Céline (Céline Fuhrer), Thomas (Thomas Scimeca), and Maxence (Maxence Tual) take a bath together in riotously silly anarchic French farce
CINÉSALON: APNÉE (Jean-Christophe Meurisse, 2016)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, February 14, $13, 4:00 & 7:30
Series continues Tuesdays through February 21
212-355-6100
fiaf.org
FIAF’s “Comedy on Film: What Makes the French Laugh?” series continues on Valentine’s Day with Jean-Christophe Meurisses’s Apnée, a riotous, ludicrous, hysterical, and often cringeworthy absurdist fable about an anarchic trio of friends/lovers who flit about France doing anything they want, unaware of the consequences of their actions. Céline (Céline Fuhrer), Thomas (Thomas Scimeca), and Maxence (Maxence Tual) are all id, no ego and superego, as they live in their own reality, separate from the rest of what is considered conventional society. Wearing wedding dresses, they try to get married; seeking to relax, they take a bath together in a storefront window; in search of a family, they storm in on an older, empty nest couple. Indeed, they are like three children who don’t know any better, who haven’t reached basic levels of adulthood, but at their core, they just want to be happy, and what’s wrong with that? Writer-director Meurisses’s feature debut, which was nominated for Best First Film at the Cannes Film Festival (the Golden Camera) and the Lumière Awards as well as the Queer Palm, is extremely silly, essentially a series of crazy vignettes, some that work a whole lot better than others, with lovely cinematography by Javier Ruiz Gomez, from Céline, Thomas, and Maxence (well, body doubles, anyway) ice skating naked while wearing Mexican wrestler masks to the three of them dressed in white in a rowboat on a beautiful lake. Apnée — the title refers to both sleep apnea as well as the French phrase “la plongée en apnée,” or “free-diving” — is screening February 14 at 4:00 and 7:30 in Florence Gould Hall, with the later show introduced by actor Edward Akrout; both screenings will be followed by a party and prize drawing. “Comedy on Film: What Makes the French Laugh?” concludes February 21 with Quentin Dupieux’s Reality, with writer and photographer Calypso introducing the 7:30 show.
Nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary, Ava DuVernay’s devastating 13th is back for an encore engagement at IFC Center. DuVernay’s follow-up to the Oscar-nominated Selma, her feature debut about the 1965 voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery, examines the history of institutional racism from slavery to today, focusing on the phrase of the 13th Amendment that says, “except as a punishment for crime.” Using archival footage, animation, music, and new interviews, DuVernay traces the criminalization of African Americans beginning with the passage of the amendment in 1865. “There’s really no understanding of our American political culture without race at the center of it,” Harvard professor Khalil G. Muhammad says. The film explores the 150-year demonization of blacks as the government built a fear-based narrative that led to the frightening imbalance in the incarceration of African Americans that has escalated dramatically since the 1970s. Among the issues that are covered are mandatory minimum sentencing, the wealth gap, the crack epidemic, the Southern Strategy, the Three Strikes law, the KKK, the Central Park Five, the 1994 crime bill, white privilege, Nancy Reagan’s Just Say No program, Willie Horton, prison labor, the Civil Rights Act, and the ongoing cultural depiction of blacks as wild animals that need to be caged. DuVernay has assembled a wide-ranging collection of experts who share their views, including Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., Maryland state senator and ALEC member Michael Hough, educator and author Michelle Alexander, UConn professor Jelani Cobb, UC Santa Cruz professor emerita Angela Davis, former American Conservative Union chairman David Keene, Grandview University professor Kevin Gannon, Dream Corps founder and president Van Jones, American Conservative Union board member Grover Norquist, and formerly incarcerated activists Shaka Senghor, Pat Nolan, Cory Greene, and Craig DeRoche in addition to such politicians as David Dinkins, Charles B. Rangel, Cory Booker, and former Speaker of the House and presidential candidate Newt Gingrich. “The objective reality is that virtually no one who is white understands the challenge of being black in America,” Gingrich explains.
There’s an ominous cloud hanging over Tim Sutton’s deeply poetic Dark Night, a grim, gripping journey into the dark night of America’s soul. The title of Sutton’s third film, following Pavilion and Memphis, also references Christopher Nolan’s 2012 Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises, for reasons that become apparent about halfway through. Dark Night opens with a close-up of a young woman’s disbelieving eyes, red, white, and blue lights flashing across her face; the camera then pulls back as the woman, wearing an American flag top, lowers her head, taking stock of an unrevealed tragedy. For the next eighty-five minutes, Sutton goes back to the beginning of this fateful day, following the lives of a small group of men, women, and children in a suburban Florida community as they go about their usual business. They play on computers, put on makeup, pet animals, and head over to the mall. One concerned mother and her detached son speak with an off-screen interviewer as if searching for reasons in the aftermath of a horrific event, but in this case it hasn’t happened yet. In many of the vignettes, there is little or no dialogue, as the characters, all nonprofessional actors mostly found on the streets of Sarasota, speak with their actions, particularly when several of the males, including a military vet and a teen with dazzling blue eyes, load firearms. In this Blue Velvet-like town, danger lurks just below the surface.
