Elaine May’s filmography is being revisited. London’s Badlands Collective is hosting “Painfully Funny: The Complete Directorial Works of Elaine May,” a series celebrating May’s “small but extraordinary body of work at [London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts] on rarely screened 35mm prints,” a press release has announced. Audiences will have the opportunity to discover — or re-discover — the writer-director’s groundbreaking features.
“The films of Elaine May should be regarded as key entries in the New Hollywood movement that emerged in the 1970s, but while the ‘movie brat’ generation of that era is still lionized, May’s films have slipped out of the conversation, and out of circulation,” the press release notes. Determined to prove just how influential May was, the series will illustrate how she “subverted the romantic comedy with ‘A New Leaf’ (1971) and ‘The Heartbreak Kid’ (1972), and then she tested the bonds of friendship under extreme duress in ‘Mikey & Nicky’ (1976) and ‘Ishtar’ (1987).”
May received Oscar nods for penning 1998’s “Primary Colors” and 1979’s “Heaven Can Wait.” In 2016 she won the Writers Guild of America West’s Laurel Award for Screenwriting Achievement, an honor recognizing her career and body of work.
“I think the real trick is for women is they should start out tough,” May has said of female filmmakers. “They don’t start out tough. They start by saying, ‘Don’t be afraid of me. I’m only a woman.’ And they’re not only women, they’re just as tough as guys.”
“Painfully Funny: The Complete Directorial Works of Elaine May” will run from September 21-23. Tickets can be purchased via ICA’s website. A trailer for the series and plot synopses of the films can be found below.
A New Leaf (1971) – ICA, Fri 21 September, 6.30pm
Elaine May made her directorial debut with this hilarious comedy about a bankrupt playboy (Walter Matthau) who plans to marry and then murder a timid and socially inept heiress (played by May) to reclaim his place among the elite. A New Leaf set the tone for May’s filmmaking career in a number of ways. It established the keen interest in relationships and betrayal that would remain integral to all of her films, and it brought her into conflict with the studio, which took the film away from her and drastically re-cut it. After submitting her version, which was three hours long and contained two murders, May entered into a legal battle with Paramount and tried to get her name taken off the film when the studio prevailed. Despite being contrary to May’s vision, A New Leaf stands as a near-perfect black comedy, a stinging commentary on class, and a surprisingly affecting love story.
The Heartbreak Kid (1972) – ICA, Sat 22 September, 6.30pm
Written by Neil Simon, based on a short story by Bruce Jay Friedman, The Heartbreak Kid is one of the great American romantic comedies. The story of a man (Charles Grodin) who falls in love with a woman (Cybill Shepherd) he meets while honeymooning in Florida with his new bride (May’s daughter, Jeannie Berlin), the set-up is pure screwball, but May executes it as a brilliantly excoriating black comedy. Like Albert Brooks’ Modern Romance (1981), it takes the tropes of the traditional romantic comedy and dismantles them one-by-one. The film was a success in 1972 and was nominated for two acting Oscars (for Berlin and Eddie Albert), but it has since become mired in rights issues and is now very hard to see. Unavailable on DVD or streaming, this 35mm screening will offer audiences a vanishingly rare opportunity to enjoy one of May’s masterpieces.
Mikey & Nicky (1976) – ICA, Sun 23 September, 4.00pm
Mikey & Nicky is Elaine May’s darkest film, and her most pitiless examination of masculine behaviour. Peter Falk and John Cassavetes play the small-time gangsters on the run from the mob, whose lifetime of memories and resentments come to the fore during one long, panic-stricken night. Developed through a long process of improvisation, with May often running three cameras simultaneously to capture every gesture, Mikey & Nicky transcends standard genre tropes and confounds audience expectations with its exhilarating, freewheeling style and the riveting intensity of the performances. Having been delivered months later than scheduled and wildly over budget, the film almost ended May’s filmmaking career, but it stands as arguably her most audacious and complex work, with the anticipated laughs gradually being stripped away to reveal the tragedy of a friendship that has been irrevocably broken.
Ishtar (1987) – ICA, Sun 23 September, 6.30pm
Ishtar, Elaine May’s latest, and certainly most underrated and misunderstood film, is the story of two musicians, played by Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman, who become unwitting pawns in a diplomatic crisis after agreeing to play a concert in Morocco. The film flopped on release, but its ongoing notoriety speaks more to a sexist industry’s discomfort with a maverick female auteur than it does to the film’s quality. “If all of the people who hate Ishtar had seen it, I would be a rich woman today,” May quipped to Mike Nichols during a post-screening Q&A in 2006, encapsulating the absurdity of the film’s reputation. Ishtar marks the culmination of May’s morbid interest in unchecked male egotism, as her gaze shifts from the pathetic vanities and neuroses of her protagonists to those of the establishment itself. It’s a terrific takedown of Reaganite foreign policy, sharp and incisive, but full of the kind of raucous silliness modern viewers will recognise in the films of Adam McKay (“I can’t believe these men may control the fate of the Middle East!”). In 2018, its time has finally come.
