Capital Projections: Global crisis edition
There’s always trouble somewhere on the planet, and many of this week’s screenings, from new titles to classics, depict a past or present, real or fictional problem around the globe. Openings include a pair of intriguing foreign films, including a French thriller set in a volatile, impoverished neighborhood and a Japanese animated romance. In repertory, two area museums continue their surveys of Iranian film with documentaries that address life before and after the 1979 revolution.
Capital Projections is The DC Line’s selective and subjective guide to notable movie screenings in the coming week.
LES MISERABLES
As tensions brew in cities around the world, this confident, exciting feature debut from director Ladj Ly immerses the viewer in a powder keg that even devoted Francophones may not be aware of: the troubled public housing projects on the outskirts of Paris.
The action is set largely in the Montfermeil neighborhood, which inspired the Victor Hugo novel that gives the film its title. But this is not a literary adaptation. The plot unfolds around Stéphane (Damien Bonnard), who has been transferred to the area’s Special Crimes Unit, which is a mixed bag. His new partner Gwanda (Djibril Zonga) is a Malian immigrant who has a friendly rapport with residents. On the other hand, Chris (Alexis Manenti), a white officer on the squad, makes racist jokes at the expense of his colleagues — and pretty much everyone he meets.
Such antagonism strains relations in a district where impoverished ethnic groups live together uneasily. As Gwanda explains to the new recruit, the area used to be so bad that at one point police just stayed away — that is, until the Muslim Brotherhood cleaned up the place, which put different pressures on the community. With the hot-headed Chris harassing neighborhood youth, locals are riled up, and it’s up to the outsider Stéphane to try to keep a level head. But when a circus passes through town, and its star lion cub is kidnapped by an African boy, a spark finally sets the region on fire.
With the help of Julien Poupard’s hand-held cinematography, Ly brilliantly captures the squalor and desperation that has plagued Montfermeil since Hugo’s time. This is the kind of ghetto where kids explore abandoned apartment buildings and use trash can lids as sleds. The director ought to know something about the setting: He grew up there, and in 2005 he witnessed riots that broke out in front of his apartment building. Les Miserables is fiction, but it’s inspired by real events. Ly shows us his home, which is full of grit and tragedy but also pulses with a thrilling energy.
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, Jan. 17, at Landmark E Street Cinema and Landmark Bethesda Row. $12.50.
WEATHERING WITH YOU
This beautifully imagined animated feature from Japan tells a teenage love story — a project that sounds simple enough. But director Makoto Shinkai uses that timeworn template to create a vivid fantasy set on an imperiled Earth.
Hodaka (voiced by Kotaro Daigo) is a high school freshman tired of his quiet village life. So he runs off to Tokyo, which is beset by a seemingly unending streak of rainy days. In this gray and dreary setting, the boy meets Hana (Nana Mori), who has an unusual talent: She’s a “sunshine girl” with the power to change the weather in a localized area. With the help of magazine publisher Mr. Suga (Shun Oguri), Hodaka helps hire Hana out to clients who might need to have a park dried out for an imminent birthday party. But the increased effort is a strain on Hana, and when Hodaka runs afoul of gangsters, they’re both in danger.
Shinkai’s previous film was the 2016 fantasy Your Name, which combined the time travel of Chris Marker’s classic La Jetée with the young adult love story of Twilight for a gorgeous and unpredictable ride. The visual elements of Weathering With You are just as strong as the plot; the director has a keen eye for modest details, like the sound of rainwater hitting a hospital-room window. He has an equal gift for the big picture, from wet Tokyo streets at night to the battles that Hana fights with the sky.
Yet this story, as fantastical as it is, doesn’t have the same impact as Shinkai’s 2016 film. The director seems to be repeating himself, with similarly doomed young lovers in similar surroundings separating and inevitably reuniting in a scenario that’s only somewhat different. Still, Weathering With You suffers mainly in comparison to its predecessor; the breathtaking art direction could wipe the floor with any other new animated feature you’re likely to see this year.
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, Jan. 17, at AMC Georgetown, AMC Hoffman Center, Regal Majestic and other area theaters.
FILMFARSI
The Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery continue their 24th annual Iranian Film Festival with a documentary that looks at a fairly unknown time in the Middle Eastern nation’s film industry.
Discerning moviegoers primarily know Iranian cinema for powerful dramas by such masters as Abbas Kiarostami (the subject of winter retrospectives at the Freer, National Gallery of Art and AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center) and Asghar Farhadi. But Tehran audiences once flocked to what film critic Hushang Kavusi derisively called “filmfarsi,” claiming that such commercial product was neither really “film” nor properly “farsi.” In the new documentary Filmfarsi, director Ehsan Khoshbakht tells the fascinating story of the forgotten popular cinema that thrived before the 1979 revolution.
