Clindor (Loïc Corbery) is caught in various personal and professional triangles in THE SCREEN ILLUSION
CinéSalon: THE SCREEN ILLUSION (L’ILLUSION COMIQUE) (Mathieu Amalric, 2010)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, December 1, $14, 7:30
Series continues Tuesdays through December 15
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org
In 2010, French actor-director Mathieu Amalric was commissioned by la Comédie-Française to make a television version of one of the plays the legendary company had recently staged. The rules were both limiting and freeing: He had to use the same cast, could not add any words to the script (but could make cuts), and had to shoot the film in twelve days without using the theater itself. Amalric had the credentials for such a daunting assignment; he had previously starred in such films as Munich, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and Kings and Queen and directed Mange ta soupe and On Tour, in which he also starred and for which he won the Best Director prize at Cannes. He decided to adapt Pierre Corneille’s 1636 play, L’Illusion comique, a melodrama written just as the Baroque style was shifting into the Classical period. The film takes place in and around a hotel in 2011, where concierge/sorcerer/detective Alcandre (Hervé Pierre) is showing surveillance video to Pridamant (Alain Lenglet), who is searching for his long-missing son, Clindor (Loïc Corbery). Clindor is working for video-game executive Matamore (Denis Podalydès); both men, as well as Adraste (Adrien Gamba-Gontard), are vying for the attention of the lovely but cold Isabelle (Suliane Brahim), daughter of corporation head Géronte (Jean-Baptiste Malartre). Meanwhile, Adraste’s coworker, Lyse (Julie Sicard), is desperately in love with Clindor. It all comes to a head one night following a dinner party, when a fierce battle takes place on a rooftop. “When all hope is gone, one has nothing more to fear,” Isabelle says.
Mathieu Amalric on the set of his Pierre Corneille adaptation for la Comédie-Française
The Screen Illusion is a clever and inventive, if at times confusing and overly farcical, adaptation of Corneille’s tale. The actors recite their lines in verse, which takes a little getting used to. Production designer Hervé Dajon and cinematographer Isabelle Razavet bathes the hotel in deep, lurid greens and reds, echoing the greed, envy, jealousy, and lust that surround the characters. The film is very much about the act of viewing; just as we watch theater and movies, becoming lost in their magic, Pridamant watches his son via CCTV cameras, and Amalric actually brings the camera — and the viewer — inside the recordings as the story unfolds before our eyes as well. “Believe only what you see,” Alcandre warns at the beginning of the film, looking into a mirror and talking to himself as well as the audience, hinting at what is to follow and foreshadowing a surprise twist at the end. Inspired by such works as Jean-Luc Godard’s Détective and Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai, Amalric, an accomplished stage performer in addition to being a film director and actor, melds all of those elements into The Screen Illusion, a tidy little tale that is more than what it first appears. The Screen Illusion is being shown at 7:30 on December 1 in Florence Gould Hall as part of FIAF’s CinéSalon series “Mathieu Amalric: Renaissance Man” and will be introduced by film critic Nicholas Elliott. The series continues through December 15 with Late September, Early Spring; Fantastic Mr. Fox; and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.
Taiwanese writer-director Chung Mong-Hong’s third feature film, following 2008’s Parking and 2010’s The Fourth Portrait, is an intense, meditatively paced thriller about family and identity. In Soul, wuxia legend Jimmy Wang (aka Jimmy Wong Yu) stars as Wang, a simple, understated old man living in a reclusive house in the mountains. After his chef son, Ah-Chuan (Joseph Chang Hsiao-Chuan), suddenly collapses in the city and is brought back to his childhood home, strange things start occurring, as Ah-Chuan seems different and dead bodies begin to pile up. It turns out that Ah-Chuan’s soul has temporarily left his body, replaced by another, not-quite-so-gentle being, leading to yet more trouble, especially because Wang’s goofy policeman nephew, Little Wu (Vincent Liang), continues to hang around, sensing that something suspicious might be going on. The Taiwanese entry for Best Foreign Language Film for the 2014 Oscars, Soul is a gripping, surreal tale that unfolds with a cool calm that can explode at any moment, and then does. Shaw Brothers veteran Wang, who wrote, directed, and starred in such martial arts classics as The Chinese Boxer and Master of the Flying Guillotine, is sensational as Uncle Wang, playing the role with an assured, self-possessed composure despite the hell the old man finds himself in.
In 1975, a comedy troupe consisting of five Oxford and Cambridge grads and an American animator, the six best known for their absurdist sketches, teamed up to make the most quotable, and perhaps all-time-funniest, film to ever come from across the pond, and you can join in the fun on November 28 as Videology in Williamsburg hosts the Monty Python and the Holy Grail Quote-a-Long. In the relentlessly hysterical film, King Arthur (Graham Chapman) leads his ne’er-do-well Knights of the Round Table — Sir Lancelot the Brave (John Cleese), Sir Robin-the-Not-Quite-So-Brave-as-Sir-Lancelot (Eric Idle), Sir Bedevere the Wise (Terry Jones), and Sir Galahad the Pure (Michael Palin) — on a quest to find the Holy Grail, as ordered by God himself (voice of Chapman, cartoon of cricket legend W. G. Grace). So off they go, visiting strange castles with even stranger knights, answering silly questions to get across a bridge, seeking advice from a mad wizard, battling a cute little killer rabbit, and searching for shrubbery. The wild romp, in which the Pythons never meet a joke too high-brow or low-brow, helped warp the minds of several generations and continues to result in much rejoicing in living rooms and movie theaters around the world.