Perceived Realities, Suppressed Souls - The New York Film Festival

by Therese Schwartz

For the 1999 Festival, I wrote about some of the films for this publication. I explained that although I have no credentials as a film maven, I have been going to the movies since I was five years old and cinema has been an important influence in my painting. More than half of the ten films I chose last year made it to the big circuit immediately after the festival. One of them won the Critics' Prize, and all were eventually picked up by other distributors. Flushed with these small triumphs, I am writing about those I have just seen. More will follow as they are screened for the press.

Poster image courtesy New York Film Festival.

Twenty-five feature films were shown in this Festival and, for the first time, ten were by Asian filmmakers. Others were from Russia, the UK, Japan, France, Sweden, Iran, Israel, Brazil and the United States.

In The House of Mirth, Scottish director Terence Davies uses the narrative skeleton of Edith Wharton's novel for his Festival debut. The details of the plot are followed, but the cool, detached voice of the novelist is absent. I agree that it is a filmmaker's prerogative to take anything he can use, but here I wish he had let Wharton rest in peace.

The story is set in early 20th Century New York society - affluent, nervously snobbish and, by European standards, just nouveau riche. Lily Bart, the central character (played by Gillian Anderson of The X Files), is beautiful, gorgeously dressed, much admired, but also an orphan girl living on the temperamental kindness of a rich old aunt. Lily knows that her future depends on making a brilliant marriage, but there are contradictions because she also has a restless and passionate nature. She is attracted to Lawrence Seldon, a young lawyer with no fortune, and he is in love with her. There is just one almost sexy scene between them, which takes place in the garden of a country house, but it is only a long kiss and a passionate clutch.

Of course, both Lily and Seldon know that there will never be a marriage and from there on he remains a bystander while she pursues the hunt. When a likely match appears, her confusion takes over and she retreats. As the plot unwinds, Lily, ever dependent on her looks and charm, is exploited by a so-called friend, a wealthy married woman who uses Lily as a screen to hide her extramarital frolic with a handsome playboy. Things go wrong, and from there all goes downhill. What follows is exclusion from the in-crowd and, finally, poverty, solitude and suicide.

At first the film describes the society of its setting, and there is generous coverage of the extravagance, the ostentation and the shallow pastimes of idle women and blustering men. Then the action descends to a kind of study of Lily as an Every Woman of the time - victimized, but also scheming; occasionally noble, but not capable of much straight thinking.

Wharton pictured the life and fall of an undereducated, intelligent but naive woman of a particular class whose highest aspiration was to marry money. The novel made it clear that choices did exist for Lily: it was her lack of self-knowledge that made her so dominated by greed and so unwilling to face her own emotional nature. But this film finally resembles a 50's "woman's movie," replete with helpless tears and sexist persecution. It could have been a cool look at the time - at the social conventions that allowed some women to see themselves as ornaments for sale, and some men to take advantage of the transaction.

France:

In The Comedy of Innocence, a film in French directed by Raul Ruiz, Camille, a nine-year-old boy in an ordinary family, drops out of reality and thinks he has another mother and a different name. With extraordinary patience, his mother (played by Isabelle Huppert) tries to discover what ails the kid. He leads her across the city to the apartment of this other mother - a woman whose child would have been the same age as Camille, but had died two years ago.

Nils Hugon (Camille) in The Comedy of Innocence, directed by Paul Ruiz.
Photo courtesy New York Film Festival.

Until the end of the film, everyone lives in a Surrealist world of mysterious elements and hidden forces lurking in unexpected places. There is no obvious explanation. But in a movie a solution is expected, and here one is given, though it falls flat. The boy and the would-be mother have met in a park where he plays every day. Although he is in the care of a nanny, she occasionally leaves him for short intervals during which the fake mother brainwashes the boy. A happy ending, which seems as unlikely as the rest of the story, is attached.

