Rojo is Argentine writer-director Benjamín Naishtat’s slow burn drama. Rojo is set just before the 1970s coup that some characters expect – but no one is anticipating how long and bloody the coup will be. Several vignettes are woven together into a tapestry of pre-coup moral malaise. Watch for the several references to desaparecida, a foreboding of the coup.
Ramen Shop is about a family’s reconciliation in light of troubled Singaporean-Japanese history. There’s a metaphorical foodie angle here, too, in the fusion of Singaporean pork rib soup with Japanese ramen stock.
Winter’s Night is Korean director Woo-jin Jang’s contemplation on a longtime marriage in which one partner has grown profoundly dissatisfied and both partners have become very confused about what to do about it. They are addressing this – or not – on a winter vacation to a remote monastery. This especially visual film (see the still below) makes full use of the frigid nights and the stark landscape to emphasize the wife’s emotional isolation.
I haven’t yet seen Loro, but master filmmaker Paolo Sorrrentino’s take on Italian scoundrel/prime minister Silvio Berlusconi is very promising. Sorrentino has already created two of the most brilliant films of this decade – The Great Beauty and Youth.
The San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM) opens tomorrow, and this week’s video pick comes from the 2014 festival. On its surface, the brilliant comedy Dear White People seems to be about racial identity, but – as writer-director Justin Simien points out – it’s really about personal identity (of which race is an important part). Set at a prestigious private college, Dear White People centers on a group of African-American students navigating the predominantly white college environment.
Each of the four primary characters has adopted a persona – choosing how they want others to view them. Middle class Sam is a fierce Black separatist (despite her White Dad and her eyes for that really nice White boy classmate). Coco, having made it to an elite college from the streets, is driven to succeed socially by ingratiating herself with the popular kids. Kyle, the Dean’s son, is the college BMOC, a traditional paragon, but with passions elsewhere. Lionel is floundering; despite being an African-American gay journalist, he doesn’t fit in with the Black kids, the LGBT community or the journalism clique. All four of their self-identities are challenged by campus events.
This very witty movie is flat-out hilarious. The title comes from Sam’s campus radio show, which features advice like “Dear White People, stop dancing!” and “Dear White People, don’t touch our hair; what are we – a petting zoo?”. While the movie explores serious themes, it does so through raucous character-driven humor. It’s a real treat.
It’s the first feature for writer-director Justin Simien and it’s a stellar debut. Dear White People is on my list of Best Movies of 2014. Dear White People, which has been spun off into a popular Netflix series, is available on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and streaming on Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, and Google Play.
Peter Sarsgaard in Michael Tyburski’s THE SOUND OF SILENCE, playing at the San Francisco International Film Festival April 10-23. Courtesy of SFFILM
In the engrossing character study The Sound of Silence, Peter Lucian (Peter Sarsgaard) is obsessed with the musical tonality of the built environment. Having assigned each area of Manhattan its own distinct musical key, Lucian prowls the city, tuning forks in hand, to map its sounds.
Lucian pays the bills as a house tuner, bringing well-heeled apartment-owners a kind of auditory feng shui. Lucian is sought after to isolate the hum of a problem refrigerator or toaster that can make a living space depression-inducing. He’s even been profiled in The New Yorker.
But we sense that Peter Lucian is a little too confident in his expertise. He is disdainful of the corporate suits trying to monetize his discoveries. “This is about universal constance, not commerce.” In a mistake of hubris, Lucian takes on a research assistant (Tony Revolori – Zero the bell boy in The Grand Budapest Hotel). Lucian is jarred by corporate espionage, and starts to unravel when a respected scientist views him as a crank. Can he recover?
Peter Sarsgaard is a marvelous choice to play a cool obsessive who seems, at time, both blissfully above validation and desperate for it. In spite of his handsome, regular features, Sargaard’s gift for uncanny stillness helps him play creepy. Sarsgaard’s Lucian has the unintended capacity of reassuring other characters, but making then even more uncomfortable.
Rashida Jones plays Ellen, a Lucian client who is not just garden-variety neurotic, but has been so rocked by a tragedy that she remains profoundly unsettled. Jones is so talented as a comic actress, a voice artist, a documentarian and the writer of that rarest of things, a smart romantic comedy (Celeste and Jess Forever). Here, she shows her dramatic chops with a character who starts the movie adrift, but grows able to offer emotional safe harbor.
