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The 2004 installment of our annual Film Comment Selects series offers
a lively collection of films from the last year championed by our writers,
many of them either overlooked or underrated, from all around the globe,
all of them New York premieres. The second week of the series is a near-complete
retrospective of the work of the defiantly unclassifiable French filmmaker
Jean-Claude Brisseau, whose unique body of work is celebrated by Frédéric
Bonnaud in our Jan/Feb issue. We are also including a special screening
of THE WORLD'S GREATEST SINNER, the only movie ever directed by
the late, great Timothy Carey, one of the most talented and truly iconoclastic
actors ever to walk in front of a camera.
Thanks to Ryan Werner, Richard Abramowitz, Wendy Lidell, Romeo Carey,
Richard Lorber & Karen Cooper.
Special thanks to HBO Films for hosting the opening night reception.
SPECIAL PREVIEW: GREENDALE
Bernard Shakey (aka Neil Young), U.S., 2003; 83m
Part family saga, part political protest and every inch an idiosyncratic
labor of love, rock musician Neil Young's sui generis adaptation of his
latest album centers on three generations of a small-town family whose
lives are changed forever when one of them kills a cop in a moment of
weakness (the Devil made him do it). Young, directing under his usual
cinematic nom de guerre "Bernard Shakey," employs the most simple of means
for this "musical novel": made in his own backyard on the northern California
coastline with a cast of friends, family, and local nonprofessionals,
it's shot (by Young himself) on Super 8, producing a soft, diffuse visual
texture that gives everything a personal, handcrafted touch. Unfashionably
sincere and heartfelt, it's a film of contradictions: a post-9/11 celebration
of simple American values (the idealism of youth, the everyday heroism
of cops and firefighters) that takes aim at the corporate and media excesses
and police-state paranoia of the Bush era, weaving images of John Ashcroft
and Osama Bin Laden into its montage. Rough-hewn, plain-spoken and direct,
it was nevertheless inspired by the example of Lars von Trier's Dancer
in the Dark - and might just be the antidote to his forthcoming Dogville.
- Gavin Smith
Thurs Feb 12: 8:30; Fri Feb 13 : 8*.
*Neil Young will be present for intro and Q & A for the Feb 13th screening
only.
ALL TOMORROW'S PARTIES
Yu Lik-wai, China, 2003; 95m Director Yu Lik-wai (better known
as Jia Zhang-ke's cameraman) follows up his Love Will Tear Us Apart
with this just as visually entrancing but far bolder film. PARTIES
is basically a series of extended vignettes of life in a dystopian near-future,
in which some kind of totalitarian government has returned to China. Digitally
shot on the grimmest post-industrial landscapes imaginable, it's filled
with one electrifying composition after another, some digitally altered
with painterly precision. Note to Yu: how about calling your third film
"Virginia Plain," or maybe "At Home He's a Tourist"? - Kent Jones
Fri Feb 13: 1:30; Thurs Feb 19: 2
NO REST FOR THE BRAVE
Alain Guiraudie, France, 2003; 104m
"An eccentric, gorgeous coming-of-age film that looks like late-Sixties
Godard crossed with Vermeer. Terrified that his dreams will kill him,
the sleep-deprived adolescent hero enters a fugue state where narratives
collide and break off, and characters who are massacred in one scene turn
up hale and hearty in the next. But the film is more than a surreal romp
through the liminal. Having tested his manhood in fantasy, the hero must
come to terms with the dilemma of the working class in a collapsing economy
that offers little hope for a better life. Guiraudie is a daredevil filmmaker,
and his film was the find of Cannes 2003." - Amy Taubin, Film Comment,
July/Aug 2003
Fri Feb 13: 3:30; Mon Feb 16: 8:15
THE GRUDGE / JU-ON
Takashi Shimizu, Japan, 2002; 92m
"The latest J-horror sensation, THE GRUDGE is a amazingly sustained
structural exercise in the organization of tension and release, and like
Ring, its scares build out of an atmosphere of creeping dread rather
than gross-out/splatter tactics. A house, haunted by a woman, her child,
and the husband who murdered them before killing himself, is the primary
locus for a dozen interconnected but essentially self-contained chapters
in which an assortment of people (the house's latest occupants, their
relatives and friends, social workers, police) come to harrowing ends.
