this week in film and television

ERIC ROHMER’S SIX MORAL TALES: LA COLLECTIONNEUSE / MY NIGHT AT MAUD’S

Néstor Almendros shot the beautiful LA COLLECTIONNEUSE, both his and director Eric Rohmer’s first feature film in color

SIX MORAL TALES: LA COLLECTIONNEUSE (THE COLLECTOR) (Eric Rohmer, 1967)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater, Francesca Beale Theater
144 & 165 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
September 16-22; series runs September 16-29
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.org

“Razor blades are words,” art critic Alain Jouffroy tells painter Daniel Pommereulle (Daniel Pommereulle) in one of the prologues at the start of La Collectionneuse, the third film in French master Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales (falling between Suzanne’s Career and My Night at Maud’s). Words might have the ability to cut, but they don’t seem to have much impact on the three people at the center of the film, which offers a sort of alternate take on François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim. Needing a break from his supposedly strenuous life, gallerist Adrien (Patrick Bauchau, who also appeared in La Carrière de Suzanne, Rohmer’s second morality tale) decides to vacation at the isolated St. Tropez summer home of the never-seen Rodolphe. Daniel is also at the house, along with Haydée (Haydée Politoff), a beautiful young woman who spends much of the film in a bikini and being taken out by a different guy nearly every night. Adrien decides that she is a “collector” of men, and the three needle one another as they discuss life and love, sex and morality, beauty and ugliness. Adrien might claim to want to have nothing to do with Haydée, but he keeps spending more and more time with her, even though he never stops criticizing her lifestyle. He even uses her as a pawn when trying to get an art collector named Sam (played by former New York Times film critic Eugene Archer under the pseudonym Seymour Hertzberg) to invest in his gallery. While everybody else in the film pretty much knows what they want, Adrien, who purports to understand life better than all of them, is a sad, lost soul, unable to get past his high-and-mighty attitude. Rohmer crafted the roles of Daniel and Haydée specifically for Pommereulle and Politoff, who improvised much of their dialogue; Bauchau opted not to take that route, making for a fascinating relationship among the three very different people.

Daniel Pommereulle and Patrick Bauchau talk about life and love, sex and morality in LA COLLECTIONNEUSE

La Collectionneuse is beautifully shot in 35mm by Néstor Almendros, the bright colors of the characters’ clothing mixing splendidly with the countryside and ocean while offering a striking visual counterpoint to the constant ennui dripping off the screen. His camera especially loves Politoff, regularly exploring her body inch by inch. The film is both Rohmer’s and Almendros’s first color feature; Almendros would go on to make more films with the director, as well as with Truffaut, even after coming to Hollywood and shooting such films as Days of Heaven, Kramer vs. Kramer, and Sophie’s Choice. Winner of a Silver Bear Extraordinary Jury Prize at the 1967 Berlinale, La Collectionneuse is screening September 16-22 at the Walter Reade Theater and the Francesca Beale Theater, kicking off the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s two-week festival of new restorations of five of Rohmer’s six tales, including My Night at Maud’s, Claire’s Knee, Suzanne’s Career, and Love in the Afternoon (but skipping The Bakery Girl of Monceau) through September 29.

SIX MORAL TALES: MY NIGHT AT MAUD’S (MA NUIT CHEZ MAUD) (Eric Rohmer, 1969)
Saturday, September 17, Walter Reade Theater, 4:30
Sunday, September 18, Francesca Beale Theater, 8:45
Saturday, September 24, Walter Reade Theater, 8:45
Sunday, September 25, Walter Reade Theater, 4:30
www.filmlinc.org

