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New York Film Festival 2018

This year's main slate, the most geographically far-flung in recent memory, features 30 films from 22 different countries.

New York Film Festival 2018
Photo: Strand Releasing

The 56th edition of the New York Film Festival will kick off on September 28 with Yorgos Lanthimos’s racy, playfully subversive costume drama The Favourite, and closes on October 14 with the North American premiere of Julian Schnabel’s At Eternity’s Gate, a look at the life—though mostly the suffering—of painter Vincent van Gogh during the time he lived in Arles and Auvers-sur-Oise, France. If not one of the most jampacked programs in the festival’s history, it is one of the more geographically far-flung ones, with 30 films from 22 different countries comprising the main slate.

This year, Netflix outpaced HBO in Emmy nominations, and readers of tea leaves believe that the studio will break into the Oscar race in a big way next year with Alfonso Cuarón’s sweeping and personal Roma, a kind of autobiography as autocritique that sees the filmmaker ruminating on the life of the woman who helped raise him in Mexico City in the early 1970s. Netflix also has three other films in this year’s main slate: the Coen brothers’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, an anthology of “western tales” united by the theme of mortality; Tamara Jenkins’s first film in 11 years, Private Life, the story of a middle-aged New York couple coping with the pressures of trying to conceive a child; and Alice Rohrwacher’s Happy as Lazzaro, a seriocomic, time-traveling fable about tobacco farmers who have been forced into serfdom.

Per usual, many of the films have been picked from the vine of Cannes, Venice, Locarno, and beyond, among them Jafar Panahi’s quasi-realist parable 3 Faces, Jia Zhang-ke’s richly self-referential Ash Is Purest White, Christian Petzold’s audaciously dissonant Transit, and Pawel Pawlikowski’s narratively minimal and aesthetically elemental Cold War. And others returning to the festival are Claire Denis, whose Robert Pattinson-starring sci-fi whatsit High Life was recently acquired by A24; Alex Ross Perry, whose Her Smell, starring a volcanic Elisabeth Moss, is one of the few films in the main slate without a distributor (though one imagines that will change soon); and Hong Sang-soo, with not one but two black-and-white films, Grass and Hotel by the River.

Among the festival’s noteworthy sidebars are Spotlight on Documentary, which includes new works by Errol Morris (American Dharma, a face-off between the filmmaker and Steve Bannon), James Longley (Angels Are Made of Light, about schoolchildren growing up with great difficulty in Kabul), and Roberto Minervini (What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire?, about African-Americans in New Orleans struggling to find social justice); the MUBI-sponsored Projections, which features the latest films from Ted Fendt (Classical Period), Jodie Mack (The Grand Bizarre), Albert Serra (Roi Soleil), and Tsai Ming-liang (Your Face); and a Special Events section that includes Orson Welles’s The Other Side of the Wind and Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s The Wild Pear Tree.

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For a complete schedule of films, screening times, and ticket information, visit the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s official site.


New York Film Festival 2018

3 Faces

Jafar Panahi works references into his film to some of the compositions, landscapes, and boundary-pushing plays of fiction and documentary evidenced in Abbas Kiarostami’s cinema. But instead of mere replication, 3 Faces filters these elements through Panahi’s own unique sensibilities. Rather than letting the mysteries in his film stand, or prolonging its ambiguities, Panahi prefers to signify potential plot directions and formal strategies and then promptly pivot away from them at the moment they outlast their usefulness. This isn’t the mark of a lesser filmmaker, but merely one who recognizes that his own strengths lie in his intuitiveness, his wit, and his humor.


New York Film Festival 2018

Asako I & II

Asako (Erika Karata) and Ryôhei’s (Masahiro Higashide) lack of stature is their stature, and this realization forces us to confront our own means of self-glorification. Who are we to judge Asako and Ryôhei for petty preoccupations that so closely mirror our own? Hamaguchi teases the audience with more vital and interesting supporting characters but keeps us tethered to Asako and Ryôhei, who do eventually confront their self-absorption—particularly Asako, in an agonizingly cathartic moment by a sick friend’s bed. Eventually, Asako and Ryôhei come to resemble not so much characters as friends, co-workers, and aquaintances who wind in and out of our lives as we march onward toward a singular conclusion. Like Happy Hour, Asako I & II is a parable of the grace—and, yes, happiness—that spring from resignation.


