this week in film and television

EDM ANTHEMS — FRENCH TOUCH ON FILM: GIRLHOOD

Karidja Touré is extraordinary as a teenager desperate to make a better life for herself in GIRLHOOD

GIRLHOOD (BANDE DE FILLES) (Céline Sciamma, 2014)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, April 26, $14, 4:00 & 7:30
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org
strandreleasing.com

FIAF’s two-month CinéSalon series “EDM Anthems: French Touch on Film” comes to a poignant conclusion April 26 with Céline Sciamma’s sensitive, gripping, award-winning Girlhood. In her outstanding film debut, Karidja Touré earned a César nomination as Most Promising Actress for playing Marieme, a sixteen-year-old girl who is trying to find a workable path to a worthwhile adulthood but is continually thwarted by socioeconomic and cultural issues. Marieme wants to go to college, but a guidance counselor tells her that her grades aren’t good enough and that she should instead choose a vocational school. She’s clearly bright, but she has to spend much of her time taking care of her younger sisters while her mother works as a cleaning lady and her lazy older brother, Djibril (Cyril Mendy), plays video games and keeps a tight watch on the women in the family. Distressed by her options as a young black woman in France, Marieme starts hanging out with a gang of tough girls led by Lady (Assa Sylla), who christens Marieme “Vic” for victory. Vic, Lady, Adiatou (Lindsay Karamoh), and Fily (Mariétou Touré) battle other small gangs, head to the city to steal fancy clothing, and flirt with the local boys in the Parisian suburbs of Bagnolet and Bobigny. Vic is attracted to Ismaël (Idrissa Diabaté), a friend of Djibril’s who is hesitant to get involved with her, but the two soon start a kind of relationship. Amid gang fights, drug dealing, neighborhood gossip, and romantic entanglements, Vic desperately searches for her identity and refuses to give up on her dreams.

Sciamma never takes the easy way out in this fresh and potent coming-of-age story. Girlhood is beautifully photographed by Crystel Fournier, who also shot Sciamma’s Water Lilies and Tomboy, using a vibrant palette to illuminate the girls’ strong emotions. The pulsating electronic soundtrack by Para One, aka Jean Baptiste de Laubier, adds to the emotional upheavals experienced every day by the characters. Karidja Touré and Assa Sylla have a terrific chemistry; the film really comes alive when they are together, through good times and bad. And despite the serious subject matter, Sciamma also lets things get loose and crazy, like when the four girls dance to Rihanna’s “Diamonds” in a hotel room. Girlhood doesn’t go out of its way to make any overt political statements about race, poverty, or the aftermath of colonialism; instead it is an intelligent, deeply moving story of one girl who is unwilling to sacrifice her power and settle for less than what she wants. The film is screening at FIAF on April 26 at 4:00 and 7:30, with the later showing introduced by DJ Bearcat.

PETER FISCHLI DAVID WEISS: HOW TO WORK BETTER

Museum survey juxtaposes the work of Fischli and Weiss to form new dialogues (photo by David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation)

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Ave. at 89th St.
Through April 27, $25
Peter Fischli New School talk: Monday, April 25, $10, 6:30
212-423-3587
www.guggenheim.org
events.newschool.edu

Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s engaging, subversive DIY style is on full display in their first major museum retrospective, “How to Work Better,” on view at the Guggenheim through April 27. Known as Fischli/Weiss, the Zürich-born artists began their long collaboration in the late 1970s, continuing through Weiss’s death in 2012 at the age of sixty-five. The duo specialized in reimagining everyday objects, using synthetic rubber, unfired clay, and polyurethane, with a kitschy sense of humor. The exhibition pairs series from throughout their career, bringing together disparate elements to create a dialogue that gets to the heart of their method and process as they investigate form and structure. The sculptures of “Walls, Corners, and Tubes” are seen with “Kanalvideo,” a psychedelic trip through the sewers of Zürich. “Cars” and “Hostesses” turn the titles into miniature representations in white plaster. One floor is dedicated to “Suddenly This Overview,” a collection of hundreds of unfired clay miniatures that they called “The Subjective Tableaux,” exploring the whole of human existence, featuring such works as “Mick Jagger and Brian Jones Going Home Satisfied after Composing ‘I Can’t Get No Satisfaction,’” “Panic in the Audience When Lumière Shows His Film,” and “The Russians Launch the First Rocket into Space.” Fischli and Weiss essentially re-created their studio in numerous polyurethane installations, crafting art materials, soda cans, cleaning supplies, jars of food, and other objects out of polyurethane, forcing viewers to questions everything they see.

