Innholdsfortegnelse for July-August 2019 Vol. 55 No.4 i Film Comment

THE WHISTLERS FOLLOWS A POLICE INVEStigator (Vlad Ivanov) who ships out to the Canary Islands and gets embroiled in dirty business—which happens to involve a long-distance language consisting entirely of whistles. I talked with soft-spoken filmmaker Corneliu Porumboiu (Police, Adjective; Infinite Football) in Cannes, where his feature was appearing for the first time in Competition. I understand that the idea for The Whistlers came to you from a television show you saw shortly after completing Police, Adjective. Yes. Right away I was attracted by the language. I tried to read some things about it, and I even wrote a draft of the script, but I didn’t like it, so I did When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism [2013]. I wrote another draft or two before The Treasure [2015], and…

LAURIE ANDERSON IS NOTHING IF NOT A MERCURIAL PROPOsition. In her multiple careers, she has been a musician, a visual artist, a filmmaker (most recently in her 2015 essay film Heart of a Dog), a raconteur, an exponent of Buddhist practice, and an organizer of concerts for dogs. Perhaps what her work essentially consists of is simply wondering, on an enviably regular and fertile basis, “What if…?” and then working out the best—and often the most technologically resonant—method for pursuing that possibility further. Anderson boldly goes, and then some, in her current explorations of virtual reality, through a trilogy of works made in collaboration with Taiwanese new-media artist Hsin-Chien Huang. Formerly shown separately in various festival and gallery contexts including the Venice Film Festival, their three pieces featured in Cannes…

THE PREMISE OF JIM JARMUSCH’S ZOMBIE movie The Dead Don’t Die is that fracking at the polar ice caps has destabilized the Earth’s magnetic field so that time is out of joint and bad things happen—such as the dead arising from their graves. The setting is Centerville, a very small town in upstate New York with a three-person police force (Bill Murray, Adam Driver, and Chloë Sevigny); a bunch of oddball residents (Tom Waits, Danny Glover, Steve Buscemi, Larry Fessenden, RZA, Caleb Landry Jones, and Eszter Balint among them); some visitors, including hipsters played by Selena Gomez, Luka Sabbat, and Austin Butler; a Scottish samurai swordswoman moonlighting as the town’s mortician (Tilda Swinton); and a few very hungry zombies (Iggy Pop, Sara Driver, Carol Kane), who get the party started.…

SEEMINGLY INCAPABLE OF FILMING A VISUALLY UNINTERESTING scene, Nadav Lapid continues to refine his highly muscular compositional sense, which can turn even the most mundane encounter into a moment fraught with energy and tension. I spoke with Lapid two days before Synonyms won the Golden Bear at the 69th Berlinale in February. Can you tell me a bit about the personal experiences that inspired Synonyms? The film is based on personal experience in the sense that more or less all the things that occur in it have really happened. Sometimes in different versions, sometimes closer to my experience. For example, like everyone in Israel, I served three or three and a half years in the military. When I completed my service, on one of my first days out, I colored…

THIS YEAR’S CANNES OPENED WITH A ZOMBIE COMEDY BY JIM JARMUSCH; THE REST of the festival reminded us that there are multiple ways in which the dead don’t die. A highlight of the Directors’ Fortnight section, Bertrand Bonello’s Zombi Child is, among other things, an intervention: a vigorous attempt to complicate the position that the zombie figure has long occupied in Western pop culture, from Bela Lugosi through George Romero to the continuing onslaught of living-dead narratives. Like almost all such stories, Zombi Child capitalizes on the zombie’s semiotic adaptability, his suggestive capacity for metaphor. But unlike most of them, it takes seriously the historical origins of the zombie myth in the brutal conditions of slavery in French-ruled Haiti. The zombi—as first understood and as spelled in the original Creole—was…

On Cinema By Glauber Rocha, edited by Ismail Xavier I.B. Tauris, $99 YOU MIGHT SAY THAT ON CINEMA, A COMPILATION OF the Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha’s writings, is cinema. To read it is to experience in concentrated form the cinephilia of the late ’60s: Rocha was not only a filmmaker but, as Jonas Mekas called himself, a “raving maniac of cinema.” As the best-known representative of Brazil’s Cinema Novo, Rocha (1939-1981) is arguably the preeminent figure in Brazilian film history—first, because he makes an impassioned intellectual case for Cinema Novo as the successor movement to the French New Wave and Italian neorealism, and second, because as On Cinema demonstrates, he had an acute sense of his own historical position: “I was a surrealist, a futurist, a Dadaist, and a Marxist all…

