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Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Miserabilisme doesn’t get much more miserable than in Brazilian director Marianna Brennand’s Manas. Set among the wretchedly poor population that lives along the Amazon River, the film is not a call to action to save the forests from the predations of white Brazilians. Executive produced by, among others, Oscar winner Walter Salles and the Belgian Dardenne brothers, it eschews the warmth and humanism of the films of Salles. In all regards it bears the earmarks of the Dardennes, whose films almost invariably feature the lowest strata of society struggling to survive financially and morally. The social problem Manas deals with is incest, which seems to be rampant in this part of the world. The filmmaker João Moreira Salles—co-founder, with his brother Walter, of the production company Videofilmes—told me that “It’s very hard to do what Marianna achieved: a film about sexual abuse in which you don’t see anything but know exactly what’s happening. She was able to turn something ethically unfilmable into the core of her film. It’s a woman’s movie, a woman’s sensibility, a woman’s gaze into something we men are still unable to deal with visually.”

Thirteen-year-old Tielle is the heart and soul of the film. She lives with her parents, two brothers, and a sister. She misses her older sister Claudia, who has left their miserable riverside hut and the grinding poverty for some city somewhere. The family, despite its difficult situation, seems to be a happy one. Tielle has an artistic bent, attends school, and goes to her evangelical church where she performs in a youth dance company. The hammock on which she sleeps is broken, so she must share a bed with her father, replacing her pregnant mother on the mattress. The suspicions raised by this are confirmed on a hunting trip she takes with her father.

Manas from that point on is a pointed exposé of incest, a problem so widespread that it is spoken about directly and indirectly everywhere in the village, even in church. It’s simply something that is, something the victims are told to accept. The problem is eternal and omnipresent, passing from mother to daughter, from sister to sister. Beyond that, the desperate poverty makes the possibility of sex for pay with passing bargemen a constant opportunity, even for girls like Tielle who are little more than children.

The horrors of this life are made all the more vivid by Brennand’s choice to shoot the film entirely with a handheld camera, which lends it all a documentary feel; in fact, the film was originally planned to be a documentary. So awful is the world in which Tielle and her peers move that an authority figure like the police social worker is presented as a caring, wise woman who truly wants to help Tielle escape her vanished sister’s fate. But in fact there is no hope, no escape save one, and Tielle takes it when she suspects that her father has designs on her little sister.

Manas is a chilling portrait of an isolated society that offers no opportunities besides ever deeper degradation. The cost of Tielle’s ultimate escape is unimaginable.

A. Gopalan (senior editor): The Devil Wears Prada has been my guilty pleasure since college. In low moments, when exhausted from the drudgery of work, or just on bad hair days, I could turn the movie on and be assured of a couple of hours of garden-variety escapism—makeovers! parties! Paris!—that nevertheless came with a sharp commentary on how work won’t love you back. Did I have to sit through triggering comments on weight and body size, the ceaseless objectification of women, and badly aging jokes? Yes, yes I did. But these off-color bits seemed part of the movie’s skewering of the fashion industry, so I was okay to put up with them, content in the knowledge that even if the movie wasn’t great, it was still great fun.

The Devil Wears Prada 2, out this month after a 20-year interval, takes an opposite approach. It is certainly fan service (it offers an almost frame-by-frame, outfit-by-outfit homage to the original), but it also takes itself seriously. No longer are the filmmakers content to expose the tyranny of one fashion industry “devil” and her minions; they are going after the whole structure—sweatshop-contracting firms, clicks-obsessed conglomerate owners, McKinsey consultants, AI-pilled billionaires, and various other magazine-destroyers. I was happy, of course, to watch the red sun rising over the media industry, and watching Anne Hathaway cry her Oscar-winning tears about private equity stripping everything for parts was more cathartic than I would have expected.

