Unknown Pleasures

Taking the pulse of New York City's film culture is not merely a matter of running through the list of 400-plus new films released in commercial arthouses and multiplexes in the last year. To measure the breadth and vitality of the city's scene--a community composed of multifarious niches--you need to examine the entire culture of talk, print, screenings, events, festivals, and surrounding interactions. You need to face all that flares up from the margins along with all that galvanizes attention center stage. It's within this sphere that the "Film Comment Selects" series now underway at the Film Society of Lincoln Center can be taken as a sign of the community's good health.

The slate of movies offered in the two-week program, inaugurated in 2002 and now a welcome annual affair, does not fall under any thematic, historical, or national banner. Instead, these are all films curated out of passionate critical advocacy, titles brought together from the past year's international film festival season, running from Rotterdam and Berlin to Venice, Toronto, and Vancouver. Donning the collective role of curator are the pack of contributing writers to Film Comment, the Film Society's bimonthly publication (at present, the best American film magazine, though Canada's Cinemascope surpasses it on the continent).

In this way, such essential critics as Kent Jones, Chuck Stephens, Olaf Möller (in Cologne), and Fréderic Bonnaud (in Paris, at Libération), under the editorship of Gavin Smith, marry their convictions and exert a refreshing influence on the film-going opportunities available to New Yorkers. The Film Comment series--which entails the Village Voice's yearly unveiling of best undistributed movies that play in early summer at the BAM Cinématek--furthermore acts as an invaluable supplement to the New York Film Festival's heavy-hitting selection each September.

As it happens, French and Asian cinemas field the most films in this year's edition. One of the best bets is Bright Future, the first digital video feature from rising Japanese writer-director Kiyoshi Kurosawa. His brilliant metaphysical murder-mystery Cure (1997) was tuned to a chilling, hypnotic pitch of unease, the result of a startling succession of enigmatic encounters. This new one revolves around a Tokyo factory worker's pet poisonous jellyfish and the fiery red creature's unnerving mutation. Takashi Shimizu's The Grudge promises frightening payoffs. It's firmly locked into the J-horror genre mode now in bloom and spearheaded by Takashi Miike's demented thrillers.

Three DV productions arrive from China, where breakneck urban transformations have fueled a so-called New Wave in the last few years. Andrew Cheng's pair of underground Shanghai-set features shot on a shoestring might be overshadowed by the dystopian All Tomorrow's Parties, the debut of Yu Lik-wai (cinematographer to Jia Zhang-ke).

Some of the most highly anticipated premieres are French works from proven auteurs. The Story of Marie and Julien is the latest from veteran New Wave filmmaker Jacques Rivette, and it concerns a clock repairman and his lost love (the forever stunning Emmanuelle Béart). By all accounts, Rivette's serene assurance and knack for cerebral narrative gamesmanship are present again, recalling the daring play of haunting reality and phantasmatic dream found in his 1970s masterpieces.

André Téchiné works in a vein of intimate discretion, observation, and clarity focused on deeply felt relationships. His new film Strayed (opening later this year) is largely set in a French country house during the Occupation. Arnaud Desplechin is a director who always seems to be working at an oblique angle to other filmmakers, pinpointing effects everyone else takes for granted and making them newly sharp and strange. While it's highly unlikely Playing "In the Company of Men" will be the equal of his astonishing and beguiling 2000 movie Esther Kahn, its premise sounds intriguing: a self-referential, disruptive adaptation of a fairly conventional play.

Alongside these known names, there's Alain Guirardie and his first feature No Rest for the Brave, described as a virtuosic and droll fable traversing a countryside terrain, drifting along like a nutty dream. The last third of the Film Comment series consists of a seven-film retrospective of Jean-Claude Brisseau, an unknown quantity on this side of the Atlantic, whose Secret Things will open here next week.

As for the rest of the line-up's highlights, The Magic Gloves, the third movie from Argentine filmmaker Martin Rejtman, is an unsentimental portrait of a Buenos Aires gypsy cab driver that blurs deadpan comedy and static melancholy. In a documentary hybrid The Five Obstructions (opening later this year), Danish provocateur Lars Von Trier challenges his mentor Jörgen Leth, creator of the 1967 short The Perfect Human, to the task of remaking his classic five times over, according to a gauntlet of formal constraints. Two other documentaries take more associative, expository approaches. Canadian documentarian Peter Mettler treks around the world, with the search for transcendence as his subject, in his wide-ranging Gambling, Gods and LSD. While the venerable film scholar Thom Andersen's Los Angeles Plays Itself (opening later this year) burrows into the architecture, iconography, and geography of the city as seen through films that have been set there.

Lamentably, a good deal of the finest independent and foreign films follow snaking paths before finally arriving on screens and then swiftly disappearing. Seizing their chance, local cinephiles--burning for those films which until now they've only read about--will certainly be gratified in the next two weeks, and so will moviegoers in the mood for more adventurous fare, curious to see a small sample of the important works that never manage to receive commercial distribution. Even the films due to come out soon are better seen projected in Walter Reade Theater than in some alcove at the Angelika or a tinny bomb shelter at the Quad.

If you're going

Showtimes at www.filmlinc.com 165 W 65th St. The theater is on the plaza level above Alice Tully Hall.Tickets: $10, students $7, members $6.