this week in film and television

BROADWAY BARES 2021: TWERK FROM HOME

Who: More than 170 dancers, Harvey Fierstein, J. Harrison Ghee, Jay Armstrong Johnson, Robyn Hurder, Peppermint, Jelani Remy
What: Annual benefit for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS
Where: Broadway Cares, YouTube
When: Sunday, June 20, free, 9:00
Why: Last year, the annual “Broadway Bares” benefit, in which performers take it off for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, went virtual, and the 2021 edition follows suit with “Twerk from Home.” On June 20 at 9:00, vaxxed and waxed performers will show us what they got from their homes, where they’ve spent so much of the past fifteen months because of the pandemic lockdown, and from across the city now that we are opening up again. Directed by “Bares” creator and Tony winner Jerry Mitchell with codirectors Laya Barak and Nick Kenkel, the free evening features more than a dozen high-concept videos from choreographers Barak, Kenkel, John Alix, Al Blackstone, Frank Boccia, Karla Garcia, Jonathan Lee, Ray Mercer, Dylan Pearce, Jenn Rose, Luis Salgado, Michael Lee Scott, Gabriella Sorretino, Kellen Stancil, Rickey Tripp, and James Alonzo White, with appearances by more than 170 dancers, leading up to a grand finale recorded in Times Square.

Donations are strongly encouraged if you can afford it; 2020’s online event raised more than half a million dollars, which sounds great until you realize that the 2019 in-person benefit took in more than two mil. “Being back with the ‘Broadway Bares’ family to create ‘Twerk from Home’ has been an incredible reminder of how beautiful our theater community is, both inside and out,” Mitchell said in a statement. “Creating one more virtual edition of our beloved celebration in safe environments reinforces our belief that the best way to take care of ourselves is to take care of each other.” In addition, there will be special appearances by Harvey Fierstein, J. Harrison Ghee, Jay Armstrong Johnson (in a revealing opener), Robyn Hurder, Peppermint (in a new song, “Strip”), and Jelani Remy.

JULIE MEHRETU / PALIMPSEST / PRIDE CELEBRATION

Julie Mehretu, Ghosthymn (after the Raft), ink and acrylic on canvas, 2019–21 (photo by Tom Powel Imaging / © Julie Mehretu / courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery)

JULIE MEHRETU
Whitney Museum of American Art
99 Gansevoort St.
Exhibit continues Thursday – Monday through August 8, $18-$25
Palimpsest: Thursday, June 17, free with RSVP, 8:00 (available on demand June 18-20)
Pride Celebration with Julie Mehretu: Friday, June 25, free with RSVP, 7:00
212-570-3600
whitney.org

Over the years, I’ve seen many works by Julie Mehretu, but her eponymously titled midcareer retrospective at the Whitney is still a revelation. Running through August 8, the show consists of approximately thirty paintings and forty works on paper and prints from 1996 to the present by the Ethiopian-born artist, who moved with her family to Michigan when she was seven in 1977 and is now based in Harlem. Her large canvases are palimpsests of architectural urban maps, news clippings, allegorical references, economic charts, art history, and abstract lines and shapes, coming together to form a tantalizing whole that is both visually dazzling and empowered with meaning. “Mehretu analyzes and reimagines divergent cultural narratives through her own artistic methodology; an extraordinary thinker and observer, she produces work that is full of empathy, innovation, complexity, and contradiction,” LACMA CEO and director Michael Govan writes in the forward to the catalog.

Installation view of “Julie Mehretu” at the Whitney, with Cairo, 2013, and Invisible Line (collective), 2010-11 (photo by Ron Amstutz)

As captivating as her works are from a distance, the exhibition rewards visitors who spend time with them at close range, their face as near as permissible to the smooth surfaces to take in every detail. “Few artistic encounters are more thrilling than standing close to one of her large canvases, enveloped in its fullness, color, forms, and symbolic content,” Whitney director Adam D. Weinberg writes in his catalog introduction. “One is easily swept up, into, and away by the works’ informational overload and force field of visually magnetic strokes, lines, routes, and trajectories. Viewers can, and do, lose their bearings in the attempt to read, comprehend, locate themselves, and make meaning from the confrontation.”

