French Institute Alliance Française and other locations
Florence Gould Hall, 55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Le Skyroom and FIAF Gallery, 22 East 60th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
September 14 – October 14, free- $45
212-355-6160
www.fiaf.org
Tickets are now on sale for the sixth annual Crossing the Line festival, a month-long program of interdisciplinary performances and art sponsored by the French Institute Alliance Française at venues across the city. Running September 14 through October 14, the 2012 edition of CTL, curated by Gideon Lester, Lili Chopra, and Simon Dove, features a host of free events, with most ticketed shows twenty dollars and under. The festival opens on September 14 with the first of three concerts by innovative guitarist Bill Frisell, playing with two of his groups, the 858 Quartet and Beautiful Dreamers, in FIAF’s Florence Gould Hall; he’ll then be at St. Ann & the Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn the next morning at 8:00 for the world premiere of his solo piece “Early (Not Too Late),” followed that night by the world premiere of the multimedia “Close Your Eyes” at the Invisible Dog, a collaboration with musician Eyvind Kang and visual artist Jim Woodring. Brian Rogers, cofounder and artistic director of the Chocolate Factory, will present Hot Box at the Long Island City institution, a chaotic look at mayhem, stillness, and disorder using a live video feed. Festival vet Gérald Kurdian returns with The Magic of Spectacular Theater at Abrons Arts Center, combining music and magic. DD Dorvillier / Human Future Dance Corps brings Danza Permanente to the Kitchen, reimagining a Beethoven score for four dancers, with acoustic design by Zeena Parkins. Choreographer Sarah Michelson will deliver Not a Lecture / Performance, while Jack Ferver will blend psychoanalysis with dance in the very personal Mon Ma Mes, both one-time-only presentations at FIAF. Joris Lacoste’s 4 Prepared Dreams uses hypnosis on April March, Annie Dorsen, Tony Conrad, and Jonathan Caouette. Congolese dancer and choreographer Faustin Linyekula, who dazzled CTL audiences last year with more more more . . . future, will participate in a discussion on September 17 with director Peter Sellars, followed by his solo work Le Cargo on September 18. Pascal Rambert’s Love’s End examines the disintegration of a relationship, with Kate Moran and Jim Fletcher at Abrons, while Raimund Hoghe teams up with Takashi Ueno at the Baryshnikov Arts Center for Pas de Deux, a playful look at the history of the classical duet. For Diário (através de um Olho Baiano), one of numerous free events, Bel Borba, collaborating with Burt Sun and André Costantini, will create a new piece of art every day somewhere in the city throughout the festival, with all coming together for a grand finale. Also free is David Levine’s Habit, a live ninety-minute-drama that loops for eight hours in the Essex Street Market, and OMSK / Lotte van den Berg’s Pleinvrees / Agoraphobia, in which the audience (advance RSVP required) wanders around Times Square listening on their cell phones to a man making his way through the area as well. In addition, Steven and William Ladd’s Shaboygen installation will be up at the Invisible Dog, and Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s audiovisual portraits will be on view at the FIAF Gallery. Once again, CTL has included a little something for everyone, from performance art and dance to video and photography, from theater and concerts to the unusual and the indefinable.
Jia Zhangke’s fourth film (following Pickpocket, Platform, and Unknown Pleasures) is set in a Beijing theme park called the World, where people come to see miniature versions of major international cities and landmarks, including Paris, New York, London, and Tokyo, the Taj Mahal, the Pyramids, the World Trade Center, Big Ben, and the Eiffel Tower. The luminous Zhao Tao stars as Tao, a park dancer dating security guard Taisheng (Chen Taisheng). She becomes friendly with Anna, a Russian woman who has come to the park to make money so she can reunite with her daughter. However, dreams don’t always come true in this microcosm of urbanization. As Tao questions her relationship with Taisheng, he starts seeing Qun (Wang Yiqun), a fashion designer who makes knock-offs and is trying to return to her husband, who lives in Belleville. Meanwhile, Xiaowei (Jing Jue) is trapped in an abusive relationship with Niu (Jiang Zhongwei) that threatens to explode. The World is a charming little film, not looking to make any grand statements, just concentrating on the problems of ordinary people all over the globe who are struggling to survive financially, emotionally, and romantically. The World, which was shown at the 2004 New York Film Festival and was followed by such other fine Zhangke works as Still Life, Useless, and 24 City, is screening at the Walter Reade Theater as part of the ongoing series “50 Years of the New York Film Festival,” which continues with such NYFF vets as Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, Jafar Panahi’s Offside, Carlos Reygadas’s Silent Light, and Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. Individual tickets for the fiftieth anniversary of the New York Film Festival, which runs September 28 through October 14, go on sale to the general public on September 9.
