I keep thinking about the dog in Showing Up. He’s a big, white, shaggy mess of a thing, and he lays across the doorway, so everyone who comes into the office of the art school has to step over him. And everyone does; it’s second nature to them. That’s the kind of lived-in detail that only the best of filmmakers bother with, and by this point, Kelly Reichart has certainly established herself as one of our best filmmakers. This new film, one of the highlights of the 60th annual New York Film Festival, is her fourth collaboration with Michelle Williams, who stars as Lizzie, an artist with a dull administrative job in the school of office (reporting directly to her mother, no less).
Lizzie also has a show coming up, and Showing Up is very much a movie about being on a deadline – she’s trying to get her last couple of pieces done, but she has all of these annoyances and irritations, all these little combustible elements swirling around, distracting and disturbing her. Reichart’s command is so firm that she manages to make her movie both mellow and stressful; Lizzie’s irritations are never far from her mind, but the director also makes time to immerse us in the community of artists, educators, and wannabees that surround her, and also isn’t afraid to offset her difficulties by making the character prickly, a little bit of a pushover, a little bit of a martyr. It’s a quietly complicated character, and the range Williams is showing between this and The Fabelmans is a firm affirmation that she’s one of the best in the game (not that anyone needed to be reassured).
Todd Field’s Tár, (his first feature in sixteen years) is explicitly about ”cancellation,” and your reaction to it may serve as an unexpected Rorschach test – particularly since he’s wisely chosen not to stack the deck in either direction, but to create a situation and character noteworthy in their knottiness and complexity. Cate Blanchett stars as a conductor, composer, and EGOT at the height of her power whose life and livelihood (and, perhaps, her sanity) unravel slowly as a former protégé commits suicide and “some accusations” surface.
It’s a performance of tremendous precision – she begins with absolute authority and control, and over the course of the two-plus hours, loses it entirely. And the supporting cast more than keeps pace (particularly Nina Hoss, who is doing a whole master class in reaction shots). Fields’ direction is razor-sharp, as is his script; particularly strong are the closing passages, which follows the character farther than most narratives would, all the way to one of the funniest closing shots in recent memory.
Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter is a similarly stacked showcase for a gifted performer, in this case Tilda Swinton, reprising her role as Rosalind Hart in Hogg’s two previous Souvenir films, but playing her at a much older age while also taking over her daughter Honor’s role of Rosalind’s daughter Julie. (Confused?) We find mother and daughter checking in to a cozy yet spooky inn, somewhere in the Welsh countryside; they seem to be the only guests, surrounded by strange creaks, loud gusts, distant banging, doors that seem to open themselves and… is that a ghost in the window? The echoes of The Shining are not accidental, but Hogg confounds expectation at every turn; she’s using the visual and aural language of a supernatural thriller to craft a dense human drama about memory and regret.
Women Talking is based on the novel by Miriam Toews, but it feels more like a theatrical adaptation, from its cornucopia of dramatic monologues to its (mostly) single setting to its traditional three-act structure. But director and screenwriter Sarah Polley keeps the picture from getting bogged down in a torrent of talk (not that the title doesn’t warn us); there are moments that are cinematically intimate, poetic even, and occasionally she’ll burst away from the central locale with harrowing flashes of what’s been done to them, and thus what brought them there. Some of her tableaux are breathtaking, which makes Polley’s decision to use such a muddy, muted color palette all the more baffling – it gives a drab sameness to the images, and diluting the color of the blood dilutes its power. But that’s the only serious complaint; the performances are top-notch across the board, and it’s good to have Polley back in the saddle.
“I’m an American journalist and I’m going home tomorrow,” she announces, and then takes a beat, and revises: “Tomorrow or the day after.” Her name is Trish, she’s the focal character of Claire Denis’ Stars at Noon, and she’s played by Margaret Qualley in a commanding performance. She was once, indeed, a journalist, but things have gotten desperate in Nicaragua, and these days she’s turning tricks for $50 a pop, until she meets a British businessman (Joe Allwyn) who has even more to hide than she does.
There’s something inherently shady about a story centered on two white people trapped in Nicaragua, and some cultural ugliness is all but baked in here, so consider yourself warned. The picture also feels longer than it is, but that seems by design; it’s a riff on the espionage/political/erotic thriller, but pitched at Denis’ own idiosyncratic tempo, inverting familiar beats, putting the customary ingredients into a broken jar and shaking them up. And when her instincts falter, Qualley picks up the slack, holding the screen with a kind of quiet inevitability, pulling the neat trick of always putting on a brave face while letting us see, in the flicker of an eye or an offhand gesture, what she’s really thinking. It’s a live wire of a performance.
Alice Diop’s Saint Omer arrived at NYFF fresh from nabbing the Silver Lion at Venice, and like many a past winner of that festival, it’s a film I admire and respect but do not quite love. It begins as the story of Rama (Kayije Kagame), a researcher and teacher who is confident in the classroom and out of her element everywhere else. She travels to Saint-Omer to observe the trial of a woman accused of murdering her 15-month-old child, though Rama’s reason for attending is obscured, and Diop leaves the viewer adrift and uncertain for a healthy chunk of the running time.
Eventually, however, a strange bond appears between the teacher and the accused, present in exchanged glances and shared silences, and it overwhelms Rama; it all becomes too real, too personal, too unthinkable, reconnecting her with memories she locked away long ago, and the cycles of abuse, neglect, and regret that they seem to share. Saint Omer is well made and the performances are tip-top (Guslagie Malanga as the accused mother is incredible). But it goes at its themes both head-on directly and obliquely, which can be discombobulating. It packs an emotional punch, but it sure does take a roundabout route there.
