Films Seen - April 2002

[Pre-'96 films not included.]

ICE AGE (55) (dir., Chris Wedge) With the voices of Ray Romano, John Leguizamo, Denis Leary, Jack Black [Entertaining, though as much for external factors as anything onscreen - chuckling at the way psychobabble ("You've got issues") seems to have entered the realm of kiddie slang, wondering what percentage of the target audience realise the rhinos are a gay couple, musing that the unexpected stirring of paternal feelings seems to be rapidly emerging as a favourite theme in kid cartoons (doubtless a result of the writers being mostly arrested-adolescent types in their late 20s and early 30s). MONSTERS INC. had it too - ditto the central dynamic of taciturn big guy teamed with smaller live-wire - which is unfortunate, acting as a reminder of that film's superiority over this one : might've been easier to live with the tiresome back-story Manfred (a.k.a. Manny the Moody Mammoth) is allotted, human hunters having killed his own baby, etc. - making his bond with the kid both a second chance and act of inter-species redemption, blah blah blah - if we hadn't seen the graceful, instinctual way Sully got in touch with fatherhood in the Pixar movie, shamefacedly giving in to feelings he couldn't quite define (nothing here matches the poignancy of MONSTERS' last few seconds). Lacks a certain lightness of touch, which is not quite the same as a fast pace or an absence of dead spots ; also lacks plot twists (cf. MONSTERS), though the ratio of fun stuff : lame stuff isn't too discouraging. What's depressing is the knowledge that said ratio is deliberate, and different for each viewer - some will like the poop jokes, others the playground insults ("You waste of fur!"), others the adult touches and anachronistic wisecracks, others the Message about "looking out for each other" (only accident-prone squirrel Scrat, chasing an acorn with the fervour of Wile E. Coyote, seems designed to straddle demographics). Leguizamo's Sloth veers from sidekick to little kid, hapless Romeo to Jerry-Lewis spaz ; whole film gives the sense newcomers Fox stuffed their first foray in animation with everything that might possibly be considered 'cool' - smoothly effective strategy, but a little overdone. ICE AGE is so cool it's cold. Hey, I made a funny...]

TEARS OF THE BLACK TIGER (66) (dir., Wisit Sasanatieng) Chartchai Ngamsan, Stella Malucchi, Supakorn Kitsuwon [Girl in shocking-pink dress waits by lime-green gazebo in the pouring rain. Cowboy dude with pencil-thin moustache throws his head back and laughs in stylised manner ("Ha! Ha! Ha!"). Thai pop music patters on the soundtrack, duelling rivals stand before a giant painted backdrop of a yellow sun. A rough cinematic equivalent to the Avalanches' "Frontier Psychiatrist" (anyone doesn't know what I'm talking about, check out the "Since I Left You" album pronto), mixing and matching all kinds of madness in a loose Western framework, sampling Sergio Leone iconography - a showdown, a harmonica - even as the bandits use machine-guns and the plot reeks of old-style romantic melodrama (and the mix of Third World class conflict and bloody action echoes ANTONIO DAS MORTES) ; post-modern to the max, making you wonder if emotional impact can survive the self-conscious tone ("Did you catch that?" asks an intertitle after a particularly nifty bit of shooting ; "If not, we'll play it again!"). Answer turns out to be 'yes (but only just)', helped by lyrical touches - a drop of blood turns a whole river red - and the rapt, soulful performances, caught up in the film's private world - and of course the whole thing is such an Experience, with its candy colours and dressed-up folk-tale ambience. Unironically ironic, or perhaps vice versa.]

BANDITS (47) (dir., Barry Levinson) Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thornton, Cate Blanchett [Definition of the phrase 'film you forget even as you're watching it' : three stars in artificially quirky roles, script that takes refuge in conversations about Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart" ("a haiku to the complexity of love", apparently), director trying to jazz it all up via pointless flashback structure, random cuts to b&w and the dazzling (not!) conceit of a tabloid-crime TV show where our heroes are being interviewed. Offensively lazy in the way it falls back on trite, arbitrary characters, incoherence pardoned 'cause it's all just a lark - charming thieves (you'd think HUDSON HAWK would've taught Willis something), suave ladies' man vs. querulous hypochondriac, wacky dame with a yen for 80s pop classics getting in the way - especially with so much talent behind it ; then again, there is a lot of talent behind it. Empty vanity project, scrambling around for colourful distractions to hide its lack of ideas (neither the suavity nor the hypochondria are actually used in the plot), but Dante Spinotti again shows his gift for precise, self-enclosed worlds (Blanchett singing on the beach far too lovingly burnished an image for mere 'realism'), and of course I'd pay to watch Cate and Billy Bob read the phone-book - which might actually be an improvement over dialogue about Neil Young albums and outlandish phobias ("I'm afraid of Charles Laughton, actually"). Not awful, just unnecessary.]

THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES (48) (dir., Mark Pellington) Richard Gere, Laura Linney, Alan Bates, Will Patton [Random observation : truly scary movies are the ones (BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, maybe THE OTHERS) where the various occult goings-on could easily turn out to be imaginary, merely the products of a damaged mind - those, in other words, where the victims' psychological breakdown is as disturbing as any external threat they face (or think they face). The problem with this one is precisely that Gere isn't scary enough - or just interesting enough - as a character, his travails never really dovetailing with any inner demons : we know he loves (though doesn't seem obsessed by) his dead wife, but he's mostly just an ordinary, rather neutral guy who finds himself involved in some weird shit. The weird shit in question is impressively done - out-of-focus to suggest dislocation, eerie-ethereal score with occasional bursts of static, couple of extraordinary dream flashes with a brown-filtered look, like they've been soaked in a puddle of dirty water - and the film grips for a while, but there's a reason why "X-Files" episodes only run an hour ; style can't save it when it runs out of steam, and indeed becomes something of a liability - the final section, waiting around for "something terrible" to happen, seems even hollower for being flashy, and Pellington's relish in the climactic disaster (dozens killed in a big-budget blow-out) seems a little obscene. Not much there, though I did like Bates' answer to the age-old conundrum of why these super-advanced beings don't just show themselves and explain what they want instead of dealing in signs and riddles ("You're more advanced than a cockroach ; have you ever explained yourself to one of them?"). Spoiler-laden question : What exactly do the Mothmen want of our hero? On the one hand, they use his wife to try and keep him away from the town - yet they're presumably the ones who sent him there in the first place ("to die," claims Bates), and Linney's dream obviously suggests he's fated to be around in order to save her. Am I missing something?...]

ASTERIX AND OBELIX: MISSION CLEOPATRA (50) (dir., Alain Chabat) Christian Clavier, Gérard Depardieu, Jamel Debbouze, Monica Bellucci, Alain Chabat [Never been a hardcore comix fan, but I guess this is how they feel when they see their beloved classics reproduced onscreen : the first "Asterix" movie was apparently a travesty (gave it a miss for that very reason), but this is like a childhood memory come to life, following the book closely both in plot and visuals and adding a handful of new jokes in the same spirit (a Roman named Antivirus, Gauls named Malcolmix and Mathieukassovix!). The big problem is pace, sluggish at best and grinding to a halt so often it's downright embarrassing, esp. compared to zippy Hollywood kidpics (if this makes money outside France, I'll eat my shoe) ; "Asterix" comic-books work on two levels, but this often feels like one level (adult, verbal humour) trying and failing to please the other (kiddie slapstick, done on a big budget) - all a bit talky and fussy and middle-aged, rather out-of-touch in its references (ZZ Top? THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK?) : it's refreshing that a fight scene takes a swipe at badly-dubbed kung-fu flicks of the 70s, but the SHREK-weaned audience needs its stale MATRIX gag. Not that I'm complaining exactly, but watching a comedy failing to connect with its target audience - or indeed any audience - isn't a happy experience ; bonus points for a crocodile named Serge, a mule named Cannabis and the startling moment when we cut from a battle scene ("Let us now leave this scene of violence...") to a documentary on the sex lives of lobsters. Extra-bonus points for taking the Otis-elevator gag in KATE AND LEOPOLD and actually making it halfway-funny this time. Misjudged film with treasurable moments, not to mention all the old favourites - the Sphinx, the poisoned cake, the pirates ; pretty sure that "Raft of the Medusa" gag is in fact from "Asterix the Legionary", but whatever...]

