At This Year’s NYFF, Movies Aren’t Worth Showing Unless They Show Us Something Brand New indiewire.com/2021/10/nyff-2021-program-art-of-the-new-1234668717 October 2, 2021
A few hours before the 2021 New York Film Festival opened with Joel Coen’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” Lady Macbeth herself sat onstage for a press conference in Lincoln Center and unleashed the ultimate understatement. “In 400 years, everybody’s done almost everything,” Frances McDormand said. “It’s not like we’re inventing anything new.” She was referring to the daunting odds of her director-husband’s stark, expressionistic take on the ultimate Shakespearean tragedy, though she may as well have been addressing the greatest crisis in modern creativity, and one that the movies face more than most other mediums. With its silent cinema aesthetic and gruff, visceral performances, “Macbeth” certainly provides an original take on one very familiar narrative. But NYFF, as a whole, projects an ethos altogether different from other prominent festivals on the fall circuit, as its curatorial strategy heralds the art of the new. Throughout the winding path of starts and stops that has characterized the past 18 months, the return of the festival circuit has demonstrated its efficacy at launching certain films into the world, but the NYFF slate functions more like an argument for the continuity of the medium. Yes, as McDormand says, storytelling is exhausted every which way to the point where even a simulacrum has a simulacrum. Within those daunting odds, however, examples of ingenuity stand out more than ever. NYFF’s prime slots demonstrate this in subtle ways: Jane Campion’s Centerpiece selection “The Power of the Dog” reassesses masculine Western tropes with its study of a sexually repressed cowboy (Benedict Cumberbatch) who buries his identity in crude machismo and misogyny until it traps him. Next weekend’s Closing Night slot goes to Pedro Almodovar’s emotional “Parallel Mothers,” which repurposes his trademark approach to melodrama by using it to investigate the ghosts of the Spanish Civil War. While these movies explore the past from a modern day perspective, other NYFF highlights probe the immediacy of the current moment. In “The Tsugua Diaries,” codirectors Maureen Fazendeiro and Miguel Gomes present a self-reflective quarantine story told in reverse, like “Memento” by way of Dennis Hopper’s “The Last Movie.” The real-life couple open their saga on “Day 22” of an apparent love triangle huddled together in the countryside, and the ensuing project drifts backward through time, as it becomes clear that we’re watching a document of its own production. The structural gimmick results in a fascinating meditation on the haziness of day to day experiences brought on by the pandemic, as well as the sense of play that creeps into the uneasiness of getting through each day (a fun slo-mo shot of actors riding a tractor leads into the scene of an earlier day later on in which the serious Gomes explains the intention of the shot).
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