Julie Mehretu, Stadia II, ink and acrylic on canvas, 2004 (Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburg; gift of Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn and Nicolas Rohatyn and A. W. Mellon Acquisition Endowment Fund 2004.50 / photo courtesy the Carnegie Museum, © Julie Mehretu)

Such ink-on-acrylic canvases as Conjured Parts (eye), Ferguson, Haka (and Riot), (A Painting in Four Parts) Part 1, Transcending: The New International, and Retopistics: A Renegade Excavation are prime examples of the virtuosity of her technique, from her delicate brushwork to her attention to the smallest of elements, as she explores such issues as migration, colonialism, white supremacy, and racial injustice. Meanwhile, ink-on-paper drawings such as her “Inkcity” series delve into the psychology behind her vision. “I was really interested in mining myself and who I was and what made me,” Mehretu says in a Whitney video. “My interest is not in trying to dictate or determine or explain or try to give any information to anyone in that way. There aren’t any directives or any proposals in these paintings. These paintings are really experiential paintings that are informed by the time, by me, by this moment, by trying to digest that.”

Julie Mehretu, Epigraph, Damascus, photogravure, sugar lift aquatint, spit bite aquatint, and open bite on six panels, 2016 (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gift of Kelvin and Hana Davis through the 2018 Collectors Committee M.2018.188a–f, printed by BORCH Editions, Copenhagen, © Julie Mehretu)

The centerpiece is Ghosthymn (after the Raft), a large-scale canvas that has its own space opposite a window looking out at the Hudson River, David Hammons’s Day’s End, and the recently opened pier park known as Little Island. Created specifically for the Whitney show, the work references Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa as well as New York City’s past. “The insistence on new work and the idea of how that’s important . . . there was this time of suspension with the pandemic,” Mehretu says in the video. “There’s a wall that faces the river, and I was really interested in that wall and the relationship to the river and the relationship to the exterior. As you look out — I look at it every day from my studio [in Chelsea] — you sense the nineteenth-century-ness of this city even though so much of the architecture has changed. The Hudson River is the reason the city exists. There’s a sensibility in different periods of life, of the history of the making of this place, and the kind of immigrant nature of this place.” From a distance, bursts of red, yellow, and green battle it out with ghostly whites, but up close you’re likely to be surprised by what Mehretu uses to create some of her smaller images.

Julie Mehretu works on Haka (and Riot) in new documentary Julie Mehretu: Palimpsest (photo courtesy Checkerboard Film Foundation)

Mehretu was intimately involved with the survey, which began at LACMA before coming to New York City; she is extremely generous on the audio guide when talking about her process, a must-listen. You can also find out more when the museum premieres the documentary Julie Mehretu: Palimpsest from June 17 to 20, introduced by exhibition cocurator Rujeko Hockley and Checkerboard Film Foundation president Edgar Howard. And on June 24 at 7:00, Mehretu will be at the Whitney for a special in-person Pride celebration with DJ Reborn and refreshments, during which the ravishing exhibition will be open.

TRIBECA FILM: REPUBLIQUE, THE INTERACTIVE MOVIE

REPUBLIQUE, THE INTERACTIVE MOVIE (Simon Bouisson, 2019)
Tribeca Film: Outdoor & Interactive Experiences
tribecafilm.com
republique-le-film.fr/en

Created by director Simon Bouisson and writer Olivier Demangel, Republique, the Interactive Movie is a gripping virtual thriller that plays out in real time over your mobile device as a terrorist attack hits the Paris Metro. Instead of weaving between three stories, the film allows the viewer to choose which part to watch when by scrolling from one to the other; in essence, you are the editor, selecting what to follow as if you are on your phone and the events are happening live, breaking news erupting in the palm of your hand. As the tragedy unfolds, the visuals are accompanied by comments and emojis posted by fictional characters, who question what the characters are doing, cheer them on, and offer advice as the danger increases. Lucie (Lyna Khoudri) and Rio (Rio Vega) are broadcasting their “urbex” on social media when the attack starts, sending them deep underground, searching for a safe way out. Antoine (Jean-Baptiste Lafarge) and Boris (Nicolas Avinée) are a pair of lawyers on a subway platform, getting ready for a night out with friends, when things go haywire. And journalist Rudy (Xavier Lacaille) meets Nora (Noémie Merlant), who is desperately trying to find her husband, Djibril (Radouan Leflahi), who is lost amid the chaos.

