the delights to be found in The Host. I was raised on monster movies; The Creature Feature, Godzilla week, and Count Scary were staples on my TV growing up in Flint, so I know from which I speak; The Host will go down as one of the best, most entertaining and most accessible monster movies of all time. There is something for everyone here and, a perfect tragic-comic balance aside, the film is genuinely thrilling and a whole lot of fun. Kudos to Magnolia Pictures for releasing this wonderful film in the USA; Forget the movie’s “blame America first” politics, this one has hit written all over it. I am certain that Hollywood will try to remake this movie and get most of it wrong, so in the meantime, hook your wagon to the big bang that is happening in Korean cinema right now and catch The Host on the big screen.

Falling by Barbara Albert

I wasn’t sure what to think about Falling before seeing it; I had heard good things coming out of Toronto and I enjoyed Barbara Albert’s Free Radicals, but I had also been told that movie was essentially a ‘chick flick’ with few charms for the Y-chromosomed among us. Well, as if I needed further proof not to listen to the advice of my fellow film-goers, Falling turned out instead to be one of my favorite movies at the New York Film Festival. A funny, poignant look at life among a group of thirty-something former schoolmates reuniting in small a Austrian town, Falling describes both the changes in the women’s lives and the unchanging roles that are ascribed by their pasts. We’ve all been there; You get together with your old friends, and the rituals and roles that date all the way back to your childhood come screaming back and you find yourself doing and saying things you haven’t though of as being you in a long, long time. It’s all there, sitting beneath the surface, just waiting for the right buttons to be pushed.

After the death of a former school teacher who made an impact on the lives of his student, five women, all old friends, reunite at his funeral to celebrate his life and share memories of the past. The gang’s all here; Troubled Nicole (Gabriela Hegedüs) who says the first thing that comes to her mind (never mind if it’s socially acceptable), moody Brigitte (Birgit Minichmayr, who audiences will remember from Downfall), a schoolteacher with a secret, the pregnant and confident Nina (Nina Proll) whose amorous history will come back to haunt her, the hard-drinking Alex (Ursula Strauss) whose free-spirited lifestyle may not be all its cracked up to be, and the gorgeous Carmen (Kathrin Resetarits) an actress who has escaped the confines of small town life for a moderately successful career in Germany. The women end up spending the entire night floating from party to party, relationship to relationship, and rediscovering the roots of their friendship and the innumerable changes that have impacted their lives.

Alone Together: Brigitte (Birgit Minichmayr) Dances In ‘Brooklyn’ in Barbara Albert’s Fallen

At the center, Director Barbara Albert refuses to let this become a Big Chill elegy for her Gen X dreams and instead shows us the dignity of her characters, even in the least dignified of situations. An example of her excellent touch focuses on Alex who, drunk and wrapped up in the feel-good peer pressure on the dance floor of the local discotheque, decides to go topless before the frenzy of the music fades away and she is brought back to the reality of the situation. Ursula Strauss handles the moment perfectly and Albert’s refusal to look away is just he right approach for the scene. In the end, Fallen’s humor (it refuses to take itself too seriously) and its tremendous performances are a perfect compliment to Albert’s sure-handed and deep connection to the story and, who knew, the film was truly one of the gems of a very engaging 2006 New York Film Festival.

Hi everyone... Just a note to all New Yorkers that I will be hosting a bi-weekly trivia game tonight in Park Slope. Details below. Hope you can join us tonight or, if not, the next time we play on Wednesday, October 25. Topics are wide-ranging, so bring three friends (teams of four or less), $5 each, and use your brain!

Park Slope Pub Quiz!
2nd and 4th Wednesdays of the Month
9:00pm (sign up @ 8:30pm)
Teams of 4 or Less
$5 Per person
(Cash Prizes for 1st and 2nd, a free round of drinks for 3rd)

Black Sheep Pub
428 Bergen St @ 5th Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11217
(718) 638-1109

Last Friday, I joined my good friends and bloggers at one of the best-attended press screenings of the 2006 New York Film Festival, David Lynch’s hotly anticipated Inland Empire. I had read a little bit about the project and its reception at Venice, but it was last Sunday’s press screening which set the tone; To quote the ol’ Hüsker Dü song, “Love and hate were in the air/ like pollen from a flower,” and most interestingly, both reactions were usually harbored in a single person. This was a film that was not only dividing audiences, it was fostering schizophrenic reactions from individuals. Finally having seen the film myself, it’s not hard to understand why; One of the most challenging films of this or any year, Inland Empire somehow strikes a deep and logical chord while simultaneously disorienting its characters and audience within its swirling narrative.

