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DANCER IN THE DARK (Opening night)
After rekindling the classic melodrama with Breaking the Waves and retooling the TV miniseries with The Kingdom, Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier turns his madly inventive, postmodernist imagination to a reworking of the Hollywood musical. The Icelandic pop singer Björk stars in and wrote the score for this fable-like tale of a single mother working in a Midwestern factory in the early sixties; a chain of circumstances, touching on her best friend and co-worker Catherine Deneuve, and the local policeman (David Morse) who is also her landlord, lead to a heart-stopping tragic finale. The musical numbers, built on the neo-realist style pioneered by Stanley Donen, were photographed with a system of over 100 mini-DV cameras positioned around the set. The winner of the Palme d'Or of the 2000 Cannes Film Festival. 134 min. Denmark/Sweden/France, 2000 A Fine Line Features Release
22A Fri. Sept. 22, 8:15pm ATH 22B Fri. Sept. 22, 9:00pm AFH
CHUNHYANG
One of the most ravishing films in this year's festival, Korean director Im Kwon-Taek's latest triumph is also one of the most soul satisfying-as well as a lot of delirious fun. Set in the 18th century, this romantic epic traces the passionate, outlawed love between Chunhyang, the beautiful daughter of a former courtesan, and Mongryong, the haughty (and equally beautiful) son of the provincial governor. When Mongryong is sent away to finish his studies, he unwittingly leaves his lover vulnerable to the sadistic designs of the district's new governor, a man for whom every woman is prey. Thrillingly narrated by a pansori singer, with great guttural whoops and an emotional register to rival that of Maria Callas, CHUNHYANG finds a master director working at the top of his form in a film that exalts a Korean theatrical tradition even as it vividly recalls the more modest legacy of the Hollywood musical (look for Judy Garland in the final musical number). 120 min. South Korea, 2000 A Lot 47 Films Release
23A Sat. Sept. 23, 3:00pm 25A Mon. Sept. 25, 6:00pm
BOESMAN AND LENA
Only an artist equally at home both on stage and behind the camera, such as John Berry, could have devised such a perfect blending of the theatrical and cinematic as this version of Athol Fugard's masterwork. Danny Glover and Angela Bassett are both extraordinary as the title characters, a mixed-race couple scrounging out their existence while memories of their past swirl about and haunt them. An exploration of the price of making emotional contact with others, BOESMAN AND LENA never loses sight of the very real social reality to which Fugard was responding. Tragically, Berry, a victim of the Hollywood blacklist who emigrated to France and there enjoyed a successful career, died mere days before completing the film's post-production; the film stands as a perfect testament not only to his artistry but also to the political commitment that fueled his work. 86 min. France/South Africa, 2000 A Kino International Release
23B Sat. Sept. 23, 6:00pm 24E Sun. Sept. 24, 9:30pm
THE HOUSE OF MIRTH
Director Terence Davies' flawless adaptation of Edith Wharton's great first novel of manners is set among New York's haut monde at the turn of the century. Social encounters, weekends at fashionable country houses, murmuring voices and satin gowns in dim parlors crowded with furniture and bric-a-brac-a sumptuous bell-jar world, too super-civilized for violence. But its Gilded Age mafiosi (Eric Stolz, Laura Linney, Dan Aykroyd, Anthony LaPaglia, all superbly cast) practice a spiritual and socio-economic savagery so subtle it comes into awful focus only gradually--like the slow spread of blood on lace. As sacrificial lamb Lily Bart, Gillian Anderson (X Files) is a revelation; sliding inexorably from the grace money confers, she registers every nuance of Lily's spiritual refinement and social martyrdom. 140 min. UK/USA, 2000
A Showtime Presentation
23C Sat. Sept. 23, 8:30pm 24A Sun. Sept. 24, 1:30pm
A Special Retrospective Presentation
BODY AND SOUL
Presented in collaboration with Jazz at Lincoln Center. In his electrifying 1925 film debut, the great and versatile Paul Robeson played twin brothers obsessed by the same young woman, named Isabelle (Mercedes Gilbert): Isaiah, the escaped convict masquerading as a minister, and his brother Sylvester, an inventor. It sounds like standard fare for silent melodrama, but Oscar Micheaux's physically intense, at times almost hallucinatory film is anything but standard. The first great African-American filmmaker and still one of the bravest, Micheaux used this standard melodramatic situation to delve deeper into the question of race than any of the better-known (and more patronizing) white artists of the period. In its day, BODY AND SOUL was sometimes shown with musical accompaniment by a jazz ensemble, and this time it will be shown with the best jazz orchestra around, the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis, playing a new score by trombonist and composer Wycliffe Gordon. A one-of-a-kind event. 86 min. USA, 1925
Print courtesy of George Eastman House
24B Sun. Sept. 24, 5:00pm AFH 24D Sun. Sept. 24, 8:00pm AFH Tickets $55 to $20; see order form.
