this week in film and television

NYFF60 REVIVALS: THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE

Jean-Pierre Léaud stars in Jean Eustache’s New Wave epic The Mother and the Whore, screening in a new 4K restoration at the New York Film Festival

THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE (LA MAMAN ET LA PUTAIN) (Jean Eustache, 1973)
New York Film Festival, Film at Lincoln Center
Wednesday, October 5, Walter Reade Theater, 6:15
Thursday, October 6, Howard Gilman Theater, 6:30
212-355-6160
www.filmlinc.org

Jean-Pierre Léaud gives a bravura performance in French auteur Jean Eustache’s Nouvelle Vague classic, The Mother and the Whore, about love and sex in Paris following the May 1968 cultural revolution. Léaud stars as Alexandre, a jobless, dour flaneur who rambles on endlessly about politics, cinema, music, literature, sex, women’s lib, and lemonade while living with current lover Marie (Bernadette Lafont), obsessing over former lover Gilberte (Isabelle Weingarten), and starting an affair with new lover Veronika (Françoise Lebrun), a quiet nurse with a rather open sexual nature. The film’s three-and-a-half-hour length will actually fly by as you become immersed in the complex characters, the fascinating dialogue, and the excellent cast. Much of the movie consists of long takes in which Alexandre shares his warped view of life and art in small, enclosed spaces, the static camera focusing either on him or his companion. “I’m convinced all recent happenings in the world were meant against me,” he narcissistically says.

Léaud previously appeared in Eustache’ss Le Père Noël a les yeux bleus; the director also made My Little Loves, Numéro zéro, and Une sale histoire in a career cut short by his death in 1981 at the age of forty-two. A new 4K restoration of the nearly fifty-year-old film is being shown October 5 at 6:15 and October 6 at 6:30 as part of the Revivals section of the sixtieth New York Film Festival; Lebrun and restoration producer Charles Gillibert will be at the Walter Reade for a Q&A following the October 5 screening, while Lebrun will introduce the October 6 screening at the Howard Gilman.

WILLIAM SHATNER: STILL BOLDLY GOING

Who: William Shatner, Joshua Brandon, Rabbi Joshua M. Davidson
What: Livestreamed discussion
Where: Temple Emanu-El Streicker Cultural Center online
When: Thursday, October 6, free with RSVP ($28 with a copy of the book), 7:00
Why: “I love the mystery of the universe. I love all the questions that have come to us over thousands of years of exploration and hypotheses. Stars exploding years ago, their light traveling to us years later; black holes absorbing energy; satellites showing us entire galaxies in areas thought to be devoid of matter entirely . . . all of that has thrilled me for years. Where matter in the universe came from, where it’s going, why it’s expanding . . . I know very little, but I know just enough about the universe to be in its thrall, in awe of its mystery.”

So writes William Shatner in his latest book, Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder (Atria, October 4, $28), which includes such essays as “We Belong Together,” “Listen to the Animals,” and “There’s Beauty in Everything.” Now ninety-one, the actor, singer, horseman, and astronaut, whose grandparents emigrated from Ukraine and Lithuania, will launch the tome in a virtual presentation from the Temple Emanu-El Streicker Cultural Center on October 6 at 7:00, speaking with his coauthor, Joshua Brandon, and moderator Rabbi Joshua M. Davidson. Registration is free, or you can order the book with the RSVP for $28. “I probably say wow more now than when I was a child, and I am absolutely enchanted by that fact,” Shatner explains in the introduction. “I don’t know how not to be doing. I really would regret not giving myself a chance to experience something new and to learn in the process.” Words to live by from a living legend.

“HELLZAPOPPIN’: WHAT ABOUT THE BEES?”

