Innholdsfortegnelse for November - December 2015 i Film Comment

Slagged by the guitarist as “only a promo video” for The Kinks’ 1983 “Come Dancing,” Julien Temple’s short, aired on a fledgling MTV, yielded the band’s best-selling single and revealed the unsung gift of its singer-songwriter. Ray Davies plays two roles: a slick, mustachioed, cockney swain in a Fifties music-hall setpiece, and the present-day Davies, performing live in concert with The Kinks. The video culminates in the joyous tumult of a concert-hall balcony, as the camera closes in on Davies’ pinstriped spiv frozen at its center, his face a sneer of disdain, as down below The Kinks play the kind of North London dance hall that rock ’n’ roll drove to extinction. Unlike any rock star in any film you’d care to mention, Davies shines brightest here in the role…

GIVEN ITS EXTREME CONTENT AND HIGHLY CONFRONTATIONAL intensity, it comes as no surprise that Son of Saul has proved controversial. In Cannes, where the film premiered in May, I took part in a FILM COMMENT roundtable of critics; while some of us enthused about the film, Stefan Grissemann (see p. 26) found it “highly problematic and also obscene.” Manohla Dargis in The New York Times described Son of Saul as “radically dehistoricized, intellectually repellent.” Son of Saul is neither melodramatic nor mundanely centered on redemption. Nemes’s film is, most immediately, about what we do and don’t see, what can and can’t be shown. Conversely, Shoah documentarist Claude Lanzmann, famous for his disapproval of dramatic representations of the Holocaust on screen, surprised everyone by praising Son of Saul, calling it the…

With stars like Charles Bronson (1921-2003) we reach a stage where the bulk of the work is becoming forgotten— action product of a certain kind, cheap packaging at the expense of content, a loose affiliation of recurring names, nothing much to write home about. Yet Bronson became one of the first stars to turn himself into a global commodity rather than remaining just another famous actor. There were brighter stars, but Bronson was bigger box office. In the Seventies he sewed up the markets in the Middle East, Asia, and Europe. He was especially big in Japan. (Check out his Japanese ad for Mandom cologne, so far beyond camp that it could dispel any theory of the man’s lessis-more school of acting.) Bronson learned to talk of himself as product,…

ALBERTO BARBERA MUST LIKE BEING THE DIRECTOR OF THE VENICE International Film Festival, and would surely be delighted if his contract were to be renewed for another four years. And so in contrast to last year, the 2015 lineup worked hard to avoid antagonizing any one. No cinephile shenanigans this time, and no flirtation with down-and-dirty genre films! Respectable, responsible crowd-pleasers were warmly welcomed. Movies that were more intellectually demanding and aesthetically advanced if not experimental was kept to a minimum, and usually left to the old masters––most of the youngsters delivered work within the tight constraints of “Inter-Art-House” (International Art House) orthodoxy. Little in the way of the new or unconventional can be expected from most of those who have traveled the creative-labs-and-campuses circuit, and once a few of…

HOT PROPERTY | Remainder Again, Please “HOW CAN A FABRICATION REPLICATE REALITY?” FILM COMMENT mused in a 2003 overview of the gallery work of Omer Fast. Twelve years later, the song (or the refrain) remains the same. Remainder, Fast’s dizzying debut feature, adapts Tom McCarthy’s 2005 novel about an amnesiac trauma victim who attempts to jumpstart his memory by orchestrating insanely meticulous reenactments. Starring Tom Sturridge, and impeccably designed, it’s like Atom Egoyan meets Christopher Nolan meets M.C. Escher: an iterative thriller of identity. Sturridge plays a man who loses his memory in a freak accident. Awarded millions in a lawsuit settlement, he sets about pursuing the only things that money can’t buy—his past, and his intact former self. And so—mimicking a director and acquiring his own fixer-producer—he hires people…

Even by the debased standards of gallery installations and lobby art, Bring Me the Head of Tim Horton was displayed under subpar conditions at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. Looping on a flat-screen affixed to one of the Lightbox theater’s lobby support columns, this collaboration between Guy Maddin and Evan and Galen Johnson competed for attention (during my morning visit) with the imminent arrival of Johnny Depp for the Black Mass press conference next door. As photographers jostled on the line to get in and ticket buyers milled about, the left-field making-of about the Afghanistan war film Hyena Road was barely even audible from the tiny bench that sat between the screen and an opposing wall a few feet away. IN FOCUS: Bring Me the Head of Tim Horton…

