The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston is launching a new Cafe Vienna series, doling out rich coffee and miniature sandwiches in a pop-up dining space inspired by the museum's current retrospective on Austrian artist-designer Koloman Moser.
In collaboration with Decorative Center Houston, the MFAH tapped interior designer Punita Valambhia to transform the museum restaurant into a fin-de-siècle European bistro with a contemporary twist. For the next three Mondays, guests can enjoy a small lunch inside the "cafe" followed by private tours of the Moser exhibit . . . all while the building is closed to the public.
"I've tried to evoke the show by concentrating on stripes and geometric patterns, elements that define much of Moser's work," Valambhia tells CultureMap.
"We've taken the silvers and golds and cobalt blues from the show and translated them into the cafe. It's like Koloman is alive and with us today."
A pivotal figure in the proto-modernist Vienna Secession movement (Austria-Hungary's answer to Art Nouveau), Moser would join artist Gustav Klimt and architect Josef Hoffman to create the influential Wiener Werkstätte studios to produce artistically-inspired functional household goods, examples of which are on display in the MFAH exhibition.
Café Vienna will pop up on the lower level of the Beck Building on Oct. 28, Nov. 4 and Nov. 11. Tickets to the event — available on the MFAH website — are $65 each and $55 for MFAH members.
Koloman Moser, Poster for Frommes Kalender, 1899, execution: Albert Berger, Vienna, colored lithograph on paper, Serge Sabarsky Collection, New York
Describing the new movie Pillionis almost an act of futility. It contains a variety of seemingly disparate parts that coalesce into a whole to make it utterly fascinating. Few other recent films have been able to walk the line between filthy and wholesome in quite the way this one does, and that’s only because few other filmmakers would actually dare to try.
It centers on Colin (Harry Melling), a meek man in his mid-thirties who still lives at home with his parents, Pete (Douglas Hodge) and Peggy (Lesley Sharp), while working a dead-end job giving out parking tickets. While performing in a barbershop quartet at his local pub, Colin catches the eye of biker Ray (Alexander Skarsgård), who summons him for a clandestine hook-up the following day (which just so happens to be Christmas Day).
With barely a word exchanged between them, Ray establishes a dominance over Colin that quickly leads to them starting a relationship in which Colin does anything Ray asks. And that means more than just sex: Colin, whether desperate for any kind of affection or unlocking a side of himself he hadn’t known, readily agrees to cook, clean, shop, and basically do whatever else Ray wants him to do.
Written and directed by first-time feature filmmaker Harry Lighton, the film is astonishing in the way it’s able to mine humor from Colin and Ray’s atypical bond. To call Ray “unfeeling” might not be totally accurate, but the way he treats Colin borders on cruel. However, the way Lighton structures the film, it’s easy to understand why someone like Colin would be willing to go along with the situation. It’s both hilarious and heartbreaking to see Colin debase himself in a variety of ways.
On the flip side is Colin’s heartfelt arc with his parents. It’s established right away that Peggy, who is sick with cancer, is a bit too involved with Colin’s love life, with the opening scene featuring her setting him up on a blind date. But their easy acceptance of his queerness and desire to see him find love is as heartwarming as it gets. The juxtaposition between the wholesomeness of their family and Colin’s new life is also the source of a good amount of comedy.
Lighton does not shy away from the sexual side of Colin and Ray’s relationship, and the scenes he depicts are as graphic as you are likely to see in an R-rated film. Some go up to and a little past what might be expected in a mainstream movie (including the use of a certain fake appendage). Other times they play out in a comical way to illustrate just how far Colin has progressed from the person he was when the film started.
Skarsgård, who stole the show in the Charli XCX movie The Moment, is the attraction in more ways than one in this film. The part calls for someone who’s not only impossibly handsome, but also a person who can stop dissent with just a glance, and he lives up to both qualities equally well. Melling, best known for playing Neville Longbottom in the Harry Potter movies, also embodies his role perfectly. He plays Colin as weak enough to be run roughshod over by Ray, but not so hopeless as to not be worth rooting for.
Pillion (which is the name of the secondary seat on a motorcycle on which Colin rides multiple times in the film) operates at a storytelling level that is difficult to achieve. Many people will not fully understand the film’s central relationship, but the way it is showcased by Lighton makes it compelling, gut-wrenching, and sexy.
