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A World of Wonder: The 45th New York Film Festival

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The 45th New York Film Festival

Sep. 28 – Oct. 14, 2007
Order Tickets at filmlinc.com/buytickets.htm

Wes Anderson's "The Darjeeling Limited," starring Adrien Brody, Owen Wilson and Jason Schwartzman, will open the 2007 New York Film Festival

The 45th New York Film Festival, presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, will offer moviegoers a premiere look at 28 feature films from Sept. 28th through Oct. 14th at the Frederick P. Rose Hall, home of Jazz at Lincoln Center. Among the many notable directors with films in this year’s with ambitious slate are Wes Anderson, Joel and Ethan Coen, Catherine Breillat, Claude Chabrol, Todd Haynes, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Sidney Lumet, Eric Rohmer and Julian Schnabel.

The festival also includes ten new short films; six retrospectives, ranging from Ridley Scott’s "Blade Runner: The Final Cut" to John Ford’s "The Iron Horse," accompanied by a full orchestra in Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall; screenings of three forthcoming music documentaries; four HBO Films Directors Dialogues; and two showcases honoring past masters of the cinematic form alongside the 11th annual Views from the Avant-Garde, a mini-festival of experimental film voices pushing the art of the moving image in bold new directions.

Opening this year’s festival is the North American premiere of the Wes Anderson comedy, "The Darjeeling Limited," starring Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman as three brothers re-forging family ties during a train ride across India. In the festival’s Closing Night selection, "Persepolis," Marjane Satrapi’s groundbreaking graphic novel about her childhood in Iran during the Islamic Revolution comes to life onscreen through the animations of Vincent Paronnaud and the voice talents of Catherine Deneuve, Chiara Mastroianni, Danielle Darrieux and Simon Abkarian.

The festival always provides the perfect venue to see some of the best films you may or may not have heard of. With directors and talent in attendance for audience Q&A sessions after most screenings, moviegoers certainly get their money's worth.

for a complete schedule of events, head over to filmlinc.com/nyff/nyff.html

About this year's film selections:

The Darjeeling Limited

Wes Anderson, US

Owen Wilson as Francis, Jason Schwartzman as Jack and Adrien Brody as Peter in "The Darjeeling Limited"

One year after the death of their father, three estranged brothers (Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman and Adrien Brody) board the Darjeeling Limited train and travel across India on a “spiritual journey.” Any actual enlightenment is nullified by their (hilarious) bickering and one-upmanship. And then, something happens. Wes Anderson is, as always, surprising, prodigiously inventive, and masterful in his modulation of tones and emotions, and he’s achieved something magical and astonishing here. A pageant, a vibrant portrait of a place and a people, an intricate look at sibling love and rivalry. Above all, a Wes Anderson film…and a great one at that.

Hotel Chevalier

Wes Anderson, US

Jack (Jason Schwartzman) anxiously awaits the arrival of his soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend (Natalie Portman) in Paris’ Hôtel Chevalier.

Persepolis

Marjane Satrapi & Vincent Paronnaud, France

Marjane with friends in Vienna in "Persepolis"

Marjane Satrapi’s spectacular graphic novels about her life as a rebellious young woman in and out of Iran, before and after the Islamic Revolution, have caused a worldwide sensation. This vibrant, groundbreaking animated adaptation, co-directed by Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, is destined to do likewise, for both adults and discerning younger audiences. The bold-faced visual style matches the irrepressible spirit of young Marjane, first as a teenager chafing at the restrictions of the Khomeini regime, later as a disoriented expatriate in Vienna. Chiara Mastroianni and her real-life mother Catherine Deneuve provide the voices of Marjane and her mother, and every word spoken by the great Danielle Darrieux, as the voice of Marjane’s worldly-wise grandmother, is wisdom to savor.

The Vulnerable Ones

Bent-Jorgen Perlmutt, Democratic Republic of Congo

A border crossing becomes one young man’s rite of passage.

No Country for Old Men

Joel and Ethan Coen, US

Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh in "No Country For Old Men"

Cormac McCarthy’s tough, terrifying novel of violence, anomie, and masculine madness in 1980 Texas is brought to cinematic life in this throat-gripping yet oddly meditative adaptation, from the Coen brothers at their very best. Wearing an unforgettably frightening pageboy and toting a cattle stun gun that’ll haunt your nightmares, Javier Bardem is Anton Chigurh, a psychopathic assassin of the highest order whose detachment is as shocking as the carnage photographed so gorgeously by Director of Photography Roger Deakins. Tommy Lee Jones is the sheriff, and Josh Brolin is the man caught in the middle, but landscape and silence get equal time in this triumph of American moviemaking.

