this week in film and television

THE CONTENDERS 2014 — NYMPHOMANIAC: EXTENDED DIRECTOR’S CUT

Joe (Stacy Martin) learns about sexual pleasure in Lars von Trier’s controversial NYMPHOMANIAC

NYMPHOMANIAC: EXTENDED DIRECTOR’S CUT (Lars von Trier, 2013)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Sunday, November 23, 2:30
Series runs through January 16
Tickets: $12, in person only, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days, same-day screenings free with museum admission, available at Film and Media Desk beginning at 9:30 am
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
www.magpictures.com

When I reviewed Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac earlier this year, when it was released in two separate “volumes,” I wrote, “I certainly would have preferred seeing Nymphomaniac in one complete sitting rather than in two parts, one of which stands head and shoulders above the other (although they do need each other); however, I’m not sure what I’ll do when the five-and-a-half-hour director’s cut is released later this year.” Well, as promised, the extended director’s cut is now available for viewing, being shown November 23 at 2:30 as part of MoMA’s annual series “The Contenders,” consisting of films the institution believes will stand the test of time. What follows is a slightly amended version of my initial review of the first two volumes; there are an additional thirty minutes added to the first part, while the second part now includes what MoMA refers to as “some of the most gruesome and wrenching passages ever seen on film.”

In Breaking the Waves, Danish Dogme 95 cofounder Lars von Trier’s 1996 breakthrough, Stellan Skarsgård plays a paralyzed man who convinces his wife (Emily Watson) to have sexual liaisons with other men and then tell him about the encounters in graphic detail. In von Trier’s latest controversial, polarizing work, Nymphomaniac, Skarsgård stars as Seligman, a single man who takes in a woman named Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) who is soon sharing her own sexual adventures with him, in extremely graphic detail. After finding Joe severely beaten in an alley, Seligman nurses her back to health while carefully listening to her life story. She repeatedly says she is a bad, irredeemable human being because of the things she has done, which started to go off the rails when she was a small child discovering the pleasure sensations to be had in her nether regions. Her sordid tale is told in flashbacks, as her younger self (Barking at Trees’ Stacy Martin) goes from lover to lover to lover to lover to lover ad infinitum. (The specific numbers are plastered over the screen.) Along the way, Seligman offers his own interpretation of her life, praising her sense of freedom while comparing her sexuality to fly-fishing, which von Trier (Dancer in the Dark, Melancholia, Antichrist) relates in a playful way that is at first absurdly silly but actually ends up coming together. Unfortunately, however, Martin is far too bland as Joe as she beds victim after victim, including Jerôme (a miscast Shia LaBeouf), perhaps the only one who truly loves her. The film also features Christian Slater and Connie Nielsen as Joe’s parents and Uma Thurman as a scene-stealing wronged wife.

Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) continues her search for sexual pleasure and pain in the second half of NYMPHOMANIAC (photo by Christian Geisnaes)

The second half of von Trier’s four-hour graphic exploration of feminine sexuality and the very nature of storytelling itself is a masterfully crafted, often deadly dull and repetitive, but, in the end, gloriously inventive work. Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is in the midst of telling her brutally in-depth tale of sexual addiction to the sincere and respectful Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård), who brought her into his home upon finding her badly beaten in a dark alley. In the flashbacks, Joe is now played with mystery and complexity by Gainsbourg, after the young Joe had been previously portrayed by the bland and boring Stacy Martin, and the change of actress is one of the key reasons why the second part works so much better than the first. Joe shares details of trying to make a sex sandwich, giving group therapy a shot, becoming obsessed with a violent sadist (Jamie Bell), and accepting a dangerous job with L (Willem Dafoe).

L (Willem Dafoe) offers Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) a dangerous job in second volume of controversial Lars von Trier epic (photo by Christian Geisnaes)

L (Willem Dafoe) offers Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) a dangerous job in controversial Lars von Trier sexual epic (photo by Christian Geisnaes)

In between her stories, which are divided into such chapters as “The Eastern and the Western Church (The Silent Duck)” and “The Mirror,” Seligman delves into various intellectual theories to help explain her exploits, discussing religion, paradox, democracy, language, mythology, Freud, and such dichotomies as suffering and happiness, pleasure and pain, Wagner and Beethoven, and the virgin and the whore. Cinematographer Manuel Alberto Claro’s camera is far more steady in these scenes, in contrast to the moving, handheld shots that dominate the flashbacks. The interplay between the calm, gentle Seligman and the lonely, lost Joe is beautifully acted and inherently touching, but, this being von Trier, the film’s ending will further controversies that already involve episodes of extreme violence and actual sexual penetration (the latter performed by body doubles). The MoMA series continues through January 16 with such other 2014 cinematic entries as Gillian Robespierre’s Obvious Child, Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher, and Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash.

