Late Fame

With LATE FAME, American critic-turned-filmmaker Kent Jones teams up with Samy Burch (the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Todd Haynes’ MAY DECEMBER, 2023) to transpose Viennese writer Arthur Schnitzler’s titular 1895 novella to present-day New York City. Ed Saxburger (Willem Dafoe) is an aging post office worker whose book of poetry from the 1970s has been rediscovered by a group of self-styled aesthetes aspiring to revitalise the city’s literature scene. These young men—pampered yet charmingly eccentric, like characters from a Whit Stillman movie—bring Saxburger into their circle, hoping that the elder bard’s past proximity to the city’s counterculture and writers like William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsberg will magically legitimise their aspirations. While Saxburger grows increasingly suspect of the group’s project, he becomes bewitched by their sole female member, an older actress and Zelda Fitzgerald wannabe played by Greta Lee. Critical of both the new generation of urban creatives and the tendency to idealise the past, LATE FAME is a tender, humorously perceptive character study spiced up by biting insights into privilege, celebrity and artistic legacy. (Beatrice Loayza)

In the presence of Kent Jones.

Kent Jones: A LETTER TO ELIA (2010), HITCHCOCK/TRUFFAUT (2015), DIANE (2018)