New York Film Festival 2018

Ash Is Purest White

The political dimensions of Jia Zhang-ke’s films hve led to a strained relationship with state censors in the past—and so the director’s appointment this year as a representative of China’s 13th National People’s Congress, and the larger indication that he was working to gain the favor of the state, created some worries about the integrity of his films going forward. But thankfully, the clever, subversive, and hugely ambitious Ash Is Purest White assuages those concerns. The film serves as a considered retrospection, and a coherent transition between Jia’s neorealist early films and his more recent populist melodramas. It’s a quixotic and profound statement on the spatial and temporal dissonances that inform life in 21st-century China.

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New York Film Festival 2018

At Eternity’s Gate

An impressionistic biopic, shot through with Julian Schnabel’s usual insolence toward narrative and formal conventions, At Eternity’s Gate, co-written by Jean-Claude Carrière, eschews any serious attempts to understand Vincent van Gogh (played here by Willem Dafoe) or his art, and simply luxuriates in the beauty that beguiled the man. This is both a fitting tribute to an artist who rebuffed conventional painting techniques, and a disappointingly self-indulgent exercise, the efforts of a filmmaker whose affinity for abstractions often interfere with the story he’s trying to tell, and distract from the purported subject of the film.


New York Film Festival 2018

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

The Coen brothers’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is a paean to the western, a silly, mood-shifting shaggy-dog anthology that feels at once structurally ambitious and somehow inchoate, almost perfunctory at times. It comprises six separate stories, concerning a mélange of typical reprobates and shoot-you-in-the-back gunmen. There are also a few innocent souls, though most of them suffer at the hands of the reprobates and gunmen. (Zoe Kazan, playing the film’s one true innocent, leads the most fully developed story, about a pair of siblings who join a caravan to Oregon.) Despite the slapstick humor and typically wry banter on display, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs sees the Coen brothers at their most misanthropic, depicting humanity as a kind of pestilence, nothing more than a bunch of malefactors and murderers who will, given the chance, fuck you over. Death pervades these stories, seeping into each narrative like blood into a garment.


New York Film Festival 2018

Burning

Lee Chang-dong is a social realist whose work is still loaded with symbolism that verges on the poetic. The watchful eyes of Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in), who lives near the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas, double for the widescreen camera that patiently roves over and registers the film’s action. Burning, based on Haruki Murakami’s 1992 short story “Barn Burning,” is fixed on messy and mundane surfaces, and yet amid its displays of everyday naturalism are references to preternatural rituals and symbolic offerings. By its conclusion, Burning has broken through its zero-sum late-capitalist confines in order to invest aesthetic grandeur to the quotidian, and in disquietingly sublime fashion.


New York Film Festival 2018

Cold War

Cold War is shot in the same impeccable black-and-white, full-frame Academy ratio as Pawel Pawlikowski’s 2014 film Ida, but this time the filmmaker engages his symmetrically balanced images as a canvas primed to be disrupted. The various carefully choreographed sequences of a Polish folk ensemble’s song-and-dance performances register almost imperceptibly as anachronistic: Zula’s (Joanna Kulig) dancing is just a little more loose-limbed than that of her stagemates, her facial expression a bit more solemn and melancholy as she sings a traditional folk song about a forbidden love. One early shot perfectly encapsulates the film’s vision of nascent, emerging modernity: Zula’s body bobs gently in a river, barely disturbing the water’s surface calm.

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New York Film Festival 2018

A Faithful Man

From its plainly declarative title to its narrative’s multitude of infidelities, A Faithful Man comes off a bit like a wry subtweet at director Louis Garrel’s father, Philippe Garrel, whose filmography is packed with stories of men cheating and women being cheated on, many modeled on his 10-year relationship with pop icon Nico. The twist here is that A Faithful Man is pretty solidly a comedy—and that the beautiful women in the film, rather than the aloof, debonair male artist, are initially the ones with the most sexual agency.


