Innholdsfortegnelse for March-April 2018 Vol. 54 No.2 i Film Comment

“The TV scene with Joe and his mother was an improvisation. The only thing is, that ‘e e!-e e!-ee!’ noise [from Psycho] is really expensive—you can’t use that sound without paying 13 grand or something.” LYNNE RAMSAY’S YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE premiered at Cannes last year in an unfinished version. Now fine-tuned, the thriller—based on a novella by Jonathan Ames—is a blood-soaked Descent Into Hell story, with Joaquin Phoenix as Joe, a war-traumatized professional killer trying to save a young girl from a pedophile ring. In Cannes, the film was something more than a work in progress, but it feels much more cogent in the completed version. What exactly have you changed? We’d just shot the war scenes [flashbacks to Joe’s past]. I wanted them to be like shards…

This essay was originally written for a special Wong Kar Wai tribute at the Lumière festival, where the director received a prize for career achievement last fall. Thirty years after As Tears Go By emerged and 20 years after In the Mood for Love began its journey to the screen, Wong’s essential work looms ever larger in cinema, history, and memory. Permission for translation and publication of this essay has been graciously granted by the author. FOR A LONG TIME, WE BARELY SAW HONG KONG IN HONG KONG films. They were shot in studios, most of the time by filmmakers who turned their backs on the city in which they lived—temporarily, they thought. They were firmly rooted in a mythified past or the imaginary worlds of traditional martial arts and…

SPOOR, THE ENGLISH TITLE OF THE 2017 FILM DIRECTED by Agnieszka Holland in association with Kasia Adamik, refers to the trail left by an animal that hunters use to track it down. Pokot, the Polish title, is a hunting term for the count of the day’s kills. In the course of Holland’s film—her most magnificent work—the hunters become the hunted. Three of them are brutally killed. I cheered their deaths. They deserved no better. At the New York Film Festival last fall, Holland described Spoor as “an anarchistic, feminist, ecological crime story with elements of black comedy and magic realism.” She noted that four years ago when she and novelist Olga Tokarczuk began adapting the latter’s novel, Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead, they did not consider…

Sundance This is a moment when racial and gender diversity is the entertainment industry’s biggest talking point, but Sundance has always been ahead of the curve in actively supporting exactly that. FOR SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL VETERANS, THERE WERE FEW SURPRISES IN THE 2018 edition. This is not a negative observation. Yes, this is a moment when racial and gender diversity is the entertainment industry’s biggest talking point, but Sundance—the Institute, the Labs, and the festival—has always been ahead of the curve in actively supporting exactly that. Don’t forget that in 1989, the year the festival was transformed overnight into a honeypot for agents and studios by Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape, the grand prize went to Nancy Savoca’s True Love. Regarding gender, the question that arose from Sundance’s decades-long…

Director: Andrew Haigh Country/Distributor: USA, A24 Opening: March 30 DESPITE THE MYTHICAL PROMISE of the “open road,” romanticized visions of the American West often give rise to a directionless isolation. A loneliness pervades the narrow, deserted highway in the opening of Jerry Schatzberg’s Scarecrow, an improbable meeting place for Gene Hackman and Al Pacino’s drifters; the desert seems to swallow up a broken-down Harry Dean Stanton in Paris, Texas. In Andrew Haigh’s fourth feature Lean on Pete, 15-year-old Charley Thompson (Charlie Plummer) appears similarly adrift as he trudges across mesas with Pete, the ailing racehorse he’s trying to save from the slaughterhouse. In this multi-state sprawl, Haigh stresses Charley’s confinement—as his supplies dwindle, he looks dangerously small in high-angle shots, as though the landscape threatens to close in on him.…

