Wild Grass

Directed by: Alain Resnais
Written by: Alex Reval & Laurent Herbiet
Full credits at IMDb

The elderly behave like adolescents in Wild Grass (Le Herbes Folles)—that goes not just for the characters, but the director as well. Based on a novel by Christian Gailly—of which the film is so enamored that it relies a bit too heavily on voice-over—the movie revolves around Georges (Andre Dussollier), who recovers a stranger’s stolen wallet and becomes pre-occupied with the owner, Marguerite (Sabine Azéma), so much so that he starts acting like a 14-year-old boy: he panics over calling her; mails her a letter, changes his mind, and tries to get it back from her mailbox. But soon his puppy crush turns to malicious infatuation, and the film becomes A Comedy of Unhealthy Obsession: he’s leaving rambling messages on her answering machine, sending letters whose pages add up to small stacks. She eventually enlists the police (including Mathieu Amalric) to repel his attentions, after which she becomes interested in him and the obsession begins anew, from the opposite direction.

Renais, an elder statesman of the New Wave who attended a post-screening press conference dressed in an overcoat that recalled another Alain—Monsieur Delon—clearly thinks that’s a bad idea: as her curiosity develops, he fills the screen with red lights, flashing sirens and red-painted sets. Generally, he directs the film with a bubbly and flamboyant style, evoking a youthful Godard or, more contemporarily, Christophe Honore at his exuberant best. Fantasies play out in clouds on the side of the screen, like comic book thought-bubbles; a woman closes a sliding door and reopens it a moment later in a different outfit. The free-spiritedness reflects a love for the old-fashioned magic of moviemaking and filmgoing—as does the occasional use of Franz Waxman’s Twentieth Century Fox theme music. On the surface, Wild Grass is about obsessive romantic love; a bit deeper, it’s about an elderly cineaste’s obsession with the movies. Grade: B+

A dispatch from the 2009 New York Film Festival.


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Broken Embraces

Written & Directed by: Pedro Almodóvar
Full credits at IMDb

Thanks to an unnecessary framing device, Broken Embraces (Los Abrazos Rotos) is essentially two movies: one, the sort of brightly colored melodrama we've come to expect from Pedro Almodóvar; the other, a neo-homage to the Los Angeles noir. The film toggles between the telenovelic and the quasi-Lynchian; would that Almodóvar had dedicated himself solely to the latter. Lluís Homar, who could easily win a Kelsey Grammer lookalike contest, stars as a blind screenwriter and former film director; he recounts the tale of his tragico-torrid affair, 16 years earlier, with Lena (Penélope Cruz, magnificent as ever), a call girl turned magnate's moll turned actress when her elderly sugar daddy (José Luis Gómez), Ernesto Martel, turns movie-producer for her. These flashbacks, captivatingly foreboding, take far too long to emerge from the inert and dramatically muddled present-day scenes and are eventually cut way too short; they also evoke a wide range of other films.

Keep reading this dispatch from the 2009 New York Film Festival at The L Magazine


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The White Ribbon

Written & Directed by: Michael Haneke
Full credits from IMDb

And that little boy grew up to be…Hermann Goering? The Teutonic, toe-headed tots, tykes and teens that occupy the edges of Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon (Das Weiße Band), a cold-eyed, cynical and misanthropic whodunit set in the run-up to W.W. I, presumably grow up to become Hitler-heiling adults; Haneke’s film, then, examines how capacities for cruelty, violence and antipathy (of National Socialist proportions!) are formed, as well as who, or what, is to blame for churning out such adorable lil’ monsters.

Filmed in a sharply focused black and white that suggests easy moral clarity, with vivid period details that extend down to the haircuts, the movie chronicles a series of malicious and mostly mysterious incidents that befall a German farming village between 1913 and 1914...

Keep reading this dispatch from the 2009 New York Film Festival at The L Magazine.


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Antichrist

Written & Directed by: Lars von Trier
Full credits from IMDb

For a while Antichrist is wonderful, a mature and gripping film—at turns fanciful and literal, pitting the rabidly emotional against the coolly rational—that grapples with the contours of grief, the effects of toddler suicide, the limits of psychotherapy and the dynamics of marriage. And then Charlotte Gainsbourg has to spoil it all by doing something stupid like cutting off her clitoris. With a pair of scissors. In extreme close-up.

Oh, right, this is a Lars von Trier movie—the Danish provocateur's (gulp) "horror movie".

Keep reading this dispatch from the 2009 New York Film Festival at The L Magazine


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Police, Adjective

Written & Directed by: Corneliu Porumboiu
Full credits from IMDb

Many of the films associated with the Romanian New Wave, most notably 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, have been set during the 80s, during the crest of the tyrannical Ceausescu years; to understand what's happening now, those films suggest, we must look back to recent history. But Corneliu Porumboiu's movies go one reflective step farther: they are set in the present, looking back at the past, so we may understand the present. The marvelous 12:08 East of Bucharest examined, 16 years later, the circumstances of the revolution that brought down the Communist government, but it's real purpose was to bemoan the failure of Romania to build a better society from that opportunity. His latest, Police, Adjective (Politist, Adj.), another masterpiece, grapples with a similar idea. It's also about language.

Keep reading this dispatch from the 2009 New York Film Festival at The L Magazine.


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