Bad Hair

An impressive, tough film by Mariana Rondón, Bad Hair tells the story of Junior, a little gay boy who is obsessed with straightening his beautiful black curls. Rondón does not go into the complicated cultural/racial implications of Junior's dissatisfaction with his curls. She lets the story shed light into these nuances with no editorializing. Of the few Venezuelan films I've seen, this is the only one that is world class, and it is certainly the best. It is well written, well directed, well edited and it has an impressive sound design. The writer/director, the cinematographer, editor and sound designer all happen to be women, which is rare anywhere in cinema. Well done.
A sort of Dardenne brothers' film set in Caracas, Bad Hair is a small, terse movie that manages to tell a rich story without melodrama, exposition or sentimentality, and with a solid sense of craft.
Rondón touches upon many issues of Venezuelan reality just by letting us witness the daily life of Junior and Marta, his beleaguered mother: we learn about the violence that claimed his dad, we see in detail, the poverty from which Marta is trying hard to extricate herself, and we are dropped into a world punished with the sexual mores of unrestrained machismo, like rampant homophobia and an extreme preoccupation with the female body and beauty contests. No other country is more obsessed with, or, I believe, has had more Miss Universe winners than Venezuela.
Marta is a widow, left alone with Junior and a baby (and a fantastic mother in law, who is as mischievous as Marta is dour). But the twist is that Marta, unlike many long-suffering mothers in Latino culture, is a tough, hardened piece of work. The twist is that she rejects her child because he is gay (usually the dad is the uncomprehending dolt, but he is absent here). This is quite daring. Marta makes terrible sacrifices out of a sharp sense of reality, not because she is a saint.
She lost her job as a security guard and is trying to get it back. She and the kids live in a project-like high rise, and she struggles to make ends meet. Just the day to day hassle of scrambling to pay the neighbor to take care of the baby, of not having money to pay for Junior's school photo, of looking for a job and being treated with contempt is a sustained look into a difficult life.
The film shows a reality that Chavismo has not been able to improve for most Venezuelans. Kids play violent games, using foul language alarmingly unsuited to their age, as they listen without flinching to nearby gunfire in the middle of the day. Marta asks for a job and is told she will get minimum wage and no benefits. For all the grandstanding of the Chavista regime, her life, and that of the equally run down neighbors, doesn't seem to get much better. Rondón is smart, however, about not getting into ideological territory: she shows things as they are and lets the viewers reach their own conclusions.
Marta thinks something is wrong with Junior and takes him to the doctor at a public clinic (this is one of the improvements on the lives of the poor by the regime). But she doesn't even know how to talk to the doctor about Junior's sexuality. And the overtaxed, well meaning doctor is no better. His advice to her is to get a man in the home so he can be a role model for the boy. He also tells her to stop bringing her healthy children to the overburdened clinic. In just one scene, we get a lot of information about the reality of the culture and the country. The film is full of such telling moments.
It's one tough film that which shows a mother repulsed by her own child. And Marta is a deeply flawed mother. She is hostile to Junior, and because she is uneducated and prejudiced, is way out of her element trying to bring him up. But within her harshness, she tries her best.  I expected a little more tenderness from the film, a respite from the harshness, but Rondón's sticks to her guns. Life is tough and in such a culture, poor Junior has his work cut out for him. The more clear eyed he is about how hard life is if you are different, the more chances he will have to survive.
This movie would be almost unbearable if it wasn't for a vein of very dry humor and the sharp, sympathetic observation of some funny and bizarre goings on, such as the weight loss meditation seances at a neighbor's house or the endearing, brittle friendship between Junior and his best friend, a charismatic, chubby little girl who dreams of being a beauty queen. I wish that Rondón was a little kinder with Junior, that Marta could reach a softer place in her stony heart, that people in this film would temper their obtuseness, but I respect Rondón's uncompromising vision of reality and I look forward to more good movies from her.

La Camioneta

A very poignant, surprising documentary by Mark Kendall, this film focuses on a unique journey. Who knew that many used American school buses, most of them in perfect shape, are auctioned relatively cheaply? Enterprising people from Guatemala and some countries in Africa buy them to provide privatized public transportation in their countries. What is promptly discarded in the US after a few years of use in pristine, uneventful roads, is transformed into a crowded haven for people who can't afford to have their own transportation in less fortunate countries.
La Camioneta begins at such an auction in Pennsylvania, and follows the journey of a handsome yellow school bus and his driver through the treacherous Mexican border, where there are always shakedowns by the authorities, to a village in Guatemala. There, the bus is sold quite expensively to an enterprising dreamer, who has always wanted to drive his own bus. The bus is repainted in lovely colors and shapes by a humble and gifted artist, and blessed by a Catholic priest, so it will be safe from extortion and violence from organized crime, which runs rampant in Guatemala, a very poor country with high levels of crime.
The drivers and their families fear for their safety. A TV report mentions that 130 of them have been killed by the mob. But this is what they do and what they love to do, and there are barely other jobs to choose from.
The entrepreneurial spirit is not exclusive to Americans. Trying to eke out a living in a beautiful, albeit impoverished, unsafe, corrupt, uneducated country, is not enough for men of dignity. They don't have most of the advantages of educated, economically stable people, but they have the same drive to succeed. Many leave and come to the US, and others like them stay behind. They all risk their lives to do better.
Through this journey we get a look at the economic and social disparities, and the resulting symbiosis, (which so many Americans are hell-bent on denying) between the US and countries like Guatemala.
By the end of the paint job, which is made by stenciling, using newspaper and masking tape, one roots and fears for the newly colorful bus and the sweet, resilient people that will make it their transport as they work and fight for a better life.

NYFF 2012: The Ones That Got Away

Yesterday was my last day at the 50th New York Film Festival and I was invigorated and not at all tired after 22 movies, perhaps because I saw mostly extraordinary films.
But, as is to be expected, there were some clunkers, all of which my instincts had correctly warned me against. There were no truly offensive movies, but the three French movies I saw (not counting Amour) were very disappointing.
Camille Rewinds by Noemie Lvovsky is a French remake of Peggy Sue Got Married that does not improve on the original. It is rambling and not very disciplined, although it has some funny moments.
About my violent impatience with You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet, the latest outing by Alain Resnais, you can read here. It was the worst movie I saw in the festival.
Also disappointing was Olivier Assayas' Something In The Air, an autobiographical account of his radical high school days. Assayas is an energetic, exciting filmmaker, as he amply demonstrated with Carlos, but here he chooses to use sulking non-actors for the main roles and all the energy he puts into the staging, his untalented cast saps from the film, making it extremely tedious. They look the part of French students in the seventies but they are morose, and unintelligible young people without personalities. It's hard to care for their conundrums. Assayas has a great sense of atmosphere and has much to criticize of idiotic student politics, drug use and bad French taste in pop music. As in Carlos, a vastly superior film, he continues coldly skewering dogmatic ideologues with his refreshing lack of patience for antiquated leftist clichés. I'm glad I stayed until the end because the best scene in the film comes late in the movie and involves the shoot of a movie starring Nazis, a prehistoric bimbo and a dinosaur. But it takes Assayas way too long to get to the point; namely, that art and creativity and even working on the cheesiest film on Earth are a better, more genuine calling than being an aimless young French bourgeois toying with ideas of revolution.
Sally Potter, whose films I have never liked, did not disappoint with Ginger and Rosa, which is pretty bad. The only reason I bought tickets was the cast, which promised the great Timothy Spall, Annette Bening, and Oliver Platt, only to waste them in puny roles. The main roles are mostly miscast, with a truly awful Christina Hendricks playing Ginger's mom, Alessandro Nivola, misdirected, playing her dad and a good, lovely Elle Fanning playing Ginger. Why Potter couldn't find actual British actors to play these roles is beyond me, but you could feel the strain in the actors grappling with the accents (with Fanning faring best of all). The movie is an obvious and labored melodrama with artistic pretentions, whose beautiful cinematography reminds one of expensive TV commercials. Potter lets her actors flounder, can't direct her way out of a paper bag, can't stage a scene for the life of her, her scenes are mostly vignettes that end nowhere, and her thesis about a British teenager coming of age in the sixties while obsessed with nuclear annihilation is obvious and strained. The festival's organizers don't do Potter any favors by including such a mediocre, bumbling film amongst such quality company. There were first films by directors from Mexico, China and Israel that showed much more discipline and rigor than this half-baked exercise in melodrama. Ginger and Rosa is like a Mexican soap with fake British accents. Dreadful.
The Dead Man and Being Happy, an Argentinian film by Spanish filmmaker Javier Rebollo, is an interesting concept marred by way too much cleverness. It's a road movie starring an old hit man and a younger woman, who drive around Argentina as he waits to die from three inoperable tumors. There is fun observation of some of Argentina's most endearing quirks, like sheltering Nazis and being always on the verge of development or disaster, usually both at once, but it's all marred by a really annoying, mostly unfunny and unnecessary voiceover narration that aims for drollness but is redundant and pretentious. Still, there is something oddly appealing about the adventure, even if it is contrived. I guess it's the travelogue aspect of it. Nothing that Lucrecia Martel hasn't done a million times better.
Here are our favorite NYFF films top down:

