this week in film and television

BELLA! THIS WOMAN’S PLACE IS IN THE HOUSE

Bella Abzug defiantly makes her case in Jeff L. Lieberman’s new documentary opening at the Quad

BELLA (Jeff L. Lieberman, 2023)
Village East by Angelika
181-189 Second Ave. at Twelfth St.
August 18-24
www.angelikafilmcenter.com

When I was a kid, we often wondered, “WWBD?” — “What would Bella do?,” referencing Bella Abzug, a towering New York City political figure beginning in the 1970s. Today too many people might answer that question with “Bella who?”

Jeff L. Lieberman’s new documentary, Bella! This Woman’s Place Is in the House, lays out precisely who she is and what she did during her roller-coaster career as an ahead-of-her-time advocate for change whose campaign slogan was, in pure Bella fashion: “This Woman’s Place Is in the House.”

“She came out and screamed about what was going on with women. It really upset the white male power structure, who was being frightened by women coming in and taking over their power. That didn’t stop Bella,” one of her campaign aides, Arnie Weiss, says. “She talked about the issues that mattered to me: women’s rights, gay rights, civil rights, nuclear disarmament, protecting the environment, ending the war in Vietnam,” actress, singer, and activist Barbra Streisand explains. And former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi points out: “She knew that she wasn’t there just for Bella and her generation, that she was there to make sure that the doors were open for what came next.”

Born Bella Savitzky in the Bronx in 1920, the year that women got the right to vote, Bella was a fighter from the start, challenging the traditions at her parents’ synagogue and enrolling as one of only six women out of 120 in her Columbia Law School class. She married Martin Abzug, had two daughters, and then, in 1950, began five decades of battling for minorities and the underprivileged, defending the wrongly accused Willie McGee in a rape case in Mississippi. She railed against Joe McCarthy, befriended Malcolm X’s family after he was assassinated, and joined the “Women Strike for Peace” movement, protesting against nuclear weapons.

After helping New York City mayor John Lindsay get reelected in 1969, she decided to run for office herself, challenging seven-term incumbent Leonard Farbstein in the primary and talk show host Barry Farber in the general election for Manhattan’s 19th Congressional District seat. She was unrelenting, feisty, and loud, adopting a trademark look by always wearing a hat, building up a wealth of supporters as well as plenty of detractors.

“She was called all kinds of names. She was loved and definitely hated,” her daughter Eve, a social worker, says. She had to take “all those barbs and even worse from men who should have known better . . . a real organized effort to create a monster who’s not liked,” Phil Donahue explains. “She went with the hat, and she took off the gloves,” actress and activist Shirley MacLaine emphasizes.

Through archival news footage, home movies, audio diaries, photographs, and new interviews, Lieberman celebrates Abzug’s fierce courage as she refused to allow anything or anyone to get in her way as she sought equality across the board. “To all of us young kids, Bella represented the mother that we all wished we had,” gay rights activist Allen Roskoff says, recalling a night when Abzug campaigned at the Continental Baths in front of a bevy of naked men.

Among those who discuss Abzug and her legacy are many people who were with her in the trenches, including journalist and activist Gloria Steinem, activist and politician Ronnie Eldridge, Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, campaign aide and undersecretary of commerce Eric Hirschhorn, actress and activist Marlo Thomas, press secretary and historian Harold Holzer, activist and author Letty Cottin Pogrebin, political consultant Dick Morris, Congresswoman Maxine Waters, Treasury secretary Jack Lew, jewelry designer Lois Sasson, poet and activist Robin Morgan, author and actress Renée Taylor, administrative aide and later literary agent Esther Newberg, and Congressman Charles Rangel in addition to former first lady and senator Hilary Rodham Clinton, New York Times editor Max Frankel, former NYC mayor David Dinkins, Battling Bella author Leandra Zarnow, and Bridgette McGee, granddaughter of the executed Willie McGee.

Lieberman (The Amazing Nina Simone, Re-Emerging: The Jews of Nigeria) tracks Abzug as she argues for the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, runs for the Senate and mayor, shakes up the seminal 1977 Women’s Conference in Houston, and confronts CIA director George H. W. Bush about a file on her, all the while enjoying a loving relationship with Martin. Former traffic reporter Captain Dan Rosenson relates a remarkable story of attempting to helicopter Abzug into a 1971 antiwar protest that had turned violent.

