Francine Fishpaw (Divine) faces a series of suburban dilemmas in John Waters’s odoriferous Polyester
POLYESTER (John Waters, 1981)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Friday, April 19, and Saturday, April 20, midnight
Series continues through April 27
212-924-7771 www.ifccenter.com
Camp champ John Waters’s crudely rambunctious cult classic suburban satire Polyester, which underwent a 4K restoration in 2019, follows the misadventures of the Job-like Francine Fishpaw, ravishingly portrayed by drag queen extraordinaire Divine. Her God-fearing life takes a bitter turn when she catches her nasty, demanding husband, porn purveyor Elmer (David Samson), with his sexpot secretary, Sandra Sullivan (Mink Stole). Her status in the community, so precious to her, is ruined as she becomes an alcoholic, unable to rein in her wildly promiscuous daughter, Lu-Lu (Mary Garlington) — who has the hots for bad boy Bo-Bo Belsinger, played by Dead Boys frontman Stiv Bators!! — or her inhalant-abusing son, Baltimore Foot Stomper Dexter Fishpaw (Ken King).
She also receives no emotional or financial support from her skunk of a mother, La Rue (Joni Ruth White). The only one who stands by her is her ultra-strange, simple-minded bestie, the Baby Jane-like although kindhearted Cuddles Kovinsky (Edith Massey), but she finds a glimmer of hope in a handsome hunk of a he-man (Hollywood heartthrob Tab Hunter!!) who tantalizingly keeps showing up on her radar in a flashy white sports car, like Suzanne Somers does to Richard Dreyfuss in American Graffiti.
Francine (Divine) falls for the hunky Todd (Tab Hunter) in Polyester
When the Douglas Sirk-inspired Polyester premiered in May 1981 at the old Waverly, which became the IFC in 2005, it was shown in Odorama — each moviegoer was given a scratch-and-sniff card of ten smells that were signaled by the corresponding number blinking on the screen. (I unfortunately still remember number nine all too well.) It’s not just a gimmick; in the movie, Francine is constantly sniffing around like an animal, though she is not so much hunting prey as being prey. The acting is about as over the top as it gets and the editing and camerawork DIY sloppy as writer, producer, and director Waters, who had previously made such films as Pink Flamingos and Female Troubles and would go on to make Cry-Baby, Serial Mom, and Hairspray, addresses such issues as pornography, abortion, religion, addiction, marriage, class, fat shaming, parenting, and the movies themselves with a brash sense of humor that can never go too low.
Baltimore native Waters fills the film, his first major hit, with his usual Dreamlanders cast of oddball actors; in addition to Divine, Massey, and Stole, you’ll find Susan Lowe, Cookie Mueller, George Hulse, Mary Vivian Pearce, Sharon Niesp, Jean Hill, George Figgs, and Marina Melin in small roles. The score features a trio of songs — Hunter sings the title track, written by Chris Stein and Debbie Harry of Blondie, while Bill Murray warbles Harry and Michael Kamen’s “The Best Thing.” More than forty years later, Polyester is still like nothing you’ve ever seen before, a wacky work that established Waters in popular culture as a unique auteur with his own unique cinematic language. The film is screening April 19 and 20 — in Odorama — at midnight in the IFC Center series “Sicks by John Waters,” which concludes April 26-27 with Multiple Maniacs.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
KEN LOACH
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
April 19 – May 2
212-727-8110 filmforum.org
British filmmaker Ken Loach’s The Old Oak opened at Film Forum on April 5, the conclusion to his Northeast England trilogy, following I, Daniel Blake, and Sorry We Missed You. Loach, a social realist who turns eighty-eight in June, has said that The Old Oak will be his final work, which would mark the end of a brilliant career that included twenty-eight films. Film Forum will be presenting twenty-one of those films in a retrospective tribute running April 19 through May 2, from his debut, 1967’s Poor Cow to 1991’s Riff-Raff, 1996’s Carla’s Song, 2000’s Bread and Roses, and 2013’s The Spirit of ’45. Below is a look at two of the highlights.
