MAIN SLATE: ANORA (Sean Baker, 2024)
Film at Lincoln Center
Saturday, September 28, 6:15
Sunday, September 29, noon
www.filmlinc.org

The sixty-second edition of the New York Film Festival is under way, and the first standout is Sean Baker’s Anora.

Winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes, Anora is a nonstop wild ride through the frenetic, unpredictable relationship between a stripper and the scion of a Russian oligarch. It starts out luridly but quickly morphs into a touching and surprisingly human tale.

Mikey Madison, who starred in the 2022 Scream sequel, shows off her mighty pipes in the film, making a career breakthrough as Ani, a stripper living in a Brighton Beach railroad apartment who catches the eye of Ivan Zakharov (Mark Eydelshteyn), who buys her for a week, lighting up the nights in a cavalcade of sex and drugs while developing what appears to be turning into a real relationship. But when his parents, Nikolai (Aleksei Serebryakov) and Galina (Darya Ekamasova), find out about it, they sic their guard dogs, Igor (Yura Borisov), Toros (Karren Karagulian), and Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan), on them, leading to hilariously violent scenes as Ani sets out to prove that she is not a hooker and is not ashamed of being a sex worker.

Written, edited, and directed by Baker, whose previous work includes Take Out, Tangerine, The Florida Project, and Red Rocket, Anora is an aggressive, in-your-face trip that races from Coney Island to Las Vegas, with lush cinematography by Drew Daniels, a pulsating score by Matthew Hearon-Smith, and fanciful costumes by Jocelyn Pierce.

Madison, a regular on Better Things and Lady in the Lake, is fearless as Ani, a determined young woman who knows what she wants and is not afraid to say it out loud and fight for it. The coda is disappointing — it would have been much better if the film ended before the final moments in the car — but otherwise Anora is a thrilling cinematic experience.

Anora is screening September 28 and 29, with Baker and Madison on hand for Q&As. The ferocious film will then return to Lincoln Center for a theatrical run in mid-October, with Baker and Madison participating in Q&As October 16 and 18. Keep watching this space for more reviews from NYFF62.

MAIN SLATE: A TRAVELER’S NEEDS (Hong Sangsoo, 2024)
Film at Lincoln Center
Wednesday, October 2, 9:00
Thursday, October 3, 6:15
www.filmlinc.org

Longtime New York Film Festival favorite Hong Sangsoo returns to Lincoln Center with two touching works for NYFF62. For nearly thirty years, the South Korean Hong has been making contemplative, character-driven films in which writers or directors develop different kinds of relationships with actors, fans, students, and other admirers amid a lot of drinking, eating, and smoking as they discuss art, love, human nature, and film itself.

In such gems as Oki’s Movie, The Day He Arrives, Yourself and Yours, Like You Know It All, and Right Now, Wrong Then, Hong constructs slow-paced, intriguing philosophical narratives in which not much necessarily happens but nearly every minute is imbued with meaning.

In A Traveler’s Needs, Isabelle Huppert, in her third Hong film (following 2012’s In Another Country and 2017’s Claire’s Camera), stars as Iris, a mysterious Frenchwoman who seems to just appear and disappear; we know almost nothing about her or why she is in Seoul.

When we first encounter her, she is teaching French to a young pianist, Isong (Kim Seungyun), asking her questions using index cards and an old cassette recorder that looks almost like a toy. We soon find out that Iris is not a trained teacher but someone who only recently developed her unique method, which involves asking her students how they feel deep inside, and that she has no idea if it will actually work.

Iris, who dresses like she is on vacation, wearing a flowery dress, green sweater, and wide-brimmed hat, next visits Wonju (Lee Hyeyoung) and her husband, Haesoon (Kwon Haehyo), to teach them French. Wonju is suspicious of Iris and her technique, but as they partake of more of the milky rice wine known as makgeolli, everyone loosens up a bit.

Later, Iris returns home, to an apartment she shares with Inguk (Ha Seongguk), a younger man who is not quite ready to introduce her to his mother, Yeonhee (Cho Yunhee), although the relationship between Inguk and Iris is unclear.

So how does A Traveler’s Needs make you feel? Like many of Hong’s films, it’s a calm tale featuring lots of conversation and long takes, highlighted by another superb performance by Huppert. It might be best exemplified by a scene in which Iris approaches a tiny river, takes off her shoes, steps into the water, looks around while humming, and drops one of her shoes. It’s hard to tell if it was supposed to happen, but Huppert lets out an adorable sigh, picks it up, shakes it out, and carries on.

