You Are Here takes place across the Lincoln Center campus July 14-30 (photo by Justin Chao)
YOU ARE HERE
The Isabel and Peter Malkin Stage, Josie Robertson Plaza, Hearst Plaza, Paul Milstein Pool and Terrace, Lincoln Center campus
Installation: July 14-23, free
Live performances: July 24-30, free two weeks in advance through TodayTix lottery, 7:00 www.lincolncenter.org
Lincoln Center continues its free Restart Stages program with You Are Here, a multidisciplinary audio and performance installation on Josie Robertson Plaza and Hearst Plaza. From July 13 to 23, the work, conceived by Andrea Miller, the founder and artistic director of the Brooklyn-based Gallim dance company, will be open to the public, who can make their way through a series of sculptures featuring audio portraits of twenty-five New Yorkers affiliated with Lincoln Center and its arts and education community partners. Sharing their experiences over the last sixteen months is a diverse group of individuals, including Bruce Adolphe of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Kiri Avelar of Ballet Hispánico, Anthony Roth Costanzo of the Metropolitan Opera, Alphonso Horne of Jazz at Lincoln Center, Egyptt LaBeija of BAAD! Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, Cassie Mey of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Muriel Miguel of Spiderwoman Theater, Hahn Dae Soo of Korean Cultural Center New York, Taylor Stanley of the New York City Ballet, Gabriela Torres of Juilliard, and Valarie Wong of NewYork-Presbyterian. Other participants are Dietrice Bolden, Jessica Chen, Ryan Dobrin, Jermaine Greaves, Milosz Grzywacz, Lila Lomax, Ryan Opalanietet, Elijah Schreiner, Alexandra Siladi, Paul Smithyman, Jen Suragiat, KJ Takahashi, Fatou Thiam, and Susan Thomasson of Lincoln Center Security, Film at Lincoln Center, the Asian American Arts Alliance, the School of American Ballet, Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School, and other institutions and organizations. The sound sculptures are by Tony-winning scenic designer Mimi Lien, spread across an aural garden created by composer Justin Hicks; costumes are by Oana Botezan, with choreography by Miller and direction by Miller and Lynsey Peisinger.
From July 24 to 30 at 7:00, the audio portraits will be replaced by live performances in and around the Paul Milstein Pool and Terrace that are free through a TodayTix lottery available two weeks in advance; activating the space will be Gallim dancers Lauryn Hayes, Christopher Kinsey, Nouhoum Koita, Misa Lucyshyn, Gary Reagan, Connor Speetjens, Taylor Stanley, Haley Sung, Georgia Usborne, and Amadi Washington. (The audio sculptures will be open to ticket holders at 6:00.) In addition, on July 22 at 6:00, Miller will host the latest edition of the virtual Gallim Happy Hour, a livestreamed discussion with Stanley and Mey about You Are Here, taking place over Zoom and Facebook Live.
John Waters’s Serial Mom meets The Dukes of Hazzard in No Puppet Co.’s campy, devilishly sly Sloppy Bonnie: A Roadkill Musical (for the Modern Chick!), streaming through July 15. Yes, it can get overly silly and repetitive and feels stretched out at ninety minutes, but it’s also tons of fun. Filmed in front of a live audience on an outdoor stage at OZ Arts in Nashville in June, Sloppy Bonnie has been enhanced for online viewing with all-out-goofy cartoonish animation, from abstract shapes and handwritten text to such scenic elements as trees, chairs, doors, buildings, signs, animals, and car parts, as if someone was having a blast playing around with various Instagram stickers. (The illumination and design is by Phillip Frank.)
Amanda Disney stars as the title character, a southern gal in a denim skirt and checkered gingham shirt who is on the road in her 1972 pink Chevy Nova to see her fiancé, Jedidiah, a youth pastor in training at Camp New Life Bay on Shotgun Mountain. Her story is being told by Chauncy (Curtis Reed) and Dr. Rob (James Rudolph II), the hosts of Cosmic Country Radio. “Your Morning Moral this morning is the moral of the American Woman,” Dr. Rob announces. This American woman, a special ed teacher in Sulfur Springs, is hell-bent on getting what she wants, willing to use her feminine wiles as she travels through the south, meeting up with numerous dudes, some of whom, for one reason or another, end up dead. (All the minor characters are played by either Reed or Rudolph II.)
