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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
 ROUNDUP OF THE 46TH NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL, PART TWO Bullet in the Head The good news: One of the two films acquired during the last New York Film Festival (besides Tokyo Sonata) is co-writer/director Agnès Jaoui’s new comedy of manners, Let It Rain. Like her earlier films, she has turned kvetching and fumbling conversations into an art form. With ease, she throws you into the power plays between rising political star Agathe (Jaoui) and her overshadowed younger sister, and Karim, a hotel receptionist/aspiring filmmaker and his mentor, Michel (co-writer Jean-Pierre Bacri). The subject of their documentary: Agathe. (Karim is also the son of the lifelong housekeeper to Agathe’s family.) The mood changes from one moment to the next without causing whiplash, and Jaoui balances the drama with the year’s funniest sight gags, thanks to Michel, oblivious to his failings but strongly protective of his ego.
The infantile adult male made a comeback at this year’s festival. Taking the prize in arrested development is the 40-something protagonist of Hong Sang-soo’s Night and Day. Low-key, tousled-hair artist Sung-nam makes a new start in Paris, with a wife back in Seoul. Yet, he never speaks a word of French and surrounds himself with compatriots, especially two female art students half his age, playing one against the other. He spends his days reading the Bible, drinking beer, and trying to get laid. Ah, to be middle aged, footloose, and fancy free! There are many sardonic moments, but at 144 minutes, the insouciant pacing matches Sung-nam’s ramblings, but there are the occasional bizarre visual sights that break the lull—though you have to wait over two hours to see the oddity of a boar’s snout pressed against a bathhouse window. So far, Night and Day has no takers, but the director’s previous films were released here, so the chances are that eventually it will find a distributor (my money is on New Yorker Films).
Yet another film with the ubiquitous hand-held (and sometimes out of focus) camera, Tony Manero immediately has the feel of the Dardenne brothers, but their films explore the possibility of transformation and redemption. Tony Manero wallows in transgression. Although the Raul’s path is clear-cut after the first hour, to where you could predict Raul’s behavior, there are plenty of shocking and disturbing moments (and I’m not including where he scatologically marks his territory). For actor Alfredo Castro’s sinister steely stare alone, Tony Manero memorably stands out weeks after its screening. A challenge to market, it, along with the next two films, has yet to land a U.S. distribution deal. Beginning with a stampede of camels, Tulpan joins the ethnological subgenre along with The Story of the Weeping Camel and Mongolia Ping Pong. Set on the arid flat steppes of Kazakhstan, it also follows a nomadic, yurt-dwelling family, but centers on Asa, a young man fresh from serving in the Russian Navy, a stint which fails to impress Tulpan, the woman he wants to marry; his ears are too big. And he has no flock. He can barely keep up with his taciturn brother-in-law wrangling sheep. He lives with his sister, her none-too-pleased husband and three children, which include a scene-stealing tike and a daughter incessantly singing folk tunes at the top of her lungs. Tulpan has the trademarks of the quasi-documentary/fictional film—the vérité camera and long takes, with coarse slice-of-life vignettes (a son popping his dad’s blackheads on his back.) Yet it dares to be sentimental. Underneath the fly-swatted surface is a gentle coming-of-age. Director Sergey Dvortsevoy filmed in the remote, underpopulated area called the Hunger Steppe, and worked around the schedule of the sheep, vividly capturing two births—the film should serve credit for a 4-H badge in animal husbandry.
Stylistically, the terror-in-the-daylight Spanish
drama Bullet in the Head takes its intriguing and detached tone to the extreme,
where a series of everyday occurrences turns deadly. For 80 minutes, the
static camera surveys a portly middle-aged man from a distance—across
the street, through apartment windows, at a bar, or in a park. Not a
word of dialogue is audible, only ambience. Plot and character is left
entirely to the viewer to imagine, until the last 10 minutes (the title
should give you an idea of what happens). However, the sudden shock in
tone may have another different and unintended effect than the director
intended, relief that finally something has happened. Otherwise, it’s
an uncomplicated premise stretched out. Kent Turner
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