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LABOR OF LOVE — 100 YEARS OF MOVIE DATES: MASCULIN FÉMININ

Paul (Jean-Pierre Léaud) has his eyes on the prize in Godard’s MASCULIN FÉMININ

MASCULIN FÉMININ (Jean-Luc Godard, 1966)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Friday, May 6, 2:00 & 7:00
Series runs May 4-17
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

In a 1966 interview with Pierre Daix about Masculin feminin, director Jean-Luc Godard said, “When I made this film, I didn’t have the least idea of what I wanted.” Initially to be based on the Guy de Maupassant short stories “The Signal” and “Paul’s Mistress,” the film ended up being a revolutionary examination of the emerging youth culture in France, which Godard identifies as “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola.” Godard threw away the script and worked on the fly to make the film, which stars Jean-Pierre Léaud as Paul, a peculiar young man who quickly becomes obsessed with budding pop star Madeleine, played by real-life Yé-yé singer Chantal Goya. (Godard discovered her on a television variety show.) Paul chases Madeleine, getting a job at the same company, going to the movies and nightclubs with her and her friends, and meeting her in cafés, where he wants to talk about the troubles of contemporary society and she just wants to have a good time. “Man’s conscience doesn’t determine his existence. His social being determines his conscience,” Paul proclaims. He continually argues that there is nothing going on even as strange events occur around him to which he is completely oblivious, including a lover’s spat in which a woman guns down a man in broad daylight. (Sounds of rapid-fire bullets can be heard over the intertitles for each of the film’s fifteen faits précis, evoking a sense of impending doom.) Paul has bizarre conversations with his best friend, Robert (Michel Debord), a radical who asks him to help put up anarchist posters. Posing as a journalist, Paul brutally interviews Miss 19 (Elsa Leroy), a young model with a very different view of society and politics. Godard has also included a playful battle of the sexes in the center of it all: Paul wants Madeleine, much to the consternation of Madeleine’s roommate, Elisabeth (Marlène Jobert), who also has designs on her; meanwhile, Robert goes out with another of Madeleine’s friends, the more grounded Catherine (Catherine-Isabelle Duport), who is interested in Paul. It all makes for great fun, taking place in a surreal black-and-white world dominated by rampant consumerism.

Brigitte Bardot makes an unexpected cameo in MASCULIN FÉMININ

In addition, Godard comments on the state of cinema itself. As they watch a Bergman-esque Swedish erotic film (directed by Godard and starring Eva-Britt Strandberg and Birger Malmsten), Paul dashes off to the projectionist, arguing that the aspect ratio is wrong. And in a café scene, French starlet Brigitte Bardot and theater director Antoine Bourseiller sit in a booth, playing themselves as they go over a script, bringing together the real and the imaginary. “I no longer have any idea where I am from the point of view of cinema,” Godard told Daix. “I am in search of cinema. It seems to me that I have lost it.” Well, he apparently found it again with the seminal Masculin feminin, which is screening with Agnès Varda’s 1975 eight-minute short, Women Reply: Our Bodies Our Sex, on May 6 in the BAMcinématek series “Labor of Love: 100 First Dates.” The festival, inspired by Moira Weigel’s new book, Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating, consists of great date flicks that are also about searching for a significant other. The lineup also features such favorites as Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail paired with Edwin S. Porter’s 1904 How a French Nobleman Got a Wife through the New York Herald, Richard Brooks’s Looking for Mr. Goodbar, William Friedkin’s Cruising, Max Ophüls’s La Ronde, and Mary Harron’s American Psycho. Be careful which film you choose to see if you’ll be taking a date, as it will reveal a whole lot about you….

