Austin Lyric Opera, the Austin Film Society and Alamo Drafthouse are screening Aki Kaurismaki’s moden retelling of the 19th-cenetury story on which the opera La Bohème–which opens November 7 in Austin–is based. Adapted from the novel Scenes de la vie de Boheme by Henri Murger, this 1992 film is a beautiful comedy about down-and-out artists in modern-day Paris. Kaurismaki, who also wrote the screen play, has created a kind of twilight world, half reverent, half ironic which allows the ideals and ardor of the nineteenth-century artist to persist even in these less idealistic times.
The New York Times said of the film, “Here is a fine, deceptively querulous comedy that mocks the conventions of art and romantic love while, at the same time, exalting them as the only means of salvation. Make no mistake about it: Mr. Kaurismaki is an original, one of the cinema’s most distinctive and idiosyncratic new artists, and possibly one of the most serious. La Vie de Bohème.”
La Vie De Bohème
Monday, October 26 @ 7pm, Alamo Drafthouse, 1120 S Lamar
Tickets: $10, $8 for AFS members