The film's peculiar genius is that it relentlessly mines every possibility
of scaring the audience that its confined settings and circumscribed scenario
can yield, running multiple variations on a single idea with unbelievably
terrifying results." - Gavin Smith, Film Comment, Nov/Dec 2003
Fri Feb 13: 6
LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF
Thom Andersen, U.S., 2003, digital; 169m "Thom Andersen's epic
essay on Los Angeles starts out as a poignant account of the intertwined
histories of the city and Hollywood, gracefully debunking certain myths
and misunderstandings as it proceeds. But, via ruminations on Californian
modernist architecture and its weird misuse by the La-la-land establishment,
it develops into a reflection on post-New Hollywood political defeatism
and ultimately a paean to cinematic realism, realpolitik, and a sense
of collective humanism. For me the most dignified film of 2003, and a
true work of the Left." - Olaf Möller
Sat Feb 14: 1:30
LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF will open at Film Forum in the summer
of 2004.
THE WORLD'S GREATEST SINNER
Timothy Carey, U.S., 1962; 75m
Remember the spastic guy who assassinates the racehorse in Kubrick's The
Killing? Or the doomed soldier who kills the cockroach in Paths
of Glory? That would be the late, great Tim Carey, one of the most
feared - and fired - character actors of all time. What most people don't
know is that he also wrote, produced, and directed this psychotic treatise
on power, corruption, and the infinity that lies within a communion wafer.
After legally changing his name to God - and amassing a small army of
deluded devotees - Carey's antihero derails into a morass of existential
dread. A primitive but authentic American indie - the missing link between
Ed Wood and John Cassavetes? "Possibly the most bizarre vanity-cum-auteur
vehicle on record." - Grover Lewis, Film Comment, Jan/Feb 2004
Sat Feb 14: 5
SPECIAL PREVIEW: BRIGHT FUTURE
Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan, 2003; 92m
Japanese cinema leading light Kiyoshi Kurosawa's improbably tender and
hopeful story of alter egos, alienation, and anarchic acts of social defiance
could almost be a reply to Fight Club. Charting a course away from
genre and into the deceptive waters of psychodrama, Kurosawa's first digital
film, and his most cryptic and pared down work to date, is about an aimless
twentysomething, Yuji (Joe Odagiri), who is drawn into the orbit of enigmatic
factory co-worker Mamoru (Todanabu Asano). When his self-appointed mentor
inexplicably murders their boss and his family and commits suicide in
prison, Yuji inherits not only his friend's lethal pet jellyfish but also
his relationship with his estranged father. Kurosawa's trademark opaque
minimalist visuals and unique attunement to social disconnect and urban
periphery become the ideal setting for a meditation on the need to adapt
to the new environment of the 21st-century.
Sat Feb 14: 7
SPECIAL PREVIEW: STRAYED
/ LES ÉGARÉS
André Téchiné, France, 2003; 95m
"Seeking refuge from the Germans at the beginning of the Occupation, Odile
(Emmanuelle Béart), a Parisian bourgeoise with two children in
tow, reluctantly falls in love with Yvan (Gaspard Ulliel), a delinquent,
illiterate youth whose well-developed survival skills soon make him indispensable.
