A Parlor of Myths
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

“The truth about a film festival,” critic Manny Farber once wrote, “is that it is a parlor of myths, a dilemma bound to overrun a place that is supposed to be exhibiting only the best blue-chip films.” He was talking about the sixth annual New York Film Festival, that juicy slab of late-1960s cinephilia, and four decades later it’s bracing to watch his scalpel intellect cut through the fat, poke at the bones, then move in to slice off the leanest, healthiest cuts.
With characteristic iconoclasm, Farber debunked the “fluid magic” of “Lola Montes,” finding it more like “hauling an old corpse around and around in sawdust.” His admiration for the “awesome, mysterious wonders” of “Mouchette” developed from a close inspection of hygiene, costumes, and body language. This tremendous attention to detail led him to notice “Weekend” as “a film which loves its body odor. “A forgotten Norman Mailer opus had “authentic scurrility and funk” despite “a zillion little irritations.”
Anyone set on attending the 43rd New York Film Festival would do well to prime with a fresh reading of Farber (the relevant missives are included in his “Negative Space” collection); his lancing words effectively describe (and proscribe) much of the blue-chip dilemma unspooling over the next two weeks.
Lars von Trier hauls around an old corpse with “Manderlay” (September 30 & October 1), his feckless repeat of the chalk-prop agitprop introduced in “Dogville.” Seventy years after the abolition of slavery, Grace (Bryce Dallas Howard), the daughter of a gangster (Willem Dafoe), discovers a forgotten plantation trapped in its old ways. Her attempts to forcibly liberate, then democratize the situation blow up in her face, with predictable Trierian irony and nastiness. Politically banal and aesthetically enervated, the film’s failure of nerve is parroted by the festival’s capitulation to hype.
They compensate by offering one of the great body-odor epics in modern movies. “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” (September 24 & 25) is an amazing, quasi-real-time immersion in the death-trip of a Romanian alcoholic; think of it as a sane, secular riposte to “The Passion of the Christ.” Cristi Puiu’s Kafkaesque mortality procedural takes time to sink in, but the rewards are as big as they come. Like the brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, he’s got a rare talent for infusing verite with unobtrusive allegory.
My problems with “L’Enfant” (September 24 & 25), the latest dose of low-rent Belgian existentialism from the brothers Dardenne, concern what I initially took as an overly schematic narrative. But critic and NYFF selection committee member Kent Jones has made a persuasive case against such complaints (“It is indeed true that ‘The Child’ has less tension than either ‘Rosetta’ or ‘The Son,’ but what doesn’t?”), and I’m willing to hang fire until a second look.
No question of this: The Dardennes engineer taut humanist parables like no one else, and if “L’Enfant” ends up a second-rate entry in their oeuvre, it still runs circles around the glut of AmerIndies gazing at the navel of privileged adolescence. This ubiquitous subgenre is represented at the NYFF by “The Squid and the Whale” (September 26 & 27). Noah Baumbach’s acerbic cine-memoir of his upbringing in 1980s Park Slope has a sharp eye for its proto-bobo milieu, and a terrific ear for anxiety and disappointment formulated into idees recus. But there’s stronger English language fare elsewhere in the program.
George Clooney provides a worthy opening-night selection with “Good Night, and Good Luck” (tonight), his sober dramatization of the Murrow-McCarthy smackdown. Steven Soderbergh goes low-fi with “Bubble,” the first in a planned group of digitalvideo quickies. Michael Winterbottom goes high-concept – 18th century-style – with his adaptation, “Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story” (October 7 & 8), of Laurence Sterne’s definitive digressive classic.
The festival centerpiece, Neil Jordan’s “Breakfast on Pluto” (October 1 & 2), is infected by a zillion little irritations. Cillian Murphy is semi-credible as a transsexual gamine on a picaresque adventure through the Irish Troubles, but Liam Neeson, Stephen Rea, and a period pop soundtrack are marvelous.
Bennett Miller’s surprisingly tough-minded “Capote” (September 27 & 28) is a festival revelation. A million miles from the typical Oscar-grubbing biopic, this cool, meticulous drama examines the making of “In Cold Blood” as a case study of the artist as monster. Philip Seymour Hoffman is exact and chilling in the title role.
In the sangfroid department, however, “Capote” has got nothing on Michael Haneke’s “Cache” (“Hidden,” October 9), the riveting allegorical thriller that closes the festival. Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche star as an immaculate Parisian bourgeois couple undone by a return of the repressed: enigmatic surveillance videos that implicate their complicity in a European history of violence. The unresolved narrative belies a debt to Antonioni, whose 1975 masterpiece “The Passenger” (October 8) returns to the festival in a warm-up for its theatrical release this fall.
As yet lacking distribution – and thus a must-see – is Hou Hsiaohsien’s “Three Times,” an eccentric romantic triptych starring Shu Qi and Chang Chen. The first section one-ups the 1960s pictures of Wong Kar-wai; the second revisits the aura of “Flowers of Shanghai” in the terms of silent cinema; the third drifts through contemporary ennui and into irrelevance.
Also undistributed is Hang Sangsoo’s “Tale of Cinema” (October 1 & 2), a deft meta-narrative about life and the movies deliquescing into witty mise-en-scene. Mitsuo Yanagimachi plays similar games in the superior “Who’s Camus Anyway?” (October 3 & 4), a subtle, disarming comedy that comes off like an autumnal Japanese hybrid of Robert Altman and the snarky teen horror comedy.
Awesome, mysterious wonders accrue from Issey Ogata’s bewitching performance in “The Sun” (October 8), a meditation on the last days Emperor Hirohito spent holed up in his bunker palace before conceding defeat. Mr. Ogata’s facial tics constitute a tour de force all in themselves, but the truly amazing feat here is to render intelligible, and oddly poignant, the process of a demigod renouncing his divinity.
Who else but Alexander Sokurov (“Russian Ark”) could give us an extended riff on the geopolitical implication of a dissected hermit crab? Or interrupt a claustrophobic chamber piece for apocalyptic visions of flying fish? A fantastic enigma and funny to boot, “The Sun” is the NYFF’s most flabbergasting audio-visual invention, the moodiest of its mood pieces, and beautifully, brilliantly bonkers.
It’s also, alas, sold out, but as always with the NYFF, you can brave the standby line and maybe even scrounge up a deal on the “tickets” section of Craigslist. Otherwise, there are plenty of seats to the sidebar survey of films from Japan’s Shochiku Company (September 24-October 20); you can’t go wrong with Ozu, Mizoguchi, Oshima, or Hou.
And there are always tickets to be had for the criminally overlooked Views From the Avant Garde program. This year, new work from the usual suspects (Ken Jacobs, Luther Price, Peter Tscherkassky) abuts “A Trip to the Louvre” by the legendary Straub-Huillet duo, as well as the New York premiere of short films by the visionary Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
This brings us to a thrilling world-class coup for an event often dismissed as leftovers (albeit tasty ones) from the festival circuit. I’d gladly skip every movie from now until Christmas for a look at Andy Warhol’s notorious “Blue Movie” (October 1). All but unseen since its suppression in the late 1960s, this exquisitely rare screening affords a public reckoning with the last film attributable to Warhol as sole director.
By “direction,” of course, Warhol simply arranged a scenario and turned the camera on his stars: beautiful, garrulous Viva (on hand to present the screening) and her affable stud Louis Waldon. By the second reel, “Blue Movie” justifies its title through some desultory lovemaking – though it also refers to an accidental blue tint in the photography. Most of the film entails postcoital talk about current events; the original press kit described it as “a film about the Vietnam War and what we can do about it.” Tickets are still available.
Pace Manny Farber, the only civilian dilemma of the NYFF is what to see – and how to see it. Despite the festival’s regrettable exclusivity, enterprising cinephiles should be able to figure out both.