Cléo (Corinne Marchand) looks back at her life in Agnès Varda’s Nouvelle Vague classic
CINÉSALON: CLEO FROM 5 TO 7 (CLÉO DE 5 À 7) (Agnès Varda, 1962)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, January 28, $13, 4:00 & 7:30
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org
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 (Le Bonheur, Vagabond) 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. A new digital restoration of Cléo de 5 à 7 is screening January 28 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 French author Catherine Cusset. The three-month festival continues with such other recently restored French classics as Jean Renoir’s Boudu Saved from Drowning (introduced by Henry Bean), Jacques Demy’s Une chambre en ville (introduced by Adam Gopnik), and Max Ophüls’s Lola Montès (introduced by Lola Montes Schnabel).
There’s something always lurking just beneath the surface of Mitsuo Yanagimachi’s 1985 drama, Himatsuri, and when it finally arrives, it’s shocking and explosive. In the small coastal village of Nigishima, the fishermen are at odds with the lumberjacks. Someone is dumping oil in the water, killing the fish, and the chief suspect is Tatsuo (Kinya Kitaoji), a strong woodsman who chops down trees, raises dogs to hunt down wild boars, shoots monkeys, cheats on his wife with a former girlfriend turned hussy (Kiwako Taichi), and is the only villager who refuses to sell his property to a company intent on building a marine park there. He both cavorts with and defies nature and the local spiritual beliefs, at one point swimming naked in the waters leading to a sanctuary. “Only I can make the goddess feel like a woman,” he proclaims. Carefully watching and worshiping Tatsuo is young Ryota (Ryota Nakamoto), who also oversteps boundaries, using sacred branches in animal traps, and is forced to expose himself to the goddess in retribution. Soon a storm comes, transforming Tatsuo and leading to a horrific conclusion. Set in the area where the Japanese creation myth takes place, Himatsuri is a strange creature indeed, with confusing plot twists, bizarre transitions, and some very weird scenes, with a creepy score by Tōru Takemitsu and lush photography by Tamura Masaki. Yanagimachi’s tale, written by Kenji Nakagami, is no mere clarion call to save the environment; instead, it’s an examination of man’s inhumanity to nature, the disregard for the trees, the oceans, the animals (while also commenting on religion, homosexuality, and contemporary society). Yanagimachi (God Speed You! Black Emperor; Ai ni tsuite, Tokyo) mixes genres, from horror to thriller to romance to musical, as he tells the story of one man who just can’t stop himself.
Director and star Bruce Ramsay strips down and condenses the Bard in his 1940s-set noirish update of Hamlet, but in doing so he also drains one of Shakespeare’s most powerful tragedies of all its poetry and emotion. Trimming the tale down to a far-too-lean eighty-seven minutes, Ramsay cuts out characters and reinterprets scenes to focus on the family-related aspects of the story of betrayal, madness, murder, and revenge, using the original text for the most part while setting the entire film in one large house (actually the University Women’s Club in Vancouver). He fills the cast with veterans of Canada’s Bard on the Beach series, including Gillian Barber as Gertrude, Duncan Fraser as Polonius, Haig Sutherland as Laertes, Martin Sims as Guildenstern, Russell Roberts as the ghost of Hamlet’s father, and Lara Gilchrist as Ophelia; Welsh actor Peter Wingfield plays Claudius, with Stephen Lobo as Horatio and Bret Stait as Rosencrantz. The bare-bones film was shot in three days (for a mere — and rather admirable — $27,000), but it’s taken nearly three years for it to get a U.S. theatrical release, and it’s easy to see why. Ramsay’s Hamlet is more like a failed episode of Masterpiece Theatre, sort of Agatha Christie meets Downton Abbey in postwar London, than a fresh new look at the extremely familiar play, though it is a noble attempt. Indeed, “I must be cruel to be kind. Thus bad begins and worse remains behind.” Hamlet opens at Cinema Village on January 10, with Ramsay taking part in Q&As following the 7:10 screenings on Friday and Saturday night.