twi-ny recommended events

AMOUR OR LESS — A BLIER BUFFET: GET OUT YOUR HANDKERCHIEFS

Get Out Your Handkerchiefs is part of Bertrand Blier festival at the Quad

Solange (Carole Laure), Raoul (Gérard Depardieu), and Stéphane (Patrick Dewaere) form a unique kind of family in Bertrand Blier’s Get Out Your Handkerchiefs

GET OUR YOUR HANDKERCHIEFS (PRÉPAREZ VOS MOUCHOIRS) (Bertrand Blier, 1978)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
March 15-21
212-255-2243
quadcinema.com

French writer-director Bertrand Blier’s Oscar-winning Get Out Your Handkerchiefs is no weepy melodrama. If you need hankies while watching, they’ll be for the tears rolling down your face from laughter. A fortieth-anniversary 2K restoration is screening March 15-21 in the Quad series “Amour or Less: A Blier Buffet,” a nine-film celebration of the five-decade career of the controversial auteur, who has been regularly labeled a misogynist. Get Out Your Handkerchiefs has stirred up its share of naysayers through the years, so it’s fascinating to watch it now, in the midst of the #MeToo movement. The film opens in a restaurant where the brutish, doting Raoul (Gérard Depardieu) is eating with his bored, disinterested wife, Solange (Carole Laure). Suspecting that she is stealing glances at a man seated at a table behind him, Raoul approaches him, a schoolteacher named Stéphane (Patrick Dewaere), and practically begs him to sleep with his wife. Raoul, a driving instructor, loves Solange so much that he is willing to go to great lengths to make her happy, even if it means sharing her bed with another man.

Adolescence hits Christian Belœil (Riton Liebman) hard in Oscar-winning romantic comedy

Of course, she has something to say about it and ultimately decides, without much excitement, that the plan is fine with her; she desperately wants to have a baby but has been unable to conceive with her husband. The men begin having quite the bromance themselves as they talk about Mozart while Solange knits, and knits, and knits. (The first scene Blier wrote was when the two men have a less-than-intelligent discussion on Mozart; Blier then built the film around that.) Their green-grocer neighbor (Michel Serrault) starts hanging around as well, concerned about Solange’s search for contentment. Solange, Raoul, and Stéphane spend a summer working together at a camp, where they meet Christian Belœil (Riton Liebman), a thirteen-year-old rich kid who gets bullied by the other boys but takes a liking to Solange as his hormones rage out of control. The film gets more absurdist, and funnier and funnier, as it heads into territory destined to offend politically correct watchdogs everywhere.

A fortieth-anniversary 2K restoration opens at the Quad on March 15

A fortieth-anniversary 2K restoration of Get Out Your Handkerchiefs opens at the Quad on March 15

Named Best Picture by the National Society of Film Critics in addition to nabbing the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Get Out Your Handkerchiefs is a delightful farce that turns traditional family and societal relationships inside out and upside down, whether it be parents and children, mothers and sons, husbands and wives, teachers and students, or just a couple of dudes. Depardieu and Dewaere, who previously teamed up in Blier’s Going Places, are a comic force as a couple of ordinary guys caught up in a crazy riff on Jules et Jim, Raoul a driving instructor who doesn’t know where he’s going, Stéphane a man obsessed with Pocket Books. Laure (Sweet Movie, La Tête de Normande St-Onge) charmingly underplays the enigmatic Solange: Raoul and Stéphane think she might be a simpleton, but is she? The scenes of her knitting are hilariously deadpan, and the matching sweaters she produces eventually show up on nearly everyone, their prosaic patterns sometimes echoed in the walls, floors furniture, and other elements. Meanwhile, the comedy turns poignant as Christian, who can’t stand his parents (Eléonore Hirt and Jean Rougerie) or the other kids, spends more time with his new adult friends, especially Solange. At one point Christian is in bed reading Ralph Dennis’s super-noir On bricole, the cover showing a man torn in half, as if Raoul and Stéphane are two parts of the same human being (or referencing Christian’s growth from boy to man). And Stéphane is reading Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada, a novel about a rather unusual family. Through it all is a wonderfully evocative score by Georges Delerue. “Amour or Less: A Blier Buffet” continues through March 21 with such other Blier works as Beau-père, Merci la vie, Ménage (Tenue de soirée), and Going Places.

