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EMOTION PICTURES — INTERNATIONAL MELODRAMAS: THE GODDESS

Iconic Chinese star Ruan Lingyu gives one of her best performances in silent classic The Goddess

THE GODDESS (SHEN NU) (Wu Yonggang, 1934)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
144 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
Thursday, December 21, 8:30
Series runs December 13 – January 7
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.org

Wu Yonggang’s directorial debut, The Goddess, made for Lianhua Film Company after he worked as a designer for the Shaw brothers, is a socially conscious, emotive tale about one woman’s struggle to give her young son a better life than her own. The seventy-three-minute silent film opens with a series of shots by cinematographer Hong Weilie that follows the evening light, from the setting sun to a man on a ladder lighting a street corner oil lamp to an apartment window seen from the outside. Wu then cuts to inside the room, revealing a dressing table with lots of makeup, then a pair of dresses hanging on the wall, and a doll. The camera next rises from an empty basket on the floor to a nervous woman (Ruan Lingyu) cradling a baby. She looks at a clock; it is time for her to leave her child and walk the streets of the city to make money. It’s a melancholy scene in a melancholy film, but the unnamed prostitute is no mere hooker with a heart of gold; she is a determined yet fragile woman who will do anything for her son, Shuiping (Keng Li). Running from the police, she is helped by Zhang (Zhang Zhizhi), a low-level gangster who decides to become her pimp, regularly taking her money and threatening her future, and that of her son’s. Whenever she attempts to raise her station, particularly when she saves enough money to send Shuiping to private school, there is always something that brings her back down.

A prostitute (Ruan Lingyu) dreams of a better life for her son (Keng Li) in Wu Yonggang’s The Goddess

Writer-director Wu also designed the sets, which include German Expressionist-type buildings and alleyways along with blinking neon towers and stores. Large columns increase in number, as if creating bars around the woman. Holding on to Shuiping, the woman is seen through Zhang’s spread legs, trapped. Using soft focus, superimposition, and slow fades — the camera cannot get enough of Ruan’s expressive face — Wu depicts her nightly travails as she smokes cigarettes and looks for her next customer. In one memorable scene, Wu shows only feet on the sidewalk as she is propositioned and accepts. But he never sentimentalizes the fallen woman, instead making her a tragic example of societal ills in 1930s China, especially gender and class hierarchies, as explained by the school’s principal. “She is a human being and has her human rights — so does her son,” he says. Unfortunately, most everyone else does not agree. The Goddess is a silent film classic, a major success in China; Wu (The Desert Island, Loyal Family) remade it with sound in 1938 as Rouge Tears. Sadly, Ruan, a huge star, had serious personal problems and committed suicide in 1935, at the age of twenty-four, a victim of gossip and physical abuse; Stanley Kwan’s award-winning 1992 biopic, Centre Stage, detailed her life, with Maggie Cheung playing Ruan. (Visual artist Isaac Julien re-created scenes from The Goddess with Zhao Tao and also cast Cheung as Goddess of the Sea in his nine-screen 2013 MoMA installation, Ten Thousand Waves.) The Chinese title, shennü, refers to both a goddess and a prostitute; Wu, and Ruan, reveals that one does not preclude the other. The Goddess is screening December 21 at the Walter Reade Theater in the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “Emotion Pictures: International Melodrama,” with live piano accompaniment by Donald Sosin. The series, which divides its more than fifty films into four categories — Silent Screen, Hollywood’s Golden Age, International Classics, and Modern/Postmodern Drama — continues through January 7 with works by Yasujirô Ozu, Arturo Ripstein, Charlie Chaplin, Pedro Almodóvar, Clint Eastwood, Guy Maddin, Douglas Sirk, Leo McCarey, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Vincente Minnelli, Terence Davies, and many more.

EMOTION PICTURES: INTERNATIONAL MELODRAMAS

Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman star in Douglas Sirk’s gorgeous Technicolor emotional melodrama All That Heaven Allows

ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS (Douglas Sirk, 1955)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater, Francesca Beale Theater
144/165 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
Wednesday, December 13, 6:30
Monday, January 1, 7:00
Series runs December 13 – January 6
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.org

Forget about It’s a Wonderful Life, Miracle on Thirty-Fourth Street, and endless versions of A Christmas Carol; our favorite holiday movie is Douglas Sirk’s sensationally strange and beautiful All That Heaven Allows, which you can see December 13 and January 1 as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s four-week, fifty-four-movie, get-out-your-handkerchiefs series “Emotion Pictures: International Melodrama.” Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman, who played characters who fell in love in Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession, are at it again in All That Heaven Allows. This time around, Hudson is Ron Kirby, a softhearted, hunky gardener who prefers a simple, outdoorsy life yet is drawn to Cary Scott (Wyman), an older widow who is firmly entrenched in her community’s country-club lifestyle with her best friend, Sara (Agnes Moorehead). Kirby and Cary begin a passionate affair but when they decide to wed, the snooty members of the town’s social register are thoroughly appalled and do everything in their power to drive them apart because of class, wealth, and age differences. (At thirty-seven, Wyman was a mere eight years older than Hudson in real life.) Meanwhile, Cary’s kids, high schooler Kay (Gloria Talbott) and college student Ned (William Reynolds), find their mother’s impending marriage to Kirby disgusting and distasteful as well, preferring she marry Harvey (Conrad Nagel), a plain, sexless widower. In 1950s America, women were still subservient to the needs of men and to raising their children, not permitted by society to lead their own lives and make decisions for themselves, especially when it came to their sexuality. The film features an essentially nonreligious belief system that is embodied by Kirby, who is inspired by the writings on naturalism and the true meaning of success espoused by Henry David Thoreau in Walden. Indeed, the outside world is central to the film; Sirk and his longtime cinematographer, Russell Metty, let the camera linger on trees, lakes, snow banks, and deer. Flowers abound indoors and out, and windows always look out on beautiful scenery, as if paintings, accompanied by Frank Skinner’s equally lush score and Bill Thomas’s colorful costumes.

