Tokyo Drifter is part of six-film Japan Society tribute to master filmmaker Seijun Suzuki
SEIJUN SUZUKI CENTENNIAL
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
February 3-11, $15 japansociety.org
“I am often told that a script with a dark subject always turns into a more cheerful movie in my hands,” master Japanese filmmaker Seijun Suzuki says in a brief Criterion “Suzuki on Suzuki” video interview. “Maybe it is due to my personality that I dislike dark stories. I always start by thinking about the style and design of the film. I choose the costumes and sets based on that initial image. Rather than using the same color, isn’t if more fun if each scene is a different color?”
Suzuki’s 1966 yakuza yarn, Tokyo Drifter, is a prime example of his philosophy of cinema, a berserk noir screening February 4 in the Japan Society tribute “Seijun Suzuki Centennial,” honoring the Tokyo-born director of more than fifty films between 1956 and 2005; Suzuki died in February 2017 at the age of ninety-three.
Tokyo Drifter must be seen on the big screen to be fully appreciated. Nearly every set is an eye-popping work of art, courtesy of production designer Takeo Kimura, and lushly photographed by cinematographer Shigeyoshi Mine. Black-and-white morphs into bold and brash reds, yellows, and blues for no reason. Backgrounds disappear so it looks like a shootout is taking place in a black void. A statue of a woman holding some kind of prehistoric giant donut switches hues as the action continues around it. Our hero, whose blazer goes from powder blue to yellow to cream to white, turns a corner and is suddenly running down a heavenly white German expressionist passageway. A villain uses his black gun to dial on a red phone. Hajime Kaburagi’s jazzy noir score mixes with romantic ballads, complete with a man in black playing a white piano. Red blood squirts into the air. Shinya Inoue’s editing is inconsistent and choppy, adding to the derangement, whether done on purpose or not.
Suave Tetsu “Phoenix” Hondo (Tetsuya Watari) and his boss, Kurata (Ryūji Kita), are getting out of the yakuza game, but Otsuka (Hideaki Esumi) and his gang, including Tatsu “the Viper” (Tamio Kawaji), are not going to let it be easy for them. Kurata owes an important building payment to Keiichi (Tsuyoshi Yoshida), who is willing to make a fair deal, as Kurata does not have all the money. But Otsuka sneaks in and threatens Keiichi to sell to him so Otsuka can take over the immensely valuable property. Kurata’s assistant, Mutsuko (Kaoru Hama), reads comic books and is secretly in cahoots with Otsuka, while Tetsu’s girlfriend, Chiharu (Chieko Matsubara), is a sweet-natured lounge singer who performs in a far-out nightclub. (Watari sings the song over the opening credits.) Double crosses lead to characters questioning loyalty and trust as the body count rises amid a groovy avant-garde Pop art setting unlike any other yakuza flick. (Suzuki followed it up with Tokyo Drifter 2: The Sea Is Bright Red as the Color of Love, a very different kind of film.)
Copresented by the Japan Foundation and guest curated by University of Alberta assistant professor William Carroll, “Seijun Suzuki Centennial” runs February 3-11 and comprises imported 35mm films from throughout Suzuki’s career: the ghost story Kagero-za (1981), the second part of his Taisho Trilogy, which began with 1980’s Zigeunerweisen and concluded with 1991’s Yumeji; a double feature of the director’s first Nikkatsu yakuza thriller, Satan’s Town (1956), and the forty-minute melodrama Love Letter (1958); 1966’s Carmen from Kawachi, one of three Suzuki adaptations of novels by Tôkô Kon; and A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness (1977), about a model turned golf star who faces stress and a stalker, Suzuki’s first film in ten years following a battle with Nikkatsu, which decided it no longer liked his unpredictable work after Branded to Kill.
“As Suzuki worked in a transforming film industry, he experimented with new possibilities given by changes in technology and took up new stylistic trends as they were developed by his colleagues, but he pushed them toward more abstract ends. As a result, Suzuki’s style was a constantly shifting target,” Carroll writes in Suzuki Seijun and Postwar Japanese Cinema. “Ultimately, the Seijunesque is defined less by a singular trait or tendency than by a push-or-pull, direct juxtaposition, or synthesis between multiple tendencies that would seem to be irreconcilable.” All that and more is on view in this tribute to a film icon.
“Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak,” John Berger writes in the seminal text Ways of Seeing. “But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.”
In documentary filmmaker Kimi Takesue’s Onlookers, having its world premiere at Slamdance in Park City, Utah, this weekend and available for streaming January 23-29, there are no words, no dialogue — just seventy-two minutes of stunning visuals exploring what we see and what we know, what we are present for and what we are absent for.
