(The second leg of my 2005 New York Film Festival tour and another installment of journal scribblings—which still look suspiciously like blurbs. If only Aleksandr Sokurov’s’s intimate, reflective The Sun ranked with the first week’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, the field was richer and more varied. For more general info regarding the festival, please see my first dispatch. Otherwise, on with the show… 10/1: Lars von Trier’s sequel to Dogville, Manderlay, has been dismissed by many as an uninspired retread, and certainly it lacks the earlier film’s sense of discovery and narrative tautness. As partial compensation, the director’s trademark cynicism is here directed (more or less) against an abhorrent institution rather than human nature. Between films, our Grace (an unbowed Bryce Dallas Howard) has become a willful liberal scold trying to end slavery 70 years after the Emancipation Proclamation. Admittedly, von Trier’s study of American racism is muddled—yet oddly in keeping with the social ill’s long, convoluted history. And he’s managed to squeeze every last ounce of meaning from David Bowie’s “Young Americans,” flashing well-timed stills of Bush and the World Trade Center under the closing credits. 10/2: Each of the day’s four offerings had something to recommend it, but two nonetheless registered as disappointments, unfortunate (if not entirely unexpected) instances of diminishing returns. 2002’s Turning Gate was a left-field surprise—fresh, vital and wholly unexpected—but director Hong Sang-soo’s subsequent efforts have transformed prior innovation into formula. With its ineffectual lead, wounded masculine pride and fumbling relationships, A Tale of Cinema seems little more than an unfocused, half-hearted reworking of familiar materials. Similarly, after the gripping Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and manipulative Oldboy, the final installment in Park Chanwook’s “Revenge Trilogy,” Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, feels tired and redundant, its plot twists more a function of narrative expectation than genuine catharsis. The film is looser and more genuinely comic than its predecessors, but its insights into our apparently innate thirst for retribution, no matter how valid, seem one-dimensional after A History of Violence. The festival sleeper: Through the Forest. Jean-Paul Civeyrac’s sixth feature arrived in New York with little advance notice, but although sometimes overwrought, this 10-shot, hour-plus tone poem is an unprepossessing gem. Overcome by grief, Armelle (in an unguarded performance by newcomer Camille Berthomier) becomes increasingly convinced that her dead lover is trying to contact her from beyond. A romantic/erotic ghost story, the film’s expressive palette becomes more vibrant and playful as the boundaries between the corporeal and spiritual blur (much like Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride). The festival surprise: Breakfast on Pluto. Neil Jordan is a gifted director with a decidedly uneven filmography, but his latest is his strongest, most assured work since 1997’s The Butcher Boy—perhaps stronger. The film is a fey pop symphony keyed to the sometimes barbed easy-listening kitsch of Harry Nilsson, Bobby Goldsboro and Dusty Springfield, its neither-man-nor-woman foundling (Cillian Murphy on a roll) cast as the lead in his own life’s story. This Dickensian picaresque—from glam rock to woodland mascot, magic act and peep show—chronicles Patty Kitten’s quest for his mother, the “Phantom Lady.” But though the film’s redemptive arc is marked by crushing pain, it maintains a winningly wide-eyed innocence. By the time Jordan invokes the sainted strains of Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, Pluto has earned its frothy mix of humor and pathos. 10/3: Today, two choice archival features: one a main program entry, the other part of the Shochiku Company retrospective. The former, Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger is almost as much of a cipher as its central character, reporter David Locke (an appropriately enigmatic Jack Nicholson). For years held privately by the actor, the film is finally being re-released in something resembling its intended form. The Ripley-esque Locke assumes the persona of a conveniently deceased gunrunner, effectively renouncing his unfulfilling career and loveless marriage. But though now theoretically a man of action, he seems more consumed with erasing his identity entirely. This elusive, hypnotic film echoes the rhythms of its protagonist, moving in fits and starts until its justly celebrated climactic scene, a bravura, extended tracking shot—painstakingly choreographed, gorgeously composed. Like The Passenger, Kenji Mizoguchi’s muted masterpiece The Loyal 47 