this week in lectures, signings, panel discussions, workshops, and Q&As

CULINARY KIDS FOOD FESTIVAL

New York Botanical Garden hosts family-friendly culinary food fest February 17-23

New York Botanical Garden hosts family-friendly culinary food fest February 17-23

New York Botanical Garden
Dining Pavilion behind the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory
2900 Southern Blvd.
February 17-23, 10:00 am – 5:00 pm
All-Garden Pass: adults $20, children two to twelve $8
718-817-8700
www.nybg.org

The New York Botanical Garden is taking advantage of the February school break by hosting a family-friendly culinary food festival February 17-23, part of its Edible Academy programming, which focuses on “the important connections between plants, gardening, nutrition, and the benefits of a healthful lifestyle.” The weeklong event, which takes place in the Dining Pavilion behind the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, will offer cooking demonstrations, food tastings, tips and recipes from local chefs and garden staff, workshops, hands-on activities, and live entertainment. Parents and children can stop by the Tip-Top Pickle Shop, the Cheesemonger’s Shop, the Bakery, and Spice Adventures to learn about specific parts of the food-making process and can also create seed packets to grow their own basil. On February 21 to 23, Janice Buckner will put on a food-related puppet show, and on February 23 the Bronx Arts Ensemble Family Concert will present Hansel and Gretel, in which two kids nearly end up on the menu. In addition, the garden, which should be looking lovely with all the snow, has several exhibitions on view, including “Tropical Paradise,” “Close: The Photography of Allan Pollok-Morris,” and “Four Seasons,” as well as the self-guided Winter Walk in the Forest, Seasonal Conifer Explorations, a Winter Plant & Tree Tour, and more.

THE CREATIVE COLLABORATION OF MARTIN SCORSESE AND LEONARDO DiCAPRIO: THE DEPARTED

Leonardo DiCaprio gets ready for battle in Martin Scorsese's Oscar-winning THE DEPARTED

Leonardo DiCaprio gets ready for battle in Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winning THE DEPARTED

THE DEPARTED (Martin Scorsese, 2006)
Bow Tie Ziegfeld Theater
141 West 54th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Thursday, February 13, 3:30
Festival runs February 13-14
212-765-7600
www.bowtiecinemas.com

Based on Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s awesome Infernal Affairs (2002), Martin Scorsese’s relatively faithful remake, The Departed, moves the relentless action and intrigue from Hong Kong to the mean streets of Boston, where it is hard to tell cop from criminal. Just out of the academy, Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) rises quickly to detective in the Special Investigations Unit, but he’s actually in cahoots with master crime lord Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson). Meanwhile, Billy Costigan (an excellent Leonardo DiCaprio), training to become a cop, is sent deep undercover (including a prison stint) to infiltrate Costello’s gang, with only Captain Queenan (Martin Sheen) and Sergeant Dignam (a very funny and foul-mouthed Mark Wahlberg) aware of the secret mission. Sullivan and Costigan are like opposite sides of the same persona; in between them stands Costello — and Madolyn (Vera Farmiga), a psychiatrist who is in a relationship with one and is doctor to the other. As both the cops and the criminals search desperately for their respective rats, no one can trust each other, leading to lots of blood and a spectacular finale. Nicholson has a field day as the aging gangster, chewing up mounds of scenery in his first film with Scorsese, who returned to peak form with his best work since 1990’s Goodfellas. The film was nominated for five Oscars, winning four, for Best Director, Best Film Editing (Thelma Schoonmaker), Best Adapted Screenplay (William Monahan), and Best Picture, while Wahlberg was nominated for Best Supporting Actor.

