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FILM FORUM JR.: THE RED BALLOON

French classic THE RED BALLOON kicks off new family-friendly Sunday-morning series at Film Forum

THE RED BALLOON (LE BALLON ROUGE) (Albert Lamorisse, 1956)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Sunday, January 6, $7, 11:00 am
Series continues through August 11
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org

Lovingly restored five years ago by Janus Films in a new 35mm print, Albert Lamorisse’s The Red Balloon, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, tells the story of a young boy (Pascal Lamorisse, the director’s son) who makes friends with an extraordinary red balloon, which follows him through the streets of Belleville in Paris, waits for him while he is in school, and obeys his every command. But the neighborhood kids are afraid of this stranger and go on a mission to burst the young boy’s bubble. Lamorisse gives life and emotion to the balloon (more than twenty-five thousand were used in the making of the film) in a masterful use of simple special effects well before CGI and other modern technology. The Red Balloon, which also features the splendid music of Maurice Leroux and the fine photography of Edmond Séchan, is kicking off the new series “Film Forum Jr.” on January 6 along with Robert Cannon’s Oscar-winning 1950 animated short Gerald McBoing McBoing (followed by a Gerald McBoing McBoing sound-alike contest) and Claude Berri’s Oscar-winning live-action short Le Poulet. The new Film Forum series will be screening family-friendly movies at 11:00 on Sunday mornings; upcoming programs include Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr., Creature from the Black Lagoon in 3D, the Marx Brothers’ Horse Feathers, and the original Frankenstein and King Kong.

NINOTCHKA

Greta Garbo and Melvyn Douglas get involved in a battle of wits and ideologies in Ernst Lubitsch’s classic romantic comedy NINOTCHKA

NINOTCHKA (Ernst Lubitsch, 2012)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Through January 3
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org

Greta Garbo laughs — and says she doesn’t want to be alone — in Ernst Lubitsch’s classic pre-Cold War comedy Ninotchka, currently showing in a new 35mm print at Film Forum through January 3. In her next-to-last film, Garbo is sensational as Nina Ivanovna “Ninotchka” Yakushova, a Russian envoy sent to Paris to clean up a mess left by three comrade stooges, Iranov (Sig Ruman), Buljanov (Felix Bressart), and Kopalsky (Alexander Granach). The hapless trio from the Russian Trade Board had been sent to France to sell jewelry previously owned by the Grand Duchess Swana (Ina Claire) and now in the possession of the government following the 1917 Russian Revolution. But the duchess’s lover, Count Léon d’Algout (Melvyn Douglas), gets wind of the plan and attempts to break up the deal while also introducing the three men to the many decadent pleasures of a free, capitalist society. Then in waltzes the stern, by-the-book Ninotchka, who wants to set the Russian men straight, as well as Léon. “As basic material, you may not be bad,” she tells him atop the Eiffel Tower, “but you are the unfortunate product of a doomed culture.” At first, Ninotchka speaks robotically, spouting the company line, but she loosens up considerably once Léon shows her what communism has been depriving her of, yet it’s difficult for her to turn her back on the cause, leading to numerous hysterical conversations — the razor-sharp script was written by Charles Brackett, Walter Reisch, and Billy Wilder, based on a story by Melchior Lengyel — that serve as both a battle of the sexes and social commentary on the Russian and French ways of life. “I’ve heard of the arrogant male in capitalistic society. It is having a superior earning power that makes you that way,” Ninotchka tells Léon shortly after meeting him on a Paris street. “A Russian! I love Russians! Comrade, I’ve been fascinated by your Five-Year Plan for the last fifteen years,” Léon responds, to which Ninotchka tersely replies, “Your type will soon be extinct.” Nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Original Story, and Best Screenplay, Ninotchka is one of the most delightful romantic comedies ever made, filled with little surprises every step of the way (including a serious cameo by Bela Lugosi), serving up a blueprint that has been followed by so many films for nearly three-quarters of a century ever since.

TABU

Miguel Gomes’s award-winning TABU features stories within stories and a curious crocodile

TABU (Miguel Gomes, 2012)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
December 26 – January 8
212-727-8110
www.adoptfilms.net
www.filmforum.org

