The New York Film Festival ran from September 27 to October 14 at Lincoln Center and additional venues throughout the city.
Renata Adler once wrote that to be a critic “is not a day’s work for a thinking adult,” which is probably why I spent fourteen hours waiting in line on the second floor of the Samuel B. & David Rose Building as September turned to October, only a long run time less than I spent watching movies inside of Walter Reade Theater, press hub of the sixty-second New York Film Festival. I saw eight films in full, including two double features and a public screening, walked out of one, watched another in the Criterion office, and projected five more onto my bedroom wall in Crown Heights. Only one of these—a small sample of the seventy-one features programmed—actually premiered in New York (Julia Loktev’s miniseries-length My Undesirable Friends: Part 1 – Last Air in Moscow), the rest having made earlier debuts at Venice, Cannes, Berlin, Sundance, Telluride, Marseille, and Gothenburg, which says as much about Lincoln Center’s pecking order on the festival circuit as it does about my presence there. From the outset, this was to be a feast of table scraps, a carnival of stolen valor, a gala for also-rans, a celebration of prestigious mediocrity.
Like most critics, I have a day job. Mine involves teaching English at a prep school four blocks from the festival, a proximity that, once a year, allows me to temporarily literalize the double life I lead: During free periods and after the last bell, one lanyard comes off and another goes on. Behold, the least intrepid superhero in the cinematic universe. My credentials are green, denoting a second-class rank and subjecting me to occasionally interminable queues that badges on the warmer end of the visible spectrum (with gold reserved for patrons, of course) invite their owners to cut, their privileged existence rewarded with comfort, security, and time.
The fatalists among us take what petty indignities we must suffer in stride, resigning ourselves to the fact that the critical mass gathered beside the stanchions is, in effect, the festival. Here is where to find a party of cinephiles doing in broad daylight what they might at an actual party—doomscrolling, vaping, pontificating, navel gazing, brownnosing, eavesdropping, pitching, gobbling snacks, and talking shit. The cast of characters is varied but recurrent, from pleasant comrades in the freelance corps to imagined nemeses with staff positions. After my first screening, of The Brutalist, I took Richard Brody’s place at the urinal, and whatever unflushed droplets of New Yorker piss that splashed back dampened me with a metaphor more poignant than anything I’d seen in the preceding 215 minutes of Brady Corbet’s ambitious but flawed epic of the American dream. If Brody is the festival’s unofficial mascot, this is because—in addition to looking the part—he embodies the prevailing spirit of film criticism today: contrarian, alternately poptimist and middlebrow, only sporadically persuasive. I am as guilty of these sins as anyone, and though I only spotted Brody twice this time around, his absence haunted my experience no less than his presence, dancing upon both shoulders as Jungian shadow and ego ideal. In this context, watching movies becomes about watching other people watch movies, too—unwitting doppelgängers in my own private cinema of voyeuristic narcissism.
Film is, fundamentally, an art of doubling, and at every showtime, foils, couples, clones, and alter egos piled up. I anticipated this pattern on day one, as soon as I realized that The Brutalist not only concerns a Hungarian architect and survivor of Buchenwald, László Tóth (Adrien Brody), attempting to build his magnum opus in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, but also a sexually troubled heroin addict navigating the postwar boom in a foreign land—much like William Lee (Daniel Craig), antihero of Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of the William S. Burroughs novel Queer (1985). The unfortunate back-to-back scheduling of the documentary No Other Land, a collective effort led by Palestinian Basel Adra and Israeli Yuval Abraham, and A Real Pain, Jesse Eisenberg’s first and hopefully last directorial effort, drove the point home. Eisenberg’s David and Kieran Culkin’s Benji, Jewish cousins from New York, cathect generational trauma on a heritage tour of Poland following the death of their grandmother. Meanwhile, in the West Bank community of Masafer Yatta, Israelis perpetuate the pain of history by means of bulldozers, handcuffs, tear gas, and bullets. Jomo Fray’s first-person camera in RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys, adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize winner, forces the audience into the two protagonists’ points of view only to merge them into one in the final act, when Turner (Brandon Wilson) assumes the identity of his friend Elwood (Ethan Cole Sharp) after the latter is killed while attempting to escape the reform school where the two are imprisoned. Alex Ross Perry’s Pavements and Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada cast their characters two or more times over; Nicolás Pereda’s Lázaro at Night and Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door give their actors dual roles to play. Jason Schwartzman steals scenes in Pavements and Queer, and Sigrid Nunez provides the source material for both The Room Next Door and Siegel & McGehee’s The Friend (which I didn’t manage to catch). Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light tracks the fraught love lives of two Malayali nurses at a Mumbai hospital in parallel motion, while in Yashaddai Owens’s fantasy of James Baldwin’s early days in Paris, Jimmy, actor Benny O. Arthur’s passing resemblance to the author falls short of resurrection.
