THE IDOL director Hany Abu-Assad will participate in Q&As following the 5:00 and 7:40 PM shows and introduce the 10:15 PM show on Friday, May 27 at the Monica Film Center. He will also do Q&As following the 4:30 and 7:10 PM shows in at the Fine Arts on Saturday, May 28th.
Slate: “The Director and Star of DHEEPAN on the Refugee Crisis and Taking Inspiration From Scorsese.”
We are very excited to open Jacques Audiard’s DHEEPAN this Friday at the Royal and May 20th at the Playhouse 7 and Town Center 5. Winner of the Palme d’Or at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, Audiard’s (The Beat that My Heart Skipped, Rust and Bone, A Prophet) latest is a gripping, human, and timely tale of survival in which three Sri Lankan refugees pose as a family to flee their war-ravaged homeland for France, only to find themselves embroiled in violence in the Parisian suburbs.
Slate just posted this interview with M. Audiard and his lead actor, Jesuthasan Antonythasan:
Slate’s Aisha Harris: Jacques, what drew you to telling this story?
Jacques Audiard: It goes back five years ago. At the end of shooting A Prophet … I wanted to do a remake of Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs with immigrants in a housing project. So I gave up on the idea of Straw Dogs—I didn’t totally give it up, but put it on the side—and it became another story … The starting point—the spark of the movie—is this idea of the fake family—this concept of the fake family. And, slowly, love [enters] the story. At the end, there was a bit of everything: There was a bit of Straw Dogs; there was a bit of a love story, a bit of the fake family.
And Shoba, you were once part of the Tamil Tigers [Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam]. How much of your story wound up in the movie, and how much did you collaborate on the script?
Jesuthasan Antonythasan: So, there are a lot of similarities between the Dheepan character and myself. For example, we were in the LTTE, we are immigrants, and we came out of the country on fake passports. That’s the 50 percent similarity, I would say. The remaining 50 percent, where we are not alike—that is in the way we responded to the same situations. The way he reacted to the pressures and things that he faced is very different from how I would’ve reacted to them.
That is a big part of the story: Dheepan having been a former soldier and trying to escape that, but then there’s also the struggle of being in a completely different war zone in a foreign country with gangs. What are the main differences between how you responded and how Dheepan responded to being in that kind of environment?
Antonythasan: So, when I left Sri Lanka and came to France, I was 20 years old. This character, when he leaves, he’s in his 40s. I left at a time when the issues in Sri Lanka were actually smaller and on the verge of becoming a lot worse, but this character comes when they are at their peak. And so he comes at a time when he’s basically formed his thoughts, and he’s come without any other options. I came at age 20 with my own ideologies. I came to France and got involved in politics on my own—like Marxist organizations—and continued to learn and educate myself. But he comes at a time where everything’s sort of fully formed, and that’s his reaction, because he’s kind of set in his ways.
The war ended, technically, in 2009. Have you been back since? Do you have any desire to go back?
Antonythasan: Legally, I cannot visit Sri Lanka at the moment, because I’m an illegal immigrant to France, so I don’t have the documents to be able to go back and visit. Also, the situation is such that I cannot go there and freely speak or freely write. So, I don’t want to go there until I can do that.
In the scene where the commander comes and tries to bring you back, is that something that happened to you, or have you ever felt that pressure from outside forces to go back?
Antonythasan: It didn’t happen to me directly, because at the time that I left the country it was very different circumstances.
This was in the ’80s, correct?
Antonythasan: ’86. But, in 2009, when the war technically ended over there and the Tigers were, more or less, complete in Sri Lanka, it did happen all over the world. So: Europe, Canada, the States, where that kind of situation—of people coming and trying to rebuild the Tigers from outside of Sri Lanka—was very, very realistic.
What was it like for you to reenact things that happened when you were younger? Did it affect you at all?
Antonythasan: I left the country almost 25 years ago. So, when I was making this film, it’s not as if they came flooding back after 25 years—I’ve been remembering them, re-living them, and going through them every single day for all those years.
As you mentioned, Jacques, Dheepan is also kind of a love story. And that love is very much built around that fake family—trying to learn to love this woman who’s supposed to be your wife and learn to love this child who’s supposed to be your daughter. What did you hope to convey about those characters within the relationships between the three of them?
Audiard: I’m not sure that the function of movies is to convey a message. It is just to show images. [The theme that I was interested in] is: How do you change your life? How many chances do you have to change your life? One? Two? Seven? What does it cost? What does it cost to leave your old life behind, and what does it cost to start a new one? He really believes that we deserve several lives, but the second life is always more expensive than the first one. The first one has been given to you; the second one, you have to create it. That’s your own project.