Yvonne Rainer’s “last dance” includes a pillow fight at New York Live Arts

Who: Emily Coates, Brittany Bailey, Brittany Engel-Adams, Patricia Hoffbauer, Vincent McCloskey, Emmanuèle Phuon, David Thomson, Timothy Ward, Kathleen Chalfant
What: World premiere
Where: New York Live Arts Theater, 219 West Nineteenth St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
When: October 5-8, $15-$85
Why: Legendary dancer, choreographer, filmmaker, author, and activist Yvonne Rainer asks, “What about the bees?” in what she has announced will be her “last dance.” Premiering October 5-8 at New York Live Arts, “HELLZAPOPPIN’: What about the bees?” takes on systemic racism through text, movement, and live projections, including excerpts from the 1941 Hollywood musical Hellzapoppin’, a reality-busting movie melding film and theater starring Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson, Martha Raye, Mischa Auer, Shemp Howard, Slim and Slam, and Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, and Jean Vigo’s highly influential 1933 antiestablishment film about boarding school, Zero for Conduct. The evening begins with a screening of Rainer’s 2002 half-hour film After Many a Summer Dies the Swan: Hybrid, which expands on a piece she choreographed for Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project incorporating texts by Oscar Kokoschka, Adolf Loos, Arnold Schoenberg, and Ludwig Wittgenstein and rehearsal footage shot by Charles Atlas and Natsuko Inue.

“HELLZAPOPPIN’: What about the bees?” runs October 5-8 at NYLA

A coproduction of NYLA and Performa, “HELLZAPOPPIN’: What about the bees?” will be performed by a mix of dancers and actors, featuring Emily Coates, Brittany Bailey, Brittany Engel-Adams, Patricia Hoffbauer, Vincent McCloskey, Emmanuèle Phuon, David Thomson, Timothy Ward, and Kathleen Chalfant. Rainer also harkens back to her fictional character Apollo Musagetes, leader of the muses, who in 2020 presented “Revisions: A Truncated History of the Universe for Dummies: A Rant Dance, Lecture, and Letter to Humanity.” “I’m going to be veering back and forth between various topics: my aging self-pity, my ‘permanently recovering racism,’ my sometimes evasive appropriation of the notion that not all white people, and not all white women, are racists, and various historical and cultural reflections,” Rainer, who is now eighty-seven, said in a statement. Rainer will participate in a Stay Late conversation with Bill T. Jones following the October 6 show.

BURNING BRIGHT — NEW FRENCH FILMMAKERS 2022: ZERO FUCKS GIVEN

Adèle Exarchopoulos stars as a flight attendant going nowhere in Zero Fucks Given

CinéSalon: ZERO FUCKS GIVEN (RIEN À FOUTRE) (Julie Lecoustre & Emmanuel Marre, 2021)
French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF)
FIAF Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, October 4, 4:00 & 7:30
Series continues Tuesdays through October 25, 4:00 & 7:30
fiaf.org

Adèle Exarchopoulos is magnetic as a flight attendant with a loose grip on her life in Zero Fucks Given, the debut directorial collaboration between Paris- and Brussels-based cowriters and producers Emmanuel Marre and Julie Lecoustre. The film is screening October 4 at 4:00 and 7:30 in the FIAF CinéSalon series “Burning Bright: New French Filmmakers 2022,” consisting of nine features and three shorts from up-and-coming and emerging French directors.

Exarchopoulos (Blue Is the Warmest Color, Mandibles) stars as Cassandre, a twentysomething woman who’s unable to commit to anything, but it doesn’t seem to bother her. She considers herself a free spirit, but she doesn’t do much with that freedom. She is based at an airport in Lanzarote in the Canary Islands and wants to get a better airline job in Dubai; she might travel the world, but she spends most of her time in airport hotels and nightclubs, swiping right and left on her cellphone for company. “I like people for two hours and then it’s goodbye,” she tells friends.

As a flight attendant for Wing, she downs vodka before takeoff, usually does the bare minimum at work, and regularly breaks the rules, which she thinks don’t apply to her; when she is offered a promotion, she asserts that she doesn’t want any more responsibilities. After partying, she often wakes up in a blackout about the night before. She might claim to not care, but she is clearly haunted by the death of her mother, who died in a horrific car crash. She has trouble communicating with her father, Jean (Alexandre Perrier), who was devastated by the loss and is trying to sue someone, anyone. When Cassandre — whose name references the Greek mythological figure who was cursed with the ability to prophesize doom that no one listens to — eventually has to return home, suppressed emotions bubble to the surface.

