this week in film and television

OLD SCHOOL KUNG FU FEST: SWORD FIGHTING HEROES EDITION

US premiere of 2K remaster of Chang Peng-yi’s The Night Orchid is part of Metrograph series

OLD SCHOOL KUNG FU FEST: SWORD FIGHTING HEROES EDITION
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
April 21-30
metrograph.com

When I was a kid, I spent many a rainy Saturday afternoon watching Kung Fu Theater, a weekly serving of wuxia films, poorly dubbed martial arts films from Hong Kong that were among the coolest movies I’d ever seen, filled with indecipherable plots and fantabulous weapons. It didn’t get much better than The Story of Drunken Master, Five Fingers of Death, and Bruce Lee squaring off against Chuck Norris and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

Last year the RZA and DJ Scratch joined forces for the tribute song “Saturday Afternoon Kung Fu Theatre,” in which the RZA declares, “Can we watch another movie next Saturday? / Be sure to tune in next week / for The Masked Avengers and Heroes of the East.”

You don’t have to wait for next week, as Metrograph is currently showing the tenth “Old School Kung Fu Fest: Sword Fighting Heroes Edition” through April 30. The tenth festival consists of fifteen flicks, little known and classic, including the US premiere of Lin Jing-jie’s three-and-a-half-hour documentary The King of Wuxia, about King Hu; Hu’s 1969-71 A Touch of Zen, 1973 The Fate of Lee Khan, and 1975 The Valiant Ones; Yang Shih-ching’s 1970 The Grand Passion, made by A Touch of Zen’s production manager during downtime of that film; a 2K remaster of Chang Peng-I’s 1983 The Night Orchid; Sung Tsun-shou’s 1969 Iron Mistress; and Chris Huang’s 2000 The Legend of the Sacred Stone.

Below are some of the other highlights of the series, which is presented by Metrograph and Subway Cinema in association with Taipei Cultural Center in New York.

THE GHOST HILL (Ting Shan-hsi, 1971)
Sunday, April 23, 3:00
metrograph.com

The Swordsman of All Swordsmen trilogy concludes with Ting Shan-hsi’s fantastically mad The Ghost Hill. You don’t need to have seen Joseph Kuo’s The Swordsman of All Swordsmen or Lung Chien’s The Bravest Revenge — although the former is screening at Metrograph April 22-23 and the latter is available virtually on Metrograph at Home — to get instantly sucked into the grand finale, in which Tsai Ing-chieh (Tien Peng) might at last avenge the murder of his father by Yun Chung-chun (Chen Bao-liang). The wuxia epic begins with a high-flying battle between Tsai and Feng Chun-ching (David Tang Wei), aka Black Dragon Hero, on a rocky beachfront, overseen by the Grand Master (Kao Ming), who will present to the winner the coveted Purple Light Sword, bestowing upon him the title of Master Swordsman.

Tsai takes home the trophy, but it is immediately stolen from him by thieves who also slay his master. Tsai and his goofy but loyal brother head out to regain the sword and kill Yun, but it turns out that someone has already beaten them to it, although Yun’s daughter, Fei Yen-tzu (Polly Shang-kuan), an accomplished assassin known as Flying Swallow, blames Tsai for the evil deed. But soon Tsai, his brother, Fei, and Feng are teaming up to defeat the evil King Chin (Hsieh Han) and the girl he raised, Chin Man-chiao (Han Hsiang-chin), aka Princess of the Underworld, who he is grooming to be his bride.

As the men fight over the women and the women fight over the men, the action moves into Chin’s fortress, where Tsai and his merry band of homeless beggars must make it through ten boobytrapped hells in order to face Chin and his dangerous left arm.

Writer-director Ting, cinematographer Lin Tsan-ting, art director Tsao Nien-lung, and set decorator Chen Shang-lin add fab touches to every scene, from character names — Green Demon Judge, Misty Light Master, Iron Bull, and the Murdering Wonder Child to the Black and White Wuchang, the Ox Head Demon, the Yanluo Wang, and the Soul-Hunting Yaksha — to colorful costumes, lavishly cheesy sets, a boiling oil bath, epic sound effects and music (with Theremin!), ultracool weapons, and plenty of fire and blood, along with watermelons and a special beheading.

