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ECCENTRICS OF FRENCH COMEDY: YOYO

All the wealth in the world can’t make a lonely millionaire (Pierre Étaix) happy in YOYO

CINÉSALON: YOYO (Pierre Étaix, 1965)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, February 3, 4:00
Series continues Tuesdays through February 24
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org

French auteur Pierre Étaix’s strange and beautiful films were long inaccessible, the subject of nearly two decades of legal wrangling, but on February 3 at 4:00, the French Institute Alliance Française will be presenting his 1965 bittersweet black-and-white slapstick charmer, Yoyo, as part of its January-February CinéSalon “Eccentrics of French Comedy” series, followed by a wine reception. (In April 2010, Étaix was finally able to once again bring his films to the public, his entire output restored and making their New York debut at a festival of all five features and three shorts at Film Forum in October 2012.) Étaix, who wrote Yoyo with master collaborator Jean-Claude Carrière, who also cowrote films by Luis Buñuel, Miloš Forman, Volker Schlöndorff, Andrzej Wajda, Nagisa Oshima, and Louis Malle and won an honorary Academy Award for lifetime achievement in 2014, stars as a ridiculously wealthy but extremely bored man who lives alone in an ornately decorated, absurdly large chateau. It’s 1925, and he has servants for absolutely everything, as well as his own private band and flappers, but he pines for his lost love, Isolina (Claudine Auger). One day she arrives with a traveling circus, along with a young boy (Philippe Dionnet) who turns out to be his son. She at first rejects the multimillionaire, but when he loses it all on Black Tuesday, the three of them form their own traveling circus, with the boy ultimately turning into a popular clown named Yoyo (played as an adult by Étaix) and seeking to restore the chateau and his family.

French auteur Pierre Étaix takes clowning around very seriously in rediscovered classic

The first section of the film is a glorious homage to the silent film era and other cinematic comedians, with director and star Étaix evoking his mentor, Jacques Tati; Charlie Chaplin; Buster Keaton; and, later, Jerry Lewis, with whom he’d appear as Gustav the Great in Lewis’s never-to-be-seen Holocaust film The Day the Clown Died. Nouvelle Vague cinematographer Jean Boffety (An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge; Je t’aime, je t’aime) shoots Yoyo in a sharp, gorgeous black-and-white, composing breathtaking shots that boast a dazzling symmetry that must make Wes Anderson giddy with delight, while Étaix fills the film with ingenious sight gags that would make Ernie Kovacs proud (just wait till you see the supposed still-life painting), all anchored by Jean Paillaud’s memorable musical theme. But once the stock market crashes and talkies take over, dialogue enters the picture, and the camera is often off balance, the perfect symmetry a thing of the past. With Yoyo, Étaix, who had previously made Heureux Anniversaire and The Suitor and would go on to make The Great Love and En pleine forme, was influenced by the sudden, tragic death of his father, his love of the circus — he had already worked under the big tent, and he would leave films to become a clown in a traveling circus in the early 1970s — and his viewing of Fellini’s 8½ (look for the La Strada poster) resulting in a film that sometimes gets a little lost and too surreal, but he ultimately brings things back around as Yoyo grows into a star and the story travels through the arc of twentieth-century entertainment, from the silent era to talkies to television. It’s a real treat that Étaix’s work is undergoing this rediscovery; lovers of Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist will particularly enjoy Yoyo. “Eccentrics of French Comedy” continues through February 24 with Riad Sattouf’s The French Kissers introduced by Jean-Philippe Tessé, Jacques Rozier’s Du côté d’Orouët introduced by Annie Bergen, Eric Rohmer’s The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediatheque introduced by Nicholas Elliott, and Luc Moullet’s The Land of Madness introduced by Pavol Liska.