It all makes for the kind of candy-coated America that David Lynch turned upside down and inside out in Blue Velvet and that directly influenced Todd Haynes’s 2002 Sirk homage, Far from Heaven, in which white Connecticut housewife Cathy Whitaker (Julianne Moore), who is married to a closeted white executive (Dennis Quaid), becomes perhaps too friendly with her black gardener (Dennis Haysbert), a melding of All That Heaven Allows and Sirk’s Imitation of Life. (Both Far from Heaven and Imitation of Life are part of the series as well.) At one point, Kirby talks about how his best friend learned to be his own man. “And you want me to be a man,” Cary says. “Only in that one way,” Kirby responds, playfully looking over at Cary; it’s as if Hudson is teasing her about his real-life sexuality. People’s double nature is reflected throughout, as Sirk and Metty use fireplace screens, windshields, mirrors, and even a television set to create physical separation between characters as well as the inner and outer parts of the same character. In addition, there is a vast array of ties, cravats, scarves, ascots, bow ties, and other articles of clothing that everyone wears around their necks, as if their true feelings are always being choked and hidden. It’s a magnificent film, richly textured and multilayered, not nearly as cynical and tongue-in-cheek as some claim it to be. All That Heaven Allows is screening December 13 and January 1 in “Emotion Pictures: International Melodrama,” which divides its films into four categories: Silent Screen, Hollywood’s Golden Age, International Classics, and Modern/Postmodern Drama, with works by Yasujirô Ozu, Martin Scorsese, Pier-Paolo Pasolini, Charlie Chaplin, Pedro Almodóvar, Clint Eastwood, Federico Fellini, Youssef Chahine, David Lean, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Vincente Minnelli, Max Ophüls, and many more.

Sergey Urusevsky’s dazzling camera work is a character unto itself in The Cranes Are Flying

THE CRANES ARE FLYING (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1957)
Sunday, December 17, 4:00
Saturday, December 30, 3:30
www.filmlinc.org

Even at a mere ninety-seven minutes, Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes Are Flying is a sweeping Russian antiwar epic, an intimate and moving black-and-white tale of romance and betrayal during WWII. Veronika (Tatyana Samojlova) and Boris (Aleksey Batalov) are madly in love, swirling dizzyingly through the streets and up and down a winding staircase. But when Russia enters the war, Boris signs up and heads to the front, while Veronika is pursued by Boris’s cousin, Mark (Aleksandr Shvorin). Pining for word from Boris, Veronika works as a nurse at a hospital run by Boris’s father, Fyodor Ivanovich (Vasili Merkuryev), as the family, including Boris’s sister, Irina (Svetlana Kharitonova), looks askance at her relationship with Mark. The personal and political intrigue comes to a harrowing conclusion in a grand finale that for all its scale and scope gets to the very heart and soul of how the war affected the Soviet people on an individual, human level, in the family lives of women and children, lovers and cousins, husbands and wives.

Unforeseen circumstances trap Veronika (Tatyana Samojlova) in wartime Russia in Mikhail Kalatozov’s masterful The Cranes Are Flying

The only Russian film to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes by itself, The Cranes Are Flying is a masterful work of art, a searing portrait of the horrors of war as seen through the eyes of one desperate woman. Adapting his own play, Viktor Rozov’s story sets up Boris and his family as a microcosm of Soviet society under Stalin; it’s no coincidence that the film was made only after the leader’s death. It’s a whirlwind piece of filmmaking, a marvelous collaboration between director Kalatozov, editor Mariya Timofeyeva (Ballad of a Soldier), composer Moisey Vaynberg (the opera The Passenger), and cinematographer Sergey Urusevsky, who also worked with Kalatozov on I Am Cuba and The Unsent Letter; Urusevsky’s camera, often handheld, is simply dazzling, whether moving through and above crowd scenes, closing in on Samojlova’s face and Batalov’s eyes, or twirling up at the sky. Poetic and lyrical, heartbreaking and maddening, The Cranes Are Flying is an exquisite example of the power of cinema. You can see it December 17 and 30 in the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “Emotion Pictures: International Melodrama,” which also features works by D. W. Griffith, F. W. Murnau, Oscar Micheaux, Nicholas Ray, George Cukor, Ida Lupino, Leo McCarey, Ritwik Ghatak, Mikio Naruse, Jacques Demy, Lars von Trier, Guy Maddin, and many more.

Oharu (Kinuyo Tanaka) lives a life filled with misery after misery in Mizoguchi melodrama

THE LIFE OF OHARU (SAIKAKU ICHIDAI ONNA) (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1952)
Monday, December 18, 1:30
Saturday, January 6, 3:45
www.filmlinc.org

We used to think that Aki Kaurismäki’s The Match Factory Girl was the saddest film ever made about a young woman who just can’t catch a break, as misery after misery keeps piling up on her ever-more-pathetic existence. But the Finnish black comedy has nothing on Kenji Mizoguchi’s The Life of Oharu, a searing, brutal example of the Buddhist observation of impermanence and the role of women in Japanese society. The film, based on a seventeenth-century novel by Ihara Saikaku, is told in flashback, with Oharu (Kinuyo Tanaka) recounting what led her to become a fifty-year-old prostitute nobody wants. It all starts to go downhill after she falls in love with Katsunosuke (Toshirô Mifune), a lowly page beneath her family’s station. The affair brings shame to her mother (Tsukie Matsuura) and father (Ichiro Sugai), as well as exile. The family is redeemed when Oharu is chosen to be the concubine of Lord Matsudaira (Toshiaki Konoe) in order to give birth to his heir, but Lady Matsudaira (Hisako Yamane) wants her gone once the baby is born, and so she is sent home again, without the money her father was sure would come to them.

Donald Richie called THE LIFE OF OHARU “one of Mizoguchi’s most elegantly beautiful films”

Mizoguchi’s The Life of Oharu is an elegant film about one woman’s struggle to survive in a cold world

Over the next several years, Oharu becomes involved in a series of personal and financial relationships, each one beginning with at least some hope and promise for a better future but always ending in tragedy. Nevertheless, she keeps on going, despite setback after setback, bearing terrible burdens while never giving up. Mizoguchi (Sansho the Bailiff, The 47 Ronin, Street of Shame) bathes much of the film in darkness and shadow, casting an eerie glow over the unrelentingly melodramatic narrative. Tanaka, who appeared in fifteen of Mizoguchi’s films and also became the second Japanese woman director (Love Letter, Love Under the Crucifix), gives a subtly compelling performance as Oharu, one of the most tragic figures in the history of cinema. Winner of the International Prize at the 1952 Venice International Film Festival, The Life of Oharu is screening December 18 and January 6 in the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “Emotion Pictures: International Melodrama,” which also features works Teuvo Tulio, Fei Mu, George Kuchar, Todd Haynes, Wong Kar Wai, Terence Davies, Leos Carax, Wu Yonggang, Robert Stevenson, and many more.

