Courtesy of Late Film LLC.

Courtesy of Janus Films.

New York Film Festival 2025:

Late Fame
Peter Hujar’s Day

Rating *** A must-see

Directed by Kent Jones
Directed by Ira Sachs

One of the presumably unintentional but noticeable trends that arose during the first week of the 63rd New York Film Festival’s press screenings was a consideration of art’s place in the world, often accompanied by an aesthetic that might be said to constitute a throwback. Films like Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent and Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, which utilized thriller elements in tandem with a tumultuous ’70s backdrop, also featured extended meditations on how the experience of cinema and painting, respectively, can capture the spirit of then-modern sociopolitical currents. Two other films took 1970s artistry as their main subject: Kent Jones’s Late Fame and Ira Sachs’s Peter Hujar’s Day.

Though my familiarity with their work is roughly equal—both films are the second I’ve seen by their respective directors—and they belong to the same generation of Americans, the two filmmakers couldn’t be more dissimilar. Anyone who came to cinephilia in the past few years could be forgiven for not knowing the name Kent Jones, but there’s little excuse for anyone even remotely plugged into American film culture before then, considering his work as a longtime film critic—I routinely cite his piece on John Ford for Film Comment as one of my favorite articles of criticism—archivist (including for Martin Scorsese), and, most pertinently, director of the New York Film Festival for a surprisingly abbreviated term from 2013 to 2019. Though that span of time may be too short and recent to accurately judge, his tenure, especially considering Dennis Lim’s continual presence on the selection committee during that time, certainly helped usher along NYFF’s evolution into an ever more open and exploratory festival. In terms of his own filmmaking, Jones has already made a number of documentaries, and his fiction feature debut Diane (2018), a somber consideration of a woman near the end of her life, led him to leave film programming behind to make directing his main pursuit.

Ironically, I’m less familiar with Sachs: despite being five years Jones’s junior, he has already made nine features, starting with The Delta (1997). A mainstay of Sundance, with such celebrated works as Married Life (2007) and Love Is Strange (2014), along with a Cannes competition berth with the Isabelle Huppert-starring Frankie (2019), he had something of an unexpected mid-career resurgence with Passages, the only other film of his I’ve seen so far. A seemingly more overtly sensual work starring three of Europe’s most celebrated arthouse actors in Franz Rogowski, Ben Whishaw, and Adéle Exarchopoulos, it drew a seemingly larger than usual audience with its frank depiction of a queer love triangle inextricable from its apex’s bad behavior and badder outfits.

Both Late Fame and Peter Hujar’s Day, then, come as something of a pivot for both filmmakers. While the latter premiered, as usual, all the way back in Sundance—bypassing its predecessor’s summer MUBI release for this late but fitting New York fall festival spot—the former, contra the prior film’s Tribeca premiere, bowed in the Venice Orizzonti competition, an unexpected but deserved berth for an American independent film. The star is far more recognizable this time: Willem Dafoe plays the incongruously named Ed Saxberger, a poet of some minor renown in the late 1970s who works in today’s New York City as a post office employee, having settled into a comfortable routine of sorting letters and hanging out with barflies unaware of his past life. One day, he encounters Wilson Meyers (Edmund Donovan), the de facto leader of a young literary group known as the Enthusiasm Society, who has staked out his apartment and, over the course of a few effusive meetings, expresses his admiration for the erstwhile poet and asks him to join the society. As they gear up for a statement event and Saxberger attempts to write for the first time in decades, he draws closer to Gloria (Greta Lee), the only female member of the group, whose commitment to her acting aspirations and exaggerated mannerisms set her apart from the would-be mavericks.

Unlike Diane, Jones didn’t write the script for Late Fame, which was already penned by May December scribe Samy Burch, adapted to a modern American setting from Arthur Schnitzler’s novella. Though I had completely forgotten about this fact before the closing credits—and the screenplay doesn’t try to match the fiendish machinations on display in Todd Haynes’s film—it goes some ways in accounting for the renewed sense of relaxation that suffuses this film. From the opening montage, a stream of late-’70s New York avant-garde images that suggest the milieu in which Saxberger briefly practiced his craft, it is clear that Jones is interested in a much larger sense of place than the snowy woods of his previous film, and he takes care to recognize its hustle and bustle while also finding room for his hero’s own, more sanguine experience. The camera is wilder in its greater commitment to handheld, often used in tandem with rapid cutting during some of the larger group scenes, where a split-second shot of a minor member’s smirk adds to the viewer’s (and Saxberger’s) confusion while trying to understand his newfound milieu. In between these dialogue-heavy sequences, there are occasionally some lovely, rapid dissolves of the skies of New York, occupied by birds and buildings, which suggest Saxberger taking the temperature of his assumed home, a poetic mind still at work even as the form has fallen away.

