Tag Archives: walter reade theater

ILLUMINATING MOONLIGHT: MOONLIGHT / KILLER OF SHEEP / SILENT LIGHT / THREE TIMES

Chiron (Alex Hibbert) looks out at a hard future in Barry Jenkins’s powerful MOONLIGHT

MOONLIGHT (Barry Jenkins, 2016)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
Thursday, January 5, 6:30
Series runs January 4-9
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.org
moonlight-movie.com

The Film Society of Lincoln Center is paying tribute to one of the best films of the year, Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight, with the six-day series “Illuminating Moonlight,” running January 4-9 and consisting of screenings of the L.A.-based writer-director’s 2008 debut, Medicine for Melancholy, starring Wyatt Cenac and Tracey Heggins, which Jenkins will introduce; his follow-up, Moonlight, which will be followed by a Q&A with Jenkins; and six diverse works that directly influenced Jenkins in making Moonlight: Carlos Reygadas’s Silent Light, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Three Times, Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together, Nagisa Ôshima’s Gohatto, and Claire Denis’s Beau Travail. In Moonlight, Jenkins tells the powerful and moving story of Chiron, a shy, troubled boy growing up in Liberty City, Florida, in three chapters as Chiron goes from a young boy (Little, played by Alex Hibbert) to a teenager (Chiron, played by Ashton Sanders) to a twenty-seven-year-old man (Black, played by Trevante Rhodes). The semiautobiographical film is based on playwright and actor Tarell Alvin McCraney’s In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue and Jenkins’s own experiences; both men are from Liberty City but did not know each other there. In the first section, Little is chased by bullies and runs into an abandoned building, where he is found by Juan (Mahershala Ali), a drug dealer who brings him home to his girlfriend, Teresa (Janelle Monáe). They become a kind of surrogate family, as Little’s mother, Paula (Naomie Harris), is a crack addict who will do just about anything for her next score. Little also finds solace in his friendship with Kevin (Jaden Piner, later played by Jharrel Jerome and André Holland). In the second chapter, Chiron is taunted and bullied by Terrel (Patrick Decile) while trying to come to terms with his sexual orientation. In the third section, the passage of time reveals how much has changed, although the film turns overly melodramatic at the end. Taking its inspiration from the source material, Moonlight is beautifully photographed by James Laxton, who has previously shot Medicine for Melancholy and Jenkins’s 2003 shorts, My Josephine and Little Brown Boy, and 2011 “Remigration” episode of Futurestates, bathing the film in lush blues. Jenkins’s subtly paced style is accompanied by a gorgeous classical-inspired score by Nicholas Britell (The Big Short). Moonlight is anchored by superb performances by Emmy nominee Ali (House of Cards, Hidden Figures) as the cool and caring Juan; Harris (Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, 28 Days Later) as the drug-addicted Paula, who has lost control of her life; Monáe (Hidden Figures, The Electric Lady) as the sweet and understanding Teresa; and Sanders (The Retrieval) as the in-between Chiron, who feels overwhelmed by all the maelstrom swirling around him.

Charles Burnett’s KILLER OF SHEEP examines black life in postwar America

KILLER OF SHEEP (Charles Burnett, 1977)
Wednesday, January 4, 7:00
Sunday, January 8, 8:45
www.filmlinc.org
www.killerofsheep.com

In 2007, Milestone Films restored and released Charles Burnett’s low-budget feature-length debut, Killer of Sheep, with the original soundtrack intact; the film had not been available on VHS or DVD for decades because of music rights problems that were finally cleared. (The soundtrack includes such seminal black artists as Etta James, Dinah Washington, Little Walter, and Paul Robeson.) Shot on weekends for less than $10,000, Killer of Sheep took four years to put together and another four years to get noticed, when it won the FIPRESCI Prize at the 1981 Berlin Film Festival. Reminiscent of the work of Jean Renoir and the Italian neo-Realists, the film tells a simple story about a family just trying to get by, struggling to survive in their tough Watts neighborhood in the mid-1970s. The slice-of-life scenes are sometimes very funny, sometimes scary, but always poignant, as Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders) trudges to his dirty job in a slaughterhouse in order to provide for his wife (Kaycee Moore) and children (Jack Drummond and Angela Burnett). Every day he is faced with new choices, from participating in a murder to buying a used car engine, but he takes it all in stride. The motley cast of characters, including Charles Bracy and Eugene Cherry, is primarily made up of nonprofessional actors with a limited range of talent, but that is all part of what makes it all feel so real. Killer of Sheep was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 1989, the second year of the program, making it among the first fifty to be selected, in the same group as Rebel Without a Cause, The Godfather, Duck Soup, All About Eve, and It’s a Wonderful Life, which certainly puts its place in history in context. Killer of Sheep is screening January 4 and 8 in the “Illuminating Moonlight” series.

