by Bill Chambers Ben Affleck's films as a director are no longer
surprisingly good--they're expectedly good. The surprise of his latest, Argo,
is twofold: first, put a beard on Affleck and suddenly he's an actor of gravitas;
second, that this directing detour his career took may have been born of not
just self-preservation, but real movie love. You can see it in his hoarding of
genre staples for one-scene (Adrienne Barbeau) and in some cases one-line
(Michael Parks) roles, but more importantly, you can see it in the gentle
Hollywood satire Argo briefly--perhaps too briefly--becomes. Set
in 1979, the picture is suffused with a passion for filmmaking, if also a tinge
of wistfulness for that bygone era in filmmaking. Though it may be
period-authentic when Affleck shows the Hollywood sign in a state of disrepair,
I think it's meant as commentary on the present. Argo is the second
Warner release this year to revert to the golden-age Saul Bass logo--it fits better here.
En Kongelig Affære ***/**** directed by Nikolaj Arcel
by Angelo MureddaA
Royal Affair isn't
exactly Barry Lyndon,
but as period pieces go, it's surprisingly robust, the rare costume drama that
takes a genuine interest in how the unruly personalities of rulers and
politicians determine a nation's political outcomes as much as the ideologies
they represent. It doesn't seem so promising at first, beginning as it does with a title
card that sets the scene with ominous overtones. "It is the Age of
Enlightenment," we're told in the tasteful font of "Masterpiece Theatre", and while the
rest of Europe has gone through a massive philosophical and ethical shift with
respect to its perception of peasants and landed gentry, Denmark has remained
an outpost of the old, thanks in no small part to the conservative court that
pulls the strings of mad young King Christian (Mikkel Følsgaard, Best Actor
winner at Berlin). Enter his blushing new Welsh bride and our narrator,
Caroline (Alicia Vikander), a revolutionary intellect--her book collection
doesn't pass the Danish board of censors--who flounders in the country she now
rules until things are livened by Johann Friedrich Struensee (Mads Mikkelsen),
a German doctor and secret pamphleteer of the Enlightenment sent to bring sense
back to the erratic King.
by Angelo MureddaReality, Matteo Garrone's follow-up to the urban planner's nightmare of Gomorrah, is a nasty little
thing, at once an indictment of the mass delusion of celebrity culture and a
finely-wrought character study of Luciano, a fish merchant and small-town Neapolitan
crook who dreams of being a contestant on "Big Brother". Luciano is
played with wide-eyed wonder and deep sincerity by Aniello Arena, a mafia
hitman currently serving a life sentence for a triple-homicide--unlike his
modest fictional counterpart, who's involved in a baffling scheme to resell
pastry-making robots on the black market. It's a terrific performance, somehow
sweet and deranged in equal measure, and it's the reason Reality works as well
as it does when it begins to assume his warped perspective.
by Angelo MureddaThe Hunt hinges on a misunderstanding, a nasty story born of a child's bruised ego and happily seized by a pack of overeager concern trolls calling themselves adults. But there's a whole other story about misunderstanding to be spun from how the film will surely be received in different quarters as either a devastating portrait of small-town life or a grim black comedy. That one is all on director and Dogme 95 cofounder Thomas Vinterberg. While it's always dicey to ascribe authorial intent, Vinterberg seems to waffle between middlebrow tragedy and scattershot satire not out of some postmodern commitment to walking the edge of irony, but because the script can't really sustain a further push in either direction. That makes The Hunt a provocative film, sure, but also a bit of a lazy one--a conversation starter without much follow-through.
by Angelo Muredda A firm refusal of the charge that Canadian
filmmaking is unable to see much farther than its own backyard, Kim Nguyen's Rebelle tackles a complex sociopolitical situation without reducing it to
easy lessons learned. The most recent reference point for what Nguyen is doing
with this first-person chronicle of Komona (Rachel Mwanza), a 12-year-old
abducted from her home in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and turned into
a child soldier for rebel forces, is probably Denis Villeneuve's Incendies. But though that film also reaches for global significance in tracing
the grim trajectory of a politically disenfranchised child, its vagueness stands
in sharp contrast to Nguyen's accomplishment here, which is to ground Komona's
story in a particular milieu.
