Boy Meets Girl Citizen Kane Ivan’s Childhood The Story of a Three-Day Pass

classic films

KEITH UHLICH

Citizen Kane

Boy Meets Girl (1984, Leos Carax, France) Can you make a classic movie your first time out? Leos Carax, the infamous French filmmaker whose most recent effort, Annette, is now in theaters, did just that with his debut, Boy Meets Girl. A captivating black-and-white romance between two tortured souls, the movie initially follows aspiring filmmaker Alex (Denis Levant, Carax’s frequent collaborator) and model-intraining Mireille (Mireille Perrier) on separate tracks. Both are reeling from relationships gone bad, until they fatefully cross paths at a chi-chi house party (a hypnotically prolonged sequence) and embark on an operatic path to tragedy. Carax was 23 when he helmed the project, which took home an award from Cannes, and earned some tut-tuts for what was perceived as juvenile brooding. Yet there’s an empathy here for the weary, the aimless, and the heartache-prone that feels ageless and wise beyond its years. (Streaming on Amazon.)

Citizen Kane (1941, Orson Welles, USA) Boy wonder Orson Welles was also in his twenties when he cowrote, produced, directed and starred in the grandaddy of all first-film classics. Publishing tycoon Charles Foster Kane (Welles) dies in the opening scene, and everything that follows is an interrogation (primarily via flashback) of what he meant by his dying word, “Rosebud.” It’s a sled. C’mon, people. Everyone knows it’s a sled. But the symbol isn’t the point—it’s that of a life recalled, by a varying cast of colorful characters, in all its contradictions and calamities, so that we’re no closer to solving the mystery of Kane at the end as we are at the beginning. In a movie filled to bursting with astonishing sounds and images (Gregg Toland’s cinematography is a masterclass all on its own), there’s perhaps none greater than the one of Kane reflected through mirrors into infinite versions of himself. (Streaming on HBOMax.)

Ivan’s Childhood (1962, Andrei Tarkovsky, Soviet Union) Early in his life, the great Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky visited a medium, who summoned the spirit of author Boris Pasternak to commune with the aspiring filmmaker. “You will make 7 films,” said Pasternak. “Only 7?” asked Tarkovsky. “But they’ll all be

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<10 NEW BOOKS

Our Country Friends by Gary Shteyngart (Random House; $23.49)

Eight friends, one country house, four romances, and six months in isolation—a novel about love, friendship, family, and betrayal, a book that reads like a great Russian novel, or Chekhov on the Hudson, by a novelist The New York Times calls “one of his generation’s most original writers.” Call it the COVID-era Decameron. In March 2020, eight friends decamp to a country house for six months to spend quarantine together. After the last year, you can just imagine how badly that must have gone—even if they had an abundance of outdoor space. But Shteyngart has demonstrated time and again a natural talent for bringing wit to even the bleakest situations.

The Judge's List: A Novel by John Grisham (Doubleday, $29.99)

In The Whistler, Lacy Stoltz investigated a corrupt judge who was taking millions in bribes from a crime syndicate. She put the criminals away, but only after being attacked and nearly killed. Three years later, she is tired of her work for the Florida Board on Judicial Conduct and ready for a change. Then she meets a mysterious woman who is so frightened she uses a number of aliases. Jeri Crosby’s father was murdered 20 years earlier in a case that remains unsolved and that has grown stone cold. But Jeri has a suspect whom she has become obsessed with and has stalked for two decades. Along the way, she has discovered other victims.

Suspicions are easy enough, but proof seems impossible. The man is brilliant, patient, and always one step ahead of law enforcement. He is the most cunning of all serial killers. He knows forensics, police procedure, and most important: he knows the law. He is a judge, in Florida—under Lacy’s jurisdiction.

He has a list, with the names of his victims and targets, all unsuspecting people unlucky enough to have crossed his path and wronged him in some way. How can Lacy pursue him, without becoming the next name on his list?

