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THEATER & CINEMA: THE LAST METRO

Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu star in François Truffaut’s gripping WWII melodrama THE LAST METRO

CINÉSALON: THE LAST METRO (LE DERNIER METRO) (François Truffaut, 1980)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, October 27, $14, 4:00 & 7:30 (later screening introduced by Olivia Bransbourg)
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org

FIAF’s CinéSalon series “Theater & Cinema” concludes October 27 with François Truffaut’s powerful Oscar-nominated WWII melodrama, The Last Metro. Set in Vichy France during the German occupation, the film takes place in and around the Théâtre Montmartre, which has been taken over by movie-star actress (and non-Jew) Marion Steiner (Catherine Deneuve) after her husband, Jewish theater director Lucas Steiner (Heinz Bennent), has apparently escaped the Nazi regime. But in fact Lucas is hiding out in the theater’s basement, where he has translated a Norwegian play, aptly titled Disappearance, and is directing it from below. The cast and crew of Disappearance include ladies’ man Bernard Granger (Gérard Depardieu) as Marion’s love interest; costume designer Arlette Guillaume (Andréa Ferréol), who refuses Bernard’s advances because of a secret reason; young actress Nadine Marsac (Sabine Haudepin), who will do just about anything to get parts; stage manager Raymond Boursier (Maurice Risch), who is deeply dedicated to the theater; and Jean-Loup Cottins (Jean Poiret), the stand-in director for Lucas. Only Marion knows where Lucas is, but danger grows when critic, publisher, and Nazi collaborator Daxiat (Jean-Louis Richard) starts sniffing around a little too much.

Catherine Deneuve on-set with director François Truffaut during the making of THE LAST METRO

Genre lover Truffaut reaches deep into his cinematic bag of tricks in The Last Metro, paying tribute to film noir, romantic melodrama, war movies, and even musicals as he references Casablanca, The Phantom of the Opera, The Diary of Anne Frank, Gaslight, To Be or Not to Be, The Golden Coach, Notorious, and Cabaret. He takes on anti-Semitism, anti-homosexuality, and anti-humanism in general while setting up a compelling love triangle that is echoed in the play-within-a movie, which is staged on a dramatic, surreal pink Expressionistic set. Depardieu and Deneuve, who went on to make such other films together as Claude Berri’s Fort Saganne, André Téchiné’s Changing Times, and François Ozon’s Potiche, might not be Bogart and Bergman, but they are a magnetic duo, Depardieu’s hulking, brutishly handsome presence dominating confined spaces, Deneuve’s refined, radiant beauty glowing amid a predominantly drab palette. The film uses the metaphor of theater as a way to escape reality, whether on an individual basis or during an international crisis, but of course Truffaut is also citing film as its own escape, a place where people flock to when times are both good and bad. The Last Metro — the title refers to the final train of the night, which passengers must catch in order to not break the strict curfew — is a beautifully made picture, the second in Truffaut’s planned trilogy of films about entertainment, following 1973’s Day for Night and preceding the never-finished L’Agence Magique. Winner of a 1990 César for Best Film of the 1980s in addition to ten previous Césars, including Best Film, Best Director (Truffaut), Best Actor (Depardieu), Best Actress (Deneuve), Best Cinematography (Nestor Almendros), Best Music (Georges Delerue), Best Production Design (Jean-Pierre Kohut-Svelko), and Best Writing (Truffaut and Suzanne Schiffman), The Last Metro is screening at 4:00 and 7:30 on October 27 in Florence Gould Hall; the later show will be introduced by French publisher and fragrance designer Olivia Bransbourg.

THEATER & CINEMA: GAMES OF LOVE AND CHANCE

Teenagers discuss life and love in award-winning GAMES OF LOVE AND CHANCE

Teenagers argue over life and love in award-winning GAMES OF LOVE AND CHANCE

CINÉSALON: GAMES OF LOVE AND CHANCE (L’ESQUIVE) (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2003)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, October 20, $14, 4:00 & 7:30 (later screening introduced by Nicolas Bouchaud)
Series continues through October 27
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org

FIAF’s CinéSalon series “Theater & Cinema” continues October 20 with Abdellatif Kechiche’s poignant 2003 drama, Games of Love and Chance. Winner of the César Award for Best Film, Best Director, Best Writing (Kechiche and Ghalia Lacroix), and Most Promising Actress (Sara Forestier), the film follows a group of teenagers, mostly of North African descent, in the housing projects of Seine-Saint-Denis as their everyday lives intersect with the play that is being put on in their French literature class, Marivaux’s 1730 romantic comedy, The Game of Love and Chance. In the class play, Forestier is Lydia, a bit of a diva who is portraying Lisette, a maid posing as a wealthy woman, opposite the always loud and angry Frida (Sabrina Ouazani), who is Silvia, a wealthy woman pretending to be a maid. Rachid (Rachid Hami) is initially Arlequin, but he is bribed out of the role by Krimo (Osman Elkharraz), who desperately wants to get close to Lydia. However, he has no real interest in acting, and no talent, which upsets their teacher (Carole Franck), who is looking forward to staging a quality show. Krimo’s pursuit of Lydia also creates more problems with his on-again, off-again longtime girlfriend, Magali (Aurélie Ganito), who believes the two are destined to be together no matter what. And when Krimo’s best friend, Fathi (Hafet Ben-Ahmed), gets involved, things threaten to get explosive. Kechiche, who also won the César for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay for The Secret of the Grain and the Palme d’Or for Blue Is the Warmest Colour, explores class distinction, teenage awkwardness, and artistic expression in the film, which is shot by Lubomir Bakchev primarily with a handheld camera and features powerful performances by the young cast. The differences between the language spoken in Marivaux’s play and the slang of the boys and girls in the hood can be a bit much at times, and the English subtitles are almost ridiculously outdated and stagy, but you’ll get used to it. Kechiche clearly has an eye for new talent; three of his five films featured young women who went on to win the César for Most Promising Actress (Forestier in Games of Love and Chance, Hafsia Herzi in The Secret of the Grain, and Adèle Exarchopoulos in Blue Is the Warmest Colour). Games of Love and Chance is screening in Florence Gould Hall on October 20 at 4:00 and 7:30; the later show will be introduced by actor and director Nicolas Bouchaud, who starred in The Exercise Was Beneficial, Sir at FIAF in May 2014. The series, highlighting films about theater, concludes October 27 with François Truffaut’s The Last Metro.

THEATER & CINEMA: CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA

Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart mix fact and fiction in Olivier Assayas’s CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA

CINÉSALON: CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA (Olivier Assayas, 2014)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, October 6, $14, 4:00 & 7:30 (later screening introduced by Florence Colombani)
Series continues through October 27
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org
www.ifcfilms.com

The related concepts of time and reality wind through Olivier Assayas’s beautifully poetic, melancholy Clouds of Sils Maria much like actual snakelike clouds slither through the twisting Maloja Pass in the Swiss Alps, as life imitates art and vice versa. Juliette Binoche stars as Maria Enders, a famous French actress who is on her way to Zurich to accept an award for her mentor, playwright Wilhelm Melchior, who eschews such mundane ceremonies. But while en route, Maria and her personal assistant, the extremely attentive and capable Valentine (Kristen Stewart), learn that Wilhelm has suddenly and unexpectedly passed away, and Maria considers turning back, especially when she later finds out that Henryk Wald (Hanns Zischler), an old nemesis, will be there to pay homage to Wilhelm as well, but she decides to go ahead after all. At a cocktail party, Maria meets with hot director Klaus Diesterweg (Lars Eidinger), who is preparing a new stage production of Wilhelm and Maria’s first big hit, The Maloja Snake, but this time Maria would play Helena, an older woman obsessed with ambitious eighteen-year-old Sigrid, the role she originally performed twenty years earlier, to great acclaim. Klaus is planning to cast Lindsay Lohan-like troublemaking star and walking tabloid headline Jo-Ann Ellis (Chloë Grace Moretz) as Sigrid, which does not thrill Maria as her past and present meld together in an almost dreamlike narrative punctuated by the music of Handel and cinematographer Yorick Le Saux’s gorgeous shots of vast mountain landscapes.

Valentine (Kristen Stewart) and Maria (Juliette Binoche) go in search of the Maloja Snake in the Swiss Alps

Clouds of Sils Maria resonates on many levels, both inside and outside of the main plot and the film itself. Assayas (Irma Vep, Demonlover) cowrote André Téchiné’s 1983 film, Rendez-Vous, which was Binoche’s breakthrough; Assayas and Binoche wouldn’t work together again until his 2008 film Summer Hours, similar to the relationship between Wilhelm and Maria. Meanwhile, the story of the play-within-the-film is echoed by the relationship between Maria and Valentine, who are having trouble separating the personal from the professional. It is often difficult to know when the two women are practicing lines and when they are talking about their “real” lives. Binoche (Blue, Caché) is simply extraordinary as Maria, a distressed and anxious woman who is suddenly facing getting older somewhat sooner than expected, while Stewart (The Twilight Saga, On the Road) became the first American woman to win a French César, for Best Supporting Actress, for her sensitive portrayal of Valentine, a strong-willed young woman who might or might not be holding something back. The scenes between the two are riveting as they venture in and out of the reality of the film, their onscreen chemistry building and building till it’s at last ready to ignite. Art, life, cinema, theater, fiction, and reality all come together in Clouds of Sils Maria, as Maria, Assayas, and Binoche take stock of where they’ve been, where they are, and where they’re going. The film is screening at 4:00 and 7:30 on October 6 in FIAF’s CinéSalon series “Theater & Cinema”; the later show will be introduced by Florence Colombani. The Tuesday festival continues through October 27 with such other stage-related dramas as Arnaud Desplechin’s Esther Kahn, Abdellatif Kechiche’s Games of Love and Chance, and François Truffaut’s The Last Metro.

THEATER & CINEMA: VA SAVOIR

Jeanne Balibar is extraordinary in Jacques Rivette masterpiece

CINÉSALON: VA SAVOIR (WHO KNOWS?) (Jacques Rivette, 2001)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, September 29, $14, 4:00 & 7:30 (later screening introduced by Mathieu Bauer)
Series continues through October 27
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org

Jacques Rivette’s Va Savoir is a long, talky French movie about very beautiful, very complicated, sex-crazed men and women — and it just might be the master filmmaker’s crowning glory, a magnificent masterpiece that deserved its slot as the New York Film Festival’s opening night selection back in 2001. This erotically charged, very funny drama is set around a traveling theater company’s return to Paris to put on Pirandello’s As You Desire Me in the original Italian. Ugo (Sergio Castellitto), the director and costar of the play, is romantically involved with Camille (Jeanne Balibar), the lead actress, who visits her former lover Pierre (Jacques Bonnaffé), a philosopher with a thing for Heidegger, who is now living with Sonia (Marianne Basler), a dance instructor who is being chased by Arthur (Bruno Todeschini), a ne’er-do-well whose half sister, Do (Hélène de Fougerolles), has taken a liking to Ugo and offers to help him find an unpublished ghost play by Carlo Goldini, which her mother (Catherine Rouvel) just might have. Every minute of this film is pure magic, and at the center of it all is the fantastique Camille, an instinctual, graceful actress whom everyone — men and women — fall in love with, played by the fantastique, instinctual, graceful Balibar, whom audiences will fall in love with as well. French film enthusiasts should watch for Claude Berri in a small role. Lovingly photographed by William Lubtchansky and edited by his wife, Nicole Lubtchansky, Va Savoir is screening at 4:00 and 7:30 on September 29 in FIAF’s CinéSalon series “Theater & Cinema”; the later show will be introduced by Mathieu Bauer. (FIAF is screening the 154-minute version, not the 220-minute director’s cut.) The Tuesday festival continues through October 27 with such other stage-related dramas as Olivier Assayas’s Clouds of Sils Maria, Arnaud Desplechin’s Esther Kahn, Abdellatif Kechiche’s Games of Love and Chance, and François Truffaut’s The Last Metro.

ANT HAMPTON: THE EXTRA PEOPLE

The audience takes center stage in Ant Hampton’s THE EXTRA PEOPLE

CROSSING THE LINE
French Institute Alliance Française
Florence Gould Hall, 55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Friday, September 25, and Saturday, September 26, $25
Festival continues through October 4
212-355-6160
www.fiaf.org
www.anthampton.com

Swiss-born British multidisciplinary artist Ant Hampton specializes in creating hard-to-categorize immersive performance installations that take place outside of the usual dynamic between performer and audience, making the latter an active participant in the production. Since 2007, Hampton has been presenting his Autoteatro series, works in which audience members and unrehearsed guest performers are given instructions and act out the pieces themselves. For Etiquette, two people sat across from each other in a public space and followed what they were told to do via headphones. For Hello for Dummies, pairs of strangers were sent to sit and interact on outdoor benches. Hampton’s latest work is The Extra People, premiering at FIAF’s Crossing the Line festival. The site-specific piece will take place in Florence Gould Hall, with fifteen audience members onstage and another fifteen sitting in seats. Each person will have a flashlight, a neon vest, and headphones, which will instruct them what to do and where to go. Hampton’s website advises to “avoid eye contact” and explains that “the overall picture is out of your reach: too big, beyond your comprehension, or simply not your job to know. . . . In a challenge to the assumption (often taken for granted) that collectivity is what you find in the theater, the building here reflects society rather differently, with its audience situated as atomized individuals adrift or even asleep among both seating and stage, plugged into their own audio streams, patiently awaiting their call, and eventually acting upon it.” Some of the slots are already sold out, so act fast if you want to have a rather unusual experience in a theatrical setting.

THEATER & CINEMA: VENUS IN FUR

The relationship between actor and director becomes an intense psychosexual battle in Roman Polanski’s VENUS IN FUR

CINÉSALON: VENUS IN FUR (LA VÉNUS À LA FOURRURE) (Roman Polanski, 2013)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, September 22, $14, 4:00 & 7:30 (later screening with David Ives Q&A)
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org
www.ifcfilms.com

For his third stage adaptation in ten years, following 1994’s Death and the Maiden and 2011’s Carnage, Roman Polanski created a marvelous, multilayered examination of the intricate nature of storytelling, consumed with aspects of doubling. David Ives’s Tony-nominated play, Venus in Fur, is about a cynical theater director, Thomas Novachek, who is auditioning actresses for the lead in his next production, a theatrical version of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s psychosexual novella Venus in Furs (which led to the term “sado-masochism”), itself a man’s retelling of his enslavement by a woman. In the film, as he is packing up and about to head home, Thomas (Matthieu Amalric) is interrupted by Vanda (Emmanuelle Seigner), a tall blond who at first appears ditzy and unprepared, practically begging him to let her audition even though she isn’t on the casting sheet, then slowly taking charge as she reveals an intimate knowledge not only of his script but of stagecraft as well. An at-first flummoxed Thomas becomes more and more intrigued as Vanda performs the role of Wanda von Dunayev and he reads the part of Severin von Kushemski, their actor-director relationship intertwining with that of the characters’ dangerous and erotic attraction.

Roman Polanski directs wife Emmanuelle Seigner in thrilling stage adaptation of Tony-winning play

Roman Polanski directs wife Emmanuelle Seigner in thrilling stage adaptation of Tony-nominated play

Ives’s English-language play, which earned Nina Arianda a Tony for Best Actress, was set in an office, but Polanski, who cowrote the screenplay with Ives, has moved this French version to an old theater (the Théâtre Récamier in Paris, rebuilt by designer Jean Rabasse) where a musical production of John Ford’s Stagecoach has recently taken place, with some of the props still onstage, including a rather phallic (and prickly) cactus. Polanski has masterfully used the machinations of cinema to expand on the play while also remaining true to its single setting. One of the world’s finest actors, Amalric, who looks more than a little like a younger Polanski, is spectacular as the pretentious Thomas, his expression-filled eyes and herky-jerky motion defining the evolution of his character’s fascination with Vanda, while Seigner, who is Polanski’s wife, is a dynamo of breathless erotic power and energy, seamlessly weaving in and out of different aspects of Vanda. Venus in Fur was shot in chronological order with one camera by cinematographer Paweł Edelman, who photographed Polanski’s previous five feature films, making it feel like the viewer is onstage, experiencing the events in real time. Alexandre Desplat’s complex, gorgeous score is a character unto itself, beginning with the outdoor establishing shot of the theater. The film also contains elements that recall such previous Polanski works as The Tenant, Bitter Moon, Tess, and The Fearless Vampire Killers, placing it firmly within his impressive canon. Polanski was handed Ives’s script at Cannes in 2012, and this screen version was then shown at Cannes for the 2013 festival, a whirlwind production that is echoed in Seigner’s performance. Venus in Fur kicks off the CinéSalon series “Theater & Cinema” on September 22, with Ives on hand for a Q&A moderated by Nicholas Elliott following the 7:30 screening. The Tuesday festival continues through October 27 with such other stage-related dramas as Jacques Rivette’s Va Savoir, Olivier Assayas’s Clouds of Sils Maria, Arnaud Desplechin’s Esther Kahn, Abdellatif Kechiche’s Games of Love and Chance, and François Truffaut’s The Last Metro. But FIAF is only getting started with Amalric, who will be the subject of a six-week retrospective in November and December; he’ll be in Florence Gould Hall for a Q&A with costar Stéphanie Cléau following the 7:30 screening of The Blue Room on November 3, then will perform in writer-director Cléau’s stage production of Le Moral des Ménages with Anne-Laure Tondu at FIAF on November 4-5.

CROSSING THE LINE 2015

Jack Ferver and Marc Swanson will present CHAMBRE as part of FIAFs annual Crossing the Line festival (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Jack Ferver and Marc Swanson will present the glittering CHAMBRE as part of FIAF’s annual Crossing the Line festival (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

French Institute Alliance Française and other locations
Florence Gould Hall, 55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
FIAF Gallery, 22 East 60th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
September 10 – October 4, free – $35
212-355-6160
www.fiaf.org

Tickets are now available for FIAF’s ninth annual late summer/early fall multidisciplinary arts festival, and you better act fast if you want to see some of this year’s most intriguing programs. For us, the highlight is Jack Ferver and Marc Swanson’s Chambre, an installation and performance piece at the New Museum inspired by Jean Genet’s The Maids and pop-culture elements, with extravagant costumes by Reid Bartelme and experimental sound and music by twi-ny fave Roarke Menzies. British artist Ant Hampton’s Autoteatro series continues with The Extra People, in which participants will go on an individual adventure through FIAF’s Florence Gould Theater. The U.S. premiere of Brazilian artist Gustavo Ciriaco and Austrian artist Andrea Sonnberger’s Here whilst we walk will take small groups, bound by a giant rubber band, on a silent trip through Red Hook. Elana Langer’s free What I Live By will pop up at three locations, examining brand identification and personal values. Iranian artist Ali Moini searches for freedom in the multimedia dance work Lives at New York Live Arts (NYLA). Miguel Gutierrez will present the New York City premiere of all three parts of his Age & Beauty series, Mid-Career Artist/Suicide Note or &:-/; Asian Beauty @ the Werq Meeting or The Choreographer & Her Muse or &:@&; and Dancer or You can make whatever the fuck you want but you’ll only tour solos or The Powerful People or We are strong/We are powerful/We are beautiful/We are divine or &:’////, at NYLA, featuring such collaborators as Mickey Mahar, Michelle Boulé, Jen Rosenblit, Ishmael Houston-Jones, and Alex Rodabaugh. Italian artist Alessandro Sciarroni asks Folk-s, will you still love me tomorrow? in his unique interpretation of Bavarian folk dance at NYLA. French director Joris Lacoste investigates multiple languages and human spoken expression in Suite n°2 in Florence Gould Hall. Also on the bill are Shezad Dawood’s “It was a time that was a time” exhibition at Pioneer Works, a photography show by Mazaccio & Drowilal in the FIAF Gallery, Olivia Bransbourg’s ICONOfly magazine, and Adrian Heathfield and André Lepecki’s three-day symposium, “Afterlives: The Persistence of Performance,” at FIAF and MoMA.