this week in film and television

ASH IS PUREST WHITE

Qiao (Zhao Tao) how her life is turning out in Jia Zhang-Ke’s Ash Is Purest White

ASH IS PUREST WHITE (Jia Zhang-Ke, 2018)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater, Francesca Beale Theater
144/165 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Aves., 212-875-5050
Quad Cinema, 34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves., 212-255-2243
www.ashispurestwhitemovie.com

Jia Zhang-Ke reaches into his recent past, and China’s, in his elegiac Ash Is Purest White. In the film, which opens today at the Quad and Lincoln Center, the Sixth Generation writer-director’s wife and muse, Zhao Tao, stars as Qiao, a combination of the characters she played in Jia’s 2002 Unknown Pleasures and 2006 Still Life. It’s the spring of 2001, and Qiao is living in style with her handsome, ultracool jianghu boyfriend, well-respected local gangster Guo Bin (Liao Fan). She runs a gambling parlor, where she asserts her power with men who are in awe of her. But when a rival gang attacks Bin and Qiao pulls a gun, their lives take a series of unexpected turns as the story moves first to 2006 and then to 2018, when things are decidedly, and sadly, different for both of them in a China that has changed as well.

Things are about to change for Guo Bin (Liao Fan) in Ash Is Purest White

As in many of his fiction works, Jia includes documentary elements as he touches upon China’s socioeconomic crisis, primarily exemplified by the Three Gorges Dam project, which led to the displacement of families and the literal disappearance of small communities. Working with a new cinematographer, Eric Gautier, who has lensed films for Olivier Assayas, Walter Salles, Leos Carax, Alain Resnais, and Arnaud Desplechin, among others — his longtime cameraman, Yu Lik-Wai, was unavailable — Jia incorporates general footage he shot between 2001 and 2006 of everyday people and architecture that underscores China’s many changes. There are many gorgeous shots of towns and cities, at one point bathed in white volcanic ash, with costumes of bright yellow, red, and blue, as Gautier goes from digital video to Digibeta, HD video, film, and the RED Weapon camera to add distinct textures. (Jia took the title from what was supposed to be Fei Mu’s last work, which was later made by Zhu Shilin.)

Qiao and Bin try to go back, but little is the same, except for some of their old friends, who are still trying to hold on to the way things were. Zhao (A Touch of Sin, Mountains May Depart) is slow and deliberate as Qiao, her wide eyes telling a story all their own as she wrestles with disappointment, searching for some meaning in her life, while Fan (The Final Master; Black Coal, Thin Ice) is bold and forceful as a proud, powerful man who undergoes a radical shift. “The city is developing fast. It’s ours for the taking,” Bin says early on. But in Jia’s moving, heartfelt epic, there’s nothing for them to grab on to anymore.

INFRASTRUCTURE ON FILM: SNOWPIERCER

Curtis (Chris Evans) leads a revolt in Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer

SNOWPIERCER (Bong Joon-ho, 2014)
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Ave. at Second St.
Saturday, March 16, and Thursday, March 21, 9:00
Series runs March 14-28
212-505-5181
anthologyfilmarchives.org
www.snowpiercer-film.com

Korean director Bong Joon-ho, who had a huge international hit in 2006 with The Host and a major critical success with 2009’s Mother, made his English-language feature debut with Snowpiercer, a nonstop postapocalyptic thrill ride that takes its place with such other memorable train films as The Great Train Robbery, From Russia with Love, The Train, and Murder on the Orient Express. It’s 2031, seventeen years after the chemical C7, which was supposed to end climate change, instead froze the earth, killing all living beings except for a group of survivors on board a train run by a perpetual motion machine. In the rear of the train, men, women, and children are treated like prisoners, beaten, tortured, dressed in rags, their only food mysterious gelatin blocks. Soldiers led by the cold-hearted Mason (Tilda Swinton) and the yellow-clad Claude (Emma Levie), whose outfit brings virtually the only color to this dark, dank, deeply depressing setting, violently keep the peace as the two women heartlessly dictate orders and abscond with the children. But Curtis Everett (Chris Evans) and Edgar (Jamie Bell) hatch a plan to get past the guards and make their way to the front of the train in order to find out just what is really going on and to meet with Wilford, the wealthy entrepreneur running the engine. With the help of defiant mother Tanya (Octavia Spencer), elder statesman Gilliam (John Hurt), train engineer Namgoong Minsu (Bong regular Song Kang-ho), and Namgoong’s daughter, Yona (Go Ah-sung), Curtis attempts to lead a small revolution that is seemingly doomed to failure.