MEAN MACHINE (24) (dir., Barry Skolnick) Vinnie Jones, David Kelly, David Hemmings, Danny Dyer, Jason Statham [Seemed like a good idea at the time - watch the original (THE LONGEST YARD) back-to-back with this British remake, substituting real football (sorry, Yank readers) for the American variety. Result? 99 minutes of head-shaking and tongue-clicking, racking up misjudgments, wrong decisions and things I'd seen done better just a couple of hours before - so much so I'm starting to think the rating may be unreliably harsh, first impressions getting in the way and so forth (though it's not like I found the original all that great). Then again, it's surely (i.e. objectively) a dumb idea to dilute the impact of the warden - one of YARD's strongest elements - by introducing him later in the story and refracting him through the more powerful figure of the 'king con', losing all the mano-a-mano conflict and anti-authoritarian overtones - just as it's surely (i.e. objectively) a cliché to have the hero win his fellow cons' respect by intervening to protect a black inmate from a racist guard (Reynolds in the original simply appealed to their baser instincts, viz. the violence they can wreak on the guards during a football match ; the whole character was much less sympathetic, a weak-willed cynic who sticks his neck out for nobody). And it's surely counter-productive to focus on the cons' fights and rivalries instead of their oppression by the common enemy (except of course it makes them more macho, allowing everyone to act 'hard') , and it's surely insane to have the prisoners go 2-0 up in the climactic game, so we instinctively start rooting for the guards to equalise (except someone obviously thought it'd be 'boring' to play the match in time-honoured victory-from-the-jaws-of-defeat structure) ; and it's surely a depressing sign of the times that the warden's secretary, who previously gave herself to our hero with the sweetly rueful "I'm as far from Tallahassee as you are", now offers the glibly Girl Power-ish "This is strictly sex, you understand - I won't respect you in the morning", almost as depressing as the fact that it's now the heroes (rather than the villains) who play dirty in the football finale. Charitable fans may prefer to read that as a veiled homage to Jones's reputation as a 'hard man' in his playing days - and will doubtless be amused by the rudimentary way he scores the winning goal (no dodging and dribbling for Hod-Carrier Vinnie) - but this really is a bad movie : muddled, slapdash, pointlessly aggressive, sub-Guy Ritchie laddish, prone to comic violence set to jaunty music, playing for laughs when all else fails. Weirdest bit of criminal inflation : the fearsome prisoner called Monk, who'd killed 5 people with his bare hands in the original - but has now killed 23. Serial-killer market's so competitive these days...]

LIAM (64) (dir., Stephen Frears) Ian Hart, Claire Hackett, Anthony Borrows, Megan Burns, David Hart, Anne Reid [ANGELA'S ASHES territory, but Frears is up to something much more sophisticated (though I did miss the rollicking rhythms of the Parker yarn) : rendering a childhood (and indeed a society) as a collection of rules and rituals, most obviously the heavy-handed strictures of Catholicism - but also social norms and the repeated rituals of family life (eldest son relinquishing the 'good chair' every evening when Dad comes home from work, little Liam brushing Mum's hair to "soothe your nerves"), not to mention the symbolic stammer which can only be tamed by imposing structure on the words (singing instead of speaking them). More ambivalent than perhaps it seems, given how absurdly over-the-top the priests preaching hellfire are : stoic little Liam isn't necessarily unhappy, given a coherent framework by the endless rules in his life (Communion, washing away his sins, also removes his stammer) - it's just that a ritualised society works as a kind of bubble, shutting out reality, which is doubly dangerous when the rules constantly instil guilt in children (once the bubble bursts, as it does for Liam's father, guilt can only be relieved by lashing out). Uncommonly honest memoir, more child's-eye view than most, deftly made, spiced with colourful vernacular ("Poor lad's starving, look at him - scared to walk over a grid") - but it's all incident, giving the impression it could end at any point with no great loss, and then when it does end it just seems contrived and melodramatic (though the very last scene is at least unexpected). Casting Ian and (kid brother?) David Hart as father and son must've seemed a good idea, but they look so similar it's actually incredibly distracting ; so much for family.]

