Innholdsfortegnelse for March - April 2016 i Film Comment

IT’S HARD TO BELIEVE THAT JOHN TURTURRO JUST TURNED 59. AN eye-blink ago, he was the new kid on the block in 1989’s Do the Right Thing, hanging around Sal’s doomed pizzeria, appearing as the quintessential Italian-American male who was either too scrawny, or goofy, or just wrong for the Mussolini or muscle archetypes. He’s there on the edges of The Flamingo Kid, To Live and Die in L.A., The Color of Money, and Hannah and Her Sisters. But in Five Corners, Tony Bill saw the dark side of Turturro, and he’s been mining it ever since as the quiet guy, Mt. Etna, who could go off at any moment and take down more than the corner where Ernest Borgnine—Turturro’s archetypal forebear—stood around as Marty. Turturro’s essential sweetness is always…

EXTERIOR. DAYTIME. A STREET IN WARSAW, JAMMED WITH UNMOVING traffic. Some people have stepped out of their cars, standing behind opened doors to look further up the road at some unseen activity or phenomenon, and a few are taking pictures with their smartphones. Hardly anything is moving except for the tall young man who’s dancing against the tide of cars and drivers, swinging his arms overhead, spinning and undulating—and except for the camera that’s following and gliding closely behind. Is music playing? And is it live or in his head? No one seems to take much notice of the man, save for the camera, and save for us. Yet we don’t just take notice of him: we’re with him—in step, in motion, centered on him in the frame, going forward.…

LIKE JEAN GABIN, VINCENT LINDON STARTED out looking like a handsome playboy, before growing into another kind of actor, consistently portraying mysterious, somber characters. Lindon, whose career began off screen in the costume department of Alain Resnais’s Mon Oncle d’Amérique (80), has taken on many a pent-up hero who moves as if concealing a secret, or perhaps a secret self. In Augustine (12), he plays Professor Charcot, the celebrated neurologist who treated hysterical women but whose own wild impulses were buried under the formal attire of the times. At 56, the actor looks too haunted to be the suave lady-killer and too classy to be the loser. Though he hails from a kind of Parisian aristocracy—his uncle, Jérôme Lindon of Editions du Minuit, published Samuel Beckett—he has made his mark…

OF COURSE, YOU WANT TO READ ABOUT The Birth of a Nation, THE big story out of Sundance 2016, but not one that necessarily will have legs. Nate Parker’s debut feature is a biopic about Nat Turner, a contested figure in American history (when he is not ignored outright). Turner led a slave revolt in Southampton County, Virginia in 1831 that began and ended in a bloodbath: about 60 white men, women, and children were murdered by Turner and his followers, who in turn were all murdered or driven out by whites, and with them many slaves who had not participated in the uprising. The Birth of a Nation is a mess of a film, but it has ambition (witness its title) and a sense of urgency—qualities that were notably…

The astral sunset of orange hair, the mismatched pupils staring out from pools of azure eye shadow, the parted coral lips, all standing out against a skin tone a shade whiter than the allwhite background. If you had to find a single document to encapsulate the audiovisual phenomenon of David Bowie, you could do worse than the film clip for “Life on Mars?,” the roving, exploratory camera handled by Bowie’s official court photographer, Mick Rock. Bowie’s work in the musicvideo format spanned through the end of the Scopitone, the birth of MTV, the Vevo afterlife, and into his own postmortem. His first crack at it, if we don’t count hawking popsicles in a 1967 TV commercial directed by Ridley Scott, was a lo-fi sci-fi “Space Oddity” clip shot at the…

DISPENSING WITH THE HOMAGES TO LOW-BUDGET THAI FILM AND TELEVISION THAT GAVE a distinctive flavor to the magical realist goings-on of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (10) and Tropical Malady (04), Cemetery of Splendor is Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s most openly political film. Of course, openness is relative—there’s still plenty of myth and symbolism to sift through—but the occultation is in direct dialogue with the regime set in place by Thailand’s military dictatorship. Cemetery of Splendor is also the director’s most profoundly sorrowful work, one that speaks in dream-logic fits and starts to the country’s troubled past and tenebrous future. “There’s some political influence, but I still feel that it’s not a political film. Many people can access this from many angles.” Set in the filmmaker’s hometown of Khon…

NOT SO LONG AGO, THE DEPENDABLY DIVINE MIDNIGHT SECTION featured down-and-dirty horror movies with the occasional side helping of super-dark humor and other miscellanea. But not so anymore; straight-up horror seems to have become the exception. This year, we got a cheerfully twisted Kevin Smith teenage romp that quickly wears itself out (Yoga Hosers); an unbearable “feminist” revenge Western (Outlaws and Angels, sadly the only film in the fest that was shot and projected on 35mm); two thoroughly grating gross-out comedies, one about a whacked-out chick afflicted with a far-from-routine pregnancy (Antibirth), the other about a well-endowed strangler who kills his victims while slathered in grease (umm, yes, The Greasy Strangler); a tedious purported documentary about a group of people addicted to an immersive “real-life” horror-experience delivery service (The Blackout…

