Cinema is a reflexive medium. From the very beginning, when Louis Lumiére filmed workers leaving his family’s photographic-equipment factory, moving images have been used to investigate where images come from and why exactly they have been made. If that sounds a little highfalutin, let me put it like this: the movies love the movies—even when they actively distrust what movies do to the people who make them and to the world.
The sixty-third edition of the New York Film Festival did not lack for films on the relationship between art and life. Sentimental Value, the latest from Scandinavian melodrama maximalist Joachim Trier, concerns the frayed and fraying relationship between a director named Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård) and his two daughters. Nora (Worst Person in the World breakout Renate Reinsve) is a stage actress whose great talent is tied up with her great emotional upheaval—we first see her having a panic attack in the moments before a performance—while her sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) had a starring role in one of her father’s most beloved films. Gustav left their mother when both girls were young. They have connected with him only on film sets, where he could be caring and attentive—qualities that evaporated after the final cut.
After years of absence, Gustav has returned to Oslo just in time to miss his ex-wife’s funeral. More importantly, for him, he wants to make a new film, and he wants Nora to play the lead role: a housewife who, like Gustav’s own mother, sends her son off to school and then commits suicide. He will film it in their ancestral wood-framed house, a site of dense psychic energy where all manner of agonies and emancipations have been accruing across the generations. This overlap between imagination and place, art and life, is best illustrated during the film’s many bravura montages, revealing intimate conversations between distant eras, and the correspondences between seemingly dissimilar lives.
Trier has always worked in two modes: controlled character studies like Oslo, August 31 (still his best film) and maximalist sagas (Reprise, Worst Person in the World), where the director’s anything-goes spirit strains to make a big statement. Sentimental Value manages to fuse these styles, saving Trier’s flashiest tricks for sequences devoted to earlier generations of the Borg family—all those births and deaths and intersections with history stifling one another in the same set of tastefully decorated rooms. These montages refresh the film whenever its typically restrained tragicomedy begins to flag, injecting a bit of the real world into what otherwise might have become a cramped exercise in cinematic self-scrutiny.
There are some who consider Trier a high-toned pseud; I don’t. Yet for all the dramatic zags and humane performances (Lilleaas is a particularly wonderful surprise), Sentimental Value rarely digs as deep as you’d like. This is especially true of Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), an American movie star who signs onto Gustav’s film after Nora refuses. These sections—at film festivals, press junkets, rehearsal tables—seem pulled directly from Trier’s own experiences. Sentimental Value probably only achieves this scope (and budget) because Fanning, an American movie star in real life, is in it. Yet despite her best efforts, Rachel’s struggle to get her arms around a character obviously based on the director’s mother has no life to it, and no depth. To its credit, the script does not caricature Rachel as a vapid starlet, but it also doesn’t give her much to work with, and the film’s insights into the relationship between an artist’s work and his or her life are similarly limited. I respect Trier’s refusal of profound revelations and definite answers, and the confidence with which he guides you toward merely provisional conclusions. I just wish he had more to say.
Ditto Noah Baumbach, who seems determined to extend his cold streak with the help of multiple movie stars and all the picturesque locations Netflix’s Oscar budget can buy. His latest effort could be worse—we’re not talking about another White Noise here—but few films in recent time have evaporated so immediately from my mind as Jay Kelly, a pleasant, sentimental, and grossly oversold rehash of clichés about aging movie stars. George Clooney does his best as the title character, a leading man of a certain age who might be a good stand-in for Clooney himself if Clooney had spent his late career starring in special-effects blockbusters rather than hawking coffee and tequila. Despite what some other characters in the film tell us tell us, Kelly isn’t an especially bad guy. Nor is a particularly great actor. He’s just a pro, a man who has prioritized his professional accomplishments at the expense of most other things in his life: his marriages; his relationships with his daughters; and his friendship with Ron (Adam Sandler), his devoted manager and ostensible friend.
It would be pointless to detail the plot of Jay Kelly. Very little happens in the film that could not have happened differently to the same effect with the same evergreen themes. Suffice it to say that, on a whim, Jay jets off to Tuscany to receive a career-achievement award and to reflect, via glossy flashbacks, on important moments in his young life—an act of reflective self-mythologizing that the film encourages us to transpose onto Clooney himself. Jay Kelly even ends with an in-film montage of the real-life star’s greatest hits, a rousing deployment of middlebrow film clips that unites everyone in Jay’s life in a celebration of, well, George Clooney.
