Fernando (Paul Hamy) sets out on a fantastical spiritual journey in João Pedro Rodrigues’s strangely compelling and beautifully photographed film THE ORNITHOLOGIST
THE ORNITHOLOGIST (O ORNITÓLOGO) (João Pedro Rodrigues, 2016)
Film Society of Lincoln Center
West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Aves.
Wednesday, October 12, Walter Reade Theater, $15, 9:00
Thursday, October 13, Bruno Walter Auditorium, $15, 9:15
Festival runs September 30 – October 16
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.org
João Pedro Rodrigues reimagines the story of Fernando Martins de Bulhões, also known as Anthony of Lisbon and Saint Anthony of Padua, in the utterly bizarre and infectiously weird adventure drama The Ornithologist. Rodrigues, who also dealt with the thirteenth-century priest’s legacy in the 2013 zombie short Morning of Saint Anthony’s Day, puts ornithologist Fernando (Paul Hamy) through a series of tests after his canoe capsizes while he’s on a bird-watching expedition. He is found near death on the shore by a pair of Chinese pilgrims (Han Wen and Chan Suan), walking Camino de Santiago, who decide to do something very odd with him. His Stations of the Cross journey continues as he meets a deaf and mute goatherd (Xelo Cagiao), a group of colorful, masked caretos, and a trio of topless women on horseback (Juliane Elting, Isabelle Puntel, and Flora Bulcao), who in different ways challenge his sexuality and spirituality. Rodrigues (The Last Time I Saw Macao, To Die Like a Man) infuses the wild tale with references to Christianity, paganism, ritual, superstition, and Greek mythology as Fernando’s physical and psychological strength is tested in oddball events that get stranger and stranger until the director, who was already dubbing in Hamy’s Portuguese lines with his own, starts switching places with the actor.
When he was younger, Rodrigues had a major interest in ornithology, and he relates that to filmmaking early on. Fernando stops in his canoe and takes out his binoculars to look at a bird soaring above him and follows a black stork protecting its eggs in partially hidden reeds; the director cuts to our view of the bird, comparing the binoculars to the movie camera while also putting us inside Fernando’s head. The dazzling cinematography is by Rodrigues regular Rui Poças; everything was shot on location, with no interiors or studio sets. The stellar art direction and production design is by cowriter and regular Rodrigues collaborator João Rui Guerra da Mata. The subtly haunting score is by Séverine Ballon. “I have to admit this Fernando, the future Anthony, gradually became infused with my personal story. While he may live inside me, in a way I returned the favor and made myself live inside him,” Rodrigues explains in his poignant director’s statement. “My film is a purposefully transgressive and blasphemous re-appropriation of the saint’s life.” Saint Anthony is the patron saint of lost things; after seeing the film, audiences will be happy that they found it. The Ornithologist is making its U.S. premiere October 12 at 9:00 and October 13 at 9:15 in the Explorations section of the New York Film Festival.
Eugène Green returns to the New York Film Festival with the glorious French satire / black comedy / biblical parable Son of Joseph, a masterful blending of sound, image, and story that is as stunning to listen to as it is to watch. Newcomer Victor Ezenfis stars as Vincent, an intractable young teen who is desperate to discover who his father is, no matter how hard his single mother (Natacha Regnier), a nurse, tries to keep that information from him. “I don’t want to help people,” he says. “I love no one.” His sneaky ways finally reveal the man’s name, and Vincent tracks him down only to discover that the man, Oscar Pormenor (Mathieu Amalric), is a boorish, self-obsessed publisher who is cheating on his wife with his sexy secretary, Bernadette (Julia de Gasquet). At a party for his company’s latest book, The Predatory Mother, ever-so-chic critic Violette Tréfouille (Maria de Medeiros) mistakes Vincent for an up-and-coming novelist, with Oscar cluelessly declaring him the next Céline before finding out who the boy really is. Soon a disappointed Vincent is befriended by Oscar’s brother, Joseph (Fabrizio Rongione), but neither is aware of the connection. As Vincent is introduced to art and literature, he attempts to manipulate everyone around him in order to form the family he’s always wanted.
André Téchiné’s Being 17 is a touching and sensitive coming-of-age drama set in and around the beautiful Pyrenees in France. Written by Téchiné and Céline Sciamma, who has made such poignant films about teens as 
“Don’t try to know everything,” Min-jung (Lee Yoo-young) says in Hong Sang-soo’s latest unusual and brilliant romantic drama, Yourself and Yours. It’s impossible to know everything that happens in Hong’s films, which set fiction against reality, laying bare cinematic narrative techniques. With a propensity to use protagonists who are directors, it is often difficult to tell what is happening in the film vs. the film-within-the-film. He also repeats scenes with slight differences, calling into question the storytelling nature of cinema as well as real life, in which there are no do-overs. In the marvelous Yourself and Yours, scenes don’t repeat, although the existence of a main character might. Min-jung is in a relationship with painter Young-soo (Kim Joo-hyuk), who is dealing with the failing health of his mother when he is told by a friend (Kim Eui-sung) that Min-jung was seen in a bar drunk and arguing with another man. Young-soo refuses to believe it, since he and Min-jung are facing her drinking problem by very carefully limiting the number of drinks she has when she goes out with him. But when the friend insists that numerous people have seen her in bars with other men and imbibing heavily, Young-soo confronts her, and she virulently defends herself, claiming that they are lies and that he should have more faith in her. She leaves him, and over the next several days she has encounters with various men, but she appears to be either a pathological liar or have a memory problem as she tells the older Jaeyoung (Kwon Hae-hyo), a friend of Min-jung’s, that she is a twin who does not know the painter; later, with filmmaker Sangwon (Yu Jun-sang), she maintains that they have never met despite his assertion that they have. Through it all, Young-soo is determined to win her back. “I want to love each day with my loved one, and then die,” he explains with romantic fervor. He also acknowledges Min-jung’s uniqueness: “Her mind itself is extraordinary,” he says.
