The New York Film Festival hits at a strange moment in the calendar.
By the time the 61st edition opened on September 29, Cannes, Venice, and Toronto had all hosted their festivals (in May, August, and September, respectively). Many of the year’s banner titles — Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, Michael Mann’s Ferrari, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron, Todd Haynes’ May December — and a handful of those anticipated by cinephiles — Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall (this year’s Palme d’Or winner), Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist, Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest — are on the NYFF slate. But they debuted at one of those three earlier events.
New York hosts the North American premieres for May December (the Opening Night selection), Priscilla (the Centerpiece choice), Ferrari (the Closing Night pick), and Maestro (feted at the Spotlight Gala), but how much buzz is really on these films entering the festival? Particularly in the Big Apple, where all of them are guaranteed a wide release. Visiting festivalgoers undoubtedly have these movies circled in their programs, as do the celebrities who will be on hand for red carpets, parties, and the like. But a film festival built around a core of, essentially, safe, mainstream fare that has been introduced — and had their distribution rights sold — elsewhere feels anticlimactic. And somewhat inert.
Look beyond the headliners, though, and NYFF comes alive. Harmony Korine’s 80-minute shot-in-infrared provocation Aggro Dr1ft is here, as is Eduardo Williams’ The Human Surge 3, a picaresque made using a 360-degree camera. There are documentaries about the reconstruction of a town established and financed in 1908 by African Americans (Allensworth) and about moths (The Night Visitors). There’s a scrap of a short, made by Agnes Varda in 1967, of Pier Paolo Pasolini wandering Times Square; there’s the last footage Jean-Luc Godard assembled, Trailer of a Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars. There’s Return to Reason, a restoration of four experiments made by Man Ray in the 1920s, and a revival of Able Gance’s 1923 silent film La Roue — which runs an eye-popping (maybe literally) 426 minutes.
And through much of the festival program — marquee titles and new discoveries alike — courses a current of searching, particularly for belief. Two films in particular have stayed with me long after the theater lights went up for how they structure quietly profound cinematic encounters that tackle the theme.
One is Wim Wenders’ arrestingly intimate Perfect Days, an elegant and intimate rumination on ritual, culture, memory, and connection — focused on a public toilet cleaner, of all people. Really, though, that choice of character shouldn’t be a surprise. Wenders has always enjoyed the company of those we’d otherwise overlook. In that way, the janitor — Kôji Yakusho in an exquisitely interior performance that rightly earned him the Best Actor award at Cannes — is recognizable as a Wenders character. He could also be found in an Ozu film, to which Perfect Days — set in Tokyo and told in Japanese — invites comparison.
I’ll have more to say on Perfect Days next month. For now, I want to focus on the other of the two films because it has haunted me for weeks.
Pham Thien An’s Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, which won Cannes’ Camera d’Or this year for best first film, is a 177-minute Vietnamese interrogation of faith, loss, and time. And if that sounds challenging, I think that’s the point. The film, like religion and ritual, rewards focused, intentional engagement while opening new vistas of ambiguity and complication.
The plot is reed thin: a young man’s sister-in-law dies in an accident, leaving him to care for his nephew and leading him from Saigon back to his rural home village. Thien (Le Phong Vu) has the kind of spiritual ennui familiar to anyone who spent their 20s or 30s toiling in urban anonymity, and when the film begins we find him and two friends drunkenly waxing on faith. “The experience of belief is ambiguous,” Thien says. “I want to believe but can’t.”
But Thien tries, particularly after he’s called on to care for his nephew and he returns to the community he grew up in. It’s a shift captured in how Pham shoots the film. Saigon’s urbanism is all wet streets and neon; rural Vietnam is misty and ethereal, earthy yet otherworldly. And while Thien navigates being a kind of tourist in his birthplace, we’re reminded of our temporary visitation. Pham organizes scenes with window and door frames as the focal point of a shot. Characters will sometimes be visible in those windows and doors, but just as often they’ll engage with each other in ways that take them out of those frames. We can hear them, but we can’t see them. We become voyeurs twice over.
It’s a confident choice for a first-time feature director, but one that imbues the film with a gravity that usually springs from much older artists. It’s also totally in keeping with the spirit of the work. Pham constructs the film around very, very long shots: five, 10, 25 minutes long. Reading that as a statement of fact, it’s easy to dismiss such choices as gimmicks. After all, that’s how Hollywood typically deploys the long, unbroken shot, the director calling attention to himself as clever or daring. But here, Pham uses them neither as tricks nor exclamation points but, rather, to create something closer to religious icons than the building blocks of a film.
Cocoon Shell opens with a shot that lasts at least five minutes. It begins with a soccer match before the camera tracks right, over to Thien and his buddies drinking and talking in a crowded outdoor restaurant, until the camera tracks right again to a motorcycle accident in a wet, dimly lit intersection. Besides creating three very dense, very alive tapestries, this has the effect of opening the film with the kind of altarpiece triptych. A bit later is an even longer shot of Thien getting a massage, where nothing is insignificant because everything is a rite. And another shot, later in the film, begins with Thien and his nephew burying a bird and ends, some 25 minutes later, in a Renaissance painting-like moment between Thien and an aging Vietnam War veteran connected in a candlelit relief.
You can’t help but be staggered by these moments. They’re intense and intimate and, at least at first, uncomfortable. We’re not used to seeing film this way. But Pham’s patience (and his actors’ and crews’ skill) consumes us — physically and emotionally — in Thien’s journey, while forcing us into a state of heightened awareness. Of watching a film, certainly, but also of our own being. So many films get labeled “meditative,” but this is the first I’ve seen where it feels earned. Watching Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell is like entering a cinema cloister, giving yourself over to something large, mysterious, and cosmic.
It does run out of steam in the last 20 minutes or so, as Thien’s search becomes literal as well as metaphysical. Some of Pham’s twists and turns get a little too twisty and turny for their own good. But what comes before is so resonant, so original, that I’m a willing apologist.
Imploring everyone to rush out to a three-hour Vietnamese film about rediscovered faith and reconnecting with your root is, I know, a tall order. But I’m going to do it anyway. This film is a singular experience. It was for me, anyway. And I’m anxious to revisit it.
Next month: More from the 61st New York Film festival, including Wenders’ Perfect Days, a documentary about Brazilian movie palaces, and highlights from the shorts programs.
The New York Film Festival runs through October 15. The full lineup and tickets to individual screenings are available online at filmlinc.org/nyff2023.