Collaboration between Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio is celebrated in two-day festival at the Ziegfeld

Collaboration between Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio is celebrated with two-day festival at the Ziegfeld

The Departed is being shown on February 13 at 3:30 as part of a two-day salute at the Ziegfeld to the long-running partnership between DiCaprio and Scorsese, including screenings of all five of their collaborations: The Aviator, Scorsese’s examination of Howard Hughes’s (DiCaprio) high-flying and controversial airplane career; Gangs of New York, which pits Amsterdam Vallon (DiCaprio) against Bill “the Butcher” Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis) in the city’s immigrant-heavy Five Corners; Shutter Island, an adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s novel with DiCaprio as a U.S. marshal; and their latest, the multi-Oscar-nominated The Wolf of Wall Street, in which DiCaprio plays real-life stockbroker Jordan Belfort. DiCaprio, Schoonmaker, and screenwriter Terence Winter will take part in a Q&A with Kent Jones prior to the 7:00 screening of Wolf on February 13.

REMASTERED AND RESTORED — TREASURES OF FRENCH CINEMA: UNE CHAMBRE EN VILLE

dark but colorful French musical

Edith (Dominique Sanda) and François (Richard Berry) find each other in Jacques Demy’s dark but colorful French musical

CINÉSALON: UNE CHAMBRE EN VILLE (A ROOM IN TOWN) (Jacques Demy, 1982)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, February 11, $13, 4:00 & 7:30
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org

From the very opening of Une Chambre en Ville (A Room in Town), French New Wave director Jacques Demy announces that the 1982 musical melodrama is going to be something a little different. As a rising sun changes color over a construction site across the Loire River, what appear to be closing credits run up the screen, set to Michel Colombier’s romantic score, as if the film is ending. But Demy and cinematographer Jean Penzer are only getting started, shifting from black-and-white to color to black-and-white again as they cut to the hard streets of 1955 Nantes, where a shipyard strike is under way. Riot police are in a stand-off with hundreds of male and female strikers, characters on both sides singing instead of talking and shouting — in a scene that eerily evokes Tom Hooper’s Les Misérables, which came thirty years later. Soon the intricate plot unfolds, as the striking, and broke, François Guilbaud (Richard Berry), who is renting a room from former baroness Margot Langlois (Danielle Darrieux) and dating doe-eyed Violette Pelletier (Fabienne Guyon), instantly falls for femme fatale Edith Leroyer (Dominique Sanda), Mme. Langlois’s recently married daughter, who is already fed up with her impotent cheapskate of a husband, television salesman Edmond Leroyer (Michel Piccoli). The over-the-top drama plays out in wonderfully garish rooms of deep, intoxicating colors, which are echoed by Rosalie Varda’s (daughter of Demy and Agnès Varda) costumes, which even go so far as to have Violette wearing violet and Edith going bare beneath her luxurious fur coat, with no one changing clothes over the course of the two days in which the story takes place. As the strike continues, the main characters connect with one another in good and bad ways, especially when straight razors and guns are involved.

Striking workers are ready to fight the power in Jacques Demys UNE CHAMBRE EN VILLE

Striking workers are ready to fight for their rights in Jacques Demy’s UNE CHAMBRE EN VILLE

Writer-director Demy, who transformed the movie musical in the 1960s with The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort (the latter also featuring Darrieux), includes no Hollywood-like set pieces in Une Chambre en Ville, no dancing, no choruses — essentially, no real songs at all. Instead, all of the dialogue is sung by the actors (or dubbed in by someone else) as if in regular conversation. Inspired by a real shipyard strike in his hometown of Nantes in 1955, Demy takes on such concepts as wealth, class, authority, home, family, and, most of all, love — both real and imagined, unrequited and lustful — in the vastly underrated film, which is quite entertaining and very funny despite its dark themes. And be on the lookout for more echoes of Les Misérables throughout. A new digital restoration of Une Chambre en Ville is screening February 11 at 4:00 & 7:30 as part of the FIAF CinéSalon series “Remastered & Restored: Treasures of French Cinema”; the later screening will be presented by New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik, and both shows will be followed by a wine reception. The three-month festival continues with such other recently restored French classics as Max Ophüls’s Lola Montès (introduced by Lola Montes Schnabel), Claude Chabrol’s The Color of Lies (costar Jacques Gamblin will no longer introduce the film), and Jean-Pierre Melville’s Two Men in Manhattan.

