Jack Hussar (Danny Huston) and Diana (Sienna Miller) consider a private rendezvous in TWO JACKS (although the first half of the film is shot in black-and-white, all promotional images are curiously available only in color)
TWO JACKS (Bernard Rose, 2012)
Cinema Village
22 East 12th St. between University Pl. & Fifth Ave.
Opens Friday, October 18
212-924-3363
www.cinemavillage.com
www.twojacksfilm.com
Danny Huston and Bernard Rose continue their adaptations of the work of Leo Tolstoy in the inside-joke-laden, fair-to-middling Two Jacks. Following 1997’s Anna Karenina, 2000’s Ivansxtc, and 2008’s The Kreutzer Sonata, writer, director, editor, and cinematographer Rose and executive producer and star Huston explore Hollywood legend in the film, which is based on the Tolstoy short story “Two Hussars.” The first half, shot in black-and-white, features Huston as Jack Hussar, a cigar-chomping old-time Hollywood auteur seeking financing for a picture he wants to make in Africa; any resemblance to Danny’s father, director John Huston, is purely on purpose. Shuttled around by huge fan and wannabe filmmaker Brad Perry (Dave Pressler), Hussar goes to a party where he meets the glittering Diana (Siennna Miller) and eventually gets into more than a bit of trouble. The second half of the film, shot in color, takes place several decades later, as Jack’s son, Jack Hussar Jr., played by Boardwalk Empire’s Jack Huston, Danny’s nephew and John’s grandson, arrives in Hollywood to make his first movie, getting involved with an older Diana (Jacqueline Bisset), her daughter, Lily (Rosie Fellner), his father’s card-playing producer, Lorenzo (narrator Richard Portnow), and Lorenzo’s young girlfriend, Laura (Scarlett Kapella). Like father, like son; much of the action in the second half mimics what happened in the first half. Two Jacks never quite achieves its goals, caught between its main narrative and creating a meta surrounding the Huston family. It ends up being overly predictable and disjointed, although it does have its moments, particularly the scenes involving Jack Sr. and Diana. Two Jacks, which premiered at the 2012 Montreal World Film Festival, opens October 18 at Cinema Village; meanwhile, Rose and Danny Huston have already made their next Tolstoy adaptation, Boxing Day.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Oscar-winning team of writer-director-producer Richard Trank and writer-producer Rabbi Marvin Hier (The Long Way Home, Genocide) has followed up the staid, plodding 
About six years ago, Jonathan Demme was driving in his car toward the George Washington Bridge when he heard a song on the radio that changed his life. It was by a Neapolitan musician he had never heard of before, Enzo Avitable. A few years later, producer Davide Azzolini invited Demme to be a special guest at the Naples Film Festival, and Demme agreed to attend, as long as he got to meet Avitable. Not only did Azzolini arrange the meeting, but they all decided to work together as well. The result is the charming documentary Enzo Avitable Music Life, in which Demme captures the always smiling and positive Avitable playing in a beautiful Baroque church with a stellar group of musicians from around the world, showing off his cluttered apartment (along with photos of him with James Brown, Tina Turner, and other superstars he has performed with), and visiting his childhood town of Marianella. As with such previous Demme documentaries as Stop Making Sense, Storefront Hitchcock, and 
In a 1966 interview with Pierre Daix about Masculin féminin, director Jean-Luc Godard said, “When I made this film, I didn’t have the least idea of what I wanted.” Initially to be based on the Guy de Maupassant short stories “The Signal” and “Paul’s Mistress,” the film ended up being a revolutionary examination of the emerging youth culture in France, which Godard identifies as “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola.” Godard threw away the script and worked on the fly to make the film, which stars Jean-Pierre Léaud as Paul, a peculiar young man who quickly becomes obsessed with budding pop star Madeleine, played by real-life Yé-yé singer Chantal Goya. (Godard discovered her on a television variety show.) Paul chases Madeleine, getting a job at the same company, going to the movies and nightclubs with her and her friends, and meeting her in cafés, where he wants to talk about the troubles of contemporary society and she just wants to have a good time. “Man’s conscience doesn’t determine his existence. His social being determines his conscience,” Paul proclaims. He continually argues that there is nothing going on even as strange events occur around him to which he is completely oblivious, including a lover’s spat in which a woman guns down a man in broad daylight. (Sounds of rapid-fire bullets can be heard over the intertitles for each of the film’s fifteen faits précis, evoking a sense of impending doom.) Paul has bizarre conversations with his best friend, Robert (Michel Debord), a radical who asks him to help put up anarchist posters. Posing as a journalist, Paul brutally interviews Miss 19 (Elsa Leroy), a young model with a very different view of society and politics. Godard has also included a playful battle of the sexes in the center of it all: Paul wants Madeleine, much to the consternation of Madeleine’s roommate, Elisabeth (Marlène Jobert), who also has designs on her; meanwhile, Robert goes out with another of Madeleine’s friends, the more grounded Catherine (Catherine-Isabelle Duport), who is interested in Paul.
