At New Directors/New Films, the Faces Tell the Story
In 'Familiar Touch,' Kathleen Chalfant plays a woman whose inner life alternately burns bright and suddenly dims. Her character, Ruth, has an inviting smile and natural physical grace, though at times she falters midstep. A former cook and a cookbook author now in her 80s, she lives alone in a pleasant modern home cluttered with shelves of books and just-so personal touches that convey the passage of time in a full, well-lived life. Ruth seems thoroughly at ease in her own skin when she first appears, bustling in her kitchen. She's preparing lunch for a visitor who, you soon learn, is the son she no longer recognizes.
Written and directed by Sarah Friedland, 'Familiar Touch' is the opening-night selection Wednesday in the New Directors/New Films festival and a terrific leadoff for the annual event. Ruth's openly loving and hurting son soon hurries her to his car — she thinks that they're en route to a hotel — and into an assisted living facility. There, she settles into a new reality as she struggles with her memory, connects with other residents and finds support among the staff. In Chalfant's mesmerizing, eloquently expressive face, you see both Ruth's piercing loss and a soul safely settling into the eternal now as her past, present and future fade away.
Chalfant's is just one of the memorable faces in the annual New Directors/New Films series, a collaboration of Film at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art that gathers movies from around the world. Established in 1972, the event was designed to draw attention to the kind of nonmainstream work that didn't always make it into commercial theaters. That's one reason that I always look forward to it; the other is that its programmers take film seriously. That's clear throughout the lineup, which could use more genre variety, yet, at its finest, offers you personal, thoughtful, imaginative, adult work of the kind that plays in art houses and on more adventurous streamers. These are movies made and chosen by people who love the art.
That love is also evident in the great diversity of men, women and children in the program, a variety that underscores the centrality of the human face as the great cinematic landscape. This year, partly because of the dystopian chatter about A.I., I was struck anew by the deep, signifying power of smiles, frowns and sneers, and how watching movies usually means watching other people. No matter if their directors tug at your heart (as in the documentary 'Timestamp') or keep you at an intellectual distance (the drama 'Drowning Dry'), these movies present an astonishment of humanity. In selection after selection, old and young visages, some untroubled and others wrenched in pain, bring you face-to-face with the world.
That world is rarely more anguished than it is in 'Timestamp.' Directed by Kateryna Gornostai, this Ukrainian heartbreaker offers a nonfiction portrait of the nation through its children. Violence is ever-present — in safety precautions, ruined buildings, worried adults — but mercifully there are no hospital scenes or screaming kids, just sorrow. In the northeast city of Kharkiv near the Russian border, cherubs attend a school in an underground subway station while in the central city of Cherkasy, high schoolers prepare for graduation, a rite of passage that becomes progressively melancholic. Not all these children will reach adulthood.
We are so habituated to watching large, looming faces — thanks in part to TVs love of yammering bobbleheads and now smartphones — that their onscreen absence can be striking and even disorienting. That wasn't always the case: In early cinema, such close-ups didn't necessarily function the way we're accustomed to now. The historian Eileen Bowser, for instance, points out that the 1907 comedy 'Laughing Gas,' about a woman who goes to the dentist, opens with a close-up of her wincing with a bandage around her head and ends with another of her laughing and bandage free. The close-ups amplify the story, yet in contrast to the way filmmakers soon began to employ them, they're not part of the actual narrative.
The faces that beguiled early-cinema audiences begot the old star system and its striking, primped and retouched glamour pusses. Independent film tends to foreground more ostensibly authentic faces, but even these need to signify. A pretty face can by turns seduce, distract or terrify, one reason that the lovely, fiercely eyebrowed actress Dolores Oliverio makes such a formidable central attraction in Laura Casabé's sly, delectably creepy Argentine freakout, 'The Virgin of the Quarry Lake.' Oliverio's brooding looks speak volumes as does the lightly rubbery visage of the gay dad in Fabian Stumm's German comedy 'Sad Jokes' and the vulnerably open one of a bullied Hungarian boy in Balint Szimler's 'Lesson Learned.'
In Rohan Parashuram Kanawade's gentle, low-key charmer 'Cactus Pears,' a gay Indian man (a quietly sympathetic Bhushaan Manoj) travels back to his childhood home and reconnects with an old lover who's had a life our hero didn't have, made choices he didn't know he could make. You watch the protagonist watch others and, as you do, discover how he sees himself. You don't learn nearly as much, by contrast, about the characters who drift in and out of Alexandra Simpson's 'No Sleep Till,' an engrossing, teasingly fragmented portrait of different Floridians readying themselves (or not!) for a coming hurricane. As palm trees shudder against the ominous sky, these weather-watchers seem like emissaries from the apocalypse.
The Lithuanian director Laurynas Bareisa doesn't explain much in his intriguing puzzler 'Drowning Dry.' Instead, he builds the story's tension steadily with unsettling surveillance-like shots (who's watching whom?) and by keeping you at a remove from the characters. Although he sprinkles in a few close-ups of faces early on, most offer just partial views or are almost too teasingly brief for you to get a bead on the different personalities. Deep in the story, though, amid unfolding tragedies, he cuts to a woman (Gelmine Glemzaite) while she's setting a table. She seems happily preoccupied with her task, yet as Bareisa holds on her face and she turns her profile to the camera, the pieces of this fractured story begin sliding more clearly into place and you see what happiness looks like before it disappears.
There are notably few early close-ups of faces in the exuberant, formally assured 'Mad Bills to Pay (Or Destiny, dile que no soy malo),' a festival standout. Fast-paced and crackling with energy, it tracks the adventures of Rico (Juan Collado, wonderful), a 19-year-old Bronx charisma bomb trying to figure out life. So it's telling that he looks asleep in the first shot, a nice setup for his coming of age. Amid the loving, at times combative clamor of his home life, Rico tries to do the right thing (Spike Lee's influence is conspicuous), makes bad and funny choices, and wins your heart. It isn't until the end, when reality and adulthood hit, that the director Joel Alfonso Vargas — remember this New York kid's name — truly narrows in on Rico's soft, tender face and you see what it looks like when a child needs to become a man.
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