A classy collection of cinematic gems

By MILAN PAURICH
VINDICATOR CORRESPONDENT
After the mass insanity of last month's Toronto International Film Festival, where lines for press and industry screenings reached bottleneck proportions, the relative calm and decorum of the 40th New York Film Festival felt more than ever like the pause that refreshes.
Despite the festival's undeserved reputation for snootiness, the folks in New York really know how to treat accredited journalists. They even have the decency to serve a continental breakfast at morning press screenings. And how can you not love a film festival where all the movies are shown in just two theaters (one an actual concert hall) within spitting distance of each other? In Toronto, you need a subway map to navigate more than a half-dozen venues scattered across town.
Even the scheduling of press conferences in New York is sheer genius since they're actually held immediately after screenings -- and in the same theater, no less! Compare that with Toronto where ink-stained wretches are forced to shuttle clear across town, usually missing another movie in the process, then squeezed into a room the size of a service elevator for an abbreviated meet-and-greet with the filmmakers.
All in good taste
If New York lacks the glitz, glamour and star power of Toronto, it more than compensates in class, thoughtfulness and unerring good taste. With nary a cinematic clinker in sight, it's no wonder it's known as "the Tiffany's of American film festivals." Here's a brief rundown, then, of some of the highlights (and rare low points) of The Film Society of Lincoln Center's annual gathering for celluloid cognoscenti:
"About Schmidt." Recently widowed sixtysomething retiree Jack Nicholson (a miraculous performance) must come to terms with his daughter's marriage to a man he can't stand and the failure that his life has become. For the first time in his career, the great American social satirist Alexander Payne ("Election") tempers his usual acidic wit with compassion. This just might be the best American movie of the year. ssss
"Auto Focus." Director Paul Schrader ("American Gigolo") takes a bemused, nonjudgmental look at the sordid life and even more unseemly death of "Hogan's Heroes" star Bob Crane (Greg Kinnear in a gutsy performance that's already generating Oscar buzz). sss 1/2
"Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary." In a spellbinding 90-minute interview, 81-year-old Traudl Junge reminisces about what it was like to be Adolf Hitler's secretary. Directors Andre Heller and Othmar Schmiderer have made an invaluable addition to Holocaust literature that deserves to be seen by as wide an audience as possible. Sony Classics wisely snatched up domestic distribution rights and plan a 2003 release. ssss
"Bloody Sunday." A searing, incendiary retelling of the events that took place in Londonderry, Northern Ireland on January 30, 1972, when British soldiers turned a peaceful IRA protest march into a bloodbath (27 were shot and 13 killed in the fracas). Jittery camera work and jagged editing give it a documentary-flavored "Black Hawk Down"-style immediacy. The unavoidable Kent State parallels make it doubly disturbing. sss 1/2
"Chihwaseon." Veteran director Im Kwok-Taek ("Chunhyang") shared the directing prize at Cannes for his vivid and pictorial, if not always cohesive screen biography of 19th-century Korean painter Jang Seung-Ub. While not as satisfying as such recent artist biopics as "Pollock" or "Frida," Im's impressionistic approach serves up plenty of dazzling eye candy along the way. sss
"Divine Intervention." Maybe you need a doctorate in Middle Eastern studies to appreciate the humor in Elia Suleiman's extravagantly praised Cannes award winner set against the backdrop of a Palestinian community in Nazareth. Lacking the requisite academic certification, I found Suleiman's series of absurdist blackout skits (connected by only the most cursory of plots) to be slow-going indeed. ss
"Friday Night." The night before moving in with her boyfriend, a young woman (Valerie Lemercier) has a fateful one-night stand with a stranger (Vincent Lindon) whom she met in a Paris traffic jam. Told mostly through poetic imagery with minimal dialogue, this one-of-a-kind tour-de-force by Claire ("Beau Travail") Denis feels like a cinematic haiku. sss 1/2
"The Magdalene Sisters." A horrific, fact-based account of Ireland's Sisters of Magdalene who used wayward girls as virtual slave labor for their profit-making laundries until the mid-1990s. Directed with all the impact (and subtlety) of a sledgehammer by the gifted Scottish actor Peter Mullan, this often luridly sensationalistic Miramax release has already been condemned by the Vatican. ss 1/2
