twi-ny recommended events

JAPAN CUTS: BLUE HOUR

Kiyoura (Shim Eun-Kyung) and Sunada (Kaho) wonder what’s next in Yuko Hakota’s Blue Hour

FESTIVAL OF NEW JAPANESE FILM: BLUE HOUR (BURU AWA NI BUTTOBASU) (ブルーアワーにぶっ飛ばす) (Yuko Hakota, 2019)
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Sunday, July 28, 8:00
Festival runs July 19-28
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org

The Japan Cuts festival at Japan Society concludes July 28 with the North American premiere of Yuko Hakota’s beautiful, wistful Blue Hour. The movie is named after one of the two magic times of day, particularly for filmmakers: The golden hour occurs right after sunrise and before sunset, when the sky turns a warm, golden color, while the blue hour takes place right before sunrise and after sunset, when a colder, deep blue permeates. In the film, Kaho stars as Sunada, a television commercial director with a habit of making poor decisions in her life and career. She’s just turned thirty and wants to do more than produce ads but does not appear to be driven enough. She is married to a kindhearted man-child (Daichi Watanabe) but is having an affair with the married Togashi (Yusuke Santamaria). At a party, she drinks to excess, embarrassing herself in front of her crew. And she hasn’t been home to visit her family in several years. She seemingly could have it all, but she lacks ambition and often seems chilly and aloof to others. “I don’t like people who like me,” she says at one point. Later, she admits, “I don’t know what it’s like to be close.”

Sunada (Kaho) has trouble finding happiness in Blue Hour

When Sunada mentions to one of her only friends, the impulsive, unemployed, and very charming Kiyoura (Shim Eun-Kyung), that she is getting ready to go home to see her grandmother, Kiyo proclaims that she will drive them there right away, so they get into her car and away they go. We learn a lot about the two women on the road trip — although this is no Thelma and Louise — but even more when they arrive at Sunada’s family’s small farm in the boondocks, where her oddball brother, Sumio (Daisuke Kuroda), lives with their sweet mother (Kaho Minami) and eclectic father (Denden). Sunada looks like she would rather be anywhere else. As Sunada refuses to relate to her significantly un-Ozu-like clan, Kiyo fits right in, always seeking fun in whatever she does, the polar opposite of her friend.

Lovingly photographed in soft hues by Ryuto Kondo, Hakota’s debut is a moving and poignant tale of a woman who has, sadly, apparently given up too soon; she’s an unusual protagonist in that just as she says that she doesn’t like people who like her, she herself is difficult to like. It’s hard not to see her as emblematic of Japan’s current troubled younger generation, one noted for its failure to socialize, date, marry, get a job, or even leave the house. Former teen model Kaho (A Gentle Breeze in the Village, Our Little Sister) wonderfully captures the character’s ennui, while award-winning South Korean actress and former child star Shim (Happy Killers, Miss Granny) is radiant as the ever-positive Kiyo, who is in love with life no matter where it takes her. Blue Hour is a small gem, quirky and insightful, delicate and alluring. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Hakota, Kaho, and Shim. Among the other films playing at Japan Cuts are Mitsuaki Iwago’s The Island of Cats, Hiroshi Okuyama’s Jesus, and Makoto Sasaki’s Night Cruising in addition to the free panel discussion “The Current State of Film Restoration in Japan” on July 26 at 4:30, which will examine the industry itself and the restoration of Kenji Mizoguchi’s masterpiece Ugetsu.

