Films Seen - June 2002

[Pre-'96 films not included.]

SKIN OF MAN, HEART OF BEAST (73) (dir., Helene Angel) Serge Riaboukine, Bernard Blancan, Maaike Jansen [Male violence, and the women who deal with it : ignoring it, like the easy lay who tries to pretend nothing is wrong, can get you killed ; the very old view it philosophically, the very young process this brutal world as if it were a fairy-tale (very Bruno Bettelheim) - but must finally face it for what it is, staking their claim and screaming out their rage and frustration (the shift, significantly, comes with a first mention of school, "where you'll learn to read and write" - growing from blissful ignorance to a measure of autonomy). One could draw a parallel with abused women, who invent 'fairy-tales' ('he's depressed' / 'he loves me really') to explain the abuse, but the film works just fine as it is - volatile and wildly imaginative, full of sudden crying, yelling, dancing and a mind-blowing contrast, the serene little girl with the violence around her (great juxtaposition, even when the 'violence' is just a chorus of male voices singing). Angel puts the placid French countryside side-by-side with a culture scarred by evil fathers and the phantoms of old wars ("I've killed for France!" claims the psycho, seeking admittance to the club led by Algeria and Indochina), as well as macabre touches like the clack-clack of Coco's new teeth in the scary-funny fairy-tale supper, and comes up with the headiest brew this side of Neil Jordan (though actually much better than his rather woolly nightmares). Sensitive but pitiless, with a special knack for messing with your mind, flickering from nasty to lyrical and back again in the blink of an eye ; plenty of rough edges, but they're part of the deal.]

ORANGE COUNTY (52) (dir., Jake Kasdan) Colin Hanks, Schuyler Fisk, Jack Black, Catherine O'Hara, John Lithgow [Easy to imagine the pitch Kasdan (and uber-producer Scott Rudin) must've made to the plethora of names filling out the cast of this amiable comedy : "Not just a teenpic, a teenpic with a brain - one you'd actually want your kids to watch, not like nasty ROAD TRIP and those bad-role-model teens thinking only of extreme sports and trying to get laid". That last phrase is a direct quote from its hero, which is part of the problem : the dynamic has him searching for a "higher purpose" (seems he wants to be a writer), living in an "intellectual wasteland" where Britney Spears trumps Toni Morrison and Shakespeare gets less respect than Di Caprio - and it's seemingly played straight, the film shaking its head along with him at a landscape littered with stoner teens, neurotic parents, incompetent teachers and general money-worship. The effect veers between middle-aged, what's-the-world-coming-to priggishness (Ritalin in place of discipline! maids with their own therapists!) and a new kind of teen pandering - flattering the target audience not on its hedonism but its alienation, echoing the plaints of smarter-than-thou teens embarrassed by their family and friends : it's like GHOST WORLD played for cuddly laughs and positive messages, our hero finally realising he loves Orange County after all, which is not quite the same as Enid's realisation of her own inadequacy. Too-conservative and generally suspect, with Money triumphant in the end and Kevin Kline misused by Kasdan Jr. as he was by Sr., but it does have its pleasures (esp. compared to that nasty ROAD TRIP, etc) : clear, coherent comedy-of-disasters structure, cheerleaders shimmying to Crazy Town's "Butterfly", reference to a vampire show on TV that's really about the reunification of Germany ("Buffy"-subtext mania gone mad), splendid gallery of supporting comics, Jack Black saying "D'you want me to get naked and start the revolewtion?" - and of course the thrill of gawking at Hanks and Fisk, offspring of Tom and Sissy Spacek, respectively. Come to think of it - what with Jake also qualifying as Hollywood royalty - maybe the pitch was just "Be in this movie or I'll tell my parents"...]

