Gossip Central

Love It Was Not and When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit: The Holocaust in Film

Maya Sarfaty’s Love It Was Not, a most unusual documentary, tells the improbable story of the infatuation of a high-ranking SS officer with a Jewish inmate at Auschwitz. An Austrian-Israeli coproduction, the film was part of a program at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage, with a Q&A with the director and Austrian producer, Kurt Langbein, and is to date one of the most affecting films to reimagine Auschwitz in scope and day-to-day detail: the focus on the relationship between Franz Wunsch and Helena Citron allows for a glimpse into the death camp from the perspective of young love. Yes, this really happened amidst the gas chambers and crematoria, an open secret romance.

According to her girlfriends—interviewed post-war for this film, having survived and benefitted from the special attentions of Wunsch (20), Helena Citron (19) was a beauty. Family photos attest to her looks, and later, interviews with a much older woman show the angles of her cheekbones and fierce eyes, a cross between Kim Novak and Eva Gardner. She and her friends were assigned to the Kanada warehouses, where they sorted the belongings of inmates sent to be gassed. When she had typhus, Wunsch nursed her to health. One day, Helena’s sister arrived with her two children. Wunsch plucked her from their arms amidst a crowd ready to be murdered, allowing her to work alongside her sister. The plight of the children haunts the rescue; the ambivalence of survival at Auschwitz could not be better illustrated. Wunsch was known to be a beast, beating male inmates, and yet was capable of gentle emotions toward Helena.

Revisiting A Quiet Place II: Shhhhhhh!

For my first venture into a theater, still restricted for COVID, I screened A Quiet Place II, coincidentally the very last movie I saw in a theater, on March 9, 2020. When life changed the following weekend, it was understood, the very last thing anyone should see at this time is a work of art that could induce nightmares of a world besieged by unknown killer entities. Wisely, the movie’s opening was put on hold. Now fourteen months later, and on second view, the film feels even more special. Don’t miss it.

Here is what I wrote about the film, and its swank premiere from 2020:

Introducing the next chapter to the hit horror movie, A Quiet Place, writer/director John Krasinski said he never wanted to make a sequel, and now he prefers the new one: “That’s for you to decide,” he said to the rapt audience at the Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Hall premiere. Expect: the most successful franchise ever.

Zombies Unite!: Army of the Dead: Location, Location, Location

At a Q&A at the Paris Theater, after a screening of the new Netflix zombie hit, Army of the Dead, to air this weekend, director and D.P.—this is so his movie-- Zack Snyder said he was thinking about The Sheltering Sky and how a protagonist dies in the desert of some weird disease. In conversation with Grace Randolph, a comic book writer and YouTube star, and his producer/ wife Deb Snyder, he was invoking Paul Bowles’ midcentury novel and Bernardo Bertolucci’s movie starring John Malkovich and Debra Winger as a married couple who go deeper into anonymity as they leave Western culture behind in the North African landscape. This reference is one of a zillion that makes the movie Army of the Dead so much fun to watch—including Richard Wagner’s Gotterdammerung, a sly nod to the arid humor of doom.

Oscar Women: What They Wore

One could suspect from the way the Oscars were put together at LA’s Union Station, this was an unusual year. How do you dress for well, the imperative to simply show up? Some women took the Hollywood glam route: Amanda Seyfried’s red ball gown seemed from every camera angle to fill the room. Ditto for Angela Bassett’s pouf shoulders. Cleavage and bare midriffs were a thing. And others rocked in covered up understatement: Olivia Coleman in demure Dior, Glenn Close dazzled in Armani Prive, even when she was wiggling her butt. The Nomadland women from multi-awarded Chloe Zhao to Frances McDormand whose wolf howl was the most musical note of the evening wore dour. Even the real-life nomads, like Swankie, so endearing and colorful in this desert toned movie, made up and coiffed, looked more dressed up.

But, had she attended, what would Ann Roth have said or worn collecting her Oscar for costume design? A second-time winner at 89, like Anthony Hopkins at 83, she sat this one out. In 2012, Roth was honored for her work at the Hamptons International Film Festival. Here’s what I learned about her illustrious decades-long career:

Midnight Cowboy in 1969: How to Win an Oscar Without a Campaign

This week, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures sent out a Timeline featuring many “firsts:” among them citing Midnight Cowboy (1969), the first X-rated film to win Best Picture. With Glenn Frankel’s new book, Shooting Midnight Cowboy: Art, Sex, Loneliness, Liberation, and the Making of a Dark Classic, much has been written clarifying that X-rating: “Few had high expectations that an X-rated movie about an aspiring male prostitute made in New York . . . would do well in the Hollywood-centric Oscars.”