Abzug, who died in 1998 at the age of seventy-seven, was not always successful — she lost several elections, and many of the policies she supported failed to make it into law — but she paved a trail for others to follow. She was so far ahead of her time that it would be fascinating to see how she would fare in today’s painfully divisive America.

“She was just too real,” Steinem says.

“She was just too early,” Tomlin adds.

“I never felt like I couldn’t have it all,” Abzug herself said.

The film passionately reestablishes Abzug’s well-earned credentials and importance to America’s modern sociopolitical history. In 2015, Bank St., where she lived, was renamed Bella Abzug Way; Bella Abzug Park opened in Hudson Yards in 2022; and Mayor Eric Adams has proclaimed August 18, 2023, as Bella Abzug Day, in honor of the world premiere of Bella! in the Village.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

OWNERS (VLASTNÍCI)

A co-op board meeting turns to the absurdly ridiculous in Jiří Havelka’s Owners

OWNERS (AKA THE OWNERS) (VLASTNÍCI) (Jiří Havelka, 2019)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
August 18-24
212-255-2243
quadcinema.com

Best. Co-op. Meeting. Ever.

If you’re considering joining your co-op board or just moving into a co-op, you need to first watch Jiří Havelka’s absurdist darker-than-dark comedy, Owners. Nearly the entire ninety-minute film, Havelka’s impressive debut, takes place in a community room in an apartment complex in Prague, where the board is meeting to discuss various important, and not-so-important, issues. The exacting proceedings turn into a kind of residential Twelve Angry Men, except in this case everybody is guilty of something.

Each of the characters sitting around the long, rectangular table come to the meeting with their own baggage, much of which gets unceremoniously unpacked. The chairperson is Mrs. Zahrádková (Tereza Ramba), who has three young children and has only the sincerest intentions to improve everyone’s living conditions by fixing the attic, installing an elevator, putting in safety bars, and making other necessary changes. She is accompanied by her husband, Mr. Zahrádka (Vojtech Kotek), who, after some debate — nearly everything, no matter how mundane, requires deliberation and a vote — is okayed to take the minutes.

Ms. Horváthová (Dagmar Havlová) has a lot to say about noise, water consumption, and pigeons. The virulently anti-elevator Mrs. Procházková (Pavla Tomicová) is subletting space to a group of handsome young African students and is joined by her “administrator,” Mr. Novák (Ondrej Malý), a mysterious jack of all trades who apparently has a company that can perform any task the co-op requires.

Mrs. Procházková (Pavla Tomicová) knows exactly what she wants, and doesn’t, in hilarious dark comedy

The stern Mrs. Roubícková (Klára Melísková) makes sure the HOA guidelines are strictly adhered to. The somewhat simple-minded Mr. Svec (David Novotný) is sitting in for his elderly mother, who is ill; he seems more concerned with the cake Mr. Zahrádka made and the bottle of Honey Jack than the numerous disputes. People can’t stop bringing up the sexual orientation of Mr. Nitranský (Andrej Polák), who threatens to sue.

At one end of the table are the well-dressed Cermák twins (Krystof Hádek and Stanislav Majer), attending their first meeting as they decide what to do with the their recently deceased father’s apartment and apparently have connections that can help the co-op with any legal or financial matters. At the other end of the table is the unkempt Mr. Kubát (Jirí Lábus), who refuses to approve any changes whatsoever, preferring the ways things were done under Socialism. In a far corner, one of Mr. Kubát’s tenants, Mr. Sokol (Ladislav Trojan), sits quietly, reading a book, saying nothing.

Near the door is a new couple, Mr. Bernásek (Jirí Cerný) and his pregnant wife, Mrs. Bernásková (Marie Sawa), who look on incredulously without commenting, wondering what the hell they have gotten themselves into. But nobody is allowed to leave; “You’re on the attendance sheet,” Mrs. Roubícková yells whenever anyone tries to exit the madness.

“Does the word solidarity mean anything to you?” Mr. Nitranský asks facetiously.

“Look, this is a ridiculous comedy,” Mr. Kubát says, just about the only statement no one argues with.

Written and directed by playwright, actor, presenter, and theater director Havelka based on his play The Society of Owners (Condominium), Owners is about much more than the power that comes with home ownership. It’s a brutally cynical parable of the political situation in the Czech Republic and the world, as liberals, conservatives, moderates, and extremists fight over the smallest details, resulting in little if anything getting accomplished and making no one happy but the anarchists. It’s like a divisive conversation on social media, with no hope of ever changing anyone’s mind.

“I want something to finally happen or the building will rot away before our eyes,” Mrs. Zahrádková declares, but no one is listening.

