Sandwiches and NYFF60
Tar, Stars at Noon, White Noise, a famous Italian sandwich, and more
Attending the New York Film Festival is always a whirlwind of movie viewing, sometimes with six films in a single day. I covered some titles (including the highly anticipated Bones and All) for LitHub—but have augmented my thoughts here along with some more first impressions of things I watched—including three highly anticipated new releases you can catch right now. We’ll start food first, and short takes last.
i. what sustained me before, during, and after screenings
ii. new releases: Tar / Decision to Leave / Stars at Noon
iii. all’anticio vinaio and more
A SANDWICH A DAY
Ham, butter, and gruyere on baguette at Epicurie Boulud, an oasis in the midst of Lincoln Center condos.
The “Genova”
Hot soppressata, olive sauce, arugula, smoked scamorza, sun-dried tomatoes, from Sfilatino. The best part about this little Italian sandwich shop is that it doesn’t discriminate between breakfast and lunch, allowing you to order any of their twenty plus sandwiches or piadine (flatbread) starting at 8AM. All thanks to the residents’ of 58th street’s need for java and the dearth of neighborhood cafes. (I’m skeptical of the espresso here but, please, prove me wrong.)
Roast pork with broccoli rabe at Archestratus. As good if not better than at your usual Italian sandwich shop. I savor the quality over quantity here, and if my mind isn’t playing tricks on me, the crumb of the bread had the homey density of polenta. My experience eating this al fresco could not even be ruined by the impromptu puking of a neighboring poodle, heaving up a pile of oyster crackers.
TÁR
dir. Todd Field
Cate Blanchett is deliciously monstrous and invigoratingly evil as a polymath conductor and cruel genius. No one has so taken to leisurely jogging with such conniving force since Claire Underwood. To call her an antihero feels numbingly reductive and insufficiently categorizes the nuance Todd Field brings to this portrait of an egomaniac. His frames are brilliantly cold and photography exactingly beautiful, (see: the coolly Brutalist apartment in Berlin she shares with her partner played by Nina Hoss), and I can’t get over the little details, like her gifted Birkin bag or those fine-gauge knits slung over her perfect tailoring.
Tar is about the potently American concoction of power, corruption, lies, and reinvention—which places the film along the ranks of There Will Be Blood. Blanchett even gets a “milkshake” moment, a terrorizing display of self-delusion and ego, here accompanied by some emphatic accordion playing. Now playing.
DECISION TO LEAVE
dir. Park Chan-wook
A police detective investigates the death of an older man and falls in love with his widow. Park Chan-wook, director of Oldboy and The Handmaiden, evinces a mellowing out with this tangled yarn, forging a lithesome visual language that fuses a carousel of memory and desire between the observer and the observed, cop and suspect, cat and mouse. Indebted to Vertigo, this flawless film crackles with sophistication and elegantly toys with genre conventions, twisting femme fatale standards to establish an affecting love story in the process. Now playing.
STARS AT NOON
dir. Claire Denis
Rum and sunlight on repeat for two strangers in a strange land, reinventing and losing their identities in the process. Antonioni did it better with The Passenger, but I’m here for Margaret Qualley, a sparkling revelation proving The Leftovers was no fluke. In fisherman’s sandals and a serious thicket of hair, she stomps around the puddles of Nicaragua as an American journalist-prostitute-possibly-something-else, stumbling into love—or is it opportunistic codependence—with a sketchy English business.
Stars at Noon exudes a sensuous haze, a Claire Denis signature, through listless afternoons, noncommittal chatter, the desperation of being properly marooned, but the political ambivalence of this film, based on Denis Johnson’s novel, feels less productive here than the French filmmaker’s previous efforts. Still, gestures of existential hunger and ravenous longing drip throughout.
Denis’ dialogue feels alien as ever (a good thing), picked over, and selectively enunciated by Qualley who coos, yelps, and concocts a half-language of babytalk, landing in orbit of Gena Rowlands. Joe Alwyn, though, is generically boyish and lifeless. Thank God Benny Safdie shows up two-thirds of the way through. Now playing.
WHITE NOISE
dir. Noah Baumbach
Noah Baumbach has taken existential dread mainstream. It is less a needling splinter in one’s side as it was in DeLillo’s book than it is an ordinary facet of adult life meant to strengthen the bonds of marriage. Showcasing Baumbach’s happiest couple, White Noise, ironically, is the director’s most life-affirming movie to date.
In fact, he imbues the movie with such buoyancy that it culminates in a supermarket song and dance set to LCD Soundsystem—their newest single in five years and inarguably the best part of the movie. (More of Andre 3000, shimmying in the cereal aisle and otherwise, please.) At the press screening, everyone showed their age and allegiance by excitedly gearing their questions towards James Murphy instead of Baumbach. Opens in Nov— but you should wait until December when it goes to Netflix.
all’Antico Vinaio
Transposing one of the world’s most popular restaurants to another country is in many ways as difficult as adapting a seminal text for the screen. Part of the appeal of eating at Florentine sandwich shop All’Antico Vinaio is that 1) you're in Italy and 2) you can eat it on the sidewalk. I suppose you can still do the latter on 8th ave in Midtown, at their first stateside location, and yesterday the shop opened a second location on Sullivan Street, now enabling you to eat with hoards of NYU students downtown, if you prefer.
