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Reviews
Ex Machina (2014)
Slick Fantasy for Tech Bros
Tech bros will love this film. They will love the fantasy of designing gorgeous, anatomically complete female robots in a New Zealand-type hideaway. The robots fall in love with you and serve your every need - just like real babes!
Of course, things don't turn out perfectly in the end. But that's OK. Your best pickup lines don't always work either. Who can figure babes out?
Viewers who are not tech bros will see an unoriginal retelling of the Frankenstein myth, a one-dimensional villain, a melodramatic atmosphere of menace better suited to a TV show, and juvenile male notions of women and love.
For a more surprising and grownup treatment of a similar theme, see "Her" (2013).
Suzhou he (2000)
Shallow, Cliché-Ridden
The film's premise is promising: a tale whose events may be partially or entirely invented by a dreamy narrator under the influence of his colorful locality.
But in its execution, the film has all the depth of a music video or a perfume commercial. The story is a melodrama enacted by cartoon characters. Meimei and Moudan (mindless dolls who alternately tease and surrender to the protagonist) are mere projections of male adolescent fantasy. Mardar is similarly one-dimensional, shifting from kidnapper to romantic but revealing no inner life.
The film has two redeeming features. The cinematography beautifully depicts dilapidated aspects of Shanghai in faded colors. And the musical score provides an unusually varied and effective complement to the action.
Lazzaro felice (2018)
Simplistic Perspective on Society
"Happy as Lazzaro" is informed by a social critique favored by European intellectuals: because society is not perfect, it must be condemned in its entirety.
Such a critique is antithetical to art. Art calls for understanding of the many failures of humanity, not condemnation. It also calls for an awareness of how much about human affairs is unknowable.
The critique allows, however, for self-satisfied artistic preening, exemplified in this film by the dubiously chic character of Antonia (Alba Rohrwacher).
The Lost Daughter (2021)
A Masterpiece, If You Look in the Right Places
The most impressive feature of "The Lost Daughter," for me, is the skill with which the director controls the viewers' experience of ambiguity.
Almost every event on-screen, no matter how trivial, is subject to at least two readings. It may mean nothing. Or it may be a sign of some terrible development that is building just out of our sight.
Similarly, almost every action or statement by the characters, no matter how minor, may mean nothing. Or it may portend some dreadful psychological explosion to come in the future.
The director is remarkably successful in maintaining these contradictory potential readings throughout the film. But her biggest challenge will be resolving them in the end. Do you take the path of meaning nothing and (perhaps like Antonioni) declare that the world is strange because we're hopelessly alienated from it? Or (like the conventional thriller) do you reveal a hidden conspiracy that ends in a burst of conflict?
Maggie Gyllenhaal takes neither of these familiar paths. She finds an original and satisfying way of resolving the multivalence she had skillfully established. Her way is true to life, true to the actual predicament of being conscious in the world - neither meaningless nor melodramatic.
Watching the film, we learn a new perspective on the ambiguity of the events and behaviors we encounter in our own lives. Like all great works of art, the film changes how the world appears to us.
The Boss (1956)
Poor Script, Direction, & Acting, except for Two Good Performances
My assessment of this film leaves aside the film's historical connections and the screenwriter's biography.
The script, direction, and acting (with two exceptions, noted below) are one-dimensional and heavy-handed. John Payne performs in a single mode -- snarling -- until the end, when he woodenly tries to appear chastened, with equally unconvincing results.
The feebleness of the filmmaking is illustrated by the relationship between the brothers Matt and Tim Brady. Their rivalry is supposed to be the key to Matt's motivation. But all that comes across in their encounters is the same unexplained belligerence that marks the rest of Payne's performance.
His refusal to end his marriage to a woman he despises shows the same failure: the filmmakers are reaching for a complexity that lies beyond their powers (or budget), and the result seems arbitrary and schematic.
Two redeeming features of the film are the portrayals of secondary characters by Gloria McGehee and Robin Morse. McGehee, as the unwanted wife, reads her lines with a natural directness that breaks through the genre conventions surrounding her. Morse, as a gang leader, convincingly presents a contradiction: an intelligent thug. This rare bit of psychological richness culminates in his distinctive walk, a lurching gait that seems to say, Because I can kill you, I have no pretenses. The director wakes from his slumber and holds the camera on this walk in two shots.
À double tour (1959)
Moral Confusion
In some of Chabrol's lesser films, like "À double tour," his effort to preserve the ambiguity of characters' inner lives slips into incoherence about their moral status. Fed mixed signals, the viewer can't decide what attitude to take toward the characters and loses interest in the film.
"À double tour" provides evidence for two contrary readings. In one view, the mother is an intelligent, modest, likable person, a faithful wife and caring mother. She is afflicted by two destructive forces in the household: a weak husband, who is having an affair with a vapid younger woman, and a boorish prospective son-in-law who is good for nothing. But the film also encourages the opposite view: the husband and prospective son-in-law are free spirits, combating bourgeois repression embodied by the mother.
This contradiction is crystallized by a central puzzle: the husband and prospective son-in-law constantly display their contempt for the mother, but we never see her behaving contemptibly.
The film's lack of moral position toward the characters is not a sign of an artistic sophistication that forces viewers to "make up their own minds" as in real life. It is, rather, a failure to establish an essential element in a work of art: a point of view. Given equal evidence on both sides of the film's moral conflicts, viewers draw no conclusion and thus lack a deep involvement in the work.
The same problem affects Chabrol's "Le boucher" (1970), in which the protagonist is given no motivation for protecting a homicidal maniac, who goes on to kill again. Both films end up repelling viewers instead of engaging them. By contrast, his "La femme infidèle" (1969) is a masterpiece because even though the heroine's two actions are contradictory (cheating on her husband, yet returning to love him), the film develops a single emotional truth that embraces them.
Le boucher (1970)
Chabrol's Perfect Touch Is Missing
Chabrol in his previous two films with Audran ("Les biches" and "La femme infidèle") shows a perfect touch in presenting actions whose motivations are unexplained or underexplained yet emotionally plausible. Here, in "Le boucher," he miscalculates and does the opposite: Hélène's motivation is obvious and implausible.
Hélène is intelligent, happy, and successful in a career she loves, and she has sworn off romance after a bad experience. Yet we're supposed to believe she's drawn to a man whose every remark shows him to be embittered, morose, and uneducated. And the attraction is such that after only a few casual meetings with him, she hides evidence that he's a deranged killer.
Her action is a touchstone of the thriller genre: a protagonist covering up a lover's crime. When this moment is handled properly, the audience's shock at the perversion of justice is balanced by sympathy for the protagonist's devotion. But since there is no basis for Hélène's devotion, we respond only with disgust, which destroys our sympathy for her -- a fatal flaw for any film. Our disgust increases after the third murder, which she's partly responsible for. The film grows ever more repellent as it fails to acknowledge how compromised its heroine is.
Finally comes the ride to the hospital, where Paul makes a speech. Here is Chabrol's chance to salvage the situation by revealing some poetic truth behind it. Instead, Paul only declares that he worships Hélène. He adds a creepy, stalker-like confession of how he stood in the street many nights staring at her window. These are platitudes that beautiful women hear all too often. Yet for Chabrol they justify Hélène's radiant expression at the hospital, her first kiss of Paul, and her vigil by the water after his death. Becoming the object of a homicidal sadist's obsession -- something that real women dread -- supposedly transforms and redeems Hélène.
Chabrol apparently had in mind a schematic notion about embracing the bestial foundation of society as it breaks through the bourgeois surface, but he failed to develop the schema into a credible story.