You won’t find any Richard Gere romances in the vicinity of Lincoln Center, as the 38th annual edition kicks off on Sept. 22. If the ongoing Toronto International Film Festival is, as its organizers say, a “smorgasbord” overflowing with hundreds of entrees, think of New York’s as three dozen plates of food for thought, served up to offset what appears to be a low-calorie fall from Hollywood.
Not that every dish, unpredictably flavored, will sit well. The festival opener, Lars von Trier’s divisive “Dancer in the Dark,” is guaranteed to have some viewers clutching their stomachs. Is its downward trajectory of a plucky factory worker, played by singer-songwriter Bjork, a welcome return to the raw and bleeding emotions of silent films? Or, with its occasional spasms of musical numbers, is the movie an abject embarrassment unseen since Liv Ullmann and Peter Finch clunked their way through “Lost Horizon” a generation ago? The evidence for both views goes on display next Friday at Lincoln Center.
Richard Pena is the judge. Educated at what he calls “the University of the New York Film Festival,” which he attended for 23 years before being invited to participate 13 years ago, Pena is the chairman of the five-member selection committee and program director of The Film Society of Lincoln Center. The selection process, he says, begins with his visit to the Berlin International Film Festival in February, includes a full committee retreat to Cannes in spring, and culminates with the whittling down from thousands of possibilities to the final list in late July and early August. “It’s passionate, but, happily, not cutthroat,” he says. “What’s most important for us is to come together as a unit and come up with a list that best represents the unit.”
Though the 36 films ultimately selected come from 22 countries, the committee spent significant time in the thickets of Asian cinema, choosing 10 entries from regional filmmakers. “This has been going on for years; in the 1994 Film Festival, we had five Chinese films,” says Pena. “Asian cinema has become a larger and larger presence in many programs, not just ours-it’s clearly one of the areas of real excitement in world cinema.” And, it would seem, one of the more ruminative: Shinji Aoyama’s film “Eureka” (the focal point of which is a bus hijacking gone wrong) runs 217 minutes, and is in black and white for extra rigor. Pena insists it’s worth waking up for a 10:30 a.m. showing on Saturday, October 7, to see. “I couldn’t recommend a film in the program more highly,” he says.
Stargazing is one of the incidental pleasures of festival attendance-though there’s no telling which filmmaking personnel will show up at Alice Tully Hall for the question and answer session that follow each screening. But Gillian Anderson’s cultists have been taking out Film Society memberships this year to secure seats at screenings of Terence Davies’ “The House of Mirth,” an adaptation of Edith Wharton’s novel that casts the “X-Files” star in a new light. No word yet if she’ll interrupt her day job for a bit of moonlighting in New York, or who might attend from director/star Ed Harris’ “Pollock,” the actor’s labor-of-love biopic, featuring Val Kilmer as Willem de Kooning. Pena, however, confirms Danny Glover and Angela Bassett for the film version of Athol Fugard’s play “Boesman and Lena,” paying tribute to its late director, John Berry.
More information on this year’s Festival and ancillary special events, including a complete schedule, can be found at www.filmlinc.com. (Moore mouths off in Neil Jordan’s “Not I,” double-billed with Atom Egoyan’s “Krapp’s Last Tape,” a twin helping of Samuel Beckett). Pena’s personal tip sheet on recommended viewing includes “The Circle,” a sharp-edged drama from Iran, the Tarantino-flavored Mexican entry, “Amores Perros,” and the Festival’s first-ever Israel film, “Kippur.” Depending on how you score the selection committee’s choices, Sydney will have nothing on Manhattan when it comes to showcasing international achievement in the coming weeks.
