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

LAST FLIGHT HOME

Filmmaker Ondi Timoner says goodbye to her father in Last Flight Home

LAST FLIGHT HOME (Ondi Timoner, 2022)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, October 7
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.interloperfilms.com

Filmmaker Ondi Timoner and her family say goodbye to their beloved patriarch in the remarkable Last Flight Home, an honest, deeply human example of how we face death. At the age of ninety-two, Eli Timoner, husband, father, grandfather, friend, boss, and patient, decided that it was time for him to die. “I’ll always be looking down on all of you. Help me go there and end all this agony,” he says from his bed in his California living room.

Eli had spent the previous forty years partially paralyzed, having suffered a debilitating stroke at the age of fifty-three shortly after getting his neck cracked by a masseuse. Because of his disability, he ended up losing his business — he had been the president of Laura Lee Candy and later founded Air Florida — but still managed to put his three children, Rachel (a rabbi), David, and Ondi, through Yale.

The Timoner clan very carefully follows California’s End of Life Option Act, which specifies a fifteen-day period in which the patient goes through a series of medical tests and legal requirements that will allow him to die with dignity, in this case at home surrounded by family. During this time, friends and relatives visit Eli, in person and online, as it is February 2021 and the Covid-19 pandemic is raging. Most of these meetings are warm and happy; everyone is extolling Eli’s life, not mourning his coming passing.

Even as his body fades, his mind is still sharp as he shares memories, tells bad jokes, praises Joe Biden and Rachel Maddow — Eli is a fiercely dedicated liberal — and ponders regrets that haunt him. He gives words of wisdom to his children and grandchildren, who let him know how much they love him and how important he will always be to them, and he returns the love. “You give love, you get love,” he advises one of his grandsons.

“To know this is coming is a luxury,” Ondi says to the hospice nurse, Candice Carsey, and they take full advantage of that, putting together a farewell list, reviewing Eli’s obituary with him, and arranging for the burial plot and funeral. Two-time Sundance winner Ondi (We Live in Public, Dig!) was not initially planning to make a documentary about her father and his passing; she set up unobtrusive cameras to capture the events for herself because that is what she has always done, how she processes things. It wasn’t until her sister asked her to make a memorial video for a Zoom service that she realized the treasure trove of material she had amassed honoring her father’s life. Serving as writer, director, photographer, producer, and editor, Ondi intercuts archival material, including family photographs, home movies, and clips of Eli’s business successes. Her partner, Morgan Doctor, composed the moving score.

As the days count down to March 3, 2021, the viewer feels as if they have become part of the Timoners’ extended family, gaining understanding of the various characters and feeling their pain and love. The film goes beyond cinéma verité or fly-on-the-wall witnessing; it’s a privilege to be invited into what is normally such a private, personal experience. Death is something everyone has their own relationship with, but Ondi turns her father’s passing into a communal gathering that celebrates life as well as dying with dignity.

“Long time since I felt your warmth. I’m so glad to bathe in it,” Eli tells his former daughter-in-law, Felicia Park-Rogers, as they say goodbye to each other. With Last Flight Home, we all get to bathe in the warmth of an ordinary yet extraordinary human being.

Last Flight Home opens October 7 at IFC, with Ondi Timoner participating in Q&As with special guests following the 7:15 shows that night (moderated by Amy Berg) and October 8 (moderated by Sandi DuBowski).

NYFF60 SPOTLIGHT: BONES AND ALL

Maren (Taylor Russell) and Lee (Timothée Chalamet) try to find love among so much blood in Bones and All

BONES AND ALL (Luca Guadagnino, 2022)
New York Film Festival, Film at Lincoln Center
Thursday, October 6, Alice Tully Hall, 9:00
Saturday, October 8, Alice Tully Hall, 2:45
Tuesday, October 11, Alamo Drafthouse Staten Island, 6:00
Sunday, October 16, Walter Reade Theater, 5:45
www.filmlinc.org

Luca Guadagnino won the Silver Lion for Best Director at the Venice Film Festival for his horror/road movie/romance Bones and All, a Spotlight selection of NYFF60. The Italian director evokes Bonnie and Clyde and Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry in the tale of two young people who were born with a taste for human flesh. But they’re not vampires; they don’t come out only at night, and they don’t just suck out their victims’ blood but go for a much heartier meal.

At a sleepover with a few girls from her new high school, Maren Yearly (Taylor Russell) desperately wants to fit in, but things go astray when she starts munching on one of the girls’ fingers. Her father (André Holland), who has been shuttling her to small towns for years because of her needs, takes off, believing that he cannot protect her anymore, but he leaves behind a cassette tape in which he details her life; she listens to parts of the tape every day as her full story emerges.

