Maternal breakdown cinema
On Die My Love and If I Had Legs I'd Kick You
I was out sick last week and finally embarked on a cultural pilgrimage I had managed to avoid my entire life: watching Sex and the City. Within a few episodes, I spotted Susan Seidelman and Nicole Holofcener directing credits, plus Justin Theroux, my eternal internet boyfriend. If someone had told me any of that sooner, I possibly would’ve tuned in years ago.
Naturally, from there I plunged into contemplating two films about the exact opposite of cosmopolitans and brunch: women, mothers specifically, who can barely hold themselves, let alone their lives, together.
Die My Love, in theaters, and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, rentable on demand as of yesterday, are two new films directed by women and yoked together in early chatter for their shared terrain of distressed motherhood. At first they seem like mirror works, but beneath the surface lies a gulf. I like one a whole lot more than the other.
Short takes
HIGH ART with a Q&A. Lisa Cholodenko will be in conversation with Bette Gordon after a screening of this lesbian romance (a favorite new-to-me watch) at Columbia University’s Lenfest Center for the arts it’s the newish glass building north of the main campus designed by Renzo Piano.
DIARY OF A MAD HOUSEWIFE, 35mm. A chance to revisit one of my all-time discoveries, programmed as part of Momi’s very solid American women in the 70s series. No one warned me that Frank Langella would be hot, or that I’d experience Safdie-level anxiety watching this thing. I saw it a few years ago and haven’t shaken it since. A domestic nightmare that feels startlingly modern. Also a Thanksgiving movie.
Film Forum’s Le Heist Français series starts on Friday. If you need a starting point: the Melville films starring Alain Delon, or Rififi, the godfather of all heist movies. I, for one, will be catching a 35mm screening of Claude Sautet’s Max et les ferrailleurs, which I’ve never seen.
ZODIAC KILLER PROJECT. Charlie Shackleton’s documentary on true crime’s most infamous cipher is a masterclass in turning cinematic lemons into lemonade. After being denied rights to a nonfic book by a former cop convinced he cracked the case, Shackleton sidesteps the legal brick wall by crafting a wry essay film in the conditional tense. He layers his narration over images of Bay Area courthouses, police stations, and anonymous buildings—empty, banal, the opposite of sensational—along with reenactments and archival clips. In doing so, he both satirizes and deconstructs the true-crime genre, acknowledging that the very tropes he’s critiquing are baked into his own project. Zodiac Killer becomes a witty, genre-probing exercise that blends slow-burn suspense with the quietude of a landscape film. It’s steeped in manufactured tension, but rather than condescending to the viewer, it feels more like an old friend telling a story he’s eager to share.
I’m dying to try the salt bread from Uju Studios, which is hosting a pop-up at Park at Kims, a handsome new Korean cafe in Little Italy. Go and report back.
I did get nyc’s best coconut cake, though, at Caroline Schiff’s pop-up at Brooklyn’s New Museum. It’s closed for now, but the former Gage and Tollner’s pastry chef has a diner in the works for next year.
DIE MY LOVE
Any movie about a woman who may or may not be crazy, encircling hysteria, inevitably traces back to A Woman Under the Influence (1974) and Gena Rowlands’s incinerating, flash-point performance as Mabel Ferlinghetti, a mother and wife who is if not actually unstable, then tuned to a frequency incomprehensible to everyone around her. She stirs the sauce, sets the table, talks to no one in particular. People fret over her—and fret over whether they should even be fretting.
