Still a bit fuzzy on the recent changes to the Academy’s qualifying rules for a Best Documentary Feature nomination? Yeah, join the club––I had to look up this post from last October as a bit of a refresher. The biggest change, is that films are required to complete a seven-day run in both Los Angeles and Manhattan before August 31. So once again, the IDA has put together a mini-documentary festival later this month in Los Angeles to help a number of films make that milestone.
Two films, two days, two revered European filmmakers presenting work that, in one way or another, reps a return. Olivier Assayas’ Summer Hours screened in the market without the Cannes Film Festival’s official kiss on the cheek, but even without that critical imprimatur, it’s nonetheless one the finest features I’ve seen this year, a return to classicism of a sort for Assayas (in the press notes, he admits that he sought to return to the stylistic concerns and working method of his Late August, Early September era) and the kind of thoughtful French film designed for adults for which there seems to longer be a U.S. market (IFC bought it anyway). Of Time and the City, Terrence Davies’ first film in eight years after the commercially unsuccessful artistic triumph of The House of Mirth, is a plain return to work. Both movies are about memory, about place, and a taking stock of the relationship between the two that happens in mid-life.
