Yun Jung-hee returns to the screen for the first time in sixteen years in moving POETRY, which will screen the next three Sundays at Symphony Space
POETRY (SHI) (Lee Chang-dong, 2010)
Symphony Space Leonard Nimoy Thalia
2537 Broadway at 95th St.
Sunday, April 10, 17, 24, $12, 4:00
212-864-5400
www.kino.com/poetry
www.symphonyspace.org
Returning to the screen for the first time in sixteen years, legendary Korean actress Yun Jung-hee is mesmerizing in Lee Chang-dong’s beautiful, bittersweet, and poetic Poetry. Yun stars as Mija, a lovely but simple woman raising her teenage grandson, Wook (Lee David), and working as a maid for Mr. Kang (Kim Hi-ra), a Viagra-taking old man debilitated from a stroke. When she is told that Wook is involved in the tragic suicide of a classmate (Han Su-young), Mija essentially goes about her business as usual, not outwardly reacting while clearly deeply troubled inside. As the complications in her life grow, she turns to a community poetry class for solace, determined to finish a poem before the memory loss that is causing her to forget certain basic words overwhelms her. Winner of the Best Screenplay award at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, Poetry is a gorgeously understated work, a visual, emotional poem that never drifts from its slow, steady pace. Writer-director Lee (Peppermint Candy, Secret Sunshine) occasionally treads a little too close to clichéd melodrama, but he always gets back on track, sharing the moving story of an unforgettable character. Throughout the film he offers no easy answers, leaving lots of room for interpretation, like poems themselves. Poetry will be showing at 4:00 on April 10, 17, and 24 at Symphony Space as part of the Thalia Film Sundays series.
One of the most influential films of all time, Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 masterpiece stars Toshiro Mifune as a bandit accused of the brutal rape of a samurai’s wife (Machiko Kyo) and the murder of her husband (Masayuki Mori). However, four eyewitnesses tell a tribunal four different stories, each told in flashback as if the truth, forcing the characters — and the audience — to question the reality of what they see and experience. Kurosawa veteran Takashi Shimura — the Japanese Ward Bond — plays a local woodcutter, with Minoru Chiaka as the priest. The mesmerizing work, which won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, is beautifully shot by Kazuo Miyagawa; Rashomon is nothing short of unforgettable. Rashomon is screening April 9 as part of Film Forum’s “5 Japanese Divas” series, featuring four weeks of films starring Kyo, Isuzu Yamada, Kimuyo Tanaka, Setsuko Hara, and Hideko Takamine, who play strong, determined women in such classic works as Yasujiro Ozu’s Early Summer (1951) and Tokyo Story (1953), Hiroshi Teshigahara’s The Face of Another (1966), Mikio Naruse’s Okaasan (1952) and Flowing (1956), Kurosawa’s The Idiot (1951) and Throne of Blood (1957), Keisuke Kinoshita’s Carmen Comes Home (1951) and Twenty-Four Eyes (1954), and Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu (1953), Sansho the Bailiff (1954), and Street of Shame (1956), among others.
Brian De Palma lets his Hitchcockian roots show in Sisters, even going so far as to hire Bernard Herrmann to compose the music for this low-budget horrorfest starring Margot Kidder as a detached Siamese twin and Jennifer Salt (Eunice from Soap) as a writer for the Staten Island Panorama, the author of such columns as “The Lost Borough,” “Save the Ferry,” and “Why We Call Them Pigs.” You’ll guess the twist about twenty minutes in, but you’ll still have a lot of fun with the usual load of De Palma sex, gore, and violence. Sisters is screening in a rare 35mm print at BAM on Friday at 7:30, kicking off the “De Palma Suspense” series, and will be introduced by writer-director Noah Baumbach (The Squid & the Whale). The series continues Saturday night with Paul Williams starring in De Palma’s cult favorite Phantom of the Paradise, which will be followed by a Q&A with producer Ed Pressman and costar William Finley. Carrie and Body Double screen on Sunday, with The Fury on Monday, Obsession on Tuesday, Blow Out on Wednesday, Raising Cain on April 18, Femme Fatale on April 19, and the great Dressed to Kill closing things out on April 20.