ASH IS PUREST WHITE

Qiao (Zhao Tao) how her life is turning out in Jia Zhang-Ke’s Ash Is Purest White

ASH IS PUREST WHITE (Jia Zhang-Ke, 2018)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater, Francesca Beale Theater
144/165 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Aves., 212-875-5050
Quad Cinema, 34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves., 212-255-2243
www.ashispurestwhitemovie.com

Jia Zhang-Ke reaches into his recent past, and China’s, in his elegiac Ash Is Purest White. In the film, which opens today at the Quad and Lincoln Center, the Sixth Generation writer-director’s wife and muse, Zhao Tao, stars as Qiao, a combination of the characters she played in Jia’s 2002 Unknown Pleasures and 2006 Still Life. It’s the spring of 2001, and Qiao is living in style with her handsome, ultracool jianghu boyfriend, well-respected local gangster Guo Bin (Liao Fan). She runs a gambling parlor, where she asserts her power with men who are in awe of her. But when a rival gang attacks Bin and Qiao pulls a gun, their lives take a series of unexpected turns as the story moves first to 2006 and then to 2018, when things are decidedly, and sadly, different for both of them in a China that has changed as well.

Things are about to change for Guo Bin (Liao Fan) in Ash Is Purest White

As in many of his fiction works, Jia includes documentary elements as he touches upon China’s socioeconomic crisis, primarily exemplified by the Three Gorges Dam project, which led to the displacement of families and the literal disappearance of small communities. Working with a new cinematographer, Eric Gautier, who has lensed films for Olivier Assayas, Walter Salles, Leos Carax, Alain Resnais, and Arnaud Desplechin, among others — his longtime cameraman, Yu Lik-Wai, was unavailable — Jia incorporates general footage he shot between 2001 and 2006 of everyday people and architecture that underscores China’s many changes. There are many gorgeous shots of towns and cities, at one point bathed in white volcanic ash, with costumes of bright yellow, red, and blue, as Gautier goes from digital video to Digibeta, HD video, film, and the RED Weapon camera to add distinct textures. (Jia took the title from what was supposed to be Fei Mu’s last work, which was later made by Zhu Shilin.)

Qiao and Bin try to go back, but little is the same, except for some of their old friends, who are still trying to hold on to the way things were. Zhao (A Touch of Sin, Mountains May Depart) is slow and deliberate as Qiao, her wide eyes telling a story all their own as she wrestles with disappointment, searching for some meaning in her life, while Fan (The Final Master; Black Coal, Thin Ice) is bold and forceful as a proud, powerful man who undergoes a radical shift. “The city is developing fast. It’s ours for the taking,” Bin says early on. But in Jia’s moving, heartfelt epic, there’s nothing for them to grab on to anymore.

KIRSTEIN AND BALANCHINE’S NEW YORK CITY BALLET: FOUR MODERN WORKS

Peter Walker in George Balanchine’s Agon. Photo: Erin Baiano

Peter Walker will be part of NYCB performance at MoMA that includes excerpt from George Balanchine’s Agon (photo by Erin Baiano)

MoMA, Museum of Modern Art
Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
March 16-18, free with museum admission of $14-$25, 12:00 and 3:00
Exhibit runs through June 7, $14-$25
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

