Betelnut (Yang Heng, China) Some mistake Yang’s debut feature for a Jia Zhangke knock-off. It’s actually more like a narrative daydream by James Benning, a contemplative study of two mildly delinquent teenagers going nowhere during one summer in Hicksville. (The location is Jishou, Hunan, the director’s hometown.) Plenty happens—violence, theft, and two stalled relationships—but the formalist approach finesses a sense of perfect stasis, underlined by the absence of moralizing, melodrama, and character arcs. There are less than 50 shots, each one of them exquisite.—Tony Rayns
Bled Number One
(Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, France/Algeria)
Ameur-Zaïmeche revisits the protagonist of his highly successful Wesh wesh, qu’est-ce qui se passe?. Here Kamel returns to his hometown, somewhere in Algeria, having been deported from France after a prison term—a double penalty. Although his main character is loaded with the baggage of the problems that are currently unsettling France—Franco-Algerian relations, immigration, loss of roots—the director doesn’t use him as a vehicle for a social thesis. Instead he devises a new realism, a realism tinted with fantasy elements, to explore reality in all its strangeness. Kamel, who is played by the director himself, floats between two worlds, two countries, and two cultures, and his anxiety becomes that of Globalized Man.—Frédéric Bonnaud
Carmen
(Jean-Pierre Limosin, France)
Following 2002’s Novo with its amnesiac protagonist, Limosin continues to reflect on the human condition in this made-for-TV film. It’s a sort of E.T. remake in which a bonobo, a smarter species of chimpanzee, escapes from a language-research institute and discovers the realities of poverty, fear, and joy. Limosin, a marginal figure in French cinema, deserves to be recognized as an important auteur.—Shigehiko HasumiSubtitle
Crickets
(Shinji Aoyama, Japan)
After his avant-garde sci-fi outing Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?, Aoyama returns to the depiction of ordinary life. A wealthy young woman leaves the city behind for a quiet life in a coastal village. Fascinated by the void in the eyes of a blind, deaf old man, she commits herself to his care, studying him like an entomologist in an effort to understand his incomprehensible behavior. What does he represent to her? Perhaps the void (what Roland Barthes called le vide) left after the deposing of the Emperor of Japan. If so, Crickets can be seen as a bold reply to Sokurov’s The Sun.—Shigehiko Hasumi
Faceless Things
(Kim Kyong-Mook, South Korea)Faceless Things shows two acts of gay sadomasochistic sex—one acted, the other not—with such bare-faced cheek that some viewers will be repelled. But this remarkable movie announces the 21-year-old Kim as a filmmaker in the Apichatpong league: an allusive poet whose direction of non-pro actors is as impressive as his grasp of the possibilities and limitations of cinematic form. The film consists of only three shots, the first (around 45 minutes) fiction, the second (around 20 minutes) documentary, and the third (very brief) something else. Exploring the space between cleanliness and “dirt,” this is the indie triumph of the year.—Tony Rayns
The Family Friend
(Paolo Sorrentino, Italy)
The Neapolitan director’s third film departs from the glacial Zen of The Consequences of Love and comes on like a Jacobean punk Fellini. A willfully eccentric small-town beauty-and-the-beast story, it features one of the year’s most memorable screen presences: Giacomo Rizzo as the shuffling, sweet-sucking, flamboyantly creepy moneylender Geremia de Geremei. Sorrentino’s stylistics can seem gratuitously fanciful, but here the corrupt lushness is mesmerizing, like a gorgeous outcrop of fungal decay on a marble wall.—Jonathan Romney
The Hills of Disorder
(Andrea Tonacci, Brazil)
Like The New World and The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, Tonacci’s first feature in 28 years deals with first contact and culture clash. The great Italo-Brazilian modernist revisualizes mankind’s history through the real-life jungle wanderings of Carapiru, a tribesman whose community was exterminated by farmers. After years of drifting, the authorities transferred him back to what remains of his people. Carapiru and the rest of the cast play themselves, while Tonacci explores the multiple realities of their lives, merging oral history, reportage, ethnographic recordings, and re-creations of events, rituals, and customs into one mournful gesture.—Olaf Möller
L’Île et elle
(Agnès Varda, France)
Varda has been creating installations since 2003, and the Fondation Cartier’s triumphant large-scale show (eight works plus photographic prints) displayed the technical audacity and sly wit with which she treats the subjects herein: widowhood, the power of place (in this case, the coastal isle of Noirmoutier in the Vendée region), and family memory. It’s like wandering through one of her films.—Chris Darke
It’s Winter
(Rafi Pitts, Iran)
Without pitching itself willfully as a mold-breaker, Pitts’s austere, melancholy, and concise drama nevertheless feels like something markedly different in Iranian film—poetic realism with a dash of small-town noir. The film has a mesmerizing antihero in Ali Nicksolat’s strutting, self-pitying protagonist. He’s a charismatic, arrogant drifter who blows into an industrial suburb of Tehran and hits on a young woman as soon as he concludes that she’s a widow. A bleak but compassionate picture of Iranian masculinity and of that nation’s working life.—Jonathan Romney
Lady Chatterley
(Pascale Ferran, France)
After a 12-year silence, the director of Petits arrangements avec les morts and L’Âge des possibles confirms that she’s one of the greatest filmmakers in France today. Taking up a British lit classic that later became a hippie free-love standard, she renews the genre of literary adaptation, avoiding all sentimentality. Her subjects here are the way time unfolds, the slow blossoming of desire, and a woman’s emancipation. The film’s greatest achievement lies in its lovemaking scenes, which are treated without salaciousness but with a stubborn determination to capture sex in all its discomfort, clumsiness, and disappointment.—Frédéric Bonnaud