KRAPP'S LAST TAPE
and NOT I
During "a late evening in the future," a grey, disheveled figure--bearing a striking resemblance to Samuel Beckett himself, as many have observed--reviews his life via spools of audiotape. With a prescience for the age of the camcorder, the play suggests that the recordings equal the sum total of its only character's existence. Part of the ambitious Beckett Project by Dublin's Gate Theater to film all of Beckett's plays, Atom Egoyan's version boasts the dramatic authority of John Hurt as well as a decided instinct for the Beckettian gesture. Although KRAPP'S LAST TAPE is a prime example of the playwright's affinity for the possibilities of radio, Egoyan brings a real cinematic perspective to the work--paradoxically, of course, since it's achieved through a further refinement of Beckett's vision. 63 min. Canada/Ireland, 2000 Preceded by NOT I. In this short Beckett piece, directed by Neil Jordan, a woman's mouth (Julianne Moore's) is shot in extreme close-up, from various angles, as it spits out stream-of-consciousness memories from an empty life; cumulatively, Moore's lipsticked, mobile orifice begins to look like a chattering hell gate. 14 min. Ireland, 2000
24C Sun. Sept. 24, 7:15pm 25B Mon. Sept. 25, 9:00pm
THE COMEDY OF INNOCENCE
Young Camille, a boy with a penchant for recording quick, almost furtive snippets of the world on his camcorder, has just turned nine. One day he announces that it's getting quite late and he really must go home before his mother becomes worried--a declaration that comes as a surprise to his mother, Ariane (Isabelle Huppert), who's there at home with him. Based on the recently translated novel
The Boy with Two Mothers by Massimo Bontempelli, this new film by Raul Ruiz (Time Regained) is a marvelous invocation of the uncanny, of the sense of living with alternative universes which lurk behind every tree in the park. As a woman determined to keep her son while struggling to comprehend his new world, Isabelle Huppert gives a quietly powerful, beautifully nuanced performance.
98 min. France, 2000
26A Tues. Sept. 26, 6:00pm 28B Thurs. Sept. 28, 9:00pm
THE CIRCLE
In this shocking, politically courageous look at the "other Iran," there's a scene in which a woman goes to light up a cigarette only to be rebuked by a man she doesn't even know. Here, this "other Iran" is not simply the world of women, chadors licking at the edges of the frame, but women willfully, sometimes furiously, in plain sight. Director Jafar Panahi's narrative delicately drifts among several women, each story gracefully melting into another, while a sense of their everyday oppression comes increasingly into sharp focus. In Panahi's first film, The White Balloon (NYFF '95), the subject was a little girl in search of a goldfish; here the theme is women in search of their own selves. Unsentimental and deeply felt, the film has a pulp vigor and bristling moral outrage that mark it as a very new kind of Iranian cinema from first frame to last. 89 min. Iran, 2000
26B Tues. Sept. 26, 9:00pm 27A Wed. Sept. 27, 6:00pm
BROTHER
A magnificent return to form for Japan's reigning master of the gangster film, Takeshi Kitano (Hana-Bi). The director also stars, under his stage name Beat Takeshi, as a yakuza who is banished from Tokyo as a result of a gang war; looking up his younger brother in Los Angeles, he finds his sibling engaged in some highly unprofessional, low-level dealing, and decides to take matters in hand. Soon, he's built up a powerful organization that earns the unwanted attention of the local mafia. Rich in deadpan humor and in spectacularly choreographed violence, BROTHER blends horror and sentimentality in Kitano's patented, thoroughly inimitable style. 107 min. USA, 2000
A Sony Pictures Classics Release
27B Wed. Sept. 27, 9:00pm 28A Thurs. Sept. 28, 6:00pm
FAITHLESS
An aged filmmaker (Erland Josephson) sifts through memories of infidelity, aided by a lovely woman (Lena Endre)--perhaps the star of his new, autobiographical movie? Or a ghost from his guilty past? From giddy sexual trysts through shattering exposure to tragic fallout, this deeply moving film's central act of betrayal is like a stone cast into water; emotional shock waves start small, then engulf lover, husband, wife, and especially their little girl. Ingmar Bergman scripted, drawing on his own experience; Liv Ullmann, star of so many of Bergman's best movies about marriage, directs with uncompromising and compassionate clarity. The cast is uniformly terrific, but Endre is simply astonishing in an almost unbearable revelation of body and soul. FAITHLESS is that rarity, a contemporary film about the true, everyday consequences of passion. 155 min. Sweden, 2000 A Samuel Goldwyn Films/Fireworks Pictures Release
