Married mother Margaret Jones (Charlotte Rampling) is madly in love with a monkey in Nagisa Ôshima’s surprisingly tame MAX, MON AMOUR
CinéSalon: MAX, MON AMOUR (Nagisa Ôshima, 1986)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, July 7, $13, 4:00 & 7:30
Series continues Tuesdays through July 28
212-355-6100
fiaf.org
It’s rather hard to tell how much Japanese auteur Nagisa Ôshima is monkeying around with his very strange 1986 movie, Max, Mon Amour, a love story between an intelligent, beautiful woman and a chimpanzee. The director of such powerful films as Cruel Story of Youth; Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence; Taboo; and In the Realm of the Senses seems to have lost his own senses with this surprisingly straightforward, tame tale of bestiality, a collaboration with master cinematographer Raoul Coutard, who shot seminal works by Truffaut and Godard; screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, who has written or cowritten nearly ninety films by such directors as Pierre Étaix (who plays the detective in Max), Luis Buñuel, Volker Schlöndorff, Philippe Garrel, and Miloš Forman; and special effects and makeup artist extraordinaire Rick Baker, the mastermind behind the 1976 King Kong, the Michael Jackson video Thriller, Ratboy, Hellboy, and An American Werewolf in London, among many others. Evoking Bedtime for Bonzo and Ed more than Planet of the Apes and Gorillas in the Mist, Max, Mon Amour is about a well-to-do English family living in Paris whose lives undergo a rather radical change when husband Peter Jones (Anthony Higgins) catches his elegant wife, Margaret (Charlotte Rampling), in bed with a chimp. Margaret insists that she and the chimp, Max, are madly in love and somehow convinces Peter to let her bring the sensitive yet dangerous beast home, which confuses their son, Nelson (Christopher Hovik), and causes their maid, Maria (Victoria Abril), to break out in ugly rashes. Peter, a diplomat, works for the queen of England, so as he prepares for a royal visit to Paris, he also has to deal with this new addition to his ever-more-dysfunctional family.
Throughout the film, it’s almost impossible to figure out when Ôshima is being serious, when he is being ironic, when he is trying to make a metaphorical point about evolution, or when he is commenting on the state of contemporary aristocratic European society. When Margaret puts on a fur coat, is that a reference to her hypocrisy? Is her affair with a zoo animal being directly compared to Peter’s dalliance with his assistant Camille (Diana Quick)? Even better, is Ôshima relating Max to Her Royal Highness? We are all mammals, after all. Or are Ôshima and Carrière merely riffing on Buñuel’s 1972 surrealist classic The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, which Carrière cowrote? Perhaps Max, Mon Amour is about all of that, or maybe none of it, as Ôshima lays it all out very plainly, as if it is not a completely crazy thing that a woman can have an affair with a chimp and have him become part of the family. Regardless, the film is just plain silly, although it looks pretty great, particularly Rampling wearing gorgeous outfits and a Princess Di do and Quick in hysterically hideous haute couture gone terribly wrong. Meanwhile, Michel Portal’s score mines Laurie Anderson territory. You can decide for yourself whether Max, Mon Amour is a misunderstood masterpiece or an absurd piece of trifle when it is shown on July 7 in the French Institute Alliance Française’s CinéSalon series “Jean-Claude Carrière: Writing the Impossible.” (The 7:30 show will be introduced by Japan Society film programmer Kazu Watanabe, who will attempt to shed more light on this, and both the 4:00 and 7:30 shows will be followed by a wine reception.) The two-month festival consists of a wide range of films written by two-time Oscar winner Carrière, who, at eighty-three, is still hard at work. The series continues through July 28 with such other Carrière collaborations as Andrzej Wajda’s Danton, Louis Malle’s May Fools, and Jonathan Glazer’s Birth.
Shortly after meeting Ron “Stray Dog” Hall at the Biker Church in Branson, Missouri, writer-director Debra Granik (Down to the Bone) cast the Vietnam vet as Thump Milton in her second feature, the Oscar-nominated Winter’s Bone. Upon learning more about him, she soon decided that he would be a great subject for a documentary, so she took to the road, following him across the country in the engaging and revealing Stray Dog. Nearly always dressed in black, including his treasured leather jacket covered in medals and patches — when he puts it in a suitcase for a trip, it’s a ritual like he’s folding the American flag — Hall is a wonderfully grizzled old man with a fluffy white beard. At home, he is learning Spanish online so he can communicate better with his new wife, Alicia, a Mexican immigrant, and her two sons (who still live across the border). He visits with his teenage granddaughter, who is making some questionable decisions about her future. In Missouri, he owns and operates the At Ease RV Park, where he gives breaks to fellow vets who can’t always afford to pay the rent. And when he goes on the road, participating in the Run for the Wall, joining up with thousands of other bikers heading for the annual service at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, he stops along the way at other ceremonies honoring soldiers who have gone missing, are POWs, or were killed in action in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other wars.
The fourteenth annual New York Asian Film Festival is saluting legendary Hong Kong director Ringo Lam, presenting him with the Lifetime Achievement Award. Lam, who turns sixty this year, will be at Lincoln Center for screenings of two of his works, City on Fire on June 27 and Full Alert on June 28. In the latter, Lam’s follow-up to his disappointing Hollywood debut, the Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle Maximum Risk, Lau Ching-wan stars as Officer Pao, a member of Hong Kong’s Special Crime Bureau who becomes involved in a case that turns deeply personal. After arresting explosives expert Mak Kwan (Francis Ng) for the brutal murder of an architect, Pao is determined to find the rest of Mak’s Taiwanese crew, which is led by mainland boss Jie (Jack Gao), and prevent the robbery of a mysterious vault. Pao and his team track Mak’s girlfriend, Chung Lai Hung (Amanda Lee), who knows more than she’s letting on, while Pao and Mak become immersed in a tense, psychological game of cat and mouse, exploring what it feels like to kill someone. There are numerous incredulous plot twists and a rather lame car chase, but the guerrilla filmmaking style of Lam and cinematographer Ardy Lam, ranging through the streets of a Hong Kong about to be handed over from the British to the Chinese, is supremely effective, as are the lead performances by Lau and Ng, evoking the relationships portrayed earlier by Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in Michael Mann’s Heat and later by Andy Lau and Tony Leung in Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s Infernal Affairs. The use of mobile phones and surveillance technology feels much older than 1997, displaying how far we have come so fast. Lam saves the heavy violence for the spectacular finale, letting the emotions build before exploding. Nominated for five Hong Kong Film Awards, including Best Film, Best Director, and Best Actor (Lau), Full Alert is screening at the Walter Reade Theater on June 28 at 2:00, with Lam on hand to introduce it. The New York Asian Film Festival continues at Lincoln Center through July 6 with more than three dozen new and old films from China, Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Cambodia, and other Southeast Asian countries, including Sabu’s Chasuke’s Journey, Kinji Fukasuku’s Battles without Honor and Humanity, Im Sang-soo’s The President’s Last Bang, Wang Xiaoshuai’s Red Amnesia, Im Kwon-taek’s Revivre, and Sion Sono’s Tokyo Tribe.
