The New York Film Festival, Week Two: Loose Talk, Bold Action
The New York Film Festival is a feast of many parts, but its divisions are mainly symbolic. Such major festivals as those in Cannes, Berlin, and Venice are competitive; they offer prizes and make a distinction between movies in the main competition and those in other sections. Thus, the value judgments in those programming decisions have practical effects. The New York Film Festival is different: it was conceived as a “festival of festivals,” presenting movies that made their débuts at other festivals. The N.Y.F.F. also reliably features some world premières, but they’re nestled among a throng of movies already seen elsewhere. The festival’s parsing of films into its Main Slate and its other sections (principally Spotlight, Currents, and Revivals) is an unofficial consumer guide. The Main Slate is the prime showcase of what’s deemed best in the year of world cinema; the Spotlight offers what’s widely anticipated; and, in this year’s program guide, Dennis Lim, the festival’s artistic director, calls Currents “our home for films that push against the conventions of cinematic form.”
As a result, it should come as no surprise that one of the best films of the festival (and of the year) is screening in Currents: “Red Rocks,” by the French filmmaker Bruno Dumont. He’s among the world’s great directors of children—from the tough North Sea adolescents in his political crime comedy “Li’l Quinquin” (2014) to the child Joan of Arc in his rock opera “Jeannette” (2017). But the most original work he has done with children is in this new film (which premièred at Cannes in May). “Red Rocks” is a high-tension melodrama, set mainly in a calm, gentrified town on the French Riviera, about two groups of idle youths who meet by chance and clash when a girl from one group and a boy from the other become romantically involved. The characters, like the actors who portray them, are somewhere between five and seven years old.
These are precocious, free-range kids. Géo (Kaylon Lancel), the short and cocky leader of one group—a pint-size James Cagney—tools around town on a quad bike with his two friends, Manon (Louise Podolski) and Rouben (Mohamed Coly). Manon and Géo are something of a couple, and Dumont delights in classic cinematic gestures of romance, as when Manon catches a lift with Rouben to a meeting place and then hops off his quad and onto Géo’s. The trio’s main amusement is jumping into the Mediterranean from the terrifying heights of the titular clifflike crags. That’s where they meet the other group of kids, two girls and a boy. Géo helps one of them, Eve (Kelsie Verdeilles), up a steep hill, and soon, when all six children are chased away from the rocks by police, she and he are walking hand in hand. She warns him, however, that she already has a boyfriend, the boy in her trio, called B (Alessandro Piquera), who’s tall, phlegmatic, glowering, and mortally jealous.
“Red Rocks” is no “Bugsy Malone”; these children aren’t imitating adults. The story and dialogue, written by Dumont, are carefully constructed, but his child actors experience the scripted events freely, in terms of their own personalities and reactions. That’s what Dumont does with adult actors, too, in his greatest films—whether working with amateurs, as he often does, or filming floridly theatrical professionals. But here, keeping the camera close to these five-year-olds, he makes their childhood—and the essence of childhood itself—into the subject of his film, just as much as the scripted story is.
The performances he elicits in “Red Rocks” are as documentary-impulsive as they are dramatically apt. Class relations figure prominently. One child lives in a small modern house, another in a mobile home; when a third is found to live in a gated villa, Géo asks, through the bars of the gate, “Why are you locked in?” (as opposed to wondering why he’s locked out). The heart of the film is romanticism of a rare brazenness, raised to melodramatic fury by the children’s spontaneity and Dumont’s images of a nature-mad frenzy to match. The story’s most sophisticated elements coalesce with the kids’ ingenuously profound view of the world they’re discovering, in all its daily strangeness, as when Eve both jealously and curiously asks Géo about Manon, “What are you like with her?” At a train station, watching him strut proudly away, she gazes wonderingly upon him, the sun silhouetting her and illuminating wisps of her long hair blowing in the breeze.
It’s worth adding that, after seeing the film, I stumbled across a few recent French interviews with Dumont, and the making of “Red Rocks” turns out to have been as extraordinary as the film itself. It was a guerrilla shoot, carefully planned but done on location without permits in scattered bits and pieces, with handheld cameras pressing close to the children and getting ecstatic closeups on the wing. Plenty of artifice and simulation are involved, too—essential for keeping the children safe—but they don’t interfere with the film’s quasi-documentary precision in evoking local life. Regardless of Dumont’s meticulously realized visual tricks, the wild and jubilant audacity of the film’s creation is evident onscreen.
