this week in film and television

A CLOSE-UP OF ABBAS KIAROSTAMI: FIVE DEDICATED TO OZU / ROADS OF KIAROSTAMI

FIVE DEDICATED TO OZU is screening as part of tribute to Abbas Kiarostami at Lincoln Center

FIVE DEDICATED TO OZU (Abbas Kiarostami, 2003)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
Thursday, February 14, $13, 8:45
Series continues through February 17
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.com

We first saw Abbas Kiarostami’s gorgeous five-part film Five Dedicated to Ozu at the Iranian director’s 2007 multidimensional MoMA exhibit, “Image Maker,” where all five segments ran continuously and simultaneously in five semiprivate partitioned spaces, each with its own comfy bench. The film as a whole, which is composed of static shots on a beach in Galicia, are dedicated to Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, whose films attempted to catch the reality of human existence in all its simplicity. In the first episode, the coming waves threaten a piece of driftwood; we dare you not to create your own narrative in your head once the wood is split apart. (By the way, this is the only part of the film that includes any camera movement at all, as Kiarostami opts to follow the driftwood for one short moment.) For the second scene, the camera is moved to the boardwalk, with people passing to the right and left as the surf continues to crash onto the shore; this is the least compelling of the five pieces. Back on the beach for the third part, the camera finds a group of stray dogs in the distance, nestled together by the water; again, as one dog gets up and moves away, left to himself, you’ll create your own ideas about what is really happening. Next is the funniest section of the movie, as a long line of ducks don’t know whether they’re coming or going, but they do so determinedly. Finally, the last scene takes place at night, as the moon glistens in a dark sky as the sounds of frogs and nature envelop this small part of the earth. Relax and let your mind wander during this fascinating and fun cinematic experience that we found exhilarating as a single work — but we also loved how it was installed at MoMA, where you could sit down with any of the films at any time and just let them take you away. Five Dedicated to Ozu is screening Thursday, February 14, at 8:45 with Kiarostami’s 2006 short Roads of Kiarostami at the Walter Reade Theater as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “A Close-Up of Abbas Kiarostami,” which continues through February 17 with such other films as 10 on Ten, Fellow Citizen, Life and Nothing More, Through the Olive Trees, and more works by the master Iranian director in celebration of his latest, Like Someone in Love, which opens theatrically February 15.

DRAWN INTO FILM — KOREAN ANIMATION! THE HOUSE

A young woman meets the spirits of decaying buildings in THE HOUSE

KOREAN MOVIE NIGHT: THE HOUSE (JIB) (Ban Joo-young, Lee Hyun-jin, Lee Jae-ho-I, Park Eun-young-I, and Park Mi-sun, 2011)
Tribeca Cinemas
54 Varick St. at Laight St.
Tuesday, February 12, free, 7:00
212-759-9550
www.koreanculture.org
www.tribecacinemas.com

The Korean Academy of Film Arts takes on urban renewal in their annual collaboration, The House. Ban Joo-young, Lee Hyun-jin, Lee Jae-ho-I, Park Eun-young-I, and Park Mi-sun team up to tell the story of a young woman, Ga-young (voiced by Kim Kkobbi), struggling to get by in modern-day Korea. With no money and no real job, she moves into a ramshackle apartment with Hee-ju (Ha Jae-sook) while dreaming of winning the lottery and being able to move into a nearby wealthy complex. But when she finds a magic bracelet, she suddenly can see the spirits of the old houses, who would die if their buildings were torn down by the city, changing Ga-yong’s attitude about just what home means. The filmmakers combine CGI and real photographs with the drawing style of Yoshitoro Nara and the look and sensibility of Hayao Miyazaki’s classic Spirited Away in The House, an admirable if ultimately unsatisfying story that has too many holes and lacks nuance. It ends up feeling overly derivative and unsentimentally political, even if it is based on some real circumstances, as evidenced by the pictures that accompany the closing credits. Also featuring the voices of Choi Jeong-ho, Choi Ha-na, Kim Hee-jin, and Oh In-sil as multiple characters, The House is screening for free February 12 at 7:00 at Tribeca Cinemas as part of the latest biweekly Korean Movie Night series, “Drawn into Film: Korean Animation!,” which continues February 26 with Yuen Sang-ho’s debut, The Window.

