this week in film and television

NYFF52 MAIN SLATE: THE BLUE ROOM

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

THE BLUE ROOM (LA CHAMBRE BLEUE) (Mathieu Amalric, 2014)
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Monday, September 29, Alice Tully Hall, 9:00 pm
Tuesday, September 30, Francesca Beale Theater, 9:00 pm
Festival runs September 26 – October 12
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.com
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 makes its North American premiere at the New York Film Festival September 29 and 30. 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. Amalric will participate in a Q&A following the September 29 screening at 9:00 at Alice Tully Hall; in addition, he will sit down for a free HBO Directors Dialogue that same day at 6:00 in the Walter Reade Theater, where he’s sure to discuss such influences as Alfred Hitchcock, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Otto Preminger, and Fritz Lang.

NYFF52 MAIN SLATE: TWO SHOTS FIRED

Life goes on after a bizarre shooting event in Martín Rejtman’s absurdist TWO SHOTS FIRED

TWO SHOTS FIRED (DOS DISPAROS) (Martín Rejtman, 2014)
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Monday, September 29, Walter Reade Theater, 8:45 pm
Tuesday, September 30, Francesca Beale Theater, 3:00 pm
Festival runs September 26 – October 12
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.com

Award-winning Argentine writer-director Martín Rejtman is back with his first film in eight years (and only his fourth feature in his nearly thirty-year career), the absurdist black comedy Two Shots Fired. The calmly paced story begins as sixteen-year-old Mariano (Rafael Federman), after a night of dancing, goes about his daily chores, swimming laps in his family’s backyard pool (as the dog runs alongside him) and mowing the lawn. He shows no emotion when he accidently runs over the mower’s electric cord; instead he simply goes into the house for tools to fix it. There he also finds a box with a gun, so he goes into his room, puts the gun against his head, and pulls the trigger, like it’s a perfectly normal thing to do. He then places the barrel against his stomach and shoots himself a second time. The first shot merely grazes his temple, while the second shot seems to have left a bullet lodged in his body. Mariano evenhandedly claims that he is not depressed and was not trying to kill himself, and his friends and family essentially act as if nothing has happened, going on with their simple, ordinary lives. The only ones who appear to be even the slightest bit concerned are his mother (Susana Pampin), who secretly hides all the scissors and kitchen knives, and the dog, who runs away.

When Mariano attempts to go anywhere with his brother (Benjamín Coelho) that involves passing through a metal detector, the system beeps at him; when his brother tries to explain that it must be because there is a bullet in him, Mariano doesn’t care, opting not to enter, instead waiting outside without complaining, explaining, or making a scene. When he practices with his woodwind quartet, his recorder releases a second note every time he plays, presumably the result of the lodged bullet, but he continues on, like it’s no big deal. And when his cell phone incessantly goes off, he doesn’t get mad or embarrassed; he simply tries to find a place to put it where it won’t disturb him or anyone else. He, and everyone around him, including a potential girlfriend (Manuela Martelli) and his music teacher (Laura Paredes), just keep on keeping on, going about their business, virtually emotionless. They’re not trying to forget what happened; instead, it’s like it is just another part of daily existence in this Buenos Aires suburb. A minimalist, Rejtman (Rapado, The Magic Gloves) first focuses his camera on a place, then doesn’t move it as characters walk in and some kind of “action,” however critical or monotonous, takes place; then the people leave the frame as the camera lingers, like Ozu on Valium. What happens is just as important, or unimportant, as what doesn’t happen. Every scene is treated the same, a meditation on the mundanity of life (with perhaps more than a passing reference to how Argentina has dealt with los desaparecidos and its long-running volatile political climate). And just like life, parts of the film are boring, parts are wildly funny, parts are unpredictable, and parts are, well, just parts of life. Two Shots Fired is having its U.S. premiere September 29 and 30 at the 52nd New York Film Festival, which opens September 26 with David Fincher’s Gone Girl and concludes October 11 with Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Birdman, or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance.