Before going too far into the film itself, a little bit of recent analysis might come in handy. In three of his four most recent films (the exception being the lyrical and antithetical The Straight Story), Lynch seems to be dealing with the idea of Hollywood and the process of making films by making films about the process (particularly the interior process) of making films; Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive and now Inland Empire all seem to me to be extensions of Lynch’s own interior universe, where ideas, consciousness (both self and global) and narrative impulses combine in exploration of the complicated creative relationships that abound when bringing a film to life. Lynch describes it as a 'magical' process, and his films reflect that philosophy by utilizing narrative tricks, misdirection, sleight of hand and visual magic to tell already complicated and unconventional stories. Whereas I think Slavoj Zizek had it right in The Pervert’s Guide To Cinema when discussing the role of The Mystery Man (played by Robert Blake) in Lost Highway as being an extension of the Director’s role in creating, manipulating and capturing a filmed story, and while Mulholland Drive is clearly about the death of the dream of old Hollywood glamour, Inland Empire seems precisely focused on the relationship between the anxiety of inner life and the burden of film history. Together, all three films utilize similar tactics to achieve a very real and very personal idea about creation; ‘Real’ characters are doubled with their ‘ideal’ or ‘fantasy’ doppelgangers, stories live in the space between the character's fantasy or imagined life, the filmic unreality of those stories are folded within the movie itself, and the top-level filmic reality (or the movie, on all of its levels, that we as the audience experience as whole, that is, Inland Empire itself) is a vessel for conveying the relationships between the layers of story beneath.

In this sense, it is interesting to note that all three films came about after the end of Twin Peaks and Fire Walk With Me, which seem to be both the birthplace of these almost novelistic complexities but also a transformation in Lynch’s own professional career; The Hollywood studios and companies who had backed films like The Elephant Man (Paramount) and Dune (Universal) and a series like Twin Peaks (ABC) were suddenly gone from his life. This is pure speculation, but I think the experience of making the 'classic' films in particular mark a transition for Lynch; With Blue Velvet (with DeLaurentis), Wild at Heart (Samuel Goldwyn Company) and Fire Walk With Me (New Line), each an excoriation of Hollywood genres and classic cinematic ideals, and with the cancellation of Twin Peaks (which seemingly provided Lynch the proper length and format to explore his ideas about storytelling), I really think that Lynch was freed up to tackle Hollywood as both an ideal and a dark, horrifying reality. This being Lynch, a film about corporate suits imposing their will on creative people is far too banal a topic, but the inner life is far more rich and sublime; The deep anxiety of creative people, their innate understanding of and adherence to the unsustainable fantasy of Hollywood, and the ways in which terror about the validity of the dream in a world that is predicated on maintaining shiny surfaces (and spilling blood beneath them) suddenly becomes the central concern of Lynch’s films.

Director David Lynch

Which leads us to Inland Empire, perhaps the most playful and unified ‘dark Hollywood’ film of Lynch’s career. Starting at the top, Inland Empire as a title is a clear reference to that interior fantasy life we’ve already discussed; A vast landscape of anxiety, history, narrative and the dream. As such, watching the film becomes such a dissociative experience that I think most people, even fans of Lynch’s previous films, will be deeply challenged in trying to assemble a single, master narrative from the onslaught of ideas and stories that fold up and blossom inside of one another within the movie. That said, and with a caveat emptor of having only seen the film once (I need to see it again, certainly, to validate my first understanding of the film), I think that a clear story emerges, one that is structured not unlike Mulholland Drive’s dream world. Nikki (Laura Dern) is a wealthy actress and wife of a very jealous Polish tycoon living in Los Angeles. After a new neighbor comes over for tea and warns Nikki about the dangerous relationship between the past, present and future (in a scene that reads like a high-camp take on the tarot card opening of Cleo from 5 to 7). Nikki wins the starring role of Sue in a film called On High In Blue Tommorrow (my memory fails me, but I think that is correct) and will star in the film with Devon (Justin Theroux), a lothario who is quickly warned against flirting with Nikki by his own friends and Nikki’s jealous husband (reminding me of the Robert Loggia/ Balthazar Getty relationship in Lost Highway). Devon plays the role of Billy in Blue Tomorrow, which is being directed by Kingsley (Jeremy Irons) who, at the first cast reading of the film, tells Nikki and Devon a secret about the film’s development; Ostensibly the story of an affair between two married people, Blue Tomorrow is based on a cursed ‘gypsy’ folk tale called 4/7 which was previously adapted for the screen but never made because its lead actors were murdered. Soon, Nikki and Devon fall into bed with one another, calling one another Sue and Billy and much like the transformative sex scene in Mulholland Drive, Nikki’s anxiety is released as if from Pandora’s Box and all hell breaks loose.

Bad Girls: Laura Dern as Nikki as Sue in David Lynch's Inland Empire

Soon, Nikki’s story begins to overlap with that of Sue, whose own story is an extension of the ‘gypsy’ (here, Polish) tale and the unfilmed adaptation of it, which Lynch imagines as a mid-20th Century period piece (and starring a different actress in the Nikki/Sue role). This being a David Lynch movie, we’re never sure if Nikki is Sue, if Sue is Nikki, if the girl in the unfilmed Polish adaptation/story is making the whole story up in a present-day hotel room, or if she herself is merely an extension of something inside Nikki. That said, if we imagine each layer of Lynch’s cinematic onion as simultaneously distinct and part of the whole, being peeled back and reassembled, it is always relatively clear where we are in the movie because, as with Lost Highway and Mulholland, the only level that really counts is the unified level, Inland Empire itself, on which we, as an audience, are experiencing the movie. As a single, unified story, Inland Empire is difficult (yes) and without paying deep attention to the structural relationship between the scenes and characters, it can quickly grow extremely confusing (yes), but a close reading of the film pays countless dividends and makes a great deal of sense while housing elements about which I should probably re-visit before commenting (the Rabbits, the definitive relationship between Kingsley’s film and Nikki’s life). That said, in the film’s final hour, much like in Mulholland, Lynch pulls back the curtain and opens the boxes within boxes, showing us where we have been all along and patient viewers are rewarded with a finale sure to put a smile on every face; a musical a tour de force through the Lynchian universe.

