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“You can’t beat life as far as the absurdness and the coincidences.” Director Vadim Perelman on PERSIAN LESSONS.

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Andrea Meyer recently posted this interview with Persian Lessons director Vadim Perelman on Frenchly. We open the film this Friday at the Royal and Town Center. The Guardian wrote that the film was “superbly acted…It floored me in the devastating final moments;” Screen Daily called the film “a big, widescreen cinematic ride which deftly mixes suspense, laughter and tears;” and the Daily Mail noted the film is “a hugely compelling, highly original Holocaust drama.”

Perelman will participate in a Q&A after the Saturday evening screening at the Royal. You can read Meyer’s full Frenchly piece here but here’s an excerpt:

It’s 1942 in occupied France. Gilles (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart), a Belgian Jew, is crammed into the back of a truck with other Jews who have been rounded up by SS soldiers to be transported to a Nazi camp. When the man seated next to him offers to trade him a stolen book of Persian legends for his sandwich, he agrees. And when the guards inexplicably start shooting, Gilles saves himself from the firing squad by insisting that he’s not Jewish, but Persian, holding up the book as evidence. They don’t believe him. After all, who wouldn’t make up a story to save himself?

But with golden light setting over the wooded glade, a miracle occurs. One of the guards remembers that Koch, the officer who runs the kitchen at the Nazi transit camp where they work, is looking for a Persian to teach him Farsi. He’s even offering a stock of canned meat to whomever can locate one. Back at camp, everyone still suspects that Gilles is lying, but he is clever, creative, and desperate to save his own life, and he manages to convince the only person who matters that he indeed speaks Farsi. For months he teaches Koch (Lars Eidinger) words that he passes off as Farsi. In fact, he is inventing an entire nonsensical language, in which he and his student carry on conversations. Around them, Nazi soldiers bicker, flirt, and betray one another, while the Jewish prisoners are forced at gunpoint to do grueling work. Occasionally someone is shot for perceived misbehavior and every few months, the camp is cleared out, and the prisoners transported to other camps where they will be killed.

The film’s premise is implausible. The absurdity and humor of Gilles’ efforts and the Nazi shenanigans around them feels uncomfortable and misguided at times in the context of the Holocaust, yet it is never pushed into full-fledged satire, which might make it more palatable. And yet, playing Gilles, Nahuel Pérez Biscayart is so convincing, we cannot help but be pulled in by his outrageous scam and the horrifying risks he takes. This man, with his haunted, pleading eyes, faces sure death and yet continues to carry out his charade, even as he becomes increasingly aware of the fate of the other Jews around him.

Director Vadim Perelman, originally from Ukraine, began his career with the acclaimed 2003 drama House of Sand and Fog. In his new film, he treads a tricky line between comedy, satire, and tragic Holocaust tale. Many will dislike or dismiss the film. But no one can deny the power of its final moments, when our eyes are opened to the significance of the deeper work that Gilles has managed to accomplish.

Esteemed film curator Larry Kardish (former Senior Curator of Film at MoMA) was so taken by the film when he saw it at the Berlin Film Festival in 2020 that he created a retrospective around it, screening it from June 2-8 at the Quad Theater in New York. The series, Notes on Persian Lessons, will feature House of Sand and Fog, as well as several films starring its leading actors. (Including Pérez Biscayart playing a young AIDS activist in the French film Beats per Minute, and Eidinger in French director Olivier Assayas’ wonderful Clouds of Sils Maria and Personal Shopper.) Other films in the series feature the work of Persian Lessons’ composer, cinematographer, and producers. Persian Lessons opens on June 9, with a national rollout to follow.

I spoke with Perelman about his haunting story, the powerful performances of its actors, and why it makes sense to make implausible movies about the Holocaust.

What drew you to this story?

I always wanted to make a film about the Holocaust, because I have a personal connection to it. I’m originally from Kyiv, where Babi Yar happened during the war. My mother just barely escaped Kyiv with her mother, and the rest of the people who stayed perished. So for me it’s always been a personal thing. In the gamut of Holocaust films, which is its own genre now, there’s the rub-your-face-in-it kind of films like Son of Saul and Night and Fog, which just show you what happened. The other type is farce, like Jojo Rabbit, and, to a certain extent, Life is Beautiful, where you try to laugh through the tears. This one fit so perfectly in the middle of it, I think, and plus I loved the conceit of the story. I loved the language, though I probably wouldn’t have done it if the final scene weren’t there.

