Misericordia, Music, and More
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As Il Cinema Ritrovato and FIDMarseille prepare to wrap on Sunday, Karlovy Vary opens today, and two more festivals have announced the recipients of their lifetime achievement awards. Sigourney Weaver will be honored with a Golden Lion during Venice’s eighty-first edition (August 28 through September 7), and Isabelle Huppert will be féted in October at the Festival Lumière in Lyon.
This week’s highlights:
- In Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia, Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) returns to his hometown for the funeral of his former mentor, who happens to have been the father of his best friend. “What begins as an overtly homoerotic small-town rivalry, teeming with provincial repressions and boredom-fueled jealousies, transitions into an increasingly absurd yet ambiently melancholic murder investigation in which mushroom hunting and one particularly horny priest play pivotal roles,” writes Beatrice Loayza at the top of her interview with Guiraudie for the Notebook. They discuss his religious background, casting, and the “fullness and volume” cinematographer Claire Mathon brings to his films—they previously worked together on Stranger by the Lake (2013) and Staying Vertical (2016). “Mushrooms are simultaneously erotic and fantastic and morbid,” says Guiraudie, “and there’s this element of renewal that I wanted to evoke, of the rotting body somehow returning.”
- When Music premiered in Berlin last year, Angela Schanelec won the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay. Attentive viewers will “discover the sturdy bones of the tragedy of Oedipus, bent and twisted, almost beyond recognition, into a modern-day retelling,” writes the New Yorker’s Justin Chang, who observes that “the movie’s emphasis on the significance of looking carries the weight of an imperative, one that seems keenly directed at the viewer.” “For me,” Schanelec tells Forrest Cardamenis at the Film Stage, “someone who is looking at something is extremely interesting. Not because I ask myself what he’s looking at, but because of how he looks when he is looking.” At In Review Online, Michael Sicinski tells Schanelec that he’s “struck by the depiction of landscape in Music. The film seems to insist on the undeniable presence of space, and what happens when bodies enter or exit those spaces.” “That’s the work,” says Schanelec. “Imaging and creating a space, and then to imagine the human or animal moving through that space, entering and leaving. I imagine it and then try to find the space. That describes how I see my work.”
- “Paul Schrader is never going to be mistaken for a gentle filmmaker,” writes Mitchell Beaupre. “His work is harsh, it reckons with some of the most difficult questions we can ask ourselves.” For Paste, Beaupre has ranked and reassessed all twenty-three of Schrader’s features—clearly a labor of love. In Hardcore (1979, #9), George C. Scott’s Jake Van Dorn “captures both sides of the Schrader coin: his father’s repulsion with the debauched world our leading figure dives into, and Paul’s own fascination with and seduction by it.” The Comfort of Strangers (1990, #7) “could have been pitched as more of a direct horror picture, but its trappings as a Merchant-Ivory drama give it an even greater appeal as a Trojan Horse into terror.” For more on Schrader, see Sean Burns at Crooked Marquee on Light of Day (1987), which comes in at #16 on Beaupre’s list.
- In 2019, Albert Serra drew on an installation he created in Madrid and a play he staged in Berlin to make Liberté, which won a Special Jury Prize when it premiered in the Un Certain Regard program in Cannes. Newly reimagined as an immersive space, Liberté is now an exhibition on view at Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam through September 29. Visitors enter a dark forest, where the year is 1774 and French and Prussian libertines abandon any and all inhibitions. Writing for AnOther, Thom Waite finds that “desire and its satisfaction are taken so far, pushed to their absolute limits, that they attain a kind of emptiness that Serra compares to the narcissistic excesses of modern social media. It’s an interesting parallel. How did the libertines reach such a state of extreme and unconventional longing? They were pushed there, perhaps, out of a desire for desire—the kind that can’t be simply and immediately sated, given an abundance of power and resources. Longing is a paradoxical emotion, after all, that fails the moment it’s fulfilled.”
- From the bottom to the top, the Reveal’s Keith Phipps and Scott Tobias have been talking their way through the Greatest Films of All Time poll that Sight and Sound conducted in 2022. They’ve arrived at #75, a slot shared by Kenji Mizoguchi’s Sansho the Bailiff (1954), Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1959), and Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (2001). In Sansho, an eleventh-century governor is exiled, his wife and children are separated, and for Ari Aster, this is “just one of the most devastating melodramas I’ve ever seen.” Sansho is “a spiritual film in a world in which spirits keep their silence,” finds Phipps. “Yet I don’t leave the film with a sense of hopelessness. Instead, it feels like an imperative to live a moral and compassionate life with the recognition that the struggle never ends.”
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