The Adventures of Gigi the Law (Alessandro Comodin, 2022).
Every New York film critic and cinephile I know looks forward to the New York Film Festival as perhaps the major event of the year. At the same time, these critics’ most common complaint is that the Main Slate shows the work of the same established star auteurs over and over again. If Claire Denis, Frederick Wiseman, or Tsai Ming-liang—just to name a few—makes a movie, you can bet that their film will be in the lineup. The running joke these days is that if Hong Sang-soo made seven films in a year instead of his usual two, we’d probably get the chance to see all seven.
Luckily for those of us curious about new faces, though, the festival has expanded over the last few years with the addition of the Spotlight and Currents sidebars. The festival tends to treat Currents especially like a second tier, a grab bag of minor league auteurs waiting for their shot at the big leagues. In contrast to the Main Slaters, these directors tend to be younger, working on smaller budgets for a smaller intended audience, and a bit more formally experimental. But each of those seeming deficiencies can be a blessing in disguise. I’m surprised, in fact, how often I’ve preferred the films in Currents. And this year’s crop is no exception.
This year, I managed to see ten of the fifteen features in the Currents sidebar. I liked almost all of them. But of all the movies I saw, a few stuck out for me because they highlighted the sidebar’s adventurous spirit. I was looking forward to The Adventures of Gigi the Law because I was a big fan of an earlier film by Alessandro Comodin, Summer of Giacomo (2011). This movie confused me initially, though, because it seemed quite different in tone—soothingly satirical rather than sumptuously humanist—but I soon fell under its spell. On the surface, it feels like a quiet and gently comedic account of a rural police officer. We follow the protagonist Gigi on his rounds, driving through country roads near the Veneto-Friuli border, aimlessly accomplishing nothing at all. It’s hard not to think about Abbas Kiarostami: we see long, uninterrupted takes of Gigi driving, shot from the passenger seat; long, uninterrupted takes of one of his colleagues in the passenger seat, shot from the driver’s seat; and long, uninterrupted point-of-view shots looking out through the windshield. But as with Kiarostami, Comodin’s minimalist aesthetic forces the viewer to pay much closer attention to minor details and to read the film a little more creatively.
If you do pay attention, you begin to see that the film has currents and undercurrents. On the one hand, it seems like just some pleasant ethnographic fiction-documentary hybrid, a travelogue of the Veneto-Friulian countryside, an account of the very slow and very inconsequential way of life of a charmingly unimportant provincial cop. We see long takes of Gigi driving to investigate a report about someone burning clippings in their backyard, only to discover that there is no fire; long takes of Gigi and a colleague in the car trying to recall the lyrics of an old Julio Iglesias song; long takes of Gigi parked by the side of the road smoking a cigarette while he claims to be working. It comes across as a gently comedic commentary on the uselessness of the police—albeit, with a charmed affection for their uselessness.
But on the other hand, Comodin sneaks in other, more disturbing elements. We might choose to see the film—if we care to watch it closely—as a subtle critique of police power. Despite his agreeable ineffectuality, we also see in Gigi the workings of the surveillance state. He’s always looking, observing, following. And because there’s nothing much to do, he can investigate anything his heart desires. Over the course of the film, he develops a slight but ever-increasing obsession with the goings-on of a young man named Tommaso. He follows him, lying in wait, tracking his most minute activities, even though it’s clear that the kid has done nothing wrong. One of Gigi’s colleagues comments on his weird fixation, hinting at an ugly backstory in which Gigi got in trouble with his bosses after they caught him doing this kind of inappropriate surveillance once before. Comodin intensifies this mysterious aspect of Gigi’s character with an oneiric, Apichatpong-esque homoerotic sequence shrouded in a nighttime forest.
Wisely, though, Comodin doesn’t turn his film into any sort of Freudian explication of Gigi’s unconscious yearnings, nor into any explicit critique of the government’s police power. His interests are, luckily for us, more humanist and poetic than ideological. In the end, he gives Gigi a few touching moments—especially one scene in which he recalls the day when he had to take a young man struggling with mental illness to a psychiatric hospital, a scene played out in another long, uninterrupted take in which the lead actor, Pier Luigi Mecchia, appears to break character, struggling to maintain his decorum in front of the camera, overwhelmed by the memory. It was only later, reading about the film online, that I found out that Mecchia is not an actor at all, but Comodin’s uncle, playing a slightly fictionalized version of himself—a fact that helped me see that this film was even more multilayered than I’d thought.