ROOFTOP FILMS / MoMA POPRALLY x STATEN ISLAND: SPLASH

poprally

Snug Harbor Cultural Center
1000 Richmond Terrace, Staten Island
Saturday, July 27, $10 (free for children sixteen and under), 7:00
www.rooftopfilms.com
snug-harbor.org
www.moma.org

With MoMA’s main digs in Midtown under renovation, the second summer PopRally is going across the river to Staten Island on July 27. Partnering with Rooftop Films, MoMA is holding the festivities at one of the city’s genuine treasures, Snug Harbor Cultural Center & Botanical Garden, for food, drink, music, film, and more. The main event is a 9:00 screening of Ron Howard’s classic 1984 comedy, Splash, starring Tom Hanks as Allen Bauer, a single guy who falls in love with a mermaid (Daryl Hannah) who is being tracked by a scientist (Eugene Levy); John Candy is Hanks’s crazy brother. The evening will also include giveaways, trivia contests, music from DJ Tom of Maker Park Radio and the Gotham Easy Brass Band, beverages from Five Boroughs Brewing Co., and food from Staten Island vendors Ho’ Brah Tacos and Egger’s Ice Cream Parlor. Free shuttle bus service will be provided between Snug Harbor and the Staten Island Ferry terminal before and after the screening. Attendees are encouraged but not required to show up in aquatic costumes; you can bring a blanket (limited chairs will be available) that you can spread out on the South Meadow. Go early and check out the lovely Snug Harbor itself; admission is only five dollars and it’s open till five. PopRally will be traveling to the Bronx next.

ANN TOEBBE: FRIENDS AND RENTALS

Ann Toebbe Friend: Jana, 2018 gouache, paper collage and pencil on panel

Ann Toebbe, Friend: Jana, gouache, paper collage and pencil on panel, 2018

Tibor de Nagy
11 Rivington St.
Tuesday – Saturday through July 27, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-262-5050
www.tibordenagy.com

At first glance, you might think that Ann Toebbe’s “Friends and Rentals” exhibit at Tibor de Nagy on the Lower East Side consists of flat architectural renderings of real home layouts. But up close you’ll see they’re delightfully detailed three-dimensional collages of the interiors of houses, it turns out, owned by Toebbe’s friends and members of her extended family in Ohio and Kentucky. The Cincinnati-born, Chicago-based artist creates the works based on social media postings and actual visits to these houses, but she uses only her memory, not photographs or on-site sketches. Toebbe incorporates flocking, cut paper, yarn, glitter, pencil, gouache, and other materials on panels in constructing these birds’-eye views that serve as unique biographical portraits even though most of them contain no people in them. The rooms are divided to resemble how a brain is compartmentalized into different thought processes and, in these crazy days, how so many of us must multitask, but the works have a calming effect, not a frantic pace. Friend: Jana features a muted brown palette, while Friends: Lisa and Tim is much more colorful, and the only one seen from a horizontal perspective of the standing house. Not surprisingly, LA Air BnB is more standard and folksy than Friend: Becky, which includes children’s toys and a flatscreen TV showing a football game.

Ann Toebbe Friend: Susan, 2019 gouache, paper collage, flocking and pencil on panel

Ann Toebbe, Friend: Susan, gouache, paper collage, flocking and pencil on panel, 2019

You’ll find family photos, religious icons, the American flag, carpets, knickknacks, backyards, Christmas decorations, pets, plants, clocks, birthday presents, and a few lurking human figures, all helping describe people that we are likely never to meet but now somehow know. In the catalog essay “Ann Toebbe Wants to Organize Your Life,” Ryan Steadman writes that Toebbe “empathically [relates] to her subjects’ desire to reinvent themselves in their living spaces by making paintings that are themselves appealing coping strategies. . . . with a fortitude that usually belongs to a librarian or a paleontologist.” Each work is not to scale and is not architecturally sound, as Toebbe, who counts Venezuelan artist Arturo Herrera as her mentor, puts a little fantasy into each life. As you walk around the gallery, you’ll wonder what your home might look like if Toebbe re-created it on panel, but you’ll only be able to imagine it, or perhaps go home and reorganize your own clutter.

