One of the most extraordinary events in the superb current season at American Ballet Theater at the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center will surely prove to be the thrilling matinee performance on Saturday, June 22nd, of the Kenneth MacMillan masterpiece, Manon —after the classic 18th-century novel by the Abbé Prévost—regrettably not seen in New York for several years. The enchanting score is assembled from works by the estimable Jules Massenet—who himself composed a major opera adapted from the story—orchestrated and arranged by Martin Yates, here excellently conducted by Ormsby Wilkins. The effective staging is by Julie Lincoln and Robert Tewsley, with scenery and period costumes designed by Nicholas Georgiadis, and lighting by Thomas R. Skelton.

 

Isabella Boylston has scarcely ever been better than she was in the title role, although the tragic outcome of the final act might have had more pathos had the part been danced by Natalia Osipova. Her partner, as Des Grieux, was the incomparable David Hallberg, performing for the first time this season, and dazzling in every scene. Also at his best was Blaine Hoven—who has been moving from strength to strength this season—as Lescaut. Christine Shevchenko was outstanding as Lescaut’s mistress. The primary cast was assisted by Alexandre Hammoudi as Monsieur G.M. and Thomas Forster as the Jailer, while the marvelouscorps de balletwas simply magnificent.

 

The following week’s performance on the evening of Monday, June 24th, of the sublime, immensely popular Swan Lake was also fabulous. The choreography is by Kevin McKenzie after that of the legendary Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov, with a glorious score by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky conducted by David LaMarche, and attractive sets and costumes by Zack Brown and clever lighting by Duane Schuler.

 

Hee Seo was simply astonishing as Odette-Odile, perfectly incarnating both roles. Her partner, Cory Stearns, was exceptional as Prince Siegfried. Hoven again excelled as Benno, the Prince’s friend. Von Rothbart was played by both Roman Zhurbin and, remarkably, Forster.

 

The superlative secondary cast deserves enumeration with Katherine Williams and Catherine Hurlin mesmerizing in the two Pas de trois. The exquisite Cygnettes were Cassandra Trenary, Luciana Paris, Nicole Graniero, and Skylar Brandt. Also terrific were April Giangeruso and Melanie Hamrick as the Two Swans.

 

Act III too was replete with first-rate dancing including Paulina Waski, Courtney Lavine, Gemma Bond and Stephanie Williams as, respectively, the Hungarian, Spanish, Italian, and Polish Princesses. In the Czardas, there were Zhong-Jing Fang and Alexei Agoudine; in the Spanish Dance, Hamrick again, Duncan Lyle, Brittany Degrofft, and Jose Sebastian; and in the Neapolitan dance, Joseph Gorak and Jonathan Klein. The corps de ballet, despite a few infelicities, was again entrancing.

 

The season closes next week with performances of Tchaikovsky’s fantastic Sleeping Beauty.

Blu-rays of the Week 

(Criterion Collection)

French director Bruno Dumont has made alternately hypnotic and infuriating dramas about individuals approaching states of grace in their singular ways; in that sense, he’s a legitimate successor to Robert Bresson. But Dumont’s best film remains his first, this 1997 study of an epileptic young man in a rough-hewn seaside town in northern France, where Dumont himself grew up.

 

 

 

The director has found the perfect locales in which to play out his dissection of spiritual malaise, and his amateur cast—led by one David Douche as the alternate brutal and gentle hero of sorts—responds with astonishing realism. The film’s gritty cinematography by Philippe Van Leeuw looks especially potent in hi-def; extras include Dumont interviews from 1997, 2014 and 2019. 

 

Between the Lines 

(Cohen Film Collection)

Joan Micklin Silver’s 1977 comedy drama about the messy professional and private lives of young journalists at a Boston alternative weekly has attained a certain cache thanks to an estimable cast of then-unknowns who did better work elsewhere: Lindsay Crouse, John Heard, Jill Eickenberry, Jeff Goldblum, Bruno Kirby and Marilu Henner.

 

 

 

 

Though at times insightful, the film lurches from episode to episode too disjointedly. There’s also the late, lamented Gwen Welles, an actress who died far too young at 42 in 1993. The new hi-def transfer is excellent; lone extra is a new Silver interview.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Heroes Shed No Tears 

This early John Woo shoot-em-up, set on the Vietnam-Laos border, follows a mercenary soldier whose wife and young son’s lives are in peril when he crosses a sadistic colonel.

 

 

 

There’s non-stop action and blood-letting—most of it implausible, and when the mercenary’s son evades a raging inferno, downright risible—but the 88 minutes fly by, which has always been Woo’s forte. The hi-def transfer looks terrific; extras include a new interview with the movie’s star, Eddy Ko.

 

None but the Brave 

(Warner Archive)

In novice director and star Frank Sinatra’s hands, this 1965 WWII drama—about what happens after American marines crash-land on a remote Pacific island inhabited by a platoon of Japanese soldiers—wavers uneasily between psychological study and “can we just get along” liberal pieties.