Late Fame is, above all else, an often thrillingly imperfect film, one more open to the possibilities of total failure than Jones’s last film. From the inherent critique of these pretenders to the literary throne—the camera noticeably locks down for a few searing scenes that capture Meyers’s and his associates’ wealth—to Lee’s performance, which is so stylized and self-consciously that the expected reveal of her in a “normal” guise still carries a certain charge, the film risks being insular and even mean-spirited in its takedown of privileged posers, especially as the planned reading spirals further out of control. But it is all united under Dafoe, as warm and playfully rueful as he’s ever been, a force of calm in the midst of the chaos of his peers and his city. Crucially, though his poem is quite good (to my ears) and he does enjoy being feted, Saxberger, and therefore the film that he anchors, is free to slip in and out of these different modes; some are more successfully handled than others, but the lightness of its aging spirit is often unexpected and welcome.

Despite opening with the same camera slate opening as Passages, Peter Hujar’s Day is even more of a left turn for Sachs. Unlike Late Fame‘s fictional poet (but real poetry scene), the film takes not only real people but a very specific occurrence as its subject: in December 1974, writer Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall) attempted to embark on a project where she would record artists she knew talking in minute detail about the events of their previous day. For her first and only entry—as laid out in intertitles at the beginning of the film—she chose Peter Hujar (Ben Whishaw), a semi-prominent photographer; though the tape was subsequently lost, a transcript was retained, the contents of which provided the basis for this 76-minute film.

At first glance, Peter Hujar’s Day might seem even more self-satisfied, a 16mm-shot recounting of a fairly banal day in the life of a long-gone New York artist, with an extended anecdote about photographing Allen Ginsberg and stray references to Susan Sontag as perhaps the most readily discernible signposts to the average viewer. But though I can’t recall the precise wording of those title cards, they gesture towards what becomes compelling, even moving about this film. Because the transcript presumably contains no details as to the timespan of the recording, nor what may have transpired between its gaps, the film thus registers as a hybrid between audio reenactment of a documented event and an opportunity to imagine intimate, symbiotic actions of speaking and listening, full of little digressions, snacking, and movements between Rosenkrantz’s apartment and the building’s roof.

Sachs evokes this not only with a precision of framing within the Academy ratio frame, but also by constantly highlighting the inherently constructed nature of this production. Some are a bit more gratuitous than others—a recurring use of film rollouts, a few long shots where the slate and boom mic are visible, a handful of montages where preexisting music swells as Whishaw and Hall appear in poised repose—but they provide continual punctuation that remind the viewer of the work that must go into recreating Hujar’s attempt to recall his own past day. The film even appears to take place over the span of a few days, with a full day-night-day-night cycle, suggesting that to simply talk about one’s day in any detail at all itself takes more time than it does to live it. There, then is the crux of Peter Hujar’s Day‘s raison d’être: given that Hujar’s own recounting of his previous day’s happenings is inherently colored by his own perspective and the inevitable lapses in concentration and memory, the film is thus an imagining of a real event’s imagining of real events. That this all does not take away from the pleasures of existing in a long-gone artistic climate and of watching a gifted actor speaking and another strong actor intently listening is, in its own knowingly small way, more than a little impressive.

Courtesy of Sideshow/Janus Films.

Courtesy of MUBI.

Misericordia/Miséricorde

Rating **** Masterpiece

Directed by Alain Guiraudie

Grand Tour

Rating **** Masterpiece

Directed by Miguel Gomes

I sometimes worry that my habit of writing about two new releases together—stolen, like the credits/ratings block immediately above, from Jonathan Rosenbaum—can feel like a crutch. True, it can sometimes provide a productive, logical point of comparison, and just as often it can come as something of a challenge. But in this instance, it’s meant, at least at the outset, as a means of saving time, of allowing me to write at length about two of my favorite films of the decade thus far without needing to shortchange one or the other by “consigning” it to a capsule review, or taking even longer than I already have in my delayed writing and publication of what you’re reading now. Of course, this very act of combination could be seen as an implicit denigration, meaning that the films either aren’t worth my time and effort to tackle individually or that they can’t stand up by themselves. That (I hope) incorrect assumption is something I’m willing to risk, for the sake of various other competing obligations (for this website and in the actually “important” things in the “real world”).

That being said, the more I think about these two films, the more parallels present themselves. In an earlier, embryonic version of this piece concerned solely with the first film, I noted that from my vantage point, the early to mid-2010s seemed like an unusual time period, full of filmmakers who established themselves with what appeared to be a breakthrough hit; some of them have gone on to become part of what might be considered the film festival mainstay, while others have receded in visibility within the American cinephile consciousness for one reason or another. Alain Guiraudie seems to me the clearest and most understandable example, given the particular confluence of thriller mechanics, frank gay sexuality, and rigorous form offered by 2013’s Stranger by the Lake. However, Miguel Gomes isn’t far behind, even though 2012’s Tabu ultimately had a marginally smaller footprint when it was released. Both continue to operate as statements, even milestones, pure expressions of fated desire as filtered through Guiraudie’s stunningly casual treatment of cruising within precise, locked-down frames and Gomes’s two-part, black-and-white meditation on colonialism present and past, eventually slipping into his own unique take on silent cinema.

