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    Philippe Gaulier on the Art of Clowning and Sacha Baron Cohen

    The French master teacher Philippe Gaulier has worked with stars like Sacha Baron Cohen. But at 78, are his methods, which include insults, outdated?ÉTAMPES, France — It’s unlikely anyone alive has made more clowns cry than Philippe Gaulier.In a supposedly more sensitive era, hundreds of people regularly travel from all around the world to a small town an hour outside of Paris to study clowning with Gaulier, a gruff 78-year-old éminence grise known for his blunt, flamboyantly negative feedback. Wearing a pink tie, beret and stern look over a bushy white beard on a recent tour of the school, he looked the part of the guru — a mischievous one. He pointed at a large photo of himself teaching in China and joked he was “Clown Chairman Mao.”In his office, sitting across from his wife, Michiko Miyazaki Gaulier, a former student who is now a colleague, he made no apologies for his pugnacious style, saying students who are not funny have a choice: “You have to change or leave the school. You are boring. If you want to stay boring all your life, you will never be a clown.”Gaulier has been teaching clowns for about half a century, but his stature has grown in recent years, becoming an influential and divisive figure of considerable mystique, the Dumbledore of round red noses. The primary reason for his raised profile is the success of Sacha Baron Cohen, a former student who praised Gaulier on Marc Maron’s podcast in 2016 and described receiving bad reviews from him in a 2021 appearance on “Late Night With Seth Meyers.”“I was always interested in comedy, but it was Gaulier who helped me understand how to be funny,” Baron Cohen wrote in the preface to Gaulier’s book “The Tormentor.”Clowns remain a staple of the circus, but the reach of the ancient art is much wider these days, with a growing theatrical scene as well as performers crossing over into other forms. The alumni network at Gaulier’s school, where many make lifelong connections, is expansive — spanning film and theater (Emma Thompson, Kathryn Hunter), circus and live comedy, with students like the Los Angeles comedian Dr. Brown becoming gurus themselves. Another protégé, Zach Zucker, is the host of Stamptown, a popular showcase of cutting-edge comics in Brooklyn, its name inspired by the town of Gaulier’s school. “He has become the name to drop,” Geoff Sobelle, an acclaimed performer and former student, said about Gaulier’s reputation among clowns.In a two-hour interview last month, Gaulier, speaking in English, came off less like a teacher than a very funny insult comic, teasing and trash-talking, tossing jabs at everyone from Slava Polunin, the Tony-nominated Russian clown (“For children who has problem to sleep, can be good”) to the legendary mime Marcel Marceau (“He’s a maniac with his gestures”). Asked if someone can be funny who didn’t make him laugh, he said it was possible, before turning back to me, gesturing at my clothes: “It’s possible that you with your glasses, your hair, that you are funny,” he said, before the punchline. “And someone really well-dressed is, too. The opposite of you.”He’s allergic to anything that smacks of pretension, which inevitably inspires one of his favorite expressions: “of my balls,” as in Slava is a “poetic clown of my balls.”Compared with other clowning teachers, Gaulier said he does not emphasize technique or physical virtuosity. His pedagogy aims for something more intangible, nurturing a childlike spirit, a sense of play onstage. The most important quality in a clown is keeping things light and present, and, as he said with the utmost respect, stupid. Finding “your idiot,” as he calls it, is the essence of clowning, which, unlike comic acting, requires a performer to stick with the same character. “A clown is a special kind of idiot, absolutely different and innocent,” he said. “A marvelous idiot.”Gaulier “helped me understand how to be funny,” Sacha Baron Cohen has written.Cedrine Scheidig for The New York TimesGaulier said he could put a red nose on anyone and tell how they played as a 7-year-old. Students, who do in fact do exercises in red noses, describe this in gushing terms.“He liberated me,” said René Bazinet, a highly respected German-Canadian clown who has worked for years with Cirque du Soleil. “In my first year, I had to read a poem, and he kept stopping me, saying, ‘Why are you clearing your throat? Say the poem. Why are you doing this? Why that?’ And one moment, my brain just opened up. His way of attacking the falseness was a relief to me. I was becoming an idiot.”This process can sometimes sound like a masochistic cleansing ritual. “He just insults his students all day long until they start laughing and their ego gets out of the way,” Bazinet said. “You are taking your ego to the slaughterhouse.”Former students inevitably have stories of bruising feedback, usually told with the affection of grizzled war veterans. Kendall Cornell, who leads an all-female clown troupe, Clowns Ex Machina, recalled a lot of tears, but also a “mind-blowing” experience that taught her things she didn’t learn in other classes. There’s even a Facebook group that collects insults called “Philippe Gaulier Hit Me With a Stick.”The criticisms include “You sound like overcooked spaghetti in a pressure cooker” and “You are a very good clown for my grandmother.” He frequently focuses