Author: hushtruth
Academy conversations …’Good Time’ with Robert Pattinson..
The Knockturnal..Robert Pattinson, Safdie Brothers, Barkhad Abdi & Taliah Webster Talk ‘Good Time’
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From the film: director/writer Josh Safdie, director/actor Benny Safdie, writer Ronnie Bronstein, cast members Robert Pattinson, Buddy Duress, Barkhad Abdi, Taliah Webster, and Necro, producers Paris Kasidokostas-Latsis, Terry Dougas, Sebastian Bear-McClard and Oscar Boyson, co-producer Brendan McHugh, co-executive producer Stephanie Meurer, cinematographer Sean Price Williams, composer Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never), and production designer Sam Lisenco walked the red carpet.
Additional guests included Demi Moore, Marisa Tomei, Chloe Sevigny, Chris Abbott, Ashley Benson, Justin Bartha, A$AP Ferg, Josh Ostrovsky aka The Fat Jew, Casey Neistat, Cynthia Rowley, Cipriana Quann, TK Quann, Ira Sachs, Emma Roberts and Rostam Batmanglij, to name a few.
Check out our red carpet interviews below:
Robert Pattinson
While working on this film, at what point did you look in the mirror and go, “Oh my god, I don’t recognize myself anymore?”
Not really. I always recognize myself, but I was really surprised by the end when we just got through the entire movie and there had never been anything, there was never a cellphone picture, nothing, which is incredibly satisfying and relieving.
How do you feel about the Oscar buzz?
I don’t think about that all. It sounds terrible considering I’m doing press now, but I was done with my desires at Cannes. This is all just gravy.
Can you speak about collaborating with the Safdie Brothers and what you admire about them?
Their discipline and the level of energy they bring to jobs.
Safdie Brothers
Taliah was saying that Rob was always in character. Was he method?
Josh: I don’t know if he was method, but he had a hard time leaving the character. He would sleep in the costumes sometimes.
He was brooding?
Benny: Yeah, he was always brooding, kind of like running all of the stuff through his head, you know, at any moment.
Josh: He was super self-serious.
What did you guys do to cement the co-dependency of your characters as brothers?
Benny: We actually did a bunch of stuff beforehand … where we did camera tests but they were kind of like historical tests where we worked at a car wash and he would see what it was like to have a brother like this in the real world, you know, without anybody watching. It developed kind of a kinship between us and also it allowed him to see what the world would be like if he did have me in there.
How does it feel to have Martin Scorsese produce your next film, because that’s happening?
Josh: Literally like the burning bush calling your name.
Benny: It doesn’t. It’s like a third degree burn, you don’t feel it.
Josh: It’s him and Scott Rudin so it’s like this like insane …
What are those meetings like?
Josh: Well they’re never in the same room at the same time.
So what’s your meeting like with Marty?
Benny: He gets more involved in post. So, our meetings with him have been brief.
I saw Demi Moore is here.
Josh: Demi is amazing. I met her recently I’ve been a lifelong fan of hers.
Did you write something about her?
Josh: Always, yeah! That’s the thing. When this project came to be there was no Good Time and we built it around Rob
Benny: And then you meet people, and if they ooze something, you know, you can kind of feel it and she definitely puts something out there.
What is a New York night with all of you guys together? What does that look like?
Josh: It’s improvised, you know. I don’t know. I mean, sometimes it feels like Good Time, you know, it’s like a non-stop thing, but, you know … this past 19 months I’ve been slaving over this movie, so it’s hard to think of any life out … everyone would make fun of me, it’s like, “Oh, you’re just going to be working all the time.”
Do you feel like you’re New York auteurs?
Benny: We keep lifting up the sidewalk and being like, “Oh, that’s interesting! Oh my God look at that!” You know, there’s so much to mine here.
Were you always going to play the brother? Did you always have that in mind?
Benny: The short answer is no … We were looking at casting some other people, maybe some people with disabilities, but, it didn’t feel right, so then, basically what ended up happening was is we realized that I had been developing it… Once I was gonna be the character I just kinda went all in.
Taliah Webster
How did you get involved?
My acting teacher was like, “Here’s a casting call. I really think you should go.” I go, and a lot of callbacks later, and here I am.
Where are you from?
I’m from Bronx, New York.
Where are you taking your classes?
High school. I’m also having acting classes at HB Studio.
What is it like to be in such a buzzy, independent film?
It’s amazing. You never think that you’re first thing that you do in the acting business would be a movie and it’s a pretty great movie.
How is it working with the Safdie brothers?
It was fun. You create bonds with everybody. Everybody is friendly with each other.
Speak a little bit about your character’s journey and what you loved about it?
I loved how she was so much like me. I understand what it’s like to be in a home that you don’t want to be in no more, like you want to leave. Any the opportunity you have, you want to go. This is kind of my goal. The movie was my goal, my escape from everything.
You got to Cannes, how was that?
Cannes was beautiful. Nothing that you would ever experience all the time.
How was collaborating with Rob? You guys have a significant amount of scenes.
It was fun being with Rob. That’s my admiration. I adore this man. I’ve watched every single Twilight, so it was like actually doing it is just fun.
When you told your friends and family, were they like, “Oh my gosh, that’s crazy”?
Most of them was like, “Oh my gosh, wait, you’re lying. You’re just going to have to tell me when the movie comes out, so I can go see it myself.” I’m like, “Fine, we can do that.”
What’s next for you?
Whatever comes is whatever I’m trying to take. I’m trying to do short films, any films that comes towards me, I’m willing to take it.
Barkhad Abdi
Your character gets beaten up pretty bad in this movie.
It was fun doing it honestly. We had a lot of laughs working at it and I can’t wait to see the movie.
And how was filming in New York?
Yeah it was fun, it was just cold.
Speak about working with Rob.
He’s cool. He’s hard-working and he’s just really focused on what he does.
How about collaborating with the directors?
Yes, they’re brothers, they’re really hard-working people. They pull it off, I’m really excited for them. All the hard-work they put in. I love film-making. I believe fifty-percent is believing in yourself. You had that clear from them, they believe in this project and they did whatever to make it happen and look at them today. That’s what motivates me. I’m really excited for them. I’m part of it as well so that’s why I’m here. I can’t wait to see the movie.
A fun party followed at Flash Factory where guests enjoyed White Castle and Pizza. The film is now playing.
LATimes..With a revelatory Robert Pattinson in the lead, ‘Good Time’ proves exactly that….
The title of “Good Time,” a nerve-jangling new thriller from New York-based directors Josh and Benny Safdie, is uttered briefly in the movie’s final moments by a character of little consequence. In that rather forlorn context, the words come off as despairing and more than a little ironic, the cruel kicker to a story about a few lowlifes caught up in a swift-moving cycle of crime and punishment, desperation and greed.