WHEN BOY MEETS GIRL: THE CINEMA OF LEOS CARAX

Alex (Denis Lavant) and Mireille (Mireille Perrier) share their unique views on life in Leos Carax’s Nouvelle Vague tribute

CinémaTuesdays: BOY MEETS GIRL (Leos Carax, 1984)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, February 12, $10, 12:30, 4:00, 7:00
212-355-6160
www.fiaf.org

French auteur Leos Carax learned a lot about making movies during his stint as a critic for Cahiers du cinéma, the magazine that came to represent the Nouvelle Vague movement of the 1950s. Born Alexandre Oscar Dupont in a Paris suburb in 1960, Carax released his first feature-length film in 1984, Boy Meets Girl, a black-and-white homage to the legacy of Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, and Claude Chabrol as well as King Vidor, Buster Keaton, and Ingmar Bergman. Yet despite its obvious influences, Boy Meets Girl triumphs as a uniquely told tale of a strange young man named Alex (Carax’s onscreen alter ego, Denis Lavant) and his oddball adventures in search of love and truth. Dumped by Florence (Anna Baldaccini), he fakes his way into a party, where he finds Mireille (Mireille Perrier), a suicidal model who is intrigued by him. Carax, who would go on to make such well-received films as Mauvais Sang, Pola X, and Holy Motors, fills Boy Meets Girl with wonderful little touches, beautifully photographed in long takes by Jean-Yves Escoffier, from a repeating black-and-white clothing pattern and a battle with a pinball machine to a sudden burst of tap-dancing and a mysterious meeting along the Seine. Alex is a warped version of Jean-Pierre Léaud’s Antoine Doinel, but even though Alex as a lead character is no match for Truffaut’s seminal figure in the history of twentieth-century cinema, it’s still impossible to take your eyes off him as he continues to do and say a a whole lot of very weird and unpredictable things. Boy Meets Girl is screening on February 12 at Florence Gould Hall as part of the French Institute Alliance Française CinémaTuesdays series “When Boy Meets Girl: The Cinema of Leos Carax” and will be preceded by Merde, Carax’s contribution to the three-part omnibus Tokyo! (Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, and Bong Joon-ho, 2008), in which a wild-eyed CHUD-like (Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dweller) character (Lavant) emerges from below, wreaking havoc on the streets of Tokyo, speaking a bizarre language that only French magistrate Maitre Voland (Jean-François Balmer) can understand. The series continues on February 19 with Pola X, which stars Guillaume Depardieu, Yekaterina Golubeva, and Catherine Deneuve, and February 26 with Carax’s widely hailed latest film, Holy Motors, with the director on hand to participate in a Q&A with Richard Brody following the 7:00 show.

MoMA PRESENTS: ALEJANDRO LANDES’S PORFIRIO

Porfirio dreams of a better life in minimalist film based on a true story

PORFIRIO (Alejandro Landes, 2011)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
February 8-14
Tickets: $12, in person only, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days, same-day screenings free with museum admission, available at Film and Media Desk beginning at 9:30 am
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
www.magic-lantern-films.com

