NYFF, Week 1
Stuff I've seen and thought about
My favorite thing about the New York Film Festival, which opens to the public today, is how it elongates the feeling of walking out of the movie theater for two weeks. Walking out of the theater is one of my favorite parts of going to the movies. When it’s good, the movie is the best part, but walking out is consistently great, regardless of the movie. It’s life affirming to emerge from a dark room into the late afternoon light, into another fiction of a city. This year, for the P&I run, they’ve cranked up the AC to “arctic” at the WRT, and the tips of my fingers tingled as they came up to temperature. I love the walk from Lincoln Center to the subway at Columbus Circle and glimpsing Central Park in all its mid-week hullaballoos, all those strollers, ladies getting coffee.
One thing about the Upper West Side is that there are always ladies getting coffee and old couples getting lunch at 11 a.m. Despite its awful do not buy under any circumstances eight-dollar cold brew, this is what I like about the Le Pain Quotidien on 65th and Columbus. You get the sense there that some old couples have decided it’s the best spot to get a warm lunch. I am soothed by a place that can evoke that atmosphere despite being a chain. This is why Dunkin’ Donuts is better in suburban Massachusetts, because it is the hang-out spot of old people with routines. If it gets colder soon, I’m hoping to cozy up with some old crones at LPQ for lentil soup in between screenings. Otherwise it looks like I’ll continue to deplete my wallet in salad bars.
I’ve rounded up some thoughts about stuff I’ve seen so far; I’ll do another post like this if the notion appeals. Some titles, which I’m hoping to write about at length, I’ve left out. These are capsule reviews and first feelings, but just as often, I’m really talking about what the movies made me think of. I’ve tried not to spoil anything.
Miroirs no. 3 (dir. Christian Petzold)
Fate has lately wanted me to brush up on my German. I went to German school for eight years, and at points, could communicate effectively with my favorite teacher, a tall, rosy-cheeked and high-spirited man by the name of Herr Barkowski, whom I very much wanted to please, because he had an European sort of belly laugh and always looked sweaty. I thought of Herr Barkowski watching Miroirs, as well as when I was going through Pia Frankenberg’s filmography for an assignment for Notebook. I remembered his grammar lessons on the whiteboard and how valiantly he guided us through pronouncing things. Paula Beer’s enunciation is excellent for a foreign and rusty ear; now I’m considering deep-diving into Petzold’s filmography as a way to dust off the spiderwebs. It helps that I like his movies. I certainly like them better than the two movies my school insisted on playing, every single semester, both to get us used to hearing the language and to warn us off the dangers of totalitarianism: The Wave (2008) and Good Bye, Lenin! (2003). I sort of remember Good Bye, Lenin being good –– The Wave is on the nose, but I guess a good way to shock teenagers into attention. The teacher in that movie was always swimming in a cold lake in the morning.
I really liked the ambiance of Miroirs, and I have a feeling that of the Petzolds I’ve seen, it’ll stay with me the most. I love stranger-in-the-house plots, and the movie successfully retains some of Petzold’s metaphysical sensibility while being anchored in the plot. Paula Beer is excellent as always, and Barbara Auer’s gravitas counterbalances her light-footed charm in a satisfying way. I wanted to spend a few days in the family’s country house, riding their bikes and eating their food, even if they’re kind of weird.
The Mastermind (dir. Kelly Reichardt)
I was kind of perplexed by this, so I’ll circle back; for now I’ll admit that I don’t think Alana Haim has it for acting. I never listened to as much Haim as might seem adequate for a person like me (one of three sisters). I was with one of my sisters when we watched Haim’s Coachella set in 2018, which completely blew our minds. Later I found out that the set was directed by PTA, which maybe accounted for the fact that listening to Haim on my headphones at the library in college didn’t feel as cool as watching them that night.
