NYFF 2011

Time Out New York Project: Issue #830, September 29-October 5, 2011 (ONLINE)

4:44: Last Day on Earth
It’s a Manhattan kind of apocalypse in Abel Ferrara’s low-rent last-day-on-earth melodrama. Lower East-siders Cisco (Willem Dafoe) and Skye (Shanyn Leigh) — he’s a high-strung layabout; she’s a ditzy painter — while away the hours before the ozone layer gives way and life as we know it is snuffed out. The film galumphs from scene to scene with good ideas (the narcotic-like comfort of television screens and mobile devices) smashing against risible ones (Dafoe figures in a cringingly direct-to-video-esque dream sequence). Much of 4:44 feels like it was made in a drug-induced haze, the rest during a depressive, splitting-headache hangover. Neither mode is particularly rewarding, though Gothamites are sure to get a laugh out of NY1 newscaster Pat Kiernan’s screw-you-guys-I’m-going-home cameo.—KU

Carnage
Put Roman Polanski in a room and he’ll make the most out of it. Save for some single-shot bookends, all of Carnage takes place in the Brooklyn apartment of conciliatory liberals Penelope and Michael Longstreet (Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly), whose child was hit with a stick by the son of finance-pharmaceutical power couple Nancy and Alan Cowan (Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz). Their real-time we-can-work-it-out meeting slowly devolves from coffee-and-cobbler pleasantries to vomit-and-insult hurling invective. “I wipe my ass with your human rights,” screams a tipsy Winslet — just one of the many quotable lines transposed from Yasmina Reza’s hit play. The horror of this highly entertaining piece (do see it with a crowd) comes from the very potent sensation that these so-called adults are doomed to repeat this irresolvable scenario ad nauseum — while the outside world moves on with cold indifference.—KU

Goodbye First Love
Mia Hansen-Løve’s third feature after All is Forgiven and Father of My Children is sure to win this exceedingly talented writer-director many more fans. At first it seems to be a sort-of simple, yet beautifully frank romance between French teenagers Camille (Lola Créton) and Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky). But after the duo’s impassioned relationship dissolves, the perspective shifts exclusively to Camille, who the film then follows over an emotionally tumultuous decade: She trains to be an architect, is romanced by her older professor, and pines feverishly for her first love. Hansen-Løve and the superb Créton (making more-than-good on the promise she showed in Catherine Breillat’s Bluebeard) never misstep in showing Camille’s slow transition from fragile juvenile to functioning adult. This is how you portray adolescence onscreen.—KU

The Kid with a Bike
Oh, those Dardennes. Still making great movies with second-nature ease. The Belgian filmmaking duo’s latest, as you’ve surely guessed, concerns a child and a two-wheeler: Cyril (Thomas Doret) is a temperamental 11-year-old left to a foster care facility by his down-and-out father (Jérémie Renier). A kind hairdresser (Cécile De France) develops an interest in the boy, even though he’s clearly on the cusp of criminality, and adopts him for weekends. From there, this deceptively realistic film unleashes a maelstrom of torments and temptations — from a bike-stealing bully to a charmingly wolfish criminal — that hint at the story’s potent spiritual undercurrent. The Dardennes have often had a religious streak running through their work (films like The Son and La Promesse hinge on shattering admissions that you can imagine occurring in the confessional). Here, the heightened quotidian details pave the way for a literal miracle that is subtly visualized, yet still hits with the force of a heaven-sent epiphany.—KU

The Loneliest Planet
In Meek’s Cutoff Deux, Brooklyn-based artist and filmmaker Julia Loktev (Day Night Day Night) follows soon-to-be-married couple Nica (Hani Furstenberg) and Alex (Gael Garcia Bernal) on an excruciating hike through the Eurasian wilderness. Loktev’s aesthetic is annoyingly predetermined — the often-canted images, which seem to be struggling against gravity, all but screech in your ear that something bad is going to happen to these flightily adoring protagonists. There is indeed an incident around the halfway point that drives a wedge between the couple and pushes Hani closer to the mysterious local (Bidzina Gujabidze) who acts as the couple’s guide. But the minimalist melodrama that ensues is an ill-conceived mix of Herzogian ecstatic truth, dorm room feminism and Antonionennui.—KU

Pina
German director Wim Wenders pays tribute to the late Pina Bausch with this often-ravishing 3-D feature. The main reason to see it is for the extended excerpts from four of the dancer-choreographer’s ballets (“Le Sacre du Printemps”; “Kontakthof”; “Café Müller”; and “Vollmond”), all beautifully performed by members of her company in both interior and exterior locations. The added dimension lends a consistently mesmerizing clarity to the images — a sequence set on an elevated train is particularly stunning for its seemingly infinite depths — though the rest of the material (such as some too-artily shot interviews with the dancers) feels more intrusive than illuminating. Still, as a curiosity-stoking introduction to this great artist’s work, you could hardly do better.—KU

Sleeping Sickness
Baffling. Mysterious. Inexplicable. Mesmerizing. Ulrich Kohler’s Cameroon-set feature invites all sorts of tersely direct descriptions for the scalpel-precise way it draws you into its bifurcated story. The first half focuses on a white man abroad: Ebbo (Pierre Bokma) is a (probably German) physician who’s spent so much of his life in Africa studying the eponymous disease that he’s effectively been shorn of a cultural identity. In part two, which is signaled by a brilliantly disorienting smash-cut, black French doctor Alex (Jean-Christophe Folly) — who’s never been to his ancestral continent — goes to check on the progress of the sleeping sickness program and finds Ebbo in an even more frazzled state. Kohler doesn’t hand-hold his audience: Details about the characters (and even how much time has passed between scenes) emerge casually and cryptically so that we are constantly playing mental catch-up. But the journey is well-worth it, and the film’s heart of darkness finale is quite simply awe-inspiring.—KU

This Is Not a Film
Yes it is…and a great one at that. Iranian writer-director Jafar Panahi, currently imprisoned for six years and banned from making movies for two decades, shot this profound feature clandestinely in his own apartment while he waited for his sentence to be handed down. It plays like a day-in-the-life documentary: Panahi talks with his lawyer, feeds his scene-stealing pet iguana, and tries not to be consumed by the despair of his situation. (“If we could tell a film, then why make a film,” he says while acting out sequences from a never-realized script — a devastating low point.) But there are clues throughout — especially during a humorous interlude with a neighbor’s dog, as well as a brilliantly extended set piece focused on the apartment building’s garbage collector — that this is a much more canny blend of fiction and fact in line with the director’s meta-masterpiece The Mirror. The threat to Panahi’s livelihood is nonetheless very real; that he meets this terrible situation with such dignity and effusiveness is as inspiring as it is heartbreaking.—KU

The Turin Horse
Bela Tarr’s purportedly final film begins with a narrator relating the apocryphal story of Friedrich Nietzsche’s life-changing encounter with the eponymous equine. “Of the horse we know nothing,” the narrator concludes. After which, Tarr takes us on another of his expertly filmed, often lugubrious, yet still overwhelming journeys into the depths of despair. The stripped-down story is set at a remote, constantly wind-swept farm where the horse and its owners—a morose farmer and his attentive daughter—play out a doom-laden drama: The horse refuses to work; the water well runs dry; visits by a pessimistic neighbor and some marauding gypsies portend something terrible on the horizon. What will it take before the characters’ already-fragile will to live flames out like the oil lamps that suddenly refuse to work? Tarr fans will bow before the Euro-autuer’s pitch-black final testament. But it’s not likely to win many converts.—KU

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