Nominated for the Palme d’Or and a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, My Night at Maud’s, Éric Rohmer’s fourth entry in his Six Moral Tales series (falling between La Collectionneuse and Claire’s Knee) continues the French director’s fascinating exploration of love, marriage, and tangled relationships. Three years removed from playing the romantic racecar driver Jean-Louis in Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman, Jean-Louis Trintignant again stars as a man named Jean-Louis, this time a single thirty-four-year-old Michelin engineer living a relatively solitary life in the French suburb of Clermont. A devout Catholic, he is developing an obsession with a fellow churchgoer, the blonde, beautiful Françoise (Marie-Christine Barrault), about whom he knows practically nothing. After bumping into an old school friend, Vidal (Antoine Vitez), the two men delve into deep discussions of religion, Marxism, Pascal, mathematics, Jansenism, and women. Vidal then invites Jean-Louis to the home of his girlfriend, Maud (Françoise Fabian), a divorced single mother with open thoughts about sexuality, responsibility, and morality that intrigue Jean-Louis, for whom respectability and appearance are so important. The conversation turns to such topics as hypocrisy, grace, infidelity, and principles, but Maud eventually tires of such talk. “Dialectic does nothing for me,” she says shortly after explaining that she always sleeps in the nude. Later, when Jean-Louis and Maud are alone, she tells him, “You’re both a shamefaced Christian and a shamefaced Don Juan.” Soon a clearly conflicted Jean-Louis is involved in several love triangles that are far beyond his understanding, so he again seeks solace in church. My Night at Maud’s is a classic French tale, with characters spouting off philosophically while smoking cigarettes, drinking wine and other cocktails, and getting naked. Shot in black-and-white by Néstor Almendros, the film roams from midnight mass to a single woman’s bed and back to church, as Jean-Louis, played with expert concern by Trintignant, is forced to examine his own deep desires and how they relate to his spirituality. Fabian (Belle de Jour, The Letter) is outstanding as Maud, whose freedom titillates and confuses Jean-Louis. My Night at Maud’s, which is being shown September 17-18 and 24-25 as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Six Moral Tales series, is one of Rohmer’s best, most accomplished works despite its haughty intellectualism.

CHAN IS MISSING

American-born Chinese cabdriver Jo (Wood Moy) is searching for more than just two grand in CHAN IS MISSING

CHAN IS MISSING (Wayne Wang, 1982)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
September 9-11
212-660-0312
metrograph.com

Wayne Wang’s debut feature, the 1982 indie landmark Chan Is Missing, opens with a Chinese version of Bill Haley and the Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock,” but subtitles reveal the Chinese lyrics are all about the bleak economic situation. “Red beans, barbeque sauce, tea leaves, all the prices rise / Encumber the whole family, low salaries are just not enough / Till there is not one drop left in the soy sauce bottle / That’s enough, this price increase has to stop.” That sets the stage for the culture clash at the center of the black-and-white film as Wang focuses on Chinese immigrants and ABCs (American-born Chinese) attempting to establish their own identities in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Jo (Wood Moy) and his nephew, Steve (Marc Hayashi), have pooled together $4,000 to buy their own taxi medallion, but after they give someone cash to process the paperwork, the man, named Chan Hung, disappears, along with their hard-earned money. So uncle and nephew turn into detectives, searching for Chan by tracking down his friends, relatives, and acquaintances, but it seems that no one knows where Chan is — or who he is, as each person shares stories of a very different man. Along the way, there are discussions of Mandarin and Cantonese food, the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan, Communism and new Chinese money, immigration and assimilation, and local politics and “the legal implications of cross-cultural misunderstandings.” A cook in a Samurai Night Fever T-shirt laments having to make another order of sweet and sour pork instead of pursuing aeronautical engineering, which he studied in school back in China with Chan. A man who knows Chan from a cultural center finds newspaper articles in Chan’s jacket about a murder. A distinguished gentleman in a three-piece suit thinks Chan returned to Mainland China, explaining to Jo, who was born in the United States, “Here in America, people treat you like a foreigner. You don’t belong here.” And a teacher at a newcomers language center talks about how immigrants should become Chinese-American, pulling out that most American of desserts, an apple pie, that has been made using Chinese techniques. “This is all too confusing,” Jo says.

chan is missing

It’s no coincidence that the man Jo and Steve are trying to track down is named Chan, a direct reference to Charlie Chan, the Honolulu detective, usually portrayed by non-Asian actors, who was a controversial stereotype in numerous Hollywood movies. The missing character of Chan also represents the Chinese experience in America as a whole, emblematic of the entire community as it sets down roots in San Francisco, having to work menial jobs to get started. “This mystery is appropriately Chinese; what’s not there seems to have just as much meaning as what is there,” Jo says. When we first see Jo, immediately after the opening credits, while the rock-and-roll song is still playing, he is initially obscured by glare on the windshield of the cab he is driving through the streets of Chinatown, the buildings reflected in the glass. He eventually comes into focus, leading viewers on a journey for identity that is still relevant today. Wang, who was born and raised in Hong Kong and was named after John Wayne, made Chan Is Missing for a mere $22,000. He has gone on to make such Chinese-American films as Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart, Eat a Bowl of Tea, and The Joy Luck Club as well as such non-Chinese fare as Smoke, Because of Winn-Dixie, and The Center of the World, his oeuvre echoing how Chinese immigrants try to balance their heritage and the old ways with assimilation. Chan Is Missing is screening September 9-11 at Metrograph in a new 35mm print.

