Category / New York Film Festival

by Edward Champion

NYFF: Serbis (2008)

[This is the seventh part in an open series of reports from the New York Film Festival.]

I suspect that Brilliante Mendoza’s Serbis will make suckers (although certainly not in the head-bobbing sense we see here) of those looking for an “authentic” depiction of the underworld. Every open-minded “critic” needs a film that suggests a depiction of life that the critic has no experience in, but can vicariously “understand” because he has seen it represented on cinema. Therefore, by way of the “different” perspective, narrative fallacies that wouldn’t be accepted in a more conventional story are somehow protected. Serbis (meaning service, as in “A cheap blowjob, sir?” although this may very well translate into the equally applicable “Would you like fries with that suckoff?”), is fervently dedicated to fellatio, rent boys, ruptured men’s room pipes, and other seemingly sordid imagery. I found it to be a bore and longed for a William T. Vollmann book. The film’s problem is not just that we have nobody to really care about, but that there is simply no contextual investigation into the realities that keep these characters toiling in a porn theater.

“I’m a certified nurse,” says the stern Nayda, “What the hell am I doing here?” I likewise hoped for an answer to that question, particularly since we see later on the wall that Nayda has actually earned a Bachelor of Science. Which would suggest that she’s a bit more than just a certified nurse.

The Pinedas are a dysfunctional family operating the Family Theater, a movie house (the last of three apparently; the other two have closed down) dedicated to such offerings as Seedling and Frolic in the Water. Every week, there’s a new set of reels delivered with a new movie. But the man delivering the goods doesn’t offer any small talk. He simply says, “See you next week.” The Family matriarch, Nanay, is busy in court, suing her husband for bigamy and the folks who work this movie house, adorned with posters and paintings of half-dressed women, await text messages on the verdict. A smart kid named Jonas (who is also bespectacled, living up to the nerdy cliche) runs around, playing Minesweeper on his computer and dazzling various family members with his apparent math wizardry. You’d think the kid’s math skills would come in handy for counting change, but one episode demonstrates that the Pinedas are easily duped. Then there’s Alan, who has a boil the size of a nipple on his ass. Subtlety, as we can see, is not a strong suit for screenwriter Armando Lao and Mendoza.

This is all shot in a Dogme 95 style, with the sounds of the street blaring over key pieces of dialogue and what little emotion we’re permitted to espy, along with shaky handheld camera work that now seems something of a visual relic here in the 21st century.

But any movie featuring a slightly surreal moment with a goat running around a theater’s filthy floors and nuns falling down in the street can’t be all bad, can it? I latched onto these two images because I found myself desperate for some larger framework, some visceral inroads that would help me to parse the poverty beyond the film’s simplistic dichotomy (sex workers and family members) occupying the same premises. I was struck by one moment in which a mother holding a small child asks Nayda if her son, who is sixteen, might be inside. Nayda insists that the theater doesn’t let minors in and brushes her away. But it is quite evident that underage sex workers are getting some pocket money on the inside. Nobody cares to observe.

Lao and Mendoza, however, don’t offer us any complex motivations that might make us more fascinated by this tragedy. There’s one interesting moment in which a prostitute is teaching another aspiring streetwalker how to walk down stairs to attract johns. And the handover of this very basic body language is somewhat stunning to take in, particularly as other sex workers surround these two figures without a trace of empathy. It’s just a simple business transaction.

I paid attention to the porn music just to stay remotely interested, and discovered that one piece playing over pumping bodies bore a striking resemblance to Taxi Driver. I wonder if Bernard Hermann’s estate received a check. Probably not.

But like most failed artistic efforts to find the real, this film presented more disinterest than interest. The problem boils down, so to speak, to one simple maxim: If there isn’t a narrative, atmosphere ain’t enough, no matter how noble the intentions.

by Edward Champion

NYFF: Shuga (2007)

[This is the sixth part in an open series of reports from the New York Film Festival.]

Film adaptations of the Russian literary greats have, for the most part, been disastrous. One counts Martha Fiennes’s wretched 1999 attempt to transform Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and King Vidor’s bland 1959 version of Tolstoy’s War and Peace as two primary offenders. (For my money, the campy Dostoevsky transmutation, Crime and Punishment in Suburbia, with its superficial teen angst and a chunky Michael Ironside cast slightly against type was, for all of its considerable flaws, far more engaging than these two turkeys. And that’s saying something.) And when one confines this relationship to the problematic Anna Karenina, discounting the protracted television adaptations (some not bad, but one 1985 version preposterously casting Christopher Reeve as Count Vronsky), it should be observed that not even the talented and literary-minded Bernard Rose could make a worthwhile Karenina in 1997. Perhaps Anna Karenina is, like Don Quixote, not really intended to be adapted. And while the fates have tilted against those tilting at windmills (including Orson Welles and Terry Gilliam), they have kept a more laissez-faire with regard to this Tolstoy masterpiece.

