It’s hard for me to remember the many years during the 70s that I used to hitchhike from Provincetown to NYC in the fall with my backpack filled with tickets for the NY Film Festival. It was always one of the high points of my year. Landing finally in the city, sleeping on Cookie Mueller’s couch and seeing so many movies, my eyes would bleed with joy. Back then I had much more stamina and could sit through four or five films a day. It’s harder for me now and there was such a great selection this year for the 62nd NY Film Festival that I was unable to get into like the opening selection Nickle Boys. I was dying to see Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Perez and Brady Corbet’s ambitious epic The Brutalist. I heard the great Marianne Jean-Baptiste gives a towering performance in Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths. And looking forward to Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada and the new one for the director of Stranger by the Lake Alain Guiraudie called Misericordia. Even the revivals are mouth-watering including Robert Bresson’s Four Night of a Dreamer. But here are a few that I really loved.
Anora. Director Sean Baker’s (The Florida Project) latest is a rollicking, raunchy, riotously funny film about a 23-year-old Brighton Beach exotic dancer Anora (or “Ani” as she lies to be called). played winningly by Mikey Madison. One night she does a lap dance for a crazy, rich Russian- Ivan (Mark Eydelshtein), who offers her $15,000 to spend a wild week with him in his parent’s mansion. They party, they fuck- he’s like a big immature kid. He has sex like a jack rabbit, smokes pot and plays video games in his boxers. But Ani finds him rather amusing. They fly off to Las Vegas just for fun and impulsively get married, but there is hell to pay when they come home and his godfather Toros (Karren Karagulian) finds out. Toros hurries over with two thugs- Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and Igor (Yura Borisov)- in order to annul the marriage before the wealthy, furious Russian parents get to NY in their private plane. Ivan runs away leaving Ani to fight off the goons on her own. But she is a scrappy, foul-mouthed fury- she breaks Garnick’s nose, and Igor has to tie her down with a telephone cord to keep her from leaving. Then they drive around Coney Island hunting for the wayward son- who is busy drinking, carousing and throwing money around in a myriad of clubs. Pretty Woman 2 this ain’t. Sean Baker delights in filming the more fringe members of society- but he is never judgmental in any way. Ani is a real tough cookie, but genuinely sweet too, and during their frantic, freewheeling night you can even see Igor’s admiration for her indomitable spunk grow in the face of all this chaos.
Rumours. Deliciously hilarious dark satire by director Guy Maddin (plus Evan & Galen Johnson) about a G7 conference that goes apocalyptically wrong. The heads of state have arrived, had press photos taken and are about to sit down to a “working” dinner in a gazebo far away from the main house. But the Canadian prime Minister (Roy Dupuis) is outwardly depressed and wanders off into the woods only to be followed by the German Chancellor (fabulously amusing Cate Blanchett). The rest attempt to break off into groups and begin work. But then a series of disturbing events begin to unfold. “Bog People” (2,000-year-old bodies that have been dug up by archeologists in the area) are seen wandering around but the main house is deserted and phone service is down. The French President (Denis Menochet) is injured and is pushed through the forest in a found wheelbarrow. The group staggers through the woods towards a ferry that hopefully will take them to the highway when they come across a dazed President of the European Commission (Alicia Vikander) only speaking Swedish and protecting a giant brain. This surreal journey feels somewhat like a play by Eugene Ionesco as filmed by Luis Bunuel and is mordantly witty and scarily on target politically. A real delight.