Letty Mason (Lillian Gish) is being driven crazy by internal and external sources in The Wind

THE WIND (Victor Sjöström, 1928)
December 19, 8:30
www.filmlinc.org

Victor Sjöström’s 1928 now-classic silent film The Wind stars Lillian Gish as Letty Mason, a young woman traveling from Virginia to Texas to live with her cousin Beverly (Edward Earle). Traveling from the cultured, civilized East to what was still the wild West, the uncertain Letty must confront the fierceness of nature head-on — both human nature and the harsh natural environment. On the train, she is wooed by cattleman Wirt Roddy (Montagu Love), but her fears grow as she first sees the vicious wind howling outside the train window the closer she gets to her destination. Once in Sweetwater, she is picked up by her cousin’s neighbors, the handsome Lige Hightower (Lars Hanson), and his goofy sidekick, Sourdough (William Orlamond). Both men take a quick liking to Letty, who seems most attracted to Wirt. Soon Beverly’s wife, Cora (Dorothy Cumming, in her next-to-last film before retiring), becomes jealous of Letty’s closeness with her husband and kids and kicks her out, leaving a desperate Letty to make choices she might not be ready for as the wind outside becomes fiercer and ever-more dangerous. The Wind is a tour de force for Gish in her last silent movie, not only because of her emotionally gripping portrayal of Letty but because she put the entire production together, obtaining the rights to the novel by Dorothy Scarborough, hiring the Swedish director and star Hanson, and arguing over the ending with the producers and Irving Thalberg. (Unfortunately, she lost on that account, just about the only thing that did not go the way she wanted.)

Letty Mason (Lillian Gish) and Lige Hightower (Lars Hanson) have some tough decisions to make in Victor Sjöström’s silent classic

Sjöström (The Phantom Carriage, The Divine Woman), who played Professor Isak Borg in Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, and cinematographer John Arnold create some dazzling effects as a twister threatens and Letty battles both inside and outside; she is regularly shot from the side, at the door of the shack where she lives, not knowing if she’d be safer inside or outside as the wind and sand blast over her. The film, an early look at climate change, was shot in the Mojave Desert in difficult circumstances; to get the wind to swirl, the crew used propellers from eight airplanes. Dialogue is sparse, and the story is told primarily in taut visuals. A restored 35mm print of The Wind with the original music and effects soundtrack is screening December 19 in the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “Emotion Pictures: International Melodrama.”

THE NON-ACTOR: WEEK ONE

Film Society of Lincoln Center series highlights classic works featuring nonprofessional actors, including Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew

Film Society of Lincoln Center
Walter Reade Theater, 165 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
Francesca Beale Theater, 144 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
November 24 – December 10
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.org

Ever since the invention of the motion picture, men and women have been trying to capture real life on film at twenty-four frames per second, not only in documentaries but in works of fiction. The more believable a situation or character feels, whether in a crime drama, sci-fi tale, Western, or romantic comedy, the more successful the movie often is. And now, in the age of social media and the YouTube star, the time is ripe for “The Non-Actor,” an ambitious twelve-day series at the Film Society of Lincoln Center consisting of more than forty films from around the world made between 1928 and 2013 featuring nonprofessional actors in lead or key roles. In addition to the below films, the series, running November 24 to December 10, includes such wide-ranging highlights as Ousmane Semebene’s Black Girl, Spencer Williams’s The Blood of Jesus, Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames, Shirley Clarke’s The Cool World, Roberto Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero, Sergei Eisenstein’s October, and Robert Flaherty’s Louisiana Story. As the late Robin Williams famously said: “Reality . . . What a Concept.”

Apu (Subir Banerjee) watches life unfold in his small Indian village in Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali

PATHER PANCHALI (SONG OF THE LITTLE ROAD) (Satyajit Ray, 1955)
Friday, November 24, 1:30, and Sunday, November 26, 6:00
www.filmlinc.org

A groundbreaking work in the history of world cinema, Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali and its two sequels, Aparajito and Apur Sansar, have been meticulously restored by the Criterion Collection and the Academy Film Archive following a nitrate fire in 1993 — the year after Ray was awarded an honorary Oscar on his deathbed. Inspired by a meeting with Jean Renoir in Kolkata, where Renoir was shooting The River, and watching ninety-nine films in six months while working as a graphic designer for an advertising agency in London, Ray decided to make his first film, adapting Bibhutibhushan Banerjee’s 1929 novel, which he knew well; Ray had contributed illustrations to a later edition of the book. The film took nearly five years to make as Ray faced repeated financing problems, such delays as cattle eating flowers that were needed for an important scene, and a cast and crew primarily of nonprofessionals. Despite all those issues, Pather Panchali is a stunning masterpiece, a bittersweet and captivating tale of a rural family mired in poverty, struggling to survive in extremely hard times. In a small village, Sarbajaya (Karuna Banerjee) is raising her daughter, Durga (Runki Banerjee), a rambunctious teen, and son, Apu (Subir Banerjee), while her husband, dreamer Harihar (Kanu Banerjee), a wannabe playwright and poet, goes off for months at a time, trying to find work in the city. (The actors shared a common surname but were not related in real life.) Sarbajaya is also caring for their elderly cousin, “Auntie” Indir (retired theater actress Chunibala Devi), who walks very slowly, hunched over and with impossibly leathery skin. The family goes about its business from day to day, as the kids play with friends, figure out how they can get something from the sweets man, and hang out with Auntie, who offers a fresh perspective on life. Sarbajaya is embarrassed that she cannot pay back several rupees she owes her relatively wealthy neighbor, who owns an orchard from which Durga steals fruit. It’s a meager existence, but it avoids being completely dark and bleak because of Auntie’s sense of humor and Apu’s wide-eyed innocence. The film is told from his point of view — in fact, the first time we see him, he is lying down, covered, and one of his eyes pops open, dominating the screen. It’s a difficult, challenging life, but there’s always hope.

