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BEST OF THE NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL 1998 Send This Review to a Friend
Many superior films of a broad variety have emerged from showcasing at the 36th New York Film Festival, which had a particularly good selection this year. Some have already been bought for release. I'll pass over those I didn't care for, such as "Velvet Goldmine," "Flowers of Shanghai," "River of Gold" and "Late August, Early September." Here are reviews of the top ten that I saw and consider particularly worth your seeing whenever they play at your theaters.
CELEBRITY--Woody Allen, remaining behind the camera, has taken a lacerating look at society's topsy-turvy values in a comedy that mercilessly ridicules the standards by which a television host is more esteeemd than a teacher. With a terrific cast, Allen focuses on insecure relationships and a collection of characters wickedly portrayed to reflect the malaise that afflicts so many of our lives and aspects of our culture.
This time no less an actor than Kenneth Branagh takes on the leading role of Lee Simon, the part that Allen would have played had he cast himself. Branagh is all nervous mannerisms, Allen style, as a journalist tired of writing celebrity interviews and restless in his personal relationships. He's really quite pathetic, yet Allen relies on comedy to illuminate his plight. Judy Davis plays his ex-wife, who is also a mess and lacks self- esteem, even when she is adored by her new lover, cozily played by Joe Mantegna. In fact she is so unsure of herself that she goes to a hooker (Bebe Neuwirth) for advice on how to improve her sexual performance. Her mentor has a handy supply of bananas and the episode is as hilarious as it is gross.
The other characters whom we meet include Melanie Griffith as a movie star who professes faithfulness to her husband--well, at least part of her is faithful. Winona Ryder plays a flighty actress, Michael Lerner is a very busy plastic surgeon who rushes from chair to chair in his overflowing office, Charlize Theron is a treat as the gorgeous model who gives great come-on but is thoroughly absorbed in her looks, her work and making the Manhattan scene. Famke Janssen portrays a book editor with whom Simon becomes involved, then unceremoniously rejects.
"Celebrity" even has Leonardo DiCaprio as an egotistical wild man of an actor to whom Simon desperately tries to sell a script idea while DiCaprio tears apart a hotel room and abuses a girlfriend (Gretchen Mol). The gags, the situations, the surprise appearances, the satirical thrusts are all packaged with the customary Allen elan, this time in the black and white photography of the great Sven Nykvist. As usual, Allen uses accompanying music astutely.
In a sense this is Allen's "La Dolce Vita," albeit with a New York sensibility far- removed from Fellini's Rome, but also a cry for help in the face of a society gone bonkers. A Miramax Films release.
HAPPINESS--Todd Solondz's view of society is also acerbic, and he, too, sees his characters through a comic lens. But his comedy is of the creepy-crawly sort. He invites us to laugh at a suburban extended family even as we feel sorry for them. He can get a laugh out of loneliness and he even dares to deal with pedophilia, while a pull on our emotions lurks as an undercurrent. As you might expect, not every viewer will relate kindly to writer-director Solondz's dark humor.
The spotlight is primarily on three sisters and the environment of a New Jersey suburb. One sister is hopelessly hapless. Another is a smug housewife unaware of her husband's hunger for young boys, in contrast to his warm and understanding relationship with his own young son. The third sister is an egomaniacal but unhappy and insecure author beneath her bravado.
A shy male misfit who gets his jollies with obscene phone calls is the target of unwanted affection from a frustrated fat woman down the hall. And so it goes. Nobody of any consequence in the film has a solid life behind their masks, and Solondz, whose talent was evident in his earlier "Welcome to the Dollhouse", provides relief only through his off-center sense of humor. A fine cast encompassing Jane Adams, Cynthia Stevenson, Lara Flynn Boyle, Dylan Baker, Rufus Read, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Elizabeth Ashley, Louise Lasser, Ben Gazzara and others, make the characters come disturbingly alive in Solondz's suburban purgatory. A Good Machine Release.
SLAM--Not only does "Slam" deal unflinchingly with ghetto conditions in Washington, D.C. and the road to prison and ruin that so many African-American men tread, but it zeroes in on self-reliant struggles to climb out of the morass, which is a dimension not often portrayed.
The story involves Ray, a street poet at the crossroads, and Lauren, a woman who has survived her own battle and comes to his rescue. Saul Williams, with an impressive bearing and voice to match renders Ray extremely appealing, and the passion coursing through Sonja Sohn's performance as Lauren makes her a joy to watch.