41 STRINGS

Nick Zinner will lead a large, handpicked ensemble to perform “41 Strings” at Rockefeller Center on July 27 (photo by Jason Williamson)

Who: Nick Zinner and an all-star group of musicians
What: “41 Strings”
Where: Rockefeller Center plaza, between 49th & 50th Sts. and Fifth & Sixth Aves.
When: Saturday, July 27, free, 6:00
Why: On July 27, Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner will perform his symphonic composition “41 Strings” in Rockefeller Plaza. A celebration of the four seasons, the four-part, twenty-eight-minute work, cowritten with creative producer Berrin Noorata, debuted in 2011 for the forty-first anniversary of Earth Day. At Rockefeller Center, Zinner, an adventurous musician and photographer who has collaborated on several artistic projects, will be joined by guitarists Paul Banks of Interpol, Lenny Kaye of the Patti Smith Band, Sarah Lipstate of Noveller, Aku Orraca-Tetteh of Florence and the Machine, Ava Mendoza of Unnatural Ways, Angel Deradoorian, and Andrew Wyatt, in addition to synth players Nancy Whang of LCD Soundsystem and Ben Vida of Soft Circle, drummers Brian Chase of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Ryan Sawyer of Gang Gang Dance, and Hisham Bharoocha of Soft Circle and Black Dice, bassists Jaleel Bunton of TV on the Radio and Andy Macleod, and a thirty-five piece string ensemble with arrangements by Gillian Rivers. The free concert will begin at 6:00 with “IIII” by Bharoocha, Chase, Sawyer, Vida, and student drummers. You can get a taste of what’s to come in this Creators Project video from 2011.

“I DO NOT CARE IF WE GO DOWN IN HISTORY AS BARBARIANS”

How the 1941 Odessa massacre has been remembered is the central focus of Radu Jude’s “I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians”

“I DO NOT CARE IF WE GO DOWN IN HISTORY AS BARBARIANS” (ÎMI ESTE INDIFERENT DACĂ ÎN ISTORIE VOM INTRA CA BARBARI) (Radu Jude, 2018)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, July 19
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
bigworldpictures.org

Romanian writer-director Radu Jude follows up his 2017 documentary, The Dead Nation, with “I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians,” a bold, provocative fiction film with nonfiction elements that explores continuing anti-Semitism and bigotry in Romania, Eastern Europe, and the world. The title is taken from a statement made by Romanian military dictator Marshal Ion Antonescu to the Council of Ministers in the summer of 1941, just a few months before the Odessa massacre in which tens of thousands of Jews were killed by Romanian troops. The film is set in contemporary times, as theater director Mariana Marin (Ioana Iacob) is preparing for a live, one-time-only massacre reenactment in the town square. Marin is determined to show what really happened during those days, complete with brutal murders and hangings, but Constantin Movilă (theater director Alexandru Dabija), her connection with the local government, insists that she leave out the gruesome parts, that the show should be a celebration of Romanian heroes. She argues that it would not be fair to the nearly four hundred thousand Jews that were ethnically cleansed by the Romanian military, but he quibbles over what’s true and what the community wants to see. As the show approaches, Movilă threatens to cancel it while numerous actors complain about the negative aspects being depicted, displaying affection for “Uncle Hitler” and a lack of empathy for the exterminated Jews.

“I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians” is like a post-Nouvelle Vague film, echoing elements of French cinema from Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette to Olivier Assayas and Arnaud Desplechin, with debates of texts by Isaac Babel, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Joseph Goebbels, Nicolae Steinhardt, and others. But instead of becoming pedantic, the discussions serve to enlighten the arguments and define such characters as Movilă and, in particular, Marin, who not accidentally shares the same name with a Romanian poet who wrote, “Serene and bitter, I hurry across my native land / As if tomorrow had already been.” The entire film is seen from Marin’s determined point of view, whether she’s reading in bed with her lover, Ștefan (Șerban Pavlu), getting support from her lead actor, Traian (Alex Bogdan), and right-hand assistant, Oltea (Ilinca Manolache), or smoking and drinking in a bubbles-free bath. She’s mad at the state of the world and disgusted that people don’t want to know the truth of their history; she’s like the tank she insists she must have for the production — and like the tank, which has to stand still, Marin refuses to budge, understanding the difference between compromise and censorship.

