When Philippe Garrel’s most recent film premiered in competition at Cannes last year, it carried the French title La Frontière de l’aube; that was translated in English in the Cannes guide as Frontier of Dawn, but the subtitle at the beginning of the film read, The Dawn of the Shore. None of these titles give any indication of what this film is: a story of amour gone so fou that the natural world becomes subject to the supernatural. Hands down the most accessible Garrel film I’ve seen, it’s still a strange, swoony, genre-bending challenge. I named it as the best undistributed film of 2008; now, IFC is screening it theatrically in series at BAM in Brooklyn (starting tonight) and at Cinefamily in Los Angeles (Saturday, March 14), before it premieres on VOD.

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February has been a good month for American movies in which vulnerable males stare out their bedroom windows at willowy, troubled blondes and grow obsessed. No, Rear Window has not been re-released; in James Gray’s melodrama Two Lovers a Brooklyn Heeb falls for the Shiksa next door, and in William Olsson’s stylistically assured, super-cynical without even realizing it directorial debut An American Affair, a slick, low-budget period movie with the cozy art direction of a Danish furniture commercial without even blinking an eye suggests that Jack Kennedy was a man of many mistresses and woefully foreseeable enemies.

Such is our post-Watergate American existence that we no longer see politicians as enlightened, civic minded individuals in an ennobling vocation. Such is our post-Lewinsky American existence that we are no longer shocked or even especially aroused by our political leaders’ sexual misdeeds. Sure Eliot Spitzer’s political star fell just under a year ago after his nocturnal visits from call girl Ashley Dupre were exposed, but Louisiana Senator David Vitter continues to sit in his Senate seat nearly a year and a half after he admitted to seeing prostitutes. As An American Affair deftly dramatizes, in the previous era the press corps would have just kept what they knew about the sex lives of powerful men under wraps. But lets get to those tantalizing one sheets.

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James Gray’s Two Lovers, loosely based on a Dostoyevsky short story,  offers up the most penetrating examination of male immaturity American cinema has seen since Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love.

Beginning with a suicide attempt by Leonard (Joaquin Phoenix), it  depicts the thirtysomething Brooklynite’s life with his parents. After a nasty break-up, he’s retreated back to the comfort of their home. They push him towards Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), the daughter of a business associate, but he’s more attracted to  neighbor Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow). However, Michelle is prone to self-destructive behavior like passing out in nightclub bathrooms and carrying on an affair with a married man. Gray explores one of his favorite   themes: family life as a seductive trap. Unlike his first three films, Two Lovers is not a genre exercise, but it’s no less dark or moody because none of its characters packs a gun or works for the Mafia.

Spout talked to Gray in New York earlier this week, where he proved to have plenty to say about Dostoyevsky, Brighton Beach and why his films are more popular in France than the U.S.

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By the time Casey Affleck’s documentary (or mockumentary) on Joaquin Phoenix’s retirement from acting and subsequent rap career is finished, will anyone still care about any of it? If today’s frenzy over Phoenix’s appearance last night on Late Show with David Letterman is any indication, I’m guessing that many people will. I seriously thought the story was beyond tired at this point, especially after the very believable accusations that Phoenix’s career change and behavior are nothing but a Borat- or Punk’d- or Andy Kaufman-like prank. From looking at some of the reactions today, though, I guess there are still a lot of people in the media who haven’t heard it’s a hoax (most think he’s on drugs here). But even the more-knowing bloggers were all about Phoenix this morning, whether because they are annoyed with the actor for blowing a great opportunity to promote his new film, Two Lovers, or they’re simply still curious about what’s actually going on. What I want to know is, has anyone else thought about the obvious rise-from-the-ashes connection between the actor’s name and a certain mythological creature? Maybe that’s his whole motivation behind the act.

Anyway, here’s a sampling of what people are saying about the Letterman appearance:
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Rarely has movie love been handled with both the dreamy indulgence and the cynicism that James Grey pulls off in Two Lovers. It’s a pity that the film, which premiered nine months ago at Cannes and is now rolling out on VOD and in theaters via Magnolia, has been pegged in time as the allegedly final film of star Joaquin Phoenix. In this meditation on class passing and infinite adolescence, set mainly in Brighton Beach with a few giddy sojourns to Manhattan, Grey creates a mood pocket, as it were, that’s distinctly out of time. Working off a series of contrasts that’s very true to its New York setting, Two Lovers is implicitly concerned with the way romantic relationships give us an opportunity to slide back and forth across class lines; if that motion temporarily offers the potential for an erasal of personal history, our ultimate stations in life can’t be escaped.

