Like every other North American festival this time of year, the Palm Springs film festival, which closed this past Monday, is pulled into the apparently inescapable vortex of the Academy Awards. Despite all the sturm und drang of the Academy’s internal organizational drama, cost overruns on the new Academy museum at Wilshire and Fairfax and strain to diversify its (still) white-dominant membership, the Oscars rule, and not in a good way. The Oscars have utterly colonized English-language movies aspiring to that thing known as “art.”
This is a recent development that the so-called “art film” world hasn’t figured out or responded to as a way of resisting it. It’s not even clear that there can be a resistance. The marketing and business tentacles of the Oscar’s influence are now profoundly globalized and deeply entrenched in nearly every corner of cinema culture. This website—and a few others—aims to explore those other corners, but they’re threatened with cultural irrelevancy in the face of the Oscar behemoth.
Palm Springs effectively caps the festival period that begins with Venice, in which every movie is judged by the Entertainment Press Complex as either counting as an Oscar “contender” or not. This journalistic voodoo, now practiced by a whole cadre of writers who literally make a living on this beat alone (this beat tends to start these days during Telluride, formerly a Shangri-La escape from the movie business that’s been invaded and taken over by it), has nothing to do with criticism or cinephilia and everything to do with some kind of gut feeling that the movie will “work” with Oscar voters. And if you don’t count, you’re out; you may as well not exist. Steve McQueen’s “Widows” was first viewed this season as a “contender” by the voodoo journalists, and then it wasn’t, and there’s nobody alive who can explain exactly why. This also means that a masterwork like Alice Rohrwacher’s “Happy As Lazzaro” doesn’t count anymore since the Italian cinema bureaucrats selected Matteo Garrone’s vastly inferior “Dogman” over it as Italy’s foreign-language Oscar selection.
The public perception of Palm Springs as the world’s most comprehensive showplace for the foreign language Oscar (it screened over 40 of the movies submitted for the 2019 race) tends to pigeonhole the festival as an awards season banquet—flagrantly encouraged by the opening night gala that hands out awards to select “contenders.” That perception extends to real-world politics: Palm Springs is also home to a lot of Oscar voters, many of whom attend the festival. (It may be one of the few they attend all year.)
But there’s another way of perceiving Palm Springs. Like TIFF used to be and like the much smaller AFI still is, it’s a festival-of-festival with few world premieres and a program curated from the year’s major festivals. If Palm Springs is viewed less as an Oscar season contender gambit and more as an example of a survey of the year’s festival work, it begins to look like something else.
What does it tell us about the year?
That’s the tricky one, since the selection is flawed. Nothing or next-to-nothing from Berlinale’s Forum, Locarno, Jeonju, Rotterdam, FID Marseilles or CPH DOX (to name a few of the best premiering festivals and sections) appeared in Palm Springs. Checking back with an early best-of-2018 list that I made for the Korean film magazine Filo, I see that of 15 listed titles only Alfonso Cuaron’s “Roma” and Lee Chang-dong’s “Burning” screened at Palm Springs, no doubt due to their robust Oscar season profile. Such eligible possibilities as Hong Sang-soo’s “Hotel by the River,” Travis Wilkerson’s “Do You Wonder Who Fired The Gun?”, Michael Dweck’s “The Last Race” (the best non-fiction movie I saw last year), Corneliu Porimboiu’s “Infinite Football,” Nicole Vogele’s “Closing Time,” and Andrea Bussmann’s “Fausto” were missing.
This is nothing new. Palm Springs’s programming is generally audience-driven, and there’s no audience in Palm Springs waiting to watch the latest Travis Wilkerson.
And yet I found that I could pack day after day with catch-up viewing of major festival movies and get a fair sampling of works across the calendar year, starting with Berlin, and the Alfred Bauer winner “The Heiresses,” which also won a Silver Bear best actress for Ana Brun, who plays Chela, a woman seemingly living in the twilight years of her glamour days in the Paraguayan capital of Asuncion. Writer-director Marcelo Martinessi calmly observes how Chela navigates a new life when her longtime life partner Chiquita is tossed into prison on financial fraud charges: The navigation is literal, since Chela accidentally becomes a driver for women, opening her up to new options. Martinessi avoids insisting on any perspective except the most crucial one, which is life’s inevitable state of flux.
Possibly Berlin’s best film was Christian Petzold’s inspired reimagining of Anna Seghers’s novel, “Transit,” and it proved to be the best at Palm Springs as well. Petzold’s adaptation turns Seghers’s fiction of Nazi-occupied France in 1942—written during the events themselves—into a speculative fiction set in the near-future, and yet still partially lodged in 1942, straddling both time zones with a subtle invisibility. Petzold, after an increasingly strong filmography (“Yella,” “Jerichow,” “Barbara,” his segment for the extraordinary “Dreileben” trilogy, “Phoenix”), grows stronger and more audacious in his storytelling and formal interests with a strange adventure of intrigue, shifting identities and alliances in Marseilles before the invaders arrive. Nazis? Europe’s white ultra-nationalists, now turned into ruthless armies? Let the news tell you the answers.
The other end of disturbed Europe, in Russia and Ukraine, yielded two of the year’s most assured and driven dramas. Resurfacing a decade after his charming debut set in his native Kazakhstan, “Tulpan,” writer-director Sergey Dvortsevoy arrived this year at Cannes with “Ayka,” which tended to get lost in the Palme d’Or noise since it screened on the competition’s final day. The jury didn’t miss it though, and correctly gave the amazing Samal Yeslyamova best actress. Shot on and off over six years, the time-compressed drama plays like the ultimate statement in the International Dardenne Style, the camera relentlessly tracking Yeslyamova’s undocumented Kazakh woman (and new mom) through Moscow’s mean, dirty, snow-slogged streets. It stands as the year’s most extraordinary declaration of compassion toward the people Donald Trump despises the most.
