this week in film and television

MONTHLY CLASSICS: RINGU

Reiko Asakawa (Nanako Matsushima) finds herself and her young son in danger in Ringu

RINGU (Hideo Nakata, 1998)
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Friday, October 7, $15, 7:00
212-715-1258
japansociety.org/events

In many ways, Hideo Nakata’s 1998 classic, Ringu, is the ultimate horror movie: a film about a film that scares people to death. But Ringu is not chock-full of blood, gore, and violence; instead it’s more of a psychological tale that plays out like an investigative procedural as two characters desperately search for answers to save themselves from impending death.

Journalist Reiko Asakawa (Nanako Matsushima) and her ex-husband, professor and author Ryūji Takayama (Hiroyuki Sanada), are both on tight deadlines — for their lives. After Reiko’s niece, Tomoko Ōishi (Yuko Takeuchi), suddenly dies, apparently from fright, Reiko discovers a rumor that Tomoko and some of her friends had watched a short video, then received a phone call in which an otherworldly voice told them they would die in a week. And they did.

Reiko tracks down the eerie videotape and watches it herself — a few minutes of creepy, hard-to-decipher grainy images — after which the phone rings, telling her she has one week to live. She shows the tape to Ryūji, who has extrasensory powers, and they start digging deep into who shown in the tape and what it is trying to communicate. As they begin uncovering fascinating facts, their son, Yōichi (Rikiya Ōtaka), gets hold of the video and watches it, so all three are doomed if they don’t figure out how to reverse the curse — if that is even possible.

Adapted by screenwriter Hiroshi Takahashi from the 1991 novel by Koji Suzuki, Ringu is a softer film than you might expect, maintaining a slow, even pace, avoiding cheap shocks as the relatively calm and gentle Reiko continues her research and is able to work together with her former husband, who has not been a father to Yoichi at all. The film gains momentum as Reiko and Ryūji learn more about the people in the video, but Nakata, who went on to make several sequels in addition to Dark Water, Chaos, The Incite Mill, and the Death Note spinoff L: Change the World, never lets things get out of hand. The supporting cast includes pop singer Miki Nakatani as Mai Takano, one of Ryūji’s students; the prolific Yutaka Matsushige (he’s appeared in more than one hundred films and television shows since 1992) as Yoshino, a reporter who assists Reiko; and Rie Inō as the strange figure hiding behind all that black hair.

The 2019 twentieth anniversary digital restoration of Ringu is screening October 7 at 7:00 in Japan Society’s Monthly Classics series, which continues October 14 with Mamoru Oshii’s Angel’s Egg. Oh, and just for the record, a “homomorphism” — the word is written on Ryūji’s blackboard of mathematical equations — is a map between algebraic objects that come in two forms, “group” and “ring,” the latter being a structure-preserving function.

NYFF60 SPOTLIGHT: BONES AND ALL

Maren (Taylor Russell) and Lee (Timothée Chalamet) try to find love among so much blood in Bones and All

BONES AND ALL (Luca Guadagnino, 2022)
New York Film Festival, Film at Lincoln Center
Thursday, October 6, Alice Tully Hall, 9:00
Saturday, October 8, Alice Tully Hall, 2:45
Tuesday, October 11, Alamo Drafthouse Staten Island, 6:00
Sunday, October 16, Walter Reade Theater, 5:45
www.filmlinc.org

Luca Guadagnino won the Silver Lion for Best Director at the Venice Film Festival for his horror/road movie/romance Bones and All, a Spotlight selection of NYFF60. The Italian director evokes Bonnie and Clyde and Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry in the tale of two young people who were born with a taste for human flesh. But they’re not vampires; they don’t come out only at night, and they don’t just suck out their victims’ blood but go for a much heartier meal.

At a sleepover with a few girls from her new high school, Maren Yearly (Taylor Russell) desperately wants to fit in, but things go astray when she starts munching on one of the girls’ fingers. Her father (André Holland), who has been shuttling her to small towns for years because of her needs, takes off, believing that he cannot protect her anymore, but he leaves behind a cassette tape in which he details her life; she listens to parts of the tape every day as her full story emerges.

