Tag Archives: Francesca Beale Theater

11 FLOWERS

11 FLOWERS

Four friends grow up during the end of the Cultural Revolution in Wang Xiaoshuai’s 11 FLOWERS

11 FLOWERS (Wang Xiaoshuai, 2011)
Quad Cinema, 34 West 13th St., 212-255-2243
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center
Francesca Beale Theater, 144 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave., 212-875-5601
Opens Friday, February 22
firstrunfeatures.com/11flowers

Sixth Generation Chinese director Wang Xiaoshuai (Beijing Bicycle, Shanghai Dreams) reaches back into his childhood in the poignant, autobiographical 11 Flowers. Set in 1975 near the end of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the film is seen through the eyes of eleven-year-old Wang Han (Liu Wenquing), who lives with his family in a poor, remote village in Guizhou province as part of the Third Front movement, in which the nation moved industry inland to protect it from possible Soviet attack. Wang’s father (Wang Jingchun) spends the week away from his wife (Yan Ni), son, and young daughter (Zhao Shiqi), working at an opera house in town. When one of Wang’s teachers, Miss Zhou (Yu Yue), tells Wang that he should get a clean shirt so he can look good as the new class gym leader, his mother at first is mad at him for even asking for such a luxury item but ultimately makes him one. However, while fooling around with his friends, Louse (Zhang Kexuan), Mouse (Zhong Guo Liuxing), and Wei Jun (Lou Yihao), something happens to the shirt, which soon winds up in the hands of a possible murderer (Wang Ziyi) on the run from the police. Based on actual events that happened to him as a child, Wang’s 11 Flowers is a beautifully crafted coming-of-age film, reminiscent of Rob Reiner’s Stand by Me. Wang, who was known as Wang Han when he was a boy, narrates the opening and closing himself, adding yet more personal touches to the tale. Hovering over the work is the specter of the Cultural Revolution; in one moving scene, adults have gathered for a small dinner party, but when one of them starts singing an old favorite tune, Wang’s father quickly changes it to a Mao-endorsed propaganda song for fear of being caught doing something against the government’s wishes. Much like Wang’s father teaches his son how to paint, interpreting reality on canvas, director Wang interprets his childhood reality onscreen in this small gem of a film.

LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE

The lives of three very different individuals intertwine in Abbas Kiarostami’s remarkable LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE

LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE (Abbas Kiarostami, 2012)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, 144 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave., 718-636-4100
Landmark Sunshine Cinema, 143 East Houston St. between First & Second Aves., 212-330-8182
Opens Friday, February 15
www.ifcfilms.com

Following the Tuscany-set Certified Copy, his first film made outside of his home country, master Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami heads to Japan for the beautifully told Like Someone in Love. Rin Takanashi stars as Akiko, a sociology student supporting herself as an escort working for bar owner and pimp Hiroshi (Denden). An older, classy businessman, Hiroshi insists that Akiko is the only person to handle a certain client, so, despite her loud objections, she is put in a cab and taken to meet Takashi (Tadashi Okuno), an elderly professor who seems to just want some company. But soon Akiko unwittingly puts the gentle old man in the middle of her complicated life, which includes her extremely jealous and potentially violent boyfriend, Noriaki (Ryō Kase), and a surprise visit from her grandmother (Kaneko Kubota). Taking its title from the song made famous by, among others, Ella Fitzgerald, Like Someone in Love is an intelligent character-driven narrative that investigates different forms of love and romance in unique and engaging ways. Kiarostami (Taste of Cherry, Close-Up) and cinematographer Katsumi Yanagijima, who has worked on numerous films by Takeshi Kitano, establish their visual style from the very beginning, as an unseen woman, later revealed to be Akiko, is on the phone lying to her abusive boyfriend about where she is, the camera not moving for extended periods of time as people bustle around her in a crowded bar. As is often the case with Kiarostami, who has said that his next film will be set in Italy, much of the film takes place in close quarters, including many in cars, both moving and parked, forcing characters to have to deal with one another and face certain realities they might otherwise avoid. Takanashi is excellent as Akiko, a young woman trapped in several bad situations of her own making, but octogenarian Okuno steals the show in the first lead role of a long career that has primarily consisted of being an extra. The soft look in his eyes, the tender way he shuffles through his apartment, and his very careful diction are simply captivating. Despite his outstanding performance, Okuno is committed to returning to the background in future films, shunning the limelight. A jazz-filled film that at times evokes the more serious work of Woody Allen, another director most associated with a home base but who has been making movies in other cities for a number of years now, Like Someone in Love is like a great jazz song, especially one in which the notes that are not played are more important than those that are.