The details of the plot are based on interviews the filmmakers did with psychologists and victim-support charities, focusing on not only the intense action but the reaction of the characters as the situation grows more dire. The claustrophobic nature of the seventy-minute film is palpable as people run through dark tunnels and ominous corridors and wonder what is behind the next closed door while you watch on your small phone, unable to help in any way, trapped along with them. The experience is particularly potent after a year of quarantine, when so much of the world was unable to see friends and family or go to the movies, instead relegated to home screens and personal devices. Bouisson (Jour de vote, Tokyo Reverse) and Demangel (111, Atlantique) keep everything moving swiftly, but there’s no need to panic if you’re a completist or you think you missed something important; at the end of the film, you are given access to scenes that can fill in any holes or that you want to check out again.

David Mendizábal: eat me!

Who: David Mendizábal
What: Livestreamed presentation
Where: Soho Rep. YouTube
When: Thursday, June 17, free with RSVP, 7:00
Why: During the pandemic, Soho Rep. started Project Number One, in which eight artists were paid as salaried staff members, earning $1,250 per week plus health insurance to develop new work while shining a light on the problems creators faced as theaters closed and Covid-19 spread around the world. Becca Blackwell, Shayok Misha Chowdhury, Stacey Derosier, David Mendizábal, Ife Olujobi, David Ryan Smith, Carmelita Tropicana, and Jillian Walker met regularly to discuss what comes next for theater makers. In May, Smith released The Story of a Circle, a personal tale in which he pulls no punches from Walkerspace, and Tropicana is posting her podcast That’s Not What Happened here.

On June 17, director and designer Mendizábal will begin streaming his contribution, eat me! Describing the show, he writes, “They say that every seven years we essentially become new people, because in that time, every old cell in our body has been replaced by a new cell through a process known as autophagy. Autophagy literally translates to ‘self-eating,’ which got me thinking: What are the parts of myself, or ideas I’ve held on to / that I would eat away if I could? / What would I replace those ideas with?” The film is inspired by an Ecuadorian ritual in which people share “guaguas de pan,” or bread babies, with their lost loved ones on November 2, Día de los Difuntos (Day of the Deceased). Mendizábal (On the Grounds of Belonging, Tell Hector I Miss Him) sees his film, which is edited by Yee Eun Nam, with music and sound by Mauricio Escamilla and animation by Jeromy Velasco, as “a release and a rebirth” as we return to life together.

BIG SCREEN SUMMER NYFF58 REDUX: SMALL AXE

Steve McQueen’s Small Axe consists of five powerful stories of racism and harassment of West Indian immigrants in London from the 1960s to the 1980s (photo courtesy BBC One)

BIG SCREEN SUMMER NYFF58 REDUX
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center / Walter Reade Theater
144 / 165 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Aves.
June 11 – August 26, $10-$15
www.filmlinc.org

One of the joys of fall, and the signal that the summer blockbuster movie blitz is over, is the New York Film Festival. Since 1963, the NYFF has been presenting a wide range of works from around the world, often with postscreening discussions with members of the cast and crew. The 2020 edition was completely virtual because of the pandemic lockdown, so Film at Lincoln Center (FLSC) is bringing much of the festival back with “Big Screen Summer: NYFF58 Redux,” featuring nearly three dozen films now being shown the way they’re supposed to be seen, on large screens at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center and the Walter Reade Theater. Running June 11 to August 26, “NYFF58 Redux” gets under way with two weeks of Steve McQueen’s mammoth five-part epic about West Indian immigrants in London from the 1960s through the 1980s, Small Axe, which was actually made for television; it screens with a newly recorded interview with McQueen, who started as an experimental filmmaker and has made such previous films as Hunger, Twelve Years a Slave, and Shame, and FLSC director of programming Denis Lim.