But on another level, the title isn’t ironic at all. At once a swift, relentless chase thriller and an exhilarating mood piece that recalls the great, gritty crime dramas ofSidney Lumet and Abel Ferrara, “Good Time” is also exactly what it says it is: a thrill, a blast, a fast-acting tonic of a movie. There may be something counterintuitive about a picture of such crushing personal lows sending you out of the theater on such a potent cinematic high. But then, the Safdie brothers have always been counterintuitive in their focus on the kinds of men and women who dart through life with neither plan nor purpose, their tempers flared and their nerve endings exposed.
The directors’ two prior feature-length collaborations — “Daddy Longlegs” (2009), an empathetic portrait of a raging and remarkably unfit father, and “Heaven Knows What” (2015), a harrowing chronicle of junkie anomie — drew their material from the stuff of real life, as borne out by their refusal to traffic in easy narratives of redemption or uplift. “Good Time” proves similarly allergic to compromise, which is fairly remarkable, considering that this time the Safdies have not only filtered their lower-depths poetry through the prism of genre but they’ve also cast an honest-to-God movie star.
That would be Robert Pattinson, the 31-year-old British heartthrob who came to fame playing a shimmery vampire in the “Twilight” movies — a blockbuster association that Pattinson, not unlike his former costar Kristen Stewart, has quietly and fastidiously dismantled. He has done this in part by working with some of the more interesting names in world cinema, like David Cronenberg, who mined the actor’s previously hidden depths in the 2012 art-house chiller “Cosmopolis,” and James Gray, who cast him brilliantly against type as a real-life Amazon explorer in this year’s “The Lost City of Z.”
“Good Time” is Pattinson’s breakthrough, the most sustained and revelatory transformation of the actor’s career and, not coincidentally, the most extreme of his recent efforts to thwart the audience’s sympathies. The young man in question is Constantine Nikas, a.k.a. Connie, a scuzzy small-timer from Queens who dashes through much of the movie sporting stud earrings, a gray hoodie and a hastily applied blond dye job. He is both a catastrophically inept criminal and a nimble improvisational genius, a master at getting himself out of one hair-raising situation only to plunge himself immediately into another.
Connie’s sole redeeming quality is his love for his brother, Nick, a hearing-impaired, mentally disabled young man played with galvanizing vulnerability by Benny Safdie (doing a nice job of directing himself). We first meet Nick during a psychiatric evaluation, and as he utters a series of gruff, one-line responses to the questions posed by the therapist (Peter Verby), an entire history of neglect and abuse emerges in every pause.
Into the room storms Connie, who has clearly chosen to rebel against the Nikas family’s mistreatment rather than buckle under, if Pattinson’s agitated live-wire intensity is any indication. Shortly after dragging Nick out of the evaluation, Connie, promising a big payday and a fresh start in Virginia, makes his brother an accomplice in a shockingly clumsy bank robbery that plays out with a stomach-knotting mix of tension and dark humor.
After a few startling setbacks and botched getaways, the hapless Nick is arrested, leaving it to the fugitive Connie to bust him out of jail. With practiced nerve and an often appallingly funny approach to problem-solving, Connie starts by trying to get his tetchy, naive girlfriend, Corey (a sharp Jennifer Jason Leigh), to post his brother’s bail. That plan quickly fizzles, but it’s still an amusing introduction to a character who seems to have emerged fully formed from a movie of her own — one you’d gladly follow her back into if this one weren’t so compelling.
The same could be said of a fast-talking ex-con, Ray (played by “Heaven Knows What’s” almost-too-perfectly named Buddy Duress), whose access to a secret LSD stash sends Connie on yet another harebrained get-rich-quick scheme. Most affecting of all are an elderly Haitian immigrant (Gladys Mathon) and her sardonic 16-year-old granddaughter, Crystal (Taliah Webster, a newcomer and a natural), whose seemingly limitless patience and hospitality Connie prevails upon after one particularly narrow escape.
The screenplay, written by Josh Safdie and his regular collaborator Ronald Bronstein, may have contrived these supporting characters to steer the plot from one complication to the next, but on-screen, they feel like nothing less than the camera’s brilliant discoveries. By blurring the line where narrative expediency ends and shrewd slice-of-life observation begins, the filmmakers have made a breathless, propulsive action movie without stinting on any of the close-to-the-skin realism that distinguished their earlier work.
That realism doesn’t preclude a surfeit of style. When cinematographer Sean Price Williams isn’t sending the camera zooming across the city in overhead establishing shots, he’s locking the actors in tight, jittery closeups that convey both mobility and entrapment. The faster these guys run, the more the noose tightens around their necks. The action tends to play out in cramped, squalid settings — the back of an ambulance, the interior of a jail cell, the dark rooms of an apartment that briefly becomes the saddest of safe houses.
The Safdies have fun saturating their images in pulsing neon reds and turning up the pure sonic adrenaline of Oneohtrix Point Never’s electronic score, but their pulse-quickening flourishes feel entirely of a piece with the matters at hand. And at every moment, their attentiveness to process gives “Good Time” a razor-sharp focus and a bristling, moment-to-moment unpredictability. The story never gets ahead of itself, or allows us to get ahead of it; most of the time, we’re caught up watching Connie think his way out of every predicament.
And, in turn, doing some thinking ourselves. In a movie that effortlessly embodies the ethnic and cultural diversity of the Safdies’ home city, it shouldn’t escape anyone’s notice that Connie, despite his lowly upbringing, enjoys a measure of social privilege that some of the other characters do not. Blink and you’ll miss the curious fate that befalls a black security guard (Barkhad Abdi, an Oscar nominee for “Captain Phillips”), or the pointed moment when a couple of police officers, spying Connie and Crystal together, proceed to target the African American teenager rather than the white bank robber whose face has been plastered all over the news.
The filmmakers don’t belabor their point; as that title suggests, they certainly want you to enjoy yourself. But they’ve made the rare genre piece that refuses to equate entertainment with an escape from reality, or to turn a tale of foolish men into a celebration of stupidity. The greatness of Pattinson’s performance makes it awfully hard not to root for Connie Nikas, but that’s no reason to mistake him for the hero.