Durga (Runki Banerjee) offers Auntie (Chunibala Devi) a stolen treat in Pather Panchali

The episodic Pather Panchali was heavily influenced by Italian Neorealism while also evoking works by Ozu, Kurosawa, and Renoir, providing an alternative to the flashier, popular Bollywood style. First-time writer-director Ray and first-time cinematographer Subrata Mitra maintain a lyrical, poetic pace, accompanied by a traditional score by sitar legend Ravi Shankar. The film succeeds both as a cultural testament, lending insight into the poor of India, as well as a fully realized cinematic story; it won the country’s National Film Award for Best Feature Film while also earning Best Human Document honors at Cannes. Sarbajaya, Durga, Apu, and Auntie are almost always barefoot, wearing the same clothes, scraping the bottom of the pan with their fingers for that last grain of rice, but there’s an elegance and grace, an intoxicating honesty, to their simple, laborious daily lives. Ray would go on to make such other films as Teen Kanya, Jalsaghar, Ashani Sanket, Devi, and Agantuk, but he is most remembered for “The Apu Trilogy,” which looks absolutely gorgeous in the new 4K restorations, reaffirming its lofty place in the coming-of-age pantheon alongside François Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel series. Pather Panchali is being shown November 24 and 26 in the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “The Non-Actor.”

De Sica Neorealist classic is the heartbreaking story of a man and his dog

De Sica neorealist classic is the heartbreaking story of an elderly man and his faithful dog

UMBERTO D. (Vittorio De Sica, 1952)
Friday, November 24, 4:00, and Wednesday, November 29, 1:00
www.filmlinc.org

We don’t think we’ll ever stop crying. Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist masterpiece Umberto D. stars Carlo Battisti (a professor whom De Sica saw one day and thought would be perfect for the lead role; it would be Battisti’s only film) as Umberto Domenico Ferrari, an elderly former bureaucrat who is too proud to sacrifice his dignity in order to pay his mean-spirited landlady (Lina Gennari), who rents out his room by the hour while he’s out walking his beloved dog, Flag, and trying to find some way to get money and food. Umberto D. is befriended by the boardinghouse maid (Maria Pia Casilio), who is pregnant with the child of one of two servicemen, neither of whom wants to have anything to do with her. As Umberto D.’s options start running out, he considers desperate measures to free himself from his loneliness and poverty. His relationship with Flag is one of the most moving in cinema history. Don’t miss this remarkable achievement, which was lovingly restored last decade by eighty-six-year-old lighting specialist Vincenzo Verzini, known as Little Giotto. Umberto D. is screening November 24 and 29 at the Walter Reade Theater and will be preceded by Cesare Zavattini and Francesco Maselli’s half-hour Story of Caterina, from the omnibus Love in the City.

The tender love between a young girl (Anne Wiazemsky) and a donkey lies at the heart of Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar

AU HASARD BALTHAZAR (Robert Bresson, 1966)
Saturday, November 25, 4:00, and Tuesday, November 28, 4:00
www.filmlinc.org

Robert Bresson’s heartbreaking 1966 masterpiece, Au hasard Balthazar, is an unforgettable tale of the life and times of a most unusual yet completely ordinary donkey. As the opening credits roll, we hear writer and pianist Jean-Joël Barbier performing Franz Schubert’s Sonata No. 20, interrupted by the braying of a donkey and concluding with the sound of bells ringing. In a small rural community in France, a donkey has been born. Young Jacques and his sister baptize him and name him Balthazar, after one of the three Magi who presented the infant Jesus with gifts. Jacques and his neighbor, Marie, adore the donkey, treating him not only as their friend but their surrogate child, believing they are destined to marry. But they are torn apart by a land dispute between their fathers, and when they become teenagers, although the upstanding Jacques (Walter Green) still desires Marie (Anne Wiazemsky), she shamefully gives herself to Gérard (François Lafarge), the sinister leader of a local gang of bike-riding juvenile delinquents. Gérard abuses Marie as well as Balthazar, who soon sets off on a journey inspired by Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot and the Stations of the Cross, going from owner to owner in a series of vignettes that also represent the seven deadly sins. His big, dark eyes appearing to understand what is happening to him, Balthazar encounters lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride but soldiers on, loved by Marie, who becomes ever-more helpless, unable and unwilling to take control of her destiny, much to the disappointment of her parents (Philippe Asselin and Nathalie Joyaut). Her sad fate seems predetermined, as does that of her beloved Balthazar, who literally and figuratively bears the heavy weight of the sins of all around him.

“Everyone who sees this film will be absolutely astonished because this film is really the world in an hour and a half,” Jean-Luc Godard famously said about Au hasard Balthazar, and that gets right to the heart of the film. (Godard went on to cast Wiazemsky in several of his movies; the two were married from 1967 to 1979.) Written and directed by Bresson (Pickpocket, Diary of a Country Priest), beautifully edited by Raymond Lamy, stunningly photographed in black-and-white by Ghislain Cloquet, and featuring primarily nonprofessional actors, Au hasard Balthazar is about young love, sacrifice, honor, family, life and death — and the very essence of humanity, most evidently seen in the form of an amazing animal. The film is rife with biblical overtones, but it is not merely citing dogma, nor is it a direct parable, instead exploring the contradictions inherent in religion. Marie is part Mother Mary, part Mary Magdalene, but mostly just a deeply troubled girl. One night Gérard and his gang beat Balthazar as Marie watches, saying nothing; the next morning, she looks up in church as he sings a Latin hymn that is bookended by the ringing of Balthazar’s bells and the chiming of the church bells.

Metrograph will host week-long fiftieth-anniversary presentation of extraordinary Au hasard Balthazar

The Book of Proverbs explains that “idle hands are the devil’s workshop,” and Bresson expands on this concept by continually focusing on hands. Sitting on a bench in the dark, Marie puts her left hand over her heart, then slowly moves it onto the bench, where another hand emerges from the shadows to gently touch hers. She runs away, but Bresson’s camera still follows her hand as it closes and then opens a door. Later, as Gérard prepares to set Balthazar’s tail on fire, a car passes by, and the camera centers on Gérard’s hands, fidgeting nervously as he worries about being caught. When the drunkard Arnold (Jean-Claude Guilbert) is questioned by the police about a murder, Bresson zooms in on three men’s hands as Arnold gives his papers to the captain (Jacques Sorbets), who gives them to an associate, who then asks for Arnold’s hands so he can take his fingerprints, as if the hands themselves are guilty, stained with sin. “Holding on to me, too?” Arnold says. And when Balthazar performs a trick at a circus, his front hooves become the primary objects of attention. Screening at Lincoln Center on November 25 and 28, Au hasard Balthazar is filled with such glorious moments, layers of meaning attached to every sound and image, a staggering cinematic achievement that amply deserves its status as one of the greatest films ever made.