The film takes place in various parts of Laos as director, producer, cinematographer, sound recordist, and editor Takesue sets up her camera and leaves it there as scenes unfold in real time and with natural sound, from a breathtaking fourteen-second sunset to five and a half minutes of six women sitting by the side of the road, preparing to fill begging bowls for a long line of Buddhist monks. Animals graze in a temple courtyard as bells chime. Women sell goods at an open-air market. Rivers flow, wind rustles trees, roosters crow, birds chirp, a cat rests on a step, a man relaxes in a hammock, all taking their time, no one in a hurry.
Then the tourists arrive; a few run up to take pictures of a monk beating a drum, then walk away, not actually stopping to watch and listen. A woman snaps a photo of three fellow sightseers standing atop a small, raging waterfall as a man fishes below. A local worker waits as a woman checks her cell phone, as if he isn’t there, standing next to her. A group of backpackers gets a prime view at a boat racing festival while locals observe from the shore. On a mountain, six tourists search for the best angle to take selfies. Visitors at a guest house sit in an outdoor lounge and watch Friends.
Born in Colorado and raised in Hawai’i and Massachusetts, Takesue has previously made Where Are You Taking Me? in Uganda, Heaven’s Crossroad in Vietnam, and 95 and 6 to Go in Hawai’i, about reconnecting with her grandfather. In Onlookers, she is not necessarily criticizing the tourists or celebrating the Laotian locals; she’s merely showing how people witness and experience the world, particularly when it comes to travelers and residents.
She beautifully captures this relationship in a short but captivating scene that begins with a static shot of an old religious shrine that looks like it hasn’t been in operation for years. A young woman enters the frame, sits down, poses for a selfie, stands up, snaps a photo of the shrine, then saunters off, never once stopping to just look at the shrine itself. The camera lingers on the building for several seconds, with nobody around, just the decaying structure set against a blue sky and between lush greenery.
We see what we want to see, when we want to see it, not always recognizing what is right in front of us, whether we’re at home or on vacation. It reminded me of people who go to a museum and take pictures of classic artworks but only see them through the lens of their phone rather than experiencing them with their own eyes. In fact, each frame of Onlookers is composed like a painting that slowly comes to life.
“The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe,” Berger writes in his book. “Yet this seeing which comes before words, and can never be quite covered by them, is not a question of mechanically reacting to stimuli. (It can only be thought of in this way if one isolates the small part of the process which concerns the eye’s retina.) We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice. As a result of this act, what we see is brought within our reach — though not necessarily within arm’s reach. To touch something is to situate oneself in relation to it. . . . We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves. Our vision is continually active, continually moving, continually holding things in a circle around itself, constituting what is present to us as we are. Soon after we can see, we are aware that we can also be seen.”
In all films, the audience might not have a choice of what they’re looking at, but they can decide for themselves what they’re seeing. And in the case of Onlookers, what they’re seeing is a gorgeous portrait of ourselves that no selfie can catch.
Cecilia Suárez stars in NYJFF closing night selection, Violeta Salama’s Alegría
THIRTY-SECOND ANNUAL NEW YORK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL
Walter Reade Theater, Film at Lincoln Center
165 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Aves.
January 12-23, $15 in person, $10 virtual (bundle $15)
212-875-5050 www.filmlinc.org thejewishmuseum.org
The thirty-second annual New York Jewish Film Festival comes along at a time with rising anti-Semitism in America and around the world, disarray in the Israeli government amid the controversial return of a former leader, and continuing battles in the Middle East over human rights and land possession. Why should this year be different from any other year?
Running January 12-23 at Film at Lincoln Center, the series comprises twenty-one feature-length narrative films and documentaries and a program of six shorts by women that explore the past, present, and future of Judaism and the diaspora. The festival kicks off with the New York premiere of Fred Cavayé’s Farewell, Mr. Haffmann, in which Daniel Auteuil plays the title character, a jeweler in Nazi-occupied Paris trying to preserve his family. The opening-night selection is Ofir Raul Graizer’s America, about an Israeli swimming coach (Michael Moshonov) who returns to Tel Aviv after living in Chicago, a reunion that doesn’t go quite as planned; the screening will be followed by a Q&A with writer, director, and editor Graizer.
Hannah Saidiner’s My Parent, Neal is part of special shorts program at NYJFF
The centerpiece film is Delphine Coulin and Muriel Coulin’s Charlotte Salomon: Life and the Maiden, a documentary about the German-Jewish artist who was murdered at Auschwitz at the age of twenty-six but left behind a remarkable legacy; the film includes the voices of Vicky Krieps, Mathieu Amalric, and Hanna Schygulla, and both screenings on January 18 will be followed by a Q&A with the directors. The festival closes with Violeta Salama’s Alegría, about a single mother (Cecilia Suárez) wrestling with her own faith and the patriarchy as she ventures from Mexico to her hometown in the autonomous North African city of Melilla for her niece’s Orthodox wedding. Salama will discuss her debut feature after both screenings on January 22.