Portuguese director Miguel Gomes, inspired by F. W. Murnau’s 1931 two-part Tabu and stories related to him by family members in addition to a band featured in his second film, charms and confuses in his third film, the highly unusual and intriguing Tabu. Shot in alluring black-and-white by Rui Poças, the film begins with a captivating, intensely sad tale of lost love narrated by Gomes that takes place prior to the Portuguese Colonial War. That section is followed by the introduction of Pilar (Teresa Madruga), a relatively ordinary, very kind middle-aged woman in modern-day Lisbon who watches out for her elderly neighbor, Aurora (Laura Soveral), a gambling addict who lives with her black maid, Santa (Isabel Cardoso), whom she accuses of performing voodoo on her. As Aurora’s mental and physical health worsens, she sends Pilar and Santa to find a man named Gian Luca Ventura (Henrique Espírito Santo), whose recalling of his youthful adventures as a wild, carefree musician (Carloto Cotta) with the beautiful young Aurora (Ana Moreira) takes up the rest of the film. The long flashback, which again returns to a time before the colonial war, is told completely in voice-over, like a silent film with subtitles, the only sound coming from the 1960s music made by the group led by Gian Luca’s best friend, Mário (Manuel Mesquita), and Aurora’s husband (Ivo Müller). (Yes, that song by the pool is actually the Ramones.) Dividing the film into two parts, “Paradise Lost” and “Paradise,” Gomes (The Face You Deserve, Our Beloved Month of August) and cowriter Mariana Ricardo investigate forbidden romance, colonialism, racism, class structure, and haunting memories in stories within stories that give Tabu an atmosphere of mystery and impending doom. Linking it all together is an African crocodile with thoughts of escape. Winner of the FIPRESCI Jury Prize and Alfred Baeur Prize for Artistic Innovation at the 2012 Berlin Film Festival, Tabu is an aural and visual wonder, a uniquely structured film deserving of multiple viewings in order to grasp its full impact, although do not expect all questions to be answered in clear-cut ways.

JEAN-LOUIS TRINTIGNANT: A MAN AND A WOMAN / MY NIGHT AT MAUD’S

Anouk Aimée and Jean-Louis Trintignant play characters trying to escape their pasts in Claude Lelouch’s A MAN AND A WOMAN

A MAN AND A WOMAN (UN HOMME ET UNE FEMME) (Claude Lelouch, 1966)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Sunday, December 16, and Monday, December 17
Series runs through December 20
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org

Winner of both the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film and the Palme d’Or at Cannes, Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman is one of the most popular, and most unusual, romantic love stories ever put on film. Oscar-nominated Anouk Aimée stars as Anne Gauthier and Jean-Louis Trintignant as Jean-Louis Duroc, two people who each has a child in a boarding school in Deauville. Anne, a former actress, and Jean-Louis, a successful racecar driver, seem to hit it off immediately, but they both have pasts that haunt them and threaten any kind of relationship. Shot in three weeks with a handheld camera by Lelouch, who earned nods for Best Director and Best Screenplay (with Pierre Uytterhoeven), A Man and a Woman is a tour-de-force of filmmaking, going from the modern day to the past via a series of flashbacks that at first alternate between color and black-and-white, then shift hues in curious, indeterminate ways. Much of the film takes place in cars, either as Jean-Louis races around a track or the protagonists sit in his red Mustang convertible and talk about their lives, their hopes, their fears. The heat they generate is palpable, making their reluctance to just fall madly, deeply in love that much more heart-wrenching, all set to a memorable soundtrack by Francis Lai. Lelouch, Trintignant, and Aimée revisited the story in 1986 with A Man and a Woman: 20 Years Later, without the same impact and success. A new print of the original will be shown December 16-17 in a grand double feature with Eric Rohmer’s My Night at Maud’s as part of Film Forum’s two-week tribute to Trintignant, leading up to the theatrical release of the French star’s latest, Michael Haneke’s remarkable Palme d’Or winner Amour, which once again displays the actor’s unique range and sensitivity in an unforgettable performance that is likely to finally make him much better known in the United States, at the tender age of eighty-two.

Jean-Louis (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is more than a little intrigued by Maud (Françoise Fabian) in the fourth of Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales

MY NIGHT AT MAUD’S (MA NUIT CHEZ MAUD) (Eric Rohmer, 1969)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Sunday, December 16, and Monday, December 17
Series runs through December 20
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org

