Last month, on the opening day of I’m leaving for Cannes tomorrow, which is, you know, fantastic, but there are things going on in New York over the next week or so that I’m sad to miss. The other night, I went to Lincoln Center to see Jonah Who Will Be 25 In The Year 2000 (about which I have good things to say, but begrudgingly––I can’t help but suspect that this was the template for that micro-genre of milquetoast Oscar bait, the Remember When We Were Young, Liberal and Semi-Bohemian? ensemble dramedy, which always portends relevance but rarely manages to pull off a whole hell of a lot beyond getting ten people to, eventually, eat dinner together), and that was the first I’d heard of the Film Society’s tribute to Jennifer Jones, which begins Friday (the day I arrive in Cannes) and ends May 24 (the day before I leave).
Drat, and all the more annoying because I’ve been longing for the time to devote to a Jennifer Jones kick lately, ever seeing Ruby Gentry two weeks ago at Anthology. And also, because Dan Callahan’s profile of Jones timed to the series at The House Next Door gives such a great picture of what I’m missing. I’d kill to see Jones in Ernst Lubitsch’s last finished film, Cluny Brown. Jones “turns her own (feigned?) obliviousness into the drollest, most sophisticated of dirty jokes,” Callahan writes. “As low-born Cluny, whose love of plumbing stands in for her incipient sexual possibilities, Jones is an unending delight, finding just the right note of wide-eyed eccentricity for Lubitsch’s satire of English mores.”
Sigh –– I love it when plumbing stands in for incipient sexual possibilities. If you’re in town over through next weekend, check out one or two of these films and let us know what you think. I’ll just have to make do with the above, hauntingly weird “homage” to Cluny Brown, scored to Bjork.
