2006 NYFF Wrap-up

Twenty-three films in just over two weeks, a handful of festival-related parties, and hours of conversation with critics, bloggers, festival programmers, distributors, directors, and other assorted denizens of the film world. And now it's over. In retrospect, it was a strong year, and a welcome relief from the dearth of interesting films released in the first eight months of 2006. Interestingly enough, my top three picks of the festival — Syndromes and a Century, Woman on the Beach, and Climates — all contain a bifurcated narrative structure. That two of the three are dysfucntional relationship dramas should come as no surprise to those who know me well. I've already written once about Woman on the Beach, and will do so again when the DVD comes out next month, for there's plenty more to say. Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Climates caught me by surprise and simply blew me away — not only the most beautifully shot film at the festival, but one of the greatest breakup films of all time. (I'll save my review for when the film opens in NYC later this month.) As I mentioned in an earlier post, I've had several false starts at penning a proper review of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Syndromes and a Century, but I can say this about it — while I've certainly enjoyed watching the director's other films, I must confess that I never quite got any of them. That wasn't the case this time. The vast number of ideas burried in his city doctor/country doctor split — the reversals, variations, and contrasts — spoke to me in a series of little epiphanies that left me smiling through most of the film. The sequence that finds a woman staring down the camera until it backs off to a comfortable distance might very well be my favorite cinematic moment of the year, followed of course by the highly unexpected all-aerobicizing ending. For those interested in the music used in that scene, it's from Japanese recording artist Neil & Iraiza, and the song is called Fez (Men Working). Yes, I've uploaded a copy for you all: Neil & Iraiza - Men Working.mp3 Brief thoughts on a few other titles from the festival: The Host (Bong Joon-ho, South Korea) — Given all the praise from Cannes, I had no doubt that I would enjoy Bong's take on the monster movie. What I didn't realize was just how moving it would be as well. As with his two previous features, the police procedural Memories of Murder and the black comedy Barking Dogs Never Bite (my review here), Bong again proves himself a master of genre subversion, incorporating just enough political and social subtext to allow it to trascend convention. (Also, my vote for poster of the year. See above.) Marie Antoinette (Sophia Coppola, USA) — Who would have thought that this film would turn out to be the most contentious of the festival amongst critics? Though it was the first film screened for the press, it was the one title you heard people arguing about throughout the entire festival. I can't help but believe some of the backlash is due to the director being la fille de Francis, and not, as some critics claim, outrage at the absence of voices from the enlightened citizenry. Sure, it's full of shoe, fashion, and confectionery porn, but were we truly expecting anything else? From its opening shot of a reclining Kirsten Dunst giving a knowing wink to the camera to the familar chord triplet of Gang of Four's Natural's Not In It, it should be apparant that we're not about to get a in-depth study of 18th century class relations. It's bascially a reworking of Lost in Translation — a young married girl, trapped in a strange country, struggles to find herself. This is the cattiness and decadence of Versailles as seen through the eyes of a teenage girl. And why not? It's a bit of fun, a great soundtrack, some good performances, and not much more. The casting of Rip Torn and Asia Argento as Louis Quinze and his mistress Madame du Barry is pure genius, and the pair are contenders for sleaziest couple to ever grace the silver screen. Offside (Jafar Panahi, Iran) — It's hard not to like Panahi's overly optimistic allegorical tale of a group of young woman daring to challenge the patriarchy by sneaking in to a football match. However, it seems like a step backwards for the director whose last film, the