New York Film Festival 2018

A Family Tour

Ying Liang’s film is righteously and vigorously angry about injustices committed by the Chinese government, but where his earlier work tended to calcify around that anger, A Family Tour offers a more complex and contemplative take on themes of political dissent, and even the effectiveness of cinema as an outlet for protest. Through Chen Xiaolin’s (Nai An) self-awareness—she laments that her house is going to be demolished in order to build a new road but also muses, “Think of it as a contribution we make to the country”—Ying earnestly engages with a worldview counter to Yang’s consummate defiance, presenting a character who has been the victim of injustice throughout her life, and who has learned to live with it, for the sake of protecting herself and her family.


New York Film Festival 2018

The Favorite

The Favourite’s biggest revelation may be that Yorgos Lanthimos treats his characters here with a degree of compassion, rather than regard them with his usual smirking indifference. When the opening scene draws attention to the fact that Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) keeps 17 caged rabbits in her bedroom, it feels like an inconsequential quirky detail. But when the heartbreaking reason for this is later revealed, it affords Colman the opportunity to transform Anne in an instant from grotesque caricature to fully formed tragic figure. Meanwhile, the tension between Lady Sarah (Rachel Weisz) and Abigail (Emma Stone) gradually escalates until they’re circling each other like dueling wild animals. Especially riveting is how Lanthimos foregrounds the contrasting approaches each woman takes to furthering her interests: Sarah is directly combative, while Abigail maintains an air of sweetness and decorum even as her scheming grows diabolical.


New York Film Festival 2018

La Flor

Structure aside, La Flor’s main purpose is as a showcase for four actresses—Laura Paredes, Elisa Carricajo, Pilar Gamboa, and Valeria Correa—who have primarily worked in Argentinean theater. “This film is by and for them,” Mariano Llinás notes in the film’s opening scene, though you can sense a shrug in the way the Argentine filmmaker says it, as if he’s trying to temper any bullshit romantic notions of the visionary artist and the muses that inspire him. That’s not to say love is lacking between this particular creator and his creatives, just that the admiration-cum-idolization that the more auteurist-minded among us often like to read into the female-obsessed films of, say, Josef von Sternberg or Alfred Hitchcock isn’t only indulged here, but also knowingly dissected and laid bare by Llinás.

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New York Film Festival 2018

Grass

Grass suggests what might happen if a black hole opened up in Hong Sang-soo’s world, splintering its citizens off into maddening parallels of one another. The film doesn’t quite concern the usual Hong narrative, in which one of the filmmaker’s on-screen surrogates disastrously courts several beautiful younger women while getting annihilated on soju. Instead, Grass is composed of several fragments in which multiple groups of characters expound on overlapping stories of grief, bitterness, and lust. Primarily set in an appealingly quaint café that plays nonstop classical music, the film wanders from one human duet to the next, with an occasional trio or quartet, as Areum (Kim Min-hee) listens in from the corner of the room, typing on her laptop.


New York Film Festival 2018

Happy as Lazzaro

Around Happy as Lazzaro’s midway point, a sudden change in time and place offers expanded possibilities for the film’s strange brand of comedy, but Alice Rohrwacher simply doubles down on her view of laborers as a perpetually exploited class, updating Marquise Alfonsina de Luna’s (Nicoletta Braschi) white serfs tilling without pay to a contemporary gig economy where multiethnic indigent and immigrant workers have to underbid each other for day jobs, all while their exploiting overlords slowly rot away in self-enforced isolation. It’s a shrewd observation, but one that Rohrwacher belabors in a way that she doesn’t in the first half, which illustrates rather than insists on the theme. Still, Happy as Lazzaro is one of the sharper, and funnier, recent films to reckon with the injustices of class disparities, and its smartest joke is centering its satire on its hyperbolically innocent protagonist, whose Candide-like naïveté makes him the object of fascination and reflexive resentment of nearly everyone he meets.


