The 60th New York Film Festival
With new movies from Switzerland, South Korea, France, and Romania
Writing
For Plough, I wrote about my two favorite movies from my weekend at NYFF60, Cyril Schäublin’s Unrest, about 19th-century watchmakers and Pyotr Kropotkin, and Cristian Mungiu’s R.M.N., about racial and class anxieties in rural Transylvania. A possibly unlikely pairing, but I found much in common between the two of them to think about. A teaser:
Though movies set in this era are a dime a dozen, Unrest sounds like no other period film I can think of. Nearly every scene of the film is underscored by the mechanical hums, drones, and pulses that constitute the daily soundtrack of the workers’ lives. (Toward the end, when Kropotkin and Josephine slip away from the factory, the manmade sounds are merely replaced with birdsongs that follow their own logical, repetitive rhythms.) Visually the film takes some chances as well. What some may find an overly studied or pretentious filmmaking choice I was personally quite smitten by: Schäublin alternates standard close up shots of characters speaking and working with off-center wide shots, the people shunted to the far corners of the frame and smaller in scale beside their built environment. This patterning of scenes strikes a compromise between the storyteller’s need to provide a human face for audiences to relate to and the theorist’s desire to pull back from human subjectivity to reveal the constructed underpinnings of life. Even Kropotkin doesn’t factor into the story nearly as much as I’ve made it sound – he practically disappears among the rest of the cast, notable more for his strong beard than anything else.
Watching
As for the other movies I saw…
The Novelist’s Film (2022)
At 10pm on my first Friday night in New York I was tired, I was cranky, I was barely in the mood to sit through my first movie of the fest, and I couldn’t tell as the film rolled on whether these were actually the ideal conditions for it. The Novelist’s Film is the third new Hong Sang-soo movie I’ve seen this year (after Introduction and In Front of Your Face, both technically from 2021). His age is starting to show, both in his renewed interest in middle-aged protagonists and in the decomposition of his compositions. The highlights in this film are blown right out (see below), and the effect was jarring. It nearly hurt to look at it.
Per the title, the film is about an idea-starved novelist (Lee Hye-yeong) who meets an actress in the park (Kim Min-hee) and makes a short movie with her. Along the way she has conversations with a friend who runs a bookstore, a filmmaker and his wife (who keeps introducing him as “the man I live with,” only later revealing they’ve been married 30-odd years), and a bookstore employee who gives an impromptu Korean Sign Language lesson. This last bit feels like a bit of a dig at Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car, which features a KSL performance from an actress (Park Yoo-rim) who didn’t know any KSL when she auditioned—though who knows for sure.
Despite my crankiness, I was still struck by the film and how its degraded aesthetics eventually came to feel appropriate for a movie about seeking to overcome creative block in one’s later years, the details lost in the overexposed portions of the image like gaps in the novelist’s receding memory. The film ends with the film the novelist makes—or is it something else? It’s in color, in contrast to the rest of The Novelist’s Film being in black and white, and it resuscitates the autobiographical element that has been missing from Hong’s last couple of films. Kim Min-hee, singing Wagner’s Bridal Chorus, offers a bouquet of wildflowers to the camera operator, who appears to be none other than Hong himself. The credits role, and then we’re treated to the first post-credits sequence in the Hong Cinematic Universe that I’m aware of. Never let anyone tell you an old Hong isn’t capable of new tricks.
The Day of Despair (1992)
Drawing from the closing days in the life of the writer Camilo Castelo Branco, Oliveira’s film opens with a narration of Branco’s diary over a very, very long take of the wheel of a carriage spinning down the road. Clearly I should have timed this shot to better give you a sense of its interminability, but suffice it to say I was transfixed by the formal audacity and the plangent sound design.
If the movie had carried on like this it could have become one of my favorite avant-garde films of all time. Instead it…does something else. At Branco’s house—his actual house, now kept up as a historical landmark—we are introduced to Branco himself (Mário Barroso) and his mistress, Ana Plácido (Teresa Madruga). But not so fast: Madruga appears in modern attire and introduces herself as follows: “I am Teresa Madruga, and I will be playing Ana Plácido.” Yes, it’s one of those movies. The rest of the film trundles on with its fourth wall riddled with bullet holes, lurching from comic to tragic scenes until the fateful day of despair comes calling for its protagonist. I don’t know if they have public access television in Portugal but I strongly suspect they would have shown this bizarre, though not unpleasant, piece of edutainment on it if they do.
One Fine Morning (2022)
It happened to me: my assigned seat at the Alice Tully Hall premiere of One Fine Morning was front and center. Mia Hansen-Løve, approximately 10 feet in front of me, introduced the film with an acknowledgment that it came from a more personal place than usual. In the post-show Q&A with Dennis Lim, who must have been unnerved the next day to see me in the front row again for Unrest at the Walter Reade, she addressed the folk wisdom that all of her films are autobiographical in some way by admitting that her new film, like many of her old ones, was an attempt to put some distance between herself and events that had happened to her.
Sandra (Léa Seydoux in pixie-cut mode) is an interpreter and single mom, the daughter of retired professor Georg (Pascal Greggory), who is suffering from early cognitive decline. Georg lives alone, and Sandra, the oldest daughter, is responsible for figuring out his care situation along with his ex-wife Françoise (Nicole Garcia). Given how rapidly his condition is progressing, they decide to move him into a nursing home; given the waitlists for a good one in the city, what ensues is a dispiriting and unnervingly realistic journey around town from hospital to hospital. Sandra, who is relatively anhedonic as a result of what I think is the implied suicide of her husband, performs her filial duty without complaint but at sustained cost to her already-down spirits.
While this is going on, Sandra reconnects with her old friend Clément (Melvil Poupaud). Though he’s married with a kid, Sandra is down bad and initiates a fling with him. Idiot that he is, he goes along, all the way up to the dissolution of his marriage. Hansen-Løve pitched this movie as an attempt to wed two emotionally contrasting stories—a parent’s decline, a newfound love—that don’t normally coincide onscreen and don’t have anything to do with one another. I don’t know if she’s got that quite right; it sure seems like Sandra is motivated by the sadness in her life to go looking for a novel experience to lift her spirits (or would that be self-medicate?). The movie’s ending, which sees both narrative strands resolve more or less happily, feels improbable, if not outright wishful thinking, but who am I to cast that kind of judgment on Hansen-Løve’s life or artistic process?