Enys Men is set on an abandoned island in 1973, and shot in tight, grainy 16mm, so the initial scenes of its protagonist (Mary Woodvine, very good) wandering the bare seaside have the uncanny feel of an In Search Of episode. Such callbacks, and the old school stylistic devices therein, are responsible for the film’s initial appeal, but as she spends more and more screen time going about her dull daily routines, the picture begins to feel less like a slow burn than a crawl burn. The sound design is assaultive, and there are some genuinely arresting images (and some very silly ones), but the storytelling is so oblique that it never really goes anywhere; writer/director Mark Jenkin shows a command of texture and vibes, but there’s just not much else going on here.
She Said, which dramatizes the New York Times’ bombshell reporting on the sex crimes of Harvey Weinstein, landed with a real splash at NYFF, a festival on Weinstein’s home turf that frequently showcased his Oscar hopefuls. That recent history plays in the movie’s favor; it still feels like tending to an open wound. But verisimilitude and proximity can only carry it so far. Much of Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s dialogue is artless, and because her script so directly courts comparisons to All the President’s Men – two reporters and a tough editor chasing down a giant, impossible story – we can’t help but notice how little personality the characters have been given.
That movie, to be fair, didn’t have the same kind of cultural responsibility as this one; its reporters could be clumsy (incompetent, even), their editor could be insensitive, and so on. But Carey Mulligan, Zoe Kazan, and especially Patricia Clarkson barely have any dimensions beyond the stresses of the work/life balance; these are actors who can play anything, but you have to give them something. That said, once the machinery of the newspaper picture starts grinding, She Said picks up steam; if you don’t get the goosebumps when Andre Braugher tells his reporters, “Go write,” or when tears fill Kazan’s eyes as she finally gets her named source, or when they land on that perfect last shot, well, you might just be made of wood.
Frederick Wiseman is best known for three-plus hour documentaries about the meeting rooms that shape American life, so the idea of him directing an hour-long, mostly outdoor French-language monologue in period dress seems deliberately counterintuitive, like Martin Scorsese directing a 3-D family movie or something insane like that. But that’s exactly what he’s done with A Couple, which stars Nathalie Boutefeu as Sophia Tolstoy, delivering the text of her letters to “Leon” aloud to camera, the raging waves breaking over rocks on the shore a none-too-subtle metaphor for the tempests raging inside her. Her text is a mixture of fond memories and contemptuous complaints, and after a while, a recurring theme emerges; this film, and her story, is mostly about the concessions made (often without question) to encourage and enable the male genius. That’s a provocative subject, and A Couple has some lovely images and poignant moments. But try as he might, Wiseman just can’t make much of a movie out of it.
Alain Gomis’s Rewind & Play is a quite unusual documentary, featuring but not “about” (in any traditional sense) the great jazz pianist Thelonius Monk. It is comprised of footage from a December 1969 trip to Paris – a bit of film of his arrival at the airport, but mostly raw footage from an appearance on the French television program “Jazz Portrait.” Monk does not seem at ease on camera (or in France, frankly), and it’s a stilted, awkward interview, the musician and his white, French host crashing against barriers of both language and culture. Gomis brilliantly shares all the outtakes, do-overs, and rough edges, which makes for a tremendous revealing look at how celebrities are packaged, how talk show conversations are created, and (especially in this period) how Black entertainers were infantilized. Finally, at the end, they just let him play, and it’s perfect: evocative, emotional, melancholy, affecting. “Oh you know, all I do is play,” he chuckles early on, and it seems like a dodge; by the end, it feels like a plea.
Film journalist Elvis Mitchell’s Is That Black Enough For You?!? is subtitled “How one decade forever changed the movies (for me),” and it lives up to that promise – a searching, sometimes thoughtful, sometimes indulgent essay film on the fruitful Black American cinema period of 1968-1978, and why that period ended. Mitchell hits the canon (Shaft, Sweet Sweetback, Cotton Comes to Harlem, Coffy) but also departs from it to sing the praises of lesser-known or less acclaimed titles, which is welcome; he also shares a keen understanding of why these films were so effective (their protagonists were heroic antidotes to the antiheroes of white ‘70s cinema, served to an audience that was ready to see them), and thoughtfully explores the fuzzy line between representation and exploitation. But the filmmaking is wildly unruly; side bits are mentioned but discarded, little errors in facts and editing pepper the picture, and several detours seem to have been included simply because he had the material, and not because they further the discussion in a meaningful way. There’s a lot to like here, but Is That Black Enough plays like the rough cut of what could eventually be a very fine documentary.
Laura Poitros’s All the Beauty and the Bloodshed offers the viewer two first-rate films for the price of one: a bio-doc of the artist Nan Goldin, one of the most innovative photographers of her time, and an on-the-ground chronicle of her current activism, leading ACT-UP-inspired actions at museums where the Sackler family, which amassed enormous wealth manufacturing and marketing OxyContin, has “washed their blood money” through donations. These museums, which have wings, pools, and entire buildings bearing the Sackler name, are marquee attractions where, uncomfortably enough, Goldin’s work is part of the permanent collection – so she’s putting her money where her mouth is, laying her career on the line by going right at these monsters.
That material is gripping, recalling the in-the-moment danger of Poitros’s Citizenfour. But the biographical sections are just as riveting; Godlin is a tremendous storyteller, and intersected with some of the most notorious scenes of the late 20th century (Boston in the ‘70s, John Waters’ Dreamlanders, ‘80s downtown NYC, early AIDS art and activism). She’s matter-of-fact but evocative, and sentimental though she doesn’t sentimentalize. All the Beauty could be either of those movies and be great; that it is both, and that they intertwine so delicately and devastatingly at its conclusion, makes it one of the finest films (documentary or narrative) of the year. 
