Following yesterday’s reveal of Luca Guadagnino’s “After the Hunt” as the Opening Night film, the 63rd New York Film Festival continues to flex its auteurist muscle.
NYFF has announced that Jim Jarmusch’s latest effort, “Father Mother Sister Brother,” will serve as this year’s Centerpiece selection, with its North American premiere set for October 3 at Alice Tully Hall. This one is skipping Telluride and Toronto.
Premiering earlier in Venice, the film boasts a starry ensemble—Cate Blanchett, Vicky Krieps, Adam Driver, Tom Waits, Charlotte Rampling, Mayim Bialik, Indy's Moore, and Luka Sabbat.
It should also be noted that Jarmusch’s film was controversially rejected by Cannes earlier this year, but has somehow managed to nab a NYFF Centerpiece slot. Cannes has a history of making mistakes, having rejected an innumerable number of great films over the years, and it’s quite possible Jarmusch’s film is another one. We’ll see.
Described by NYFF as a “perceptive study in familial dynamics,” the film is structured as a triptych, each segment set in a different country and focused on adult children reconnecting with estranged or aging parents. One segment features Driver and Bialik as siblings visiting their reclusive father (Tom Waits) in rural New Jersey. Another centers on Blanchett and Krieps reuniting with their emotionally distant mother (Rampling) in Dublin. The final chapter brings Moore and Sabbat together in Paris to process a family tragedy.
According to the festival, the film unfolds as an “anti-action film,” slow and deliberate in its rhythms, letting emotions accrue “like flowers being carefully placed in three delicate arrangements.” Cinematographers Frederick Elmes and Yorick Le Saux, along with editor Affonso Gonçalves, are cited as key collaborators in realizing this vision. The film is a MUBI release.
Festival Artistic Director Dennis Lim went so far as to call Father Mother Sister Brother “one of [Jarmusch’s] very best,” describing it as “wise, generous, slyly funny, and enormously moving.”
The 63rd New York Film Festival runs from September 26 to October 13.
Nobody expected a 55-year-old NC-17 movie to be one of the surprise box office stories of the fall. Yet here we are, and this absolutely puts a smile on my face.