Extraordinary
Amour Michael Haneke
Caesar Must Die!  Paolo and Vittorio Taviani
Like Someone in Love Abbas Kiarostami
Beyond The Hills Christian Mungiu
The Gatekeepers Dror Moreh

Excellent
Barbara Christian Petzold
Tabu Miguel Gomez
Fill The Void Rama Burshtein

Very Good
Frances Ha  Noah Baumbach
Our Children Joachim Lafosse
No Pablo Larrain

Good
Final Cut Gyorgy Palfi
Here and There Antonio Méndez Esparza
Memories, Look at Me Song Fang
Bwakaw Jun Robles Lana

Disappointing
Something in The Air Olivier Assayas
Camille Rewinds Noemi Lvovsky

Annoying, but Interesting
The Dead Man and Being Happy Javier Rebollo
Room 237 Rodney Ascher
Roman Polanski: Odd Man Out, Marina Zenovich

Dreadful
Ginger and Rosa Sally Potter
You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet  Alain Resnais

Stay tuned for more reviews of the Festival coming soon.

On DVD: Alamar

This is simply a beautiful movie. I'm not a huge fan of meditative cinematic tone poems, which I sometimes find boring and pretentious, with the filmmakers' heavy stamp of sensibility and opinion intruding upon the pristine circumstances that they set out to portray; but this beautifully thought out and realized film by Pablo González-Rubio is another story.
A hybrid between storytelling and documentary, Alamar (which is a poetic way of saying "to the sea"), follows the summer that Natan, a young boy who lives in Rome with his Italian mother, comes to spend time in Banco Chinchorro, the remote island where his Mexican dad lives with his own father, a crusty, lively old fisherman in Mexico. These people live literally in the sea, in a little house on stilts. They fish for lobster, red snapper and barracuda. They catch the lobster by diving into the sea with a snorkel and a harpoon, looking for them in their caves and spearing one by one. The fish they catch by throwing fishing line with bait. No sophisticated equipment; just goggles, a snorkel, fins, a spear, bait, line, and a pretty solid motor boat. The young father teaches Natan what his life is about. He is loving but firm, and Natan is a quick study.
González-Rubio, who wrote, directed, edited, produced and magnificently shot the film, has an artist's eye for composition, camera movement, and color. The images are absolutely stunning. He captures the cramped intimacy of the boat, of the little shack, as well as the majesty of the sea, the hard work of the fishermen. The underwater photography by Alexis Zabé and David Torres Castillo is also spectacular, yet inobtrusive: everything is in proportion to the simplicity of the story. The filmmaker achieves a wonderful trick: he makes it look like he's staying out of the story while crafting it with great skill, delicacy and insight. He knows better than to divert attention from the quiet power of the story and of the bond between three generations of men.
Alamar has the feel of a documentary, although González-Rubio wrote the story. There is no philosophizing, as in Le Quattro Volte, a similar film about life in a remote Italian town. There is no artistic self-indulgence either, no excruciatingly long takes that attempt to pummel the viewer into appreciating nature, and make you feel guilty for not having the superhuman attention span that such pretension requires. Every minute of Alamar is moving and mesmerizing, because it is so visually magnificent and because it concentrates on an intimate, but almost mythical story about a boy who comes from a world away to spend the summer with his dad, who lives with very little. From the comforts of Europe with all the trappings of what we call civilization, plush toys, TV, running showers, to a wooden shack with a hammock and a radio, in a place where no one ever wears shoes.
Natan turns out to be surprisingly adept at adapting. Not every urban little boy would take to the choppy seas with such esprit de corps, let alone being away from his mom and the life he knows, to an existence where there is nothing to do but fish, eat what you caught and look at the sea. Oh, but there is so much more to marvel at. An egret that comes to the house for breakfast, hermit crabs, fish gasping for breath: life on Earth.
We see Natan queasy from seasickness and perhaps jet lag on his first fishing expedition. The first time his dad teaches him to snorkel, it's not fun. But soon he becomes a child of nature. It seems that he has inherited some of his dad's ways. By the time he has to leave, he sheds quiet tears as his father comforts him with words that promise constant nearness.
Gonzalez Rubio lets things happen. He doesn't create contrast or conflict where the image and the action speak for themselves. If this was in less sensitive hands, it could easily be turned into a story of a fish out of water who learns to be in the water, a boy hero who learns from his hero father, but thankfully, the filmmaker doesn't impose the artifice of dramatic narrative on them; it is there, naturally in the sadness of the geographical distance between them. There are no false notes in Alamar. I regret missing this movie when it was shown in theaters. But it is gorgeous, even on a small screen.