But still, there is something stilted about this sequel. Maybe it is the much looser writing and the strangely jarring cuts—a few more rounds of editing would have helped—or maybe it’s just that the movie is trying so hard to Say Something Big. The late-capitalist disasters facing Andy Sachs (Hathaway) and her colleagues at Runway are realistic, and their efforts to try and save their jobs equally so, but their emotional journeys are not. Some of this is because the characters’ rough edges have all been rounded out: Andy is no longer desperately needy, Emily Charlton (Emily Blunt) isn’t an anorexic mean girl, and worst of all, Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) isn’t diabolical. You’re a beast who is chained, one odious Harvard MBA tells Miranda at one point. You need to be unleashed. I was sad to agree with him. I wanted a Miranda who ranted and raved as she lost her empire. I wanted her lashing out at everyone around her, instead of being policed out of her rude zingers by a head-shaking PA, or having to—gasp—quietly put her own coat away because HR said so. I wanted her, in short, to feel as unhinged and almost dangerous as she did the first time around, so that by the time the movie lets us get closer to that enigmatic, damaged character, it feels meaningful—armor cracking open, only to reveal more complex rot within.

Perhaps it is wrong to expect a sequel to employ the same formula that its predecessor used to such great effect. Perhaps it’s good that mainstream movies are getting better, the characters less offensive, the themes more serious. But I had more fun when our screen devils were more-or-less irredeemable, the bad workplaces unendurable, and the conclusions something other than what Miranda and Andy agree on at the end: God, I love working, don’t you?

Alisa Solomon (Contributing Writer): If you’re in New York—and have a couple hundred bucks to spare—you still have a chance to catch Wally Shawn performing his astonishing 1990 play, The Fever. There are two more performances, the last on May 24th at the Greenwich House Theater in Manhattan.

If you know Shawn as a Jewish Voice for Peace comrade or fellow canvasser for Zohran Mamdani, the radical challenge of this play will not surprise you. (If you know him only as the nerds and ne’er-do-wells he plays in works like The Princess Bride or Young Sheldon, you’ll simply recognize his elfin charm and the reedy, rising timbre of his voice.)

Sitting in a chair, wearing street clothes, Shawn’s character—an unnamed traveler to an unnamed “poor country where my language is not spoken” and where a revolution is underway—delivers a mesmerizing two-hour monologue in which he recounts how he has undergone a crisis of class consciousness. The text winds among past recollections of the speaker’s cushy life at home and earlier trips to poor countries, his delirious hallucinations, and his present circumstances: sitting on the bathroom floor of his hotel room puking his guts out. His nausea is Sartrean—as existential as it is visceral—but his sickening realization isn’t that life itself lacks predetermined purpose, but that one’s place in the social order one is born into is as random as it is unshakeable.

The piece lives entirely in its incredibly vivid language. We are there with the narrator on the cold tile floor watching a water bug slither into a crack; we recoil with the kick “a tall revolutionary guard in an undershirt” delivers to his head in a scene he imagines; we feel the lustrous chill of a cold urban night on which “it seems that at a certain moment every car and face and pane of glass is suddenly covered in a delicious wetness, like the wetness you see on a frozen cherry”—a beauty, he says, “that is the sort of thing that the communists will never understand, just as human decency is the sort of thing that I will never understand.”

What he has come to understand is the inextricable link between the privileged and the poor: “if food is produced for the hungry children, then certain operas will not be performed; if certain performances are in fact given, then the food won’t be produced, and the children will die.” But it’s not this recognition that is the crux of the play; Shawn isn’t rubbing anyone’s face in the extractive and exploitative practices that produce their comfort. Rather, we see how, despite this knowledge, the speaker justifies his wealth and advantages. The play invites us into that seemingly irreconcilable struggle—to feel our own sweats and chills as we examine our culpability and contemplate how to break open a seemingly closed system.

Some 35 years ago, Shawn originally performed The Fever in private homes for well-to-do audiences before expanding its reach by presenting it in theaters. His idea was to speak directly, without artifice, to people of his own comfy class. The airline-like dynamic pricing that has pushed ticket costs to $229 as demand rises for these last performances, may deliver that audience, but the piece addresses anyone who hears echoes of the character’s self-justification in the brazen boasting of our country’s current leadership, for whom the immiseration of others for personal gain is not a problem, but a triumph.