BJÖRK: BIOPHILIA LIVE

BJÖRK: BIOPHILIA LIVE (Nick Fenton & Peter Strickland, 2014)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, September 26
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.biophiliathefilm.com

“Welcome to Biophilia, the love for nature in all her manifestations, from the tiniest organism to the greatest red giant floating in the farthest realm of the universe. . . . In Biophilia, you will experience how the three come together: nature, music, technology. Listen, learn, and create. . . . We are on the brink of a revolution that will reunite humans with nature through new technological innovations. Until we get there, prepare, explore Biophilia.” So announces British naturalist Sir David Attenborough at the beginning of Björk: Biophilia Live, Nick Fenton and Peter Strickland’s lovely film of Icelandic musician Björk’s final show of her Biophilia tour, a more-than-two-year journey in which she presented a dazzling multimedia concert experience based on her 2011 album and genre-redefining interactive app. Filmed at the Alexandra Palace in London, the cutting-edge in-the-round show features Björk performing such complex songs as “Thunderbolt,” “Moon,” “Crystalline,” and “Virus” from the hit record, accompanied by the twenty-woman Icelandic chorus Graduale Nobili and a group of visually dramatic instruments built and/or adapted specifically for her, including a pendulum-swinging gravity harp, the percussive hang, a gameleste, and a Tesla coil. In addition, most songs have related animation that ranges from the far reaches of space to deep inside the human body. Fenton, a longtime documentary editor, and Strickland, the writer-director of such fiction films as Berberian Sound Studio and Katalin Varga, often splash the animation on the front of the screen, immersing the viewer in a vast array of shapes, colors, and scientific imagery, like a turned-around Joshua Light Show. But even amid all the gadgetry and computers, Björk is the real star, ever charming in a wild wig and futuristic costume as she sings in her engaging accent and unique voice, enchanting the audience for more than ninety minutes as she brings together nature, music, and technology in a whole new way. We saw the show when it came to Roseland in March 2012 and can heartily affirm that Fenton and Strickland have done a wonderful job of capturing the feeling of being there, something that is rare in concert films.

Björk: Biophilia Live opens September 26 at the IFC Center; the 9:20 screening each night will also include the Channel 4 documentary When Björk Met Attenborough, in which director Louise Hooper goes behind the scenes of the three-year creation of the tour as it prepares for its debut performance in Manchester in June 2011. In the four-part, fifty-two-minute film, Björk visits the British Natural History Museum with big fan Attenborough as they talk about the sound of sound in nature, transcendence, prelanguage, and the evolution of singing, beginning with lyrebirds, and meets with Henry Dag, the inventor of the solar-powered sharpsichord, Andy Cavatorta, who created the gravity harp for her, and Evan Grant, who discusses cymatics, visualization, and the vibration of sound. In addition, another Björk fan, Dr. Oliver Sacks, delves into the connections between music and the brain, and Damian Taylor and Scott Snibbe go inside the development of the app. Tilda Swinton’s narration feels too much like an industrial video hyping the project, but otherwise When Björk Met Attenborough, also known as Björk and Attenborough: The Nature of Music, offers fascinating insight into Biophilia in all its incarnations.

FRANCESCO CLEMENTE: INSPIRED BY INDIA

Francesco Clemente, “Moon,” gouache on twelve sheets of handmade Pondicherry paper joined with handwoven cotton strips, 1985 (courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th St. at Seventh Ave.
Wednesday – Monday through February 2, $10-$15 (free Fridays 6:00 – 10:00)
212-620-5000
www.rubinmuseum.org

Over the last four decades, Italian artist Francesco Clemente has spent a significant amount of time living in India, collaborating with local artists and artisans to create works that explore the culture in unique ways. A small sampling of these works is now on view at the Rubin Museum in “Francesco Clemente: Inspired by India.” Consisting of four large-scale paintings from 1980 and one from 1985, two watercolor series from 1989 and 2012-13, and a quartet of corner sculptures made specifically for this show, the exhibit is set up to evoke an Indian temple. “Building on the plan, orientation, and personality of the Rubin Museum gallery — and corresponding loosely to the concept of vastu (sacred proportion) in ancient Indian texts known as shastras — the exhibition was designed to reflect metaphorically the experience of visiting an Indian temple,” curator Beth Citron writes in the catalog. “Building a dialogue between the architecture of the gallery and the art within it also speaks to Clemente’s great sensitivity to environment and his deep understanding of Indian visual, material, and spiritual cultures.” The 1980 works, composed of gouache on sheets of handmade Pondicherry paper joined with handwoven cotton strips, include the powerful “Moon,” in which a nude man is being dragged away from (or perhaps into) a swirling moon by a rock tied around his neck, and “Hunger,” in which a man is taking a bite out of an Ouroboros, a snake devouring itself in a circle. The recent series “Sixteen Amulets for the Road” features depictions of men in chains, clocks showing different times, twisted ladders reaching toward the sky, and birds surrounded by graphic arrows, with one unlucky creature pierced by one of the sharp symbols. Most impressive is “The Black Book,” sixteen intensely beautiful, small, dark watercolors of men and women in the midst of heated passion; the longer you look at them, the more you can make out what is going on in these otherwise abstract images. The sculptures have similar names as the paintings — “Moon,” “Earth,” “Sun,” “Hunger” — each one set on a makeshift bamboo pedestal, at the top such repurposed objects as a vase, a suitcase, a mystery box, and a flag with quotations from Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle on either side.