Guiraudie and Gomes have each released two feature film projects within a year of each other since then, neither to close the same fanfare. The former’s case is perhaps more banal: Staying Vertical, despite a surprise Cannes competition berth, was too willfully weird to attract a wide audience, and Nobody’s Hero, despite its considerable strengths, was doomed by a reluctant festival rollout and risky treatment of its terrorism backdrop. Gomes, for his part, went both bigger and smaller: the ambitious three-part epic Arabian Nights, all components of which premiered at the same time, was destined to confuse listmakers and cinephiles alike, while the lowkey lockdown film The Tsugua Diaries (co-directed with his artistic and life partner Maureen Fazendeiro) was a minor work by its very nature.

At last year’s Cannes, Guiraudie and Gomes took unexpected paths towards some semblance of critical acclaim. The French director’s Misericordia bowed in the non-competitive Cannes Premiere section, a post-COVID addition widely perceived as a backhanded compliment and tertiary tier of programming amid the main selection, generating nearly as many comments expressing disbelief that it was not in Competition as Víctor Erice’s Close Your Eyes and Lisandro Alonso’s Eureka from the previous year put together. For his part, the Portuguese director did appear in Cannes Competition for the first time with Grand Tour, winning an unexpected yet very well-deserved Best Director prize from the jury. In the usual fashion, they both received US theatrical releases earlier this year, coming out in back-to-back weeks in March.

Much of the (separate) discussion around these two films has hinged around a crucial concept: a filmmaker knowingly revisiting the style of his past works, whether to recapture something of a past glory or not. Both Misericordia and Grand Tour seem to call back specifically to Stranger by the Lake and Tabu, respectively, and it’s certainly no accident that these somewhat more palatable modes have been received as something of a return to form. Guiraudie’s film does indeed return to the openly queer murder mystery framework, while Gomes issued another bifurcated black-and-white tale of thwarted colonialist romance conveyed through archaic cinematic methods. But to reduce these two films, and their elaborations upon past successes, is to risk taking two master filmmakers for granted, even considering their recent reemergence into the wider cinephile consciousness.

As might be inferred by my shorter enumeration, Misericordia shares less in common with Guiraudie’s past work than Grand Tour does with Gomes’s. Like those films, however, it begins fully in media res, a long winding opening shot from the perspective of a car that eventually enters Saint-Martial, a remote village in the French countryside. The driver is Jérèmie (Félix Kysyl), a young man returning to his hometown on the occasion of his baker mentor’s funeral. Though he initially plans to leave that same night, the baker’s wife Martine (Catherine Frot) urges him to stay, and so begins an indefinite period of time spent in the company of the local villagers, including Martine’s son Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand), former acquaintance Walter (David Ayala), and the local priest (Jacques Develay).

Though the aforementioned violence does occur remarkably early and acts as the nominal plot engine for Misericordia‘s second two-thirds, Guiraudie establishes early on that there is much more on his mind than another tale of a h(a)unted man. The most immediate impression is of a specific, unusual sense of routine within an environ that is—to Jérèmie at least—both old and new. He is frequently seen walking in the yellowing forests from the relatively few locations that constitute the bulk of the film’s centers of activity, a purely beautiful backdrop of foliage and mountains (captured by Guiraudie’s frequent collaborator Claire Mathon) that often dwarfs Jérèmie and those he interacts with. Across innumerable glasses of pastis, several physical and/or verbal fights of varying levels of intensity, and various criss-crossing attractions (mostly between men), the interplay between the expansive outdoors and cramped interiors comes to form an odd mirror for the situation that Jérèmie has found himself in.

As his moral struggle increases in prominence, so too does the priest’s role, in a manner not dissimilar from the lonely straight man played by Patrick d’Assumçao in Stranger by the Lake. Aside from some chance interactions, the intertwining of Jérèmie and the priest truly begins with one of the most remarkable scenes to ever take place in a confessional, an veiled outpouring of dedication and doubt that bursts open Guiruadie’s carefully couched conversations. Though the film’s title—Latin for mercy—is never uttered onscreen, this scene and another between the two men on a cliff overlooking the village communicate in unexpectedly forthright terms all that goes into such a concept, which involves forgiveness of both the other and the self. With these elements coming to form the more thematic framework, Misericordia is able to also incorporate characters and narratives closer to farce, including a pair of dogged yet polite police officers whose presence only further muddies the waters of Guiraudie’s characteristically slippery relationship between reality and dreams. The final note is one of total ambiguity, an unexpected note given to an unexpected person that refuses any hint of finality, one final gambit in a continual highwire act between hilarity, suspense, and heartrending emotion.

If Misericordia only gets more fascinating as it unfolds, Grand Tour is a marvel from its production concept alone. It is composed of what might be considered two separate tendencies: the narrative, which follows the story of a British civil servant (Edward, played by Gonçalo Waddington) who flees across Asia in the year 1918, pursued by his betrothed Molly (Crista Alfaite), which is told from first his perspective, then hers on obvious soundstages in Portugal shot in black-and-white by Rui Poças; and the non-narrative, which incorporates black-and-white and color footage shot in modern times with no attempts to hide the century-long gap between the diegesis of the story and the new aspects of the present; much of it was shot by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, but the sections in China were shot (due to lockdown protocol) by Gui Liang, with Gomes directing remotely from across the country.