There are also a number of awesome quotes. “We can never understand the grievances of the previous generation,” Yen-tzu posits. “The gates of heaven are open but you choose to knock on hell’s door,” King Chin warns Tsai.

The Ghost Hill evokes such later films as Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, Chang Cheh’s Five Venoms, Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, and Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but it’s in a class all by itself. And it should be special watching it not alone on a rainy day but in a theater packed with wuxia fans likely to be hooting and hollering all the way.

Shu Qi is an expertly trained killer with a conscience in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s gorgeous period drama

THE ASSASSIN (刺客聶隱娘) (NIE YINNIANG) (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2015)
Saturday, April 29, 7:00, and Sunday, April 30, 9:15
metrograph.com

Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien’s first film in eight years is a visually sumptuous feast, perhaps the most beautifully poetic wuxia film ever made. Inspired by a chuanqi story by Pei Xing, The Assassin is set during the ninth-century Tang dynasty, on the brink of war between Weibo and the Royal Court. Exiled from her home since she was ten, Nie Yinniang (Hou muse Shu Qi) has returned thirteen years later, now an expert assassin, trained by the nun (Fang-Yi Sheu) who raised her to be a cold-blooded killer out for revenge. After being unable to execute a hit out of sympathy for her target’s child, Yinniang is ordered to kill Tian Ji’an (Chang Chen), her cousin and the man to whom she was betrothed as a young girl, as a lesson to teach her not to let personal passions rule her. But don’t worry about the plot, which is far from clear and at times impossible to follow. Instead, glory in Hou’s virtuosity as a filmmaker; he was named Best Director at Cannes for The Assassin, a meditative journey through a fantastical medieval world. Hou and cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-Bing craft each frame like it’s a classical Chinese painting, a work of art unto itself. The camera moves slowly, if at all, as the story plays out in long shots, in both time and space, with very few close-ups and no quick cuts, even during the martial arts fights in which Yinniang displays her awesome skills. Hou often lingers on her face, which shows no outward emotion, although her soul is in turmoil. Hou evokes Andrei Tarkovsky, Akira Kurosawa, Ang Lee, and Zhang Yimou as he takes the viewer from spectacular mountains and river valleys to lush interiors (the stunning sets and gorgeous costumes, bathed in red, black, and gold, are by Hwarng Wern-ying), with silk curtains, bamboo and birch trees, columns, and other elements often in the foreground, along with mist, fog, and smoke, occasionally obscuring the proceedings, lending a surreal quality to Hou’s innate realism.

There are long passages of silence or with only quiet, barely audible music by composer Lim Giong, with very little dialogue, as rituals are performed, baths are prepared, and a bit of black magic takes place. The opening scenes, set around a breathtaking mountain abbey in Inner Mongolia, are shot in black-and-white with no soundtrack, like a silent film, harkening to cinema’s past as well as Yinniang’s; when it switches over to color, fiery reds take over as the credits begin. Throughout the film, the nun wears white and the assassin wears black, in stark contrast to the others’ exquisitely colorful attire; however, the film is not about good and evil but something in between. Shu and Cheng, who played a trio of lovers in Hou’s Three Times, seem to be barely acting in The Assassin, immersing themselves in their characters; Hou (The Puppetmaster, Flowers of Shanghai) gives all of his cast, professional and nonprofessional alike, a tremendous amount of freedom, and it results here in scenes that feel real despite our knowing better. Sure, a touch more plot explication would have been nice, but that was not what Hou was after; he wanted to create a mood, an atmosphere, to transport the actors and the audience to another time and place, and he has done that marvelously. The Assassin is a treasure chest of memorable moments that rewards multiple viewings. I’ve seen it twice and can’t wait to see it again — but I’ve given up trying to figure out exactly what it’s about, instead reveling in its immense, contemplative beauty. Hou’s previous full-length film was 2007’s Flight of the Red Balloon; it’s now been eight years since The Assassin, so here’s hoping his next film is on its way.