Poor Mr. Lazarescu. He lives in a shoddy hovel of an apartment in Bucharest, where he drinks too much and gets out too little. He moves around very slowly and has trouble saying what’s on his mind, even to his three cats. His family is sick and tired of telling him to lay off the booze, so they ignore his complaints. Suffering from headaches and stomach pain, he phones for an ambulance several times, but it arrives only after a neighbor calls as well. Mr. Lazarescu then spends the rest of this very long night fading away as he is taken to hospital after hospital by the ambulance nurse, who gets involved in a seemingly endless battle with doctors to try to save him. Ian Fiscuteanu is sensationally realistic as Mr. Lazarescu; you’ll quickly forget that he’s not really a drunk, disgusting, dying old man. Luminita Gheorghiu is excellent as Mioara, the nurse who gets caught up in Mr. Lazarescu’s case. Winner of the Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard Award, cowriter-director Cristi Puiu’s very dark comedy is simply captivating; despite a slow start, it’ll pull you in with its well-choreographed scenes, documentary style, and careful camera movement. (Also look for the subtle and very specific naming of characters.) Using Erich Rohmer’s “Six Moral Tales” as inspiration, Puiu has said that The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is the first of his own “Six Stories from the Bucharest Suburbs,” this one dealing with “the love of humanity,” followed by 2010’s Aurora. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, which was shown at the 2005 New York Film Festival is screening at the Walter Reade Theater as part of the ongoing series “50 Years of the New York Film Festival,” which continues with such NYFF vets as Jafar Panahi’s Offside, Carlos Reygadas’s Silent Light, and Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. Individual tickets for the fiftieth anniversary of the New York Film Festival, which runs September 28 through October 14, go on sale to the general public on September 9.
Danish journalist Mads Brügger risked a lot more than just his career in making The Ambassador; he put his life on the line as well. “If you do it the way we will set you up to do it, you have a very high probability of success,” he is told by Colin Evans, who works for a company that can allegedly make anyone a diplomat of a diamond-rich African nation for the right price. “If you do it any other way, the best that you can hope for is to be arrested and go to jail and lose everything you’ve got. That’s the best you can hope for. The worst you can hope for is that you end up dead in a ditch in Africa.” Using his full name, Mads Johan Brügger Cortzen seeks to become a Liberian diplomat to the Central African Republic, meeting with powerful, important, and dangerous people on his fascinating journey, handing out “envelopes of happiness” filled with cash while claiming to want to build a match factory with the help of native pygmies. As Brügger’s story gets more and more ridiculous, he gains greater access, with soon only President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s signature necessary to achieve his absurd goal. An intriguing mix of Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat and Ali G characters and controversial filmmaker and activist Michael Moore, Brügger, whose previous film, The Red Chapel, found him leading a bizarre experimental theater troupe into North Korea, goes about his business with a sly confidence, balancing the serious nature of the proceedings with humorous moments that threaten to reveal his ruse, but nobody seems to catch on as the money keeps flowing. (The film was financed by Lars Von Trier’s Zentropa studio.) Primarily using hidden cameras that he keeps rolling even after being told that filming is not allowed, Brügger employs his unique brand of what he calls “performative journalism,” a blend of performance art and investigative journalism that results in an outrageously entertaining film that exposes surprisingly blatant international corruption and has led to a firestorm of debate. The film opens August 29 at the IFC Center, with Brügger on hand for a Q&A following the 8:20 screenings on August 29 and 30.
After being blacklisted in Hollywood, American auteur Jules Dassin (The Naked City, Brute Force) headed to France, where he was hired to adapt Du Rififi Chez Les Hommes, a crime novel by Auguste le Breton that he made significant changes to, resulting in one of the all-time-great heist films. After spending five years in prison, Tony le Stephanois (Jean Servais) gets out and hooks up again with his old protégé, Jo le Suédois (Carl Möhner), who has settled down with his wife (Janine Darcy) and child (Dominique Maurin) for what was supposed to be a life of domestic tranquility. Joined by Mario Farrati (Robert Manuel), a fun-loving bon vivant with a very sexy girlfriend (Claude Sylvain), and cool and calm safecracker César le Milanais (Dassin, using the pseudonym Perlo Vita), the crew plans a heist of a small Mappin & Webb jewelry store on the Rue de Rivoli. Not content with a quick score, Tony lays the groundwork for a major take, but greed, lust, jealousy, and revenge get in the way in Dassin’s masterful film noir. The complex plan gets even more complicated as César falls for Viviane (Magali Noël), a singer who works at the L’Âge d’Or nightclub, which is owned by Pierre Grutter (Marcel Lupovici), who has taken up with Tony’s former squeeze, Mado (Marie Sabouret), and is trying to save his brother, Louis Grutter (Pierre Grasset), from a serious drug habit. (The club is named for Luis Buñuel’s 1930 film, which featured the same production designer as Rififi, Alexandre Trauner.) As the plot heats up, things threaten to explode in Dassin’s thrilling black-and-white film, which takes a series of unexpected twists and turns as it goes from its remarkably tense and highly influential heist scene to a wild climax. Dassin, who went on to make another of the great caper movies, 1964’s Topkapi, was named Best Director at Cannes for Rififi, which is screening August 26 as part of the MoMA series “Gaumont Thrillers: From Fantômas to A Gang Story,” which continues with such Gaumont-produced films as Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face, Maurice Pialat’s Police, Claude Chabrol’s Les Cousins, and Alain Corneau’s Serie noire.
