New York Film Festival
September 24 – October 10, 2010

Here come the Romanians. Or perhaps, the Romanians are here to stay. This prestigious fest has a long list of favorite directors, and this year is not exactly an exception, though watch out for several notable young ones who seem to have no trouble making names for themselves despite their short list of works. Romania’s burgeoning new wave community is brimming with them. It’s the new Iran, while Abbas Kiarostami moves to Europe, Apichatpong Weerasethakul moves to the afterlife, and Manoel de Oliveira firmly refuses to do so.

Aurora, directed by Christi Puiu, now of the old guard in the Romanian new wave, tops this year’s three Romanian NYFF offerings with its clever combination of speculation and insight. The director also stars as the murdering protagonist, with a keen sense of himself as both character and mise-en-scene element. Moving back and forth in front of a constantly repositioning camera, he flirts with the camera operator (actually he used three different ones during production) as he goes about the menial tasks leading up to the killings, like negotiating the renovations on his apartment, picking up his daughter from school, and purchasing the appropriate gauge of shotgun. Aurora nearly makes the audience an accomplice, and gives the term “premeditated” an entirely new meaning. Consistent with typical new wave style, the takes are exceedingly long, but Puiu takes care only to reveal what is absolutely necessary for the story. At 181 minutes, it will require a bit of an investment, but it’s certainly as smart a film as any you’ll see at the festival.

Tuesday, After Christmas’s director, Radu Muntean, employs such an economical style in the cinematography I suppose an alternate title would be One-Shot Scenes from a Marriage. The camera refuses to cut without motivation, and most of the drama plays out in extended conversations between Paul and the three women in his life, his wife, his daughter, and his girlfriend. Look for an incredible break up scene more than halfway through where about 10 minutes go by without an edit. Muntean really drags us through the mire of infidelity, giving us a fair look at all sides of the story, despite focusing on Paul in the center. He’s the only active party, and his women are the unfortunate bearers of circumstance, but this clever director allows us great access to their emotional lives, in particular the women. For such stripped-down technique, it’s a remarkably moving piece.

The Autobiography of Ceausescu takes place over several decades in the public life of Romania’s once beloved dictator Nicolae Ceausescu (pronounced chow-shess-koo). The trick? Director Andrei Ujica relies almost solely on official state broadcasts, beginning with Ceausescu’s induction as the secretary general of Romania’s Communist Party, continuing through over 30 years of his dictatorship, and ending with his fall from grace in 1989 after ordering troops to fire on protesters in the city of Timisoara. Ceausescu and his wife were subsequently executed, though the last footage we see (which bookends this 180-minute documentary) is a hastily recorded video interview with the two shortly before their trial. Nearly all of the archival footage, though, is captivating—especially the extended sequences from Ceausescu’s state visits to China and North Korea—and makes a compelling argument about the role of propaganda in the historical record. Most of the usual ideological doublespeak is included, yet Ceausescu was never too proud to declare the Cold War conflict asymmetrical. We’re a poor country, he would repeatedly point out. This figure may have ended his career as a villain, but a message that the West’s war against the East was an entirely unfair fight will forever be his legacy. On the other hand, the unbelievable amount of news footage might just be Ujica saying, “New wave? Romanians have been shooting long takes since the sixties!”

Third in Patrick Keiller’s “Robinson” series, Robinson in Ruins, features the voice of Vanessa Redgrave as Robinson’s former lover, who, having discovered his tapes and notes, finishes the meandering documentary for him. It’s in the vein of a fantastic recent film by John Gianvito, Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind, a similarly meandering piece that hops from cemetery to unknown cemetery in search of the graves of America’s unsung folk heroes. Keiller, though, tells his particular story from across the pond in a sarcastic people’s history that smacks of England’s 20th century identity complex, with a character perhaps more akin to countryman and fellow sardonic wit Terence Davies. Like a contemptuous Jan Brady, Keiller’s narrator hints at NATO and the United States with a passive mix of both judgment and envy. This ambitious essay film encompasses 16^th century land reform through to the current economic climate, and then some, so bring a notebook. Watch for the spider fashioning its web (reminiscent of another master of capturing nature within the 4:3 aspect ratio, Nathaniel Dorsky) while Redgrave dryly describes the recent collapse of the finance industry. Heady.

Jean-Luc Godard’s latest really gets going at one point, only to bust apart somewhere in the final third. Film Socialisme, conceptually, doesn’t bring a whole lot new to the table, relying on time tested “Godardisms”—the numerous shots of both cameras and animals, for example (what do they see when they look at things?)—to keep from sinking into an almost dreamlike reverie. That and the use of what Godard calls “Navajo Subtitles,” a kind of poetic translation of the complicated French conversations into pared down haiku phrases in English. At one time, he was hitting a stride with Chris Marker-esque poetic essays like JLG/JLG (1995) and The Old Place (1998), but methinks this one leaves far more open for interpretation than we’re used to. That said, I offer my own. Rocker Patti Smith makes several appearances in the first third with an acoustic guitar slung over her shoulder, commanding by her very presence that our moral selves be on high alert. She’s one of several passengers on a slow ferry to Algiers. Oh, this is a protest film! Post-colonial guilt, I suppose. Somehow upon arrival, though, we become lost in the place. Not by its otherness, or by its potential for exploitation, as Godard announces quite early with a veiled reference to Pépé le Moko (1937), but in a much more Heart of Darkness, J.G. Ballard way, where the place becomes something very real and overpowers the enlightened-yet-somehow-unsuspecting-do-gooder we all fancy ourselves being. Don’t go to Algiers unless you’re planning to stay. Michael Lee
October 7, 2010