On the run, she meets up with fellow cannibal and extremely creepy Sully (Mark Rylance), who is happy to have a companion and wants to become her mentor. But she eventually is back out on the road, hungry and desperate, not wanting to kill, when she meets up with cannibal drifter, Lee (Timothée Chalamet), who provides her with companionship, food, and love as they try to stay alive and not get caught.

Maren (Taylor Russell) and Lee (Timothée Chalamet) take a rare break in new horror romance

Russell (Lost in Space, Waves), who won the Marcello Mastroianni Award for emerging actor at Venice, is captivating as Maren, who just wants to have a normal life. Her eyes are filled with both fear and wonder at the world that awaits her. Chalamet (Call Me by Your Name, Dune) is compelling as the raggedy would-be hero with puppy-dog eyes. Oscar and Tony winner Rylance (Bridge of Spies, Wolf Hall) nearly steals the movie as Sully, until a misbegotten late scene, while Tony and Emmy nominee Michael Stuhlbarg (A Serious Man, Dopesick) is nearly unrecognizable as the wickedly devilish Jake. The film also features Oscar nominee Chloë Sevigny (Boys Don’t Cry, Big Love) as Maren’s mother, Anna Cobb as Kayla, Lee’s sister, Jessica Harper (Suspiria, My Favorite Year) as Maren’s grandmother, and filmmaker David Gordon Green (George Washington, Pineapple Express) as Brad, Jake’s friend.

Adapted by David Kajganich from Camille DeAngelis’s 2015 novel, Bones and All is riddled with plot holes and inconsistencies, asking the audience to suspend disbelief all too often, and its final scenes become clichéd and melodramatic, but it’s worth seeing for Russell’s performance alone, as well as the developing relationship between Maren and Lee, which is like a 1980s version of Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway) and Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty) or Mary (Susan George) and Larry (Peter Fonda), although bloodier in its own way. The soundtrack is a blast, with a score composed by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross and such songs as Leonard Cohen’s “You Want It Darker.” Guadagnino, Russell, and Sevigny will be at Alice Tully Hall on October 6 for a Q&A following the 9:00 screening.

NYFF60 REVIVALS: THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE

Jean-Pierre Léaud stars in Jean Eustache’s New Wave epic The Mother and the Whore, screening in a new 4K restoration at the New York Film Festival

THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE (LA MAMAN ET LA PUTAIN) (Jean Eustache, 1973)
New York Film Festival, Film at Lincoln Center
Wednesday, October 5, Walter Reade Theater, 6:15
Thursday, October 6, Howard Gilman Theater, 6:30
212-355-6160
www.filmlinc.org

Jean-Pierre Léaud gives a bravura performance in French auteur Jean Eustache’s Nouvelle Vague classic, The Mother and the Whore, about love and sex in Paris following the May 1968 cultural revolution. Léaud stars as Alexandre, a jobless, dour flaneur who rambles on endlessly about politics, cinema, music, literature, sex, women’s lib, and lemonade while living with current lover Marie (Bernadette Lafont), obsessing over former lover Gilberte (Isabelle Weingarten), and starting an affair with new lover Veronika (Françoise Lebrun), a quiet nurse with a rather open sexual nature. The film’s three-and-a-half-hour length will actually fly by as you become immersed in the complex characters, the fascinating dialogue, and the excellent cast. Much of the movie consists of long takes in which Alexandre shares his warped view of life and art in small, enclosed spaces, the static camera focusing either on him or his companion. “I’m convinced all recent happenings in the world were meant against me,” he narcissistically says.

Léaud previously appeared in Eustache’ss Le Père Noël a les yeux bleus; the director also made My Little Loves, Numéro zéro, and Une sale histoire in a career cut short by his death in 1981 at the age of forty-two. A new 4K restoration of the nearly fifty-year-old film is being shown October 5 at 6:15 and October 6 at 6:30 as part of the Revivals section of the sixtieth New York Film Festival; Lebrun and restoration producer Charles Gillibert will be at the Walter Reade for a Q&A following the October 5 screening, while Lebrun will introduce the October 6 screening at the Howard Gilman.

WILLIAM SHATNER: STILL BOLDLY GOING

Who: William Shatner, Joshua Brandon, Rabbi Joshua M. Davidson
What: Livestreamed discussion
Where: Temple Emanu-El Streicker Cultural Center online
When: Thursday, October 6, free with RSVP ($28 with a copy of the book), 7:00
Why: “I love the mystery of the universe. I love all the questions that have come to us over thousands of years of exploration and hypotheses. Stars exploding years ago, their light traveling to us years later; black holes absorbing energy; satellites showing us entire galaxies in areas thought to be devoid of matter entirely . . . all of that has thrilled me for years. Where matter in the universe came from, where it’s going, why it’s expanding . . . I know very little, but I know just enough about the universe to be in its thrall, in awe of its mystery.”