THE ART OF SEX AND SEDUCTION: THE MAN WHO LOVED WOMEN

Bertrand Morane (Charles Denner) keeps his eyes on he prize in François Truffaut’s THE MAN WHO LOVED WOMEN

CINÉSALON: THE MAN WHO LOVED WOMEN (L’HOMME QUI AIMAIT LES FEMMES) (François Truffaut, 1977)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, December 16, $13, 7:30
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org

Back in October, a Hollaback! video went viral showing a young woman walking through New York City as men harassed her by calling out suggestively to her, looking luridly at her, and even following her. It’s hard not to think about that video, posted by a nonprofit “dedicated to ending street harassment,” when watching François Truffaut’s 1977 film, The Man Who Loved Women. As Maurice Jaubert’s bright, cheery score plays, a string of women get out of their cars to attend a funeral. The hearse drives past the camera — just as cinematographer Nestor Almendros’s name flashes on the screen — and holds for a few seconds as Truffaut himself watches the hearse go by, then walks off in the other direction. “One funeral is just like another,” Geneviève (Brigitte Fossey) says in voice-over. “However, this one is special. Not a man in sight. Only women . . . nothing but women.” They have all gathered to say farewell to Bertrand Morane (Charles Denner), a man obsessed with the fairer sex, particularly when he sees their bare ankles and calves. He goes to great lengths to find them, to be with them, but he is no mere ladies’ man or womanizing misogynist seeking to add notches to his belt. Deeply affected by his rather offbeat relationship with his mother (Marie-Jeanne Montfajon), he finds it impossible to stop these constant urges. He works in a lab building and testing model airplanes for the military, still a child playing with toys. He is not a particular handsome man, nor is he that dapper or charming, but there is something in his eyes, in his mannerisms, that make him surprisingly desirable to the opposite sex. He is after more than just physical pleasure, but it always remains just out of his grasp, leaving an empty hole inside that he tries to fill by writing a book about his numerous exploits and endless search for happiness, a journey that ends with his premature death.

Bertrand Morane (Charles Denner) decides to share his love of women with the rest of the world

Truffaut, who based some situations in the film on his own life with women and his mother, fills The Man Who Loved Women with a bevy of beauties, including Nelly Borgeaud, Geneviève Fontanel, Valérie Bonnier, Nathalie Baye, and Leslie Caron. But The Man Who Loved Women is not just about eye candy, even with the nudity; it’s about the search for true love, as evidenced by a late scene between Bertrand and former flame Véra (Caron). It’s also about the art of storytelling itself, told in flashback and, in the second half, focusing on Bertrand’s book, with a stream of clever self-references linking cinema and literature. Denner, who previously starred in Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black, has an uncanny way of making us root for him despite the sheer political incorrectness of his raison d’être; The Man Who Loved Women is probably not on Hollaback!’s Christmas wish list. But as crafted by screenwriters Truffaut, Michel Fermaud, and Suzanne Schiffman, the film, which is set in the pretty city of Montpellier in the south of France, portrays Bertrand as a kind of romantic antihero, an everyman who is fully aware of what he is doing but just can’t stop it. The film was remade in 1983 by Blake Edwards with Burt Reynolds, Julie Andrews, and Kim Basinger, but it’s not the same, of course. Truffaut’s The Man Who Loved Women, which earned César nominations for Denner, Borgeaud, and Fontanel, concludes the French Institute Alliance Française CinéSalon series “The Art of Sex and Seduction” on December 16 at 7:30, introduced by cultural critic Laura Kipnis.

THE ART OF SEX AND SEDUCTION: SWIMMING POOL

Jealousy and envy are at the heart of François Ozon’s sexy thriller

CINÉSALON: SWIMMING POOL (François Ozon, 2003)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, November 18, $13, 4:00 & 7:30
Series continues Tuesdays through December 16
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org
www.focusfeatures.com

