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      ‘Deception’ Review: Verbal Fetishism

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      In Arnaud Desplechin’s sly adaptation of Philip Roth’s 1990 novel, a middle-aged writer draws inspiration for his next book from discussions with his mistress.Leave it to the French to idealize adultery in the name of artistic freedom — which is not to say that “Deception,” the latest feature by Arnaud Desplechin, should be dismissed as only a navel-gazing masculine reverie.True, its hero is a philandering middle-aged novelist; he has an affair with a divine younger woman; and there’s even an imaginary trial where said novelist stands before a jury of women accusing him of misogyny.But, if you can tolerate these passé indulgences, there’s also something slyly compelling about this ethereal, pillow-talk-heavy drama.“Deception” is a fairly faithful adaptation of Philip Roth’s 1990 novel — a book that Desplechin has long desired to commit to screen. No wonder, the two men share a fixation with unsavory intimacies and narcissistic-but-tender protagonists.Divided into 12 chapters, it follows an American expatriate, Philip (Denis Podalydès), who is working on a new book, though we hardly ever see him write. Mostly, he’s wrapped up in discussions with his nameless English mistress (Léa Seydoux). These talks are his writing process, his mistress, his muse.Philip also reconnects with past lovers — like the cancer-ridden Rosalie (a vibrant Emmanuelle Devos). At the same time, his actual wife (Anouk Grinberg) remains in the margins, tucked away at home.At a certain point, one character observes, writers stop “translating reality into fiction” and begin to “impose fiction on reality.” Philip technically travels between New York and London, but the film plays like a chamber drama, with dreamy fade-outs and occasional strokes of fantasy contributing to the idea that what we see is a version of Philip’s novel.At the film’s beginning, Seydoux’s paramour describes Philip’s office in expert detail, and retorts with a challenge: “Now let’s see how well you’ve been paying attention.” It’s an intriguing comment that opens up a question as the film unfolds: attention, yes, but of what kind?DeceptionNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Watch on Mubi. More

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      ‘Emergency’ Review: Party Over

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      A celebratory evening takes a turn when college friends find a young woman passed out in their house.If you have a low threshold for bad decision making, “Emergency” might test your patience. But the film smartly navigates the iffy steps its characters take. Those choices cascade when the best friends and college seniors Kunle (Donald Elise Watkins) and Sean (RJ Cyler) arrive home to find their front door ajar and a young white woman passed out on the living-room floor. Their housemate Carlos (Sebastian Chacon) hasn’t a clue. The dilemma Emma — that’s her name and she’s played by Maddie Nichols — presents upends their plans to become the first Black men to complete the college’s evening-long party circuit known as the “legendary tour.”Kunle wants to call 911. Sean, who’s been vaping for hours, says no. Carlos could go either way. Sean’s resistance isn’t simply the result of the fog of weed. And this is the spiky point of the director Carey Williams and the writer KD Dávila: What happens when what should be a simple call to the police isn’t?“Emergency” infuses a college comedy with lessons about race and entitlement. In the decision-making department, Emma and her older sister Maddy (Sabrina Carpenter) have some explaining to do — or would, were their sense of privilege not so unquestioned.Thanks to some good filmmaking decisions, “Emergency” is rife with tart observations about campus life. It is evocatively shot by Michael Dallatorre, particularly the montage of how Sean imagined the party night unfolding. Still, the best choice comes in casting Cyler and Watkins. The wise slacker and the guileless nerd couldn’t be more different, which makes the testing of their bond as friends, but also as Black men, rich and resonant.EmergencyRated R for pervasive language, a cloud bank of weed smoke and some sexual references. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters now, streaming on Amazon May 27. More

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      What Is Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival?

