New York Film Festival - Third Dispatch

Rose of Nevada (Mark Jenkin) - I'll be blunt. I admired Jenkin's Enys Men (2022) as a perplexing mood piece. But I opted for his latest feature solely because I thought it would allow me to be in the same room with the co-star of the film, George MacKay, the architecturally gorgeous actor who appeared in two of my favorite recent films, The End (Joshua Oppenheimer, 2024) and best-film-of-the-decade-candidate The Beast (Bertrand Bonello, 2023). Alas, the beauty was not in attendance. Still, I wasn't aware of his absence until after the screening so I received Jenkin's latest Cornwall puzzle with an open mind if not heart. 

McKay plays Nick, a fisherman from a present-day, rundown Cornish village who goes off with drifter Liam (Callum Turner, perhaps even more gorgeous but lacking the angularity that makes MacKay's face so delectable for filmic compositions) on the titular watercraft for a job. They return to find they are back in 1993 when the village was thriving and each subsequent run on the Rose of Nevada tosses them back and forth between the two eras. Jenkin provides narrative tension through the men's divergent reactions to the time jumps. While Nick is understandably baffled and searches for signs of his wife and family, Liam plays the sexual field and may be engaging in some conceptual incest back in the present. Jonathan Romney in Sight & Sound found it "a tale of the fantastic, but rooted in the bleak political realities of 2020s Britain." I found it suffered from the drawbacks of the subgenre - diverting while it plays but easily placed on the shelf with other puzzles and forgotten once it's over, despite its gorgeous 16mm photography and reportedly post-sync sound that make the film look like a lost 1970s folk-horror screamer.

Grade: B+

 

Sirāt (Óliver Laxe) - Since Laxe's latest shifts into shock mode about halfway through, it's best to keep this short. A father, Luis (Sergi López), with his son, Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona), descends upon a rave in a Moroccan desert in search of his daughter who has gone missing. A military unit breaks up the rave and lines up a caravan to be arrested. But along with two groups of revelers, Luis speeds away in his van. They're all off to another rave where Luis hopes he might find his daughter. After changing tires, bartering with locals for gas, and avoiding another military convoy, things take a turn for the even worse. 

Sirāt enjoyed a June release in Spain, doing robust box office figures for an art film. It's also divided audiences pretty starkly; check the array of takes on Letterboxd. I didn't know what to do with it once I stepped off the ride. Since the ensemble are all European, Laxe may be suggesting something about colonialism or locating pleasure zones in the midst of regional conflicts. But where Rose of Nevada is a puzzle, Sirāt is a roller coaster. Extremely gripping, even harrowing, it raises your blood pressure but to what end? Wrong answers only.

Grade: B+