Whether in prison, on the streets or at a slam session of poetry and rap, the film breathes authenticity under the sharp direction of Marc Levin, whose experience making documentaries shows. "Slam" is powerful, vivid and unique. A Trimark Pictures release.
SAME OLD SONG (ON CONNAIT LA CHANSON)--French director Alain Resnais, who in the past has given us such valued films as "Hiroshima mon amour," "La guerre est finie," and "Providence" obviously enjoys being innovative. Here, in what many will readily recognize as a tribute to the late British writer Dennis Potter ("The Singing Detective"), Resnais spins a delightful tale of relationships by having characters suddenly break into song. The voices do not always match the gender.
The result is a merrily entertaining confection of romance and human nature, elevated by effervescent performances from a winsome cast that includes Sabine Azema, Pierre Arditi, Jean-Pierre Bacri, Andre Dussollier, Agnes Jaoui, and Jane Birkin. The story, scripted by Jaoui and Bacri, concerns finding the right mate, a subject with universal appeal.
Told straight, the story would be interesting enough. But the musical interludes, which pop up unexpectedly, add extra delight, as well as refreshingly funny moments. The tone is set right at the start with a surprise opening and chanson that I don't want to spoil for you by describing. This is a film to discover for yourself. It's one of the best movies in recent years to come from France, where things are looking up these days for cinematic artistry.
A TALE OF AUTUMN (CONTE D'AUTOMNE)--Few directors can tell a story and examine character with the esprit of Eric Rohmer, one of France's premier directors. Twenty-eight years have passed since he delighted us with "Claire's Knee," but his style is a fresh and sparkling as ever. He also stars Beatrice Romand, whom he introduced in "Claire's Knee." Although older now, she has lost none of her charm. In fact, her charm and her talent have grown with maturity.
The film belongs to Rohmer's "Tales of the Four Seasons." And this time, in a lovely South of France setting, he is concerned with the need of Magali, a divorcee (Romand), to find the right man. She doesn't have an easy personality, and she has all but given up, except in her secret hopes. Isabelle, her close friend played by the superb Marie Riviere, is eager to help and unbeknownst to Magali, places a mate-seeking ad in her name. Gerald (Alain Libolt), the man the ad attracts, turns out to be eligible and charming, but it is Isabelle who meets him and pretends to be Magali. Can you predict the complexities?
Our pleasure comes partly from Rohmer's intelligent dialogue and his avoidance of easy cliches in favor of genuine probing of character and human behavior involving desire and denial amid a gamut of insecurities. Other key characters add to the amusement, and just as Shakespeare was adept at disentangling relationships, by the film's end Rohmer sorts everything out in ways that are immensely pleasing.
One rarely encounters films as joyously sophisticated as this, unless, of course, it is another by Eric Rohmer. An October Films release.
IN THE PRESENCE OF A CLOWN--Ingmar Bergman keeps saying he isn't making any more films, but along he comes with one for Swedish television. The New York Film Festival showcased it on digital video projected on a large screen and it was the sharpest projection video I've ever seen. The film itself is yet another Bergman triumph for a master who is here as brilliant as ever when it comes to telling a story steeped in originality and intellectual challenge.
Consider this heady mixture. Carl, (Borje Ahlstedt) a recurring character in Bergman films based on an uncle of his, including in "Fanny and Alexander", is confined to a psychiatric ward, where he revels in the music of Franz Schubert. Carl has been hospitalized for attacking his fiancee Enter another patient, Osvald (Erland Josephson), and the two concoct a plan to bring sound to then-silent film by having actors speak the lines behind a screen.
In a remote area of the troupe's ensuing tour, their film "The Joy of the Joyous Girl" is projected with amusingly dire results. Bergman appears to be twitting the development of cinema by linking it to craziness, and when things go wrong, it takes stage acting to rescue the situation, perhaps a comment on his love for theater versus his greater renown for cinema. What would a Bergman film be without the specter of death? Here death hovers ominously and mysteriously in the person of a chalk-faced female clown, who appears intermittently, once with chalky breasts bared. In one scene death is made love to--not something you see every day at the movies.
