this week in film and television

THE CONTENDERS 2017: THE BIG SICK

Actor and stand-up comic Kumail Nanjiani and Emily Gardner (Zoe Kazan) explore love and romance in The Big Sick

THE BIG SICK (Michael Showalter, 2017)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Friday, December 29, $12, 7:30
Series runs through January 12
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
www.thebigsickmovie.com

Michael Showalter’s surprise summer hit, The Big Sick, is a heart-wrenchingly bittersweet romantic comedy loosely based on the real life of Pakistani American actor and comic Kumail Nanjiani. It would do a disservice to call the film, which was produced by Judd Apatow and Barry Mendel, a mere romcom, as it is so much more, taking on religion, assimilation, responsibility, culture, and personal identity with intelligence and wit. Kumail plays an Uber driver and stand-up comedian gigging at a Chicago club with fellow comics CJ (Bo Burnham), Mary (Aidy Bryant), and his doofy roommate, Chris (Kurt Braunohler). Kumail spends a lot of time at his parents’ suburban home, the heart of his family, where his mother, Sharmeen (Zenobia Shroff) and father, Azmat (Anupam Kher), continually invite single young Pakistani women to “drop by” to meet him, determined to arrange a proper marriage for their son. However, Kumail has started sort-of seeing a blond American woman, Emily Gardner (Zoe Kazan), after she playfully heckles him at a gig. As their relationship gets more serious, Kumail still hasn’t told his parents or his brother, Naveed (Adeel Akhtar), jeopardizing their future, but when Emily is struck by a sudden illness, Kumail reevaluates who he is and what he desires out of life. Emily’s illness also forces him to get to know her parents, Beth (Holly Hunter) and Terry (Ray Romano), who at first want nothing to do with him.

Beth (Holly Hunter) and Terry (Ray Romano) wait for news on their daughter in Michael Showalter’s The Big Sick

Written by Nanjiani (The Meltdown with Jonah and Kumail, Silicon Valley) and freelance journalist and author Emily V. Gordon ( SuperYou: Release Your Inner Superhero, The Carmichael Show), The Big Sick is as gripping as it is funny. The characters are well defined, and the plot is filled with both delightful and shocking twists and turns that will have you on the edge of your seat, tears at the ready, particularly if you don’t know what ultimately happened to Kumail and Emily in actuality. Nanjiani is adorably understated playing a version of himself, while Emmy nominee Kazan (Ruby Sparks, Olive Kitteridge) is charming and quirky as Emily; the two have an instant chemistry that makes the stop-and-go beginning of their relationship thoroughly involving. Emmy winner Romano (Everybody Loves Raymond, Men of a Certain Age) and Oscar and Emmy winner Hunter (The Piano, Saving Grace) are terrific as Emily’s parents, who have some issues of their own to resolve aside from Kumail and Emily. (As a side note, the scene where Beth gets into a fight with a heckler was inspired by a real incident in which Hunter heckled a tennis player at the US Open.) Bryant (Saturday Night Live, Danger & Eggs) and musician and stand-up comic Burnham provide solid, um, comic relief, while Shroff and Kher excel as Kumail’s parents, who insist that Kumail follow tradition, regardless of what he wants for himself. One of the best films of the year, The Big Sick is screening December 29 at 7:30 in MoMA’s annual series “The Contenders,” which consists of films the institution believes will stand the test of time; it continues through January 12 with such other 2017 works as James Mangold’s Logan, James Gray’s The Lost City of Z, Steven Spielberg’s The Post, and Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird.

A VERY BERRI CHRISTMAS: THE TWO OF US

Alain Cohen makes a sparkling debut in Claude Berri’s semiautobiographical masterpiece, The Two of Us

THE TWO OF US (LE VIEIL HOMME ET L’ENFANT) (Claude Berri, 1967)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Opens Friday, December 22
Series runs December 29 – January 4
212-255-2243
quadcinema.com