There’s even a welcome appearance by Austin Pendleton as a Lucian mentor of uncertain reliability. I’ve loved Pendleton since his turn in 1972’s What’s Up, Doc?. (Come to think of it, that movie had a musicologist obsessed with the inherent tonal qualities of igneous rocks.)
The Sound of Silence is the first feature for director and co-writer Michael Tyburski, and it’s a promising debut. Despite using an understated color palette, Tyburski delivers some stirring cinema with his use of sound. As Lucian looks over the city early in the morning, we hear a few musical notes, and then a full orchestra tuning up as the city awakens into its workday. When Lucian takes Ellen for a drink, it is to the quietest possible venue – a club with a decibel level somewhere between a library and a morgue; afterwards, Lucian emerges into urban cacophony. When an academic treats him like a crackpot, we all hear ringing, not just Lucian.
As one would hope, the sound design of The Sound of Silence is remarkable, and the score works very well. The April 14 San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM Festival) screening is at the Dolby Cinema, which should be a real treat.
The Sound of Silence premiered at Sundance, has distribution through Sony Pictures, and screens twice at the 2019 SFFILM.
The menu at SFFILM includes 86 feature films and 70 shorts from 52 countries, impeccably curated by Director of Programming Rachel Rosen and her team. 72 of the films have female directors. At last year’s fest, I was introduced to the movie that became my choice as 2018’s best film, Leave No Trace.
This year’s program is especially loaded. Here are some enticing festival highlights:
The premiere of the upcoming Netflix series Amistead Maupin’s Tales of the City. Nothing is more San Francisco than the Tales of the City saga, first serialized in the Chronicle in 1978 and adapted into the 1993 PBS episodic series that made Laura Linney a star. The Netflix series continues the story into today’s San Francisco, with Linney’s Mary Ann returning to 28 Barbary Lane. Laura Linney will attend the screening.
Linney will make a second personal appearance to receive an award at a screening of her film The Savages.
French director Claire Denis will present her venture into sci-fi, High Life. The word among critics is that High Life is a doozy – and both the sex and violence are unforgettable.
Laura Dern will appear with her latest film, Trial by Fire.
Fresh from its premiere at SXSW, actress Olivia Wilde will attend the screening of the film she has directed, Booksmart, starring Kaitlyn Dever.
Documentarian Jennifer Siebel Newson will present her latest, The Great American Lie. Siebel Newsom, also the First Lady of California, is not a dilettante, as anyone can tell her previous film, Miss Representation.
John C. Reilly will receive an award at a screening of last year’s The Sisters Brothers.
The world premiere of Q-Ball, the documentary about the basketball team at San Quentin. (Yes, they play all their games at home.) The film is produced by Warriors star Kevin Durant.
Boots Riley, the Bay Area director of last year’s iconoclastic hit Sorry to Bother You, will make the State of Cinema Address.
Loro, master filmmaker Paolo Sorrrentino’s take on Italian scoundrel/prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, will screen. Sorrentino has already created two of the most brilliant films of this decade – The Great Beauty and Youth.
My under-the-radar recommendation is the quietly engrossing The Sound of Silence, which just premiered at Sundance, starring Peter Sargaard. It’s the feature debut for director and co-writer Michael Tyburski, and it’s exceptional.
The 2019 San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILMFestival) opens this Wednesday. Here’s SFFILMFestival’s information on the program, the schedule and tickets and passes.
Throughout SFFILMFestival, you can follow me on Twitter for the very latest coverage.
Peter Sarsgaard in Michael Tyburski’s THE SOUND OF SILENCE, playing at the San Francisco International Film Festival April 10-23. Courtesy of SFFILM.
Right: Juli Jakab as Irisz Leiter Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics
OUT NOW
The Brinkis documentarian Alison Klayman’s up-close-and-personal portrait of Steve Bannon, the outsized personality who coached Donald Trump’s race-baiting right into the White House. As Bannon unintentionally reveals himself to be pathetically craving relevance, I found The Brink to be irresistible, and I watched with fascination.
