Capital Celluloid 2014 - Day 36: Wed Feb 5

No1 Bastards (Denis, 2013) plus director Q&A: Hackney Picturehouse, 6.30pm


Here is the Hackney Picturehouse introduction:

We are delighted to welcome director Claire Denis for a Q&A after this preview screening.
Supertanker captain Marco (Lindon, ANYTHING FOR HER) returns to Paris, where his sister (Bataille) is facing bankruptcy following her husband’s death. He then finds himself forced to unravel an increasingly complex web of intrigue and tragedy involving both family and voyeuristically observed strangers.

As with 2009’s award-laden WHITE MATERIAL, writer-director Denis articulates this beguilingly dark tale by concentrating on the characters, often in intense close-up, punctuated with beautiful, sometimes disconnected images that, with an almost dreamlike inevitability, come together to make sense of the whole.

The unconventional narrative and striking cinematography are wrapped around an unflinching meditation on individual indifference to social norms that harks back to CHINATOWN and even classic noir in its examination of amorality and corruption.

Here is the trailer.

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No2 Ashes of Time (Redux) (Kar-wai, 1994): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.50pm


This is screening as part of a Wong Kar-wai season at the Prince Charles. Details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Wong Kar Wai's Ashes of Time (1994) was an abstract martial-arts adventure about a mercenary assassin (Leslie Cheung) and his rival (Tony Leung Ka Fai), inspired by the two main characters in Louis Cha's novel The Eagle Shooting Heroes. For this director's cut, Wong has trimmed several minutes and reorganized the narrative according to the passage of seasons, though the plot is still impenetrable. The original synth score has been replaced by an orchestration with cello solos by Yo-Yo Ma, and Christopher Doyle's cinematography has been remastered, losing some of its graininess. As in the original version, the fights are outweighed by existential angst and Buddhist introspection, but the sequence in which a blind swordsman (Tony Leung Chiu Wai) takes on an army of thieves is still gangbusters. In Cantonese and Mandarin with subtitles.
Andrea Gronvall

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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