I took something like a vacation this year to attend the 52nd
New York Film Festival. I purchased one
of their package deals, which guaranteed tickets to both the festival’s
Centerpiece, Paul Thomas Anderson’s INHERENT VICE, and the festival closer Alejandro
González Iñárritu’s BIRDMAN OR (THE UNEXPECTED VIRTUE OF IGNORANCE), as well as
a dozen tickets that could be used for anything else showing in the Main Slate (barring
the festival’s opener, GONE GIRL…that would be another $50).
In 15 days, I managed to catch 18 of the 31 films from the
Main Slate, as well as one from the Spotlight On Documentary series. I only
took 4 days off from work, and drove 30 hours in total. I missed many films
that sounded worthwhile, including the latest features from Jean-Luc Godard,
Alain Resnais, Hong Sang-soo, Arnaud Desplechin, and Pedro Costa, short films
from Kathryn Bigelow and Claire Denis, and a restoration of THE COLOR OF POMEGRANTES
introduced by Martin Scorsese.
Happily, everything I saw was of at least some interest. I
could appreciate certain risks being taken, or note some interesting choices,
even in the case of the films I was less enthusiastic about. I have to stress that it is hard to
trust your own first impressions of films when you see them within a marathon
context, particularly if you are feeling a little physically worn down. The
process of writing up this experience has given me an even greater respect for professional critics who engage in festival coverage, but also more suspicious of their assessments.
I was grateful to see these films on the big screen. My
expectation is that On Demand/Streaming options will drive nearly all theatres that show
independent/foreign/documentary films out of business in less than 10 years.
Simultaneous On Demand and limited theatrical releases, a strategy exemplified
by this year’s SNOWPIERCER, NYMPHOMANIAC, JOE, BLUE RUIN and NYFF selection LISTEN
UP PHILIP (among others) is likely to become the norm. Given that streaming a
film at home is both more convenient and less expensive (especially if one
lives outside a city), it both increases the size of a film’s potential
audience and reduces the odds that anyone would choose to go out of their way
to see it on the big screen. What impact this will have on non-Hollywood
cinema, from the amount of money people can raise, the adjusted expectations on
a film’s potential profitability, the aesthetic considerations filmmakers will
make knowing audiences will only see it on a smaller screen…that, I couldn’t
tell you. But this shift away from the old traditions of theatrical
distribution is already applicable to most of what I saw at the festival.
One of the films I saw there was David Cronenberg’s MAPS TO
THE STARS. It may only be receiving a perfunctory cinema release at best since
Focus World, a related label of Focus Features that specializes in Video On
Demand releases, acquired it. Despite a name director, a cast
populated with stars (Cannes Best Actress-winner Julianne Moore, John Cusack,
Robert Pattinson), and a reasonably commercial premise, it will more than
likely be dumped into the on-demand market next year and maybe play in a few
theatres for a week or two. I’d be surprised if most of the still-unreleased
films I saw can expect a much healthier theatrical life than that, excepting
INHERENT VICE, and maybe MR. TURNER and CLOUDS OF SAINT MARIA. This might not
hurt a film like PASOLINI so much, which employs a more intimate, close-up heavy
style, but it will drastically alter one’s experience with JAUJA (which I’ve
learned will have a limited theatrical release via Cinema Guild).
My first day of the festival included U.S. Premieres for two
filmmakers who first came to prominence in horror/exploitation films, Asia
Argento and David Cronenberg. Both
Argento and Cronenberg had last been heard from with intriguing short films,
FIRMEZA and THE NEST, respectively. While Cronenberg’s was dry, self-reflexive
nod to his earlier “body horror” days, Argento’s FIRMEZA, in which Argento herself portrays a woman whose morning-after observation of her lover triggers a
memory/fantasy of a healing ceremony, displayed a relaxed, almost psychedelic
quality. It was quite a departure from her two earlier features, and I wondered what that would mean for her new feature.
MISUNDERSTOOD
(original title: INCOMPRESA) makes the strongest case so far for Argento as a
director. It is her
most subversive film, marrying the openly autobiographical approach of SCARLET DIVA to the nightmare childhood
concerns of THE HEART IS DECEITFUL ABOVE ALL THINGS, but smuggling the grim
worldview of these earlier features inside a bright, and often funny, coming-of-age
presentation. Set in 1984 and filmed in 16mm, MISUNDERSTOOD tells the story of nine-year old Aria
(Giulia Salerno), who turns to her best friend
(Alice Pea), punk rock, and, especially, her rich fantasy life to escape the
self-involved jerks that comprise her family. To what degree the film is an autobiography, Argento prefers not to say, but I feel obligated to mention that
Aria is Asia’s actual first name. But Aria’s father (Gabriel Garko) is a
popular actor, not a film director, and her mother (Charlotte Gainsbourg, whose
Italian didn’t sound dubbed to me) is a singer, not an actress.
Fans of
Asia Argento’s earlier features expecting her work to evolve towards more
transgressive territory, a la old collaborators like Abel Ferrara and Catherine
Breillat, may view this film critically as a retreat towards safer arthouse conventions.
The fact that this is an Italian language film may even lead some to perceive MISUNDERSTOOD as more of an “art film” than her earlier efforts, though Pedro Almodóvar at his raunchiest has never required so profane a set of subtitles.
