Positively 3rd Street

Labor Day weekend M5

Got burned on my 4th of July weekend M4: 75% of the films later came to downtown New Haven. So beginning with this one, I return to a more stringent policy toward the Landmark Sunshine, pretty much taking it out of the mix, as has been the case with the Angelika for some time. So this trip I stay on the 3rd Street Axis: three at IFC (even though, against all odds, My Winnipeg from last trip came to town--as far as I know, Guy Maddin's first theatrical appearance in New Haven), including one revival, and two at Pioneer 2 Boots, whence I don't recall anything ever making it the 75 miles up the shoreline.

The result was one of the best Ms ever--everything at least good, with one so memorable I may just need to own it. Moreover, I had time between the IFC and 2 Boots segments of the itinerary to settle in for a couple of excellent slices of pie at the latter's pizza joint, then go for a nice Alphabet City stroll, seeing several of the neighborhood's stunningly beautiful pocket gardens en route to and from the East River. It occurred to me, and I have since confirmed, that my walk took me farther east than I'd ever been on foot in Manhattan (and nearly as far east as there is to go, of course).

My final film started 15 minutes later than advertised and was c. 20 minutes longer, the result being that I exited the theater needing to teleport myself to Grand Central in 10 minutes to catch the 11:22 train home. Conscious of my carbon footprint, I've been restricting teleporter use to genuine emergencies, so instead I walked uptown to catch the 12:22. I walked up Avenue A as far as it goes; the first thing someone like me notices in such a nighttime walk is that I was significantly older than virtually everyone else on the street; the second thing I noticed was that I was significantly less tattooed and pierced than most. Ah, I love this city!

Trouble the Water

IFC

Spike Lee set the standard for mainstream Hurricane Katrina documentaries with When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts on HBO, but Carl Deal and Tia Lessin--piggybacking on the realtime home video of the amazing (self-declared, but it's hard to argue) Kim Rivers, aka BlackKoldMadina--have set the standard in the guerrilla doc division. The film focuses on the experiences of Rivers and her extended (and extending) family as they ride out the storm, pull things back together afterward, flee to Memphis, then come back to what is, undeniably, irresistibly, home.

A moving work, which can't help but stoke the old angers and revive the old sorrows, but is ultimately about surviving, prevailing.

Vredens dag (Day of wrath) (1943)

IFC

OK, first of all, how did Denmark even manage to have a film industry in 1943? And then how did Carl Theodor Dreyer manage to put together the most stunning cinematic study of witch mania I've ever seen?

The minister Absalon is a godfearing man whose one slip was to circumvent the punishment of a confessed witch who happens to be the mother of the young woman he loves. Suffice it to say that this turns out to be a bad decision. What makes the film exceptional is that it portrays the central issue through the seventeenth-century lens of the characters (someone coming out of the theater with me commented astutely that the look of the film creates the illusion that it's an artifact of a contemporary film industry), but everything also makes perfect sense when viewed through the lens of twentieth-century psychology. Young Anne (Lisbeth Movin--her last film role was as the widow in Babettes gæstebud [Babette's feast]) is at the least bewitching in the metaphorical sense, and it is easy for all in the story--Anne included--to believe that the talent is literal.

La Fille coupée en deux (A girl cut in two)

IFC

As I was watching this, I was thinking, "am I the first to notice the connection to the Evelyn Nesbit-Stanford White story? But now I see that the answer is no--it's even mentioned in the middle of Manohla Dargis's Times review, the problem being that I tend to read just the lead and the end of a Times review.

The least of the five films on the itinerary, but it's a pretty high bar. Ludivine Sagnier, of course, is always worth seeing, but the scene stealer is Marie Bunel as Gabrielle's mother--let's see more of her.

And a semantic question? Why is a title whose translation is straightforward tweaked in the English version from "The girl" to "A girl"? There's a difference, yo. No one ever sang about a man in a flying trapeze. Was it an attempt to minimize the echo of the lurid 1955 The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing (Joan Collins as Nesbit, Ray Milland as White, and Farley Granger as Nesbit's husband and murderous protector Harry Thaw)? If so, it's not a very effective minimization.

Maria Bethânia: Música é perfume (Music is perfume)

2 Boots

Oh, great: more music I have to buy. Bethânia, the sister of Caetano Veloso, sings the music of her brother and other Brazilian songwriters in a rough, gravelly voice--one songwriter likens it to the abrasion between stones en route to becoming sand. The film follows her through the creation of the album Brasileirinho and the associated concerts, and--well, you just fall in love. And emotionally beautiful film, even though technically it looks as if the filmmakers depended on donations of reel-end bits of film.

Youssou N'Dour: Return to Gorée

2 Boots

A more ambitious music documentary, this one follows the titular artist on a tour from his native Senegal to Atlanta, New Orleans, New York, and Luxembourg (!) to assemble a troupe of musicians to help him demonstrate the connections between his native land's music and that of the diaspora, mostly jazz. The payoff (sadly underrepresented) is a concert at the Gorée prison, where kidnapped Africans waited three hundred years ago to be loaded onto slave ships bound for the New World.

N'Dour is a Muslim, and he struggles to find a fit with Christian spirituals, but it's a story of accommodation, and of faith in the same music, if not in the same rite. One of the most affecting moments comes in Brooklyn, where Amiri Baraka makes a poetic contribution to a recording session, breaking in the middle to sing the lines that brought my M5 full circle: "Wade in the water / God's gonna trouble the water."

Trailers

• Astonishingly, two IFC films without trailers, and there are rarely if ever trailers at 2 Boots, so only four for the day. But before I catalogue those, I should mention the short I saw at IFC, "Looking Glass," a fairly obvious ghosty thing. Also, I can't fail to mention the bit of promotional film for an IFC-related festival that was running soundlessly nonstop premovie on each screen, if only to ask how in the clip related to Fay Grim, indy darling Parker Posey could be identified in the caption as Jennifer Jason Leigh.
• Nights and Weekends--A defiantly mumblecore trailer for a film by Greta Gerwig and Joe Swanberg, who made Hannah Takes the Stairs, currently #23 on my Netflix queue; Swanberg also directed LOL, which I didn't like much. 3.
• Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell--Another documentary about a musician I'd never heard of, but this one doesn't seem much up my alley; 2.
• Moving Midway--Potentially fascinating doc about the physical (including real estate) legacy of slavery; 4.
• Un secret--Potentially soppy French melodrama, but Mathieu Amalric makes it at least a soft 4.