twi-ny recommended events

COMEDY ON FILM: WHAT MAKES THE FRENCH LAUGH? APNÉE

Céline (Céline Fuhrer), Thomas (Thomas Scimeca), and Maxence (Maxence Tual) take a bath together in riotously silly anarchic French farce

CINÉSALON: APNÉE (Jean-Christophe Meurisse, 2016)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, February 14, $13, 4:00 & 7:30
Series continues Tuesdays through February 21
212-355-6100
fiaf.org

FIAF’s “Comedy on Film: What Makes the French Laugh?” series continues on Valentine’s Day with Jean-Christophe Meurisses’s Apnée, a riotous, ludicrous, hysterical, and often cringeworthy absurdist fable about an anarchic trio of friends/lovers who flit about France doing anything they want, unaware of the consequences of their actions. Céline (Céline Fuhrer), Thomas (Thomas Scimeca), and Maxence (Maxence Tual) are all id, no ego and superego, as they live in their own reality, separate from the rest of what is considered conventional society. Wearing wedding dresses, they try to get married; seeking to relax, they take a bath together in a storefront window; in search of a family, they storm in on an older, empty nest couple. Indeed, they are like three children who don’t know any better, who haven’t reached basic levels of adulthood, but at their core, they just want to be happy, and what’s wrong with that? Writer-director Meurisses’s feature debut, which was nominated for Best First Film at the Cannes Film Festival (the Golden Camera) and the Lumière Awards as well as the Queer Palm, is extremely silly, essentially a series of crazy vignettes, some that work a whole lot better than others, with lovely cinematography by Javier Ruiz Gomez, from Céline, Thomas, and Maxence (well, body doubles, anyway) ice skating naked while wearing Mexican wrestler masks to the three of them dressed in white in a rowboat on a beautiful lake. Apnée — the title refers to both sleep apnea as well as the French phrase “la plongée en apnée,” or “free-diving” — is screening February 14 at 4:00 and 7:30 in Florence Gould Hall, with the later show introduced by actor Edward Akrout; both screenings will be followed by a party and prize drawing. “Comedy on Film: What Makes the French Laugh?” concludes February 21 with Quentin Dupieux’s Reality, with writer and photographer Calypso introducing the 7:30 show.

TICKET ALERT — AGNÈS VARDA: VISUAL ARTIST

French legend Agnès Varda will discuss her life and career as a visual artist at FIAF

French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, February 28, $30, 7:30
Series continues Tuesday nights through March 21
212-355-6100
fiaf.org

Over the years, FIAF has shown many films by Nouvelle Vague master Agnès Varda, the celebrated auteur behind such classics as Vagabond, Cléo from 5 to 7, The Gleaners and I, Jacquot de Nantes, and The Beaches of Agnès. Now the French Institute Alliance Française is bringing Varda herself to Florence Gould Hall for the special talk “Agnès Varda: Visual Artist,” taking place on February 28 at 7:30, moderated by art dealer Olivier Renaud-Clément. The Belgium-born, France-based Varda, who was married to Jacques Demy for nearly thirty years, will be focusing not only on her film career but her upcoming gallery show at Blum & Poe, which runs March 2 to April 15. The discussion also kicks off FIAF’s CinéSalon series “Agnès Varda: Life as Art,” which consists of Varda’s Daguerréotypes on March 7, with the 7:30 screening followed by a talk with Varda and curator Laurence Kardish, Jacqot de Nantes on March 14, and Lola on March 21. This is a very special chance to see the remarkable eighty-eight-year-old Varda, so get your tickets now.

