NYFF: In the Shadow of Women

Manuel here eating a baguette furiously hoping you’ll pay attention to him as he tackles this French film about wounded masculinity.

While I worried I would only catch films dealing with death throughout the entirety of the 53rd iteration of the New York Film Festival, I chanced upon Philippe Garrel’s In the Shadow of Women, a black-and-white film about infidelity. The film centers on Pierre and Manon (Stanislas Merhar and Clotilde Courau), a married couple who work together on his documentary film projects. We slowly see their routine slowly getting rusty and so it comes as no surprise when Pierre falls for a young intern (Lena Paugam) working at the same film archives our couple frequents. The affair and its subsequent shattering effect on the marriage plays out pretty much how you’d expect, with few of Garrel’s choices coming from left-field though never quite steering far from the narrative and character beats all too common in films about broken marriages.

I have to admit, I’m a sucker for this genre. Closer. Unfaithful. Gone Girl. Little Children. I love me a good “our relationship is falling apart” film. [More...]

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NYFF: Voilà... "The Walk"

Nathaniel reporting from NYFF 53 though this movie is now in IMAX theaters and next week wide for all y'all. This piece was original published in a shorter version in my column @ Towleroad

The Walk  begins in mid air with a jaunty circus-like score from composer Alan Silvestri accompanying the clouds. Our birds-eye view is quickly revealed as just above Manhattan, perched on no less a tourist icon than the Statue of Liberty. That we’re looking at something purely presentational is abundantly clear as crinkly-eyed Joseph Gordon-Levitt makes his first appearance, smiling and speaking directly to the camera. And he speaks with a cartoon French accent to boot. (To be fair to JGL, many real French people sound like cartoon people when they speak English. This is meant as a compliment because who doesn’t love cartoons and/or French accents?). What’s more, at least to these only super-marginally trained ears (I watch a lot of French movies and I took French in high school –that’s the extent of it!) JGL’s actual French sounds impeccable in his subtitled scenes with French co-stars.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt's adorableness can be so distracting? Is that why filmmakers keep trying to make him look not so much like Joseph Gordon-Levitt? We already know he can sing / dance / act and in this film he juggles and wirewalks and speaks fluent French. Is there anything he can’t do? 

Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s adorableness can be so distracting! Let’s get back on topic...

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NYFF: 10 Best Things About "Carol" (First Impressions)

Todd Haynes' highly anticipated Carol screened a week ago for NYFF press and I immediately began marking time P.C. "POST CAROL". It was that impactful. For something that appears so delicate it breaks with immeasurable force. Carol recounts the relationship between a posh 40something society wife (Cate Blanchett), no stranger to lesbian affairs, and a curious 20something photographer/shopgirl (Rooney Mara) who has never been in love. Haynes's sixth feature is one of his best and thus both a marvel and a relief since he had gone AWOL from movie screens for eight years. The film which began the long drought, I'm Not There, is the only one that this longtime Haynes fanatic doesn't cherish.

Herewith 10 favorite things (in no particular order) about Carol right after meeting her. This infatuation is too potent to think clearly at this point for a traditional review. A word of caution: exciting first dates don't always lead to fullblown rewarding relationships but this one appears to be a (celluloid) romance for the long haul. 

1. Gifts & Gift-Wrapping
We like to think of final quarter movies as "gifts" since so much of awards season is centered around the holidays. This one is beautifully wrapped (the production values are breathtaking on literally every level) and even better once you start tearing the careful packaging apart to see what it's gifted you with. Carol also takes place during Christmas just like Tangerine so in one single cinematic year we've received the best Lesbian Christmas movie and the best Trans Christmas movie. How about that? More...

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NYFF: Ingrid Bergman - In Her Own Words

Manuel, adding a belated capper to our Ingrid Bergman centennial coverage. While I’m well-versed on Streep, Davis, Hepburn, and other towering female stars, Bergman has always eluded me. It is my one big actressexual blindspot. Is it because she’s effortlessly aloof, somehow always beyond my grasp?