"The Man Without a Past." Finland's master of poker-faced comic absurdism Aki Kaurismaki ("The Match Factory Girl") was awarded the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes for his droll and deliciously deadpan modern fairy tale about an amnesiac (Markku Peltola) who gets his life back on track thanks to the efforts of a kindly Salvation Army worker (Cannes' Best Actress winner Kati Outinen). ssss
"My Mother's Smile." A lapsed Catholic (Richard Lewis look-alike Sergio Castellitto) is shocked to learn that his despised late mother is being considered for canonization as a saint. Surprisingly witty and accessible for a Marxist theological debate, it's also Italian director Marco Bellocchio's first watchable movie in nearly 30 years. sss
"Punch-Drunk Love." Adam Sandler plays a small-business owner whose life takes an unexpected turn when a beautiful young Englishwoman (Emily Watson from "Gosford Park") enters his life. This relatively small-scaled romantic comedy by the phenomenally gifted Paul Thomas Anderson ("Boogie Nights," "Magnolia") has as much creative audacity, unerring craftsmanship and original notions about life, love and its various discontents as his heftier works. ssss
"Russian Ark." In one continuous shot lasting an unprecedented 90 minutes, visionary director Alexander Sukoruv playfully tackles 300 years of Russian cultural and political history. Filmed at St. Petersburg's Hermitage Museum, Sokoruv's cinematic milestone is a work of staggering, unsurpassed physical beauty. Is this the first true 21st-century movie? ssss
"Safe Conduct." A screenwriter (Denis Podalydes) and an assistant director (Berlin Film Festival Best Actor winner Jacques Gamblin) risk their lives simply by plying their trades in Nazi-occupied France. This intimate, fact-based epic drama from veteran director Bertrand ("Round Midnight") Tavernier has the narrative richness and character depth of a great novel. ssss
"The Son." A teenage boy (Morgan Marinne) unwittingly apprentices as a carpenter for the man (Olivier Gourmet, who won Best Actor at this year's Cannes Film Festival) whose son he killed five years earlier. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's utterly remarkable Christian parable about healing and forgiveness is actually superior to their Palme d'Or-winning "Rosetta" from 1999. ssss
"Springtime in a Small Town." Tian ("The Blue Kite") Zhuangshuang's rigorous yet soulful remake of a 1948 Chinese classic that aches with the plaintive sadness of an eternally unrequited love. Fifth Generation pioneer Tian's first film in nearly 10 years was well worth the wait. ssss
"Talk to Her." In a hospital, two men (breakout star Javier Carmara and Dario Grandinetti) form an unlikely bond while holding separate vigils over the comatose women they love. Exquisitely moving and brashly funny, this latest work from Oscar-winning Spanish director Pedro Almodovar ("All About My Mother") is a flat-out masterpiece and the finest film of his 20-plus-year career. ssss
"Ten." An attractive divorced woman (Mania Akbari) converses with a series of passengers behind the wheel of her car, "Taxicab Confessions"-style, in Iranian director Abbas ("A Taste of Cherry") Kiarostami's deceptively minimalist new film. Elegantly composed and edited, this digitally shot chamber piece packs a surprising wallop, mostly at the expense of Iran's deeply ingrained misogyny. sss
"To Be and To Have." A keenly observant French documentary chronicling one year in the life of a teacher and his pupils in a provincial one-room schoolhouse. The subject matter might sound mundane, but director Nicholas Philibert has made a joyful ode to the power and glories of learning that transcends culture or nationality. ssss
"Turning Gate." Hong Sang-soo's bittersweet charmer feels a bit like a Korean version of one of Francois Truffaut's Antoine Doinel stories ("Stolen Kisses," "Bed and Board"). This could be the film that finally puts the much vaunted New Korean Cinema on the domestic art-house map. sss 1/2
"Unknown Pleasures." Contemporary China and its aimless, rudderless youth are the subjects of Jia Zhang Ke's eye-opening follow-up to his three-hour-plus "Platform" (NYFF 2000). Jia takes the studied, formalist approach of Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien (a leisurely pace, languorously distended shots, etc.) and makes it uniquely his own. He could become one of the new millennium's leading filmmakers. sss 1/2
"Waiting for Happiness." A small seaside village on the West African coast is the setting for acclaimed director Abderrahmane Sissako's exotic allegory for spiritual displacement. Although suffused with a palpable yearning, it's ultimately too unfocused and meandering to make much of an emotional connection with the audience. ss 1/2