You can still stream Tre Maison Dasan, the unwavering and emotionally powerful documentary about boys with incarcerated parents from PBS.
For the first hour-and-a-half of Sunset, I was convinced that I was watching the best movie of the year. Then the coherence unraveled, but I still recommend Sunset, even with its flaws, for its uncommon artistry.
The puzzling thriller Transit, with all its originality just isn’t director Christian Petzold’s best.
This week’s Stream of the Week is the riveting psychodramaPhoenix. It’s better than director Christian Petzold’s Transit, and you can stream it from Netflix Instant, Amazon, YouTube and Google Play.
ON TV
Tonight and again on April 7, Turner Classic Movies airs one of my Overlooked Noir. Film noir tends to be about guys with bad luck, but NOBODY would trade their luck with Ernie Driscoll, the anti-hero of 1953’s 99 River Street. Driscoll (John Payne) was leading in a championship boxing match before a fluke cut ends both the fight and his pugilistic career. Now he’s driving a hack, and his highest aspiration is to open a gas station. But the wife he adores (the movie’s Bad Girl) hurls hurtful invective at him constantly. At the same time, she’s cuckolding him with a hood. If that weren’t enough, he gets framed for a murder. And, mid-movie, he even gets set up by the Good Girl! That Good Girl is played by Evelyn Keyes, who knocks it out of the park in two scenes, one on a darkened theater stage and one in a dive bar
Steve Bannon in THE BRINK, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
The Brinkis documentarian Alison Klayman’s up-close-and-personal portrait of Steve Bannon, the outsized personality who founded Breitbart as a “platform for the alt right” and who encouraged Donald Trump’s race-baiting right into the White House.
But even Trump is not shameless enough to keep Bannon around – as The Brink opens, Bannon has just been fired from the Trump Administration in the wake of the wake of the Charlottesville disgrace (“very fine people on both sides“). Bannon is now embarking on a campaign of uniting the European populist Right around a common racist/ white supremicist/anti-immigration message.
Bannon, of course, is a genius at political messaging, and his major outcome was the once unthinkable re-emergence of public white supremicism – voicing those who lived under the dark, damp underside of rocks and logs with the other creepy-crawlies, and making them feel like they can walk the earth erect like other vertebrates.
Bannon is a major ham, and all too happy to let the world watch him in action. Bannon, of all people, is savvy enough to understand that Klayman is hostile to his beliefs and career,yet he granted her intimate access. His ego must not have allowed him to resist a movie about himself – or he learned from Trump that no publicity is bad publicity.
For her part, Alison Klayman (Ai Wei-wei: Never Sorry) is clever enough to let Bannon himself reveal his flaws. As he thinks he is showing us his skills, he is also showing himself to be an attention-craving blowhard. The horror isn’t that Bannon is some invincible evil mastermind but it’s in the masses (only glimpsed) that are so consumed by the fear and hatred that he peddles.
In the riveting opening sequence, Bannon describes how German technocrats designed the Birkenau death camp to be masterfully efficient. The banality of evil is not an original thought, but Bannon’s insights are more than a little scary (and his appreciation of Nazi efficiency is uncomfortable).
I found The Brink to be irresistible and watched with fascination. To those who have had their fill of the propagandists of the Right in Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes and Get Me Roger Stone(with Paul Manafort as bonus, I say that The Brink still offers insights – and more satisfaction. Bannon wants his political skill to be validated, but The Brink reveals how pathetically he craves relevance.
In the German psychological drama Phoenix, Nina Hoss plays Nelly, an Auschwitz survivor whose face has been destroyed by a Nazi gunshot; her sister has arranged for plastic surgery to reconstruct her face. When Nelly gets her new face, we accompany her on an intense quest.
Writer-director Christian Petzold is an economical story-teller, respectful of the audience’s intelligence. Watching a border guard’s reaction to her disfigurement and hearing snippets from the sister and the plastic surgeon, we gradually piece together her back story. The doctor asks what seems like a very good question – Why would a Jewish woman successfully rooted in London return to Germany in 1938? The answer to that question involves a Woman Loving Too Much.
