Day: March 12, 2025

“I Know What Nothing Means”…Yes!

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Posted by yours truly 22 years ago: “There’s this better-than-pretty-good film about wealthy jaded Hollywood types called Play It As It Lays, and no under-40 person reading this column has heard of it, much less seen it.

“The director was the once-very-hot Frank Perry (Diary of a Mad Housewife, Rancho Deluxe, Mommie Dearest), and it was based on a respected 1970 Joan Didion novel of the same name, which Ben Stein once called ‘the best novel about Hollywood ever.’

“The stars were Tuesday Weld, Anthony Perkins (playing a cynical gay producer and giving the second-best performance of his life, after Psycho‘s Norman Bates), Adam Roarke (best thing he ever did), Tammy Grimes, Ruth Ford and several others you’ve probably never heard of.

“It stood out, as I recall, for its unusually dark and nihilistic portrait of some very skewed souls in the employ of the film industry, and for Perry’s fragmented, back-and-forth cutting that was not only in keeping with the style in which Didion’s book was written, but with the randomness of thoughts flicking around inside the head of its main character, Maria Wyeth (Weld).

“It was gloomy, ambitious, ‘different’ (even by unconventional ’70s standards), and Persona-like. It had a chilly, almost spooky fascination with downer attitudes among the moneyed elite. Some of the big gun critics bashed it, but others were admiring and spoke of Oscar-level achievement.

For many, many years there’s been no Bluray or DVD of Play It As It Lays, which opened 52 and 1/2 years ago (10.19.72 or two weeks before Richard Nixon‘s landslide re-election). 15 or 20 years ago it briefly played on the Sundance Channel; a decade ago it screened at the Hollywood Blvd. American Cinematheque, and then at the AC’s Los Feliz theatre three or four years ago.

And now…deliverance! A restored 4K DCP of this brilliant, all-but-forgotten film is currently showing at Manhattan’s Film Forum. (The final day is Thursday, 3.20.) Play it As It Lays wouldn’t have been restored if the rights hadn’t been cleared for a Bluray and streaming. I read somewhere that Indicator has the British Bluray home video rights.

One way or another Perry’s film will be commercially available to home viewers before long. After decades upon decades of absence.

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Allegedly Lying Bertolucci / “Tango” Flick Finally Opening

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A first-peek screening of Jessica Palud‘s Being Maria (Kino Lorber), a drama about the making of Bernardo Bertolucci‘s Last Tango in Paris (’72), is happening at the Walter Reade theatre on Saturday, 3.15, under the banner of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema.

Being Maria will open commercially on Thursday, 3.20, at the Quad Cinema. Palud and Matt Dillon, who portrays Marlon Brando in the film, will show up at the Quad that day and on Friday, 3.21, for a post-screening q & a.

I intend to be there and ask questions about the truthfulness of Being Maria, as it portrays the filming of Last Tango‘s simulated anal-rape scene in a way that sharply differs from an account circulated by Bertolucci, to wit: “Somebody thought, and thinks, that Maria had not been informed about the violence on her” — i.e., the acting out of an anal rape scene in which Brando pretends to violate Schneider. “That is false!”

Jordan Ruimy caught an out-of-competition Cannes screening of Being Maria on 5.21.24. He emerged with a view that the film is #MeToo propaganda. Ruimy said that Palud’s film “pretends that the rape scene was unscripted [when in fact it was]. What the film suggests is that Brando and Bertolucci were unsatisfied by a take and plotted to add the rape scene without Schneider knowing it [in advance].”

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