Film Freak Central

Brooklyn Horror Film Festival '22: Megalomaniac

***½/****
starring Eline Schumacher, Wim Willaert, Benjamin Ramon, Pierre Nisse
written and directed by Karim Ouelhaj

by Walter Chaw Belgian filmmaker Karim Ouelhaj's Megalomaniac joins Danish filmmaker Christian Taldrup's Speak No Evil as fresh additions to what feels like a new iteration of the "French New Extremity" subgenre coined by ARTFORUM's James Quandt, which flowered briefly at the turn of the 21^st century. Films of the loosely-defined movement dealt with the ugliest parts of France's social history, treating atrocities long thought better hidden with a frankness as unusual as the explicitness of the images. I love many of these films--Pascal Laugier's Martyrs and Claire Denis's Trouble Every Day, in fact, rank high among my all-time favourites, even though I almost never recommend them in polite company. Their violence is extreme and intimate. In place of catharsis, find only despair and self-loathing. I have felt this existential howl watching certain films of Bergman's--Tobe Hooper's, too. But I would say the French New Extremity caught the attention of the mainstream for the craft of its presentation and the care and intelligence with which the characters made to suffer were drawn. They're difficult to dismiss as exploitation or "foreign" in a pejorative sense. They're gruelling but artistically rigorous, making them difficult to diminish. I think of many of the genre pictures of South Korea like this, too: devastation exploitation flicks made by Steven Spielberg. And though credit is due the birthplace of the Marquis de Sade and Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol for finding another meat-spigot to turn at the dawn of our last fin de siècle, works by Lars von Trier (The House That Jack Built certainly and even Antichrist) and Fatih Akin's The Golden Glove suggest whatever was in the water is spreading.

House of Gucci (2021) + Benedetta (2021)

HOUSE OF GUCCI
***/****
starring Lady Gaga, Adam Driver, Jared Leto, Al Pacino
screenplay by Becky Johnston and Roberto Bentivegna
directed by Ridley Scott

BENEDETTA
***½/****
starring Virginie Efira, Charlotte Rampling, Daphné Patakia, Lambert Wilson
screenplay by David Birke and Paul Verhoeven, based on the book by Judith C. Brown
directed by Paul Verhoeven

by Walter Chaw Ridley Scott's second based-on-a-true-story prestige period piece of 2021 after The Last Duel takes place in the I Love You to Death cinematic universe, wherein formerly dignified actors affect ridiculous Italian accents while taking bullets from hitmen hired by their wives, ex or otherwise. Just the spectacle of watching Adam Driver do a scene with Al Pacino at an Italian picnic, the two of them talking like Mario brothers while a brunette Lady Gaga croaks in an accidental Russian accent is... And the soundtrack! George Michael, Donna Summer, New Order, the Eurythmics--it's all of it like a Nagel painting come to life: gaudy affectations of glamour and art for the bawdiest appreciators of unintentional camp. Indeed, House of Gucci is prime grist for the headliner in a midnight call-along, or the feature presentation in a future episode of "MST3K"--although, at two-and-a-half hours, I worry the same jokes would keep getting recycled, most of them about the accents, a few of them about sex-pest Jared Leto's turn as Paolo Gucci, buried beneath a ton of prosthetics that make him look on the outside what he is on the inside. (Here's the punchline: Leto steals the movie.) A deadly drinking game could be devised from the times Pacino's accent slips from hilarious Italian to Al Pacino to, during a weird funeral scene, Bela Lugosi Transylvanian. There's a scene in the last half of the film where Paolo groans into an airport payphone, "I got to wash! If you could smell-a between my groins, you'd-a unnerstan!" while Aldo makes the "c'mon" expression trying to get his attention, and then later Aldo gives Paolo, his little Fredo, the "you disappointed the hell out of me" kiss of death and, again, it's... Well, it's notably, spectacularly terrible is what it is. And I liked it.

Titane (2021)

***/****
starring Vincent Lindon, Agathe Rousselle, Garance Marillier, Lais Salameh
written and directed by Julia Ducournau

by Walter Chaw In Julia Ducournau's first film, Raw, there's a part involving scissors wielded near a vagina that almost made me pass out. A sequence in her second film, Titane, involves another massively inappropriate object wielded near, and inside, a vagina, yet it didn't bother me half as much. This may have something to do with Titane's tone and attitude towards menace: In Raw, there's a tenderness and familiarity to it all that makes the horror invasive, whereas Titane gives off an alien, madcap, Mack Sennett vibe that announces the movie's allegorical intentions as a barker at a carnival sideshow might. What's constant in Ducournau's two films is an admirably reductive drive to boil a woman's body down to its biological functions. As Titane opens, hero Alexia (Agathe Rousselle)--badly scarred from the titanium plate behind her ear, the product of a childhood car accident she caused by wanting very badly to sing along to the car's engine noise--is making her living as a stripper/model at an underground car show. Her body is a fetish object the way a car is to certain men, you see, and I'm thinking immediately not only of how men often assign a feminine pronoun to their cars, but also of e.e. cummings's naughty poem "she being brand." Here it is in full:

Bergman Island (2021)

**/****
starring Vicky Krieps, Tim Roth, Mia Wasikowska, Anders Danielsen Lie
written and directed by Mia Hansen-Løve

by Walter Chaw Eric Rohmer made some snoozers, too. So it is with Mia Hansen-Løve, the inheritor of Rohmer's cinema of intimate behavioural observation and obsession, and her Bergman Island, which lands midway between pointlessly clever and fatally self-obsessed. It follows married filmmakers Tony (Tim Roth) and Chris (Vicky Krieps) as they retreat to Ingmar Bergman's compound on Fårö Island in the Baltic to finish their respective screenplays. Tony's having a much easier time of it, and it's revealed they've been invited to this unusual writer's retreat at least in part so Tony can screen and conduct a Q&A for one of his films. From what we see of it, it's possibly a horror film; whatever it is, it's clear that Tony's work is very different from Chris's. Bergman shot a few of his film and TV productions on Fårö--in fact, Fårö was for him like Yoknapatawpha County was for Faulkner: an entire world unto itself that functioned as the canvas and backdrop for his working-through of major themes. There's a tour of sites that Tony goes on and Chris does not, since she meets an earnest young graduate student, Hampus (Hampus Nordenson), studying Bergman, of course, and decides to spend the day with him instead. You think this will be a source of conflict in Bergman Island, particularly as Chris comments that the couple will be sleeping in the same bedroom where Scenes from a Marriage was shot, but it's not.

