NYFF ’09: Broken Embraces

It seems a renaissance of sorts is underway for Pedro Almodóvar’s breakout film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Rumor has it a book musical adaptation is on the fast-track to Broadway. Almodóvar also resurrects Verge as the recognizable film within his new film, the noirish drama Broken Embraces (trailer here), which closes the 2009 New York Film Festival tomorrow night.

Harry Caine could easily be a character in a Cornell Woolrich novel. That is because Harry Caine does not really exist. He was once the famous director Mateo Blanco, who wrote scripts under the Caine pseudonym. When a traumatic accident led to his blindness, Blanco the director essentially died, with Caine the screenwriter assuming his place.

Caine might be blind, but he still has an eye for women and though he can no longer direct, he still has an appreciation for cinema, frequently listening to art-house classics with Diego, the son of his agent Judit Garcia. Not one to dwell on the past, Caine rebuffs the interview requests of Ray X, an aspiring documentarian and the son of an old acquaintance. However, as Caine finds himself nursing Diego back to health following an incident with a laced drink, he starts to open up to younger man, telling his story in flashback form.

Mateo Blanco was the writer and director of Girls and Suitcases. It starred Lena Rivero, the mistress of industrialist Ernesto Martel, who financed the picture. Garcia, who had once had a fling with Blanco, was his trusted production manager. Basically, it was a classic film noir situation, virtually guaranteed to breed jealousy and betrayal.

Not coincidentally, Suitcases bears a strong resemblance to Verge, except it is awful, deliberately assembled with Blanco’s worst takes by a vengeful Martel. It is an oddly amusing exercise in self-referential gamesmanship, but only one of many cinematic pastiches in Broken. Rodrigo Prieto’s ominously gauzy cinematography is arguably more reminiscent of Hitchcock’s color films of the 1950’s and 1960’s then 1940’s noir.

Almodóvar also frequently nods to the post-war Italian neo-realists, like Rossellini, whose Viaggio in Italia moves the furtive lovers to tears as they watch it in each others arms. In fact, Broken’s key art appears to be modeled after the classic posters of post-war Italian cinema.

Though Broken often has a noir vibe, whenever the film approaches genuine film noir territory, Almodóvar deliberately pulls back, undercutting the thriller aspects. Aside from a few key scenes, the violence of Broken is emotional rather than physical in nature. Yet, it is suffused with a strange romanticism for cinema. Indeed, the moving image, be it classic films or videotape of his fateful accident, may well be more powerful than real life for Caine—a constant and enduring force inexorably shaping his life.

Unlike the dramatically extroverted Verge, Broken is a more self-consciously intellectual film. Yet, Lluis Homar is quite riveting as Caine/Blanco, finding intriguing nuances throughout each stage of his character’s development. In a sense, Penelope Cruz is also perfectly cast as Lena, an austere beauty who remains something of a cipher throughout the film.

Broken is a dark, lush love-letter to cinema. While it might come across as a bit cold in comparison to some of Almodóvar’s more hot-blooded films, it is ultimately a very satisfying twist on the portrait-of-the-filmmaker-as-a-suffering-artist subgenre of art film. It closes this year’s NYFF on Sunday (10/11).

NYFF ’09: White Ribbon

It is 1914 and Archduke Franz Ferdinand is still alive. Yet these cannot be described as days of innocence for one rural town in northern Germany. A rash of disturbing incidents will mar the community’s deceptive tranquility, well before the intervention of great historical events. Of course, far worse atrocities will be committed in Germany in the years to come when the pre-WWI-era children begin to assert themselves in German society. Austrian director Michael Haneke submits that generation of Germans to a rough session of forensic psychoanalysis in his Palme D’Or winning film The White Ribbon (trailer here), which screens this Wednesday at the 2009 New York Film Festival.

The kids are most definitely not alright in Ribbon, but their parents and authority figures are little better. Random acts of cruelty, often targeting children, have been committed by a person or persons unknown. First, the town doctor is seriously injured when his horse stumbles on a trip-wire, leaving the hamlet without his services for succeeding tragedies. Next, a woman dies in the Baron’s barn, perhaps as a result of mere negligence. Then the Baron’s son is briefly abducted and severely beaten. Yet the townspeople will soon see even worse crimes.

The local schoolteacher starts to form certain suspicions about the culprits, which Haneke unsubtly foreshadows throughout the film. However, Ribbon is less concerned with legalistic questions of guilt than the shocking lack of empathy of the villagers, both young and old, creating the environment that gave rise to the strange crimes.