KUROSAWA x 11: IKIRU

Takashi Shimura does a stellar job with a rare leading role in Kurosawa’s captivating melodrama IKIRU

Takashi Shimura does a stellar job with a rare leading role in Akira Kurosawa’s captivating melodrama IKIRU

IKIRU (TO LIVE) (DOOMED) (Akira Kurosawa, 1952)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Tuesday, September 6, 1:30 & 7:30
Series continues through September 8
212-660-0312
metrograph.com

In Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 gem, Ikiru, the great Takashi Shimura is outstanding as simple-minded petty bureaucrat Kanji Watanabe, a paper-pushing section chief who has not taken a day off in thirty years. But when he suddenly finds out that he is dying of stomach cancer, he finally decides that there might be more to life than he thought after meeting up with an oddball novelist (Yunosuke Ito). While his son, Mitsuo (Nobuo Kaneko), and coworkers wonder just what is going on with him — he has chosen not to tell anyone about his illness — he begins cavorting with Kimura (Shinichi Himori), a young woman filled with a zest for life. Although the plot sounds somewhat predictable, Kurosawa’s intuitive direction, a smart script (co-written with Hideo Oguni), and a marvelously slow-paced performance by Shimura (Stray Dog, Scandal, Seven Samurai) make this one of the director’s best melodramas. Winner of a special prize at the 1954 Berlin International Film Festival, Ikiru is screening September 6 as part of Metrograph’s “Kurosawa x 11” series, which continues through September 8 with such other treats as Hidden Fortress, Red Beard, and The Bad Sleep Well.

MAX ROSE

Jerry Lewis stars as a newly widowed octogenarian who becomes obsessed with a mystery about his late wife in MAX ROSE

MAX ROSE (Daniel Noah, 2016)
Landmark Sunshine Cinema
143 East Houston St. between First & Second Aves.
September 2-9
212-330-8182
www.landmarktheatres.com
www.facebook.com/MaxRoseMovie

In his first starring role in more than twenty years, Jerry Lewis is superb in the otherwise clichéd and maudlin melodrama Max Rose. Lewis plays the title character, an eighty-seven-year-old former jazz pianist whose just lost his beloved wife of sixty-five years, Eva (Claire Bloom). While dealing with his sudden loneliness, Max finds a small compact that a man named Ben gave to Eva on November 5, 1959, with an inscription declaring his secret love. Max becomes obsessed with finding out who the man is and determining whether his marriage was a fraud. Meanwhile, his granddaughter, Annie (Kerry Bishé), is helping Max through this difficult time, even though her own marriage might be in trouble, and Annie’s father, Max’s son, Christopher (Kevin Pollak), is experiencing his own family dilemmas. Christopher tries to reestablish a relationship with Max, but the father keeps pushing the son away. Writer-director Daniel Noah’s feature-film debut has all the hallmarks of, well, a Hallmark movie of the week, laden with genre clichés that the talented cast fights to rise above. Bishé (Argo, Halt and Catch Fire) is absolutely lovely as Max’s dedicated granddaughter, but Pollak isn’t given enough to do as Max’s beat-upon son. A scene in which Max cavorts with a group of new elderly friends has a bittersweet joy to it, at least partially because all four actors — Lewis, Rance Howard, Lee Weaver, and Mort Sahl — were in their eighties when it was filmed. Dean Stockwell, who recently turned eighty, makes a strange appearance near the end, and Bloom is an octogenarian as well.

The plot jumps around, as does the emotional manipulation, heightened by Michel Legrand’s overly sentimental score, and Noah throws in a few odd references, including one to Kurt Vonnegut, which harkens back to Lewis’s appearance in the critically despised Slapstick of Another Kind, an adaptation of Vonnegut’s 1976 novel, Slapstick, that earned Lewis a Golden Raspberry nomination for Worst Actor. (He lost to Sylvester Stallone in Rhinestone.) Noah also has a thing about flowers, from Max’s last name, Rose, to the name of the social administrator, Ms. Flowers (Illeana Douglas), at the assisted living facility he moves into, but that never quite reaches full bloom, like the rest of the narrative. But throughout the film’s eighty-three minutes, it is impossible to take your eyes off Lewis; the director, and the camera, love him, and for good reason. Sitting in his favorite chair in his red sweater, legs spread, rising pants revealing long white socks that approach his knee, Lewis recalls his role as Jerry Langford in Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy, when he was kidnapped and tied up, the look in his eyes revealing all you need to know about his character, only now much sadder and forlorn. Best known as a slapstick comedian and muscular dystrophy telethon host, Lewis is a graceful and talented actor, his every movement filled with the knowledge gained over a long life. An early version of the film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2013; the movie is finally getting its theatrical release, playing a short one-week run at the Landmark Sunshine. Deduct a star if Lewis is just not your thing.

