Capital Projections: Office hell edition
This week’s openings include a timely story of workplace harassment and an epic about Italian organized crime. Upcoming repertory screenings include more from Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, and, in an archival 35-mm print, a classic 1967 crime drama.
Capital Projections is The DC Line’s selective and subjective guide to notable movie screenings in the coming week.
THE ASSISTANT
For a recent college grad, an entry-level job in New York can be an exciting prospect. But grueling hours and, worse, sexual harassment can turn a dream job into a nightmare. A new drama from writer-director Kitty Green (Casting Jon Benet) paints a bleak picture of life at the bottom of the totem pole in a New York film production company. Without making any explicit references to the #MeToo Movement, the film depicts an office dynamic that suggests what it might have been like to work for Harvey Weinstein.
Much of the film relies on observation, but an unsettling plot emerges behind doors that are closed to us — and to most of its characters. Julia Garner (Ozark) stars as Jane, who gets up each day before dawn to get from her Queens apartment to her SoHo office. As the cityscape lights up the early-morning sky, you get some sense of the excitement at this commercial epicenter of the world, but once Jane is at work, it’s a dreary affair. She makes copies, she makes coffee, she fields phone calls, and she’s so busy that she forgets to call her father for his birthday. Much of the film unspools without a musical score, so the tedium of the workplace is on full view, often in silence, as if we are voyeurs. We never see Jane’s boss; we hear him over the phone making demands and complaining when his assistant has inadvertently gotten in the way of a tryst by intercepting a phone call from a lover. Things get worse for Jane when a pretty new hire appears on the scene. Although Ruby (Makenzie Leigh) has just arrived from Idaho with no film production experience, the boss is quick to find her a cushy hotel room — and Jane worries what might happen to the naive recruit. But is there anything she can do for the new charge?
Green has primarily worked on documentaries, and her fiction debut has a clinical dryness that adds to its verisimilitude. Cinematographer Michael Latham sets up his camera like a fly on the wall, the static compositions designed to offer just a glimpse of what might be happening inside a doorway or through a foggy window. Garner navigates her character’s emotions as a trapped animal might; in an unusual detail, we see that Jane is the only person on staff who keeps her coat tucked in a desk drawer, as if she’s isolated from her company’s forbidding power structure. When Jane tries to speak up about what she sees happening, her concerns are promptly swept under the table, and none of her male — or female — colleagues are willing to do anything about the situation. Despite the potentially sensationalist subject matter, The Assistant plays out with great restraint; even so, it manages to come off as a horror movie that just happens to take place at work.
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, Feb. 7, at Landmark E Street Cinema and Landmark Bethesda Row. $12.50.
THE TRAITOR
Martin Scorsese isn’t the only veteran director to tackle the sordid history of organized crime. Yet while The Irishman is an autumnal tale of mortality and regret in mid-century America, the latest from 80-year-old Marco Bellocchio (The Wedding Director), which takes place in the latter part of the 20th century, doesn’t exactly look back with wistful penitence.
The true-crime drama is based on the tumultuous life of Tommaso Buscetta, a Mafia figure who became an informant in the 1980s and ’90s. Pierfrancesco Favino (American audiences might know him from The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian) stars as this charismatic family man who, as the film opens, is living in Brazil after fleeing Italian authorities. But the heroin trade in his native Palermo is heating up, and after his eldest sons, who are still in Italy, are killed, Buscetta makes a deal to go home and mete out his vengeance — in a courtroom.
Bellocchio has been making movies for over 50 years, and there’s a clear throughline running from his 1965 debut Fists in the Pocket all the way to The Traitor. While his energetic first film observed a young man with an almost feral penchant for violence, Bellocchio’s new work is no less volatile as it depicts criminal beasts put behind bars. He is the kind of unpredictable imagemaker who might cut abruptly from a courtroom to a zoo, with wild scenes in both venues. In my Washington Post review, I wrote that, “If ‘The Traitor’ proves anything, it’s that an 80-year-old filmmaker can still pounce.”
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, Feb. 7, at the Avalon Theatre, Cinema Arts Theatres, and Angelika Film Center & Café at Mosaic. $12 to $15.
HOMEWORK
The late Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami got his start making films for Kanun, the state education agency. So it follows that many of his short subjects and feature films took place in the world of children. But that doesn’t mean these were idyllic slices of innocence. When Kiarostami observed the young, it was frequently in what is often their most dreaded environment: the classroom. The 1989 film Homework, even though it’s a documentary, thus becomes a study in horror.
