Capital Projections: Separated sisters edition
After a slew of high-profile holiday openings, 2020 begins with a pair of compelling new films, one a tropical melodrama and the other a 3D documentary about one of the dance world’s most challenging artists. Also on screen is an impressive feature debut from a pair of local filmmakers, and this week’s repertory offerings include a samurai classic and the early work of an Iranian master.
Capital Projections is The DC Line’s selective and subjective guide to notable movie screenings in the coming week.
INVISIBLE LIFE
Set primarily in 1950s Rio de Janeiro, this period drama from director Karim Aïnouz (Madame Satã) tells the moving story of close-knit 20-something sisters who are separated by the overbearing men in their lives. Guida (Júlia Stockler) is a freewheeling, lively young woman who runs away to get married to a Greek sailor. Her sister Eurídice (Carol Duarte) is a talented pianist with ambitions to leave Brazil and study music in Vienna.
The setting and character names partially echo Greek mythology and Marcel Camus’ Rio-set 1959 masterpiece Black Orpheus, except in this case Euridice doesn’t disappear into a sinister underworld — her hell is in plain sight. When Guida returns home pregnant with her marriage over before it started (it turns out that the Greek sailor made promises to multiple women), her strict father tells her that Euridice has left for Vienna and is ashamed of her sister’s behavior. In fact, Euridice is still in Rio, unhappily married, her dreams put on hold indefinitely when she, too, becomes pregnant.
The “invisible life” that gives the film its name is in fact perfectly visible to the viewer. Guida writes letters to her lost sister, who she imagines is on the other side of the ocean but who actually lives in the same city, with the two of them almost crossing paths but never quite meeting. The hot-blooded Stockler and the quietly seething Duarte quickly establish the sisters’ differing personalities and their profound bond before they are so cruelly separated. They come across as real people with real suffering, but the men who surround them are so villainous as to seem like caricatures of Latin American machismo. Cinematographer Hélène Louvart (Happy as Lazaro) generates a visceral atmosphere that’s romantic enough to lead one to expect a happy ending. This makes the film frustrating by design, although its dramatic dividends do finally pay off to some degree in a bittersweet final act.
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, Jan. 3, at Landmark E Street Cinema. $12.50.
CUNNINGHAM
Merce Cunningham’s dazzling choreography was captured on film throughout his career, which spanned from the 1930s until his death in 2009. But the sometimes-sprawling dances were not always well served by a flat visual medium. Videographer Charles Atlas, for instance, documented Cunningham’s collaborations with artist Robert Rauschenberg (who designed the pointillist set of the 1958 piece Summerspace, seen above) using a static camera that resulted in a fairly dry chronicle of pieces that were much more dynamic in person. In this new documentary, director Alla Kovgan uses the latest 3D imagery techniques to create a fuller picture of Cunningham’s art.
Cunningham covers the peak period from 1944 to 1972, which featured the artist taking risks that were sometimes met with derision from audiences at the time. Cunningham eschewed conventional narrative; he resisted the avant-garde tag even though he was quite willing to get weird. For instance, a piece such as Antic Meet, first performed in 1958, is led by a gangly dancer wearing a costume that looks like a cubist interpretation of a Christmas sweater. But this unusual work, with its distinctly modern-art sensibility, had its roots in vaudeville. These abstract dances can be forbidding on the surface but are loaded with immediate aesthetic pleasures, whether it’s slapstick comedy or the beauty of the body in motion.
I wasn’t able to preview the film in 3D, but the colorful new stagings of pieces like Summerscape and RainForest (with floating silver pillows designed by Andy Warhol) are stunning even in two dimensions, so the added depth of the theatrical presentation is sure to be a treat for anyone interested in modern dance. Cunningham is a must for fans of the choreographer, and it may even create a few converts to his challenging art.
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, Jan. 3, at Landmark E Street Cinema. $12.50.
LOST HOLIDAY
Holiday reunions aren’t all warm and fuzzy. This independent feature from sibling directors Michael and Thomas Matthews argues that seasonal tensions can inspire unstable and downright homicidal behavior. The shaggy plot unfolds when Margaret (House of Cards’ Kate Lyn Sheil) returns home to the DC suburbs with her friend Henry (co-director Thomas Matthews, who appeared in the HBO series The Newsroom). They meet up with high school chums at a Christmas party, where Margaret soon finds out that her ex-boyfriend Mark (William Jackson Harper of The Good Place) is engaged. She turns moody and starts to drink heavily; Henry, on the other hand, is a loud, boorish goofball. When the oil-and-water duo starts looking for more illicit substances to get them through year-end festivities, they run afoul of a Russian drug dealer (musician Tone Tank) who they think may have murdered a rising pop star (Ismenia Mendes).
The Matthews brothers grew up in Chevy Chase, Maryland, and they set this flawed but impressive feature debut in their old local haunts (you can read more about the making of the film in this DCist feature). Sheil, a mainstay of indie cinema, has been terrific in films like Kate Plays Christine, and here she brings depth to a character that seems undercooked. Thomas Matthews, unfortunately, makes Henry insufferable, presumably a conscious choice. When the friends are forced to make a quick getaway, Margaret warns Henry to duck so he won’t be recognized by their pursuers. With a smug grin he assures her, “That’s OK, I’m wearing a hat!” — a tacky cap with “Paris Hilton” written across it (both characters obviously come from privilege). This odd tonal shift leads the film to careen uneasily from gritty thriller to mumblecore comedy.
