Goings on About Town: MOVIES

By THE NEW YORKER

Terra Femme

Photograph courtesy Courtney Stephens

The director Courtney Stephens’s found-footage film “Terra Femme” (which is streaming through April 3 in moma’s “Doc Fortnight” program) began as a series of live presentations. This format converges with the documentary’s very subject: amateur travel films—in effect, home movies—from the nineteen-twenties through the forties, made by women, some of whom similarly presented them publicly with their own in-person commentary. Stephens discerningly culled this footage from many public and private archives; she accompanies her insightful montage of the clips with her own deeply researched monologue, intertwining tales from the lives of the filmmakers with self-questioning discussions and stories of her efforts to make a film of her own travels. In showing the filmmakers’ wide-ranging cinematic practices and points of view, she pursues the underlying question of whether there is such a thing as the “female gaze”; she develops far-reaching analyses of women’s filmmaking in an era when few women had professional directing careers—and ultimately connects their work to the sociology and the spirit of travel itself.

— Richard Brody

Bachelor Flat

This latter-day screwball comedy, from 1962, is the director Frank Tashlin’s daring, uproarious reworking of Howard Hawks’s “Bringing Up Baby.” Terry-Thomas plays Bruce Patterson, a middle-aged British archeologist at a California university who is about to marry Helen Bushmill (Celeste Holm), a high-flying fashion designer. But Helen has a secret—a prior marriage and a teen-age daughter, Libby (Tuesday Weld), who, while her mother is out of town, turns up at Bruce’s house pretending to be a tough runaway. Meanwhile, Bruce’s inquisitive friend Michael (Richard Beymer), a law student, sparks erotic misunderstandings and pushes Bruce into ever-wilder schemes to hide Libby. Tashlin plays cartoonishly expert high-speed games with opening and closing doors, and he gleefully piles on ribald jokes involving a priapically huge dinosaur bone, a pair of breastplates, a vibrating bed, recalcitrant pants, upright umbrellas, and Jessica, a dachshund who’s a real hound dog. With winks and nods at science fiction and Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” a dream sequence, and a film-within-a-film, Tashlin celebrates pop culture as a mind-expanding Freudian truth serum.

— Richard Brody

Crime of Passion

Kathy Ferguson (Barbara Stanwyck), a hard-nosed, street-smart journalist in San Francisco—and a proudly single woman on the brink of middle age—is taken off the gossip desk to cover a murder investigation by two cops who have come up from L.A. She falls in love with one of them, Lieutenant Bill Doyle (Sterling Hayden); her scoop lands her a big New York promotion, but she turns it down and marries him on a whim. Doyle is a big, sardonic doormat of a team player whose burden is lightened by life with Kathy, but she wants more for him. She’s ambitious by proxy, and her idle-hands plot for his advancement involves Doyle’s boss, Inspector Tony Pope (Raymond Burr). In this tight-lipped film noir of suburban frustration and doomed romance, the director, Gerd Oswald, gets all the little things right, from the frowzy styles and smeary makeup to the inspired casting (including Fay Wray as Pope’s wife) and the terse visual wit of gunshots and kisses. Released in 1957.

— Richard Brody

Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival

Celebrating its 25th anniversary, Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival showcases over 200 of the finest documentaries...

Celebrating its 25th anniversary, Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival showcases over 200 of the finest documentaries...

Les Coquillettes

The title of Sophie Letourneur’s giddy, time-bending 2012 metafiction means “elbow macaroni,” which its protagonists—Sophie (Letourneur), Carole (Carole Le Page), and Camille (Camille Ge­naud)—eat twice: in an apartment in Paris where the three young women chat about love, sex, and their previous summer’s jaunt to the Locarno Film Festival, and in the apartment that they shared in Locarno. Sophie is obsessed with the real-life actor Louis Garrel and spends much of the festival searching for him; the sexually frustrated Carole is looking for a lover; and the uncertain Camille finds herself in a push and pull with an indifferent young man (the critic Julien Gester). But, as the action flips back and forth between past and present, the women’s recollections of their awkward encounters at the festival clash subtly and antically with the camera’s unflinching record. Letourneur’s dialogue adorns their observations with a tooth-tingling array of Franglicisms; much of the action is displaced to Facebook and text messages, and the conspicuous dubbing of voices throughout gives this vertiginous, documentary-style comedy the air of a live-action car­toon.

