twi-ny recommended events

CRIMES OF PASSION — THE EROTIC THRILLER: SWIMMING POOL

Jealousy and envy are at the heart of François Ozon’s sexy thriller

SWIMMING POOL (François Ozon, 2003)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Sunday, February 4, 7:00; Thursday, February 15, 2:45; Friday, February 16, 2:25
Series runs February 2-16
212-255-2243
quadcinema.com
www.focusfeatures.com

Charlotte Rampling is divine in Swimming Pool, François Ozon’s playfully creepy mystery about a popular British crime novelist taking a break from the big city (London) to recapture her muse at her publisher’s French villa, only to be interrupted by the publisher’s hot-to-trot teenage daughter. Rampling stars as Sarah Morton, a fiftysomething novelist who is jealous of the attention being poured on young writer Terry Long (Sebastian Harcombe) by her longtime publisher, John Bosload (Game of Thrones’s Charles Dance). John sends Sarah off to his elegant country house, where she sets out to complete her next Inspector Dorwell novel in peace and quiet. But the prim and proper — and rather bitter and cynical — Sarah quickly has her working vacation intruded upon by Julie (Ludivine Sagnier), John’s teenage daughter, who likes walking around topless and living life to the fullest, clearly enjoying how Sarah looks at her and judges her. “You’re just a frustrated English writer who writes about dirty things but never does them,” Julie says, and soon Sarah is reevaluating the choices she’s made in her own life. Rampling, who mixes sexuality with a heart-wrenching vulnerability like no other actress (see The Night Porter, The Verdict, and Heading South), more than holds her own as the primpy old maid in the shadow of a young beauty, even tossing in some of nudity to show that she still has it. (Rampling has also posed nude in her sixties in a series of photographs by Juergen Teller alongside twentysomething model Raquel Zimmerman, so such “competition” is nothing to her.)

Julie (Ludivine Sagnier) and Sarah (Charlotte Rampling) come to a kind of understanding in François Ozon’s Swimming Pool

Rampling has really found her groove working with Ozon, having appeared in four of his films, highlighted by a devastating performance in Under the Sand as a wife dealing with the sudden disappearance of her husband. Sagnier, who has also starred in Ozon’s Water Drops on Burning Rocks and 8 Women, is a delight to watch, especially as things turn dark. Swimming Pool is very much about duality; the film opens with a shot of the shimmering Thames river while the title comes onscreen and Philippe Rombi’s score of mystery and danger plays, and later Sarah says, “I absolutely loathe swimming pools,” to which Julie responds, “Pools are boring; there’s no excitement, no feeling of infinity. It’s just a big bathtub.” (“It’s more like a cesspool of living bacteria,” Sarah adds.) Ozon (Time to Leave, Criminal Lovers) explores most of the seven deadly sins as Sarah and Julie get to know each other all too well. Swimming Pool is screening February 4, 15, and 16 in the Quad Cinema series “Crimes of Passion: The Erotic Thriller,” which runs February 2-16 and includes such other hot flicks as Angel Heart, Basic Instinct, Body Double, Body Heat, In the Cut, Vertigo, and Fatal Attraction.

YOU ARE NOW ONE OF US — FILM AT CLUB 57: GOD TOLD ME TO

Tony Lo Bianco stars as a New York City cop searching for a cultlike leader in God Told Me To

GOD TOLD ME TO (Larry Cohen, 1976)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Friday, February 2, 7:00, and Sunday, February 4, 1:45
Series runs through February 14
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

Watching the first half hour of Larry Cohen’s 1976 thriller, God Told Me To, is extremely difficult, given the continuing spate of mass shootings in the United States and the battle over gun control. The film opens with a man (Sammy Williams) on top of a water tower in New York City, picking off random people down below with a .22 caliber rifle. Detective Peter Nicholas (Tony Lo Bianco) risks his life to go face-to-face with the soft-spoken killer, who says he did it because “God told me to.” A religious Catholic suffering a crisis of faith, Nicholas gets the same response from a series of other mass murderers, including a cop played by Andy Kaufman, in his big screen debut, who lets loose during the St. Patrick’s Day Parade. (The next scene takes place at the Feast of San Gennaro, which is held every September in Little Italy, but it’s clear that six months have not elapsed, so we’ll give Cohen, a native of Washington Heights, poetic license in this case.) As Lo Bianco gets deeper and deeper into the mystery that involves an odd, cultlike figure named Bernard Phillips (Richard Lynch), he also has to deal with his estranged wife, Martha (Sandy Dennis), and his younger girlfriend, Casey Forster (Deborah Raffin). As he gets closer to the truth, he is forced to look deep into his soul amid all the madness. God Told Me To is shot by cinematographer Paul Glickman guerrilla style primarily without city permits and using a handheld camera, keeping the viewer off balance; the choppy editing by Michael D. Corey, Arthur Mandelberg, and William J. Waters doesn’t help smooth things out. The production values are quintessential low-budget mid-’70s, eliciting screams not of horror but of campy enjoyment among the middle-aged, who grew up watching these offbeat films at offbeat times in wood-paneled basements. Inspired by the Bible and one of the very first “aliens visited Earth!” books, Erich von Däniken’s bestselling Chariots of the Gods, Cohen, a producer, director, and writer who made such other low-budget faves as Black Caesar, It’s Alive, Q, The Stuff, and The Masters of Horror episode Pick Me Up, creates some intense scenes, including a hellish visit to a burning underground lair, as the twisting plot enters sci-fi territory involving a very special vagina.