In her first leading role, Iacob is mesmerizing throughout the film’s 140 minutes, giving a tour-de-force performance that lays it all out there as she portrays a bold and brash woman who won’t back down from her personal and professional desires; she’s so immersed in the part that at times you’ll think you’re watching a documentary, enhanced by cinematographer Marius Panduru’s wandering, unpredictable camera. Jude (Scarred Hearts, Aferim!) tackles such critical issues as governmental whitewashing of history, the public’s selective memory, and the definition of patriotism itself, a debate raging across America under the current administration as well as in other nations. Whether Marin gets to stage the show or not ends up being besides the point as the people around her reveal their biases and hatreds, something a play is not about to change. “I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians” is a necessary film, but it’s also a frightening one.

LIGIA LEWIS: SENSATION 1 / THIS INTERIOR

Ligia Lewis, minor matter, 2016. Photo by Martha Glenn.

Ligia Lewis, whose minor matter is seen above, translates Sensation 1 for the High Line this week (photo by Martha Glenn)

The High Line, Fourteenth Street Passage
July 23-25, free with advance RSVP, 7:30
www.thehighline.org
ligialewis.com

Dancer and choreographer Ligia Lewis presents the next iteration of her Sensation series July 23-25 with Sensation 1 / This Interior, the first to be performed outside, taking place at 7:30 each night at the Fourteenth Street Passage on the High Line. Sensation 1 premiered as an indoor solo in 2011, followed the next year by Sensation 2; both pieces involved very slow movement that viewed the body as a sculptural object. Now the Dominican-born, Berlin-based Lewis, who has recently completed a trilogy consisting of Sorrow Swag (2014), minor matter (2016), and Water Will (in Melody) (2018), revisits Sensation with dancers Trinity Bobo, Emma Cohen, Rebecca Gual, Miguel Ángel Guzmán, Stephanie Peña, and Jumatatu M. Poe and music by Lewis’s brother, George Lewis Jr., aka Twin Shadow, focusing on the last note of a song on multiple bodies as a shared experience. Admission is free with advance RSVP.

Lubaina Himid’s Five Conversations is part of High Line group show “En Plein Air” (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Be sure to show up early or stay late and take a walk along the High Line to see its current art commissions. The group show “En Plein Air” comprises works by Ei Arakawa, Firelei Báez, Daniel Buren, Sam Falls, Lubaina Himid, Lara Schnitger, Ryan Sullivan, and Vivian Suter that, like Sensation 1 / This Interior, take advantage of the outdoor location. Also be on the lookout for Simone Leigh’s giant Brick House, a sixteen-foot-high bronze figure of a black woman with long cornrow braids and a skirt that doubles as her body and a dwelling; Ruth Ewan’s Silent Agitator, which demands that it’s “time to organize”; Dorothy Iannone’s I Lift My Lamp Beside the Golden Door, depicting three colorful versions of the Statue of Liberty; and Autumn Knight’s Complete Total Pleasure, a new video about anhedonia, power, race, and control.

And on August 6 at 5:00, the High Line will host “In Conversation: On Top of All This,” a free (with advance RSVP) three-hour gathering on the Spur at Thirtieth St. and Tenth Ave., with poetry, fiction, prompts, and predictions from poet and scholar Lucas Crawford, poet, curator, and artist Anaïs Duplan, and dancer, writer, curator, and choreographer Emily Johnson, including prerecorded audio reflections, readings, and a panel discussion.