In conjunction with the wide-ranging exhibition “Lincoln Kirstein’s Modern,” MoMA is presenting “Kirstein and Balanchine’s New York City Ballet: Four Modern Works,” a series of dance performances in the Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday at noon and 3:00. The exhibit, which opens on Sunday and continues through June 7, consists of nearly three hundred paintings, photographs, sculptures, letters, videos, drawings, and ephemera collected by or associated with the Rochester-born Lincoln Kirstein, a polymath, cultural critic, Presidential Medal of Freedom honoree, librettist, and writer who cofounded the New York City Ballet with George Balanchine and was part of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives unit during WWII. The presentation, hosted by NYCB corps de ballet member Silas Farley, will include excerpts from 1941’s Concerto Barocco, 1946’s The Four Temperaments, 1948’s Orpheus, and 1957’s Agon, accompanied by Brooklyn-born pianist Elaine Chelton. The works will be performed by Farley, Gonzalo Garcia, Anthony Huxley, Sara Adams, Ashley Laracey, Unity Phelan, Peter Walker, Devin Alberda, Marika Anderson, Eliza Blutt, Meaghan Dutton-O’Hara, Laine Habony, Baily Jones, Olivia MacKinnon, Jenelle Manzi, Miriam Miller, Andrew Scordato, and Mary Elizabeth Sell. It’s free with museum admission, but there is limited seating.

INFRASTRUCTURE ON FILM: SNOWPIERCER

Curtis (Chris Evans) leads a revolt in Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer

SNOWPIERCER (Bong Joon-ho, 2014)
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Ave. at Second St.
Saturday, March 16, and Thursday, March 21, 9:00
Series runs March 14-28
212-505-5181
anthologyfilmarchives.org
www.snowpiercer-film.com

Korean director Bong Joon-ho, who had a huge international hit in 2006 with The Host and a major critical success with 2009’s Mother, made his English-language feature debut with Snowpiercer, a nonstop postapocalyptic thrill ride that takes its place with such other memorable train films as The Great Train Robbery, From Russia with Love, The Train, and Murder on the Orient Express. It’s 2031, seventeen years after the chemical C7, which was supposed to end climate change, instead froze the earth, killing all living beings except for a group of survivors on board a train run by a perpetual motion machine. In the rear of the train, men, women, and children are treated like prisoners, beaten, tortured, dressed in rags, their only food mysterious gelatin blocks. Soldiers led by the cold-hearted Mason (Tilda Swinton) and the yellow-clad Claude (Emma Levie), whose outfit brings virtually the only color to this dark, dank, deeply depressing setting, violently keep the peace as the two women heartlessly dictate orders and abscond with the children. But Curtis Everett (Chris Evans) and Edgar (Jamie Bell) hatch a plan to get past the guards and make their way to the front of the train in order to find out just what is really going on and to meet with Wilford, the wealthy entrepreneur running the engine. With the help of defiant mother Tanya (Octavia Spencer), elder statesman Gilliam (John Hurt), train engineer Namgoong Minsu (Bong regular Song Kang-ho), and Namgoong’s daughter, Yona (Go Ah-sung), Curtis attempts to lead a small revolution that is seemingly doomed to failure.

Mason (Tilda Swinton) has something to say about potential revolution on board train to nowhere

Inspired by the French graphic novel Le Transperceneige by Jean-Marc Rochette and Benjamin Legrand (who both make cameos in the film), Snowpiercer is a tense, gripping thriller that unfolds as a microcosm of contemporary society, intelligently taking on race, class, poverty, drug addiction, education, and corporate greed and power. Evans (Captain America, Push) is almost unrecognizable as Everett, a flawed hero trying to make things right, followed every step of the way by cold-blooded killer Franco the Elder (Romanian star Vlad Ivanov of Police, Adjective and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days). The film features splendid production design by Ondrej Nekvasil; each train car offers a completely different look and feel as Curtis heads toward the front, leading to a finale that is everything the conclusion to the Matrix trilogy wanted to be. Bong (Memories of Murder), who cowrote the film with Kelly Masterson (Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead), doesn’t shy away from violence in telling this complex story – of course, it doesn’t hurt that one of the producers is Korean master Park Chan-woo (the Vengeance trilogy, Thirst), who had recently made his first English-language film as well, Stoker. A fantastically claustrophobic chase film, Snowpiercer is screening March 16 and 21 at 9:00 in the Anthology Film Archives series “Infrastructure on Film,” which consists of works that involve constructed environments dealing with history, technology, and humanity. Running March 14-28, the series, curated in collaboration with Rebecca Cleman of Electronic Arts Intermix, features such other films as Frederick Wiseman’s Canal Zone, Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Path of Oil, Dominic Angerame’s City Symphony, and Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West and will continue with a second part in the spring.

