Many Returns
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One month after his triumphant return to Cannes, where he won the Palme d’Or for It Was Just an Accident, Jafar Panahi has called on the United Nations and the global community to “decisively force” Iran and Israel to halt their military attacks on each other: “I demand an immediate end to the devastating war between the Islamic Republic and the Israeli regime; a war that destroys the lives of civilians on both sides and destroys vital infrastructures. This war is a serious threat to regional peace and human values. Both regimes should be blatantly condemned for their persistence of violence, warfare, and absolute indifference to human dignity.”
This week’s highlights:
- A critical and box-office success when it opened in West Germany in 1981 and a hit at Bleak Week when Sean Baker introduced it a few weeks ago, Uli Edel’s Christiane F., newly restored, opens today at Film at Lincoln Center in New York. Natja Brunckhorst, who went on to appear in Fassbinder’s Querelle (1982) and to direct Sandra Hüller and Ronald Zehrfeld in last year’s Two to One, was thirteen when she played a Berlin junkie turning tricks to support her habit. David Bowie’s “presence here, both on the soundtrack and in a concert segment, elevates the desolate film into a bizarre, exalted realm,” writes Melissa Anderson at 4Columns. “And beyond its lurid subject matter, Edel’s movie functions as a kind of sinister city symphony, indelibly depicting the divided metropolis’s most execrable stretches, thronged with young people who, despite their desperation and catatonia, somehow still seem writhingly, frantically alive.”
- The latest restoration of Killer of Sheep (1977), Charles Burnett’s first feature, is out now on 4K UHD and Blu-ray, will screen on Monday and Thursday at Il Cinema Ritrovato, and will arrive on the Criterion Channel next month. “A social realist, Burnett found the ultimate principle of moviemaking, which is the creation of drama, in the mundane,” writes Doreen St. Félix in a beautiful profile for the New Yorker. “He did not want to make everyday people saints, as was the post-civil-rights-movement impulse. He wanted to portray Blackness as a mystery, recognizable but unquantifiable even to the people themselves . . . Following the disastrous treatment of My Brother’s Wedding [1983], the fulcrum came into view: one Burnett receiving accolades and heroic acknowledgement in the press and the other struggling to finance, complete, and release his projects.”
- As part of a recent series of pieces on Jane Austen at the Paris Review, three contributors offer brief thoughts on just a few of the many, many adaptations. In Autumn de Wilde’s Emma (2020), Mia Goth, “my favorite Harriet . . . shares a likeness with Brittany Murphy, whose Tai is Harriet’s proxy in Clueless,” writes Whitney Mallett. “Both actresses are bubbly, blissful, but present to the universe’s darkness—it’s not the same as being naive, even if the qualities are sometimes confused.” Carrie Cracknell’s Persuasion (2022) is “the Pet Sematary of Austen-inspired cinema,” finds Alissa Bennett, while for Arielle Isack, Gurinder Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice (2004) turns the original 1813 novel “into a jubilant smorgasbord of song and dance, and expounds upon its core concept—the uneasy path romantic love charts through social structures—by portraying a romance that surmounts not only class difference, but also modern iterations of colonialism.”
- Writing for Notebook, Imogen Sara Smith offers a full-blown survey of the Mikio Naruse oeuvre, while at Screen Slate, Mark Asch zeroes in on “perhaps the most psychologically confrontational film of his career.” It’s “of a piece with Naruse’s melodramas, which concern characters trapped by rigid gender roles, intense social scrutiny, and their own impossible desires. But The Stranger Within a Woman (1966)—a noir, more or less, with edgy modernist flourishes including stark Bergmanesque two-shots and solarization during violent scenes—gets at his familiar themes through uncharacteristic means.” Stranger has come and gone in New York (though the retrospective will carry on at Metrograph through June 29) but it will screen as part of the retrospectives in Berkeley (July 3 through December 21) and at the Harvard Film Archive (July 5 through November 3).
- Metrograph programmer Edo Choi tells The Last Thing I Saw host Nicolas Rapold that he and Japan Society’s Alexander Fee faced more of a challenge putting the Naruse retrospective together than they did when organizing last year’s two-part series focusing on Hiroshi Shimizu, whose career was easily divided into pre- and postwar periods. “Throughout his career, Shimizu possessed the reputation of a bon vivant touched by sprezzatura,” writes Alex Kong in a piece for n+1 that touches on the crucial role of fragrances in Shimizu’s work before turning to Mr. Thank You (1936), “Shimizu’s most celebrated film, which takes place on a bus trip through a stretch of mountainous terrain . . . Forward tracking shots, from the perspective of the bus itself, approach pedestrians walking on the road from behind, before dissolving into a rear-view perspective as the bus pulls ahead of them. Passing through physical objects like so many wisps of air, these lovely shots are perhaps the purest distillation of Shimizu’s feather-light aesthetic.”
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