5 things to watch this weekend – 10 to 12 March
A teacher takes a trip to the remotest school on earth, while the New York indie scene of The Strokes and Interpol swaggers back into focus.
Meet Me in the Bathroom (2022)
Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide
Taking its lead from the celebrated oral history by Lizzy Goodman, this entertaining documentary chronicles that early 2000s revival of skinny-jeaned NYC indie rock encompassing The Strokes, Interpol, TV on the Radio, the Yeah Yeahs Yeahs, The Rapture and many more. The film takes us back to a city rocked by the attacks of 9/11, a music industry ambushed by the advent of Napster and file sharing, and Brooklyn neighbourhoods experiencing a creative renaissance en route to hipster gentrification. Meet Me in the Bathroom crams in a lot; too much of it circling back to The Strokes. But the lo-fi archive footage vividly revives a parade gone by.
Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom (2019)
Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide and BFI Player
Four years have elapsed since Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom first screened in festivals, but we should be grateful for this cinema release, however belated: films from Bhutan come our way all too rarely. It’s a calming, cockle-warming experience about a trainee teacher in Thimphu who has ambitions to become a singer and move to Australia. But, as punishment for his lack of diligence, he’s sent for his final year to teach in a tiny off-grid community high in the Himalayas – at the remotest school in the world. The scenery is breathtaking, but supplies are short: there are no textbooks or blackboards, but he does get a yak for company – along with plenty of time to think.
Cutter’s Way (1981)
Where’s it on? Blu-ray
Somewhere on the winding road linking The Long Goodbye (1973) to later oddball LA neo-noirs The Big Lebowski (1998) and Inherent Vice (2014) is Ivan Passer’s shaggy conspiracy thriller Cutter’s Way. Released as the sun set on the New Hollywood era, it stars Jeff Bridges and John Heard as two pals wading into trouble after the discovery of a dead body in a garbage can brings them into the nefarious orbit of a local business tycoon. Passer was a leading light of the Czech New Wave, but seems intuitively plugged in to the West Coast vibe of burnt-out paranoia and post-hippie-era disillusionment.
I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (2006)
Where’s it on? BFI Player
Along with other modern classics such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century and Mahamat Saleh Haroun’s Daratt, this typically languid feature from Taiwanese-Malaysian auteur Tsai Ming-liang was one of a bumper crop of six features commissioned in 2006 for the New Crowned Hope festival celebrating 250 years since Mozart’s birth. Good luck digging out any connections to Wolfgang Amadeus – what Tsai presents instead is another of his hypnotic explorations of desire, loneliness and the frailty of the flesh – for the first time filming in his birth country, Malaysia. His recurrent muse Lee Kang-sheng here plays two separate roles: a paralysed man in a coma and a migrant being nursed back to health after a beating.
Ballade aux sources (1965)
Where’s it on? Eventive
The latest in the Independent Cinema Office’s The Cinema of Ideas series of online talks and screenings centres the debate around the return of cultural artefacts. Restitution in Motion: The Call for the Return of Cultural Property is programmed by BFI curator Xavier Alexandre Pillai and is streaming in staggered fashion between 7 and 21 March. Already available is this true rarity, an early unfinished work by Mauritanian director Med Hondo, whose subsequent features Soleil O (1970) and West Indies (1979) recently broke the Sight and Sound top 250. A journey through post-colonial North Africa, the 31-minute fragment is accompanied by a presentation by archivist Annabelle Aventurin.
