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Photo courtesy of VCUarts
Still from "A Separation"
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Photo courtesy of VCUarts
Still from "When Pigs Fly"
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Photo by Godlis
"When Pigs Fly" director Sara Driver
VCUarts Cinematheque, an ongoing film series, presents an around-the-world triptych of challenging, chameleonic motion pictures, shown in glorious new 35mm prints. This fall’s celluloid showcase ends strong, with three outstanding and idiosyncratic selections, free of charge.
A Separation, a 2012 film from Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, is a wrenching story of marriage, money and the demands of family set against the background of a restrictive
society. The first Iranian film to win the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, this powerful tale won the plaudits of critics and audiences alike. David Thomson wrote in The New Republic that “you cannot watch the film without feeling kinship with the characters and admitting their decency as well as their mistakes.” It screens Nov. 4.
One of the series’ most anticipated offerings, When Pigs Fly, is an irreverent and light-hearted work from 1993 that features the great Alfred Molina as a scruffy jazz musician who finds inspiration and solace from a rocking chair haunted by two spirits, one of them played by acerbic British singer Marianne Faithfull. Music fans will dig her presence, as well as the original score by The Clash’s Joe Strummer, while movie buffs will delight in the extended cameo by veteran character actor Seymour Cassel and the film’s surreal flights of fancy. Director Sara Driver, mainly known for her work with director Jim Jarmusch, will be on hand as a guest speaker at the Nov. 11 screening.
Amour, from acclaimed Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke, is the final entry in the series, showing Dec. 2. It tells the story of a loving elderly couple (Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva) coping with their own mortality after the wife suffers a paralyzing stroke. Actress Isabelle Huppert, who was so memorable in Haneke’s The Piano Teacher, plays their concerned daughter in this 2012 drama, which garnered several Oscar nominations, including one for Riva for Best Actress. Cineastes know Haneke is a precise and calculating director who rarely resorts to sentimentality, which makes his matter-of-fact rendering of this beautiful love story that much more absorbing and heartbreaking.
Films in the Tuesday-night Cinematheque series begin at 7 p.m. at the Grace Street Theatre, 924 W. Grace St. arts.vcu.edu/cinema/cinematheque