god told me to

One of the undersung actors of the 1970s, Lo Bianco, who starred in such films as The Honeymoon Killers, The French Connection, The Seven-Ups, and Bloodbrothers and played Mayor Fiorella La Guardia in his traveling one-man show The Little Flower, gives one of his most nuanced performances in God Told Me To, whether desperately trying to stop killers or learning some hard facts from an elderly woman in a nursing home, portrayed by Oscar winner Sylvia Sidney. (The film also features old-time Broadway and Hollywood actor Sam Levene as publisher Everett Lukas.) Oscar-winning composer Bernard Herrmann was supposed to write the score but sadly passed away before he could begin, so Frank Cordell took over; the film is dedicated to Herrmann, who had written the score for It’s Alive. Fans of 1960s and 1970s television series will have a field day recognizing familiar faces in small roles, character actors who appeared in multitudes of comedies and dramas; among the names you’ll be Googling to see what else they’ve been in are Mason Adams, Richard Lynch, Harry Bellaver, and John Heffernan. God Told Me To, which was also released as Demon, is a gritty, dark film that resonates in a new way today, especially since all of the killers are white American males with apparent links to a supreme being. The film is screening February 2 and 4 at MoMA as part of the series “You Are Now One of Us: Film at Club 57,” being held in conjunction with the exhibition “Club 57: Film, Performance, and Art in the East Village, 1978–1983,” a celebration of the countercultural underground venue in the basement of a Polish church on St. Marks Pl. where people gathered to experience alternative art; among the curators were Susan Hannaford, Tom Scully, Keith Haring, and Ann Magnuson. The series continues through February 14 with such other fine fare as David Cronenberg’s Rabid, Dennis Donnelly’s The Toolbox Murders, Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space, and “Cartoons You Won’t See on TV.”

DOCUMENTARISTS FOR A DAY: A MAN VANISHES

Shôhei Imamura’s A Man Vanishes is part of documentary film series at Anthology Archives

A MAN VANISHES (NINGEN JŌHATSU) (Shôhei Imamura, 1967)
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Ave. at Second St.
Saturday, February 3, 6:15; Thursday, February 8, 9:00; Sunday, February 11, 6:15
Series runs February 2 – February 20
212-505-5181
anthologyfilmarchives.org

Japanese filmmaker Shôhei Imamura blurs the lines between reality and fiction in his cinéma vérité masterpiece, A Man Vanishes. The 1967 black-and-white documentary delves into one of Japan’s annual multitude of missing persons cases, this time investigating the mysterious disappearance of Tadashi Ôshima, a plastics wholesaler who vanished during a business trip. Imamura sends out actor Shigeru Tsuyuguchi (The Insect Woman, Intentions of Murder) to conduct interviews with Ôshima’s fiancée, Yoshie Hayakawa, who develops an interest in her inquisitor; Yoshie’s sister, Sayo, who quickly finds herself on the defensive; business associates who talk about Ôshima’s drinking, womanizing, and embezzling from the company; and several people who remember seeing Sayo together with Ôshima, something she adamantly denies despite the building evidence. Throughout the 130-minute work, the film references itself as being a film, culminating in Imamura’s pulling the rug out from under viewers and calling everything they’ve seen into question in an unforgettable moment that breaks down the fourth wall and explodes the very nature of truth and cinematic storytelling itself. It also explores individual identity and just how much one really knows those closest to them. Originally supposed to be the first of a twenty-four-part series exploring two dozen missing-persons cases, A Man Vanishes ended up being such a challenging undertaking that it was the only one Imamura made, but what a film it is; it would be more than a decade before he returned to fiction, with 1979’s Vengeance Is Mine, which led the way to a spectacular final two decades that also included The Ballad of Narayama, Eijanaika, Black Rain, The Eel, Dr. Akagi, and Warm Water Under a Red Bridge. The amazing A Man Vanishes is screening February 3, 8, and 11 in the Anthology Film Archives series “Documentarists for a Day,” which highlights nonfiction works made by directors better known for their fiction films. The first part of the festival runs February 2-20 and also includes Orson Welles’s F for Fake, Roberto Rossellini’s India: Matri Bhumi and Interview with Salvador Allende, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Theater in Trance, and Louis Malle’s God’s Country before returning in the spring with documentaries by Eric Rohmer, Manoel de Oliveira, Claire Denis, Satyajit Ray, and others.

