twi-ny recommended events

CINEMATOGRAPHER CAROLINE CHAMPETIER: SHAPING THE LIGHT — THE INNOCENTS / HOLY MOTORS

A convent of nuns reexamine their faith following tragedy in Les Innocentes

Polish nuns reexamine their faith following unspeakable tragedy during WWII in Les Innocentes

CinéSalon: THE INNOCENTS (LES INNOCENTES) (AGNUS DEI) (Anne Fontaine, 2016)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, October 24, $14 ($23 for both films), 4:00
Series continues Tuesdays through October 31
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org
www.musicboxfilms.com

FIAF’s CinéSalon series “Cinematographer Caroline Champetier: Shaping the Light” continues the celebration of the career of the César-winning French director of photography October 24 with two of her best films, Anne Fontaine’s Les Innocentes and Léos Carax’s Holy Motors, each of which will be followed by a Q&A and wine and beer reception with Champetier. Inspired by a true story, Les Innocentes is a haunting tale of a French WWII Red Cross doctor, Mathilde Beaulieu (Lou de Laâge), who is secretly summoned by Sister Maria (Agata Buzek) to help a nun give birth in a remote Polish convent. She soon discovers that several of the Benedictine nuns are pregnant, the result of brutal rapes by Soviet soldiers. The Mother Superior (Agata Kulesza) doesn’t want any outsiders to know what happened, out of both shame and fear, but the babies, and the nuns themselves, may not survive without obstetric care. Mathilde, a Communist, is stationed at a mobile surgical hospital in Warsaw, where she primarily assists Samuel (Vincent Macaigne), a Jewish doctor tending to wounded soldiers after the war, in December 1945; she gets into trouble with Samuel when she refuses to even hint at where she is disappearing to. As the due dates for the multiple births draw close, so does the danger surrounding Mathilde and the nuns.

Les Innocentes was nominated for four Césars, Best Film, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay — even though it was based on the diaries of French Resistance doctor Madeleine Pauliac — and Best Cinematography, by Champetier (Of Gods and Men, Toute une nuit), who does an exquisite job with her camera throughout the film, which is beautifully directed by Fontaine (Coco Before Chanel, Gemma Bovery). In scene after scene, amid a palette dominated by black, white, and brownish gray, a light glows near the center of the screen, from candles, open doorways, windows, and snow to a fire, lamps, truck headlights, and even the white parts of the nuns’ habits, giving the film a chiaroscuro look reminiscent of canvases by Georges de la Tour. It’s like a flicker of hope at the center of tragedy, or birth coming out of death as the nuns and the doctors reexamine their faith, their basic belief system, and the concept of motherhood. De Laâge, who was nominated twice for the Most Promising Actress César, gives a heartfelt, honest performance as Mathilde, as she goes back and forth between her duties with the Red Cross and her deep-set desire to help the nuns. Champetier’s camera loves her face, which often melts into the shot like a figure in a classical painting. Les Innocentes is a powerful look at some of the many innocent victims of war and how far people will go to protect their secrets. Les Innocentes is screening October 24 at 4:00 at FIAF, followed by a Q&A and wine and beer reception with Champetier.

Léos Carax’s Holy Motors is a dazzling tribute to Paris, cinema, and the art of storytelling

CinéSalon: HOLY MOTORS (Léos Carax, 2012)
Tuesday, October 24, $14 ($23 for both films), 7:30
www.fiaf.org
www.holymotorsfilm.com

French writer-director Léos Carax (Boy Meets Girl, Mauvais Sang) has made only five feature films in his thirty-plus-year career, a sadly low output for such an innovative, talented director, but in 2012 he gave birth to his masterpiece, the endlessly intriguing, confusing, and exhilarating Holy Motors. His first film since 1999’s POLA X, the work is a surreal tale of character and identity, spreading across multiple genres in a series of bizarre, entertaining, and often indecipherable set pieces. Holy Motors opens with Carax himself playing le Dormeur, a man who wakes up and walks through a hidden door in his room and into a movie theater where a packed house, watching King Vidor’s The Crowd, is fast asleep. The focus soon shifts to Carax alter ego Denis Lavant as Monsieur Oscar, a curious character who is being chauffeured around Paris in a white stretch limo driven by the elegant Céline (Édith Scob). Oscar has a list of assignments for the day that involve his putting on elaborate costumes — including revisiting his sewer character from Merde, Carax’s contribution to the 2009 omnibus Tokyo! that also included shorts by Michel Gondry and Bon Joon-ho — and becoming immersed in scenes that might or might not be staged, blurring the lines between fiction and reality within, of course, a completely fictional world to begin with. It is as if each scene is a separate little movie, and indeed, Carax, whose middle name is Oscar, has said that he made Holy Motors after several other projects fell through, so perhaps he has melded many of those ideas into this fabulously abstruse tale that constantly reinvents itself.