Over all of this, there is narration given by unnamed voices who speak in the language of the country Edward, then Molly is in at the time, and it is this wild collision of voices and past and present that gives Grand Tour so much of its spark. It is crucial that Gomes does not attempt to disguise what many have already characterized as an excessively Orientalist lens. There is never any point at which the film is unaware of the distance that exists between it and everything it is depicting: the gap in time between it and the Western characters, and the gap in perspective between it and the locales it is existing within. Like Molly’s continual pursuit of Edward, there is the constant sense of searching, during which Gomes’s unique methodology allows him to open up the film to the possibility of experiencing all that the world has to offer.

That being said, Grand Tour wouldn’t be as successful if Gomes lacked an investment in the central dynamic. Part of this is courtesy of the sneakily coherent structure of his screenplay (co-written with Fazendeiro, Telmo Churro, and Mariana Ricardo), which progresses rapidly through Edward’s hapless travails and then diverges from them during Molly’s retracing of his steps, throwing in additional characters which complicate and delay her quest in unexpected, often amusing ways. It also becomes clear that the ardor and care with which Gomes captures both halves of the twinned journeys form a metonym for the passion that Molly has for Edward despite his parting; Alfaite’s performance, full of exuberance and bemused determination, seems to represent Gomes’s perspective better than the shambling Waddington. By the end, which feels like a grand Classical Hollywood exit, the sights and sounds that the viewer experiences alongside these two people are overpowering, a reminder of all that remains to be seen.

Here
Here

Rating *** A must-see

Directed by Bas Devos
Directed by Robert Zemeckis

It’s nothing new to have films with the exact same title within a few years of each other, an only mildly less amusing variation on the confluence of two films with similar subject matter coming out at the same time. There have been no fewer than three films in the past five years to have the English title of Limbo, and two films named Dogman have competed in major film festivals in the last six; film critic Neil Young has even utilized the Twitter hashtag #ThisTitleIsTaken to note the eternal recurrence of titles such as Home, Chaos, and Eden. Such dubbings point as firmly to the undying relevance of the themes they evoke (for better or worse), but it also suggests a desire for a flexible mind on the part of the viewer: many filmmakers might find it useful to outline but not relate the precise nature of the limbo or the home that their film will tackle.

What separates the latest and most potentially tantalizing iteration in this trend to date is, at least initially, the inevitability. When Here premiered at the Berlinale last year, and it became apparent that Cinema Guild would opt to release it in 2024, it seemed more and more likely that it would align with Here‘s release year. I thought of the idea of this review many months ago and, despite more than a half year separating the releases of Here and Here—along with 2024’s fellow travelers of Walter Salles’s Oscar contender I’m Still Here, the belated week-long run of Christopher Harris’s 2001 experimental film still/here, and various other films like Here After, I Like It Here, and You Can’t Stay Here–I endeavored to write about what may seem two entirely separate films solely linked by their names.

I want to stress that, though confusion and obfuscation are key aspects of reading this review, this is a sincere attempt to discuss two continuously generative films that hail from entirely different sources of inspiration and are aimed towards divergent affects. They also, coincidentally enough, come from two directors on the opposite end of their artistic careers and the spectrum of visibility. Here is the Belgian filmmaker Bas Devos’s fourth feature film, and is at best his second to make a breakthrough stateside. Each of his films—all low-budget works resolutely belonging to the arthouse—have incorporated celluloid in some way, even going so far as to involve 65mm for certain shots in his first two features, and they operate with a conscious miniaturist sensibility, all running under 90 minutes and dealing with individuals’ experiences of the city and people around them. By contrast, Here is Robert Zemeckis’s twenty-second feature film at the tail-end of a career full of whiz-bang Hollywood filmmaking, alternately acclaimed and despised technical experimentation, and curious reckonings—both purposeful and unconscious—with nostalgia for the American Century, even as it was still in progress. His oeuvre involves too many different digressions and periods to easily summarize, but it’s safe to say that, despite some abiding supporters (including myself), his level of critical and popular support at this time might be even below the few but largely glowing reviews that Devos has received.

Here has been characterized, largely accurately, as belonging to a new phase of Devos’s career after his first two notably pessimistic features Violet (2014) and Hellhole (2019). His third feature, the nocturnal city reverie Ghost Tropic, premiered a scant few months after the latter and heralded a much less harsh outlook, a shift to 16mm, and a greater incorporation of nature within the city of Brussels that has served as Devos’s primary location. Here, like its fellow Brussels-set films, is concerned with the immigrant experience in a less precarious sense than many contemporary works, using their enclaves and quotidian interactions to explore what it means to exist in a place that is both home and not home. Here‘s protagonists initially seem to embody these two separate mindsets: Stefan (Stefan Gota) is a Romanian construction worker preparing to return to his native country on holiday, though he may his extend his “stay” indefinitely; Shuxiu (Gong Liyo, who was also an editor on Wang Bing’s monumental Youth trilogy) is a Chinese bryologist (researcher of mosses) who teaches at a university and helps out with her aunt’s restaurant, with no mention of any plans to alter her life.

