The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, November 4-10
The Blue Room (2014)
Directed by Mathieu Amalric
Amalric’s coolly inventive adaptation of Georges Simenon’s story involves two illicit lovers who seem to interpret their mutual vows differently, rendered in alternating and discontinuous arrest-and-trial and flashback sequences that convolutedly answer the question of what exactly has happened. The movie has a Strangers on a Train flavor, in line with Amalric’s Hitchcockian interest in (and facility with) dark psychology and human misunderstanding, also displayed in his turn as a defensive playwright engaged in a manipulative and sadomasochistic confrontation with a mercurial actress in Roman Polanski’s Venus in Fur. Like so many essentially inadvertent rogues, Amalric’s Julien seems to lose more control the harder he grasps for it. In addition to Amalric’s rapier-like direction and the cast’s nuanced acting, what makes the movie compelling is, paradoxically, that Julien’s qualities are so unremarkably human. Jonathan Stevenson (November 6, 7pm; November 8, 3:15pm at Anthology Film Archives’s Amalric series)