They travel into the back country and break into an empty house, and become
a makeshift, uneasy family unit, sequestered in a kind of desert island
paradise, cut off from the outside world. Having set up this self-contained
world, Téchiné plays out the dynamics of class and sexuality,
with an economy and delicacy that have by now become second nature." -
Gavin Smith, Film Comment , July/August 2003
Sat Feb 14: 9
THE STORY OF MARIE AND JULIEN / L'HISTOIRE DE
MARIE ET JULIEN
Jacques Rivette, France, 2003; 150m
"Rivette's film transforms the romance between an elusive, enigmatic femme
and her solitary, stolid beau into a circuitous pas de deux of redemption
and second chances for two lost souls in search of 'deliverance'. Constructed
from MacGuffins (chance encounters, 'clues,' an undermotivated blackmail
subplot), the narrative is at once simple (a man and a woman) and opaque
(things are not what they seem). Rivette appears to be revisiting the
'trance' mode of Céline and Julie Go Boating and Le Pont
du Nord, but what's most remarkable about the film is how moving it
is finally, and how much is at stake after all." - Gavin Smith,
Film Comment, Nov/Dec 2003
Sun Feb 15: 1:30; Wed Feb 18: 8; Fri Feb 20: 3:10
THE MAGIC GLOVES
Martin Rejtman, Argentina, 2003; 90m
"The film spins the tale of a 35-year-old gypsy cab driver confronting
loss, crisis, and separation while remaining ever faithful to his beloved
car and sole object of desire. Rejtman's keen eye for the absurd focuses
on addiction and depression, on the crisis of middle age, on connections
made and missed - all permeated by deep melancholia. The tight script
and outstanding ensemble acting draw a wonderously poignant portrait of
paralysis and miscommunication in present-day Buenos Aires. Its unflinching
view of the state of things there - here and now - is subversively funny.
It is a near masterpiece." - Pablo Suárez, Film Comment,
Sept/Oct 2003
Sun Feb 15: 4:30; Wed Feb 18: 1:30 & 6
PLAYING "IN THE COMPANY
OF MEN / EN JOUANT "DANS LA COMPAGNIE DES HOMMES
Arnaud Desplechin, France, 2003; 118m
In many ways a departure, Arnaud Desplechin's latest is based on a play
by British writer Edward Bond about a family business dynasty coming undone.
Bond writes on a vast, Shakespearean scale, putting racism, Oedipal and
class conflicts into the mix. Rather than simplify this tough, thorny
material, Desplechin dives in headfirst, working in quick, bold strokes:
his handheld camera seems to be scuttling everywhere, picking up the smallest
nuance of every violent exchange and every backroom power shift. Inspired
by Al Pacino's Looking for Richard, the director also takes us
in and out of his own story, filming his actors in rehearsal and even
throwing in a scene from Hamlet to broaden the women's roles. This
is one rough, tough movie, with moments you will never forget. - Kent
Jones
Sun Feb 15: 6:30; Tue Feb 17: 1; Wed Feb 18: 3:30
RIPLEY'S GAME
Liliana Cavani, Italy, 2002; 110m
"Numerous directors have taken on Highsmith's enigmatic and contrary antihero,
Tom Ripley. Liliana Cavani has crafted the most enjoyable and subtly textured
Ripley film since Purple Noon. From the sudden grisly anarchy of
its opening sequence, RIPLEY'S GAME yanks the viewer into the queasy,
hyperkinetic ambience that Highsmith so uniquely evoked in literature,
that quality of hungover propulsion through progressively uglier complications,
involving endless trains and airports and implacable adversaries, alternating
with a silken, strangely nauseating comfort zone of connoisseurship and
high culture accoutrements. John Malkovich plays Ripley a good deal weirder
than his predecessors; what has always been absent from other attempts
at the character - the element of abrupt, obscene, psychotic violence
experienced as pleasure - Malkovich incarnates to stupefying perfection."
- Gary Indiana, Film Comment, Nov/Dec 2003
Sun Feb 15: 9; Thurs Feb 19: 4; Fri Feb 20: 1
GAMBLING, GODS AND LSD
Peter Mettler, Switzerland/Canada, 2002; 180m
Peter Mettler's epic, meditative essay-cum-documentary-cum-unclassifiable
whatsit takes on a vast subject: the search for transcendence, from North
America to Switzerland to India. As you watch Mettler find the mystical/visual
link between a desert drive glimpsed through a rain-flecked windshield,
excited spectators eagerly awaiting the destruction of a Las Vegas hotel,
an old friend with a drug-softened brain talking about being "slain in
the spirit," an ethereal climb through the Swiss Alps, a camera-shy boy
running through a grove of trees by the Ganges, you get the sense that
Mettler could teach the Dalai Lama a thing or two about patience. He took
years to edit his material, and there's not a minute of this serene, intense
movie that doesn't feel organic, arrived at rather than assumed.- Kent
Jones
Mon Feb 16: 1; Fri Feb 20: 8
SHANGHAI PANIC
Andrew Cheng, China, 2001, digital; 87m This first feature from
new Sixth Generation sensation Andrew Cheng, a low-budget, underground
DV docu-drama about alienated Shanghai youth, was inspired by the writings
of banned bad-girl novelist Mian Mian, who appears in the film with several
of her cohorts, more or less playing themselves. "The film strikes a fine
balance between loose improvisation and fidelity to the original stories."
