Film is a strange medium. It requires creating images and moments that must have the semblance of reality but which are totally fictional. At least, that’s the conceit — more often than not, a little (or more) truth bleeds into the material, consciously or otherwise, and the lines between reality and fiction become blurred. Several movies at the 57th New York Film Festival explore this merging, using it to comment upon the protagonists and their reality, creating a deeper understanding of their characters while sending them into pleasant (or troubling) oblivion.
Banderas is astonishingly good at portraying a person who has lived a wild life but is hopelessly lost and trying to find the spark within himself again. He loses himself in reminiscing about his boyhood, obsesses over his fraught relationship with his deceased mother, treats an ex-lover with both wistfulness and regret, and tries heroin with an old creative partner. All throughout, Salvador is creating new art from these experiences, slowly finding his way back to the world of expression that is his true addiction and savior.
Pain and Glory takes a while to come together, but as the pieces of Salvador’s life click into place it becomes more and more satisfying and touching. Almodóvar employs some clever stylistic techniques to blur the lines between the fiction and the reality of Salvador’s past, saying that exactly what happened and in what order doesn’t matter as much as how it impacted and informed Salvador’s life.
Right from the opening scene, Ye glides back and forth between the play, rehearsal for the play, and reality, blending all three into a surreal stew. The effect is pleasantly intriguing at first, but as more and more characters enter the story, too many subplots are introduced, and the obfuscation starts to annoy and alienate rather than delight. Ultimately, Ye is presenting the world of spycraft as one where people are always lying on some level, where the truth about someone else can never be fully known, and where reality and fantasy exist in the same moment. It’s just a shame that the experience is as frustrating and emotionally cold as that concept.
On paper, The Whistlers is a fairly generic crime tale, featuring a lot of mysterious motivations and double crosses and so on, but Porumboiu gives it enough style to be a good time. The film gains some substance by making comparisons to the cinematic reputation of criminals and adventure versus the “real” absurd mundanity of it: a series of shady deals and murders go down in the Hotel Opera where opera is constantly heard, several characters watch movies within the movie that echo the proceedings, and one fantastic scene sees an American film director stumble upon the gang’s hideout on the island, thinking it’d be great for his new movie. It doesn’t end well for him, just one of many instances of Porumboiu’s stylish neo-noir being unsentimental (if not particularly surprising) when it comes to the characters’ ultimate fates.
The film becomes a little scattered as Triet cuts back and forth between Sibyl’s flashbacks and her present-day confusion regarding her reality, the tone and structure upended a bit too often. Overall, however, the film is a good mix of compelling, layered, funny, and sad, as the script and Efira’s performance remain sympathetic to the character while making her the antihero of her own story. Like the other films discussed previously, Sibyl creates a deeper portrait of its main character by giving the audience a subjective experience of the way reality and fiction blur together. In that fashion, these movies showcase the value of art, in that it can express the confusion, anxieties, and beauty of life in ways that reality in all its bland shapelessness cannot compete with. 