More to Watch at the Mill Valley Film Festival 46
By Meredith Brody
(October 9, 2023)
Halfway home! But there’s still lots to recommend and to look forward to. I didn’t catch American Fiction in Toronto, and I didn’t hear very much about it – it wasn’t one of those movies that people cited as one of their favorites – so I was quite surprised when it won TIFF’s prestigious People’s Choice Award. Since way down deep I am shallow, this increased my want-to-see tenfold. It’s the directing debut and first feature film of Cord Jefferson, a journalist and television writer. It sounds slightly dangerous – Jeffrey Wright plays a college professor and mid-range novelist who concocts a pseudonymous novel replete with Black tropes that he disdains, that becomes a literary sensation. It’s easier to laugh in a big audience, so I’d love to see it at the festival. (Playing Wednesday October 11 at 6:30 at the Sequoia, and Friday October 13 at 3 pm at the Rafael.)
Sofia Coppola’s films are never less than intriguing to me, and sometimes much more than that (see: Lost in Translation), so Priscilla (playing Wednesday October 11 at noon at the Sequoia and Wednesday October 11 at 7 pm at the Sequoia) would be on my list for that alone. It’s based on the memoir of Priscilla Presley, who met Elvis when she was 14 and he was 24, married him at 21, and divorced him six years later. Sofia Coppola has both dedicated the movie to her mother Eleanor and compared Eleanor finding herself as a creative person while being married to Francis Ford Coppola to Priscilla Presley’s life. Sofia Coppola is expected to be at the 7 pm screening, and I’ve never heard her live. Plus Jacob Elordi is gorgeous and Cailee Spaeny is a complete unknown to me. I’m in.
The movie that had me swooning at Telluride – two hours and 25 minutes of sheer erotic bliss – is The Taste of Things (playing Wednesday October 11 at 6 pm at the Rafael and Thursday October 12 at 3 pm at BAMPFA), based on the novel The Passionate Epicure by Marcel Rouff, a 1924 novel which I’ve read and enjoyed. It’s the story of the long affair between an exacting gourmet, Dodin-Bouffant, played by Benoit Magimel, and his equally exacting cook, Eugènie, incarnated by Juliette Binoche. For some, the balletic shots of the preparation of rich and complicated dishes might be too much Food Network, but under the hand of Trăn Anh Hùng(The Scent of Green Papaya), who won Best Director at Cannes for his work here, it struck me as sheer poetry. La vraie cuisine au beurre – take that, Babette’s Feast! (Don’t trust an anorexic to come up with a good menu.) I’ve almost convinced myself to see it again.
Fingernails (playing Thursday October 12 at 7 pm at the Sequoia and Sunday October 15 at 8 pm at the Sequoia) is proof that movies are magic and you can make them do any damn thing you want. In this instance, there exists a test for perfect romantic compatibility, achieved by removing, yes, a fingernail from each of the prospective couple and running it through a machine. Jessie Buckley and Jeremy Allen White have passed the test (they have a certificate to prove it), but when Jessie starts working at the Love Institute that administers the tests, she is discomfited by her attraction to Riz Ahmed, a colleague. And, yes, the path to true love never runs smooth.
May December (playing Thursday October 12 at 6:30 pm at the Rafael and Friday October 13 at 3 pm at the Sequoia) is the biggest want-to-see on my list. From one of my favorite directors, Todd Haynes, working with his soulmate, gifted producer Christine Vachon, they’re due to receive the MVFF Award for Lifetime Achievement for Collaboration at Thursday’s screening. The film stars Julianne Moore, another frequent Haynes/Vachon collaborator, as a woman who shocked the world with her affair with a schoolboy, but they married, had children, and are still together. Natalie Portman plays a movie star hired to play Julianne in a movie, who spends time with the family on a research trip. I would say “I can’t wait,” but when I read that under somebody else’s name, I always think “But you HAVE to.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-hV-0PyDuY
A sweet surprise in Toronto was National Anthem (playing Thursday October 12 at 7:30 at the Rafael and Friday October 13 at 4 pm at the Rafael), a sweet-tempered coming-of-age and coming-out story about a shy young country boy finding his pansexual tribe at an unusual ranch in New Mexico. Dylan (pouty-lipped Charlie Plummer) needs work to pay the bills for his younger brother and feckless mom, and his gig digging post holes introduces him to the colorful and affectionate world of gay rodeos. He falls for the gorgeous Sky (a charismatic Eve Lindley), a barrel-racer in an open relationship with the macho ranch owner. Director Luke Gilford won acclaim several years ago with his photographs of the International Gay Rodeo Association, and he photographs the New Mexico landscapes and the landscapes of the body with real affection and sensitivity.
NYAD (playing Friday October 13 at 6:15 pm at the Sequoia and Sunday October 15 at 7 pm at the Lark) will be released on Netflix November 3, but here’s a movie that will benefit enormously from the big screen, where its blue skies and blue seas (both of which can turn dark and dangerous in seconds) will be seen to best advantage. Annette Bening plays the cranky, narcissistic Diana Nyad (“nyad means water nymph, my name is my destiny”, and Jodie Foster shines as her friend, coach, and enabler. Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, Oscar-winners for the astonishing mountain-climbing documentary Free Solo, direct their first narrative feature, and Vasarhelyi with be in attendance for the MVFF Director’s Night.
Do you like the films of Errol Morris? Do you like the work of novelist John le Carré? Even if you don’t, there’s a good chance you’ll enjoy The Pigeon Tunnel (playing Saturday October 14 at 4 pm at the Rafael and Sunday October 15 at the Sequoia), in which le Carré (aka David Cornwall, son of a con man, and himself a veteran spy for Britain’s M15 and M16) spins tale after tale about his life and works. Morris’s trademark hypnotic camerawork and equally hypnotic Philip Glass score works perfectly as the notorious interview-adverse le Carré seems to relish taking the time to tell his story (he died in 2020 at the age of 89).
Who knows about the nose? It’s a tempest in a Neti pot as far as I’m concerned. I just know I love the idea of Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein, the exuberant Maestro of the title, and Carey Mulligan as the glamorous Felicia Montealegre, the Costa Rican-Chilean actress who was his wife for twenty-seven years until she died, and the mother of his three children. Cooper co-wrote the script with Josh Singer, directed, and produced along with Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, of whom you might have heard. Maestro will play in all three Rafael theaters and both of the Sequoias at 5 pm on Sunday October 15, and we will all bid a fond farewell to the two towns that hosted us so pleasantly over 11 days in October.
Read Meredith Brody’s part one Preview here.
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.
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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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