Pedro Almodóvar, Jean-Luc Godard, Ingmar Bergman, Ousmane Sembene, and Mike Leigh are among the directors of 25 feature films showcased at this year's New York Film Festival. Take a look at the complete line-up and check back for news and reviews from Lincoln Center.
Opening Night: Look At Me - Review
With their last film, the Oscar-nominated The Taste of Others, filmmaker-actress Agnès Jaoui and her writing partner-lead actor Jean-Pierre Bacri gave us a deliciously bittersweet ensemble comedy. Jaoui becomes a world-class director with this witty, visually accomplished comedy that was a triumph at this year's Cannes Film Festival. The masterful script (Best Screenplay at Cannes) shows us a bunch of pushy, ruthless Parisians who would be quite at home in Manhattan. The women are unhappy with their looks while the men are looking for something on the side. When not intent on seduction, these artistic careerists specialize in elegantly humiliating and one-upping each other. Bacri plays a novelist-turned-publisher, a tyrant of egotistical self-regard, who has little use for his homely daughter with an angelic voice; Jaoui is the daughter's celebrity-smitten singing coach. The surprise is how much tenderness Jaoui manages to elicit for her neurotic, self-absorbed characters. She demonstrates beautifully, as Jean Renoir put it, that "Everyone has his reasons." 110 min. France, 2004. A Sony Pictures Classics Release.
NYFF Retrospective: The Big Red One
Sam Fuller, the cinematic poet laureate of hard-boiled America, made The Big Red One as a labor of love, a deeply personal memoir of his time in the most renowned U.S. infantry unit of WWII. When the film was released in 1980, it was cut drastically, for reasons of length and, perhaps, for fear of offending the sensibilities of general audiences. Over the years, the complete Big Red One remained a cinematic legend. Now, thanks to the efforts of Richard Schickel and Brian Jamieson, it has become a reality. To say that it lives up to expectations is an understatement. What was once a stately, old-fashioned epic following the progress of Lee Marvin's hard-bitten sergeant and his four young charges (Robert Carradine's Griff is Fuller's alter ego), as they work their way from Northern Africa to the death camps of central Europe, is now a powerful, one-of-a-kind portrait of war. The hell of it, the tedium of it, the craziness of it - few war movies have ever achieved such eloquence. 158 min. USA, 1980 (restored 2004.) A Warner Bros. Release.
Triple Agent
A major departure for Eric Rohmer - a stark psychological melodrama based on a true story. It is 1936, the era of the Popular Front and the Spanish Civil War. A White Russian general, Fyodor, has immigrated to Paris with his lovely, devoted wife, Arsinoé. She sympathizes with the Communist neighbors upstairs; he finds them naïve, but his own political convictions are continually shifting. Weighing aloud whether to keep serving the irrelevant White Russians, go over to the Soviet Union, or throw in his lot with the Nazis, Fyodor invites speculation that he is a spy - a double or triple agent or perhaps merely an opportunist trying to reinvent himself. Alongside this espionage story is the subtle drama of a marriage being tested. The husband's glib confidence makes us question the nature of trust; the viewer is placed in the same position as Fyodor's wife, forced continuously to parse sincerity from insincerity. Triple Agent is a moving love story of two people trying to outrun the juggernaut of history. 115 min. France, 2004.
Tropical Malady - Review
There may be no more beguilingly mysterious film this year than the Festival debut of the lavishly gifted Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Leaving Bangkok for the seemingly peaceful Thai countryside, the story begins as a conventional, if marvelously achieved, love story between a young soldier and a young man from the country. But just when we've gotten comfortable with Apichatpong's tender account of two men falling for each other (including one startlingly erotic moment), he launches us into the realm of myth and legend, in which human and animal join together in a fantastic union. 118 min. Thailand, 2004. A Strand Releasing Release.
Undertow
Undertow retains the dreamlike lyricism and empathy with adolescents that were among the hallmarks of George Washington, David Gordon Green's accomplished debut (NYFF 2000). With this tense, atmospheric tale of a family in peril, he adds Southern gothic to the mix. A widowed Georgia farmer (Dermot Mulroney) is visited by his jailbird brother (Josh Lucas), who is looking to settle old scores. He soon becomes the nemesis of the farmer's two, troubled young sons, who embark on a fast-paced escape across forests, backwood villages, small cities and shantytowns - a journey reminiscent both emotionally and visually of The Night of the Hunter. 107 min. USA, 2004. A United Artists Release.