NYFF 2011: Miss Bala

Although it is described as an action thriller, what Miss Bala does best is make palpable the feelings of fear, revulsion and violation that Mexicans have been grappling with since the dawning of era of the war on drugs.
Laura Guerrero, (Stephanie Sigman), lives in Tijuana with her father and brother and dreams of entering the Miss Baja California beauty contest. In a flash, her world is upended when her best friend Suzu is caught in the crossfire of Lino, a drug lord (Noé Hernández) who storms a sleazy nightclub and sprays everybody with bullets. Laura hides in the bathroom, but he nabs her and spares her life in exchange for criminal favors. Suzu has made acquaintance with some shady guy and that's how it all starts: you come near someone with "connections" and next thing you know, either you are dead or there is no way out. Written by Gerardo Naranjo and Mauricio Katz as a nightmarish version of Alice in Wonderland, and directed with panache by a much improved Naranjo (I'm Gonna Explode), Miss Bala portrays a country that is completely defaced by crime and corruption. Things are beyond outrageous, but that's how things are. Lino has unchecked power: he and his gang roam the streets of Tijuana armed and unimpeded, they close streets, plant bombs, massacre people dancing in nightclubs, have gunfights in plain daylight, buy their arms from a gringo on the other side of the border, and can even fix state beauty contests. Nothing is outside their purview of terror and nobody can refuse or resist it. What unfolds, is in fact, something that looks like an actual war. You would think you are in Baghdad, but this is the new normal.
Mexico is a surrealistic country and its particular war on drugs has Mexican surrealism written all over it (the cult of the Santa Muerte, narcocorridos, the grotesque violence). In the movie, as in life, bodies are dumped in front of the US consulate, strung from bridges. This movie is far less violent than what goes on in reality (decapitated heads appear in Acapulco beaches, people are burned inside casinos). Even though the movie feels tremendously violent, there is little graphic violence, a great directorial choice. Miss Bala depicts the ascendancy of the drug cartels as de facto rulers of Mexico through the point of view of Laura, showing it as the rape of the country that it is; for Laura Guerrero, in my view, symbolizes Mexico. One good day she finds herself in a gruesome nightmare and she has no idea how the hell she got there or how will she ever get out.
Everything outrageous that happens in Miss Bala is credible, and Mexicans will recognize this tragic state of affairs almost with a shrug. It is the realism of the surreal. There are a couple of plot points that strain credulity, chief among them the fact that no one in Mexico, unless they are five years old or just flew in from Mars, voluntarily goes inside a patrol car with a policeman. I could suspend disbelief because the movie establishes that Laura, who does this, is desperately looking for her friend Suzu, and she makes the grave mistake of asking the police for help. This particular cop works for Lino (who doesn't?), and soon she is spirited down the rabbit hole of the drug business.
The organizational skills of Lino's gang are amazing; I wondered if they ever actually had time to run the profitable side of their business, busy as they were killing other gangs, exacting petty but bloody revenges and orchestrating symbolic gestures of terror.
The movie works like a charm until the end of the second act, which takes place at the state beauty contest, with a scene of marvelous, piercing irony. Laura gets what she always wanted, though not the way she wanted it. The movie could have ended there but there is a final chain of escalating humiliations. Suddenly, we understand Lino's contest-fixing motivations (although the deals he makes are not entirely clear to me), and the war on drugs is uncovered to be an enormous farce, staged with the bottomless cynicism of those with power, for the duping of Mexican society and of our neighbor to the north, whose gargantuan appetite for illegal drugs is largely the cause of all this misery. I understand the filmmakers' decision to take the story to its natural and extreme consequences, which is to say that the war on drugs is a losing proposition because many of those who are supposed to be fighting it are actually abetting it. In terms of storytelling, however, it feels redundant, even as the bitter ironies of Laura's brush with the drug cartel keep piling on. In the end, although the story could benefit from more clarity, what boggles the mind and is very effective, are the endless layers and implications of moral rot of everything we just witnessed. Mexico is literally being raped and betrayed, and sinister forces are in cohoots to strangle it.
Miss Bala is being marketed as an action thriller, but a movie with a heroine who is forced to commit crimes in order to survive is not your typical action flick. Usually, films with passive protagonists are hard to watch because if the heroes are not the agents of change, it's hard for the audience to care. But Miss Bala works as a fable, because Laura is put in a situation in which she has do what Lino orders; otherwise she's toast and so is her family. Her dilemmas become existential. No matter how she slices it, she is drowning in rot. The suspense comes from wondering if Laura is going to summon some sort of integrity and stop being a slave to Lino, and whether this is even feasible. To the movie's credit, it steers clear from cliched heroics and wishful thinking. There is nothing that Laura or anyone can do to stop the putrefaction. When she does try, her motives are less decency or integrity than revenge, revulsion, and reaching the limits of human tolerance of humiliation and depravity. What happens to her embodies the sense of shock, revulsion and mainly of impotence that is gripping the country. Similarly, the drug lord's character summarizes the ambiguity that some Mexicans feel for the societal cancers that are the narcos. He seems to have protective feelings for Laura, but they are just his way of playing God. He can grant her life, riches, miracles, just as easily as he can send her to the lowest depths of hell, or kill her and her entire family. In the end, he is a user and an abuser, and there is nothing in him remotely approaching redemption, which is as it should be. Some Mexicans' admiration for the moxie of these barbarians is not only puerile, but tragic. Miss Bala makes clear that there is no sense of honor in these gangs, just unspeakable, depraved cowardice.
This movie poses an interesting conundrum: it aims to thrill and entertain, while at the same time it argues a sober message about the reality of the Mexican war on drugs. This is not in and of itself contradictory; a movie like The Hurt Locker is a perfect example of a great action movie that is also a serious anti-war movie. Yet in the case of Miss Bala, something feels amiss. Perhaps the titles at the end stating the number of victims and the billions of dollars reaped by the cartels are unnecessarily preachy. I enjoyed it very much as an acute and accurate metaphor of Mexico today, but I never felt I was watching a crime caper or an action thriller. It is way too tragic for that.

El Velador

El Velador by young Mexican filmmaker Natalia Almada, is a documentary only in the sense that it is not a fictional film. It narrows down its focus on the reality of drug violence in the northern state of Sinaloa, Mexico by following the daily routine of an impoverished caretaker at a grotesque and rapidly expanding cemetery mostly populated by victims and perpetrators of drug violence. There are no interviews, no talking heads and no solemn voiceover narration. More importantly, Almada refuses to show the morbid violence that is gripping the media in Mexico and terrorizing its citizens. For a narrative thread, she uses the soundtrack of escalating drug-related savagery through radio or TV newscasts reporting the latest decapitations, executions, and kidnappings.
Almada's film is a dreamlike, quietly outraged meditation on the surreal reality of Mexican drug warfare. Thus, it is not for the impatient or literal minded. Her camera records the repetitive every day rituals of the place without the slightest hurry. Her scenes are long and static. She has a keen eye for meaningful images but someone expecting a thrilling ride through the terrible mayhem going on in Mexico may be exasperated by her slow and oblique approach. Her patient, deliberate style is reminiscent of filmmakers like Kiarostami or Apitchapong Weeaseethakul. but there is much to be gleaned from what she observes in this dusty, godforsaken place, where young dead criminals abide in gaudy palaces while poor victims in bare concrete rectangles. As she patiently records the comings and goings of the cemetery, our sense of incredulity and outrage sharpens. At certain points, I felt she was about to fall prey to pretentiousness, but I respect and understand her approach. By eschewing conventional documentary style she makes a strong, thoughtful and artistically mature personal statement.
Almada is attuned to the kind of poetry that can only happen in deeply surreal countries like Mexico. There are endless shots of the caretaker patiently watering dust with a garden hose. Long shots of the skyline of this bizarre city of dead souls, which looks like a midget version of a Mexican colonial town, resting on the outskirts of the city of the living, like a pariah relative. Almada trains her camera on the guy who makes a living selling snacks and coconut water at the cemetery. On the toil of construction workers building by hand the gaudy mausoleums. Tacky enormous plastic posters honor the young men killed. A young, rich widow who drives a white Audi, mops the floor of the condo-like tomb of her dearly departed every day. By refusing to add the cacophony of opinion to the terrible fray that is the war on drugs in Mexico, and to show the horrendous pornography of drug violence, Almada paints a devastating portrait of class inequality and a country gripped by social insanity.
In one exasperating but effective scene, she keeps the camera on the construction workers as she captures the sounds of the horrible wailing of a mourning mother. She sounds totally over the top, a walking Mexican cliche of La Llorona, the wailing woman, with the kind of hammy crying you hear in a telenovela, except that the histrionics are real. Yet Almada either can't (for fear of reprisals) or won't show us the woman. This goes on for a good long while and finally we see her and the funeral group from afar. Generic mourners, suffering. Almada has plenty of empathy for the caretaker and the builders, which she lovingly photographs. She spends time on close ups of cherubic children who play around the graves of their dead fathers. But her impersonal approach restrains her from imbuing her film with too much emotion, which is welcome and bracing. Her empathy for the workers feels genuine, while her detachment as she films the rich widow mopping obsessively, shows a wise restraint, letting the audience decide if they want to judge or pity. And there is sly humor at work too. Mexicans have a chummier relationship with death and the dead than other cultures. At Day of the Dead in Oaxaca, I was visiting a humble cemetery once, and I saw a guy selling popsicles around the graves, jingling the bells of his little cart, and a man in full clown regalia. In this city of dead narcos, the snack vendor makes the rounds by turning on his loudspeakers as high as he can. He apparently knows when burials are scheduled so he's there to sell fresh mangoes, coconuts or chicharrones to the mourners. People bury their untimely dead with impressive wreaths and brass bands. They spend a lot of drug money in lavish gifts to the dead. The caretaker however, lives in a shack with one lightbulb. His bed is made of 4 overturned paint buckets and a slab of plywood, whereas the ridiculous tombs he guards are mini McMansions for the dead. They have doors and windows and second floors. They have terraces and gardens and cupolas. Their absurdity is staggering.
Almada is not interested in personal histories or testimonies, but this doesn't mean that the film is not deeply human. By avoiding contact with the mourners, she makes the audience wonder about these people. How can they live with this reality? How has this nightmare become a normal, daily occurrence in our country? What are the children of Mexico feeling and fearing, playing around premature graves and surrounded by the horrible whispers of endless violence?

