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NYFF: Silent Light

By Karina Longworth posted 2 years ago

Those who love Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light and those who hate it tend to use the same kind of lazy shorthand to describe its pleasures (or tortures). The story of Johan, a devout husband and family man who struggles–spiritually, mentally, emotionally, physically–against his feelings for another woman, Silent Light’s languid, desperately sad narrative takes a turn towards the transcendent about a hundred minutes in, at which point I scrawled in my notebook, “Bresson in Technicolor, maybe on acid.” In my mind, this was high praise. But later in the day, I overheard another critic use a similar analogy to explain why Silent Light is, actually, “terrible”: “It’s like Diane Arbus doing Bergman, on quaaludes.” Maybe it’s just a generational thing–I’m a little too young to know much about ‘ludes–but that sounds even more appealing than what I initially came up with. Still, from here on out, I resolve to resist the dismissively simple equation of (Dead European Master + Passe Party Drug). Silent Light deserves better than that.

This was one NYFF selection that screened for the press sans a post-screening Q & A with the filmmaker, and I think it would have benefited tremendously from one. At the very least, there would have been quite a bit of value in talking to Reygadas about his process (armed with French and Dutch financing, the Mexican filmmaker shot on location in Northern Mexico’s Mennonite community, with a cast full of non-actors speaking their native tongue, the medieval German dialect Plautdietsch).

But admittedly, Reygadas would have been walking in to a tough crowd. Many critics seemingly wrote the director off after his last film, Battle in Heaven, which, in addition to sharing Silent’s ponderous pace, featured a now-infamous scene described by Gerald Peary as featuring an “unhappy, mechanical blow job ministered by a hot senorita on her numb, big-bellied chaffeur.” Peary, one of the film’s staunchest defenders, acknowledged that Heaven “grossed out many American critics” at that film’s Cannes premiere. I imagine that at least some of those who didn’t skip the NYFF screening of Silent Light in avoidance of further revulsion left disappointed when there wasn’t any.
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Festivals, NYFF 2007, Reviews

Blueberry Mornings, Afternoons, and Nights

By posted 2 years ago

Could there be more chatter out there about Wong Kar Wai’s new film, My Blueberry Nights, which opened the Cannes Film Festival? I doubt it. It’s strange, because I’m not even convinced that people think it’s a great film, but it sure has created a lot of buzz. (Maybe it has something to do with how long people had to stand in line to get in and how many people got turned away and what color their film festival badges were…or it could have more to do with the acting debut of Norah Jones?)

Erica Abeel from the Filmmaker Magazine blog sums up what most people seem to be saying: “…it seems almost sacrilegious to report that “Blueberry,” the Hong Kong auteur’s first English-language production, and his first film set and shot in the U.S., is gorgeous to look at, but not a helluva lot more. In fact, the screening in the packed Salle Debussy was greeted with only a smattering of anemic applause.”

Similarly, from Cinematical: “My Blueberry Nights is so beautifully shot, though, that you’d be excused for thinking that the quality of the performances is almost irrelevant; each scene is a symphony of color and light, each frame exquisitely shaped by the play of pigment and shade. New York is caught in blue, wintry tones; Memphis in deep, relaxed browns; Nevada’s casinos come alive in jittery crimson. It’s too bad that we can’t quite believe in the characters within those gorgeous visions, though.”

And I found this opinion interesting, from Isabella Ho, a film scholar from Taiwan. She observes that two accomplished Asian directors–Wong Kar Wai and Hou Hsiao Hsien from Taiwan–are at Cannes with their first films not shot in their native languages. It made me think of Alfonso Cuaron (Children of Men) and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritus (Babel), both Spanish-speaking filmmakers with big 2006 hits in English. (I wrote a post a few months back about all the attention being given to Mexican cinema.) Here’s what Isabella Ho has to say:

“I think it’s very sad that these directors are driven to make movies outside their home countries and in other languages,” said Ho, a representative of Taiwan film distributor cum production company CMC. “Their home audience doesn’t seem to appreciate the stories they are trying to tell.”

Is it sad? I can see sad aspects about it, but I don’t know if they outweigh the benefits of Wong Kar Wai being able to just make the film he wants to visually make. After all, it sounds like My Blueberry Nights could be a movie to watch with the sound on mute, anyway.

You can read even more about My Blueberry Nights here on indieWIRE, here on GreenCine Daily, here on the Filmmaker Magazine blog, and here on the Risky Business blog.

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