New Directions

“If cinema is to survive social media, it needs to return to its roots, expressing a story through light, movement, gesture and the nuances of performance.”

Courtesy of New Directors New Films, 2011

New Directions

Tony Zaza

Film Festival season in New York begins shortly after the Academy Awards with the annual New Directors New Films series presented by The Film Society of Lincoln Center. Not a true festival, NDNF has evolved from a simple harbinger of spring to a useful early warning physical. It takes the pulse of world cinema to gauge whether it is as ill as it appears to be during the Academy Awards. Happily, there are signs of vitality in several of the 2011 offerings.
Circumstance (dir. Maryam Keshavarz)

Even Islam must contend with hormones and female trouble. As a coming-of-age movie, Circumstance draws the apt metaphor for a society that is also in development from a kind of inflexible adolescence to a more adult state. It proposes a curious comingling of issues of sexual orientation and obedience (to self, to family, to love, to country, to belief). And it presupposes the difficulty of achieving any consensus of opinion in a country with a societal model like Iran. Although the quasi-political melodrama is spiced with interesting sociological details of the Islamic world, its affluent family at war with itself is as American(ized) as apple pie. It’s Gossip Girl gone Persian.
Curling (dir. Denis Cote)

This cinema of quiet desperation has all the hallmarks of 1950s British Kitchen Sink, a marked focus on a strong sense of place, experiences of the common “little” man, and small struggles of deep emotional consequence. Although its early bleak outlook leads to signs of optimism, this little tale in which a father and daughter achieve security through obsessive anti-social habits and a kind of self-imposed quarantine, its compositions and small internal movements yield both a feeling of absurdist humor and a portrait of pathological paranoia constantly pretending impending danger. This is reality TV on acid.
Octobre (dir. Daniel & Diego Vega)

If cinema is to survive social media, it needs to return to its roots, expressing a story through light, movement, gesture and the nuances of performance. In Octobre, a curious portrait of a middle-aged pawnbroker living life as though quarantined, set in Lima, Peru, and operating under sparse but fluid settings, the cinema is redeemed. Love, longing, indifference, and personal renaissance are all revealed using the most subtle, albeit predictable, plot contrivances—but also a forceful simplicity of action and reaction amidst the tender interplay of rich characterizations. This is a film in which the blink of an eye or the twitch of a finger tells more about the scene than formal elements and where family values appear to melt the melancholy and the mundane.
Margin Call (dir. J.C. Chandor)

J.C. Chandor’s Margin Call, a vainglorious attempt to persuade us that brokers are part of our human species, is an elegant tribute to the spirit of capitalism. Painted in the subtle hues of corporate stainless, punctuated with beautifully framed evening cityscapes and cold but glam interiors, this is a film that suggests that all human endeavor mirrors both our darkest as well as our most humane instincts. Its heroes and villains are one and the same; their common thread, a desire to survive and excel. Chandor’s tale, however, like so much generational thought, forgets history, or at least dismisses that which preceded all our “crashes” as if nothing had been premeditated, that deception was just a sales tactic, and that disposing of careers and, sometimes, lives is natural, cyclic, and ennobling. It’s stylish, provocative and lacking of innocence like its protagonists and equates cold heartedness with a virtue of star power.