by Bill Chambers 27 according to the IMDb but convincingly
aged down, Tatiana Maslany gives a star-making performance in Picture Day
as 18-year-old Claire, who's forced to repeat the twelfth grade after failing
math and phys-ed. It seems obvious that she in fact chose not to be jettisoned
from the womb of high school just yet, though she shows little interest in
actually attending classes, to the consternation of the vice principal
(Catherine Fitch). ("You can't stay in high school forever, Claire,"
the VP tells her. "You did," Claire snaps.) One day, she joins a kid
who's deviated from his gym class to smoke up--are teenage potheads really this
brazen now?--and discovers that he's Henry (Spencer Van Wyck), the timid boy
she used to babysit, all grown up. A science wiz who turned down a
private-school education (he sort of resents his intellect--plus, it was an
all-boys academy), he even grows his own marijuana, in a closet that contains,
among other things, a shrine to Claire filled with enough traces of her
DNA--chewed gum, soiled tissues, hair bands--that one wonders if he intends to
clone her.
by Angelo Muredda From the moment it screened at Cannes, Amour became the odds-on favourite to win the Palme d'Or, and no wonder:
Terrence Malick worked more or less the same formalist-auteur-goes-humanist
formula to great success just last year. But while The Tree of Life's cosmic
drama was hardly a stretch for Malick, you have to think Amour, which ultimately did cop the big prize, was a harder nut to crack for Michael Haneke. He was, of
course, first awarded the Palme for a thuddingly obvious Village of the Damned knockoff designed for people
who don't do horror. Would he prove himself human after all?
De rouille et d'os **/**** directed by Jacques Audiard
by Angelo Muredda On paper, the most troubling thing about Rust & Bone is the suggestion, right from the title, that we're in for a yarn
about maimed bodies that go bump in the night, grinding their way into
oblivion. You have to give some credit to Jacques Audiard--who's otherwise
taking a decisive step back from A Prophet--for going surprisingly easy on the figurative potential of a love
story between Stephanie (Marion Cotillard), a whale trainer turned
double-amputee after a rough day on the job, and Ali (Bullhead's Matthias Schoenaerts), a brutish security guard and distant
father who moonlights as a back-alley boxer. Based on two short stories (it
shows) from Toronto-born author Craig Davidson, the film puts itself squarely
in the specious Paul Haggis tradition of the crisscrossing tragedy but keeps
the stakes pretty low much of the time, mostly sparing us the usual tortured
hymns about how we're all connected at some primal level. As a disability film,
a problem genre that finds little middle ground between triumph-of-adversity
celebrations and euthanasia apologies, it's also fairly attuned to mechanical
matters that usually lie outside the bounds of melodrama. Consider Stephanie's
insurance-paid apartment, a smartly-organized space for a wheelchair user, down
to the widened doorframes and easily-accessible washer and dryer. Ephemera
counts for something.
by Angelo Muredda Following the boys-only slate of the Cannes Film Festival, which made room for tepidly-received efforts from the likes of Andrew Dominik and Lee Daniels but shut out women in a comparable phase of their careers, June has been a surprisingly fruitful month for female directors of North American independents. Not that it's compensation for that snub, but it's heartening to see Lynn Shelton's Your Sister's Sister and Sarah Polley's Take This Waltz get the lion's share of positive indie press in recent weeks, putting them in good company with Wes Anderson, whose Moonrise Kingdom did make Cannes's official selection. You could think of the Female Eye Film Festival, now entering its tenth year and running through June 24th at Toronto's Carlton Cinemas, as a low-key companion to those higher-profile releases.
Recent Comments