But a more unusual circumstance for the film’s Oscar success was that it won with almost no campaign to shepherd it along with Academy voters—certainly, as Frankel notes, it had “no money for the lavish events that Universal and 20^th Century Fox” hosted for Anne of a Thousand Days and Hello Dolly, the kind of thing that in recent years Peggy Siegal did so well, hired by the studios to host luncheons that featured filmmakers and actors in high-minded conversation about making art. Instead, the Midnight Cowboy producers made sepia-toned stills, using different ones for each ad. Frankel quotes Gabe Sumner at United Artists, “It was a terrific movie. We didn’t need anyone to stand up and give a speech. We knew what we had.”

Secrets of the Whales Premieres in Time for Earth Day

Introducing the National Geographic series at a virtual premiere, to stream on Disney +, part of a weeklong celebration of Earth Day, the actress Sigourney Weaver, found the secrets of whales “astonishing.” What is truly astonishing is how intimate National Geographic photographer Brian Skerry becomes with the whales, learning their “secrets.” It is no spoiler to reveal them: Whales have culture. Using the tag line: they play, they mourn, they are just like us, National Geographic promotes the idea of empathy for another species—big time!

The filming of this epic adventure took three years. Amazing how much humans can bond with their fellow mammals in that time, in many locations: Norway, Antarctica, Dominica, St. Lawrence, New Zealand, the South Pacific, to name a few of the spectacular locations. We were rapt for two hours: one Orca attempted to feed fin and wet suit clad Skerry, undersea camera in hand, who quipped, perhaps she was thinking he was undernourished. She’d picked up a stingray, and knew to turn it upside down to a sleep mode to better serve him for dinner. Yes, survival is key, and that wisdom is handed down through elder females.

Blindness Opens Off-Broadway: Sight for Sore Eyes

If I have to ease into live theater, Blindness is a great conduit, and an event. At the Daryl Roth Theater, temperature taken, health form complete, viewers file into the cavernous space fitted with lighting fixtures, a neon of color; seats, 2 together, are distanced. Headsets in place like bunny ears, you are ordered to situate them properly, left ear, right ear, the authoritarian British voice commands, repeat. This is important for a visceral experience based on Jose Saramago’s famed novel, in Simon Stephens’ trim adaptation. Everything depends on sound and light. Sight too, or lack of it.

The Man Who Sold his Skin: Skin in the Oscar Game

          
“You want my soul?”

            “I want your back.”

Provocative and transactional, the dialogue illustrates the film, The Man Who Sold his Skin’s pact with the Devil. From Tunisia, the film frames director Kaouther Ben Hania’s central conceit for the state of Syrian refugees, and is nominated for this year’s Best International Feature Academy Award.

The devil in question is Jeffrey Godefroy (Koen De Bouw), artist supreme, who needs a man’s back to create his latest work of art. Already a highly marketable name, Godefroy (free of God?) and his assistant Soraya, a blond Monica Bellucci, make an offer to Sam Ali (Yahya Mahayni) from Raqqa who fights for freedom, and wants only to be with Abeer (Dea Liane), the girl of his dreams, now married to a diplomat and living in Brussels. Godefroy makes him an offer he cannot refuse, involving his back, and his presence as an art installation. His journey to Abeer takes more than a passport.

Harris Yulin and Jessica Hecht Star in a Staged Reading of Squeaky for Guild Hall

“All families are the same, but like snowflakes, they are different,” said actor Bob Balaban recently by phone, explaining the rich detail of the play Squeaky, he’s to direct this week for a March 28 Guild Hall Zoom reading.

The story attracted not only Balaban to direct, but a dream cast, all noted stage and screen actors. An outsized, charismatic character, Squeaky will be read by Harris Yulin. The exchanges between Jeff and his brother Rob, a conman, will be read by the actors Marc Kudisch and Ben Shenkman. Connie, who watches over Stan will read by LaTanya Richardson Jackson. And their mother Sandy-- trust me, you could not invent a character as brilliantly skewed as she is in just one scene-- is Jessica Hecht.

Based on playwright Jeff Cohen’s family experiences, noted Balaban, “Squeaky works well because it is so accurate to the details Jeff Cohen lived.” Many families find themselves in situations, the sons in conflict as to how to deal with their parents’ golden years, particularly if problems with dementia arise—but these parents!

Rendez-vous with French Cinema: The Pleasures of French Movies

Netflix’ great series Call My Agent put me in the mood to hear as much French as possible. While the sophisticated, cultured patter of this hugely popular Parisian-set series does not speak for all of France, now Lincoln Center’s annual Rendez-vous with French Cinema, in collaboration with Unifrance, is in full swing, expanding the French experience. The festival is once again virtual as it was last year when the pandemic disrupted plans to see the films at the Walter Reade and hobnob with the actors/ directors in person. Still, kicking off with the tender documentary, Little Girl, this year’s Rendez-vous offers many pleasures.

The opening night documentary, Little Girl, features Sasha, born a boy, who affirms himself a girl despite the raised eyebrows of school authorities. Director Sebastien Lifshitz follows the family for a year, through Sasha’s routines, her balletic pirouettes, and visits to a psychoanalyst. Sasha’s mother is unofficially the film’s hero. Her support for Sasha’s true self brings tears to the eyes, that yes, Sasha can live in her true body.