Nominated for the Palme d’Or and a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, My Night at Maud’s, Éric Rohmer’s fourth entry in his Six Moral Tales series (Clarie’s Knee, Love in the Afternoon), continues the French director’s fascinating exploration of love, marriage, and tangled relationships. Three years removed from playing the romantic racecar driver Jean-Louis in Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman, Jean-Louis Trintignant again stars as a man named Jean-Louis, this time a single thirty-four-year-old Michelin engineer living a relatively solitary life in the French suburb of Clermont. A devout Catholic, he is developing an obsession with a fellow churchgoer, the blonde, beautiful Françoise (Marie-Christine Barrault), about whom he knows practically nothing. After bumping into an old school friend, Vidal (Antoine Vitez), the two men delve into deep discussions of religion, Marxism, Pascal, mathematics, Jansenism, and women. Vidal then invites Jean-Louis to the home of his girlfriend, Maud (Françoise Fabian), a divorced single mother with open thoughts about sexuality, responsibility, and morality that intrigue Jean-Louis, for whom respectability and appearance are so important. The conversation turns to such topics as hypocrisy, grace, infidelity, and principles, but Maud eventually tires of such talk. “Dialectic does nothing for me,” she says shortly after explaining that she always sleeps in the nude. Later, when Jean-Louis and Maud are alone, she tells him, “You’re both a shamefaced Christian and a shamefaced Don Juan.” Soon a clearly conflicted Jean-Louis is involved in several love triangles that are far beyond his understanding, so he again seeks solace in church. My Night at Maud’s is a classic French tale, with characters spouting off philosophically while smoking cigarettes, drinking wine and other cocktails, and getting naked. Shot in black-and-white by Nestor Almendros, the film roams from midnight mass to a single woman’s bed and back to church, as Jean-Louis, played with expert concern by Trintignant, is forced to examine his own deep desires and how they relate to his spirituality. Fabian (Belle de Jour, The Letter) is outstanding as Maud, whose freedom titillates and confuses Jean-Louis. One of Rohmer’s best, most accomplished works despite its haughty intellectualism, My Night at Maud’s is screening December 16-17 at Film Forum in a terrific double feature with A Man and a Woman as part of its “Trintignant” series.

JEAN-LOUIS TRINTIGNANT: THE CONFORMIST

Jean-Louis Trintignant tries to find his place in the world in Bernardo Bertolucci’s lush masterpiece, THE CONFORMIST

THE CONFORMIST (IL CONFORMISTA) (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Friday, December 7, and Saturday, December 8
Series runs December 7-20
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org

Based on the novel by Alberto Moravia, Bernardo Bertolucci’s gorgeous masterpiece, The Conformist, is a political thriller about paranoia, pedophilia, and trying to find one’s place in a changing world. Jean-Louis Trintignant stars as Marcello Clerici, a troubled man who suffered childhood traumas and is now attempting to join the fascist secret police. To prove his dedication to the movement, he is ordered to assassinate one of his former professors, the radical Luca Quadri (Enzo Tarascio), who is living in France. He falls for Quadri’s much younger wife, Anna (Dominique Sanda), who takes an intriguing liking to Clerici’s wife, Giulia (Stefania Sandrelli), while Manganiello (Gastone Moschin) keeps a close watch on him, making sure he will carry out his assignment. The Conformist, made just after The Spider’s Stratagem and followed by Last Tango in Paris, captures one man’s desperate need to belong, to become a part of Mussolini’s fascist society and feel normal at the expense of his real inner feelings and beliefs. An atheist, he goes to church to confess because Giulia demands it. A bureaucrat, he is not a cold-blooded killer, but he will murder a part of his past in order to be accepted by the fascists (as well as Bertolucci’s own past, as he makes a sly reference to his former mentor, Jean-Luc Godard, by using the French auteur’s phone number and address for Quadri’s). Production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro bathe the film in lush Art Deco colors as Bertolucci moves the story, told in flashbacks, through a series of set pieces that include an erotic dance by Anna and Giulia, a Kafkaesque visit to a government ministry, and a stunning use of black and white and light and shadow as Marcello and Giulia discuss their impending marriage. The Conformist is a multilayered psychological examination of a complex figure living in complex times, as much about the 1930s as the 1970s, as the youth of the Western world sought personal, political, and sexual freedom. The Conformist kicks off Film Forum’s two-week tribute to Trintignant, which also includes such double features as Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colors: Red and François Truffaut’s Confidentially Yours, Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman and Eric Rohmer’s My Night at Maud’s, and Jacques Deray’s The Outside Man and René Clement’s And Hope to Die in addition to Dino Risi’s Il Sorpasso, Sergio Corbucci’s The Great Silence, Costa-Gavras’s Z, and others, leading up to the theatrical release of Trintignant’s latest, Michael Haneke’s remarkable Palme d’Or winner Amour, which once again displays the actor’s unique range and sensitivity in an unforgettable performance that is likely to finally make him much better known in the United States, at the tender age of eighty-two.