I noticed on IMDB that the film has perhaps found an American distributor in Magnolia Pictures*, and I really can’t imagine how interesting the film’s life as a theatrical release will be; Be warned, Inland Empire is a step or two removed from the relative comforts of even a difficult film like Lost Highway. In addition to its complex story, the film was shot on MiniDV and looks it**; the sumptuous color and visual depth of Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive are gone in favor of the grainy immediacy of Dogme-quality video. Of course, through the magic of the post-production process, there are plenty of haunting, Lynchian visuals at play on the screen but, as Lynch has sworn off film “forever” in favor of the flexible video production process, I really did miss the richness of the color palate of film. I am nervous writing about this film at all after a single viewing, but one of the most engaging aspects of the experience is how the recent films all work together, overlap, and talk amongst one another and, as such, Inland Empire seems almost a master narrative for Lynch’s filmmaking career, bringing together all of his concerns as a filmmaker and blowing them apart before reassembling them again, magically, right before our eyes.

*UPDATE 10/11/06: It appears Magnolia is not releasing the film and Lynch will be doing so himself. Kudos for having the economic courage to back up his aesthetic convictions.

**Of course, in the press conference after the film, questions focused almost exclusively on Lynch’s migration to DV as a filmmaking format, and Lynch and Dern were unanimous in their praise of the light, nimble cameras and the flexibility that they provided. This industry fixation on tools and production process was a real shame because the film itself opened so many channels of exploration that, by the time Lynch’s time on the podium was over, the press conference seemed like a huge waste of an opportunity. Despite some very minor questions about content, the fascination with the DV camera (Inland was shot on a PD-150) took us all out of what Lynch himself recognized as the ‘magic’ of watching the film and into the mundane world of camera equipment. This is almost endemic of the press conference format at the NYFF, where people seem to be asking questions not out of a general curiosity about the film, but for the sake of winking at their neighbor and winning approval from their peers. Not to be too salty, but if this is the state of the film press, well, no wonder we’re in the mess we’re in.

I was recently clicking around on-line when I stumbled upon a small item on David Poland's site which featured a look at the poster for David Fincher's upcoming film Zodiac, based on the unsolved Zodiac Killer crimes in the San Francisco Bay area in the late 1960's and early 1970's. As a fan of true crime stories, the story of the Zodiac murders has always scared my pants off because of the escalating and bizarre nature of the horrible crimes, their randomness, the ciphers and tantalizing clues that the Zodiac delivered to the authorities and the fact that the crimes remain unsolved. I have been following Fincher's project from afar, very much looking forward to seeing what he brings to the story as I think he may be the perfect person to tell it.

True Crimes: Writer/Columnist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) discusses The Zodiac case with Inspector Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) in David Fincher's forthcoming Zodiac

The poster also reminded me of another situation whch I think is pretty interesting. In March of this year, THINKFilm released another film about the Zodiac Killer, Alexander Bulkley's The Zodiac, a somewhat successful re-telling of the story of the Zodiac, this one, like Fincher's, focused on law enforcement's failed attempt to find the killer. Here, as was the case with the two recent films about Truman Capote and the writing of In Cold Blood (last year's Capote and this year's Infamous), we have two films about essentially the same exact subject coming out within a year of one another, this time with almost the exact same name. Interestingly, it seems to be a reverse model of the Capote projects; the more well-known film in this case will most certainly come out after the first, lesser known project. While time will tell what the box office has in store for Infamous and Zodiac, and I look forward to seeing both, I can't help but wonder if to have two sets of twin films, albeit different takes on the same subject, all coming so close together heralds a new trend in the industry. I don't mind it so much, but with many films not being picked up and so few films gobbling up so much screen space, I wonder if it makes sense. I guess filmgoers will decide if this is a viable situation for these films (it certainly appears to be more so for Zodiac than The Zodiac) or if the repetition of a single story only sabotages the narrative power of both films. Time will tell. In the meantime, I'll be popping The Zodiac on my Netflix queue and I can't wait to see what Fincher does with one of the creepiest crime stories in American history. It seems as though he has controversially chosen to tell the story told by Robert Graysmith in his book Zodiac and Zodiac Unmasked, which has been challenged by some as misrepresenting the evidence of the case in favor of telling a good story. But hey, as the foundation of a movie script, a good story is fine by me. It's impossible to tell a historical story with 100% accuracy, but I'm sure that Zodiac will be a very good, highly compelling movie. Or at least I hope it is, because I've got goosebumps already.

