Peter Dunning reflects back on his hard life in Tony Stone documentary
PETER AND THE FARM (Tony Stone, 2016)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Opens Friday, November 4
212-660-0312
www.peterandthefarmfilm.com
metrograph.com
“There’s not a part of this farm that has not been scattered with my sweat, my piss, my blood, my spit, my tears, fingernails, skin, and hair,” Peter Dunning says in Tony Stone’s Peter and the Farm. Dunning and Stone essentially show all that and more in the intimate documentary, holding nothing back, resulting in a film that is often difficult to watch, following a crotchety, suicidal, alcoholic sixty-nine-year-old organic meat farmer with a mangled hand who is estranged from his family and runs his 187-acre Vermont farm seemingly by himself. “I’m living in hell,” he says with cold detachment. Dunning is brutal with his animals, which include cows, sheep, and pigs, or at least it seems brutal to this city boy; Stone shows him shooting, skinning, and beheading one sheep, which caused me to look away from the screen, something I very rarely do. Stone also zooms in on a cow’s butt as it relieves itself of a massive amount of feces, followed by a vet sticking nearly his entire arm inside the animal to check if it is pregnant.
Stone (Severed Ways: The Norse Discovery of America), a New York City native who produced the film with his wife, musician, photographer, and actress Melissa Auf der Maur (the couple previously collaborated on Out of Our Minds and cofounded the multidisciplinary arts space Basilica Hudson), casts no judgment on Dunning, letting him just go about his business mostly on his own; they occasionally speak to each other, Stone an off-camera presence à la Albert Maysles. It’s a fascinating relationship — the two met at a farmers market when Stone was nine years old — made more than a little creepy because Dunning initially wanted Stone to film his suicide. But Peter soldiers on against all the odds, getting up every morning and feeding his flock, riding the John Deere, sharing poignant memories, and lamenting his life, which turned out very different from the way he imagined it. Peter and the Farm, which previously screened at such festivals as True/False in Missouri and New Directors / New Films at MoMA and Lincoln Center, opens November 4 at Metrograph, with Stone participating in a Q&A at the 7:00 show on Friday.
Robert Bresson’s 1959 Pickpocket is a stylistic marvel, a brilliant examination of a deeply troubled man and his dark obsessions. Evoking Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Martin LaSalle made his cinematic debut as Michel, a ne’er-do-well Parisian who lives in a decrepit apartment, refuses to visit his ailing mother (Dolly Scal), and decides to become a pickpocket. But it’s not necessarily the money he’s after; he hides the cash and watches that he steals in his room, which he is unable to lock from the outside. Instead, his petty thievery seems to give him some kind of psychosexual thrill, although his pleasure can seldom be seen in his staring, beady eyes. As the film opens, Michel is at the racetrack, dipping his fingers into a woman’s purse in an erotically charged moment that is captivating, instantly turning the viewer into voyeur. Of course, film audiences by nature are a kind of peeping Tom, but Bresson makes them complicit in Michel’s actions; although there is virtually nothing to like about the character, who is distant and aloof when not being outright nasty, even to his only friends, Jacques (Pierre Leymarie) and Jeanne (Marika Green), the audience can’t help but breathlessly root for him to succeed as he dangerously dips his hands into men’s pockets on the street and in the Metro. Soon he is being watched by a police inspector (Jean Pélégri), to whom he daringly gives a book about George Barrington, the famed “Prince of Pickpockets,” as well as a stranger (Kassagi) who wants him to join a small cadre of thieves, leading to a gorgeously choreographed scene of the men working in tandem as they pick a bunch of pockets. Through it all, however, Michel remains nonplussed, living a strange, private life, uncomfortable in his own skin. “You’re not in this world,” Jeanne tells him at one point.
Brazilian writer-director Anna Muylaert once again intricately explores the nature of class, identity, and family in her fifth feature film, the powerful and poignant Don’t Call Me Son. In last year’s award-winning The Second Mother, Muylaert told the story of a live-in housekeeper who was like a surrogate mother to the family she works for, but things change when her estranged teenage daughter comes to stay with her. In Don’t Call Me Son, a family is torn apart when it is discovered that the mother, Arcay (Dani Nefusi), actually stole her children, son Pierre (Naomi Nero) and daughter Jaqueline (Lais Dias), when they were babies, and the kids’ biological parents have been searching desperately for them ever since and have now found them. Pierre is a seventeen-year-old gender-bending bisexual musician who seems relatively comfortable in his own skin, at least for a seventeen-year-old gender-bending bisexual musician, until Arcay is arrested and imprisoned for kidnapping. She might not have been a model mother, but she was his mother, and he is devastated when he is suddenly forced to move in with his biological parents, Glória (also played by Nefusi) and Matheus (Matheus Nachtergaele), who are overjoyed to have him back but were expecting someone a little bit more traditional; however, Pierre’s new younger brother, Joca (Daniel Botelho), appears to be happy he now has such a cool, if tortured, sibling. Meanwhile, Jaqueline is taken away to live with her real parents. As Glória and Matheus persist in calling Pierre by the name they gave him at birth, Felipe, the teen acts out as he tries to figure out who he is and redefine his place in a world that has been turned upside down and inside out.
