Film Comment September - October 2017

ONE WAY OF THINKING ABOUT Film Comment is as a critical chronicle of film history as it is happening. That means writing about both rising filmmakers of note and established voices, not to mention shedding light on the overlooked or appreciating artists we think we know well under a new light. All too often in recent months and years, film history has also entailed memorializing the dead, as one major figure after another has ridden off into the sunset. And so we remember the Gallic cool of Jeanne Moreau, the total filmmaking and exquisite high moronic comedy of Jerry Lewis, and the vocabulary-defining horrors of George A. Romero. For movie lovers and critics alike, that can leave us racked with the sadness of seeing our favorites (and we could name…

News, views, conversations, and other things to get worked up about EVERY TIME YOU APPLY AN INTERPRETATION AND ADD LAYERS of craftsmanship—whether it’s the performance of an actor, the impact of a location, the casualness of reality entering through a door left open on set—you’re working on a new path in the long and inexhaustible process of writing. The original book by André Aciman was our greatest influence. It’s set in Liguria, a waterfront region in the northwest of Italy. James Ivory’s script was set in Sicily, the absolute south of Italy, and the movie is set in Lombardy, a region in northern Italy. It’s these beautiful flatlands far away from the sea, all completely soaked in spring water, so it’s perfect to create the specific and peculiar texture of…

BUREAUCRACY, PRISONS, AND ABSURDLY soul-sickening bad times in the countryside all have pride of place in Russian literature and film—but why choose just one? Sergei Loznitsa’s A Gentle Creature is a moveable feast of folly and venality in the backwaters of the superpower-turned-rogue-state, as seen through the eyes of a hapless petitioner. Stoic and unflinching, Vasilina Makovtseva plays a woman who journeys to a prison town to find out what happened to her husband, after a care package is returned to her. It’s an almost comically corrupt place, where she’s snubbed by cops on the take, ferried about town by a pimp, and barely helped by a civil-rights lawyer who faces hostility from the government and the public. Perhaps this is a good moment to say that much of A…

Now that movies are regularly reduced to “fresh” or “rotten” status, roasted or praised in insta-reactions on social media, and written about in “reviews” that are just slightly reworded press releases, hyperbole in criticism is at an all-time high. (that last bit might sound like an overstatement, but it seems true, so let’s just assume it’s correct and move on.) Conferring greatness upon the mediocre is a surefire way to get your name into a trailer or poster, so the savvy brand-building writer will have no qualms describing something as “the best action-comedy reboot of 2017” as early as april—when there are still, you know, eight months left in the year. of course, these kinds of pronouncements are appealing for publicity purposes, and they certainly don’t hurt when it comes…

I love the stories that came out of Cannes about your watching Top of the Lake: China Girl with the audience and soliciting their guesses between episodes as to who might be the culprit. At your upcoming retrospective in New York, which films are you most eager to re-experience with an audience? I suppose In the Cut [2003], which was so badly received at the time it was released, especially in America. The Portrait of a Lady [1996] is also a film that I personally come back to a lot. Nicole [Kidman] is far better in that than anyone gave her credit for. In just the first two episodes of China Girl, we see powerful images that also operate as mysterious gestalts for the whole series. One is that rolling suitcase pushed into…

Soleil Ô / Oh, Sun Med hondo, 1970, film foundation/World Cinema fund ONE OF THE FIRST THINGS THAT THE UNNAMED WEST African man at the center of Med Hondo’s first feature does in Paris is pick up a newspaper. Copies of the daily paper—an artifact of what he calls the “sweet France” where he wants to make a home—will follow him throughout the ordeal of exclusion and humiliation he’ll soon suffer. He circles classifieds advertising jobs for which he’s summarily turned down on the basis of his race; he’s reading a paper when he meets the white woman who scorns him after their night together; it’s after he despairingly hurls a stack of magazines and newspapers across his sparse rented room that we enter the cathartic, rage-filled nightmare sequence with…