The Power of the Dog (Movie)

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      The Future of Movies Collides With the Past at the New York Film Festival

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      Memory and storytelling are intriguingly intertwined in work by world-class filmmakers that confounds and intrigues.For almost six decades, the New York Film Festival has offered a glimpse of the movie future. That has certainly been true this year, with the Lincoln Center screening rooms populated and a busy season of streaming and theatrical releases ahead. Over two autumn weeks — the 59th edition of the festival runs through Sunday — New York cinephiles are treated to a series of sneak previews, early chances to see films that will make their way into the wider world over the next few months.Part of the function of the event is to spark word of mouth and media coverage, to tease the Oscar race and handicap the art-house box office, and to see what people are inclined to argue about. Will it be the lurid provocations of Julia Ducournau’s “Titane”? The wide-screen western psychodrama of Jane Campion’s “The Power of the Dog”? The aching, low-key intimacy of Mike Mills’s “C’mon C’mon”? There has been something reassuring about the ritual of those questions, and about the conversations, blessedly unrelated to pandemics or politics, that they promise.But the excitement of novelty has been tinged with nostalgia. Apart from the required masks and proof of vaccination, this New York festival seemed a lot like the earlier ones. The blend of favored auteurs and up-and-comers felt familiar, and not in a bad way. We expect to see Todd Haynes, Wes Anderson, Bruno Dumont and Hong Sangsoo in this setting, and also to stumble into discoveries and reappraisals. I didn’t know what to expect from “What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?,” from the Georgian director Alexandre Koberidze. After having seen it — a slow-moving, semi-magical romance with a ruminative voice-over and leisurely shots of the town of Kutaisi — I’m still not sure what to make of it. That, too, is a quintessential festival experience.A scene from the Bucharest-set “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn.”Silviu Ghetie/Micro FilmAfter watching most of the main slate and a handful of other offerings — and dealing with the inevitable regret about what I’ve missed — my main takeaway is a feeling of comfort. This is unusual, and in the past I might have seen that as a form of disappointment. What I tend to look for, what I believe in to the point of dogmatism, is art that is challenging, difficult, abrasive, shocking. I saw a few attempts at that, including “Titane,” which in spite of its bright colors, extreme violence and sexual aggression didn’t quite succeed for me, and Radu Jude’s “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn,” which very much did.Jude shot his film on the streets of Bucharest in 2020, where people are masked, anxious and rude. Like that setting, the story — of a schoolteacher caught up in a culture-war sex scandal — is unpleasantly contemporary, and the overall mood of the picture is rough and dyspeptic. This is the opposite of escapism, and while I can’t say “Bad Luck Banging” is a lot of fun, it has a purgative, present-tense power. This is how we live, and it’s awful.What’s the alternative? Or, more precisely, is there a kind of aesthetic relief from current reality that doesn’t amount to a denial of it? An answer that seems to appeal to many filmmakers at the moment is to treat the medium as a vehicle of memory, to use its tools to construct a record of the past with room for its ambiguities, blank spaces and clashing perspectives.Tilda Swinton is an Englishwoman living in Colombia in “Memoria.”NeonThe most radical and overt gesture of this kind comes, aptly enough, in “Memoria,” from the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Like his earlier features (including “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives”), this one is dreamy and elusive, less a story than a succession of moods and existential puzzles. Tilda Swinton plays an Englishwoman living in Colombia who starts hearing a loud noise inaudible to anyone else. She asks a young sound engineer to help synthesize what she hears, which turns out not to be the only strange phenomenon she encounters.In a small town in the mountains she meets a man with the same name as the engineer who claims to remember everything that has ever happened to him. Not only that, he can decode “memories” of past events stored in rocks and other inanimate objects. His consciousness is so saturated, he says, that he has never left his hometown, and never watched any movies or television. His new acquaintance is surprised, and tells him some of what he’s been missing. Sports. News. Game shows.It doesn’t sound very persuasive. What would he do with those images? But I don’t think “Memoria” is dismissing its own technology so much as it’s reminding the audience how much more there is to reality than our attempts to represent it. The film is mind-blowing in its ambition and strangeness, but also decidedly modest, as if it were one of those stones packed with information that we might someday learn to unlock.The most memorable films about memory at the festival felt similarly (though also specifically, uniquely) open-ended, inconclusive. Joanna Hogg’s “The Souvenir Part II,” like “Memoria,” evokes memory in its title, and looks through a double rearview mirror. Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne), a London film student in the 1980s, recovers from the death of her lover (Tom Burke, as seen in “The Souvenir”) by turning their relationship into the subject of her thesis project. That movie is also called “The Souvenir,” which makes “Part II” a kind of making-of pseudo-documentary as well as a memoir, a coming-of-age story and a time capsule of the later Thatcher years.Milena Smit, left, and Penélope Cruz in Pedro Almodóvar’s “Parallel Mothers.”Sony Pictures Releasing InternationalPedro Almodóvar’s “Parallel Mothers” moves both forward and backward, with love and politics on its mind. It follows the entwined lives of its two main characters, women (played by Milena Smit and Penélope Cruz) who give birth in the same hospital, over a period of several years. Their fates unfold under the shadow, at times imperceptible, at times unavoidable, of the Spanish Civil War and the dictatorship that followed. The intersection of historical trauma and individual destiny isn’t an uncommon theme in contemporary cinema, but Almodóvar handles it with characteristic elegance and a profoundly melancholy humanism.Almodóvar, the avatar of Spain’s youthful post-Franco awakening, is now in his early 70s. His film will close the festival this weekend, bookending a triptych of major work by his generational cohort. Joel Coen, born in 1954, and Jane Campion, born in 1957, both came on the scene, like Almodóvar, in the 1980s, and are both asserting their seniority by breaking out in new directions: Coen with his swift-moving, stirring “The Tragedy of Macbeth” (his first film without his brother, Ethan) and Campion with the tragic “Power of the Dog.” These movies look like throwbacks — “Macbeth” to the black-and-white Shakespeare of Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier; “Power” to sprawling Technicolor epics like “Giant” — but they are also signs of life. And portents, maybe, of the future. More

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      An Eerie, Thrilling Trip to the Toronto International Film Festival

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      With theaters at 50 percent capacity, our critic found herself somewhat isolated as she took in highlights like “The Tsugua Diaries” and “Hold Your Fire.”“Would you like to move to the orchestra?” a voice from the dark whispered.I was at the Toronto International Film Festival and, moments earlier, had just realized that I was the only festivalgoer in the very capacious, very empty balcony. In normal years, this 2,000-seat theater, a festival mainstay, is packed with excitedly buzzing attendees. But normal is so very 2019 as are crowds. It felt awfully lonely up there with just me and some ushers, so I said Sure! and ran down to the orchestra, settling amid other attendees who, perhaps like me, were trying to feign a sense of togetherness — at a Covid-safe distance, of course.One of the largest film happenings in the world, the Toronto festival celebrated its 46th anniversary this year and, more gloomily, its second year of putting on a show during the pandemic. On a number of levels, it was a success: Although scaled down from its preplague era, the festival, which ends Saturday, presented some 200 movies, in person and digitally, from across the world. There were premieres, panels and lots of mask-muffled “Have a great day!” from the staff. Benedict Cumberbatch — the star of Jane Campion’s “The Power of the Dog” and Will Sharpe’s “The Electrical Life of Louis Wain” — popped in via satellite for a chat.It was much the same while being profoundly different. More than anything, as I attended movies in the festival’s eerily depopulated theaters — sitting in rooms that, per Canadian safety rules, couldn’t exceed 50 percent capacity — I was reminded that a film festival isn’t simply a series of back-to-back new movies. It’s also people, joined together, and ordinarily jammed together, as one under the cinematic groove. There is always vulgarity, of course, the red-carpet posing, the Oscar-race hustling, and I’ve watched plenty of profane monstrosities at Toronto, Sundance, et al. But even when the movies disappoint, I am always happy at a festival, watching alongside people as crazy about movies as I am.Benedict Cumberbatch, left, and Jesse Plemons in “The Power of the Dog.”Kirsty Griffin/NetflixThere weren’t many people, but there was still a lot to like and to love in Toronto, including Cumberbatch flexing his muscles in the nude as a 1920s Montana cowboy in Campion’s magnificent “The Power of the Dog” and playing a rather more buttoned-up cat fancier in “Louis Wain.” A charming, poignant biographical account, that film portrays the life of a British artist who, starting in the late 19th century — with pen, vibrant ink and a fantastically wild imagination — helped teach the joys of cat worship to a dog-besotted Britain. The movie may make some gag, but I dug its tenderness and Wain’s work, which grew trippier the older and more mentally unstable he became.For higher-profile selections like these, the fall festivals — Telluride and Venice recently ended — serve as a legitimizing launchpad for the fall season, a way to distinguish themselves from the hundreds of movies also vying for attention. Disney can scoop up spectators by the millions. Titles like “The Power of the Dog,” which falls under the fuzzy heading of art film yet is entirely accessible to those actually paying attention, need to seduce a smaller viewership, even if Campion has long been a revered auteur. They need festival audiences, critics included, on the front lines, particularly if a movie is headed toward next year’s Academy Awards. (“Dog” is more likely to go the Oscar distance than Wain’s cats.)And, after months and months of streaming new movies in my living room, I was exceptionally happy to be at Toronto. I’ve