Films Seen - June 2001

[Pre-'96 films not included.]

TIGERLAND (60) (dir., Joel Schumacher) Colin Farrell, Matthew Davis, Shea Whigham, Cole Hauser [Pains me slightly to rate this above KIPPUR, which played similar documentary-style war games with a lot more veracity - but I did have a better time at this one (and there's no portentous face-painting either). Thoroughly hokey but very enjoyable account of a 21st-century dude - smart, snarky, self-aware, prone to saying things like "This is the scene where the troublemaker gets beaten by his buddies, right?" - somehow stuck among hopelessly square early-70s military types, who say "I shit you not" and spout macho crap about the joys of "soldiering" like they believe it (imagine FULL METAL JACKET with Joker as a sexy, dynamic hero instead of an ineffectual cut-up). Schumacher's Dogme-lite pretensions are of course insufferable - all the hot colours and free-flow camera moves, as though the film were raw and unvarnished when in fact it's swarming with clichés, from the psycho soldier ("Wilson, what are you doing? That's live ammo!") to the sensitive college boy taking notes so he can write it all down someday ; there's even a "bumpkin saint" who delivers a homespun philosophical speech - except the film explicitly identifies him as a bumpkin saint (to pre-empt our irony), and his speech is to the effect that "everything is shit", so it's obviously 'gritty' and 'real' and not a glib Hollywood scriptwriter's speech at all. Yet, on a basic level, the thing really works : sense of claustrophobia - men at close quarters - is tangible, performances rock, all kinds of energy keep bumping against each other and the hero's psychology is actually quite interesting - the way he shies away from any real friendship, the way he refuses to be defined (even as a hero), the way he always seems to be fighting against his nature, rebelling so he won't succumb (he could be a real good soldier, if he only let himself). Obviously Schumacher's best since FALLING DOWN - not exactly pure in heart, but that's the deal. At least he's upfront about being a king-size poseur.] 

MALENA (56) (dir., Giuseppe Tornatore) Giuseppe Sulfaro, Monica Bellucci, Luciano Federico [The work of a true vulgarian, which is what redeems it. Obviously sad that a cutesy trifle is crowding more deserving arthouse fare out of distribution, or that Miramax are putting money into this kind of unthreatening, prepackaged Euro-product - period setting, check ; picturesque village, check ; child interest, check ; spurious Message about beauty killed by sexual repression and hypocrisy in oppressive, unenlightened times, check - but it doesn't take away from the fact that Tornatore's making exactly the movie he wants to make. He's the kind of film-maker who'd break up a striking image of Malena sashaying down the beach road (framed by sea on one side, stone on the other) with a close-up of the bulge in our young hero's pants, or includes cartoonish fantasies of the kid lusting after her in various heroic guises ("Me Tarzan, you Malena") without even the nous - or delicacy - to make them resonate with a corresponding fantasy of coming to her rescue when the village is against her ; it's by no means a good film - yet it's not a phony, hypocritical film like CHOCOLAT either. Tornatore's sensibility is a village sensibility - he fills his crude cartoon with fart sounds and jacking-off and tits falling out and lots of hyperventilating Sicilians because 'that's what people like', not because he's trying to make fun of anyone (even dedicates the film to his father!), and he takes the village moral code for granted : CHOCOLAT (which couldn't even get the importance of Lent right) ends in harmony and fair-mindedness, both sides meeting each other halfway, but this ends quite simply with the village accepting Malena because she's become 'respectable' - having hounded her out and treated her abominably, they now take her back because she's been reunited with her husband (and she, instead of saying "To hell with you", acknowledges their polite greetings and joins them on the passegiata). Ironic that a film so actively conceived as 'product' should be so distinct from its mealy-mouthed stablemates - it's actually quite cruel, and impenitent on the pettiness and malice of village life, and more hardscrabble than CINEMA PARADISO which swaddled the harshness in 'the magic of the movies' ; sometimes funny too (liked our hero's determined expression as he carefully oils the bedsprings in preparation for a busy - albeit solitary - night), though it starts repeating its effects long before the end. A third-rate Fellini's second-rate AMARCORD, when you come right down to it ; but at least it's honest, according to its lights...]