NIGHT ACROSS THE STREET

NIGHT ACROSS THE STREET

Raúl Ruiz’s final film, NIGHT ACROSS THE STREET, is an abstract, surreal examination of time and memory

THE NIGHT ACROSS THE STREET (LA NOCHE DE ENFRENTE) (Raúl Ruiz, 2012)
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center: Francesca Beale Theater
144 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
February 8-14
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.com

Raúl Ruiz’s last film, Night Across the Street, proves to be a fitting finale for the long career of the Chilean-French auteur, who died at the age of seventy in August 2011, leaving behind a legacy of more than one hundred movies and one hundred plays. An adaptation — or as Ruiz explained it, “adoption” — from a pair of short stories by Imaginist writer Hernán del Solar Night Across the Street follows the odd meanderings of Don Celso (Sergio Hernandez), an old man about to retire from his office job. Past, present, and future, the real and the imagined, merge in abstract, surreal ways as Don Celso goes back to his childhood, where he (played as a boy by Santiago Figueroa) takes his idol, Beethoven (Sergio Schmied), to the movies and gets life lessons from Long John Silver (Pedro Villagra). As an adult, he hangs out with the fictional version of French teacher and writer Jean Giono (Christian Vadim), whose real self and family appear to be elsewhere. And he visits a haunted hotel run by Nigilda (Valentina Vargad) where he believes he will meet his doom. Memories and hallucinations mingle in front of obviously fake backgrounds, strange, unexplained characters appear then disappear, and Don Celso (and Ruiz, of course) has fun with such words as “Antofagasta” and “rhododendron” in a film that Ruiz created to be shown only after his death. (He made the film after being diagnosed with liver cancer, which he survived by getting a transplant, only to die shortly thereafter of a lung infection.) And at the center of it all is one of Ruiz’s favorite themes, time — Don Celso is regularly interrupted by an annoying alarm clock that signals him to take unidentified medication, keeping him alive even as the end beckons. Night Across the Street is an elegiac swan song by a master filmmaker.

NEW RELEASES AT THE FILM SOCIETY: HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE

HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE provides a fascinating inside look at AIDS activists fighting the power

HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE (David France, 2012)
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center: Francesca Beale Theater
144 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Through Thursday, January 24
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.com
www.surviveaplague.com

Contemporary activists stand to learn a lot from the gripping documentary How to Survive a Plague. For his directorial debut, longtime journalist David France, one of the first reporters to cover the AIDS crisis that began in the early 1980s, scoured through more than seven hundred hours of mostly never-before-seen archival footage and home movies of protests, meetings, public actions, and other elements of the concerted effort to get politicians and the pharmaceutical industry to recognize the growing health epidemic and do something as the death toll quickly rose into the millions. Focusing on radical groups ACT UP and TAG (Treatment Action Group), France follows such activist leaders as Peter Staley, Mark Harrington, Larry Kramer, Bob Rafsky, and Dr. Iris Long as they attack the policies of President George H. W. Bush, famously heckle presidential candidate Bill Clinton, and battle to get drug companies to create affordable, effective AIDS medicine, all while continuing to bury loved ones in both public and private ceremonies. France includes new interviews with many key activists who reveal surprising details about the movement, providing a sort of fight-the-power primer about how to get things done. The film also shines a light on lesser-known heroes, several filled with anger and rage, others much calmer, who fought through tremendous adversity to make a difference and ultimately save millions of lives. How to Survive a Plague is screening at the Film Society of Lincoln Center through January 24, celebrating its Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Feature.

SPANISH CINEMA NOW: THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGOISIE

A group of restless bourgeoisie is in search of a dinner party in surreal Luis Buñuel classic

THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE (Luis Buñuel, 1972)
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Walter Reade Theater, 165 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center: Francesca Beale Theater, 144 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
November 23-29, $13
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.com

Winner of the 1972 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is a sharp, cynical skewering of the European power structure, taking on the high-falutin’ hypocrisy of the government, the military, religion, and, primarily, the wealthy class in hysterical vignettes that center around a group of rich friends trying to sit down and enjoy a meal. But every time they get close, they are ultimately thwarted by miscommunication, a corpse, army maneuvers, terrorists, and, perhaps most bizarrely, fake stage chicken. Buñuel regular Fernando Rey is a hoot as Rafael Acosta, the cocaine-dealing ambassador of Miranda who doesn’t take insults well. Stéphane Audran and Jean-Pierre Cassel play the Sénéchals, a lustful couple desperate to finish a romantic rendezvous even as their guests wait, Julien Bertheau is the local bishop who moonlights as a gardener, Claude Piéplu is an erudite colonel not afraid to share his opinion at a haughty cocktail party, and Maria Gabriella Maione is a sexy stranger who might or might not be a revolutionary after Acosta. Meanwhile, Acosta doesn’t mind making a play for Simone Thévenot (Delphine Seyrig) right under her husband’s (Paul Frankeur) nose. And Ines (Milena Vukotic), one of the Sénéchals’ maids, watches it all with a wonderfully subtle disdain. As if the first half of the film were not surreal enough, the second half includes a series of riotous dream sequences involving ghostly apparitions and a bit of the old ultra-violence, either outwardly related by characters or as cinematic surprises dished out by the masterful Buñuel. None too discreet about its myriad charms, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is having a week-long fortieth-anniversary engagement at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in advance of the annual Spanish Cinema Now series, which runs December 7-16 and includes a special sidebar of Buñuel’s Land Without Bread, Tristana, and Viridiana; when you buy a ticket to Discreet Charm, you can get tickets for any Spanish Cinema Now screening for nine dollars by selecting the “Affiliate” option online or showing your ticket stub at the box office.