on the eyes. “If you are funny,” he told me, “you have funny eyes.”Gaulier is even stingy with compliments for his most successful alumni. Asked about Baron Cohen as a student, he said: “Nice boy. Tall.” Pressed for more, he added, “He’s a guy who when he understands something, he’s going to sell it. That’s enough.”When he was 8, Gaulier, who grew up in Paris near a circus, was kicked out of school for punching his gymnastics teacher. Seven decades later, he has no regrets. “He was a bastard,” he said, explaining that the instructor made students march like in the army. “I hate the military. Teachers, too.”His ambition was to be a tragic actor, but every time he tried to do serious work in drama school, he said with resignation, everyone laughed. This led him to a class with the renowned mime and master teacher Jacques Lecoq, whose pioneering training was rooted in clowning, improvisation and mask work. Gaulier became a performer who, with his partner, Pierre Byland, had a hit clown show, during which he broke 200 plates every night.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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    ‘Nocturna’ Review: A Dark Night of the Soul

    A seemingly haunted apartment building terrorizes a bewildered old man in this psychological thriller.Divided into two distinct features — the first of which can stand alone, while the second may work best as a dialogue with the first — “Nocturna” weaves memory and nightmare into a haunting tale of loneliness and regret.In “Side A — The Great Old Man’s Night,” we meet Ulysses (Pepe Soriano), a confused nonagenarian who lives with his infirm wife, Dalia (Marilú Marini), in a run-down apartment whose soaring ceilings and clouded windows enclose a spacious prison. When Ulysses tries to go shopping, he is gently deterred by the building’s super; yet their food supplies are dwindling, and Ulysses wonders why he can never leave, why their son never visits, and why he can’t recall their estranged daughter’s name. Maybe Dalia is right, and the homeowners’ association will evict them if they see how the couple is living. Or maybe his confinement is just the latest in a lifetime of Dalia’s cruelties.Like Ulysses, we search for answers, but the Argentine writer and director, Gonzalo Calzada, is interested only in dropping clues. As the clock creeps into the wee hours, the couple is awakened by their upstairs neighbor, Elena (Desirée Salgueiro), pounding on their door and screaming for help. A surging atmosphere of dread and danger envelops the film as a terrified Ulysses retreats into golden memories of a childhood game of hide-and-seek. The ghosts in the building, however — and the body in his courtyard — will not let him be.Sad and strange and deeply upsetting, “Side A” profits from Claudio Beiza’s velvety, gray-green images and a soundtrack pulsing with heartbeats and the distressing whine of Ulysses’s hearing aid. Our assumptions about his life and marriage may harden; but not until “Side B — Where the Elephants Go to Die,” are they enriched and interrogated. Here, Calzado uses more experimental techniques to expand his narrative, paralleling the flickering impermanence of filmed images with physical and psychological decay. Together, these unusual films do more than contemplate loss and longing: They warn us that the time to make amends might be briefer than we think.Nocturna: Side A — The Great Old Man’s NightNot rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. Available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.Nocturna: Side B — Where the Elephants Go to DieNot rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 7 minutes. Available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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    Alec Baldwin Turns Over His Phone in ‘Rust’ Investigation

    Detectives investigating the actor’s fatal shooting of a cinematographer on a film set in New Mexico had gotten a search warrant for the phone nearly a month ago.The actor Alec Baldwin turned his phone in to the police in Suffolk County, N.Y., on Friday morning, his lawyer said, starting a process that will allow investigators to collect data related to his fatal shooting of a cinematographer on the set of the film “Rust” last year in New Mexico.Mr. Baldwin agreed to a process in which he would hand over his iPhone and its password, and the phone’s data would be reviewed by officials from the Suffolk County police department and district attorney’s office before the relevant data would be passed to the authorities in New Mexico, according to a search agreement provided by Mr. Baldwin’s lawyer. Mr. Baldwin, who has a home in Suffolk County, handed the phone over to the police himself, his lawyer, Aaron Dyer, said. Juan Rios, a spokesman for the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office, said his office had been notified that the phone was handed over to the authorities in Suffolk County, N.Y.According to the terms of the search agreement, officials in Suffolk County will review the phone’s communications — including texts, emails, call records, voice mail messages, digital images and internet browser history — between June 1 and Dec. 5 last year, and will exclude any communications with his lawyers or his wife, Hilaria, which are protected by privilege.