The sister plans to re-settle both of them in Israel, but Nelly is obsessed with finding her husband. She does find her husband, who firmly believes that Nelly is dead. But he notes that the post-surgery Nelly resembles his pre-war wife, and he has a reason to have her impersonate the real Nelly. So he has the real Nelly (who he doesn’t think IS the real Nelly) pretending to be herself. It’s kind of a reverse version of The Return of Martin Guerre.
It’s the ultimate masquerade. How would you feel while listening to your spouse describe you in detail to a stranger?
Nina Hoss is an uncommonly gifted actress. Here she acts with her face fully bandaged for the first third of the film. We ache for her Nelly’s obsessive need for her husband – and when she finally finds him, she still doesn’t really have him.
As the husband, Ronald Zehfeld shows us the magnetism that attracts Nina, along with the brusque purposefulness that he thinks he needs to survive and flourish in the post-war Germany.
Christian Petzold and Nina Hoss collaborated on the recent film Barbara (he won the Berlin Film Festival’s Silver Bear for his work). About Barbara, I wrote
“Given that’s it difficult to imagine how anyone else could have improved Barbara, I’ll be looking for Petzold’s next movie.”
Well, here it is, and it’s gripping.
The ending of the film is both surprising and satisfying. Several people in my audience let out an audible “Wow!” at the same time.
Phoenix was one of my Best Movies of 2015. It is available to stream from Netflix Instant, Amazon Video, YouTube and Google Play.
Right: Juli Jakab as Írisz in SUNSET. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics
For the first hour-and-a-half of Sunset, I was convinced that I was watching the best movie of the year. Sunset is a visual masterpiece but the story’s coherence and pacing slips away in the final act.
Set only months before the outbreak of World War I, anarchy is erupting as a response to corrupt, senile empires. The young woman Írisz Leiter (Juli Jakab), who was sent to Trieste at age two when her parents died, returns to Budapest and to her parents’ prestigious millinery store. That store – still hatmaker to the elite of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – is now owned by Oszkár Brill (Vlad Ivanov), who is threatened by her reappearance.
Írisz is determined to find out more about what happened to her parents, but she becomes entangled by one more mystery after another. She encounters a former family retainer who is mad, and an aristocratic widow who may be mad; they and some sympathetic milliners leak the shocking snippets. Soon she is surprised to learn that she has a sibling – but can she find him? Then she finds out about a notorious murder – but what really happened and why? She stumbles upon an anarchist plot – but against whom and when? And an upcoming royal visit has a decidedly sinister side.
As Írisz insinuates herself in Brill’s squad of young female milliners, she plays detective, unspooling the web of mysteries. While the story is focused on Írisz’ family secrets, Sunset is gripping. When the story grows wider, into a royal perversion and an anarchist upheaval it gets less coherent and less compelling.
Sunset was written and directed by László Nemes, who burst into world cinema with the gripping, innovative and impossibly grim Son of Saul. That film won the Best Foreign Language Picture Oscar. Sunset’s cinematographer Mátyás Erdély won the American Society of Cinematographers Spotlight Award for Son of Saul.
From the painting of Budapest in the opening titles. Sunset is a feast for the eyes. I haven’t seen a film since Ida in which every frame is composed to be a stand alone piece of art. The color palette of the daytime scenes conjures a time that we know from sepia-tinged photos. The chiaroscuro in the nighttime scenes lit by early electricity and open flames is magnificent.
Right: Juli Jakab as Irisz Leiter in SUNSET. Courtesy of Sony Pictures ClassicsCenter: Evelin Dobos as Zelma, Vlad Ivanov as Oszkar Brill in SUNSET. Courtesy of Sony Pictures ClassicsCenter: Evelin Dobos as Zelma in SUN.SET. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics
Some have noted that the part of the always intense Írisz doesn’t offer much range for Juli Jakab. But Jakab is able to carry this film in which she’s in every scene, and I admired her performance.
Ivanov is best known for the Romanian masterpiece 4 Days, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, in which he played one of cinema’s most repellent characters, Mr. Bebe, the sexually harrassing abortionist. American audiences have also seen Ivanov’s performances in Police, Adjective and Snowpiercer. Hopefully, Ivanov’s star turn in Hier, which I reviewed for Cinequest, will get an American release.
