Beachside movies and treats

The Rockaway Film Festival. Jacques Rozier, not not-Rohmer adjacent

Last week I learned the hard way that sending out a newsletter on a Sunday is a no-go for engagement, but it had to be done! If you missed it, I wrote about my favorite movie and only new-to-me meal of the year so far.

Next month I’m headed to the Toronto Film Festival, so I’ll have the early word on movies like Luca Guadagino’s Queer, Durga Chew Boses’s directorial debut starring Chloe Sevigny, and more. Paid subscribers can also look out for an email about what not to miss at the NY Film Festival ahead ticket releases. Let me know what you’re excited or curious about.

Agnes Martin’s Gabriel (1976)

Tomorrow is the opening night of the 7th edition of the Rockaway Film Festival and the program is filled with mixed moods and tones, and undulating textures. If you’re in town and headed to the beach, you might check out some of these special films.

On my short list: 

• Nele Wohlatz’s Sleep With Your Eyes Open

• Zia Anger’s meta-meta hybrid My First Feature

• A shorts program by animator Faith Hubley (yes, mother of Yo La Tengo’s Georgia)

• and Gabriel, artist Agnes Martin’s only feature film

But first, you should hit up up Brothers on the boardwalk for a slice of lemon coconut cake and one of their smoothies, an unexpectedly harmonious blend of flavor and wellness. After all, these guys are from Florida.

JACQUES ROZIER, Chronicler of summer

Retrospective at Lincoln Center

Jacques Rozier's feature films, nearly all clocking in over two hours long, are exercises in unhurried, orchestrated absurdity. They are a documentaries in disguise, shot in a nonchalant, sometimes shaky hand, relying on improvisation and non-professional actors to capture the jaunty rhythms of life. Quotidian minutiae are rendered convincingly and casually authentic, often revolving around the fleeting pleasures of vacation. Three of four S’s—sun, sand, sea, and sex  as a travel agent says in one film, are never short supply in what are essentially shaggy, hangout films.

In Rozier’s breezy debut ADIEU PHILIPPINE (1962), a television assistant romps around Paris and Corsica with a pair of aspiring actresses. Set against the backdrop of the Algerian War, Rozier's playful handling of the young man’s imminent military service—his choice to engage in romance rather than engage with the political—is subtly radical. The film was beloved by Godard and Truffaut, but its distribution and production woes led to poor commercial reception and the filmmaker’s a nearly decade-long hiatus. Rozier was effectively excluded from being labeled part of the New Wave—not that he would’ve necessarily wanted that.

As other critics and the director himself has noted, his style hews closely to Italian Neorealism and French comedies of the 1930s, which became more evident with the tourism satire THE CASTAWAYS OF TURTLE ISLAND (1976) that blends realism and lyricism and a wry brand of Renoir-humor. When a travel agent starts selling a Survivor-esque Robinson Crusoe packages, the trip truly becomes the journey here, where the debacle of getting to the deserted island takes up most of the film.

The retrospective's highlight is NEAR OROËT (1971), a disarmingly capricious summer film where three young ladies, seeking a late holiday, bunker into one of their mom’s beach house in western France. Another one of the ladies’ gangly boss, Gilbert, happens to be in town and with weaselly insistence, insinuates himself into their company and their shelter. Restricted to sleeping in a tent on the sandy patio, he never spoils their fun as a love quadrangle cements itself late in the film, by which point the soreness of the characters comes into view. 

Of course, Rohmer is a master of the vacation film, but where his work is cerebral, Rozier's is more tactile, even a little bit frivolous. Both directors luxuriate in dialogue, but while Rohmer's bookish characters grapple with existential anxieties in philosophical dialogue, Rozier’s content to let his—more basic girlies, in today’s parlance—bubble up and boil over with laughter and an unburdened, goofy joy. The movie is rife with giggling and frequently justified yelping. A sailboat ride on choppy waters and a loose bucket of eels, make for charmingly outlandish set pieces.

Truffaut said there’s “something of genius in the balance between the insignificance of the events filmed and the density of reality that confers sufficient importance on them to fascinate us” regarding Adieu Philippine, but the observation applies to Near Orouet, too, with its stream of endless jokes and fruitless gags that we don’t understand but start to care about. The film unfolds in a series of seemingly random scenes: the girls wrestling over pastries, ragging on each other's diets, running along the beach. The time, marked by specific title cards, seems to drift in and out, mirroring the carefree rhythm of summer days.

RIYL: Observational documentaries, Jacques Rivette, Maryam Nassir Zadeh, licking your fingers/eating with your hands, bed head.

Beachside treats

Cooking on vacation strikes me as a chore. I seem to be in the minority on this. I don't understand the appeal of escaping only to continue what I do at home. Barely lifting finger other than to make a pot of coffee, the girlies in Near Orouët seem to agree. Vacation is designed for casual unambition. Fried oysters and funnel cakes. Stone fruit in a hammock. Like the characters, we should all allow ourselves to rush outside to the nearest shop and treat it like an extension of our living rooms. (They get waffles and churros.) Gilbert, who drunkenly makes an elaborate stew out of a fat conger eel, clearly didn’t get the message. Nobody eats it. ☼

3 packable sandwiches

Fruit sandwich. Think of how refreshing this might be in the saltwater air. Make easily yourself with some milkbread or pick up at Postcard

Pan bagnat. Make c/o

David Lebovitz

or pick one up Pave, Breads Bakery, or possibly Cafe Mado.

Jambon beurre. Leaning into the French theme here. More difficult to make at home than you might think. Luckily, I made a list.