Sunday, October 9, 2011

Film Fest Gleams Mysterious This Year

In its 49th incarnation, well into respectable middle age, the New York Film Festival has experienced a growth spurt and a burst of youthful energy. The Film Society of Lincoln Center, which hosts the festival, expanded its footprint last summer, with the opening of the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, a street-level miniplex across West 65th Street from the lofty terrace of the Walter Reade Theater. The festival’s offerings have expanded accordingly, with more classic films and retrospectives, a new documentary program and a larger selection of Views From the Avant-Garde, in addition to the 27 features in the main slate.

Ditta Miranda Jasifi in “Pina,” a 3-D film directed by Wim Wenders
Gala screenings have been added beyond the traditional opening, centerpiece and closing-night events. And on Monday night there will be a sneak preview of an as-yet-unannounced film described as “a major work in progress by a master filmmaker” at Avery Fisher Hall.
Clint Eastwood’s “J. Edgar”?
Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo”?
The next “Twilight” installment?

Footage from a party last night at Joe Swanberg’s apartment? Your guess is as good as mine.
An element of surprise is surely welcome at a festival that can seem, year in and year out, a bit predictable, an annual parade of work by the same cluster of masters. This consistency is in many ways admirable, especially in contrast to the indiscriminate frenzy of the Tribeca Film Festival. It is good to have attention lavished on the latest efforts from Pedro Almodóvar, David Cronenberg, Jafar Panahi and Lars von Trier, among other stalwarts of the festival. But a sense of energy, of spontaneity, is also a good thing, and perhaps necessary if the festival is to hold on to its reputation as an important event both on the New York cultural calendar and in the larger world of cinema.

It offers New Yorkers a chance to see some of the most eagerly anticipated movies of the season. Between now and the closing-night festivities on Sunday, these include Mr. Almodóvar’s “Skin I Live In,” with Antonio Banderas as an obsessive plastic surgeon, and “The Descendants,” directed by Alexander Payne, with George Clooney as a fumbling father. But Manhattan audiences will not have to wait long for a second chance, since “Skin” hits theaters on Friday, two days after its Lincoln Center gala, and “The Descendants” arrives early next month. The fantastic Israeli film “Footnote” will also show up in theaters, and if you see only one movie about Talmudic scholarship this year, make it this one. (But if you have time for more than one Israeli movie, and an interest in that country’s increasingly vital and ambitious national cinemas, check out Nadav Lapid’s “Policeman,” a tough and incendiary drama of social dysfunction and ideological warfare in the Jewish state.)

The main slate, in other words, consists largely of sneak previews of movies that will, within the coming months, have at least limited commercial release. This does not result from a failure of imagination on the part of the festival’s selection committee, but rather from the robust state of art-house distribution, at least in New York. Those of us who routinely lament the meager prospects and diminished cachet of challenging films (particularly those that challenge audiences to read subtitles) may be too wedded to gloom. In the early days of the New York Film Festival it often provided starved cinephiles with their only opportunity to see exciting and exotic new work. Now that work is less elusive and more accessible. What you miss this month on the Upper West Side is likely to come around again downtown or in Brooklyn, at the IFC Center or Film Forum or Brooklyn Academy of Music — or else somewhere in the churning, chaotic realm of video on demand.

Nonetheless, there is something thrilling (you might say festive) about such an abundance of riches gathered in one place over two weeks. The final stretch of the festival is, among other things, a celebration of the varieties of beauty that film can deliver. These range from the visual luster of “The Skin I Live In” — a typically Almodóvarian symphony of expressive color, keyed to the rich sonorities of Alberto Iglesias’s score — to the sun-dappled naturalism of Mia Hansen-Love’s “Goodbye First Love,” an entrancingly sweet and bracingly unsentimental story of youthful passion.

A rougher kind of beauty can be found in “Martha Marcy May Marlene,” directed by Sean Durkin, a study of psychological torment anchored by Elizabeth Olsen’s performance as a young woman trying to escape the clutches of a religious cult. The film is harsh and dreamy, its images haunting even if its story is not entirely convincing.

Perhaps the most ravishing aesthetic experience to be found at the Film Society — or anywhere else in New York at the moment — is Wim Wenders’s “Pina,” a 3-D documentary tribute to the life and work of the German choreographer Pina Bausch. Live-action 3-D is usually disappointing, bullying the eye and foreshortening rather than expanding the kinetic pleasure of watching bodies move through space. But Mr. Wenders uses the format to capture the elusive essence of dance, not only preserving Ms. Bausch’s art but also clarifying its intentions and making visible its inspirations.

“Pina” is both the literal record of a series of performances (punctuated with interviews) and a complex weave of illusions. It is a reminder of the power film has to blur, or even render moot, the boundary between the literal and the artificial. “This Is Not a Film” makes a similar point in a very different way. To identify its director as the Iranian filmmaker Mr. Panahi would be inaccurate and possibly dangerous. Shortly before the nonfilm was shot (with a digital video camera operated by Mojtaba Mirtahmasb and an iPhone wielded by Mr. Panahi), the Iranian government had sentenced Mr. Panahi to six years in prison and forbidden him from making films for 20 years.

“This Is Not a Film” finds him at home in his apartment in Tehran, musing on his predicament, strategizing on the phone with his lawyer and feeding his daughter’s pet iguana. He attempts a kind of staged reading of a screenplay and reviews clips from his earlier films “The Circle” and “Crimson Gold” (both highlights of previous years at the New York Film Festival). Nothing overtly cinematic here: just a video diary of daily life. And yet the plainness of Mr. Panahi’s self-presentation — nothing to see here, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad! — is the source of the film’s sly, subversive power and also of its formal ingenuity. No authority can prevent “This Is Not a Film” from being exactly what it is not supposed to be, and nobody who holds onto the faith that art can be a weapon against tyranny should miss it — here or anywhere else it turns up.

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