8 THENEWYORKER,M AY18, 2020
PHOTO 12 / ALAMY
Film at Lincoln Center’s Virtual Cinema series will offer, starting May 15,
a welcome restoration of a modern classic, Nanni Moretti’s “Caro Diario”
(“Dear Diary”), from 1993. This light-toned but thematically substantial
autofiction is organized like a sequence of diary entries brought to life
with Moretti’s wryly confessional voice-overs. The first section, “On My
Vespa,” shows Moretti as a Roman flâneur in fast motion, zipping through
the city and delighting in familiar sights; it blends sardonic observations
with musical fantasies and an awkward chance encounter with Jennifer
Beals, before concluding with a grand yet graceful memorial tribute to the
director and writer Pier Paolo Pasolini. The second part, “Islands,” a tale
of Moretti’s quest for solitude in a vain effort to write a script, becomes a
self-satirizing homage to Roberto Rossellini’s first film with Ingrid Berg-
man, “Stromboli.” The final section, “Doctors,” involving Moretti’s own
experience of chemotherapy (which he films) and his subsequent misad-
ventures with the Italian medical system, crowns his comedic vision of a
way of life, rooted in humane warmth, at risk of being lost.—Richard BrodyWHATTO STREAM
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newyorker.com/goings-on-about-towntour guide named Maria Mathis (Tommye
Myrick), a twenty-two-year-old black woman
who, desperate to escape small-town life, is
about to leave home for college. Maria comes
from a poor family descended from enslaved
Africans; Peter comes from a landowning Cre-
ole family (including mixed-race ancestors who
owned slaves), and their relationship is strained
by the groups’ long-standing social differences.
Jenkins’s spare, frank lyricism foregrounds the
couple’s tense discussions about the traumas
of history, the weight of cultural memory, and
the pressure of racial injustice; he lends the
intimate tale a vast and vital resonance.—Rich-
ard Brody (Streaming on the Criterion Channel.)
The Curious Case of
Benjamin Button
The director David Fincher and the writers
Eric Roth and Robin Swicord rework F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s gentle fantasy, about a man who is
born old and ages in reverse, into a sumptuous
and stirring romantic drama. With the frame-
work of a long-hidden diary and a mysterious
tale of concealed paternity, they turn Benja-
min’s recollections into flashbacks that begin
with his birth, on November 11, 1918. Pitt’s
face and head, made up to appear aged, are
digitally grafted onto a child’s body; the result
is an exquisite hyperrealism that floats through
history with the fragile bliss of dreams. In his
youth, Benjamin meets a girl named Daisy,
who, as an adult (played by Cate Blanchett),
is the love of his life; she grows older as he
becomes ever younger. His sense of being out
of synch with his times yields an intensified
sense of mortality; his keen, quiet serenity
is perched on the edge of tears. The movie’s
framing story, set in a New Orleans hospital
during Hurricane Katrina, is a grave reminder
of tragic impermanence.—R.B. (Streaming on
Netflix and other services.)Fourteen
The diverging paths and seething conflicts of
two lifelong friends, now young Brooklyn pro-
fessionals, are explored deeply and poignantly
in this deceptively calm melodrama, written
and directed by Dan Sallitt. It stars TallieMedel as Mara, an aspiring writer and teacher;
she’s working toward a master’s degree while
negotiating a fragile relationship with a soft-
ware engineer (C. Mason Wells) who’s often
on the road. Yet Mara’s tightest bond is with
Jo (Norma Kuhling), a social worker whose
temperamental ways—and substance-abuse
issues—impede Jo’s career and make friend-
ship an increasingly rough road. Mara and Jo
see each other through a series of romantic
troubles, with the burden of care landing on
the more settled Mara’s shoulders; the resulting
frustrations play out in sharply written, briskly
staged, urgently performed sequences that leap
daringly ahead in time through the friends’
major life changes and convey the sense of
days being seized from looming chaos. Medel,
an independent-film mainstay, and Kuhling, a
newcomer, hold the screen fiercely, together
and apart.—R.B. (Streaming on Grasshopper Film
and other sites.)Losing Ground
Kathleen Collins’s only feature, from 1982, is
the story of a middle-class black couple in New
York—Sarah (Seret Scott), a young philosophy
professor, and Victor (Bill Gunn), an older
artist—whose careers shake the fault lines in
their romance. Sarah plans to spend the sum-
mer writing an essay on ecstatic experience,
but Victor, an abstractionist in search of new
inspirations, finds them a country house in
an upstate town where he uses the locals as
models—especially one young woman, Celia
(Maritza Rivera). Sarah struggles with her
research while Victor’s art flourishes, and
Celia soon becomes an uneasy presence in
their home. Collins dramatizes crises of gen-
der and race—as well as of intellectual pursuit
and artistic ambition—with a decisive and nu-
anced touch, and her attentiveness to light and
color is itself painterly; the movie conveys a
thrillingly tactile sense of high-relief surfaces.
When Sarah accepts a role in a student film
along with a suave and graying actor (Duane
Jones) who offers consolation, the fusion of
cinema and life, of symbol and substance, rises
to a shriek of redemption.—R.B. (Streaming on
the Criterion Channel.)Pain and Glory
The latest film from Pedro Almodóvar stars
Antonio Banderas as Salvador Mallo, a movie
director in late middle age. (Many of the de-
tails are autobiographical.) He lives alone in
Madrid, attended by aches and pains of every
description; it is only in meeting figures from
his past—an actor with whom he once worked;
a former lover—that he rediscovers his cre-
ative strength. Now and then, we are spirited
back into that past, and to the happiness that
enveloped Salvador, as a boy (played by Asier
Flores), in the company of his mother, Jacinta
(Penélope Cruz). No one is more dexterous
than Almodóvar at slipping to and fro across
time, and never before has he, or the rueful
Banderas, conjured so convincing an air of
autumnal regret. A lovely performance from
Julieta Serrano, as the elderly Jacinta, is wholly
in keeping with the mood. In Spanish.—An-
thony Lane (Reviewed in our issue of 10/14/19.)
(Streaming on Amazon, Vudu, and other services.)