“Mr. Baldwin has a right to privacy regarding the contents of the iPhone, as well as regarding communications with his attorneys and with his spouse, which communications are protected by the attorney-client privilege and the marital communications privilege respectively,” the agreement states..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}The police in Suffolk County are to create a “forensic download” of the iPhone “in its entirety,” according to the agreement, before the device is returned to Mr. Baldwin.The fatal shooting occurred on Oct. 21, while Mr. Baldwin was practicing drawing an old-fashioned revolver from a shoulder holster. He had been told that the gun did not contain any live rounds, but it did, and it discharged a bullet that killed the cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, and wounded the movie’s director, Joel Souza. Investigators looking into the shooting, and seeking to determine how a live round got into the gun, secured a search warrant for Mr. Baldwin’s phone on Dec. 16.The agreement to turn over Mr. Baldwin’s phone states that the search warrant is not enforceable in New York — where he lives — and that without Mr. Baldwin’s consent to search the phone, the authorities would be required to seek a separate warrant in the state. To avoid that, the agreement says, Mr. Baldwin has agreed to proceed “as if the NM Warrant had been obtained in New York.”“Alec voluntarily provided his phone to the authorities this morning so they can finish their investigation,” Mr. Dyer said in a statement. “But this matter isn’t about his phone, and there are no answers on his phone. Alec did nothing wrong.”The set of the movie “Rust,” where Halyna Hutchins was fatally shot in October.Jae C. Hong/Associated PressWhile generally limiting their search to communications between June 1 and Dec. 5, officers will be able to access communications with Matthew Hutchins, Ms. Hutchins’s widower, and Santa Fe law enforcement officials from any date, according to the search agreement. It said that Mr. Baldwin had agreed to provide a list of telephone numbers for “individuals and entities connected with the production of the film.” The officials “may only extract call records for calls to or from those numbers during the relevant time period,” according to the agreement.After media outlets reported last week that the Santa Fe authorities did not have Mr. Baldwin’s phone three weeks after the warrant was granted, Mr. Baldwin posted a video on his Instagram account saying that any suggestion that he was not cooperating with investigators was “a lie.” He said that the process would take time and that the authorities “have to specify what exactly they want.”“They can’t just go through your phone and take, you know, your photos or your love letters to your wife or what have you,” Mr. Baldwin said in the video.In a television interview last month, Mr. Baldwin denied responsibility for Ms. Hutchins’s death, saying that he did not know how live rounds got onto the film set and that he did not pull the trigger before the gun went off.Before handing Mr. Baldwin the gun on set, the movie’s first assistant director, Dave Halls, called out “cold gun,” an industry term meaning that a firearm does not have live rounds and is safe to use. Mr. Baldwin said in the interview that Ms. Hutchins had been instructing him on where to point the gun when it discharged.“It is clear that he was told it was a cold gun, and was following instructions when this tragic accident occurred,” Mr. Dyer said in the statement. “The real question that needs to be answered is how live rounds got on the set in the first place.” More

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    Erika Lust's Alternative Porn Vision

    The Swedish moviemaker thinks pornography can create a society that sees sexuality as myriad and joyful, and where women’s pleasure matters.BARCELONA, Spain — When Billie Eilish called pornography “a disgrace” in a recent radio interview, the quote made headlines. The Grammy-winning musician said she had started watching at around age 11, to learn how to have sex, and that she was now angry about the way she felt porn misrepresented women.When people talk about pornography, they’re often referring, like Eilish, to its commercial, heterosexual variety, which is what most of the free porn online tends to be. On those sites, you’d be forgiven for thinking it all looks the same. But depending on the sexual politics and vision of its creator, porn can look wildly different.Take, for example, the work of the Swedish filmmaker Erika Lust. She has built her production company, Erika Lust Films, into an art-house pornography behemoth by offering something outside the porn mainstream. Most viewers watch Lust’s stylish, highly produced films by subscribing to her websites, where she also distributes videos by other like-minded directors. But her own films have also been screened in regular movie theaters in Berlin, London, Paris, Los Angeles and New York.