LOU REED DRONES

Laurie Anderson will be presenting “Lou Reed Drones” March 13 at St. John the Divine (photo by Da Ping Luo)

Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine
1047 Amsterdam Ave. at 112th St.
Wednesday, March 13, free with advance RSVP, 6:30 – 11:30 pm
212-316-7540
www.stjohndivine.org
www.loureed.com

When punk godfather Lou Reed departed this mortal coil on October 13, 2013, at the age of seventy-one, he left behind a legacy of music, poetry, and good old New York City toughness. His songs and style have so influenced our concepts of “downtown,” “cool,” and “rock,” it’s as if he’s still with us. And that’s how it will feel on March 13, when his longtime partner, musician and artist Laurie Anderson, presents “Lou Reed Drones” in the Crossing at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine for five hours beginning at 6:30. The soundscape installation features more than a half dozen of Reed’s guitars, each one in front of a large amplifier; his former guitar tech and collaborator Stewart Hurwood fiddles with various knobs and dials as droning feedback noise emerges, a different emanation of Reed’s famed Metal Machine Music. We saw the piece two years ago in the Bruno Walter Auditorium at Lincoln Center, where we could lie on the floor and just let it vibrate in all our cells; it’s a dramatic piece that can take you wherever you want to go, reaching another level as it floats into St. John the Divine’s eight-second echo. (Visitors are encouraged to walk around the space to experience unique sonic perceptions.) That performance offered the bonus of additional live musicians, including Anderson on violin. Free with advance RSVP, the work is part of the exhibition “The Value of Sanctuary: Building a House without Walls,” which continues at the cathedral through June 30.

HUBBARD STREET DANCE CHICAGO: DECADANCE

Hubbard Street Dance Chicago performs Ohad Naharin’s Anaphase as part of Decadance/Chicago at the Joyce (© Todd Rosenberg Photography)

The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Ave. at 19th St.
March 6-17, $10-$80
212-242-0800
www.joyce.org
www.hubbardstreetdance.com

Hubbard Street Dance Chicago’s Decadance/Chicago is an exhilarating evening of invigorating motion and sound, energetically performed by the talented Illinois troupe, returning to the Joyce for the first time in four years. The piece consists of excerpts from nine works by Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin and Batsheva Dance Company, a kind of evolving greatest-hits package. The evening opens with a tall young man in somewhat Hasidic garb, instructing us to turn off our cellphones in a very serious tone of voice. When the second act begins, he asks the audience a series of questions that get rather personal. Both introductions immediately work to create an intimate, quirky, magical space for the performers and audience to inhabit. The sixteen-person company, each one worthy of singling out — Craig D. Black Jr., Jacqueline Burnett, Rena Butler, Alicia Delgadillo, Kellie Epperheimer, Michael Gross, Elliot Hammans, Alysia Johnson, Myles Lavallee, Adrienne Lipson, Florian Lochner, Ana Lopez, Andrew Murdock, David Schultz, Kevin J. Shannon, and Connie Shiau — exhibits Naharin’s Gaga movement language, “which emphasizes the exploration of sensation and availability for movement,” resulting in a unique and identifiable vocabulary that offers dancers chances to improvise amid the complex structures.

