Ringmaster Peter Ustinov promises “Rumour! Scandal! Passion!” in presenting story of Lola Montès (Martine Carol)
LOLA MONTÈS (Max Ophüls, 1955)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Sunday, April 24, 5:00
Series runs April 22-30
212-660-0312
metrograph.com
“And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for!” announces the monocled, whip-snapping Mammoth Circus ringmaster (Peter Ustinov) as Max Ophüls’s 1955 CinemaScope masterpiece, Lola Montès, begins. “The most sensational act of the century!” he continues, the camera following him in a breathtaking tracking shot as he introduces “a creature a hundred times more wild than any beast in our menagerie! A monster of cruelty . . . with the eyes of an angel!” Then, with much fanfare, Lola Montès (Martine Carol) arrives like a queen — albeit a circus queen — as the ringmaster tells the audience that they (we) are about to witness “the whole truth of the extraordinary life of Lola Montès.” What follows is not necessarily the true tale of the famed courtesan and entertainer who gained more notoriety for her scandalous love affairs and hourglass body than for her abilities as an actress and dancer. Lola’s story is told in a series of flashbacks showing her with Franz Liszt (Will Quadflieg), Lt. Thomas James (Ivan Desny), conductor Claudio Pirotto (Claude Pinoteau), a young student (Oskar Werner), and, most critically, King Ludwig I of Bavaria (a dashing Anton Walbrook). The episodes reveal her to be both loved and reviled as she struggles to succeed in her career, which ends up taking second place to the men in her life. Ophüls barely shows the cigar-loving Lola performing, instead letting the camera slowly dance around her, often depicting her through window frames, screens, and curtains as if she is a caged animal, all leading to a dangerous grand finale.
Lola (Martine Carol) dreams of a better life in Max Ophüls’s CinemaScope masterpiece
Lola Montès is filled with visual splendor; Jean d’Eaubonne and Willy Schatz’s sets are lush and elegant, and Georges Annenkov’s and Marcel Escoffier’s costumes are beautiful and appropriately extravagant, while cinematographer Christian Matras creates an emotionally powerful palette, bathing Ophüls’s first and only color film in bold reds and blues. (The director of such previous classics as La Ronde, Le Plaisir, and Letter from an Unknown Woman died in 1957 at the age of fifty-four while making Les Amants de Montparnasse.) It’s a dazzling cinematic achievement, one that was initially met with derision, then chopped up by the producers, but finally restored to its exquisite original version. Lola Montès is screening April 24 at 5:00 as part of the Metrograph series “Fassbinder’s Top Ten,” running April 22-30 and consisting of the ten films the German director cited as his favorites in 1982, shortly before his drug-related death at the age of thirty-seven. Held in conjunction with the upcoming release of the new documentary Fassbinder: To Love without Demands, the series also includes such classics as Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar, Howard Hawks’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom, and Luchino Visconti’s The Damned.
Japan Society’s 2016 Globus Film Series “Japan Sings! The Japanese Musical Film” continues April 19 with a complex, hard-to-define work that is not in any way a traditional musical. But then again, it’s by Nagisa Oshima, who didn’t care much for conventions. In 1967, Oshima, who had previously made such controversial films as Pleasures of the Flesh and Violence at Noon, cowrote (with Takeshi Tamura, Mamoru Sasaki, and Toshio Tajima, although much of the film is improvised) and directed Sing a Song of Sex, the original Japanese title of which translates as A Treatise on Japanese Bawdy Songs. The film opens with red liquid dripping on a red background, as if the Japanese flag is being stained with old and new blood. Hikaru Hayashi’s soundtrack chimes in, combining 1960s mystery and sex comedy themes. On a high school campus, many students are protesting the Vietnam War, but four virgin boys, Nakamura (pop singer Ichiro Araki), Ueda (Kôji Iwabuchi), Hiroi (Kazumi Kushida), and Maruyama (Hiroshi Satô), instead are immersed in sexual fantasies involving raping a politically active student they know only as number 469 (Kazuko Tajima). They go out drinking one night in Tokyo with their professor, Otake (Ichizô Itami), as well as three female students, Kaneda (Hideko Yoshida), Ikeda (Hiroko Masuda), and Satomi (Nobuko Miyamoto), who worship the teacher. Professor Otake gets drunk and sings a low-class shanty that demeans women, a Japanese flag behind him. Later he declares, “Bawdy songs, raunchy songs, erotic songs, songs about sex — these are the suppressed voices of the people. An oppressed people’s labor, their lives . . . and their loves. Once people became conscious of these things, they naturally turned to song to express themselves. That’s why bawdy songs represent the history of the people.” He says that he feels sorry for the youth of Japan, who don’t even know they’re being oppressed. Then another drunk man in the bar explains, “So a doomed people sing the songs of a doomed nation? What’s it matter? Japan’s full of doomed people.” That night Professor Otake dies in his hotel room, leaving the three young women to mourn for him and the four young men to continue his bawdy adventures. Meanwhile, Otake’s lover, Takako Tanigawa (Akiko Koyama), becomes involved in the controversy surrounding his death.