CONFLATING NONFICTION AND REALISM IN FILM MAY BE UNDERSTANDABLE, but it’s as much of a historical and cultural conjoining as it is a formal or practical one. Before the advent of portable sync sound in the late 1950s and early ’60s, recording spontaneous audio coterminous with observed imagery wasn’t possible. What that meant was that half the presentation of documentary was expressive or editorial in nature—not the domain of dramatic realism. But it hasn’t stopped us, in the decades since, from equating style with truth, from considering footage captured and presented in a realistic fashion as more legitimately nonfiction. Such assumptions don’t hold up when a longer history of art and documentation come into consideration. Painting provides one nonrealistic mode of observation and documentation, and two new Chinese films approach…

NO SINGLE WORK OF LITERATURE—PERHAPS NO SINGLE WORK OF ART—PERMEates the Mexican imagination like Pedro Páramo. While Juan Rulfo’s first and only novel did not make an immediate splash upon its publication in 1955, within a handful of years its reputation burgeoned, aided in part by its profound influence on a generation of writers from across Latin America, Gabriel García Márquez among them, who would collectively be credited with the development of magic realism. It also received plaudits from luminaries such as Jorge Luis Borges, whose stories, along with those of fellow Argentine authors Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo, could be regarded as precedents of the style. Pedro Páramo is both universal in its core themes and, in its particulars, a mirror to its native culture. Following a wayfarer…

THE APPEARANCE OF MATI DIOP’S FIRST FEATURE, Atlantics, in the rarefied atmosphere of the Cannes competition brought with it a sense of occasion and history. It has lately not gone unnoticed that the gatekeepers of many major festivals have not exactly rushed to include women or filmmakers of color, or for that matter, emerging voices—it is rare for a young director (Diop is 37) to vault immediately into the Cannes pantheon. For anyone paying attention, though, the unusual degree of anticipation surrounding this long-awaited debut was not about what Diop represents but what she has accomplished: this is a filmmaker who has, in no uncertain terms, announced herself as a major talent, with a series of short and medium-length films—Atlantiques (2009), Snow Canon (2011), Big in Vietnam (2012), A Thousand…

IT COULD BE THE PREMISE OF ONE OF NELLY KAPLAN’S films: a young woman arrives in France with little to her name beyond $50, a letter of introduction to Henri Langlois, great beauty, and extreme magnetism. She has affairs with titans of film and literature; begins her own career as an artist; debuts with an incendiary, widely admired film; and yet remains a resolute outsider for the next 50 years. Kaplan was born in Buenos Aires in 1931 to a Russian-Jewish family. Growing bored of her bourgeois life, she set sail for Le Havre to represent the Argentine Cinémathèque in France in 1953. Shortly after arriving in Paris, a 22-year-old Kaplan caught the eye of a 64-year-old Abel Gance at the Cinémathèque Française. She became his mistress and collaborator. While…

ACOUPLE OF DAYS AFTER PARASITE PREMIERED AT CANNES 2019, AND TWO days before it won the Palme d’Or, I sat down for a brief interview with the film’s director, Bong Joon-ho. Parasite is the film I most wanted to see on the big screens of the festival’s main theaters, the Lumière and the Debussy, with a combined international audience of nearly 3,400. There are no truly comparable theaters in New York in terms of size, luminous projection, and clarity of sound. While movie palaces are not a necessity for art films, Bong is one of the only contemporary filmmakers whose movies appeal to both art and mass film audiences. A scathing social satire that fuses raucous comedy with deep despair, Parasite is set in contemporary Seoul, where the enormous gap…