THE DREAMERS

Matthew (Michael Pitt), Isabelle (Eva Green), and Theo (Louis Garrel) frolic in their own erotic fantasy world during the 1968 Paris riots in THE DREAMERS

THE DREAMERS (Bernardo Bertolucci, 2003)
Videology Bar & Cinema
308 Bedford Ave.
Saturday, January 2, $5, 12 midnight
718-782-3468
videologybarandcinema.com

Bernardo Bertolucci’s sexiopolitical look at Paris in the tumultuous year of 1968 focuses on three individuals: Matthew (Dawson Creek’s Michael Pitt), a shy American studying in France; Theo (French heartthrob Louis Garrel), a cigarette-smoking oh-so-French moody lad; and Isabelle (Penny Dreadful’s Eva Green), Theo’s “twin” who likes to walk around naked and flirt with both Matthew and Theo. The trio acts out scenes from films, plays dangerously erotic games, and drinks a lot of wine as the outside world comes crashing down around them. Green (Casino Royale, Kingdom of Heaven) is mesmerizing in her film debut, Pitt (Funny Games, Seven Psychopaths) reveals that he has few shortcomings, and the NC-17 rating is sure to attract an interesting crowd. And look out for a cameo appearance by Jean-Pierre Léaud playing himself. This is Bertolucci’s third film set in Paris, following The Conformist and Last Tango in Paris, and it’s another winner. (Bertolucci, who is now seventy-four, has made only one film since The Dreamers, the 2012 Italian drama Me and You.) The Dreamers is screening at midnight on January 2 at Videology in Brooklyn; future midnight screenings include Carlos Reygadas’s Post Tenebras Lux on January 15, Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers on January 16, Ken Russell’s Lisztomania on January 22, and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s epic Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom on January 29-30.

CONSEQUENCES: ALPHAVILLE

Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) seeks help from Natasha Vonbraun (Anna Karina) in Jean-Luc Godard’s masterful ALPHAVILLE

ALPHAVILLE: A STRANGE ADVENTURE OF LEMMY CAUTION (ALPHAVILLE: UNE ÉTRANGE AVENTURE DE LEMMY CAUTION) (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)
Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th St. at Seventh Ave.
Friday, October 16, $10, 9:30
212-620-5000
rubinmuseum.org

“Sometimes, reality is too complex for oral communication. But legend embodies it in a form which enables it to spread all over the world,” a growly, disembodied, mechanical-like voice says at the beginning of Jean-Luc Godard’s futuristic sci-fi noir thriller, Alphaville: Une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution. Godard’s 1965 black-and-white masterpiece takes place in an unidentified time period in a dark, unadorned, special-effects-free Paris. A tough-as-nails man in hat and trench coat named Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) has arrived in Alphaville from the Outlands, claiming to be journalist Ivan Johnson, on assignment from the Figaro-Pravda newspaper. But his real mission is to first find fellow agent Henry Dickson (Akim Tamiroff), then capture or kill Alphaville leader and death-ray inventor Professor Vonbraun (Howard Vernon), the former Leonard Nosferatu. A Guadalcanal veteran who drives a Ford Galaxie, Caution — a character Constantine played in a series of films based on the novels of Peter Cheyney, including This Man Is Dangerous, Dames Get Along, and Your Turn, Darling — is a no-nonsense guy who takes nothing for granted. “All things weird are normal in this whore of cities,” he tells a blond seductress third class, who apparently comes with his hotel room. Documenting everything he sees with an Instamatic flash camera, Caution (perhaps a stand-in for Godard himself?) is soon visited by Natasha Vonbraun (Anna Karina), the professor’s daughter, setting off on an Orwellian journey through a grim city where poetry and emotion, and such words as “love,” “why,” and “conscience,” are banned in favor of “because” and “Silence. Logic. Security. Prudence,” where the hotel Bible is actually an ever-changing dictionary and enemies of the state are killed in swimming pools and pulled out by clones of Esther Williams, all overseen by a computer known as Alpha 60 (whose text, based on writings by Jorge Luis Borges, is eerily spoken by a man without a larynx, using a mechanized voice box).

