Plus, bonus Megalopolis and The Apprentice.
Note: I realize these are very loaded days for a studio and a film festival to be premiering a “horrors of war” movie, and a WWII one, no less. One of NYFF’s major contributing partners is Bloomberg Philanthropies, and while not calling for a boycott of NYFF, several filmmakers and festival workers signed statements urging organizers to break those ties because of Bloomberg’s City Leadership center that has “trained mayors and city officials from Modi’in Illit and Mateh Binyamin Regional Council representing more than 40 [illegal] West Bank settlements.” Meanwhile, public protestors disrupted an NYFF screening of Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door to draw attention to Israeli airstrikes on Palestine and Lebanon. Steve McQueen’s Blitz, shot for Apple TV+ and set during the bombs dropped on majority-white civilians in allied England in 1940–41, comes on the heels of all this unrest. My preface is to place the Blitz screening in context and not at all to implicate the Black British McQueen in any wrongdoing.
Blitz is frustrating. It seems to want to subvert the genres of “middlebrow Oscar-bait war drama” and “middlebrow dark fantasy story for kids” by weaving in the visceral violences of bombs dropping and anti-Black racism, but we still get a movie that’s 85 percent middlebrow Oscar-bait war drama, etc. As a filmmaker (12 Years a Slave, the brilliant Small Axe) McQueen’s greatest strength is in how he lovingly captures the energy, community, and pain of Black lives, and some of the scenes that are most deeply felt in Blitz are when we see George (Elliott Heffernan) and other Black characters register and process the recurring daily traumas that their present situation is only magnifying. And McQueen brings a vulnerable intimacy to the later scenes of Londoners hunkering down for a night’s shelter in the Underground, especially when George nestles between tight track space like a feral cat in a flowerbox. But it’s a pedestrian script, the dialogue is leaden, and it all looks too tidy (for someone constantly evacuating a blitz, Saoirse Ronan’s Rita doesn’t have a hair out of place or a speck of dirt on her until the final scene). Visually, I do like how the CGI here and in other movies these days functions as a sort of Old Hollywood matte painting effect to add an “off the ground” dreamy element rather than to convince anyone of verisimilitude. Its use in the panoramic views of London reminded me of the aesthetic worldbuilding that made The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992) so haunting, even if that was ultimately a middlebrow dark fantasy story for kids. Lovely surprise: a supporting turn from Paul “Down in the Tube Station at Midnight” Weller as Rita’s dad and George’s white grandfather, the sweet, piano-playing patriarch of their bohemian home. And their family dynamic is a nice parallel with the book I’m reading now, Neneh Cherry’s poetic new memoir A Thousand Threads, in which she recalls her own jazz-inflected, mixed-race bohemian family and the micro- and macro-aggressions they endured for rejecting social norms.
Frederick Wiseman, now 94, has been producing movies since 1963 (Shirley Clarke’s The Cool World) and directing his own since 1967 (Titicut Follies). I love or at least have very warm feelings toward everything he’s made — he is one of our most intelligent and wise living filmmakers, with a leftist heart that can be wry but refuses to become embittered. The newly restored Model, his PBS documentary about the New York modeling agency Zoli Management, is a treasure: a glimpse into an NYC of magnificently shitty office buildings with big windows and bad landlord-special paint jobs, a taste of the new wave and R&B songs burning up the town and the severe European expressionism dominating high-fashion editorial pages, and a celebration of the richness of street life beyond the rarefied elite. It’s a shockingly humane profile of the modeling profession compared to the 2000s competitive-reality grossness of Tyra Banks and Janice Dickinson. No doubt the modeling world of 1980 was rife with body shaming too, but that’s not in Wiseman’s edit other than the couple times he shows us the agents laying down sad truths to models under 5’7 seeking print work. He treats everyone as a professional (at varying levels of skill and experience) either doing a job or seeking one. And the models themselves are the audience hook, but as a filmmaker his eye always returns to the camera operators, their lighting setups, their assistants, and the directors of the TV spots Zoli’s roster is booked for. His lone “villain” is the white male director of one of these spots, impatient with a flustered young woman not nailing the take, and calling her “sweetheart” and “dear” in a patronizingly cokey way. By contrast, another director — of a tricky composite shot with multiple angles of the same stockinged leg balanced in the air — tells the owner of the leg about the shot’s technical demands and takes the burden of perfection off of her and affords her the psychic space to get it right. In addition to Model being a feminist text, it’s a labor text and one not blind to race either. Wiseman doesn’t forget the by no means trivial amount of people of color in the business, as models, as garment workers, and as human beings off-duty. I took one of the closing scenes, a small runway show where Black women walked in fun cocktail dresses that looked more like “elevated mall apparel” than haute couture, as a subtle read on the kinds of B-grade jobs agencies could book Black women for if they weren’t Beverly Johnson or Pat Cleveland. I really loved this movie and I’m thrilled that with the push from Wiseman’s Zipporah Films to digitize and restore his collected filmography, it will find new audiences. Along with Queer, it’s the best thing I saw at NYFF.