The Quad is celebrating the holidays with “A Very Berri Christmas,” a wide-ranging ten-film tribute to French writer, director, producer, actor, and distributor Claude Berri that includes such favorites as Jean de Florette, Manon of the Spring, and Le Sex Shop. The series kicks off December 22 with the U.S. premiere of the fiftieth anniversary 4K restoration of Berri’s semiautobiographical debut feature, the extraordinary WWII coming-of-age drama The Two of Us. “In November 1943, I was eight years old . . . and already a Jew,” Berri, who was born Claude Berel Langmann, says in voice-over at the start of the film, which is based on his real-life experiences when he was sent to live with a gentile family during the war. Young Claude Langmann (Alain Cohen) can’t help getting into trouble even though his father (Charles Denner) keeps trying to make him understand that Jews have to lay low and stay below the radar in German-occupied Paris. But soon Claude’s exasperated father and loving mother (Zorica Lozic) send him off to the Grenoble countryside to stay with Mémé (Luce Fabiole) and Pépé (Michel Simon), an older couple who don’t know that he’s Jewish. They become surrogate grandparents for Claude, who builds a particularly special relationship with Pépé, an animal lover who blames the world’s ills on the Jews, the Communists, the Bolsheviks, and the English. He regularly chastises his son, Victor (Roger Carel), who is married to Suzanne (Sylvine Delannoy). Pépé prefers the company of his treasured fifteen-year-old dog, Kinou, who has his own chair at the dinner table and sleeps in bed with Mémé and Pépé. As Pépé sings the praises of Vichy leader Marshal Philippe Pétain, Claude continues to wreak more than his share of havoc, from getting in fights at school to flirting with Dinou (Elisabeth Rey), the daughter of Maxime (Paul Préboist), a farmer whose son (Didier Perret) can’t keep his finger out of his nose.

The Jewish Claude (Alain Cohen) and the anti-Semitic Pépé (Michel Simon) form a unique bond in sensitive and beautiful WWII drama

The Two of Us, whose French title translates as The Old Man and the Child, is anchored by spectacular performances by newcomer Cohen, whose maternal grandparents were killed at Auschwitz, and Simon (L’Atalante, Boudu Saved from Drowning), in one of his last roles following a debilitating accident with makeup dye. Despite being only nine years old, Cohen, who would go on to play Claude in two other films by Berri, shows an innate understanding of his character’s complexities; Claude knows how to push adults’ buttons, as revealed by his sly smiles. He subtly taunts Pépé about his anti-Semitism, at one point teasing the old man about the size and shape of his nose. Cohen even looks directly into the camera a few times, as if he’s aware that we’re watching him. Simon won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival for his portrayal of Pépé, a big, lovable, gentle man with a tender humanity except for his dangerous political views; Berri does not apologize for him but instead depicts him as someone who doesn’t really know any better and perhaps might just learn something from Claude. Berri also throws in a playful reference to a frying pan, a key object in his Oscar-winning 1962 short, Le Poulet, about a hen. The 4K restoration of The Two of Us is sensational, bringing out the sharp details of Jean Penzer’s black-and-white photography, which combines beautifully with Georges Delerue’s gorgeous, understated score. The Two of Us is an unforgettable film, relentlessly charming despite its serious subject matter, with one of the all-time-great performances by a child. “A Very Berri Christmas” continues December 29 through January 4 with such other films as Germinal, Male of the Century, Uranus, and Je vous aime, which boasts a spectacularly attractive cast as Catherine Deneuve tries to discover what went wrong with former lovers Gérard Depardieu, Jean-Louis Trintignant, and Serge Gainsbourg.

EMOTION PICTURES — INTERNATIONAL MELODRAMAS: THE GODDESS

Iconic Chinese star Ruan Lingyu gives one of her best performances in silent classic The Goddess

THE GODDESS (SHEN NU) (Wu Yonggang, 1934)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
144 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
Thursday, December 21, 8:30
Series runs December 13 – January 7
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.org

Wu Yonggang’s directorial debut, The Goddess, made for Lianhua Film Company after he worked as a designer for the Shaw brothers, is a socially conscious, emotive tale about one woman’s struggle to give her young son a better life than her own. The seventy-three-minute silent film opens with a series of shots by cinematographer Hong Weilie that follows the evening light, from the setting sun to a man on a ladder lighting a street corner oil lamp to an apartment window seen from the outside. Wu then cuts to inside the room, revealing a dressing table with lots of makeup, then a pair of dresses hanging on the wall, and a doll. The camera next rises from an empty basket on the floor to a nervous woman (Ruan Lingyu) cradling a baby. She looks at a clock; it is time for her to leave her child and walk the streets of the city to make money. It’s a melancholy scene in a melancholy film, but the unnamed prostitute is no mere hooker with a heart of gold; she is a determined yet fragile woman who will do anything for her son, Shuiping (Keng Li). Running from the police, she is helped by Zhang (Zhang Zhizhi), a low-level gangster who decides to become her pimp, regularly taking her money and threatening her future, and that of her son’s. Whenever she attempts to raise her station, particularly when she saves enough money to send Shuiping to private school, there is always something that brings her back down.