TIFF '21: Earwig + Night Raiders

EARWIG
***½/****
starring Paul Hilton, Romola Garai, Alex Lawther, Romane Hemelaers
written by Lucile Hadžihalilović & Geoff Cox
directed by Lucile Hadžhalilović

NIGHT RAIDERS
***/****
starring Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers, Brooklyn Letexier-Hart, Gail Maurice, Amanda Plummer
written and directed by Danis Goulet

by Angelo Muredda Parenting and being looked after are the stuff of nightmares in Lucile Hadžhalilović's genuinely creepy curio Earwig, which is as visually and aurally arresting as it is inscrutable. A cryptic dance between a man named Albert (Paul Hilton) and his ten-year-old charge, Mia (Romane Hemelaers), the film charts their ritualistic and mostly unspoken interactions in a dingy apartment, making us tense witnesses to an unexplained paternal science experiment conducted under the all-seeing eye of a supervisor who phones in his instructions from offscreen, apparently to prepare the girl for whatever is lying in wait for her. That's about all we know, though Hadžhalilović skillfully hangs this threadbare plot on indelible images while evoking our primitive stirrings of anxiety for the future. No small feat, given how little dialogue there is.

Fantasia Fest '21: Hotel Poseidon

****/****
starring Ruth Becquart, Steve Geerts, Anneke Sluiters, Tine Van den Wyngaert
written and directed by Stef Lernous

by Walter Chaw An art director's fever dream, Stef Lernous's Hotel Poseidon is a sequel in spirit to Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro's Delicatessen and a film that would comfortably complete a trilogy with Jeunet & Caro's City of Lost Children. Here, Lernous says that we're all the product of our shadows, those unexamined parts of us shoved into the crannies of our unconscious, and he packs every frame with florid, fulsome, grotesque manifestations of this idea, which is matched by a genuinely exciting dedication to going for it. It's not unlike a David Lynch film in that way, and like Lynch's work, its unpredictability and willingness to do anything make it both very funny and occasionally existentially horrifying. Sometimes in the same moment. Hotel Poseidon is set in a single building bathed in a sickly sepia palette and suffused with themes of submersion. It follows a vignette structure of sorts that finds a different psychodrama, a different element of the subconscious, played out in each room of a decaying apartment hotel. The film is a tour through the unconscious--a Being John Malkovich or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in which each new horror plumbs personal depths of grief, guilt, and shame most of all. (Its closest analogue may actually be Barton Fink.) Hotel Poseidon, in other words, is difficult to describe.

Crisis (2021)

*/****
starring Gary Oldman, Armie Hammer, Evangeline Lilly, Greg Kinnear
written and directed by Nicholas Jarecki

by Walter Chaw Nicholas Jarecki's Crisis is a Stanley Kramer piece, a "means well," ripped-from-the-headlines message flick that hews closer to 3 Needles than to Traffic in terms of effectiveness and humility. In place of dialogue, there is exposition; and in place of performances, there are swollen forehead veins and trembling lower lips, aghast at the injustices of a cold universe. Crisis sheds "importance" from itself like dander from a stressed but beloved pet, and it's unseemly to come down too hard on it when its greatest crimes are that it is middlebrow in its politeness and really doesn't have much to say beyond what's already inherently obvious. It's possible to do stuff like this and make something like The Insider--that is, something powerful, artful, and transformative. More commonly, it turns out like Crisis has turned out: instantly forgettable and mildly embarrassing in the way of your hip dad trying to jam with you about the evils of the sticky icky. Oh, and use a condom, son.

TIFF 2019: Atlantiques

Atlantique
***/****
starring Mama Sané, Amadou Mbow, Ibrahima Traoré, Nicole Sougou
screenplay by Mati Diop, Olivier Demangel
directed by Mati Diop

by Angelo Muredda Working from her own 2009 short Atlantiques, first-time feature director Mati Diop makes a bold impression with Atlantics. An elegant film that will hopefully lose the ungainly subtitle "A Ghost Love Story" by the time it makes its way to Netflix (where it's bound in the coming months), it's an awfully strong directorial calling card with a distinctive rhythm and point of view, its tactility and sensuousness evoking the work of Diop's former director and mentor Claire Denis without losing its own youthful verve.

TIFF 2019: Sound of Metal

***/****
starring Riz Ahmed, Olivia Cooke, Mathieu Amalric, Paul Raci
written by Abraham Marder & Darius Marder
directed by Darius Marder

by Angelo Muredda It comes as a pleasant jolt that there's a lot to say about Sound of Metal, The Place Beyond the Pines' co-screenwriter Darius Marder's feature debut. On paper, the story of Ruben (Riz Ahmed), a noise-metal drummer and recovering addict who suddenly loses his hearing in the middle of a tour with his girlfriend and musical partner Lou (Olivia Cooke), seems like the stuff of a run-of-the-mill disability melodrama about learning to appreciate life's little pleasures in silence. And though it veers close to something like that message in its final moments, which threaten to put a bow on a rather messy human drama, the film is surprisingly complicated about the new worlds, sensory experiences, and cultures in which Ruben is being initiated.

Domino (2019)

***/****
starring Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Carice Van Houten, Eriq Ebouaney, Guy Pearce
written by Petter Skavlan
directed by Brian De Palma

by Alice Stoehr When Brian De Palma was 17, relates Julie Salamon in her book The Devil's Candy, he tried to prove his father was having an affair. "All summer long he recorded his father's telephone calls," she writes. "On more than one occasion he climbed up a tree outside his father's office and snapped pictures of him and his nurse." Though perhaps too pat as an origin story, this experience--oft-repeated by biographers, as well as the director himself--haunts his filmography. From Dressed to Kill to Blow Out to Snake Eyes, his characters and camera fixate on audiovisual evidence. They foreground how film itself can act as documentation, to either reveal or distort the truth. These same preoccupations shape Domino, his thirtieth feature and the first he's directed since 2012's Passion. The espionage thriller, penned by Norwegian screenwriter Petter Skavlan, intertwines three sets of characters as they bound across Western Europe. Christian (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) is a Copenhagen cop who sees his partner's throat slit in a set-piece modelled after the opening of Vertigo. He seeks vengeance against the assailant, Ezra (Eriq Ebouaney), who's blackmailed by a handler at the CIA (Guy Pearce) into tracking down the same ISIS cell that beheaded his father. It's tawdry material, nesting two revenge narratives and plenty of terrorist intrigue inside a film that's under 90 minutes long.

