Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Learn from a master
By Edward Copeland
Watching the opening minutes of Wild Grass, if you didn't know who directed the film, you wouldn't realize the filmmaker was well into his 80s and one of the legends of cinema. The beauty and fluidity in which the images grab you would seem to shout the coming of a strong new talent. However, Wild Grass shows that Alain Resnais, who turned 88 this summer, still has the ability to make a film far more compelling than directors a third of his age.
The master behind such classics as Hiroshima, Mon Amour and my personal favorite of his, Last Year at Marienbad, brings an unusually energetic flair to Wild Grass, which begins simply enough with the theft of a purse belonging to Marguerite Muir (Sabine Azema). The sequence soars as slow-motion shots surveill the red purse flying through the air as she makes her way down the sidewalk running parallel to a strip of stores.
Azema, with a wild head of red hair, has been acting for quite a long time, best known to me for her great work in Bertrand Tavernier's A Sunday in the Country, which won her the Cesar for best actress and the National Board of Review prize for best supporting actress in 1984.
Her abandoned wallet, money missing, is discovered by Georges Palet (Andre Dussollier) who turns it into the police (in the form of the always great Mathieu Almaric) but Georges develops an unhealthy obsession with Marguerite, despite the fact he has a very lovely wife of his own (Emmanuelle Devos).
There are hints from a voiceover, sometimes Georges, sometimes an omniscient narrator (Edouard Baer) that there is some ugliness in Georges' past. Perhaps some sort of murder, even of the serial slaying type. Definite hints of violence.
She calls to thank Georges for turning her wallet into the police, but he takes offense at her disinterest at meeting and his harassment escalates. His stalking begins to be too much for Marguerite, who tries to get the police to warn him off, but she finds herself interested in this strange man as well. Is their mutual fascination a romantic one or something else?
Still, don't get the mistaken impression that Wild Grass is a thriller. It's much more complicated, intriguing and satisfying than that. Based on a novel by Christian Gailly and adapted by Alex Reval and Laurent Herbiet, you can never be certain where Wild Grass is heading and that's part of what makes it so compelling. Despite its stylish but rather conventional beginning, the film's ambiguity grows as it rolls along and that only makes it all the more mesmerizing.
The entire ensemble excels, though it's really Dussolier and Azema's show as far as the acting goes. As for the filmmaking, it belongs to Resnais.
It's not as if he hasn't been active lately, though I haven't seen any of his recent work, but to see a director pushing 90 produce a work of such mastery that puts filmmakers not even born when his classics were made to shame is a stunning feat indeed.
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Labels: 10s, Foreign, Mathieu Almaric, Resnais
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Thursday, April 02, 2009
The Abel Vuillards
By Edward Copeland
Sometimes films can remind you of other films when they really couldn't be less alike. Still, as I watched Arnaud Desplechin's A Christmas Tale again and again I was reminded of Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums.
Jean-Paul Roussillon and Catherine Deneuve star as Abel and Junon Vuillard, the head of an extended family forever haunted by the death of the first born as a child to a form of leukemia. Early on, the film is a bit confusing as it tries to establish the major characters and events through a series of chapters that form one of the many similarities to Tenenbaums.
All the Vuillard children seem to have some sort of creative outlet: Elizabeth, the only girl (Anne Consigny), writes plays; Henri, the black
sheep (Mathieu Almaric), tries theater among other things; and Ivan (Melvil Poupaud) paints with his cousin Simon (Laurent Capelluto). For some reason, Elizabeth, a dour, unhappy woman, used an occasion to pay off some of Henri's criminal debts by making a deal with him to be banned from all family occasions. He can still see the others separately, but not together. It's unclear what caused Elizabeth's hatred toward Henri, but she seems generally unhappy with her work-obsessed lawyer husband (Hippolyte Girardot) and her troubled teenage son Paul (Emile Berling) who ends up in a mental institution though later gets out and stumbles upon his uncle Henri and tries to reunite the entire family for Christmas, especially when Junon turns out to be deathly ill with the same ailment that killed their first born and the relatives need to be tested for a dangerous bone marrow match that might not even work and poses risk for the donor. Where A Christmas Tale diverges from any similarity to Anderson's film is tone. There's nothing whimsical about what's going on here, though there are laughs. It's slow at times, but it does have a great ensemble.