tense, gritty, Crimson Gold, held the promise of a new direction for Panahi. Offside feels as if it was targetted specifically to the international film festival circuit, and could have easily been the followup to 1995 festival darling The White Balloon. Gardens in Autumn (Otar Iosseliani, France) — Fans of the Tbilissy-born director will find nothing terribly new in his latest absurdist romp — a political satire about a cabinet minister who in a matter of minutres goes from riches to rags — yet there's an unfamilar warmth to the film that works well with the director's trademark Tati-esque setups. Séverin Blanchet is magnificent as Vincent, the dethroned politico who wanders carefree from one situation to the next, but it is Michel Piccoli in drag as Vincent's mother who steals the show. Paprika (Satoshi Kon, Japan) — I watched all eighty-nine minutes of Kon's latest foray into anime weirdness in slack-jawed wonder. However, it was too early in the morning for me to make sense of this bit of kawaii psychedelia that finds (to mention but a few) a refrigerator, a giant frog, and the Statue of Liberty dancing down a Tokyo street. One that I'll have to see again. Our Daily Bread (Nikolaus Geyrhalter, Austria) — All I could think about while watching this documentary on food production in Europe was how nice the conditions are in the manfacturing plants, at least when compared to their American counterparts. Instead of contemplating on how and what we eat, I marveled at the precision technology, and the attention to cleanliness. (The film ends with an intense scrubbing down of a slaughterhouse.) Having been deeply disturbed by Lino Brocka's Insiang a few days prior, which opens to the amplified squeals of pigs being manually slaughtered, Geyrhalter's mechanized images in comparison left me cold. Years ago I saw Frederick Wiseman's Meat, which, like Our Daily Bread, is devoid of commentary, yet its effect is far more lasting. Geyrhalter's film seems more like an installation piece than a proper documentary, and that might very well have been his intention. Poison Friends (Emmanuel Bourdieu, France) — Much like the superb My Sex Life... or How I Got Into an Argument (which Bourdieu wrote for Arnaud Desplechin), Poison Friends is a dramedy set amongst a group of good looking young French intellectuals in nice sweaters. Though unlike Desplechin, Bourdieu is less interested in romantic entaglements than he is in intellectual machismo and blustering pomposity. It may lack emotional depth, but Bourdieu's sharply drawn characters and talented cast of relative newcomers make this a fascinating watch. A film that repeatedly name-drops Karl Kraus, it couldn't be more French if it tried. Inland Empire (David Lynch, USA) — Remember Agent Cooper's dream sequences in Twin Peaks? ("Sometimes my arms bend back.") Imagine that for three hours and you've pretty much got an idea of what to expect from Lynch's latest.  A film where every doppelgänger has an antipode, it's one that's going to keep third-year film studies students busy for years to come, even if this work plunged from the depth of Lynch's subconscious practically resists interpretation. Still, it's a must-see, if only for Laura Dern's performance (her best) and the closing credit sequence. Little Children (Todd Field, USA) — Is Little Children this year's Crash? Perhaps. For his second film, Todd Field has once again transformed a respectable piece of literature (here, Tom Perrotta's novel of the same name) into a ham-fisted bit of pretentious nonsense that treats its audience like the titular tykes. Field's perspective on suburban America is nearly as condescending as the expository narration that runs through the film (itself an indication of a weak screenplay), and his need to bestialize an already creepy child sex offender by turning him into a self-mutilating Norman Bates clone would be laughable if it wasn't so pathetic. The darkly comic tone that pervades Perotta's novel has been entirely stripped away and replaced with the overwhelming stench of Field's own Oscar-baiting self-aggrandizement. The most insulting film of 2006, I fail to understand how it got accepted into this or any other festival. Other NYFF reviews: The Queen Woman on the Beach Bamako Private Fears in Public Places The Journals of Knud Rasmussen

