Tag Archives: Laemmle Royal

DALIDA

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A star was born last spring at the COLCOA screening of DALIDA, a sweeping, big-screen biopic in the manner of Love Me or Leave Me, Lady Sings the Blues, and I’ll Cry Tomorrow. This week, Angelenos can see what the fuss was about in a series of Monday night screenings, courtesy of Laemmle.

In the title role, Sveva Alviti pulls out all the stops as the towering, tragic international chanteuse Dalida, climbing the charts while unsuccessfully navigating perfidious showbiz, bad marriage choices, and an irreversible spiral of despair.

 

DALIDA, Monday, October 23, at 7:30 pm.

LAEMMLE ROYAL, 11523 Santa Monica Boulevard, West Los Angeles.

LAEMMLE PLAYHOUSE, 673 East Colorado Boulevard, Pasadena.

LAEMMLE TOWN CENTER, 17200 Ventura Boulevard, Encino.

LAEMMLE CLAREMONT, 450 West 2nd Street, Claremont.

laemmle.com/films/42735

 

DALIDA is also the opening night feature at this year’s ARPA International Film Festival in Hollywood.

Friday, November 3, at 8 pm.

EGYPTIAN THEATRE, 6712 Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles.

arpafilmfestival.com/

 

DALIDA, video on demand, from December 5. All platforms.

Sveva Alviti and Nicolas Duvauchelle in Dalida (2017). Image credit: Under The Milky Way.

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DENEUVE AT ZENITH

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For the last ten years, Catherine Deneuve has been playing versions of herself—an intelligent, independent, chic woman of a certain age, a great, well-preserved beauty (a nip here, a tuck there) with the signature blonde Deneuve helmet and ever-present cigarette. Regrets, she’s had a few, but she wears her battle scars lightly and—fortunately for us—shows no sign of slowing down.

In her new film THE MIDWIFE, written and directed by Martin Provost, she plays Béatrice, a gambler—literally and figuratively. Living on grand casino memories and sketchy loan arrangements with old comrades, she’s been reduced to backroom card games with deliverymen and taxi drivers on their lunch break. (A Deneuve character in an animal-print coat, blouse, or scarf signals “downmarket.”)

On top of everthing else, Béatrice has just gotten news of a serious health crisis. So, before it’s too late, she attempts one last reunion with a long-abandoned ex-lover, a swimming champion. (And a specimen of singular male beauty interestingly doubled in the film by Quentin Dolmaire, last seen in his breakout performance in Arnaud Desplechin’s My Golden Days.) To find the former lover, Béatrice tracks down his daughter, played by the great Catherine Frot as the midwife of the title.

What follows is an exceptionally well-made and often comic examination of two disparate hustlers—one devil-may-care and resigned to her fate, the other earnestly navigating corporate downsizing in the health care industry—who finally find comity and joy in a rapidly contracting world.

 

THE MIDWIFE

Through August 10.

Laemmle Royal

11523 Santa Monica Boulevard, West Los Angeles.

Laemmle Playhouse

673 East Colorado Boulevard, Pasadena.

Laemmle Town Center

17200 Ventura Boulevard, Encino.

Above: Catherine Deneuve in The Midwife/Sage-femme (2017).

Below: Deneuve and Catherine Frot. Image credit: Music Box Films.

TERENCE DAVIES’ MASTERPIECE

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The cinema of Terence Davies has drawn on the books and plays of Edith Wharton (The House of Mirth), John Kennedy Toole (The Neon Bible), and Terence Rattigan (The Deep Blue Sea). His early works (Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes) were autobiographical. Davies was not—is not—out and proud, but homosexual and not all that happy about it. Rather than celebrate difference, he worries it into an exquisite torture with a brilliant musical soundtrack.

The first hour of his new film, A QUIET PASSION (starring Cynthia Nixon as Emily Dickinson), essays the Massachusetts poet’s young life with line after line of Wildean wit, as Emily, her sister Vinnie (Jennifer Ehle), and her close friend Susan (Jodhi May) expose and eviscerate the hypocrisies of their mid-nineteenth-century society:

“The best compliments are always dubious—that’s part of their charm.”

“Cherish your ignorance. You never know when you might need it.”

“Going to church is like going to Boston. You only enjoy it after you’ve gone home.”

“A women should aspire to be younger than her waistline.”

“Never play happy music at a wedding. It’s so misleading.”

And so on. But since there were no epigrams addressing Dickinson’s state of middle-aged virginity, as she grew older she grew bitter. But her words could always clear the air:

“Any argument about gender is war, because that is slavery.”

“Those of us who live minor lives deprived of a certain kind of love, we know how to starve. We deceive others, and then ourselves. It is the worst kind of lie….Rigor is no substitute for happiness.”

 

A QUIET PASSION, through May 18

LAEMMLE ROYAL, 11523 Santa Monica Boulevard, West Los Angeles

LAEMMLE PLAYHOUSE 7, 673 East Colorado Boulevard, Pasadena

LAEMMLE TOWN CENTER 5, 17200 Ventura Boulevard, Encino

 

A QUIET PASSION, May 12 through May 18

LAEMMLE MONICA FILM CENTER, 1332 2nd Street, Santa Monica

 

laemmle.com/films/41874

Cynthia Nixon as Emily Dickinson in A Quiet Passion, directed by Terence Davies Image credit: Music Box Films

Cynthia Nixon as Emily Dickinson in A Quiet Passion, directed by Terence Davies
Image credit: Music Box Films