A Life Apart: Hasidism in America returns to the New York Jewish Film Festival in a twenty-fifth anniversary 4K restoration
Among the other highlights are Sylvie Ohayon’s Haute Couture, starring Nathalie Baye as a Dior seamstress in Paris; the New York premiere of Tomer Heymann’s I Am Not, a documentary about boarding school student Oren Levy, who shuns human contact, which will be followed by a hybrid Q&A with Heymann and several of the film’s subjects; the New York premiere of octogenarian Ralph Arlyck’s I Like It Here, a personal film about aging; Jake Paltrow’s June Zero, a fictionalized retelling of the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann from three different perspectives; and a pair of revivals, Joseph Green and Leon Trystand’s 1939 Yiddish film A Letter to Mother, and the world premiere of the twenty-fifth anniversary 4K restoration of Oren Rudavsky and Menachem Daum’s A Life Apart: Hasidism in America, a seminal documentary narrated by Sarah Jessica Parker and Leonard Nimoy and with a score by Yale Strom, followed by a panel discussion with Daum, Rudavsky, Ayala Fader, Marcus Allison, Pearl Gluck, and Rabbi Mayer Schiller.
(Keep watching this space for full and capsule reviews throughout the festival.)
Farewell, Mr. Haffmann offers a unique perspective on the Nazi occupation of Paris
FAREWELL, MR. HAFFMANN (Fred Cavayé, 2021)
Walter Reade Theater
Monday, January 16, 8:30 www.filmlinc.org
Fred Cavayé’s stunning Farewell, Mr. Haffmann offers several unique twists on the Holocaust drama, resulting in a breathtaking microcosm of so much of what happened, particularly during the Nazi occupation of France. The film is adapted from a play by Jean-Philippe Daguerre, with nearly all the action taking place in Joseph Haffmann’s jewelry shop, where Haffmann lives with his wife and three children. After getting his family out in May 1941, Haffmann finds himself trapped in Paris, cutting a deal with his assistant (Gilles Lellouche) and his wife (Sara Giraudeau) that grows ever-more dangerous as Nazi leaders start coming to the shop to buy jewelry for their wives and mistresses. Daniel Auteuil (Jean de Florette,Girl on the Bridge) is riveting as Haffmann, who experiences anti-Semitism and war from a fascinating perspective, both psychologically and physically.
Two men are at odds over religion and love in Ady Walter’s Shttl
SHTTL (Ady Walter, 2022)
Walter Reade Theater
Monday, January 16, 5:30, and Tuesday, January 17, 1:00 www.filmlinc.org
On the eve of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, a small Yiddish-speaking village on the Polish border teeters on the edge as the citizens debate war, collaboration, religion, women’s roles in society, and true love. In the tense, gripping Shttl, Ady Walter pulls off quite an impressive directorial debut, shooting the 110-minute film in one continuous take, shifting between black-and-white and color as the narrative unfolds: Mendele (Moshe Lobel) joins the military, promising to come back for Yuna (Anisia Stasevich), but while he is gone she is wooed/harassed by the mean-spirited Folie (Antoine Millet), whose father (Saul Rubinek) is the community’s spiritual leader. The strange spelling of the title is an homage to Georges Perec’s 1969 novel, La Disparition (A Void), which never uses the fifth letter of the alphabet, its loss a symbol of profound absence. (Both of French novelist Perec’s parents were killed during the Holocaust, his father on the field of battle, his mother in Auschwitz.) The village, or shtetl, was built for the film and is being turned into a Jewish-Ukrainian museum. The screening on January 16 will be followed by a Q&A with Walter, New Yiddish Rep veteran Lobel, award-winning German-born Canadian actor Rubinek, and producer Jean-Charles Lévy.
An intense melding of Unorthodox and Shtisel, Mordechai Vardi’s Barren is a heart-wrenching drama about an Orthodox couple, Naftali (Yoav Rotman) and Feigi (Mili Eshet), desperate to have a child. They live with his mother, a matchmaker (Ilanit Ben-Yaakov), and his father, a Torah scribe (Nevo Kimchi), both of whom were secular before becoming Orthodox. When Naftali goes on a pilgrimage to Uman for Rosh Hashanah to pray for fertility, his father invites over a mysterious man who has nowhere to spend the holiday. Rabbi Eliyahu (Gil Frank) claims to be able to heal by blowing the shofar; he offers to do so for Feigi, but their encounter turns terribly wrong, leading every member of the family to reconsider their faith and their personal responsibilities.
