By David D’Arcy

Three films that stood out at this year’s annual festival at the Museum of Modern Art and Film at Lincoln Center.

New Directors/New Films, the annual festival at the Museum of Modern Art and Film at Lincoln Center, was a mix of the new and the newest, with a lot to discover. Here are three films that caught my attention.

A scene from Fiume O Morte. Photo: courtesy of New Directors/New Films

The title Fiume o Morte (“Fiume or Death”) challenges anyone to guess what it might mean. This hybrid documentary is about a brief fascist government imposed after World War I in the city that today is known as Rijeka. The authoritarian regime was headed by a vain, self-important Italian poet. The filmmaker’s inquiries about the city’s past begin in the present.

Director Igor Bezinovic took his camera to the streets of Rijeka, called Fiume by Italians, and asks folks who the writer Gabriele D’Annunzio was. Most of the Croatian speakers haven’t the slightest idea, although a few are aware he was a fascist. The Italians whom Bezinovic meets also remember him as a fascist, although there’s a good chance that they read some of his poems in school. As with much of what students learn at school, most of those poems have been forgotten.

Fiume o Morte then moves to the years after World War I. In 1919, D’Annunzio and a corps of ardent young armed followers seized control of the city, where Fiumano, a subdialect of the Venetian dialect, was spoken. He declared the place liberated. This violent putsch, which seemed lifted from an operetta (complete with an anthem that Italian fascists later adopted) proved to be inconvenient and embarrassing for the emerging Benito Mussolini. Annoyed, Il Duce said of the short and bald D’Annunzio that he was like an infected tooth — you either pull it out or cover it in gold. D’Annunzio and his boy soldiers were driven out of Fiume after 16 months, and the poet (toothless in more ways than one, but still a loudmouth in his later years) went off to a pampered retirement on Lake Garda.

Probing and mocking the story as he tells it, Bezinovic drafted an army of some 300 mostly nonprofessionals to act out historical scenes. Dressed in period costumes, his performers give the film a Brechtian feel of  modern alienation, not to mention all sorts of inescapable Trumpian allusions. It helps that the self-involved D’Annunzio had his obedient minions photograph everything that was happening.

The narrative, accompanied by constant reflections on past events, advances propulsively through the short-lived D’Annunzio regime. The archival effects sit somewhere between collage and confetti. The film is a pastiche of a retrograde moment: a determined autocrat found enough followers to create a city-state — until a more powerful fascist leader drove him out. A petty bully brought down by a bigger bully.

Fiume o Morte is about the challenge, and the responsibility, of bringing that history to today’s audiences. Along the way it offers uproarious and erudite reflections on a mini-regime built on vanity. Had D’Annunzio won, he would have demanded a self-glorifying chronicle of his triumph as the historical record. Of course, when the power-mad poet’s followers weren’t looting Fiume’s buildings (here dramatized through jolting sound effects), they were brutalizing its inhabitants as they ransacked its cultural institutions. Instead of a self-serving lie, we have history according to Bezinovic, a stroke of great fortune.

Back to today. Think of another leader who at the present time is emptying libraries and programming the Kennedy Center and shaking down universities. Fiume o Morte is a film that makes you hesitate before using the word “unimaginable.” Check festival listings for it.

Kathleen Chalfant in a scene from Familiar Touch. Photo: courtesy of New Directors/New Films

Familiar Touch is described by its director Sarah Frankel as a coming of (old) age movie. That’s a cute line, though it loses some of its charm as we enter an assisted living facility with Ruth (Kathleen Chalfant), an 80-ish woman who was in control of her life until she wasn’t. We watch her fading mental capacities fail to keep up with the world around her. The film begins with a scene in which Ruth is no longer able to recognize her son (H. Jon Benjamin). He brings her to a senior citizen home that she knows nothing about, although she was informed of the move. Her adjustment, if that’s the word, is the arrival of old age. If you’ve been close to people in that situation, or if you are that age, the experience could be strikingly familiar. The film offers such an immersion in the transition from independence to constant care that it can feel like an intimate documentary. Yet Familiar Touch is scripted, played by actors.

And here is where the term “coming of (old) age movie” becomes more than a tagline. If the coming of age movie is a story of awareness or maturity or deals with the emergence of self, the coming of (old) age deals with diminution. It is about the loss of capacity, which is why Ruth entered assisted living in the first place. It’s about an assimilation into inevitability, and it is a relatively soft landing in this case. Still, incapacity is a hard thing to accept and, for all the warmth of the place (in Pasadena), where the picture was filmed, I felt a chill coming from the soft, constant, unwavering light under which Ruth has to adjust to her cognitive decline. For all the narrative’s tenderness and attention — at times some of her skills survive, especially when it comes to cooking for others and teaching them to please people that way — I was reminded of the joke, “What’s the best thing about getting old? I forget.”

If Familiar Touch is empathetic, it is also dramatically taut. Scenes take the form of distillations of familiar events reduced to essential words and gestures that reminded this viewer that we all have a common destination.

The film does offer a moment where we go beyond the senior home’s soft interiors. At one point, the camera looks out of a window and down to a driveway where caregivers, whom we’ve seen working with Ruth, are taking a break. One of them asks the other how things are going, eliciting a response that a parent is having a rough time with aging. Looking back at his place of employment, the care worker notes that he could never afford to send a relative there. The film briefly slips out of its insular dramatic cocoon. Familiar Touch reminds us that we all get old, but most can’t afford to do so comfortably. The film moves from the festival circuit to theatrical release on June 20.

A scene from Drowning Dry. Photo: courtesy of New Directors/New Films

Lithuanian director and cinematographer Lavrina Bareisa’s Drowning Dry is constructed around two couples entering middle age. The film crafts its own special vision of discomfort by scrambling the sequence of its narrative.

We begin at a Mixed Martial Arts tournament, which buff, handsome Lukas wins, but only after taking a battering that makes his wife Ernesta beg him to quit the sport. Soon the couple and their son are heading to a lake house with her sister Juste, whose paunchy, rich husband, Tomas, is convinced that he can beat Lukas in a fistfight. One kick to the head puts that illusion to rest, and the group heads to the lake, where Urte, Juste’s daughter, disappears underwater and the adults save her from drowning.

She survives, but the story of Drowning Dry is torn apart as if someone had shredded the script. Fast cars take to the road; the lake house is sold; emergency workers take charge of a wreck; and the two sisters move on with their lives. ((The film’s more fitting title in Lithuanian is “Sisters.”) Bareisa makes sure that his tale is anything but orderly. On the road, the two men who lived (or played) close to violence end up consumed in a crash that is deftly underplayed and ominously anticlimactic. Sorry for the spoiler.

There are echoes of Ruben Ostlund’s Force Majeure throughout Drowning Dry — sometimes it feels as if the film is drowning in them. Reviews have been filled with formalist considerations of how Bareisa deliberately took his script apart. We’re not talking about editing. Drowning Dry won awards at festivals and was the Lithuanian nominee for the Best International Film Academy Award. This is the kind of film that wins critics’ awards, but not Oscars.

Bareisa’s film is unsettling. You watch with dread at the events he’s deconstructing. It’s grim, but that’s a relative term in Lithuania, with Russia right across the border. Now playing at festivals, Drowning Dry opens in theaters on July 18.

David D’Arcy lives in New York. For years, he was a programmer for the Haifa International Film Festival in Israel. He writes about art for many publications, including the Art Newspaper. He produced and co-wrote the documentary Portrait of Wally (2012), about the fight over a Nazi-looted painting found at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.