THE MAN WHO CRIED (46) (dir., Sally Potter) Christina Ricci, John Turturro, Johnny Depp, Cate Blanchett [Ha! "So the little English girl has a secret. She is not what she seems, ha?". Stay your hand, knave! I am the villainous opera singer, twirling my moustache in a film of bold, vivid strokes. Let the music soar! Music and image be my touchstones - away with plot. Ah, the universal language! "But then what do I know? I ham-a just a foolish singer... Eccola! La bella bambola!". Wait! I am a sad-eyed gypsy, and I make love slowly, caressingly, and I brush my hand across a woman's face like a wisp of breeze on a summer's day. "All the children here are mine. And all the old ones are my parents". Yes. I am Cate Blanchett, putting on a fake Russian accent. "Vinter vas vinter in Moscow". I preen and pout and toss my head tragically. I'm the best thing by a mile in a good-looking film (Sacha Vierny!) with its head up its arse, too obsessed with swirling cinematic arpeggios to ever start making emotional sense. "We are safe in Paris. After all, this is the country where they wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Liberty, equality...". "You gypsies should go back where you belong. Why do they live like that? Because they are dirty, lazy thieves!". Unhand me, sir! - I am the pallid Englishwoman behind it all. I have learned to tango, and the blood of conquistadors courses through my veins. "Alora! ... So she speaks, la brunetta..."]

TWO FAMILY HOUSE (61) (dir., Raymond De Felitta) Michael Rispoli, Kelly Macdonald, Katherine Narducci [Not a lot to say about this one, except that it shows its hand far too early to no discernible advantage (is there any reason why the narrator's identity couldn't have been kept as a last-minute surprise?) and features a lovely performance by Mr. Rispoli, a John Goodman-type lug with an elfin Tom Hulce face. Also as delicate a tale of passion as I've seen all year, though it does go a little flat after the sparring turns to hesitant courtship turns to love ; bonus points for neither soft-pedalling nor adding little 00s riders to the 50s characters' casual racism and sexism, and for Kevin Conway as the drunkest, canniest, most obstreperous Irishman this side of Peter O'Toole.]

FOREVER MINE (58) (dir., Paul Schrader) Joseph Fiennes, Gretchen Mol, Ray Liotta ["It is the addition of strangeness to beauty that constitutes the Romantic character in Art," reads the opening caption, quoting Walter Pater - but the presence of an Angelo Badalamenti score conjures up much stranger (and more beautiful) films than this "Count of Monte Cristo"-ish scenario. "Give All To Love" reads an inscription on the wall - and Schrader does, though at least he has the good sense to cast cold-eyed Ray Liotta as the voice of cynicism ("What is this gibberish?" he protests when Fiennes starts to burble about his love being "like plants turning to the sun" ; "Nobody talks like this! Make sense!"). Otherwise, long lingering looks and pastel colours (lots of peach and pink), slow dancing in beachside hideaways, a love-letter sealed with a drop of blood, a heroine recognising her disfigured lover by his kiss ; aims for the delirious artifice of Sirk and Minnelli - hence, presumably, Mol's 50s-housewife hairstyle and a hero named Ripley (as in Ripley's "Believe It Or Not") - but it's both less and more than John Dahl-style pastiche. Plot isn't strong enough (though the lines are literate), but the dark, yearning undercurrents - the weight of Catholic guilt, the knowledge (expressed in the drab, punishing look of the second half) that you never can go back again - are as deeply-felt as the swooning romanticism ; when it turns into a fairytale at the very end - when the story of their love becomes a love story - it equates the story with the love itself, both of them a way of transcending / finding refuge from a harsh world. For us film-buff types, this is really rather touching.]

