Capital Projections: Moovable feast edition
This week’s openings include two very different crime stories, one set in present-day Milan and the other in 19th-century Oregon. Also on screen, the New African Film Festival continues; unfortunately, due to coronavirus-related temporary closings, programs dedicated to a Taiwanese director and a tribute to Armenian artists have been canceled.
Capital Projections is The DC Line’s selective and subjective guide to notable movie screenings in the coming week.
FIRST COW
A slow but mesmerizing tale of friendship and capitalism, the latest film from director Kelly Reichardt (Wendy and Lucy) is in some ways an origin story of American gumption, crime — and cupcakes.
First Cow introduces its period plot from a present-day discovery: A woman (Alia Shawkat) hiking through the woods around Oregon’s Columbia River finds a shallow grave with two skeletons. How did they get there? As the sound of airplanes disappears from the landscape, the movie quietly shifts some 200 years into the past, where Cookie (John Magaro) is preparing meals for a group of trappers who hope to capitalize on the craze for beaver pelts. The mild-mannered chef forages what ingredients he can find in the woods, and it is there that he stumbles upon and befriends King Lu (Orion Lee), a Chinese immigrant who’s seeking his own fortune on the American frontier.
Opportunity knocks — in bovine form. A wealthy landowner known as Chief Factor (Toby Jones) has imported a dairy cow, the first in the region. In the middle of the night, the friends sneak onto Chief Factor’s land and surreptitiously milk the cow, with Cookie tenderly wooing the creature while King Lu climbs a tree to keep watch. With their spoils, Cookie begins making oily cakes (described by Reichardt at a Kennedy Center screening as similar to doughnuts without holes), which prove to be such a hit among the trappers that they line up for the 19th-century equivalent of a food truck. But the pioneering entrepreneurs won’t be able to keep the source of the stolen milk a secret for long.
In other hands this material might fuel a heist movie, or something akin to a two-part episode of Little House on the Prairie. But Reichart’s films have always had a distinct, patient rhythm: artful, accessible and subtly comic. Screenwriter Jon Raymond adapted his own novel of the same name. Unlike typical period pieces, his screenplay doesn’t strain to modernize characters. Cookie and King Lu are recognizable figures, but their demeanor is distinctly different from what we expect from 21st-century movies: These are people who know their way around the woods and can survive off the land by their wits and resourcefulness. And despite the deception at the heart of their business model, the friends are trusting in a way that is foreign to the current climate.
A plot that focuses on the friendships and working relations of men makes First Cow quite a departure from Reichardt’s previous film, the episodic Certain Women. Cookie and King Lu are ordinary men trying to make their mark around a new country with ingenuity, salesmanship and subterfuge. As the excavation that begins the film foreshadows, it didn’t end well for them. But at least the journey is sweet.
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, March 13, at Landmark E Street Cinema, Landmark Bethesda Row and AMC Shirlington. $12.50 to $13.49.
THE BURNT ORANGE HERESY
The complicated plot of this smart, sexy crime thriller revolves around art critic James Figueras (Claes Bang). He has published a book with the self-aggrandizing title The Power of the Critic, but his own power could use a boost: He’s living in Milan, where he gives art talks for a meager salary that isn’t sufficient to support his amphetamine habit. Fortunately, his powers of persuasion are sharp. Waxing about a mediocre abstract, he tells a lecture audience that its painter died in the Holocaust. Once he convinces attendees that the work has a subtle poignancy, he pulls the rug out from under them: He painted it himself.
This seductive duplicity impresses the young American tourist Berenice Hollis (Elizabeth Debicki), who has a steamy affair with the grizzled writer. The couple are soon invited to a lavish villa owned by art dealer Joseph Cassidy (Mick Jagger), who has a proposition for his old acquaintance: The reclusive artist Jerome Debney (Donald Sutherland), who hasn’t finished a painting in years, is staying at Cassidy’s guesthouse. If Figueras manages to break into Debney’s studio and steal one of his priceless canvasses, Cassidy will turn it into a big career move for the writer.
Adapted from the 1971 novel by renowned crime writer Charles Willeford, The Burnt Orange Heresy veers far from its source; screenwriter Scott B. Smith moves the action from seedy South Florida to picturesque Italy, and makes other radical changes to the plot. If the pretty scenery waters down the book’s hard-boiled milieu, at least one major change is an improvement: Willeford’s Hollis was a naive airhead, but Smith gives Debicki plenty of smart-alecky dialogue to chew on, making her a strong foil for Bang’s weary sophistication.
