What a strange and uncomfortable coincidence that the New York Film Festival has programmed one of its best line-ups during one of the worst years in modern American history. Filing out of any given screening, opening your laptop and checking your phone after hours in the dark, you might find soldiers advancing on American cities, or opposition figures threatened with arrest, or naked children handcuffed on the street overnight. And then you would take your seat for another film about political prisoners and authoritarian judicial systems and the dehumanizing effects of despotism and commerce, and let it all happen again.
Not that this particular blend of the distinguished and the disastrous is all that unprecedented for NYFF. Arriving at the tail end of the global festival calendar, when many of the year’s biggest films have already premiered, the festival’s programmers are free to cherry-pick from the best of world cinema—putting them in a perfect position to survey prevailing moods, and respond with a comprehensive slate. Just weeks after the 2001 World Trade Center attacks, audiences at Lincoln Center sat down to watch Mulholland Drive and Fat Girl and La Cienaga, the debut feature from then-unknown Argentine master Lucrecia Martel. Martel returned this year with Nuestra Tierra, a documentary which probes the limits of documentation itself. She begins with a small frame: the trial of three men for the murder of indigenous leader Javier Chocobar. According to Darío Amín, he and two associates arrived in the community of Chuschagasta in order to exploit a mining interest on land long owned by his family. The men were confronted by the residents of Chuschagasta, and then someone, somehow, shot Chocobar.
This was in 2009; Chocobar’s murderers were not charged until 2018, after nine years of protest. This trial, ostensibly over a land dispute, is revealed to encompass the history not only of the Chuschagastas — an indigenous band declared legally extinct at the beginning of the 19th century — but of Argentina’s indigenous peoples, as both groups and individuals. In court, Amín and his lawyers throw everything at the Chuschagastas, submitting deeds, historical testimony, and video footage to prove, definitively, that their accusers have no standing. That a murder had been committed with one of their guns seems almost secondary. They are asserting their right to act with impunity against a community and a people who, by the official definition, do not even exist.
Nuestra Tierra screened at NYFF under the title Landmarks, but I prefer the literal translation: Our Land. For as Martel carefully, humanely unspools, the community and the people of Chuschagasta very much exist. The Amíns of the world may have their deed and title, but as one woman memorably remarks: “Paper does not question the pen.” Those in a place to establish the law are also the people in charge of its interpretation and enforcement, creating a series of escalating distortions that spiral throughout Argentine history. Martel frontloads her film with legal and historical evidence only to devastatingly pick it apart, allowing her many indigenous interlocutors to highlight what that evidence leaves out, and to submit evidence of their own. Their memories, their photographs, their common histories and family names: all attest to a continuity of communal life that predates and survives the traumas of colonization, independence, and legal dispossession.
Amín and his associates earnestly believed the law could not punish them because it never had. Martel’s was not the only film at the festival to take impunity as its subject. In the Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa’s Two Prosecutors, the state itself has become one massive state of exception. In 1937, a young, card-carrying Soviet prosecutor named Kornyev (Aleksander Kuznetsov) receives a note from a man who claims he has been unjustly imprisoned by the secret police in Bryansk. Newly-appointed and fresh out of school, this prosecutor believes completely in the Soviet state, and especially the law with all its rights and protections. And so when the persecuted man, a writer and revolutionary, claims to have uncovered an NKVD plot to undermine Stalin, Kornyev heads off to Moscow to inform the proper authorities.
Loznitsa has made a perverse kind of process film. There are no shortcuts here: Two Prosecutors lays out in near real-time the journey from the gate of the prison to the high security block, a series of grim, grimy corridors which we must trudge down alongside Kornyev, illustrating via architecture the oppressive depths of the already-extant darkness. At every step, the young prosecutor makes sure to follow proper protocol, grounding his prosecutorial authority in the letter of the law. Yet the Soviet Union of the Great Terror is a place where laws are applied, not followed, where a secondary, instrumental law operates out in the open, visible in every office and at every padlocked door, a secret only to those who believe the old, written rules still apply. The film’s grim joke is that those who actually believed in the promise of the Soviet project were the first to fall under the knife. Kornyev is doomed from the first moment he insists on his duties under the law, but thanks to his patriotism, he can’t see it.