So writes William Shatner in his latest book, Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder (Atria, October 4, $28), which includes such essays as “We Belong Together,” “Listen to the Animals,” and “There’s Beauty in Everything.” Now ninety-one, the actor, singer, horseman, and astronaut, whose grandparents emigrated from Ukraine and Lithuania, will launch the tome in a virtual presentation from the Temple Emanu-El Streicker Cultural Center on October 6 at 7:00, speaking with his coauthor, Joshua Brandon, and moderator Rabbi Joshua M. Davidson. Registration is free, or you can order the book with the RSVP for $28. “I probably say wow more now than when I was a child, and I am absolutely enchanted by that fact,” Shatner explains in the introduction. “I don’t know how not to be doing. I really would regret not giving myself a chance to experience something new and to learn in the process.” Words to live by from a living legend.

“HELLZAPOPPIN’: WHAT ABOUT THE BEES?”

Yvonne Rainer’s “last dance” includes a pillow fight at New York Live Arts

Who: Emily Coates, Brittany Bailey, Brittany Engel-Adams, Patricia Hoffbauer, Vincent McCloskey, Emmanuèle Phuon, David Thomson, Timothy Ward, Kathleen Chalfant
What: World premiere
Where: New York Live Arts Theater, 219 West Nineteenth St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
When: October 5-8, $15-$85
Why: Legendary dancer, choreographer, filmmaker, author, and activist Yvonne Rainer asks, “What about the bees?” in what she has announced will be her “last dance.” Premiering October 5-8 at New York Live Arts, “HELLZAPOPPIN’: What about the bees?” takes on systemic racism through text, movement, and live projections, including excerpts from the 1941 Hollywood musical Hellzapoppin’, a reality-busting movie melding film and theater starring Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson, Martha Raye, Mischa Auer, Shemp Howard, Slim and Slam, and Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, and Jean Vigo’s highly influential 1933 antiestablishment film about boarding school, Zero for Conduct. The evening begins with a screening of Rainer’s 2002 half-hour film After Many a Summer Dies the Swan: Hybrid, which expands on a piece she choreographed for Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project incorporating texts by Oscar Kokoschka, Adolf Loos, Arnold Schoenberg, and Ludwig Wittgenstein and rehearsal footage shot by Charles Atlas and Natsuko Inue.

“HELLZAPOPPIN’: What about the bees?” runs October 5-8 at NYLA

A coproduction of NYLA and Performa, “HELLZAPOPPIN’: What about the bees?” will be performed by a mix of dancers and actors, featuring Emily Coates, Brittany Bailey, Brittany Engel-Adams, Patricia Hoffbauer, Vincent McCloskey, Emmanuèle Phuon, David Thomson, Timothy Ward, and Kathleen Chalfant. Rainer also harkens back to her fictional character Apollo Musagetes, leader of the muses, who in 2020 presented “Revisions: A Truncated History of the Universe for Dummies: A Rant Dance, Lecture, and Letter to Humanity.” “I’m going to be veering back and forth between various topics: my aging self-pity, my ‘permanently recovering racism,’ my sometimes evasive appropriation of the notion that not all white people, and not all white women, are racists, and various historical and cultural reflections,” Rainer, who is now eighty-seven, said in a statement. Rainer will participate in a Stay Late conversation with Bill T. Jones following the October 6 show.

NYFF60 MAIN SLATE: TRIANGLE OF SADNESS

Yaya (Charlbi Dean) and Carl (Harris Dickinson) just want to keep enjoying the good life in Triangle of Sadness

TRIANGLE OF SADNESS (Ruben Östlund, 2022)
New York Film Festival, Film at Lincoln Center
Saturday, October 1, Alice Tully Hall, 9:00
Sunday, October 2, Alice Tully Hall, 2:15
Monday, October 3, Walter Reade Theater, 2:30
Monday, October 3, Museum of the Moving Image, 6:00
www.filmlinc.org

About halfway through Ruben Östlund’s brilliant Palme d’Or–winning satire Triangle of Sadness, I let out a sharp, loud laugh that made the people sitting around me wonder if I was okay. I was fine, and there were many more chuckles, snickers, giggles, guffaws, howls, and snorts to come, and not just from me.

In his previous films, Force Majeure and Palme d’Or winner The Square, the Swedish auteur has shown that he never lacks for subtlety as he skewers the lifestyles of the rich but not necessarily famous, mixing fear with farce, pushing both about as far as they can go without breaking.

In Triangle of Sadness, named for the small frown of worry wrinkles between a person’s eyebrows, Östlund channels Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and The Exterminating Angel, Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (the “Autumn Years” segment with Mr. Creosote), and Lina Wertmüller’s romantic class comedy Swept Away . . . by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August, resulting in an outrageously over-the-top condemnation of the privilege born of war and colonialism.