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‘Good Time’
Rating: R, for language throughout, violence, drug use and sexual content
Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes
Playing: ArcLight Cinemas, Hollywood, and the Landmark, West Los Angeles
Roger Ebert.. What shines so well about “Good Time” can be traced back to Robert Pattinson
There’s a hum to the night of major cities. It’s the sound of unceasing traffic, neon lights buzzing, televisions on in every apartment, and more, and it creates a unique energy that you don’t find outside of places like New York City, Atlanta, Chicago, etc. It’s the kind of anxious energy that comes with a lack of sleep—paranoid and twitchy. That hum pervades the Safdie brothers’ excellent “Good Time,” a film that reminds me of great “city movies” of the ‘70s like “Mean Streets” and “Dog Day Afternoon.” With a central performance from Robert Pattinson that feels like a direct descendant of Al Pacino’s in that Lumet film, “Good Time” is a movie that can’t sit still, and I mean that in the best possible way. There’s a palpable sense of anxiety and panic that comes through in every heated frame after the film’s inciting incident. It’s one of those rare movies that makes you feel edgy, conveying its protagonist’s dilemma in ways that prey on your nerves and emotions more than just relaying a night-from-hell anecdote.
“Good Time” opens with one of its only relatively sedate scenes (although even it is filmed in such a way that it feels tense). Nick Nikas (the film’s co-director Ben Safdie) sits uncomfortably in a court-ordered therapy session. Through the exchange with his doctor (Peter Verby), we learn that Nick was violent with his grandmother, and that he’s mentally handicapped enough to not fully understand how to control his anger or the social repercussions of his actions. Just as the therapist is getting somewhere, Nick’s brother Connie (Pattinson) bursts in and takes Nick out of the room. Connie thinks he’s doing good by protecting his brother—of course, he is not. And this will be a theme of the night ahead of Connie, one in which he’ll constantly try to fix a situation but only make it worse.
The movie proper opens with a bank robbery. Nick and Connie want $65,000 from a bank and appear to get away with it before a dye pack covers them, and their payload, in bright red dye. Nick gets nabbed by the cops, sending him to Rikers Island. Too much of the robbery money is ruined to make his bail, so Connie needs to come up with $10k as quickly as possible to get him out. He starts with his girlfriend (Jennifer Jason Leigh), and, well, things get crazier from there in ways that I wouldn’t dare spoil.
Working again with the great cinematographer Sean Price Williams(who shot the Safdies’ “Heaven Knows What,” Alex Ross Perry’s “Queen of Earth,” and others), the Safdies give “Good Time” a claustrophobic energy that’s hard to fully convey in a review. It’s accomplished through intense close-ups and a style that could be called jittery but never calls too much attention to itself. It’s a visual language designed to enhance the enhance the mood of its leading man without distracting from it, and it works remarkably with an assist by a pulsing score from Daniel Lopatin.
Having said that, most of what shines so well about “Good Time” can be traced back to Robert Pattinson’s performance, the best of an already-impressive career. He is impossible to ignore from his very first scene, expressing Connie’s ability to only keep digging himself deeper and deeper into trouble. Connie makes choices instantly, and one gets the impression that it’s an instinctual ability that has helped him at times but will only prove his downfall on this particular night. “Good Time” is essentially one long chase movie—the story of a man trying to evade capture for a bank robbery and get his brother out of the predicament into which he threw him—and Pattinson perfectly conveys the nervous energy of being essentially hunted by your own bad decisions without ever feeling like he’s chewing scenery. Like Pacino in the ‘70s, there’s something in the eyes and the body language, an unease about what’s going to happen next, an inability to sit down. It is a stunning performance, and one of the best of 2017 by far.
By and large, films are passive experiences. We sit in the dark and allow stories to play out in front of us, behind the safety of the movie screen. Movies like “Good Time” that break down that comfort and make us as edgy as their protagonists are rare and should be embraced. They give us the characters that stand the test of time and, as with “Dog Day Afternoon,” people keep discussing four decades after their release. Connie Nikas is one of those characters.
New Republic..Good Time Is a Brilliantly Grim New York Thriller
Photo courtesy of A24
The Safdie brothers’ new movie with Robert Pattinson breathes life into a waning genre.
It was hard not to draw a couple of conclusions about current cinema from the 1970s New York program on at Film Forum last month: that the gentrification of the cityhas been accompanied by a gentrification of filmmaking styles; and that the New York-based thriller has undergone a sharp decline. The New York of The French Connection and Klute is still with us—the architecture and the elevated train rails, if less of the street signage and none of the old-model cars—but it tends to be omitted onscreen in films that show the cobblestoned streets of DUMBO, SoHo, and TriBeCa (it’s so often obviously those three neighborhoods) as trash-free zones of glossy self-realization and not quite tragic heartache. New York is now a city of respectable careerists. Missing are the sort of inept policemen who in Aram Avakian’s Cops and Robbers hit on a scheme to rip off a gangster in order to liberate themselves from their daily hours stuck in traffic on the BQE.
The terrain of the gritty street crime thriller has meanwhile largely been ceded to a kitchified Boston (as in The Departed or The Town) or a sweaty Atlanta (last year’sTriple 9). The New York period piece still thrives—see A Most Violent Year or American Hustle—but feeds on the notion that sleaziness and crime are things of the past. There are exceptions, of course—like James Gray’s The Yards or We Own the Night, or Michaël R. Roskam’s The Drop—but more typical is a shiny moralizing piece of trash like Allen Hughes’s Broken City. The presence in Broken City of Griffin Dunne, as the developer behind the corrupt mayor’s machinations, was a reminder of how far we are from After Hours, Martin Scorcese’s nocturnal SoHo freakout. In After Hours Dunne starred as a yuppie on the loose when there was still plenty of danger to be found downtown on any given night.
It’s the spirit of After Hours and Cops and Robbers that pervades Good Time, the new thriller by the brothers Josh and Benny Safdie. If future revivalists ever program a New York in the Teens festival, Good Time will have to be at its center. Connie and Nick, two brothers played by Robert Pattinson and Benny Safdie, are a pair of less than competent bank robbers. Nick is actually mentally disabled—rendered with moving pathos by Safdie—and the point of their heist is a windfall that will allow them to retreat somewhere south of the city and live in the woods, far away from the sort of invasive social services workers we see counseling him in the film’s opening scenes and the not entirely sweet grandmother who’s a source of Nick’s traumas. Connie’s plan involves a note, hoodies, and a pair of somewhat lifelike masks that make the brothers look like black men, then a getaway by bus from the Port Authority. It would be a hare-brained plan even if it weren’t for the cloud of incriminating red dye that bursts from the backpack full of cash just after they leave the bank.
