SURREAL SEPTEMBER
Let's get weird.
FANDO Y LIS 1968
Surrealist filmmaker, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s unique career began with this bizarre tale of corrupted innocence, sadomasochistic love and unattainable paradise. Jodorowsky’s sublime freak-out follows impotent Fando (Sergio Kleiner) and his paraplegic sweetheart Lis (Diana Mariscal) searching for the enchanted city of Tar where spiritual ecstasy resides.
Sunday, September 1
Tuesday, September 3
Director: Alejandro Jodorowsky
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Starring: Sergio Kleiner, Diana Mariscal
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Runtime: 97 min., Mexico
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Language: Spanish w/ English subtitles
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Director: David Cronenberg​
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Starring: Peter Weller, Judy Davis, Ian Holm, Julian Sands​
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Runtime: 115 min., Canada
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Language: English
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NAKED LUNCH 1991
In this adaptation of William S. Burroughs’s hallucinatory, once-thought-unfilmable novel Naked Lunch, directed by David Cronenberg, a part-time exterminator and full-time drug addict named Bill Lee (Peter Weller) plunges into the nightmarish Interzone, a netherworld of sinister cabals and giant talking bugs. Alternately humorous and grotesque—and always surreal—the film mingles aspects of Burroughs’s novel with incidents from the writer’s own life, resulting in an evocative paranoid fantasy and a self-reflexive investigation into the mysteries of the creative process.
Saturday, September 7
Sunday, September 8
BRAZIL 1985
In the dystopian masterpiece Brazil, Jonathan Pryce plays a daydreaming everyman who finds himself caught in the soul-crushing gears of a nightmarish bureaucracy. This cautionary tale by Terry Gilliam, one of the great films of the 1980s, has come to be esteemed alongside antitotalitarian works by the likes of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. And in terms of set design, cinematography, music, and effects, Brazil is a nonstop dazzler.
Tuesday, September 10
Director: Terry Gilliam​
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Starring: Jonathan Pryce, Robert De Niro, Katherine Helmond, Ian Holm​
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Runtime: 143 min., UK/USA
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Language: English
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Director: Leos Carax​
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Starring: Denis Lavant, Edith Scob, Eva Mendes, Kylie Minogue​
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Runtime: 115 min., France
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Language: French w/ English subtitles
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HOLY MOTORS 1985
“Nothing makes ‘sense’ in this crazy-beautiful reverie about movies, love and the love of movies...[a]nd yet everything is exactly as it should be.” -- Entertainment Weekly
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Joyous, hilarious, and otherworldly are but a few ways to describe this liquid narrative from Leos Carax: creator of LOVERS ON THE BRIDGE, BOY MEETS GIRL, MAUVAIS SANG and POLA X.
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In the performance(s) of a lifetime, regular Carax collaborator Denis Lavant is an amorphous Actor on a chameleonic mission to inhabit a variety of public roles: a bag lady, an assassin, a sewer-dwelling freakazoid, a heated lover and much more. Chauffeured around Paris by Edith Scob (EYES WITHOUT A FACE), Lavant commits to each character so thoroughly, and engages you so quickly with each swap that it’s impossible to predict what comes next. Essential 21st-century viewing.