When I wrote about Cactus Flower and that amazing dance sequence, I realized the only other film of hers I’d watched is (obviously) Casablanca. So, when I saw the New York Film Festival would be screening Ingrid Bergman - In Her Own Words, well, I couldn’t deny myself the pleasure of taking Bergman 101, a general survey of the actress crafted out of Bergman’s own letters and diaries (hence the title) and made up mostly of her own home videos. You get to see a young Isabella Rossellini, a bumbling Hitchcock, and Rossellini playing papa to his young kids, and even Ingrid’s very first “no makeup” screen test; I’m sure they had to add the qualifier because those deep red lips popped even in black and white.

I’m unsure how the film plays for those who know everything about the mythic beginnings of that enigmatic Swedish star, all the gossip surrounding her banishment from Hollywood (and her triumphant return), and who can trace the history of cinema by tracking the star’s own move from small national markets to Hollywood to Europe and back again, all the while gracing the stage in Italy, France, the West End and Broadway. But for those of us uninitiated -- or at the very least, not well-versed -- in Bergman, this was a treat, particularly paired with so many home movies that showcase not only her great eye. As her daughter Ingrid says, while most families have as many home tapes as them, Bergman’s were never boring, and you can see in her obsession with recording her visits with her kids an attempt to capture moments that were always much too short and fleeting. 

Much like Bernstein’s look at his mother Nora Ephron (boy what is it with mothers at this festival!), Stig Björkman’s film is not really interested in hagiography; frank conversations with her children paint a picture of an ambitious woman who did everything and anything she needed (and wanted!) to do what she wanted to do above all: be in front of the camera, in many cases at the expense of her children and her marriages. Pia Lindström, her daughter from her first marriage, is asked at one point whether there’ll one day be a Mommie Dearest book about Bergman. Oh no, she says, I can’t imagine that ever happening. She was always so loving. If anything, we all just wanted more of her.

Ingrid Bergman - In Her Own Words plays Monday October 5th and Tuesday October 6th.

NYFF: Microbe & Gasoline

Here's Jason reporting from NYFF on Michel Gondry's latest film.

I've always been fascinated by, in this modern day-and-age of super handy internet pornography (ha ha handy), the cartoonish sort you'll sometimes stumble upon online - with access to the billions upon billions of pixelated private parts available at the click of a mouse just who's getting off to this hand-drawn stuff? Michel Gondry offers up the answer with Microbe & Gasoline, and of course it had to be Michel Gondry. The best known purveyor of cinematic hand-stitched whimsy, who's turned everything from dreams to clouds to memory itself into tactile seeming sensations, would want to get his mitts smudged with the detailing of wank-book pencil lines. 

This isn't as odd an entry point into Microbe & Gasoline as it might seem at first blush. The film, which tells the tale of the bloom and blossom of friendship between two teenage outsider princes, their crowns two matching heads of thick provincial locks, is somewhat obsessed with body functions, as teenage boys are prone to. It's not just getting laid (although that is there too, waving wildly) - it's haircuts and bathroom stops and strangers (putting the strange in stranger danger) wanting to caress your molars.

But then Gondry is our tightrope practitioner of phantasmagorical practicality - when he soars, he soars along a surface of scratches and knicks and splintered wooden beams. Whereas somebody like Christopher Nolan will go out of his way to scrub the surface of his imagination into a flat gleaming cube, inscrutably too scrutable, Gondry's gonna flip that mirror over and get to work on its underbelly, hammer in hand, nails in teeth.

It doesn't always work! It hasn't really worked in awhile, save moments here and there - I liked bits of Mood Indigo but it always felt like somebody else's story, too dour by several degrees. And don't get me started on The We and the I, which felt like being trapped in an echo chamber of humiliation and teenage horror which I hardly made it through - Gondry can almost be too generous a soul, allowing his folks to tip far too far towards screech instead of sing. Microbe & Gasoline though, it works. He keeps himself in check - the whimsy bumps and chugs along the road with precision-crafted engineering, and his two lead actors have an endearingly low-key rapport. It's his best film since Eternal Sunshine.

Microbe & Gasoline is screening at the New York Film Festival on Sunday, October 4 and Monday, October 5.