NY Film Festival 2026: European Ennui and an African Mrs. Dalloway
After a disappointing start, a few gems appeared—thanks in part to great female roles superbly played by Sophie Okonedo, Léa Seydoux, and Ana Dumitrascu.
The Diary of a Chambermaid, directed by Radu Jude.
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It had to happen sooner or later. Up to now I’d had a pretty good batting average at the New York Film Festival. Despite my grumbling, I saw several good films over the last five years, and a few terrific ones—notably Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (Radu Jude), Red Rocket (Sean Baker), What Does That Nature Say to You (Hong Sang-soo), and Fallen Leaves (Aki Kaurismaki).
What went wrong this year? Was it just my bad choices? The fact that I relied too much on films that had won prizes in Cannes and Berlin? Or was it the state of the art in general, in which the U.S. doesn’t seem to be able to produce much more than commercial schlock, and Europe seems torn between commercial products and attempts at High Art?
As usual, I stayed with foreign films that might run in New York for only a few nights. I managed to see seven, four of which were ponderous and unoriginal—hardly a laugh, or even a chuckle, in the bunch. Two others had their moments—one with a vividly written central character, the other with some bravura acting. Only one film—Clarissa, by the Nigerian Esiri brothers—was really satisfying. Though in many ways the film felt like a classic mid–20th century movie drama, this unlikely adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway did what the other films didn’t do—create a believable, coherent cinematic world that invited the viewer to enter into it and be moved.
Sandra Hüller in Fatherland, directed by Pawlikowski.
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First, quickly, here were the losers:
Fatherland and Rose were films I was particularly looking forward to. Fatherland was written and directed by Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski, who’d made the wonderful films Ida (2013) and Cold War (2018). Rose, by the German director Markus Schleinzer, had an intriguing premise: a woman who impersonated a soldier in the Thirty Years’ War and then returned from war—still impersonating a man—to claim a fallen comrade’s inheritance. Both films featured the dazzling actor Sandra Hüller. What wasn’t there to like?
Sandra Hüller in Rose, directed by Marcus Schleinzer.
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But both films flopped.
Focusing on a trip that Nobel Prize–winning writer Thomas Mann took in postwar Germany, Fatherland couldn’t seem to decide what it was about. Was it Mann’s cool detachment (in mid-film, his writer-son Klaus commits suicide, which Mann dismisses at a distance as Oedipal envy)? The political situation in a divided Germany, where both East and West were vying for Mann’s approbation? Was it Mann’s fraught relationship with his daughter, who apparently—at least on occasion—liked to puncture her father’s imperious manner?
Terse to a fault, shot in gorgeous black-and-white, Fatherland drifts from possibility to possibility, never committing or extending a scene to where fireworks between the characters might occur. It’s all so polite, subdued, cautious! As if the subject matter is so intimidating that Pawlikowski doesn’t dare to delve deeper into Mann’s human flaws—and so we come away from Fatherland with an empty, unsatisfied feeling, the way we used to feel a few decades ago when nouvelle cuisine was first introduced.
I’m afraid the empty feeling persists with Markus Schleinzer’s Rose. As short and terse (93 minutes long) as Fatherland, again shot in moody black-and-white, Rose is so respectful of its subject matter that it takes no risks at all. Potentially dramatic scenes, especially after Rose’s deception is discovered and she is put on trial for heresy, recall Carl Dreyer’s great silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), but whereas Passion is almost unbearably tense and dramatic, Schleinzer makes do with a few predictably condemnatory remarks from the judge and Hüller’s stony silence.
At least for a moment or two, the heightened rhetoric of the judges in Dreyer’s film and Joan’s palpable fear makes us wonder about her sanity; in Rose, the protagonist’s dignity and probity are never in doubt. Doubt—or at least a moment or two of dramatic tension—might have sparked this film into life.
Iris Lebedeva in Minotaur, directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev.
