Innholdsfortegnelse for May - June 2016 i Film Comment

STARING HEAVENWARD ON OUR COVER is Agyness Deyn, star of Sunset Song from Terence Davies. This heart-wrenching and exactingly shot adaptation of a Scottish novel about a young woman on a farm comes to theaters in May. Davies has already premiered another film, A Quiet Passion, about Emily Dickinson, at Berlin, so readers have a lot to look forward to. Jonathan Romney talked to the filmmaker—whose The House of Mirth graced our Jan/Feb 2001 best-of-decade issue—about both movies. Among the titles featured in that best-of-decade festivalof-lists issue was La Captive, by Chantal Akerman, whose legacy continues to grow since her death. In a new essay, Amy Taubin probes the relationship that fueled and complicated so much of what Akerman made: the maternal bond, which the filmmaker made the overt subject…

AT THE SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL THIS PAST JANUARY, ROBERT GREENE’S Kate Plays Christine took home a Grand Jury Prize for Writing— the first time a documentary had ever been recognized at the festival in that category. What does it mean to single out a documentary’s “writing”? Perhaps the Sundance nod was evidence of an advancing appreciation of nonfiction film as a construct; it might also have been a veiled, cheeky statement that Greene’s film is not really a documentary. Yet even though Kate Plays Christine deliberately pushes the boundaries of nonfiction— Greene enlists actress Kate Lyn Sheil to play a character and to play herself playing the character—it doesn’t list a credited writer. Greene’s curious prize aside, the truth is that documentaries have long enlisted writing as an essential element…

An essential component of any government investigation is a personality profile, which helps to create a narrative for criminal behavior. I’m intimately aware of this practice because, back in 2004, the university psychology laboratory where I worked was raided by animal-rights activists, and I was an early prime suspect. Two FBI agents came to my apartment (one asked questions, the other silently looked over my bookshelves) after my fellow lab workers confirmed that I tended to be “passionate” about things. The personalities—all passionate— that have pulled back the veil on the often illegal surveillance and covert warfare committed by governments are a fundamental part of the narratives around these leaks, and how we have come to understand them. These key figures have tended to collapse the roles of reporter, activist,…

TOP 10 1. River of Grass restoration Kelly Reichardt, 94; Oscilloscope $34.99 2. Cemetery of Splendor Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thai., 15; Strand $27.99 3. La Chienne Renoir, Fr., 31; Criterion $29.95 4. Le Amiche Antonioni, It., 55; Criterion $29.95 5. The Revenant Alejandro G. Iñárritu, 15; Fox $29.99 6. Arabian Nights trilogy Miguel Gomes, Port./Fr./Ger./Switz., 15; Kino Lorber $39.95 7. Maurice Pialat x 4: Volume I: The Mouth Agape, Fr., 76; Graduate First, Fr./Can., 78; Loulou, Fr., 80; Volume 2: Under the Sun of Satan, Fr., 87; Cohen Media $39.98 each volume 8. Mustang Deniz Gamze Ergüven, Fr./Ger./Turk., 15; Cohen Media $24.98 9. Francofonia Sokurov, Fr./Ger./Neth., 15; Music Box $29.95 10. No Home Movie Akerman, Belg./Fr., 15; Icarus $29.99 RECOMMENDED Cary Grant: The Vault Collection: Blonde Venus, Josef von Sternberg, 32;…

LIFE’S WORK Noah Baumbach has been shooting his latest film in New York City (as is his wont). It’s been variously referred to as The Meyerowitz Stories and Yeh Din Ka Kissa, which translates from Hindi as “Story of the Day.” The story returns the director to the realm of domestic dysfunction, with Dustin Hoffman playing a respected artist and “patriarch” for whom a career retrospective brings together his estranged family members. These include two (mostly) adult sons played by Ben Stiller and Adam Sandler, and Emma Thompson as the man’s “dreadful, passiveaggressive alcoholic” wife—her words, not ours. LAST DANCE Sebastián Lelio’s follow-up to his awardwinning Gloria wrapped last month in Santiago, Chile. Una mujer fantástica (“An Amazing Woman”) stars Daniela Vega as Marina, a trans woman dealing with the…

“OUR WHOLE MOVIEMAKING SYSTEM IS LIKE OUR AUTO MANUFACTURING,” director, producer, and onetime actor Richard Quine complained to New York Post columnist Archer Winsten in the late summer of 1960. “They ask people what they want. They research public taste and come up with a chrome bouillabaisse, a potpourri—it’s not a Renoir, not a classic…” Quine then strained to recall a name, and Winsten gave it to him: Resnais, whose Hiroshima, mon amour was then making worldwide waves. Quine continued: “He made a picture with no thought of a world market. In Hollywood we’ve got to do a film—I do. And though I may have an artistic vision, we’ve got to make it bookable in as many of 13,000 theaters as possible. We’ve got to think about exhibitors, the churches,…

ROBERTO MINERVINI’S FOURTH feature, The Other Side, welcomes the viewer to West Monroe, a city on the banks of the Ouachita River in northeast Louisiana, and acquaints you with corners therein that you wouldn’t see just passing through on I-20. The film invites us inside the trailer shared by Mark and Lisa, an affianced, methamphetamine-addicted couple, and bears witness to their sex and squabbles, their impassioned oaths that act as a brief respite from an overall pattern of mutually reinforcing self-destruction—the place is cavern-dank, but their affection makes it seem almost cozy. We’re introduced to Jim, a 70-year-old friend of Mark’s who has scarcely a tooth left in his head and is rarely seen without a bottle of brown liquor in his hand, a ridiculous man who is suddenly ennobled…