New York Film Festival 2018

Her Smell

Alex Ross Perry’s characters are caustic and have messy lives, but he’s never been so visually unruly in his own style, which isn’t to say he’s being sloppy. For one, the choreography of characters entering and exiting rooms is precise, and the ever-moving compositions are, if seemingly abstracted, always slyly contemplated in their timing. For the first 20 or so minutes, Her Smell is Perry’s weirdest film, and has hues of the psychological horror about which the director has spoken fondly. It’s an uncomfortable, oneiric opening, devoid of context, tense in a way that eludes succinct explanation. You may get the feeling that an abrupt, lugubrious act of violence may happen at any moment—after all, maybe self-destruction is an act of slow, prolonged violence.


New York Film Festival 2018

High Life

It’s no backhanded compliment to say the hype surrounding Claire Denis’s High Life will and must run aground of the film itself. Given the participation of celebrities like Robert Pattinson, industry types couldn’t help but wonder if Denis was planning to perform an art-house subversion on the sci-fi genre and deliver something mainstream-friendlier than her prior work. But the most subversive thing about High Life is probably that it exists in the first place; it’s a vision of the future as bleak and feverish as her 2013 thriller Bastards, which depicted a man’s man’s man’s world whose concentric cycles of patriarchal abuse offered no relief. Much like Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke thought better than to try aestheticizing alien life in 2001: A Space Odyssey, High Life leaves the story of Earth’s degradation for the viewer to imagine—as much an exercise in tactical minimalism as it is in ducking the cosmic-voyage paces we’ve all been through a million times before.

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New York Film Festival 2018

Hotel by the River

Set in a hotel by the Han River in South Korea, Hotel by the River abounds in wintry landscapes that threaten to swallow people up in blasts of bright white light. This feeling of being eclipsed has an existential quality, as the film’s characters are all facing crises springing from infidelity, loneliness, alcoholism, lust, and parental abandonment. Yet it’s also occasionally exhilarating for them to feel trapped by a storm that encourages their mind to wander. Writer-director Hong Sang-soo sustains these simultaneous feelings of lost-ness and reverie throughout Hotel by the River, informing the film with a ghostly pallor that’s somewhat new to his work.


New York Film Festival 2018

If Beale Street Could Talk

“Do this book, or die,” says James Baldwin of his creative process in the 1989 compilation The Writer’s Chapbook. “You have to go through that. Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.” You can sense such endurance in every frame of If Beale Street Could Talk, Barry Jenkins’s superb adaptation of Baldwin’s 1974 novel of the same name, which the writer-director penned in the same period—the summer of 2013—as the script for Moonlight. There’s a hunger, a need for imaginative expression, in both films, and it’s especially pronounced in If Beale Street Could Talk, given the tragic and tender yearnings between the two African-American youths at its center.


New York Film Festival 2018

The Image Book

The Image Book ends with a display of madness that would be a more than appropriate sendoff for Jean-Luc Godard’s restless career. Taken from Max Ophüls’s Le Plaisir, it’s a sequence of a man dancing and spinning around furiously until, finally, he falls down. This moment also serves as a canny reminder that, whatever effort it takes to understand the exact nature of the work that Godard is doing here, he’s also exerting that effort with us—and he seems to mind not at all if he collapses in the process.


New York Film Festival 2018

In My Room

In My Room often exhibits an interest only in the accruing of incidents, giving it a this-happens-then-this-happens quality that defiantly eschews psychological shading. The effect is hypnotic at first: Armin’s (Hans Löw) initial encounters with a world now empty of human life have a shell-shocked stillness that gives way slowly to giddy catharsis, with this mope suddenly and unexpectedly ripping it down a forsaken thoroughfare in a Lamborghini as the camera takes in a view from the front bumper. But as the months start passing unceremoniously, with hard cuts disguising ellipses that fast-forward dramatically through Armin’s time in isolation, it’s hard not to feel like writer-director Ulrich Kohler is evading some of the most fruitful opportunities to explore his main character’s psyche. How does Armin go from being an ineffectual nobody to a ripped Robinson Crusoe-esque figure overseeing a virtual Noah’s Ark of livestock, and what emotional and logistical hurdles needed to be usurped to get there?

