THE BALLAD OF GENESIS AND LADY JAYE takes audiences behind the scenes of a very unusual love story
THE BALLAD OF GENESIS AND LADY JAYE (Marie Losier, 2011)
Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th St. at Seventh Ave.
March 13 – April 3, various days and times
212-620-5000
rubinmuseum.org
www.balladofgenesisandladyjaye.com
Experimental director Marie Losier tells a very different kind of love story in the intimate documentary The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye, her debut feature-length film. In 1993, British industrial music legend Genesis P-Orridge, the founder of such highly influential groups as Psychic TV, Throbbing Gristle, and COUM Transmissions (and who changed his name from Neil Andrew Megson in 1971), married Jacqueline Mary Breyer, a nurse and singer who then changed her name to Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge. The two artists were so madly in love that they decided to become a single “pandrogynous” unit known as Breyer P-Orridge, undergoing various forms of plastic surgery to look more alike. Both their life and their music were influenced by the literary cut-up style developed by Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs, but the film itself has the feel that it too was cut up and randomly put back together, resulting in a seriously flawed and fractured narrative that has fascinating individual moments that don’t form a cohesive whole. Mixing in home movies, staged reenactments, archival concert footage, voice-over narration by Genesis, and new interviews (with such friends and colleagues as Tony Conrad, Marti Domination, Lili Chopra, and Peaches), Losier never quite gets to the heart of the matter. Much of the film feels as if something’s missing, as if the director got too close to her subjects and assumed the audience can fill in certain gaps. As she says in the project’s production notes, “The film will attempt to present the incredible complexity of Genesis’ personality from many different angles, most especially my subjective point of view. From my earliest films, my feeling has been that when shooting real life subjects, my very presence changes the reality of what I am filming. Therefore, I am not a neutral participant, but one equally engaged and inspired by what is happening in front of my camera.” As personal and revealing as the film gets at times, much of it also seems forced and overly arty. The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye is screening at various days and times through April 3 at the Rubin Museum in conjunction with the new site-specific interactive-exchange exhibition “Genesis Breyer P-Orridge: Try to Altar Everything.”
An orgy doesn’t go quite as planned in Yann Gonzalez’s dark, lurid, and silly directorial debut, You and the Night. The erotic tragicomedy evokes the films of Derek Jarman along with Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut and, primarily, Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus as seven characters gather one evening for a night of debauchery in the name of love, desperate to fill the gaps in their sad lives. “It’s our secret vice. A little break from the eternal, maddening class struggle,” the Star (Fabienne Babe) tells a pair of cops who show up looking for a runaway boy. The party is hosted by trans gypsy maid Udo (Nicolas Maury); the other guests are Ali (Kate Moran), an older woman joined by her younger lover, Matthias (Niels Schneider); the Stud (soccer star Éric Cantona), who boasts of his enormous manhood (and then proves it); the Teen (Alain Fabien Delon, son of French screen idol Alain Delon), who has not developed his own identity yet; and the Slut (Julie Brémond), who can’t wait to do anyone and everyone. Over the course of the night, they share their dreams, relate their pasts, and search for love, set to a score by French electronic band M83, which is led by Anthony Gonzalez, Yann’s brother. The movie’s supposed to be dreamy and poetic, but instead it’s cold and artificial, often bathed in an unfeeling blue light that furthers the distance between the characters and the audience. It’s often hard to tell what’s supposed to be “real” and what’s meant to be tongue-in-cheek, although Béatrice Dalle’s cameo as a whip-touting commissioner is, well, it just is. You and the Night is screening in FIAF’s “EDM Anthems: French Touch on Film” series on March 15 at 4:00 and 7:30; the series continues on Tuesdays through April 26 with such other films as Mia Hansen-Løve’s Eden, Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, and Céline Sciamma’s Girlhood, which are either set in the club scene or feature EDM-based soundtracks.