Stunningly photographed by Caroline Champetier, former president of the French Association of Cinematographers, the film is also a loving tribute to Paris, the cinema, and the art of storytelling, with direct and indirect references to Franz Kafka, E. T. A. Hoffman, Charlie Chaplin, Lon Chaney, Eadweard Muybridge, Georges Franju, and others. (Scob, who starred in Franju’s Eyes Without a Face, at one point even pulls out a mask similar to the one she wore in that classic thriller.) The outstanding cast also features Kylie Minogue, who does indeed get to sing; Eva Mendes as a robotic model; and Michel Piccoli as the mysterious Man with the Birthmark. Holy Motors is screening October 24 at 7:30 at FIAF, followed by a Q&A and wine and beer reception with Champetier. “Cinematographer Caroline Champetier: Shaping the Light” concludes October 31 with Margarethe von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt and Jean-Luc Godard’s Grandeur et décadence d’un petit commerce de cinema.

A NITE TO DISMEMBER: THE HAUNTED LIBRARY

Tony Curtis dances with glee as he readies for Nitehawk’s “A Nite to Dismember,” which includes The Manitou

Nitehawk Cinema
136 Metropolitan Ave. between Berry St. & Wythe Ave.
Saturday, October 28, $65, 12 midnight to 6:00 am
718-384-3980
nitehawkcinema.com

Nitehawk Cinema’s fifth annual “A Nite to Dismember” is dedicated to horror films based on novels, including several bloody-strange choices that should get your blood flowing for Halloween. Running a mere 540 minutes, “A Nite to Dismember: The Haunted Library” begins at midnight with Roger Corman’s 1964 favorite The Masque of the Red Death, starring Vincent Price and Jane Asher, based on the Edgar Allan Poe book and the Poe short story “Hop Frog.” Batting second is James Whale’s seldom-screened The Old Dark House, based on J. B. Priestley’s Benighted and boasting the spectacular cast of Boris Karloff, Charles Laughton, Eva Moore, Gloria Stuart, Melvyn Douglas, and Raymond Massey. Next up is Hideo Nakata’s genuinely creepy and scary 1998 game changer, Ringu, based on the Kôji Suzuki book; the flick was followed by sequels and a decent Hollywood remake, but there’s nothing like the original. In the cleanup spot is Jennifer Kent’s 2014 sleeper hit, The Babadook, about a children’s pop-up book with some downright frightening elements. The all-night scares conclude with a very odd yet inspired selection, William Girdler’s 1978 The Manitou, based on Graham Masterton’s first novel and featuring Michael Ansara, Susan Strasberg, Burgess Meredith, and Tony Curtis in a supernatural tale about a neck tumor that turns out to be the rather unhappy title character. The evening will also include a new short film, a costume contest hosted by Jameson Caskmates, FG. Freaks candy from Eugene J., David Lynch Organic Coffee, a library of horror books curated by Sam Zimmerman, Kris King, and Caryn Coleman, trivia with prizes from Shudder and Out of Print, gift bags, and a free eggs-and-tater-tots breakfast if you make it all the way through.

