Timbuktu

One expects the worst emotional torture from a movie about the ISIS menace, and if you've been on a diet of simplistic, good versus evil American movie tropes, Timbuktu may mess with your head, but Abdehrrahmane Sissako's magnificent film is a rare gem. It unfurls delicacy and humanity, and even gentle humor, to express its profound outrage about the barbarism of the perverted Islamic rule of ISIS.
Sissako looks at Mali's misfortune with ruthless compassion. He and female screenwriter Kessen Tall do not make the ISIS soldiers into the embodiment of evil. Some are ignorant, but some are smart and speak several languages. Some use their power to try to further their personal agendas, like getting a bride (one shyly, one by force). Some intercede to try to curb the fanatical religious harassment of their neighbors. Others relish the power they can only wield by joining such a cult. They are all guided by unshakable conviction in their warped, life-denying principles. Sissako aims to provide a glimpse of what it is like to live under such insane rules, both for the enforcers and their victims.
He subverts the jihadists by deliberately countering the sensationalist effect of ISIS' appalling violence with a day to day portrait of life under their rule. Sissako refuses to give them free publicity with their thirst for blood, which just gives them more power and sows more fear.
Instead, we witness truly heroic day to day defiance in the courageous stand of a woman fishmonger who refuses to wear gloves, as per ISIS's absurd dictates; through a group of young people who continue to play beautiful Malian music in their home when music is forbidden, or youths who play imaginary soccer, because soccer is forbidden too.
Sissako has a keen sense of the surreal, and an equally firm grasp on reality, which gives Timbuktu the depth of poetry. His sense of humor is almost shocking, under the circumstances, but his ribbing of their ridiculous rules is moving and revelatory. In this world, a Tuareg family of shepherds lives in tents, but owns a cellphone. The jihadis are gadget crazy, and, in a very funny scene, try to make propaganda videos to convince the people of Mali to renounce their normal lives. This world seems as distant as another planet, yet people are up to date with the latest soccer scores. However, they are left to deal with the horrifying invaders on their own. No one protects them. They fight, not with violence, but with stubborn defiance.
Sissako resorts to violence a handful of times. He understands that less is far more shocking than more. But the violation, the humiliation, the privation of dignity and liberty of the inhabitants of Timbuktu are faced with every day is the greatest violence of all. This movie manages to destroy you and uplift you at the same time. It finds some solace in humanity, but ends with a devastating image, a truly powerful reminder that inaction and submission guarantee a future of endless, irrational terror.
Timbuktu is Mauritania's entry for the Academy Awards, and it it is a formidable contender. A remarkable film.

Saint Laurent: NYFF 14

The French filmic powers that be are perverse if they think this movie by Bertrand Bonello, their entry to the upcoming Academy Awards, is going to win an Oscar. I know what they're thinking: "Les Americains, they love les biopics! Le Oscar is ours!"
Except that movie is called Yves Saint Laurent, by Jalil Lespert, and would have had a decent chance at the bald guy, had they sent that one instead. But they chose Saint Laurent, a three-hour long, shapeless, ridiculous mess that is far more about its self-indulgent director than it is about its fascinating subject.
Poor Yves (Gaspard Ulliel) and his partner, Pierre Bergé (the great Jeremie Renier, wasted and miscast), are ciphers in this sordid vision of 1970's depravity. Bonello is more interested in his own spin on the tortured artist than in YSL himself. He devotes endless minutes and resources to YSL's world: Regine's, the drugs, the sex, the muses and hangers on. He does not bother creating dimensional characters or a compelling story. The movie is an endless collection of untethered moments in YSL's life in the Seventies. Each year, announced with a huge title, seems to last forever. There is no forward momentum. There is no dramatic action. Organizing a movie by years is not the most exciting way to develop a plot; hence, there is none, and the movie drags on and on.
One never understands what made this universally admired, successful designer so unhappy, or what the relationship was like between him and Bergé. They ignore each other for most of the movie. Bonello has no sense of timing or staging. He spends an eternity on a meeting between Bergé and Saint Laurent's American investors, covering the minutiae of their licensing deals, but not one minute is spent in giving Saint Laurent a say in his own destiny. According to Bonello, YSL is some sort of martyr to creative genius. An icon (and a pouting, annoying one at that), more than a man of flesh and blood.
The actors are helpless, as they have nothing to do. Ulliel gets YSL's mannered whispering and gait right, but apparently so can anyone else. He tries to be as enigmatic as possible, but we have no idea of what can possibly be going on in his mind. Renier fares even worse, with an unforgivable dark wig and glued on facial hair.  For a movie about a man who only cared about beauty and elegance, very short shrift is actually given to his enormous talent. There is no interest in what he achieved, no sense of elegance or beauty. Bonello is only interested in his own thesis about artistic self-destruction and bourgeois depravity. This is not only boring, but a disservice to a true creative genius.
Who cares if a cast of thousands is summoned: Lea Seydoux (wasted as Loulou de la Falaise), Dominique Sanda (wasted as Saint Laurent's mére) and Helmut Berger, the movie's only coup de theatre, tragically unrecognizable as YSL at the end of his life. They are like lifeless mannequins peppering a feverish, clumsy tableau vivant. The movie comes alive only twice. When Berger appears and steals the show, and when Louis Garrel shows up as the depraved lover who drove YSL to despair. He seems to be the only one having any fun.
This movie has no business being in the New York Film Festival (let alone the Oscars), but every year one can count on a handful of insufferably pretentious (mostly French) movies that the selection committee swoons over because they are messy and smelly, and somehow they confuse that with art.
It is tragic that a movie like Yves Saint Laurent, which is made with enormous craft and has two of the most magnificent performances of the year, is dismissed because it is more conventional. It's only sin is that it aims to tell YSL's story well, whereas Bonello's movie is as vapid and pretentious as your worst nightmares about the world of fashion.

