Last Cinema Standing’s 2017 Year in Review

The tendency in people is to look for a lesson, a theme, some kind of connecting thread to give all the chaos around us meaning and purpose. We invent religions and other systems of belief to cope. We study far-off stars and earth-bound microbes in search of answers. We talk, hopefully, with each other – as opposed to at each other, over each other, or not at all – creating communities to guide us, comfort us, and protect us. There must be some reason, we think, we wonder, we hope, and in the face of great uncertainty, we press on.

All of this is to say 2017 did not make much sense. At times, navigating the past 12 months felt like creeping through a dimly lit corridor, grasping at shadows instead of the light. I won’t get too political here – there will be plenty of time for that later – except to say it was a bad year and logic suggests this will be even worse.

Last Cinema Standing began as a way to start a conversation about films, to relate them to people’s lives, and to foster a deeper appreciation for what the movies can teach us about ourselves and each other. In the face of the world as it is, it is fair to ask if that mission still has meaning. I submit it means more now than ever before. I am fond of quoting Roger Ebert and in particular his calling the cinema “a machine that generates empathy.” In this new world, I cannot think of a greater need than such a machine.

So we press on. Where life does not provide a lesson, a theme, or a thread, perhaps the year in film will offer one. Beyond that, however, the Year in Review gives us a chance to reflect on and celebrate a bounty of wonderful movies and experiences. It is about the moments, the quotes, the performances, and the films that will stick with us as the calendar pages flip. Last Cinema Standing will spend the next week diving into all of that and more, but first, I wanted to share a few highlights from a year in moviegoing.

Writer-director Julia Ducournau’s Raw screened as part of the Film Society’s New Directors, New Films Festival, and it was a treat, indeed. Ducournau and star Garance Marillier stayed for a fabulous question-and-answer session afterward, during which a woman in the audience stood and angrily confronted the director. She wondered why such a film even needs to exist then stormed out of the theater. Ducournau merely smirked and continued undeterred. There must be a perverse pleasure in making a film that upsets someone to such a degree but nevertheless compels her to sit through the whole thing.

In April, the QUAD Cinema, one of those great old New York City art-house theaters, after a years-long renovation and change of hands, re-opened as a cinephile’s dream. Apart from its wonderful selection of first-run films, the operators have dedicated the QUAD to becoming the premier repertory theater in the city. As part of that mission, the programmers present the First Encounters series, in which notable figures in the film world choose films they have never seen, watch them with an audience and react.

I was fortunate to attend the inaugural event, at which writer-director-actor Greta Gerwig presented David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. A few days later, John Turturro was on hand for a viewing of Satyajit Ray’s world cinema masterwork Pather Panchali. To see a great or interesting film anew through the eyes of one who has never seen it is among the true joys of cinema – this is why we share our favorite movies with our friends – and to experience that with professionals who are also endlessly knowledgeable and boundless in the depth of their love for the form, well, that is just the icing on the cake.

In September, the Lincoln Center screened Spike Lee’s Crooklyn as the inaugural One Film, One New York selection, an initiative to unite the city under the banner of a single moviegoing experience. The film was shown for free around the city, and Lee appeared at the Lincoln Center in Manhattan and the BAM Cinematek in Brooklyn with New York Times film critic AO Scott to discuss his quintessentially New York film. My fiancée and I waited three hours in the rain to hear Mr. Lee’s thoughts, and he did not disappoint. Spike, as ever, was Spike – equal parts prickly, confrontational, and humble, but always damn right.

The following month came the New York Film Festival, where we attended a screening of Sean Baker’s lovely ode to the resilience and spirit of childhood, The Florida Project. Baker was joined onstage afterward by his co-writer and the stars of the film, including the 7-year-old scene-stealer Brooklynn Prince, who if she so chooses could feature in everything from now until the sun burns out and that would be just fine.

Eight years ago, I called Carter Burwell the best composer working in Hollywood, an opinion that has not wavered. Last month, I got the chance to tell him so when he was on hand for a screening of Todd Haynes’ Wonderstruck. Long stretches of the film are carried only by music, and Burwell once again proves up to the task. In discussion, he proved worthy of admiration not only for his talent but for his kindness and generosity,

I could go on all day like this, and if you catch me in conversation, there is always the chance I will, but let’s wrap it up with this: In May, I attended the Film Society’s Chaplin Award Gala, where Robert De Niro was honored for his contributions to the cinema. It was about this time the current administration was elbow-deep in its attempts to defund the National Endowment for the Arts, among other arts programs.

It was a wonderful evening, filled with humorous, heartfelt speeches from folks like Meryl Streep, Ben Stiller, Michael Douglas, Whoopi Goldberg, and Martin Scorsese, who ultimately presented De Niro with the award. But the highlight surely was De Niro, who could not pass up the opportunity to stand up and speak for artists and art everywhere in a speech that spoke to the very core of why we were all there that night.

“Everyone knows Chaplin was a great artist, but he made his movies to entertain. It was only later that they became art,” De Niro said. “I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because of our government’s hostility towards art. The budget proposal, among its other draconian cuts to life-saving and life-enhancing programs, eliminates the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. For their own devices and political purposes, the administration suggests that the money for these all-inclusive program goes to the rich, liberal elite. This is what they now call an alternative fact. I call it what it is — bullshit.”

Bullshit it was, and bullshit it remains. If there is a lesson, a theme, or a meaning to be taken from the chaos of the past year, it is this: Art will not be silenced, and each of the extraordinary writers, directors, and performers contributing to the cinema is evidence of that fact. So we press on.

Welcome to Last Cinema Standing’s 2017 Year in Review, in which we will look back at the year that was cinema through the best moments, best quotes, best performances, and best films of the past 12 months. Check back each day this week for a new entry. Tomorrow: Top 10 Moments.

45 Years: Of ghosts, gone but not forgotten

Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling star in writer-director Andrew Haigh's superb marital drama 45 Years.

“They asked me how I knew my true love was true

I of course replied something here inside cannot be denied

They said someday you’ll find all who love are blind

When your heart’s on fire, you must realize smoke gets in your eyes

So I chaffed them and I gaily laughed to think they could doubt our love

Yet today my love has flown away; I am without my love

Now laughing friends deride tears I cannot hide

So I smile and say, when a lovely flame dies, smoke gets in your eyes”

– “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” lyrics by Otto Harbach

People make honesty trickier than it needs to be in most cases. Though it may not seem so initially, the easiest path is always the path of truth and openness, and the long-term ramifications of a lie will inevitably dwarf the short-term pain of the truth. The longer a lie sits, the more it festers, and the worse it will be when its falsehood is brought to the light of day, and rest assured, it always finds the light of day.

We form most of our relationships based on these principles, in particular our romantic ones. Marriage may not mean much as an institution, but at its most basic, it is an agreement to communicate honestly and share openly. The couple at the center of writer-director Andrew Haigh’s magnificent 45 Years has failed this test, and in one letter they probably never thought would arrive, the weight of 45 years of deceit is brought to bear.

