twi-ny recommended events

NYFF51 — AFTERNOON OF A FAUN: TANAQUIL LE CLERCQ

The tragic career of dancer Tanaquil Le Clercq is examined in new documentary

AFTERNOON OF A FAUN: TANAQUIL LE CLERCQ (Nancy Buirski, 2013)
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Walter Reade Theater, 165 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Monday, September 30, 6:00 pm
Howard Gilman Theater, 144 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Friday, October 11, 1:00
Francesca Beale Theater, 144 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Sunday, October 13, 6:00
Festival runs September 27 – October 13
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.com

“Tanny’s body created inspiration for choreographers,” one of the interviewees says in Nancy Buirski’s documentary Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq. “They could do things that they hadn’t seen before.” The American Masters presentation examines the life and career of prima ballerina Tanaquil Le Clercq, affectionately known as Tanny, who took the dance world by storm in the 1940s and ’50s before tragically being struck down by polio in 1956 at the age of twenty-seven. Le Clercq served as muse to both Jerome Robbins, who made Afternoon of a Faun for her, and George Balanchine, who created such seminal works as Western Symphony, La Valse, and Symphony in C for Le Clercq — and married Tanny in 1952. In the documentary, Buirski (The Loving Story) speaks with Arthur Mitchell and Jacques D’Amboise, who both danced with Le Clercq, her childhood friend Pat McBride Lousada, and Barbara Horgan, Balanchine’s longtime assistant, while also including an old interview with Robbins, who deeply loved Le Clercq as well. The film features spectacular, rarely seen archival footage of Le Clercq performing many of the New York City Ballet’s classic works, both onstage and even on The Red Skelton Show. The name Tanaquil relates to the word “omen” — in history, Tanaquil, the wife of the fifth king of Rome, was somewhat of a prophetess who believed in omens — and the film details several shocking omens surrounding her contracting polio. The film would benefit from sharing more information about Le Clercq’s life post-1957 — she died on New Year’s Eve in 2000 at the age of seventy-one — but Afternoon of a Faun is still a lovely, compassionate, and heartbreaking look at a one-of-a-kind performer. Afternoon of a Faun is screening at the New York Film Festival on September 30 at the Walter Reade Theater (followed by a Q&A with the director), on October 11 at the Howard Gilman Theater, and on October 13 at the Francesca Beale Theater.

NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL: NOBODY’S DAUGHTER HAEWON

A couple tries to rekindle their romance in NOBODY’S DAUGHTER HAEWON

A couple considers rekindling their romance in NOBODY’S DAUGHTER HAEWON

NOBODY’S DAUGHTER HAEWON (NUGU-UI TTAL-DO ANIN HAEWON) (Hong Sang-soo, 2013)
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Alice Tully Hall, 1941 Broadway at 65th St.
Sunday, September 29, 9:00 pm
Francesca Beale Theater, 144 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Monday, September 30, 3:30
Festival runs September 27 – October 13
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.com

In South Korean director Hong Sang-soo’s latest bittersweet tale, Nobody’s Daughter Haewon, nearly everyone who meets college student Haewon (Jeong Eun-chae) tells her that she’s “pretty,” from her mother (Kim Ja-ok), who has decided to pack up and move to Canada, to legendary star Jane Birkin (playing herself), whom she bumps into on the street, to a hot bookstore owner, to fellow students and teachers. Rather stuck up and direct on the outside but much more tender and lost on the inside, Haewon reaches out to a former lover, film professor Seongjun (Lee Sun-kyun), who is married with a baby. As they contemplate rekindling their affair, they wind up getting drunk on sake with a group of Seongjun’s students, who suspect the teacher-student romance and clearly do not like Haewon. Meanwhile, Haewon, who is reading Norbert Elias’s The Loneliness of the Dying, is intrigued by the flirtations of another film professor, Jungwon (Kim Eui-sung), who teaches in San Diego. From Seoul’s West Village to the historic Fort Namhan, Haewon tries to find her place in the world as writer-director Hong employs a chronological narrative that combines her dreams with reality over the course of a few weeks in springtime.