“There’s not just one type of porn,” Lust said in an interview at her office in Barcelona, where she has lived since 2000. “People see it as one monolithic entity, but it’s not.”In the films Lust makes, she said her goal was for the female performers to have real orgasms. “When women watch porn, they need to see that women are being stimulated,” she said. “If there is a scene with penetrative sex, viewers need to see a woman using her hand or a vibrator at the same time — because that’s what works for most women.”Lust, 44, added that she had spoken with many young women who told her, “‘Something’s wrong with my body, I can’t reach an orgasm with a man,’ because they’re reproducing what they learn from online porn.”In Eilish’s radio interview, she said that the damage inflicted on her by online pornography went deeper still: In her view, it had “destroyed” her brain. The philosopher Amia Srinivasan has also recently considered porn’s effect on the mind, reviving feminist debates from the 1970s and ’80s.In “The Right to Sex,” Srinivasan’s 2021 best-selling essay collection, she argues that, “While filmed sex seemingly opens up a world of sexual possibility, all too often it shuts down the sexual imagination, making it weak, dependent, lazy, codified. The sexual imagination is transformed into a mimesis-machine, incapable of generating its own novelty.” (Srinivasan declined to be interviewed for this article.)Although in her book she argues against censoring explicit material — a move that often unfairly targets women and sexual minorities, she writes — the Oxford University academic advises young people to lay off porn if they want their sex lives to be “more joyful, more equal, freer.”“Perhaps then the sexual imagination could be coaxed, even briefly, to recall its lost power,” Srinivasan writes.“Sex is such a huge part of who we are,” Lust said, “and there are so many more stories to tell.”Monica FiguerasYet Lust said it was film’s capacity to excite the erotic imagination that first drew her to pornography. While studying political science at Lund University in Sweden, she said she read “Hard Core,” a book by Linda Williams that is regarded as a classic of feminist film criticism, and that argues that pornography is a way of communicating ideas about gender and sex.Feminist thinking led Lust to realize that porn, like many other cultural products, was mostly made by men, for men and from a narrow perspective: that of “middle-aged, heterosexual, white men,” she said. This male view of sexuality was “often misogynistic, in which women were reduced to tools for men’s orgasm,” she added. A lot of commercial porn is shot from a disembodied male perspective, and often the only part of a male performer that’s visible onscreen is his penis, Lust said.The films she directs and produces, on the other hand, show women with sexual agency, who stimulate their own clitorises and whose facial expressions communicate their emotional and psychological states. Lust’s performers have a natural, everyday look and include people of “different sexualities, skin colors and body shapes,” she said.Her films are also heavy on plot lines. Lust’s best-known series, “XConfessions,” are filmed depictions of her viewers’ real fantasies. Anyone can “confess” their imagined or real-life sex stories through the XConfessions website. If she likes the idea, she turns it into a film. The stories include classic and kinky fantasies and are sometimes made by guest directors, such as the Canadian cult queer filmmaker Bruce LaBruce. One of his “XConfessions” movies, “Valentin, Pierre and Catalina,” is a remake of François Truffaut’s classic movie “Jules and Jim,” a three-way polyamorous love story between a woman and two men.LaBruce, who just wrapped up a feature-length parody porn movie for Lust set in the fashion industry, said in a phone interview that he was not surprised by the recent resurgence of negative attitudes toward porn. “The idea that porn is a male way of controlling women — that used to be the provenance of the Christian right,” he said. “Now, the left and the right have kind of flipped.”The anthropologist Gayle Rubin, who was on the “pro-sex” feminist side of the 1970s and ’80s “sex wars,” opposing calls for censorship, said by phone that pornography was “easy to pick on” because, historically, it had been marginalized socially and legally.“You know in movies when you think the monster is dead, but it just keeps coming back?” she said. “These assumptions about porn just keep resurfacing, going back more than four decades.“Many people just don’t think as rigorously about porn as they do other topics. Porn is a special case in how it’s treated intellectually, which is badly — even among philosophers and others who should know better,” Rubin said.While the porn industry is not known for critical reflection, there are, however, events like the Berlin Porn Film Festival, an annual gathering that seeks to provide new perspectives on the genre — artistic, social and even philosophical. Paulita Pappel, a porn performer and director who is one of the event’s curators, said that porn was often “a mirror of wider problems in society.” She added that, “The more we scapegoat and stigmatize it, the less space there will be for porn to be diverse, and the less chance we have to change the bigger issues.”When Lust screened her first feature-length movie, “The Intern,” to a sold-out audience at the festival in October, many in the audience — men, women and gender nonconforming people, mostly in their 20 and 30s — said that they came to see the film in search of an alternative to traditional porn.“I’m here because my friend recommended Erika Lust, because she doesn’t make heteronormative porn,” said Levent Ekemen, 28, a graduate student. “Her films show sensuality, and they’re extremely erotic.”Lust, center, on the set of “The Intern,” her first feature-length movie, which had its premiere at the Berlin Porn Film Festival in 2021.Adriana EskenaziLust said she hoped that the movies on her websites can have an “expansive” effect on people’s sense of the erotic. “With some of LaBruce’s films with male interaction,” she said, “men tell me, ‘Erika, I’ve never watched this before, but it was on your site, and it was hot!’ People are opening up their sexual visions outside of what they might be used to seeing.”She added that she wanted to help create a society that sees sexuality as myriad and joyful, and where women’s pleasure matters. “The value filmmaking has when it comes to empathizing with other people is incredible,” she said. “Sex is such a huge part of who we are, and there are so many more stories to tell.”“I have a right to tell them,” she added. “And no one can stop me.” More