Life alterations (and lack thereof) form the central conundrums surrounding Here. Based on Richard McGuire’s 2014 graphic novel—a 304-page tome itself expanded from a 6-page comic story in 1989, if there weren’t enough versions of Here already in play—it aims for what scans as an immensely ambitious undertaking: to chronicle the events of a specific place from prehistoric times to the modern day in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. Like its source(s), Here uses a fixed, slightly askew perspective—here somewhere on the wall between a house’s living room and dining room; the graphic novel is closer to the corner of the room and produces a more angular yet more “neutral” composition, while the comic story’s point of view only looks at a corner of the living room by the window—that, in the film’s most publicized gambit, restricts Zemeckis to a single camera set-up for the entirety of Here.

It should be said that, despite my great admiration for both films, Here is a definitely stronger, more cohesive, and ultimately more beautiful work than Here. The opening shots of each swiftly communicate both the intentions and the level of subtlety each is operating on: Here observes a construction site in the distance with trees largely covering it in the foreground, an elegant interplay in emphases between the human-constructed city and the nature that will assert itself in fits and starts within these confines before eventually fully taking over the narrative. It’s difficult to talk about what exactly constitutes a shot within Here, since it uses the source’s technique of placing frames within frames to capture a part of the spot of land at a different time from the primary tableaux surrounding it, but Here opens with a car driving in front of the house, different frames within frames capturing three different cars along the same trajectory, before a multitude of views of the home interior and/or undeveloped land at different times that eventually resolve into the first dialogue scene with Here‘s central couple, Richard (Tom Hanks) and Margaret (Robin Wright), as they enter what was the former’s home for more than half a century. Elegance is and isn’t the name of the game for Here which, for all its narratives—intersecting in space but not time—reveals itself to be the tale of the Young clan, from the time that Richard’s parents moved into the house after World War II to his moving out in the early 2000s. For many, that sixty-year timespan feels reminiscent of the last time Zemeckis, Hanks, Wright, and co-screenwriter last collaborated on a film, resulting in the vastly more popular Forrest Gump thirty years ago. While Here‘s hokeyness and eagerness to track the times that are a’changin’ do strike a chord of recognition, it’s a comparison that feels as limited as the film’s perspective.

Speaking of which: one of Here‘s most brilliant moments reveals the canniness of its aesthetic strategy: the first definable “incident” on this patch of land, both chronologically and in the unfolding of the film, shows the extinction of the dinosaurs, complete with copious amounts of lava and fleeing reptiles. Any conventional treatment of this event, a spectacular global disaster, would feature grand sweeping shots of the devastation that showed off the scale of the barren, fiery landscapes. Here, on the other hand, refuses such elaborations, and its restraint signals the divide between this patch of land and others; while much can be inferred about the (eventually literal) outside world and a great deal is brought into the house, spoken about, and shown on television, it is left to the imagination what might happen. Here is a film that revels in imagination, in the direct images of its characters’ experiences and the thrumming richness of the world that surrounds them. Though it takes place over five days and four nights, its sense of time feels considerably more porous than the ordinary cycle of light and dark. Part of that has to do with Stefan’s habitual insomnia, which stretches out nights to achieve not the sustained mood of Devos’s previous film, but instead a slippage between waking and dreamed life.

Both Stefan and Shuxiu experience this second state at one point: the latter’s represents her first entry into the film, describing in Mandarin Chinese voiceover a morning in bed where she briefly forgot the names of the things surrounding her, moving from panic to an acceptance of a oneness with the world that is broken up by the sound of an outside siren. The images that accompany this recounting, a series of shots in the woods of the mosses and trees, precede Shuxiu’s first on-screen appearance, and are echoed during a brief nap Stefan takes while paying a visit to the hospital his sister works at. It’s possible to see Here as a film simultaneously highlighting and dismissing the unity of world. Though the various occupants of the land fall into consciously rhyming cycles, sometimes in a manner that manages to be equally revelatory and short-sighted—an early airplane fanatic and patriarch dies from the Spanish flu, while the Latine housekeeper for a Black family (notably the only domestic worker in the whole film) is all-too-unsubtly shown developing COVID—the swath of experience inevitably calls attention to the disparities on display.

The Youngs live in a continual state of middle-class malaise, with Richard forced to give up on his painting aspirations by an unplanned pregnancy, becoming an insurance salesman while he and Margaret continue to live in the house with his parents and siblings; a 1940s couple eventually gets rich by inventing the La-Z-Boy chair and immediately departs for California; two other families live there for a seemingly brief period of time before a death drives them away. But through all the passings in their own family, the Youngs stay far longer than they should, as much at the mercy of capitalist striving as their own inertia. Here reflects this emotional turmoil with an eerie placidity, incorporating their sufferings with those of others—including a Lenni-Lenape couple whose own family formation coincides on-screen with Richard and Margaret’s, eventually concluding with the woman’s death from old age—into the inexorable passage of time. Though certain milestones are clearer than others (none moreso than a television showing the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show, a sign of Zemeckis returning to the roots of his debut I Wanna Hold Your Hand), the signposting that generally occurs is resolutely ordinary or undercut: New Year’s Eve 2003, the end of the Revolutionary War being met with a verbal shrug. The origins of the La-Z-Boy, as much amusing on-screen attention as it gets, seem to be forgotten by history, and the only thing that people point out is the beautiful historical building across the street, belonging to, of all people, Benjamin Franklin’s extra-marital son, who staunchly backed the British colonial forces. The famed inventor and Founding Father makes an appearance, but that grand house is literally backgrounded at almost all times, a footnote in history only notable because it happens to be the only colonial governor’s mansion still standing today. To be overshadowed by barely remembered history is something of a terrible state of existence.

