Philippe Petit will share many of his tightrope secrets at STREB on February 8 (photo by Michael Kerstgens/Collection Philippe Petit)
SLAM (STREB Lab for Action Mechanics)
51 North 1st Street
Thursday, February 8, $40-$45, 7:00
streb.org/masterclass
Tightrope master Philippe Petit has walked between the two towers of the World Trade Center and across the Niagara River, the Sydney Harbor Bridge, the Eiffel Tower, Grand Central Terminal, and other locations around the world. On February 8, the sixty-nine-year-old French-born, New York City-based magician, juggler, fencer, bullfighter, and circus performer will be at SLAM in Brooklyn, the STREB Lab for Action Mechanics, holding an open practice. The public is invited into one of his “secret” sessions at 7:00, consisting of an introduction, warm-up exercises, and walking on a twenty-five-foot-long, seven-foot-high tightrope, where the audience can get up close and watch his every movement and facial gesture. The walks will be accompanied by stories of the choreographic elements, followed by a Q&A. Tickets are $40 in advance and $45 at the door for this rare opportunity to go behind the scenes with one of the greatest high-wire artists of all time.
French filmmaker Mia Hansen-Løve will be at Metrograph on February 4 to introduce a special screening of her third film, an infuriating yet captivating tale that runs hot and cold. Goodbye First Love begins in Paris in 1999, as fifteen-year-old Camille (Lola Créton) frolics naked with Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky), her slightly older boyfriend. While she professes her deep, undying love for him, he refuses to declare his total dedication to her, instead preparing to leave her and France for a long sojourn through South America. When Camille goes home and starts sobbing, her mother (Valérie Bonneton), who is not a big fan of Sullivan’s, asks why. “I cry because I’m melancholic,” Camille answers, as only a fifteen-year-old character in a French film would. As the years pass, Camille grows into a fine young woman, studying architecture and dating a much older man (Magne-Håvard Brekke), but she can’t forget Sullivan, and when he eventually reenters her life, she has some hard choices to make. Créton (Bluebeard) evokes a young Isabelle Huppert as Camille, while Urzendowsky (The Way Back) is somewhat distant as the distant Sullivan. There is never any real passion between them; Hansen-Løve (All Is Forgiven, 
Alan Arkin’s directorial debut is a hysterically absurdist foray into the urban paranoia that haunted a lawless New York City in the late 1960s and 1970s. Based on Jules Feiffer’s first play, which was a Broadway flop in 1969 but became a hit in London and off Broadway, Little Murders centers on the offbeat relationship between the determined and domineering Patsy Newquist (Marcia Rodd) and the calm, easygoing Alfred Chamberlain (Elliott Gould). They first meet when Patsy tries to save him from getting beaten up yet again by a group of thugs, but he doesn’t want any help; he never fights back, instead letting them tire themselves out. A former successful commercial photographer, Alfred now spends his time taking artistic pictures of feces he finds on the filthy streets. He and Patsy sort of start dating, but Alfred, who regularly says, “I don’t know what love is,” is too passive for Patsy, who makes it her project to mold him into a stronger man, as if he were one of her interior design projects. The black comedy reaches new heights when Alfred meets Patsy’s rather eccentric family, played by the three actors who originated the roles on the stage. Vincent Gardenia is her high-strung father who laments what has become of the city, Elizabeth Wilson is her prim and proper mother who only sees what she wants to see, and Jon Korkes is deliciously funny as her crazy brother, who finds humor in just about everything. Meanwhile, wherever Patsy goes, a heavy-breathing phone caller follows.