SUNSHINE (50) (dir., Istvan Szabo) Ralph Fiennes, Rosemary Harris, Rachel Weisz, Jennifer Ehle, Deborah Kara Unger [Easy to call it old-fashioned, but in fact this kind of thing is still quite common - only on TV mini-series, and at a much flabbier pace. The briskness is a blessing, the film never boring : its three hours could easily be two - or four, or six, which is precisely the problem. Years pass, shots and lines recur ("Please God, may we always go on singing"), themes re-stated from generation to generation - notably betrayal of ethnic identity, as one generation changes its name in the interests of assimilation, its children change their religion, finally a grandchild betrays his very Jewishness by agreeing to investigate a "Zionist plot" against the state ; a slight over-obviousness constantly threatens - a wife rebukes her husband for kowtowing to his superiors right after we've seen him do it, a deer-hunt symbolises moral corruption, someone raves about "the world of Communism, where exploitation will be unknown" (ha! funny!) ; and the thing never builds, simply rattles along, finally winding up in bathetic conclusion. "Politics has made a mess of our lives," twitters wise old Granny ; "Still, life was beautiful...". Yeah, sure, whatever. Funniest line (in context) : "Put the teddy bear down".]

THE PLEDGE (65) (dir., Sean Penn) Jack Nicholson, Robin Wright Penn, Benicio Del Toro, Tom Noonan [Shouldn't really talk about this one, seeing as it turned into such an epiphany for me. Wish I knew whether it's designed that way or whether I was just slow on the uptake, but it wasn't till about half an hour from the end when I suddenly realised what was going on, and everything suddenly came together - suddenly clicked that our hero hadn't been especially interested in Ms. Penn till he found out she had a little girl, that he built the child's swing teasingly close to the main road (that was the shot that woke me up, actually), that, on a hidden but important level, he didn't really care about them at all, only for his "pledge". It's a brilliant dynamic, doing what THE STRAIGHT STORY should've done and never did - taking the admirable moral steadfastness of a vanishing generation ("I made a promise! You're old enough to remember when that meant something!") and conflating it with dangerous obsession - but it's odd that it should sneak up on you (maybe it was just me), because Penn's effects are otherwise quite conspicuous : he's the kind of film-maker you forgive because he's thinking in terms of "Art", even though what he actually does is self-conscious and inorganic - stuff like showing the hero's alienation by having him wander out-of-focus through a roomful of in-focus revellers (it is a memorable effect - if only you weren't so constantly aware that Penn knows it), or the astonishing sequence at the turkey farm, or Noonan flaunting his MANHUNTER associations. Thought it was riveting (especially the last half-hour) ; but I'd really like to see it again with my eyes open...]

BAMBOOZLED (24) (dir., Spike Lee) Damon Wayans, Jada Pinkett-Smith, Savian Glover, Michael Rapaport [To quote Ms. Pinkett-Smith : "You know what? You're talkin' a hole in my head!". Minor points for the premise (might be more if I was American), but the execution is strident, leaden, headache-inducing and offensively bad - we don't even know if the show-within-a-show is a hit because people are taking its antiquated vaudeville ironically, like a SOUND OF MUSIC sing-a-long, or at face value (for a zealot like Lee, it presumably makes no difference : if the film has a point, it's the thoroughly humourless one that satire can never be an excuse for political incorrectness). Never understood these characters - never understood why Jada constantly raises objections as Wayans pitches the show to Rapaport, given that she's already agreed to go along with the idea (was Lee terrified people would misunderstand if he didn't actually have someone there making it clear the views expressed are not those of the director?) ; never understood why Wayans goes on live radio to defend the show just when he finally has his "small victory", i.e. proved his point about white America wanting only to see buffoonish black people. I don't think Lee understands them either, nor does he care - long before the end it's collapsed into crude showbiz in-jokes and lame gags about "Timmy Hillnigger" Jeans. The final montage, parading Old Hollywood's Negro characters, is perhaps the film's highlight, but also its greatest indictment : anyone who'd lump Ethel Waters (in, I think, CABIN IN THE SKY) together with the Stepin Fetchits and bug-eyed clowns, just because all of them happen to be black, may or may not have a right to talk about race - but he certainly has no business making movies.]