Movie bank robberies have grown increasingly technical over the decades: enough blueprints, hardware, sangfroid, and hours in the library researching metals and we could all be Robert De Niro in Heat. Good Time restores the desperation and dirtbag absurdity of the endeavor. The film has room at once for pain and outrageous twists that lend the film an outlaw jocularity. Nick loses his nerve when approached by the cops and is arrested after running through a plate glass window. He’s taken to Riker’s Island, where his face is soon further bloodied. Connie spends the rest of the film trying to raise his bail (in clean bills) or break him out of hospital lockup. The overnight quest takes him to the apartment of a girlfriend (Jennifer Jason Leigh, playing the pliable lover of a significantly younger man), a bail bondsman’s office, Adventureland in Long Island City (in a scene that plays like a deranged version of the funhouse finale of Lady from Shanghai), and to the Tivoli Towers apartment complex in Crown Heights. The cramped dwellings, grimy White Castle franchises, and exhaust-filled expressways of this nightmare are parts of the city that sit beside the gentrified zones that prefer to pretend they don’t exist.
Pattinson, the Twilight vampire and the vampire capitalist in David Cronenberg’sCosmopolis, is deglamorized almost beyond recognition, then bleached blond when he sees his mug on the local news. Brotherly loyalty sparks new powers of resourcefulness in Connie, and he takes advantage of anyone unlucky enough to come into his orbit, including a stoned teenage girl (Taliyah Webster), a security guard (Barkhard Abdi), and another criminal (Buddy Duress). The filmmakers at times seem at pains to portray him as someone more sympathetic and selfless than a mere common criminal, though he lies, steals a car or two, kidnaps someone, poisons somebody else, and commits multiple assaults. But we root for him, mostly.
That’s because the Safdies have hit on a magical combination of the hyper-realism of their earlier films Heaven Knows What (2014), a searing portrait of a heroin addict (Arielle Holmes) on the Upper West Side, and The Pleasures of Being Robbed (2008), about a charming kleptomaniac (Eleonore Hendricks) adept at stealing handbags, and a purely cinematic ethos of amateur criminality derived from the sleazy 1970s. Their filming style—tight shots that follow characters as if attached to their necks by a leash—has the weird effect of making even the outdoors seem claustrophobic. There was something of this mix of the light and the heavy in Daddy Longlegs (2010), but that film was ultimately an endearing portrait of a loving father (based on the Safdies’ dad) just bumbling enough to knock out his sons for days on sleeping pills but not neglectful enough to convince the audience he’d let them come to real harm.Daddy Longlegs is sentimentality at its edgiest. Good Time is considerably grimmer but also considerably more fun. It suggests a dark, shadowy future—occasionally pierced by blinding neon lights—for a genre that’s lately seemed broken.
Rolling Stone… Robert Pattinson Delivers the Performance of His Career
Former teen heartthrob gets gritty in this wild ride of an indie crime thriller
By now, Robert Pattinson shouldn’t have to prove he can act. Cosmopolis, The Rover, Maps to the Stars and The Lost City of Z – they all show that his brooding Twilightdays have passed into teen-movie myth. But if doubters still need proof, check out the Pattinson tour de force in Good Time. The title makes the movie sound like a romp. Instead, it’s a hellish ride through a New York night. As directed by the Safdie brothers, Josh and Benny, the movie rips through 100 minutes of screen time like Wile E. Coyote with his tail on fire. It’s electrifying.
Pattinson plays Connie Nikas, a small-time crook with a protective love for his mentally-challenged brother Nick (Benny Safdie). It’s Connie who breaks his sibling out of a psych ward and tries to build his self-confidence by using him in a Queens bank robbery. Both wear hoodies and rubber masks; both beat a hasty retreat once they’ve secured the loot. But if you’ve seen the Safdie brothers strut their stuff in films like Heaven Knows What and Daddy Longlegs, you know that everything that can go wrong will go wrong. Working from a script by Josh Safdie and actor/longtime collaborator Ronnie Bronstein, Good Time makes an explosive combination of suspense and laughs. The pace intensifies without mercy (big shout-outs to Daniel Lopatin’s thumping score and Sean Price Williams’ prowling camera) as the NYPD grabs Nick. Connie cooks up a plan to grab him back. Imagine the Marx Brothers in a Tarantino movie and you get the picture.
After failing to squeeze bail money out of his older girlfriend Corey (Jennifer Jason Leigh), the desperate crook turns to Ray (Heaven Knows What actor Buddy Duress), a speed-talking parolee with access to liquid LSD that they hope to turn into cash. Duress is a primo scene-stealer – and he’s still trumped by the dynamite Taliah Webster as Crystal, a black teen with a practical interest in sex and a passion for reality cop shows. Connie is repulsed: “I don’t wanna see them justify this shit.”Through a series of misadventures, they all end up at a shut-down amusement park where a security guard, played by Captain Phillips Oscar nominee Barkhad Abdi, upsets their plans for a quick fix.
It’s a wild, whacked-out ride that cements the reputation of the Safdies as gutter poets with a flair for tension that won’t quit. But it’s a never-better Pattinson who gives the film soul and a center of gravity. The actor invests Connie with a devotion to his brother that never slips into fake sentiment. There’s not an ounce of Hollywood fat in Good Time. It comes at you hard.
NYFF…55th New York Film Festival Main Slate Announced
The 55th New York Film Festival’s Main Slate has been announced, featuring a selection of 25 films from around the globe.
NYFF Director and Selection Committee Chair Kent Jones said, “Every year, I’m asked about the themes in our Main Slate line-up, and every year I say the same thing: we choose the best films we see, and the common themes and preoccupations arise only after the fact. As I look at this slate of beautiful work, I could just make a series of simple observations: that these films come from all over the globe; that there is a nice balance of filmmakers known and unknown to many here in New York; that the overall balance between frankness and artistry holds me in awe; that there are two gala selections with the word ‘wonder’ in their titles; and that eight of the 25 films were directed by women.”
This year’s Main Slate showcases films honored at Cannes including Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or–winner The Square; Robin Campillo’s BPM, awarded the Cannes Critics’ Prize; and Agnès Varda & JR’s Faces Places, which took home the Golden Eye. From Berlin, Aki Kaurismäki’s Silver Bear–winner The Other Side of Hope and Agnieszka Holland’s Alfred Bauer Prize–winner Spoor mark the returns of two New York Film Festival veterans, while Luca Guadagnino’s acclaimed Call Me by Your Name will be his NYFF debut. Also returning are Arnaud Desplechin, Noah Baumbach, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Claire Denis, Philippe Garrel, Lucrecia Martel, and Hong Sang-soo, who has two features in the lineup this year, while filmmakers new to the festival include Sean Baker, Greta Gerwig, Serge Bozon, Dee Rees, Chloé Zhao, Joachim Trier, Alain Gomis, and Valeska Grisebach.
As previously announced, the NYFF55 Opening Night is Richard Linklater’s Last Flag Flying, Todd Haynes’s Wonderstruck is Centerpiece, and Woody Allen’sWonder Wheel will close the festival.
