Tag Archives: Francesca Beale Theater

ERIC ROHMER’S SIX MORAL TALES: LA COLLECTIONNEUSE / MY NIGHT AT MAUD’S

Néstor Almendros shot the beautiful LA COLLECTIONNEUSE, both his and director Eric Rohmer’s first feature film in color

SIX MORAL TALES: LA COLLECTIONNEUSE (THE COLLECTOR) (Eric Rohmer, 1967)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater, Francesca Beale Theater
144 & 165 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
September 16-22; series runs September 16-29
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.org

“Razor blades are words,” art critic Alain Jouffroy tells painter Daniel Pommereulle (Daniel Pommereulle) in one of the prologues at the start of La Collectionneuse, the third film in French master Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales (falling between Suzanne’s Career and My Night at Maud’s). Words might have the ability to cut, but they don’t seem to have much impact on the three people at the center of the film, which offers a sort of alternate take on François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim. Needing a break from his supposedly strenuous life, gallerist Adrien (Patrick Bauchau, who also appeared in La Carrière de Suzanne, Rohmer’s second morality tale) decides to vacation at the isolated St. Tropez summer home of the never-seen Rodolphe. Daniel is also at the house, along with Haydée (Haydée Politoff), a beautiful young woman who spends much of the film in a bikini and being taken out by a different guy nearly every night. Adrien decides that she is a “collector” of men, and the three needle one another as they discuss life and love, sex and morality, beauty and ugliness. Adrien might claim to want to have nothing to do with Haydée, but he keeps spending more and more time with her, even though he never stops criticizing her lifestyle. He even uses her as a pawn when trying to get an art collector named Sam (played by former New York Times film critic Eugene Archer under the pseudonym Seymour Hertzberg) to invest in his gallery. While everybody else in the film pretty much knows what they want, Adrien, who purports to understand life better than all of them, is a sad, lost soul, unable to get past his high-and-mighty attitude. Rohmer crafted the roles of Daniel and Haydée specifically for Pommereulle and Politoff, who improvised much of their dialogue; Bauchau opted not to take that route, making for a fascinating relationship among the three very different people.

Daniel Pommereulle and Patrick Bauchau talk about life and love, sex and morality in LA COLLECTIONNEUSE

La Collectionneuse is beautifully shot in 35mm by Néstor Almendros, the bright colors of the characters’ clothing mixing splendidly with the countryside and ocean while offering a striking visual counterpoint to the constant ennui dripping off the screen. His camera especially loves Politoff, regularly exploring her body inch by inch. The film is both Rohmer’s and Almendros’s first color feature; Almendros would go on to make more films with the director, as well as with Truffaut, even after coming to Hollywood and shooting such films as Days of Heaven, Kramer vs. Kramer, and Sophie’s Choice. Winner of a Silver Bear Extraordinary Jury Prize at the 1967 Berlinale, La Collectionneuse is screening September 16-22 at the Walter Reade Theater and the Francesca Beale Theater, kicking off the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s two-week festival of new restorations of five of Rohmer’s six tales, including My Night at Maud’s, Claire’s Knee, Suzanne’s Career, and Love in the Afternoon (but skipping The Bakery Girl of Monceau) through September 29.

SIX MORAL TALES: MY NIGHT AT MAUD’S (MA NUIT CHEZ MAUD) (Eric Rohmer, 1969)
Saturday, September 17, Walter Reade Theater, 4:30
Sunday, September 18, Francesca Beale Theater, 8:45
Saturday, September 24, Walter Reade Theater, 8:45
Sunday, September 25, Walter Reade Theater, 4:30
www.filmlinc.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 (falling between La Collectionneuse and Claire’s Knee) 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 Néstor 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. My Night at Maud’s, which is being shown September 17-18 and 24-25 as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Six Moral Tales series, is one of Rohmer’s best, most accomplished works despite its haughty intellectualism.

