Reflections on the 62nd New York Film Festival (Part One)
New York Film Festival (NYFF) time happily again! Two films really knocked me out at the start of the NYFF press screenings.
“The Seed of the Sacred Fig” is directed by Iranian Mohammad Rasoulof, penalized for opposing the theocratic Mullah government’s authoritarian edicts and barely escaping the country with his life. In this film, he constructs a brilliant way of confronting the regime. He posits a character, named Iman, who has just been “promoted” to the job of investigating protesters and other apparent enemies of the state to determine if they merit a death sentence. Rasoulof explores how this changes Iman’s life, shockingly starting with his being urged and finally agreeing to sign a death edict of some young dissident without reviewing the evidence. He then requires from his wife and two daughters a new concern about how they conduct their lives. The wife is the film’s most complex character, deeply involved with her husband, attentive to his every mood, protective of him and the family unit, a “good wife.” But as she increasingly supports and defends him (though aware of what is disturbing and horrific in the demands of his new life), she becomes herself a strong policing force overseeing the girls. The daughters almost accidentally—and then naturally enough—join in the protest rallies with their contemporaries and gradually shift from unthinking naïveté to truly watching, seeing, questioning, and, finally, resisting. They bridle over being told to accept total loss of control over their futures, their bodies. And the footage of the actual mass anti-government riots in Iran shown throughout the film, some seemingly caught on cell phone cameras, is very stirring.
This film, despite the urgency of its material, its engaging narration, and the skill with which it was made, is an imperfect work. It has a certain artifice, awkwardness; it can feel like a polemic. Characterizations are mainly shallow; dialogue can feel somewhat stilted and uninspired. But to me, none of that really matters, given its overall power. The pain caused by the regime’s brutality is casually visible in the background behind every conversation—another blindfolded young person is being hauled away to God knows where. That pain, which the mother tries to keep distant, comes closer and closer to the family itself, until it directly confronts them, with the father ruthlessly, brutally, investigating his own wife and daughters. In the film’s final section, he has lost all his recognizably human misgivings, no longer a troubled, striving human being, and has become the full incarnation of the regime in all its religious certitude and monstrousness. He is bent on finding which of the women in his little family is resistant to him, and he will permit no resistance at all, perhaps even prepared to kill the guilty one, beyond all reasoning, much less love, outraged that any of the women would even try to assert herself, even try to negotiate terms for a compromise.
Iran, whose great sophisticated filmmakers like Kiarostami and Panahi I have admired and watched for years, seems a very long way from tribal Afghanistan, but the current regime’s most recent rulings against women, shrouded in their hijabs, buried in shapeless Burkas, reduced to a heap of fabric, is just a step away from the Afghan mullahs forbidding women to even speak outside the house, to use their voices even to buy groceries. And in truth, our own corrupt and hyper-conservative Supreme Court’s recent anti-abortion actions and the outrageous pronouncements of Trump-Vance & Co. seem to come out of the same drive by men to totally control women’s lives, the same outrage when women want to share power in the outer world. The film’s long final scenes of the father hunting down his own wife and daughters may not fully work as a literal reality, but boy does it feel real, and devastating, and emotionally recognizable.
On the second day of the press screenings came Dea Kulumbegashvili’s “April,” from the country of Georgia. Kulumbegashvili, a director I have never heard of, a 38-year-old woman, is one of a number of remarkable women filmmakers in this year’s festival—this being her second feature film. And it is a stunner. It begins with a strange ancient-looking female nude figure moving haltingly (a bit like a Noh dancer) through black space. Then rain fiercely pouring, storm sounds, the sound of breathing. And then we are looking down on a real childbirth, astonishing, so moving to see. Then we are into the narration, which concerns the main character, Nina, a handsome OB/GYN doctor and efficient professional who finds herself attacked for causing the death of a newborn by failing to do a cesarean section, despite ambiguities and unclear responsibility. We also gradually discover, often just by following her car nighttime journeys down dark, empty roads, that she also reluctantly performs abortions when they are desperately needed, putting herself at further risk if she is found out, given the narrow mores of this remote, rural community. But she is a committed, caring doctor who serves, who listens to people. She weighs the peril to herself against a mother’s fear of what an enraged, ignorant father would do to an impregnated daughter (not to mention the terrible way we eventually learn the girl is pregnant).