Comments

[SarahBrit]

Many hugs and kisses to you Filmbrain for posting the mp3!! I had that song circling in my head for days after the film festival screening, even going so far as humming it to a clerk in a cd shop in hopes of finding it. Bless you!

[Dan]

Too right about Little Children. As I sat there watching it in the under-construction Alice Tully Hall, all I could do was curse myself for throwing away 20 clams for this piece of crap. I'm done with Field. Fool me once....and all that jazz.

[Brian]

I've been trying to shield myself from too much advance information about Syndromes and a Century but I couldn't resist checking out that mp3. I love it! I'm not expecting to see the film until next year but am glad to hear you liked it.

[Adam]

Dude,

SYNDROMES OF A CENTURY ". . . Spoke to me in a series of little epiphanies that left me smiling through most of the film." Same here, same here. I'd say more, but I'm off to my aerobics class.

Adam

[scot]

A few weeks back, I picked up the Times and saw A.O. Scott's glowing review of Little Children and since then I have seen only love or absolutely despise it reviews. Even in Scott's glowing review it seemed to be an extremely cynical and strange film to recieve such praise. But, after reading so many others hating it I might be staying away for less offensive fare like Marie Antoinette

[Mikko]

I still haven't seen Tropical Malady, but I think Blisfully Yours and Wordly Desires are by far more interesting of Weerasethakul's work. Syndromes and a Century was one of the most disappointing films I saw in Toronto.

It could be that I wasn't in the best mood during the festival as I found most of the films I saw somehow annoyingly disappointing (including the third Miike I've disliked in a row)... I don't generally feel the need to understand every moment of a film to call it a masterpiece. So in a way Syndromes felt like a redundant rehash of his earlier themes. I just hated the hospital. What I liked about Blisfully was that the factory was real. It felt real. As did the doctor scene... But the whole hospital section in Syndromes was so artificial (not only in the sense that it was meant to be artificial) and (themathically obvious or) forced. If you want to show post-industrial alienation or whatever, there's plenty of good real examples to go by, you don't have to go into inventing some cheesy futurism.... Also the tracking shots were awful!

Maybe I'm a weird guy, but I also much prefer Lost Highway to Mulholland Dr. and even had a very negative first reaction to MD... I'm dying to see INLAND EMPIRE, although I'm not sure how it's going to be possible, and whether my stomach can handle the look of DV used by someone who I've considered by far the best visual artist in the world since Kubrick died.

[Filmbrain]

Adam --

Glad to hear you felt the same way about Syndromes. Been digging your PIFF reports at GreenCine -- next year I'm determined to join you.

[Filmbrain]

Scot --

The kicker in Scott's review of Little Children was this: [Field] proves to be among the most literary of American filmmakers, one of the few who tries to find a visual language suited to the ambiguous plainness of contemporary realist fiction.

Somewhat ironic, given how he has not once but twice mangled a literary work. As for his visual language, it certainly is plain, but I doubt it stems from a desire to mirror contemporary realist fiction.

[Filmbrain]

I don't generally feel the need to understand every moment of a film to call it a masterpiece.

Mikko - Perhaps that's true with me at well, but in the case of Weerasethakul, I couldn't even see what it was that people were getting so crazy about. Visually stunning, but not once in the four films I'd seen of his prior to Syndromes and a Century did I feel I could latch on to something. I loved the "artificiality" of the hospital -- rooms with limbs, ominous vent-like things, harsh lighting, etc. It came off as so striking after that very typical fist half, with it's lush, serene landscapes. But there was so much more going on -- particularly in the sound design, which from the opening scene (the voices never fade even though the characters are walking away) is just unbelievable. The harmony (of sorts) at the end is perfect. I am dying to see the film again.

I agree with you about Lynch -- I too prefer Lost Highway over Mulholland Dr. The video is tough to take at times in Inland Empire, especially given that the characters are almost exclusively shot in unflattering wide-angle closeups. The roughness of the low-end DV suits the material, I guess, but it does depress to know that he'll never work with film again.

[Mikko]

Fair enough, I guess we'll have to agree to disagree. I guess I just loved the way his other work had this elusive quality to them while they still were very clearly about something. That a film "resists interpretation" (to quote your nice phrase) is actually quite interesting to me if the filmmaker has talent enough to make it emtionally authentic... Maybe that's where we differ? (Not that I think Lynch's work overall is at all impossible to pull meaning from.)

I'm still a little disappointed that I didn't catch Hong Sang-soo's latest in Toronto, but I'm glad you liked it. I loved Tale of Cinema and this seems like similar territory, even if it's more conventional.

[Ben]

It's so nice to see someone else openly hating on Little Children. And the Crash comparison is apt. Crash is a little more shrill, a little less bearable, but if the shoe fits, etc.
I'm far from a libertine, but I'm kind of shocked that no one has called out Fields/the film on his/its weird anti-sex hysteria. (Well, in his Running With Scissors review, Armond White briefly mentions it and refers to its "sexual hatred." Again, apt.)