Ronin could be described as an “anti-action” film. Based on historical events, the movie tracks the aftermath of a whispered insult culminating in the eventual dissolution of two rival clans. But the director’s chamber epic eschews the standard western-inflected samurai genre trappings, instead focusing on dialogue and behavior: code, custom, duty, honor and responsibility. Famously, the climactic siege occurs off-screen, its details relayed in a letter to the Asan family’s remaining female court. In contrast, The President’s Last Bang restages recent history as “pure” entertainment. In the hands of director Im Sang-soo, the 1979 assassination of South Korean president Park Chung-hee becomes the stuff of high-grade pulp. Lurid, low-angle shots and jitterbug edits alternate with a moving camera that circles the action like a nervous panther. Up through the grisly central bloodbath, the director’s bold approach proves largely effective. But as Bang unravels the confused aftermath (with notable intimations of Dr. Strangelove), this satiric feature loses much of its focus and manic energy. 10/4: Two exceptional films set in Japan: a 1933 silent feature by a “second-tier” Japanese master and a historical drama by a much-lauded, contemporary Russian stylist. Yet both are tonally of a piece. The latter, The Sun, chronicling the final days of Hirohito’s rein, provides an interesting bookend to Downfall, contrasting portraits of one man’s efforts to renounce his divinity and another’s to achieve godhead. Aleksandr Sokurov’s film is lustrous and beautiful, at once lightly comic and gently mournful. Issey Ogata’s emperor exhibits a childlike delight and fascination in the simplest physical activity: operating a light, opening a door, mimicking the mannerisms of Charlie Chaplin. At times, the film has the look and feel of science fiction, from its Jules Verne underground interiors to the Japanese leader’s apocalyptic vision of flying war-fish. And the sound design is precise, minimalist and evocative; even the mere scratchings of a pencil suggest untold emotional depths. Exquisite. Advance word handicapped Japanese Girls at the Harbor as one of the Shochiku retrospective’s great discoveries. And though it doesn’t quite qualify as the second coming of Sunrise, its grace and elegance announce a rarely seen (at least in the U.S.) classic. The plot outline is boilerplate melodrama: Two school friends love the same boy, a street tough; one plunges into prostitution, the other an unhappy marriage. But Hiroshi Shimizu’s direction—his uncluttered compositions, his expansive location shots, his elliptical edits—are the essence of cinematic poetry. 10/5: And the hits just keep coming: Two more winners, this time exploring the many intricacies and nuances of male-female relationships. Gabrielle, based on a Joseph Conrad short story, is a razor-sharp parlor drama of recrimination and betrayal. Jean, a self-satisfied collector, and his wife, his supreme objet d’art, have shared a passionless marriage of convenience for 10 years, until the titular heroine’s one moment of happiness causes her to rethink their unseemly union. Isabelle Huppert and Pascal Greggory as the combative couple deliver their verbal thrusts and parries with steely relish. Director Patrice Chéreau’s recent efforts have been characterized by a loose, realist humanism; this is as tight and precision-crafted as Mamet at his best. Hou Hsiao-hsien’s critical moment may have passed. Response to his latest features, the intimate (and undistributed) Café Lumière and the vastly underrated Millennium Mambo, has been positive but tempered. In retrospect, his transition from the world historic to the interpersonal seems inevitable—a transition marked by a broadened tonal range: airy, bemused, bittersweet, mysterious, sometimes tragic. His latest, Three Times, depicts a trio of love stories linked across the years by shared leads. A letter from the first segment, set in a 1966 Kaohsiung pool hall, closes with the inspired clinch, “stay beautiful.” And aesthetic beauty may very well prove to be the central preoccupation of the Taiwanese master’s current phase. The realist hues that characterized his ‘90s landmarks have surrendered to a more expressionistic play of color and light: a turquoise wall interrupted by a shock of white, the warm brown interiors of a brothel, a cool blue fluorescent glow against a wall of photographs. 