A prostitute (Ruan Lingyu) dreams of a better life for her son (Keng Li) in Wu Yonggang’s The Goddess

Writer-director Wu also designed the sets, which include German Expressionist-type buildings and alleyways along with blinking neon towers and stores. Large columns increase in number, as if creating bars around the woman. Holding on to Shuiping, the woman is seen through Zhang’s spread legs, trapped. Using soft focus, superimposition, and slow fades — the camera cannot get enough of Ruan’s expressive face — Wu depicts her nightly travails as she smokes cigarettes and looks for her next customer. In one memorable scene, Wu shows only feet on the sidewalk as she is propositioned and accepts. But he never sentimentalizes the fallen woman, instead making her a tragic example of societal ills in 1930s China, especially gender and class hierarchies, as explained by the school’s principal. “She is a human being and has her human rights — so does her son,” he says. Unfortunately, most everyone else does not agree. The Goddess is a silent film classic, a major success in China; Wu (The Desert Island, Loyal Family) remade it with sound in 1938 as Rouge Tears. Sadly, Ruan, a huge star, had serious personal problems and committed suicide in 1935, at the age of twenty-four, a victim of gossip and physical abuse; Stanley Kwan’s award-winning 1992 biopic, Centre Stage, detailed her life, with Maggie Cheung playing Ruan. (Visual artist Isaac Julien re-created scenes from The Goddess with Zhao Tao and also cast Cheung as Goddess of the Sea in his nine-screen 2013 MoMA installation, Ten Thousand Waves.) The Chinese title, shennü, refers to both a goddess and a prostitute; Wu, and Ruan, reveals that one does not preclude the other. The Goddess is screening December 21 at the Walter Reade Theater in the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “Emotion Pictures: International Melodrama,” with live piano accompaniment by Donald Sosin. The series, which divides its more than fifty films into four categories — Silent Screen, Hollywood’s Golden Age, International Classics, and Modern/Postmodern Drama — continues through January 7 with works by Yasujirô Ozu, Arturo Ripstein, Charlie Chaplin, Pedro Almodóvar, Clint Eastwood, Guy Maddin, Douglas Sirk, Leo McCarey, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Vincente Minnelli, Terence Davies, and many more.

EMOTION PICTURES: INTERNATIONAL MELODRAMAS

Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman star in Douglas Sirk’s gorgeous Technicolor emotional melodrama All That Heaven Allows

ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS (Douglas Sirk, 1955)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater, Francesca Beale Theater
144/165 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
Wednesday, December 13, 6:30
Monday, January 1, 7:00
Series runs December 13 – January 6
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.org

Forget about It’s a Wonderful Life, Miracle on Thirty-Fourth Street, and endless versions of A Christmas Carol; our favorite holiday movie is Douglas Sirk’s sensationally strange and beautiful All That Heaven Allows, which you can see December 13 and January 1 as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s four-week, fifty-four-movie, get-out-your-handkerchiefs series “Emotion Pictures: International Melodrama.” Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman, who played characters who fell in love in Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession, are at it again in All That Heaven Allows. This time around, Hudson is Ron Kirby, a softhearted, hunky gardener who prefers a simple, outdoorsy life yet is drawn to Cary Scott (Wyman), an older widow who is firmly entrenched in her community’s country-club lifestyle with her best friend, Sara (Agnes Moorehead). Kirby and Cary begin a passionate affair but when they decide to wed, the snooty members of the town’s social register are thoroughly appalled and do everything in their power to drive them apart because of class, wealth, and age differences. (At thirty-seven, Wyman was a mere eight years older than Hudson in real life.) Meanwhile, Cary’s kids, high schooler Kay (Gloria Talbott) and college student Ned (William Reynolds), find their mother’s impending marriage to Kirby disgusting and distasteful as well, preferring she marry Harvey (Conrad Nagel), a plain, sexless widower. In 1950s America, women were still subservient to the needs of men and to raising their children, not permitted by society to lead their own lives and make decisions for themselves, especially when it came to their sexuality. The film features an essentially nonreligious belief system that is embodied by Kirby, who is inspired by the writings on naturalism and the true meaning of success espoused by Henry David Thoreau in Walden. Indeed, the outside world is central to the film; Sirk and his longtime cinematographer, Russell Metty, let the camera linger on trees, lakes, snow banks, and deer. Flowers abound indoors and out, and windows always look out on beautiful scenery, as if paintings, accompanied by Frank Skinner’s equally lush score and Bill Thomas’s colorful costumes.

