Film Freak Central

Trouble Every Day (2001)

****/****
starring Vincent Gallo, Tricia Vessey, Béatrice Dalle, Alex Descas
screenplay by Claire Denis & Jean-Pol Fargeau
directed by Claire Denis

by Walter Chaw Plaintive and sad, Claire Denis's remarkable Trouble Every Day is a rare combination of honesty, beauty, and maybe even genius. It isn't enough to say that the picture captures the barbarism festering at the core of gender dynamics, nor is it sufficient to express my frank amazement at how Denis subverts genre in ways perverse and powerful. Here's a canny director who knows the vocabulary of cinema as well as the cruel poetics of sexual anthropology; perhaps it's enough to say that Trouble Every Day captures something ineffably true about the sex act with images vital, frank, and unshakable.

The Woman in the Fifth (2012)

La femme du Vème
*½/****
starring Ethan Hawke, Kristin Scott Thomas, Joanna Kulig, Samir Guesmi
screenplay by Pawel Pawlikowski, based on Douglas Kennedy's novel
directed by Pawel Pawlikowski

by Angelo Muredda Midway through Pawel Pawlikowski's The Woman in the Fifth, Romanian femme fatale Margit (Kristin Scott Thomas) tells glum American writer Tom (Ethan Hawke) not to worry about his writer's block. "You have the makings of a serious work now," she reassures him: "A broken life, down-and-out in Paris." Intended as a key to the film, a hint that we aren't watching real events at all but rather their translation into an American's grim European masterwork, this exchange does nothing so much as outline the limits of Pawlikowski's imagination. His first feature since 2004's unsettling My Summer of Love, this is an odd misstep, the kind of bad movie that can only be made with the purest of intentions. I don't doubt that Pawlikowski, working from a thriller by American writer Douglas Kennedy, believes in this idea that good novels are born of wretched experiences--that being a disgraced literature professor and stalled artist shaking down phantoms in run-down Paris gives you a direct line to authenticity. But it's the sort of half-baked conceit that defines countless shallow genre texts shooting for arthouse credibility, the hallmark of a Secret Window knockoff that begs to be taken as seriously as a good Paul Auster novel.

I've Loved You So Long (2008) - Blu-ray Disc

Il y a longtemps que je t'aime
**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C+
starring Kristin Scott Thomas, Elsa Zylberstein, Serge Hazanavicius, Laurent Grevill
written and directed by Philippe Claudel

by Bryant Frazer There are a number of reasons why Kristin Scott Thomas's performance, which is at the centre of I've Loved You So Long (Il y a longtemps que je t'aime), stands out. Yes, it's because she's a terrific screen presence. Yes, it's because it's invariably refreshing to see a 48-year-old Englishwoman sinking her teeth into a three-dimensional role, not just emoting with great adeptness but deploying her fluent French. But there's another reason: In a film that basically amounts to an extremely well-executed Lifetime Movie Channel special, Thomas is by far the most nuanced aspect of the production. In the sleepiness of her eyes and the weariness of her glances, you can read her acid dismissal of the world around her. In the parallel lines of tiny wrinkles around her lips--you can see them in close-up--are mapped out the quiet ravages that would be visited upon any of us by too many years in splendid isolation. Thomas is an unself-conscious beauty for sure, but an aging one. And it's that full-fledged adulthood, that great density of experience and heartbreak that she embodies, that adds weight to what could be, as scripted, an off-puttingly generic moodiness. Her presence is a beacon amongst stock characters and coy screenwriter's tricks, a canticle amidst the clichés that threaten to swamp her story.

The Last Samurai (2003) + The Girl from Paris (2003)

THE LAST SAMURAI
**½/****
starring Tom Cruise, Billy Connolly, Tony Goldwyn, Shin Koyamada
screenplay by John Logan and Marshall Herskovitz & Edward Zwick
directed by Edward Zwick

Une hirondelle a fait le printemps
***/****
starring Michel Serrault, Mathilde Seigner, Jean-Paul Roussillon, Frédéric Pierrot
screenplay by Christian Carion and Eric Assous
directed by Christian Carion

by Walter Chaw Concerned with the encroachment of technology, spawned by the humanism of the French Revolution, Romanticism as a movement in poetry is involved in nostalgia for an idealized Natural history. On film, it occasionally manifests itself in period pieces that focus on the encroachment and proliferation of the railroad: its engines (as in King Vidor's Duel in the Sun and Beyond the Forest, or the Hughes Brothers' From Hell) the manifestation of the industrial revolution in terms of hellmouths and serpents--William Blake's "Tyger" burning bright in the forests of a primordial night, all-consuming and inexorable. That loss of ritual to the march of time, tradition and heritage falling before the metal chimera of technology finds itself articulated in two very different films: Edward Zwick's curious, derivative, workmanlike The Last Samurai, and Christian Carion's bleak and affecting The Girl from Paris (Une hirondelle a fait le printemps).