ARTISTIC UPRISING: A CALL FOR REVOLUTIONARY LOVE

artisticuprising-vday

Who: Ryan Amador, Donna Auston, BETTY, R. Emery Bright, Great Caesar, Staceyann Chin, Kate Clinton, Julissa Contreras, Michael Cunningham, Lea DeLaria, Eve Ensler, Laura Flanders, Dan Fogler, Alixa Garcia, Suzanne Gardinier, Valarie Kaur, James Lecesne, Amy León, Mickey Love, Ian Pai, Mack Royal, Ally Sheedy, Casey Spooner, Elizabeth Streb, New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer, Thenmozhi Soundararajan, Imani Uzuri, more
What: V-Day protest gathering as part of annual One Billion Rising campaign
Where: Washington Square Arch, north side of Washington Square Park at Fifth Ave.
When: Tuesday, February 14, free, 6:00 – 9:00
Why: On Valentine’s Day, you can join the solidarity movement to end the exploitation of women at what is expected to be a huge gathering in Washington Square Park led by V-Day, the nonprofit organization cofounded by Eve Ensler. On February 14 from 6:00 to 9:00, a group of activists and artists will lead “a day of revolutionary love & resistance,” continuing the protests that included the Women’s March on Washington on January 21 and the airport protests against the Muslim ban. According to its Facebook page, “The event is being called in a response to the current racist, misogynist, xenophobic political climate where the rights of women, refugees, immigrants, Muslims, LGBTQIAGNC people, African Americans, the indigenous, and the poor are at serious risk.” There will be performances and speeches by writers, actors, musicians, dancers, and others, and audience members will get a chance to take the stage too and let loose as part of Where We Meet’s Ranting Box. The protest will take place on Valentine’s Day in two hundred countries around the world, so people can feel the love around the globe as they rise up, disrupt, incite, mobilize, arouse, awaken, inspire, resist, connect, and come together “to hold our governments and other patriarchal institutions accountable.”

JONAH AND OTTO

The older Otto (Sean Gormley) and the younger Jonah (Rupert Simonian) take a stark look at their lives in Robert Holman’s New York City debut (photo by Davidawa Photography)

The Lion Theatre at Theatre Row
410 West 42nd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through February 25, $50 ($39.50 with code TRJODISC)
www.losttribetheatrefilm.com
www.theatrerow.org

British playwright Robert Holman finally makes his New York City debut with Jonah and Otto, an involving, splendidly acted drama with palindromic elements that opened last night at the Lion Theatre at Theatre Row. The story takes place over one day on the East Sussex coast, where Otto (Sean Gormley), a proper, well-dressed vicar, is rubbing himself against a stone wall. The much younger, slovenly Jonah (Rupert Simonian) enters through a door, startling Otto. “So what if I am. So what if I do feel lonely. I’m not saying I do,” the immediately defensive Otto declares. Otto assumes that Jonah is a thief, and the younger man does indeed need money. “It’s a disgrace to be poor. Is it my bloody fault?” Jonah, who considers himself an entertainer and magician, says. For the next ninety minutes, the two men play a kind of psychological cat-and-mouse game, discussing love, suicide, poshies and muckies, God, doubt, and family as each slowly faces his inner demons. Otto and Jonah might seem like opposites — the former a tall, well-spoken, well-off man of the cloth, the latter a less-educated, shlumpy dude with no money; even their ages are inverses, Otto sixty-two, Jonah twenty-six — but it soon becomes apparent that they are more alike than they realize, or are willing to admit. Both men are fathers — Otto is married with four daughters, while Jonah has an infant girl in the grocery cart he pushes around with all his belongings, but they both also are deeply lonely souls disappointed in what their lives have become. “There’s something sweet about loneliness; I had promises to keep,” Otto explains. “I failed miserably. Life? It’s just one more thing to keep clean.” Meanwhile, Jonah says, “I know I’m useless. I’m worthless. I’m very small.” The play gets bogged down by a pair of health-related melodramatic subplots that further link the two men. “What would you think if we was the last two people on earth?” Jonah asks. Otto responds, “I’d think how unlucky I was to end up with you.”