On the run, she meets up with fellow cannibal and extremely creepy Sully (Mark Rylance), who is happy to have a companion and wants to become her mentor. But she eventually is back out on the road, hungry and desperate, not wanting to kill, when she meets up with cannibal drifter, Lee (Timothée Chalamet), who provides her with companionship, food, and love as they try to stay alive and not get caught.

Maren (Taylor Russell) and Lee (Timothée Chalamet) take a rare break in new horror romance

Russell (Lost in Space, Waves), who won the Marcello Mastroianni Award for emerging actor at Venice, is captivating as Maren, who just wants to have a normal life. Her eyes are filled with both fear and wonder at the world that awaits her. Chalamet (Call Me by Your Name, Dune) is compelling as the raggedy would-be hero with puppy-dog eyes. Oscar and Tony winner Rylance (Bridge of Spies, Wolf Hall) nearly steals the movie as Sully, until a misbegotten late scene, while Tony and Emmy nominee Michael Stuhlbarg (A Serious Man, Dopesick) is nearly unrecognizable as the wickedly devilish Jake. The film also features Oscar nominee Chloë Sevigny (Boys Don’t Cry, Big Love) as Maren’s mother, Anna Cobb as Kayla, Lee’s sister, Jessica Harper (Suspiria, My Favorite Year) as Maren’s grandmother, and filmmaker David Gordon Green (George Washington, Pineapple Express) as Brad, Jake’s friend.

Adapted by David Kajganich from Camille DeAngelis’s 2015 novel, Bones and All is riddled with plot holes and inconsistencies, asking the audience to suspend disbelief all too often, and its final scenes become clichéd and melodramatic, but it’s worth seeing for Russell’s performance alone, as well as the developing relationship between Maren and Lee, which is like a 1980s version of Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway) and Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty) or Mary (Susan George) and Larry (Peter Fonda), although bloodier in its own way. The soundtrack is a blast, with a score composed by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross and such songs as Leonard Cohen’s “You Want It Darker.” Guadagnino, Russell, and Sevigny will be at Alice Tully Hall on October 6 for a Q&A following the 9:00 screening.

NYFF60 REVIVALS: THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE

Jean-Pierre Léaud stars in Jean Eustache’s New Wave epic The Mother and the Whore, screening in a new 4K restoration at the New York Film Festival

THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE (LA MAMAN ET LA PUTAIN) (Jean Eustache, 1973)
New York Film Festival, Film at Lincoln Center
Wednesday, October 5, Walter Reade Theater, 6:15
Thursday, October 6, Howard Gilman Theater, 6:30
212-355-6160
www.filmlinc.org

Jean-Pierre Léaud gives a bravura performance in French auteur Jean Eustache’s Nouvelle Vague classic, The Mother and the Whore, about love and sex in Paris following the May 1968 cultural revolution. Léaud stars as Alexandre, a jobless, dour flaneur who rambles on endlessly about politics, cinema, music, literature, sex, women’s lib, and lemonade while living with current lover Marie (Bernadette Lafont), obsessing over former lover Gilberte (Isabelle Weingarten), and starting an affair with new lover Veronika (Françoise Lebrun), a quiet nurse with a rather open sexual nature. The film’s three-and-a-half-hour length will actually fly by as you become immersed in the complex characters, the fascinating dialogue, and the excellent cast. Much of the movie consists of long takes in which Alexandre shares his warped view of life and art in small, enclosed spaces, the static camera focusing either on him or his companion. “I’m convinced all recent happenings in the world were meant against me,” he narcissistically says.

Léaud previously appeared in Eustache’ss Le Père Noël a les yeux bleus; the director also made My Little Loves, Numéro zéro, and Une sale histoire in a career cut short by his death in 1981 at the age of forty-two. A new 4K restoration of the nearly fifty-year-old film is being shown October 5 at 6:15 and October 6 at 6:30 as part of the Revivals section of the sixtieth New York Film Festival; Lebrun and restoration producer Charles Gillibert will be at the Walter Reade for a Q&A following the October 5 screening, while Lebrun will introduce the October 6 screening at the Howard Gilman.

