45th New York Film Festival

Abstract

New York City, September 28-October 14, 2007 The 45th New York Film Festival had a strong selection from illustrious directors: Sidney Lumet, Bela Tarr, Alexander Sokurov, Catherine Breillat, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, Brian De Palma, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Jia Zhangke, John Landis, Wes Anderson, Todd Haynes, Gus Van Sant, and the Cohens, among many others, all showed new work. Dominant themes were faith, women and dead children, comedy, adaptations, and father/son Oedipal fears. The last seamed the work of the older directors-especially Lumet, Chabrol, and Rohmer, now in their seventies and eighties-but it appeared in younger directors' films too-notably that of the Cohens. Their No Country for Old Men was by far the strongest entry, and its first hour was a state-of-the-art blood-and-guts chase story, a perfect killing machine called cinema. The film later dissipated into sophistic, what-is-life-about philosophy-ridden dialogue that carried a new kind of Oedipal subplot. The older man (here Tommy Lee Jones as the baffled sheriff) survived the deadly son (here the Terminator-like killer, Javier Bardem) but, then, forlornly longed for a mythic father's comfort. This narrative-of implacable death and worn-out, nostalgic older men-became a suspicious metaphor for the Iraq war vs. World War II. The Cohens shouldn't waste their art on parables when what we need from them is a direct Iraq war hit. War itself was little addressed except in the settings of Sokurov's almost fablelike, spare Alexandra, set in a Chechnyan desert army camp, and De Palma's unfortunate Iraq film, Redacted, the first war feature from a well-known U.S. director. His fictionalized version of a well-publicized, real rape and killing, structured as clips of videos, international TV reports, and Internet sites, is a morass of the worst army-platoon-gone-crazy cliches. No contribution to the antiwar effort, it trivializes the war as simply a place where psychopathology is acted out. A few films were notable for their directors' pursuit of originality. Todd Haynes, one of American cinema's most interesting talents, lost the mark in his ambitious and ironic attempt at a biographic kaleidoscope of Bob Dylan's life, I'm Not There. Haynes states that we shouldn't be trying to find out who we (which he sees as the philosophy of the last few decades), but rather we should be reinventing ourselves, and he conceptualizes Dylan as the ultimate self-reinventor. The film is a collage of the supposed Dylan inventions-as husband, as cultural icon, as Billy the Kid, as a black runaway child, as folk singer-played by six actors, including an excellent Cate Blanchett. But none of the versions can carry this grand scheme. The film has no center. Haynes's rendition of Dylan's 1960s and 1970s are only gimmicky and, more, he promotes the ingrained prejudices of those eras as the film borders on racism and sexism. I think Haynes's best work is to come and will be in his take on contemporary reinvention, something far truer to his generation than to Dylan's. …