Female Film Critics 24/375
The 62nd New York Film Festival offers a diverse range of film styles and issues, a delightful world cinema snapshot. With entries from Singapore and Georgia, China and Japan, France and Palestine, South Korea and Portugal, any attempt to synthesize the myriad issues and themes is futile, albeit tempting, for all touched on weighty issues, even the more amusing ones.
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Singaporean writer/director Yeo Siew Hua’s Stranger Eyes reinforces all the characters’ surveillance paranoia after young Little Bo disappears from a playground with her father nearby. In a plot that zig zags through disparate events, Bo’s parents frantically pursue leads, complicated by furtive DVDs repeatedly pushed under their apartment door. The content depicts Bo’s parents’ most private and some public moments. Numerous subplots and a nonchronological timeline challenge viewers to follow what at first appear to be disconnected events. However, all the characters contribute incidents that implicate them in covert activities. Conclusions to incidents are occasionally left hanging, only to circle around and connect with a delayed contextualization. This shatters the public personas, thereby delivering a clever, poetic justice payoff for the previously off-putting voyeurism. For each character hides a secret self expressed through veiled desires and embarrassing behavior.
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This year’s New York Film Festival boasted an impressive roster of features, with an array of talented women both behind and in front of the camera. The coveted Main Slate was stacked, with eight films directed by women and nearly as many women-centric titles directed by men. Several women directors went out on a limb, performing bold experimentations in style and genre. It is difficult to establish a theme within such a varied international festival, but in general I was taken with several women’s performances in male-directed films and by the bold choices made by many of the women directors. In either case, women are occupying center stage in a still male-dominated festival, in which the majority of the films are directed by men. It’s a promising step forward, to see so many inspiring women both in front of and behind the scenes, and one can only hope that next year will bring even more to the forefront.
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