Jonah (Rupert Simonian) and Otto (Sean Gormley) are more alike than they realize in Geraldine Hughes’s directorial debut (photo by Davidawa Photography)

Holman’s other plays, which date back to 1972, include The Overgrown Path at the Royal Court, Bad Weather at the Royal Shakespeare Company, and A Thousand Stars Explode in the Sky at the Lyric Hammersmith, written with David Eldridge (The Knot of the Heart, In Basildon) and Simon Stephens (Heisenberg, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) and featuring Simonian. Presented by Lost Tribe Theatre, which specializes in producing works by underappreciated British and American playwrights, Jonah and Otto, despite a few bumps, is a cogent, analytical tale, ably helmed by actress and first-time director Geraldine Hughes (Jerusalem, Belfast Blues). Irish Rep veteran Gormley (The Weir, A Day by the Sea) is solid and caring as the stiff-upper-lipped Otto, who is at a crossroads in his life, while Simonian (Peter Pan, To Kill a Mockingbird) is engaging as the odd Jonah, who is smarter than he lets on. The two have an instant chemistry that has you rooting for them. Holman’s dialogue is constantly surprising and wonderfully layered, with funny insults and clever insight, particularly in a somewhat surreal scene in which the similarities between the two men are crystallized with a touch of playful magic. “Why did you have to find me?” Otto asks Jonah. You’ll be glad he did.

13th

Controversial activist and author Angela Davis shares her views on civil rights in compelling Oscar-nominated documentary

13th (Ava DuVernay, 2016)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
February 8-16, 12:30 pm
212-924-7771
www.avaduvernay.com
www.ifccenter.com

Nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary, Ava DuVernay’s devastating 13th is back for an encore engagement at IFC Center. DuVernay’s follow-up to the Oscar-nominated Selma, her feature debut about the 1965 voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery, examines the history of institutional racism from slavery to today, focusing on the phrase of the 13th Amendment that says, “except as a punishment for crime.” Using archival footage, animation, music, and new interviews, DuVernay traces the criminalization of African Americans beginning with the passage of the amendment in 1865. “There’s really no understanding of our American political culture without race at the center of it,” Harvard professor Khalil G. Muhammad says. The film explores the 150-year demonization of blacks as the government built a fear-based narrative that led to the frightening imbalance in the incarceration of African Americans that has escalated dramatically since the 1970s. Among the issues that are covered are mandatory minimum sentencing, the wealth gap, the crack epidemic, the Southern Strategy, the Three Strikes law, the KKK, the Central Park Five, the 1994 crime bill, white privilege, Nancy Reagan’s Just Say No program, Willie Horton, prison labor, the Civil Rights Act, and the ongoing cultural depiction of blacks as wild animals that need to be caged. DuVernay has assembled a wide-ranging collection of experts who share their views, including Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., Maryland state senator and ALEC member Michael Hough, educator and author Michelle Alexander, UConn professor Jelani Cobb, UC Santa Cruz professor emerita Angela Davis, former American Conservative Union chairman David Keene, Grandview University professor Kevin Gannon, Dream Corps founder and president Van Jones, American Conservative Union board member Grover Norquist, and formerly incarcerated activists Shaka Senghor, Pat Nolan, Cory Greene, and Craig DeRoche in addition to such politicians as David Dinkins, Charles B. Rangel, Cory Booker, and former Speaker of the House and presidential candidate Newt Gingrich. “The objective reality is that virtually no one who is white understands the challenge of being black in America,” Gingrich explains.

Cinematographers Hans Charles and Kira Kelly photograph most of the speakers in front of brick walls and windows, as if confined from the outside world, except for Davis, who is in a cavernous abandoned space. Editor Spencer Averick, who also cowrote the film with DuVernay, interweaves compelling footage of such presidents as Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton alongside staggering statistics, scenes from D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, bold graphics, songs by Nina Simone, Killer Mike, Public Enemy, dead prez, Nas, the Roots, Usher, and soundtrack composer Jason Moran, and news clips to show the progression of the mass incarceration dilemma since the passage of the 13th Amendment, which reads in full: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” It’s a terrifying and sad legacy of America, the supposed “land of the free,” and one that isn’t getting much better, even after eight years under the country’s first black president. A Netflix original, DuVernay’s film is filled with surprising connections and fascinating insight that should embarrass anyone who believes that we are living in some kind of postracial society in which racism is going away. It’s not an easy film to watch, but it is a film that needs to be seen.

