Capital Projections: All you need is love 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.
YESTERDAY
The Roman emperor Claudius, who reigned in the first century A.D., was by all accounts a prolific writer. But none of his works survive; we only know of his life and output from Suetonius and others he also inspired. In pop music, it would be like living in a world where we had Get the Knack but nothing by the Fab Four. That’s something akin to the premise of Yesterday, a romantic comedy-fantasy from director Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire), which imagines an even greater blow to musical history. Jack (Himesh Patel of Eastenders) is a struggling London musician who’s spent the past 10 years playing small clubs without ever finding much appreciation — that is, other than from Ellie (Lily James of Downton Abbey), who’s harbored a crush on him and became his first manager. But after an unexplained power outage around the world, Jack wakes up to discover that the Beatles never existed, though he somehow remembers their songs. When he casually plays “Yesterday” for his friends and family, their enthusiastic reaction leads to a rejuvenated singing career. But at what cost?
Yesterday comes from a story by Simpsons writer Jack Barth, and the screenplay by Richard Curtis (Four Weddings and a Funeral) uses the concept — which is admittedly ridiculous — as the basis for a largely endearing rom-com that happens to have one of the great songbooks for its soundtrack. Patel’s performances of classic Lennon-McCartney chestnuts are convincing enough that, miraculously, you can almost imagine that, like the fawning audiences he ends up playing for, you’re hearing them for the first time. Some of that magic comes from Patel’s modesty; he seems in awe that he’s become a conduit for art that has been mysteriously forgotten, but you can also see his unease in finding his artistic voice through songs he didn’t write. The film’s third act doesn’t maintain the heady rush of Jack’s rise to fame, but the chemistry between Patel and James keeps the love story going when the success story loses steam. If we must have jukebox movies like Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman, let their source material be as impeccable and universal as this.
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, June 28, at area theaters.
THE THIRD WIFE
This assured feature debut from writer-director Ash Mayfair tells a sensuous, unsettling tale about the treatment of women in 19th-century Vietnam. In an arranged marriage, 14-year-old May (Nguyen Phuong Tra My) becomes the third wife to an older, wealthy landowner (Le Vu Long). May finds her conjugal activities painful, but is tutored by older wives who vie for attention. The dynamic becomes even more fraught after she witnesses a secret tryst between members of her husband’s staff; what she sees, however, awakens her own desires. Mayfair and cinematographer Chananun Chotrungroj use the rural setting to parallel May’s struggles with the natural world around her; her first night of marriage is juxtaposed with footage of larval insects that wouldn’t look out of place in a David Lynch film. Such symbolism can get heavy-handed. Especially with digital camerawork that looks almost too polished, the movie feels like an unusual, uncomfortable combination of nature documentary and social-issues melodrama.
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, June 28, at E Street Landmark Cinema. $12.50.
THE AFRICAN QUEEN
A dangerous riverboat journey becomes a metaphor for life’s trials — and the setting for one of the great romantic comedies — in director John Huston’s 1951 adventure, set in British East Africa at the onset of World War I. Rose (Katharine Hepburn) is a refined English missionary teaching hymns to locals who largely resist her proselytizing. Charlie (Humphrey Bogart, who won an Oscar for his performance) is the shaggy captain of a rusted vessel he calls The African Queen. When German forces invade, they’re forced to take flight on a trip that, thanks to the natural setting and the talents of two screen legends, seems almost mythical. There may never have been an odder couple, but, without the kind of pandering sentiment that drips in contemporary romances, the pair develops a respectful chemistry, learning basic survival skills from each other as they fall in love. Is there any more intimate act between lovers than the promise to salt each other’s leeches? The Pulitzer Prize-winning author James Agee adapted C. S. Forester’s novel for the screenplay, and the result is one of the most beloved movies from Hollywood’s golden age.
Watch the trailer.
Sunday, June 30, at 5:10 p.m.; Monday, July 1, at noon; Tuesday, July 2, at noon; and Thursday, July 4, at 7:15 p.m. at the AFI SIlver Theatre and Cultural Center. $13.
EARLY SUMMER
Over the course of a career that spanned from silent-era dramas to the vivid colors and fart jokes of the 1959 comedy Good Morning, director Yasujiro Ozu and his ensemble of devoted actors examined the mores of a changing Japan. In this 1951 drama, Ozu regulars Chishu Ryu and Setsuko Hara navigate a father-daughter relationship at a mid-century moment when tradition gave way to modernity. Hara plays Noriko, whose family (including a loving father played by Ryu) is ready to see their favorite daughter get married. Her boss tries to set her up with an older businessman, but she instead chooses a childhood friend — subtly and irrevocably upending the family dynamic. The Freer and Sackler galleries will be screening a 35-mm print as part of their continuing series Monthly Matinees: Japanese Classics.
Watch the trailer.
Wednesday, July 3, at 2 p.m. at the Freer Gallery of Art. Free.
HYENAS
Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambéty made an international splash with his bold 1973 film Touki Bouki, about a young couple who leave their impoverished country for more lucrative opportunities in Paris. This follow-up, nearly 20 years in the making, was adapted from a work by Swiss avant-garde playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt. Reversing the first film’s journey, Hyenas follows a now-rich woman returning home with a startling proposition: She will give her fortune to the village she left behind if its residents kill the man who abandoned her years before. The Hollywood Reporter writes that “viewers may expect a Preston Sturges-like romp through small-town venality. What they’ll actually get is stranger and sadder, a gimlet-eyed allegory about the influence of foreign money that … feels custom-made for a continent struggling with its relationship to strings-attached aid from countries that were once invaders.” The AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center will be screening a new 2K digital restoration.
Watch the trailer.
Monday, July 1, at 7:10 p.m. and Tuesday, July 2, at 9 p.m. at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center. $13.
PUTNEY SWOPE
Advertising parodies have been a staple of entertainment for as long as there’s been advertising. But in this 1969 satire, director Robert Downey Sr. (the actor’s father) took on Madison Avenue with a distinctly counterculture irreverence. The movie charts the unlikely rise of Swope (Arnold Johnson, his voice controversially dubbed by Downey), the only African American on the board of a prestigious but stodgy advertising firm. The new boss burns bridges, throwing out the old guard for Black Power and black comedy. But is the new guard as destructively power-hungry as the old? As I wrote in the Washington City Paper when the film screened earlier this year: “This is no Mad Men; Downey parodies TV commercials (and the whole political gamut) with an equal outrageousness that’s guaranteed to offend somebody at the same time as it makes you laugh out loud.” The screening is a presentation of the equally ribald and irreverent Washington Psychotronic Film Society.
Watch the trailer.
Monday, July 1, at 8 p.m at Smoke and Barrel. Free.
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