It all makes for the kind of candy-coated America that David Lynch turned upside down and inside out in Blue Velvet and that directly influenced Todd Haynes’s 2002 Sirk homage, Far from Heaven, in which white Connecticut housewife Cathy Whitaker (Julianne Moore), who is married to a closeted white executive (Dennis Quaid), becomes perhaps too friendly with her black gardener (Dennis Haysbert), a melding of All That Heaven Allows and Sirk’s Imitation of Life. (Both Far from Heaven and Imitation of Life are part of the series as well.) At one point, Kirby talks about how his best friend learned to be his own man. “And you want me to be a man,” Cary says. “Only in that one way,” Kirby responds, playfully looking over at Cary; it’s as if Hudson is teasing her about his real-life sexuality. People’s double nature is reflected throughout, as Sirk and Metty use fireplace screens, windshields, mirrors, and even a television set to create physical separation between characters as well as the inner and outer parts of the same character. In addition, there is a vast array of ties, cravats, scarves, ascots, bow ties, and other articles of clothing that everyone wears around their necks, as if their true feelings are always being choked and hidden. It’s a magnificent film, richly textured and multilayered, not nearly as cynical and tongue-in-cheek as some claim it to be. All That Heaven Allows is screening December 13 and January 1 in “Emotion Pictures: International Melodrama,” which divides its films into four categories: Silent Screen, Hollywood’s Golden Age, International Classics, and Modern/Postmodern Drama, with works by Yasujirô Ozu, Martin Scorsese, Pier-Paolo Pasolini, Charlie Chaplin, Pedro Almodóvar, Clint Eastwood, Federico Fellini, Youssef Chahine, David Lean, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Vincente Minnelli, Max Ophüls, and many more.

Sergey Urusevsky’s dazzling camera work is a character unto itself in The Cranes Are Flying

THE CRANES ARE FLYING (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1957)
Sunday, December 17, 4:00
Saturday, December 30, 3:30
www.filmlinc.org

Even at a mere ninety-seven minutes, Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes Are Flying is a sweeping Russian antiwar epic, an intimate and moving black-and-white tale of romance and betrayal during WWII. Veronika (Tatyana Samojlova) and Boris (Aleksey Batalov) are madly in love, swirling dizzyingly through the streets and up and down a winding staircase. But when Russia enters the war, Boris signs up and heads to the front, while Veronika is pursued by Boris’s cousin, Mark (Aleksandr Shvorin). Pining for word from Boris, Veronika works as a nurse at a hospital run by Boris’s father, Fyodor Ivanovich (Vasili Merkuryev), as the family, including Boris’s sister, Irina (Svetlana Kharitonova), looks askance at her relationship with Mark. The personal and political intrigue comes to a harrowing conclusion in a grand finale that for all its scale and scope gets to the very heart and soul of how the war affected the Soviet people on an individual, human level, in the family lives of women and children, lovers and cousins, husbands and wives.

Unforeseen circumstances trap Veronika (Tatyana Samojlova) in wartime Russia in Mikhail Kalatozov’s masterful The Cranes Are Flying

The only Russian film to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes by itself, The Cranes Are Flying is a masterful work of art, a searing portrait of the horrors of war as seen through the eyes of one desperate woman. Adapting his own play, Viktor Rozov’s story sets up Boris and his family as a microcosm of Soviet society under Stalin; it’s no coincidence that the film was made only after the leader’s death. It’s a whirlwind piece of filmmaking, a marvelous collaboration between director Kalatozov, editor Mariya Timofeyeva (Ballad of a Soldier), composer Moisey Vaynberg (the opera The Passenger), and cinematographer Sergey Urusevsky, who also worked with Kalatozov on I Am Cuba and The Unsent Letter; Urusevsky’s camera, often handheld, is simply dazzling, whether moving through and above crowd scenes, closing in on Samojlova’s face and Batalov’s eyes, or twirling up at the sky. Poetic and lyrical, heartbreaking and maddening, The Cranes Are Flying is an exquisite example of the power of cinema. You can see it December 17 and 30 in the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “Emotion Pictures: International Melodrama,” which also features works by D. W. Griffith, F. W. Murnau, Oscar Micheaux, Nicholas Ray, George Cukor, Ida Lupino, Leo McCarey, Ritwik Ghatak, Mikio Naruse, Jacques Demy, Lars von Trier, Guy Maddin, and many more.

