Gossip Central

45th New York Film Festival

When this, my favorite of all festivals, kicks off this Friday night with Darjeeling Limited, Wes Anderson's new film, the colors will be all curry, turmeric, saffron and blues. Set in India, this road movie featuring Jason Schwartzman, Adrian Brody, and the much troubled Owen Wilson (see the tabloids on his attempted suicide), is about losing “baggage.” (Those on film were designed by Marc Jacobs for Louis Vuitton and I wish they had cast them off in my direction). It is also about Wes Anderson's preoccupation with family dysfunction (see The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and The Royal Tenebaums, not to mention Rushmore). Specifically, Anderson is obsessed with irresponsible parenting and its side effects. Three brothers on a train search for mom (Anjelica Huston) after the death of their father. She has not attended the funeral and the boys want to know why. Connecting with this self-absorbed missionary proves elusive, but that does not mean she fails to nurture. One of the film's surprises is how, once these grown men find her in the depths of rural India, they regress to baby behavior, especially in a scene replicating a nursery, like the Darlings at home in Peter Pan. Don't be fooled: the cartoon colors and sight gags belie some serious stuff. Dr. Freud, this one's for you.

             Another kind of doctor prevails in Julian Schnabel's masterpiece The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, based upon a book written in the most remarkable of circumstances. The film opens with antique x-rays of bones over the titles ushering us into the “locked-in,” dreamy consciousness of Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric), a Parisian fashion editor who at age 43 experienced a stroke that left him paralyzed except for the blinking of one eye. With the help of a team of nurses, including Schnabel's wife, Olatz Lopez Garamendia in a hilarious scene showing him how to use his tongue, he learns how to signal the alphabet in eye blinks and thus arduously composes his narrative. Shot in the actual French hospital where Bauby was treated, the film images his post-stroke world: the weight and immobility of the diver in water, the lightness and freedom of the butterfly. The one-eyed point of view was the central conceit of Ron Harwood's adaptation, the Academy Award winning screenwriter (for The Pianist) wrote me in an email, the images embellished by the outsized artist/ director Julian Schnabel. At the festival's press conference, Schnabel revealed that making this film helped him deal with the death of his father Jack, a butcher who died at age 92 in 2004.  On screen, Bauby shaves his father (Max von Sydow) in perhaps the most sensitive father-son scene ever filmed. The candid Schnabel recounted a time when he helped his father in the bath reminding him not to shit in the comforting water, which of course he did. Too much information, and yet, onscreen that tenderness translates to an extraordinary, human scale movie.                                                                                 Regina Weinreich

Darjeeling Limited (trailer)

Fall Fashions

Never mind that they didn't have runway shows in the 1600's. At the Metropolitan Museum's impressive new exhibition of Dutch paintings, The Age of Rembrandt, fashion trends abound. A1665-67 study of a young woman by Johannes Vermeer, probably a portrait of the painter's daughter, accentuates the latest 17th century trend in plucked eyebrows and forehead. Yikes! Fortunately such fashion risks didn't make it to the recent shows at the Bryant Park tents, although the skeleton-revealing silhouettes of most models would have certainly raised a few eyebrows in Rembrandt's time.

At Joanna Mastroianni's show for spring, a dragonfly motif dominated the embroidered mostly evening dresses and ensembles. Mastroianni, one of the most wearable of designers, claims to have been transfixed by the incidence of one gossamer-winged creature perching itself on her hand while she was working in her New York studio during a torrential rain: “That very moment I was enamored with its mystical and spiritual symbolism.” So much so that the final model carried Mastroianni's dog wearing the motif on an evening capelet. This is a designer who appeals to every age and while I cannot see either Iris Apfel (85) or Zelda Kaplan (91) in any of the mini-dresses, these women were attentive to the work as worn by the girls parading before them with their melancholy pouts. If you really want to see a fashion challenge, however, go immediately to the Jewish Museum. Along with a fine exhibition of 50 paintings and works on paper by the impressionist Camille Pissarro, a new show features Bruce Davidson's photographs of writer Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Lower East Side. A video of a 1972 play starring Singer's infamous character, Mrs. Pupko, sporting her even more outrageous full-length, stringy beard, loops on a monitor. Now that's what I call a transgender look. May it never hit the Fashion Week catwalks.

