Multiple paradoxes in cinema rest on the idea of the intimate. The stubborn notion that cinema is not quite art once bolstered itself on film’s peopled nature implying no intimate creative force, no single ‘artist’ speaking to the spectator. Some naysayers pointed to the sheer industry required to make a film as compared to painting, literature, sculpture or dance in which the individual’s intimacy with their medium transforms it; and yet others conversely pointed to cinema’s broad appeal, invoking an entrenched art world snobbery. In spite of these notions, film established itself (thanks in no small part to theorists such as Rudolf Arnheim, who nonetheless found sound and color dilutive) as a visual medium that represents and evokes human experience and emotion, sealing its place in the pantheon of the arts.
After making my way through a robust lineup at the 62nd New York Film Festival (NYFF), a selection that pointed to this remarkable ability of the movies to bring us in to an experience, I’ve been thinking about the camera’s intimate gaze, which intensifies evocative power, as emblematic of film’s expanding claim on art through. The cinema-going experience asks us to be proximate even before a film begins, as we sit a hair’s breadth from each other. A second intimacy arises between our lives and those unfolding on screen. In forgoing scale dramas à la 2023’s Killers of The Flower Moon and Poor Things, or roving biopics in the vein of Oppenheimer and Maestro, and in setting their sights on exploring ordinary lives at close range, filmmakers at this year’s NYFF deepened that intimacy to great effect.
A still from ‘Who By Fire.’ Photo: Balthazar Lab
Take Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths. The director, known for building portraits in films such as Vera Drake and Another Year, has long been a favorite of mine for his powers of observation. Hard Truths opens on the façade of a home in Brixton, London before taking us inside to its middle-aged protagonist, Pansy, played by Marianne Jean-Baptiste who broke onto the international scene 28 years ago as a star of Leigh’s Palme d’Or winner Secrets and Lies. The quiet sterility of the home is shattered the moment Pansy opens her mouth. We soon learn from Pansy’s outbursts at her plumber husband Curtley (David Webber), her hairdresser sister Chantelle (Michele Austin), and her sensitive but aloof son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), that Pansy is furious.
‘Hard Truths.’ Photo: Bleecker Street
Leigh is too astute of a filmmaker to feed the ‘angry Black woman’ stereotype; the film is a much-needed rebuttal to that. Without sharing the roots of her anger, Leigh embeds subtle hints of the trauma Pansy is carrying – a marriage in which she feels unseen, the anniversary of her mother’s death rolling around, a (possibly post-Covid) distrust of the medical establishment. In the camera’s close attention to Pansy’s actions (frequent Leigh collaborator Dick Pope is cinematographer), from her incessant cleaning to her recoil at touch and her inability to commit to, let alone savor, a single moment, we watch Pansy’s pain radiate outward. For Hard Truths, as with the rest of his oeuvre, Leigh worked without a script, improvising frequently and building his characters’ shared histories with his actors. This trust compounds our intimacy with Pansy. Her tirades are comic until we recognize ourselves and so the tragedy in them. Without reliance on plot, Leigh maintains an unbelievable tension in character as the camera weaves from the recesses of Pansy’s spotless home to the hair salon and eventually to the burial plot she visits with her sister. When we finally reach Chantelle’s sunny home, the cheeriness is impossible to bear; we have been thrust so far into Pansy’s pain.
Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine is Light also takes us into the lesser filmed corners of an iconic city, Mumbai, through a close look at the lives of unlikely protagonists. The NYFF main slate screening, which was the first film from India in 30 years to compete in the main competition at the Cannes Film Festival and took home their Grand Prix award, follows three hospital workers in Mumbai. Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha) are nurses and roommates living very different stages of life; Prabha in the lonely aftermath of an arranged marriage where her husband has emigrated to Germany for work, and Anu in the throes of a new love (with Hridhu Haroon as Shiaz) made illicit by religious difference. Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), a cook at the same hospital, seeks solace in the other women when she finds herself on precarious footing as a widow facing eviction from ruthless property developers. Making the film in Malayalam (as well as some Bhojpuri, Bengali and Marathi) was a challenge for Kapadia as it is not her native language, but she saw it as a nod, both to the migrant nature of Mumbai and healthcare talent from Kerala. Kapadia reveals the nature of migration via intimacy with her characters, carrying forward and reinventing the baton held aloft by Ray’s Apu Trilogy and Taraporewala and Nair’s Salaam Bombay!
