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Film Festivals

41st NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL

By • Oct 23rd, 2003 • Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6

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I have lost my notes and reviews of two films which I enjoyed and which I recommend to you, in hopes they will become available in the future on DVD.
BRIGHT LEAVES (USA/First Run Features) is a documentary, written, directed and narrated by the wry, North Carolina humorist, Ross McElwee (SHERMAN’S MARCH) as a both a family history and a history of the state’s biggest cash crop, although its most lethal, tobacco.
McElwee comes from a tobacco family; his great grandfather was the maker of the famous brand named Bull Durham, an empire eclipsed by the cigarette-making prowess of the Dukes. McElwee is obsessed with the 1950 Warners’ film, BRIGHT LEAF, in which Gary Cooper is forced to relinquish his tobacco riches much like McElwee’s progenitor. Whether BRIGHT LEAF is actually his great grandfather’s biopic becomes one of the thematic strands of the film, as is the tradition in the McElwee family of physicians caring for generations of tobacco smoking victims.
RAJA (France), written and directed by Jacques Doillon, is a wonderful slow dance of Brechtian sexual politics in the guise of a Lolita-Humbert Humbert conflict. This hostile romance pits a wealthy, middle-aged, French owner of a mansion in Morocco, Fred, (played by the superb Pascal Greggory) and his adorably sexy, though huffy servant, the much younger Raja (Najat Benssallem).
You may be sure that Raja is not about to capitulate to Fred’s advances without courtship, gifts, and, ultimately, marriage–or the cash equivalent. There is a lot of kvetching about the politics of working inside the much cooler house or being returned to toil in the heat of the sun-baked garden, where the furious Fred demotes Raja for non-compliance.
What’s most amusing to me is that Raja can pull her stunts because she has utterly no interest in the much-too-mature M. Greggory, whom, as you may know from a host of French films, is a marvelous-looking chap.

I heard that a Polish film, provocatively titled PORNOGRAPHY (adapted from the third novel of the great Polish writer, Witold Gombrowicz), was fascinating, but it was not for me.
This protracted picaresque tale concerns two middle-aged, Warsaw, cultural figures who sit out the German occupation of Poland by retiring to a friend’s farm and contriving mischief. Their first failed complot is an attempt to sexually interest a young, attractive blonde couple in each other. (The blondes prove completely indifferent to one another.) The tricksters pretext for attempting to arouse the youths’ passion (and steal the young girl from her older, highly proper fiancée) is to have the kids rehearse a love scene from a concocted film script, to be shot after the war.
When this scheme fizzles, they plot to have the blond youth assassinate a Nazi deserter, who has had a nervous breakdown and is hiding out on the farm, which is teeming with German soldiers.
True, I have an aversion to barnyard pranks, but I found these as wearisome as the latest, dumb “Polish jokes.”

Having attended all but three of the 41 New York Film Festivals, I can’t quite believe that, once more, “I ate the whole thing,” as chronic indulgers used to exclaim in the old bromo seltzer commercials.
I come away from each Festival knowing that, even though I have missed Cannes, Venice, and Toronto, eventually, in New York, I will have seen the best of the fests. It’s the ultimate film roundup.

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