Hoots and Hollers #3: Report from NYFF61 As A Layperson Who Spent Roughly $250 On Movie Tickets
Movie star Glen Powell, Italians (again), and one for Mahler.
I had every intention of sending this newsletter in mid-October, and instead found myself incapable of sitting down and focusing on writing. If you’re reading this, I sincerely hope you have at least called your representative to demand a ceasefire (and again, and again). I’m here now belatedly with this dispatch from NYFF, and tomorrow I’ll send around my October round-up. From there, I hope to get back on a relatively regular track of newsletter writing.
New York Film Festival 61
This year was my third NYFF and the first one for which I was fully prepared: I had a crazy color-coded spreadsheet and a willingness to spend an egregious amount of money, I texted friends well in advance, we coordinated who’d try to buy what, I wrote “NYFF TIX ON SALE” really big on my calendar. And the result was (with a little help from my friends and despite entering the online queue at #4635) I fucking nailed it!
Hit Man
This ticket came courtesy of my friend Hooman, who had early membership access. Thank you, Hooman!
I cannot fathom a better way to have kickstarted NYFF than with Hit Man. Hit Man is quintessential hoot and holler, a movie that at every turn is asking: what would be the fun thing to do here? During one scene toward the end (you’ll know it when you see it), the whole audience burst into applause before the film was even done. I have maybe never been in a room with people that buzzed up.
Hit Man is, in Linklater’s own words, a dream combination of noir and screwball comedy—it’s got the crime, the femme fatale, but it also has romance, zany situations and joke after joke after joke. Foolishly, I was terrified this movie was going to come to a boring conclusion about the downsides of lying and was instead delighted to find a genuinely inspiring movie about the power of faking it til we make it. We can change our lives through pretend!
For years, Glen Powell has been on the precipice of stardom. The combination of Hit Man’s sure-to-be algorithmically buried Netflix release and the bafflingly charmless trailer for Anyone But You will probably bring him more of the same but I don’t care that the world doesn’t agree: Glen Powell is a star. He just has it, that ineffable something that separates run of the mill handsome dudes from movie stars, and he also has it in spades with his costar Adria Arjona. In my dream world, these two make a variation on the screwball comedy together every other year.
Bleat
Bleat is a short Yorgos Lanthimos made a couple years ago with Emma Stone as part of a collaboration with the Greek National Opera. I went to see Bleat because I couldn’t get tickets to Poor Things. The live musical accompaniment was cool but I admit that this was almost shockingly bad, a parodically vague-but-horny piece of art house cinema that felt like the work of a much less practiced artist. I am still excited for Poor Things!
Household Saints and Renata
These were two films by Nancy Savoca. The first, Renata, was a very good short about an Italian Catholic woman attempting to leave her husband. I admit I spent much of its short runtime thinking about the current state of jeans. There are no good jeans anymore!
Savoca’s feature Household Saints, almost-lost1 and gorgeously restored, is an overwhelming case of me-bait: 1950s Little Italy, an offbeat romance between two weirdos, cooking (sometimes well, sometimes really badly), sausage, opera, Catholicism, being a girl, decorating a girl bedroom in a Jesus-y way2, baby Michael Imperioli in glasses, a date to see Last Year at Marienbad. Household Saints has a lot of what I love about my favorite novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. It is also a warm, multigenerational story of New York immigrants in an ethnic enclave and girlhood, dense with details of the neighborhood and the people who populate it. Household Saints is essentially two films Frankensteined lovingly into one: the romance between Vincent D’Onofrio and Tracey Ullman and the story of a teenaged Lili Taylor who, to the surprise of her parents, is intent on becoming a Carmelite nun. Its wild tonal shifts understandably don’t work for everyone, but I love it because really, sometimes life is many things at once and very, very weird.
My BAM Double Bill: Priscilla and The Taste of Things
A trick with NYFF is that it is quite easy to get tickets to the screenings they do off-site at BAM and MOMI. Granted, it turned out I was a little too hasty and basically nobody wanted to see The Taste of Things as much as I did—for the rest of the festival, tickets for this movie remained amply available and I really didn’t have to subject myself to a late night double bill after a full day out with friends in Yonkers, but how was I supposed to know that. France had chosen it as their Oscar submission! Juliette Binoche!
In any case, despite being sleepy and very hungry (and I do not suggest going into TTOT hungry), I loved both these movies very much. Priscilla is exactly what I wanted from Sofia Coppola: midcentury America Marie Antoinette. They’re not really the same movie though. They are both about privileged girls, very young, trapped in their perfect dollhouses but Marie Antoinette is a queen filling her empty, loveless life with shoes, shoes, cakes, parties, parties, shoes, parties. It’s a constant swirl of cream and Converse and needle drops. Priscilla on the other hand is boring. Priscilla doesn’t get to choose her own dresses or throw parties or have friends. She just sits, sits, sits in Graceland, waiting for Elvis to come home and shine a bit of his light on her before leaving again. It is powerfully claustrophobic, sad, and then cathartic and Jacob Elordi is the perfect Coppola Elvis3: threateningly tall, charming but sinister.
