The 2004 New York Film Festival

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The New York Sun

Ingmar Bergman, 86, has said that “Saraband” is his last film – a claim he’s been making with every new project ever since “Fanny and Alexander” was released 22 years ago. But if Mr. Bergman really means it, he has ended his extraordinary filmmaking career with a sublime elegy – his own eloge de l’amour.


“Saraband” began as a television film shot on digital video, a sequel of sorts to Mr. Bergman’s matrimonial masterpiece “Scenes From a Marriage” (1973), which itself originally ran as a six-part series on Swedish television. “Saraband” reunites the tempestuous couple from “Scenes,” Marianne (Liv Ullmann) and Johan (Erland Josephson), who haven’t seen each other in more than 30 years.


“Today, as I lean over photographs of my childhood to study my mother’s face through a magnifying glass, I try to penetrate long vanished emotions,” Mr. Bergman wrote in his autobiography. “Saraband” opens with a similar scene: Marianne is poring over hundreds of snapshots, speaking directly to the viewer as she provides updates on her life and that of Johan and their two daughters. Direct address is often a risky gambit, but the supremely gifted Ms. Ullmann seamlessly incorporates the distancing device into the drama.


On impulse, Marianne travels to her ex-husband’s summer house, which he shares with his son, Henrik (Borje Ahlstedt), and Henrik’s 19-year-old daughter, Karin (Julia Dufvenius). It’s a tender, awkward reunion, marked by the tricky art of renegotiating intimacy. “Are we going to start hugging?” Marianne asks Johan, whose slightly tremoring hands show the onset of infirmity.


Throughout “Saraband,” family ties are sundered and sutured. Johan and Henrik hate each other with eviscerating intensity; Johan tolerates his son’s presence out of pure devotion to his granddaughter. Karin has become her unstable father’s surrogate companion since the death of his loving wife, Anna, two years ago. Wracked with grief, Henrik and Karin are enmeshed in a folie a deux, feuding – and even embracing – like lovers. Marianne, a divorce lawyer for decades, becomes the confidante to all three, listening and soothing as best she can.


A framed black-and-white photograph of Anna functions in much the same way as the pictures of Mr. Bergman’s mother: to probe what it means to love – and be loved by – someone so deeply. At the post-screening press conference, Ms. Ullmann said that the beautiful woman in the photograph was once married to Mr. Bergman’s son, Max. Following up, one viewer asked Ms. Ullmann, once intimately involved with Mr. Bergman, if making “Saraband” proved too challenging because of the memories it may have evoked for her. “I’m not afraid of that – on the contrary,” she replied. “But there’s very little in this film that touches on my life.”


Although Mr. Bergman and Ms. Ullmann, like Marianne and Johan, haven’t been a couple for decades, they still share a deep bond. Asked what it was like to work on a film shot on digital video, Ms. Ullmann noted, “The digital system was new for him and new for me. I was afraid that I would lose that very close connection to him. But in the last scene there were secret smoke signals going on between us. Nobody knew when it was over that we had been like Indians.”


Is it really over for Mr. Bergman? “I think this time he means it,” the actress said. “But he didn’t want to be part of saying goodbye.”


– Melissa Anderson


***


‘I’ve stopped caring,” grumbles Miles (Paul Giamatti) in Alexander Payne’s “Sideways,” which closes the New York Film Festival. I thought Mr. Payne had, too, after seeing his last film, 2002’s “About Schmidt,” which was a smug excoriation of middle America. But in “Sideways” the misanthropy has melted and been replaced by tenderness, resulting in a supremely moving, emotionally astute film.


Like “About Schmidt,” “Sideways” concerns a road trip. In the former film, the titular character traveled solo in a Winnebago from Omaha to Denver. This one features Miles, a middle-school English teacher, motoring from Southern California to the vineyards of Santa Barbara County with his college pal Jack (Thomas Haden Church), a washed-up television actor. Buffeted by rejection – his beloved wife divorced him two years ago, his novel is nixed by one publishing house after another – Miles self-medicates with Pinot Noir, Xanax, and Laxapro. Jack, a week away from marrying an Armenian-American beauty, brays to his friend, “We’re here to party, man.”


As a buddy movie, “Sideways” is a tart – but never disdainful – look at male friendship. Horny, lunk-headed Jack constantly lies to and aggravates his passive aggressive, bookish traveling companion, but Miles succumbs to his wishes every time – which only increases his own self-loathing. “You’re an infant, Jack,” Miles protests to his priapic pal. Yet when Jack does break down and cry like a baby, Miles simply agrees, once again, to his next ludicrous plan.


Although he’s almost completely shut down, Miles’s palate remains alive. “Quaffable, but far from transcendent,” the sadsack wine connoisseur snorts at a tasting somewhere in the Santa Ynez Valley. But the slightest hint of intimacy makes him retreat immediately; after Maya (Virginia Madsen), a waitress and fellow wine aficionado, places her hand on his, he rushes off to the bathroom to insult himself.


Mr. Giamatti, in his best performance yet, is the gut-wrenching soul of “Sideways.” The tics and mannerisms he displayed as another depressive, Harvey Pekar, in “American Splendor” have developed here as perfectly calibrated expressions of disgust, anguish, sorrow, and, in rare flashes, hope. Watching Miles gradually, if ineptly, thaw – he clumsily hands Maya the towering manuscript of his pretentiously titled novel “The Day After Yesterday” in lieu of a good-night kiss – is one of the most achingly honest portrayals of vulnerability on celluloid.