Havelka tackles sexuality, race, gender, age, health care, greed, ethics, and more in the film, which was shot in ten days with two cameras by cinematographer Martin Žiaran. Havelka and editor Otakar Šenovský occasionally insert blink-and-you’ll-miss-them snippets of apartment interiors and little problems that represent the crumbling infrastructure of democracy. Anežka Straková’s set design features a large print of Frans Snyders’s seventeenth-century Deer Hunt, a painting of dogs tearing apart a deer that adds a surprise touch of humor that made me bark out loud with laughter.

The film begins and ends in elegant splendor with, respectively, Jan Dismas Zelenka’s Baroque compositions De profundis and Sub olea pacis: Melodrama de Sancto Wenceslao, which translates to “Under the Olive Tree of Peace and the Palm Tree of Virtue the Crown of Bohemia Splendidly Shines Before the Whole World: Melodrama to Saint Wenceslaus.”

You won’t find any olive tree of peace or palm tree of virtue in this co-op, but you will find a hilarious cast of characters who, frighteningly, are often too close for comfort.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

F. GARY GRAY IN ACTION

Biopic follows N.W.A straight outta Compton as they take their case to the people

STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON (F. Gary Gray, 2015)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Saturday, August 19, 9:40, and Sunday, August 20, 9:10
Series runs August 11-20
www.straightouttacompton.com
metrograph.com

Born in New York City and raised in South Los Angeles, F. Gary Gray got his start making hip-hop videos for such artists as Outkast, Dr. Dre, TLC, and Ice Cube before directing his first film, the 1995 favorite Friday, starring cowriter Ice Cube, Chris Tucker, and Nia Long. Since then he has nine more films under his belt, focusing on action crime thrillers.

Running at Metrograph August 11-20, “F. Gary Gray in Action” consists of five of his hottest flicks, beginning with 2009’s Law Abiding Citizen, in which an honest man (Gerard Butler) battles a prosecutor (Jamie Foxx) after a home invasion. In 1996’s Set It Off, Jada Pinkett, Vivica A. Fox, Kimberly Elise, and Queen Latifah play friends who decide to rob a bank. In 2005, Gray helmed Be Cool, the sequel to the 1995 smash Get Shorty, both based on Elmore Leonard novels; this follow-up brings back John Travolta as Miami mobster Chili Palmer, who now gets involved in the music industry, joined by Uma Thurman, Vince Vaughn, Cedric the Entertainer, Andre Benjamin, Steven Tyler, Christina Milian, Harvey Keitel, Dwayne Johnson, and Danny DeVito. Gray’s 2003 remake of Peter Collinson’s 1969 heist comedy, The Italian Job, upped the action ante, with Mark Wahlberg, Charlize Theron, Edward Norton, Jason Statham, Mos Def, Franky G, and Donald Sutherland.

The ten-day series concludes with 2015’s Straight Outta Compton, which comes barreling out of the gates with all the rage and fury of the 1988 title track that kicks off with Dr. Dre declaring, “You are now about to witness the strength of street knowledge.” The energetic film traces the rise and fall, or creation and dissolution, of N.W.A, the seminal south L.A. hip-hop group that changed music forever. In the late 1980s, Ice Cube (O’Shea Jackson Jr.), Dr. Dre (Corey Hawkins), Eazy-E (Jason Mitchell), MC Ren (Aldis Hodge), and DJ Yella (Neil Brown Jr.) formed a rap group that sought to capture the sound and feel of what was happening on the streets of Compton, from drugs and gangs to racist cops and poverty.

They were a smash hit, particularly their controversial song “Fuck Tha Police,” which set up confrontations with authorities as the band hit the road on a nationwide tour. But when Cube and Dre start questioning where all the money is going — Eazy-E and manager Jerry Heller (Paul Giamatti) seem to be doing a lot better than the rest of them — everything they have built up threatens to unravel. And once Suge Knight (R. Marcus Taylor) enters the picture, the violence level increases, and things start getting even more out of control.

Life threatens to get outta control for N.W.A in Straight Outta Compton

With Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, and Tomica Woods-Wright, Eazy-E’s widow, among the producers, Straight Outta Compton doesn’t pussyfoot around as the various characters make their cases for artistic and financial freedom while reinventing the music business. Juilliard graduate Hawkins (BlacKkKlansman, In the Heights) is outstanding as Dre, maintaining a calm demeanor even as all hell breaks loose around him, while Jackson Jr. (Just Mercy, Cocaine Bear) has trouble hitting the high notes portraying his father, Cube, and Mitchell (Detroit, Mudbound) gives Eazy-E an unpredictable nuance. Taylor (Baby Driver) wreaks havoc as Knight, the extremely dangerous cofounder of Death Row Records, who makes sure he gets what he wants, while Oscar nominee and Emmy winner Giamatti (Cinderella Man, Sideways) has a steady disposition as a white man in a black man’s world.