(For more on the controversy surrounding Graysmith's book Zodiac Unmasked and his claims to have solved the case, and recognizing a major potential SPOILER about the film, click here.)

The cinematic intersection of the political and the aesthetic is an eternally precarious place; Make a point too eagerly, too earnestly and you risk preaching only to the choir but divest too much political reality from the story you tell in favor of the obliquely beautiful image and you risk obscuring the message. This year’s NYFF has found several films, all of them foreign, that bring necessarily transgressive political ideas to the screen in both beautifully and narratively compelling ways. That these films are foreign is no surprise; sitting in the Walter Reade and watching each of them, I found myself thinking how, at this moent in American life, when fear has erased the pursuit of truth in the name of political triumphalism, films that even attempt to artfully render political dissent seem almost impossible; It's mourning in America. The only example I can think of is Shortbus which, despite its message of personal freedom, doesn’t quite paint personal liberation with the broader strokes of social injustice; Where is the honest outrage in our fiction? As our national cinema’s shortcomings grow into the feeling of a deep absence of a the lost understanding of the necessity of art, the world at large continues to transcend our failings and literally puts our political values to shame. Which is, in all honesty, where they belong.

Bamako by Abderrahmane Sissako

Abderrahmane Sissako’s Bamako (named for the city in Mali where the film takes place) is a powerful film which is deeply rooted in the Pan-African cinematic tradition while, at the same time, dealing with the universal issue of the impact of globalization in a profound and deeply engaging way. The citizens of Bamako, suffering a drastic shortage of every imaginable social resource or national investment, have decided to stage a trial in order to find some sort of rough justice for their community and Africa as a whole. The defendants? The World Bank and the IMF who, having set the conditions of ‘structural adjustment’ (aka the privatization and internationalization of national services and resources) and high-interest loans as necessary to secure international aid, have left the people of Mali in the terrible situation where the cost of living is not ruled by organic market forces but a deeply tilted playing field that keeps the nation on the brink of economic collapse.

In the wake of the way in which the issue of ‘globalization’ has been opposed in the West (a disorganized collection of social groups who seem more likely to attack a single Starbucks or McDonald’s franchise in a riot than significantly impact the culture of consumption), watching Sissako’s film was absolutely revelatory for its level-headed dignity and deep understanding of the issues of conditional “development.” That Sissako places the words of condemnation and testimony in the mouths of everyday citizens, men and women from all walks of life, and places the trial in the courtyard of a residential building where life goes on literally around the trial, is perhaps the film’s most poetic decision and fosters a much deeper connection to the heady material than a simple, documentary-style, talking head litany of complaint ever could. It is in the everyday reality of the film’s subplots that the point is driven home even further; A gun goes missing, a marriage dissolves, a child becomes ill, all narrative examples of the ramifications of the prosecution's most powerful charges. Two rhyming moments eloquently underscore the effect; A young mother and wife sings a Malian pop song to a small audience in a nightclub. Later, Sissako shows her perform the same song again, this time in exile in Senegal with tears streaming down her face. In the second example, an elderly griot rises to testify in the trial without having been invited to do so and is forced to return to his seat with the promise he will be called upon later. When the trial concludes with the closing statements of the European and African lawyers (talking in highly academic and political terms), the griot rises again and delivers a stunning testimony; A song and story, untranslated in the film’s subtitles, that delivers more meaning in its emotional power than any rhetoric ever could. It is of no consequence what has been said before; the griot’s song is the objective truth of the entire film.

The Song Remains The Same: Abderrahmane Sissako’s Bamako

After the film’s public screening, the Film Society convened a panel to discuss the movie and, as a film programmer who has often doubted the importance of film panels at festivals, I was utterly amazed by not only the the turnout (Mira Nair, Danny Glover, Phillip Lopate and Jonathan Demme were all in attendance) but the powerful panelists themselves; The Director Abderrahmane Sissako, the actor/singer/activist Harry Belafonte, the economist Jeffery David Sachs, the Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz (former Chief Economist of The World Bank), and Mahmood Mamdani, President of the Council for Development of Social Research in Africa. I have never seen a more credentialed film panel in my entire life, and while the discussion between panelists was rather constricted by the chosen format (long, individual opening statements which ended up taking up the majority of time without much interaction between the speakers), the depth of thinking about issues ranging from the problems with the current structure of international aid institutions in regard to Africa to the importance of individual political action and voice in the process of change made for an engaging conversation.

One of the topics that a very erudite audience member touched upon but which was ultimately lost in the free-for-all of the question and answer session was Bamako’s role as a movie. It was on my mind as well as, in the long tradition of African cinema, the movie seemed a return to the metaphoric political films of the post-colonial flowering in African film. Whereas films like Ousmane Sembene’s Xala (1975) and Med Hondo’s terrific Soleil O (1967) demonstrate the two sides of the post-colonial and neo-colonial relationship (internal corruption by African leaders in the mode of their colonial oppressors and the racist realities of the colonial experience and the diaspora), Bamako outlines the story of our age of globalization within the deeply-rooted context of a long history of African political cinema. I have heard nothing but praise for the film from audience members and, despite some misguidedly literal-minded and tepid reviews (I don’t usually disagree with Ed Gonzalez but mentioning The Constant Gardener in this review sinks his boat before it even sails), I expect that if New Yorker Films handles this movie properly and allows word of mouth to build in progressive communities, it could become a milestone for African film in this country.

