FIAF will celebrate Bastille Day with annual street fair on July 9
60th St. between Fifth & Lexington Aves.
Sunday, July 9, free, 12 noon – 7:00 pm
www.bastilledaynyc.com
fiaf.org
On July 14, 1789, a Parisian mob stormed the Bastille prison, a symbolic victory that kicked off the French Revolution and the establishment of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Ever since, July 14 has been a national holiday celebrating liberté, égalité, and fraternité. In New York City, the Bastille Day festivities are set for Sunday, July 9, along Sixtieth St., where the French Institute Alliance Française hosts its annual daylong party of food, music, dance, and other special activities. There will be a Summer in the South of France Wine, Beer, Cocktail, and Cheese Tasting in FIAF’s Tinker Auditorium from 12 noon to 4:30 ($25) as well as the elegant ninety-minute Champagne & Chocolate Tastings in Le Skyroom at 12:30 and 3:00 ($65-$75) featuring delights from Drappier, Pol Roger, Bollinger, Ayala, Brimoncourt, La Caravelle, Chocolat Moderne, La Maison du Chocolat, MarieBelle, Voilà Chocolat, and Maman Bakery, with live music from the Avalon Jazz Band. The annual raffle ($5) can win you such prizes as a trip to Paris and Le Martinique or dinners at French restaurants. Food and drink will be available from Bien Cuit, Brasserie Cognac, Dana Confection, DBGB Kitchen and Bar, Dominique Ansel Kitchen, Financier, Le Souk, Miss Madeleine, Oliviers & Co., Pain D’Avignon, Sel Magique, Simply Gourmand, St. Michel, Sud de France, François Payard Bakery, Pistache, the Crepe Escape, and others. The fête also includes roaming French mime Catherina Gasta, a photobooth, the pop-up Marché Français boutique, a kids corner, a pop-up library, a Caribbean Zouk dance lesson with Franck Muhel (12:15), the Citroën Car Show, a “Libres Ensemble” Slam Performance with Brooklyn rapper Napoleon Da Legend and Québecois slammer Webster (1:00), It’s Showtime NYC! (1:45), Can-Can Dancing with Karen Peled (2:30 & 3:45), DJ Ol’ Stark (2:45), the Hungry March Band (3:00), a concert with French baritone David Serero (3:45), and the New York premiere of Lisa Azuelos’s Dalida ($8-$14, 5:30).
The sixteenth annual New York Asian Film Festival gets under way June 30 with writer-director Nattawut Poonpiriya’s big Thai hit, Bad Genius. The amazingly smart Lynn (NYAFF 2017 Screen International Rising Star Award winner Chutimon Cheungcharoensukying) switches schools for an opportunity to win a coveted scholarship and go to a better college, with the help of her father, a respected teacher (Thaneth Warakulnukroh). She quickly becomes besties with the popular Grace (Eisaya Hosuwan), who is dating snobby rich kid Pat (Teeradon Supapunpinyo). Lynn mentors Grace, who is not a very good student, and is then hired by Pat’s wealthy father (Sahajak Boonthanakit) to tutor his son to improve his low grades. Soon Grace, Pat, and several of Pat’s other friends (Vittawin Veeravidhayanant, Suwijak Mahatthanachotwanich, Narwin Rathlertkarn, Thanawat Sutat Na Ayutthaya, and Thanachart Phinyocheep) are paying substantial money to Lynn, who has devised unique ways to cheat on multiple-choice tests. As she and Bank (Chanon Santinatornkul), another smart scholarship student — whose parents (Uraiwan Puvichitsutin and Somchai Ruedikunrangsi) run a small laundry, which embarrasses him and drives him to improve his, and their, lot — compete for a prestigious Singapore scholarship, lies, betrayal, greed, and deception lead to major troubles for everyone as the crucial standardized STIC tests approach.