BEWARE OF MR. BAKER

Crotchety old drummer Ginger Baker has quite a story to tell in BEWARE OF MR. BAKER

BEWARE OF MR. BAKER (Jay Bulger, 2012)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
November 28 – December 11
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org
www.bewareofmrbaker.com

“A great virtuoso madman,” “scary,” “a motherfucker,” “a lovable rogue,” “a dope addict,” “the hammer of the gods,” “a force of nature,” “horrible,” “the world’s greatest drummer” — these are just some of the terms of affection heaped on legendary drummer Ginger Baker by his friends, relatives, and musical colleagues at the beginning of Jay Bulger’s propulsive documentary, Beware of Mr. Baker. In 2009, after spending three months with Baker and his family in South Africa, Bulger published the in-depth article “The Devil and Ginger Baker” in Rolling Stone. Two years later, Bulger went back to expand the story into a feature-length film, but Baker was not about to make it easy for him, continually insulting his questions, calling him names, and even cracking him in the nose with his cane. “He influenced me as a drummer but not as a person,” Bad Company and Free drummer Simon Kirke says of Baker, an opinion shared by many in this revealing film. Baker might be crotchety, but he also opens up to Bulger, particularly in describing when, as a child during WWII, he would hear the bombings outside, sounds that would have an impact on his playing. Bulger speaks with such other percussionists as the Rolling Stones’ Charlie Watts, Rush’s Neal Peart, the Grateful Dead’s Mickey Hart, Metallica’s Lars Ulrich, the Police’s Stewart Copeland, Vanilla Fudge’s Carmine Appice, and Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason, as well as such former Baker bandmates as Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, and Steve Winwood, who all rave about Baker’s remarkable abilities behind the kit while also delving into his self-destructive behavior, which led him through a parade of groups, home countries, and spouses. “I don’t know if it’s his ability to move on or it’s his inability to stay,” points out Baker’s third wife, Karen Loucks Rinedollar, a statement that applies to both Baker’s personal and professional lives.

Drummer Ginger Baker and director Jay Bulger developed a rather unique relationship during the making of fascinating documentary

Through photographs, old and new interviews, playful animation, and superb archival footage of live performances, Bulger traces Baker’s career path from the Graham Bond Organisation, Cream, Blind Faith, Ginger Baker’s Air Force, the Baker Gurvitz Army, and Masters of Reality to his little-known collaboration with Fela Kuti and his drum battles with three of his four major influences: Phil Seamen, Elvin Jones, and Art Blakey. (The fourth is Max Roach; Baker gets emotional discussing how all four men eventually became friends of his.) In ninety-two freewheeling minutes, Bulger crafts a fascinating portrait of a wild anomaly, an immensely talented musician whose difficult, unpredictable personality and selfish refusal to ever compromise continues to result in controversy and separation everywhere he goes. Yet through it all, everyone still speaks fondly of Baker; Bruce might talk about how much they hated each other and couldn’t stand playing together — Baker once punched Bruce onstage in the face for stepping on his drum solo — but in the end Bruce can’t help but profess his love for the enigmatic, eclectic Baker. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2012 SXSW festival, Beware of Mr. Baker begins a two-week run at Film Forum on November 28, with Bulger in attendance at the 8:20 show on opening night to talk about the film.

THE MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT

Goofy chemist Sid Stratton (Alec Guinness) is looking to revolutionize the textile industry in the Ealing classic THE MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT

THE MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT (Alexander Mackendrick, 1951)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
November 16-22
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org

Alexander Mackendrick’s splendid 1951 Ealing comedy The Man in the White Suit is a hysterical Marxist fantasy about corporations, unions, and the working man that doesn’t feel dated in the least. Alec Guinness stars as Sidney Stratton, a brilliant scientist relegated to lower-class jobs at textile mills while he works feverishly on a secret product that he believes will revolutionize the industry — and the world. After being fired by Michael Corland (Michael Gough) at one factory, Sid goes over to Birnley’s, run by Alan Birnley (Cecil Parker, whose voiceover narration begins and ends the film). As Sid develops his groundbreaking product, he also develops a liking for Birnley’s daughter, Daphne (Joan Greenwood), who is preparing to marry Corland. Meanwhile, tough-talking union leader Bertha (Vida Hope) also takes a shine to the absentminded chemist, who soon finds himself on the run, chased by just about everyone he’s ever met, not understanding why they all are so against him. Guinness is at his goofy best as Sid, a loner obsessed with the challenge he has set for himself; his makeshift, Rube Goldberg-like chemistry sets are a riot, bubbling over with silly noises like they’re in a cartoon. But at the heart of the film lies some fascinating insight on the nature of big business that is still relevant today. Nominated for an Oscar for Best Screenplay, The Man in the White Suit is an extremely witty film, expertly directed (and cowritten) by Mackendrick, who would go on to make such other great pictures as The Ladykillers and Sweet Smell of Success and would have turned one hundred this year. It’s easy to imagine that if someone in a textile mill today came up with a similar invention as Stratton’s, the same arguments against it would arise, suppressing progress in favor of personal interest and preservation.