FOUR SEASONS LODGE (Andrew Jacobs, 2008)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at East Third St.
Opens Wednesday, November 11
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.fourseasonsmovie.org
“Life is not easy for everyone,” Olga Bowman says about midway through Andrew Jacobs’s spectacular cinéma vérité documentary, FOUR SEASONS LODGE. “But life can be beautiful even when it’s not so easy.” For twenty-five summers, a group of Holocaust survivors, mostly Polish Jews, would meet at the Four Seasons Lodge in the Catskills, where they would talk, dance, argue, eat, hug, discuss their latest aches and pains, and primarily revel in life despite the horrific things they suffered through and witnessed at such concentration camps as Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Jacobs discovered this heartwarming community while researching a series of articles for the New York Times; when he heard that the lodge was being sold and that the 2006 season might be the group’s last, he decided to make a movie about it. Seeking advice from the legendary Albert Maysles, Jacobs actually landed the master documentarian as his chief cameraman, giving FOUR SEASONS LODGE the feel of such classic Maysles brothers’ works as SALESMAN and GREY GARDENS.
Jacobs is like the proverbial fly on the wall, focusing on ten primary characters who don’t mind sharing their simple existence with the rest of the world. “I am full of life,” one woman says, and that is what the film is really about, even as this collection of extraordinary people are staring at their own mortality. They might have survived the camps, but as they reach into their eighties and nineties, they understand that death is near – but they refuse to let a little thing like that stop them from enjoying some lox and herring, schmaltzy music, bad jokes, and, most of all, each other. Audiences will fall in love with such couples as Hymie and Tosha Abramowitz (Hymie’s pronunciation of the word herring is worth the price of admission all by itself), Tobias Buchman and Lola Wenglin, and the endearing Olga Bowman and Genya Boyman, who are all charming in unique, unexpected ways. FOUR SEASONS LODGE is an extraordinary accomplishment, a subtle yet unforgettable experience that is one of the best films of the decade.
While the truth might be out there somewhere, it’s not exactly going to be found in this very strange venture. Playing more like IN SEARCH OF . . . A LOST EPISODE OF THE X-FILES, director Olatunde Osunsanmi’s THE FOURTH KIND combines actual audio and video taken by psychologist Abbey Tyler in October 2000 with fictional re-creations by actors to try to lend believability to this story of possible repeated alien abduction in Nome, Alaska. Milla Jovovich, who really needs a new agent, stars as Dr. Tyler, whose husband has just been brutally murdered. Dr. Tyler is investigating a series of odd cases in which local men and women are having trouble sleeping, waking up every morning at 3:33, seeing a white owl, and suddenly speaking in Sumerian. Under hypnosis, the patients relive frightening scenes that lead to real-life violence. Osunsanmi (WITHIN) ups the ante – and complicates the narrative – by intercutting actual footage from Tyler’s studies, often playing them on a split-screen against the reenactments to prove how real this must all be. He also includes segments from an interview he conducted with Tyler at Chapman University as she details what happened to her and her family. Will Patton is annoying as the sheriff who thinks Tyler’s study is too dangerous to continue, while the solid Elias Koteas is Tyler’s mentor who refuses to believe no matter how strong the evidence might be. When THE FOURTH KIND tries to just be a horror movie, it’s not wholly awful, but when it strains and strains to assert that these close encounters are real, it borders on the edge of the ridiculous and just plain silly.
After getting a biopsy taken and drawing the death card while consulting a fortune-teller, popular French singer Cléo (Corinne Marchand) begins looking back at her life — and wondering just what’s left of it — while awaiting the dreaded results. The blonde beauty talks with old friends, asks her piano player (Michel Legrand, who composed the score) to write her a song, and meets a dapper gentleman in the park, becoming both participant and viewer in her own existence. As Cléo makes her way around town, director (and former photographer) Agnès Varda shows off early 1960s Paris, expertly winding her camera through the Rive Gauche. Just as Cléo seeks to find out what’s real (her actual name is Florence and that gorgeous hair is a wig), Varda shoots the film in a cinema verité style, almost as if it’s a documentary. She even sets the film in real time (adding chapter titles with a clock update), enhancing the audience’s connection with Cléo as she awaits her fate, but the movie runs only ninety minutes, adding mystery to what is to become of Cléo, as if she exists both on-screen and off, alongside the viewer. A central film in the French Nouvelle Vague and one of the first to be made by a woman, CLÉO DE 5 À 7 is an influential classic even as it has lost a step or two over the years. Varda, now in her eighties, has also made such well-regarded films as LE BONHEUR (1965), VAGABOND (1985), THE GLEANERS AND I (2000), and THE BEACHES OF AGNÉS (2008), among others.
Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul won the Jury Prize at Cannes for this beautiful, mystical work that will thoroughly engage you — if you allow it to. Part tender love story between a country boy (Banlop Lomnoi) and a soldier (Dakda Kaewbuadee), part folktale set in the deep forests of Thailand, TROPICAL MALADY is a like a visual poem in which details are not as important as the overall effect, which is intoxicating. The unorthodox film features ghosts, a shape-shifter, unusual characters, and a playful sense of humor that come together to form a subtle meditation on life and love.