Among those Bonnie encounters are Chris and Bryan, who want to do more than just help fix her car when it breaks down; Trucker Joe, from whom she wrangles a ride; her friend Sissy; her estranged momma; high school choir leader Sondra and her bestie, Missy; Dandy the Lonesome Rodeo Clown; and Jesus. Each set piece features a song, with such titles as “You Might Call Me Basic,” “My Way or Bust,” “McNugget of Your Love,” and, perhaps most important, “Let’s Address the Nativity Chicken,” with the score paying tribute to Hank Williams, Kid Rock, Johnny Cash, and Charlie Daniels along the way.
Virtual edition of Sloppy Bonnie features fun visual tricks
“We set out on our journey / While the dew’s still on the grass,” Jesus and Bonnie sing in the duet “Jesus Riding Shotgun.” Jesus: “Bonnie tells her whole life story / Over half a tank of gas.” Bonnie: “Jesus reads aloud the names of all the little towns we pass / With his hand hung out his window / Lettin’ air blow through his nail hole.” As she gets closer to Jedidiah, leaving behind a trail of blood, she doesn’t necessarily come to some hard realizations about faith, family, and free will. She’s also searching to find out why she was cast as a chicken in the Nativity Manger Parade. “What exactly did a chicken have to do with sweet baby Jesus?” she asks. “I suppose there could always have been one in the barn where they had to sleep. But then why would the chicken be parading in with the wise men? Does chicken travel well? Why was there a nativity chicken? Why am I here, Mamma?” (The choreography and chicken movement is by Gabrielle Saliba.)
Directed by Leah Lowe and written by playwright Krista Knight and composer Barry Brinegar of No Puppet Co., who last summer presented the six-part virtual puppet play Crush, made in Knight and Brinegar’s home studio in the East Village, Sloppy Bonnie can, um, get a bit sloppy and the dialogue and lyrics are not exactly razor-sharp, but its DIY sensibility, the carnivalesque music, and the joy expressed every second by Disney, Reed, and Rudolph II are infectious. The show does comment on misogyny, sexism, marriage, motherhood, and feminine toxicity — 3D oval eggs appear often onscreen — so don’t let the message get lost in all the mayhem. And you get it all for a mere ten bucks.
Who: Dawoud Bey, Torkwase Dyson, Elisabeth Sherman What: Live online discussion Where:Whitney Museum Zoom When: Thursday, July 8, free with advance RSVP, 6:00 (exhibit continues through October 3) Why: One of the many pleasures of “Dawoud Bey: An American Project,” the exemplary survey of the work of Queens-born photographer Dawoud Bey, is listening to him describe his process on the audio guide. The sixty-eight-year-old artist and Columbia College Chicago professor shares detailed aspects of his career while discussing numerous photos and series. You can hear more from Bey on July 8 at 6:00 when he participates in the Zoom talk “Narrative Materiality” with interdisciplinary artist Torkwase Dyson, moderated by exhibition cocurator Elisabeth Sherman.
On the audio guide, Bey talks about about his series “Night Coming Tenderly, Black,” a 2017 commission for the Front Triennial in Cleveland consisting of photos taken along what was the Underground Railroad in Ohio, dark shots of houses, trees, and the sea without people, “Of necessity, those locations, most of them were never known. They couldn’t be. They weren’t supposed to be. So there is that layer of invisibility built into the history. And so what I did was through research finding a few sites that are in fact known to be related to the Underground Railroad and then began to look at the landscape around those sites imagining a fugitive African American moving through that landscape, what that landscape might have looked like and felt like.”
In her catalog essay “Black Compositional Thought: Black Hauntology, Plantationscene, and Paradoxical Form,” Dyson writes, “Blackness will swallow the whole of terror to be free. It will move across distances, molecules, units — through atmospheres and concrete, in magic and bloodstreams to self-liberate. To image and imagine movements and geographies of freedom, known and unknown, is to regard this space as irreducible, or to regard black spatial geography as irreducible. ‘Night Coming Tenderly, Black’ is attuned to the irreducible place of black liberation inside terror. Each photograph makes manifest in the viewer a full-body, ongoing refusal to belong to a nation, land, person, or state under a system of terror, as conditioned by architecture, agriculture, modernity, or industrialized white supremacy. The process of freeing a full black body from spatial terror while black flesh holds and is seen as material and terror is liberation.”