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days

Cristian Mungiu, Romania

Anamaria Marinca as Otilia in "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days"

Cristian Mungiu’s terrific new film takes us on an unflinching tour of the now distant but still frightening world of Romania’s Ceaucescu regime during its death throes. Our guides are two college students, Otilia and Gabita, preparing for a mysterious appointment in a cheap hotel. Mungiu’s film, the first in a trilogy, is composed in long, uninterrupted takes which edge the viewer into the contemplation of a morally broken universe, where every encounter, even the most seemingly innocent, is tinged with suspicion and fear. Newcomers Anamaria Marinca and Laura Vasiliu are exceptional in the leading roles. This film contains mature content.

Actresses

Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, France

Noémie Lvovsky as Nathalie and Mathieu Amalric as Denis in "Actresses"

In her second directorial outing, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi strikes a beautiful balance between feminine longing and judicious self-deflation. Her Marcelline is a radiant presence on stage, and in real life a guarded, single 40-year-old woman yearning for a child and a lover. Set against rehearsals for a production of Turgenev’s A Month in the Country, with Mathieu Amalric as the egotistical director, a smoldering Louis Garrel as the young, manly costar, and Bruni Tedeschi’s writing collaborator Noémie Lvovsky as a contrasting woman of appetites straddled with a husband and kids, Actresses is delightfully personal, offbeat, uproariously funny and true to its own female rhythms.

Alexandra

Alexander Sokurov, Russia

Galina Vishnevskaya (right) as Alexandra in "Alexandra"

No living filmmaker has been more obsessed with the state of the Russian soul than Alexander Sokurov. In his viscerally powerful Alexandra, this great filmmaker ponders the cost of war. Mother Russia herself, a blunt, grimly humorous, and totally unintimidated babushka (indelibly played by octogenarian opera diva Galina Vishnevskaya) pays a visit to her grandson's unit in Chechnya. She rides among the young recruits in a troop transport and later, a tank; however incongruous, her tour of inspection through this dusty, sun-bleached landscape has a terrible familiarity. Seldom has a filmmaker so directly addressed his fellow citizens.

The Axe in the Attic

Ed Pincus & Lucia Small, US

Malik Rahim, New Orleans in "The Axe in the Attic"

When Ed Pincus and Lucia Small watched Hurricane Katrina play out on their televisions, they felt incapable of standing idly by. They began by simply filming the television screen, and then set out for New Orleans, with stops along the way in cities and small towns that had offered refuge to victims of the storm. The stories they discovered are harrowing portraits of human survival and bureaucratic red tape, rendered in classical cinema verité style. Yet The Axe in the Attic is also a startling investigation into the ethics of documentary filmmaking, as Pincus and Small question their ability to remain neutral in the face of apocalyptic chaos.

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead

Sidney Lumet, US

Seymour Hoffman as Andy and Ethan Hawke as Hank in "Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead"

At 83, Sidney Lumet has made one of his best films, a riveting drama of greed and blood ties, and a great New York crime story. Ethan Hawke and Philip Seymour Hoffman are two brothers—one down-and-out, the other living beyond his means—who conspire to rob a Westchester jewelry store. The foolproof plan goes horribly awry, igniting a series of violent and ironic twists of fate out of a Greek tragedy. As always, Lumet brings out the best in a stellar cast (including Marisa Tomei, Albert Finney and Rosemary Harris), while his crisp direction leaves many a younger filmmaker in the dust.

Calle Santa Fe

Carmen Castillo, Chile/France/Belgium

Carmen Castillo, director of "Calle Santa Fe"

The title refers to the street in Santiago, Chile, where Miguel Enriquez, the leader of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR), was gunned down by secret police in 1974. After three decades in exile, Enriquez’s widow, Carmen Castillo, returns to that haunted address and embarks on a soul-searching journey into her conflicted past, and into the unresolved modern history of her homeland. The result is less a documentary than a testament, as Castillo re-establishes contact with the neighbor who saved her life, the parents of deceased MIR activists, and her own family. A moving meditation on revolutionary fervor and the landscape of memory. Presented in association with the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival.

Orishas: Hay un Son

Edouard Salier, France

A dazzling visual response to the Franco-Cuban group Orisha’s 2006 hit song.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Julian Schnabel, France/US

Max von Sydow as Papinou and Mathieu Amalric as Jean-Dominique Bauby in "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly"

Jean-Dominique Bauby was a key player in Parisian social and cultural circles before suffering a massive stroke at the age of 43, which robbed him of all muscle control save his left eyelid. Blinking one letter at a time, he composed a book describing life in a vegetative state that became an international bestseller. This is the basis of Julian Schnabel’s enthralling new film, with the marvelous Mathieu Amalric as Bauby. Diving Bell is a powerful meditation on the nature of visual perception, as well as a celebration of the emergence of personal artistic expression.