The film is an apt companion to Kiarostami’s 1987 film Where Is the Friend’s House? (screening at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center on Feb. 8, 10 and 12), in which a boy becomes anxious when he can’t find where his friend lives. The director was inspired to make Homework by his own anxiety: as a father, he had trouble helping his son with all of the assigned homework. The film primarily consists of interviews, mostly with students but also with a few notable adults, including a parent who seems to think that American students don’t have to do any homework at all. But it’s the kids who tell the most troubling stories, about frequent beatings and the seeming absence of praise. “I don’t know,” more than one student says to the question “What is encouragement?”
Iranian authorities initially took issue with the film because of a sequence in which students, attempting to say Islamic prayers, fail to chant in unison. Kiarostami cut the audio in that scene, but the film was banned anyway. Homework ends on a particularly chilling note with a child who, when asked to recite one of his prayers, becomes terrified for fear of the consequences if he gets it wrong; the boy completes the prayer successfully despite his agitation, but a sense of unease remains. As I wrote in a 2017 piece for Spectrum Culture, “What kind of educational system instills such fear in a good student?” The Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery screen the film, with an introduction by film scholar Godfrey Cheshire, as part of their continuing Kiarostami retrospective.
Watch a clip.
Sunday, Feb. 9, at 1:30 p.m. at the Freer Gallery of Art. Free.
MUNA MOTO
The National Gallery of Art launches its series “African Legacy: Francophone Films 1955 to 2019” with this 1975 drama from Cameroonian director Jean-Pierre Dikongué-Pipa. The film tells the story of Ngando and Ndomé, a young couple in love. Marriage arrangements in their society require that Ngando’s family provide a dowry, but they’re too poor to do so. When Ndomé becomes pregnant, she is required culturally to take a husband; villagers decide that Ngando’s uncle, who already has three wives, should be the groom. The film was reportedly made under the watchful eyes of government censors; according to film critic Guy Hennebelle, the director said that he was able to show “only one fifth of what he felt at heart.” Hennebelle writes that Muna Moto “shows the extent to which African cinema is able to chronicle reality, however its representatives may be gagged by the power of money and by those in power. How many Mozarts of the people have thus been spiritually if not physically slain?” We’re fortunate that Dikongué-Pipa was able to overcome the obstacles.
Saturday, Feb. 8, at 2:30 p.m at the National Gallery of Art in the West Building Lecture Hall. Free.
BONNIE AND CLYDE
The Library of Congress continues its series “A Year of Change: Best Picture Nominees of 1968” with Arthur Penn’s 1967 drama. With a freewheeling energy inspired by the French New Wave, the story of iconic American outlaws Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway) and Clyde Barrows (Warren Beatty) broke new ground in the level of sex and violence permitted onscreen. The film earned 10 Oscar nominations with two wins — Estelle Parsons for Best Supporting Actress and Burnett Guffey for Best Cinematography. In his 1967 review, critic Roger Ebert called it “a milestone in the history of American movies.” The box-office smash had an influence beyond cinema, providing inspiration for counterculture attitude as well as women’s fashion. In a 2017 piece marking the 50th anniversary of the film, Vogue’s Julia Cooper made the fascinating argument that Dunaway’s wardrobe led to today’s power suits. “On set,” Cooper wrote, “Dunaway’s cocked beret and patterned neck scarves evoked the cool existentialism of French New Wave cinema, while her bias cuts emulated the real life, tough-as-nails Texan Bonnie Parker.” The Library of Congress (note: I work there, but did not work on this program) will be screening a 35-mm print.
Watch the trailer.
Thursday, Feb. 13, at 7 p.m. at the Mary Pickford Theater on the third floor of the Madison Building of the Library of Congress. Free advance tickets are available via Eventbrite. Doors open 30 minutes before screening. Seating is very limited, but standbys are encouraged to line up starting at 6:30 p.m. In the likely event of a sellout, unclaimed seats will be released five minutes before showtime.
MAX MON AMOUR
Leave it to the Washington Psychotronic Film Society to program this unusual love story for the week of Valentine’s Day. Director Nagisa Ôshima’s 1986 film tells the story of Margaret (Charlotte Rampling), who strays from her marriage to a British diplomat. Her new love interest, however, isn’t exactly another man — it’s a chimp. Rampling told The Guardian in 1990 that, in Oshima’s view, “only a British husband could put up with the situation,” which may explain a great deal about Japanese-British relations. Upon its delayed 1994 release in the U.S. market, The Chicago Tribune’s Michael Wilmington wrote that the film is “imperfect but somehow coldly endearing.”
Watch the trailer.
Monday, Feb. 10, at 8 p.m. at Smoke and Barrel. Free.
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