this week in film and television

SCARY MOVIES 9 — AN EVENING WITH LARRY FESSENDEN: THE LAST WINTER

THE LAST WINTER is first of two scary movies from Larry Fessendens Glass Eye Pix screening at Lincoln Center series

THE LAST WINTER is first of two scary movies from Larry Fessenden’s Glass Eye Pix screening at Lincoln Center on November 3

AN EVENING WITH LARRY FESSENDEN: THE LAST WINTER (Larry Fessenden, 2006)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
Tuesday, November 3, 7:00
Series continues through November 5
212-875-5050
www.thelastwinter.net
www.filmlinc.org

In Alaska, a company called North is preparing to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, with the permission of the U.S. government. North has sent along environmentalist James Hoffman (James LeGros) and his assistant, Elliot Taylor (Jamie Harrold), to ensure that the team, led by the imposing Ed Pollack (Ron Perlman), follows all proper guidelines and agreements. But when strange things start happening — including weird visions, odd disappearances, and brutal deaths — Pollack is determined to move forward, no matter the cost. Written and directed by Larry Fessenden (Habit, Wendigo), who also makes a cameo in the film, The Last Winter is a global-warming horror story in the tradition of John Carpenter’s The Thing, where the small cast of characters never knows just what is waiting for them around every corner — and out on the treacherous, blindingly white landscape that surrounds and engulfs them. The film also stars Connie Britton (Friday Night Lights) as Abby Sellers, a strong-minded woman who has left Pollack for Hoffman; indie stalwart Kevin Corrigan (Walking and Talking) as vehicle expert Motor; Zach Gilford (Friday Night Lights) as young and innocent Maxwell McKinder; Grammy-winning composer and musician Joanne Shenandoah (Skywoman) as Dawn Russell, who prepares the meals and cleans up after everyone; and Pato Hoffmann (Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman) as Lee Means, a Native American who has a deep understanding of the land and the spirits. A scary look at an all-too-possible future, The Last Winter is screening on November 3 at 7:00 in the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “Scary Movies 9,” appropriately enough, and will be followed by a Q&A with Fessenden, Perlman, and LeGros. “An Evening with Larry Fessenden,” who is celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of his indie film company, Glass Eye Pix, continues at 9:30 with Mickey Keating’s Darling, followed by a Q&A with Keating, Fessenden, and actors Lauren Ashley Carter and Brian Morvant.

MATHIEU AMALRIC — RENAISSANCE MAN: THE BLUE ROOM

Mathieu Amalric stars as a husband and father in deep trouble in film he also directed and cowrote

CinéSalon: THE BLUE ROOM (LA CHAMBRE BLEUE) (Mathieu Amalric, 2014)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, November 3, $14, 4:00 & 7:30
Series continues Tuesdays through December 15
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org
www.lachambrebleue-lefilm.com

Real-life partners Mathieu Amalric and Stéphanie Cléau strip Georges Simenon’s short 1955 novel The Blue Room to its bare essentials — and we do mean bare — in their intimate, claustrophobic modern noir adaptation, which kicks off FIAF’s six-week tribute to Amalric, consisting of the eight-film CinéSalon series “Mathieu Amalric: Renaissance Man” and the special two-night theatrical presentation Fight or Flight (Le Moral des Ménages), starring Amalric and Anne-Laure Tondu, directed by Cléau. In addition to being one of the world’s most talented actors, starring in such films as Kings and Queen, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, A Christmas Tale, and Venus in Fur, Amalric has directed several previous works, including On Tour, which earned him the Best Director prize at Cannes. In The Blue Room, Amalric plays Julien Gahyde, a successful agriculture equipment salesman whose passionate affair with a local pharmacist’s wife, Esther Despierre (Cléau, who cowrote the script with Amalric), appears to have ended in murder. The film opens with Grégoire Hetzel’s lush, sweeping music as the camera makes its way to a blue hotel room where Julien and Esther have just made love offscreen. “Did I hurt you?” she asks. “No,” he responds. “You’re angry,” she says. “No,” he repeats as she laughs and a drop of blood falls on a creamy white sheet. Only then do we see the naked, sweaty couple, whose lurid tale has been succinctly revealed by this highly stylized, beautifully orchestrated scene. Next we hear Julien being interrogated by a magistrate (Laurent Poitrenaux) about a suspicious death, and soon we see Julien in handcuffs in the police station. We don’t know exactly what crime he has been accused of, nor do we know the victim — it could be Julien’s wife, Delphine (Léa Drucker), Esther’s husband, Nicolas (Olivier Mauvezin), or maybe even Esther herself. But as director Amalric, cinematographer Christophe Beaucarne, and editor François Gedigier cut between the past and the present, the details slowly unfold — although that doesn’t mean they ever become completely clear.