Speaking of guys lost in the sauce: Park Chan-Wook might as well be the modern master of men in way over their heads. No Other Choice, his latest, is a slick, surprising, often funny, frequently violent, yet strangely synthetic tale of job market woe. After decades of loyal service to his foreign-owned paper manufacturer, Man-soo (Lee Byung-hun) is suddenly let go. Though he might seem the cheery father figure, Man-soo is a man on the edge: deep in debt, pummeled by faulty self-help advice, and riding the knife-edge of sobriety, he must find a new paper-industry job, and soon, or risk losing his family, his home, and his sense of self.
In subject, at least, No Other Choice resembles Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 2008 masterpiece Tokyo Sonata. In both films, a patriarch’s unemployment throws his family into crisis, with disastrous consequences. Where Kurosawa unearths horror from plain-faced, everyday images — a family sitting down to dinner while a train rumbles just outside the window — Park showboats, transforming the domestic sphere into a zone of perverse, Hitchcockian intrigue. The father stages his grand plan — murder the foreman at a rival paper company, and kill off anyone else who might apply for the job — from the family greenhouse, a hothouse structure whose translucent walls and painstakingly-cultivated plants stand-in for Man-soo’s own crystalline repression, visible to everyone other than the man himself.
The violence, and the style, flows from there; this is the director of Oldboy we’re talking about. Yet for all the vicious jokes and wild style — the film’s depiction of mayhem and murder and overall debauchery is utterly unlike anything I have ever seen — the effect is strangely muted. The violence is frequently grotesque, and often just gross. It all feels oddly weightless, without visceral impact or anything approaching moral import. Park remains a virtuoso. With No Other Choice, unfortunately, all that style is soulless.
Violence, after all, is not ephemeral: it scars our bodies and warps our minds, and lodges itself in the very structure of society, and it does not end when the lights come up. Martel knows this; Loznitsa knows this; twenty years ago, in his vengeance trilogy, Park seemed to understand it too. Jafar Panahi has been forced by circumstance to understand the indelibilities of violence. The Iranian master has been imprisoned multiple times for his opposition to the Islamic Republic, and in 2010 the Revolutionary Court banned him from making films for the next twenty years.
He has since made six, all in secret, all touching in some way on the existential uncertainty produced by life in an authoritarian society. His Palme D’Or-winning It Was Just an Accident is kicked off by one such uncertainty: the sound of a prosthetic leg, squeaking in the dark. Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) has been haunted by this sound for so long that he can no longer tell whether it is the auditory equivalent of phantom limb — or if it belongs to the man who tortured him in prison, an intelligence officer they called Eghbal (peg-leg or the gimp), and who they knew only by the squelching of his pegleg. On a whim, Vahid kidnaps this ostensible stranger off the side of the road, meaning to bury him alive.
Yet whether from fear or uncertainty, Vahid cannot go through with the deed. Instead, he drives across Tehran searching for other former prisoners, all wounded by Eghbal, all trying to construct a life beyond their captivity and persecution. It’s a struggle: Vahid has damaged kidneys, Goli (Hadis Pakbaten) suffers from breakdowns, the journalist Shiva (Mariam Afshari) had to leave the rage-filled Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr), who lives as if walled inside the torture chamber. Travelling in Vahid’s van, they squabble and argue, unable to agree about whether the kidnapped man really is their Eghbal, and what should be done to him, and how to go on living their lives in a society they suffered unimaginably to change, but could not. In a recurring joke, every official they come across, from security guards to ER nurses, is so ready to accept a bribe they literally carry a credit card scanner on their person, a glimpse into a society so bent by the daily transactions of despotism that even their private lives are disfigured by their own corruptions.