PULP: A FILM ABOUT LIFE, DEATH AND SUPERMARKETS

Jarvis Cocker takes a ride through his hometown of Sheffield as he prepares for Pulp farewell concert

PULP: A FILM ABOUT LIFE, DEATH & SUPERMARKETS (Florian Habicht, 2013)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Wednesday, November 19
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.pulpthefilm.com

Florian Habicht’s Pulp: A Film About Life, Death & Supermarkets is a brilliant inside look at the long-lasting relationship between a band and its hometown. In December 2012, British alternative band Pulp returned to the place of its birth, the rugged, working-class city of Sheffield in the north of England, for what was being billed as its last-ever concert on dry land. Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker hooked up with Habicht (Love Story, Woodenhead), conceiving a project in which the time and place, along with the fans, would be just as important as the band and its music, if not more so. In the nonchronological film, Habicht cuts between archival footage of Pulp, clips from the final concert, interviews on the street with old and young fans, and brief chats with Pulp tour manager Liam Rippon and the other band members: guitarist Mark Webber, keyboardist Candida Doyle, bassist Steve Mackey, and drummer Nick Banks, who are pretty much taking it all in stride. But at the center of it all is the soft-spoken, enigmatic Cocker, who founded Pulp back in 1978 when he was fifteen years old.

Habicht shows Cocker biking and driving through Sheffield, discussing his first job working for a fishmonger in a mall, and, most thrillingly, fixing a flat tire on his less-than-fancy car. The theme song of the documentary is Pulp’s “Common People,” in which a woman tells Cocker, “I want to live like common people / I want to do whatever common people do / I want to sleep with common people / I want to sleep with common people like you.” Is it possible for a rock star to be “common people”? It doesn’t really matter as Cocker reestablishes his connection to Sheffield. “We stopped playing in 2001 or 2002 or whatever it was, and I did feel that the way it finished was kind of a bit, I don’t know, not right,” he says in the film. “It didn’t feel like a good ending. . . . So I know that tidying up isn’t the greatest rock-and-roll motivation, but I did want to kind of tidy things up and give the story a happy ending.” It is all very happy indeed, as Habicht also delves into such Pulp favorites as “This Is Hardcore” and “Help the Aged” as well as “Disco 2000,” “Underwear,” and “Sheffield: Sex City.” The band, which released seven studio albums during its career, from 1983’s It through 2001’s We Love Life, has no arguments or complaints, just positive attitudes that make Pulp a thoroughly exhilarating experience.

BILL MORRISON — COMPOSITIONS: BILL FRISELL, RON MILES, TONY SCHERR, AND KENNY WOLLESEN PERFORM LIVE WITH “THE GREAT FLOOD”

BILL FRISELL, RON MILES, TONY SCHERR, AND KENNY WOLLESEN PERFORM LIVE WITH THE GREAT FLOOD (Bill Morrison, 2011)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Friday, November 21, 8:00
Tickets: $12, in person only, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days, same-day screenings free with museum admission, available at Film and Media Desk beginning at 9:30 am
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
www.icarusfilms.com

Sound and image meld together beautifully in Bill Morrison’s meditative, elegiac The Great Flood. Inspired by John M. Barry’s 1997 book Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, Morrison teamed up with improvisational musician Bill Frisell on the project. The two had previously worked together on a pair of short works, The Mesmerist and The Film of Her, after meeting at the Village Vanguard when Morrison was a dishwasher at the jazz club where Frisell was playing. Morrison (Decasia, The Miners’ Hymns), who specializes in using deteriorated and degraded archival footage and experimental scores, scoured the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the Hoover Presidential Library, and other sources to come up with remarkable scenes of the flooding of the Mississippi in 1927. Divided into such chapters as “Sharecroppers,” “Swollen Tributaries,” “Evacuation,” “Aftermath,” and “Watershed,” with snippets of informational text but without narration, the film follows the southern blacks who were most affected by the massive flood, being forced to shore up the levees around white areas, losing their own homes, and ultimately heading north as part of the Great Migration, bringing the Delta blues with them.