Offside by Jafar Panahi

In light of the United States’ seemingly unwavering desire to capitalize on its simple-minded declaration of Iran as a nation squarely located within the “Axis of Evil” (as deeply embarrassing a turn of phrase as has ever been spoken in the name of international diplomacy), the issue of gender discrimination at Iran’s national soccer stadium may seem like small potatoes; Clearly, nuclear proliferation threatens what remains of the relationship between our two nations and the world at large. But after watching Jafar Panahi’s tremendously moving Offside, which details the detention of women at a Tehran soccer stadium after they try to sneak into a World Cup qualifying match (only men are allowed to attend matches), I’d bet even the most simple-minded reductionist would have a hard time pointing to a single instance of ‘evil’ in the Iran depicted on-screen. That is not to say that Offside is a statement of national pride by any means, but more a statement of the profound depth of the Iranian character; Shooting on the fly and without permits, Panahi has constructed a movie that defines the humanity of Iranian society by showing its deepest limitations and flaws.

The story is simple; Young women, dressed in baggy clothes in an attempt to cloak their gender, have been captured by the stadium’s guards and detained for trying to attend a soccer match between Iran and Bahrain. The stakes are high; If Iran wins, the national team wins a trip to Germany and the 2006 World Cup but, if they lose, the nation stays home and misses out on inclusion in the global party. The women are held just outside the stadium’s walls by their reluctant captors who parrot the logic of this selective exclusion without ever seeming to believe too deeply in the justifications for the rules they must enforce (which are predicated on the idea that if women attend a soccer match, they will be exposed to unwholesome language and behavior by men who are too excited by the game to protect the women’s virtue. Seriously.) Slowly, the captors and captives are united by their interest in the national team’s performance, and as the film winds down and the women are taken by van to meet their fate with Tehran’s Vice Squad, the team wins the match and qualifies for the World Cup, setting off celebrations of such magnitude that all traffic is halted and the women’s captivity becomes a moot point; Captors and captives dance arm in arm into the night.

A Nation Divided: Jafar Panahi’s Offside

Despite the sporting context of Panahi’s chosen subject, the film is truly a discussion of Iran’s national identity and the meaning of citizenship in a society which discriminates against women. Despite the ‘enlightened’ gender politics of most Western nations (insert ironic cough), Offside is no invitation to gloat at the misguided social customs of a nation out of touch with individual freedom, but instead a deeply humanist portrait of a society trying its best to understand individuality in the context of collective traditions. Panahi never lets Iranian society off the hook and there is no question that Offside is an indictment of an Iran which paternally rejects the idea of individual personhood for women (there isn’t a single argument by a male character that doesn’t refer to an hypothetical father, husband or brother who would be insulted by the women’s participation in the soccer crowd). The choice of the Iranian National Team is an inspired one; If one of the most important of social interactions is restricted to only half the population, just whose nation is Iran? The film’s finale, where cosmopolitan Tehranians literally dance in the streets celebrating their collective national achievement makes the point more clearly than any silly speech by a world leader might; On the street level, where men and women live their lives together, Iran is just like any other nation in the world, dancing, singing and united in the pursuit of a good time. Before another ill-considered word between the two nations is uttered, I encourage all Americans to watch Offside and discover a deep sense of self-recognition and regret that we could allow things to come this far without acknowledging how much we truly have in common.

Our Daily Bread by Nickolaus Geyrhalter

I have been to every Press and Industry screening at the festival (save for the added weekend screenings which will be playing again this Friday… a boy’s gotta watch soccer sometime!), and I have noticed an annoying trend which is symptomatic of every festival I’ve ever attended but which irks me to no end; While high-profile (and soon to be released) films like Borat at Toronto or today’s screening of Pedro Almodovar’s Volver at the New York Film Festival pack the press and industry in like sardines, the smaller, lesser-known films tend to go relatively unseen. I feel a deep connection to my friends and colleagues who I’ve seen at all of the films, as if there are only a few of us with enough intellectual curiosity (or without other, pressing affairs maybe… maybe!) to actually see the NYFF program through to the end. One of the most powerful and engaging films of this year’s festival was one of the least-seen; Nickolaus Geyrhalter’s gorgeous and horrifying Our Daily Bread.
A documentary almost totally without dialogue (no talking heads, no interviews, no voiceover, nada), the film is a series of perfectly executed shots that show us the realities of modern food production; The raising, keeping, slaughter and butchering of all kinds of animals, the greenhouse estates that grow row after row of vegetables and the machines which automate many of the industrial processes utilized to maximize production. I found myself deeply fascinated by the innovation and ruthless efficiency of the machinery itself and the array of gadgets, robotic production tools and assembly line processing of amazing quantities of food is shot so beautifully, the rhythm of production so hypnotic, I almost forgot that what I was watching may not be the ideal mode of food production (to put it mildly). In fact, the film seems to assume a deep distrust for mechanized food production on the viewer’s behalf, but is so aesthetically beautiful in presenting a neutral view of the process, it was hard not to be unsure if the film weren’t in fact a celebration of modernization and factory farming. However, Geyrhalter’s decision to avoid commentary is perhaps the film’s greatest asset; My mind was racing with questions about what I was watching, actively rebelling against the formal beauty of the cinematic experience by questioning not only the film’s subject and presentation, but my own experience and fascination with the images.