BRAINWAVE 2014: ON MEDITATION

Giancarlo Esposito might have broken bad as Gus Hermanos on BREAKING BAD, but he’ll discuss meditation with neuroscientist Moran Cerf at the Rubin Museum this weekend

Giancarlo Esposito might have broken bad as Gus Fring on BREAKING BAD, but he’ll discuss meditation with neuroscientist Moran Cerf at the Rubin Museum this weekend

Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th St. at Seventh Ave.
Begins February 8, $20
212-620-5000
www.rmanyc.org/onmeditation

Need pointers on how to relax in today’s ever-more-crazy world? The Rubin Museum has just the thing, a sidebar to its annual Brainwave programming that focuses on ways to ease the mind, body, and spirit and get on the path to enlightenment. “On Meditation” combines short biographical portraits with talks pairing artists and Zen teachers with scientists. The series begins February 8 with “The Monk,” teaming the Venerable Metteyya with Weill Cornell neurosurgeon Philip E. Steig at 3:00, followed at 6:00 by “The Actor,” with Giancarlo Esposito and neuroscientist Moran Cerf. On February 12, “The TM Teacher” brings together David Lynch Foundation director Bob Roth and NYU experimental psychologist Barry Cohen after a short portrait of Lynch talking about his longtime practice of Transcendental Meditation. On February 19, “The Zen Teacher” focuses on Shinge Roko Sherry Chayat Roshi and Princeton neuroscientist Brent A. Field, spurred by a portrait of Zen Buddhist author Peter Matthiessen. On April 11, Hatha yoga expert Elena Brower and Weill Cornell neuropsychologist Kenneth Perrine will delve into “The Yoga Teacher,” while on May 2 “The Congressman” features Ohio congressman Tim Ryan and cognitive scientist Emma Seppala. Tickets for all events are twenty dollars, and more pairings will be added.

AFTERNOON OF A FAUN: TANAQUIL LE CLERCQ

Tanaquil le Clercq

The tragic career of dancer Tanaquil Le Clercq is examined in documentary about Balanchine and Robbins muse

AFTERNOON OF A FAUN: TANAQUIL LE CLERCQ (Nancy Buirski, 2013)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center
144 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
February 5-13
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.com
www.facebook.com/tannyfilm

“Tanny’s body created inspiration for choreographers,” one of the interviewees says in Nancy Buirski’s documentary Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq. “They could do things that they hadn’t seen before.” The American Masters presentation examines the life and career of prima ballerina Tanaquil Le Clercq, affectionately known as Tanny, who took the dance world by storm in the 1940s and ’50s before tragically being struck down by polio in 1956 at the age of twenty-seven. Le Clercq served as muse to both Jerome Robbins, who made Afternoon of a Faun for her, and George Balanchine, who created such seminal works as Western Symphony, La Valse, and Symphony in C for Le Clercq — and married Tanny in 1952. In the documentary, Buirski (The Loving Story) speaks with Arthur Mitchell and Jacques D’Amboise, who both danced with Le Clercq, her childhood friend Pat McBride Lousada, and Barbara Horgan, Balanchine’s longtime assistant, while also including an old interview with Robbins, who deeply loved Le Clercq as well. The film features spectacular, rarely seen archival footage of Le Clercq performing many of the New York City Ballet’s classic works, both onstage and even on The Red Skelton Show. The name Tanaquil relates to the word “omen” — in history, Tanaquil, the wife of the fifth king of Rome, was somewhat of a prophetess who believed in omens — and the film details several shocking omens surrounding her contracting polio. The film would benefit from sharing more information about Le Clercq’s life post-1957 — she died on New Year’s Eve in 2000 at the age of seventy-one — but Afternoon of a Faun is still a lovely, compassionate, and heartbreaking look at a one-of-a-kind performer. A selection of the 2013 New York Film Festival, Afternoon of a Faun returns to the Film Society of Lincoln Center for its official theatrical release February 5-13, with Q&As following the 6:45 screenings on February 5 with D’Amboise and former Alliance of the Arts president Randall Bourscheidt, moderated by producer Ric Burns, on February 7 with Mitchell and Bourscheidt, and on February 8 with Mitchell.