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    Mommy Is Going Away for Awhile

    The antiheroine of the moment, in movies like “The Lost Daughter” and novels like “I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness,” commits the mother’s ultimate sin: abandoning her children.There are so many ways to do motherhood wrong, or so a mother is told. She can be overbearing or remote. She can smother or neglect. She can mother in such a specifically bad way that she is assigned a bad-mom archetype: stage mother, refrigerator mother, “cool mom.” She can hover like a helicopter mom or bully like a bulldozer mom. But the thing she cannot do — the thing that is so taboo it rivals actually murdering her offspring — is leave.The mother who abandons her children haunts our family narratives. She is made into a lurid tabloid figure, an exotic exception to the common deadbeat father. Or she is sketched into the background of a plot, her absence lending a protagonist a propulsive origin story. This figure arouses our ridicule (consider Meryl Streep’s daffy American president in “Don’t Look Up,” who forgets to save her son as she flees the apocalypse) or our pity (see “Parallel Mothers,” where an actress has ditched her daughter for lousy television parts). But lately the vanishing mother has provoked a fresh response: respect.In Maggie Gyllenhaal’s film “The Lost Daughter,” she is Leda (played, across two decades, by Jessie Buckley and Olivia Colman), a promising translator who deserts her young daughters for several years to pursue her career (and a dalliance with an Auden scholar). In HBO’s “Scenes From a Marriage,” a gender-scrambled remake of Ingmar Bergman’s 1973 mini-series, she is Mira (Jessica Chastain), a Boston tech executive who jets to Tel Aviv for an affair disguised as a work project. And in Claire Vaye Watkins’s autofictional novel “I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness,” she is also Claire Vaye Watkins, a novelist who leaves her infant to smoke a ton of weed, sleep with a guy who lives in a van and confront her own troubled upbringing.In each case, her children are not abandoned outright; they are left in the care of fathers and other relatives. When a man leaves in this way, he is unexceptional. When a woman does it, she becomes a monster, or perhaps an antiheroine riding out a dark maternal fantasy. Feminism has supplied women with options, but a choice also represents a foreclosure, and women, because they are people, do not always know what they want. As these protagonists thrash against their own decisions, they also bump up against the limits of that freedom, revealing how women’s choices are rarely socially supported but always thoroughly judged.A mother losing her children is a nightmare. The title of “The Lost Daughter” refers in part to such an incident, when a child disappears at the beach. But a mother leaving her children — that’s a daydream, an imagined but repressed alternate life. In the “Sex and the City” reboot “And Just Like That…,” Miranda — now the mother to a teenager — counsels a professor who is considering having children. “There are so many nights when I would love to be a judge and go home to an empty house,” she says. And on Instagram, the airbrushed mirage of mothering is being challenged by displays of raw desperation. The Not Safe for Mom Group, which surfaces confessions of anonymous mothers, pulses with idle threats of role refusal, like: “I want to be alone!!! I don’t want to make your lunch!!”Being alone: that is the mother’s reasonable and functionally impossible dream. Especially recently, when avenues of escape have been sealed off: schools closed, day care centers suspended, offices shuttered, jobs lost or abandoned in crisis. Now the house is never empty, and also you can never leave. During a pandemic, a plucky middle-class gal can still “have it all,” as long as she can manage job and children simultaneously, from the floor of a lawless living room.The ‘Sex and the City’ UniverseThe sprawling franchise revolutionized how women were portrayed on the screen. And the show isn’t over yet. A New Series: Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte return for another strut down the premium cable runway in “And Just Like That,” streaming on HBO. Off Broadway: Candace Bushnell, whose writing gave birth to the “Sex and the City” universe, stars in her one-woman show based on her life. In Carrie’s Footsteps: “Sex and the City” painted a seductive vision of Manhattan, inspiring many young women to move to the city. The Origins: For the show’s 20th anniversary in 2018, Bushnell shared how a collection of essays turned into a pathbreaking series.Cards on the table: I am