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      A Look Back at ‘Black Girl’ and Other Ousmane Sembène Films

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      At Film Forum, a retrospective of the Senegalese director’s work shows the care he took in telling female stories.A princess ascends from the water like a siren. The stony gaze of an African mask lures a beautiful maid homeward. The Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène rendered myth a visual map that rescued the African past from the sullying grasp of empire. In place of demigods and antiheroes, women were his preferred orbit.The director revealed his enduring preoccupations in the Sembènian heroine: Broadly speaking, she was principled, defiant, inclined to revolt, however outwardly hopeless her odds appeared. Where colonial literature either struggled to translate the finer contours of traditional African gender arrangements or offered only a cursory sketch of their subjection, Sembène stayed attuned to the shades of women’s displacement. He understood, for instance, in “Xala” (1975) how a woman who was too imperious to enter the house of her husband’s second wife could bear, in somber silence, when he took a third, even younger bride, and fractured further what little love was left to her, his first and eldest wife.Feminine multiplicity animated Sembène’s (literary and cinematic) corpus, and he took the cost of his characters’ bravery seriously. Their triumphs come hard-won or not at all. They frequently become the cherished apotheosis of liberation or, where denied by earthly circumstance, rebellion. The director nursed an abiding suspicion of all religion, but his films betray him: If he surrendered in faith to anything, it was the African woman.Dyella Touré as Ngoné in “Xala” from 1975.Ousmane Sembène, via Film ForumOn the occasion of the director’s centennial, Film Forum is hosting a two-week retrospective commemorating Sembène’s work, including the short film “Borom Sarret” (1963), one of the earliest narrative films made in sub-Saharan Africa, a feat that later crowned him the “father of African cinema.” No reading of Sembène (who died in 2007 at 84) is complete without understanding that he considered himself among the griots, a venerable caste of West African storytellers charged with preserving oral tradition. The formal brushstrokes of his compositions contain traces of his tutelage in Moscow, but the Indigenous orality to which he was heir defined his social-realist fables: peopled with all of folklore’s classical archetypes — the trickster, the headstrong princess, the jealous (possibly vengeful) wife — and designed in the shadow of its didactic architecture, replete with curses, the gluttonous elite and resourceful outcasts.For much of the director’s youth, French law prevented Africans from filming in Africa. If the imperial project is, fundamentally, erasure, to interrupt and rewrite history, we see how authorship emerges paramount. Sembène, therefore, regarded the griot as a historian. His early short “Niaye” (1964), about a young village girl impregnated by her father, a chief, would herald persisting themes: A voice-over declares the griots the “only memory of this country” and laments, “Our country is dying of lies and false morality.”Sembène began as a novelist, after he taught himself to read and write in French (many of his films are adapted from his novels and short stories). But the written word, too, inevitably proved an awkward province for his activism; literacy came enveloped in colonial intrusion. Cinema proposed to reconcile the tension among language, text and orality, a conflict he restages in “Black Girl” (1966), his debut feature and perhaps best known work.Ousmane Sembène at the Cannes Film Festival in 1967.Gilbert Tourte/Gamma-Rapho, via Getty ImagesHe was first compelled to recount the tragedy of Diouana (played by Mbissine Thérèse Diop) after he stumbled across a startling report about a Black maid in a French newspaper. He published “Black Girl” as a short story in 1962, two years after Senegal seized independence. Here, the ingénue becomes a doomed emissary of a long invaded nation, still bound psychically and economically to its interlopers.Diouana abandons her village in Dakar, possessed of quixotic visions of France, where she ventures to work as a nanny for a well-to-do white family. But the fantasy crumbles upon her arrival when the nameless “Madame” thrusts Diouana into the role of housekeeper. Confined to the cramped house, she toils away daily at domestic chores, overworked and mistreated by her employer. In flashbacks, we encounter a different Diouana: spirited, glamorous and, as it happens, perilously myopic.But the most telling sequence occurs when Diouana receives a letter from her mother (perhaps penned by the village schoolmaster, played by Sembène himself). Diouana listens wordlessly as her employers read the letter. They offer to transcribe her response, lies, of course, about her “good health.” But more important, their translation amounts to a symbolic personal (and political) violation; history disrupted, vocal theft. In protest, Diouana reclaims all she has left: her body.If women model the zeniths of revolutionary vitality, it was men, in Sembène’s estimation, who were generally useless. “Xala” dispenses a scalding indictment of Senegal’s government after the nominal expulsion of the white colonists. On his third wedding night, El-Hadji (Thierno Leye), a wealthy member of the country’s ruling class, finds himself afflicted with xala, the curse of impotence. He dismisses the obvious displeasure of his first two wives, both too traditionalist and dependent upon him for any objection to land meaningfully. Only his daughter Rama (Myriam Niang), the same age as his new wife, can truly kindle his rage, for she alone represents the noble independence El-Hadji superficially performs. He dons suits and drinks imported water; she refuses the water and his language. In a testament to their alliances, El-Hadji snaps at Rama, “Why do you always answer in Wolof when I speak to you in French?”In “Emitaï” and other Sembène films, men are considered generally useless.Ousmane Sembène, via Film ForumIn “Emitaï” (1971) — named for the Diola god of thunder — the French army absconds with the village’s young men and demands, too, their rice (a sacred crop) to feed soldiers. While the elders exhort their gods, the women hide the harvest, which they cultivate themselves. Sembène revels in these glimpses of communal ceremony through protracted sequences: a line of women, heads crowned with baskets of rice, maps the winding path from the wetlands home; elsewhere, they bend over, splashing the delicate stalks with fistfuls of river water. For the women’s insolence, the French platoon holds them captive, their silent demonstration dappled in blazing sunlight.But powerful men seem especially susceptible to colonial imposition. In “Ceddo” (1977), amid the triad of Islam, Christianity and the slave trade, the ceddo (nonbelievers) kidnap the princess to ensure the king’s allegiance to their freedom. But the king, flanked by a menacing, ambitious imam and his disciples, realizes too late that any dominion he once held has been usurped, if not foolishly delivered, to these outsiders with their foreign gods. It seems the leadership of men fails to challenge empire efficiently because they pursue some approximation of its power. No wonder that Sembène’s films routinely faced censorship; “Ceddo” and “Emitaï” were both banned in Senegal for years.Sembène was never deterred. His final film, “Moolaadé” (2004), bore him to the outskirts of Burkina Faso for a stringent reproach of female genital mutilation. Four girls flee their impending circumcision and find a noble champion in Collé (Fatoumata Coulibaly), a kindly woman who refused to have her daughter “cut,” much to the disapproval of the community’s elders. Somehow his most harrowing plunge into women’s suffering yielded his most ardent tribute to their courage.The series Sembène runs at Film Forum from Sept. 8-24. More information is at filmforum.org. More