Zero Fucks Given has an infectious, freewheeling atmosphere; the cast includes nonprofessional actors and actual airline personnel, and Perrier, who plays Cassandre’s distraught dad, is one of the associate producers. Marre and Lecoustre (Castle to Castle) eschew rehearsals and encourage significant improvisation while shooting on location with extended breaks in between filming scenes. Exarchopoulos even does her own hair and makeup and wears her own clothing to give the film a more realistic feeling.

Cinematographer Olivier Boonjing zooms in on Cassandre’s face and body as she pretends not to care about what she’s doing, but there’s more to her than she’s allowing herself to acknowledge. “I’m rather lucky,” she says, but she’s going nowhere. She rarely has time to experience the ritzy cities she flies to, traveling back and forth in the enclosed space of airplanes, breathing recycled air. Her mother died in a roundabout, unable to get out of a traffic circle, a stark metaphor for how Cassandre is stuck in life. You might not give a fuck about Cassandre at the beginning, but by the end you’ll be giving more than a few.

“Burning Bright: New French Filmmakers 2022” continues on Tuesdays through October 25 with Audrey Diwan’s Happening, Martin Jauvat’s Grand Paris, and Lina Soualem’s Their Algeria.

NYFF60 MAIN SLATE: TRIANGLE OF SADNESS

Yaya (Charlbi Dean) and Carl (Harris Dickinson) just want to keep enjoying the good life in Triangle of Sadness

TRIANGLE OF SADNESS (Ruben Östlund, 2022)
New York Film Festival, Film at Lincoln Center
Saturday, October 1, Alice Tully Hall, 9:00
Sunday, October 2, Alice Tully Hall, 2:15
Monday, October 3, Walter Reade Theater, 2:30
Monday, October 3, Museum of the Moving Image, 6:00
www.filmlinc.org

About halfway through Ruben Östlund’s brilliant Palme d’Or–winning satire Triangle of Sadness, I let out a sharp, loud laugh that made the people sitting around me wonder if I was okay. I was fine, and there were many more chuckles, snickers, giggles, guffaws, howls, and snorts to come, and not just from me.

In his previous films, Force Majeure and Palme d’Or winner The Square, the Swedish auteur has shown that he never lacks for subtlety as he skewers the lifestyles of the rich but not necessarily famous, mixing fear with farce, pushing both about as far as they can go without breaking.

In Triangle of Sadness, named for the small frown of worry wrinkles between a person’s eyebrows, Östlund channels Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and The Exterminating Angel, Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (the “Autumn Years” segment with Mr. Creosote), and Lina Wertmüller’s romantic class comedy Swept Away . . . by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August, resulting in an outrageously over-the-top condemnation of the privilege born of war and colonialism.

The protagonists are semi-successful male model Carl (Harris Dickinson) and female model and social media influencer Yaya (Charlbi Dean), two extremely beautiful people who are at the center of each of the three parts of the 149-minute film. In the first section, Carl auditions for a runway job and the couple argue over who is going to pick up the check after a fancy dinner. In the second chapter, they mostly enjoy their free luxury cruise aboard a yacht even when all hell breaks loose. And in the finale, they have to figure out how far they will go just to stay alive.

Along the way, they meet a fantastic mélange of characters, including vacuous fashion reporter Lewis (Thobias Thorwid), gluttonous Russian capitalist Dimitry (Zlatko Burić), toilet cleaner Abigail (Dolly de Leon), chief ship steward Paula (Vicki Berlin), ridiculously rich single man Jorma Björkman (Henrik Dorsin), ridiculously rich single woman Vera (Sunnyi Melles), ridiculously rich and demure British couple Clementine (Amanda Walker) and Winston (Oliver Ford Davies), the mysterious Nelson (Jean-Christophe Folly), and alcoholic yacht captain Thomas Smith (Woody Harrelson).

Darius (Arvin Kananian) and Captain Smith (Woody Harrelson) try to keep their balance in Palme d’Or winner

Dickinson (See How They Run, Where the Crawdads Sing) and Dean (Spud, Black Lightning) are magnetic together as flawed glitterati who exist in their own reality, until they don’t. (A star in the making, South African actress and model Dean died tragically this past August at the age of thirty-two.) Burić and Harrelson are a riot as their friendship blossoms amid booze and debates over Karl Marx, capitalism, and socialism. As a bonus, the yacht in the film is the Christina O, which was formerly owned by Aristotle Onassis and Jackie Kennedy. The rest of the large cast plays the dark humor with exquisitely calm, mannered demeanors.

