NYFF #1: Early Currents Highlights
Lazaro At Night (Nicolás Pereda, 2024), 7 Walks With Mark Brown (Pierre Creton, Vincent Barré, 2024), bluish (Lilith Kraxner, Milena Czernovsky, 2024)
While festival hype understandably coalesces around a given year’s starriest awards films, some of my favorite festival films often show up outside of main slates. For me, the most exciting branch of NYFF is the Currents section. As a more experimental complement to the Main Selections, Currents provides a survey of the year’s most prominent experimentally-minded films. This year’s selection features 12 features and 6 shorts programs, with breakout films from newer voices such as Marta Mateus (Fire of Wind) and Matthew Rankin (Universal Language) alongside buzzy new works from established masters like Matias Piñero (You Burn Me) and Malena Szlam (Archipelago of Earthen Bones - To Bunya). These are great films that may never find distribution, or in the case of a film like Bonello’s Coma, take years to make their way to the states. The festival often places Currents features near the beginning of the festival, before playing the shorts programs over the second weekend. If I have one recommendation for how to navigate the festival, it’s to try and prioritize some of these films.
A film of relaxed, almost Hong-ian rhythms with confounding moments of surreality, Nicolás Pereda’s Lazaro At Night is a puzzling doodle of a film that succeeds due to its sheer pleasurability. Three actors, including the titular Lazaro, are all competing for roles in a film. The director has an unorthodox casting process that mostly involves watching the actors in their day to day lives. As he says at the outset of the film, in his work, the characters become the actors. Throughout this initial stretch of Lazaro, we’re thrown between the behind-the-scenes of the casting process, much of which concerns a love-triangle between the three actors and Lazaro’s obnoxious antics, and actual scenes from the film within the film. It’s incredibly hard to distinguish which is which so what emerges is a witty, loose comedy around various competitions between this central trio, whether it be their desire for love, recognition, or work. The last section of the film is a loose adaptation of Aladdin, where Lazaro plays a thief. He and his mother come across the genie’s lamp in their hut, and over two nights, ask for food, selling the silverware and plates to buy even more sustenance. I like that the film doesn’t form a coherent whole, instead creating mysterious plays on material and romantic longing. It’s refreshing to encounter such an enigmatic film. Within the occasionally staid mode of “festival cinema”, Lazaro’s relentless intrigue and comic levity is a breath of fresh air.
Just as impressive is the latest from Pierre Creton and Vincent Barré, 7 Walks With Mark Brown. In Creton’s 2023 feature A Prince, which centered around a group of gay botanists in the French countryside, connection and heritage were cheekily symbolized through plants. While 7 Walks is a documentary, it similarly incorporates feelings of camaraderie and nostalgia into the experience of looking at French flora. As Creton and Barré explain, the film follows the botanist Mark Brown on seven walks throughout France as he attempts to recreate a primary forest called The Dawn of Flowers, composed entirely of indigenous plants. On the first iteration of the walks, we see Brown, Creton, Barré, and friends exploring the wilderness, discussing the various plants they encounter. Brown talks about their origins and his personal histories with them while a team sets up a film camera to capture shots of the plants. Brown’s vulnerability while sharing intimate stories of childhood and lost love, along with the palpable friendship between the crew is what propels the film. What’s most remarkable is how plainly and directly Creton, Barré, and Brown convey the history of the landscape through the perspective of one particularly generous conduit.
In the second half of 7 Walks, titled Herbarium, Brown names the plants seen in the footage shot from the first portion of the film. While he initially just gives the scientific names of each plant in a rather academic tone, it doesn’t take long for him to add little factual tidbits or mutter phrases like “it was sublime”. In a way, it’s like watching ASMR arthouse Planet Earth, but seeing the herbarium after the sourcing of each radiantly beautiful shot gives us our own piece of precious history to recall.
My favorite of these early Currents premieres is Lilith Kraxner and Milena Czernovsky’s bluish. This film is immediately one of the essential portraits of post-COVID young adulthood. bluish is a two hander, following the mundane lives of two girls, Sasha and Errol, navigating life in Vienna. Like Kraxner and Czernovsky’s debut, Beatrix, the film is incredibly quiet, often watching the girls spend time alone brushing their teeth, swimming, showering, and browsing their phones in static close ups. This formal framework persists when they eventually begin to interact with the outside world, so when Sasha begins to go to parties and Errol goes on a date, bluish remains defiantly solitary. The film’s title not only informs bluish’s color palette, but also its mood, which captures a lingering seclusion that’s melancholic without ever dipping into outright sadness. Like a swimming pool that becomes an understated metaphor for collective urban drift, the film is still, placid and reflective.
Across their two features, what I appreciate the most about Kraxner and Czernovsky is their acknowledgement that their protagonists’ withdrawal is as much a symptom of disaffection as it is an exercise of their agency, shown in bluish through an extended sequence where Errol, who’s helping out with an art exhibit, frames the screen in blue tape to denote where a section of the exhibition should go. This tension is also indicative of the friendship between Errol and Sasha, who are clearly close friends, but find comfort in their respective frames, framing connection as a complement to their comfort within their own worlds.
In its illustration of Errol and Sasha’s post-COVID existence, bluish finds thrilling, contemporary ways to depict isolation, frequently using technology to dip the film into first-person through Google Maps, VR imagery, guided meditation, and even Zoom classes (a brilliant scene where the app’s green grids and pinning functions echo the scene of the tape framing), while also making generational connections that point towards Errol and Sasha’s connection to a universal female experience. The film just gets everything right, from its casual queer milieu to its three masterfully directed dance sequences to the most tender depiction of the aging female body in recent memory. bluish is the exact type of daring, emerging filmmaking the Currents section is meant to showcase.