The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, May 11-17
The Inner Scar (1972)
Directed by Philippe Garrel
It is not certain that there are many filmmakers who’ve experienced more of a clean aesthetic break in their filmographies as Garrel had pre-/post-1979. While viewers familiar with his later work (including most Anglophones) will identify in The Inner Scar the palpable sense of strung-out codependency in relationships at the core of his emotional cinema, the ethereal and epic language within which these facets are hidden is more or less unrecognizable. The reason for the aforementioned break is undoubtedly the terminus of Garrel’s relationship with chanteuse Nico, who exudes a Teutonic aura that both compliments and repudiates the evocations of primal earth Garrel is going for, effectively linking his troubled love to the beginning of humanity (The Inner Scar has no discernible narrative). The vistas the camera captures are striking, as antithetical as can be to the 70s France that his contemporaries were depicting during the post-New Wave era; the coupling of tracks from Nico’s Desertshore with these visions make the film positively otherworldly. Eric Barroso (May 13, 6:45pm; May 15, 2:30pm at “Metrograph A-Z”)