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FILM COMMENT
November/December 2002
LESS IS MORE: THE NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL
by Phillip Lopate
The New York Film Festival is a small, curated "boutique" of world cinema, with only 25 feature slots, purporting to be the cream of the crop. When it works, as it did this year, the chosen films seem to be having a rarefied conversation with one another, almost like a graduate seminar. Other years may have yielded more masterpieces, but rarely has the quality been so consistently high, and one came away with a clearer notion of the state of the art. For instance, the extended take seemed ubiquitous as a privileged technique, but its range of flexibility proved exceptional, from Alexander Sokurov's ecstatic whirling through the Hermitage Museum in Russian Ark to the Dardenne Brothers' sweaty pursuit of a workaholic carpentry teacher and his assistant in their magnificent The Son, to Abbas Kiarostami's claustrophobically immobile car dialogues in his superlative, structuralist-inflected Ten, to the lateral, hypnotically swaying camera in Tian Zhuangzhuang's haunting Springtime in a Small Town.
About this last title, it came as no surprise that the director of Horse Thief and The Blue Kite made such a strong film, but the novelty was its delicacy and exquisite aestheticism. Tian took as a point of departure Fei Mu's Forties melodrama about a sickly aristocrat, his restless wife, and his best friend (who had once been the woman's lover, before her marriage). To this sticky, heavy-breathing plot, Tian brought a detachment that takes in the architecture of a decaying villa with leprous walls, and tracks the characters from room to room as they flail to escape or surrender to their passions. Set in 1946, it features a gaslit alternation of sumptuous colors and impenetrable shadows that recalls the moody atmosphere of Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Flowers of Shanghai (both the work of an amazing cinematographer, Mark Lee Ping-bing). The distanced camera allows for psychological undercurrents of attraction, guilt, or self-revulsion to gather steam; the slightest gestures, such as the woman placing her head on her ex-lover's shoulder, explode with unexpected force. Most remarkable is the long birthday scene when the wife gets herself and her ex-lover drunk, and her husband, in the background (never in close-up), finally understands what is going on. A wild expressionism of emotion butts up against a supremely calm, bolero-like mise-en-scène. In sum, Springtime is less a remake than a modernistic meditation on this melodrama, a severe imposition of strict tempo on romantically febrile material.
In that sense, it bears a family resemblance to another superb movie shown here, The Uncertainty Principle, wherein Oliveira stylizes the melodramatic shenanigans of Iberian novels with a density and gravity that is faintly absurd, almost in the manner of late Buñuel. The difference is that, while both directors employ a rigorously removed long-shot aesthetic that refuses to indulge any sentimentality or excuses for bad behavior, Tian's balanced sympathy for his three errant protagonists transcends archness and moves us to pity.
Another subtle, extended-take film from Asia is Turning Gate, by the South Korean director Hong Sang-soo. It follows a handsome, somewhat spoiled but likable out-of-work actor as he is pursued by, and pursues, two women. The film is set up in chapters and well-composed tableaux, during which a sly comic feeling starts bubbling up in the embarrassing zone between sex and love. The three sex scenes are especially amazing, deftly revealing character through bedroom intimacies. The protagonist is clearly an unfinished man, an actor waiting to be filled by other people's lines, accommodating and yet eager not to be trapped. Banging up against his self-limitations, he begins to change, moving from ambivalence to desire; but is the world ready for him? (Having it both ways, the film cleverly offers a fortune-teller's preview of the hero's fate near the end, even as it leaves him in narrative limbo, standing in the rain.) The freshness of this movie is that you never know where it's going from scene to scene. Along with his previous film, the engaging Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Hong Sang-soo is carving out a surprising cinema of understatement and psychological richness, based on the colliding needs of contemporary men and women.
Character complexity is at the heart of Kiarostami's Ten, my favorite film at the festival. In ten dialogue scenes, a beautiful woman bent on self-actualization
drives her son, sister, and various hitchhikers through the clogged streets of Tehran. The austere visuals leave us no exit from the situational tensions affecting the characters: I was most impressed with the sudden yet utterly convincing shifts between the driver's self-knowledge, rationalizations, blind spots, and eruptive irritations. One moment she's patience itself with her young son as he lashes out at her; the next, unconsciously seductive and provoking toward him. The social neurosis of patriarchal Iran is folded seamlessly into this woman's psyche, as she grapples with her conflicting drives, and eventually comes to a more stoic understanding about how little is under her control.
That same helical entwining of individual and social pathologies forms the basis of Love and Diane, an absorbing three-hour documentary by Jennifer Dworkin. Two generations of black women in a Brooklyn ghetto struggle to raise their children and keep their pride, in the face of economic hardship, drug problems, HIV infection, a history of parental abandonment, emotional depression, and the schizoid bureaucratic requirements of social welfare programs. One can certainly sympathize with Love, the teenage ex-hooker mom, and her angry resistance to playing by the Man's rules, even as one cringes at her self-destructive lapses and alibis. What is so honorably dramatized here is the slowness of the process of forgiveness, not to mention the acquisition of realistic self-insight and responsibility for one's actions. The filmmaking is undistinguished and a bit rough, the documentary's point of view sometimes murky, but enough comes through to give us a privileged view of the hard lives of these self-divided women.
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