Jean-Claude Carrière Comes to Brooklyn
In his native France Jean-Claude Carrière is a respected intellectual, playwright, and author. He has enjoyed a multi-decade theatrical collaboration with the highly influential British theatrical producer and director Peter Brook, and his book "Conversations sur L'Iinvisible," a freewheeling discussion about human survival with Umberto Eco, Stephen Jay Gould, and others on the eve of Y2K (published here as "Conversations About the End of Time"), was a bestseller. For the next 13 days, BAMCinématek will showcase Carrière's screenwriting skills in 10 films culled from his 120-plus credits.
"I have no idea," Mr. Carrière, now 74, wrote in his entertaining and rigorous 1994 examination of the movies, "The Secret Language of Film," "what kind of beast a well-directed but badly written film might be." A veteran of collaborations with filmmakers as varied as Jean-Luc Godard, the Spanish surrealist Luis Buñuel (his scripts for Buñuel's "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" and "That Obscure Object of Desire" in 1972 and 1977, respectively, earned him Academy Award nominations), and the British music video and commercial helmer-turned-feature director Jonathan Glazer, Mr. Carrière is entitled to some confusion on that score. BAM's program, "Jean Claude Carrière's Language of Film" features nothing but strong examples of both the writer's and the director's art.
Bunuel's "Diary of a Chambermaid" (today) and "Belle de Jour" (9/16), are both expertly crafted treatises on sexual politics and prime examples of 1960s art-house import erotica. Milos Forman's "Taking Off" (9/14) may be the least dated generation gap film of the "Graduate" era. Volker Schlondorff's "The Tin Drum" (9/17) remains the best novel adaptation by a director who has made a career of adapting novels.
But the two rarely revived gems of BAM's series are Nagisa Oshima's "Max Mon Amour" (9/21) and Jacques Deray's "The Outside Man" (9/15). "Max" makes a weirdly compelling case for Charlotte Rampling's head-over-heels romance with a chimpanzee by dissecting the jealousy of Rampling's husband. "Man" strands French hit man Jean-Louis Tritignant in an early 70s Los Angeles where the landscape is as defined by Ann-Margret's cleavage as it is by the Venice Pier.
Through September 27 (30 Lafayette Ave., between Ashland Place and St. Felix Street, Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).
