No1: The Last Days of Disco (Stillman, 1998): ICA Cinema, 6pm
This Lost Reels presentation is from an original 35mm print, and will be followed by an in-person Q&A with writer/director Whit Stillman.
Time Out review:
Manhattan, the early '80s. Recent graduates from an upper crust college,
Alice (Chloe Sevigny) and Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale) - flatmates and friends of a
sort - pass their days working as trainee publishing editors, and most
of their nights discussing social niceties at a fashionable disco where
assistant manager Des (Eigeman) courts the boss's disfavour by admitting
the wrong kind of clientele. The girls hang out at the disco with a
preppy bunch of Harvard admen and lawyers; rumour, rivalry and
falling-out is rife and relationships are frequently at risk. The third
comedy of manners in Whit Stillman's loose trilogy about the 'doomed
bourgeois in love' again highlights the writer/director's expertise with
naturalistically articulate dialogue whose idioms, ironies and
absurdities provide vivid insights into the delusions, desires and often
ludicrous tribal rituals of the young, privileged and, mostly, pretty
ineffectual. Like Metropolitan and Barcelona, it's a
brittle, sporadically brilliant film, very funny but rooted in social,
political, historical and emotional realities. Beckinsale, especially,
is a revelation, making Charlotte smug, spiteful, sexy and, underneath,
rather sad, all with a spot-on accent.
Geoff Andrew
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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No2: La Terra Trema (Visconti, 1948): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 4.20pm
This presentation, which is also screened on January 16th, is part of the Luchino Visconti season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.
Luchino Vsconti's second feature (five years after Ossessione in 1942) was an improvised drama produced by the Communist Party, filmed with and among Sicilian fishermen in the village of Aci-Trezza. An overwhelmingly stark chronicle of a family which strives but fails to break out of the poverty trap - they try to cut out the middlemen by embarking in what one might call 'free enterprise', with disastrous results - La Terra Trema‚ stands as a masterpiece of neo-realism, a social conscience cinema of proletarian ways and means. Yet, despite this, it's no less 'operatic' than the director's later decadent melodramas: it surges with great tides of emotion. The film is distinguished by its vivid camerawork, at once poetic and 'documentary'. (Francesco Rosi and Franco Zeffirelli, it may be noted, served as assistant directors.) Visconti only finished the film by selling some of his mother's jewellery and an apartment in Rome. Yet, true to his breeding, he brought home one of the boys from the film and installed him as his butler.
Tom Charity
Here (and above ) is the trailer.
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