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      Cannes’s sidebars and parallel festivals kick off today (other than Cannes Classics, which opened yesterday with a restoration of “The Mother and the Whore.”)One you’ll likely hear chatter about is Un Certain Regard, the official selection’s largest sidebar of new films. The section’s name is usually translated into English as “a certain look”; this doesn’t quite capture the spirit of the event, which is about looking to new horizons and filmmakers.In effect, Un Certain Regard functions as a low-key mirror image of the main competition. Screenings are in the Salle Claude Debussy, which doesn’t have the same evening-dress-code restrictions as the larger Grand Théâtre Lumière, where the competition films play. The program has its own jury, with this year’s chaired by the Italian actress Valeria Golino. And while the prizes are not nearly as scrutinized as the Palme d’Or, Un Certain Regard’s top award has in the past gone to filmmakers who went on to have major careers, like Thailand’s Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Greece’s Yorgos Lanthimos.That said, Un Certain Regard can’t simply be described as a lineup of up-and-coming filmmakers. Occasionally, the programmers throw a past Palme contender like Sofia Coppola, or Claire Denis, into the mix, which inevitably looks insulting to those directors, regardless of whether that’s the intention. Un Certain Regard also frequently serves as a platform for actors making their feature-directing debuts. This year, Riley Keough is here with “War Pony,” which she directed with Gina Gammell. It’s billed as a coming-of-age story about two young Oglala Lakota men. More

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      Rosmarie Trapp of the ‘Sound of Music’ Family Dies at 93

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      She was the last surviving daughter of the baron and the would-be nun depicted in the stage musical and 1965 film.Rosmarie Trapp, a member of the singing family made famous by the stage musical and film “The Sound of Music” and the last surviving daughter of Baron Georg Johannes von Trapp, the family patriarch, died on May 13 at a nursing home in Morrisville, Vt. She was 93.The Trapp Family Lodge, the family business in Stowe, Vt., announced her death on Tuesday.Ms. Trapp (who dropped the “von” from her name years ago) was the daughter of Georg and Maria Augusta (Kutschera) von Trapp, the would-be nun who became a governess with the family and ultimately married the baron.Rosmarie is not depicted in “The Sound of Music,” which focused on the seven children Georg von Trapp had with his first wife, although she was in fact almost 10 when the family fled Austria in 1938 after that country came under Nazi rule. Among the many liberties “The Sound of Music” took with the family’s story was the timeline — Georg and Maria actually married in 1927, not a decade later.In any case, Rosmarie did travel and perform with the Trapp Family Singers for years and was a presence at the lodge in Stowe, where she would hold singalongs for the guests. She acknowledged, though, that it took her some time to embrace the fame that the musical thrust upon her after it debuted on Broadway in 1959, beginning a three-year run, and then was adapted into a 1965 movie, which won the best picture Oscar.“I used to think I was a museum,” she told The Chicago Tribune in 1997, when she was evangelizing on behalf of the Community of the Crucified One, a Pennsylvania-based church, “but I can’t escape it.”“Now I’m using it as a tool,” she added. “I’m not a victim of it anymore.”Some of the children of Baron Georg von Trapp singing during a Mass in his honor in 1997 in Stowe, Vt., where the family runs a lodge. From left, Maria von Trapp, Eleonore Campbell, Werner von Trapp, Rosmarie Trapp and Agathe von TrappAssociated PressRosmarie Barbara von Trapp was born on Feb. 8, 1929, in Aigen, a village outside Salzburg, Austria. The family began singing publicly in the 1930s in Europe, but the baron had no interest in cooperating with Hitler once the Nazis took control, and so the family left Austria, taking a train to Italy. (The “Sound of Music” depiction of the departure was fictionalized.)The family gave its first New York concert, at Town Hall, in December 1938 and soon settled in the United States, first in Pennsylvania, then in Vermont.“We chose America because it was the furthest away from Hitler,” Ms. Trapp told The Palm Beach Post of Florida in 2007, when she spoke to students from the musical theater program and Holocaust studies classes at William T. Dwyer High School in Palm Beach Gardens.The family singing group continued to perform into the 1950s. Late in the decade, Ms. Trapp and other family members went to New Guinea to do missionary work for several years. Ms. Trapp’s father died in 1947, and her mother died in 1987.Ms. Trapp’s brother, Johannes von Trapp, is the last living member of the original family singers and her only immediate survivor.The Trapp Family Singers repertory, of course, included none of the songs later composed by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II for “The Sound of Music,” but when Ms. Trapp gave talks like the one at the Florida high school, she would gladly take requests for a number or two from the musical. What did she think of the film?“It was a nice movie,” she told The Post in 2007. “But it wasn’t like my life.” More