The multi-award-winning anthology, which premiered on BBC One in the UK and Amazon in the US, begins with Mangrove (June 11-17), the true story of Frank Crichlow (Shaun Parkes) and the Mangrove Nine, Trinidadian immigrants who were harassed mercilessly by Notting Hill police for establishing a peaceful community at Crichlow’s Mangrove café. The second film, one of the best of 2020, is the exhilarating Lovers Rock (June 11-24), a seventy-minute reggae house party in London in 1980, where a group of men and women dance, sing, and fall in love in a cramped space to such songs as Dennis Bovell’s “Silly Games.” (If you’re wondering who the lone old man is, it’s Bovell himself, making a cameo.) But even as Martha (Amarah-Jae St. Aubyn) and Franklyn (Micheal Ward) hit if off, the spectre of racism is not far away. Intimately photographed by Shabier Kirchner, Lovers Rock is an unforgettable experience.

In Red, White and Blue (June 11-17), John Boyega stars as the real-life Leroy Logan, a frustrated West Indian man who joins the London Metropolitan Police department, hoping to change its fundamental racism from the inside, much to the chagrin of his father (Steve Toussaint). Boyega is riveting as Logan discovers that achieving his goal is going to be a lot harder than he ever imagined. Sheyi Cole makes his film debut in the true story Alex Wheatle (June 12-16) as the title character, a teenager caught in England’s discriminatory social services structure and then arrested for participating in the 1981 Brixton uprising, a protest against poor socioeconomic conditions for the African-Caribbean community that included “Bloody Saturday.” The remarkable anthology concludes with Education (June 11-17), an hourlong exploration of institutionalized segregation in the British school system through the eyes of Kingsley (Kenyah Sandy), who is sent to a “special” school where West Indians are purposely kept undereducated, their potentials squashed early in life. A grand achievement by a master filmmaker, Small Axe is no mere historical document of what happened in London decades ago; it is a powerful examination of systemic racism and anti-immigrant biases that is still alive and well in the twenty-first century, especially here in America.

“Big Screen Summer: NYFF58 Redux” continues through August with such other 2020 film festival favorites as Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai, Joyce Chopra’s Smooth Talk, C. W. Winter’s The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin), Eugène Green’s Atarrabi and Mikelats, Cristi Puiu’s Malmkrog, William Klein’s Muhammad Ali, the Greatest, Raúl Ruiz and Valeria Sarmiento’s The Tango of the Widower and Its Distorting Mirror, Jia Zhangke’s Xiao Wu, and Orson Welles’s Hopper/Welles, an epic conversation between Welles and Dennis Hopper.

CELEBRATING SERGE GAINSBOURG

Jane Birkin, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Rebecca Marder will celebrate the life and legacy of Serge Gainsbourg in live FIAF event

Who: Jane Birkin, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Rebecca Marder, Michael Cooper
What: Virtual talk
Where: FIAF online
When: Thursday, June 10, free with RSVP, 6:30
Why: Thirty years ago this past March, French singer-songwriter, actor, filmmaker, and bon vivant Serge Gainsbourg died of a heart attack at the age of sixty-two, leaving behind a beloved legacy that has only grown since. On June 10 at 6:30, FIAF will host the live online discussion “Celebrating Serge Gainsbourg,” with the engaging model, actress, and singer-songwriter Jane Birkin, his personal and professional partner from 1968 to 1980; their daughter, actress and singer-songwriter Charlotte Gainsbourg; and actress and musician Rebecca Marder, one of six performers in the concert film La Comédie-Française chante Gainsbourg; the event will be moderated by New York Times deputy culture editor Michael Cooper. Admission is free with advance RSVP.