Auteur and film historian Bertrand Tavernier takes viewers on a fascinating, deeply personal trip into the world of early French movies in the extraordinary My Journey through French Cinema. Inspired by Martin Scorsese’s 1995 A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese through American Movies and 1999 My Voyage to Italy, the French auteur recounts how he believes that going to the theater as a child helped him survive a serious illness and led to a lifelong love of cinema; he even battled and beat cancer while making this documentary. In more than three hours that fly by surprisingly quickly, Tavernier examines dozens and dozens of French films, not looking at them as a historian or a fan but as a fellow director; in addition, the film unfolds neither chronologically nor thematically but in a delightfully charming stream of consciousness as Tavernier shares personal anecdotes that lead him from film to film and director to director. He begins by describing the first movie that had a major impact on him, Jacques Becker’s Dernier Atout, and moves on to his days working with Volker Schlöndorff for Jean-Pierre Melville, who thought he was a terrible assistant and turned him into a publicist; Tavernier also wrote for Les Cahiers du cinema and Positif. Through voiceover and onscreen appearances, Tavernier spends a lot of time discussing Melville (Bob le flambeur, Le Doulos) and Claude Sautet (Classe tous risques), whom he considers his cinematic godfathers; Becker (Casque d’Or, Le Trou); Jean Renoir (A Day in the Country, Rules of the Game); Marcel Carné (Le jour se lève, Hôtel du Nord); Jean-Luc Godard (Contempt, Pierrot le fou); composers Maurice Jaubert (Port of Shadows, L’Atalante) and Joseph Kosma (Le Chat, House on the Waterfront); and actors Jean Gabin (La Bȇte Humaine, Grand Illusion) and Eddie Constantine (Alphaville, Cet homme est dangereux). Also garnering significant mention are Jean Sacha, Gilles Grangier, Henri Decoin, Jean Delannoy, Edmond T. Gréville, Lino Ventura, and Pierre Schoendoerffer.
In Bertrand Tavernier’s sweeping romantic epic, young and beautiful Marie de Mézières (Mélanie Thierry) has a big problem: It seems that every man she meets falls in love with her. Already in a passionate relationship with the heroic Henri de Guise (Gaspard Ulliel), a leader of the Catholics against the Protestant Huguenots in the French Wars of Religion of the 1560s, Marie is suddenly part of a shady deal between her father (Philippe Magnan) and the Duke de Montpensier (Michel Vuillermoz), marrying her off to the rather uninspiring though steadfast Prince Philippe de Montpensier (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet), who warms to his bride much quicker than she to him. Returning to the battlefield, Philippe asks his mentor, the older and wiser Count de Chabannes (Lambert Wilson), to teach Marie in the ways of the court to prepare her for meeting Catherine de Medici, but even such a solid, moralistic man as Chabannes — who deserted from the army after killing a peasant family, supposedly in the name of his lord and saviour — cannot prevent himself from succumbing to the many charms of his unaware charge. And when she meets the wild and unpredictable Duke d’Anjou (Raphaël Personnaz), the king’s brother is smitten as well. But through it all, Marie, a modern woman who wants to learn to write and make her own choices, remains fiercely drawn to Henri, a forbidden love that threatens dire consequences. Based on the 1662 novella by Madame de La Fayette, The Princess of Montpensier is a thrilling tale of love and war, of honor and betrayal.
“There’s something about a train that’s magic,” Richie Havens sang in a series of 1980s Amtrak commercials. Master documentarian Albert Maysles goes in search of that magic in his final film, In Transit. In 2014-15, Maysles, who passed away in 2015 at the age of eighty-eight, and his team took several trips on Amtrak’s Empire Builder, described as “America’s busiest long-distance train route,” which carries passengers between Chicago and the Pacific Northwest over the course of three days, following much of the route that explorers Lewis and Clark mapped out in the early nineteenth century. Maysles, Nelson Walker, David Usui, and Ben Wu focus handheld cameras on men, women, and children of all ages and ethnicities as they talk with other passengers about transitions they’re going through. One pregnant woman is past her due date, hoping she makes it to Minnesota to give birth with members of her family. She makes friends with a man who is photographing everywhere they go. A young man has suddenly quit his job to try to make a new life with his high school sweetheart in Indiana. A Native American talks about how he is riding the train to think about his relationship with his partner, which is on the ropes. An abused woman is returning from seeing her daughter for the first time in nearly half a century. Sometimes they’re speaking directly with Maysles, and other times the filmmakers are like flies on the wall, picking up snippets of conversations as the passengers share their hopes and dreams, along with their struggles and fears, in true cinéma vérité fashion. Everyone is open and free, including the conductors. “This is the only job I’ve ever wanted,” one of the trainmen explains.