The 42nd New York Film Festival

By: Kevin Filipski

Tuesday January 18, 2005

A successful film festival is a rare thing - in fact, when only one or two good movies emerge from the dross it's time for celebration. But at this year's New York Film Festival, there were several good movies, a few very good movies and even a few great films.

A successful film festival is a rare thing - in fact, when only one or two good movies emerge from the dross it's time for celebration. But at this year's New York Film Festival, there were several good movies, a few very good movies and even a few great films, spread out amid the usual dross. So by that standard, the 42nd annual festival was a smash hit.

The opening night film, Talk to Me, consolidated French actress/writer/director Agnes Jaoui's nimbleness at creating sophisticated, mature comedies of manners: Parisian versions of Woody Allen's films, if you like. Closing night's Sideways was Alexander Payne's partial atonement for the disastrous About Schmidt, which inexplicably opened the festival two years ago. In Sideways, Payne has returned to the fertile ground of his other decent film, Election: a cutting, occasionally insightful comic journey into contemporary America, abetted by clusters of funny dialogue and splendid acting by Paul Giamatti, Thomas Haden Church and Virginia Madsen.

In between, the festival presented new works by veterans, up-and-coming directors and other filmmakers whose initial works had promised greatness. Unfortunately, it was this last group that disappointed.

Also from France, Arnaud Desplechin's Kings and Queen, a sporadically perceptive exploration of a woman and the men in her life - father, son, ex- and current lovers - was too long by at least a half-hour. The same could be said for The World, Jia Zhangke's ambitious look at the denizens of an amusement park consisting of scale models of global tourist attractions. But The World did contain an incisive throwaway line: as one of the guides discusses the Manhattan skyline model, he says that, although the real Twin Towers were destroyed, "Ours are still standing."

Both Desplechin and Jia have made at least one great film - My Sex Life and Platform, respectively - so their latest misfires can be excused (even though each man's previous film - Esther Khan and Unknown Pleasures - was also below their high standards.). No such excuse, however, for Pedro Almodovar, who has already made his share of failures, and Bad Education only adds to an increasingly aggravating filmography.

Bad Education is extremely well-made, as are all of Almodovar's films, but it's also a dishonest and coy melodrama about a subject - child-molesting priests - that deserves franker treatment. Again, a similar problem crops up in The Holy Girl, Lucrecia Martel's follow-up to her extremely interesting debut feature La Cienaga: Martel never confronts the many subtleties of her theme - budding teenage sexuality - and the result is a muddleheaded attempt at sorting through the immense difficulties of growing up.

Unfortunately too, Café Lumiere finds Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien in an untenable position: having said that he wanted to make an homage to the great Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, Hou ends up helming a fitful and quite dull exploration of modern-day Taiwan, never scaling the heights of artistry that Ozu, even in his rare routine pictures, did. Hou should go back to being Hou and forget about Ozu.

Another New York Festival favorite, Zhang Yimou, returned with one of the most stunning-looking movies I've ever seen, House of Flying Daggers, a martial-arts epic that makes even Zhang's own Hero look amateurish. But after an hour of splendidly edited, staged and shot swordplay and action, it begins to take its toll. Still, the movie never looks less than ravishing (and I'm not speaking strictly of the eye-popping Zhang Ziyi - or Ziyi Zhang, as she's now Americanizing her name), although I wonder if those gorgeous vistas and exteriors are the result of truly remarkable cinematography or mere CGI work.

Several filmmakers made auspicious debuts at the festival: Or (My Treasure), from Israeli Keren Yedaya, was an unflinching look at prostitution in contemporary Tel Aviv; In the Battlefields, from Lebanese Danielle Arbid, showed that personal lives in Lebanon can be as dangerously volatile as they are outside the home; Woman Is the Future of Man, from Hang Sang-hoo, was distinguished by more nudity than I can ever remember in a movie from South Korea; and The Gate of the Sun, a remarkably coherent 4-1/2 historical epic from Egyptian Yousry Nasrallah, brings Middle Eastern events to the West through unjaundiced eyes.

Among long-time festival entrants were the usual hits and misses. Triple Agent was heralded as a new kind of movie from France's Eric Rohmer, but even though it was ostensibly a spy thriller, it had little suspense and far too much talk - just like Rohmer's other films. Another New Wave standard-bearer, Jean-Luc Godard, arrived with Notre Musique, an often inscrutable but brilliantly filmed and edited cinematic essay about the possibility of war and the impossibility of peace.

Mike Leigh made his best film to date, Vera Drake, a shattering true-life drama about an abortionist in 1950 London who happens to be a model mother and wife; Imelda Staunton gives the kind of performance for which awards were made. (And she deserves them.) Senegalese veteran Ousmane Semebene's best film, Moolaade, is a riveting study of an African village's slow realization that genital mutilation may not be the best custom to preserve for the future. Semebene artfully finds humor and horror side-by-side in this explosive subject.

Finally, there was the return of Ingmar Bergman. Saraband is a sequel to Scenes from a Marriage, as Liv Ullmann looks up Erland Josephson 30 years after their divorce, and finding a sorrowful relationship being played out among him, his son and his granddaughter. Sublimely acted, phenomenally directed and with so many moments of naked intimacy and candor that sometimes you can't bear to watch, Saraband is supposed to be Bergman's final film (as was Fanny and Alexander 20 years ago) - here's hoping, as Ullmann herself said at the festival press conference, that the 85-year-old Bergman again goes back on his word.

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The 42nd New York Film Festival

By: Kevin Filipski

Tuesday January 18, 2005

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