Haigh and Rampling talk 45 Years. (photo credit: Julie Cunnah)

Earlier last month, Haigh and the film’s star, Charlotte Rampling, came to the Lincoln Center in New York City to screen the movie and stayed after for an intelligent, evocative chat about lies, liars, and the demons they bring to life. Rampling especially was witty, charming, and unafraid to discuss the depths to which she went to portray a character whose world is shattered by a long-forgotten, thought-buried trauma.

“In a film like this, you really need to evolve very subtly, and you don’t know what level of subtlety you’re looking for until you start to play a character,” said Rampling. “In the situation with [co-star Tom Courtenay], we didn’t know how far it was going to go, where it was going to go. We were really exploring. Although obviously, there is a script, but within that script and within sequences and within the dialogue, we’re always feeling our way. … Day by day, we’re living that story.”

Rampling and Courtenay are legends of European cinema with a combined 110 years of onscreen experience and more than 160 credits between them. Though they had never worked together before this, they were part of the same movement in European cinema that led filmmakers to tell more personal stories about the everyday lives of working-class people. In a very real way, that legacy of honest, emotionally grounded storytelling continues with 45 Years.

They play Kate and Geoff, who are a week away from celebrating their 45th wedding anniversary when Geoff receives a letter in the mail. The body of his long-dead first love, Katia, has been discovered. She died in a hiking accident in the Alps some months before Geoff met Kate, and her body has been perfectly preserved in a glacier at the exact moment of her death – a fitting symbol for the memory of a long-ago love who has never aged and never changed.

The news understandably brings up a lot of feelings in Geoff, feelings Kate thought he had discarded when they met. They have spent 45 mostly happy years together, but Geoff’s reminiscences cause Kate to question whether she is and always has been his second choice. Haigh’s slow-burn narrative puts the audience fully in Kate’s headspace as we walk with her through each of seven days leading up to the couple’s anniversary party. The strain this news puts on their relationship becomes suffocating to the point where the film no longer plays like a traditional marital drama but like a thriller.

Courtenay and Rampling in 45 Years.

This building tension informs the way Haigh chooses to shoot most of the scenes, filming long, unbroken takes of the couple interacting. Sometimes they speak, and sometimes they are silent, but there is always a conversation taking place, an exchange of ideas and emotions. Courtenay and Rampling are brilliant at using these extended sequences to create fully realized characters and a totally lived-in relationship.

“From the very early stages, I knew that I wanted it to be shot in long takes and lots of essentially two-shots,” said Haigh. “For me, it’s very interesting to see, especially in a film about relationships, to see two people who are quite intent on having that relationship, to see the dynamics of that relationship unfold in real time rather than have the emotion created by the cuts. I want to see the awkwardness of that emotion sometimes happen in front of my eyes, and I think if you start cutting too much, you’re creating the emotions with the cuts within scenes. I just love what it does to performance and what that means about performance. … It just feels more truthful to me.”

While Geoff becomes obsessed with a fleeting moment in time from his past and gives himself over simultaneously to reverie and regret, Kate begins to question the very foundations of not just her marriage but her life. Faced now with the reality of a husband who may never have given up the ghost of his former love, she wonders how much that specter has loomed over her relationship and the choices she and Geoff have made.

“We all have these alternative versions of our lives that play out in numerous different ways, and I think that’s almost the hardest thing for Kate to deal with,” said Haigh. “It’s like somebody shining a very intense light on her life and what’s happened to her life, and one of the interesting things to me about those kind of conversations is when he says that he would have married [Katia] … What would have happened to Kate? What would have happened to her life? She’d have met someone else, been living somewhere else, doing something else. Those kind of issues, if I think about them, they make me have a mental breakdown. The weight of choice and the weight of our decisions and coincidence and randomness can be very heavy on people.”

That weight only grows as the film progresses and Kate and Geoff become even further enmeshed in their feelings about the past, their lives together, and the lives they could have led separately. Rampling and Courtenay quietly deliver two of the best acting performances of the year individually, but when they are together onscreen, it is like the rest of the world stops. For better or worse, in those moments, it is just Geoff and Kate and nearly five decades of betrayal, and the actors come together to make the audience feel every ounce of their shared pain.

It is of course no easy feat to portray the kind of intimate, dynamic relationship shared by Geoff and Kate, but Rampling and Courtenay absolutely dig into their characters’ psyches to unearth all the fears, jealousies, and doubts that have kept them rooted to this place. Neither performance works without the other, and Rampling and Courtenay have an almost effortless onscreen chemistry, which Rampling attributed to their shared life experiences.

“You are what you are anyway, and then you come to a role, and that role needs you to bring your own past in, but that’s actually the most natural thing you can do,” said Rampling. “An instant rapport is created with the person if he also is the same age as you, more or less, and also did the same things. Although we didn’t actually know each other, it didn’t matter we didn’t know each other. We were actually involved in the same world, so that made a big difference. I think also the choice … when Andrew decided that it would be Tom, it was very much that. There’s already a kind of something familiar between the two of us, something almost like as if we come from the same place.”

Rampling and Courtenay in 45 Years.

From an audience perspective, the love the characters clearly shared and still share, aided by the obvious chemistry between the two leads, makes the devastation of their situation nearly impossible to bear. We are bystanders, watching as a couple whose foundation seemed solid disintegrates in front of us because Geoff could not bring himself to be honest with Kate from the beginning. Perhaps he has not even been able to be honest with himself until the letter arrives.

“What’s interesting to me is that they do love each other, and they always have loved each other, but that doesn’t mean that’s still not fragile,” said Haigh. “It doesn’t take that much to start throwing people off balance, and that’s how I see it. I think it is emotional infidelity. I think it’s a lack of honesty, like your understanding of your relationship has just shifted, has changed, and you can’t get back to what it was.”

It ruins nothing to say there is no blow-up argument, no final confrontation, nor even a real resolution, and there never could be. That is not who these people are, Kate in particular. She would rather, were it possible, move on, start over, do anything they can to put the past back in the past, but the past is one thing. Truth is another, and truth, once known, can never be unknown.

Finally, it is up to Kate to decide how she can move on now that the fundamental relationship in her life, the thing that has defined her entire adulthood, has been forever altered. How, indeed, when her husband is so consumed by a past frozen in ice that he cannot see the present and future have gone up in flames? Perhaps they will be able to put out this fire, but the smoke will linger, and hiding therein will be the ghost of which they dare not speak.

Carol: The predicament of looking

Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett star in director Todd Haynes' sublime new romance Carol.

You see someone across the room, and you instantly feel a connection. You do not have the words to express what you feel, but you know you are changed by this moment. Your image of this person is filtered through your past, your present, your vision of the future, your expectations of this person, and the other thousand things that can come between the two of you. You must fight through all these filters until you are face to face with this other person, and only then can you truly connect.