struggling to draft this essay on my phone as my pantsless toddler — banished from day care for 10 days because someone got Covid — wages a tireless campaign to commandeer my device, hold it to his ear and say hewwo. I feel charmed, annoyed and implicated, as I wonder whether his neediness is attributable to some parental defect, perhaps related to my own constant phone use.Do I want to abandon my child? No, but I am newly attuned to the psychological head space of a woman who does. The Auden scholar of “The Lost Daughter” (played, in an inspired bit of casting, by Gyllenhaal’s husband, Peter Sarsgaard), entices Leda by quoting Simone Weil: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” Attention is a loaded word: It can mean caring for another person, but also a powerful mental focus, and a parent can seldom execute both definitions at once.Leda wants to attend to her translation work, but she also wants someone to pay attention to her. To be blunt, she wants to work and to have sex. Often in these stories, the two are bound together in a hyper-individualistic fusion of romantic careerism. In “Scenes from a Marriage,” Mira plans to tell her daughter, “I have to go away for work, which is true” — only because she has arranged a professional obligation to facilitate her affair with an Israeli start-up bro. Her gateway drug to abandonment is, as is often the case, a business trip. Mira first strays at a company boat party; Leda tastes freedom at a translation conference; Claire embarks on a reading tour from which she never returns.The work trip is the Rumspringa of motherhood. Like the mama bird in “Are You My Mother?,” a woman is allowed to leave the nest to retrieve a worm, though someone, somewhere may be noting her absence with schoolmarmish disapproval. In Caitlin Flanagan’s 2012 indictment of Joan Didion, recirculated after Didion’s death, Flanagan dings Didion for taking a film job across the country, leaving her 3-year-old daughter over Christmas.Still, there is something absurd about the fashioning of work as the ultimate escape. It is only remotely plausible if our desperate mother enjoys a high-status creative position (translator, novelist, thought leader.) When other mothers of fiction leave, their fantasies are quickly revealed as delusions. In Nicole Dennis-Benn’s novel “Patsy,” a Jamaican secretary abandons her daughter to pursue an American dream in New York, only to become a nanny caring for someone else’s children. And in Jessamine Chan’s dystopian novel “The School for Good Mothers,” Frida is sleep deprived and drowning in work when she leaves her toddler at home alone for two hours. Though Frida feels “a sudden pleasure” when she shuts the door behind her, her fantasy life is short and bleak: She escapes as far as her office, where she sends emails. For that, she is conscripted into a re-education camp for bad moms.Each of our absent mothers has her reasons. Leda’s academic husband has prioritized his career over hers, and this makes her decisions legible, even sympathetic. But in “I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness,” Watkins lends her doppelgänger no exculpatory circumstances. Claire has a doula, day care, Obamacare breast pump, tenure-track job, several therapists and the world’s most understanding husband. When she starts sleeping in a hammock on campus, her husband says: “I think it’s cool you’re following your … heart, or … whatever … is happening … out there.” Nothing obvious impedes her from capable mothering, but ​​like Bartleby, the Child-bearer, she would simply prefer not to.In heaping privileges upon Claire, Watkins suggests that there are burdens of motherhood that cannot be solved with money, lifted by a co-parent or cured by a mental health professional. The trouble is motherhood itself, and its ideal of total selfless devotion. Motherhood had turned Claire into a “blank,” a figure who “didn’t seem to think much” and “had trouble completing her sentences.” As these women discover, their menu of life choices is not so expansive after all. They long to be offered a different position: dad. Claire wants to “behave like a man, a slightly bad one.” As Mira abruptly exits, she assures her husband, “Men do it all the time.”These women may leave, but they don’t quite get away with it. Mira eventually loses both job and boyfriend and begs for her old life back. Leda’s abandonment becomes a dark secret in a thriller that builds to a violent end. Only Claire is curiously impervious to consequence. She follows her selfish impulses all the way to the desert, where she spends her days crying and masturbating alone in a tent. Then she calls her husband, who flies out to her, happy tot in tow; eventually Claire claims a life where she can “read and write and nap and teach and soak and smoke” and see her daughter on breaks. By exacting no cosmic punishment on Claire, Watkins refuses to facilitate the reader’s judgment. But she also makes it harder to care.When I was pregnant, I had a fantasy, too. In it I was single, childless, still very young somehow and living out an alternate life in a van in Wyoming. Reading “I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness” broke the spell. As Claire ripped bongs and circled new sexual partners, she struck me not as a monster or a hero but something perhaps worse — boring. Even as these stories work to uncover motherhood’s complex emotional truths, they indulge their own little fiction: that a mother only becomes interesting when she stops being one. More