Henry Dickson (Akim Tamiroff) attempts to shed light on a grim situation in intellectual sci-fi film noir

Meanwhile, Caution travels everywhere with his paperback copy of Paul Éluard’s Capital of Pain, which includes such short poems as “To Be Caught in the Trap,” “In the Cylinder of Tribulations,” and “The Big Uninhabitable House.” Paul Misraki’s relentless noir score fits right in with Raoul Coutard’s bleakly beautiful cinematography, which often shows Caution through glass doors and windows and in enclosed spaces. Godard infuses Alphaville with cinematic flourishes, inside jokes, political statements, and intellectual references, directly and indirectly evoking Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus, Orson Welles’s Mr. Arkadin, Chris Marker’s La Jetée, American cartoons (a pair of white-coated professors who announce a memory problem with 183 Omega Minus are named Eckel and Jeckel, played by Cahiers du cinema’s Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean-André Fieschi), and even his own films, with Jean-Pierre Léaud making a very brief cameo as a waiter. But one of the myriad pleasures of Alphaville — which won the Golden Bear at Berlin and at one time had the working title Tarzan vs. IBM — is that it can be enjoyed on many different levels, as dystopian warning, fascist parable, cinema about cinema, individual vs. the state thriller, or, quite simply, classic French noir. Recently digitally restored with a new translation and subtitles by Lenny Borger and Cynthia Schoch, Alphaville is screening October 16 in the Rubin Museum Cabaret Cinema series “Consequences” and will be introduced by Buddhist studies professor Christopher Kelley. “All is linked, all is consequence,” a scientist tells Caution in the film. The series is being held in conjunction with “Karma: Cause, Effect and the Illusion of Fate,” which continues through December 30 with conversations (David Eagleman + Whoopi Goldberg, Noah Hutton + Jonathan Demme, Gary Indiana + Tracey Emin, Ian Somerhalder + Carol Anne Clayson) and such other karma-related films as George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, Ken Russell’s Altered States, Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel, and Sherwood Hu’s Prince of the Himalayas.

BLACK & WHITE ’SCOPE — INTERNATIONAL CINEMA: THE 400 BLOWS

Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) can’t seem to stay away from trouble in François Truffaut’s autobiographical Nouvelle Vague classic THE 400 BLOWS

THE 400 BLOWS (LES QUATRE CENTS COUPS) (François Truffaut, 1959)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Friday, May 29, 2:00, 4:30, 7:00 & 9:30
Series runs May 29 – June 16
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

“They won’t be happy you’re missing school like this,” a man tells fourteen-year-old Jean-Pierre Léaud as he’s auditioning for the part of Antoine Doinel in François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows. “It doesn’t matter, as long as I’m happy,” Léaud responds. The French New Wave classic marked the first of five films, including one short, in which Léaud played the iconic character, as audiences around the world followed his search for happiness. In The 400 Blows, Doinel is a tough twelve-year-old kid who loves Balzac, has never seen the ocean, and is always getting into trouble with his parents, who treat him more like a problem than a son. He is clearly very smart, but he does poorly in school, where he is harassed by his teacher, whom they call Sourpuss (Guy Decomble). One day when he decides to play hooky, he catches his mother (Claire Maurier) kissing another man, and instead of telling his father (Albert Rémy), he runs away from home, moving in with his friend René (Patrick Auffay), setting off a series of events that lead to a whole lot more trouble and an unforgettable final shot. The 400 Blows is one of the most intelligent films ever made about adolescence, a tender, honest portrayal of a mischievous kid who just wants to be understood. Léaud gives a wonderfully nuanced performance that makes Antoine a uniquely believable and sympathetic character even when he is making some very bad choices. The bittersweet autobiographical paean to childhood rebellion is also about escape of all kinds, beginning and ending with Henri Decaë’s camera racing away alongside Jean Constantin’s glorious score. The Adventures of Antoine Doinel series continued with 1962’s Antoine and Colette, 1968’s Stolen Kisses, 1970’s Bed and Board, and 1979’s Love on the Run, as the world grew up with Antoine, and Truffaut alter-ego Léaud.

Nominated for a Best Original Screenplay Oscar and earning Truffaut Best Director honors at Cannes, The 400 Blows is screening in Brooklyn on May 29, kicking off the BAMcinématek series “Black & White ’Scope: International Cinema,” an eighteen-day, twenty-eight-film festival featuring 1950s and ’60s black-and-white films shot in CinemaScope. The series includes such other Truffaut classics as Shoot the Piano Player and Jules and Jim in addition to five films by Akira Kurosawa, Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad, Kon Ichikawa’s Fires on the Plain, Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, Joseph Losey’s The Damned, and Masahiro Shinoda’s Pale Flower, a veritable master’s level course in cinema studies.

