The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, March 23-29
Directed by Kathleen Collins
The late Collins’s recently restored fifty-minute-long debut film will screen within a program called “Life / Death and Afterlife.” Her film is sandwiched between two others: Kim Miller’s Madame Mae Nang Nak (2014), in which a Thai supernatural folk tale is related orally through different local narrators, and Tamar Guimarães and Kasper Akhøj’s 2014 black-and-white silent Captain Gervasio’s Family, which depicts encounters with spiritual mediums in a small Brazilian town. The program’s middle ghost story (which Collins adapted from Henry H. Roth’s novel Cruz Chronicles) also offers a cross-cultural encounter. The three upstate New York-based Puerto Rican siblings of this lucid and sumptuously colorful 16mm-to-DCP work’s title (played by Randy Ruiz, Lionel Pina, and José Machado) are contracted by an elderly wealthy woman of Irish descent (Sylvia Field) to renovate her mansion for a ball before her soon-to-come death arrives. While the former actress dreams longingly of ghosts from her past, the three young men deal vividly with the absence of their late father, killed while attempting a bank robbery, whose own ghost (rendered through handheld POV shots) frequently appears to give advice to eldest brother Victor while remaining unperceived by his other sons. The Cruz men labor daily at Miss Malloy’s place, with varying degrees of acceptance, in an effort to build their own honest paths; then, in a twist, all four living characters find peace by jointly embracing their phantoms. Aaron Cutler (March 29, 7pm at Anthology Film Archives as part of their ongoing Flaherty NYC programming)