Whilst the first half of the film revels in moments of the women’s urban lives – a red rice cooker from Prabha’s estranged husband arriving alien-like to their tiny flat share, Anu under fluorescent lights in the train’s ladies’ compartment watching text bubbles glow on her phone, nurses in their signature turquoise uniforms crowding a blood-maroon placenta – the second half is a transportive journey to Parvaty’s rural home on the Konkan coast. In the relative openness of the village, where greenery and dirt paths make an earthy contrast to the ethereal reds and blues of the city (credit to cinematographer Ranbir Das’ sensitively trained lens), the women, prodded on by each other and the environment, experience their own awakenings. The sustained intimacy of momentous human interactions unfolding in spaces made to envelop – lovers’ trysts in caves and forests and a resuscitation in close-up on a beach – bring the impact of Kapadia’s film home.
‘April.’ Photo: Film At Lincoln Center
Framing as evocation is also at the heart of April, a second miraculous film from Georgian filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili. Centered on a respected OB-GYN (Ia Sukhitashvili as the stoic Nina) who takes on clandestine abortions for women in rural Georgia, the film floors when it uses long artfully composed takes to heighten feeling. Cinematographer Arseni Khachaturan’s camera stays trained on a deaf-mute woman’s parted legs bent at the knees on a dining table while Nina performs an abortion, the soft light against the wall in direct opposition to the utilitarian chink of the tools of Nina’s trade. Later the same evening, when a storm ravages the landscape, the frame captures an entire muddy swath of road cutting the fields surrounding the woman’s house. When the doctor’s car gets stuck, its blinking lights at the edge of the frame are as tiny and insistent as her patient’s might have been when she suffered the assault that resulted in her pregnancy.
Claustrophobic spaces serve as a remarkable metaphor for the crushing weight on women in Mohammad Rasoulof’s Seed of the Sacred Fig too. Rasoulof, whose films have repeatedly brought him in conflict with the Iranian authorities and who now lives in exile, trains his lens on Iman (Missagh Zareh), a Tehran civil servant, and his pious wife Najmeh (Soheila Golestani), and two daughters Rezvan and Sana (Mahsa Rostami and Setareh Maleki). The film unfurls against the backdrop of the 2022 protests in Iran. Iman devolves from soft-spoken to increasingly belligerent at home after he takes on a new role as an inspector for the regime. While we get glimpses of the protests raging on the street, Rasoulof creates a thriller out of a kind of home invasion where the intimacy of domestic space becomes fraught with tension. Pooyan Aghababaei’s camera does wonderful work to this end. Fear literally enters the space when one of the girls’ badly beaten friends seeks refuge, confronting us with her bruised face, and later when Iman turns his daughters’ bedroom upside down after a gun disappears from their house. The home becomes symbolic of the state, the intimate standing in as a canvas for the body politic. When Iman makes a series of shocking turns against his family, locking them up on trip to the countryside, the symbolism is complete – no one is free, until we are all free.
‘The Seed of the Sacred Fig.’ Photo: NEON
In considering intimacy drawn from the domestic on screen, it is worth also mentioning two French language films at the NYFF that use domestic tableaus to great effect. Quebecois director Philippe Lesage’s Who By Fire, a drama that unfolds as three families vacation in a forested home, is a notable addition to the pantheon of coming-of-age films. Much of Who By Fire’s effect is drawn from intercutting long group takes (Balthazar Lab is cinematographer) of heated dinner table drama and a fantastic living room dance party, with eerie moments where the teen protagonist Jeff (Noah Parker) is alone in a wooded cabin or with the young woman he tries and fails to romance. Misericordia, French director Alain Guiraudie’s latest, which competed for the Queer Palm at Cannes, likewise makes stunning use of wide takes in the forest (from cinematographer Claire Mathon) as autumnal backdrop against which a darkly comic murder of passion unfolds.
‘Misericordia’ Photo: Sideshow/Janus Films
The films of this year’s NYFF crop that deal with conflicts outside the domestic; large-scale conflicts of war and colonization, the feudal strife of the Middle Ages and the competition and escalation of sport, find their power in tethering us to the intimate too.
