Innholdsfortegnelse for May-June 2019 Vol. 55 No.3 i Film Comment

BEFORE I FULLY KNEW WHO DAVID ESSEX WAS OR EVEN WHAT HE LOOKED LIKE, his name alone made me cringe. It conjured a musty, long-forgotten teen idol of the ’70s, a cut-rate David Cassidy with British teeth, a target for esoteric pub jokes. Essex was indeed a sensation in Britain in that decade, a number-one pop vocalist and teenybopper pin-up with songs like “Rock On” and “Gonna Make You a Star.” But in 1967, he also began a career as an actor, going on to star in popular rock ’n’ roll fables That’ll Be the Day (1973) and Stardust (1974). Stardust is a typical rise-and-fall tale of fame and hedonism, but its precursor, That’ll Be the Day, set in 1958, proves to be piercingly insightful and unpredictable. Essex plays the…

SEVEN YEARS IN MAY AFFONSO UCHÔA PREMIERING IN VISIONS DU RéEL’S BURNING LIGHTS COMPETITION FOR FORMALLY experimental nonfiction films, Affonso Uchôa’s latest work continues his examination of life on the periphery in Contagem, Brazil. The main subject, Rafael dos Santos Rocha, receives a writing credit along with Uchôa and his Araby co-director João Dumans; the film’s highlight is a 25-minute take of Rafael, half-illuminated by campfire and seemingly speaking directly to the camera, relaying his personal descent into drug addiction, police brutality, and systemic political oppression as capricious as it is terrorizing. At the climax of this supposed monologue, we cut to another figure sitting on the opposite side of the campfire, who devastatingly dismisses Rafael’s story as mundane and common. This destabilization alienates and surprises, a reminder that intimacy…

LATE NIGHT INVITES US INTO A WONDROUS ALTERNATE reality—a world in which a woman is the host of a premier late-night talk show, and has been for so long that she’s now jaded and considered out of touch. when we first meet emma thompson’s witheringly sardonic and immaculately dressed katherine newbury, she’s accepting yet another emmy for her 28-year stint as the face of a show called tonight. but the awards don’t amount to much, we soon discover; her ratings have been in decline for a couple of years, in part because her writers’ room comprises entirely milquetoast men whom she has never even taken an interest in meeting. when an argument with one of these (uniformly white) men culminates in katherine being accused of hating women, she issues her…

ONE OF THE PLEASURES OF US, THE SOPHOMORE feature from writer-director Jordan Peele, has been just how much it continues to yield upon second, third, and fourth helpings. It is film as mille-feuille. Each of its layers offers something different, and in turn reveals something about the viewer—which is how a horror film can somehow be an allegory about capitalism, about the violence inflicted on Native Americans, about the prison-industrial complex, and about the violence inflicted by, or as a result of, assimilation. If Us is about the United States, it’s worth asking: what makes us, well, us? Why is how we define ourselves so important, especially in a country that regards itself as a melting pot of cultures, traditions, and ethnicities? And how does it affect how we think…

WHEN WRITING ABOUT BLAKE EDWARDS’S 10 in the Chicago Reader, a young critic named Dave Kehr does something almost no film writer ever does—he gets into the lenses. Kehr is describing the scene in which Dudley Moore’s nearing-midlife songwriter George first claps his eyes on Bo Derek’s Jennifer as the car carrying her pulls up alongside him while stopped at a corner in Beverly Hills. Of George’s initial encounter with the woman who will become his idée fixe, Kehr writes: “The close-ups of Jennifer are taken with a longer lens, which has the effect of magnifying Jennifer’s presence, as if through a telescope, making her larger and more luminous as she casts her perfect blue eyes into the depths of George’s soul. The long lens, though, only appears to bring…

