The Lewis clan is in for a very different Christmas in Anna Condo’s debut feature
MERRY CHRISTMAS (Anna Condo, 2013)
Cinema Village
22 East 12th St. between University Pl. & Fifth Ave.
December 6-26
212-924-3363
www.cinemavillage.com
www.merrychristmasthemovie.com
“I don’t think that this is going to be a boring weekend,” one character says early on in Anna Condo’s debut feature, Merry Christmas. It turns out she couldn’t be more wrong, for the misguided film feels like it goes on for a weekend, even though it’s a mere eighty-three minutes long. Hit hard by the financial crisis, a wealthy New York City family ends up spending its Christmas in a Pennsylvania B&B instead of Aspen, playing a murder-mystery game set in and around a 1974 disco lounge. As the family members move in and out of character, real feelings emerge as they discuss God and Satan, Freud and finance, Park Ave. and the ghetto, race and Fox News, and how much a homeless stranger looks like Charles Manson. Condo, who was born in Armenia, raised in France, and is married to artist George Condo, directed and edited Merry Christmas (and chose the crazy costumes); there is no writer credit because the film, shot in two and a half days on location, is completely improvised. Each actor was given a one-page outline of their character, and each scene was done in one take, without rehearsal. Condo then took three years to edit the film. If this is what she chose to include, we’d hate to see what ended up on the cutting-room floor. Part reality show, part Arrested Development rip-off, Merry Christmas is most severely hampered by a collection of characters you wouldn’t want to spend five minutes with, let alone nearly an hour and a half. The cast includes Alexandra Stewart as clueless family matriarch Maya Dawn Lewis, Antony Langdon as the bitterly annoying Ted, Elizabeth Jasicki as late arriver Janice Black, Eleonore Condo (daughter of Anna and George) as teenage Lily Lazarus, Martin Pfefferkorn as the homeless stranger (who actually looks a lot more like Denis Lavant’s character in Leos Carax’s Merde than Manson), Tibor Feldman as Lewis attorney Leon, and real-life innkeeper Darlene Elders as Kay, the owner of the B&B. In Suzi Forbes Chase’s Recommended Bed & Breakfasts: Mid-Atlantic States, the author writes, “Innkeeper Darlene Elders has a theme for her bed-and-breakfast, and it goes like this: ‘If every day were Christmas, our hearts would be filled with loving, giving, caring, and sharing every day — not just at Christmas.’” Unfortunately, there’s not much to love about Merry Christmas, which opens December 6 at Cinema Village; Anna Condo, Eleonore Condo, Feldman, and Jasicki will participate in a Q&A following the 3:15 screening on Sunday, December 8.
Yasujirō Ozu’s first film in color, at the studio’s request, is another engagingly told exploration of the changing relationship between parents and children, the traditional and the modern, in postwar Japan. Both funny and elegiac, Equinox Flower opens with businessman Wataru Hirayama (Shin Saburi) giving a surprisingly personal speech at a friend’s daughter’s wedding, explaining that he is envious that the newlyweds are truly in love, as opposed to his marriage, which was arranged for him and his wife, Kiyoko (Kinuyo Tanaka). Hirayama is later approached by an old middle school friend, Mikami (Ozu regular Chishu Ryu), who wants him to speak with his daughter, Fumiko (Yoshiko Kuga), who has left home to be with a man against her father’s will. Meanwhile, Yukiko (Fujiko Yamamoto), a friend of Hirayama’s elder daughter, Setsuko (Ineko Arima), is constantly being set up by her gossipy mother, Hatsu (Chieko Naniwa). Hirayama does not seem to be instantly against what Fumiko and Yukiko want for themselves, but when a young salaryman named Taniguchi (Keiji Sada) asks Hirayama for permission to marry his older daughter, Setsuko (Ineko Arima), Hirayama stands firmly against their wedding, claiming that he will decide Setsuko’s future. “Can’t I find my own happiness?” Setsuko cries out. The widening gap between father and daughter represents the modernization Japan is experiencing, but the past is always close at hand; Ozu and longtime cowriter Kōgo Noda even have Taniguchi being transferred to Hiroshima, the scene of such tragedy and devastation. Yet there is still a lighthearted aspect to Equinox Flower, and Ozu and cinematographer Yuharu Atsuta embrace the use of color, including beautiful outdoor scenes of Hirayama and Kiyoko looking out across a river and mountain, a train station sign warning of dangerous winds, the flashing neon RCA Victor building, and laundry floating against a cloudy blue sky. The interiors are carefully designed as well, with objects of various colors arranged like still-life paintings, particularly a red teapot that shows up in numerous shots. And Kiyoko’s seemingly offhanded adjustment of a broom hanging on the wall is unforgettable. But at the center of it all is Saburi’s marvelously gentle performance as a proud man caught between the past, the present, and the future. Equinox Flower is screening December 8-12 as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center festival “Ozu and His Afterlives,” which honors the 110th anniversary of the master filmmaker’s birth and the 50th anniversary of his death; he died on his birthday at the age of sixty in 1963. The series also features Ozu’s An Autumn Afternoon in addition to seven works that were either directly or indirectly inspired by Ozu and his unique style, including Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Still Walking, Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise, Aki Kaurismäki’s The Match Factory Girl, Claire Denis’s 35 Shots of Rum, Pedro Costa’s In Vanda’s Room, and Wim Wenders’s Tokyo-Ga.
There are plenty of great double features in Film Forum’s nearly four-week retrospective of Barbara Stanwyck, but none are as ingenious as the pairing of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity with Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve. In both black-and-white pictures, Stanwyck excels as an alluring, tough-talking swindler teamed up with a major American actor playing against type. (And each film also features at least one extremely clunky, head-scratching cut.) In 1941, a brunette Stanwyck, who was born Ruby Catherine Stevens in Brooklyn, played the title character in The Lady Eve; while it’s usually lumped in with the classic screwball comedies, Sturges’s film, based on an original story by Irish playwright Monckton Hoffe (who was nominated for an Oscar), is much darker and slower than its supposed brethren. A brunette Stanwyck is first seen as Jean Harrington, a con artist looking to trick a wealthy man on a cruise ship. At her side is her father, “Colonel” Harrington (Charles Coburn), a gambler and a cheat. As soon as Jean sees rich ale scion Charles Pike (a wonderfully innocent Henry Fonda), she digs her claws into the shy, humble man, challenging the Hays Code as she shows off her gams and leans into him with a heart-pounding sexiness. Pike of course falls for Jean, but when his right-hand man, Muggsy (William Demarest), discovers that she regularly preys on suckers, Charles is devastated. However, in this case, Jean’s feelings might actually be real, forcing her to go to extreme circumstances to try to get him back. Stanwyck is, well, a ball of fire as Jean/Eve, determined to win at all costs. Fonda, not usually known for his comedic abilities, is a riot as poor Hopsie, as Jean calls him; the looks on his face when she ratchets up the sex appeal are priceless, and a later scene when he keeps falling down at a party displays a surprising flair for physical comedy. The opening and closing credits feature a corny animated snake in the Garden of Eden; in The Lady Eve, Stanwyck offers the apple, and Fonda can’t wait to take a bite. And there’s nothing shameful about that.