Amalric fills The Blue Room with bold splashes of color amid all the darkness and muted skin tones, from the red towel that signals Julien and Esther’s illicit rendezvous to Delphine’s blue bikini to the strikingly red hair of Nicolas’s mother (Véronique Alain) and the shiny green and yellow John Deere equipment he sells. Amalric and Cléau trim so much out of the original story that it too often feels overly cold and calculating, the manipulation too clear and obvious. The nudity also lacks subtlety; Amalric and Cléau might be comfortable with each other sans clothing, but it seems to be a bit of an obsession with Amalric the director. Nonetheless, The Blue Room, shot in the old-fashioned aspect ratio of 1:33 and running a mere seventy-six minutes, is a gripping yarn, a lurid tale of sex and murder, pain and passion, and femmes fatale, told from the point of view of a relatively quiet, reserved man who never thought his world could just fall apart like it does. With such plot elements as adultery and murder and even the presence of a young daughter (Mona Jaffart), the story cannot fail to call to mind French author Gustave Flaubert’s classic novel of provincial France and misplaced passion, Madame Bovary, but the near-echoes never become too loud, merely adding a somewhat puzzling flavor to the film, like a dream half remembered. The Blue Room is screening at 4:00 & 7:30 on November 3 in Florence Gould Hall; Amalric and Cléau will participate in a Q&A following the 7:30 show. The series continues through December 15 with such other Amalric films as My Sex Life . . . or How I Got into an Argument, The Screen Illusion, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. A companion series continues at Anthology Film Archives through November 8.

MAKING ROUNDS

Two doctors diagnose patients the old-fashioned way at Mount Sinai in MAKING ROUNDS

MAKING ROUNDS (Muffie Meyer, 2014)
Cinema Village
22 East 12th St. between University Pl. & Fifth Ave.
Opens Friday, October 30
212-924-3363
firstrunfeatures.com
www.cinemavillage.com

Over the last several decades, the U.S. health care system has grown increasingly impersonal because of technological advancement, the pharmaceutical boom, and the privatization of public hospitals. But two old-time doctors at Mount Sinai Heart are keeping the human touch alive, and not just for nostalgia’s sake. Muffie Meyer’s sweet-natured, important documentary, Making Rounds, follows Dr. Valentin Fuster, the director of Mount Sinai Heart, and Dr. Herschel Sklaroff, clinical professor of medicine, cardiology, as they lead residents from room to room in the Cardiac Care Unit at New York City’s Mount Sinai Hospital, diagnosing patients with a refreshing lack of reliance on technology. “We both have the philosophy that the number one objective in medicine is the patient,” Dr. Fuster explains. “We both believe that most of what you learn about a particular patient is at the bedside, not with machines.” Dr. Sklaroff adds, “Dr. Fuster and I make rounds the old-fashioned way. The first thing that we do is go to the patient and hold his hand. With that touch you establish rapport instantly. We were trained to go to the bedside and talk to the patients, and take the perfect history, do the perfect physical, from which one ought to be able to make a diagnosis or come close to a diagnosis, maybe ninety percent of the time.” They display a warm, caring bedside manner as they talk, touch, listen, and teach, examining a sixty-seven-year-old woman with coronary heart disease, a twenty-two-year-old single mother who needs a heart transplant, and a fifty-one-year-old man with cardiomyopathy who resists treatment.

