MVFF46: Some Highly Recommended Movies in Our Delightful Local Film Festival
By Meredith Brody
(October 5, 2023)
Some of us cinephiles know the exquisite pain of yearning to see a movie for months and months before we can access it. When the festival circuit begins with Sundance in January, Berlin in February, and the 900-pound-gorilla Cannes in May, we learn about the tempting new films that are greeted with standing ovations and win prizes and acclaim.
It’ll be many months or even years before they arrive in our theaters (the ones that remain) or on our streaming services – which I consider a poor substitute for the communal experience. There was a time when I avoided Netflix or Amazon or Apple movies at film festivals, feeling, well, I’d already paid for the pleasure, I’d watch them at home.
Now I try to see them in the festival setting, cherishing the large screen and the engaged and committed audiences.
The first time we Bay Areans have the opportunity to sample some of the movies we’ve been reading about for months now is at the excellent Mill Valley Film Festival, which has programmed plums that have recently garnered the famed standing ovations in Venice, great publicity from Telluride and Toronto, and just premiered exclusively at the still-unspooling New York Film Festival. MVFF46 is the first chance you’ll have to see the hotly-anticipated May December, Priscilla, and Maestro, where they made their world premieres.
I was lucky enough to attend both Telluride and Toronto, and saw movies at both which I can recommend without cavil. (Well, maybe a little cavil.) But you should know what YOU like by now.)
When you wander around film festivals and bump into friends, the first question you get asked is “What have you liked?” Happily I had answers, which became an automatic response: The Zone of Interest (which I explained as “Nazis Have Problems, Too”) and Anatomy of a Fall.
Both were Cannes sensations.
The Zone of Interest (playing only Friday October 6 at 7 pm at the Rafael) was based (loosely, it seems) on a novel of the same name by Martin Amis, who died on May 19, the same day the film premiered at Cannes. It’s the first film by director Jonathan Glazer since his fascinating erotic sfi fi/horror movie Under the Skin, eight years ago. The Zone of Interest won Cannes’ Grand Prix, the second most prestigious prize after the Palme d’Or.
It views the Holocaust through the lens of the people next door. It’ll take a while before you realize just where the pleasant house of Hedwig and Rudolf Höss is located, just who is working in their garden, just why there’s smoke constantly rising from the tall chimney behind the garden wall.
Mrs. Höss is played by Sandra Hüller (who played the manic daughter in Toni Erdmann). She also stars in the Cannes Palme d’Or winner Anatomy of a Fall (playing Saturday October 7 at 2:30 pm at the Sequoia and Sunday October 15 at 6:30 pm at BAMPFA). It’s an engrossing whodunit/courtroom drama of the “did he fall or jump or was he pushed” genre. Hüller is compelling in this, just ambiguous enough to keep you guessing, as the successful writer who might have pushed her husband to commit suicide – or just pushed him.
Her dual roles in these two much-lauded festival films led a charming young publicist to plant a seed in my ear (and many others, I’m sure) that wouldn’t it be wonderful if Höss were nominated for the Oscar in both the Best Actress and the Best Supporting Actress categories next year. Hey, why not?
Christian Friedel plays SS officer Rudolf Höss and appeared at the Festival.
Another Festival favorite is the beloved and modest humanist Alice Rohrwacher, whose La Chimera (playing Friday October 6 at 8 pm at the Rafael and Sunday October 8 at 4 pm at BAMPFA) follows a nutty and attractive group of Etruscan tomb raiders in Italy who coalesce around a handsome though loopy aspiring archaeologist played by Josh O’Connor. Rohrwacher’s equally beloved actress sister Alba Rohrwacher makes a seductive appearance, as does the radiant Isabella Rossellini.
Wim Wenders returns with a full-length narrative film after an absence of several years with the calm, Zen-like Perfect Days (playing on Saturday October 7 at 7 pm at BAMPFA and Monday October 9 at 4 pm at the Rafael), a two-inches-of-ivory examination of the happy life of a serene Japanese toilet cleaner (Koji Yakusho), who appreciates routine, music, literature, nature, and navigates life’s vicissitudes with aplomb.
In a special tribute program on Sunday October 8 at the Rafael at 4 pm, famed San Francisco artist-filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson will receive the Mind the Gap Award at a screening of Cyborgian Rhapsody,Francisco artist-filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson will receive the Mind the Gap Visionary Artist/Lifetime Achievement Award at a screening of Cyborgian Rhapsody, four shorts about technology created over decades, featuring Joan Chen and Tessa Thompson, culminating in the 2023 edition, written and performed by a GPT 3 Chatbot.