This is a story about surviving the Holocaust and also about creating a new language and finding a way to honor those lost. For you, what are the big themes? What is it about?

It’s about this: I took a great chance by humanizing the Nazi character, by giving him the ability to be human on the screen to a certain extent and that ability was given to him with that cockamamie language, that made-up language. For some reason, in that language he could be human and talk about his mother and his fears and his brother. Otherwise, he was just a Nazi, and humanizing him amplifies the horrors of what they did. It’s a morality tale. It’s not just oh, those guys are evil, and oh, those poor Jews. It’s more like, this could happen again, and it will probably never happen again with the Germans in that role, because they’ve been indoctrinated to never let that happen again. It might be the other way around. It might be us, the Jews. It might be the Russians.

For your country, it’s Russians right now.

For the whole world, it’s Russians right now.

Vadim Perelman

What was the reception like at the Berlin Film Festival?

It got a 15-minute standing ovation, until they had to kick everybody out of the theater. They wouldn’t stop clapping. It was Germans mostly, which was kind of interesting, and they laughed a lot, so I thought they were really enjoying it.

Most of the humor involved the Nazi characters, the secret lives of Nazis.

They laughed at that. It was like a reality show with the Nazis in the camp.

The story feels implausible, farfetched, unlikely. In real life this man never could have survived.

I think there are more implausible stories that happened during this time, not just about survival but falling in love at a camp just before death, or actually surviving the chambers and ending up living in Israel together after that. You can’t beat life as far as the absurdness and the coincidences. This is kind of a fable. I say this is inspired by true events, but it’s inspired by things that happened all the time, by the Holocaust itself, by the Nazis.

THE NIGHT OF THE 12TH “never stops sending chills up your spine.” Opening Friday at the Royal, Town Center & Glendale.

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Based on a true crime book by Pauline Guéna, The Night of the 12th [La nuit du 12] is a spellbinding French mystery that’s “both highly effective and brilliantly acted, where procedures and mindsets reveal a frayed society” (Cineuropa), posing uneasy questions about the male-dominated world of law enforcement, and their ability to handle the violent crimes routinely perpetrated against women. The film was rightly nominated for 10 César Awards, winning six, including Best Film, Adapted Screenplay, Director, Supporting Actor and Most Promising Newcomer. We’re thrilled to open the film this Friday at the Royal in West L.A., Town Center in Encino, and Glendale.
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“Its real-world mysteries eventually become existential ones, but the film never stops sending chills up your spine.” ~ Bilge Ebiri, New York Magazine/Vulture
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“This taut and piercing thriller is one of Moll’s stronger works to date, using a genre template to delve into issues of violence, gender and policing in contemporary France.” ~ Jordan Mintzer, Hollywood Reporter
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“The grandeur of the film comes from the depth of emotion. These may be the hard-boiled characters, but they are still human.” ~ Paul Byrnes, Sydney Morning Herald

“A brutally engrossing drama.” ~ Peter Bradshaw, Guardian
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“The Night of the 12th keeps tricking us into thinking it’s a more conventional thriller than it is. ~ Owen Gleiberman, Variety

“The long and devastating fallout from a senseless act of violence affects almost everyone in this compelling reality-inspired account, which lingers in the mind in a way that few crime stories do.” ~ Helen O’Hara, Empire Magazine
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“Today, at 79, Hammons is among our greatest living artists. His work is nothing less than a cultural touchstone for critical developments at the center of American art and life.” Christopher Knight on THE MELT GOES ON FOREVER, opening Friday at the Monica Film Center.

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The new documentary The Melt Goes on Forever: The Art & Times of David Hammons chronicles the singular career of the elusive African-American art star David Hammons from Watts rebellion era ’60s L.A. to global art world prominence today. Hammons’ category-defying practice – rooted in a deep critique of American society and the elite art world – is in the words of one art critic “an invitation to confront the fissures between races.” We open the film this Friday at the Monica Film Center.

