By Ela Bittencourt
Marielle Heller, 'The Diary of a Teenage Girl' (2014)
The 44th edition of New Directors/New Films festival (ND/NF) – co-presented by the Film Society at Lincoln Center and MoMA – did not shy away from crowd pleasers. Among them, the viewers could choose from Franz Kafka’s The Castle (1928) transported to Mongolia, a lush adventure set in the Jordanian desert, a teenager’s sexual quest in the 1970s California, and a vision of Russia’s social and economic doomsday that echoed the 2015 Oscar-nominated foreign-language film, Leviathan.
Darhad Erdenibulag and Emyr ap Richard’s K (2015) was close enough to the original, with just the right touch of local flourish, to please ardent Kafka lovers, while proving a worthy follow-up to a similarly austere and formalist earlier adaptation by Michael Haneke (The Castle, 1997). Marielle Heller’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2014) channeled teenage lust, lightening it up with brief inserted animations, and indulged in a close point-of-view of its droopy-faced under-age female protagonist, prompting Rajendra Roy, the curator at the Museum of Modern Art where the film opened the ND/NF festival, to note that the era of movies made by men had passed. Meanwhile, Naji Abu Nowar’s Theeb (2014) compressed the complex geopolitical landscape of the Ottoman Empire (as also depicted in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, 1962) into a microcosm, in which a young Bedouin boy avenges his brother’s senseless murder at the hands of feuding tribes. Finally, both Yuriy Bykov’s The Fool (2014) and Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s The Tribe (2014) used contemporary Russia and post-Soviet Ukraine as backdrops for grim social dystopias, in which love and acts of compassionate solidarity are brutally stamped out.
Naji Abu Nowar, ‘Theeb’, 2014
But it was the less definable films that ultimately confirmed the festival’s ambition to highlight the world’s boldest young film talents. Most of the films in this grouping were highly discursive and open-ended. They felt so full of life – of minute entanglements, fleeting revelations of the Joycean kind – that they produced an almost unbearable sensory richness. Unbearable, because like much of our age, these films percolate with subterranean disquietude, introducing the troubling question of how one is to live amidst so much violence, particularly at a young age. Among these, Bas Devos’s Violet (2014) gently traces the stages of alienation of a teenage boy, Jesse, who witnesses a fatal stabbing of a friend in a shopping mall. Stunned and helpless, Jesse must find his way back to the familiar comforts of biking with friends, and into the embrace of his supportive parents. Devos stresses the primacy of sensory experience – the rich colours and the sensuous textures of Nicolas Karakatsanis’s cinematography, matched with small but decisive gestures, amplify the scant dialogue in a story that painfully demonstrates how we might become estranged from our own lives. Devos conveys poignantly the pains of affirming one’s identity at a young age, after a shock that disrupts the very sense of one’s personhood.
Virgil Vernier, ‘Mercuriales’, (2014)
One of my favorite films at the ND/NF this year, Virgil Vernier’s Mercuriales (2014), is a metaphysical, bloodless, vampiric tale, perfectly suited to our soulless capitalist age. Here the violence is more covert, suggested by two glass towers located in a Paris suburb, the eponymous Mercuriales, which evoke 9/11 and the threat of global terrorism while also serving as temples to vacuous consumerism. It is a sight that Vernier gazed upon growing up, and his film is full of images that are uncannily familiar, casual and comforting as only childhood memories can be, but also threatening, as in children’s macabre fairy tales. The towers is where two young receptionists, Moldovan Lisa (Ana Neborac) and French Joane (Philippine Stindel) meet. The two become instant soul sisters, though their bond is illusory, as relationships formed in youth can be; a fortuitous meeting that dissolves at a season’s end. When Lisa quits her job, the two women spend most of their time babysitting, visiting a sex club, or wandering about the city-maze of ugly, misshaped apartment complexes. They go on a brief retreat to Joane family’s country house. But Joane, always the restless type, escapes the idyll into casual sex, leaving Lisa brooding in the empty house.