NEW WAVE PICK Paris Belongs to Us, Criterion, $29.95 “ONCE YOU START MAKING CONCESSIONS, you can’t stop,” says Gerard (Giani Esposito), a theater director who walks away from his production of Shakespeare’s Pericles when his angel investors turn out to be meddlesome demons in disguise. Nothing is as it seems in Paris Belongs to Us, the first feature by the late Jacques Rivette, beginning with the title, immediately contravened by an epigraph from Charles Peguy: “Paris belongs to no one.” Rivette, who was more than usually successful in avoiding concessions in the course of a half-century of filmmaking activity, began his career by introducing motifs that he would revisit time and again: rehearsals and conspiracies. A literature student, Anne (Betty Schneider), stumbles into a role in Pericles, and shortly afterward…

ANY LONDONER OF THE 1950S, ’60S AND ’70S, filmgoer or not, would most likely have been aware of the posters of Peter Strausfeld (1910-1980). Eye-catching and distinctive, Strausfeld’s duo-chromatic woodcut and linocut posters were printed, in batches of 300 to 500, to be displayed in the London Underground, where, for over three decades, they advertised screenings at the Academy Cinema repertory house on Oxford Street. Strausfeld’s exclusive relationship with the Academy is unique in the annals of cinema exhibition. An émigré from Nazi Germany, the artist was interned as an “enemy alien” during the war on the Isle of Man. It was there that he met Austrian filmmaker George Hoellering, and when, after the war, Hoellering took over the Academy Cinema to showcase European and Asian cinema, he hired Strausfeld…

Ostensibly a cinematic portrait of the Louvre, Aleksandr Sokurov’s Francofonia: An Elegy for Europe zeroes in on the drama of the museum’s survival during the Second World War, when Nazi officer Count Franziskus Wolff-Metternich found bureaucratic ways to disobey his art-collecting superiors, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, and cooperate with museum director Jacques Jaujard to shield the museum’s paintings from Allied bombing and Nazi seizure. Yet a slippery disjunction between the film’s images (from the opening credits to deathbed photographs of famous Russian writers to scenes of a sea captain speaking on video-phone with the film’s narrator) and the willful, digressive voiceover sets Francofonia up as a detective story for viewers. The Louvre appears as treasure house, resurrection site, crime scene. Sokurov’s voiceover alternates fluidly between conversing with the sea…

“Sing a song of sad young men. Glasses full of rye. All the news is bad again. Kiss your dreams goodbye.” —“THE BALLAD OF THE SAD YOUNG MEN” Lyrics by Fran Landesman LET’S GO BACK IN TIME. TO A TIME WHEN GAYS and lesbians were considered inferior forms of human. To a time when the idea of a bi- or fluid sexuality was roundly deemed a myth or, worse, an aberration. To a time when transgender people were considered social pariahs or perhaps attractions to be gawked at publicly. When same-sex couples had to fight to be treated as equals in the eyes of their government, neighbors, even families. To a time when politicians used them as fodder for their own gain, whether they approved or disapproved of them, or…

In Terrence Malick’s spiritual reveries The Tree of Life (11), To the Wonder (12), and now Knight of Cups, production designer and hands-on genius Jack Fisk performs like a quick-change artist of time, space, and mood. Malick’s portrait of a screenwriter (Christian Bale) who drifts from marriage with a heroic doctor (Cate Blanchett) into liaisons with a succession of insubstantial beauties, is like an impressionistic L.A./Vegas version of Federico Fellini’s La dolce vita. Fisk himself compares it to the abstract art of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert. Fisk reveals that he is not just, as he says, a “compatriot or a partner” to his directors— who also include David Lynch, Paul Thomas Anderson, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, and Brian De Palma—but also their champion and interpreter. How do you prepare when you…

Everybody Wants Some REVIEW BY NICK PINKERTON Director: Richard Linklater Country/Year: U.S., 2016 Opening: April 1 Where: Limited RICHARD LINKLATER’S DOZEN-YEARS-IN-THE-MAKING DOMESTIC epic Boyhood was an art-house smash, and deservedly so—a distinctly American shomin-geki built around an audacious conceptual gambit. And like any work deemed “critic-proof,” Boyhood garnered its share of clickbait backlash, one common theme being that it was overrated by a critical establishment made up of somewhat socially awkward white males who saw themselves mirrored in the film’s somewhat socially awkward white male protagonist. Whatever else might be said about Everybody Wants Some, it won’t face the same accusations. Linklater’s latest, an ensemble comedy set on a Texas campus during the three-and-a-half days before the start of classes, is focused on a pack of wild alpha males: the…