The van and its inhabitants finally arrive at a grave dug in the dry dirt on the outskirts of the city, with a single Beckettian tree to mark the spot. Were this only an existential parable, or even a revenge fantasy, you could hardly blame Panahi. Yet he is an artist, and his film is the best I’ve seen this year. The violence in Accident does not come cheap; it’s not a joke, like in Park’s film, or, as in Loznitsa’s, a mere matter of bureaucracy. In its final, red-hued moments, Panahi’s masterpiece descends into a hell of recrimination and rage, revealing the double dehumanization of life in an authoritarian society, where not only the truth but even fundamental aspects of individual self-understanding — how we live, and for what — warp and dissolve. Revenge, like resistance, proves futile; even if he were to kill the gimp, Vahid would never stop listening for him. The regime might have let him out of prison, but he will never be free.
This tyrannical collapse — of the public into the private — can also move in reverse, with the stuff of intimate life projected outward onto others. In Rebecca Zlotowski’s delectably stylish A Private Life, this work begins in the office of Parisian psychiatrist Lilian Steiner (a bilingual Jodie Foster), a professional so accustomed to her patients that she can no longer hear them. Lilian works in a realm where every sentence is a confession, every stray word open to interpretation. So when one of her patients commits suicide, she refuses to accept the official explanation. If the woman were suicidal, then this master psychiatrist would have caught it; death, like the life she narrated from the fainting couch, must mean something.
The mystery that follows is both fleet and convoluted, full of damp dead-ends and autumnal detours. It’s quite a lot of fun, and Foster is (as ever) fantastic, playing a woman so convinced of the significance of her search that she has long stopped paying attention to how others see or hear her. After a meeting with a psychic, the Jewish Steiner becomes convinced the truth of the matter lies in a past life, an occupation drama which conscripts everyone in her life, from her patient’s furious husband to her estranged son, into supporting roles within her own psychodrama. That uncovering the answer to this mystery might require her to pay attention to this life, right now — this is a possibility Lilian deliberately avoids, as she has so much else in her own, private life.
Zlotowski has made a light, pleasurable film, and that’s nothing to sniff at. It made a good match with Miroirs No. 3, the latest work of post-Fordian minimalism from Christian Petzold. A young woman named Laura (repeat collaborator Paula Beer) survives a car crash, moves into a nearby house occupied by an unknown family, and refuses to leave. Her behavior is strange; their behavior is strange; for the longest time, basic questions of who any of these people are, or why they act as they do, go unanswered, suspending the viewer in calm, confident uncertainty.
Petzold makes films about social identity: how the person we present to others comes to affect how we see ourselves. From the very beginning, Laura seems adrift, unable to keep track of her belongings, the time or the date. Surrendering to the woozy, out-of-place rhythms of the house, she allows herself to be treated as another member of the family, a kind of personality collapse which threatens to swallow her up, or pull the house down around her.
Well, not quite so dramatic. Since his triumphant 2010s run of metaphysical thrillers, Petzold has been working in a succinct, contained mode in which even stories about climate change have low stakes. As in Zlotowski’s film, the answers here are fundamentally domestic, the pain a matter of mundane grief. I’m not complaining; even great filmmakers get to shift modes. I just want to see what the director of Transit might make of our degraded, disintegrating time. From the sound of his next feature — about “political-left witches who are killing capitalists” — we won’t have to wait long.
These films come from around the world; they span fiction and nonfiction, the present and the past; some are weighty, and some light. Yet whenever (and wherever) they were initially made, all rhymed with the strange, inverted days in which I saw them. What ought to be private is made public, while the endless daily assault has colonized our quiet moments, our private lives. With any luck, a few of these films will outlive the moment of their reception — will emerge into other contexts, or become a context all their own. This year, at least, they served as a mirror, and a dark one at that.