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Pas sur la bouche (2003)
Gushy French musical for doe-eyed centenarians
What was this? Why was I here?
The trailer was sophisticatedly blasé suggesting that Alain Resnais had cast Audrey (Amélie) Tautou to target the American market, and that lantern-jawed Jalil Lespert would add to the film's swoon factor. So, expecting a saccharin romcom I had failed to do my homework on Google and I woke up three minutes into the film to a startling revelation.
'It's an operetta! No one told me!'
In our thrillseeking contemporary culture accelerated by Karen O's screams and the mentholated bandwidth of broadband wifi, people could question the 2-hour time investment required to watch a bigscreen adaptation of an obscure French-language three-act operetta which was first performed in 1925. Especially one which glorifies the frivolity of the Parisian jetset via music and rhyme, replaces location shots with deliberately stagey sets, and conceals a skeletal plot under the billowing skirts of witty ditties and fully-orchestrated vignettes.
The core tune, 'Pas Sur La Bouche', is typical of the film as a whole. It recounts how Eric Thomson (Lambert Wilson), a 'pudibond' (prudish) American businessmen, is too pent up to kiss girls on the lips. Four nubile sirens entreaty the fleeing entrepreneur for a covert snog, and through basic studio boomwork we are subjected to half-length shots of turgid choreography as the frigid, bespectacled yank retreats up the successive tiers of a grandstand. Does Mr Thomson suddenly succumb to the onslaught, staging an impromptu gangbang with the four nymphettes and confessing his concupiscence to a nearby priest? Of course not. It's 1925. Eric Thomson has never heard of Viagra. This is an operetta.
Which is fine if you're about 115 years old and you're into the genre. 'Pas Sur La Bouche' certainly seemed like a jolly, nostalgic outing for its dapper actors especially the slinky, hammy Sabine Azéma and the neurotic, unkempt Isabelle Nanty. Wouldn't we all leap at the chance to get dolled up in chintzy art deco garb and to dish up outmoded verbal conceits - in song - to the cinemagoing masses?
The plot is the kind of open-door/close-door farce that works well in theatre. Wealthy Socialite Gilberte (Azéma) hides her former marriage from Magnate husband Valandray (Pierre Arditi). Socialite flirts with Beau (Jalil Lespert), a struggling artist. Beau is courted by Belle (Audrey Tautou) yet he prefers Socialite. Belle confides in Socialite's Spinster sister (Isabelle Nanty), who assumes the role of matchmaker. Socialite's American ex-husband (Lambert Wilson) returns to buy Magnate's business. High jinks ensue. After much silliness all ends well.
So far, so Molière. The songs (by librettist André Bardé and Maurice Yvain, the Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd-Webber of their day) are jaunty and innocuous. They offer plenty of scope for the sort of theatrical winks and to-camera headtwists occasionally glimpsed in Abba videos. The standout tracklist below - with rhyming summaries to replace what can only be approximate subtitles - is an appeal to a less faithful rendering of the vaudeville format in future.
"Choeur d'entrée"
-Rich girls detail their passions for retail, fashions
-Subplot rake is overt about his chasing of skirt
-Magnate lets rip with his pet discourse: that devil, divorce.
"Comme j'aimerais mon mari"
-Socialite lauds the botox invigoration of toyboy flirtation
-Reveals her projection of six-packed ab onto spouse's flab
"Gilberte et Valandray"
-Socialite and Magnate engage in kitchen cajoling during lobster-boiling
-A warbled feuilleton about riches, kisses, dresses, bouillon
"Quand On N'a Pas Ce Que L'on Aime"
-Wallflowers debunk the inconstancy of hunks
-Hearts flutter, lips quiver, Spinster splutters, Belle shivers
"Pas Sur La Bouche"
-Stiff, suited yank avoids lolita hanky-pank
"Sur Le Quai Malaquais"
-Beau and Belle muse their future caress at a Seine-side address
-Dénouement will follow, with entire cast in tow
And that's about it. Burst into tears, not song. If you want a timewarp back to lavish musicals about Paris, dust off some old videos of Funny Face or Gigi and tap the heels of your black-and-white correspondent's shoes to Maurice Chevalier's 'Sank 'eavens for lee-toll gulls'. Or at least rent Moulin Rouge. It seems that the octogenarian Alain Resnais took heart from the box office success of 'Huit Femmes', François Ozon's singing, dancing allstar vehicle aimed purely at humiliating France's bouffoned-and-tucked grandes actrices. And what with the cinematic euros pouring into musicals of late - Topsy Turvy, Moulin Rouge, Chicago surely this operetta would provide succour to French audiences sickened by the rewind rape scenes of 'Irreversible' or the porno violence of 'Baise-Moi'? With that bobbed actress out of Amélie, it might even have turned a profit.
