Tenth Rail
413 Tenth Ave. at 33rd St.
Thursday, June 23, suggested donation $10, 6:00 – 9:00
www.facebook.com/event
www.american.redcross.org
Jamband veteran Greg Merritt, whose latest project is Heavy Road, and producer and songwriter Mark Marshall (Merge, New Eye) are teaming up June 23 for a special show at Tenth Rail benefiting the Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund to help those affected by the deadly tornado in Joplin, Missouri. They’ll be playing acoustic covers of songs by the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead, and others, in addition to original improvisations. Admission is free but they are requesting a suggested donation of $10 to help the many victims of the tornado. There will also be $5 drink specials until 8:00.
“Breaking the Waves: The Films of Zero Chou” continues June 23 at 6:30 with a screening of Zero Chou’s 2008 lesbian melodrama, Drifting Flowers. Written at the same time she wrote her previous film, 2004’s Splendid Float, which was set in the world of drag queens, Drifting Flowers consists of three interrelated tales of romance and intimate relationships. The first section is told from the point of view of eight-year-old May (Pai Chih-Ying), who lives with her older sister, Jing (Serena Fang), a blind nightclub singer. Social services thinks May would be better off with a real family instead of doing her homework and falling asleep every night at the club, but things get even more complicated when both May and Jing come to rely on Jing’s new accordion player, the very butch Diego (Chao Yi-Lan), in very different ways. The second segment follows the elderly Lily (Lu Yi-Ching), who is wasting away at a senior citizens’ home until her husband, Yen (Sam Wang), suddenly shows up and instantly fills Lily with fond memories — although she mistakes him for the woman she loved, Ocean; it turns out that the “marriage” was a fraud just to fool their parents so Lily and Yen could actually live with their same-sex lovers. But as Lily feels a new vibrancy in her life, Yen is suffering terribly with HIV. The final part goes back to Diego’s teen years, when she worked in her family’s puppet theater and developed her first real crush on young burlesque singer Lily (Herb Hsu), linking the three stories. Drifting Flowers is bogged down by cliché after cliché, constantly telegraphing exactly where it’s going. Chou, the only openly lesbian Taiwanese filmmaker, regularly takes the easy, obvious route, not being fair to her characters, who deserve better. Although individual vignettes offer the promise of a more challenging narrative, the story inevitably returns to the lowest common denominator in dealing with gender identity, which is a shame, because Chou had so much more to work with. Continuing her goal of making six lesbian films, each one representing another color of the gay rainbow pride flag — Spider Lilies was green, Splendid Float yellow — Drifting Flowers is red. The series concludes June 30 with Chou’s 2001 film, Corners.
Based on a true story that writer-director Hirokazu Kore-eda (Maborosi, After Life) read about back in 1988, Nobody Knows is a heartwarming, heartbreaking film about four extraordinary half-siblings who must fend for themselves every time their mother takes off for extended periods of time. Japanese TV and pop star YOU makes her feature-film debut as Keiko, a young woman who has four kids by way of four different men. When she’s home, she shows affection for the children, but the problem is, she’s rarely home. Instead, twelve-year-old Akira (Yagira Yuya) must take care of the shy Kyoko (Kitaura Ayu), who handles the laundry; the troublemaker Shigeru (Kimura Hiei), who can’t follow the rules; and sweet baby Yuki (Shimizu Momoko), who likes chocolates and squeaky shoes. At first, it is charming and uplifting watching how Akira handles the complicated situation — the other kids are not allowed outside because the landlord will evict them if he finds out about them, and Akira even helps teach the family, who do not attend school — but as Keiko disappears for longer periods of time, the children’s lives grow more dire by the day as food and money start running out. Kore-eda, who also edited and produced this powerful picture, has created a moving, involving film that nearly plays like a documentary, avoiding melodramatic clichés and instead wrapping the audience up in the closeted life of four terrific kids whose tragic existence will ultimately break your heart. Nobody Knows is screening at MoMA on June 23 and 24 as part of the series “In Focus: IFC Films,” which concludes with a sneak peek of Errol Morris’s Tabloid (2010) on June 24 at 8:00.