Hong Kong:

In the Mood for Love, made in Hong Kong and spoken in Cantonese and Shanghainese, is different in style and substance from any other film in the Festival. The story line is open and easy, but it is encased in a setting as minimally elegant as a perfect Oriental painting. Every aspect has been carefully designed: the color is subdued but haunting, the actors move as lightly as though in a ballet and periodically the action changes from real to choreographed.

The story is about two young people living in adjacent apartments who know that their absent spouses are having affairs. They flirt with the idea of having one of their own but it never happens. They talk and eat together, the sexual tension heavy but never acknowledged. They conduct themselves as just friends even though the woman is beautiful and lonely, the man handsome, virile and needy. The delicate action plays around the unspoken words, the expressive eyes and the self-imposed restraint, but the emotion comes through and it is crushing. The director Wong Kar-wai departs from the usual contemporary style of not omitting anything, so even the simplest viewer can understand. Here, no obstacles blocked the way of the director - he also wrote the screenplay and was the producer.

Sweden:

The Swedish entry, Faithless was directed by Liv Ullmann and it holds the same uncompromising clarity that distinguished her as an actress. The structure of the film, written by Ingmar Bergman, is deceptively simple - it has sparse settings, few characters, and minimal dialogue. The multiple layers of the story are peeled away slowly - a marriage is taken apart and the revelations are overwhelming. Marianne is an actress married to Markus, an international concert pianist. They have a little girl named Isabelle. The best friend is David, an erratic playwright.

Marianne seems content, but the husband is often away on long tours, and during one Marianne and David begin an affair which is at first just playful and affectionate. It turns more intense when David becomes jealous, angry, possessive and unable to work.

Faithless screenwriter Ingmar Bergman. Photo courtesy Samuel Goldman Films / IDP Distribution.	Director Liv Ullmann and Lena Endre (Marianne) from Faithless. Photo courtesy Samual Goldman Films / IDP Distribution.

It is soon obvious that the marriage is flawed, that the principals are driven by more than love or sex, and that there will be no perfect solution. David becomes more unstable, Marianne is both drawn to him and frightened, and Lena Endre's (Marianne's) face expresses this perfectly without words or gestures.

On discovering the affair, the musician husband says he encouraged it, yet he goes into a crazy fury anyway, becoming vindictive and initiating a fight for full custody of Isabelle. He is obviously out of his mind and, in a frightful scene, suggests that Isabelle join him in suicide. The bewildered child runs away and he does it alone.

Now everything has been exposed, the movie ends quietly, and the after effect is shattering.

Iran:

For the past twenty years, the Post Revolutionary Censor Board of Iran has not allowed Bahman Farmanara to make his own films. In desperation, he accepted a commission from Japanese TV to make a documentary about funeral rites. The film seen here, Smell of Camphor, Fragrance of Jasmine, is the result, and it gradually becomes a story about his own death and funeral. In this semi-autobiography, he reveals both his fear of death and also his finicky concern that all the funeral ceremonies be conducted according to his taste.

Firuz Behjat Mohamadi as a memorial sign renter, and director Bahman Farmanara as
Bahman Farjami, in Smell of Camphor, Fragrance of Jasmine.
Photo courtesy Lincoln Center Film Festival.

There is a bizarre mingling of humor and dread as Farmanara actually imagines his own demise. In spite of the censors, this film draws back the iron curtain and tells something about the state of Iran today. The atmosphere of fear, suspicion, danger, and depression is real with just the smallest hint that the filmmaker may be producing subversive propaganda.

About the Author:

For a glimpse into Therese Schwartz's life as a writer about art, refer to Newsletter issues 1 through 4, in which her serialized essay, The Year that Was: Marching toward the Millennium, appears. She reviewed the 2000 Whitney Biennial in Newsletter Issues 12 and 13 and wrote about selections from last year's New York Film Festival in issue 7. AMC

 

 

 

 

 

Resources:

The website for the 38th New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center is at http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff/nyff.h tm

For a detailed list of all the movies screened, including brief descriptions, use this link: http://www.filmlinc.com/ny ff/nyfffilms2000.htm