SEE IT BIG! THE 70MM SHOW: INHERENT VICE

Reese Witherspoon and Joaquin Phoenix reveal that opposites attract in INHERENT VICE

INHERENT VICE (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2014)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Saturday, September 3, and Sunday, September 4, $15 (ticket purchase may be applied toward same-day admission to museum), 7:00
718-777-6800
www.inherentvicemovie.com
www.movingimage.us

It makes sense that award-winning writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, who has made such complex, challenging films as Magnolia, There Will Be Blood, and The Master, has made the first cinematic adaptation of a novel by reclusive, iconoclastic author Thomas Pynchon, who has written such complex, challenging books as Gravity’s Rainbow, V., and Vineland. It also makes sense that the book he chose to adapt is Inherent Vice, probably the most lighthearted and breezy of Pynchon’s tomes. But it also makes sense that the film itself is complex and challenging — and downright confusing. Walking out of the theater, we were pretty sure we liked what we had just seen, even if we didn’t completely understand what had happened. (As Jena Malone said of the making of the film, “The logic becomes the chaos and the chaos becomes the logic.”) The neonoir takes place in 1970 in the fictional Valley town of Gordita Beach (based on Manhattan Beach, where Pynchon lived for a long time). Joaquin Phoenix stars as Larry “Doc” Sportello, a mutton-chopped ex-hippie who is now a private gumshoe working out of a health clinic. One day his ex, Shasta Fay Hepworth (a transplendent Katherine Waterston), shows up to ask him to get her out of a jam involving her billionaire boyfriend, Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts), who has gone missing, perhaps at the hands of Wolfmann’s high-society wife, Sloane (Serena Scott Thomas). Meanwhile, Doc is also hired by Hope Harlingen (Malone) to determine whether her supposedly dead husband, surf-sax legend Coy (Owen Wilson), is actually alive. As Pynchon himself says in the book trailer, “At that point, it gets sort of peculiar,” and peculiar it does indeed get, as Doc becomes immersed in a web of lies and deceit, dealing with a dangerous cult known as the Golden Fang (where Martin Short plays a sex-crazed dentist with a wild abandon), a curious health facility called the Chryskylodon Institute run by Dr. Threeply (Jefferson Mays), and Det. Bigfoot Bjornsen (Josh Brolin), a “renaissance cop” who has no time for any of Doc’s hippie crap, as the Manson murders hover over everything. Well, at least that’s what we think the plot is about.

Doc (Joaquin Phoenix) and Bigfoot (Josh Brolin) don’t agree on much in Paul Thomas Anderson adaptation of Thomas Pynchon novel

As with all Anderson films, Inherent Vice looks and sounds great; cinematographer Robert Elswit, who has shot most of Anderson’s films, bathes the quirky drama in hazy, syrupy colors, while Jonny Greenwood’s score is accompanied by songs by Can, Sam Cooke, Minnie Riperton, the Marketts, and Neil Young. (In fact, Young’s Journey through the Past experimental film served as an influence on Anderson when making Inherent Vice, as did David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker’s Police Squad and Naked Gun series, Robert Altman’s 1973 Philip Marlowe movie The Long Goodbye, and Howard Hawks’s 1946 version of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep.) It all has the feel of the Coen brothers’ The Big Lebowski as reinterpreted by Anderson and Pynchon — who might have been on-set during at least some of the shooting and supposedly makes a cameo in the picture. The film is littered with absurdist jokes and oddities, from the way Bigfoot eats a chocolate-covered banana to a trio of FBI agents picking their noses, from the right-wing Vigilant California organization to a clip from the 1952 Cold War propaganda film Red Nightmare. Phoenix once again fully inhabits his character, who putt-putts around in an old Dodge Dart and just wants life to be mellow and groovy. Brolin is hysterical as his foil, the straitlaced, flattop cop who has a penchant for busting down doors. The large cast also includes Benicio del Toro as Sauncho Smilax, Doc’s too-cool lawyer; Reese Witherspoon as Penny Kimball, Doc’s well-coiffed girlfriend; Maya Rudolph (Anderson’s real-life partner and the daughter of Riperton) as receptionist Petunia Leeway; Sasha Pieterse as Japonica Fenway, who hangs with Golden Fang dentist Rudy Blatnoyd (Short); and Joanna Newsom as Sortilège, the film’s narrator (who does not appear in the book). Inherent Vice is yet another unique cinematic experience from Anderson, one that is likely to take multiple viewings to understand just what is going on, but as with his previous films, it is likely to be well worth the investment. Inherent Vice is screening September 3 & 4 at 7:00 in the Museum of the Moving Image series “See It Big! The 70mm Show,” which comes to a close this weekend with Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet as well.