‘The Damned.’ Photo: Les Films Du Losange
Italian director Roberto Minervini, who made his mark with sensitive dramatizations of American rural lives lived at the margins (Stop the Pounding Heart and The Other Side), produces something disarmingly quiet even when he turns his sights to the American Civil War. The Damned, for which Minervini won Best Director in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes, uses many of the non-actors turned actors through their prior work with him to portray a group of volunteer Union soldiers as they patrol territory in the then uncharted western United States. Minervini’s direction is filtered to gorgeous effect via cinematographer Carlos Alfonso Corral. The men appear alternatingly as smaller bodies against a vast landscape or in close shots, their faces craggy and striking as the land, conversing about the meaning of it all. These are not the deliberate ruminations of war movies but the minor fears of boys and men made mammoth by their vulnerability. There is no battle scene crescendo, but instead a mid-movie twilight rifle scene that is pretty enough for tears, before a group of soldiers wander off, not into the fog of war but that of moral incertitude. This lack of resolution as sustained question, not dramatic irony, leaves us to contemplate the devastating inconsequence of our lives.
Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg in ‘A Real Pain.’ Photo: Searchlight Pictures
Two films that deal with a subsequent war and the Holocaust also find surprising new lenses on the tragedy by narrowing focus. Jesse Eisenberg’s poignant and frequently funny A Real Pain, in which he stars alongside a palpably unpredictable Kieran Culkin, reimagines the road movie. The two cousins (David and Benji) make the reverse journey from present day America through Poland to honor their grandmother who has recently passed after having survived the Holocaust. A Real Pain is as modest as Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist is spectacular – a compliment to both films. Again, The Brutalist takes the collective trauma of the Holocaust and views it through the intimacy of one man’s struggle; against the past, against the addiction that results from its horrors and against the forces of capitalism that threaten his vision as an architect after his passage to America. Adrian Brody does some of his best work here as architect László Tóth. The three-and-a-half-hour film, which Corbet co-wrote with Mona Fastvold, has the epic sweep of Citizen Kane, a frequent comparison that has caused some debate.
‘Brutalist.’ Photo: Focus Features
I watched The Brutalist twice in two weeks at NYFF and will be watching it again on its release. On a second viewing, I was able to pull myself away from the drama of story and pay more attention to all that coalesced to make story more dramatic. Most markedly for me was the astonishing score from Daniel Blumberg that juxtaposes feathery piano with brassy bombastic orchestra, and the sumptuous visuals (courtesy Lol Crawley’s camerawork) – not least the ellipsis in an Italian quarry where Tóth and his patron Harrison Lee Van Buren (a marvelously hammy Guy Pearce) venture to select marble. The less said about this scene, the better to experience it, but it is worth noting the sheer magnificence of the architecture which elevates The Brutalist above its scant flaws. The first question on the audience’s mind after my screenings was whether Tóth was a real man and therein lay the genius of the film: to make the individual iconic via imagination, not biopic; to dare to ask What is the American Dream? and embed in that the question What is art? When Van Buren asks Tóth, ‘Why architecture?’ and Tóth replies, ‘Nothing is of its own explanation. Is there a better description of a cube than that of its own construction?’, Corbet is perhaps telling us to accept his film on its own intimate terms, an ask born of the knowing necessary to sustain original thinker and artist alike.
An NYFF selection that deals with a less discussed tragedy of WW2 is Blitz from British director Steve McQueen, best known for 12 Years A Slave and for his work on screen to canonize the Black British experience. Blitz refers to the eight-month Nazi campaign during which London was bombed for 57 relentless days and nights. Early criticism suggests the film is more pure drama and less edge than McQueen’s prior work, but to my mind centering a mixed-race boy in a Dickensian tale is just the type of reclamation of history that makes McQueen a singular talent. And, here too, intimacy is at work in the shape of nine-year-old George, a remarkable Elliot Heffernan in his film debut, who becomes the film’s pulsing heart. If the dialogue feels a tad earnest as it charts George’s journey across the city to be reunited with his mother (Saoirse Ronan as Rita), the journey itself soars through innovative production design (from Adam Stockhausen), much of which recreates real events as with a moment in the Café de Paris on Coventry Street, just before its bombing, when sprits are ecstatic and jazz notes loud. We experience this, as Elliot does, weaving through the place, stopping to marvel as the vocalist goes full tilt and then; annihilation.