Zatôichi (2003)
Blood splats and tapdancing
Haven't seen Kill Bill yet, but this cartoonish samurai film by Takeshi Kitano was suitably twisted (in a good way), ultraviolent and lovable.
It retells the old kurosawa-via-spaghetti western vengeance tale of a lone samurai entering a remote village to defend lowly peasants against sadistic and grinning local kingpins. The predictable showdown is preceded by numerous superheroic deeds: both good samurai and evil samurai hastily dispatch scores of anonymous henchmen, ninjas, assassins and neer-do-wells. The attention paid to severed hands, blood splats and human sheesh-kebabs approaches high art. Several details make the film really fun: the swordmaster is a blind masseur, he is helped by a bitchy transvestite geisha, and the film ends with a bollywoodesque tapdancing extravaganza. And why not?
Mystic River (2003)
Copshow pilot with Hollywood stars
A slow-burning, semi-intelligent and extremely traditional thriller about three childhood friends reunited as adults through a murder. Predictably, the three street-playing kids are now the investigating detective, the victim's father and the suspected murderer.
Solidly acted by Sean Penn (somewhat bombastic) playing an ex-con revenge pop, Kevin Bacon (better) as an unheroically tense detective and Tim Robbins as a paedophile-abused murder suspect (subdued).
I won't bother revealing the plot. It's perhaps worth catching this well-crafted film on TV, but it is definitely not a cinematic film.
The oscars awarded to Sean Penn and Tim Robbins for what is, at base, a humdrum copshow pilot with Hollywood stars, suggest that Clint Eastwood, who directed, has a lot of friends in the Academy.
Spun (2002)
Overlong pop video
An overlong pop video by Jonas Akerlund about meta-amphetamine addicts in smalltown America.
Deliberately controversialist in that it shows the flipside of the American dream: motel-dwelling dropouts, trailer trash, pole dancing bimbos, corrupt cops, convenience store christians, hispanic teen-mums and cowboy junkies.
While the trailers were fantastic, the cut-cut-cut MTV-style editing -- split-screens, stop-action door-slams, visual conceit switchovers -- gets genuinely annoying about five minutes into the film. Add to this trendy excursions into low-tech animation and fast-forward porno, not to mention the casting of various disinterred celebrities (mickey rourke, debbie harry) and you have an example of all that is puerile about indie movies today.
A decent alt. soundtrack -- Billy Corgan's Zwan covering iron maiden -- helps give the film some cohesion, but there is not much going on that has not been done recently to far better effect in, say, Trainspotting, Requiem for a Dream, Being John Malkovich or even The Simpsons.
Cold Mountain (2003)
Inflated emotions
Another finely-crafted foray into 'English Patient' territory from Anthony Minghella. Impossible yet enduring love is cut short by the disasters of war. As costume drama goes, the focus is solipsistic and literary. Yet Nicole and Jude's impossibly handsome features suit what is at base an overblown but well-told love story.