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    Jasmila Zbanic Is Vilified in Serbia and ‘Disobedient’ at Home

    Jasmila Zbanic, named Europe’s best director for “Quo Vadis, Aida?”, insists on blaming individuals, not ethnic groups, for atrocities done as Yugoslavia imploded, a stance that can anger all sides.SARAJEVO, Bosnia and Herzegovina — A celebrated Bosnian film director always knew her latest movie, the harrowing drama of a mother trying unsuccessfully to save her husband and two sons from the Srebrenica massacre in 1995, would be panned by Serb nationalists.But the filmmaker, Jasmila Zbanic, was still taken aback when Serbian media invited a convicted war criminal to opine on the movie, “Quo Vadis, Aida?”, for which she recently won Europe’s best director award.The chosen critic? Veselin Sljivancanin, a former Yugoslav army officer sentenced to prison by a tribunal in The Hague for aiding and abetting the murder of prisoners in Croatia in the Vukovar massacre.While asking such a notorious figure to comment on the movie was a surprise, his reaction to it wasn’t: He denounced it as lies that “incite ethnic hatred” and smear all Serbs.“He, a war criminal, wants all Serbs, most of whom had nothing to do with his crimes, to feel attacked for his crimes,” Ms. Zbanic said in a recent interview at her production company atop a hill overlooking Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital. “He is putting his guilt on all Serbs.”Ms. Zbanic speaking after the first public showing of “Quo Vadis, Aida?” in 2020 in Srebrenica, where some 8,000 Muslim men and boys were massacred in 1995.Kemal Softic/Associated PressMs. Zbanic’s unwavering belief that the guilt for the atrocities committed as the former Yugoslavia split apart belongs to individuals, not ethnic groups, has also made her a difficult cultural icon for some in her own community of Bosnian Muslims, known as Bosniaks, to embrace.When the European Film Academy last month gave her the award of best director and selected “Quo Vadis, Aida?” as Europe’s best film of the year, a few Bosniak politicians congratulated her on their personal Facebook pages, but there were no official celebrations of the kind held whenever Bosniak athletes triumph abroad.“I did not even get any flowers,” she said.Fiercely independent and a self-declared feminist, Ms. Zbanic has for years kept her distance from Bosnia’s dominant and male-dominated political force, the Party of Democratic Action, or S.D.A., a Bosniak nationalist group. Like Serb parties on the other side of the ethnic divide, the S.D.A. now wins votes by stirring animosity toward, and fear of, other groups.“I’m very much against S.D.A., the main political party, so they know I am not theirs,” she said, noting that she had several times selected ethnic Serb actors for starring roles in her movies. “I don’t choose actors because of their nationality but because they are the best,” she said.In her most recent movie, the main role, a Bosniak translator working for the United Nations in Srebrenica, is played by Jasna Djuricic from Serbia. Ms. Djuricic, who won the best actress award from the European Film Academy, has been pilloried in Serb media as a Muslim-loving traitor.The actress Jasna Djuricic, left, with Ms. Zbanic on the set of “Quo Vadis, Aida?” Ms. Djuricic has been called a traitor in her native Serbia.Imrana Kapetanovic/DeblokadaHaris Pasovic, a prominent Bosnian theater director and Ms. Zbanic’s professor during the war years at the Sarajevo Academy of Performing Arts, said his former student’s collaboration with the Serbian actress demonstrated her faith that culture transcends nationalism.“Events were meant to separate these two people forever, but they came together to create this incredible work of art,” Mr. Pasovic said.International acclaim, he added, has made Ms. Zbanic “the most successful woman in Bosnian history” and, as a result, “she terrifies Balkan politicians,” nearly all men. “She is very careful not to be used in Balkan political trading and has never wanted to be part of anybody’s bloc,” Mr. Pasovic said.Bosnia has a long, rich history of filmmaking from when it was still part of Yugoslavia, the multiethnic socialist state that fell apart in the early 1990s and spawned Europe’s bloodiest armed conflict since World War II. More than 140,000 died in the ensuing conflicts.“What I learned during the war is that food and culture are equal,” Ms. Zbanic said. “You can’t live without either.”Like so much else in Bosnia, a patchwork of different ethnic groups and religions, the film industry has been left bitterly divided by the traumas of war. Emir Kusturica, a well-known Sarajevo-born director who has embraced Serb nationalism, is now reviled by many Bosniaks as a champion of “Greater Serbia,” the cause that tore Bosnia apart in the 1990s.Ms. Zbanic, 47, said she despised Mr. Kusturica’s politics — he is close to Milorad Dodik, the belligerent nationalist leader of Bosnia’s Serb-controlled region — but still respected his talents. “We should appreciate professionals no matter what ideology they have,” she said.Seventeen years old when Bosnian Serbs began a nearly four-year siege of Sarajevo in 1992, Ms. Zbanic said her films, which include “Grbavica,” a 2006 feature about a single mother whose daughter was conceived in a wartime rape, are her “attempt to understand what happened and how what happened during the war is still influencing our everyday life.”Ms. Zbanic speaking to cast members on the set of “Quo Vadis, Aida?”Imrana Kapetanovic/Deblokada“Grbavica” helped pressure Bosnian politicians into changing the law to give previously neglected wartime rape victims the same official recognition and allowances as former soldiers. She counts that as one of her proudest achievements, noting that “truth is always good, even if it is painful and even if it hurts, it moves things forward.”Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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    Alec Baldwin Will Turn in Phone to Investigators This Week, Lawyer Says