But it’s the related programming that takes this exhibition to another level. For “Clemente x 8,” the artist will engage in onstage conversations with multimedia performer Patti Smith (October 1), theater innovator Robert Lepage (October 5), hip-hop star Nas (October 7), Tibetan monk Gelek Rimpoche (October 8), chef Eric Ripert (October 22), architect Billie Tsien (October 29), Sopranos creator David Chase (November 5), and writer-director Alfonso Cuarón (November 9); all tickets are $45 and include admission to the exhibition before and after the talk. In addition, Clemente has selected the films for the museum’s Friday-night Cabaret Cinema series; “My Formative Years” consists of ten works introduced by special guests, pairing Stella Schnabel with Luis Buñuel’s Viridiana, daughter Chiara Clemente with Bernardo Bertolucci’s Before the Revolution, Philip Glass with Conrad Rooks’s Chappaqua, Neil LaBute with Peter Fonda’s The Hired Hand, and Karole Armitage with Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, among other screenings through December 5. (Admission is free with a minimum $10 purchase in the K2 Lounge.) And finally, exhibition curator Citron will speak with contemporary artists on select Friday nights at 6:15; the impressive “Artists on Art” lineup boasts Fred Tomaselli on September 26, Julian Schnabel on October 3, Philip Taaffe on October 17, Sandeep Mukherjee on October 24, David Salle on November 7, Terry Winters on November 14, and Swoon on November 21. (Free tickets are distributed beginning at 5:45.)

NYFF52 CONVERGENCE: LAST HIJACK

LAST HIJACK (Tommy Pallotta & Femke Wolting, 2014)
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Sunday, September 28, 1:30 (interactive) and 8:00 (regular screening)
Festival runs September 25 – October 12
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.com
www.lasthijack.com

Tommy Pallotta and Femke Wolting personalize the story of a real-life Somali pirate in the surprisingly intimate and moving Last Hijack. “I want to go back to the ocean once again, take one last ship, and use the money to build a house for my family,” Mohamed narrates as he puts together a small team to pull off a hijack that they hope will make them rich. After that, Mohamed is planning to settle down with his fiancée, Muna, who, along with her parents, is trying to convince him to give up piracy immediately. But Mohamed is determined to make one final score. Cutting-edge filmmakers Pallotta (a producer on such innovative films as Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly and Waking Life and director of the documentary American Prince) and Wolting (a producer of Peter Greenaway’s Rembrandt’s J’Accuse and director of such nonfiction films as Another Perfect World, about 3D gaming, and Sneakers, about the cultural aspects of the sports shoe) gain remarkable access as Mohamed and his cohorts speak openly about their criminal activities and test their weaponry. Pallotta and Wolting cut between the nonfiction narrative and animated scenes that go on inside Mohamed’s head, where he transforms into a large bird that flies through the air and can simply just pick up the target ship with his claws. But life is not that easy, as Mohamed already knows. In the film, Pallotta and Wolting reveal the other side of the story, the one not shown in Captain Phillips or Stolen Seas, told from the point of view of the Somali pirates themselves; the codirectors don’t demonize Mohamed, nor do they turn him into some kind of folk hero. Instead, he’s just a man who needs to make what might turn out to be the most important decision of his life. The eighty-three-minute documentary version of Last Hijack is screening in the Convergence section of the New York Film Festival on September 28 at 8:00; earlier that day, at 1:30, the hour-long interactive “Online Experience” will take place, with Pallotta and Wolting incorporating data visualization, audio, and more animation and live footage to immerse the audience in the tale from multiple perspectives.