Cillian Murphy stars in Ken Loach’s The Wind that Shakes the Barley
THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY (Ken Loach, 2006)
Saturday, April 20, 5:20
Thursday, April 25, 3:00
Saturday, April 27, 7:40
Tuesday, April 30, 8:10 filmforum.org
Winner of the 2006 Palme d’Or at Cannes, The Wind that Shakes the Barley is a brutal masterpiece from director Ken Loach (Family Life,Raining Stones). It’s 1920, and the English black and tans are running roughshod through Ireland, leaving broken and dead bodies in their wake as they keep the population frightened and in poverty. But poorly armed yet determined local guerrilla armies are forming, prepared to fight for freedom in their homeland. In one small town, Damien (Cillian Murphy) is getting ready to move to London to train as a doctor, but he decides instead to join the burgeoning Irish Republican Army after seeing one too many bloody beatings.
Swearing their loyalty to the cause and led by Damien’s brother, Teddy (Padraic Delaney), they set up ambushes of British forces, gathering weapons in a desperate attempt to win back their country. Damien also falls for Sinead (Orla Fitzgerald), one of many women who work as messengers and spies and run safe houses. But when a questionable treaty is signed, loyalty is tested and families torn apart. Written by Paul Laverty and also featuring Liam Cunningham, Mary Riordan, Myles Horgan, and Mary Murphy, The Wind that Shakes the Barley is a fierce, no-holds-barred, if one-sided, look at a violent conflict that has lasted for centuries.
Eric Bishop (Steve Evets) gets some advice from his hero, football star Eric Cantona (Eric Cantona)
LOOKING FOR ERIC (Ken Loach, 2010)
Sunday, April 21, 7:50
Friday, April 26, 8:20 filmforum.org
With his life in freefall, postal employee Eric Bishop (Steve Evets) gazes up at his poster of soccer legend Eric Cantona and wonders what the Manchester United star would do – and then, like magic, Cantona (played by Cantona himself) appears in his room, to lend advice and help him through his myriad problems. Reminiscent of how Bogie (Jerry Lacy) guides Allan (Woody Allen) in Play It Again, Sam, Cantona hangs out with Bishop, talking about how he dealt with adversity on the field and off and sharing joints while discussing life. Bishop’s stepsons don’t listen to him, his second wife has left him, and he ends up in the hospital after driving the wrong way through a traffic circle. But his close group of motley friends – Spleen (Justin Moorhouse), Jack (Des Sharples), Monk (Greg Cook), Judge (Mick Ferry), Smug (Smug Roberts), Travis (Johnny Travis), and leader Meatballs (John Henshaw) – stick by him through thick and thin, especially when his son Ryan (Gerard Kearns) gets into serious trouble with a local gangster (Steve Marsh).
A light-hearted, tender comedy that turns somewhat goofy at the end, Looking for Eric was directed by British iconoclast Ken Loach, who has previously offered up such tales as Kes,Riff-Raff,Carla’s Song, and The Wind That Shakes the Barley. Loach and screenwriting partner Paul Laverty were looking for a sweet, innocent film to make when Cantona actually approached them with an idea that they turned into Looking for Eric, a nod to such charmers as Waking Ned Devine and The Full Monty that includes clips of many of Cantona’s most spectacular goals as well as his infamous farewell press conference.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Who:Charles Busch,Melissa Errico What: Book talk Where:The National Arts Club, 15 Gramercy Park South When: Monday, April 15, free with advance RSVP, 6:30 Why: In the first chapter of his memoir, Leading Lady: A Memoir of a Most Unusual Boy (Smart Pop, September 2023, $27.95), Charles Busch is writing about meeting up with Joan Rivers. “Dining with a group of friends at Joe Allen, Joan expressed wistfully, ‘I wish I had a gay son I could phone at midnight and discuss whatever movie was on TCM.’ Everyone laughed. I fell silent, but inside I was pleading, Take me. I’ll be your gay son. Joan was the most prominent in a long line of smart, bigger-than-life mother figures I’ve attached myself to. All my life, I’ve been in a search for a maternal woman whose lap I could rest my head on.”
New York native Busch has been part of the entertainment scene in the city since the late 1970s, writing and appearing in numerous plays and films, often in drag. The Tony nominee and Drama Desk Award winner has dazzled audiences with such plays as The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife,Vampire Lesbians of Sodom,The Tribute Artist, and The Confession of Lily Dare as well as Psycho Beach Party and Die, Mommie, Die!, both of which transferred from stage to the big screen. He currently can be seen in Ibsen’s Ghost at 59E59 through April 14.