A mother (Essie Davis) and her young son (Noah Wiseman) must get past terrible tragedy in The Babadook

THE BABADOOK (Jennifer Kent, 2014)
nitehawkcinema.com
www.thebabadook.com

A sleeper hit at Sundance that was named Best First Film of 2014 by the New York Film Critics Circle, The Babadook is a frightening tale of a mother and her young son — and a suspicious, scary character called the Babadook — trapped in a terrifying situation. Expanded from her 2005 ten-minute short, Monster, writer-director Jennifer Kent’s debut feature focuses on the relationship between single mom Amelia (Essie Davis), who works as a nursing home aide, and her seemingly uncontrollable six-year-old son, Samuel (Noah Wiseman), who is constantly getting into trouble because he’s more than just a little strange. Sam was born the same day his father, Oskar (Ben Winspear), died, killed in a car accident while rushing Amelia to the hospital to give birth, resulting in Amelia harboring a deep resentment toward the boy, one that she is afraid to acknowledge. Meanwhile, Sam walks around with home-made weapons to protect his mother from a presence he says haunts them. One night Amelia reads Sam a book that suddenly appeared on the shelf, an odd pop-up book called Mister Babadook that threatens her. She tries to throw it away, but as Sam and the book keep reminding her, “You can’t get rid of the Babadook.” Soon the Babadook appears to take physical form, and Amelia must face her deepest, darkest fears if she wants she and Sam to survive.

Writer-director Jennifer Kent brings out classic horror tropes in her feature debut, the sleeper hit THE BABADOOK

Writer-director Jennifer Kent explores classic horror tropes in her feature debut, the sleeper hit The Babadook

The Babadook began life as a demonic children’s book designed by illustrator Alex Juhasz specifically for the film — and one that was available in a limited edition, although you might want to think twice before inviting the twisted tome into your house. The gripping film, shot by Polish cinematographer Radek Ladczuk in subdued German expressionist tones of black, gray, and white with bursts of other colors, evokes such classic horror fare as Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, where place plays such a key role in the terror. The Babadook itself is a kind of warped combination of the villains from F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and Hideo Nakata’s Ringu. Kent, a former actress who studied at Australia’s National Institute of Dramatic Art with Davis, lets further influences show in the late-night television Amelia is obsessed with, which includes films by early French wizard Georges Méliès. But the real fear comes from something that many parents experience but are too ashamed or embarrassed to admit: that they might not actually love their child, despite trying their best to do so. At its tender heart, The Babadook is a story of a mother and son who must go through a kind of hell if they are going to get past the awful way they were brought together.

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

Shakespeare’s words fly by in a fury in Elevator Repair Service’s frenetic Measure for Measure (photo by Richard Termine)

The Public Theater, LuEsther Hall
425 Lafayette St. by Astor Pl.
Tuesday – Sunday through November 12, $75
212-967-7555
www.publictheater.org

There’s a frenetic, anarchic pace to Elevator Repair Service’s Indy 500 version of Measure for Measure, running at the Public Theater’s LuEsther Hall through November 12. It’s like Howard Hawks’s His Girl Friday on speed, the dialogue whizzing by, in sound and images, as the characters, in a bizarre array of costumes ranging from contemporary suits to hippy outfits to strange fake underpants worn over clothing, engage in corny but funny slapstick and often converse using antique Candlestick telephones even when they are sitting right across the H-shaped table from one another. The play includes every single word of Shakespeare’s script, which is occasionally projected in large letters all across the stage, but it still scrolls past so quickly there is not enough time to read it all. To maintain the verbal madness, which slows down only for one key scene, there is a Teleprompter behind the audience that guides the actors primarily for speed, employing software designed by ERS member Scott Shepherd, who also plays the Duke. (Shepherd and ERS founding artistic director John Collins, the director of Measure for Measure, are veterans of the Wooster Group, which also incorporates unique visuals using monitors in their shows.) You might not clearly understand everything everyone says, but you’ll be able to follow the general shenanigans as the Bard takes on sex, mortality, morality, fidelity, virtue, virginity, marriage, religion, pregnancy, prison, and capital punishment.