Special MoMA screening of THE GREAT FLOOD will feature live musical accompaniment

Guitarist Frisell, joined by Ron Miles on cornet, Tony Scherr on guitar and bass, and Kenny Wollesen on drums and vibes, has composed a gorgeous, moving score, heavily influenced by a trip his band and Morrison took in early 2011 up the Mississippi, with the group playing in multiple cities while the river threatened to flood again. Each chapter, from an overhead view of a computerized map that details the 1927 flood to a fast and furious foray through the Sears Roebuck catalog, from a Baptist church procession to a series of rare clips of such bluesmen as Big Bill Broonzy, Son House, Sonny Boy Williamson, and Robert Lockwood, features a different piece of music, highlighted by Frisell’s always inventive guitar and Miles’s deeply expressive horn. Of course, as the images pass by, it’s impossible not to think of Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy and be awed by the devastating power of nature, as well as realize how little has changed with regard to the reaction of politicians and who the victims tend to be. But the film is rarely mournful; instead, there’s often a celebratory quality about it, centered on people’s natural instinct to survive. The Great Flood is screening November 21 at 8:00, concluding MoMA’s “Bill Morrison: Compositions,” with Frisell, Miles, Scherr, and Wollesen performing the score live as a special treat. In addition, MoMA’s rotating “Bill Morrison: Re-Compositions” exhibition currently features “Decomposing Loops,” consisting of excerpts from Light Is Calling, Just Ancient Loops, and Decasia, through December 8.

SOUTH ASIAN INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2014

Karthik Subbaraj’s JIGARTHANDA opens the eleventh South Asian International Film Festival this week

SAIFF 2014
SVA Theatre, AMC Loews 19th St., Carlton Hotel, Joe’s Pub
November 18-23, $15-$125
www.saiff.org

The eleventh edition of the South Asian International Film Festival, which was founded by Shilen Amin to present works from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Nepal and from within the Indian Diaspora, takes place November 18-23, consisting of eight feature films, four shorts, after-parties, receptions, and live music. The opening-night selection, X., is one of several festival films dealing with the art of the movies themselves, made by eleven Indian directors sharing in telling the story of a filmmaker by exploring his sexual past. In Karthik Subbaraj’s Jigarthanda (Cold Heart), a young director tries to make a reality gangster flick (Subbaraj will participate in a Q&A following the November 21 world premiere screening at the SVA Theatre), while a Bollywood writer heads to Hollywood in the centerpiece world premiere of Raj Nidimoru and Krishna D.K.’s Happy Ending. Other films include Shrihari Sathe’s Ek Hazarachi Note, Kanu Behl’s Titli, and Nabeel Qureshi’s closing-night, Karachi-set Na Maloom Afraad, which will also be followed by a Q&A. Wednesday night’s after-party at Joe’s Pub will be highlighted by a live performance by Raveena Aurora, while filmgoers are invited to mingle with the filmmakers at the closing-night cocktail reception on Sunday.

THE ART OF SEX AND SEDUCTION: SWIMMING POOL

Jealousy and envy are at the heart of François Ozon’s sexy thriller

CINÉSALON: SWIMMING POOL (François Ozon, 2003)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, November 18, $13, 4:00 & 7:30
Series continues Tuesdays through December 16
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org
www.focusfeatures.com

Charlotte Rampling is divine in François Ozon’s playfully creepy mystery about a popular British crime novelist taking a break from the big city (London) to recapture her muse at her publisher’s French villa, only to be interrupted by the publisher’s hot-to-trot teenage daughter. Rampling stars as Sarah Morton, a fiftysomething novelist who is jealous of the attention being poured on young writer Terry Long (Sebastian Harcombe) by her longtime publisher, John Bosload (Game of Thrones’s Charles Dance). John sends Sarah off to his elegant country house, where she sets out to complete her next Inspector Dorwell novel in peace and quiet. But the prim and proper — and rather bitter and cynical — Sarah’s working vacation is soon intruded upon by Julie (Ludivine Sagnier), John’s teenage daughter, who likes walking around topless and living life to the fullest, clearly enjoying how Sarah looks at her and judges her. “You’re just a frustrated English writer who writes about dirty things but never does them,” Julie says, and soon Sarah is reevaluating the choices she’s made in her own life. Rampling, who mixes sexuality with a heart-wrenching vulnerability like no other actress (see The Night Porter, The Verdict, and Heading South), more than holds her own as the primpy old maid in the shadow of a young beauty, even tossing in some of nudity to show that she still has it. (Rampling has also posed nude in her sixties in a series of photographs by Juergen Teller alongside twentysomething model Raquel Zimmerman, so such “competition” is nothing to her.)

