A born complainer by nature, anyone fortunate enough to be in contact with me during the New York Film Festival has surely heard me complain about the inconveniences of festival attendance. My list of grievances is long and often extremely petty: the hours spent in lines, the anxious dash for an aisle seat at the Walter Reade, the inane overheard post-screening comments by my fellow attendees (“I need a second viewing to parse it,” one genius said after watching Uncut Gems), the frantic post-work subway rides to screenings, the endless late-night subway rides home after screenings; and, of course, that most persistent of dilemmas - when and where to eat before watching all of these movies. To hear me tell it, NYFF is a test of wills first, and a film festival second.
All this being said, the joys of attending NYFF are undeniable, and the festival has been a definite highlight of my time living in New York. What I love most of all is the palpable, collective excitement over these new films by current and maybe even future giants of world cinema. I won’t soon forget hearing an audience burst out in applause in the middle of Juliano Dornelles and Kleber Mendoça Filho’s Bacurau or the standing ovation for Jia Zhangke that followed his triumph Ash is Purest White.
Presented with the prospect of a virtual NYFF, my first thought was that all of the minor inconveniences had been rendered non-existent - here was a chance to appreciate these movies on their own terms, without an internal debate about whether I was going to eat falafel afterward. But this at the cost of losing the festival’s social aspect—even as someone who attends NYFF solo, I surely missed that collective excitement. Gone too is the enveloping experience of seeing a movie in a theater, replaced by the constant distractions of life at home.
With the added convenience of the festival being virtual, I thought that it might be fun to check out a few films by directors whose work I didn’t know well or at all. In past years, the buzz around certain films can help make them as much of an event as the new works by directors I already love, and there’s a thrill in seeing as many movies as possible within those two weeks.
In execution, these were my least favorite films I watched during NYFF. I was mostly lost through Isabella, Matias Piniero’s modern interpretation of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, about a woman named Mariel preparing to audition for the lead role in that same play. Piniero strings together a bunch of recurring motifs that give the film a fascinating, low-key feeling of disorientation — a repeated shot of a woman crossing a street; bold color coding (especially the color purple, whose various interpretations are outlined in the opening narration); a prevalence of rectangles in the compositions, paralleling the art installation that Mariel helps assemble over the course of the film. But it ultimately feels too threadbare, with Piniero's series of tricks and games not adding up to much in relation to its story, which itself felt too minimal.
Eugene Green’s Atarrabi and Mikelats provoked an even stronger negative reaction. An adaptation of a fable about two boys born to a goddess mother and a mortal father and then kept in the care of the Devil, its early scenes are amusing and mysterious, with details like the Devil’s love of rap music provoking mild chuckles. But Green’s style is exceptionally grating. Built upon deadpan acting, pregnant pauses and static direct-to-camera close-ups, Green obviously intends to create a certain detachment, a cross between absurdism and art house, transcendental grandeur. However, because his visuals are often flat and affectless, his snail’s crawl pace pretty much just makes this a chore to watch. A familiarity with Green’s style would have helped me know what I was in for, and a packed crowd may have made it easier to appreciate the film’s sense of humor. Being that I was watching this in the comfort of my own home, I couldn’t help but feel bitter about how I could have spent those two hours watching Jackie Chan or George Cukor movies instead.
On the other hand, the new films by Hong Sang-soo, Jia Zhangke and Christian Petzold were highlights. Where Hong's films are often built out of scenes of drunken reverie and soul-baring, The Woman Who Ran is a movie about sober reflection. In three distinct sequences, Kim Min-hee visits with three friends — the first two on purpose, and the third by coincidence, when Kim wanders into the movie theater that her friend happens to work at. Kim and her friends talk about food, each conversation is interrupted by a man, and each sequence ends with Kim watching a screen. In execution the recurrence of these motifs is rather unassuming, but also rigid enough to make you notice when the film’s final third changes things up to quietly devastating effect. The zoom shot into a yawning cat’s face is perhaps the most memorable zoom shot in the Hong oeuvre.