WARREN OATES — HIRED HAND: COCKFIGHTER

Warren Oates tries to get his life back on track in Monte Hellman’s COCKFIGHTER

COCKFIGHTER (Monte Hellman, 1974)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center
Francesca Beale Theater, 144 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
Sunday, July 3, 9:00, and Wednesday, July 6, 5:15
Festival runs through July 7
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.org

Director Monte Hellman and star Warren Oates enter “the mystic realm of the great cock” in the 1974 cult film Cockfighter. Alternately known as Born to Kill and Gamblin’ Man, the film is set in the world of cockfighting, where Frank Mansfield (Oates) is trying to capture the Cockfighter of the Year award following a devastating loss that cost him his money, car, trailer, girlfriend, and voice — he took a vow of silence until he wins the coveted medal. Mansfield communicates with others via his own made-up sign language and by writing on a small pad; in addition, he delivers brief internal monologues in occasional voiceovers. He teams up with moneyman Omar Baradansky (Richard B. Shull) as he attempts to regain his footing in the illegal cockfighting world, taking on such challengers as Junior (Steve Railsback), Tom (Ed Begley Jr.), and archnemesis Jack Burke (Harry Dean Stanton); his drive for success is also fueled by his desire to finally marry his much-put-upon fiancée, Mary Elizabeth (Patricia Pearcy). The cast also includes Laurie Bird as Mansfield’s old girlfriend, Troy Donahue as his brother, Millie Perkins as his sister-in-law, Warren Finnerty as Sanders, Allman Brothers guitarist Dickey Betts as a masked robber, and Charles Willeford, who wrote the screenplay based on his novel, as Ed Middleton.

cockfighter 2

Shot in a mere four weeks, Cockfighter is not a very easy movie to watch. The cockfighting scenes are real, filmed in a documentary style by master cinematographer Néstor Almendros, who had previously worked with Eric Rohmer and François Truffaut and would go on to lens such films as Days of Heaven, Kramer vs. Kramer, Sophie’s Choice, and The Blue Lagoon. However, Almendros was hampered by a less-than-stellar staff and a low budget courtesy of producer Roger Corman, who wanted more blood and sex and did not allow Hellman (Two-Lane Blacktop, The Shooting) to rewrite the script the way he wanted to. Corman even had coeditor Lewis Teague (Cujo, The Jewel of the Nile) film some additional scenes to increase the lurid factor. (Hellman, who was inspired by A Place in the Sun and Shoot the Piano Player, has noted that the versions that are not called Cockfighter are not his director’s cut.) Even the music, by jazz singer-songwriter Michael Franks, feels out of place. But the film ultimately works because of Oates’s scorching performance as Frank, another in a long line of luckless, lovable losers that would fill his resume (Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, Race with the Devil, The Wild Bunch). Oates ambles from scene to scene with an infectious relish; you can’t wait to see what Frank will do next, and how Oates will play it. Hellman also doesn’t glorify the “sport” of cockfighting but instead presents it as pretty much what it is, a vile and despicable business populated by low-grade chumps. Cockfighter is screening July 3 and 6 in the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “Warren Oates: Hired Hand,” in a poor print that is emblematic of all the problems associated with the making of the movie. “I don’t care if they release it or not,” Oates said about Cockfighter. “It ain’t bitterness but just an insight.” The series is being held in conjunction with the release of the restored version of Leslie Stevens’s little-seen 1960 thriller, Private Property, starring Oates, Corey Allen, and Kate Manx. The tribute to Oates, who died in 1982 at the age of fifty-three, continues through July 7 with such other Oates films as Dillinger, 92 in the Shade, The Hired Hand, The Brink’s Job, and the inimitable Stripes.

HOCKNEY

Documentary celebrates the life and career of British artist David Hockney

HOCKNEY (Randall Wright, 2015)
Metrograph, 7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts., 212-660-0312
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Francesca Beale Theater, Walter Reade Theater,
West 65th St. between Amsterdam Ave. & Broadway
Opens Friday, April 22
hockneyfilm.tumblr.com