So goes the love story at the center of director Todd Haynes sumptuous new film Carol. The film stars Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara as Carol and Therese, two women who fall in love but whose romance is complicated by the prevailing social norms of the early 1950s. Haynes was in attendance Wednesday night at the Lincoln Center in New York City for a screening of Carol and an extended conversation to kick off the Film Society’s retrospective “Todd Haynes: The Other Side of Dreams.”

Dennis Lim and Haynes at the Lincoln Center.

The series, which runs through Nov. 29, will feature all of Hayne’s feature films, several of his shorts, and the HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce. Each screening will be paired with a film hand-picked by Haynes and cited as either a direct or indirect influence on the filmmaker’s work, and Haynes will be on hand to introduce and discuss several of the films.

With its post-World War II setting and gay love story, Carol is sure to remind viewers of Haynes’ earlier film Far from Heaven, but while the two share certain similarities, Carol is much grittier and more intensely focused. Rather than try to encompass the malaise of an entire generation as he did in that previous work, Haynes narrows his focus to the specific experiences of Carol and Therese. The script, written by Phyllis Nagy and based on the Patricia Highsmith novel The Price of Salt, makes us a part of this world and shows us life from the perspective of two stoic but vulnerable women.

“For me, it was an opportunity to explore the love story in a way that I felt like I really hadn’t done in movies,” said Haynes. “On the one hand, it made me think of how I felt when I was in Therese’s shoes, as many of us have all been, falling in love, maybe when we’re much younger, maybe not, where you feel completely like you are inventing a language, like no one has ever experienced this before, like you’re completely at the mercy of the power of the person who you’re obsessed over and reading the signs and indicators of how they feel about you.

“But what’s interesting about this is it’s both universal, and it’s intensely historically specific because that’s really true about lesbian representation at this time, even more than gay male representation. So it has both very specific historical relevance and accuracy, but it also speaks to a feeling that we’ve all had when we don’t have that historical specificity to support it.”

Therese is a Manhattan shopgirl who first meets Carol when the older woman is picking out a doll to give to her young daughter for Christmas. Therese is instantly struck by this woman but has no frame of reference for her feelings. Haynes pointed out that in the novel, Therese says she would “call it love, except Carol is a woman.” It is this discrepancy between raw emotion and social convention that drives the narrative, and Haynes and his two lead actresses play off this cognitive dissonance wonderfully.

In a way, both women are forced to fight who they are. For her part, Therese barely understands this strange new experience of falling for a woman and tries to rationalize her actions to her friends and ersatz partner Richard. While Carol has carried on relationships with women before, she is in the midst of a messy divorce and still must learn to navigate the murky waters of female sexuality – let alone female homosexuality – at a time when women who stepped outside the norm were perceived as mentally unbalanced.

Blanchett and Mara are perfectly keyed in to this struggle, and though about half the movie depicts each character’s separate life, the central romance is so engrossing that everything else seems to fall away – as it would for two new lovers. Carol’s seduction of Therese is quick but not easy and takes place in a series of exchanges full of silence and anxiety, which Haynes took from the novel but did not find in the first draft of the script he read.

“I felt when I first read [Nagy’s] first draft that there was something – and she immediately agreed with me when I talked to her about it – that had been defanged in her treatment of the novel,” said Haynes. “The novel has such great disquiet and anxiety between the two women, and in the script, the first draft I read, there was a kind of congeniality between them right away. It felt like this has been adjusted for financiers. This had been eased along the long, arduous process of trying to get it made, and when I talked to Phyllis about that tension and that disquiet, she was like, ‘Yes! Great! Let’s get that back in the script.’”

Haynes’ instinct was correct, and the heavy silences, during which neither Therese nor Carol knows what to make of the other, are among the best moments in the film. In these seemingly blank spaces, Blanchett and Mara are tasked with conveying a range of complex emotions with a single glance or furrowed brow, and Haynes was quick to point out the actresses’ contribution to the success of the film.

Lim and Haynes speak after a screening of Carol.

“It is all in those silences and the lack of dialogue and the gestures,” said Haynes. “Some of those moments are very clearly marked and described in the script, but it’s also I think that really great performances like Rooney’s, which sort of conducts the way we look at both her face reading Carol and what she’s seeing in Carol, it’s so cognizant of the proportions of film as a medium and how much trust it gives to the viewer to invite interpretation and that if she did any more, it would be like, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa.’ It’s indicating too much. It’s telling too much. If she did any less, it would feel maybe vacant or unengaging or uninteresting, and it’s just walking that really delicate line.”

The director had similar praise for Blanchett, particularly with regard to her awareness of the camera and its meaning. At different points through the film, Blanchett must keep track of where her character is both emotionally and in relation to how Therese feels about her. She must project her true self and the image of herself that Therese is seeing at various moments in the story. Blanchett, who was instrumental in getting the film made in the first place, has a facility for this kind of nuanced character acting that is simply stunning to watch.

“The amazing thing about this performance of Cate’s is that Cate is aware of her proximity to the viewer so acutely and basically has to depict the image of Carol through the eyes of Therese and then various shades of a closer proximity to the real, complicated, and often ambivalent woman behind that image,” said Haynes. “If she wasn’t aware of that and almost always aware of where the camera is and what it’s doing when it’s photographing her – whose point of view it’s assuming at different times in the movie – the language of the movie wouldn’t work.”

The language of the film is its imagery as we almost always view these characters through windows or mirrors or curtains or some combination of factors. The visual narrative then becomes the stripping away of these filters standing between Carol and Therese but also between the audience and the characters.

“The interest in filtering and creating barriers between us and the objects we’re looking at just reveals the predicament of looking and maybe at some level stokes desire because when there’s something in the way, you want to get around it, and you’re aware of the act that you are looking,” said Haynes. “When there’s nothing in the way, you don’t even have to think about looking as a predicament, but this continually puts something between us, so it is filtering. Cate and Rooney also participated in that visual language. Just as the way I was describing Cate’s sensitivity toward where the camera was and how she was being depicted through these filters, that visual language was a starting point for everybody involved.”

Haynes skillfully holds the viewer at a distance throughout the film, mirroring for us the experience Therese has with Carol, until finally there are no more barriers to overcome, no more filters to remove. It is at this moment for the characters and the audience that everything becomes clear, and once it is, we are truly able to connect.

Lovers and Lollipops

Haynes chose to pair Carol with Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin’s 1956 romantic comedy Lovers and Lollipops, which follows the story of a single mother introducing her 7-year-old daughter to her new boyfriend. The film is a funny, honest snapshot of its time and place and captures a version of New York City that heavily influenced Haynes’ portrayal of the city in Carol.

