twi-ny recommended events

JEAN-LOUIS TRINTIGNANT: A MAN AND A WOMAN / MY NIGHT AT MAUD’S

Anouk Aimée and Jean-Louis Trintignant play characters trying to escape their pasts in Claude Lelouch’s A MAN AND A WOMAN

A MAN AND A WOMAN (UN HOMME ET UNE FEMME) (Claude Lelouch, 1966)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Sunday, December 16, and Monday, December 17
Series runs through December 20
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org

Winner of both the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film and the Palme d’Or at Cannes, Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman is one of the most popular, and most unusual, romantic love stories ever put on film. Oscar-nominated Anouk Aimée stars as Anne Gauthier and Jean-Louis Trintignant as Jean-Louis Duroc, two people who each has a child in a boarding school in Deauville. Anne, a former actress, and Jean-Louis, a successful racecar driver, seem to hit it off immediately, but they both have pasts that haunt them and threaten any kind of relationship. Shot in three weeks with a handheld camera by Lelouch, who earned nods for Best Director and Best Screenplay (with Pierre Uytterhoeven), A Man and a Woman is a tour-de-force of filmmaking, going from the modern day to the past via a series of flashbacks that at first alternate between color and black-and-white, then shift hues in curious, indeterminate ways. Much of the film takes place in cars, either as Jean-Louis races around a track or the protagonists sit in his red Mustang convertible and talk about their lives, their hopes, their fears. The heat they generate is palpable, making their reluctance to just fall madly, deeply in love that much more heart-wrenching, all set to a memorable soundtrack by Francis Lai. Lelouch, Trintignant, and Aimée revisited the story in 1986 with A Man and a Woman: 20 Years Later, without the same impact and success. A new print of the original will be shown December 16-17 in a grand double feature with Eric Rohmer’s My Night at Maud’s as part of Film Forum’s two-week tribute to Trintignant, leading up to the theatrical release of the French star’s latest, Michael Haneke’s remarkable Palme d’Or winner Amour, which once again displays the actor’s unique range and sensitivity in an unforgettable performance that is likely to finally make him much better known in the United States, at the tender age of eighty-two.

Jean-Louis (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is more than a little intrigued by Maud (Françoise Fabian) in the fourth of Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales

MY NIGHT AT MAUD’S (MA NUIT CHEZ MAUD) (Eric Rohmer, 1969)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Sunday, December 16, and Monday, December 17
Series runs through December 20
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org

Nominated for the Palme d’Or and a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, My Night at Maud’s, Éric Rohmer’s fourth entry in his Six Moral Tales series (Clarie’s Knee, Love in the Afternoon), continues the French director’s fascinating exploration of love, marriage, and tangled relationships. Three years removed from playing the romantic racecar driver Jean-Louis in Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman, Jean-Louis Trintignant again stars as a man named Jean-Louis, this time a single thirty-four-year-old Michelin engineer living a relatively solitary life in the French suburb of Clermont. A devout Catholic, he is developing an obsession with a fellow churchgoer, the blonde, beautiful Françoise (Marie-Christine Barrault), about whom he knows practically nothing. After bumping into an old school friend, Vidal (Antoine Vitez), the two men delve into deep discussions of religion, Marxism, Pascal, mathematics, Jansenism, and women. Vidal then invites Jean-Louis to the home of his girlfriend, Maud (Françoise Fabian), a divorced single mother with open thoughts about sexuality, responsibility, and morality that intrigue Jean-Louis, for whom respectability and appearance are so important. The conversation turns to such topics as hypocrisy, grace, infidelity, and principles, but Maud eventually tires of such talk. “Dialectic does nothing for me,” she says shortly after explaining that she always sleeps in the nude. Later, when Jean-Louis and Maud are alone, she tells him, “You’re both a shamefaced Christian and a shamefaced Don Juan.” Soon a clearly conflicted Jean-Louis is involved in several love triangles that are far beyond his understanding, so he again seeks solace in church. My Night at Maud’s is a classic French tale, with characters spouting off philosophically while smoking cigarettes, drinking wine and other cocktails, and getting naked. Shot in black-and-white by Nestor Almendros, the film roams from midnight mass to a single woman’s bed and back to church, as Jean-Louis, played with expert concern by Trintignant, is forced to examine his own deep desires and how they relate to his spirituality. Fabian (Belle de Jour, The Letter) is outstanding as Maud, whose freedom titillates and confuses Jean-Louis. One of Rohmer’s best, most accomplished works despite its haughty intellectualism, My Night at Maud’s is screening December 16-17 at Film Forum in a terrific double feature with A Man and a Woman as part of its “Trintignant” series.

