The New York Film Festival, Week One: Better Late Than Never
Many of the best films I’ve seen at advance screenings of this year’s New York Film Festival are by veterans of the annual event, but this year’s main-slate lineup adds a twist: a veteran filmmaker who is making his long-delayed N.Y.F.F. début. The director in question, Mani Haghighi, has been making features for more than twenty years; four of them are among the best films of the era, but only one has been released in the U.S. Now his latest will have its world première at the festival, on September 30th, and I’ve been delaying mentioning its title in order to leave space for it at the end of the sentence: “I Deserve a Lover Whose Every Rise Sets Fiery Dooms Raging Across the Skies.”
The film is as idiosyncratic, audacious, poetic, and original as its title—an achievement that’s all the more impressive given that it’s a documentary. It’s one of only a few that Haghighi has made, but it puts most career documentarians to shame, displaying a level of imagination, invention, and style that has rarely been matched in nonfiction cinema. The premise is simple. It’s a portrait film of a middle-aged couple, Nasser Bakhshi and Roghayeh Najdi, who live in Tabriz, a city in northwestern Iran, and each characterize themselves the same way: “artist, archivist, collector.” Haghighi observes them working in all three of those fields and unfolds the connections of these disparate activities, while also revelling in the couple’s fascinating anecdotes, alluring personalities, and dramatic, stylish modes of self-presentation. In other words, Haghighi takes on a familiar subgenre and makes it excitingly new, turning it into an exemplary variety of cinematic modernity.
The film’s first sequence shows how the couple does their collecting. A squad of young assistants—seen in closeup portraits, then shown donning black gloves, aprons, and medical masks—cover what looks like a huge personal library, filled with books and objets d’art, with protective clear plastic. Then workers carry truckloads of wrapped packages into the space, and the assistants slash the parcels open to unpack what, to all appearances, is junk—a lightbulb, pottery, machine parts, old books, which are covered in dust and dirt. However, before Haghighi reveals what the two artists intend to do with this odd jumble, he explains, in voice-over, that he’d planned another opening and, indeed, shot it—but it was lost when his footage was confiscated by security forces on the charge that he’d filmed women without head scarves. Moreover, the current war on Iran mounted by the United States and Israel also turns out to have factored into the fate of this missing footage, and it likewise impinges on the events that Haghighi manages to depict onscreen.
Bakhshi and Najdi’s collecting is inextricably bound up with their art. Both are painters. Although they paint separately, in different styles and ways—Haghighi delights in comparing their methods—they both create large, realistic yet phantasmagorical paintings using images gleaned from scrounged-up photo albums, and they both scavenge small-scale items for use in collages. Yet it is not just their use of found objects that is artistic but the very way that they contemplate these pieces and explore the histories they contain. The film, while centering Iran’s current political and social crises, also brings to light obscure aspects, moments, and corners of Iranian history, public and private, which Bakhshi and Najdi discuss in great detail. One of the albums in the pair’s collection is filled with photographs (of extraordinary, poignant provenance) from the nineteen-forties and fifties of women who, as children, had been abducted and forced into prostitution. Another includes photos (seemingly from the sixties or early seventies) of men in bathing suits at a swimming spot that appears to be a meeting place for gay men. A large collection of notebooks by an unknown man turns out to be a trove of outsider art—a copious, fanatically pursued life’s project, consisting of drawings and speculative writings on a wide range of scientific and spiritual subjects.
Haghighi’s filming of the couple, their work, and their world is artistic in itself; he brings their ideas and observations to the screen by responding to them with images and cinematic practices that offer the visual variety and energetic invention of his dramatic features. In response to a conversation in which the couple decry the prevalence of tattoos, Haghighi shows startlingly intimate closeups of the tattoos on the skin of their assistants (as well as one that Bakhshi himself got in his youth). The director follows the couple in their rounds of collecting, interviewing the merchants at an antique shop and a rug shop about this distinctive pair of customers. He also interviews a psychologist about hoarding, from a medical and emotional perspective—but he does so ironically, in contrast to the earnest, intense, and highly principled practicality of the couple’s archival fervor.
Though large-scale politics filter into their work, Bakhshi and Najdi place more stress on the fact that their very practice of collecting and archiving—their gathering and preservation of overlooked, discarded, and seemingly banal materials—exemplifies a crucially political ideal. Their collection isn’t merely a trove of aesthetic wonders in the raw but also an act of “rebellion,” a way of “resisting” official histories that privilege the stories and artifacts of the rich and powerful. The couple’s collection exalts experiences and creations of ordinary people who otherwise would be lost to history along with their disdained treasures.
The inspiration that Haghighi draws, above all, from the couple’s work is on bold display in his original approach to archival images—which is also a living lesson to the world’s filmmakers. He cites and shows the item in the collection that sparked his desire to make the movie, an album of slides depicting an academic botanist’s family life and scientific work. The portraits in the album—family outings in the countryside, a wedding party, domestic gatherings—are, at first glance, unexceptional, even banal. But, having offered these initial glimpses, Haghighi’s camera gets to work, macrophotographically zeroing in on small groups and on individual faces and gestures. His reframings reveal that those casual images contain latent portraiture with the grandeur and the power of classical paintings. At times, the ultra-closeups move in even further to spotlight vague forms of shadow and light, color and shape, along with the intensified grain of the photographic image itself, giving rise to a haunting series of avant-garde abstractions. Haghighi’s highly technical quest for hidden demotic beauty parallels the couple’s own passion while also offering a sharp practical and artistic lesson for all filmmakers: not to use archival images as history by the yard but as subjects in themselves, ones as much in need of uninhibited directorial intervention as any fictional subject. “I Deserve a Lover . . .” is a thrilling display of humanistic enthusiasm, aesthetic inspiration, and creative freedom on both sides of the camera.
