Digital Week – May 21st

One of Ukraine’s greatest directors, Kira Muratova toiled for much of her career under the oppressive Soviet system, and several of her films, pre-Glasnost, were banned or suppressed for years, even decades. This near-exhaustive survey of 16 of her features, made between 1964 and 2012 (she died in 2018 at age 83), shows Muratova as an uncompromising artist whose work artfully dissects quotidian lives with a pinpoint scalpel. Her early classics “Brief Encounters” (1967) and “The Long Farewell” (1971) are messy in the best way, mirroring her female protagonists’ unstable personal and public lives. “The Asthenic Syndrome,” Muratova’s 1989 international breakthrough, is a profoundly cutting critique of the USSR’s last days told through her dazzling formalist technique. Some Muratova films will be released by Criterion, but to see them on the big screen, visit the Walter Reade Theater by May 25.

Vicente Aranda—the best post-Bunuel Spanish director after Carlos Saura—made artfully erotic explorations of female sexuality for several decades (he died in 2015 at age 88). Film Movement Plus has resurrected a quartet of his films, a grab bag of his work that showcases his singular mix of seriousness, sleaziness and potent political commentary. “The Girl in the Yellow Panties” (1980) introduces a former Francoist writer who’s beguiled by his sexy young niece (played by Aranda’s muse, the great Victoria Abril, in one of her first—and most memorable—roles). Abril returns majestically in “Lovers” (1991), an absorbing true-life adultery drama a la “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” as a widowed landlord who seduces her young tenant as he tries to navigate pre-married life with his virginal fiancée (Maribel Verdu, another superb Spanish actress in one of her earliest starring roles). The other two Aranda films, 1994’s “The Turkish Passion” and 1998’s “The Naked Eye,” are like late-night Cinemax softcore flicks distinguished by Aranda’s precise direction and the performances of his leading ladies Ana Belén (“Turkish Passion”) and Laura Morante (“Naked Eye”).

Director Bille August, who made masterly character studies like “Pelle the Conqueror” and “The Best Intentions” early in his career, made a late-career classic with “A Fortunate Man” in 2018, while his latest, an adaptation of German/Austrian writer Stefan Zweig’s only novel, is a well-mounted bittersweet romance between an army officer and a crippled but beautiful and headstrong woman. It’s beautifully shot, compellingly acted and keeps one engaged from start to finish, but August allows a certain sentimentality to creep in that’s not present in Zweig’s more tough-minded novel, and the result is less than the sum of its considerable parts.

Norwegian writer-director Dag Johan Haugerud’s triptych about forms of nontraditional intimacy—titled “Love,” “Sex,” and “Dreams”—comprises standalone works that can be seen in any order; the first being shown here, “Love,” introduces two colleagues at an Oslo hospital: Marianne, a single straight doctor, and Tor, a single gay nurse, who have conversations about pursuing sexual gratification without love or personal attachments. Although a fascinating philosophical exercise, Haugerud’s film never achieves any emotional or dramatic resonance since it feels that the director is randomly moving his pieces on a chessboard, with little that’s organic or truly felt in the relationships or character motivation. It will be interesting to see if the other two films can avoid this self-inflicted impediment.

The “Dune” franchise, starting with Frank Herbert’s books, seems the most self-important and humorless of all sci-fi/fantasy worlds, and this prequel—which takes place more than 10,000 years (!) before the events of “Dune”—is another example. It focuses on the women of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood, who foretell the birth of hero Paul Atreides, but—at least in this six-episode telling—the dourness and violence of the protagonists (embodied without much distinction by eminent performers like Emily Watson and Olivia Williams) are dramatized with po-faced inscrutability. The UHD image looks excellent; extras are the featurette “Building Worlds” and five “Behind the Veil” featurettes.

Bong Joon Ho’s follow-up to his ham-fisted but Oscar-winning “Parasite” is a sci-fi story set in 2054 during a space expedition where our eponymous hero is an “expendable,” taking on dangerous jobs and being cloned every time he dies. It’s a strangely inert, even risible black comedy that purloins Edward Ashton’s underlying novel (pointedly titled “Mickey 7”) to little effect but stultifying repetition. Bong’s direction—despite accomplished cinematography, editing, sets and costumes—is plodding and his actors follow suit, particularly a sleepy Robert Pattinson as Mickey and hammy Mark Ruffalo and Toni Colette as the colony’s leaders. The film looks quite impressive in UHD; extras comprise several on-set featurettes.