Screener

NYFF: Closing-Night Film 'Persepolis'

Adaptations of graphic novels for the screen are all the rage—just check out the upcoming slate from Warner Bros.—but Persepolis is not exactly the younger sister of 300 or Sin City. Marjane Satrapi’s two-volume memoir about her childhood during Iran’s Islamic Revolution has plenty of action and even guns, yes, but is much more a funny and poignant coming-of-age story with universal appeal. Given that Satrapi’s film just closed the New York Film Festival, that appeal is clearly extending beyond the usual graphic novel fanboys.

In 1978 Marjane is a spunky nine year old who idolizes Bruce Lee and doesn’t understand the fuss about events unfolding outside her family’s modest apartment. After the overthrow of the Shah, life becomes more difficult, however, as her beloved uncle is jailed and executed and war erupts between Iran and Iraq. Marjane’s parents send her to school in Vienna, but after several misspent years there she returns home, only to find a drastically changed country. Forced to wear a veil at all times and abide by strict Islamic codes, Marjane resists until realizing she must leave Iran for good.

At the press conference following the film’s screening, Satrapi explained that until she went to live in France in her twenties, she had a typical false impression of the power of graphic novels. “Before that I had the idea about comics that everyone else has about comics—it’s really for kids or adolescents or retarded adults. Then I read [Art Spiegelman’s] Maus and it was like a slap in my face, and I realized, it was just a medium like any other to express yourself. In my mind the images and the text, they are not separated. It became an obvious way to express myself.”

NYFF: Brian De Palma's Scuffle Over 'Redacted'

A strange thing has happened since last Monday, when I attended the New York Film Festival press conference for Brian De Palma’s Redacted: the press conference itself got press. For months now De Palma has been loudly decrying Mark Cuban and his HDNet productions, which financed the film, for forcing him to “redact” a portion of his movie. During Monday’s conference Cuban struck back—or, well, Eamonn Bowles did; Bowles is a representative of Cuban’s Magnolia Pictures, which is distributing the film. De Palma was discussing the montage of the photos at the end of Redacted--real war photographs which include dead American soldiers; HDNet demanded that black bars be placed over the eyes of the subjects, and De Palma was just getting into explaining the reasons why when a voice chimed in from the back of the Walter Reade Theater. Here’s the transcript:

NYFF: No Country For Old Men

Javier Bardem stalks his prey as hitman Anton Chigurh.

It’s inaccurate to call No Country For Old Men fun—you’ve probably got some issues to work through if you do—but man, is it satisfying. The Coen Brothers return to crime and the American West after a string of recent comedies, and No Country is proof that they can still do suspense and black, black humor better than just about anyone else. It’s hard to think of anyone else more capable of filming a potential execution-style killing that makes you laugh.

And speaking of fun…the Coens seem to be having a blast with one of their three main characters, the indefatigable psychopath Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem). Sporting one of the worst haircuts in cinematic history –“We inflicted the hair on Javier,” Ethan Coen says—and a face incapable of cracking a smile, Chigurh stalks western Texas in pursuit of Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a retired welder who, by chance, has made off with $2 million belonging to Chigurh. A professional assassin by trade and total psychopath, Chigurh lets his victims flip coins to decide their fate, performs surgery on himself, and walks away from a car explosion without flinching. It’s cruelly delightful to watch Chigurh anticipate his next destructive move, but when he pairs up with another man seeking the money (Woody Harrelson), it actually becomes funny: Chigurh is a ruthless hit man who seems unfamiliar with the concept of an ATM.

NYFF: I Just Didn't Do It

It’s been 11 years since Masayuki Suo’s last film, the romantic comedy Shall We Dansu? Since then he has worked on many projects, but none inspired him until I Just Didn’t Do It, a dramatic exposé of the Japanese criminal system.

“It has been six-and-a-half years since I started working on [this project], but this was the one I felt I absolutely had to do,” he said at the press conference following the festival screening of his film.

Ryo Kase stars as Teppei Kaneko, an ordinary young man whose life is changed when he is accused of groping a teenage girl on a crowded commuter train. As it is on New York City subways, groping is a common occurrence, and often a case of one person’s word against another’s. Teppei is immediately taken into custody and languishes in jail for weeks, as his best friend and mother work to find lawyers to represent him. An astonishing 99.9% of defendants in Japanese trials are convicted, a sobering statistic that gives Teppei little hope of exoneration.

NYFF: Margot at the Wedding

Nicole Kidman stars as the titular character.

Though Noah Baumbach has discussed the ways in which his own childhood inspired his previous film, The Squid and the Whale, the origins of Margot at the Wedding came from a single idea: a mother and a son sitting on a train. I had this idea, [and] I thought something seemed exciting to me,” Baumbach said at the film’s press conference. “I felt like I could feel the movie even though I didn't know what the movie was.”

That image became the first scene of Baumbach’s film, a meditation on familial relationships that may not contain the same narrative elegance as his previous, Oscar-nominated film, but tells a far more universal story.

NYFF: Go-Go Tales

Bob Hoskins keeps things in line at the Paradise Lounge.