CRUEL BEAUTY: A ROMANTIC WEEKEND WITH MEIKO KAJI — LADY SNOWBLOOD: LOVE SONG OF VENGEANCE

Meiko Kaji reprises her role as an avenging angel-demon in LADY SNOWBLOOD: LOVE SONG WITH VENGEANCE

LADY SNOWBLOOD: LOVE SONG OF VENGEANCE (修羅雪姫怨み恋歌) (SHURAYUKIHIME URAMI RENKA) (Toshiya Fujita, 1974)
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Saturday, February 11, 4:30
Series runs February 10-12
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org

Japan Society prepares for Valentine’s Day with the awesome weekend series “Cruel Beauty: A Romantic Weekend with Meiko Kaji,” paying tribute to the legendary genre actress and pop singer, who will turn seventy in March, by screening five of her films February 10-12. “Japanese movie stars don’t get much more iconic than actress Meiko Kaji,” guest curator Marc Walkow writes in a program note. “She remains an inimitable presence in Japanese cinema, and an icon who continues to inspire filmmakers and audiences around the world.” The series gets under way Friday night with the international premiere of Kinji Fukasaku’s 1975 three-part yakuza film New Battle without Honor and Humanity: The Boss’s Head and also includes Teruo Ishii’s Blind Woman’s Curse, Shunya Ito’s Female Prisoner Scorpion: Beast Stable, and Yasuharu Hasebe’s Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter, works that show off Kaji’s skills in contemporary and historical action movies. One of her most intense roles is Lady Snowblood, based on the manga by Kazuo Koike (Lone Wolf and Cub) and illustrator Kazuo Kamimura. Japan Society is screening the second film in the duology, 1974’s Lady Snowblood: Love Song of Vengeance, on February 11 at 4:30. In the first film, set during the Meiji Period of the late nineteenth century, Yuki Kashima is born in prison, her dying mother declaring her to be an asura demon who will avenge the murder of her father and brother and the mother’s rape. The cinematography pays tribute to its manga roots, with impressively composed shots that one can almost see on the page, the pacing between wide-angle and closeup echoing the rhythm of panels and frames. In the second film, Yuki, known as Lady Snowblood, has become a coldhearted master assassin who kills virtually without emotion. Hired by Seishiro Kikui (Shin Kishida) to recover an important document, she poses as a maid to infiltrate the home of anarchist Ransui Tokunaga (Juzo Itami) but soon finds herself in the middle of a conspiracy and coverup that could bring down the corrupt government following the Russo-Japanese War. Allying herself with Ransui’s hot brother, Shusuke (Yoshio Harada), she wields her sword with skillful abandon, leaving an ever-growing pile of bodies in her wake.

The sequel, a kind of Eastern spaghetti Western, is not nearly as focused as the original, with inexplicable plot twists (especially the inconsistent use of guns), but the violence is extreme and beautiful; blood doesn’t just gusht out of Yuki’s victims but sizzles on the soundtrack. In the opening scene, Lady Snowblood is ambushed at a cemetery as she mourns her mentor; after dispatching everyone, she coolly drinks from the pond where one dead man’s blood has spilled, the taste of vengeance sweet indeed. The film features brutal torture and a propensity for stabbing eyes, as if pounding into our heads that justice is blind. The villains also are spreading the plague, as various people’s faces and bodies become grotesque and deteriorate, referencing the effects of the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (Pay close attention to the final blood splatter.) Although not nearly as good as its predecessor, Lady Snowblood: Love Song of Vengeance is still a must-see, particularly for the formidable Kaji, an avenging angel-demon and preying tiger who served as the direct inspiration for Black Mamba (Uma Thurman) in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol. I (and she even sings some of the songs). All of the films in the Japan Society series are sequels or follow-ups, but don’t let that scare you off. “In the world of Japanese genre filmmaking — samurai and yakuza films, exploitation movies, horror films — sequels were very rarely linked to each other by a continuing storyline,” Walkow explains. “Viewers needn’t be worried if they haven’t seen the original entries; all the films stand on their own.”

