This week, Jared Bowen reviews a cinematic opera from BLO, a reimagining of “Miss Julie” from ArtsEmerson, and the breakout film from last year’s Sundance Film Festival, “Minari.”
“The Fall of the House of Usher,”
presented virtually by Boston Lyric Opera on operabox.tv
Edgar Allan Poe’s gothic horror tale, "The Fall of the House of Usher," receives an operatic treatment by Boston Lyric Opera. Directed by James Darrah and adapted by screenwriter Raúl Santos, this" Usher" centers around a young girl named Luna, an immigrant who is detained at the U.S. border. Rendered with a a mix of stop motion animation, hand-drawn animation, and archival footage, “Usher” offers a unique film experience set to Philip Glass’s original score.
“It has been a longstanding dream of mine to kind of combine both the study and love of film and film history,” said Darrah. “I feel like opera, for the most part, has largely ignored that as a potential for visual exploration.”
“Julia,”
presented virtually by ArtsEmerson through February 22
ArtsEmerson presents a modern reimagining of August Strindberg's 19th century play “Miss Julie.” In “Julia,” a young woman enters into a relationship with one of her family’s employees resulting in a wrenching and destructive storm, laying bare the dynamics of race, power and gender. Throughout the play, a lone camera circles the action—spotlighting the unique and sometimes blurred perspectives on the events occurring in real time. Every performance of “Julia” is also followed by a talkback with director/playwright Christiane Jatahy and actors Julia Bernat and Rodrigo de Odé. A warning: the play includes explicit sexual content.
“The story is layered, it's complicated [and] really navigates class and gender dominance,” says ArtsEmerson Executive Director David Howse. “The content of the story itself, it needs to be lifted. And for us [at ArtsEmerson] it's both the point and the prompt.”
streaming via the A24 Screening Room and showing at Showcase Cinemas de Lux and Landmark’s Kendall Square Cinema
“Minari” presents a fresh take on the American dream. In this semi-autobiographical film directed by Lee Isaac Chung, “Minari” follows the story of a Korean-American family moving from California to rural Arkansas in the 1980s to start a farm. But their hopeful Garden of Eden is fraught with challenges thrust upon strangers in a strange land who are trying to assimilate, climb economic rungs and keep their family whole.
“What’s especially marvelous in an already exquisite film is how significantly we access the story through each of the finely rendered characters,” said Bowen. “From the endless joy a new, wide-open landscape affords the children, to the possibilities dreamed by the adults, to the sense of joie de vivre manifested by a grandmother with no patience for anything but moving forward in her latter days.”
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