Director: Richard Linklater Country/Distributor: USA, Annapurna Opening: August 16 ONE COULD SAY THAT ANY SERIOUS work of cinema, theater, literature, music, painting, photography, or critical writing is in essence an unspoken search for meaning; Richard Linklater’s oeuvre has been explicit in dramatizing these aims. The writer-director may have shifted to a more mainstream narrative register over the years, but the ethos he espoused in such epochal, millennium-adjacent works as Slacker, Before Sunrise, andWaking Life—in which his characters wandered as they wondered about the point of it all—has remained detectable throughout. In his early thirties, Before Sunset’s Jesse (Ethan Hawke) was already feeling existential about aging, musing to his partner in pontification, Celine, about what matters in the ever-spectacular now: “This is it! This is actually happening. What do you think is…

KLEBER MENDONçA FILHO AND JULIANO Dornelles’s new film has been likened to Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, and indeed both Bacurau and Márquez’s Macondo—remote, isolated towns in Brazil—have histories marked by turmoil, corruption, and political violence. Bacurau takes place in the country’s sertão, or backcountry, which in fiction has been represented mostly as wild, bewildering, and parched. It is Brazil’s Wild West, if you will. In Mendonça and Dornelles’s film, the rural community is mysteriously targeted by heavily armed and murderous foreign white tourists. The stunned Bacurauans have no choice but to defend themselves—and this they do with gusto. Among the unforgettable scenes is one in which a vulnerable elderly black farmer shoots his white assailant—a scene whose B-film gore elicited gasps in Cannes, but also applause.…

Cairo Station & The Land Youssef Chahine, 1958 & 1969 Misr International Films LATE IN THE 1960S, IN THE AFTERMATH OF EGYPT’S DEFEAT IN the Six-Day War, Youssef Chahine took up a long-planned project: an adaptation of a novel by Abd al-Rahman al-Sharqawi about a group of farmers in the 1930s who resist the routing of a road through the land on which they’ve staked their lives. He had just finished a demoralizing and contentious Egyptian-Soviet co-production, People and the Nile (1968); this next film, The Land (1969), was a kind of showcase for his own expansive, generous sensibility. Rather than concentrating on any one plot or building to any one climax, he spun a vast web of episodes linked by complicated lines of cause and effect: bursts of state-sanctioned…

I GREW UP WATCHING MONSTER MOVIES AND HORROR MOVIES on TV and at the cinema. When I was a little kid, there was a show called Creature Features that ran usually on Friday nights or sometimes early Saturday mornings. And I would just watch all the old Universal monster movies and the Hammer films from England. There was also a magazine called Famous Monsters of Filmland that came out monthly, and it was all about monster movies. That was the very first thing that got me excited [about makeup and special effects]. When I was a teenager in the ’80s, there was a huge wave of really cool sci-fi horror stuff. You had An American Werewolf in London (1981), and The Howling (1981), and John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), and…

I’M A SINGER,” SUSAN SAYS TO STEVIE, SHORTLY AFTER THEY meet-cute in Ken Loach’s 1991 labor comedy, Riff-Raff. Stevie, an ex-thief played by a fresh-faced Robert Carlyle in his breakthrough role, has found Susan’s handbag on the construction site where he works, and gone round to her house to return it. It’s not love at first sight, exactly—more like a hopeful bet. Susan, played with sweet sympathy by a daffy, rabbit-eyed Emer McCourt, explains, after much halting self-deprecation, that she has a gig coming up at a pub. The glass beads in her hair tinkle musically against her earrings, live accompaniment to her habit of pushing back her bangs. Everything about Susan is nervy and New Age. She drinks green tea (“caffeine makes me nervous”), consults an astrological book, and…

IN THE OPENING SEQUENCE OF NADAV LAPID’S THIRD FEATURE, Synonyms, a young traveler faints from cold inside the bathtub of a bare apartment in Saint-Germain-des-Prés after having his belongings stolen. Suspended in a pose recalling Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat, his naked body is discovered the next morning by a bourgeois bohemian couple residing in the building, Emile (Quentin Dolmaire) and Caroline (Louise Chevillotte), who carry him onto their bed and revive his pulse by rubbing him vigorously. “Is this death?” Yoav (Tom Mercier) asks in accented French when he wakes up in Paris a day after leaving Tel Aviv with no plans to return. Draping him in a yellow wool coat and furnishing him with money and supplies, Emile, the son of a rich industrialist and an aspiring…