Here has a few half-remembered invocations of history, both anthropocentric and natural: a friend of Stefan’s points out that the first trains to travel in mainland Europe arrived in Brussels, which he in turn mentions to Shuxiu a little while after she tells him that mosses were the first plants to grow on land. Where the great anguish and only half-convincing catharsis of Here lies in all the ways the modern world can make a person feel small, Here is largely content with that designation, even embracing it in many ways. It’s useful of course to see the mosses that become so crucial to the last third of Here as a synecdoche for the film’s aims: a thing that grows everywhere without people noticing it—Stefan even draws a comparison to himself—that is itself “a forest full of life.” But this move into nature only heightens the more (figuratively) subterranean beauty of the abutting city in night and day, and draws further attention to the ways in which Stefan was already interacting with nature: his preparations of soup to fully empty his fridge before his journeys, the various seeds that mysteriously appear in his pocket, his trip to a communal garden. Here is much more about finding the joy in the place where you live, but Here‘s slender narrative invokes this idea when it comes to Stefan’s situation: in an early scene in his apartment, he looks out his window at the city, before turning back and saying “this is my home” in Romanian, a phrase that, depending where you look, has a completely different meaning.

Here has garnered many divergent reactions and points of comparison—Michael Snow’s structuralist masterpiece Wavelength, the fixed proscenium staging of the Lumières, the grand-scale suburbia of The Tree of Life, the similar constraints of Steven Soderbergh’s Presence from this year—but it’s worth pointing out what, to me, strikes me as some key differences from the little I’ve glimpsed of the graphic novel (I’ve read and liked the comic story decently). Though the central narrative appears to be similar, there’s an abstract quality to much of Here, with its constant aim to find contextless juxtapositions between similar activities across time, that Here, for all its strengths, does not attempt to emulate: even as the constant shifting makes it purposefully difficult to get fully acclimated to the various storylines for the first twenty minutes or so, this does ultimately aim to tell a set of linear stories.

And yet, Here‘s adherence to traditional dramatics and relatively coherent screen elements produces its own daring innovations and reference points. The former is the removal of the year designation within each frame within the frame, automatically producing a destabilizing effect wholly removed from the greater use of such frames in the comics. While guesses can be made as to the origin of these individual shots, and the frames within frames are used more to transition between scenes rather than to constantly interrupt the proceedings, the effect is of a time period (minutes or decades apart) intruding upon one another, where the death march of the narrative becomes only crueler and more sobering when juxtaposed in the same frame with a celebration at another time. Méliès might be the better silent cinema pioneer to refer to, both in terms of cutting-edge technology—the extensive use of generative AI to de-age the actors during the take is never completely convincing but feels remarkably close, an uncanny valley Zemeckis has dwelled in for many years—and in a self-conscious theatricality. The living room runs deep into the background, though not quite as much as the graphic novel’s, but while Here varies its focal points’ distance from the camera well, many scenes are played rather close, with characters frequently looking disconcertingly off-screen past the camera, or beginning or ending a scene by walking towards or away from an unknown sector. Perhaps the film’s single most galvanizing moment expands the viewer’s sense—knowingly jarring them away from the perspective of the characters—of the space with a sublimely simple device.

The ending of Here is as ambiguous as the ending of Here is unambiguous, but both find a clear place of resolution that centers around a realization of all that remains forgotten and uncomprehended. Even though Here‘s title is used frequently, down to being the very last word spoken, the formal choice that accompanies it acts as a revelation for the audience that, once again, was apparent to the characters all along. Here contains a much more modest, yet no less impactful movement of its own, carrying within it an unmistakable sense of tenderness and curiosity that explores an interior rather than exterior space. Nick Newman (via Adam Nayman) has a much more cynical view of the final perspective of Here‘s, and it’s true that its neat narrative tidiness speaks just as much to all that has been lost and the even further diminished stature of this central couple, but the very last frames within the frame—returning to look once more at the little living room where centuries of personal history have taken place—feels remarkably in line with Here‘s mosses: a mini-forest of life, full of pleasure and pain.

Chime
The Serpent’s Path/La Voie du serpent
Cloud/クラウド/Kuraudo

Rating *** A must-see

Directed by Kurosawa Kiyoshi

The average cinephile would certainly be forgiven for not noticing Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s relatively long absence from filmmaking to open this tumultuous decade. After his perpetually underrated Wife of a Spy played in competition at the Venice Film Festival in 2020, he didn’t put out another film for four years, his longest break since 2008 (Tokyo Sonata) to 2012 (Penance). In the haze of the pandemic and its attendant complications, it’s only natural that even a steady artist like Kurosawa would fall out of view. Still, the slow roll-out of announcements—beginning in April 2023 and concluding in February 2024—that he would be releasing three feature films in the calendar year was one of the more delightful phenomenons of the past few years.

