There’s Always More At The New York Film Festival

My colleague Kaveh Jalinous has already covered a fair amount of this year’s New York Film Festival in his roundup, and combined with what he and Stephen Garrett have covered for Book & Film Globe at previous festivals like Sundance, Cannes, and Venice throughout the year, it might seem that there wouldn’t be much left for me to highlight. But the NYFF exhaustively surveys the past year’s film-festival circuit, so you can always check out movies that you might have missed elsewhere. I discovered many worthy films, both among the higher-profile titles and hidden away in the fest’s many sidebars.

The highest-profile was Sofia Coppola’s biopic Priscilla, this year’s Centerpiece selection, and to my mind her best film since underrated Somewhere from 2010. Some of that may be because she’s treading rather familiar territory here. You could see the Priscilla Presley this film presents—based on her 1985 memoir Elvis and Me, cowritten with Sandra Harmon—as a spiritual cousin to the Marie Antoinette of Coppola’s eponymous 2006 biopic: a young woman who finds herself trapped in the prison of privilege long before she has a chance to mature and develop her own agency.

Priscilla, however, isn’t Marie Antoinette redux. In some ways, it’s a more aesthetically conventional picture than the earlier film. For instance, there are perhaps only two needle-drops in the soundtrack of this newer film that sound anachronistic compared to the post-punk and New Wave tunes included throughout the 18th-century-set Marie Antoinette. Coppola’s decision to foreground the rock tunes of her upbringing was arguably her way of indicating her own empathy for the infamous French royal, thereby implying a more detached perspective on her part toward Priscilla Presley.

And yet, there’s nothing chilly about Priscilla, which sees Priscilla’s (Cailee Spaeny) starry-eyed courtship of, eventual marriage to, and ultimate separation from Elvis Presley (Jacob Elordi) with equal parts fascination, understanding, sorrow, and quiet anger. What makes Coppola’s examinations of privilege more interesting than most is the degree to which she’s willing to stand back and truly scrutinize it, thereby inviting us to form our own judgments. Thus, Coppola allows us to fully share in Priscilla’s obsession with Elvis upon meeting him at a party in Berlin while also later feeling her sense of confinement upon realizing how constricting being the wife of a controlling, philandering superstar can be. Her eventual flight from Elvis signals not just escape, but possibility: Perhaps now she’ll have the opportunity to figure out who she is as an individual (among other things, the first of the three Naked Gun pictures she costarred in is only three years away from the publication of her memoir).

Rosine Mbakam’s Mambar Pierrette, a feature selection in NYFF’s experimental Currents sidebar, is as much a character study as Priscilla, albeit focusing on a working-class character rather than a person who marries into wealth. The eponymous Mambar (played by Mbakam’s cousin, Pierrette Aboheu Njeuthat) is a seamstress who struggles to keep her own business afloat in Douala, Cameroon. The difficulties that plague her throughout the film might make it sound like an unremitting wallow in misery. Someone robs her on her way home from work one night, for instance, and the next morning she finds many of her garments soaked after heavy rain overnight. Such misfortunes occur on top her of being a single mother raising her children on her own after her husband abandoned her years ago.

But Mbakam is less interested in misery than in dignity. What comes across in Njeuthat’s magnetic performance is a resilient woman who finds the strength to carry on and stick to her principles even amid less-than-ideal social and financial circumstances. (When a friend/client of hers suddenly feels down after a potential romantic interest jilts her, for example, we see Mambar, even with her financially pinched circumstances, treat her to a night on the town to lift her spirits.) Mbakam’s background in documentary filmmaking—this is her first fiction feature—also helps to dry out any potential salt-of-the-earth sentimentality and anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal self-righteousness. The result is a film that is affecting in its modesty.

You could hardly accuse the new British film All of Us Strangers of modesty. At the very least, it finds its writer-director, Andrew Haigh, exploring more fantastical terrain after the naturalism of his previous features, Weekend, 45 Years, and Lean on Pete. All of Us Strangers—which is based on a 1987 novel called Strangers by Taichi Yamada—is in part a gay romance, with screenwriter Adam (Andrew Scott) and fellow apartment building resident Harry (Paul Mescal) tentatively starting a relationship.

