The last weekend of the New Directors/New Films series, at MOMA and Film Society of Lincoln Center, features two of the best films in the program: Shireen Seno’s “Nervous Translation” and Ricky D’Ambrose’s “Notes on an Appearance,” which have something important in common. Both confront, with insight, audacity, and style, one of the fundamental challenges of the modern cinema: how to portray the inner life of characters along with the cultural context that informs their thoughts.
“Nervous Translation“ (April 7-8) begins with a little girl named Yael (Jana Agoncillo), who’s seated in front of a stocky, round-cornered old television set, using a boombox to play cassettes. The suspicion that she’s living in a Wes Anderson land of nostalgic technology is soon dispelled: she’s living in the Philippines, and Ferdinand Marcos is still in the news; it’s the late nineteen-eighties. The cassettes that Yael listens to are recorded by her father, Dodong, who’s working in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; they’re spoken love letters addressed to Yael’s mother, Val (Angge Santos). A smart student, Yael transcribes Filipino sentences that her father speaks and, in her notebook, translates them into English; she replicates, with her tiny toy kitchen set, the domesticities of which her father speaks longingly; she does a “mad minute” of multiplication tables over the phone with her friend Wappy; she accompanies her mother on visits to family friends who’ve just returned home from a stint working in Japan, where they complain about their relationships with their Japanese employers.
The film is Seno’s second feature; she’s a Filipina filmmaker who was born in Tokyo, and the movie is centered on the experience of economic migration, both from the perspective of migrants and from the point of view of family members left behind at home. Yael is growing up under the influence of her father’s absence, amid the strain on her parents’ relationship—their loneliness and mutual longing, her mother’s efforts to raise Yael alone while also working a hard and dull job in a local shoe factory. Dodong’s voice on tape is the movie’s key motif, a sort of image-free melodramatic series that Yael follows and replays obsessively—and that fuses with voices on the news discussing the end of the Marcos regime and the transition of power, as well as with television commercials from video cassettes that her friends have brought back from Japan.
Dodong is a twin; his brother, Tito Ton (Sid Lucero), Yael’s uncle, is a local rock sensation, a member of a band called the Futures, and the soundtrack of “Nervous Translation” is filled with their bouncy, New Wave-styled rock. It’s a mark of Seno’s ingenuity to depict the movie’s minuscule moments with dramatic urgency, to invest them with an intricately detailed intimacy, centered on Agoncillo’s poised, alert performance. Yael’s quiet energy and constant, inventive industriousness fills the movie with micro-incidents that Seno observes with vast, playful, and resonantly perceptive visual variety. She portrays Yael’s real-life experiences as well as her melodramatic reveries, an elaborate inner theatre of romantic dreams and calmly lurid fantasies—which then are harshly jolted into bitter practicalities by outside events that reflect both Seno’s apocalyptic imagination and her historical consciousness. “Nervous Translation” accomplishes a diverse range of rare cinematic feats—it’s among the best recent evocations of a child’s life and thought, and among the most sophisticated fusions of culture and character. It renders the political personal in a way that should leave many socially minded filmmakers agape with envy.
I’ve written here about Ricky D’Ambrose’s 2015 short film, ”Six Cents in the Pocket,” which marks an extraordinary new mode of movie narrative that he extended in the 2017 short “Spiral Jetty” and now maps onto the wider dramatic framework of his first feature, “Notes on an Appearance” (April 6-7). Like “Nervous Translation,” D’Ambrose’s feature is documentary in the literal sense: it’s centered on textual, graphic, and audiovisual materials that play a crucial role in the story as well as in characters’ lives and thoughts. Also, like Seno’s film, “Notes on an Appearance” is knocked slightly out of time. It’s set in the current day but its substance is archival, a recuperation of traces of decades past and of recent events alike in media—largely print media, which D’Ambrose films with a nostalgia for the sense of stylish power that it embodies.
The movie is set in New York, in the present day, but it’s redolent of the tones, moods, and conflicts of earlier times—it’s a vision of the closed circuits of a hothouse intellectual city that, whether or not it still exists, remains one of the dominant myths of modern life, and D’Ambrose faces it with a wry style that nonetheless channels the vast emotional power behind the myth’s very endurance. David (played by the filmmaker Bingham Bryant, who is also a former New Yorker intern) is a twenty-eight-year-old aspiring writer at loose ends. He helps his girlfriend, Madeleine (Tallie Medel), get set up in Milan; he comes home and, unhappily, stays with his parents in Chappaqua; he heads to Brooklyn and moves in with a former college friend named Todd (Keith Poulson), a doctoral student who’s writing a biography of a controversial political theorist named Stephen Taubes. Todd hires David as a research assistant, David goes out for a walk and never returns, and Todd spends the rest of the film’s hour-long span searching for David.
The live-action scenes of “Notes on an Appearance” are bare, spare, and epigrammatic. Travel, whether around the world or in the city, is marked by postcards, boarding passes, subway maps, train schedules. The life and work of Taubes is documented amply, in faux articles from The New Yorker, the Times, the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, and other publications, as well as in Taubes’s own (fictitious) video archives of his travels and his own books (their covers are parodies of other books, such as a well-known Martin Heidegger collection). Taubes is depicted as a controversial thinker whose hostility to democracy instigates direct, even violent political action. He wrote for an anti-Semitic journal in the nineteen-eighties; his followers are suspected of having murdered one of his critics. (If there’s one weakness in the film, it’s the effacement of any sense of what Todd and David make of Taubes and his ideas.) D’Ambrose creates David’s diaries and puts them onscreen; he adorns the soundtrack with music ranging from Cecil Taylor to Rossini; he stages a conference on translation in which Todd’s partner, Karin (Madeleine James), takes part. (He also adorns several characters with names borrowed from real-life critics and writers, and includes several other actual critics and writers among the cast of actors, as if to affirm the actual existence, or persistence, of the movie’s milieu in the city of today.)
Above all, “Notes on an Appearance” (even the title is scintillatingly ironic) reflects a conflict-riddled, vigorously self-deluding intellectual realm where the ideal, grand-scale stakes bear the weight of immediate passion and the local, personal stakes remain disturbingly, bewilderingly remote. But D’Ambrose’s ardent intellectualism is a sublime comedic mask. For all his gleeful fabrication of a realm of cultural aspirations and achievements, his subject is the mysteries that elude dialectics and disputations, the ones that animate the artistic, aesthetic impulse that his movie both exalts and embodies.
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