What We Saw At The New York Film Festival

Another year of film festivals has come to an end, spiritually at least, with the recently-wrapped-up New York Film Festival. Based on how many good-to-great films I’ve seen in the past few weeks, this has been a gratifyingly strong year in offerings from Sundance, Berlin, Cannes, Venice, Toronto, and more. Though others have already covered some of the most interesting entries in this year’s NYFF for this site from those other festivals (including this year’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner, Sean Baker’s raucously entertaining Anora; Pedro Almodóvar’s moving English-language feature debut The Room Next Door, which snagged Venice’s Golden Lion; and another award winner at Venice, Brady Corbet’s uneven but often enthralling VistaVision epic The Brutalist), there are still some worthy films as yet covered that are worth keeping your eye on in the months ahead.

Sadly, Blitz, this year’s closing night film, isn’t one of them (especially disappointing after the beauties of its remarkable opening night film, RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys, and the aforementioned Room Next Door, its centerpiece selection). As its title suggests, Steve McQueen’s latest film takes place during the devastating German bombing campaign against the United Kingdom during World War II from September 1940 to May 1941. Narratively, it runs along two tracks: one revolving around Rita (Saoirse Ronan) as she simply tries to keep her head above water after she’s forced her only son, George (Elliott Heffernan), to board a train and evacuate the area while she holds onto her job at a munitions factory; the other focusing on George’s trek back home after he jumps off the train.

This sets the stage for a potentially heartrending epic journey from darkness to light, one that McQueen certainly seemed capable of delivering in his own unsentimental way based on his previous films. That makes the sledgehammer sentimentality of Blitz rather shocking. McQueen, who scripted this film himself (maybe a red flag in hindsight), gives us scenes in which George witnesses and falls victim to societal racism (he’s biracial, his father having been arrested and eventually deported), eventually affirming his own Blackness after previously denying his racial identity. Rita, meanwhile, witnesses the sacking of outspoken fellow female munitions workers after they loudly voice their desire for greater working-class protections. Eventually, she falls in with a group of socialists to try to make herself feel more useful.

The fundamentally humane perspective behind such scenes is laudable, of course. But McQueen, who also wrote the screenplay, for once seems intent on tapping into his inner Stanley Kramer, subordinating the kind of nuance that distinguished films like Hunger and 12 Years a Slave to broad-strokes caricaturing and point-making. Steven Spielberg seems to be another guiding light this time around, but one look at Spielberg’s 1987 film Empire of the Sun, which similarly charts a boy’s coming-of-age during World War II, demonstrates where Blitz falls short.

There’s an integrity to the child’s-eye view Spielberg articulates, the brutality its young protagonist witnesses subverting that perspective. McQueen, by contrast, is too much the aesthete to really commit to either child-like innocence or pained experience. The end result, despite some undoubtedly powerful moments and committed performances, is easily McQueen’s worst film (though not the worst at this year’s NYFF—that dishonor goes to Chinese auteur Jia Zhangke’s mystifyingly acclaimed semi-remix film Caught by the Tides).

Misericordia, the latest film from Alain Guiraudie, is neither the best nor the worst film of his career. Instead, it finds this French filmmaker, who started to gain more world recognition with his 2013 film Stranger by the Lake, uncovering a different way to explore his pet theme of forbidden sexual desires. If Stranger dealt with such desires brought out into the open, Misericordia explores the sublimation of them through non-physical means.

The twisty plot revolves around the return of Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) to his hometown of Saint-Martial on the occasion of his former local bakery boss’s funeral. His visit inflames the passions of seemingly everyone around him. The boss’s wife, Martine (Catherine Frot), seems to go the extra mile to make him feel welcome, while her son Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand) suspects him of trying to make romantic moves on his mother. Jérémie, however, has more of a thing for Vincent’s friend, Walter (David Ayala). And then there’s the local priest (Jacques Develay) who roams around town carrying a secret desire of his own…

Guiraudie observes it all with deadpan amusement even as one of the characters commits a crime of passion and another makes a startling confession inside a church. But he’s less interested in shock value than in sincerely examining the hidden depths of desire that explains such perverse behavior. The film’s title is French for “mercy,” and that is precisely what Guiraudie grants his characters without excusing their appetites, sexual or otherwise. Misericordia finds fascinating ways to challenge your own preconceived notions about people, morality, and society at large without raising its voice. (They’ve set the film for a limited theatrical release next March, so more people will get a chance to see it for themselves.)

Though the New York Film Festival has historically focused more on summing up the year in film to date rather than paving the way for, say, potential Oscar contenders, the festival does occasionally present world premieres. This year’s festival featured two fairly high-profile ones. I sadly wasn’t able to fit in Julia Loktev’s five-hour-plus documentary about dissident Russian journalists, My Undesirable Friends, Part I—Last Air in Moscow, but I did catch Robinson Devor’s nonfiction film Suburban Fury.