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      Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Masterpiece of Existential Angst

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      His moody 2004 film, ‘Distant,’ about an unemployed factory worker in Istanbul, has been revived for a short run at Film Forum in Manhattan.The miracle of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “Distant” is that it is continually absorbing, even when not much is happening — which is most of the time. A photographer before he became the dean of Turkish filmmakers, Ceylan is a master of existential angst and transfigured dailiness whose movies invite contemplation.Revived for a week at Film Forum in a new digital restoration, “Distant” — which opened in the United States in 2004, having won the second-highest prize at Cannes — looks even better than I remembered.The brief precredit sequence is emblematic of Ceylan’s style. A tiny figure trudges across a snowy field in what feels like real time, accompanied by ambient sounds. This is followed by a slow pan to the road, slightly in advance of the vehicle that will take him to Istanbul. Immanence is all.An unemployed factory worker, Yusuf (Mehmet Emin Toprak) arrives in the city with vague hopes of shipping out to sea. While shambolically looking for a job, he stays with his older cousin Mahmut (Muzaffer Özdemir), a commercial photographer with abandoned artistic aspirations. (If Mahmut might be the director’s unflattering self-portrait, Yusuf was played by Ceylan’s actual cousin, tragically killed in a car crash before the movie’s release.)Sufficiently affluent to indulge his alienation, Mahmut has a decent apartment in a nice neighborhood, but his emotions are as frozen as the snow that blanket the city. “Distant” often feels directed by the weather. (Ceylan’s next film, about a marital breakup in which he co-starred with his wife, was titled “Climates.”)Each frustrated in his own way, the cousins can barely relate. Yusuf is a bit of a bumpkin. Mahmut is a grouch who spends most evenings sacked out in front of his TV (switching from a Tarkovsky movie to — when Yusuf leaves the room — porn). Mahmut’s immobility is parodied by the sticky tape he puts down nightly in hopes of trapping the mouse that lives in his kitchen.Although his mood of rapt sadness is his own, Ceylan has affinities to Michelangelo Antonioni (feel for bourgeois estrangement), Yasujiro Ozu (exquisite, unshowy compositions), Robert Bresson (precise use of sound) and even Jacques Tati (deadpan humor).Pervaded with a sense of apprehension, “Distant” seems to promise a crime — not least because Yusuf has a practice of following women in the street. In one mordant joke, he trails a woman into a park, inadvertently makes eye contact with another lurker, then hastily conceals himself when the woman’s date shows up.The transgression finally comes from an act of omission, rather commission, so mean and petty as to seem earthshaking. As the fate of the mouse suggests, Ceylan has a feel for understated symbols. The New York Times critic Elvis Mitchell, although generally unenthusiastic (“almost like a droll take on ‘The Odd Couple’”), did acknowledge that “Distant” required a second viewing “to work its spell.”In the final scene, Mahmut sits alone by the harbor, smoking a cigarette from a pack Yusuf left behind. His anguish is palpable. There’s no particular reason to feel sorry for this guy except he’s human and alone.DistantMay 20-26 at Film Forum in Manhattan; filmforum.org. More

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      Marty Callner Might Be the Most Influential Comedy Director