Bey continues, “They’re all about the imagination. Looking closely at a piece of the land and noticing all of these thorns that certainly make the landscape so much more threatening if one had to move through it. So when I thought about it through that particular narrative, the landscape became for me a very transformed space. And that’s the space and place that I want the viewer to think about when they look at that work. I want them to completely forget about the present. This work is not about the present, which is why those photographs are all so large. I wanted to create a physical space for the viewer to enter into that, allow them just to be in that landscape.”
Named after a quote from Langston Hughes’s poem “Dream Variation” — “Rest at pale evening. . . . / A tall, slim tree. . . . / Night coming tenderly / Black like me.” — the series is notable in that there are no people in these dark, mysterious photographs, which more than hint at the ghosts of those who escaped slavery through the Underground Railroad as well as their descendants. These large-scale works demand and reward intense viewing, beautiful in and of themselves while imbued with the narrative of this country’s original sin.
“Night Coming Tenderly, Black” is one of only several powerful series in the show, which continues on the first and eighth floors of the Whitney through October 3. Bey’s 2012 “Birmingham Project,” which was included in the New Museum’s recently closed “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America,” features black-and-white diptychs that pair a photo of a child the same age as one of the four Black girls (Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley) killed in the 1963 KKK bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Alabama and the two boys (Johnny Robinson, Virgil Ware) murdered in the aftermath with an image of a grown woman or man the age the victims would have been in 2012 had they lived. It’s a brutal reminder of what racism continues to take away, evoking the missing men, women, and children in “Night Coming Tenderly, Black.”
Bey’s first series, “Harlem, USA,” invites viewers into the Harlem of the mid- to late-1970s, with 35mm black-and-white photographs of Deas McNeil in his barbershop, two girls having fun posing in front of a local restaurant, three well-dressed women leaning on a “Police Line” barrier during a parade, and a dapper old man wearing a white bowtie and a black bowler.
In the 1980s, Bey headed upstate to Syracuse, where he again focused on the Black community in its natural surroundings. “It was a deliberate choice to foreground the Black subject in those photographs, giving them a place not only in my pictures . . . but on the wall[s] of galleries and museums when that work was exhibited,” Bey notes. He moved from the 35mm wide-angle-lens camera to a tripod-mounted 4 × 5-inch-format camera for his Polaroid street portraits of strangers he met, including a boy eating a Foxy Pop, a young man and woman hugging in Prospect Park, and a young man on an exercise bicycle in Amityville, all looking directly at the camera. Bey would give the instant Polaroid picture to his subjects, then print them later from the negative; for this exhibit, they can now be seen nearly life-size.
In 1991, Bey turned to a two-hundred-pound, six-foot-tall, five-foot wide Polaroid camera to photograph friends and such fellow artists as Lorna Simpson, putting together two, three, and as many as six exposures for each, the edges of the Polaroids visible, letting us inside his process as he emphasizes the complexities of the people in these color images.
Another room is dedicated to Bey’s “Class Pictures,” color photos of marginalized teenagers whose words are seen alongside the pictures. “Sometimes I wonder what color my soul is. I hope that it’s the color of heaven,” Omar says. Kevin admits, “Thanks to the death of my father I grew up much too fast and never learned how to ask anyone for help. I carry my own burdens . . . alone. This is my curse.”
Bey returned to Harlem in 2014–17 for “Harlem Redux,” pigmented inkjet prints that focus on place rather than people in a changing neighborhood that is very different from the Harlem he photographed four decades earlier, best exemplified by Girls, Ornaments, and Vacant Lot, NY, which depicts two hair advertisements of smiling Black girls next to an abandoned, litter-strewn, fenced-in area. “One of the things that was beginning to happen in Harlem was that there were these, as I called them, spaces where something used to be,” Bey says on the audio guide. “And when those places are completely obliterated, when they’re torn down and you end up with a vacant lot, there’s a kind of disruption of place memory. Because at some point, even if you know the community well, you can’t quite remember what used to be there. And that to me was a profound experience.” A visit to the Whitney to see “Dawoud Bey: An American Project” is a profound experience itself, reminding us of what was, and projecting what might be.
Regina Aquino stars in Round House Theatre’s virtual version of Young Jean Lee’s We’re Gonna Die
WE’RE GONNA DIE
Round House Theatre online
Available on demand through July 25, $32.50 www.roundhousetheatre.org
One of the last in-person plays I saw before the pandemic lockdown was Second Stage’s dynamic, ebullient version of Young Jean Lee’s We’re Gonna Die. Near the end, silver balloons bearing the name of the show were released from the ceiling of the Tony Kiser Theater, gently drifting down on the audience. I brought two home, and, remarkably, one of them is still partially filled, resting on top of a shelf where I see it every day. It is a symbol of the resilience of the human spirit, and of theater itself, which is on its way back after a difficult time.
