Capital Projections: No pain no gain 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.
PAIN AND GLORY
Antonio Banderas and Nora Navas (© El Deseo. Photo by Manolo Pavón courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics)
I wasn’t able to see any of this week’s new releases, but the most anticipated opening may be the career-summing latest from director Pedro Almodóvar (Volver). Antonio Banderas, his favored leading man, stars as aging filmmaker (and directorial stand-in) Salvador Mallo, who much like Almodóvar is dealing with the aftermath of painful back surgery. Mallo spends the film looking back on his life and accomplishments. By all accounts Almodóvar, whose films frequently incorporate autobiographical elements, treats Pain and Glory as an opportunity to engage in his own self-assessment and confessional. With a current Rotten Tomatoes score of 97%, the critical consensus is overwhelmingly favorable. In a four-star review, The Washington Post’s Michael O’Sullivan calls it “an intimate, moving mediation that is at once deeply personal and universal.”
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, Oct. 11, at Landmark E Street Cinema, Landmark Bethesda Row, Angelika Mosaic, AMC Shirlington, and Cinema Arts Theatres.
BLACK ORPHEUS
In this 1959 fantasy, director Marcel Camus transformed Greek mythology into a delirious romantic musical set in the midst of Rio de Janeiro’s fevered Carnival. Eurydice (Pittsburgh-born Marpessa Dawn) fears for her life at home on the farm, so she goes to visit her cousin Serafina (Léa Garcia) in Rio. There she meets the handsome trolley driver Orfeo (Breno Mello), who’s engaged to the flashy, arrogant Mira (Lourdes de Oliveira) but is quickly smitten by the beautiful stranger and her prophetic name. Meanwhile, everyone is getting ready for Carnival, with masqueraders dancing through a night that promises excitement but also danger. When the figure of Death comes looking for Eurydice, Orfeo struggles to protect his true love.
Bursting with the music of Luiz Bonfá and Antonio Carlos Jobim, Black Orpheus helped popularize bossa nova, the Brazilian pop form that soon after the cinematic release took the world by rhythmic storm. Much of the film has an irresistible hip-shaking tone that spills out of the frame; Camus blocked his actors like dancers, the tragedy playing out like a haunting ballet. But this isn’t just a picturesque celebration. The pre-Lenten reverie amounts to a vain communal effort to fend off dark forces with music — and love. Cinematographer Jean Bourgoin (who had just worked on Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle, a tonally different film that nevertheless bears some visual similarities) bathes these iconic characters in vivid, highly saturated colors that turn Rio into a dream and a nightmare. The fantasy is grounded on a boisterous soundtrack that propels its characters as well as its audience. So when the music stops as Orfeo begins to navigate the underworld, the effect is startling. The National Museum of American History is screening a 35-mm print of this classic romance as part of its Hispanic History Month Film Series.
Saturday, Oct. 12, at 1:30 p.m. in the Warner Bros. Theatre at the National Museum of American History. $10. Buy tickets here.
THE WELL
The popular Noir City DC film noir festival returns to the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center this weekend, promising lots of hard-boiled crime drama and existential anxiety. While the subgenre frequently lends itself to stories of cynical detectives and femmes fatales, there‘s a different kind of unease in this 1951 thriller, one more timely than anything else in the program. Taking place in a racially mixed California town, the movie begins when an African American girl wanders into a field and falls into an abandoned well. After a white man (future M*A*S*H player Harry Morgan) is suspected of kidnapping the girl, all hell breaks loose when false rumors lead to an all-out race riot.
With its provocative portrayal of a divided 20th-century America, The Well plays out much like 21st-century social media, in which the spread of misinformation (both inadvertent and deliberate) can lead to a snowballing outrage throughout the political spectrum. The Oscar-nominated screenplay by Russell Rouse and Clarence Greene can get heavy-handed, but director Leo C. Popkin keeps things moving so quickly that you can feel the growing tension. The film’s third act promises an end to discord, with the townspeople coming together again for a common goal, but in today’s divisive climate it seems like too much to ask for. Read more about this year’s festival in my Washington City Paper preview.
Watch the trailer.
Sunday, Oct. 13, at 7:30 p.m. (with an introduction by film scholar Foster Hirsch); Monday, Oct. 14, at 9:15 p.m.; Tuesday, Oct. 15, at 3 p.m.; and Wednesday, Oct. 16, at 3 p.m. at the AFi Silver Theatre and Cultural Center. $13.
TEACHER’S PET
The Library of Congress (disclosure: I work there, but did not work on this program) honors legendary singer and actress Doris Day, who died this year at the age of 97, with a 35-mm screening of this 1958 romantic comedy. Day stars as Erica Stone, a journalism instructor who invites veteran newspaperman James Gannon (Clark Gable, in one of his last roles) to speak to her class. Gannon refuses, but his editor orders him to take the assignment, and he shows up just in time to see Stone mockingly reading one of his articles to her students. To get his revenge, Gannon signs up for the young upstart’s class, but as anyone who knows rom-com conventions is aware, such antagonism will surely lead to kisses, even if he is more than 20 years her senior. A contemporary New York Times review makes the head-scratching complaint that “Miss Day is a mite too exotic for the role of an instructor of journalism,” but concludes that “all concerned have welded romance, ribbing and reality into a cheerful and charming entertainment.” Directed by George Seaton (Miracle on 34th Street), the film co-stars bombshell Mamie Van Doren as a nightclub singer and Gig Young (whose performance earned him an Oscar nod) as a psychology professor.
Watch the trailer.
Thursday Oct. 17, at 7 p.m. in the Mary Pickford Theatre on the third floor of the Madison Building at the Library of Congress. Free. Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis. Doors open at 6:30 p.m.
THE LAST EMPEROR
The newly launched series Cinema Revived at the Freer and Sackler galleries will feature recent restorations of classic films. This weekend’s showcase is a digital version of director Bernardo Bertolucci’s Oscar-winning epic about the life of Emperor Pu Yi, who was 3 years old when he assumed the throne of the Qing dynasty in 1908. The film traces the Emperor’s powerless life from the childhood joys of riding his bicycle in the Forbidden City to his imprisonment by Communist forces. In a four-star review, Roger Ebert wrote, “it is precisely because so little ‘happens’ in this epic that its vast and expensive production schedule is important. When we see those thousands of servants bowing to a little boy, for example, the image is effective precisely because the kowtowing means nothing to the boy, and the lives of the servants have been dedicated to no useful purpose.” The screening will be followed by a panel discussion with film critic Bilge Ebiri, Freer and Sackler curator Jan Stuart and George Washington University professor Daqing Yang.
Watch the trailer.
Sunday, Oct. 13, at 1 p.m. at the Freer Gallery of Art. Free.
ROBOT MONSTER
If Teacher’s Pet depicts a contrived May-December romance, this 1953 sci-fi B-movie offers an even more unlikely lovers: an alien robot charged with destroying Earth and a young woman whose spunky pulchritude just might save the world. The Washington Psychotronic Film Society admits that the monster “looks a lot like a gorilla in a diving helmet,” but what do you expect from a low-budget picture once featured on MST3K? Yet the film has its champions; critic Fernando Croce calls it “a furry fist raised for sci-fi misfits everywhere,” and notes that it somehow anticipated the David Bowie vehicle The Man Who Fell to Earth.
Watch the trailer.
Monday, Oct. 14, at 8 p.m. at Smoke and Barrel. Free.
This post has been updated to include more local theaters showing Pain and Glory.