ANTITRUST (45) (dir., Peter Howitt) Ryan Phillippe, Tim Robbins, Rachael Leigh Cook, Claire Forlani [What's the matter with people? This is a guilty pleasure to rival HACKERS, esp. in the second half when everything's getting over-explained in absurd join-the-dots montages and Howitt intermittently goes nuts whipping up a frenzy of excitement - which is ironic, because much of the first half is spent having a laugh at the hyped-up world of computer geeks, where everything is new and "creative" and "radical" ("Challenge me!" orders Robbins' loopy Bill Gates figure ; "Surprise me! Defy me!") even though everyone actually conforms to exactly the same stunted geeky type ; you can tell it's written (albeit in his sleep) by a mordant fortysomething - Howard Franklin, of the underrated QUICK CHANGE - when Phillippe's buddy tells the other guys he's arranged a meeting with three venture capitalists, then preens roguishly as if they were hot chicks. Has its good points even as conspiracy thriller, actually (it's refreshing that the villains are always 'on' to our hero, instead of acting like morons), but you can't take it seriously when it goes totally wack so often and hilariously : the "not in the box, it's in the band" moment defies belief - wouldn't be fair to spoil it - but the villain's secret database containing ever-more-arcane information about the characters (not just what our hero is allergic to, but also who drove him to the hospital when he last had an attack) is also pretty funny. Other favourites : the "digital canvas" with its built-in sensor shimmering into life behind our hero, indicating that someone else is in the room (look out, Ryan!) ; the crooked cop being referred to in the secret database (for some reason) by a code-name, which could just be XYZ but is actually a reference to his person (so why not use his real name?) and just happens to be visible in a photo on his office wall which our hero just happens to spot in the nick of time (cue hysterical music and repeated zooms into ECU of his eyes) ; Claire Forlani suddenly leaping into action, grabbing a bread roll just before the hapless Phillippe sinks his teeth into it with the immortal line "Honey, no! ... Sesame seeds!!!".]

WATER DROPS ON BURNING ROCKS (53) (dir., Francois Ozon) Bernard Giraudeau, Malik Zidi, Ludivine Sagnier, Anna Thomson [Key shot here is the repeated image of two people staring out from adjoining windows, seen from outside, each one framed by his (or her) window - each trapped in their own little world, especially when we learn that the windows don't open. Impossibility of connection, windows-of-the-soul motif, windows-as-mirrors - and mirror images, hence the repeated dialogue ("I'm a good kisser") with the characters alternating roles, as if they all had a bit of each other within themselves - but Ozon's mind isn't really on the heavy stuff : he's having fun with an unabashedly artificial piece - leaving in all the 70s references (stereos instead of CDs, etc.) in Fassbinder's original play and adding a bum-wiggling disco number for added kitsch, even as he wraps the whole thing in mirthless laughs and decadent 'sophistication'. Minor but shapely, with a slight kick ; those caught up in its characters' emotional dilemmas may feel somewhat cheated ; those who consider themselves men (and women) of the world - no doubt including the ineffable M. Giraudeau - may find it hilarious.]