THE EXILES (Kent Mackenzie, 1961)
Wednesday, November 29, 8:45, and Friday, December 1, 4:45
www.filmlinc.org
www.exilesfilm.com

Having restored Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep and My Brother’s Wedding, Milestone, the UCLA Film & Television Archive, and preservationist Ross Lipman teamed up again to bring back Kent Mackenzie’s black-and-white slice-of-life tale The Exiles, which debuted at the 1961 Venice Film Festival and screened at the inaugural 1964 New York Film Festival before disappearing until its restoration, upon which it was selected for the 2008 Berlin International Film Festival. The Exiles follows a group of American Indians as they hang out on a long Friday night of partying and soul searching in the Bunker Hill section of Los Angeles, centering on Homer (Homer Nish) and Yvonne (Yvonne Williams), who are going to have a baby. After Yvonne makes dinner for Homer and his friends, the men drop her off at the movies by herself while they go out drinking and gambling and, in Tommy’s (Tommy Reynolds) case, looking for some female accompaniment. As the night goes on, Homer, Yvonne, and Tommy share their thoughts and dreams in voice-over monologues that came out of interviews Mackenzie conducted with them. In fact, the cast worked with the director in shaping the story and getting the details right, ensuring its authenticity and realism, giving The Exiles a cinéma vérité feel. Although the film suffers from a poorly synced soundtrack — it is too often too clear that the dialogue was dubbed in later and doesn’t match the movement of the actors’ mouths — it is still an engaging, important independent work (the initial budget was $539) about a subject rarely depicted onscreen with such honesty. Mackenzie, who followed up The Exiles with the documentaries The Teenage Revolution (1965) and Saturday Morning (1971) before his death in 1980 a the age of fifty, avoids sociopolitical remonstrations in favor of a sweet innocence behind which lies the difficulties of the plight of American Indians assimilating into U.S. society. The Exiles is screening November 29 and December 1 at the Francesca Beale Theater.

NYFF55 SPOTLIGHT ON DOCUMENTARY: THE VENERABLE W.

Megalomaniacal monk spouts his extremist views in Barbet Schroeder’s The Venerable W.

THE VENERABLE W. (Barbet Schroeder, 2017)
New York Film Festival, Film Society of Lincoln Center
Friday, October 13, Walter Reade Theater, $25, 6:00
Saturday, October 14, Francesca Beale Theater, $25, 1:00
Festival runs September 28 – October 15
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.org
www.filmsdulosange.fr/en

According to long-standing traditions and beliefs, Buddhists have empathy and compassion for all sentient beings. For example, in the recently released documentary The Last Dalai Lama?, His Holiness expressed such feelings even for the Chinese military and government that have waged war on the Tibetan people for more than fifty years and have decided that they will select the next Dalai Lama. So when Iranian-born Swiss-French director Barbet Schroeder heard about Ashin Wirathu, a Buddhist monk in Myanmar advocating violence against a Muslim minority known as the Rohingyas, he headed to the country, formerly known as Burma, where he was so shocked and disturbed by what he saw that he can still barely say the monk’s name in interviews. Nor could he bring himself to use it in the title of his film about the controversial figure, The Venerable W., which is screening at the New York Film Festival on October 13 and 14, followed by Q&As with the director. With the documentary, Schroeder, who is best known for such works as Barfly, Reversal of Fortune, and Single White Female, concludes his Trilogy of Evil, which began with General Idi Amin Dada: A Self Portrait in 1974, about the Ugandan dictator, and continued in 2007 with Terror’s Advocate, about lawyer Jacques Vergès, who has defended such clients as a former Nazi, a Khmer Rouge leader, and a Holocaust denier. The Venerable W. consists of archival footage and new interviews with Wirathu, as Schroeder essentially lets the leader speak his mind, in sermons to his rabid followers, at public events, and in his monastery, where he espouses his beliefs to the filmmaker. “The main features of the African catfish are that: They grow very fast. They breed very fast too. And they’re violent. They eat their own species and destroy their natural resources. The Muslims are exactly like these fish,” Wirathu, who was born in Kyaukse near Mandalay in 1968, says with a sly smile. He regularly boasts of his accomplishments in subduing the Rohingyas, whom he often refers to using a slur that is the equivalent of the N-word in America.

The Venerable Wirathu walks among his faithful minions in shocking documentary

A megalomaniacal nationalist with extremist positions on patriotism, protectionism, and border crossings and a clever manipulator of social media, Wirathu, inspired by the 1997 book In Fear of Our Race Disappearing, also makes extravagant, debunked claims using false statistics, from declaring that he started the 2007 Saffron Revolution to arguing that the Rohingyas are burning down their own villages so they can blame the Buddhists. Much of what he is saying sounds eerily familiar, evoking racist, nationalist sentiments that are gaining ground around the world, particularly in France, England, and America. “In the USA, if the people want to maintain peace and security, they have to choose Donald Trump,” Wirathu says. Schroeder also speaks with seven men who share their views about Wirathu: W.’s master, U. Zanitar; investigative magazine editor Kyaw Zayar Htun; Saffron Revolution monk U. Kaylar Sa; Fortify Rights creator Matthew Smith; Muslim political candidate Abdul Rasheed; Spanish journalist Carlos Sardiña Galache; and highly revered monk U. Galonni. Together they paint a portrait of a dangerous fanatic who is fomenting bitter hatred that has led to extensive episodes of rape, violence, and murder while the military and the government, headed by Aung San Suu Kyi, either support what Wirathu’s doing or merely look the other way. In numerous voiceovers, Portuguese actress Maria de Medeiros recites quotations from Buddhist texts, including the Metta Sutta, and states various sociopolitical facts. “The Buddha is often above good and evil, but his words should help us limit the mechanics of evil,” she narrates. Meanwhile, Wirathu, who was declared “the Face of Buddhist Terror” in a June 2013 Time magazine cover story, insists he is doing the right thing for his country. “I help people who have been persecuted by Muslims,” he says. “The threat against Buddhism has reached alert level.” It’s a brutal film to watch, infuriating and frightening, as Schroeder and editor Nelly Quettier clearly and concisely present the facts, without judgment, including scenes of people on fire and being viciously beaten; the director might not make any grand statements against what Wirathu and his flock are doing — he lets the monk take care of that by himself — but the film is a clarion call for us all to be aware of what is happening around the world, as well as in our own backyard. Both screenings of The Venerable W. will be preceded by the short film What Are You Up to, Barbet Schroeder?, which goes behind the scenes of his decision to tell Wirathu’s story.