The beautifully minimalist SILENT LIGHT served as an influence on Barry Jenkins’s MOONLIGHT

SILENT LIGHT (STELLET LICHT) (Carlos Reygadas, 2007)
Thursday, January 5, 3:30
Sunday, January 8, 6:00
www.filmlinc.org

Carlos Reygadas’s Silent Light is a gentle, deeply felt, gorgeously shot work of intense calm and beauty. The film opens with a stunning sunrise and ends with a glorious sunset; in between is scene after scene of sublime beauty and simplicity, as Reygadas uses natural sound and light, a cast of mostly nonprofessional actors, and no incidental music to tell his story, allowing it to proceed naturally. In a Mennonite farming community in northern Mexico where Plautdietsch is the primary language, Johan (Cornelio Wall Fehr) is torn between his wife, Esther (Miriam Toews), and his lover, Marianne (Maria Pankratz). While he loves Esther, he finds a physical and spiritual bond with Marianne that he does not feel with his wife and their large extended family. Although it pains Johan deeply to betray Esther, he is unable to decide between the two women, even after tragedy strikes. Every single shot of the spare, unusual film, which tied for the Jury Prize at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival (with Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis), is meticulously composed by Reygadas (Japon, Battle in Heaven) and cinematographer Alexis Zabe, as if a painting. Many of the scenes consist of long takes with little or no camera movement and sparse dialogue, evoking the work of Japanese minimalist master Yasujiro Ozu. The lack of music evokes the silence of the title, but the quiet, filled with space and meaning, is never empty. And the three leads — Fehr, who lives in Mexico; Toews, who is from Canada; and Pankratz, who was born in Kazakhstan and lives in Germany — are uniformly excellent in their very first film roles. Screening January 5 and 8 in the “Illuminating Moonlight” series, Silent Light is a mesmerizing, memorable, and very different kind of cinematic experience.

Chang Chen and Shu Qi fall in love in three different decades in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s THREE TIMES

THREE TIMES (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2005)
Friday, January 6, 4:00
Sunday, January 8, 3:00
www.filmlinc.org

Hou Hsiao-hsien’s gorgeous Three Times is an evocative, poetic trilogy of tales about life and love in Taiwan, all starring the mesmerizing Shu Qi (Hou’s Millennium Mambo) and the stalwart Chang Chen (Wong Kar-wai’s 2046 and Happy Together). In A Time for Love, set in 1966 and featuring a repeated soft-rock soundtrack, Chen, about to leave for military service, meets May, a pool-hall girl, and promises to write to her even though they have only just met and barely said a word to each other. When he gets a furlough, he goes to the pool hall only to find that she’s on the move, so with Zen-like cool he tries to track her down. A Time for Freedom, a silent film with interstitial dialogue and period music, takes place in an elegant brothel in 1911, where Mr. Chang regularly visits a beautiful courtesan. But while she dreams of him buying out her contract and marrying her, he seems intent on helping out another couple instead. Hou concludes the trilogy with A Time for Youth, set in fast-paced modern-day Taipei, as Jing, an epileptic singer, and Zhen, a motorcycle-riding photographer, embark on a passionate, nearly wordless affair that has serious consequences for their significant others. Three Times is a rare treat for cineastes, a poetic, intelligent, though overly long study of relationships between men and women in a changing Taiwan over the last hundred years, focusing on character, time and place, and the art of filmmaking itself. Three Times is screening January 6 and 8 in the “Illuminating Moonlight” series.

