Tag Archives: Romy Schneider

POOL PARTY: SWIMMING POOL / A BIGGER SPLASH

POOL PARTY
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
August 5-14
212-660-0312
metrograph.com
www.focusfeatures.com

With New York City sweltering in a muggy, sweat-drenching summer with temps that have stayed in the nineties, Metrograph offers two things to cool you off that usually don’t go together: air-conditioning and swimming. But that’s just what their new series, “Pool Party,” does, consisting of seven films in which characters go for a dip, for good and for bad.

The series kicks off with François Ozon’s beguiling mystery Swimming Pool, in which Charlotte Rampling shows Ludivine Sagnier that she still has it, followed by Jacques Deray’s 1969 erotic thriller La Piscine, in which Jane Birkin shakes things up between Alain Delon and Romy Schneider. Burt Lancaster swims home through suburban backyard pools in Frank Perry’s 1968 adaptation of John Cheever’s 1964 short story “The Swimmer.” Selena Gomez and friends take a wild road trip in Harmony Korine’s 2012 Spring Breakers, meeting up with a metallic-smiling James Franco. Elsie Fisher finds more trouble than she bargained for as a middle school vlogger in Bo Burnham’s bittersweet debut, Eighth Grade. British artist David Hockney makes a big splash in Jack Hazan’s 1974 hybrid docudrama, A Bigger Splash. And Lucretia Martel traces the fall of a bourgeois family in her 2001 debut, La Ciénaga. Below is a deeper dive into two of the films; get those bathing suits on and jump in to beat the heat!

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

SWIMMING POOL (François Ozon, 2003)
Friday, August 5, 2:45
Sunday, August 7, 12:20
metrograph.com
www.focusfeatures.com

Charlotte Rampling is divine in Swimming Pool, 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 quickly has her working vacation 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 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 five 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.

David Hockney works on his masterpiece in Jack Hazan’s A Bigger Splash

A BIGGER SPLASH (Jack Hazan, 1974)
Saturday, August 6, 2:30
Sunday, August 7, 5:00
Saturday, August 13, 7:15
metrograph.com

Coinciding with Pride celebrations throughout New York City in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots in June 2019, Metrograph premiered a 4K restoration of Jack Hazan’s pivotal 1974 A Bigger Splash, a fiction-nonfiction hybrid that was a breakthrough work for its depiction of gay culture as well as its inside look at the fashionable and chic Los Angeles art scene of the early 1970s. In November 2018, David Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) sold at auction for $90.3 million, the most ever paid for a work by a living artist. A Bigger Splash, named after another of Hockney’s paintings — both are part of a series of canvases set around pools in ritzy Los Angeles — takes place over three years, as the British artist, based in California at the time, hangs out with friends, checks out a fashion show, prepares for a gallery exhibition, and works on Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) in the wake of a painful breakup with his boyfriend, model, and muse, Peter Schlesinger, who is a key figure in the painting.

It’s often hard to know which scenes are pure documentary and which are staged for the camera as Hazan and his then-parter, David Mingay, who served as director of photography, tag along with Hockney, who rides around in his small, dirty BMW, meeting up with textile designer Celia Birtwell, fashion designer Ossie Clark, curator Henry Geldzahler, gallerist John Kasmin, artist Patrick Procktor, and others, who are identified only at the beginning, in black-and-white sketches during the opening credits. The film features copious amounts of male nudity, including a long sex scene between two men, a group of beautiful boys diving into a pool in a fantasy sequence, and Hockney disrobing and taking a shower. Hockney’s assistant, Mo McDermott, contributes occasional voice-overs; he also poses as the man standing on the deck in Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), only to be replaced by Schlesinger later. There are several surreal moments involving Hockney’s work: He cuts up one painting; Geldzahler gazes long and hard at himself in the double portrait of him and Christopher Scott; and Hockney tries to light the cigarette Procktor is holding in a painting as Procktor watches, cigarette in hand, mimicking his pose on canvas. At one point Hockney is photographing Schlesinger in Kensington Gardens, reminiscent of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up, which questions the very nature of capturing reality on film.

Hockney was so upset when he first saw A Bigger Splash, which Hazan made for about twenty thousand dollars, that he offered to buy it back from Hazan in order to destroy it; Hazan refused, and Hockney went into a deep depression. His friends ultimately convinced him that it was a worthwhile movie and he eventually accepted it. It’s a one-of-a-kind film, a wild journey that goes far beyond the creative process as an artist makes his masterpiece. Hockney, who turned eighty-five last month, has been on quite a roll of late. He was the subject of a 2016 documentary by Randall Wright, was widely hailed for his 2018 Met retrospective, and had a major drawing show at the Morgan Library in 2020-21. In addition, Catherine Cusset’s novel, Life of David Hockney, was published in English in 2019, a fictionalized tale that conceptually recalls A Bigger Splash.