Shawn has been playing The Fever in the same space where his exquisite new play, What We Did Before Our Moth Days—an exploration of human decency from a more personal angle, also highly recommended—has been running. It closes after a matinee performance, also on May 24th, and as of this writing, there are still some $65 seats. (More on this play coming to Jewish Currents soon.) To round out this spring’s marvelous Wally Shawn moment, you can catch him in some of his more serious film roles in a series at the Metrograph.  Don’t miss his brilliant performances in two modern masterpieces—Vanya on 42nd Street and A Master Builder.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Some book recommendations…

Top of the list is Arnoud Visser’s expansive history of the hatred of intellectuals, On Pedantry. As he writes, “A longue durée perspective has revealed that intellect and irritation have never been far apart.” Visser provides this perspective, taking us through ancient Greece, Rome, the Patristic Period of Christianity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, Enlightenment Europe, and that most benighted of lands, America. Visser looks at more than the pedantry of grammar sticklers, who are easy targets. He looks at the image and presentation of philosophers and intellectuals throughout the ages, and how they’ve been mocked for their appearance (disheveled, bearded, homely), for having poor manners, for being disruptive, for being all head and no heart, and just for being generally unpleasant. Intellectuals have been attacked by other intellectuals for their pedantry, but that has been a self-contained internecine fight of little wide consequence. More alarming are the attacks from without, which have fed the most reactionary movements, both religious and secular, over the centuries. Visser writes of the ways Socrates has been viewed, but also of Jerry Lewis in The Nutty Professor. There is nothing pedantic about On Pedantry. It’s a demonstration that ideas can be exciting, as can intellectual history.

Leslier Fiedler’s classic volume of literary criticism, Love and Death in the American Novel, originally published in 1960 and newly reissued by NYRB Classics (of course), is an indictment of the classic American novel’s failure to properly come to grips with adult subjects, i.e., with relationships between men and women. Roaming widely, examining the course of the novel as a form from 18th century England to mid-20th century America, Fiedler conclusively demonstrates that all of American literature derives from works like Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle, which “presides over the birth of the American imagination.” Since Irving’s creation of the upstate Dutchman, the typical male protagonist of our fiction has been “a man on the run into the forest and out to the sea, down the river or into combat—anywhere to avoid ‘civilization’ which is to say, the confrontation of man and woman.” For Fiedler, the ultimate and exemplary love story of classical American fiction is that of Huck and Jim. A stunning book that is still pertinent and that illuminates extra-literary corners of American life and thought.

Daniel Okrent’s biography Stephen Sondheim: Art Isn’t Easy, a new addition to the great Yale Jewish Lives series, presents us with yet another genius whose work is among the most remarkable in the field of American popular music and about whom no reader can come away saying, “It would have been great to know him.” Sondheim was moody, touchy, rancorous, mean-spirited, slovenly, and often malodorous. Those of us who had the good fortune not to know him up close can revel in Okrent’s insightful, critical, yet fair evaluation of Sondheim’s shows and their impact on theater and musical life in general. This is a Jewish life, yet Okrent points out that only three Jewish characters appear in Sondheim-authored shows. But despite having no real contact with Jewish life, Sondheim’s personal language was filled with yiddishisms. Not having known him, never having confronted his unexpected and unjustifiable rages, we can all sit back and enjoy the music and lyrics of the author of Sunday in the Park With George, Pacific Overtures, Company, and Into the Woods, and in particular of the songs “Someone in a Tree,” “A Derby Hat” (both from Pacific Overtures, the former Sondheim’s personal favorite among the songs he wrote), and “Being Alive” as sung by Larry Kert. Okrent gives readers all the essential information they need to appreciate his subject’s accomplishments.

Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): When I was young, I read and reread anthologies of jokes, especially Isaac Asimov’s Treasury of Humor and Leo Rosten’s Giant Book of Laughter—both thick, musty tomes with hundreds of numbered jokes. I was a shy and studious child, and they promised formulae for social life, albeit ones that were half a century outdated. They also afforded access to the densely Jewish cultural milieu in which my parents’ generation had been raised, but which by the 1990s was largely confined to offputting, brined kiddush foods and kitschy television bits.

Imagine my surprised recognition in perusing the ur-source of these childhood secular bibles in the folklorist Mordekhai Lipson’s 1928 Yiddish volume, Di velt dertseylt, a selection of which has been translated by father-and-son team Jonathan and Jonah Sampson Boyarin under the title As The Story Goes: Funny, Strange, and Serious Stories of Yiddishland’s Jews. Many of the jokes I learned from Asimov and Rosten appear almost verbatim in Lipson’s book—like the one about the antisemitic Russian colonel who insists on calling his dog “yid” in the presence of a Jewish passenger; the Jew replies that it’s a pity the dog is Jewish, as otherwise he could have had a distinguished career in the Russian military. Lipson’s collection suggests that my curiosity and nostalgia had older objects than I’d thought.

