DCist’s totally subjective and not at all comprehensive look at the most sensuous, Bollywoodian, classic and atmospheric movies playing in town during the next seven days.
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Eli Wallach and Carroll BakerNineteen-year old “Baby Doll” Meighan (Carroll Baker) smoulders away in her day bed. She’s married to sad-sack Archie Lee (Karl Malden) under the condition that they not consummate the agreement until her twentieth birthday. The young lady’s integrity is thereatened by the arrival of cotton baron Silva Vacarro (Eli Wallach, in one of his best roles). Based on Tennessee Williams’ one-act play, Baby Doll was directed by who may be the playwright’s greatest interpreter, Elia Kazan, and is larded with Southern Gothic sleaze of the highest order. Wallach and Baker share a cat-and-mouse seduction that is one of the more sexually tense and gross scenes in cinema.
View the trailer.
Tonight at 8 p.m. at the Hirshhorn. Free.
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Shashi Kapoor and Zeenat Aman.Satyam Shivam Sundaram/Love Sublime (a.k.a. Love, Truth and Beauty)
The Freer Gallery wraps ups its tribute to Bollywood actor and director Raj Kapoor with this 1978 epic about a scarred beauty (Zeenat Aman), a city engineer (Kapoor’s youngest brother Shashi), and their singing and dancing love story. The Freer calls this film, “a meditation on love and beauty; a raunchy, Russ Meyer-esque T&A melodrama; an exposé of the dangers of rural electrification; and a throwback psychedelic musical.” The concept of a Russ Meyer Bollywood musical boggles the frickin’ mind. Note: the AFI also closes out its own Kapoor series next week with Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (Tuesday, Jun 26 at 7:30) and God, Your River is Tainted (Thursday, June 28 at 7:30).
View a clip http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnWk0xn9WE4&feature=relmfu
Satyam Shivam Sundaram/Love Sublime screens Sunday, June 24 at 2 p.m. at the Freer. Free
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Keith Carradine and co-star.Director Alan Rudolph’s inconsistent career peaked in the 1980s with his romantic neo-noir Choose Me, but this atmospheric follow-up from 1985 is more Psychotronic, only slightly less successful, and still neo-noir. In a town called “Rain City” (aka Seattle) Rudolph favorite Keith Carradine is a young father who turns to crime and 80s eye shadow to support his wife (Lori Singer) and baby. Kris Kristofferson is an ex-cop released from prison and struggling with his return to civilian life and diner owner Genevieve Bujold. With Joe Morton as a mystic thug, Divine in a Sydney Greenstreet role as gangster Hilly Blue, and Marianne Faithfull’s soaring version of the old blues song. Producer Dave Blocker told the audience at a 2010 screening of the film that “When Bob Dylan saw [it], he joked that Keith’s hair was a character all its own.” I hope that someday the AFI will brings prints of this and Choose Me to their 80s series, but in the meantime, give props to the Washington Psychotronic Film Society.
View the trailer.
Monday, June 25 at 8 p.m. at McFadden’s. Free, with a $5 suggested donation to help cover expenses.
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Nadezhda Markina (Zeitgeist Films)A huge, sterile condo is home to middle-aged couple Elena and Vladimir, who sleep in separate rooms but maintain a cold, cordial relationship. He is a wealthy businessman. She is his former nurse, and comes from a modest family living in the shadow of a nuclear plant. When Vladimir falls ill, Elena wife may have a chance to help her struggling family. Director Andrei Zvyagintsev builds tension — part Hitchcock, part Antonioni — out of careful sound design (a car alarm can be heard outside the couple’s condo) and compositions that pack the widescreen frame with the mundane worst of modern Russian architecture. Music by Phillip Glass (his Symphony No. 3) makes walking through this bleak landscape an act filled with dread.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark E Street Cinema.
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His People (Edward Sloman, 1925, 16 mm, 93 minutes). Image courtesy of Photofest Ciné-Concert: His People preceded by Amarilly of Clothesline Alley
Edward Sloman’s 1925 film His People was shot on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and documents the struggles of a Russian immigrant pushcart peddler and his family. Shown with “America’s Sweetheart” Mary Pickford as an Irish cigarette girl in Amarilly of Clothesline Alley. Live musical accompaniment will be provided by pianist Dennis James and tenor Douglas Bowles.
Saturday, June 23 at 2:30 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art. Free.
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Also opening this weekend, apocalyptic visions of the past and present: the President faces a national crisis in Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter and Steve Carell faces a meteor in Seeking a Friend for the End of the World. We’ll have full reviews tomorrow, as well as more coverage of Silverdocs.