From the outset, this was to be a feast of table scraps, a carnival of stolen valor, a gala for also-rans, a celebration of prestigious mediocrity.
According to artistic director Dennis Lim, “The festival’s ambition is to reflect the state of cinema in a given year, which often means also reflecting the state of the world.” Were the entries I did not see—Steve McQueen’s Blitz, Sean Baker’s Anora, Jia Zhangke’s Caught by the Tides, Mati Diop’s Dahomey, Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, and David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, all sorely missed—to test the strength of my theory that what these films “reflect” is a crumbling dystopia atomized by mutual suspicion, sectarianism, boredom, regret, loss, and greed, it would be convenient enough to argue that not much has changed since the cinematograph was invented in 1895. Such is my worldview, anyway, but I am not above conceding that my preoccupation with transcendence via death, deception, nihilism, and ecstasy narrowed the range of what I made myself available to consume. During a press conference after The Room Next Door, Almodovár told the audience, “Nothing is going to hasten the end of the planet more than neoliberalism and the rise of the far right, and we have them both here, side by side.”
This might have been a reference to Earth, the West, America, New York City, or the festival itself. In mid-September, I received an email from the New York Counter Film Festival (NYCFF) requesting that I withdraw my press coverage of the main event and write about theirs instead. In collaboration with Writers Against the War on Gaza, Art Against Displacement, and “a large coalition of the alternative film scene in NYC,” the organization objects to Lincoln Center’s “major Zionist funders” (primarily billionaire David Rubenstein and Bloomberg Philanthropies) as well as the complex’s artwashing of its own history of settler colonialism. In this respect, Stanley Nelson’s Lincoln Center–commissioned documentary San Juan Hill: Manhattan’s Lost Neighborhood, which premiered, problematically or not, at the former epicenter of the African American neighborhood demolished by Robert Moses’s project of urban renewal, volunteered an easy target. But “the behemoth NYFF” was not entirely lacking in “open discussion and critique,” as the boycotters alleged: After the public premiere of The Room Next Door, video circulated online of Almodóvar and his latest muse, Tilda Swinton, eagerly offering a microphone to protesters who interrupted the press conference to denounce the festival for “facilitating illegal settlements in Palestine,” momentarily sanctioning nondiegetic indignation on behalf of the oppressed within Alice Tully Hall.
The venue makes an appearance in Almodóvar’s film, when Martha (Swinton) and Ingrid (Julianne Moore) sip coffee before a screening of Roberto Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy (1954); this is where Martha, succumbing to terminal cancer, reveals to her old friend that she plans to euthanize herself with a pill acquired on the dark web and proposes that Ingrid serve as an accomplice. The broader campus recently figured prominently in Todd Field’s Tár (2022) and Bradley Cooper’s Maestro (2023); The Room Next Door’s geographical reflexivity continues the trend. At the press screening, Almodóvar described the cameo as a “tribute” to the festival, which began programming his films in 1988, and an attempt to thwart accusations of tourism against his English-language debut, placing his characters alongside the audience “in the heart of New York”—though the modernist box of glass and steel to which the two women retreat upstate, a descendant of Tóth’s Brutalist structures, stands, in reality, an hour northwest of Madrid. Queer’s Mexico City is equally duplicitous, built on a soundstage in Rome’s Cinecittà, which Benito Mussolini inaugurated in 1937 with the slogan “Cinema is the most powerful weapon.” Guadagnino is no fascist, but his use of double-exposure, Burroughs’s metaphor for the self-erasure at the core of desire, visualizes a death drive Craig’s Lee shares with Brody’s Tóth, Swinton’s Martha, Culkin’s Benji, and Oh, Canada’s Leonard Fife (Richard Gere and Jacob Elordi), but not Nickel Boys’s Turner or the residents of Masafer Yatta, who stare down oblivion with an unremitting will to survive.