Sheil helps ground the film despite the Matthews’ mess of a script. What also helps is a distinctive visual style. Donovan Sell’s grainy 16-mm cinematography reveals a fine eye for abstract details such as a dripping faucet and the haze of a windshield at night, and these elements are deftly assembled by editor Katie Ennis. The world of Lost Holiday is inhabited by some obnoxious characters, but their tortured play takes place in an atmospheric landscape likely to appeal to many local filmgoers: Old-school Montgomery County landmarks such as Talbert’s Ice Service in Bethesda and Hank Dietle’s Tavern in Rockville (seen here before the 2018 fire that devastated the business) are prominently featured. Who would have thought that the Maryland suburbs were full of so much poetry?
Watch the trailer.
Wednesday, Jan. 8, at 8 p.m. at the Avalon Theatre, followed by a Q&A with directors Michael and Thomas Matthews. $13.
THE SWORD OF DOOM
Adapted from a Japanese newspaper serial that ran for three decades, this 1966 samurai thriller set in the 1860s is among the most brutal examples of a violent subgenre. Tatsuya Nakadai, who would go on to play the elderly warlord in Akira Kurosawa’s 1985 masterpiece Ran, stars as rogue samurai Ryunosuke Tsukue, who is essentially pure evil. When he first appears in the film, it’s to kill an old man making a religious pilgrimage; by the end, he’s laying waste to a seemingly endless supply of unworthy opponents. What drama could play out amid this nihilistic carnage?
Tsukue doesn’t exactly develop as a character, the plot unfolding around him as potential victims navigate his deadly orbit. Many scheme to destroy the villain. Hyoma (Yûzô Kayama), for instance, is determined to avenge the death of the brother who died at Tsukue’s hands. Meanwhile, mercenaries try to win the devil’s favor; one of them, Hama (Michiyo Aratama), allies herself with Tsukue after he kills her husband.
Director Kihachi Okamoto generates a bleak landscape that serves as a chilling counterpoint to the volatile 1960s; the film seems to argue that, while the modern era may seem to be vicious without precedent, violence has always been the way. At the head of this hopeless scenario is Nakadai, who dominates the screen with a sinister gaze that seems haunted. Indeed, by the end of the film, Tsukue is visited by ghosts, beckoning him from the underworld.
Toshiro Mifune (Seven Samurai) co-stars as Shimada, who instructs Hyoma in a fighting technique that may be the only hope to defeat Tsukue. But as Hyoma practices his sword thrusts against a sliver of light, one wonders if technical proficiency is sufficient to conquer such a powerful demon. The National Museum of Asian Art will be screening a 35-mm print as part of its monthly series of Japanese Classics.
Watch the trailer.
Wednesday, Jan. 8, at 2 p.m. at the Freer Gallery of Art. Free.
A WEDDING SUIT
This month the National Gallery of Art screens the early work of the late Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, who died in 2016, leaving behind a body of work that is one of the great studies of the human condition. This hourlong film from 1976 deals with two themes that Kiarostami explored throughout his career: Iran’s deep class divisions and the struggles and aspirations of the country’s children.
The plot revolves around an ordinary wedding suit that, for two teens, represents a prosperity they can only dream of. Working-class boys Hossein and Mamad live in an apartment downstairs from a tailor’s shop. When a middle-class woman takes her son to the tailor to order a suit for his sister’s wedding, the boys scheme to borrow the suit for a night and get it back into the shop before the clients pick it up.
Kiarostami’s class consciousness is fully on view in this early film. While the woman is negotiating a price for the suit, her son leafs through an American clothing catalog, dreaming of belonging to a still-higher class. When Mamad manages to sneak off with the suit, where does he go? To a live magic show. As I wrote in a 2017 piece for Spectrum Culture, “This is his dream of how the rich live, and it’s as glamorous and mysterious as he imagined.” While Kiasrostami would go on to more unconventional narratives in films such as A Taste of Cherry and Certified Copy, A Wedding Suit tells a straightforward story. Even so, it’s a fascinating window into the director’s lifelong concerns.
Saturday, Jan. 4, at 4 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art in the West Building Lecture Hall. Free.
MONSTROSITY
The segue from A Wedding Suit to the Washington Psychotronic Film Society, which is screening this 1987 exploitation movie, may seem like a turn from the sublime to the ridiculous. But even though Monstrosity director Andy Milligan is considered a mere “gutter auteur” (to borrow the title of one book-length study of his work), his low-budget productions turned Z-movies into an idiosyncratic, personal art — and in this film, he seems to anticipate a device that Abbas Kiarostami would use 10 years later.
Monstrosity adapts the story of Frankenstein’s monster and uses it to explore one of Milligan’s most favored themes: revenge. Mark (David Homb) is a young medical student who’s devastated when his girlfriend Ronnie (Audra Marie Ribeiro) is raped and killed by street thugs. Feeling helpless in a vicious world, Mark and his pre-med friends come up with an ingenious plan: to sew together discarded body parts and create a patchwork vigilante they call Frankie (played by Hal Borske).
It sounds like typical mad-scientist fare, but Borske, a Milligan regular going back to the 1965 short Vapors, is clearly a directorial stand-in, which gives the film a bittersweet resonance. In a 2018 piece for Spectrum Culture, I wrote: “Does Milligan feel that he himself is a damaged monster, pieced together from discarded parts?” When the monster comes alive, the first thing he does is hug a teddy bear, which points to another of the director’s leitmotifs — the corruption of innocence.
Monstrosity concludes on a note of hope for its damaged characters, but it’s not that simple: the director breaks the fourth wall much like Kiarostami does in his 1997 film A Taste of Cherry — it was just a movie, we realize as Milligan calls out “Cut! Print!” Yet while Kiarostami’s epilogue reveals his camera crew, assuring us that his bleak plot was just make-believe, Milligan pulls the rug out from his own happy ending.
Watch the trailer.
Monday, Jan. 6, at 8 p.m. at Smoke and Barrel. Free.
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