    The sheriff’s office in Santa Fe said nearly a month had elapsed since a search warrant was issued for the phone, but it had not yet been surrendered.A lawyer for Alec Baldwin said on Thursday that the actor would turn over his cellphone “this week” to authorities investigating his fatal shooting of a cinematographer on the set for the film “Rust,” nearly a month after detectives secured a search warrant for the device.The pledge came hours after the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office — which is investigating the shooting — had released a statement pointedly noting that the warrant had been obtained on Dec. 16 but that “to date, the cellphone has not been turned over to authorities.”Mr. Baldwin’s lawyer, Aaron Dyer, said in a statement that he and his client had reached an agreement with officials in Santa Fe County last weekend regarding the actor’s phone and that they were finalizing logistics with the authorities in New York, where Mr. Baldwin has a home.“Ever since this tragic incident, Mr. Baldwin has continued to cooperate with the authorities, and any suggestion to the contrary is simply untrue,” Mr. Dyer said in the statement. “We requested that the authorities obtain a warrant so that we could protect his privacy on other matters unrelated to ‘Rust’ and have been working through that process.”After media outlets reported last week that investigators did not yet have Mr. Baldwin’s phone, weeks after a judge in New Mexico approved the warrant request, Mr. Baldwin posted a video of himself on Instagram saying he was complying but that the process was taking time. He suggested that he was concerned about maintaining his privacy, saying, “They can’t just go through your phone and take, you know, your photos or your love letters to your wife or what have you.”Officials in Suffolk County, New York, said last week that they were also involved in facilitating the phone’s transfer to the authorities.In a television interview last month, Mr. Baldwin fiercely insisted that he was not to blame in the shooting that killed the cinematographer of the film, Halyna Hutchins, and injured the director, Joel Souza. He said that when the gun went off, he had been practicing drawing it from his shoulder holster and that he had not pulled the trigger; he said he had not fully cocked the hammer of the gun, an old-fashioned revolver, but had pulled it back as far as he could and let it go in an action that might have set it off.Mr. Baldwin said in the TV interview that he did not know how live rounds got on the set of the western, a question at the center of the authorities’ investigation in Santa Fe. More

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    ‘Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America’ Review: Social Studies

    In a documentary constructed around a lecture from 2018, the lawyer Jeffery Robinson presents a persuasive look at United States history.It’s unlikely that any lecture documentary since “An Inconvenient Truth” has had the galvanizing potential of “Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America” — and if that sounds like faint praise, it isn’t meant that way.The film presents a talk that the lawyer Jeffery Robinson (a former deputy legal director at the A.C.L.U.) gave at Town Hall in New York on Juneteenth 2018. His subject is nothing less than the history of anti-Black racism in the United States.For Robinson’s arguments, the historical evidence is in plain sight, yet much of it, as he promises, may be new to many viewers. He shows how the text of Article V of the Constitution shielded slavery from amendments until 1808, reads from Confederate states’ secession statements and has a chorus perform the disfavored third verse of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”The film, directed by Emily Kunstler and Sarah Kunstler (daughters of the Chicago Seven lawyer William Kunstler), intersperses scenes of Robinson traveling the country. He visits Charleston, where fingerprints from slave labor can still be seen; Staten Island, where he meets with Eric Garner’s mother; and his native Memphis, where his parents had to devise a workaround to buy a home as a Black family.Robinson brings nuance to topics — unconscious bias, reparations, how to deal with the fact that George Washington owned slaves — that have become flash points in society, without ever losing the core of his progressive message. It’s a confrontational film, but never an alienating one, and so much of what’s in it is persuasive.Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in AmericaRated PG-13. Discussion and imagery of racist violence, and derogatory language. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. In theaters. More