NYFF 2021: Hit the Road, Unclenching the Fists, The Girl and the Spider | Festivals & Awards

“Unclenching The Fists” is steeped in its influences like a bitter tea, from its title, a reference to similarly incest-minded “Fists in the Pocket” by the great Marco Bellocchio (whose latest film plays at NYFF as well) to its final camcorder shot final image of two people on a motorcycle, culled in spirit and technique from the great Kiarostami (the film might be the first to be spoken in Ossetian, an Iranian dialect native to one sliver of the shadow of the Caucasus mountains). And yet its psychological and emotional effect feels so new and raw it’s like salting a wound you didn’t know you had acquired. Kovalenko fills the film with every metaphorical and formal iteration of here theme (the need to be someone and somewhere else) as a 90-minute movie can handle. There are the too-close compositions of every member of the family uncomfortably embracing out of desperate need; there’s the idea of a culture displaced and living in a predetermined exile; there’s the locked house which Ada wishes to flee, and the most touching and worrisome of all is that she carries around real and figurative scars from a terrorist action in her youth.

Kovalenko based this on a real incident, when Chechen separatists held hostages to demand recognition from Russia of their country’s autonomy. It ended with Russian tanks storming the sites and the ensuing fight killed 331 people and injured hundreds more. Ada is supposed to have been in those attacks and her body is still marked by the event from the plentiful visible wounds to the fact that she wears a diaper because she can’t control her bladder. This obviously codes her as suspended in her own childhood. Her terror of her father, her love/lust for Akim and her loveless relationship with her boyfriend place her in a mid-air freewill, that way adulthood, this way regression to the safety childhood. If she could remove one element of this triangle she could settle on an identity, but everyone around her gets something out of her confusion, and she wants or thinks she needs some of it. Kovalenko has done something exhaustingly rare and painted a portrait of someone at once steeped in storytelling language, myth, psychology real and adduced through culture, and she’s done it without ever straining for importance. Ada is important because she’s perfectly imagined; her very talented creator has painted her as a blur of motion and conflict, someone who would die for the right touch to mean the right things. I was enormously moved.

If I wasn’t as moved by “The Girl and the Spider,” the much belated and much appreciated return of Ramon and Silvan Zürcher (“The Strange Little Cat”) it’s because it’s after a much more modest response. The Zürchers only have two features and some shorts to their name but they’ve declared their uncommon interests and strengths with equally uncommon zeal. “The Girl and the Spider” is about a woman moving out of her apartment and the ruptures it causes in her relationships. Her mother is weirded out by her roommate, who is quite obviously jealous that she’s being left behind. The other roommates have to then contend with their situations changing. “The Strange Little Cat” was about a day in the life of a family saying goodbye to an old relative, each in their own way, and how life bursts through our facades in ways great and small. The same calm demeanors are permeated by unease and unspoken longings in “The Girl and the Spider,” signified by repeated shots of a jackhammer working on pavement outside the apartment. Its successes are in its rich tableaux of odd everyday living, from the drill, which brings to mind the work of documentarian Jürgen Böttcher, to a Styrofoam cup with a pencil stuck in it, to a woman naked except for a motorcycle helmet. Each lustrous tableaux is enough to justify the movie’s existence, and though it may lack the alien immediacy of their debut it’s a necessary kind of work. Very few people want to showcase human behavior like this (Jean Eustache did it, though more loquaciously) and the Zürcher’s do seem to be trying to break new ground through simple means, which is terribly exciting.

The reason I’ll never stop covering New York Film Festival is days like this, where I get to report that I’ve seen three of the best and most open-hearted movies of the year. Even in fear, in sickness, or isolated and upset, it makes one feel alive to reach your hand into the continuity of film art, so frequently a place with no life and no reward and feel a pulse in there.