Review: Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son

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Louise Bourgeois: the Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine

A remarkable and ambitious documentary

By GERALD PEARY | November 4, 2008

3.5 Stars

It took two brave and persistent filmmakers, Amei Wallach and Marion Cajori, to break through the still-imposing façade of sculptor Louise Bourgeois, now 96, and get her to relax a bit and offer her remarkable story. What we learn, in intimate conversations at her Brooklyn studio, is that she remains furious, 80 years later, that her father in France took a mistress in front of her mother. And she’s still hurt that her insensitive père would carve a tangerine at the dinner table and compare the fruit’s beauty to his young daughter’s ugliness. “My emotions are my demons,” Bourgeois confesses, then states that her wounds from childhood motivated a half-century of extraordinary personal art on the cusp of modernism and post-modernism, often about being female and the imprisoned body. This ambitious documentary has been in the making since 1992; Marion Cajori died of cancer in 2006, before it was finished. 99 minutes | MFA : November 6, 8, 13, 20, 21, 23, 28, 30

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Long before the threat of swine flu, Mexico was the scene of an outbreak of a very different kind: Modernism.
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Trail of tunes
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Festival atmosphere
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States of the art
In New England, where you can't swing a sack of cranberries without hitting a venerable cultural institution, anyone with access to a car (or even a subway pass) can scope out these topnotch art museums.
French disconnections
Last year's Boston French Film Festival featured Claude Chabrol's A Girl Cut in Two , and that, combined with this year's Chris Marker retrospective at the Harvard Film Archive and Agnès Varda's fine new The Beaches of Agnès , made it seem almost plausible that the New Wave might rise again.
Music as memory
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Pleasure principles
King Sunny Adé's music is bubbly as a tonic — a percolating, pop-infused update of the traditional Yoruba sound. "My songs are made to lift worries, so people can be happy and dance their troubles away," declares the 62-year-old Nigerian world-music star.
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In 1992, Nigerian juju master King Sunny Adé and his African Beats played the Park Plaza Hotel ballroom as part of the Boston Globe Jazz & Blues Festival. What I remember most vividly is the hypnotic overlap of undulating guitar lines.
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