The MUBI Weekly Digest | 9th November 2019
David Farnor | On 10, Nov 2019
MUBI continues its eclectic range of director retrospectives this week, with highlights from the careers of Michael Haneke and Francois Ozon joined by a run of Luis Ospina work and a double-bill of Alan Resnais.
Want to see something on the big screen? Use MUBI Go (which offers a free cinema ticket every week to its subscribers), to see A Dog Called Money, MUBI’s exclusive new release, at participating theatres.
Otherwise, don’t miss your chance to catch London Film Festival favourite Zombi Child this week – you can read our interview with director Bertrand Bonello here.
What’s new, coming soon and leaving soon on the subscription service? This is your weekly MUBI Digest:
This week on MUBI
Ozon: Water Drops on Burning Rocks – 9th November
Working from an unproduced play by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Ozon made one of the most inventive films of his career with this 70s period piece. A synthesis of subversive genres: part musical, part sex farce, a little melodrama, Water Drops on Burning Rocks is a remarkably sardonic love story.
Haneke: The Piano Teacher – 10th November
Erika, a piano teacher at the Vienna Conservatory, lives with her tyrannical mother in a hermetically sealed world of love-hate and dependency in which there is no room for men. Then one of Erika’s pupils decides to seduce his teacher…
A Paper Tiger – 11th November
MUBI’s Luis Ospina tribute continues with this apocryphal doc playfully braiding reality, fiction and historical revisionism. Inviting the audience to participate in a game of deception, A Paper Tiger is a meditation on the elusive meaning of art—and cinema—where truth and lies become indiscernible.
Alice T. – 12th November
Alice is an adopted teenager who has a strained relationship with her adoptive mother. Being an endless source of problems, Alice forges lies and blurs the lines between the fiction she creates and her real existence. One day, Alice confesses that she is pregnant and that she wants to keep the baby.
Resnais: Last Year At Marienbad – 13th November
Part mystery, part fever dream, and possibly a ghost story, Last Year At Marienbad follows a married woman, A, and a man, X, through the empty rooms of a luxurious, baroque hotel that time forgot. X tries to persuade the incredulous A that they met in the same place the year before.
Resnais: Stavisky – 14th November
Biarritz, 1933. Charm and talent help small-time swindler Serge Alexandre, alias Stavisky, to bribe his way into the centre of French political power. But when his great scam involving millions gets exposed, he brings the government to the verge of collapse and the country to the brink of civil war.
Ozon: 5×2 – 15th November
As young French couple Gilles and Marion officially separate, we see, in reverse order, five milestone moments in their relationship: their divorce, a tense dinner with friends, the birth of their child, their joyous wedding and their first encounter.
Other new releases on MUBI
MUBI Release: A Dog Called Money
Award-winning war photographer and filmmaker Seamus Murphy explores the creative inspiration behind PJ Harvey’s album The Hope Six Demolition Project, filming her in a London recording studio and charting their travels together in Afghanistan, Kosovo and the U.S.
LFF:Yves Saint Laurent: The Last Collections
As Yves Saint Laurent, one of the greatest Parisian haute couture designers, draws the sketches for his final collection, behind the scenes, Pierre Bergé manages a series of events to celebrate the fashion icon as a modern myth.
The Birds
Hitchcock’s classic horror remains one of his best.
Ozon: Under the Sand
Marie and Jean have been happily married for years and are on holiday in Western France. As is their custom, they spend their holiday in a cottage on the coast. When her husband goes swimming and, after a brief afternoon nap, Marie wakes up, she finds that her husband has not returned.
The Vampires of Poverty
Two filmmakers travel around impoverished sectors of the cities of Bogotá and Cali in search of the images of abjection needed to complete a documentary commissioned by German TV. Meanwhile, another camera captures these “vampire” filmmakers feeding off the misery of their marginal subjects.
byNWR: Murder in Mississippi
Torn-from-the-headlines exploitation or daring social commentary? Joseph P. Mawra’s film is a little of both, using the true story of the killing of civil rights workers in the American deep South as a gritty springboard for another ultra-low-budget entry from the director of Chained Girls.