NYFF52 MAIN SLATE: LA SAPIENZA

LA SAPIENZA feature glorious sights and sounds as a couple tries to rekindle their spark

LA SAPIENZA (THE SAPIENCE) (Eugène Green, 2014)
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Saturday, September 27, Alice Tully Hall, 3:00, and Sunday, September 28, Francesca Beale Theater, 12:15
Festival runs September 19-25
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.com

New York City-born French filmmaker Eugène Green equates humanity and architecture in the lush, rich film La Sapienza. Named for the concept of gaining wisdom as well as Italian architect Francesco Borromini’s seventeenth-century Roman Catholic Baroque church Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza, the film follows an older couple who rediscover their personal and professional passion after meeting a young pair of siblings. Architect Alexandre Schmidt (Fabrizio Rongione) and his wife, sociologist Aliénor (Christelle Prot Landman), are walking through a park in Switzerland when they see a teenage girl (Arianna Nastro) nearly collapse into the arms of a slightly older boy (Ludovico Succio). It turns out that Lavinia is suffering from incapacitating dizzy spells and is cared for by her brother, Goffredo, who is interested in studying architecture. Aliénor becomes involved in Lavinia’s situation while Alexandre, an intense, cynical man, returns to the book he is writing on Borromini (who famously worked in the shadow of Bernini) and travels to Italy with Goffredo as the boy’s reluctant mentor. Green’s (Toutes les nuits, Le monde vivant) first digital feature opens with the glorious sounds of Claudio Monteverdi accompanying cinematographer Raphaël O’Byrne’s magisterial shots of statuary and architecture in Rome. The acting at the start, particularly Rongione’s, is purposefully stiff and mannered, cold and stonelike, but it warms up as the characters learn (or relearn) about the myriad possibilities life offers. Green uses the metaphor of Baroque architecture’s role in the Counter-Reformation as a symbol for Alexandre and Aliénor’s relationship, as they finally face long-held emotions and reconsider their future, all while Green lingers on magnificent structures. La Sapienza will have its U.S. premiere at the New York Film Festival on September 27 at 3:00 and September 28 at 12:15; both screenings will be followed by a Q&A with Green, who also appears in the film as the grizzled Chaldean.

RETRO METRO: THE WARRIORS

You can come out and play with the Warriors as they head to Brooklyn for BAM festival kickoff

THE WARRIORS (Walter Hill, 1979)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Friday, September 26, 3:00, 5:00, 7:30 & 9:45
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.warriorsmovie.co.uk

At a huge gang meeting in the Bronx (actually shot in Riverside Park), the Warriors are wrongly accused of having killed Cyrus (Roger Hill), an outspoken leader trying to band all the warring factions together to form one huge force that can take over the New York City borough by borough. The Warriors then must make it back to their home turf, Coney Island, with every gang in New York lying in wait for them to pass through their territory. This iconic New York City gang movie is based on Sol Yurick’s novel, which in turn is loosely based on Xenophon’s Anabasis, which told of the ancient Greeks’ retreat from Persia. Michael Beck stars as Swan, who becomes the de-facto leader of the Warriors after Cleon (Dorsey Wright) gets taken down early. Battling Swan for control is Ajax (Dexter’s James Remar) and tough-talking Mercy (Too Close for Comfort’s Deborah Van Valkenburgh). Serving as a Greek chorus is Lynne (Law & Order) Thigpen as a radio DJ, and, yes, that young woman out too late in Central Park is eventual Oscar winner Mercedes Ruehl.

Among the cartoony gangs of New York who try to stop the Warriors are the roller-skating Punks, the pathetic Orphans, the militaristic Gramercy Riffs, the all-girl Lizzies, the ragtag Rogues, and the inimitable Baseball Furies. Another main character is the New York City subway system itself, which is why it is kicking off the BAMcinématek series “Retro Metro” on September 26, ten days of sixteen films with key scenes set underground, including the original Taking of Pelham One Two Three; Leslie Harris’s indie breakthrough Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.; Larry Peerce’s cult favorite The Incident, with a superb, subtle all-star cast; and such pairings as Vincente Minnelli’s The Clock with Stan Brakhage’s The Wonder Ring and Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly’s On the Town with D. A. Pennebaker’s Daybreak Express (as well as Saturday Night Fever, Speedy, Beat Street, and more).