There was a time when Baumbach would have approached this sort of preening with acid disdain, or at least a whiff of sarcasm. Pietro Marcello’s slantwise biopic Duse adopts a slightly more critical approach to its famous subject. When the film begins, the legendary stage actress Elenora Duse (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) is ascending through (CGI) clouds to perform for Italian soldiers at the end of the First World War. She is all too happy to serve the national cause—a narcissistic, unreflective patriotism that invites and welcomes flattery, so long as it comes from official channels. This portends badly for Duse, as fascism is just around the corner. In case you forgot this, Marcello makes sure remind you via archival footage, and the occasional intrusion of blackshirts who disappear once this simple narrative point has been made.
Marcello has directed interesting films before, and with its synth soundtrack and grainy handheld camerawork, Duse seems to reject the staid classicism that plagues most period pieces. Unfortunately, this is pure biopic pablum, full of exquisite costumes and terrible writing. It’s the sort of movie where a man who looks exactly like Benito Mussolini will walk into a room and someone will whisper to the person next to her: “That’s Mussolini.” Despite the generally excellent production design—this thing is lousy with capes—the whole thing feels overwhelmingly fake, cursed by cheap CGI and flimsy characters. There is nothing under its often gorgeous surfaces.
Speaking of megalomaniacs who changed the world: in his charming, superfluous Nouvelle Vague, Richard Linklater reenacts the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless in the style of, well, Breathless. Linklater clearly owes the French New Wave a great debt, and Nouvelle Vague plays like a mix of primer and love letter, dutifully providing viewers with all relevant historical information about Cahiers du Cinema and the Parisian scene before it dutifully recreates the shoot of Breathless, day by humdrum day. If you were being generous, you could say that Linklater is engaged in an act of deliberate demystification, revealing how even a revolutionary work of art requires mundane decisions and distributed labor to emerge. If you were not being generous, you might say that the director has created a high-class version of one of those History Channel specials that exist to fluff the legacy (and the ego) of a great artist.
I think I land somewhere between these two judgments. Linklater’s loose, conversational rhythms—the persistent sense, common to all his work, that we are watching people being themselves—often feel straight out of the New Wave itself. Missing are all the radical bits of that movement. Watching Linklater’s film, I wished he had made something less devoted to Godard’s story and more to his art. Like Breathless, such a film would have been shot on the streets of contemporary Paris, without sets or costumes, incorporating the texture and energy of everyday life directly into the story itself. Such a film could easily fail; it certainly wouldn’t be available on Netflix. But it would be at least be something real and alive, which is more than I can say for Nouvelle Vague.
Thankfully, this was not Linklater’s only film, or period piece, or even biopic, at this year’s New York Film Festival. Whereas Nouvelle Vague profiles a man at the very beginning of his creative life, Blue Moon is about one at the very end. The lyricist Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke) is short, rude, and often drunk. These and other problems have cost him love, money, and his creative partnership with Richard Rogers (Andrew Scott), which made him, for a time, very successful. On the opening night of Rogers’s great success with Oklahoma!, Hart has stationed himself at the bar of Sardi’s, ready to intercept the revelers when they come to celebrate. As he explains to the bartender (Bobby Cannavale), to the pianist (Jonah Lees), to his date Elizabeth (Margaret Qualley), and to anyone else who will listen, Oklahoma! is cornpone kitsch, a celebration of a rural heartland that deserves nothing but scorn.
Hart projects mastery, knowledge, and wit. Yet as he works the room, desperation keeps poking through. He professes sobriety, and steals drinks whenever possible. He speaks of Elizabeth’s transformative love, yet when she stands young and beautiful before him, he hems and haws and asks instead about her college boyfriends. Hawke plays Hart as a man who can’t shut up because of his insecurities—he speaks and speaks and speaks in the hope that he can make up for whatever he has just said, that he might speak a better self into being. He is surrounded by people who respect him, who often love him, but who are also sick of having to put up with him. They do what the bartender can’t: they cut him off.
Blue Moon is finally the story of a man who cannot help the fact that he is too much: too sexual, too cynical, too proud to surrender anything that might make him more palatable to a wider audience. Even if he had the chance to make his own Oklahoma!, he wouldn’t want to. Is he admirably principled or just too proud? See it and decide for yourself.