For all of its coherent storyline, Mercuriales is predominantly a collage. Vernier inserts television footage of riots (glimpsed at a diner where Lisa is sitting), but also photographs of burning cars and buildings, while a female voice intones in the voiceover, ‘All this is but a nightmare.’ There is then the sense of being suspended somewhere between reality and dreaming, heightened by Lisa’s spiritual bent (her evocations of spirits, her conversations with an owl, which may be read as a ghost of Lisa’s disappeared cousin). Mercuriales is particularly evocative in capturing Parisian suburbs, the surveillance, people, and the marred landscapes of urban desolation, which in Lisa’s eyes are novel and foreign, but also woven into her own country’s macabre folk beliefs and violent past. Vernier does a splendid job of recasting Paris as a place of new, confused cultural and geographical markers, reimagining his city through the eyes of his estranged protagonists. This effect is heightened by Jordane Chouzenoux’s striking 16mm cinematography, and by James Ferraro’s eerie electronic score. And since this is a story about women, preoccupied with female stereotypes, it at times hinted at Vera Chytilova fearsome Daisies (1966), though in a postmodern fashion where games are more somber, or even sinister, rather than camp.
Nadav Lapid, ‘The Kindergarten Teacher’, (2014)
Another stellar filmmaker, Nadav Lapid, showcases his uncompromising, assured storytelling in The Kindergarten Teacher (2014). Nira, a beautiful kindergarten teacher with stoic features and a sullen fieriness, meets a five-year-old prodigy, Yoav. Yoav delivers fluid lines of poetry while pacing the kindergarten courtyard in a trance, usually after he declares, ‘I have a poem.’ It is a state of daydreaming, alarming and messianic. Yoav’s past is fraught with sadness – his parents are separated and his profligate, successful restaurateur-father lies to the boy that his mother is dead. Yet in many ways, Yoav is just a shy, ordinary boy. Still, his poetry won’t go away, and neither does Nira’s increasing obstinacy that Yoav must be nurtured against all odds, his precocious lyrics scrupulously recorded and published. It isn’t long before Nira has Yoav call her to jot down his lines, visits the boy’s uncle, an unconvinced and frustrated literary man himself, and then the boy’s father, who refuses to support her endeavors. By the time we are introduced to Nira’s own children – a son who, much to Nira’s regret, stays on in the military, and a teenage daughter – they are faint echoes of her newly found passion, proving that poetry has been delegated to an agonizing death, in an age that favours money and force over glorious, deliberate thought. Add to this the fact that Nira is herself a fledgling poet, and even passes off Yoav’s poetry as her own in a poetry workshop, testing it out on her colleagues and gaining the affections of an intrigued teacher, and a somewhat disquieting picture emerges of a woman whose conviction can be icy-cold, and who cannot be read merely as a devotee. In the film’s apex, it is left to Yoav, who has now been carried away from his new school, to save himself from greatness, or perhaps just from the mad, maddening chokehold of Nira’s misplaced passions.
Zia Anger, ‘I Remember Nothing’, (2015)
Two of the most ambitious films I saw this year at ND/NF were shorts, both world premieres. Zia Anger’s I Remember Nothing (2015) possesses a frightening Lynchian fluidity. It tells a story of Joan, a college softball player, who leaves class early for practice. Split into chapters titled after stages of an epileptic seizure, the film dares the audience to lose itself in its nightmarish twists. We see Joan metamorphose, wearing the same uniform but played by different actresses in each chapter. We follow her gaze as she ogles a female bystander at the field, and has an absurdist encounter with the woman and her boyfriend. When Joan suddenly loses consciousness, the dreams are revealed as a medical condition. Yet Joan’s slippery identities and latent sexual passions linger, without needing to be explained. I Remember Nothing is beautifully controlled, and its cerebral allure and the frankness with which it delves into a woman’s psyche bring to mind the films of Joanna Hogg, who was a revelation at the 51st New York Film Festival.
Zhou Tao’s Blue and Red (2014), a winner of the Han Nefkens/BACC Asian Contemporary Art Award, takes place on the peripheries of unspecified public events. The Chinese artist may be at a peace rally, a celebration or, at another time, at the scene of a violent clash with the police. He films spectators sleeping on the steps of government buildings, spreading mats and tents, dancing or meditating. He captures their rapturous faces in the afterglow of a stadium’s neon lights, while at other times he depicts them in most prosaic moments. But throughout, the restrictive setup and the amplified ambient sound create a nearly apocalyptic aura, imbuing small gestures with uncanny grandeur. Indefinable, Blue and Red is heartbreaking in its evocation of the shutout masses, against a giant dome pulsing with light. Other times, a sense of togetherness, of participation possible even on the fringes, fills this work with an otherworldly calm.