On the Whispers and Bangs of NYFF 63

An interesting thing about attending a film festival: the context surrounding your screenings can’t help but bleed through the edges of the screen and color what you see. Even more than a normal screening, a festival screening’s context is always other films: the film you saw last night, the film you’re seeing tomorrow, the film you just snuck into so you could secure a seat for this one.

At its most overwhelming, that experience can create a flattening effect. But at its most illuminating, it can draw unexpected connections, creating intertextuality where there might have been none.

Degrees of Art

Take two of the first films I watched at the 63rd New York Film Festival, Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind and Kent Jones’ Late Fame. On the surface, the films share little in common: Reichardt’s latest is a ‘70s heist film as slow jazz, while Jones’ is a funnysad portrait of a failed poet finally feeling some delayed acclaim. But viewed back-to-back, certain similarities pop — like the fact that both films softly skewer a certain kind of art student.

Over the course of The Mastermind, Josh O’Connor’s typically rumpled thief is slowly revealed to be a former art school student who mistakes his appreciation of high art for a higher purpose — a distinction not lost on the many friends and family from whom he constantly asks for handouts. In retrospect, it makes perfect sense that such a patient filmmaker as Reichardt would tackle such a patient art as stealing it. She has the attention span necessary to hold the frame beyond the waiting-waiting-going of the crime itself, lingering with her “mastermind” long after the thrill of the heist has faded and he’s left with empty hotel rooms and overnight buses.  The idea of an aspiring artist who only ever got as far as stealing the kinds of works he once hoped to make is an ironic literalization of “good artists copy, great artists steal,” and it meets its more earnest match in Late Fame.

The eager young poet-wannabes of Jones’ film are just as high-minded as O’Connor’s thief, with about the same amount to show for it, but they are more highly funded (there’s a very funny reveal when we finally see where one of these bohemian posturers actually lives). In the absence of their own success, they glom onto Willem Dafoe’s aging poet, Ed Saxberger, whose one published collection saw minor success decades earlier but never broke through. This becomes something of a symbiotic relationship: Saxberger lends the kids an air of credibility, and their attention gives him at least a microdose of late fame. The relationship ultimately stumbles for some of the same reasons that artistic careers often do, but Jones maintains a level of respect for both Saxberger’s inability to sell out and the young poets’ cynically funded but sincere enthusiasm for the arts — much more respect than Reichardt has for her thief’s selfish lack of ambition, even as both films mine the myriad trajectories of the artistic-minded for insightful humor and tragedy.

Voids-B-Gone

Christian Petzold’s Miroirs No. 3 and Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice have less of a literal connection, but both films are, in a sense, about attempting to fill holes. Petzold’s film is a characteristically understated drama about Laura (Petzold’s frequent collaborator Paula Beer) who is in a car crash while on vacation that kills her boyfriend and leaves her in the care of the kind but mysterious Betty (Barbara Auer). What begins as a Good Samaritan act slowly morphs into something else, as Petzold drip-feeds us details about Betty’s family and the void Laura is unwittingly helping them fill. The emotional dynamics at play are not always totally scrutable, but at least you’re questioning them while taking in scenic pastoral bike rides, or fresh plum cakes, or a Ravel piece sweeping enough to heal a broken family.

The holes in No Other Choice are both more literal and not. Yoo Man-soo (Lee Byung-hun) has just lost the job he dedicated his entire life to, sending him into an existential tailspin and a brutal job market. Back against the wall, he can only conceive of an inhumane solution to an inhumane problem, and so he begins tracking down his biggest competitors for the few open roles in their field in order to, well, kill them. It’s a more linear construction than Park has built in a while, but he’s never doing just one thing at a time, so even this relatively straightforward comedy thriller manages to deftly comment on the way late-stage capitalism makes warfare where there should be solidarity while emphasizing the holes in Man-soo’s soul as much as the ones he’s digging in his backyard. It won’t linger with me like Decision to Leave, but I laughed a lot — both at the jokes and at Park’s stupid-good shot invention. 

Eurovision

Elsewhere at the fest, two beloved Gen X American auteurs headed to Europe, albeit in different centuries. Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly stars George Clooney as George Clooney (or okay, fine, as “Jay Kelly,” but close enough), an aging movie star wandering Europe wondering if he could’ve given a better performance as a father and a friend with just one more take. The movie delivers on its high-potential pairing of director and star, though your mileage may vary on how far (if at all) it elevates the basic pitch. This is simpler and sweeter than Baumbach has ever been, although he rides a predictable path to a late-breaking and beautifully—even movingly—ambivalent ending that bets heavily on the audience’s presumed goodwill toward Clooney’s filmography. For this audience of one, that was a safe bet. 

Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague is less interested in “Europe” and “movies” than “late-50s Paris” and one movie: Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless. Named after the French “New Wave” cinematic movement led by Godard and his fellow filmmaker/critic friends at the film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, the film is essentially a classic Linklater hangout comedy set during the making of one of the most influential films of all time.

That may sound like a tricky gap to shoot, and you do get the sense that half of Linklater’s motive in making this was simply to get to walk around recreations of Godard’s sets. But rather than a pointless romp, I found this a valuable (and very fun) opportunity to watch a significant voice in our era of cinema sing along and softly harmonize with one of the most significant voices in all of cinema. Plus, the other half of his motive feels like a very Linklater-y version of hagiography. He uses Godard and his compatriots as proof that you can be insufferable and also right, and also to suggest what Linklater’s always suggesting: that the real genius is the person who just tries things with their friends. (Don’t tell Godard, but my viewing was undoubtedly enhanced by having just rewatched Breathless on my phone while in line for the screening. Context!)

Brad to Basics

Speaking of context, it might sound like sacrilege to mention the groundbreaking, run-and-gun guerilla filmmaking of Godard and co. in the same sentence as Bradley Cooper’s Is This Thing On?, but having watched Nouvelle Vague earlier at the festival, I couldn’t help but draw the comparison when hearing Cooper speak about permitlessly shooting his new film in the streets of Greenwich Village, dodging traffic and stealing shots wherever they could. And context bleeds where you wouldn’t expect it to: during the same press conference, Cooper credited Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu for his decision to shoot using a 1.66:1 aspect ratio, and Laura Dern said Cooper’s handheld shooting style of being right up in his actors’ faces reminded her of her experiences shooting Inland Empire with the late, great David Lynch.

Ironically, these blue-chip references surround what is undeniably Cooper’s most modest outing as a director, and maybe not coincidentally, one of his most successful. His filmmaking finds a nice balance between A Star Is Born’s freewheeling intimacy and the try-hard formalism of Maestro while inverting the shape of those films’ arcs; rather than a third-act turn into weepiness, Is This Thing On? starts low so it can go out on an unexpected high. It’s a surprisingly mundane story of divorce and maybe-reconciliation, but the endearingly oddball instincts that gave us Snoopy abandoned in the vestibule are still there to enliven the proceedings. And all this talk of context is appropriate: While he may not be Robert Altman, Cooper has a keen understanding of the relationship between background and foreground, thoughtfully framing his shots to highlight how one informs the other. Whether it all adds up is less interesting to me than whether it’s interesting to me; watching him rein it in (while also reiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiining it in!!!), I was interested.

A Quiet Place

Besides, some modesty is fitting for what in many ways was a quieter festival than I’m used to. Some of that sense of quiet may be slightly pejorative, such as with Ira Sachs’ Peter Hujar’s Day, a reenactment of a recorded conversation between the writer Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall) and her photographer friend, Peter Hujar (Ben Whishaw). Sachs finds some unexpected (but appropriate) photographic beauty in the single-setting apartment where Peter painstakingly recalls every minute activity of his last 24 hours, and the movie serves as more proof that Whishaw would be a compelling screen presence simply reading from the phone book. Unfortunately, he proves this by reading material that is at times only marginally more interesting than the phone book.

A House of Dynamite, Kathryn Bigelow’s new, not-so-speculative thriller about an impending nuclear apocalypse, has much louder ambitions than Sachs’ film. But what it does with those ambitions — effectively recreating Dr. Strangelove with none of the humor and ten times the graveness — doesn’t feel like it adds anything but dread to what Kubrick did 60 years ago. A high bar to be sure, but A House of Dynamite unintentionally makes the case that Kubrick’s satire was better suited for underlining the lunacy of mutually assured destruction — allowing us to laugh at the end of the world and so imagine it conquerable — than Bigelow’s solemnity is. Maybe her movie will scare someone with a nuclear football into de-escalation, and I hope it does! But I don’t have one, and I would’ve preferred a bang to the self-serious whimper we got.