Meyer, who codirected Grey Gardens and has directed many television documentaries and nonfiction miniseries (Twyla on Twyla, Liberty! The American Revolution), includes some surprising facts about the health-care system; for example: “In the U.S., we spend an estimated 700 billion dollars a year on tests and procedures that do not improve health outcomes” and “Every year in the U.S., there are at least half a million misdiagnoses in primary care alone — an estimated 10 to 20% of cases.” She doesn’t use any talking heads to either support or question the doctors’ methods, so it’s all a bit one-sided, but it seems pretty hard to deny the old-timers’ success. After watching this engaging, and, in its own way, scary portrait of a dying art, you’ll never look at your own doctor the same again. Making Rounds opens October 30 at Cinema Village; Meyer and Dr. Sklaroff will participate in a Q&A following the 7:00 show Friday night.

THE WONDERS

A beekeeping family tries to hold it all together in THE WONDERS

THE WONDERS (LE MERAVIGLIE) (Alice Rohrwacher, 2014)
Lincoln Plaza Cinema
1886 Broadway at 63rd St.
Opens Friday, October 30
212-757-2280
www.lincolnplazacinema.com
lemeraviglie.mymovies.it

Winner of the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, Alice Rohrwacher’s The Wonders is a sweet little gem of a movie, focusing on a German-Italian family that finds itself at a critical crossroads. Set in Rohrwacher’s (Corpo celeste) hometown in the countryside between Umbria-Lazio and Tuscany, the film follows the travails of a beekeeping family led by the gangly Wolfgang (Sam Louwyck), a grumpy ne’er-do-well from one of the Germanic countries who is trying to live some kind of back-to-the-land life away from authorities in an undeveloped backwater. His allegiance to old-fashioned tradition includes overworking his four young daughters while his wife, Angelica (Alba Rohrwacher, the director’s older sister), keeps at a distance and live-in friend Cocò (Sabine Timoteo) keeps stirring up the pot. At the center of it all is twelve-year-old Gelsomina (first-time actress Maria Alexandra Lungu, who was discovered in a catechism class), an exceptional beekeeper who wants her father to allow the family to participate in a television contest, Countryside Wonders, that could earn them much-needed money. But her father prefers taking care of things himself — though not very well, particularly when he acquires a camel for no apparent reason. Suspicious of the government and contemporary society, Wolfgang likes living in relative isolation; inviting strangers into their world could reveal the illegal working conditions, not to mention abuse of child labor laws. However, Gelsomina is determined to improve their existence, starting with the competition, which is hosted by the beguiling, fairy-tale-like Milly Catena (Monica Bellucci in a marvelous white head piece, partially poking fun at her own sex-symbol image).

Propelled by Lungu’s beautifully gentle performance, which captures the essence of so many basic childhood dilemmas, The Wonders is a warm, tender-hearted film, one that keeps buzzing even if it lacks a big sting, a coming-of-age drama not only for Gelsomina but for the family as a whole. Photographed in a neorealist style by Hélène Louvart, the film is about tradition and change, about the city and the country, about the old and the new, about what home means, and, yes, about bees and honey; there are no trick shots or special effects when it comes to the actors working with beehives and swarms. “The parents of Maria Alexandra Lungu were very happy,” the director states in the film’s press kit. “They said that if the film wouldn’t work out, at least their daughter learned a real skill and could become a beekeeper!” The Wonders, which was a selection of the fifty-second New York Film Festival, opens October 30 at Lincoln Plaza.