Lovers and Lollipops

“Lovers and Lollipops was a discovery because I didn’t know about it, and I was really interested in evoking natural light and natural settings in New York City at this time, but I wasn’t finding great examples of that from Hollywood at the period,” said Haynes. “Well, Ruth Orkin and Morris Engel were partners, as I mentioned earlier, and they made these films together, and Lovers and Lollipops, unlike Little Fugitive, which is about a little boy who runs off to Coney Island for the day, this one really took place in a lot of the locations that are relevant to Carol, including a scene in Macy’s toy floor.

“Macy’s in Lovers and Lollipops is like a disaster area. There’s trash on the floor and kids rolling around and tired shopwomen and pegboard walls, and [production designer] Judy Becker and I were like, ‘Pegboard, yes! We’re going to put pegboard all over Carol.’ People are always saying, ‘Carol is such a stylish-looking film,’ and I’m like, ‘What?’ It’s dingy and distressed, and I love that about it. I mean Carol is stylish, and the clothes are great looking because people dressed that way in the ’50s, but I love the distress of it.”

In addition to the photography, Lovers and Lollipops was a tremendous influence on the depiction of Carol and Therese as women of the period, and Haynes said Blanchett and Mara took great inspiration from Lori March’s central performance.

“The woman represents a kind of lost example of femininity that you don’t see in actresses from the period and we haven’t seen since – maybe you see glimmers of it in your grandmothers – and it’s a kind of poised, slightly mannered version of a woman that is just kind of a lost iconography,” said Haynes. “It was just so interesting to both Cate and Rooney in looking at how to build these characters, who are both very different kinds of women in Carol, but this central character in Lovers and Lollipops was instrumental in that development for both actresses.”

Won’t back down: Reproduction and rebellion in Mustang

Left to right, Mustang director Deniz Gamze Erguven and stars Gunes Sensoy, Doga Zeynep Doguslu, and Elit Iscan speak at the Lincoln Center.

One of the things you learn early on when studying social sciences at the university level is not to view other cultures through your own lens. It is an important lesson because it is a natural response to see another culture and judge its virtue or villainy based on the practices we preach. Eating dog meat, for instance, may be repellent to many of us, but that is a lens issue. It is important to view actions through the lens of others, and the more lenses you are able to look through, the clearer the cultural tapestry of our world becomes.

That said, there are inherent wrongs in this world. You do not need to look too hard to find places where the mask of “culture” is used to justify murder, oppression, and injustice. No matter what lens you view these acts through, the image is one of tyranny and evil. Among the most common and least comprehensible forms of this is the subjugation of women. In nearly every part of the world, including the U.S., women face discrimination and repression for the simple fact of being women.

With the idea of bringing this injustice to the fore, first-time feature writer-director Deniz Gamze Ergüven delivers us Mustang, a genre-bending tale of female oppression in modern Turkey. It is a powerful story of how small transgressions against human rights lead to greater violations and how entire societies contribute to and reinforce the problem.

Doguslu, Iscan, Tugba Sunguroglu, and Ilayda Akdogan at the Lincoln Center.

On Monday, Ergüven and the film’s cast – Günes Sensoy, Doga Zeynep Doguslu, Elit Iscan, Tugba Sunguroglu, and Ilayda Akdogan – were in New York for a sneak preview of the film and post-screening discussion. Ergüven spoke at length about her filmmaking influences, putting together the fabulous ensemble, and the importance of speaking out against oppression.

“There was an urgent need and drive to tell what it is to be a woman, focusing on something even more specific – what it is to be a woman in Turkey,” said Ergüven. “One thing about living in a patriarchal society is it’s so part of the setting that most people will not even start questioning it, and they will reproduce it. Like the woman in the film, the grandmother, reproduces what social pressure tells her to reproduce. So even the starting point of saying, ‘Let’s discuss this,’ is already something to step forward.”

The film follows five sisters living with their grandmother and uncle in a small village in Turkey. After the girls create a scandal in the village – in an incident taken directly from Ergüven’s life – the uncle and grandmother begin the process of breaking these five girls – hence, the film’s title. It starts out small with lessons in cooking and sewing, turning the home into a “wife factory,” according to the youngest sister, Lale (Sensoy), who narrates. Soon, however, the factory becomes a prison as bars go up over the windows and the locks are changed on the doors.

Of course, the girls rebel, fighting back against their lessons and sneaking out at every opportunity. Their greatest infraction is to attend a soccer game, and the resulting punishment changes the course of all their lives. One by one, the girls are promised and married off, leading to a final showdown between the prisoners and their captors. The last 20 minutes of the film constitute a glorious payoff to everything that has come before, and though I will not reveal the story points here, I will say the direction, cinematography, editing, and acting in the sequence all come together to create one of the most stirring climaxes you will see this year.

The chemistry among the five actresses on screen and off is a sight to behold. Their bond seems so unbreakable that even as events conspire against them, we in the audience secretly believe there is nothing that will tear them apart. The film, co-written by French filmmaker Alice Winocour, has no such sentimentality, and there is a moment midway through when the girls huddle together and Lale tells us in voiceover this is the last time they will all be together. Such is the performance of the actors as a group that your heart breaks at this news. The effect works because of the great performances Ergüven gets out of these mostly first-time actors.

The sisters come together in Mustang.

“It was impossible to give any parts to anyone until we had the five,” said Ergüven. “It was always one body with five heads from the script on. Five girls who don’t have their parents, who find everything they need emotionally among each other. It was always thinking about the level of intimacy they have. … It had to be perfect. One day, we gathered these five, and it was a magic moment, actually. It clicked.”

If the story of a group of sisters fighting back against the roles society has predetermined for them reminds you perhaps of The Virgin Suicides, rest assured, Ergüven has been made aware of the similarities. In fact, she said she has been asked the question hundreds of times while doing press for Mustang, including by one audience member Monday night. While there are shades of writer-director Sofia Coppola’s 1999 drama, Ergüven’s influences are much more wide ranging and surprising than you might think.

“The closest script in terms of structure is Escape from Alcatraz, really … but of course, the context is completely different,” said Ergüven, who also drew from classic and modern westerns for the look and feel of the film, even cribbing a couple tracks from the original score of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Warren Ellis, who composed the music for that film with Nick Cave, also composed the haunting soundtrack for Mustang. The film also contains visual references to Ingmar Bergman, most notably Persona.

The script’s tone reflects these myriad genre influences and finds a sweet spot between black comedy and chamber drama. The sisters laugh and play and make the best they can of their situation, but the dire nature of their circumstances is never out of mind for long. Around every corner is another lock, another set of bars, and another reminder of their position in the household and the world.

“The place of women is very central in the debates on society and about this government [in Turkey], which is extremely conservative, which has an idea of what we should be living according to the place, a very specific place women should have, and they’re very vocal, so they speak everyday about what you should do or not,” said Ergüven. “Like, you should have three or four children. It was three. Now, it’s four. You should not laugh in public places. They micromanage every little thing. Like, they say girls and boys shouldn’t be roommates if they’re students. It’s like not only having a person who is holding your throat but who also is whispering something in your ear.”