Sowing The Unknown Seed: Nickolaus Geyrhalter’s Our Daily Bread

Which is to say, Our Daily Bread is all the more eloquent for trusting the viewer to recognize the attraction and repulsion of industrial food production and to think deeply about the subject without telling us what to think. I am deeply grateful for that experience as no other film in the festival has given me so much pause for thought. On the one hand, I look at highly efficient, mechanized (and since the farms are in Europe, very clean and safe) production of mass quantities of food and I couldn’t help think of Darfur or the Tanzania of Darwin’s Nighmare or the innumerable other areas where famine rages and how truly efficient food production could truly help eliminate hunger in the world. On the other hand, knowing what we know about the world, it seems clear that not a single morsel of the food produced in Our Daily Bread will ever pass the lips of a person who can’t pay for it at a European grocer’s. Add to this the knowledge that mass production without agricultural diversity has been shown to negatively impact the long-term sustainability of the land, and questions ricochet around the borders of the film’s impeccable frames. Can industrial food production be put to its proper use as a potential food source for the millions who need it or will it only serve as a profitable, efficient way to destroy sustainable farming? The film offers no answers, and is so much the better for not doing so.

Things are wrapping up in a week or so, but I promise more as I have time and the films warrant discussion. I could go on, but if you made it this far, we probably both need a break. More soon.

It's been a glorious couple of weeks at The Walter Reade Theater. I know I always blather on about how much I love attending The New York Film Festival and how it simply wouldn't be autumn if I weren't scrambling every morning to get the D Train to Columbus Circle, timing it just right to maximize the dual concerns of a good night’s sleep and having time to check in, grab the tender half of a blueberry muffin and find a seat before the festival trailer rolls. This has been a particularly interesting year in my opinion, if only because I have been able to see every single film on offer so far, which really has allowed me a comprehensive look at the programming sensibility of the festival this year. I have to say, I am rather envious of both the festival’s process and its refusal to waiver from its mission and vision; In a city like New York, always in flux and where change is sometimes mistaken for progress, the Film Society’s decision to stay the course and deliver a thoughtful program that rewards deep exploration with an overwhelming ratio of success to failure.

This year, doubly so; The inclusion of the Janus Films 50 Year Anniversary sidebar, as well as screenings of lost classics like Alberto Lattuada’s Mafioso and the festival’s salute to Alejandro Jodorowsky has deeply enriched the festival’s program. Having seen three of the Janus prints (Knife In The Water, Summer With Monika and Fires On The Plain, all spectacular), Mafioso and Jodorwsky’s insane and glorious El Topo, I am more convinced than ever that showing classic films, both lost and canonized, is a truly wonderful way to deepen a festival program and bring clarity and context to the new films. Perhaps the one filmmaker whose influence is most deeply felt at this year’s festival also has a day in the sun on the horizon; As part of the Janus retrospective, Luis Buñuel’s Viridiana screens on Thursday, October 12th and Friday, October 13th (of course!). Last year, it seemed like the entire world had tuned into the work of Robert Bresson; This year, of all of the filmmakers who have influenced the films at The New York Film Festival, it is Buñuel whose name keeps popping up, for better or worse.

The first film that immediately jumps front and center in this discussion is Manoel de Oliveira’s Belle Toujours, created as a sequel (and perhaps a love letter) to Buñuel’s 1967 classic Belle de jour. That film, which explored the sexual dysfunction of a housewife turned prostitute named Séverine Serizy (Catherine Deneuve), is one of Buñuel’s masterpieces of psychological and sexual insight, and the thought of de Oliveira’s theatrical, patient storytelling being used in the service of placing an addendum to the story made me a little leery of the possible result. Yes, de Oliveira has earned the laurels he has received; the man so much as sneezes on a 35mm camera and the results show up in festivals from Cannes to New York and beyond. But as he has grown more concerned with the experience of aging (and rightly so), his films have become more and more preoccupied with loss, both physical and emotional, and I wasn’t sure that the same sensibility that recently gave us a film as obsessed with mortality as I’m Going Home would bring the proper levity and perversion to a Belle de jour sequel.