The Paradise Lounge in Abel Ferrara’s Go Go Talesisn’t based on a specific New York strip club…wink wink, nudge nudge. As Ferrara said in the press conference following the film, “Somewhere in a city to be nameless, on a street that will remain nameless between 19th and 21st, there was a place. It was more or less like this.”

Fair enough. Though Ferrara isn’t giving details thanks to what he calls a “litigious society,” we can assume it’s the inspiration of a real place that gives Ray Ruby’s Paradise Lounge such verisimilitude. Easily compared to Altman or Renoir’s ensemble casts, Go Go Tales follows the chaotic, unpredictable and hilarious happenings at a New York City gentleman’s lounge on the verge of financial crisis. Willem Defoe plays Ruby, the optimistic but beleaguered owner; Bob Hoskins and Frankie Cee help manage the club, Roy Dotrice plays Ruby’s financial manager, Matthew Modine is Ruby’s successful brother, and Asia Argento is one of the many tempestuous dancers demanding their due. Sylvia Miles holds court as the club's landlord, who constantly threatens to shut down the place and rent to Bed, Bath & Beyond. The key to their salvation is a winning lottery ticket hidden somewhere in the club for safekeeping; now, if only Ruby can find it…

NYFF: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days

Like Blade Runner, a fellow film selected for the New York Film Festival, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days depicts a bleak world with little color, serious governmental control and no hope for the future. Unlike Ridley Scott, though, Cristian Mungiu is telling his story in a world that already existed: Romania in the 1980s, in the final days of Communism and the brutal dictatorship of Nicolai Ceausescu. His Palme d’Or-winning film follows one harrowing day in the lives of two college students: Gabita (Laura Vasiliu), who must get an illegal abortion, and her roommate Otilia (Anamaria Marinca), who makes huge sacrifices to help her desperate friend.

It feels wrong to review a film like 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days in anything less than ten pages. It’s so richly detailed, so full of technical skill and brilliant performances, insight and political wisdom, it’s the kind of film I would have written film papers about back in college, and it will almost definitely be written about in the future. Plenty of other critics have weighed in on the film’s merits (it currently has a 100% rating at Rotten Tomatoes), but perhaps the most important 2 cents I can throw in is this: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, yes, has subtitles, and yes, it deals with dark issues, and yes, it uses a series of long takes to tell its story, but it is not boring. As Mungiu said himself in the press conference following the film’s screening, “I wanted to point out that it’s possible, just using the means [of] an art-house film, to have the tension that you have with an American thriller.”

NYFF: The Last Mistress

Vellini and Ryno get it on despite better judgment.

Who better to bring a little sex to the New York Film Festival than Catherine Breillat? The French director famous for her blunt eroticism chose an apt novel to adapt for her latest, The Last Mistress, Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly’s tale about a 10-year love affair between a French nobleman and a passionate Spanish woman. Fu’ad Ait Aattou makes his film debut as Ryno, the playboy who spends his fortune on his lover Vellini (Asia Argento), and eventually must marry a richer woman (Roxane Mesquida) despite his unwilling love and lust for Vellini.

For Breillat, much of what went into making the film was “destiny,” as when she auditioned Aattou for the role of Ryno. “When I looked at [Fu’ad], I said to my assistant, oh this one, he’s Ryno, he’s my dream. You have to run after him because you never can find for me some boy like him. It’s a sign of destiny.” Breillat chose d’Aurevilly’s novel because “if I had lived in the 19th century, the author would have been me.”

NYFF: The Orphanage

Belén Rueda stars in The Orphanage

One of the neater and more relaxed aspects of the New York Film Festival is their midnight screening selection. Usually the source for high-class, prestige films, the festival cuts loose at the witching hour and screens films that, while very good on their own merits, might have a little more in common with the grindhouse midnight screenings of old.

The first weekend’s midnight show, The Orphanage, takes the horror standard of a haunted house to new, emotionally resonant levels. The film by first-time director Juan Antonio Bayona is presented by Guillermo del Toro, who pulled off a similar feat by making fantasy an Oscar-winner with last year’s Pan’s Labyrinth. Bayona’s film hews much closer to its genre roots than the transcendent Labyrinth, but provides the combination of thrills and genuine storytelling that American directors seem to have forgotten about lately.

NYFF: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Marie-Josée Croze plays Jean-Dominque Bauby's first nurse in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

“I’m not going to ask everybody to raise their hand who took LSD in this room. I'll spare you that embarrassment. I did.”

You can’t say Julian Schnabel doesn’t know how to work a room. Dressed in a flannel shirt with four top buttons undone, sporting unruly hair and colored glasses, Schnabel brought a casual air to the press room following the screening of his film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. The film earned Schnabel the Best Director prize at Cannes--though, Schnabel insists, “Probably if I was French I would have won the Palme d'Or.” Schnabel’s third film about a real-life artist, Diving Bell tells the story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, the editor of France’s Elle magazine who had a stroke at age 43 that paralyzed his entire body except his left eye. After some resistance Bauby learned to use a system devised by his nurse in which he could blink out, letter by letter, whatever he wanted to say. Using this system he wrote a memoir about his time trapped within his own immobile body, which was published 10 days before his death.