The protagonists are semi-successful male model Carl (Harris Dickinson) and female model and social media influencer Yaya (Charlbi Dean), two extremely beautiful people who are at the center of each of the three parts of the 149-minute film. In the first section, Carl auditions for a runway job and the couple argue over who is going to pick up the check after a fancy dinner. In the second chapter, they mostly enjoy their free luxury cruise aboard a yacht even when all hell breaks loose. And in the finale, they have to figure out how far they will go just to stay alive.

Along the way, they meet a fantastic mélange of characters, including vacuous fashion reporter Lewis (Thobias Thorwid), gluttonous Russian capitalist Dimitry (Zlatko Burić), toilet cleaner Abigail (Dolly de Leon), chief ship steward Paula (Vicki Berlin), ridiculously rich single man Jorma Björkman (Henrik Dorsin), ridiculously rich single woman Vera (Sunnyi Melles), ridiculously rich and demure British couple Clementine (Amanda Walker) and Winston (Oliver Ford Davies), the mysterious Nelson (Jean-Christophe Folly), and alcoholic yacht captain Thomas Smith (Woody Harrelson).

Darius (Arvin Kananian) and Captain Smith (Woody Harrelson) try to keep their balance in Palme d’Or winner

Dickinson (See How They Run, Where the Crawdads Sing) and Dean (Spud, Black Lightning) are magnetic together as flawed glitterati who exist in their own reality, until they don’t. (A star in the making, South African actress and model Dean died tragically this past August at the age of thirty-two.) Burić and Harrelson are a riot as their friendship blossoms amid booze and debates over Karl Marx, capitalism, and socialism. As a bonus, the yacht in the film is the Christina O, which was formerly owned by Aristotle Onassis and Jackie Kennedy. The rest of the large cast plays the dark humor with exquisitely calm, mannered demeanors.

Östlund, who has also written and directed Gitarrmongot, Involuntary, and Play, holds nothing back in Triangle of Sadness; the film could use a bit of trimming here and there, but that’s not his style. He puts it all out there, full steam ahead, damn the torpedoes. (The French title is Sans filtre, or “Without Filter.”) Both Force Majeure and The Square left indelible images in my head, and the same is true with his latest film, which still has me breaking out into laughter when I recall several key moments, such as Dimitry boasting, “I sell shit”; ship steward Alicia (Alicia Eriksson) trying not to say no to a demanding passenger; Captain Smith leaning sideways right before the captain’s dinner, next to his stable second in command, Darius (Arvin Kananian); and Abigail asking fellow survivors who’s in charge. It’s all so much unrelenting madness even as it hits you over the head with its political philosophy.

Triangle of Sadness screens October 1-3 at the New York Film Festival, with Östlund, de Leon, and Burić participating in Q&As following the shows on the first two days at Alice Tully Hall. The film opens in theaters October 7.

THEATER TALKS — DEATH OF A SALESMAN: A CONVERSATION WITH WENDELL PIERCE, SHARON D. CLARKE, ANDRÉ DE SHIELDS, AND MIRANDA CROMWELL

Who: Wendell Pierce, Sharon D. Clarke, André De Shields, Miranda Cromwell, Salamishah Tillet
What: Panel discussion on new Death of a Salesman revival
Where: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (NYPL), 515 Malcolm X Blvd., and online
When: Monday, October 3, free with RSVP, 7:00
Why: Lee J. Cobb, George C. Scott, Dustin Hoffman, Brian Dennehy, and Philip Seymour Hoffman have all starred as Willy Loman in Broadway productions of Arthur Miller’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 1949 American classic, Death of a Salesman. You can now add to that prestigious list Wendell Pierce, in the latest Broadway revival, now in previews for an October 9 opening at the Hudson Theatre. The cast features Pierce and Sharon D. Clarke as Willy’s wife, Linda — both won Oliviers for their performances in the West End production — along with André De Shields as Ben, Khris Davis as Biff, and McKinley Belcher III as Happy, the first all-Black Loman family on the Great White Way.

On October 3 at 7:00, Pierce (The Wire, The Piano Lesson), Clarke (Holby City, Caroline, or Change), and Tony and Emmy winner De Shields (Hadestown, The Full Monty) will be joined by director Miranda Cromwell (Magic Elves, Pigeon English) and moderator and Pulitzer Prize winner Salamishah Tillet for a discussion at the NYPL’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; presented in conjunction with the 92nd St. Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center, the free event is being held in person and online, and advance registration is required. “So many of the elements of the play are fundamentally questioning of the American dream, and when you put that through the perspective of the Black experience, that enriches it,” Cromwell said in a statement. “The obstacles are harder, the stakes become higher.”