Once More, With Feeling: Michel Piccoli reprises the role of Henri Husson in Manoel de Oliveira's Belle Toujours

I was half-right; While primarily a reunion of fictional characters (Michel Piccoli reprises his role as Henri Husson while Bulle Ogier replaces Deneuve as Séverine) for the purpose of uncovering the great, unresolved mystery of Buñuel’s original (did Husson reveal Séverine’s transgressions to her husband?), de Oliveira’s film is as light and nimble as a spry old couple waltzing to a long-forgotten love song. What the film is short on is Buñuel’s playful cocktail of perversion and guilt, and so, Belle Toujours is less a sequel in terms of being an extension of the original film as it is a chance to dress up the original characters in their regrets, longings and unanswered questions and have a little fun. In that sense, the movie is not unlike a tender Proustian pastry, light, fluffy and a reminder of a deeper primal experience. Of course, the film has its own delights; the reunion dinner between Séverine and Henri is hilarious and includes a perfectly random nod to Buñuel’s own brand of surrealism (a rooster, completely from left-field), while de Oliveira has the good sense not to allow his film to serve as a corrective to Buñuel’s decision to leave some things unsaid. Fans of the original will get a kick out of de Oliveira’s exercise, while I assume those unfamiliar with the original will probably wonder what all the fuss is about.

After seeing Piccoli having a time of it in de Oliveira’s film, it was a good deal of fun to watch him romp around the screen in drag in Otar Iosseliani’s Gardens in Autumn, another film that seems almost in dialogue with Buñuel’s work. Unlike de Oliveira’s film, however, Iosseliani takes the Buñuelian path of surreal satire down what is ultimately a dead-end; Gardens in Autumn is probably my least favorite film in the festival which, despite its intellectual origins in films like The Discreet Charm of The Bourgeoisie and L’ Âge d’or, is a single bad idea stretched to an interminable 115 minutes. This is a movie that desperately needs a second idea and a second layer of meaning, but Iosseliani seems incapable of recognizing that even its best assets are finite (i.e. Piccoli in drag) and beats its single joke and idea about French politics into the ground within 45 minutes. The film is more like a joke about surrealism told by someone who couldn’t be bothered to try and understand the form, and try as I might to open up to the film’s charms, Iosseliani brings in doses of casual racism and stereotype which, instead of subverting the ideas on display, ham-fistedly end up reinforcing the worst in his characters. Unlike Buñuel, it seems Iosseliani doesn’t really know the world he is describing and has even less to say about it. I’m not sure how the film made it into the NYFF line-up, but watching it felt like witnessing the first mistake at the festival so far.

Uh, Yeah. Cough: Michel Piccoli In Drag Can't Save Otar Iosseliani’s Gardens in Autumn

Leave it to a classic film to rescue Buñuel from the clutches of sentimentality and misunderstanding; Alejandro Jodorwsky’s El Topo landed with the force of a hurricane on the spare industry audience that showed up to watch it last Thursday, and seeing the film on the big screen, its bold, eye-popping colors restored to their proper glory, has been one of the true delights of the festival so far. I first saw El Topo as a teenager on a VHS tape at a friend’s house and I was in no way prepared for it. Even seeing it again, this time as a college student (again on VHS), I wasn’t sure I ‘got it’. What a difference adulthood makes; Watching the film again, it seems in perfect concert with its time, the filmmaking ideas of 1970 and the decade beyond, and with a deep understanbding of the surreal international bifurcation (war and pacifism) which defined its age. For the uninitiated, imagine an episode of the TV show Kung Fu set in Mexico, re-cast to star Klaus Kinski and directed by the love child of Buñuel and Sam Pekinpah and you might begin to touch upon the glory of El Topo.

Crazy World, Crazy Times: Alejandro Jodorowsky's 1970 Classic El Topo

Essentially the story of a gun slinging, revenge-minded cowboy who seeks to become the best gunfighter in Mexico, Jodorwsky’s film takes a hard turn into the spiritual redemption of his murderous protagonist when, having mastered the world of the gun, our bandito humbles himself in an underworld of disabled people and seeks to liberate them from their suffering. Jodorwsky gets the surrealism of social relations absolutely right by confronting power on its own ridiculous terms; Where a film like Gardens in Autumn shows the absurdity of political life as being essential banal, El Topo confronts sprituality and redemption as life and death, blood, violence and the painful quest to remake oneself into something noble. Despite being an absurd joyride into the abyss, El Topo is deeply serious and has the courage of its convictions, making it a graphic, worthy heir to the cinematic surrealism Buñuel described as early as Un Chein Andalou.

With Viridiana on the horizon, I am very much looking forward to bringing the circle to a natural whole, but even without seeing it again, its clear that Buñuel is having a major revival at the New York Film Festival. It’s more than deserved; Who better to show us how to understand the absurdity of our own times better than the master himself?

Mike Tully loooves giving me shit to do. One day, when he least expects it, revenge will be mine. In the meantime, I hand in my second homework assignment.

Having mastered the historical horror film (The Devil’s Backbone) and restored the comic book movie to its darkest roots (Hellboy) it should come as no surprise that Guillermo del Toro’s devastatingly beautiful new film Pan’s Labyrinth, the Closing Night Film of this year’s New York Film Festival, is true to the Director’s principle concern in his previous films; The nightmarish experience of coming of age made manifest in the worst possible of social circumstances. Blending the magic realism of the fairytale with the historical epic in an utterly consistent and meaningful way, Pan’s Labyrinth is a dark, angry film about the ways in which violence and war destroy social relations and how imagination and creativity can only go so far in liberating us from the harsh physical realities of the cruel world around us.