NYFF50: LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE

The lives of three very different individuals intertwine in Abbas Kiarostami’s remarkable LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE

NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL MAIN SLATE: LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE (Abbas Kiarostami, 2012)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Alice Tully Hall
1941 Broadway at 66th St.
Monday, October 8, Francesca Beale Theater, 6:15
Festival runs through October 14
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.com

Following the Tuscany-set Certified Copy, his first film made outside of his home country, master Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami heads to Japan for the beautifully told Like Someone in Love. Rin Takanashi stars as Akiko, a sociology student supporting herself as an escort working for bar owner and pimp Hiroshi (Denden). An older, classy businessman, Hiroshi insists that Akiko is the only person to handle a certain client, so, despite her loud objections, she is put in a cab and taken to meet Takashi (Tadashi Okuno), an elderly professor who seems to just want some company. But soon Akiko unwittingly puts the gentle old man in the middle of her complicated life, which includes her extremely jealous and potentially violent boyfriend, Noriaki (Ryō Kase), and a surprise visit from her grandmother (Kaneko Kubota). Taking its title from the song made famous by, among others, Ella Fitzgerald, Like Someone in Love is an intelligent character-driven narrative that investigates different forms of love and romance in unique and engaging ways. Kiarostami (Taste of Cherry, Close-Up) and cinematographer Katsumi Yanagijima, who has worked on numerous films by Takeshi Kitano, establish their visual style from the very beginning, as an unseen woman, later revealed to be Akiko, is on the phone lying to her abusive boyfriend about where she is, the camera not moving for extended periods of time as people bustle around her in a crowded bar. As is often the case with Kiarostami, who has said that his next film will be set in Italy, much of the film takes place in close quarters, including many in cars, both moving and parked, forcing characters to have to deal with one another and face certain realities they might otherwise avoid. Takanashi is excellent as Akiko, a young woman trapped in several bad situations of her own making, but octogenarian Okuno steals the show in the first lead role of a long career that has primarily consisted of being an extra. The soft look in his eyes, the tender way he shuffles through his apartment, and his very careful diction are simply captivating. Despite his outstanding performance, Okuno is committed to returning to the background in future films, shunning the limelight. A jazz-filled film that at times evokes the more serious work of Woody Allen, another director most associated with a home base but who has been making movies in other cities for a number of years now, Like Someone in Love is like a great jazz song, especially one in which the notes that are not played are more important than those that are.

NYFF50 HBO DIRECTORS DIALOGUE: ABBAS KIAROSTAMI

The always engaging Abbas Kiarostami will talk about his life and career in a special Directors Dialogue at the fiftieth New York Film Festival (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Film Society of Lincoln Center, Bruno Walter Auditorium
111 Amsterdam Ave. at 66th St.
Saturday, October 6, $15, 6:00
Festival runs through October 14
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.com

A decade ago, master Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami was denied a visa to come to the New York Film Festival to present his latest film, Ten. “It’s a terrible sign of what’s happening in my country today that no one seems to realize or care about the kind of negative signal this sends out to the entire Muslim world,” festival director Richard Peña said at the time. Ten years later, Kiarostami (Close-Up, Taste of Cherry) will be making a special appearance at the fiftieth New York Film Festival, the last one organized by Peña, who is stepping down after twenty-five years. Kiarostami will be speaking with Brooklyn-born writer Phillip Lopate at the Bruno Walter Auditorium on October 6 at 6:00 as part of the HBO Directors Dialogue series. A visual artist who had an exceptional dual show at MoMA and PS1, “Image Maker,” in 2007, Kiarostami has brought the remarkable Like Someone to Love to this year’s festival; the film, set in Japan and featuring outstanding performances by Tadashi Okuno and Rin Takanashi, will have its second and final screening October 8 at the Francesca Beale Theater. Kiarostami is a fascinating figure, a stylish cool cat in ever-present dark glasses who has an engaging knowledge of art and cinema that always makes for a lively discussion. The series continues October 7 with David Chase in conversation with Scott Foundas and October 13 with Robert Zemeckis speaking with Peña.