NYFF: Les Cowboys

Our coverage of the New York Film Festival turns to France - here's Jason line-dancing along with Thomas Bidegain's modern-ish spin on The Searchers called Les Cowboys.

Much like the killer whales that hover so symbolically over the film there are several themes swimming above and below the surface in Jacques Audiard's Rust and Bone. The one that landed the biggest blow was its dissection of patriarchal macho via Matthias Schoenaerts' character (Matthias has built his career on the dichotomy between his hulking frame and his tender heart). As a result Rust & Bone's final act, which felt like a detour at first, proved inevitable and invaluable to the film's ultimate achievement. Absence, it turns out, makes the heart grow colder, and only sacrifice - in this case the shattering of exceptional fists - could pound it back to life.

Les Cowboys, the first film directed by Thomas Bidegain, who wrote Rust and Bone (and other famous French films like A Prophet and Saint Laurent), similarly becomes a story of paternal symbiosis - the effects of a father's psychic touch, bruising adjoining generations. In fact the father in Les Cowboys (played by the usually comic François Damiens) and Matthias Schoenaerts' character in the earlier film share the name Alain. While they're both fixated on saving those around them, they're very different men. Cowboys' Alain, though, never finds his way to the forest from the trees. His obsession and his abandonment make eventual islands of everything he comes into contact with.

It's he first who is abandoned, when his sixteen year old daughter steals away in the night with her Muslim boyfriend, sending a letter behind saying not to follow. But follow he must, his pride as a father maligned. The daughter's action at first seems only thoughtless and cruel, an erratic whim of a love-struck teenager. With time - and there are long passages of time in Les Cowboys, trailing across similarly long and distant frontiers - as her father's eyes and words narrow and harden, we begin to understand she might've had more cause to search for breathing room.

There is also a son, a brother, barely even noticed at first. He's a footnote in his own father's eye-line, until he ages up into a capable third hand. What might become of him, dragged along in the wake of these two outwardly moving forces, both as good as ghosts to him? Les Cowboys has smart things to say about these almost ritualistic cycles of abandonment. Yes, one can be a wanderer, and yes two together (or, it turns out, two also apart) are always going some place, but three? Well, three leads to four and five and that universe, once thought ever expanding, manages its own ways to close itself back up again.

Les Cowboys screens at NYFF on Thursday, October 1 and Friday, October 2.

NYFF: De Palma

Brian de Palma. The man behind: Passion, Mission to Mars, Body Double, Scarface, Carrie, Sisters, Blow Out, Dressed to Kill, and many more.Jason reporting from the New York Film Festival.

Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow's documentary De Palma is, at a basic level, just a sit-down walk-through with the director Brian De Palma across the length of his entire movie career. The co-directors had previously gotten this tour on a personal level, having weekly dinners with the man, and decided, for awesomeness' sake, to capture for future generations of movie-geeks' sake. I saw De Palma only a week and a half ago, and I feel like it needs to be known that not only have I been forced, literally forced, in the wake of it to go and watch three of De Palma's movies in the time between watching the doc and writing this review, but it's also colored every single thing I've written in the time since, and if you follow my hyperactive blog then you know I write a whole lot in a week and a half. A ton. And Brian De Palma, he done swallowed me whole. I can only see things through his eyes now.

I mean, I'm an easy mark, the easiest of easies: I've vigorously defended the likes of Snake Eyes or Femme Fatale at dinner parties; I've drunkenly slurred out verbal love-letters to Fiona Shaw's three miles passed the mark performance in The Black Dahlia; I've had more nightmares scarred by Angie Dickinson's elevator experience than most people have had nightmares, period.

Paltrow, de Palma, and Baumbach

I love sleaze and I love Hitchcock and in Brian De Palma the twain they meet and they meet like fireworks bursting over a triumphantly dead Nancy Allen, and it's like roadhouse whiskey to me -- I like it, I like it!!!

He is New York's Verhoeven -- fun and dirty and adult, dumb and genius in equal gasping measure. I'll go down with his ship, lapping up every red drop. And De Palma, The Film, captures the the man's madness in glorious measure. It is indeed like sitting down to dinner with the man who could dream up both Holly Body's cum speech and "Say hello to my little friend" and poking him in the belly for more. He is ready able and willing to spill more or more still for us, and it's this geek's idea of paradise. I could've watched fifteen full hours of De Palma.

De Palma is screening at the NYFF on Wednesday, September 30th and will eventually be distributed by A24.  Previous NYFF reviews here. For more Jason De Palma love, you need to visit My New Plaid Pants.

