New York Film Festival: The (Unofficial) Awards!

With tonight’s screening of The Descendants, the New York Film Festival wraps up its 49^th year, and one of its most ambitious years in terms of its expanded programming and excellent selection. Of course, NYFF now turns toward the future, with a year-long retrospective of works from the previous years in gearing up for the golden anniversary, including screenings of works by Marco Bellocchio and Carlos Saura in the coming weeks.

But one thing that the Film Society at Lincoln Center never does are awards. The 27 Main Selection films are all worth your time equally. Of course, this is America, and there are winners and losers.  Since people can only spend so much time at the movies this fall, one would like to know what is for sure worth checking out. So here are my awards. The top prize, “The Golden Bull,” named after our now infamous Wall Street symbol in the city.

The Golden Bull: A Separation, a film by Asghar Farhadi

The Silver Bull: Martha Marcy May Marlene, a film by Sean Durkin

Best Director: Bela Tarr, The Turin Horse

Best Actor: Michael Fassbender, Shame

Best Supporting Actor: Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Le Havre

Best Actress: Kirstin Dunst, Melancholia

Best Supporting Actress: Berenice Bejo, The Artist

Best Screenplay: Le Havre

Best Cinematography: Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

New York Film Festival: Alexander Payne's The Descendants (Closing Night Selection)

The Descendants (Closing Night Selection)

A Film By Alexander Payne

United States

            Clouds always seem to hang over the sky in The Descendants, the first feature length film from Alexander Payne since his wine-country comedy Sideways. The film, set in Hawaii, is full of gorgeous sun-soaked beaches and tropical landscapes, but those clouds always seem to hang a shadow in the land. It seems apt then that our protagonist, Matt King, calls out the absurdity of the island as a place only of happiness. “Paradise can go fuck itself,” he exclaims in a voiceover.

           The Descendants is a reserved and fascinating maturation for the director of usually much more bizarre comedies like About Schmidt and Election. The film, which stars George Clooney among a cast of character actors and breakout unknowns, is a much more nuanced work with melancholic tones as a man has to come to terms with his identity as a father and a husband. On the surface, and through the way that Mr. Payne adapts the narrative from the novel by Kuai Hart Hemmings, it feels like Mr. Payne is treading on easy territory. But the film is all in the details, and especially Mr. Payne’s direction of the film, as it presents a slow transition of forgiveness through a portrait of an American family, coming to learn what that word really means.

New York Film Festival: Michel Hazanvicius's The Artist

The Artist

A Film By Michel Hazanavicius

France

            The opening scene of The Artist, a mainstream delight shot in a very classical matter, is one of the film’s many in-jokes, as we see a handsome man being electrocuted in a chair. “Talk” scream the men torturing him. Well, they don’t scream it—a title card tells us that’s what they are shouting as their mouths open but we here only the chimes and whistles of Ludovic Bource’s score. Soon enough, the film cuts out to a full-house theater watching the silent flick, but the illusion doesn’t stop, when the audience screams, the only sound is violins, and when the applause comes at the end, we hear only the joy of silence.

            The Artist is an homage to the good ol’ era of silent filmmaking made in the style: black and white, 4:3 aspect ratio, title cards for dialogue, and (save for two smartly used sequences) only music to take us through the narrative. It is of course also an extremely self-aware film, following two movie stars at transitional periods of their lives in the heyday of Hollywood. The director behind this project, however, is a Frenchman named Michel Hazanavicius, and the two stars, Jean Dujardin and Berenice Bejo, are French as well. But just because they don’t come from the US of A doesn’t mean they can’t appreciate the day when words meant nothing and gestures and expressions were at the heart of Hollywood.

New York Film Festival: Sean Durkin's Martha Marcy May Marlene

Martha Marcy May Marlene

A Film By Sean Durkin

USA

            If you go see the independent thriller, Martha Marcy May Marlene, which you most definitely should, I want you to sit as close to the screen as possible. Not because I want you to hurt your neck (in that case, go a few rows back), but I want you to be engulfed by this film full of intense close-ups that will put you in the most uncomfortable position possible. I want you to really feel each loud sound that disrupts this  film full of silences. I want you to feel as paranoid as its main character, feeling that any moment of calm can be instantly destroyed by unknown forces creeping just outside the frame.