The Last Black Man in San Francisco BY STUART KLAWANS Director: Joe Talbot Country/Distributor: USA, A24 Opening: June 7 ONCE YOU’VE HEARD THE STORY behind The Last Black Man in San Francisco, you’re stuck with facts that are too distracting to dwell on and too informative to ignore. It’s as if you were to learn that the author of Great Expectations really was an orphan named Pip, who had spent part of his youth in the home of a crazy spinster. No doubt the knowledge would add to your pleasure—but only after you’d fallen in love with the work. So, to take things in proper order with Joe Talbot’s lovely, quasi-Dickensian film, begin with Jimmie (Jimmie Fails): a young man in whose eyes worry has taken up permanent residence, just…

What Is Japanese Cinema? A History By Inuhiko Yomota, translated by Philip Kaffen, Columbia University Press, $26 IN DESCRIBING THE STATE OF JAPANESE CINEMA IN THE 2000s, Inuhiko Yomota laments what he sees as a nationally insular mentality: “Japanese cinema only speaks Japanese and is aimed at a solely Japanese audience.” It’s a characteristically frank and perceptive observation by Yomota, an immensely prolific cultural critic and film historian whose wide-ranging interests and expertise are anything but inward-looking. In addition to authoring numerous books and articles on East Asian cinema, he has written on Western classical music, translated the work of Edward Said and Paul Bowles, holds degrees in Italian and Korean studies… and the list goes on. The issue of national insularity is a common thread throughout What Is Japanese…

In 2017, tsai ming-liang brought his 55-minute VR work The Deserted to the Venice Biennale in a 4K version. Now upgraded to 8K, it screened in April in London as part of the Taiwan Film Festival UK. The director’s regular lead, Lee Kang-sheng, stars as a man living among ghosts in a wrecked apartment block in the countryside. How did the project come about? Three or four years ago, many people were trying to get me to make a VR film. At first I wasn’t interested—I always thought it was just a medium for gaming. [Taiwanese tech company] HTC invited me to do VR because they wanted some proper content. I tried to watch as much VR work as possible. I thought it was so boring—but then one young person…

SEEING, ACTUALLY SEEING ANOTHER PERSON, TURNS OUT to be immensely difficult. It’s not just a matter of optics, but also of culture, and history, and fear, and other factors that tend to warp perception. Women, in particular and especially, still rarely are seen without filters of bias, stereotyping, assumptions, fantasy, fear, willful subjugation. As both humans and viewers, moviegoers are left needing to unsee what’s not there, even just to start. In several particularly mindful recent works of nonfiction shown at this year’s CPH:DOX festival in Copenhagen, filmmakers sought to see and represent individual women with clarity and honesty—in certain respects radically so. In the purposefully methodical and implicitly somber School of Seduction - Three Stories from Russia, director Alina Rudnitskaya spent nearly a decade shadowing three women she originally…

IN THE MIDDLE OF THIS DECADE, AROUND THE TIME WHEN EVEN mid-grade restaurants started “deconstructing” their desserts, a spate of American filmmakers yielded a greater-than-usual number of films that were not adaptations per se but not not adaptations. Tarantino’s unchaining of Sergio Corbucci’s 1966 Django sustained both directors’ habits of reinterpreting borrowed blueprints they didn’t bother disguising. Woody Allen, a serial mimic, infused Blue Jasmine with enough elements of the Bernie Madoff scandal, plus some dramatic fillips of his own, that the movie passed as more than the Streetcar Named Desire retread it plainly was. Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel paid overt homage to multiple fictions by Stefan Zweig—an adaptation of his overall palette, not of any one piece. And Birdman, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu from a screenplay…

JEAN-HONORÉ FRAGONARD’S PAINTING THE SOUVENIR, completed in the mid-to-late 1770s, depicts a romantic sentimental scene—pure “rococo,” shimmering with love, light, frivolity. A young woman in a pink dress, tight in the bodice with flowing voluminous skirt, carves an initial into a tree. Beside her a dog perches on a stone pedestal (with Fragonard’s signature etched in the side), and a letter from her lover lies on the ground. A white sky glows around her body. There is no sign of the political upheaval in France at the time. The outer world does not exist. According to the first sale catalog, the girl is supposed to be “Julie,” the lead character in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 1761 epistolary novel Julie, or the New Heloise. Fragonard’s painting plays a large role in Joanna Hogg’s…