This movie is very timely right now, considering everything that’s going on with the Northern African and Middle Eastern refugees who are seeking asylum. In light of the news this week about France taking in, I think, 25,000 refugees, how do you feel about that? And do you think that nations that can do it should be opening their borders?
Antonythasan: In my opinion, these Western countries that have the ability to take in refugees have the duty to take them in. Because what happened in Sri Lanka was not just the result of just the Sri Lankan government—it was the result of many international governments feeding in and causing that war and the genocide. So they have the duty to take in those who are affected or who are victims of that war. So just like things happening in Syria and other countries right now—that is a result of a lot of other governments having a hand in them, so they have a duty to clean up what they started.
How about you, Jacques?
Audiard: I totally agree with what Shoba said … I think that’s just the beginning. What we are seeing today is just small images of what’s going to happen in the future. And we are very late to react, especially in European countries. If you are small in Europe—you have a small country—they think they are gonna continue their own lives by themselves—national identity, so on and so forth … It’s garbage. It is going to explode. It is going to explode. The world of tomorrow will be like that—that’s gonna be our culture: total worldwide migrant movement.
Antonythasan: This news that France—or London and France—for example, is taking 25,000 immigrants, or London taking so many thousand—they’re making such a big deal out of that, but you don’t realize that countries like India and Pakistan have been taking in refugees for years, and in way larger amounts. And Pakistan is one of the countries that welcomed the most refugees in general.
To conclude, I’d like to pivot to that final scene, when Dheepan is ascending upon the gang house, which is much darker in terms of the way it’s shot, compared to the rest of the movie. It sort of reminded me, in a weird way, of the final scene in Taxi Driver—was that an influence at all?
Audiard: It came to my mind, absolutely. In economic terms, I wanted to do a low-tech shot, so that’s what was in my mind, yes … And actually, I wanted to do an overshot from the top, too, but I didn’t have the means to do it, so I gave up on the idea. But the idea was there.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Just in time for Passover, STREIT’S: MATZO AND THE AMERICAN DREAM Opens at the Music Hall and Town Center on April 20
In the heart of New York’s rapidly gentrifying Lower East Side stand four tenement buildings that have housed the Streit’s Matzo factory since 1925. An iconic New York institution and a fifth generation family business, the Streit’s factory and the Streit family itself have long held firmly to tradition, churning flour and water into matzos through ovens as old as the factory itself.
Though the factory seems a century removed from the world around it, even Streit’s is not immune to the forces that challenge manufacturing and family businesses everywhere. Streit’s: Matzo and the American Dream is a story of tradition, of resistance and resilience, and a celebration of a family whose commitment to their heritage and to their employees is inspiring proof that the family that bakes together, stays together.
Awards: Best Documentary – Rockland International Jewish Film Festival 2015
Julie Delpy’s LOLO Opens March 25 at the NoHo, Playhouse, Monica Film Center and Music Hall
In her new romantic comedy LOLO, director/co-writer Julie Delpy plays Violette, a 40-year-old workaholic with a career in the fashion industry who falls for a provincial computer geek, Jean-Rene (Dany Boon), while on a spa retreat with her best friend. But Jean-Rene faces a major challenge: he must win the trust and respect of Violette’s teenage son, Lolo (Vincent Lacoste), who is determined to wreak havoc on the couple’s fledgling relationship and remain his mother’s favorite. Writing for the Tribune News Service, Katie Walsh wrote that “Delpy brings an unflinching perspective to the realities of balancing new love and motherhood, even while playing it for laughs.” Boyd van Hoeij of the Hollywood Reporter described the film as “a high-concept comedy that’s French actress-director Julie Delpy’s most winningly mainstream concoction yet.” And Adam Morgan of the Chicago Reader called the film “an infinitely quotable riot, especially when Delpy and Viard share the screen.”
Ryan Lattanzio, film critic and staff writer at Indiewire’s Thompson on Hollywood blog, published an interview with Ms. Delpy last week, the beginning of which we excerpt here.
“I’m starting to look like Christopher Walken. I’ve had people say that to me. It’s a little scary,” Julie Delpy told me during our interview about her sixth feature, “Lolo,” which FilmRise opens stateside on March 11. It’s the sort of flippant non-sequitur you can expect from the French writer, director and actress whose trademark is her manic charm.
