this week in film and television

JAPAN CUTS: HARUNEKO

Soro Hakimoto’s Haruneko takes viewers into the strange and alluring dark night of the soul

FESTIVAL OF NEW JAPANESE FILM: HARUNEKO (SPRING CAT) (はるねこ) (Soro Hakimoto, 2016)
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Sunday, July 16, 8:45
Festival runs July 13-23
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org
www.haruneko-movie.com

Writer, director, editor, and composer Soro Hakimoto’s cinematic debut, Haruneko, opens with a swirling, unidentifiable image and gently haunting music featuring portentous voices that fade away as a misty forest emerges and an old white car appears, complete with a black cat. “Let’s sing,” the young driver (Keisuke Yamamoto) mumbles to himself as an old man (Yohta Kawase) looks steadily in front of him in the backseat. It’s an alluring beginning to a film that includes so many classic Japanese movie tropes: ghosts, ominous felines, yakuza, a mysterious forest, sudden bursts of singing, poorly translated subtitles, and a perplexing plot. Amid a lush green landscape is a lone cabin, where people come to die. It is operated by the Manager (Yamamoto) with the help of a young boy named Haru (Ryuto Iwata); also there are the boy’s piano-playing sister (Minako Akatsuka), their grandmother (Lily), and an old man (Min Tanaka) who sits in a rocking chair on the porch. In the middle of the forest is a dark area where the Manager, dressed in a striking white tuxedo, hosts a magic lantern show, spouting poetry and breaking out into uplifting J-pop as slides of a person’s life are projected onto a screen. “Petals are dancing in the wind to celebrate our meeting and departing,” the Manager says. “What is what you see to you? What is not what you don’t see to you?” Later the café is visited by a distraught and crazed yakuza on the run (Yo Takahashi) and a longhaired man (Llon Kawai) with a selfie stick who has committed a horrific atrocity, both seeking, in their own ways, to end their misery. Through it all, the residents of the café remain calm and understanding as their visitors face their destiny.

Produced by Shinji Aoyama (Eureka, Tokyo Park) and Takenori Sento (Ringu, H Story), the film recalls Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s elegiac Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, an exquisite tale of death and rebirth. Hokimoto made Haruneko shortly after the loss of his father, a stage designer, and there are certainly elements that evoke a man’s trying to come to terms with just what death is. Not all of it makes sense — wait till you see the band made up of adults in white cat masks — but Hokimoto is not overly concerned with that, instead concentrating on stunning visuals courtesy of documentary cinematographer Yoi Suzuki and glorious musical numbers. There are also some very funny moments alongside all the weirdness. “Reveal everything. Admit everything. Show everything. Get out everything. Hide nothing,” the Manager sings as men and women in black dance wildly and the forest comes alive with electrifying energy. Haruneko is making its North American premiere July 16 at 8:45 in the Experimental Spotlight section of Japan Society’s Japan Cuts: Festival of New Japanese Cinema, which continues through July 23 with such other works as Konrad Aderer’s Resistance at Tule Lake, Akira Nagai’s Teiichi: Battle of Supreme High, Sion Sono’s Anti-Porno, and Jean-Gabriel Périot’s Summer Lights.

BACK10: 2007 — BRUNCH MOVIE: AMERICAN GANGSTER

Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington) does whatever is necessary to succeed in Ridley Scott’s American Gangster

AMERICAN GANGSTER (Ridley Scott, 2007)
Nitehawk Cinema
136 Metropolitan Ave. between Berry St. & Wythe Ave.
Sunday, July 16, 11:00 am
Series runs through August 26
718-384-3980
nitehawkcinema.com

Nitehawk Cinema turns back the clock a decade for its summer series “Back10: 2007,” presenting sixteen films that premiered that year, which saw No Country for Old Men nab Best Picture, Daniel Day-Lewis (There Will Be Blood) win Best Actor, and Marion Cotillard (La Vie en Rose) capture the Best Actress trophy at the eightieth Academy Awards. The series begins July 15 at midnight with David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises, followed Sunday morning by American Gangster. Based on a true story, Ridley Scott’s American Gangster tracks the path of two very different men during the Vietnam War era. Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington) is a proud, dedicated man from poor southern roots who is determined to become the most respected and loved drug lord of Harlem. Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe) is an honest-to-a-fault Jewish cop studying to become a lawyer while failing miserably in his personal life. Cold, calculating, and smooth as silk, Lucas will do whatever is necessary to ensure his absolute success, including shooting another player in the head in plain view on an uptown street. Meanwhile, Roberts becomes a pariah in the corrupt police department when he finds nearly a million dollars in cash and turns it in. As the war escalates in Southeast Asia, Lucas and Roberts are both on a dangerous road that threatens to explode all around them.