The Blue Room: NYFF 14

Actor Matthieu Amalric directs and stars as Julien Gahyde in this adaptation of the Georges Simenon novel about an amour fou between a couple of lovers whose spouses are in the way. His wife, Stephanie Cleau, cowrote the script with him and stars as his lover, so it's all en famille.
The story jumps in time from their lovemaking sessions at a small village hotel to Julien's arrest and subsequent interrogations by the police, a judge and a psychiatrist. We don't know who killed who, but the story unspools as Gahyde is forced to articulate his actions to the investigators by going back in time for clues to the murders that came out of his affair. It's a great premise: a sexual passion so intense, it drives two married people to want to off their spouses, with the twist that Simenon keeps you wondering who the hell did what. And more importantly, what exactly was the emotional turn that precipitated thoughts of romantic freedom into plans for murder. We don't know if Julien did it, or if he was framed by Esther his lover. We never see them scheming, we only glimpse the fallout.
To judge from the adaptation, which I assume is faithful, Simenon treats the story as a procedural, making us glean information in bits and pieces. My favorite scene is when the police bear down on Julien asking him incredibly intimate questions, demanding he translate his doomed infatuation into a collection of hard facts. He bristles that life is not like that when you are living it. The insight is that you don't necessarily know what you are doing in the moment. You may find yourself committed to a plan you didn't even realize you hatched.
Human motivation is the main interest of the noir genre. Why do we do the dark things we do? A good noir does not want to answer this question neatly. It wants to create lingering curiosity about the darkest corners of our souls. But all good noirs also require precision and style, and I found these to be missing from The Blue Room.  Amalric is a competent director, but this story, and noirs in general, beg for someone with a strong visual style and a commitment to the precision of plot. I like to be kept guessing, but I have to confess that by the end it was unclear to me whodunit. I am not even sure if this is intentional on the part of Simenon or the filmmakers. Although one doesn't necessarily need everything neatly tied up by the end, lack of clarity is not the same as mystery.
Amalric wants to convey a sense of claustrophobia, of the world crashing on the character. To pay homage to the RKO classic film noirs, he uses the old 1:33 aspect ratio and a lush, romantic music score, but he does not use an equivalent visual style, and the movie feels visually poor. The talkiness and all the jumping back and forth, although mostly clear, make the movie feel like a slog.
I have seen two French films so far at the New York Film Festival and they both suffer from this attention to meta details (in this case, aspect ratio, lush score, homages to Bresson, references to Gustave Courbet, etc.) at the expense of a careful handling of the story. It's as if the filmmakers are more interested in telling us about themselves, when they should be at the service of the story. Amalric, who is usually a riveting actor, seems unfocussed in the role of Julien. Perhaps he bit more than he could chew. The Blue Room is worth seeing because it's always good to go down the shadowy lanes of film noir, but it is not as sharp or as shadowy as it deserves to be.

Whiplash: NYFF 14

Whiplash, impressively written and directed by Damien Chazelle, is a stunner. A thrilling, exquisitely crafted ride that gives one hope about the future of American film. The twist is, it is a rather conventional story. It may remind you of Rocky, or of Full Metal Jacket, or Black Swan or even of Bambi (the hero has no mommy, again). But the difference is in the milieu: Whiplash is the story of young Andrew Neyman (a spectacular Miles Teller), an ambitious student at a renowned music academy in New York. He plays jazz drums. Andrew meets his match in the sadistic professor Terence Fletcher, played by J.K. Simmons, in the role of a lifetime.
The plot uses some well worn tropes: the girlfriend that competes with jazz for Andrew's attention, the absent mother, the music competition; story turns you know like the back of your hand, but Chazelle manages to make them look fresh by unleashing truly surprising twists that keep you on the edge of your seat.  Chazelle reimagines and invigorates yet another story of an obsessive hero struggling to make himself heard, through jazz. Whiplash is a tight composition of a film that works with a fantastic score by Justin Hurwitz and Tim Simonec, plus standards like Caravan by Duke Ellington and the title song by Hank Levy. Apparently, Chazelle storyboarded the film to the music score, which explains why Whiplash is a thrillingly musical film, and since the music is big band jazz, it has major swing.
The craftsmanship on every aspect of this movie is of the highest caliber: the music editing, the visual editing, the cinematography, and the very sharp writing and directing from Chazelle. Which brings me to the actors. As Andrew, Miles Teller offers an almost silent performance, but you can detect every single shift of feeling that crosses his mind. He does quiet intensity well, and he is truthful and riveting. In terms of talent, I can't think of another young American actor today that reminds me of Sean Penn or even De Niro like Teller does.
He holds his own and then some against the formidable J.K. Simmons, letting it rip as Fletcher, a sadistic son of a bitch who abuses students with inspired humiliating rants and soul crushing torture. Fletcher is deeply wrong about his method, which is to force talent out by way of destruction (though, to his credit, it does get the students to practice). He is hateful, but Simmons somehow makes him likable: he inhabits his conviction fully and we can understand his flaw. It's not that he means well. It's not tough love. It's that he believes he has a calling to beat the next Charlie Parker out of someone, both for the love of jazz and for the hurt of being unable to reach those heights of genius himself.
Chazelle sustains the tension between the turning wheels of plot and the complexity of the characters. The outlandish flourishes he indulges in feel earned because the movie is one with the world it portrays; with the music its characters worship. Whiplash is an exhilarating movie. I hope it gets the accolades it deserves this award season.