UNFAITHFUL (50) (dir., Adrian Lyne) Diane Lane, Richard Gere, Olivier Martinez, Erik Per Sullivan [Unfaithful! Diane Lane is unfaithful! Oooh, unfaithful! Honestly didn't realise this was a remake of LA FEMME INFIDELE till the Big Twist, but it's hardly surprising given the Chabrol was a mordant joke about the bourgeoisie's talent for emerging unscathed (and even strengthened) from moral calamity whereas this is a cry of indignant disapproval that anyone should stray from the family hearth when they have a nice home and button-cute kid and sensitive husband who looks like Richard Gere into the bargain. Subtle for a while, while the wife is pondering whether or not to succumb (Lane does a lot with the little she's given), and domestic detail seems at first well-observed (kid reluctant to brush his teeth, wife telling husband he's got his sweater on backwards) - but there's nowhere to go once the deed is done except for the guilt to pile up, and it soon becomes clear we're meant to view family life as a kind of blissful nirvana, Lyne doing stuff like cross-cutting dinner en famille with a body being discovered in the town dump (how sweet is this, he says, as opposed to this). All a bit simplistic, playing gender roles as baldly as FATAL ATTRACTION - significantly, Lane's affair leads to her neglecting her duties as wife and mother - and connecting sex with pain as clearly (if implicitly) as 9 1/2 WEEKS, the sex itself a naughty 'bit of rough' with an Old World degenerate (even takes her to a Jacques Tati Festival!), not a million miles from the Western women drawn to Rudolph Valentino as THE SHEIK all those years ago. You have to wonder why Lyne decided to remake the Chabrol, given how repugnant its ending must appear to his moralistic worldview : unsurprisingly, it goes on and on, like a lawyer looking for a loophole, sinking into turgid melodrama and unnecessary confrontations ("What happened, Edward?") when it should have ended at the dinner party, and the business with the crystal globe. Martinez' Other Man is kind of laughable, symbolically offering hollow culture (he's a book-dealer, meaning he's surrounded by books but doesn't read them) and interrupting perfectly good English with cries of "Putain!" and "Allez!", but the others acquit themselves reasonably (did I mention Lane is pretty hot?). Gere trying to follow the instructions for a newly-bought DV camera ("Over here, honey!") gets my vote as the archetypal 00s Family Moment...]

THE PORNOGRAPHER (58) (dir., Bertrand Bonello) Jean-Pierre Léaud, Jérémie Rénier, Dominique Blanc, Catherine Mouchet [Starts as arthouse extension of BOOGIE NIGHTS - porn-monger not just a film-maker but a Tortured Artist too - ends with the title near-irrelevant, just a study of middle-aged dead-endness that could be happening to anyone (though the porn does ratchet up our hero's guilt quotient). All a red herring, quite deliberately, and it's obviously a clue that the 'pornographer' never appears in the same shot as the sex scene he's shooting (though I guess it could just be that Léaud wouldn't agree to it) ; detachment from the action is his trademark, like the ascetic style he shoots in (cf. his producer, who wants it cut fast "like a video clip") and his resignation from Life itself - his austere minimalism incidentally keeping the 60s flame alive, like the students who rebel by withdrawing into silence (the only true rebellion in an overstuffed world running on built-in obsolescence, like the computers you have to replace every couple of years). It all comes together, which is why it's satisfying - our hero trying at all times to reclaim "emotion" (even when he's talking blow-jobs with his lead actress), therefore out of place in his work as he is in his life - though it also feels pretentious and very secondhand, like Bonello's parroting from Greatest Art-Film Hits of the past few years : the dance-as-release scene near the end apes BEAU TRAVAIL, the ageing-revolutionary blues is pure Garrel, and Léaud is squarely in his IRMA VEP role - though he does it brilliantly, hands fluttering and eyebrows jiggling like the world's most effete Mad Scientist. He's a cinematic treasure, though of course a wildly unconvincing pornographer ; then again, it's not much more convincing when our hero's rich friend gives him a plot of land pretty much on a whim, or when angry teen Rénier goes to the movies at one point - sitting down to watch Joao Cesar Monteiro's multiplex smash A COMEDIA DE DEUS. Maybe M. Bonello can invite us to his planet someday...]