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New York Film Festival 2018

Long Day’s Journey into Night

Somehow, Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey into Night is self-aware and fluid as its own viewing experience, yet inextricable from its influences. While several scenes function as miniature remakes from Tarkovsky, Hitchcock, Tarantino, and others, the viewer who doesn’t instantly clock these grace notes as borrowed stands the best chance of sitting back and having their mind blown for two straight hours. The film will strike at least one chord, if not all of them, with anyone who has tried to outrun their own mistakes while, at the same time, searching, perhaps endlessly, for one more glimpse at a face from the past.


New York Film Festival 2018

Monrovia, Indiana

We have a heartbreaking tendency to feel that our existences are small compared to the pop-cultural mythos—of sports, movies, politics, and TV—that engulfs our imaginations. By spinning everyday lives into media, Frederick Wiseman casually reveals the opera of everyday life. At least two sequences in Monrovia, Indiana are as profoundly rhapsodic as any in Wiseman’s career. In a veterinarian’s office, we see the amputation of a dog’s tail seemingly in real time, and the love with which the professionals stroke the animal intermingles with the creature’s unmooring vulnerability as it lays unconscious with its tongue sticking out. This moment is one of Wiseman’s vintage celebrations of infrastructure, as is the long funeral that serves as this great film’s climax.



New York Film Festival 2018

Non-Fiction

Non-Fiction is at its finest when its more acidic moments bluntly confront characters’ myopic behaviors, but it ultimately falls back into its default mode of arguing at length about how the appreciation of art is affected by the format of its representation. This topic has intriguing potential as a jumping-off point for knotty relationship comedy, a means of taking jabs at characters for how their artistic pretensions color their interpersonal relationships. But the repetitious arguments about art too often exist at a remove from the film’s more amusing depiction of its characters’ amorous woes. Never has Olivier Assayas so thoroughly belabored his ideas, and he drains the film of the playfulness at its margins, leaving only an esoteric lecture in its place.



New York Film Festival 2018

Private Life

It’s been nine years since writer-director Tamara Jenkins’s last film, during which time the trends in indie cinema have gradually shifted. The boon of comedies about white middle-class late baby boomers and early Gen Xers working through midlife crises (typified by films like Sideways, The Squid and the Whale, and Jenkins’s own The Savages) has lost much of its appeal, making way for films open to a more diverse range of experiences. But it’s not just because Private Life is yet another film about the woes of narcissistic, cynical, fortysomethings that it feels so much like a regression. It’s because everything from its verbose, pseudo-intellectual, reference-littered script to its wide shots of people sitting, facing the camera, and looking very sad makes Private Life feel like a particular kind of outdated bougie Sundance film.

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New York Film Festival 2018

Ray & Liz

Though not prone to the dreamlike flights of fancy that define Terence Davies’s The Long Day Closes, another autobiographical film that hauntingly recreates the gloominess and ephemera of lower-class daily life in small-town Britain, Ray & Liz generates pathos instead through its detailed attention to its characters’ attempts to find permanence and meaning in a fundamentally unstable reality. For all of Liz’s (Ella Smith) cursing and brashness, she’s endeared to us by her puzzle-making, painting, and knitting—all born out of an implicit desire to generate things of value by hand when monetary value is so hard to come by. And while drinking is often a way to forget, for Ray (Justin Salinger) it seems to be an outlet to remembering. When life is a drudging, dehumanizing crusade, there’s an element of dignity in that.


New York Film Festival 2018

Roma

Alfonso Cuarón mixes classical and modern modes of melodrama so freely that Roma calls to mind Francis Ford Coppola’s ’80s films, which used similarly old and new Hollywood techniques to craft stories that wedded nostalgia with clear-eyed social commentary. But where Coppola set his fondness for old melodramas and musicals against the ills those films often papered over, Cuarón confronts his own personal privilege, ruminating on the perspective of the sort of woman who helped raise him. In the end, Roma is autobiography as autocritique, and in exploring a point of view adjacent to his own, Cuarón appears to have rediscovered his identity as a filmmaker.


