More stories

  • in

    ‘Inside’ Review: Tortured Artist, Meet Tortured Man

    Willem Dafoe stars as an art thief who gets trapped in a penthouse in this drama.The art thief (a brutish Willem Dafoe) trapped in a megamillionaire’s extravagant loft knows the value of the bronze wedge he’s damaging in a desperate attempt to pry open the door. It’s one of the few pieces he intended to steal from the smart home before its security pad failed and the exits locked shut. But Vasilis Katsoupis, the director of the stark survival thriller “Inside,” deliberately withholds that the makeshift crowbar is meant to be the Lynn Chadwick piece “Paper Hat,” last auctioned at 2.5 million pounds. Katsoupis prefers his moral challenge incalculable: Do we want the art to endure or the criminal?Playing fair, the filmmaker also refuses to share details about the burglar. Blessedly, there are no flashbacks to the robber’s mother, no panic about a spouse or cat, and not much voice-over aside from a couple of lines establishing that the man once fancied himself an artist, too. I wouldn’t have known his name was Nemo if not for the end credits — good thing, as I’d have giggled when he made sashimi of the tropical fish.The logic behind Nemo’s captivity doesn’t gel. (Alarm sirens screech with not one visit from the security desk? Who do they summon, Batman?) Katsoupis and the screenwriter Ben Hopkins aren’t concerned with making a credible heist caper. Katsoupis is more of a snotty provocateur with the elegance to posture as deep. He sneers at the rich, stocking the stony apartment with futile luxuries that give it the feel of a pharaoh’s tomb. The fridge contains only caviar, truffle sauce and booze; worse, it blares the “Macarena” to remind users to shut the door. (There are just three musicians on the film’s soundtrack — John Cage, Radiohead, and those forbidden dancers Los Del Rio — the cinematic equivalent of a challenge on “Chopped.”) At the same time, the fritzing control system cuts the water and cranks the heat to 106 degrees. So-called smart tech — the practical opposite of fine art — is the closest thing to a villain. This computer isn’t self-aware like Hal 9000. Still, Stanley Kubrick would say he warned us not to hand our house keys to Siri.The contemporary art curator Leonardo Bigazzi shrewdly selected the work that lines the walls. A photo of a duct-taped man mocks the prisoner’s plight. Overpriced neon tubes are there so we can look forward to seeing them smashed. Our knee-jerk guesstimations of worth are continually pranked. Take when a starving Nemo finds a few oranges. They’re moldy. (Worthless.) Wait, they’re concrete sculptures. (Insultingly worthless!) Nemo hurls the concrete at the windows. (Oh! Maybe they’re useful after all?) A hungry man can’t care that the oranges’ sculptor, Alvaro Urbano, intended to comment on cultural rot during the Franco dictatorship.So it’s disruptive, and then cathartic, to watch Dafoe’s primal performance dominate this museum/mausoleum and force us to side with humanity. He’s perfectly cast in a part that calls for quietly whirring intelligence. Plus, he’s the rare movie star with the kind of brutal bone structure that would have inspired the Expressionist painter Egon Schiele — who has several pieces here — to grab his paintbrush. (The unpleasant close-up of Nemo’s bowel movements in the bathtub, however, only works as a nod to Andres Serrano.)The film abandons its tempo somewhere after the eighth sunset, when the days begin to blend together and Katsoupis slathers on unnecessary hallucinations. When boredom sets in, we’re offered the silence to contemplate our own definition of art as Nemo the criminal evolves into Nemo the creator. His towering escape contraptions are tools. His haunting wall doodles are therapy. They’re both awarded as much reverence as everything with a price tag.InsideRated R for nude and crude imagery. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