PISO PORTA / BACK DOOR (33) (dir., Yiorgos Tsemperopoulos) Constantinos Papademetriou, Antonis Kafetzopoulos [Hugely acclaimed in Greece, but I really don't think they'll be exporting this too much : it's just not very good, a coming-of-age tale alternately banal (maudlin piano music as our hero watches home-movies of his dead father) and unattractively gaudy - cross-cutting between the boy jacking off and a Latin-music trio crooning in a restaurant (the music crescendoing at the point of climax), or interrupting the flow for pointless flash-forwards of the kid being apparently led to jail (though what's actually happening turns out to be infinitely more pretentious). Best bit : the brothel scene, where our hero loses his virginity to a sub-Fellini whore who feeds him stuffed peppers and grumbles about her boyfriend in between absent-mindedly urging him on. Worst bits : a tie between our lad spiking the soup with acid at his parents' ultra-posh dinner party (stuffed shirts get high! chortle!) and the glimpse of a hippy commune complete with long-hair strumming his guitar in the corner, singing "Blowin' In The Wind". Most puzzling bit (did I miss something?) : the reference in a funeral oration to the dead father wanting to build tall buildings, "to create a new Athens - just like in Stuttgart". Why Stuttgart?...]

A ROOM FOR ROMEO BRASS (58) (dir., Shane Meadows) Andrew Shim, Ben Marshall, Paddy Considine [For about an hour, the director is invisible : characters act selfish, cruel and unreasonable - or, in one case, just plain weird - but nothing's being shoehorned, no-one's getting judged ; then it turns a misfit into an out-and-out villain and the whole thing just collapses, especially in the climactic confrontation, both crude and needless (it could easily have ended on Morell ordering Romeo out of the house, followed by a tentative reconciliation between the two boys). Presumably it's deliberate, Meadows setting out to make a film that begins in Ken Loach country and builds to the bold, naked strokes of a Hollywood melodrama, but the joins are visible - it just seems to judder suddenly into a different kind of movie - and it doesn't really make dramatic sense, because there's nothing to mark Morell out as a worse person than the various other thoughtless / flawed characters ; his comeuppance feels more like a lack of compassion, or at least a too-conventional ending (esp. coupled with the return to family values and sickly-sweet coda) for such an original movie. There's that peculiarly British / Irish mix of aggression and affection (see also THE GENERAL, THE VAN, even the Guy Ritchie movies to some extent), where you laugh indulgently then suddenly realise there's nothing to laugh about - the kids try to be macho ("don't walk away and disrespect me"), but they're too brutalised to be very cute - yet Meadows adds a little something of his own, something zany and undisciplined : you get the feeling he'd write in a herd of pink elephants if he felt like it, and arrange it so no-one bats an eye. Morell's an audacious creation, like a creature from another planet - or one of Mike Leigh's caricatures - and what's great is how his absurd babbling about his inner demons ("What unfolded then was this fight. Between me and this unseen entity") turns out in the end to be all too accurate ; what's not so great is that he actually stops babbling absurdly as he turns into a villain, which is just lazy and inconsistent (it really bugs me when films do that ; it's like Kevin Spacey losing the big words and starting to talk normally in the second hour of PAY IT FORWARD). Estimable, but somehow disappointing ; bonus points for The Specials over the opening credits, though.]

THE TAILOR OF PANAMA (62) (dir., John Boorman) Geoffrey Rush, Pierce Brosnan, Jamie Lee Curtis, Brendan Gleeson [More Le Carré than Boorman, which is definitely a good thing, though I'm assuming the CASABLANCA references weren't in the original novel ; that's what it's about, debunking the honour and self-sacrifice of the romantic spy story, and the scenes where characters parry barbed, Graham Greene-ish dialogue ("Where's your patriotism?" "I had it out in prison. Without an anaesthetic") are the kind of scintillating pleasure rarely to be had at the movies (the first Brosnan-Rush exchange, five minutes of gamesmanship wherein they both pretend to an upper-class Britishness neither of them actually possesses, is especially amusing given that the high-toned Brit-speak is being bandied about by an Australian and an Irishman). Alas, it gets muddled, partly because it doesn't establish the Rush character unequivocally as a romantic - makes it look like he's being motivated by money ('tailoring' his beliefs like he does his garments), which creates confusion when it then tries to contrast his (apparently newfound) idealism against Brosnan's mercenary attitude : comes off looking preachy when in fact the film was playful from the start - literally from the opening caption - needing only a consistent core of virtue against which to bounce its mischievous (but very real) cynicism. It's superb that it ends with the forces of Good accomplishing precisely nothing (at least in terms of influencing the course of events), that Noriega is identified as George Bush Sr.'s creature in a casual throwaway line, as if all thinking persons already knew that (as indeed they do), that the chief spy ('M' to Brosnan's anti-Bond) is last seen running around a hotel room in his underwear ; too diffuse, though - the ersatz-CASABLANCA world and world-as-it-is should be two different strands but emerge (as others have noted) more like two different movies. Is Brosnan to be commended for subverting his image, or is it more that he only has one schtick and it just looks better when he puts a little spin on it? Very funny, either way...]