Presunto Culpable/Presumed Guilty

I just saw the harrowing Mexican documentary Presumed Guilty online.
You can watch it, and should watch it here.
If you are in Mexico, buy a ticket and see it at a theater. Bring everybody with you. Every Mexican citizen needs to see this film. And every Mexican citizen needs to demand intelligent and immediate reforms to the legal system.
By following just one case of a man falsely convicted of murder, this film shows that there is absolutely no justice or legality in Mexico. Watch this film and you will feel you are falling into a darkest rabbit hole of byzantine lies. 
Presunto Culpable reminded me of Errol Morris' The Thin Blue Line. Every Mexican citizen knows that the legal system in Mexico is something to dread, but until you actually hear the story of one man, see his face, the smug faces of the judge and the prosecutor, until you see the mother, sisters, wife of the accused -- it's out of sight, out of mind. Whoever has money can buy themselves their freedom, those who can't are in jail.
Reforms are planned to introduce the novel concept of presumption of innocence in Mexico by 2016. Right now, the presumption is of guilt. The accused needs to prove his innocence; the accusers need not prove culpability. This is beyond barbaric. The trial process is worse than anything Kafka could have imagined. The prosecutor always wins the cases because the file they prepare with the police is considered incontrovertible evidence. Furthermore, physical evidence is not sought to prove culpability. Witnesses supply testimony. In a land of corrupt cops and judges, you can only imagine what this means. The movie gives some horrifying statistics: something like 95% of the accused are convicted.
One of the reasons why the system has not been scrapped may be that the police are too lazy to do their jobs. Investigating a crime and gathering evidence is hard work, but scouring the streets for people to falsely accuse is a breeze. But I suspect something deeper. Mexicans live in such a corrupt country that their default mode is suspicion and cynicism. They are not used to facts and evidence and questioning. This evil, bizarre system, which has been in place for centuries, is a manifestation of this dark side of the national psyche. Nobody believes anybody. Everybody suspects everybody. Everybody is out to get you.
Watch this film and you may be inclined to feel the same way. Mexicans know full well that they are on their own, because if anything happens to them, whether guilty or innocent, they have no legal recourse. The law is against them either way. A judge is shown beyond a doubt that evidence was fabricated and this does not change his mind. He is either saving face or in cahoots with the cops. Or, he believes in a power stronger than evidence and reason. He believes in distrust.
The movie claims that reforms are planned, but now they include a statute in which people can be held for up to 80 days without any proof of wrongdoing! This is insane.
I guess this is to give time to bad detectives to build cases and malignant bureaucrats to type the reams of capitalized, baroque verbal diarrhea they type to collect their wages. Millions of Mexicans make a living through a monstrous bureaucracy whose last interest is to stop the hundreds of thousands of tons of paperwork it produces.
Beyond the atrocious facts, no mortal can possibly fathom the antiquated, obtuse and florid legal language of the courts. The protagonist of the movie, Toño, is a smart man. At one point he asks the prosecutor (probably currently the most hated bitch in Mexico) to explain to him in language that a normal person can understand, why she considers him guilty, when all the evidence points to the contrary. I think her cynical response is: because it's my job.

Presunto Culpable is the biggest grossing documentary in Mexico (over $3.5 million dollars so far). Recently, it was pulled from theaters since the sole "witness" that testified asked a judge to ban it because he did not consent to being filmed. This is a kid with no education so I imagine someone more crafty told him to step forward and whine. An appellate court reversed the decision. This "witness", who was a minor when the police told him who to accuse, has not been charged with giving false testimony. The actual killer is presumably still at large and the judge and prosecutor who convicted on false evidence still have their jobs. What's more, the detective who planted culpability on an innocent man was promoted for his conduct.
As is usual, the contempt and disrespect of the Mexican government for its citizens is felt not only in the appalling law system, but in the realm of the day to day. There is no courtroom. There are no seats. Like every other government office in Mexico, the courts are a dump. The film claims that many convicts never even get to see their judge. In this case, after an appeal, the accused is brought in behind a narrow cage and he goes through a medieval ritual called a careo, a face off, where he is supposed to interrogate his accusers. The defense lawyer is barely allowed to ask any questions.
For years, the people who live off the maze of the penal-legal system in Mexico have inflicted their chaotic damage happily unimpeded. Nobody films them, nobody demands accountability, nobody even wants to know what goes on in there. But times have changed, and they haven't noticed that Mexican society today is evolving, while they remain mired in dangerously archaic processes and total impunity. They hide beyond massive webs of lies and brazen stubbornness, but it is clear that they are bewildered by the presence of cameras and of questioners. They have never had to explain themselves before.

Mexico should be ashamed of itself. It cannot call itself a modern country. It cannot call itself a functioning civil society as long as the legal system is not reformed. As long as this legal system is in place, it is a dump no better than Libya.
New technologies now allow people to bear witness to and produce evidence of  injustice, whether through a video camera, a cellphone, twitter or facebook. This is what hopefully will bring reform. As we have seen recently in the Arab world and in this powerful documentary, the powers that be are desperately hanging on to their archaic, corrupt systems and they try to suppress information, while citizens are using new tools to demand change. The whole world is watching.