The groundswell seemed to stem from a variety of impulses: the excitement at his return of course, the surprise at this heightened degree of prolificness (Hong Sang-soo was inevitably invoked). However, there was perhaps just a little bit of relief. Following a run of, in the eyes of the many who still view Kurosawa as “merely” one of horror cinema’s greatest exponents, unconventional films—Before We Vanish‘s alien invasion, To the Ends of the Earth‘s odd travelogue, Wife of a Spy‘s period intrigue—the announcements of first a remake of Serpent’s Path (1998), one of his final V-cinema efforts, then the explicitly supernatural Chime, and finally the suspense thriller Cloud seemed to herald something of a return to form.

Ironically, the timeline of the films’ respective availability has been jumbled and uneven at every turn. The 45-minute Chime premiered in a sidebar at the Berlinale and, thanks to its botched release from a NFT company, became available via extralegal means a few months later. Though The Serpent’s Path technically premiered second, receiving a full-fledged theatrical release in Japan in June, it was completely unseen in the West until its competition berth at the San Sebastian Film Festival, and has only received a scant few festival showings in North America since then. Therefore, Cloud, the final film announced and premiered from this trio, has received much greater attention at an earlier time than its predecessor, thanks to a Venice out-of-competition slot (where it was commonly cited as being better than a number of the actual Golden Lion hopefuls) and a well-attended TIFF premiere. And, as has been frequently mentioned, none of these films currently have U.S. distribution.

I say all of this not only to catalogue the strange journey that related films, especially Kurosawa’s—lest we forget that Journey to the Shore, an Un Certain Regard prizewinner and NYFF Main Slate entry, never got an American distributor—can take in the currents of the festival circuit, but to point at what might be called a certain interchangeability between these three works, all of which are strong and distinct in their own ways yet ever-so-slightly lesser than the majority of his more recent work. I watched these earlier this month—in an appropriately mixed-up order: The Serpent’s Path, Cloud, Chime; I’ll be discussing the films according to the order they premiered—and throughout I couldn’t help but think of how my friend Evan Morgan, one of the smartest critics I know (especially on Kurosawa), remarked to me that, after seeing Chime and knowing about the two films to follow, he felt Kurosawa was entering a more retrospective period after more than a decade where “everything seemed new and open to infinite possibilities,” an assessment which is, for better or worse, largely accurate, or at least indicative of a somewhat more straightforward conception than his previous predilection.

Chime, despite its short running time and novel setting, is ultimately the film that adheres most closely to this paradigm; it is also the strongest of the year. Kurosawa is by no means new to working within the span of an hour, but these works—including “Beautiful New Bay Area Project” and Seventh Code, both from 2013, and his short “Actually…” from two years ago—have typically, due to a combination of their status as commissions and their more free-floating narratives, allowed Kurosawa to play in freewheeling fashion with genre and tone. Chime, by contrast, is almost perversely committed to its evocation of the dread that has been his most widely beloved mode for so long, which is to say that this is paradoxically a continually surprising film narratively without the unexpected shifts of many of his other, even better works.

True, Chime generates an immediate frisson from its main character’s work: the antiseptic teaching kitchens, besides uncannily reminding me instantly of Frederick Wiseman’s Menus-Plaisirs—Les Troisgros, are much more orderly yet oddly reminiscent of his typically dingy environs, with all the cold reflective metal and knives a sure harbinger of the violence to come. The familiar elements don’t only appear at work; viewing this in close proximity to Tokyo Sonata, the family dinners here bear a marked resemblance, only streamlined and stripped of all but the most essential elements. When the premise first came out, many compared it to Memoria, but besides there being surprisingly little of the actual chime (much more akin to wind chimes as opposed to, say, the sound of a ringtone), it is more than anything else an externalization, a reminder of all the potential evil surrounding us.

Especially at this early juncture, it’s too reductive to say that Chime is the most successful of Kurosawa’s films this year merely because it sticks closest to his strengths, which lie both in sustained mood and in the various means by which he teases out his characters’ madness: the overflowing box of cans that the chef’s wife is dumping out at one point, the nighttime sojourn to hide a body, a disastrous job interview caused by the chef’s manic inability to get out of his own perspective. It’s probably unlikely that this scenario could sustain a film much longer than this one, especially considering the coda: a sudden burst of (emulated?) film grain that calls to mind Kurosawa’s recreation of 9.5mm film for Wife of a Spy, the exact right frenzied note to end a uniformly thrilling 45 minutes. Chime is direct about its intentions and executes them in the right manner, which for a craftsman of this caliber is kind of ideal.

In a certain sense, it’s convenient for referential purposese that the remake of Kurosawa’s 1998 film appears to be formally titled in English The Serpent’s Path, though I wonder how much of that comes from the direct translation of the French “La Voie” (not “le chemin” as originally reported). Such a small yet focusing element describes this take on his original material well. For me, if it is not quite the best of this trio, then it’s certainly the most fascinating. In broad strokes, The Serpent’s Path operates as a tremendously faithful remake of Serpent’s Path, following a grieving father as he, with the help of a much more implacable accomplice, kidnaps and tortures men who he believes killed—unlike in the Japanese original, molestation is never mentioned—his daughter.

