Argo

It's a great story, very well told by director/protagonist Ben Affleck, based on the true story of Tony Mendez, who concocted a fake film production in order to rescue out of Iran six American embassy employees who were hiding in the house of the Canadian ambassador, at the time of the Iranian hostage crisis.
The movie starts with a lovely, powerful sequence with storyboards that remind us of that once upon a time, there was a democratically elected Iranian leader, a secular man, who decided to nationalize his country's oil industry. In no time, the US and Britain engineered a coup d'etat and in his place put the Shah Reza Pahlavi, who became a monstrous murderer, thief and torturer. It was this intervention that helped create the Islamic Revolution which deposed the Shah, who was granted asylum in the US and never extradited as his the new regime in Iran justly requested. Today we have to deal with these fundamentalist maniacs thanks to our stellar foreign relations fiascoes such as that one. Times were so different then, before our middle eastern misadventures escalated into 9/11, Iraq and Afghanistan, that it was not inconceivable that producers would want to go shoot a film in Iran just as the Revolution was happening. But truth is stranger than fiction.
Affleck plays Mendez, a stonefaced agent specializing in exfiltration (getting people out of messes), who gets the idea to use a fake movie as a cover, when no other cover will hold. There is much enjoyment to be had in the casting of the great John Goodman as the make up effects artist and CIA helper John Chambers, who helps put the fake production together and the marvelous Alan Arkin as Lester Siegel, an old Hollywood shark. Re Alan Arkin all one can say is that nobody in the business lands their lines with such deadpan aplomb. Everything that comes out of his mouth has perfect, devastating timing. Everything has a delicious zing. Goodman is on screen for like five minutes and almost steals the show. But it is the handling of the material that is most interesting. There is nothing funny about the first part of the movie. The violence is palpable, the hatred of America shot in close up (stellar, unobtrusive, but exciting work by cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto), the nerves are frayed. But the moment the Hollywood plan turns up, comedy does too and one wonders if Affleck is going to be able to mesh the tones. Somehow, it works. All the actors are excellent, the jokes land well (except for one they keep repeating over and over), and the movie is very well done, the pacing exciting, the experience thrilling. Affleck is becoming a more confident director with each movie he makes. He greatly underplays plays Mendez as a dry man who is loath to betray feelings. His wooden face as he sits in a negotiation between Arkin and Richard Kind is hilarious. He betrays nothing except for a minuscule flick of recognition, perhaps awe, when Arkin mentions his friend Warren Beatty. This CIA man feels more alien in this meeting than perhaps in any other of his dangerous missions, but he too is impressed by star power. The third act is a nail-biting bit of suspense, including soaring string music (by Alexandre Desplat), just like in the movies, as if to weave the surrealism of the actual story with the fantasy of film. A bit where the fake filmmakers show some Revolutionary guards at the airport the film's storyboards and one of them literally pitches the movie to them in Farsi, with impropmtu sound effects, speaks to the power that stories, and movies, even the most farfetched and ridiculous, have to enthrall an audience. Argo ends too neatly, too happily, like in the movies. It is more of a caper with political sting than an issue movie and it errs on the side of telling a good story, even if it takes liberties, and cuts to the chase, like they do in the movies.