Sixteen months later, Maryland’s Round House Theatre has mounted a more subdued but still powerful virtual version of the sixty-five-minute show, filmed live with a masked, limited, socially distanced audience and streaming through July 11. We’re Gonna Die consists of a series of first-person true stories and accompanying songs that look at how we approach and deal with impermanence. It was originally staged by Lee and her band, Future Wife, at Joe’s Pub in 2011 and then at Lincoln Center’s Clare Tow Theater in 2013. Raja Feather Kelly tore the roof off with his production at Second Stage, which took place in a hospital waiting room and featured a breakout performance by Janelle McDermoth.
At Round House, Regina Aquino stars as the narrator and singer, who relates the tales as if they all happened to her. (They were actually compiled from friends and relatives of Lee’s.) She runs up the steps, writhes across the floor, and jumps up and down on Paige Hathaway’s two-level set, which features bold colors and graphic symbols, with the musicians of the Chance Club each in their own large, homey cubicle: bassist Jason Wilson, keyboardist Laura Van Duzer, guitarist Matthew Schleigh, and drummer Manny Arciniega. The evening begins with an original composition by the Chance Club, “Wagons and Stars,” to set the mood, and then the show kicks off with the first of six vignettes that cover a wide spectrum of age and health, from the innocence of children to the isolation of growing old, exploring insomnia, the health-care system, family responsibilities, friendship, and generational angst, including “Lullaby for the Miserable,” “Comfort for the Lonely,” “When You Get Old,” and “Horrible Things.”
“I would have horrible nightmares and wake up with this feeling of dread that I was gonna die the exact way my father did,” Aquino says, talking about having trouble sleeping. “And if anyone tried to help me, I would just get angrier and angrier, and no one could do anything.” In the propulsive “I Still Have You,” she declares, “You still have me / I’m in your bed / I’ll hold your hand / until you’re dead / If I die first / you’ll be alone / but until then / you’ll have a home.”
Regina Aquino shares stories of loneliness and loss amid rocking songs in We’re Gonna Die
The show is fluidly directed and choreographed by Paige Hernandez, with cinematography by Maboud Ebrahimzadeh, costumes by Ivania Stack, sound by Mathew M. Nielson, and lighting by Harold F. Burgess II, making it a successful hybrid that is anchored by Aquino’s (The Events,Eureka Day) warm, intimate performance that will have you hanging on her every word.
In the grand finale, “I’m Gonna Die,” everyone joins in for a celebratory chorus that is filled with hope after a year in which more than six hundred thousand American died of Covid-19. The show has always had a positive outlook, but it hits a little deeper now. We all have developed a very different relationship with mortality, so don’t be surprised when you join in, with a smile on your face, as Aquino sings, “I’m gonna die / I’m gonna die someday / Then I’ll be gone / And it’ll be OK.”
In my March 2020 review of Kelly’s production at Second Stage, I wrote, “‘There’s a very good chance you’re not going to die,’ President Trump said when news about the coronavirus crisis was first spreading. While that might be true when it comes to Covid-19, it’s not true in general.” Indeed, what a year and a half it has been, as that balloon can attest.
The stream is available on demand through July 25; you can watch a panel discussion with Aquino, dramaturg Naysan Mojgani, and others here.
Westport Country Playhouse’s virtual Tiny House is streaming through July 18
TINY HOUSE
Westport Country Playhouse
Through July 18, $25 per viewer, $100 per household www.westportplayhouse.org
In Westport Country Playhouse’s virtual version of Michael Gotch’s first full-length play, Tiny House, Sam (Sara Bues), referring to her childhood, says, “I still hate fireworks.” Her mother, Billie (Elizabeth Heflin), asks, “You do?” Sam responds, “Yeah, they scare me. Like gunshots. Or someone jumping out and yelling boo! They don’t feel like a celebration. They feel like bad surprises.”
There are a lot of fireworks and bad surprises in store for the wisecracking Billie, the ultraserious Sam, Sam’s snarky husband, Nick (Denver Milord), and Billie’s second husband, the goofy but likable Larry (Lee E. Ernst), as the family comes together for the Fourth of July holiday at Sam and Nick’s new, and extremely small, eco-conscious house in the mountains. Billie is used to the finer things in life, which changed when her first husband was sent to prison; she also has very different political views than Nick does, leading to some vicious battles.
