Purple Gaze
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Starting this afternoon, New Yorkâs Film Forum will present a weeklong series of eleven films starring Alain Delon. Heâs appeared in about nine times as many movies, so this will be just a sampler, but few would quibble with the selections. As Anthony Lane points out in the New Yorker, the series âmoves from the late springtime of Delonâs career to its high summer.â
With Ripley fever in the air, beginning with Purple Noon (1960), RenĂ© ClĂ©mentâs adaptation of Patricia Highsmithâs The Talented Mr. Ripley, is a nice touch. âDelon is flat-out terrific in Joseph Loseyâs Mr. Klein, a 1976 World War II mystery in which heâs a wealthy art dealer whose life slowly comes undone when heâs mistaken for a Jewish man with the same name,â writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. âHeâs also very good in Jacques Derayâs La piscine (1969), a tight, nasty piece of work about bored bourgeois types whose torpor is broken by murder.â Bruce Goldstein, Film Forumâs repertory artistic director, will introduce Sundayâs screening of La piscine.
As a new restoration of Le samouraĂŻ (1967) tours North America, the series includes two more films directed by Jean-Pierre Melville, Le cercle rouge (1970) and Un flic (1972). Luchino Visconti is here twice as well, with Rocco and His Brothers (1960) and the one David Weir has written a book about and will introduce on Monday, The Leopard (1963). Reviewing Jack Cardiffâs The Girl on a Motorcycle (1968) in this weekâs 4Columnsâit screens on TuesdayâMelissa Anderson notes that âeven bad movies are not without their fascinations and oddities.â
âWhat is it about this particular actor,â asks Lane, âthat marks him out and favors him with that uncanny, self-enclosing remoteness that we associate with stardom, even at its most gregarious? It was not his voice, for sure; when he is dubbed into Italian for Visconti and Antonioni, there isnât much of a letdown. If we watch him greedily, asking for more, it is for a reason so obvious, and so elemental, that stating it plainly seems almost indecent, but here goes. Alain Delon, in his prime, was the most beautiful man in the history of the movies.â
This weekâs highlights:
- Jessica Kiang has launched a new monthly column for Sight and Sound on the films of 1974, âthe high watermark of a long-vanished period, when general movie audiences were imagined to be adults.â Kiang anchors her opener to Francis Ford Coppolaâs The Conversation, which turned fifty last Sunday, prompting Adam Nayman to write about this âsupremely and persuasively paranoid thrillerâ for the Ringer. In the Guardian, Scott Tobias writes that âCoppolaâs brilliant film predicted a future in which the more we think we know about human beings, the less we likely do.â
- John Akomfrah will represent Britain at this yearâs Venice Biennale (April 20 through November 24). Profiling Akomfrah for frieze, Vanessa Peterson revisits such recent work as Vertigo Sea (2015), Purple (2017), and Four Nocturnes (2019) as well as his directorial debut: âTo rewatch Handsworth Songs (1986) nowâAkomfrahâs highly acclaimed documentary chronicling the uprisings sparked by racist policing in Birmingham and London during the 1980sâat a time when those on the right of Britainâs political spectrum are demonizing migrants amidst rolling labor strikes, is to see our current moment reflected at us through the 1980s.â Handsworth Songs screens next month as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music series Uncharted Territories: Black Britain on Film, 1963â1986, programmed by Criterionâs own Ashley Clark.
- Vera Drewâs The Peopleâs Joker, currently positioned as an âunauthorized parody,â is âan anarchic, punk, profane work that invigorates the trans memoir/essayistic mode,â writes Caden Mark Gardner in an exchange with Willow Catelyn Maclay at Reverse Shot. The film âfeels not like a work strictly for trans people to feel âseen,â but instead articulates its themes to a potentially broad audience who often see trans people as ciphers for a brand of respectability politicsâwhich most of us neither signed up for nor want. For that alone it feels like a major work, and a film that I both related to and felt called out by as a trans person.â Gardner and Maclayâs book Corpses, Fools and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema will be out in July.
- Charles Burnettâs The Annihilation of Fish (1999) has been newly restored and revived. For Film Comment, Racquel Gates writes that when this âmeditation on love, companionship, and community . . . is placed within the context of Burnettâs larger oeuvre, clear thematic and stylistic through lines emerge. Like in his other work, Burnett stages the home as the site where social and cultural issues converge with the interpersonal. In Fish, the boardinghouse serves as the space where individuals negotiate aging and its effects on their senses of self and community, just as the family home stood as a battleground for generational and geographic conflicts in To Sleep With Anger (1990).â
- The soundtrack for Louis Malleâs Elevator to the Gallows (1958) by Miles Davis and four French jazz musicians is âfamous in part because it was improvised quickly while watching rushes from the film, but itâs also a point of negotiation between Europe and America, recorded music and cinema, composition and time,â writes Sasha Frere-Jones for Metrograph Journal. Jeanne Moreau is âat the center of what makes Elevator still valuable as both film and music. Scenes of her walking around Paris, almost getting hit by cars, and staring dolefully at boys playing pinball is where the second half of the twentieth century begins.â
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