I liked Licorice Pizza okay, and what I liked about it didn’t really have to do with Alana Haim. Seeing her directed by someone other than PTA only confirmed my lukewarm suspicions. She doesn’t have a lot of scenes or even lines in Mastermind, but she’s an important character for the film’s trajectory, and when she is onscreen she can’t quite emerge from under the weight of Josh O’Connor’s effortless charm. At times, it was almost like you could feel her telling herself, okay, now it’s time to get serious and do some Acting. That said, maybe I’m being too harsh and will feel differently on rewatch… I am sort of bitter that my sisters and I don’t have any musical talent.
Magellan (dir. Lav Diaz)
Portuñol spoken rampantly. I had a hard time being fully immersed in the rhythms of Magellan, but that might have been the aforementioned horrendous eight-dollar-cold brew and my hectic, discombobulated morning, which weathered several small disasters before I could make it to WRT at around 9:45 a.m. I could’ve used some more ponderous writing in the ship’s logbook, but between a young bride who is also a ghost and Gael García Bernal’s lunatic eyes, glittering maniacally from his bearded, bear-like face, there was a lot to like.
I just didn’t feel like I learned much about Fernão Magalhães as a person, rather than as a representative for the general maniacal Portuguese explorer. What makes him different from the other lunatics, like Bartomoleu Dias or Vasco da Gama? Or even from Dom Albuquerque, his boss, who falls asleep drunk in the middle of a speech? I liked his characterization as a person who loses his mind more and more as the days at sea become longer and the violence more inescapable –– who wouldn’t? But I wished that I understood more about what drove him out to sea in the first place. When we start Magellan, Fernão is already on his first voyage. I can’t imagine how scary it must’ve been to set across the ocean in the 1500s, with no clear idea of whether or not you’d return and what you’d find. It’s kind of like going to space. The make-up of a psyche that is attracted to that seems fit for prodding, and maybe because the movie is called Magellan, I hoped we would break into that territory. I do like that Diaz bookended the movie with the indigenous communities that had to bear the brunt of this violent hubris, and maybe that’s part of the point: These people were fucking crazy and they ruined so much with their craziness. And for what?!
Rose of Nevada (dir. Mark Jenkin)
As a premise, “ghost ship” is one of those things, like “jaded lawyer” or “crumbling family,” that will always appeal to me. Throw in some cable knit sweaters and some squishing rubber boots and I’m fully onboard. Jenkin’s restraint towards the “coziness” of this premise is what holds the movie back. His pointillistic style, with the metered tight shots and the emphasis on detail, created a compelling atmosphere, but it got in the way of the plot almost as soon as it started to cook. Between the characters and the time-travel and the ghostliness, the film felt like it wanted to be a narrative-driven movie, and it was like Jenkin was tugging on the other side of the rope to insist that it was actually a vibes-forward movie. Sometimes, when we watch a movie that feels uneven, Dave will say that the unevenness comes from the “authorial voice” wanting to beat the story into a particular kind of submission –– I could sense that diagnosis here. Why not write a time-traveling ghost-ship story and let it rock?
Improbably, the movie Rose of Nevada made me think of the most was Challengers. That’s because of what Richard Brody wrote about it. He thought the time-scheme of the film got in the way of its dramatic gravity: “With a rammed-tight dramatic structure, dénouements arise not out of the temperaments and inclinations of characters—they more or less don’t have any—but from a mechanism imposed on the story. There isn’t enough flash, enough excess, enough room for imperfection, for details that don’t fit into the schema… Whereas a chronologically ordered story can, without fear of confusing its audience, find space for sidebars, for meandering, for characters revealing themselves offhandedly in ways that don’t necessarily move the plot ahead.” That argument suggests that the film could’ve transcended had it followed a more “classic,” or even “traditional,” story structure; its loftier aspirations are what hold it back. That’s what I feel like is going on with Rose of Nevada.
