nyff 2024

rumours, grand tour, the shrouds, nightshift

Recently, I started logging my movie-watching on Letterboxd, partly due to peer pressure from my partner and partly bcause it's one of the few remaining social networks with at least a whiff of, as Max Read put it, "the lost quality of "Doesn't Make Me Wish I Was Dead'." However, it is a social network, which implies some inevitable far-off impermanence, so I thought I'd collate some of the less shitposty reviews here.

It's October, so the films I've been watching lately come from two buckets: horror movies of varying quality, the offerings of my partner's randomized list; and films that screened at this year's New York Film Festival, which we decided that since we're in reasonable commuting distance to Lincoln Center we really had little reason not to check out.

Constrained by schedules and sold-out sceenings (this was a late-ish sort of plan), we ended up going to four showings; here's what I had to say about them.

Rumours

Guy Maddin, Canada, 2024

G7 meets Katy t3h PeNgU1N oF d00m meets softboi emo of the Canadian variety.

This was the plot of an Animorphs book, and that's all I have to say.

Grand Tour

Miguel Gomes, Portugal, 2024

A skittish man flees his dreaded wedding day via a 1910s English colonial tourist route through Asia; his spurned bride follows the same route to find him. Gomes and a remote crew also follow that route to make a modern-day documentary. One of these is the frame story, and it's not entirely clear which.

The subject matter lends itself to a certain kind of /r/relationships-brained interpretation; I dreaded checking Letterboxd for the inevitable "men are trash" takes. lol, lmao, etc, but it seemed clear and intentional in the film that Molly represents the toxic optimism to Edward's toxic passivity; both of them are just out here, in their feelings, following their respective main-character delusions to their tragic ends.

Less pop-psychologically, it's increasingly clear during both their segments that our two tragic tourists represent two distinct but equally real kinds of colonialism: viewing the various destinations in Asia as mysterious lands to get lost in, versus novelties to consume then obstacles to subdue depending on one's caprices. (It's worth noting that Molly is the one who actually gets a bunch of laborers killed and thinks nothing of it, whereas Edward just kinda intrudes upon rituals and spaces where he isn't wanted.)

Anyway, deeply old-fashioned -- given the Maugham source material, that was probably inevitable -- and allegorical in such a hazy, ambiguous way that the (very unsubtle) depictions of colonialism and orientalism start to shade into just plain orientalism. Well-crafted, gorgeous shots (in the literal as well as the "great gowns, beautiful gowns" senses), but also the reviewer who compared it to Eat Pray Love was not wrong.

The Shrouds

David Cronenberg, Canada, 2024

Voyeuristic corpse shrouds and sexualized Chandler conspiracies.

This works best if viewed as neither a meditation on grief -- though it is palpably that, and "palpably" is the exact correct word -- nor a scare-quotes-included "David Cronenberg film," but as a '90s erotic thriller. Yes, eroticism and thrillers are the second- and third-best things Cronenberg is known for (in some order), but I'm specifically talking the '90s varietal. The overgrown, overambitious, and overheated gnarl of quasipolitical psychosexual conspiracies that is the plot can probably only function in that genre, and function they do; it's probably one of the best erotic thrillers this decade.

Product placement aside, it's refreshing to see a film in which the technobullshit is intentionally bullshit. (A certain reveal would have been obvious to anyone who knows what "AI" actually does in 2024, were it not for the fact that most movies do not know and thus don't show what it actually does.)

Nightshift

Robina Rose, UK, 1981

A remastering of a low-budget British vignette-film: flashes of a hotel's comings and going, filtered through a receptionist on her night shift. Reminiscent of Geoff Ryman's "253" and similar works: vignettes of people loosely bound by occupying different chambers of the same space, but otherwise unknowable to one another. Far more emotionally muted though -- at times you could even call this cozy -- than some other examples of the form; clandestine scenes these are not, despite some arguing, some suffering, and multiple suites being trashed in multiple ways.

Your stance will depend almost entirely on how evocative you think vacuuming an empty room is, or seeing a lit window from far off at night, or for the zoomers among you, the "After Hours" page on the Aesthetics Wiki. (Typing that feels so trivializing, but it's not not a draw.)

Another draw: Great soundtrack.

footnotes

1. On the surface, at least; toxicity is still around for those who go looking for it, usually in the form of diatribes about the right and wrong ways to post there (which inevitably include the ways you post there). 🔼
2. the one with an unidentified (but identifiable) world leader drinking liquor in his boxers in an easy chair 🔼