Top 20 Alternative Picks for TIFF 2013: Marcel Ophüls’ Ain’t Misbehavin’

Ain’t Misbehavin’ – Marcel Ophüls

Section: TIFF Docs
Dates: Tuesday 10th, Thursday 12th, Sunday 15th

Buzz: The freewheeling memoir Ain’t Misbehavin’ (titled Un Voyageur in French) screened alongside Frank Pavich’s Jodorowsky’s Dune during Director’s Fortnight at Cannes. While the latter is perhaps the most buzzed about TIFF Doc, the first feature from Marcel Ophüls in nearly two decades should not be overlooked. The son of celebrated German-Jewish filmmaker Max Ophüls (The Earrings of Madame de …) and friend of François Truffaut, the master documentarian, now eighty-five years old, has lived an extraordinary life. Marcel Ophüls won the Academy Award for Best Documentary and the FIPRESCI Award at Cannes for Hotel Terminus (1988), while his Oscar nominated, four-hour long The Sorrow and The Pity (1969), that explored French resistance and collaboration with Nazis was memorialized in Annie Hall. After the endless critical praise for his Holocaust-related material, it will be remarkable to witness the untapped lightness and humor of Marcel Ophüls. The promise of dishy old Hollywood anecdotes and personal memories of Jeanne Moreau, Bertold Brecht, Ernst Lubitsch, Otto Preminger, Woody Allen and Stanley Kubrick doesn’t hurt either.

The Gist: Eighteen years after his last film (The Troubles We’ve Seen: A History of Journalism in Wartime), Marcel Ophuls comes back as one of the last cinema master and more especially, the most caustic and the funniest.