Slaughterhouses of Modernity (Heinz Emigholz, 2022).
Slaughterhouses of Modernity was my first experience with director Heinz Emigholz, a documentarian/cinematic essayist of architectural modernity. This one has a fascinatingly discursive structure. He begins by studying the buildings of Francisco Salamone—the most notable modernist architect of the Argentine Pampas in the late 1930s, that period immediately after a right-wing coup—focusing especially on the dozens of slaughterhouses he built, which are now decayed and in ruins. He seems to be interested in how capitalism necessarily builds only to destroy, and thus in how the seemingly radical aesthetics of modernism are intrinsically complicit in this problematic dynamic. He then moves on to a former spa town that was destroyed by rising waters, a short story by Borges about an intellectual Nazi commandant, the history of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin (a building that every generation in Germany destroys and then rebuilds in a fraught attempt to reimagine the nation’s history), the genocidal policies of Wilhelm II in Namibia, only to end by returning to South America, this time by offering up images of the wildly colorful Neo-Andean architecture of Freddy Mamani Silvestre in Bolivia.
At times, Emigholz’s narration is overwhelming: it feels like we’re merely watching a slide lecture. Then there are long stretches of nothing but static images of buildings backed by ambient noise. He films these edifices mostly in postcard pictures of exteriors or in canted close-ups of architectural sections. With these silences and unexplained transitions, he mostly follows an organizing principle of poetic collage, pausing every once in a while to articulate an explicit argument. This combination of approaches struck me as both frustratingly opaque and poetic. What is he saying, really? Sometimes, it wasn’t entirely clear. Sometimes, though, it felt liberating not to be told what to think, to be free to engage in the work of thinking along with the director.
Emigholz introduces Mamani’s architecture at the end seemingly as an antidote to what he sees as the inherent sickness of European culture (capitalism, imperialism, genocide). I couldn’t help but feel, though, that by overlaying his images of this playful Neo-Andean architecture with the droll and ironic avant-garde German disco of Kiev Stingl, even Emigholz’s concluding valorization of an anti-Eurocentric aesthetic is also somewhat conflicted—perhaps because even in this indigenous context, architecture will always necessarily be the product of capitalism, which has already seeded its inevitable destruction.
You Have to Come and See It (Jonás Trueba, 2022).
Like the only other Jonás Trueba film I’ve managed to see, The August Virgin (2019), You Have to Come and See It is deceptively quiet. In this one, two couples meet at a piano bar in Madrid. They haven’t seen each other in a year. One couple has moved out to the exurbs, and they tell the other couple that they really must come out to see their new home. Six months later, they arrive for a visit. They explore the house, they have lunch, then they go for a long walk out in nature. That’s it. That’s the whole movie. No antagonists, no conflict, no resolution to any problem because it’s not quite clear that there was any problem to begin with—other than the fact that these people are middle-aged and bourgeois and, thus, their entire lives are suffused with the quiet resignation that defines the middle-aged, bourgeois existence.
But Trueba does occasionally pierce this random flow of total inconsequentiality with a few traditional narrative trigger points. One of the women has had a miscarriage; she and the other woman can speak of it only in hushed and awkward tones when the men are in the other room. They don’t know how to talk about it because no one knows how to talk about it. The moment is brief; the conversation gets interrupted. We never return to the subject. Later, at lunch, the second woman wants to talk about a book she’s been reading by the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk. She wants to talk about how we should live in a world that’s teetering on the edge of utter catastrophe, how we should imagine the reorganization of a planet on the verge of death by reimagining the self. But the men start shifting in their seats uncomfortably: isn’t talking about philosophy at this simple lunch a bit pretentious? There’s some gentle joking, some embarrassed shrugs. It’s much better, they all eventually come to think, just to spend some time maybe playing some mindless ping pong. Or maybe going for a long walk. Quotidian silences like these function only to cover up some gaping horror—on both the individual and the cosmic level.
Each of these films displays one of the dominant styles of Currents: an aesthetic of deceptive inconsequentiality. On the surface, not much seemed to happen in these movies. But they each inspired an unusual amount of active participation on the part of the viewer. We were prompted to tease out of these apparent non-events a deeper reflection on the human condition. And it may have been this extra spectatorial labor, more than anything else, that prevented these films from making it into the Main Slate and relegated them to this seemingly secondary but perhaps much more consequential sidebar.