Mason (Tilda Swinton) has something to say about potential revolution on board train to nowhere

Inspired by the French graphic novel Le Transperceneige by Jean-Marc Rochette and Benjamin Legrand (who both make cameos in the film), Snowpiercer is a tense, gripping thriller that unfolds as a microcosm of contemporary society, intelligently taking on race, class, poverty, drug addiction, education, and corporate greed and power. Evans (Captain America, Push) is almost unrecognizable as Everett, a flawed hero trying to make things right, followed every step of the way by cold-blooded killer Franco the Elder (Romanian star Vlad Ivanov of Police, Adjective and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days). The film features splendid production design by Ondrej Nekvasil; each train car offers a completely different look and feel as Curtis heads toward the front, leading to a finale that is everything the conclusion to the Matrix trilogy wanted to be. Bong (Memories of Murder), who cowrote the film with Kelly Masterson (Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead), doesn’t shy away from violence in telling this complex story – of course, it doesn’t hurt that one of the producers is Korean master Park Chan-woo (the Vengeance trilogy, Thirst), who had recently made his first English-language film as well, Stoker. A fantastically claustrophobic chase film, Snowpiercer is screening March 16 and 21 at 9:00 in the Anthology Film Archives series “Infrastructure on Film,” which consists of works that involve constructed environments dealing with history, technology, and humanity. Running March 14-28, the series, curated in collaboration with Rebecca Cleman of Electronic Arts Intermix, features such other films as Frederick Wiseman’s Canal Zone, Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Path of Oil, Dominic Angerame’s City Symphony, and Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West and will continue with a second part in the spring.

3 FACES

Iranian auteur Jafar Panahi plays himself in gorgeously photographed and beautifully paced 3 Faces

3 FACES (SE ROKH) (Jafar Panahi, 2018)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, March 8
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com

One of the most brilliant and revered storytellers in the world, Iranian auteur Jafar Panahi proves his genius yet again with his latest cinematic masterpiece, the tenderhearted yet subtly fierce road movie 3 Faces. The film, which made its US premiere this past fall at the New York Film Festival, won the Best Screenplay prize at Cannes, and screened in January as part of IFC’s inaugural Iranian Film Festival New York, is now back at IFC for a theatrical run beginning March 8. As with some of Panahi’s earlier works, 3 Faces walks the fine line between fiction and nonfiction while defending the art of filmmaking. Popular Iranian movie and television star Behnaz Jafari, playing herself, has received a video in which a teenage girl named Marziyeh (Marziyeh Rezaei), frustrated that her family will not let her study acting at the conservatory where she’s been accepted, commits suicide onscreen, disappointed that her many texts and phone calls to her hero, Jafari, went unanswered. Deeply upset by the video — which was inspired by a real event — Jafari, who claims to have received no such messages, enlists her friend and colleague, writer-director Panahi, also playing himself, to head into the treacherous mountains to try to find out more about Marziyeh and her friend Maedeh (Maedeh Erteghaei). They learn the girls are from a small village in the Turkish-speaking Azeri region in northwest Iran, and as they make their way through narrow, dangerous mountain roads, they encounter tiny, close-knit communities that still embrace old traditions and rituals and are not exactly looking to help them find out the truth.

Iranian star Behnaz Jafari plays herself as she tries to solve a mystery in Jafar Panahi’s 3 Faces

Panahi (Offside, The Circle) — who is banned from writing and directing films in his native Iran, is not allowed to give interviews, and cannot leave the country — spends much of the time in his car, which not only works as a plot device but also was considered necessary in order for him to hide from local authorities who might turn him in to the government. He and Jafari stop in three villages, the birthplaces of his mother, father, and grandparents, for further safety. The title refers to three generations of women in Iranian cinema: Marziyeh, the young, aspiring artist; Jafari, the current star (coincidentally, when she goes to a café, the men inside are watching an episode from her television series); and Shahrzad, aka Kobra Saeedi, a late 1960s, early 1970s film icon who has essentially vanished from public view following the Islamic Revolution of 1978-79, banned from acting in Iran. (Although Shahrzad does not appear as herself in the film, she does read her poetry in voiceover.) 3 Faces is gorgeously photographed by Amin Jafari and beautifully edited by Mastaneh Mohajer, composed of many long takes with few cuts and little camera movement; early on there is a spectacular eleven-minute scene in which an emotionally tortured Jafari listens to Panahi next to her on the phone, gets out of the car, and walks around it, the camera glued to her the whole time in a riveting tour-de-force performance.

