DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week, including a pair of coming of age movies from around the world, unheralded musicals, and classics of French cinema.
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Evangelia Randou and Ariane Labed come of age, I guess, in ATTENBERG.What it is: Coming of age, Greek style.
Why you want to see it: 23-yr old virgin Marina lives a depressing factory town in Greece. Between trips to take her father for cancer treatments, she struggles between exploration of and indifference to sexuality, and listens to a lot of Suicide. The title of Attenberg comes from Marina’s best friend Bella’s mispronunciation of Sir David Attenborough, whose nature documentaries are a source of fascination for Marina. The film won me over at first merely by using a tripod, but the compositions become as stiff and forced as the plot. Marina’s unlikely fixation on Alan Vega’s art-rockabilly suggests a young woman dying to break out of her dead-end shell. Unfortunately she’s stuck in precious interludes that have Marina and Bella strutting a silly walk, linked arm in arm like arthouse siamese twins. It’s the kind of quirk to which a 23-year-old might resort in order to avoid thinking about things like your father’s cancer treatment. Call it hipster nature fiction. It may not surprise you that director Athina Rachel Tsangari studied performance art at NYU in the 1990s. It’s both encouraging and discouraging that Tsangari gets good performances out of her cast. If only the characters and relationships had not been shoehorned into a box of precious whimsy.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at West End Cinema.
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Boy (James Rolleston) waits for his Dad. Courtesy of Paladin/Unison Films.What it is: Coming of age, New Zealand style.
Why you want to see it: An 11-year-old Maori boy obsessed with Michael Jackson moonwalks to impress his friends and mentally casts his absent father in the gloved one’s biggest music videos. Based on the short film “Two cars, one night,” Taika Waititi’s film looks at the reach of pop culture all the way to a Maori community in New Zealand circa 1984. This week’s second or third tale of an absent father (cf The Kid with a Bike and Mirror Mirror), but this time pop returns to look for a bag of money he buried. Director Waititi has several writing and directing credits on Flight of the Conchords, so one hopes that show’s combination of dry wit and pop culture will steer this away from potentially maudlin tendencies.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark E Street Cinema.
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Gene Kelly and Francoise Dorléac in THE YOUNG GIRLS OF ROCHEFORTXanadu and The Young Girls of Rochefort
What they are: Great musicals that you don’t think of as Gene Kelly movies.
Why you want to see them: The AFI’s Gene Kelly retrospective highlights two fine later works in his musical oeuvre. The Young Girls of Rochefort was director Jacques Demy’s follow-up to the classic Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and in some ways it’s even better, just as vibrant and colorful with songs as catchy and a more cheerful palette and plot. Casting Kelly as a romantic foil for Francoise Dorléac (Catherine Deneuve’s real life sister) completes the homage to MGM musicals. Kelly’s final feature role was as the aging bandleader Danny McGuire in the much-maligned Xanadu. The 1980 film, a critical and commercial flop at the time, was recently revived on stage to stellar reviews, but the musical turned a charming, earnest story of love and mythology into a lot of smug, self-conscious camp. The original is full of corn but has an innocence much more winning than its winking Broadway counterpart. And if the soundtrack features an ELO past their peak, it boasts a classic pop duet in “Suddenly.” The AFI showed a gorgeous 35mm print of Xanadu a few years ago, and this is well worth seeing on the big screen.
View trailers for Xanadu and The Young Girls of Rochefort.
Xanadu screens Friday March 30 and Saturday March 31; Young Girls of Rochefort screens Sunday April 1, Tuesday, April 3 and Thursday April 5. At the AFI Silver.
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Dominique Sanda in Une Femme Douce. © New Yorker FilmsWhat it is: A rarely screened work from Robert Bresson.
Why you want to see it: The National Gallery closes out its complete retrospective of this French director’s films with a quartet of later works, including his first film in color. Une Femme Douce (1969), an adaptation of the Dostoevsky short story “A Gentle Creature,” stars Dominque Sanda as a young wife who commits suicide; the woman’s husband, and the film, traces the life that let up to her desperate act. Shown this Sunday with Bresson’s final film, the crime drama L’Argent (1982). On Saturday the Gallery screens The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962) with Lancelot du Lac (1974), whose bloody depictions of knights in armor inadvertently recalls Monty Python.
View a clip from Une Femme Douce.
Une Femme Douce screens Sunday, April 1 at 4 p.m. at the National Gallery. Free.
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What it is: A low-budget sci-fi sex comedy from Korea.
Why you want to see it: The series Korean Film Festival DC 2012 continues at the Freer, and I’ll let their curatorial staff describe this intriguing title: “Young-gun, a self-appointed urban hero with a fake moustache, rescues a damsel in distress. She turns out to be a space alien on a mission to be impregnated by an earthling, by any means necessary. Unfortunately for her, Young-gun has taken a vow of chastity and would rather play Jenga than bed a comely ET.” Guillame Montagnana of Slasherhouse speaks the universal language when he calls Invasion of Alien Bikini, “une production mindfuck excellente.” Budding filmmakers, take note: the movie was made for less than $5,000. Intended for mature audiences.
View the trailer.
Sunday, April 1 at 1 p.m. at the Freer. Free.
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Also opening this week, two very different modern fairy tales: the Dardenne Brothers’ naturalistic The Kid with a Bike, and Tarsem Singh’s reimagined Snow White, Mirror Mirror. We’ll have full reviews tomorrow.