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      Marty Callner made the first modern special, setting the template still in use. (He was also key to hair-metal videos. But that’s another story.)Since comedy is often overlooked at the Oscars, why doesn’t it have its own awards show?It’s been tried, but the self-seriousness of such events can be an odd fit. So when Netflix started an awards show celebrating the greats in stand-up — who will be inducted into the Hall of Fame being built at the National Comedy Center — it was inevitable that a participating comic would make fun of the whole thing.At the recent Los Angeles taping of that awards show, “The Hall: Honoring the Greats of Stand-Up,” which premieres on Thursday, Richard Pryor, Joan Rivers, George Carlin and Robin Williams were inducted with speeches by Dave Chappelle, Chelsea Handler, Jon Stewart and John Mulaney. When Mulaney introduced Williams by reading a letter from the late comic’s daughter, he appeared momentarily emotional before pausing to say: “I don’t want to cry at a fake awards show.”That didn’t sit right with Marty Callner, the show’s co-creator (with Randall Gladstein) and director, who cut that quip in the edit. “It’s real,” he told me in the backyard of his Malibu home. “The Hall” has been a longtime dream of his, an effort to reintroduce classic comedy to younger generations, and an honor that he says comics will appreciate and care about. “These guys are still human beings and they still have egos and they still want a legacy.”John Mulaney inducting Robin Williams into the Hall of Fame on the new special.Terence Patrick/NetflixCallner, 75, has his own complicated relationship with a public legacy since his remarkable career has largely existed in the background. In fact, he might be the most successful director you have never heard of.Over the past five decades, Callner has worked with some of the most famous brand names in popular culture — Madonna, Jerry Seinfeld, the Dallas Cowboys — and was a formative figure at the dawn of two modern art forms: the stand-up special and the music video, neither of which are known for giving much credit to the director. If that weren’t enough innovation, he also created “Hard Knocks,” a hit reality show that for 20 years, turned N.F.L. training camp into a soap opera.“The Hall,” whose inductees were chosen by a panel of comedy industry types like club owners and agents chosen by Callner, is only the latest institution he’s built, but it’s one he speaks about with personal passion, especially since he knew each of the first four comics being inducted. “Stand-up is such a part of my life that I wanted to give back,” he said.Callner was raised by a single parent (his father left when he was 2) in Cincinnati, a midcentury television hub. He credits a 1969 trip on synthetic psilocybin for awakening his previously dormant creativity, started working an entry-level job in live local news and immediately fell in love. He hung around the Cincinnati station at all hours, sponging up shot composition and camera angles. When a director suddenly left one afternoon for a family emergency, Callner got his chance, moving on to direct commercials and Boston Celtics games including their championship season in 1974. His success led to two offers: to work for NBC Sports, a national behemoth, or for a relatively unknown new cable channel called HBO, where he would be able to shape its look and style (and direct live coverage of Wimbledon). Callner bet on the option where he could have more sway. It wouldn’t take long for this to pay off in his big break.Two months after “Saturday Night Live” premiered in 1975, he directed a show that started a tradition that rivals it: “An Evening With Robert Klein” was the first HBO stand-up special. Shelley Berman and Bob Newhart had made specials for television the previous decade, but it was Klein’s hour that pointed the way to the future, even opening with a backstage scene of the comic preparing. This cold open would become such a stand-up special cliché that Callner said he wouldn’t use it again.HBO had a couple of advantages over network television: It presented longer sets, and, critically, comics could curse. The line that Klein cared most about, Callner said, came after he swore: “What a catharsis,” he quipped.Callner zoomed in on him during this moment to emphasize the point.The day after the show premiered, a positive review in The Times described the process of using five cameras to capture an uncensored long-form portrait of the comic as “innovative.”