WILLIAM SHATNER: STILL BOLDLY GOING

Who: William Shatner, Joshua Brandon, Rabbi Joshua M. Davidson
What: Livestreamed discussion
Where: Temple Emanu-El Streicker Cultural Center online
When: Thursday, October 6, free with RSVP ($28 with a copy of the book), 7:00
Why: “I love the mystery of the universe. I love all the questions that have come to us over thousands of years of exploration and hypotheses. Stars exploding years ago, their light traveling to us years later; black holes absorbing energy; satellites showing us entire galaxies in areas thought to be devoid of matter entirely . . . all of that has thrilled me for years. Where matter in the universe came from, where it’s going, why it’s expanding . . . I know very little, but I know just enough about the universe to be in its thrall, in awe of its mystery.”

So writes William Shatner in his latest book, Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder (Atria, October 4, $28), which includes such essays as “We Belong Together,” “Listen to the Animals,” and “There’s Beauty in Everything.” Now ninety-one, the actor, singer, horseman, and astronaut, whose grandparents emigrated from Ukraine and Lithuania, will launch the tome in a virtual presentation from the Temple Emanu-El Streicker Cultural Center on October 6 at 7:00, speaking with his coauthor, Joshua Brandon, and moderator Rabbi Joshua M. Davidson. Registration is free, or you can order the book with the RSVP for $28. “I probably say wow more now than when I was a child, and I am absolutely enchanted by that fact,” Shatner explains in the introduction. “I don’t know how not to be doing. I really would regret not giving myself a chance to experience something new and to learn in the process.” Words to live by from a living legend.

“HELLZAPOPPIN’: WHAT ABOUT THE BEES?”

Yvonne Rainer’s “last dance” includes a pillow fight at New York Live Arts

Who: Emily Coates, Brittany Bailey, Brittany Engel-Adams, Patricia Hoffbauer, Vincent McCloskey, Emmanuèle Phuon, David Thomson, Timothy Ward, Kathleen Chalfant
What: World premiere
Where: New York Live Arts Theater, 219 West Nineteenth St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
When: October 5-8, $15-$85
Why: Legendary dancer, choreographer, filmmaker, author, and activist Yvonne Rainer asks, “What about the bees?” in what she has announced will be her “last dance.” Premiering October 5-8 at New York Live Arts, “HELLZAPOPPIN’: What about the bees?” takes on systemic racism through text, movement, and live projections, including excerpts from the 1941 Hollywood musical Hellzapoppin’, a reality-busting movie melding film and theater starring Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson, Martha Raye, Mischa Auer, Shemp Howard, Slim and Slam, and Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, and Jean Vigo’s highly influential 1933 antiestablishment film about boarding school, Zero for Conduct. The evening begins with a screening of Rainer’s 2002 half-hour film After Many a Summer Dies the Swan: Hybrid, which expands on a piece she choreographed for Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project incorporating texts by Oscar Kokoschka, Adolf Loos, Arnold Schoenberg, and Ludwig Wittgenstein and rehearsal footage shot by Charles Atlas and Natsuko Inue.

“HELLZAPOPPIN’: What about the bees?” runs October 5-8 at NYLA

A coproduction of NYLA and Performa, “HELLZAPOPPIN’: What about the bees?” will be performed by a mix of dancers and actors, featuring Emily Coates, Brittany Bailey, Brittany Engel-Adams, Patricia Hoffbauer, Vincent McCloskey, Emmanuèle Phuon, David Thomson, Timothy Ward, and Kathleen Chalfant. Rainer also harkens back to her fictional character Apollo Musagetes, leader of the muses, who in 2020 presented “Revisions: A Truncated History of the Universe for Dummies: A Rant Dance, Lecture, and Letter to Humanity.” “I’m going to be veering back and forth between various topics: my aging self-pity, my ‘permanently recovering racism,’ my sometimes evasive appropriation of the notion that not all white people, and not all white women, are racists, and various historical and cultural reflections,” Rainer, who is now eighty-seven, said in a statement. Rainer will participate in a Stay Late conversation with Bill T. Jones following the October 6 show.