attended the festival for years, largely because of the variegated bounty of its offerings, from the commercial to the avant-garde. When it was founded in 1976, it was called the Festival of Festivals, partly because it screened films that had played elsewhere. It was intended for the general public (Cannes is invitation-only), a mandate that helped give Toronto a democratic vibe. In the words of one of its founders, Bill Marshall, “There’s something for everyone, but not everything for everyone, but something.”A scene from “Hold Your Fire,” about hostage negotiations.InterPositive Media, via Toronto International Film FestivalIn the decades that followed, Toronto rebranded itself as the Toronto International Film Festival and opened a handsome complex called the Lightbox in a soulless area called the entertainment district, where construction crews always seem to be building glass-and-steel apartment complexes for young professionals with dogs. Even so, the event’s populist ethos continues, as does its hodgepodge programming. Here, as usual, you could catch movies that had played in Berlin, Cannes and Telluride and would soon make their way to New York and beyond. One of the best things about Toronto, though, is that it isn’t an auteur-driven festival or an Oscar-baiting one: It’s just a flood of movies — good, bad and indifferent.There were teary melodramas, cryptic whatsits and period dramas like Kenneth Branagh’s “Belfast,” which is as watchable as it is predictable. A story in black-and-white — visually and in its beats — the movie takes place in the title city in the 1960s, just as partisan violence descends on a cozy street where Catholic and Protestant families live alongside one another in dewy harmony. Centered on a cute tyke nestled in the bosom of a loving family whose members are mostly known commodities (Judi Dench and Ciaran Hinds play the grandparents), the movie is in the vein of John Boorman’s “Hope and Glory,” a far finer coming-of-age story set during World War II.Among the other offerings were movies that belong to familiar subgenres that I call the Sad Single Women With Dying Plants Movie (“True Things”) and the ever-popular Damaged Woman Film, some more outré (this year’s risible Cannes Palmes d’Or winner, “Titane”) than others (“The Mad Women’s Ball”). And then there was Edgar Wright’s frenetic “Last Night in Soho,” which is a female-friendship movie of a kind and putative empowerment story about another sad woman (Thomasin McKenzie) and her glamorous sad doppelgänger (Anya Taylor-Joy). The two meet across time in a London crawling with mean girls and unspeakably predatory men.Jacques Cousteau’s life is examined in a new documentary.Story Syndicate, via Toronto International Film FestivalAs usual, the documentaries were often a sure bet. Although “Becoming Cousteau,” about the underwater French explorer and filmmaker Jacques Cousteau, is a fairly standard biographical portrait, the director Liz Garbus manages to push the movie into deeper depths. Filled with beautiful archival images of pristine waters, the movie opens as a fairly straight great-man story only to evolve into a thoughtful examination of what Cousteau’s early adventures wrought, including his lucrative work-for-hire helping to find oil in the Persian Gulf. As development progressively destroyed the undersea world that he helped illuminate, Cousteau became a fervent environmentalist — too late but still laudable.More formally audacious were two of my festival highlights: “Flee,” a Danish movie about an Afghan refugee, and “Hold Your Fire,” a jaw-dropper about a decades-old American hostage crisis. Directed by Stefan Forbes, “Hold Your Fire” looks back on a 1973 robbery in Brooklyn that went catastrophically wrong when its painfully young perpetrators were discovered midcrime. (Forbes also edited the wealth of archival material and shot the recent interviews with survivors and witnesses, like the psychologist Harvey Schlossberg, the definition of a mensch.) The incident quickly mushroomed into a televised spectacle and became a turning point in hostage negotiating; more than anything, it exhumes an instructive, bleakly relevant chapter in the city’s long racially fractious history.“Flee” is focused on an Afghan refugee, a friend of the documentary’s director. Final Cut for Real, via Toronto International Film Festival“Flee,” directed by Jonas Poher Rasmussen, is a beautifully, at times expressionistically animated documentary — punctuated with shocks of unanimated newsreel-style imagery — about the filmmaker’s longtime friend, Amin (a pseudonym), a refugee from Afghanistan. The two met in high school and remained in touch, but it was only when Rasmussen started making this movie that he actually learned the real difficulties and intricacies of Amin’s story. “Flee” unwinds piecemeal as Amin — often lying on a couch, as if in a shrink’s office — recounts his harrowing travels, with a brother or alone, in a journey that, in some painful ways, is ongoing.My favorite movie of this year’s festival, “The Tsugua Diaries,” doesn’t easily fit into any obvious genre category, which is one of its attractions. Like some other titles in this year’s festival, the movie was shot during the pandemic, but it is also very much about the pandemic. Or, rather, it’s about time and its passage as well as friendship and the deep, life-sustaining pleasures of being with other people. It was directed by Maureen Fazendeiro (she’s French) and Miguel Gomes (he’s Portuguese) who are a couple, and is both formally playful — its divided in chapters, each of which take the movie back in time — and unexpectedly moving. I wept buckets, and I can’t wait to see it again. More