Chock-full of rock ’n’ roll and sex and violence, these movies weren’t that different from their American counterparts, and remakes of Alfred Hitchcock thrillers and Hollywood classics like Sabrina and Gilda were box office hits in the Iranian capital and beyond. Yet, as demonstrated in a clip from Nosratolah Vahdat’s An Isfahani in the Land of Hitler (which you can see in full, albeit without subtitles, here), even a sex comedy had to follow a certain moral protocol: Before a Muslim character could give into seduction by a German woman, he had to perform a ritual in order to marry his mistress, if only temporarily.
The movement’s surviving films, seen here in clips sourced from VHS tapes, have all been banned by the current regime, and existing copies suffer from faded color and otherwise lousy image quality. Thus a large part of the nation’s cultural history seems to hang by a thread. Filmfarsi is more than just compelling entertainment and political history; it’s an archival success story that keeps the past alive.
The movement’s surviving films, seen here in clips sourced from VHS tapes, have all been banned by the current regime; Khoshbakht, in an email to The DC Line, explained that his documentary couldn’t be shown either in Iran. “If I or anyone else even [tried] to submit the film to the authorities for a distribution licence, he/she would be already in deep trouble for the mere fact of having made the film, let alone showing it,” he wrote.
Since existing copies of these vintage titles suffer from faded color and otherwise lousy image quality, a large part of the nation’s cultural history seems to hang by a thread. Filmfarsi is more than just compelling entertainment and political history; it’s an archival success story that keeps the past alive.
Watch the trailer.
Sunday, Jan. 19, at 1:30 p.m. at the Freer Gallery of Art. Free.
CASE #1, CASE #2
The National Gallery of Art wraps up its survey of director Abbas Kiarostami’s early films with this 47-minute semi-documentary from 1979. Set in a classroom, Case #1, Case #2 offers two dramatized scenarios in which a student makes a banging noise behind the teacher’s back. In the first case, a classmate turns in the troublemaker; in the other, the noisemaker’s peers refuse to turn him in.
In the film’s second segment, Kiarostami shows both sketches to the children’s parents, and the real reactions vary wildly. A military officer, for instance, believes the children shouldn’t snitch, but a pair of working-class parents feel that someone should call out the instigator for the benefit of the rest of the class.
It sounds like a straightforward tale of discipline, but in the context of the era, this is a provocative and chilling film. As I explained in a 2017 piece for Spectrum Culture, “This seemingly benign educational drama was caught in history in a way that would seem impossible in America. Kiarostami wrapped up shooting the film in January 1979, and at the time it featured commentary by educational experts who worked under the Shah. Days after the film was completed, the Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile and declared an Islamic Republic. Kiarostami reshot the film’s commentaries to include members of the new regime, yet the film was still banned and remained out of circulation for decades.” Case #1, Case #2 has a power that far exceeds its brief running time. The film will be screened with the 1977 short Tribute to Teachers, in which Kiarostami interviews Iranian instructors in what turned out to be the last years of the Shah’s rule.
Saturday, Jan. 18, at 12:30 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art in the West Building Lecture Hall. Free.
JOURNEY TO THE DEPTHS OF THE STUDENT’S SOUL
Shaw restaurant Bistro Bohem has offered a monthly Film and Beer series for nearly a decade in conjunction with the Embassy of the Czech Republic. This year, to commemorate the 350th anniversary of the death of John Amos Comenius, a Czech philosopher considered the father of modern education, the program will focus on films with a classroom setting. Based on stories by author Jaroslav Žák, this 1939 comedy directed by Bistro favorite Martin Frič looks at relationships among students and teachers. But, unlike the young people in Case #1, Case #2 or those in American comedies like Fast Times at Ridgemont High, these students get along with their elders. The plot revolves around veteran natural sciences teacher Matulka (Jindřich Plachta), who has avoided taking a mandatory state exam; with the help of the young Latin teacher Voříšek (František Vnouček), the students rally around Matulka to help him get his groove back. To encourage a collegial mood, a free beer is included with the screening.
Tuesday, Jan. 21, at 7 p.m. at Bistro Bohem. Admission is free, but RSVPs are required. Contact 202-735-5895 or bistrobohem@gmail.com. Guests must arrive by 6:45 p.m. to keep their reservation.
NINJA III: THE DOMINATION
If, like me, you appreciate the day-glo colors and infectious energy of the much-maligned 1984 musical Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, you might be happy to learn that its star Lucinda Dickey worked with the same director, Sam Firstenberg, in a very different exploitation movie that same year. Ninja III tells the story of what happens when the spirit of an evil ninja inhabits the body of an aerobics instructor (Dickey). The reviews at the time were about as scathing as those for Breakin’ 2. The Washington Post’s Paul Attanasio dismissed it as Samurai Flashdance Meets the Exorcist but reserved some admiration for its action sequences. “Victims aren’t merely hit in this movie,” he wrote, “they’re hurtled airborne across city streets, blown into dumpsters, propelled through tombstones.”
Naturally, this will be a presentation of the Washington Psychotronic Film Society.
Watch the trailer.
Monday, Jan. 20, at 8 p.m. at Smoke and Barrel. Free.
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