Mandy (2018) + Suspiria (2018)

MANDY
***/****
starring Nicolas Cage, Andrea Riseborough, Linus Roache, Bill Duke
screenplay by Panos Cosmatos & Aaron Stewart-Ahn
directed by Panos Cosmatos

SUSPIRIA
****/****
starring Dakota Johnson, Tilda Swinton, Mia Goth, Chloë Grace Moretz
screenplay by David Kajganich, based on the screenplay by Dario Argento and Daria Nicolodi
directed by Luca Guadagnino

by Walter Chaw Panos Cosmatos's Mandy is an old-fashioned acid trip of a movie--like if Head were directed by Rob Zombie. Indeed, the film it owes the most to is Zombie's exceptional mood piece Lords of Salem. It's already gained a fair deal of cult cachet (as well as a surprising/not-surprising box-office run), not the least for the best use of King Crimson since Children of Men (prog-rock is having a good 2018 between just this and Private Life), for the late Jóhann Jóhannsson's bliss-out score, and for an unhinged Nicolas Cage performance augmented by Viking berserker rage superpowers. Not for nothing is Mandy a period piece opening with Ronald Reagan's "Evil Empire" speech, dissolving into a pixie-font title card setting the scene as "The Shadow Mountains" in the year of our lord, 1983. Mandy (Andrea Riseborough) is drawing "kinda like a jungle temple" in the remote home she shares with Red Miller (Cage). In bed, they talk about their favourite planets (hers: Jupiter, for the storms; his: Saturn, probably--no, wait, "Galactus") as Cosmatos bathes them in neon reds, then pans up into the Northern Lights arrayed above them. They canoe and it's so beautiful, the wave patterns and the blue, so blue it's almost lurid. Fire, then, a screen of it. All the elements will be represented here as metaphor for the completeness of their bond. It's not subtle. Now's not the time for subtlety.

Let the Sunshine In (2017)

Un beau soleil intérieur
***½/****
starring Juliette Binoche, Xavier Beauvois, Josiane Balasko, Sandrine Dumas
screenplay by Claire Denis and Christine Angot, based on the book A Lover's Discourse: Fragments by Roland Barthes
directed by Claire Denis

by Angelo Muredda Improbable as it might seem for a filmmaker who once wrestled with philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy's elliptical and uncanny autobiographical essay on his heart transplant, Claire Denis sets her sights on the ostensibly lower-hanging fruit of the romantic comedy in Let the Sunshine In. This play with formal conventions has some precedent, to be sure, in the near-magical coincidences of Vendredi soir and the table-setting musical centrepiece that drives the final act of 35 Shots of Rum. As with L'Intrus, the film also stands as an idiosyncratic adaptation of a French philosopher's non-narrative work--this time Roland Barthes's A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, whose musings on how lovers talk to each other aren't loaded in the characters' mouths here so much as they are allowed to steep into the ambience like a strong tea. If the genre of happy endings and restored cosmic imbalances seems on paper to be an odd fit for Denis's predilections for delicate wordless gestures, in practice, Let the Sunshine In is nevertheless as singular as Denis's ostensibly less categorizable work: a mercurial and rather lovely portrait of a lonely woman's attempt to replenish herself and secure her future without closing any doors, which is ultimately as open to possibility as its heroine.

What Happened to Monday (2017) - Netflix

Seven Sisters
**½/****
starring Noomi Rapace, Glenn Close, Pål Sverre Hagen, Willem Dafoe
screenplay by Max Botkin and Kerry Williamson
directed by Tommy Wirkola

by Alice Stoehr The bad news manifests itself in a flurry of stock footage and newscasters' voices. "Too many people, not enough food," declares one near-future pundit. "It is the biggest crisis in human history," adds another. Dr. Nicolette Cayman, a politician so Thatcher-esque that Glenn Close plays her in pearls and a navy blue suit, helps Europe's now-federalized government institute a strict one-child policy. Her Gestapo-like Child Allocation Bureau (or "CAB") patrols city streets, threatening hidden siblings with indefinite cryogenic stasis. So far, so familiar. It's much like Soylent Green or Children of Men or any of a dozen other dystopian thrillers. But What Happened to Monday's knotty premise continues: What if, say, seven identical sisters grew up in this political climate? They could each leave the house exactly one day a week, each time assuming the same collective identity. And what if one of these sisters, while out and about, happened to disappear?

Fantastic Fest '16: Raw

Grave
****/****
starring Garance Marillier, Ella Rumpf, Rabah Naït Oufella, Marion Vernoux
written and directed by Julia Ducournau

by Walter Chaw A spiritual blood sister of Claire Denis's Trouble Every Day, Julia Ducournau's feature debut Raw is a crystallization of the last couple years' steady creep towards unabashedly gyno-centric fare. Kimberly Peirce's unfairly derided Carrie, which Raw references in one of its canniest, funniest moments, gathers monstrously in the rearview as a film doomed to have been just ahead of its time--literally hours away from being justly hailed as harbinger of a period of Furiosas and Reys, of It Follows and The Witch and The Green Room and more. As genre fare, Raw is as raw as it could be, the tale of a vegan first-year veterinary school student named Justine (Garance Marillier) who is submitted to a series of cruel hazing rituals that introduce her to body-image issues, existential crises, eating disorders, and the taste of sweet, sweet animal protein. You know, freshman year. Ducournau captures it all beautifully: the horror of being away, of surrendering to the higher university mind, of experimenting with drugs and drink and sex and becoming a full inhabitant of the desires and fears that will fuel the rest of your life. There's a scene early on where Justine visits a doctor (French writer and director Marion Vernoux) that reminds of the sequences in Jacob's Ladder where Jacob visits his angelic chiropractor. It's shot differently from the rest of the film. It's brighter. The film will never be this bright again.