A drunken night at a sake restaurant reveals some hard truths in Hong Sang-soo’s latest New York Film Festival entry

Hong has explored similar terrain in such previous films as Like You Know It All, Oki’s Movie, Woman on the Beach, and Tale of Cinema, but there’s just enough of an edge to Nobody’s Daughter Haewon to prevent it from feeling repetitive and more of the same. As always, Hong favors long establishing shots and a stationary camera that suddenly and awkwardly zooms in, instantly reminding viewers that they are watching a film. However, the scene in the restaurant goes on for several minutes with no cuts or camera movements, letting the acting and the dialogue tell the story without cinematic interference. Nobody’s Daughter Haewon also clocks in at a mere hour and a half, much shorter than most of his earlier work, which tends to go on way too long, but this one feels a little lighter in substance as well. Nobody’s Daughter Haewon is screening at the New York Film Festival on September 29 at Alice Tully Hall and on September 30 at the Francesca Beale Theater; Hong was initially scheduled to appear at one of the shows for a Q&A but is now unable to do so.

NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL: LE WEEK-END

Nick (Jim Broadbent) and Meg (Lindsay Duncan) reevaluate their relationship while celebrating their thirtieth anniversary in Roger Michell’s LE WEEK-END

LE WEEK-END (Roger Michell, 2013)
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Alice Tully Hall, 1941 Broadway at 65th St.
Sunday, September 29, 6:00 pm
Walter Reade Theater, 165 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Monday, October 7, 6:00
Festival runs September 27 – October 13
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.com
www.musicboxfilms.com

Mike Nichols’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? meets Richard Linklater’s “Before” series in Roger Michell’s bittersweet romantic black comedy, Le Week-end. Professor Nick Burrows (Jim Broadbent) and teacher Meg Burrows (Lindsay Duncan) are celebrating their thirtieth wedding anniversary by returning to Paris, where they spent their honeymoon. But whereas their first visit was filled with love, hope, and dreams of a bright future, they have come to the realization that their life together didn’t quite turn out as planned. While Nick still seems to be in love with his wife, Meg is reevaluating their relationship, continually lashing into him and spending what little money they have with reckless abandon. When they unexpectedly bump into an old colleague of Nick’s, the self-absorbed chatterbox Morgan (Jeff Goldblum), they are invited and go to a party where they imagine what could have been, forcing them to face some brutal truths.

Jeff Goldblum is a hoot as a self-absorbed writer in New York Film Festival selection LE WEEK-END

Broadbent (Iris, Topsy-Turvy) and Duncan (Mansfield Park, Traffik) are marvelous together, inhabiting their roles with a beautiful grace, evoking what Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy) might be like in the third or fourth sequel to Before Sunrise. Meanwhile, it’s hard to imagine anyone but Goldblum (The Fly, The Big Chill) playing the jittery Morgan so wonderfully. Director Michell and writer Hanif Kureishi, who previously collaborated on The Buddha of Suburbia, The Mother, and Venus, have created a very funny, honest, mature, and heart-wrenching portrait of a couple in sudden crisis after three decades of marriage, not necessarily knowing what, if anything, went wrong when. Le Week-end, which pays tribute to Jean-Luc Godard both in its title and in a late scene, is screening September 29 and October 7 at the fifty-first New York Film Festival, with Michell, Broadbent, Duncan, and producer Kevin Loader participating in a Q&A following the September 29 show at Alice Tully Hall.

RED BULL SOUND SELECT: BRIAN FALLON AND THE BOUNCING SOULS

Gaslight Anthem leader Brian Fallon has curated the September edition of the Red Bull Sound Select showcase series and will play a set with the Bouncing Souls at MHOW (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Music Hall of Williamsburg
66 North Sixth St.
Monday, September 30, $3, 8:00
www.redbullsoundselect.com
www.musichallofwilliamsburg.com