It is this two-pronged attack that makes the reality of such oppression so insidious. In Mustang, the girls’ uncle holds them by the throat as their grandmother whispers platitudes about culture and respect. In the film’s most disturbing scene, one of the girls is set to be married off after being sexually assaulted, and the grandmother tells her it will be okay as her own wedding was one of “special circumstances” – special circumstances in this case meaning rape. As Ergüven said, she reproduces what social pressure tells her to reproduce, and here, she reproduces an affront to human decency.

Mustang is a powerful document of what happens when we allow cultural norms to dictate our actions without questioning the origins or motives of those norms. More than likely, these traditions are in place to keep powerful people in power and keep all others quiet. As such, Mustang is a defiant shout and a brash, bold takedown of a system that should require no lens to see its evil.

Film festivals, Coen brothers, and Scorsese talks

The 15th anniversary screening of O Brother, Where Art Thou? at the New York Film Festival (photo credit: Sean DiSerio).

With the end of the New York Film Festival today, fall festival season is mostly at a close. The big ones – Telluride, Toronto, Venice, New York – have had their say and launched a great majority of the films that will compete for the top Oscars come January and February. For the most part, the movies that were meant to play like gangbusters did, and a little below, we will take a look at some of the reactions as the first phase of the run-up to the Academy Awards wraps up.

I have lived in New York nearly two years now, but this was the first year I was able to attend any of the New York Film Festival. As you might imagine, it was quite the experience, one I hope to expand on in the coming years. No, I did not get to attend any of the big premieres or see any of the new films. I will catch up with those in theaters like most of you will. Instead, my 2015 New York Film Festival experience was focused on the past.

O Brother, Where Art Thou?

On Sept. 29, I was invited to the 15th anniversary screening of Joel and Ethan Coen’s O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the brothers’ adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey transposed to Dust Bowl America. In attendance for the post-screening question-and-answer session, moderated by festival director Kent Jones, were the Coens, stars George Clooney, John Turturro, and Tim Blake Nelson, and legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins.

Tim Blake Nelson, Geroge Clooney, and John Turturro in O Brother.

The Coens are as rye as their films suggest, and at any mention of their genius – which came up a lot from the audience – they demurred. As far as they are concerned, they are just two humble guys who like to make movies. In their introduction, Joel Coen said they rarely re-watch their films, and the last time they had was at a similar event for their debut feature, Blood Simple. He joked they came away with 15 or 20 minutes of edits to make and added the next time we see O Brother not to be surprised if it is about 15 minutes shorter.

For the most part, they seemed reluctant to discuss any deeper meaning or intent behind their film – a trait that can be seen in almost all their interviews, as well – but that did not stop the rest of those assembled on stage from gushing about their work. Nelson in particular was complimentary and also offered that the Coens and this film essentially launched his career.

Deakins, who was Oscar-nominated for the film and has worked with the Coen brothers 12 times, spoke about the digital intermediate process used to capture the faded-postcard look of the film. The technique involves digitizing a film to alter the color and other characteristics of the image in post-production. It was the first time the process had been used in a major motion picture in the U.S., and its success is further proof of Deakins’ brilliance behind the camera.

Ethan Coen, Kent Jones, and Nelson at the afterparty.

Clooney, whose third collaboration with the Coens you may have seen a new trailer for this week, is every bit the star you imagine him to be, and his reputation as a charming, impish troublemaker seems well deserved if you believe Clooney himself. He told tales of playing the Coens off each other, trying to trip up the famously simpatico siblings, and just generally being a puckish presence on set. He was similarly puckish on stage, much to the audience’s delight.

The evening concluded with an afterparty at the Landmarc restaurant in Columbus Circle and drinks with the Coens, Deakins, Nelson, and a number of festival luminaries. Clooney did not attend the afterparty, which is probably for the best. Stars like that have a tendency to suck all the air out of a room just by showing up. As it was, it was a loose affair full of good conversation, tasty food, and free-flowing wine.

I told Deakins what he must already know – that he is a master of what he does and his work on this year’s Sicario is breathtaking. I listened to Nelson, Jones, and Ethan Coen chat it up on one side of the room as Joel Coen held court on the other. At the end of it all, I stood on the sidewalk and joked with Ethan Coen about the rain, which had started sometime during the party. He chuckled, but the joke was clearly on me as he made his way to the car he arrived in, while I, dressed for the occasion but not the weather, walked to my train.

Heaven Can Wait

If you are a film nerd – and if you are here, you are either a film nerd or related to me somehow – there is no more rewarding experience than listening to Martin Scorsese speak. Hearing Scorsese talk about film and film history is like hearing Hank Aaron talk about baseball or Ernest Hemingway about writing. There is nothing you can say that will add to the conversation, so just shut up, sit back, and listen.

Martin Scorsese talks to Jones (photo credit: David Godlis).

For about 25 minutes Oct. 1 at Alice Tully Hall, I had the chance to do just that. Scorsese was at the Lincoln Center for a screening of Ernst Lubitsch’s classic Heaven Can Wait (no relation to the 1978 Warren Beatty movie of the same name), but mostly, he was in town to talk about The Film Foundation and its ongoing mission to rescue and preserve classic films for future generations.

Heaven Can Wait is a beautiful showcase for the foundation’s work. For a movie from 1943, the print we saw looked absolutely gorgeous, featuring a depth of color and brilliance of sound we would be lucky to get for a new film, let alone one produced more than seven decades ago. The set design truly pops, and Gene Tierney is as luminous as you are ever likely to see her. If you have the opportunity to see a roadshow screening at a theater or museum of one of The Film Foundation’s restored prints, I urge you to go. Whether or not you have seen the films, these restored prints are like seeing them anew.

Jones was back, ostensibly to moderate the conversation, but in the end, he was just like the rest of us in the audience, an engaged student humbly taking in lessons from the master. Jones opened the talk by asking Scorsese to describe how he got involved in the preservation and restoration of old films, and that was it. Scorsese was off.

It would be an injustice to the experience to pull out of context a few choice quotes or funny anecdotes. It was not that kind of evening. When you listen to Scorsese lecture, it is about feeling the cumulative effect of one man’s life in film washing over you. If you are lucky, you will grasp just some of it. This man, a giant of the film industry, has dedicated most of the second half of his life so far to giving back to that industry. He is an inspiration, through and through, and just given the chance to sit in awe of him, well, yeah, heaven can wait.

Festival season

The fall festival season is an embarrassment of riches for film fans. It is the time when movies we have all been anticipating get their first public screenings, and when movies we have never even heard of prove worthy of anticipation. Moreover, the festival circuit is now the prime breeding ground for Best Picture contenders at the Oscars and, more often than not, Best Picture winners.

Going back to the Coens’ No Country for Old Men, each of the last eight Best Picture winners has debuted at a festival, and just to prove everything is connected in some way or another, the last film to win without a festival premiere was Scorsese’s The Departed in 2006. Unsurprisingly, that was also the last Best Picture winner that was a significantly commercial proposition from the get-go, although The King’s Speech, Slumdog Millionaire, and Argo were all box-office hits.