NYFF 2012: No

This third part of Pablo Larraín's trilogy about Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile is the most approachable and crowd pleasing of them all, if not the most rigorous. The movie that put him on the map, Tony Manero, is a carefully crafted, extremely disturbing look at a sociopathic character, played by the fantastic Alfredo Castro, who is obsessed with impersonating John Travolta at a time when his countrymen are being murdered and tortured. His second movie, Post-Mortem, also starring Castro, is also an unsavory tale about a weird man who is confronted by the ugly reality of his country as his job at the morgue becomes too busy. Throughout the trilogy, Larraín seems consumed by the idea of individual indifference in the face of tyranny.
This final installment, based on a play by Antonio Skármeta, and co-written by Pedro Peirano, the writer director of The Maid and Old Cats), follows the travails of advertising creative René Saavedra (a wonderful Gael García Bernal), as he reluctantly decides to help the Chilean opposition craft a TV campaign in order to win a referendum in the last years of that brutal regime. The US, after helping Pinochet gain power by orchestrating a coup d'etat against Salvador Allende, got qualms about the human rights abuses of Pinochet's 15-year dictatorship and pressured for a referendum, the first democratic elections to take place in that country since Pinochet took power. The movie is a fun, although rambling tour into how the opposing campaigns communicated to the Chilean people. "No" means the vote against Pinochet for another term.
Larraín, who has a penchant for stylishly ugly aesthetics, goes all the way by shooting the entire movie in low resolution video, which is what existed in those days. After a while, one gets used to the result, but everything looks hideous. However, this time he stays away from the ugly, violent grotesquerie of his other two films.
René's boss is a Pinochet sympathizer and rich bastard, played by the chamaleonlike Castro, whose agency helps the regime, because he actually supports it ideologically. It's a fun fight between two creative minds, and not necessarily between opposing ideologies, but between young and fresh, and conservative and hanging on to power by whatever means possible. René's boss likes to threaten and harass, much like the regime he represents.
Larraín gets the dynamics and milieu of advertising just right. Very much fun is watching René always use the same bullshit spiel ("Chilean society is ready for this") to sell different campaigns to different clients, regardless of the product. He is not concerned with ideology. He cares about image and fun looking spectacle and the kind of idiotic ads that somehow move a lot of product. The movie starts with an outrageous commercial for a cola called "Free", so hilariously tacky that not even an imaginative director like Larraín could have come up with it as a parody.  Larraín uses actual footage of brutally squelched demonstrations, Pinochet ads, opposition ads, and the commercials of the era and intersperses them with the story of René, in which actual leaders of the opposition movement appear, including Patricio Aylwin, the man who eventually won the election. The choice to unify the quality of the video to the actual footage pays off, even as one's eyes suffer, making the movie seem as real and in the historic moment as possible.
René fights the tendency of the opposition to sound like martyrs and recite the catalogue of horrors under Pinochet's murderous regime. He instinctively understands that even though it may all be true, people don't want to hear it. It dispirits them and makes them afraid to vote against such a well oiled repressive machine. Instead, he fights Pinochet with rainbows, young people dancing on the streets and Chileans eating baguettes at picnics (unrealistic, but it looks pretty, which is what matters). His clients feel this is offensive, but what choice do they have? Since the law is that each party has 15 minutes a night (an eternity) to present a platform, the No party allows René to do his rainbows and "We are the world" ripoffs, but they also sneak in some powerful truth telling ads. Meanwhile, on the other side, the debate hinges upon whether the Generalissimo should always appear in his medal bedecked uniform or wear civilian clothes. When they decide to poke fun at the rainbows and the happy dancing, it backfires, since as René knows, the audience hates negative reinforcement. As he sees himself losing the battle against frivolity and optimism, René's boss bitterly muses that the "Yes" campaign has too many military men, too many fat military wives, too many parades and uniforms. It is as stale and putrid as can be, as befits where it comes from.
Larrain is a great satirist and in No he lets loose and spends a lot of time going from one campaign to the other, and including a lot of fascinating original footage, but which unfortunately makes the energy of the movie flag. Still, No is a very engaging, original, smart film about a man that ends up doing something heroic for his country without really wanting to; an unlikely hero without principles, except that of doing what he knows to do best. García Bernal's stunned reaction to the results of the election, his gradual overcoming with emotion as he goes out into the streets anonymously and the enormity of what happened seeps in, is a gorgeous piece of silent acting. There is great joy at Pinochet's defeat but the movie ends in a bittersweet note as René goes back to selling bullshit, a changed man. The question is whether Chile has really changed with him.