‘Blitz.’ Photo: Apple TV+
The legacy of war and imperialism can be harder to personalize than the act itself, but French-Senegalese director Mati Diop finds a way in her documentary Dahomey. The title refers to the Kingdom of Dahomey, located in present day Benin, from which the Benin Bronzes were looted by colonial powers. The inventive documentary, which won the Berlin Film Festival’s highest honor, the Golden Bear, maps the movement of 26 such artifacts from France to Nigeria by blending the fact of their return with an imaginative leap. Diop worked with Haitian writer Makenzy Orcel to craft a script for the 26th statue representing King Ghezo. Together they vocalize the immortalized king’s memories of his homeland, his emotions at being returned and his consternation at being given a mere number by his captors. The passage back becomes both a radical subversion of imperial enslavement and a confrontation of Ghezo’s having profited from slavery himself. By animating the inanimate and making the historic intimate, Diop makes the process of decolonization visceral.
‘Harvest.’ Photo: The Match Factory
Intimacy in cinema is perhaps most startling when it is drawn overwhelmingly from the visual language itself, as seen in two new films from remarkable women directors who, like Kapadia and Kulumbegashvili, are reimagining the theater of the visual. Harvest, the fourth feature from Greek director Athina Rachel Tsangari, adapted from British author Jim Crace’s novel, is a dream-nightmare into the Middle Ages after economic progress disrupts a pastoral village. The dreamlike quality comes from proximity to the earth’s beauty and the nightmare from the relative barbarism of lives determined by nature’s whims and regulated by doses of myth and torture. Sean Price Williams’ astonishing camera seduces us into the core of this story so we feel, with protagonist Walter Thirsk (an astonishing Caleb Landry Jones), the pull of idyllic fields as the sun cycles over them and the discomfort of men dumped in the stocks as they watch village revelry from their unmoving hillock posts. Zambian-Welsh director Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is equally hypnotic, luring us into after-death rituals in modern Zambia via surrealist imagery and funereal wails. Modernity’s wedge between our true nature and ourselves is paramount in both films. There is a delicious irony that it is the technology of the camera’s gaze that allows us to bridge this gap and submit to their spells.
‘On Becoming A Guinea Fowl.’ Photo: A24
Sports brought another locus of intimacy, the arenas of baseball pitch and bullfighter’s ring, to NYFF films that turned these hallowed (for some) spaces inside out. While I can’t imagine spectating at the latter, watching Carson Lund’s Eephus, particularly against a backdrop of World Series fervor in New York, had me hankering to watch my first live baseball game. Eephus which came to the NYFF after premiering in the taste-making Directors’ Fortnight section at Cannes is a sports film unlike any other. Filmed on location at Soldiers Field in Massachusetts, Eephus takes the viewer inside the final game of an amateur baseball team via a wonderfully quirky ensemble cast who could be real-life-dad versions of actors off a Wes Anderson set. As the day progresses, a positively Shakespearian existentialist turn sees the players cling on, resignedly desperate, strobing car headlights so they can keep playing as pitch-black night shrouds their white baseball suits. Atmosphere is everything here and Lund, in his debut, proves to be adept at it, rotating his lens around the pitch from an inner focal point as the earth spins on its axis.
‘Eephus.’ Photo: Carson Lund
The bullfight comes to us from another master of atmosphere, Albert Serra. In spite of its gruesome subject, I preferred Afternoons of Solitude to Serra’s much-lauded Pacifiction which came to the NYFF two years ago. Functioning in a tighter register and as documentarian in Afternoons, Serra takes us into the once widely revered Spanish blood sport and defies us to look away as his camera roves the arena. Unusually for a documentary, there is no narrative voiceover, explication or interviewing, a restraint that amplifies intimacy by allowing maximum contemplation. Serra focuses on Peruvian-born star bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey and on the bull itself as it is coerced from majesty to depletion. At numerous moments we watch the life drain from an animal’s eyes up close, only to see it flicker as the hulk of it is dragged off the field. Intimacy turns to suffocation as we are saturated with pomp. An interior camera in the limousine that ferries Rey and his entourage from grand hotel rooms, where he is corseted into his sequined outfits, to the rings where he performs, becomes a visual echo chamber suggestive of the violent indignity of machismo. It is a brutal corrective to an embattled sport in the Catalan filmmaker’s homeland.