Devor essentially built the film out of a single interview: that of Sara Jane Moore, who was the second person in 1975 to try to assassinate President Gerald Ford (Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme preceded her by 17 days). From regular suburban housewife; to a bookkeeper for Randolph Hearst after his daughter Patricia’s famous kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army; to an FBI informant after developing a sympathy for the SLA’s aims but a distaste for their methods; to disillusioned would-be presidential assassin, Moore’s story is the kind of stranger-than-fiction story that many documentary filmmakers dream of.

To some degree, Devor stays out of Moore’s way, trusting the inherently compelling nature of Moore’s chronicle to speak for itself. That’s not to say he doesn’t do anything interesting on the filmmaking front. There’s genuine visual imagination in the way Devor and cinematographer Sean Kirby stage and frame the backdrops surrounding Moore, each setting relating to a section of her story. Devor’s use of archival footage and clips throughout (he also edited the film) is similarly masterful in the way he deploys them to add cultural context to Moore’s testimony. Composer Paul Matthew Moore ties it all together with a brooding score that wouldn’t feel out of place in one of those American paranoid thrillers from the ’70s.

Moore’s isn’t technically the only voice we hear in Suburban Fury. We also hear from someone named Bert Worthington (voiced by Devor himself), Moore’s ostensible FBI handler, but who, according to press notes, is an alias that Moore came up with to protect her handler’s real identity and all of whose words Moore herself recounts. Devor, dubiously, doesn’t mention this at all in the film, but it perhaps that explains why the voiceover narration doesn’t add nearly as much productive tension to Moore’s own testimony as one might have hoped.

Devor is forthcoming about one stipulation of the film’s making: Moore insisted that she be the only person the director interviewed. Like it or not, that caveat immediately lends it an aura of one-sidedness that makes Suburban Fury, compelling as it is, fairly limited in its scope, especially when one notes how much Moore still insists on being cagey about. Devor ultimately leaves it up to the viewer how much of Moore’s story to believe and/or discount.

One could never accuse Mike Leigh of having a limited view of humanity. The great British filmmaker is back with Hard Truths, his first film since his underrated 2018 historical drama Peterloo. Not only is it the best film I saw at this year’s New York Film Festival, but it also served as a wonderful reminder of the possibility of cinema to speak to common experience.

Not that there’s anything “common,” exactly, about its protagonist, Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste, working with Leigh again after their 1996 collaboration Secrets and Lies). Consider her the polar opposite of Poppy, the protagonist of Leigh’s 2008 comedy Happy-Go-Lucky. Whereas Poppy seemed at times almost disturbingly unflappable in her optimism, Pansy perceives just about everything as a slight, blowing up at people, including her clearly long-suffering husband Curtley (David Webber) and son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), for even the most minor of offenses.

Leigh plays some of this for dark comedy, especially when Pansy takes her ire out on strangers at a furniture store, a supermarket, and her doctors. But Leigh has never been one for caricature, even with a character as extreme as this one. So there are hints throughout, not just in Leigh’s dialogue but in some of Jean-Baptiste’s gestures and line readings, of what may have led her to this depressive state: a difficult childhood, possible troubles with law enforcement, the sociopolitical tenor of the times.

Though Pansy is certainly a major character in the film, she is hardly the only one that makes an impression. There’s also her sister, Chantelle (Michele Austin), who’s all light to Pansy’s eternal darkness. (Pansy at one point accuses Chantelle of getting the lion’s share of their parents’ love and affection, another potential hint at Pansy’s own current emotional circumstances.) A hairdresser who has an easy rapport with her customers and displays seemingly infinite patience with her sister, she has two daughters, Kayla (Ani Nelson) and Aleisha (Sophia Brown), who have picked up their mother’s gregarious spirit. But at what cost?

There’s a key passage early in the film that only seems trivial on the surface but speaks volumes upon reflection, in which we see Kayla, who works at a skincare company, getting browbeaten after a presentation during a meeting presided over by her boss (Samantha Spiro), and then putting a false front of positivity in a subsequent scene when Aleisha asks her how the presentation went.

At what point does optimism cross into self-deception? Surely you could ask a similar question about Pansy’s bottomless pessimism. Perhaps looking somewhere in the middle of those philosophical poles lies something like the secret to living in this tempestuous, unpredictable world of ours. If nothing else, the fact that the film is able to trigger such introspection is the key to what makes Hard Truths special. Leigh’s brand of humanism is very much of the tough-love variety: He may show affection for and desire to understand his characters, but he’s also willing to call them on their bullshit whenever necessary.

The film will have a one-week awards-qualifying run in December before it opens in more theaters in January, but seeing it at this year’s New York Film Festival felt like getting a sneak peek at a treasure chest before it officially opened itself up to a wider public.