Piglet: The Unexpected Story of a Deaf, Blind, Pink Puppy and His Family by Melissa Shapiro DVM (Atria; $26)

When veterinarian Melissa Shapiro gets a call about a tiny deaf blind puppy rescued from a hoarding situation in need of fostering, she doesn’t hesitate to say, “yes.” Little does she know how that decision will transform her, her family, and legions of admirers destined to embrace the saga of the indomitable pink pup. One of the most anxious dogs Melissa had ever encountered, the traumatized Piglet weighed under two pounds upon his welcome into the Shapiro household—which included Melissa’s husband Warren and their three college-aged kids, plus six other rescued dogs. After weeks of reassurance, and lots of love, Piglet connected, gained confidence, and his extraordinary spirit emerged. Melissa soon forged a powerful bond with Piglet, allowing the two to communicate without sound or visual cues.

When the day arrived to say good-bye to the now dashing, six-pound pink boy dog with the larger than life spirit, Melissa faced a heartwrenching decision. Could she hand him over to someone willing to give Piglet the full-time attention he required or could she adapt her schedule and her household to make a permanent place for him? Of course, the answer was simple: love would find a way.

Curious, engaged, and incredibly eager to learn, Piglet quickly became part of the family. What started out as a few simple Facebook posts of Piglet and his pack rapidly evolved into a global celebration of Piglet’s infectiously positive mindset. Piglet illustrates this story of one special little puppy with a purpose to teach the power of empathy, love, and kindness. n < 8 NEW MUSIC

Layla Revisited (Live At LOCKN') [2 CD] Tedeschi Trucks Band Fantasy

Layla Revisited (Live at LOCKN') captures Tedeschi Trucks Band at their incendiary best, together with Phish's renowned guitarist/vocalist Trey Anastasio. Recorded August 24, 2019, the performance of the legendary album in its entirety was kept secret until the moment the band took stage. It’s clear that their surprise performance that night—which included close TTB collaborator Doyle Bramhall II on guitar— meant something special to the fans who experience it.

Freedom over Everything Vince Mendoza Modern Recordings

Grammy-winner Vince Mendoza is known for various activities: he’s been a regular guest with the Metropole Orchestra for many years (and won a Grammy for his collaboration with Elvis Costello), arranged the strings for the current Melody Gardot album, did the arrangements of the first two Björk albums and has worked with many other superstars for decades. His latest work is inspired by current events in the USA and features extraordinary guests: Roots rapper Black Thought, Julia Bullock, Joshua Redman and Antonio Sanchez.

Release Me 2 Barbra Streisand Sony Legacy

The only artist to ever achieve #1 albums in SIX consecutive decades, Barbra Streisand’s Release Me 2 is yet another gem in her unparalleled career. The follow-up to her acclaimed 2012 album, Release Me, this new collection contains previously unreleased tracks from Barbra’s vault, including duets with Willie Nelson and Kermit the Frog. With songs by Burt Bacharach, Hal David, Barry Gibb, Paul Williams, Randy Newman, Michel Legrand and Alan & Marilyn Bergman, Harold Arlen, and Carole King, Barbra describes Release Me 2 as, “A lovely walk down memory lane…a chance to revisit, and in some cases, add a finishing instrumental touch to songs that still resonate for me in meaningful ways. n

cy Jones on your new album, so too are members of your family—your father, Michael on “Cry,” and grandfather David Gauthier.

Working with my dad was amazing, as he is one of the very best bass players in the world. The weight of him playing is equitable to the gravitas of this song. The tradition of Black farm families and their music—you don’t hear that much anymore. I wanted to reclaim that, reclaim my family’s lineage, and put that into what I do musically now. Each and every one of these people had, at one time or another, a role in teaching me something important, something that pushed me to develop into exactly who I am today. This is about paying something back, but it is so much more. There are years and years of my life in these songs.

You called “We Are,” in its totality, “a culmination of my life to this point” before its release. Does that still stand?

It does. I want We Are to impact people who listen to this music. Lineage plays a role in this as I want new artists, dancers, and musicians to get something from following my quest.

Thelonious Monk is a hero of yours. What do you recall about hearing him the first time? I felt a kindred spirit in Monk when I first heard him at 18 years old when I moved to New York and was at Julliard. I found myself listening to him for an entire year straight, after being at this jam session—one that still happens uptown, on the Upper West Side at 96th Street—at Cleopatra’s Needle, where someone started play-

Doing the “Hump Day Dance” with Stephen Colbert. ing Evidence. I had never heard Monk before. The theme, the melody, sounded like what I had been working on in the practice room at school. I had been hearing it in my head forever as I was trying to approach this sound and really develop it. After I got home and checked out Evidence, I realized that the song I had in my head, that I thought I’d created, was something he had already developed a version of 50 years earlier.