Julie (Ludivine Sagnier) and Sarah (Charlotte Rampling) come to a kind of understanding in François Ozon’s SWIMMING POOL

Rampling has really found her groove working with Ozon, having appeared in four of his films, highlighted by a devastating performance in Under the Sand as a wife dealing with the sudden disappearance of her husband. Sagnier, who has also starred in Ozon’s Water Drops on Burning Rocks and 8 Women, is a delight to watch, especially as things turn dark. Swimming Pool is very much about duality; the film opens with a shot of the shimmering Thames river while the title comes onscreen and Philippe Rombi’s score of mystery and danger plays, and later Sarah says, “I absolutely loathe swimming pools,” to which Julie responds, “Pools are boring; there’s no excitement, no feeling of infinity. It’s just a big bathtub.” (“It’s more like a cesspool of living bacteria,” Sarah adds.) Ozon (Time to Leave, Criminal Lovers) explores most of the seven deadly sins as Sarah and Julie get to know each other all too well. Swimming Pool is being shown November 18 at 4:00 and 7:30 as part of the French Institute Alliance Française CinéSalon series “The Art of Sex and Seduction,” with the later screening introduced by filmmaker Ry Russo-Young and followed by a wine reception; the series continues Tuesdays through December 16 with Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake introduced by Alan Brown, Catherine Breillat’s The Last Mistress introduced by Melissa Anderson, and François Truffaut’s The Man Who Loved Women introduced by Laura Kipnis, all complemented by Jean-Daniel Lorieux’s “Seducing the Lens” photography exhibition.

THE EPIC OF EVEREST

Striking document of 1924 attempt to climb Mount Everest has been restored by the British Film Institute

THE EPIC OF EVEREST (Captain John Noel, 1924)
Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th St. at Seventh Ave.
Select days November 14 – December 21
212-620-5000
www.rubinmuseum.org
www.bfi.org.uk

In 1924, two British men, among the most famous mountaineers of their time, George Mallory and Andrew “Sandy” Irvine, set out with a large team to climb to the summit of Everest. Their amazing journey was documented by Captain John Noel, who used a hand-cranked camera with an impressive telephoto lens and sent the footage via yak to a lab in Darjeeling to be developed. The resulting black-and-white film, The Epic of Everest, is a poetic document of the third attempt to scale Everest, a mountain the Tibetans called “Chomo-Lung-Ma,” or Goddess Mother of the World. The eighty-seven-minute silent film has been digitally restored by the British Film Institute in a beautiful version that is making its New York premiere November 14 at the Rubin Museum, where it will be shown more than a dozen times through December 21, with most screenings introduced by a special guest and some followed by Q&As. The Epic of Everest, which is also ethnographically important for its (at times ethnocentric) depiction of local Tibetan culture, includes several scenes of Mount Everest tinted in blue, red, and violet; the ice-blue Fairyland section is especially breathtaking. Meanwhile, the restored intertitles display such dramatic text as “There is nowhere here any trace of life or man. It is a glimpse into a world that knows him not. Grand, solemn, unutterably lonely, the Rongbuk Glacier of Everest reveals itself.” and “Nor can one wonder at the invention that has clothed this extraordinary peak with a sacred character. What a terrifying thing it is! What an immensity of size, height and power it possesses!”

