I was able to hit a pair of director doubles while up at NYFF, in both cases with a dud and a classic.
First, and what I was most excited for, was the new historic features by Richard Linklater, Nouvelle Vague and Blue Moon. Linklater’s an old favorite—a filmmaker I’ve matured with—made these two of my most anticipated films at the fest. But Nouvelle Vague, recreating the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s world-altering debut Breathless, is little beyond a hollow exercise. It’s easy to see what draws Linklater to the material, from its hangout qualities to the way Godard speaks to figures like Melville, Rossellini, and Bresson as sages of the medium (a recurring trope for Linklater’s young people is to speak at length to mentors). Yet there’s a necessary contradiction that Nouvelle Vague never transcends: Linklater made a precise re-enactment of a film that’s notable for its total spontaneity.
Linklater’s much more comfortable in the confines of a hotel bar in Blue Moon, which follows a washed-up Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke) on the night of his former partner’s latest play, Oklahoma! Hawke’s brilliant as the confident and feeble Hart, a man who can’t admit to himself that he’s a loser—something which weighs heavy on Richard Rogers (Andrew Scott) as Hart comes back to him begging to relive the old times that Rogers got so tired of. The usually charismatic Hawke has to restrain himself to play Hart, often standing in a trench or sitting in a tiny chair to let the other actors bear over him, and eschewing his easy good looks for a comb-over. Here Hawke’s fully theatrical as a man for whom that’s all he has—Hart isn’t naturally gifted with good looks, but apparently is with his way of words, and he does everything in his power to make himself interesting to others. Still, he can’t help himself, and finds himself heading again for the bottle while in the shadow of other people living the life he feels like he deserves. It’s delicately staged by Linklater, displaying the kind of effortless, driven decoupage that would fit in with the best old Hollywood journeymen, demonstrating again that he’s (subtly) one of the best working directors in America.
I’m more broadly skeptical of Romanian auteur Radu Jude. I hadn’t seen much beyond his short films before going into a double-header this year at NYFF, and I remain justified in my ambivalence. Kontinental ‘25 was interesting as a work of low-budget filmmaking, shot on iPhone in primarily long, conversational takes. And while I agree with the film’s thesis about housing issues being half-heartedly addressed by simply patching over our infrastructural problems with cheap developments, I didn’t particularly enjoy this satire of Romanian Euro-liberalism. Eszter Tompa is great as Orsolya, a Hungarian-Romanian bailiff, who’s racked with guilt after her eviction of a homeless man leads to his suicide, and Jude’s criticism of his bureaucratic society is apt, although Kontinental ‘25 lacks momentum enough to sustain itself.
The same can’t be said for Jude’s Dracula, a ridiculous, rip-roaring, disgusting, abhorrent, reprehensible, and oddly sweet take on what a cheap Transylvanian retelling of the region’s most famous man would look like. It opens with (what feels like five minutes) of various AI-generated renderings of Dracula telling the audience to suck their cocks before we meet Adonis (played Adonis Tanța, who was also in Kontinental ‘25), a moronic wanna-be filmmaker who’s using AI tools on his iPad to try to make his own Dracula movie. The film mixes terrible-looking AI images with live-action footage, often intercutting between them in the same sequence, to hilarious effect—demonstrating how terrible and uncreative this technology is, while also highlighting a beauty to amateurish filmmaking in comparison. Like Linklater’s Blue Moon, Jude’s Dracula is about people that want to be taken seriously, but where Linklater homes in on that feeling’s tragic angle, Jude shows how funny these people can be.