What I’m Seeing This Week: My loving wife and I have a babysitter and are going to go see Nosferatu at either Cinemapolis or the Regal Ithaca Mall this weekend!
Also in Theaters: My favorite new film now playing Ithaca is Babygirl, which as Alexis Soloski recently noted in the New York Times is part of a bumper crop of “age-gap romances centered on women in midlife” that also includes this week’s home video recommendation. Its final scenes literalize the notion that a failure to communicate is the root of all interpersonal conflicts a bit too much for my tastes, but you can easily imagine Nicole Kidman’s Romy Mathis ending up someplace very different, and the film absolutely gets credit for that. She and male co-lead Harris Dickinson are terrific, as is Antonio Banderas in a supporting role. Babygirl closes at Cinemapolis today but continues its run at the Regal at least through Thursday. I also enjoyed A Complete Unknown, which is at Cinemapolis and the Regal all week. I’m intrigued by The Last Showgirl, which opens at both of those theaters this week, and Better Man, which opens at the Regal, but alas my schedule only permits me to see one movie. On the repertory front, the 4k restoration of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg at Cinemapolis for one week only should be your top choice if you’ve never seen it. I wrote about director Jacques Demy’s next film The Young Girls of Rochefort last February if you’d like some sense of what you’re in for. But seriously: just go!
Home Video: Last Summer, which is now streaming on the Criterion Channel, is similar to Babygirl in that it also features a female protagonist in her 50s who is depicted as sexy and a plot that revolves around implications and after effects of her having sex with a much younger man. Or boy, maybe, in this case. Here she’s named Anne and played by Léa Drucker, who in the words of David Ehrlich (speaking of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort) “still faintly resembles a young Catherine Deneuve” and he’s played by Samuel Kircher, a 21-year-old in real life whose character Théo is still in high school in the film. Oh yeah, and he’s Anne’s stepson. But while that may sound lurid and sensational, where Babygirl is specifically about the difficulty of achieving both personal and professional fulfillment when the deck is stacked against your gender, Last Summer is about the even more general disturbing urge to throw it all away that I suspect many people who “have it all” will identify with.
Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts can be found here. A running list of all of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.
The Prodigal Cinephile 