DEVOURING DEVOURING

Netta Yerushalmy explores communication through movement and sound in debut evening-length piece (photo by Ayala Gazit)

NETTA YERUSHALMY: DEVOURING DEVOURING
La MaMa
Ellen Stewart Theatre
66 East Fourth St., second floor, between Bowery & Second Ave.
Through December 16, 7:30, $20
212-475-7710
www.lamama.org
www.nettay.com

Netta Yerushalmy’s Devouring Devouring was developed over the course of two years, as the choreographer and four dancers interacted primarily via video conferencing between New York and Tel Aviv before coming together for the physical performance. That communication is at the heart of the involving sixty-minute work, Yerushalmy’s first evening-length piece. For the first half of the performance, Joanna Kotze, Toni Melaas, Ofir Yudilevitch, and Stuart Singer acknowledge one another but don’t ever touch. They run, jump, and angle across the black stage, emerging and departing from behind a tall, narrow orange curtain in one corner. Twelve icicle bulbs dangle over the back, while six chandelier-type fixtures hang horizontally over the center. Wearing loose-fitting light gray tops and tight dark gray pants — except for when Singer appears twice in a lovely white Baroque gown designed by costumer Magdalena Jarkowiec — the dancers gesture with their hands, make direct eye contact with the audience, and perform repetitive movements. But slowly they begin engaging in physical contact, first just brushing by one another, then lightly touching hands, before breaking off into trios that have fun with conventions, including a memorable moment in which one dancer’s foot shoots out unexpectedly from between two other dancers’ bodies. Mark degli Antoni’s soundtrack also goes through significant changes, starting off with electronic noise, followed by a classic Woody Allen joke and a Baroque melody, along with patches of complete silence, the experiments in sound melding with the experiments in movement. Although all four dancers give strong performances, Kotze is extraordinary, whether standing on her tiptoes at the front of the stage for an extended period of time, gazing seriously at people in the crowd, or dramatically lifting one leg high up in the air while lying on the floor. Yerushalmy’s (Rooms Without a View; Hello, My Name Is Catherine) piece explores communication not only among the dancers but with the audience as well; if there is a narrative, it might actually be the audience’s need to discover one, which it will have trouble doing in this case. And despite many funny segments (in addition to Allen’s joke), the dancers never crack even the hint of a smile — at least, not until the performance is over and they get to enjoy a well-deserved round of applause.

ROAD MOVIES — DIRECTED AND SELECTED BY WALTER SALLES: THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES

Rodrigo De la Serna and Gael Garcia Bernal are on the road in Walter Salles’s THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES

THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES (DIARIOS DE MOTOCICLETA) (Walter Salles, 2004)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Sunday, December 16, 6:30
Series runs December 14-20
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com

In Walter Salles’s road movie The Motorcycle Diaries, Gael Garcia Bernal and Rodrigo De la Serna star as buddies Ernesto Guevara de la Serna and Alberto Granado, who hop aboard the Mighty One, an old, dilapidated Norton motorcycle, on a grand adventure across South America, on their way to work at a leper colony. While fun-loving Alberto is out for action, the more serious Ernesto wants to remain true to his love, Chichina (Mia Maestro). As they scam people for food, drink, mechanical help, and a place to sleep, they learn a lot more about life than they expected, especially Ernesto, who gets caught up in the plight of the poor, the sick, and the homeless, laying the groundwork for his revolutionary leadership in Cuba (where he is more well known as Che Guevara). The film, based on the writings of Ernesto and Alberto, is beautifully shot on location by Eric Gautier and excellently directed by Brazilian Salles, who previously gave us the wonderful Central Station and the heartbreaking Behind the Sun. Stick around for the credits, which begin with photos of Ernesto and Alberto from the actual trip. The Motorcycle Diaries is screening December 16 at 6:30 in a new 35mm print as part of the IFC Center series “Road Movies: Directed and Selected by Walter Salles,” in conjunction with the December 21 theatrical release of Salles’s adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. The series also includes such films as Central Station, Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour, and John Ford’s The Searchers.