At the end of July, fellow Jersey bands the Gaslight Anthem (The ’59 Sound, American Slang) and the Bouncing Souls (Maniacal Laughter, Ghosts on the Boardwalk) played a hot show on Pier 26 in Hudson River Park to a bevy of fans shouting along with every word and forming a wicked mosh pit. On September 30 at the Music Hall of Williamsburg, Gaslight Anthem leader Brian Fallon will be joining longtime punks the Bouncing Souls for the monthly edition of the Red Bull Sound Select series, which Fallon curated in conjunction with Brooklyn Vegan. The main event is Fallon playing a set with the Bouncing Souls; don’t be surprised if they tear through a raucous version of “East Coast! Fuck You!” Opening up will be a pair of Brooklyn groups, garage-popsters Nude Beach and Red Bull Sound Select band Aye Nako, who describe themselves as “four weirdos trying to find their confidence / sexuality / harmony / pay day,” specializing in such genres as “homopop, queercore, punk, and non-college rock.” You can stream Aye Nako’s strong debut, Unleash Yourself, here. Tickets are a mere three bucks and are available only at the door the night of the show.

NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL: THE LAST OF THE UNJUST

Claude Lanzmann and Benjamin Murmelstein discuss the Holocaust in revealing documentary

THE LAST OF THE UNJUST (LE DERNIER DES INJUSTES) (Claude Lanzmann, 2013)
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Alice Tully Hall, 1941 Broadway at 65th St.
Sunday, September 29, 1:00 pm
Festival runs September 27 – October 13
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.com

For forty years, French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann has been documenting the Holocaust and the birth of the state of Israel in such provocative and powerful films as Israel, Why; Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4 P.M.; and his nine-and-a-half-hour masterpiece, Shoah. In 1997, he made A Visitor from the Living, built around a 1979 interview with International Red Cross worker Maurice Rossel, who led a delegation inspecting the Nazis’ so-called “model ghetto” of Theresienstadt, which turned out to be a glorified concentration camp. Lanzmann returns to the Czech camp in The Last of the Unjust, an utterly fascinating 218-minute documentary consisting of a series of interviews he conducted in Rome in 1975 with Rabbi Benjamin Murmelstein, the only Jewish Elder to survive the Holocaust. For years, Murmelstein, who was appointed directly by and reported to Obersturmbannführer Adolph Eichmann, has been declared a Nazi collaborator, by writer Hannah Arendt and many others, even being arrested, imprisoned, and tried by Czech authorities. But in The Last of the Unjust, he paints a vivid portrait of everyday life in Theresienstadt, claiming he was not a collaborator but instead was doing whatever he could to improve conditions for the Jews there.

Claude Lanzmann visits Theresienstadt in film about the model ghetto’s last Jewish Elder

He poignantly describes not knowing about gas chambers and trains to Auschwitz and proudly defends his actions, referring to himself as the “last of the unjust.” Murmelstein has a spectacular memory, vividly recalling specific moments, answering all of Lanzmann’s questions with a bold honesty and correcting long-held misbeliefs concerning Theresienstadt. A cool, cigarette-smoking Lanzmann is seen in the old interviews and he also appears in new footage shot as he visits the camp and other relevant locations, geographically linking the past and the present. Between Murmelstein’s amazing storytelling ability and Lanzmann’s sharing of his personal perspective, the film never gets boring or repetitive over the course of its three-and-a-half-hour length. In the written introduction, Lanzmann states, “It took me a long time to come to the realization that I didn’t have the right to keep this to myself.” He has indeed done a great service by not keeping this to himself, making yet another poignant document of the Holocaust as seen through the eyes of a unique and thoroughly intriguing witness. An official selection of the New York Film Festival, The Last of the Unjust is screening September 29 at 1:00 at Alice Tully Hall, followed by a Q&A with the eighty-seven-year-old Lanzmann.

ATLANTIC ANTIC 2013

A huge crowd is expected at the annual Atlantic Antic festival, which this year honors Marty Markowitz

Atlantic Ave. between Hicks St. & Fourth Ave.
Sunday, September 29, free, 12 noon – 6:00 pm
www.atlanticave.org