Those he loves—right-wing Russian nationalists and Putin acolytes—surely loathe Sergei Loznitsa’s unclassifiable “Donbass,” a vast, multi-panel view of absurd and savage scenes (13 total, derived from non-fake events) in Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine. Since no two Loznitsa movies are alike, it doesn’t surprise that “Donbass” has no formal link with his past work, except for being the result of rigorous research and hot-white anger at Russian nationalist thuggery. The panorama of this movie is of a country overrun by human monsters, who do all manner of atrocities from massacres staged to look like they’re committed by the Ukraine enemies to casually housing people in cave-like conditions. Oh, and the movie can also be funny as hell.
Another way of observing the staging of historic atrocities comes from the prolific Radu Jude, who has recently considered history as personal tragedy (“Scarred Hearts”) and as a haunting tour through family photo albums (“Tara Moarta”). His film-about-a-film, “I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians,” takes Jude back to his wonderful 2009 feature, “The Happiest Girl in the World,” also centered on a young woman working on a film set in the middle of Bucharest. The former shoot involved a silly commercial; the new one is a documentation of a theatrical restaging of Romanian collaboration with the Nazis during occupation leading to Final Solution tactics. The director is a young woman who could easily be the person from the earlier movie grown up, with bold, grown-up ideas.
Nobody would have thought that long ago to view Palm Springs as a good place to survey new Chinese cinema, but the one thing that 2018 proved was that despite the repressive, nationalist and neo-Confucian policies of the Xi Jinping regime in Beijing, independent Chinese cinema is making some amazing movies. A few of the best landed at Palm Springs, including Bi Gan’s astounding leap forward (from his no-budget wonder “Kaili Blues”), the partially 3D “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” blending his fascinations for Hou Hsiao-hsien and Alexander Sokurov (among others); an uneven but always deeply engaging epic from Jia Zhangke, his Cannes competition work “Ash is Purest White”; writer-director Cathy Yan’s ambitious comedy debut, “Dead Pigs,” whose pointed barbs at Chinese real estate, business and environmental abuses nevertheless didn’t prevent it from receiving approval from China’s film censor agency; and, to my surprise, “Shadow,” a reasonably decent movie from the dubious Zhang Yimou, who has become China’s closest thing to Official State Filmmaker. There’s even Jiang Wen’s finale to his overwrought “Bullets” trilogy, the bloated “Hidden Man,” whose only interesting element is a detailed re-creation of the hutong neighborhoods in Beijing (then Beiping, since it wasn’t the capital) in the 1930s. One could complain that Palm Springs didn’t go all the way and screen the great Chinese movie of the year, the late Hu Bo’s “An Elephant Sitting Still,” or Wang Bing’s massive lamentation, “Dead Souls,” but no one festival can do it all.
It also certainly couldn’t be expected to screen Mariano Llinas’s 14-hour “La Flor,” the 2018 darling of art cinema mavens (despite its disastrous early-draft screening a couple of years ago in Mar del Plata), but that aside, the representation of Latin America at Palm Springs was spotty at best. Some cited the showoff-y spectacle of Cristina Gallego’s and Ciro Guerra’s “Birds of Passage” (about to land at Sundance, and a big festival hit during 2018) as evidence of something exciting; I saw only red flags signaling Colombian filmmakers wanting to make a lot of money with their next movie, probably in Hollywood. It wasn’t a great year for Mexico and South and Central American cinemas, and though the vastly overrated Morelia festival winner “The Chambermaid” and Julio Hernandez Cordon’s latest, the weakly conceived cartel sci-fi whatsit titled “Buy Me a Gun,” provided audiences with a tiny glimpse of the huge Mexican cinema, it was only a peek.
Festivals regularly screen younger filmmakers on the rise. They also, either by obligation or blindness, screen filmmakers on the decline. Could it be that Ben Wheatley is already declining? On the evidence of his newest, the silly nothing titled “Happy Birthday, Colin Burstead,” following his immensely stupid shoot ‘em up, “Free Fire,” it could be. Olivier Assayas had better bounce back fast from his dreadful would-be comedy set in the publishing business in the digital age, “Non-Fiction,” the worst imitation of a bad Woody Allen movie I’ve seen. (I had to keep reminding myself that this is from the man who gave us “Demonlover.”) France backed the festival’s worst movies I saw, not only “Non-Fiction,” but the inane and aimless horse opera from writer-director Joachim Lafosse, “Keep Going,” which shows the filmmaker at an absolute dead end. Can you be in decline with only your second movie? Yes you can, says Laszlo Nemes, who seemed to take the world by storm with his Cannes sensation, “Son of Saul,” though some of us wondered if the new emperor was wearing any clothes.
He’s pretty damn naked with “Sunset,” a disastrously bad art cinema epic of a woman caught up in events as Budapest falls into mayhem on the eve of World War I. Somehow, this movie, which sends audiences out of the theater in meaningless puzzlement (I can’t tell you what happens in the movie because I literally don’t know) has a distributor, Sony Pictures Classics. Meanwhile, the powerful “Ayka,” which had everyone in my seated row in tears at the end, has no U.S. distributor. Festivals, like Palm Springs, even for all their limitations are playing their proper role as an exposition for art cinema. U.S. distributors, on the other hand, continue to be a real problem.