NYFF: Cemetery Of Splendour

Jason on the the latest from beloved Thai director Apichatpong "Joe" Weerasethakul.

From what I gather, Weerasethakul is a filmmaker easiest approached with a road-map - an iconography of expectations, of mood and mise-en-scene, to guide you gently into the good night of his magical thinking. That is to say it's best to know what you're getting into. You're best served with a reference point, a friendly little ghost to hold your hand and lead you through the invisible world he's maneuvering his camera through.

It's a world that's not just off frame, to the left or right as you might expect. It's more as if it's sitting in the seats both left and right of you in the theater, occasionally grabbing at your popcorn, maybe whispering a lightly dirty joke in your ear before resting its head on your shoulder. It's comforting... but also a little invasive. He wants all of you.

I went in alone. Cemetery of Splendour, Weerasethakul's newest film, was my first. Hey, everybody had a first at one point, right? That's what makes it first. And just like losing one's virginity I found myself bewildered, a little bit sweaty, and ultimately ashamed at myself for putting it off for so long. That's what I was afraid of? Yeah it was a little bit weird but it went down fine, and I look forward to another spin.

Splendour tells the story of a somnambulist pack of soldiers, mysteriously struck sleepy-time by their surroundings, housed in a former school and taken care of by both some friendly local women (never unfriendly enough to not give a giggling poke at their engorged dream members) as well as a series of glowing candy-cane-shaped lamps, arcing gracefully over their beds while offering the jungle (and the film) a singular neon surrealism. It's rumored that the soldiers were digging up the earth for fiber-optics cables when they were struck ill and these lamps are like living heads of those wires, War of the Worlds-style, risen up to keep a slow colorful creepy watch over their slumber.

The film slowly (I'll have to bust out my thesaurus to find variations on "slowly" and "dreamily" for this review) closes in, in its medium-to-long-shot manner, on one sleeping soldier, and one nurse-type - Itt and Jen, who manage to form a sweet and easy rapport in between the comatose moments. He usually wakes up to her massaging some part of him, which is really the quickest way to a man's heart, no matter what the foodies say.

I don't want to trace out the road-map for you any further. I think if you've already wandered in Weerasethakul-Land you basically know your way around, and you know the journey - one taken half-drifting along just an inch or two above the ground as if you, like Jen, have one leg shorter than the other - itself is the destination. What a lovely journey though - a series of small escalating emotional catharses that moves through like clouds, like a slight breeze through the fanned trees, giving prayer to the benevolent specters milling about in the underbrush.

Cemetery of Splendour is screening at the New York Film Festival on Wednesday, September 30 and Thursday, October 1. If you're interested in Weerasethakul, check out Nathaniel's reviews of his Palme d'or winner Uncle Boonmee.

NYFF: Everything is Copy

Manuel here continuing our NYFF coverage with a documentary about the late great Nora Ephron, Everything is Copy. An HBO documentary, it played to quite the packed house last week with nary a dry eye in the house by its end.

Nora was…

 Kind. Open. Generous. Witty. Interesting. Funny.
Ambitious. Mean. Tough. Malevolent. Judgmental.

You’d expect the first half of those adjectives to make an appearance in the touching portrait of Ephron by her son, Jacob Bernstein. That Everything is Copy includes the latter half is what makes it a pricklier and much more fascinating exploration of the late writer and director. 

Quotes from Spielberg, Streep and more after the jump...

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NYFF: Mia Madre & No Home Movie

Manuel on an unlikely double feature he’d like to dub “How I Mourned Your Mother.”

In his TIFF coverage, Nathaniel mentioned that film festivals sometimes offer you random thematic threads born out of unlikely juxtapositions. This was the case when I caught Nanni Moretti’s Mia Madre and Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie almost back to back. Both films are concerned and inspired by the death of the respective filmmakers’ mothers. The results are as widely different as you’d imagine and fascinating for wildly different reasons.

Moretti’s Mia Madre opens with a scene of laborers rioting against their factory’s owners. Workers chant and fight against armored policemen in riot gear. And then Margherita (an effectively understated Margherita Buy) yells “Stop!” She’s shooting a film, as it turns out and she’s not too happy with the framing she was getting. We slowly learn her personal life is taking a toll; she’s broken up with her boyfriend and her mother is slowly dying at the hospital. You can almost imagine the press about that shoot (“Director’s Personal Issues All But Ruined the Production”). [More...]

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