The music scenes are spectacular, especially a Detroit concert that turned into a showdown between the cops and N.W.A, and it’s cool to see Snoop Dogg (Keith Stanfield), Chuck D (Rogelio Douglas Jr.), and Tupac Shakur (Marcc Rose). The film wavers a bit when it tries to get overly sentimental or inject too many side stories; it’s best when it just forges ahead with the frenzy and furor that was N.W.A, taking on exasperating social conditions the only way they knew how. Straight Outta Compton also features several scenes in which primarily white cops harass black men and women that evoke what is still going on today around the country. Gray (Men in Black: International, A Man Apart) even throws in a fun reference to Friday when the band throws a naked woman out of a hotel party, telling her, “Bye, Felicia.” (If you don’t get the reference, look it up.) At the end of the song “Straight Outta Compton,” N.W.A concludes, “Damn, that shit was dope.” The same can be said of Gray’s dynamic film. Up next for Gray is the January 2024 Netflix heist thriller Lift, starring Kevin Hart.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

HARLEM WEEK: A GREAT DAY IN HARLEM AND MORE

Who: Uptown Dance Academy, the Gospel Caravan, IMPACT Repertory Theatre, Mama Foundation’s Sing Harlem! Choir, Bishop Hezekiah Walker & Choir, Ray Chew & the Harlem Music Festival All-Star Band featuring Nona Hendryx, more
What: Annual Harlem Week celebration
Where: U.S. Grant National Memorial Park, West 122nd St. at Riverside Dr.
When: Sunday, August 13, free, noon – 7:00 pm (festival runs August 9-16)
Why: One of the centerpieces of Harlem Week is “A Great Day in Harlem,” which takes place Sunday, August 13, as part of this annual summer festival. There will be an international village with booths selling food, clothing, jewelry, and more, as well as live music and dance divided into “Artz, Rootz & Rhythm,” “The Gospel Caravan,” “The Fashion Flava Fashion Show,” and “The Concert Under the Stars.” Among the performers are the Uptown Dance Academy, the Gospel Caravan, IMPACT Repertory Theatre, the Sing Harlem! Choir, and Bishop Hezekiah Walker & Choir. In addition, Ray Chew & the Harlem Music Festival All-Star Band, featuring Nona Hendryx, will perform a tribute to the one and only Tina Turner, who died in May at the age of eighty-three; Harry Belafonte, Tony Bennett, Miriam Makeba, and Tito Puente will also be honored.

The theme of the forty-ninth annual Harlem Week is “Be the Change: Hope. Joy. Love.”; it runs August 9-16 with such other free events as the panel discussion “Climate & Environmental Justice in Harlem: Storms, Heat & Wildfires,” A Harlem SummerStage concert, Senior Citizens Day, the Uptown Night Market, the Percy Sutton Harlem 5K Run & Walk & Children’s Run, “Choose Healthy Life Service of Renewal and Healing,” Great Jazz on the Great Hill in Central Park with Wycliffe Gordon and Bobby Sanabria, Imagenation Outdoor Film Festival screenings of Beat Street with DJ Spivey and Max Roach: The Drum Also Waltzes, a Youth Conference & Hackathon, Economic Development Day, an Arts & Culture Broadway Summit, Harlem on My Mind Conversations, a Jobs & Career Fair, and more. “We continue to build a stronger, more united Harlem, radiating hope, joy, and love throughout our beloved city,” Harlem Week chairman Lloyd Williams said in a statement.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

BEAUTIFUL BINOCHE

Quad series celebrating Juliette Binoche runs August 4-10 (artwork by Brianna Ashby)

BEAUTIFUL BINOCHE
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
August 4-10
quadcinema.com

In preparation for the August 11 opening of her latest feature, Emmanuel Carrère’s Between Two Worlds, the Quad is taking a look back at the career of award-winning French actress Juliette Binoche with eight of her most well known works. “Beautiful Binoche” kicks off August 3 with Philip Kaufman’s 1988 adaptation of recently deceased Czech author Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which had been thought to have been impossible to film. The nearly three-hour story of a love triangle set in the Czech Republic in the late 1960s is screening August 4 at 3:30 and 7:00; the first show will be introduced by Columbia professor and author Annette Insdorf, the second by producer Paul Zaentz.