The L.A. Times’ art critic Christopher Knight recently wrote about the film and Hammons, whom he describes as “among our greatest living artists.” Here’s an excerpt:

“In David Hammons’ most disarming art, seeming simplicity assumes sharp sophistication. It’s like a supercharged matryoshka doll, with each layer peeling back to reveal and fertilize another layer — and another, and another, and another, until a viewer is dizzy with exhaustion, both delightful and chastening.

David Hammons. Photo credit: Dawoud Bey. 

“Black life in a white-dominated society has been Hammons’ focus for more than half a century, at least since the fateful year of 1968. That’s when he enrolled in what is now called Otis College of Art and Design to work with artist Charles White, back when the school was at the edge of L.A.’s MacArthur Park (the one that was then melting in the dark, all the sweet green icing flowing down). Today, at 79, Hammons is among our greatest living artists. His work is nothing less than a cultural touchstone for critical developments at the center of American art and life.

“A documentary film about a living artist is especially difficult to do when the subject won’t participate, including not sitting for an interview. That’s one reason why The Melt Goes on Forever: The Art & Times of David Hammons is noteworthy. The film is absorbing anyhow, minus the artist’s retrospective musings, thanks to contributions from many smart and observant artists and others.

Blizzard Ball animation still, 2022 Credit: Tynesha Foreman

“Hammons shows up now and then in rare documentary footage, which only adds to a distanced sense of disregard for norms that has been central to his aesthetic. That includes general indifference to the current clamor for celebrity driving so much contemporary culture.

“Surely the film’s well-established co-directors — Judd Tully, a longtime New York art writer, and Harold Crooks, an award-winning Canadian filmmaker — assumed before they started that they’d have to do without the artist’s direct contribution to their 2022 documentary. (It finally arrives Friday in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Monica Film Center, jumping to Amazon and Apple TV on July 5.) Hammons is famously elusive. I met him only once, in 1991, as he was finishing up a few minor details on the installation of a terrific midcareer survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. He was congenial, we exchanged pleasantries, and he was gone. The show, on the other hand, spoke with dazzling, sometimes strangely confounding eloquence…[the film] frames the larger narrative of a supremely gifted Black artist, moving through a white-dominated art world awash in ever-larger piles of cash, as a tale of humanity brutalized by stony economic transactions. In that, The Melt Goes on Forever: The Art & Times of David Hammons reverberates against the founding sins of U.S. history, which remain painfully operative today.”

“All 21 movies in competition at Cannes, ranked from worst to best.” Justin Chang reports from the world’s premiere film festival.

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For decades, we Angelenos have been deeply fortunate to have gifted writers covering film for us in the L.A. Times. Charles Champlin, Sheila Benson, Kevin Thomas, Kenneth Turan, Manohla Dargis and a strong stable of freelancers brought and now Justin Chang brings indefatigable movie love combined with trenchant insights and historical knowledge to our doorsteps (and now phone and computer screens) every week. For proof, read Justin Chang’s dispatch from the French Riviera, where he somehow managed to see dozens of films within a very short span of time and emerge bleary-eyed but still able to write beautifully and succinctly about the world cinema he had just digested. It goes without saying that Laemmle Theatres be screening most if not all of these in the months ahead. To whet your appetite, M. Chang’s favorites are below, ranked from quite good to superb. (Click through to the full story to read about the ones he panned or gave mixed reviews.)

8. ‘Last Summer’ (Catherine Breillat) ~ A French-language remake of a well-received Danish movie (2019’s “Queen of Hearts”) wasn’t the comeback anyone expected of Breillat, who’s known for her fearless and provocative explorations of sexuality (“Romance,” “Fat Girl,” “Anatomy of Hell”) but hasn’t made a new feature in 10 years. Still, there’s a telltale absence of easy moralizing in this drama about a married lawyer (a fantastic Léa Drucker) who has a torrid affair with her teenage stepson (Samuel Kircher). That’s not a spoiler; what’s surprising here is the explosive, ever-shifting power dynamics that ensue, which Breillat explores and unpacks with delectable, diamond-hard rigor. It’s wonderful to have her back.