GOING STEADI — 40 YEARS OF STEADICAM: AFTER HOURS

Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) nightmare starts innocently enough while reading Henry Millers Tropic of Cancer in a diner in AFTER HOURS

Paul Hackett’s (Griffin Dunne) nightmare starts innocently enough while reading Henry Miller’s TROPIC OF CANCER in a coffee shop in AFTER HOURS

AFTER HOURS (Martin Scorsese, 1985)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
Sunday, December 25, 6:00, and Monday, January 2, 9:15
Series runs through January 3
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.org

“We are all alone here and we are dead,” Henry Miller writes in the first paragraph of Tropic of Cancer, which is the book narcissistic word processor Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) is reading in a New York City coffee shop, catapulting him into a harrowing downtown nightmare in Martin Scorsese’s brilliant horror comedy, After Hours. Dunne, in one of his two best roles — the other was in John Landis’s very different horror comedy, 1981’s An American Werewolf in London — is exceptional as Hackett, a stand-in for the proverbial everyman seeking safety and home but bedeviled by circumstance, again and again and again. At the coffee shop, Hackett meets charming but unpredictable Marcy Franklin (Roseanna Arquette), who invites him over to her friend’s loft in SoHo. It’s already late, but the titillated Upper East Sider decides to takes a cab downtown; however, the last of his money, a twenty-dollar bill, literally flies out the window as his taxi driver (Larry Block) speeds like a madman through the mean streets of Manhattan. These eighties days predate ATMs, cashback, and Ubers, and Hackett spends the rest of his very long night encountering a bizarre cast of characters, none of whom seems able to give him the fifty-three cents he needs to cover the new subway fare of $1.50, which rose suddenly at midnight, plunging him into after-hours chaos. Among those he meets are kinky sculptor Kiki Bridges (Linda Fiorentino) and her sadist lover, Horst (Will Patton); lonely cocktail waitress and sixties leftover Julie (Teri Garr); helpful bartender Tom (John Heard); possible thieves Neil (Cheech Marin) and Pepe (Tommy Chong); ice-cream-truck driver Gail (Catherine O’Hara); and lonely lady June (Verna Bloom). Not the best judge of character, at least partly because he’s not exactly a sympathetic listener, the Yuppie-ish Hackett is soon running through the streets of SoHo in the rain, chased by an angry vigilante mob.

Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) has plenty to scream about after meeting sculptor Kiki Bridges (Linda Fiorentino) in Martin Scorsese’s brilliant black comedy

Written as a film-school project by Joseph Minion and inspired by Joe Frank’s monologue “Lies” (which led to a plagiarism battle), After Hours is shot in a modern noir style by regular Scorsese cinematographer Michael Ballhaus (Goodfellas, The Last Temptation of Christ, The Departed). Much of the film takes place in dark rooms and spaces; at one point, inside the S&M Berlin Club, Scorsese himself, in a cameo as a stage tech, shines a spotlight right into the camera, temporarily blinding the viewer. The many dichotomies in the film range from light and dark to uptown/downtown to fire and water; there are multiple references to fire and burns, as if Paul is trapped in a kind of hell, and it is often raining as he tries to find a way out. Paul’s metaphorical impotency is also a major theme; he keeps meeting women who are sexually attracted to him, but just as he can’t get north of SoHo, he has no luck in various bedrooms, for various reasons. In a bathroom, he sees a drawing of a shark chomping on an erect penis, and it’s no coincidence that Gail drives a Mr. Softee truck. The film also features cameos by character actors Clarence Felder as a bouncer, Dick Miller, Rocco Sisto, and Victor Argo as diner and coffee-shop employees, and Bronson Pinchot as Paul’s ambitious coworker, while the fab score ranges from Mozart and Bach to Joni Mitchell, the Monkees, Bad Brains, and Peggy Lee. A ferocious, fast-paced fantasia about abject loneliness, pretentious art, and the ever-present prospect of death, After Hours is screening December 25 and January 2 at the Walter Reade Theater as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “Going Steadi: 40 Years of Steadicam,” which consists of twenty-nine films that feature the use of the Steadicam, invented by Garrett Brown and first used in 1976 in Hal Ashby’s Bound for Glory; the Steadicam operator for After Hours was one of the masters, Larry McConkey (Goodfellas, The Silence of the Lambs, Kill Bill). The series runs through January 3 and also includes Goodfellas, Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown, Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut and The Shining, Warren Beatty’s Bulworth, Bertrand Tavernier’s Coup de Torchon, Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights and Magnolia.

