NYFF: Beloved Sisters

"...and that is why you should nominate us for Best Foreign Film at the Oscars."Our NYFF coverage continues with Nathaniel learning a 'don't procrastinate lesson'

This will be brief though the movie is not. IMDb lists the running time of Beloved Sisters, a fine new costume drama, as 138 minutes. The version that screened this past week at NYFF was 170 minutes long or nearly three hours. I do not know which version AMPAS  foreign language film committee will be screening but as soon as I find out I'll share. I do know this: a 170 minute long movie in which you can't read any of your notes (due to scribbling on the same line repeatedly in the dark) should be written up immediately and not left to swiss cheese memory. 

Beloved Sisters is a true(ish) story about sisters Charlotte (Henriette Confurius) and Caroline (Hannah Herzprung) and the talented man they fall for (Florian Stetter as Friedrich Schiller). The sisters are the best of friends but for financial reasons they have to part; Their mother widowed, Caroline marries for money to help support her family. As the movie begins, Charlotte is now old enough to be shopped around town... excuse me "introduced into high society" as well. Though Charlotte is lovely and (mostly) obedient, she doesn't have the right temperament to acclimate to stuffy society events, aristocratic mores, and arranged marriages. Instead she wants to marry the penniless poet Schiller who will eventually become famous, hence the interest in making a movie about this at all over 225 years later. Her mother, in need of money, doesn't approve.

Soon married Caroline is also in love with Friedrich but, in stark contract to most love triangles, the sisters are happy to share him. One near-drowning which ends with Friedrich scandalously naked and warmed by the sisters sets this odd triangle on its two-decade course. Since history is not at all explicit about what went down between Schiller and the sisters he became so close to, there are many theories and Dominik Graf's film fills in the blanks with a kind of lush romanticism that wouldn't be out of place in a swoony romance novel albeit one without the bodice ripping salaciousness. The film is interested, though not heavily invested in the life of the mind and rather timid about sex actually. This doesn't feel like a misstep exactly since Charlotte's ideas of romance is naive and youthful and the character arcs largely involve the three of them accepting the compromises and difficulties of marriages and friendship.

Though many of the details of the film have slipped by me two weeks later (blame a month of constant film festivalling, not the movie itself) I still remember evocative production design from rich wallpaper to a the delapidated ruins of a family house,  and the wonderfully complicit reading of letters directly to camera. Most of all I remember the first half (which flies by) when love is new and all consuming. Beloved Sisters feels more ordinary the longer it plays, unfortunately, but the first half has a charming youthful idealism and a firm grasp on illicit if modest thrills that come from soulmate devotion, and secretive infatuations like a Heavenly Creatures without the blood spattering psychosis.

Previous NYFF Reviews here. Oscar submission charts here. 
16 Foreign Oscar Submissions Reviewed:  Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Cuba,France, Germany, Iceland, Latvia, Mauritania, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Sweden and Venezuela

Box Office: Expect Gone Girl To Stick Around

Hey all, Nathaniel back at my own home blog. Sorry for my radio silence the past couple of days but on rare occasions the words just don't come. What did you see this weekend? Here's what the masses turned out for.

Gone Girl's strong opening weekend -- a best for David Fincher -- suggests that it's going to stick around for awhile given how many conversations it starts (and editorials it will continue to inspire). That must be what that blurb whore meant when he said "date movie of the decade"... that you'd want to talk about it after seeing it giving you conversation fodder at dinner. At least I hope that's what he meant because the story is so cynical about relationships and would probably be a horrible thing to see with someone you barely knew and didn't know if you could trust and didn't know how to read their reactions to entertainment yet (people want different things from it, after all).