29A Fri. Sept. 29, 6:00pm 2B Mon. Oct. 2, 8:30pm
GEORGE WASHINGTON
Floating somewhere in the limbo between Tobacco Road and a post-industrial urban moonscape, GEORGE WASHINGTON is decorated with the tactile wreckage of steel mills and railroads, and the more amorphous remains of a disposable society. It's true that the movie's young souls adrift articulate no particular politics--but that's precisely what makes this ambiguous film as potent and eloquent as any agitprop that ever was. There's no doubt that director David Gordon Green's first feature is an audacious, low-flying fantasy. Nor any doubt that it marks the debut of an original filmmaking mind. George Washington uses children--mostly black, but of varying races and ages--to tell its story, about one odd kid with an unclosed skull who wears a football helmet and has strange aspirations of heroism. What that heroism means, and the comic-tragic means by which the strange young George attains his dreams, is the stuff of soul-disturbing resonance. An intoxicating mix of hardware and reveries, this is a movie about kids that's anything but a kid's movie. 90 min. USA, 2000 A Cowboy Booking International Release
29B Fri. Sept. 29, 9:30pm 1A Sun. Oct. 1, 1:30pm
GOHATTO
It has been fourteen years since the last feature film from Nagisa Oshima, the presiding spirit of Japan's New Wave of the 1960s. Like Oshima's scandalous
In the Realm of the Senses (NYFF '76), GOHATTO deals with the anti-authoritarian sway of sexuality, a nearly taboo topic in Japan. The setting is a 19th century samurai school, where an impossibly handsome new recruit (Ryuhei Matsuda) spreads trouble and desire through the ranks of enlisted men and officers alike (among them, BROTHER's director and star, Beat Takeshi). Filmed in a stately, burnished style, with an extraordinarily inventive use of artificial exteriors filmed in a Tokyo studio, GOHATTO is a late-life statement from one of the genuine masters of the medium. 100 min. Japan, 2000 30A Sat. Sept. 30, 12:00 noon
2A Mon. Oct. 2, 6:00pm
SMELL OF CAMPHOR, FRAGRANCE OF JASMINE
Bahman, an Iranian film director, has not been allowed to work by the Post-Revolutionary Censor Board for the past 20 years. Somewhat in desperation, he accepts an assignment from Japanese TV to make a documentary about funeral rites, which gradually becomes a film about his own funeral, as well as about the fear of his own impending death. A politically charged parable that offers a bracingly different look at the current situation in Iran, SMELL OF CAMPHOR marks the return to directing (after a 24-year absence) of Bahman Farmanara, a key figure of the pre-1979 Iranian cinema, who also (perhaps not surprisingly) gives an elegant performance as the lead character. Winner of almost every major award at the 2000 Fajr Film Festival in Tehran, SMELL OF CAMPHOR is a graceful, moving work whose unconcealed anger and bitterness are tempered by a wisdom that understands the need to move beyond the past. 93 min. Iran, 2000
30B Sat. Sept. 30, 3:00pm 3B Tues. Oct. 3, 9:00pm
A New York Film Festival Retrospective
SEVEN MEN FROM NOW
In the mid-1950s, director Budd Boetticher and actor Randolph Scott teamed up for a series of finely etched, elegiac westerns which count among the greatest glories of American cinema of the time. Sadly, the first of these, SEVEN MEN FROM NOW, was for years unavailable; happily, the film has now been beautifully restored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Scripted by Burt Kennedy, SEVEN MEN FROM NOW follows aging lawman Ben Stride (Scott) as he burns a trail of murderous revenge across a hardscrabble landscape searching for his wife's murderers; along the way he picks up a homesteading Eastern couple as well as an immensely sociable, smart-talking outlaw, Big Masters (Lee Marvin). A trained bullfighter, Boetticher imagined his films as a series of feints, dares and passes, all leading to the final, inevitable showdown in the middle of the ring; in SEVEN MEN FROM NOW, that approach is transformed into a haunting moral vision.