MY FIRST FILM FEST: WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE

Carol (voiced by James Gandolfini) and Max (Max Records) discuss life in Spike Jonze’s inventive live-action version of WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE (Spike Jonze, 2009)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
Sunday, November 6, 9:00
Series runs November 3-8
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.org

The endlessly inventive Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation.) has done the seemingly impossible, expanding Maurice Sendak’s classic 1963 children’s book, Where the Wild Things Are, into a fun and fantastical feature-length film. Written by Jonze and Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius), the movie uses the ten sentences of the book and Sendak’s magical characters and transforms them into a world of wonder. Acting out after his sister’s friends crush his igloo and his divorced mother (Catherine Keener) ignores him in favor of a new boyfriend (Mark Ruffalo), nine-year-old Max (Max Records) runs away and sails across the ocean, landing on a faraway island where seven giant monsters live. In search of a leader, they name Max king, but he gets more than he bargained for as the ruler of the cynical Judith (voiced by Catherine O’Hara), the dumpy Ira (Forest Whitaker), the independent KW (Lauren Ambrose), the mysterious Bull (Michael Berry Jr.), the sad sack Alexander (Paul Dano), the dependable Douglas (Chris Cooper), and, most importantly, the manic-depressive Carol (James Gandolfini).

Max becomes king of the forest in cinematic adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s classic bedtime story

Each character represents a different part of Max, a developing emotion that he must learn to deal with as he grows up. He is immediately drawn to Carol, whom he first sees destroying the group’s small, makeshift homes, echoing Max’s feelings about his own family situation. Max’s relationship with Carol — himself in the midst of a breakup with KW — is the heart of the story, as Carol goes from one extreme to another, at one point bouncing around the forest with sheer glee, then snuggling up with everyone in a warming group sleep, and finally turning into a dangerous ogre. As Jonze has pointed out, Wild Things, which received the full blessing of Sendak, is not necessarily a movie for children but about childhood. It beautifully captures a child’s innate sense of adventure and imagination while also showing that choices come with consequences. Fans of the book will be amazed at how well Jonze depicts the Wild Things themselves, which come alive as if they just jumped right out of the pages of the book; actors (not the voice-over artists) are in the costumes, their faces digitally manipulated by CGI effects, but they feel as real as they did when your mother first read you the enchanting story while tucking you in your bed. Where the Wild Things Are is screening November 6 at 9:00 at the Walter Reade Theater as part of the inaugural Film Society of Lincoln Center series “My First Film Fest,” which consists of thirteen films that form a first film festival for young moviegoers, from Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind to Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times and Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou’s Microcosmos, in addition to Yared Zeleke’s Lamb, followed by a Q&A with Zeleke; the New York premiere of Émilie Deleuze’s Miss Impossible, followed by a Q&A with Deleuze; the North American premiere of Hubert Viel’s Girls in the Middle Ages; and a sneak preview of Mike Mitchell and Walt Dohrn’s Trolls. Although the intent is to have kids “remember their first film festival,” several of the screenings take place at six o’clock and later, which might not be appropriate for younger children, the intended audience for most of these tales.

NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL SPOTLIGHT ON DOCUMENTARY: KARL MARX CITY

Documentarian Petra Epperlein investigates her fathers mysterious past in KARL MARX CITY

Documentarian Petra Epperlein investigates her father’s mysterious suicide in KARL MARX CITY

KARL MARX CITY (Petra Epperlein & Michael Tucker, 2016)
Film Society of Lincoln Center
West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Aves.
Friday, October 14, Walter Reade Theater, $15, 8:30
Saturday, October 15, Francesca Beale Theater, $15, 12:30
Festival runs September 30 – October 16
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.org
karlmarxcity.com