Filmmaker Darezhan Omirbaev, however, has no such qualms attempting to beat the rap with Shuga. With the deck firmly stacked against him, he tries to tackle Tolstoy in a mere 90 minutes, which is the creative equivalent of the All-England Summarize Proust Competition. He chops whole sections of exposition, but in the process he also chops much-needed moments for character development. As a result, Alexei Karenin appears here as a laconic and gloomy man who smoothly picks up his cell phone at the coat check and casually orders thugs to beat up Vronsky (the violent suffering here in lieu of the steeplechase). This simplistic character might have worked if Omirbaev was working the yakuza genre. But for a film with such narrative heft to live up to, one is left here with superficial strands. The country that Shuga and Vronsky leave here is actually Paris. And while there’s an interesting undercurrent involving how cameras capture reality (Kostya here is a budding photographer and, at one point, the happy adulterous couple pass by a film crew shooting a scene in which a man sings his heart out into an apartment building’s buzzer) and children of all ages are often parked in front of televisions and GameBoy Advances, none of these thematic possibilities can atone for the film’s considerable blandness, perhaps best summarized by Omirbaev’s endless concern for birch wall paneling and a bland visual palette suggesting a close attention to the flooring section of the Home Depot catalog. “Fate will always win out,” says a philosophical pal of Kostya’s. But fate was much better captured in Tolstoy.

It also doesn’t help that Alnur Turgambayeva’s Shuga — the Kazakh Karenina — is about as interesting as a dessicated cucumber thrown into a tasteless salad. The smooth-cheeked Turgambayeva comes to us not with that allure and complexity that would make a man leave his betrothed, but with a bag of tricks that includes one ineptly commanding glare and an ability to turn her head while wearing colorful sweaters (for those curious, these sweaters come in purple and orange). Now this talent might get you somewhere if you need to grab someone’s attention at a cocktail party, but if you’re a canonized romantic figure that a film needs to hang its weight on, you probably should step aside and let someone else handle the job. Aidos Sagatov is not much better as Vronsky. He wears an isthumus-like soul patch to impart some nobility. And Omirbaev’s idea of wealth is talking on a fax machine from 1987. (For all I know, fax machines from 1987 may very well be cutting-edge in Kazakhstan. But if this is the case, what of the GameBoy Advance?) One naturally expects this douchebag to attempt suicide, as he does in Tolstoy’s book, but the closest he comes to self-oblivion is watching a video made by “friends” of the three thugs who beat the tar out of him.

There is one section right before Chuga’s inevitable trip to the train station where Omirbaev has the principal characters involved with Chuga closing a door and staring at the camera. And while again, there’s something here to be said about Omirbaev’s concern for how the camera sees, without that pivotal human behavior that Tolstoy wrote about so well, even a heavy-handed theme along these lines is useless.

I was far from the only one who grumbled about this movie. Most people after the screening were not happy at all, although I did encounter one friendly gentleman in the industry who was blown away by it. (As it turned out, our cinematic tastes were diametrically opposed.) When I pressed him on why he had enjoyed this film, his affinity was predicated largely on the film’s technical qualities and the motifs that I have outlined above.

And while I can appreciate technical qualities as much as the next film geek, I nevertheless demand emotion and engagement from a film of this type. And I think it’s safe to say that Omirbaev’s film did not cut the mustard with me. Omirbaev’s camera may be interested in walls, doors, and a blue sky painted on a ceiling dome in an opera house. But these are not the places that a camera should drift when dealing with the tortured hypocrisies of the human spirit.

by Edward Champion

NYFF: In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni (1978)

[This is the fifth part in an open series of reports from the New York Film Festival.]

