Jason Bailey
Watching Nouvelle Vague, Richard Linklater’s dramatization of the making of the French New Wave classic Breathless, at the New York Film Festival (where so many figures of that movement were greeted as geniuses) must be what watching a Marvel movie at ComicCon is like. It’s presumably one of the few venues on earth where the introduction of Eric Rohmer gets a knowing chuckle. But that kind of recognition can go both ways, as an audience so well-versed in this story and its history is more prone to pushing back at inaccuracies, simplifications, or mere bad taste. So perhaps the highest praise possible for Linklater’s film is that the NYFF audience didn’t revolt.
I worried they might during the early passages, undeniably the roughest patch of the picture, which too often turn into a collection of director Jean-Luc Godard’s Famous Quotes — “Art is not a pastime but a priesthood,” “All you need for a movie is a girl and a gun,” “The best way to criticize a movie is to make another movie,” they play all the hits. But once we get into the actual physical production of Breathless, it’s easy to get caught up; Linklater, no doubt through a combination of research and personal experience, summons up the genuine electricity of the first-time filmmaker, and the excitement is infectious. The character of Godard — and therefore the try-as-he-might performance by Guillaume Marbeck — never quite penetrates the surface. Zoey Deutch, however, makes for a captivating Jean Seberg; she has that ethereal, pixieish, movie-star quality down cold, and her considerable spark helps keep things lively.
Remarkably, Linklater had another examination of a beloved pop culture figure in the line-up — one that also, thankfully, avoids the wheezy tropes of the show-biz biopic. Blue Moon stars Ethan Hawke as Lorenz Hart, the lyricist half of the songwriting team of Rodgers and Hart, whom we first meet on his way to his death at 48. Robert Kaplow’s script then backs up seven months, to the opening night of Oklahoma!, Rodgers first of many collaborations with, essentially, Hart’s replacement, Oscar Hammerstein II. Hart can’t bear to watch all of Oklahoma! (I get it, brother), so he slips over to Sardi’s to get an early start on the opening night party.
That evening, in Kaplow’s dramatization, becomes a moment of reckoning for the songwriter, in which the pieces of his romantic life and career bend until they break. His script is snappy and witty, equally adept at sparkling conversation (he spends much of the evening holding court on his favorite topics: music, art, and himself) and painful subtext. The latter is omnipresent in his strained conversations with Rodgers, who is played by Andrew Scott in a marvel of a performance; he communicates their whole history, all of his frustrations and resentments, in his body language and timing. (Margaret Qualley also provides a jolt of juice as the object of his “irrational adoration.”) Blue Moon feels overlong at 100 minutes, and the visual tricks to shorten Hawke’s 5’10” frame to Hart’s 5’ flat are a seemingly unnecessary distraction. But it stays with you.
Linklater’s not the only filmmaker taking stock of the business of show at NYFF this year. Jay Kelly stars George Clooney as the title character, an actor and movie star who is, well, very much like George Clooney. Baumbach’s emotionally wise screenplay catches him at an inflection point; he’s just wrapped a movie, and is starting another one quickly, but a pending empty nest (his youngest daughter is about to head off to college) causes a bit of a breakdown. A film festival in Tuscany that wants to honor him, and at first he refuses (“No tributes”), but when he realizes that trip would allow him to barge into his daughter’s European vacation, he decides to go — and ends up reexamining his life and career along the way.
The best lines and scenes in Baumbach and Emily Mortimer’s screenplay really dig into movies, as both a money-making industry and a personal art. One wishes that Baumbach would’ve been willing to make a movie that’s entirely and unapologetically inside baseball, and just went for it. It feels, however, like he felt he had to offset the show-biz material with more general tear-jerker bad-dad stuff, pitching it like a middlebrow crowd-pleaser to avoid alienating the Netflix scroller. But he just ends up undercutting what works, and several of the sentimental moments land with a thud. The result is an odd duck of a movie that feels personal and specific, and yet also somewhat anonymous.