78 min. USA, 1956 30C Sat. Sept. 30, 6:00pm
Festival Centerpiece: POLLOCK
When the struggling, self-torturing Jackson Pollock has his epiphany of drips in Ed Harris's Pollock--the artist's first encounter with the style that would become his signature--there's the sound of a banjo mixed in among the music. Then we remember that Pollock has said he once loved a girl who played the banjo before alcohol and art criticism became the twin terrors of his life. The actor's long-planned, long-delayed biography of the seminal abstract-expressionist (and his own directorial debut) couldn't have been better cast, not physically--Harris is better looking than his subject, but otherwise they're a wiry, balding match. But Harris also inhabits, with both respect and actorly abandon, the sometimes tender, often pathetic aspects of Pollock's psychology: his sense of inferiority before such European counterparts as Willem de Kooning (Val Kilmer); his resentment of onetime champion Clement Greenberg (Jeffrey Tambor); the love turned-savage-by-booze for Lee Krassner (Marcia Gay Harden), his self-sacrificing artist wife. Pollock had his art movement; Harris has his movie. 117 min. USA, 2000
30D Sat. Sept. 30, 8:30pm 1B Sun. Oct. 1, 4:00pm
THE GLEANERS AND I
An intimate, picaresque inquiry into French life, as lived by the country's poor and its provident, as well as by the film's own director, Agnès Varda. The aesthetic, political and finally moral point of departure for Varda are gleaners, those individuals who pick at already-reaped fields for the odd potato, the leftover turnip, and in previous generations were immortalized by the likes of Millet and Van Gogh. Varda isn't particularly interested in immortalizing today's gleaners but in investigating the reasons that lead the anonymous (desperate and quixotic both) and the celebrated (including a famous chef) to sift through our detritus. Along her journey, Varda constructs a portrait of France that is every bit as modern as the digital camera with which she does her filming, and in the process comes up with her finest, most effective work since Vagabond. 76 min. France, 2000
1C Sun. Oct. 1, 7:00pm
IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE
Set in Hong Kong in 1962, Wong Kar-wai's latest film is a romantic idyll in which all the sex and confessions have been excised, leaving gestures and shards of feeling in their place. Nominally about two married people who discover that their spouses are having an affair with each other, IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE is instead more about aquarium-green and gold-vermilion, the moist tenderness at play in Tony Leung's eyes and the way in which Maggie Cheung's fingers brush against a doorjamb. As always, love is ephemeral, the mood indigo. More quiet and still than much of the director's recent work, the film is achingly, shockingly beautiful-somehow, and somehow rightly, it ends at Angkor Wat, the great Hindu temple in whose shadow this idyll about love and time lost comes to a whispery, mysterious close. 97 min. Hong Kong, 2000
A USA Films Release 1D Sun. Oct. 1, 9:30pm 3A Tues. Oct. 3, 6:00pm
YI YI (A ONE AND A TWO)
A masterpiece of synchronicity, empathy and narrative control, YI YI is like a particularly fine timepiece, as fascinating for the way it functions as the way it's formed. The best film yet by one of the world's leading filmmakers, YI YI not only affirms Edward Yang's greatness, but crystallizes his work of the last ten years. Once again, Yang probes the conflicts and anxieties of life in Taiwan, but this time through the prism of family. Middle-aged businessman NJ is having personal and professional crises-his computer firm is in flux and he's just met an old girlfriend. Meanwhile, Grandma has had a stroke, for