Behnaz Jafari and Jafar Panahi encounter culture clashes and more in unique and unusual road movie

3 Faces is Panahi’s fourth film since he was arrested and convicted in 2010 for “colluding with the intention to commit crimes against the country’s national security and propaganda against the Islamic Republic”; the other works are This Is Not a Film, Closed Curtain, and Taxi Tehran, all of which Panahi starred in and all of which take place primarily inside either a home or a vehicle. 3 Faces is the first one in which he spends at least some time outside, where it is more risky for him; in fact, whenever he leaves the car in 3 Faces, it is evident how tentative he is, especially when confronted by an angry man. The film also has a clear feminist bent, not only centering on the three generations of women, but also demonstrating the outdated notions of male dominance, as depicted by a stud bull with “golden balls” and one villager’s belief in the mystical power of circumcised foreskin and how he relates it to former macho star Behrouz Vossoughi, who appeared with Shahrzad in the 1973 film The Hateful Wolf and is still active today, living in California. Panahi, of course, will not be present for the opening at IFC, as his road has been blocked, leaving him a perilous path that he must navigate with great care.

RAOUL PECK x 2: FATAL ASSISTANCE

Documentary reveals that there’s still a whole lot to be done in Haitian recovery effort as organizations fight over details

FATAL ASSISTANCE (ASSISTANCE MORTELLE) (Raoul Peck, 2012)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Saturday, March 9, 4:00
212-660-0312
metrograph.com

Award-winning Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck’s Fatal Assistance begins by posting remarkable numbers onscreen: In the wake of the devastating earthquake that hit his native country on January 12, 2010, there were 230,000 deaths, 300,000 wounded, and 1.5 million people homeless, with some 4,000 NGOs coming to Haiti to make use of a promised $11 billion in relief over a five-year period. But as Peck reveals, there is significant controversy over where the money is and how it’s being spent as the troubled Haitian people are still seeking proper health care and a place to live. “The line between intrusion, support, and aid is very fine,” says Jean-Max Bellerive, the Haitian prime minister at the time of the disaster, explaining that too many of the donors want to cherry-pick how their money is used. Bill Vastine, senior “debris” adviser for the Interim Commission for the Reconstruction of Haiti (CIRH), which was co-chaired by Bellerive and President Bill Clinton, responds, “The international community said they were gonna grant so many billions of dollars to Haiti. That didn’t mean we were gonna send so many billions of dollars to a bank account and let the Haitian government do with it as they will.” Somewhere in the middle is CIRH senior housing adviser Priscilla Phelps, who seems to be the only person who recognizes why the relief effort has turned into a disaster all its own; by the end of the film, she is struggling to hold back tears.

There’s a lot of talk but not nearly as much action in Haitian recovery from devastating earthquake

A self-described “political radical,” Peck doesn’t play it neutral in Fatal Assistance, instead adding mournful music by Alexei Aigui, somber English narration by a male voice (Peck narrates the French-language version), and a female voice-over reading melodramatic “Dear friend” letters that poetically trash what is happening in Haiti. “Every few decades, the rich promise everything to the poor,” the male voice-over says. “The dream of eradication of poverty, disease, death remains a perpetual fantasy.” Even though Peck (Lumumba, 2010 Human Rights Watch Film Festival centerpiece Moloch Tropical) attacks the agendas of the donors and NGOs while pushing an agenda of his own, Fatal Assistance is an important document that shows that just because money pours in to help in a crisis situation doesn’t mean that the things that need to be done are being taken care of properly. The centerpiece selection of the 2013 Human Rights Watch Film Festival, Fatal Assistance is screening March 9 at 4:00 as part of the one-day Metrograph program “Raoul Peck x 2” and will be preceded by Peck’s 2014 film, Murder in Pacot. Peck, the former Haitian minister of culture, the 1994 winner of the HRWFF’s Nestor Almendros Award for courage in filmmaking, and the 2001 HRWFF Lifetime Achievement Award winner, was initially going to introduce both films, but he will no longer be present.

