The New Yorker – May 13, 2019

10 THENEWYORKER,M AY 13, 2019

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COURTESY GEIDAI FILMS

The modern cinema is defined by writer-directors whose movies re-

consider the relationship between images and spoken language; the

prolific young Japanese filmmaker Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, the subject of a

retrospective at Metrograph (May 10-17), finds original responses to the

challenge, as seen in his first feature, “Passion,” from 2008. Its flagrantly

melodramatic subject, involving a fraying circle of friends nearing thirty

in middle-class Tokyo, could spark the plot of a soap opera: a ne’er-do-

well man is in love with a woman who teaches high-school math. She’s

engaged to a man who’s a part-time university lecturer, but he’s still in

love with a woman with whom he had an affair years earlier. Hamaguchi’s

script offers florid arias of confrontation and self-revelation; in his striking

repertoire of visual compositions, including flurries of urgent closeups and

thrillingly panoramic long takes, the poised and assertive actors seem to

fill not just the screen but the city itself with his prose.—Richard Brody

INREVIVAL

PHOTOGRAPH BY KYOKO HAMADA FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE

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MOVIES

Avengers: Endgame

After twenty-two Marvel films, we have fi-

nally reached some sort of culmination—for

now. This new installment, clocking in at

more than three hours, dashes any hopes of

a modest farewell. The directors, as before,

are Joe and Anthony Russo, and many of

the franchise’s main characters continue to

hog the stage: Iron Man (Robert Downey,

Jr.), Captain America (Chris Evans), Black

Widow (Scarlett Johansson), Hulk (Mark

Ruffalo), and Thor (Chris Hemsworth),

who is really not looking his best. Also in

attendance is Thanos (Josh Brolin), who,

on the commendable principle that you

should finish what you have started, means

to rid the universe of those pesky Avengers

once and for all. The movie is sometimes

treacle-slow and glazed with grief, but it

rallies for a noisy climax, as heroes old and

new gather for one last round of construc-

tive destruction. Fans (and fans alone) will

melt into puddles of excitement.—Anthony

Lane (Reviewed in our issue of 5/6/19.) (In

wide release.)

Pasolini

Abel Ferrara’s daringly subjective sketch of

the last day in the life of the Italian director

and writer—who was murdered in 1975—

ranges from meticulous dramatizations of

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s personal and professional

encounters to realizations of his unmade

movies. Pasolini (Willem Dafoe) is sombre,

pensive, and resolute while contending with

the censorship of his film “Salò,” consider-

ing political violence then rampant in Italy,

and delivering a scathing interview against

media-fuelled consumerism. In serene gath-

erings with his longtime actors Laura Betti

(Maria de Medeiros) and Ninetto Davoli

(Riccardo Scamarcio), Pasolini seems to be

composing and envisioning even during chit-

chat. (The real-life Davoli plays the star of

a metaphysical-pornographic fantasy that

Pasolini had planned to film, and which Fer-

rara creates, evocatively but tamely.) The

final episode involves Pasolini’s pickup of a

seventeen-year-old boy (Damiano Tamilia),

who was later convicted of his murder. Here,

Ferrara unfolds his own version of the killing

but, straining toward the sublime, stumbles

into vulgarity. In English and Italian.—Rich-

ard Brody (In limited release.)

Return to Bollène

The classic tale of a prodigal son’s homecoming

gets an incisive update in the first feature by

Saïd Hamich, who sets the action in the small

city in southern France where he grew up. The

protagonist, Nassim (Anas El Baz), who works

in finance in Abu Dhabi, travels to his home

town of Bollène to visit his mother (Jamila

Charik) and his siblings, and to introduce them

to his fiancée, Elisabeth (Kate Colebrook), a

white American woman. His family (like Ha-

mich’s) is Moroccan; they live in a segregated

neighborhood, and the city is now governed by

the racist far right. With each reunion, Nassim,

who has long rejected his family’s traditions

and Islamic practice, reopens old conflicts and

sparks new ones; he suddenly finds himself an

outsider everywhere. Hamich imbues Nassim’s

tense encounters and troubled observations

with a deliberate and mournful pace that re-

flects both private melancholy and political

outrage. In Arabic, French, and English.—R.B.

(Museum of the Moving Image, May 12.)

The White Crow

Ralph Fiennes’s film, both cautious and intent,

guides us through the early years of the ballet

dancer Rudolf Nureyev (Oleg Ivenko), from his

impoverished childhood in the Soviet Union

to his momentous decision, at a Paris airport,

to defect to the West, in 1961. David Hare’s

script, adapted from Julie Kavanagh’s biography,

divides Nureyev’s young life into segments and

flicks back and forth between them. Fiennes

himself plays Alexander Pushkin, a kindly mel-

ancholic who teaches Nureyev at a ballet school

in Leningrad. The protégé repays his master by

sleeping with his wife (Chulpan Khamatova),

yet the film remains solemnly unsensational,

sharing Nureyev’s cultural gusto but making

no attempt to match his wilder side. Although

Ivenko, a trained dancer rather than an actor,

can be flat in his delivery of lines, he compen-

sates with the fierce and soaring agility of his

movements onstage. There, perhaps, viewers

new to Nureyev will start to see what the clamor

was all about.—A.L. (5/6/19) (In wide release.)

Wrong Move

Wim Wenders’s 1975 drama is an update of the

primordial Bildungsroman, Goethe’s “Wilhelm

Meister’s Apprenticeship.” Wenders’smodern

Wilhelm (Rüdiger Vogler) is a young bourgeois

man with a great record collection and a head

full of frustrated ambitions, who escapes from

his family home into an artist’s life. En route

toBonn, Wilhelm joins a group of performers,

including the acrobat Mignon (Nastassja Kinski,

in her first film) and the actress Therese (Hanna

Schygulla). Wenders grafts the novelistic frame-

work onto a road movie that’s a virtual documen-

tary of West German sights and moods. What

he finds is a nation hemmed in by prosperity

and history. With a keen eye for cityscapes, he

sees the sleek forms of postwar German archi-

tecture as mirrors within mirrors that stifle

thought by means of style. Linkingthe coun-

try’s literary heritage to the indelible stain of

Nazi-era depravities, heturns a self-consciously

casual ramble into a vast soul-searching.—R.B.

(Film Forum, May 12, and streaming.)

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