In 1999, filmmaker Petra Epperlein’s fifty-seven-year-old father, Wolfgang, thoroughly washed his company car, burned all of his personal papers and photographs, and then hanged himself from a tree in the family garden in their home in Chemnitz, which was known as Karl Marx City in what was formerly communist East Germany from shortly after the end of WWII to the fall of the Berlin Wall. “Much like Karl Marx City, her father set out to erase himself,” narrator Matilda Tucker, Epperlein’s daughter, says near the beginning of the intricately plotted and gripping documentary Karl Marx City. “All that he left behind were questions.” Fifteen years later, Epperlein, who has made such sociopolitical films with her husband, Michael Tucker, as Gunner Palace, The Prisoner Or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair, and Bulletproof Salesman — the duo call themselves Pepper & Bones — returned to Chemnitz to try to answer some of those questions and find out whether her father had killed himself because, as was rumored, he had collaborated with the Stasi, the much-feared East German secret police. Between 1950 and 1990, the German Democratic Republic employed 92,000 officers and 200,000 informants to spy on their own friends, neighbors, and family, using audio and video to track their every move in order to identify supposed enemies of the state. Written, directed, edited, and produced by Epperlein and Tucker — Petra also did the audio recording and Michael served as cinematographer and sound designer — Karl Marx City features declassified surveillance tapes, broadcast intercepts, and propaganda films from the Ministry for State Security (the Stasi, or Staatssicherheit) along with striking new black-and-white footage of Epperlein’s quest as she poignantly retraces her father’s steps. She meets with such current and former employees of the Stasi Archive as Lothar Raschker, Dr. Juliane Schütterle, and Dagmar Hovestadt, Cold War and GDR expert Dr. Douglas Selvage, and Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial director Dr. Hubertus Knabe to examine the history of the Stasi and detail the effects it had on the psyche of the German people.

Poignant documentary looks into Stasi control of Karl Marx City during the Cold War era

Epperlein also speaks with former classmate Jana X and her parents, Stasi collaborators R. and S., and historian and suicide-letter expert Dr. Udo Grashoff, who examines a note and postcard that Wolfgang sent Petra just before he killed himself. “The main question of the Stasi was, Who is the enemy, and how can we prove that he is an enemy or she is an enemy?” Dr. Grashoff points out. “But you and I, we have different questions. And we find in the files empirical material that allows us to answer our different questions, and this is the value of the Stasi files for me. I’m not interested in the questions of the Stasi. You can find your own truth.” Petra’s twin brothers, Uwe and Volker, and their mother, Christa, also talk about their father, with Christa sometimes hesitant and emotional. Visiting sites from her family’s past, Epperlein travels everywhere wearing headphones and carrying a large fur-covered microphone, emphasizing how her, and our, world is still under constant surveillance. “No aspect of society escaped their gaze,” Tucker narrates early on, referring to the Stasi. “Everyone a suspect. The enemy is everyone.” Epperlein occasionally addresses the camera directly, creating boundary-shattering moments between filmmaker and audience while evoking the ability of the camera and microphone to make us all subjects, particularly in this surveillance-heavy age. In addition, Karl Marx City offers a vocabulary lesson, defining such words as Die Wende (“the change”), Ostalgie (“the feeling for home”), Erinnerungskutlur (“the culture of remembrance”), and Vergangenheitsbewältigung (“the process of coming to terms with the past”), the letters shown onscreen in torn red-and-white strips as if ripped from tabloid headlines or ransom notes. Karl Marx City is an eye-opening look at a frightening past as well as a potent reminder of what can always happen again — if it isn’t already. The film is screening October 14 & 15 in the Spotlight on Documentary section of the New York Film Festival, with both shows followed by a Q&A with Pepper & Bones.

NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL MAIN SLATE: SON OF JOSEPH

Vincent (newcomer Victor Ezenfis) is desperate to put his family back together in Eugène Green’s SON OF JOSEPH

SON OF JOSEPH (LE FILS DE JOSEPH) (Eugène Green, 2016)
Film Society of Lincoln Center
West 65th St. between Eighth & Amsterdam Aves.
Sunday, October 9, Bruno Walter Auditorium, $20, 8:00
Monday, October 10, Walter Reade Theater, $20, 6:00
Festival runs September 30 – October 16
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.org
www.kinolorber.com

Eugène Green returns to the New York Film Festival with the glorious French satire / black comedy / biblical parable Son of Joseph, a masterful blending of sound, image, and story that is as stunning to listen to as it is to watch. Newcomer Victor Ezenfis stars as Vincent, an intractable young teen who is desperate to discover who his father is, no matter how hard his single mother (Natacha Regnier), a nurse, tries to keep that information from him. “I don’t want to help people,” he says. “I love no one.” His sneaky ways finally reveal the man’s name, and Vincent tracks him down only to discover that the man, Oscar Pormenor (Mathieu Amalric), is a boorish, self-obsessed publisher who is cheating on his wife with his sexy secretary, Bernadette (Julia de Gasquet). At a party for his company’s latest book, The Predatory Mother, ever-so-chic critic Violette Tréfouille (Maria de Medeiros) mistakes Vincent for an up-and-coming novelist, with Oscar cluelessly declaring him the next Céline before finding out who the boy really is. Soon a disappointed Vincent is befriended by Oscar’s brother, Joseph (Fabrizio Rongione), but neither is aware of the connection. As Vincent is introduced to art and literature, he attempts to manipulate everyone around him in order to form the family he’s always wanted.