Tomboy (2011)

***/****
starring Zoé Héran, Jeanne Disson, Malonn Lévana, Sophie Cattani, Mathieu Demy
written and directed by Céline Sciamma

by Angelo Muredda "It suits you." So Lisa (Jeanne Disson) tells her new crush, Mikael (Zoé Héran), after she's given him a lipstick-and-rouge makeover. What Lisa doesn't know is that Mikael is nominally Laure, a 10-year old girl who's just moved into the neighbourhood and is more interested in donning baggy pants and stretched shirts to play soccer with the local ruffians than in wearing the feminine outfits her mother (Sophie Cattani) hangs in her closet. Tomboy, director and screenwriter Céline Sciamma's poignant and sharply observed follow-up to 2007's more acerbic Water Lilies, smartly downplays the precarious position Laure is in: trying on a new identity in this foreign environment could be disastrous today, it suggests, but there's always tomorrow. Sciamma mostly steers clear of the prescriptive aphorisms about girlhood that Catherine Breillat's recent output trades in. Instead, she gravitates towards the more mundane ambiguity of moments when adolescents who are already in a highly transitional state grow wise to the arbitrary way their identity gets decided for them by accidents of birth and other people's coercive gestures. You get the sense that Laure is all-too conscious of how innocent gifts of dresses--or, for that matter, lipstick--might actually be gender-normative roadmaps, but until an unfortunate last-act revelation, the film doesn't reach for the polemic; any revelations come only through cinematographer Crystel Fournier's tight hold on our protagonist.

A Very Long Engagement (2004)

Un long dimanche de fiançailles
**½/****
starring Audrey Tautou, Gaspard Ulliel, Dominique Pinon, Clovis Cornillac
screenplay by Jean-Pierre Jeunet & Guillaume Laurant, based on the novel by Sébastien Japrisot
directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet

by Walter Chaw Jean-Pierre Jeunet reunites immediately with his Amélie minx Audrey Tautou in this curious little Great War bauble, which locates the last time the French were considered military powers in a story of cowardly self-mutilation at the Front that results in the obsessive search of one war widow for the erstwhile deserter fiancé she knows in her heart is still alive. The picture, in other words, blows the patriotic flute for both the French and the Yanks, who, surely coincidentally, are the two entities financing the piece. (It's also probably a coincidence that a period epic romance set against war is opening just in time for Oscar consideration.) A Very Long Engagement is a tale of suffocating, all-consuming love, thus it works as something like a bloody companion piece to the oppressive romantic illness of Amélie, going so far as to dip into that film's bag of tricks (the matte Paris, the heroine returning lost artifacts, the butter-smooth montage introductions, the affection for idiosyncratic secondary characters) and recycle its tone of freakish insouciance. Jeunet's latest is so charming that it feels aggressive--and so well made that the horrors of trench warfare have all the impact of a beautifully-dressed, slightly morbid department store window.

Va savoir (2001)

***½/****
starring Claude Berri, Catherine Rouvel, Hélène de Fougerolles, Jeanne Balibar
screenplay by Luigi Pirandello, Jacques Rivette, Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent
directed by Jacques Rivette

by Walter Chaw

"I hate symbolic art in which the presentation loses all spontaneous movement in order to become a machine, an allegory - a vain and misconceived effort because the very fact of giving an allegorical sense to a presentation clearly shows that we have to do with a fable which by itself has no truth either fantastic or direct; it was made for the demonstration of some moral truth." -Luigi Pirandello from Playwrights on Playwriting, ed. by Toby Cole, 1961

Young Adam (2003); Millennium Mambo (2001); Secret Things (2002)