VOYEURISM, SURVEILLANCE, AND IDENTITY IN THE CINEMA: DAVID HOLZMAN’S DIARY

L. M. Kit Carson presages the YouTube Generation in DAVID HOLZMAN’S DIARY

DAVID HOLZMAN’S DIARY (Jim McBride, 1967)
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Ave. at Second St.
Friday, September 2, 7:15, and Saturday, September 3, 9:00
Series continues through September 4
212-505-5181
anthologyfilmarchives.org

New York City native Jim McBride’s directorial debut, the seminal David Holzman’s Diary, presages the YouTube Generation and reality shows in its depiction of a man obsessed with capturing virtually every moment of his life on camera. L. M. Kit Carson stars as David Holzman, a twenty-five-year-old unemployed schlemiel who goes everywhere with his 16mm camera, photographing the streets of his Upper West Side neighborhood, his model girlfriend, Penny (Eileen Dietz), and the woman in the apartment across the street. He also often turns the camera on himself as he discusses his life and moviemaking, directly and indirectly referencing Jean-Luc Godard, Alfred Hitchcock, Vincente Minnelli, Orson Welles, and Luchino Visconti. The black-and-white film is set up as if it’s a documentary, with choppy cuts and a barely audible soundtrack of a radio playing music and sharing the news of the day (July 1967). Holzman is happiest when he gets a new fish-eye lens and shows it off by carrying it through the streets above his head, offering a different perspective of the city. Like today’s world, McBride (The Big Easy, Great Balls of Fire!) brings up issues of voyeurism and privacy, because to Holzman, it’s as if nothing really exists unless it’s on film or television (or, now, the internet). Thus, it makes sense that David Holzman’s Diary is screening as part of the Anthology Film Archives series “Voyeurism, Surveillance, and Identity in the Cinema,” being held in conjunction with the International Center of Photography’s inaugural exhibition in its new downtown space on the Bowery, the multimedia “Public, Private, Secret.” The film series continues with Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason on September 2 & 4 and the short film program “Exhibitionism / Self-Fashioning” on September 3 & 4. The two-floor exhibition explores how we allow ourselves to be seen, and how we look at others, in public and private in the second decade of the twenty-first century, with works by Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman, Doug Rickard, Gillian Wearing, Garry Winogrand, Sophie Calle, Lyle Ashton Harris, Jill Magid, Phil Collins, Shelly Silver, Rashid Johnson, Martine Syms, Trevor Paglen, and others.

FELLINI: 8½

Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni) is in a bit of a personal and professional crisis in Fellini masterpiece “8½”

WEEKEND CLASSICS: 8½ (Federico Fellini, 1963)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
September 2-5, 11:00 am
Series continues through September 25
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com

“Your eminence, I am not happy,” Guido (Marcello Mastroianni) tells the cardinal (Tito Masini) halfway through Federico Fellini’s self-reflexive masterpiece 8½. “Why should you be happy?” the cardinal responds. “That is not your task in life. Who said we were put on this earth to be happy?” Well, film makes people happy, and it’s because of works such as 8½. Fellini’s Oscar-winning eighth-and-a-half movie is a sensational self-examination of film and fame, a hysterically funny, surreal story of a famous Italian auteur who finds his life and career in need of a major overhaul. Mastroianni is magnificent as Guido Anselmi, a man in a personal and professional crisis who has gone to a healing spa for some much-needed relaxation, but he doesn’t get any as he is continually harassed by producers, screenwriters, would-be actresses, and various other oddball hangers-on. He also has to deal both with his mistress, Carla (Sandra Milo), who is quite a handful, as well as his wife, Luisa (Anouk Aimée), who is losing patience with his lies. Trapped in a strange world of his own creation, Guido has dreams where he flies over claustrophobic traffic and makes out with his dead mother, and his next film involves a spaceship; it doesn’t take a psychiatrist to figure out the many inner demons that are haunting him. Marvelously shot by Gianni Di Venanzo in black-and-white, scored with a vast sense of humor by Nino Rota, and featuring some of the most amazing hats ever seen on film — costume designer Piero Gherardi won an Oscar for all the great dresses and chapeaux — 8½ is an endlessly fascinating and wildly entertaining exploration of the creative process and the bizarre world of filmmaking itself. And after seeing 8½, you’ll appreciate Woody Allen’s 1980 homage, Stardust Memories, a whole lot more. “Weekend Classics” continues September 9-11 with Fellini Satyricon before concluding September 23-25 with City of Women.