Anticipating NYFF, 9/27.

This year's New York Film Festival has been covered by everyone, even before its first public screening, calling your attention to the stars, the honorees and the greatest hits, so I'll concentrate on some of the lesser-hyped attractions that should not be missed.

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is part of a new crop of life-affirming dramas from Romania, if your idea of affirming life is getting an illegal abortion so you can get on with your own, which brings it close to what life used to be like in Romania before communism fell and people could emigrate. I suppose that it's also life-affirming to learn that there is a medical system out there that is worse than the one we have in the US, if you can get access to it. (You saw a more modern version of Romanian medicine in the unforgettable The Death of Mr Lazarescu, which played at the NYFF, after Cannes, like this one, two years ago.) Cristian Mungiu has the right instincts here for realism. Add superb acting, fine story-telling, dead-on production design (which I can't imagine took too much of a stretch in Bucharest), shake with emotion, and you have a film that reminds us that Romania is one of cinema's promising places right now, and Mungiu should be watched for the next two installments in what he says is a trilogy.

Make sure not to miss the restored Leave Her to Heaven by John Stahl. In the 1945 film, with stunning locations and a production design by Thomas Little and Ernest Lansing to match, Gene Tierney plays a beauty whose selfishness goes far beyond her allure, and that's saying something. We travel from Maine to the New Mexico of the 40s (though far from Los Alamos) to discover the depths of her character, who can pull a credulous writer played by Cornel Wilde in her trap and then watch his crippled brother die in another trap that she sets. "But he's a cripple," she laments, in a pre-PC plea to her husband that he not accompany them on a vacation. Ultimately, she throws herself down a staircase, fearing that the baby she's carrying will wriggle its way between her and her husband. Tierney is as cold as can be, with every hair and stitch in place. Remember, this was 1945, when even Americans had a hard time getting their hands on nylon stockings or much of anything else. Why Tierney's character had no problem doing so may be the story that the next remake of the film will tell. Her emotionless expression as young Danny (Darryl Hickman) drown as she sits in a boat a few feet away behind the most elegant of sunglasses is so cold that it could be in a fashion ad today. Wilde, who finally cools to her, has the well-meaning demeanor of Tom Hanks. Over the top doesn't come close to describing this one. Just be thankful that it's campy enough to keep you laughing through much of the torture that Tierney practices so easily.

I was surprised to see a Mexican film with the aesthetic of large-format German photography - that is, if you think that Stellet Licht by Carlos Reygadas is a Mexican film. The slow deliberate drama about a Mennonite farmer's anguish over a love affair - illicit, of course - is described as the first feature ever to made in the Plautdeutsch dialect, a form of German that settlers from religious sects brought to the New World between the 17th and 19th centuries. I've heard the film's dramatic approach compared to Dreyer and to Terrence Malick. Slow it down a bit and that might hit the mark.

With the film's long opening sequence in which the camera follows a star through the sky, from what seems to be a mountaintop - it turns out to be a farm in a wide northern Mexican valley - you are prepared for what is largely a silent movie, albeit one in which the tersest of comments in a language that no one outside this community understands make for performances that expand the vocabulary of stoicism. I was reminded of head-on shots by Bernd and Hilla Becher of buildings standing alone in their environments; the pictures often resemble architectural equivalents of Mennonite garb. I also thought of the mute photographs of Thomas Struth and Rineke Dijkstra, photographers with a high profile in the contemporary art scene, who take pictures of "expressionless" subjects looking straight into the camera against a background that is as spare as the feelings they reveal. (If you can't find pictures by these photographers, who were omnipresent on the art scene a few years ago, you'll find some of Struth's work in the new photo galleries that just opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Dijkstra is Dutch, actually, although Plautdeutsch, also called Plattdeutsch, was spoken in the lowland ares of Germany north of Holland.) Your natural reaction to these pictures is to imagine a narrative that goes beyond the single image. Reygadas has put this kind of imagery - these images really, since the pictures are moving, despite the glacial slowness - in the service of a story built on a wide silent landscape and on the spareness of expressed emotion. The Plautdeutsch is the added novelty. Don't expect to understand any of it. It won't matter. The drama here is visual.

Back to the main event. I'm not sure what was behind The Darjeeling Limited by Wes Anderson - there's probably an interview with him somewhere that explains it all in fascinating and allusive detail. As everyone knows by now, the NYFF opening night film is a road movie, a train movie, actually, set on an Indian line that three brothers (Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman) travel to reach something. I guess that had instant comedy written all over it. Of course, they get only a certain distance on the train and then set off for the real goal, what surfers (which is what these guys might have been if this film were made 40 years ago) would have called "The Big Kahuna," except it's their mother. It's a shame the film isn't funny, although the soundtrack is a nostalgic pleasure as it mixes classic music from the films of Satyajit Ray with the Rolling Stones. So is the prologue, Hotel Chevalier. Should Anderson be advised that his real calling is for short films? This one makes you long for Moe, Larry and Curly. Did I notice an homage to the much-underappreciated Three Stooges in Orbit, or was I just dreaming that I was watching another movie?

- David D'Arcy

"If the larger film festivals around the world are competitive workshops for filmmakers willing to fight for distinction, the New York Film Festival (Sept 28 - Oct 14) is the class assembly - a place where only the finest craftsmanship gets a spot on the stage," writes Eric Kohn in the New York Press. "That's the idea, anyway, but it's worth noting that this year's rich program at Lincoln Center has traces of unconditional love for old-school talent, as though elders of the art form gain inclusion simply for their perseverance."

"I've grumped sporadically over the years about the NYFF's slightly snooty, Manhattan-centric tone of cultural superiority, so it's time to confess to some warm and fuzzy feelings toward the grande dame of American film festivals (this year is its 45th)," writes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon. "For one thing, as festival programmer Richard Peña observed in a recent interview with ST VanAirsdale of the Reeler, the NYFF is actively and aggressively curated. 'The public really feels that this is a festival that is carefully selected,' Peña said. 'They might disagree violently with our selections, but they feel like somebody has selected these films - that somebody has said, "This film and not that film."' Peña is taking a none-too-subtle dig at his neighbors to the south, the programmers at the Tribeca Film Festival, who have jostled their way to some degree of global prominence (and/or notoriety) by seemingly screening any damn movie that's less than four hours long and pretty much in focus. There's a lot to be said for his approach."

"Comparing movies is a drag, especially in a noncompetitive event, but the choices in this famously selective fest (28 'official' features on top of the sidebars) vary in merit," writes Howard Feinstein at indieWIRE. "Here's the skinny on 13 of the 14 full-length narrative... and the one doc showing during the first nine days; a follow-up on the second half appears next Friday."

Online viewing tip. An NYFF-heavy edition of ReelerTV.

Posted by dwhudson at September 27, 2007 2:27 PM