Disturbances of Unnatural Orders
Share
Following Monday’s unveiling of its Galas and Special Presentations, Toronto has spent the week rolling out more lineups for its 2024 edition, which runs from September 5 through 15. Pedro Páramo, the feature directorial debut of cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto (Killers of the Flower Moon), will be one of ten films competing for the Platform Prize. Durga Chew-Bose’s Bonjour tristesse, a fresh adaptation of Françoise Sagan’s 1954 novel with Chloë Sevigny, Claes Bang, and Lily McInerny, will open this year’s Discovery program, and Midnight Madness will open with the North American premiere of Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance.
Film at Lincoln Center has selected Steve McQueen’s Blitz as the Closing Night presentation for this year’s New York Film Festival (September 27 through October 14). Set in 1940s London, Blitz stars Saoirse Ronan and newcomer Elliott Heffernan as a mother and son who become separated during the German bombing campaign.
Starting Friday, FLC will present Spectacle Every Day: Mexican Popular Cinema, a series of twenty-two films selected from last year’s retrospective in Locarno. The series spotlights the golden age of Mexican cinema, which spanned roughly from the 1940s through the ’60s, and the programmers emphasize the variety of their sampling: “From pitch-black noir, delightful comedy, and lurid melodrama—sometimes all in one film—to a 3-D swashbuckler, luchador-vampire horror, and a superhero film, these exquisite tales interpreted and radically influenced popular culture through sweeping productions that take us to grandiose wrestling rings, frenetic cabarets and nightclubs, exquisite haciendas, restless cities, and everywhere in between.”
This week’s highlights:
- “So often in class-conflict films, it is the service workers who note that their employers are ‘nice’ and not the other way around,” writes Moeko Fujii in a piece for Orion Magazine on Claude Chabrol’s La cérémonie (1995) and Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite (2019). “The workers know they can be judged by their competency, their discretion, their personableness—any number of categories, haphazard and numerous, that have niceness as a minimum requirement. Meanwhile, the wealthy are judged on only one scale: from the nice to the monstrous.” In Parasite, Bong is essentially asking, “What would it take to see niceness—with all of its connotations of balance—as nothing more than the monstrous in disguise?” In La cérémonie, Sandrine Bonnaire’s Sophie is a maid employed by a well-to-do family, and when she meets Isabelle Huppert’s Jeanne, the two “unite around converting the halo of the family’s niceness into something else.”
- Shonni Enelow has launched a new column at Reverse Shot, Indirect Address, noting that in an essay for a 2016 issue of Film Comment, “I described the shift in American film acting away from the big gestures of emotional expressivity that had dominated culturally legible great performances since the mid-twentieth century.” Jennifer Lawrence in Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone (2010), for example, or Rooney Mara in David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) “demonstrated an implicit skepticism and mistrust of emotional expression.” So “where are we now? In this series I’m trying to answer that question. Anna Cobb’s performance as Casey, the childlike teenager at the center of Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair [2021], offers a compelling place to start.”
- Justin Chang has also given us an update on an ongoing project, his appreciation of the work of Ann Hui. In a 2014 essay for Variety, Chang noted that Hui had made “intimate dramas about middle-age romances and cross-generational friendships, but also Qing Dynasty wuxia epics and slapstick horror-comedies,” and in 2022, he wrote for us about “one of Hui’s strongest film,” Boat People (1982). July Rhapsody (2002), newly restored and currently touring U.S. theaters, “may feel more prosaic than [poetic], but it’s awfully irresistible prose,” writes Chang in the New Yorker. The film “unfurls as a series of stories, one nested within the other; it’s a tricky narrative structure, handled with such deft offhandedness that you almost forget it’s there.” Hui’s “once-over-lightly approach is startlingly effective; it suggests just how swiftly time passes for us all, and how untethered the characters are from their own moment.”
- When Wei Shujun’s Only the River Flows, an adaptation of a novel by Yu Hua, premiered in Cannes last year, Michael Sicinski wrote at In Review Online that this “knotty, complex police drama combines elements from genre masters like Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Bong Joon Ho, but nevertheless displays a highly individualistic sensibility.” Set in the 1990s, shot on 16 mm, and a box-office hit in China, River begins its North American theatrical run today at New York’s Metrograph, and for the Journal, Jordan Cronk talks with Wei about starting out as a teenage actor, performing hip-hop, and casting Jia Zhangke in his latest feature, Mostly Sunny (2024). “The relationships between Chinese directors from different generations are evolving through a process of continuous inheritance,” says Wei.
- Sarah Minter’s Nobody Is Innocent (1986) “details the hardscrabble lives of teenage punks playing themselves in a paper-thinly fictionalized docudrama version of their lives in Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, the vast ex-urb of Mexico City dubbed ‘Neza York,’” writes Steve Macfarlane in the introduction to his interview with Emiliano Rocha Minter, the son of Minter and her filmmaking partner, Gregorio Rocha. Our Criterion Channel program Mexico City Punk features four of their films. Minter and Macfarlane’s conversation touches on the microcinema Minter cofounded, La Cueva, and the one Macfarlane works with, Spectacle; Rocha’s vast collection of films, cameras, and other “machines of cinema”; and Sarah Minter’s love for Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929).
Don’t miss out on your Daily briefing! Subscribe to the RSS feed.