TOP TEN WIDE (800 THEATERS PLUS)
01 GONE GIRL $38 NEW Review
02 ANNABELLE $37.2 NEW
03 THE EQUALIZER $19 (cum. $64.5) Why Denzel?
04 THE BOXTROLLS $12.4 (cum. $32.5) The Most Exciting Animation Studio
05 THE MAZE RUNNER $12 (cum. $73.9) Review
06 LEFT BEHIND $6.8 NEW 
07 THIS IS WHERE I LEAVE YOU $4 (cum. $29) 
08 DOLPHIN TALE 2 $3.5 (cum. $.1)
09 GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY $3 (cum. $323.3) Review & Ten Best Trees
10 NO GOOD DEED $2.5 (cum. $50.1)  

Hrithik Roshan gets wet for action flick BANG BANGTOP TEN LIMITED (EXCLUDING WIDE RELEASES LOSING THEATERS)
01 BANG BANG $1.2 NEW 
02 THE GOOD LIE $.9 NEW
03 THE SKELETON TWINS $.7 (cum. $3.5)
04 MY OLD LADY $.4 (cum. $2.2)
05 BREAKUP BUDDIES $.2 NEW
06 HECTOR AND THE SEARCH FOR HAPPINESS $.2 (cum. $.5)
07 LOVE IS STRANGE $.1 (cum. $2) Review
08 THE TRIP TO ITALY $.1 (cum. $2.6) Review
09 PRIDE $.09 (cum. $.2) Review
10 JIMI: ALL IS BY MY SIDE $.09 (cum. $.2)  

The latest Bollywood action flick starring Hrithik Roshan, he of the very huge muscles and stunning eyes opened big. I don't see Bollywood movies unless there's a dance sequence so someone let me know if Hrithik shows his moves again in this one.

I can watch his dancing in Dhoom again forever...

The other newbie The Good Lie was just behind. I keep hearing that the advertising is not very accurate. Maggie Smith fans have come out for My Old Lady despite a total lack of publicity but weirdly it isn't doing nearly as well as Quartet did and that was a really bad movie. And now two great gay films:  Love is Strange didn't take off like I'd hoped but a $2 million theatrical gross for an indie without bankable stars these days isn't exactly bad news either. Meanwhile Pride, my fav cause of the moment, is only in three cities but will add more next Friday. As I've said before I think this would be a massive arthouse hit if this were still the 1990s when people went to charming limited release movies rather than waiting for them to go to Netflix.

Emmy Threats to the standard lineup don't you think? Jeffrey Tambor for Best Actor in a comedy and Viola Davis for Best Actress in a drama

In TV's version of box office, the ratings, Viola's How To Get Away With Murder is the best ranked new network show of the fall -- thus far, at least, since it's premature to say such things given that premieres are still happening. If you haven't yet checked out my liveblog of the first two episodes why not do it. I'm probably spendingnew week bingeing on Amazon's Transparent. Watched the first three episodes last night and wow it's good with fantastic performances, intriguing and tangled character-based plots, and a firm sense of taking it all very seriously while also being able to laugh at itself. Amazon had been waiting for a series to capture accolades / attention in a way that would put them on the map as a content creator and this could well be it. I haven't heard anything about whether any of their recent pilots (we reviewed Hand of God) will be making it to series. 

What did you see this weekend?

NYFF: Mike Leigh and Dick Pope Begin Oscar Preparations with 'Mr Turner'

It wasn’t just the obvious reasons relating to being a fan of William Turner that made Mike Leigh want to make Mr. Turner. No, what it essentially boiled down to for the British director and his long-gestating passion project was that, essentially, Turner was a clear-cut case of “a Mike Leigh character”. Hearing Leigh describe the famed artist this way actually made me go back and think about the role given that Turner, as portrayed by Timothy Spall in his Cannes-winning performance, hardly comes off as from the same working class terrain of Leigh’s most famous films like Secrets and Lies or Another Year.

I’m still not entirely sure how the statement holds, but the press conference that followed Friday afternoon's screening of Leigh’s lush, gorgeously produced 150-minute biopic did allow for some typically keen insight from the man and his cast and crew who will surely be out there campaigning for the film throughout awards season hoping to crash an already strong roster of British biopics with style and grace typical of a Leigh movie.