Östlund, who has also written and directed Gitarrmongot, Involuntary, and Play, holds nothing back in Triangle of Sadness; the film could use a bit of trimming here and there, but that’s not his style. He puts it all out there, full steam ahead, damn the torpedoes. (The French title is Sans filtre, or “Without Filter.”) Both Force Majeure and The Square left indelible images in my head, and the same is true with his latest film, which still has me breaking out into laughter when I recall several key moments, such as Dimitry boasting, “I sell shit”; ship steward Alicia (Alicia Eriksson) trying not to say no to a demanding passenger; Captain Smith leaning sideways right before the captain’s dinner, next to his stable second in command, Darius (Arvin Kananian); and Abigail asking fellow survivors who’s in charge. It’s all so much unrelenting madness even as it hits you over the head with its political philosophy.

Triangle of Sadness screens October 1-3 at the New York Film Festival, with Östlund, de Leon, and Burić participating in Q&As following the shows on the first two days at Alice Tully Hall. The film opens in theaters October 7.

TAMING THE GARDEN

Taming the Garden follows the uprooting of a mighty oak across land and sea

TAMING THE GARDEN (Salomé Jashi, 2021)
New Plaza Cinema @Macaulay Honors College
35 West Sixty-Seventh St.
Opens Friday, September 30
newplazacinema.org
tamingthegarden-film.com

“I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree,” Joyce Kilmer wrote in the beloved “Trees,” concluding, “Poems are made by fools like me, / But only God can make a tree.”

Eccentric billionaire and former Georgia prime minister Bidzina Ivanishvili is a kind of unseen god hovering over Salomé Jashi’s profoundly poetic documentary, Taming the Garden. The gorgeously shot film, which evokes the large-scale landscape photography of Edward Burtynsky, is a cinéma verité work that follows the moving of a glorious oak from its native home in the Caucasus to Shekvetili Dendrological Park, where Ivanishvili collects and replants trees that he likes.

Jashi, a former journalist born in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 1981, tells us virtually none of this; she traces the journey with no commentary, no interstitial text, no detailed information about what we are watching. Instead, Jashi, serving as director, writer, producer, and cinematographer (with Goga Devdariani), has us accompany the mighty tree as it ventures across land and sea, first carefully dug up by a somewhat ragtag group of workers, then transported by flatbed and a barge to its ultimate destination.

The beautifully photographed Taming the Garden features scenes that evoke painting and still photography

But in order to arrive there, the tree leaves behind a controversial wake. It is so tall and wide that it often can’t make it through the streets of small towns without other trees that line the blocks having to be severely trimmed or cut down themselves. Ivanishvili offers those trees’ owners money in exchange for chopping down the living, breathing trees; he also improves the quality of the roads the tree travels over. The residents of these villages argue over the decisions they are faced with, mostly speaking Mingrelian.

“Why do these trees have to suffer? Just so Ivanishvili can have his tree!” one declares. “They’re forcing me to do something bad,” another says, feeling he has no choice but to take the cash and let a tree on his property be chainsawed into timber. “They say they’d rather have a tree than a road!” a man complains. “Who gives a fuck about trees!”

“What is there to cry about?” a villager says to an elderly woman who remembers having planted a sapling more than half a century before; she is now in tears as she watches it come down. Someone else shouts out in wonder, “That man really likes trees!”

Beautifully edited by Chris Wright and featuring a natural soundscape by Philippe Ciompi accompanied by music by Karlheinz Stockhausen (“Waage”), Solage, Clément Janequin, and Ute Wassermann (“Strange Songs for Voice and Bird Whistles”), Taming the Garden is a visual and aural marvel. It is filled with images you are likely not soon to forget: the oak floating on a barge in the distance on the Black Sea; rusty piping being pushed into the dirt below the tree; dripping water that evokes the shadows of roots and branches growing; men clearing a path in a lush green landscape reminiscent of a Dutch painting; and the leaves at the top of the tree blowing in the breeze as it is driven down a street, as if moving from Great Birnam Wood to Dunsinane Hill at the end of Macbeth.

