10 THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER18, 2021
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For more reviews, visit
newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town COURTESY ICARUS FILMSMetrograph has reopened its theatres while maintaining its online
program, and it’s offering, in both formats, “Le Navire ‘Night’ ” (“The
Ship ‘Night’ ”), from 1979, written and directed by Marguerite Duras,
which is as original as it is rare. (Screenings start Oct. 15; streaming
begins Oct. 18.) Duras, one of the great modern novelists, was also an
innovative filmmaker, and here she devises a new genre that meshes with
her literary artistry—the cinematic audiobook. She applies it to a story
about phone sex, which she transforms into an existential mystery and a
gothic nightmare. It follows a twentysomething non-couple—a man who
works nights at a phone company, and a woman who’s dying of leukemia
and living as a shut-in at her wealthy father’s suburban villa—who reach
peaks of erotic pleasure by masturbating to each other’s voices, but never
meet. Duras and Benoît Jacquot (a young director) narrate the elliptical
yet ecstatic tale in incantatory voice-overs as the movie’s images show the
places where the action could have happened and the actors—Dominique
Sanda, Bulle Ogier, and Mathieu Carrière—who would have performed
the drama if she’d filmed it. To match the story’s might-have-beens, Duras
invents the conditional tense on film.—Richard BrodyONTHEBIGSCREEN
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MOVIES
Carnival of Souls
Herk Harvey, a Kansas-based maker of indus-
trial films, directed this horror movie, from
1962; it’s one of the great American independent
films. After a catastrophic car accident, a church
organist named Mary (Candace Hilligoss) re-
turns from the dead to live a seemingly ordinary
life, until her nonexistence catches up with
her. The film blends metaphysical shock with
social disturbance; its story of death, sex, and
religion is rooted in its place and time like a
documentary. Mary is frightened silly by visions
of a ghoulish man (played by Harvey); mean-
while, she tries to fend off a pushy neighbor,
John Linden (Sidney Berger), who repeatedly
asks her out, but her terrifying visions make
it tough for her to stay alone at night. Harvey
realizes baroque fantasies and hectic delusions
with ingenious manipulations of sound and
image (which he desynchronizes to nightmarish
effect), and he adds a sense, similar to that of
Michelangelo Antonioni’s contemporaneous
films, of the alienating power of architecture.
Harvey died in 1996 without making another
feature.—Richard Brody (Playing on TCM Oct. 16
and streaming on the Criterion Channel.)The Tarnished Angels
In 1932, an itinerant troupe of stunt fliers and
air racers at a New Orleans fairground draws the
attention of Burke Devlin (Rock Hudson), an
ambitious and colorful journalist. His fascination
with Roger Shumann (Robert Stack), a First
World War ace pilot with a craving for danger,
is amplified by his attraction to the flier’s wife,
LaVerne (Dorothy Malone), a flashy parachutejumper of vast yet untapped emotional resources
who is adored by Roger’s crack mechanic, Jiggs
(Jack Carson), and lusted after by all the hang-
ers-on; as for Roger himself, he’s ready to betray
her for a serviceable airplane. To get their story,
Burke has to become a part of it. In this 1957 ad-
aptation of William Faulkner’s novel “Pylon,” the
director, Douglas Sirk, mines exotic Americana
for a philosophical strain of feminine endurance
in a land that’s both made and menaced by its
intrepid male warriors. With its tangled shad-
ows, fun-house mirrors, wrenching angles, and
glaring lights, the wide-screen black-and-white
photography evokes the psychological distortions
of reckless and rootless outsiders, the dispropor-
tion of their seedy circumstances to their doomed
heroism.—R.B. (Streaming on Tubi.)The Two Faces of a
Bamiléké Woman
The Cameroonian-born, Belgium-based direc-
tor Rosine Mbakam’s first-person documen-
tary, from 2016, fuses intimate inquiry with
historical insight. Accompanied by her white
European husband and their toddler son, she
returns to her native city, Yaoundé, to visit
her mother, whose recollections—including
of her marriage to a polygamous man—reveal
a hidden nexus of politics and tradition. A
probing interviewer, the filmmaker elicits her
mother’s and her aunts’ appalling memories
of the family’s and the country’s past, includ-
ing the sale of women for forced marriages
and the kidnapping of men for forced labor.
Mbakam, who does her own cinematography,
is a passionate portraitist who discerns ideas
in action; attentive to the physical labor that
occupies much of the women’s time, she re-
veals how the bonds between them sustain
the family both practically and emotionally.
The collective organization and financial in-
dependence of women emerge as essential for
progress, whether personal, political, or artis-
tic—and, as Mbakam says in her trenchant
voice-over, for her own intellectual awakening.
In French and Bamiléké.—R.B. (Streaming on
Amazon and Icarus.)Le Week-End
In Roger Michell’s 2014 film, written by Hanif
Kureishi, a middle-aged British couple (Jim
Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan), married for
thirty years, take the train to Paris, determined
to have a good time and resigned to the fact that,
in all probability, they won’t. They seem riven
with bickering, and yet, at the same time, the
sheer habit of argument serves to bind them to-
gether. Pleasure is grabbed on the go, in glimpses
of the city and in helpings of food and wine; no
less intermittent, but more awkward, is the mov-
ie’s farcical strain, which twice finds husband and
wife running out without paying the check. It’s
easy to tire (if not despair) of them, but both lead
actors are in fine sparring form, and the story is
rescued and revived, just in time, by a delectable
cameo from Jeff Goldblum. He plays an Amer-
ican in Paris—hopelessly pleased with himself,
and eternally foolish, yet very hard to dislike. He
could almost use a movie of his own.—Anthony
Lane (Reviewed in our issue of 3/17/14.) (Streaming
on Tubi, Amazon, and other services.)but also a site of soothing; it’s for the living
even more than for the dead. Harris turns
theatre into a monument, ephemeral but
real, to ongoing pain.—V.C. (7/12 & 19/21)
(playwrightshorizons.org; through Oct. 17.)