Tabla de contenidos para May - June 2017 en Film Comment

I watched your film Lumière! at the Toronto Film Festival with your live commentary—a truly eye-opening showcase of the Lumières’ filmmaking. The innovations reminded me of what Stanley Donen told me once, that his ingenuity in musicals was because “the snow was fresh.” Sometimes we cry about our lost love of cinema, but I’ve been taking care of the Lumière films for the last 25 to 30 years, and I feel something new now, which makes me very optimistic. Because of our digital civilization, because of what cinema became, these films are more and more important. It’s not only curiosity about the origin of cinema, blah blah blah... There is some connection between the past and what cinema should continue to be—that simplicity. Do you have these movies in the back of…

It’s quite possible that you heard a snatch of “falling” in your head when you read the words “Twin Peaks”: the spare, four-note, Duane Eddy–influenced bass hook followed by a response from a Rhodes piano, over and over, their backand- forth in time lost beneath an ascending swell of swirling synthesized strings. It’s a sound that, once heard, isn’t forgotten. That sound will likely return once more this May, when Mark Frost and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks saga resumes a quarter-century after it was last heard in the spin-off film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. Predating the “quality television” PR revolution by about a decade, Twin Peaks has remained in the public consciousness after the so-called Golden Age has come and gone, with a persistence that defies generational boundaries.…

Alien invasions have long been a staple of sci-fi cinema, but alien home invasions remain territory less explored. And whereas the rare instances like E.T. and Jeff Bridges’s Starman tend to be visitors of the friendly variety, the couple that comes knocking at the door of married journalists Julie and Andrew (Mickey Sumner and Ruben Crow) in Jamie Patterson’s intriguing, bare-bones thriller Caught immediately put them— and the viewer—at terrible unease. Impeccably groomed and dressed in light-colored suits, they communicate oddly; there’s a disconnect, as if they couldn’t possibly be human, or at least not from planet Earth. And as the roles are reversed—the journalists become the interview subjects as they are questioned about their current research—it begins to seem like they may have stumbled upon something sinister. The initial…

Watching De Niro act opposite such veterans of the studio system days as Robert Mitchum and Dana Andrews, it’s apparent that he has a great deal in common with the laconic screen acting—or reacting—of the pre-Method years. Robert de niro is a watcher. he has often played men who are alone, outsiders, the world held at a distance from them. This distance may result from the world’s sense of their power, or from these men’s sense of their own pariah status, but in either case they are assigned the position of observer, even voyeur—think of his omnipotent Ace Rothstein, alert to every detail of what happens on the floor (and in the kitchen) of the Tangiers in Casino (1995); his quick-study student-of-the-streets Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II (1974);…

throughout rainer werner fassbinder’s colossal career, which shifted be tween thea te r, TV, and cinema with greater ease than that of any other postwar European filmmaker, public television in the German post-studio era proved to be a fecund medium , y ieldi ng some of his most r igorous work. In 1972 West Germany, his miniseries Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day was broadcast to nearly six million viewers. Commissioned by the channel Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), it was envisioned by its producers as an eight-episode working-class drama focusing on themes of civic progress. However, against their expectations for a socialist-realist portrait of Cologne, Fassbinder delivered a b rilliantly layered chamb er drama ab out a n eccentric family and their economic and cultural environment, w hich functions as both…

Director: Koji Fukada Country/Distributor: Japan/France, Film movement Opening: June 16 In less than a decade, japanese director Koji Fukada has proven himself one of cinema’s most exacting purveyors of domestic disequilibrium. In his 2010 sociopolitical comedy Hospitalité, the home of a Japanese print-shop owner and his young wife is overrun by a pair of unruly houseguests and a band of foreigners seeking shelter. The less outwardly calamitous Au revoir l’été (2013), turns a Rohmer-esque tale of a young woman vacationing at her aunt’s seaside home into a subtle portrait of casual duplicity amongst acquaintances. Harmonium, Fukada’s latest and the winner of the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, likewise pivots on the arrival of an unexpected guest. But rather than employ the setup for humorous…