Eshet (Take the “A” Train,Beyond the Mountains and Hills) is haunting as Feigi, her eyes filled with yearning for what she imagined her life would be like. Based on actual events, the film focuses on the unjust treatment of women in Orthodox society, their rights determined by men, including local tribunals made up of supposedly wise scholars following religious doctrine, who decide what women should and should not do and whether they should remain married or get divorced. It’s a harrowing tale anchored by a powerful lead performance. The film will be available virtually January 23-28.
Jean-Paul Trintignant tries to find his place in the world in Bernardo Bertolucci’s lush masterpiece, The Conformist
THE CONFORMIST (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
January 6-19
212-727-8110 www.filmforum.org
Based on the novel by Alberto Moravia, Bernardo Bertolucci’s gorgeous masterpiece, The Conformist, is a political thriller about paranoia, pedophilia, and trying to find one’s place in a changing world, and you can experience it in all its glory in a 4K digital restoration at Film Forum. Jean-Louis Trintignant (And God Created Woman, Z, My Night at Maud’s) stars as Marcello Clerici, a troubled man who suffered childhood traumas and is now attempting to join the fascist secret police. To prove his dedication to the movement, he is ordered to assassinate one of his former professors, the radical Luca Quadri (Enzo Tarascio), who is living in France. He falls for Quadri’s much younger wife, Anna (Dominique Sanda), who takes an intriguing liking to Clerici’s wife, Giulia (Stefania Sandrelli), while Manganiello (Gastone Moschin) keeps a close watch on him, making sure he will carry out his assignment.
The Conformist, made just after The Spider’s Stragagem and followed by Last Tango in Paris, captures one man’s desperate need to belong, to become a part of Mussolini’s fascist society and feel normal at the expense of his real inner feelings and beliefs, not unlike the indoctrination too many people get sucked into today via online hate groups. An atheist, he goes to church to confess because Giulia demands it. A bureaucrat, he is not a cold-blooded killer, but he will murder a part of his past in order to be accepted by the fascists (as well as Bertolucci’s own past, as he makes a sly reference to his former mentor, Jean-Luc Godard, by using the French auteur’s phone number and address for Quadri’s). Production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro bathe the film in lush Art Deco colors as Bertolucci moves the story, told in flashbacks, through a series of set pieces that include an erotic dance by Anna and Giulia, a Kafkaesque visit to a government ministry, and a stunning use of black and white and light and shadow as Marcello and Giulia discuss their impending marriage. The Conformist is a multilayered psychological examination of a complex figure living in complex times, as much about the 1930s as the 1970s, as the youth of the Western world sought personal, political, and sexual freedom.
A Thousand Ways (Part Three): Assembly brings strangers together at the New York Public Library (photo courtesy 600 Highwaymen)
UNDER THE RADAR FESTIVAL
Public Theater and other venues
January 4-22, free – $60 publictheater.org
The Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival is back and in person for its eighteenth iteration, running January 4-22 at the Public as well as Chelsea Factory, NYU Skirball, La MaMa, BAM, and the New York Public Library’s Stavros Niarchos Foundation branch. As always, the works come from around the world, a mélange of disciplines that offers unique theatrical experiences. Among this year’s selections are Jasmine Lee-Jones’s seven methods of killing kylie jenner, Annie Saunders and Becca Wolff’s Our Country, Roger Guenveur Smith’s Otto Frank, Rachel Mars’s Your Sexts Are Shit: Older Better Letters, Kaneza Schaal’s KLII, and Timothy White Eagle and the Violet Triangle’s The Indigo Room.
In addition, “Incoming! — Works-in-Process” features early looks at pieces by Mia Rovegno, Miranda Haymon, Nile Harris, Mariana Valencia, Eric Lockley, Savon Bartley, Raelle Myrick-Hodges, and Justin Elizabeth Sayre, while Joe’s Pub will host performances by Eszter Balint, Negin Farsad, Julian Fleisher and his Rather Big Band, Salty Brine, and Migguel Anggelo.
Below is a look at four of the highlights.
600 HIGHWAYMEN: A THOUSAND WAYS (PART THREE): AN ASSEMBLY
The New York Public Library, Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library
455 Fifth Ave. at Fortieth St., seventh floor
January 4-22, free with advance RSVP publictheater.org
At the January 2021 Under the Radar Festival, the Obie-winning 600 Highwaymen presented A Thousand Ways (Part One): A Phone Call, a free hourlong telephone conversation between you and another person, randomly put together and facilitated by an electronic voice that asks both general and intimate questions, from where you are sitting to what smells you are missing, structured around a dangerous and lonely fictional situation that is a metaphor for sheltering in place. The company followed that up with the second part, An Encounter, in which you and a stranger — not the same one — meet in person, sitting across a table, separated from one another by a clear glass panel, with no touching and no sharing of objects. In both sections, I bonded quickly with the other person, making for intimate and poignant moments when we were all keeping our distance from each other.