MOSTLY MOZART: THE MAGIC FLUTE

(photo © Stephanie Berger, courtesy Lincoln Center)

Pamina (Maureen McKay) and Papageno (Rodion Pogossov) are looking for love in Mostly Mozart Festival production of The Magic Flute (photo © Stephanie Berger, courtesy Lincoln Center)

DIE ZAUBERFLÖTE
David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center
20 Lincoln Center Plaza
July 17-20, 7:00
Festival continues through August 10
212-496-0600
www.lincolncenter.org
www.davidhkochtheater.com

Komische Oper Berlin teams up with British company 1927 for a candy-colored fantastical version of The Magic Flute, which kicks off Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival. Directed by Suzanne Andrade and Barrie Kosky, the nearly three-hour delight features the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, conducted by Louis Langrée, playing in front of a terrific cast and a large white wall on which Paul Barritt projects fanciful hand-drawn animation throughout. The performers, who mostly appear and disappear through several doors at multiple levels of the wall — the set is by Esther Bialas, who also designed the fun costumes — interact directly with the cartoonish images, petting a black cat, sending hearts, blowing smoke rings, and being chased by a fire-breathing serpent. None of librettist Emanuel Schikaneder’s dialogue is spoken; instead, it is projected in dramatic fonts projected on the wall.

The Queen of the Night (Audrey Luna) hovers over it all like a giant spider in The Magic Flute (photo © Stephanie Berger, courtesy Lincoln Center)

After being saved in a dark forest by the Queen of the Night (alternately played by Audrey Luna or Aleksandra Olczyk), Tamino (Julien Behr / Aaron Blake) meets Papageno (Rodion Pogossov / Evan Hughes), who initially takes credit for the rescue and so is punished by the Three Ladies (Ashley Milanese, Karolina Gumos, and Ezgi Kutlu), who make him mute by taking away his mouth, which flies across the screen like a chattering teeth toy. The ladies, who serve the queen, show Tamino a picture of the ruler’s daughter, Pamina (Maureen McKay / Vera-Lotte Böcker), to Tamino, who instantly falls in love with her. But Pamina has been captured by the evil Monostatos (Johannes Dunz) for his boss, the intellectual Sarastro (Dimitry Ivashchenko / Wenwei Zhang). For protection, the ladies give Tamino a magic flute (an animated fairy) and Papageno magic bells that emerge from a box as tiny dancers. As Tamino tries to free Pamina through a series of trials (silence, temptation, fire and water), Papageno searches for his own love.

Mrs. Scwhatz, Klatsch, and Tratsch (Ashley Milanese, Karolina Gumos, and Ezgi Kutlu) offer a unique kind of help to Tamino (Julien Behr) and Papageno (Rodion Pogossov) in fanciful Mozart adaptation at Lincoln Center (photo © Stephanie Berger, courtesy Lincoln Center)

Combining vaudeville, silent movie tropes, a bawdy sense of humor, anime, and a heartfelt reverence for Mozart’s extraordinary music, this version of The Magic Flute — Wolfgang’s 1791 work, which premiered only a few months before his death at the age of thirty-five, was not made for opera aficionados but for the general public — creates a devilishly delicious, weird and wonderful world that will bring out the kid in you, although it is not necessarily for die Kinder. The staging is endlessly inventive, and the cast has everything timed to the second as they immerse themselves into the animation, which is spectacular, particularly the Queen of the Night, who is a giant eight-legged spider. Tantalizing references abound: The magic flute itself is a Tinker Bell-like naked winged creature, Monostatos evokes F. W. Murnau’s vampire Nosferatu, Sarastro looks like silent-film pioneer Georges Méliès, Papageno is a cross between Buster Keaton and Ed Wynn, and the magic bells and the three spirit boys recall Henry Darger’s drawings. Diego Leetz deserves special mention for his magnificent lighting design, with its many nods to silent cinema, as well as principal Jasmine Choi and Tanya Dusevic Witek on flute. It’s a shame this production, so bursting with life’s energy and romance, treachery and trepidation, is running only four days, as it’s a Magic Flute for the ages.