September 2024: Fall Film Festivals, Part 1 - Telluride, TIFF, and NYFF
Monthly Roundup Post
Welcome to my monthly round up post. Here you will find all my writing from the previous month, plus a look at everything I watched.
September was packed with three film festivals (Telluride, TIFF, and NYFF), as well as the 50th anniversary celebration of Films By Women/Chicago ‘74 (which is still on going). Along with all the watching, I wrote about 19 films in September, including a long gestating piece about the anti-capitalist themes of a beloved Sandra Bullock film.
Female Filmmakers in Focus: Mika Gustafson and Alexander Öhrstrand on Paradise is Burning
TIFF Dispatch: Bonjour Tristesse, The Fire Inside, The Last Showgirl
A Century Ago, a Forgotten Soviet Film Changed the Face of Sci-Fi: Yakov Protazanov's Aelita: Queen of Mars
“I’m a Star!”: the Letterboxd crew scares up our favorite horror performances: Claude Rains in The Invisible Man
I watched a lot of films in September, both at the various film festivals, but also in rep screenings and at home. Overall, August and September have been the two most rewarding movie-going months of the year so far. For everything I watched — and quick thoughts on most — go over to Letterboxd. Some of these highlights I wrote in depth about during my festival coverage, while others I hope to write more on as they get closer to their non-festival release dates.
I only saw three films from Telluride (all via links), but the best of them was hands down Andres Veiel’s documentary Riefenstahl. Veiel uses archival footage (interviews, TV appearances, etc.) to reexamine history from a new angle in a manner similar to Riotsville, USA from a few years ago. This allows Riefenstahl’s own monstrous words to speak for themselves, while using additional archival material (Nazi logbooks, newspaper articles, photographs, etc.) to add context that proves the veracity of all the acts she participated in, refuting her claims that her legacy has been tarnished by lies. The film also does not deify her filmmaking prowess as if that would absolve her of her horrors.
The first film I saw at TIFF was also probably my favorite. I’m the first to be shocked at how much I loved a new Paul Schrader film but here we are. His film Oh, Canada stars Richard Gere as a documentarian who is telling the “true” story of his life on camera as he is dying. The film uses various filmic techniques to differentiate between the threads of his life and his mind, which often collide or spiral into nothingness. Jacob Elordi is wonderful as the younger version of Gere’s character, who we see through the lens of the older man’s memories. The film reminded me of sitting with my Grampa during his last week and how the brain will fire off all sorts of things during its last moments, and as you witness this process there is no way for you to know what is real and what real even means in the face of someone’s emotional life as they face the great unknown. I hope to write more about this film closer to its release.
I reviewed Matt and Mara out of TIFF, so I recommend reading that to get my full thoughts, but I will say this film really snuck up on me by the end and hit me with a full-fledged emotional wallop.
Another film I wrote about out of the festival was Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl, which features a stellar performance from star Pamela Anderson that reminded me of both my Great Aunt Zay, herself a one-time showgirl, and the great comedienne Judy Holliday.
Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door not only features two towering performances from Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, but it also continues the same kind of focus on reexamining history and politics through the lens of aging and death that he did in Parallel Mothers. If you’ve ever had a conversation with me in person you know I can get a little intense and bring the whole vibe down, and I have not felt as seen for that as I did by John Turturro’s character in this.
The best documentary I saw at TIFF was Hind Meddeb’s Sudan, Remember Us, which knows that sometimes the most powerful tool of resistance is poetry. Meddeb began making her film in spring 2019 as young Sudanese activists in Khartoum celebrated the overthrow of a long dictatorship, then continued to film the brutal aftermath as the military refused a peaceful transfer of power to the people. Throughout the film we meet activists, street poets, and the ordinary people who are fighting for their rights and for their country despite all the violent opposition they face. We also get first hand accounts from those who survived some of the more violent acts perpetrated by the military. This was the North American premiere and it was an incredibly moving experience, in part because several of the audiences members had either lived through the massacre or the coup and shared with the audiences their stories of resistance and community. Truly, this film is a blessing.
