22 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY 17 &24, 2020
delights—translations into language of a
vanished opulence that his images lovingly
display. He films Giannini, Antonelli, and
O’Neill with a rapt tenderness. He captures
their glances in closeups of magnetic power,
which are matched by the mellifluous, mod-
ulated voices that pour out grief in lofty
and delicate phrases—and conceal, with the
same rhetorical flourishes, deeply calculated
machinations of an imperial cruelty. In Ital-
ian.—R.B. (Film Forum.)
Portrait of a Lady on Fire
An artist named Marianne (Noémie Mer-
lant) journeys to a remote house in Brittany,
where she has been hired to paint a portrait
of Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), a young woman
on the brink of marriage. To begin with,
however, the subject refuses to pose; Mari-
anne has to do the painting in secret, so that
Héloïse won’t know what she’s up to. From
these furtive beginnings, Céline Sciamma’s
new film, set in pre-Revolutionary France,
fans out into a love story of startling openness
and power—one zealously performed, edited
with great concision, and concluding in a
barrage of unforeseen and barely manageable
emotion. With Valeria Golino as Héloïse’s
mother and Luàna Bajrami as Sophie, the
family’s loyal maid. Sophie has troubles of
her own, which, far from being ignored by her
social superiors, are assuaged, in a stirring
show of female solidarity. In French.—An-
thony Lane (Reviewed in our issue of 12/9/19.)
(In limited release.)The Rules of the Game
The director Jean Renoir gives himself a star
turn in this panoramic romance—made in
1939, on the eve of the Second World War—
that’s both a portrait of the artist and a vi-
sion of the times. He plays Octave, a failed
musician whose high-society machinations
result in a grand reception for France’s heroictransatlantic pilot (Roland Toutain), who is
in love with their hostess, a Viennese émigrée
(Nora Gregor). She, in turn, is married to
a French marquis (Marcel Dalio), who is
cheating on her with a Parisian sophisticate
(Mila Parély). Meanwhile, Octave flirts with
a chambermaid (Paulette Dubost), sparking
the violent rage of her gamekeeper husband
(Gaston Modot). Life upstairs and down-
stairs in a majestic château gives Renoir a vast
stage to fill with the themes and characters
of the day, including a fatuous general who
seems to embody the Maginot Line. Renoir’s
operetta-like confection is booby-trapped;
stupefied revellers, fixing their gaze on a
player piano, take their place among history’s
passive victims. In French.—R.B. (Anthology
Film Archives, Feb. 23, and streaming.)Seberg
Kristen Stewart, armed with short-cropped
hair and spiky emotional responses, digs
deep into the role of Jean Seberg. Benedict
Andrews’s movie takes us through just one
of the many dismaying chapters in the ac-
tress’s life. The story begins, appropriately,
in 1968, in Paris, where Seberg lives with
her husband, Romain Gary (Yvan Attal).
On a flight to America, she meets an activist
named Hakim Jamal (Anthony Mackie), and
she not only embarks on an affair with him
but starts devoting her energies, and her
money, to radical causes. As a result, the
F.B.I. agents Jack Solomon (Jack O’Con-
nell) and Carl Kowalski (Vince Vaughn) are
instructed to spy on Seberg, and thereafter
to trash her reputation with leaks and lies.
The consequences for her mental health are
cruel and lasting. The film is at its strongest,
unsurprisingly, when Stewart holds center
stage; elsewhere, the focus of dramatic at-
tention seems to wander.—A.L. (12/16/19)
(In limited release.)Vitalina Varela
Spectacular images, ideas, emotions, and per-
formances are embedded in the lugubrious
pace and tone of Pedro Costa’s modernist
fusion of classic melodrama and documen-
tary. The protagonist—played by a nonpro-
fessional actor who is also named Vitalina
Varela—travels from her home in Cape Verde
to Lisbon, to visit her terminally ill hus-
band (whom she hasn’t seen in decades),
but arrives three days after his death. She
moves into his dilapidated apartment and
joins his community of immigrants who are
struggling to survive in the face of racist
hostility and official neglect. Most of the
movie is virtually subterranean, with shanties
and basements cast in permanent shadows.
A grief-stricken priest (played by Ventura)
provides the neighborhood’s safety net,
though his labors can’t keep pace with his
parishioners’ ordeals. But the steadfast and
determined Vitalina takes the lead in uniting
the neighborhood; several glorious outdoor
sequences of poignant farewells to the dead
and new beginnings of hands-on local devel-
opment have the visionary rapture of scenes
by John Ford. In Cape Verdean Creole and
Portuguese.—R.B. (In limited release.)COURTESY MARK RAPPAPORT
“Rock Hudson’s Home Movies,” one of the most original of all essay-
films, screens Feb. 13 and Feb. 16, at Anthology Film Archives, in a
retrospective of the director Mark Rappaport’s work. (It’s also stream-
ing.) The film was made in 1992, seven years after Hudson died, of
AIDS, and the ensuing public disclosure that he was gay. It’s mainly
composed of brief clips from a copious selection of Hudson’s films—
including melodramas by Douglas Sirk and comedies that co-star Doris
Day and Tony Randall—which, as revealed by Rappaport’s incisive
analyses, display coded behavior ranging from subtle cruising to bla-
tant homoeroticism, at a time when Hudson’s sexual orientation was
an open secret among his peers but carefully hidden from the public.
Rappaport adds to these clips a fictional monologue, performed by the
actor Eric Farr, who plays Hudson speaking posthumously about the
ironies on which his conventionally manly screen persona was based,
and the agonies of his double life. This touch of fiction turns the clips of
Hudson’s performances into virtual documentaries of his inner self, of
Hollywood’s winking mores, and of the repressive times.—Richard BrodyINREVIVAL
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