On the basis of sense memory alone—comparing the excitement I felt upon seeing the list of movies in this year’s New York Film Festival, which runs from September 26th through October 12th, with that of previous years—I’d say that this is perhaps the best Main Slate lineup in decades. Since I don’t travel the world to festivals, I haven’t seen most of the films that are receiving their New York premières. So my gleeful response to the list is motivated by a basic and practical auteurism: it’s likely that new movies by people whose previous movies have been good will also be good.
The N.Y.F.F. has always been a place to discover much of the year’s best in world cinema. But one of the effects of the flowering, in recent decades, of cinematic imagination is that so-called art-house movies have strayed farther than before from the commercial mainstream. Even as on-demand programming and streaming video make it easier for viewers far from cities to see a wide and diverse array of movies, the discussion around those movies has become polarized, leaving many of the best contemporary filmmakers seemingly in the shadow of mass media—and outside the N.Y.F.F. pantheon.
This year, things have changed, and for the better. The festival’s programmers have looked outside of the art-house spotlight, for films by filmmakers who haven’t yet experienced a “breakout” or a “crossover.” They have sought out the best of world cinema without regard to the leading indicators of popularity.
In Paris in September, 2001, I wanted to interview the director Jean-Marie Straub but didn’t know how to reach him. Then I saw a listing for a film screening in the Latin Quarter—a première of Pedro Costa’s “In Vanda’s Room”—followed by a discussion moderated by Straub. Bingo! I’d attend the screening (having never heard of the film or its maker), get involved in the discussion, and then have a pretext to talk with Straub afterward. And that’s exactly what happened, except for one thing: the movie, which started as my alibi, proved to be a revelation. Costa is one of the most important and original directors working today; in the film, he blurs the boundaries of fiction and nonfiction, moving into a neighborhood in Lisbon and working with the people whom he encounters there to construct their stories and the film. “Colossal Youth,” which follows an elderly Cape Verdean man named Ventura, is indeed a colossal film; its intimate focus opens up mighty historic vistas. Ventura himself is a walking landscape of time. He returned in one of Costa’s short films, included in the series “Centro Histórico,” and he’s at the center of Costa’s latest film, “Horse Money.”
Eugène Green—a native New Yorker, born Eugene Green, who adopted his accent grave along with his French nationality—is the William Christie of the cinema. Christie, an American-born musicologist, moved to France more than forty years ago and rediscovered the works and the performance practices of French baroque music (his recordings of Lully, Charpentier, and Rameau are superb—and his version of Handel’s “Messiah” is my favorite). Green, in France, restored works and methods of French baroque theatre—and then added, to the ephemeral glories of the stage, the enduring ones of the cinema. In his previous films, which include “The Living World,” “Le Pont des Arts,” and “The Portuguese Nun,” Green holds modern life up to the exacting lens of the classics. His refined vision blends the hieratic with the carnivalesque, the spiritual with the erotic, the formal with the unstrung. Back in 2009, I described his work as “the dream of a virtual love child of Robert Bresson and Elaine May”; his new film, “La Sapienza,” involves an architect who develops an obsession with the work of the seventeenth-century architect Francesco Borromini.
The Argentinean director Matías Piñeiro’s “Viola,” which played at Lincoln Center earlier this year, also has a classical focus—it’s centered on a small, youthful startup theatre troupe in Buenos Aires that’s performing “Twelfth Night”—as well as a cinematic one: the video-delivery business that sustains some of its members. Piñeiro sees Shakespeare not as an enshrined object of academic veneration but as a mirror of the modern soul; he captures the comic dignity of young aesthetes, with the intertwined passions of art and desire, ideals and practicalities, in subtly inflected images of a romantic tenderness. His new film, “The Princess of France,” extends his Shakespearean explorations, taking as its subject a radio production of “Love’s Labour’s Lost” and the lives of the young people involved in it.