- Bérénice Reynaud, Film Comment, Sept/Oct 2003
Mon Feb 16: 4:30
WELCOME TO DESTINATION SHANGHAI
Andrew Cheng, China, 2003, 86m
With his second film, "Cheng takes a giant leap forward. Visually, he
reworks his digital images to create a dark, oneiric, haunting universe
of lonely lives on the margins…. The narrative consists of small, loosely
connected vignettes, filmed in minimalist style and in extremely long
takes…. Young people with neither talent nor prospects sell their bodies,
winding up dead on the waterfront or running naked through a public park….
Far removed from the romantic vision of the Shanghai underworld offered
by Suzhou River, Cheng's film reveals a new, original vision of
China's urban nightmare." - Bérénice Reynaud, Film
Comment, Sept/Oct 2003.
Mon Feb 16: 6:30; Fri Feb 20: 6
THE FIVE OBSTRUCTIONS
Lars von Trier & Jorgen Leth, Denmark, 2003; 90m
In an act of playful intellectual torture, Lars von Trier has his hero,
the great Danish filmmaker Jorgen Leth, remake his classic 1967 short,
The Perfect Human, five times with five different imposed rules.
What emerges is a unique form of dual biography - two ornery artists dissecting
each other. Over the years, The Perfect Human "has become an ur-form
or koan from which Trier has worked on several occasions, and THE FIVE
OBSTRUCTIONS is the latest step in its development. It refracts the
original film, and, at the same time, represents a five-step program of
Trierian self-annihilation." - Olaf Möller, Film Comment,
Nov/Dec 2003
Thurs Feb 19: 9
THE FIVE OBSTRUCTIONS will open at Film Forum in 2004.
JEAN-CLAUDE BRISSEAU:
ANTI SOCIAL REALIST
A former schoolteacher, Jean-Claude Brisseau is the most atypical of great
French filmmakers. His themes, his career, his influences, his personality
all conspire to make him truly marginal. He belongs to none of French
cinema's "families." He's a lone wolf, and pays a high price for his independence.
His integrity and meticulousness scare off producers, and each of his
10 films was the result of a fierce struggle. - Frederic Bonnaud,
Film Comment, Jan/Feb 2004
SPECIAL PREVIEW: SECRET THINGS / CHOSES SECRETES
France, 2002; 115m
A certain tendency in Gallic cinema follows the following formula: Beautiful
women, rampant male misogyny, and then a hyperbolic resolution often involving
mythological source material. Jean-Claude Brisseau's latest affront to
sense and sensibility is currently the dominant case study. (Cahiers du
Cinéma proclaimed it 2002's Film of the Year.) Two lubricious women
climb the corporate ladder wielding sex as a weapon. They eventually collide
with a man more depraved than they are. Everything goes baroque. "A brilliant
reflection upon the degraded state of the contemporary imagination." -
Frédéric Bonnaud, Film Comment, Jan/Feb 2004
Tue Feb 17: 9
WHITE WEDDING / NOCHE BLANCHE
1989; 92m
Vanessa Paradis made her memorable debut in this dark and pessimistic
account of the vacuous relationship between Mathilde (Paradis), an intelligent
yet troubled 17-year-old, and François (Bruno Crémer), a
50-year-old philosophy teacher. To ensure that the girl doesn't continue
to fall under the influence of her suicidal mother, her father has sent
her away to live alone - as a result, she habitually plays truant. François
takes her side and defends her to the school board, so that she will not
be expelled. Soon, the two are involved in a passionate affair, much to
the chagrin of François's suspicious wife, Catherine (Ludmila Mikael).