Brazilian filmmaker Alejandro Landes’s minimalist Porfirio begins and ends with close-up shots of the title character, Porfirio Ramírez Aldana, taken slightly from below by cinematographer Thimios Bakatakis, focusing on the upper half of the man’s bare body, which is paralyzed from the waist done. Porfirio looks around as if he’s lost in a world that has let him down, and indeed it has. In the film, which opens theatrically at MoMA on February 8 for a one-week engagement, Porfirio plays himself, a Colombian father who was paralyzed by a policeman’s bullet and now lives a hard life selling minutes on his cell phone and needing the help of his eldest son, Lissin (played by his youngest son, Jarlisson Ramírez Reinoso), and neighbor/lover, Jasbleidy (real-life neighbor Yor Jasbleidy Santos Torres), just to get through every day. Landes uses natural light and sound and no score to add reality to the true story of a once-proud man now imprisoned in his wheelchair and getting the runaround from the state regarding compensation he feels he is owed. Landes (Cocalero) keeps the tale purposefully vague, never giving the details of the legal case or how and why Porfirio was shot, instead telling the story through Porfirio’s mesmerizing eyes, which are filled with a beguiling mixture of pain and mystery. “In one of the deepest moments of the film, Porfirio gazes out the window of his bedroom and, I dare say, we can peak into his very soul,” Landes, who spent five years with his subject, explains in the film’s production notes. “It was the second shot on the first day of the shoot. Although I think we captured many other fine moments, I must admit none matched a shining innocence I saw in his eyes that first day.” Landes was drawn to Porfirio’s story after reading about the extraordinary thing he did, which made him famous in South America and around the world, earning him the nickname the Air Pirate, but the director doesn’t delve into those details either. There’s no past or future for Porfirio, only the present for a compelling man desperate to regain his dignity. Landes will be at MoMA on opening night to participate in a discussion following the 7:00 screening of this small gem.

NIGHT ACROSS THE STREET

Raúl Ruiz’s final film, NIGHT ACROSS THE STREET, is an abstract, surreal examination of time and memory

THE NIGHT ACROSS THE STREET (LA NOCHE DE ENFRENTE) (Raúl Ruiz, 2012)
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center: Francesca Beale Theater
144 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
February 8-14
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.com

Raúl Ruiz’s last film, Night Across the Street, proves to be a fitting finale for the long career of the Chilean-French auteur, who died at the age of seventy in August 2011, leaving behind a legacy of more than one hundred movies and one hundred plays. An adaptation — or as Ruiz explained it, “adoption” — from a pair of short stories by Imaginist writer Hernán del Solar Night Across the Street follows the odd meanderings of Don Celso (Sergio Hernandez), an old man about to retire from his office job. Past, present, and future, the real and the imagined, merge in abstract, surreal ways as Don Celso goes back to his childhood, where he (played as a boy by Santiago Figueroa) takes his idol, Beethoven (Sergio Schmied), to the movies and gets life lessons from Long John Silver (Pedro Villagra). As an adult, he hangs out with the fictional version of French teacher and writer Jean Giono (Christian Vadim), whose real self and family appear to be elsewhere. And he visits a haunted hotel run by Nigilda (Valentina Vargad) where he believes he will meet his doom. Memories and hallucinations mingle in front of obviously fake backgrounds, strange, unexplained characters appear then disappear, and Don Celso (and Ruiz, of course) has fun with such words as “Antofagasta” and “rhododendron” in a film that Ruiz created to be shown only after his death. (He made the film after being diagnosed with liver cancer, which he survived by getting a transplant, only to die shortly thereafter of a lung infection.) And at the center of it all is one of Ruiz’s favorite themes, time — Don Celso is regularly interrupted by an annoying alarm clock that signals him to take unidentified medication, keeping him alive even as the end beckons. Night Across the Street is an elegiac swan song by a master filmmaker.

FERLINGHETTI: A REBIRTH OF WONDER

Lawrence Ferlinghetti proves to be a man of many hats in refreshing documentary

FERLINGHETTI (Christopher Felver, 2009)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St.
Opens Friday, February 8
212-255-2243
www.quadcinema.com
www.ferlinghettifilm.com