The Bikeriders (Monday October 9 at 7:15 pm at the Rafael and Saturday October 14 at 11 am at the Sequoia) was inspired by a book of photographs – Danny Lyons’ seminal 1967 book of the same name, chronicling the sexy and dangerous life of a Chicago biker gang. Director Jeff Nichols turned his fascination with the images into a narrative with an astonishing cast, including Austin Butler, Jodie Comer, Tom Hardy, and Michael Shannon. Nichols, previously at the MVFF with his film Loving, will receive the MVFF Award for directing at Monday’s screening.
After seeing Alexander Payne’s funny, loving, poignant The Holdovers (playing Tuesday October 10 at 7 pm at the Sequoia and Thursday October 12 at 3 pm at the Rafael), I was reminded of the great French humanists Jean Renoir and Marcel Pagnol – creating a community with an assortment of eccentric but ultimately recognizable people. Payne reunites with Paul Giammeti (Sideways), his Michel Simon, a crotchety teacher at a stuffy New England prep school, who is tasked with remaining at the school to oversee a few kids over Christmas break. There’s a particularly self-destructive and unhappy one (played by newcomer Dominic Sessa), and the “family” includes the school’s grieving cafeteria manager (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) and a sweet school office worker (Carrie Preston) who moonlights as a bar waitress. In Payne’s capable hands, The Holdovers skirts sentimentality as skillfully as the best Christmas movies of Hollywood’s Golden Age and remains unpredictable until its end.
Emerald Fennell is something of a phenomenon and a surprise as a director. Delightful as the lesbian Nurse Patsy in Call the Midwife, coruscating as Camilla Parker Bowles in The Crown (Camilla Parker Bowles WISHES she was a witty and bitchy as Fennell played her), amusing as her authoring of Killing Eve episodes were, her first film as writer/director, Promising Young Woman, astonished with its headlong and uncompromising portrait of a woman Who Would Not Take It. The film was nominated for Oscars for Best Film, Best Directing, Best Editing, Carey Mulligan for Best Actress, and Fennell won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.
Her sophomore offering, Saltburn (playing Tuesday October 10 at the Rafael at 7 pm and Wednesday October 11 at the Rafael at 2:30) continues Fennell’s run of wit and surprise and shock. It begins in what one assumes is Evelyn Waugh and Brideshead Revisited territory: sunny days at Oxford, peopled by the beautiful (exquisitely photogenic Jacob Elordi of Euphoria fame) and those who worship beauty (Barry Keoghan who whined in The Banshees of Inisherin), followed by sunny days in the exquisitely photogenic Saltburn estate. Saltburn is peopled by the hilarious Rosamund Pike, Richard E. Grant, Paul Rhys, and Carey Mulligan, and numberless Bright Young Things who appear at parties. Class comes in to play, of course, and Evelyn Waugh is replaced by a bit of Agatha Christie and a soupçon of Patricia Highsmith. After I watched Saltburn, mouth agape, I added it to my list of favorites when asked “Whathaveyouseenthatyouliked.”
At Tuesday’s screening Fennell will be presented with the richly deserved Mind the Gap award of Filmmaker of the Year.
There’s much more to come in Part 2, covering MVFF46’s second week, which unlike many other film festivals that start strong and then fade away to a whisper, saves some of its best for last.
The Mill Valley Film Festival plays October 5-11, 2023 in San Rafael, Mill Valley, Larkspur, San Francisco and Berkeley. Many features and shorts films will also be available on streaming. Complete info here.
Follow these links (because they are not obvious on the website) for the complete schedule alphabetically by title or by date.
The 238 page Program Book will not be printed but can be downloaded here.
Page 42 has a grid to compare what is showing when but a few new films have been added and most can be found on the printed grid available at the theaters.
For all other information about the Festival go to the home page.
Follow Mill Valley Film Festival on social media for late additions and added showings:
Explore all California Film Institute Programs.
Meredith Brody, a graduate of both the Paris Cordon Bleu cooking school and USC film school, has been the restaurant critic for, among others, the Village Voice, LA Weekly, and SF Weekly, and has written for countless film magazines and websites including Cahiers du Cinema, Film Comment, and Indiewire. Her writings on books, theater, television, and travel have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Interview. She also contributes to EatDrinkFilms including her“Meals with Meredith,” where she talks about food and film with filmmakers at restaurants in northern California, writes about vintage cocktails and where she eats during film festivals at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco. A selection of her EDF pieces are found here.
One could describe Meredith as “hooked on cinema” as she attends four-five films a day at many bay area and international festivals each year. Somebody has to do it. Read about her journey back to festivals after two years in pandemic mode.
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