The 55th New York Film Festival Main Slate
Opening Night
Last Flag Flying
Dir. Richard Linklater
Centerpiece
Wonderstruck
Dir. Todd Haynes
Closing Night
Wonder Wheel
Dir. Woody Allen
Before We Vanish
Dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa
BPM (Beats Per Minute)/120 battements par minute
Dir. Robin Campillo
Bright Sunshine In/Un beau soleil intérieur
Dir. Claire Denis
Call Me by Your Name
Dir. Luca Guadagnino
The Day After
Dir. Hong Sang-soo
Faces Places/Visages villages
Dir. Agnès Varda & JR
Félicité
Dir. Alain Gomis
The Florida Project
Dir. Sean Baker
Ismael’s Ghosts/Les fantômes d’Ismaël
Dir. Arnaud Desplechin
Lady Bird
Dir. Greta Gerwig
Lover for a Day/L’Amant d’un jour
Dir. Philippe Garrel
The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
Dir. Noah Baumbach
Mrs. Hyde/Madame Hyde
Dir. Serge Bozon
Mudbound
Dir. Dee Rees
On the Beach at Night Alone
Dir. Hong Sang-soo
The Other Side of Hope/Toivon tuolla puolen
Dir. Aki Kaurismäki
The Rider
Dir. Chloé Zhao
Spoor/Pokot
Dir. Agnieszka Holland, in cooperation with Kasia Adamik
The Square
Dir. Ruben Östlund
Thelma
Dir. Joachim Trier
Western
Dir. Valeska Grisebach
Zama
Dir. Lucrecia Martel
NYFF Special Events, Spotlight on Documentary, Revivals, Convergence, and Projections sections, as well as filmmaker conversations and panels, will be announced in the coming weeks.
The 18-day New York Film Festival highlights the best in world cinema, featuring works from celebrated filmmakers as well as fresh new talent. The selection committee, chaired by Jones, also includes Dennis Lim, FSLC Director of Programming; Florence Almozini, FSLC Associate Director of Programming; and Amy Taubin, Contributing Editor, Film Comment and Sight & Sound.
Tickets for the 55th New York Film Festival will go on sale September 10. Become a member by August 16 to get discounts and early ticket access at NYFF. VIP passes and packages are on sale now and offer one of the earliest opportunities to purchase tickets and secure seats at some of the festival’s biggest events. Learn more here.
55th NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL
Films & Descriptions
Opening Night
Last Flag Flying
Dir. Richard Linklater, USA, 2017, 119m
World Premiere
In Richard Linklater’s lyrical road movie, as funny as it is heartbreaking, three aging Vietnam-era Navy vets—soft-spoken Doc (Steve Carell), unhinged and unfiltered Sal (Bryan Cranston), and quietly measured Mueller (Laurence Fishburne)—reunite to perform a sacred task: the proper burial of Doc’s only child, who has been killed in the early days of the Iraq invasion. As this trio of old friends makes its way up the Eastern seaboard, Linklater gives us a rich rendering of friendship, a grand mosaic of common life in the USA during the Bush era, and a striking meditation on the passage of time and the nature of truth. To put it simply, Last Flag Flying is a great movie from one of America’s finest filmmakers. An Amazon Studios release.
Centerpiece
Wonderstruck
Dir. Todd Haynes, USA, 2017, 117m
In 1977, following the death of his single mother, Ben (Oakes Fegley) loses his hearing in a freak accident and makes his way from Minnesota to New York, hoping to learn about the father he has never met. A half-century earlier, another deaf 12-year-old, Rose (Millicent Simmonds), flees her restrictive Hoboken home, captivated by the bustle and romance of the nearby big city. Each of these parallel adventures, unfolding largely without dialogue, is an exuberant love letter to a different bygone era of New York. The mystery of how they ultimately converge, which involves Julianne Moore in a lovely dual role, provides the film’s emotional core. Adapted from a young-adult novel by Hugo author Brian Selznick, Wonderstruck is an all-ages enchantment, entirely true to director Todd Haynes’s sensibility: an intelligent, deeply personal, and lovingly intricate tribute to the power of obsession. An Amazon Studios release.
Closing Night
Wonder Wheel
Dir. Woody Allen, USA, 2017
World Premiere
In a career spanning 50 years and almost as many features, Woody Allen has periodically refined, reinvented, and redefined the terms of his art, and that’s exactly what he does with his daring new film. We’re in Coney Island in the 1950s. A lifeguard (Justin Timberlake) tells us a story that just might be filtered through his vivid imagination: a middle-aged carousel operator (Jim Belushi) and his beleaguered wife (Kate Winslet), who eke out a living on the boardwalk, are visited by his estranged daughter (Juno Temple)—a situation from which layer upon layer of all-too-human complications develop. Allen and his cinematographer, the great Vittorio Storaro, working with a remarkable cast led by Winslet in a startlingly brave, powerhouse performance, have created a bracing and truly surprising movie experience. An Amazon Studios release.
Before We Vanish
Dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan, 2017, 129m
The latest from master of art-horror Kiyoshi Kurosawa is perhaps his most mainstream film yet, a throwback to 1980s sci-fi. An advance crew of three aliens journey to Earth in preparation for a complete takeover of the planet. They snatch not only bodies but memories, beliefs, values—everything that defines their conquests as human—leaving only hollow shells, which are all but unrecognizable to their loved ones. This disturbing parable for our present moment, replete with stunning images—including a drone attack and a bit of Clockwork Orange–style murder and mayhem—is also a profoundly mystical affirmation of love as the only form of resistance and salvation. A NEON release.
BPM (Beats Per Minute)/120 battements par minute
Dir. Robin Campillo, France, 2017, 144m
U.S. Premiere
In the early 1990s, ACT UP—in France, as in the U.S.—was on the front lines of AIDS activism. Its members, mostly gay, HIV-positive men, stormed drug company and government offices in “Silence=Death” T-shirts, facing down complacent suits with the urgency of their struggle for life. Robin Campillo (Eastern Boys) depicts their comradeship and tenacity in waking up the world to the disease that was killing them and movingly dramatizes the persistence of passionate love affairs even in dire circumstances. All the actors, many of them unknown, are splendid in this film, which not only celebrates the courage of ACT UP but also tacitly provides a model of resistance to the forces of destruction running rampant today. A release of The Orchard.