I also wrote about Georgia filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili’s second feature April, but what I didn’t share in that piece was the way this film truly broke some of the audience members. It’s very graphic in its depiction of women’s health treatment, including a long take of an abortion and a bloody birthing scene that ends in death, and one man in particular could not handle it. Every time the film got too graphic he pulled out his phone to stare at his little screen rather than face the reality on the big one.
There is a lot to say about Halina Reijn’s Babygirl, but what I’ll say now is that real ones have known Harris Dickinson was one of the best and most daring actors of his generation since Beach Rats back in 2017. I hope Nicole Kidman is duly lauded for her performance here, in which she plays this character like a woman on a tightrope carrying a full porcelain tea service trying not to spill a single drop of tea, let alone break the fragile dishes. This is a film that knows that desire is messy, monogamy is complicated, love is not necessarily tied to sex, and sometimes women just need to get some satisfaction.
One of my fave discoveries from TIFF was Vietnamese director Linh Duong’s Don’t Cry, Butterfly. An incredible new voice has a emerged with this film. It’s a funny, sad, deeply weird, and incredibly insightful look at how silence in the face of patriarchy is crushing us all. I can’t wait for more people to discover this gem.
Similar to the new Schrader, David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds had a muted response at Cannes, but I loved it. Cronenberg came out after the screening for a brief Q&A where he said he made the film in order to explore his own singular grief after losing his wife of 43 years. He said he couldn’t relate to those who said they’d recently lost a parent because “you don’t make love to your dad.” Grief is universal in that we all experience it at some point, but it’s also a personal, lonely experience because we all have a different relationship to whoever it is we are grieving. The tepid reception to both this and Oh, Canada is truly head scratching. Both films are wife guy auteurs dealing with their grief and what it’s like to be with someone who is dying in ways that are very unique to their own cinematic obsessions and styles, in conversation with their life and their art.
Another discovery for me at TIFF was Sketch, a film I originally did not have on my radar but ended up reviewing after I had switch out a film I had been assigned to another writer. And I am so glad that happened, because, like I wrote in my capsule review, this film is a little miracle. The film stars Tony Hale as a widower who is struggling to parent his kids amongst their shared grief. His daughter’s dark drawings raise concerns at the school and his son is always trying to fix things, while pushing his own complicated feelings deep down into himself. Things go awry when the kids discover a magical pool of water that can fix anything and also bring things to life — including her monstrous drawings. The film feels wholly original and just a little bit frightening, the way kids’ drawings and imaginations can be.
Another film that got dismissed out of Cannes was Andrea Arnold’s Bird and again I really do not understand why. She's discovered another unique screen talent in Nykiya Adams, who stars as a girl on the brink of adolescence who lives in a squat with her dad (Barry Keoghan) and her older brother. The film takes flight when she befriends a mysterious man (Franz Rogowski) who has returned to the neighborhood seeking his parents he never really knew. Keoghan is so good at bringing unexpected layers to a character that could so easily be a cliche, while Rogowski continues to be the heir apparent to Ben Whishaw's style of incredibly raw, empathetic sad boys (complementary). The film covers similar themes to all of Arnold’s work, but for me it’s her boldest swing yet and I loved every minute of it.
I’m not going to lie, I only saw the Leos Carax documentary C’est pas moi (It’s Not Me) at NYFF so I could ensure I had a seat for the next screening. I haven’t been a fan of Carax in the past, but damn I loved this film. Any film that attempts to re-create cat vision in one sequence and then examines the power of silent film grammar in the next is most definitely my shit. It’s a very theory heavy film, asking you to reconsider everything you think you know about film as a language, but does so in such a fun and engaging way that I can’t imagine not having fun with it. Really, my only complaint is that at 45 minutes it felt too short. I want more!
The next film was Pablo Larraín’s Maria, which stars Angelina Jolie as Maria Callas during her final week in Paris before her death at the age of 53. While it is touted as the third film is his unofficial trilogy of iconic women (along with Jackie and Spencer), it might actually have more in common with his Neruda, his imaginative biopic of poet-politician Pablo Neruda. I have been a huge fan of Jolie for the past twenty-five years and it is just so thrilling to see her back at the top of her game (By The Sea hive, where you at??) with a role worthy of her talent. She’s playful and wistful and wily and larger-than-life and for most of the film I just felt blessed to witness her at work. I also hope this film give Fernet Branca its moment.