A single mother (Natacha Regnier) has her hands full with son Vincent (Victor Ezenfis) in extraordinary biblical parable

Green, an American expatriate living and working in France, divides Son of Joseph into five chapters named for major biblical events, including “The Sacrifice of Abraham,” “The Golden Calf,” and “The Flight to Egypt.” Vincent is mesmerized by a poster in his room of Caravaggio’s “The Sacrifice of Isaac”; at the Louvre, Joseph shows him religious paintings such as Philippe de Champaigne’s “The Dead Christ” and Georges de la Tour’s “Joseph the Carpenter.” Ever the absurdist, Green (Toutes les nuits, Le monde vivant) turns to the surreal for the finale, which features a revelation that elicited an audible gasp of wonder from the audience when I saw it, an exhalation in which I heartily participated. As in 2014’s architectural wonder La Sapienza, which also starred Rongione, each frame is composed like a work of art, courtesy of longtime Green cinematographer Raphaël O’Byrne, along with editor Valérie Loiseleux, set designer Paul Rouschop, and costume designer Agnès Noden. The entrancing color schemes and long two-shots in addition to spectacular sound by Benoît De Clerck immerse you in Green’s unique and unusual fantasy world.

The actors, who speak in Green’s trademark overly mannered and stiff style, occasionally look directly into the camera, speaking lines to the viewer, but Son of Joseph never gets preachy. It’s a bizarrely entertaining tale of family, of fathers and sons, and mothers and sons, where all the details matter. Inside a church, Vincent witnesses musical ensemble Le Poème Harmonique perform a work in Latin by Domenico Mazzocchi about a mother dealing with the death of her son. Earlier, when Vincent turns down a friend’s offer to join his sperm-selling operation, it’s not merely because he might find the job distasteful; deep down, he doesn’t want any other kid to go through life not knowing who his father is. He might say, “I don’t want to help people. I love no one.” But he proves himself wrong in this stunner. Coproduced by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Son of Joseph is screening October 9 at 8:00 and October 10 at 6:00 at the New York Film Festival; both screenings will be followed by a Q&A with Green, who also appears in the film as the grizzled hotel concierge.

NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL MAIN SLATE: YOURSELF AND YOURS

Young-soo (Kim Joo-hyuk) tries to win back Min-jung (Lee Yoo-young) in Hong Sang-soo’s YOURSELF AND YOURS

YOURSELF AND YOURS (Hong Sang-soo, 2016)
Film Society of Lincoln Center
West 65th St. between Eighth & Amsterdam Aves.
Friday, October 7, Bruno Walter Auditorium, 9:00
Monday, October 10, Walter Reade Theater, 9:00
Friday, October 14, Howard Gilman Theater, 9:45
Sunday, October 16, Howard Gilman Theater, 8:00
Festival runs September 30 – October 16
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.org

“Don’t try to know everything,” Min-jung (Lee Yoo-young) says in Hong Sang-soo’s latest unusual and brilliant romantic drama, Yourself and Yours. It’s impossible to know everything that happens in Hong’s films, which set fiction against reality, laying bare cinematic narrative techniques. With a propensity to use protagonists who are directors, it is often difficult to tell what is happening in the film vs. the film-within-the-film. He also repeats scenes with slight differences, calling into question the storytelling nature of cinema as well as real life, in which there are no do-overs. In the marvelous Yourself and Yours, scenes don’t repeat, although the existence of a main character might. Min-jung is in a relationship with painter Young-soo (Kim Joo-hyuk), who is dealing with the failing health of his mother when he is told by a friend (Kim Eui-sung) that Min-jung was seen in a bar drunk and arguing with another man. Young-soo refuses to believe it, since he and Min-jung are facing her drinking problem by very carefully limiting the number of drinks she has when she goes out with him. But when the friend insists that numerous people have seen her in bars with other men and imbibing heavily, Young-soo confronts her, and she virulently defends herself, claiming that they are lies and that he should have more faith in her. She leaves him, and over the next several days she has encounters with various men, but she appears to be either a pathological liar or have a memory problem as she tells the older Jaeyoung (Kwon Hae-hyo), a friend of Min-jung’s, that she is a twin who does not know the painter; later, with filmmaker Sangwon (Yu Jun-sang), she maintains that they have never met despite his assertion that they have. Through it all, Young-soo is determined to win her back. “I want to love each day with my loved one, and then die,” he explains with romantic fervor. He also acknowledges Min-jung’s uniqueness: “Her mind itself is extraordinary,” he says.