NYC FABMANIA WEEK

fabmania

On February 7, 1964, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr landed at JFK to a wild welcome as they came to America for the first time to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show. New York City is paying tribute to that seminal moment in the history of the Fab Four with Fabmania Week, featuring a host of special events celebrating this golden anniversary. The centerpiece of it all is the fortieth anniversary of the Fest for Beatles Fans, taking place February 7-9 at the Grand Hyatt in Midtown ($32.50-$225). Among the many guests are Cousin Brucie (broadcasting live), Donovan, Billy J. Kramer, Peter Asher, Chad & Jeremy, Freda Kelly, Bob Guren, and Allan Tannenbaum; the Fest also features a re-creation of the Cavern Club, screenings of Ryan White’s Good Ol’ Freda, a marketplace of memorabilia, look-alike and costume contests, and yoga sessions in an ashram, in addition to book signings, art exhibitions, and other tributes. On February 6, Donovan, Asher, Kramer, Kelly, Vince Calandra, and moderator Martin Lewis will take part in the friends-of-the-Beatles panel discussion “It Was 50 Years Ago Today . . . Celebrating 50 Years of the Beatles in the USA” at the 92nd St. Y ($15-$29, 8:15). The Morrison Hotel Gallery exhibit “50th Anniversary of the Beatles’ First US Tour,” curated by Julian Lennon, opens on February 7 and runs through February 28, consisting of twenty-five images, some never before shown in public, of John, Paul, George, and Ringo taken by such photographers as Ken Regan, Charles Trainor, Curt Gunther, Robert Whitaker, Rowland Scherman, and Terry O’Neill.

Curt Gunther’s photograph of the Beatles playing with slot cars is included in Morrison Hotel Gallery exhibit curated by Julian Lennon (photo © Curt Gunther, 1964)

Curt Gunther’s photograph of the Beatles playing with slot cars is included in Morrison Hotel Gallery exhibit curated by Julian Lennon (photo © Curt Gunther, 1964)

The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts will be home to the multimedia exhibition “Ladies and Gentlemen . . . the Beatles!” from February 6 through May 10, examining the effects Beatlemania had on American pop culture during the mid-1960s, comprising interviews, instruments, posters, music, and an oral history booth where fans can share their own memories; there will also be a free symposium on February 9 in the library’s Bruno Walter Auditorium with presentations by Bruce Spizer (“The Beatles Are Coming! The Birth of Beatlemania in America”), Dennis Elsas (“It Was 50 Years Ago Today — The Beatles Invade America”), Chuck Gunderson (“Some Fun Tonight! The Backstage Story of the 1964 Summer North American Tour”), Allan Kozinn (“Studio Days / Touring Years”), and Russ Lease (“The Drop-T Logo and the Most Significant Drumkit in Popular Music History”), emceed by curator Robert Santelli. On February 8, the Town Hall will hold the “America Celebrates the Beatles’ 50th Anniversary All-Star Concert” ($63-$272, 7:30), with a wide-ranging lineup playing songs by and inspired by the Liverpudlian quartet, including Melissa Manchester, Tommy James, Al Jardine, Danny Aiello, Marshal Crenshaw, Larry Kirwin, Aztec Two-Step, Melanie, along with appearances by such Beatles fans as Dick Cavett, Len Berman, the Amazing Kreskin, and Charles Grodin. And on February 8 & 9 at 1:00, the Paley Center will present “The Beatles Invasion 50-Year Celebration: See the Fab Four on the Big Screen, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah,” with showings of the complete Ed Sullivan Show broadcast from February 9, 1964, and the Maysles brothers’ original What’s Happening! The Beatles in the U.S.A. documentary.

