Capital Projections: The politics of dancing edition
This week’s openings include a harrowing drama of post-war Leningrad and a present-day tale of dance and sexuality in a former Soviet territory, the country of Georgia. Repertory offerings include a late-career masterpiece from Abbas Kiarostami, as well as classics from Senegal and the U.S.
Capital Projections is The DC Line’s selective and subjective guide to notable movie screenings in the coming week.
BEANPOLE
Director Kantemir Balagov, born in the Russian republic of Kabardino-Balkaria, isn’t even 30 years old. But with his vividly photographed, harrowing second film, he has crafted a war drama that demonstrates the care and patience of a mature artist.
Set in Leningrad in 1945, Beanpole quickly introduces us to the title character’s affliction, which she developed during military service. Iya (Viktoria Miroshnichenko), who gets the nickname Beanpole from her statuesque height and gangly build, is at the hospital where she works, tending to injured soldiers back from the war. When we meet Iya, the pale, gaunt young woman is in the middle of one of her occasional catatonic states, which leaves her nearly paralyzed except for her twitching head and the ticking sound she makes as she struggles to breathe.
At home, Iya takes care of a 3-year old boy. When her friend Masha (Vasilisa Perelygina) — the child’s mother — returns from the front lines, she finds a ruined city, a troubled friend and even more tragedy.
Miroshnichenko plays the title character, and she throws her whole towering figure into the role, haunted and awkward and effectively conveying deep trauma just by the way she holds her hand in front of her face. But the larger and more challenging role belongs to Perelygina, who spends most of the movie quietly seething. The more we learn about Masha, the more we see the layers of horror that the war has left brewing inside her. Balagov directs at least two scenes of such smoldering intensity that one expects the performers to explode in rage — but it never comes to the surface. That restraint is much of what makes Beanpole so powerful: Its performers’ pent-up emotions emerge through carefully articulated gestures that play like a funereal ballet. It’s hard to imagine two better performances will come along this year.
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, Feb. 21, at Landmark E Street Cinema, Cinema Arts Theatres and Old Greenbelt Theater. $13 to $15.
AND THEN WE DANCED
While Beanpole conveys the agony of post-war Leningrad through a kind of body-horror ballet, a new film from director Levan Akin uses dance to look at changing mores in the country of Georgia.
Merab (Levan Gelbakhiani) and his partner Mary (Ana Javakishvili) are young members of the National Georgian Ensemble, a dance troupe whose grizzled leader Aleko (Kakha Gogidze) barks, “There is no sexuality in Georgian dance.” Aleko is concerned that Merab and Mary are showing too much passion during a duet — just wait until he sees the troublemaking recruit Iralki (Bachi Valishvili), on whom Merab soon develops a crush that makes him forget everything he knows about Georgian dance.
This coming-of-age drama places a young man coming to terms with his sexuality in the middle of a Georgian dance tradition that (at least as we are told) is highly resistant to change. The film’s central conceit appears to be that, as Irakli and Merab fall in love, they bring a new freedom to the nation’s stuffy terpsichore. But the film’s troubled young characters are unable to fully embody that metaphor.
As Merab struggles with his new attraction, it throws off his dynamic with Mary, and even when he performs solo, he loses control of his craft just as he loses his head to passion. It doesn’t help that the dances are filmed in a choppy manner. The actors work hard at an art that is expressed by the entire body, but the bodies on screen are so cropped that it’s hard to understand how well they evoke tradition or progress. Merab’s most provocative dance may be one he performs outside the studio — but what should be his triumphant audition is disjointed enough that it diminishes the young man’s thrill of reinvention. As a well-observed drama of the competitive dance world, And Then We Danced is an improvement on the cheesy Step Up franchise, but its subversive themes could have used more pizazz.
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, Feb. 21, at Landmark E Street Cinema and Cinema Arts Theatres. $12.50 to $13.
LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE
Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami frequently took his characters on journeys, from the wandering child of Where Is the Friend’s House? to the emotionally lost adult in Taste of Cherry. So it may be appropriate that Kiarostami made this late-career masterpiece so far from home.
First released in 2012, the film’s complicated dynamic revolves around Akiko (Rin Takanashi), a young Tokyo prostitute. In one of the most gorgeous sequences in Kiarostami’s career, we see her in a taxicab, the big city’s lights overwhelming her as she listens to a series of voice messages from her grandmother, who was in Tokyo on a day trip and is presumably unaware of what her granddaughter does for a living. As Akiko’s face is lost in layers of dizzying reflections, the images convey her conflicted emotions, desperate to reconnect with family but ashamed of her life. As she asks the cab driver to circle around the train station to see if she can spot her grandmother, we share in her sorrow, because we can barely see out the passenger’s window ourselves.