BIRTHDAY GIRL (61) (dir., Jez Butterworth) Ben Chaplin, Nicole Kidman, Vincent Cassel, Mathieu Kassovitz [Saw this most recently as B. MONKEY, if I'm not mistaken - diffident Brit has his life demolished by exotic siren, finally rescues her from criminal cohorts - only without the humour and dash of VERTIGO (sap betrayed by woman who is not what she seems) ; also without Ms. Kidman, who is not Asia Argento for worse and (mostly) for better - lacking an edge of wayward recklessness but also a much better actress, able to project a kind of grudging vulnerability without compromising her tough-cookie character (sensing that a good heart isn't quite the same as a soft one, and a prickly exterior may conceal the former without the latter), not to mention stylish smoulder and a killer Russian accent. The film is rather slapdash and none the worse for it, making room for a bondage fetish, a critique of "Cats" and a snooty hotel clerk with a massive framed portrait of himself on the wall behind him (even as baffling non sequiturs go, it's pretty wild) ; worthy Message underneath it all, of course - "Trust and Letting Go", and the complications thereof - plus a fair bit of sympathy for everyone involved : like its heroine, it's amoral on top and decent (as opposed to tender) underneath, though I'm guessing Butterworth's favourite character isn't Kidman or Chaplin's (well-played but unmemorable) hero but in fact Cassel, oozing sleazy charm and throwing his angular body in all directions. Jolly stuff with a slapstick looseness and sardonic mistrust of the corny and convenient (worm-that-turns angle isn't overplayed : nerd can't quite turn into a tough guy, nor does the gun-shaped lighter turn into a weapon) ; feels a bit contrived when the couple go on the road together, but you don't really mind. It's the kind of film that has to end up on the road sooner or later.]

SPIDER-MAN (76) (second viewing - 74, third viewing - 71) (dir., Sam Raimi) Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, James Franco, Willem Dafoe [Making blockbusters is a lot like making love, it turns out : you've got to take it slow, let it build a little, keep it human (unless of course you're a teenage boy, in which case fast and incoherent will do just as well). All the virtues of this sensationally good Hollywood tentpole are encapsulated in the held-long shot right after Peter's first triumph in Spidey costume - just the eyes in close-up behind the mask, dancing with excitement at his newfound power - or the long early scene between him and Mary Jane, where they glide around each other for a while and she says "You're taller than you look" : an earnestly emotional third dimension, wryly appropriate to a film whose hero must choose between helping others or pursuing power as a Nietzchian superman (apt analogy for a Hollywood movie choosing to connect with human frailties rather than indulge in expensive spectacle) and confirming Raimi's finally got it together, more-or-less remaking DARKMAN - the ending is identical - with added pathos, blending visual flair (the "costume possibilities" montage) with the psychological approach he's been pursuing in recent years. It's a very grounded film, eschewing irony as well as fantasy, emphasising the gritty everyday aspects of this most urban of superheroes - where would he be without tall buildings to climb? - in bits like the cynical editor (a reminder that Koepp also wrote THE PAPER) or assorted big-city types offering a vox-pop on our hero ("He stinks and I don't like him!" offers one citizen) ; maybe too grounded for some people, and it's true it doesn't offer anything like the visual abstractions of BATMAN (it's not abstract at all, actually) but it seems ungrateful to demand more poetry when the result is so poignant and compelling : didn't realise how un-invested I was in most superhero movies till I felt how raptly and attentively I was watching this one. Plotting gets a little ragged in the second half, things just happening without much transition, but it's easy to forgive as an analogue for the comic-strip style of stories told in panels (DICK TRACY had much the same m.o.) or even a cinematic equivalent for Spidey himself, flitting from rooftop to rooftop without much use for the bits in between ; old-fashioned values and generally affectionate portrait of the city, citizens turning out to save our hero's life at a crucial moment - cf. the malevolent metropolis in BATMAN - may be a reflection of a new national mood, post-Sept.11 (or, of course, may not) ; obviously lucky in its casting, Dunst's sharp little features perfectly complementing Maguire's moon-faced dreaminess, but I guess you make your own luck in these matters...] [Hard to say what changed on second and third viewing. It's not that I liked it less, exactly - more a dawning realisation that I was initially so thrilled to find a 'human dimension' to a comic-book movie, I chose to overlook how bitty the second half of the film is. Everything up to approx. where Spidey and Goblin meet outside Jameson's office is still fine - Maguire's exhilaration as his life changes is entirely charming - but then the rhythm gets choppy and ideas sort of evaporate (even the 'human dimension' doesn't really develop). Feels like a first-rate Origin Myth with a rushed, second-rate adventure tacked on, basically.]