NYFF55: ROBERT MITCHUM RETROSPECTIVE

Robert Mitchum is subject of twenty-four-film retrospective at the New York Film Festival, honoring the centennial of his birth

New York Film Festival
Film Society of Lincoln Center
October 2-14
www.filmlinc.org/nyff2017

Bridgeport-born actor Robert Mitchum was a man’s man and an actor’s actor, a devilishly handsome and hunky machine operator from a working-class family who turned to acting following a nervous breakdown in the early 1940s. He went on to appear in more than 125 films, from noir thrillers and military dramas to sweeping romances and Westerns, establishing himself as a rough, rugged tough guy who was almost always cool, calm, and collected, with a deceptive easygoing manner. Mitchum, who passed away in 1997 at the age of seventy-nine, was also a recording artist and a poet. The Film Society of Lincoln Center is honoring the centenary of Mitchum’s birth with a twenty-four-movie salute at the fifty-fifth annual New York Film Festival, beginning October 2 with The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Track of the Cat, and River of No Return and including The Story of G.I. Joe, for which Mitchum received his only Oscar nomination, for Best Supporting Actor. Below is a look at several of the films being shown at this special event.

Robert Mitchum and his oldest son, James, play brothers in Thunder Road

THUNDER ROAD (Arthur Ripley, 1958)
Francesca Beale Theater
Wednesday, October 4, 3:30
www.filmlinc.org

The film that gave Bruce Springsteen the title for one of his greatest songs is not one of Robert Mitchum’s best, although it was one of his most personal. The story of moonshining families in the backwoods of Tennessee was cowritten and produced by Mitchum, who also wrote the theme song, “The Ballad of Thunder Road,” and his sixteen-year-old son, James, plays his brother, Robin, a part originally meant for Elvis Presley. Robert Mitchum is Lucas Doolin, a daring transporter of illegal whiskey. Robin soups up his cars, giving them extra juice and an escape hatch for the moonshine in case the treasury agents, led by the determined and dedicated Troy Barrett (Gene Barry), catch him. When gangster Carl Kogan (Jacques Aubuchon) decides to take over the local trade, the whiskey runners are caught in more jeopardy, from both sides of the law. Meanwhile, Luke is in love with singer Francie Wymore (Keely Smith) but is being chased by Roxanna Ledbetter (Sandra Knight), who fellow transporter Jed Moultrie (Mitchell Ryan) is sweet on. With its opening authoritative voiceover about taxation and “the wild and reckless men” who work in the moonshine trade, the movie makes its message clear; these transporters are not heroes, and they must pay for their crimes. Director Arthur Ripley, who specialized in short films and television episodes, cannot maintain the story even for its ninety minutes, and although Mitchum is strong and sturdy in his role, James and Smith are not up to the task. There are some fine driving scenes, but the film plays too much like government propaganda, although that didn’t stop it from becoming a drive-in favorite over the years.

Robert Ryan, Robert Mitchum, and Robert Young star in Oscar-nominated social noir, Crossfire

CROSSFIRE (Edward Dmytryk, 1947)
Howard Gilman Theater
Friday, October 6, 3:30
www.filmlinc.org

Edward Dmytryk’s 1947 socially conscious noir classic, Crossfire, has one of the great opening scenes of the genre, a fight that begins in shadows, plunges into darkness as a lamp is knocked over, and finally, in a sliver of light as shadows dominate the screen, J. Roy Hunt’s camera focuses on a man lying on the floor, dead. The rest of the film traces what happened that night, from the discovery of the perpetrator to how to catch the killer. There’s a fascinating twist to the story involving bigotry and hatred that is timely and relevant, involving anti-Semitism; in fact, the film was adapted by John Paxton based on screenwriter and director Richard Brooks’s novel, The Brick Foxhole, in which the victim was gay, but that had to be changed because of the Hays Code. World War II is over, and a group of recently discharged soldiers are in Washington, DC, trying to redefine their purpose in the aftermath of four years of battle. A night of drinking ends in the death of Joseph Samuels (Sam Levene), and police investigator Finlay (Robert Young) is on the case, speaking with the calm and disciplined Sgt. Keeley (Robert Mitchum) and the defensive and shifty Montgomery (Robert Ryan). The initial evidence points to Corporal Arthur Mitchell (George Cooper), who can’t remember all of the details of the night of the murder. After leaving Samuels’s apartment — also there were Monty and soldier Floyd Bowers (Steve Brodie) — the drunk and confused “Mitch” met up with tough-talking taxi dancer Ginny (Gloria Grahame), but she wants to stay out of the investigation completely. While Keeley tries to get to the bottom of everything without the police, Captain Finlay is not about to let them handle this by themselves.

Crossfire came out in 1947, the same year another, more famous film about anti-Semitism, Gentleman’s Agreement, was released. Both were nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, which Gentleman’s Agreement won a mere two months before the establishment of the State of Israel. But whereas Elia Kazan’s film, about a journalist, played by Gregory Peck, posing as a Jew for a story, is a more intellectual movie about the inherent anti-Semitism in society, Dmytryk’s (The Caine Mutiny; Murder, My Sweet) film looks much deeper at hatred and the violence it can lead to, without becoming pedantic and preachy. An Oscar-nominated Ryan, Mitchum, and Young form a marvelous trio, each of the soldiers developing a unique relationship with the police captain; it’s one of Young’s (Father Knows Best; Marcus Welby, M.D.) best roles, particularly when, with his ever-present pipe, he slinks back in his chair at a nearly impossible angle. “This business about hating Jews comes in a lot of different sizes,” Finlay explains in words that still ring true today and could be about various ethnicities, races, sexual orientations, and religions. “There’s the ‘You can’t join our country club’ kind. The ‘You can’t live around here’ kind. The ‘You can’t work here’ kind. And because we stand for all these, we get Monty’s kind. He’s just one guy; we don’t get him very often, but he grows out of all the rest. You know we have a law against carrying a gun? We have that law because a gun is dangerous. Well, hate — Monty’s kind of hate — is like a gun. If you carry it around with you, it can go off. . . . Hating is always insane, always senseless.” Also nominated for Best Director, Best Supporting Actress (Grahame), and Best Adapted Screenplay and winner of Best Social Film at Cannes, Crossfire is a gripping, bold tale about hate, war, and violence and what can happen to soldiers once the official, approved fighting is over. At one point, Finlay asks Keeley if he’s ever killed anyone, and the sergeant responds, “Where you get medals for it.” The brutality of war is central to Crossfire, which illuminates a psychological form of what became known as PTSD while also staring in the face of illogical hate in the aftermath of the Holocaust.

