10 THENEWYORKER,MARCH2, 2020
COURTESY METROGRAPH PICTURES AND WAKA FILMS
An extraordinary twelve-year-old actor, Lissa Baléra, stars in the
Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambety’s final film, “The Little
Girl Who Sold the Sun,” from 1999. (It screens in MOMA’s series “It’s
All in Me: Black Heroines,” on Feb. 29.) Baléra plays Sili Laam, a
girl from a shantytown outside Dakar who, despite a disability that
requires her to use crutches, travels to the city to make a living for
herself and her blind grandmother. Sili becomes an itinerant newspaper
vender (the only female one there) and is so successful that she incurs
the resentment—and the violence—of her young male competitors,
whom she faces down with courage and resilience. Mambety’s richly
textured view of urban life fuses fiction and documentary, displaying
the rampant poverty and endemic misogyny in the modernizing capital.
With fable-like lyricism, he contrasts the bitter competition among
the poor with exemplary acts of audacious solidarity—and shows the
vital public culture that arises spontaneously from the struggles of
street people.—Richard BrodyINREVIVAL
1
For more reviews, visit
newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town1
MOVIES
Birds of Prey
Cathy Yan’s film is a spinoff of “Suicide
Squad” (2016). That was not a tale, you’d
think, from which much was asking to be
spun, but Margot Robbie, undaunted, re-
prises her role as Harley Quinn. Still, the
character boasts a well-defined look—pigtails,
hot pants, and tattoos—and a backstory to
reckon with: she trained as a psychiatrist
before sashaying over to the dark side. She
and the Joker were the power couple of
Gotham, but that relationship has now ended,
and a grieving Harley takes out her wrath
on anyone who crosses her path, notably
a crime lord known as Black Mask (Ewan
McGregor). She also joins up with other
female fighters (played by Ella Jay Basco,
Jurnee Smollett-Bell, Rosie Perez, and Mary
Elizabeth Winstead), yet the sense of team
spirit is fitful at best, and the movie sputters
out in manic violence and a flurry of onscreen
graphics.—Anthony Lane (Reviewed in our issue
of 2/17 & 24/20.) (In wide release.)
La Captive
Chantal Akerman’s tale of erotic obsession and
artistic sublimation, from 2000—an adaptation
of Proust’s “La Prisonnière”—stars Stanislas
Merhar as Simon, a rich and effete young Pa-
risian intellectual, whose live-in lover, Ariane
(Sylvie Testud), is in love with another woman
(Olivia Bonamy). Updating the action to con-
temporary Paris, Akerman infuses modernity—
with its remote controls, cordless phones, and
sleek cars—with anachronistic luxuries, styles,
and, above all, manners. The actors’ chilled
voices and frozen gestures evoke an age of in-
timate decorum that’s broken solely by sexual
abandon (depicted with a disturbing blend of
delicacy and crudeness). Finding rhapsodic
melodrama in high art, Akerman pulls Mozart
out of the opera house and into the bedroom
with an arch a-cappella duet for separated lovers.
She places her exemplary young actors—limpid
and agitated, relaxed yet precise—in majestic
tableaux of sumptuous settings and colors that
resonate with the roiling mysteries and volup-
tuous overtones of films by Alfred Hitchcock. In
French.—Richard Brody (French Institute Alliance
Française, March 3, and streaming.)Corpus Christi
Daniel (Bartosz Bielenia), a young convict, is
released from a juvenile-detention center and,
instead of taking on a job that was set up for him,
walks to a nearby parish, in rural Poland, and
pretends to be a priest named Father Tomasz.
So successful is the deceit that his congrega-
tion grows, and he assuages some of the bitter
feelings that have eroded the community. One
of the many ironies that sustain Jan Komasa’s
fine movie, which was nominated for Best In-
ternational Feature Film at this year’s Academy
Awards, is that Daniel is more of a believer than
a fraudster. If we, in turn, believe in the effect
that he has on the faithful, that’s largely because
of the charismatic Bielenia, whose intensity—
like the glare of his blue-green eyes—rarely
falters. He is ably supported by Aleksandra
Konieczna, as a sexton who suspects the truth. In
Polish.—A.L. (2/17 & 24/20) (In limited release.)Downhill
Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Will Ferrell star in
this remake of the 2014 Swedish drama “Force
Majeure,” which is itself a twist on Ernest
Hemingway’s story “The Short Happy Life
of Francis Macomber,” a tale of a marriage
instantly soured when the husband displays
cowardice. Here, the Stantons—Billie (Louis-
Dreyfus), Pete (Ferrell), and their two young
sons—arrive at a resort in the Austrian Alps
for a ski vacation; when a controlled avalanche
appears to threaten the family, Pete, rather than
face the danger alongside his wife and children,
bolts, then denies having done so. The film’s
directors, Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, who wrote
the script with Jesse Armstrong, split the origi-
nal movie’s sardonic tone into separate strands
of over-the-top comedy and harsh melodrama.
The latter schema is promising, but the movie
doesn’t follow through on it; family life is ren-
dered so clichéd that the story offers nothing
but mechanical plot points, and the poorly
defined characters have no identities beyond
the actors’ personalities.—R.B. (In wide release.)Premature
The director Rashaad Ernesto Green’s poignant
coming-of-age drama reflects his fruitful collab-
oration with Zora Howard, who wrote the script
with him and also stars as Ayanna, a high-school
senior in Harlem who is preparing to leave for
college. But Ayanna’s plans change when she
begins a relationship with an earnest and deter-
mined musician named Isaiah (Joshua Boone)
and becomes pregnant. Though their romance is
at the movie’s center, the drama rests on a solidly
constructed foundation of friendship—Ayanna’s
bonds with her three best friends (played by
Imani Lewis, Tashiana Washington, and Alexis
Marie Wint). The young women’s deep-rooted,
no-holds-barred rapport comes to life in dia-
logue of brash vitality and passionate under-
standing; the actors, aided by Green’s attentive
direction, realize these scenes with energy and
nuance that the overarching plot often omits. The
merely illustrative approach to the main drama
undercuts the lived-in specificity of this fine-
grained background. Michelle Wilson brings
strength and vulnerability to her too few scenes
as Ayanna’s mother.—R.B. (In limited release.)