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      Lynn Lynn’s Journey From Rocker to Dissecting Myanmar’s Coup in Film

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      Lynn Lynn was a musical idol when he volunteered in 2015 to protect the life of Myanmar’s new civilian leader. Forced to flee after 2021’s coup, he has reinvented himself as a film director.Long before he became an award-winning filmmaker, Lynn Lynn was already a star.His voice was ubiquitous on the radio, belting out rock songs, and he played sold-out shows in stadiums across the country. Everywhere he went, fans hounded him for selfies and autographs.But all that fame was confined to Myanmar, a country he had to flee after a February 2021 military coup.It wasn’t only his lyrics about the suffering of people under military rule that had made him a target of the country’s generals. He was also close to the country’s now-imprisoned civilian leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, having once served as her bodyguard.Now living in the Thai city of Mae Sot, bordering Myanmar, the 39-year-old rocker has taken on a new identity: refugee.Despite the drastic changes in his circumstances, he has not given up on art, but he has changed his focus: to film.His first short movie, “The Beginning,” whose main characters are a fictional group of people from Myanmar, focuses on the importance of good will in building a democratic nation. Five months later, he followed with “The Way,” which captures the trauma and despair of a family suffering from a nation’s conflict; despite the dark themes, the movie is a musical — the first by a director from Myanmar.Both films have won multiple honors at international film festivals, with “The Way” also earning multiple accolades for its soundtrack.“I want to give the message that the military junta can oppress an artist physically, but the spirit and art cannot be oppressed,” Mr. Lynn Lynn said, speaking from his spartan music studio, a bedroom in a rented house in Mae Sot.Mr. Lynn Lynn walking behind Daw Aung San Suu Kyi when he was one of the bodyguards of Myanmar’s civilian leader.Lauren DeCicca/Getty ImagesMr. Lynn Lynn’s life story has been shaped by his country’s convulsive recent history, shifting from dictatorship to democracy to the present-day resistance.The youngest of four boys, he was born in the city of Mandalay to a railway worker father and a mother who stayed at home.When he was 5, he saw close at hand the brutality of the army whose leaders ruled the nation: soldiers pulling passengers from a boat and commanding everyone — regardless of age — to kneel. That scene of dominance and humiliation, he says, has stayed with him throughout his adult life.As a 9-year-old, he taught himself how to play guitar. After high school, he moved to Yangon, the capital at the time, where he cycled through a series of jobs, including bus conductor and security guard, while trying to start a musical career.His big break came in 2001, after he walked into a recording studio to drop off his demo tape and was soon hired to compose songs for some of Myanmar’s most famous singers. He established a reputation for composing original songs, a rarity in a country where nearly all the songs were copied from abroad.In 2007, he marched daily with the country’s monks during the Saffron Revolution protests. He read over and over again “Freedom From Fear,” a book of essays by Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, at the time the leader of the country’s opposition, who was under house arrest.He learned how to navigate the country’s censors. Out of every five songs submitted, he was instructed to change the lyrics of three. Sometimes, he submitted different lyrics and then later swapped back in the original words, without anyone seeming to notice.“He is a rebel,” said his wife, Chit Thu Wai, a well-known actress and singer.Mr. Lynn Lynn with his wife, Chit Thu Wai, a well-known actress, in his music studio in Mae Sot.Lauren DeCicca for The New York TimesIn 2008, Mr. Lynn Lynn released “Think,” an album with love songs that he had written initially for other singers. It was an instant hit and catapulted him to stardom.In 2011, the military initiated a range of sweeping political changes, including releasing Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, who convened a gathering of the country’s artists at her house.There, Mr. Lynn Lynn told the Nobel Peace Prize winner he would be willing to do anything for her. He became one of her bodyguards during the 2012 by-election and the 2015 general election.After she won in 2015, becoming the country’s civilian leader, Mr. Lynn Lynn returned to music. Able to sing openly about the generals, he released an album called “The Fourth Revolution.”Then, in February 2021, two months after Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi won the 2020 election in a landslide, the military detained her and announced it had taken power in a coup.The junta charged dozens of actors and musicians, including Mr. Lynn Lynn and his wife, with “incitement.” After months in hiding, the family decided reluctantly to leave Myanmar.Mr. Lynn Lynn went first in August 2021, trekking across a jungle and then swimming to Mae Sot. Ms. Chit Thu Wai and their twin daughters, now 6, followed a week later.Mae Sot, the Thai border city where Mr. Lynn Lynn fled with his family.Lauren DeCicca for The New York TimesMr. Lynn Lynn had never wanted to make movies in Myanmar. While he dabbled in script writing and supported independent filmmakers through a production company he owned with his wife, he considered most of the movies made in Myanmar to be too lowbrow to much interest him.He says he turned to film in part to “challenge” his artistic peers back home, many of whom allow the generals to use them for propaganda.Myanmar’s Directorate of Public Relations and Psychological Warfare has always exploited actors and actresses, using them in films to portray soldiers as honorable heroes. In return for staying silent, these celebrities enjoy perks, like being paid to attend galas such as the Myanmar Academy Awards.Mr. Lynn Lynn says he has noticed that the timing of these celebrity events often coincides with reports about more military atrocities. Nearly every week brings horrific news: 100 dead in an airstrike. Bombs dropped at an outdoor concert. Eleven children killed at a school.Midway through an interview in Mae Sot, Mr. Lynn Lynn lifted up his T-shirt to reveal his back. In neat, cursive script, there were 700 tattooed names and ages of some of those killed in the coup’s aftermath.Aung Myint, 32. Tun Win Han, 25. Khin Myo Chit, 7.“There are so many more to come,” Ms. Chit Thu Wai said.Mr. Lynn Lynn’s back is tattooed with the names and ages of 700 of those killed after the coup.Lauren DeCicca for The New York TimesMr. Lynn Lynn says he looks at the names in the mirror to “compel a sense of urgency upon my consciousness.” The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, a rights group, said more than 4,000 people had been killed in Myanmar since the coup.Mr. Lynn Lynn knew that shooting movies in Mae Sot, so close to Myanmar, was dangerous. Seventeen of 20 cast members of “The Way” stood accused of “incitement,” and they feared Myanmar military’s spies were everywhere, raising concerns they could be abducted or killed. In the movie, members of the central family sing about their suffering from conflict and their quest for peace and justice. Myanmar is never explicitly mentioned because, Mr. Lynn Lynn says, he wants the story to be universal.Two weeks before the shoot, he was still not sure how he would pull it off without the sophisticated equipment typically needed to make a film. He decided to borrow a friend’s iPhone 13 Pro to use as the camera. For the music, he gave himself a crash course in sound mixing.Mr. Lynn Lynn with a wooden ship that was used as a prop in his film “The Way.”Lauren DeCicca for The New York TimesMr. Lynn Lynn’s cast members had never acted before, but some had backgrounds similar to the stories that he wanted to depict. His directorial advice was to read the script and “feel it in your heart,” recalled Aung Lun, one of the actors, who had left his 5-year-old son and wife behind in Myanmar when he fled in 2021.Mr. Aung Lun’s character in “The Way” leaves his baby daughter at a school as soldiers set fire to their village. Years later, his character confesses that secret to his family.During that scene, Mr. Aung Lun cried so hard the crew had to pause the shoot for an hour.As Mr. Lynn Lynn waits to hear whether he and his family can be resettled in the United States, he has more film projects in the works, including a satire set in Myanmar before the coup.Wherever he finds himself, he intends to keep making films.“I want to use a language understood by the entire universe,” he said. ”I want to show that even while we are on the run, our art will continue to live powerfully.” More