Insdorf will also introduce the 5:00 screening on August 6 of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s 1993 Three Colours: Blue, about tragedy and liberty, the first of a trilogy, while Zaentz will be back August 6 at 7:00 to introduce Anthony Minghella’s 1996 The English Patient, for which Binoche won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her portrayal of a French-Canadian combat nurse during WWII. Louis Malle’s 1992 Damage, in which Binoche stars as a political femme fatale involved with a Member of Parliament played by Jeremy Irons, screens twice on Saturday, while Claire Denis’s 2017 Let the Sunshine In, loosely adapted from Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, is being shown twice on August 10, with the 5:00 screening introduced by Jourdain Searles.

Binoche, who has appeared in more than seventy films since her 1983 debut, has perhaps worked with more of the world’s greatest directors than any other living performer, an astounding array of international creators that also includes André Téchiné, Jean-Luc Godard, Leos Carax, Lasse Hallström, John Boorman, Abel Ferrara, Amos Gitai, Hou Hsiao-hsien, David Cronenberg, Sylvie Testud, Hirokazu Kore-eda, and Christophe Honoré. Below is a look at the three other films that are part of the Quad series, which runs August 4-10 and concludes with a sneak preview of Between Two Worlds.

Daniel Autieul and Juliette Binoche star in Michael Haneke’s Caché

CACHÉ (HIDDEN) (Michael Haneke, 2005)
Monday, August 7, 5:00 & 7:30
quadcinema.com
sonyclassics.com/cache

Michael Haneke was named Best Director at Cannes for Caché, a slow-moving yet gripping psychological drama about a seemingly happy French family whose lives are about to be torn apart. The film stars Daniel Auteil as Georges, the host of a literary public television talk show, and Juliette Binoche as his wife, Anne, a book editor. One day a mysterious videotape is left for them, showing a continuous shot of their house. More tapes follow, wrapped in childish drawings of a boy with blood coming out of his mouth. Fearing for the safety of their son, Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky), they go to the police, who say they cannot do anything until an actual crime has been committed. As the tapes reveal more information and invite more danger, Georges’s secrets and lies threaten the future of his marriage.

Caché is a tense, involving thriller that is both uncomfortable and captivating to watch. Haneke zooms in closely on the relationship between Georges and Anne, keeping all other characters in the background; in fact, there is no musical score or even any incidental music to enhance the searing emotions coming from Auteil and Binoche. Winner of numerous year-end critics awards for Best Foreign Language Film, Caché is screening August 5 at the Quad. Oh, and be sure to pay close attention to the long final shot for just one more crucial twist that many people in the audience will miss.

William Shimell and Juliette Binoche both play annoying characters you will not want to hang out with in Certified Copy

CERTIFIED COPY (COPIE CONFORME) (Abbas Kiarostami, 2010)
Tuesday, August 8, 5:00 & 7:00
quadcinema.com
www.ifcfilms.com

Writer, director, poet, photographer, editor, graphic designer, and painter Abbas Kiarostami was one of Iran’s leading filmmakers for nearly forty years before his death in 2016, compiling a resume that includes such important international films as Under the Olive Trees (1994), Taste of Cherry (1997), and The Wind Will Carry Us (1999). Certified Copy was his first feature made outside of his home country, a dreadfully boring and annoying art-infused romantic comedy set in Italy. Juliette Binoche was named Best Actress at Cannes for her starring role as an unnamed single mother and antiques dealer who is obsessed with English author James Miller’s (British opera star William Shimell) book on the history and meaning of art replicas, titled Certified Copy. Inexplicably, the two strangers are soon on a bizarre sort-of date, driving through Tuscany and becoming involved in a series of vignettes about love and marriage, literature and art, and other topics.

Both characters are seriously flawed and emotionally unstable in ways that make them unattractive to watch, especially in obvious set-ups that either go nowhere or exactly where you think they’re going. While Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke made the somewhat similar Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, in which two strangers from different countries spend a day together (but mostly by themselves), the sexual tension and excitement always building, Certified Copy is more reminiscent of Hans Canova’s ridiculous Conversations with Other Women, in which Aaron Eckhart and Helena Bonham Carter play wedding guests with a past whom viewers can’t wait to just shut up and get off the screen. Don’t let the supposed adult dialogue of the overrated Certified Copy fool you into thinking it’s an intelligent, mature look at believable relationships; instead, it feels like a staid copy of other, better films you think you’ve seen but can’t remember — and won’t care. Certified Copy is screening on August 8 at the Quad; the 7:00 show will be introduced by film critic Simon Abrams, who likely appreciates it more than I do.

Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart mix fact and fiction in Olivier Assayas’s Clouds of Sils Maria

CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA (Olivier Assayas, 2014)
Wednesday, August 9, 5:00 & 7:30
quadcinema.com
www.ifcfilms.com

The related concepts of time and reality wind through Olivier Assayas’s beautifully poetic, melancholy Clouds of Sils Maria, much like actual snakelike clouds slither through the twisting Maloja Pass in the Swiss Alps, as life imitates art and vice versa. Juliette Binoche stars as Maria Enders, a famous French actress who is on her way to Zurich to accept an award for her mentor, playwright Wilhelm Melchior, who eschews such mundane ceremonies. But while en route, Maria and her personal assistant, the extremely attentive and capable Valentine (Kristen Stewart), learn that Wilhelm has suddenly and unexpectedly passed away, and Maria considers turning back, especially when she later finds out that Henryk Wald (Hanns Zischler), an old nemesis, will be there to pay homage to Wilhelm as well, but she decides to go ahead after all. At a cocktail party, Maria meets with hot director Klaus Diesterweg (Lars Eidinger), who is preparing a new stage production of Wilhelm and Maria’s first big hit, The Maloja Snake, but this time Maria would play Helena, an older woman obsessed with ambitious eighteen-year-old Sigrid, the role she originally performed twenty years earlier, to great acclaim. Klaus is planning to cast Lindsay Lohan–like troublemaking star and walking tabloid headline Jo-Ann Ellis (Chloë Grace Moretz) as Sigrid, which does not thrill Maria as her past and present meld together in an almost dreamlike narrative punctuated by the music of Handel and cinematographer Yorick Le Saux’s gorgeous shots of vast mountain landscapes.

Valentine (Kristen Stewart) and Maria (Juliette Binoche) go in search of the Maloja Snake in the Swiss Alps

Clouds of Sils Maria resonates on many levels, both inside and outside of the main plot and the film itself. Assayas (Irma Vep, Demonlover) cowrote André Téchiné’s 1983 film, Rendez-Vous, which was Binoche’s breakthrough; Assayas and Binoche wouldn’t work together again until his 2008 film Summer Hours, similar to the relationship between Wilhelm and Maria. Meanwhile, the story of the play-within-the-film is echoed by the relationship between Maria and Valentine, who are having trouble separating the personal from the professional. It is often difficult to know when the two women are practicing lines and when they are talking about their “real” lives. Binoche is simply extraordinary as Maria, a distressed and anxious woman who is suddenly facing getting older somewhat sooner than expected, while Stewart became the first American woman to win a French César, for Best Supporting Actress, for her sensitive portrayal of Valentine, a strong-willed young woman who might or might not be holding something back. The scenes between the two are riveting as they venture in and out of the reality of the film, their onscreen chemistry building and building till it’s at last ready to ignite. Art, life, cinema, theater, fiction, and reality all come together in Clouds of Sils Maria, as Maria, Assayas, and Binoche take stock of where they’ve been, where they are, and where they’re going.

NORTH CIRCULAR

North Circular tells the story of a Dublin road through music and its wide-ranging residents

NORTH CIRCULAR (Luke McManus, 2022)
DCTV Firehouse Cinema
87 Lafayette St.
Opens Friday, July 28
212-966-4510
firehouse.dctvny.org

“All the time I said I’d move away / I’m thinkin’, ‘Gemma, were you going insane?’” Gemma Dunleavy sings to a packed club audience over the closing credits of Luke McManus’s gorgeous, elegiac documentary musical, North Circular, opening July 28 at DCTV Firehouse Cinema.

Shot in stark, emotionally resonant black-and-white that forges a timeless atmosphere, the film takes viewers across all of Dublin’s North Circular Road, from Phoenix Park to Dublin Port, as locals talk about their lives, play music, and rail against gentrification while defending their communities.

“I think the North Circular bears the marks of its history: the marks of power and of privilege . . . Pain and poverty . . . unravelling of lives,” one man says. “The pageantry of empire, but also the reality of its military violence.”