Miles does learn to care again, bravely jettisoning anhedonia for risk-taking. Similarly, Mr. Payne has tossed aside ridicule for something far more daring: love.


– Melissa Anderson


***


Read backwards or forwards, “Palindromes” is poop, but the press conference following its press screening was a real kick in the pants. Writer-director Todd Solondz was joined on stage by Ellen Barkin, who co-stars as the mother of Aviva, a young girl desperate to get pregnant. The audience members who stuck around cooed at the auteur, who stammered and stuttered and winded up admitting “I could go on but maybe its better if I don’t.” True!


A particularly imaginative member of the press asked Ms. Barkin why she elected to work for Mr. Solondz. Ms. Barkin said she felt the movies don’t represent the little people, such as herself. When she looks up at the glamorous actresses on the screen, well, that’s not her. “The human issue of characters on film,” she proclaimed: “we don’t see that enough in the movies.”


The issue in “Palindromes” is abortion. Following some consensual hanky-panky with a pubescent, sex-obsessed filmmaker, Aviva gets her wish, but her parents demand an abortion. Deprived her bundle of joy, Aviva runs away from home, hitchhiking on the New Jersey Turnpike. Eventually, after allowing herself to be sodomized by a grubby truck driver (“Can I still get pregnant that way?”), she ends up at a foster home for disabled runaways.


This bright, creepy refuge is run by Mama Sunshine (Debra Monk), a fundamentalist anti-abortionist who rescues abandoned fetuses from the trash in order to give them a proper Christian burial. Her charges include a blind albino, a Latino epileptic, a double-amputee, and a Muslim boy. Aviva happily joins the fold until her trucker lover shows up one day to plot the assassination of a certain abortion doctor.


The nadir of the 42nd New York Film Festival, “Palindromes” has nothing new to say about abortion, fundamentalism, serpents in the Garden State, or anything else, but it does have a gimmick. Aviva is played by eight different actresses, including a skinny redhead, an enormous African-American, and Jennifer Jason Leigh. To what end? At the press conference, Mr. Solondz mumbled something about a “universalizing goal.” In any event, this relieves what would have been the tedium of a single boring performance, and gives us something to think about other than Mr. Solondz’s shabby opportunism.


– Nathan Lee


***


I’d suffer a dozen “Palindromes” for one more visit to “Cafe Lumiere,” a luminous masterwork by the great Hou Hsiao-hsien. This graceful homage to Ozu is a predictable effort from Mr. Hou – predictable in its delicacy, in its peerless lucidity, in the awesome intelligence evident in every frame. Just as predictably, it enters the festival without a distributor. Mr. Hou’s neglect by the gatekeepers of the American art house is cowardly, shameful, appalling, a betrayal of the cinema of our time. The good news is there are enough Houheads in New York to secure “Cafe Lumiere” at least a handful of one-off screenings in the coming year.


Mr. Hou’s first film made outside his native Taiwan attenuates an Ozu scenario to the vanishing point: Yoko (Yo Hitoto), a young Japanese writer, has become pregnant by her Taiwanese lover, whom she does not wish to marry. His family business, umbrella manufacturing, strikes her as an unappealing prospect; Yoko’s parents begin to drizzle anxiety.


There may be other factors in her decision (the lover is never onscreen), but it’s not Mr. Hou’s thing to saddle his characters with psychology or puff out his stories with exposition. Avoiding the willful opacity that turns lesser sophisticates into mere mannerists, his genius lies in letting people be, eschewing all manner of psychodramatic ornamentation. It’s a way of directing people aligned with, but utterly distinct from, the cold Bressonian strategy; “Cafe Lumiere” is radiant with emotion, as if lit from within by some impossibly fragile star.


Yoko researches the life of composer Jiang Wen-ye, but spends much of her time hanging out with Hajimi (Asando Tadanobu), who run a small, neat bookshop in Tokyo and passes his time recording the ambient sounds of city trains. They walk, talk, and haunt their favorite cafe. A romantic impulse seeds their friendship but never flowers. Under the spell of its filmmaker’s calm, “Cafe Lumiere” loosens a floating poignancy from their uninflected affections.


And that, more or less, is the plot of “Cafe Lumiere.” It’s a picture that defies verbal appreciation; as the title indicates, this is a place to refresh oneself with light. A useful review would entail printing a series of high-quality, semi translucent stills from the film, through which one might glean something of the limpid quality of the cinematography. That might indicate Mr. Hou’s exciting arrangement of volumes in space, how the stuff of the film may be shelved in relaxed grids, woven into arabesques of varying focal range, or attached to the unwinding ribbon of smooth-riding tracking shots.


But it would convey nothing about the softness of rhythm, or explain the ineffable serenity of this remarkable film. Like Ozu, Mr. Hou is one of the great shapers of the celluloid art, and with “Cafe Lumiere,” he melds these skills to the simple stuff of everyday life. The master would applaud his disciple’s humility, and then marvel at his surpassing virtuosity.


– Nathan Lee


The New York Sun

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