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      ‘My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3’ Review: A Noisy Sequel

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      Nia Vardalos is back in a noisy sequel that cedes the punchlines, and the plotlines, to the more cacophonous members of the Portokalos clan.Nia Vardalos seized the movie industry’s attention two decades ago when she wrote and starred in the loosely autobiographical “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” an indie charmer that remains the highest-grossing romantic comedy of all time.Audiences rallied behind her relatable Toula Portokalos, a wallflower Chicago waitress who straightened both her hair and her spine despite the protests of her domineering family. As Toula fought to leave her father’s restaurant, forge her own career and marry her non-Greek boyfriend (John Corbett), many moviegoers saw themselves in her hard-won successes.But so much for empowerment this time around. “It’s a badge of honor to take care of people,” Toula narrates humbly at the top of “My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3.” This is the first film in the franchise that Vardalos not only performs in and writes, but also directs — although, in truth, she’s barely the star.This noisy sequel cedes the punchlines and the plotlines to the more cacophonous members of the Portokalos clan, particularly Andrea Martin’s returning scene-stealer, the busybody Aunt Voula. (“I’m not a gossip, I’m a tattletale,” Voula huffs.) While the ensemble bickers and schemes, or, in the case of Toula’s preening brother Nick (Louis Mandylor), publicly shaves himself at inappropriate times, Toula’s laughs come only at her expense. (Hitting her head, falling off a donkey and so forth.) The script functions like a recipe for its own opening shot of baklava; flattened and bland, Toula exists only to constrain the nuts.The story starts after the passing of Toula’s father, Gus, the patriarch played with grumbling affection by Michael Constantine, who died in 2021. To honor Gus, a grab-bag of family members takes their first-ever trip to Greece to visit his mountainous childhood home, a near-abandoned hamlet near(ish) the beach. Only six people remain in the village, and two of them are secretly dating — the series’s core trope remains a hushed romance.This and dozens of other tiny conflicts ripple through the movie, resolving themselves with a hug or an absent-minded cutaway before any one problem swells into something worth our concern. The oddest disposable gag comes when Toula blurts her sexual attraction to a mustachioed stranger (Alexis Georgoulis). The man immediately reveals himself to be a relative.The ancient Greeks wrote tragedy after tragedy warning against hubris. Yet, Vardalos’s flailing crowd-pleaser needs a shot of self-confidence and logic. Why has Toula, a micromanaging former travel guide, flown her relatives overseas without thinking to book a hotel? Why would we believe that her square daughter (Elena Kampouris) is, with zero evidence, a wild child on the edge of sabotaging her life? And why do some of the rural Greeks speak English with a better accent than Aunt Voula? Nothing adds up.Not that I begrudge Martin a single one of her quips. If Vardalos is no longer comfortable at the center of the franchise, hand the whole thing over to her.My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3Rated PG-13 for a suggestive scene on a nude beach with strategically placed slices of watermelon. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Nun II’ Review: Back in the Habit

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      The latest installment in the “Conjuring” franchise continues a formula of frights with a splash of religious world building.Jump scares abound in “The Nun II,” a sequel to the 2018 film, which was itself a spinoff of the “Conjuring” franchise. It continues the misadventures of Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga) and the demonic force Valak (Bonnie Aarons).This time, the call is coming from inside a house of religious education. While investigating a string of murders across Europe, Sister Irene posits that Maurice (Jonas Bloquet), or Frenchie, as he’s known — her farm boy companion from “The Nun” — may have become possessed by the demon force and, if so, is unknowingly harboring it at the Catholic boarding school in France where he now works. It’s up to Sister Irene and her new companion, a skeptical novitiate named Sister Debra (Storm Reid), to race over and stop the demon before it unleashes its full horrors.The pacing of the film, set in the 1950s and directed by Michael Chaves, is too neat: It runs like haunted clockwork, shoving characters down dark alleyways or abandoned chapels every five minutes with little justification. Scene after scene builds fear and tension, and then a monster appears, and then … not much else, in most cases.Not everything in “The Nun II” is centered on screams. There’s also a good deal of lore involving Saint Lucy, patron saint of the blind, plus a holy relic that might point to Sister Irene’s ancestral origin. Maybe this is the sort of intricate world building that avid watchers of the “Conjuring” movies are deeply invested in. Or maybe — if the gasps and guffaws I heard in my theater are any indication — audiences are mostly there to watch a headmistress being bludgeoned to death by a thurible.The Nun IIRated R for ecclesiastical violence. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Charles Busch, Drag Legend, Tells All in His New Memoir