Charlotte Rampling is divine in François Ozon’s playfully creepy mystery about a popular British crime novelist taking a break from the big city (London) to recapture her muse at her publisher’s French villa, only to be interrupted by the publisher’s hot-to-trot teenage daughter. Rampling stars as Sarah Morton, a fiftysomething novelist who is jealous of the attention being poured on young writer Terry Long (Sebastian Harcombe) by her longtime publisher, John Bosload (Game of Thrones’s Charles Dance). John sends Sarah off to his elegant country house, where she sets out to complete her next Inspector Dorwell novel in peace and quiet. But the prim and proper — and rather bitter and cynical — Sarah’s working vacation is soon intruded upon by Julie (Ludivine Sagnier), John’s teenage daughter, who likes walking around topless and living life to the fullest, clearly enjoying how Sarah looks at her and judges her. “You’re just a frustrated English writer who writes about dirty things but never does them,” Julie says, and soon Sarah is reevaluating the choices she’s made in her own life. Rampling, who mixes sexuality with a heart-wrenching vulnerability like no other actress (see The Night Porter, The Verdict, and Heading South), more than holds her own as the primpy old maid in the shadow of a young beauty, even tossing in some of nudity to show that she still has it. (Rampling has also posed nude in her sixties in a series of photographs by Juergen Teller alongside twentysomething model Raquel Zimmerman, so such “competition” is nothing to her.)

Julie (Ludivine Sagnier) and Sarah (Charlotte Rampling) come to a kind of understanding in François Ozon’s SWIMMING POOL

Rampling has really found her groove working with Ozon, having appeared in four of his films, highlighted by a devastating performance in Under the Sand as a wife dealing with the sudden disappearance of her husband. Sagnier, who has also starred in Ozon’s Water Drops on Burning Rocks and 8 Women, is a delight to watch, especially as things turn dark. Swimming Pool is very much about duality; the film opens with a shot of the shimmering Thames river while the title comes onscreen and Philippe Rombi’s score of mystery and danger plays, and later Sarah says, “I absolutely loathe swimming pools,” to which Julie responds, “Pools are boring; there’s no excitement, no feeling of infinity. It’s just a big bathtub.” (“It’s more like a cesspool of living bacteria,” Sarah adds.) Ozon (Time to Leave, Criminal Lovers) explores most of the seven deadly sins as Sarah and Julie get to know each other all too well. Swimming Pool is being shown November 18 at 4:00 and 7:30 as part of the French Institute Alliance Française CinéSalon series “The Art of Sex and Seduction,” with the later screening introduced by filmmaker Ry Russo-Young and followed by a wine reception; the series continues Tuesdays through December 16 with Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake introduced by Alan Brown, Catherine Breillat’s The Last Mistress introduced by Melissa Anderson, and François Truffaut’s The Man Who Loved Women introduced by Laura Kipnis, all complemented by Jean-Daniel Lorieux’s “Seducing the Lens” photography exhibition.

THE ART OF SEX AND SEDUCTION: LADY CHATTERLEY

Connie Chatterley (Marina Hands) and gamekeeper Parkin (Jean-Louis Coulloc’h) explore sexual freedom in LADY CHATTERLEY

CINÉSALON: LADY CHATTERLEY (Pascale Ferran, 2006)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, November 11, $13, 4:00 & 7:30
Series continues Tuesdays through December 16
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org

D. H. Lawrence’s oft-banned and censored Lady Chatterley’s Lover has been turned into several films, including highly erotic versions starring Sylvia Kristel, Patricia Javier, and Harlee McBride. But for his 2006 film, Lady Chatterley, French director Pascale Ferran turned to the second version of Lawrence’s tale of love, sex, and infidelity, adapting 1927’s John Thomas and Lady Jane into the César-winning Lady Chatterley. Marina Hands won a César as Best Actress for her sensitive portrayal of Constance Chatterley, wife of Sir Clifford Chatterley (Hippolyte Girardot), a bitter, wealthy aristocratic mine owner who was paralyzed from the waist down in World War I. Sent to give a message to the Chatterleys’ gamekeeper, Parkin (Jean-Louis Coulloc’h), Connie sees him with his shirt off, washing himself outside, and something instantly stirs inside her. She begins making frequent visits to his cabin in the forest, and soon they are having an affair. When Connie prepares to go on a trip with her sister, Hilda (Hélène Fillières), she hires Mrs. Bolton (Hélène Alexandridis) as Sir Clifford’s nurse, but Clifford and Mrs. Bolton grow suspicious of Connie’s long disappearances, forcing Connie to decide what path to take.