“That changed my life,” Callner said, adding that the article led HBO to sign him up for a series of specials that made the cable channel the central home for this nascent form. He directed the first specials of Robin Williams, Steve Martin and Carlin, who became a good friend and the best man at his wedding. Did Carlin give a speech? “I’m sure he did but I don’t even remember being there,” Callner said, smiling. “It was the 1980s.”The look of these early specials did not draw attention to itself. “I learned the comedy directs me,” he said. “If a comedian is doing something physical, it better be a head-to-toe shot. If he’s making a poignant point, it better be on a close shot. It was reportage. My job was to capture their genius and not take shots that were superfluous. I see all kinds of directors today making this mistake. They are cutting around to show off.”“My job was to capture their genius and not take shots that were superfluous,” Callner said, with an Emmy for “Hard Knocks” on his desk.Peter Fisher for The New York TimesBy the end of the decade, Callner had become bored with specials and excited by a flashier art form in its infancy at another young cable channel, MTV.His first video, Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take it,” was a slapstick production that leaned on his comic background. In it, a boy (played by his son) sends his angry dad out the window thanks to the power of his declaration, “I want to rock!” (which was Callner’s voice dubbed in). This proved to be a major hit and led to directing jobs on hundreds more videos, including 18 with Aerosmith and four with Cher. It was Callner’s idea to put Cher on a cannon on a Navy ship in the video “If I Could Turn Back Time.” Asked why, he said, “It was phallic,” which is hard to argue with.In these early days of MTV, the aesthetic for videos was up for grabs, said Rob Tannenbaum, who co-wrote “I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution” and is an occasional contributor to The Times. He explained, “Devo wanted them to be avant-garde films; Duran Duran wanted them to be Patrick Nagel-style reveries; Marty Callner thought videos should be funny, which proved to be a more durable concept.” He added, “He understood, early on, that videos could be about more than amusement — they could be about branding and even mythology.”To be sure, they were also about scantily clad women (MTV once gave him a note that his video for the Scorpions’ “Big City Nights,” had too many women in bikinis) and hair, lots of it. As much as anyone, Callner created the visuals for the era when rock was dominated by flowing, feathered locks. The secret auteur of the genre known as hair metal was his hairdresser wife of 40 years, Aleeza Callner, who blow-dried the heads of the members of Whitesnake, Poison, Kiss, the Scorpions — not to mention Sam Kinison and Jerry Seinfeld.After a career directing television that tapped into the raw American id, Callner, who said he hated the objectification of women “even though I can’t say I wasn’t culpable,” is now looking at an unlikely new idea. He’s planning a festival called “America’s Wedding” in which 2,000 couples would get married at the same time in Las Vegas.For now, he is focused on “The Hall,” which Netflix aims to make an annual tradition. Callner, who once directed a tribute to Lenny Bruce, said that the influential stand-up received the fifth most votes, and hopes he gets inducted in a future show.Asked if it ever bothers him that his work is so much better known than he is, he said what mattered to him was the final product. “I didn’t become a household name,” he said, in front of a beautiful view of the water, “but I did become the highest paid television director in Hollywood, and the reason is: I made people a lot of money.” More