So, true to the form of her neurotic and often coordination-impaired characters, Delpy was strapped into an ankle brace for an injury that, yes, she assured, she brought with her to the festival, where her new French farce made its North American premiere.
Delpy writes, directs and stars in “Lolo” as Violette, a forty-something single mother and fashion director living in Paris who is romantically fretting over Jean-René (Dany Boon), a less-than-hip engineer who is not in her league. Their courtship gets heated with anxiety and confusion as Violette’s tyrannical teenage son Lolo (Vincent LaCoste) attempts to manipulate and control the relationship in psychotic ways, from drugging and humiliating Jean-René (during an encounter with Karl Lagerfeld!) to sprinkling his clothes with rash-making chemicals. It gets worse, which is why Delpy sees the film more as a comedic cousin of “Carrie” and “The Bad Seed” than as a rom-com.
Though perhaps too narrowly French to click with US audiences, “Lolo,” while not quite as satisfying a meal as the “Before” trilogy or her “2 Days” films, is a sweet surprise from Delpy, a poison bonbon she injects with frank sexual dialogue that is true to how people talk. In France, anyway.
Ryan Lattanzio: Because of its sexual frankness, this movie is brash and funny in ways I wish more American films were.
Julie Delpy: Thank you. I like that. That comes up a lot, which says it’s not happening much in American film. It’s happening a little on American TV, like “Girls,” but films are still a domain where women don’t talk frankly about sex, which is weird. Of course, not all women talk about sex this way, like someone uptight in the Midwest — not that the Midwest is uptight, but you know what I mean! — or like some housewife who’s never been out of their house. But I feel like a lot of women do talk like this. It was important for me that the women talked about sexuality, made fun of it, had no hangups, and were natural about it.
It’s unusual to have your kind of female perspective. “Lolo” is politically incorrect, as were “2 Days in Paris” and “New York,” and it’s anti-puritanical. That’s why I enjoyed it. Politically correct is so boring.
Yeah, it’s so boring to me, and it’s not even a question because I do it in every one of my films. Political correctness bores me. Especially as a woman, it’s like you can’t really be funny. It’s changing a little bit, like Sarah Silverman is very politically incorrect. Sometimes she goes overboard. She always gets in trouble, which is really fun. I love the thing about her taking a shower with her mom and the water falling off her mom’s pussy and onto the daughter.
She’s here now too for her movie, “I Smile Back,” as a drug-addicted housewife.
To get an award! [laughs] Is she paralyzed in the film? That’s the question!
Well, looking at your broken ankle right now, it seems you’re planning that for your next film.
I’m already working on it. I’m method acting right now.
In “Lolo” I also admired the “girl talk,” the way the women talk about their rolls of fat, and their sagging, well, “pussies,” as you wrote it.
Well that’s how it is. We talk about those things. I wanted to describe the kind of women that don’t censor themselves anymore. They’ve reached a level in life where they’re comfortable talking about everything. They don’t have those hangups about their looks as much. It comes so naturally for me to talk and write like this, because I talk like this!
I’m sure everyone is asking for your assessment of the state of women directors working today, because the big question in the US is “Why so little?” Is that a question in France?
Not as much. There are many women directors, but there’s a different approach. For example, it’s very hard to be a mother and a director. As a director, you leave town a lot, for long periods of time, so it makes it very difficult to be with your kid. It’s very hard for a mother to be away from her kid. It’s hard for a father, but for a mother comes the guilt. I don’t think men have that guilt of leaving. They might miss their kid, the emotional part is there. But they don’t have the guilt of leaving. Society has put a guilt on women when you leave your child, which you can’t help. Also it’s more natural for a woman to feel guilty in general. I was talking to an actress who was talking to a woman director and she was telling me that women directors have kind of quit making features because now they’re focusing on TV in LA, to be near their kids. I’m not making a film every year, so I can handle it. “Lolo” was shot in Paris, but the next film I want to do in the US to be as close as possible to my son.
To read the complete interview, click here.
Kurosawa’s RAN, beautifully restored in 4K, opens March 18th at the Ahrya Fine Arts in Beverly Hills
They don’t make them like Akira Kurosawa’s magisterial RAN anymore, but the truth is, they didn’t really make them like this regal epic back then either.
– Kenneth Turan, LA Times
Laemmle and Rialto Pictures are proud to present a stunning 4k restoration of Akira Kurosawa’s RAN beginning March 18th at the Ahrya Fine Arts in Beverly Hills. Also starting March 18th is the re-release of AK, Chris Marker’s (La Jetée) Kurosawa documentary filmed during the production of RAN.