Kids hang out on a stoop on North Circular Road in documentary musical

A slow-moving, often still camera focuses on animals, monuments, cricketers, birds, kids on stoops, construction, a pet shop, a waterfall, a cemetery. It follows a group trying to save the Cobblestone pub. It shows fans of the Bohemian Football Club, known as Bohs, preparing for a match against their archrivals, the Shamrock Rovers, at Dalymount Park. The camera lingers on images — dark passages, fireworks, unique architecture, a helicopter flying over a stadium, a man walking his ferret, the sun, the moon and clouds — making everything and everybody equal. Not a single person in the film is identified, by name, occupation, or otherwise.

A former inmate stands outside Mountjoy Prison and admits, “Not knowing what was going to happen when you went in, and actually not knowing what was going to happen when you came out, because you walked that road, whatever direction you went in. . . . The road took me in a different direction, so to speak. Because the last time I got out I walked out onto the North Circular Road and I took a different route. I took the route of looking for help.”

Along the way, people sing traditional ballads and new dirges in pubs and on the street, including Annie Hughes (“The Blackbird of Avondale”), John Francis Flynn (“The Lag’s Song”), Julie Kavanagh (“Siúil a Rún”), Séan Ó Túama (“An Cualann”), Jerry O’Reilly (“Van Diemen’s Land”), Eoghan O Ceannabháin (“Dark Horse on the Wind”), Ian Lynch (“Banks of the Nile”), and Dunleavy (“Up de Flats”), using guitar, banjo, drums, pennywhistle, and bagpipes.

“I think the hardest thing about the pipes sometimes is listening to them, you know?” a military bagpiper says, worrying that the younger generation is not turning to the instrument. (You can find out more about the music in the film here.)

In his directorial debut, McManus, who has lived just off North Circular Road for twenty years, beautifully weaves together music, dialogue, and imagery; the emotive score features incidental music by Kevin Murphy and Thomas Haugh of Seti the First, in addition to the vocal quartet Landless, that maintains the even-keeled pace.

The documentary was edited by John Murphy with a heart-wrenching, mesmerizing attention to detail; nothing is random. McManus, who cites
Gianfranco Rosi’s Sacro GRA and Zed Nelson’s The Street as inspiration, refers to the film as a “documentary musical,” explaining in a director’s note, “The use of music as a specific technique of storytelling is both an aesthetic and an editorial decision — to make a documentary that combines the musical and the factual film in a way that isn’t simply a documentary about music but is more a documentary
musical.”

North Circular is a paean to what was, what is, and what might be, in Dublin and, essentially, in tight-knit neighborhoods everywhere, particularly when it comes to class, colonialism, and gentrification. “There are people who have lived their whole lives on the road, and it is their world,” one man says. “But there are also people for whom it’s a place of transience. The flow of people is fundamental to the area.” Because in the end, it’s the people who make a place a home.

(There will be five performance Q&As with McManus, Hughes, Maeve O’Boyle, John Riordan, Donal Foreman, John Lee, and the Cobblestone’s Meabh Mulligan opening weekend at DCTV Firehouse Cinema, featuring discussion and music.)

JAPAN CUTS: FESTIVAL OF NEW JAPANESE FILM 2023

Under the Turquoise Sky is centerpiece of 2023 Japan Cuts fest

JAPAN CUTS: FESTIVAL OF NEW JAPANESE FILM
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
July 26 – August 6
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org

Always one of the best fests of the year, Japan Society’s Japan Cuts is back for its sixteenth iteration, consisting of two dozen features and fifteen shorts from across genres, including sci-fi/fantasy, romance, action-adventure, animation, comedy, mystery, thriller, and family drama. The Festival of New Japanese Film opens July 26 with Takehiko Inoue’s The First Slam Dunk, based on his 1990s manga about the Shohoku High School basketball team. The centerpiece is the US premiere of KENTARO’s Under the Turquoise Sky, a road movie set in Mongolia. The festival closes August 6 with the US premiere of Ryuhei Kitamura’s The Three Sisters of Tenmasou Inn, a supernatural drama set in a way station.

Japan Cuts pays tribute to the late composer Ryuichi Sakamoto with a special screening of Elizabeth Lennard’s 1985 documentary Tokyo Melody: A Film about Ryuichi Sakamoto, introduced by Akiko Yano, one of the pianist’s ex-wives, and will be followed by a Q&A with the director. The Next Generation sidebar comprises a half dozen flicks by emerging filmmakers, from actor Hiroki Kono’s debut, J005311, and Yusuke Morii’s Amiko to Ryohei Sasatani’s award-winning, 1960s-set Sanka: Nomads of the Mountain and Yuho Ishibashi’s When Morning Comes, I Feel Empty (followed by a Q&A with the director). Below is a look at several of this year’s selections, with more to be added as the festival continues.

