Gossip Central

Melanie Laurent Plays the Violin in The Concert

 A high point of this summer's feel good movie opening this week is surely a superb Tchaikovsky concerto performed unrehearsed in Paris by a hilarious rag tag bunch of Russian musicians posing as the famed Bolshoi Orchestra. If you believe in such miracles, or can laugh at the conceit, The Concert, written and directed by Radu Mihaileanu, is for you. 

The mastermind of this prank, Andrei Filipov (Alexei Guskov) is now a janitor, but in his prime as orchestra conductor, he was fired for defending his Jewish performers. This historic detail from Brezhnev's regime provides a resonant backstory, bringing the orchestra together with a young Parisian violinist Anne-Marie Jacquet (a radiant Melanie Laurent) who yearns only for the watchful eyes of her parents, thinking they died in an accident.

The acclaimed French actress and director Melanie Laurent is best known in the U.S. for her performance in the movie Inglorious Basterds. Last week, I chatted briefly with her on the phone about her roles as violinist and as Jewish survivor of various oppressions, Quentin Tarantino, and her future films.

You play the violin so beautifully in this film. As far as I know, you are not a violinist. How did this role come to you?

ML: The director chose me. I met him three times to speak about the script. He chose someone else who could not play the violin. The role was a big challenge involving much training. She dropped out. My performance is fake except for the right hand. The left hand is a special effect. It's a lot of work to learn fake movements.

Your role as Anne-Marie Jacquet in The Concert is very similar to Shosanna Dreyfus in Inglorious Basterds. Are you being type cast as the Jewish orphan?

ML: I did The Concert before Inglorious Basterds. By coincidence the two characters are close: very strong women focused on one thing, fragile, artistic. Shosanna is focused on movies, Anne-Marie on classical music. That they are Jewish is important for me, and playing the violin evoked my inner Slavic emotion.

How was the shooting, working with such a strange, eccentric group?

ML: They shot the Russian parts and then arrived in Paris to film the concert in the Theatre du Chatelet. No one spoke English or French. It was “hi,”  “hi,” exactly as it is in the movie.

Will we see you in more movies soon?

ML: After Inglorious Basterds I did Round Up. My next movie is with Ewan McGregor, Beginners to be released in 2011.

You have received several awards for your acting, including the 2007 Cesar Rising Star Award. While you were not nominated last year, Inglorious Basterds was up for several Oscars. Were you excited?

ML: Quentin invited me to the Oscars. I was in a play so I couldn't go. I went on the Japan tour. We had a great time. I was disappointed he did not win for his script. 

Was there any truth to the rumor that you were romantically involved with Quentin during the making of Inglorious Basterds?

ML: Is that what people said? With Quentin? That's funny.

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

Patricia Clarkson Smokes a Hookah in Cairo Time

 
Long known as the friend (Vicky Cristina Barcelona), the mom (Pieces of April), the quirky aunt (the HBO series Six Feet Under), it's about time Patricia Clarkson starred in a movie. And star she does in Cairo Time, a fable about Juliette, a magazine writer who goes to Cairo to meet up with her husband, a U.N. official, for a vacation. Delayed in Gaza, he sends his friend Tareq (Alexander Siddiq) to shepherd her through this exotic and bustling location, complete with pyramids, camels, a boatride on the Nile, and splendid sunsets. For emotional transportation, the hookah is the least of it. The movie of Eat, Pray, Love may be on the horizon, but Cairo Time gets there first.

At a special screening on Monday night followed by dinner at rhe refurbished Plaza Athenee, the Canadian writer/director Ruba Nadda, resplendent in red dress and lips, with long raven hair, spoke about this story, emblematic of a woman's awakening. “I was focused on the man,” she said surprisingly. “I wanted to show a man from the Middle East like my Syrian father, traditional and yet a feminist.” 