Éric Rohmer: A Biography By Antoine de Baecque and Noël Herpe Columbia University Press, $40 THERE’S A CERTAIN VOYEURISTIC PLEASURE IN GLEANING ANY details whatsoever concerning the life of Éric Rohmer, one of French cinema’s all-time most discreet and self-effacing titans. After all, Rohmer was a kind of mystery man whose supreme masterpiece may not have been any of his films (although a number of them merit that descriptor) but rather the pseudonymous persona under which he amassed a critical and artistic oeuvre comparable in its influence only to that of his fellow Young Turk, Jean-Luc Godard. News that renowned biographer Antoine de Baecque had, alongside co-author Noël Herpe, waded out into the relatively uncharted waters of la vie de Rohmer and dredged up an essential and ceaselessly enjoyable work…

Jean-Luc Godard has been shooting—or conjuring or whatever it is he does—his latest film. There weren’t more details, or any, at press time, but that’s news enough ... Wim Wenders will direct Alicia Vikander and James McAvoy in Submergence, the story of a love affair; the film received a boost of German and French funding, as did Michael Haneke’s family drama Happy End, starring Isabelle Huppert and Jean-Louis Trintignant ... The next project by Aferim! director Radu Jude was looking for funding at Rotterdam under the title Is This What You Were Born For? ... Philippe Garrel will ride again with L’Amant d’un jour (“One-Day Lover”), thanks to ARTE France Cinéma. He’s currently shooting the story about a father and his 23-year-old daughter, who comes back to live at home.…

How did the idea for the movie come to be? I started to think about it a long, long, long time ago. Even before Innocence. At that time the heart of the project was the hospital. And the mother and the child, maybe 10 years old, on the verge of becoming a teenager. And her not wanting him to go away, and hoping to keep him a child. Then I read the short story that became Innocence, so I jumped on that first. Then I wanted to go back to this, which was, for me, a horror movie. Through the experience of Innocence, [my concept of Evolution] changed a bit. I also didn’t want to repeat the same thing. What was the challenge with Evolution? It was not easy to…

IN HER 1965 ESSAY “THE IMAGINATION of Disaster,” Susan Sontag considered science-fiction films manifestations “of the aesthetics of destruction . . . the peculiar beauties to be found in wreaking havoc, making a mess.” She was thinking in terms of structure, spectacle, a crude dance of sublimation and desublimation: Them!, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Mysterians, Rodan, The Day the Earth Caught Fire. Their mix of naïveté and “alien-ness,” Armageddon and reassuring banalities, ostensibly was a far cry (and perhaps a release) from the exemplary rigors of the art cinema she exalted: Godard, Bresson, Resnais. Yet Godard, for one, had other ideas: Alphaville (65) was already in the can, a landing strip for an unanticipated Invasion of the Highbrows into the cheap realm of speculative fiction, dystopian fantasy, cosmic…

FROM AFAR Director: Lorenzo Vigas Country/Year: Venezuela/Mexico, 2015 Opening: June 8 Where: New York PICKED UP ON THE STREETS OF CARACAS and brought to a fussily decorated apartment, a young man reluctantly takes off his shirt and lowers his briefs as commanded. The seated older man who’s giving the instructions, Armando (Pablo Larraín fixture Alfredo Castro), dispassionately pleasures himself (out of frame). There’s an impersonal, almost antiseptic quality to the sexual encounter that opens Lorenzo Vigas’s oppressively quiet From Afar: Armando’s face doesn’t betray lust as much as a listless fascination with the boy’s lithe body. Later, Armando’s run-in with another young pick-up, Elder (Luis Silva), turns violent as the swaggering teen hurls homophobic insults and a right hook at the unsuspecting if unruffled older man. Soon, though, the pair…

The Malkovich Sessions By Sandro Miller Glitterati, $95 At long last, the John Malkovich coffee-table book we’ve all been waiting for! Or not, as the case may be. But here it is nonetheless: an oversized, lavishly printed, exquisitely unnecessary portfolio of the actor in various states of dress, undress, goofing, brooding, posing, mimicry, and parody. Malkovich the dandy, Malkovich the Theater Person, Malkovich the joker, Malkovich as The Joker. Malkovich done up as Hitler, Che, Lennon, Marilyn, Warhol, Picasso, Meryl Streep, Muhammad Ali. Malkovich simulating iconic photographs by Diane Arbus, Robert Mapplethorpe, Irving Penn, Dorothea Lange. Malkovich as Christ covered in piss (in homage to Andres Serrano’s notorious Piss Christ). Malkovich as a priest clutching a sausage. Malkovich as a priest getting a blow job from an altar boy. Saucy!…

Renato Casaro 1. The Killing Stanley Kubrick, USA, 1956. 1964 poster. 2. Red River Howard Hawks, USA, 1948. 1963 poster. 3. Solaris Andrei Tarkovsky, USSR, 1972. 1974 poster A GENERATION OR TWO YOUNGER than the cartellonisti of Italian poster art’s golden age, Renato Casaro (born in 1935) grew up movie-mad in Treviso, north of Venice. He loved to draw and spent hours copying the styles of the artists whose posters adorned the town’s Cinema Garibaldi. By his late teens he was painting murals for the Garibaldi, and by 19 he was employed at the renowned Studio Favalli in Rome, opening his own studio two years later. Over the next 40 years, Casaro became one of Italy’s most prolific film-poster artists, much sought after internationally. He took the Italian tradition into…