Hong also incorporates an oddly endearing repetition in the film, in dialogue, character traits, and Iris’s movement, particularly how she walks when she exits a scene. She practically floats in and out of her world, innocent and carefree, like a child. Hong’s camera loves her — he wrote, directed, photographed, produced, and edited the film in addition to composing the score — and so will you.

A Traveler’s Needs is screening October 2 at 9:00 and October 3 at 6:15, with Huppert participating in Q&As after each show; she will also return to Lincoln Center November 21 for a Q&A when the film opens at the Walter Reade Theater.

MAIN SLATE: BY THE STREAM (Hong Sangsoo, 2024)
Film at Lincoln Center
Friday, October 4, 9:00
Friday, October 11, 6:45
www.filmlinc.org

“I’ll light the smallest lamp in the corner and protect it until I die,” a college student tells Chu Sieon (Kwon Haehyo) when he asks four young women what they want to do in the future in Hong Sangsoo’s By the Stream. It’s a subtle admission in a subtle film filled with small lamps in corners, literally and figuratively.

Hong wrote, edited, produced, directed, photographed, and composed the score for the film, another intimate, eloquent drama about people just going about their daily lives, eating, drinking, and talking about creativity and love. It takes place on a lovely campus at a woman’s university in Seoul, where it’s time for the annual skit contest, when the various departments put on ten-minute shows. Art professor Jeonim (Kim Minhee) is in a jam when the director in charge of the script for her department has been kicked out after sleeping with three of the students.

Jeonim makes a desperate call to her uncle, Chu, a onetime popular actor who was canceled for unstated reasons and has been running a small bookstore on a remote lake for decades. Niece and uncle have not spoken for ten years, but Sieon accepts the offer, returning to the school where he got his start forty years before. While the four art students are not exactly psyched about the script he has written for them, the head of the department, Jeong (Cho Yunhee), is instantly smitten with him, an adoring fan who wants to spend more and more time with him — and he doesn’t seem to mind all the attention.

With skit night approaching, Jeonim, Sieon, and Jeong do a lot of eating, talking, and drinking, enjoying eel and the milk rice wine known as makgeolli, as relationships grow more complicated and characters reexamine who they are and what they want.

By the Stream is Hong’s thirty-second film since his debut, 1996’s The Day a Pig Fell into the Well. It’s also the thirteenth Hong film Kim has starred in; they began an affair in 2015 — they are both separated from their spouses, with whom they have children, which caused a scandal in South Korea — and Kim, an award-winning international star, has not worked for another director since Park Chan-wook’s 2016 The Handmaiden. Hong is twenty-two years older than Kim; Kwon is seventeen years older than Cho. That is not to imply that By the Stream is autobiographical, but it appears to have personal elements that add intrigue to the gentle magic of the storytelling and characterization.

Kim won the Best Performance award at Locarno for her role as Jeonim, who spends much of her time drawing the ripples in a stream, the water ever changing and constantly moving, like life. She then re-creates the patterns on her loom, finding solace in making art. Chu is reenergized by his decision to direct the skit, interacting with people as he hasn’t since isolating himself at his bookstore. And Jeong shows a different side of herself as she becomes a fan girl forming a connection with the object of her affection.

Hong often leaves his camera fixed as the action unfolds, particularly when the three protagonists are at tables, eating, drinking, and talking, composing a kind of flowing, ever-changing portrait. Water has been a leitmotif throughout Hong’s career; several of his films have the words water, river, beach, and stream in them, and in others, water plays a part, like the beautiful scene in A Traveler’s Needs when Iris (Isabelle Huppert) steps into a small stream.

As in so many of Hong’s works, By the Stream proceeds at its own hypnotic pace, offering profound if understated treatises on the little things in life, like that small lamp in the corner.

REVIVALS: HELLRAISER (Clive Barker, 1987)
Saturday, October 5, 9:15
Wednesday, October 9, 1:00
www.filmlinc.org

“What’s your pleasure?” an unseen character asks at the beginning and end of Clive Barker’s Hellraiser, now screening at NYFF62 in a 4K restoration. Adapted from his novella The Hellbound Heart, the horror film made quite a splash when it was released in 1987, and its legacy as a genre classic has only grown over the years, despite, not because of, nine sequels, none of which Barker wrote or directed. The film faced bans and censorship, so Barker had to make some concessions, editing certain ultraviolent and S&M scenes, but there are still plenty in there to justify its cult status.

“We did a version which had some spanking in it and the MPAA was not very appreciative of that,” Barker said in the DVD audio commentary. “[They also] told me I was allowed two consecutive buttock thrusts from Frank but a third would be deemed obscene.”

