New York Film Festival / Diary no. 1

Bagels, Late Fame, and Josh O'Connor

1979 poster by Michelangelo Pistoletto

The New York Film Festival is the hometown festival and it opens today. A diary here feels less compelling—most days look like my regular life, just with more movies and less vigilance about basic self-care. I get tired and end up flirting with the kind of dehydration that leads to migraines. It’s always easier to nurse one at home than in some fake four-star hotel.¹

But, the first day of press screenings opened on an unexpectedly optimistic note, and that felt worth writing down. Next week I’ll supply my usual short reviews.

Elsewhere, I wrote two fashion-related pieces:

• An interview whe costume designer of Lurker for High Snobiety.

• An essay on German iconoclast Tabea Blumenschein (director, actor, costume and fashion designer, artist) for Metrograph Journal.

This year’s NYFF poster by RaMell Ross

Press screening / Day 1

9:00 AM - Most Wednesdays you can find me in the company of the city’s most discerning bean heads descending upon a new coffee shop in the city and on this day we are at Kabin, a Nordic cocktail bar that successfully moonlights as a cafe in the morning hours I sample Kenyan and Honduran pour-overs, and an espresso with hot milk calligraphed into swan.

10:30 AM - Movie snacks don’t take the form you think when you are a working critic. They are will often constitute your meal, and that makes eating at film festivals hard. But this is home, and I shock myself with how well I know the city. Even though I can never figure out what to eat for dinner, I still know where all the options lie, which means I can conjure options sustenance that takes into account logical planning and deliciousness ever so easily.

So, I walk a few blocks north, sneering at Leon’s on my way to PopUp. PopUp’s mild scallion cream cheese along with their well-documented refusal to slice and schmear the bread (it is truly more bread-like than bagel) is suitable for in-theater consumption.²

The employees are sincerely and almost unrealistically cheerful. The linebacker who takes my order inquires about my branded tote bag, and then follows up about my favorite movie and snack. Today’s answer: Thief and a bagel. He recommends elderflower Swedish fish from Bon Bon.

10:45 AM - On the A train, the Queens-accented chatter of FDNY employees plunk into my ears: Raising Canes, Mad for Chicken, bbq chicken. Emboldened by the good-will interactions bestowed on me this morning, I chime in to suggest the Indian fried chicken at Rowdy Rooster, which has a location near Penn Station where the train happens to pull in.

I did not mention Thai fried chicken at the newly opened Mommy Pais, which I’m not sure I can approve of despite the wonderfully succulent dark meat. $17 is a lot.

They ask if I’m on my way to work and I nod with a stunted and impostrous vigor, still not used to the idea that this is, at the moment, my work. He and the guys just watched the latest Spike Lee joint. They’re ahead of me. Still to cross off: Highest 2 Lowest, Weapons, Eddington, Caught Stealing, neglected but not forgotten.

12:00PM - Miroirs No. 3 by Christian Petzold is an optimal way to kick off press screenings and awaken the senses. The movie makes it easy to pay reverent attention to the textures of leisurely living— drinking coffee, taking meals on the porch, biking through an empty field, listening to a good song twice—that awaken your senses. Unlike his last movie Afire, there is no one to hassle your idyll. This film is easily better than that one, but perhaps not as cutting as his early work. (Phoenix is one of the few films that truly earns the ubiquitous descriptor of “quietly devastating.” It is streaming for free on tubi, god’s gift to us all.)

In Miroirs no. 3, a pianist named Laura (Paula Beer), sidelined by a horrific accident, becomes the unexpected houseguest of a kindly older woman (Barbara Auer) who peers at her just a little too adoringly. The film taps into Petzold’s familiar themes of all things Vertigo—doubles, and mourning, and recreating things in one’s image as he rework—with elegant devotion. What it may lack in terms grandeur or new ideas, it makes up for with an uncanny and sweet rewiring of a more disreputable tradition: the horror-movie archetype of lonely widow and/or peculiar mother (see: Greta, Mother’s Instinct).