AT THE BEGINNING OF RYUSUKE HAMAGUCHI’S beguilingly kooky non-romance Asako I & II, the blank-eyed young woman of the title (Erika Karata) falls deeply, irrevocably in love with a wild-haired bad boy named Baku (Masahiro Higashide), who catches her eye on the streets of Osaka amid a fortuitous spray of firecrackers. Their relationship lasts no longer than a few quick scenes, in which we learn almost nothing about him, except for his habit of vanishing for days and weeks at a time. Soon enough Asako finds that her boyfriend has gone for good, and just as abruptly, Hamaguchi shuttles us forward several years, where we find the heroine about to hurl herself into a Vertigo-like vortex with the mild-mannered salaryman Ryohei (also played by Higashide), a dead ringer for her…

THE BEAUTY OF ROBERTO GAVALDÓN’S FILMS UNSETTLES, like a sultry night perfumed with jasmine and haunted by a whiff of decay. Once you are lured in, there is no way out; the plots unfurl with serpentine grace to reveal a fatal sting of irony. The traps are velvety and merciless. Gavaldón made everything from dramas of rural poverty to plush women’s pictures to magical-realist fables, but it is his appeal to the insatiable appetite for film noir that makes him an easy sell for audiences today. A number of his films, along with those of his peers Julio Bracho and Emilio Fernández, have been restored to dazzling luster by Mexico’s two major film archives, the Cineteca Nacional and the Filmoteca de la UNAM, and have made the rounds of international…

Anthony Asquith x 2: Shooting Stars, co-directed with a.V. Bramble, uK, 1928; Underground, uK, 1928; Kino classics BRITISH JOURNEYMAN ANTHONY ASQUITH CAME TO NARRATIVE cinema by a somewhat unconventional but extremely privileged path. Born of a Liberal Prime Minister and a British society lady, he was educated at Eaton House and Oxford, and upon graduation found himself in Hollywood striking up friendships with Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. He returned to his native land and began working at a company that made industrial films, including naturalist documentaries, before being given his first chance at narrative cinema with Shooting Stars and Underground (both 1928), which are finally being released in the U.S. on Blu-ray in beautiful transfers by Kino Lorber. From the beginning and throughout their run times, both films use extremely…

Permutations of an impossible romance intertwine in End of the Century, a quietly adventurous, decades-spanning gay love story from Argentine writer-director Lucio Castro. A world premiere at this year’s New Directors/New Films festival, Castro’s debut feature unfolds for much of its opening third in relatively straightforward fashion: one day in Barcelona, Ocho (Juan Barberini) and Javi (Ramon Pujol), a newly single poet and a married television director, respectively, catch each other’s eye on the beach, and later hook up in what seems at first like a fairly typical afternoon tryst. But when they meet up again later that evening, Javi tells Ocho that they’ve actually met before—20 years earlier, just before the turn of the millennium. From there the story leaps backward, to their first encounter as two closeted young…

Adoption & The Two of Them Márta Mészáros, 1975 & 1977 Hungarian Film Archive In the mid-1970s an idea seemed to haunt the hungarian filmmaker Márta Mészáros. A woman with a steady job and a settled routine meets a younger woman whose own life is restless—people call her wayward, consider her a problem—and mobile. Before long the two of them develop an intense sort of intimacy that resists description: tender, familial, jealous. In Adoption and The Two of Them, two of the nine Mészáros films the Hungarian Film Archive is restoring this year, she played with variations on that premise, bringing together her central characters and then wrenching them back apart. Midway through Adoption, for instance, a factory worker named Kata (Katalin Berek) and Anna (Gyöngyvér Vigh), the younger woman…

