THE 47^TH NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL
September 25 – October 11, 2009

Around a Small Mountain
Bluebeard
Hadewijch
Life During Wartime
Trash Humpers
White Material  
 

Every festival has one—the WTF film that drives audiences toward the exit sign. In programming Harmony Korine’s raw Trash Humpers, the New York Film Festival stakes its claim as a curator, leading audiences to something they most likely would overlook or avoid. The NYFF is nothing if not consistent, championing a director whose Gummo was labeled the worst film of the year in 1997 by Janet Maslin of the New York Times.

But there are no dead grandmas or cats here, just murder, mayhem, and masturbation. Take the title literally. Never have so many curbside trash containers been violated in the name of art, as well as trees, a mailbox, and a forlorn electric pole. Trash Humpers looks like a discarded, homemade VHS recording of the ramblings and ravings of two men and one woman wearing old people masks. They look almost nonhuman, like Mandy Patinkin in Alien Nation.

Even Korine has admitted it’s not really a movie. If he wanted to make a provocation, he has succeeded—a poor baby doll is gleefully beaten with a hammer, and a zaftig prostitute sings “Silent Night” while groping a client. Boring it ain’t. Korine’s adopted town of Nashville makes Manhattan look like Mayberry.

Two other NYFF veterans return in their strongest efforts yet (and like the other films mentioned here, they have no US distributor as of yet). Their inclusion lives up to the festival’s mission of picking the crème of the year’s art-house crop. White Material may be the closest Claire Denis comes to making an action film. As intimate but far more intense than her most recent films, she and cowriter Marie NDiaye ambitiously draw upon a larger canvas: an unnamed African coming apart as a rebel army, armed with child soldiers, takes over the countryside (with shades of the recent conflict in Uganda).

A refreshingly subdued Isabelle Huppert stars as a stoic Marie Vial (but keep in mind that with Huppert, her steely façade is bound to crack). She heads a struggling, family-run coffee plantation all on her own. Her workers have fled, heeding the warnings of the French Army of advancing rebels, but all Marie needs are five days to harvest the coffee beans. The film’s point of view is scattered and to the point. This is Africa seen through the white bourgeois, the black elite, and children with machetes. It’s also the rare film about Africa that doesn’t allow the beauty of the land to overwhelm or apply a glossy sheen to the story.

With many tense scenes of discomfort (both for the characters and the audience), Bruno Dumont has painted a lucid and startling portrait of ego run amok crossed with absolute religious fervor in Hadewijch. The title refers both to the 13th century Dutch mystic and poet (and allegedly nun) and the young, 21st-century novice (née Céline) who painstakingly follows in her namesake’s footsteps. Punishing herself, Hadewijch goes without warmth or food, barely eating a scrap of bread. (The soft-spoken, baby-faced Julie Sokolowski looks like she stepped out of a Giovanni Bellini painting.) Despite all the outward signs of devotion, her mother superior sees otherwise, calling her a caricature of a nun with a “high degree of self love,” and recommends that Céline return to the world outside the convent. At first, we have to take the mother superior’s word, but we know that Céline’s a bit odd because of what she says and, later, commits. She puts off the advances of a would-be boyfriend declaring, “I love Christ. I’m for him.” Later, during prayer, she whispers, “The sweetest thing about love is its violence.” Oh, oh.

In Bluebeard, director Catherine Breillat proves she need not rely on nudity or explicit sex to startle an audience, thanks to a twist during the on-screen retelling of Charles Perrault’s chestnut of the many-married ogre, his new bride, and the forbidden room in his castle. Sometime in the recent past (the 1950s?), two sisters sit in an attic, the younger one reading the tale aloud, deliberately terrifying her older sister. Gracefully interwoven is the depiction of the fairy tale. But one of the two parallel narratives easily overpowers the other. The two adolescent girls are much more comfortable in front of the camera (and seem to be having a lot of fun, especially reacting to the tale’s gorier details) than the teenage girls in the fairy tale-within-the-tale. But then again, Breillat directs the Bluebeard story line with a deliberate flatness, like a literal retelling, where all the actors appear stiff compared to the vivacious girls.

There’s nothing sadder than a circus performing to an empty tent, as in eighty-one-year-old New Waver Jacque Rivette’s Around a Small Mountain. Somehow it’s even sadder when the one audience member laughs, taking the clowns, unused to any response, by surprise. That would be Sergio Castellitto, as a well-to-do roamer who stays in a small provincial French town for a week just to see a family circus on its last leg. Eventually, he becomes part of an act, and delves into the romantic and personal entanglements of the troupe.

The film begins promisingly, almost dialogue free, but then the actors start to yak. Actress Jane Birkin’s reactions and supple physicality bring to mind Guilietta Masina, even before we find out that Birkin plays a former circus performer who has returned to the fold. But the nimbleness of the film fades when the acting turns flatly presentational. The actors, directed to face the camera, are constrained by the artificiality of the dialogue. When Birkin delivers not one but two confessional monologues, she’s in her own world, disconnected from the audience. You don’t go to the circus for speech. Unlike the other films reviewed here, this trifle is a rote choice for the festival.

Like almost any given year, the French are well represented, making up about a third of the main slate. In terms of narrative films, there are nine French (co-) productions, compared to only two American. Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire (yes, that’s its full title), which will be released in November, and the comedy of cruelty Life During Wartime. Director Todd Solondz’s sequel of sorts to his 1998 Happiness has an entirely new cast—same characters, more neuroses. Although softer and a wee bit more hopeful than its predecessor, the script is as corrosively caustic, taking familiar potshots at gaudy, sterile suburbia (sorry South Florida and New Jersey) and the dysfunctional family.

Life centers on the ironically named Joy, played by the barely there, self-effacing Shirley Henderson, as the film’s most frightening figure, a guilt-ridden, ego-less doormat—her wispy, high-pitched, little-girl voice is an acquired taste. Allison Janney veers dangerously toward a sitcom performance as Joy’s pill-popping, blindly optimistic older sister. And as the pathologically narcissistic sibling, Ally Sheedy overacts compared to the serenely cool Lara Flynn Boyle, who originated the role. Strongest in the cast, though, is Dylan Snyder as freckle-face Timothy, who finally finds out that his father is not dead, but a pedophile sent to the slammer. He handles the squirm-producing dialogue without affectation, and poses the film’s repeated question, “Maybe it’s better to forget and not forgive.” Although Solondz sometimes strains for shock value, there are enough subtle verbal jabs that sting. Kent Turner
October 10, 2009