NYFF 2012: The Gatekeepers

This intense, intelligent, eye-opening documentary by Israeli cinematographer Dror Moreh is a series of interviews with six ex-heads of the Shin Bet, the Israeli Security Service. The candor with which Yuval Diskin, Avraham Shalom, Avi Dichter, Yaacov Peri, Carmi Gilon and Ami Ayalon speak, may be shocking for those who insist on looking at the occupation as ignorable historic fallout, or worse, as a security buffer or a messianic calling. These men, who have patrolled the occupied territories and spoken with many Palestinians, are as blunt about their unsavory activities, as about their reckoning of the grave mistake of maintaining the occupation. They ensure Israel's survival by recruiting Palestinians to be informers against terrorists, elicit information from prisoners through harassment techniques short of violent torture, and constantly make decisions to kill targets. Their years of tough experience have led them to believe that the current policies of the State of Israel are leading it towards extinction. They should know.
The film is a crash course on Middle East geopolitics, starting from the Six Day War in 1967, in which Israel conquered the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, after a concerted attack by neighboring Arab countries. This created a Palestinian refugee problem that has become an untenable thorn on the side of Israel and threatens its survival.
The endless, nauseating cycle of violence on both sides is shown with shocking footage of the bloody aftermath of suicide bombings, Israeli tanks razing homes in Gaza, major riots in the two Intifadas, and even some footage of targeted assassinations. The cumulative effect of the carnage on both sides not only makes one queasy, it makes one question the effectiveness of endless retaliation. It's barbaric.
The heads of the Shin Bet like well executed, clean plans in which they kill their targets without harming anyone else. One of their best efforts involved a remotely controlled cellphone that had explosives inside. How they managed to make it available to an important terrorist leader, they don't specify. But as one of them says (looking like the sweetest grandpa in the world), there's nothing better than a clean hit. Unfortunately, clean hits don't always happen. Things are rarely clean, and even more rarely black and white. One of them criticizes American drone attacks in Afghanistan: you target a wedding, you kill everybody around, and you don't even know if the target was actually there. They talk about issues that currently plague the Obama administration, but that nobody in this country is interested in airing, such as drone attacks, collateral damage in targeted assassinations, the use of torture and the pointless escalation of war.
They offer candid explanations of successful missions as well as of terrible blunders. They go into detail about a complex operation designed to take out several important terrorist leaders in Gaza, an operation that because of political pressure, compromised the amount of tonnage they needed to pulverize the house the targets were meeting in, thus allowing all the targets to walk out of the rubble on their own two feet, as one describes it. But they also had to disarm and neutralize a dangerous religious fringe group known as the Jewish Underground, which intended to blow up the Dome of The Rock, the third holiest place in the Muslim world. They prevented the worst Middle East crisis of all time, if not a global conflict, and sent these maniacs to jail, only to see their sentences shortened by the right-wing Likud government. One of them thinks that the worst threat to Israel's survival is not the enemy without, but the messianic, Biblical fringe groups that are supported by the current Bibi regime, which continues populating religious settlements. 
The Shin Bet leaders are not gung-ho ideological bullies. They have to be great pragmatists and weigh every option, looking for all kinds of political and human fallout. Their experience has made them see the occupation in a different way. They all want out. Since Israel is a democracy with legal institutions, some of them had to resign after terrorists who were captured alive were beaten to death by soldiers, or when they botched operations, harming innocent Palestinian civilians. They concede they were unable to prevent the unprecedented assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at the hands of a religious punk. Moreh pointedly shows the horrifying anti-Rabin incitement propaganda created by the far right, which is reminiscent of Nazi propaganda. In fact, Abraham Shalom, one of the most ruthless Shin Bet leaders, even says that the occupation reminds him of the Nazi army. He is careful to distinguish between the extermination of the Jews, to the occupation of Europe by the Germans, which is what the occupation reminds him of. But that these words come out of the mouth of an ex-director of the Shin Bet is unprecedented. In the Q&A after the show, Moreh explained that Shalom was a survivor of the Nazis. Apparently, he was also in charge of the operation that brought Adolf Eichmann to trial in Israel. That Moreh chose not to include this as a justification for Shalom's comment and his ruthlessness defending Israel, shows how tough minded the filmmaker is in his pursuit of changing the status quo. One of the ex-directors says "we have become cruel". It is the unvarnished truth, and it hurts. This is not what Israel was meant to be.
The Gatekeepers shares the political agenda of these men, who have come out publicly to voice their concern about the direction Israel is taking, in which nothing is being done, if not exacerbate an already explosive situation, in order to ease the burden of the occupation for both sides. They all feel contempt for the Israeli political leadership regardless of ideology, which only calculates the collateral damage of public opinion and panders to fear. At the beginning of the film, one of them says that before any operation, the Shin Bet offers the politicians several carefully considered options, but politicians see things in black and white. They only want to know: to do it or not to do it?  As they bear witness, it is much more complicated than that.
What is astounding about this film, beside the candor with which the men speak, unthinkable here in the "land of freedom" that is the US; is that all of them, regardless of their ideology, are unequivocally against more Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, all of them are for a Palestinian state, and all of them are willing to talk to absolutely any enemy, no matter how hateful, brutal and irrational (including Hamas, Ahmadinejad, etc) to inch peace forward. At times, they sound like they almost pine for the likes of Yassir Arafat, now that Israel has to deal with crazier fundamentalist enemies. After all their bloody efforts, they are convinced that talking and listening are the only way.
This taut, gripping, powerful documentary is required viewing for anybody who claims to support Israel as well as for anybody who wants to get a closer look at the complex geopolitical reality of the area. It's not pretty, it's not reassuring, it's shocking and tough as nails, but it is essential.