OUR LADY OF THE ASSASSINS (40) (dir., Barbet Schroeder) German Jaramillo, Anderson Ballesteros, Juan David Restrepo [Mr. Jaramillo - or perhaps writer Fernando Vallejo, who appears to have based the character none-too-loosely on himself - should probably team up with Bahman Farmanara from SMELL OF CAMPHOR, FRAGRANCE OF JASMINE : then they could spend their days in middle-aged self-centredness, dissing various easy targets in their respective countries, waxing nostalgic over this and that, talking portentously of Death and generally affirming their status as rebels, intellectuals and superior people - though hopefully without a camera around to record it all. The main difference is that Farmanara grumbled mostly to himself whereas Jaramillo / Vallejo gets a succession of teenage acolytes / catamites to laugh admiringly and say "You're so crazy" as he takes pot-shots at the Pope, Simon Bolivar and the state of Colombian society, not to mention soccer and loud rock music - all while the audience drums its fingers, wondering if the central dynamic is going to develop at all (it doesn't) and what the point is of filming on location in Medellin if we're only going to see an empty apartment and a few nondescript side-streets (could it be the attraction of lurid in-the-belly-of-the-beast anecdotes to beef up the press notes?). Gives the impression of a film made for its own sake, not necessarily with an audience in mind - maybe Schroeder fancied the adventure (bit of excitement in his twilight years) and Vallejo fancied flaunting his morbid cynicism ("Everything in this world ends", "Taking someone's life is doing them a favour", etc) and glib attempts at blasphemy - which would also explain why it all looks so flat, like no-one really cared to make it interesting : overlit or just evenly-lit, like a sitcom or indeed like porn (which actually sounds quite intriguing, if there were any indication it might be deliberate). Tedious gay windbag gets his wish-fulfilment fantasy, film-maker tags along in jungle-boots and pith helmet, everyone feels very brave and pleased with themselves. Be there or be somewhere else.]

SHIRI (56) (dir., Kang Je-gyu) Han Suk-kyu, Choi Min-sik, Kim Yoon-jin [Korean action crowd-pleaser, generally medium-cool. Visuals gleam without trying to dazzle a la NOWHERE TO HIDE, plot is often dopey - sometimes in a good way (loved the elaborate McGuffin, a super-weapon that can lay waste to entire cities but only if someone points a light at it for half-an-hour first), sometimes just plain dopey - and political comment about reconciliation between the two Koreas obviously means more to a local audience. Works fine as a yarn, with impressive shoot-outs - camera darting all over the place - and a ticking-bomb finale, though it does seem to give everything more or less the same emphasis (exploding skyscraper sequence seems especially perfunctory, though that's obviously a case of post-WTC sensitivities) ; on this evidence, Kang's next project could as easily be a moody neo-noir as a Jean-Cluade Van Damme vehicle. Silliest subtitle : "Did you go to alcohol cessation class today?".]

THE DEVIL'S BACKBONE (58) (dir., Guillermo Del Toro) Fernando Tielve, Federico Luppi, Eduardo Noriega, Marisa Paredes [Slight sense (as in CRONOS) of prosaic story gussied up with amber filters and looming shadows, not to mention a gratuitous Civil War backdrop : 'Sight & Sound' (in a glowing review) reckons the narrative "echoes the conflict between the two Spains played out in the Civil War itself : the scientific rationalism of the Leftist schoolmaster versus the supernatural irrationalism implicitly embodied by fascism" - but that "implicitly" leaves a lot of leeway in my opinion, and (more importantly) the film is structured in a way that makes such conflict non-existent, having shown its supernatural elements pretty unequivocally from the first (unless it's saying scientific rationalism - hence, presumably, the Leftist side - is fundamentally misguided, which seems a bit of a stretch). Much more likely that Del Toro simply felt the war added spice to a stale storyline, ditto the details of the rather Dickensian boarding school (best bit : new kid in an empty dorm takes a suspicious sniff of the industrial-strength bar of soap he's been issued) and various other colourful elements - artificial leg, unexploded bomb - even though none of them gets developed to the extent where you feel they had to be there (they're just props, like the strikingly barren Spanish landscape around it all). Glides along pleasantly but predictably, with a not-so-scary ghost and boringly villainous Noriega (attempted back-story never really fleshes out the character), fortunately ends on a high : stirring climax is straight out of a Boys' Own adventure story, kids improvising weapons as they're forced to fend for themselves, while the memorably gruesome final Act - heavy on the small corpses - illustrates why Del Toro must have been tempted to return to his roots after his American sojourn. I get the feeling we're not in Hollywood anymore...]