7. ‘Fallen Leaves’ (Aki Kaurismäki) ~ The title readies you for an autumnal work from Finland’s master of deadpan comic melancholy, though of all the familiar Kaurismäkian virtues on display here — the precise compositions, the brilliant gags, the swells of emotion that the characters feel deeply but can’t express — it’s the curious timelessness of the whole endeavor that shines through. That’s true even when the director ushers in overheard radio chatter about the war in Ukraine, a pointed touch that exists in steadily pulsing tension with an exquisitely directed love story, beautifully acted by Alma Pöysti and Jussi Vatanen. Oh, and it runs 81 minutes, making it the shortest movie in competition as well as one of the best.

6. ‘May December’ (Todd Haynes) ~ In exploring the decades-later aftermath of a sexual relationship between a woman and a young boy, Haynes’ densely layered, disarmingly funny, Netflix-acquired melodrama finds itself in playful, coincidental conversation with a few other movies on this list: “Last Summer,” of course, and also “Four Daughters,” with its layered inquiry into the nature of acting and cinematic artifice. Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman give superbly matched performances as, respectively, the movie’s Mary Kay Letourneau figure and the actor chosen to play her, and Haynes shrewdly leaves it to us to decide which of the two, if either, deserves condemnation. Caught in the middle is the young boy turned confused man, played by a revelatory Charles Melton, with a heartache so real and vivid it chokes the laughter in your throat.

5. ‘The Pot-au-Feu’ (Trần Anh Hùng) ~ The purest pleasure in this year’s competition is this two-and-a-half-hour French foodie romance, adapted from Marcel Rouff’s novel, that consists of long, dramatically uninflected sequences of Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel cooking up a storm in their enormous 19th century kitchen. But what a graceful, perfectly controlled and utterly mouthwatering storm it is, and what an ideal vehicle this is for Trần, a Vietnamese French director known for his sensuality-first filmmaking. If you’ve wanted to see vol-au-vent and baked Alaska assembled from the inside out, or observe the proper, napkin-over-the-head consumption of an ortolan, or just watch Binoche juggle veal racks and cream sauces with masterly ease, this is a picture to place on the arthouse culinary porn shelf alongside “Babette’s Feast” and “Eat Drink Man Woman.” You’ll never bother with “Julie & Julia” again.

4. ‘Youth (Spring)’ (Wang Bing) ~ Though it clocks in at more than three and a half hours, this utterly engrossing documentary — the first nonfiction work to compete at Cannes in some time — is a relatively short effort from Wang, whose films can stretch to six, eight or more hours at a time. His subject, as ever, is the perilous state of modern China, witnessed here in the numbing daily routines of teenage garment workers as they manufacture children’s clothes in the privately owned workshops of Zhili City. As this lengthy but never-leisurely work unfolds, you may find yourself mesmerized by the speed and dexterity with which these workers stitch each piece together, infuriated by how ruthlessly they’re exploited, and reminded — by all the laughter, horseplay and sexual frustration that occasionally burst into the frame — of just how young they truly are. Long as the movie is, its grim observations and implications linger far longer.

3. ‘La Chimera’ (Alice Rohrwacher) ~ The best archaeological adventure yarn at Cannes this year wasn’t “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny”; it was Rohrwacher’s richly enveloping story of a young Englishman (a superbly scruffy, melancholy Josh O’Connor) with a heart full of ache and a talent for rooting out buried artifacts in the Italian countryside. With her wondrous 2018 Cannes entry, “Happy as Lazzaro,” Rohrwacher inflected the traditions of classic Italian cinema with a bracingly modern spirit. In this strange, layered and moving new work — by turns a ghost story, a romance, a crime drama and a bittersweet evocation of communal life — she shows a similar fascination with the old and the new, weaving the treasures of the past into a work of art rooted in the here and now.

2. ‘Anatomy of a Fall’ (Justine Triet) ~ A man falls to his death in the snow; did he stumble or jump, or was he pushed? The murder trial that follows in this intricate and enthralling courtroom whodunit, acquired for theatrical distribution by Neon on the strength of its enthusiastic Cannes reception, means to get at the truth. But it succeeds only in teasing out more questions: about men and women, parents and children, and the burdens of guilt and responsibility in a difficult marriage. There are, however, a few matters that can be settled beyond a reasonable doubt: Sandra Hüller, who plays the widow on trial, is one of the foremost actors of her generation, and Triet, who previously directed Hüller in their enjoyable 2019 meta-comedy, “Sibyl,” has taken a major leap forward.

Sandra Hüller in ‘Anatomy of a Fall.’