Siddiq, a British actor who plays the man in question, modestly says he is not offered a great deal of roles and was captivated by Ruba's Cairo Time script. Originally from Sudan, Siddiq will soon appear in Julian Schnabel's Miral, a long awaited movie based on the Palestinian writer Rula Jebreal's novel. “I play a very different kind of man, a Palestinian who is the glue for the women in the story.”

Of the many well-wishers in attendance including Al Roker, Hoda Kotb, travel correspondent Peter Greenberg, another woman in red stood out: Patricia Clarkson's 75 year old mother. An elected Councilwoman from New Orleans, Jackie Clarkson was at ground zero during Hurricane Katrina, staying on to help with the city's recovery. You could see in an instant where Clarkson gets her vivacity.

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

Katie Holmes Gets “Extra” Credit for Movie Premiere

Katie Holmes blew into town to attend Monday night’s New York premiere of “The Extra Man.” She briefly walked the red carpet, avoiding the screening and after party, before moving on to Toronto for an early call to the set of the tv mini-series “The Kennedys.” She plays Jackie Onassis, a role not unlike the one she plays in real life as Mrs. Tom Cruise.

Expected not to attend, Katie was brave to support writer/director Shari Springer Berman and her co-stars Kevin Kline and Paul Dano considering that many reviewers after the movie’s opening at Sundance found her performance “weak.”

As Mary, Holmes plays a vegan office mate and heart throb for Paul Dano’s Louis Ives, a nerdy devotee of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” with a taste for cross dressing; in one scene he sports a black lace teddy you may wish to have seen on Holmes, were she not slated for the “straight man” role in a movie that abounds in eccentrics.

It’s hard to say whether the part was written lamely, or if Holmes is just lackluster in it. The days of “Pieces of April” are farther and farther away.

Kevin Kline as Henry Harrison heads this quirky concoction of character actors, the extra man or social escort to haute monde matrons. Lynn Cohen and the magnificent Marian Seldes cheered him on from the audience. Tracey Ullman, scouting for a seat, could have rounded out this eccentric cast.

Before the screening began, writer/director Shari Springer Berman (her partner Robert Pulcini was absent),  dedicated the opening at the Village East Cinema to the memory of recently deceased Harvey Pekar. “American Splendor,” also directed by Berman and Pulcini, was based on his work.

Novelist Jonathan Ames–creator of HBO’s Bored to Death as well as the author of the novel on which The Extra Man is based–was next at the microphone. He performed three yelps, which sounded like a Shofar being blown on the High Holidays. Yes. he yelped. Loudly.  It was fairly odd. Ames also noted that this location on 2nd Avenue was a one-time Yiddish Theater

Vapiano, a new pizza and pasta emporium on University Place was packed for the after party. Guests queued up for individually created servings of carbonara, or pesto, allowing diners — like Mrs. Kevin Kline aka Phoebe Cates, Sean Lennon, Samantha Mathis, Drew Nieporent, Zoe Kazan, designer Cynthia Rowley, Eli Tahari, Patrick Demarchelier, actress Yaya DeCosta, Eammon Bowles, Rachel Dratch, Judah Friedlander, Dan Hedaya– to exert some eccentricity of their own.

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

D. A. Pennebaker Celebrates 85th Birthday in the Hamptons

  
Legendary documentary filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker was feted at a paella feast for his 85th birthday on Saturday by wife and partner Chris Hegedus and the expansive Pennebaker clan including one ex-wife, eight children, a flock of grandkids with one on the way. Longtime associates Nick Doob, Jane Balfour and others were on hand in a sprawling house near the beach in East Hampton, the party hosted by his daughter, Zoe, a painter. What sort of gift do you give on this grand occasion? A basket of garden vegetables, and a copy of the newly published correspondence between Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg (Viking). (Penny, as he is called, was once tapped to do the long awaited film of On the Road, now half a century later to be shot in early fall in Montreal with Walter Salles at the helm.) And Roger Friedman, co-producer on his documentary Only the Strong Survive, brought Penny a surprise guest: Aretha Franklin. The cake was a homemade hazelnut confection, a hint of what's to come in the new PennebakerHegedus documentary opening in September at Film Forum: Kings of Pastry.