  • in

    Why Willem Dafoe Can’t Slow Down

    Listen to This ArticleTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.WILLEM DAFOE, DRESSED in a black leather jacket, enters the downtown Manhattan restaurant where we’d planned to meet. He has his phone up to his ear, a look that’s almost a parody: In walks a Very Busy Guy. He sees me at the table, gestures at the phone extravagantly, rolls his eyes and grimaces at the absurdity of it. As the seconds go by, his apologetic demeanor morphs into something more like comedy — his head shaking, his hand waving in a vaguely Italian-style telegraph of exasperation, all of it coalescing into a fascinating improvisational bit.He stood a few feet from our table as he finished the call, giving the staff at the Georgian cafe ample opportunity to take in the actor in their midst. Maybe the performance was for their benefit, too? Yet it didn’t feel showy: He was not too famous to hide, not too self-conscious to resist doing what he does almost unthinkingly, which is use his body to perform. Acting is not so much a job for Dafoe as a way of being in the world, a practice so essential he can’t go without it.The digital cover of T’s 2023 spring Men’s Fashion issue.Collier SchorrDafoe, 67, is an unusual celebrity, perhaps the world’s most famous character actor — one who came up through New York experimental theater, who never intended to appeal to the masses. Like a Christopher Walken or a Ralph Fiennes, he suggests in his choices of roles as much as his performances that he thrives on parts that other actors might find distasteful or unflattering; he differentiates himself by a certain lack of discrimination. He’s been in nearly 150 films since his first starring role, as a young but hardened biker in Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Loveless” (1981). Many of them have been blockbusters, but some have never played in the United States and many were made by young directors about whom he knew little more than, as he puts it, that they gave him “a good feeling.”This month, Dafoe stars in “Inside,” a debut feature by the Greek director Vasilis Katsoupis, 46, about an art thief trapped by an elaborate security system within a minimalist high-end apartment that’s dangerously low on life-sustaining necessities. For 90 minutes, the camera rarely strays from Dafoe, as his character, over the course of months, endures near-starvation, total isolation and the absence (no small thing) of a functioning toilet. Working on the project required the actor to live apart from his family and friends for six weeks, “like a monk,” he says, cooking for himself in a small rental in Cologne, Germany. In the film, he lays himself bare, physically and psychologically, burrowing deep into the humbling ugliness of true desperation. He was, Dafoe told me later, “in heaven.”The actor Willem Dafoe, photographed in New York City on Nov. 16, 2022, wears Bottega Veneta jacket and pants, price on request, bottegaveneta.com; and stylist’s own turtleneck.WILLEM DAFOE WAS born William Dafoe in Appleton, Wis., where he was drawn to community theater, the kid who’d do anything for a laugh. The second youngest of eight children, he made sure he would be seen, even amid the chaos of a home packed with older teenagers, their comings and goings barely monitored by his mother, a nurse, and his father, a surgeon (both now dead). “It doesn’t take a psychologist to figure out that when you’re in a big family, you gotta find your place,” he says. “I became the entertainer.” An extrovert with a transgressive streak, he dropped out of high school after being falsely accused, he says, of making a pornographic film for a communications class. He nonetheless briefly attended the University of Wisconsin and eventually joined an experimental troupe called Theatre X. (Along the way, the young man who’d been known as Billy decided to switch to Willem, a name a friend from college called him.)At 21, Dafoe arrived in 1970s-era downtown Manhattan, a creative playground for artists attracted to its cheap, empty lofts. Here, he came to admire the work of Elizabeth LeCompte, the pioneering director known for her role shaping the work of Spalding Gray, the polymathic performance artist. Dafoe began collaborating with both and then helped the couple form the theater troupe that would become the Wooster Group in 1980. But his integration into their world started with a major disruption: He fell in love with LeCompte, who left Gray to embark upon a 26-year relationship with Dafoe. (He and LeCompte have one son, Jack, who’s 40.) The three ended up subdividing the loft LeCompte had shared with Gray with a wall and separate entrances so no one had to move out. A hothouse of talent, tension and creativity, the Wooster Group soon became one of the most influential theatrical companies in New York, central to downtown culture, in conversation with the city’s emergent dance and performance art scenes. Their work wasn’t linear, but there was nothing haphazard about their highly stylized, carefully rehearsed projects, which often ran on tight clockwork choreographies, integrating video and complicating ideas of plot.Dior Men coat, $5,600, shirt, $950, and pants, $890, dior.com; Prada turtleneck, $1,890, and boots (worn throughout), $1,790, prada.com; stylist’s own socks; and Dafoe’s own ring (worn throughout).Dafoe fell naturally into work that demanded both a strong ego and a spirit of collaboration. But the actor Kate Valk, another founding member who still performs with the Wooster Group, recalls Dafoe as providing the kind of energy associated with the frontman in a band: captivating and telegenic. “He was an important part of the charisma of the group,” she says. “He had that impish impulse always. He very much represented the id in the room.” Both Valk, now 65, and LeCompte, now 78, remember Dafoe as hungry to be looked at. “He wants very much to be needed,” says LeCompte. “And if he’s needed, he’ll give everything. He has to work.” Wooster also made experimental movies, in which it became clear that Dafoe — his chiseled face teetering between beautiful and gaunt — might have a future on film. (“Who needs the American West when you have all the planes on that face?” asks Valk.) He became known for taking on dark roles: the soulless killer in “To Live and Die in L.A.,” the 1985 William Friedkin thriller; a maniac with a surprising underlying pathos in E. Elias Merhige’s “Shadow of the Vampire,” for which he earned his second of four Academy Award nominations in 2001. But for many years, he toggled between two extremes: heartless freaks (“Wild at Heart,” 1990) and the near-saintly (Sergeant Elias in “Platoon,” 