“Why are you popular?” artist David Hockney is asked in an old interview in the 2014 documentary Hockney. “I’m not that sure,” the painter and photographer answers with a laugh. “I’m interested in ways of looking, because people will respond. Everybody does look; it’s just a question of how hard.” Award-winning director Randall Wright, who in 2002 made David Hockney: Secret Knowledge, examining the artist’s theories about the use of cameras and photographic-like visualization techniques in art going back centuries, this time takes a loving, more wide-ranging look at Hockney’s professional and personal worlds. Combining new interviews with old footage and home movies and photographs from Hockney’s private archives — which have never been made public before — Wright reveals Hockney to be an absolutely charming and engaging man with a genuine passion for life but not without his demons. “The paintings all related, whether superficially or intensely, on his life, and his trying to deal with his homosexuality, and trying to deal with his fantasies, and trying to deal with the issues of a sexual identity,” fellow British artist and longtime Hockney friend Mark Berger explains. “And he used wit to play with these identities. He was really like a little high school girl about it.” Wright and cinematographer Patrick Duval insert beautiful shots of many of Hockney’s paintings, slowly moving over the canvases as Hockney and, often, the subjects being depicted discuss them. Among the glorious works shown, from portraits and realistic paintings to more experimental, surreal, and abstract pieces, are “A Bigger Splash,” “Portrait of My Father,” “Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy,” “We Two Boys Together Clinging Together,” “Picture of a Hollywood Swimming Pool,” “Beverly Hills Housewife,” “Celia with a Foot on a Chair,” and such Polaroid composites as “Still Life Blue Guitar 4th April 1982.”

David Hockney opens up his personal archives for illuminating documentary

The film reveals Hockney to be a Warholian-like figure with a much more open and fun-loving personality — complete with odd glasses, bottle-blonde hair with bangs, and a love of photography — enjoying the party life as he goes from his hometown, “dingy Bradford” in England, to New York and Los Angeles; he currently lives in England and California and still paints seven days a week at the age of seventy-eight. It’s quite a thrill to see Hockney at work in his studios, putting brush to canvas. “I paint what I like and when I like” is one of numerous Hockney quotes that Wright uses on title cards, setting them on different monochrome backgrounds and interspersing them throughout the film. Wright (Lucian Freud: A Painted Life) also explores in-depth Hockney’s relationships with such friends and/or lovers as Peter Schlesinger and Henry Geldzahler. One drawback is that the director identifies his interview subjects, Hockney’s friends, colleagues, and relatives, only by name, so it is not always clear what their relationship to the artist is; most viewers are not likely to know who Bachardy, Arthur Lambert, Tchaik Chassay, Melissa North, Wayne Sleep, John Kasmin, or even Ed Ruscha and Jack Larson are or how Margaret Hockney is related to David. (Larson is the recently deceased actor who played Jimmy Olsen on the Superman television series and became a collector of Hockney’s work, while Margaret is David’s sister.) But that’s only a minor quibble in a wonderful documentary that celebrates not only the artist but his work and process, which comes alive on the screen, digital technology allowing the paintings and photographs to pop with their brilliant colors. If you didn’t appreciate Hockney’s talent before, this documentary will change your mind about it. And if you already were a fan of him and his work, this film will make you love him even more.

GOLDEN DAYS — THE FILMS OF ARNAUD DESPLECHIN: JIMMY P.: PSYCHOTHERAPY OF A PLAINS INDIAN

Georges Devereux (Mathieu Amalric) and James Picard (Benicio del Toro) are both looking for answers in Arnaud Desplechin’s JIMMY P.

JIMMY P.: PSYCHOTHERAPY OF A PLAINS INDIAN (Arnaud Desplechin, 2013)
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Francesca Beale Theater, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center
144 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
Sunday, March 13, 7:30, and Wednesday, March 16, 4:00
Series runs March 11-17
www.filmlinc.org
www.ifcfilms.com

Based on a true story documented in Georges Devereux’s 1951 book, Reality and Dream: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian, which features an introduction by Margaret Mead, Palme d’Or nominee Jimmy P. details the fascinating relationship between French-Hungarian ethnologist, anthropologist, and psychoanalyst Devereux (Mathieu Amalric) and Native American Blackfoot James Picard (Benicio del Toro). A WWII veteran living in Montana in 1948, Picard is taken to Topeka Winter Hospital after suffering from debilitating headaches and temporary blindness. When doctors Menninger (Larry Pine), Holt (Joseph Cross), Braatoy (Ricky Wayne), and Jokl (Elya Baskin) can’t find anything physically wrong with Picard — and wonder whether their unfamiliarity with Indians is limiting their understanding of his problems — Menninger calls in his colleague Devereux, a Freudian who is having difficulty getting a full-time position because of some of the unusual methods he employs. An excited Devereux immerses himself in Picard’s case, getting the direct, not-very-talkative Blackfoot to soon start opening up about his personal life, share his dreams, and discuss his military experiences. While the other doctors disagree with one another on what Devereux is doing, he and Jimmy develop a unique friendship, two very different men trying to find their place in life. Director Arnaud Desplechin wrote the screenplay (with Julie Peyr and Kent Jones) specifically for Amalric and del Toro, and it’s a terrific pairing, the former, who has previously starred in Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale, My Sex Life . . . or How I Got Into an Argument, and Kings and Queen, playing Devereux with a childlike, wide-eyed wonder, the latter portraying Jimmy with dark, brooding, penetrating eyes while also exuding an inner peace and poetry. The film slows down and gets off track when it strays from its main storyline, particularly when Devereux is visited by his married girlfriend, Madeleine (Gina McKee), and the reenacted dream sequences and past memories are hit or miss, some boasting a surreal beauty, others unnecessarily confusing, but when Amalric (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) and del Toro (Traffic) are on-screen together, Jimmy P. is mesmerizing. Jimmy P.: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian is screening March 13 & 16 in the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “Golden Days: The Films of Arnaud Desplechin,” a weeklong retrospective celebrating the March 18 release of Desplechin’s latest film, My Golden Days. Running March 11-17, the festival features such other films as The Sentinel, La vie des morts (which Desplechin will introduce on March 15), Kings and Queen (which will be followed by a Q&A with the director on March 17), and My Golden Days (with Desplechin on hand for Q&As after screenings on March 15 & 18).

GOLDEN DAYS — THE FILMS OF ARNAUD DESPLECHIN: A CHRISTMAS TALE

Mathieu Amalric and Catherine Deneuve star as siblings in a dysfunctional family in Arnaud Desplechin’s A CHRISTMAS TALE

A CHRISTMAS TALE (UN CONTE DE NOËL) (Arnaud Desplechin, 2008)
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Francesca Beale Theater, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center
144 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
Saturday, March 12, 8:00, and Wednesday, March 16, 7:00
Series runs March 11-17
www.filmlinc.org

One of the best films of 2008, A Christmas Tale is yet another extraordinary work from French post-New Wave filmmaker Arnaud Desplechin (La Sentinelle, Esther Kahn). Desplechin, who examined family dysfunction in the masterful Kings and Queen (one of the best films of 2006), brings back much of the same cast for A Christmas Tale. Catherine Deneuve stars as Junon, the family matriarch who has just discovered she has leukemia and is in need of a bone-marrow transplant. Although it is rare for children to donate bone marrow to their mother (or grandmother), Junon insists that they all take the test to see if they are compatible. Soon they gather at Junon and Abel’s (Jean-Paul Roussilon) house for the holidays: oldest daughter Elizabeth (Anne Consigny), a dark and depressed woman whose teenage son, Paul (Emile Berling), has been institutionalized with mental problems and whose husband, Claude (Hippolyte Girardot), is rarely home; Ivan (Melvil Poupaud), the youngest son, a carefree sort married to Sylvia (Chiara Mastroianni, Deneuve’s real-life daughter), whom Junon strongly distrusts; and black sheep Henri (Mathieu Amalric), the middle child who was initially conceived primarily to save Abel and Junon’s first son, Joseph, who ended up dying of the same leukemia that Junon has contracted. Henri, who shows up with a new girlfriend, the very direct Faunia (Emmanuelle Devos), is a philandering ne’er-do-well who is deeply estranged from Elizabeth and not close with his mother, leading to much strife as Christmas — and a possible transplant — nears. Desplechin, who wrote the script with playwright and director Emmanuel Bourdieu, once again has created powerful, realistic characters portrayed marvelously by his extremely talented cast; despite the family’s massive dysfunction, you’ll feel that even spending more than two and a half hours with them is not enough. A Christmas Tale is screening March 12 & 16 in the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “Golden Days: The Films of Arnaud Desplechin,” a weeklong retrospective celebrating the March 18 release of his latest film, My Golden Days. Running March 11-17, the festival features such other films as My Sex Life . . . or How I Got into an Argument, La vie des morts (which Desplechin will introduce on March 15), Kings and Queen (which will be followed by a Q&A with the director on March 17), and My Golden Days (with Desplechin on hand for Q&As after screenings on March 15 & 18).