Fischli and Weiss’s polyurethane installations re-create their studio environment while questioning what is real (photo by David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation)

The duo asks its own questions in “Question Projections,” in which a seemingly endless stream of inquiries are projected onto a dark wall, asking, among other things, “Is it more important for the world or for me to be doing well?,” “Why does nothing never happen?,” “Where are all those rats coming from?,” and “Is hunger an emotion?” The survey also highlights Fischli and Weiss’s films starring their alter egos, Rat and Bear — Order and Cleanliness, The Least Resistance, and The Right Way — in addition to their most popular work, The Way Things Go, a thirty-one-minute video in which everyday objects, from tires, bottles, and balloons to ladders, candles, and garbage bags, form a supposedly seamless chain reaction that is actually made up of twenty-three shots. Among the other series and installations accumulated in “How to Work Better,” which was initiated while Weiss was still alive, are “Visible World,” “The Raft,” “Sausage Series,” and “Fotografías,” celebrating the full range of the artists’ oeuvre. “Fischli and Weiss deliberately drew attention to the intersection of art and manual labor throughout their practice,” curator Nancy Spector writes in the catalog. “Even though they consistently presented themselves as carefree observers of the world at large . . . the artists also slyly exposed the concerted effort behind their artmaking.” But most of all, “How to Work Better” is fun. In conjunction with the show, the text-based wall mural “How to Work Better” can be seen on the corner of Houston and Mott Streets through May 1; the Public Art Fund project offers ten pieces of advice, including “Do one thing at a time,” “Learn to ask questions,” and “Accept change as inevitable.” On Monday, April 25, Fischli, who will turn sixty-four in June, will deliver a talk at the New School about his and Weiss’s public works, one of which stands outside the Guggenheim: “Haus,” an inviting structure that offers no way inside.

STRANGER THAN FICTION: TREMBLING BEFORE GOD

Subjects must hide their identity in documentary about gay Orthodox Jews

Subjects must hide their identity in documentary about gay Orthodox and Hasidic Jews

TREMBLING BEFORE G-D (Sandi Simcha DuBowski, 2001)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at Third St.
Tuesday, April 26, 7:30
Series continues Tuesdays and/or Thursdays through May 31
212-924-7771
www.tremblingbeforeg-d.com
stfdocs.com

Being gay and an Orthodox Jew just doesn’t mix. Sandi Simcha DuBowski’s award-winning documentary, Trembling Before G-d, takes a close look at gay Orthodox and Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn, Miami, Jerusalem, and London who are either rejected by their religious community or remain hidden in the closet, unable to express in public who they are. Many of the subjects use fake names and are shot in silhouette or by a handheld camera that never shows their full faces, in order to protect their identity; these powerful images get right to the heart and soul of the matter. The naysayers point out that the Bible clearly states that homosexuality is wrong, and they still believe that gays can be “cured” through therapy and atonement ceremonies for sexual sins or by eating figs. The film is having a special fifteenth-anniversary screening at the IFC Center as part of the Stranger than Fiction series and will be followed by what should be a lively and fascinating Q&A with DuBowski and subjects Rabbi Steve Greenberg, Michelle, Naomi, and Mark that should explore whether anything has changed in the last decade and a half. The series continues through May 31 with such other documentaries as Lynn True’s In Transit, Holly Morris’s The Babushkas of Chernobyl, and Ido Haar’s Presenting Princess Shaw, with Princess Shaw present for a Q&A.

HOCKNEY

Documentary celebrates the life and career of British artist David Hockney

HOCKNEY (Randall Wright, 2015)
Metrograph, 7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts., 212-660-0312
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Francesca Beale Theater, Walter Reade Theater,
West 65th St. between Amsterdam Ave. & Broadway
Opens Friday, April 22
hockneyfilm.tumblr.com

“Why are you popular?” artist David Hockney is asked in an old interview in the 2014 documentary Hockney. “I’m not that sure,” the painter and photographer answers with a laugh. “I’m interested in ways of looking, because people will respond. Everybody does look; it’s just a question of how hard.” Award-winning director Randall Wright, who in 2002 made David Hockney: Secret Knowledge, examining the artist’s theories about the use of cameras and photographic-like visualization techniques in art going back centuries, this time takes a loving, more wide-ranging look at Hockney’s professional and personal worlds. Combining new interviews with old footage and home movies and photographs from Hockney’s private archives — which have never been made public before — Wright reveals Hockney to be an absolutely charming and engaging man with a genuine passion for life but not without his demons. “The paintings all related, whether superficially or intensely, on his life, and his trying to deal with his homosexuality, and trying to deal with his fantasies, and trying to deal with the issues of a sexual identity,” fellow British artist and longtime Hockney friend Mark Berger explains. “And he used wit to play with these identities. He was really like a little high school girl about it.” Wright and cinematographer Patrick Duval insert beautiful shots of many of Hockney’s paintings, slowly moving over the canvases as Hockney and, often, the subjects being depicted discuss them. Among the glorious works shown, from portraits and realistic paintings to more experimental, surreal, and abstract pieces, are “A Bigger Splash,” “Portrait of My Father,” “Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy,” “We Two Boys Together Clinging Together,” “Picture of a Hollywood Swimming Pool,” “Beverly Hills Housewife,” “Celia with a Foot on a Chair,” and such Polaroid composites as “Still Life Blue Guitar 4th April 1982.”