Several people who are much smarter than I am have written plenty of words about Guy Debord’s 1978 film, In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni, a title which I must confess is rather difficult for me to type without looking at another browser window (currently open, right next to a minimized Explorer window urging me to search through “My Computer” and presumably my soul) and ensuring that I am not making a spelling mistake. (Yes, I could cut and paste the title, like your typical hack journalist would. And I suspect, given the thin crowd I observed, very few will actually write about it, claiming the film to be too difficult or too sophisticated. But I wish to respond to the more troubling typing gaffe at hand. Speaking only for myself, I retain some small hope that I might actually type in this Latin palindrome correctly with repeated effort. Incidentally, in case you might be wondering, this phrase stands for “We Turn in the Night, Consumed by Fire.”) And several people who are much smarter than I am will indeed be discussing this film on Friday, October 3. But I don’t believe Debord, the man best known for his Situationist activities (and if we mere consumer slaves take this film at face value, Debord was one of the finest egotists that mid-20th century French philosophy had to offer) would have approved of this staged commentary. The film, after all, ends with the subtitle: TO BE GONE THROUGH AGAIN FROM THE BEGINNING. Which I think is a pretty clear instruction. So would it not have made more sense for the good people at the Lincoln Center to simply play the film twice for the benefit of any party who may not have parsed Debord’s words correctly the first time around, rather than to have talking heads attempt to explain the film for the audience? The assembled parties, last I heard, had no intention of excusing themselves.

And I certainly don’t believe that Debord would have approved of some balding blogger, who is, at present, clutching a copy of the film’s script that was kindly handed out by the good people at the Lincoln Center and is now again getting lost in Debord’s considerable thoughts, their relationship to the images, and is wondering why very few people make films quite like this anymore and what possible “take” I might offer.

For that matter, I don’t think that any reader (and especially French philosophers) would approve of these last two paragraphs, which are mired in needless clauses and parenthetical asides, and don’t really get anywhere close to conveying my rather amazing cinematic experience on Saturday morning, in which I was barely awake, peering around desperately for a caffeine drip, greeted in the dark by a dry and bitter French voice unloading a steady stream of anti-consumerist language, followed by personal adventures in the Left Bank that were truly not that different from the usual n+1 ravings (i.e., douchebag entitlement), but becoming, nevertheless, quite fascinated by the images of pilfered trailers from mediocre films, endless tracking shots across water, and assorted stills of overhead shots of Paris, various grids, and crummy-looking buildings.

This was indeed Paris, ten years after the riots and the failed experiment. And Debord, in 1978, did not like it one bit:

It was in Paris, a city that was then so beautiful that many people preferred to be poor there rather than rich anywhere else.

Who, now that nothing of it remains, will be able to understand this, apart from those who remember its glory? Who else could know the pleasures and exhaustions we experienced in these neighborhoods where everything has now become so abysmal?

Now the degree to which you can accept the veracity of this statement will probably inform the degree to which you enjoy Debord’s film. This is a man, knowing very well that he has enslaved his audience for 100 minutes, who proceeds to kvetch even grander than Jean-Paul Sartre. He often removes the images entirely, giving us either all-black and all-white for several minutes, so that the audience will be reminded of who is in command. (The film was made in an epoch before the remote control offered us the mute button.) He prides himself in his voiceover for being an intolerable gadfly. He regrets nothing, saying to us, “I remain completely incapable of imagining how I could have done anything any differently.” He suggests that he and his fellow gadflies are somehow superior because they did not apply for grants and did not go on television. Those who have not begun to live in some individual (and presumably Debord-like) fashion “are waiting for nothing less than a permanent paradise,” which might be identified as a job promotion or a total revolution. But Debord’s purpose was actually quite simple: “For our aim had been none other than to provoke a practical and public division between those who still want the existing world and those who will decide to reject it.”

I’m making Debord come across like an insufferable asshole. And while this may be somewhat true, the salient point I took away from this film was that there is now nobody like Debord who is telling the truth like this — even if Debord himself only half-believed it. It seems that something terrible has been lost in the last twenty years. A dessication of identity. A capitulation. I am not aware of anybody using the great possibilities provided to us by YouTube making a film like this who doesn’t care about the audience and who doesn’t care about how their offerings are perceived. It’s all about giving into the slim possibilities of fifteen minutes of fame, rather than living a lifetime of unapologetic infamy.

So Debord’s film comes at us forty years later reminding us that there was an altogether different type of provocateur who held various mediums hostage and used this to extort an audience into challenging their assumptions. Tout à fait brillant! If anyone will now listen to the man, his words are perhaps more important than any of us anticipated.

by Edward Champion

NYFF: Tokyo Sonata (2008)

[This is the fourth part in an open series of reports from the New York Film Festival. For related material, you can read my interview with screenwriter Max Mannix or listen to a podcast interview with director Kiyoshi Kurosawa.]