Melodrama and documentary fuse in a drastically different way in “The Dreamed Adventure,” a memory-rich and passion-stoked tale of love and history by the German director Valeska Grisebach. The movie is set in Bulgaria, in an area near its borders with Greece and Turkey, a criminal badlands of smuggling and human trafficking. There, a middle-aged, small-time operator named Said (Syuleyman Letifov) bumps into Veska (Yana Radeva), a long-ago friend, perhaps even a lover, who’s now an archeologist on a dig in the region’s remote hills. She offers him a ride and, by chance, soon finds herself caught up in his criminal dealings. Learning that gangland activities in the area also impinge on her dig, she insinuates herself into the area’s underworld and gets entangled with some of its more colorful figures.
This is a modern-day film noir, plotted tensely and filled with the breathless thrills of dangerous games and risky business, but it offers more than the familiar pleasures of the genre, because of the people Veska encounters. In this chaotic border zone, the boundary between legitimate business and dirty dealings turns out to be ambiguous, for reasons rooted in historical turmoil. In Bulgaria’s post-Communist nineteen-nineties, when the country suddenly lurched from stifled East to Wild West, life in the region shifted sharply from torpid endurance to desperate survivalism. Stories of that time emerge in extended scenes of group dialogue that arise from Veska’s intrepid inquiries. Functioning like an oral historian or a reporter, she speaks with elders in the murky milieu and elicits their scathing, bitterly candid accounts of those disorientingly anarchic times. I have no idea whether these sequences are scripted, cast, and performed or whether Grisebach indeed brought locals together to tell their tales. Either way, they’re persuasively documentary in their tone and their substance, and the vitality of the narratives that come to the surface gives the movie’s overt, genre-tinged fictions an awe-inspiring authenticity.
The joys of “Nowhere to Lay My Eyes,” one of a pair of films by Hong Sangsoo at this year’s festival, include its wide-ranging geographic and dramatic purview, which makes for a startling contrast with the other film, playing this coming week, “The Day She Returns”—one of his most radically compressed and confined movies. He made that movie first, and it is almost as if its contents, under pressure, led to “Nowhere to Lay My Eyes” ’s spatial breakout. Both are films about filmmaking and, as such, works of personal urgency, but in “The Day She Returns” the point of entry is an institution on the commercial periphery that has become strangely integral to cinema: the interview. A middle-aged actress named Bae Jeongsu (played by Song Sun-mi), having stepped away from the profession for a dozen years, is now making her return in an independent film, and her story is attracting press. (In recent years, Hong has made four films with a great actress of the nineteen-nineties and two-thousands, Lee Hye-young, and the first of these, in 2021, marked her return to movies after a hiatus of more than a decade.) In a small restaurant in Seoul, Jeongsu does three interviews in quick succession with three young female journalists. Those conversations make up most of the movie’s screen time and provide all of its substance.
Interviews are such a staple of movie publicity that it’s no wonder that most of them come off as arrantly and shamelessly promotional—advertisements dressed up as thoughts. Still, sometimes the formal, professional format of interviews can spur ideas, associations, and confessions that might never have arisen in more casual or familiar settings. So it is in “The Day She Returns.” In the course of Jeongsu’s talks with the three younger reporters, she yields up personal anecdotes and dispenses didactic reflections (“There are too many interpretations in this world,” she says to one interviewer, and tells another, “For the sake of real love, you should do things you don’t like”) that she develops at length. Rather than giving a commentary on her film or attempting to lure audiences to it, Jeongsu generates a kind of independent verbal creation that’s parallel to, but not part of, her acting career. The question, given the teeming imaginative and emotional energy that these interviews unleash, is what Jeongsu herself can make of it, how she can use it. When, as part of her return to the industry, Jeongsu attends an acting class, Hong’s film offers a wickedly teasing answer to that question. His vision of creation is, like Jeongsu’s, unsparing, self-sacrificing, anti-productive—a lofty irony for one of the world’s most prolific directors.