Oharu (Kinuyo Tanaka) lives a life filled with misery after misery in Mizoguchi melodrama

THE LIFE OF OHARU (SAIKAKU ICHIDAI ONNA) (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1952)
Monday, December 18, 1:30
Saturday, January 6, 3:45
www.filmlinc.org

We used to think that Aki Kaurismäki’s The Match Factory Girl was the saddest film ever made about a young woman who just can’t catch a break, as misery after misery keeps piling up on her ever-more-pathetic existence. But the Finnish black comedy has nothing on Kenji Mizoguchi’s The Life of Oharu, a searing, brutal example of the Buddhist observation of impermanence and the role of women in Japanese society. The film, based on a seventeenth-century novel by Ihara Saikaku, is told in flashback, with Oharu (Kinuyo Tanaka) recounting what led her to become a fifty-year-old prostitute nobody wants. It all starts to go downhill after she falls in love with Katsunosuke (Toshirô Mifune), a lowly page beneath her family’s station. The affair brings shame to her mother (Tsukie Matsuura) and father (Ichiro Sugai), as well as exile. The family is redeemed when Oharu is chosen to be the concubine of Lord Matsudaira (Toshiaki Konoe) in order to give birth to his heir, but Lady Matsudaira (Hisako Yamane) wants her gone once the baby is born, and so she is sent home again, without the money her father was sure would come to them.

Donald Richie called THE LIFE OF OHARU “one of Mizoguchi’s most elegantly beautiful films”

Mizoguchi’s The Life of Oharu is an elegant film about one woman’s struggle to survive in a cold world

Over the next several years, Oharu becomes involved in a series of personal and financial relationships, each one beginning with at least some hope and promise for a better future but always ending in tragedy. Nevertheless, she keeps on going, despite setback after setback, bearing terrible burdens while never giving up. Mizoguchi (Sansho the Bailiff, The 47 Ronin, Street of Shame) bathes much of the film in darkness and shadow, casting an eerie glow over the unrelentingly melodramatic narrative. Tanaka, who appeared in fifteen of Mizoguchi’s films and also became the second Japanese woman director (Love Letter, Love Under the Crucifix), gives a subtly compelling performance as Oharu, one of the most tragic figures in the history of cinema. Winner of the International Prize at the 1952 Venice International Film Festival, The Life of Oharu is screening December 18 and January 6 in the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “Emotion Pictures: International Melodrama,” which also features works Teuvo Tulio, Fei Mu, George Kuchar, Todd Haynes, Wong Kar Wai, Terence Davies, Leos Carax, Wu Yonggang, Robert Stevenson, and many more.

Letty Mason (Lillian Gish) is being driven crazy by internal and external sources in The Wind

THE WIND (Victor Sjöström, 1928)
December 19, 8:30
www.filmlinc.org

Victor Sjöström’s 1928 now-classic silent film The Wind stars Lillian Gish as Letty Mason, a young woman traveling from Virginia to Texas to live with her cousin Beverly (Edward Earle). Traveling from the cultured, civilized East to what was still the wild West, the uncertain Letty must confront the fierceness of nature head-on — both human nature and the harsh natural environment. On the train, she is wooed by cattleman Wirt Roddy (Montagu Love), but her fears grow as she first sees the vicious wind howling outside the train window the closer she gets to her destination. Once in Sweetwater, she is picked up by her cousin’s neighbors, the handsome Lige Hightower (Lars Hanson), and his goofy sidekick, Sourdough (William Orlamond). Both men take a quick liking to Letty, who seems most attracted to Wirt. Soon Beverly’s wife, Cora (Dorothy Cumming, in her next-to-last film before retiring), becomes jealous of Letty’s closeness with her husband and kids and kicks her out, leaving a desperate Letty to make choices she might not be ready for as the wind outside becomes fiercer and ever-more dangerous. The Wind is a tour de force for Gish in her last silent movie, not only because of her emotionally gripping portrayal of Letty but because she put the entire production together, obtaining the rights to the novel by Dorothy Scarborough, hiring the Swedish director and star Hanson, and arguing over the ending with the producers and Irving Thalberg. (Unfortunately, she lost on that account, just about the only thing that did not go the way she wanted.)

