NYFF 2020 Film Review: Festival Dispatch

Capsule reviews from this year’s New York Film Festival

Because of COVID-19 pandemic this year, it was impossible for me to write full-length reviews for everything I saw at NYFF. So, here’s a special edition of Strange Harbors Capsule Reviews, covering an epic philosophical debate, the premiere of director Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology, and new films from Jia Zhangke and Sofia Coppola.

Malmkrog

In Cristi Puiu’s Malmkrog, a series of sprawling philosophical debates rage on in a turn-of-the-century Transylvanian manor. A finely-crafted assemblage of parley, with florid and demanding treatises on religion, morality, and history, the film attempts to adapt the philosophy texts of Vladimir Solovyov into compelling drama. Is it successful? Not really. Malmkrog is far from impenetrable, and at times even gripping with its colorful cast of pontificating blowhards, but at three-and-a-half hours long, it’s a gauntlet. There’s flirtation with some sort of boiling point, but Malmkrog is too self-involved with the sound of its own voice to give the satisfaction. C

Small Axe: Lovers Rock

Joyousness as protest. A brief, 68-minute respite from the rest of his Small Axe entries, Steve McQueen’s Lovers Rock is a celebration of Blackness - the ultimate hangout movie tangential to the cutting historical significance of Mangrove and Red, White and Blue.  Unfolding over the course of a single Saturday in West Indian London during the 1980s, Lovers Rock hums vibrantly with dancing, flirting, and feasting as McQueen captures every facet of a Black sanctuary. Tyranny and oppression are right on the outskirts in the form of jeering white faces, but Lovers Rock persists with its sensuous vibe. Steve McQueen doesn’t exercise a light touch often, but Lovers Rock proves that its a lane where he shines brightly. B+ 

Small Axe: Mangrove

Small Axe: Mangrove is what The Trial of the Chicago Seven wants to be. Precise, fiery, historical courtroom drama that never descends into treacle or finger-wagging invectives, Steve McQueen’s very first entry in his Small Axe anthology is a rousing spark of revolution. Putting systemic racism in a vice of revelation, Mangrove tells the story of a West Indian restaurant in Black Notting Hill besieged by racially motivated police raids, and the subsequent trial that exposed the anti-Black racism within London's Metropolitan Police. Letitia Wright, Shaun Parkes, and Malachi Kirby burst with electricity, and director Steve McQueen showcases some of his sharpest and most sensitive filmmaking with this exposé on prejudice from across the pond. A-

Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue

Jia Zhangke has always been the keeper of China’s change - a dynamic, living ledger of the country as it’s shaped by time and turmoil. Comprised mostly of talking heads, Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue still manages to capture the sprawl of Jia’s narrative features of Platform or Ash Is Purest White. What at first seems like a dry chronicle of a literature festival in his hometown - examining the cross-generational works of writers Jia Pingwa, Yu Hua, Liang Hong, and the late Ma Feng - slowly becomes a meditation on China’s relationship with literature as it undergoes rapid, radical change. A dense, niche documentary made accessible through compelling framing; as moving as it is enlightening. B+

On the Rocks

Undoubtedly Sofia Coppola’s most conventional, facile film, On the Rocks grinds Rashida Jones into the familiar throes of a midlife crisis. Lacking the hazy mystique of Lost in Translation, the bite of Marie Antoinette, or the devastation of The Virgin Suicides, On the Rocks is featherweight comedy that is nevertheless charming. The chemistry between Jones and Bill Murray that oscillates from bitter to tender and back again elevates the film’s more trope-y elements. The story of a stale marriage under threat of collapse and a furtive investigation into a husband’s extra-marital activities is as generic as it comes, but add in Coppola’s handle on New York City and Murray and Jones careening through traffic in a classic sportscar, and On the Rocks is just agreeable enough. B-