NYFF 64: “London” and “The Loneliest Man in Town” blur the line between fact, fiction and portraiture

by Cláudio Alves

When one’s engagement with cinema happens mostly through mainstream productions, it’s easy to fall into the false belief that narrative and documentary film are two strictly separated categories. However, almost since the medium's birth, the line between the two has been blurred, the barrier porous and permeable. One might go as far back as the Lumières’ artificial staging for their shorts, or perhaps relitigate the authenticity of Flaherty’s Nanook of the North for the millionth time since it hit theaters in 1922. Perchance we might reflect on the cinematic traditions of Portuguese post-revolution cinema, or the Iranian auteurs who kept pushing boundaries with their hybrid works in the 80s, 90s, and beyond. At the 64th New York Film Festival, many films fell between the binary of fact and fiction, with two doing so by appealing to the portrait as a cinematic model.

They’re both Austrian projects that vied for the Golden Berlin Bear earlier this year – Sebastian Brameshuber’s London and Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel’s The Loneliest Man in Town…

LONDON, Sebastian Brameshuber 

Between Vienna and Salzburg, the West Autobahn stands as the first motorway ever built in Austria, its completion dating back to the late 60s and its origin drawing from Nazi projects for the nation. Nowadays, it’s an unremarkable part of life, of a daily routine, for most who drive on it. It’s also where Sebastian Brameshuber sets his latest film, whose title, London, is as misleading here as it might be for the Brazilian character study that won the Queer Lion in Venice. For the first shot, an establishing point that welcomes us into the film proper, Brameshuber doesn’t let us see anything but the road, putting us in the driver’s seat as we peer through the windshield looking for something, someone.

The driver finds them in a parking lot, holding a McDonald’s bag while wearing a soldier’s uniform. He’s a military conscript, here for a ride arranged through an unnamed app, eager to talk, to share, to open himself up to the driver, the camera, us. Conversation flows naturally, though, with not a hint of a staged confession - or so we might be led to believe - as the young man questions the institution whose garb he now wears and for which he has and will perform heinous violence. He has PTSD, even if, at first, he might not have been able to name it as such, to articulate the malady with such specific language. Bobby helps, an active listener who’s as committed to that role as to his gig as an amateur chauffeur for the needy and dispossessed, lost along the way.

Bobby is Bobby Sommer, the driver and a face some viewers might recognize from Jem Cohen’s Museum Hours docufiction from over a decade ago. Ostensibly, Sommer isn’t playing a role in the traditional sense, only embodying himself as a facilitator for dialogue, Marina Abramovic-style. And these interactions are always shot the same way. A profile shot of the driver from the passenger seat’s perspective, its reverse, and that windshield camera looking ahead at the road. Well, sort of. Because, truth be told, shooting in a car driving down the Autobahn isn’t the most practical thing, especially when the structural premise of your film is to record one-on-one conversations.

So, most of London’s two hours was actually shot indoors, in a studio, through the magic of rear projection and a casting call that invited folks to share parts of their biography in this forged car ride. Sommer would improvise, sharing something of himself, too, and thus assuming a fraction of the same vulnerable position his scene partners allowed themselves to embody. Do these constructions make the conversations any less real, though? Their essence is still somewhat true, as are the things said that go beyond personal stories. And we’d never get unmediated reality in a straight documentary anyway, because the camera’s presence will always warp the world around it, whether we admit it or not. 

One might question the need for the illusion, especially since it repeats itself time and again, never disclosed within the film that, after that first sequence, is usually catching up to the ride in media res and only breaking for interstitials that follow Bobby Sommer into a life that might be his own, or just another part of the fantasy. Then again, seeing someone drink a cup of coffee at a service station is only a lie if you allow it to be. The man is there, the coffee is there, and it's actually being consumed. It’s true, no? In light of this, the subterfuge in certain conversational passages, like the ride with a Romanian woman during a rainstorm when communication is more broken than usual, might feel like betrayal. But are they a betrayal? Does cinema, even docufiction, owe us a rundown of all its mechanisms?

More interesting to ponder is the content of the conversations, how they do and don’t paint a portrait of the socioeconomic landscape that comes with the country we keep spying through the car windows. Brameshuber and Dane Komljen’s editing is as sharp as a surgery-ready scalpel, managing the audience’s attention through a repetitive cycle that could easily inspire disengagement. That also implies some heavy curatorial work, rawness and rough edges smoothed over for a stab at a flowing portraiture that can sometimes feel too cleanly “apolitical” even as it hints at a moment of growing militarism and connects much of Austria’s infrastructure to the Third Reich, not to mention the last two passengers Bobby drives through the night. Maybe it doesn’t go far enough. Maybe that’s not the ultimate point of the exercise. 