King Hu’s A Touch of Zen is a trippy journey toward enlightenment

A TOUCH OF ZEN (King Hu, 1969/1971)
Sunday, April 30, 1:00
metrograph.com

King Hu’s 1969 highly influential wuxia classic, A Touch of Zen, is a three-hour epic that features an impossible-to-figure-out plot, a goofy romance, wicked-cool weaponry, an awesome Buddhist monk, a bloody massacre, and action scenes that clearly involve the overuse of trampolines. Still, it’s great fun, even if it is way too long. (The film, which was initially shown in two parts, earned a special technical prize at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival.) Shih Jun stars as Ku Shen Chai, a local calligrapher and scholar who is extremely curious when the mysterious Ouyang Nin (Tin Peng) suddenly show up in town. It turns out that Ouyang is after Miss Yang (Hsu Feng) to exact “justice” for the corrupt Eunuch Wei, who is out to kill her entire family. Hu (Come Drink with Me, Dragon Gate Inn) fills the film with long, poetic establishing shots of fields and the fort, using herky-jerky camera movements (that might or might not have been done on purpose) and throwing in an ultra-trippy psychedelic mountain scene that is about as 1960s as it gets. Winner of the Technical Grand Prize at Cannes, A Touch of Zen is ostensibly about Ku’s journey toward enlightenment, but it’s also about so much more, although I’m not completely sure what that is.

PLAN 75

Michi Kakutani (Chieko Baisho) faces the end of her life sooner than she wants to in Plan 75

PLAN 75 (Chie Hayakawa, 2022)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, April 21
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.kimstim.com

In March 2020, at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, sixty-nine-year-old Texas lt. gov. Dan Patrick told Tucker Carlson on Fox News, “No one reached out to me and said, ‘As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?’ And if that’s the exchange, I’m all in.” Many people agreed that in order to protect the US economy, it was acceptable to let senior citizens die from the coronavirus.

Japanese writer-director Chie Hayakawa takes that concept to the next level in her debut feature, the melancholic, gorgeously photographed Plan 75, opening April 21 at IFC Center.

Expanded from a short film she made for the 2018 omnibus Ten Years Japan, in which five directors made works set ten years in the future, Plan 75 unfolds in a near dystopia where the Japanese government, in order to combat the inconvenient truth that the population is aging at a potentially unsustainable rate, offers all citizens seventy-five and older the opportunity to be euthanized, no questions asked, in exchange for one thousand dollars and free cremation, among other lures.

“The surplus of seniors is draining Japan’s economy and taking a heavy toll on the young generation,” a young man with a rifle narrates at the beginning of the film. “Surely the elderly don’t wish to be a blight on our lives. The Japanese have a long, proud history of sacrificing themselves to benefit the country. I pray that my courageous act will trigger discussion and a future that’s brighter for this nation.”

Yôko Narimiya (Yumi Kawai) takes a job at a government euthanasia company in Plan 75

Plan 75 evokes elements of Richard Fleischer’s 1973 thriller Soylent Green, in which the government provides extravagantly organized assisted suicide, and Michael Anderson’s 1976 sci-fi flick Logan’s Run, in which citizens are not permitted to live past the age of thirty.

Legendary actress and singer Chieko Baisho is mesmerizing as Michi Kakutani, an elegant seventy-eight-year-old woman with no family. After losing her job as a hotel maid, she tries to find other employment, but it’s difficult at her age. Running out of money, she worries that she might soon be homeless.

She then finds out about the government program called Plan 75; cheerful banners and television commercials are pervasive. Several of her friends, including Ineko (Hisako Ôkata), are interested in the proposition, especially the part that comes with a free stay in a resort. But Michi is not ready to die.

Hiromu Okabe (Hayato Isomura) is a bright and enthusiastic young man who is one of Plan 75’s leading salesmen. He eagerly signs up senior citizens for Plan 75 with a smile on his face, believing it is a good thing for everyone. But when his uncle, Yukio Okabe (Taka Takao), shows up to enroll in the program, he starts having second thoughts.