Filmed in New York City, American Gangster — featuring an excellent script by Steven Zaillian and intense, superb direction from Scott (Blade Runner, Alien — is a compelling thinking man’s mob pic, a worthy successor to (and mash-up of) such genre classics as The French Connection, Serpico, and New Jack City. The diverse all-star cast also includes Chiwetel Ejiofor, RZA, T.I., Josh Brolin, Carla Gugino, Cuba Gooding Jr., Armand Assante, Idris Elba, Joe Morton, Roger Bart, Common, Kevin Corrigan, John Hawkes, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, Norman Reedus, and the great Ruby Dee and Clarence Williams III. Nominated for two Oscars — Dee for Best Supporting Actress and Arthur Max and Beth Rubino for Best Art Direction — American Gangster is screening July 16 at 11:00 in the morning in Nitehawk’s “Back10” series, which continues through August 26 with such other decade-old fare as J. A. Bayona’s The Orphanage, Rob Zombie’s Halloween reboot, Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton, Jason Reitman’s Juno, and Danny Boyle’s Sunshine.

FALSE CONFESSIONS

Araminte (Isabelle Huppert) and Dorante (Louis Garrel) contemplate love and romance in False Confessions

FALSE CONFESSIONS (LES FAUSSES CONFIDENCES) (Luc Bondy, 2016)
Angelika Film Center, 18 West Houston St. at Mercer St., 212-995-2570
Lincoln Plaza Cinema, 1886 Broadway between 62nd & 63rd Sts., 212-757-2280
Opens Friday, July 14
bigworldpictures.org

Swiss-born French opera and theater director Luc Bondy also made several films during his five-decade career, the last of which, False Confessions, opens on Bastille Day at the Angelika and Lincoln Plaza. Based on Pierre Carlet de Chamberlain de Marivaux’s 1737 play, Les Fausses Confidences, the film was made at the same time Bondy was directing a stage version of the romantic comedy of manners at the Théâtre de l’Odéon; during the day, he would shoot scenes for the film, and the same cast would then perform at the theater for a live audience at night. The mesmerizing Isabelle Huppert stars as Araminte, a wealthy, and very sexy, widow who is convinced by her valet, Dubois (Yves Jacques), to hire the innately handsome Dorante (Louis Garrel) as her private secretary. Dubois’s plan is to have his former boss, Dorante, woo Araminte and marry her for her money. But Araminte is already being courted by the dastardly Count (Jean-Pierre Malo), who is also lording over her with a questionable legal dispute that he promises will go away once they are wed. Meanwhile, Dorante’s uncle, Monsieur Rémy (Bernard Verley), is trying to make a reputable match between his nephew and Marton (Manon Combes), Araminte’s servant and companion. Chaos soon reigns as Dorante does indeed fall in love with Araminte, who understands that social graces prevent their union, and Marton falls head-over-heels for Dorante.

Marton (Manon Combes) tries to hold on to Dorante (Louis Garrel) in Luc Bondy’s adaptation of Marivaux play

Bondy and cowriter Geoffrey Layton have moved the setting to twenty-first-century Paris, but the story remains in the eighteenth, creating an often troubling dichotomy. Both Araminte and Marton desire Dorante, but Garrel plays him with a stiff indifference, so it is hard to see his charm. Bulle Ogier goes way over the top as Araminte’s annoyingly gauche mother, Madame Argante, who orders her daughter to fire Dorante and marry the Count. Various miscommunications, both accidental and intended, only serve to continue the rather droll, uninspired plot, which, despite all the talk of love and romance, is curiously dull. But at the center of it all is Huppert, one of the world’s greatest actresses, who is radiant throughout it all, looking fabulous in Moidele Bickel’s costumes, whether doing Tai Chi, sitting on a park bench, or draped in an elegant white silk robe. Aside from Huppert, the production, which was completed by Bondy’s wife, Marie-Louise Bischofberger, after his death in November 2015 at the age of sixty-seven, is rather lifeless; as the finale reveals, there is a big difference between stage and screen, and what works for one does not necessarily work for the other. Bondy leaves behind quite a legacy, but this TV-movie version of the Marivaux play is a lesser part of it.