COLLATERAL DAMAGE (36) (dir., Andrew Davis) Arnold Schwarzenegger, Elias Koteas, Francesca Neri, Cliff Curtis, John Leguizamo, John Turturro [Things I've learned from Arnie : (i) a major explosion can't hurt you, as long as you leap away to the side just before the blast ; (ii) being struck repeatedly with a metal bar or rifle-butt is not that bad, though it'll make you scrunch your eyes up with pain a little ; (iii) if travelling incognito in a Third World country, do take time to protect a woman and her child from street punks, even though it immediately makes you conspicuous (they may turn out - you never know - to be the wife and child of the man you are tracking) ; (iv) if all else fails, pretend to be German. Shamefully enjoyable for the first hour or so, while the big guy's galumphing round Colombia being upstaged by fast-talking actors (Turturro, Leguizamo) more nimble than himself ; not so great once the quarry is discovered and battle is joined, making for a line of uninspired action set-pieces. Neither good nor dire, notable mainly for another glimpse of the New Red-Bloodedness, Koteas' special agent (who'd certainly have been a villain 5 years ago) sneering at those who'd negotiate with terrorists, Arnie taking matters into his own hands when authorities prove timid, and the rebel leader musing that "Americans have forgotten the reality of war" (which is more or less the same message as in BLACK HAWK DOWN). Where is all this leading us, my fellow wimps?...]

WE WERE SOLDIERS (33) (dir., Randall Wallace) Mel Gibson, Madeleine Stowe, Greg Kinnear, Chris Klein [Weird, lopsided hierarchy going on here : at the top (nominally) are the generals and politicians, mostly unseen but invariably clueless and irrelevant ; in the middle are the field commanders in the battle itself, ranging from 'mere' brilliant strategists (on the Vietcong side) to out-and-out supermen - Gibson's heroic colonel, who combines unbounded courage with undimmed compassion, gung-ho soldiery with the smarts of a bookworm, prays with his kids then makes fiery love to his wife ; then, at the bottom, just below their exalted commanders, are the soldiers themselves, whose role is to die as frequently and graphically as possible. It's the cinematic equivalent of those WWI CO's (think George Macready in PATHS OF GLORY) lost in grand strategies, glorying in the myth of the brave, patriotic soldier, not especially caring that each arrow on their maps represents thousands of men getting killed - except that it's even more perverse, because it wants to feel the soldiers' pain (dedicated to the young men "of both sides" who lost their lives) even as it's wallowing in their gruesome deaths (a bugler gets it in the neck as he draws breath to blow ; a baby-faced soldier dies in close-up, saying "Tell my wife I love her" ; every time we get to know anyone, that's the cue for them to die horribly). Obviously enjoys the wargames, doesn't just reduce them to Playstation stylistics a la BLACK HAWK DOWN, but at least that film was honest about dehumanising everything - this is more like those experiments where apes are offered food then get an electric shock when they reach out to take it (after a while, we don't want to know anyone, simply watch the battle unfold with detached, academic respect for the logistics involved). Endorsement of macho values is a little startling, wives pretty much reduced to housework and shopping (gotta love that bizarre cut from the roar of battle to the whirr of a vacuum cleaner, though) ; prayer scene suggesting God takes sides in war had me double-taking, ditto scene suggesting patriotic glory of soldiering somehow redeems racial discrimination. "What's a war, daddy?" asks nauseating moppet ; "Something that shouldn't happen, but it does," replies Gibson, typifying the film's schizophrenia (and not exactly explaining why this particular war required America to be in Vietnam in the first place). "We were soldiers once ... and young," tolls portentous voice-over at the end, and the camera pans mournfully across the Vietnam War Memorial, with the names of all the folks we've just seen getting burned, blown up and dismembered in full gory detail : so poignant, yet so satisfyingly brutal (not to mention hypocritical). Isn't Madeleine Stowe supposed to be really picky about the roles she plays? Was it the attraction of batting her eyes at Mel, or is she some kind of warmonger fascist-militarist babe in real life? I think we should be told...]