Carancho

A very interesting but flawed Argentinian noir by Pablo Trapero, with my honey Ricardo Darín and Trapero's wife Martina Gusman, Carancho is a gripping story about Héctor Sosa, an ambulance chaser who wants out (Darín) and who falls in love with Luján, an ambulance medic (Gusman). The story is phenomenal and Darín as always, excellent, but the movie is marred by some wrongheaded choices. First thing that bothered me was the spastic editing, which feels like the filmmakers don't trust their own story and they barely let their actors breathe life into their roles; they keep cutting abruptly and before the scenes get a chance to bloom. There are several scenes that seem to serve no purpose, while one pines for scenes that illuminate character, particularly hers.
I don't know if Darín is such an authoritative actor that he can create character where it is barely written, but Gusman's character doesn't fare as well. She is sketchily written and although I didn't have issues believing that she would fall for this man, a hack whom Darin succeeds in making not only credible but sympathetic, I had to supply most of her motives because the writers don't bother. At first Luján appears as a no-nonsense, competent medic with a bit of a drug problem. For two thirds of the film, she takes command of every situation with cool headed aplomb. But by the third act she becomes whiny and clingy and even though one can understand her reasons, this seems to be totally out of character. She is like another person. Crying and clinging are supremely uninteresting choices for an actor. The movie collapses under the weight of many incomprehensible choices: there is no real passion between the two main characters. A stylistic reliance on too much blood and a relentlessly dark color palette veer into the grotesque and strain credibility. Plus, the movie has a very contrived ending that is meant to be ironic but had the audience actually laughing. This film is weirdly oblique and baroque at the same time: it skimps on telling detail and overdoes the obvious.
Still, I enjoyed big chunks of it, mainly because the story is so good.
I really liked the fact that it features an Homme Fatale. He is the one who insinuates himself and his attendant chaos into her life, which is great, for a change. And I loved that it depicts a never-ending spiral of endemic cynicism and corruption (lawyers, ambulance drivers, doctors, police: everyone is tainted). In movies involving ambulances and medics, the focus is always on the dangers suffered by the victims, but Carancho shows that ambulance personnel are vulnerable to danger themselves. In one scene, an injured drunk harasses Luján as she is trying to tend to him in the ambulance and there is a darkly comic violent fight between two injured parties that takes place as they are both lying in the E.R. Both incidents are treated with a bracing dose of dark humor. Some of its twists make Carancho feel like a refreshing addition to the genre, but it is a not altogether satisfying film noir.

The Ten Best Latin American Films of the 2000s

Be sure to check out the first edition of the Cinema Tropical Awards this Friday.

I was very happy to have been asked to compile my list of the 10 best Latin American films of the last decade by Cinema Tropical, a worthy and serious organization devoted to promoting quality films from south of the border.
I am in the good company of a bunch of other cinephiles and cineastes. You can check out the winners and download all the lists at the link above.
Here's what I sent:

I was relieved that I could think of more than ten good Latin American films of the last decade. 

This could not have been easy 20 years ago.

The common thread in my selection is a group of talented Latin American filmmakers who are, first and foremost, masters of their craft and who are deeply invested in their social reality without ever falling into melodramatic excess. The list includes two established international talents, Lucrecia Martel, one of the best filmmakers in the world today, and Alfonso Cuarón. The rest are new filmmakers, both male and female, that show extraordinary promise. Fabián Bielinsky left us wondering what marvels he could have achieved with his impressive command of genre. 

All of them have a bracing inclination for aesthetic rigor and clear eyed intelligence.

LA CIÉNAGA (Lucrecia Martel, Argentina, 2001)

With a jaundiced eye and an amazing knack for atmosphere, Lucrecia Martel explores the complex dynamics of the provincial bourgeoisie in Argentina.

Y TU MAMÁ TAMBIÉN (Alfonso Cuarón, México, 2001)

Alfonso Cuarón shows his mastery at handling both farce and deep melancholy without sentimentality. The script is sharp, funny and subtly revealing of the contrasts in Mexican society.

THE HEADLESS WOMAN  (Lucrecia Martel, Argentina, 2008)

A woman is involved in a car accident; she is disoriented, then there is a coverup. Lucrecia Martel creates a richly layered physical, psychic and political world, that resonates beyond its provinical confines.

NINE QUEENS (Fabián Bielinsky, Argentina, 2000)

A fantastically taut, smart, crisp caper with fabulous twists and the magnificent, sullen sexiness of Ricardo Darín.

DUCK SEASON (Fernando Eimbcke, México, 2004)

Mexican teenagers bored out of their wits on a Sunday afternoon, reminiscent of Ozu. The work of a young filmmaker with plenty of style and delicate wisdom.

XXY (Lucía Puenzo, Argentina, 2007)

A strong, intelligent film about a teenage hermafrodite, XXY is the movie equivalent of tough love; fierce, unsentimental, compassionate and with a breakout performance by Inés Efrón. 

THE MAID (Sebastián Silva, Chile, 2009)

She lives among us! A psychologically astute film about a live-in maid, that staple of the Latin American upper classes’ happiness or dread. With a fearsome performance by Catalina Saavedra.

THE AURA (Fabián Bielinsky, Argentina, 2005)

A gorgeous, atmospheric noir that challenges convention by happening in a cabin in the Patagonian woods. Oodles of style.

TONY MANERO (Pablo Larraín, Chile)

A murderer dreams of becoming the best John Travolta impersonator during the Pinochet years. A chillingly original portrait of absolute moral rot.

LA ZONA (Rodrigo Plá, México)

Rich people literally fence themselves off the poverty around them, living in comfy, arrogant isolation in the middle of their own country. Mexico, in a nutshell.

Having said this, I also liked Martel's La Niña Santa, but I thought it shouldn't be a Martel monopoly. I also liked, less, Pablo Trapero's Leonera. I liked Cautiva, I sort of liked Whisky and Silent Light. 

 I did not include Amores Perros because I knew it was going to be on many of my colleagues' lists and I like Y Tú Mamá También better. I have not seen Fernando Eimbcke's Lake Tahoe, which made it to several lists. For the life of me, I don't understand why people like Pan's Labyrinth so much, but that's the beauty of film, hay de todo para todos.

NYFF: Old Cats

As Pedro Peirano and Sebastián Silva, the talented writer/directors of this charming but unsettling film explained yesterday after the screening, they are a combination of Michael Haneke and Mike Leigh. This is a pretty good way to describe this film, their second outing after the excellent The Maid. Old Cats is a story about a very toxic relationship between a cold and unloving mother (Bélgica Castro), who is starting to have serious symptoms of Alzheimer's, and her monumentally screwed up 40-something daughter, (a ferocious performance by Claudia Celedón, who was the lady of the house in The Maid). Just the fact that the movie concentrates in a bad mother-daughter relationship is cause for rejoicing. There are very few of those around. It is a total bonus that it is splendidly written, extraordinarily acted and very funny and powerful.
The mother lives with her second husband (Alejandro Sieveking, Castro's husband in real life) in an apartment crammed with tchotchkes and two obese old cats. The movie was actually shot in the couple's apartment.
The daughter, who has a butch girlfriend who insists that people call her Hugo (the great Catalina Saavedra), basically wants her mother to sign the apartment to her so she can sell it and make the money that has always eluded her.
As in Mike Leigh, there is plenty of laughter about their impossibility to connect. The first time we hear of the daughter, she is on the phone asking to come see her mother and her voice is overly chirpy and phony. The mother isn't buying it. When she finally shows up, her entrance is almost a showstopper. She makes a terrible fuss about her allergies to the cats, who have to be sequestered in one room for the duration of her visit. She can't stand that the animals receive more affection than she ever did.
I was blown away by Celedón's performance, which should be as star-making as that of Catalina Saavedra's in The Maid. She is the very picture of a royal fuck up: needy, manipulative, self-involved, scheming, whiny and a loser. She seems to be surrounded by a tornado of negative energy, but by the end of the film we pity her, for it is clear that we are witnessing the result of years of maternal rejection, and at least she has tried to do something with her life, even though it was never worked.
The mother turns out to be not as sweet and vulnerable as one thinks at the beginning, but by the end, she is not as heartless either. For a moment I thought that the movie was sliding into melodrama, but Old Cats retains its dramatic and comedic integrity. The characters may change their stubborn ways, but only just enough. Or maybe not enough.
Both The Maid and Old Cats are movies that feel like nature documentaries on the behavior of the human species, but without the soothing voiceover narration. Silva and Peirano are young filmmakers who seem to be wise beyond their years, and a creative team to follow.