While Rosten’s and Asimov’s books all feature anonymous, fictional characters, Lipson’s stories are all about specific, famous Jews—mostly rabbis, both Hasidim and mitnagdim, but also a few Enlighteners like Mendelsohn, famous converts to Christianity, and even a handful of Zionists. (A few lines are even, implausibly, attributed to medieval sages, like Abraham Ibn Ezra, who is reported to have complained about his luck in business, “Were I to sell candles, the sun would never set; were I to sell funeral shrouds, no one would ever die.”) While most of the stories must be apocryphal, the collection presents itself as documenting the verbal brilliance and pungency of the Ashkenazi elite. And where Jewishness in mid-20th century America signified an amorphous, witty ethnicity, here the stories capture ongoing and many-sided political and religious conflicts.

Lipson’s subjects generally articulate a non-dogmatic traditionalism; he celebrates rabbis’ extreme self-deprivation for charitable ends, legal flexibility to accommodate poor Jews’ material needs, or astringent critiques of wealthy businessmen. In their respective introductions, the Boyarins frame the work differently. Jonathan sees it as a window onto Eastern European Jewish life at a particular moment, one less sentimentalized than, say, Fiddler on the Roof; Jonah, meanwhile, sees it as a political resource, albeit a complicated one, which contains anti-capitalist critique and corrects for Christian hegemony. Maybe. For my part, I will say that many of the stories are in fact very clever, and several made me laugh out loud.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Paul Klee said of his artistic process that in basing so many of his creations on lines he was “taking a dot for a walk.” Seldom has an artist been as humorously clear about his practice, as is amply demonstrated in the terrific show Paul Klee: Other Possible Words, at the Jewish Museum through July 26th. It’s precisely the simplicity and possibilities inherent in the line, the simple stroke and its peregrinations, that is the basis for so much of Klee’s work. He constructed an oeuvre that, as we see in this show, was capable of abstract beauty and pointed political protest. Much of the exhibit is focused on Klee the enemy of Nazism and fascism. His politics, his modernism, and his Bauhaus background placed him on the Nazi enemies list, and even saw him falsely said to be a Jew. As a result, he spent his final years in exile in Switzerland, where he died in 1940.

In works like “Creators II” (1930) and “Departure of the Ghost” (1931), the lines weave and intertwine and multiply as shape with a hint of the human presence. These are lines that not only walk—literally, since in “Departure of the Ghost” they are poised atop two legs—they swoop, curl, and form intricate patterns as they cross paths. But his lines can be drawn into figurative service when need be, and Klee shows that they can be a weapon against fascism. Paintings like “Voice from the Ether” (1939) show a child converted into a radio, a passive recipient of the Nazi message being transmitted over the airwaves.

Klee was not devoid of a sense of humor, testimony for which is “Revolution of the Viaducts” (1937). Eleven viaducts of various colors, reduced to arches whose bases are in the form of human feet, have broken ranks and assembled in no order, refusing their assigned regimentation. “Mask of Fear,” a masterpiece from 1932, with its subdued colors, and its egg-shaped figure, looks to have been painted with fewer than 15 strokes, animated by fear and rage.

Most surprising in the show are a set of stark charcoal drawings, depictions of the daily horrors of Nazi rule. Drawn in 1933, the year of Hitler’s accession to power, these small, seemingly hastily done works show people being shot down in the street; a man crawling; a stiff, bloated figure posed as a dictator; a manhunt; and people emigrating. These display cases are a mini-chronicle of the early years of Nazi rule.

Present also are the shaped and shapeless figures set against striking backgrounds that are Klee’s signature. But even the paintings of fruits, pears, figs, and apples are filled with foreboding, the fruits containing rotted spots.