Ira Sachs is in the midst of a great run of films, which his latest, “The Man I Love,” extends, and clarifies, as a trilogy of freedom. His preceding film, the small-scale bio-pic “Peter Hujar’s Day,” ponders the daily struggles of pioneers of freedom and hints at the price they paid. (The movie takes place in New York in 1974, but it’s impossible to forget that Hujar died of AIDS, in 1987.) The film before that, “Passages,” set in present-day Paris, is a tale of a radically free life. “The Man I Love,” set in New York in the late-eighties, is an agonized but inspiring drama of a free death—a story of darkness rising. Rami Malek stars as Jimmy George, a performance artist (or, as he calls himself, a theatre artist), whose work is essentially avant-cabaret. He’s a local hero who hasn’t achieved the fame his talent deserves. He is also H.I.V.-positive and was recently hospitalized and nearly died; so says his partner, Dennis (Tom Sturridge). Jimmy meets a neighbor named Vincent (Luther Ford), and they become sexually involved. Meanwhile, he is working hard to put together a new show. His physical strength and mental acuity are dwindling, but his emotional energy is as strong as ever.
“The Man I Love” is something of a musical. Sachs thrills to the mutual inspiration of theatre people at leisure: the domestic riffing of performers, bouncing songs and jokes to one another as if tossing beach balls, offers moments of immortal joy. Family looms large in the story’s emotional life and its artistic focus, too. Jimmy offers his nephew a video camera and then records a message that morphs into a wild testament of his secret adventures; at his elderly parents’ anniversary party, he sings for them, unleashing a torchy and passionate rendition of “Look What They’ve Done to My Song, Ma” which Sachs films in a long take that’s among the year’s cinematic anthology pieces. (Oddly enough, that 1970 song also turns up in the mega-budget “Digger.”) “The Man I Love” is turbulent and tender, emotionally bruising and vulnerable throughout, its quasi-operatic fervor contrasting poignantly with its physical confines and its clinically inevitable decrescendo. I only wish that this low-budget production had twenty times more funding, so that Sachs could have reconstructed the physical city as mightily as he reconstructs its inner life.
In “What Can’t Be Mentioned,” another offering in the festival’s Currents section, Dan Sallitt, a veteran New York independent filmmaker, takes a view of relationships, personal and professional, that could be defined as mechanical, in the best way. He looks inside the body of social life to consider the engine and see how parts mesh, functions vary, and breakdowns occur. As the title suggests, the new film is a sequel to his 2012 film, “The Unspeakable Act,” which starred Tallie Medel as a seventeen-year-old in the grip of incestuous lust for her older brother Matthew, played by Sky Hirschkron. In “What Can’t Be Mentioned,” the two actors reprise those roles. Now in her thirties, Jackie, who sought therapy in the earlier film, is a therapist herself. She lives with a musician named Anthony (Kyle McCormack)—seemingly happily, except that sex has become a problem. When she learns that Matthew’s partner, Lily (Kit Zauhar), is pregnant, she visits the couple for a week or so. While there, she drinks heavily and, with her inhibitions down, unleashes increasingly pugnacious and intrusive questions about the couple’s life and, in particular, their sex life, together and apart.
Sallitt fills the movie with sharp, epigrammatic, confrontational dialogue that functions as dramatic action. The film presents a keen vision of how language works—not least because language is Jackie’s work. “What Can’t Be Mentioned” is anchored in therapy, showing Jackie’s strategic verbal tussles with clients. As a self-proclaimed Freudian, she prompts them to give voice to what they resist saying, by having them say whatever comes to mind. But the film unfolds a majestic paradox, rooted in those sessions: the closer clients look at their lives, and the more Jackie urges them not only to express their emotions but to examine them, the more abstract the talk gets. Every move closer is also a step back in conceptualization and contextualization. The view becomes more meta still when Jackie, in conference with her supervisor (Strawn Bovee), engages in her own intense self-scrutiny. By the time she’s moved to examine her sex life with Anthony—and to probe her own sexuality—the movie, with its shrewdly posed images of talking bodies, has become as vertiginously abstract as it is recklessly carnal.
“What Can’t Be Mentioned,” which is just over an hour long, is screening with a short film, “Sounds from Home,” by Nathan Silver, whose highly personal films have often featured performances by his mother, Cindy. Title cards explain that, after the 2024 election, the filmmaker and his wife, Nicole Fuentes, moved to Paris; his parents, Cindy and Harvey, who live in upstate New York, began birding, and Cindy sent him audio recordings of their outdoor expeditions. The filmmaker sets Paris street scenes and domestic activities to the soundtrack of his parents’ lively chat: there’s discussion of their impending fiftieth anniversary (which Nathan and Nicole are unable to attend); the political world impinges on the natural one. (“I tell you, we’re living in a police state. White-throated sparrow, tree swallow.”) The connections turn out to be more than coincidental. The movie’s tender melancholy opens the door to the public space and finds menace in odd, off-kilter comedic places. ♦