Flight of the Red Balloon

Hou Hsiao-hsien, France

"The Flight of the Red Balloon"

Hou Hsiao-hsien’s ineffably serene film is not so much a remake of Albert Lamorisse’s children’s classic as a complex homage refracted through the complications of life in modern Paris. Juliette Binoche is Suzanne, the proprietor of a marionette theater and the single mother of a lonely boy named Simon (Simon Iteanu) who spends his days with his Chinese au pair Song (Song Fang). Simon and Song watch as the adults around them come apart at the seams, with joy and anguish, love and hatred…while the red balloon drifts across the Parisian landscape. Hou’s film is heartbreakingly beautiful, and it is graced with a truly magnificent performance from Binoche.

A Girl Cut In Two

Claude Chabrol, France

François Berléand as Charles Saint-Denis and Ludivine Sagnier as Gabrielle Deneige in "A Girl Cut In Two"

Claude Chabrol, with nearly 60 features behind him, is at the top of his game with this mordant social satire, filled with unforgettably nasty characters and inspired by the sensational Gilded Age shooting of architect Stanford White. A jaded novelist (François Berléand) competes with the bizarrely unstable heir to a Lyon pharmaceutical fortune (Benoît Magimel) for the affections of a luscious TV weathergirl (Ludivine Sagnier). Chabrol skewers the pretensions of literati and haute bourgeois alike and, although the inevitable crime of passion is committed late in the movie, it’s evident that what we have really been watching is the gradual murder of a soul.

Saturday’s Shadow

Nick Gordon, UK

Which depicts the painful aftermath of a racially charged close encounter.

Go Go Tales

Abel Ferrara, US

Willem Dafoe (middle) as Ray Ruby in "Go Go Tales"

The future of the Paradise Lounge may ride on tonight’s New York lottery drawing, but there’s no question that Abel Ferrara hits the jackpot with this outrageous and unexpectedly poignant comic fantasy about a disheveled strip club owner (Willem Dafoe) striving to keep his doors open in the face of potential bankruptcy. Go Go Tales crackles with vaudevillian showmanship, impromptu musical numbers and live-wire performances from Dafoe, Bob Hoskins, Sylvia Miles and Asia Argento (duly heralded as “the scariest, sexiest girl in the world”). Consider it Ferrara’s wistful valentine to a pre-gentrification Big Apple, and to his own unlikely longevity as an American maverick.

Death To The Tinman

Ray Tintori, US, 2007

An offbeat take on man’s duality and sacrifice in the name of love.

I Just Didn’t Do It

Masayuki Suo, Japan

Ryo Kase as Teppei Kaneko in "I Just Didn’t Do It"

Masayuki Suo, the director of Shall We Dance, trades sweetness for a tart taste of Kafka in his new film, with a dash of Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man. Falsely accused of groping a schoolgirl on a jammed train, Teppei (Ryo Kase, from Letters From Iwo Jima) is advised to plead guilty, pay a small fine, and get on with his life. But he maintains his innocence and won’t be persuaded to compromise. Suo’s follow-up to his 1996 smash hit begins as a criminal justice procedural and develops into an engrossing study (and damning indictment) of a flawed justice system, in which the presumption of innocence is basically non-existent.

I’m Not There

Todd Haynes, US

Richard Gere as Billy in "I’m Not There"

Todd Haynes’ “Dylan movie” is a singularity: a cinematic phantasmagoria built around the poetic re-invention of the self, which collapses time and leaves linear progress and cold logic in the shadows. Haynes swirls through Dylan’s life and legends, and allows a series of avatars (including Richard Gere, young Marcus Carl Franklin and, most miraculously of all, Cate Blanchett) to bloom within a variety of settings, styles and registers. Like Dylan’s music, with which it is lovingly suffused, I’m Not There is the purest quicksilver, slipping through cracks and crevices to the poetic heart of the world.

In the City of Sylvia

Jose Luis Guerin, Spain/France

Xavier Lafitte and Pilar López de Ayala in "In the City of Sylvia"

During a few languid summer days, a young foreigner spends his afternoons sketching in an outdoor café. He is looking for a woman named Sylvia who he’d met years before in the same city, but he is also sketching the many attractive young women he sees everywhere, any one of whom could be her. Then one fine afternoon, he thinks he’s actually seen her, and he sets off through the city to confront his memory. José Luis Guerín’s lovely, exceedingly graceful work eloquently captures the feeling of being in love with love, and the youthful sense of a world filled with an almost limitless sensuality.

The Last Mistress

Catherine Breillat, France

Asia Argento as Vellini in "The Last Mistress"

France’s foremost provocatrice, Catherine Breillat continues to surprise as she pursues her career-long interest in the ramifications of female desire. Breillat’s sumptuous adaptation of Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Une vieille maîtresse may be set during the reign of Louis Philippe, but this dangerous liaison is recognizably modern. Disrupting cinematic as well as social conventions, Asia Argento gives another extraordinary performance in the title role as “a capricious flamenca who can outstare the sun.” A true star as well as a fine actress, Argento holds the screen with the force of her carnality, which may be precisely Breillat’s point.

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