The Legend of Time
(Isaki Lacuesta, Spain)
Meaning emanates from the poetic space created by the conflation of two documentary narratives: one about a child who decides to mourn the death of his father by not singing, and the other about a Japanese woman who travels to the isle of San Fernando in southern Spain to learn how to sing like Camarón, the most legendary of flamenco singers. Lacuesta’s film puts Spanish filmmaking shoulder to shoulder with the most stimulating exponents of contemporary cinema, from the humanist marginality of Costa to the fractured conceptual experiments of Apichatpong.—Manuel Yáñez Murillo
Notes on Film 02
(Norbert Pfaffenbichler, Austria)
A metrical reconsideration of Robert Frank’s O.K. End Here: 26 scenes from the life of an ordinary alienated couple, with scene A being shown in 26 variations, B in 25, C in 24, all the way to Z, which is shown only once. The variations are structured to follow an alternating progression (A1; A2B1; A3B2C1, etc.). In other words, a steady succession of variations, sub-variations, revelations, with a single constant and another progression of possibilities, toward one final image of loss. A profound meditation on freedom and its conditions, and like the other 2006 Austrian notable, Michael Glawogger’s Slumming, a scathing critique of contemporary cinema’s obsession with determinism and chance.—Olaf Möller
Le Pressentiment
(Jean-Pierre Darroussin, France)
Guédiguian regular Darroussin directs, co-scripts, and takes the lead in this delightfully lugubrious fable of a Parisian judge penitent (with more than an echo of Camus’s The Fall). His self-imposed retreat from career and worldly success for a life of contemplation and compassion demonstrates that no good deed goes unpunished.—Chris Darke
***Retribution
(Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan)
Just as the detective in Charisma was ensnared by a forest’s strange power, so the detective in Kurosawa’s new film is trapped by the enigmatic power of water as he investigates a serial murder case in the Tokyo Bay area. The constant surface vibration of the sea causes him to wonder if he is in fact hunting himself. More than a depiction of an identity crisis, the film offers a mysterious vision of human destiny in which the demarcation between life and death itself is erased. Watch out for a brief, splendid shot dedicated to the memory of the late Richard Fleischer, one of Kurosawa’s masters.—Shigehiko Hasumi ***This film will play the Walter Reade Theater on 2/17 @ 8:15pm, 2/18 @ 4:30pm, and 2/19 @ 8:00pm as part of Film Comment Selects. Purchase tickets here.
So Much So Fast
(Steven Ascher & Jeanne Jordan, U.S.)
No art form tells time like cinema, and no fictional scaffolding of scenes, regardless of resonance, can achieve the existential weight of doc time. Ascher and Jordan’s four-year study of a young, Kennedy-esque Bostonian diagnosed with als (aka Lou Gehrig’s disease), a degenerative neurological disorder, provides a vibrant how-to manual for battling an implacable disease on multiple fronts. Guerrilla science and family dynamics aside, the underlying theme is a race against the clock shared, at different levels, by the Heywoods, by us as viewers, and by the film itself, flailing against the light.—Paul Arthur
Song and Solitude
(Nathaniel Dorsky, U.S.)
Old School doesn’t describe it. Dorsky has achieved such a subtle mastery over the most basic means of cinematic expression—composition, duration, juxtaposition—that he can squeeze a wealth of emotional vibrations out of the silent, seemingly banal interplay of foreground and background objects. A formalist with a brimming, elegiac soul, Dorsky will gently rock your attitude toward cinematic landscape. His world is a sublime mystery measured by patience and unmatched visual insight.—Paul Arthur
Ten Ox-Herding Pictures #2: Seeing the Footprints
(Lee Ji-sang, South Korea)
Part two of theologian/filmmaker/farmer Lee’s autobiographical digital-video revisualization of the Ten Ox-herding Pictures, those useful images in the Manual of Zen Buddhism that depict the illusions to be negated before the truth-seeker can experience enlightenment. We witness scenes from Lee’s farm life and the harsh beauty of nature and its soothing radiance. It’s even more sorrow-filled than part one while being just as aesthetically coarse.—Olaf Möller
Them (Ils)
(David Moreau & Xavier Palud, France)
A lean horror machine designed to simply wring the audience dry across barely 75 minutes of almost real-time action. The confidence with which the first-time directing duo wield their sharp instruments recalls early Carpenter, resulting in the ultimate home-invasion nightmare—Funny Games by way of Assault on Precinct 13. Avoiding the overt nastiness of so many recent French genre offerings, this is instead a slightly show-offy master class in timing, staging, and pacing; you may catch yourself trying to peer around the edge of the screen to see where the next shock is coming from.—David Cox
***The Yacoubian Building
(Marwan Hamed, Egypt)
This adaptation of Alaa Al Aswani’s Arabic best seller offers a sprawling account of the ills and enduring charms of Cairo through the intersecting lives of the residents of the once ritzy Yacoubian Building, built in 1937 to house the city’s elite and feed their Paris envy. In the process, the film confronts the unavoidable issues of Islam’s growing influence, political corruption, poverty, torture, terrorism, and the hitherto taboo subject of homosexuality, as well as the more subtle yet most affecting theme: the vanishing of a certain culture of gentility. At close to three (albeit fast-paced) hours, Hamed’s directorial debut may be an uneven ride, but it is enchanting and riveting, and possibly the best Arab film in decades.—Joumane Chahine ***This film will play the Walter Reade Theater on 2/21 @ 6:15pm and 2/24 @ 7:45pm as part of Film Comment Selects. Purchase tickets here.