 

 

 

Director Sinatra, who plays the Americans’ drunken doctor, is unable to avoid a mire of clichés throughout, making this an honorable failure that nevertheless anticipated Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers/Letters from Iwo Jima by nearly four decades. There’s a fine hi-def transfer.

 

DVDs of the Week 

(Seventh Art)

French artist Edgar Degas kept his distance from his impressionist cohorts, going his own way in the paintings and sculptures of racehorses and ballet dancers for which he is best known.

 

 

 

This 90-minute documentary, in conjunction with a traveling exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England, is a fine overview of the artist’s background and artistry, and doesn’t sugarcoat his virulent anti-Semitism, which reached its apex during the sordid Dreyfus affair. Extras are additional interviews and a glimpse at the museum.

 

Sara Stein—From Berlin to Tel Aviv 

(Omnibus)

Matthias Tiefenbacher’s exciting four-film 2015 mini-series follows a secular Jewish detective whose investigation of a Berlin murder case propels her on a journey to Tel Aviv, where she begins a new life colored by her religion—and her decision to become a detective in Israel.

 

 

 

These refreshingly sharp procedurals are highlighted by the always on-target portrayal of Stein by German actress Katharina Lorenz. Four 90-minute episodes are included on two discs.

 

CD of the Week 

(Decca)

Valentina Lisitsa has given herself a monumental task by performing all of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s solo works for piano—10 CDs worth, over 11 hours of music—but she succeeds brilliantly. Although Tchaikovsky’s music has been criticized as being too flashy, too flagrantly sentimental, it is technically impressive and anything but mechanical.

 

 

 

Lisitsa’s flawless playing follows suit, finding the joyful musicality in the two sonatas and the innate playfulness in his Children’s Album. Then there are the fiendish technical challenges of the solo-piano versions of The Nutcracker and the 1812 Overture, which she masters with hair-raising ease.

A masterly artist who specialized in dramatizing undramatic lives, Italian director Ermanno Olmi—who died last year at age 86—made psychologically acute character studies that are as close as fictional films have come to showing real life in all its complexity and ordinariness. The director himself said it all: “The cinema is life and life is the cinema for me.” 

 

Film at Lincoln Center’s current retrospective—some of his films, rarely seen in this country, are being shown in 35mm prints courtesy of the Instituto Luce Cinecitta in Italy—should, I hope, bring about a reappraisal of the extraordinary work Olmi created, even after his critical and commercial peak, 1978’s The Tree of Wooden Clogs, after which the director almost completely disappeared from our screens.

 

Born in 1931 in Bergamo, in northern Italy’s Lombardy region northeast of Milan, Olmi began making short films in the early 1950s for Milanese electric company Edisonvolta. In 1958 the company commissioned him to make a short about a hydroelectric dam in the mountains; he instead returned with his first feature, 1958’s Time Stood Still, whose protagonists are embodied with simple authenticity by the first of many amateurs Olmi used to enact fictional events similar to those in their own lives.

 

Olmi’s imposing body of work is highlighted by his early masterpieces Il Posto (1961) and The Fiancés (1963), both of which follow quotidian existence with an eloquence that speaks directly to the heart. Olmi entirely avoided artifice and affectation in his films, preferring to concentrate on the intense emotions of his characters as they attempt to maintain their dignity in their struggles to survive. That even goes for the capitalist at the center of the 1968 classic One Fine Day, who finds his world forever altered after a pair of events threaten to boost him professionally and ruin him personally. Olmi’s gracious and sympathetic study is punctuated by his visually arresting snapshots into the troubled man’s mind.

 

Then there are the Catholic director’s more overtly religious films, like A Man Named John (1965), a singular biopic about Pope John XXIII; Cammina, Cammina (Walking, Walking, 1983), a recreation of the story of the Magi; and Genesis: The Creation and the Flood (1994), a visualization of events in the first book of the Bible. These transcend their narrow structures to become triumphant paeans to the goodness of man and his co-existence with nature, artfully displayed by Olmi’s earthy imagery.

 

Two of Olmi’s greatest late-period films consider the insanity of war. The Profession of Arms (2001), a biography of the 16th century military man Giovanni de’ Medici, was photographed in a procession of indelible images by Olmi’s son, Fabio Olmi. Olmi’s final film., 2014’s Greenery Will Bloom Again, is a spare, humane meditation on warfare, embodied in shivering soldiers caught up in the machinery that made World War I such a protracted and horrific bloodbath.

 

In Olmi’s films, it’s the precisely etched faces—expressive, inscrutable and hauntingly human—that viewers will remember. There is the young man in Il Posto, visibly heartsick when the girl he adores is among a new crowd; the lovers in The Fiancés realizing their bond can remain strong, even while separated; and the alcoholic hero of the elegant, dream-like fable The Legend of the Holy Drinker, at last finding spiritual redemption (a role wonderfully played by Rutger Hauer in a rare instance of Olmi casting a name actor).

 

A poet of the commonplace, Ermanno Olmi—as this retrospective makes clear—made films that are anything but.