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Also in East Hampton: a panel at Guild Hall last week featured funny ladies Joy Behar, Angela LaGreca, the always charming Meredith Viera, and a lavish buffet catered by Citarella. The conversation revolved around wisdom learned while doing The View-i.e. Barbara Walters always asking of topics: does it play in Wyoming, to the subject of ageing: Joy Behar at 67 says it's a pain in the ass, but offers, “A smile is a natural facelift.”
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And, as announced, Jackson Browne performed at the newly minted annual Hamptons Oceana fundraiser in Watermill, hosted by Lois Robbins and Sue Cohn Rockefeller. Sam Waterston and Caroline Hirsch were among the rapt audience for his ocean-themed classics: “After the Deluge,” “Rock Me on the Water,” and other hits “Runnin' on Empty,” “Wonderland,” “The Pretender,” and “Taken it Easy.“ Oceana Chairman of the Board Keith Addis plans to take an expedition down to the Gulf.
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The evolution of Montauk from a fishing town to a Hampton proper has been gradual and steady. The Montauk Yacht Club had a major renovation in the past few years. The Memory Motel has made a comeback. The Surf Lodge took a beat up bar on the water and transformed it into a luxury getaway with trendy nightspot. This summer's stellar makeover is the Panoramic View Resort & Residences on the Old Highway. Hear the ocean, smell the sea brine, you'd swear you were in the villa of your wildest dreams.

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

Brion Gysin's Flickering Light at the New Museum

After the Guggenheim's 2009 show, The Third Mind, named for a concept of collaboration by famed novelist William S. Burroughs and lesser known painter, writer, restaurateur, raconteur Brion Gysin, inevitably a curiosity would grow around this exceptional artist of many trades. The New Museum does great service to Gysin's work in a new show called Dreamachine, so dubbed for a device he co-created to stimulate hallucinatory states of consciousness. Makeup magnate Helena Rubinstein was said to have had one. And Keith Haring brought Gysin to New York for a show at the Tower Gallery in the 1980's in exchange for one. And now, you too can sit on a cushion and feel the flicker of light over your closed lids. But who was Brion Gysin and why haven't we seen more of him?

As Nabokov wrote of his Lolita protagonist Humbert Humbert, Gysin was a salad of racial genes: a mix of British, Swiss, and Canadian. He lived mainly in Paris, and in Tangier, loci of much literary and artistic experimentation. Many have considered him merely a catalyst of art in others: for example, it was Gysin who invented the cut-ups, a collage technique utilized to random perfection by Burroughs in a series of novels. While the New Museum exhibits this part of his career, this show of 300 works also features calligraphic paintings, drawings, films, notebooks--sufficient evidence for a rethinking of Gysin as an artist on his own.

In the excellent catalogue that accompanies this exhibit, friends and colleagues offer fascinating glimpses into his art. Poet John Giorno provides insights into Gysin as a sound poet, painter George Condo writes of Gysin's photorealist imagery, describing him as “a man of internal music for which no score could be transcribed.” Throbbing Gristles' Genesis Breyer P. Orridge explains the uses of cut-ups for his own work and the inspired Gysin notion, “Poets don't own words,” opening the door for alternate modes of creativity. James Grauerholz, executor of both Burroughs' and Gysin's literary estate, writes movingly of the personal ties between Burroughs and Gysin particularly after 1974 until each one died, Gysin in 1986 and Burroughs in 1997. Contextualizing William Burroughs as a painter, he claims, begins with Brion Gysin.

In a taped interview, Burroughs laments that the mold is gone for people of a certain caliber-including Becket, Genet, Bowles, and Gysin. The tribute from so close a friend and collaborator goes far in illustrating the remembrance of those who knew him best. You won't, however, get Gysin's drama queen persona at the New Museum. Curator Laura Hoptman spoke about such limitations at a press opening.  None of Gysin's Jma el Fna market place paintings -works that were on view in Burroughs's Bunker as well as leaning against the floor in Paul Bowles's Tangier flat-are represented. Morocco career is evident in other calligraphic works. More than other expatriates living there in the pivotal mid-century, he “went native” in adopting habits and perceptions.