BEST ACTRESS: A CÉSAR-WINNING SHOWDOWN

And the FIAF audience award for favorite César-winning Best Actress ever goes to . . .

RED CARPET SCREENING AND PARTY
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, March 6, $14, 4:00 & 7:30
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org

The ninetieth Academy Awards will be given out tonight, but there is also excitement building for another highly anticipated movie contest, the conclusion of FIAF’s two-month CinéSalon series “Best Actress: A César-Winning Showdown.” On Tuesday nights from January 9 to February 20, the French Institute Alliance Française presented films featuring nine of France’s finest actresses, each of whom has won the coveted César for Best Actress. On March 6 at 4:00 and 7:30, the winner will be announced with a special surprise screening and wine and beer reception (in addition to Champagne at the later show), and attendees are encouraged to come in festival attire. The outstanding nominees are Marion Cotillard, Isabelle Adjani, Nathalie Baye, Emmanuelle Riva, Romy Schneider, Juliette Binoche, Catherine Deneuve, Sandrine Bonnaire, and Isabelle Huppert. FIAF has offered a hint about the film that will be screened, starring the audience-voted favorite César winner ever: “This French cinema gem will keep you at the edge of your seat and make you laugh too.”

HOMAGE TO JEANNE MOREAU: THE TRIAL

Anthony Perkins stars as Josef K. in Orson Welles’s adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial

THE TRIAL (Orson Welles, 1962)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
September 1-7
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

“The Trial is the best film I have ever made,” Orson Welles told the BBC in a 1962 interview. While that might not be quite true — Welles already had Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, Macbeth, Othello, and Touch of Evil on his resume — his free-form adaptation of Franz Kafka’s posthumously published 1925 novel is an extraordinary work that has only been increasing in critical stature since its 1962 release. The absurdist drama now can be seen in a new restoration playing September 1-7 as part of a two-movie Film Forum tribute to Jeanne Moreau that also includes Jacques Demy’s Bay of Angels; Moreau passed away on July 31 at the age of eighty-nine. Welles reordered the narrative and changed the ending in telling Kafka’s harrowing tale of Josef K. (Anthony Perkins), a low-level bureaucrat who suddenly finds himself in the midst of a mysterious existential ordeal, under arrest for an unnamed crime and facing an unknown fate. Welles begins the film with Kafka’s “Before the Law” parable, told by the auteur over “pin-screen animation” by Alexander Alexeïeff and Claire Parker. Later, Welles, as Albert Hastler, known as the Advocate, repeats the story to Josef, confirming that Welles the filmmaker is fully in control, serving as judge, jury, and executioner of everything we see and hear — and we indeed hear a lot of Welles, who dubbed the voices for many of the characters himself. At the end of the opening parable, Welles explains, “’Tis been said that the logic of this story is the logic of a dream . . . of a nightmare,” and the camera then focuses in on Josef in bed, where he’s about to be roused and placed under arrest.

Josef has no idea what he’s done, shocked to find Inspector A (Arnoldo Foà) hovering over him and three of his coworkers searching the room of his landlady, Mrs. Grubach (Madeleine Robinson). His teenage cousin, Irmie (Naydra Shore), is concerned for him, and his uncle, Max (Max Haufler), takes him to see Hastler to beg the powerful Advocate to handle Josef’s case. As he gets more caught up in the puzzling conundrums, he meets such oddball characters as the pitiful Bloch (Akim Tamiroff), another Advocate client; the Chief Clerk (Fernand Ledoux); the Examining Magistrate (Max Buchsbaum); the Courtroom Guard (Wolfgang Reichmann); a priest (Michael Lonsdale); and painter Titorelli (William Chappell), whose bizarre tree-house-like studio is surrounded by giddy young girls. The locations are spectacular; lacking the necessary budget to build sets, Welles was going to use vast, empty spaces, but instead he accidentally came upon the abandoned Gare d’Orsay train station in Paris, which featured immensely large rooms that evoked an endless Baroque warehouse. He also shot in a Stalinist apartment complex in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, which evoked the cold uniformity of the lives of its citizenry. Each set offers surprises for the viewer, beginning with Josef’s bedroom, which cinematographer Edmond Richard (Chimes at Midnight, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeisie) shoots at skewed, low angles, keeping everything off balance while the tall Perkins struggles to avoid hitting his head on the ceiling, trapped from the very start.

