NYFF: Mike Leigh's Exquisite and Frustrating 'Mr. Turner'

NYFF coverage continues with Michael C on Mike Leigh's latest 

When a film like Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner comes along you find yourself wishing you could take back all the “great cinematography” praise you tossed around so cavalierly on other films so that the words can carry more weight now that you really need them. Ideally, so far in 2014, one would have only applied the same praise to Darius Khondji’s work on The Immigrant. OK, yes, Under the Skin’s Daniel Landin also. It’s been an exceptional year.

Not content to merely display his paintings, Leigh and cinematographer Dick Pope manage to permeate the air with the aura of J. M.W. Turner’s art. Some of the film’s images produced audible gasps at the screening I attended. The glory of the visuals grant Leigh and company the freedom to dispense with the many of the usual biopic clichés since we understand so much about Turner’s passion just by looking at the screen. Mike Leigh’s latest simulates what it might be like to see the world through the eyes of the great painter. This element alone makes Mr. Turner essential viewing.

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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.

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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)

NYFF: Two Days, One Night

Our NYFF coverage continues with Michael Cusumano on Belgium's "Two Days, One Night" starring Marion Cotillard 

The experience of watching the Dardenne brothers latest critically adored Cannes hit, Two Days, One Night, brings home just how conditioned we are to expect our protagonists to be active and fearless. We are not used to heroes that need to be pushed and prodded to stand up for themselves. Our heroes tend to plunge into conflict with nary a second thought. Marion Cotillard’s Sandra is not one of those characters. When Sandra awakes one morning to a phone call informing her that she has lost her job at a company that makes solar panels, her first impulse is to take it lying down. Literally. On an upswing after what we gather is a nasty struggle with depression, Sandra crawls back into bed resigned to let her sickness swallow her whole this time.

It becomes clear that management, in a move brilliant in its craven cowardice, had given Sandra’s coworkers the choice of keeping Sandra or keeping their bonuses. On top of which, whispers were spread that Sandra was going to be let go no matter what, so it’s no surprise when the vote is a lopsided 14 to 2 in favor of firing Sandra and keeping bonuses. When Sandra’s husband and friends compel her to protest the underhanded way this was carried out, her boss allows for a second vote after the weekend, comfortable in the expectation that convincing people to sacrifice their bonuses is a fool's errand.

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NYFF: A Tiger and a Princess (or Two) Walk Into a Cafe...

NYFF continues. Here's Nathaniel with brief takes on three films...

Allow me to break a rule of film criticism. Rather than wag fingers at directors/films and call them "pretentious!" (a common and near-useless criticism for films with ambitions) or "opaque" (a beautiful adjective, less judgmental but still descriptive of the "ummm..." effect), I shall simply admit that sometimes I don't get it. I think we all have these cases, whether it be films/genres or even entire filmographies that are headscratchers to us whilst others drool. Most people are loathe to admit it lest they seem dumb but I don't have time to worry about that. Way too busy for that particular insecurity. Especially with all the room in my schedule I make for the other ones.

I'm pairing these three films (Ming of Harlem, The Princess of France, and Hill of Freedom) for that reason and also because they all have "of" in the title. Deep reasons. Here we go...

MING OF HARLEM 
Ming is a tiger. Harlem is Harlem.

This documentary is about a 400 lb tiger that was once living in a Harlem skyrise not too far from where I live. My cat lives with me in a Harlem skyrise, too, but he's only 11 lbs. The film is part of the "Projection" series at NYFF. That's a potentially less offputting title for a swath of moviegoers than "Views from the Avant Garde" which is what it used to be called. Having seen the picture, I'm not sure I understand what's avante garde about it?

Perhaps it's the lack of talking heads projecting emotions on to animals OR explaining the psychology of the man who housed them until he was sent to prison for doing just that. Perhaps it's the very sparse insertion of local and national news footage from the time of the scandal, of which there is surely a lot more. The movie is, in part, more of a meditative look at two animals; the tiger shared his apartment with a full grown alligator albeit not in the same room...

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NYFF: Out of Sight, Time Out of Mind

NYFF continues. Here's Glenn looking at Richard Gere in 'Time Out of Mind'.

“The Richard Gere homeless movie” is a bit of a glib way to describe Time out of Mind, but that is the moniker that Oren Moverman’s third feature has found itself labelled with. I mean, it’s not like it’s without merit; Richard Gere does indeed play a homeless man, something far removed from the type of roles we’re more typically used to seeing the 65-year-old actor portray – and something one critic at the post-film Q&A attempted to allude to by asking the actor to compare this role to that in Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo, much to the actor’s and the crowd’s confusion.

I wish I could say there was more going on in Oren Moverman’s film, but I’m not sure I can. At least outside of the formal aspirations, which are admittedly very impressive and the sort of thing that made me wish for a meatier film to support them.

Moverman’s third film after the Oscar-nominated The Messenger and the contemptuous Rampart is a simple one, preferring to simply observe rather than truly examine the plague of homelessness. Large chunks of the film play out at a distance both emotionally and physically as Moverman’s camera stares at him from across the street, through windows, behind doors and in crowds, a visual concept that works technical wonders. In comparison to another homeless-on-the-streets-of-New-York film at NYFF, the Safdie brothers’ Heaven Knows What, which favored intense close-ups and bleak 16mm imagery, cinematographer Bobby Bukowski views from afar and when coupled with the enveloping diegetic sound design helps create a spellbinding technical achievement that is far beyond the film’s otherwise meagre we-are-the-world aspirations.

Politically, Time out of Mind has the same sort of goals as Bob Dylan from whom the film gets it title. Shining a light on a shameful part of American (and indeed global) society, but doesn’t really go far enough. On a dramatic level the film works better when Gere is allowed to share the screen with and interact with others. Jena Malone as the daughter he follows while she’s on a date and at work at a dive bar. Bob Vereen as a fellow shelter-seeker. And most impressively Kyra Sedgwick who is virtually unrecognizable as a woman of the streets who pushes around a cart of cans, sharing a moment of emotional and physical intimacy with the lead character that speaks to the universal nature of wanting to connect.

The film’s style will undoubtedly frustrate many who would likely favor something more immediate that would allow Gere the chance to scream and yell about the plight of being homeless. While I certainly don’t quite want that, more an emotional anchor would have been appreciated. As it is, Time Out of Mind is too long for something with such a slim emotional trajectory. As is common with films of this type, the moment it ends is perhaps the moment it gets the most interesting dramatically. As a technical demonstration, however, Moverman and his crew have achieved something special. It’s an awkward balancing act that doesn’t always work, but there’s a lot here to admire. B-

Time Out of Mind screens on Sunday Oct 5 (6pm) and Thursday Oct 9 (8.45pm)