            Martha Marcy May Marlene is the latest in a series of independent features from the United States that appear to be ushering in a new wave of smartly composed films that reject the DIY mumblecore genre in favor of a cinema of haunting compositions and dynamic narratives, but still at the independent level. Although the film is directed by newcomer Sean Durkin, some of the other names in the credits show the evolving filmmaking collective: a producer of the film is Antonio Campos, who shot the haunting surveillance thriller Afterschool, and that film’s director of photography Jody Lee Lipes also create haunting work here (as well as in the coming-of-age comedy Tiny Furniture). But here it is Mr. Durkin, as well as his impressive cast led by Elizabeth Olsen, that leads what is an intensely intimate character study in the guise of a mystery that does less conventional scares and more spine-tingling chills.

New York Film Festival: Jafar Panahi's This Is Not A Film

This Is Not A Film

An Experiment by Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb

Iran

            When the 2009 protests across Tehran failed to overthrow the political dictatorship that had dominated Iran for over 40 years, there were of course repercussions to be made, especially in the liberal filmmaking community. Abbas Kiarostami has all but fled his native country, now making films outside of his state. Mohsen Makhmalbaf abandoned filmmaking to become a full time revolutionary. And Jafar Panahi, perhaps the most political filmmaker of the country, was banned from being a filmmaker for 20 years.

            And thus, Mr. Panahi, along with a conspirator, the documentarian Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, have made a fascinating experiment in what they consider non-cinema. Or is it? That’s the point of This Is Not A Film, a direct allegory of cinema as political statement. Its mere existence might lead to Mr. Panahi’s immediate arrest, but it is a bold work that questions not only the absurdity of the politics of Iran, but the nature of what defines film.

New York Film Festival: Pedro Almodóvar's The Skin I Live In (Gala Selection)

The Skin I Live In (Gala Selection)

A Film By Pedro Almodóvar

Spain

            The colors of the world have never felt deader than in Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In, a bizarre and kinky melodrama from the Spanish director. Although the home of doctor Robert Ledgard is full of excessive paintings and bright colors, it has an all-too orderly feeling about. And of course below the home is the lab, a sterile world of metallic shades and vials of dark red blood. Something has horribly gone wrong in the usually magical world that has defined Spain’s national cinematic treasure, where what once was so comforting now creates fear.

            It’s also what makes The Skin I Live In one of Mr. Almodóvar’s most pleasurable works in some time. While it is certainly in the director’s wheel house, it has the excitement of a young filmmaker throwing every trick he has in the book on the screen. 2008’s Broken Embraces, while meticulously crafted and gorgeously shot, had the feeling of déjà vu for Mr. Almodóvar, retreading on the same thematic and emotional ground covered in his masterful works since the 1980s. But reuniting with Antonio Banderas and bringing in newcomer Elena Anaya, Mr. Almodóvar has made a truly insane film about gender, control, and yes cinema.

New York Film Festival: Steve McQueen's Shame

Shame

A Film By Steve McQueen

United Kingdom/United States

            Shame, the second feature from British artist Steve McQueen, opens on a shot from top down on its main character, Brandon, sprawled along his bed. But he only takes up half the frame, the other half highlighting his empty grayish blue sheets. The painterly quality of this image is of course no surprise to those who know Mr. McQueen, a conceptual artists that has only recently moved into filmmaking. But it also highlights the emptiness that surrounds Brandon, who, in a world where he can have anything, still finds himself longing for something, anything, to fill the void of his life.

            Mr. McQueen’s first film, Hunger, was an audaciously bold and formalistically polarizing debut that followed the British IRA hunger strikes in the late 1970s. Mr. McQueen, uninterested in politics, focused on the control and degradation of the body, and the mental power to command such an organism. It was also the first film to introduce us to Michael Fassbender, who went on to starring roles in Fish Tank, Jane Eyre, and A Dangerous Method, who plays Brandon in Shame. And if Hunger was about the complete control of the body, Shame is about a body that constantly feeds in order to keep the mental state from absolute disaster.

New York Film Festival: Béla Tarr's The Turin Horse

The Turin Horse

A Film By Béla Tarr

Hungary

            When the “plebeians” below us think about art cinema, they may imagine long tracking shots where nothing happens, filmed in black and white without dialogue, on subjects that seem moronic and too mundane to ever demand the attention of cameras. Of course, those men and women are certainly entitled to their opinion (as well as their Transformers), but they may be missing out on something that even most filmmakers would refuse to do: stare into the abyss of life with much disdain and fear as it stares back into us.

