The best things I’ve seen from the second week of the New York Film Festival come from a trio of usual suspects, three veteran filmmakers whose work has long been appearing at the festival and whose new films provide illuminating views both of their longtime artistic obsessions and of the present day.
“City Hall,” the new film by Frederick Wiseman, who’s ninety (and whose first film, “Titicut Follies,” played at the festival in 1967), completes an unofficial trilogy, with his 2014 film “In Jackson Heights” (a view of a multicultural neighborhood invigorated by community activism) and “Monrovia, Indiana,” from 2018, showing the torpor of a homogeneous and backward-looking town. In “City Hall,” Wiseman considers, with a lofty philosophical logic and an ardent sense of observation, the very nature of good government, as he sees it at work in Boston, with the mayoralty of Marty Walsh (who was elected in 2013 and reëlected in 2017). Wiseman (who works with the cinematographer John Davey and a camera assistant; he records sound himself) had extraordinary access to some of the inner workings of Boston’s government, though many of the most powerful and revelatory sequences in the film—which runs an absorbing four and a half hours—involve public events. Walsh is the animating spirit throughout but not the center of attention; when he appears, it’s almost exclusively at public events, where, with a longtime politician’s deftness, he tugs at the audience’s heartstrings while at the same time passionately expressing his progressive principles, which include opposition to federal anti-immigrant policies and activism on behalf of social justice. At other meetings, residents confront the Mayor’s representatives and other official participants in remarkable displays of civic activism. The crucial word in the many meetings is one that turns up in a budget discussion early on: complexity. Whether confronting homelessness or drug addiction, building inspection or income disparity or the mental health of veterans, accessibility for the disabled or inequities in the allotment of contracts, traffic management or the organization of a victory parade for the Boston Red Sox or (in the movie’s most extended and most stirring sequence) a public debate over the location of a cannabis center, government—which is to say, skilled and caring public officials and professional administrators—confronts problems that it can’t avoid and that only it can solve. Where “In Jackson Heights” looked at community from street level, “City Hall” considers in detail the government’s role—and responsibility—in fostering that sense of community, and the connection of that sense to the city’s over-all well-being.
The Chinese director Jia Zhangke (whose début feature, “Xiao Wu,” a.k.a. “Pickpocket,” from 1997, is also playing at the festival, in a new restoration) interweaves elements of fiction and documentary in all of his films, with the balance usually tilting toward the former. His new film, “Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue,” is a documentary of a familiar style, composed mainly of interviews with Chinese writers (and their relatives). With its wide range of participants and subjects—writers active at the time of the Communist takeover in the postwar years, ones who endured the Cultural Revolution, and others whose careers took off in the relative thaw of the nineteen-eighties and nineties—it’s an allusive history of China since the founding of its one-party regime. Its very title is a sort of spoiler—it’s a reference to an anecdote related in the movie’s last scene, regarding the gap between official textbooks and actual experience, and it looks back ironically at the entire movie to lead viewers to compare what its participants said to what they couldn’t say. (One writer, for instance, speaks in passing of the “peace and joy” that prevailed at Beijing University in 1989, the closest he could come to acknowledging the Tiananmen massacre.) What does get said is nonetheless moving and fascinating, and the richly detailed stories of writers’ lives peer deep into family troubles and personal struggles and link them to the grand forces of history. In their telling, what dominates the decades following the Second World War is the desperate poverty of rural villages and small towns, the mighty political efforts to overcome it (with a blend of local collective organization and draconian decrees from above), and, throughout, the inextricable politicization of private lives and literary careers alike—which nonetheless gives rise to narratives of great artistic power. Jia’s subjects are, above all, creative writers, and the vividness, the vitality, the passion of their spoken-word dramas, delivered in a variety of private and public settings, conjure vast skeins of imagined images, which seem virtually superimposed on Jia’s scenes of the telling.
Philippe Garrel, a prodigy of the French cinema (whose work was first included in the New York Film Festival in 1970, when he was twenty-two), has developed a spare method, a self-imposed classicism of dramatic intimacy, centered largely on the lives of young people, that runs the risks of theoretical abstraction (thinness of observation) in pursuit of its power (symbolic distillation of great emotion). His new film, “The Salt of Tears,” starts aridly, in scenes of a bus-stop encounter of two young adults that in short order becomes a fragile romance, but it soon rises very high with its fusion of brusque candor and unspoken yearnings. Luc (Logann Antuofermo) is a cabinetmaker who works with his aged, widowed, and solitary father (André Wilms) in a provincial town; Luc goes to Paris to compete for a spot in a prestigious furniture-making academy (it really exists), meets Djemila (Oulaya Amamra), who’s working at a day job and planning to go back to school, and he jerkishly messes up their relationship. Back home, he pursues other relationships even as he and Djemila remain in touch (quaintly, by letter); then he moves to Paris. The virtually mathematical precision with which the movie’s young people, whether brash or tender, cavalier or devoted, get a tough and unsentimental education is matched by images of a rarefied, concentrated, vertiginous power. There’s a peculiar timelessness imposed on the movie by a blend of casting (Wilms, who’s seventy-three, lends the role an ancient air of craggy authority) and tone; the script, which Garrel co-wrote with Arlette Langmann (born in 1946) and Jean-Claude Carrière (born in 1931), feels like a revisitation of the austerities, aspirations, and humiliations of an earlier age, a return to primordial experiences and artistic ambitions. Specifically, the film has an air of the nineteen-sixties, minus its politics—but plus some of the politics of today, notably, a vision of France’s ethnic diversity and of right-wing goons who violently oppose it. The film also happens to have one of the best dance scenes in the recent cinema; the choreography is by Catherine Marcadé.