1986; Jesus Christ in Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ,” 1988). “When I saw him as Jesus, I thought, ‘Oy — Jesus,’” says LeCompte. “I realized, ‘He can be on a very big screen.’”Prada coat, price on request, shirt, $4,600, and turtleneck.So much of Dafoe’s movie career reflects the expressionism he honed at Wooster, in performances that were highly physical. Those qualities endure in his depiction of the Green Goblin in Marvel’s “Spider-Man” films; he appears in four of them, but his operatic performance in the first one, from 2002, is considered essential to the success of the series. And yet, another of his most memorable performances is a study in understatement. In the 2017 independent film “The Florida Project,” he embodies a man who’s made many choices he regrets but is trying, nonetheless, to do right by those he can help, however modestly. The film relied on local Floridians without feature film experience; the director, Sean Baker, shot the ending on an iPhone. At this stage in his career, Dafoe says, he has the luxury of accepting assignments on instinct: “When you’re starting out, you feel like every film can ruin you. Now I can take more risks.”IN “INSIDE,” THE burden of carrying the movie rests squarely on Dafoe, and on what he can still do with his body. A former student of karate, a daily practitioner of Ashtanga yoga, a skilled tango dancer, Dafoe, in one of the film’s memorable scenes, constructs a 28-foot-high tower of furniture, his breath labored as he lugs tables and breaks down chairs. In attempting to escape through a skylight, he crawls to the top of the structure and nimbly stands up before stretching his arms overhead. The athleticism on display from an actor in his late 60s is so striking that it’s almost distracting.Collier SchorrWatching the movie, I told Dafoe, I had the sense of him as an actor who — but he cut me off before I could finish: “Who’s not even entertaining the question of ‘Who’s going to see this, and what’s it going to do for me?’” He smiled.I was going to say I had the sense of an actor who is intent on proving — to directors, but more so to himself — that he is still strong enough, still motivated enough psychologically, to do grueling work; who refuses to let age be an impediment. Dafoe’s longevity, says the director Abel Ferrara, 71, with whom he’s collaborated several times, reflects his two and a half decades with Wooster. The grounding with the theater meant he never left for Los Angeles, where so many actors hustle for the wrong things. And as long as he was with the company, he was acting most days, rather than waiting out empty stretches in between projects, as other stars do. “You can’t be an actor, not working,” says Ferrara. “He knows that.”“Inside” was the kind of project that Dafoe relishes, one in which the role itself is a work in progress. “We had a pact,” says Katsoupis, the director, “that although we had a beautiful script, we would be discovering this character day by day.” Dafoe’s input was essential, down to the drawing he made of the mural his character would eventually create as he grasped for his own humanity within the unrelentingly hostile apartment. Stories he told Katsoupis over dinner — about a tuneless nursery rhyme that an ill patient of his mother’s used to sing, or about a particular hilarious but repetitive joke that a Bulgarian translator once told him — ended up in the film.Emporio Armani jacket and pants, price on request, armani.com; and Sunspel T-shirt, $90, sunspel.com.“You throw yourself into it,” Dafoe says. “And you have a beautiful day full of adventure and impressions that you don’t always get — and then you feel turned on.” He likens the experience of working with a director to being in love. “You feel energized and like your best self — you’re so enamored of this person that you want to be the best person possible. That’s the proposal: ‘We need you to do this thing, to go on this mission.’” The waiter at the restaurant brought a plate of Georgian desserts, including a rich honey cake, and, over oat vodka, Dafoe showed me some recent images on his phone: an ice skater he enjoyed watching on television; a digital clock in a cab showing the time 4:44 (part of the name of a 2011 film he made with Ferrara); a photo of him near a painting by the Brazilian artist Maxwell Alexandre, a copy of which is featured in “Inside.” He had been stunned to see the original in the lobby of the Shed, a Manhattan arts space, earlier that week and had someone take a photo of him in front of it — with his pants around his ankles. (“I told you, I like transgression!” he explains.) For Dafoe, performing for an audience, even a personal one, often involves high jinks and spontaneity. At some level, he’s clearly still driven by the desire to entertain, to shock, that drove him as a young actor. But interwoven with that is another motivation that takes more commitment: wringing the most meaning possible from inhabiting someone else’s story. He may get immediate satisfaction from the big laugh, but the truly hard days are justified by something else — finding significance in an object as simple as a glass filled with water, an example he gives from his latest film, how much it changes depending on who’s poured it, who’s drinking it, with what experience behind it. “Your curiosity in that moment — it’s not normal,” Dafoe says. “It’s hyperawareness.”Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello coat, $7,000, and pants, $1,290, ysl.com; and Prada turtleneck.His intention is to try to bond with other confused humans, he says, by acting out versions of their stories. It’s an impulse, he adds, as old as dancing in front of the campfire: “I’m going to get up and do this for me and for you and for all of us.” Comfort, consolation, connection — what else matters? “Because really,” he says, “there’re only two events. There’s birth. And there’s death. And in between, it’s all —” Then Dafoe makes the kind of crazy eyes that render him riveting onscreen, and the spiral hand gesture for “nuts” with a hand on either side of his head, emitting the babbling sound — garbled, funny, unnerving — of a madman.DURING THE 26 years that Dafoe collaborated with the Wooster Group, film was always something he did privately, on his own. His Hollywood income helped keep the company afloat; his colleagues supported the movies without being particularly interested in them. Eventually, he says, his absences — and then the fame that came after “Spider-Man,” in the aughts — took a toll on the relationships he had with his fellow company members. “They were a family,” he says matter-of-factly. “And I was like a man with many families.” In 2003, Dafoe, who was filming in Italy, fell in love with Giada Colagrande, an Italian director who was 27 at the time. A mutual friend had introduced them not long after she directed and starred in “Open My Heart” (2002), an erotic noir that had been a sensation at the Venice Film Festival. In a painful break with LeCompte — and therefore the Wooster Group — Dafoe moved part time to Rome to be with Colagrande, whom he married in 2005. The dissolution of that relationship was a shock not just to LeCompte but to the whole group. “I nearly had a nervous breakdown,” Valk says. And yet it somehow came as a surprise to Dafoe that he was exiled from the troupe.