Screen Picks

Le Grand Rôle (Sat., Nov. 13, 8 p.m., Sun., Nov. 14, 2 p.m., Mon., Nov. 15, 7 p.m., $10-$18, Gershman Y, Broad and Pine sts., 215-545-4400) The Jewish Film Festival, whose co-founder Archie Perlmutter passed away Sunday morning, begins its 24th year with this comedy about a director trying to mount a Yiddish-language version of The Merchant of Venice. Perlmutter, who contributed many articles to the City Paper with his wife, Ruth, was a fixture of the Philadelphia film scene and an invaluable patron of the arts. Contributions may be made to the JFF in his name.

Directors in Focus: John Cassavetes (through Sun., Nov. 14, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6542); John Cassavetes: Five Films ($124.95 DVD) Mentioned in more award speeches than Harvey Weinstein, John Cassavetes is the patron saint of independent film, although if he hadn't died in 1989, he might have had a few less-than-complimentary words for the movies made in his name. Self-financed, self-determining and ultimately self-destructive, Cassavetes took the money he made as a Hollywood actor and sunk it into movies that seemed to rebuke everything Hollywood stood for (though the truth is a bit more complicated).

As much for his production style as for the films it produced, Cassavetes, the subject of a six-film International House retrospective and the Criterion Collection's most lavish box set ever, has become an object of intense, even cultish, devotion, from acolytes who are as ardent as they are unhelpful. Ray Carney, whose writing on the director could fill a small house, repeatedly denigrates Orson Welles as a way to shore up Cassavetes' purportedly anti-theatrical style, alienating anyone who thinks Citizen Kane is more than "fake art," while in The New York Times, Manohla Dargis argued that Cassavetes' detractors were merely irked because he "dared to call himself an artist." It's enough to make anyone give up before they start.

Luckily, the I-House retrospective and Five Films, the Criterion box, provide ample opportunities to find your own point of entry. (I hasten to add that the latter should not substitute for the former, especially since two of the retrospective's highlights, Husbands and Love Streams, are not available on DVD.) Aficionados invariably steer new fish toward 1968's Faces (not part of the retrospective), which unleashed Cassavetes' pent-up frustration after a dead-end detour into studio movies. It's a great place to start, as long as you never want to watch another Cassavetes film. Sardonically announcing itself as "La Dolce Vita of the commercial field," the film's borderline-hysterical performances make for tough going between undeniable moments of brilliance. Any movie which has ever used jittery camerawork, low light and miserable characters as shorthand for authenticity owes Faces a profound debt, but that's not exactly a compliment.

Perhaps what makes Faces so unsatisfying in terms of Cassavetes' body of work is that it's the rare one of his movies where the director is nowhere to be found. Though Cassavetes rarely gave himself more than a supporting role, he's everywhere in his own movies. He's Ben Gazzara's strip-joint owner in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, struggling to stage shows while creditors close in around him. He's Seymour Cassell's romantic obsessive in Minnie and Moskowitz, leaping class barriers and common sense to woo the museum curator played by Gena Rowlands, Cassavetes' wife and frequent leading lady. But most often, Rowlands was Cassavetes' doppelganger, as well as his muse, his salvation and his most virtuosic instrument. Even in his semi-swan song Love Streams, Cassavetes never got closer to autobiography than in Opening Night, in which Rowlands plays an alcoholic theater actress whose path to enlightenment is a downward spiral. Stuck in a part she doesn't believe in, Rowlands' character decides that in order to find the truth of the play, she must destroy it.

Cassavetes' reputation as an actor's director is well-deserved. His movies luxuriate, often to a fault, in the minutiae of performance; he made stars of Ben Gazzara and Peter Falk and unleashed the wild likes of Timothy Carey and Val Avery, who could put their stamp on an entire movie in a matter of minutes. But if time has shown the performances in Cassavetes' movies to be far more expressionistic than naturalistic, his unpredictable camera movements, often guided by his own hand, are as remarkable for their nuance as their more easily imitated energy. What's more, he was a visionary of rhythmic editing; sometimes the most important part of a scene is where it stops.

Thursday through Sunday, I-House runs four of Cassavetes' best in chronological order: Husbands (1970), A Woman Under the Influence (1974), The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (the longer 1976 version) and Love Streams, with a Saturday afternoon screening of the 3 1/2-hour documentary A Constant Forge for those who just can't get enough. Over the course of four nights (five if you saw Shadows on Wednesday), the evolution of Cassavetes' style is clear, even dramatic, which will be news to those who don't think he has one. The Criterion box, with its hours of supplements, permits more considered reflection, but with Cassavetes, immersion is the way to go. Throw yourself in, and figure out what it means later on.

Suspicious River/Singapore Sling (Fri., Nov 12, 8 p.m., free, the Rotunda, 4014 Walnut St.) Twentysomething terrible Andrew Repasky McElhinney may be in the thick of adapting Noel Coward, but his latest Video Vault twofer is a lot closer to the quasi-porn confrontation of Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye. Molly Parker, who first attracted attention in Lynne Stopkewich's necrophiliac Kissed, reunites with Stopkewich for Suspicious River, in which she's a motel clerk giving herself away to a series of seedy customers. Things go wrong, both for her and the movie, when a mysterious child intrudes into the plot. Still, Parker is always worth watching, although it's hard to square her predilection for playing sexual compulsives with her placid, milky affect. The actors in Nikos Nikolaidis' Singapore Sling don't have any such qualms, which is lucky since it's hard to play cannibalistic, sadistic, quasi-lesbian sisters with any measure of restraint. An unclassifiable blend of noir, exploitation and psychotronic horror, it's The Night of the Hunter as reimagined by Jack Smith.

Rules of the Road/The Odds of Recovery (Tue., Nov. 16, International House, 7 p.m., free) Tarnation fans should flock to this double-bill of films by Su Friedrich, who introduces the program. Rules tackles the end of a lesbian relationship with deadpan wit, using the station wagon she and her partner once owned as a metaphor for enduring heartbreak; you'll never look at a tan Country Squire the same way again. Odds chronicles Friedrich's long-running health problems, pitting clinical voice-overs against exam-room footage and video confessionals. Innumerable operations, tai chi classes and self-help books later, Friedrich emerges as truly healthy for the first time in her life. Reflective without navel-gazing, she's the model for a generation of personal storytellers.

Miscellaneous Pick: New music ensemble Relâche stages another of its popular shows at the Prince Music Theater, this time accompanying early silent animation by Max Fleischer and Otto Messmer (Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m., Sun., 3 p.m., $20).

(sam@citypaper.net)

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