HE BROUGHT HER HEART BACK IN A BOX

Kay (Juliana Canfield) and Christopher (Tom Pecinka) battle racism in the Jim Crow south in He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box (photo by Gerry Goodstein)

Theatre for a New Audience, Polonsky Shakespeare Center
262 Ashland Pl. between Lafayette Ave. & Fulton St.
Tuesday – Sunday through February 11, $90-$125
866-811-4111
www.tfana.org

In 2016, the Signature presented a powerful revival of Adrienne Kennedy’s Obie-winning debut play, 1964’s Funnyhouse of a Negro, as part of a trio of experimental one-act plays, with Edward Albee’s The Sandbox and María Irene Fornés’s The Drowning. Now Theatre for a New Audience is staging the world premiere of the eighty-six-year-old Kennedy’s first play in nine years and first solo-written drama in two decades, He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box, which opened last night and deals with many of the same issues, focusing on generations of Americans affected by Jim Crow laws and institutional racism, and it feels like not a moment too soon nor a moment too late. Inspired by events in her own life and featuring snippets from Noël Coward’s Bitter Sweet and Christopher Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris, the fifty-minute show is set in the fictional town of Montefiore, Georgia, in June 1941, where Christopher (Tom Pecinka), son of successful white businessman Harrison Aherne and a white woman — Harrison also has three young children by three black women — and Kay (Juliana Canfield), the daughter of a white writer and a black woman who died mysteriously shortly after Kay was born, have declared their desire for each other. The two seventeen-year-olds know their love is forbidden so they keep it a secret as Christopher leaves for New York City to pursue a stage career and they exchange letters. “He just knew these things. He understands history. He understands the devastation of the human spirit,” Chris writes about his father. “He knows the importance of making a person enter through the back door and of never addressing them as you are addressed. He understands how language can be used to humiliate.” Kay writes back, “My grandmother always said we saw my father all the time on Main Street but he never looked our way. My grandmother said, ‘Your father would look away but his mother would look at you like she was going to kill you right there.’” Meanwhile, Christopher begins to question his father’s friendship with Germans as WWII spreads around the world and is about to involve America. As they continue writing letters and planning their marriage, they traverse Christopher Barreca’s breathtaking set, a floor with several chairs, one of which is occupied by a life-size puppet representing Harrison Aherne. A long stairway leads up to a closed door; on either side are huge brick barriers. Video designer Austin Switser projects images on the floor, walls, and steps of two trains, one for blacks, one for whites; signs in waiting rooms and at water fountains declaring “White” and “Colored”; and photographs further displaying differences in class and race embodied by Christopher and Kay’s relationship.

Adrienne Kennedy’s He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box is a haunting memory play about childhood, first love, and Jim Crow (photo by Gerry Goodstein)

Kennedy (Sleep Deprivation Chamber, June and Jean in Concert), who lived in New York for thirty years before moving to Virginia six years ago to be with her son, Adam, her collaborator on several plays, looks directly at racism and segregation and the lasting effects of slavery in He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box, as the history of two families becomes a microcosm for societal ills that sadly continue to be crucial sources of pain in American life today. It’s a dark fairy tale ably guided by Obie-winning director Evan Yionoulis (The Violet Hour, Three Days of Rain), who helmed the Lortel Award-winning TFANA revival of Kennedy’s Ohio State Murders in 2007. Despite its often confusing and fragmentary narrative, which eschews contemporary realism, Pecinka and Canfield, in her professional New York stage debut, are tantalizing together, striking surprisingly emotional chords as Kay and Christopher’s Romeo-and-Juliet-style love grows. The play is exceedingly angry and at times agonizingly personal, as if we are meeting Kennedy’s inner demons, as if she knew what she wanted to say and got right to the point, unconcerned with conventional plot and character development. (She wrote the play for her grandson after watching him graduate from a Virginia high school, feeling that not much had changed since the 1950s.) But there are also transcendent moments of pure poetry as Kennedy illuminates the sheer hatred that lies at the heart of racism. As you enter the theater, be sure to stop by the miniature model of the gray, dank Montefiore town, devoid of people, as if haunted, with tiny segregation signs at a water fountain and in the train station waiting room. As Kennedy demonstrates, one possible future is that there will ultimately be no one left, neither blacks nor whites, all victims of fear, jealousy, and the violence that comes with that.