Full of disembodied voices and alienation, Like Someone in Love was the last film released in the director’s lifetime: He died in 2016. As I wrote in a 2018 piece for Spectrum Culture, “This heartbreaking journey, a search for wisdom that is frustratingly incomplete, is his final masterpiece.” The film will be screened at the Freer Gallery of Art as well as at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center as the institutions wrap up career retrospectives. Also screening at the Freer Gallery this weekend is Kiarostami’s final film, 24 Frames (Sunday, Feb. 23, at 1 p.m.), released posthumously in 2017.
Watch the trailer.
Sunday, Feb. 23, at 3:30 p.m. at the Freer Gallery of Art. Free.
Monday, Feb. 24, at 7:15 p.m. at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center. $13.
THE GRADUATE
Next week the Mary Pickford Theatre at the Library of Congress (note: I work there, but didn’t work on this program) wraps up the series “A Year of Change: Best Picture Nominees of 1968” with the classic comedy from director Mike Nichols. In what would be his breakout role, Dustin Hoffman stars as Ben Braddock, a young college grad who returns home to the California suburbs uncertain about his future. The screenplay by Calder Willingman and Buck Henry tapped the counterculture attitude, thumbing its nose at American middle-class mores; the soundtrack by Simon & Garfunkel helped make this one of the defining films of its generation. But has its satire become dated? Two reviews by the late Roger Ebert, written 30 years apart, offer very different perspectives on the film’s easy targets, like bored housewife Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft). In 1967, Ebert barely considered the middle-aged seductress (although it should be noted that Bancroft, playing a much older woman, was only six years Hoffman’s senior). Upon revisiting the film in 1997, Ebert came to think that she might be the film’s true hero: ”I see Benjamin not as an admirable rebel,” he wrote, “but as a self-centered creep whose put-downs of adults are tiresome,” while Mrs. Robinson is “sardonic, satirical and articulate — the only person in the movie you would want to have a conversation with.” How does The Graduate hold up half a century later? Come see a 35-mm print and find out.
Watch the trailer.
Thursday, Feb. 27, 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 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.
LA NOIRE DE …
The National Gallery of Art’s series “African Legacy: Francophone Films 1955 to 2019” continues with the 1966 feature debut from Ousmane Sembène. The Senegalese writer-director had already published several novels and a book of short stories by the time he turned to filmmaking — inspired, ironically enough, by Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia, which Adolf Hitler had commissioned to prove the superiority of German athletes. Sembène adapted his own short story about Diouana (Mbissine Thérèse Diop), a young woman who goes to France, where she’s exploited by the white couple who hire her as their maid. Black Girl, as the film is also known, was one of the first Sub-Saharan African films to be shown internationally. “Sembène’s use of cinema is nothing but a compromise gesture to bring home what the widespread illiteracy in the continent would not allow him to accomplish in his literary work,” wrote biographer Samba Gadjigo. He has also said the film “remains a gorgeous, shocking, and an of-the-moment African story.” It’s being screened with Sembène’s 1963 short “Borom Sarret,” about a horse-drawn cart driver who doesn’t charge his passengers.
Watch the trailer.
Sunday, Feb. 23, at 4 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art in the West Building Lecture Hall. Free.
HARD TICKET TO HAWAII
Chicago native Andy Sidaris took a circuitous path to exploitation cinema. He was an uncredited “football choreographer” for Robert Altman’s 1970 comedy-drama MASH, and for the bulk of his career he directed coverage of sports events, taking charge of ABC’s Wide World of Sports for 25 years. Known for crowd-pleasing audience shots, Sidaris was fond of ordering camera footage of cheerleaders — a harbinger of his fiction features that became known as the Bullets, Bombs and Babes series. Next week the Washington Psychotronic Film Society screens the director’s 1987 thriller, which programmers boast features three Playboy playmates “and their hunky counterparts” who “take on a diamond-smuggling drug kingpin, a skateboarding assassin with a blowup doll, and a carcinogenic toilet snake, while taking off their clothes at every opportunity.” Tempering expectations of the exotic locale, the WPFS points out, “This ain’t no hula.”
Watch the trailer.
Monday, Feb. 24, at 8 p.m. at Smoke and Barrel. Free.
This post has been updated to correct references to Vasilisa Perelygina and Viktoria Miroshnichenko in the section on Beanpole.
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