THE GIFT (52) (dir., Sam Raimi) Cate Blanchett, Giovanni Ribisi, Greg Kinnear, Keanu Reeves, Hilary Swank ["I don't have anything to look forward to," says a girl in a small Southern town - unexpectedly reminding me of GEORGE WASHINGTON, which may be part of why this Gothic ghost story never really came together : unlike (say) WHAT LIES BENEATH, with its chillingly detached, geometric feel, this evokes a certain fuzzy lyricism - veined light, willow-shaded lakes, unnamed things stirring in the shadows : it's a Flannery O'Connor / SLING BLADE kind of world, and you expect the horror to be correspondingly eerie, yet the film operates entirely as a "boo!" movie - every time the heroine is alone in frame you just know she's about to be startled by a noise or run into someone unexpectedly, usually with a crashing chord or peal of thunder on the soundtrack as she turns and recoils. Raimi seems torn between his disreputable roots and nascent 'respectability' - it's a quality cast in a Paramount Classic, only with a Jerry Springer outlook, meaning it behaves like a character drama then suddenly erupts in little fits of violence with appropriately overheated visuals (the zoom into a corpse's gaping eye being perhaps the most vivid) ; it feels like a talky soap intermittently hijacked by horror-comic gremlins. Hard to say how it might've worked, but pushing the spooky Southern atmosphere would've been a start - all the God vs. Satan talk has a certain kick, and there's something nicely shivery when Ribisi turns into a Boo Radley figure at the very end ; otherwise notable mostly for Blanchett and some rare flashes of Raimi humour, like the QUICK AND THE DEAD-ish barrage of cuts to portentous close-ups when they're dragging the lake, think they've found the corpse - but it's only an old bicycle. The man loves to tease...]

ALL THE PRETTY HORSES (51) (dir., Billy Bob Thornton) Matt Damon, Henry Thomas, Lucas Black, Penelope Cruz [Didn't much like the book, but at least it had a kind of haunted starkness, something ornery and dusty and apparently authentic ; Robert Patrick has it, glimpsed for about two seconds in an early scene (his part no doubt slashed by post-production 'differences'), and there are little echoes of it here and there, as when the tough old dowager says that "in the end, we all get cured of our sentiments". Thomas and especially Damon (an actor I usually respond to) are all wrong, however - way too old, too noble, too sedate, too well-fed somehow - and it's all been airbrushed and Miramaxed into handsome Oscar-fodder, with horses galloping in pools of moonlight and occasional voice-over for that print-the-legend feeling, popping in at the end with a thoughtful little coda ("Lacey once asked me if God looks out for people...") so you know you're about to watch the last scene of the movie. Very much a plodder, though it doubtless hurts that the entire introduction seems to be missing - we barely know our heroes, so it doesn't quite make sense when they fuck with Blevins' mind on first meeting (they hadn't seemed particularly humorous) or go from no-hoper cowboys to champion mustang-tamers in the space of a scene (nor does Thornton change the rhythm or the emphasis). Hobbled and anaemic - apart from Black, who's simply amazing, not so much what he does as the purity of his demeanour, his unmediated, unreconstructed quality : he seems entirely untouched by the modern world, a young head full of ancient ghosts and superstitions - it's impossible to say what he might become when he grows up (maybe a Michael J. Pollard-style character actor?)*, impossible even to imagine him in the same business as the Josh Hartnetts and Jason Biggses. He gives a bland film character ; shouldn't this of all DVDs have featured masses of deleted scenes, though?...]

