Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky) and Camille (Lola Créton) experience the pleasure and pain of young romance in GOODBYE FIRST LOVE
CINÉSALON: GOODBYE FIRST LOVE (UN AMOUR DE JEUNESSE) (Mia Hansen-Løve, 2011)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, June 24, $13, 4:00 & 7:30
212-355-6100
http://www.fiaf.org
www.ifcfilms.com
French filmmaker Mia Hansen-Løve’s third film is an infuriating yet captivating tale that runs hot and cold. Goodbye First Love begins in Paris in 1999, as fifteen-year-old Camille (Lola Créton) frolics naked with Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky), her slightly older boyfriend. While she professes her deep, undying lover for him, he refuses to declare his total dedication to her, instead preparing to leave her and France for a long sojourn through South America. When Camille goes home and starts sobbing, her mother (Valérie Bonneton), who is not a big fan of Sullivan’s, asks why. “I cry because I’m melancholic,” Camille answers, as only a fifteen-year-old character in a French film would. As the years pass, Camille grows into a fine young woman, studying architecture and dating a much older man (Magne-Håvard Brekke), but she can’t forget Sullivan, and when he eventually reenters her life, she has some hard choices to make. Créton (Bluebeard) evokes a young Isabelle Huppert as Camille, while Urzendowsky (The Way Back) is somewhat distant as the distant Sullivan. There is never any real passion between them; Hansen-Løve (All Is Forgiven, The Father of My Children) often skips over the more emotional, pivotal moments, instead concentrating on the after-effects and discussions. While that works at times, at others it feels as if something crucial was left out, and not necessarily with good reason. Still, Créton carries the film with her puppy-dog eyes, lithe body, and a graceful demeanor that will make you forgive her character’s increasingly frustrating decisions. Goodbye First Love is screening June 24 at 4:00 and 7:30 as part of the FIAF CinéSalon series “Cahiers due Cinéma’s Top Picks”; the later screening will be introduced by Richard Peña, and both showings will be followed by a wine reception.
In Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, the Russian 2001: A Space Odyssey, Natalya Bondarchuk and Donatus Banionis star as a different kind of couple caught up in something very strange that is going on in outer space, unexplainable to both the characters in the film and the people in the audience. Banionis plays Dr. Kris Kelvin, a psychologist who is sent to the Solaris space station to decide whether to put an end to the solaristics project that Burton (Vladislav Dvorzhetsky) complicated twenty years before. What he discovers is one death, two possibly insane men, and his supposedly dead wife (Bondarchuk). Ambiguity reigns supreme in this gorgeously shot (in color and black-and-white by cinematographer Vadim Yusov) and scored (by Eduard Artemyev) film that, while technically science fiction, is really about the human conscience, another gem from master Russian director Tarkovsky (Ivan’s Childhood, Andrei Rublev, Nostalghia). See it whether or not you’ve checked out Steven Soderbergh’s underrated remake with George Clooney and Natascha McElhone. Based on Stanislaw Lem’s novel, Solaris is screening June 22 at 2:00 as part of the Museum of the Moving Image’s “See It Big! Science Fiction (Part Two)” series, which continues through July 12 with such other sci-fi flicks as Alain Resnais’s Je T’Aime, Je T’Aime, Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running and Brainstorm in 70mm, and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, also in 70mm
For his third stage adaptation in ten years, following 1994’s Death and the Maiden and 2011’s Carnage, Roman Polanski has created a marvelous, multilayered examination of the intricate nature of storytelling, consumed with aspects of doubling. David Ives’s Tony-nominated play, 
Alexander Mackendrick’s splendid 1951 Ealing comedy The Man in the White Suit is a hysterical Marxist fantasy about corporations, unions, and the working man that doesn’t feel dated in the least. Alec Guinness stars as Sidney Stratton, a brilliant scientist relegated to lower-class jobs at textile mills while he works feverishly on a secret product that he believes will revolutionize the industry — and the world. After being fired by Michael Corland (Michael Gough) at one factory, Sid goes over to Birnley’s, run by Alan Birnley (Cecil Parker, whose voiceover narration begins and ends the film). As Sid develops his groundbreaking product, he also develops a liking for Birnley’s daughter, Daphne (Joan Greenwood), who is preparing to marry Corland. Meanwhile, tough-talking union leader Bertha (Vida Hope) also takes a shine to the absentminded chemist, who soon finds himself on the run, chased by just about everyone he’s ever met, not understanding why they all are so against him. Guinness is at his goofy best as Sid, a loner obsessed with the challenge he has set for himself; his makeshift, Rube Goldberg-like chemistry sets are a riot, bubbling over with silly noises like they’re in a cartoon. But at the heart of the film lies some fascinating insight on the nature of big business that is still relevant today. Nominated for an Oscar for Best Screenplay, The Man in the White Suit is an extremely witty film, expertly directed (and cowritten) by Mackendrick, who would go on to make such other great pictures as The Ladykillers and Sweet Smell of Success. It’s easy to imagine that if someone in a textile mill today came up with a similar invention as Stratton’s, the same arguments against it would arise, suppressing progress in favor of personal interest and preservation. The Man in the White Suit is being shown June 20-21 at Film Forum in a double feature with Charles Crichton’s delightful heist comedy The Lavender Hill Mob — both in 35mm restorations — as part of “Alec Guinness 100,” celebrating Sir Alec’s centennial with screenings of more than two dozen of his films, including The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Ladykillers, Our Man in Havana, Lawrence of Arabia, The Scapegoat, The Prisoner, and the 1997 Special Edition of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.
