Isabelle Huppert is determined to see her coffee crop through to fruition despite the growing dangers in Claire Denis’s WHITE MATERIAL
WHITE MATERIAL (Claire Denis, 2009)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Saturday, November 19, 10:00
Series runs November 19-21
212-660-0312
metrograph.com
You will never hear us complaining about too much Isabelle Huppert. The sixty-three-year-old French actress has been all over the place recently, having appeared in no fewer than seven films in 2015–16 in addition to touring the world in Krzysztof Warlikowski’s Phèdre(s), which came to BAM this past September, and appearing with Cate Blanchett in Jean Genet’s The Maids at City Center in 2014. In conjunction with the release of her latest two films, Mia Hansen-Løve’s Things to Come and Paul Verhoeven’s Elle, Metrograph is hosting a seven-movie Huppert retrospective this weekend, with the grand actress on hand on the Lower East Side for a Q&A following Hong Sang-soo’s In Another Country and to introduce Curtis Hanson’s L.A. Confidential. The series also includes Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher, Catherine Breillat’s Abuse of Weakness, Hal Hartley’s Amateur, and Ursula Maier’s Hom. as well as Claire Denis’s White Material, which takes place in an unnamed West African nation besieged by a bloody civil war between rebels and the military government. Huppert stars as Maria Vial, who steadfastly refuses to leave her coffee plantation, determined to see the last crop through to fruition. Despite pleas from the French army, which is vacating the country; her ex-husband, André (Christophe Lambert), who is attempting to sell the plantation out from under her; and her workers, whose lives are in danger, Maria is unwilling to give up her home and way of life, apparently blind to what is going on all around her.
She seems to be living in her own world, as if all the outside forces exploding around her do not affect her and her family. Without thinking twice, she even allows the Boxer (Isaach De Bankolé) to stay there, the seriously wounded leader of the rebel militia, not considering what kind of dire jeopardy that could result in. But when her slacker son, Manuel (Nicolas Duvauchelle), freaks out, she is forced to take a harder look at reality, but even then she continues to see only what she wants to see. A selection of both the New York and Venice Film Festivals, White Material is an often obvious yet compelling look at the last remnants of postcolonial European domination as a new Africa is being born in disorder and violence. Directed and cowritten (with French playwright Marie Ndiaye) by Denis (Chocolat, Beau Travail), who was born in Paris and raised in Africa, the film has a central flaw in its premise that viewers will either buy or reject: whether they accept Maria’s blindness to the evolving situation that has everyone else on the run. Watching Maria’s actions can be infuriating, and in the hands of another actress they might not have worked, but Huppert is mesmerizing in the decidedly unglamorous role.
For his feature-length debut, writer-director Juan Reina was all set to make a documentary in Norway about a group of Finnish friends’ daring attempt to break the world record for longest cave dive. But the narrative quickly changed when two of the divers, Jari Huotarinen and Jari Uusimäki, suffered tragic accidents and died, their bodies trapped underwater. Unable to retrieve the bodies because of safety concerns, the authorities closed off the area to any further diving. But the rest of the Finnish team decides that they cannot leave their friends down there and come up with a plan to secretly dive in and bring them back home for proper burials. A kind of mix between a Werner Herzog adventure documentary, a procedural caper film, and a military rescue drama, Diving into the Unknown follows Sami Paakkarinen, Vesa “Vesku” Rantanen, Kai “Kaitsu” Känkänen, Patrik “Patte” Grönqvist, and others as they decide to risk their lives in the waters that killed their fellow divers. “I do everything I can not to die while diving,” Paakkarinen says early on, later adding, “You should never expect that a dive will go well . . . because then it never does.” Grönqvist notes, “It has to be fun. If it’s not fun, there’s no point in doing it.” But during the rescue attempt, he says, “From the outside this might seem foolishly risky. But life in general can be risky. You cannot prepare for everything that could go wrong. You just cannot practice facing a dead friend at one hundred and ten meters.” No matter how many dives they’ve been on together, each new one comes with its own obstacles and dangers; when the men say goodbye to their respective families, they know deep down that they might not return alive. And it’s not just the physical aspects of diving that place them in jeopardy; several discuss the emotional and psychological trauma that could impact their safety, especially when diving to recover two of their closest friends.