David Hockney opens up his personal archives for illuminating documentary

The film reveals Hockney to be a Warholian-like figure with a much more open and fun-loving personality — complete with odd glasses, bottle-blonde hair with bangs, and a love of photography — enjoying the party life as he goes from his hometown, “dingy Bradford” in England, to New York and Los Angeles; he currently lives in England and California and still paints seven days a week at the age of seventy-eight. It’s quite a thrill to see Hockney at work in his studios, putting brush to canvas. “I paint what I like and when I like” is one of numerous Hockney quotes that Wright uses on title cards, setting them on different monochrome backgrounds and interspersing them throughout the film. Wright (Lucian Freud: A Painted Life) also explores in-depth Hockney’s relationships with such friends and/or lovers as Peter Schlesinger and Henry Geldzahler. One drawback is that the director identifies his interview subjects, Hockney’s friends, colleagues, and relatives, only by name, so it is not always clear what their relationship to the artist is; most viewers are not likely to know who Bachardy, Arthur Lambert, Tchaik Chassay, Melissa North, Wayne Sleep, John Kasmin, or even Ed Ruscha and Jack Larson are or how Margaret Hockney is related to David. (Larson is the recently deceased actor who played Jimmy Olsen on the Superman television series and became a collector of Hockney’s work, while Margaret is David’s sister.) But that’s only a minor quibble in a wonderful documentary that celebrates not only the artist but his work and process, which comes alive on the screen, digital technology allowing the paintings and photographs to pop with their brilliant colors. If you didn’t appreciate Hockney’s talent before, this documentary will change your mind about it. And if you already were a fan of him and his work, this film will make you love him even more.

JAPAN SINGS! THE JAPANESE MUSICAL FILM: THE HAPPINESS OF THE KATAKURIS

A Japanese family can’t escape strange deaths in THE HAPPINESS OF THE KATAKURIS

THE HAPPINESS OF THE KATAKURIS (カタクリ家の幸福) (Takashi Miike, 2001)
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Saturday, April 23, 7:00
Festival runs through April 23
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org

“Let’s forget any accidents by singing and dancing!” is the cry of the Katakuris, a seemingly cursed family in one of the craziest dark musical comedies you’re ever likely to see. Japanese genre king Takashi Miike, who has made more than 120 films in his twenty-five-year career, outdid himself in 2001’s The Happiness of the Katakuris, an endlessly inventive tale of a disaster-ridden clan that moves to the middle of nowhere to run a country inn, lured by a rumor that a railroad will be built nearby. Masao Katakuri (Kenji Sawada) is a laid-off department-store shoe salesman who has big dreams, supported by his devoted wife and former work colleague, Terue (Keiko Matsuzaka). Their daughter, Shizue (Naomi Nishida), is a divorced single mother who falls for suspicious navy officer Richard Sagawa (Kiyoshiro Imawano), while their son, Masayuki (Shinji Takeda), is a disgraced financier. Masao’s elderly father, Jinpei (Tetsurō Tamba), likes killing birds and playing with the family dog, Pochi. The film is narrated by Terue’s young daughter, Yurie (Tamaki Miyazaki), who is sharing her memories of one very bizarre summer. Desperate for paying customers at the bed and breakfast they have dubbed White Lovers, the family is excited when a guest finally arrives, but alas, he is there only to commit suicide. Afraid that news of his death would ruin any chances of success, the Katakuris decide to cover it up by burying the man and not reporting anything to the police. And when subsequent guests end up dead as well — in bizarre, ridiculous ways — there is no turning back.

Takashi Miike has a blast with crazy musical

Miike (Ichi The Killer, Audition, Thirteen Assassins) and screenwriter Kikumi Yamagishi (Miike’s Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai and Over Your Dead Body) masterfully mix comedy, romance, Claymation, music, murder, and mayhem in this enormously entertaining and highly original movie that is filled with a never-ending bag of surprises. Loosely based on Kim Jee-woon’s The Quiet Family, the film includes an adorably vicious animated angel-winged mini-monster, a quartet of Macbeth-like witch women, and odes to Psycho, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and The Sound of Music. Each musical set piece, choreographed by Ryohei Kondo of the Condors, is done in a different style, going from bright and funny to dark and sinister, but always with a firm tongue in cheek. There’s lots of red blood, blue skies, and green, green grass as this oddball extended family try to make a better life for themselves, but luck is certainly not on their side. The Happiness of the Katakuris is screening April 23 at 4:00 in Japan Society’s rather eclectic 2016 Globus Film Series “Japan Sings! The Japanese Musical Film,” which concludes at 7:00 with another delightful offbeat musical, Memories of Matsuko.

TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL: HERE ALONE

Ann (Lucy Walters) is struggling to survive a postapocalyptic nightmare in HERE ALONE

HERE ALONE (Rod Blackhurst, 2016)
Sunday, April 24, Bow Tie Cinemas Chelsea 5, 9:45
tribecafilm.com
www.herealonefilm.com

Rod Blackhurst’s tense 2013 short film, Alone Time, in which a New York City woman named Ann (Rose Hemingway) heads upstate for a few days of camping by herself, was based on a true story. Fortunately, Blackhurst’s feature debut, Here Alone, is not. The gripping postapocalyptic thriller is set in what has become our standard vision of the near future, when a virus has decimated the world’s population, turning people into cannibalistic zombies. (Are there any other kind?) Ann (Lucy Walters) is doing her best to survive in the forest by herself, raiding nearby houses for canned food while evading the hungry walking dead. The film flashes back and forth between the present and the recent past, when Ann, her husband, Jason (Shane West), and their baby left their home to seek safety in the woods. Along the way, Jason taught Ann detailed survival methods, which she uses to the best of her ability. When she finds a teenage girl, Olivia (Gina Piersanti), and her injured stepfather, Chris (Adam David Thompson), in the middle of the road, she has to decide whether to help and trust them — while also facing haunting memories, as they remind her of the family she has lost — in a future that is uncertain for all of them. Director and editor Blackhurst, screenwriter David Ebeltoft, and cinematographer Adam McDaid (Ebeltoft cowrote Alone Time with Blackhurst, and McDaid photographed the short) have crafted a nifty little horror film, mining familiar genre territory but twisting conventions just enough to keep viewers on the edge of their seat. You can’t take your eyes off Walters (Shame, Power), who gives Ann a tough yet vulnerable quality, focusing on her troubled psyche, with Thompson (A Walk among the Tombstones, Mozart in the Jungle) and Piersanti (It Felt Like Love) keeping things right on the edge of comfort and chaos. Here Alone is screening in the Midnight section of the Tribeca Film Festival on April 24 at 9:45.

JAPAN SINGS! THE JAPANESE MUSICAL FILM: MEMORIES OF MATSUKO

Tetsuya Nakashima’s MEMORIES OF MATSUKO concludes Japan Society series focusing on the history of the Japanese musical

MEMORIES OF MATSUKO (Tetsuya Nakashima, 2006)
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Saturday, April 23, 7:00
Festival runs through April 23
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org

We called Tetsuya Nakashima’s 2004 hit, Kamikaze Girls, the “otaku version of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amelie,” referring to it as “fresh,” “frenetic,” “fast-paced,” and “very funny.” His feature-length follow-up, the stunningly gorgeous Memories of Matsuko, also recalls Amelie and all those other adjectives, albeit with much more sadness. Miki Nakatani (Ring, Silk) stars as Matsuko, a sweet woman who spent her life just looking to be loved but instead found nothing but heartbreak, deception, and physical and emotional abuse. But Memories of Matsuko, is not a depressing melodrama, even if Nakashima (Confessions, The World of Kanako) incorporates touches of Douglas Sirk every now and again. The film is drenched in glorious Technicolor, often breaking out into bright and cheerful musical numbers straight out of a 1950s fantasy world. As the movie begins, Matsuko has been found murdered, and her long-estranged brother (Akira Emoto) has sent his son, Sho (Eita), who never knew she existed, to clean out her apartment. As Sho goes through the mess she left behind, the film flashes back to critical moments in Matsuko’s life — and he also meets some crazy characters in the present. It’s difficult rooting for the endearing Matsuko knowing what becomes of her, but Nakashima’s remarkable visual style will grab you and never let go. And like Audrey Tatou in Amelie, Nakatani — who won a host of Japanese acting awards for her outstanding performance — is just a marvel to watch. Memories of Matsuko is a fine choice to conclude Japan Society’s rather eclectic 2016 Globus Film Series “Japan Sings! The Japanese Musical Film.” As curator Michael Raine notes, “The ubiquity of music and song in postwar Japanese cinema became an anti-naturalist resource for modernist filmmakers to characterize social groups (Twilight Saloon, A Treatise on Japanese Bawdy Songs), or to tweak contemporary debates in avant-garde music by combining Buddhist chant and naniwabushi with West Side Story (Oh, Bomb!). We can hear echoes of that irony even in more recent musical films (The Happiness of the Katakuris, Memories of Matsuko), in which the utopian musical numbers only accentuate the bleakness of the lives they comment on. Seeing and hearing the tradition of musical films in Japanese cinema gives us a different view of Japanese popular culture that is smart as well as silly and sometimes devastating, too.”