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      “Leading Lady,” a mosaic of reminiscence and self-analysis, explores the ascent of a man who’s really good at playing women.Charles Busch, the celebrated male actress, Tony-nominated playwright and, most recently, exuberant memoirist, has been thinking that his bed might make a good stage. At his Greenwich Village duplex last month, he noted how the arched entrance to his blindingly white boudoir resembles a proscenium.The room is in the style of 1940s-vintage Dorothy Draper, an interior decorator known for her Modern Baroque sensibility. It is the sort of place, Busch observed, that you could imagine Gene Tierney bedding down as the chic advertising executive (and presumed murder victim) in the glamorous 1944 film noir “Laura.”The show Busch would like to perform here, though, would be a production of Lucille Fletcher’s radio play “Sorry, Wrong Number,” in which a high-strung, bedridden rich woman overhears her own murder being plotted via a crossed telephone connection. The role was memorably played by Barbara Stanwyck in the 1948 film.“I really should do it before I’m too old,” said Busch, who was then a few weeks shy of 69. With brushed-back, graying hair and a mandarin-collared shirt and trousers (drag is for the stage), he resembled a discreetly bohemian college professor.He figured an audience of 12 could be squeezed into the hallway. Busch himself, presumably in a luxe peignoir, would be waiting “in the bed, like Jessica Chastain,” who sat onstage in a wordless prologue in the recent Broadway revival of “A Doll’s House.”In his 2010 show “The Divine Sister,” Busch (here with Amy Rutberg) delivered a twisted tale of the secret lives of nuns.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBusch, too, would be in character from the get-go, “eating chocolates and being neurotic.” He plucked at the air with impatient, fidgeting fingers. Suddenly a doomed, desperate invalid woman seemed to loom before me. I felt dizzy, caught between a shiver and a giggle.I had arrived just 10 minutes earlier chez Busch, whose “Leading Lady: A Memoir of a Most Unusual Boy” comes out on Tuesday. But already much of the essence of this man who plays women had been established: the encyclopedic frame of reference, the conjuring of a sparklingly sophisticated Manhattan, the summoning of a decades-spanning parade of actresses and, above all, the giddy Judy-and-Mickey-style excitement of putting on a show.These elements are much in evidence in “Leading Lady,” a book that brings to mind “Act One” — Moss Hart’s classic account of a sentimental education in the theater — but with a lot more wigs and costume changes, as well as a blithe detour working as a rent boy for nine months. And, of course, a different roster of famous names as supporting players, who here include Liza Minnelli, Carol Channing, Angela Lansbury and Kim Novak.Though the book was 14 years in the making (“I wrote many plays in between, darling”), autobiography would seem to come naturally to a man who says, “While I am living an experience, I am turning it into narrative.” Assembled as a time-scrambling mosaic of reminiscence and self-analysis, “Leading Lady” chronicles the ascent of a motherless boy who discovered that he was really good onstage only when he put on women’s clothes.“When I play a male role, I’m fine,” he said, “but there’s somebody else who could do it better. But as far as being a male actress, I have a pretty healthy ego.”The late-career films of Lana Turner, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis and Susan Hayward inspired Busch’s role as a faded screen diva with murder on her mind in “Die Mommie Die!”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBusch’s crowded résumé includes screenplays (his movie with Carl Andress, “The Sixth Reel,” in which he appears in and out of drag, will be screened in New York this month), national cabaret tours and the authorship of a hit Broadway comedy, “The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife.”But as the memoir’s title suggests, Busch is above all a leading lady. His self-starring plays — inspired by the female-centric melodramas of vintage Hollywood — usually find him elaborately bewigged and begowned, cherry picking gestures and inflections from the likes of Stanwyck, Jean Harlow, Rosalind Russell and Joan Crawford. These traits coalesce into a single, swirlingly allusive portrait, usually of a strong, fabulously dressed woman in jeopardy.John Epperson, Busch’s longtime friend and, as the great Lypsinka, his peer in the downtown cross-dressing pantheon, sees both their work as part of a tradition of live performance that dates to drag antecedents like Charles Ludlam, the founder of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, which presciently blurred the lines between both genres and genders. It was a sensibility taking fresh forms in East Village bars four decades ago like the Pyramid Club and the Limbo Lounge, the birthplace of Busch’s breakout work, “Vampire Lesbians of Sodom.” “As someone once said to me, ‘Observe the absurdities in the culture,’” Epperson said. “I think I was already doing that! And that’s what he does, too, in his own angled way.”Staged Off Broadway with minimal budgets and maximal inventiveness, Busch’s plays have usually been everything their redolent titles promise — “Vampire Lesbians” (which had a five-year Off Broadway run in the mid-1980s), “The Lady in Question,” “Die Mommie Die!,” “The Divine Sister” and, most recently, “The Confession of Lily Dare,” which ran in New York shortly before the pandemic.“The Confession of Lily Dare,” a 2020 show, found Busch evoking Helen Hayes, Ruth Chatterton and other stars of pre-Code mother-love weepies.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt first, they’re just a hoot. Shaped by a mix of sincere affection and amused distance, they echo the experience of watching the films that inspired them. It’s an approach that has allowed Busch to maintain a singular position in the increasingly crowded world of drag, which has become both the stuff of prime-time entertainment (see: “RuPaul’s Drag Race” and its progeny) and a political lightning rod. With its gleeful emphasis on the extravagantly made-over self, drag would seem to be a perfect fun house mirror for a culture ever more obsessed with the illusions — and truths — of self-presentation.At the same time, men dressing as women now routinely evokes fire-breathing outrage from American conservatives. “That’s all just a snare and a delusion,” Busch said of the right-wing attacks on cross-dressing. “It’s like ‘Footloose’ or something,” he added, referring to the 1984 film about a small town that prohibits teenagers from dancing. “It would be funny if it weren’t so dangerous.”For years, Busch bristled at being called a drag queen; in early interviews, he insisted that performing as a woman was purely an artistic choice. It is a stance that now embarrasses him. “If you base your entire creative life around female imagery, it has to come from somewhere profound,” he said.From the moment he first donned drag for a play about Siamese twins he wrote while a student at Northwestern University, he realized that a female persona allowed him a confidence and expressiveness he lacked performing as a man. Today, he is happy to be called a “godmother of drag.” Reached on tour in California, two notable stars from “RuPaul’s Drag Race” confirmed Busch’s claim to that title.BenDeLaCreme said Busch’s performances were “like this distillation of our collective queer conscious.” Jinkx Monsoon, who met Busch for lunch, found him to possess “all the grandeur and sparkle of an opera diva, the self-awareness of a vaudeville clown and the grace of a first lady giving a tour of the White House.” The actor Doug Plaut, who worked with Busch on “The Sixth Reel,” views him as a surrogate mother, as well as “the most fascinating person who has ever lived.”Busch burst onto the New York theater scene in the mid-1980s with the long-running Off Broadway hit “Vampire Lesbians of Sodom.”Bruce Glikas/FilmMagic, via Getty ImagesBusch’s own mother died of a heart attack just down the street from their home in Hartsdale, N.Y., when Busch was 7, and her absence pervades “Leading Lady.” His father, who owned a record store, was affable but inattentive, and Busch’s maternal aunt, Lillian Blum, a smart, arts-loving widow who lived in Manhattan, stepped into the vacuum.She was in essence “both my mother and my father,” he said his therapist pointed out. Busch sees her as the true hero of his book. She died in 1999.Busch was also very close to his sister Margaret, who was three years older. “We were like empaths,” he said. “We were both really good mimics. And she was the most feminine, fragile little thing, but her Jimmy Cagney had as much nuance as my Greer Garson.” She died of heart disease on July 13, and when I visited Busch a few weeks later, he was still raw from the loss.He choked up talking about the comedian Joan Rivers, the most dominant of the mother figures he’s been drawn to throughout his adult life. “After she died, I was kind of sniffing around a bunch of older ladies, thinking I’d find another one,” he said. “But you can’t replace people.”Busch is working on a show about the playwright Henrik Ibsen’s widow, who is “sexually awakened by a sailor.”Justin Kaneps for The New York TimesHe did seem a bit washed-out that day, especially amid the vibrant portraits of him throughout the Chinese-red living room to which we had adjourned. These included Busch à la Dietrich, on a sofa cushion; Busch as Sarah Bernhardt in moody black and white; Busch as a springy human exclamation point per the theater illustrator Al Hirschfeld; and a host of diversely made-up busts Busch created from his own face mask.It felt like the natural setting for someone who habitually shifts among different selves. As we talked, his voice most often brought to mind not his beloved movie goddesses but the aw-shucks wholesomeness of the boy-next-door matinee idol Van Johnson or a young Jimmy Stewart.The women would surface, though, in bursts of ripe annotation — the breathless booming of Bette Davis, the stateliness of Norma Shearer or the “deadpan look that’s slightly mad” that shows up, he said, in every performance by Vivien Leigh, his favorite actress.He’s thinking of at last incorporating the patrician tones of Katharine Hepburn, circa “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” into his next production, “Ibsen’s Ghost: An Irresponsible Biographical Fantasy.” It’s about the epochal dramatist Henrik Ibsen’s widow, who is “sexually awakened by a sailor,” and is scheduled to arrive in New York early next year.“It may be my farewell performance,” he said solemnly. I reminded him that he had said the same thing about “Lily Dare” a few years ago.“Yes, that was going to be my farewell performance,” he agreed, a bit testy. “But I don’t know.” He then landed the requisite one-liner with a dry Eve Arden drawl: “I don’t have enough hobbies.” More