NYFF: Post Mortem

 
When I saw Pablo Larrain's Tony Manero two years ago at the New York Film Festival, I was very impressed with its dark originality, although it was tough going. 
Larrain returns to the festival this year with Post Mortem, a movie that takes place on the days of the coup d'etat against president Salvador Allende. Like Tony Manero, Post Mortem aims to disturb. As in the first film, the protagonist is played by stone faced actor Alfredo Castro, and there are many parallels between the two films. Larrain's creative choices are becoming stylistic tics: a central character that barely registers emotion, a fascination with the cheesier side of show biz as some sort of metaphor for living in an apolitical fantasyland, drained out colors, Bressonian angles, joyless sex, nasty characters, humor so dark it dies in your throat. In short; unabated, sordid gloom. Blokes, a short produced by his company also shown at the festival, deals with the same historical period in Chile and the same topic (the political is personal) in a similar washed out style. Larrain is becoming a cottage industry of dyspepsia. He was born in 1976, three years after the coup, and he grew up in Pinochet's murderous, repressive dictatorship. Hence, his movies are jewel boxes of stylized rage. They ooze moral revulsion. This is visually rendered with a predilection for showing characters eating and having sex in unsavory ways. They are meant to literally create disgust in the audience.
I find Larrain's style extremely interesting and totally legitimate, but labored. Post Mortem is another brutal parable of how the political is intensely personal, and how the evil that society allows, festers inside each citizen that acquiesces to it.
Mario, the main character, works as a note taker at a morgue and is in love with "La Nancy", the burlesque dancer who lives across the street from him. She is mean and crazy, delusional with faded grandeur, even as her sleazy impresario refuses to put her on stage because she is so emaciated, she looks like she just came from a weekend in Auschwitz. There is one scene in the middle of the movie when she comes to visit Mario and he offers her a fried egg. She bursts out crying and he follows suit, slobbering and spilling snot and saliva all over his food. This goes on for quite a while. This is profoundly shocking and at the same time darkly funny, because it comes out of nowhere, as neither of the characters actually reaches out to console one another. Five minutes of grotesque crying and then Larrain cuts to a close up of Nancy being humped, presumably by Mario. There is no tenderness, no joy; she never even looks at him, she doesn't touch him. It's a nasty and sordid world. Again.
Nancy's father happens to be a communist organizer, so that when the shit hits the fan, Mario is obliviously taking a shower while we can hear violence across the street, her house is ransacked and torched and he can't find her, sending him into a desperate frenzy, which in his case is indicated as a microscopic frown. He rescues her super cute dog and heals it. The man is utterly in love.
The morgue, which was a relatively leisurely affair before the coup, becomes monstruosly busy after. Murdered civilians are brought in by the truckload to be catalogued, according to the military's orders, without names, just by gender, approximate age and number of bullet holes. Mario continues doing his job, betraying no opinion of what is going on around him, but he helps to save someone who turns out to be alive in the pile of bodies he is carting to the morgue. He may be stonefaced, but he is not totally inhuman. Only one of the workers in the morgue displays what is commonly recognized as human emotion. She is revolted by what is happening, and she loses it, in the only scene in the film that allows the audience to feel grief and indignation.
Larrain is preoccupied with people who look the other way while tanks are rolling by, who are oblivious to politics and who think that politics don't affect them. And while his massive anger is understandable, his cold blooded approach is too stylized and his deliberately repulsive style ultimately distances, if it doesn't altogether alienate, the audience. I respect that he sets out to provoke revulsion and a visceral rejection of political indifference (he unsparingly portrays his fellow Chileans for the most part, as extraordinarily nasty, self interested people) but I wonder if untempered disgust is enough. If you are expecting Mario to be positively transformed by the end of the movie, you are in for a bitter shock. His amorous travails finally lead him to perform a cruelly horrifying vendetta, sinking him further into his disconnection from the society around him. It's a great ending, but watching Post Mortem is like taking a gallon of bitter medicine. It may be good for you, but that doesn't mean you have to like it.

The Secret in Their Eyes

Lately, I've been thinking that the foreign movies that win the Academy Award win by virtue of their length. I bet nobody really sees all the contenders. They just look at the dvd cover and vote for whichever movie is shorter. Either that, or whichever movie is more sentimental.
The Oscar winner for best foreign movie of 2009, this Argentinian film is a perfectly good movie, but it is not a better movie than The White Ribbon or A Prophet, the other strong contenders for the Oscar, which were more cerebral, less touchy-feely. This one is much more crowd-pleasing and sentimental. It is also an interesting hybrid of a thriller with a love story.
The first act is a straight procedural, inflected with a lot of sharp humor, about Benjamin Esposito, the extraordinary Ricardo Darin, who works in the byzantine Argentine justice system (I defy anyone to explain to me what it is exactly that they do, these people with the pompous titles. I think they are the equivalent of district attorneys).
A great running joke of the movie is that they call each other by these archaic titles but they expend most of their energy refusing to work. They are engulfed in paper, as are all festering, incompetent, useless Latin American bureaucracies. Esposito is forced to investigate the rape and murder of a young woman, and years later he tries to write a novel about the case, which obsesses him for life.
The film is based on a novel and it feels literary. There are wonderful characters, all played by wonderful actors and everybody is highly articulate, in love with the sound of their own language. There is a breezy, fun rhythm to their repartee. The subtitles miss most of the specific saltiness, the dry irony inherent in Argentinian slang. It's quite delicious.
The movie goes back and forth between past and present as Esposito tries to write his book. At first it seems like a conventional crime story, but soon the dark side of Argentinian politics makes itself revoltingly clear. I would have to give away important plot points to explain why, which I won't do, but I think this is the best part of the film. Up to this point we've been following a crime story with no apparent broader implications, but there is a turn, which feels like a knife twisting in the gut, when it becomes clear how the repressive machine of power worked to make a mockery of justice and could taint any citizen, even those who had nothing to do with politics. The fact that it springs out almost from left field makes it all the more shocking and more resonant.
Delicately braided into the thread of the crime, is the parallel story of the impossible crush between Esposito and his well connected, aristocratic boss, the wonderful Soledad Villamil.  Both actors achieve a lovely sexual tension they basically communicate with their eyes, and have beautiful chemistry together. It's nice to see two very smart people in love. Very sexy.
Here I must pause and sing the praises of Ricardo Darin, the greatest Argentinian actor ever, and as far as I'm concerned, squarely in the pantheon of great international film actors. Darin has never appeared, that I know of, in an English speaking film. He is not conventionally handsome, his face is puffy and craggy, his eyes the sharpest blue. But he is so charismatic, he just needs to show up. He has a combination of steely cool and warm passion that I bet makes many a heart flutter just like mine. Yet he is an extremely intelligent, measured actor, who never ever does anything histrionic when his quiet intensity and transparency suffice.  Lo amo.
Back to the movie: it's a complicated yarn that defies our expectations of the classic whodunit and is populated by great characters, some very funny like Sandoval (Guillermo Francella), a lush and Esposito's sidekick; some pompous, ineffectual bureaucrats, like the judge they all work for, and some horrendously evil, like Romano (Mariano Argento), one of the most villanous, yet totally credible bureaucrats ever committed to film. That man has a scene which encapsulates the absolute rot of a bureaucrat at the service of criminal power and he nails it. The acting is all first rate.
The movie is grounded in the political reality of Argentina in the seventies, and it is about human decency, revenge and the possibility, or even the relevance of pursuing, defending, and getting justice years after the fact, just as it is about missed personal opportunities. This story revisits the festering wound of the dirty war in Argentina very powerfully precisely because it does so obliquely.
The movie falters towards the end, where it adds an extra layer of romantic schmaltz and the restoration of justice of sorts that feels like wishful thinking to me.  Up to the third act I was mesmerized with the twists of the plot, the richness of the characters, the language and the atmosphere (many scenes in weathered old bars and cafés, the moth-eaten mustiness of the Tribunals of Justice) and the aching wistfulness of opportunities lost. However, the end feels a little contrived and a little saccharine.
On one hand it's kind of the genteel revenge fantasy of anybody who feels justice has not been served, and on the other, it's a romantic happy ending. I was a little disappointed by it.