            And thus comes the final film from Béla Tarr, The Turin Horse, a two and a half hour masterpiece that is brutal truth at 24 frames per second. This deeply disturbing work borderlines on parody of art cinema, mainly because Mr. Tarr is a relentless filmmaker who never compromises in his portraiture of a life void of hope and the impossibility to fight against the idea of a progressive world. I had somehow missed Mr. Tarr’s previous features—most notably the 450 minute Sátántangó—but knew to be prepared. A mutual friend of mine and Mr. Tarr’s suggested to let the film “wash over me.” And bathe in despair I did.

New York Film Festival: Simon Curtis's My Week With Marilyn (Centerpiece Selection)

My Week With Marilyn (Centerpiece Selection)

A Film By Simon Curtis

United Kingdom

            My Week With Marilyn, a messy comedy of sorts that’s more enamored at its star than it needs to be, opens with a recreation of a song and dance number from There’s No Business Like Show Business. There’s Marilyn Monroe, all jazzed up, singing “Heat Wave.” We then break out of it and into the cinema onto the face of the young Colin Clark. He looks up in awe in the way that us plebeians always glorify our stars, and if you don’t understand his love, then you can’t understand Ms. Monroe.

            That’s not to put down the great star who made splashes whether on screen or off, becoming one of the most recognizable names and faces of her era. Like Richard Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles, My Week With Marilyn attempts to view a giant star through the eyes of a small man who can only see the genius. The similarities end there, despite a tonal disposition to direct everything with a light foot and a skip in the wind. Some of this comes from issues with the script by Adrian Hodges, based on a pair of memoirs by Mr. Clark (yes two whole memoirs for one summer with a star!) and director Simon Curtis, who isn’t exactly sure how to handle the more serious moments. But much of the issue is the perspective of the film itself, which tries to throw Ms. Monroe from such a limited point of view, instead of giving us real access to the person behind the face.

New York Film Festival: Nuri Bile Ceylan's Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

A Film By Nuri Bile Ceylan

Turkey

            As the title might suggest, landscape may be the most crucial character in the dark and elliptical Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. As the men we follow progress through the night, the clear plains and trees seem to carry on into the distance without end. These men are lost in a world where not much exists beyond the trees and the slowly fading sun. Like the opening shots of Abbas Kiaraostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us, they are dwarfed among the plains in their small cars, which become their only source of light as their search continues into the long night.

            Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is the latest work from Turkish director Nuri Bile Ceylan, best known for his 2006 film Climates. Mr. Ceylan’s latest feature is both an epic  as well as an intimate and minimalist portrayal of daily life. Shot gorgeously along the Anatolian plains, this occasionally frustrating work attempts to explore a lot of different themes and ideas, as well as characters, but through a small prism of access in which we our limited by the realism of how people truly act. But as it slowly treks toward some sort of conclusion, this police procedural is a unique and assuredly bold attempt to explore a number of notions about the existence of human life, or at least something of that matter.

New York Film Festival: David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method

A Dangerous Method (Gala Presentation)

A Film By David Cronenberg

United Kingdom/Canada/Germany

            Cinema and psychoanalysis have a long history together, as the new technology and the striking new school of thought both began and evolved during the turn of the 20^th century. And since the 1970s, psychoanalysis has been used in film theory to explore films in new light, where characters once thought to be crazy are instead explored within their Freudian terms of wanting to return the womb or whatnot (Classic Hollywood seems ripe with metaphors for sex looking back).

            So what psychoanalysis can we read on the makers of psychoanalysis? That certainly sounds like an interesting question for David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, a stately and occasionally involving piece on the history of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, as well as the woman that changed everything. On first appearances, Mr. Cronenberg, known for his more graphically violent films from Videodrome, to Crash, to A History of Violence, might seem like the wrong choice for this stately work from screenwriter Christopher Hampton (adapting his own play The Talking Cure, that adapted from the book A Most Dangerous Method by John Kerr). But thematically, this is a work through and through by Mr. Cronenberg, exploring how an idea can transform, disfigure, and infect the body.

New York Film Festival: Asghar Farhadi's A Separation

A Separation

Directed By Asghar Farhadi

Iran

            The political state of Iran might feel like the elephant in the room in Asghar Farhadi’s masterful A Separation, but the film wants to remove such greater implications as early as the opening scene. We watch from the point of view of a judge as a man and woman come for a divorce. Simin (Leila Hatami) wants to leave the state and because her husband Naader (Peyman Moaadi) won’t join her, she wants a divorce. She tells the judge she doesn’t want to raise her daughter in such a state. When the judge asks her to describe what is wrong with the state of Iran, she acts ambivalently toward the question. The truth, we later learn, is that she has no intention of leaving; it might just be a ploy to get her husband to show her respect.