In 1985, the production of RAN was possible thanks to a French-Japanese collaboration and 30 years later, Studiocanal and Kadokawa replicated this partnership to restore the film. The majority of the restoration work was done manually image by image, based on an original negative. Color grading was approved by Masaharu Ueda, one of RAN’s three cinematographers and a close associate of Kurosawa’s. The 4K restoration premiered at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival.
RAN (literally, “chaos” or “turmoil”) brings together the great themes and gorgeous images of the director’s life work. A brilliantly conceived meditation on Shakespeare’s King Lear, crossed with Japan’s 16th-century civil wars, it stars the great Tatsuya Nakadai (Kagemusha, High and Low, Yojimbo) as Lord Hidetora Ichimonji, an aging ruler who decides to abdicate and divide his land equally among his three sons, unleashing an intense power struggle. A spectacular adventure punctuated by epic battle scenes with breathtaking color and a visual splendor that remains unparalleled. Kurosawa storyboarded the entire film in watercolors ten years before production began.
Dazzling Japanese Animation THE BOY AND THE BEAST Comes to Five Laemmle Venues in Early March
THE BOY AND THE BEAST, which we’ll open March 4 at the Playhouse, Town Center and Fine Arts and March 11 at the Monica Film Center and Claremont 5, is the latest feature film from award-winning Japanese director Mamoru Hosoda (Summer Wars, Wolf Children, both of which we will soon be screening at the Fine Arts): When Kyuta, a young orphan living on the streets of Shibuya, stumbles into a fantastic world of beasts, he’s taken in by Kumatetsu, a gruff, rough-around-the-edges warrior beast who’s been searching for the perfect apprentice. Despite their constant bickering, Kyuta and Kumatetsu begin training together and slowly form a bond as surrogate father and son. But when a deep darkness threatens to throw the human and beast worlds into chaos, the strong bond between this unlikely family will be put to the ultimate test—a final showdown that will only be won if the two can finally work together using all of their combined strength and courage.
Writing in the L.A. Times, animation expert Charles Solomon called the film “a dazzling blend of drawn and CG animation” and Hosada “one of the most interesting writer-directors working in Japanese animation.” In Variety Peter Debruge declared the film “an action-packed buddy movie that strategically combines several of Japanese fans’ favorite ingredients: conflicted teens, supernatural creatures and epic battles.”
A Taviani Trio Opens Friday at the Ahrya Fine Arts Theatre
From Variety, Monday, January 25:
Italy’s Taviani Brothers On Selected Works And What A Gentleman Ettore Scola Was (EXCLUSIVE)
By Nick Vivarelli, International Correspondent
Italy’s revered filmmaking duo, the Taviani Brothers, Paolo and Vittorio, emerged way before the Coens, the Hugheses and the Wachowskis and are amazingly still active, well in their 80’s. They spoke, in unison, to Variety about their three classics “Padre Padrone,” “Night of the Shooting Stars,” and “Kaos,” which will screen in L.A. as part of a Taviani tribute, and also about their more recent works “Caesar Must Die,” the 2012 Berlin Golden Bear winner, and “Wondrous Boccaccio” which opened the Beijing fest last year. The Taviani tribute will be presented Jan.29–Feb.4 at the Ahrya Fine Arts Theatre by Cohen Media Group’s Classics of Cinema Film Collection.
It’s well-known that Rossellini loved “Padre Padrone.” He presided the Cannes Jury that awarded it the Palme d’Or in 1977. It’s also known he was a great inspiration to you when you were both very young. Can you talk to me a little about that?
We were high-school students in Pisa. We walked into a movie theatre called Cinema Italia, which no longer exists, and there was a film playing called ‘Paisà’ that we had never heard of. There were only a few people there, and when we saw these images they really blew our minds. We had experienced the war as kids, and very deeply. But what we were seeing on screen made that reality so much clearer for us. This movie was telling us things about ourselves that we did not know. So we said to ourselves: ‘If cinema has this strength, this power to reveal to ourselves our own truths, then we will make movies!’ We decided to become filmmakers right there, on that day. Years later, when we went to Cannes with “Padre Padrone,” the thought that we had started making movies thanks to Rossellini and that he was awarding us the Palme d’Or was for us like the closure of a splendid luminous circle. It’s an extraordinary memory.
The other big contender that year for the Palme was Ettore Scola’s ‘A Special Day’. There was a very heated debate over whether Scola’s film should have won the prize instead of yours. Did you ever talk with Scola about this?