THE STORY OF THIRD WORLD CINEMA CORPORATION—A fledgling production house founded by Black and Latino artists in 1971—is at once inspirational and heartbreaking. An earnest “for us, by us” effort to tell stories the studios would have never picked up, the company staffed its productions with people who had been or would have been systemically kept outside studio gates. Throughout most of Hollywood’s first century, few studios had produced Black- and Latino-centric movies, claiming they were risky or not of interest to general audiences. From the silent era through the 1950s, segregated theaters created an independent market for movies by Black filmmakers for Black audiences, and later, new independent filmmaking efforts arose with the cultural upheaval of the 1960s, followed by the rise of blaxploitation, the L.A. Rebellion, and Chicano…

IT WAS AN UNFAMILIAR FEELING FOR MANY CRITICS AT CANNES: WAS THAT CONTENTMENT, or perhaps even… pleasure? Yes, there it was, a lingering smile around one week into the festival—in the immediate afterglow of Parasite and Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, and in the longer wake of Bacurau, Pain and Glory, Atlantics, The Whistlers, Portrait of a Lady on Fire… I could go on, and I will. Sometimes Cannes can be a question of rhythm—whether it’s the luck of several promising filmmakers being in sync with the festival, or the well-timed landing of crowd-pleasers and provocations alike at the beginning and middle—and the 72nd edition hit the sweet spot. Certainly one factor was how many auteurs steered into the pulpy appeals of genre narratives, their vividness, and their rejuvenating…

Director: Jennifer Kent Country/Distributor: Australia/Canada/USA, IFC Films Opening: August 2 NOT GONNA LIE, MY IMMEDIATE reaction after clapping eyes on British lieutenant Hawkins (Sam Claflin) was, oh hey he’s cute… for a basic white guy. Questionable taste in men, as it happens, is not beside the point in The Nightingale, a movie whose languorous runtime affords ample mental space to reflect on one’s culpability. A disquisition on the historical crimes subtending the category “basic white guy,” Jennifer Kent’s follow-up to The Babadook is another kind of horror film, in which the monster has crept from the shadows of one woman’s psyche to brutalize the daylit social field. This creature’s name is colonialism, and, unlike the title character of Kent’s breakout, he is very much not going to become a queer meme.…

Director: Lulu Wang Country/Distributor: USA, A24 Opening: July 12 The slump of Awkafina’s shoulders in The Farewell reflects how journeys home turn us into children again, and the way the presence of elders makes us shrink into being cared for, no matter how long it’s been since we’ve seen them. SECRETS ARE A LOT LIKE PSYCHOLOGical versions of Chekhov’s guns. Stories that introduce them are really building up to the moment when they’re inevitably revealed. But writer/director Lulu Wang subverts that dictum with her second feature, The Farewell, a film “based on an actual lie,” which Wang shared in a piece for NPR’s This American Life in 2016. In The Farewell, rapper and actress Awkwafina plays Billi, a young writer living in New York. She and her parents moved to…

Director: Victor Kossakovsky Country/Distributor: UK/Germany/Denmark/USA, Sony Pictures Classics Opening: August 16 IN VICTOR KOSSAKOVSKY’S MASTERFUL essay film Aquarela, water in all its forms provides the scale against which human life is to be measured. We watch it metamorphose from ice to liquid, snow to rain to mist. In the beginning, there are rocky coasts, barren islands, and sheltering inlets from which to espy the surrounding waters. It is from an outcropping that we first see the vast expanse of Lake Baikal, the world’s most ancient freshwater lake, in a languorous pan. We move down to its frozen surface, where men are searching for something below—cars that have broken through the ice. As the film continues, we travel westward toward Greenland, Florida, and Venezuela. There are less and less people, more…

My Mother Laughs By Chantal Akerman, translated by Corina Copp The Song Cave, $20 ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN FRENCH IN 2013, AND NOW available in an English translation by the poet and critic Corina Copp, the late Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman’s My Mother Laughs is a shattering memoir about her octogenarian mother’s final years and an intimate companion piece to her documentary on the same subject, 2015’s No Home Movie. Unfolding in a nonlinear associational style that mirrors Akerman’s fluctuating psyche during trying times, My Mother Laughs charts her symbiotic love-hate relationship with her mother Natalia, an Auschwitz survivor whose traumatic past never ceased to haunt the director and her work since her seminal 1975 breakthrough, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Filled with joie de vivre despite her…