If I were making bets on the most promising post-Potter careers of the many talented young actors in that film franchise, I would not have put much down on Harry Melling, who spent those years trapped in the one-joke role of Dudley Dursley. But he’s been doing good work for the likes of the Coen Brothers, Gina Prince-Blythewood, and Scott Cooper, and he’s a revelation in Pillion, which could best be described as a gay BDSM coming-of-age romance. He plays a tentative young man named Colin (so wholesome that he sings in a barbershop quartet) who captures the attention of ridiculously attractive biker Ray (Alexander Skarsgård) and discovers that he has, in Ray’s words, “an aptitude for devotion.”
Writer/director Harry Lighton immerses the viewer into an entire scene, with its own rules and roles (which we learn alongside him), and does not pull punches in terms of its graphic sex. But he also has a sense of humor, thankfully (nothing is potentially funnier than someone else’s kink), with most of the laughs provided by Colin’s endearing politeness. Melling has such a warm, open face, and knows exactly how high to pitch the vulnerability of the character — and that matters, as the entire third act is dependent on him finally speaking up about what he wants. Pillion could’ve played as a collection of cheap thrills, but it’s ultimately about healthily navigating a transgressive relationship: how to understand what you like, understand what your partner likes, and navigate your individual boundaries. And Lighton also gets that it can be about those things, and also be sexy and funny and fun; in fact, one can inform the other.
There is a plot (and a good one) in Christian Petzold’s Miroirs No. 3, but that’s not really what the movie is about; it’s about Paula Beer’s face, and the mysteries it holds. She plays a young woman named Laura who is riding in the passenger seat when her boyfriend’s car goes off the road. He’s killed instantly, but she’s just a little banged up. Betty (Barbara Auer), who lives nearby, witnesses the accident, and an immediate, all but inexplicable bond develops between them. She offers the strangely disassociated young woman a place to stay and recuperate.
Miroirs is modest and mellow as hell — you fall into the lackadaisical rhythms of Laura’s days alongside her – until it’s not. Bristling little bits of tension are provided by Betty’s husband and her adult son, though they paint an incomplete picture; we only see them through Laura’s eyes, so the secrets they’re keeping are kept from us as well. The reveals and revelations are satisfying, emotionally and intellectually, but again, they’re not really what the picture is about. When I think of it, I’ll think of the complex emotions Beer is conveying as she sits for her recital, or in the marvelously enigmatic closing shot.
The heroes — if you want to use the word, and it’s understandable if not — of Francesco Sossai’s The Last One for the Road are a pair of irresponsible lushes and occasional louses, and (at once time, at least) borderline criminals. The fact that you come away from this freewheeling, loosey-goosey road comedy with anything but contempt for them is far from certain; that you come away with such affection is borderline miraculous. But that’s the skill of Sossai’s direction, and of the just-right performances by Sergio Romano and Pierpaolo Capovilla as two guys who are, as it’s so eloquently put, “too old to grow up.”
Credit is also due to Filippo Scotti as Giulio, the young student whom they meet during a long night of carousing and quickly size up as someone who could live a little; they take him under their collective wing and show him a good time, or their approximation of it. The title comes from their never-ending journey for “one last drink,” which becomes a running gag, a refrain, a reminder that guys like these are never really done. Their adventures are tinged with melancholy, as such stories often are, but Sossai handles the pathos with a light touch, and finds just the right note to close on.
Hlynur Pálmason’s Godland was fairly heavy on plot, so it takes some time to realize that his new film The Love That Remains isn’t about any specific conflict or crisis, but a feeling. It begins by faking us out, with a series of meandering, slice-of-life impressions of a seemingly warm and happy family, only to reveal that the mother and father have separated. And so much of the picture is concerned with how it feels to linger in limbo, in this liminal space where the center of one’s universe has ended, but no one wants to let it go.
Pálmason captures that feeling with a perceptive eye and ear — the scene where a tiny spat about nothing snowballs into a full-on rager is one of the closest approximations of marital irritation I’ve ever seen — while simultaneously shedding the naturalistic approach of the early scenes as he goes. Stylistically, it grows increasingly strange and experimental as its central relationship grows less stable, jolting us with shock edits and surrealistic imagery. It doesn’t hold together with the force or emotion of Godland, but it has its moments.