Coming back to ‘live,’ and The Late Show” band: how do you interact with that ensemble of musicians, as opposed to your trio that you interact with on your albums and your concerts

The trio is less about rehearsing. Not that we don’t rehearse; we do. But we don’t have to rehearse. It’s more about communicating and putting together these structures. All of the songs on this new album, the forms got set up as different structures that we go in between. We cue each other as to when we’re going into the next section. There are structures that we play with that are malleable. With the Late Show band, we rehearse in a way that is more like an orchestra. I have some of the greatest orchestra players who can play any type of music, and multiple instruments. There, it is just about me developing a repertoire where I’m writing out parts or the whole arrangement. It’s a different approach, but there we do create space for spontaneous communication that’s more akin to the avantgarde stuff I do with the trio. The structure of The Late Show doesn’t always allow for that, but it is there—more so than on any other show. n

Jon Batiste during a taping of an episode of Austin City Limits at ACL Live on July 18, 2021 in Austin, Texas. (Photo by Gary Miller/Getty Images) Strutting his stuff the night he won an Oscar for best original score for the animated film Soul at the April 25 ceremony in Los Angeles. Photo by Chris Pizzello-Pool/Getty Images

Performing on the steps of the Brooklyn Library at a Juneteenth event. Credit: Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

<5 SAFFRON’S SPOT

But that’s not the story for me. I became friends with the sheep’s owners, Julie and Anthony. He was a shop teacher and a jewelry-maker, as well as the kind of solid guy you need to be to run a sheep farm. Julie had a day job, but otherwise, her life centered around the remarkable wool the animals produced. Fiber artists would reserve the coats of Julie’s prized sheep immediately after the last growth was sheared. She also kept angora rabbits, and during an afternoon visit, I watched Julie spin yarn directly from the animal as it rested contented on her lap. I painted one of their rams named Zeus—whose gruff exterior belied a very sweet disposition. He grew prize-winning wool as well, and like most of the sheep was fitted with a canvas bag that was worn until it was time for the next shearing. The coat grew inside, protected from the elements, and when the wrap was removed, his wool looked and felt like whipped cream.

I painted a lamb that was minutes old after watching it born in the middle of the night of March 3rd in one of their sheds. I remember that date because it was 3 am on 3/3/03—Julie’s Birthday. And about 3 degrees, too. There were other paintings as well; a sheep being sheared and a mother with her two lambs: one white one black.

The farm is gone. Julie was lost (in any real sense) to Alzheimer’s, and Anthony deals with it still. That part is heartbreaking. But there were many good times. A lot of art was made because of Anthony and Julie, through his Industrial Arts classes, and his jewelry, and the wool Julie sent out into the world to become gorgeous works of fiber art. And you can include my paintings, which reflected not just my thoughts as an artist, but my reaction to that wonderful part of the world I experienced—the life, nature, and beauty they shared with me.

When Doreen and I built our house in 2009, we retired Sheep’s Clothing and hung it on a prominent wall, where it could be seen from everywhere in the living section of the house. That was a long time ago. When we found out it was going to the Michener Museum for six months, we had to decide what to put in its place. The replacement painting had to be large enough and strong enough to fill some hefty, impassioned shoes. We have a bunch of great paintings by other artists that would fit the space, among them a wonderful George Thomson townscape, a fabulous Jen Warpole trapeze image, and a stunning Ann Cooper Dobbins floral. They all could hold the wall with ease. But we knew that every time we looked at them, we would remember Saffron—Julie, and Anthony too—and that wouldn’t be fair. We love all the paintings we have, but love wasn’t the point.