ENDLESS POETRY

Alejandro Jodorowsky guides his younger self (Adan Jodorowsky, his real-life son) through Endless Poetry

ENDLESS POETRY (POESIA SIN FIN) (Alejandro Jodorowsky, 2016)
Landmark Sunshine Cinema
143 East Houston St. between First & Second Aves.
Opens Friday, July 14
212-330-8182
www.landmarktheatres.com
www.endlesspoetrythemovie.com

Eccentric auteur Alejandro Jodorowsky, the mastermind behind such midnight-movie classics as 1971’s El Topo and 1973’s The Holy Mountain, once again turns his magical realist eye on his own life as a young poet in Chile in the 1940s in Endless Poetry, picking up where he left off in the autobiographical saga he began in 2013’s The Dance of Reality, his first film in more than two decades. Starting with his family’s departure from the village of Tocopilla for the big city of Santiago, where Jodorowsky’s father, Jaime (Brontis Jodorowsky), opened a clothing shop, the film quickly dispenses with any pretense of realist narrative as it explodes into a phantasmagoric bildungsroman, shot in eye-popping color by master Hong Kong cinematographer Christopher Doyle (In the Mood for Love, Last Life in the Universe). With one son, Brontis, playing his father; another son, musician Adan, playing Alejandro as a young man (he also composed the score); his grandson, Jeremías Herskovits, portraying him as a boy (Alejandrito); and occasional appearances by himself as . . . himself, interacting with his onscreen/offscreen family, Alejandro mixes time, space, and storytelling with a strong dose of the psychotherapeutic and shamanic blend he calls Psychomagic. To further the incestuous casting, Sara, his mother, and Stella Díaz Varín, his muse and lover, are played by the same actress, opera singer Pamela Flores, while his circle of friends, most of whom went on to become respected poets (Leandro Taub as the wild and crazy Enrique Lihn, Flores as Diaz Varín, Felipe Rios as Nicanor Parra), clowns, near-döppelgangers, little people (Julia Avendaño is a stand-out as Pequeñita), masked skeletons and devils, sex and nudity, and exuberant tarot card readers tumble off the screen in this disturbing, often surreal, but somehow endearing and engaging tale of the artist as a young man, searching for the meaning of his life as well as life in general.

endless poetry 2

Reminiscent of Federico Fellini’s semiautobiographical Oscar-winning Amarcord, Endless Poetryis one of Jodorowsky’s most approachable works, centering on the familiar Romantic struggle of a young male artist coming-of-age against his petit bourgeois family and oppressive society, represented here by the rise of real-life dictator Carlos Ibáñez del Campo (Bastián Bodenhofer). A sly sense of humor and fondness for his youthful follies and friends brighten the proceedings, as does the spectacular production design by Alejandro himself. The final scenes of young Jodorowsky’s departure for Paris demonstrate that this old master still has the power to move an audience with strange and beautiful images that shock and unsettle — especially if one knows exactly how intertwined the relationships of the actors are with the characters they play. Endless Poetry opens July 14 at the Landmark Sunshine, with Alejandro participating in Q&As after the 7:00 show and before the 10:00 show on opening night and with Adan following the 7:00 show on July 15.

JAPAN CUTS: HENGYORO

Go Takamine is back with his first film in nearly twenty years, the surreal and magical Hengyoro

FESTIVAL OF NEW JAPANESE FILM: HENGYORO (QUEER FISH LANE) (変魚路) (Go Takamine, 2017)
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Saturday, July 15, 2:30
Festival runs July 13-23
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org

“Has my head been emptied? No matter how I cut this film, the blood of Okinawa spews forth,” iconoclastic Japanese auteur Go Takamine says about Hengyoro, his first film since 1989’s Untamagiru. The Okinawan-born writer and director has been making shorts, features, and documentaries about his home island since 1974, including Okinawan Dream Show, Okinawan Chirudai, and 1985’s extraordinary Paradise View. Hengyoro, which is having its international premiere July 15 as part of Japan Society’s annual Japan Cuts Festival of New Japanese Cinema, is set in Patai Village (Ifepataijyo) on Okinawa, where despondent souls who have survived death reside. Aging actors Tarugani (Taira Susumu) and Papajo (Kitamura Saburou) are putting on the “chain plays” Tomaiaka and Kurukanizashi, which combine film and theater. Meanwhile, Kame is making a plaster cast of a partially nude woman, hard rocker Missiler dances madly, serenading folksinger Ryukyu Lewd Bug leads a pack of unusual animals, and shop owner Shimabukuro Seitoku sends his trio of ear-cutting wives, the Bibiju, after Tarugani and Papajo. There is also an underwater plastic surgery lab, dragonfly spy planes, illegal aphrodisiacs, cranial ant insertion, a magical red cord and matching bag, and explosions that go “Pshoo.”