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      Tom Cruise on ‘Top Gun: Maverick' and Doing His Own Stunts

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      CANNES, France — It has been 30 years since Tom Cruise attended the Cannes Film Festival, and it’s evident the festival would like to make up for lost time. Perhaps that’s why, in advance of a conversation with the actor billed as a “Rendezvous with Tom Cruise” — which was itself happening in advance of the evening premiere of Cruise’s sequel “Top Gun: Maverick” — the festival played a nearly 15-minute-long clip reel of Cruise’s filmography, hyperbolically scored to Richard Strauss’s “Also sprach Zarathustra.” As the actor and audience watched from their seats, the reel touched on Cruise the action star, Cruise the dramatic thespian and Cruise the romantic, though the latter section, which featured him pitching woo at a bevy of leading ladies, notably left out Cruise’s ex-wife and three-time co-star Nicole Kidman.“It’s wild seeing this reel,” Cruise said after taking the stage. “It’s like your life in ten minutes — very trippy.” Cruise was speaking in front of a mostly unmasked crowd in the Salle Claude Debussy, which included hundreds of journalists and a team from Cruise’s agent, CAA. “After everything we’ve been through, it’s such a privilege to see your faces,” he said. He noted that “Top Gun: Maverick” had been held for two years because of the pandemic, though he refused to show it on a streaming service in the meantime. “Not gonna happen!” Cruise said to applause. The 59-year-old star is insistent that his movies receive a lengthy theatrical window, a mandate that has sometimes put him in conflict with studio heads, who are eager to fill their streaming services with star-driven content. And in an era where big names like Leonardo DiCaprio and Sandra Bullock have no problem appearing in films for Netflix, Cruise remains a rare holdout.“There’s a very specific way to make a movie for cinema, and I make movies for the big screen,” said Cruise. “I know where they go after that and that’s fine.” He said he even called theater owners during the pandemic to reassure them: “Just know we are making ‘Mission: Impossible.’ ‘Top Gun’ is coming out.”Cruise is a discursive speaker who will leap out of one anecdote before it’s done to land in another, then another. (Perhaps that would make for an esoteric set piece in one of his action films?) But it was striking how often he returned to his formative experience shooting the 1981 movie “Taps,” in which he acted opposite George C. Scott and found himself fascinated by the way the filmmaking worked. Cruise said that while shooting, he thought, “Please, if I could just do this for the rest of my life, I will never take it for granted.”And in the absence of any challenging questions from his interlocutor, the French journalist Didier Allouch — who was mostly content to burble blandishments like “You’re absolutely extraordinary” to his interview subject — Cruise had the freedom to basically spin his own narrative of being a determined student of cinema and his fellow man. (And “Taps,” of course.)“I was the kind of kid who always wrote goals on the wall of what kind of movies I liked or what I wanted my life to be, and I worked toward those goals,” Cruise said.Though the conversation increasingly leaned toward bland generalities — “I’m interested in people, cultures, and adventure,” Cruise said more than once — it did provide one major laugh line when Allouch asked why he was so determined to do his own stunts in the “Mission: Impossible” movies, which will soon be receiving seventh and eighth installments shot back-to-back. “No one asked Gene Kelly ‘Why do you dance?’” replied the star. More

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      Cannes Film Festival Impacted by the War in Ukraine

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      The war in Ukraine is casting a long shadow over this year’s Cannes Film Festival. On Tuesday, Volodymyr Zelensky, the country’s president, addressed the event’s opening ceremony, with stirring rhetoric and Charlie Chaplin quotes.But the conflict had already had an impact on the festival long before Zelensky’s appearance. Within days of Russia’s invasion, in February, some of Ukraine’s leading movie directors and producers called on film festivals worldwide to boycott Russians, as a sign of support. Cannes said in a statement in March that it would no longer “welcome official Russian delegations, nor accept the presence of anyone linked to the Russian government,” but added that it would not ban Russian directors.There is one major Russian director at this year’s event: Kirill Serebrennikov, who is competing for the Palme d’Or with “Tchaikovsky’s Wife.” The Cannes press office told The Hollywood Reporter it had approved “only a few” Russian media outlets to cover the event, and that all of those outlets opposed the war. It was unclear, however, if any state news outlets had requested accreditation, and the festival did not respond to emailed questions.Two movies by Ukrainian directors are on the festival’s program: Maksim Nakonechnyi’s “Butterfly Vision” and Sergei Loznitsa’s “The Natural History of Destruction.” But even those choices might stir controversy. In March, the Ukrainian Film Academy expelled Loznitsa, because he did not support its call to boycott Russian movies.A scene from Sergei Loznitsa’s “The Natural History of Destruction.”Progress FilmRita Burkovska in “Butterfly Vision.”
      “When I hear calls to ban Russian films, I think of my Russian friends — decent and honorable people,” Loznitsa told The New York Times in March. “We cannot judge people by their passports,” he added: “They are victims of this war, just like we are.” More