What Does That Nature Say to You (dir. Hong Sang-soo)
I always enjoy watching Sang-soo’s people live their lives, but I don’t always feel very close to them. I was tearing up during this whole thing, which made me want to call my dad. I was ready to settle into that warm, fuzzy feeling –– I remembered how, very early on in our relationship, I walked into my parents’ kitchen to find Dave and my dad talking about Philip Roth. I was struck then with the ease reserved for people who know they are making the right decision; they had something to talk about that wasn’t me! –– but the longer Donghwa, the boyfriend, and Oryeong, the dad, spend time together, the more comfortable Donghwa feels to drink, speak informally, and let his real personality come through, a terrible decision when you’re first meeting your girlfriend’s parents for an impromptu day visit. A dinner scene towards the end escalates to the point of turning this otherwise ballad of a picture into a full-on horror movie.
This film seems to progress almost purely on discovery, like Sang-soo was really “listening” to these characters and letting them shape the story’s arc. That’s a mythical aspect of fiction writing that Dave is always talking about and which I, a nonfiction writer, have never experienced first hand. It’s one of those things, though: You know it when you see it.
The Fence (dir. Claire Denis)
Just one day after seeing this, Dave and I saw Matt Dillon at a restaurant in SoHo, which is one of those small coincidences that convinces you that everything in this world is connected, actually, like the mushrooms under the earth. Dillon does a good enough job in The Fence, but the script isn’t giving him a lot to work with. For a story that’s ostensibly about the horrific, infectious power of colonial and postcolonial violence, I was not at all moved by the reality that those things are so horrific because they affect people. The whole movie plays, and feels, like an intellectual exercise. It’s a cold movie even when characters are crying, screaming, dying and shooting each other.
Kontinental ‘25 (dir. Radu Jude)
My first Radu Jude, and I loved his sense of humor. I loved watching Ezster Tompa walk around looking distressed, being funny, and pushing her bangs away from her eyes. The playfulness and heart in the premise of this film –– a bailiff suffers a crisis of conscience –– reminded me of Nicole Holofcener’s Please Give, an under-appreciated entry in her oeuvre, I think. I don’t know why but I feel obligated to mention that this was shot on an iPhone; I have no feeling toward that choice one way or the other. I was really absorbed by the characters.
Maybe the thing that surprised me the most about Kontinental is that I didn’t know Romanian sounded so Latin. I guess I’d never spent two hours listening to people speak in Romanian before, and it sort of astounded me. I found myself in disbelief catching several words that meant the thing I’d think they’d mean. Despite it being a country in Europe, I guess I always thought of Romania as being a place really, really far away, but the familiarity of the language made it feel infinitely closer. It sounds not completely unlike São Paulo-accented Portuguese, which is to say, Italian. It’s ridiculous and embarrassing that I should be so surprised, and fitting that it’s a riff on Rossellini’s Europe ‘51. It’d be sick to see Jude’s take on Stromboli.
The Love that Remains (dir. Hlynur Pálmason)
Another movie that made me miss my family so bad, I was crying at 10 a.m. Gorgeous landscapes, gorgeous sweaters, sweet relationships between siblings, and still a painful movie about falling just short of the person you want to be for the people you love the most. It kind of makes me tear up again just writing that. One time I asked Dave what was one movie trope that will always move him, no matter what. Mine was: Dad who is trying his hardest to be the best he can be but just can’t. Dave’s was: When people are not who they used to be, which made me laugh because it was so sad. Miraculously, The Love that Remains is a mash-up of these two story tropes without being overly sentimental or sappy. It’s restrained and controlled without feeling robotic. And it’s insanely beautiful to look at.
Pillion (dir. Harry Lighton)
This movie, which is about an unlikely sub-dom relationship between a dorky, dutiful only son and a sexy sexy biker who wears a lot of leather, is bonded more tightly than any of its men. The performances were great, and I believed the dynamic between the characters, but within five minutes you knew what was going on here, and it followed that path all the way to the end, no surprises. That said, any number of 19-year-olds are going to be obsessed with this movie, so I’m happy for them.
Okay, that’s it for week one. More thoughts soon, if you wanna! Tell me if you enjoyed this?