Wrap it Up, Move 'em Out

Breezing by as quickly as it began, the final weekend of the solidly impressive 43rd New York Film Festival ended on a mighty high note with a sold-out screening of Austrian auteur Michael Haneke's distressingly potent masterpiece, Caché (Hidden). Perhaps more subdued and accessible than his Time of the Wolf, The Piano Teacher or Funny Games, Haneke's latest French-language feat is no less intense in its static-shot suspense as a right-here, right-now political allegory wrapped in the husk of an arthouse thriller. Daniel Auteil and Juliette Binoche star as the Parisian heads of a bourgeois nuclear family who discover—wrapped in bloody children's drawings on their porch—surveillance videos of themselves, left by an anonymous stalker. The police refuse to react until actions more heinous than idle threats occur, leaving the once-complacent couple to decipher vague clues, confront their troublesome past, and challenge anyone who may or may not shoulder culpability. Haneke is a masterful manipulator, making his nightmares our own by toying with our viewer subjectivity; are the images we see a narrative reality, or are we obliviously experiencing more surveillance footage as seen from a TV monitor? Pointing out our modern privacy-invasion paranoias within the margins of some trickily self-reflexive editing, Caché (which opens around Christmas, ho ho!) is an ingeniously open-ended sort of post-millennial Rashomon, in which truths cemented by technological recordings could still be interpreted as virtual lies.

The lingering creepiness and dislocation escalates in Russian Ark director Aleksandr Sokurov's The Sun (a/k/a Solntse), the third in a planned tetralogy of psychological ruminations over fading totalitarian leaders. While Moloch explored Hitler's relationship with Eva Braun, and Taurus focused on Lenin as a struggling stroke victim, The Sun shines on Japanese Emperor Hirohito (Issey Ogata, in an impeccably low-key performance) as he stands ready to surrender in the final days of WWII. Shot on subtly warped D.V. in low-lit sepias and foggy blue-greys, the film measures out a haunting amount of breathing room to absorb the sweeping details of Hirohito's rituals within his palace bunker: taking meals from his skittish manservants, meeting with his idolatrous cabinet, hobbying with marine biology. Even during the grand confrontations with Douglas MacArthur (Robert Dawson, not so bad himself) that lie at the The Sun's core, Sokurov and screenwriter Yuri Arabov aren't trying to recreate history as much as humanize Hirohito through surreal demystification, layering ambient soundscapes and cross-fading hypnotic imagery to draw power away from the deification of a rather demure, awkward and shamed icon who has never come to terms with being hailed a godhead. Though this profound and simply astonishing portrait is one of the best films of the year, The Sun is still without a U.S. distributor, so feel lucky if you've basked in its festival-screen majesty.

You'd think that the lone laugh riot in this line-up might relax with all the high-brow pretensions, yet you've never meta-comedy quite like Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story. Diabolically clever and nothing short of hilarious, the latest career reinvention from the wildly diverse Michael Winterbottom (24 Hour Party People, Code 46, 9 Songs—hey, what's with all the numbers?) is both an absurdist refitting of Laurence Sterne's "unfilmable" 18th-century pomo tome and a movie-making mockumentary caricatured from the real lives of its actors. (Think Being John Malkovich meets Adaptation as a period piece, and you're nearly there.) The rubber cement that holds it all together, Steve Coogan stars as actor Steve Coogan, on a movie set to play comic hero Tristram, a character who in turn plays his own father for the film-within-this-film. As perplexingly chaotic as that may sound, Winterbottom's gift to this high-balanced juggling act is in deftly simmering down the carnival of improvisations, multiplying digressions (it takes more than half the film for Tristram to be born), and potentially tired insider-baseball parody to a remarkably consistent tone. Of special note, Rob Brydon nearly steals the show as Coogan's sparring partner in one-upsmanship (their biggest beef being that Brydon nearly steals the show!), Gillian Anderson costars in a referentially small role as the California beach-girl version of herself, and nearly the entire soundtrack has been culled from costume epics like The Draughtsman's Contract and Barry Lyndon (plus the king of showbiz satire, 8 1/2). One of the most radically original comedies in years, Tristram Shandy opens to the thinking public in early November.

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