Despite the arrival of newer and more capacious film
festivals in Gotham and elsewhere since its founding 52 years ago, the New York
Film Festival remains the pre-eminent gateway for foreign films entering the
U.S. market. This year there are some notable omissions from the festival’s
slate of foreign-language titles including Cannes laureates “Winter Sleep” by
Nuri Bilge Ceylan and “Leviathan” by Sergey Zvagintsev, and Berlin Golden Bear
winner “Black Coal, Thin Ice” by Diao Yinan, exclusions which mean there are no
films in the festival from, respectively, Turkey, Russia and China, which adds
to the previously noted impression of a greater Eurocentric focus than in other
years.
Yet the selective nature and relatively small size of the
festival’s main slate means that such omissions are all but inevitable. And of
the foreign films that are included
this year, some arrive without U.S. distributors and thus are likely to be seeable
only on the festival circuit (although a lucky a few sometimes get picked up by
distributors in New York). Others, including the two considered here, will be
headed into American art houses in the coming months.
Coming out of Mia Hansen-Love’s “Eden,” I expressed surprise to a friend that the French film had
acquired U.S. distribution. Not that it is a bad film at all. But at a time
when the box office for foreign-language films continues its steady decline, it
would seem a distributor would need to see something truly exceptional in a
film to take a gamble on it; and while “Eden” is capably made and enjoyable to
watch, I wouldn’t call it an exceptional piece of cinema. My friend replied
that he saw a different logic at work: rather than being given a typical
art-house release, he suggested, “Eden” will have an accompanying soundtrack
and be marketed less as an art film than as a music film.
Two words explain why that might work: Daft Punk. The French
musical duo are now at the height of their international popularity, and they
appear in “Eden,” which dramatizes the emergence of the scene they grew out of
with a story that follows a fictional DJ from his fledgling spins in the early
‘90s through the peaking and collapse of his career more than 15 years later.
Hansen-Love co-wrote the film with her brother Sven, who had such a career
himself and whose collaboration no doubt helps give “Eden” an authenticity that
appears both meticulous and thoroughgoing: the clubs, the music, the fanzines
and radio shows, the patios and fashions all exactingly recreate the Paris of
two decades ago.
For fans into this era of French techno and its assorted
variants, the film surely offers a treasure trove of delights. And indeed it
might be that “Eden” can be considered most successful–even remarkable–as a
kind of semi-documentary about an important but seldom dramatized slice of
pop-music history.
The film’s other great virtue is Hansen-Love’s direction.
While its fluid visual style sometimes recalls “Cold Water” and other films by
her husband, Olivier Assayas, the filmmaker’s confidence and skill are
distinctively her own. She’s one of those directors with an un-showy, unerring
sense of where to place the camera, which here is most notably employed in
large club scenes and which makes the film a constant pleasure visually.
Its weaknesses mainly stem from having a long first part and
short second part, with the former playing as an evocative but sometimes
monotonous and excessively long music-scene chronicle that’s centered on a
surprisingly bland protagonist. Paul (Félix de Givry) seems a nice chap and he
goes through the usual relationship ups-and-downs as his DJ career ascends and
even goes international (there’s a sequence where he comes to New York and DJs
at P.S.1). But aside from a few scenes where Paul and circle are stirred by a
friend’s suicide, the tale’s first part is strikingly unemotional. Among other
missed dramatic opportunities, it doesn’t begin to explore the relationship
between Paul and his DJ partner.
The tale’s second part, though, partly compensates for the
deficits of what has come before. Here it’s as if the film shifts from being a
faux-doc to an actual drama, one that contemplates the point when, in a
person’s mid-30s, the dreams of his teens and early 20s become unsustainable
and a painful change of direction is necessitated. This bittersweet juncture is
beautifully captured and it gives the film an aptly elegiac ending.
With its stellar soundtrack and guest stars that include
Greta Gerwig, Brady Corbet, Golshifteh Farahani and Arsinée Khanjian, “Eden”
has beaucoup de hipness cachet. We’ll see if that’s enough to get young
American moviegoers and music fans past their general aversion to subtitled
films. If so, it will be cause for celebration.
While “Horse Money”
by Portuguese director Pedro Costa will likely be released (by Cinema Guild)
next spring, no one should expect to it compete with whatever foreign
crowd-pleaser the Weinstein Company happens to be promoting at the time. Costa
is a darling of many critics and festivals for reasons that strike me as mostly
dubious: his films feature heavily aestheticized surfaces lacquered over
fashionable political subjects and attitudes. Like the rock band that only you
and 12 other people like, he preaches to a like-minded coterie. Even in the
diminished world of art-house cinema, his commercial prospects can barely be
considered marginal.
In reviewing his sixth feature at Locarno, where it won the
Best Director trophy, The Hollywood Reporter predicted that it “will enrapture
some while leaving others dangling in frustrated limbo.” That’s a pretty good
description of the kind of audience-dividing director Costa is, even in
festival situations. It also handily summarizes my own double-edged reaction to
the film, a mix of rapture and frustration.
The latter begins with the fact that I had little idea what
was going on in it. (This is called “post-narrative” cinema, folks.) Apparently
played by non-actors, mostly blacks who originated in a former Portuguese African
colony, Costa’s characters move and out of dingy factories and hospitals,
talking of things (travel, death) that obviously have more meaning to them than
they did to me. They seem poor, weary, beleaguered, unhappy.
Viewers who know Costa’s past work will understand more
about this film’s intent than newcomers. Like his three previous films, “Horse
Money” takes place in the Lisbon shantytown of Fountainhas, many of whose poor
residents come from Cabo Verde, which gained its independence in the mid’-70s
due to a revolution in Portugal. There are many cryptic references to these
events in the dialogue. The film’s main character is played by an aged black
man named Ventura, who has appeared in previous Costa films.
I have no idea how Costa constructs his scripts, or even if
he uses a script, but it appears that many of the actors are narrating their
own stories, at least in part. This, as well as the people’s faces and
roughhewn settings, gives the film a documentary-like feeling of authenticity
(like the images of New York tenement photographer Jacob Riis that are used as
a prologue), even if their meanings remain blurry to anyone not familiar with
the specific historical and sociopolitical context.
Costa has been accused of obscurantism, and I think there’s
merit to the charge. Yet the power of his imagistic procession is undeniable,
even enrapturing. Somewhere between Rembrandt and “Eraserhead,” dominated by
shades of brown and gray, the film’s pristine HD cinematography (co-credited to
Costa and Leonardo Simoes) conjures a dark night-world of shadows, hulking
forms and sculpted faces that’s as visually alluring as it is psychologically
resonant. Watching it, though my doubts about the story’s opaqueness remained,
I felt myself being swayed into the Costa camp.