Along the way, Go references Bruce Conner, Bill Morrison, Ingmar Bergman, and Alejandro Jodorowsky, so don’t expect to make much sense of the story. Gorgeously photographed by Takagi Shunichi and Hirata Mamoru, showing off the landscape as well as Sakata Kiyoko’s dazzling costumes, the film roams from black-and-white to color, from regular speed to slow motion, incorporating multiple genres and narrators amid changing film stocks as Go and editor Shun’ichi Takagi imaginatively mix in decomposing celluloid and archival footage Go shot years ago; he also populates the film with superimposed miniature people on brain coral and ghostly faces in trees, all set to a wildly diverse soundtrack by Nobuyuki Kikuchi. So what’s it all about? Is it a surreal commentary on WWII and the dropping of the atomic bombs? A sly take on the discrimination Okinawans have encountered from Japan? An exploration of storytelling itself? Does it even matter? Hengyoro, whose English title is Queer Fish Lane, is a visual and aural treat, an artistic feast that is as strange and confounding as it is entertaining and endearing. “We’ll follow wherever our path leads,” Papajo tells Tarugani; we’ll follow wherever Go’s path takes us. Hengyoro is screening July 15 at 2:30 in the Experimental Spotlight section of Japan Cuts; the festival runs July 13-23 with such other works as Yuki Tanada’s My Dad and Mr. Ito, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Daguerrotype, Sion Sono’s Anti-Porno, and the North American premiere of the restoration of Seijun Suzuki’s 1980 Zigeunerweisen.

BRONX GOTHIC

Okwui Okpokwasili takes viewers behind the scenes of her one-woman show in Bronx Gothic (photo courtesy of Grasshopper Film)

BRONX GOTHIC (Andrew Rossi, 2017)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
July 12-25
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org
grasshopperfilm.com

“Okwui’s job is to scare people, just to scare them to get them to kind of wake up,” dancer, choreographer, and conceptualist Ralph Lemon says of his frequent collaborator and protégée Okwui Okpokwasili in the powerful new documentary Bronx Gothic. Directed by Okpokwasili’s longtime friend Andrew Rossi, the film follows Okpokwasili during the last three months of her tour for her semiautobiographical one-woman show, Bronx Gothic, a fierce, confrontational, yet heart-wrenching production that hits audiences right in the gut. Rossi cuts between scenes from the show — he attached an extra microphone to Okpokwasili’s body to create a stronger, more immediate effect on film — to Parkchester native Okpokwasili giving backstage insight, visiting her Nigerian-born, Bronx-based parents, and spending time with her husband, Peter Born, who directed and designed the show, and their young daughter, Umechi. The performance itself begins with Okpokwasili already moving at the rear of the stage, shaking and vibrating relentlessly, facing away from people as they filter in and take their seats. She continues those unnerving movements for nearly a half hour (onstage but not in the film) before finally turning around and approaching a mic stand, where she portrays a pair of eleven-year-old girls exchanging deeply personal notes, talking about dreams, sexuality, violence, and abuse as they seek their own identity. “Bronx Gothic is about two girls sharing secrets. . . . It is about the adolescent body going into a new body, inhabiting the body of a brown girl in a world that privileges whiteness,” Okpokwasili, whose other works include Poor People’s TV Room and the Bessie-winning Pent-Up: A Revenge Dance, explains in the film. National Medal of Arts recipient Lemon adds, “It’s about racism, gender politics — it’s not just about these two little black girls in the Bronx.” Rossi includes clips of Okpokwasili performing at MoMA in Lemon’s “On Line” in 2011, developing Bronx Gothic at residencies at Baryshnikov Arts Center and New York Live Arts, and participating in talkbacks at Alverno College in Milwaukee and the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, where the tour concluded, right next to her childhood church, which brings memories surging back to her.

