New York Film Festival 60 Screenings 6

Trenque Lauquen (Laura Citarella)

As a passionate devotee of John Waters' theory, espoused in his epochal 1983 "Guilty Pleasures" column for Film Comment (reprinted in Crackpot), that art film publicists should adopt the promotion  practices of exploitation filmmakers, I see no use in sugarcoating the difficulty of art cinema. So perhaps I can sell the 250-minute Argentinian Trenque Lauquen to the potentially considerate by quoting this five-star Letterboxd blurb from one Jesse Catherine Webber: "This is about puzzles, then about meeting a cool lesbian couple and wondering if you would work as a throuple, then about going for a really long walk." That's truth in advertising, folks. Except it misses so much more. Told in 12 chapters, Trenque Lauquen is an extended homage to L'Avventura (Michaelangelo Antonioni, 1960) given how both films center on the questions surrounding the disappearance of a woman rather than any resolution. The joy sparked by Citarella's epic inheres in determining how fragments of story may or may not fit together, sort of like rummaging through a box into which pieces from several different puzzles have been poured. As stately as the film is paced, Citarella brings excitement by giving up more information than we can process in one sitting. Just as we're comfortable spinning four or five plates, she places another one in our hand: new flower species, love letters hidden in books, a feminist radio program, an extraordinary, lengthy voice recording from the lost woman, the possible existence of a Loch Ness-type creature in a lake in the titular city, more. And, indeed, it ends with an extending walking sequence which, as my pal Jody concurred, recalls the wanderings of Vagabond (Agnès Varda, 1985). Citarella produced Mariano Llinás' 14-hour La Flor (2018) and if you were lucky enough to take in that behemoth, you might recognize the same Rivette-like games with narrative here. But Trenque Lauquen is a more assured film with enormous replay potential. Get obsessed.

Grade: A

New York Film Festival 60 Screenings 5

Personality Crisis: One Night Only (Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi)

A long-overdue hagiography of the great David Johansen, Personality Crisis: One Night Only documents a January 2020 performance when Johansen brought his Buster Poindexter persona uptown to the tony boîte Cafe Carlyle. Performing on his 70th birthday, Johansen reconceives Poindexter as a raconteur-cum-spritiual-guru as he runs through the Johansen songbook including numbers from David solo and the New York Dolls. The set leans heavily on 2006's One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This, the Dolls' comeback after 32 years and the songs survive the cocktail-lounge treatment; it serves to highlight Johansen the heartbreaking melodist. Archival footage and current interviews fill out the 127-minute running time and round out a portrait of an nonpareil artist who seems glad to be alive and bears no bitterness over lesser bands like Aerosmith and Kiss taking Johansen's shtick to greater financial reward. 

But that archival footage poses a problem. Scorsese and Tedeschi include a 1973 episode of the British television show The Old Grey Whistle Test with the Dolls performing "Jet Boy." The clip helps cement their status as the greatest rock 'n' roll combo in the history of popular music. Johansen pouts and prances as much as he taunts, shouting directly into the camera and demanding we take the tumult uncut. And mind, this is a lip-sync performance. But few, if any, performers can match that energy in their 70s and Personality Crisis ignores a crucial question: must all popular music, even rock 'n' roll at its most demanding, be transformed into Great American Songbook fodder sung over spilled Cosmopolitans at the piano?

Take the songs from One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This  That album is now sixteen years old (gah!) and the day mentioned in the title has finally arrived. Personality Crisis will please you. But if those songs have always sounded a tad too professional, especially up against the world-historic ruckus the Dolls caused in the early 1970s, they sound like a final chapter here: winning, committed, worth celebrating but giving off a noticeable scent of formaldehyde. I do too want the Johansen songbook sung at the Townhouse or Marie's Crisis alongside the endless show tunes. But I also want another chapter while Johansen still roams the earth. And no matter moving and welcome, Personality Crisis isn't it.

