New Directors/New Films is the little sibling of the autumn New York Film Festival. It’s less expensive and less crowded, and I have had a somewhat better track record picking worthwhile movies from the list of unknowns there than at the fall festival.
Co-presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, it has given us the New York premieres of movies like Half Nelson, Into Great Silence, The Devil and Daniel Johnston, Darwin’s Nightmare, Slacker, L.I.E., In the Company of Men, I Shot Andy Warhol, and Welcome to the Dollhouse – plus a whole lot of movies that never get a commercial release.
This year I caught nine out of 26 films. As luck would have it, I missed two of the breakout successes of this year's festival, the Belgian film Congorama and the American The Great Wall of Sound, but I expect they will turn up in theaters in six months or so. Here’s what I did see:
Once, a “verité musical” from Ireland, has only a wisp of a plot, but it does gain considerable charm from its leading man, Glen Hansard, playing a musician who sings on the streets of Dublin for change when not working in his dad’s vacuum repair shop. He meets a Czech émigré (Marketa Iglova), who turns out also to be a songwriter, as well as a classically trained pianist. They are drawn to each other (and of course the audience roots for them to get together), but circumstances keep their friendship platonic – while their aching longing expresses itself in a dozen or so songs, artfully worked into the course of the film. Hansard, lead singer of the band The Frames, is a natural on screen, and gives a very affecting performance as a lonely, big-hearted artist. Iglova, less surefooted with dialogue, is nonetheless appealing, and just fine in the musical scenes. In the end, there’s not much to it as a movie, but Hansard and the songs will stay with you. The CD The Swell Season contains several songs from the film, performed by the two leads.
Glue - This film from Argentina covers familiar territory – disaffected adolescents – but the setting provides a different cultural prism from the many American movies on the subject. The houses and landscapes in the part of Patagonia where our hero, Lucas (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart), lives are fairly bleak (until the very end, when a camping trip reveals a bit of breathtaking landscape) – they resemble lower-middle-class neighborhoods in semi-rural sections of Texas or Florida (for American equivalents, think of Thirteen or Bully). Lucas’s parents don’t get along, and in fact don’t spend much time together. He’s bored and unhappy and restless, and he thinks endlessly about sex – mostly with girls, but also sometimes with his best friend, a football hunk named Nacho (Nahuel Viale). The film’s frank eroticism may attract or repel some viewers. Although too long, it’s very well directed, and the mostly improvised performances are fresh and alive.
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