Marina Hands won a César as Best Actress for her moving portrayal of the title character in Pascale Ferran’s LADY CHATTERLEY

Lady Chatterley is no mere sex romp or erotic tale; Ferran (L’Âge des possibles, Bird People), who cowrote the César-winning script with Roger Bohbot and Pierre Trividic, treats the subject with an austere honesty. The sex scenes are not lurid but instead wholly believable as Connie and Parkin explore each other’s bodies and souls, their class differences creating a wall between them. The award-laden film also won Césars for Julien Hirsch’s lush yet old-fashioned cinematography and Marie-Claude Altot’s beautiful costume design, the precise details of which are particularly on display when Connie carefully undresses. The film is at times agonizingly slow-paced and too long at nearly three hours, but its overt Frenchness offers a fascinating take on a familiar story. Lady Chatterley is being shown November 11 at 4:00 and 7:30 as part of the French Institute Alliance Française CinéSalon series “The Art of Sex and Seduction,” with the later screening introduced by film critic Nicholas Elliott and followed by a wine reception; the series continues Tuesdays through December 16 with François Ozon’s Swimming Pool introduced by Ry Russo-Young, Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake introduced by Alan Brown, Catherine Breillat’s The Last Mistress introduced by Melissa Anderson, and François Truffaut’s The Man Who Loved Women introduced by Laura Kipnis. There will also be talks, panel discussions, Jean-Daniel Lorieux’s “Seducing the Lens” photography exhibition, and other programs as part of “The Art of Sex & Seduction.”

THE ART OF SEX AND SEDUCTION: LAST TANGO IN PARIS

Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider star in Bernardo Bertolucci’s controversial LAST TANGO IN PARIS

CINÉSALON: LAST TANGO IN PARIS (ULTIMO TANGO A PARIGI) (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, November 4, $13, 4:00 & 7:30
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org

One of the most artistic films ever made about seduction, Bernardo Bertolucci’s controversial X-rated Last Tango in Paris kicks off the French Institute Alliance Française’s CinéSalon series “The Art of Sex and Seduction” on November 4. Written by Bertolucci (The Conformist, The Spider’s Stratagem) with regular collaborator and editor Franco Arcalli and with French dialogue by Agnès Varda (Le Bonheur, Vagabond), the film opens with credits featuring jazzy romantic music by Argentine saxophonist Gato Barbieri and two colorful and dramatic paintings by Francis Bacon, “Double Portrait of Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach” and “Study for a Portrait,” that set the stage for what is to follow. (Bacon was a major influence on the look and feel of the film, photographed by Vittorio Storaro.) Bertolucci then cuts to a haggard man (Marlon Brando) standing under the Pont de Bir-Hakeim in Paris, screaming out, “Fucking God!” His hair disheveled, he is wearing a long brown jacket and seems to be holding back tears. An adorable young woman (Maria Schneider) in a fashionable fluffy white coat and black hat with flowers passes by, stops and looks at him, then moves on. They meet again inside a large, sparsely furnished apartment at the end of Rue Jules Verne that they are each interested in renting. Both looking for something else in life, they quickly have sex and roll over on the floor, exhausted. For the next three days, they meet in the apartment for heated passion that the man, Paul, insists include nothing of the outside world — no references to names or places, no past, no present, no future; the young woman, Jeanne, agrees. Their sex goes from gentle and touching to brutal and animalistic; in fact, after one session, Bertolucci cuts to actual animals. The film is nothing if not subtle.

