With Valentine’s Day approaching, Nevada County filmgoers may be heartened to find a little movie romance with four films where love is both thwarted and fulfilled while leaving its profound mark. Three of them are lowkey arthouse works that come from neither Hollywood nor the Hallmark Channel, while the fourth is one of the last fanfares from Tinseltown’s glorious musical past. All four provide good excuses to get out of the house and indulge in the communal experience of a night at the movies.
The lovefest starts on Sunday, February 4th at 1:00 PM as Grass Valley’s Sutton Cinema celebrates the sixtieth anniversary of My Fair Lady (1964), one of the last trumpet blasts of the classic Hollywood musical, and among the best.
Adapted from the Broadway musical, which was in turn adapted from George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, it’s a gorgeous, tuneful spectacle packed with eye-filling costumes, witty dialogue, great performances, and wonderful songs that are still being hummed today. Driving the production are two masters from Hollywood’s Golden Age taking late career bows: mogul-producer Jack Warner and director George Cukor.
For those new to the film, Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison), an arrogant phonetics scholar, bets a fellow scholar (Wilfrid Hyde-White) that he can remake a lowly street urchin into a proper English lady simply by drilling her in proper upper-class English diction. Unfortunately for him (and lucky for us), his guinea pig is the high-spirited Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn), who does a little remolding herself as Higgins’s precious theorizing comes undone by the stealth hand of romance. Marni Nixon dubbed Audrey Hepburn’s singing voice, but Ms. Hepburn’s perfection as Eliza remains undimmed. You may find the film’s ending dates, but all that comes before is an exquisite confection. Though available on Turner Classics and other streaming outlets, the big screen is the place to experience My Fair Lady in all its richness.
Once that’s over, you can jump in your car and head up to Nevada City as The Onyx Theatre Downtown starts another month of its Sunday night programming of unique vintage films. Love among the ruins might be the theme of this month’s calendar, as its first item is an arthouse classic that will appeal to those who love Past Lives (2023), one of this year’s Best Picture nominees: In the Mood for Love (2000) writer-director Wong Kar-wai’s quiet, poignant film of thwarted passion and the scars it leaves behind.
The film opens in an overcrowded tenement in early 1960s Hong Kong with stars Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung as next-door neighbors who discover their respective spouses are cheating on them with each other. Bonded by betrayal, they seek solace in friendship and swear to keep their relationship chaste out of personal honor, fear of condemnation by the crowded hive that defines their world, and the belief that they’re somehow better than their spouses. But love cares little for such matters as it rises to claim them both.
Kar-wai’s direction seems inspired by both a tight budget and the dramas of Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu. He tightly frames the couple’s interactions within the cramped rooms, doorways, and hallways that close in like prison walls. The stark compositions put their deep feelings in ironic tension with their lowly surroundings. To further enhance the mood of longing, this most gorgeous tearjerker also features an excellent score that includes songs by Nat King Cole.
On Sunday night February 11th, The Onyx Downtown shows Moonlight (2016), the surprise 2017 Best Picture winner–the one where the Oscar presenters mistakenly awarded Best Picture to La-La-Land before their course was corrected. A good thing, too, because this is the better film. Writer-director Barry Jenkins, working from a budget that was nearly the lowest ever for a Best Picture winner, tells the semi-autobiographical story of Chiron, a profoundly lonely, shy, and closeted gay Black youth who’s forced to navigate the challenges and dangers to body and soul that confront him at nearly every turn in his tough Miami neighborhood. (Anyone who’s suffered at the hands of bullies will sympathize.)
As he grows into manhood, Chiron learns he’s not as doomed to loneliness as he thinks when he finds true love, which, considering his other choices, seems a triumph. Chiron is played by three actors at various points in his life—Alex R. Hibbert, Ashton Sanders, and Trevante Rhodes—and they’re all excellent, as is Oscar-winner Mahersharla Ali as one of Chiron’s benefactors.
The Onyx Downtown takes the next weekend off but closes out the month on Sunday, February 25th,with another arthouse film, this time about a case of l’amour fou. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) is a slowly paced but visually stunning period romance from France. Noémie Merlant plays Marianne, a successful eighteenth-century female portrait artist who’s called to an isolated, strangely barren, chateau to paint the portrait of Héloïse (Adele Haènel), a young aristocratic woman. Unfortunately, her subject refuses to sit for her portrait, yearning to be back in the convent from where her mother (Valeria Galino) removed her for an arranged, and very unwanted, marriage to an anonymous suitor. Somehow Marianne must maneuver and seduce restless, angry Héloïse into sitting still long enough to fulfill her contract, an attempt that backfires on her when she falls in love with her subject.
A chamber drama with, significantly, with only a brief touch of music, Portrait of a Lady on Fire seems at first to sit within the Gothic penumbra cast by Jane Eyre, but instead opens another door to passion. This smoldering film often plays like a meditation on the links between love, art, and gender politics as the two women engage in a languorous lesbian pas de deux hidden away from the oppressive world that encloses them.
Writer-director Céline Sciamma and cinematographer Claire Mathon capture the slow pace of life of that era with gorgeously composed images (some created by contemporary artist Héléne Delamire) that cast a spell, even if, at times, the film plays like a slow tour of the Louvre. It concludes with one of those startling revelations out of the films of Eric Rohmer, illustrating that it’s not always who we love but what we love that defines us.
Thomas Burchfield’s short story “McCain Takes a Bullet” was a runner-up in last year’s Gold Country Writers’ Short Story Contest; his short story, “McCain, the Stranger” is in the online version of Mystery Tribune. His article “Noir or Not?: Straw Dogs” appeared in a recent issue of Noir City magazine. A freelance editor, he’s also the author of the short story “Lucky Day” in the anthology Berkeley Noir (Akashic Press 2020), He’s also the author of Butchertown (Ambler House 2017), a ripping, 1920s gangster thriller and the award-winning contemporary vampire novel Dragon’s Ark. He reviews movies regularly on Medium and may be found on Facebook.