The Shrouds. “Grief is rotting your teeth,” the dentist says to Karsh (Vincent Cassel). It’s more than rotting the teeth of the tech mogul- it’s become his industry since the loss of his beloved wife Becca (Diane Kruger). Through his corporation GraveTech, he’s created a technological cemetery where the deceased are buried in a special shroud which allows families of their loved ones to watch them deteriorate in the grave. For Karsh, this is a comfort and he has a spot right next to his wife for his own body. (Cassel’s spooky resemblance to David Cronenberg is another sardonic treat). But an act of mysterious vandalism results in knocked over gravestones and a hack that disables the entire system. He engages his scruffy hacker friend Maury (Guy Pearce) to fix the problem and try to discover who is trying to destroy him. Maury has also created Karsh’s artificially intelligent avatar “Hunny,” but even the “Hunny” slowly begins to act suspicious. Diane Kruger plays two roles- his late wife Becca, who Karsh recalls in disturbing sequences charting her physical transformation and disintegration due to her cancer treatments. Kruger also plays her neurotic dog groomer sister Terry, once married to Maury, who gets hot when she hears a conspiracy theory. Cronenberg’s meditation on grief definitely has a melancholy quality (and feels achingly personal). But there’s also dark humor coursing through it and he manages to wittily sample from previous films- the technological paranoia of Videodrome, the surgical body horror of Crash and Crimes of the Future. It’s a film that will clearly divide audiences, but the minute that gorgeous, creepy score by Howard Shore began I was a goner.
The Room Next Door. Director Pedro Almodovar’s first English-language film, based on the novel What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez, is a compassionate, elegant, transcendent tale of friendship and mortality. Julianne Moore plays Ingrid who, after many years rekindles friendship with her old friend Martha (Tilda Swinton)- they were close during their youthful days when they both worked at Paper magazine. Ingrid went on to became an auto/fiction novelist and Martha a war correspondent. Martha is now battling cancer, but because the treatments and experimental drugs aren’t working she asks Ingrid to accompany her to a rented house in upstate New York and be with her when she takes her life (aided by a pill she purchased off the dark web). Ingrid has just finished a book about her fear of death and is horrified and reluctant at first but gives in to be there for her friend. This is not the bummer it sounds like at all. There is great empathy without cloying sentimentality. There is also great wit and warmth. Not to mention two towering performances by Swinton and Moore– whose friendship and feelings for each other is poignant and palpable. Almodovar always has such specific color schemes in his films, and here the color red is used beautifully- right down to the red door of Martha’s room and the scarlet lipstick she eventually applies to her lips. The movie covers friendship with such simplicity, truthfulness and tenderness, not to mention slipping in perfect literary and cinematic allusions, like James Joyce’s The Dead, and the infinite joy of watching Buster Keaton. Pedro even playfully throws in a reference to Erotic Vagrancy, a new book about Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton’s tumultuous love affair. But it’s really about the strong bond of friendship in the face of tragedy, and there is such beauty, loveliness and hopefulness in that.
Queer. “I’m not queer- I’m disembodied,” says Eugene (Drew Starkey) to William Lee (Daniel Craig) as they are hallucinating like crazy in the jungle under the influence a native drug called “yage.” Luca Guadagnino’s transcendent film adaptation is from a William S. Burroughs‘ memoir-like short novel he wrote between 1951 and 1953. Daniel Craig plays Burroughs’ alter-ego William Lee, a dissolute expatriate in Mexico. In his linen suit, fedora and packing a handgun, Lee prowls the bars at night, hanging with his bearded, scruffy friend Joe (an unrecognizable Jason Schwartzman) who regales Lee with stories about all the tricks who ripped him off. One night he becomes intrigued with a handsome, mysterious, recently discharged American serviceman Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey). He can’t make out if Eugene is straight or not but stalks him anyway from bar to bar until he finally gets him into his bed. Their relationship is confused and strained at best, but Lee talks Eugene into making a journey with him into South America so he can experience this native drug that he believes with enhance telepathy. Lee’s heroin addiction catches up with him on the road when he starts to withdraw badly but they do make it to the heart of the jungle where they encounter a pistol-packing botanist- Dr. Cotter (an outrageous Lesley Manville) who lets William and Eugene experience the strange high of “yage.” That trippy sequence is sensationally surreal. But in the end, it’s about a different kind of addiction. It’s obsession and lust and the memory of a past messy love that still burns into your memory and soul. Daniel Craig gives a fearless, heartbreaking performance. Drew Starkey plays the hesitant and inscrutable lover brilliantly. And the screenplay by Justin Kuritzkes conjures its own poetry. The film even ends with a Trent Reznor song over the credits with lyrics by William S. Burroughs (from a poem he wrote right before his death) and sung by the great Caetano Veloso. It doesn’t get any better than this.