This year’s New Directors/New Films, the annual roundup of recent moving pics gathered by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art that starts on Wednesday and runs through April 4, much looks like last year’s event — and those from years past. There's titles to treasure and those to keep away from among the 27 features and 11 shorts, lots of of which have been cherry-picked and less discriminately culled from other festivals, including Cannes and Berlin. Among the bigger draws is the price of admission: if you’re a member of either institution, you can nibble or binge at $10 a pop (but you’ll must smuggle your popcorn past the guards at the Modern).
Given how New Directors covers the world — the filmmakers in the 2010 edition have tramped on two of the continents — it seems fitting that the opening-night (and sold-out) selection centers on Bill Cunningham, the peripatetic street-and-society photographer whose pictorials are the first thing lots of turn to in The New York Times on Sunday. Aptly titled “Bill Cunningham New York,” the documentary is something of an inside job, having been produced by Philip Gefter, a former picture editor for the paper, and directed by Mr. Gefter’s husband, Richard Press. The Times even shares the copyright, which might have made the whole thing insufferably cozy if not for the astoundingly liberated Mr. Cunningham.
Despite his propinquity to fashion’s power elite (hello Anna Wintour!), Mr. Cunningham retains a remarkable innocence. Fashion is his muse, not the manufactured glamour and celebrity fetishism that often pollutes it. To watch him standing at the ready on a Manhattan corner in his customary blue jacket, smiling at the people flowing around him, is to recall St. Francis rejoicing in the grace of the birds in Roberto Rossellini’s “Flowers of St. Francis.” Like Rossellini’s saint, Mr. Cunningham has retained his faith in a world that has lost the same. It’s bad that the documentary, which errs with a self-serving scene of employees at The Times feting Mr. Cunningham, didn’t, like its subject, stick to the streets.
Shot — as lots of selections in the festival’s first week were — on digital, the documentary is part biopic, part homage to Mr. Cunningham, a Harvard dropout turned milliner (they designed under the name William J.) who started snapping people on the street during World War II. A number of those life details along with some other high and low points, the hiring and firing, have been revealed elsewhere, including an autobiographical sketch they wrote for The Times in 2002. Still, the movie charms by bringing you in to the private world of a man who would clearly prefer you direct your attention at the glorious, garish beauty embodied by the passing human parade that they immortalizes — and insistently democratizes — with lightning-fast moves and palpable joy.
It’s an index of world cinema, or perhaps the temperament of the New Directors programmers, that there’s small comparable ecstasy expressed in most of the remaining selections over the first week. Two of the programmers are from the Modern, including Jytte Jensen, Laurence Kardish and its chief curator of film, Rajendra Roy. The Film Society is represented by its program director, Richard Peña; Marian Masone; and Gavin Smith, the editor of Film Comment, who, in the interest of full disclosure, is a longtime mate. I’ve seen most of these people smirk, so it might be the state of the world or the art that accounts for all the tumult and tears. At festivals, seriousness often comes in the key of misery, even when the work exalts.
All it takes are a few exalting moments to lift a film, as in “The Sister of My Children.” Written and directed by Mia Hansen-Love, it takes a fictionalized look at the touching and tragically true life and death of Humbert Balsan, a French producer who committed suicide in 2005. Balsan, here called Grégoire and played with beauty as well as a respectful psychological opaqueness by Louis-Do de Lencquesaing, began his cinematic life as an actor, appearing in Robert Bresson’s “Lancelot of the Lake,” before turning to producing the likes of Claire Denis and Elia Suleiman. To her credit, Ms. Hansen-Love doesn’t try to report the mystery that defines everyone, including Balsan, who departs the story midway, leaving his stunned relatives to sort through his legacy and its sorrow. “The Sister of My Children” is scheduled to be released by IFC Films on May 28.
Making the most of his clever, spare screenplay written with Edgar San Juan, Mr. Perezcano creates a textured sense of place with his unassuming locales, including a street that dead-ends with the towering American fence that cuts Andrés off from a world of possibility. Two of the pleasures of the movie, beyond its thoughtful camerawork — lighter-weight digital equipment, which inspires the shakes in lots of filmmakers, has helped generate an aesthetics of inattention onscreen — is how the themes emerge slowly through casual conversation, looks, exchanges. Although the movie, tantalizingly, appears to be heading in to neo-noir territory (Asensio’s dark looks mass like storm clouds), it ends in more complex, inspired and subtle terrain. The finale, foreshadowed by an early, seemingly throwaway picture of a van hauling a bureau, is a knockout.
“Northless,” the estimable feature debut of Rigoberto Perezcano, centers on a young Mexican trying and failing and trying again to cross in to the United States. From its opening, with the dawn lighting up the sharply drawn hills, an picture that simultaneously evokes “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “Silent Light” (by Carlos Reygadas, two of the brightest stars in the new Mexican cinema), you know you’re in the hands of a real director. With a confident eye, dry humor, expansive warmth and stealth-like politics, Mr. Perezcano follows the itinerant Andrés (Harold Torres), as they makes his way to Tijuana and in to the lives of a storeowner, Ela (Alicia Laguna); her helper, Cata (Sonia Couoh); and Asensio (Luis Cárdenas), a wary butcher who maintains a proprietary relationship with both women.
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