The Life Nostalgic

Pensive recollections of the past have been a thematic habit throughout the NYFF, but no other film so far has harnessed that power to drill through ribcages (for direct access to the heart, you see) quite like Wes Anderson cohort Noah Baumbach's third feature, The Squid and the Whale. Vulnerably honest and near-flawlessly perceptive, this tragically giddy coming-of-ager draws loosely upon the writer-director's childhood experiences as a product of divorce in Park Slope, Brooklyn circa 1986. As paterfamilias to the erudite and rapidly dissolving clan Berkman, smugly competitive professor and failing novelist Bernard (Jeff Daniels) flounders in his egocentric insecurities, particularly a cruel jealousy over cheating wife Joan (Laura Linney) and her newfound successes as a writer. Angry 16-year-old son Walt (Jesse Eisenberg, the film's primary point-of-view) and repressed 12-year-old brother Frank (Owen Kline) aren't any more grounded than their neurotic folks, with everyone taking loyalties and laying blame like a volleyball spike. For some, mining the uncensored dysfunctionalities of an intellectual New York family for humor may sound casually like The Royal Tenenbuams, but Baumbach's painstakingly humane and fragile portrait is far less ironic or pretentious, even while abstracting new emotional riches from a Tangerine Dream song off the Risky Business soundtrack. Available to the masses starting in October, the film is already keeping a seat warm in the top tier of this year's fest.

While we're still having a Squid of a time, let me invoke the obscurer-than-thou parlance of Bernard Berkman to say that Regular Lovers (a/k/a Les Amants Réguliers, the latest from newly trendy yet still undervalued French director Philippe Garrel) is "only a minor Garrel." Though the film peaks early and loses its teeth over the course of three hours (which could be contextually justified), this otherwise impressive flashback to the May '68 Paris revolts deserves to find a U.S. distributor on the strengths of its exquisitely full-framed, award-winning cinematography alone (shot in stark-contrast monochrome by William Lubtchandsky, who has five Godard flicks and over a dozen Rivettes under his belt). Through a haze of opium smoke and Molotov cocktails igniting, Regular Lovers plays out like the heavier politicized and unsentimentalized counterpoint to Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers, both of which star number-one son Louis Garrel as a vintage hipster living in the eye of a romanticized revolution. In lieu of film-talk and hedonistic escapism, however, this junior Garrel is a poet who helps overturn cars with his student posse, entertains a Rohmer-ready affair with a nubile sculptress (Clotilde Hesme), then attempts to find hurry-up-and-wait purpose in the dwindling aftermath of the riots, recreated here in long takes with hauntingly vibrant precision.

We next set the Wayback Machine to 1959, the year that Breakfast at Tiffany's author Truman Capote first found inspiration from a N.Y. Times article to ultimately craft his true-crime masterpiece, In Cold Blood. Working from an adapted script by Dan Futterman and directed by first-time narrative helmer Bennett Miller (The Cruise), Oscar nominee-in-training Philip Seymour Hoffman is Capote, not only in his embodiment of the literary icon, but because the film itself is mere background dressing to Hoffman's savviest performance to date. Focused solely on the years surrounding the book from conception to literal execution, Capote confidently chronicles the lispy jet setter's journalistic quest for best-seller fodder in Holcomb, KS after four members of a farm family are viciously murdered. Accompanied by To Kill a Mockingbird writer and pal Harper Lee (Catherine Keener), Capote somehow charms the skittish locals into scoring interview time with one of the two caught killers, Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jr.), at which point the film's subversive agenda is revealed as character assassination by biopic. Rather than canonize one of U.S. history's most respected novelists, the film triple-underlines his callous, manipulative, opportunistic, egomaniacal, and just plain ugly nature, nearly ignoring the well-documented erotic tension between he and Smith to instead show just how impatient he was for a noose-necked novel ending. Past that, Capote is unstylized and safe, a far cry from the fest's more relevant Good Night, and Good Luck., but still many well-turned phrases better than last year's one-named bio, Ray.

Last up is a modern-day Polish drama that evokes such European childhood-anxiety classics as The Tin Drum and My Life as a Dog, and is definitely my favorite undistributed film of the festival thus far. Warmly directed by Dorota Kedzierzawska (The Crows) in the autumnal hues of Arthur Reinhart's equally bleak and beautiful lensing, I Am (a/k/a Jestem) tells a timeless tale as fiercely independent as its title, following the ordeal-forced maturation of a nameless 11-year-old orphanage escapee (Piotr Jagielski), nicknamed "Mongrel" by the merciless pack of young hooligans who roam the streets like feral predators. After being rejected by his town-whore of a mother (in what demands open discourse as the film's most intense and memorable sequence), this kid dreamer with the angry, curious eyes finds refuge on a corroded river barge that looks lifted from a Theo Angelopoulos set. Surprisingly proud and level-headed, the boy feels no pressure to find company, but nevertheless befriends a giggly, gangly girl whose family-spurned isolation runs just as deep. If that brief synopsis doesn't sell it, let me now address you heavy-sighing skeptics: Plenty of alienated-youth pictures have shared similar naturalistic urges to the fairly straightforward I Am, but rarely do they transcend the mainstream like this vital treasure, which offers only fascinating performances while avoiding all traces of spoon-fed pathos and sappy triumphs of the human spirit. Then just to rile the Koyaanisqatsi fans, it should be noted that the film's delicately varied, minimalistic Michael Nyman score makes Philip Glass' recent work truly sound rote.

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