Roussillon is good with nearly a constant smile who just wants everyone to be happy and well. Deneuve is great as a mother who can seem warm, but really has a chilly interior and exterior. Emmanuelle Devos is a delight as Faunia, Henri's perpetually bemused girlfriend. Chiara Mastroianni, the daughter of Marcello Mastroianni and Deneuve, has some great scenes as Ivan's wife after she learns a secret.
The film's standout though is Almaric, who makes Henri a completely unpredictable force. You feel sorry for him one minute, understand the hate for him the next. Almaric is brilliant. I wish I could say the same for the film.
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Labels: 00s, Foreign, Mastroianni, Mathieu Almaric, Wes Anderson
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Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Tell don't show
By Edward Copeland
Films relating to the Holocaust seem to have been more plentiful than usual in 2008. However, Claude Miller's French film A Secret doesn't go the usual route of depicting the horrors. In fact, it goes out of its way to strip the story of its drama and while the acting is good and individual set pieces are nice, the overall film is a puzzlement.
Told mostly in flashback, A Secret focuses on a Jewish family in Paris trying to survive and make a plan as the Nazis move in. The father Maxime (Patrick Bruel) is pretty much a nonpracticing Jew anyway and he'd like to keep it that way, but his wife Hannah (Ludivine Sagnier) is more devout and feels it's wrong to deny her heritage.
Much of this past is unknown to Maxime's youngest son Francois, who was born after the war and similarly rejects Judaism until he faces ugly anti-Semitism and the family's maid starts filling him in.
For a film with a title such as A Secret, you'd expect it to be a bigger one, but the strange thing about the movie is that it shows what happened in the past but then fails to depict a followup. We never see Francois' reaction to his family history or even a meeting of new understanding between the adult Francois (Mathieu Almaric) and the aged Maxime.
As a result, A Secret plays like a gun whose trigger has been pulled but whose chamber never empties.
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Labels: 00s, Foreign, Mathieu Almaric
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Friday, December 14, 2007
Picking your own body's lock
By Edward Copeland
At first, the images are quite jarring, the out-of-focus pictures dizzying. For those who don't know the story of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, it tells the true tale of Jean-Dominique Bauby, the French editor of Elle magazine who suffered an incapacitating stroke at the age of 42. Before the health crisis, Bauby had planned to write a modern version of The Count of Monte Cristo, though he later decides that you shouldn't mess with a masterpiece. That's the way I feel about Julian Schnabel's film about Bauby.
Mathieu Almaric stars as Bauby, and while the film itself has been garnering deserved praise, I think his contribution has been undervalued. Except for a few flashbacks, Almaric's performance nearly is all voiceover, commenting on his situation to people who can't hear his voice.
Physically, Almaric is as restricted as Bauby was, spending most of the film essentially immobile except for the blink of an eye (and often looking foolish beneath an Elmer Fudd-type rabbit-fur hunting cap that a friend places on his head. The real-life Bauby feels as anyone in his situation could be expected to feel when he finds he's a victim of "locked-in syndrome," still there but unable to converse with the outside world about matters as important as children or as mundane as annoying flies.
Schnabel's filmmaking approach perfectly mirrors what the view from inside Bauby might have been like. It takes some getting used to, but once Bauby decides to abandon self-pity, the film tosses away its initial gimmick as well.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly sounds as if it could be a very depressing film, but nothing could be further from the proof. It entertains as you join the cynical Bauby within his virtual cocoon and it's inspiring when he decides to write a book when the only way he can is by blinking, one letter at a time, to devoted nurses and friends who translate for him. Bauby realized that no matter what the state of your physical body is, your memories and your imagination cannot be paralyzed.