TIFF '16: A Quiet Passion

****/****
starring Cynthia Nixon, Jennifer Ehle, Jodhi May, Keith Carradine
written and directed by Terence Davies

by Walter Chaw Terence Davies doesn't make a lot of movies but he does make masterpieces fairly regularly. A Quiet Passion, a biopic of the notoriously reclusive Emily Dickinson, is his latest. His portrait of the "Belle of Amherst" captures the poet (Cynthia Nixon, transcendent) as a woman who finds no succour in the petrified pieties of her rigid New England society, turning inwards instead to the dubious pleasures of family and verse. She looks for approval from both. Her father (Keith Carradine) suffers her streak of rebellion. There's the sense that he sees in her the continuation of his own modest progressivism, indicated by the quiet approval he gives to his children's mockery of his silly sister (Annette Badland), his acceptance of Emily's rejection of a religious education, and his indulging of Emily's desire to write in the small hours of the night. One senses that these witching hours are her room of one's own. The tableaux of Emily swaddled in the purple cocoon of night is not just a romantic notion, but evocation, too, of Davies's deep consciousness of colour in his pictures, pointing to how these early, idealistic moments are contrasted by the sick yellows, whites, and browns that populate the period after her father's death. He breaks that mourning with an impressionistic interlude that opens upon a green bower, then Emily bathed in firelight in something like the physical/spiritual ecstasy that would be denied her--that she perhaps denied herself for fear and self-loathing--all her life. He closes a door on her, slowly. It's a passage that expresses the tension of the film's title: Emily finds deliverance only upon a deeper metaphysical implosion.

TIFF '16: Elle

***/****
directed by Paul Verhoeven

by Bill Chambers The first thing you hear in Elle, after Anne Dudley's giallo-worthy (and, thus, slightly misleading) overture, are some violent sex noises, but the first thing you see is a cat, a good ol' Russian blue, who is watching his owner get violated with daunting ambivalence. Meet the director. Migrating from his native Holland to France this time, Paul Verhoeven has made a movie fascinated with rape at either the best or worst cultural moment he could have chosen. Michèle (Isabelle Huppert) is depicted being raped several times over the course of the film by the same ski-masked stranger; my own reaction was a complicated gnarl of disgust and desensitization that led to more disgust. Eventually, I think, Michèle's relationship with her attacker becomes S&M in all but name, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Michèle is a well-to-do Parisian with a videogame company that seems to specialize in hentai (meaning you also get to see tentacle rape, Verhoeven-style). Family members--including a mother (Judith Magre) who's into much-younger men and a layabout son (Jonas Bloquet) who's fallen under the spell of a pregnant gold digger (Alice Isaaz)--orbit in close proximity despite her abrasive candor, which at one point finds her telling her friends and puppyish ex-husband (Charles Berling) about her rape over cocktails after work. They worry, but because she's the alpha dog, they probably don't worry enough.

Hot Docs '16: No Man is an Island

**/****
directed by Tim De Keersmaecker

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 28-May 8, 2016 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers The white sands and turquoise waters of Lampedusa, Italy's southernmost island, have attracted tourists like iron filings in the age of TripAdvisor. It's paradise found, an oasis in the Mediterranean. And it's "the door to Africa," a European outpost at which migrants dock en masse. No Man is an Island alternates between two young refugees who've established themselves there in some capacity. Omar, who fled Tunisia during the Arab Spring, is the Eliza Doolittle-like apprentice to the doctor who heads up the medical centre for new arrivals, while the comparatively laconic Adam, from Ghana, is the houseboy of a man who came to Lampedusa by way of Colombia and seems a little sketchy in his "Miami Vice" digs. Both Omar and Adam are struggling with assimilation--Omar feels out of place, perhaps owing to unresolved feelings about his sexual orientation, whereas Adam is finding it difficult to transcend the jocular racism of his newfound peers--yet nothing particularly dynamic or revelatory comes from paralleling their stories; ultimately, this feels like two discrete documentaries interrupting each other. Director Tim De Keersmaecker develops motifs--recurring images of sea turtles and the Virgin Mary--but his dreamy, elliptical approach robs them of thematic weight. (Reading about Lampedusa, I discovered that it simultaneously rescues some 200 sea turtles a year from the vagaries of the fishing industry.) More superficial than profound, the film is a glorified DSLR demo video when all's said and done, and as sympathetic as Omar and Adam are, this aesthetic really emphasizes the poetry of their surroundings, taking the edge off their rootlessness. No Man is an Island might be a better tourism video than it intends.

TIFF '15: Black; We Monsters; Keeper

BLACK
*/****
directed by Adil El Arbi & Bilall Fallah

Wir Monster, a.k.a. Cold Days
**/****
directed by Sebastian Ko

KEEPER (pictured)
***/****
directed by Guillaume Senez

by Bill Chambers My random sampling of #TIFF15's Discovery programme yielded a loose trilogy of bildungsromane. The most 'problematic' of these, as the kids say, is Black, a West Side Story redux set on the surprisingly mean streets of Brussels, where rival gangs of Moroccan and (I think) Congolese immigrants antagonize the locals and each other. Marwan (charming Aboubakr Bensaihi) and Mavela (gorgeous Martha Canga Antonio) meet-cute in police custody. He's Moroccan, she hangs with "the Black Bronx," whose name very purposely evokes American ghettos for that soupçon of danger. When he hits on her, she asks him how he'd feel if his sister brought a black man home; Marwan admits there's a double standard, then reassuringly points out they're both African. Within days they're a couple on the DL, whispering dreams of an honest future together. Alas, Mavela becomes inextricably tethered to the Black Bronx when she baits a female member of Marwan's posse to their clubhouse to be gangraped, then endures the same torment herself after they find out about her affair with Marwan. Note that the first rape happens offscreen while Mavela's does not, and though I don't condone any rape scene, there is something ultra-nauseating about graphically violating the Maria/Juliet figure, like when Edith Bunker endured a rape attempt: It breaks some socio-artistic contract we have with our most wholesome archetypes. It didn't make me hate her attackers so much as it made me hate the filmmakers.

