Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) and Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard) explore an extramarital affair in BRIEF ENCOUNTER
CABARET CINEMA: BRIEF ENCOUNTER (David Lean, 1945)
Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th St. at Seventh Ave.
Friday, November 16, free with $7 bar minimum, 9:30
212-620-5000
www.rmanyc.org
“Don’t hurry. I’m perfectly happy,” Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) tells her rather boring husband, Fred (Cyril Raymond), as he returns to his crossword puzzle one night. “How can I possibly say that?” she then thinks to herself. “‘Don’t hurry. I’m perfectly happy.’ If only it were true. Not, I suppose, that anybody’s ever perfectly happy, really. But just to be ordinarily contented, to be at peace. It’s such a little while ago really but it seems an eternity since that train went out of the station, taking him away into the darkness. I was happy then.” In David Lean’s Brief Encounter, one of the greatest romantic films ever made, Laura, a housewife and mother, can’t stop herself from falling for dapper doctor Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard), who is also married. As they explore a potential physical relationship, Laura is wracked with guilt, especially as she keeps bumping into nosy gossip Myrtle Bagot (Joyce Carey). But the two potential lovers are so drawn to each other, filling the holes in each other’s lives, that they consider risking all they have for just one more moment together. Winner of the 1946 Palme d’Or at Cannes, Brief Encounter is told in flashback in Laura’s voice as she goes over every wonderful and terrifying detail in her mind while contemplating whether to spill the beans to the generally oblivious Fred. Written by Noël Coward based on his 1936 one-act play, Still Life, the film features terrifically subtle performances by Johnson and Howard as the daring couple; you can’t help but root for them, despite the possible consequences. Lean, who earned the first of his seven Best Director Oscar nominations for the heartbreaking film, keeps things relatively, well, lean, getting right to the point in less than ninety minutes; he would go on to helm such sprawling epics as The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, and A Passage to India before his death in 1991 at the age of eighty-three. Brief Encounter is screening on November 16 as part of the Rubin Museum Cabaret Cinema series “Happiness is . . .” and will be introduced by journalist Marie Brenner; the series continues through December 28 with such films as Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca, George Cukor’s Camille, and Vincente Minnellis’s An American in Paris, held in conjunction with the larger Rubin Museum program “Happy Talk.”
“I consider myself more of a chess player,” Ai Weiwei says at the beginning of Never Sorry, Alison Klayman’s revealing documentary about the larger-than-life Chinese artist and dissident. “My opponent makes a move, I make a move. Now I’m waiting for my opponent to make the next move.” Over the last several years, Ai has become perhaps the most famous and controversial artist in the world, primarily since he participated in the design of Beijing National Stadium, known as the Bird’s Nest, for the 2008 Summer Olympics, then denounced the Games on political grounds. Ai gives director, producer, and cinematographer Klayman, making her first full-length film, remarkable access to his personal and professional life as he gets physically abused by Chinese police, prepares to open major exhibits in Munich and London, and visits with his young son, Ai Lao, the result of a tryst with Wang Fen, an editor on his underground films. Klayman speaks with Ai Weiwei’s devoted wife, Lu Qing, an artist who publicly fought for his freedom when he disappeared in 2011; his mother, Gao Ying, who spent time in a labor camp with her dissident-poet husband, the late Ai Quing; and such fellow Chinese artists and critics as Chen Danqing, Feng Boyi, Hsieh Tehching, and Gu Changwei, who speak admiringly of Ai’s dedication to his art and his fearless search for the truth. A round man with a long, graying bear, Ai is a fascinating, complicated character, a gentle bull who openly criticizes his country because he loves it so much. He is a social media giant, making documentaries that are available for free on the internet and revolutionizing the way Twitter and the blogosphere are used. Ai risks his own freedom by demanding freedom for all, calling for government transparency before and after he is secretly arrested, not afraid of the potential repercussions. And he is also a proud cat lover — more than forty felines regularly roam around his studio — eagerly showing off one talented kitty that has a unique way of opening a door. Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry shows Ai to be an honorable, supremely principled human being who has deep respect for the history of China and a fierce determination to improve its future, no matter the personal cost. The film completed its extended run at the IFC Center on November 8, but it will have an encore screening there on November 13, with Klayman on hand, as part of the DOC NYC festival, a week of nonfiction screenings that also includes such works as Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi’s 5 Broken Cameras, with Michael Moore in attendance; Rob Fruchtman and Lisa Fruchtman’s Sweet Dreams, with the directors and special guests participating in a discussion; and Mary Kerr’s 
Seán Ó Cualáín puts one of the most iconic photographs ever of New York City under the microscope in the interesting yet too often slipshod documentary Men at Lunch. In 1932, a photographer snapped a picture of eleven construction workers having lunch while sitting atop a girder on what would become the sixty-ninth floor of the RCA Building in Rockefeller Center. The men are casually talking, having a smoke, and holding white cardboard lunchboxes while dangling their feet some 850 feet in the air, a bustling city below them, Central Park sprawled out behind them. Narrated by Fionnula Flanagan (Ulysses, Waking Ned Devine), the film delves into who the men might be, attempts to figure out whether it was indeed Charles C. Ebbets who took the photo, and seeks to put the picture into the social and cultural context of the depression and the wave of immigration, focusing on the Irish (the film is an Irish production), many of whom went into the construction industry. “This is a photograph in which every element of photography and of New York City kind of come together with spectacular panache,” filmmaker Ric Burns says. But while Ó Cualáín employs captivating archival footage as he tries to solve the photograph’s many mysteries, he extends the focus too far, biting off more than he can chew in a mere seventy minutes, as a handful of talking heads and Niall Murphy’s text make grand statements about the human condition in the twentieth century that are too often a reach, then spends too much time with a pair of Irish characters who believe they are related to two of the men in the picture. Still, the part of the film that zeroes in on the taking of the photograph is absolutely fascinating. Men at Lunch is making its U.S. premiere at the DOC NYC festival November 10 at the SVA Theatre and November 14 at the IFC Center, with Ó Cualáín on hand at the first screening to talk about the film.