There are, of course, notable interludes to the pore-scouring scenes of abstraction, hiraeth and loss: the gruesome battle scene of the first few minutes, Renée Zellweiger's calamityjaneisms as 'emancipated country female' and various revenge-shooting shenanigans in countryside shacks (reminiscent of 'The Outlaw Josey Wales'). These help to transform the film from a straightforward tearjerker-for-spinsters into the kind of engaging quiet-loud epic that never quite exceeds the constraints of the human bladder. All in all, a solid choice for boy-girl cinemagoing. All performances are strong, even if Jude Law's matinee-idol southern drawl shifts occasionally into self-caricature, with deservedly Oscar-winning comic interludes from Renée Zellweiger, Kiefer Sutherland as a pompous philandering reverend and a banjo-playing cameo from Jack White of the White Stripes. Perhaps the southern landscape could have been better filmed - the landscape-shots are less affectionate than in, say, 'O Brother Where Art Thou'.
Dôruzu (2002)
scopophilia justified
Beat Kitano's 'Dolls' offers lush, Moebius-like visuals and a slight return to the self-indulgent, forlorn road-movie territory of Hana-Bi with - for once - only a passing yakuza reference.
The silent, 2-minute-take wanderings of the protagonists mean that the pacing is slow. Much of the script must have read "Matsumoto and Sawako shuffle, pout, stare into middle-distance, pout and shuffle some more".
But the physiognomies are beautifully chiselled, the cinematography and locations are stunning, and the stock characters work well (groom jilts bride, fan meets crestfallen popstar, ageing gangster regrets life's love lost). If you were able to appreciate the beauty behind a similarly bleak Japanese film - the bum-numbing 'Eureka' - you'll like this too. For those who like less meditative cinema, watch Kitano's 'Brother' instead.
Russkiy kovcheg (2002)
Unfashionably sumptuous art-cinema
A meandering, ghostly wander through The Hermitage that is famous for being shot in a single 1 1/2 hour-long take.
An unseen steadycam-carrying narrator wanders through the palace accompanied by a fellow interloper and conversationalist - a ramrod-posture, opium-addled 19th century aesthete (a kind of Sar Peladan-Lavater-Max Schreck fusion). Together they lead us through the museum, commenting on Russian history, human nature and the perpetuity of art. Occasionally we see historical figures (tsars, tsarinas, soldiers, aging ballerinas and ruminant tourists) in a mixture of stiff domestic scenes and lavish state ceremonies. Several times, the camera lingers on paintings or works of art - a.o. El Greco's SS Peter and Paul, Rembrandt's Danaë and Prodigal Son, Sevres porcelain and malachite vases - where our aristocratic companion mutters incoherently on dandyish themes such as connoisseurship, Russia's mainlining of European culture and feminine charms.
And that's about it: over a thousand actors, a mile of marbled antechambers, staircases and throne rooms, with only minor qualms about cinema seat comfort. Half of me was screaming 'pretentious art bollocks' but the other half was enjoying the tour and the sheer opulence of the costumes, art and palace decor.
The Rules of Attraction (2002)
Begins with a technicolor yawn... then becomes one.
Roger Avary's (Pulp Fiction screenwriter) adaptation of the Brett Easton Ellis Novel. A pretty shallow film about self-obsessed middle-class freshmen at a New England college who conspicuously consume their way through suffocating student ennui by engaging in drunken shags, chemical abuse and keg-swilling frat parties.
Starts well, with fast-rewind action linking various threads in the narrative, but becomes boring with all the deliberate schlock (a pretty stomach churning suicide scene rivalling ken park) and inane psychobabble. The story centres around a bizarre love triangle: drug dealer questions but continues his beergoggle promiscuity, bisexual prettyboy fancies drug dealer, drug dealer's (virgin) female love interest finds drugdealer servicing her roommate.
One redeeming feature comes late on - a fast-forward monologue describing a bitplayer richkid's arrogant, seed-sowing jaunt through the bedsits, brothels and headshops of backpacker Europe: a Grand Tour subverted. Otherwise, it tries too hard to build a 'cult film' atmosphere of existential cool and detachment. And the comic scenes with the drugdealers reveal perhaps the worst acting I've seen since Flemish soap opera.
Angela's Ashes (1999)
Leprecorniness redeemed by a blarneystone script
The first half-hour of 'Angela's Ashes' suggests we are about to endure two hours of heartfelt, leprecorny sentimentality.