In Vienna, the Duke is about to head out of town for a while, leaving his deputy, Angelo (Pete Simpson), in charge. However, the Duke hovers around, disguised as a friar, as the story unfolds, involving Juliet (Lindsay Hockaday), who is having a child with Claudio (Greig Sargeant); brothel manager Mistress Overdone (Susie Sokol); Claudio’s sister, Isabella (Rinne Groff), a religious novice; the nun Mariana (April Matthis); the young nobleman and lowlife Lucio (Mike Iveson); the Provost (Maggie Hoffman), who runs the prison; aged adviser Escalus (Vin Knight); constable Elbow (Gavin Price, who also is the sound designer); and various other characters of ill and not-so-ill repute. The plot centers on Angelo’s arrest of Claudio for impregnating Juliet out of wedlock and the deputy’s offer to release him from prison only if Isabella will sleep with him. It’s quite a moral dilemma — especially as more and more men in positions of power in America today are discovered to be sexual predators — and one that is not resolved very easily. “Death is a fearful thing,” Claudio tells Isabella, who responds, “And shamed life a hateful.”

Brothel manager Mistress Overdone (Susie Sokol) has something to say in ERS adaptation of Measure for Measure (photo by Richard Termine)

At a talkback following the October 18 performance, the audience was asked if it was anyone’s first time at the Public, and no hands went up. They were next asked if it was anyone’s first time seeing Shakespeare, and a few hands went up. They were then asked if it was anyone’s first time seeing Measure for Measure, and more than half the hands went up. It is also ERS’s first time doing the Bard, following well-received, original adaptations of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (Gatz), William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, and Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (The Select), among other presentations. Founded in 1991 by artistic director John Collins, ERS leans heavily toward the experimental over the traditional, and that is as evident as ever in this exciting version of one of Shakespeare’s seldom-performed problem plays.

Director Collins and ERS have chosen to make the ribald shenanigans take a backseat to the staging, which is filled with delightful contradictions and decisions that go from the sublime to the ridiculous. “I’ve come to appreciate that Shakespeare’s densely layered metaphors and dizzying grammatical constructions can’t possibly be thoroughly understood and processed in real-time by any but the Elizabethan scholar. But maybe that doesn’t matter,” Collins writes in a program note. It might have been very different if he had chosen to do a more familiar Shakespeare play, in which much of the audience might already know the main aspects of the plot, so selecting Measure for Measure, which zooms by in an intermissionless 135 minutes, is a curious decision. Of course, opera is not exactly plot-friendly to those who don’t know the story either. In preparing for the show, Collins had the cast and crew watch Howard Hawks’s His Girl Friday along with Hands on a Hardbody and the Marx Brothers, elements of which help propel this version to another level that Shakespeare purists might wag a finger at but more adventurous theatergoers will end up clapping wildly at.

SIMONE FORTI, STEVE PAXTON, YVONNE RAINER: TEA FOR THREE

Steve Paxton, Simone Forti, Yvonne Rainer will join forces for three special evenings at Danspace Project (photos by Ian Douglas)

Danspace Project
St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery
131 East Tenth St. between Second & Third Aves.
October 26-28, $22
866-811-4111
www.danspaceproject.org

Danspace Project is bringing together a sensational trio for “Tea for Three,” as experimental dancer and choreographer Steve Paxton, dancer, artist, and writer Simone Forti, and dancer, choreographer, writer, and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer come together for three nights of “performance, improvisation, and interaction.” The extraordinary threesome were part of Robert Dunn’s Judson Memorial Church workshops nearly sixty years ago, and these presentations are the first time Paxton, Forti, and Rainer have collaborated as a trio. “They each bring their doughty selves to the stage, making dance and performance conversation. No tea is served, but food for thought,” Paxton writes in a statement. Tickets are sold out, but there will be a wait list every night beginning at 7:15. Good luck!

MARY JANE

Sherry (Liza Colón-Zayas) and Mary Jane (Carrie Coon) check Alex’s meds in moving, bittersweet drama (photo by Joan Marcus)

New York Theatre Workshop
79 East Fourth St. between Second & Third Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through October 29, $79
www.nytw.org

