ALL ABOUT LILY CHOU-CHOU
DIRECTOR: SHUNJI IWAI
2001 / 146MIN / DCP
Incredibly prescient in its understanding of how a still-young internet would fundamentally alter youth culture, Shunji’s film introduces Yuichi (Hayato Ichihara) in an ice field, the landscape gradually obscured by accreting chat room messages. Alienated from classmates and his old friend Shusuke (Shugo Oshinari), Yuichi retreats into his relationship with the songs of goth-inflected pop act Lily Chou-Chou—created for the film, with vocals by Salyu, though the three-piece reformed for the movie’s 10th anniversary—whose music can do nothing to stop the bloody, hormone-fueled reckoning ahead. A clangorous collision of tradition and ultramodernity, innovative in its understanding of digital cinematography as a new medium with new rules.
BASIC INSTINCT
DIRECTOR: PAUL VERHOEVEN
1992 / 127MIN / DCP
The picket lines formed by LBGTQ activists to protest the perceived negative depictions of gay and bisexual characters in this elegant erotic thriller, penned by professional sleaze Joe Eszterhas, didn’t do much to temper its huge popularity. Verhoeven's Basic Instinct made a star of ice queen blonde Sharon Stone, the femme fatale that Michael Douglas’s San Francisco detective, who’s investigating a rock star’s murder, just can’t keep his mitts off.
A TIME TO LIVE AND A TIME TO DIE
DIRECTOR: HOU HSIAO-HSIEN
1985 / 138MIN / DCP
Arguably the film in which all the elements of Hou’s meticulously controlled, objectively distanced mature style identifiably coalesce, and his first collaboration with crucial cohort Lee, the deeply personal coming-of-age story A Time to Live and a Time to Die—which Hou periodically narrates himself—draws on his family’s experience of relocating to rural Taiwan from mainland China in the late ’40s, following the character of immigrant Ah-hsiao through some 20 years that encompass childhood self-discovery, adolescent rebellion, and the eventual compromises, regrets, and compensations of adulthood. “Working in long takes and wide-screen, deep-focus compositions that frame the characters from a discreet distance, Hou allows the locations to seep into our own memories and experience, so that… we come to know them almost as intimately as touchstones in our own lives.” —Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
Introduction and Q&A with Mark Lee Ping-bing on Friday, September 6th
THE AVIATOR'S WIFE
DIRECTOR: ÉRIC ROHMER
1981 / 106MIN / DCP
The inaugural film of Rohmer’s “Comedies and Proverbs” cycle, The Aviator’s Wife is a fleecy farce of romantic overanalysis that finds the director exploring the possibilities of handheld camerawork in following a narrative expression of the opening epigraph: “It is impossible to think of nothing.” A young man sees his girlfriend’s ex leaving her apartment one early morning, and his imagination is off to the races, as stars Philippe Marlaud and Marie Rivière introduce a younger, less perfectly articulate type of Rohmer character than those of the “Moral Tales.” A Metrograph Pictures release.
FLOWERS OF SHANGHAI
DIRECTOR: HOU HSIAO HSIEN
1998 / 113MIN / ENG SUB / DCP
Lee’s floating camera drifts through the candlelit, opium-drenched dens of 1880s Shanghai in Hou’s elegant film of longing and long takes, adapted from Han Bangqing’s 1892 Wu language novel The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai, a classic that was translated into Mandarin Chinese and English by Chang. A quietly devastating, expertly modulated drama of intrigue and romance among the high-end “flower girl” courtesans and their wealthy patrons, one of the latter played by the peerless Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Flowers of Shanghai ranks frequently as among the best films of the ’90s.
THE GREAT BUDDHA+
DIRECTOR: HUANG HSIN-YAO
2017 / 102MIN / DCP
Huang’s debut feature, winner of the top prize at the 19th Taipei Film Festival and one of Lee’s favorite works of recent Taiwanese cinema, is a crafty, pitch-black comedy of underclass resourcefulness, resentfulness, and envy about a security guard, Pickle (documentarian Cres Chuang), who works at a factory that produces statues of the Buddha. Discovering of a trove of dashboard camera videos documenting the womanizing factory owner’s sleazy secret life one night, Pickle, with his lone pal, Belly Button (Bamboo Chen), a scavenger who ekes out a living collecting recyclables, finds himself initiated into the unsavory hidden world of the unscrupulous superrich. A brilliant film about the haves and have-nots, shot in color and black and white by filmmaker Chung Mong-hong, with Huang himself providing a hysterically vulgar running commentary to the action.
RED MOON TIDE
DIRECTOR: LOIS PATIĂ‘O
2020 / 84MIN / DCP
Patiño (2023’s Samsara) draws from the deep well of Galician mythology for his meditative fiction feature debut, set in a seaside village in northwestern Spain—also the setting of his documentary Coast of Death—that has been rocked by news of the disappearance of a diver, Rubio (Rubio de Camelle), renowned locally for his ability to retrieve shipwrecked sailors’ bodies. Their motionless vigil is overlaid with lyrical voiceover monologues, which are interrupted by the arrival of three witches tasked with searching for the absent Rubio. “A portrait of a seaside village suspended in an extraordinary catatonia. Its transfixion is contagious… A majestic vision.” —The New York Times