Julianne Moore faces a family crisis in Todd Haynes’s FAR FROM HEAVEN
FAR FROM HEAVEN (Todd Haynes, 2002)
MoMA Film
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Saturday, June 11, 5:00
Series continues through June 19
Tickets: $10, 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
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
www.farfromheavenmovie.com
Douglas Sirk and Thomas Mann would be proud. In Todd Haynes’s wonderfully retro Far from Heaven, Oscar-nominated Julianne Moore is amazing as 1950s housewife Cathy Whitaker, who thinks she has the perfect idyllic suburban life — until she discovers that her husband (Dennis Quaid) has a secret that dare not speak its name. Mr. & Mrs. Magnatech they are not after all. When she starts getting all chummy with the black gardener (Dennis Haysbert), people start talking, of course. Part Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959), part Death in Venice, and oh-so-original, Haynes’s awesome achievement will have you believing you’re watching a film made in the 1950s, propelled by Elmer Bernstein’s excellent music, Edward Lachman’s remarkable photography, and Mark Friedberg’s terrific production design. Far from Heaven is screening at MoMA on June 11 with Tom Kalin’s 1991 short finally destroy us as part of the series “Drama Queens — The Soap Opera in Experimental and Independent Cinema,” which continues with such films as Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (1955), Bette Gordon’s Variety (1984), and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Angst essen Seele auf (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul) (1973), many of which are also paired with short works.
David Lynch’s debut feature is about faith, fidelity, and fatherhood. Jack Nance stars as Henry Spencer, a lonely, scared man who suddenly has to raise his newborn child himself after his girlfriend, Mary X (Charlotte Stewart), leaves. Oh, it’s also about fear, fascination, and futility, the most bizarre film ever made by a major director. The avant-garde narrative seems to come from another dimension, with mutants, decapitation, a lady in a radiator, and a pencil-making machine. Everything about the movie, shot in creepy black and white, is strange, from the sound to the special effects to the bizarre score to the greatest hairstyles this side of BARTON FINK. It’s nearly a one-man show, with Lynch serving as writer, director, composer, producer, art director, production designer, editor, and special effects guru. ERASERHEAD is an amazing, unforgettable journey through the diseased mind of a madman. You haven’t truly lived until you’ve seen it at least once.
One Lucky Elephant follows the heartwarming — and heartbreaking — story of a very different kind of relationship, one that audiences will find hard to forget. In 1984, when she was two years old, Flora the elephant was orphaned when poachers killed her family in Zimbabwe. She was shipped off to America, where she was soon purchased by Ivor David Balding, who quickly made her the centerpiece of his Circus Flora. In May 2000, filmmakers Lisa Leeman and Cristina Colissimo were invited to document Flora’s farewell performance, as she was ready to retire from something she had seemingly loved doing for so many years. Balding and Flora are shown to be like doting father and precocious daughter; as he talks about what is next for Flora, she playfully harasses him. But what’s next for Flora turns out to be the focus of the the film, as Balding’s sincere attempts to return Flora to the African wild, or even to a zoo or sanctuary, are met with rising challenges, often exacerbated by her unwillingness to be apart from him. “It’s hard to think that maybe I’d made a mistake to take this elephant’s life and merge it with mine,” he says at one point. Leeman ended up spending ten years following what she calls “a father-daughter interspecies story,” as Balding meets with such experts as Ron Magill of the Miami Metrozoo, Willie Theison of the Pittsburgh Zoo, and Carol Buckley of the Elephant Sanctuary in his never-ending quest to do right by Flora, whose long-term relationships with people have complicated the situation. But as much as the film is about this unique pair of individuals, it also deals with such issues as natural habitat, safe animal environments, and humanity’s responsibility to the animal kingdom. You might never look at a zoo — and certainly an elephant — in the same way again. One Lucky Elephant opens tonight at Film Forum for a two-week run, with director Leeman and cowriter, producer, and cinematographer Colissimo on hand at the 6:30 screenings on June 8, 10 & 11 to discuss the film; on June 8 they will be joined by Dr. Iain Douglas-Hamilton of Save the Elephants and and Joshua Ginsberg of the Wildlife Conservation Society.
Winner of the Teddy Award for best queer feature film at the 2007 Berlinale, Zero Chou’s Spider Lilies is an involving melodrama that starts out silly and quirky but quickly turns to far more serious topics. Rainie Yang is delightful as eighteen-year-old Jade, a kawaii innocent who tries to make money as a sexy web-cam girl but never goes too far, sometimes because her granny walks into her room and looks into the camera at rather inappropriate moments. When one of her loyal followers — an internet cop participating in a sting to entrap online sex sites but who harbors a hidden affection for Jade — suggests she get a tattoo, Jade goes to a local parlor run by Takeko (Isabella Leong), a slightly older young woman whom Jade had a puppy-dog crush on when she was nine. But Takeko, a serious person with a wild tattoo running up and down her left arm, doesn’t seem to remember Jade, at least not at first. When Jade asks for the same spider lily tattoo, Takeko refuses, claiming that they “are the flowers that grow along the path to hell.” Indeed, Takeko seems to live in a private hell all her own, filled with haunting childhood memories centered around an earthquake that killed her father and left her brother, Ching (Shen Jian-hung), with severe mental problems that require special care. She is also a surrogate older sister for Ah-Dong (Shih Yuan-chieh), a wannabe-rebel who finds strength and confidence from Takeko’s tattoos but uses them to bully unsuspecting students. Although the story, written by Singing Chen, goes off on too many tangents, Chou brings everything together as the characters approach a bittersweet finale. Leong and Yang make a fascinating potential couple; Chou, the only openly lesbian filmmaker in Taiwan, prepared them for their roles by having them watch episodes of The L Word. Spider Lilies continues Chou’s use of one of the colors of the gay pride rainbow flag in each of her films; in this case, she features green, seen in the flashy wig that Jade wears. Spider Lilies will be shown at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts on June 9 at 6:30 as part of the series “Breaking the Waves: The Films of Zero Chou” and will be introduced by the director. The series continues on June 16 with 2004’s Splendid Float, June 23 with 2008’s Drifting Flowers, and June 30 with 2001’s Corners. Keep watching twi-ny for select reviews of these rarely shown but important and evocative works.
