NYFF. The Northern Land.

"The rarefied and mostly impenetrable The Northern Land is hardly the first film from 59-year-old Portugese filmmaker João Botelho," notes Michael Koresky in Reverse Shot, "but for most of us on these shores it might as well be.... Botelho's film will remind devoted festivalgoers at times of Rohmer (The Lady and the Duke's digital backdrops to fussy historical drama), Rivette (forthrightly artificial play-acting), Raul Ruiz (affected Proustian time-collapsing), Maddin (its opening moments, surrounded by irises, appear as though glimpsed through a kinetoscope), and most markedly the director's fellow countryman and preeminent cinema centenarian Manoel de Oliveira, with whom Botelho seems to share a penchant for a discursive meta brand of filmmaking."

"A mist-covered mountainous landscape, rustling hoopskirts, and familial secrets cluster together in João Botelho's at best perplexing, but mainly lackluster film The Northern Land, the director's interpretation of Portuguese writer Agustina Bessa-Luís's novel," writes Jenny Jediny at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "Drawing from a sensuously emphasized account of personal histories and ghosts of forgotten ancestors, The Northern Land aims to unravel the seemingly intricate mystery within a family tree, and also engage its audience in its labyrinthine method of storytelling. Unfortunately, the film falls far short in both of these ambitions."

"[I] seems a film whose time has come and gone in its own creation," writes Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook. "[T]he very medium that both enables and eases the video's production fundamentally cripples its aesthetics: digital video plus historical costume pageantry plus heavily stylized theatrical lighting results only in the look of actors on a stage in front of us playing dress up."

Ed Champion finds it "beautiful in the same way that a particularly striking postcard purchased at Duane Reade is beautiful. The people who inhabit this film are not beautiful. Nor are they particularly interesting."

Posted by dwhudson at October 15, 2008 8:06 AM