But Adam also takes frequent train trips out to his childhood home where he hangs out with his parents (Jamie Bell and Claire Foy)—both of whom died long ago. That’s right, All of Us Strangers is also a ghost story, one in which Adam essentially gets to make up for lost time with these parental apparitions by having all of the experiences he was unable to have with them as a teenager, including the experience of coming out to them. But all this dwelling on the past doesn’t help the perpetually depressed Adam much in the present.

In other words, All of Us Strangers is as much a cinematic therapy session as it is a romance and a ghost story—a prospect that some may find more appealing than others. Some of the film’s visual and aural details are certainly striking. The apartment building both Adam and Harry live in is nearly empty, thus lending even more of a haunted atmosphere to the proceedings, captured by cinematographer Jamie Ramsay.

And in general, Haigh blurs the line between reality and metaphysics in ways that keep us intriguingly off-guard throughout (he lightly tosses in hints throughout that some of what we’re seeing may well be manifestations of a script Adam is writing). Alas, most of the characters never rise above the level of ciphers, and the film eventually progresses toward some fairly predictable, rather sentimental conclusions before ending on an unconvincing play toward the cosmic. Based on the sniffles I heard at the press screening I attended, though, many won’t share my skepticism.

But I don’t want to end this dispatch, and Book & Film Globe’s New York Film Festival coverage as a whole, on a down note. So allow me to highlight a Main Slate selection that I think deserves more attention than it’s gotten both at the fest and in previous festivals (including Cannes, where it premiered): the Italian docudrama Kidnapped. Its director, Marco Bellocchio, is hardly a new voice in cinema; he’s been steadily making films since his 1965 debut Fists in the Pocket. But the gusto with which he approached, for instance, the life of Mafia boss turned whistleblower Tommaso Buscetta in his 2019 film The Traitor belied his august age (he’s 83 now).

You can find much of that intensity in Kidnapped. It’s a dramatization of an infamous 19th-century scandal revolving around Edgardo Mortara (played as a boy by Enea Sala, then later as an adult by Leonard Maltese), a six-year-old boy born to Jewish parents who was, as the film’s title indicates, abducted by the Papal States after they learn he received a secret Catholic baptism as a baby. The furious battle Edgardo’s parents, father Salomone (Fausto Russo Alessi) and mother Marianna (Barbara Ronchi), wage to regain custody of their son broadens into a larger fight between Catholicism and Judaism, with Pope Pius IX (Paolo Pierobon), fearing a further loss of his authority as a result of the brewing Risorgimento, refusing to bow down to international calls for him to return the boy. An internal battle also rages, however, in Edgardo himself, as Bellocchio keeps us guessing as to whether he’s quietly resisting his Catholic education or fully drinking the Kool-Aid (he ultimately became an ordained Catholic priest).

At one point, Edgardo has a dream in which he sees Jesus Christ himself get off the cross and walk out of a church. Beyond that, one character’s particularly lacerating self-flagellation, and some evocative uses of Rachmaninoff’s The Isle of the Dead and a string-orchestra arrangement of Shostakovich’s Eighth String Quartet on the soundtrack, Kidnapped shows Bellocchio in a relatively more sober vein compared to The Traitor.

That’s hardly a drawback, however, given how inherently involving, even at times enraging the story is; Bellocchio is enough of a master to know when the let the narrative speak for itself and when to stylistically push to evoke characters’ given emotional states. And of course, given the recent rise in cases of anti-Semitism globally, Kidnapped is certainly timely. But as usual with Bellocchio, he’s less interested in scoring political points as he is in looking at how this harrowing incident affects people on different sides. By the time the film reaches its devastating conclusion, we’ve realized that there are no easy heroes and villains here, just people so locked into their own internal biases that they tragically abandon the soul of the young boy they’re fighting over.

And with that cheery conclusion, I greatly look forward to next year’s NYFF!