In a case of synergy, uptown at MoMA, at the new Matisse exhibition at MoMA, “Radical Invention 1913-1917,” such famous paintings as “Zorah in Yellow” show the imprint of Tangier, the place Bowles called “a dream scape.” Christopher Nolan's new movie starring Leonardo diCaprio, Inception, a film that plays with states of consciousness, uses the Tangier medina as the perfect maze for working out the Burroughs/Gysin conception of ideas as viruses.

Brion Gysin extolled a humbling worldview: we are Here to Go; nevertheless at the New Museum, it is simply amazing to see the rich legacy he left behind.

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

Shakespeare in the Park: Not Your Usual Romp on the Great Lawn

 
Merchant of Venice is always a bitter pill for us Jews, even when the production is as good as the one at the Delacorte Theater featuring a cast led by Lily Rabe as the beautiful-as-she-is-wise Portia and Al Pacino. Well, if the payis and tsissis fit the droopy, beaked visage of Shylock, I say, wear them. An anti-Semite's dream, using the definition that a thing is anti-Semitic if it is more Jew hating than is mete, Merchant of Venice is that thing, but what should we do? Censor Shakespeare?

Indeed, I know not censorship. Much has been written about the pound of flesh, the 3000 ducats, perhaps most poignantly by Philip Roth in his 1993 novel Operation Shylock. The critics have been over the moon about the fine ensemble, ruminating on the relative merits of Pacino here vs. his Shylock in Michael Radford's 2004 movie.

So, what rankles us today in our bucolic Central Park? To start, the character of Antonio, ably played by Byron Jennings, is too well liked by his gentile consorts. How do we, the p.c. minded public and Jews alike, take his insult upon insult, his comfortable insistence that he would continue to insult Shylock, even if the Jew were to lend him the desperately needed ducats, with or without interest?

And what of justice: Shylock is more than derailed by the loss of his daughter Jessica (Heather Lind) to her Christian beau Lorenzo (Bill Heck). Must we witness his baptism too? Staged is the opening of a pool by which Shylock, head dunked, is stripped of yarmulke and identity. Here is Shakespeare's pre-figuration of a post-Holocaust problem: when is a Jew not a Jew? The last we see of Shylock, he is lumbering off into an unlit hole. The “does not a Jew bleed” scene, great as it is-with Pacino speaking it in a resigned softness-- does not sufficiently cover the racism. Shakespeare cannot seem to wrap his ample humanity around this character.

But here is where this staging, under the fine direction of Daniel Sullivan, opens a door: as all exit, Jessica alone in the brilliance of an unscripted image, hangs out by that pool: what is she thinking of her part in her father's demise? Leaving the theater, I overheard one viewer jest that a sequel is waiting to be written in which Lorenzo converts to Judaism.

The subject of Marriage is under scrutiny in “Merchant,” and in another of Shakespeare's problem plays, The Winter's Tale, with which it shares the summer stage and most of the cast. In the darkly mercantile “Merchant,” marriage is a transaction of good guessing, with loyalties played out in the fate of two gold rings. In The Winter's Tale, well directed by Michael Grief, a seriously wrong-headed monarch Leontes (Ruben Santiago-Hudson) dooms his wife Hermoine (Linda Emond) and friend Polixenes (Jesse L. Martin) accusing the innocent pair of adultery -- defying even the Oracle. You know there's trouble when the gods are called in.

And how do men know the ways of the gods? Those mysteries may be interpreted by Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who stands out as Paulina, a woman of the court. This fine actress is good in “Merchant” too, as Portia's sidekick Nerissa, but in this play she is a bedazzling sorceress in magenta. You cheer for her as she gives those dumb rulers the what for.