Jeanne (Maria Schneider) and Paul (Marlon Brando) share a private, sexual relationship in LAST TANGO IN PARIS

The lovers’ real lives are revealed in bits and pieces, as Paul tries to recover from his wife’s suicide and Jeanne deals with a fiancée, Thomas (Jean-Pierre Léaud), who has suddenly decided to make a film about them, without her permission, asking precisely the kind of questions that Paul never wants to talk about. When away from the apartment, Jeanne is shown primarily in the bright outdoors, flitting about fancifully and giving Thomas a hard time; in one of the only scenes in which she’s inside, Thomas makes a point of opening up several doors, preventing her from ever feeling trapped. Meanwhile, Paul is seen mostly in tight, dark spaces, especially right after having a fight with his dead wife’s mother. He walks into his hotel’s dark hallway, the only light coming from two of his neighbors as they open their doors just a bit to spy on him. Not saying anything, he pulls their doors shut as the screen goes from light to dark to light to dark again, and then Bertolucci cuts to Paul and Jeanne’s apartment door as she opens it, ushering in the brightness that always surrounds her. It’s a powerful moment that heightens the difference between the older, less hopeful man and the younger, eager woman. Inevitably, however, the safety of their private, primal relationship is threatened, and tragedy awaits.

Jeanne and Paul develop a complicated sexual relationship in LAST TANGO

“I’ve tried to describe the impact of a film that has made the strongest impression on me in almost twenty years of reviewing. This is a movie people will be arguing about, I think, for as long as there are movies,” Pauline Kael wrote in the New Yorker on October 28, 1972, shortly before Last Tango closed the tenth New York Film Festival. “It is a movie you can’t get out of your system, and I think it will make some people very angry and disgust others. I don’t believe that there’s anyone whose feelings can be totally resolved about the sex scenes and the social attitudes in this film.” More than forty years later, the fetishistic Last Tango in Paris still has the ability to evoke those strong emotions. The sex scenes range from tender, as when Jeanne tells Paul they should try to climax without touching, to when Paul uses butter in an attack that was not scripted and about which Schneider told the Daily Mail in 2007, “I felt humiliated and to be honest, I felt a little raped, both by Marlon and by Bertolucci. After the scene, Marlon didn’t console me or apologise. Thankfully, there was just one take.” At the time of the shooting, Brando was forty-eight and Schneider nineteen; Last Tango was released between The Godfather and Missouri Breaks, in which Brando starred with Jack Nicholson, while Schneider would go on to make Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger with Nicholson in 1975. Brando died in 2004 at the age of eighty, leaving behind a legacy of more than forty films. Schneider died in 2011 at the age of fifty-eight; she also appeared in more than forty films, but she was never able to escape the associations that followed her after her breakthrough performance in Last Tango, which featured extensive nudity, something she refused to do ever again. Even in 2014, Last Tango in Paris is both sexy and shocking, passionate and provocative, alluring and disturbing, all at the same time, a movie that, as Kael said, viewers won’t easily be able to get out of their system.

Last Tango in Paris is being shown at FIAF on November 4 at 4:00 and 7:30, with the later screening introduced by New School philosophy professor Simon Critchley and followed by a wine reception; the series continues Tuesdays through December 16 with Pascale Ferran’s Lady Chatterley introduced by Catherine Cusset, François Ozon’s Swimming Pool introduced by Ry Russo-Young, Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake introduced by Alan Brown, Catherine Breillat’s The Last Mistress introduced by Melissa Anderson (Breillat also appears as Mouchette in Last Tango), and François Truffaut’s The Man Who Loved Women introduced by Laura Kipnis. There will also be talks, panel discussions, Jean-Daniel Lorieux’s “Seducing the Lens” photography exhibition, and other programs as part of “The Art of Sex & Seduction.”