Klee was fond of painting angels in his distinctive style, and there are some wonderful ones here. Sadly, Angelus Novus, his most celebrated angel and the one many of you will be anxious to see, thanks to its Walter Benjamin connection, is still blocked in Israel, a victim of Netanyahu and Trump’s war. In its place is an exhibition print, which at first glance has the aura of an original work of art spoken of by Benjamin, but which loses it upon reading the explanatory text that accompanies it. Benjamin still gets a nod. We arrive before it thinking we are seeing the Angel of History in an artistic work that once belonged to Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Gershom Scholem. Instead, we have an example of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.

Hannah Gold (assistant editor): My partner, as a final (and admittedly random) elective credit for his psychoanalytic training, is taking a class on the Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar. So far, I have caught five of the ten required films, dutifully projected onto the walls of our apartment, or on our upstairs neighbor’s TV.

We’ve been moving chronologically across Almodóvar’s more than 40 years of filmmaking, starting with Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón (there isn’t a standard translation of the title, but one is Pepi, Luci, Bom, and other women on the heap), a film from 1980 centered on the misadventures of poorly treated, poorly behaved women who are out for revenge and a good time. Pepi and the other early films are raunchy and disorganized, flippantly violent, juvenile and charming. They capture Madrid just a few years post-Franco, following young punks, mostly queer people and women—even the nuns are snorting cocaine and injecting heroin. Gender and sexuality are unstable, AIDS is killing, the clubs are full. Watched in rapid succession, the movies blur together in their absurdity, as recurring actors engage in convoluted plotlines. Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, from 1988, is now a cult classic, and was nominated for an Oscar for best foreign language film. Eleven years later, All About My Mother finally won Almodóvar the prize. Both films are worth watching. But my favorite by far has been Volver.

Released more than two decades into his career, Volver is more polished, more normative—but only by Almodóvar’s standards. The film centers a family: Raimunda, played by Penélope Cruz, and her mother, sister, daughter, aunt, and longtime neighbor. The aunt and neighbor still live in the village where Raimunda and her sister were raised, which is plagued by wind. Their mother and father were killed in a wildfire, stoked by those nefarious winds, but their mother has recently been sighted around the village; it’s believed that she returned as a ghost, to nurse her sister in her final weeks. The aunt’s death is one of two that open the film—the second occurs when Raimunda’s teenage daughter stabs her father (Raimunda’s husband) after he comes onto her. Most of the movie occurs in the aftermath of these losses. Raimunda comically and fairly nonchalantly deals with the body of her pedophile, deadbeat husband, while opening an ad hoc restaurant in an empty building next door. After the aunt’s funeral, the mother (who may or may not be a ghost), comes to live with Raimunda’s sister in Madrid, posing as a Russian emigre as she assists in her daughter’s apartment-based hair salon. For those recently awash in Almodóvar’s oeuvre, it’s a pleasure to see Carmen Maura, who starred in the earlier films in her twenties, return as a charming, maybe-dead grandmother.

In keeping with Almodóvar’s style, the men are cartoonishly villainous, or otherwise minor. The women are idiosyncratic in both their sloppiness and their devotion to each other, but are more tempered than the stars of his earlier projects (there’s only one sex worker in this film, and the protagonist is much too comfortable treating her badly). There is still a campy playfulness, and a willingness to bend the limits of the realistic. Unlike the earlier films, Volver makes good on each thread of the intricate plotline, and is tremendously satisfying. I won’t ruin the twists, but one elicited audible gasps from myself, my partner, and our benevolent host of an upstairs neighbor.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Love as a destructive force is at the heart of Arnaud Desplechin’s new film Two Pianos. It doesn’t lead to death in this case, as it does in other films that view love in this way, like Truffaut’s The Woman Next Door, but it wreaks havoc on a marriage and a musical career.

Mathias Vogler, played by the strikingly handsome François Civil, has returned to his native Lyon from Japan, where he has taught piano for several years. He’s come back—in a dreadful state—to participate in a concert with his revered former teacher, Elena Audin (a steely Charlotte Rampling), frail and elderly. Audin tells her former student that her mind is going and that rather than resort to playing from a score rather than from memory, she will be ending her career. She wants Mathias at her side when she makes the announcement. But the revival of a failed love from his past puts paid to this plan.