Director Guillermo del Toro

The story is a simple one; A young girl named Ofelia (Ivana Banquero) travels with her mother Carmen (Ariadna Gil) to the mountains of rural Spain in order to join her mother’s new husband Captain Vidal (Sergei Lopez, as one of the cinema’s greatest on-screen villains) and his infantry unit in Franco’s army. As World War II rages outside the Spanish borders, the internal struggle between Vidal’s fascist army and the Spanish revolutionaries fighting a guerilla insurgency in the Northern mountains is, historically, winding down; The Spanish Civil War has been over for years, but the anti-fascist struggle carries on with raids against the army and attempts to foment revolution amongst the people of Spain. Against this backdrop, Ofelia (if a name were ever a window into a character’s fate, this one is) uncovers an ancient pagan labyrinth on the grounds of the villa she and her family occupy and, fearlessly following the urging of a wood fairy with whom she has made contact, uncovers the world of The Faun (Doug Jones), a forest creature from an underworld kingdom who believes Ofelia to be the long lost Princess of the realm. The Faun gives Ofelia a book that magically outlines the tasks she must complete in order to be restored to her throne and escape the horrors of the world in which she lives.

As Ofelia begins to complete her magical duties (all of which ultimately climax in helping her pregnant mother’s difficult maternity), Captain Vidal and his soldiers have other duties to attend to as they engage in the type of cruelty that one imagines happens only in a place like Guantanamo Bay; the cold-blooded murder of suspected revolutionaries without trial (in the mode of Gaspar Nöe) and the brutal torture of prisoners of war. Not that home life is much better; Vidal’s continual debasements of Ofelia and Carmen as mere accessories to his desire to perpetuate himself through paternity keep things grim within the villa’s rustic walls. Ofelia’s only respite from Viadal’s dismissive abuse is her mother’s rare attention and the support of Mercedes (Maribel Verdú), Vidal’s chief house servant and a woman with her own secrets to keep. As the stories escalate and climax in perfect concert (the rebellion draws closer as Carmen’s pregnancy comes to term and Ofelia’s magical mission reaches its final stage), the stakes are perfectly understood and fraught with thrilling tension, but all the while, there is an overwhelming sense that things will not end well. And they don’t.

Transgression: Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) Confronts The Pale Man (Doug Jones) in Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth

The ending, so dependent upon del Toro adequately establishing the stakes and desires of his characters in the film’s first two hours, ends up being a perfect payoff for the story’s main concern with the inescapable reality of war and violence. It is also among the film's most mundane moments, which only enhances its power; In a film filled with masterful battle sequences (the sound design and cinematography combine with del Toro’s refusal to look away from war violence to create some of the most intense on-screen battles since the opening of Saving Private Ryan) and truly scary fantasy sequences (ripe with horrifying monsters and riveting visuals), the film’s final minutes instead showcase two quick acts of graphic violence that underscore the everyday nature of murder and terrible tragedy in the lives of these characters. Ultimately, what makes the film so effective is the way in which the narrative structure of both worlds, Ofelia’s fantasy land and Vidal’s murderous fiefdom, intertwine and overlap with one another; The rules of Ofelia’s game are primarily concerned with the inherent logic of her situation at Vidal’s villa, an escape not from his world but from her own feeling of powerlessness in it.

Balancing a truly frightening fairytale (all of the good ones are, are they not?) against the real-life tragedy of war, murder and torture is no easy task and I am astonished at how del Toro keeps the stakes in both stories on equal footing; We are as concerned about the details of Ofelia’s fantasy life as we are about the battles raging in and around the villa. This is why Pan’s Labyrinth is such a triumph, because del Toro knows how to tell his story and its refined, thematically consistent narrative creates a heartbreaking fantasy life that does not trump reality but rather provides a thrilling counterpoint which, in the end, may or may not provide solace for everything that is lost. Whether del Toro’s biggest risk, his ending, works for every viewer I cannot say, but I will say that I found it to be consistent with the vision of the world on display in Pan’s Labyrinth and for me, it remains the only possible ending for a film with so many current, real-world interests. This is a brave choice for a Closing Night Film, especially at a festival that last year ended with Michael Haneke’s Cache. There will be no head scratching at Alice Tully Hall this year, but I am not sure what impact the film will have on denizens of Lincoln Center when the final shot cuts to black. Del Toro’s film is a challenging, powerful work but its combination of fantasy and violence will not be everyone’s cup of tea. An inspired choice and I'm interested to see how it plays.

I would love to leave it there, but as I walked out of the Walter Reade at 10:15pm last Tuesday (at the end of a five film day), Michael Tully muttered a sentence which made perfect sense and had to be addressed; He wondered aloud how the film’s creation of a fantasy world, a lost kingdom whereby a girl must be restored to her rightful place by the completion of arcane, fantastic tasks, might measure up against a film that has driven me crazy since I saw it this summer; M. Night Shyamalan’s Lady In The Water. Like the idiot I often am, I accepted the assignment and now, at the risk of posting the longest post in my own personal history, I feel compelled to re-visit that colossal failure of a film in the context of del Toro’s success.