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Meet the Contenders: Rosamund Pike "Gone Girl"

Each weekend a profile on a just-opened Oscar contender. Here's abstew on this weekend's breakthrough leading lady. Mild tonal spoilers follow

Rosamund Pike as "Amazing Amy" in Gone Girl
Best Actress

 

Born: January 27, 1979 in London, England

The Role: Based on the best-selling novel from Gillian Flynn, Pike plays the beautiful, ideal "cool girl", Amy Dunne. After she and her husband Nick (Ben Affleck) find themselves unemployed and strapped for cash, they move back to Nick's hometown of North Carthage, Missouri. But the marriage isn't the idealic relationship it once was and on the morning of their 5th wedding anniversary, Amy goes missing - with Nick as the prime suspect. To say more would ruin the film, but let's just say that Amy looms large over the rest of the story...

Reese Witherspoon bought the rights to the book, hoping to cast herself as Amy. But when David Fincher came on board to direct, he had a very specific idea of the character in mind, citing Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy as his model and considered well-known stars like Charlize Theron, Emily Blunt, Olivia Wilde, Abbie Cornish, and Julianne Hough (?!). Fincher went with Rosamund Pike because she wasn't as recognizable and he loved her "opacity" as an actress, having seen her in several films but never quite getting a read on her, allowing the mysterious character to remain so through her anonymity.

Previous Brushes with Oscar and Critical Takes after the jump...

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NYFF: 'Jauja' Loses Viggo (And The Audience) In The Wilderness

NYFF continues with Michael C on Jauja starring Viggo Mortensen

Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja does so many things that critics complain films don’t do, I feel obligated to love it. It has a rich sense of atmosphere. It’s thoughtful. Alonso composes his frames beautifully, and he has the patience to hold on them until every last ounce of meaning has been wrung from the image. It does all this and more, so why was it that by the halfway point I was hoping the projector would break down so I could bolt for the exit?

I think it has to do with the fact that Jauja is made with near total disregard for the audience, and I don’t mean its glacial pacing. If a film is going to be this impenetrable, in fairness, it should contain enough ideas to occupy the audience’s mind while the action on screen is making the slower parts of Gus Van Sant’s Gerry look like Jurassic Park. Jauja contains ideas enough to support your average short film. There’s only so much symbolism about colonialism one can extract from Viggo stumbling alone and confused through the Argentinean wilderness, and for me Jauja’s pulse dies about the fifth time he pauses to refill his canteen. Jauja doesn’t illuminate or challenge so much as it gathers a group of potential story elements into a bundle, ties that bundle to a balloon and then watches placidly as the whole thing floats off into the distance. Not even a late film swerve into the surreal is enough to jolt a heartbeat back into the proceedings. 

Most of the film’s ideas (and 90% of the plot) are frontloaded into the film’s opening act. Details are sketchy but we can be sure that Viggo plays a Danish army captain traveling with his beautiful 15-year-old daughter, Ingeborg, to South America in the late 1800’s. He’s a surveyor, there to aid the military’s attempts to carve civilization out of the wilderness, but that mission quickly takes a backseat to the job of shielding his daughter from the swarm of military men who take an immediate and unwholesome interest in her. When Ingeborg runs off with a handsome young soldier Viggo grabs his saber and sets off into the Argentinean wild after them in what appears to be the start of a dark chase movie but is actually a plunge into an existential void.

Jauja must be working for some viewers since it won the FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes. It certainly plays with the confidence of a film that turned out exactly as its maker intended. Outside the rarified air of the international festival circuit Jauja would probably be most at home as an installation projected on the wall of a modern art museum where patrons can be free to ponder Viggo speaking Danish and staggering over rocks until they feel they have gotten everything out of it they are going to get. (15 to 20 minutes is sufficient). As a movie, it reminds me of the classic intellectual defense of “You have to listen to the notes he’s not playing.” To find Jauja a rewarding experience you have to appreciate all the movie Alonso did not make.

#455258648 / gettyimages.com

 

P.S. It’s pronounced “How-huh” and it refers to the Spanish term for an idyllic utopia. How this relates to the film, like everything else in Jauja, is a bit tough to pinpoint. Jauja screens Tuesday October 7th (9 PM) with Viggo in attendance for a Q&A and Thursday Oct 9th (6 PM)