Four from the Forum

We’ll take a closer look at the rest of the competition after the awards are announced on Wednesday, and then delve into the critical response to Fire when it arrives in New York on March 3 to open Film at Lincoln Center’s Rendez-Vous with French Cinema. Today we turn to the Forum, to two films loosely adapted from plays, another inspired by the work of a groundbreaking ecologist, and a documentary that serves in part as a history of the festival’s most aesthetically and thematically daring section.

As the final credits roll on The Kegelstatt Trio, Portuguese director Rita Azevedo Gomes thanks her cast and crew for their “disinterested collaboration,” and in every aspect of the production, there is a sense of weightless ease that only the truly accomplished can afford. Le trio en mi bémol was to have been a fifth episode in what instead became Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle (1987). Eric Rohmer ultimately decided to develop the two-hander into his only theatrical play.

In Azevedo Gomes’s film, Adélia (Rita Durão) drops in on her ex, Paul (Pierre Léon), a musician—or perhaps a musicologist or composer—who lives alone in an airy modernist house near the coast (the film was shot in the northwest corner of Portugal). In the first of seven conversations that take place over the course of a year, they discuss Adélia’s love life, but what they’re really working out is a definition of the parameters of their own postromantic relationship.

“Cut!” interrupts this first scene, which is now revealed to be part of a film within the film. The director, Jorge, played by Spanish filmmaker Adolfo Arrieta, tells each of his actors that they were absolutely perfect, but the scene isn’t working, and he has no idea why. His assistant, Mariana (Olivia Cábez), tells the actors not to take it too hard: “It’s all a big joke!” The Kegelstatt Trio is far richer than a setup and a punchline, but it is a Rohmerian comedy after all, and one with a slow-turning twist that hinges on Adélia and Paul’s shared passion for Mozart’s 1786 trio for clarinet, viola, and piano in E-flat major.

Before A Flower in the Mouth premiered over the weekend, Éric Baudelaire had been trying to get an adaptation of Luigi Pirandello’s 1922 play L’uomo dal fiore in bocca off the ground for more than twenty years. In two distinct parts, Baudelaire, working with cinematographer Claire Mathon and editor Claire Atherton, twice juxtaposes the beauty of flowers with premonitions of doom. Following a prelude in which an unnamed man (rapper Oxmo Puccino) silently watches Paris shut down for the evening, the first section is a straight-up observational documentary. At the world’s largest flower market in the Netherlands, blossoms are sorted, bunched, cellophaned, boxed, and stacked on robot trolleys that glide past workers attending to their machines, lost in perpetual, deadeningly repetitive motion.

The second section returns to the man from the prologue as he enters one of the few bars still open at this late hour and orders his usual. He drinks alone until another man (Dali Benssalah) comes in, places his neat little shopping bags on the bar, and orders a Blue Lagoon (it looks awful, but sounds not all that bad: Curaçao, vodka, and lemonade). With a friendly smile and a barely detectable hint of urgency, the regular strikes up a conversation. He’s a keen observer and a florid talker who eventually steers his meandering chat with the newcomer toward a sort confession and command: seize the day. In the 1990s, Baudelaire intended to make this film about AIDS, “and then Covid-19 gave it yet another dimension,” he says. “But every time reality catches up with the text, its literary and philosophical depth allows it to transcend the news and tragedies of the moment. Beyond disease and death, it is a film about life.”

Writing about Afterwater, director Dane Komljen quotes from G. Evelyn Hutchinson’s A Treatise on Limnology: “Lakes seem, on the scale of years or of human life spans, permanent features of landscapes, but they are geologically transitory, usually born of catastrophes, to mature and to die quietly and imperceptibly.” Two students, a zoologist and a botanist, wrap their work in their respective labs and take a train from Berlin to a distant lakeside, where they set up a tent, swim, wander, and read to each other—odes to water by poets from around the world, legends of sunken cities, and stories of a saintlike man tormented by a dark secret.

On its own, this first half of Afterwater would surely be one of the most beautiful films at the festival. There are sequences that may bring Tsai Ming-liang to mind and shots reminiscent of the early work of Albert Serra. But Afterwater segues into a second half shot on analogue video that comes off as salvaged footage from an earlier project. Dancers in pleated skirts interact with the flora of a swampy forest, and while some of their seemingly improvised choreography mirrors passages from the far less scuzzy first half, it becomes difficult after a while to overcome the impression that the film has reached a point of diminishing returns.

As mentioned on Thursday,Come with Me to the Cinema: The Gregors is a documentary portrait of cinema’s most vital curators in Germany, Ulrich and Erika Gregor. Stylistically, Alice Agneskirchner’s film can get a little choppy here and there. Some might have been able to do without the reenactments of the Gregors as young students scooting around on Ulrich’s Vespa as they transport the reels of their latest discovery to a university film society. But the stories these two have to tell—Claude Lanzmann encouraging Erika to come to terms with the trauma of her childhood, Ulrich convincing Jim Jarmusch that he was a genuine filmmaker when no one else wanted anything to do with Permanent Vacation (1980)—are captivating.

The film truly soars when it takes a break from sequencing events—this scandal, that protest, the founding of the Arsenal movie theater and then the Forum—to dwell on the Gregors’ evolving and ongoing relationships with individual films and their makers. The Gregors’ recollections of Konrad Wolf (Divided Heaven, 1964), for example, or their discussion of their current friendships with István Szabó (Father, 1965) and Jutta Brückner (Years of Hunger, 1980) are enriched with smartly selected clips. Come with Me to the Cinema runs just over two and a half hours and would have undoubtedly remained just as engaging if it ran for two and a half more.