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      Mattel’s Windfall From ‘Barbie’

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      The company’s approach has paid off to a degree that even the C.E.O. could hardly have believed possible.When Ynon Kreiz arrived at Mattel in April 2018, the newly installed chief executive had one mantra when it came to a feature film starring Barbie, a project he really wanted to get off the ground: He didn’t care if the movie sold a single additional doll.But “Barbie” the film had to be good and a cultural event. It had to be different. It had to break molds.And if that meant turning the chief executive of Mattel — i.e., himself — into the object of comic ridicule in the portrayal of the chief executive character in the film (“vain and foolish to the nth degree,” as The Guardian put it), then so be it.That approach has paid off to a degree that even Mr. Kreiz could hardly have believed possible. “Barbie” is close to grossing $1.4 billion and passed one of the “Harry Potter” movies as the top-grossing Warner Bros. film of all time. It could end up near the $2 billion mark. (The record-holder is 2009’s “Avatar,” at $2.9 billion.)How Mattel pulled off a feat that had eluded the company for years was the subject of recent interviews with Mr. Kreiz; Robbie Brenner, Mattel’s executive producer of films; spokespeople for Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig, the film’s star and its writer-director; and others familiar with the doll’s sometimes tortuous path to the big screen.Mattel and Warner have jealously guarded their financial arrangements. But people with knowledge of their agreement said Mattel earned 5 percent of the box office revenue, as well as a percentage of eventual profits as a producer of the movie and additional payments as owner of the Barbie intellectual property rights. At $2 billion in box office revenue, that amounts to $100 million. In addition, there are sales of merchandise connected to the movie as well as an expected boost in sales of dolls.Representatives for Mattel and Warner declined to comment on the financial arrangements, though the company’s chief financial officer said at a conference on Thursday that the company would make about $125 million in total billings from the film.Even though Barbie results weren’t reflected in Mattel’s latest earnings, released July 26, all anyone wanted to talk about at the earnings call was “Barbie.” Mr. Kreiz hailed the film as a “milestone moment” in the company’s strategy to “capture the value of its I.P.” and demonstrate its ability to attract and team up with top creative talent — a cornerstone of its ambitious slate of more toy-themed movies.After the first “Barbie” trailer — showing a hyper-blond, Day-Glo-clad Ms. Robbie and Ryan Gosling skating along Venice Beach — went viral in December, anticipation started building. Mattel stock has been on a tear. It has gained 33 percent, from $16.24 on Dec. 19 to this week’s $21.55. The S&P 500 rose 16 percent over the same period.Wall Street has been reluctant to give much credit to one hit, on the theory that such success is hard to replicate. (“Barbie” has had no discernible impact on Warner Bros. Discovery’s stock price.)But for Mattel, the positive impact of “Barbie” goes far beyond just one film. The company’s yearslong strategy to become a major film producer, using its vast storehouse of toys as intellectual property, had been met in Hollywood with skepticism, if not outright mockery. A-list talent wasn’t lining up to direct a plush purple dinosaur like Barney. But now the perception that Mattel’s leadership is willing to trust and support an unorthodox creative team that delivered both a box office bonanza and a possible awards contender has radically altered that.And Mattel’s surprising willingness to make fun of itself was one of the elements that mostly delighted critics and added to the buzz that roped in many more moviegoers than the “Barbie” fan base.That Mr. Kreiz was willing to laugh at his own caricature came as something as a surprise to some acquaintances and former colleagues. An Israeli military veteran with dual Israeli and British citizenship, a former professional wind surfer, an avid kite surfer and a fitness buff, with more than a passing resemblance to a younger Arnold Schwarzenegger, the 58-year-old Mr. Kreiz comes across as more of a square-jawed G.I. Joe action hero than a Barbie fan with a sense of humor.Mr. Kreiz’s entire career was in media and entertainment, not retail. His longtime mentor, the Power Rangers entrepreneur and billionaire Haim Saban, hired him fresh out of the University of California, Los Angeles, to launch Fox Kids Europe, a joint venture with Fox. He later ran Maker Studios, a YouTube aggregator, which Disney acquired in 2014. Mr. Kreiz left in 2016, and Maker was folded into the Disney Digital Network in 2017.That “Barbie” even got made was no small feat. It had languished at Sony for years, with Mattel routinely renewing the option, as various writers struggled to adapt the doll for the big screen. Although one of the most popular toys ever, Barbie was the subject of intense controversy, seen both as a symbol of female empowerment and as an impossible standard of beauty and femininity. The only feasible approach seemed a parody. The comedian Amy Schumer was once slated for the part. But scripts came and went.Ynon Kreiz, the chief executive of Mattel, and Robbie Brenner, a producer of “Barbie.”Rozette Halvorson for The New York TimesWeeks after becoming chief executive in 2018, Mr. Kreiz refused to renew the Sony option, according to multiple people interviewed for this article. He called Ms. Robbie’s agent and asked for a meeting. Ms. Robbie was among the most sought-after young actresses in Hollywood, fresh from acclaimed performances in diverse roles — as the ill-fated ice skater Tonya Harding in “I, Tonya”; in Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street”; and as a fixture in Warner’s DC Comics universe as Harley Quinn, the Joker’s former girlfriend. And while no human could replicate Barbie’s exaggerated dimensions, Ms. Robbie came reasonably close, while also radiating wholesome beauty.Ms. Robbie was simultaneously reaching out to Mattel and Mr. Kreiz after learning that the “Barbie” option hadn’t been renewed. She was looking for a potential franchise to take to Warner, where her production company, LuckyChap, had a first-look deal. But she wasn’t looking to star in the film herself.Over breakfast at the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel, the plush entertainment and celebrity hangout not far from Mattel’s less glamorous El Segundo headquarters, Mr. Kreiz shared his vision: He didn’t want to make movies in order just to sell toys. He wanted something fresh, unconventional, bold.