The audience never gets a good look at Alex, a seriously ill child, in Amy Herzog’s heart-wrenching and bittersweet Mary Jane. That’s because he’s more than just a chronically sick boy; in the beautifully rendered play, running at New York Theatre Workshop through October 29, he’s representative of the many fears, real and imagined, that haunt us all. Carrie Coon is extraordinary as Mary Jane, a thirtysomething single mother living in a small apartment in Queens with her two-and-a-half-year-old son, Alex, who was born prematurely and requires machines and full-time supervision to keep him alive. A former teacher, Mary Jane works as an administrative assistant for a real estate developer to get health insurance, but the demands of caring for Alex constantly jeopardize that job. As the play opens, the building super, Ruthie (Brenda Wehle), is trying to fix a clog in the sink when she notices that Mary Jane has removed the window guard, which is against the law. “It’s just that he loves looking out the windows, especially when he’s sick and I can’t take him outside?” Mary Jane says. “And it seems like such a small thing but the bars actually do bother him.” We don’t know whether they really bother Alex or not, or whether Mary Jane is projecting her feelings of entrapment in the immensely difficult situation. Alex has several at-home nurses, but the most dedicated is Sherry (Liza Colón-Zayas), who has practically become part of the family; one afternoon she brings over her niece, college student Amelia (Danaya Esperanza), who wants to meet Alex but is taken aback when he doesn’t even seem aware of her presence. A naturally upbeat and helpful person, Mary Jane is also guiding Brianne (Susan Pourfar), a friend of a friend who has a child with similar health issues as Alex. Mary Jane wants to keep Alex out of the hospital, but she has no choice after he suffers a bad seizure and deteriorates. At the hospital, she speaks with the abrupt and direct Dr. Toros (Colón-Zayas); Chaya (Pourfar), a Hasidic woman with a daughter in the same room as Alex; and Tenkei (Wehle), a former teacher and newly ordained Buddhist monk. Meanwhile, she’s on the lookout for Kat (Esperanza), the mysterious music therapist. “There is no more normal,” Sherry tells Mary Jane early on. No, nothing is normal, anywhere, in this brilliantly realized world created by Pulitzer Prize finalist Herzog and two-time Obie-winning director Anne Kauffman.

Amy Herzog and Anne Kaufman have teamed up on the beautiful, heart-wrenching Mary Jane at NYTW

Mary Jane is primarily about a single mother caring for her seriously ill child, yet it is also about so much more, particularly fear and faith. Alex spends nearly the entire play unseen by the audience while Laura Jellinek’s (The Nether, The Wolves) set magically morphs from apartment to hospital before our very eyes. The clever setup takes a cue from her recent Broadway design for Marvin’s Room, in which the aging, ill Marvin is onstage for much of the show but is also essentially unseen, in bed in the back, only occasionally visible in silhouette. It’s a key choice in Mary Jane, as Alex is more than just one specific sick boy; instead, he’s symbolic of the personal crises and potential disasters so many of us face every day. In fact, the word “disaster” is used numerous times throughout the show; Brianne works in disaster management, Mary Jane blames an indecipherable note on her phone as an “autocorrect disaster,” Chaya speaks of the need not to get too overwhelmed by disaster, and Amelia mentions having recently visited the 9/11 Museum with her aunt. Meanwhile, faith becomes a critical topic. “Does my faith make it easier?” Chaya, whose name means “life” in Hebrew, asks Mary Jane, continuing, “I don’t think having a sick child is less painful for me than for people without religion, I don’t think so.” Mary Jane is also very much about women in contemporary society and the problematic health-care system. It’s an all-female cast, and the crew is predominantly made up of women as well. Tony nominee Coon (The Leftovers, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) plays Mary Jane with an intoxicating warmth, an everywoman desperately trying to keep on a happy face in extremely difficult times, while the rest of the excellent actors each take on two roles that cleverly relate to each other: Wehle as the philosophical Queens super and the philosophical monk, Colón-Zayas as a nurse and a doctor, Esperanza as a college student and a music therapist, and Pourfar as two very different mothers. “Everybody has stuff,” Mary Jane tells Chaya, who replies, “That’s not true. Some people don’t have stuff. I know a lot of people, in fact, without any stuff at all.” In Mary Jane, there’s certainly a lot of “stuff”: the stuff of life, the stuff of death, and the pain in-between.