At one point a woman, standing in the street as others take cellphone video of the chopping down of a tree, makes the sign of the cross. “A tree that looks at God all day, / And lifts her leafy arms to pray,” Kilmer wrote in his 1914 poem. With Taming the Garden, Jashi (The Dazzling Light of Sunset, Bakhmaro) has created a deeply sensitive and eloquent cinematic experience that deals with one man’s power as it relates to the concepts of home and displacement. “Everything we do in this life will be weighed up in the next life,” one man philosophizes. Joyce Kilmer couldn’t have said it any better.

NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL 60: FREE TALKS

Paul Schrader will discuss his latest film, Master Gardener, in free talk at NYFF60

NYFF60: FREE TALKS
New York Film Festival 60
Elinor Bunin Munroe Amphitheater, 144 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
October 1-15, free tickets available one hour before showtime
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.org/nyff2022

If you don’t act immediately, it is often difficult to get tickets to the New York Film Festival’s most hotly anticipated events, appearances by superstars and internationally renowned directors at New York, US, North American, and world premieres. But there are more than a dozen free talks, lectures, panel discussions, and game-playing events that are first-come, first-served, at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Amphitheater at Lincoln Center; free tickets are distributed an hour prior to the talk, one per person. This year’s lineup includes Noah Baumbach, Nan Goldin, Paul Schrader, Cauleen Smith, Alice Diop, Frederick Wiseman, Nancy Savoca, Laura Poitras, Elvis Mitchell, Mia Hansen-Løve, Kelly Reichardt, and Molly Haskell, which is not too shabby. Below is the full schedule; you can also catch these events on YouTube later.

Saturday, October 1
Deep Focus: Noah Baumbach, White Noise, 6:00

Special Events — Cinephile Game Night: NYFF60 Edition, 8:00

Sunday, October 2
Deep Focus: Paul Schrader, Master Gardener, 2:00

The 2022 Amos Vogel Lecture, with Cauleen Smith, followed by a Q&A with Jacqueline Stewart, 6:00

Monday, October 3
Roundtables: “Politics of Desire,” with Joao Pedro Rodrigues (Will-o’-the-Wisp), Ruth Beckermann (Mutzenbacher), Elisabeth Subrin, and Isabel Sandoval (Maria Schneider, 1983), 4:00

Crosscuts: Alice Diop & Frederick Wiseman, 6:00

Special Events — IndieWire Presents: Screen Talk Live, with Eric Kohn and special guests, 6:30

Special Events — Cinephile Game Night: NYFF60 Edition, 8:00

Cauleen Smith, whose Drylongso (above) screened an the 1998 New York Film Festival, will deliver the 2022 Amos Vogel Lecture

Thursday, October 6
Roundtables: “Missing Movies,” presentation and workshop with Amy Heller, Dennis Doros, Nancy Savoca, Rich Guay, Ira Deutchman, and Maya Cade, 6:00

Saturday, October 8
Roundtables — “Film Comment Live: On the Critical Attitude,” with hosts Devika Girish and Clinton Krute and guest Laura Poitras (All the Beauty and the Bloodshed), Elvis Mitchell (Is That Black Enough for You?!?), Tiffany Sia (What Rules the Invisible), and Alain Gomis (Rewind & Play), 1:00

Crosscuts: Mia Hansen-Løve (One Fine Morning) & Charlotte Wells (Aftersun), 4:00

Deep Focus: Nan Goldin, 7:00

Sunday, October 9
Crosscuts: Joanna Hogg (The Eternal Daughter) & Kelly Reichardt (Showing Up), 6:00

Special Events — Cinephile Game Night: NYFF60 Edition, 8:00

Tuesday, October 11
Deep Focus: Annie Ernaux, 6:00

Thursday, October 13
Special Events: “Inclusive Visions,” with a wine-tasting presentation by Dr. Hoby Wedler, hosted by Michele Spitz, 6:00

Saturday, October 15
Roundtables — “Film Comment Live“: Festival Report, with Devika Girish, Clinton Krute, Kelli Weston, Phoebe Chen, Molly Haskell, and others, 6:00