“Our vision for Barbie was someone with a strong voice, a clear message, with cultural resonance that would make a societal impact,” he said, recalling his message.Mr. Kreiz’s obvious enthusiasm and determination, and his pitch for creative integrity make him hard to resist, as Ms. Brenner, a producer, discovered when he recruited her to run the newly created Mattel film division during another meal at the Polo Lounge. Ms. Brenner, a respected producer and an Academy Award nominee for “Dallas Buyers Club,” was attracted to his idea for the movie. In Mr. Kreiz’s vision, Mattel would be as much a movie company as a toy company. The two bonded after he asked her who should play Barbie, and she, too, volunteered Ms. Robbie.At their first meeting, Ms. Robbie suggested Ms. Gerwig for the director. The two were friends and had talked about working together. Mr. Kreiz loved the idea in part because it was so unexpected — Ms. Gerwig had directed and written acclaimed but offbeat independent films like “Frances Ha,” “Lady Bird” and a new take on the classic “Little Women,” but no big-budget fare.“Lady Bird” was one of Ms. Brenner’s favorite movies. But would Ms. Gerwig consider such a mass-market, commercial proposal?Ms. Gerwig, it turned out, had played with Barbie dolls and loved them. She even had old photos of herself playing with Barbie. Ms. Brenner met with Ms. Gerwig and her partner, Noah Baumbach, also an acclaimed screenwriter and director, at an editing facility in New York. They kicked around a few ideas, but nothing concrete emerged. Anything seemed possible.A deal was struck, and Warner signed on as co-producer. Once Ms. Gerwig was on board, Ms. Robbie agreed to star.At which point Ms. Gerwig and Mr. Baumbach retreated. “I know it’s not conventional and not what you’re used to, but we have to go into a room for a few months. That’s how we work and want to do it,” as Ms. Gerwig put it, Mr. Kreiz recalled.The script for “Barbie” — starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling and directed by Greta Gerwig — “was like going on this crazy ride,” Ms. Brenner said.Warner Bros.When the script did land in Ms. Brenner’s email, it was 147 pages — the length of a Quentin Tarantino film, epic by Hollywood standards. She closed her office door and started reading. “It was like going on this crazy ride,” she recalled. It broke rules, including the so-called fourth wall, addressing the audience directly. It poked fun at Mattel.New to the company, Ms. Brenner didn’t know if this would prove too much for Mattel executives. But she believed it was a great script.Ms. Brenner’s first call was to Mr. Kreiz. “I’ve read a lot of scripts, and this is so different,” she told him. “It’s special. You don’t get this feeling many times in an entire career.”Mr. Kreiz read the script twice, back to back. “It was deep, provoking, unconventional and imaginative,” he said. “It was everything I was hoping it would be.”Ms. Brenner was pleasantly surprised. “Ynon is a very confident person,” she said. “He can laugh at himself.”At one point Mr. Kreiz flew to London, where “Barbie” sets were being built at Warner’s studio outside the city. He and Ms. Gerwig spent a half-hour discussing the perfect shade of pink.Mr. Kreiz and Ms. Brenner knew they had a potential hit. “It was our secret that we couldn’t talk about,” Ms. Brenner recalled.The original budget target of $80 million jumped above $120 million once Ms. Gerwig was signed. But even that wouldn’t realize the director’s full vision for the film. For Warner executives it was a struggle to find what are known as “comps,” similar films that had grossed enough to justify such an outlay.Would “Barbie” be another “Charlie’s Angels” from 2019 — which was budgeted at $55 million but grossed only $73 million and, after marketing costs, lost money? Or another “Wonder Woman” from 2017, budgeted at over $100 million, with a worldwide gross of $822 million?Eventually the budget hit $141 million and, with some reshoots, ultimately topped $150 million.On opening night, July 21, Mr. Kreiz took his 19-year-old daughter to the Regal cinema complex at Union Square in Manhattan. As they neared the theater, droves of moviegoers — and not just young girls — were heading to it in pink outfits. Five screenings were in progress. All were sold out.Mr. Kreiz and his daughter dropped in and out to gauge audience reactions. People laughed, applauded and in a few cases shed tears.Of course the success of “Barbie” has drastically raised the bar — and expectations — for Mattel’s movies in development, starting with “Masters of the Universe,” written and directed by the brothers Adam and Aaron Nee. Twelve more films are in various stages of development, including a “Hot Wheels” produced by J.J. Abrams, also at Warner. Some of these may need to be rethought.And there will no doubt be “Barbie” sequels, perhaps even a James Bond-like franchise, which would be Mr. Kreiz’s ultimate fantasy (although he said it was too soon to discuss any such plans).Mr. Kreiz acknowledged that in a notoriously fickle and unpredictable business, future success is hardly assured. But “Barbie” has given Mattel momentum — the beginning of what he calls “a multiyear franchise management strategy.” More