Ultimately Brisseau's film is "another pure melodrama dealing with the
difficulty of communication and the impossibility of achieving true romantic
fusion between a man and a woman." - Frédéric Bonnaud
Sat Feb 21: 5 & 9:15; Wed Feb 25: 5:10
THE BLACK ANGEL / L'ANGE NOIR
1994; 99m
A French noir brimming with high style and featuring singer Sylvie Vartan
as the archetypal blond femme fatale. Married to a respectable magistrate
(Michel Piccoli), she murders a gangster she claims tried to rape her.
As her lawyer, Tcheky Karyo doesn't have a chance against this dark angel's
wiles even as he uncovers her sordid past as an ex-hooker, porn-movie
queen, and mistress of the deceased hood. "This explosive cocktail produces
a unique and proud film, a grand slam from a filmmaker still holding onto
the cinema of his masters and his own fantasies on the one hand and his
anger toward an all-too-well-established social order on the other, the
former shaping and illuminating the latter." - Frédéric
Bonnaud
Sat Feb 21: 7; Tue Feb 24: 3
A BRUTAL GAME / UN JEU
BRUTAL
1983; 89m
Brisseau focuses on the fascinating juxtaposition between a serial child
killer descending into madness and the young handicapped daughter he is
attempting to raise. Tessier (Bruno Crémer), a renowned biologist,
decides to stop work to take care of his rebellious offspring Isabelle
(Emmanuelle Debever). Formerly institutionalized, Isabelle is finally
coming out of her shell, while her father is simultaneously retreating
from all reality. The disturbing parallel narrative is aided in no small
part by Brisseau's rich and stylized mise-en-scène, which helps
to create a deeply unsettling atmosphere through a heightened awareness
of both the concrete and the metaphysical.
Sun Feb 22: 2; Thurs Feb 26: 5 & 9
CÉLINE
1992; 90m
Saturated in a kind of strangely supernatural light, this lovely and provocative
film seems to break loose from time entirely to fall into dream. On the
heels of a family crisis, 20-year-old Céline (Isabelle Pasco) is
cast out to find her own way. Nearly suicidal, sitting on a sidewalk in
the pouring rain, this lost soul is rescued by Geneviève (Lisa
Hérédia), a nurse. Eventually, the two take up residence
in the country, where Céline loses herself in intense sessions
of meditation - that's when strange phenomena begin to affect her. Brisseau's
calm camera-eye captures a mysterious transfer of energy between the two
women, healer and visionary, who may be aspects of the same mystical force.
Sun Feb 22: 4; Tue Feb 24: 1; Thurs Feb 26: 7
WORKERS FOR THE GOOD LORD
/ LES SAVATES DU BON DIEU
1994; 99m
Boosted by almost unanimously enthusiastic reviews, this unapologetically
Marxist melodrama, alternately tender and visceral, is considered one
of Brisseau's most daring, ambitious films. Fred (Stanislas Merhar) and
Elodie (Coralie Revel), a young couple with a small daughter, live in
an impoverished section of Saint-Etienne, scraping to make ends meet.
Tiring of Fred's irresponsible ways, Elodie leaves, but Fred is determined
to track her down. "This delirious philosophical epic fable, with its
abrupt shifts in rhythm and tone, featuring an African shaman who performs
miracles, enabled Brisseau to finally shake off his reputation as merely
a socially themed, naturalistic filmmaker." - Frédéric
Bonnaud
Sun Feb 22: 6; Wed Feb 25: 3 & 9
SOUND AND FURY
1987; 95m Former teacher Brisseau's real-life experiences inspired
this powerful film, a precursor to La Haine: tough, urgent, yet
poetic, it explores the loneliness and lack of affection in the lives
of two teenagers - innocents in the jungle of high-rises and savage school
gangs. The film marked Brisseau as a socially conscious filmmaker, "committed
to revealing the violence and exclusionary politics at work in the projects
and the dead-end life of the underclass. But that perception ignored the
fantasy elements, surreal touches, and strong sense of the grotesque that
constantly disturb the film's apparent naturalism, much like in Buñuel's
Los Olvidados." - Frédéric Bonnaud
Sun Feb 22: 8:15; Wed Feb 25: 7; Thurs Feb 26: 3
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