Saint Laurent (2014)

***/****
starring Gaspard Ulliel, Jérémie Renier, Louis Garrel, Helmut Berger
screenplay by Bertrand Bonello and Thomas Bidegain
directed by Bertrand Bonello

by Angelo Muredda Bertrand Bonello enters the postmodern biopic sweepstakes with Saint Laurent, no less than the third chronicle of the titular French designer and haute couture icon in as many years. With regrets to Pierre Thoretton's understated but chilly L'amour fou, which comes at its subject through the reminiscences of his lifelong professional and personal partner Pierre Berge, Bonello's project is almost certainly the most fetching (thanks in no small part to costume designer Anais Romand), marrying a contemporary fixation on the limits of biographical storytelling with the sort of impressionist brushstrokes the Matisse devotee might have appreciated. In the wake of filmmakers as disparate as Todd Haynes and Abel Ferrara self-consciously toying with the limits of the biopic form, ostensibly killing dynamic subjects by pinning them to the wall, Saint Laurent isn't as radical a work of genre subversion as some of its adherents claim, but it sure as hell is beautiful, channelling its subject's hedonist spirit and delicate aesthetic sensibility in roughly equal measure.

TIFF '14: Cub

Welp
½*/****
directed by Jonas Govaerts

by Bill Chambers Cub--or Welp, as it is humorously called in the original Dutch--has a killer hook, or at least a viable-enough premise that some considerable buzz has built up around this Midnight Madness entry. A troop of cub scouts goes camping in Belgian woods allegedly occupied by Kai, a boy who becomes a werewolf by night; the two young scout masters, Peter (Stef Aerts) and Chris (Titus De Voogdt), build their own buzz about the cryptozoic creature to have something for the campfires (also because they seem to like antagonizing children), unaware of course that Kai does exist in the form of a lightning-quick feral kid wearing a mask fashioned from tree-bark. Sam (Maurice Luijten) actually stumbles on Kai's treehouse, where the child stows trinkets purloined from campers, The Final Terror-style, but being an apparent charity case gives Sam zero credibility with those he tells--particularly Peter, who takes sadistic glee in isolating Sam from his peers and targeting him for military punishments that Chris, the more empathetic and merciful of the two, is never around to avert. Seriously: even with a wild child who can't figure out how to work a can opener living large in a treehouse worthy of I.M. Pei, Chris's constant absence is the movie's most confounding mystery.

TIFF '14: Waste Land

**/****
written and directed by Pieter Van Hees

by Bill Chambers Ominously chaptered after the weeks in a pregnancy, Waste Land begins with an encouraging but deceptive touch of absurdity, as Brussels homicide detective Leo Woeste (Jérémie Renier) placidly stands in for the victim at a nauseatingly fresh crime scene while the addled perpetrator tries to reconstruct the murder for a forensics team. Leo's next case, involving the occult-related death of a young Congolese immigrant, coincides with wife Kathleen (the appropriately-named Natali Broods) announcing she's with child--her second, Leo's first--and planning on aborting it due to her husband's grim attachment to his profession. He goads her into keeping it by pledging to quit the force once he's through with this latest investigation, but it proves an unreasonable vortex that soon has him becoming infatuated with the dead man's sister (Babetida Sadjo) and going off the grid, as well as the proverbial deep end.

Telluride '14: Two Days, One Night

Deux jours, une nuit
****/****
starring Marion Cotillard, Fabrizio Rongione, Pili Groyne, Simon Caudry
written and directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

by Walter Chaw Somewhere in the middle of the Dardennes' Two Days, One Night, Sandra (Marion Cotillard), trying to convince her sixteen co-workers to vote to allow her to keep her job at the expense of a bonus of one-thousand euros, accuses her husband Manu (Fabrizio Rongione) of turning off the radio because the song is too sad and he fears she's too fragile for it. She turns it back on. It's Petula Clark's French-language cover of Jackie DeShannon's "Needles and Pins," "La Nuit N'en Finit Plus." Shot in the Dardennes style, close and over the shoulder, Sandra looks at Manu slyly for a second, pumps up the volume, and laughs. Cotillard is disarming, as always, and she's so natural in this moment--in all of the film, but in this moment in particular. It's stunning. Her Sandra is absolutely compelling throughout. Her victories are ecstatic; her defeats are deflating. About an hour in, I realized that Two Days, One Night is a fable--a literal one, with a heroine undergoing a series of trials, forced to say the same things like a Belgian Bartleby to a sequence of different people in different situations. Even her exit line at the end of every encounter ("Thank you, goodbye") is identical each time. It's through this repetition that the film finds a rhythm, sure, but also room for Sandra to learn and for Two Days, One Night to paint as complete and sympathetic a picture of depression as there's ever been.

Ernest & Celestine (2012) + Jodorowsky's Dune (2014)

Ernest et Célestine
**½/****
screenplay by Daniel Pennac, based on books by Gabrielle Vincent
directed by Stéphane Aubier, Vincent Patar, Benjamin Renner

JODOROWSKY'S DUNE
**½/****
directed by Frank Pavich

by Walter Chaw Broad, earnest, unassuming animation from France, Ernest & Celestine is the tale of a little girl mouse, Celestine (voice of Pauline Brunner), and gruff bear Ernest (Lambert Wilson), who overcome their cultural prejudices to become fast friends. Celestine is outcast because she'd like to be an artist instead of a dentist; Ernest is outcast because he's a busker struggling to eke out a subsistence living. Over a series of misadventures, the two end up doing the Badlands in Ernest's ramshackle hideaway, awaiting their fate and trying to enjoy their borrowed time. It's all leading to a grim ending, but it's not that kind of movie.