However, over the last few years, an interesting shift has taken place with regard to the line between independent, festival hit and big-budget blockbuster – namely, it has disappeared. In fact, some of the best reviewed films of this festival season have been commercially minded movies from marquee directors such as Ridley Scott (The Martian), Steven Spielberg (Bridge of Spies), Robert Zemeckis (The Walk), and Danny Boyle (Steve Jobs). There is no saying exactly whether these films will have the legs to make it to Oscar season, but with those names, those reviews, and likely big numbers at the box office, they have a good shot.

Charlie Kaufman's Anomalisa is scheduled for a December release.

As far as the movies I was less familiar with coming into the fall, a few have certainly cropped up that I will be putting at the top of my personal must-see list. Foremost among them, writer-director Charlie Kaufman’s Anomalisa, a stop-motion animated feature that won the special jury prize at the Venice Film Festival. I am a big fan of Kaufman’s writing (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and an even bigger fan of his lone feature directing credit, Synecdoche, N.Y., so consider me in the bag for his latest venture.

Another director I have always loved is Tom McCarthy, whose first three features are unimpeachable – The Station Agent, The Visitor, and Win Win. He took an odd turn off course with last year’s simultaneously dour and oddly whimsical The Cobbler, but he appears to be back in form with Spotlight, which has gotten some of the best notices of any film at any festival this year. The film tracks the true story of the Boston Globe’s attempts to break open the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal. It sounds like topical, important work from one of our finest, most underappreciated directors, and I cannot wait.

I could go on, but you get the idea. The festival season is over, which means it is movie-going season for the rest of us. It is nearly impossible in any year to keep up with all the great films being released, and this year looks better than most, so as my idol used to say, I’ll see you at the movies.

The Kindergarten Teacher: First poetry, then anything else

Avi Shnaidman (left) and Sarit Larry star in Nadav Lapid's excellent new film The Kindergarten Teacher.

Parents probably do not ask themselves enough what they hope their children get out of going to school each day. It seems a pretty significant question to ask. For the most part, we agree it is important for children to attend school from a fairly young age, but we rarely identify the specific good scholarship is intended to promote.

This question is intrinsically linked to the function of school teachers in our society. These people devote their lives to the education of children, and they ask little in return for their investment, yet the question of what they are investing in still stands. Israeli writer-director Nadav Lapid’s sophomore feature The Kindergarten Teacher is a stunning exploration of the role teachers play in our culture and the lengths to which one woman will go to fulfill her perceived duty.

Lapid was in New York last week for a screening of his film, followed by a question-and-answer session at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Lapid was chatty, witty, and engaging throughout a half-hour discussion in which he touched on the need for art in society, the essential function of educators, and the importance of contradictions.

“I think there’s something in this position of kindergarten teacher,” said Lapid. “On one hand, kindergarten teachers, as we know, are real persons, private persons who have their private life, etc. On the other hand, they are the ones who are in charge of the transmission of social values, of state values, of moral values. They are the ones who meet the future citizens in their earliest stage in order to prepare them, to make them appropriate to become a part of society. They are also an incarnation of right and wrong, bad and good in the eyes of society, and I think that this specific kindergarten teacher – she’s in a kind of permanent rebellion.”

Nira, brilliantly played by Sarit Larry, is a middle-aged kindergarten teacher whose life lacks excitement and inspiration. Her husband is a loving man but a dolt. Her job often seems like nothing more than glorified babysitting until one day when her world changes and a new light shines down on her. She overhears one of her students, a 5-year-old boy, Yoav (Avi Shnaidman), dictate a poem to his nanny. The verse is beautiful, and Nira obsesses over the prodigiously insightful mind of this child.

The first thing she does is repurpose two of Yoav’s poems to impress the teacher and students of her night school creative writing class, claiming she has written them. We seem to be headed for a narrative in which the teacher steals the child’s poems in order to procure some form of glory for herself, but Lapid’s script is smarter than that. The Kindergarten Teacher veers into entirely different territory, portraying Nira as a person so moved by the glory of Yoav’s poetry that she absolutely must share his gift with the world, regardless of what rules or cultural norms she has to violate to do so.

“She’s doubting this right and wrong, the social, the moral values, and I think in a way she’s inventing an alternative moral system, which to make things short, it claims something like: first, words of poetry, and then anything else,” said Lapid. “I try to imagine our world ruled by such a kindergarten teacher … First poetry, then anything else – imagine that. Since her life was totally shaken, changed, turned upside down after she hears a 5-year-old kid mumble two or three lines of poetry, she believes in a way that each time this kid opens his mouth, the world should stop turning around. People should stop anything and listen. Maybe it’s not such a bad belief.”

The film positions Nira as a radical warrior, fighting for art and beauty in a world more concerned with the shallow and prosaic. It may seem like an extreme stance on her part, but as we watch Yoav’s nanny use his gift for her gain and his father decry the art of poetry, it becomes easier for us to understand Nira’s desire to strike back at the culture. Yoav’s father, a wealthy restauranteur, explicitly tells Nira not to encourage the child’s gift, but she refuses to contribute to a society that will not stop to recognize greatness when confronted with it.

“She’s aiming not only to save this kid, not only to save herself, not only to save this kid’s words but in a way to change the course of history,” said Lapid. “She aims to change the universe in the way she declares war against what most of us see as triviality, as banality. She claims a war against the man who’s sitting right now in front of his TV watching a quite-stupid TV show, even if this man is her husband.”

Adding another layer to the proceedings, however, is Yoav himself. He is not some perspicacious movie child like other preternaturally gifted kids in lesser films. He is a child – shy, uncoordinated, and simple but paradoxically capable of producing intensely beautiful words of poetry. It is this paradox that intrigues Nira, said Lapid. It is a mystery at the center of the film that she must follow through to its end, whether it leads to her destruction or redemption.

“At a certain moment, we understood there is something in this age, 5 years old, that combines huge, verbal capacity – very powerful imagination on one hand – and something very basic in the physical gestures,” said Lapid. “That’s why, for example, you can see the kid doing his ritual, his poetic ritual, walking from left to right, right to left, reciting sometimes very complicated words, and almost falling while he’s walking because there’s something basic about him. There was a moment when I think we understood that this is the essence because the kid is a contradiction.”

If Lapid’s script makes this point, then his direction and the jaw-dropping camerawork of cinematographer Shai Goldman drive the point home. Whole scenes will play out from Nira or Yoav’s point of view before the audience even realizes it is looking through the eyes of one of the characters. There are no boundaries between the camera and the action, forcing viewers to become a part of the story but depriving them of any agency, much like the children in Nira’s class.