Comparisons can be made between Asia Argento and another
director she has acted for, Sofia Coppola. Like Argento, she is a writer/director who has had to prove
herself worthy of the professional opportunities afforded by nepotism, as well as sidestep
the shadow of an iconic father still actively working (albeit far from the peak of his
powers) as a director himself.
Both Argento and Coppola make personal films informed by a unique perspective, coming of age in a world of glamour, art and
celebrity. But their sincere efforts to explore their feelings about the alienation such an upbringing can produce inevitably invite sneers and/or eye rolling from populist-minded viewers (and critics) with
no patience for the whining of the rich and beautiful. Conscious of this
dilemma after the brutal reception that greeted SCARLET DIVA, Argento’s response is to rupture her almost Fellini-esque idyll with
bursts of rage, vulgarity, and destruction. I wonder how long it will be before some film programmer shows it on a
double bill with Lukas Moodyssson’s WE ARE THE BEST?
With
time to kill between the Argento and Cronenberg films, I attended a screening
of Eugene Green’s LA SAPIENZA on a whim with no hint of what to expect.
Critic/programmer Dennis Lim’s introduction went on the assumption that many of
the audience would be quite familiar with Green’s earlier work, none of which
I’d seen. LA SAPIENZA was my happiest surprise of the festival. The film is a charming low-key comedy-drama,
with a subtle, funny turn from Dardenne Brothers regular Fabrizio Rongione.
The plot
concerns an unhappy married couple that crosses paths with a pair of earnest
young siblings while the husband is researching the work of the architect Francesco
Borromini. The film is undoubtedly richer if one has some knowledge of
Borromini’s work, but I went into it in total ignorance and still enjoyed it.
If you took an Eric Rohmer film like SUMMER, but filmed many of the
conversations with the actors directly addressing the camera in the manner
seen in many of Yasujiro Ozu’s films, you’d have a ballpark idea of the
style.
If I’m
honest, I have to confess the most recent David Cronenberg film I’d rate among
his very best was the forever-divisive CRASH, which was produced 18 years ago. Yet
few films in the festival filled me with greater anticipation going in than his
latest, MAPS TO THE STARS. Cronenberg is a filmmaker whose work I’ve actively
followed since I was a teenager, even his weaker films still holding some
interest for me in terms of how they fit into the bigger picture of his
filmography. I’ve even traveled to Toronto to visit locations from several of
his movies, which is a vacation worth considering if you’re weary of Paris
and/or Disney World.
1999’s
eXistenZ aside, David Cronenberg has not been generating wholly original material
since VIDEODROME, but his own voice is still very much evident in his
screenplays, whether adapting Burroughs, Ballard, or (more recently) DeLillo.
SPIDER, adapted by Patrick McGrath from his own novel, technically marks the
transition to where Cronenberg begins directing the screenplays of other
writers almost exclusively (M. BUTTERFLY being the only earlier instance). Yet
it still feels to me stylistically like the last work in a string of
adventurous, often hard-to-classify films that THE FLY’s success afforded him
the opportunity to make. The fantastically gloomy SPIDER’s poor commercial
performance impacted Cronenberg financially, having waived his own salary to help get it made. His return three years later with A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE marked
the beginning of a more accessible direction. While I don’t doubt Cronenberg has a personal
investment in films like EASTERN PROMISES, A DANGEROUS METHOD, or MAPS TO THE
STARS, they feel to me more like for-hire assignments than what came before.
MAPS TO
THE STARS was written by Bruce Wagner, author of novels like Force Majeure (no relation to the recent
Ruben Östlund movie)and Dead Stars, which was based on a draft
of the MAPS script when an earlier iteration of the project fell through due to
financing difficulties. The film follows several characters whose stories interrelate:
a fading movie star (Julianne Moore), a mysterious young woman with severe
burns and sleek black gloves that conceal most of her arms (a terrific Mia
Wasikowska), a hateful Bieber-ish child star (Evan Bird), a limo driver looking
for a break into show business (Robert Pattinson), and a self-help guru (John
Cusack) who practices an absurd form of massage-based psychotherapy
(illustrated in a scene that plays as almost a parody of one of Dr. Raglan’s
psychoplasmics sessions from THE BROOD).
I went
into the theatre expecting a Cronenbergian variation on THE PLAYER, but I found
that it reminded me more of the underrated Paul Schrader/Bret Easton Ellis
collaboration, THE CANYONS. You can see
that same combination of a comically bitchy, tell-all Hollywood satirical
thriller filtered through the perspective of a cerebral filmmaker quite
comfortable exploring the sexual and violent aspects of the story, but too
sophisticated to wholeheartedly embrace the trashier elements in the
manner of, say, a Paul Verhoeven. Cronenberg has "fused" with many distinct voices in the past, but it's Wagner's that is the more prominent one here.
All of this doesn’t make for an uninteresting movie. Cronenberg’s seeming disconnect from the
material adds a compelling strangeness to it all, but it’s hard to imagine anyone
finding MAPS TO THE STARS totally satisfying. The film contains sequences of real power, but others are
startlingly amateurish. Indeed, there’s
a murder wherein a character (and, I guess, the audience) is beaten over the
head by a metaphoric object so clunky that I’m now starting to wonder if the
moment was intended as a parody of symbolism. I’m curious to see whether the
strengths or the weaknesses become more apparent when I re-watch this.