YOUNG ADAM
**½/****
starring Ewan McGregor, Tilda Swinton, Peter Mullan, Emily Mortimer
screenplay by David Mackenzie, based on the novel by Alexander Trocchi
directed by David Mackenzie

Qian xi man po
****/****
starring Shu Qi, Jack Kao, Tuan Chun-hao, Chen Yi-Hsuan
screenplay by Chu T'ien-wen
directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien

Choses secrètes
***½/****
starring Coralie Revel, Sabrina Seyvecou, Roger Mirmont, Fabrice Deville
written and directed by Jean-Claude Brisseau

by Walter Chaw David Mackenzie's Young Adam opens with a shot from below of a duck paddling placidly along the surface of a lake that's replaced by a woman's corpse, then replaced by a filthy barge-worker and his mate fishing the cadaver out with a gaffing hook. Young Adam is a beautiful picture, really, its interiors sepia-tinged like a cameo photograph and its exteriors bleached and desperate, and as a film about surfaces, it marches to its own logic with the dyspeptic malaise, if not the consistent nihilistic poetry, of a Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Surfaces include skin, of course, and a scene where tattooed Les (Peter Mullan) washes his hired help Joe (Ewan McGregor) is as blandly erotic as a scene where Joe performs cunnilingus on Les's wife Ella (Tilda Swinton), an act that wins him the fried egg he was denied at breakfast. Consumption suggesting sustenance seeps into a scene where Joe covers his girlfriend, Cathie (Emily Mortimer), with custard, ketchup, and mustard before caning and raping her. Joe's furnace is unquenchable: as Biblical doppelganger, his carnal curiosity is constantly stoked by the invitation of moribund English housewives and widows--and his ire is only aroused when an appropriate mate choice threatens to free him from his fleshy fixations. Young Adam is about being trapped and listless, about the lost generation afflicted by a plague of ennui--paddling in a circle, floating between updrafts in the widening gyre.

Source Code (2011) + Certified Copy (2010)

SOURCE CODE
****/****
starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Monaghan, Vera Farmiga, Jeffrey Wright
screenplay by Ben Ripley
directed by Duncan Jones

Copie conforme
****/****
starring Juliette Binoche, William Shimell
written and directed by Abbas Kiarostami

by Walter Chaw The one part of Source Code that isn't duck-ass tight poses so many questions about the nature of our hero's heroism and the aftermath of the film that it opens up what initially seems a hermetically-sealed conceit into something of real depth and fascination. Far from the solipsism of failures interesting (Timecrimes) and not (Primer), different from marginal successes like 12 Monkeys and Déjà Vu, Duncan Jones's sophomore feature (after the similarly thorny Moon) plays most like a child of Last Year at Marienbad and a companion piece to Abbas Kiarostami's contemporaneous Certified Copy. It speaks in terms of quantum physics and string theory, but without pretension, achieving the almost impossible by introducing difficult concepts at the same pace with which its characters--not a dummy among them--are able to understand them without gassing (or worse, falling well behind) the audience. That it presents itself as a mainstream, popular entertainment is more to its credit, giving lie to the notion that Hollywood is bankrupt of ideas. Rather, it's the destination for gifted filmmakers--some of them smart enough, and resourceful enough, to hold fast to their idealism and intelligence for, if not an entire career, then at least long enough to set a bar.

Belle de jour (1967) - The Criterion Collection Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A
starring Catherine Deneuve, Jean Sorel, Michel Piccoli, Geneviève Page
screenplay by Luis Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière, based on the novel by Joseph Kessel
directed by Luis Buñuel

by Jefferson Robbins It's fitting that a film about a woman agonizingly balanced between sexual repression and sexual freedom depicts an inner life balanced between two different periods in history. The opening moments of Luis Buñuel's Belle de jour lead us to believe it will be a period piece. In a static wide shot, a black horse-drawn coach on a country lane leisurely approaches. Two bystanders appear to root in the hedges along the path, too distant to be clearly made out: Are they peasants? Estate groundskeepers? Our eyes are programmed now to expect something Edwardian, or, more applicable to the subject matter, Victorian. Only when an automobile makes a turn in the distance do we realize the setting is contemporary. The modernity comes as a jolt, but from this sequence we will return to some kind of imagined past again and again as the heroine--a very modern woman, one whose frightened explorations map the sexual realms of our own later decades--slips between the cracks in her own mind.