Meanwhile, fellow employee Yôko Narimiya (Yumi Kawai) is assigned to Michi’s case, quickly growing close with the older woman, which is against the rules. And Maria (Stefanie Arianne) is a Filipino caregiver who has come to Japan to make enough money to pay for her ailing daughter’s heart operation; instead of helping sick and elderly people survive, she is now processing their belongings after they are killed by the state, reminiscent of how the Nazis collected the possessions of victims of the gas chambers.

“Humans have no choice about whether to be born, but it would be a good thing if we were able to choose when it’s time to die,” an elderly woman says happily in a commercial in a Plan 75 waiting room that reverses our usual expectations; instead of waiting to see doctors to keep them healthy, these seniors are waiting to die. “Being able to decide how my life will end provided me peace of mind,” the spokeswoman adds.

Plan 75 is a chilling look at where we might be headed; at times it feels like a documentary, its narrative all too believable. Cinematographer Hideho Urata’s camera ranges from close-ups of Baishô’s face, both celebrating and mourning every deep wrinkle, to dark interiors where the elderly slowly go through their meager daily existence and bright exteriors where children play and trains speed by as Michi can only watch.

At one point, after reading a section of the Plan 75 manual, which purports to give older people the chance to die with dignity, Yôko stares accusingly at the audience, implicating us in this frightening example of elder abuse. Hayakawa and Urata then cut to a sunset peeking through a tree next to a bland housing complex, followed by a shot of Michi’s hand, held up to a fading light through the window, examining each bent and crooked finger as she lies on a futon, wondering if she’s made the right choice — or even was given much of one in the first place.

Winner of a Caméra d’Or Special Distinction at Cannes, Plan 75 is a haunting cautionary tale that speaks volumes as to how senior citizens are treated, or mistreated, whether during a global pandemic or just every day, in Japan or elsewhere, including right here in America, where too many politicians consider them excess baggage. And the stunning finale emphasizes that we need to do something about it, and fast.

Hayakawa (Bird, Niagara) will be at IFC Center opening weekend, participating in Q&As on April 21 at 7:00 with Reiko Tahara, April 22 at 7:10 with Risa Morimoto, and April 23 at 4:25 with Kris Montello.

RIALTO AT 25

World premiere of 4K restoration of Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville kicks off “Rialto at 25” at MoMA (photo courtesy the Kobal Collection)

RIALTO AT 25
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
April 19 – May 22, $8-$12
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
www.rialtopictures.com

In 1997, Bruce Goldstein started Rialto Pictures, joined the following year by Adrienne Halpern. For more than a quarter-century, Rialto has been dedicated to reissuing and restoring classic foreign and independent films, both famous and forgotten, often debuting them at Film Forum, where Goldstein has long served as master programmer. MoMA pays tribute to copresidents Goldstein and Halpern with “Rialto at 25,” a five-week series consisting of thirty-one films released by the beloved distribution company, beginning with Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1947 murder mystery, Quai Des Orfèvres, and the world premiere of a brand-new 4K restoration of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 futuristic thriller, Alphaville.

Organized by MoMA Film curator Dave Kehr, the festival also includes Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, John Carpenter’s Escape from New York, Robert Hamer’s Kind Hearts and Coronets, Marcel Carné’s Le Jour Se Lève, Akira Kurosawa’s Ran, Carol Reed’s The Third Man, Joe Dante’s The Howling, and Alberto Cavalcanti’s Went the Day Well?

“I began Rialto Pictures out of sheer frustration. Many classic movies, particularly European films, had no distribution in the United States, with prints either impossible to get or unavailable to repertory cinemas,” Goldstein said in a statement. “And, just as bad, a lot of important classics — like Renoir’s Grand Illusion and Godard’s Breathless — were seen for decades only in miserable 16mm copies, with bad image and sound. By getting the rights to movies like these myself, I could make brand new 35mm prints and show them — not just in New York — but in movie theaters across the country.”

Rialto has amassed a profoundly remarkable collection that is well represented in the MoMA series; among the other highlights and surprises are Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria (with a seven-minute restored scene), Jules Dassin’s Rififi, Orson Welles’s The Trial, Joseph Losey’s Mr. Klein, John Boulting’s Brighton Rock, and Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and That Obscure Object of Desire. In addition, MoMA has created a special forty-five-minute compilation of Rialto trailers.

