The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, February 10-16
Directed by Claude Chabrol
A refined and seductive look at bisexuality in the 1960s. Chabrol brings to life absent-minded characters in a power struggle amidst a mise-en-scène of muted colors and culpability. This power, an indicator for happiness, is desired by two women— Frédérique (Stéphane Audran) and Why (Jacqueline Sassard)—who embark on a sexual relationship symbolic of their own socioeconomic reality. The two women vacation in Saint Tropez, and it’s there they meet an architect (the august, statuesque Jean Louis Trintignant) and each embark on a separate affair with the man—Why being heterosexually deflowered; Frédérique going tête-à-tête in a willful seduction. Like in Persona two years before, the characters begin to adapt each other’s personalities, and soon Why emerges from her battered cocoon as mad and vengeful in the denouement. Samantha Vacca (February 14, 7:30pm; February 22, 10pm at the Spectacle’s “Anti-Valentines”)