FILM
Year’s New Cinema Favorites in Town
57th New York Film Festival runs through October 13
BY STEVE ERICKSON
The New York Film Festival
has settled comfortably
into late middle age as a
collection of the greatest
hits from the year’s earlier major
festivals. One mark of our times
is that it’s showing Todd Phillips’
“Joker,” a comic book adaptation
that won the top prize at the Venice
Film Festival while receiving
a string of reviews suggesting it
could inspire violence from incels
and the Tyler Durden fan club. If
it aspires to be the contemporary
equivalent of Scorsese at his grimmest,
the New York director himself
kicks off the festival with “The
Irishman” (which will open at the
IFC Center November 1 but, as a
Netfl ix release, is bound for limited
theatrical exposure).
The festival closes with Edward
Norton’s adaptation of Jonathan
Lethem’s “Motherless Brooklyn,”
with the remainder of two-plus
weeks offering a survey of international
cinema — the NYFF touts
29 fi lms from 17 countries.
The leading LGBTQ-themed
fi lms in the Main Slate are Pedro
Almodóvar’s “Pain and Glory,”
starring Antonio Banderas as
the director’s troubled alter ego,
and Celine Sciamma’s “Portrait
of a Lady on Fire, ” which depicts
a lesbian painter and her female
muse in 18th-century France. Albert
Serra’s Marquis de Sade- and
Andy Warhol-inspired orgy “Liberté,”
perhaps the most sexually
explicit fi lm ever to play Cannes,
might warrant being categorized
as from an orientation all of its
own. (It should be fun to watch the
walkouts at its screenings!)
The documentary selection offers
a selection of LGBTQ subjects:
the Mount Sinai transgender
surgery unit in Tania Cypriano’s
“Born To Be” and profi les of Roy
Cohn, Oliver Sacks, and Merce
Cunningham. In the retrospective
section, three rare shorts made
between 1966 and 1986 by the Armenian
director Sergei Parajanov,
who was arrested by the Soviet
government for being gay, play in
Mt. Sinai Hospital’s Dr. Jess Ting (center) in Tania Cypriano’s “Born To Be,” which screens September
28 and 29.
Idir Ben Addi and Othmane Moumen in the Dardenne brothers’ “Young Ahmed,” screening September
30 and October 2.
restorations.
If “elevated reality TV” were
a sub-genre, “Born To Be” (Sep.
28, 3:15 p.m. at the Walter Reade
Theater; Sep. 29, 3:45 p.m. at the
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center)
would fi t in. It resembles a longer
and classier version of the hospital
NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL
KINO LORBER
bound medical shows that fi ll
up the cable dial. Cypriano uses
Dr. Jess Ting as an entry point for
a Transgender 101 lesson. Ting
knew little about trans identity
or the community when he volunteered
to begin performing gender
confi rmation surgery 18 months
before Cypriano started fi lming,
but jumped right in where his colleagues
got scared. “Born To Be”
introduces us to a group of his patients,
mostly shown in his offi ce
and discussing their medical procedures
— though it does accompany
some to their apartments
and neighborhoods.
Even so, Cypriano’s approach
is superfi cial. The fi lm assumes
that we need a cisgender man as
a point of entry and identifi cation.
That would work better if Ting’s
home life held much interest. The
fi lm attempts to fi ll in his personality
— several scenes show him
playing the bass and he mentions
that he left music training at Julliard
to follow his parents’ wishes
and attend medical school instead
— are tepid.
The fi lm touches on aspects
of transgender life it could have
treated in more detail, such as
generational and racial differences.
When one of Ting’s apparently
successful subjects goes from
confi dently speaking at schools to
a suicide attempt, we’re left wondering
whether we are really that
much more liberated than when
an older patient pursued sex work
in the West Side highway’s trucks
in the ‘70s.
With “Young Ahmed” (Sep. 30,
6 p.m. at Alice Tully Hall; Oct. 2,
8:30 p.m. at the Elinor Bunin Munroe
Film Center) the Dardenne
brothers have made their equivalent
of “Three Billboards Outside
Ebbing, Missouri,” and I don’t
mean that as praise. They’ve chosen
topical, highly charged subject
matter to work with but have
blundered blithely into stereotypes
about Muslims, radicalization, and
terrorism, played out with little
nuance. The plot got dragged on
social media back when it was a
single line on IMDB: Belgian-Arab
teen Ahmed (Idir Ben Addi) lives
under the spell of a strict version
of Islam, inspired by a local imam,
that leads him to attempt to kill
his teacher.
➤ NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL, continued on p.29
September 26 - October 9 28 , 2019 | GayCityNews.com
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