Min-jung (Lee Yoo-young) tells Jaeyoung (Kwon Hae-hyo) she has a twin in YOURSELF AND YOURS

Yourself and Yours is an intelligent and witty exploration of fear and trust, built around a beautiful young woman who might or might not be lying, as she seems to reboot every time she meets a man, erasing her recent past. Lee (Late Spring, The Treacherous) is outstanding as Min-jung, keeping the audience on edge as to just what might be going through her “extraordinary” mind. Kim (Lovers in Prague, My Wife Got Married) plays Young-soo with just the right amount of worry and trepidation. As with most Hong films (The Day He Arrives, Oki’s Movie, Like You Know It All, Right Now, Wrong Then), there is a natural flow to the narrative, with long shots of characters just sitting around talking, smoking, and drinking — albeit primarily beer in this case rather than soju — with minimal camera movement courtesy of Hong regular cinematographer Park Hong-yeol (Hahaha, Our Sunhi), save for Hong’s trademark awkward zooms. There’s also an overtly cute romantic comedy score by Dalpalan to keep things light amid all the seriousness. Hong continually works on his scripts, so the actors generally get their lines the day of the shoot, adding to the normal, everyday feel of the performances. Many writers have compared the film to Luis Buñuel’s grand finale, 1977’s That Obscure Object of Desire, in which Carole Bouquet and Angelina Molina alternate playing a flamenco dancer, postulating that there are numerous Min-jungs wandering around town, a series of doppelgängers hanging out in bars. That’s not the way I saw it at all (and at the San Sebastian Film Festival, Hong denied it was a direct influence); instead, I see it as one Min-jung, dealing with the endless aspects of relationships, and one Young-soo, an artist who desperately wants to believe in true love and who does not want to be alone, particularly with his mother on her deathbed. There’s the smallest of cues near the end that explains it all, but I’m not about to give that away. And I’m not sure how much it even matters, as regardless of how many Min-jungs might populate this fictional world, Hong has crafted another mesmerizing and mysterious look at love and romance as only he can. The film is screening October 7, 10, 14, and 16 at the New York Film Festival; it is currently without U.S. distribution, perhaps partly because Hong is embroiled in controversy, having recently left his wife of thirty years for the much younger Kim Min-hee, star of Right Now, Wrong Then, as if he is living one of his own movies.

NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL MAIN SLATE: PATERSON

Adam Driver and Golshifteh Farahani star as a happy New Jersey couple in Jim Jarmusch’s PATERSON