On April 29, Goldstein will present the illustrated talk “The Art of Subtitles”; several screenings will feature introductions or discussions; and originally commissioned Rialto posters will be on view. Goldstein will introduce Jacques Deray’s La Piscine on April 26 and Dino Risi’s Una Vita Difficile on May 14, translator and subtitler Michael F. Moore will introduce Francesco Rosi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli on April 22, Whit Stillman and actors Dylan Hundley and Carolyn Farina will participate in a discussion following a screening of Metropolitan on April 27, actor Madjid Niroumand will talk about Amir Naderi’s Davandeh with Goldstein after a screening on April 28, and Julien Duvivier’s Panique will be introduced on April 26 by Pierre Simon, the son of Georges Simenon, on whose novel the film is based. You might as well just move in to MoMA from April 19 to May 22, but keep looking over your shoulder.

GUILLERMO DEL TORO: CRAFTING PINOCCHIO

A large-scale Pinocchio hovers over a MoMA hallway (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

GUILLERMO DEL TORO: CRAFTING PINOCCHIO
MoMA, Museum of Modern Art
The Debra and Leon Black Family Film Center
The Paul J. Sachs Galleries
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Through April 15, $14-$25 (sixteen and under free)
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
crafting pinocchio slideshow

You don’t have to have seen Guillermo del Toro’s Oscar-winning stop-motion-animated Pinocchio or even liked it in order to appreciate the magical “Crafting Pinocchio” exhibition at MoMA, on view for just a few more days. Expect long lines to check out models, maquettes, drawings, dioramas, and video that goes behind the scenes of the making of the film, which started out as a chapter book illustrated by Gris Grimly.

“After the book was published, me and some friends started to develop how this could be a movie. And we came up with a list of directors, and Guillermo was top on the list,” Grimly explains on the audioguide. “Shortly after that, I got a call from a gallery that was selling my artwork, and they said that Guillermo came in and bought a piece of my Pinocchio artwork. And I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me!’ They called him up and we had lunch. And this was 2004, I think. It’s been a long time coming. This has been like twenty some years.”

Doctors examine Pinocchio in scene from Oscar-winning film (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The exhibit is an enticing collection that will bring out the little kid in you. You’ll learn about the creation of such characters as Cricket (voiced by Ewan McGregor), Geppetto (David Bradley), Pinocchio (Gregory Mann), Podesta (Ron Perlman), Dottore (John Turturro), Candlewick (Finn Wolfhard), Spazzatura (Cate Blanchett), the Black Rabbits (Tim Blake Nelson), Count Volpe (Christoph Waltz), the Wood Sprite (Tilda Swinton), and Mussolini (Tom Kenny) and encounter scenes set in Geppetto’s home, the doctor’s office, the battlefield, and the circus where Pinocchio performs.

“This is a fable very close to my heart, and one that I think has lived in many incarnations,” del Toro says on the guide. “And I trust the one we’re offering to you is a particularly beautiful one. This is a tale about becoming who you are, not transforming yourself for others, which goes counter to the traditional take on Pinocchio.” The film itself will be screened at MoMA on April 14 and 15 at 3:00.

Exhibit goes behind the scenes of the making of Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

In the film center downstairs are a number of old copies of Carlo Collodi’s story in multiple languages from around the world, an inside look at the music in del Toro’s movie, and clips and posters from Pinocchio and such other del Toro works as Nightmare Alley, The Shape of Water, Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy, and The Devil’s Backbone.

On the audioguide, del Toro adds, “We wanted to create a story about a world that behaves like a puppet and obeys everything they’re told, and a puppet that chooses to be disobedient and finds his own morality, his own soul, and his own humanity by that disobedience.” The MoMA show captures just how del Toro accomplished that.