Now comes the grand finale, Assembly, where sixteen strangers at a time will come together to finish the story at the New York Public Library’s Stavros Niarchos Foundation branch in Midtown. Written and created by Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone, A Thousand Ways innovatively tracks how the pandemic lockdown influenced the ways we interact with others as well as how critical connection and entertainment are.
Palindromic show makes US premiere at Under the Radar Festival (photo courtesy Ontroerend Goed)
ONTROEREND GOED: Are we not drawn onward to new erA
BAM Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
January 4-8, $45 publictheater.org www.bam.org
What do the following three statements have in common? “Dammit, I’m mad.” “Madam in Eden, I’m Adam.” “A man, a plan, a canal – Panama.” They are all palindromes, reading the same way backward and forward. They also, in their own way, relate to Ontroerend Goed’s Are we not drawn onward to new erA, running January 4-8 at BAM’s Fishman Space. Directed by Alexander Devriendt, the Belgian theater collective’s seventy-minute show features a title and a narrative that work both backward and forward as they explore climate change and the destruction wrought by humanity, which has set the Garden of Eden on the path toward armageddon. But maybe, just maybe, there is still time to save the planet if we come up with just the right plan.
The world is obsessed with Moby-Dick much the way Captain Ahab is obsessed with the great white itself. Now it’s Norwegian theater company Plexus Polaire and artistic director Yngvild Aspeli’s turn to harpoon the story of one of the most grand quests in all of literature. Aspeli (Signaux,Opéra Opaque,Dracula) incorporates seven actors, fifty puppets, video projections, a drowned orchestra, and a giant whale to transform Herman Melville’s 1851 novel into a haunting ninety-minute multimedia production at NYU Skirball for four performances only, so get on board as soon as you can.
Brian Mendes and Jim Fletcher get ready for NYCP’s Field of Mars (photo courtesy New York City Players)
I’ll follow Richard Maxwell and New York City Players anywhere, whether it’s on a boat past the Statue of Liberty (The Vessel), an existential journey inside relationships and theater itself (The Evening,Isolde) and outside time and space (Paradiso,Good Samaritans), or even to the Red Planet and beyond. Actually, his newest piece, Field of Mars, playing at NYU Skirball January 19-29, refers not to the fourth planet from the sun but to the ancient term for a large public space and military parade ground. Maxwell doesn’t like to share too much about upcoming shows, but we do know that this one features Lakpa Bhutia, Nicholas Elliott, Jim Fletcher, Eleanor Hutchins, Paige Martin, Brian Mendes, James Moore, Phil Moore, Steven Thompson, Tory Vazquez, and Gillian Walsh and that the limited audience will be seated on the stage.
Oh, and Maxwell noted in an email blast: “Field of Mars: A chain restaurant in Chapel Hill is used as a way to measure the progress of primates, from hunter/gatherer to fast casual dining experience. Topics covered: Music, Food, Nature, and Spirituality. . . . I also wanted to take this opportunity to tell parents regarding the content of Field of Mars: my kids (aged 11 and 15) will not be seeing this show.”
Giancarlo Esposito plays a philosophical cabbie in Julian Rosefeldt’s Euphoria (photo by Nicholas Knight / courtesy of Park Avenue Armory)
EUPHORIA
Park Ave. Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at Sixty-Seventh St.
Daily through January 8, $18 www.armoryonpark.org
“The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed — for lack of a better word — is good,” Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) famously pronounced in Oliver Stone’s Oscar-nominated 1987 film, Wall Street. “Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms — greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge — has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed — you mark my words — will not only save Teldar Paper but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.”
Well, as it turns out, greed has not exactly saved America or the world, but is there still hope? German filmmaker Julian Rosefeldt explores that possibility in his beautifully rendered twenty-four-channel immersive installation, Euphoria, continuing at Park Avenue Armory through January 8. It arrives at an opportune moment, not only in the midst of a post-global-pandemic economic crisis but during the holiday season, when rampant consumerism dominates our everyday life.
In 2016, Rosefeldt presented Manifesto at the armory, a thirteen-channel film projected on screens placed throughout Wade Thompson Drill Hall, featuring Cate Blanchett as twelve different characters spouting cultural missives by artists and philosophers going back more than 150 years. One of the themes came from Jim Jarmusch: “Nothing is original.” While nearly all the dialogue in Euphoria is taken from another source, how it is incorporated into a 115-minute visual and aural feast is anything but derivative or uninventive. And it’s about a lot more than just the Benjamins.