FACES PLACES

JR and Agnès Varda have a blast in the masterful Faces and Places

JR and Agnès Varda have a blast with people and animals in the masterful Faces and Places

FACES PLACES (VISAGES VILLAGES) (Agnès Varda & JR, 2017)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
October 6-26
quadcinema.com
cohenmediagroup.tumblr.com

“We’ll have fun making a film,” legendary eighty-eight-year-old Belgian-born French auteur Agnès Varda tells thirty-three-year-old French photographer and street artist JR in Faces Places (Visages Villages), a masterful road movie that may very well be the most fun film you’ll see all year. The unlikely pair first met when Varda, who has made such classics as Cléo from 5 to 7, Vagabond, Jacquot de Nantes, and The Gleaners and I, accepted an invitation from JR, whose practice involves wheat-pasting giant black-and-white photos of men, women, and children on architectural structures, to visit his Paris studio. (JR brought his “Inside Out” art project to Times Square in 2013.) When Varda saw JR’s blow-up of a 1960 self-portrait Varda shot of herself standing in front of a Bellini painting in Venice, the two instantly hit it off and decided to make a film together, heading out in JR’s small photo-booth truck to team up with people in small towns throughout France, including coal miners, dockworkers, farmers, a church-bell ringer, and factory workers. The reactions of the villagers — shrewd, curious, flattered — to JR’s enormous wheat-pasted blow-ups of themselves on their neighborhood walls, barns, abandoned housing, containers, water towers, and other locations are fascinating. “JR is fulfilling my greatest desire. To meet new faces and photograph them, so they don’t fall down the holes of my memory,” Varda, who edited the film with Maxime Pozzi-Garcia, says. Varda and JR make a formidable duo, finding a childlike innocence in their collaboration that is simply captivating to watch.

Cinematic collaboration between Agnès Varda and JR results in stunning visions of humanity

Varda continually tries to get JR to remove his ever-present dark glasses, remembering how her friend and colleague Jean-Luc Godard once let her take pictures of him without glasses, but JR prefers to maintain his mystery, a man who photographs tens of thousands of people’s faces around the world while never fully showing his own. Varda, who relies on the “power of imagination,” even sets up an afternoon with Godard at his home in Switzerland, preparing by having JR roll her furiously through the same Louvre galleries the protagonists run through in Godard’s Band of Outsiders, but of course nothing with Godard ever goes quite as planned. “Chance has always been my best asset,” Varda proclaims in the film, and it is chance, and the willingness to enthusiastically embrace every moment of life, that helps give Faces Places its immeasurable charm. The film, which features a playful score by Matthieu Chedid (‑M-) and was executive produced by Varda’s daughter, Rosalie Varda-Demy, subtly tackles socioeconomic issues but is primarily a marvelous celebration of genuine humanity.

THE MINISTRY OF SILLY FILMS: MONTY PYTHON AND BEYOND

Mr. Creosote (Terry Jones) is about to explode in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life

Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
October 20-26
quadcinema.com
www.montypython.com

On October 5, 1969, an oddly titled sketch comedy show premiered on BBC One, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, written by and starring five very bright, seriously funny British men from Cambridge and Oxford — Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin — and an American animator, Terry Gilliam, who had graduated from Occidental College in Los Angeles and had become a British citizen in 1968. The half-hour program regularly skewered the status quo, taking on politics, sports, the arts, England, the medical establishment, family relationships, religion, historical events, class, the military, the police, and, perhaps most of all, television itself. The show ran until 1974, when it began airing on PBS in the United States while the Pythons moved on to the movies. The Quad is celebrating the troupe’s successful transition to cinema with the week-long series “The Ministry of Silly Films: Monty Python and Beyond,” featuring all four official Python movies as well as eight that either starred or was written and/or directed by at least one member of the troupe. The mini-festival begins with one of the funniest, most quotable films ever made, 1974’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail, in which King Arthur (Chapman) goes in search of the ancient relic, accompanied by a ragtag group of knights who encounter a killer rabbit, a wizard, the Bridge of Death, a shrubber, a nasty French taunter, and a collector of the dead. It’s deliriously silly for every second of its ninety-one minutes.