The hourlong film, adapted from Stéphane Varupenne and Sébastien Pouderoux’s Les Serge (Gainsbourg Point Barre), directed by Julien Condemine, and featuring Varupenne, Pouderoux, Marder, Benjamin Lavernhe, Noam Morgensztern, and Yoann Gasiorowski, will be streaming exclusively by FIAF from June 10 to 30; virtual tickets are $15.

UNDINE

Paula Beer stars as the mysterious title character in Christian Petzold’s award-winning Undine (photo by Christian Schulz)

UNDINE (Christian Petzold, 2019)
IFC Center, 323 Sixth Ave.
Film at Lincoln Center,
Opens June 4
www.ifccenter.com
www.filmlinc.org

Master German writer-director Christian Petzold (Phoenix, Barbara) gives a unique contemporary twist to a classic European fairy tale in Undine, which opens June 4 at IFC Center and Lincoln Center as well as online. The less you know about the original myth the better, but let’s just say it involves a water nymph, romance, betrayal, and death.

Paula Beer was named Best Actress at the Berlin International Film Festival and at the European Film Awards for her powerful performance as Undine Wibeau, a historian who gives architectural tours of expansive, heavily detailed models of the past, present, and future of Berlin for the Senate Administration for Urban Development. Early on, when her boyfriend, Johannes (Jacob Matschenz), tells her that he is in love with another woman, Nora (Julia Franz Richter), Undine sternly says, “If you leave me, I’ll have to kill you.” There is no reason to doubt her.

Distressed by the situation, she is standing uneasily in a café, looking at an aquarium filled with colorful fish and a small statue of a diver when Christoph (Franz Rogowski), who just attended one of her talks, hesitantly approaches her and offers praise for the lecture. An accident shatters the glass of the aquarium and Undine and Christoph are knocked to the ground, drenched in water. As the fish squirm for life on the floor, Undine and Christoph instantly fall in love. “I’m usually under water,” Christoph, an industrial diver, says to her. German romanticism and French Impressionism mix with magical realism and a revenge thriller as Christoph and Undine run around together, reveling in their love until another accident results in serious trouble.

Undine (Paula Beer) is an architectural historian who is drawn to water in myth-based drama

Among the distinguished writers and composers who have told their own versions of the story of Undine are Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, Oscar Wilde, E. T. A. Hoffman, Edgar Allan Poe, Sergei Prokofiev, Hans Christian Andersen, Seamus Heaney, Claude Debussy, and DC Comics. Audrey Hepburn won a Tony for her performance as the title character in Jean Giraudoux’s Ondine on Broadway in 1954. In 2010, Neil Jordan’s Ondine, coincidentally also released on June 4, starred Colin Farrell as a fisherman who catches a woman known as Ondine (Alicja Bachleda) who has a special connection with water.

Water is central to Petzold’s film, from the aquarium to Christoph’s job to Johannes’s pool. Berlin itself was built on a swamp, adding relevance to Undine’s architectural lectures, in which she explains that the name of the city means “dry place in the marsh.” When she is searching for Johannes, she goes into the men’s bathroom and one of the faucets is dripping, the noise echoing down an empty hallway. When Johannes wants to go away with Undine, he tries to lure her by mentioning he’s booked the room they like “overlooking the pond.” Much of the film takes place underwater, with the actors in and out of their scuba gear, beautifully filmed by cameraman Sascha Mieke. (Unfortunately, the giant catfish is animated.) Hans Fromm is the aboveground cinematographer, lushly capturing the streets of Berlin as well as the forest surrounding the lake where Christoph works with Monika (Maryam Zaree) and Jochen (Rafael Stachowiak).

Beer and Rogowski have an intense chemistry that drives the film; they starred together in Petzold’s previous film, Transit, which deals with political refugees, stolen identity, and forbidden love, and are both magnetic here again, whether aboveground or below. The soundtrack’s theme features pianist Vikingur Ólafsson’s gorgeous, haunting rendition of Bach’s Concerto in D Minor, BWV 974 – 2. Adagio. “Everything is there in Johann Sebastian’s music: architectural perfection and profound emotion,” Ólafsson has said, which relates directly to Petzold’s film itself.