Our reviewer did his best. But even with an abundance of movies to choose from, this year’s offerings weren’t quite as good as he’d hoped for
By George Blecher
Violent and occasionally breathtaking: Albert Serra’s bullfight documentary Afternoons of Solitude is a stripped-down metaphor for life and death.. . . . . . . . . . . . .
October 31, 2024
Maybe I didn’t choose well this time. Or maybe the films were disappointing. But something didn’t work for me at the 62nd New York Film Festival.
Perhaps because there was more of everything—films, countries represented, attendance—the festival was a bit overwhelming. I tried to read between the lines to find quirky, intelligent, original films. A few directors like Jacques Audiard are dependably terrific, but their films would be on Netflix or in theaters minutes after the festival closed. Did I really want to see another film by Pedro Almodovar or Paul Schrader?
Except for the first and last films on my list—the first a complete sleeper, the last a breakthrough film from a director who’s deserved success for years—my picks had a slight undercurrent of lethargy about them, as if the directors/writers hadn’t quite dug deeply enough into the material to find a personal vision.
If the subject of Albert Serra’s documentary, Afternoons of Solitude—bullfighting—repels you, pass this one by. But if you’re curious, open to seeing what a smart director might find in such a violent, primitive, occasionally breathtaking ritual, this film is more than worth seeing; in some ways, it is a lesson in how to make art.
I’d seen only one film by the 49-year-old Spanish director—The Death of Louis XIV (2016), starring Jean-Pierre Léaud, the actor synonymous with the early films of François Truffaut. It is a remarkable if eccentric film, slow-moving and almost excruciatingly focused on its central character. From the moment when the king has a stroke in his garden to his dying in a canopied bed, the camera virtually never leaves Léaud.
Afternoons of Solitude is curiously similar. Here, Serra focuses almost exclusively on the battle between matador and bull. The film opens with a single frame closeup of a bull in a dark field, and for the duration of the film Serra devotes much more footage to the dying bulls than to the matador, Andrés Roca Rey, whom he follows to a series of corridas in Spain and South America. Rather than making value judgments, Serra focuses on the process itself, the phenomenon. The bulls in their dying resemble the king on his deathbed: solitary, dignified, helpless, monumental.
In the Q&A, Serra, known for his bravado, maintained that if he isn’t the world’s greatest director, he is the world’s greatest editor. He isn’t far from wrong. In dispensing with most of the sociology and even the pageant of bullfighting, Serra’s editing feels like pure vision, pure seeing. Several bulls die, but in the course of the season Roca Rey is also gored three times. Serra makes no comparisons; wounds—death—are simply part of the ritual. In these violent but detached times, the primitiveness of the bullfighting ritual, with its gaudy costumes and weapons that go back to at least Minoan times, seems more revealing and honest about human nature than contemporary warfare. Either opponent can die. The bull is stronger, the human more intelligent.
Though Roca Rey’s assistants constantly pump him up, he is genuinely humble: “I was lucky,” he mutters to himself. “How is it possible that I wasn’t killed?”
Over two hours long, Afternoons of Solitude captures the repetitiveness of the corrida and even its boredom. This is a ritual that is mostly banal and cruel, but occasionally—when bull and matador find a rhythm and enter into a shared ballet—the banality gives way to something else: a stripped-down metaphor for what it is like to live and die.
I wanted to see the 4K restoration of Northern Lights (1978), an indie film by John Hanson and Rob Nilsson, mainly for nostalgia’s sake. Made with practically no money over a number of years, it was awarded a First Director’s Prize at Cannes in 1979. I knew a couple of the actors back in the day, and was interested in getting a feel of the spirit of the times, when the indie movement still had steam in it, and director/writers wanted to make films with a social conscience.
It’s not that Northern Lights is dated. On the contrary. The story of a young Scandinavian-American in 1910s North Dakota trying to form a Farmers’ League to combat the grain cartels and bank foreclosures, the film has an appealingly handcrafted quality that makes it vivid and fresh. There are stunning black/white scenes of stormy, windswept plains, ancient threshers, craggy-faced farmers (many of the actors were recruited from the region where the film was shot) kidding each other in a North Dakota mishmash of Swedish and Norwegian.
It’s just that things have changed so much since Northern Lights was made! The film has an earnestness, faith, and hope in the possibility that democratic change is possible when people come together in a common cause. (In the Q&A, the directors noted that even though North Dakota is now one of the reddest states in the Union, the co-operative institutions that the Farmers’ League established are still thriving.) Since this film was made, we’ve become so much more cynical; the gentle humor of farmers talking over a pot-bellied stove has been replaced by the in-your-face satire of Saturday Night Live.
Seeing Northern Lights today evokes all sorts of longing for a less bitterly divided America. It’s lovely that Kino Lorber has restored and is committed to redistributing the film; maybe its sincerity can influence at least a few young people today.
Whimsical and disjointed: Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language follows Iranians transplanted to the Canadian city of Winnipeg, with its “bulky, brutalist buildings.”. . . . . . . . . . . . .