Okwui Okpokwasili nuzzles her daughter, Umechi, in poignant and timely documentary (photo courtesy of Grasshopper Film)

Rossi is keenly aware of the potentially controversial territory he has entered. “As a white man, I was conscious of the complexity and implications of embarking on a project that revolves around the experience of African American females,” he points out in his director’s statement. “But fundamentally, I believe in an artist’s creative ability to explore topics that are foreign to the artist’s own background. I think this takes on even more resonance when the work itself has an explicit objective to ‘grow our empathic capacity,’ as Okwui says of Bronx Gothic, [seeking] an audience that is composed of ‘black women, black men, Asian women, Asian men, white women, white men, Latina women, Latina men….’” Cinematographers Bryan Sarkinen and Rossi (Page One: Inside the New York Times, The First Monday in May) can’t get enough of Okpokwasili’s mesmerizing face, which commands attention, whether she’s smiling, singing, or crying, as well as her body, which is drenched with sweat in the show. “We have been acculturated to watching brown bodies in pain. I’m asking you to see the brown body. I’m going to be falling, hitting a hardwood floor, and hopefully there is a flood of feeling for a brown body in pain,” Okpokwasili says. Meanwhile, shots of the audience reveal some individuals aghast, some hypnotized, and others looking away. Editor Andrew Coffman and coeditors Thomas Rivera Montes and Rossi shift from Okpokwasili performing to just being herself, but the film has occasional bumpy transitions; also, Okpokwasili, who wrote the show when she was pregnant, does the vast majority of the talking, echoing her one-woman show but also at times bordering on becoming self-indulgent. (Okpokwasili produced the film with Rossi, while Born serves as one of the executive producers.) But the documentary is a fine introduction to this unique and fearless creative force and a fascinating examination of the development of a timely, brave work. Bronx Gothic opens July 12 at Film Forum, with Okpokwasili and Rossi taking part in Q&As at the 7:00 screenings on July 12, 14, and 15.

FILMS ON THE GREEN: THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP

Gael García Bernal and Charlotte Gainsbourg star in Michel Gondry’s delightfully silly The Science of Sleep

THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP (LA CIENCIA DEL SUEÑO) (Michel Gondry, 2006)
J. Hood Wright Park
351 Fort Washington Ave.
Wednesday, July 12, free, 8:30
Series continues Friday nights through July 28 (and September 7)
frenchculture.org
www.nycgovparks.org

The tenth anniversary of Films on the Green continues with a bonus Wednesday screening July 12 in J. Hood Wright Park of eclectic auteur Michel Gondry’s feature-length debut as both writer and director. The Science of Sleep is a complex, confusing, kaleidoscopic stew that is as charming as it is frustrating. Gael García Bernal (The Motorcycle Diaries, Mozart in the Jungle) stars as the juvenile but endearing Stéphane, a young man in a silly hat who has trouble differentiating dreams from reality. The childlike Stéphane becomes friends with his new neighbor, Stephanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg, daughter of Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin), who still has plenty of the child left inside her as well. Stéphane has a job his mother (Miou-Miou) got him, toiling for a small company that makes calendars, alongside the hysterical Guy (Alain Chabat), who can’t help constantly poking fun at coworkers Serge (Sacha Bourdo) and Martine (Aurélia Petit).

Gondry, who is also responsible for the brilliant Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as well as the highly entertaining Dave Chappelle’s Block Party and the bizarre Human Nature, uses low-tech green-screening and stop-motion animation to reveal Stéphane’s fantasy world, bringing to mind such masters as Jan Svankmajer and the Brothers Quay. Unfortunately, just as Stéphane can’t tell what’s real from what he’s dreaming, viewers will often have difficulty as well; some of the plot turns are downright infuriating, and Stéphane’s TV show teeters on the edge of embarrassing. But you’ll also be hard-pressed not to leave the park feeling like a kid in a candy store. Presented in partnership with the Mexican Cultural Institute of New York, the screening, which is in French and English, will be shown with Spanish subtitles. Produced by the French Embassy, FACE Foundation, and NYC Parks, Films on the Green continues Friday nights through July 28 (before a September 7 finale) with such other French works as Marcel Carné’s Port of Shadows selected by Laurie Anderson, Jean Grémillon’s Lumière d’été picked and introduced by Matías Piñeiro, Jean Renoir’s Elena and Her Men chosen by Isabella Rossellini, and François Truffaut’s The Wild Child selected by James Ivory.