ICA introduction: A provocative, lesser-known gem in David Cronenberg’s oeuvre, M. Butterfly entwines
love with deception, espionage and fantasy. Based on a real-life affair
in 1960s China, the film unfolds as a haunting variation on the 'bed
trick': a story of mistaken identity and self-delusion, where desire is
sustained through illusion and cultural fantasy. As a lover’s identity
is gradually unmasked, the film exposes the fragile boundaries between
intimacy, performance and belief, and the limits of what can truly be
known about another person.
This screening forms part of a
wider film programme exploring the 'bed trick' – one of the oldest
narrative devices in myth, literature and cinema – in which characters
go to bed with one person and wake up with another. Across three films
and a book launch, the programme examines how cinema uses disguise,
secrecy and revelation to probe desire, fantasy and the entanglement of
sex and lies.
This film is part of a Cuban cinema season at the ICA. Full details here.
ICA introduction: This powerful drama brings a pious sugar plantation owner, in 1790s
Cuba, attempting to head off an uprising, to share his table at
Easter with 12 enslaved men. A radical and often surreal parable
showing slavery as an economic system and championing Black
resistance. “A masterpiece from the first image to the last”. The
film was inspired by a real story. The impressive dinner sequence is
the structural core of the film: almost an hour, which feels
experimental and chaotic. “Let me see if I understand, when
overseer beats me, I should be happy?” says one man at the table to
the plantation owner. It is an extraordinary meditation on speech and
power, slavery and freedom, submission and rebellion, ideology and
oppression, ritual and ethics. 2026 marks its 50th anniversary. The
screening will be introduced by a Cuban film specialist.
Time Out review: A brilliant Godardian parable, reflecting the contemporary Cuban
situation through a tale of a slave revolt on a sugar plantation in late
18th century Havana (historically, the moment when the old slave-based
industry was under pressure from the new mechanised European techniques
of sugar refining, and when the heady scent of freedom was sniffed in
the air). The action takes place over the days of Easter, culminating
when a rich, fanatically religious landowner reconstructs the Last
Supper with twelve slaves. But when the slaves' response theatens his
economic interests, the pious Christian suppresses the uprising. This
complex indictment of religious hypocrisy and cultural colonisation
reflects the same subtlety as Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's earlier Memories of Underdevelopment.
This screening will be preceded by a talk by Professor Ginette Vincendeau (King’s College), author of Brigitte Bardot (BFI, 2019) and of the forthcoming BFI Classic on Godard’s Le Mépris, who will reflect on the controversial legacy of the iconoclastic star in the era of ‘cancel culture’. The film is also being shown on March 29th. Details here. Here's all the information on the Bardot season at the cinema.
Cine Lumiere introduction: A dazzling poem of sumptuous, shimmering images, A Very Private Affair (Vie privée) was long considered one of the most beautiful colour films ever made, with its unique impressionist
texture and luminosity together with its astonishing camera movements.
Louis Malle did not want to make a documentary about Brigitte Bardot,
but a film. He said, “Explaining the Bardot myth… is the business of sociologists, not storytellers”. In the film, Jill, a young woman from Geneva, arrives in Paris and
quickly becomes a dancer, actress, and sex symbol. She is adored but
also hounded day and night by photographers and fans. She has no
privacy… A Very Private Affair (Vie privée) was invisible for almost thirty years and restored in 2023.
This film is part of a min-season of Cuban cinema at the ICA. Details here.