                                                                                                                    Regina Weinreich

Happy Birthday, On the Road

When Jack Kerouac woke up on this morning 50 years ago,  

he was a little known writer for the last time, reports Joyce Johnson. She knew. His girlfriend at the time, she was with him waiting at the corner newsstand for the papers to come in. Having received a glorious rave in the New York Times by the critic Gilbert Millstein, soon his second novel, On the Road, became #2 on the Best Seller list. In the 50 years it has been in print, On the Road never lost its momentum as a zeitgeist novel, never lost its cool. And the question today, when it seems more famous than ever, is what gives this book of all books its legs?
The answer is simple and complicated, having to do with such qualities as integrity, vision, talent, genius-hardly the fame-making values of today. The answer is the work is art, uncompromised, even though it was revised from the original scroll that is now, an aging rock star, tattered and yellowed, touring America. As the story goes, Kerouac wanted On the Road published as it was, unfurling it for editor Robert Giroux at its completion in 1951who pointed out the impracticality of printing it that way. The manuscript languished for six years during which time Kerouac wrote The Subterraneans and Doctor Sax, among others of his “true-life” novels. Maybe fans will know the name Kerouac from 10,000 Maniacs, or a lyric by Billy Joel. But most will know it for his beloved books.
When first published on this day in 1957, On the Road spoke to a restless Ozzie-and-Harriet America and sent a multitude of individuals “on the road.” William Burroughs famously said it is responsible for the boom in blue jean sales. I guess that is what it means to be a zeitgeist novel, that as its writer, your image can sell khakis for GAP, as Kerouac's has done. But now, with the publication of the scroll text by Viking, reissues of the 1957 version, and a reconsideration of another Kerouac book, Visions of Cody, best to check it out yourself and see if this classic of two buddies on the open road speaks to you.
                                                                                                                Regina Weinreich

Last Licks: Summer 2007

Billy Sullivan's knockout show of paintings and photographs at Guild Hall featured portraits of '70's downtown art world denizen: Cookie Mueller, famous for acting in the early gross out now classic films Pink Flamingos and Desperate Living, two of John Waters's works before Hairspray “normalized” him for Broadway and Hollywood. Waters never lost that pencil thin mustache though, a sure sign that his subversive side remains, however dormant. Who knew he would become so conventional? Before she died of AIDS, Cookie wrote a memoir describing the making of Pink Flamingos-which also starred Mink Stole and other underground stars, of how Divine's shit-eating ending was shot-yes that was real dog do do. An excerpt appears in “The Outlaw Bible of American Literature” (Thunder's Mouth). Meantime, Sullivan is doing the poster for this year's Hamptons International Film Festival.
John Waters is, I'm sure, a big fan of Charles Busch as am I. His over the top performance in Bay Street's revival of “The Lady in Question,” a play he wrote in 1989, was surprisingly nuanced and funny. Charles Busch as actor is all gesture: his face in false lashes registers split-second reactions; his body propelled by the swing of an arm, his slender hips in slight swivel, he sashays with grace in heels that would give most women pause. As writer, Busch cleverly reinvents a camp vehicle channeling Charles Ludlum, the brilliant playwright lost to AIDS in the early '80's, who was unforgettable in his send up of Maria Callas in his Theater of the Ridiculous production..

Vered Gallery exhibited some work from Michelle Marie: paintings of trees with geometric shaped leaves and a sculpture using the same mathematical motif. Sounds brainy over arty, right? Turns out Michelle Marie created her own algorithm for the series. You would never guess from looking at her, slight and big haired like a beauty queen, she'd be so into science. Raised in Atlanta she is in fact the child of a beauty queen and scientist and has three sisters-growing up was sort of Little Women, she told me-and she's also cut a hit record and had her work adorn Tiffany's windows. At dinner at Le Flirt, over filet mignon, French fries, grilled chicken, pasta, potato, rice--not a bad dish in the house--Patrick McMullen snapped away and R. Couri Hay vamped outrageously. But it is not called Le Flirt for nothing. Michelle Marie was making eyes with a gorgeous guy across the table, her husband it turns out, who courted her by buying her art.

To benefit the East Hampton Library, Alec Baldwin showed up at a private dinner party honoring Gail Levin, noted art historian and biographer of Edward Hopper and Judy Chicago. Seems that he's writing a book of his own, about his messy divorce and the legal system.

                                                                                  Regina Weinreich