1. ‘The Zone of Interest’ (Jonathan Glazer) ~ I’ve written much already about this one and will be writing more about it in the future, when it’s released theatrically by A24. But Glazer’s brilliantly unfaithful adaptation of a novel by the late Martin Amis was the most gripping movie I saw at Cannes and the one that refused to leave me alone. A formally controlled portrait of a Nazi commandant (Christian Friedel) and his family going about their lives right next door to Auschwitz, it’s a brilliant negative-space vision of the Holocaust, a mesmeric portrait of human evil observed from the inside, and its images and words have come rushing back to me with alarming frequency and clarity all Cannes long. Given the mixed festival reactions to Glazer’s earlier triumphs “Birth” and “Under the Skin,” it feels gratifyingly right to see “The Zone of Interest” already getting its due.

From ‘The Zone of Interest.’

And finally, this is how my personal Cannes jury of one would dole out the awards. In spread-the-wealth fashion, I’m allowing a couple ties, and I’m also limiting each movie to just one win, with one exception (per the festival’s rules, a movie can win both an acting prize and a screenplay prize).

Palme d’Or: “The Zone of Interest” (Jonathan Glazer)

Grand Prix: “Youth (Spring)” (Wang Bing)

Jury Prize (tie): “The Pot-au-Feu” (Trần Anh Hùng) and “Fallen Leaves” (Aki Kaurismäki)

Director: Alice Rohrwacher, “La Chimera”

Actress: Sandra Hüller, “Anatomy of a Fall” (Justine Triet)

Actor (tie): Charles Melton, “May December” (Todd Haynes), and Koji Yakusho, “Perfect Days” (Wim Wenders)

[To see how the festival jury doled out the prizes, click here]

 

 

A “sensitive and devilishly detailed coming-of-age drama,” THE STARLING GIRL opens Friday at the Laemmle Town Center, Monica Film Center and Glendale.

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A Grand Jury Prize nominee at Sundance and an Audience Award nominee at South by Southwest as well as a winner of the Directors to Watch Prize at the Palm Springs International Film Festival, The Starling Girl is both a brilliant depiction of the American evangelical community and, with the fantastic lead performance of Eliza Scanlen, a chance to catch a rising star. You may have seen her supporting performances in, among other things, Sharp Objects (2018) and Little Women (2019). The Starling Girl gives Scanlen the chance to carry a feature and she utterly succeeds.
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“The Starling Girl lives and breathes through Scanlen’s stellar performance.” ~ Monica Castillo, RogerEbert.com
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“Parmet’s strong script and surety behind the camera navigates the audience through this complicated story of religion and sexuality, patriarchy and power, brought to eerily accurate life by the ensemble of excellent actors.” ~ Katie Walsh, TheWrap

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“Laurel Parmet makes a striking, assured feature directorial debut with The Starling Girl, which serves double duty in solidifying Eliza Scanlen’s already pretty solid reputation as a young actor worth watching.” ~ Glenn Kenny, Boston Globe

“Parmet is confident enough to know that atmosphere, emotional tone and unspoken feeling can convey far more meaning than the talkiest of dialogue.” ~  Ann Hornaday, Washington Post

“Parmet’s less interested in cultish dread than a more naturalistic dullness of isolation and groupthink you’d find in any closed conservative society where women of faith have been sold a purity narrative.” ~ Robert Abele, Los Angeles Times

“It’s a refreshing change to see this milieu treated with the level of nuance that Laurel Parmet brings to The Starling Girl.” ~ Peter Debruge, Variety

“The language and strictures of their religious community are perfectly rendered by writer and director Laurel Parmet, who captures the complicated interplay of power and immaturity that can blossom in isolated communities.” ~ Alissa Wilkinson, Vox

“Scanlen’s work here is steeped in the feeling of a real-life being lived right in front of you.” ~ Jason Bailey, The Playlist

“The power of this sensitive and devilishly detailed coming-of-age drama is rooted in the friction that it finds between biblical paternalism and modern personhood.” ~ David Ehrlich, indieWire

“When you have Julia in your head, it’s bliss, because it just makes me funnier, knowing that she’ll do it.” Nicole Holofcener and Julia Louis-Dreyfus on YOU HURT MY FEELINGS, opening Friday.

