Yongzhao (Qin Hao) leads a double life in Lou Ye’s Asian Film Awards winner MYSTERY
MYSTERY (Lou Ye, 2012)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
Wednesday, July 3, 5:45, and Thursday, July 11, 1:00
212-875-5601
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Controversial Sixth Generation director Lou Ye, who scored an international hit with 2000’s Suzhou River but whose work is regularly banned by Chinese authorities, officially returns to his homeland with Mystery, a complex tale that weaves together two main stories in the centrally located city of Wuhan. The dark film opens with a young woman, Xiaomin (Chang Fangyuan), getting mowed down by a car racing down the highway on a rainy night. Meanwhile, the married Sang Qi (Qi Xi) tells her new friend, single mother Lu Jie (Hao Lei), that she thinks her husband, Yongzhao (Qin Hao), is having an affair, but both women soon have more surprises in store for them as an intricate web of infidelity, betrayal, obsession, lies, class, cover-ups, and payoffs slowly reveals itself. Written by Lou (Purple Butterfly, Summer Palace) with Mei Feng and Yu Fan, Mystery, a selection of the Un Certain Regard sidebar at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival and Best Picture, Best Screenwriter, and Best Newcomer (Qi Xi) winner at the Asian Film Awards, is a moody, often uneasy work that tries too hard to confuse the viewer yet still manages to be compelling as things eventually come into focus. Inspired by three stories Mei found on the internet about changing social structures on the mainland, the film ends with unexpected violence that Lou was forced to edit for the Chinese release, leading him to remove his name from that version. Mystery is having its North American premiere July 3 & 11 at the Walter Reade Theater as part of the New York Asian Film Festival, which continues through July 15 with works from China, Japan, Thailand, Korea, the Philippines, and other countries, including Jang Cheol-Soo’s Secretly Greatly, Hideo Nakata’s The Complex, Jeong Byeong-Gil’s Confession of Murder, Johnnie To’s Drug War, Takashi Miike’s Lesson of the Evil, and a retrospective of Taiwanese director Tsai Yang-Ming.
The fiftieth-anniversary restoration of Jean-Luc Godard’s Nouvelle Vague classic, Breathless, which came out in 2010, will leave audiences, well, breathless. Godard’s first feature-length film, buoyed by an original treatment by François Truffaut and with Claude Chabrol serving as technical adviser, is as much about the cinema itself as it is about would-be small-time gangster Michel Poiccard (an iconic Jean-Paul Belmondo), an ultra-cool dude wandering from girl to girl in Paris, looking for extra helpings of sex and money and having trouble getting either. Along the way he steals a car and shoots a cop as if shooing away a fly before teaming up with Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg) and heading out on the run. Godard references William Faulkner and Dashiell Hammett, Humphrey Bogart and Sam Fuller as Michel and Patricia make faces at each other, discuss death, and are chased by the police. Anarchy prevails, both in Belmondo’s character and the film as a whole, which can go off in any direction at any time. Godard himself shows up as the man who identifies Michel, and there are also cameos by New Wave directors Jean-Pierre Melville and Jacques Rivette. The beautiful restoration, supervised by the film’s director of photography, Raoul Coutard, also includes a new translation and subtitles that breathe new life into one of cinema’s greatest treasures. Breathless is screening July 3 & 4 at 1:30 as as part of MoMA’s continuing series “An Auteurist History of Film,” which continues in July with such other seminal international works as Satyajit Ray’s Teen Kanya, Blake Edwards’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player.
Loosely based on a Noël Coward play that was recently made into a film starring Colin Firth, Jessica Biel, and Kristin Scott Thomas, Alfred Hitchcock’s Easy Virtue is another of the Master of Suspense’s cleverly told melodramas, a risqué tale of a woman unfairly placed in a lurid situation. Isabel Jeans stars as Larita Filton, a loving wife whose husband, Aubrey (Franklin Dyall), has commissioned her portrait by painter Claude Robson (Eric Bransby Williams). Just as Claude makes a play for Larita, she fights him off and Aubrey walks in. He misinterprets the scene, shots ring out, the artist is dead, and Claude files a highly publicized divorce case in which Larita is found guilty of misconduct. Trying to put her notorious past behind her, she heads for the Mediterranean, where she meets John Whittaker (Robin Irvine), a wealthy mama’s boy who falls instantly in love with her and brings her back to his parents’ country estate. But once there, Whittaker’s nasty mother (Violet Farebrother) and conniving sisters (Dacia Deane and Dorothy Boyd) do everything they can to ruin the relationship, seeking to uncover Larita’s history while also attempting to put her son back together with longtime family friend Sarah (Enid Stamp Taylor). Easy Virtue, which features yet another Hitchcock blonde, is a gripping film about honesty, reputation, individuality, and character as an innocent woman is forced to face undeserved consequences in the superficial world of high society. Hitchcock, who makes his cameo holding a walking stick, gliding past Larita while she sits by a tennis court, includes several wonderful touches involving circles and ovals, from a close-up of a judge’s wig to a shot through a tennis racket’s strings to a dining room dominated by a group of elongated, haloed saints on one wall. Easy Virtue is also one of Hitchcock’s dourest silent melodramas, lacking any comic relief as a wronged woman desperately tries to right her life. A DCP restoration of Easy Virtue is being screened July 2 at 7:30 in the BAM Harvey Theater as part of “The Hitchcock 9,” with live piano music by Stephen Horne. The series continues through July 3 with such other rarely shown Hitchcock silents as The Farmer’s Wife, Downhill, Champagne, and The Pleasure Garden, Sir Alfred’s debut, which has been restored with an additional twenty minutes that have been missing since its initial release.