Letty Mason (Lillian Gish) and Lige Hightower (Lars Hanson) have some tough decisions to make in Victor Sjöström’s silent classic

Sjöström (The Phantom Carriage, The Divine Woman), who played Professor Isak Borg in Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, and cinematographer John Arnold create some dazzling effects as a twister threatens and Letty battles both inside and outside; she is regularly shot from the side, at the door of the shack where she lives, not knowing if she’d be safer inside or outside as the wind and sand blast over her. The film, an early look at climate change, was shot in the Mojave Desert in difficult circumstances; to get the wind to swirl, the crew used propellers from eight airplanes. Dialogue is sparse, and the story is told primarily in taut visuals. A restored 35mm print of The Wind with the original music and effects soundtrack is screening December 19 in the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “Emotion Pictures: International Melodrama.”

PRIME LOIS SMITH

Lois Smith will be at the Quad this week for a celebration of her long career, including her acclaimed performance in Marjorie Prime

Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
December 12-14
212-255-2243
quadcinema.com

Topeka-born stage and screen actress Lois Smith will be at the Quad this week to celebrate her seven-decade career, which has featured such plays as The Grapes of Wrath, The Trip to Bountiful, Buried Child, and John, earning two Tony nominations and an Obie, and such films as East of Eden; Foxes; Five Easy Pieces; Next Stop, Greenwich Village; and this year’s Marjorie Prime and Lady Bird. Five of those films, with the exception of Lady Bird, make up the Quad series “Prime Lois Smith,” running December 12–14, with Smith either introducing or taking part in Q&As for every screening but one. Among the television programs she’s had recurring roles on are Desperate Housewives, True Blood, ER, and Grace and Frankie. Smith, who was on the November 21, 1955, cover of Life magazine with Judy Tyler, Jayne Mansfield, Susan Strasberg, and Diane Cilento, is still going strong at the age of eighty-seven, with more work on the horizon.

Cal Trask (James Dean) and Anne (Lois Smith) share a tender moment in Elia Kazan’s adaptation of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden

EAST OF EDEN (Elia Kazan, 1955)
Tuesday, December 12, 6:30
quadcinema.com

“I guess there’s just a certain amount of good and bad you get from your parents and I just got the bad,” Cal (James Dean) says in Elia Kazan’s cinematic adaptation of part of John Steinbeck’s 1952 novel, East of Eden, a modern retelling of the biblical Cain and Abel story. In his first starring role, Dean received a posthumous Oscar nomination for his moody, angst-ridden performance as Cal Trask, a troubled young man who discovers that the mother (Best Supporting Actress winner Jo Van Fleet) he thought was dead is actually alive and well and running a successful house of prostitution nearby. Cal tries to win his father’s (Raymond Massey as Adam Trask) love and acceptance any way he can, including helping him develop his grand plan to transport lettuce from their farm via refrigerated railway cars, but his father seems to always favor his other son, Aron (Richard Davalos). Aron, meanwhile, is in love with Abra (Julie Harris), a sweet young woman who takes a serious interest in Cal and desperately wants him to succeed. But the well-meaning though misunderstood Cal does things his own way, which gets him in trouble with his father and brother, the mother who wants nothing to do with him, the sheriff (Burl Ives), and just about everyone else he comes in contact with.

Set in Monterey and Salinas, East of Eden begins with a grand overture by Leonard Rosenman, announcing the film is going to be a major undertaking, and it lives up to its billing. Dean is masterful as Cal, peppering Paul Osborn’s script with powerful improvisational moments as he expresses his frustration with his family and life in general. His inner turmoil threatens to explode in both word and gesture as he just seeks to be loved. Dean would follow up East of Eden with seminal roles in Rebel Without a Cause and Giant before his death in a car crash in 1955 at the age of twenty-four, leaving behind a remarkable legacy that has influenced generations of actors ever since. Lois Smith makes her film debut as Anne, the young woman who works at the brothel and is charmed by Cal in a steamy scene. Smith will be on hand for a Q&A following the December 12 screening of the film at the Quad as part of the series “Prime Lois Smith.”

Lois Smith plays the sister of prodigal son (Jack Nicholson) in Five Easy Pieces

Lois Smith plays the sister of prodigal son Bobby Dupea (Jack Nicholson) in Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces

FIVE EASY PIECES (Bob Rafelson, 1970)
Wednesday, December 13, 6:30
Thursday, December 14, 9:10
quadcinema.com

A key film that helped lead 1960s cinema into the grittier 1970s, Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces is one of the most American of dramas, a tale of ennui and unrest among the rich and the poor, a road movie that travels from trailer parks to fashionable country estates. Caught in between is Bobby Dupea (Jack Nicholson), a former piano prodigy now working on an oil rig and living with a well-meaning but not very bright waitress, Rayette (Karen Black). When Bobby finds out that his father is ill, he reluctantly returns to the family home, the prodigal son who had left all that behind, escaping to a less-complicated though unsatisfying life putting his fingers in a bowling ball rather than tickling the keys of a grand piano. Back in his old house, he has to deal with his brother, Carl (Ralph Waite), a onetime violinist who can no longer play because of an injured neck and who serves as the film’s comic relief; Carl’s wife, Catherine (Susan Anspach), a snooty woman Bobby has always been attracted to; and Bobby’s sister, Partita (Lois Smith), a lonely, troubled soul who has the hots for Spicer (John Ryan), the live-in nurse who takes care of their wheelchair-bound father (William Challee).

