The Second Woman repeats the same scene from John Cassavetes’s Opening Night one hundred times (photo by Heidrun Lohr)
THE SECOND WOMAN
BAM Fisher, Fishman Space, 321 Ashland Pl.
October 18, 5:00 pm – October 19, 5:00 pm, $25
718-636-4100
www.bam.org/secondwoman
Last month, Cyril Teste’s multimedia adaptation of John Cassavetes’s 1977 film Opening Night kicked off FIAF’s Crossing the Line Festival, an immersive production highlighted by the US stage debut of French star Isabelle Adjani. Cassavetes’s film stars Gena Rowlands, his wife, as a theater actress getting lost between fiction and reality during out-of-town previews of a show called Second Woman; Cassavetes plays her leading man. Now BAM is presenting another unique exploration of the film in its Next Wave Festival. Beginning at 5:00 on the afternoon of October 18 and continuing for twenty-four consecutive hours, actress Alia Shawkat (Arrested Development, Blaze) will perform the same scene from Opening Night one hundred times, each with a different man playing opposite her. (There will be short breaks at 7:00 pm and then every two hours.) Created, written, and directed by Nat Randall and Anna Breckon, Second Man features video direction by EO Gill and Breckon (there are four cameras in use), lighting by Amber Silk and Kayla Burrett, sound by Nina Buchanan, and set design by Genevieve Murray/FUTURE METHOD STUDIO.
As opposed to theater, which is live every night, a movie scene can be done over and over again until everyone involved — particularly the director and the star — is happy with the result. However, in this case, Shawkat — who in Miguel Arteta’s Duck Butter played a character on a twenty-four-hour date with another woman, making love every sixty minutes — will be caught in an endless loop, a repetition that will be different every time as the other actor changes. “The Second Woman takes as its starting point the idea that emotions and identities are culturally and historically specific, and that gender identities are defined by, and produced through, emotional cultures and norms,” Randall and Breckon explain in a program note. “Taking gender, as a particular relation to cultural power and privilege, as its focus, The Second Woman explores the ways in which gender privilege and power expresses itself through feeling.” Advance timed tickets allow entry at 5:00 and midnight on Friday and 4:00 and 8:00 am on Saturday; otherwise, you can buy tickets at the venue, and you are allowed to leave and come back at any time as space permits.
The first film that Akira Kurosawa had total control over, Drunken Angel tells the story of a young Yakuza member, Matsunaga (Toshirô Mifune), who shows up late one night at the office of the neighborhood doctor, Sanada (Takashi Shimura), to have a bullet removed from his hand. Sanada, an expert on tuberculosis, immediately diagnoses Matsunaga with the disease, but the gangster is too proud to admit there is anything wrong with him. Sanada sees a lot of himself in the young man, remembering a time when his life was full of choices — he could have been a gangster or a successful big-city doctor. When Okada (Reisaburo Yamamoto) returns from prison, searching for Sanada’s nurse, Miyo (Chieko Nakakita), the film turns into a classic noir, with marvelous touches of German expressionism thrown in. The terrible incidental music lapses into melodramatic mush, preventing the film from reaching its full potential greatness, but that’s just a minor quibble.
In Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 gem, Ikiru, winner of a special prize at the 1954 Berlin International Film Festival, the great Takashi Shimura is outstanding as simple-minded petty bureaucrat Kanji Watanabe, a paper-pushing section chief who has not taken a day off in thirty years. But when he suddenly finds out that he is dying of stomach cancer, he finally decides that there might be more to life than he thought after meeting up with an oddball novelist (Yunosuke Ito). While his son, Mitsuo (Nobuo Kaneko), and coworkers wonder just what is going on with him — he has chosen not to tell anyone about his illness — he begins cavorting with Kimura (Shinichi Himori), a young woman filled with a zest for life. Although the plot sounds somewhat predictable, Kurosawa’s intuitive direction, a smart script (cowritten with Hideo Oguni), and a marvelously slow-paced performance by Shimura (Stray Dog, Scandal, Seven Samurai) make this one of the director’s best melodramas.
Loosely adapted from Maxim Gorky’s social realist play, The Lower Depths is a staggering achievement, yet another masterpiece from Japanese auteur Akira Kurosawa. Set in an immensely dark and dingy ramshackle skid-row tenement during the Edo period, the claustrophobic film examines the rich and the poor, gambling and prostitution, life and death, and everything in between through the eyes of impoverished characters who have nothing. The motley crew includes the suspicious landlord, Rokubei (Ganjiro Nakamura), and his much younger wife, Osugi (Isuzu Yamada); Osugi’s sister, Okayo (Kyôko Kagawa); the thief Sutekichi (Toshirō Mifune), who gets involved in a love triangle with a noir murder angle; and Kahei (Bokuzen Hidari), an elderly newcomer who might be more than just a grandfatherly observer. Despite the brutal conditions they live in, the inhabitants soldier on, some dreaming of their better past, others still hoping for a promising future. Kurosawa infuses the gripping film with a wry sense of humor, not allowing anyone to wallow away in self-pity. The play had previously been turned into a film in 1936 by Jean Renoir, starring Jean Gabin as the thief.
