CineScene--By and For Movie Lovers

Best of the
New York Film Festival
by Chris Knipp

The Sun (Sokurov)

Sokurov's haunting recreation of how Emperor Hirohito spent the last hours before the Japanese surrender, this is a miraculous work, and it provided the most powerful aesthetic and emotional experience of the NYFF. The Sun depicts a man who knows very well what is going on but lives in a cocoon, in a state of detachment and ineffectuality that becomes strangely heartrendiing. Issey Ogata's performance as the Emperor easily competes for hypnotic intensity with Bruno Ganz's in the German film Downfall -- but with a very different sort of bunker and a very different kind of man: a silent, immaculate country house with a few faithful srvants in attendance; a small, frail but upright and dignified personage who can easily explain the causes of the Japanese defeat to his general staff but has never learned to dress himself or open a door. Even on this day he is more comfortable browsing through photos of his family and American movie stars, discussing marine biology, and writing poetry. Despite the disgrace, he is selflessly happy that peace has come. He inks a brush to write a statement to his absent son, but instead drafts a few verses about the weather. Later he is taken to see Eisenhower, and then brought back again to dine with the general. He enjoys the wine and the meat and has his first taste of a Havana cigar. The Americans conclude that the Emperor is like a child. "What's it like being a living god?" Ike asks. And speaking, to the dismay of the Japanese interpreter, in perfect English, Hirohito says, "What can I tell you? You know, it is not easy being Emperor." These are just a few details in a film rich in telling ones. Simply enuimerating them can't explain this film's slow, cululative emotional wallop -- or the lovely, fantastic, dreamlike landscape images toward the end.

L'Enfant (Dardennes)

The Dardennes, who won their second Palme d'Or at Cannes this year with L'Enfant (The Child), describe it as "a love story that is also the story

of a father." Twenty-year-old Bruno ( Jérémie Renier) is a petty thief and scam artist in Seraing, an east Belgian steel town, who lives off his girlfriend's welfare and impulsively spends whatever he steals. When eighteen-year-old Sonia (Déborah François) returns after the birth of thier son Jimmy, Bruno's far worse than merely unready to accept the responsiblity of fatherhood. Unbeknownst to Sonia, he decides to sell the baby on the black market. The film is about what happens following this grotesquely ill-advised decision.

L'Enfant is urgent with movement and has little talk. As with the 1996 La promesse (The Promise), where Jérémie Renier debuted, Rosetta (1999), and Le Fils (The Son, 2003), the action is ceaseless and obsessive and seems almost real-time. But the Dardennes make every minute count. In those rare moments when the hyper-kenetic Bruno is momentarily still and the camera looks into his face, there's a strong sense of the doubt that will lead to his transformation. When Bruno tells Sonia "I'm sorry," or "I need you" and "I love you" the words carry weight because he doesn't normally ever say such things. But Sonia says, "You lie as you breathe." L'Enfant is as powerful and accomplished as anything the Dardennes have done, and as thought-provoking.

Bubble (Soderbergh)

Soderbergh is highly effective on new territory with Bubble, a low-budget film about three working-class people in a doll factory and a crime. It doesn't seem as if he's taken any movies as his models, though some of the conventions of a police procedural take over toward the end. The images shot in HD of the factory, the houses, roads, and people of Ohio and West Virginia could have been taken not from movies but from 1970's and 1980's still photographers like Robert Adams, or particularly from Lee Friedlander's Factory Valleys.

Debbie Doebreier (Martha), Dustin James Ashley (Kyle), and Misty Dawn Wilkins (Rose) come from West Virginia and Ohio. Decker Moody (Dectective Don) is a West Virginia police detective.

Coleman Hough, who wrote the screenplay, has kept it naive and simple. When a man learns his daughter is in jail for murder, he says, "Oh, I see." The attractive young Kyle and the doughty Martha go to and from work and have lunch together. At one point Martha snaps a photo of Kyle because he's her "best friend," she says. When young, pretty Rose is hired to help fill a big order at the doll factory, she joins the other two at lunch, and starts going off with Kyle for a smoke afterward: the equation has changed. Then Kyle and Rose plan a date, but Martha doesn't know about it. Because everyone is so inexpressive, it's not clear that any of them even know what they're feeling. You might contrast the arch cleverness applied to naive people working in a nowhere Walmart-like store in Miguel Arteta's 2002 The Good Girl. These people in Bubble just are, and the murder that happens is like lots of murders that don't make it to the screen that just happen, the perpetrators being people the victim trusted, nobody knowing how it all happened. The Voice called Bubble "aggressively disorienting in its banality," but taken on its own terms, it works. Deft manipulation of non-actors and precise, attractive use of HD photography are important factors in the film's economy and success.

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Puiu)

Crisit Puiu was inspired at nineteen by Jim Jarmusch's Stanger Than Paradise to become a filmmaker. He says ER is syndiicated in Rumania: "When you watch the American show, there's movement in every direction, the choreography of the characters is amazing -- but I can't believe any of it." In Mr. Laarescu Puiu does an ER, Rumanian style. There's movement in only one direction -- following sixty-something Lazarescu, a drinker with a sore belly and a terrible headache, on a Saturday night in Bucharest when there has been a bad bus accident, after he calls 911. Puiu throws out hints of profundity with names in the script like Lazarus, Virgil, Dante, Remus, and Angel; and the trek from hospital to hosital as Lazarescu's diagnosis changes and his condition worsens can be seen as a journey through Hell. But the film didn't win the Un Certain Regard top prize at Cannes this year because of any message. It's Puiu's attention to detail, the precise planning of dialogue and camera positions that gives documentary accuracy to the action and makes the film compulsively watchable and somehow unique.