Although production designers play a critical role in the making of a film, it’s something that the public tends to take for granted; the best of the best are not exactly household names. The Museum of the Moving Image seeks to rectify that in at least one case with its new series, “See It Big! Jack Fisk,” a celebration of the work of Oscar-nominated production designer, art director, and carpenter Jack Fisk. The fifteen-film series runs March 11 to April 1, kicking off with Terence Malick’s The New World. At the time the film was released in 2005, the iconoclastic American auteur had directed a mere four films in his forty-year career, each a gem in its own way — 1973’s Badlands, 1978’s Days of Heaven, 1998’s The Thin Red Line, and 2005’s The New World, and all of which Fisk worked on. Spectacularly photographed by cinematographer Emanuel Luzbeki (who has won three consecutive Oscars as of the 2016 Academy Awards), The New World reimagines the story of Captain John Smith (Colin Farrell) and Pocahontas (Q’orianka Kilcher) as an epic tale of unrequited desire, a fiercely passionate, if not completely accurate, love story for the ages. In 1607, a crew led by Captain Christopher Newport (Christopher Plummer) has landed in what will come to be known as Jamestown. The disgraced Smith, who was nearly hanged for mutiny, is ordered to meet with “the naturals” in order to develop a favorable relationship. But Smith falls deeply for Pocahontas, Chief Powhatan’s (August Schellenberg) beautiful young daughter, who shares his feelings, leading to a dangerous love that threatens to leave death and destruction in its wake. Large stretches of the film feature no dialogue, instead consisting of gorgeously framed shots with gentle, poetic narration from Smith, Pocahontas, and, later, John Rolfe (Christian Bale). The scenes between Farrell and Kilcher nearly ignite the screen, their eyes burning into each other. Malick and Luzbeki focus on lush, rolling fields and rushing rivers that are more than just beautiful scenery; the gorgeous landscape of this new world is filled with promise, with hope, even though we know what eventually, tragically happens. The film, which experienced well-documented casting, editing, and distribution dilemmas, bogs down considerably when Smith’s place in the newly named Rebecca’s life is taken over by Rolfe, but it all builds to a heart-wrenching conclusion. The New World is screening March 11 at 7:00; the series is being held in conjunction with the upcoming release of Malick’s latest film, Knight of Cups, which is being shown April 1 and on which Fisk, who has worked on every one of Malick’s feature films, served as production designer.
Asia Society’s “Of Ghosts, Samurai, and War: A Series of Classic Japanese Film” series heads into its second weekend with one of the most important and influential — and greatest — works to ever come from Japan. Winner of the Silver Lion for Best Director at the 1953 Venice Film Festival, Kenji Mizoguchi’s seventy-eighth film, Ugetsu, is a dazzling masterpiece steeped in Japanese storytelling tradition, especially ghost lore. Based on two tales by Ueda Akinari and Guy de Maupassant’s “How He Got the Legion of Honor,” Ugetsu unfolds like a scroll painting beginning with the credits, which run over artworks of nature scenes while Fumio Hayasaka’s urgent score starts setting the mood, and continues into the first three shots, pans of the vast countryside leading to Genjurō (Masayuki Mori) loading his cart to sell his pottery in nearby Nagahama, helped by his wife, Miyagi (Kinuyo Tanaka), clutching their small child, Genichi (Ikio Sawamura). Miyagi’s assistant, Tōbei (Sakae Ozawa), insists on coming along, despite the protestations of his nagging wife, Ohama (Mitsuko Mito), as he is determined to become a samurai even though he is more of a hapless fool. “I need to sell all this before the fighting starts,” Genjurō tells Miyagi, referring to a civil war that is making its way through the land. Tōbei adds, “I swear by the god of war: I’m tired of being poor.” After unexpected success with his wares, Genjurō furiously makes more pottery to sell at another market even as the soldiers are approaching and the rest of the villagers run for their lives. At the second market, an elegant woman, Lady Wakasa (Machiko Kyō), and her nurse, Ukon (Kikue Mōri), ask him to bring a large amount of his merchandise to their mansion. Once he gets there, Lady Wakasa seduces him, and soon Genjurō, Miyagi, Genichi, Tōbei, and Ohama are facing very different fates. 
One of the best films of 2008, A Christmas Tale is yet another extraordinary work from French post-New Wave filmmaker Arnaud Desplechin (La Sentinelle, Esther Kahn). Desplechin, who examined family dysfunction in the masterful 