* : the IMDb informs me that he actually intends to be a professional fisherman (!) when he comes of age - but why let truth stand in the way of a little film-buffy speculation?

MA PETITE ENTREPRISE (56) (dir., Pierre Jolivet) Vincent Lindon, Francois Berléand, Roschdy Zem, Zabou [I see so few French popular hits - and so many arty critical hits - there's an irresistible temptation to un-French them, trying to find English-language equivalents for the goings-on. Berléand is obviously Alan Rickman-ish, Roschdy Zem has a Christian Slater quality (only bigger and more assertive), while the film as a whole is perhaps an Ealing comedy transplanted to the inner city (or of course outer city, i.e. banlieue) with a touch of the light-hearted heist movie - though actually belonging to a demotic working-class brand of comedy not much in vogue nowadays, especially in America (unless in sitcoms like "Roseanne" or "King of Queens"). Sad-sack hero Lindon isn't a smart-ass or a bungler - more Kevin Pollak than Tim Allen, the comic protagonist as working stiff in realistic surroundings ; that the film aims for laughs doesn't preclude social comment (e.g. the Arab immigrant kid), nor does it preclude its characters from acting like sexual beings, as when our hero and his ex-wife fumble for a mid-morning quickie in the warehouse ; go get a condom, she instructs, "I'll touch myself while I'm waiting". OK, so maybe there isn't any English-language equivalent...]

VOYAGES (68) (dir., Emmanuel Finkiel) Shulamit Adar, Esther Gorintin, Liliane Rovere [Three stories around (not about) the Holocaust - past, present and future : Poland (memories of Auschwitz) to Paris (trying, awkwardly and imperfectly, to connect with the past) to Israel (the future, where Time has already moved on, everyone is young and nobody speaks Yiddish). Definitely Kieslowskian, with invisible connections drawn (but not quite drawn) between the characters, paced for moments of stillness and a sense of being so close to the characters we can feel their heartbeat ; Finkiel has a gift for the momentary epiphany, the out-of-nowhere image that pulls you up short and makes you catch your breath. A beach full of swimmers is suddenly transfixed by a sunset, standing in the shallows like a forest of bodies ; a busload of elderly Holocaust survivors are flanked by another going in the same direction (on the road to Auschwitz), the passengers gazing at each other through rain-spattered glass - silently recognising each other as members of the same species. Lapidary craftsmanship, though the middle story doesn't work as well as the others ; a voyage from unresolvedness to a kind of closure, confusion to clarity, Eastern European murk to Middle Eastern light ; that the light is harsh and uncomfortable - and the ending offers only the smallest of mercies - is par for the course.]

LA MALADIE DE SACHS (74) (dir., Michel Deville) Albert Dupontel, Valérie Dréville, Dominique Reymond [Why isn't this film better known? Not one for the film-as-Art brigade, admittedly - old-fashioned, ineluctably 'humanist' - though Deville finds many a grace note in his fluid, nimble style (for instance : scene starts with an offscreen Dr. Sachs talking to a patient in his office ; patient nods, says goodbye, pan with him as he walks out the door ; pan back to Sachs for the first time and it's already a different scene, examining another patient minutes or hours later). Not really one for the film-as-narrative folks, either (though I was never bored), being a character study more than anything. Surely, though, the film-as-Life people, all the Loach and Leigh supporters should've championed it, wise and humorous and immensely moving as it is. Closest recent equivalent is perhaps IT ALL STARTS TODAY (with a doctor instead of a teacher), also focusing on a hero who's selfless, devoted yet often prickly, bad with small talk, not a schmoozer or team player. Sachs does sometimes seem impossibly virtuous (he rescues a drunk wandering by the side of the road ; he calls on patients "like a friend", just to see how they're doing), and the film goes wrong once or twice, as with the disaffected teenager he magically 'cures' (a reminder, perhaps, that Deville - like Tavernier - is pushing 70) ; yet it isn't out to preach - nor, unlike IT ALL STARTS TODAY, to rant about the state of the nation. It's the story of a good man - a devoted servant, like Atticus Finch or Dr. Akagi - but also an obsessive, and thus also the story of his obsessions - people's lives, and their faces and bodies, all the "banal" but important details of their being : Sachs is refracted through his patients (we're forever overhearing people's thoughts about him), and the film often stops to listen to this or that story, people swarming round him in all shapes and sizes, sharing their secrets (he is, of course, a surrogate for the film-maker - and the book he's writing bears the title of the film itself). Could've been sanctimonious, and triumphantly isn't ; funny, rich, paced at breakneck speed, its flaws dwarfed by the overall achievement. In a word, life-affirming.]