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I’ll be heading out to the Denver Film Festival on Wednesday, to sit on a jury and moderate a panel. The festival started last night, and through next Sunday they’ll be showing a ton of my favorite films from the 2008 festival circuit (like Intimidad, Guest of Cindy Sherman, Prince of Broadway, Finally, Lillian and Dan, SIta Sings the Blues, Two Lovers, and Everything is Fine), plus a number of titles that I’ve missed at over festivals but hope to catch up with (like Three Monkeys, Woodpecker, Song Sung Blue). Also, they’re doing a tribute to pioneering video/performance artist Carolee Schneemann, which is awesome.

The panel I’m moderating, called DIY Filmmaking in an Indie Apocalypse, will bring together a number of filmmakers who have found some success (with critics, with festival juries, or even financially) making personal films outside of the broken indie film stuctures that we’ve all been wringing our hands over for the last couple of years. It’s on Friday, November 21 at 7pm. If you’re going to be in town, do stop by.

• With Halloween dragging the weekend box office down by over thirty percent, High School Musical 3 took the top spot with just $15 million. The Weinstein Company says Zack and Miri Make a Porno came in second with $10.7 million, but rival studios say that projection may be inflated.
• Meanwhile, Europeans really like James Bond.
• MSNBC Films has picked up Witch Hunt. The documentary, which premiered at Toronto and is narrated by Sean Penn, willhave an Oscar qualifying run and then air on TV next year.
• Variety has picked up the “Joaquin Phoenix is quitting movies” story. They’re running an AP item which says the actor, who showed up to Saturday’s Two Lovers premiere at AFI with the phrase “good bye” written on his knuckles, confirmed to reporters that he’s leaving the business to “focus on music,” and promised, “I will emotionally impact you with that, as well.”

As you can see above, Floridian turned Brooklynite Holly Herrick knows a thing or two about flowers, but this is just where her expertise begins. The programmer of Sarasota’s quickly emerging film festival has taken up programming duties at the Hamptons Film Festival, which kicks off on Wednesday. We spoke recently about why Agnes Varda’s new film shook her up, the new record from The Walkmen and why she’s looking forward to Examined Life so much. …Read more

I believe this Hollywood Reporter story on the struggles faced by several American Cannes premieres to find a stateside distributor is the first notice that 2929 Entertainment has decided to give James Gray’s Two Lovers to Magnolia to distribute.

The film famously drew mixed reactions in Cannes; I gave it a thumbs up with some reservations, whilst the very idea of waiting in line for it drove Lisa Schwarzbaum to expletives. Lovers has a lower profile than What Just Happened?, another film which 2929 recently decided to let their sister company distribute when buyers didn’t materialize. Both bleak and stylized, the romantic melodrama might even be a tougher sell to audiences than a satire about old men who work in the film industry. We’ll see––Magnolia’s planning a limited release in early 2009.

The French title of Philippe Garrel’s film in competition here is La Frontière de l’aube; the English translation in the Cannes guide is Frontier of Dawn, but the subtitle at the beginning of the film read, The Dawn of the Shore. Neither title gives any indication of what this film is: a story of amour gone so fou that the natural world becomes subject to the supernatural. Hands down the most accessible Garrel film I’ve seen, it’s still a strange, swoony, genre-bending challenge.

I have to wonder if those critics who dismissed James Gray’s Two Lovers earlier in week will bother to grapple with the similarities between that star-studded American production and Garrel’s infinitely cooler, warm-toned black-and-white capital-A work of Art. On paper, they’re essentially the same film: a Jewish photographer falls for a difficult, substance-dependent blonde; even though that relationship is clearly doomed from the start, it haunts him and prevents him from happily settling into a domestic routine with a still-beautiful but less troubled and exciting brunette. The big difference, at least narratively speaking: in Gray’s film, as the director told Andrew O’Hehir, the protagonist ultimately “does choose life.” Spoiler alert! The resolution to Garrel’s story is the diametric opposite.

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I don’t entirely buy James Grey’s Two Lovers, and typing this having just walked out of the far superior Un Conte De Noel, I feel strange even praising it. I freely admit that even as certain elements are effectively  thrilling in their depiction of tortured passion, it’s all put to the service of a narrative that is occasionally offensive in its total lack of surprise. But, but, but: after dozing on and off for the film’s first twenty or thirty minutes, I awoke to see Joaquin Phoenix breakdancing his way into the arms of Gwyneth Paltrow, and for whatever reason, from that point on I was sort of into it. About an hour later I became totally sucked in, when that moment of dance floor silliness met its dissonant counterpoint with a second, far more desperate scene of Phoenix dancing his way into Paltrow’s arms.  It’ll be too little too late for some, but in its final third, Two Lovers becomes an extremely strong parable about the madness of romantic love, and maybe even its impossibility.

That scene…it looks like a classic romantic high, until you realize that there’s almost no color on the screen beyond the white-gold wisps of Paltrow’s windblown hair dusting the frame. It hits you that the characters think that what they’re doing is going to save them both when in fact (and maybe this is where the generic story arc becomes a bonus), we know it’s only going to make everything worse. It’s bleak. It’s beautiful.

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