Bright Sunshine In/Un beau soleil intérieur
Dir. Claire Denis, France, 2017, 95m
North American Premiere
Juliette Binoche is both incandescent and emotionally raw in Claire Denis’s extraordinary new film as Isabelle, a middle-aged Parisian artist in search of definitive love. The film moves elliptically, as though set to some mysterious bio-rhythm, from one romantic/emotional attachment to another: from the boorish married lover (Xavier Beauvois); to the subtly histrionic actor (Nicolas Duvauchelle), also married; to the dreamboat hairdresser (Paul Blain); to the gentle man (Alex Descas) not quite ready for commitment to . . . a mysterious fortune-teller. Appropriately enough, Bright Sunshine In (very loosely inspired by Roland Barthes’sA Lover’s Discourse) feels like it’s been lit from within; it was lit from without by Denis’s longtime cinematographer Agnès Godard. It is also very funny. A Sundance Selects release.
Call Me by Your Name
Dir. Luca Guadagnino, Italy/France, 2017, 132m
A story of summer love unlike any other, the sensual new film from the director of I Am Love, set in 1983, charts the slowly ripening romance between Elio (Timothée Chalamet), an American teen on the verge of discovering himself, and Oliver (Armie Hammer), the handsome older grad student whom his professor father (Michael Stuhlbarg) has invited to their vacation home in Northern Italy. Adapted from the wistful novel by André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name is Guadagnino’s most exquisitely rendered, visually restrained film, capturing with eloquence the confusion and longing of youth, anchored by a remarkable, star-making performance by Chalamet, always a nervy bundle of swagger and insecurity, contrasting with Hammer’s stoicism. A Sony Pictures Classics release.
The Day After
Dir. Hong Sang-soo, South Korea, 2017, 92m
U.S. Premiere
Hong continues in the openly emotional register of his On the Beach at Night Alone, also showing in this year’s Main Slate. Shot in moody black and white, The Day After opens with book publisher Bongwan (Kwon Hae-hyo) fending off his wife’s heated accusations of infidelity. At the office, it’s the first day for his new assistant, Areum (Kim Min-hee), whose predecessor was Bongwan’s lover. Mistaken identity, repetition compulsion, and déjà vu figure into the narrative as the film entangles its characters across multiple timelines through an intricate geometry of desire, suspicion, and betrayal. The end result is one of Hong’s most plaintive and philosophical works.
Faces Places/Visages villages
Dir. Agnès Varda & JR, France, 2016, 89m
The 88-year-old Agnès Varda teamed up with the 33-year-old visual artist JR for this tour of rural France that follows in the footsteps of Varda’s groundbreaking documentary The Gleaners and I (NYFF 2000) in its celebration of artisanal production, workers’ solidarity, and the photographic arts in the face of mortality. Varda and JR wielded cameras themselves, but they were also documented in their travels by multiple image and sound recordists. Out of this often spontaneous jumble, Varda and her editor Maxime Pozzi-Garcia created an unassuming masterpiece (the winner of this year’s L’Oeil d’or at Cannes) that is vivid, lyrical, and inspiringly humanistic. A Cohen Media Group release.
Félicité
Dir. Alain Gomis, France/Senegal/Belgium/Germany/Lebanon, 2017, 124m
U.S. Premiere
The new film from Alain Gomis, a French director of Guinea-Bissauan and Senegalese descent, is largely set in the roughest areas of the rough city of Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Here, a woman named Félicité (Véro Tshanda Beya Mputu) scrapes together a living as a singer in a makeshift bar (her accompanists are played by members of the Kasai Allstars band). When her son is seriously injured in an accident, she goes in search of money for his medical care and embarks on a double journey: through the punishing outer world of the city and the inner world of the soul. Félicité is tough, tender, lyrical, mysterious, funny, and terrifying, both responsive to the moment and fixed on its heroine’s spiritual progress. A Strand Releasing release.
The Florida Project
Dir. Sean Baker, USA, 2017, 105m
U.S. Premiere
A six-year-old girl (the remarkable Brooklynn Prince) and her two best friends run wild on the grounds of a week-by-week motel complex on the edge of Orlando’s Disney World. Meanwhile, her mother (talented novice Bria Vinaite) desperately tries to cajole the motel manager (an ever-surprising Willem Dafoe) to turn a blind eye to the way she pays the rent. A film about but not for kids, Baker’s depiction of childhood on the margins has fierce energy, tenderness, and great beauty. After the ingenuity of his iPhone-shot 2015 breakout Tangerine, Baker reasserts his commitment to 35mm film with sun-blasted images that evoke a young girl’s vision of adventure and endurance beyond heartbreak. An A24 release.
Ismael’s Ghosts/Les fantômes d’Ismaël
Dir. Arnaud Desplechin, France, 2017, 132m
North American Premiere
Phantoms swirl around Ismael (Mathieu Amalric), a filmmaker in the throes of writing a spy thriller based on the unlikely escapades of his brother, Ivan Dedalus (Louis Garrel). His only true source of stability, his relationship with Sylvia (Charlotte Gainsbourg), is upended, as is the life of his Jewish documentarian mentor and father-in-law (László Szabó), when Ismael’s wife Carlotta (Marion Cotillard), who disappeared twenty years earlier, returns, and, like one of Hitchcock’s fragile, delusional femmes fatales, expects that her husband and father are still in thrall to her. A brilliant shape-shifter—part farce, part melodrama—Ismael’s Ghosts is finally about the process of creating a work of art and all the madness required. A Magnolia Pictures release.
Lady Bird
Dir. Greta Gerwig, USA, 2017, 93m
Greta Gerwig’s directorial debut is a portrait of an artistically inclined young woman (Saoirse Ronan) trying to define herself in the shadow of her mother (Laurie Metcalf) and searching for an escape route from her hometown of Sacramento. Moods are layered upon moods at the furious pace of late adolescence in this lovely and loving film, which shifts deftly from one emotional and comic register to the next.Lady Bird is rich in invention and incident, and it is powered by Ronan, one of the finest actors in movies. With Lucas Hedges and Timothée Chalamet as the men in Lady Bird’s life, Beanie Feldstein as her best friend, and Tracy Letts as her dad. An A24 release.
Lover for a Day/L’Amant d’un jour
Dir. Philippe Garrel, France, 2017, 76m
North American Premiere
Lover for a Day is an exquisite meditation on love and fidelity that recalls Garrel’s previous NYFF selections Jealousy (NYFF 2013) and In the Shadow of Women(NYFF 2015). After a painful breakup, heartbroken Jeanne (Esther Garrel) moves back in with her university professor father, Gilles (Eric Caravaca), to discover that he is living with optimistic, life-loving student Ariane (newcomer Louise Chevillotte), who is the same age as Jeanne. An unusual triangular relationship emerges as both girls seek the favor of Gilles, as daughter or lover, while developing their own friendship, finding common ground despite their differences. Gorgeously shot in grainy black and white by Renato Berta (Au revoir les enfants), Lover for a Dayperfectly illustrates Garrel’s poetic exploration of relationships and desire. A MUBI release.