A PALLID MAN, HIS FACE INEXPRESSIVE, MAKES HIS WAY THROUGH a death factory. He’s at work, a functionary; his job is to guide people calmly inside, make them undress, then enter a room, for purposes of hygiene, it would appear. He routinely fulfills his duties, quickly collecting the valuables of those you can hear screaming and banging on the doors of the gas chamber they are now locked within. Minutes later he will be dragging their naked corpses away and cleaning the area for the next round. This is the world Son of Saul inhabits: a film willing to grant an inside view of a Nazi extermination camp, aiming for a cool reenactment of the unspeakable incidents that have occurred there. As an art-house experiment that refuses sentimentality and character…

Spotlight REVIEW BY DAVID FEAR Director: Tom McCarthy Country/Year: U.S., 2015 Opening: November 9 Where: New York and Los Angeles YOU WON’T BE ABLE TO THROW A paperweight or a Pulitzer without hitting critical comparisons between Tom McCarthy’s drama about Boston Globe reporters exposing the Catholic Church’s musical-chairs pedophile policy and All the President’s Men, the reigning standardbearer for compelling movie journalism. Let’s not bury the lede: in addition to some straight-up tips of the hat, there are trace similarities between Alan J. Pakula’s howthe-Watergate-was-won autopsy and this deep dive into top-down institutional rot in Beantown and beyond. Both are concerned with uncovering cover-ups; both are dogged in detailing how newsroom sausage gets made. And if McCarthy’s ode to the men and women who kept following the money—not to mention…

FOR ALL OF THEIR SCOPE, DEPTH, AND COMPLEXITY, FREDERICK Wiseman’s films often unfold with the elegant simplicity of Morse code. Short establishing shots; long scene; brief interstitial sequence; really long scene; short exterior shot; really, really, really long scene. And onward to the end, the films proceed at this irregularly regular tempo, holding our attention and communicating meaning through the music of modulation and duration. It’s true of his institutionally focused films from Welfare (75) to At Berkeley (13), as well as of his films of place, including the current In Jackson Heights, a portrait of the Queens, New York, neighborhood that’s one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse in the world. Of course there’s more than Morse code at play, as these segments function like notes of varying…

I ONCE PLAYFULLY SUGGESTED A REPERTORY SERIES CALLED “HITTING the Wall,” devoted to the disastrous last works of great directors— films so bad they’re capable of demoralizing the most ardent auteurist, even as they rendered their creators permanently unemployable. A Countess from Hong Kong paired with Buddy, Buddy, for instance. Elia Kazan’s 1969 film The Arrangement is not quite on the subterranean level of those career-killers, even though that’s basically what it did. The reviews were dire when they weren’t condescending—“overwrought misfire” captures the prevailing tone, and it’s not an inaccurate summation of the film itself. Kazan had had failures before—A Face in the Crowd (57), Wild River (60), America, America (63)—but they were financial failures, serious movies on serious themes that were treated respectfully by critics. The Arrangement was…

An ice pick. An atomizer. A rose. I scrawled these words in my notebook before swooning home from Carol, Todd Haynes’s consummate braiding of social diagnosis and emotional catharsis. Weather aside, there is something irreducibly cold about the world inhabited by Rooney Mara’s Therese Belivet, a shopgirl and aspiring photographer in early-Fifties Manhattan, and by Cate Blanchett’s Carol Aird, a wellto-do suburban homemaker. Carol’s impending divorce gets messier once her husband cites a vague “morality clause” in petitioning for custody of their daughter. Therese, whose boyfriend keeps pushing romantic trips and long-term commitments, finds that beginnings and middles of relationships can be as disorienting as conclusions. The two women meet, differently unprepared for the passion they soon feel for each other. While capturing the chill of inhibited longings and New…

A PART FROM A NEW PROGRAM OR TWO, THE ANNUAL CARNIVAL OF commotion at Toronto did not appear to give rise to that much more hubbub for the 40th-anniversary edition. Certainly the opening-night film, Demolition, was nothing to crow about, and while the opener of any fest is often an easy target, it was dismaying to read the programmerin-chief boasting that he and his colleagues couldn’t have tailor-made a better film for the purpose. That’s because Jean-Marc Vallée, apparently desirable after hosting awards-courting performances in Dallas Buyers Club and Wild, surpasses his directorial tendency toward tone-deaf politics with the bizarre douchebag-liberation narrative of his newest. Looking a bit like a bourgeois action figure, Jake Gyllenhaal plays an i-banker who works for his fatherin-law’s firm and loses his wife in a…