The film’s action all through—with the human body, especially the female body, at its center—is embedded in the earth itself: beautiful images of mountain-ringed, tilled fields; muddy and threateningly dark, dangerous roads; violent thunder and lightning storms; the coming of spring with fields of red poppies, yellow buttercups, and sudden cuts to the freshest of cherry blossoms. All this contrasts with the silent whites and greys, sterile and alienated, of the medical offices and corridors, at the end of which Nina is often seen as a small figure, underlining her strange solitariness. She chooses to live her life alone, having refused marriage long ago to what appears to be a good and truly loving fellow doctor. We see her needing what are even now quite shocking acts of impersonal sex, which expose her to creepiness and humiliation from gross male strangers. Yet this adds a poignant note to her humanity, the need under her look of efficiency and control. She too is a body. This bold film has us witness not only a live birth but the deft performance of a real cesarean section and a long sequence recreating an abortion. But there is little touch of the polemic here; this is a film about abortion, but it is far richer than that, evoking a world that is murky and dark beyond gender and rural ignorance. But it is rich especially because of the complexity of Nina. Particularly haunting for me was that strange, very old nude female figure that the film starts and ends with—unexplained but the more viscerally striking for its mysteriousness and ambiguity. “April” is not likely to be widely distributed, given its long, long takes, the patience it asks of the viewer. But I left the film deeply moved by the massive ambition of it, how well it was made, the suggestiveness, the capacity to hold together so beautifully the whole struggling muck of the human enterprise, especially as it comes to women.
When I wrote my book “Women Directors: the Emergence of a New Cinema” decades ago, I undertook it because I fell in love with the work of another woman from that part of the world: the Hungarian director Marta Meszaros, who few remember these days—black-and-white films that presented women’s lives with an intimacy and honesty I had never before seen on screen. The project gradually enlarged itself, because then (in the 1980s) around me in New York, one independent woman filmmaker after another was suddenly stepping forward. I have been so intrigued by Susan Seidelman’s coming to Great Barrington now to talk about her work in those years, “Desperately Seeking Susan” and, for me the even more dazzling but more raw film that preceded it, “Smithereens.” Her recollection of how uncalculating, how innocent that filmmaking was, focused only on the movie itself, was how a number of the very early American films were made by women in those years—”Girlfriends” by Claudia Weill, “Hester Street” by Joan Micklin Silver, Elaine May’s work, all fresh still, a beautiful moment. But given the way production works in our country, such filmmaking is very hard, if not impossible, to sustain, and it was all over too soon—with a very few precious hardy souls, like Kelly Reichardt, continuing on that way. So we must look mostly to places like Georgia for such a personal vision to emerge from new generations of women filmmakers. But they are coming, more and more, and it is hugely heartening to see.
On the other hand, a more formally virtuosic American independent, like Sean Baker’s “Anora,” which deservedly copped the highest award (the Palm D’Or) this year at Cannes, is a beautiful thing indeed. Be warned, much of this film can feel quasi-pornographic. It opens with a series of nude women seductively undulating their naked behinds and breasts over men, filling the screen—the lighting and camera movement gorgeous here as through the entire film. We are in a world of sex workers, who pole dance and weave in and out among the customers, chatting and friendly as if at a party, sitting on men’s laps, taking them to private rooms for more intimate encounters. Everyone looks happy and bouyant. The performer we focus on is Anora (remarkably acted by Mikey Madison), who calls herself Ani, the only Russian speaker in the Manhattan club, which is how she finds herself with a very young, very rich Russian boy, Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), who calls himself Vanya. Ani is a fighter, portrayed as sweet but tough, a hardworking working girl with a big mouth, literally and figuratively. She demands that the supervisor treat the girls with respect, she argues that if the boss won’t give her healthcare, a 401K, and workers’ compensation, he can’t dictate her hours. Her full name in fact means “warrior.” Ani shares a very modest apartment in Brooklyn with her sister next to a continually noisy elevated train line—the other side of the tracks for sure. When Vanya, besotted with her marvelous screwing, brings her home to his billionaire absent father’s super huge mansion, swooping around to greet her like the kid he is, it is the bedazzlement of “Pretty Woman” multiplied many times. So the film is positioned for a hot current movie market for strong women, class inequity, and a fascination with extreme wealth. In happy transactional bargaining ($15,000), Ani gives him exclusive access to her for a week, during which they screw joyfully, endlessly, funnily. Baker is so inventive, so deliciously imaginative, so witty in managing the action in skillfully varied choreographed ways, the camera constantly in motion, past color and glitter, alive and exciting image making, and always much humor. Partying with others leads to wild Bacchanalian drinking, drug taking, more screwing. Yet the two central characters have a kind of cute innocence, having fun; even the wildly skin-tight, sequined dresses Ani wears are funny—though she mostly wears next to nothing, which she does sweetly too. The boy is spoiled, has never worked, and has unlimited funds; his emptiness is clear as he goes instantly from sex to video games, seemingly entirely without interests—and yet he too has charm. Baker further keeps it light and positive by emphasizing the open joy and playfulness of the sex and Ani’s lack of calculation.