The Workshop strands itself between its desire to provoke and its refusal of hyperbole, withholding coherent perspectives on the urgent subjects it broaches. Director: Laurent Cantet Country/Distributor: France, Strand Releasing Opening: March 23 THE BATACLAN. THE NAME RINGS out 40 minutes into The Workshop, like a ghost shaking its chains, just two years after three gunmen murdered 90 people in that Parisian concert hall. That’s notably less time than it took Hollywood screenplays to address 9/11, Sandy Hook, or Charleston. The phrase alone announces a welcome refusal to hide behind abstractions, instantly raising the stakes of Laurent Cantet’s meditation on conflict and killing in a multiracial society, and on the vaporous line between artistic conjecture and murderous imagination. The subject of the Bataclan arises among seven brown, black, and white…

Filmatique displayed its political commitment with last year’s Banned Nations season: films from Syria, Iran, Sudan, and elsewhere, in response to the Trump ban on travel from Muslim nations. ⏩ Filmatique NOT LONG AGO, CINEPHILES WHO DIDN’T have the opportunity to travel to festivals just had to grin and bear it when hearing about the riches of the international film scene, and pray that a handful of each year’s choice titles would get some degree of theatrical or DVD exposure. Today, thanks to the expanding field of streaming services, a hungry viewer might almost panic at the amount of interesting material that’s available to watch at home. Fandor, MUBI, et al. provide their own diverse and idiosyncratic menus, while services such as Sundance Now and Festival Scope offer a wide…

The wide, wide world of cinematic nonfiction Filming turns the present into the past, then editing turns it into a new kind of present. But something else can transform footage, something related to but also divergent from time: our feelings. FILM FOOTAGE ALWAYS BELONGS TO THE PAST, WHETHER IT was shot a century, a week, or five minutes ago. What enlivens footage, and makes it current regardless of age, is the series of decisions over shaping and presenting it. Such is a foundational alchemy of filmmaking: filming turns the present into the past, then editing turns it into a new kind of present. But something else can transform footage, something related to but also divergent from time: our feelings. Time progresses, as do we, as does the filmmaker—yet these progressions…

OUR HOUSE YUI KIYOHARA YUI KIYOHARA’S AUSPICIOUS SECOND FEATURE—A MYSTERIOUS, SURPRISING WORK THAT recalls Jacques Rivette, Kiyoshi Kurosawa (her teacher), and even Mulholland Drive—is something like a low-key, stripped-down take on the oneiric “woman in trouble” film. Drawing structural inspiration from the fugues of Bach, the film interweaves two parallel narratives unfolding seemingly at the same time and in the same place, albeit in different dimensions. We first meet 13-year-old Seri with some friends during an apparent attic dance party, and soon we learn that she lives with her mother in a coastal town. It comes as little surprise that Seri doesn’t approve of her mother’s new boyfriend. But before we can get too comfortable with that familiar-enough story, we’re ushered off to another one, in which an amnesiac named…

THE HISTORY OF STALINISM IS PARTICULARLY BLEAK, even by Soviet standards, but director Armando Iannucci tells it like a joke. As comedy out of historical tragedy, The Death of Stalin is thankfully more Mel Brooks’s History of the World: Part I than Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful—which is to say dirty, irreverent, and riotously funny. A master parodist of the vulgar incompetence of American and British politicos, Iannucci is best known for Veep (2012-), In the Loop (2009), and The Thick of It (2005-2012), which skewer beige civil servants awash in meaningless paperwork. In stark contrast to the reassuring hum of photocopiers and fax machines, The Death of Stalin is set to the staccato soundtrack of extras being shot in the head. As corpses pile up, the thing that strikes…

Once you’ve had decades of movie experiences, mind-blowing and life-altering discoveries are fewer and further between, even if you act like nothing’s different. Astonishment becomes unfazed surprise; admiration usurps the place of revelation. Intimations of obsolescence creep into our best-laid aesthetics and we ponder at what point mortality catches up with not only artists (and critics) but also the art form itself. In 1968, Manny Farber asked the ever-pertinent impertinent question: “How many films since Musketeers of Pig Alley [1912] have been sustained?” Fifty years on—and 100-plus after D.W. Griffith’s 17-minute bolt from the blue—I’d recalibrate it: how many movies are truly one of a kind, and deserve—sustain—a nice Latin term like sui generis? Then one fine morning, fate nudges you toward an unreleased film—actually, a three-hour, shot-on-video opus—that sounds…

