BAMcinématek presents Adjani, a 12-film retrospective of French icon and fierce leading lady Isabelle Adjani, Mar 8—21 New DCP restorations of André Téchiné’s The Brontë Sisters and the director’s cut of Elaine May’s Ishtar, plus a newly restored 35mm print of Walter Hill’s The Driver Presented in partnership with uniFrance Films and French Cultural Services The Wall Street Journal is the title sponsor of BAM Rose Cinemas and BAMcinématek. Brooklyn, NY/Feb 8, 2013—From Thursday, March 8, through Thursday, March 21, BAMcinématek presents Adjani, a 12-film retrospective of “the French Garbo,” including underseen rarities as well as the actress’ best-known work, several shown in new 35mm prints and DCP restorations. Isabelle Adjani’s fierce, powerful screen presence and raven-haired beauty have made her an icon of French cinema. Bursting onto the international scene in Truffaut’s The Story of Adele H., she has gone on to win a record five Césars, work with such auteurs as Werner Herzog, Roman Polanski, Walter Hill, and Andrzej Zulawski, and become an outspoken champion of immigrant rights. In her best roles, Adjani projects a smoldering intensity that is at once alluring and excitingly unpredictable. “I am what they call a pretty intense actress,” Adjani, a specialist in tragic heroines and madwomen, has admitted. She became a star in France in the comedy The Slap (1974) and around the world a year later when François Truffaut, mesmerized by that performance, cast Adjani as the lovesick daughter of Victor Hugo in The Story of Adele H. (1975—Screening Sunday, March 10). In this “musical, lilting film with a tidal pull to it” (Pauline Kael), Truffaut scrupulously recreates the everyday details of transit, entertainment, and communication in Hugo’s era. Against that backdrop of mundane reality Adjani etches one of the cinema’s most ardent studies of frustrated passion, a real-life stalker avant la lettre who followed a disinterested lover around the world. Adele H. earned Adjani Best Actress awards from the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics, as well as an Academy Award nomination, commencing a career as one of the most decorated actresses in film history; she went on to earn citations from the Cannes and Berlin Film Festivals, a second Oscar nod, and a record-breaking five César Awards. Though she was something of an outsider in France—the child of a German mother and an Algerian garage worker who grew up in a working-class Paris suburb—the rest of the world greeted Adjani, with her pouty lips and rounded vowels, as the emblematic jeune fille. Journalists often compared her to Bardot (for her sensuality) and Garbo (for her mystery). “Indignant, amused, aloof, proud, possessed—the most cherishable actress alive,” rhapsodized James Wolcott. Adjani was shrewd about her career, choosing projects less for the quality of the role than for the director at the helm. Roman Polanski was a must for Adjani. He cast her as the kooky girlfriend in The Tenant (1976—Mar 17), the claustrophobic, Kafkaesque cult favorite in which a nobody (played by Polanski himself) purloins an apartment following its occupant’s suicide and begins to take on the dead girl’s identity. For Werner Herzog, Adjani played Lucy in Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979—Mar 16), a remake of the canonical silent that, much like Adele H., emphasized the grimy minutiae of 19th-century life as much as its supernatural horrors: those hordes of plague-bearing rats induce as many squirms as the bloodsucking freak (Klaus Kinski). Polish master Andrzej Zulawski pursued Adjani for years before she agreed to star in his masterpiece, Possession (1981—Mar 15), as the terrorized wife in a bitter divorce drama that morphs into a Freudian science fiction opus (complete with a Carlo Rambaldi monster!). Adjani’s infamous five-minute food-flinging freak-out became the centerpiece of one of the cinema’s most uninhibited performances, winning her a Best Actress Award at Cannes and her first César. Adjani also had a good eye for recognizing promising new directors, notably the young André Téchiné, for whom she starred in Barocco (1976) and The Brontë Sisters (1979—Mar 8; new DCP restoration). Hauntingly atmospheric and almost Bressonian in its restraint, Téchiné’s literary biography assembles an all-star cast as the repressed (and oppressed) soeurs: Marie-France Pisier, Isabelle Huppert, and Adjani, who plays defiant tomboy Emily, wearing pants and roaming the windy moors with her brother (her Queen Margot costar Pascal Greggory) and her blind father (A Clockwork Orange’s Patrick Magee) en route to writing Wuthering Heights. By the mid-80s, Adjani had become France’s biggest box office draw, starring in popular hits like Jean- Paul Rappeneau’s All Fired Up (1982—Mar 20), Jean Becker’s One Deadly Summer (1983—Mar 14), and Luc Besson’s Subway (1985—Mar 9). Rappeneau’s family comedy, which starred Yves Montand as uptight Adjani’s long-lost père, did not receive a commercial release abroad, and makes a rare appearance in this series. Becker’s steamy, sunlit noir about a seductress who blows into a provincial town on a mission of revenge, scandalized French audiences for its extended full-frontal scenes featuring Adjani, known until then as a “good girl.” Clothed again, and in the highest of fashion, Adjani decorated Besson’s Subway as a gangster’s wife who falls for peroxided, tuxedo-clad pickpocket Christopher Lambert in this key entry in the short-lived ultra-pop cinéma du look movement. A tabloid fixture in her native country, Adjani endured a series of scandals, including the revelation of her North African heritage (initially, she had lied, claiming her father was Turkish) as she spoke out against racism, and a bizarre rumor that she was dying of AIDS. Undaunted, Adjani used her bankability to get a passion project off the ground, handpicking Bruno Nuytten (the cinematographer on The Brontë Sisters and the father of her first child) to direct Camille Claudel (1988—Mar 13), a biopic about a promising sculptress who becomes ruinously obsessed with her teacher and lover Rodin (Gérard Depardieu). “Her most overwhelming and characteristic performance, as a woman in love with art, exhilaration, and danger” (David Thomson). Best known in the US for her romances with Warren Beatty and Daniel Day Lewis, Adjani flirted with a Hollywood career that was never wholly consummated. Dropping out of Sydney Pollack’s Bobby Deerfield, and turning down Fatal Attraction and Dick Tracy, Adjani—fluent in English via a crash course of Happy Days reruns—made her US debut in The Driver (1978—Mar 9; in a newly restored 35mm print) as a professional gambler drawn to Ryan O’Neal’s inscrutable wheel-man. Walter Hill’s lean, moody criminal-versus-cop chase—“perhaps the most abstract movie ever made in Hollywood” (Michael Sragow)—was a blueprint for the recent hit thriller Drive. Adjani’s second American film, shot on location in Morocco, was Elaine May’s Ishtar (1987—Mar 20), a political satire that cast megastars Beatty and Dustin Hoffman as nitwit lounge singers caught up in a CIA plot to overthrow a Middle Eastern government. A humungous flop upon its initial release and an enduring punchline for late-night comedians, Ishtar has over time become a cause célèbre, having been championed by prominent film critics including J. Hoberman (“extremely droll… worthy of Samuel Beckett”), Jonathan Rosenbaum (“very prescient… a surprisingly sweet-tempered farce”), and Richard Brody (“among the most original, audacious, and inventive movies… of modern times”). BAMcinématek presents a new DCP restoration of the director’s cut. At the height of her stardom, Adjani went into semi-retirement, interrupting a nearly 15-year absence from the screen in the mid-90s to make three films, among them Patrice Chéreau’s Queen Margot (1994— Mar 21), an energetic bodice ripper that compiles more sex and blood than all of her earlier period pieces combined. As Marguerite de Valois, the radiant Adjani was nearly 40 but somehow passed for half that. “Filmographies are like necrologies,” she wrote in the film’s Cannes program. “I do not like dates. The present is always the start.” For press information, please contact Gabriele Caroti at 718.724.8024 / [email protected] Lisa Thomas at 718.724.8023 / [email protected] Adjani Film Schedule Fri, Mar 8 2, 4:30, 7, 9:30pm: The Brontë Sisters Sat, Mar 9 2, 7pm: The Driver 4:30, 9:30pm: Subway Sun, Mar 10 2, 4:30, 7, 9:30pm: The Story of Adele H. Wed, Mar 13 4:30, 7:45pm: Camille Claudel Thu, Mar 14 4:30, 7:30pm: One Deadly Summer Fri, Mar 15 1:30, 4, 6:45, 9:30pm: Possession Sat, Mar 16 7, 9:30pm: Nosferatu the Vampyre Sun, Mar 17 1:30, 4, 6:45, 9:30pm: The Tenant Wed, Mar 20 4:30, 9:30pm: All Fired Up 7pm: Ishtar Thu, Mar 21 7pm: Queen Margot Film Descriptions All Fired Up (1982) 108min Directed by Jean-Paul Rappeneau. With Yves Montand. Adjani’s comedic chops get a rare showcase in this farcical thriller about a young woman whose long- absent father (French acting legend Yves Montand) reappears suddenly to scrounge money for… well, what does he need that money for, really? Soon enough, father and daughter are fending off mobsters in scenic Swiss locales, culminating in an alpine chase. 35mm. Wed, Mar 20 at 4:30, 9:30pm The Brontë Sisters (1979) 120min New DCP restoration! Directed by André Téchiné. With Isabelle Huppert, Marie-France Pisier. Emily (Adjani), Charlotte (Pisier), and Anne (Huppert) eke out a drab existence in Victorian England while caring for their troubled, opium-addicted brother.