A lot of research and work clearly went into the making of this carefully wrought film, even into the broad working-class Brooklyn accent that Madison adopts for Ani, as well as her expert, graceful call-girl moves. While this can look like mostly empty sensational filmmaking, a first hour of crude, in-your-face, titillating content, if that is all you see, you would be making a mistake. It is true that Sean Baker’s films all focus on very marginal worlds, often on sex workers, about whom he can be very funny (which takes some of the edge off the salaciousness). His previous film, “Red Rocket” (available on Prime), has as its central character, Mikey, a washed-up porn star who is a nasty piece of work, though full of wild energy, braggadocio, and a kind of charisma. He recounts tall tales about his mastery of specific sex acts in those porn films and seduces an uncomfortably young girl who works in a donut shop with dreams of porn stardom and escape from a Texas town where lives all seem stuck and hopeless. (He sells marijuana out of the donut shop, doing well because, the girl tells him, when the guys get off their shifts at the oil refineries, they all want to die. And one remembers the actual shocking statistics about working-class, middle-aged white men’s suicides, the highest rates in this country.) In “Anora” too, Ani reminds Vanya that she has to go to work, and we are conscious of the worn-looking workers who clean the billionaire Russians’ mansion; even the hoods just want desperately to keep their jobs with the rich family. So Baker embeds his raunchy, sometimes outrageous dramas in those desperate economic realities, and maybe uses the glitz to draw attention to darker matters of our so unfair social order. We have the sense that the characters we watch are all struggling just to survive. He also wins us by the brilliance of his casting, choosing amazingly perfect actors, many of whom are not actors at all but people he picks up. He suspends judgment in his films, certainly in “Anora,” and viewers mostly suspend judgment too. Baker in fact proclaims it his mission to remove the stigma from sex workers.
“Anora” has a marked shift in tone when the two get married on a drunken spree. Ivan’s parents get wind of it, and the Albanian hoods that work for them close in to undo the connection. Physical comedy of another kind ensues, again choreographed like a dance, with Ani left to her own considerable resources—of fights, bites, house wreckage, screams, curses, wild car chases, and more upstairs-downstairs dynamic a la “Parasite,” with the cocooned billionaire Russian parents finally face to face with the plucky, foul-mouthed poor working girl. As she is about to take final leave of the seaside mansion and her dream, Baker gives us a gorgeous image of Ani from behind, looking out the massive windows beautifully flecked with falling snowflakes, at the cold world that awaits her. But the film’s real conclusion, which comes a little later, not to be revealed, unexpected, is a perfect one, a humanistic liaison, the pathos of loss, perhaps a redemption. This director knows how to use all the cinematic tools brilliantly. The press-screening audience I saw the film with enjoyed it enormously, for how well done it was, for the spunky, sexy fun of it and the underlying pain and rebellion against the trap of class.
“A Real Pain,” directed by Jesse Eisenberg, and starring him and Kieren Culkin (arguably the nastiest sibling in “Succession”), posits two estranged Jewish cousins, David and Benji Kaplan, taking a trip to the area of Poland from which their recently deceased grandmother came. Beginning and ending in a New York airport, the pair connect to a Holocaust tour group, but despite this promise of something ambitious, large, serious, “A Real Pain” is—for me, a bit disappointingly—a smaller film, mainly about the interactions between the two young men, penetratingly psychological as well as amusing, as Benjy grabs the plane’s window seat, David’s bag of nuts, and everyone’s attention constantly, undeniably “a real pain.” Many will find this entertaining, probing, smart, and finally poignant, given what we learn of Benji’s life difficulties. Mine is a minority report.