SDFF '13: The Fifth Season

La cinquième saison
****/****
starring Aurelia Poirier, Django Schrevens, Sam Louwyck, Gill Vancompernolle
written and directed by Peter Brosens & Jessica Woodworth

by Walter Chaw It begins as a puzzle, the active-engagement kind where a film, maybe an art film not very good and certainly not lacking in pretension, wears all the hopes of its creators on its sleeve. But then, out of nowhere, Peter Brosens and Jessica Woodworth's The Fifth Season (La cinquième saison) ties together all the pretty pictures into an entirely honourable updating of a few of the ideas from, but most importantly the atmosphere of, Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man. Truth be told, the pictures are more than just pretty: they're stunning at times, and it's easy to be mesmerized by them--by their surrealism and meticulous framing, and, at the end of it all, by their gorgeous absurdity. This is rapturous filmmaking that in its first minutes watches two teens kiss, tentatively, in the cold and the woods, their breath trembling the soft down on each other's faces. We feel, with them, the discovery of something new. The Fifth Season is a film about textures, but rather than just be a film about textures, it does something that maybe Terrence Malick's movies do, certainly Bela Tarr's: it makes its form comment on its function.

SDFF '13: The Broken Circle Breakdown

***/****
starring Johan Heldenbergh, Veerle Baetens, Nell Cattrysse, Geert Van Rampelberg
screenplay by Carl Joos & Felix Van Groeningen, based on the play by Johan Heldenbergh & Mieke Dobbels
directed by Felix Van Groeningen

by Walter Chaw Felix Van Groeningen's The Broken Circle Breakdown eventually loses impetus and becomes political theatre, but until it does it's exceptional melodrama, raw and emotional. It walks the fine line for a while, staying just this side of exploitation in its alinear tale of a little girl who gets cancer and her parents--how they met, the aftermath, and then the far aftermath. The film's central event, then, isn't the child's fate, but rather the meet-cute of the parents, with squarish Didier (Johan Heldenbergh) asking about Elise's (Veerle Baetens) tattoos in the parlour where she works. A bit shocked, and maybe titillated, that each has a story of a different man attached to it, he invites her to, essentially, come see him perform with his bluegrass band in a tiny club down the way. Van Groeningen, working from an original idea and stage play by Heldenbergh, adroitly alternates the events of the film with Didier's band's songs; in other words, The Broken Circle Breakdown owes a greater kinship to Cabaret than to Once--even though, at its best, its intent leans more towards the personal than the political. This means, of course, that once it becomes more political than personal, it also loses its rudder and balance. Already, effortlessly, about so much, it stumbles badly when it tries to be.

The Attack (2013)

L'attentat
***/****
starring Ali Suliman, Remonde Amsellem, Evgenia Dodina, Karim Saleh
screenplay by Joelle Touma and Ziad Doueiri, based on the novel by Yasmina Khadra
directed by Ziad Doueiri

by Walter Chaw Lebanese-born Ziad Doueiri, an assistant cameraman on Quentin Tarantino's first three features, demonstrates as a director the kind of elliptical reserve more commonly associated with Terrence Malick. Indeed, the most powerful stretches of his sophomore effort, The Attack, recall the fragments of The Thin Red Line that elucidate Pvt. Bell's wife's betrayal through a series of voiceovers, remembered conversations, and gauzy/idealized images of a bucolic existence that may or may not have ever existed. An adaptation of a novel by Yasmina Khadra, The Attack details the discovery by an Arab emergency-room surgeon based in Israel, Amin (Ali Suliman), that his wife Siham (Reymond Amsalem, who has the quality and pitch of Illeana Douglas--a wonderful thing) is the suicide bomber responsible for an attack in Tel Aviv, the casualties of which we watch Amin try to save. Amin has been "accepted" by the Jews, we understand, though there's tension throughout the early scenes as his friends and colleagues awkwardly navigate around him in a way that reads initially as condescending, then increasingly hostile as events unfold. Hannah Arendt would have something to say about this; so would Paula Deen and her legion of insensate followers. When Amin receives an award for his work, his acceptance speech includes the platitude that all Arabs have a little Jew in them and vice versa; by the picture's last words, "Every time you go away, a little piece of me dies," one wonders if he means the little piece that has empathy for the opposition's point of view.

Rosetta (1999) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Émilie Dequenne, Fabrizio Rongione, Olivier Gourmet, Anne Yernaux
written and directed by Luc & Jean-Pierre Dardenne

click any image to enlarge

by Bryant Frazer If there were any doubt that the Dardennes discovered what would be their lasting aesthetic with La promesse, it was dispelled in the opening moments of Rosetta. The earlier film spent a lot of time following characters around, hovering behind them as they made their way through their world. As Rosetta begins, we're again in close to a character, but this time we have a velocity: The girl, Rosetta (Emilie Dequenne), is storming from room to room in some kind of industrial facility, and the Dardennes' camera is following her at speed. This isn't a virtuoso tracking shot out of Scorsese or P.T. Anderson, though; Rosetta isn't accommodating the camera. When she exits a room, she slams the door behind her and the camera is caught up short, forcing an edit. When she erupts onto a factory floor, she ducks underneath the machinery, making her own passageways where the camera cannot go, and again forcing a cut. We are not welcome to follow.

La promesse (1996) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Jérémie Renier, Olivier Gourmet, Assita Ouedraogo, Rasmane Ouedraogo
written and directed by Luc Dardenne & Jean-Pierre Dardenne

click any image to enlarge

by Bryant Frazer Since the mid-1990s, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have been the standard-bearers for French-language Belgian cinema. Born in Engis and raised in nearby Seraing (both located in the industrial Belgian province of Liège), the Dardennes started making documentaries in the 1970s, followed by a pair of narrative films they immediately disavowed. 1996's La promesse was a completely fresh start. The Dardennes' non-fiction work demonstrated a social consciousness that remained in effect once they found their narrative voice, and it's amazing how fully realized this effort is, exhibiting many of the formal strategies and much of the narrative sensibility that would serve them well over the next decade and a half.