New York Times review: An
openly tendentious tour de force considered by many as Cuban cinema’s
peak accomplishment, Humberto Solás’s Lucía (1968) is a
landmark film. Solás, who
died 10 years ago,
was in his mid-20s when he made Cuba’s most elaborate and expensive
movie yet — and perhaps ever. A 2-hour-40-minute black-and-white
pageant, Lucía dramatizes the situation of three oppressed
women, all named Lucía, at cusp moments of Cuban history — the
1890s war of independence, the early 1930s uprising against the
dictatorship of Gerardo Machado and the post-revolutionary ’60s. Each
story has its own style, and each Lucía represents a different
social class. The Lucía of 1895 (played by the stage diva Raquel
Revuelta) is a woman from an aristocratic Havana family who, losing
her youth, embarks on a passionate affair with a handsome Spaniard. A
story of love and betrayal is set against the war between the Spanish
and the Cuban guerrillas known as mambises, many former slaves; the
sequence is reminiscent of but even wilder in its orchestrated tumult
than Luchino Visconti’s operatic costume dramas. Like the lovers in
Visconti’s Senso, the protagonist cannot will herself outside
of history. The
second Lucía (Eslinda Nuñez, who played the object of the
antihero’s fantasies in “Memories
of Underdevelopment”)
is the daughter of a bourgeois family. Unlike the first Lucía, she
tries to engage rather than escape, giving herself to an idealistic
young opponent of the Machado regime. Although not without violence,
this section is tender and even dreamy — episodes of street
fighting punctuate a “new wave” love story. Hauntingly beautiful,
Ms. Nuñez could double for Delphine Seyrig in “Last Year at
Marienbad.” But despite her character’s political commitment, she
is marginalized as a woman even as her intellectual lover is
betrayed. The 1930s revolution is incomplete. The
third Lucía is the Castro equivalent of a Soviet positive heroine —
not unlike Adela Legrá, the captivating untrained actress who plays
her. An illiterate peasant, this Lucía leaves a female work brigade
for love of a self-regarding, insanely proprietary truck driver.
Having traded labor for servitude, she must learn to assert herself
against the traditional macho husband who tells her, “I am the
Revolution.” Reminiscent of the Italian film farces of the ’60s,
the episode employs a rollicking version of the ballad “Guantanamera”
to comment on their conjugal struggle and end the movie on a note of
triumphant ambiguity.
This film is part of the Cuban film season at the Garden Cinema. Full details here.
The
screening will be followed by a Q&A with special guests from Cuba,
distinguished cinema actors Mirtha Ibarra and Eslinda Núñez.
Garden Cinema introduction: This
film heralded a new genre of sociocritical comedy in Cuba and was the
debut feature of director Juan Carlos Tabio. It is full of Cubanisms –
popular everyday problems, language and attitudes of that era and a
range of characters from an idealist architect to an opportunistic
bureaucrat. Gloria
wants her adult daughter to find a husband, who she considers a “good
match”, and engineers a chain of house swaps to move to a “better
neighbourhood” to make things go her way - but her daughter has
different ideas and to love who she wants. It examines the desire to get
ahead in a society that says everyone is equal but also celebrates the
resourcefulness with which people solve their own problems.
Time Out review: The most dementedly elegiac thriller you've ever seen, distilling a lifetime's enthusiasm for American and French film noir,
with little Chinese about it apart from the soundtrack and the looks of
the three beautiful leads. It started out as a homage to Martin
Scorsese and Jean-Pierre Melville, but the limitless arsenal of guns and
rocket-launchers appears somehow to have got in the way.
Exquisitely-tailored contract killer Jeff (Chow Yun-Fat, Hong Kong's
finest actor) accidentally damages the sight of nightclub singer Jennie
while blasting a dozen gangsters to kingdom come. He befriends the
near-blind girl, and decides to take One Last Job to finance the cornea
graft she needs. Meanwhile he is stalked by a misfit cop (Danny Lee), who
eventually falls in love with him and winds up fighting alongside him.
There are half-a-dozen mega-massacres along the way, plus extraordinary
spasms of sentimentality, romance and soul searching. The tone is
hysterical from start to finish, but John Woo's lush visual stylings and
taste for baroque detail give the whole thing an improbably serene air
of abstraction. Tony Rayns
Time Out review: A delightfully touching comedy, Milos Forman's first in America and far better than his later One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or Ragtime,
this deals with the attempts of a middle-aged, middle class American
couple to trace and lure back their runaway daughter. Scenes of their
search are intercut with sequences at a musical audition for
disillusioned youth, and Forman's wry but sympathetic humour derives
largely from the incongruities he observes in both situations: deserted
parents, concerned and conservative, getting stoned in an effort to
understand why kids smoke dope; a rosy, virginal young girl singing a
quiet folk song in praise of fucking. Never taking sides, but allowing
both factions engaged in the generation gap war plenty of space and
generosity, its gentle wit has aged far more gracefully than the
hectoring sermons of most youth movies churned out in the late '60s and
early '70s. Geoff Andrew