“I was totally naïve,” he says now. Leaving LeCompte meant losing some of his closest friends — and it meant walking away from experimental theater. “I just took a different life,” he says. “I started seeking out other opportunities in the theater, but it was very difficult after working in the company.” This past decade, he performed in two Robert Wilson productions in New York City — “The Old Woman” (2014), opposite Mikhail Baryshnikov, and “The Life and Death of Marina Abramović” (2013) — and he continues to pursue ambitious avant-garde projects with the few well-known collaborators who can launch them on a prominent stage. But he has little interest in conventional theater, he says: “It has to be something that I’ve never done before.”Emporio Armani jacket (sold as part of a suit); and Sunspel T-shirt.Now, when he’s not filming, he spends whatever time he has with Colagrande in New York and in Italy. During the pandemic, her mother moved into a farmhouse an hour’s drive outside of Rome, where the couple frequently join her. Over time, they’ve built it into a working farm, with goats, alpacas, a renegade ram, some showy turkeys (“They think they’re peacocks,” Colagrande says) and a vegetable garden big enough that they supply a nearby restaurant with cauliflowers, eggplants, tomatoes and lettuces.The actor has discovered, relatively late in life, how much he loves animals — maybe even identifies with them. “Paul Schrader” — who directed him in “Light Sleeper” (1992) — “says that all actors are like farm animals,” Dafoe told me. “They like to work.” I had gone to see him in Italy, where we were now chatting in the house, over the din of a green monk parrot, Paco, whom Colagrande, now 47, had rescued off a Roman street. It seemed to me the farm is like one big ensemble group, a cast of characters — sacred, showy, chirpy, recalcitrant — who demand attention and time, and also, crucially, who need Dafoe.Dafoe, for his part, seems perennially drawn to new troupes. He frequently works with the American directors Wes Anderson (five films together) and Robert Eggers (three). More recently, he has been drafted into the group of actors who collaborate with the Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos. He just finished filming, in New Orleans, a Lanthimos project with Emma Stone called “And,” the details of which have not been revealed; the two actors also recently wrapped another Lanthimos movie, “Poor Things,” based on a novel with a Victorian setting and a “Frankenstein”-inspired theme.  On the CoversHermès jumpsuit, $6,150, hermes.com; Sunspel T-shirt; and stylist’s own turtleneck.Zegna polo, $4,700, zegna.com; and stylist’s own turtleneck.While making “And,” Stone was struck by how much Dafoe loved being on set. The actors, she recalls, would often hear one assistant director announcing to another, over a walkie-talkie, that Dafoe was “self-motivating to set” — meaning, showing up even though there was no official reason to be there. “That’s what you want from actors,” says Lanthimos, 49. “To want to be part of it in any way.” In one scene, Stone’s character is seen slapping Dafoe’s, who’s meant to be off camera; ordinarily, Stone would make the gesture without an actor present, but Dafoe insisted that the move would look more genuine if he were actually being slapped, and then took the (staged) blow some 20 times.“There’s this instinct to perform that many actors have — the ‘look at me, look at me!’ kind of performer,” says Stone. “He’s the opposite of that.” Her comment, notably, was the opposite of how LeCompte and Valk characterized his relationship to the audience — an apparent eagerness to delight the viewer. “Maybe it’s changed through the years,” Stone says. “A lot of actors I bond with have been doing this for a long time, and you know they’ve gone from ‘I’ to ‘We.’”Dafoe says he saw his relationship to acting shift in tandem with the stages of life. He started out an extrovert, performing for the attention. Then it turned into an adult affair: “Once you start working, you use that as a means to survive.” For those who stick with it, the study of the craft takes over; the extroversion turns inward. “And then,” he says, “it becomes like a spiritual thing — to find your connection with all things.” He seems, in one sense, to be racing against time — to be seizing on his hard-won status to work as often as possible, in roles that are as physical and challenging as possible, while he still can. Other actors slow down over the years; for Dafoe, a sense of mortality makes all the more compelling his desire to “melt into things,” as he says, choosing parts that connect him to something bigger than himself.At the farm, after bowls of pasta, I asked Colagrande what kind of role she’d like to see Dafoe try next. “The head of a cult,” she told me. They’re both fascinated by figures who could create an awakening in large groups of people — while using that talent possibly for evil. Dafoe was reluctant to answer the question himself — to him, it’s never about the role but the whole project. He acknowledged that he wanted to keep doing parts that were vital: physical ones, like being the captain of a ship, or performing love scenes or working with animals. Off the table are kindly or ailing grandfathers.Colagrande and I had been talking privately for almost half an hour; we realized it was time to call me a taxi. Dafoe was — understandably — getting restless after all the leisure, the long lunch, the chores that had been put off. He had Italian to study, he had animals to feed, he had scripts to read — there was work to do, thank God, and he wanted, he needed, to go do it.Hair by Adlena Dignam at Bryant Artists using Oribe. Grooming by Aya Iwakami. Set design by Robert Sumrell. Production: Hen’s Tooth. Digital tech: Jarrod Turner. Photo assistants: Ariel Sadok, Dylan Garcia, Terry Gifford. Set assistant: Erin Turner. Director of photography: Angel Zinovieff. Assistant camera: Erin Althaus. Tailor: Eugenio Solanillos. Stylist’s assistant: Verity Azario More

  • in

    Lars von Trier Had the Key to the End of ‘The Kingdom’ All Along

    As he grapples with Parkinson’s and considers what’s next, the director continues to provoke in “The Kingdom Exodus,” the final season of his haunted-hospital drama.In the first two seasons of Lars von Trier’s haunted-hospital drama “The Kingdom,” hailed since the 1990s as Denmark’s “Twin Peaks,” von Trier appears in a tuxedo at the end of each episode to offer a droll recap and wish viewers a pleasant evening. With an impish grin and an appeal to “take the good with the evil,” he ends with a devil-horn salute.But in the belated five-part conclusion, “The Kingdom Exodus,” which begins streaming Sunday on Mubi, von Trier delivers his closing remarks from behind a curtain.“I’ve retired a bit physically,” he says, his shoes peeking out from under the curtain, citing “vanity” as the reason. “The 24 years that have passed since the old episodes have left their mark, and I can’t compete with the unbearably cocky young Lars von Trier.”It is, on one level, a gag typical of von Trier, 66, a filmmaker who never has never taken himself too seriously, sometimes to a fault, even as he has created some of the most ferociously imaginative, rule-bending and at times infuriating movies of the last 30 years, including “Breaking the Waves,” “Dancer in the Dark” and “Dogville.”But the comment is also a reflection of his current state. In August, von Trier’s production company, Zentropa, announced that he had Parkinson’s disease. Weeks later, a visibly trembling von Trier gave a surprise, prerecorded introduction at the premiere of “The Kingdom Exodus” at the Venice Film Festival, later telling Variety that he intended to take a break from filmmaking. In a video call from his home in Copenhagen this month, he warned he would not be able to speak as precisely as he wanted.“That took at least a quarter of my brain, in the sense that I can’t find the words,” he said of his illness, “and in English it’s twice as difficult.” Or as he said in a second interview later in the week, his dark, self-deprecating humor coming through: “I would like to say to you that I am not as stupid as you think I am right now.”Von Trier was joking, as he does almost compulsively in conversation, his sense of humor no less mordant or provocative now than it was when the first two seasons of “Kingdom” aired on Danish television, in 1994 and 1997. A combination of horror and satire set at the Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen, the series was an early international breakthrough for von Trier, and finishing it completes a circle of sorts, one with origins dating to his 1987 feature “Epidemic,” which used the hospital as a location.Episodes of the first two seasons of “The Kingdom,” which aired in the 1990s, ended with a recap by von Trier and an appeal to “take the good with the evil.”Zentropa/MubiIn “The Kingdom Exodus,” which begins streaming on Sunday, von Trier delivers the recaps from behind a curtain. Zentropa/MubiStill, as he considers what’s next, he seemed more circumspect than the von Trier who raised eyebrows at the Cannes Film Festival in 2009 when he declared, “I am the best director in the world.” Or who, two years later at the same festival, expressed sympathy for Hitler and delivered the line “OK, I’m a Nazi” — another joke, but one that got him temporarily barred from Cannes. (Unprompted, he expressed regret over the over the 2011 incident when we spoke, referring to it as “the catastrophe.”)The actor Willem Dafoe, who began working with von Trier on “Manderlay” (2005) and plays the satanic Grand Duc in “Exodus,” spoke of two qualities that keep drawing him back to von Trier — the director’s ability to communicate without speaking and his habit of speaking too much.“He’s well known for not having a filter, and sometimes it gets him into trouble because he goes to places socially that may be difficult to accept,” Dafoe said. “But creatively, that kind of looseness, that kind of allows him to contemplate the unthinkable.”At Venice this year, “Exodus” was received as a return to form, but the fact that it was even completed was improbable. The franchise is a ghost story in more ways than one.The series was always meant to have a third, final season. But after Season 2, the principal actors started to die. Ernst-Hugo Jaregard, who played the imperious, dyspeptic Swedish physician Stig Helmer, died in 1998. Kirsten Rolffes, who played the malingering spiritualist Mrs. Drusse, died in 2000. After a while, von Trier said, he gave up.“But then four years ago I had a mental situation that was not good,” he said, “and I knew the only thing that could help was to work.” “Exodus” was simply the easiest thing to do.A third season of “The Kingdom” was stalled after its principle characters began dying, including Ernst-Hugo Jaregard (as Dr. Stig Helmer), who died in 1998.Zentropa/MubiMikael Persbrandt plays Helmer’s son in “Exodus.” Like his father, he is a Swede who complains constantly about Danes.Zentropa/MubiVon Trier, who shares screenwriting credit across the series with his longtime collaborator Niels Vorsel, wrote much more slowly than he usually did. (“Dogville,” he said, was written in 10 days.) His ambition was to give the series as much of an ending as possible. This season is also, he thinks, the funniest of the three.Unlike the first two installments, which were mainly studio productions, “Exodus” was filmed principally at the real-life Rigshospitalet, during Covid, no less. The story brings back some original characters in supporting roles while presenting substitutes for the departed leads.In place of Stig Helmer, “Exodus” offers Stig Helmer Jr. (Mikael Persbrandt), who takes a job at the hospital to experience living in the nation that drove his father mad. (Like his father, he constantly carps about Danish customs.) In place of Mrs. Drusse, the show has Karen (Bodil Jorgensen), a sleepwalker who, in the first of many meta touches, is introduced watching the closing credits of Season 2’s final episode and complaining, “That’s no ending.”The shoot was difficult for von Trier, who remembered receiving his diagnosis during the course of the production.“I have never felt so bad on a shoot before,” he said. “But on the other hand, I enjoyed especially the work with the actors.”The feeling was mutual for Jorgensen, who had starred in von Trier’s “The Idiots,” from 1998. On a set in 2014, she was run over by a tractor, and her lungs collapsed. Her road to recovery was long. The shared experience of having overcome physical obstacles had bonded her and her director, she said. “I survived, and Lars survived.”She added: “What I experienced was that every day, he got more and more interested in the telling of the story.”In early seasons, Kirsten Rolffes plays the Miss Marple-type character Mrs. Drusse, who is in touch with the spiritual realm. Rolffes died in 2000.Zentropa/MubiIn place of Mrs. Drusse, “Exodus” has Karen (Bodil Jorgensen), a sleepwalker who seems similarly attuned to the supernatural.Zentropa/MubiVon Trier said he has always considered “The Kingdom” a “left-hand work,” a money job that permits a certain kind of freedom. He likes that sort of abandon, even if he cares more for his feature films. “The good side is of course that you take any idea and say it’s good enough and put it in,” he said.Still, one subplot in “Exodus” plays with fire, even for a director inclined toward controversy. In it, Stig Jr., who is working to make the hospital more inclusive (new rules on pronouns abound), tries to initiate a romance with a colleague (Tuva Novotny) by asking her consent by email. She winds up running to a lawyer (Alexander Skarsgard), who somehow represents them both.The references to sexual harassment risk appearing pointed: In 2017, Bjork, who starred in “Dancer in the Dark,” accused a “Danish director” who was widely understood to be von Trier of unwanted touches and sexual advances. That same year, Peter Aalbaek Jensen, who co-founded Zentropa, was accused of sexual harassment by multiple women at the company, to which he later responded, in The Hollywood Reporter, “I’ll stop slapping asses.”Von Trier said that the subplot of “Exodus” was inspired by broader cultural discussions in Denmark. He has consistently denied Bjork’s accusations. (“I don’t have to defend,” he said during our interview. “I have nothing to defend.”)Whatever ways “Exodus” dares being called objectionable, the response so far has been enthusiastic. Alberto Barbera, the director of the Venice Film Festival, suggested that the audience’s familiarity with the original — and with von Trier’s prankishness — played a role in its positive reception.As “often happens with cult works,” he wrote in an email, there was “lively participation accompanied with a mixture of spontaneous applause, laughs and — probably for many — moments of nostalgia for being taken back.”Jorgensen, who has had health struggles of her own, said that the shared experience of having overcome physical obstacles had bonded her and von Trier.Christian Geisnæs/ZentropaTo the extent that he ever did, von Trier no longer considers himself the best director in the world. “It’s not like running 100 meters, and then the stopwatch will tell you if you won,” he said. “You can’t compare art, and you can’t compare films.”But there are some constants. He still hasn’t been to the United States. He still doesn’t fly. (If he allowed himself one flight? “To Iceland, to meet Bjork in person and really talk this through.”) He is still searching for projects now that “Kingdom” is completed, but he said his health would need to improve before he started something new.In the meantime, he has his routines. Our first conversation took place the day of the Danish general election, and he had just voted — as usual, he said, “for the most-left party I could find.” (In case anyone still wondered whether he is a Nazi.) Jorgensen, who lives near von Trier, mentioned taking regular walks with him, saying it was good for his Parkinson’s.Then there is one project that he is already shooting — a video series with the working title “Report From Lars.” He wants it to be available free, perhaps on the internet.In each chapter, von Trier will share insights that he has learned about filmmaking.“Then people who hate my films can do the opposite,” he said. More

  • in

    These 'Spider-Man' Villains Return in 'No Way Home'

    Willem Dafoe, Alfred Molina and Jamie Foxx talk about reprising their bad-guy roles in the blockbuster sequel.They were very good at being bad.At the dawn of the “Spider-Man” film franchise in 2002, Willem Dafoe, the acclaimed actor of movies like “Shadow of the Vampire” and “The Last Temptation of Christ,” inaugurated the superhero series with a credible, formidable villain, Norman Osborn — otherwise known as the Green Goblin.Two years later, Alfred Molina, the distinguished star of film (“Frida,” “Boogie Nights”) and theater (“Art”), donned the mechanical tentacles of the nefarious Otto Octavius — a.k.a. Doctor Octopus — for a sequel, “Spider-Man 2.”Another decade and another iteration of the franchise went by, and the mantle of eminent evildoer was passed to Jamie Foxx, an Academy Award winner for “Ray,” who played Max Dillon and his high-voltage alter ego, Electro, in “The Amazing Spider-Man 2.”Each reset — not to mention the fact that some of the characters died in their films — seemed to preclude the possibility that these actors and the bad guys they played could ever meet up in a single film.But that comic-book fantasy became cinematic reality in the current blockbuster “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” in which an errant spell cast by Doctor Strange brings Osborn, Octavius and Dillon into a dimension where Tom Holland wears the Spidey suit. (Oh yeah, the movie also unites Holland and his “Spider-Man” predecessors, Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield — blah, blah, blah.)For Dafoe, Molina and Foxx, “No Way Home” allowed them to share (or steal) trade secrets. The movie also gave their bad guys the opportunity to try out being good guys: as Molina explained, “All the villains got a chance to not just redeem ourselves but find a deeper, more nuanced level to fill out our characters and make them richer.”In individual interviews, the actors talked about being recruited to the “Spider-Man” franchise, returning for “No Way Home,” and the process and pleasures of doing their dirty deeds. These are edited excerpts from those conversations.What do you remember about first being offered your role in the “Spider-Man” series? What was different about superhero movies at the time?WILLEM DAFOE They offered the Goblin/Norman Osborn part to many people before they arrived at me. I was shooting a film in Spain [“The Reckoning”], and they sent the casting director to Spain and we shot a little audition in my hotel room. It wasn’t business as usual. But it was something I was very interested in doing, and I had a good feeling for Sam Raimi [who directed the original “Spider-Man” movies]. Of course, some people, at that point, thought it was very strange to make a film out of a comic. But I saw there could be a great pleasure and a great adventure in it, so I pursued it.The Green Goblin — and that mask — in the first “Spider-Man.”Sony PicturesALFRED MOLINA These movies have become very specific and almost forensic in the way they’re made. They have to appeal to all kinds of quadrants. On Sam Raimi’s film, I found the best way to handle the enormity of the event was to remember that as an actor, you’re a small cog in a much, much larger machine. You don’t spend a great deal of time exploring character or motivations, particularly if you’re playing a villain. But for me, that’s part of the joy of it — of turning a moment into, hopefully, a fun piece of storytelling.Explore the Marvel Cinematic UniverseThe popular franchise of superhero films and television series continues to expand. ‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’: The web slinger is back with the latest installment of the “Spider-Man” series.‘Hawkeye’: Jeremy Renner returns to the role of Clint Barton, the wisecracking marksman of the Avengers, in the Disney+ mini-series.‘Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings’: The superhero originated in comics filled with racist stereotypes. The movie knocked them down.‘Eternals’: The two-and-a-half-hour epic introduces nearly a dozen new characters, hopping back and forth through time.JAMIE FOXX All I can tell you is that my kids finally thought I was cool. “OK, we get all that other stuff you’ve been doing. But what? You’re going to go where? Are you kidding me?” They just loved Andrew Garfield. I was so jazzed to be able to be a kid myself. Watching the “Spider-Man” television show, back in the day, when his web was like a shoestring or whatever, and then to be part of this huge, huge world, it was just mind-blowing.After your movies, did you ever feel pangs of disappointment to see the “Spider-Man” franchise continue without you?DAFOE Even in the second and third installments [of the Raimi films], having me do little cameos, it was a pleasure to just see everyone again and stick my toe in the pool. But I didn’t have the imagination of continuing on.MOLINA I just walked away from my movie thinking, well, that was fun. I really had a great time. But I never thought, oh God, I wish they’d bring him back. I never had any kind of hankering to do it again. When your character dies, you go, that’s it.FOXX You can never look at it that way. If you look at the disappointments of what could have been, you can never do this business.How were you approached about “No Way Home,” and how much did you know about the other actors who were participating in it?DAFOE When Amy Pascal [a “Spider-Man” producer] and Jon Watts [the director of “No Way Home”] called me up and said we’d like to pitch you this idea, I thought, this is crazy. But let’s see what they have to say. I really didn’t want to do a cameo. I wanted to make sure there was something substantial enough to do that wasn’t just a tip of the hat. And the other thing was, I said I really want there to be action — I want to take part in action scenes. Because that’s really fun for me. It’s the only way to root the character. Otherwise it just becomes a series of memes.MOLINA When I got asked to come in for a meeting with Amy and Jon, I actually thought it was for a completely different project, maybe to play another villain, or maybe an interview for some retrospective documentary. As the years had gone by, I thought, they may well bring Doc Ock back. But I never thought they’d bring him back with me. I was witness to my body changing, things moving. I walked in completely innocent. Like everyone else, I didn’t know the full extent of where the film was going. I didn’t get to read a whole script — I just saw the pages pertinent to me.Molina opposed Tobey Maguire as our hero in “Spider-Man 2.”Melissa Moseley/Sony PicturesFOXX They were able to keep the mystique alive in a world where mystique doesn’t exist, anywhere. There’s Instagram posts and it’s about how many likes you get. Imagine if Picasso was screenshotting everything, everybody could see it, like, “Eh, I don’t want to buy that painting.” They kept everything under wraps and we all bought into something.Did anything change about how you played your characters in the new film?DAFOE I must be honest, I am aware that there was some criticism of that [Green Goblin] mask in the original one. We heard it enough that it was probably a consideration, to change it up a little bit. I don’t think about that because I don’t think about emoting with my face. My face follows my heart. It’s just an expression of what you’re feeling.MOLINA In my original film, the tentacles — I almost said my tentacles — they were mechanical. They were played by puppeteers who gave them personality. We were like a gang — I dubbed us the Octourage. But this time around, the technology is so much more advanced that the tentacles were computer-generated and I was on my own. That was a whole other way of looking at it.FOXX There was a character I played in “Baby Driver,” his name was Bats. He got killed off, but this was an opportunity to let Bats a little bit in on Electro. He wasn’t like, I want to [expletive] everybody up — I just want to get mine. Everybody flying through the air, looking good, got girlfriends. That now becomes the mantra of Electro.Had you previously met the actors who play your fellow villains? What was it like encountering them on “No Way Home”?DAFOE [Alfred and I] started at about the same time, so I was aware of his work and I’d see him through the years, so it was fun to see him and hear his stories. He’s got a million of them. And it was really fun to work with Jamie, because I’ve loved him ever since “In Living Color.” He’s a supremely sweet and energetic guy.MOLINA Willem and I met each other briefly on the set of Sam’s movie. They brought me to watch Willem doing a scene as Doc Ock, just a little practical joke, which was delightful. For me, Green Goblin is the absolute zenith of supervillains, and he plays him with such relish. For my money, he’s the top man.FOXX Alfred is the funniest guy on the planet. But then, the first time I saw Willem, I said, I’ve got to bow seven times, bro. He said, [bashful Willem Dafoe voice] “Ah, Jamie, you’re so nice, thank you so much, Jamie.” I said, no, bro, you’re going to get these seven bows. I would just watch these guys work and even small things that they would do, I’d say, ooh, I’mma steal that.Foxx in his first go-round as Electro, in “The Amazing Spider-Man 2.” 2014Sony PicturesYour characters in “No Way Home” each have ample opportunity to be very bad and the chance to turn good. Which side do you prefer?DAFOE Whenever you play a role, it is you and it isn’t you. If you’re going to play one of these archvillains, it’s the most natural thing in the world to cultivate the opposite of what they lead with. You develop a vulnerability and an insecurity against the confidence of the aggression. We all have that little devil on one shoulder and that little angel on the other shoulder. I remember as a kid seeing cartoons with that image. God knows it stayed with me.MOLINA They’re two very different things, but in a way they belong to each other. Whatever element in Doc Ock that is villainous is made more villainous in the minds of the audience because of their knowledge of his goodness. And at the same time, his return to decency is even more poignant because of what we know he’s capable of doing and has done.FOXX Oh, it’s always great to be bad, bro. What makes the superheroes super is how bad the villains can be.If any of the characters you’ve previously played could appear in the same movie, who would you want to see team up?DAFOE Once you finish something, you’ve got to make room for the next thing. So I don’t have much of an imagination for that kind of thing. Maybe I’m a little simpler. One at a time, one at a time.MOLINA Just off the top of my head, I think it might be cool if Doc Ock met up with Diego Rivera [from “Frida”] and lent him the tentacles so he could finish off all those glorious murals. He could get so much work done. He could be working on four or five canvases at the same time.FOXX Oh, man, Django [from “Django Unchained”], Willie Beamen [from “Any Given Sunday”] and Electro would be crazy. If they could share, they’d be like, yo, I need a little bit of that electricity over here. More

  • in

    ‘Nightmare Alley’ Review: Seeing Is Believing. (Suckers!)

