\u201cRed Rocks\u201d is no \u201cBugsy Malone\u201d; these children aren\u2019t imitating adults. The story and dialogue, written by Dumont, are carefully constructed, but his child actors experience the scripted events freely, in terms of their own personalities and reactions. That\u2019s what Dumont does with adult actors, too, in his greatest films\u2014whether working with amateurs, as he often does, or filming floridly theatrical professionals. But here, keeping the camera close to these five-year-olds, he makes their childhood\u2014and the essence of childhood itself\u2014into the subject of his film, just as much as the scripted story is.<\/p>\n
The performances he elicits in \u201cRed Rocks\u201d are as documentary-impulsive as they are dramatically apt. Class relations figure prominently. One child lives in a small modern house, another in a mobile home; when a third is found to live in a gated villa, G\u00e9o asks, through the bars of the gate, \u201cWhy are you locked in?\u201d (as opposed to wondering why he\u2019s locked out). The heart of the film is romanticism of a rare brazenness, raised to melodramatic fury by the children\u2019s spontaneity and Dumont\u2019s images of a nature-mad frenzy to match. The story\u2019s most sophisticated elements coalesce with the kids\u2019 ingenuously profound view of the world they\u2019re discovering, in all its daily strangeness, as when Eve both jealously and curiously asks G\u00e9o about Manon, \u201cWhat are you like with her?\u201d At a train station, watching him strut proudly away, she gazes wonderingly upon him, the sun silhouetting her and illuminating wisps of her long hair blowing in the breeze.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s worth adding that, after seeing the film, I stumbled across a few recent French interviews with Dumont, and the making of \u201cRed Rocks\u201d turns out to have been as extraordinary as the film itself. It was a guerrilla shoot, carefully planned but done on location without permits in scattered bits and pieces, with handheld cameras pressing close to the children and getting ecstatic closeups on the wing. Plenty of artifice and simulation are involved, too\u2014essential for keeping the children safe\u2014but they don\u2019t interfere with the film\u2019s quasi-documentary precision in evoking local life. Regardless of Dumont\u2019s meticulously realized visual tricks, the wild and jubilant audacity of the film\u2019s creation is evident onscreen.<\/p>\n
Melodrama and documentary fuse in a drastically different way in \u201cThe Dreamed Adventure,\u201d a memory-rich and passion-stoked tale of love and history by the German director Valeska Grisebach. The movie is set in Bulgaria, in an area near its borders with Greece and Turkey, a criminal badlands of smuggling and human trafficking. There, a middle-aged, small-time operator named Said (Syuleyman Letifov) bumps into Veska (Yana Radeva), a long-ago friend, perhaps even a lover, who\u2019s now an archeologist on a dig in the region\u2019s remote hills. She offers him a ride and, by chance, soon finds herself caught up in his criminal dealings. Learning that gangland activities in the area also impinge on her dig, she insinuates herself into the area\u2019s underworld and gets entangled with some of its more colorful figures.<\/p>\n
This is a modern-day film noir, plotted tensely and filled with the breathless thrills of dangerous games and risky business, but it offers more than the familiar pleasures of the genre, because of the people Veska encounters. In this chaotic border zone, the boundary between legitimate business and dirty dealings turns out to be ambiguous, for reasons rooted in historical turmoil. In Bulgaria\u2019s post-Communist nineteen-nineties, when the country suddenly lurched from stifled East to Wild West, life in the region shifted sharply from torpid endurance to desperate survivalism. Stories of that time emerge in extended scenes of group dialogue that arise from Veska\u2019s intrepid inquiries. Functioning like an oral historian or a reporter, she speaks with elders in the murky milieu and elicits their scathing, bitterly candid accounts of those disorientingly anarchic times. I have no idea whether these sequences are scripted, cast, and performed or whether Grisebach indeed brought locals together to tell their tales. Either way, they\u2019re persuasively documentary in their tone and their substance, and the vitality of the narratives that come to the surface gives the movie\u2019s overt, genre-tinged fictions an awe-inspiring authenticity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cRed Rocks\u201d is no \u201cBugsy Malone\u201d; these children aren\u2019t imitating adults. The story and dialogue, written by Dumont,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":363007,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[158,9,14115,11,10],"class_list":["post-363006","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-movies","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-film-festival","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363006","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=363006"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363006\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/363007"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=363006"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=363006"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=363006"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}