When Mathias arrives at Elena’s apartment directly from the airport, he faints dead away at the sight of a woman exiting the elevator. We’ve already seen her at home with her happy, enthusiastic husband, who recounts Jewish jokes and Hasidic tales. Claude and her husband are old friends of Mathias, though Claude was far more. It was the end of her affair with Voglet that drove him from France. The time away has done him no good: he loves her every bit as much as he did before leaving.

Claude has had a child in the interim, and Mathias, who has crossed paths with him by chance, realizes that the child is his. When Claude’s adoring husband dies suddenly, his hopes of picking up where they had left off are revived. She’s not averse to this, or is she? Two Pianos is an account of their coming close to repairing their loss, in the same way Matthias is attempting to repair his shattered career. However talented Matthias might be, it’s not the healing power of music and his rare talent that drive him, but the uncontrollable train that is thwarted love.

If Mathias is all desire, Claude is far more complicated. Desire there is, and she teases her ex with its rekindling, advancing and then retreating from her beloved. Seeing the return of a love thought lost then thwarted anew, Mathias’ self-destructiveness adds force to love’s destructive capabilities. Matthias must decide whether to stay and fight for Claude or to accept that the game isn’t worth the candle. Paradoxically, his decision will destroy him on one front and save him on another. I’ve not yet decided whether the end of the film is a happy one, or even if it’s the end of the story, and that is its genius.

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): There are a great many heavy, serious things I’ve been reading and watching, but because we all need it, I thought I would share something that brought me about an hour of pure, unmitigated joy and escapism. Who among us elder millennials and Gen X cusps does not have the softest of spots for Richard Linklater’s 1993 movie Dazed and Confused, about the last day of school in Austin, Texas, in 1976? Among the many things I love about it is the way it’s very much of a specific time (the mid-’70s) and also out of it: The early ’90s was almost a sister period, the fashion sense and hedonistic sensibilities of two decades prior having cycled back around. But more importantly, the time is youth. There’s a loving and intoxicating portrait of American adolescence that both takes it seriously and grants it its frivolity. Of course, so much of that is tied up with sex—it’s the climate of the film, it’s in the air. Attractions circulate and shift directions with the wind.

That’s why it was so much fun to stumble upon a 2020 oral history of the real-life flirtations and hookups on the set of Dazed and Confused among the young, horny cast. Parker Posey seeking solace from her fraying relationship in Anthony Rapp! Joey Lauren Adams and Rory Cochrane listening to music together until 4 am! (And Ben Affleck getting none, ha!) Milla Jovovich was only 16 but ended up eloping with her onscreen boyfriend Shawn Andrews (her mother forced an annulment soon after). Jason London fell in “love-at-first sight” at auditions with Chrisse Harnos. In other words, it was all real. They were having an unforgettable summer together, sneaking in and out of each other’s hotel rooms, falling in love, being reckless and hormonal. If you’re a fan of the movie, I promise you’ll get a kick out of this little history.

Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): Shayok Misha Chowdhury’s Rheology begins as a science lecture. Bulbul Chakraborty, a real-life physics professor at Brandeis, stands before a blackboard, chalking formulas and amiably explaining the mysteries of sand (rheology is the study of how matter changes form under pressure). Sand is a “fragile matter,” she demonstrates, that can flow like water and also behave like something fixed and firm. Which is it, she amiably asks, liquid or solid?

Something similar might be asked of theater—it’s a flowing evanescent figment made of fleshly humans—and writer-director Chowdhury soon tacitly draws the analogy. Some 20 minutes into her lecture, Chakraborty sips some water and, alarmingly, begins to choke. Only when Chowdhury rises from a seat in the audience, to give her acting notes and to urge her to try again, do we know that she was faking. But she wasn’t at all faking in the sense one expects in the theater. She is no actor playing a fictional character; she is not only a real physicist, but also Chowdhury’s real-life mother, and in this false-but-true theatrical moment in which she struggles to breathe, Rheology changes its own form—and then does so again and again.

It morphs from science lesson into fourth wall-busting self-reflection, and then into operatic histrionics (a live cellist heightening the ginned-up emotion), surrealist fantasy, Tagore-inspired melodrama, and sentimental mother-son duet, all as Chowdhury imagines the unimaginable: his mother’s inevitable death. As it prances across these forms, the piece is by turns playful, tender, uncanny, and in one scene, when Chowdhury curls up next his mother and sucks his thumb, creepily Oedipal.