Hot Docs 2012: Summer of Giacomo (d. Alessandro Comodin)

by Angelo Muredda Conceptually sandwiched somewhere between Maren Ade’s terrific Everyone Else and Terrence Malick’s Badlands, Alessandro Comodin’s Summerof Giacomo is a richly textured portrait of dumb love in the grass, times two. As the lengthy credits of electric blue font superimposed on black and scored to languid birdsong suggest, this is chiefly an aesthetic experience, and Comodin delivers a gorgeously lensed (on 16mm) account of twentyish Giacomo and Stefani’s wayward hike through the countryside in search of a river by which to set up camp for the afternoon. The press notes tell us that Stefani is a childhood friend, but that hardly matters: all that we gather and need to gather is that something might have happened at some point, but outside of this hike, it’s over. What we’re left with, then, apart from their pathfinding and inevitable squabble, is a dense sensory record of the seriously goofy and – this is nicely underplayed – deaf Giacomo’s experience. His cochlear implant is briefly glimpsed in the first over-the-shoulder shot of him clanging randomly at a drum set, and you could happily read the film as an experiment in attending to the sounds, both slight and explosive, that pass through the device en route to his dufus skull.

The Artist (2011)

***½/****
starring Jean Dujardin, Berenice Bejo, John Goodman, James Cromwell
written and directed by Michel Hazanavicius

by Walter Chaw It's tempting to dismiss Michel Hazanavicius's The Artist as fluff. It's tempting to take the side of Kim Novak when she complains about this fluff using Bernard Hermann's Vertigo score in vain, and a few critics and Internet memes have done exactly that. Yet The Artist is more than a passing fancy precisely because it uses the Vertigo theme correctly in a sentence. Indeed, it even has its way with film preservationists and other snobs (the kind who champion Hugo, for instance) by suggesting that obsessive movie love to the exclusion of all else is the same sort of illness, ultimately, as necrophilia. In the fluffy course of its runtime, in fact,The Artist manages to be as subversive and scabrous a Hollywood artifact as Sunset Blvd., finding its monkey funeral towards the end instead of at the beginning but presenting a close-up Mr. DeMille at its conclusion almost as ambiguous and doomed. It's popular because it keeps its edges carefully sheathed...but they're there. And I think people are offended once they realize--most of them long, long after the fact, and through other avenues--that Hazanavicius had the temerity to peanut-butter a little obsessive, consumptive, solipsistic love in there to gum up all the crevices. I'll be honest: I think that if you don't believe The Artist is correct in its use of Vertigo, you probably also thought that Vertigo was a love story.

The Devil's Double (2011) - Blu-ray Disc

*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Dominic Cooper, Ludivine Sagnier, Philip Quast, Raad Rawi
screenplay by Michael Thomas
directed by Lee Tamahori

by Angelo Muredda The Devil's Double might be the first bad movie about which you can non-figuratively say, "That looked like piss." Director Lee Tamahori, who started off decently with 1994's Once Were Warriors but has since become a dependable franchise killer (Along Came A Spider, Die Another Day, xXx: State of the Union) and a Hollywood hack behind the occasional Nicolas Cage abortion (Next), bathes every shot in garish yellow lights that transform white leather couches into urine-stained gilded bars. If you're willing to excuse this aesthetic for the first few seconds of every shot as an uncomfortable and weirdly xenophobic bit of formalism--what better way to depict Iraq than to give it a nice golden shower?--good luck with the rest. When characters reposition themselves in the frame, they often seem to block the light source and thrust their companions into the dark for no good reason. DP Sam McCurdy surely considers this a clever trick, as he executes it over and over again, yet Tamahori's film, a hollow adaptation of Latif Yahia's unconfirmed autobiographical account of serving for many years as Uday Hussein's political decoy, is such a bore that the effect is one of watching someone throw buckets of neon paint on a blank canvas.

The Smurfs (2011)

½*/****
starring Neil Patrick Harris, Jayma Mays, Sofia Vergara, Hank Azaria
screenplay by J. David Stem & David N. Weiss and Jat Scherick & David Ronn
directed by Raja Gosnell

by Walter Chaw Between preaching its preach about not being pigeonholed and the importance of living life in the moment, Raja Gosnell's The Smurfs misses no opportunity to talk about the superficiality of Smurfette (voice of Katy Perry) discovering her secret shopping bug; Gargamel (Hank Azaria) turning an "old lady" into a balloon-chested hottie; and human hero Patrick (Neil Patrick Harris) helping his harridan cosmetics boss Odile (Sofia Vergara) sell gallons of snake oil to the Vanity Smurfs (voice of John Oliver) of the world. There's also a lot of pissing, puking, shitting, and farting; a disturbing running joke about putting heads on a pike; highly-imitable and often-disturbing cat violence; and a wave of overwhelming weariness that rolls off these Alvin and the Chipmunks/The Sorcerer's Apprentice pieces of shit that tend to flop but never hard enough to prevent the clockwork arrival of another something just like it. Fact is, the kid-movie market is too lucrative to not take homerun swings at it with '80s-nostalgic, high-concept falderal such as this; fact is, too, that The Smurfs, et al, come coated in critic-repellent asbestos, because no matter how deadening and odious something is, as long as your pliant and uncritical children enjoy it, it's fine. What were you expecting, Citizen Kane? Were that the same rationale applied to food made for children: what were you expecting, free of salmonella and rat turds?

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.