Robert Mitchum gets caught up in some dangerous dichotomies in The Night of the Hunter

THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (Charles Laughton, 1955)
Alice Tully Hall
Monday, October 9, 3:30
www.filmlinc.org

Robert Mitchum redefined himself in Charles Laughton’s lurid story of traveling preacher/con man/murderer Harry Powell, who has the word “love” tattooed on one set of knuckles and “hate” on the other. While in prison, Powell bunks with Ben Harper (Peter Graves), who got caught stealing $10,000 — but the only person who knows where the money is is Ben’s young son, John (Billy Chapin). When Preacher is released from jail, he shows up on the Harpers’ doorstep, ready to woo the widow Willa (Shelley Winters) — and get his hands on the money any way he can, including torturing John and his sister, Ruby (Gloria Castillo). Laughton’s only directorial effort is seriously flawed — the scenes in the beginning and end with Lillian Gish are wholly unnecessary and detract from the overall mood. Stanley Cortez’s cinematography is outstanding, featuring his unique use of shadows, an intense battle between light and dark (which plays off of several themes: old versus young, rich versus poor, good versus evil, men versus women), and some marvelous silhouettes. Based on Davis Grubb’s 1953 novel, the film has made its way onto many best-of lists, from scariest and most thrilling to all-time great and most beautiful.

(Robert Mitchum) has quite a tale to tell () in film noir classic

Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum) has quite a tale to tell Ann Miller (Virginia Huston) in film noir classic

OUT OF THE PAST (Jacques Tourneur, 1947)
Walter Reade Theater
Monday, October 9, 4:00
www.filmlinc.org

“You know, maybe I was wrong and luck is like love,” Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum) says in Out of the Past. “You have to go all the way to find it.” Bailey, previously known as Markham, is looking for luck and love in Jacques Tourneur’s film noir classic, considered one of the best of the genre, but he knows that it’s not going to come easy. Jeff is trying to escape his recent past by making a new life for himself in small-town Bridgeport, California (a nod to Mitchum’s real birthplace, Bridgeport, Connecticut), where he runs a gas station and is wooing Ann Miller (Virginia Huston), who is supposedly dating Jim (Richard Webb), the local policeman. But when Joe Stefanos (Paul Valentine) suddenly shows up, Jeff is thrown back into his sordid past when, as a private investigator, he got in too deep after being hired by New York gangster Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas) to track down the kingpin’s girlfriend, Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer), who shot Whit and took off with forty grand. When Jeff finds her, he falls hard and fast and ultimately lies to Whit and Joe, Whit’s right-hand man, who never liked Jeff in the first place. To clean their slate, Whit forces Jeff to do one more job for him, involving lawyer Leonard Eels (Ken Niles), Eels’s secretary, Meta Carson (Rhonda Fleming), and, of course, Kathie. Jeff’s going to need a whole lot more than luck to get out of this one.

Adapted by Daniel Mainwaring from his 1946 novel, Build My Gallows High, Out of the Past is the quintessential noir, with shadowy cinematography by Nicholas Musuraca, moody music by Roy Webb, a bold antihero played by Mitchum, and Greer as one of the great femme fatales. Mitchum’s effortlessly cool and calm style, both onscreen and in his voiceover narration, shines through, a terrific counterpoint to Douglas’s wonderfully smarmy and sarcastic turn as the slick Sterling. Cigarettes play a major role in the film from the very start, when Joe flicks a match at Jeff’s young gas station employee (Dickie Moore, from The Little Rascals), a portent of things to come; from then on, the tension thickens as more and more butts are smoked, adding to the heavy atmosphere maintained by Tourneur, a longtime editor who also directed such films as Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie. “Look at all the angles,” Joe, seen from behind, tells Jeff, whose face is half in shadow, but he’s talking to the viewer as well. Out of the Past is screening on October 9 at 4:00 at the Walter Reade Theater and will be introduced by Mitchum’s son, Christopher, who has appeared in more than sixty films himself.

Robert Mitchum heads back to Japan in Sydney Pollack’s The Yakuza

THE YAKUZA (Sydney Pollack, 1975)
Francesca Beale Theater
Friday, October 13, 3:15
Festival runs through October 14
www.filmlinc.org

One of Hollywood’s first forays into the Japanese underworld has quite a pedigree — directed by Sydney Pollack (coming off his success with The Way We Were) and written by Robert Towne (who had just scribed Chinatown and Shampoo) and Paul Schrader (his first writing credit, to be followed by Taxi Driver). Robert Mitchum stars as Harry Kilmer, a WWII vet who returns to Japan thirty years later to help his friend George Tanner (Brian Family Affair Keith), whose daughter has been kidnapped. Kilmer thinks he can just walk in and walk out, but things quickly get complicated, and he ends up having to take care of some unfinished business involving the great Keiko Kishi (The Twilight Samurai). Kilmer and his trigger-happy young cohort, Dusty (Richard Logan’s Run Jordan), hole up at Oliver’s (Herb “Murray the Cop” Edelman), where they are joined by Tanaka (Ken Takakura) in their battle against Toshiro Tono (Eiji Hiroshima Mon Amour Okada) and Goro (James Flower Drum Song Shigeta) while searching for a man with a spider tattoo on his head. There are lots of shootouts and sword fights, discussions of honor and betrayal, and, in the grand Yakuza tradition, the ritual cutting off of the pinkie. Oh, and there’s Robert Mitchum, of course, a cinematic giant who towers above it all.