BURNING BRIGHT — NEW FRENCH FILMMAKERS 2022: ZERO FUCKS GIVEN

Adèle Exarchopoulos stars as a flight attendant going nowhere in Zero Fucks Given

CinéSalon: ZERO FUCKS GIVEN (RIEN À FOUTRE) (Julie Lecoustre & Emmanuel Marre, 2021)
French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF)
FIAF Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, October 4, 4:00 & 7:30
Series continues Tuesdays through October 25, 4:00 & 7:30
fiaf.org

Adèle Exarchopoulos is magnetic as a flight attendant with a loose grip on her life in Zero Fucks Given, the debut directorial collaboration between Paris- and Brussels-based cowriters and producers Emmanuel Marre and Julie Lecoustre. The film is screening October 4 at 4:00 and 7:30 in the FIAF CinéSalon series “Burning Bright: New French Filmmakers 2022,” consisting of nine features and three shorts from up-and-coming and emerging French directors.

Exarchopoulos (Blue Is the Warmest Color, Mandibles) stars as Cassandre, a twentysomething woman who’s unable to commit to anything, but it doesn’t seem to bother her. She considers herself a free spirit, but she doesn’t do much with that freedom. She is based at an airport in Lanzarote in the Canary Islands and wants to get a better airline job in Dubai; she might travel the world, but she spends most of her time in airport hotels and nightclubs, swiping right and left on her cellphone for company. “I like people for two hours and then it’s goodbye,” she tells friends.

As a flight attendant for Wing, she downs vodka before takeoff, usually does the bare minimum at work, and regularly breaks the rules, which she thinks don’t apply to her; when she is offered a promotion, she asserts that she doesn’t want any more responsibilities. After partying, she often wakes up in a blackout about the night before. She might claim to not care, but she is clearly haunted by the death of her mother, who died in a horrific car crash. She has trouble communicating with her father, Jean (Alexandre Perrier), who was devastated by the loss and is trying to sue someone, anyone. When Cassandre — whose name references the Greek mythological figure who was cursed with the ability to prophesize doom that no one listens to — eventually has to return home, suppressed emotions bubble to the surface.

Zero Fucks Given has an infectious, freewheeling atmosphere; the cast includes nonprofessional actors and actual airline personnel, and Perrier, who plays Cassandre’s distraught dad, is one of the associate producers. Marre and Lecoustre (Castle to Castle) eschew rehearsals and encourage significant improvisation while shooting on location with extended breaks in between filming scenes. Exarchopoulos even does her own hair and makeup and wears her own clothing to give the film a more realistic feeling.

Cinematographer Olivier Boonjing zooms in on Cassandre’s face and body as she pretends not to care about what she’s doing, but there’s more to her than she’s allowing herself to acknowledge. “I’m rather lucky,” she says, but she’s going nowhere. She rarely has time to experience the ritzy cities she flies to, traveling back and forth in the enclosed space of airplanes, breathing recycled air. Her mother died in a roundabout, unable to get out of a traffic circle, a stark metaphor for how Cassandre is stuck in life. You might not give a fuck about Cassandre at the beginning, but by the end you’ll be giving more than a few.

“Burning Bright: New French Filmmakers 2022” continues on Tuesdays through October 25 with Audrey Diwan’s Happening, Martin Jauvat’s Grand Paris, and Lina Soualem’s Their Algeria.