Director: Michael Showalter Country/Distributor: USA, Amazon Studios & Lionsgate Opening: June 23 Meet-cutes and missed connections are typically the workhorses of charming courtship stories. Then there are the rare tales that seem so improbable, they could have been lifted from paperback romance novels. Exactly how actor-writer Kumail Nanjiani (Silicon Valley) and writer Emily V. Gordon came to be husband and wife in real life involved both a) his circumventing his conservative Pakistani family’s expectations of an arranged marriage, and b) her being put into a medically induced coma, among other events. The pair have immortalized their story by co-writing the bittersweet romantic comedy The Big Sick, already proclaimed a standout at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. It’s not hard to see why the Michael Showalter–directed film has already resonated so…

Henry james’s productive years coincided with the birth of cinema, but no filmmaker translated his work to the screen until nearly 20 years after his death. The first attempt, Fox’s Berkeley Square (1933), spun its time-traveling romance from James’s unfinished and posthumously published novel The Sense of the Past. Between 1948 and 1951, that same text, more popular with the public than with literary scholars, inspired a remake from Fox, this one titled I’ll Never Forget You, and four separate TV productions. Meanwhile, cinematic treatments lagged, with only three other adaptations premiering before the 1970s. Martin Gabel’s The Lost Moment, an eccentric retooling of The Aspern Papers from 1947, attracted moderate fanfare—mostly puff pieces about the makeup required to help fortysomething Agnes Moorehead play a 105-year-old woman. William Wyler’s The…

“Then she realized that there was nothing left for her to do, ever.” It’s a shattering moment in Guy de Maupassant’s 1883 debut novel, Une Vie, when the young aristocrat Jeanne de Lamare becomes aware that her childish dreams have evaporated in the aftermath of a whirlwind marriage to a man she thought she loved. The story of a naïve, affectionate, and idealistic woman’s disillusionment and degradation, the novel indelibly catalogs the calamitous betrayals, loss of loved ones, and financial ruin she endures. Stéphane Brizé brings characteristic humanity and delicate realism to his adaptation of Une Vie, titled A Woman’s Life for the U.S. release. His first period film, it’s a project that initially attracted his interest about 20 years ago after hearing of the novel from Florence Vignon, who…

It’s after midnight in Paris. Following a cluster of terrorist attacks, a clean-cut young man (Finnegan Oldfield) slips away from his department store sanctuary to take a quick look around. A few police cars speed by; a helicopter buzzes overhead. (A roof-level shot offers a bird’s-eye view of a different feather: unmoored lantern balloons float upward, like a flock of mini-UFOs or decorative drones.) The man strolls past a burning car and finds a young woman sitting on a bicycle. He asks what she’s heard. She says the authorities have leads but nobody’s claimed responsibility. It was bound to happen, the girl repeats somnolently—“and now it has.” Her shrug conveys a formidable mixture of acceptance and apathy. “Some people are overjoyed. And then you see others crying…” Her fatalism suggests…

If filmmaking from Montreal in the early 1970s is known at all outside of Canada, it has traditionally been either for its nonfiction—embodied by the vérité documentaries of Gilles Groulx, Pierre Perrault, and Denys Arcand, among others—or the acclaimed realist dramas of directors like Michel Brault and Claude Jutra. These films were all closely attuned to the onset and effects of the “Quiet Revolution,” which pushed the province toward secularization and drew battle lines between federalist and sovereigntist camps; Brault’s docu-fictional Les Ordres (1974), about the October Crisis, is exemplary of this style. This narrative of a serious, politically committed French-Canadian cinema is complicated by the efforts of a ramshackle Anglophone filmmaking collective led by non-native Montrealers Larry Kent, Frank Vitale, and Allan Moyle. Taken together, this unsung group of…

Director: Rama Burshtein Country/Distributor: Israel, Roadside Attractions Opening: May 12 Israeli actress Noa Kooler has an open and fluid face, washed over by waves of humor and thought and pain. Her performance as Michal in The Wedding Plan, writer/ director Rama Burshtein’s follow-up to 2012’s Fill the Void, is a masterpiece of storytelling power from the very first scene when Michal visits a fortune-teller, hoping for insight into her prospects for marriage. An Orthodox Jew born into a secular family, Michal wants a conventional life, but she’s not a conventional person: she keeps a menagerie and hires herself out as a traveling zoo for parties. After a broken engagement, she makes the radical move to continue planning for the wedding, trusting in God that a groom will appear. A matchmaker…

