The Official Story
The Official Story
“No people can survive without memory,” Alicia tells her history class. But in post-junta Argentina, memory was often selective. In the Oscar-winning The Official Story (1985), Alicia gradually grows aware that her foster daughter was the child of a mother killed by the military. Not everyone in her complicit circle is a monster, but in a shocking climax, she learns that the relentless logic of torture is closer to home than she ever imagined.
Love, Cecil
He was an accomplished painter, writer and Oscar-winning costume designer, yet Cecil Beaton made his deepest mark as a photographer, especially from the photo shoots he choreographed for Vogue starting in the 1930s. Lisa Immordino Vreeland’s Love, Cecil is a sparkling documentary that captures Beaton’s endearing charm. Grounded in fin de siècle aestheticism, he was forever in search of beauty, and when he couldn’t find it, he built it from the materials of life.
La Madre, El Hijo y La Abuela (Mother, Son, and Grandmother)
Photographer Cristóbal (Gonzalo Aburto) arrives in a small, remote Chilean town recently damaged by a volcanic eruption. He’s not documenting the damage but conducting a “project” to find his identity. Cristóbal falls in with an ailing grandmother and her shopkeeper daughter in a story that is sad and sweet but somehow never melodramatic or cloying. Writer-director Benjamin Brunet imbues Mother, Son, and Grandmother with some fine filmic moments wrapped into an intimate, human-scale drama.
Rodin
Vincent Lindon plays Auguste Rodin in this nicely turned out biographical drama. The French language film by Jacques Doillons depicts the self-taught artist as something of an outsider who achieved acclaim relatively late in life as a groundbreaking sculptor. He has two mistresses, long-time companion Rose (Séverine Caneele) and fetching young artist Camille (Izïa Higelin) and is admired by the great Impressionists. Rodin spends much time where it belongs, in the artist’s studio amidst damp clay.