Remembering cinéastes who have passed on Just as Straub was bound to Huillet, it was never just Dan but always Dan and Toby. I loved running into them anytime anywhere, always smiling and usually hand in hand. WHEN I THINK OF DAN TALBOT, I THINK OF HIS WARMTH, HIS COURT-liness, and his gentility. And I think of this: that he started a company because he wanted to show the world a movie that he loved. Needless to say, things have “evolved” since the mid-1960s. Half a century later, “I love this movie” has come to mean “I think we will make money with this movie.” It has been this way for quite some time. About 20 years ago, I was talking to a film distributor with excellent taste and a…

The intention here is to look in the palimpsests of studio screenwriting for little reflections of Faulkner, who could not help but bring his Southern-stamped personality to bear. William Faulkner at Twentieth Century-Fox: The Annotated Screenplays Edited by Sarah Gleeson-White, Oxford University Press, $105 LIKE SO MANY AMERICAN LITERATI FOLLOWING THE COMING of the talkies, William Faulkner went into the movie business in search of fast paydays. It was an odd fit for one of the country’s foremost dirt-between-the-toes regionalists in a studio-era industry accustomed to re-creating the far reaches of the globe within the confines of a soundstage. But unlike some of his peers, most famously F. Scott Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Hollywood got along quite equitably. He was enough of a fixture to be burlesqued in Joel and Ethan…

Hale County This Morning, This Evening resists the tendency to slot black lives into familiar storylines of inertia and inevitable suffering, as ready-made vessels for tragedy. IT COULD NOT SOUND SIMPLER AS A DESCRIPTION of a film: moments from the lives of African-American residents of a smallish county in Alabama. But if RaMell Ross’s debut feature is as simple as all that, why have we seen little of these lives on screen elsewhere? Premiering at Sundance in January, Ross’s journal-like experimental nonfiction film cycles through a panoply of scenes that might serve as lyrical cutaways in other hands: a child running back and forth in a living room, a man backing away from a car window, sweat dripping from another man playing basketball, a bonfire’s nimbus of smoke phasing out…

Elegant Beast, which appeared the year before Yuzo Kawashima’s death, is among other things an inventory of strategies for shooting an entire widescreen, color film in one cluttered apartment. Elegant Beast Yuzo Kawashima, 1962, Kadokawa Corporation YUZO KAWASHIMA WAS AN EMBLEMATIC FIGURE OF POSTWAR Japanese cinema. The legacy of World War II loomed over his acerbic social satires much as it did over the work of his contemporaries Masaki Kobayashi and Keisuke Kinoshita. Unlike those directors, Kawashima died at an early age (45), just as a younger generation of filmmakers—including his student and protégé, Shohei Imamura—was emerging with an angrier, edgier, and more heterodox style. Kawashima, then, remained a transitional figure, his fierce sense of hypocrisy and exploitation shaped by the beginnings of Japan’s economic resurgence after the war. Elegant…

Filmmaking according to the makers Wonderstruck was the hardest movie I ever scheduled and also the most rewarding. We were shooting essentially two different movies—one set in the ’70s and one in the ’20s. YOU TELL SOMEBODY THAT YOU’RE AN ASSISTANT DIRECTOR AND THEY THINK, “Well, you’re the guy who gets the director the coffee, right?” (No, that’s the director’s assistant.) In preproduction my primary function is to schedule the movie—determining what scenes are going to be shot in what order. A big piece of the schedule is actors’ availability. That drives the train more than anything else. Wonderstruck (2017) was the hardest movie I ever scheduled and also the most rewarding. We were shooting essentially two different movies—one set in the ’70s and one in the ’20s. I needed…