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Gifted writer-director Nicole Holofcener (Lovely and Amazing, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, The Last Duel) has a new comedic drama we’re thrilled to open Friday at our Claremont, Glendale, Santa Monica, Newhall, North Hollywood and Encino theaters. You Hurt My Feelings is her second collaboration with Seinfeld and Veep legend, 11-time Emmy Award winner and Mark Twain Prize for American Humor recipient Julia Louis-Dreyfus. The first was Enough Said, with James Gandolfini. Hopefully the two collaborate again because this one’s a gem too. Alissa Wilkinson of Vox described the movie as “warm-hearted and rueful and hilarious in all the best ways” while Brian Tallerico of RogerEbert.com wrote that it’s “one of [Holofcener’s] smartest and funniest films.”

The New York Times just published a joint interview with Holofcener and Louis-Dreyfus. Here’s an excerpt:

Was there an inciting incident that prompted this film?

NICOLE HOLOFCENER It started brewing as soon as I started screening my movies or having people read my scripts, wondering if they’re telling me the truth or not. And believing that I can tell. What a nightmare this situation would be, if somebody that close to me revealed to someone else that they didn’t like my work, or even just one of my movies. They have to love everything, in other words, for me to feel safe.

JULIA LOUIS-DREYFUS She’s very sensitive.

HOLOFCENER I just came up with a what-if. What would be the worst scenario of somebody telling me they love something and me not believing them? I do have friends that I don’t believe. And there’s one person in particular that I don’t believe. I’m actually OK with it. Because I know they love me and get me and clearly they’re wrong. I mean, it hurts a little. They didn’t admit it.

Since Nicole wrote this script with you in mind, did you connect to it immediately?

LOUIS-DREYFUS Yes. I think it’s interesting to consider the notion of worth and self-worth. Am I my work? And who am I without my work? That’s certainly something I like to think about. And that this is ostensibly a great relationship between a married couple, and then the wheels just totally fall off the bus. That was kind of terrifying to consider.

I told Frank Rich [the former New York Times columnist who was an executive producer of her series “Veep”] the premise of this before we shot it. He audibly gasped.

HOLOFCENER Oh good. That’s my audience. Not the p

eople who would hear the premise and go, ‘Yeah, so what? Like, what planet are you from?’

Since you wrote this with Julia in mind, did that change your approach?

HOLOFCENER [To Louis-Dreyfus] Just don’t listen, because it’s going to sound stupid.

[Louis-Dreyfus throws her cappuccino-stained napkin over her head to avoid eye contact.]

HOLOFCENER When you have Julia in your head, it’s bliss, because it just makes me funnier, knowing that she’ll do it. She just sparks my imagination.

Is there a scene that you wouldn’t have written if Julia wasn’t your lead actress?

LOUIS-DREYFUS Oh God.

HOLOFCENER Certainly, I can see other actors doing the scenes differently, and I’m so glad they’re not in it and she is.

What scene specifically?

HOLOFCENER The scene where she’s sitting on the couch with her sister, she’s smoking pot. This is after she’s heard the bad news; she’s crying. It’s tragic. And you really feel for her, but you’re laughing because of that face.

LOUIS-DREYFUS Oh gee, thanks.

HOLOFCENER Julia walks a very fine line between comedy and drama. And that’s what I like to do with my writing. I didn’t have to do much, or anything, for her to get what I mean. We know this movie is about something fairly minor in the world of things.

LOUIS-DREYFUS But also very major.

HOLOFCENER But in the big picture, we’re not going to be crying for her. We hope she’ll get over it. But I think that scene works because she seems like she’s about 16. I think all of us are sometimes still 16. Especially when it comes to getting approval or not getting approval. I still think of myself that way. So that’s funny to see a grown-up person behave like they’re 16, in an honest way. Not in a movie way. Or a histrionic or a silly way.

Click here to read the full New York Times piece.

“Lucid and searching, scorching and incantatory,” Ralph & Sophie Fiennes’ FOUR QUARTETS opens May 16 at the Monica Film Center.