Please bestow all kinds of awards upon Daniel Craig for his tricksy ethereal exiled dirty-old-man hopeless romantic junkie pharmonaut explorer — and William S. Burroughs surrogate — in Luca Guadagnino’s new adaptation of Burroughs’s Queer. Phantasmagoric and serpentine, recalling at times Beau Travail and Moira Shearer’s balletic psychosis in The Red Shoes, it’s Guadagnino at the height of his power and the most redoubtable acting from a certified leading man whose talents are simultaneously quite rated and underrated. The overarching vibe of Queer is “horny gay white men languidly haunting the cafes of late-forties Mexico City because yes hipsters with colonization fetishes but also at this time it’s far less safe for homosexuals and bisexuals and their questioning friends to exist in most parts of the States.” The B-plot is drugs, and that’s all I’ll say. The relatively contemporary music cues are my only true ick, great songs though they may be; Guadagnino is trying to go for a Sofia Coppola Marie Antoinette punkish conceit but here it’s too jarring. Sinéad O’Connor’s “All Apologies” cover and other Nirvana tunes do make sense though. Burroughs and Kurt Cobain were friendly in their respective final days. And Cobain’s “everyone is gay” and “in the sun I feel as one” lyrics stand out as the story’s themes come into view of longing for fulfillment and spiritual integration in a framework shaped by queerness in the radical sense of an intellectual, cultural, political position on a battlefield one has been forcibly drafted onto, out on the margins, in the shadows. And later, New Order’s “Leave Me Alone” rides a quiet headrush of desperation and release to good effect. I’ve been avoiding reading reviews until I wrote mine up and now I’m very curious how the film will be received when it opens in November.
It wasn’t bad. It was what I expected. There’s a lot of this sort of thing in the air lately, from Maria director Pablo Larraín himself (Jackie, Spencer) and the Ryan Murphy Celebrity Miniseries Universe, gauzy portraits of troubled, demanding twentieth-century grandes dames in the autumns of their days. And I’m a mark for all of it. Quality or not, I will swallow such productions like a fistful of Mandrax. Angelina Jolie is a fine Maria Callas, looking luminous, moving with hard-fought dignity and a phantom cloak of heartbreak. Jolie studied opera for the role, although typically the voice we hear is the real Callas’s and sometimes it’s a digital blend of the late Greco-American diva and Jolie’s own pipes. Alba Rohrwacher and Pierfrancesco Favino are wonderful as the beleaguered but loyal live-in assistants who keep the ailing Callas upright and extant and attempt to keep her safe from prescription drug abuse.
Pavements, Alex Ross Perry’s documockubiopic about indie rock’s Pavement, is an averted disaster that through creative editing and the power of song is (to me) enjoyably salvageable. The project is a sensitive subject for Stephen Malkmus and the band and I suspected as much while watching them at the Q&A, appearing as promised but struggling to be supportive and positive. There are four separate strands in Pavements: a quasi-staged art exhibit pop-up of archival material, a more standard documentary centering a 2022 tour against the beginnings and salad days and tumult, a Yacht Rock–style goofball comedy biopic poking fun at Bohemian Rhapsody et al, and a lofty jukebox musical that scans as utterly earnest despite its Nathan Fielder art-prank measures. (Apparently the biopic part was a resolute failure with the audience that got to see it, something Perry is quick to note.) I allow the whole megillah some grace because I tend to adore hare-brained auteurism that swings for the fences. So I’m chill if Perry wants to swing for a hodgepodge of the microcosmic setpieces-within-setpieces of Charlie Kaufman and Fellini with crazy Jacques Rivette black-box-theatre shit and Charles Atlas’s Hail the New Puritan (about the staging of postpunk choreographer Michael Clark’s 1984 ballet with music by the Fall). And I’m intrigued by the Sondheimization of Malkmus’s melodies; I’ve been saying for years that his lithe, elastic tenor has a soupçon of Broadway razzle-dazzle.