Universal Language is the kind of movie that film nerds like me encounter in film festivals, chuckle our way through, and quickly forget. There seems to be a stage of development in film auteurs where homages to their mentors substitute for original material, and cleverness substitutes for depth; but when they find out what they really want to make films about, these early efforts can seem sophomoric.
Matthew Rankin is a filmmaker from Winnipeg, a Western Canadian capital filled with bulky, Brutalist buildings that Rankin shoots his actors walking past far too many times. The conceit of the film is that as a lover of Iranian cinema (and apparently of Iranian heritage himself), Rankin transforms Winnipeg into a Farsi community, and kind of superimposes the sweetness and irony of Iranian filmmakers like Jafar Panahi and Mehran Modiri onto this plain, snowy place. The whimsical, disjointed story concerns the filmmaker coming home to see his aging mother, who has forgotten him and been adopted into an Iranian immigrant family. Probably the funniest sequence in the film is a five-minute bit at the beginning, featuring a volatile school teacher punishing his students by stuffing them all into a closet—but that scene has little to do with the rest of the film. Rankin creates ads of Iranians in cowboy hats hawking turkeys on Canadian TV, and indeed turkeys strut through several sequences. In a way—perhaps because of the cowboy hats—Universal Language reminded me of an early film by the Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki, Leningrad Cowboys Go America (1989), which mixed genres in a terse, wry way that after a while felt clunky.
Maybe it’s a question of age. For a younger, film-obsessed audience, it might be fun to parse the in-jokes and sort out the references and homages in Universal Language. For me, not so much.
Jia Zhangke is one of the heavy hitters in international films. His films have won prizes in Cannes, Berlin, and Venice. Still Life, from 2006, is a masterpiece. Set against the demolition of the city of Fengjie by the Three Gorges Dam, it looks not only at how families and communities are destroyed by state development projects, but also at how personal relationships fall apart, solidarity breaks down, and community members lose a sense of commitment to one another. It is also one of the first films to feature Zhao Tao, whose luminous face has the quality of Cycladic art; her features seem almost to be sketched in rather than articulated. (Zhao has appeared in all of Jia’s subsequent films, and is always riveting.) In A Touch of Sin (2013) and Ashes Are the Purest White (2018), Jia found a way to use the American gangster genre to show how China’s turn to capitalism alienates its population as much as Chinese communism has done.
But Jia’s Caught by the Tides is disappointing. The director went through his old films—whole scenes have been lifted from his early works—and recycled them into a fragile story based on characters played by Zhao Tao and a recurrent male character. This film is less about plot than aging—both characters (and actors) age visibly, and, more important, China transitions from a poor but more “communal” country (reflected in a lovely scene of women singing together around a wood-burning stove) to a prosperous, tech-obsessed nation where robots glide through supermarkets asking customers if they can be of service. Whereas in Jia’s earlier films his affection for the messy intensity of contemporary China was equaled by his anger at the changes that communism and capitalism brought about, Caught by the Tides is slow, melancholic, and ultimately a little boring. There are some vivid scenes, especially at the very end, where the middle-aged Zhao character leaves her hobbling old lover and runs off against the background of Beijing’s Forbidden City with a horde of midnight joggers. With its sparkling produce, its high-tech cheerfulness—and its sterile lack of feeling—Chinese capitalism seems even more insidious than the communism that Mao created.
Noisy but unconvincing: Steve McQueen’s Blitz comes with a storyline that’s laden with clichés.. . . . . . . . . . . . .
I’m not sure what I was expecting from Blitz. Director/writer Steve McQueen is a Hollywood pro-level filmmaker with an intense social awareness, and at times something more—the promise of an individual point of view.
The scenography, costumes, and technology of Blitz are impeccable. Saoirse Ronan is plucky and beautiful, and the young man playing her 11-year-old son (Elliott Heffernan) is energetic and cute. The blitz scenes are terrifyingly noisy. But apart from the racial overlay (a white mother and a mixed-race child), this story has been told a thousand times, starting with Tom Sawyer and maybe much earlier. A boy shipped away for his own protection from the London blitz jumps off the train, has hair-raising and near-death adventures, and finally finds his way back to his loving mother. About two-thirds of the way through the film, it takes a Dickensian turn when the boy is recruited by a den of thieves out of Oliver Twist. McQueen takes us into the frenetic elegance of a London nightclub with a Black jazz orchestra playing to well-heeled Whites. An ominous silence falls, we see a German plane overhead—and the scene immediately cuts to the gang of thieves looting the now-decimated club, stealing jewelry from corpses and toasting each other with leftover champagne.
It’s a gripping moment—deeper, scarier, more authentic than anything else in the film.
But then we’re back in Hollywood-land. The boy escapes the gang and rescues a crowd of people trapped in a flooded Underground station, only to arrive home hours after his grandfather is killed in last night’s blitz.
Blitz got me to thinking about the myth Hollywood created, with its gorgeous scenography, paper-thin characters, happy (or semi-happy) endings. The ancient Greeks watched much bloodier plays over and over, with resolutions much darker than our pop culture’s. Would it ever be possible to change the paradigm and make narratives in which resolutions are only provisional, and all that the audience comes out of the theater with is uncertainty?
