New York Film Festival 61 Screenings

The Beast (Bertrand Bonello)

In his 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle, Henry James distilled one man's existence into a 50-page rumination on living a life of fear, avoiding the title creature in whatever form he (both the character and, as many scholars suggest, James himself) imagined it would take. Bonello's perverse adaptation is radically expansive, flitting between 1910, 2014, and 2044 with several other eras represented in between. And the beast takes many more forms here - unconsummated love, perceived slights voiced by an incel, a world overrun by robots and artificial intelligence. I want to say little more here to preserve the myriad surprises in store except to note that the first third moves like a glacial prestige project. But stick with it and watch the thing go haywire. In its varied cognitive registers, its crucial meditation on the transhistorical nature of fear and grievances, and its multifarious soundtrack, all delicately balanced such that it forces you at the end to flash over the previous two-plus hours and long to watch it again immediately, it just might be Bonello's masterpiece (so far!).

Grade: A (it's such an off-kilter experience that I need more viewings to be surer but I can easily imagine this winding up an A+)

The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer) 

Another radically reimagined adaptation, this time of Martin Amis' 2014 novel about romantic intrigue amongst Nazi officials against the backdrop of Auschwitz. Where Amis used pseudonyms, Glazer, who wrote the screenplay, portrays the actual longest-running Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller). As with his previous outing, 2013's Under the Skin, Glazer places cameras at various points throughout the bucolic Höss home, mere meters away from the atrocities of the death camp, and allowed the actors to move naturally throughout the location. The lack of analytical editing (at least from the perspective of the performers) is an obvious attempt to represent the banality of evil. But as with so many such projects, the question as to what exactly is being illuminated here remains elusive and the pretensions to objectivity utterly misplaced in a film on this subject. And there's an attendant naivete accompanying Glazer's m.o. During the Q&A, he noted that he wanted to avoid a straightforward representation of the Holocaust: “The idea of not showing, not reenacting, the atrocities or the violence was absolutely mandatory for me…There were two films, the one you see and the one your hear.” That second film comprises the soundtrack and we frequently hear gun shots and cries of agony in the distance (and several times not so in the distance). This assiduously constructed soundscape is as much as reenactment of Holocaust atrocities as Schindler's List and to suggest otherwise is to fall into the trap of conceiving of violence as a purely visual phenomenon or as instantiated in a limited visual palette, e.g., Michael Haneke's contention that he never shows violence in Funny Games. The Zone of Interest is nowhere near as execrable as that candidate for the worst film ever made. But it's marked by a similar confusion, especially given how many glimpses of violence Glazer treats us to in the film we see, e.g. a ubiquitous chimney pumping out smoke, fire, and ashes from ovens burning up to 10,000 bodies a day and two scenes centered on the teeth of murdered prisoners. 

Grade: B-minus

AGGRO DR1FT (Harmony Korine)

Four Unloved Women, Adrift on a Purposeless Sea, Experience the Ecstasy of Dissection (David Cronenberg)

The atmosphere in which this screening took place (at midnight on a Sunday-becoming-Monday night) was as noteworthy as the film itself. Weed permeated the air about ten minutes before Korine took to the stage to introduce the film. He noted the smell but anyone could be forgiven for thinking he lit the bong given his wacky introduction. Five chairs were on the stage below the screen set up for a previous (or subsequent?) Q&A. Korine confessed he was weirded out by them, repeating "Where did the people go?" several times. It all became too much for him so he had NYFF staff remove the chairs. After he himself removed the final remaining chair, we thought he was finally ready to discuss the film. But he then thanked us for coming and the screening started. Typically, the carnivalesque environment that greeted the screening would have pissed me off. But Araabmuzik's carpet bombing soundtrack flattened any unwanted sound (indeed, the festival programmer who introduced Korine told us we should silence our phones but it wouldn't matter either way). Still, the young hetero couple, pretty model types, in front of me were extremely fidgety throughout. The dyed blonde gal kept looking in every direction, constantly whispering blissfully unheard somethings to her shaggy-haired companion, and left the theatre at one point during the 80-minute film. During the end credits, they still couldn't contain themselves and passed back and forth an iPhone on which they were playing chess. Three even younger looking guys seated next to them kept chitchatting and taking pictures of a person in full bondage gear complete with a jet-black facekini. The film was Spring Breakers told through infrared, an obnoxious gambit that requires the captivity of a festival showing to make it through. Somehow, it lowered my blood pressure and I wound up loving the experience. Preceded by a quizzical four-minute Cronenberg short of dissected female mannequins washed up on a beach with entrails spilling out all over. 