Through the biopic scourge of the past several years, I’ve often found myself engaging in a thought exercise to separate the wheat from the chaff: would this movie be successful, as a piece of storytelling, if I knew absolutely nothing about the subject? Duse, the new film from Martin Eden director Pietro Marcello, finally offers up an actualization of that thought exercise; before it began, I hadn’t so much as heard of Eleonora Duse, a legendary Italian stage actress of the early 20th century — yet I was riveted by Marcello’s account, and the ideas it explores.
Chief among them is the power of the theater; an early scene, in which Madame Duse (who has returned to the stage, after a 12-year absence, following a brush with death and unexpected bankruptcy) pushes and prods a young co-star gets at something real and magical about the art of acting. Yet as much as it’s about acting (and star Valeria Bruni Tedeschi beautifully captures the specific, self-involved zestiness of a famous actor), its Mussolini-era setting means it’s just as much about the delusions of those in power — and even more so, of those in close proximity to it.
Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani’s Bouchra is a frankly thrilling experiment, in which a fairly typical (though very good) indie drama story — the young immigrant artist in New York City, grappling with the bridging of cultures and her mother’s discomfort with her queerness — is rendered in an altogether unexpected and delightful way. Because, you see, Bouchra is a coyote, one of the anthropomorphic creatures that populate this version of Gotham instead of humans, and her story is told in photorealistic animation.
Now, to be clear, it could have been done in straightforward, low-budget indie movie fashion, shot on video with real people in real locations, and would have been just fine (or better). But blurring real life with this distinct, unique aesthetic gives it a playfulness that’s matched by the friskiness of the structure, and its own blurring of fiction and “reality.” The gimmick does what a good gimmick should: it makes the movie stand out, while the concerns of its narrative keep it grounded in a vivid, relatable present.
The Fence is the latest from Claire Denis, and it’s a minor entry in her filmography, perhaps deliberately so. Based on Bernard-Marie Koltès’s play Black Battles with Dogs, it’s essentially a four-hander; the fence of the title surrounds a construction site in West Africa, where a worker has been killed in an “unfortunate incident,” and his brother (Isaach De Bankolé) has arrived to take the body back to their village. Horn (Matt Dillon) is on the fence’s other side, along with his newly-arrived wife (Mia McKenna-Bruce) and his right-hand man (Tom Blyth), who was responsible for the incident, or accident, or perhaps more.
The picture begins as a pair of duets, little arias of discomfort and tension, before the four characters converge over one long night, when things come to a slow boil. The visitor is an immovable object; Horn cannot help him, and if he is not helped, he will not leave. Eventually, the stubbornness of the situation renders the picture a bit monotonous, the dialogue is somewhat stagey, and Dillon is in a little over his head. But there are things worth seeing here — particularly the soulful work of McKenna-Bruce, delivering on the promise she showed in How to have Sex — and Denis, who always has more on her mind than what’s in the frame, settles on a grotesquely effective visual metaphor for bloodthirsty colonialism.
Any time I don’t connect with a foreign film, I have a tendency to take the blame, assuming there’s some sort of local angle or political subtext that I, as a vulgar American, simply don’t get. And that may well explain why I found myself checking my watch so frequently during Kontinental ’25, though writer/director Radu Jude’s last two films (Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn and Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World) suffered from no such alienation, in spite of being firmly ensconced in his home country of Romania.
No, it seems to be a question of approach; those were big, shambling satires of contemporary life, while Kontinental is more disciplined and focused. Yet it somehow feels more aimless, locked in to the repetition of its narrative until it becomes monotonous — and worse than all of that, it barely bothers to be funny. Throw in some surprisingly amateurish filmmaking (whatever he’s doing with his random establishing shots, it doesn’t work) and you’ve got a real disappointment from a genuinely exciting filmmaker.
The New York Film Festival opens today and runs through October 13th.
