10 THENEWYORKER,M AY 9, 2022
1
For more reviews, visit
newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town COURTESY MKThe revelatory series “Forgotten Filmmakers of the French New Wave,”
at MOMA (May 4-June 2), shows a new generation of filmmakers in
the late nineteen-fifties and early sixties defying France’s conservatism
and censorship to depict the social lives of the country’s youth—which
included men’s efforts to pick up women. That subject inspired several
of the program’s scathing masterworks, such as Jacques Rozier’s “Adieu
Philippine,” in which the protagonist desperately seeks fun before re-
porting for military duty in France’s brutal, colonial war in Algeria; Jean
Rouch’s “La Punition,” in which a cloistered young woman tries to get
picked up as a sociological experiment and discovers a world of injustice;
and “La Dérive,” by Paule Delsol, one of the movement’s few female
directors, in which a young woman in revolt against provincial moralism
faces physical and emotional abuse. In Jean Eustache’s featurette “Santa
Claus Has Blue Eyes,” from 1966, a poor and unemployed young man’s
solitude is enforced by classist snobbery, the threats of violent men, and
his own delusions. The story, involving flashbacks and a voice-over, is
told in retrospect, looking back at the grim undercurrents of modern
times and dispelling nostalgia for youth.—Richard BrodyONTHEBIGSCREEN
1
MOVIES
In Front of Your Face
This new drama by the prolific Korean direc-
tor Hong Sangsoo is, like many of his movies,
set in the milieu of filmmaking, but it has a
haunting spiritual dimension that sets it apart
from his other work. It’s the story of a home-
coming: Sangok, a fiftysomething actress, has
been out of the business for a while—and out
of the country, living in the United States.
(She’s played by Lee Hyeyoung, who had
also withdrawn from movies for many years.)
While visiting her sister, Jeongok (Cho Yun-
hee), in Seoul, Sangok delves back into her
own past, visiting crucial sites of her youth,
including her childhood home. Responding to
a call from a prominent director named Jae-
won (Kwon Haehyo), Sangok also prepares to
return to movie acting—if her fragile health,
the reason for her return, can take it. Excavat-
ing long-suppressed memories and restoring
frayed relationships, Sangok expounds a pas-
sionate philosophy of life that’s embodied by
Lee’s poised, luminous presence and exalted
by Hong’s ardently attentive images.—Richard
Brody (In theatrical release.)Love & Mercy
Bill Pohlad’s 2014 film is about the rise and
fall of Brian Wilson, although it gently
suggests that, from the start, Wilson’s life
had been marked by risings and fallings of
every kind. Paul Dano plays Wilson as a
young man—already flush with surfer hits,
and heading toward the deeper and more
troubled waters of “Pet Sounds” and “Good
Vibrations”—and he dives into the gratifying
role as if it were a plunge pool. The older
Wilson is played by John Cusack, whose
looks may be wrong for the part but who
captures the hesitant moves of a wounded
creature—preyed upon by Eugene Landy
(Paul Giamatti), a dangerous quack with
tubs of pharmaceuticals, but rescued byMelinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks), the
sanest and strongest figure in the story.
Scholars of the Beach Boys will, no doubt,
find much to quarrel with here, yet the film
is wholeheartedly invested in the plight of
its characters—and, rarer still, in the joyous
mechanics of the songs. When did you last
see a musical bio-pic that seemed happiest—
and most patiently rapt with detail—in the
recording studio?—Anthony Lane (Reviewed
in our issue of 6/8/15.) (Streaming on HBO
Max, Prime Video, and other services.)Vortex
Gaspar Noé’s lugubrious, clinical, yet sus-
penseful and affecting drama depends on a
gimmick: for most of its two-and-a-quarter
hours, it’s done with a split screen, featuring
two nearly square frames showing separate
fields of action. It’s about the infirmities
and indignities of old age; its protagonists
are an elderly, unnamed Parisian couple.
The woman (Françoise Lebrun) is a former
psychiatrist who is precipitously declining
into dementia; the man (the longtime di-
rector Dario Argento) is a film critic with
heart trouble. They can no longer maintain
their huge apartment, which is cluttered with
books and papers and a lifetime of cinematic
and political memorabilia (centered on the
sixties), and the woman is at constant risk
of accidental self-harm. Their son, Stéphane
(Alex Lutz), a drug addict in recovery, tries
to place them in an assisted-living facility—
which his father, whose career and love affairs
aren’t over, resists. The movie plays like a
granularly realistic horror story, but it packs
an acrid undertone of anti-modern resigna-
tion—Noé depicts medical care as futile, the
streets as chaos, institutions as corrupt, and
the age of heroic struggles as long past.—R.B.
(In theatrical release.)Where Are My Children?
Lois Weber’s 1916 drama about sex, birth
control, and abortion presents the first of
these things as inevitable, making the sec-
ond necessary in order to avoid the third.
The story is launched by classist progres-
sivism rooted in eugenics. It’s centered on a
New York district attorney named Richard
Walton (Tyrone Power, Sr.), who believes
that unchecked procreation among the poor
is a breeding ground for crime; nonetheless,
he’s prosecuting the author of a book about
birth control for indecency. Meanwhile,
unbeknownst to Walton, whose marriage
is childless, his wife (Helen Riaume, Pow-
er’s wife) has been seeing an abortionist to
terminate her pregnancies, and her socialite
friends have been doing so, too. (Weber
punctuates the movie with metaphysical
visions of unborn children descending to
Earth or returning to the heavens.) The
movie veers into tragedies of two sorts—one
arising from the depravity of the rich, the
other from the vanity of the glamorous. We-
ber’s view of the privileged and the powerful
highlights their responsibilities; she joins
scrutiny of their hypocritical moralism to a
panorama of their misrule.—R.B. (Screening
May 7 at Metrograph.)