Nemes, in partnership with his cinematographer Erdély is a peerless filmmaker, but he is not yet a peerless storyteller. I still recommend Sunset, even with its flaws, for its uncommon artistry.
. Paula Beer and Franz Rogowski in TRANSIT. Courtesy of Music Box Films
In Christian Petzold’s puzzling thriller Transit, George (Franz Rogowski) flees Paris for his life, just ahead of the invading Nazis. He assumes the identity of a dead author, which comes with a ticket from Marseilles to the safety of the Western Hemisphere. Trouble is, the ship won’t leave for weeks, so he must wait it out in Marseilles as the Nazis get closer and closer. He finds himself in a community of other refugees – all forlornly hoping for a ticket, a visa, a letter of transit so they can get out, too. Completely at the disposal of impenetrable bureaucracies, their situation is Kafkaesque. It’s a puddle of human desperation, and the clock is ticking.
Georg glimpses a mysterious beauty, Marie (Paula Beer). She turns out to be the widow of the man that Georg is impersonating, but she doesn’t know that her husband is dead. What Georg knows is that he also has papers for her to join him on the escape ship. While waiting for her husband to appear in Marseilles, she has taken up with the altruistic doctor Richard (Godehard Giese).
So, we have European refugees holed up, trying to get letters of transit to escape the Nazis. Our protagonist is in love with a woman, who is with a selfless idealist. Yes, this story does have its similarities to Casablanca – there’s even a dramatic sacrifice at the end. But the impeccably plotted Casablanca is easy to follow, and Transit has its surreal aspects. Casablanca is of its time – when individuals subsumed their interests to a great, global cause: “I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” Set in the same wartime period, Transit is of our time – focused on the micro-plight of individuals.
I’m trying to think how to explain this – it’s a period story shot in modern times. So, the characters wear 1940s clothes and use 1940s typewriters. But the environs are modern Paris and Marseilles, so the storm troopers are modern French SWAT teams and the police vehicles are modern French cop cars with their Euro sirens. It may sound weird, but it worked for me. I just became absorbed in figuring out what was going on.
Franz Rogowski and Lilien Batman in TRANSIT. Courtesy of Music Box Films
There is a sweet and effective subplot involving Georg and a boy with a disability. Their relationship is the most relatable part of Transit.
Franz Rogowski (so good as Boxer in Victoria) has an intensity that pays off in his portrayal of Georg, who is either escaping or, when he has a moment, seeking. Beer captures Marie’s unreliability and fragility; she makes us understand why Georg’s would be so attracted to Marie – and why that might not work out for him.
At some point in Marseilles, Transit lost me. I still was engaged in the intellectual execise of figuring out the puzzles, but I stopped caring about Georg and Marie. Christian Petzold’s previous films Barbara and Phoenix prove that he is an exceptional filmmaker. Transit, for all its originality just isn’t Petzold’s best.
Salma Hayek and Jesse Eisenberg in THE HUMMINGBIRD PROJECT
In The Hummingbird Project, two brothers take on Wall Street power in a race to build a fiber-optic cable network from Kansas City to New York City. They plan to take advantage of getting financial data several nanoseconds before everyone else and to become zillionaires. Vincent (Jesse Eisenberg) is the wheeler-dealer and Anton (Alexander Skarsgård) is the technical whiz. It’s a ridiculously audacious bet, and the movie is about whether they can pull it off.
Their ruthless Wall Street competition is personalized in the character played by Salma Hayek. Hayek is okay, but she appears to be performing in a different (and better) movie than the other leads.
The Hummingbird Project doesn’t quite work. Eisenberg is not a stranger to jittery, fast-talking roles. But here, he accelerates into auctioneer-pacing, and he speaks so quickly that it’s hard to follow. There’s too much film footage invested in the cable-laying procedural. And why the hell does Vincent return a THIRD time to visit the Amish farmers in the rainstorm?
There are two good scenes in The Hummingbird Project, both involving Anton. In one, he decides to physically run away from the FBI and, in the other, he exacts some hacking revenge on the Wall Street baddies.
I saw The Hummingbird Project at Cinequest, and it is now playing in Bay Area theaters.