Rossellini believed in a certain type of cinema. When he found films that explored new roads that fascinated him, as was the case with ‘Padre Padrone’, he really wanted to make a statement to support them. Ettore sent us a telegram which read: ‘The best film has won,’ I must still have it somewhere. He was very affectionate and kind. When we talked about it, he said: ‘That’s what Rossellini is like.’ He was very generous about it. What happened is that Scola’s extraordinary film – his greatest – was sacrificed on the altar of the type of cultural statement that Rossellini wanted to make. When we talked about this with Scola, that is what we would always say to each other.
Like “Paisà” “The Night of the Shooting Stars” is about World War Two. But it is also autobiographical and has fablelike and poetic aspects. I know you worked on this film with the great Tonino Guerra, who besides being a screenwriter was a poet.
We went to Tonino, who we had known for years, with an already written screenplay. He read it, really liked it, and then we started talking. That’s how we worked. He would read our script and say things, some of which were extraordinary and some of which were not, in which case he would say: ‘ok, I take that back.’ It was a marvellous relationship, but not in terms of strict writing. We would always write the screenplays first and then have these dialogues with him that brought us extraordinary poetic ideas.
Of course you also worked with Guerra on “Kaos,” which was based on Pirandello.
After “The Night of the Shooting Stars” we went to Tonino and said: ‘Tonino, we have a new idea: we want to do these Pirandello short stories’ He said: hold it! You guys are crazy. After what you’ve achieved with ‘Padre Padrone’ and ’Shooting Stars’ you want to put yourselves under Pirandello’s heel, but he’s going to crush you. I refuse to work on this. It’s a mistake. So we decided we would think about it. A few days later we went back to him and said ‘we’re doing Pirandello’ And he said: ‘great! I was just testing you guys. I wanted to see how determined you were.’ And so we started working.
Many years later you made “Caesar Must Die,” which is about high-security inmates acting Shakespeare and won the Golden Bear at the 2012 Berlin fest. How did that come about?
We were invited to see a play at the Rebibbia jail in Rome, and we were shocked and awed. That day an inmate with a life sentence was reading a canto from Dante’s Inferno: He said: ‘I don’t think anybody in this room can understand this verse the way we do. We know what it’s like not be able to love a woman. His passion as he read Dante in Neapolitan dialect was such that we turned to each other and were both crying. And we said: ‘we have to make a film about this!’
One thing that I found really interesting about your latest film: “Wondrous Boccaccio,” an adaptation of “The Decameron,” is that it opened the Beijing Film Festival last year. Also I wonder: what was it like going from jail cells to Boccaccio?
The film was hugely successful in China. In talking to film students there we realized that in China they love historical and fantasy movies. As for why Boccaccio? Actually the two films spring from the same emotions. In jail there is horror and suffering, so Dante or Shakespeare really speak to them and when they act they put all their passion into it. Thanks to Shakespeare they save themselves. It’s like a mass escape. Art saves them, even if only for a moment. In “The Decameron” it’s the same thing. There is the plague, horror, suffering, desire to survive. How do these young people survive? Telling each other stories. For a few days they manage not to think about death, or to think about it only sporadically.
In 45 YEARS, Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay give a master class in screen acting.
On December 23rd we’ll be opening one of the most acclaimed films of the season, 45 Years, starring Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay. The veteran actors were both awarded Silver Bears for Best Actor and Actress at the Berlin International Film Festival earlier this year and this month the Los Angeles Film Critics Association voted to name Ms. Rampling Best Actress of the Year. The film was directed by a relative newcomer, Briton Andrew Haigh, whose perfectly realized 2011 romance Weekend played to great acclaim all over the world. His follow-up feature is 45 Years, a moving, profound and superbly performed look at a marriage and its secrets. The story opens one week prior to Kate Mercer’s (Rampling) 45th wedding anniversary and the planning for the party is going well. But then a letter arrives for her husband (Courtenay). The body of his long-lost first love has been discovered, frozen and preserved in the glaciers of the Swiss Alps. By the time the party is upon them, five days later, there may not be a marriage left to celebrate.
In Time Out London Dave Calhoun wrote, “It’s a film of small moments and tiny gestures that leaves a very, very big impression.” In the New York Post Lou Lumenick mused that “Rampling has never received an Oscar nomination, but she deserves one for this performance. Courtenay, who has two Oscar nods under his belt, rates another one for helping Rampling reach this peak.”
We are thrilled to open 45 Years on December 23rd at the Royal and New Year’s Day at the Playhouse 7 and Town Center 5.
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