10 THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 2, 2019
COURTESY CELESTIAL PICTURES
The Hong Kong-based Shaw Brothers movie studio, best known for
its martial-arts productions, also hired women to direct films in a wide
range of genres, as seen in Metrograph’s “Shaw Sisters” series, running
through Sept. 8. The program includes Ann Hui’s rapturous melodrama
“Love in a Fallen City,” from 1984, based on Eileen Chang’s 1943 novel
of the same title. The story, set during the Second World War, begins in
Shanghai, where Pai Liu-so (Cora Miao), a young divorced woman who’s
desperate to leave her extended family, accepts an invitation to accompany
a wealthy woman to Hong Kong. There, Liu-so is scandalously courted
by Fan Liu-yuan (Chow Yun-fat), a Malaysian businessman whose inten-
tions don’t include marriage. Hui invests the romantic tale with operatic
splendor; the actors’ frozen gestures and severe gazes are matched by
exquisite costumes, sumptuous décor, luridly clashing colors, and highly
stylized camerawork. Liu-so and Liu-yuan’s affair is complicated by the
Japanese invasion of the city, which Hui films starkly and unflinchingly,
without losing the thread of intimate passion.—Richard BrodyIN REVIVAL
1
For more reviews, visit
newyorker.com/goings-on-about-townpropaganda, and silence on which it depended.
Wang, who was born and raised in China and
lives in the United States, returns to her home
town, in Jiangxi Province, where family mem-
bers describe their experiences of the govern-
ment’s tight control over natality and private
life over all. She interviews former “family
planning” officers and a former midwife, who
estimates that she performed fifty or sixty
thousand forced abortions and sterilizations
(and who now does what she calls penance,
as an infertility specialist). Speaking with
witnesses to infanticide and abandonment
(especially of female babies), Wang connects
China’s policy to its international market for
the adoption of so-called orphans. Above all,
the film reveals that the law depended on the
impunity of China’s one-party rule and on
the censorship that it still enforces—and on
a contempt for women that goes beyond the
country’s borders.—R.B. (In wide release.)Summer
Éric Rohmer’s 1986 drama, which blends fic-
tion and documentary with a graceful splen-dor, may be the finest example of his supple
yet severe artistry. Delphine (Marie Rivière)
is a stubborn Paris secretary whose instinctive
negativity is put to the test when her vacation
plans are spoiled. Rohmer turns her tentative
visits to family and friends in search of new
travel options into an ethnographic study
of French leisure habits—and into a paint-
erly celebration of the natural habitats and
architectural glories around which they’re
organized. But the pleasures of new places and
new friends clash with Delphine’s inchoate
longings and with her prickly social obstinacy.
Rohmer borrowed the film’s original title, “Le
Rayon Vert” (“The Green Ray”), from a novel
by Jules Verne, which intrudes surprisingly
on the action and shapes the drama’s many
coincidences into a sort of destiny. As Rohmer
rapturously proves through the adventures of
his quietly rebellious protagonist, the negative
of a negative is a positive. In French.—R.B.
(Metrograph, Aug. 30, and streaming.)This Is Not Berlin
This earnest, energetic, but slapdash coming-
of-age story, by the director Hari Sama, is
set in Mexico City in 1986. It’s centered on
two high-school students and best friends—
Carlos (Xabiani Ponce de León), who has a
gift for electronics, and Gera (José Antonio
Toledano), who aspires to the cool factor
of his older sister, Rita (Ximena Romo), a
singer-songwriter in a hard-edged rock band.
Carlos manages to fix the band’s electric key-
board, which gets the boys an entrée into the
hip club where the group is performing. New
acquaintances lead Gera and Carlos out of
the childish realm of after-school fights and
porn magazines and into sexual awakenings,
experimentation with drugs, and the artistic
avant-garde—all of which converges with po-
litical consciousness and activism relating to
the AIDS crisis. Family tragedy, legal matters,
and the World Cup all zip through the drama,
which has a miniseries’ worth of incidents that
get dispatched in quick, merely informational
scenes filmed with little style or imagination.
In Spanish.—R.B. (In limited release.)Where’d You Go, Bernadette
Maria Semple’s busy and best-selling novel is
brought to the screen by Richard Linklater,
with Cate Blanchett, at her smartest and her
most unstoppable, as Bernadette Fox. Once
a celebrated architect, bordering on genius,
Bernadette renounced her career and spent
years giving in to insomnia and anxiety while
sharpening her tongue in contempt of lesser
mortals. It’s a hell of a role, and nobody but
Blanchett, perhaps, could bring it off; the rest
of the film, unsurprisingly, surrenders to her
performance. The story leads Linklater to
unfamiliar ground—first to Seattle, where
the heroine lives with her husband, Elgie
Branch (Billy Crudup), and their precocious
daughter, Bee (Emma Nelson), and thence to
Antarctica, of all places, where the eternally
restless Bernadette appears, at last, to feel at
home. With Kristen Wiig as a persnickety
neighbor, Laurence Fishburne as a fellow-ar-
chitect, and Judy Greer as a shrink.—A.L.
(8/26/19) (In wide release.)he opts for yet another period piece—while,
of course, reserving the imaginative right to
adjust historical facts to his satisfaction. The
year is 1969, and an actor named Rick Dalton
(Leonardo DiCaprio) is on the downslide.
Once a star, he has been reduced to playing
dastardly types on TV, and an agent (Al Pa-
cino) proposes that he try Italian Westerns.
Rick is good pals with his stunt double, Cliff
Booth (Brad Pitt), and the movie is most
rewarding when it’s most relaxed—when the
two of them just hang out. Rick’s neighbor
is Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), and there’s
a lovely scene in which she goes to watch
herself on the big screen, with Tarantino’s
cinephilia in full cry. Meanwhile, in the wings,
the Manson clan awaits.—A.L. (8/5 & 12/19)
(In wide release.)
One Child Nation
This boldly confrontational and journalisti-
cally probing documentary, by Nanfu Wang
and Jialing Zhang, goes beyond the slogan
of China’s longtime “one-child policy” to
reveal the system of violence, corruption,