MURDER and Murder

Director: Yvonne Rainer, Yvonne Rainer, Yvonne Rainer, Yvonne Rainer, Yvonne Rainer, Yvonne Rainer, Yvonne Rainer

1996 / 113min / DCP

Rainer’s last feature is also one of her most personal, inspired by the lows and highs of a breast cancer diagnosis in the early 1990s, and the surprise of a burgeoning lesbian relationship. The latter is playfully refracted here through the love story of two women from very different backgrounds: Yvonne’s sixty-something screen counterpart Doris (Joanna Merlin) who gleefully announces that she “loves eating pussy,” and the younger academic she’s soon to move in with, Mildred (Kathleen Chalfant). A comic romance whose emotions are amplified by Rainer’s structural tomfoolery and signature intellectual rigor—with the director providing running commentary and appearing intermittently to address the camera—MURDER and murder probes the pleasures, and attendant questions, of late-in-life love affairs.

Yvonne Rainer in attendance for an introduction on Sunday, February 26th, at 3:15