Staged by Ian Robinson and Rachael Osborne so that several of the excerpts flow smoothly into the next, Decadance/Chicago highlights the upper body at the start, particularly the arms and hands, as dancers come together and break off into solos. They rarely slow down as they move to Dick Dale’s “Hava Nagila,” Goldfrapp’s “Train,” Arvo Pärt’s “Fur Alina,” Marusha’s “Somewhere over the Rainbow,” Ali Hassan Kuban’s “Mabrouk Wo Arisna,” Dean Martin’s “Sway,” the Beach Boys’ “You’re Welcome,” and a woman reciting Charles Bukowski’s 1972 poem “making it,” the last with poetic cumulative choreography for five women. The company lines up at the front of the stage as the dancers suddenly burst into brief solos; they break into three groups and play a game of horse as each dancer either copies the previous one or dares the proceeding one to match them; the cast ventures into the audience and grabs partners to dance with onstage; and then they bring out the showstopping Anaphase, in which fifteen performers are arranged in a semicircle of chairs and remove their Hasidic garb (black pants, white shirt, black jacket, and black hat) to Naharin and Tractor’s Revenge’s adaptation of the traditional Passover song “Ehad Mi Yodea,” a dazzling display that leaves the audience breathless.

The excerpts range from 1993’s Anaphase — which I have now seen three times, the first by Batsheva, then by Alvin Ailey, in which I was one of the audience members brought onstage, and now by Hubbard Street, with my wife getting chosen to dance, and it has been a joy on each occasion — to 2011’s Sadeh21 and also include Zachacha, Naharin’s Virus, Three, Telophaza, George & Zalman, Max, and Seder. Experiencing Naharin’s choreography performed by this young, high-energy, spectacularly gifted company makes for an electrifying evening that’s not to be missed. Decadance/Chicago continues through March 10, to be followed March 12-17 by HSDC’s versions of a trio of works by Canadian choreographer and Kidd Pivot founder Crystal Pite, A Picture of You Falling, The Other You, and Grace Engine, all with music by Owen Belton. Batsheva fans can catch Naharin’s Venezuela March 27-30 at BAM.

THE MUSIC OF VAN MORRISON AT CARNEGIE HALL

van morrison

Who: Brian Fallon, Shawn Colvin, the Secret Sisters, Richard Marx, Marc Cohn, Bettye LaVette, Josh Ritter, Glen Hansard, Anderson East, the Resistance Revival Chorus, Lee Fields, David Johansen, Blind Boys of Alabama, Robert Earl Keen, William Elliott Whitmore, John Paul White, Darlene Love, Low Cut Connie, Valerie June, Patti Smith, and the house band of Tony Garnier, Steve Jordan, Smokey Hormel, and Leon Pendarvis, with more to be announced
What: Fundraising tribute to Van Morrison benefiting music programs for kids
Where: Carnegie Hall, Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage, 57th St. & Seventh Ave., 212-247-7800
When: Thursday, March 21, $48-$175 (VIP packages $325-$10,000), 8:00
Why: Since 2006, City Winery has been staging “Music of” benefit tribute shows to legendary performers at Carnegie Hall, from David Bowie, Prince, Aretha Franklin, and Bruce Springsteen to Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Jimmy Webb, and the Who. This year City Winery owner Michael Dorf turns to Irish troubadour Van Morrison, the seventy-three-year-old Belfast-born genius who has made such albums as Astral Weeks, Moondance, Into the Music, Beautiful Vision, The Healing Game, and Pay the Devil. Equally adept at jazz, blues, R&B, rock, and soul, Morrison started with Them in 1964 and has released forty records as a solo artist, including six since 2015. In addition to being one of the great songwriters of all time and boasting one of the most gorgeous voices in the business, Morrison is a master at reinterpreting the work of others, so it should be fascinating to see how a group of fellow musicians cover his tunes March 21 at Carnegie Hall; the impressive roster is listed above. There will also be a rehearsal show at City Winery the night before ($45-$65, 8:00). All proceeds will benefit Midori & Friends, the Center for Arts Education, Little Kids Rock, the Grammy Music Education Coaliton, Fixing Instruments for Kids in Schools, the Orchestra Now, Jazz House Kids, the D’Addario Foundation, the VH1 Save the Music Foundation, Sonic Arts for All, and the Church Street School for Music & Art.