10/6: It would be hard to top yesterday, but then the morning press screening offered yet another welcome surprise. Michael Winterbottom’s Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story never improves on its opening scene, a makeup table discussion between Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon about teeth color and billing—though a hot chestnut down the former’s pants and an absurdly large see-through uterus definitely contend. Nevertheless, this pomo behind-the-scenes deconstruction of Lawrence Sterne’s “unfilmable” novel is uncommonly witty and dexterous throughout. The talented cast gleefully upends the foibles and neuroses that too often accompany stardom and crucially, semi-stardom. But the run couldn’t last forever. Despite its potentially incendiary subject, 48-hours in the lives of two Palestinian suicide bombers, Paradise Now feels unexceptional. The film does a decent job humanizing the would-be terrorists, two school friends compelled more by duty than fundamentalist belief, but it saves its most cogent insights for a late-film argument and monologue—as if director Hany Abu-Assad didn’t trust the material to convey these emotionally charged ideas. Still, the final shot, an extreme close-up of two unblinking eyes, remains chilling. 10/7: After a largely incident-free second leg, a press screening hiccup forces a cineaste’s Sophie’s-choice between must-see entries from the main program and the Shochiku retro. When will I ever get a chance to see Nagisa Oshima’s seminal Naked Youth on the big screen again? At least Michael Haneke’s widely hyped Caché didn’t disappoint. At the beginning of his post-screening press conference, the director made it clear that he wouldn’t discuss the source of the film’s ominous videos. But once Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and his wife (Juliette Binoche) begin receiving anonymous surveillance tapes of their home, the same question understandably becomes a consuming preoccupation. Ultimately, their investigation turns inward, unpacking the secrets and lies lingering beneath their apparently stable marriage. Ostensibly a detached essay on today’s surveillance culture, the film is just as concerned with the mediated nature of media. A late-film, long, static shot, obviously not the work of the stalker/amateur filmmaker, nonetheless engenders a similar sense of unease, a sense that someone has selected this particular image for us to view. The schedule revision did give me a chance to catch up with Capote, and no it isn’t a standard issue biopic—more like the making of In Cold Blood. As such, the film serves as an interesting counterpoint to Good Night, and Good Luck, two films providing radically different perspectives on the history of American reportage. The worthy Philip Seymour Hoffman, in the title role, is definitely flexing for Oscar gold, but the film doesn’t offer much more than superficial insight into the celebrity/author’s motivations. Rather, its narrative energies seem focused on relating how in his efforts to uncover the humanity of two would-be monsters, Capote became something of a monster himself, a parasite feeding on the living dead. Stylish, well-crafted and respectable; still, if you haven’t already done so, read the book. Trend-spotters may note the three South Korean selections among the main program or the inclusion of five Sony Classics titles. The former would likely be more important if any of the films were among the festival standouts, and the latter is meaningful to Nashvillians only insofar as the thus-afflicted movies will likely arrive in town late and with little advance notice. Strangely enough, my favorite film of the week, a new print of the much-loved Once Upon a Time in the West, revisited many of the festival’s most resonant themes: how we view and depict our history, how past actions inform and influence our lives, the uses and abuses of revenge and our shared history of violence. But in his efforts to explain the immediacy and characteristic empathy of the Dardenne brothers’ oeuvre, selection committee member Kent Jones offered a more compelling structuring concept in that moldy, long-shelved phrase, the “human condition”: the easy rapport between friends and colleagues (Good Night, and Good Luck), the way a meaningful job can become a cause (The Death of Mr. Lazarescu), the gradual realization of our parents’ imperfections (The Squid and the Whale), a childhood friendship that imperceptibly deepens into something more sustaining (Something Like Happiness), a tender embrace in the wake of overwhelming loss (Breakfast on Pluto), the giddy first rush of newfound love (Three Times), the petty bickering that threatens to undermine even the closest of friendships (Tristram Shandy). During the Saturday-evening performance I caught just after returning to New York, Amy Rigby voiced the eternal question, “Would someone explain to me this modern life?” Though I’d never argue that this year’s New York Film Festival (or film in general) explicated the complexities of “modern life” in any meaningful way, at its strongest it certainly helped us better understand them.