New York Film Festival 57 Screenings 3
Still mulling over Day 2 but I can dispatch with Day 3 quickly.
Oh Mercy! (Arnaud Desplechin)
Two disappointments from two fave directors, first Reichardt with First Cow and now Desplechin with this curious policier (French title: Roubaix, une lumière). I should state right away that Esther Kahn was on my Aughts Top Ten list and I've adored every other Desplechin I've seen making the conventionality (that word again!) of this one rather a shock. An elegy for Desplechin's decaying Northern France home town of Roubaix, Oh Mercy! cannot sit still for its first half as it picks up bits of stories concerning various law enforcement officials and impoverished residents. The goal here, as Desplechin made clear in the Q & A, is to delineate the structural inequalities that contributed to Roubaix's decline as a whole. But the clipped narratives do little to illuminate that context since they remain at the level of the individual rather than the structural or institutional. Even worse, the second half settles into a straightforward murder investigation meant to unsettle the viewer's sympathy for two primary characters rather than allow us to ponder larger structures of inequity. Desplechin likened his film to Hitchcock's The Wrong Man (1956) in the Q & A. But he's achieved an ever so mildly arty episode of Law & Order instead.
Grade: B.
Oh Mercy! (Arnaud Desplechin)
Two disappointments from two fave directors, first Reichardt with First Cow and now Desplechin with this curious policier (French title: Roubaix, une lumière). I should state right away that Esther Kahn was on my Aughts Top Ten list and I've adored every other Desplechin I've seen making the conventionality (that word again!) of this one rather a shock. An elegy for Desplechin's decaying Northern France home town of Roubaix, Oh Mercy! cannot sit still for its first half as it picks up bits of stories concerning various law enforcement officials and impoverished residents. The goal here, as Desplechin made clear in the Q & A, is to delineate the structural inequalities that contributed to Roubaix's decline as a whole. But the clipped narratives do little to illuminate that context since they remain at the level of the individual rather than the structural or institutional. Even worse, the second half settles into a straightforward murder investigation meant to unsettle the viewer's sympathy for two primary characters rather than allow us to ponder larger structures of inequity. Desplechin likened his film to Hitchcock's The Wrong Man (1956) in the Q & A. But he's achieved an ever so mildly arty episode of Law & Order instead.
Grade: B.
Labels: Arnaud Desplechin, NYFF
posted by Kevin John at 10:45 AM
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