MONTHLY CLASSICS: GODZILLA / DIRECTING GODZILLA: THE LIFE OF FILMMAKER ISHIRO HONDA

Godzilla emerges from the ocean after nuclear testing in classic monster movie

GODZILLA (Ishirō Honda, 1954)
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Friday, February 2, $13, 7:00
Directing Godzilla: Wednesday, February 21, $14, 6:30
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org

More than two dozen sequels, prequels, remakes, and reboots have not diluted in the slightest the grandeur of the original 1954 version of Godzilla, one of the greatest monster movies ever made. If you’ve only seen the feeble, reedited, Americanized Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, made two years later with Canadian-born actor Raymond Burr inserted as an American reporter, well, wipe that out of your head. On February 2, Japan Society is screening the real thing, the restored treasure as part of its Monthly Classics series; it will be followed on February 21 with “Directing Godzilla: The Life of Filmmaker Ishirō Honda,” a talk with Steve Ryfle, author of Ishirō Honda: A Life in Film, From Godzilla to Kurosawa, moderated by Film Forum repertory programming director Bruce Goldstein, whose Rialto Pictures released the film in theaters in 2004 and 2014, followed by a book signing and reception with many old Godzilla posters and memorabilia items on view.

Ishirō Honda has a smoke with his atomic-gas-breathing monster on the set of Godzilla

The film was inspired by Eugène Lourié’s The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and a real incident involving the Daigo Fukuryū Maru, a tuna-fishing boat that got hit by radioactive fallout in January 1954 from a U.S. test of a dry-fuel thermonuclear device in the Pacific Ocean. Writer-director Ishirō Honda and cowriter Takeo Murata expanded on Shigeru Kayama’s story, focusing on a giant dinosaur under the sea who comes back to life after H-bomb testing by the U.S. Standing 165 feet tall and able to breathe atomic gas, Godzilla — known as Gojira in Japanese, a combination of gorira, the Japanese word for gorilla, and kujira, which means whale — wreaks havoc on Japanese towns as he makes his way toward Tokyo. While the military and the government want to destroy the creature — who is played by Haruo Nakajima and Katsumi Tezuka in a monster suit, tramping over miniature houses, streets, cars, trains, and buildings using the suitmation technique (both men also make cameos outside the costume) — Dr. Yamane (Takashi Shimura) wants to study Godzilla to find out how the radiation only makes it stronger instead of destroying it. (Throughout, Godzilla is referred to as “it” and not “he,” perhaps because the creature is in part a representation of America and what it wrought in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.) “Godzilla was baptized in the fire of the H-bomb and survived. What could kill it now?” Dr. Yamane asks. Meanwhile, one of Dr. Yamane’s assistants, Dr. Serizawa (Akihiko Hirata), is working on a secret oxygen destroyer that he will show only to his fiancée, Yamane’s daughter, Emiko (Momoko Kōchi), who is having trouble telling Dr. Serizawa that she is actually in love with salvage ship captain Hideto Ogata (Akira Takarada). “Godzilla’s no different from the H-bomb still hanging over Japan’s head,” Ogata tells Dr. Yamane, who is none too pleased with his take on the situation. Through it all, the media risks everything to get the story.

Even for 1954, many of the special effects, photographed by Masao Tamai, are cheesy but fun, and composer Akira Ifukube’s fiercely dramatic score goes toe-to-toe with the monster. The Toho film is no mere monster movie but instead is filled with metaphors and references about WWII and the use of atomic bombs, examining it from political and socioeconomic vantage points while questioning the future of technological advances. “But what if your discovery is used for some horrible purpose?” Emiko asks Dr. Serizawa, who wears an eye patch, as if he can only see part of things. Godzilla could only have come from Japan, much like King Kong was purely an American creation produced by Hollywood; in fact, the two went at it in Honda’s 1962 film, King Kong vs. Godzilla. The next year, Akira Kurosawa would make I Live in Fear (Ikimono no kiroku), an intense psychological drama about the nuclear holocaust’s effects on one man, a factory owner played by Toshirô Mifune — who meets with a dentist portrayed by Kurosawa regular Shimura — a kind of companion piece to Godzilla. Honda, who served as an assistant director to Kurosawa on many films before making his own pictures, would go on to make such other sci-fi flicks as Rodan, The H-Man, Mothra, and Destroy All Monsters, but it was on Godzilla that he got everything right, capturing the fate of a nation in the aftermath of nuclear devastation while still managing to gain sympathy for the monster. It is also difficult to watch the film in 2018 without thinking of America’s current debate over illegal immigration and fear of the other, particularly when Godzilla approaches an electrified fence meant to keep him out, as well as the threat of nuclear war as President Trump battles Kim Jon Un on Twitter.