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.”

TOUT TRUFFAUT: BED AND BOARD

Antoine (Jean-Pierre Léaud) and Christine (Claude Jade) dine on baby food in BED AND BOARD

BED AND BOARD (DOMICILE CONJUGAL) (François Truffaut, 1970)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Wednesday, April 9, 1:15, 3:15, 5:15, 7:40, 9:45
Festival continues through April 17
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org

When we first encounter Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) in Bed and Board, he is running down stairs to dye flowers, complaining that one flower always remains unchanged. Of course, that unchanging flower is Antoine himself, who we’ve watched grow up in François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, Antoine and Colette, and Stolen Kisses. (Bed and Board was supposed to be the final chapter, but Truffaut and Léaud teamed up again in 1979 for Love on the Run.) The upstart adolescent is far from being mature, even though he has now married Christine (Claude Jade) and is preparing to have a baby. Antoine is still very much a child, unable to face any serious responsibilities. When he gets a new job, it’s steering motorized boats on a pond at a hydraulics company, in a miniature version of a port; it’s like a doll’s house for men, a rehearsal for real, full-size life. He is still desexualized; when he’s in bed with his wife, he wants to nickname each of her breasts, which he claims are different sizes, instead of seeing them as beautiful erogenous zones. When they don’t have anything to eat in the apartment, he decides to dine on baby food with Christine. And when Christine’s parents (Claire Duhamel and Daniel Ceccaldi) come to see the baby, his father-in-law wants to make sure that Antoine doesn’t keep their present of a toy duck for himself. Antoine hasn’t grown out of his own fantasy world, and he still doesn’t understand that there are consequences to his actions, especially when he becomes interested in a beguiling Japanese woman named Kyoko (Hiroko Berghauer). He is surrounded by characters who live in the building and gather in the courtyard — a man (Jacques Rispal) who hasn’t stepped outside in decades, a waitress (Danièle Girard) who has the hots for Antoine, a gregarious bar owner (Jacques Jouanneau), and a new stranger (Claude Véga) everyone calls the Strangler — but he’s yet to really decide on his own character. Despite their monetary woes — Christine gives violin lessons in their home to make money — Antoine keeps lending more and more cash to a sponging friend (Jacques Robiolles) as if he’s made of francs. But Antoine clearly doesn’t know what he’s made of, at least not yet.

Antoine Doinel still has plenty of growing up to do in BED AND BOARD

Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) still has plenty of growing up to do as Truffaut’s Nouvelle Vague cycle continues

Bed and Board (or, perhaps, Bed and Bored?) is a charming yet bittersweet romantic comedy that is at times extremely frustrating. Having followed Antoine’s life for so long, we ache to see him make the right decisions, yet hate ourselves for giving him the benefit of the doubt when he makes such wrongheaded, selfish choices. “You are my sister, my daughter, my mother,” he tells Christine, who answers, “I’d hoped to be your wife.” Shot on location by Nestor Almendros in an actual apartment complex, the film has a welcoming, natural feel, as if we’re part of Antoine’s extended family. Truffaut, who cowrote the script with Bernard Revon, has lighthearted fun with the details, adding unique flourishes while paying tribute to such cinema greats as Jacques Tati, Alain Resnais, John Ford, and Orson Welles. Bed and Board is screening April 9 as part of Film Forum’s “Tout Truffaut” series, which continues through April 17 with such other Truffaut treasures as Two English Girls, Day for Night, Small Change, Mississippi Mermaid, and The Last Metro.

ALPHAVILLE

Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) seeks help from Natasha Vonbraun (Anna Karina) in Jean-Luc Godard’s masterful ALPHAVILLE

ALPHAVILLE: A STRANGE ADVENTURE OF LEMMY CAUTION (ALPHAVILLE: UNE ÉTRANGE AVENTURE DE LEMMY CAUTION) (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
February 7-13
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org

Henry Dickson (Akim Tamiroff) attempts to shed light on a grim situation in intellectual sci-fi film noir