THE MYSTERY OF PICASSO

Spanish artist Pablo Picasso and French director Henri-Georges Clouzot collaborate on thrilling film about creative genius

THE MYSTERY OF PICASSO (Le mystère Picasso) (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1956)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Opens March 1
212-727-8110
filmforum.org
milestonefilms.com

Suspense master Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Mystery of Picasso, now playing at Film Forum in a beautiful 4K restoration from Milestone, is one of the most thrilling films ever made about art and the creative process. In the 1949 short Visit to Picasso, Belgian director Paul Haesaerts photographed Pablo Picasso painting on a glass plate. Picasso and his longtime friend Clouzot take that basic concept to the next level in The Mystery of Picasso, in which the Spanish artist uses inks that bleed through paper so Clouzot can shoot him from the other side; the works unfold like magic, evolving on camera seemingly without the genius present. “We’d give anything to have been in Rimbaud’s mind while he was writing ‘Le Bateau Ivre,’ or in Mozart’s while he was composing the Jupiter Symphony, to discover this secret mechanism that guides the creator in a perilous adventure,” Clouzot says at the beginning. “Thanks to God, what is impossible in poetry and music is attainable in painting. To find out what goes on in a painter’s head, you need to follow his hand. A painter’s adventure is an odd one!” It’s breathtaking as the pictures emerge, revealing Picasso’s remarkable command of line, altering images as he pleases with just a brushstroke or two.

Pablo Picasso races against the clock to complete a painting as cinematographer Claude Renoir captures it all

Most of the works are accompanied by glorious music by composer Georges Auric, ranging from bold fanfares and classical lilts to jazzy riffs. (Several drawings have no music so the sounds of Picasso’s brushstrokes can be heard, a score unto itself.) Picasso is seen several times in the film, which is in black-and-white except for the colors in the paintings: Before the credits, he paints at an easel, closely examining the work with penetrating wide eyes; a moment later, he appears in a cloud of smoke (from his cigarette); in the middle, shirtless, he shows off his impressive seventy-five-year-old physique, battling the clock as Clouzot announces that a reel is running out, another camera revealing the basic method employed by Clouzot and cinematographer Claude Renoir, the nephew of filmmaker Jean Renoir and grandson of Impressionist master Auguste Renoir; and, at the end, Picasso boldly signs the film, which was shot over three months in the summer at Studios de la Victorine in Nice. (Among those stopping by to check out the progress were Jean Cocteau, Jacques Prévert, and Luis Buñuel.) At another point Picasso decides that he wants to switch from ink on paper to oil on canvas.

“I haven’t gone below the surface yet. We should go deeper. Risk all. Try to see one picture turning onto another,” he says as Clouzot (The Wages of Fear, Les Diaboliques) and Renoir (The Golden Coach, The Spy Who Loved Me) change to CinemaScope. The result is La Plage de la Garoupe, which was shot over eight days using a stop-motion technique so editor Henri Colpi could remove Picasso from the scene, since he had to make it the traditional way, in front of the canvas. All of the works were supposed to be destroyed once the film was completed, but it is rumored that a few still exist. Colpi wrote in Letters to a Young Editor that Picasso had kept many of the drawings but they were damaged in an accident involving his cat. In the final shot, Centaur, a sculpture Picasso made from such studio materials as a lens box, a light stanchion, an easel, and boxes, can be seen in the background; it is currently in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The Mystery of Picasso might not contain the artist’s finest works, it can feel repetitive even at seventy-five minutes, and it’s not all quite as spontaneous as it seems, but it offers a captivating look inside the mind of one of the most important and distinguished artists of the twentieth century.

JOSEPH PULITZER: VOICE OF THE PEOPLE

The life and times of Joseph Pulitzer are explored in Oren Rudavsky documentary

JOSEPH PULITZER: VOICE OF THE PEOPLE (Oren Rudavsky, 2018)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Opens March 1
212-255-2243
quadcinema.com
www.josephpulitzerfilm.com

“It is not enough to refrain from publishing fake news . . . accuracy is to a newspaper what virtue is to a woman,” Joseph Pulitzer, voiced by a thickly Hungarian-accented Liev Schreiber, says in Oren Rudavsky’s Joseph Pulitzer: Voice of the People, opening March 1 at the Quad. Made for PBS’s American Masters series, the documentary, narrated by Adam Driver, gets off to a slow start, with numerous talking heads, wearisome reenactments, and modern-day B-roll shots. There’s some fascinating information about Pulitzer, who was born in Hungary in 1847, came to America penniless to fight in the Civil War, and eventually built a publishing empire that made him extremely wealthy even as he still fought aggressively for the poor, the disenfranchised, the overlooked, the underrepresented. Of course, Rudavsky (A Life Apart: Hasidism in America) — who directed the film, wrote it with Robert Seidman and editor Ramon Rivera Moret, and produced it with Seidman and Andrea Miller — had limited pictorial resources for the first half of Pulitzer’s life, before photography became more mainstream and before Pulitzer bought and ran the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the New York World.