I found Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent to be an altogether more successful film than Peter Hujar’s Day or A House of Dynamite, and its grouping here in terms of “quietness” has more to do with expectations than results. For one thing, if you call your movie “The Secret Agent,” I’m going to expect a certain amount of thrilling espionage that is simply not what Filho had on his mind. And to be fair, the incongruence of the movie’s title and its action (or lack thereof) is in keeping with a corrupt Brazilian government that made unwitting operatives out of professors, teachers, and projectionists. 

I just can’t help it if, much like last year’s I’m Still Here, the choice to keep the camera mostly on the aftershock of corruption rather than its epicenter makes more of an emotional impact than a narrative one. Not that the film is boring — in fact, leaving the backstory that drove Wagner Moura’s Armando into hiding unexplained for so long into its runtime lends a mysterious propulsion to even the film’s slower digressions. It’s just that it’s not quite as riveting as its title had me hoping it’d be. Still, its relative quietness is paid off with the very loud second gear it eventually kicks into, and Moura continues to make a case as one of the most interesting actors to watch, whatever he’s doing (or not).

Best of the Fest

Given this dichotomy between the bangs and whispers of the festival, it’s probably fitting that the two best films I saw there were the loudest and quietest, respectively. Claiming the former title (and by a comfortable margin) was Oliver Laxe’s Sirāt. It didn’t hurt that I saw it at the perfect point, after taking in a run of solid, accomplished films that nonetheless didn’t stir me out of my seat; enter Laxe’s film, which electrified it. The movie’s elevator pitch could stand on its own — a father and son (Sergi López and Bruno Núñez) search for their missing daughter/sister at a series of raves in the Moroccan desert — but Laxe double-charges it by filling the journey between raves with Sorcerer-level perils and oppressively scoring the whole thing with thought-obliterating dance music.

What follows is in part a sweet, fish-out-of-water story about the father and son being taken in by the found family of desert ravers… up until those perils start taking a genuinely shocking toll. I’m not sure that every turn will withstand accusations of shock-trolling — this is far and away the most upsetting film I’ve seen in a long time — but Laxe uses the increasingly extreme emotional stakes of the characters to slowly sync their inner journeys with the otherworldly settings around them. It helps that he shoots those settings with ominous wonder, and that the all-around extremity somehow coheres into a potential explanation for how these people might’ve been pushed this far off the map in the first place — or how they can weather the horrors they see there and keep standing, dancing even. 

On the other end of Laxe’s deliberately abrasive beat drops is Joachim Trier, who makes soft movies about hard topics. It’s a deceptive approach that makes his films land like rain: they’re so gentle in their rhythms that you don’t notice what a flood of feeling they’ve amassed until the dam breaks. That structure applies narratively as well: Sentimental Value’s scenes are often bookended by cut-to-black ellipses, making them feel like they’re happening in isolation until you realize just how much novelistic richness Trier has slyly woven between them. Life’s like that, too, I think he’s saying; you don’t realize what you’ve realized (or what others have realized about you) until the tears are welling up.

In this case, the realizations revolve around Renate Reinsve’s Nora and her estranged filmmaker father (Stellan Skarsgård), whose idea of reconciliation is casting his actor daughter in his latest film. In some ways, it’s a surprising (and superior) twin to Jay Kelly: both films are about bad dads in the movie business longing for a second shot with their two daughters. By the end of Jay Kelly, we see Clooney’s Kelly want that shot; by the end of Sentimental Value, we see Skarsgård’s Gustav take it. One approach is not inherently more effective than the other, but watching Nora watch her father try to finally fill in the gaps by using the very thing that split their foundation — his art — is as moving as it is understated. Why waste words doing what Reinsve and Skarsgård can do with looks?

A moving runner in Sentimental Value involves the personification of Nora’s childhood home, where the house is imagined as a being who grows more content the fuller it is. At the risk of riding this context train right off of a cliff, it doesn’t feel like too sentimental a jump to consider the Walter Reade Theater — where I watched all twelve of these films, and where I’ll watch countless others — as a house whose happiest days are its fullest. 

For a few weeks each fall, it’s full to bursting: of critics, and filmmakers, and cinephiles, and fans, there to see what we can see, bouncing the movies off of each other and our seatmates in a warm, chattery game of pinball. Even in a quieter year, the building is abuzz — if less in reaction to any particular film, than in response to the great gift of film, any film, every film. In their diverse periods, approaches, missteps, and triumphs, this year’s NYFF slate embodies the medium’s great spectrum as well as any. What a gift, to bathe in its rainbow again!