“If I decide to make a film called The Kindergarten Teacher, which takes place in a kindergarten and there are kids and that talks in a way also about childhood and adults, childhood … should be present on the screen,” said Lapid. “For me, present on the screen means that it’s like a child. The characters on the screen will have their own independent way of thinking, while the camera will have different way of thinking, my way of thinking.

“In part of the film, there will be sometimes a collision between the camera and the characters, between the borders of the frame and the character in the middle of the frame. For example, they don’t keep distance from the camera. They don’t respect the autonomy, the independence of the camera. They don’t respect the objectivity of the camera. They force the camera to be subjective, to take a position, so in a way, it’s a combination between order and concept and arbitrary things and freedom.”

The clash between order and freedom drives much of The Kindergarten Teacher and gives it power. Poetry is no parent’s idea of a stable career path, least of all Yoav’s father, but must that be a consideration? In Yoav’s words, Nira sees beauty, freedom, and expression, and she determines to encourage and nurture these traits. The society she lives in would rather she not. If she cannot transcend, she will be crushed, leaving us still with the question: If not the devotion and dedication of someone like Nira, what do we really want from our teachers?

New York times part II: A Trainwreck and a whirlwind

Amy Schumer, Judd Apatow, and Bill Hader (left to right) introduce Trainwreck at the Lincoln Center.

I have not written much in this space over the last couple of weeks, but it has not been for lack of material. I do not do much aside from go to work and attend films, and the last week and a half or so has seen a tremendous amount of both activities, such as they are. Here is a rough sketch of the last 11 days:

July 7 – Martin Scorsese exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art and a screening of Carol Reed’s classic The Third Man (read about that here)

July 8 – A screening of the new documentary Stray Dog and a Q and A with director Debra Granik and producer Victoria Stewart

July 9 – A preview screening of Sundance hit Tangerine with a Q and A with the director, cast, and crew

July 13 – An hour-long talk with Parker Posey about her experience in the independent film world and her work in the new Woody Allen film Irrational Man

July 14 – World premiere of Judd Apatow’s Trainwreck, as well as the bacchanal of an afterparty

July 16 – Screening of Matthew Heineman’s Mexican drug war documentary Cartel Land with a post-screening Q and A with the director

I intend to write about each and every one of these events, and I am behind on some of my newer film reviews – briefly, see Dope, which is fantastic; skip Me and Early and the Dying Girl, which is overly self-aware; see Amy, a fascinating documentary about the pitfalls of celebrity and stardom. But since I have no idea when I will even be able to transcribe all my interviews, let alone write thoughtful pieces about these experiences, I thought I would briefly touch on them here. Think of this as a teaser of things to come.

Stray Dog

Granik is known mostly for her Oscar-nominated second feature Winter’s Bone, which helped establish Jennifer Lawrence as a star even before the Hunger Games films. Though I was not a huge fan, Winter’s Bone is well worth seeing for its stark, unflinching depiction of rural drug culture and its effect on innocent bystanders, as well as for a knockout leading performance by Lawrence.

For the documentary Stray Dog, Granik returns to the Ozarks and takes as her subject Ronnie Hall, who played one of the more intimidating figures in Winter’s Bone. Hall is a biker, Vietnam veteran, and all-around sweetheart. Where I felt Winter’s Bone in places had a dehumanizing effect on the inhabitants of this southern mountainous region, Stray Dog works to correct that.

This is a compassionate portrait of a man who was tortured by anger and depression over the things he did as a soldier but who overcomes his challenges by giving and receiving love as much as he can. The film covers everything we expect from movies about veterans – family, duty, honor, loyalty, pride, etc. – but does so with such a light touch it never comes across as manipulative or insincere. It is a beautiful film and easily the best documentary I have seen so far this year.

Tangerine

Tangerine, from writer-director Sean Baker, is a curious case, presenting as it does the lives of two transgender prostitutes, their pimp, and a cab driver in their orbit all on one eventful Christmas Eve in Los Angeles. The story covers territory rarely seen in cinema and feels resolutely real; however, from a filmmaking standpoint, this is a hard movie to love.

Baker casts non-professionals as his transgender leads – Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor – and shoots the entire film on an iPhone5. As a result, there is something distinctly amateurish about the early proceedings, particularly as the iPhone camera does a poor job of capturing daylight. Once you get into the evening hours and you get on the wavelength of the performances, things start to coalesce.

The film has been hailed as a credit to independent filmmaking, and it is certainly that, but I am unsure of whether that is a positive credit. It is a fair question to ask whether this is the film that should represent independent films on the larger stage, but I appreciate the spirit and intention of Tangerine, perhaps more than the execution.

Parker Posey

Speaking of independent film, Posey was once known as the Queen of the Indies, and she spent a solid hour Monday discussing her lengthy career in a question-and-answer session at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. She was there ostensibly to talk about Allen’s Irrational Man, which opened Friday, but since no one had yet seen the film, the conversation was more about Posey’s place in the Hollywood machine – that is to say, her place standing just outside the machine.

Posey has done big budget. The films are usually bad – Superman Returns, Josie and the Pussycats, Blade: Trinity – but invariably, Posey is the best thing about them. Her home obviously is in the independent world, and her collaborations with Christopher Guest are legend. When the audience could ask questions, the first place it went was to Best in Show and what working with Guest is like, despite the fact he has not made a feature film since 2006.

Bubbly and ethereal, Posey answered questions willingly, if circuitously, and was not short on stories to illuminate a life spent making movies. She was intelligent, funny, and self-deprecating, a perfect Allen heroine, which he seems to think, too, as it was announced Friday that Posey has joined the cast of Allen’s next as-yet-untitled film. Allen is my favorite director, and the next film could be great, but I would still say there is a good chance Posey will be one of the best things about it.

Trainwreck

A little birthday present to myself, my partner in life and crime and I got all dolled up in our nicest fineries Tuesday and attended an old-fashioned movie premiere – and that will be the last time I use the phrase “old fashioned” to describe anything regarding Apatow and writer-producer-star Amy Schumer’s wonderful Trainwreck. This is the best film Apatow has yet made, successfully marrying small character moments with huge laughs and bringing Schumer’s acerbic brand of comedy to the screen in a way that stays true to both their styles.

After the screening, it was off to the famous Tavern on the Green, which you may remember from Ghostbusters, for the afterparty. It was everything you would expect from a big, Hollywood-style event. The booze flowed freely, the food never stopped coming, and famous faces drifted in and out of every room. Belly up to the bar and there is Ezra Miller. Head into the back room to find ?uestlove and Julia Stiles hanging out together. In one corner, Lebron James holds court, and in another, Apatow graciously accepts his due praise. At the center of it all is Schumer.

I spend pretty much all day every day thinking about films, watching films, analyzing films, and just generally projecting film reels in the cinema of my mind. I do not get out of my head a lot. But on this occasion, it was nice to suit up, get down, and gush like any other fan. I got stuck behind Colin Quinn by the food line. I got a picture with Tilda Swinton. I fist bumped Dave Attel. It was just cool. Nothing more, nothing less.