Euphoria comprises six distinct scenes, each of which exists on its own in a loop; you can enter at any time, as the order doesn’t matter. The linking factor is the discussion of socioeconomics in the modern world. There are black fold floor chairs scattered around the space, but you can also walk around the installation. The main screen hangs at the center, where the six stories are told. Five smaller screens are at the same level in a circle, where drummers Terri Lyne Carrington, Peter Erskine, Yissy García, Eric Harland, and Antonio Sanchez occasionally pick up their sticks and play. Eighteen more screens surround the space, except for the entrance, on which 140 members of the Brooklyn Youth Chorus are projected, life-size; in the dark hall, it often looks like they are actually there, in person, singing or, when silent, standing more or less still, their slight swaying adding a dash of reality to the primary narrative, which delves into the fantastical. (The score is by Samy Moussa, with an additional composition by Cassie Kinoshi.)
Julian Rosefeldt’s twenty-four-channel installation surrounds viewers (photo by Nicholas Knight / courtesy of Park Avenue Armory)
On a cold winter night in New York City, a taxi driver played by Giancarlo Esposito, partially channeling his character from Jarmusch’s Night on Earth, including his “fresh” winter hat with earflaps, picks up a well-dressed man with shopping bags who is going to the Brooklyn Navy Yard; it’s not long before we realize Esposito is playing both roles. The cabbie does most of the talking, his dialogue made up of quotes from John Steinbeck, Noam Chomsky, Fareed Zakaria, G. K. Chesterton, JR, Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, and others, seamlessly woven together. “My momma always said: Too many people buy things they don’t need with money they don’t have to impress people who don’t care,” the cabbie says (Will Rogers). Passing by strange things happening on the street, the cabbie delivers lines that essentially sum up much of what Euphoria is about: “And then they see their idealism turn into realism, their realism into cynicism, their cynicism turn into apathy, their apathy into selfishness, their selfishness into greed and then they have babies, and they have hopes but they also have fears, so they create nests that become bunkers, they make their houses baby-safe and they buy baby car seats and organic apple juice and hire multilingual nannies and pay tuition to private schools out of love but also out of fear. What happened? You start by trying to create a new world and then you find yourself just wanting to add a bottle to your cellar, you see yourself aging and wonder if you’ve put enough away for that and suddenly you realize that you’re frightened of the years ahead of you. You never think you’ll become corrupt but time corrupts you, wears you down, wears you out. You get tired, you get old, you give up on your dreams. . . . You mind who you think you wanted to be” (Don Winslow).
The action moves next to a postapocalyptic ship graveyard where five white homeless men, Poet, Smartass, Randy, Keynes, and Sidekick, gather around a trash fire, discussing the “three great forces [that] rule the world: stupidity, fear, and greed” (Albert Einstein). Randy declares, “It seems to me that not doing what we love in the name of greed is just very poor management of our lives. I will tell you the secret to getting rich: Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful!” (Warren Buffett). Quotes from Machiavelli, Snoop Dog, Erich Fromm, Socrates, Adam Smith, Stephen King, Elizabeth Warren, and more are interwoven as the men pass around a bottle of rum, eat marshmallows, and burn a smartphone and, unbeknownst to them, a parade of animals in the background boards a large wooden ship, as if a new world is starting that the men will not be part of.
In a parcel delivery factory, three women (Virginia Newcomb, Ayesha Jordan, Kate Strong) work an assembly line, scanning and organizing packages while discussing how “things can only get worse” (Invisible Committee). They detail their struggles with overwhelming debt, long hours and low pay, racial injustice, motherhood, and misogyny and sexualization, sharing the words of Audre Lorde, Sojourner Truth, Ursula K. Le Guin, Angela Davis, bell hooks, Cardi B, and Frantz Fanon. “You sound like an archaeologist!” one of the women says to her conveyor-belt mate, who responds, “That’s right! I am an archaeologist. You wanna know why? ’Cause my life lies in fucking ruins.”
An elegant Kyiv bank turns into a surreal carnival in a scene that kicks off with a doorman (Yuriy Shepak) looking into the camera and saying, “It is a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money” (Albert Camus). A moment later he adds, “Money is like blood. It gives life if it flows. Money enlightens those who use it to open the flower of the world” (Alejandro Jodorowsky). Excerpts from Yuval Noah Harari, Michael Lewis, Matt Taibbi, Bertolt Brecht, George Carlin, Don DeLillo, and Karl Marx merge as a security guard (Nina Songa), a mother (Evgenia Muts), a homeless woman (Elena Aleksandrovich), and a cleaner (Corey Scott-Gilbert) go about their business, the bankers transforming into magicians, acrobats, and dancers. It’s a Busby Berkeley celebration in which money isn’t real, just another trick or performance. As the cleaner notes, “Money isn’t a material reality — it is a psychological construct. It works by converting matter into mind. So why does it succeed? Because people trust the figments of their collective imagination. Trust is the raw material from which all types of money are minted. Religion asks us to believe in something. Money only asks us to believe that other people believe in something” (Yuval Noah Harari).