PASOLINI 40 YEARS LATER: WITH ALFREDO JAAR AND NORMAN MacAFEE

Alfredo Jaar, THE ASHES OF PASOLINI, 2009. Video: 38:00 (Courtesy the artist, New York)

Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Ave. at Second St.
Sunday, November 1, free, 12:30 pm
646-336-5771
anthologyfilmarchives.org
www.alfredojaar.net

Chilean artist, architect, and filmmaker Alfredo Jaar honors the fortieth anniversary of the mysterious murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini with a special presentation at Anthology Film Archives on November 1. “Pasolini 40 Years Later: with Alfredo Jaar and Norman MacAfee” consists of a screening of Jaar’s 2009 documentary, The Ashes of Pasolini, the launch of a new artist book, Pier Paolo Pasolini: The Ashes of Gramsci, readings from the iconoclastic Italian writer and director’s poetry, and a discussion about Pasolini’s life and work. Jaar will be joined by writer, visual artist, literary translator, and freelance book editor Norman MacAfee for the event. Jaar has written that The Ashes of Pasolini — a eulogy for Pasolini inspired by Pasolini’s poem “The Ashes of Gramsci,” which was a eulogy for Italian theoretician Antonio Gramsci — “is a modest film about the death of an extraordinary intellectual. . . . As you know, it is still unclear who killed him. But for me, it has always been clear why: it was because of fear. Fear of his voice, fear of his life style, fear of his ideas, fear of his opinions, fear of his intellect. He was the totally complete intellectual: a filmmaker, a poet, a writer, a journalist, a critic, a polemist. He was totally involved in the cultural and political life of his time. As an artist he took risks, broke the rules, he created his own rules.” The tribute will be followed by a book signing and reception; the book will be available for purchase for $10.

MATHIEU AMALRIC — RENAISSANCE MAN: KINGS AND QUEEN

The always-engaging Mathieu Amalric is being feted by Anthology Film Archives and the French Institute Alliance Française

KINGS AND QUEEN (ROIS ET REINE) (Arnaud Desplechin, 2004)
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Ave. at Second St.
Saturday, October 31, 6:00, and Saturday, November 7, 8:30
Series runs October 29 – November 8 (companion series at FIAF runs November 3 – December 15)
212-505-5181
anthologyfilmarchives.org

Award-winning French actor-director Mathieu Amalric is celebrating his fiftieth birthday with an exciting invasion of New York City, where he is being honored in a pair of terrific companion film series and will also star in a theatrical production. FIAF’s CinéSalon tribute runs on Tuesday nights through December 15, beginning November 3 with a screening of his 2014 film The Blue Room, followed by a Q&A with Amalric and costar and cowriter Stéphanie Cléau, who is also his real-life partner; Amalric will also star in Fight or Flight (Le Moral des Ménages), Cléau’s stage adaptation of the novel by Eric Reinhardt. But the big festivities begin at Anthology Film Archives, where “Mathieu Amalric: Renaissance Man” runs October 29 through November 8, featuring ten of his films, including Otar Iosseliani’s 1984 Favorites of the Moon, in which he makes his film debut, and 2001’s Eat Your Soup, his first directorial effort.

Mathieu Amalric won a César for his starring role in KINGS AND QUEEN

Mathieu Amalric won a César for his starring role in Arnaud Desplechin’s KINGS AND QUEEN

Amalric has made several films with Arnaud Desplechin (A Christmas Tale, My Sex Life . . . or How I Got into an Argument), and one of the best is being shown October 31 and November 7 at Anthology. In Kings and Queen, Emmanuelle Devos is spectacular as Nora, a divorced single mother with a ten-year-old son (Valentin Lelong), an ailing father (Maurice Garrel), a troubled sister (Nathalie Boutefeu), a straitlaced, boring fiance (Olivier Rabourdin), a dead ex-husband who appears as a ghost (Joachim Salinger), a manic, tax-evading ex-husband who is institutionalized (a fabulous Amalric), and a deep-seated survival instinct that is infectious. Throw in a suicidal woman (Magalie Woch) who can’t get enough sex, an alluring doctor (Catherine Deneuve), a drug-addicted lawyer (Hippolyte Girardot), a remarkably calm, gun-toting convenience-store owner (Jean-Paul Roussillon), and other unusual characters and plotlines and you have one highly entertaining, complex, and marvelously original French drama that will fly by much faster than its two-and-a-half-hour length would lead you to believe. Amalric won his first César for the role; he won his second three years later for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Amalric will be at Anthology to introduce the October 31 screening of Roman Polanski’s Venus in Fur.