“Solar, bio-friendly, 100% recycled materials, tiny carbon footprint, completely self-sustaining. We’re like pioneers, I guess,” Nick explains. “My firm got Interior Design magazine up here after we finished the build, did a shoot; they’re going to follow the story for the first year or so. In installments.”
“Nice,” Larry says.
Nick adds, “Sam’s writing the copy for it —”
“—in monthly installments —” Sam cuts him off.
“Nice!” Larry repeats.
“— like a real-time journal,” Nick says.
“The Donner party kept a journal, too,” Billie snipes. “For a while.”
They are soon joined by neighbors Win (Stephen Pelinski) and Carol (Kathleen Pirkl-Tague), Renaissance Faire veterans who arrive in Medieval (and, later, Middle-Earth) costumes and make such pronouncements as “Hear ye! Hear ye! Kingdoms Major and Kingdoms Minor! Your Monarch
approacheth! Tremble and be amazed!” and “Zounds, he knows! / A fellow traveller!”
Meanwhile, another neighbor, Bernard (Hassan El-Amin), is a Keats-spouting, marmot-offering, well-armed survivalist who believes the end of the world is coming. “My sources are active. Triangulated and triple sourced,” he warns Nick and Sam, continuing, “Verifiable intel, not misdirection. Multiple potential flash points worldwide. Zero Hour feel to it.” Nick responds, “I don’t know, you know? Stuff I’m hearing just feels like garden-variety neo-Cold War saber rattling if you ask me.” As the fireworks approach, so does the sturm und drang as dark family truths emerge amid one key piece of advice for all to heed: “Don’t fuck with an elf.”
The show was originally workshopped with a different cast at Westport in 2018 and performed in January 2019 by the Resident Ensemble Players at the University of Delaware under the title Minor Fantastical Kingdoms, with that cast reuniting for this virtual edition, with playhouse artistic director Mark Lamos helming all three iterations. Part of Westport’s ninetieth anniversary virtual 2021 season, the one-hundred-minute Tiny House is tailor made for this moment in time as we emerge from lockdown, when we faced isolation and loneliness, unable to see friends and family for more than a year as we fought over politics and sought bits of joy in unexpected places.
Tiny House was filmed by Lacey Erb with the actors in different locations, performing in front of green screens, employing methods mastered by the Irish Rep; in fact, the digital design, which includes benches, chairs, and couches that make it appear that the actors are together in the same space and looking out at the forest and a vast mountain landscape, is by longtime Irish Rep designer Charlie Corcoran, based on Hugh Landwehr’s original set. Dan Scully served as editor, with costumes by Tricia Barsamian (Will and Carol’s getups are particularly fun and fanciful) and music and sound by Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen.
The cast is highlighted by a wickedly delicious turn by Heflin (The Government Inspector,The Odd Couple), who never misses a beat as we learn more about her character’s situation, and Bues (Falling Away, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window) as Billie’s daughter, who is having issues dealing with the sins of her parents. The show will be available on demand through July 18; you can check out a symposium about the work here, and there will be a talkback on July 12. Next up for Westport is John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt: A Parable in November.
The Māori film Cousins is a heart-wrenching story of an indigenous family in New Zealand (Aotearoa) torn apart by colonialism and bigotry as they try to hold on to their traditions. The film, directed by the award-winning Māori duo Ainsley Gardiner and Briar Grace-Smith, opens in the mid-twentieth century with Mata (Te Raukura Gray) in green, Makareta (Mihi Te Rauhi Daniels) in blue, and Missy (Keyahne Patrick-Williams) in red playing on a lush landscape of rolling hills and a twisting river. “Three cousins,” a narrator says in Māori. “Their paths woven across time. Their lives separate. Their lives converge. They separate again. This is how it must be.”
The scene cuts to the modern day, as Mata (Tanea Heke), walking down a city street, stops at a corner, waits for the light to turn green, slowly removes her shoes while reciting a nursery rhyme in her head, and begins to cross only when the red walk sign starts flashing, as if she is inviting danger. Wandering through an outdoor market, she appears to be homeless and broke. Meanwhile, Markareta (Grace-Smith, who also wrote the screenplay) and Missy (Rachel House) are fighting the government’s attempts to take some of their land — and wondering where Mata is. Sent to an orphanage by her father (Jack Sergent), Mata was “adopted” by a white New Zealander, Mrs. Parkinson (Sylvia Rands), who changed her name to May Parker and used her as a servant, keeping her away from her family, who have been searching for her for fifty years.