REMASTERED AND RESTORED — TREASURES OF FRENCH CINEMA: BOUDU SAVED FROM DROWNING

Jean Renoirs BOUDU SAVED FROM DROWNING is a very different kind of shaggy dog tale

Jean Renoir’s BOUDU SAVED FROM DROWNING is a very different kind of shaggy dog tale

CINÉSALON: BOUDU SAVED FROM DROWNING (BOUDU SAUVÉ DÉS EAUX) (Jean Renoir, 1932)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, February 4, $13, 4:00 & 7:30
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org

After his dog runs away, a homeless tramp jumps into the Seine, only to be rescued by a bookseller who brings him home to stay with his family in Jean Renoir’s 1932 masterpiece, Boudu Saved from Drowning. Adapted by Renoir from René Fauchois’s play — the brief opening scene takes place onstage, announcing that what is to follow is essentially a fable — the depression-era social satire centers on the relationship between the wacky, unpredictable bum, Priapus Boudu (Michel Simon, who also played the lead in the play), and Edouard Lestingois (Charles Granval), a bourgeois bookstore owner cheating on his wife, Emma (Marcelle Hainia), with one of their maids, Anne-Marie (Sévérine Lerczinska). Lestingois first spots Boudu while looking through his telescope at the masses on the Pont des Arts, like a filmmaker shooting a documentary; “I’ve never seen such a perfect tramp!” he declares. (Indeed, Renoir regularly comments on the art of filmmaking in Boudu, especially with his use of music, nearly all of which is eventually revealed to be coming from natural sources.) Lestingois helps save the suicidal Boudu, nursing him quickly back to health and letting him stay at the house, much to the chagrin of his wife. Rather than being thankful, Boudu is a whirling dervish of ill manners, breaking dishes, using fancy lingerie to shine his shoes, and daring to eat sardines with his hands. Despite Boudu’s rudeness, Edouard, Emma, and Ann-Marie are all drawn to him in different ways, particularly Edouard, who dresses Boudu in his clothes as if he were a kind of doppelgänger, an alternate version with a completely different set of expectations and responsibilities. But there’s no controlling the bushy-haired Boudu, who reacts to all stimuli like a child who does whatever he wants, not caring about the consequences. One of the keys to the film is that very barrier, the question as to whether Boudu is a conniving tramp who knows exactly what he’s doing or just a pitiable poor soul with no self-control. Boudu — and, therefore, Simon, who gives a towering, spectacular performance, one of the greatest of early cinema — is part Charlie Chaplin, part Buster Keaton, part Little Rascal, and the influence of the character extends to Denis Lavant’s underground creature in Léos Carax’s Merde short in the Tokyo! omnibus and Eddie Murphy’s Billy Ray Valentine in John Landis’s Trading Places. (The film has also been remade twice; Paul Mazursky’s Down and Out in Beverly Hills stars Nick Nolte as the tramp, while Gérard Depardieu plays the role in Gérard Jugnot’s 2005 Boudu.)

BOUDU

Michel Simon gives one of the great performances of early cinema in Jean Renoir’s masterful social satire

Renoir, who had previously worked with Simon on La Chienne and On purge bébé, frames each shot with careful precision, from squeezing in a large group trying to help the unconscious Boudu to a more open scene in which a fancifully dressed couple is picnicking in the park, reminiscent of an Impressionist painting, calling to mind, of course, Renoir’s father, Pierre-Auguste. Indeed, the younger Renoir sets apart his interiors from his exteriors in the film quite distinctly; indoors, Boudu feels closed in, unable to sleep in a bed, while outdoors he seems much more at home. At one point he rests off the ground in the doorway to the bookstore, neither inside nor out, caught in between the two worlds. But he ultimately makes his choice, and it’s really the only one available to him. A new digital restoration of Boudu Saved from Drowning is screening February 4 at 4:00 & 7:30 as part of the FIAF CinéSalon series “Remastered & Restored: Treasures of French Cinema”; the later screening will be introduced by screenwriter and director Henry Bean (Internal Affairs, The Believer), and both shows will be followed by a wine reception. The three-month festival continues with such other recently restored French classics as Max Ophüls’s Lola Montès (introduced by Lola Montes Schnabel), Jacques Demy’s Une chambre en ville (introduced by Adam Gopnik), and Claude Chabrol’s The Color of Lies (introduced by Jacques Gamblin).