Then Doreen had a great idea. I should do a painting of Sheep’s Clothing hanging on its wall before it leaves and put that new image in its place. It was brilliant, making use of how I address my personal world—a more than suitable temporary replacement for my pretty girl dressed in white. n

<12 FILM ROUNDUP

nately minimizes his personal stamp. There’s still plenty of captivatingly morose struggle to be had in the tale of teenage giant robot pilot Shinji Ikari (Megumi Ogata), whose fate is intertwined with that of every being on Planet Earth. Yet the gorgeous imagery (particularly the vertiginous battle for Paris that opens the film) is often at odds with the religious and philosophical musings, the supercharged spectacle sadly detracting from the heady substance. [N/R] HHH

The Green Knight (Dir. David Lowery). Starring: Dev Patel, Alicia Vikander, Joel Edgerton. A Ghost Story and Pete’s Dragon writer-director David Lowery retells an Arthurian legend in this rather dour and dull fantasy, one that improves slightly in retrospect because of its compelling final twenty minutes. Dev Patel plays aspiring knight of the round table Gawain (Dev Patel), who, in an early scene before the assembled court of King Arthur (Sean Harris), cavalierly duels with the Green Knight (Ralph Ineson, under layers of makeup that make him resemble one of the Lord of the Rings’s sentient tree spirits, the Ents). Despite being dealt what looks like a death blow, the Green Knight survives and instructs Gawain to meet him in his kingdom one year hence so that he may return the decapitative favor. Thus begins a quest that involves everything from an irritating scavenger (Barry Keoghan) to a bisexual lord (Joel Edgerton), as well as a dual role (a poor androgynous innocent and a sexually tempting aristocrat) for the exceedingly bland Alicia Vikander. But it’s only when the film turns into a Last Temptation of Christ riff during its extended climax that Lowery appears engaged by the material in a manner other than cursory. [R] HH1/2

Val (Dirs. Ting Poo and Leo Scott). Documentary. The Iceman (as in Top Gun’s Iceman) cometh in this intimate doc profile of actor Val Kilmer. Much of it is comprised of footage the dedicated, oft-pilloried performer shot himself on the sets of his movies, as well as among his family, be it his Christian Scientist parents, his ex-wife Joanne Whalley, or children Mercedes and Jack (the latter of whom narrates the film). In recent years, Kilmer had a battle with throat cancer that left him with a tracheotomy, as well as an altered voice and appearance. We see as much of him in his current state as we do his days as a pretty boy with a volatile talent that was rarely taken advantage of, and which most people tried to contain. There’s a bit of a “gawk” factor to Val, though it’s of a knowing sort. Kilmer grapples onscreen at times with the fact that he’s selling an ideal past version of himself to make ends meet; you’d expect nothing less from this mercurial performer than self-knowing exploitation. Yet he does it all with good humor and an overall emotional openness that is as disarming as it is deeply moving. [R] HHH1/2 n good,” came the reply. His first feature is indeed good, great even, and a classic among artists as varied as Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Paul Sartre and Krzysztof Kieślowski. It portrays the hardscrabble life of a 12-year-old boy, Ivan (Nikolai Burlyayev), doing his darndest to survive WWII. He becomes a resistance fighter in the Russian army, adept at reconnaissance missions because of his small stature. But that doesn’t forestall his inevitable doom. As often in Tarkovsky, Ivan’s existence is paralleled with nature in all its beauty and indifference, with trees possessing a particularly poetic charge in the ways they act as both shelter and silent witness. (Streaming on Criterion Channel.)

The Story of a Three-Day Pass (1967, Melvin Van Peebles, France/U.S.) Iconoclastic AfricanAmerican multihyphenate Melvin Van Peebles (Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song) made his feature debut with this terrific comedydrama, recently restored and soon available via a comprehensive Criterion Collection box set. He adapted the story from his own novel and shot the resulting feature in France (Van Peebles moved to Europe early in his career after being unable to find film work in America). Harry Baird plays a black American G.I. abroad, who is granted a three-day pass from his duties by his officious and offensive white captain. He wanders Paris and meets a beautiful white woman (Nicole Berger) who he falls in love with…and she, seemingly, with him. Endlessly inventive in ways similar to French New Wave classics (see the dueling fantasy sequences in which the two lovers hysterically imagine how the other person views them), the film is also a prickly satire of racism and miscegenation. It’s clear evidence of Van Peebles’s enduring, inimitable talent to prod both the cerebrum and the funny bone. (Available through Criterion.) n

<16 CLASSIC FILMS

Answer to this month’s puzzle