MY SEX LIFE, OR HOW I GOT INTO AN ARGUMENT (68) (dir., Arnaud Desplechin) Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Devos, Emmanuel Salinger, Jeanne Balibar ["Is there anything more sparkling, more dizzying than the possible?" says our hero, quoting Kierkegaard (it's the kind of film that would quote Kierkegaard) ; yet pursuing the impossible is precisely his trouble - longing for adventure, despising the safe bourgeois life even as a child, that "submission to the female order of things", yet arrested in adolescent yearning instead of moving on. Everyone here's looking for more (explicitly so in the semi-successful strand of the character who wants to be a priest without quite knowing why), yet too self-conscious and self-indulgent to face reality or do anything about it - end up torturing each other, over-rationalising, vain and dishonest at worst, "unhappy but funny" at best. The film copies the self-consciousness (an omniscient narrator constantly telling us what's about to happen), and, at three hours, certainly the self-indulgence ; and, like them, it's also looking for more - looking for lost-generation poetry in the parties and arguments and aimless bickering and intimate gossip about all the funny things people do during sex. Desplechin has a surprising quirky side, throwing in an out-of-nowhere dream sequence, a scarecrow hanging from a palm tree, a man in a white suit entering pursued by a monkey ; the whole film treads the line between seeing the world through its hero's eyes - everything that happens is important - and showing up his foolishness : "today is going to be Paul's greatest humiliation," intones the voice-over, but all that happens is a fellow teacher snubs him by not saying hello (which of course he turns in his mind into a major drama). This may, in the absence (so far) of THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE, be the most sophisticated film I've ever seen - maybe even more than (the very similar) LATE AUGUST, EARLY SEPTEMBER, because it's truly agnostic, both morally and spiritually ("cold and harsh," as our hero describes himself) : friendship is a cooler, less momentous thing here, love desultory, warmth not really an issue - there can be progress at the end, but never really tenderness. "Tenderness is the fear of adulthood," it replies, quoting Kundera (it's the kind of film that would quote Kundera), a nostalgic yearning for the snug world of children. Can there ever be a sadder line - or, perhaps, a truer? Wearying, excessive, precise, brilliantly acted ; M. Desplechin is the kind of genius who probably has no friends at all...]

LA FAUSSE SUIVANTE (46) (dir., Benoit Jacquot) Sandrine Kiberlain, Isabelle Huppert, Pierre Arditi, Mathieu Amalric [Less a film than an exercise : Jacquot and his starry cast film an 18th-century play (by Marivaux) more or less unadorned, setting it in an empty theatre to reinforce the fact that (a) all the characters are 'acting', masking their true emotions beneath their public personae, and (b) the result is unabashedly stagy, albeit filmed primarily in tight shots. Non-stop talk, most of it good, under-lit (to approximate kerosene lamps), evenly paced ; hard to hate - it is what it is - hard to cherish either ; imagine if Olivier's HENRY V had never moved beyond its theatrical opening. Amalric's newly-hatched look and anxious energy, playing moral corruption as 21st-century neurosis, pretty much steals the show.]