            And that’s the crux of why Mr. Farhadi’s film is a much more human drama than anything else. Obviously in the United States, it is difficult to watch a film like A Separation without commenting on the social politics that might be lingering just below the surface. But perhaps let’s consider the narrative and style on the terms the film wants to subscribe. What we thus find in A Separation is a wondrously observed legal drama that provides endless complexity and moral quandaries that offer no easy answers.

New York Film Festival: Gerardo Naranjo's Miss Bala

Miss Bala

A Film By Gerardo Naranjo

Mexico

            The clash of situations is at the heart of Miss Bala, a Mexican crime saga from director Gerardo Naranjo. Laura, a young woman who has been forced to help a powerful drug lord, watches as a DEA agent is run over, dragged through the street, and hung over a highway. The drug lords then take her to a fixed beauty pageant, where the bright lights practically blind her and the atmosphere promises youth, beauty, and love, which couldn’t clash more with the men controlling her lives.

            But clash is also one of the fatal flaws of this gorgeously shot but somewhat hollow film. Mr. Naranjo made a huge splash at the New York Film Festival in 2008 with I’m Gonna Explode, a unique exploration of youth and class with the powerful energy adapted from Godard’s Pierret Le Fou. Here, Mr. Naranjo is in somewhat stripping down the crime thriller to its essentials—another NYFF hit, Gomorrah, might be this film’s distant cousin—though it indulges through its camera. The outcome is a somewhat mixed result that may interest audiences with its bizarre but true story of a beauty queen involved in the drug war, but rarely finds a uniquely statement on the terrible situation.

New York Film Festival: Lars Von Trier's Melancholia

Melancholia

Directed By Lars Von Trier

Denmark

When describing the filmmaking qualities or narrative strategies of Lars Von Trier, one word shows up again and again: provocateur. The Danish director wants to get inside our skin, distort our comforts, and make us shout at his vision of the world as false. This applies not only to his films like Dogville or Antichrist, but also to his personality off the screen. At the premiere of Antichrist at Cannes, he claimed that God had declared him the greatest director in the world. And this year, at the premiere of his latest film Melancholia, Mr. Von Trier went on a rant that ended with him claiming himself a Nazi. Give it, the director was only joking, knowing the Cannes press core would eat such comments up (it did; the jury declared Mr. Von Trier persona non grata). But Mr. Von Trier was really loves watching those reactions nonetheless. This is a director who loves fucking with you.

And thus comes Melancholia, Mr. Von Trier’s latest, and surprisingly restrained examination once again of depression, except this time with a bang. The apocalyptic imagery that surrounds Melancholia not only makes for some moments of truly shock, but there is certainly much more under this surface as well. Mr. Von Trier suffered from a severe depression in 2006 and has been slowly rebuilding himself as a person, including the blunt instrument that was Antichrist in 2009. But now with some distance, and a real provocation out of the way, Mr. Von Trier has created a more thoughtful and shocking approach to not only examining his own depression, but how to fuck with us as well.

New York Film Festival: Nicholas Ray's We Can't Go Home Again

We Can’t Go Home Again (1972/2011)

A Film By Nicholas Ray

United States

            If you know Nicholas Ray, it’s probably because you’ve viewed his quintessential teen angst film, Rebel Without a Cause. Perhaps if you’re a cinephile, you’ve dug into In a Lonely Place or They Live By Night, noirs that helped define the genre. You might know Mr. Ray as a director of men that fall against inescapable forces, anguished by their own destinies that trap them. But what happened to Mr. Ray? Where exactly does a man with such sound and fury disappear?

            The answer, finally after forty years, is We Can’t Go Home Again, an experimental feature from 1972 that was Mr. Ray’s last narrative film. Thanks to his wife Susan Ray, We Can’t Go Home Again has been vividly brought to life in all, well, its mystique and confusion. Shot with students in Binghamton’s Harper College in upstate New York, We Can’t Go Home Again premiered to middling reviews and not much buzz in Cannes in 1973. Mr. Ray kept shooting footage and editing it until his death in 1979, and thanks to Mrs. Ray, we now can explore a filmmaker who instead of continued the traditions that defined his career, ended with something quite different.

New York Film Festival: Aki Kaurismäki's Le Havre

Le Havre

A Film by Aki Kaurismäki

Finland/France

            Le Havre, a very witty and adorable comedy from French director Aki Kaurismäki, is best watched with a nice cappuccino, as it is truly one of the sweetest films ever conceived. You might not think it if you read the film’s synopsis, which concerns an old man, his terminally ill wife, and the smuggling of an illegal immigrant to London. But in Mr. Kaurismäki’s world, none of that is really too stern, who instead paints a world of nostalgic delight on a costal town in Finland. It’s the type of place you may have thought died out decades ago, and perhaps that is true, except Mr. Kaurismäki wants us to believe in fairy tales nonetheless.