Jeanne Moreau and Anthony Perkins play neighbors in Orson Welles’s The Trial

Josef goes on a metaphysical journey, accompanied by Tomaso Albinoni’s grand, emotional Adagio for Organ and Strings and jazzy noir, that takes him to Hastler’s bedroom, where the Advocate seems to spend most of his time sleeping, smoking, eating, and drinking instead of tending to his clients; a room stuffed with stacks of old, decaying files, as if there’s no longer any past; and an office with perfectly arranged rows and rows of robotic workers at desks. In a large courtroom, Josef picks up a law book, but it is thickly covered with dust, as if it hasn’t been opened in a long time, letting him know that justice is going to be hard to come by in this surreal world. He might think he is guilty of nothing, but in Welles’s conception of Kafka’s tale, anyone living within the constructs of this society is automatically implicated. Josef is also guilty of a certain kind of sexual misconduct with women; he is attracted to nearly every female he meets, whether single, married, or involved with another, including Burstner, Leni (Romy Schneider), Hilda (Elsa Martinelli), Miss Pittl (Suzanne Flon), and the court archivist (Paola Mori), stopping his supposedly desperate search for the truth to snag a kiss, a hug, or a possible quick roll in the hay, even if it complicates his mission. In so doing, Josef — and Welles, of course — condemns us all. “It’s the most autobiographical movie that I’ve ever made, the only one that’s really close to me,” Welles wrote of the film. “It’s much closer to my own feelings about everything than any other picture I’ve made.” That quote might indeed be true; despite all of the surreal absurdity in The Trial, there is something inherently frightening and believable about it, especially when viewed today, in a world dominated by surveillance, the surrender of private space, and a system of government with a rapidly deteriorating rule of law.

LHOMMME BEHIND THE CAMERA: LE COMBAT DANS L’ÎLE

Jean-Louis Trintignant and Romy Schneider share a fun moment on the set of the gripping political/romantic thriller LE COMBAT DANS L’ÎLE

CinéSalon: LE COMBAT DANS L’ÎLE (FIRE AND ICE) (Alain Cavalier, 1962)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, February 9, $14, 4:00 & 7:30
Series continues Tuesdays through February 23
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org
zeitgeistfilms.com

FIAF’s wide-ranging “Lhomme Behind the Camera” CinéSalon series continues February 9 with a double rare treat: a visit by the man himself, master cinematographer Pierre Lhomme. The eighty-five-year-old Lhomme, who has shot more than sixty films for such directors as Jean-Pierre Melville, Robert Bresson, William Klein, Marguerite Duras, James Ivory, Ismail Merchant, Benoît Jacquot, Patrice Chéreau, and Volker Schlöndorff, will be at Florence Gould Hall on February 9 for a Q&A following the second of two screenings of Alain Cavalier’s ravishing debut, the rarely shown and underappreciated 1962 neonoir Le combat dans l’île. The gripping French New Wave film, which was rediscovered in 2009, combines a crime thriller with a love triangle, shot in shadowy, smokey black-and-white by Lhomme. Jean-Louis Trintignant (The Conformist, A Man and a Woman) is stoic as Clément Lesser, a member of a small, right-wing radical group determined to change things in France by any means necessary. Romy Schneider (Purple Noon Mädchen in Uniform) is warm and charming as Anne Lesser, Clément’s wife, a party girl who is growing tired of her husband’s cold, controlling nature and his secret rendezvous with the group, which is led by mastermind Serge (Pierre Asso). After an assassination attempt goes awry, Clément and Anne hide out at the isolated home of Clément’s childhood friend, Paul (Jules et Jim’s Henri Serre), a left-wing idealist who prints political material. When Clément has to set out on his own, Anne and Paul become close, setting up both a philosophical and romantic battle between the two old friends.

Jean-Louis Trintignant, Romy Schneider, and Pierre Asso star in Alain Cavalier’s debut film

Cavalier (Thérèse, Un étrange voyage) and Lhomme (Army of Shadows, The Mother and the Whore) create a tense, claustrophobic atmosphere in Le combat dans l’île, with Lhomme’s slowly moving camera — a Cameflex that was so noisy that all of the dialogue had to be dubbed in later — closing in on his characters in small rooms, where they sometimes emerge from complete darkness. The story is a kind of parable about French politics in the 1960s, following the landslide victory of Charles de Gaulle, who would survive several assassination attempts during his ten years as president. Le combat dans l’île also boasts quite a pedigree, with Cavalier’s mentor, Louis Malle, serving as producer, dialogue written with Jean-Paul Rappenau, and an outstanding score by French composer Serge Nigg; Cavalier said the film’s father was Bresson and mother was Jean Renoir. The solid cast also includes Jacques Berlioz as Clément’s wealthy and powerful industrialist father, Maurice Garrel as left-wing politician Terrasse, and Diane Lepvrier as Cécile, Paul’s young housekeeper. The FIAF series continues February 16 with Chris Marker and Lhomme’s Le Joli Mai and concludes February 23 with Rappenau’s Cyrano de Bergerac, starring Gérard Depardieu.