Disparate Moods
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Adriana Asti, a major star of the Italian theater, had a remarkable career in cinema as well, working with Luchino Visconti (Rocco and His Brothers), Pier Paolo Pasolini (Accattone), Bernardo Bertolucci (Before the Revolution), Susan Sontag (Duet for Cannibals), Vittorio De Sica (A Brief Vacation), Luis Buñuel (The Phantom of Liberty), André Téchiné (Unforgivable), and Abel Ferrara (Pasolini). Asti passed away this week at the age of ninety-four.
Late summer and fall festivals have spent the week announcing the recipients of their various awards: Golshifteh Farahani in Locarno; Ray Winstone and Stellan Skarsgård in Sarajevo; Julian Schnabel and Gus Van Sant in Venice; Guillermo del Toro, Jodie Foster, Hikari, and Lee Byung Hun in Toronto; and producer Esther García, known for her work with Pedro Almodóvar, in San Sebastián, whose poster this year is a tribute to the late Marisa Paredes, who appeared in six of Almodóvar’s features.
This year’s New York Film Festival will close with the world premiere of Bradley Cooper’s Is This Thing On?, starring Will Arnett as Alex, who launches a new career as a standup comedian following a sad yet amicable split with his wife (Laura Dern). NYFF director Dennis Lim calls Cooper’s third feature “a fond tribute to New York City’s comedy scene, a sensitive study of midlife discontent, and a modern-day comedy of remarriage, pitch-perfect in its balance of humor and feeling.”
This week’s highlights:
- Caroline Golum has an absolutely delightful piece up at Screen Slate about taking her second feature, Revelations of Divine Love, to its world premiere at FIDMarseille, “the Cote d’Azur’s foremost festival of experimentation” and “a renowned showcase of arthouse B-sides.” Revelations centers on Julian of Norwich (Tessa Strain), a fourteenth-century mystic who secluded herself to write and pray as an anchoress. Introducing her outstanding interview with Golum for Filmmaker, Sofia Bohdanowicz suggests that the film is “about the survival of an artist’s spirit, and through its movements, it becomes a kind of mirror: sincere, strange, detailed, and hand-stitched. More than anything the work asks the question: how do we know that we’re enough?”
- In the current New York Review of Books, James Quandt airs his mixed feelings about the work of Jacques Rozier, who “shared many affinities with his fellow director Jean Eustache, including a fondness for French popular culture of yesteryear, admiration for the talky Provençal comedies of Marcel Pagnol—whom they both idealized—and a taste for the similarly loquacious cinema of Sacha Guitry. They also shared an outsider status with the Cahiers du cinéma clique and an immense talent for self-sabotage.” But: “Eustache aims for philosophical magnitude, Rozier for quotidian pleasure.” Later, in a parenthetical remark, Quandt adds: “Every Rozier film feels like it longs to be a musical.”
- Opening today and running through August 11 at the Paris Theater in New York, Punch Up: Uppercuts to the Upper Crust is a series of fifteen films, including Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (1939), released less than two months before the outbreak of the Second World War. It’s “a vision of looming catastrophe, of authoritarian menace from within as well as from without, and of the diabolical complicity of France’s privileged classes, both aristocratic and bourgeois, in depravities committed in their name and their interest,” writes the New Yorker’s Richard Brody. At the same time, Renoir’s film blends “disparate moods and tones at a whirlwind tempo: slapstick comedy and poignant melodrama, graceful lyricism and bumptious braggadocio, witty satire and bitter tragedy.”
- Tomorrow afternoon, This Long Century founder Jason Evans will host a Q&A at New York’s Metrograph with Amiel Courtin-Wilson, whose 2016 film The Silent Eye captures an improvised performance by the late free-jazz pianist Cecil Taylor and Japanese Butoh dancer Min Tanaka. “When Taylor slams the piano, he does so with an unexpected tenderness,” writes Joshua Minsoo Kim for Metrograph Journal, “and it’s matched by Tanaka’s graceful movements. To describe cluster chords or jerky twitches with such adjectives isn’t terribly common, but the words are fitting given what they force upon the viewer: rapt attention through thoughtful synergy. When the camera shows Tanaka dancing, and then reveals a smiling Taylor, it feels as though he’s delighting at their unity, in the magic they’re conjuring on the fly.”
- Since March, Adam Nayman and Manuela Lazic have been meeting up once a month at the Ringer to discuss one of ten films that, taken together, “sum up something interesting—if not definitive—about the past quarter century of film.” This month’s selection, Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (2014), has sparked what Lazic calls “our most galaxy-brained” discussion yet. As Nayman points out, this is “a movie inflected by Heidegger and Whitman; scored to modern classical music and Czech opera; adorned with scriptural quotations and embedded religious allegories; and modeled, both obliquely and directly, on the book of Job as a meditation on God’s will and our shared capacity for suffering, forgiveness, and redemption . . . For me, there’s definitely a strain of embarrassment when it comes to talking about The Tree of Life, but it’s not because I’m a detractor. If anything, watching it now—another decade and change deeper into life, and after becoming a father—leaves me dangerously close to proclaiming that it makes me feel seen.”
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