CROSSING THE LINE — RYOJI IKEDA: SUPERPOSITION

(superposition, 2012 © Kazuo Fukunaga / Kyoto Experiment in Kyoto Art Theater, Shunjuza)

Metropolitan Museum of Art
Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium
1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St.
October 17-18, $35, 7:00
212-570-3949
www.fiaf.org
www.metmuseum.org

In the summer of 2011, Japanese multimedia artist Ryoji Ikeda dazzled New Yorkers with the immersive site-specific work the transfinite, which invited visitors to sit down in the Park Avenue Armory and merge with a two-sided monolithic wall, extended onto the floor, that came alive with a mind-blowing array of experimental digital music and mathematically based projections, as if welcoming people inside the mind of a cutting-edge computer. Things will be only slightly more contained for the U.S. premiere of superposition, Ikeda’s theatrical piece being presented October 17 & 18 in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium. Ticket holders may be sitting in seats, but what’s happening onstage will take them through mesmerizing sound and visuals that combine art and science, mathematics and human behavior in unique ways, exploring technology, philosophy, probability, and the future of existence, zeroing in on a single subatomic particle. The work is being presented as part of the French Institute Alliance Française’s annual Crossing the Line Festival, consisting of multidisciplinary projects and performances at locations throughout the city. In conjunction with superposition, Salon 94 on East Ninety-Fourth St. is hosting a solo exhibition of Ikeda’s work October 20-31, and his black-and-white test pattern [times square] is being projected on nearly four dozen digital screens in Times Square nightly from 11:57 to midnight for the October installment of “Midnight Moment,” the monthly program organized and supported by the Times Square Advertising Coalition in partnership with Times Square Arts; on October 16, the visuals will be accompanied by an Exclusive Sound Experience, with limited headphones available beginning at 11:00. (If you’re attending the October 17 performance of superposition, be sure to arrive at the museum early, as Icelandic cellist Hildur Guðnadóttir will be playing a special pop-up concert at 6:00 in the Carroll and Milton Petrie European Sculpture Court (Gallery 548) inspired by the Costume Institute’s upcoming “Death Becomes Her: A Century of Mourning Attire,” which opens October 21.)

CROSSING THE LINE: “KILLER ROAD” BY SOUNDWALK COLLECTIVE & JESSE AND PATTI SMITH

Soundwalk Collective, Jesse and Patti Smith, and Lillevan collaborate on an exploration of Nico’s death in Crossing the Line presentation

Soundwalk Collective, Jesse and Patti Smith, and Lillevan collaborate on poetic audiovisual exploration of Nico’s death in Crossing the Line presentation

KILLER ROAD
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Thursday, October 2, $40, 7:30
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org

A limited number of tickets have just been released for Killer Road, a one-night-only event that is part of FIAF’s annual Crossing the Line interdisciplinary arts festival. On October 2, Soundwalk Collective, the international trio of Stephan Crasneanscki, Simone Merli, and Kamran Sadeghi that specializes in site-specific audio installations, and mother and daughter composers and musicians Patti and Jesse Smith, will convene at Florence Gould Hall to present a tribute to Velvet Underground lead vocalist and Factory actress Nico. The presentation, originally performed earlier this year in Nico’s native country of Germany, focuses on Nico’s death at the age of forty-nine in 1988 while riding a bicycle on vacation in Ibiza with her son Ari. Soundwalk Collective will incorporate samples from the harmoniums that Nico played — one of which was given to her by Patti Smith after her original instrument was stolen in 1978 — as Smith reads Nico’s last poems (“Facing the wind / it’s holding me against my will / and doesn’t leave me still”) and video artist Lillevan provides visual projections. “Patti was very kind to me,” Nico said about Smith, as noted in Richard Witts’s biography Nico: The Life and Lies of an Icon. “Early in 1978 my harmonium was stolen from me. I was without any money and now I couldn’t even earn a living playing without my organ. A friend of mine saw one with green bellows in an obscure shop, the only one in Paris. Patti bought it for me. I was so happy and ashamed. I said, ‘I’ll give you back the money when I get it,’ but she insisted the organ was a present and I should forget about the money. I cried. I was ashamed she saw me without money.”