ROAD MOVIES — DIRECTED AND SELECTED BY WALTER SALLES: THE PASSENGER

Locke (Jack Nicholson) reevaluates his life in Michelangelo Antonioni’s existential suspense thriller THE PASSENGER

THE PASSENGER (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1975)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Saturday, December 15, 9:30, and Tuesday, December 18, 9:00
Series runs December 14-20
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com

Nominated for the Palme d’Or in Cannes in 1975, Michelangelo Antonioni’s existential suspense thriller is a fascinating character study of a lost, lonely man. Jack Nicholson stars as Locke, a successful, well-respected journalist who is researching a story on the guerrilla movement in Chad. Life isn’t as fun and exciting as it used to be for him, as witnessed by his utter helplessness after his car gets stuck in the sand. Upon returning to his hotel room, he discovers that his neighbor, Robertson (Chuck Mulvehill), is dead — and he decides to switch places with him, to stop being Locke and instead live a completely different existence. Even when he finds out that Robertson was involved in international espionage and gun running, Locke continues the deception, traveling dangerously through England, Germany, and Spain with a free-spirited young architecture student (Maria Schneider) while his wife (Jenny Runacre) and business associate (Ian Hendry) — and the police — try to find him. The Passenger is marvelously slow-paced, never in a hurry to make no point about just what the point of it all is. Nicholson glides through the film with an unease that is as unnerving as it is intoxicating as he struggles to find his way in life, a cinematic representative of something that is within us all. The Passengeris screening December 15 and 18 as part of the IFC Center series “Road Movies: Directed and Selected by Walter Salles,” in conjunction with the December 21 theatrical release of Salles’s adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. The series also includes such films as Salles’s Central Station and The Motorcycle Diaries, Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour, and John Ford’s The Searchers.

THE PIANO LESSON

August Wilson’s THE PIANO LESSON is back in a sparkling revival at the Signature Theatre (photo by Joan Marcus)

The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Irene Diamond Stage
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Extended through January 13, $75
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

Inspired by a 1983 painting by Romare Bearden, August Wilson brought the canvas to life in his masterful 1990 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, The Piano Lesson, currently in the midst of a sparkling revival at the Signature Theatre through December 23. After three years away, Boy Willie (Brandon J. Dirden) returns to the home of his uncle, Doaker Charles (James A. Williams), and sister, Berniece (Roslyn Ruff), in Pittsburgh’s Hill District in 1936, bringing with him his best friend and cohort, Lymon (Jason Dirden), a flatbed loaded with watermelons, and a plan to buy back ancestral land by selling a treasured family piano. But the piano is more than just a valuable musical instrument; it represents the history of the Charles clan, in both how it came to be in their possession and the intricate carvings of their forebears that line the front and side. The already taut drama then kicks into high gear as generations and siblings clash, a ghost does or does not appear, and brash, fast-talking Boy Willie faces down hard-won traditions.

Brandon J. Dirden comes on like a speeding train in brilliant revival (photo by Joan Marcus)

The fourth play in Wilson’s ten-part Pittsburgh Cycle that features one work set in each decade of the twentieth century (and also includes Fences, Two Trains Running, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and Seven Guitars), The Piano Lesson is stunning in its language, every line like an expertly crafted piece of music, the tempo rising and falling and rising again, a talking blues that examines the black experience in America in captivating ways. Brandon J. Dirden, taking on the iconic role previously performed by Samuel L. Jackson and, most famously, by a Tony-nominated Charles S. Dutton, is a whirlwind as Boy Willie, an explosive character unable to say or do anything in a small way, charging across the stage like a train speeding through a station, on an unstoppable path to somewhere better. His brother Jason is endearing as the much simpler Lymon, who seems happy enough with a cheap suit and night on the town. Williams, who earlier this year played Mr. M in the Signature revival of Athol Fugard’s My Children! My Africa!, provides the voice of reason as Doaker, along with Eric Lenox Abrams as Avery, a minister who would like to settle down with Berniece. Chuck Cooper adds plenty of humor as the big and blustery Wining Boy, an engaging gambler and bluesman who shows just what the piano can do. The story takes place in set designer Michael Carnahan’s tear-away house, which looks like a tornado tore through it, ripping it in half, like the lives of the characters, each of whom is searching for their own personal completeness. Director Ruben Santiago-Hudson, who has both acted in and directed other works by Wilson, winning a Tony in 1996 as Canewell in Seven Guitars, clearly understands the playwright’s brilliant skill, balancing the action and words with a steady hand. One of the best production of the year on or off Broadway, The Piano Lesson is a magical night of unforgettable theater by one of America’s true masters.