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.

NYFF 2012: Like Someone in Love

Abbas Kiarostami is back to form in this jewel of a movie set in Japan. This is the second film he makes outside of Iran. His last, Certified Copy, with Juliette Binoche, felt like a clunky conceptual exercise. But Like Someone in Love is much more accomplished and heartfelt. The movie starts with a 14-minute scene in a bar in Tokio, in classic Kiarostami style. We hear a conversation, we don't quite see who's talking, but we have plenty of time to immerse ourselves in the milieu and find out who the movie is about. A young woman is protesting to her jealous boyfriend on the phone that she is with a friend. She is not lying. The friend is there, yet at another table. Through different clues, we discover that she's a young call girl and her pimp (a man who has been hovering in the background, talking to customers), asks her to go see a special client on the outskirts of town. She doesn't want to go. She claims her grandmother is in town and she has to study for her exams, which he dismisses as lame excuses. She wants him to send her friend, who is more feisty and seems more used to the line of work, but he insists it has to be her. She screams at him, but she ends up obeying. He puts her in a cab and off she goes. We get a glimpse of Tokio at night from her point of view, but Kiarostami focuses on her crushing sadness as she listens to several long messages her grandma has left her, trying to get to see her. She is there for the day and her train leaves at 10:30. It's not too late, so the girl asks the driver to drive by the station, where she sees her grandma waiting outside, as she has done for hours, hoping to see her. But she doesn't stop. Kiarostami encapsulates the entire history of the girl (and a good chunk of Japanese culture) on this car ride. Her shame at seeing her grandma, who knows she is a college student, but not a call girl, the fact that she comes from a small town, and she is not like the other small town girls who stayed put and are getting married, according to granny's gossip on the answering machine. It is the height of simplicity and great writing, and it is heartbreaking.
Her mystery customer turns out to be a courteous old man, a literature professor with a taste for Ella Fitzgerald. The movie is about how their random connection develops into a complex bond.
Surprisingly, the minute she arrives, she stops moping and turns on the charm and good manners that modern geishas are expected to have. But she seems sincere. She feels at ease with this man, who no doubt reminds her of her grandma, whom she brings up casually in conversation, as if talking about her could ease the pain of her avoidance. The professor has set an elegant table, made dinner and chilled some champagne. But she goes to the bedroom and undresses, off camera, alarming the old man, who wants to have a civilized evening first, and maybe even last. She falls asleep in his bed. He becomes entangled in this girl's life, with her jealous bully of a boyfriend. Like Someone In Love explores different kinds of love, from love for sale, to ancient unrequited love, to obsessive possessiveness, to filial love, to familiar duty and devotion. In the end, the lives of this unlikely couple intersect, crashing into each other. Kiarostami, working with the added challenge of an alien culture with a different language, is in complete command of his storytelling powers. The movie reminded me of the short stories of Anton Chekhov. It shares Chekhov's wise, poignant observation of people's troubles, a gentle humor but also great sadness. Everybody in the movie is somehow bruised and saved by love. The writing is superb, providing vast panoramas about people's lives in just a few strokes of dialogue. Kiarostami is the undisputed master of shooting inside a car. He makes it look fluid and effortless, and in his hands, the interior of a car becomes a perfect stage for human experience. Like Someone in Love is a tender, sharp, luminous film.