SCIENCE-FICTION CINEMA HAS ALWAYS HAD A paradoxical relationship with technology: while its themes usually warn us of the perils of science gone too far, its pleasures derive from the spectacular advancements of film technology. Half a century ago, special effects were the raison d’être of the American science-fiction film. A poster for 1955’s alien-invasion pic This Island Earth promised “sights of fantastic amazement never before possible on the motion picture screen!”; other classic mid-century science-fiction flicks like When Worlds Collide (1951), It Came from Outer Space (1953), and The Time Machine (1960) were marketed similarly, as Lumière-esque marvels of film technology. Their flashiness, moreover, was central to the distinctive postwar politics of these films. As Susan Sontag wrote in 1965, their “sensuous elaboration” of dystopian techno-futures allowed the viewer to…

WITH DISNEY’S IMPENDING ACQUISITION OF 20th Century Fox (as part of a larger deal), Hollywood is on the verge of experiencing its biggest merger in decades. It is still unclear how a bigger Disney could alter the industry’s future slates—you can only stake so many tentpoles before you start to run out of circus—but for one thing, the fate of Fox Searchlight hangs in the balance. Specialty distribution is undergoing its latest wave of transition: established upstarts like A24 (which took home last year’s Best Picture award for Moonlight) and Neon have emerged as exciting players in the mix, carrying a diverse range of titles unlike anything being released by any of the legacy studios. Elsewhere, the fate of The Weinstein Company remains in limbo, and the partnership between MGM…

Ismael’s Ghosts represents as much a deliberate revival of the idiosyncratic French auteur Arnaud Desplechin’s cinematic obsessions as a liberating move away from them. Director: Arnaud Desplechin Country/Distributor: France, Magnolia Pictures Opening: March 23 A narrative patchwork alternating between a Hitchcockian ghost mystery, a Cold War espionage satire, and a Fellini-esque nightmare of midlife creative block, Arnaud Desplechin’s frenetic follow-up to the ethereal and sensitive coming-of-age romance My Golden Days (2015) represents as much a deliberate revival of the idiosyncratic French auteur’s cinematic obsessions as a liberating move away from them. Formally mirroring the paranoid, hypervigilant consciousness of sleep-deprived, distraught filmmaker Ismael Vuillard (Mathieu Amalric)—a doppelgänger of 2004’s genre-bending Kings and Queen’s manic-depressive protagonist also played by Amalric—the director’s latest psychological experiment chronicles the disconcerting effects of the sudden reappearance…

Director: Lynne Ramsay Country/Distributor: USA, Amazon Studios Opening: April 6 THERE’S SOMETHING DISTINCTLY OFF-putting about Lynne Ramsay’s two American films, 2011’s We Need to Talk About Kevin and her most recent effort, You Were Never Really Here. Both hold the audience at a remove: the former through its non-chronological approach and sense of unavoidable dread, and the latter with its extremely compact and elliptical storytelling structure. Where We Need to Talk About Kevin hits the nail on the head in scene after scene (finally to great effect), You Were Never Really Here provides so little information that it ultimately becomes a movie about its own structure, about the way the scenes come together and what’s missing in between. Since the film is adapted from a novella by Jonathan Ames, it…

• DVD/ ⋆ DEBUT •BLU-RAY/ ⋆ DEBUT ► STREAMING ► EXCLUSIVE TO VOD Cinema spun, streamed, and beamed ⋆⋆ Lois Weber x 2: The Dumb Girl of Portici, co-directed with Phillips Smalley, USA, 1916; Shoes, USA, 1916; Milestone Films THERE’S ALWAYS THE HOPE THAT ARTISTS WILL BRING THEIR flair and virtuosity to even the biggest blockbuster cashin. In 1916, Lois Weber did exactly that with The Dumb Girl of Portici, an adaptation of D.F.E. Auber’s opera starring Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova as Fenella. A filmmaker who primarily worked in the socially conscious mode of Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives and Jack London’s The People of the Abyss, Weber adroitly navigates the lavish period Neapolitan sets and stages action—a royal wedding! peasant uprisings! diegetic and non-diegetic dance sequences!—in a way…