For me, “A Real Pain” has two large problems, and one of them is Culkin. It is both the strength and weakness of the film that Eisenberg lets him run away with the movie. Eisenberg talks in interviews about how carefully he prepared a shooting script; he clearly had a different film in mind, only to be dazzled—“obsessed,” he has said—by Culkin’s capacity to freely improvise. This works well if you too are enchanted by Culkin, but not so well if you are really irritated by him.
The second problem I have with the film is the Holocaust context. We go through Warsaw streets, see the monument to the Warsaw ghetto uprising, the town of Lublin, a concentration camp, the grandmother’s actual house. But in a time when surging antisemitism and Trump’s fascist threat bring this history very much alive again, it is odd that only the extremely emotionally unreliable Benji mourns and agitates about Jewish tourists now bizarrely riding in trains first class, given history; only he mocks the tourism industry‘s factoids as losing touch with the humanity of those murdered; only he weeps uncontrollably after seeing the showers and the ovens, weeping over the grandmother’s recent death and his own sad life—more likely than not—utterly dependent on her. No one on the tour had relatives killed in the Holocaust, strange in itself given how many of us do. Eisenberg has said in interviews that his family fled that house in 1938, but in the film he has the grandmother just vaguely living there when young and leaving, no time or reason given. When the two decide to leave two small stones as a memorial at the house, an elderly Polish neighbor angrily shouts at them—and then the incident is passed off as his concern that the present resident will hurt herself. But I think of my own brother’s experience when he went back to the Ukraine a few years ago to see where our large extended family lived and were killed in the Holocaust, and the hostility he met as a returning Jew—even just visiting. Eisenberg made this film with major input, financial and otherwise, from the city of Warsaw, and I would say that something is perhaps unfortunately sanitized here. Eisenberg says he balks at the “sanctimonious or false,” though he grew up with a “reverence for the trauma.” I think that when you take on such a setting, the trauma merits more than a tour of streets and a sad look at a bin of shoes. I have the sense that Eisenberg set out to make a different film and got totally waylaid. I don’t know if it was more the film I was expecting and hoping for. It is probable that audiences will be much happier with the film he actually ended up making, with the interactions of the two young men smart and sharp and engaging.
“Harvest,” by Greek director Athina Rachel Tsangari, her third feature and first English language film, is an ambitious and terrific reconstruction of a pre-industrial world: peasant-like people close to the land, communal, as they do their agricultural chores side by side, swaying and singing together. The central character, Walter, wonderfully performed by Caleb Landry Jones, in the opening sequences moves through grasses looking at tiny exquisite creatures, eating things growing around him, seemingly idyllically one with the natural world. However, the world is not totally idyllic, as when a fire is blamed instantly on outsiders, without evidence, who are pilloried for a week as punishment. Still, when the forces for early capitalism move in and destroy the communal world and drive out the villagers, the film—though sometimes drifting— richly creates a strong sense of something precious but lost forever.
“No Other Land,” a documentary by Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Hamdan Ballal, and Rachel Szor, is a devastating chronicle of the repeated assaults by the Israeli army on a group of small Palestinian villages in the West Bank. It places us in a Palestinian family, watching with young activist Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, who spends his days talking with Base, as bulldozers repeatedly destroy people’s homes, force evacuation, with the villagers rebuilding only to have the homes destroyed yet again and school buildings demolished, all under a bogus military pretext but with the clear aim of driving the villagers off their land. This is a painful film to watch, but important: the confiscation of an electric generator, the filling of a well with concrete, the pleading with hard-faced Israeli military, angry but totally warranted resistance, a gunshot that paralyzes a resister, seeing the young Palestinian activist Basel grow wearier and more discouraged by the film’s end. I am a person who was distressed by the aggressive pro-Palestinian protests on New York campuses,and the sense of revived antisemitism, and I vividly remember how much the early years of Israel meant to Jews and hold a residue of that still, in spite of Netanyahu and the appalling continuation of the war in Gaza. But this West Bank footage I will not soon forget.