Are we really to feel enduring tugs-at-heartstrings at the conveyorbelt churn of dead babies from consumptive cradles to childsize coffins? Is Alan Parker simply reeling off a litany of post-potato famine misery, where the idealistic Ulster-born catastrophe-dad Malachy (Robert Carlyle) simply excretes dolemoney up pub walls as his guilt-ridden wife Angela (Emily Watson) succours a bedful of guttermouthed flearidden waifs?
Thankfully, things pick up just as we're about to slash our wrists.
Angela's Ashes turns into a clever rites of passage movie about transcending poverty. It takes humorous potshots at church hypocrisy, with the narrator Frankie achieving redemption through his natural intelligence and hard-work. The doleful caricatures - quizzical priests, tweedy schoolmasters, masturbating pubescents, Catholic grannies, a sourpuss moneylender - are gently mocked. The persistent Limerick rain cocks a snoot at Eire touristboard sunshine. And Frankie's ingenuous confessions lend solid comic relief to the miserabilist backdrop of damp and disease. So while we gawp at the realistically-portrayed suffering of conjunctivitis and tuberculosis, we can also laugh at tales of w***ing behind dry stone walls, of vomiting the host, of having 'protestant' hair.
Frankie keeps his eyes on the prize and this is of course as predictable as a second-rate Shane McGowan lyric: NYC, the Statue of Liberty, The American Dream.
Fararishtay kifti rost (2002)
Life's grim in the 'stans
A naturalistic film about a smalltime criminal who is duped into returning from Moscow to his Tajik village on the pretext that his wise, leather-skinned mother is dying. The corrupt locals want to collect his ten year-old debts by selling the dilapidated family home.
A vinnyjonesalike Tajik hardman - there is much lens-lingering on his fighter's cheekbones and thousand yard stare - our ex-con enters a period of langour, comatosing on vodka, kick-starting the village's movie projector (to edify the local drunks with Bollywood gorefests) and suffering occasional mild beatings. In-between, there is his offscreen attempted rape of a distant cousin and nurse (who, extremely disturbingly, falls in love with him), an ill-developed attempt to build paternal feelings for a cutesy illegitimate son, and the appearance of downmarket mafiosi 'from the city'. Further explanation would require plot-spoiling, but needless to say misanthropy rules and any audience hopes for redemption - or at least, some emotional depth - are ill-rewarded.
The film has extremely subdued pacing, stunted dialogue and uniformly cruel characters. Yet the passable cinematography and acting might engage minor anthropological interest. We witness a patriarchal society where women are kept behind curtain walls, hard-currency corruption is rife and a kingpin mayor calls the shots. Universals include the unforgiving nature of poverty-stricken communities and the gradual acceptance of death by the criminal's mother.
Best avoided. The film covers similar territory to the Iranian film 'The Wind Will Carry Us', but without depth of characterisation, long-distance landscape shots or high production values.
Nada (2001)
Rien de tout
I caught this Cuban film at at an arthouse film club. It was shown shortly after the magisterial 1935 Silly Symphony cartoon where the Isle of Symphony is reconciled with the Isle of Jazz. What with the recently deceased Ruben Gonzalez piped through speakers in this old cinema-ballroom and a Cuban flag hanging from peeling stucco rocaille motifs, the scene was set for a riproaring celebration of engaged filmmaking and synchronised hissing at the idiocies of Helms-Burton. But then the film started. And the cinema's peeling paint gradually became more interesting than the shoddy mess on-screen.
The storyline of Nada Mas promises much. Carla is a bored envelope-stamper at a Cuban post office. Her only escape from an altogether humdrum existence is to purloin letters and rewrite them, transforming basic interpersonal grunts into Brontëan outbursts of breathless emotion. Cue numerous shots of photogenic Cubans gushing with joy, grief, pity, terror and the like.
The problem is that the simplicity of the narrative is marred by endless excursions into film-school artiness, latino caricature, Marx brothers slapstick and even - during a particularly underwhelming editing trick - the celluloid scratching of a schoolkid defacement onto a character's face.
