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And now, to crown the 44th king ...

Jan Stuart

October 3, 2006

Every film festival has its unofficial prom queen and king, actors whose shadow dominates by virtue of a single commanding role or by seeming to be everywhere at once. Media acclaim (and opening night glare) have already installed Helen Mirren as queen of the 44th New York Film Festival for her work as real-life royal Elizabeth II in "The Queen." For king, I would coronate the indefatigable French star Michel Piccoli, who effervesces with the joy of his craft in Manoel de Oliveira's compact lark "Belle Toujours," and provides the chief reason to see Otar Iosseliani's overstated social satire "Gardens in Autumn."

The 80-year-old Piccoli, whose 200-plus screen credits include "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" and "La Nuit de Varennes," is a mere stripling compared to his 97-year-old director on "Belle Toujours." The Oporto-born

Oliveira is in top form with this winking homage to Luis Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière's signature collaboration, "Belle de Jour," the 1967 classic with Catherine Deneuve as a blushing bride who sidelines as a high-end prostitute and Piccoli as her would-be client.

Oliveira's scenario envisions their characters, Severine and Henri, decades later, living alone in reclusive Parisian splendor. After spotting her at a concert, Henri stalks Severine (played here to touching effect by Odile Ogier) to her hotel and eventually cajoles her to coming to his place for dinner. Their champagne-and-whiskey- soaked reckoning is a delectably absurd whirl of officious waiters and clenched tensions, plus a rooster that waddles through at a pregnant moment. "Belle Toujours" glistens with discreet charms.

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Piccoli does a brief but wickedly amusing spin in "Gardens in

Autumn," appearing in matronly drag, Lady Bracknell-style, as

the mother of a newly deposed French cabinet minister (played by

Severin Blanchet). Unlike its ousted protagonist, however, this repetitive comic riff on France's whimsical body politic and the ephemeral nature of power doesn't know when to step down.

"OFFSIDE." "What would you think if men dressed in women's clothes?" shouts a soldier at a girl in male disguise in Jafar Panahi's "Offside." The absence of the crusading Iranian director at the press screening of his new film was disheartening, especially given the rare ovation it received from a jaded crew of film journalists. A director's most crowd-pleasing effort, however, can also be his least artistically rigorous work.

In "Offside," Panahi picks up

the ball where he left it at "The Circle," a devastating social critique of sexual roles in Iran that closed with a pan shot of a group of Tehrani women jailed for the crime of breathing while female. In his new film, soldiers corral a group of girls in a sports arena holding pen for trying to bluff their way into a soccer match, officially off limits to women in Iran.

Like Iosseliani in "Gardens of Autumn," Panahi makes his points in the first half (the system oppresses both sexes, and, is this really about protecting women from rude language?), and belabors them in the second. The girls shout, their exasperated captors shout back. While I was genuinely moved by the liberating finale, I also shuddered to think that "Offside" could be taken up as fodder for Uncle Sam's democracy hucksters: See how unenlightened those Iranians are? Wouldn't it be great if we could effect a little regime change and spread the joy of co-ed bleachers? While we're at it, maybe we could replace those wimpy round balls with real footballs?

GAME TIME. I would strongly warn against seeing "The Go Master" stoned on antihistamines. Such was the case when I defied an incipient cold to see Tian

Zhuangzhuang's formally stunning but tortoise-like biopic of Wu Qingyuan, a spiritually committed Chinese Go player who rose to fame in Japan. Wu's story offers an arresting cross-cultural perch from which to observe the clash between China and Japan in the mid-20th century. For better or worse, director Tian shares his protagonist's trancelike focus: even a seismic event such as the bombing of Hiroshima cannot disrupt Wu mid-game (go is an ancient board game) or dislodge the film from its dirge-likedrumbeat.

The most unalloyed pleasure I've had from a festival offering this week came from "Mafioso," a humdinger of a comedy that has been lovingly resuscitated from the vault of Italian cinema's vintage '60s. Directed by Alberto Lattuada (who co-helmed Fellini's first film, "Variety Lights"), this dark-hued 1962 delight boasts a rich, exuberant performance by Alberto Sordi as a Milanese factory foreman who takes his wife and daughters down to Sicily to meet his family and is drawn into the old life in more ways than he bargained for.

"Mafioso's" basic ingredients are so ripe for derisive laughs that one is happily surprised at the degree of compassion and nuance with which the four screenwriters vivify its provincial milieu. You don't have to be an errant son of Sicily to appreciate the point: Even the most acculturated urban arrivistes among us cannot easily rinse out our cultural roots.