The performers are good across the board, especially in a great and awkward scene where Bauby's common-law wife (Emmanuelle Seigner), the mother of his children, is forced to translate a phone call for the woman whom the pre-stroke Bauby had left her for. Max von Sydow also has a couple of nice scenes as Bauby's decrepit father, trapped in a prison of a different kind.
The screenplay itself is a bit of a translation, Ronald Harwood having written an English-language adaptation of Bauby's book which was then translated back into French.
I had not been a fan of either of Schnabel's previous films, Basquiat or Before Night Falls, but with The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Schnabel has made one outstanding film, even if he never makes another one. This film should not be missed.
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At first, the images are quite jarring, the out-of-focus pictures dizzying. For those who don't know the story of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, it tells the true tale of Jean-Dominique Bauby, the French editor of Elle magazine who suffered an incapacitating stroke at the age of 42. Before the health crisis, Bauby had planned to write a modern version of The Count of Monte Cristo, though he later decides that you shouldn't mess with a masterpiece. That's the way I feel about Julian Schnabel's film about Bauby.
Mathieu Almaric stars as Bauby, and while the film itself has been garnering deserved praise, I think his contribution has been undervalued. Except for a few flashbacks, Almaric's performance nearly is all voiceover, commenting on his situation to people who can't hear his voice.
Physically, Almaric is as restricted as Bauby was, spending most of the film essentially immobile except for the blink of an eye (and often looking foolish beneath an Elmer Fudd-type rabbit-fur hunting cap that a friend places on his head. The real-life Bauby feels as anyone in his situation could be expected to feel when he finds he's a victim of "locked-in syndrome," still there but unable to converse with the outside world about matters as important as children or as mundane as annoying flies.
Schnabel's filmmaking approach perfectly mirrors what the view from inside Bauby might have been like. It takes some getting used to, but once Bauby decides to abandon self-pity, the film tosses away its initial gimmick as well.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly sounds as if it could be a very depressing film, but nothing could be further from the proof. It entertains as you join the cynical Bauby within his virtual cocoon and it's inspiring when he decides to write a book when the only way he can is by blinking, one letter at a time, to devoted nurses and friends who translate for him. Bauby realized that no matter what the state of your physical body is, your memories and your imagination cannot be paralyzed.
The performers are good across the board, especially in a great and awkward scene where Bauby's common-law wife (Emmanuelle Seigner), the mother of his children, is forced to translate a phone call for the woman whom the pre-stroke Bauby had left her for. Max von Sydow also has a couple of nice scenes as Bauby's decrepit father, trapped in a prison of a different kind.
The screenplay itself is a bit of a translation, Ronald Harwood having written an English-language adaptation of Bauby's book which was then translated back into French.
I had not been a fan of either of Schnabel's previous films, Basquiat or Before Night Falls, but with The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Schnabel has made one outstanding film, even if he never makes another one. This film should not be missed.
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Labels: 00s, Foreign, Mathieu Almaric, Von Sydow
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Friday, January 20, 2006
Musings on Munich
By Edward Copeland
First off, I'm not going to address how accurate or inaccurate Steven Spielberg's Munich — I don't know and, unless I have personal knowledge of something that sticks in my craw, I prefer to assess movies as movies, not as factual reporting. Since Spielberg made it, you can assume going in that it's going to be technically well-made and it is. You can also tell by the ads that this is "serious Spielberg," where he sets aside his crowd-pleasing tendencies to offer something more adult. Alas, Munich is less in the league of Schindler's List or Saving Private Ryan and more in the realm of Amistad (which I like to refer to as L.A. Law with muttonchops).