In another vignette, six skate teens (Rocio Rodriguez-Inniss, Esther Odumade, Tia Murrell, Dora Zygouri, Asa Ali, and Luis Rosefeldt) come together in an abandoned bus terminal talk to about the future, debating quantitative vs. qualitative value, spouting lines from Arthur C. Clarke, Victor Hugo, William Shakespeare, Aldous Huxley, and John Maynard Keynes. “It’s considered sexy to accumulate property, money, stocks, cars. What a waste of dopamine and adrenaline if it’s all just about quantity, right?” (JR) one of the girls asks. “Right,” replies a second girl. “I mean, if a monkey hoarded more bananas than it could eat, while most of the other monkeys starved, scientists would study that monkey to figure out what the heck was wrong with it. When humans do it, we put them on the cover of Forbes” (Nathalie Robin Justice). One of the boys points out, “A brutal state of affairs, profoundly inegalitarian, is presented to us as ideal” (Alain Badiou), adding, “We humans want to compete with each other, to grow, to invent, to expand. Fair enough. But why not within an ethically defined framework, based on common shared values” (JR). As almost always, the younger generation believes they can change the world for the better, through education and the reestablishment of goals based on equality and what’s best for all, not competition that serves the few. “We need to think big. Our natural habitat has always been the future, and this terrain must be reclaimed” (Nick Srnicek/Alex Williams) a third girl says. But as a fourth girl points out, “No wonder the galaxies recede from us in every direction, at the speed of light. They are frightened. We humans are the terror of the universe” (Edward Abbey). Perhaps unsurprisingly, this section contains the most original dialogue, as the teenagers seek to discover what comes next for themselves and not just relying on existing theories.
My cycle concluded in a large supermarket, where a bold, beautiful, ever-threatening tiger (voiced by Blanchett) makes its way up and down the aisles of canned, boxed, and bottled food and drink. It warns us, “Of the world as it exists, it is not possible to be enough afraid (Theodor W. Adorno). History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce (Karl Marx). Those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. But even knowing can’t save them. ’Cause what is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood (Cormac McCarthy).” With quotes from Thomas Hobbes, Terry Pratchett, A. S. Byatt, Marquis de Sade, and Theodor W. Adorno, the hungry, swaggering animal accuses humans of being short-sighted power-mongers, filled with hatred and violence, whose extinction would bring no harm to the planet; in fact it would be welcomed. But the tiger adds, “And the best at war, finally, are those who preach peace. Beware the preachers. Beware the knowers. Beware their love” (Charles Bukowski).
In his 2000 breakthrough hit, “Ride wit Me,” Nelly proclaimed, “Hey, must be the money!” In Euphoria, Rosefeldt zeroes in specifically on greed and its devastating cost on humanity. At the beginning of the bank scene, the doorman says, “For thousands of years, philosophers, thinkers, and prophets have besmirched money and called it the root of all evil,” quoting Hurari. But the full biblical quote from the apostle Paul in Timothy 6:10 actually puts it in a different perspective: “For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.” Today, more than ever, with more of the planet’s wealth in very few hands, financial institutions are like houses of worship, evoked further by the celestial sounds of the Brooklyn Youth Chorus in the armory. Perhaps the security guard says it best when, quoting one of the wisest sages of the last fifty years, George Carlin, he says, “Give a man a gun and he can rob a bank. Give a man a bank and he can rob the world.”
Willard “Sonny” Burns (Jeremy Davies) often finds himself in the dark in Going All the Way: The Director’s Edit
GOING ALL THE WAY: THE DIRECTOR’S EDIT (Mark Pellington, 1997/2022)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Opens Friday, December 16
212-255-224 goingalltheway.oscilloscope.net quadcinema.com
During the pandemic lockdown, filmmaker Mark Pellington found the original three-hour-plus cut of his 1997 debut, Going All the Way, a little-known, rarely shown coming-of-age tale with a fabulous young cast set in small-town Indianapolis in 1954. He and editor Leo Trombetta “were just bored in Covid,” so they decided to take another stab at the film, which had previously gone through several iterations nearly a quarter century ago, ranging from 98 to 112 to more than 180 minutes.