On an overcast Friday afternoon though, I felt less like I was in Time Square than at a friend’s studio: leisurely cozy and affably cramped. Instead of tourists, the patrons were gentle old-timers, the calico kind with newspapers tucked under their arm. Standing on line together against the glass, we were an arm’s embrace away from the row of sandwich artisans. One of them offered us some warm squares of bread, Tuscan schiacciata, focaccia-like, dimpled and oily.
Though you can design your own, the signature offerings at All’Antico Vinaio are already optimized for the most harmonious taste, and the most inventive components continue to be the fanciful condiments, or creams, as they are so alluringly called: piquant truffle cream undergirds the capicola; the pistachio of course for mortadella; two creams, artichoke and pecorino, paired with soppressata and spicy eggplant.
Still, I don’t know that such treats are worth it, even if you believe NYC so starved for fresh imports. Another advantage of the original: the remarkable cost, under ten bucks, for a gargantuan sandwich. With prices hovering here in the low $20s (the website is outdated), the sandwiches show a marked degradation of that quantity/quality/cost ratio (blame inflation)— something to keep in mind should you check this place out.
More movies, hopefully coming to a theater near you soon.
EYNS MEN: Shot in 16mm on an old Bolex, this gorgeously hypnotic folk horror outfitted with minimal dialogue and maximal clatter from Mark Jenkins represents a big win for cinema: Neon picked up the rivetingly oblique and atmospheric film set on a Cornish island for distribution and will bring it to the masses probably sometime next year.
WILL-O-THE-WISP: Cheeky environmentalist fable and queer “musical fantasia” from Portuguese auteur João Pedro Rodrigues. Instead of the Art but make it sports ig— art, but make it operatically gay.
QUEENS OF THE QIN DYNASTY: The burgeoning friendship between two disenfranchised individuals, a young woman and a Chinese immigrant in Canada, each caught against institutional bureaucracy, inhabits a liminal space, like a glitch, shimmering, distorted, and beautiful
THE NOVELIST’S FILM: Pristinely preserves the curiosity of an artist/creative and their process from curious inception to reticent release.
THE ETERNAL DAUGHTER: The latest extension of the Souvenir universe is a biscuit of a film—slender and sweet, tidily wanting.
SAINT OMER: Some exquisite choreographing of gazes goes on in this “courtroom drama” generating a wealth of intellectual and emotional consequences for viewer and character alike.
BONES AND ALL: Director Luca Guadagnino tends to depict relationships between parents and children, his films resting on a child's vantage point of adulthood, one filled with tastefully posh rooms, a deluge of passion, and plenty dancing. Here Timmy the cannibal Chalamet does a number to Kiss’ “Lick It Up” in this Urban Outfitters’ dream of the 80s.
I dare say the Italian director has really found his groove, dramatizing a tale explicitly about adolescents, which benefits from his keen eye. It might have passed for trash, if it didn’t have such a tumbleweed tone and high aspirations. I don’t count myself as a fan of Guadagnino, but he’s truly hit his stride. Bones and All sheds the director’s usual spangly preoccupations, infuses his penchant for beauty into the grotesque, and brings heft to teen romance.
Worth the admission, perhaps: supporting turns by Mark Rylance and Michael Stuhlbarg.
ARMAGEDDON TIME: An autobiographical tale of white guilt. Starting with The Immigrant, each of James Gray’s movies have been worse than the last. I was eager for this one, since it returns the poet laureate of gritty Queens to his stomping grounds, but all I can ask is: Why this, now?
The members of the big name cast are like components of a soup that never quite meld. Jeremy Strong, Anthony Hopkins, Anne Hathaway—once you believe they constitute a Jewish family you’ll have to reckon with Banks Repeta. A big part of the success of a coming of age story’s success depends on the child actor and the one here is insufferable to watch, presenting himself as a skittish, wide-eyed sponge. The script isn’t really on his side, since all it does really is ask him to bear witness and gape to his discerning encounters with racism, classism, bootstrapping in America the land of opportunity, and the harsh wisdom of Fred Trump, who is a benefactor at his private school.
MASTER GARDENER: Heavy-handed on the dialogue, intriguing in its composition. Paul Schrader doesn’t flinch lately, wresting beauty in the wreckage in this clunky but humane paean of forgiveness. Original music by Blood Orange!
SHOWING UP: Quietly brazen tale of what it means to be a “minor” artist and astonishing in its adamant minimalism. Kelly Reichert’s reverence for animals included. Michelle Williams retreats inward, transforming herself as a surly Portland sculptor. The second film of the festival graced by Andre Benjamin.
DE HUMANI CORPORIS FABRICA: This is a film composed largely of robot footage from a medical camera as it pitches and burrows into patients’ internal organs during cutting-edge—though who knows, maybe they are insufferably rote— surgeries. The corporeal landscape is cavernous and fantastical but also incredibly mundane to the doctors who dwell in them all day.
You can say you’ve seen it all (if you don’t close your eyes) after witnessing a lone penis ejecting blood and a jellied disc being manipulated into the ruby yolk of someone’s eye—all while the surgeons nonchalantly discuss staffing issues or rising property values outside of Paris, where this film takes place. The juxtaposition of distance and TK makes you think about human existence, the limits and expanses of our bodies.
Don’t ask me how, but I had a feeling the second I saw Adam Driver here that we’d be light on dread.