There is just too much to say about the immensity of RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys, so I will just say it will be a true crime if Jomo Fray misses out on the cinematography Oscar two years in a row (he also lensed the best film from last year, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt), because he is truly the most exciting and innovative DP working right now. I recommend reading Robert’s review of the film because I think he does the best job really examining how the film’s first-person POV is not a gimmick, but rather a breaking with filmic form in order to craft a new cinematic syntax, while also placing emotions, sometimes uncomfortable ones, at the forefront of the experience.
Lastly, I finally got to see Mati Diop’s documentary Dahomey, which won the Golden Bear at Berlin back in February. Another film that uses perspective in a unique and engaging way, decolonizing the cinematic language in much the same way the returning of looted artifacts to Benin is a step toward decolonizing history.
Like August, September was a great month for rep film-going. These were the highlights:
Any chance I get to see The Piano on the big screen, especially in 35mm, I will take, so it was great to see the film at the Music Box Theatre a few weeks ago programmed as part of the Chicago International Film Festival’s pre-celebrations leading up to the 60th edition of the festival. Every time I see Campion’s film I feel absolutely feral for days afterwards and I cannot recommend it enough.
A few weeks ago I wrote about the 50th anniversary celebration of Films By Women/Chicago ‘74 and I am so glad I was able to a attend a few of the screenings before I headed off to NYFF. This included one of my favorite Agnès Varda film, Lions, Love (. . .and Lies) which is a much more political film than it is given credit for. It’s a satirical comedy starring Warhol factory star Viva and James Rado and Gerome Ragni, the creators of Hair, as well as Shirley Clarke as a fictional version of herself (mixed with a bit of Varda). Although it appears that their dialogue is all improvised, that is in fact not the case. The whole film is scripted by Varda, who constrasts the vernacular of the Factory style films and hippie culture with the bleak political times (Varda sets the film during the week that RFK was assassinated and Andy Warhol was shot), and adds a sprinkling of criticism of the Hollywood machine on top. In short, thematically it’s everything I love. This was followed by a screening of Joyce Wieland’s experimental film Rat Life and Diet in North America, which critiques both hippies and the military industrial complex at the same time, and Sambizanga, Sarah Maldoror’s anti-colonial masterwork, which is set in the days leading up to the Angolan War of Independence. It’s one of the great film about the need for class solidarity and the power of resistance in all forms. Yamina Price’s piece on the film is a must read. The next night they screened Mireille Dansereau’s La vie rêvée (Dream Life), which was the film the inspired the creation of the festival in the first place. It is a truly wonderful celebration of the creativity of women, but also a damnation of the way images — particularly advertising — sells falsehoods, making women feel bad about every aspect of themselves, while placing the virility of men on an alter. It’s as powerful a film now as it was fifty years ago.
NYFF also had some great revivals and restorations programmed. I was only able to catch a few, but I am so glad I got to see the new Janus restoration of Zeinabu irene Davis’s Compensation, which takes its name from the Paul Laurence Dunbar poem of the same name. The film stars Michelle A. Banks as deaf women living in Chicago in both the 1900s and the 1990s. Their relationship to a hearing man (John Earl Jelks, who is also great in the up-coming film Exhibiting Forgivness) is compared and contrasted in the two timelines. Davis also uses archival material to illustrate the great migration of African Americans from the South into Chicago, transforming the city to the one we know today. The new 4k restoration is gorgeous, with incredible updated sound design and new descriptive captions that bring a whole new life to the world she has created. The restoration will be screening here in Chicago on October 27th with Davis in attendance, and should be playing more theaters soon. I also believe a Criterion disc will be released in the not-too-distant future. I can’t wait for people to finally rediscover this gem. They also screened a short film from Chantal Akerman called I’m Hungry, I’m Cold, which uses humor to satirize the romanticization of runaways, heterosexual adolescence, and Parisian culture. It’s fantastic.
P.S. - Don’t forget every week on Friday afternoons paid subscribers get my Directed By Women Viewing Guide, with picks for new releases and streaming hidden gems.
The Shrouds is so high on my watchlist! I'm so glad you liked it
Having seen and loved both Rez Ball and The Deb, I'm glad to see you were really onboard with them too.