“All We Imagine As Light,” by Indian woman director Payal Kapadia, follows the lives of three working-class women—two nurses and a cook at the same hospital—as they move through their days in Mumbai. It is a celebration of the city, the many things the city means to people and to those three women, with the camera catching busy train commutes and luminous night vistas. It is also structured around contrasting love trajectories: young love taking its first big steps and an older woman’s disappointing wait for a husband who has gone abroad for work and not returned, resulting in her holding off the attentions of an aspiring poet/doctor drawn to her. It is an enjoyable film: nicely shot, women supporting one another, more explicit sexual material perhaps than is usual in Indian filmmaking. Of course, it is a pleasure to see a woman win the very top award at Cannes, the Grand Prize. But in truth, such a huge honor was a puzzle since the film seemed not especially distinguished—even ordinary.
“The Brutalist,” directed by Brady Corbet and clocking in at a grand three-and-a-half-hour running time (with intermission), is also huge in its ambition, in the style of Paul Thomas Anderson. It offers us a grand American immigrant epic, of the rise of a fictional architect from Hungary and the Holocaust, Laszlo Toth (played with consummate skill by Adrian Brody), to New York’s top of the heap. If that sounds too familiar a trajectory, Corbet tries to make it unique with non-stop, too-present music on the sound track (sometimes lovely old nostalgic songs, sometimes aggressive, often outrageous cacophony). He also throws in sexual surprises that seem somehow arbitrary and calculated to shock (no sooner landing in the New World than a quite explicit nighttime street encounter with a prostitute); later, episodes of homosexual suggestiveness out of nowhere with Toth’s previously kind cousin; and one strange, awkward, and unconvincing homosexual rape. The film also tries to use Toth’s Jewish identity (and that of his wife, played by Felicity Jones) to connect him (and her) with immense suffering, tragic separation, and weepy reconnection—and with a woundedness that perhaps might explain Toth’s lifelong use of heroin (which otherwise feels gratuitous, unless to make him more contemporary, and hipper, than your usual subject of such a saga.). Also linked somehow to his Jewish identity is the struggle of the great artist/genius, the gain of power, the pride of lofty achievement, and brutal humiliation at the hands of envious, rich, and entitled others—especially Harrison Van Buren, his boss, played stiffly by Guy Pearce. But his relation to the synagogue never feels clear or true, and though being Jewish is treated like a central fact of his life, one never has a sense of what it means to him. As is true of his architectural achievement, glorified ridiculously in the finale when what we see of it—and the pretentious namedropping of the Bauhaus—in no way convinces one of his talent. For all the skill of this film’s production, “The Brutalist” feels like hokum at its heart. Phony aggrandizement. Phony struggles. The one saving element, and it is an enormous one, is the performance of Adrian Brody, which is magnificent. Brody’s wonderfully expressive face, his gravitas, grounds it all and gives it whatever authenticity and believability it may have. Which is not to say that the film is not worth watching, or not enjoyable to watch—it is. This is a personal judgment, and yours might well be very different.
I take this annual column seriously and carefully weigh my choices and approaches. I must say that for my earlier reviews for The Berkshire Edge over the years, I felt strongly that I should only discuss films I really liked. Even though part of a critic’s function might be to warn people about the limits they will encounter in a work, filmmaking is such a hugely difficult process, not only artistically but in getting financing and making everything work, and the presence of a film at this festival means at least that it is a very serious attempt at something, even if not fully successful, an attempt infinitely better than what fills most of the country’s movie houses. So it seemed wrong to discourage viewers in any way from going to see one of the films at the NYFF. Better to say nothing—apart from the added fact that how one reacts to a film is very personal and two people equally immersed in a long history of filmgoing can come up with very different views of a film. However, this year, for whatever reason, I am finding more films that I have misgivings about, including some that were rewarded at the cinema mountain peak of Cannes, and that seems worrying, maybe a downward slope, perhaps a confusion of the sensational, superficial, pretentious with the real thing. Or maybe it just means I am out of step. At any rate, this time around, I am allowing myself in this column to be just as critical as I feel, and I hope that will keep no one from going to see and judge a given film for her or his self.