NYFF64 Diary, Part 1 ~ More TK @ da Movies

One of the great wonders of New York City (da best city in the world baybee!) is the yearly New York Film Festival, now in its sixty-fourth iteration, descending upon Lincoln Square in the sliver of time between summer and fall, when the weather starts to get a little nasty and damp. Right before the eyes of the industry turn inexorably to the Oscars, with their glitz and glam and insane discourse cycles and multimillion-dollar press campaigns, all the coolest freaks and sickos and perverts you and I know rock up to Alice Tully Hall to spend between one and four hours in the dark, together.

Based on my limited festival-going experience, I can overconfidently state that NYFF is the best in the biz, a deft blend of punchy, under-seen international programming and New Fun Hits that you can brag to your friends about seeing earlier than them for the rest of awards season. It's also become an annual tradition for my partner and I (eternal love as always to @abbyat10percent.bsky.social I would split a Centerpiece & Closing Pass with you until the end of time), and this year I'm gonna try to blog it! Let's see how successful that is! Maybe it'll be great!!

Film #0.5 – Primetime

There's a lot of really good stuff coming out around the festival this year, so I've decided to treat Lance Oppenheim's debut fiction feature as the unofficial kickoff to my NYFF season this year, even though we caught it at the lowly AMC 84th Street 61 the night before our first actual NYFF-aligned screening.

In a lot of ways this is a seemingly-prototypical A24 release—it's got an early-career director trying something with a big-ish budget and a stunt-ish cast, under a haze of late twentieth/early twenty-first century doldrums. Moreover, it's an adaptation of a very sturdy Esquire article that's full of detail that I imagine is essentially catnip to a filmmaker like Oppenheim, who's worked exclusively in documentaries before now—here's Bill Conradt, the district attorney whose death by suicide hastened the end of "To Catch a Predator" as a tv show,2 a Texas Longhorns fan who almost certainly knew exactly what statutes his behavior was violating; there's Billy Myrick, chief of police for Murphy, Texas, described as a hotheaded and terrible boss in so many words; over there's a detective named Gator who thinks this is all going too fast, too reckless; here's Chris Hansen, coldly pivoting towards how the show will still go on after all this mess.

The film captures some of this detail by essentially burying it so far into each character that they don't have to experience any growth or change over the course of this film. Robert Pattinson's performance as Hansen is almost alarming, a perfect opportunity for him to flex his chameleonic voice and angular-hottie looks for evil. The movie is buried under this lacquer of early-aughts digital technology—late-in-life CRT monitors and those last phones we all had before smartphones ruined our lives, websites with grainy textures and square buttons, chunky straight-to-tape broadcast cameras—and Pattinson basically gets to sit inside that melange of visual decay and destroy his soul. His coterie of hangers-on includes Merritt Weaver (the producer) and Skyler Gisondo (the decoy) as people who have not exactly reached Hansen's level of fame-hungry resolve, but they're on their way. Then again, it's not like this script is really reaching for interiority on any front, much less with these principal three—it's much more content to just act as if they're empty avatars for fame, for money, for SAG membership, for television itself, and to then point at the situation its put in front of you and ask "isn't it funny how none of these guys have souls?"

Film #1 – Rose

We actually kicked off our time at Alice Tully Hall with Rose, an incredibly stark pastoral drama directed by Markus Schleinzer (whose work I am entirely unfamiliar with), starring Sandra Hüller3 as a 17th-century woman who disguises herself as a man to go off soldiering, and then, after war, arrives at a small Protestant village to claim a land inheritance. "Now," one may be asking themselves at this point, "I don't know a ton about movies, but that sure sounds like an Austrian-German coproduction with a lot on its mind," and you would be right! It is, somehow, exactly what it says on the tin and also even more.

Hüller, whose character spends nearly all of the movie only referred to as "Master" or some equivalent, eventually gets a bride, and then problems arise as you'd expect—first from the land, and then from disease, and then from people. The film has a terribly confident matter-of-factness about it, an unwillingness to pretend that things could get better or worse than they are, because they simply are. In a way it's a remarkably honest script, insofar as each of these characters makes the exact decisions that they should make every time. Rose behaves the way she does because of how she arrived at the point that this movie begins at. Her wife, Suzannah (Caro Braun), is intermittently sheltered and overconfident, because of course she is.

It almost feels reductive to slap the roof of this movie and say something goofy like "this bad boy can fit so many contemporary analogues about gender into it" but I feel comfortable doing that because Schleinzer made that comparison very explicitly in the Q&A following the screening. But it does, in large part because it's so confidently told. It's got double standards of treatment and perception and worth suffused throughout, but the film refuses to be preachy because it's treated as an of-course proposition, because it knows that the lives that we lead are always going to be informed by perception and religion and abstract mores that we wish we could change but can't.

More tk,

Luis

1. Like most AMCs it used to be nice and have good programming, but it is now run by a syphilitic moron who thinks the only people who go to the movies are children under twelve or guys who didn't catch whatever the newest movie three weeks ago was, and the recliners are broken, and the projector in theatre three has been out of focus for I think two years.

2. It's always a little funny to remember that, despite its insane cultural impact, "To Catch a Predator" only ran for twenty episodes over three years.

3. the 🐐

Writing soundtrack