NAN GOLDIN: THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL / THE BALLAD OF SEXUAL DEPENDENCY

Nan Goldin (American, born 1953). Nan and Brian in Bed, New York City. 1983. Silver dye bleach print, printed 2006, 15 1/2 × 23 3/16" (39.4 × 58.9 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the generosity of Jon L. Stryker. © 2016 Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin, “Nan and Brian in Bed, New York City,” silver dye bleach print, 1983, printed 2006 (the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the generosity of Jon L. Stryker. © 2016 Nan Goldin)

Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Wednesday, February 8, free with museum admission, 11:30 am
Exhibition continues through April 16, $14-$25
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

“The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is the diary I let people read. My written diaries are private; they form a closed document of my world and allow me the distance to analyze it. My visual diary is public,” Nan Goldin wrote about her seminal 1985-86 multimedia exhibition and book. “There is a popular notion that the photographer is by nature a voyeur, the last one invited to the party. But I’m not crashing; this is my party. This is my family, my history.” Goldin and the Museum of Modern Art are currently inviting everyone to the party, showing The Ballad of Sexual Dependency in its complete audiovisual form through April 16. Consisting of nearly seven hundred portraits set to music by James Brown, Maria Callas, the Velvet Underground, Nina Simone, and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Ballad is set primarily amid the heroin subculture of downtown New York from 1979 to 1986, just as AIDS started ravaging the city, as well as in Berlin, Paris, Boston, Provincetown, and Mexico. Born in Washington, DC, in 1953, Goldin, who left home when she was just fourteen, took intimate photos of her chosen family — friends, lovers, junkies, drag queens, and others, including artists Greer Lankton and Vivienne Dick, actress and writer Cookie Mueller, Andy Warhol, Jim Jarmusch, and performer Suzanne Fletcher. Deeply affected by her sister Barbara’s suicide — she killed herself in 1964 at the age of eighteen, when Nan was eleven — Goldin sees the photos as a way to hold on to her memories. The photos are not chic glamour shots but instead captured moments of real life, with natural lighting and what would technically be considered imperfect composition. Yet they have an immediacy and emotion that overstaging and multiple takes would ruin. Although reminiscent of the work of Larry Clark and Diane Arbus, Ballad finds Goldin boldly revealing her life, particularly in two of the most famous shots, one of her boyfriend Brian sitting on the edge of a bed, smoking a cigarette, as sunlight pours in over Goldin’s face on a pillow, her eyes slyly looking at him, while in the other, a horribly beaten Goldin — the culprit was Brian —looks into the camera, her left eye nearly swollen shut, her red lipstick, dangling earrings, and pearl necklace defining her feminism and strength.

Nan Goldin, “Nan One Month After Being Battered, 1984,” silver dye bleach print, printed 2008 (the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase)

Nan Goldin, “Nan One Month After Being Battered,” silver dye bleach print, 1984, printed 2008 (the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase)

On February 8 at 11:30 am, independent educator Diana Bush will lead a Gallery Session at MoMA, “Nan Goldin: The Personal Is Political,” exploring the relationship between photography, memory, and diary, elements that are central to Goldin’s entire oeuvre, which also includes such books and series as “I’ll Be Your Mirror” and “The Devil’s Playground.” (You can find out more about Goldin in Sabine Lidl’s 2013 documentary, Nan Goldin — I Remember Your Face.) Named after a song in Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s 1928 classic, The Threepenny Opera (“They’re all the same / In meeting love’s confusion / Poor noble souls / Get blotted in illusion”) — The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is in its own viewing room at MoMA, where visitors feel like guests at this decades-old party, watching photos of acquaintances pass by, each one a not-so-distant memory tinged with joy and sadness. The central slide show is supplemented by numerous posters from the early versions of Ballad as well as silver dye bleach prints of more than a dozen of the photos, including “The Parents’ Wedding Photo, Swampscott, Massachusetts,” “Trixie on the Cot, New York City,” “Nan One Month After Being Battered,” and “Philippe H. and Suzanne Kissing at Euthanasia, New York City.” Goldin also wrote in the Ballad book, “The diary is my form of control over my life. It allows me to obsessively record every detail. It enables me to remember.” Extended through April 16, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is hard to forget.