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Two other films, Minotaur (directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev) and The Dreamed Adventure (directed by Valeska Griselbach), failed for more conventional reasons. Minotaur, which bafflingly won the Grand Prix at Cannes this year, is a mash-up of two familiar themes: the unfaithful-wife trope meets the super-rich-who-can-get-away-with-anything trope. A Russian oligarch’s bored wife falls for a bohemian photographer; husband finds out, rubs the lover out, pulls strings to deep-six the evidence. A thin overlay of the Ukraine War comes attached to the film, but it doesn’t enhance it or dispel Minotaur’s heavy-handed lack of originality. Don’t waste your money: You’ve seen this movie a hundred times on Netflix.
Yana Radeva in The Dreamed Adventure, directed by Valeska Griselbach.
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The Dreamed Adventure seemed to me not so much unsure of what it wanted to say as unsure of even who or what it wanted to film. A middle-aged archaeologist conducting the excavation of an ancient fortress in the Bulgarian town where she grew up runs into an old lover who promptly disappears again. We follow the archaeologist through three long hours where she observes the town’s decay, gossips and reminisces with old friends and townspeople, and confronts the town’s gangster boss and tells him what a shit he is. In the last moment, the old lover pops up yet again and tells the archaeologist that he missed her. Has her archaeological dig been a metaphor for her storehouse of personal memories? Well, yes, but isn’t that a bit obvious?
But things did get better.
Ana Dumitrascu in The Diary of a Chambermaid, directed by Radu Jude.
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I’ve been following the Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude for years. One of the youngest of a group of Romanian directors, Jude is amazingly prolific, completing a number of film projects each year, ranging from abstract art films (a recent one was a gloss on Andy Warhol’s Sleep, in which Jude trains a camera on Warhol’s grave during the course of a year), to internet detritus mixed with live action and cartoons (Dracula, Bad Luck Banging), to realistic films about complex moral dilemmas (The Best Girl in the World, Kontinental ’25). Though Jude really is an international phenomenon, his playful personality and unpretentiousness may have prevented him thus far from getting the recognition he deserves.
The Diary of a Chambermaid, Jude’s entry in this year’s festival (he had two films in the festival last year, also films in 2024 and 2023), is in his realistic mode. It centers on Gianina, a young Romanian woman (Ana Dumitrascu) employed as an all-purpose housekeeper in a liberal bourgeois Bordeaux family. The material is more predictable than in most Jude films, which often go off on tangents that eventually wend their way back to the film’s central concerns. Here Jude builds tension as Gianina’s young daughter bitterly pines for her mother to come home for the winter holidays. What happens—the home visit is delayed—is also predictable, though Jude presents it with tact and subtlety, exposing the toxic condescension of Gianina’s employers underneath their ingratiating exteriors. (He allows himself a rather restrained digression by placing Gianina in an amateur theatrical version of the original Diary of a Chambermaid, a broadly comic satire of domestic oppression in which she participates with gusto.)
But what really animates this film, taking it deeper than knee-jerk class critique, is Jude’s writing for Gianina, and Dumitrascu’s performance. Her character is no passive victim: She is spunky, sexy, defiant, outspoken, in a direct line with a number of vibrant female protagonists in Jude’s films. Like Ingmar Bergman, Jude hardly ever creates major roles for men; women dominate. He writes women’s roles with great sensitivity (at least to this male sensibility), balancing charm with intelligence and self-awareness. In Chambermaid, Dumitrascu makes the most of the dazzling dialogue and shifting moods Jude provides for her; she couldn’t be more convincing.
Léa Seydoux in The Unknown, directed by Arthur Harari.
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The Unknown, by French director Arthur Harari tries to address what seems to be a Gen Z issue—the fact that for many young people, heterosexual sex is experienced as dangerous rather than ecstatic, isolating rather than intimate. Not an easy theme to dramatize, and The Unknown does it with plodding sincerity. The film feels more like a parable than a movie, but one senses an intelligent sensibility behind it. And then there’s this curious performance by Léa Seydoux that is almost worth the price of admission.