    Guillermo del Toro’s latest movie tracks the sordid adventures of a carnival grifter played by Bradley Cooper.Festooned with gargoyles, Guillermo del Toro’s “Nightmare Alley” gets its game on in the sleazoid world of 1930s back-road carnivals. There, amid worn tents and garishly painted signs, a psychic reads gullible minds and a contortionist twists like a soft pretzel. The whole thing seems like fertile ground for del Toro, who’s drawn to the stranger, spookier corners of the imagination. So when a carnival barker promises a crowd a good show it is easy to imagine del Toro nodding along as he murmurs, Step right this way, folks.You get why Stan (Bradley Cooper) looks all agog when he wanders in. As a filmmaker, del Toro likes to lay an overflowing table, and there’s a lot to take in at the carnival, like the pickled baby, baptized Cyclops Boy; and a poor soul called the Geek, an ostensible wild man who bites the heads off chickens. It’s icky — that’s the idea. Stan has empty pockets and a mysterious past, and while others might run screaming, he soon joins the show’s roster of creepy and putatively charming charlatans. He proves a natural hustler and, as the story evolves, his grifting grows more sophisticated, lucrative and dangerous.You might have seen Tyrone Power navigating a similarly shadowy setup in the 1947 noir of the same title, directed by Edmund Goulding. Like the earlier movie, del Toro’s is based on a novel by William Lindsay Gresham, a desperate, pitiless book filled with exotic slang and steeped in the soured milk of human unkindness. Written by del Toro and Kim Morgan, the new adaptation hews more faithfully to the novel, partly because it’s not constrained by Hollywood self-censorship. But fealty isn’t always a productive strategy, and while the first film greatly tempers the book’s shocks, it doesn’t sentimentalize the source material, as this one does.Shortly after Stan becomes a carny, he begins cycling through women, beginning with a clairvoyant (Toni Collette) whose broken-down husband (David Strathairn) once had a successful mentalist act. The act uses a code that allows the performers to guess, more or less accurately, the answers to audience questions. It’s a perfect fit for an opportunist, which is a role that nicely suits Cooper, an actor who can let you see his characters’ internal whirring. Stan and another love interest (Rooney Mara) leave the carnival, taking the mentalist act on the nightclub circuit. They make bank and also meet a smooth number (Cate Blanchett) who steps out of a different, less engaging movie.Cooper adds charisma and an anxious backbeat to the story, while the old-timey carnival gives the movie texture and novelty. Part of the queasy appeal of Gresham’s novel is that it vividly brings to life the kind of low-rent carnivals that once entertained audiences with so-called human oddities, people who were often just disabled or marginalized. However exploitative, these shows provided performers with wages and homes, a community like the one immortalized in Tod Browning’s scandalous 1932 film “Freaks,” a favorite of del Toro’s. The attraction to outsider realms like the one immortalized in that film runs deep for del Toro; if nothing else, movie shoots are themselves nomadic tribes of a kind.Whatever his reasons, del Toro adores his monsters, and he’s right at home in the carnival, which he dotes on lovingly. He puts his frequent collaborator Ron Perlman in strongman tights, turns up the amperage on Willem Dafoe’s cadaverous smile and gives Collette time and space to leave an impression. Collette’s scenes with Cooper send out electric sparks, generating heat that briefly takes the chill off Stan and draws you to him. Their scenes also give Cooper a chance to flesh out the character, a mystery that unravels scene by scene. You miss Colette when her character exits, which happens all too fast because Stan has other places to go and more people to cheat.As del Toro peers into the carnival’s corners, he also folds in one of the movie’s recurring motifs: eyes. “Nightmare Alley” turns on the logic of the visible: what Stan sees and doesn’t, what patrons (you included) see and don’t. In the carnival (and in movies), seeing is believing, including in illusions, yet at what cost? Early on, Stan stumbles into an attraction decorated with eyes, an echo of Salvador Dalí’s designs for the Hitchcock film “Spellbound.” Later, when Stan develops his mentalist act, he wears a blindfold decorated with a single eye, evoking the Cyclops Boy. By the time he meets a shrink, Dr. Lilith Ritter (Blanchett), it is obvious that what Stan can never really see is himself.Del Toro is a world builder, but he can have a tough time bringing his creations to life, which is the case here despite the hard work of his fine cast. The carnival is diverting, and del Toro’s fondness for its denizens helps put a human face on these putative freaks. But once he’s finished with the preliminaries, he struggles to make the many striking parts cohere into a living, breathing whole. It’s as if, after opening his cabinet of curiosities, he expected you to continue gazing appreciatively at his collection of wonders alongside him. And while it is a nice display — everything gleams, having been lovingly polished and repolished — it’s also inert, more museological than cinematic.The problem is that this display is in service to a drama that needs narrative tension and modulation to fully work. The scenes with Lilith are particularly crucial in this respect, and also where the movie’s already logy pulse slows to a crawl. It’s no surprise that Blanchett makes quite the spectacle — she doesn’t walk and sit, she slinks and drapes — yet the performance is so mannered and self-consciously indebted to noir sirens of the past that you can almost see the quote marks framing it. In theory, Lilith should be a sharp foil for Stan. But she isn’t a character, she is a cineaste’s nostalgic plaything, and like too much of this movie she is less bathed in del Toro’s love than embalmed in it.Nightmare AlleyRated R for bloody violence. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. In theaters. More

  • in

    Review: Marina Abramovic Summons Maria Callas in ‘7 Deaths’