OFTEN IT FEELS LIKE THE SOUNDTRACK TO THE international film landscape of the ’60s and ’70s was provided entirely by Michel Legrand. Along with Georges Delerue and Louis Malle, Legrand—who died in January at age 86—was one of the rare figures associated with the French New Wave to parlay his skills into an influential career in the United States. In the ’50s, the classically trained but jazzhungry Bécon-les-Bruyères-born pianist had proven himself a popular arranger and recording artist, working with Edith Piaf, Yves Montand, and, most memorably, Miles Davis, with whom he recorded the 1958 album Legrand Jazz (a gift of sorts from Columbia Records, who had lapsed on some payments and as recompense promised Legrand an album with the artist of his choosing). By the end of the decade,…

AT SUNDANCE, THE FULLY REALIZED VISION OF THE SOUVENIR came as a welcome breath of fresh air. The day after its world premiere, I spoke with Joanna Hogg in the A24 HQ off Main Street, where she was already thinking ahead to a screenplay deadline for the film’s sequel. When I thanked her for her time, the director of this autobiographically infused film responded: “This is all material, in a way.” How did you prepare with the actors? I always find this really difficult, because it is “improvised,” but for me, improvisation is when you haven’t got a plan and you’re just seeing what happens. And it’s absolutely not that. There’s a very particular plan. I’m giving each of them lots of materials to work with that are not like…

To celebrate the Film Society’s 50th anniversary, we asked contributors from different parts of our industry to write about a film that played at one of the institution’s festivals or series over the years that reflects its daring and forward-thinking approach to cinema. CHOUGA DAREZHAN OMIRBAEV, 2008 NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL DAREZHAN OMIRBAEV’S FILMS WERE RECOMMENDED TO ME BY Philippe Garrel, and they were every bit as good as he told me they were: visually and emotionally precise, bracingly and often pitilessly sharp, unexpectedly funny, open to exaltation, and always surprising. They were also poetic in the very best sense of the word—as in all good poetry, every element of Darezhan’s films is exactingly calibrated. In contrast to the majority of filmmakers from the former Soviet republics, he is a…

AFTER THE SNOW LEFT US, SO DID CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN. ONE OF THE MOST inventive artists of her generation, Schneemann (1939-2019) left this world on March 6 at 6:00pm, just as night fell on the same Huguenot-era house in New Paltz, New York, in which she had made her acclaimed films Fuses (1964-67); Viet-Flakes (1965); her Super-8, double-projection, five-hour opus, Kitch’s Last Meal (1973-78); and many other works across wideranging media, including painting, sculpture, installation, sound, and kinetic theater. Schneemann’s influence within both the avant-garde and the larger realm of popular culture is vast. Contemporary artists who use film as one of their central mediums—like Peggy Ahwesh, Abigail Child, Leslie Thornton, Jennifer Montgomery, Maria Beatty (with whom Schneemann made several collaborative films), Katherine Bauer, M.M. Serra, Luther Price, Laida Lertxundi, Michael…

A Life in Movies: Stories from 50 Years in Hollywood By Irwin Winkler, Abrams Press, $26 MAXINE GORDON’S SOPHISTICATED GIANT, a 201 8 biography of her husb and, the jazz saxophonist Dexter Gordon, contains quite a few stories about the making of ’Round Midnig ht, the Ber trand Tavernier film in which Dexter played a self-destructive musician. She describes his first meeting with one of its producers this way: “Irwin Winkler was nothing at all like the stereo typical Hollywood producer Dexter was expecting.” By practically all accounts courtly, literate, intellectually curious, and a man of his word, Winkler—who with partner Robert Chartoff made Rocky, Raging Bull, and scores of other pictures that fall somewhere between those two cinematic poles—is indeed not stereotypically Hollywood. (He’s been married to the actor…