First of all, Munich moves at a snail's pace and I think that's partly because Spielberg either doesn't know or is afraid of what the movie will be when it grows up. On the one hand, I think he wants Munich to be a suspense drama, but the idea of making a true revenge epic — especially based on real-life events — makes him nervous. At the end of the day, no matter what he's making, I get the sense that Spielberg wants to be liked.
Then there are aspects of it that seek to deal with the political ramifications of terror and retaliation, but he seems to pull back whenever he gets too close to those waters too.
While Munich is generally well-acted (especially by Ciaran Hinds, Michael Lonsdale, Mathieu Almaric and, in a brief bit, Lynn Cohen as Golda Meir), the lead falls to Eric Bana and whether its his limitations as an actor or the handcuffs the script puts on him, his character is a cipher.
He's certainly not portrayed as a cold-blooded killer, but in the latter parts of the film, when his conscience is supposed to get to him, he can't really emote that either. It almost seems like a sudden change because the movie needed an ending.
The Munich Olympics were a watershed moment for anyone old enough to remember them — I can remember as a young child having nightmares about men wearing stocking masks appearing on my TV — so the real footage that is incorporated almost attracts more interest than the fiction that surrounds it.
In the end, I ended up feeling as cold about Munich as the film's tone seemed. It didn't hold my attention as suspense, as ruminations on conscience and guilt or certainly as an effort to look at the seemingly intractable problem of Mideast peace.
There is a lot of buzz out there that the Oscar chances for Munich have been diminished by controversy about its truthfulness, but I think in actuality the problem is that it's just not very good. It lacks a coherent point of view or even a narrative trajectory. It just sort of rolls along — and slowly.
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First off, I'm not going to address how accurate or inaccurate Steven Spielberg's Munich — I don't know and, unless I have personal knowledge of something that sticks in my craw, I prefer to assess movies as movies, not as factual reporting. Since Spielberg made it, you can assume going in that it's going to be technically well-made and it is. You can also tell by the ads that this is "serious Spielberg," where he sets aside his crowd-pleasing tendencies to offer something more adult. Alas, Munich is less in the league of Schindler's List or Saving Private Ryan and more in the realm of Amistad (which I like to refer to as L.A. Law with muttonchops).
First of all, Munich moves at a snail's pace and I think that's partly because Spielberg either doesn't know or is afraid of what the movie will be when it grows up. On the one hand, I think he wants Munich to be a suspense drama, but the idea of making a true revenge epic — especially based on real-life events — makes him nervous. At the end of the day, no matter what he's making, I get the sense that Spielberg wants to be liked.
Then there are aspects of it that seek to deal with the political ramifications of terror and retaliation, but he seems to pull back whenever he gets too close to those waters too.
While Munich is generally well-acted (especially by Ciaran Hinds, Michael Lonsdale, Mathieu Almaric and, in a brief bit, Lynn Cohen as Golda Meir), the lead falls to Eric Bana and whether its his limitations as an actor or the handcuffs the script puts on him, his character is a cipher.
He's certainly not portrayed as a cold-blooded killer, but in the latter parts of the film, when his conscience is supposed to get to him, he can't really emote that either. It almost seems like a sudden change because the movie needed an ending.
The Munich Olympics were a watershed moment for anyone old enough to remember them — I can remember as a young child having nightmares about men wearing stocking masks appearing on my TV — so the real footage that is incorporated almost attracts more interest than the fiction that surrounds it.
In the end, I ended up feeling as cold about Munich as the film's tone seemed. It didn't hold my attention as suspense, as ruminations on conscience and guilt or certainly as an effort to look at the seemingly intractable problem of Mideast peace.
There is a lot of buzz out there that the Oscar chances for Munich have been diminished by controversy about its truthfulness, but I think in actuality the problem is that it's just not very good. It lacks a coherent point of view or even a narrative trajectory. It just sort of rolls along — and slowly.
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Labels: 00s, Mathieu Almaric, Spielberg, Television
TO READ ON, CLICK HERE