Naturally, Haneke fingers the usually suspects, like the village pastor’s distinctly Calvinistic version of Christianity and Germany’s severely regimented approach to education. However, there are also elements of class resentment at work, as well. The Baron is deeply unpopular within the village and his son, a true child of privilege, is an early victim. It seems like the final remnants of feudalism are breaking down in Ribbon, leaving a vacuum of authority, which of course will eventually be filled by the National Socialists.

Haneke, the director of Funny Games, hardly set out to make another horror film. Still, the gothic atmosphere created by Christian Berger’s black-and-white cinematography is quite eerie. In fact, Ribbon is far creepier than The Village, M. Night Shyamalan’s tiresome tale of township suspense. However, the most unsettling aspect of Ribbon is the casual cruelty it depicts through some truly cutting dialogue.

Ribbon is more of a work of directorial bravura than an actors’ showcase. Still, Christian Friedel and Leonie Benesch bring welcome sensitivity to the film as the well-intentioned but ineffectual schoolteacher and his innocent young romantic interest, respectively.

Haneke takes a grim, unforgiving look at human nature, finding it distinctly brutal and malevolent in Ribbon. While he would likely argue his vision of humanity applies universally, Ribbon is seems particularly Teutonic in its austerity and chilly reserve. In spite of its predictably caricatured portrayal of religion, it is a well executed film that successfully provokes uneasy questions about man’s fundamental nature. It screens this Wednesday (10/7) and Thursday (10/8) as an official selection of the 2009 NYFF.

NYFF ’09: Wild Grass

Georges Palet is a name of infamy. Or so he claims, but Palet is not a trustworthy character. Parsing fact from Palet’s fabulations is a tricky business, as is establishing any sense of truth at all in Alain Resnais’s Wild Grass, the opening night film of the 2009 New York Film Festival.

Palet might be a scandalous figure with a checkered, perhaps even criminal past. Yet evidently nobody besides Palet seems to see him in that light, except maybe his twenty-something son. Of course, that might just be the surliness of youth. Still, for Palet it appears to be reality, which is why the chance discovery of a stolen wallet causes him great anxiety.

While debating his next step, Palet studies the contents of the wallet, developing a strange fixation on the owner, Dr. Marguerite Muir, a dentist with her pilot’s license. With some trepidation, Palet turns the wallet over to the police, who do not appear particularly impressed that he is the Georges Palet (but they are somewhat distracted at the time). Eventually, Muir calls Palet to thank him, but when she fails to live up to his expectations, Palet tells her so, repeatedly. Suddenly, Palet starts exhibiting stalker-like behavior, repeating what he calls past mistakes. And then Resnais gives the film a series of dramatic twists.

Grass will certainly be among the most talked about films of the festival. It could well rank alongside Hiroshima Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad in terms of significance within his filmography, and will be impossible for anyone seriously studying his work to ignore. What begins as a meditation on the randomness of life becomes an object lesson in the slipperiness of truth. However, Resnais’s approach to the story (based on a novel by Christian Gailly) is largely linear and completely accessible.

Regardless of viewers’ response to Resnais’s sly gamesmanship, Grass is an absolutely masterful piece of filmmaking. Like a magician, Resnais essentially tells the audience what he will do, then through misdirection and sleight of hand, leaves us stunned when the film ends where he hinted it would. With a jarringly eccentric conclusion sure to baffle many, Resnais flat out tells the audience we just got served.

Unlike most postmodern films attempting to undermine narrative structures and problematize notions of reality, Grass is a richly crafted film. Resnais stylishly superimposes dramatically rendered fantasies and seamlessly integrates Palet’s wildly unreliable interior monologues. Eric Gautier’s cinematography is sumptuously moody, with the crime jazz-influenced soundtrack composed by Mark Snow (best known for his work on the X-Files) further heightening the noir atmosphere.

Like Resnais, Andre Dussollier also keeps the audience utterly off balance with his performance as the quite possibly unbalanced Palet. While maintaining complete consistency of character, Dussollier makes it impossible to judge if he is sympathetic, deluded, dangerous, or a bizarre combination of the three. Grass notably also reunites three members of the cast of Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale, including Mathieu Almaric, who shows a real comedic flair as police officer Bernard de Bordeaux.

Those who get headaches when they hear terms like “playful postmodern subversion” will probably get exasperated with Grass. Those who enjoy coy cinematic puzzles will be thoroughly charmed. It is a very stylish film that enjoys its deceptions for their own sake. The NYFF continues through October 11th, with Main Slate selections screening at Alice Tully Hall.