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

Passions in the Hamptons: Oceana and Countdown to Zero

Long distance from LA, the television star I know best from Cheers, and who has just completed a season of Damages, Ted Danson wanted to talk about some other kind of damages, to our oceans. Enthusiastic as could be, he told me about Oceana, an organization interested in changing ocean policies worldwide. An evolution of American Oceans Campaign, he co-founded with a partner 20 years ago, Oceana is inaugurating an annual benefit on Saturday July 10 in Water Mill overlooking Mecox Bay, hosted by Lois Robins and Sue Cohn Rockefeller. Ted Danson urged me to attend. 

Cautioning about such concerns as overfishing: We could fish out our oceans commercially. Canadian Cod won’t come back. 90% of our big fish, marlin, sword, and tuna are gone. We throw away 30% of the world catch, so in addition to overfishing, we are wasteful. By bottom trawling, we destroy coral reefs where small fish feed so we are destroying the top and bottom of the food chain. And all this is fixable. He also spoke about the damage done by drilling, the Gulf of Mexico being a prime case in point, reason enough to develop wind power as they are doing in other countries. We need to develop new industry and put a moratorium on deep well drilling. Look at what the oil spill did. We cannot blindly more forward. We are a moron culture, but we can fix it. He is optimistic about being smart and attacking the problem with grace.

 Go to OceanaSplashParty.org for more information.

 And will he be joining us on July 10?

Trying to, he said, explaining an obligation that may keep him at home in Santa Monica. But who knows now that it has been announced: Jackson Browne will be performing.

And last week’s screening of Countdown to Zero at Goose Creek also featured a Q&A with the impassioned producer, Lawrence Bender, who spoke about a potential global disaster no one is really talking about: the nuclear threat. No matter what happens with oceans or other environmental problems, our planet may go down faster. As this film makes powerfully clear through an array of speakers including Valerie Plame, Gorbachev, Musharraf, and Jimmy Carter, while we are all aware, we seem to be asleep when it comes to this more cataclysmic threat. Worldwide disarmament is needed. Are you listening, Pakistan, Iran, North Korea?

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

 

 

Sting and Trudie in Love: Twin Spirits at Lincoln Center

The true love story of music legends Robert Schumann and Clara Wieck is the stuff of 19th century sturm und drang: forbidden love, lofty language, melancholy, and early death. Portraying this passionate couple on Wednesday evening, Sting in waistcoat, with his wife, actor, producer, political activist, Trudie Styler, begowned in a splendid black Roland Mouret strapless swept across the stage at the Allen Room of Jazz at Lincoln Center. Silhouetted against the expansive darkening sky over Central Park, the players looked iconic, the night magic, for an awestruck packed house.

The Culture Project in association with Music Unites hosted this special production of Twin Spirits, in celebration of Robert Schumann's 200th birthday. Narrated by David Strathairn, the program featured violinist Joshua Bell, pianists Jeremy Denk and Natasha Paremski, cellist Nina Kotova. Nathan Gunn and Camille Zamora portrayed Robert and Clara in song. In a collaboration that dates back to 2005, director John Caird crafted this “poetic meditation” on passionate love, combining Robert and Clara's love letters, their marriage diary, with compositions mostly from Robert Schumann with additional music from Chopin and Mozart.

After the stunning performance, Mayor Bloomberg addressed the audience, including “Precious” Oscar winning scriptwriter Geoffrey Fletcher, actors Joel Grey and Richard Kind, Denise Rich, among many others. The mayor had one complaint, that he had not been offered the role of Robert Schumann. After all, he said, being a dashing young leading man, “that's what I do.” He went on to thank Sting and the Police for their hefty $million donation to the city for the planting of trees. Proceeds from “Twin Spirits” would go to music education. 

Trudie Styler said her understanding of Clara came from seeing this talented woman as a heroic figure: after all, through the tragic circumstance of Robert's demise, she supported their 8 children. She also kept the delicate loving advances of Brahms at bay. Sting quipped that this expert ensemble had met that afternoon-except Trudie, he laughed. “I've known her longer.”

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura