A Main Slate Full of Discoveries at the New York Film Festival

The end of another New York Film Festival means the end of yet another comprehensive survey of today’s film-festival landscape. This year, I wasn’t quite able to color much beyond the Main Slate. Thankfully, my Book and Film Globe colleague Kaveh Jalinous was able to report on some of the highlights of the sidebar sections I mostly missed (though the 4K restoration of Satyajit Ray’s Days and Nights in the Forest he mentioned was one of the exceptions; I cosign his enthusiasm, and thankfully it’s scheduled to play more widely next year).

Major discoveries abounded in the Main Slate, though it also had its fair share of disappointments, including lesser efforts from highly regarded directors like Kelly Reichardt (The Mastermind), Noah Baumbach (Jay Kelly), German director Christian Petzold (Mirrors No. 3), and French legend Claire Denis (The Fence).

There were also a handful of film-festival darlings I admired more than loved. I strangely found myself more impressed by the intelligence behind Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value than emotionally affected by it, which wasn’t the case with the Danish filmmaker’s previous work (including Oslo, August 31st and The Worst Person in the World). And while the sheer scope and stylistic variety in Bi Gan’s third feature Resurrection, a grand folly in which he explores the intersections of cinematic and Chinese history, certainly impresses, narratively I also found it at times frustratingly opaque. I look forward to reassessing both films when they’re released later this year.

That still left a lot to celebrate. Lucrecia Martel’s documentary Landmarks, the Argentinian director’s first feature in eight years, may lack the formal daring of fiction like The Headless Woman and Zama, but its exhumation of a history of colonialist exploitation and indigenous suppression in her home country nevertheless lands with enraging force. Another noteworthy documentary, Gianfranco Rosi’s Below the Clouds, found moments of unexpected visual poetry while observing life in Naples, whose residents live under constant threat of destruction at the hands of nearby Mount Vesuvius. Neither film has set a release date yet here in the United States, so it’s possible that if you missed them at this festival, you may not have a chance to see them elsewhere.

Thankfully, other festival highlights will be coming to theaters soon enough. In fact, It Was Just an Accident, Iranian dissident filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s gripping morality play about the ethics of vengeance even among the most deserving of it, may even be out in New York and Los Angeles by the time you read this with plans for wider distribution later in the year. Also following a similar release pattern is Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent (November 26), which uses spy-thriller tropes and a magnetic lead performance from Wagner Moura (both he and Filho won awards for the film at Cannes in May) to tell an expansive and cumulatively affecting story of political resistance on personal and historical levels.

And the U.S. documentary Cover-Up (December 19), Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus’s stirring portrait of investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, will make its way to Netflix later this year. There, a wider audience can truly understand the risks a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist of integrity takes and perhaps get a sense of how journalism might work in the political context being cultivated by the current U.S. president and cabinet.

Of all the films I saw at the festival this year, though, The Currents, a psychological puzzle film from Argentinian director Milagros Mumenthaler, stuck in my memory like no other. It’s her the third feature but my first exposure to her work, and quite the beguiling initial encounter it was. It centers on Lina (Isabel Aimé González Sola), a successful fashion designer who, within the film’s first few minutes, accepts an award, throws that award into a bathroom trash can, randomly jumps into a river, and is then seen returning to her hotel room after having been rescued. Something has clearly changed within her after this incident, a possible extension of childhood anxieties that has bled with her current state of adult dissatisfaction. As is the case with her spiritual antecedents like Michelangelo Antonioni or even aforementioned fellow Argentine Martel, Mumenthaler offers us hints of what lies behind Lina’s seemingly perfect exterior but is more interested in elliptically evoking it than providing pat psychological explanations.

Beyond the sheer moment-by-moment intrigue of figuring out what’s ailing our protagonist, what makes The Currents memorable are the moments where the writer/director breaks out of the film’s opaque surface and indulges in subjective surrealism, many of these moments scored to the “Venus, the Bringer of Peace” movement from Gustav Holst’s The Planets. It all culminates in a rapturous extended sequence set in a lighthouse where Lina, in a particularly vulnerable moment, imagines the lives of some of the other women she knows in a bid to conceive of ways to potentially break out of her current impasse. The mood of existential longing Mumenthaler conjures purely through images and sounds still lingers in my memory as I write this. Having gone into the film with only a dim awareness of its reception when it premiered in Toronto last month, it’s the kind of pleasant surprise that reminds one of why festivals like the New York Film Festival are valuable.

I’m not quite done with celebrating this year’s New York Film Festival! Coming soon in another piece [it’s here now, ed] are some extended thoughts on two other Main Slate highlights: Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother and Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz’s biopic of Magellan starring Gael García Bernal.