TropiCast Numero 1

Darlings, here is the link to my first podcast ever, a very interesting (I should hope) conversation between a bunch of Latino film lovers and critics here in New York. We spoke about the list of the 10 best Latin American films of the 00 decade compiled by Cinema Tropical. If you have nothing better to do with your precious time check it out.
And here's a little video we did impromptu after the podcast.
We're having another podcast soon on the Argentinian movie who won the Best Foreign Film Academy Award this year. I will keep you posted.

Low Riders

Lately I've been consuming some samples of Latino entertainment culture in the US and I've come to the conclusion that we have an unfortunate tendency to sugarcoat and bathe our stories in corn syrup. We also tend to set the bar pretty low.
Case in point: I finally saw the Broadway musical In The Heights last night. I enjoyed some of the music, and some of the performers were wonderful, but for a look at life in the barrio in Washington Heights, I thought I was going to be choked by a cloud of cotton candy from beginning to end. The wonderful set was the only realistic thing in the entire play. I don't expect every show or movie about Latinos in the US to be about nasty drug dealers and lazy loafers, and I am all for positive characterizations of Latinos, when they are multidimensional and true to life. But if I ever see a long-suffering sweet abuela again, I am going to punch her in the face. Don't people ever get tired of the stereotype? Are their freaking grandmothers really that cloying?
In Junot Diaz's novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Oscar's mother, a Dominican immigrant who undeniably sacrifices herself for her children, is a monster of bitterness and rage. This is much more interesting than a character who is only missing a halo and two fluffy wings on her shoulders. In fact, what separates Junot Díaz's novel from the corny stuff that is produced by and about Latinos in this country is that Díaz portrays life with all its bittersweet and harsh complexity, and not as some wish it would be, a lifeless candyland of abnegation and cheap sentiment that benefits no one. Which is also why Oscar Wao was so successful and resonant in the world at large. It does not live in the ghetto of the mind that we're sometimes too eager to keep ourselves in.

Same thing with an independent movie that is coming out soon, Entre Nos, about the plight of a Colombian woman and her two children as she is abandoned by her no-good husband to fend for herself in Queens. You would think that this would be an intensely dramatic story, but instead it is totally drained of life. The characters are like stick figures covered in syrup and there is no dramatic contrast, no irony, no humor, no depth. Underwritten characters, impossibly boring, repetitive dialogue, not a shred of visceral honesty, Entre Nos manages to turn a pretty dramatic story (which at the end of the film we are surprised to learn was the actual story of the director) into a boring, flat, uninteresting mess. It is made with the most beautiful and pure intentions, and it has absolutely nothing interesting to say.
Either we oscillate between morbid, harrowing stuff (Sin Nombre, María Full of Grace) or absurdly sentimental cheese that has no relation to human reality.  Are we incapable of irony? In our countries of origin it seems to be alive and well. Why do we lose it when we get here?
This is my beef: in the name of political correctness, inclusion, multiculti harmony or whatever you want to call it, we accept much lower standards for Latinos in the US, than for the general audience. This is pernicious. This movie would not pass muster had it been made by someone other than a minority. But this is not the only example of this phenomenon. You only need to take a look at the NY Latino Film Festival, which has extraordinarily low admission criteria and people managing it who can't even speak Spanish correctly. None other than HBO, a paragon of excellence in visual storytelling, sponsors it. But apparently they don't demand nearly the same standards of excellence from Latinos. Because we are Latinos, we get away with mediocrity. And not only is mediocrity tolerated, but in many cases, celebrated and applauded. Look at those sweet, exotic Latinos, living in a planet beset by good intentions. Let's give 'em a round of applause. A little pat on the head, and there you go.
We get away with sloppiness, cheesiness, corniness, and lower standards. If we think this is helping us, it isn't. Quite the contrary, it keeps us safely in the margins of culture, instead of at the forefront. And I'm not blaming the gringos. The gringos are only trying to feel better about themselves by being condescending to us. It's up to us to demand better of ourselves.
And can we please hold the melcocha?

The Year In Movies

Best Movies of the Year
The White Ribbon, Michael Haneke
Mother, Joon Ho-Bong
Il Divo, Paolo Sorrentino
The Headless Woman, Lucrecia Martel
Lebanon, Shmuel Maoz
Bright Star, Jane Campion
The Maid, Sebastián Silva

Best American Movies
The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow
Where The Wild Things Are, Spike Jonze
The Informant! Steven Soderbergh
Adventureland, Greg Mottola
The Messenger, Oren Moverman
The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Wes Anderson

Good Small Movies
Still Walking
The Damned United
Summer Hours
Ponyo
A Single Man
Crazy Heart  
Adam
Two Lovers
Cold Souls
Paranormal Activity

Disappointments
A Serious Man
Up in the Air
Brothers
Duplicity
Funny People
Julie and Julia
The Soloist
Public Enemies
Moon
An Education
Brüno

Bad Movies
Beeswax
The Limits of Control
Public Enemies
Drag Me To Hell
Away We Go
Shrink

Hollywood Dreck
Invictus
The Hangover
Brothers
Up in The Air
Public Enemies

Best Docs of the Year
Anvil, The Story of Anvil.
Food, Inc.
American Casino
Tyson
Valentino, The Last Emperor

Disappointing Docs
Capitalism, A Love Story. 
La Danse

Bad Docs
This is It
Every Little Step

Infommercial Docs 
The September Issue
It Might Get Loud

Self Indulgent Auteurs
Antichrist, Lars Von Trier
Broken Embraces, Pedro Almodóvar
The Limits of Control, Jim Jarmusch
Inglorious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino
Life During Wartime, Todd Solondz

Best Old Movies Seen in Theatres
The Fallen Idol, Carol Reed
Small Change, François Truffaut
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, John Huston
The Bicycle Thief, Vittorio de Sica