Irvine and Mallory — the latter famously answered “Because it’s there” when asked why he wanted to climb Everest — are joined by Sherpas and donkeys; mountaineer and artist Howard Somervell, who is seen smoking a pipe while sketching in his notebook; Alpine climbers John de Vars Hazard and Edward Norton; mountaineer Geoffrey Bruce, who is described as “the Expedition’s right hand man”; and geologist Noel Odell as they attempt to do what no human had done before. The 4K restoration, done in collaboration with Noel’s daughter, Sandra, also features a haunting new score by Simon Fisher Turner that incorporates both Western and Nepalese sounds. The Epic of Everest is particularly fascinating when compared to such recent mountaineering adventures as K2: Siren of the Himalayas, revealing how little has changed, except technology, as fearless men and women seek to climb toward the heavens. Among the experts who will be at the Rubin for select screenings are AFAR executive vice president and publisher Ellen Asmodeo-Giglio on opening night, Everest climbers Robert Anderson and Phillip Trimble, Columbia Modern Tibetan Studies director Dr. Robert Barnett, Outward Bound USA executive director Steve Matous, The Alpinist magazine editor in chief Katie Ives, The Summits of Modern Man author Peter H. Hansen, and British Consul General to New York Danny Lopez.

DOC NYC SHORT LIST: FINDING VIVIAN MAIER

Documentary turns the camera on mysterious street photographer Vivian Maier (photo by Vivian Maier / courtesy of the Maloof Collection)

FINDING VIVIAN MAIER (John Maloof & Charlie Siskel, 2013)
Bow Tie Chelsea Cinemas
260 West 23rd St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
Friday, November 14, 12:30, and Saturday, November 15, 12 noon
Series runs November 13-20
www.docnyc.net
www.findingvivianmaier.com

By their very nature, street photographers take pictures of anonymous individuals, capturing a moment in time in which viewers can fill in their own details. In the wonderful documentary Finding Vivian Maier, codirectors John Maloof and Charlie Siskel turn the lens around on a street photographer herself, attempting to fill in the details of the curious life and times of Vivian Maier, about whom very little was known. “I find the mystery of it more interesting than her work itself,” says one woman for whom Vivian Maier served as a nanny decades earlier. “I’d love to know more about this person, and I don’t think you can do that through her work.” In 2007, while looking for historical photos for a book on the Portage Park section of Chicago, Maloof purchased a box of negatives at an auction. Upon discovering that they were high-quality, museum-worthy photographs, he set off on a mission to learn more about the photographer. Playing detective — while also developing hundreds of rolls of film, with thousands more to go — Maloof meets with men and women who knew Maier as an oddball, hoarding nanny who went everywhere with her camera and shared little, if anything, about her personal life. “I’m the mystery woman,” Maier says in a color home movie. Her former employers and charges, including talk-show host Phil Donahue, debate her background, the spelling and pronunciation of her name, her accent, and how she might have felt about a documentary delving into her secretive life.

Street photographer Vivian Maier captured a unique view of the world in more than 100,000 pictures (Vivian Maier / courtesy of the Maloof Collection)

Street photographer Vivian Maier captured a unique view of the world in more than 100,000 pictures (photo by Vivian Maier / courtesy of the Maloof Collection)

Maloof also discusses Maier’s work with such major photographers as Joel Meyerowitz and Mary Ellen Mark. “Had she made herself known, she would have become a famous photographer. Something was wrong. . . . A piece of the puzzle is missing,” Mark says while comparing Maier’s work to such legends as Robert Frank, Lisette Model, Helen Levitt, and Diane Arbus. Maloof tries to complete what becomes an ever-more-fascinating puzzle in this extremely enjoyable documentary that gets very serious as he finds out more about the mystery woman who is now considered an important twentieth-century artist. Finding Vivian Maier also has an intriguing pedigree; codirector and producer Siskel (Religulous) is executive producer of Comedy Central’s Tosh.0, executive producer Jeff Garlin (I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With) is a comedian who played Larry David’s best friend and agent on Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Kickstarter contributor and interviewee Tim Roth (Reservoir Dogs, Lie to Me) is an Oscar-nominated actor who collects Maier’s work. Maloof and Siskel will be on hand when Finding Vivian Maier is presented November 14 & 15 at Bow Tie Chelsea Cinemas in the Short List section of the 2014 DOC NYC festival, which runs November 13-20 and consists of more than 150 documentaries being shown at Bow Tie, the IFC Center, and the SVA Theatre. To experience Maier’s work in person, be sure to check out the photography exhibit “Vivian Maier: In Her Own Hands,” continuing at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in Midtown through December 6.