This first week the N.Y.F.F. offers two more extraordinary documentaries: William and David Greaves’s “Once Upon a Time in Harlem” (the recent completion of William Greaves’s 1972 gathering, in Duke Ellington’s apartment, of Harlem Renaissance luminaries who recall the movement and spotlight its enduring influence); and Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s “NAZA” (detailing, by way of interviews with Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers, how A.I.-assisted systems have led to a high death toll of civilians in Gaza). There may well be others that I haven’t yet seen. But the schedule doesn’t stint on fiction, which shows up in boldly expectation-defying forms. One of the most notable is the French director Arthur Harari’s “The Unknown,” a surprisingly realistic treatment of fantasy. His previous film “Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle” (released in the U.S. in 2022) was painfully literal and script-bound, but “The Unknown” starts at a high level of artifice that gains great dramatic intensity from the filmmaker’s sincere and ardent curiosity. Harari’s realism isn’t an imposed form but an outcome of fiercely focussed attention.
The protagonist, named David (Niels Schneider), a fortyish photographer is working on a fascinating historical project in the suburbs of Paris. Back from a photo shoot, he attends a raucous party where, under the influence, he catches the eye of a young woman named Eva (Léa Seydoux) whom he recognizes. They have quick sex in a back room, and, in the morning, David wakes up and discovers that he has the body of a woman—of Eva. “The Unknown” (the French title, “L’Inconnue,” is grammatically feminine, meaning “The Unknown Woman”) is a body-swap story which also poses a question of its own identity, indeed, of identity as such: is it rather a mind-swap story in which physical identity proves to be the dominant factor of selfhood? Harari pursues the question with relentless urgency rooted in the ordinary problems, psychological and practical, that David faces—including the difficulty of finding his original body. But when he, um, re-meets himself, he finds that his former male body no longer contains Eva’s mind but that of yet another woman, a high-school student named Malia, whose body (played by Lilith Grasmug) now has Eva’s mind.
One of the best aspects of “The Unknown” is its lack of causes: the crisis is inexplicable, traceable to nothing like environmental catastrophe, biological mutation, or supernatural curse. Something has happened to these characters, it may have afflicted a few others, and they all must simply deal with it. The very rarity of the phenomenon renders it incommensurable and, incomprehensible, an unspeakable secret. The tense and agonizing switch is a pure state of melodrama, a transcendent form of tragedy striking in the banal core of workaday society. The transformations are achieved with a rare virtuosity—the actors’ precision fuses with the meticulous screenwriting (by Harari, his brother Lucas, and Vincent Poymiro, based on a graphic novel by the brothers)—and the direction anchors the characters in their respective milieux in ways that, through the disturbance of normalcy, turns familiar places and habits strange and uncanny. Throughout, the movie’s deeply affecting realism feels also like symbolism—an existential crisis without any of its arch markers, a world of metaphors without referents, both universal and blank.
If Homer had written about movies, the South Korean director Hong Sangsoo’s epithet would be “the prolific.” For a decade and a half, he’s been reliably making two films a year, all on low budgets, with hardly any crew beside himself, a sound recordist, maybe an assistant—and, for about a decade, the New York Film Festival has reliably been presenting them. The effect is of a self-portrait in mosaic, each movie filling in a space or some, even better, opening up a new one. I write about them just as regularly, because their variations in form and theme, despite their inevitable similarities, have the mind-expanding force of other great obsessive projects, like Mark Rothko’s shaggy-edged rectangles or Alex Katz’s “Ada”s. But an undercurrent of my recent reviews of them has been a longing for him to push out his frames with his elbows, to open his films to the kinds of more teeming and wide-reaching worlds of some of his earlier, higher-budget movies (such as “Woman on the Beach”). This year’s festival again has two new Hong films, and the one playing in the first week, “Nowhere to Lay My Eyes,” does something of the sort, luminously and jubilantly.
When a great filmmaker makes a movie about filmmaking, pay attention; here, Hong centers a young woman named Sanghee (Kim Min-hee, Hong’s partner and frequent collaborator), an experimental filmmaker in Seoul who, with her brother, Sangwon (Shin Seok-ho), arrive on Jeju Island to visit their mother (Choi Myung-gil), a hard-nosed businesswoman who owns a restaurant and an inn—and who has a new husband (Kwon Hae-hyo), a documentary filmmaker, whom the siblings are meeting for the first time. The story pivots on the mother’s suggestion that Sanghee move to the island and learn the business in order to eventually take it over. After all, the young woman is stuck in a day job that she merely tolerates, and since her filmmaking, which is done with her own small-scale video camera, is just a “hobby,” it can be done anywhere, in the interstices of any job.
The exaggerated politesse of family relations, the minefield of long-stifled grudges, and the looming menace of secret bewilderments and frustrations keep the drama tense. Yet these overt tensions are balanced by an ongoing stream of aesthetic reflections—which in turn are doubled by Hong’s own artistry. The island’s landscapes and its urban geography are virtual characters, turning the film into a plein-air rhapsody that, in Hong’s visual compositions (he does his own cinematography), commands breathtaking expanses in limpid, painterly color. Even more, the film centers Sanghee’s own artistic practice—she tools around the island with her camera in hand, working during the family visit—and also her inner life. Just as Haghighi’s documentary offers a manifesto of filming archival images, Hong’s fiction feature is a double manifesto, of the voice-over and, exactly as the title suggests, of the basic art of seeing. “Nowhere to Lay My Eyes” defines and deploys Sanghee’s voice as a prime form of action, a virtual parallel track of images, while also transforming a simple gaze with a simple camera into an act of transcendence. Far from merely making a D.I.Y. film, Hong here proves the enduring cinematic power of the immediate. ♦