NYFF53: FREE FRIDAY

Gene Tierney and Cornel Wilde are looking forward to a day of free screenings at the New York Film Festival

NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center
144 West 65th St. between Amsterdam & Columbus Aves.
Friday, September 25, free,
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.org

In conjunction with the twenty-fifth anniversary of preservation specialists the Film Foundation and the Fox centennial, the Film Society of Lincoln Center is featuring free screenings of six restored classics on September 25 as part of the fifty-third New York Film Festival. It’s quite an eclectic lineup, beginning at 1:30 in the Howard Gilman Theater with John Ford’s 1939 Revolutionary War drama, Drums Along the Mohawk, his first Technicolor work, starring Henry Fonda and Claudette Colbert. Stanley Donen’s Two for the Road, a bittersweet romance with Albert Finney and Audrey Hepburn, is being shown at 3:30 in the Francesca Beale Theater. At 3:30 (HGT), Robert De Niro s stalks Jerry Lewis in one of Martin Scorsese’s true masterpieces, The King of Comedy. At 6:00 (FBT), Elia Kazan’s depression-era drama Wild River, with Montgomery Clift and Lee Remick, will get a rare screening. At 6:30 (HGT), Gene Tierney and Cornel Wilde star in John M. Stahl’s 1945 melodrama, Leave Her to Heaven. And the free day wraps up at 9:00 (FBT) with All That Jazz, Bob Fosse’s semiautobiographical tale highlighted by an electrifying performance by Roy Scheider. In addition, there will be sneak previews of some of the Convergence installations that are part of the festival, which runs September 25 to October 11.

STRAY DOG

Ron “Stray Dog” Hall takes his wife, and viewers, on a marvelous ride into the heart of America in Debra Granik’s charming documentary

STRAY DOG (Debra Granik, 2014)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center
144 West 65th St. between Amsterdam & Columbus Aves.
Opens Friday, July 3
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.com
www.straydogthemovie.com

Shortly after meeting Ron “Stray Dog” Hall at the Biker Church in Branson, Missouri, writer-director Debra Granik (Down to the Bone) cast the Vietnam vet as Thump Milton in her second feature, the Oscar-nominated Winter’s Bone. Upon learning more about him, she soon decided that he would be a great subject for a documentary, so she took to the road, following him across the country in the engaging and revealing Stray Dog. Nearly always dressed in black, including his treasured leather jacket covered in medals and patches — when he puts it in a suitcase for a trip, it’s a ritual like he’s folding the American flag — Hall is a wonderfully grizzled old man with a fluffy white beard. At home, he is learning Spanish online so he can communicate better with his new wife, Alicia, a Mexican immigrant, and her two sons (who still live across the border). He visits with his teenage granddaughter, who is making some questionable decisions about her future. In Missouri, he owns and operates the At Ease RV Park, where he gives breaks to fellow vets who can’t always afford to pay the rent. And when he goes on the road, participating in the Run for the Wall, joining up with thousands of other bikers heading for the annual service at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, he stops along the way at other ceremonies honoring soldiers who have gone missing, are POWs, or were killed in action in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other wars.

Hall is a gregarious, gentle man who people instantly flock to and gather around — a scene in which two of his cats sit on each of his knees is absolutely heartwarming — but he is also haunted by some of the things he did in Vietnam, suffering from nightmares that sometimes have him screaming out loud while sleeping in bed. And he wears one of his mottoes right on his arm: “Never Forgive Never Forget.” At one point he sits comfortably on a couch and says, “Just kind of being free, don’t hurt nobody, do what you want to do — a nice thing, ain’t it? You know, I’d rather live as a free man for a year than a slave for twenty.” Granik simply follows Hall as he experiences life with his surprisingly refreshing point of view; no one ever turns to the camera to make any confessions, and no talking heads are brought on board to evaluate what we’re seeing. Granik just lets this beautiful piece of Americana unfold at its own pace while also touching on such hot-button topics as immigration reform, gun control, the economic crisis, and PTSD, making no judgments as we follow the captivating exploits of a man who is part Buddha, part Santa, and all patriot. Stray Dog returns to Lincoln Center, where it was shown at the 2014 New York Film Festival, for a theatrical run beginning July 3 at the Francesca Beale Theater, with Granik participating in Q&As following the 6:45 screening on Friday and the 4:30 show on Sunday.