Performance theorists have long figured theater as a rehearsal for death. Herb Blau famously noted that it’s the only art form in which its medium—the human body—is moving toward its demise as we watch; Peggy Phelan argued that performance “becomes itself through disappearance.”

But Rheology also dramatizes a mother and son understanding each other in the fullness of their distinct lives—Chowdhury literally giving stage to Chakraborty’s arcane field of physics (as well as showing something of her existence before parenthood and her experience of losing her own mother) and Chakraborty literally entering the theatrical realm where her son professionally dwells. This profound mutual recognition makes it easy to believe Chakraborty when she reassures Chowdhury—who insists he will die without her—“You will hold your shape.”

When I saw Rheology last spring at the Bushwick Starr—it is now revived at Playwrights Horizons—it was just months after my own mother had died (at age 97—Chakraborty is only in her early 70s) and I had been feeling far more liquid than solid. Chakraborty described my state: I was like grains of sand that “hold together even as they come apart from themselves.”

Yet she reassured me, too, and so did the show, even as it shattered me.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): In the ’70s, it seemed that every week there was a new film released by Lina Wertmüller. She was an over-the-top director whose films I didn’t much like, preferring Bresson, Rohmer, Wenders, and Truffaut. In truth, I found her films unpleasant—her exaggerated characters struck me as buffoons of no interest, her attitude toward them as contemptuous and facile. But the restoration and rerelease of the first film of her major period, 1972’s The Seduction of Mimi, has shown me that I wasn’t nearly as intelligent and sophisticated a cinephile as I thought I was when I was 20.

It is not in any way a subtle film; its characters are not granted depth, and their lives and circumstances are not painted in subtle shadings. Everything in it is larger than life, pushed to the extreme. I didn’t see then what I see clearly now: The Seduction of Mimi is an opera without songs. In his brilliant Love and Death in the American Novel, Leslie Fiedler talks about how operas were the novels of illiterate Italy. The Seduction of Mimi applies the spirit of opera to the European art film, making its points broadly and brutally, but even so, with great truth.

The original title of the film translates to The Metallurgist Mimi Wounded in Honor, which pretty much tells the tale. The titular Mimi is a poor Sicilian laborer, unhappily married, who moves, as so many from southern Italy did, to Turin. Though he lost a job for voting Communist, through Mafia connections he manages to get a new job in an auto factory, and he immediately falls in with the Communists there. He becomes enamored of a beautiful supporter of the far left; playing on every possible stereotype of the over-sexed southerner, Wertmüller has him sweep her off her feet. They have a child, and he leaves politics behind. After another run in with the Mafia, he is transferred to his native region, where he falls into a caricatural—an operatic—version of a tale of jealousy and infidelity.

Mimi—played by Wertmüller’s favorite actor, Giancarlo Giannini—is a cartoon version of a Sicilian, with slicked back hair, out-of-date attire, and revoltingly reactionary attitudes toward women despite his professed Communism. Every gesture he makes is grand, every emotion spills off the screen in its excess. He is honest to the max, unfaithful to the max, an imposing lover to the max, a cuckold to the max, and an avenger to the max. Everyone around him is cut on the same cloth, from his Turinese lover, played by Wertmüller regular Mariangela Melato, to his Sicilian wife, his wife’s lover, and his wife’s lover’s wife, whom he impregnates out of spite.

No one is realistic, and the score by Piero Piccioni accentuates the operatic nature of the film. Mimi is, of course, one of the most famous of all names in Italian opera, but in the opera it is that of a woman, the female lead in La bohème. That it’s borne here by a man (his real name is Carmelo) is just another way for Wertmüller to mock the hyper-masculinity of the character.

Wertmüller’s satire is broad and all-encompassing. Crooked capitalists, southern Italians, masculinity, reactionary womanhood, and hippie leftism all take it on the chin. Wertmüller’s touch is not flawless, and there are moments of grotesque cruelty that are simply mean-spirited. But The Seduction of Mimi is a magnificent relic of a time when there was a left in Italy, when the working class and its organizations were feared and hated. More than a relic, it’s a film that marked an epoch in Italian cinema.