2023 New York Film Festival: Communities + Fantasies

Communities, planned and unplanned were the centers of other programs.  

Youth (Spring) shot, from 2014-2019. in Zhili, a town in the Wuxing District of Huzhou, located 93 miles from Shanghai centers on the bleak factories and dormitories where young people from the provinces live and work in these clothing factory sweatshops for 15 hours per day. Cheap, dingy, strewn with debris piled in walkways, workroom floors and thrown from upper walkways, these are the sites along the ironically named “Happiness Road” of young workers who wield sewing machines like race cars (they race each other to do work faster) and live in unsex dorms. Inevitably, there is banter and sexual games with little adult supervision, hence squabbles and music playing everywhere amid the cinderblock walls, thin mattresses on planks and general squalor.  This area is one of the very few zones in China where the state does not run the factories; rather, family traders run the garment industry, with thousands of workshops in the region.

The Curse is a Showtime TV series (the first TV program ever screened at the NYFF) about a newlywed couple in Espanola, New Mexico, who are starring in a new HGTV home improvement show called Flipanthropy, inspired by Chip and Joanna Gaines of HGTV’s “Fixer-Upper.” Whitney Siegel (Emma Stone) wanders around the ecologically prototype structures they plan to flip and proclaims “All my invisible homes are net zero structure, meaning the amount of energy used by the home is equal to the amount of energy created on site.  Using technology developed right in our backyard in Los Alamos, a downtrodden city, the reflective glass design is laminated with a photovoltaic profile to capture the reflection of the light and transforms it into energy. And every one of our homes is certified by the Passive House Society in Germany, the gold standard for eco living.”  She goes on to intone that they “Conscientiously rejuvenate distressed homes” and decries “…our passive house revolution.  Saving the earth one kilowatt at a time,”  employing “Holistic home philosophy on steroids.”  She and her husband Asher (Nathan Fielder) are accused of copying the designs of artist Doug Aitken https://www.dougaitkenworkshop.com/bio.  

Fantastical worlds were at the core of other films.

A surrealist Alice-in-Wonderland tale by artist Niki de Saint-Phalle, Un rêve plus long que la nuit  is a “landscapes, sets, costumes, music, sounds and Tinguely’s machines plunge the viewer into a strange, magical, fairy tale land.”  https://festival.ilcinemaritrovato.it/en/proiezione/un-reve-plus-long-que-la-nuit/
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=2005786986247814

Poor Things is a fantasy/comedy by Yorgos Lanthimos that revitalizes a Victorian woman, Bella (Emma Stone), who committed suicide, into a shameless, odd simpleton who then blossoms into a liberated woman free of societal norms. The design (by Shona Heath and James Price) is over the top from steampunk Victorian London (an era marked by extreme propriety alongside a fascination with the macabre) incorporating Arts and Crafts, Art Deco and Belle Epoque, then traveling through “grand tour” sites in Portugal, Alexandria, Athens and Paris.  The elaborate costumes Bella wears (by Holly Waddington) embody her development including elaborate, puffy sleeves and nipped-in waists, all in flamboyant excess.  The cinematography, often through a fisheye lens, morphs from near monochrome to exuberant color in a visual frenzy that helps tell the story.

The Beast takes place across three time periods: 1910, 2014 and 2044 with distinct settings for each using a through-line of fearing what might happen in all.  Loosely based on Henry James’s 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle about a man numbed by his belief that something terrible is about to befall him, Gabrielle (Lea Seydoux) in the latest sequence contemplates undergoing a procedure to “purify” her DNA to rid her of her fears (shades of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). She appears as an actress auditioning for a role in a horror film, played out in front of a green screen where characters and sets will be superimposed later, so the metaphor is that she is acting out against a threat that cannot be seen. The earliest sequence is in Belle Epoque Paris where Seydoux plays a heralded pianist first seen at a party in a lavish mansion, where she makes her way to a space displaying an art exhibition.  She is next seen at her husband’s doll factory where the blank faces echo her anxiety; it is there the Great Flood of 1910 befalls her and her companion, where they attempt to escape by swimming out through a back entrance.  The 2014 section takes place in Los Angeles, the year of the La Habra earthquake, where Gabrielle is housesitting in a modernist, glass mansion, where she feels exposed and vulnerable, watched by the owner’s surveillance cameras from afar.  

Films Mentioned:
Youth (Spring), directed by Wang Bing
The Curse, directed by Nathan Fielder & Benny Safdie
Un rêve plus long que la nuit, directed by Niki de Saint-Phalle
Poor Things, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos
The Beast, directed by Bertrand Bonello