“Poetry should be dissident, and subversive, and an agent for change,” poet, publisher, painter, activist, and military veteran Lawrence Ferlinghetti says in Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder, a refreshing and revealing documentary about the author of A Coney Island of the Mind and owner of the famous City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco. Director Christopher Felver has compiled ten years of interviews with Ferlinghetti, including trips to Italy, where the poet’s father was born; France, where the aunt who raised him was from; and his childhood home in New York. Among those sharing their opinions of the charming and friendly Ferlinghetti, who turns ninety-four next month, are fellow poets Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, Anne Waldman, and Billy Collins as well as such other artistic figures as David Amram, Dave Eggers, Dennis Hopper, and Jean-Jacques Lebel, all of whom have only the most positive things to say about the film’s subject. Despite his radicalism and calls for social and political change around the world, Ferlinghetti is nearly always wearing a smile, clearly enjoying the long life he’s leading. He discusses his friendships with Kenneth Rexroth, Shakespeare & Co. founder George Whitman, and the Beats, primarily Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, focusing at one point on the censorship trial involving his publication of Ginsberg’s Howl, which turned into a critical battle over First Amendment rights. Counterculture guru Ferlinghetti is shown performing in a studio with Amram, accepting an award from the city of San Francisco, discussing his family, working on his abstract paintings, and wearing silly hats. He is completely at ease with who he is and where he came from, as well as where he’s going, still fighting the power as valiantly as ever, not just relaxing on his many laurels. Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder is also likely to make viewers think twice about their own lives, realizing there’s a great big world out there, and it is possible for each and every person to make a difference. Felver, who has previously made documentaries on John Cage, Tony Cragg, Donald Judd, and Cecil Taylor, will be at the Quad opening night, participating in Q&As following the 6:15 and 8:00 shows on February 8.

CINEMA TROPICAL FESTIVAL: NEIGHBORING SOUNDS

Brazilian film NEIGHBORING SOUNDS examines a changing community in changing times

NEIGHBORING SOUNDS (O SOM AO REDOR) (Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2011)
92YTribeca
200 Hudson St. at Canal St.
Saturday, February 9, $12, 7:30
212-415-5500
www.92y.org
www.cinemaguild.com

Inspired by actual events that took place in his hometown of Recife, Brazil, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Neighboring Sounds is an engaging slice-of-life examination of class differences and a community in the midst of social and economic change. When Clodoaldo (Irandhir Santos) and Fernando (Nivaldo Nascimento) go door-to-door offering their services as overnight security guards protecting the street, only Francisco (W. J. Solha), an aging, wealthy sugar baron who owns much of the surrounding property, and his grandson João (Gustavo Jahn) refuse to participate in the shady proposal, but Francisco insists that they keep their hands off another of his grandsons, Dinho (Yuri Holanda), who is responsible for a spate of car-stereo robberies. This suburban neighborhood, ever more in the architectural shadow of bigger high rises going up all around them, is filled with little secrets and minor resentments. A mechanic keys an expensive car when the owner is rude to him. Clodoaldo and a maid (Clébia Souza) make use of a fancy gated house he is taking care of while the owners are away. Sisters fight over the size of a flat-screen television. And a co-op board wants to fire their longtime night watchman without a severance package because he has taken to napping on the job. Meanwhile, João, who has two children by the daughter of the family’s maid, has started a relationship with the more acceptable Sofia (Irma Brown), but the privileged João still lives in the past; when he shows an apartment in one of Francisco’s condos, he points out what would be the maid’s room, assuming everyone can afford domestic help. And Bia (Meve Jinkings) finds a different kind of domestic help, buying large quantities of pot from the water guy, finding unique ways to deal with her neighbor’s howling dog, and using household appliances to pleasure herself. A film critic who has previously made documentaries, Filho, who wrote, directed, and coedited (with João Maria) Neighboring Sounds, has populated his debut full-length feature with believable characters caught up in realistic situations, along with just the right dose of black comedy. The film was shot with natural sound at a relaxed pace, inviting viewers into this intriguing fictional tale filled with real-world implications, involving a decaying past and modern issues of safety and surveillance. While João might be the moral conscious of the story, it is Jinkings’s Bia who steals this small gem of a film, her unique methods of daily survival a joy to behold.

Neighboring Sounds is screening February 9 at 7:30 at 92YTribeca as part of the second annual Cinema Tropical Festival honoring Latin American films; Cinema Tropical named Neighboring Sounds Best Fiction Film of 2012. The series begins February 8 at 7:00 with Matías Meyer’s The Last Christeros (Los Últimos Cristeros), which won the Best Director, Feature Film award, followed at 9:00 by Santiago Mitre’s The Student (El Estudiante), which garnered Best First Film. Neighboring Sounds will be preceded on Saturday by Maite Alberdi’s The Lifeguard (El Salvavidas) at 6:00, winner of the Best Documentary prize.