In this context, watching movies becomes about watching other people watch movies, too— unwitting doppelgängers in my own private cinema of voyeuristic narcissism.
As for me, I slipped out of school early on the festival’s final Friday for the most deranged twin bill I was able to concoct: a matinee of Todd Phillips’s Joker: Folie à Deux at the AMC Lincoln Square 13 followed by a revival of Frederick Wiseman’s Model (1981) back at Walter Reade. Unlike the other spectacular flop of the season, Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis (which received a “special” premiere in advance of opening night), Joker 2 wasn’t affiliated with the festival, but its overdetermined appeal to institutional respectability, especially in the wake of Joaquin Phoenix’s Academy Award for Best Actor in 2020, fits squarely with Lincoln Center’s ethos, far from the business of comic book IP though it may be. Accustomed as I had become to packed houses, meticulous punctuality, hushed commercialism, and tidy cosmopolitanism at NYFF, visiting a multiplex was more jarring than expected: When the opening credits rolled after twenty-five minutes of coming attractions, only six percent of the IMAX auditorium’s 478 seats were occupied; in the men’s room, a broken urinal overflowed, mirroring the destitution of Arkham State Hospital, where Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck awaits trial for murder. And yet, Phillips’s musical sequel to his haggardly wrought early Scorsese pastiche more aptly encompasses the existential malaise of NYFF62 than the proudest members of its main slate—a dud film for a dud year. When Fleck’s lawyer, Maryanne Stewart (Catherine Keener), tells him, “There is another personality living inside of you, and this other personality committed these crimes,” I couldn’t help but wonder what “conflicting forces” and “fractures within” myself led me here, to feel so rudely encapsulated before the sun had even set on the day after the thirty-ninth anniversary of my birth.
Wiseman’s black-and-white documentary came out the year Folie à Deux’s precursor is set, and although Model’s New York looks much cleaner, safer, and wealthier than Phillips’s Gotham, the principal fixations of Wiseman’s lens—systems and labor—dispel the notion that the life of a model is all a walk down Park Avenue. To be sure, the historical records of autocracy and genocide preserved by My Undesirable Friends and No Other Land, still without a distribution deal in the US, feel more essential than Wiseman’s, but at a festival where a mobile replica of the Criterion closet constructed within an eighteen-foot delivery van affording visitors the chance to purchase a maximum of three DVDs per customer draws, by far, the longest lines, a vérité salute to the “proscenium of the thirty-second spot,” which one commercial director proclaims “the most difficult art form,” speaks more directly to the sensibilities of the audience assembled than a spirited defense of journalism’s indispensability to the preservation of human rights ever could. “The capacity for mental resistance is really falling,” Russian news anchor Anna Nemzer says in Loktev’s film after she is declared a “foreign agent” by Vladimir Putin’s government. Bleary-eyed, achingly sedentary, and stimulated past the point of exhaustion, I could relate: What, in this mess, is a journalist or even a filmmaker to do? “The powers of the world, China, the United States, Japan, India—they all have a veto in the UN,” Almodóvar had said in response to activists’ protestations. “They could put an end to this situation. Unfortunately, a film is never enough.” The last name I glimpsed as the end credits rolled at Walter Reade belonged to none other than the chief propagandist of blockbuster neoliberalism, Steven Spielberg, who generously restored Model, and it was then I decided that I’d finally seen enough: The movies are over, and it’s time to go home.