Grade: A-minus

New York Film Festival 60 Screening 4

Showing Up (Kelly Reichardt) 

Reichardt regular Michelle Williams returns as Lizzy, a sculptor trying to navigate the jealousies and small victories in an artists' enclave in Portland, OR. She helps her mom with administrative work at the local art school. She grows increasingly frustrated at the lack of hot water in her apartment. But the landlord is herself a budding sculptor, one with more career momentum than Lizzy. Her possibly senile father is taking in possible freeloaders. And her "genius" brother shows signs of mental imbalance. 

One might expect Showing Up to result in a tense portrait of an artist on the verge of a nervous breakdown. But despite some very real problems in her life, Lizzy knows they're not insurmountable or apocalyptic enough to require a scorched-earth campaign of retribution. Often put upon but also kind and unassuming, she's just trying to exist as an artist however modestly. The film's title refers to Lizzy's ability to show up to her own life. Many welcome scenes patiently observe the labor of art, making the film a sisterly companion to Anne Truitt's Daybook: The Journal of an Artist. This is Reichardt's warmest, most open-hearted film, nowhere near as compelling as the pregnant silences of her masterpiece, Certain Women, but better upholstered than First Cow. I hope it proves her biggest hit to date. And if none of the above sounds compelling to you, know that the calmly paced story is put into a motion by Lizzy's bad cat Ricky.

Grade: A-minus

New York Film Festival 60 Screenings 3

Pacifiction (Albert Serra)

Hopefully, the fact that I preferred several films to Albert Serra's The Death of Louis XIV at the 2016 New York Film Festival will shore up my authority when I confess that Pacifiction marks the second Serra feature in a row that I've deemed the best film at the festival (Liberté stole my heart in 2019). What can I say? About three quarters through Pacifiction's 165 minutes, I experienced a rush of euphoria so overwhelming that I can no longer shake the conclusion that Serra is our greatest director of nominally narrative feature-length films.

A source of that euphoria stems from Serra's perversion of the concept of camera coverage, the practice of shooting enough footage to provide the editor with a large amount of options to cut a scene. Serra's practice differs in that the actors have little clue where the cameras are at and thus cannot play a scene in any precise way. And given that every scene is improvised, the actors are left as unmoored as the audience (no surprise to learn that Pacifiction occasioned the most walkouts at Cannes). Furthermore, Serra's coverage program leaves him with almost as little command as his actors and audience. He doesn't know what he will wind up with and, indeed, the 165-minute film before us was planed down from 540 hours of footage over months of editing. Pacifiction, then, is chaos shaped into an all-plot-no-story phantasmagoria. That it still retains an authorial drive and a palpable albeit bewildering sense of continuity is damn near miraculous, art cinema at its furthest extreme.

The question of whether Serra's m.o. counts as directing or even results in cinema is what drives both the love and hate for this film. For those who welcome the feeling of being unmoored from ontological categories and narrative strictures, Pacification is intoxication incarnate. For others, Serra's devotion to his methodology is a ticket to hell on earth. The best critique I've come across is a brief but spirited takedown on Letterboxd from Bingham Bryant, the co-director of my beloved For the Plasma.

A synopsis is near impossible to reconstruct, never my strong point (or chief concern) anyway, since each scene appears in its place as indifferently as a breeze. Benoît Magimel plays De Roller, "High Commissioner of the Republic in French Polynesia,” a position he occupies with great interpersonal savvy. He represents the French government in Tahiti and, for a time, manages to quell the Tahitians' fears of colonialist meddling. But De Roller's specific role morphs throughout. Much of the time, he gives great meeting. But he also seems to be some sort of cultural ambassador, directing a traditional Tahitian dance performance (and thus meddling anyway?). Other times, he seems to align with the sybaritic marines and government dignitaries enjoying the beautiful women and men who people a drowsy night club. His connection to a trans woman, Shannah (Pahoa Mahagafanau, electric), deepens as the film progresses. She moves from a seemingly tangential hotel employee to De Roller's closest confidant. The film grows steadily more agitated as the threat of nuclear testing on the island becomes of a reality. Plenty more characters and situations (including an absolutely gorgeous surfing sequence) could be mentioned but less as connective tissue than elements bouncing around an entropic environment. The overall effect is akin to falling through a trap door every few minutes. I found myself simultaneously energized by the undertaking and lulled by its many hazy longueurs. 

Grade: A+