MUBI Update: 22 March 2012

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MUBI Update: 22 March 2012

Three audacious films – in entirely different ways – are our platform highlights this week on MUBI. Each’s ferocious camera-attack – on love, on a local working community, on the gangster genre – make them giddy, unusual cinematic experiences.

fidelity

Fidelity (Andrzej Żuławski, France)

As you may be aware, Polish auteur Żuławski is going through his first—and a complete—North American retrospective at the moment, to wild popularity and scucess. The organizing cinema, BAMcinématek, described the filmmaker thusly: “Dubbed the enfant terrible of Polish cinema, Andrzej Zulawski is one of the most controversial and polarizing filmmakers in the world.” At our online cinema publication, Notebook, we’ve interviewed the director. You can read that interview here.

This film is the last he has made and I couldn’t describe it better than BAM does:

“Photographer Cielia’s (Marceau) artsy shots incur the ire of her tabloid magazine employer while she struggles to remain faithful to her husband in the face of an overpowering attraction to another man. Zulawski’s take on the 17th-century novel La Princesse De Clèves is relatively restrained, by the director’s demented standards—meaning that it still manages to pack in freewheeling subplots involving Murdoch empire-type rumor mongering, human organ-trafficking, violent gangsters, nude hockey players, kinky sex, and a show-stopping performance by Marceau to match the operatic-grandeur of Isabelle Adjani in Possession and Romy Schneider in That Most Important Thing: Love.”

As with all of Żuławski’s films, this extravagant film has to be seen to be believed.

Available in: United Kingdom, Ireland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Austria, Switzerland, New Zealand, Australia

foreignparts

Foreign Parts (Verena Paravel, J.P. Sniadecki, USA)

Part of a new movement of audacious and in-depth documentaries from America—which began with Sweetgrass—this stunning exploration of a neighborhood in New York is described by the Locarno Film Festival, where it played:

“A hidden enclave in the shadow of baseball’s new Mets Stadium, the neighborhood of Willets Point, Queens, is an industrial zone fated for demolition. Filled with scrapyards and auto salvage shops, lacking sidewalks or sewage lines, the area seems ripe for tourist development. But Foreign Parts discovers a strange community where wrecks, refuse and recycling form a thriving commerce. Cars are stripped, sorted and catalogued by brand and part, then resold to an endless parade of drive-thru customers. Joe, the last original resident, rages and rallies through the street like a lost King Lear, trying to contest his immanent eviction. Two lovers, Sara and Luis, struggle for food and safety through the winter while living in an abandoned van. Julia, the homeless queen of the junkyard, exalts in her beatific visions of daily life among the forgotten. The film observes and captures the struggle of a contested “eminent domain” neighborhood before its disappearance under the capitalization of New York’s urban ecology.”

Available in: United Kingdom, Ireland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Portugal, Spain, Italy, New Zealand, Australia

sexy beast

Sexy Beast (Jonathan Glazer, USA)

Ray Winstone’s retired hood is “half of what separates Jonathan Glazer’s taut, ferociously entertaining gangster film from other genre entries… The other half is Ben Kingsley, who…has transformed himself into Gandhi’s opposite, a feral and scarily powerful mob kingpin.” —A.V. Club

Available in: France

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