At the end of the day, no matter how expansive London might feel in reflection of the open road, it always comes back to Bobby as a person and as device, as a potential avatar for cinema itself – speaking of Avatar, the convo where filmmaker Ted Fendt defends Cameron’s 2009 blockbuster as a Marxist text from the passenger’s seat is a hilarious highlight. Bobby creates the conversation, guiding it back toward and away from himself. He directs and consumes, he’s Didi-Huberman’s phenomenological theory about how the images we observe look back at us, a variation of Nietzsche’s abyss and the solace of cinematic humanism all wrapped into one. If London serves as nothing else, it’ll serve as a snapshot of Bobby Sommer and, through him, become the medium’s own self-portrait.

THE LONELIEST MAN IN TOWN, Tizza Covi & Rainer Frimmel 

Switching from Neorealist technique to a fabulist’s whimsical digressions and back again, Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel have become some of contemporary cinema's best portraitists. While their early works tended toward the collective as subject, more recent efforts have shifted their attention to the individual, often profiling those who make performance part of their lives. Indeed, looking at the likes of Babooska, Mister Universo and the Oscar-submitted Vera, one can note a special interest in eccentric figures who perform themselves for the camera with as much flair as they do it for the people in their private circles, the entire world an audience and the self a theatrical construct.

As they continue their explorations, Covi and Frimmel’s cinema feels ever more untethered from the norms of documentary filmmaking as something connected to journalism or the cataloging of fact as some would like to see it. Instead, they consider the truth of the person observed and playing a persona as the center of their project, letting everything else bend to the fantasy of those elements. With Vera, one of Italian cinema’s most tragicomic nepo babies allows us to see into her life, alright. But she’s also playing the plot of a novel Tizza Covi had written years before, getting a chance to be an actress, a star with as much presence as that of her famous father, Giuliano Gemma.

Though they’re not adapting literature or indulging the actorly aspirations of their latest subject, Covi and Frimmel continue to push the limits of what one can consider a documentary with The Loneliest Man in Town. This time, they’ve pointed their camera at Alois Koch, an Austrian singer who dedicated his whole existence to honoring the blues, obsessing over Elvis and an America that exists solely in his imagination. In fact, Koch has never left Austria, though he speaks English with the facsimile of a Southern twang and has pictures of great Black American singers all around his house and basement studio cum mausoleum. Also, for all intents and purposes, his name is Al Cook.

That’s the identity he chose for himself eons ago, staying faithful to its Hollywood dream in private, or so it seems through Covi and Frimmel’s camera. You can research Al Cook yourself and find much of what the film presents to be nothing but the truth, yet the tale twists in how it’s told, framing a very specific vision of Cook as someone whose state of being is almost spectral. We find him in an apartment building emptied out of any other tenants, as if following the doings of a ghost haunting the ruin of his past abode, loneliness burnt bright in 16mm that responds with celluloid’s volatility to events like power cuts or the lights going haywire all of a sudden. The image itself seems ready to burn out and become a ghost. 

The narrative explaining such despondency is simple and might even remind readers of Sônia Braga’s stubborn heroine in Aquarius. The reason for Cook’s solitude stems from all his neighbors having been bought out of their homes by a developing firm that wants to tear the place down to build some new corporate hell or luxury complex. In essence, he’s forced the money men to wait until he dies or gives up. And luckily for them, that’s sort of what the singer’s planning. Not a surrender to capital’s pressure, but an acknowledgment that, at the end of his life, it might be time to check some stuff from the bucket list and finally visit the places he spent years dreaming about. 

No longer will the Danube stand in for the Mississippi Delta in photo sessions for his album covers if Cook takes the money and visits the USA before his time on this Earth is done. Memphis becomes a place of pilgrimage, even though The Loneliest Man in Town rejects any spiritual tonalities that might make it a flick about faith or religion. Instead of transcendence, Covi and Frimmel are often looking for comedy, delighting in the absurdity of Cook’s Americanized stage persona and the rueful fiction of this last trip. Their mise-en-scène is almost Tati-esque in its rigor – more is communicated by how the apartment home transforms over time than any dialogue - while Cook plays his part with the consummate deadpan of a Kaurismäki protagonist.

Watching The Loneliest Man in Town, one might start a game of spotting the reality beneath the performance, and that’s both a fool’s errand and a stealth source of euphoria. Because there’s something quite beautiful about the yellowed ivories of an old piano, or the quirky juxtapositions between a real dog standing beside some porcelain cats Cook’s trying to sell, or even the genuine sorrow that takes hold of the singer when seeing archival footage of himself, his youth, and beloved persons lost to time. Best of all, Covi and Frimmel cede the entire passages to their star, letting him and his guitar, his mellifluous yet weary voice, sing the blues into cinematic immortality. May his voice be heard long after he’s gone, the character and artistry of Al Cook so much more enduring than the ephemeral nature of Alois Koch. 

Neither London nor The Loneliest Man in Town has a US distributor yet, but hope is everlasting. The latter was part of NYFF’s Main Slate, while Brameshuber’s film played in the Currents section after also screening in TIFF’s Wavelengths program.