Baz Luhrmann’s sumptuous version of The Great Gatsby is a dazzling reimagining of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel of old and new money and the American dream. The Australian director and his wife, costume and production designer extraordinaire Catherine Martin, have turned the classic tale into a lush spectacle without losing focus on the main story of life and love during the Roaring Twenties. Leonardo DiCaprio, who played the male lead in Lurhmann’s contemporary take on Romeo + Juliet, is superb as Jay Gatsby, the mystery man previously portrayed by Warner Baxter in 1926, Alan Ladd in 1949, Robert Redford in 1974, and Toby Stephens in 2000, adding a compelling level of vulnerability to the character. Gatsby has built a magnificent palace for himself on Long Island, hosting wild parties that he doesn’t care about; all he truly wants is Daisy (Carey Mulligan), a former love who has married successful businessman Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton) and lives in a mansion right across the bay. The villainous Tom is having an affair with the lower-class Myrtle Wilson (Isla Fisher), whose unaware husband, George (Jason Clarke), runs a gas station and garage in the Valley of Ashes. Although a loner, Gatsby befriends his neighbor, Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire), a young, innocent bond trader who rents a modest home at the base of Gatsby’s enormous estate and whose cousin just happens to be Daisy. As Carraway is sucked into this glamorous, debauched society, which also includes wild and elegant golf champion Jordan Baker (Elizabeth Debicki), he is forced to reexamine his own hopes and dreams as he tries to find his place in the world.
Former Japanese national surfing champion Takuji Masuda documents the wild life and times of sugar scion Bunker Spreckels in the bumpy, oddly titled Bunker77, which is having its New York City premiere November 16 and 17 at the DOC NYC festival. Born in Los Angeles in 1949, Spreckels is described in the film by friends and relatives as “radical,” “original,” “unique,” “dangerous,” and “fun,” a blond beach bum and party lover who rode waves around the world with his specially made short boards. “That was his international persona: the hunter, the surfer, the playboy, the jet-setter, the martial artist, all in one,” skateboard legend Tony Alva says of his friend and mentor. Spreckels’s grandfather, Adolph B. Spreckels, ran the Spreckels Sugar Company and, with his wife, Alma, helped develop the cities of San Francisco and San Diego. After Spreckels’s parents, Adolph B. Spreckels II and former actress Kay Williams, divorced, his mother married Clark Gable, who helped raise Bunker and his sister, Joan, for five years. Bunker always did things his own way, but his life spiraled out of control once he turned twenty-one and gained access to his multimillion-dollar trust fund, caught up in a storm of drugs, alcohol and women. He tried to become a rock star and a screen idol while skateboarding and surfing in California, Hawai’i, Australia, and South Africa. His story is told by such surfing legends as Laird Hamilton, Vinny Bryan, Bill Hamilton, Rory Russell, Nat Young, Herbie Fletcher, Spyder Wills, and Wayne Bartholomew; childhood friends Curtis Allen (son of cowboy movie star Rex Allen) and Ira Opper; Surfer magazine photographer Art Brewer, associate editor Kurt Ledterman, chief editor Drew Kampion, and publisher Steve Pezman; longtime girlfriend Ellie Silva; and journalist C. R. Steyck III, whose extensive interview with Spreckels near the end of his life is sprinkled throughout the documentary. Masuda also includes home movies, photographs, relevant clips from Gable films, and scenes from 2005’s Lords of Dogtown, in which Johnny Knoxville plays Topper Burks, who is based on Spreckels, and 1961’s Blue Hawaii, in which Elvis Presley plays a character eerily similar to Bunker. “You can definitely have too much fun with too much money,” Bartholomew says, while Steyck adds, “He was a dangerous man, mainly dangerous to himself.”
Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity is a breathtaking thriller that instantly enters the pantheon of such classic space fare as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien, and The Right Stuff. And if you haven’t seen it in 3-D, how it’s being shown in the Film Forum series “3-D Auteurs” this month, well, you haven’t really seen it. While medical engineer Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) is fixing a computer glitch outside the shuttle Explorer, veteran astronaut and wisecracker Matt Kowalski (George Clooney), on his final mission before retirement, is playing around with a new jetpack and Shariff (voiced by Paul Sharma) is having fun going on a brief spacewalk. But disaster strikes when debris from a destroyed Russian satellite suddenly comes their way, killing Shariff and the rest of the crew and crippling the shuttle, leaving Stone and Kowalski on their own in deep space, their communication with Mission Control in Houston (voiced by Ed Harris, in a nod to his participation in Apollo 13 and The Right Stuff) gone as well. Kowalski is cool and calm, listening to country music as he tries to come up with a plan that will get them to the International Space Station, but the inexperienced Stone is running out of oxygen fast as she tumbles through the emptiness, Earth in the background, so close yet so far. Written by Cuarón (Y Tu Mamá También, Children of Men) with his son Jonás, Gravity is spectacularly photographed by Emmanuel Lubezki, the master behind numerous works by Cuarón and Terrence Malick (The New World, The Tree of Life), among others. Lubezki and his team even created a new LED light box to increase the film’s realism, which is nothing less than awe-inspiring and mind-bending as it takes place in real time. Despite the vastness of space, Gravity often feels claustrophobic, particularly as Stone struggles to get a breath or attempts to operate a foreign module. 
