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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
A haunting French film about a temp worker, a Swedish portrait of modern anomie, and the Kingdom of Bhutan's first feature film. Plus: The Oscar-nominated film about the children of sex workers in Calcutta.
Feb 3, 2005 | I'm probably not supposed to give props to the competition like this, but I recently saw New York Times movie critic A.O. Scott speaking on a panel about independent film, and he said something really smart. The panel was mostly a lot of bitching and moaning about how dreary the current state of the American independent scene is, and how we're just drinking the backwash of all those great movies from 1994 to 2000 or so. (I pretty much agree with that, as it happens.)
But then Scott said he feels incredibly lucky to be a film critic right now, and he thinks it's a hopeful time, almost a golden age. He was talking about the explosion of vibrant cinema all over the world, and he's absolutely right. American indie directors seem increasingly divided into those who make emotionless film-geek genre movies (hello, Quentin!) and those who make quirky little navel-gazing meditations about themselves and their endlessly fascinating middle-class friends (hello, Alexander!). In January alone, I saw five movies made in different corners of the planet, and each one was a mind-opening experience. Each reminded me of a contradictory law of cinematic physics: The film world gets more tightly connected all the time, but it's far bigger than we usually realize.
Of course it's true that we have to seek these movies out; you won't find them at the mall, unless your mall is a lot hipper than the ones I visit. If you live anywhere outside a handful of major cities and college towns, you're likelier to see them on video than on the big screen. But that, gentle readers, is why God invented progressive-scan DVD players: If you don't like the Manhattan where I live, you can be a connoisseur of weird art films in Manhattan, Kan., or Manhattan, Nev.
After skipping the last bit of 2004 due to, as all weaselers say, circumstances beyond our control, Beyond the Multiplex is back. (Recommendations: Godard's "Nôtre Musique," sort of, and Sean Penn's performance in "The Assassination of Richard Nixon.") If the god of DVD players is willing, I'll be here every couple of weeks with the latest in foreign and ultra-indie releases, documentaries, disreputable horror flicks and whatever else comes from the kinds of distributors who work out of their apartments with help from the neighborhood Kinko's and an EarthLink address.
There's an embarrassment of riches this time out, from a disturbing French debut film to an old-fashioned Scandinavian emotional bloodbath, a slow-motion road movie in the Himalayan foothills, and a coming-of-age yarn interrupted by a CIA-sponsored coup. And that's not even counting the Oscar-nominated documentary "Born Into Brothels," which I caught up with late and which left me weeping tears of grief and gratitude.
"She's One of Us": Story of a mad temp worker (is that redundant?)
French movies are in a funny period. They keep threatening to fall down a rabbit hole of sadism and self-regard, as do Gaspar Noé's "Irreversible" (which I reluctantly admired), Bruno Dumont's "Twentynine Palms" (an almost comical disaster), Olivier Assayas' "Demonlover" (interminable and unwatchable), Claire Denis' "Trouble Every Day" and so on. But those directors, especially Denis and Dumont, have all made much better movies too, and ambitious young directors keep surfacing in the land of fromage and escargots, many of them women. (See, for instance, Delphine Gleize's "Carnage" and Anne Fontaine's "How I Killed My Father," two of the best films I've seen in recent years.)