Gardiner and Grace-Smith go back and forth between three central time periods, following the cousins as children, young adults (with Ana Scotney as Mata, Tioreore Melbourne as Markareta, and Hariata Moriarty as Missy), and in the present as they try to maintain their heritage in a world that wants to pass them by. Awarded the 2021 People’s Choice for Best Feature Drama at the Māoriland Film Festival in New Zealand, Cousins, adapted from the 1992 novel by Patricia Grace, is infused with many elements of the Māori way of life, including whakapapa (unbreakable genealogical links), kaupapa (philosophy), whānau (family), kaitiaki (guardianship of the land), Te Ao Māori (world view), whenua (land), and Tikanga Māori (cultural practice), treating them with honesty and respect, not othering them. It was shot in Te Waiiti Marae on Lake Rotoiti with the guidance of Muriwai Ihakara, who plays Wi, and the local Ngāti Hinekura and Ngāti Pikiao people, many of whom appear in small roles.
Raymond Edwards’s cinematography is gentle and beautiful, accompanied by composer Warren Maxwell’s subtly emotional score. The nine actresses who portray the three cousins are exceptional, but Gray, Scotney, and Heke stand out as Mata, who rarely speaks, overwhelmed by her childhood trauma; Heke’s eyes are particularly haunting. By the end of the film, which runs July 2–9 at the Angelika, you’ll feel like you’re part of the family, feeling their pain and love as tears well up.
Hou Hsiao-hsien gem Flowers of Shanghai explores complex relationships between wealthy patrons and courtesans
FLOWERS OF SHANGHAI (HAI SHANG HUA) (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1998)
Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Aves.
July 2-20, $15 www.filmlinc.org
Taiwanese New Wave master Hou Hsiao-hsien might be the best filmmaker whose work you’ve never seen. For more than thirty-five years, he has been telling intimate, meditative stories about life, family, and relationships with a gentle, deeply intuitive style, infused with gorgeous visuals and subtly beautiful soundtracks. Film at Lincoln Center’s wide-ranging “Big Screen Summer: NYFF58 Redux” continues with one of the New York Film Festival staple’s most elegant tales, Flowers of Shanghai. The 1998 film, being shown in a dramatic 4K restoration, is set in brothels, known as flower houses, in 1884 in the British Concession, where men and women congregate for social interaction and develop long-term bonds and responsibilities to one another based on much more than just sex. The men play drinking games, smoke opium, and buy the women gifts. The story, told in a series of vignettes as Mark Lee Ping Bin’s camera slowly moves through dark, lush, reddish gas-lit interiors, focuses on Master Wang (Tony Leung Chiu-wai), who has promised to be the sole patron of Crimson (Michiko Hada) but who has also been secretly seeing the younger Jasmin (Vicky Wei) and lavishing her with presents. The elder Master Hong (Luo Tsai-erh) and Auntie Huang (Rebecca Pan), the madam, discuss the situation, bringing up issues of responsibility and honesty, attempting to come to some kind of understanding in an exchange that shows respect for both the men and women who are a far cry from the Western conception of johns and prostitutes.
Most scenes end by fading quietly to black, then introducing the woman protagonist of the next section — Crimson, Jasmin, Pearl (Carina Lau), Jade (Shuan Fang), and Emerald (Michelle Reis) — as the women gossip and Crimson and Hong, and other pairs, try to figure out what they want out of life and from one another. In Flowers of Shanghai, Hou explores class differences, gender roles, the Asian notion of saving face, and intimacy with grace and sophistication. When the film fades out for the final time, viewers are left knowing they’ve just experienced something special, a stunning work that uses the technologies of cinema to delve into the very nature of humanity.
“Big Screen Summer: NYFF58 Redux” runs through August 26 with such other 2020 film festival favorites as Joyce Chopra’s Smooth Talk, Eugène Green’s Atarrabi and Mikelats, John Gianvito’s Her Socialist Smile, William Klein’s Muhammad Ali, the Greatest, Nuria Giménez’s My Mexican Bretzel, Philippe Lacôte’s Night of the Kings, and Orson Welles’s Hopper/Welles, an epic conversation between Welles and Dennis Hopper.
