One of the biggest box-office hits of the year is a low-budget horror film called Obsession, in which a young man buys a novelty device that is said to grant wishes. When he asks for the girl of his dreams to fall in love with him, he unleashes a demonic devotion.
Obsession is the theme of two films in the New York Film Festival, but no magic spells are required—the lead characters are already singularly bonkers.
In a performance sure to earn her an Oscar nomination, Julianne Moore plays Mona Friedman, a timid New Jersey housewife whose husband and college-age twins barely notice her. As The Debut begins, Mona impulsively tries out for the local theater production, a painfully earnest musical called Nosy Neighbors, about the residents of a New York City apartment building. Mona, who once sang in the church choir but has never performed onstage, auditions for the supporting role of building super Miss Danielle and is rejected before she even finishes her big song. The role goes to company veteran Serena Cherry (played by Broadway icon Bernadette Peters), but when Serena drops out for a more appealing opportunity, desperate director Jerry (Paul Giamatti) gives Mona the part. (No one else auditioned because Mona destroyed all the phone-number tags circulated by the theater.)
Mona is embraced by her fellow company members (including sweet lead actress Stef, played by The Little Mermaid’s Halle Bailey), but her initial, tentative stabs at the role are pathetic. Not one to shy from a challenge, petty autocrat Jerry gives Mona a one-on-one acting challenge: to convince him Miss Danielle really needs his rent check. The scene, which unleashes all of Mona’s pent-up frustration and anger, is a showstopper; the festival press audience broke into applause at the end.
From that moment on, writer-director Jesse Eisenberg’s film becomes increasingly surreal. Jerry takes method acting to an absurd level, driving Mona into Manhattan and coaxing her to enter a random building and pose as its super. Eager to explore her minor part further, Mona checks into a sleazy hotel, steals the janitor’s coveralls and tools, and haplessly attempts to fix her bathroom light fixture and showerhead, with disastrous results. At rehearsals, she insists on changing her lines to reflect the reality of a super’s life. Jerry has created a monster.
Eisenberg’s movie is both a fond salute to community theater and a satiric jab at actors who take “What’s my motivation?” all too seriously. And Mona, for all her ridiculousness, is also a poignant portrait of a woman who finds liberation in art, however tacky. The catchy but deliberately cheesy songs, with titles like “One Bedroom, Two Hearts,” were written by Eisenberg. New York theater fans will note that the cast includes several Broadway names, but the main attractions are the always excellent Giamatti and Julianne Moore going for broke.
Rooney Mara and Kate Mara in Bucking Fastard
Mona Friedman’s behavior is extreme, but she’s a model of propriety compared to Joan and Jean Holbrooke, the sisters at the center of Werner Herzog’s gonzo Bucking Fastard. Joan and Jean, played by real-life sisters Rooney and Kate Mara, are inspired by British twins Freda and Greta Chaplin, who dressed alike in drab overcoats and dowdy dresses, spoke in unison, and were never seen apart from each other. Joan and Jean have fallen madly in love with their randy neighbor Gareth Mulroney (Orlando Bloom, having a blast), who enjoys a brief ménage à trois, then dumps them and takes a wife. Bereft, the girls set fire to the inside of his car and the mailbox outside his house. The subsequent trial, in which the sisters testify as one, is a bizarre riot. They’re hit with a restraining order, and a charitable villager arranges for them to stay in his empty apartment in another town. There, the girls are taken under the wing of a gentle social worker (Domhnall Gleeson), who teaches them how to perform simple tasks like opening a can of sardines with one set of hands, not two. Eventually, they come to live with a devoted aunt in the country, where their exploration of a nearby cave leads to another crazy obsession—their determination to dig a tunnel to a new life.
Bucking Fastard wouldn’t work without the phenomenal performances of Rooney and Kate Mara, acting together for the first time. They’re so attuned to each other and to their freak-show characters it’s uncanny. And they mine all the humor of the sisters’ horny, mischievous, and defiant inner worlds. They’d be truly deserving of a joint Oscar nomination if the Academy could figure out how to bend its rules.
For nearly six decades, Werner Herzog has carved out a singular career as a fiction and nonfiction filmmaker. Bucking Fastard, filmed mostly in Ireland, is unlike anything he’s done—and it’s often laugh-out-loud funny, a surprise from a man famous for his lugubrious narration of his documentaries. Still, there are echoes of his previous works: The Holbrooke sisters fit right in with his gallery of eccentrics, and their years-long effort to carve a tunnel out of a mountain recalls the mad quest of Fitzcarraldo to pull a steamship over a mountain in the Amazon. Sixteen years ago, Herzog made a remarkable 3D documentary called Cave of Forgotten Dreams, exploring a cave in France with the oldest-known human paintings. Bucking Fastard climaxes in another spectacular site, the Posojna Cave in Slovenia, which boasts amazing formations and its own underground train. There, Joan and Jean eye yet another obsession, but confront reality in an open-ended finale that’s vintage Herzog.
At top: Julianne Moore in The Debut. All photos courtesy of Film at Lincoln Center.
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