BAD ROMANCE
Toxic relationships, obsession, repression, Stockholm Syndrome, oh my!
TIE ME UP! TIE ME DOWN! 1990
Pedro Almodóvar’s colorful and controversial tribute to the pleasures and perils of Stockholm syndrome, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! is a rambunctious dark comedy starring Antonio Banderas as an unbalanced but alluring ex-mental-patient and Victoria Abril as the B-movie and former porn star he takes prisoner in the hopes of convincing her to marry him. A highly unconventional romance that came on the spike heels of Almodóvar’s international sensation Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, this is a splashy, sexy central work in the career of one of the world’s most beloved and provocative auteurs, radiantly shot by the director’s great cinematographer, José Luis Alcaine.
Friday, February 6
Director: Pedro Almodovar
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Starring: Antonio Banderas, Victoria Abril, Rossy de Palma
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Runtime: 102 min., Spain
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Language: Spanish w/ English subtitles
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DEEP END 1970
Jerzy Skolimowski’s (Director of EO, writer of Knife in the Water) first film in the United Kingdom finds him surveying the English scene with a jaundiced eye in the darkly comic tale of a high school drop-out (John Moulder Brown) who takes a job serving lusty middle-aged matrons at a crumbling London bathhouse, where he soon develops a consuming obsession with co-worker Jane Asher. An antidote to the advertiser’s myth of Swinging London which depicts a society seething with sexual repression, featuring the music of Cat Stevens and Krautrock giants Can (then billed as The Can), whose epic “Mother Sky” is put to phenomenal use in one of the film’s several standout set pieces. (Metrograph)
Sunday, February 8
Director: Jerzy Skolimowski
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Starring: John Moulder Brown, Jane Asher, Karl Michael Vogler
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Runtime: 92 min., UK
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Language: English
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THE HONEYMOON KILLERS 1969
Martha Beck (Shirley Stoler) is sullen, overweight, and lonely. Desperate for affection, she joins Aunt Carrie’s Friendship Club and strikes up a correspondence with Ray Fernandez (Tony Lo Bianco), a charismatic smooth talker who could be the man of her dreams—or a degenerate con artist. Based on a shocking true story and shot in documentary-style black and white by the confident and inspired Leonard Kastle, in what would be his only foray into filmmaking, The Honeymoon Killers is a stark portrayal of the desperate lengths to which a lonely heart will go to find true love.
Sunday, February 15
Director: Leonard Kastle
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Starring: Shirley Stoler, Tony Lo Bianco, Mary Jane Higby
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Runtime: 108 min., USA
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Language: English
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THE PIANO TEACHER 2001
In this riveting study of the dynamics of control, Academy Award–winning director Michael Haneke takes on Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek’s controversial 1983 novel about perverse female sexuality and the world of classical music. Haneke finds his match in Isabelle Huppert, who delivers an icy but quietly seething performance as Erika, a piano professor at a Viennese conservatory who lives with her mother in a claustrophobically codependent relationship. Severely repressed, she satisfies her masochistic urges only voyeuristically until she meets Walter (Benoît Magimel), a student whose desire for Erika leads to a destructive infatuation that upsets the careful equilibrium of her life. A critical breakthrough for Haneke, The Piano Teacher—which won the Grand Prix as well as dual acting awards for its stars at Cannes—is a formalist masterwork that remains a shocking sensation.
Sunday, February 22
Director: Michael Haneke
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Starring: Isabelle Huppert, Benoit Magimel, Annie Girardot
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Runtime: 131 min., France
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Language: French w/ English subtitles
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CRASH 1996
For this icily erotic fusion of flesh and machine, David Cronenberg adapted J. G. Ballard’s future-shock novel of the 1970s into one of the most singular and provocative films of the 1990s. A traffic collision involving a disaffected commercial producer, James (James Spader), and an enigmatic doctor, Helen (Holly Hunter), brings them, along with James’s wife, Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger, in a sublimely detached performance), together in a crucible of blood and broken glass—and it’s not long before they are all initiated into a kinky, death-obsessed underworld of sadomasochistic car-crash fetishists for whom twisted metal and scar tissue are the ultimate turn-ons. Controversial from the moment it premiered at Cannes—where it won a Special Jury Prize “for originality, for daring, and for audacity”—Crash has since taken its place as a key text of late-twentieth-century cinema, a disturbingly seductive treatise on the relationships between humanity and technology, sex and violence, that is as unsettling as it is mesmerizing.
Friday, February 27
Sunday, March 1
Director: David Cronenberg
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Starring: James Spader, Holly Hunter, Elias Koteas
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Runtime: 100 min., Canada
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Language: English
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