Director: Bill Morrison Country/Distributor: USA, Kino Lorber Opening: June 9 The thread, or rather the long unwinding reels, running through Bill Morrison’s latest filmic excavation is a cache of 500-odd movies, discovered after decades under a swimming pool in a former Gold Rush town in the Yukon. Dawson City: Frozen Time, despite a title evoking either a 1980s Apple II adventure or a we’ve-lost-count blockbuster sequel, proves to be Morrison’s best film in years—a bona fide adventure through history, hopscotching across the turn of the 19th century. Through a treasure trove of archival material and charming interviews, Morrison tells the story of frontier conquest in microcosm, but with the sprawl of a great novelistic historian, he also follows individual people’s stories from generation to generation. While the film’s purview may…

On the Eve of the Future: Selected Writings on Film By Annette Michelson, The MIT Press/OCTOBER Books, $39.95 While working on a catalogue for a retrospective of New American Cinema in Europe in 1974, Annette Michelson struggled to find the perfect film still for its cover. As she recounts in “Gnosis and Iconoclasm: A Case Study in Cinephilia,” an essay that fuses tactile memories of the New York downtown film scene of the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s with theories of fetish and transgression, more than one friend suggested that she use an empty screen (“not, perhaps, without a trace of malice”). Naturally, her response was: “But whose empty screen? That of Brakhage, Sharits, Breer, Kubelka, Conner, Frampton, or Conrad?” A blank screen is never just a blank screen, and its…

Clusters of 18- to 19-year-old boys: some rough trade, some effeminate, carousing in bars and cafés, loitering by docks, flirting with older men with intent but mild indifference. To a certain kind of moviewatcher— those who’ve thrilled to Pasolini, Fassbinder, and Kenneth Anger—these are familiar images, but we’ve never seen them quite as we do in Patric Chiha’s Brothers of the Night. This extraordinary documentary immerses the viewer in the nights of young Bulgarian Roma men working gay-for-pay in Vienna to send money back to their families, bathing its subjects in an extreme visual stylization that grants them a cinematic status that approaches the mythic. Moving between an exquisite kind of vérité that captures the men in their nocturnal element and staged, highly artificial tableaux that heighten their butch sex…

From Saturday to Sunday gustav machatý, 1931, czech national Film archive The films the czech director gustav machatý made between the late ’20s and early ’30s are exercises in what it takes to achieve intimacy on screen. Machatý had a genius for extreme close-ups, which suited the intense kinds of passion, desire, and suppressed anguish he tended to have his female characters feel. Born in 1901, he made all of the movies for which he’s now known before he turned 35; he fled Europe for Hollywood in 1936 and never managed to fully reassemble his career. In each of his three most important movies, a transformative erotic experience befalls a young woman—the provincial girl played by the beauty queen Ita Rina in Seduction (1929); the 18-year-old Hedy Lamarr (then Hedy…

The director introduces the film as the director often does, keeping the preamble to a minimum before slinking away. The lights go down. The screen fires up. And then the director comes right back out again, sitting at a desk a few feet from where he’d just addressed the audience. And he stays there, minimally lit and intermittently vocal, but always visible. He’s part of the show, a live three-dimensional stage presence accompanying the recorded, two-dimensional images projected behind. When Travis Wilkerson presented Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? at Sundance in January and True/False in March, his live theatrical show was anomalous among a slate of prerecorded documentaries. Yet it’s part of a tradition of live screenings that stretches back to the origins of cinema, when the mechanical…

Fiercely intelligent, uncomfortably tense, and striking just the right balance between terror and comedy, Sean Byrne’s two exquisitely lean features—released over the painfully extended period of eight years—have cracked the code of horror. In place of the obnoxious, detestable leads found in so many scary movies, the Australian writer-director crafts protagonists with an authenticity that leaves you rooting for them and, in effect, intensely concerned for their safety as they’re thrown into highly undesirable situations. Brent, the hero of Byrne’s 2009 debut The Loved Ones, may be emotionally stunted, unable to return the words “I love you” to his girlfriend, but he is a teenage boy after all, and one who has gone through a terrible tragedy. As the driver in the car crash that killed his father, Brent (a…