There’s a connection between greatness and fecundity; most of the major filmmakers are either very prolific or would be so if they weren’t thwarted by circumstance. The South Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo should be one of the best-known directors around. He’s superbly prolific, and as his pace of production has increased, so has the quality of his films (which was already high to begin with). Going to places he knows with people he knows in situations he’s familiar with, he finds cruelty and inspiration in ordinary life, filming it with simplicity and spontaneity but also with complexity. His storytelling becomes intricate and involuted even as it reflects the speed of thought and the immediacy of impulse. His recent films “Our Sunhi,” “Nobody’s Daughter Haewon,” and “Hahaha” are still unreleased here. He turns them out faster than the industry can consume them, but each one reveals new facets of his art, his life, his milieu, and the cinema itself. They’re proof that formal innovation needn’t imply stiffness or overt intellectualism. The N.Y.F.F. presents his latest work, “Hill of Freedom,” which may be his most briskly audacious construction yet.
Mia Hansen-Løve’s second feature, “The Father of My Children,” with its particular attention to the peculiarities of the life and work of a contemporary French producer, is one of the major behind-the-scenes movies of recent years. Her third, “Goodbye First Love,” is an unfortunately complacent film, but her fourth, “Eden,” is another behind-the-scenes story—this one, about French raves in the nineties, is based on the experiences of her brother, a d.j. at the time. It features the Daft Punk duo in dramatic roles.
Abderrahmane Sissako is from Mali; his 2006 film, “Bamako,” is a masterwork of political dialectic in action; his new film, “Timbuktu,” dramatizes the jihadist takeover of that city in 2012.
When the New York Film Festival started, in 1963, American independent filmmaking was central to its mission. Its first edition featured Adolfas Mekas’s “Hallelujah the Hills”; its second included Michael Roemer’s “Nothing But a Man.” In recent years, the festival neglected that current of filmmaking, but it rejoins it this year with two major movies made locally on low budgets: Alex Ross Perry’s “Listen Up Philip” (which I wrote about here earlier this year), and the brothers Josh and Benny Safdie’s “Heaven Knows What.” Perry, the director of the scrappy, hallucinatory “Impolex” and of the self-scourging comedy “The Color Wheel,” here projects his own artistic conflicts and anti-romantic visions into a wider field of action, a New York literary scene of enduring myth; it stars Jason Schwartzman and Elisabeth Moss. The Safdies, whose feature “Daddy Longlegs” is a wildly comic view of childhood chaos and paternal dysfunction, find a different strain of city wildness on the same turf as Jerry Schatzberg’s 1971 classic “The Panic in Needle Park”: the feral and destructive intensity of the lives of young drug addicts. I’ve seen it and will say that it’s astonishingly accomplished and moving—and that the presence, in the movie's credits, of Ronald Bronstein's name is great news. (Bronstein, who co-wrote and co-edited "Heaven Knows What," directed the crucial 2007 film “Frownland,” which he has yet to follow up with another feature.)
Jean-Luc Godard’s short film “Le Nouveau Monde” and Alain Resnais’s “Muriel” were in the first New York Film Festival, in 1963; Godard’s new film, “Goodbye to Language,” and the late Resnais’s last film, “Life of Riley,” are in this year’s edition. I’ve seen Godard’s film; for now, let’s just say that it fulfills, with its digital and 3-D technology, ideas that Godard has been working on for forty years or more. In its seventy minutes, it’s both a summation and an opening of new paths. Resnais, too, became a major digital artist, in his penultimate film, “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet,” and his last one, which I haven’t seen, appears to continue in that vein.
Then, of course, there are the new films by David Fincher (“Gone Girl”), Paul Thomas Anderson (“Inherent Vice”), Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (“Two Days, One Night”), Lisandro Alonso (“Jauja”), and Bennett Miller (“Foxcatcher”), as well as a trio of dramas about the indignities endured by movie actors (David Cronenberg’s “Maps to the Stars,” Olivier Assayas’s “Clouds of Sils Maria,” and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Birdman”)—and, perhaps best of all, other films that may well prove to be unanticipated discoveries and delights.
P.S.: The New York Film Festival is a bottomless cornucopia that offers a sublime surfeit of important movies in its two-week span. For instance, there’s also a documentary section, which includes, among its offerings, Frederick Wiseman’s new film, “National Gallery,” and a repertory sidebar headed by a complete retrospective of the films of Joseph L. Mankiewicz.