Questing: Grand Tour, a dreamy and bewildering story, follows a young man fleeing his fiancée across the British Empire. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Grand Tour, by the Portuguese director Miguel Gomes, who was awarded this year’s Best Director’s Prize at Cannes, was another shot in the dark.
A dreamy, mostly black and white fable supposedly taking place in 1918, Grand Tour doesn’t worry much about anachronisms; scenes are littered with cell phones, motorcycles, glimpses of skyscrapers. The story revolves around a young Englishman in Manila who bolts when his fiancée telegrams that she’s coming to join him, and he hightails it to Rangoon, Bangkok, Saigon, Shanghai, and then “upriver” to unknown destinations. The fiancée, a passionate soul, follows him with burning Western energy, but gradually slows down and succumbs to the languor of the East.
This is an easy-going, perhaps lazy film that captures some of the non-competitive softness of Southeast Asia. After a while, however, easygoing merged for me into somnolence, and the film seemed like an excuse for director and crew to go to cool places.
At the end of Grand Tour, the fiancée dies before finding her true love, who might have already been killed by a band of robbers. But even this painfully melancholic ending is softened by a closing shot where the camera pulls back and reveals the lighting technicians turning off their equipment and the “dying” actress picking herself up to leave the set. Big deal. Of course we know we’re watching a film. But we want to be bewitched into forgetting that fact, at least for a moment. Is that too much to ask?
Slavic antics in Brighton Beach: Love, misunderstanding, and “slightly sentimental pessimism” are central to Sean Baker’s Anora, featuring Mikey Madison, as a Russian-American exotic dancer, and Mark Eydelshteyn, to her left, playing an oligarch’s spoiled son.. . . . . . . . . . . . .
I couldn’t get tickets for Sean Baker’s Anora, but luckily the festival management scheduled ten extra showings after the festival closed. I’ve loved every one of Baker’s seven previous films. This year Cannes loved him too, giving Anora the Palme d’Or. As of the rave review in October 17th The New York Times, he’s about to be loved by a good portion of the American public, as well. He deserves it.
Baker is a New Jersey boy. After studying filmmaking at New York University and The New School, he managed to find financing for his films outside of the studio system. His work has gotten better and better, especially in his last two films (The Florida Project and Red Rocket), which were co-written by his NYU colleague Chris Bergoch. Characters have become more complex, and the structure of the films more intriguing; both Project and Rocket develop slowly, with pieces of dialogue or short incidents that occur early in the film turning out to have special significance later.
Bergoch’s name is missing from the credits of Anora, which may account for the fact that this film has a simpler, more direct, less literary feeling. The story of a young Russian-American “exotic dancer” who hooks up with the spoiled son of a Russian oligarch, the film reminded me of American films of the early 1940s, like Casablanca or Sullivan’s Travels, not so much for the story line, but for the mixture of drama and comedy, larger-than-life characters, and its slightly sentimental pessimism—that in difficult times true love isn’t quite possible, and yet you muddle through.
From the very first frame, Baker throws us right into the chaos of a strip show in Brighton Beach’s Russian neighborhood. Ani (Mikey Madison in an absolutely committed performance) and the spoiled oligarch-to-be (played with maniacal intensity by Mark Eydelshteyn) meet in a club and party till they drop. But something a little more serious may be happening under the surface. When he proposes and she accepts, both on a whim, you sense that consciously or not, they have placed a quiet bet on something deeper and much scarier than sex and drugs. It’s a tiny bit obvious—again in the spirit of 1940s movies—but touching. When his parents get wind of the marriage and send a trio of heavies to break it up, the film switches into high-gear burlesque. The heavies fall on their faces, Ani fights them off with Wonder Woman aplomb, and it isn’t clear whether to take the film seriously or see it as a kind of Keystone Cops satire. I couldn’t quite believe either their goofiness or Ani’s fierce stoicism.
But the film grew on me. Baker loves and respects his characters. What he especially loves are their limitations, their unsuccessful struggles to say or even know what they feel. After a while, both Ani and her antagonists are so exhausted that they can hardly talk, and we realize they have more in common than not: all are victims of a society in which rich people—whether a coke-sniffing brat or his steely parents—manipulate other people’s lives. The last scene is devastating. Ani is about to be dropped off at home by Igor, a tenderhearted thug (Yura Borisov) who has fallen in love with her. They have no words for whatever it is that they’re feeling. He reverts to silence, she to desultory lap-dancing. But nothing works. They are as far apart as ever. Finally, she breaks down and sobs in his arms.
Other festival films that I missed but heard good things about: Emilia Pérez (Jacques Audiard’s musical about a transgender gangster!), Maria (about Maria Callas, with Angelina Jolie doing a more-than-passable recreation of the opera star), The Secret of the Sacred Fig (a high-intensity Iranian drama in which politics and family clash), and Dahomey (incorporating drama and fantasy, a complex documentary about returning art objects from Europe to Benin).
Very possibly the world’s first transgender gangster musical: Zoe Saldana, left, engages in a confab with Karla Sofia Gascón in Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez.. . . . . . . . . . . . .
George Blecher writes for The New York Times and for a number of European publications about American politics and culture.
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