KATE AND LEOPOLD (29) (dir., James Mangold) Meg Ryan, Hugh Jackman, Liev Schreiber, Breckin Meyer [Pleasant enough, but it's so incredibly shoddy. The reactionary agenda is bad enough - modern Meg, unhappy career woman, finds happiness (and femininity) with an old-fashioned man who believes in candlelight dinners and stands up when a lady leaves the table - but the real canker is the way romantic longing is used to disguise lazy plotting and an utter lack of conviction. Unconvincing stuff starts early, with 21st-century Time-traveller Schreiber taking photos with a pocket camera in a 19th-century public place, instantly calling attention to himself (a guy with a cumbersome flash-camera also wanders by, just to make sure we get it ; Mangold's target audience are people unaware that miniature cameras hadn't been invented in 1876), continues through Meyer thinking man-out-of-Time Jackman is a Method actor permanently 'in character' as a 19th-century Duke - which is bad enough, see also NURSE BETTY - basing his theory on having seen him recite the plot of "Pirates of Penzance" to a little kid (and of course you'd have to be a professional actor to do that), culminates in a twist ending that's just ridiculous, not to say inept (spoiler-laden question : how can she appear in the photos Stuart took if she clearly arrives at the stroke of midnight, long after he's gone?). Whole thing seems conceived as a kind of cartoonish comedy - it's certainly the least magical Time-travel movie of all time - or maybe the cartoonish bits are just an easy fix, like "Moon River" on the soundtrack. Leopold's attraction seems to be that he slows everyone down, teaches them a more tranquil rhythm - softens Meg, calms her rowdy brother, even trains the dog not to bark - and the point seems to be for the audience to follow suit, smiling at the 'heartwarming' mush and ignoring all the lazy incompetence : it works, in other words, as a cinematic lobotomy. Minor annoyances include Meyer doing accents (to prove he's an actor) and 19th-century architect dude talking about his "glorious erection" four different times (we get it! we get it!). Jackman's charming but Meg looks a bit bedraggled, as though the perkiness were becoming an effort ; 40th birthday sure can mess with a girl's head sometimes...]

VERSUS (44) (dir., Ryuhei Kitamura) Tak Sakaguchi, Hideo Sakaki, Kenji Matsuda, Yuichiro Arai [Martial arts. Mexican stand-offs. Japanese zombies. Really big guns. What's not to like? Nothing, on paper - but it's wall-to-wall action, hardly shaped at all, pitched and paced relentlessly at the same level, and finally as tedious as any two hours of unrelieved slapstick would be. Best character : the thug who looks like a Japanese Vincent Cassel and mutates at the climax - for no discernible reason - into a kind of human insect. Best shot : fist crashes through a skull and out the other side, splattering its contents to the ground - followed by a POV from inside the head, where the brains used to be, showing open fields framed by the outlines of the hole in the head. Most sophisticated gag : the Yakuza who claims to have trained with the FBI, and confuses everyone by peppering his talk with English words like "expert" and "fighter". Personal Caveat I : saw it in two one-hour screenings over two days, which is probably the best way to see it ; deduct 4 points if watching it in one exhausting block. Personal Caveat II : never really been a massive fan of the comic-book splatter movie, so add 10 points if you're heavily into this stuff - I mean, I don't even really love EVIL DEAD 2, for crying out loud. Except where Ash does battle with his own possessed hand, of course, and the hand suddenly goes for the machete, dragging him across the floor. That was awesome.]

HUMAN RESOURCES (60) (dir., Laurent Cantet) Jalil Lespert, Jean-Claude Vallod, Chantal Barré, Lucien Longueville [Crushing disappointment : I was on a 74 - Top Ten material - fully an hour into this one, till it all collapsed in disastrous one-sidedness. Early stages find a perfect balance, not just focusing on detail of life in the workplace (segregated canteens and rigid hierarchies, topped by the lordly figure of "the boss"), not just showcasing intelligent, apparently improvised dialogue on grown-up stuff like the 35-hour week (a rapid-fire session round the negotiating table has the undiluted passion of the lengthy debate in LAND AND FREEDOM), but also managing to set up the sides - Labour and Management - so we sympathise with one yet identify with the other : the execs work more hours, and shun outdated Communist rhetoric, and want the company to succeed, and listen to classical music in their cars - but they also wield power, and go on skiing holidays, and have it easier than the less attractive (but more admirable) workers. What's great about the set-up is the tension of inherent guilt (we know we're identifying with the wrong people, but it just makes more sense to), which is why it's offensive when the film then tries to punish us, as if we'd been merely insensitive : the second-half turnaround, separating into heroes and villains, is a travesty - not least because it crowds out the film's heart and soul, the stolid figure of the worker standing separate from both unions and management, seeing work as an anchor (the more monotonous the better). Vallod as the lumpish, unimaginative father - "Don't act clever" - may be servile and repressed, yet he also has a stubborn integrity - his own self-contained sense of space, which the film tramples in the name of Educating the Proletariat. The scene where our hero tells him off, forcing him to throw off his chains and join the union, is a classic case of didactic self-righteousness smothering those it claims to be protecting. All in all, a crying shame ; Cantet certainly has a way with actors, though...]