Unidimensional characters abound. Cunda, the boss at the post office, is a humourless dominatrix-nosferatu. Her boss-eyed accomplice, Concha, variously points fingers, eavesdrops and screeches. Cesar, the metalhead dolt and romantic interest, reveals hidden writing talent when Carla departs for Miami. A chase scene (in oh-so-hilarious fast-forward) is thrown in for good measure. All this would be fine in a Mortadello and Filemon comic strip, but in a black-and-white zero-FX flick with highbrow pretensions, ahem.
Nada Mas attempts to straddle the stile somewhere between the 'quirky-heroine-matchmakes-strangers' of Amelie and the 'poetry-as-great-redeemer' theme of Il Postino. Like Amelie, its protagonist is an eccentric single white female who combats impending spinsterdom by trying to bring magic into the lives of strangers. And like Il Postino, the film does not flinch from sustained recitals of poetry and a postman on a bicycle takes a romantic lead. Unfortunately, Nada Mas fails to capture the lushness and transcendence of either film.
There are two things that might merit watching this film in a late-night TV stupor. The first is the opening overhead shot of Carla on a checker-tiled floor, which cuts to the crossword puzzle she is working on. The second is to see Nada Mas as a cautionary example: our post Buena Vista Social Club obsession with Cuban artistic output can often blinker us into accepting any dross that features a bongo on the soundtrack. This film should not have merited a global release - films such as Waiting List and Guantanamera cover similar thematic territory far more successfully.
Dogville (2003)
Dogma Meets The Mystery Play
A knowing, assured movie in postmodern-renaissance mode, where wordsmith director and character actors form a group of players to deliver an edifying, moralising tale to groundling audiences. Clever narration and self-referencing asides ensure that the suspension of disbelief is polar: we engage with the characters, we disengage, we think, and the cycle continues through the chapters of the film. Literature students should burn their New Wave playwrights and study this.
So what can be said to convince sceptics to see this film, besides the acting, which nearly all reviewers (even the naysayers) applaud? First of all, small town observation to rival Ibsen, Harper Lee, Hugo Claus and Dylan Thomas. Second, a celebration of the English language's preponderance for homespun philosophising and absurd musings - I haven't heard actors speak their lines with such relish since 'Quills'. Third, a refreshing take on the kind of sentimental abuse-revenge narrative we have learned to hate since Sergio Leone was co-opted by Van Damme.
Stylistic criticisms have been amply covered by other reviews of the film. Naturalistic objections will no doubt plague viewers in the opening minutes: lush, virtuoso trompe l'oeil cinema this ain't, nor is it the kind of cinema verité we've come to expect from Dogma. Yet the intimacy of theatre and John Hurt's wry, avuncular narrator wins us over. The stage provides an unintrusive structure for big emotions, dialogue-focus and universalism. The minimalist decor, lighting and significant props (kitsch figurines, makeshift manacles) are worked into a deliberately contrived narrative. Most of all, so little of this 3-hour film is extraneous (with perhaps a few exceptional in-jokes - the Latin on the mine entrance for one, or the Ellis Island photo album to David Bowie's 'Young Americans' during the closing credits).
Luna Papa (1999)
Offbeat, bohemian comedy with Merchant Ivory production values
For those used to an anglo-saxon, Hollywood tradition of narrative movie-making, Luna Papa is a refreshing eyeopener. Imagine Ionesco on the big screen. It's a road movie of sorts, where armoured personnel carriers and crazed cattle-rustling pilots harrass our motley group of heroes as they drive their fabulous Volga across the lakes and landscapes of Tadzhikistan. For lovers of cinematography, the pure unadulterated sunshine and vibrant colours of the region suffuses the film with an uplifting warmth. Match this with some of the quirkiest bizarreries you're likely to have encountered: the heroine dances in a troupe of cabaret vegetables, her suitor electrocutes himself when proposing marriage, her father and brother will stop at nothing in hunting down her suspected inseminators. All in all, a thoroughly entertaining film. I won't tell you about the scene with the bull, but it's one of those cinematic moments that will stay in your head forever.