On April 16, Busch will be at the National Arts Club to talk about his life and career, in conversation with Manhattan-born, Tony-nominated actress and singer Melissa Errico, who has starred in such shows as My Fair Lady,High Society,Dracula the Musical,Amour,Sunday in the Park with George, and Aunt Dan and Lemon. Expect lots of great stories featuring many all-time theater greats.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent epic, Metropolis, has been shown over the years in various versions and with different music, most famously Giorgio Moroder’s 1984 score. On April 10, the New School’s College of Performing Arts will present the world premiere of a new score by Mannes School of Music student Amir Sanjari, performed live to the film by the Mannes Orchestra, conducted by Robert Kahn. “Among the many things that are magical about masterpieces of the silent film era is the possibility of creating new musical sound worlds for extraordinary moving images. This is just what our student composer Amir Sanjari has done with Fritz Lang’s legendary Metropolis, where the brilliant young composer of 2024 joins forces with the 1927 thunderbolt of silent film history,” executive dean Richard Kessler said in a statement. The event is part of the (Un)Silent Film series, which has featured new scores for such works as Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush and The Immigrant and Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr., with such hosts as Matthew Broderick, Bill Irwin, and Rob Bartlett.
Set one hundred years in the future, Metropolis pits man vs. machine, the corporation against the worker, and sin vs. salvation in a technologically advanced society run by business mogul Joh Fredersen (Alfred Abel). While Fredersen rakes in the big bucks on the surface, the workers are treated like slaves way down below, in a dark, dank hell where they perform their automaton-like jobs. When Fredersen’s son, Freder (Gustav Fröhlich), starts feeling sympathy for the workers and falls for Maria (Brigitte Helm), an activist who is trying to convince the men, women, and children of the lower depths that they deserve more out of life, Fredersen has mad inventor Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) create a man-machine version of Maria to steer his employees to a revolution that will lead them to self-destruct, although things don’t quite turn out as planned. Written by Lang and his wife, Thea Von Harbou, Metropolis is a visual marvel, featuring jaw-dropping special effects by Eugen Schüfftan (who was developing his Schüfftan process of using miniatures) and a stunning man-machine designed by sculptor Walter Schulze-Mittendorff.
Walter Schulze-Mittendorff’s man-machine stirs up plenty of trouble among the workers in 2026
The complex story incorporates biblical elements, from direct references to the Tower of Babel to other allusions, including fire and flood, while focusing on the relationship between father and prodigal son that evokes both God and Jesus and Abraham and Isaac. A parable that also relates to the battle between employers and unions, the film features a series of doppelgängers: There are two Marias, the real one, who is loving and genuine, and the cold and calculating man-machine; Freder and worker 11811, Georgy (Erwin Binswanger), who temporarily switch places; and Fredersen’s wife, Hel, who died while giving birth to Freder but has been revived into the initial man-machine by Rotwang, who was also in love with her. The massive achievement was shot by Karl Freund (Dracula, Key Largo) with Günther Rittau and Walter Ruttmann, who give it a dazzlingly dramatic look in every scene, accompanied by a soaring score by Gottfried Huppertz that incorporates snippets of Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle’s “La Marseillaise.” The film declares, “The mediator between head and hands must be the heart!” Lang explores all three in this remarkable film.
“Fritz Lang got the idea for Metropolis when he was in Manhattan in the 1920s promoting another movie of his. Knowing this, I took inspiration from the city itself,” Sanjari said in a statement. “The buildings, the art, and many other things in New York City inspired me to write the score. In addition, I was very inspired by minimalism and the repetition of musical ideas, so I tried to incorporate that.” Admission is free with advance RSVP.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
The career of Canadian auteur Patricia Rozema will be celebrated at Roxy retrospective
FILMS OF PATRICIA ROZEMA
Roxy Cinema
2 Sixth Ave. at Church St.
April 5-11 www.roxycinemanewyork.com
“You know, the smile that people have when they think they’re alone — that look people have when they think they’re alone or they’re not being watched — is entirely different from the way we are with others in the room,” award-winning Toronto New Wave director Patricia Rozema told David Schwartz in a November 1999 Museum of the Moving Image Pinewood Dialogue about Mansfield Park, her adaptation of the novel by Jane Austen. “I’m probably attracted to making movies because I’m a voyeur, because I wish for those moments. And since it’s illegal, for the most part, to capture them, you have to re-create them.”
