Impressions Of The 52nd New York Film Festival – Part 1

I took something like a vacation this year to attend the 52^nd 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.