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Ralph Fiennes’s exquisite performance of T. S. Eliot’s masterpiece is dynamically translated from stage to screen by director Sophie Fiennes (Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami, The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology). During the early days of COVID, the Academy Award® nominee set himself the challenge of committing Four Quartets to memory, and in 2021 he brought it to the London stage followed by a tour of theaters across the UK. Written by Nobel Prize winner Eliot in the shadow of the Second World War, the poem is a searching examination of who – and what – we are. This celebrated meditation on human experience, time, and the divine offers up questions, imagery, and emotions that bear a powerful relevance to our present day while remaining some of the most gorgeous poetry in the English language.
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“Fiennes, in his beautifully grave way, slows the poem down for us, speaking the words with rapt deliberation, so that we live in their moment. He delivers the Four Quartets as if the entire 16-poem suite were a single fractured Shakespearean monologue, lucid and searching, scorching and incantatory, all revolving around the desire to know. Fiennes sings like Gielgud, roils like Olivier, lends lines a mocking undercurrent like Ben Kingsley, and imbues it all with a world-weary grandeur that is very Ralph Fiennes. He recites Eliot’s poem as the music it is, and you feel that Eliot, through the drama of Fiennes’ presentation, comes across as nothing less than the 20th-century Shakespeare, reaching for the cosmos but driven by a deconstructive impulse, a need to take apart the forces that shape the very questions he’s asking.” ~ Owen Gleiberman, Variety

 

“Ralph Fiennes casts a spell.” – Nick Curtis, Evening Standard

“The hypnotizing, affecting performance that Fiennes extracts from this thicket of uncertain meanings and recondite references is a beautiful testament to what Eliot himself once said: ‘Genuine poetry communicates before it’s understood.’” – Dan Einav, Financial Times

“Fiennes imbues Eliot’s last great poem with all the drama of a Shakespearean soliloquy in a magnificent, intimate theatrical experience.” – Arifa Akbar, The Guardian

“A staggering experience that is going to be best seen in a darkened room where you can get lost in the words which are amplified and expanded by Fiennes’ physical performance…this is a masterclass of acting and a magnificent film. See it.” – Steve Kopian, Unseen Film

A film that “raises the bar for trans stories onscreen,” MONICA opens Friday at the Laemmle Claremont, Glendale, Monica Film Center and NoHo.

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Monica is an intimate portrait of a woman who returns home after a long absence to confront the wounds of her past. Reconnecting with her mother and the rest of her family for the first time since leaving as a teenager, Monica embarks on a path of healing and acceptance. The film delves into her internal world and state of mind, her pain and fears, her needs and desires, to explore the universal themes of abandonment and forgiveness.

Monica marks a major first foray into U.S. theaters for filmmaker Andrea Pallaoro, a fresh new voice in Italian cinema who has been making a stir with audiences overseas. A collaboration between breakout star Trace Lysette (Transparent), Oscar nominee Patricia Clarkson, and Emily Browning, the film stood out at last year’s Venice Film Festival, where it competed for the Golden Lion, Queer Lion, and won the Arca CinemaGiovani Award for best Italian Feature before eventually screening in competition at major film festivals in Chicago, Annecy, and Warsaw.

Critical praise for Monica has been almost universal:

“Monica raises the bar for trans stories onscreen, and Lysette takes her rightful place as its muse.” ~ Jude Dry, indieWire

“With uncommon sensitivity toward the interior lives of its characters, as well as to the shifting codes of trans representation, Monica is a film about making amends, where the person who deserves the apology is also the one doing all the work.” ~ Peter Debruge, Variety
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“Monica is an intimate look at the complexity of grief, reconciliation and family.” ~ Tracy Brown, Los Angeles Times
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“A quiet, heartfelt, and beautifully nuanced drama that feels unique and universal.” ~ Peter Sobczynski, RogerEbert.com

“Director Andrea Pallaoro doesn’t burden this delicate tale of reconciliation with long monologues or extensive back stories, and the performances are compelling in their restraint.” Teo Bugbee, New York Times

“Placing a uniquely trans story in the center of a well-worn road creates a path to a new sentiment to be granted to a tale that many people have and will face in their life.” ~ Niko Stratis, Autostraddle
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“Monica is a wondrous work in terms of painting with light, in which the select shadows tell their own story.” ~ Nick Allen, RogerEbert.com

“Director and co-writer Andrea Pallaoro banishes easy sentiment and proselytising in this touching film, allowing the audience to take a journey with the titular Monica and discover her story on the way.” ~ Fionnuala Halligan, Screen International