A young man and woman meet at a party and without exchanging a word have sex. The next morning, they wake up trapped in each other’s bodies! It takes much of the film for them (and us) to figure out what’s going on, and to investigate if anybody else has the same “problem.” In the hands of a Hollywood studio, this material would undoubtedly have been turned into your run-of-the-mill body-snatcher sci-fi film, but under Harari’s direction it is rendered with Godard-like elisions and lots of enigmatic silences. By the end, both captive souls try to communicate with their parents through their lovers’ bodies, but remain trapped, lost.
Léa Seydoux, an actress who’s played everything from a young gay artist (Blue Is the Warmest Color, 2013) to a Bond girl in two movies, is in nearly every frame. After the transformation but before we understand exactly what transpired, we sense the change in Seydoux’s body. Without doing anything obvious or even visible, she seems to become heavier—leaden, in fact—and throughout the film we watch her in mute distress as she lumbers around, trapped and bewildered, bearing the weight of … herself. There’s a chilling, remarkable moment when she sits and examines her face and breasts in a mirror; it feels right out of Frankenstein. Though I’m not sure I’d sit through the whole film to see the performance again, I’m glad I saw it once. Seydoux is a gifted and brave actress.
Sophie Okonedo in Clarissa, directed by Arie and Chuko Esiri.
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Though I missed This Is My Desire (2020), the debut film by the Nigerian brothers Arie and Chuko Esiri, I’d heard good things about it. I was impressed and entertained by Clarissa. Not only were the filmmakers daring enough to reach into an unexpected milieu for inspiration, the pacing of this film is elegant, elegiac, self-assured. Next to Clarissa, several of the movies on my list felt hurried or a bit jerky, out of step, as though the directors were either groping for the story or avoiding it. This film takes its time, knows what it wants to say, and opens itself to the viewer with calm professionalism.
Like Woolf’s book, Clarissa starts out with the middle-aged Mrs. Dalloway (Sophie Okonedo) getting ready for her garden party. Nominated for an Academy Award for her role in Hotel Rwanda (2004), Okonedo has the kind of soulful, limpid face that makes you want to smile and cry at the same time. Old friends appear at the party, setting off a series of memories/flashbacks that take us back to their ambitious 20s and around again to their early 50s, when they’ve become complacent, resigned, embittered, or wistful about their personal lives (failed loves, diminished career expectations) and the state of their country (hopes for a democratic republic reduced to a series of military dictatorships).
The technical challenge of a memory film like this is cutting and editing: Without the Vaseline-induced fadeouts of mid–20th century Hollywood films, how do you create a counterpoint between past and present in which both get illuminated? The directors found graceful, ingenious ways of doing this. Clarissa past (India Amarteifio) and present (Okonedo) have the same distinctive cornrow hairdo, but more important, they share a commanding, take-charge manner that appears in the younger Clarissa as impetuousness and matures into frankness in the elder. The two versions of Clarissa’s young lover Peter, a failed writer (David Oyelowo, Toheeb Jimoh), resemble each other more than the Clarissas, but add to their resemblance a sharp-tongued irony that sets them apart from their companions.
The film isn’t perfect. Septimus (Fortune Nwafor), a World War I vet suffering PTSD—and perhaps the most interesting character in Woolf’s text—doesn’t make a successful transition to film (the part feels underwritten and overplayed), and the film doesn’t dig nearly deep enough into the compromises that this upper-class group has surely made to retain their wealth and status. The Clarissa in the film lacks some of the book’s Clarissa’s high-octane energy. But these are relatively minor quibbles. The film really does manage to take two quite different cultures and forge a continuity between them.
Clarissa had a kind of liveliness about it that left me wanting to spend more time with the characters. In comparison, the European films seemed tired, as if most of the creative possibilities had been explored, and the directors/writers/auteurs didn’t know where to go next.
In recent years, South Korea and Romania have emerged as new sources for exciting movies. Could Africa be the next source? I’d see the next film by the Esiri brothers anytime.
George Blecher writes for The New York Times and for a number of European publications about American politics and culture. See NYCITYWOMAN.COM
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