Graham Chapman plays a would-be savior in LIfe of Brian

Graham Chapman plays a would-be savior in Monty Python’s Life of Brian

They followed that up with 1979’s riotous Monty Python’s Life of Brian, which, upon its release, was met with picketing, protests, and even death threats for the Pythons. The film is a gem, telling the story of a poor schlub named Brian Cohen (Chapman) who is mistaken, since birth, for his neighbor, Jesus Christ. Palin gets to play Pontius Pilate, Idle introduces the sing-along classic “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,” and Chapman adds a memorable turn as the splendidly named Biggus Dickus. Four years later, the gang explored the nature of existence itself in the choppy but often hysterical Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, which is divided into “The Miracle of Birth,” “Growth and Learning,” “Fighting Each Other,” “The Middle of the Film,” “Find the Fish,” “Middle Age,” “Live Organ Transplants,” “The Autumn Years,” and “Death.” The film includes one of the all-time-great vile scenes, involving Mr. Creosote (Jones) and a snarky waiter (Cleese) offering him a “wafer-thin” mint to finish his meal, as well as such smashing Idle tunes as “Every Sperm Is Sacred” and “Galaxy Song.” The fourth official Python film is 1971’s And Now for Something Completely Different, a collection of more than three dozen skits from the television show, restaged, so they pale in comparison to the original versions; still, it’s an opportunity to see such fab sketches as “How Not to Be Seen,” “Nudge Nudge,” “The Funniest Joke in the World,” “The Dead Parrot,” and “The Lumberjack Song” with other Python fans.

Kevin Kline looks on as John Cleese makes a move on Jamie Lee Curtis in A Fish Called Wanda

The highlights of the rest of the series are Charles Crichton’s A Fish Called Wanda, which was written by costars Cleese and Kevin Kline, earning them Oscar nods (Kline also won the award for Best Supporting Actor), and also features Jamie Lee Curtis, Stephen Fry, and Palin as the lisping Otto; Gilliam’s remarkable Brazil, the controversial 1985 drama in which a futuristic society gets buried in red tape, with a cast that includes Jonathan Pryce as poor Sam Lowry, Katherine Helmond as his well-to-do mother with a thing for facelifts, Bob Hoskins, Ian Holm, and a heroic Robert De Niro; and Gilliam’s delightful Time Bandits, a rollicking fairy tale about a group of little people traveling through time and space, meeting up with such historical, hysterical characters as Robin Hood (Cleese), King Agamemnon (Sean Connery), and Napoleon (Holm) while trapped in a battle between the Supreme Being (Sir Ralph Richardson) and the Evil Genius (David Warner). Palin cowrote the film with Gilliam and plays Vincent; the songs are by Python friend and fan George Harrison.

Rat (Eric Idle) and Mole (Steve Coogan) can’t believe what they see in The Wind in the Willows (aka Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride)

Palin is the lead in Gilliam’s uneven but fun Jabberwocky, a strange adaptation of the Lewis Carroll poem in which Palin is the simple-minded Dennis, an apprentice cooper in love with the horrible Griselda Fishfinger (Annette Badland), asking her to wait for him as he heads out to begin life anew in the big city but soon finds himself battling a giant monster. Jones does not fare quite as well with Erik the Viking, a 1989 comedy starring Tim Robbins as the title character, who goes in search of Valhalla; the stellar cast includes Cleese, Jones, Mickey Rooney, Eartha Kitt, Jim Broadbent, and Imogen Stubbs. Mel Damski’s Yellowbeard, with cowriter Chapman as a tax-evading pirate, also has an amazing cast (Cleese, Idle, Peter Boyle, Cheech & Chong, Marty Feldman, Madeline Khan, James Mason, David Bowie) but goes nowhere; it really is possible to be just too silly. Cleese, Idle, Jones, and Palin all appear in Jones’s The Wind in the Willows (aka Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride), an adaptation of the beloved children’s story by Kenneth Grahame that also boasts Steve Coogan, Nicol Williamson, Fry, and Antony Sher, with songs sung by the Weasels, Rat (Idle), and Mr. Toad (Jones). Perhaps the most surprising film to be part of the festival is Jones’s Personal Services, a drama inspired by the real-life story of brothel madame Cynthia Payne, with Julie Walters and Alec McCowen. It’s now been nearly fifty years since the debut of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and Gilliam, Cleese, Idle, and Palin are still active, going strong; sadly, Chapman died in 1989 at the age of forty-eight, and Jones has been diagnosed with dementia. Together these six individuals have left quite a mark on the world, seeing it like no one else has.