NYFF: My Golden Days

Manuel reporting from the New York Film Festival with an improbable prequel among this year’s selection.

No one does brooding romantic despair like the French. Arnaud Desplechin’s My Golden Days, a pseudo-prequel to his 1996 My Sex Life… or How I Got Into an Argument so revels in it that you could just as easily title it “The Sorrows of Young Esther.” And while yes, that title would be aping a German novel, Desplechin’s Esther (Lou Roy-Lecollinet) merits being name-checked alongside the most famous romantically bereaved character in all of literary history, and not only because Goethe’s novel, like Desplechin’s film, depends on the epistolary form.

Esther, who falls for Paul Dédalus (Quentin Dolmaire playing the younger version of Mathieu Amalric’s character from Desplechin’s earlier film), spends most of the time daring the camera to turn away from her sorrows, her tears, her despair, all of which she channels into the letter she sends Paul while he’s off at university in Paris. She cannot bear being away from him. Cannot bear her life without him.

Can you blame her? Dolmaire is beautiful!

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NYFF: Paul Thomas Anderson and "Junun"

Here's Jason reporting from the New York Film Festival on Paul Thomas Anderson's music documentary Junun which plays Sunday Oct 11th. Subscribers to MUBI can watch it streaming online. The album (of the same name) arrives on November 13th

A moment of actual honest-to-blog transcendence arrives early, surprisingly early, in Junun, Paul Thomas Anderson's documentary which drops us in the middle of a recording session involving Radiohead guitarist and film composer Jonny Greenwood and a troupe of supremely talented Indian musicians. Anderson situationally immerses us from the first frame, plunking us down at the center of a session and spinning to and fro lazy-susan-like to stare at our collaborators. But it's a wee bit further in, once we've gathered our bearings as to what we're in for (okay, nobody's gonna hold our hands, gotcha) and he lets the music practically carry us out the window and up to a quite literal bird's eye view, that I felt the first twinge of that transcendence I mentioned, and before I knew what was quite happening tears were rolling on down my face.

Listen, Jonny Greenwood's got my number. We've all got our musical deities, those folks who can twist a knob or lay their pinky finger delicately on a single string, and with it break the emotional dam damming us daily up. There aren't many folks I'd follow blindly into war, but my cult-like devotion to every member of Radiohead is unshakable, my personal firmament. I lay this admission out here because I don't know how emotionally stirring a document like Junun will be to someone who's not being moved by the music because that, alongside Anderson's shaky digital footage of men blowing horns and night-time scooter rides through the streets, is that. There are moments of individual levity sprinkled about, between numbers, but Junun's grip, while tight and skyward bound, is probably only big enough to carry off a few. I recommend being a chosen one but what do I know? I'm blind and dumb with emotion here.

Photo © Shin Katan

Previously at NYFF

NYFF: The Oscar Contender "Son of Saul"

Manuel here reporting from the New York Film Festival on Hungary's Oscar submission, a powerful debut film...

The Holocaust film is, as historical subgenres go, perhaps the most well-worn. From John Ford and George Stevens’ documentary footage of the camps liberation all the way through Spielberg’s Schindler’s List and Benigni’s Life is Beautiful, cinema has been irrevocably tied to our cultural remembrance of that most barbaric killing machine. Cinema’s ability to record, to bear witness, has no doubt played a central role in this artistic canon. Of course, at the heart of the cinematic project of the Holocaust lie conflicting and controversial ethical questions. From Theodor Adorno’s “There is no poetry after Auschwitz” dictum to storied arguments about the validity and usefulness of recreating the images of Western civilization’s most gruesome chapter, directors, victims, and historians have asked plenty of hard to answer questions.

Does the depiction not merely replicate the dehumanization on which that enterprise depended? Is there a way to narrativize this barbaric act without simplifying history? Can cinema’s images ever do anything more than ring hollow when compared with the immensity of human life lost?

If all of this sounds heady as an intro to a review of László Nemes’s debut film Son of Saul, you should’ve heard leading man (and poet) Géza Röhrig and his director talk at length about these very issues while quoting Primo Levi at the press conference a few days ago...

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NYFF: In Jackson Heights

Manuel here visiting one of my favorite New York City neighborhoods with a great guide by my side, the great Frederick Wiseman in his new doc which screened as part of the New York Film Festival.

Last summer, the day before Colombia played its World Cup match against Brazil, I was set to meet some friends in Jackson Heights to grab some hot dogs (such good hot dogs!) and go out to some of the gay clubs around Roosevelt Avenue. Little did I know Frederick Wiseman was busy filming In Jackson Heights right around the same time: framed by the World Cup and ending with the July 4th fireworks, it seems totally plausible he was shooting that very same day!

I share this anecdote because more than anything else, Wiseman’s film feels like a truly immersive visit to this Queens neighborhood. [More...]

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NYFF: Sing the Electric "Steve Jobs"

Reporting from the ongoing New York Film Festival here is Jason on Oscar hopeful "Steve Jobs".

It should surprise no one that a movie directed by Danny Boyle and written by Aaron Sorkin is all about rhythm. The rhythm is established at the start (and Steve Jobs runs zero to sixty so you'd best get a grip quick) and pulses outwards like the blink of a cursor, or a techno beat. You could probably set your watch to it... if you were a maniacal math genius who could work out the exact algorithm they're working off of. 

The new film is structured around three events in Jobs professional life: his first presentation of his Macintosh computer in 1984; the "perfect black cube" of the NeXT machine in 1988 after he was fired from Apple; and his triumphant return to the company a decade later with the crayola-tinted iMac every girl in my college dorm owned. Within each chapter, there are a series of sonnets of sorts, devoted to the folks in his life - his daughter, his work-wife, his boss, so on. The pieces shift once the rhythm is established, but structurally speaking the film is rigorous, in a (and I do not use these words lightly) soul-pleasing kind of way. Once you find your way in to Steve Jobs, there's this satisfaction in expectations, and the massaging thereof. [More...]

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