While I spend most of my time watching the Petzold movies that star Beer wondering, rhetorically, why not Nina Hoss?, I find the absence stings less here. And the ending is slightly more enigmatic than you might think and I’ve come to a reading of it that I’m pleased with.

Afterwards Celia, who writes Deeper into Movies, asks me if I feel the urge to make plum cake, featured in the film, and I confess i’ve never made the Marian Burros recipe. She compliments my moviepudding tote and I decide that should a third person inquire, I will take it as a sign to start selling them at cost.

1:45 PM - I swap snacks with Veronica: bagels for miniature maritozzi, stiff from refrigeration that makes it neater journey from hand to mouth in the dark. She also supplies sugar cookies bathed in brown butter and sage.

The last few months we’ve been scrutinizing movies together for a very special book we’re editing and that we hope turns out to be a Big Deal. She and I share the same favorite movie, and I feel like I’ve known her much longer than I actually have.

2:15PM - The Mastermind is my most anticipated movie of the festival and I am not prepared to have an ambivalent reaction. I am startled by an unexpected though finite bout of violence and the continual wryness of tone. This is not Wendy and Lucy or even Showing Up. But it is funny and the second time Josh O’Connor has played an art thief, and his performance is nearly indistinguishable from the first: the same opaque, hangdog face; the same disheveled tragic aura. A man whose feelings are never quite accessible. [Full review of The Mastermind.]

Scored to some exciting jazz, the film is an anticlimactic heist set in the 1970s with exquisite upholstery and garment dyes to match. Suspense drains away, replaced by farce—an inept crew bungling its way through rules it cannot keep. One character warns never to work with addicts, dealers, wild cards; O’Connor falls into the last category, the most erratic of all. Childishly clutching at art in a world marked by banality and cheap ugliness, he finds no refuge. Nixon, Vietnam, the broader geopolitical wreckage press at the edges of his world and just outside the frame.

The movie is growing on me by the minute and I am emboldened to put out feelers—maybe some of you will want to have an IRL discussion about it (!!) once it opens next month.

I hope if nothing, O’Connor will bring audiences to one of our great auteurs.

4:15 PM - Late Fame feels like a throwback movie to the early 2000s in its sensibility and urban earthiness. The story of a downtown poet rediscovered and swept into the orbit of literary young men, plus one mysterious and sybaritic aspiring actress, could easily make for a natural disaster. Good thing I had braced myself for something far worse. It hovers most around the threshold of cringe.

Moving along familiar beats, the film sands down the slivers of cynicism that are typically part and parcel to this kind of story, while also holding sentimentality at bay, rendering the whole thing, characters too, strangely inert (pick a lane, make a choice!). The principals stuck toggling between goofy and somber, and in the case of Greta Lee emphatically and irresistibly both. Willem Dafoe’s poet is exceedingly well-adjusted, now workng a government job (post office, like Bukowski, har har) without a whiff of complacency, which means the performance is mostly telegraphing cautious curiosity and occasionally vulnerability. Like an amiable acquaintance, he and the film are pleasant enough to meet and pass time with, but destined to slip quietly into oblivion, lost to history to memory.

Samy Burch’s script is tonally jarring in the wrong ways, stuffing pseudo-fantastical lines into the mouths of postgrad zillennials, who don’t speak the way young people do, but the way older people imagine they might. That they shun cultural critics as much as influencers means no one has heard of Naomi Fry. The kids, who inhabit the title of artist only as lifestyle, will ultimately be alright, shielded by their B and MFAs and trust funds.

This is the kind of movie that gives a whole scene reminding us that a certain hipster’s cigarettes of choice come from that bright yellow box, and that cigarettes cost $20. If that’s enough to qualify as insight or amuse you, then so too will the film.

6:30PM - I leave before No Other Choice since I’ve seen it already, and run off to see Mark Ronson talk about his newly published memoir.

1. I write this dry-heaving from my bed, instead of in front of Luca Guadagnino

2. While we’re on the topic: I also like Apollo (sourdough) with tomato; and Shelsky’s (which also happens to be sourdough) for their pastrami, egg, and cheese. My chosen curative for over-drinking.