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata sees the Japanese horror director shifting gears to a more internal terror: the tendency of passive-aggressive men to prevaricate, pretend, and otherwise put on an act as they lose their jobs, watch their sons shipped off to Iraq, and capitulate to a wretched consumerism that promises to be their future job security. Kurosawa’s conceit (cooked up in collaboration with Australian writer Max Mannix) is that nearly every individual is as disposable as the newspaper blown into a home that we see in the film’s opening shot.

Numata Sasaki (Teruyuki Kagawa) is an administrator who is downsized. He does not tell his wife. As far as he’s concerned, if he just hands over the money every month and spend the working hours out of the house, she’ll never know. As he attempts to find work, he cannot tell anyone what his job skills are and, in one terrible scene, he mumbles something about being a good karaoke singer and is humiliated before a middle-manager half his age, asked to use a pen as a microphone. He meets up with a high school buddy, another out of work man who is likewise all dressed up with no place to go who is now reduced to wandering around with a cell phone that automatically goes off five times every hour, pretending that he’s about to close a deal or attend a meeting. “I do it to calm my nerves,” he says.

What makes Tokyo Sonata‘s first deadpan hour, in particular, work so well is how Kurosawa depicts this madness like a grand Ozu parody. He regularly crosses the 180 line with his cutting, adopting Ozu’s 360 degree rule. He even has a subway line running right behind the Sasaki home, evoking Ozu’s trains, as if to suggest that this is the kind of warped film Ozu would make if he had had the misfortune to be born four decades later.

Kurosawa frequently has his side characters hiding their private moments, such as a piano teacher who takes a call concerning her divorce, but who hides halfway behind a wall. We don’t see the phone, even though we clearly hear her terrible reality. Kurosawa also takes great advantage of the organization men walking in precise lines to their jobs, their trains, and their lives as a whole. This is a world in which a teacher can be easily accused of reading porn manga by a kid and the teacher won’t be fazed by the accusation. “I’m an adult,” says the teacher of the accusation, “so it hardly bothers me.” But this “responsible” adult is quick to accuse the kid of owning a graphic novel that he had the misfortune of passing in class. In the end, the inauthentic nature of these charges puts an end to his authority.

Numata’s younger son wishes to pursue piano. But with his father putting his authoritative foot down, the son is forced to steal his monthly lunch allotment and dig through the trash for a keyboard he can approximate his finger dancing on. Never mind that he might very well be a musical prodigy.

Numata’s older son, just about an adult, spends his time handing out flyers. But he’s eager to do something meaningful. And with the United States looking for fresh military recruits, there’s always the armed forces to fall back on. As to Numata’s wife, despite possessing a few more smarts than the men in her family, her role is merely a homemaker who has obtained a driver’s license.

These existential dilemmas unfold at a snail’s pace. But the slowness permits one to get the lay of the land, to see this terrible terrain common to all developed nations with a fresh eye. Unfortunately, Kurosawa and Mannix don’t quite trust this premise and a jarring moment of violence kickstarts an array of dei ex machinis, threatening to completely undo the film. But this unwise drift into needless coincidences and Godard-like shenanigans that don’t really suit Kurosawa’s talents so well is redeemed by a moment near the end in which people are forced to stare deep into the heart of beauty. Kurosawa’s terrible conclusion is that one routine simply replaces another. Reality has become a terrain in which shell-shocked awe has overcome effusiveness. Even when some turn to crime, it is only because they aren’t capable of doing anything else, and, even here, the efforts are bungled badly.

So Kurosawa’s sonata, lacking the vocals of a proper cantata, dares to show us our own voiceless world. Without our identities, we’re reduced to pretending that things will work out, bandying about in service sector jobs, and ignoring the heartfelt passions that can be readily observed in others. This film is a damning indictment of humanity’s position in the present age, and it didn’t sit too well with some of the pretentious types I heard bitching and moaning in the back of the screening room about how slow the film was. In an age in which we’re become accustomed to easily digestible (and easily forgettable) entertainments and MTV cutting, Tokyo Sonata is a film which demands us to slow down and look at what we’ve become. It doesn’t present any solutions. But then answering the question of how we get out of this mess is not the filmmaker’s job. It’s the work of those who speak up and dare to live.

by Edward Champion

NYFF: A Christmas Tale (2008)

[This is the third part in an open series of reports from the New York Film Festival.]

Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale, despite its wintry title, is more A Midsummer Night’s Dream than Shakespeare’s Sicilian family saga, and the propinquitous tipoff here involves the 1935 film adaptation with Olivia de Havilland playing on a television set. However, at one point, a character informs family patriarch and dye manufacturer Abel Vuillard (played by the gravely-voiced Jean-Paul Rossilon) that his cologne makes him smell like Italy. The film is set largely over the course of four days, as fractious family members gather for the Christmas holiday. Desplechin’s film then is something of a cross between Home for the Holidays and Gosford Park, but without the former’s more pronounced domestic nightmares and the latter’s chessboard approach to unexpected connections between people. This is more of a light drawing room comedy, but avoids Noel Coward’s witticisms and, thankfully, manners. One keenly follows these many characters over the course of two and a half hours and feels, at times, as trapped as the family, contending with Desplechin’s dissolve-happy transitions and some wildly melodramatic backstory.

To wit: Catherine Deneuve plays the matriarch, Junon Vuillard. But unlike the Sean O’Casey play, this Junon does not work. Her drama involves a genetic condition that will lead to an early death. And a question is posed over which family member has the compatible bone marrow that will offer her a few extra years of life. (At one point, the family gathers around a blackboard, ferociously scribbling the mathematical odds with transplant or without.) Will it be the hard-drinking and prodigal son Henri, fond of getting into fistfights with in-laws and climbing outside windows jut for the hell of it? Or will it be grandson Paul, a mentally troubled teenager who sees random images of black dogs?

I’m making this film sound wilder than it is. If anything, the film could have used more hallucinations and more eccentric characters to round out this family. The manic-eyed Matthieu Amalric, who plays Henri, nearly steals the film. And because of Henri, the surrounding characters, such as a quietly tortured painter named Simon, never really get a chance to breathe. One suspects that Desplechin doesn’t entirely trust the natural impulses of his characters. Aside from the aforementioned dissolves, he regularly has the camera iris closing in on characters, much like the old silent films, and inserts homages to Vertigo and Pulp Fiction. While I realize that the French are more adept in depicting adulterous affairs than Americans, one such “midsummer” crush near the end of the film is emotionally unsatisfying, particularly since it involves an intriguing backstory of three men arguing over the woman.

I liked spending time with the Vuillards and sometimes felt as relaxed as the house guests. The house is a great depository of paintings, books, and records. The Vuillards are very tolerant with the family’s eccentric behavior, which involves daughter Elizabeth constantly sulking about the house and son Henri knocking on the door in the middle of the night, appearing with a Jewish woman who has no desire to partake in the Christian festivities. It should be observed that years before this Christmas, Elizabeth, in fact, brokered a deal in court to bail out the debt-ridden Henri. The terms involved Henri being banished from the family. But if Christmas is the seasonal panacea that brings the family together, the larger question of Henri’s long absence isn’t pursued nearly as rigorously as one might expect.

I was also unnerved by Melvil Poupaud’s close resemblance to Colin Farrell. This is certainly not Poupaud’s fault. He was no doubt born looking this way. But like Farrell, Poupaud’s character has forgotten to shave, and I kept expecting an eleventh hour sex tape to show up. It doesn’t help that Desplechin reminds us of this physical similarity by having Poupaud stand next to a film poster with Farrell’s name on it.

Desplechin, incidentally, is capable of wry subtext, such as the vulgar play-within-a-play on Christmas Eve, itself suggesting Midsummer‘s staging of Pyramus and Thisbe. The difference here is that Desplechin’s play-within-the-play has profane words shouted by young children. I can also report that, in France, The Ten Commandments plays on the television during Christmas. And it’s interesting that the French herald the birth of Christ with this televised opus while America contends with Charlton Heston’s fake beard and booming voice upon celebrating Christ’s resurrection. I was not aware of this.

But despite the unslain Abel playing Cecil Taylor and Charles Mingus, A Christmas Tale is neither particularly jazzy nor especially groundbreaking. This is somewhat surprising because Desplechin does have a few interesting ideas. When one character reads a letter, we see the man who wrote the letter reading the words against a blue backdrop. (Later in the film, when another letter is received, the light around that letter fades to black, suggesting Time stopped. But nobody ages sixteen years.) A Christmas Tale is the French cinematic equivalent of a cozy, okay in its own right, but there isn’t really a mystery and there certainly isn’t an able sleuth to delve into the modest behavioral conundrums kept ever so slightly at bay.