Capital Projections: Family secrets 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.
EVERYBODY KNOWS
The latest from Iranian writer-director Asghar Farhadi (whose 2011 masterpiece A Separation won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film) is on the surface a thriller — but the sparks fly thanks to his strengths as an acute observer of human behavior. Even though Laura (Penélope Cruz) left Spain for Buenos Aires long ago, everybody in her home village knows she still has a thing for the childhood sweetheart Paco (Javier Bardem, Cruz’s real-life husband) she left behind. With her two children in tow, she returns for her sister’s wedding. But the family reunion turns fraught when Laura’s teenage daughter Irene (Carla Campra) disappears. For Farhadi’s fans, some of these plot elements may feel familiar as he revisits aspects of his 2009 drama About Elly, which also revolved around a celebration and a disappearance. Yet this is a more mature work. The mystery at the heart of Everybody Knows isn’t as suspenseful as its complicated relationship dynamic, which leaves you wondering when somebody will spill the secrets that, as the title suggests, everybody knows. While the film’s substantial budget offers its international stars fluid camerawork and lush scenery, Farhadi succeeds in keeping up his customary focus on intimate moments in which characters can speak volumes through silent body language.
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday at Landmark E Street Cinema, Landmark Bethesda Row and AMC Shirlington. $12.50.
TRANSIT
Director Christian Petzold is a master of the slow burn, examining the darkness of German identity (and mistaken identity) in such films as the 2014 drama Phoenix. But he takes a startling new angle on the past in his latest thriller. Georg (Franz Rogowski) is trying to escape Nazi Germany as a refugee, but as he’s getting his papers in order, authorities confuse him with a famous (and subversive) author. Plans to flee to Mexico are complicated by a series of tenuous relationships that include a mysterious woman (Paula Beer of Frantz). As I wrote in my DCist preview of last year’s European Union Showcase, “what makes Transit stand out from the director’s previous work is that this period drama is staged without period trappings, placing Nazi Germany in the present day with modern dress and accoutrements. While the conceit could have come off heavy-handed, it’s instead disorienting and unsettling, keeping the viewer as off-balance as its characters.”
Watch the trailer.
Thursday, Feb. 21, at 7:30 p.m. at Landmark Bethesda Row. $13.50. Advance tickets are sold out, but a rush line will form at the door at 6:30 p.m.
THE GRAVELESS
The Freer and Sackler galleries’ 23rd annual Iranian Film Festival, which runs at the museums and at the AFI Silver Theatre through Feb. 26, continues with this 2018 drama inspired by William Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying. Moving the action from the Deep South to the Iranian desert, first-time director Mostafa Sayari tells the story of four siblings who travel across a barren landscape to bring their father’s body to the remote village where he wanted to be interred. In its roundup of this year’s festival, the Washington City Paper compares the film favorably to the work of Iranian director Asghar Farhadi (whose Everybody Knows opens this weekend): “The actors and situations are understated, with the dialogue peeling away at the truth until we finally have a new understanding of what really happened.”
Watch the trailer.
Tuesday, Feb. 19, at 7:15 p.m. at the AFI Silver. $13.
SOMETHING IS HAPPENING
The Avalon Theatre’s regular French Cinémathèque series, presented in conjunction with Cultural Services of the French Embassy, screens Anne Alix’s 2018 drama that combines documentary elements with echoes of the 1990s American hit Thelma & Louise. While in Avignon researching a gay travel guide, Dolores (Lola Dueñas, a regular in the outrageous films of director Pedro Almodóvar) pulls Irma (Bojena Horackova) out of a river after an unsuccessful suicide attempt. Riding in Dolores’ convertible, the new friends journey through what the Avalon calls “a little-seen France of factory workers, hunters, and fishermen.” In the process, Alix documents a new wave of immigrants in the Mediterranean.
Watch the trailer.
Wednesday, Feb. 20, at 8 p.m. at the Avalon. $12.75.
WHEN YOU READ THIS LETTER
The influential French director Jean-Pierre Melville is known mostly for such moody underworld thrillers as Le Samourai. But in this newly restored and rarely revived 1953 drama, Melville observes a very different secret society: the convent. Singer Juliette Gréco stars as a novitiate who leaves the convent to run the family business and guide her blood sister (Irène Galter) out of the hands of a mechanic (Philip Lemaire) whose volatile character seems torn from one of the director’s celebrated gangster films. The New York Times’ A.O. Scott wrote: “Melville’s great gift was to emphasize both the radical isolation of individuals and the sticky webs of social obligation in which they nonetheless exist. Amid the hard-boiled banalities and mechanical improbabilities of Jacques Deval’s screenplay, there are moments of jagged comedy and haunting strangeness.”
Watch the trailer.
Sunday, Feb. 17, at 5 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art. Free.
HAROLD AND MAUDE
This 1972 cult classic from director Hal Ashby (Being There) stars Bud Cort as a young man so obsessed with death that he repeatedly stages his suicide in a failed campaign to win attention from his parents. Into this morose life walks an elderly woman (Ruth Gordon) who, by contrast, loves life. The late Roger Ebert didn’t much like the film, and in his 1.5-star review wrote, “what we get, finally, is a movie of attitudes. Harold is death, Maude life, and they manage to make the two seem so similar that life’s hardly worth the extra bother.” This screening is a presentation of the Washington Psychotronic Film Society, which frequently warns attendees that its programs feature “mature subject matter for immature adults.”
Watch the trailer.
Monday, Feb. 18, at 8 p.m. at Smoke and Barrel. Free.
This post has been updated to correct the date of the National Gallery of Art screening.
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