NZIFF: Late Fame (2)

Willem Dafoe and Greta Lee bring heart and realness to this wistful, unromantic comedy about the fragility of creative ambition and a bygone, bohemian New York lost to a consumerist era of gentrification and influencers.

Turn-of-the-century Viennese writer Arthur Schnitzler’s sharp, psychological novellas of desire and delusion have barely aged a day. Stanley Kubrick adapted one for Eyes Wide Shut, and now another has been updated to present-day New York City by American director Kent Jones: the Austrian’s posthumously published story Late Fame.

Willem Dafoe is brilliant as Ed Saxberger, an unassuming post office worker. He is approaching his twilight years, but still has a glint of the street smart, intellectual edge that coloured his youth as a poet in the downtown scene. The slender book of verse he once published is now all but forgotten, until a handful of students desperate to start their own movement seek him out.

What follows is a bittersweet, unpredictable satire of the literary pretensions of a new, moneyed crowd pushing up rents and hollowing out culture. And, through the dramatic but fragile Gloria (a show-stealing Greta Lee), an associate of the group that sparks Saxberger’s curiosity, it is also an ode to the rarest, most unexpected kind of creative light, in perpetual, defiant renewal.

Phone: 06 835 7781

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