            The action begins with a scene of absurd comedy as Marcel Marx stands in a train station, waiting for the next customer at his shoeshine. A man sits down, but is cautiously watched by a couple of men in dark coats. When the man leaves, he runs and is shot down. “Luckily he had time to pay me,” Marcel remarks before leaving himself. We soon learn Marcel lives a simple though not unrewarding life: nights at the local bar, friends at the bakery, and an adoring wife who truly loves him, taking care of his every needs. But she suddenly becomes ill with cancer, leaving Marcel alone.

New York Film Festival: Julia Loktev's The Loneliest Planet

The Loneliest Planet

A Film By Julia Loktev

United States and Germany

            The moment that changes everything for the two characters in The Loneliest Planet is so brief that you need to make sure you are keeping your eyes on the screen. I almost missed it writing something in my notes. A lot of people could easily subscribe this film as one of those subtle works that requires copious amounts of attention for a sly and only relatively satisfactory payoff.  However, Julia Loktev’s second narrative film is a unique look at communication that does require more thinking than the average film, but the reward after considering the film’s actions only deepens with time.

            Shot in the gorgeous landscapes of the Georgian mountains, Ms. Loktev never sets up exactly what type of story we will be watching. We begin by seeing the young Nica (Hani Furstenberg) jumping nude up and down on a wooden plank that crashes against our eardrums. Is she captive? No, she’s just waiting for her boyfriend Alex, played by Gael García Bernal, to bring in the hot water so she can finish her shower. The two are on a backpacking adventure across Georgia. In early scenes, we see them interact with local culture through gestures and movements. These two are experienced in the world, we can tell, not just tourists trying to go the insider route.

New York Film Festival: Roman Polanski's Carnage (Opening Night Selection)

Carnage (Opening Night Selection)

A Film By Roman Polanski

France/Germany/Spain/Poland

Correction: This post has been updated to correct the gender of the film's co-writer, Yasmina Reza, who is a woman.

            The title Carnage seems like an appropriate title for any film by the international director Roman Polanski. Not that his films are particularly violent, though they do have their horrific moments, but the word carnage seems to apply to the psychological state of the characters when they have finished their toil through the unsettling world that Mr. Polanski likes to create. When we think of Mr. Polanski as a filmmaker (as opposed to his always on-the-horizon legal troubles), we think of Jake Gittes staring blankly at a dead woman, Rosemary embracing her son of Satan, or a writer maliciously hit by a car, his life’s work simply flying into the air.

            So Carnage, shortened from the Yasmina Reza play God of Carnage, seems like an appropriate for Mr. Polanski to take on. Ms. Reza’s play was a hit in Paris, London, and here in New York on Broadway, and like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, is a 4 person actor’s showcase more than anything else. But thematically, the play about two couples who slowly break down social order into manic chaos seems ripe for Mr. Polanski to play with visually and build into another one of his cinematic satires. Which is where the problem lies for this adaptation: the director doesn’t even begin to bite the apple. To say that Carnage is really a filmed play is an understatement to how literal of a translation this is.

The 49th New York Film Festival: A Tradition of Quality

            In 1963, Lincoln Center decided to host the first New York Film Festival. It was a bold idea at the time. There were no major film festivals in North America, which was still seen as a much more European idea of movie watching. But world cinema had just began to grab a hold of the Gotham public, and names like Godard, Truffaut, and Fellini became household names for an intellectual group craving bold ideas in an only 70 year old art form. So thus they went for it, showing films like The Exterminating Angel, Harakiri, The Servant, and Knife in the Water. The idea was simple: cinema was an art form that deserved are praise, and the New York Film Festival could be the launch pad for the greats of world cinema to make their names known in not only New York, but the entire United States.

            Cut to today, and the 49^th New York Film Festival, which has stubbornly kept its format in the age of ever increasing movie knowledge and distribution. And yet, it’s the simplicity of the festival—27 Main Features with retrospectives and sidebars to accompany them—that still makes it one of the greats. Here is a festival that could have easily expanded its size, or compromised its values of what types of film are worthy of play at the festival. But no. We still have five critics who debate for months on end before they decide on a handful of films that represent the best in world cinema and speak best to our times.