There’s another delight in the casting. As I wrote in my Washington Post review, “the film’s biggest pleasure comes courtesy of a hilariously hammy Jagger, who delivers such gems of art-speak as ‘Modigliani provenance’ with a gleefully upper-class air. It’s like showing up for a gallery talk and finding out that the Rolling Stones are your guide.”
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, March 13, at Landmark E Street Cinema and Angelika Film Center & Café at Mosaic. $12.50 to $15.
DESRANCES
The New African Film Festival, scheduled to run through Thursday, March 19, continues at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center with a tale of civil war in the Ivory Coast circa 2010. This film by director Apolline Traoré focuses on Francis Desrances (Jimmy Jean-Louis), who lost his family in Haiti during the 2004 coup that overthrew Jean-Bertrand Aristide. His ancestors came from Abidjan, so he resettles there and starts a new family; soon, however, civil war breaks out in his adopted home, and all the trauma of his life in Haiti comes back.
The Ivory Coast is home to more than 60 ethnic groups, and with no love lost among them, today’s immigrants are still often subject to brutal violence. So even though Traoré, who hails from Burkina Faso, is depicting a specific historical moment, her film resonates beyond its place and time. When Desrances’ daughter Haila (Jemima Naomi Nemlin) finds reels of faded 35-mm film in an abandoned movie theater converted into a makeshift shelter, it’s as if the young generation is discovering the destruction of her nation’s culture. This parallels other titles in this year’s festival: In Talking About Trees, a documentary in which veteran Sudanese filmmakers try to revive a motion picture industry that was devastated by a 1989 coup, the elder directors also find old film reels in an abandoned theater.
As a concerned father, Jean-Louis comes across like a haunted action hero in a drama based on real events, and Traoré makes the dangerous conditions palpable and horrifying, if occasionally over the top. Roving thugs — one donning purple hair and new-wave animal prints — briefly turn the movie into a sub-Saharan Mad Max. Worse, the extended final act depends on the filmmaker’s withholding information that’s obvious to everyone except Desrances. Plot contrivances aside, though, this is a riveting story of a conflict that tore apart a nation. See my Washington City Paper preview of five other titles in this year’s festival at the AFI Silver Theatre.
Watch the trailer.
Friday, March 13, at 7:30 p.m. and Tuesday, March 17, at 9:20 p.m. at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center. $13.
VIVE L’AMOUR
Friday’s scheduled screening at the Freer Gallery has been canceled in conjunction with the Smithsonian Institution’s decision to postpone or cancel all rentals, public events, programming and gatherings through May 3 as a public health precaution due to the new coronavirus. But the DC audience doesn’t have to miss out on the film: You can stream it on Kanopy, a free service available with your DC Public Library card.
Despite the amorous title, this 1994 feature from Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang is a somber drama appropriate for a time of social distancing. The movie follows three characters making use of a vacant duplex apartment building in Taipei. May Lin (Yang Kuei-mei) is a busy real estate broker; one lonely night, she takes on a new lover, street vendor Ah-jung (Chen Chao-jung), and brings him back to the empty lower level of the apartment. The lovers connect physically but are emotionally distant, so it’s no wonder that they haven’t caught onto what’s happening in the upper unit: Young salesman Hsiao-kang (Lee Kang-sheng), who stumbled on a spare key that May Lin had misplaced, is attempting to kill himself.
Much of Vive L ‘Amour unfolds without dialogue, which accentuates the deep-seated alienation at the heart of the film and to some extent explains how the characters spend the better part of two hours visiting the same space without confronting each other. Just as Michelangelo Antonioni does in such films as the 1962 drama L’Eclisse, Tsai places beautiful, lost young people in the midst of cold modern architecture. Hsiao-kang survives his attempt and eventually becomes transfixed with the young lovers’ relationship, but even as the three figures finally converge, the bitter emptiness each of them experiences can’t be shaken. The Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art had planned to screen a 35-mm print as part of the series, Lonely Hearts: The Films of Tsai Ming-liang, which was scheduled to run through April 19. The Smithsonian hasn’t yet announced whether the screenings will be rescheduled.
Watch the trailer.
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