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      in Television

      Warner Bros. Suspends Deals With Top Show Creators

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      The move, which affected star writers like Mindy Kaling and J.J. Abrams, is an escalation of the standoff between Hollywood studios and the Writers Guild of America.When television and movie writers went on strike in May, studios quickly suspended certain first-look deals — mostly those for lesser-established writers. Star show creators like Mindy Kaling and J.J. Abrams were kept on the payroll. Worried about keeping them happy, even during a walkout, studios left their multimillion-dollar deals alone, shielding them from the pain of the strike.No more.In an escalation of the standoff between studios and the Writers Guild of America — it has entered its fifth month, with no end in sight — Warner Bros. moved late Wednesday to suspend deals with the 1 percent of television writers. That includes Ms. Kaling, a creator of the Max series “The Sex Lives of College Girls,” and Mr. Abrams, whose recent television efforts include “Duster,” a coming thriller set in the 1970s, according to two people briefed on the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private suspension notices.Warner Bros. also suspended deals with Greg Berlanti (“Superman & Lois”) and Bill Lawrence (“Ted Lasso”), among others, the people said.A spokeswoman for Warner Bros. declined to comment. Representatives for the writers either declined to comment or did not return calls. A spokesman for the Writers Guild of America had no immediate response.Top writers have contractual protections that will ultimately enable them to receive all the compensation promised in their original deals. Warner Bros. is doing what is known as “suspend and extend,” according to the people briefed on the matter, meaning that the studio will halt payments for the duration of the strike — and then, when work resumes, extend the contracts by the amount of time they were suspended.The suspension of the A-lister deals suggests that the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of studios, expects the strike to continue into the fall. (A representative for the studio alliance declined to comment.) Studio executives had signaled that Labor Day was an inflection point; the industry’s sitting idle beyond that date would have a severe impact on the 2024 release calendar, particularly for movies.J.J. Abrams’s deal was also suspended. The move can exert more pressure on the striking writers guild.Jerod Harris/Getty ImagesWarner Bros. Discovery said in a securities filing on Tuesday that the Hollywood strikes — tens of thousands of actors joined writers on picket lines in mid-July, the first time both unions have been on strike at the same time since 1960 — would negatively affect its 2023 earnings by up to $500 million.“We are trying to get this resolved in a way that’s really fair and everyone feels fairly treated,” David Zaslav, the chief executive of Warner Bros. Discovery, said at a Goldman Sachs event on Wednesday. “Having said that, in our guidance, we said that this would be resolved by September. And here we are in September. This is really a very unusual event — the last time it happened was 1960.”Suspending the deals of prominent writers is one way for the studios to try to put pressure on the Writers Guild. During the last writers’ strike, in 2007, a small group of showrunners agitated for union leadership to settle with the studios as the stalemate wore on. That strike lasted 100 days; the current strike is now at the 128-day mark.Studio officials and Writers Guild negotiators have not met formally since Aug. 23, when talks broke off for the second time and the companies publicly released their latest offer in an appeal to rank-and-file members. Studios were hoping the offer would look good enough for members to pressure their leaders to make a deal.But the move seemed to have the opposite effect, instilling the 11,500-member Writers Guild with renewed resolve to keep fighting. “The companies’ counteroffer is neither nothing, nor nearly enough,” guild leaders said in a note to members on Aug. 24. “We will continue to advocate for proposals that fully address our issues rather than accept half measures.”The studios defended their proposal as offering the highest wage increase to writers in more than three decades. The studios also said that they had offered “landmark protections” against artificial intelligence, and that they vowed to offer some degree of streaming viewership data to the guild, information that had previously been held under lock and key.Both the writers and the actors have called this moment “existential,” arguing that the streaming era has deteriorated their working conditions as well as their compensation levels.Nicole Sperling More

