Double Feature: It’s Not Me (2024)/You Burn Me (2024)

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Browning Cinema

New at the Browning

It's Not Me (2024)
Directed by Leos Carax
With Leos Carax, Denis Lavant, Loreta Juodkaite
Not Rated, 42 minutes, DCP
In English and French with English subtitles

French cinema firebrand Leos Carax has spent 40 years making galvanizing movies that float in the beautifully perplexing nether space between reality and artifice, from Boy Meets Girl and Lovers on the Bridge to Holy Motors and the recent musical Annette. In his new film, he lovingly evokes the aesthetics of Jean-Luc Godard, paying aptly cheeky respect to the late New Wave master, his own career, and cinema itself, rummaging through a century of movies to situate his work within a continuum of the medium. Rather than self-aggrandize, he uses this diaristic format for an iconoclastic and impudent inquiry into power, politics, and image-making that is at once wry and playful, oblique and deeply personal.

You Burn Me (2024)
Directed by Matías Piñeiro
With Ana Cristina Barragán, Maria Inês Gonçalves, Agustina Muñoz
Not Rated, 64 minutes, DCP
In Spanish with English subtitles

An adaptation of Sea Foam, a chapter in Cesare Pavese's Dialogues with Leucò, Piñeiro's latest is an intimate and expansive meditation on death and desire and a thrilling exploration of the possibilities of adapting text to film. In Sea Foam, Pavese stages a fictional dialogue between the ancient Greek poet Sappho and the nymph Britomartis (played by frequent Piñeiro collaborators Gabi Saidón and María Villar). Sappho has thrown herself into the ocean from heartbreak. Britomartis has fallen off a cliff into the water while fleeing a man. Reuniting at the shore, they discuss life, death and the bittersweet nature of desire. But Piñeiro, known for his series of metatextual films dealing with the translation and performance of Shakespeare, is not content to simply restage a dialogue and instead infuses the film with footnotes and lacunae: the fragmentary poetry of Sappho, by whom only one complete poem still exists; the circumstances of Pavese's death, heartbroken in a Turin hotel room; and the science of sea foam with its connections to disease and fertility.