    Part mixtape and part séance, this opera project by the famed performance artist attempts to unite two divas across time.MUNICH — In Leos Carax’s new film, “Annette,” the husband and wife played by Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard are described in inverse terms. As a comedian, he kills every night; as an opera star, she dies.That’s of course a reductive view of opera. But the alignment of the art form and demise persists in the popular imagination, and guides “7 Deaths of Maria Callas.” A dramaturgically misguided séance of a project by the performance artist Marina Abramovic, it played to its largest in-person audience yet on Tuesday at the Bavarian State Opera here, after a heavily restricted run and livestream last year. It is bound for Paris and Athens in September, then Berlin and Naples — and who knows where else, with Abramovic’s celebrity behind it.“7 Deaths” is a meeting of divas in which Callas is invoked through a series of the arias for which she was notable. She is then inhabited onstage and in short films — the summoning of a spirit who, Abramovic argues, is still very much with us.In the work, Abramovic inhabits Maria Callas, miming to a recording of “Casta Diva.”Wilfried HöslShe’s right. Callas died in 1977, yet lives on in a still-robust stream of albums, art books and, yes, hologram concerts. She was known even to a public beyond opera as tabloid fodder, especially because of her affair with Aristotle Onassis — a love triangle involving Jacqueline Kennedy, his eventual wife. But her pop celebrity emerged from her being an indelible artist, who contributed to the 20th-century resurrection of bel canto repertoire with a transfixing stage presence. Even when silent, she emoted with the entirety of her face, arrestingly expressive with just a small hand gesture. Her voice failed her too early, but she embodied the “Tosca” aria “Vissi d’arte”: “I lived for art.”That voice caught the attention of a young Abramovic, who has said that she first heard Callas on the radio when she was a 14-year-old in Yugoslavia. Since then she has been haunted by their similarities: They share astrology signs, toxic relationships with their mothers and, she told The New York Times last year, “this incredible intensity in the emotions, that she can be fragile, and strong at the same time.”In the opera’s initial run, Adela Zaharia, left, sang an aria from “Lucia di Lammermoor.” On Tuesday, it was sung by Rosa Feola, in a standout performance.Wilfried HöslIn that interview, Abramovic noted one essential difference: how they reacted to losing the loves of their lives. Callas, in her view, died of a broken heart — a heart attack, to be exact — but Abramovic, so shattered that she stopped eating or drinking, eventually survived by returning to work.All this background about “7 Deaths” is clearer than the work itself, in which Callas is never present enough to persuasively intertwine with Abramovic, who upstages the great diva throughout. That’s the insurmountable flaw of the project, and the main reason it doesn’t belong in an opera house.“7 Deaths” is best experienced in person; the spatial audio design and immersive, big-screen film element made its 95-minute running time a breeze on Tuesday, compared with the tedious livestream last year. But its use of live performers relegates them to mere soundtrack, while also erasing Callas from her own history.This might have been more satisfying as a set of video installations, something like Julian Rosefeldt’s “Manifesto.” If Abramovic’s homage were accompanied by Callas’s storied recordings, the goal of joining and blurring divas could be more naturally achieved. Instead, “7 Deaths,” directed by Abramovic with Lynsey Peisinger, never quite approaches actual drama in its succession of arias and films, then its dreamy re-creation of Callas’s final moments in her Paris apartment.Nadezhda Karyazina, left, sang the role of Carmen last year against a backdrop of a video with Willem Dafoe, left onscreen, and Abramovic. On Tuesday, Samantha Hankey sang it.Wilfried HöslThe piece does include new music, by Marko Nikodijevic — ably conducted, along with the opera excerpts, by Yoel Gamzou. The overture begins with haunting bells and slippery melodies whose glissandos render them distant memories of unplaceable tunes. Behind a scrim, Abramovic lies still in a bed under soft lighting; not since Tilda Swinton has an artist so easily gotten away with sleep as performance.Then swirling clouds are projected onto the scrim — a tacky recurring “visual intermezzo,” as it is called in the credits — and a maid enters. She is the first of seven singers who dress identically and whose arias follow introductions in the form of poetic texts prerecorded by Abramovic.The characters are never named, but opera fans will recognize them instantly: Violetta Valéry from “La Traviata” (Emily Pogorelc); Desdemona from “Otello” (Leah Hawkins); Cio-Cio-San from “Madama Butterfly” (Kiandra Howarth); and the title protagonists of “Tosca” (Selene Zanetti), “Carmen” (Samantha Hankey), “Lucia di Lammermoor” (Rosa Feola) and “Norma” (Lauren Fagan).Their onstage appearances are an insult to the singers, who feel like interchangeably anonymous musical accompaniment to the short films — though Feola’s Lucia was defiantly present, a performance that captured the role’s emotional force and vocal acrobatics, even stripped of its dramatic context.In the work’s coda, Abramovic imagines herself in Callas’s Paris apartment on the day she died.Wilfried HöslA spotlight remains throughout on the sleeping Abramovic, as behind her the short films — starring her and a game Willem Dafoe, and directed by Nabil Elderkin — provide not reflections on Callas but (on a superficial level) the arias themselves, and (on a more thoughtful one) the nature of operatic artifice.In their embrace of excess, these videos flirt with winking camp. As Abramovic falls from a skyscraper in slow motion, inspired by “Tosca,” her enormous earrings dance in zero gravity; when Dafoe wraps thick snakes around her neck to strangle her like Desdemona, their slithering bodies smear her lipstick. Her Carmen is a bedazzled matador, while in the “Norma” film she and Dafoe trade gender roles, with him in a glittering gown and the penciled eyebrows of Marlene Dietrich.Little, if anything, is said here about Callas, but after the seventh aria, Nikodijevic’s music returns — now rumbling and tumultuous, with singers and instrumentalists perched in the theater’s boxes — as the scene changes to her apartment on the day of her death. It’s realistic yet suggests a place beyond, the window opening not to a streetscape but to a pale blue emptiness.In this long coda, Abramovic’s prerecorded voice both gives her directions for onstage movement and imagines Callas’s final thoughts in a collage of non sequiturs resembling a mad scene. She contemplates her luxurious bedding, “Ari” Onassis, her gay friends (Luchino Visconti, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Franco Zeffirelli, Leonard Bernstein). Then, at some point, she leaves through a door. The maids come in, dispassionately clean the room and drape black fabric over the furniture.One of them lingers, opening a turntable and dropping the needle on a record of “Casta Diva.” The sound is scratchy, but a distinct voice comes through: Callas, for the first time. Abramovic returns to the stage, in a sparkling gold gown, and mimes the performance — an outstretched hand, a downcast look. The two divas unite at last, too late.7 Deaths of Maria CallasPerformed Tuesday at the Bavarian State Opera, Munich. More

  • in

    ‘Siberia’ Review: Beast of the Northern Wilds

    Abel Ferrara’s latest psychodrama sends an ever-intense Willem Dafoe into the Arctic wilderness on a visionary reckoning with his memories and sense of self.Everybody’s got a plan until a bear wallops them. That happens to Clint (Willem Dafoe) in “Siberia,” Abel Ferrara’s latest psychodrama, which is equally set in the snowy Arctic wilds and the desolate reaches of an unquiet mind. This bracingly pure dream journey starts with Clint as a frontier bartender in a cabin, serving the odd hunter or babushka, and follows him on a dog-driven sled chase through memories and visions.The bear attack comes in an unforgettable smash cut, shattering Clint’s apparent plan to hide from the world. But unlike Ferrara’s most infamous creations — the bad lieutenants, the kings of New York—Clint’s transgressions don’t seem to be spectacular. That doesn’t stop him from ruminations and self-pity — over past relationships, an Eisenhower-era father (also played by Dafoe), or losing touch with a sense of soul. (Not to mention living with the world’s legacy of atrocity, which Ferrara invokes briefly and nightmarishly.) Also: mystics!Dafoe, a close collaborator with Ferrara, brings the intensity and nakedness (not just physical) necessary for the film’s trip. I can’t think of other actors at his level who could keep a sense of true north in a nonlinear story like this, from bear scene to sex scene to earnest confrontations, amid quotations from St. Augustine and Nietzsche.Visually, Ferrara sends him on eerie flights through day-for-night wilderness and into vertiginous caverns and sanctums (haunted by wistful musical motifs composed by Joe Delia). The film (co-written by Ferrara and Christ Zois) ends enigmatically, as dreams do. That refusal to stage an orderly conclusion or redemption might be the boldest thing about the movie.SiberiaRated R for the stuff that (some) dreams are made of, such as strong sexual content and disturbing violence. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More