PATERSON (Jim Jarmusch, 2016)
Film Society of Lincoln Center
West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
Sunday, October 2, Alice Tully Hall, $25, 9:00
Monday, October 3, Alice Tully Hall, 6:00
Sunday, October 16, Francesca Beale Theater, $15, 9:30
Festival runs September 30 – October 16
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Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson is a beautifully poetic, deceptively simple wonder about the beauty, poetry, and wonderful simplicity of life, an ode to the little things that make every day special and unique. Adam Driver stars as Paterson, a New Jersey Transit bus driver and poet who lives in Paterson with his girlfriend, Laura (Golshifteh Farahani), who spends much of her time decorating their small, quaint house, painting black and white circles and lines on curtains, couches, dishes, walls, and even her clothing, continually creating works of art out of nearly everything she comes into contact with. The film takes place over an ordinary week for the sweet-natured couple, who are very much in love, each allowing the other the freedom to explore who they are and offering their complete support. Every morning, Paterson wakes up around 6:12, as the sunlight streaks over their sleeping bodies. He checks his Casio wristwatch to confirm the time — he doesn’t use an alarm clock, nor does he own a cell phone or a computer — then snuggles closer with Laura for a few extra minutes. He eats Cheerios out of a bowl painted by Laura with circles that match the shape of the cereal. He studies a matchbook, which becomes the starting point for his next poem. Lunchbox in hand, he walks to the Market St. garage and gets on board the 23 bus. He writes a few lines of poetry, listens to fellow bus driver Donny’s (Rizwan Manji) daily complaints, then heads out on his route through his hometown, picking up pieces of some very funny passenger conversations. For lunch he sits on a bench overlooking the Paterson Great Falls and composes more mostly non-rhyming lines in his “Secret Notebook,” which he will not show anyone but Laura. At quitting time, he walks home, checks the mail, fixes the tilted mailbox, sees what new art Laura has created, and takes their English bulldog, Marvin (Nellie, who won the Palm Dog at Cannes and passed away two weeks after shooting concluded), for a walk after dark, stopping for a beer and chatting with bar owner Doc (Barry Shabaka Henley). He then goes back home, ready to do it all over again the next day. But Paterson is no bored working-class suburbanite living out a dreary routine; he finds something new and special in every moment, from his job to his relationship to his nightly trips to the bar. Every day is different from the one before, Jarmusch celebrating those variations that make life such a joy.

Adam Driver plays a poetic New Jersey Transit bus driver named Paterson in PATERSON

Set to a subtle electronic score by Sqürl, Jarmusch and Carter Logan’s band, Paterson is a gorgeous film, lovingly photographed by Frederick Elmes, who captured a very different kind of town in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, and edited to the sweet rhythm of a basic existence by Affonso Gonçalves. Paterson’s poems were written by award-winning poet Ron Padgett, who, like Jarmusch, studied with Kenneth Koch; the works, which unfold day by day, include the previously published “Love Poem” (a tribute to Ohio Blue Tip Matches and love), “Glow,” “Pumpkin,” and “Poem” as well as three written specifically for the film, “Another One,” “The Run,” and “The Line.” The words appear on the screen in a font based on Driver’s handwriting as he narrates them in voiceover. (Among the other poets referenced in the film are Frank O’Hara, Wallace Stevens, Petrarch, and Emily Dickinson.) The film is also very much about duality and pairs, which Jarmusch has said in interviews was not always intentional. Adam Driver, who served in the Marines, plays a driver and former Marine named Paterson who lives and works in Paterson. He is constantly seeing twins, from two brothers named Sam and Dave (Trevor and Troy Parham) to two young girls on his bus to two older men on a bench. While Paterson and Laura seem meant to be together, their happiness infectious, he looks on every night as Everett (William Jackson Harper) desperately pleads with Marie (Chasten Harmon) to take him back. At the bar, Paterson often speaks to Doc about the pictures on the wall of fame, photos about such native sons as Uncle Floyd and his brother, Jimmy Vivino, as well as local superstar Lou Costello, part of one of the most popular comedy duos ever with Bud Abbott, who was born in Asbury Park (and thus does not qualify for the wall). Paterson’s favorite poet is lifelong New Jersey-ite William Carlos Williams, who Laura playfully refers to as Carlos Williams Carlos. (In making the film, Jarmusch was inspired by one of Williams’s most popular phrases, “No ideas but in things.”) And when Paterson’s not encountering twins, he’s bumping into random poets (Sterling Jerins, Method Man, Masatoshi Nagase) during his walks. Paterson is a poetic marvel all its own, a dazzling film about love and harmony, about finding creativity in every aspect of life, led by marvelous performances by Driver and Farahani and written and directed by a master of cinematic restraint.

Paterson is screening October 2, 3, and 16 at the New York Film Festival; Jarmusch and Driver will participate in a Q&A following the U.S. premiere October 2 at 9:00 at Alice Tully Hall. Jarmusch is also presenting Gimme Danger, his new documentary about Iggy Pop, at this year’s festival, including a Q&A with him and the Stooge after the October 1 show. In addition, Jarmusch will be in conversation with NYFF director Kent Jones for an “On Cinema” discussion on October 4 at 8:30 at the Walter Reade Theater ($15). A true treasure, Paterson opens theatrically in the U.S. on December 28.