The centerpiece of the thirty-eighth annual Atlantic Antic, a free festival of food, music, games, family-friendly activities, and more taking place Sunday, September 29, along Atlantic Ave., is a public farewell to outgoing borough president Marty Markowitz, who will be crowned honorary King of Brooklyn. More than a million visitors are expected for the party, which includes live performances indoors and outdoors, with the Windsor Terrors, the Black Coffee Blues Band, Strictly Belly Dancing, Les Sans Culottes, Liam the Magician, a domino tournament, Rolie Polie Guacamole, DJ Hard Hittin Harry, a book signing and reading by Melanie Hope Greenberg, teen jazz duo Octave Higher, Brandi and the Alexanders, Boricua Betty, the Get It, Junior Rivera and Son de Caney, the Dysfunctional Family Jazz Band, and many others. Among the participating establishments are the Chip Shop, the Waterfront Ale House, the Brazen Head, Pacheco & Lugo, Khamit Kinks, Last Exit, Gumbo, and Hank’s Saloon, and there will be local booths galore selling all kinds of items you won’t find at standard street fairs. And for the twentieth year, the New York Transit Museum is hosting the Bus Festival on Boerum Pl. between State St. & Atlantic Ave., featuring vintage buses, workshops, free tours, and other fun things, with admission to the museum only one dollar.

NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL: CHILD OF GOD

Scott Haze plays a deeply disturbed man trying to get what he believes is his in CHILD OF GOD

CHILD OF GOD (James Franco, 2013)
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Walter Reade Theater, 165 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Sunday, September 29, 10:15 pm
Francesca Beale Theater, 144 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Tuesday, October 1, 12 noon
Festival runs September 27 – October 13
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.com

In James Franco’s faithful, brutally compelling adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s third novel, 1973’s Child of God, Scott Haze gives a courageous, unforgettable performance as Lester Ballard, a deeply disturbed man wreaking havoc on his small rural community in Sevier County in the Tennessee mountains. “His name was Lester Ballard, child of God, much like yourself, perhaps,” a narrator intones as the film opens. But Lester is not like everyone else. He is almost more animal than man, his speech hard to understand, his face hairy and rough, his gait hurried and uneven, a reclusive soul with no ability to differentiate between right and wrong, more at home in the woods and in caves than living among other people. When he lowers his head slightly and stares right into the camera, he evokes Charles Manson filtered through Charles Bukowski, with more than a touch of Jack Nicholson in The Shining; there doesn’t seem to be an ounce of humanity in him. (McCarthy has noted that Ballard was inspired at least in part by real-life serial killer Ed Gein, who also inspired Old Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Norman Bates in Psycho.) Having been kicked off his family’s land, an angered Lester sleeps in a ramshackle cabin, venturing out primarily to kill an animal for food or to seek other carnal pleasures in his own, primal way. When he sees a young couple having sex in a car, his instinct is to get rid of the boy and take the girl for himself, with no thought of the consequences.

Director and cowriter James Franco discuss a scene in adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s CHILD OF GOD

Lester is being watched closely by the aptly named Sheriff Fate (Tim Blake Nelson) and Deputy Cotton (Jim Parrack), but there’s no predicting what he will do next, and to whom. He’s a danger to everyone he meets, yet Franco, who cowrote the script with his friend and producer Vince Jolivette, manages to make Lester a somewhat sympathetic figure, despite his horrific existence, which soon includes necrophilia. No matter how despicable his actions are, it is hard not to want him to get away with it all, as Franco builds a shocking compassion for Lester from the very first scene, when John Greer (Brian Lally), a neighbor who is determined to buy the Ballard property at auction, viciously bashes in Lester’s skull. The highly literate, ubiquitous Franco, who has also adapted William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and is in preproduction on The Sound and the Fury, stays true to both the spirit and the intricacies of McCarthy’s story; every scene but one was taken directly from the book, which Franco fell in love with when he read it in graduate school. Child of God is by no means an easy film to watch, and it is sure to elicit a multitude of extreme reactions, both positive and negative, reminiscent of the response to Lars von Trier’s controversial 2009 New York Film Festival selection, Antichrist. But no matter where you stand on the film itself, it’s impossible not to be blown away by Haze’s remarkably intense performance, his every word and movement absolutely thrilling to behold. Child of God, in which both Franco and Jolivette play small roles, will screen twice at the fifty-first New York Film Festival, on September 29 at the Walter Reade Theater, followed by a Q&A with Jolivette and Haze, and again on October 1 at the Francesca Beale Theater.