EVERY OCEAN HUGHES: RIVER

Every Ocean Hughes’s River will be performed March 24–26 in conjunction with photography exhibit (photo courtesy Every Ocean Hughes)

Who: Every Ocean Hughes
What: Live performance
Where: Whitney Museum of American Art, the Susan and John Hess Family Theater, 99 Gansevoort St.
When: March 24, 7:00; March 25, 4:00 & 7:00; March 26, 4:00, $25; exhibition continues through April 2
Why: Multidisciplinary artist Every Ocean Hughes activates her Whitney photography exhibition “Every Ocean Hughes: Alive Side” with four live performances this weekend in the Susan and John Hess Family Theater. Formerly known as Emily Roysdon, Hughes investigates legacy, loss, and inheritance in “Alive Side,” consisting of photographs of the west side piers right outside the Whitney; Hughes calls them “unmarked memorials, found monuments to the lives that needed that unregulated space. To those who died living queerly. Those who died of neglect, poverty, AIDS, violence, and politics. And to those seeking life by crossing West Street.” The black-and-white photos of the dilapidated wooden piers sticking out of the water, some works sliced diagonally in half, are framed in bright pastel colors that evoke the rainbow pride flag. The exhibit also features the forty-minute video One Big Bag, in which a death doula portrayed by Lindsay Rico describes and enacts rituals surrounding the end of life; “the whole process is a creative process,” she says.

Every Ocean Hughes, The Piers Untitled (#12 collaged, #9, #14 collaged, #4), 2009-23 (photo by Ron Amstutz)

On March 24–26, the Maryland-born Hughes, who lives and works in her home state and Stockholm, will present River, a thirty-minute live performance incorporating song, text, choreographed movement, and set design exploring the crossing that takes place at death, the descent into the underworld. The cast includes Rico, Geo WyeX, Æirrinn, and Nora Brown, with movement direction by Monica Mirabile, costumes by Montana Levi Blanco, and lighting by Timothy Johnson. Tickets are $25; it is recommended they be purchased in advance.

RIMINI

Richie Bravo (Michael Thomas) tries to hang on to his long-lost past in Ulrich Seidl’s Rimini

RIMINI (Ulrich Seidl, 2022)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Opens Friday, March 17
212-255-224
quadcinema.com

Michael Thomas is unforgettable as washed-up Schlager singer Richie Bravo, an alcoholic haunted by his past, in Ulrich Seidl’s Rimini, opening March 17 at the Quad. In an early scene, he visits his brother, Ewald (Georg Friedrich), at their family home after the death of their mother and walks wistfully around the house, looking at old photos, gently brushing his hand over a piano, and playing Bata Illic’s “Schwarze Madonna” on the jukebox in the basement, dancing by himself and eventually singing along: “Every life has its woes / Happiness comes and goes / Black Madonna / Every day, every night / We will always be this happy / It’s not too late / Your future will be great / Black Madonna.”

Richie is a big, broad-shouldered man who moves with a swagger, slightly leaning to his right, his dirty blond hair in a ponytail, a wisp often falling over his face. After the funeral, he returns to his house in Rimini, Italy, a popular resort in the summer but it’s now winter, sparsely populated and covered in snow and mist. A large cutout of his younger self, when he was a star, hovers over his music room like a curse.

He is now relegated to performing in front of embarrassingly small groups of German-speaking tourists for peanuts, singing standards as well as new songs composed by Fritz Ostermayer and Herwig Zamernik. He can’t afford to hire a band, so he is accompanied by prerecorded music that is only one step removed from barroom karaoke. The dozen or two elderly fans who attend his shows adore him; he wanders through the audience, flirting with the women; following the shows, he sometimes sleeps with them for money, making more as a gigolo than as a musician. Seidl graphically depicts Richie having sex with them, particularly his ersatz girlfriend, Annie (Claudia Martini), whose dying mother (Rosa Schmidl) is in the next room. Richie is surrounded by approaching death; his father, Ekkehart (Hans-Michael Rehberg, who passed away shortly after filming), lives in a nursing home, barely able to move or speak.

Richie’s pathetic life is sent into turmoil when his daughter, Tessa (Tessa Göttlicher), suddenly shows up with her boyfriend, Moumen (Abd El Rahman), demanding the money Richie promised her and her mother when he left them eighteen years earlier, when Tessa was six. She is not asking for him to finally be a father to her; she just wants the cash and then to never see him again. But Richie is broke, and he doesn’t know how to show love and care anymore, so he is wracked with guilt, trying to find a way out of the miserable excuse of a life he has constructed for himself.