Jia’s latest documentary Swimming Out Till The Sea Turns Blue is centered around a literary festival in his native Shangxi province. Interviewing three contemporary Chinese authors, and the family and friends of a deceased fourth author, Jia sculpts a portrait of modern China that engages with the country's complicated history and contradictory identity. The specificity of place that defines Jia’s narrative features is just as crucial here. Jia’s framing of his interview subjects is always attuned to what’s happening in the background, whether it’s some family members off to the side making dumplings together or the contours of a quiet, plain city street. His interviews are divided by impressionistic images of rural China. The net effect of this is to illustrate life in a place that's rapidly changing, yet forever tied to certain moments in culture and history.
Jia is one of my favorite filmmakers working today, and I am similarly fond of Christian Petzold, whose three films of the 2010s — Barbara, Transit and Phoenix — are among the decade’s best work. Undine is closer to Petzold’s ambiguously unsettling drama Ghosts than it is to these minimalist thrillers. A romance perched precariously on a tightrope, Undine opens with the titular protagonist (Paula Beer) being broken up with by her boyfriend, to which she replies, "You know if you leave me, I have to kill you." It's a threat, and it hangs over the rest of the film. When Undine falls in love with Christoph (Franz Rogowski), in a meet-cute moment where an aquarium shatters in front of them, that line still lingered in the back of my mind. Whether or not the threat is literal remains a source of tension; at the same time, it illustrates that Undine is a film about self-destructive impulses. In an interesting repeated motif, Undine works as a tour guide in a museum about Berlin's architecture. The city's resilience and ability to rebuild in the wake of tragedy and destruction serve as a counterpoint to Undine’s peculiar heartbreak.
I tried to resist seeing the films of NYFF through the lens of life during a pandemic. But the parallels between my isolation and what I was seeing on screen were often undeniable. Set in 1900, Cristi Puiu’s Malmkrog focuses on the intense discussions of a group of elites discussing war, religion and philosophy. Their isolation is obvious. They never leave their elaborately decorated mansion, in contrast to the servants who dart around in the background to supply them with food and drink. The three meetings with friends in The Woman Who Ran also take on an interesting significance in our quarantined reality. The intrusions of the outside world, in the form of uninvited visitors and faces glimpsed through security cameras, highlight our diffuse boundary between public and private space. Pedro Almodovar’s new short The Human Voice, an adaptation of Jean Cocteau’s play, portrays Tilda Swinton as she waits in her apartment for a phone call from her ex. The Human Voice was filmed over this past summer, so it’s the only film I saw at NYFF that could be seen as a direct response to our current moment. The image of Swinton fumbling for her Air Pods when her phone lights up certainly rings true to our present moment, where human connection is really just the voices inside our heads.
My favorite film of NYFF is one that also resonated strongly with my own isolation, Tsai Ming-Liang’s Days. With its aggressive physicality, its sense of alienating space, its ruminative quiet, the film seems attuned to the specific feelings of loneliness and longing that I’ve felt over the past seven months. A minimalist romance backdropped by alienating urban sprawl and severe economic disparity, Days follows two men named Lee (played by Tsai muse Lee Kang-sheng) and Non (Anong Houngheuangsy) as they go about their lives and eventually meet in a hotel room. Tsai always emphasizes his characters' isolation. When they're at home, the soundtrack buzzes with all of the activity outside their doors, just out of reach. In his apartment, Non is framed between vertical bars that make him appear trapped. When Lee and Non interact with other people, the shots are composed in such a way that the other people are always anonymous and impersonal. The characters barely speak and what little dialogue there is is purposefully not subtitled. This decision creates an extra emphasis on the image, makes the dialogue another layer in Tsai's dense soundscapes, and gives the audience a strange sort of closeness to the film’s two enigmatic main characters.
This is a remarkably sensual, tactile film. It's so moving largely because Tsai's sensory portrayal of loneliness is as vivid and physical as his portrayal of human connection. The film's opening shot is of Lee sitting and staring off into the distance as rain falls hard around him. A mysterious white line, a reflection of something unknown, bisects the frame, running through Lee's head. The shot stretches on for four or five minutes, and in it the oppressive weight of loneliness is fully realized. This is carried throughout the entire first half of the film, in Lee walking down a crowded street, or Non methodically preparing his dinner in his bare apartment. Consequently, the spellbinding sequence where Lee and Non meet in a hotel room is pure physical catharsis — after all of that time spent in claustrophobic, alienating city spaces, here is a moment of tenderness and connection. It captures the ecstasy of no longer being isolated, even if only for a moment.