PARADISO

The New York City Players are performing Paradiso for free at Greene Naftali in Chelsea through February 10

Greene Naftali Gallery
508 West 26th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves., ground floor
Wednesday – Saturday through February 10, free with advance RSVP, 718-622-0330, 7:00
www.greenenaftaligallery.com
www.nycplayers.org

Life and death, science and mythology, earth and water, and past and future merge in Richard Maxwell’s Paradiso, continuing through February 10 at Chelsea’s Greene Naftali Gallery. The sixty-minute show, set in a pre- and postapocalyptic time, concludes Maxwell’s theatrical trilogy inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy, following The Evening and Samara. In Paradiso, characters search for hope and question faith amid grief and despair in an empty, almost blindingly white space save for three sets of three-row semicircular wooden benches for the audience; two pillars offer some respite from the desolation. The staging makes the most of the unusual gallery space; the large, long glass east side walls can open like industrial garage doors, through which Maxwell has a shining white SUV drive in. A home-made robotic figure that evokes Erector-set-level technology, with a small, creaking camera for eyes and a speaker for a mouth, gets out of the car and put-puts toward the audience. “The sky isn’t blue,” it says in somewhat garbled electronic speech. “It’s neither overcast nor sunny — it’s a white slate that blanks your eyes across the day and it daily worsens.” His long soliloquy, with his camera eye surveilling the crowd, is followed by short vignettes and monologues by Elaine Davis, Jessica Gallucci, Carina Goebelbecker, and Charles Reina as various mostly unidentified characters, from strangers and friends to family members facing dilemmas both vague and specific. Occasionally they break into slow, silent modern-dance movements.

A robot assesses the state of a pre- and postapocalyptic world in Richard Maxwell’s Paradiso

Maxwell, whose first monograph, The Theater Years, was recently copublished by Greene Naftali, wrote and directed Paradiso, which, despite all the gloom and doom, is ostensibly about love, in all its forms. “Love has no merit nor no blame,” the robot says. “Love is all that remains,” a character opines. “We are loving. Paradise means to be with the people you love who you lost, to reside in all the energy and vitality of hope,” another character says, adding, “What am I saying? I don’t use words anymore. Fuck it, I can’t dwell on it, I have to move on.” Meanwhile, two people have tea. A man and a woman sleep in the desert. A couple helps their daughter following an operation. Everyone talks primarily in nonspecific dialogue delivered in an often straightforward, detached manner. Snippets give tiny clues to what might have happened, including a major war. “Who were the people who could have saved us?” someone asks. At the end, all that is left is the robot, spewing out a long, narrow sheet of paper that conjures up a neverending CVS receipt. The audience can go up and read what keeps coming out, a series of randomly generated scenes between multiple characters that has nothing whatsoever to do with what we just saw, except everything — little fragments of life, much like Paradiso itself, offering more questions than answers but clinging to hope in an indeterminate, potentially cataclysmic future.

mecca vazie andrews and the MOVEMENT movement: [title]

mecca vazie andrews and the MOVEMENT movement will present new immersive work in dialogue with Laura Owens exhibition at the Whitney (photo courtesy of mecca vazie andrews)

Whitney Museum of American Art
99 Gansevoort St.
Saturday, February 3, $10, 4:00
Exhibition continues through February 4
212-570-3600
whitney.org
meccavazieandrews.tumblr.com

In conjunction with the exhibition Laura Owens, a midcareer survey of the work of the LA-based artist, the Whitney is hosting the immersive multimedia performance [title], by LA dancer, choreographer, and teacher mecca vazie andrews and her company, the MOVEMENT movement. The fifty-minute presentation will feature movement, sound, and projection as andrews responds to Owens’s radical style of painting, exploring freedom, enlightenment, and the future. The performance takes place on February 3 at 4:00, the day before the exhibition closes; tickets are ten dollars in addition to museum admission. Also currently on view at the Whitney are “Toyin Ojih Odutola: To Wander Determined,” “An Incomplete History of Protest: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1940-2017,” “Where We Are: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1900-1960,” and “Experiments in Electrostatics: Photocopy Art from the Whitney’s Collection, 1966-1986.”