In addition to making fiction films, Seidl (the Paradise Trilogy, Dog Days) is an award-winning documentarian, and he, cinematographer Wolfgang Thaler, and art directors Andreas Donhauser and Renate Martin bring a realistic feel to the sad story, which Seidl wrote with longtime collaborator Veronika Franz. Rimini was written specifically for Thomas (Across the Mile, Randgänger), inspired by an event when, preparing to make the 2007 Import Export, Seidl watched as Thomas spontaneously sang “My Way” in a Ukraine restaurant. Resembling a bizarro, older Brad Pitt, Thomas gives a career performance as Richie, a train wreck of a human being who barely survives in the fragile bubble he has created for himself, buried in booze, cigarettes, and cheap sex to take away the pain of knowing what might have been, his ghostly eyes always somewhere else. He’s a bear of a man, wearing a faded fur coat as he stumbles past empty playgrounds and cabanas, passing by anonymous people dressed in black.

Göttlicher is terrific in her screen debut, channeling a young Claire Danes as Tessa tries to put together her own shattered life. And Rimini is a character to itself, its streets filled with emptiness and occasional random, unidentified figures. Seidl chose to film there not because it is Federico Fellini’s hometown but because his parents took the family to the seaside resort in the 1950s, although certain scenes have a Fellini-esque quality.

Seidl explores a different side of the story in his follow-up, Sparta, which was filmed at the same time as Rimini and focuses on Ewald, a work that has been mired in controversy surrounding allegations of on-set child exploitation that the director has denied. The two films have also been presented as the 205-minute Wicked Games: Rimini Sparta at festivals.

MONTHLY ANIME: THE PLACE PROMISED IN OUR EARLY DAYS / VOICES OF A DISTANT STAR

The Place Promised in Our Early Days is part of Japan Society double feature celebrating Makato Shinkai

THE PLACE PROMISED IN OUR EARLY DAYS (Makoto Shinkai, 2004) / VOICES OF A DISTANT STAR (Makoto Shinkai, 2002)
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Friday, March 17, $15, 7:00
www.japansociety.org

Makoto Shinkai, who took the anime world by storm with his 2002 hit Voices of a Distant Star, a short film made completely on his home computer, followed that up with his first feature-length work, the magical and mystical The Place Promised in Our Early Days. Set in an alternate futuristic post-WWII world, The Place Promised centers on three friends, Hiroki, Takuya, and Sayuri, who make a vow to fly Hiroke and Takuya’s plane, Bela C’ielo, into the Tower, a monolithic structure rising into the sky that symbolizes the postwar division between the Union and US-Japanese forces. With war imminent, an older Takuya and Hiroki find themselves on opposing sides, with Sayuri lost in a coma dreamworld.

Although the plot — especially the science aspects — gets rather complex and confusing, The Place Promised is a beautiful-looking film, both tenderly sweet and harshly depressing, presenting a rather bleak forecast of the future. But stunning visual moments such as a setting sun with an illuminated halo that forms a shining star twinkling into an abandoned factory make it all worth it. Shinkai’s film was deservedly named Best Animated Film at the Mainichi Film Awards, where it topped the much more heralded Steamboy (Katsuhiro Otomo, 2004) and Howl’s Moving Castle (Hayao Miyazaki, 2004).

In celebration of the April 14 North American release of Shinkai’s latest film, Suzume, a coming-of-age story about a seventeen-year-old protagonist, Japan Society is screening The Place Promised in Our Early Days on March 17 at 7:00 in its monthly anime series. It will be preceded by Voices of a Distant Star, a devastatingly melancholic and hauntingly gorgeous twenty-five-minute exploration of loneliness as Mikako chases the evil Tarsians through the galaxies with the UN Space Army carrier Lysithea (named after a Greek mythological figure and a genus of red algae) while Noboru, her true love since they were fifteen, waits for her messages, which take longer and longer to reach him the farther out the battle takes her. Tenmon’s piano score is heartbreaking in one of the saddest and most poignant animes ever made.