Yuta Shimotsu’s Best Wishes to All weaves between past and present focusing on a frightening recipe for happiness

BEST WISHES TO ALL (みなに幸あれ) (MINA NI KO ARE) (Yuta Shimotsu, 2023)
Thursday, July 27, 9:00
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“Are you happy?” an elderly woman asks her grown granddaughter in Yuta Shimotsu’s creepy existential horror film, Best Wishes to All, making its North American premiere July 27 in Japan Society’s Japan Cuts festival. When a young Tokyo nursing student (Kotone Furukawa) returns to her grandparents’ farm in the Chikuho region, she is greeted by a surprise behind one of the doors. Or maybe it’s not really such a shocker, especially when her parents and little brother arrive and try to tell her what they claim she knew all along but refuses to face. Meanwhile, she rekindles a friendship with an old friend who is decidedly against what her family is doing.

Released earlier this year, Chie Hayakawa’s Plan 75 was a fictional, though frighteningly believable, tale about a government program in which Japanese citizens, upon reaching seventy-five years of age, could receive cash and free cremation in exchange for being euthanized in order to prevent further population growth. In Best Wishes to All, Shimotsu offers a bizarre twist on the idea of life, death, and happiness, involving — well, it wouldn’t be fair to say any more about that. But suffice to say it isn’t pretty. “I’m sorry that young people are sacrificed for old folks like me,” an old woman says to the befuddled nurse. And her grandmother scolds, “I bet you believe the world is good, right? You know nothing about the world.”

Written by Rumi Kakuta based on a story by Shimotsu, Best Wishes to All evokes such films as Takashi Miike’s The Happiness of the Katakuris and Gozu and Takashi Shimizu’s Ju-On series, the latter of which makes sense, as Shimizu is an executive producer on the film. Shimotsu and cinematographer Ryuto Iwabuchi weave between the past and the present as the secret is slowly revealed, but don’t try to think too hard about it, as it doesn’t make a whole lotta sense. Furukawa (Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy) is appealing as the nurse, and the rest of the cast ably do their part playing characters who have no names, adding to the mystery and confusion.

A trio of new friends try to save humanity in From the End of the World

FROM THE END OF THE WORLD (世界の終わりから) (SEKAI NO OWARI KARA) (Kazuaki Kiriya, 2023)
Saturday, August 5, 9:30
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Kazuaki Kiriya’s fourth film in twenty years, From the End of the World — following 2004’s Casshern, 2009’s Goemon, and 2015’s Last Knights — is a rousing thriller, if not quite the epic it aims to be. It’s 2030, and seventeen-year-old Hana Shimon (Aoi Itô) has just lost her beloved grandmother who raised her after her parents were killed in an accident. Instead of sending her to a children’s home, Shogo Ezaki (Katsuya Maiguma) and Reiko Saeki (Aya Asahina), who may or may not be some kind of government agents, lets her stay in her home if she tells them about the dreams she’s been having. Hana often slips into terrifying black-and-white nightmares involving death and destruction, where she is joined by a young girl named Yuki (Mio Masuda) and an unidentifiable creature.

She soon finds out from an old woman with spectacular hair (Mari Natsuki) that the world will be ending in two weeks and that Hana is the only one with the power to prevent disaster. “What’s your impression of the word destiny?” the woman asks Hana. At school, Hana is befriended by Takeru (Jiei Wakabayashi), bullied by Sora (Ai Tominaga), and taught by a teacher played by director Shunji Iwai; she is also pursued by Chief Cabinet Secretary Satoshi Koreeda (Katsunori Takahashi), who has other plans for her. As the clock keeps ticking, a time capsule serves as a critical plot point as past and present merge toward an uncertain future.

Evoking elements of Stranger Things as well as both Takashi Miike (The Great Yokai War) and Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro), From the End of the World — which Kiriya says will be his final directorial effort — looks fantastic, courtesy of cinematographer Chigi Kanbe, with gorgeous production design throughout as Hana travels through history. Itô (Missing, Gangoose) captures the fear and trepidation experienced by teenagers, whether having to turn in homework, battle a bully, or, well, save the Earth.

“Humans aren’t looking for salvation,” a hooded figure tells Hana. She might not have asked to be in this position, but does she have a choice?