NYFF: Saint Laurent is Über-Stylish but...

Our NYFF coverage continues with Nathaniel on France's Oscar submission Saint Laurent.

If you're going to make a biopic of one of the great fashion designers, it better damn well be stylish. Saint Laurent one of two new biopics tackling the iconic French designer Yves Saint Laurent assures you of its gifts in this area almost immediately. There's nary a frame, at least for the first two thirds of the film, that you couldn't frame and admire for aesthetic reasons: rich decadent colors, gorgeous actors as gorgeous people, carefully composed shots in elaborately decorated homes, dark exclusive clubs, and interiors of stores that that are so beautiful in their rigidity that they look more like institutional museums after hours, free of consumers but full of art. Even the daring full frontal nudity is stylish, whether it's employed for confrontational queer desire or for humor as in a memorable sequence late in the picture between a clothed woman and naked one. The scene plays like unintentional comedy for a moment until you discern that it's actual comedy, a meta joke about overdetermined STYLE and the fashion world's self mythologizing nature within a movie positively dripping with style and self-mythologizing.

The director Bertrand Bonello (House of Tolerance, The Pornographer) has chosen the right form for his movie -- at least in part, telling the story visually first and foremost, and lushly and creatively at that. Would that I had a photographic memory to recount the many fine choices but there are three that stuck with me, all from the first and second acts...

dangerous gay players & beautiful dress-up muses after the jump...

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NYFF: Blue Is The Lukewarmest Color

Our coverage of The New York Film Festival continues with Jason's take on actor-director Mathieu Amalric's The Blue Room.

The ordinary afternoon street-scene beyond an open window half-illuminates a hotel room, letting in a miniature horde of visitors - refracted sunlight, a honeybee, a cool breeze, the implacable face of somebody's unexpected husband - all inclined to land upon the sweat-strewn backs of the bed's entangled bodies in one way or another. In Mathieu Amalric's The Blue Room the lovers inside dare this space, their nudity displayed openly, to crash down around them - the bee makes a pretty picture, the breeze cuts the sticky air, and the husband, well, he'll have his day too.

The Blue Room is based on a 1964 book by Georges Simenon, a writer who's been described by some as the French Patricia Highsmith, and much like we've come to expect from adaptations of that writer this story is obsessed with crime and sex and where the twain shall tragically meet - the "criss cross" of Highsmith's Strangers on a Train especially sneaks to mind. Simenon seems less interested in Bruno & Guy's kind of repression though; he and Amalric's concerns seem to blossom off passion's full expression. So sweat and blood roll down parted lips and Amalric lingers upon the contents of that room as if they themselves hold all the answers. Time and again we flash back to the lovers, often frozen as post-coital still-life, flushed and spent - what happens when those moments can't stay contained?

Amalric's film tries to have it both ways, running simultaneously cold and hot - the frame square as an ice-box, the strings lush with heat, a court-room drama told through lurid tales of windswept outdoor encounters - but it tends to meet in the middle more often than not, lukewarm when it should boil and tepid when it should chill to the bone. The fractured timeline structure robs us of too much emotional investment - it becomes more a what-happened than a why; an assortment of mostly unknowable glances piled up and posed.

The Blue Room screens tonight Sept 30th (9 PM)

NYFF: Heavens, No!

The New York Film Festival has begun. Here's Glenn on the return of the Safdie brothers in 'Heaven Knows What'.

Heroin addicts roaming around the streets of New York City sounds like a good time at the movies, I know. Don’t storm the cinemas too quickly, okay? Okay, so I am being sarcastic, but anybody who sees the Safdie brothers’ Heaven Knows What is going to need a laugh and a heavy dose of sunshine after bearing witness to this very downbeat film from the makers of Daddy Longlegs (aka Go Get Some Rosemary). Like that 2010 film, the feature debut of Ben and Joshua Safdie as a directing partnership, Heaven Knows What is very confrontational in its imagery like somebody inspecting an open wound and poking it with a dirty finger.

Heaven Knows What is certainly a step up from that Independent Spirit winner, as the brothers become more assured in their craft and storytelling. ...more

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NYFF: Seeing Isn't Believing in 'Maps to the Stars'

The New York Film Festival has begun. Here's Glenn taking an alternative look at David Cronenberg's divisive Cannes winner 'Maps to the Stars', now a confirmed 2014 contender.

Digital filmmaking has a lot to answer for – much of it good, but a lot of it bad. Its biggest crime, however, may be eradicating David Cronenberg of style. It’s as if the transition of celluloid to digital, which coincided with his swing away from merely a cult name-brand director to one whose films, at least briefly, appeared to be targeting a somewhat more acceptingly mainstream audience (A History of Violence and Eastern Promises certainly), weakened his eye for visual storytelling. Not only is Maps to the Stars a surprisingly ugly film in terms of its garish lighting, messy blocking, and lethargic, bulky transitions, but it’s a distressingly amateur in one in terms of simple camera placement and editing.

Much was made of Matt Zoller Seitz’s plea for film writers to discuss form in more detail. “Form is not just an academic side dish to the main course of content”, he said last year, and while I am not sure what Seitz’s opinion is on Maps to the Stars I can’t imagine he would be too thrilled.

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NYFF Surprise! While We're Young: Or, The Kids Are All Wrong

Our NYFF coverage continues with Matthew Eng on this year's surprise screening -- which was less of a secret than usual this year, continually hinted at by the NYFF themselves, even spoiled ahead of time by IndieWire...

Ben Stiller & Naomi Watts star in "While We're Young"

Noah Baumbach is showing his age.

Not that this is the first time, mind you. Anyone who stuck through his exquisitely harsh and thus totally divisive Greenberg will surely remember Ben Stiller’s crusty, titular protagonist sourly announcing to a party full of fuzzed-out twentysomethings, “I hope I die before I end up meeting one of you in a job interview.”

There’s something instantly more pronounced about Baumbach’s evident unease towards the current generational divide in his latest adult dramedy, While We’re Young, in which Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts star as Josh and Cornelia, a deceptively comfortable urban couple who are surprised to find themselves befriended and seduced by Jamie and Darby, a married pair of kind-eyed, porkpie-wearing, Bushwick-dwelling hipsters, played by Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried. What starts as a casual, multi-generational friendship soon transitions into something more consuming, as Josh, a struggling documentary filmmaker whose sophomore follow-up has taken ten years to finish, finds himself both aping and inspiring Jamie, who just so happens to be an aspiring documentarian himself. [more...]

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