Rozema will be at the Roxy Cinema for several Q&As during a weeklong retrospective consisting of five of her films, beginning April 5 at 7:15 with a 4K restoration of her second feature, White Room, which stars Maurice Godin, Margot Kidder, and Kate Nelligan in a dark fairy tale about murder and celebrity obsession; the screening will be followed by a Q&A with the Future of Film Is Female’s Caryn Coleman. On April 6 at 7:30 and April 11 at 7:30, Rozema will speak with Queer Forty editor-in-chief Merryn Johns after a screening of a 4K restoration of 1995’s When Night Is Falling, in which two university professors at a faith-based institution, Camille (Pascale Bussières) and Martin (Henry Czerny), are considering getting married until Camille is suddenly drawn to the mysterious acrobat Petra (Rachael Crawford).
On April 7 at 5:15, Rozema will discuss 2018’s Mouthpiece with writer director Charlie Kaufman; the film is based on a play by Amy Nostbakken and Norah Sadava, who star as two sides of the same woman, Cassandra, dealing with the death of their mother. And on April 8 at 7:00, Rozema will be on hand to talk with A. M. Homes about her debut, I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing. In addition, a 35mm print of Mansfield Park will be shown April 6 at 5:15, and White Room will have an encore screening on April 10 at 9:00.
“I believe in tension and release, in that if you stay in the the same tone and mode and intensity for too long, it actually becomes monotonous. When you change up your pace or your humor level, then the release is welcome,” Rozema says in the DVD audio commentary of Mansfield Park. “I believe that’s my biggest job: tone control, and maintaining enough unity so that it all feels like one movie and all the scenes belong together, and yet diversity so that emotional and narrative interest is maintained.”
Polly Vandersma (Sheila McCarthy) shares her unique view of the world in I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing
“Gosh. You know, sometimes I think my head is like a gas tank. You have to be really careful what you put into it because it might just affect the whole system,” Polly Vandersma (Sheila McCarthy) says in I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing. “I mean, isn’t life the strangest thing you’ve ever seen?”
Considered one of the best films to ever come out of Canada, I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing is plenty strange itself. The 1987 comedy is a unique exploration of queer culture and belongs with such 1980s underground fare as Smithereens,Liquid Sky, and Repo Man as well as James McBride’s 1967 David Holzman’s Diary. In her second film, McCarthy stars as the birdlike Polly, a quirky, self-described “unsuccessful career woman” and “gal on the go,” a not-very-good girl Friday who is content being a temporary secretary, the antithesis of the ’80s archetype embodied by Tess McGill, the ambitious thirty-year-old portrayed by Melanie Griffith in Mike Nichols’s 1988 Working Girl.
The story is told in flashback as Polly makes a video about her simple existence, kind of like a precursor to the confessions in MTV’s The Real World but without the self-aggrandizement. Polly lives alone in Toronto, with no friends; now thirty-one, she lost both her parents ten years before. She’s not exactly smart or well rounded and not much of a conversationalist. When gallery curator Gabrielle (Paule Baillargeon) offers her a full-time position, Polly jumps at the chance, ready to immerse herself in the contemporary art world, which she knows nothing about, and Gabrielle’s personal life, which includes the sudden, unexpected return of her old girlfriend, Mary (Ann-Marie MacDonald).
Polly is an aspiring photographer who snaps pictures of people on the street hanging out, playing sports, and falling in love, all activities that seem to evade her. She develops the film in her bathroom, which she has converted into a makeshift darkroom. Meanwhile, she has endearing fantasies of climbing buildings, flying, and walking on water. Her photos and fantasies are in black-and-white, countering the pastel colors of her daily life. When she finds out that Gabrielle is a painter — her canvases literally glow, as if descended from heaven (while evoking the mysterious object in the trunk of the Chevy Malibu in Repo Man) — she becomes obsessed with her mentor’s works as both of them decide to pursue their artistic talents further.
Filmed in Toronto in one month for $275,000, I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing, winner of the Prix de la Jeunesse at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival, underwent a 4K restoration in 2017 as part of Canada 150, a celebration of the country’s 150th anniversary of its confederation. The title was taken from a line in T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. / I do not think that they will sing to me.”
McCarthy, who also appeared in Rozema’s White Room, won the first of two Genie Awards for Best Actress, the Canadian equivalent of the Oscars, for Mermaids; she would nab the honor again six years later for Diane Kingswood’s The Lotus Eaters. She is mesmerizing as the endlessly eccentric, spikey-red-haired Polly, who is as peculiar and unpredictable as she is charming and endearing; it’s like she’s arrived from another planet, intent on learning what life can be about. Pay close attention to the scene in which Gabrielle and art critic Clive (Richard Monette) discuss a new painting by a gallery artist while Polly eavesdrops; they are actually talking about her potential transformation, even if she doesn’t realize it.
Rozema wrote, directed, edited, and coproduced the film, which features playful cinematography by Douglas Koch and a fab ’80s score by Mark Korven, alongside Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5.
Rozema will participate in a Q&A with author A. M. Homes following the screening. “I wanted to make a warm-spirited anti-authority film,” Rozema says in her director’s statement. “But most of all I wanted to make a film with Polly in it, one where she and I get to hear the mermaids singing.” We should consider ourselves fortunate to be able to do the same.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
NOVEL ENCOUNTERS
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
April 5-28
212-660-0312 metrograph.com/film
Since his debut as a writer and director with 1997’s Green Fish, South Korean auteur has Lee Chang-dong has made only five subsequent feature films, which might actually add to his growing international reputation. Born on July 4, 1954, Lee is also a novelist, playwright, and short story writer and former Minister of Culture and Tourism. Metrograph will be screening all six full-length works in the series “Novel Encounters: The Films of Lee Chang-dong,” running April 5-28, featuring the US theatrical premieres of new 4K restorations of Green Fish,Peppermint Candy,Poetry, and Oasis. The series also includes A Brand New Life and A Girl at My Door, which Lee produced, and the below three works. “It brings me great delight and thrill to hold my retrospective at the esteemed Metrograph, renowned as a cherished haven for cinephiles in New York,” Lee said in a statement. “The films curated for this retrospective each serve as vessels for my earnest contemplations on life, society, and humanity, each in their own way.”
Lee Chang-dong’s Burning was the first South Korean movie to make the Oscar shortlist for Best Foreign Language Film
BURNING (Lee Chang-dong, 2018)
Friday, April 5, 9:30
Sunday, April 7, 4:30
Wednesday, April 10, 8:45 metrograph.com/film
Lee Chang-dong’s 2018 Burning, his first film since 2010, met with breakout success, becoming the first South Korean film to be shortlisted for a Best Foreign Language Oscar. Based on the short story “Barn Burning” by Japanese author Haruki Murakami, Burning is a psychological thriller, cowritten by Oh Jung-mi, about a wannabe young writer and slacker, Lee Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in), who bumps into an old classmate, Shin Hae-mi (Jeon Jong-seo), and starts up a new friendship with her, including taking care of her cat when she’s away. Lee is none too happy when she later shows up with Ben (Steven Yeun), who Jong-su thinks is wrong for her. Ben shares with Jong-su his penchant for burning down greenhouses, which only furthers Jong-su’s distrust of Ben, which does not please Hae-mi. At two and a half hours, Burning is long and slow moving, but it is also lushly photographed by Hong Kyung-pyo and deeply meditative, with a powerful ending that is worth waiting around for.
Lee Shin-ae (Jeon Do-yeon) reexamines her life in Secret Sunshine
SECRET SUNSHINE (MILYANG) (Lee Chang-dong, 2007)
Saturday, April 13, 12:00
Sunday, April 14, 2:20 metrograph.com/film
Lee Chang-dong’s fourth film — and his first since 2002’s Oh Ah Shisoo (Oasis) — is a harrowing examination of immeasurable grief. After losing her husband, Lee Shin-ae (Jeon Do-yeon) decides to move with her young son, Jun (Seon Jeong-yeob), to Milyang, her late husband’s hometown. Milyang, which means “secret sunshine,” is a typical South Korean small town, where everyone knows everybody. Restarting her life, Shin-ae gets help from Kim Jong-chan (Song Kang-ho), a local mechanic who takes an immediate liking to her. But Shin-ae is more concerned with settling down with her son and giving piano lessons. When a horrific tragedy strikes, she begins to unravel, refusing help from anyone until she turns to religion, but even that does not save her from her ever-darkening sadness. Cannes Best Actress winner Jeon gives a remarkable, devastating performance, holding nothing back as she fights for her sanity. Song, best known for his starring role in Bong Joon-ho’s The Host, is charming as Jong-chan, a friendly man who is a little too simple to understand the depth of what is happening to Shin-ae. Don’t let the nearly two-and-a-half-hour running time scare you away; Secret Sunshine is an extraordinary film that does not feel nearly that long.
Yun Jung-hee returns to the screen for the first time in sixteen years in moving Poetry
POETRY (SHI) (Lee Chang-dong, 2010)
Friday, April 26, 5:00 & 7:40
Saturday, April 27, 12:00 & 7:50
Sunday, April 28, 12:00 & 7:15 metrograph.com/film
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.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
On the Adamant tells the story of a floating sanctuary for people with mental illness
ON THE ADAMANT (Nicolas Philibert, 2023)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, March 29
212-924-7771 www.ifccenter.com kinolorber.com
“Mentally sick people have no family,” François Gozlan says in Nicolas Philibert’s charming and heartwarming On the Adamant. Winner of the Golden Bear at the 2023 Berlinale, the documentary is set on board the Adamant, a beautiful floating sanctuary docked at the Quai de la Rapée on the Seine, where a community of men and women with mental illness voluntarily gather for meetings, workshops, and general camaraderie, forming their own kind of chosen family. Started in July 2010 by the Paris Central Psychiatric Group and affiliated with the Saint-Maurice hospital complex, the Adamant offers compassionate care while encouraging the patients to explore their social and artistic sides.
Over the course of seven months in 2021 during the Covid crisis, Philibert compiled one hundred hours of footage, filming the group going over their budget, welcoming new people, playing music, cooking, painting, and working behind a coffee counter. While there are various nurses, a psychiatrist or psychologist, occupational therapists, and hospital service agents present, they are not easy to identify; no one is wearing white lab coats or name cards, so it’s not always immediately clear who is the patient and who is the caregiver.
Director, cinematographer, and editor Philibert, with a crew of no more than four, alternates between being a fly on the wall at meetings and workshops and speaking with several of the patients, who are aware, for the most part, of their medical situations and share poignant details of their personal lives. One woman discusses how she misses her teenage son, who went into foster care when he was five because, as she explains, “My mind was a mess.” A man plays a lovely tune on the piano and sings, “Nobody’s perfect.” Another man who plays the electric guitar says, “Everyone has thought of a magic wand. ‘No more this, no more that, I’ll be different.’” The dapper Frédéric Prieur, who is obsessed with the tragic deaths of Jim Morrison, James Dean, and Gérard Philipe, points out that he writes stories and songs because “I want to understand at all costs why such things happened to us.”
One man talks about his violent tendencies and ravings, admitting that without his pills he has “acute fits and hallucinations”; when he says, “Lucky I’m not armed,” it’s hard not to be reminded of the controversy in the United States about gun control. Another declares, “The people here aren’t terrorists. . . . They’re very fragile people. I’m very fragile myself. People have image problems here. That’s because others can look at us . . . In the Metro, we have slightly broken faces, maybe. I don’t know. People always give us curious looks.” But there’s nothing political in Philibert’s film other than showing that there are benevolent, humane options for treating the mentally ill, which he lets us see for ourselves; he doesn’t have any experts lecturing about what is happening on board and outside the Adamant.
Meanwhile, others share their hopes and dreams, which are not always feasible, lost in fantasies that are disconnected to reality — and perhaps more relevant to each of us than we might be willing to admit.
“You have some real stars here. Better than movie actors,” one man proudly boasts, and he’s right. As On the Adamant continues, the patients develop as unique characters in their own way, not stereotypes or caricatures put on display.
The Adamant is a refuge for people with mental illness to explore their creative sides
The film opens with Gozlan performing a screeching version of Téléphone’s “Human Bomb,” shouting out with defiance, “I want to talk to you about me, about you / Inside I see images, colors / that aren’t mine / that sometimes scare me, / sensations that can drive us mad / Our senses are the strings of pathetic marionettes / Our senses are the path to our mind / The human bomb, you have it in your hand / The detonator’s there just next to your heart / The human bomb is you, it belongs to you / If you let anyone take over your destiny / it’s the end.”
The Adamant offers the patients on board the chance to control at least part of their destiny. But the film, the first of a trilogy Philibert is making in conjunction with the Paris Central Psychiatric Group, closes with the Adamant enveloped in fog, as the future of people with mental illness is far from clear.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