Cartel Land

After a day of recovery – an open bar will often necessitate such – we headed back out to the theater, this time the IFC Center, for an altogether different experience. Cartel Land is equal parts enthralling and infuriating. Whether or not you think the War on Drugs is worth fighting, we should all be able to agree we are not winning that particular battle, not on either side of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Heineman’s film looks at two groups of vigilantes – American yahoos who fancy themselves cowboys in the Wild West and Mexican townspeople trying to take back their cities from the cartels. Heineman, who also served as one of the film’s cameramen, takes us directly inside the battle, going on raids, enduring shootouts, and witnessing horrifying crimes and tragedies. The most terrifying thing might be the web the cartels spin through daily life in Mexico as there does not seem to be any way to dismantle it, and it catches the innocent and guilty alike.

The director is knowledgeable, passionate, and dedicated to exposing the corruption of a nation seemingly overrun by drug lords. In an illuminating question-and-answer session, Heineman made his intentions clear. Change will only come when enough people get tired of the way things are and fight to fix the system. His hope is to galvanize a movement, and Cartel Land is certainly a galvanizing film.

Epilogue

Lots more to come – hopefully in a timely manner. Just look at what is out this week alone: Ant Man; Stanford Prison Experiment; The Look of Silence; Irrational Man; Mr. Holmes; and of course, Trainwreck. I guess what I am saying is: I will see you at the movies.

The family that stays together: Hanging out with The Wolfpack

Filmmaker Crystal Moselle's new documentary The Wolfpack opened this week.

The story of the Angulo family is undeniably strange. A couple and their seven children reside in a New York City apartment. The father, a devout Hare Krishna convinced the world is a dangerous place, keeps his family mostly locked inside but for doctors’ appointments and the rare recreational venture. He has the only key. The children are homeschooled, and contact with outsiders is virtually non-existent.

To connect with life beyond the apartment walls, the brothers – there is also a younger sister with a developmental disability – develop a ravenous appetite for films and take to recreating their favorites. As they mature, they rebel against their father’s rule and slowly break down his authoritarian regime. First, one brother breaks out, then the rest. As the cracks widen in the dictatorial façade behind which they had lived, the twin fears of their father and the outside world dissipate until they are mostly free, experiencing real life almost for the first time.

“Fear’s not a factor anymore – in our story,” said Govinda Angulo, the second oldest, with his twin brother Narayana, of the siblings. “I think we had a little bit of fear because we didn’t really know what to expect when we broke out. I think we’ve done really well under the circumstances. I don’t think there’s any fear there.”

Govinda and Narayana were joined onstage Thursday at the Lincoln Center in New York City by brothers Bhagavan, Makunda, and Jagadisa, as well as by their mother Susanne and director Crystal Moselle. They were in attendance for a question-and-answer session following a screening of The Wolfpack, Moselle’s new documentary about the family. The film was a sensation at the Sundance Film Festival this year and began rolling out into theaters this week.

Moselle seems to have been given unrestricted access to the Angulos to document their story, no doubt due to the fact she met the brothers after they had already begun to dismantle their father’s makeshift prison. One of the brothers even states during an interview in the film that had they met a year before they did, no one would have spoken to Moselle. However fortuitous, the director’s good timing was aided by an eye for an interesting story.

“They were walking through the crowd, and something about them intrigued me,” she said. “They had this long hair and sunglasses, and they’re all in black, and I just ran after them. … It was very organic. When I met them, they were excited that I was a filmmaker, and they wanted to get into the business of filmmaking. We started hanging out at the park and looking at cameras together. … I filmed them at the park, and they asked me to come over to their house. I just always had a camera in hand. … It was all about creativity.”

As the Q-and-A went on, the collaborative nature of the project and the relationship between Moselle and the family came into sharper focus. On some level, they are almost partners as Moselle helped the brothers produce their first short film, saying she acted as a “sound board for them to take their art to the next level.” Susanne is even more direct when discussing Moselle’s place in the family.

“Crystal was just like a friend who would come and just be there with us and hang out and have fun with everyone,” she said. “When I met Crystal, it felt very natural to just let her in and open up our home to her and our hearts to her because she’s quite an incredible woman. I have to hand it to her. It didn’t really feel like we were being filmed and like: ‘Okay, now we have to present ourselves in some kind of way to be on camera.’ It was very, very natural.”

On one level, this is what the best documentarians do – make their subjects feel comfortable to such an extent that they behave as though the cameras are not even there, though they are always rolling. However, Moselle uses this privilege mostly just to pal around with her subjects as they perform their film re-enactments. There is little deeper investigation into the nature of the family or its unusual circumstances.

This is Moselle’s first film as a director, and she has found one helluva story to tell, but throughout The Wolfpack, it seems she is concerned with the less interesting parts of that story. Rather than explore the full implications of the family’s imprisonment, Moselle gives us brief hints as to what the family may have felt and experienced, but because so much emphasis is placed on the brothers’ filmmaking, it is impossible to become fully immersed in the other parts of their story.

The filmmaker and her subjects screen the film at the Lincoln Center.

Certainly, the tale of a group of brothers who grew up watching films and re-enacting their favorites attempting to become filmmakers is intriguing and worthy of a film in its own right. However, the Angulo family story runs deeper than that, and it is hard not to be frustrated by the film’s constant refusal to dig. What is more, it is hard to understand from where such reluctance would derive. Moselle’s rapport with her subjects would seem to suggest she could have probed further had she so desired. She simply does not.

“Crystal filming us felt more like a hangout more than work,” said Makunda. “It was like playtime because it was the whole circle of the filmmaking world. Re-enactments [were] part of our world, and we recognized filmmakers filming their subjects. I think we saw it as a complete circle of filmmaking. It was all like a hangout, really.”

The motif of the experience being a “hangout” recurred throughout the Q-and-A.

Govinda went on to say: “We’re sort of a film team, ourselves with Crystal and the team that made this movie.”

That the brothers became collaborators in telling the story of their lives is an empowering narrative in some sense, but it does not necessarily make for the best film. Perhaps, then, Moselle should have had more collaboration with Susanne, whose comments closed out the evening and who seemed to get closer to exploring the core of the Angulos than any of the filmmakers on stage.

“Family-wise, I see us growing and changing and evolving as a group of people who really love each other and care about each other and stick together and help to support each other,” she said. “I’ve always felt that in their support for me and my support for them. I also feel like it’s a real time of empowerment for me personally and also for them. It’s really a wonderful thing that’s happening.”

In a scene near the end of the film, we watch as Susanne calls her mother on the phone. The two women have not spoken in decades. Susanne’s unabashed joy and astonishment at the interaction make for some of the most beautiful moments in The Wolfpack. This is the life they missed out on due to their circumstances, and the scene is representative of the film the audience missed out on. If Susanne’s unfiltered, unself-conscious emotion is any indication, it would have been something.