Grade: A-minus 

Grade for the Cronenberg: meh

New York Film Festival 60 Screenings 1

Coma (Bertrand Bonello)

Bonello's latest is somewhat of a disappointment coming after so much successive excellence (Saint Laurent, Zombi Child, Nocturama, etc). Filmed in Bonello's home in January 2021, Coma is an 81-minute collage meant to evoke the disorienting suck of staying at home during the COVID-19 pandemic. There are animated sequences, a soap opera played out via pixilated dolls (one of whom is voiced by Gaspard Ulliel, who played Saint Laurent for Bonello and who died at 37 in a skiing accident this January), videos of a YouTube influencer named Patricia Coma (Julia Faure), a Zoom call between several teen girls debating the coolest serial killer, a Simon-like memorization game meant to while away the hours/remind us that we have no free will, a forest where the living and the dead mingle, text messages, FaceTimes, more. Phrases uttered by one entity will get repeated by another. One of the dolls starts spouting Trumpisms. Bonello dedicates this stream-of-consciousness sprawl to his then-18-year-old daughter Anna, represented by the similarly aged Louise Labèque (of Zombi Child fame), as an acknowledgment of the difficulties of remaining at home at such a formative age. It's all a bit trite, especially the last sequence in which Bonello implores Anna to stay strong over images of ecological disaster. But, horizontally, it triumphs. You can ignore the vertical platitudes and bask in the perverse structure. Still, here's hoping his next project, a free adaptation of Henry James' 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle, synthesizes his best tendencies.

Grade: A-minus 

New York Film Festival 57 Screenings 4

Zombi Child (Bertrand Bonello)
Before exegesis, there is observation. Or, rather, there should be observation. Not only my students and select family members but critics and scholars want to jump to that second-order reality of attaching meaning to a work of art before appreciating or even perceiving the first-order reality of observing (never disinterested or free of power differentials) the qualities of a thing. So many of the reviewers of Bertrand Bonello's new film Zombi Child trip over themselves trying to delineate what the film means. Of course, it's a disquisition on colonialism and the nature of historical memory. An early appearance by historian Patrick Boucheron, essentially playing himself, makes that clear. But can we just take a step back and observe?

Zombi Child recounts the maybe-true story of Clairvius Narcisse (Mackenson Bijou), a Haitian man who died in 1962 only to be disinterred and rendered a zombified slave via regular doses of tetrodotoxin, the somnabulating venom in pufferfish, and Datura, a poisonous species of plants. After his master's death and thus the cessation of dosing, Narcisse regained human consciousness and returned to his family years later, dying again in 1994.

Bonello alternates this tale with present-day scenes at the Maison d’Education of the Legion of Honor in Saint-Denis, "a state school intended for the daughters, grand-daughters and great-grand-daughters of French and foreign recipients of the Legion of Honor, the Military Medal, and the National Order of Merit"* founded by Napoleon around the time Haiti achieved independence in 1804. We come to learn that Narcisse's granddaughter Mélissa (Wislanda Louimat) attends the school and must contend with the rituals promising acceptance from a group of cool girls.

The most remarkable aspect of Zombi Child is how Bonello approaches these latter scenes with just as much ethnographic fascination as the Narcisse story. For Haitian audiences and, indeed, anyone not of such lofty birthright, the traditions and practices at the Maison d’Education are foreign, not some hegemonic balcony from which to observe. Just as bizarre as any of the zombie folklore is an apparently real routine (according to Bonello at the Q & A) in which a group of students all lean back together as if to say "whoa!" in the presence of a high Maison official. And, as always with Bonello, the routine is conveyed through the musical - Voudou drumming, a rendition of "Silent Night," a school report on Rihanna, the Haitian blues rock of Moonlight Benjamin, French rappers Damso and Kalash, and Gerry & The Pacemakers' overripe but now, thanks to Bonello, devastating take on "You'll Never Walk Alone" which, I've just discovered, is the theme song for the Liverpool Football Club (talk about foreign rituals!).

What does it all mean? We'll get to that. But first, let's connect with this absolutely exquisite film.
Grade: A
*Quoted from the press kit. 

 

Visual Diary

Film diary entries do little to jog my memory. Often they read like the viewing experiences of someone else. So let's see if snapshots work. Here are some pretty pictures from films I've been watching lately.

Cuadecuc, vampir (Pere Portabella, 1971)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Le genou de Claire (Claire's Knee) (Eric Rohmer, 1970)

 

  Kings of the Road (Wim Wenders, 1976)

The American Friend (Wim Wenders, 1977)

 Meet Me at the Fair (Douglas Sirk, 1953)

Slightly French (Douglas Sirk, 1949)

 

The Murderers are Among Us (Wolfgang Staudte, 1946)

 

 

 Saint Laurent (Bertrand Bonello, 2014)