Capital Projections: Look who’s stalking edition
Capital Projections is The DC Line’s selective and subjective guide to some of the most interesting arthouse and repertory screenings in the coming week.
GRETA
This wildly plotted but oddly tame thriller from Neil Jordan (The Crying Game) paints a lush and privileged world in which good Samaritans are punished for their thoughtfulness. Frances (Chloë Grace Moretz) is a recent college grad working as a waitress in Manhattan. She doesn’t come from big-city stock, and when she sees a purse that somebody left on the subway she thinks it’s only right to track down its owner — Greta (French actress Isabelle Huppert), a lonely widow living in Brooklyn. A retired piano teacher, Greta misses her college-age daughter, who is off studying music in Paris. With Frances’ mother having recently died, the women have the potential to fill a void in each other’s lives. Unfortunately, Greta gets clingy, and Frances soon learns her new friend has a dark secret. This kind of volatile role is old hat for Huppert, who was fantastic as a psychologically wounded music instructor in Michael Haneke’s 2002 drama The Piano Teacher and terrifically mad in Paul Verhoeven’s 2016 revenge thriller Elle. Huppert’s recent cover profile in the French edition of Vanity Fair depicts her holding a screaming, almost feral cat, which seems to guarantee that Greta will be an over-the-top hoot. Yet despite some vivid touches and dark humor, the movie doesn’t quite seem high-pitched enough, the hysteria subdued compared to what Huppert and Jordan have achieved in the past.
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, March 1, at Landmark E Street Cinema, Landmark Bethesda Row and other area theaters.
BIRDS OF PASSAGE
This epic crime drama from the husband-and-wife directing duo Ciro Guerra and Cristina Gallego was on the shortlist for this year’s Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars. But even though it didn’t make the final list of nominees, it’s better than Roma, which brought home two statuettes. Birds of Passage takes its title from the traditional courtship ritual of the Wayuu people in Colombia. It is during this ceremony that Zaida (Natalie Reyes) meets Raphayet (José Acosta), a cocksure young man who struggles to win over Zaida’s mother, Ursula (Carmiña Martínez). This tale of simple folk traditions turns into a violent modern drama as Guerra and Gallego follow the young couple over a span of decades, tracing the rise and fall of Raphayet’s marijuana empire. As I wrote in my Washington City Paper preview of last year’s Latin American Film Festival, the directors followed up “their Oscar-nominated Amazon jungle drama Embrace of the Serpent with another impressive look at a culture in peril. While that 2015 film evoked the forbidding landscapes of Werner Herzog for its indictment of colonialism, [this film] effectively suggests a descent into criminal madness right out of Scarface. Still, despite such clear cultural influences, this is a crime epic like no other, a bitter lament of lost innocence in what once seemed like paradise.”
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, March 1, at Landmark E Street Cinema. $12.50.
THE LAST RESORT
Miami’s South Beach was not always the glitzy, energetic all-night town for young people that it is today. This poignant documentary tells the story of photographers Andy Sweet and Gary Monroe, who in the 1970s captured the waning days of a thriving beach community full of elderly Jewish people spending their autumn years sitting on a porch under the hot Florida sun. Colorful images promise the kind of garish portraits favored by photographer Martin Parr, and these lively, flamboyant subjects loved to party. Sweet and Monroe chronicled dance halls where hundreds of aging residents would meet for regular social events. Many of the film’s subjects have tragic stories, such as the the Jewish elders who survived the Holocaust. And the young photographers — only in their 20s at the time and showing an exceptional respect for the older generation that seems rare today — run into their own troubles as Miami’s art deco landmarks begin to crumble and criminal elements take over in the ‘80s. While its deeply saturated colors and vibrant personalities suggest a celebration of life, The Last Resort gains its power by depicting a lost generation and the passage of time that transformed Miami from a kind of paradise to a cocaine-fueled hell.
Watch the trailer.
Wednesday, March 6, at 8 p.m. at the Avalon. $12.75.
MRS. FANG
After its local premiere at the opening-night reception for last fall’s DC Chinese Film Festival, one of the most powerful nonfiction films in recent years comes back to local screens — for free.
It’s part of the latest showcase at the Freer and Sackler galleries, which over the next two weekends will feature the work of filmmaker Wang Bing, whose often marathon-length documentaries are hard to see outside of the festival circuit. In Mrs. Fang, one of his shorter documentaries, Bing trains his unsentimental eye on a 67-year-old matriarch suffering from Alzheimer’s. As I wrote in The DC Line last year, “this is an unflinching look at the woman’s last days as she remains silent, her face frozen while her extended family surrounds her with expressions of concern and sorrow. …The director’s long takes speak of a respect for life as well as death, which makes this a rare and unsettling film.” The Freer will screen a limited-edition extended version that’s 102 minutes long, courtesy of the director and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris.
Watch the trailer.
Friday, March 1, at 7 p.m. at the Freer Gallery of Art. Free.
OSSOS
The repertory film programs at the National Gallery of Art regularly highlight newly restored titles from around the world. This year, the popular series From Vault to Screen focuses on Portugal. This 1997 drama from director Pedro Costa — whom The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw called “the Samuel Beckett of cinema” — is the first part of a trilogy set in a Fontainhas, a Lisbon shanty town inhabited by immigrants from former Portuguese colonies in Africa. Ossos tells the bleak story of a young, drugged-out couple unprepared to take care of their newborn baby. James Quandt, senior programmer at the Toronto International Film Festival, wrote in Artforum: “The soulful close-ups Costa accords his abject characters verge on the beatific (the soft, longhaired father with his faraway gaze evokes one of Bellini’s musing Madonnas) and the exquisite lighting turns two symmetrical shots of a photograph, some keys, and crumpled cigarette packs lying on a red dresser into colorist still lives.” The National Gallery is screening a rare 35mm print.
Watch the trailer.
Saturday, March 2, at 4 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art. Free.
THE LONGEST YARD
The Library of Congress recalls the legacy of the late Burt Reynolds with this 1974 drama from Robert Aldrich, a versatile director known for such classics as Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and The Dirty Dozen. (Disclosure: I work at the Library of Congress but did not program this event.) Reynolds stars as Paul Crewe, a former pro football quarterback who’s doing time in prison. The prison’s sadistic warden (Eddie Albert, a long way from Green Acres) persuades Crewe to form a football team with his fellow inmates and pits them against a team made up of prison guards. Variety called The Longest Yard an “outstanding action drama“ — with an added dimension, writing that “the metaphysics of football are neatly interwoven with the politics and bestialities of totalitarian authority.”
Watch the trailer.
Thursday, March 7, at 7 p.m. in the Mary Pickford Theater on the third floor of the Madison Building at the Library of Congress, 101 Independence Ave. SE. Free. Seating is first-come, first-served. For the best seating options, patrons are encouraged to arrive 15 to 30 minutes before the scheduled start time.
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