We burned the candle at both ends in the home stretch of the 46th Annual New York Film Festival, didn’t have a life and didn’t get much sleep, but it was worth it. We felt like it was like being at Cannes, we saw such remarkable international fare.
There were 28 films shown in total and we saw 18 of them which isn’t bad number all things considered.
Of course we saw some of the NYFF pictures at early TIFF, including, Darren Aronofsky’s “The Wrestler,” Mike Leigh’s exuberant “Happy Go Lucky,” the Cannes-celebrated “Gommorah,” Steven Soderbergh’s sprawling and unsentimental “Che,” and “Waltz With Bashir,” the animated documentary about the Beirut massacre during the Lebannon war in 1982, by director Ari Folman.
We took in an eclectic slate of films, some which will certainly end up on our top 10 of 2008 to be sure. Our favorites were the Palme d’Or winner “The Class”; Argentine Lurcrecia Martel’s disconcerting and unsettling use of spatial and sonic texture in the highly-acute “The Headless Woman“; the Mexican homage to Godard-like boys and girls on the run in the super dynamic, “Voy A Explotar”; and Japanese horror-maestro Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s immaculately crafted and internalized family drama “Tokyo Sonata,” which masterfully blended amazing notes of psychological terror and dysfunction with irrational Buñuel-ian absurdism.
Also super solid was Kelly Reichardt’s minimalist travelogue on poverty, “Wendy & Lucy” which featured a devastatingly quiet performance by Michelle Williams ; the raw and heartbreaking family-run porn theater Filipino flick, “Serbis”; Steve McQueen’s uncompromising yet lyrical take on Bobby Sands’ IRA-centered hunger strike, “Hunger”; and “Tony Manero,” the Chilean film about a psychotic disco-dancer obsessed with John Travolta’s character in “Saturday Night Fever.”
The rest of the films we saw included Clint Eastwood’s “Changeling,”starring Angelina Jolie; 25-year-old native New Yorker Antonio Campos’ cerebral boarding school drama, “Afterschool“; the austere ethnodrama/ Khazikstani wild-life film, “Tulpan“; “24 City” by Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke and the highly-experimental (too much so for us) and voyeuristic, “Bullet In The Head” by Spanish Catalan director Jaime Rosales.
Notable shorts we caught included the sarcastically excellent “This Is Her” from New Zealand, the wry comment on love by the French, “Love Is Dead,” and the paean to punk rockers the Buzzcocks by British artist/filmmaker Sam Taylor Wood, “Love You More.” We also saw Zhangke “Cry Me A River” short.
We didn’t get a chance to write about all the shorts we saw, but we must mention, Guilhelm Amesland’s French-language short, “Maybe Tomorrow,” which was a striking meditation on unrequited desire and how this haunting forlornness can disquiet our professional lives. Just the way the main character seems so alone and disconnected at work because he remains unfulfilled was really moving.
We saw a ton, but we still wanted to see more. We unfortunately missed “Four Nights With Anna,” the Kieślowski-an look at creepy obsessiveness by Polish auteur Jerzy Skolimowski (the Russian uncle in Cronenberg’s “Eastern Promises”). It’s his first feature in 17 years and currently has no U.S. Distribution so we hope we didn’t miss our only chance to see it. People seemed to love it at Cannes. Other films we wanted to desperately see, but were strapped for time were Oliver Assayas’ “Summer Hours,” and the comedic-sounding “Let It Rain,” by French filmmaker Agnès Jaoui.
We’ve never been convinced by the cult surrounding Assayas, but we loved “Boarding Gate” earlier this year and the intimate-sounding ‘Summer’ — about a family obliged to honor the wishes of their deceased parents — feels like it could be his first real personal film. It doesn’t hurt that Juliette Binoche stars. She is lovely and immensely talented. Fortunately, that one comes out later this year via IFC. “Let It Rain” doesn’t have distribution that we know of, but hopefully someone picks it up soon.
We also got to hear and see Darren Aronofsky talk at the “Wrestler” Q&A and Clint Eastwood at the “Changeling” Q&A. Frankly, we took video of many of the director’s speaking about their work after the screenings were done, but we didn’t really have a chance to post them all.