Jack Nicholson, sitting next to Karen Black, is about to place the most famous sandwich order in film history

Rafelson had previously directed the psychedelic movie Head (he cocreated the Monkees band and TV show) and would go on to make such films as The King of Marvin Gardens, Stay Hungry, and Black Widow; written by Carole Eastman, Five Easy Pieces fits flawlessly in between them, a deeply philosophical work that captures the myriad changes the country was experiencing as the Woodstock Generation was forced to start growing up. The film suffers from some unsteady editing primarily in the earlier scenes, but it is still a gem, featuring at least two unforgettable scenes, one that takes place in a California highway traffic jam and the other in a diner, where Bobby places an order for the ages. And as good as both Nicholson, who earned the first of seven Best Actor Oscar nominations, and Black, who was nominated for Best Supporting Actress, are, Helena Kallianiotes nearly steals the picture as a crazy woman railing against the ills of the world from the backseat of Bobby’s car. Five Easy Pieces is screening December 13 and 14 in the Quad series “Prime Lois Smith,” with Smith taking part in a Q&A following the 6:30 screening on the 13th.

ACTOR’S CHOICE — LAMBERT WILSON & YVES MONTAND: Z

The Deputy (Yves Montand, rear left) is on his way to a fateful encounter in Costa-Gavras’s Z

CINÉSALON: Z (Costa-Gavras, 1969)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, December 12, $13, 4:00 & 7:30
Series continues Tuesdays through December 19
212-355-6100
fiaf.org

In her new book Cinematic Overtures: How to Read Opening Scenes (Columbia University Press, $20, November 2017), Columbia professor and film historian Annette Insdorf writes that the beginning moments of Costa-Gavras’s masterful 1969 political thriller, Z, “places us metaphorically in the perspective of the investigator even before we meet him: we must be attentive to detail, skeptical, and then capable of seeing the larger picture. Given the film’s incorporation of flashbacks as well, Z builds a cumulative sense of inevitability that the truth will emerge.” Insdorf will be at FIAF on December 12 to sign copies of her book and introduce the 7:30 screening of Z, which is part of the CinéSalon series “Actor’s Choice: Lambert Wilson & Yves Montand,” curated by French actor and singer Wilson. (The film will also be shown at 4:00; both screenings will be followed by a wine reception.) The Algerian-French coproduction was adapted by Costa-Gavras and Jorge Semprún from Vassilis Vassilikos’s novel, a fictionalized account of the 1963 assassination of Greek left-wing antiwar activist Grigoris Lambrakis and the government cover-up that tried to make it look like an unavoidable accident. “Any similarity to real persons and events is not coincidental. It is intentional,” the credits explain. The film opens with rapid cuts of military and religious medals before zeroing in on a meeting in which the General (Pierre Dux) tells fellow law enforcement and governmental figures that they must eradicate the “ideological mildew,” referring to left-wing activists and, specifically, a deputy (Montand), based on Lambrakis, who is scheduled to speak at a large rally. After a violent incident, the Magistrate (Jean-Louis Trintignant) starts interviewing participants and witnesses and refuses to give up even when the General, the Colonel (Julien Guiomar), and other important figures threaten him as he seeks the truth, which doesn’t matter at all to those in power, who feel they understand the larger scheme of things. The Magistrate is helped by a photojournalist (producer Jacques Perrin) who is not afraid of asking penetrating questions and secretly snapping pictures. As the lies build, the truth slowly emerges, but that doesn’t mean the violence is over.