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      in Movies

      At Venice Film Festival, Trapped Women and Controlling Men

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      This year’s lineup includes films from Sofia Coppola, Yorgos Lanthimos and Bradley Cooper in which female characters squirm under the thumbs of egocentric men.The press room at the Venice Film Festival has to be the most beautiful film festival press room in the world. Taking over the third floor of the imposing Palazzo del Casinò, the main atrium is a gargantuan, triple-height space carpeted in soft cream, with columns clad in marble extending up past Murano glass chandeliers, and floor-to-ceiling windows hung with gold-sheened drapes giving way to a sparkling blue sea. On a clear day — which it almost always is — you imagine that, were it not for the curvature of the earth, you could see forever. Or at least to Croatia.It is an eternal contradiction that this lofty space should be peopled with dozens of perspiring journalists hunched over their laptops, hammering away at their keyboards like birds beating their wings against the bars of a particularly gilded cage. Or maybe such dark thoughts in a such a light-filled structure — designed by the architect Eugenio Miozzi in 1938 to embody the monumentalist fantasy of Mussolini’s fascist regime — are a symptom of a festival lineup that, this year, features a profusion of stories about women similarly chafing against the restrictive, but often luxurious, enclosures built by controlling men.Some of these men were towering real-life figures. Penélope Cruz turns in the standout performance in Michael Mann’s “Ferrari” as the long-suffering wife of the Italian motoring magnate (Adam Driver), and Carey Mulligan does much the same as Leonard Bernstein’s wife Felicia in “Maestro,” directed by and starring Bradley Cooper. In both these cases — and arguably to the detriment of both well-made but strangely evanescent films — the portrayal of genius pales in comparison to the portrait of a woman who supported and nurtured that genius, even when it threatened to engulf her. in “Ferrari,” Penélope Cruz plays Laura Ferrari, the wife of the Italian car mogul Enzo Ferrari.Lorenzo SistiOf two memorable scenes in “Maestro,” only one — Bernstein’s performance of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony at Ely Cathedral in 1973 — is about his music. The other is a lacerating domestic argument in the couple’s bedroom, during which, in every shaking nerve, Mulligan embodies the resentment of a bright, ambitious woman whose devotion to and indulgence of her famous spouse has cost her so much of herself.The life-draining capacity of egocentric men is even more strikingly literalized in Pablo Larraín’s mordant, monochrome “El Conde,” in which the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet (Jaime Vadell) is recreated as a 250-year-old vampire. In Larraín’s scabrous, grisly alternate history, Pinochet is a decrepit immortal, drowning in self-pity since faking his death to evade justice. And Pinochet’s wife Lucía (Gloria Münchmeyer) is imagined as his equal, or even his better, in sheer perversity; much of the misery the terrorized nation experienced under the dictator is suggested to have been at her behest.But although that gives Lucía, who constantly petitions her husband to bite her so that she too can live out her depravities forever, a degree of apparent agency, that is robbed from her in one brief scene where “The Count,” as he likes to be called, casually trades her off to his obsequious Renfield-style butler (Alfredo Castro). The Count is then free to pursue an affair with a nun, including fantasy play that involves her dressing up as Marie Antoinette. (The Count has been obsessed with the ill-fated Queen of France ever since, in one of the film’s most provocatively gruesome early scenes, he licked the guillotine blade that severed her slender neck.)Marie Antoinette is perhaps the ultimate emblem of decorative married womanhood. And of course, she was the title star of a previous film from Sofia Coppola, whose Venice-competing “Priscilla” is yet another tale of a woman’s tentatively self-engineered escape from the influence of a dominant man.Jacob Elordi and Cailee Spaeny as Elvis and Priscilla Presley in “Priscilla.”Philippe Le SourdBased on, and clearly in deep sympathy with, Priscilla Presley’s memoir “Elvis and Me,” the film follows the famous couple’s relationship, from their first meeting when then-Priscilla Beaulieu (Cailee Spaeny) was just 14 years old and living on a U.S. Army base in Germany, to the moment, almost a decade-and-a-half later, when Priscilla Presley drove through the gates of Graceland for the last time as the house’s mistress.This is unmistakably a Sofia Coppola movie, in its luxuriant feel for fabrics and facades, but as in “Marie Antoinette,” here the surfaces become the substance. It is a story about how, especially to a naïve teenager, the trappings of an outwardly tantalizing lifestyle can be sprung upon you like a trap.During their first tearful goodbye in Germany, Elvis (Jacob Elordi) makes the schoolgirl Priscilla promise to “stay exactly the way you are.” But the banner film investigating the icky desire on the part of some men to keep their womenfolk infantilized is Yorgos Lanthimos’ joyously macabre “Poor Things.” The biggest hit of Venice so far, it is deeply — if twistedly, and often hilariously — concerned with the idea of female emancipation, as Bella, played by a riveting, inventive and highly physical Emma Stone, shucks off the psychological bondage first of her adoptive father (Willem Dafoe) and then of her caddish, pompous lover (Mark Ruffalo).Even the film’s hyperreal aesthetic, in which Lisbon and London are depicted by intricate, steampunky set-builds with lurid computer generated skies and seas, reinforce the concept: The film’s self-consciously airless and artificial universe makes the vigor of Bella’s adventures in sex and self-discovery all the more striking.In “Poor Things,” Emma Stone plays Bella, a woman trying to unburden herself from both her adoptive father and her vain lover.Yorgos Lanthimos/Searchlight PicturesThere are still more women trapped under the thumbs of domineering men dotted throughout the lineup, most notably in two black comedies that both feature contract killers (another feature of Venice 2023, if you also take David Fincher’s “The Killer,” Harmony Korine’s “Aggro Dr1ft” and the Liam Neeson thriller “In the Land of Saints and Sinners” into further account).Richard Linklater’s “Hit Man” stars and is co-written by Glen Powell, who deserves to leap up to major-league stardom on the back of this effervescently amoral exaggeration of a real-life story: Gary, a diffident English professor who moonlights as a fake hit man, finds love getting in the way of his mission when an abused wife, Madison (Adria Arjona), tries to enlist his services. She is driven to it as a means to escape. But the murder-solicitation in Woody Allen’s French-language “Coup de Chance,” is far less morally defensible, prompted by jealousy and again, a loss of control, as the possessive rich-guy Jean (Melvil Poupaud), discovers that his young, vivacious wife (Lou De Laâge) has taken a lover.“Coup de Chance” is, in some respects a return to form for Allen, even if one suspects that some of its breeziness is down to the attractive cast compensating for the staleness of Allen’s recent English-language quippery by mercifully speaking in French. (Native French speakers of my acquaintance tell me that the dialogue, to their ears, sounds similarly unnatural.)But it does feel more current than most of Allen’s recent output, not least in how it syncs up neatly with this Venice edition’s chief preoccupations: hit men and trapped women, and all the poor things who find themselves in plush Central Park or central Paris apartments, in press room palaces or fantastical Lisbon hotels, surrounded by luxury, but longing to be free. More