“Restored from the only 35mm release print known to exist, as all original material on the film is considered to be lost, similarly to many mid-60s grindhouse films. Certain imperfections in the source material were unavoidable, but this represents the best digital master of the film to date.” —NWR
Ozon: Criminal Lovers
With By the Grace of God in UK cinemas, revisit François Ozon’s 1999 thriller. One day in a French provincial town, Alice decides to convince Luc, her young, impressionable boyfriend, to kill Said, a classmate who’s a real show-off. They stage a macabre scene and do the terrible deed. After running away, they discover chaos instead of the fantasy life they imagined as outlaws.
The Two Irenes
By chance, Irene discovers that there is another 13-year-old Irene living in the same town. Curiously, she observes the confident, cheerful girl who lives alone with her mother. She is fascinated by this other world beyond the bounds of her own well-to-do and traditional family.
Monty Python’s Meaning of Life
The Monty Python collective explains it all in this episodic comedy. Overworked insurance clerks are staging a mutiny. They succesfully gain control of the building. But the building suddenly turns into a ship…
Port of Call
Berit, a suicidal young woman living in a working-class port town, unexpectedly falls for Gösta, a sailor on leave. Haunted by a troubled past and held in a vice grip by her domineering mother, Berit begins to hope that her relationship with Gösta might save her from self-destruction.
LFF: Zombi Child
Haiti, 1962. A man is brought back from the dead only to be sent to the living hell of the sugarcane fields. In Paris, 55 years later, at the prestigious Légion d’honneur boarding school, a Haitian girl confesses an old family secret to a group of new friends—with unthinkable consequences. Read our review – or click here to read our interview with director Bertrand Bonello.
Peeping Tom
A psychotic assistant cameraman at a film studio uses his camera equipment to film the deaths of sex workers he chooses as his victims, and unsuspecting women for his documentary on fear in Michal Powell’s seminal horror. Peeping Tom explores his childhood traumas, sexual crises, and murderous revenge as an adult.
Animal Kingdom
G’dayfellas! David Michôd’s Australian gangster flick about a teen trying to work out his place in a violent family is one of those modern masterpieces that will go down in history as launching several previously unknown talents into Hollywood – and propelling others even higher. Guy Pearce steals scenes as a cop trying to get James Frecheville’s teen to be an informer and Jacki Weaver amazes as his ruthless mother, but Ben Mendelsohn dominates the screen as the Cody’s intense patriarch. Strewth, it’s good.
L’Enfant Secret
A hidden gem from Philippe Garrel’s haunting filmography, this pocket melodrama meditates on loss, filmmaking, and the obstacles of an unstable relationship. Borrowing biographical details from the French auteur’s own love story with the singer Nico, L’enfant secret is a work of intimate poetry.
The Souvenir
In a groundbreaking new deal with Curzon Artificial Eye, MUBI brings The Souvenir to its streaming line-up just weeks after its cinema debut. British master Joanna Hogg delves into her own memories in this staggering work of heartbreaking intimacy, at once an alluring and shattering study on privilege, artistic creation and first love. With astounding performances by Honor Swinton Byrne (a revelation!), her own mother Tilda and Tom Burke.
M
Yolande Zauberman’s documentary is a bracing investigative exposé on a personal level. A deeply wrought story of one man’s heartbreaking trauma and confrontation with his past, the film also shockingly finds new victims inside a deeply private community. A painful revelation—it is hard to look away.
Haneke: Benny’s Video
Michael Haneke’s 1992 drama is a shocking, horrible piece of cinema. Benny at 14: a middle-class adolescence, absent parents most of the time, an effective void blurred in the world of video. The pictures he feeds on are overshadowing his sense of reality. Soon after, Benny loses his mind and kills a girl while filming the murder with his video camera.
Haneke: 71 Fragments of a Chronology of a Chance
On Christmas Eve 1993, a 19-year-old student kills a number of complete strangers without any apparent reason behind it. Starting with the TV newscasts of the event, 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance tracks a group of people who are randomly involved in such climactic violence.
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Last chance to stream: Titles leaving MUBI soon
Beanpole
Available until end of: 9th November
Che: Part One
Available until end of: 10th November
Che: Part Two
Available until end of: 11th November
I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History As Barbarians
Available until end of: 12th November
Shakti
Available until end of: 13th November
Island
Available until end of: 14th November
The Seventh Continent
Available until end of: 15th November
Zombi Child
Available until end of: 16th November
The Devil’s Backbone
Available until end of: 17th November
Pan’s Labyrinth
Available until end of: 18th November
Carlos
Available until end of: 19th November
Tiresia
Available until end of: 20th November