ROAD MOVIES — DIRECTED AND SELECTED BY WALTER SALLES: THE SEARCHERS

In iconic Western, Jeffrey Hunter and Ethan Edwards search for Natalie Wood, with very different motives

THE SEARCHERS (John Ford, 1956)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Saturday, December 15, 2:30, and Monday, December 17, 7:00
Series runs December 14-20
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com

That’ll be the day when someone tries to claim there’s a better Western than John Ford’s ethnocentric look at the dying of the Old West and the birth of the modern era. Essentially about a gunfighter’s attempt to find and kill his young niece, who has been kidnapped and, ostensibly, ruined by Indians, The Searchers is laden with iconic imagery, inside messages, and not-so-subtle metaphors. Hence, it is no accident that John Wayne’s son, Patrick, plays an ambitious yet inept officer named Greenhill. The elder Wayne stars as Ethan Edwards, a tough-as-nails Confederate veteran seeking revenge for the murder of his brother’s family; he’s also out to save Debbie (Natalie Wood) from the Comanches, led by a chief known as Scar (Henry Brandon), by ending her life, because in his world view, it’s better to be dead than red. Joining him on his trek is Debbie’s adopted brother, Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter), who wants to save her from Edwards. The magnificent film balances its serious center with a large dose of humor, particularly in the relationships between Ethan and Martin and Ethan with his Indian companion, Look (Beulah Archuletta). And keep your eye on that blanket in front of the house. The Searchers is screening December 15 and 17 as part of the IFC Center series “Road Movies: Directed and Selected by Walter Salles,” in conjunction with the December 21 theatrical release of Salles’s adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. The series also includes such films as Salles’s Central Station and The Motorcycle Diaries, Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour, and Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger.

SPANISH CINEMA NOW: TRISTANA

Catherine Deneuve dreams of a better life in Luis Buñuel’s TRISTANA

TRISTANA (Luis Buñuel, 1970)
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
Saturday, December 15, 5:30
Series continues through December 16
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.com

Luis Buñuel’s adaptation of Benito Pérez Galdós’s 1892 novel Tristana is an often underrated, deceivingly wicked psychological black comedy. A dubbed Catherine Deneuve stars as the title character, a shy, virginal young orphan employed in the household of the aristocratic, atheist Don Lope (Fernando Rey), an avowed atheist and aging nobleman who regularly spouts off about religion and the wretched social conditions in Spain (where the Spanish auteur had recently returned following many years living and working in Mexico). Soon Don Lope is serving as both husband and father to Tristana, who allows the world to pile its ills on her without reacting — until she meets handsome artist Horacio (Franco Nero) and begins to take matters into her own hands, with tragic results. Although Tristana is one of Buñuel’s more straightforward offerings with regard to narrative, featuring fewer surreal flourishes, it is a fascinating exploration of love, femininity, wealth, power, and a changing of the old guard. Deneuve is magnetic as Tristana, transforming from a meek, naive, gorgeous girl into a much stronger, and ultimately darker, gorgeous woman. Lola Gaos provides solid support as Saturna, who runs Don Lope’s household with a firm hand while also taking care of her deaf son, Saturno (Jesús Fernández), yet another male who is fond of the beautiful Tristana. The film is one of Buñuel’s most colorful works, wonderfully shot by cinematographer José F. Aguayo, who photographed Buñuel’s 1961 masterpiece Viridiana, which was also based on a novel by Galdós and starred Rey. Tristana is screening December 15 at 5:30 as part of the Buñuel sidebar at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s “Spanish Cinema Now” series, which continues through December 16 with such other films as Pedro Pérez Rosado’s Wilaya, Alvaro Longoria’s Sons of the Clouds, and Viridiana.