which his daughter blames herself; his wife runs off to a religious retreat; and his son is having trouble adjusting to it all, perhaps because he's a genius. The parallel motions of the story, the way lives repeat each other or reflect the choices that people make in life, establish YI YI as an emotional and intellectual wrecking ball. It would be remarkable if only for the nuanced performances or for the delicacy of the narrative or for the gentleness and affection with which Yang considers his characters. Together, these ingredients make it both irresistible and overwhelming. 173 min. Taiwan, 2000 A Winstar Cinema Release
4A Wed. Oct. 4, 6:30pm
KIPPUR
In this haunting remembrance of things past, filmmaker Amos Gitai conjures up a shattering vision of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, in which he himself was wounded. Two friends head for the Golan Heights to join up with their unit, but are deflected into a medical team that helicopters in to rescue the wounded. From the moment that the reservists begin driving out of peacetime to the front lines, literally searching for the location of war, Gitai edges us into ever more lunar landscapes where time, flesh, the very earth, are fatally susceptible to distortion and/or disintegration. KIPPUR is less about a specific struggle between states than it is an evocation of the hallucinatory state of war: confusion, shock, numbing fatigue, constant cacophony. Gitai makes us experience bone-deep the impact of the battlefield-personal and cosmic, realistic and surreal-and earns KIPPUR pride of place in a tradition defined by Sam Fuller's Steel Helmet and Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket. 123 min. Israel/France, 2000 A Kino International Release
5A Thurs. Oct. 5, 6:00pm 7D Sat. Oct. 7, 9:00pm
AMORES PERROS
In this stunning debut, Alejandro González Iñarritu effortlessly interweaves three complex storylines that collide via a terrible car crash (seen three times, from very different perspectives). From Mexico City's mean streets to posh high-rises, AMORES PERROS demonstrates fast and furiously contemporary city life and character: a young punk on fire for his brother's battered wife stumbles into the world of dog-fighting; an injured supermodel's designer pooch disappears under her apartment's floorboards; an ex-radical turned street person rescues a gunshot Rotweiler. Showing a sure narrative hand and pedal-to-the-metal style, González Iñarritu drives this gripping film from Tarantinoesque action into Buñuelian surrealism and back again, powering the ride with his own uncompromising vision of love's labours lost. (Warning: Though a disclaimer states no animal was harmed, the film contains a number of graphic scenes in which dogs appear to be injured or killed.) 153 min. Mexico, 2000
5B Thurs. Oct. 5, 9:00pm 8C Sun. Oct. 8, 9:00pm
BEFORE NIGHT FALLS
Unquestionably, Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas was one of the major talents to have emerged from the Latin American literary boom of the 1960s; yet, running afoul of the Castro regime as both a political dissident and an openly gay man, Arenas was harassed, imprisoned and physically abused--all the more so because he managed to smuggle out and publish his works abroad. Adapting Arenas' brilliant, posthumously published autobiography, painter and now very much film director Julian Schnabel magnificently captures the style and flavor of Arenas' writing, with brief, intensely vivid scenes that evoke a succession of remembrances. He is immeasurably aided by a wonderful, star-making performance by Spanish actor Javier Bardem as Reinaldo, who embodies both the strength and vulnerability of a man for whom, as he wrote during his New York exile, "there is really no solace anywhere." 125 min.