The film begins with Frank Cotton (Sean Chapman) in Morocco acquiring a puzzle box and, upon solving it in his suburban American home, getting sent to a hell realm where pain mixes with pleasure, a decadent take on the hot nightclub scene of the 1980s. Years later, Frank’s brother, Larry (Andrew Robinson), returns to the family homestead with his second wife, Julia (Clare Higgins), who unbeknownst to him had a torrid affair with Frank. Larry’s daughter, Kirsty (Ashley Laurence), shows up to provide support, but it’s instantly clear that she and Julia are not besties.

When Larry severely cuts his hand while helping the creepy movers bring a bed upstairs, the blood oozes into the floorboards and awakens Frank, who is a skinless terrifying creature (portrayed by Oliver Smith). Frank reveals to Julia, who still has the hots for him, that he can regain his skin and they can have a life together if she feeds him other human beings, so she hits the bars, bringing men home to be devoured by her lover. Larry is completely oblivious to what is going on right under his nose, but Kirsty grows suspicious, leading to an appropriately blood-soaked, out-of-this-world climax.

Hellraiser is most remembered and revered for the Cenobites, ghoulish S&M characters known as the Chatterer (Nicholas Vince), Butterball (Simon Bamford), the unnamed female (Grace Kirby), and their leader, Pinhead (Doug Bradley), who became a breakout star. The general plot is derivative and the acting has a heavy dose of soap opera attitude, but Barker pushes it all beyond the limits of standard genre fare, toying with cliché so you won’t always know what’s coming. Christopher Young’s score, Michael Buchanan’s production design, Jocelyn James’s art direction, and Aileen Seaton’s hair stylings capture the ’80s sensibility and look better than ever in the restoration, as do the special effects and intense makeup and costumes.

All in all, this version of Hellraiser provides the answer to the question “What’s your pleasure?”

MAIN SLATE: ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT (Payal Kapadia, 2024)
Film at Lincoln Center
Monday, October 7, 6:00
Tuesday, October 8, 9:15
Free talk Wednesday, October 9, 4:00
Thursday, October 10, 3:30
www.filmlinc.org

Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia won the Golden Eye at Cannes in 2021 for best documentary for A Night of Knowing Nothing, a film that mixes fact and fiction while telling the story of two lovers trying to stay connected via letters amid student protests in India. Kapadia mixes fact and fiction again in her follow-up, the tender and deeply poignant All We Imagine as Light, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes earlier this year.

The new work opens with gritty shots of the streets of Mumbai, as unseen people share their difficulties trying to make a new life for themselves after migrating from the country. “There’s always the feeling I’ll have to leave,” one person says. Another opines, “The city takes time away from you.” A third argues, “Why would anyone want to move back?”

Kapadia, who was born in Mumbai, then shifts to the fictional tale of two nurses and a third hospital employee fighting loneliness as they care for sick people. Prabha (a heart-wrenching Kani Kusruti) and the younger Anu (Divya Prabha) live together in an apartment in the city. Prabha, who is in an arranged marriage, has not seen her husband, who is working in Germany, for more than a year. Anu, whose family is Hindi, is in love with a Muslim man, Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon), keeping their relationship secret for fear of being discovered and shunned. And Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam) is a recent widow who is being evicted from her home of twenty-two years because her name is nowhere on the paperwork left behind by her husband.

When Prabha receives a brand-new German rice cooker in the mail, she assumes it is from her spouse, perhaps a message that he is not coming back and that she should proceed with her life. But she is tentative to start dating, even as she is pursued by the goofy but sweet Dr. Manoj (Azees Nedumangad), who writes poetry for her.

The three women decide to hit the road, taking a trip to Parvaty’s seaside Maharashtrian hometown, where they take stock of their lives, particularly after a man washes up onshore.

All We Imagine as Light is sensitively shot by cinematographer Ranabir Das, with a soft, jazzy score by Topshe as soft rain falls, trains pass by in the background, and Prabha and Parvaty throw stones at a billboard for a pending skyscraper that proclaims, “CLASS is a privilege reserved for the PRIVILEGED.”

All We Imagine as Light is an engaging and touchingly lyrical look at womanhood in contemporary Mumbai, as the city threatens three women with potential isolation and alienation until they bind together. The youngest, Anu, instills new energy into the others to reevaluate their situations and take action. “Do you ever think of the future?” Anu asks.

The film appropriately provides no firm answers in the end, but it is clear that Kapadia’s future is a bright one.

All We Imagine as Light is screening at NYFF62 on October 7, 8, and 10, with the writer-director participating in Q&As following the first two showings. She will also be at the Amphitheater at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center on October 9 at 4:00 for a free talk with Portuguese director Miguel Gomes, whose Grand Tour is screening October 8, 9, and 11 at the festival.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]