— Richard Brody

My Name Is Joe

Joe (Peter Mullan), the hero of Ken Loach’s funny and excoriating 1999 movie, starts things off by announcing that he is on the wagon. This being Loach, you can be fairly certain that Joe will spend the next ninety minutes falling off it, and, sure enough, he winds up in a foul blur of booze. What comes in between—and, in a terrible way, sets him back on the path of self-destruction—is a love affair. This unemployed Glaswegian meets a health worker named Sarah (Louise Goodall), who appears to offer him a better sort of life. But his old habits and connections die hard, and Mullan’s combative, unsentimental performance makes Joe’s slow ruin not just credible but unavoidable. Whether the maddened high drama of the climax rings equally true is another matter; Loach’s talent for small pleasures and crackling provincial gags has always been more winning than his determination to be a tragedian, let alone a political soothsayer.

— Anthony Lane

Stephanie Daley

Half a terrific movie. This drama, from 2006, written and directed by Hilary Brougher and starring Amber Tamblyn and Tilda Swinton (who is also an executive producer), reflects the virtues and the burdens of its independent production. The engrossing half concerns the title character (Tamblyn), a sixteen-year-old girl in a Hudson Valley town who gives birth while on a ski trip. The newborn dies, and Stephanie, who successfully concealed her pregnancy from family and friends, is charged with homicide. Most of her richly textured and poignant story—which highlights the pervasive influence of religion in small-town life—is told in flashbacks during interrogations by the forensic psychologist assigned to the case, Lydie Crane, played by Swinton. Lydie is pregnant, has recently suffered a stillbirth, and endures a clichéd range of bourgeois marital stresses and silences. (Timothy Hutton plays her intellectually suave, emotionally needy architect husband.) Her story, despite its potential, is rendered generically; Stephanie, as brought to life in Tamblyn’s nuanced and daring performance, deserves to have the film to herself.

— Richard Brody

Tales of the Four Seasons

Photograph courtesy Janus Films

In “Tales of the Four Seasons,” a quartet of films from the nineteen-nineties, Éric Rohmer reworked his career-long theme: the dangers of false love in the quest for the real thing. (Film Forum, which reopens on April 2, will release all four, one per week, on its virtual cinema only, starting on March 26.) Three of the films involve the power and the pitfalls of assisted romance—well-meaning efforts to set people up. In the cycle’s first film, “A Tale of Springtime,” a philosophy professor who has been paired off with a younger friend’s father discovers the perversity of reason in matters of the heart; “A Tale of Summer” (which Rohmer, born in 1920, based on experiences from his youth) sets the affairs of students against a quasi-autobiographical backdrop of rising artistic ambitions. The most luminous and rapturous film in the set, “A Tale of Autumn,” reunites Rohmer with the actresses Marie Rivière and Béatrice Romand, his longtime collaborators, in a wine-country drama that’s as much about friendship as love; and “A Tale of Winter,” centered on Christmas, is, fittingly, a vision of a miracle.

The Merchant of Venice

Michael Radford’s 2004 adaptation of Shakespeare’s play stars Al Pacino as Shylock, and the look of him—heavy of tread, eyes darting and wary—defines the encompassing mood. The text has been sliced and pared, and what remains is intimate and sorrowful, as if the characters knew from the start what manner of tribulation they would face. Antonio (Jeremy Irons) seems already to be mourning the loss not just of his ships at sea but of his friend Bassanio (Joseph Fiennes) to the wealthy and marriageable Portia (Lynn Collins). Her early scenes are the weakest in the movie, the comedy of the semi-fantastic sitting uneasily amid the gathering gloom. What Radford does best is shove and wheedle the story along, so that the court scene and even the final bickering over marital rings take on the air not merely of patchings-up but of bristling suspense. Much is at stake here, and, to judge by Pacino’s burning gaze, the loser, in so villainous a society, is never really in doubt.

— Anthony Lane

Tower

This documentary, by Keith Maitland, reconstructs with forensic precision and dramatic immediacy the 1966 sniper attack at the University of Texas at Austin that left eighteen people dead, an event that’s widely considered the first modern mass shooting. Maitland blends archival footage, original interviews with survivors and responders, and animated images of several sorts—including, strikingly, ones that return the interviewees to their age at the time of the attack. The animation, by Craig Staggs, has a sharp imaginative specificity, and the complex interweaving of styles turns the film into a horrifying true-crime thriller that’s enriched by a rare depth of inner experience. The effect is as much intellectual as emotional, folding the movie reflexively into its subject: the personal importance of public discussion. The dearth of archival interviews regarding this event corresponds to the interviewees’ retrospective view of the mid-sixties. Exhorted at the time to put the troubles behind them and discouraged from speaking about their experiences, many of the subjects approach Maitland’s interviews as long-overdue, albeit pain-filled, acts of personal liberation. Released in 2016.

— Richard Brody