THEATER & CINEMA: THE LAST METRO

Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu star in François Truffaut’s gripping WWII melodrama THE LAST METRO

CINÉSALON: THE LAST METRO (LE DERNIER METRO) (François Truffaut, 1980)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, October 27, $14, 4:00 & 7:30 (later screening introduced by Olivia Bransbourg)
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org

FIAF’s CinéSalon series “Theater & Cinema” concludes October 27 with François Truffaut’s powerful Oscar-nominated WWII melodrama, The Last Metro. Set in Vichy France during the German occupation, the film takes place in and around the Théâtre Montmartre, which has been taken over by movie-star actress (and non-Jew) Marion Steiner (Catherine Deneuve) after her husband, Jewish theater director Lucas Steiner (Heinz Bennent), has apparently escaped the Nazi regime. But in fact Lucas is hiding out in the theater’s basement, where he has translated a Norwegian play, aptly titled Disappearance, and is directing it from below. The cast and crew of Disappearance include ladies’ man Bernard Granger (Gérard Depardieu) as Marion’s love interest; costume designer Arlette Guillaume (Andréa Ferréol), who refuses Bernard’s advances because of a secret reason; young actress Nadine Marsac (Sabine Haudepin), who will do just about anything to get parts; stage manager Raymond Boursier (Maurice Risch), who is deeply dedicated to the theater; and Jean-Loup Cottins (Jean Poiret), the stand-in director for Lucas. Only Marion knows where Lucas is, but danger grows when critic, publisher, and Nazi collaborator Daxiat (Jean-Louis Richard) starts sniffing around a little too much.

Catherine Deneuve on-set with director François Truffaut during the making of THE LAST METRO

Genre lover Truffaut reaches deep into his cinematic bag of tricks in The Last Metro, paying tribute to film noir, romantic melodrama, war movies, and even musicals as he references Casablanca, The Phantom of the Opera, The Diary of Anne Frank, Gaslight, To Be or Not to Be, The Golden Coach, Notorious, and Cabaret. He takes on anti-Semitism, anti-homosexuality, and anti-humanism in general while setting up a compelling love triangle that is echoed in the play-within-a movie, which is staged on a dramatic, surreal pink Expressionistic set. Depardieu and Deneuve, who went on to make such other films together as Claude Berri’s Fort Saganne, André Téchiné’s Changing Times, and François Ozon’s Potiche, might not be Bogart and Bergman, but they are a magnetic duo, Depardieu’s hulking, brutishly handsome presence dominating confined spaces, Deneuve’s refined, radiant beauty glowing amid a predominantly drab palette. The film uses the metaphor of theater as a way to escape reality, whether on an individual basis or during an international crisis, but of course Truffaut is also citing film as its own escape, a place where people flock to when times are both good and bad. The Last Metro — the title refers to the final train of the night, which passengers must catch in order to not break the strict curfew — is a beautifully made picture, the second in Truffaut’s planned trilogy of films about entertainment, following 1973’s Day for Night and preceding the never-finished L’Agence Magique. Winner of a 1990 César for Best Film of the 1980s in addition to ten previous Césars, including Best Film, Best Director (Truffaut), Best Actor (Depardieu), Best Actress (Deneuve), Best Cinematography (Nestor Almendros), Best Music (Georges Delerue), Best Production Design (Jean-Pierre Kohut-Svelko), and Best Writing (Truffaut and Suzanne Schiffman), The Last Metro is screening at 4:00 and 7:30 on October 27 in Florence Gould Hall; the later show will be introduced by French publisher and fragrance designer Olivia Bransbourg.