Thus, the second half of the film is significantly better, as Rudavsky explores Pulitzer’s battles with William Randolph Hearst, which led to the concept of “yellow journalism,” then with President Theodore Roosevelt over possible corruption involving the Panama Canal deal, and finally with his health, as he loses his eyesight but continues to run his paper. The fight with Hearst over circulation numbers and who can get the most sensationalistic stories first is downright exciting, evoking the current 24/7 news cycle on social media, while elements of the Roosevelt scandal are echoed today by President Donald Trump’s relationship with the press. Among those celebrating Pulitzer, who was a firm believer in justice and was not afraid to stand up and defend it loudly, is novelist Nicholson Baker, who acquired and preserved many issues of the World and reviews several of them on camera, turning the pages as if examining priceless treasures, which in many ways they are. The voice cast also features Lauren Ambrose as Kate Davis, Rachel Brosnahan as Nellie Bly, Hugh Dancy as Alleyne Ireland, Billy Magnussen as Hearst, and Tim Blake Nelson as Roosevelt. Rudavsky will be at the Quad for Q&As following the 6:55 screenings March 1 and 2 and after the 3:05 show March 3.

WOMAN AT WAR

Hala (Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir) is out to save Mother Earth in Benedikt Erlingsson’s wonderfully absurdist and acerbic Woman at War

WOMAN AT WAR (Kona fer í stríð) (Benedikt Erlingsson, 2018)
IFC Center, 323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St., 212-924-7771
Landmark at 57 West, 657 West 57th Street, at, Twelfth Ave., 646-233-1615
Opens Friday, March 1
www.womanatwarfilm.com
www.ifccenter.com

Writer-director Benedikt Erlingsson has followed up his dazzling 2015 debut, Of Horses and Men, with the brilliant Woman at War, opening today at IFC and the Landmark at 57 West. Icelandic stage, TV, and film star Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir is sensational as choir director and eco-warrior Halla, a modern-day Artemis attempting to single-handedly bring down the country’s power grid in response to financial and environmental abuse. She roams the open landscape with her bow and arrow as she’s hunted by police tracking her in dark, ominous helicopters and drones, finding refuge with a local farmer Sveinbjörn (Jóhann Sigurðarson) and his dog, Woman. Halla gets help from Baldvin (Jörundur Ragnarsson), a detective and member of her choir; they are so cautious that when they speak about their mission, they put their cellphones in a freezer so no one can monitor them. Geirharðsdóttir also plays Halla’s twin sister, Ása, a yoga and meditation teacher preparing to go on a two-year retreat. No one suspects that Halla is the mysterious “Woman of the Mountain” behind the attacks; instead, the police keep harassing Juan Camillo (Juan Camillo Roman Estrada), a young brown man who sticks out like a sore thumb in Iceland, riding around on his overladen bicycle, claiming to be a tourist and calling everyone “puta.” When things start getting extremely dangerous, Baldvin backs off while Halla, who is also seeking to adopt a four-year-old Ukrainian girl, refuses to stop trying to save Mother Earth, one power line at a time.

Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir excels as a choir director and eco-warrior with a twin sister in Woman at War

Woman at War is a spectacular triumph, a gripping black comedy and action-adventure thriller with a deep heart. Cinematographer Bergsteinn Björgúlfsson’s camera adores Geirharðsdóttir’s face, particularly her determined eyes, and he and Erlingsson up the ante by magically giving us two of them; when Halla and Ása are together, it seems impossible that they’re not played by two different actresses. Superhero Halla also gets her own private soundtrack; as she ventures across the countryside and into various rooms and buildings, she is often accompanied by a trio of Icelandic musicians: composer, pianist, and accordionist Davíð Þór Jónsson, drummer Magnús Trygvason Eliasen, and sousaphone player Ómar Guðjónsson, occasionally joined by a Ukrainian choir, Iryna Danyleiko, Galyna Goncharenko, and Susanna Karpenko, in traditional dress. Gloriously, they are all aware of one another’s existence, adding to the fantastical and hysterically funny nature of the film, which was partly inspired by real-life seventeenth-century Icelandic outlaw couple Halla and Eyvindur. Of course, Erlingsson is also making some pretty important points about our contemporary existence, from climate change and corporate corruption to the refugee crisis and the police state, wrapped up in a gorgeously absurdist bow. Among the glut of films opening March 1, Woman at War is the one to see.