NYFF55: NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL 2017

Richard Linklater’s Last Flag Flying opens the fifty-fifth New York Film Festival this week

Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, Bruno Walter Auditorium, Alice Tully Hall
West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
September 28 – October 14
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.org/nyff2017

The New York Film Festival turns fifty-five this year, with another powerful lineup of shorts, features, documentaries, animation, and more from around the world, with Richard Linklater’s road movie, Last Flag Flying, kicking it all off on September 28. The centerpiece selection is Todd Haynes’s Wonderstruck, based on a YA novel by Brian Selznick, with Woody Allen’s Coney Island-set Wonder Wheel closing things out on October 14. Divided into Main Slate, Convergence, Projections, Talks, Retrospectives, Revivals, Shorts, and Spotlight on Documentary, this year’s lineup also features works by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Arnaud Desplechin, Agnès Varda and JR, Greta Gerwig, Claire Denis, Noah Baumbach, Aki Kaurismäki, Agnieszka Holland, Claude Lanzmann, Rebecca Miller, Griffin Dunne, Abel Ferrara, and Hong Sang-soo, most of whom will be on hand for Q&As following select screenings. There’s also a twenty-four-film salute to Robert Mitchum celebrating the centennial of his birth; revivals of works by Jean Vigo, Jean-Luc Godard, Hou Hsiao-hsien, James Whale, Philippe Garrel, Jean Renoir, Jean-Pierre Melville, and others; experimental films by Xu Bing, Luke Fowler, Kevin Jerome Everson, Barbara Hammer, and more; immersive and interactive experiences; and panel discussions and dialogues. Below is a list of at least one highlight per day for which tickets are still available or the event is free; keep checking twi-ny for reviews and further information.

Thursday, September 28
Last Flag Flying (Richard Linklater, 2017), introduced by Richard Linklater, Bryan Cranston, Laurence Fishburne, J. Quinton Johnson, and Darryl Ponicsan, Alice Tully Hall, $100, 6:00

Friday, September 29
Convergence, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, free, 3:00 – 6:00 (also 9/30 and 10/1, 12 noon – 6:00)

Saturday, September 30
On Cinema: With Richard Linklater, moderated by Kent Jones, Walter Reade Theater, $25, 6:00

Spoor (Agnieszka Holland, in cooperation with Kasia Adamik, 2017), followed by a Q&A with Agnieszka Holland and Kasia Adamik, Alice Tully Hall, $25, 9:00

Sunday, October 1
HBO Directors Dialogues: Lucrecia Martel, Howard Gilman Theater, free, 3:00

Film Comment Live: The Cinema of Experience, amphitheater, free, 7:00

Woody Allen’s Wonder Wheel closes the fifty-fifth New York Film Festival

Monday, October 2
HBO Directors Dialogues: Agnès Varda & JR, Francesca Beale Theater, free, 6:00

Zama (Lucrecia Martel, 2017), followed by a Q&A with Lucrecia Martel, Alice Tully Hall, $25, 6:00

Tuesday, October 3
L’Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934), Howard Gilman Theater, $15, 3:45

Wednesday, October 4
Film Comment Presents: A Gentle Creature (Sergei Loznitsa, 2017), Walter Reade Theater, $25, 6:00

Thursday, October 5
A Story from Chikamatsu (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954), Francesca Beale Theater, $15, 3:30

Friday, October 6
Spielberg (Susan Lacy, 2017), introduced by Jessica Levin and Emma Pildes, Walter Reade Theater, $25, 8:45

Saturday, October 7
Claude Lanzmann’s Four Sisters: The Hippocratic Oath (Claude Lanzmann, 2017), introduced by Claude Lanzmann, Alice Tully Hall, $25, 1:00

Good Luck (Ben Russell, 2017), followed by a Q&A with Ben Russell, Francesca Beale Theater, $15, 6:15

Sunday, October 8
Projections Program 5: Urban Rhapsodies, followed by a Q&A with Ayo Akingbade, Fern Silva, Ephraim Asili, and Michael Robinson, Francesca Beale Theater, $15, 12 noon

Let the Sun Shine In (Claire Denis, 2017), followed by a Q&A with Claire Denis, Alice Tully Hall, $25, 3:30

Monday, October 9
HBO Directors Dialogues: Hong Sang-soo, amphitheater, free, 7:00

Tuesday, October 10
HBO Directors Dialogues: Philippe Garrel, amphitheater, free, 8:00

Wednesday, October 11
Master Class: Vittorio Storaro and Ed Lachman, moderated by Kent Jones, Walter Reade Theater, $25, 6:15

Thursday, October 12
Hallelujah the Hills (Adolfas Mekas, 1963), introduced by Jonas Mekas, Howard Gilman Theater, $15, 6:00

Lucía (Humberto Solás 1968), Howard Gilman Theater, $15, 8:00

Friday, October 13
Ismael’s Ghosts (Arnaud Desplechin, 2017), Director’s Cut, followed by a Q&A with Arnaud Desplechin, Alice Tully Hall, $25, 6:00

Saturday, October 14
Farewell, My Lovely (Dick Richards, 1975), introduced by Robert Mitchum’s daughter, Petrine Mitchum, Howard Gilman Theater, $15, 1:30

NEW YORK ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL — HONG KONG PANORAMA: ELECTION

Simon Lam is caught in the middle of an epic battle for leadership in Johnnie Tos Election

Lok (Simon Yam) is caught in the middle of an epic battle for leadership in Johnnie To’s Election

ELECTION (HAK SE WUI) (Johnnie To, 2005)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
Friday, July 7, 8:30
Festival runs June 30 – July 15
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.org
www.subwaycinema.com

Johnnie To’s Election is the thinking man’s gangster picture, a psychological thriller that does not depend on blood and violence to get its message across. Cool-headed Lok (Simon Yam) and wild-eyed Big D (Tony Leung Ka-fai) both want to be elected the next chairman of the Wo Sing Society, but when the uncles choose Lok, Big D refuses to accept their decision. Instead, he goes after the Dragon’s Head Baton, the antique symbol of leadership that would transfer power to him. As members of the society (including Lam Suet as the endearing Big Head, Louis Koo as the slick Jimmy, and Nick Cheung as tough-guy Jet) choose which side they want to be on, resulting in chaos, treachery, and betrayal, the cops are hovering around, seeking to put an end to all triad activities. Election features more dialogue and less violence than most films of its kind, but that doesn’t make it any less effective. The next year To made the sequel, the even better Triad Election; Election 3 is set for 2018. A big winner at the twenty-fifth Hong Kong Film Awards, Election is screening July 7 at 8:30 in the Hong Kong Parnorama section of the sixteenth annual New York Asian Film Festival, which runs through July at Lincoln Center and the SVA Theatre. Among the other films in the sidebar are Lawrence Lau’s Dealer/Healer, Tsui Hark’s The Taking of Tiger Mountain in 3-D, and Alan Lo’s Zombiology: Enjoy Yourself Tonight. (Note: Tony Leung Ka-fai was initially scheduled to appear at the screening of Election but had to cancel due to unforeseen circumstances.)