The Magistrate (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is intent on getting to the bottom of a government cover-up in classic political thriller

Costa-Gavras, a Greek expat who lives and works in France, has made many political films in his long career (State of Siege, L’Aveu, Missing, Amen.), influenced by his father, who was part of the anti-Nazi Greek resistance and was later imprisoned by Greece for being a Communist. Z might ostensibly be based on specific events, but unfortunately it’s a universal story that could take place just about anywhere in a world that has lost such leaders as Martin Luther King Jr., the Kennedy brothers, Yitzhak Rabin, Anwar Sadat, Mahatma Gandhi, Malcolm X, and others to assassination. The film, which is in French, never reveals where it is set, and most of the characters are not named, instead identified by their jobs: the deputy, the colonel, the general, the magistrate, etc. Cinematographer Raoul Coutard, best known for his work with Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, and Philippe Garrel, shoots the film in a cinéma-vérité style, favoring handheld cameras (he also plays the English surgeon); Françoise Bonnot’s editing keeps building the tension while flirting with documentary-like elements; and Mikis Theodorakis’s lively score complements the action with energy and fervor. There’s also a huge dose of sly humor bordering on farce throughout. The film is particularly relevant in America, where terms such as “fake news” and “truthiness” have taken hold and the forty-fifth president has repeatedly called for and/or condoned violence against his opponents, his rivals’ supporters, and the free press. The title refers to the French word “Zei,” which means “He lives!” a phrase used by protestors; when the military took over Greece in 1967, it banned the use of the letter “Z” on placards and graffiti, along with many other things, which are listed over the closing credits. “Z” was nominated for five Oscars — Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director, Best Editing, and Best Foreign Language Film, winning the latter two; it was the first film to be nominated for both Best Picture and Best Foreign Language Film. In addition, Trintignant (Amour, The Conformist, A Man and a Woman) was named Best Actor at Cannes. “Actor’s Choice” concludes December 19 with Jérôme Salle’s The Odyssey, with Lambert Wilson, Pierre Niney, and Audrey Tatou.

SPECIAL SCREENING: THE MISSING PICTURE

Director Rithy Panh uses dioramas to fill in the gaps in Oscar-nominated The Missing Picture

THE MISSING PICTURE (L’IMAGE MANQUANTE) (Rithy Panh, 2013)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Tuesday, December 12, $15, 7:00
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.themissingpicture.bophana.org

In conjunction with the December 15-16 U.S. premiere of Bangsokol: A Requiem for Cambodia as part of the 2017 Next Wave Festival, BAM is presenting Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture on December 12 at 7:00, with Panh participating in a postscreening Q&A with Ford Foundation program officer Chi-hui Yang. Winner of the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes and nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award, The Missing Picture is a brilliantly rendered look back at the director’s childhood in Cambodia just as Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge began their reign of terror in the mid-1970s. “I seek my childhood like a lost picture, or rather it seeks me,” narrator Randal Douc says in French, reciting darkly poetic and intimately personal text written by author Christophe Bataille (Annam) based on Panh’s life. Born in Phnom Penh in 1964, Panh, who has made such previous documentaries about his native country as S21, The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine and Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell and wrote the 2012 book L’élimination with Bataille, was faced with a major challenge in telling his story; although he found remarkable archival footage of the communist Angkar regime, there are precious few photographs or home movies of his family and the community where he grew up. So he had sculptor Sarith Mang hand-carve and paint wooden figurines that Panh placed in dioramas to detail what happened to his friends, relatives, and neighbors. Panh’s camera hovers over and zooms into the dioramas, bringing these people, who exist primarily only in memory, to vivid life. When a person disappears, Panh depicts their carved representatives flying through the sky, as if finally achieving freedom amid all the horrors.

He delves into the Angkar’s propaganda movement and sloganeering — the “great leap forward,” spread through film and other methods — as the rulers sent young men and women into forced labor camps. “With film too, the harvests are glorious,” Douc states as women are shown, in black-and-white, working in the fields. “There is grain. There are the calm, determined faces. Like a painting. A poem. At last I see the Revolution they so promised us. It exists only on film.” It’s a stark comparison to cinematographer Prum Mésa’s modern-day shots of the wind blowing through lush green fields, devoid of people. The Missing Picture is an extraordinarily poignant memoir that uses the director’s personal tale as a microcosm for what happened in Cambodia during the 1970s, employing the figures and dioramas to compensate for “the missing pictures.” Like such other documentaries as Jessica Wu’s Protagonist and In the Realms of the Unreal, Michel Gondry’s Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?, Jeff Malmberg’s Marwencol, and Zachary Heinzerling’s Cutie and the Boxer, which incorporate animation, puppetry, and/or miniatures to enhance the narrative or fill in gaps, Panh makes creative use of an unexpected artistic technique, this time concentrating on painful history as well as personal and collective memory.