The Taste of Things (originally The Pot-au-Feu, which is a much better title!) is not breaking any new ground, but what if I like the ground? Food is sex, food is love. To truly live life is to love and eat. French people are always saying this, and why shouldn’t they? It’s true! What makes the long, meticulous cooking sequences in The Taste of Things such a pleasure to watch is that the camera is constantly in motion, balletically gliding over stews and fish and ice cream. Something else I love about this movie is that because it is set in 1885, some of the food looks kind of gross. To be clear, most dishes look completely divine (I’d kill for a bowl of the titular-ish dish and feel very “same” about the woman in my audience who gasped loudly when Juliette Binoche opened a metal canister to reveal churned ice cream) but there are a few menu items that look wholly unappetizing to the modern gaze, which I think of Babette’s Feast too. The trick is that you are utterly drawn in by the care with which these movie chefs prepare the food. The chefs here are Binoche and Benoît Magimel and I don’t want to knock their obvious talent, but their insane chemistry surely has something to do with the fact that they were together for 6 years and share a daughter. I think people may dismiss The Taste of Things for its sort of old-fashioned, 90s-esque European niceness, but I was completely won over by its utter romanticism.
The Zone of Interest
To the people who disliked Martin Scorsese imbuing Ernest Burkhart in Killers of the Flower Moon with humanity and a twisted-but-real love for Mollie: have I got a movie for you. The Zone of Interest is a movie from which all my friends emerged with the take “this would have made a great short.” I don’t mean to sound so dismissive. I genuinely respect Jonathan Glazer’s rigorousness in avoiding putting sympathetic Nazis or the gruesome horrors of the Holocaust on screen yet again. I think there’s a lot of validity to the notion that there is no ethical way to depict the atrocities of the extermination camps on screen without making it a sort of spectacle, no matter how sensitively it is approached and perhaps Glazer’s method is the only just way to approach the subject. And yet as I sat there watching the banal day-to-day of these Nazis I could not escape the nagging thought: I get it. And further: I would never act like that—so cold, so alien. I imagine this feeling was the opposite of its intent.
La Chimera
Here is another stark case of me-bait: a merry band of Etruscan grave robbers (tombaroli! Great word) dressed pretty circus-like, led by a rumpled archaeologist (Josh O’Connor speaking mostly Italian, great here and great in The Crown) roam around Tuscany looking for treasure. The film is interrupted at times by a folk ballad about the tombaroli. Isabella Rossellini is in this and lives in a crumbling villa. I adored this film so much. This movie involves two ideas that are immediately interesting to me. It is about an archaeologist balancing his true love of history and art with the sacrilege of profiting from it so callously. It is also about the way the barrier between our world and the next feels thinner in ancient tombs and temples (make fun of me all you want, I believe this!). Is there an inherent desecration to trying to uncover the secrets of the world and of the past? Perhaps.
Maestro
The important thing to know about Maestro going in is that it’s not a movie about the life of Leonard Bernstein, famous composer and conductor. It’s a movie about Leonard Bernstein, a man who loves TOO MUCH, and his marriage to Felicia Montealegre, and how it can really suck to be the wife of a man who is a famous composer and conductor and also a man who loves too much. Once you get into the rhythm of Bradley Cooper’s overwhelmingly sincere portrait of a marriage, scored loudly to Mahler and some Bernstein greatest hits, it is immensely pleasurable. There’s a fluidity to his work that’s kind of breathtaking. I saw a lot of exceptionally romantic films this whole festival, and I basically loved every minute of these—in fact the dance-like quality of the camerawork in Maestro reminded me a lot of The Taste of Things. The day after I saw this movie I went to the Met and afterwards I walked in the rain through Central Park, with the autumn leaves turned yellow and orange, and listened to Mahler and felt like crying (and then it turned out I hadn’t walked through the park but had somehow accidentally doubled back to the East side, so then I had to walk back through the park).
Bonus: I saw Perfect Days at something called New York Film Week.
What to say about Perfect Days? It’s a travelogue of Tokyo’s many beautiful public toilets, it’s a cleaning Tik Tok, it’s boy Jeanne Dielman, it’s a reminder that if I don’t have a Japanese 7-Eleven strawberry milk within the next 365 days I am going to combust. For months I have been singing the title Perfect Days in my head to the tune of “Perfect Day” by Hoku from Legally Blonde instead of the Lou Reed song from which it obviously draws its title. One might say Kôji Yakusho is the new Sandra Bullock: too hot to believably be alone, but totally pulls it off.
I’m sympathetic to the view that this movie is a little too cute—certainly that final needle drop doesn’t quite work for me—but if you couldn’t tell already, I am soft-hearted and I think it’s nice to just look up sometimes. My Japanese mom loves to talk about that Danish concept that went kind of viral some years ago that the secret to their national happiness is just contentedness. This is of course, a core Buddhist tenet too—freedom from want by wanting less. Day to day I subscribe more to Kim Cattrall’s “I don’t want to be in a situation for even an hour where I’m not enjoying myself” brand of hedonism, but like many people with a desk job I fantasize constantly about some kind of meaningful hands-on job that somehow affords the same benefits. Besides, maybe the Cattrall method isn’t so incompatible with Buddhist contentment after all. Sometimes it’s embarrassing how happy I am after a brisk walk and a $7 snack. Adam and I spend a lot of our relationship complimenting ourselves on our ability to craft perfect days. Ours don’t involve cleaning any toilets, but they generally involve eating a big sandwich outside and walking around and seeing a movie. Nothing too complex.
The film was never released on DVD, had a murky rights lineage due to companies getting bought up by one another and then going under, an archival print thought to be at UCLA (I believe) went missing. What a miracle that we have this!
I have in my room 1 small decorative cross, 1 small Virgin Mary figurine, a little glass vial for holy water with the Virgin of Guadalupe on it, and a small portrait of some kind of saint.
There was a lot of Twitter nonsense pitting the two Elvises against each other and obviously the truth is: they are BOTH great Elvises, perfectly attuned to their respective Elvis films.