Marie Richardson, Pernilla August, Peter Stormare and Anita Bjork richly enhance the cast, and the film moves with Bergmanesque power, sometimes highly entertaining, at other times intriguingly enigmatic. It is not to be missed by those enamoured of Bergman's work, and it surely deserves showing in the U.S. in theaters as well as on television.
MY NAME IS JOE--Dependable Ken Loach roams the Glasgow scene in his shattering social commentary built around the lives of Joe, an out-of-work former alcoholic, and Sarah, a community health worker he meets. Her instincts tell her to have the good sense to stay away from trouble, but she is smitten by Joe's decency and determination. Before long they become a struggling couple in love.
Loach and screenwriter Paul Laverty don't leave it there. The outside world intervenes, and the battle is strictly uphill with potentially dire consequences. A Loach film does not detach characters from society. The director's special gift is his ability to make his people seem real and involve us with them while simultaneously shedding light on society's inequities.
Peter Mullan and Louise Goodall are so very right as the couple that we quickly root for them to succeed despite the obstacles. The characters are also down-to-earth as products of the milieu from which they spring. The result is a powerful, emotionally engrossing drama that packs a wallop and a shattering climax.
Viewers of Loach films have sometimes said that his films ought to have English subtitles. They get their wish here. The only problem for some may be that the subtitles make it too easy not to try to pierce the Glaswegian accent. An Artisan Entertainment release.
THE APPLE --This extraordinary film from Iran directed by Samira Makhmalbaf stems from an actual situation that the director has honed into fiction based on truth. A man who kept his young daughters imprisoned under lock and key at home was denounced to the authorities by neighbors and the case became something of a cause celebre in Teheran. Makhmalhof induced the father and the girls to participate in a movie based on their respective experiences.
"The Apple" recounts what happens when the girls escape into the streets of the city and everything clicks to make for an utterly fascinating audience experience. Massoumeh and Zahra Naderi are a delight to watch, and Ghorbanali Naderi, the father, is somewhat sympathetic as he tries to defend his untenable position against a storm he could hardly have envisioned.
But it is the girls who win us over as they taste the joys of freedom and discovery for the first time in their lives. A New Yorker Films release.
GODS AND MONSTERS-- Ian McKellen is one of the greatest actors of our time, whether on stage or in film, and he is at his crackling best playing James Whale, the homosexual, suicidal director best known for having made "Frankenstein" in 1931, as well as "The Bride of Frankenstein" in 1935. It's 1957, when Whale's health has declined and he is increasingly depressed.
Into his life enters a drifter whom he employs as a gardener. Brendan Fraser makes him both physically appealing and a force that both intrigues and unsettles Whale. Lynn Redgrave, barely recognizable as an elderly woman, is an impressive presence as Whale's housekeeper who does her best to protect him from the outside world and from himself.
Writer-director Bill Condon imbues this fetching story with colorful detail, bitchy dialogue and a sense of what it meant to be gay in Whale's Hollywood. One highlight is a reenactment of Whale's recollection of the filming of "The Bride of Frankenstein." Steeped in nostalgia, "Gods and Monsters" also features a grand garden party with performers in the roles of Elsa Lanchester, Elizabeth Taylor, Boris Karloff, Princess Margaret and George Cukor.
Apart from McKellen's don't-miss performance, here is a reprise of a key chapter in the history of cinema that should delight film buffs. A Lions Gate Films release.
THE GENERAL --John Boorman wrote and directed this exceptionally well-made film about real-life Dublin criminal Martin Cahill. What makes his life interesting is not only his flamboyance and eyebrow-raising family relationship--a threesome with his wife and sister-in-law--but the ways in which his life crisscrossed with warring IRA and Loyalist sides in the political struggles within Ireland.
As dramatized by Boorman, the life of Cahill, jauntily played by Brendan Gleeson, takes on an outsized quality that transcends his path of robberies and criminality. Jon Voight is convincingly cast as a lawman whose major mission in life is to bring down Cahill, or as he is nicknamed, The General.
The film is populated by a gaudy array of types, and you are not likely to find a better assemblage of character actors playing them. My problem is that while I admire the film immensely and have nothing but praise for the performers and the direction, the characters themselves leave me rather cold and it is hard to care much about what happens to the lot of them.
Yet Boorman, perhaps best known for his masterly "Deliverance," returns as a formidable filmmaker who really knows how to put a movie together. A Sony Pictures Classics release.
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