‘Afternoons of Solitude.’ Photo: Andergraun Films
Ostensibly most ripe for intimacy, as the original form presupposes the single reader, book adaptations to screen at the NYFF hit or missed for me this year. I enjoyed the verve and cinematic risk-taking of Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of William Burroughs’ Queer. Jonathan Anderson of fashion house Loewe dressed the cast, including a linen-clad and occasionally unclad Daniel Craig, and Sayombhu Mukdeeprom shot arid bars and lush tropics to full effect. But I was less engaged by two Sigrid Nunez adaptations: The Room Next Door, a first English language film from Pedro Almodóvar, who rarely disappoints, adapted from her novel What Are You Going Through, and The Friend from filmmaking duo Siegal and McGehee. The interior landscape of character felt flattened in these translations to screen, unlike with Harvest’s (also a novel adaptation)Thirsk whose emotions pulsed through.
Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey in ‘Queer.’ Photo: Yannis Drakoulidis
However, the festival’s opening night selection, Ramel Ross’s Nickel Boys (based on Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning novel), was an adaptation that I found excelled in this regard. Perhaps I was so absorbed by Nickel Boys, which some found disorienting, because I was attuned to Ross’s lens from his previous film. It was in Hale County, This Morning, This Evening, a documentary about Black life in Alabama, that Ross developed the cinematic language of rigging his subjects with a camera as a way for them to claim authorship over their surroundings and histories, a language which he has said allows him to ‘participate not capture; shoot from, not at’. In Nickel Boys, a harrowing story of two boys sent to a Jim Crow-era reform school, Ross extends this visual style to fiction and deepens the first person POVs of both boys (Ethan Herisse as Elwood and Brandon Wilson as Turner) as their childhoods are stolen from them, before going even further in a meta transition of narrator as character looking back. The intimacy of the lens is absolute, worn as a piece of clothing. Ross takes the directness of the written word and transmits it to screen in a way that is only possible using the camera. In so doing, he rewards attention with depth and connection, and succeeds in that tricky process of making art out of art.
‘Nickel Boys.’ Photo: L. Kasimu Harris/Amazon
Ross’s ascendant star is reminiscent of the early careers of two other directors at the NYFF whose work made a splash this festival season; American director Sean Baker with the Palme d’Or winning Anora centered on a bar dancer’s (a formidable Mikey Madison as Ani) beleaguered romance, and Chilean director Pablo Larraín with Maria which premiered at the Venice International Film Festival starring an ideally cast Angelina Jolie as opera virtuoso Maria Callas in her sunset years. These directors have honed their differing styles through an shared obsession with intensely close portraits told in bold strokes and it would be remiss not to mention them in a discussion of the intimate gaze in film.
‘Bluish.’ Photo: Panama Film
But women-on-the-verge can feel like over-baked storytelling terrain and in the question of movies as art, and of the undergirding power of film to evoke emotion via intimacy, I urge readers to seek out the more quietly observed stance of Bluish. This meditative film from Austrian filmmaking duo Lilith Kraxner and Milena Czernovsky appeared in the Currents section of NYFF which highlights innovation in form. Bluish follows two young women art students, Errol and Sasha, as they move through an urban landscape. The film is a mood; from Errol’s paler-hued solitude to Sasha’s zappier, but frequently isolating, connections. The real electricity here comes from artworks-in-progress, their synthesis and contemplation. Even when the narrative is oblique, the effect is transportive and leaves the viewer considering their own creativity as they watch these two artists making and being made in a brief sliver of time. Bluish is the portrait of a young woman as an artist, inventively and intimately captured on camera. That question of film as art? It answers it with a lightness of touch, a visual caress, that would blow the theorists away.
Soleil Nathwani is a New York-based Culture Writer and Film Critic. A former Film Executive and Hedge Fund COO, Soleil hails from London and Mumbai. She is working on her debut novel and is online @soleilnathwani
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