Of course, the film takes place in Paris, featuring the great French actor Damien Bonnard as the father, and represents Kurosawa’s second film outside his native country after the French film Daguerrotype. His helper, replacing the bespectacled male math teacher of the original, is a female doctor played by Shibasaki Ko, who speaks impeccable French and in certain ways represents a combination of characters from Serpent’s Path, including an enigmatic gang leader who served as one of the main antagonists. The original has long been noted for its overwhelming bleakness, a pitiless examination of abasement that equally makes sense amid his direct-to-video work and coming right after Cure. The Serpent’s Path, at least in my view, does reach a similar height and, in terms of Kurosawa’s expression of his interests, surpass the original, but it doesn’t necessarily aim to do so via its atmosphere.

The dingy, enormous warehouse is replaced by more discrete, still dilapidated rooms reminiscent of a soundstage; the 80 minute film is expanded out to almost 2 hours without seeming to add too much in the way of plot. Rather, The Serpent’s Path works more slyly than the other two films put together when viewed from the lens of adaptation. Most obviously notable are the scenes with Nishijima Hideotoshi (the lead of Kurosawa’s Creepy, which featured Serpent’s Path star Kagawa Teruyuki) as one of the doctor’s patients, who has lived in France for many years without ever learning the language: his signature weariness mixed with charisma as he talks about his persistent migraines and growing dissatisfaction with his life communicates a great deal about a dislocation faced, in one way or another, by all the characters.

Kurosawa’s ability to evoke modern alienation has always been one of his most significant tools, and it’s further bolstered here by one of the most striking changes. While many sequences are replicated virtually identically, down to a few perfectly copied visual choices like a tilt-up as the first captive looks up at the father, the film invokes the idea of a corporate conspiracy which led to the murder much earlier than the hints given in Serpent’s Path. Both films are, at their core, about a paranoiac struggling to establish a motivation for the havoc he is wreaking, but The Serpent’s Path introduction of a more coherent throughline trades Serpent’s Path‘s haze of confusion—signified by the copious use of complex math problems—for the brutal, cold light of digital and two-faced interactions enabled by late capitalism and ostensible good intentions. Ultimately, my preference for The Serpent’s Path may simply lie in the sheer novelty of seeing Kurosawa directing Damien Bonnard as he torments Mathieu Amalric and Grégoire Colin, but the fullness with which he delves into his newly revitalized premise, even if it lacks the focus of Chime, is truly chilling.

It might be something of an anticlimax to end with Cloud, even though it’s a very worthy film in its own right and already, deservedly, has plenty of champions. Like Chime, it’s a film that, despite the noted shift from suspense thriller to quasi-action shootout, is relatively direct about its intentions and interests, and “merely” sets about executing them with great vigor. Much of the coverage around the film has revolved around its apparent updating of Cure and especially Pulse for a more depersonalized, bland Internet age; it might be too harsh to say that these comparisons are more reflective of Kurosawa’s still underseen body of work and therefore Western critics’ limited understanding of his cinema, but, a few potent scenes of our antihero as he waits for his scalped goods to sell out on a flickering reseller website aside, this is much less a film about the actual apparatus of technology than human interactions under duress.

Eric Marsh compared it to Doppelganger, which I haven’t seen, but, perhaps because of the compressed preparatory viewing I undertook for my own week of Kurosawa, it oddly reminded me most of Serpent’s Path‘s sister film Eyes of the Spider (also 1998); for his part Filipe Furtado cited The Revenge films (I’ve seen the first and can see the resemblance), which also belong to Kurosawa’s V-Cinema works. Though Eyes virtually begins where Serpent’s Path leaves off—starring Aikawa Sho, the helper in that film, as a man seeking revenge for his daughter’s murder—it quickly becomes something of a yakuza comedy, tracking the drudgery of a hitman’s life in a vague, nonsensical hierarchy; though there is plenty of bloodshed, it is dealt with in a fairly lightweight manner.

Cloud only involves the yakuza tangentially, in terms of the implied connections and past that the reseller’s assistant possesses, but it feels of a piece with Eyes of the Spider in its approach to violence and the numbing consequences of economic manipulation, especially once the reseller and his girlfriend move to the countryside and all the problems they hoped to escape are multiplied tenfold. Kurosawa’s staging of the action scenes, which reminded me of the wonderfully absurd shootouts in the very different Before We Vanish, is very clean and dynamic, playing up the cavernous desolation of the warehouse (as opposed to the disturbingly tidy warehouse in The Serpent’s Path). Ultimately, the inexorable grind of moneymaking keeps moving, encapsulated in the use of one of Kurosawa’s best recurring formal devices during the final moments: obvious rear projection during driving scenes, which he once described as aiding the sense of transformation caused by the resulting conversations. Like its two similarly brilliant brethren, it’s clear that something akin to an apocalypse is fast approaching; while most of my favorite Kurosawas don’t end on such an unambiguous note of pessimism, there’s still not much as compelling as his cinema, whatever running time, genre, or form it adopts.