The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
Dir. Noah Baumbach, USA, 2017, 110m
North American Premiere
Noah Baumbach revisits the terrain of family vanities and warring attachments that he began exploring with The Squid and the Whale in this intricately plotted story of three middle-aged siblings (Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, and Elizabeth Marvel) coping with their strong-willed father (Dustin Hoffman) and the flightiness of his wife (Emma Thompson). Baumbach’s film never stops deftly changing gears, from surges of pathos to painful comedy and back again. Needless to say, this lyrical quicksilver comedy is very much a New York experience. A Netflix release.
Mrs. Hyde/Madame Hyde
Dir. Serge Bozon, France, 2017, 95m
North American Premiere
Serge Bozon’s eccentric comedic thriller is loosely based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, with many a twist. Mrs. Géquil (Isabelle Huppert), a timid and rather peculiar physics professor, teaches in a suburban technical high school. Apart from her quiet married life with her gentle stay-at-home husband, she is mocked and despised on a daily basis by pretty much everyone around her—headmaster, colleagues, students. During a dark, stormy night, she is struck by lightning and wakes up a decidedly different person, a newly powerful Mrs. Hyde with mysterious energy and uncontrollable powers. Highlighted by Bozon’s brilliant mise en scène, Isabelle Huppert hypnotizes us again, securing her place as the ultimate queen of the screen.
Mudbound
Dir. Dee Rees, USA, 2017, 134m
Writer/director Dee Rees’s historical epic details daily life and social dynamics in the failing economy of Mississippi during the World War II era. Two families, one white (the landlords) and one black (the sharecroppers), work the same miserable piece of farmland. Out of need and empathy, the mothers of the two families bond as their younger male relatives go off to war and learn that there is a world beyond racial hatred and fear. The flawless ensemble cast includes Carey Mulligan, Mary J. Blige, Garrett Hedlund, Jason Mitchell, Jason Clarke, Rob Morgan, and Jonathan Banks. A Netflix release.
On the Beach at Night Alone
Dir. Hong Sang-soo, South Korea, 2017, 101m
Hong Sang-soo’s movies have always invited autobiographical readings, and his 19th feature is perhaps his most achingly personal film yet, a steel-nerved, clear-eyed response to the tabloid frenzy that erupted in South Korea over his relationship with actress Kim Min-hee. The film begins in Hamburg, where actress Young-hee (played by Kim herself, who won the Best Actress prize at Berlin for this role) is hiding out after the revelation of her affair with a married filmmaker. Back in Korea, a series of encounters shed light on Young-hee’s volatile state, as she slips in and out of melancholic reflection and dreams. Centered on Kim’s astonishingly layered performance, On the Beach at Night Alone is the work of a master mining new emotional depths. A Cinema Guild release.
The Other Side of Hope/Toivon tuolla puolen
Dir. Aki Kaurismäki, Finland, 2017, 98m
Leave it to Aki Kaurismäki (Le Havre, NYFF 2011), peerless master of humanist tragicomedy, to make the first great fiction film about the 21st century migrant crisis. Having escaped bombed-out Aleppo, Syrian refugee Khlaed (Sherwan Haji) seeks asylum in Finland, only to get lost in a maze of functionaries and bureaucracies. Meanwhile, shirt salesman Wikström (Sakari Kuosmanen) leaves his wife, wins big in a poker game, and takes over a restaurant whose deadpan staff he also inherits. These parallel stories dovetail to gently comic and enormously moving effect in Kaurismäki’s politically urgent fable, an object lesson on the value of compassion and hope that remains grounded in a tangible social reality. A Janus Films release.
The Rider
Dir. Chloé Zhao, USA, 2017, 104m
The hardscrabble economy of America’s rodeo country, where, for some, riding and winning is the only source of pleasure and income, is depicted with exceptional compassion and truth by a filmmaker who is in no way an insider: Zhao was born in Beijing and educated at Mount Holyoke and NYU. Set on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, The Rider is a fiction film that calls on nonprofessional actors to play characters similar to themselves, incorporating their skill sets and experiences. Brady Jandreau is extraordinary as a badly injured former champion rider and horse trainer forced to give up the life he knows and loves. A Sony Pictures Classics release.
Spoor/Pokot
Dir. Agnieszka Holland, in cooperation with Kasia Adamik, Poland/Germany/Czech Republic, 2017, 128m
U.S. Premiere
Janina Duszejko (Agnieszka Mandat) is a vigorous former engineer, part-time teacher, and animal activist, living in a near wilderness on the Polish-Czech border, where hunting is the favored year-round sport of the corrupt men who rule the region. When a series of hunters die mysteriously, Janina wonders if the animals are taking revenge, which doesn’t stop the police from coming after her. A brilliant, passionate director, Agnieszka Holland—who like Janina comes from a generation that learned to fight authoritarianism by any means necessary—forges a sprawling, wildly beautiful, emotionally enveloping film that earns its vision of utopia. It’s at once a phantasmagorical murder mystery, a tender, late-blooming love story, and a resistance and rescue thriller.
The Square
Dir. Ruben Östlund, Sweden, 2017, 150m
A precisely observed, thoroughly modern comedy of manners, Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or–winner revolves around Christian (Claes Bang), a well-heeled contemporary art curator at a Stockholm museum. While preparing his new exhibit—a four-by-four-meter zone designated as a “sanctuary of trust and caring”—Christian falls prey to a pickpocketing scam, which triggers an overzealous response and then a crisis of conscience. Featuring several instant-classic scenes and a vivid supporting cast (Elisabeth Moss, Dominic West, and noted motion-capture actor Terry Notary), The Square is the most ambitious film yet by one of contemporary cinema’s most incisive social satirists, the rare movie to have as many laughs as ideas. A Magnolia Pictures release.
Thelma
Dir. Joachim Trier, Norway/Sweden/France, 2017, 116m
In the new film from Joachim Trier (Reprise), an adolescent country girl (Eili Harboe) has just moved to the city to begin her university studies, with the internalized religious severity of her quietly domineering mother and father (Ellen Dorrit Petersen and Henrik Rafaelsen) always in mind. When she realizes that she is developing an attraction to her new friend Anja (Okay Kaya), she begins to manifest a terrifying and uncontrollable power that her parents have long feared. To reveal more would be a crime; let’s just say that this fluid, sharply observant, and continually surprising film begins in the key of horror and ends somewhere completely different. A release of The Orchard.
Western
Dir. Valeska Grisebach, Germany and Bulgaria, 2017, 119m
U.S. Premiere
As its title suggests, German director Valeska Grisebach’s first feature in a decade is a supremely intelligent genre update that recognizes the Western as a template on which to draw out eternal human conflicts. In remote rural Bulgaria, a group of German workers are building a water facility. Meinhard (Meinhard Neumann), the reserved newbie in this all-male company, immediately draws the ire of the boorish team leader, not least for his willingness to mingle with the wary locals. Cast with utterly convincing nonprofessional actors, Western is a gripping culture-clash drama, attuned both to old codes of masculinity and new forms of colonialism. A Cinema Guild release.