La Musica (1966) preceded by J’ai faim, j’ai froid (1984)
La Musica, newly restored, is an 86-minute film by Marguerite Duras and Paul Seban, adapted from a one-act play the Algerian-French Seban had penned. And the adapted version feels like a play, in that it appears to retain the narrative structure that allowed it to work within the necessary limitations of stage drama. The entire first act is a tone poem, establishing Robert Hossein’s tentative, weird friendship with American student Julie Dassin (the daughter of the blacklisted U.S. expat director Jules Dassin, in a sparkling, spiky performance). Marquee star Delphine Seyrig is barely in these scenes, only as a mysterious figure in and around a hotel. The second act careens hard into a new main character: we learn Seyrig is Elle, estranged wife of Hossein’s Lui, and we learn of their divorce proceedings and the torment of their marriage. La Musica is a mystery, a kitchen-sink melodrama, an existentialist meditation on the knots we tie ourselves in to make our pain survivable and/or momentarily dissociable, and how those knots fray us into our undoing. Chantal Akerman’s 14-minute short J’ai faim, j’ai froid is cute, covertly sapphic, feminist, a shot fired: modern young women need men way way way less than patriarchal capitalism counts on.
Stuff I saw recently outside of NYFF: Megalopolis and The Apprentice (both 2024)
Francis Ford Coppola’s ruinously expensive, long-in-the-works passion project Megalopolis was… HMM. People will be studying it for decades. I played my “spot the visual reference point” game in the theater and some of it is affirmed by looking at Coppola’s career filmography on IMDb. It becomes clear he’s pulling from projects he had a hand in: his executive production on Kurosawa’s electric Kagemusha and Schrader’s wild avant-fascist Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, his direction and co-writing on Michael Jackson kiddie vehicle Captain EO (logline: “Captain EO and his space crew are on a mission to save the world from the evil queen by giving her a song and dance”), Coppola’s notorious films maudits One from the Heart and Apocalypse Now. And yeah, Megalopolis is a stylistic mishmash of Christopher Nolan dorm-philosopher nonsense and the Marvelverse and Southland Tales and Bonfire of the Vanities and Kenneth Anger and Ayn Rand and common misinterpretations of Fritz Lang and F. Scott Fitzgerald. It’s a failure, but its ambitions did not fall off a turnip truck. It pokes around in the dark at that tender membrane separating vulgarity from transcendence, and there are moments of both. A lifetime of craft and deep knowledge, a mountain range of cocaine and yes-men. It’s incomprehensible. It’s often boring. I need to watch it three more times. It’s a very empty movie gesturing at being a substantive one — I was howling with laughter at the laundry list of Marcus Aurelius quotes, suggesting that between the Stoic grindset and his choice to pad the supporting cast with “canceled” actors like Jon Voight and Shia LaBoeuf, Coppola has been hitting the Reddit incel subs. But the aspects of Megalopolis that aren’t embarrassing are REALLY well-executed. And Adam Driver is a fucking trooper for wrestling good, naturalistic acting out of a script that gives him so little to work with. He and Aubrey Plaza look like they’re having fun, at least. It’s trite and misogynist and it’s several varieties of non-Cavendish bananas smoking in the infernal incinerator of empire, but if you flit around the thing there’s sure signs of auteurism that got away from itself over the years as Coppola’s head unspooled.
Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice works on a few levels. One, getting my boyfriends Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong and Martin Donovan into a movie together. Two, by making audiences care about and on occasion root for a couple of the twentieth century’s highest-profile villains, Abbasi effectively hands us a mirror and says, “This is how evil happens.” Because if we’re not bullied and bulldozed by figures like Donald Trump and Roy Cohn, we’re charmed, seduced. (“We” is subjective as fuck, of course, and context dependent. Trump in the seventies was a golden boy with Robert Redford comparisons.) Three, the performances seal the deal. Stan is miraculous as the vulnerable failson hungry to prove Daddy wrong and letting his ascent in power curdle his already iffy Wharton-undergrad instincts and metastasize his arrogance. Strong, in his second movie where the Trump family appears (I’m a fan of James Gray’s Queens-set Armageddon Time), plays Roy Cohn with a softness and sadness behind the arch conservative ruthless-pitbull persona, particularly when Cohn, ever in denial, is resigning himself to dying from AIDS-related complications and the truth of his longtime mentee’s callous disloyalty. It’s interesting to watch Stan’s Trump become Strong’s Cohn as he apes Cohn’s shticky monotone mannerisms and DARVO-speak, and to see Strong’s Cohn vanish into a ghost of himself after Trump has stolen his life force and AIDS has ravaged everything else. Donovan as paterfamilias and racist Coney Island developer Fred Trump? Underused. But this works. I reckon it’ll win some stuff. Recommendation for further research: if you can locate Ron Vawter’s 1992 Roy Cohn/Jack Smith, which I watched this April at Anthology, Vawter’s Cohn goes harder still. The maverick Wooster Group actor was sick with AIDS during his portrayal and would die in 1994, while Cohn had only succumbed to the virus six years prior.