New York Film Festival 2018

Shoplifters

Shoplifters melodramatically reveals Hatsue (Kirin Kiki), Osamu (Lily Franky), and Nobuyo (Sakura Ando) to be more advanced and severe criminals than one would expect given the pains to which Kore-eda has gone to render them dear to us. Their lying is positioned by Hirokazu Kore-eda as a metaphor for the lies of all families and society at large, as partially necessary lies designed to inflate the statures of diminished individuals so as to will a micro-society within a mass society that’s abandoned its citizenry. Yet the parent figures of Shoplifters are also out for themselves, and the moral drama of Kore-eda’s vision springs from the struggle the adult characters wage to reconcile their needs with the needs of their family and society. Ironically, the adults in this film earn their children’s love when they’re willing, out of truly selfless devotion, to sacrifice it.


New York Film Festival 2018

Sorry Angel

In any gay love story set in the 1990s, AIDS is bound to emerge as a conspicuous element, underpinning the narrative or taking it over entirely, and normally in somber or hysteric fashion. Is the disease haunting the characters as an imminent kiss of death or already inhabiting them? When will it start to stain their skins, turning gleeful youngsters into skeletons? In cinema, the disease is too grisly and epic to appear as mere detail or a single layer of a world complicated by so many others. In writer-director Christophe Honoré’s Sorry Angel, AIDS is indeed everywhere, though not as a looming monster sneakily picking its next victim, nor as the catastrophic result of political negligence and homophobic policy. In this film, AIDS is décor.

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New York Film Festival 2018

Too Late to Die Young

Dominga Sotomayor’s Too Late to Die Young constructs a vivid portrait of a rural commune in the summer of 1990 in Chile. The community and lifestyle presented in here corresponds to Sotomayor’s childhood, which helps explain why the film feels like a potent memory conjured up from the subconscious, rather than a pointed summation of the political transformation of the era in the wake of Augusto Pinochet’s fall from power. Knowledge of that historic event is one that Sotomayor trusts her audience to bring to the film. It’s a tall task to evoke a multifaceted subject—Chile’s newfound freedom as it impacts three different generations—entirely through autobiographical vignettes, and Too Late to Die Young, which would feel like just another nostalgic coming-of-age tale were it not for the specificity of Sotomayor’s recollections, doesn’t quite crystalize on this front. And yet, the film is too arresting in its sense of period detail and texture to register as a missed opportunity.


New York Film Festival 2018

Transit

Christian Petzold’s white-hot existentialist noir Transit is perhaps the best World War II film since Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book, even if it hinges on a suspension of disbelief that’ll be too far a stretch for some. In adapting Anna Seghers’s 1944 novel of same name (based on the author’s experiences escaping Nazi Germany for France and later to Mexico), Petzold restages the story in a blatantly anachronistic setting, a kind of historical netherverse that straddles the line between past and present. It’s an obviously contemporary environment, but neither computers nor internet are depicted, which at times pushes the story into a kind of realm of depressed magical realism. On the issue of displacement, this is a high-concept decision that asks—and, by film’s end, answers for itself—how little things have changed over all those decades. But Transit has little time for pedantry. It’s sleek and confident in the same Hitchcockian mold as Petzold’s 2015 film Phoenix.


New York Film Festival 2018

Wildlife

“And there are words,” Richard Ford writes in his 1990 novel Wildlife, “significant words, you do not want to say, words that account for busted-up lives, words that try to fix something ruined that shouldn’t be ruined and no one wanted ruined, and that words can’t fix anyway.” And it is words, and the failing of words, and the language of images articulating the things that words can’t, that interest Paul Dano. The actor’s directorial debut, adapted from Ford’s novel by Dano and Zoe Kazan, is a calm yet doleful film whose every frame is carefully composed, every camera movement contemplated and subtle. Its characters are given ample time and space to speak their minds (or to not say what’s on their minds), and they surprise themselves with decisions that are as unforeseen as they are inevitable. Wildlife is at once loquacious and laconic, a film in which simple words hold unspoken and unequivocal power, and the space between banal utterances become chasms.

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