Zama
Dir. Lucrecia Martel, Argentina/Brazil/Spain, 2017, 115m
U.S. Premiere
The great Lucrecia Martel ventures into the realm of historical fiction and makes the genre entirely her own in this adaptation of Antonio di Benedetto’s 1956 classic of Argentinean literature. In the late 18th century, in a far-flung corner of what seems to be Paraguay, the title character, an officer of the Spanish crown (Daniel Giménez Cacho) born in the Americas, waits in vain for a transfer to a more prestigious location. Martel renders Zama’s world—his daily regimen of small humiliations and petty politicking—as both absurd and mysterious, and as he increasingly succumbs to lust and paranoia, subject to a creeping disorientation. Precise yet dreamlike, and thick with atmosphere, Zama is a singular and intoxicating experience, a welcome return from one of contemporary cinema’s truly brilliant minds.
Kristen Stewart Reflects on the Allure of Gabrielle, Chanel’s Latest Fragrance
Kristen Stewart Reflects on the Allure of Gabrielle, Chanel’s Latest Fragrance
“[Authenticity is about] being true to that feeling in your stomach and having the confidence and lack of fear to follow that.”
Karl Lagerfeld often layers his collections with prescient commentary on the current state of affairs. At the recent Chanel Haute Couture show in July, he installed a partial replica of the Eiffel Tower in the centre of the Grand Palais. The original structure was built in 1889 to commemorate the centennial of the French Revolution. The top of Lagerfeld’s tower, which disappeared into a cloudy mist, hinted at an uncertain and restive future. The clothes were also stylishly sombre and structural, with occasional feathered and sequined embellishments softening their severity. In his review for Business of Fashion, Tim Blanks opined that Lagerfeld was bracing for the end of the post-Macron high. “This lion is in winter,” wrote Blanks. “And a front row of Kristen Stewart, Katy Perry, Cara Delevingne and Tilda Swinton, hair cropped uniformly, militantly close, were like his shock troops for the turmoil to come.”
A few days after the show, I meet with Kristen Stewart to talk about her new role as muse for Gabrielle Chanel, Chanel’s latest fragrance. But first I want to know how she feels about being a member of Lagerfeld’s “shock troop” and if she shares his opinion that we’re on the verge of turmoil. “Oh, yeah,” she says. “I think we’re very much in the midst of it. If you look back through history, the most amazing artistic revolutions are in conjunction with crazy political turmoil. That’s the response to it. I think things go in cycles. I really do believe it will turn around. There are too many people feeling too badly for it not to.” She is less enthused by Blanks’s comments about her frosted-tip pixie cut. “I’m happy that people say things like that about my fucking hair,” she quips.
But hair—especially for women—is a powerful signifier, I suggest; it’s not just a flip comment about style. Stewart, who is clearly a thoughtful young woman, pauses for a moment. The 27-year-old actress then opens up about how she was surprised by her own reaction to her short hair. “I like it, and oddly I feel more feminine,” she explains. “I had it cut for an action movie I’m doing, and I wanted to be careful that it didn’t make me look like I was trying too hard to be a badass. I didn’t want it to harden me, but as soon as I took it off, I felt delicate. I felt very much like a woman because it’s revealing. You can see everything—all of our most feminine qualities—our neck, chest and collarbones. Nothing is hidden.”
Coincidentally, those are also the areas on our body where we wear fragrance. The language used to market new scents can be flowery and poetic, but the press material for Gabrielle reads like a feminist manifesto: “Gabrielle Chanel fragrance invites women to have faith in who they are and what they are capable of achieving to find their own voice.”
We do associate emotions and memories with scent, but I ask Stewart whether a fragrance can also inspire a feminist sentiment. She tells me that she appreciates the narrative behind the fragrance but says it’s not important whether or not it has that power. What she loves about it is that it is “unabashedly feminine,” adding that there’s nothing worse than using masculine references or impressions to evoke feminist sentiments. “There’s nothing aggressive about this perfume,” she says. “It’s quiet, and that’s its strength. It doesn’t try too hard. Men and women are equal, but we’re not the same. Our strengths are different…. It’s nice that the fragrance’s unsubmissive nature is also purely girlie and that I’m not wearing a suit in the campaign.”
Although fragrance—which she describes as an indulgence—is evocative, Stewart concedes that it doesn’t have the same power as fashion over how a woman feels about herself. “I feel like it’s icing,” she says. “It’s the final touch.” Stewart adds that she’s not “incredibly into fashion” but credits Lagerfeld with helping her discover herself through clothes, pictures and the conversations they’ve had. “It’s like an embedded aspect of myself is brought to the surface by somebody who has the key,” she explains. “It’s like being a good director. There are a lot of people in fashion who don’t function this way, but the people I admire are seers. They’re like compulsive weirdos; they’re artists who can’t stop doing what they do. For me, it’s not necessarily about the clothes; it’s about the feeling.”
And that feeling is all about empowerment. “It’s crazy what an article of clothing can do for you,” she laughs, adding that she can show up wearing Chanel to present a movie at Cannes—“theoretically the scariest place in the world”—and feel invincible. “It’s not armour, but when I put something on and it’s absolutely undeniably and distinctly me, I feel great.”
Feeling authentic is something Stewart aspires to—whether that’s reflected in the parts she plays in films or her role with Chanel. It’s instinctual rather than contrived, and it’s about “being true to that feeling in your stomach and having the confidence and lack of fear to follow that and knowing that you’re not perfect.” Today she’s confident and composed, but the Twilight Saga star suffered from anxiety for years—to the point of being physically ill. Stewart says it resolved itself as she got older and learned to relinquish control. Her advice to anyone with similar struggles is to be kind to yourself and not judge yourself harshly. “If you have anxiety, it just means you’re a thinker, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Appreciate that. It’s a good quality to have.”
Stewart may be calm and cool today, but she concedes that if she were to have an encounter with Coco Chanel, it would be “as intimidating as hell!” She smiles when I ask her what questions she might ask Mademoiselle. “The first thing that comes to mind is: ‘Dude, do you know what you did? Are you aware of it? Years and years later, we’re still telling your story; I hope we’re doing a good job.’ I’d be like, ‘Are you proud? Are we doing it right?’” In the press kit for Gabrielle, it opens with this quote from Chanel: “I have chosen the person I wanted to be and am.” I think she would feel that Stewart is living her life with a similar sentiment.
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