NYFF60 MAIN SLATE: TRIANGLE OF SADNESS

Yaya (Charlbi Dean) and Carl (Harris Dickinson) just want to keep enjoying the good life in Triangle of Sadness

TRIANGLE OF SADNESS (Ruben Östlund, 2022)
New York Film Festival, Film at Lincoln Center
Saturday, October 1, Alice Tully Hall, 9:00
Sunday, October 2, Alice Tully Hall, 2:15
Monday, October 3, Walter Reade Theater, 2:30
Monday, October 3, Museum of the Moving Image, 6:00
www.filmlinc.org

About halfway through Ruben Östlund’s brilliant Palme d’Or–winning satire Triangle of Sadness, I let out a sharp, loud laugh that made the people sitting around me wonder if I was okay. I was fine, and there were many more chuckles, snickers, giggles, guffaws, howls, and snorts to come, and not just from me.

In his previous films, Force Majeure and Palme d’Or winner The Square, the Swedish auteur has shown that he never lacks for subtlety as he skewers the lifestyles of the rich but not necessarily famous, mixing fear with farce, pushing both about as far as they can go without breaking.

In Triangle of Sadness, named for the small frown of worry wrinkles between a person’s eyebrows, Östlund channels Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and The Exterminating Angel, Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (the “Autumn Years” segment with Mr. Creosote), and Lina Wertmüller’s romantic class comedy Swept Away . . . by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August, resulting in an outrageously over-the-top condemnation of the privilege born of war and colonialism.

The protagonists are semi-successful male model Carl (Harris Dickinson) and female model and social media influencer Yaya (Charlbi Dean), two extremely beautiful people who are at the center of each of the three parts of the 149-minute film. In the first section, Carl auditions for a runway job and the couple argue over who is going to pick up the check after a fancy dinner. In the second chapter, they mostly enjoy their free luxury cruise aboard a yacht even when all hell breaks loose. And in the finale, they have to figure out how far they will go just to stay alive.

Along the way, they meet a fantastic mélange of characters, including vacuous fashion reporter Lewis (Thobias Thorwid), gluttonous Russian capitalist Dimitry (Zlatko Burić), toilet cleaner Abigail (Dolly de Leon), chief ship steward Paula (Vicki Berlin), ridiculously rich single man Jorma Björkman (Henrik Dorsin), ridiculously rich single woman Vera (Sunnyi Melles), ridiculously rich and demure British couple Clementine (Amanda Walker) and Winston (Oliver Ford Davies), the mysterious Nelson (Jean-Christophe Folly), and alcoholic yacht captain Thomas Smith (Woody Harrelson).

Darius (Arvin Kananian) and Captain Smith (Woody Harrelson) try to keep their balance in Palme d’Or winner

Dickinson (See How They Run, Where the Crawdads Sing) and Dean (Spud, Black Lightning) are magnetic together as flawed glitterati who exist in their own reality, until they don’t. (A star in the making, South African actress and model Dean died tragically this past August at the age of thirty-two.) Burić and Harrelson are a riot as their friendship blossoms amid booze and debates over Karl Marx, capitalism, and socialism. As a bonus, the yacht in the film is the Christina O, which was formerly owned by Aristotle Onassis and Jackie Kennedy. The rest of the large cast plays the dark humor with exquisitely calm, mannered demeanors.

Östlund, who has also written and directed Gitarrmongot, Involuntary, and Play, holds nothing back in Triangle of Sadness; the film could use a bit of trimming here and there, but that’s not his style. He puts it all out there, full steam ahead, damn the torpedoes. (The French title is Sans filtre, or “Without Filter.”) Both Force Majeure and The Square left indelible images in my head, and the same is true with his latest film, which still has me breaking out into laughter when I recall several key moments, such as Dimitry boasting, “I sell shit”; ship steward Alicia (Alicia Eriksson) trying not to say no to a demanding passenger; Captain Smith leaning sideways right before the captain’s dinner, next to his stable second in command, Darius (Arvin Kananian); and Abigail asking fellow survivors who’s in charge. It’s all so much unrelenting madness even as it hits you over the head with its political philosophy.

Triangle of Sadness screens October 1-3 at the New York Film Festival, with Östlund, de Leon, and Burić participating in Q&As following the shows on the first two days at Alice Tully Hall. The film opens in theaters October 7.