The first thing you encounter when entering Robert De Niro’s Tribeca office is an ax strapped to the wall adjoining the doorway. It’s so harrowing as to be comic, or perhaps so absurd as to be serious, and in its contrast to an otherwise welcoming environment cluttered with family photos and comfortable furnishings, it well serves an artist whose intentions can be so richly, knowingly enigmatic. As his recent comedic work attests, De Niro is more than willing to play the clown, yet as borne out by his affable but ceaselessly circumspect manner in this interview, he will never play the fool. Do you still draw on your first years of learning acting and your work in the Actors Studio, or is it all so inside you at this point…

Viewers of Nocturama are unlikely to forget the film’s use of pop songs, from Willow Smith’s “Whip My Hair” (ironic commentary on the action) to Shirley Bassey’s “My Way” (an emotional expression of a young terrorist’s feelings of manic triumph) to Blondie’s “Call Me” (an aural opiate that they’re powerless to resist dancing to). But perhaps the most important musical cue is John Barry’s driving, Moog-heavy theme to the 1971-72 British TV series The Persuaders!, which helps announce the endgame of the film’s final minutes. These scenes chart the young terrorists’ downfall as police storm the mall in which they’ve been hiding out, with overlapping editing that synthesizes the film’s two halves, one inspired by Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, the other by Dawn of the Dead. After David (Finnegan Oldfield)…

Director: João Pedro Rodrigues Country/Distributor: Portugal/France/ Brazil, Strand Releasing Opening: June 23 You can depend on a joão pedro Rodrigues movie to give you a real eyeful. The Portuguese filmmaker’s erotic phantasmagorias offer no shortage of what-the-fuck tableaux, with an emphasis on bodies and the sweet havoc they wreak—the insatiable young horndog of O Fantasma, for instance, jerking himself off with a shower hose coiled around his neck; or the middle-aged transgender nightclub performer in To Die Like a Man, whose breasts leak blood and silicone. Rodrigues’s latest, The Ornithologist, is no less attuned to the shock and awe of corporeal experience, but here the fixation is couched in an almost overpowering serenity, one that prevails amid a proliferation of bewildering Christian and pagan allusions and a widescreen, nature-doc revelry…

Director: miguel arteta Country/Distributor: uSa, Roadside attractions Opening: June 9 Miguel arteta and mike white seem unlikely candidates to produce this generation’s Rules of the Game, but, as the Trump administration proves almost every day, anything is possi ble. In their quietly acerbic new chamber drama, directed by Arteta and written by White, Beatriz (Salma Hayek) is a Mexican immigrant who works in a service industry that doesn’t quite fit the upstairs/downstairs split: spirituality. She divides her professional life between the Arendale Cancer Center, offering alternative therapies for cancer patients, and bodywork house calls for clients and friends like yuppie Cathy (Connie Britton). After Beatriz’s beat-up Volkswagen refuses to start, Cathy tells Beatriz that she can spend the night at her oceanside mansion and deal with it in the morning—…

Director: ana lily amirpour Country/Distributor: uSa, neon Opening: June 23 In 2014, the moody, persian-language vampire drama A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night quickly turned its writer/director Ana Lily Amirpour into an indie darling. Although style-oversubstance objections could reasonably be raised, the film’s vivid sense of place and tight focus justified the sparse script and nebulous themes, and it exhibited a distinctive voice and a confidence that were remarkable in a first-time filmmaker. The predominantly positive critical response opened the door for a bigger budget and more elaborate production for her ambitious follow-up, The Bad Batch, which features the kinds of action sequences and celebrity cast (Keanu Reeves, Jim Carrey, Suki Waterhouse) Girl could not—and would not—have dreamed of. Unfortunately, Amirpour hasn’t quite bloomed under the greater scope of…

Director: lav diaz Country/Distributor: Philippines, Kino lorber Opening: may 19 It takes five or six minutes to read Tolstoy’s fable about unjust imprisonment, “God Sees the Truth, But Waits.” Afterward, you might spend a few years absorbing its lessons about suffering, simple goodness, and the wisdom of leaving vengeance to the Lord, but the text is economical. By contrast, it’s the work of almost four hours to view The Woman Who Left, which writer-director-cinematographer- editor Lav Diaz has based on Tolstoy’s story more or less as a circus ringmaster bases an elephant on a beach ball. If you last through the finale, you might feel that Diaz’s lessons—bite-size compared to Tolstoy’s— have been consumed along the way, leaving nothing but peanut shells. And yet The Woman Who Left has its…