“When you create a story about yourself that’s based on a lie about who you are and who your family is, sooner or later it’s bound to be revealed,” political journalist Anne Applebaum says at the beginning of Joseph Martin and Sam Blair’s engrossing documentary, Keep Quiet. “Who are we really?” In 2012, Csanád Szegedi was a terrifying young star in Hungary’s far-right Jobbik party, one of the founders of the paramilitary, pro-Nazi, nationalist Hungarian Guard, rising to election to the European Parliament on the strength of a resurgent, virulent anti-Semitism. “I wanted everyone to believe in the world as I saw it,” he says in the film. “Anti-Semitism and discrimination of Jews was a powerful motivation.” But it all came crumbling down when the public heard an audio recording of the young leader’s phone conversation with disgruntled Jobbik party member Zoltán Ambrus, who tells Szegedi that his family is actually Jewish. At first Szegedi refuses to believe it, but soon his maternal grandmother is admitting to him that she is indeed a Holocaust survivor, with a number tattooed on her arm and memories of the camps. Martin (Win a Baby, Scientologists at War) and Blair (Personal Best, Maradona ’86) detail how Szegedi dealt with this dramatic revelation as the conflicted man shares his innermost thoughts, meets with Orthodox Rabbi Boruch Oberlander, and travels to Auschwitz with Holocaust survivor Eva “Bobby” Neumann. He undergoes a radical transformation that not everyone trusts as the film explores who we are, the impact of where we come from, and whether blood trumps all. Keep Quiet is particularly relevant in a world that is experiencing yet another frightening rise in anti-Semitism, especially in Europe. Martin and Blair also delve into Hungary’s history with the Jews, and it’s not a very pleasant one. The film gets to the very heart of the matter, examining the nature of religious hatred in one man who reevaluates everything he believes in when the tables are suddenly turned. Keep Quiet, which features a beautiful score by cellist and composer Philip Sheppard, is screening in the World Documentary Competition at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 18, 19, and 20, with Martin, Blair, Rabbi Oberlander, and Szegedi present on April 18 to discuss the film.
“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy,” the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously said. In Stéphane Brizé’s The Measure of a Man, Vincent Lindon excels as a husband and father who is trying his best to survive in a changing world, fraught with challenge and controversy, that has seemingly turned its back on him. In an extraordinary performance embodying the calm before a storm that never comes, Lindon plays Thierry Taugourdeau, a working-class man who has been out of a job since the factory where he toiled for more than twenty years closed twenty months ago. He meets with job counselors, takes classes, interviews over Skype, and joins his fellow laid-off colleagues to figure out what to do next, but it is hard for him to have to start over in his fifties while trying to support his wife (Karine De Mirbeck) and take care of a teenage son who has cerebral palsy, played by Matthieu Schaller, who does have the neurological disorder. When Thierry finally does find employment, it’s not exactly a dream job, but he attempts to soldier on even when he is asked to do things that are against his moral and ethical fiber. “We all get to choose,” he says when his fellow former factory workers talk about taking action against the company that laid them off. “In my case, if only for my mental health, I prefer to draw a line and move on. Does that make me a coward?”