The Chosen Few

Small in scope, the New York Film Festival unearths disproportionate treasures.

by Sam Adams

EMPIRE OF THE SENSELESS: Laura Dern in David Lynch's impenetrable latest.

Of course, not every film responds well to the scrutiny. Easily the most anticipated film of the festival, David Lynch's Inland Empire generated theater-lobby debate that quickly split into two camps: those who think Lynch's three-hour, aggressively non-narrative feature is a self-indulgent yawn, and those who haven't the foggiest idea what to make of it. In his post-screening press conference, Lynch described the movie's lengthy shooting period as experimental in the most literal sense. Entranced by the possibilities of digital cinematography, Lynch began shooting a series of disconnected scenes, beginning with a 14-page single-spaced monologue in which Laura Dern describes a history of domestic abuse and violent revenge. Distilling the metanarrative schisms of Mulholland Dr. and Lost Highway, Empire shuttles between at least a half-dozen time/space frames. Dern alone plays a Hollywood actress, the wife of a blue-collar Polish immigrant, and a Sunset Strip prostitute, though it's unclear if they're meant to be different women or alternate versions of the same one. Although many attempts to explain the movie focused on its first hour, which repeats Mullholland's concern with roles and role-playing, it might be more productive to see it as a riff on reincarnation, exploring Lynch's interest in Transcendental Meditation as a starting point. Even Dern claims not to know how many characters she plays, although that doesn't stop her from crafting a powerful performance (performances?). Even if she doesn't know what she's playing, Dern convinces you she's playing something, supplying a sense of emotional conviction without which the movie would be truly unwatchable.

Some called it an eyesore anyway, unfavorably comparing the movie's distressed colors and blurry backgrounds to digital abominations like Tadpole. But Lynch made it clear that he saw the movie's look as a bonus, not a drawback. "For me, film is completely dead ... It's like swimmin' through molasses." There's no question that Inland Empire lacks the shimmering dread of Blue Velvet, but it's also clear that Lynch knows how to exploit the technology's limitations, pushing color balances off the charts and exploiting every opportunity to shoot in ominous near-dark.

Diving headfirst into the digital realm, Lynch announced after the festival he'd be releasing Inland Empire himself — too bad, since it would have been fun watching distributors shuffle-step around it. Although Lynch downplayed the notion of a digital aesthetic, it's clear Inland Empire could never have existed on film, although it's an open question whether that would have been a tragedy or a relief.

Still shooting on film, and gloriously so, Alain Resnais dresses up Alan Ayckbourn's Private Fears in Public Places with eye-popping production design and masterful camerawork. (One critic who saw it in Toronto was heard to exclaim, "That movie had mise-en-scène!") The story of a half-dozen Parisians whose intimacy issues strand them in glassed-in prisons, Private Fears is as chilly as the snows that cover the scene breaks, as uninvolving as it is visually dazzling.

Korea's Hong-Sang Soo has never been one to sear the eyeballs, but Woman on the Beach continues his unsettling exploration of painful relationships and repeat offenders. Discarding the engaging structuralist gimmicks of previous films, Woman on the Beach more subtly encodes the notion of recurrence through the story of a self-important film director who becomes involved with two similar women. The understated style that has kept Hong out of American theaters can be illustrated by the fact that the movie's highlight is a scene in which the director uses scribbled drawings on a hotel pad to illustrate the nature of obsession. But if it doesn't cater to narrow notions of what's "cinematic," the scene is still a career highlight, a dry gut-buster that apparently mocks the director's own methods as well as the character's inherent self-delusion.

Among the festival's less buzzed-about entries, Jafar Panahi's Offside stood out for its cutting humor. Chronicling the attempts of several Iranian women to sneak into a public soccer match, the movie details with deadpan wit the lifeless rituals excluding women from public life in the Muslim world. Substituting ironic detachment for The Circle's one-note outrage, Offside watches with raised eyebrows as the stadium guards repeat their canned rationales, most of which have to do with protecting women from off-color soccer chants. (That the women they've detained already know them by heart doesn't seem to make a difference.) Set during the build-up to the 2002 World Cup, the movie tacitly criticizes the country's failure to stay in step with the rest of the world, a message delivered as swiftly as a well-placed penalty kick.

(sam@citypaper.net)