USA, 2000
6A Fri. Oct. 6, 6:00pm 8B Sun. Oct. 8, 6:00pm
THE TASTE OF OTHERS
This buoyant, comic, tender and eccentric film introduces us to people we know exist, but whom the movies tend to forget: Great actresses who don't get the breaks. Bored rich women with no sense of style. Sexy, knowing barmaids who can find love. And, most affectingly, the mustachioed Babbitt played by Jean-Pierre Bacri, who patronizes the arts because he really wants cultural enlightenment--but who may simply lack the capacity for anything but kindness. Director and performer Agnès Jaoui, co-screenwriter of Un Air de Famille, and Same Old Song, casts herself as part of the touching and soulful ensemble that roams through this very funny and very French film. Jaoui's digressions--her comic chauffeur-bodyguard team, for instance, which functions as a Gallic, baggy-pants Rosencrantz and Guildenstern--are precisely timed. The condescension with which Bacri's character, Castella, is treated by his would-be artist friends is uncomfortably accurate. The various romantic entanglements are developed with a real-life combination of wary resistance and suicidal recklessness. All in all, THE TASTE OF OTHERS succeeds in being both a down-to-earth comedy of manners, and an effervescent cocktail of colliding humanity. 112 min. France, 2000 An Offline Releasing Presentation in association with Artistic License Films
6B Fri. Oct. 6, 9:15pm 7C Sat. Oct. 7, 6:00pm
EUREKA
The second feature from Japan's Shinji Aoyama, EUREKA is an elegiac epic about loss, mourning and community that has reminded more than one critic of John Ford's stirring work of the 1950s. A small town in the southwest is the scene of an attempted bus hijacking, which leaves a dozen people dead and three traumatized survivors: the driver (Koji Yakusho, of Imamura's The Eel) and two adolescents, a brother and sister. Unable to reinsert themselves into daily life, the trio fix up an old camper and take to the road, traveling through a backwater Japan photographed in black-and-white scope. A family is formed, but mysterious killings begin to occur in every town the group visits. EUREKA, which painlessly occupies a leisurely 3-hour and 37-minute running time, marks the emergence of a world-class talent.
217 min. Japan, 2000 7A Sat. Oct. 7, 10:30am
CHRONICALLY UNFEASIBLE
A red-hot poker thrust into the Brazilian body politic, this passionate cry from Sergio Bianchi (Romance, NDNF '89) sets into motion six characters whose meanderings, misadventures and interactions expose sad traditions of corruption and hypocrisy. Proudly agitprop, the film avoids dramatic and narrative conventions, instead challenging viewers with its confrontational, Brechtian-flavored exploration of the social, economic and sexual relations that define the management, staff and customers of an upscale Sao Paulo restaurant. Not since the heady days of Cinema Novo has a Brazilian film caused so much intense reaction and heated debate at home, yet non-Brazilians may also find Bianchi's accusations uncomfortably applicable. 101 min. Brazil, 2000
7B Sat. Oct. 7, 3:00pm
PLATFORM
Spanning the decade between 1979 and 1989, Jia Zhang Ke's second feature is a chronicle of social change, from Maoist fanaticism to capitalist indolence, as traced through a group of young performers who live in a small town in Shanxi province. Initially, they are all members of a cultural commune, singing propaganda operas before an impassive audience; as time passes and the old-time ideological structures fade away, the troupe privatizes and takes to the road, eventually offering break-dancing spectacles and punk rock concerts before crowds just as impassive but very much smaller. Warm, lively, rich in character and beautifully staged, PLATFORM recalls the early work of Hou Hsiao-hsien but with a political engagement all its own. 198 min. China/Japan, 2000
8A Sun. Oct. 8, 1:30pm
CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON (Closing Night)
In CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON
, the power and importance of family--Ang Lee's favorite theme--is explored within a spectacularly beautiful and kinetic dreamwork about legendary martial-arts heroes. Retiring master Li Mu Bai (played with transcendent Zen calm by Chow Yun Fat) might settle down with the woman warrior (the luminous Michelle Yeoh) he's always loved--until potential daughter-disciple Jen (Zhang Ziyi) turns up, torn between an evil "witch-mother" and the "way of the Tao." Matrix fight-choreographer Yuen Wo-Ping delivers breathtaking action sequences that often move like epic sword-dances, over and through castles and mystical landscapes. CROUCHING TIGER offers a cornucopia of cinematic riches: the movie's first incredible pas de deux (between martial-arts divas Yeoh and Ziyi) inspired a spontaneous ovation during Cannes' premiere screening. 120 min. Taiwan, 2000 A Sony Pictures Classics Release
9A Mon. Oct. 9, 9:00pm AFH
The 38th New York Film Festival is sponsored by Grand Marnier
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