When a pair of disaffected Parisians, Arthur (Claude Brasseur) and Franz (Sami Frey), meet an adorable young woman, Odile (Anna Karina), in English class, they decide to team up and steal a ton of money from a man living in Odile’s aunt’s house. As they meander through the streets of cinematographer Raoul Coutard’s black-and-white Paris, they talk about English and wealth, dance in a cafe while director Jean-Luc Godard breaks in with voice-over narration about their character, run through the Louvre in record time, and pause for a near-moment of pure silence. Godard throws in plenty of commentary on politics, the cinema, and the bourgeoisie in the midst of some genuinely funny scenes. Band of Outsiders is no ordinary heist movie; based on Dolores Hitchens’s novel Fool’s Gold, it is the story of three offbeat individuals who just happen to decide to attempt a robbery while living their strange existence, as if they were outside from the rest of the world. The trio of ne’er-do-wells might remind Jim Jarmusch fans of the main threesome from Stranger Than Paradise (1984), except Godard’s characters are more aggressively persistent. One of Godard’s most accessible films, Band of Outsiders is screening October 18 at the Francesca Beale Theater as part of the expansive Film Society of Lincoln Center series “Jean-Luc Godard — The Spirit of the Forms,” which continues through October 31 with such other Godard works as Les Carabiniers, La Chinoise, Contempt, Film Socialisme, King Lear, Nôtre musique, and many more.
Juliette Binoche gives a gut-wrenching performance as the traumatized title character in Bruno Dumont’s heartbreaking Camille Claudel 1915. The film takes place over the course of several days in 1915, as the sculptor and former mistress of Auguste Rodin awaits a visit from her younger brother, poet, devout Christian, and diplomat Paul Claudel. Camille has been moved to an asylum in Montdevergues, where she prepares her own meals for fear of being poisoned on orders from Rodin, who she believes is still trying to ruin her life and career twenty years after their personal and professional relationships ended. Run by nuns, the asylum is home primarily to deeply disturbed women incapable of taking care of themselves and barely able to speak coherent sentences. Claudel, a loner who was committed by her family shortly after the death of her father, desperately wants to be released and get her life back, but everything seems to be poised against her. Binoche, her pale face appearing to have been chiseled like one of Claudel’s sculptures, plays Camille with a subtle yet stern beauty, giving several long, impassioned speeches that writer-director Dumont (Twentynine Palms, L’humanité) and cinematographer Guillaume Deffontaines shoot in single takes, the camera remaining still, Camille framed like a painting. Throughout the film, Camille is seen amid mostly blacks, grays, browns, and whites, a monochromatic color scheme that echoes her work. The film has a cinéma vérité feel, as much of the sparse dialogue is improvised, many of the nuns are nurses at the asylum, and several of the patients are actually committed there, lending a neo-Realist quality to the austere setting. The film, which is “freely adapted from” Paul’s writings and letters, Camille’s letters, and medical records, is not a biopic; instead, it’s a fascinating study of a talented artist and the mental anguish that ultimately overwhelmed her.