Who: Maira Kalman
What: Book signing and pop-up store
Where: Julie Saul Gallery, 535 West 22nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves., sixth floor, 212-627-2410
When: Saturday, November 19, free admission, 3:30 – 6:00
Why: Artist Maira Kalman will be at Chelsea’s Julie Saul Gallery on Saturday for a special holiday shopping opportunity, signing copies of her books and various items made by M&CO., the design firm founded by her late husband, Tibor Kalman. Kalman, who was born in Tel Aviv and raised there and in the Bronx, will be personalizing copies of Hurry Up and Wait, Girls Standing on Lawns, My Favorite Things, Beloved Dog, and Weather, Weather; vintage watches, Elements of Style tote bags, postcards, Einstein pins, and handkerchiefs will also be available for purchase. As a bonus, the festivities will include sherry and cookies. And while at the gallery, be sure to check out the current exhibits, Andrea Grützner’s “Erbgericht/Guesthouse” and Sally Gall’s “Selections from Aerial.”
Iconoclastic writer-director Terrence Malick had made only five feature films in his forty-plus-year career when The Tree of Life came out in 2011, and it might very well be his best. And now you can see it like never before, as the BAM Next Wave Festival presents it in the Howard Gilman Opera House with a live score performed by more than one hundred singers and musicians from New York City’s Wordless Music Orchestra playing works by Mahler, Berlioz, Brahms, Górecki, Mozart, Tavener, Smetana, Couperin, and others, conducted by Ryan McAdams and featuring Robert Fleitz on piano and sopranos Charles Love and Jennifer Zetlan. Following Badlands (1973), Days of Heaven (1978), The Thin Red Line (1998), and The New World (2005), The Tree of Life is an epic masterpiece of massive proportions, a stirring visual journey into the beginning of the universe, the end of the world, and beyond. The unconventional nonlinear narrative essentially tells the story of a middle-class Texas family having a difficult time coming to grips with the death of one of their sons in the military. Malick cuts between long flashbacks of Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien (Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain) in the 1950s and 1960s, as they meet, marry, and raise their three boys, to the present, when Jack (Sean Penn), their eldest, now a successful architect, is still searching for answers. The sets by production designer Jack Fisk transport viewers from midcentury suburbia to the modern-day big city and a heavenly beach, all gorgeously shot by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. Every frame is so beautiful, it’s as if they filmed the movie only at sunrise and sunset, the Golden Hour, when the light is at its most pure. The Tree of Life is about God and not God, about faith and belief, about evolution and creationism, about religion and the scientific world. The film opens with a quote from the Book of Job: “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation . . . while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” Early on, Mrs. O’Brien says in voice-over, “The nuns taught us there are two ways through life: The way of nature, and the way of grace. You have to choose which one to follow.” Malick leaves those questions open, displaying the miracles of life and death and everything in between as perhaps the only response.
You will never hear us complaining about too much Isabelle Huppert. The sixty-three-year-old French actress has been all over the place recently, having appeared in no fewer than seven films in 2015–16 in addition to touring the world in Krzysztof Warlikowski’s Phèdre(s), which came to BAM this past September, and appearing with Cate Blanchett in Jean Genet’s The Maids at City Center in 2014. In conjunction with the release of her latest two films, Mia Hansen-Løve’s Things to Come and Paul Verhoeven’s Elle, Metrograph is hosting a seven-movie Huppert retrospective this weekend, with the grand actress on hand on the Lower East Side for a Q&A following Hong Sang-soo’s In Another Country and to introduce Curtis Hanson’s L.A. Confidential. The series also includes Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher, Catherine Breillat’s Abuse of Weakness, Hal Hartley’s Amateur, and Ursula Maier’s Hom. as well as Claire Denis’s White Material, which takes place in an unnamed West African nation besieged by a bloody civil war between rebels and the military government. Huppert stars as Maria Vial, who steadfastly refuses to leave her coffee plantation, determined to see the last crop through to fruition. Despite pleas from the French army, which is vacating the country; her ex-husband, André (Christophe Lambert), who is attempting to sell the plantation out from under her; and her workers, whose lives are in danger, Maria is unwilling to give up her home and way of life, apparently blind to what is going on all around her.
For his feature-length debut, writer-director Juan Reina was all set to make a documentary in Norway about a group of Finnish friends’ daring attempt to break the world record for longest cave dive. But the narrative quickly changed when two of the divers, Jari Huotarinen and Jari Uusimäki, suffered tragic accidents and died, their bodies trapped underwater. Unable to retrieve the bodies because of safety concerns, the authorities closed off the area to any further diving. But the rest of the Finnish team decides that they cannot leave their friends down there and come up with a plan to secretly dive in and bring them back home for proper burials. A kind of mix between a Werner Herzog adventure documentary, a procedural caper film, and a military rescue drama, Diving into the Unknown follows Sami Paakkarinen, Vesa “Vesku” Rantanen, Kai “Kaitsu” Känkänen, Patrik “Patte” Grönqvist, and others as they decide to risk their lives in the waters that killed their fellow divers. “I do everything I can not to die while diving,” Paakkarinen says early on, later adding, “You should never expect that a dive will go well . . . because then it never does.” Grönqvist notes, “It has to be fun. If it’s not fun, there’s no point in doing it.” But during the rescue attempt, he says, “From the outside this might seem foolishly risky. But life in general can be risky. You cannot prepare for everything that could go wrong. You just cannot practice facing a dead friend at one hundred and ten meters.” No matter how many dives they’ve been on together, each new one comes with its own obstacles and dangers; when the men say goodbye to their respective families, they know deep down that they might not return alive. And it’s not just the physical aspects of diving that place them in jeopardy; several discuss the emotional and psychological trauma that could impact their safety, especially when diving to recover two of their closest friends.
Baz Luhrmann’s sumptuous version of The Great Gatsby is a dazzling reimagining of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel of old and new money and the American dream. The Australian director and his wife, costume and production designer extraordinaire Catherine Martin, have turned the classic tale into a lush spectacle without losing focus on the main story of life and love during the Roaring Twenties. Leonardo DiCaprio, who played the male lead in Lurhmann’s contemporary take on Romeo + Juliet, is superb as Jay Gatsby, the mystery man previously portrayed by Warner Baxter in 1926, Alan Ladd in 1949, Robert Redford in 1974, and Toby Stephens in 2000, adding a compelling level of vulnerability to the character. Gatsby has built a magnificent palace for himself on Long Island, hosting wild parties that he doesn’t care about; all he truly wants is Daisy (Carey Mulligan), a former love who has married successful businessman Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton) and lives in a mansion right across the bay. The villainous Tom is having an affair with the lower-class Myrtle Wilson (Isla Fisher), whose unaware husband, George (Jason Clarke), runs a gas station and garage in the Valley of Ashes. Although a loner, Gatsby befriends his neighbor, Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire), a young, innocent bond trader who rents a modest home at the base of Gatsby’s enormous estate and whose cousin just happens to be Daisy. As Carraway is sucked into this glamorous, debauched society, which also includes wild and elegant golf champion Jordan Baker (Elizabeth Debicki), he is forced to reexamine his own hopes and dreams as he tries to find his place in the world.