The project was mostly to just give them something to do, but soon they had trimmed the first 40 minutes, added 50 minutes of previously unused material and new, gentle voice-over narration by Trombetta, commissioned 50 minutes of new music from composer Pete Adams, and installed an ominous title sequence by Sergio Pinheiro that recalls David Lynch, with images of Main Street, rural America, Jesus, sexuality, and a bleeding razor. The result is a very different 126-minute film, darker, more introspective and character-driven, more attuned to Dan Wakefield’s 1970 bestselling autobiographical novel, which was adapted by the author himself. (Wakefield, who is now ninety, created the late-’70s television series James at 15 and appears as farmer #2 in Going All the Way.)
“I’ve always kinda been more of an outer-directed guy. Right?” Korean War veteran Tom “Gunner” Casselman (Ben Affleck) tells high school classmate Willard “Sonny” Burns (Jeremy Davies) at a bar. “And now, as time goes on, I’m kinda becoming more inner-directed, not giving a shit so much what the crowd thinks. You’ve always been kind of more of an inner-directed guy.” It’s a keen metaphor for the revised film.
Gunner is everybody’s all-American, a classically handsome high school sports star who came back from Korea with gleaming medals on his uniform. Sonny is the kid no one remembers, a wallflower who blends in with the background, a soldier and photographer who spent the war in public information in Kansas City. Gunner is a doer, while Sonny is a watcher, yet each of them wants to be more like the other, almost as if they are two sides of the same person, ego and id. In fact, the name of the high school paper that featured Sonny’s memorable picture of Gunner on the gridiron is named the Echo.
Sonny (Jeremy Davies) watches from behind as Gunner (Ben Affleck) and Marty (Rachel Weisz) stop by the club in Going All the Way
Both men live at home with their family. Gunner’s mother is a sexually attractive, outgoing divorcée who Gunner calls Nina (Lesley Ann Warren); the first time we see them together, it looks like they’re lovers. Sonny’s Bible-thumping mother, Alma (Jill Clayburgh), treats her boy like an innocent fawn unable to make his own decisions or know what’s best for him; Sonny’s father, Elwood (John Lordan), hardly ever speaks while always agreeing with his wife.
Gunner lives life minute to minute, ready to try just about anything since he was reawakened to so many possibilities during his time in Japan, especially if it involves women. When he is immediately taken by Marty Pilcher (Rachel Weisz), a Jewish woman interested in art and who wants to move to New York, Gunner goes with her to a museum, joined by Sonny, and Sonny’s sort-of girlfriend, Buddy Porter (Amy Locane), who is in love with him even though he gives her no reason to be. She has decided that she is going to marry him and start a family in her hometown, but Sonny is not so sure. He uses her, but she lives up to her name, being more of a friend (with benefits) who is willing to carry Sonny’s (heavy psychological) load.
When Gunner and Marty set up Sonny with the unfettered and liberated Gale Ann Thayer (Rose McGowan) at a fancy party, Sonny finally lets loose, but it comes with a price that makes him reconsider what path he wants to follow.
Filmed on location in Indianapolis in thirty days and now available in a 4K restoration opening December 16 at the Quad, Going All the Way: The Director’s Edit might have disappeared among the spate of 1990s coming-of-age movies (Dazed and Confused,Varsity Blues,This Boy’s Life,Rushmore), but it is now getting a much-deserved second chance in this reimagined update.
The cast is outstanding, with Affleck, in his first lead role, self-possessed and charming as Gunner, and Davies a bundle of uncomfortable nerves as Sonny, who often mutters unfinished sentences that can barely be heard. His constant jitteriness balances Affleck’s strong confidence. Cinematographer Bobby Bukowski often shoots Affleck with bright lighting, focusing on the upper half of his body, while Davies is often seen in darkness, shot from above to make him look small and insignificant. Clayburgh and Warren play two very different kinds of mothers who get to duke it out in one of the film’s best scenes. Rising stars Weisz, McGowan, Locane, and Nick Offerman (a bit part in his film debut) are a joy to watch.
Prior to Going All the Way, Pellington was primarily a director of music videos (U2, Public Enemy, Pearl Jam, Nine Inch Nails, Foo Fighters, Bruce Springsteen) and commercials. He has clearly learned a lot in the intervening years, helming such productions as Arlington Road,I Melt with You, and The Mothman Prophecies, and the new edit benefits from his experience, even if most of his films have not been met with critical acclaim. Going All the Way: The Director’s Edit also offers a lesson in how existing footage can be reconstructed into a more complex and intriguing narrative.
Pellington will be at the Quad for Q&As at the 7:00 show on Friday with Alex Ross Perry, 7:00 on Saturday with Bilge Ebiri, and 4:20 on Sunday with Dan Mecca.