NYFF: The Headless Woman

It's official: Lucrecia Martel is my current favorite filmmaker.
She is a talent to behold. If you haven't, you need to see her first and best movie, La ciénaga (The Swamp). Then you see her second film, La niña santa (The Holy Girl) and then you see her latest, La mujer sin cabeza.
My expectations were lowish because I had heard it wasn't as good as her other two films. Well, I loved it. I loved every second of it.
Martel is a truly original filmmaker, with a style and a point of view all her own. She explores the social and family dynamics of people who live in the province of Salta, Argentina, but it's the way she does it that is totally different from anything you've ever seen. In Spanish literature there is a genre called costumbrismo, and I guess the closest equivalent in English would be the "comedy of manners", except that costumbrismo is not always necessarily a comedy. Martel's films are a most original, modern, fiercely intelligent example of costumbrismo.
In her movies, the frame is always full of people, people who don't really like each other but who are almost on top of each other all the time. Families stick together like molasses. Everybody talks at the same time, mothers are exasperated with their children, relatives say horrible things to one another, and volumes are also left unsaid. As in all her movies, this is a film about the inequalities in Argentine society, particularly in the provinces, where the differences between the middle class and the poor are very noticeable, mainly because there is close cohabitation between them. Servants live in the homes of their employers. There is a strange symbiosis between people. In Martel's films I feel like being in biology class dissecting frogs, when in fact it's humans and their customs and behaviors we are asked to observe.
Her films don't remind me of anybody else's films. Sure, you could say that her jaundiced view of family and society may recall Luis Buñuel's, but Martel is a much more technically accomplished filmmaker. Her films are strangely, oppressively gorgeous. She creates an atmosphere that feels incestuous and sticky and she does this with great aesthetic discipline. In The Headless Woman, she shoots everything at very close range, with all the focus on the foreground. There are almost no wide shots in this film (I recommend you sit towards the back of the theater). This creates a very claustrophobic feeling and it is very disquieting, as if the world outside one's body is fuzzy. Martel sticks to this choice and it works, for this is a movie about a woman who loses her head. She has a car accident and she becomes disoriented, forgetful and confused. However, we don't really know if she was already like that, or if the accident triggers a response in her that is bigger than the incident itself. For a while we don't know if she is imagining stuff. Martel leaves enormous spaces open to interpretation, but these are not arbitrary or manipulative, because she gives you enough clues to solve the puzzle in a logical, organic, coherent way. In the end, everything makes sense in this world that is strange and banal at the same time. You can fill in the blanks of this woman's life by the incredibly observed details that Martel hands out with delicate, powerful brush strokes, among them dialog that is sharp and revelatory, and totally natural and an incredible ensemble of actors.
If you take the basic plot of this movie, (a woman is involved in a car accident; she is disoriented, then there is a coverup), you would never imagine the kind of richly layered physical, psychic and political space that Martel creates out of such an incident. The story is very intimate, but it also reverberates beyond the confines of the characters' lives. It makes me think about what happened in Argentina during the military dictatorship where murders and disappearances were covered up for years. The clique of those in power is all about protecting themselves no matter what. If somebody loses their head, questions their actions, misses their place in the established order, the clique, acting instinctively like a silent organism will make sure everything remains the same.

My friend Katya was saying Martel is the most interesting filmmaker out of Latin America. I think she is one of the most brilliant filmmakers in the world today.

NY Film Festival: Tony Manero

This relentlessly dark film from Chilean director Pablo Larrain is tough going, but it is a very original, bitter film, with a very strong point of view. It takes place during the years of the Pinochet dictatorship, when Chile was under military law. The main character, a psychopath called Raúl, has an obsession. He wants to be the best Tony Manero impersonator (remember John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever?) in Chile. He watches the film over and over, he repeats the dialog like a parrot, and he busts those famous moves (in probably the most humorless, cringe inducing dance scenes ever committed to film). He also happens to be a thief and a cold blooded murderer, and the film chronicles his quest to be Tony Manero as he brazenly ignores everything else that happens around him.
The film is an extended metaphor of what happened in Chile in those days. One could see Raúl as an embodiment of the majority of Chileans, who turned a blind eye to Pinochet's abuses of power and went for easy escapism instead, provided by stupid television shows or the Hollywood dream factory. But the fact that Raúl is such a vile character, such a terrible bastard, points to a parallel with the dictator himself, killing and vanishing people with total impunity.
The violence in this film is brutal, swift and merciless. Raúl kills people with his bare hands. At the beginning he seems like a meek dreamer, but soon you realize he is full of rage. Several women find him irresistible, even as he debases them, and even as he is impotent. Maybe this too is symbolic of some people's acceptance of the Pinochet regime. There are intimations of a deeply divided society, of a racist streak through this society, and ultimately of a society disgusted with itself.
The movie is claustrophobic. It never leaves the poor working class slums where he lives. The colors are washed out, the camera is handheld all the time. The dark, bleak humor dries in your throat, the sex is brutal. Tony Manero is a nasty piece of work, but it recreates a nasty, evil time in Chilean history, and it doesn't let anybody off easy.

XXY

This excellent film by Argentinian writer/director Lucía Puenzo deals with a family's problem with hermaphroditism. That is, a couple have a teenage daughter who is half woman and half man. What is remarkable about the movie is the intelligence and the maturity with which it deals with the topic. Because she is a teenager and is starting to come of age, the family has reached a critical point in which a decision must be made about what sex is she going to be. It is hard because, Alex, the protagonist, doesn't really know it herself. The young actress who plays Alex starts out acting like a freak, a particularly difficult teenager (aren't all teenagers freaks by definition?), but one warms up to her because she goes through these extremes of pain and defiance and sheer confusion. She is amazing.
It's hard to talk about this movie without giving it away and there is so much that is bracing and interesting about it, that I don't really want to go into it. For those of you who don't live anywhere near the tiny screen of the Cinema Village where XXY is showing, I'm sure it will make it's way to Netflix. It won an important prize at Cannes last year.
In all, the cast is excellent, the script is extremely compelling, strong but moving, without ever (except in one scene) resorting to cliché or sentimentality. XXY is the movie equivalent of tough love, fierce and compassionate. Well worth watching.

Adrift in Manhattan

This is a film by my ex-colleague Alfredo De Villa, a man I admire because he's had the cojones and the patience and what it takes to have made already four independent feature films. This last one has Heather Graham, the great Dominic Chianese, William Baldwin and the great, unsung, Elizabeth Peña, among others and it is a story about people who live and love in New York.
The film is opening tomorrow at the lovely Village East Cinemas on 12th st and 2nd Ave.
I hope lots of people show up this weekend and support the film.

Vini, Vidi, Bardem

Yesterday night, O dear mortals, I had the privilege of attending a live interview with Javier Bardem, who is a magnificent actor and one of the most wonderful interview subjects I've ever seen. It is to his enormous credit that despite the very tepid, asskissing questioning and understandable but completely inappropriate flirtiness of Lynn Hirschberg, Bardem generously delivered very interesting information about his craft and his approach as an actor. She kept interrupting him with silly, giggly comments but he kept going back to his line of thought, gently bent on making the points he started out with. That he is one of the most effortlessly charming, intelligent, sensible and divine beings that ever graced this Earth also helped.
It has happened to me several times when attending this kind of events, that when otherwise fine reporters and intelligent journalists get to interview a famous subject in front of an audience, they become starstruck and squander everybody's time by fawning shamelessly. In Miss Hirschberg's case, she wasn't as terrible as that monster of brownosing, James Lipton, but she was gossipy and flirty and not serious enough. Bardem saved her from ridicule with his charm. People were saying she made him feel at ease, and it may be true to a certain point, but I think it was the other way around. Healthily acknowledging he has a huge ego, he was also charmingly self-deprecating. Utterly winning.
Now, it drives me crazy that she was obsessed with the fact that Bardem didn't speak English when he did Before Night Falls. It is an amazing feat, particularly since not only did he act flawlessly in a language he didn't master, but he used a pitch perfect Cuban accent on top of it, which she was too ignorant to even acknowledge. But how much time can one spend reminding the guy that he didn't speak English? She tried to save it with protestations that she can't speak Spanish (stupidly making him say things in Spanish so she could swoon) and that her French is bad, but it seemed childish and provincial. Get over it.
Bardem really spoke of his work as an actor with great openness and passion and he shared part of his approach. It struck me that either he is even a better actor than we all think, or he is not one of those actors who are tortured by their profession. He seems to enjoy it and respect it deeply, and his commitment is extremely serious. He spoke candidly about the envy actors of his caliber sometimes get in their countries of origin and was very generous, and seemingly totally sincere, with his praise for Antonio Banderas, who he claimed, correctly, paved the way for the international careers of people like him.
Thinking of his movies, it is worth pointing out that he has not yet sold himself out to stupid choices. His is a pretty solid resume and one can only hope he will not easily succumb to bad Hollywood temptations.