Sundance '10: Double Take

***/****
starring Ron Burrage, Mark Perry
written and directed by Johan Grimonprez

by Alex Jackson Johan Gimonprez's Double Take imagines an instance where Alfred Hitchcock is interrupted from filming 1963's The Birds to talk to his "double." This doppelgänger is from 1980--the year, you may remember (or reasonably guess), that Hitchcock died--and not his "double" at all, but rather his wraith, a vision of himself on the eve of his death. Hitchcock asks him who wins the Cold War and the wraith dismisses the question as unimportant. He wants to talk about how television is destroying cinema. The bulk of Double Take is a montage of archival footage--host segments from "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" and television broadcasts of Hitchcock's films, commercial spots for Folger's Instant Coffee that border on misogynistic, and news coverage of the 1959 Nixon/Khrushchev "kitchen debate," the infamous 1960 Nixon/Kennedy debate, the space race, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. The film calls to mind Jayne Loader and Kevin & Pierce Rafferty's 1982 curiosity The Atomic Cafe, in which the threat of nuclear holocaust is documented entirely through archival footage with no contextualizing narration or interviews. Gimonprez's digs at Richard Nixon (he match-cuts his twitchy eyes with those of a space monkey) and his facile but extremely powerful juxtaposition of The Supremes singing "Baby Love" and "Where Did Our Love Go" with footage of nuclear explosions and the escalating tensions between Cuba and the United States, to take the two most obvious examples, would have had more resonance 25 or 30 years ago, when condescension to the late-'50s/early-'60s was more fashionable and we were still under the immediate threat of nuclear annihilation. In 2010, Gimonprez's boogeyman isn't nuclear war, but television. He's suggesting that television makes everything it shows equally significant, until finally none of it matters. The Cold War is as pop as an Alfred Hitchcock thriller. But once we establish that, the film becomes somewhat self-cannibalizing. By putting criticism of television in the mouth of Hitchcock and the defense of it in the mouth of Nixon, and by holding Kennedy up as a manifestation of its denigrating effects (he seems more like a hologram than like a man), the film itself becomes subject to its own critique. If television has made it so that nothing is important, then that means Double Take itself is not important. I came out of Double Take feeling refreshed, as though I had just woken up from a beautiful dream, but something tells me I might have been even happier seeing three back-to-back episodes of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents", complete with vintage commercials.

TIFF '08: Lorna's Silence

Le silence de Lorna
***½/****
starring Arta Dobroshi, Jérémie Renier, Fabrizio Rongione, Alban Ukaj
written and directed by Jean-Pierre Dardenne & Luc Dardenne

by Bill Chambers That figures: I'm finally ready to get on board the Dardenne Brothers bandwagon and everyone's bailing. What I like--maybe love--about their latest, Lorna's Silence (Le Silence de Lorna), is that it zigs when you expect it to zag, which may peg me as superficial (some reviews of the film have admonished it for having a plot) but which nevertheless strikes me as a refreshing change of pace from the neorealist wallowing of their earlier work. (To my mind, the Dardennes crossed the threshold of self-parody with the psychotically-overrated L'Enfant and needed to acknowledge that they'd become predictable.) The picture opens on Lorna (Arta Dobroshi, bearing a striking if irrelevant resemblance to the Ellen Page of Hard Candy, right down to the costume), an Albanian immigrant residing in Belgium's economically depressed Liège (a.k.a. Dardennes Central) who's evidently reached the end of her tether with junkie husband Claudy (L'Enfant's Jérémie Renier, in a lovely performance). (We don't have to live with him, of course, but he generates a tremendous amount of pity when she slams the door in his face after he sweetly asks her to play cards.) Slowly, as though the narrative itself were irising out, Claudy is revealed to be the pawn in a green-card scheme, the necessary evil before Lorna can enter into an equally sham marriage with a Russian mobster. But if The Apartment taught us anything, nothing brings ersatz couples together like convalescence: During Claudy's latest detox, he and Lorna start acting more like a real husband and wife. And then comes the most jarring bifurcation this side of Full Metal Jacket; Lorna's Silence is two different movies, really, and it's the picture's second, less conventionally satisfying half which has courted the most hostility from critics, despite the fact that it arguably justifies more than any of their previous films all the ink spilled over the years comparing the Dardennes to Robert Bresson. (Maybe it's a challenge to those who insist on making the link.) Tempting to trot out that hoary description "fairytale for grownups," but let's just say that Lorna's Silence is on top of everything else a clever and affecting pro-choice fable. Minor Dardennes is my kind of Dardennes, I guess. PROGRAMME: Masters

Cops: 20th Anniversary Edition (1988-2007) + Smurfs: Season One, Volume One (1981-1982) - DVDs

COPS: 20TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION
Image B Sound B+ Extras B-
"Cops: 20th Season," "Pilot," "Las Vegas Heat," "First Ten Seasons," "Second Ten Seasons"

THE SMURFS: SEASON ONE, VOLUME ONE
Image B+ Sound B- Extras D
"The Smurf's Apprentice/The Smurfette/Vanity Fare," "King Smurf/The Astrosmurf/Jokey's Medicine," "St. Smurf and the Dragon/Sorcerer Smurf," "The Smurfs and the Howlibird," "The Magical Meanie/Bewitched, Bothered and Besmurfed," "Smurf-Colored Glasses/Dreamy's Nightmare," "Fuzzle Trouble/Soup a la Smurf," "The Hundredth Smurf/Smurphony in 'C'"

by Ian Pugh Kevin Rubio's "COPS"-Star Wars mashup Troops is painfully predictable, but there's a little nugget of profundity in its twist on "COPS"' familiar narration: "Suspects are guilty, period--otherwise, they wouldn't be suspects, would they?" It's the most concise description and criticism of "COPS" one could muster, almost impossible to build on because it so handily defines the tacit agreement the show's producers have with its audience. I mentioned in my review of the parodic "Reno 911!" that Fox's long-running reality show is useless in any political debate about police conduct, and it is--but upon watching several hours' worth of the series in a new "20th Anniversary Edition" DVD set, I became more perturbed by how it attempts to forge an uncrossable distance between you and the suspect. "COPS" always poses itself as something completely external to the viewer: in the interests of entertainment, the vast, vast majority of scenarios involve idiots caught in the act or resisting arrest. You're therefore not only a rubbernecker looking for a visceral thrill--you also come to consider yourself exempt from police scrutiny because you don't break the law and certainly wouldn't do so as blatantly and stupidly as these criminals. It's the equivalent of the moron who has no problem with the government wiretapping his phone because he doesn't believe he does anything to warrant their attention.

TIFF '07: Angel

**/****
starring Romola Garai, Michael Fassbender, Sam Neill, Charlotte Rampling
screenplay by François Ozon & Martin Crimp, based on the novel by Elizabeth Taylor
directed by François Ozon

by Bill Chambers François Ozon is what David Bordwell might call a "polystylist," though his eclecticism has mostly yielded diminishing returns. His latest finds him suiting up for yet another genre, and although it could be considered something of a throwback to his early features Water Drops on Burning Rocks and 8 Women (if by virtue of its roots in someone else's material), he's too tony now for the vaguely subversive pastiches with which he made his mark. Based on a book--unread by yours truly--by the other Elizabeth Taylor, Angel on the one hand arguably corresponds to the historical biopic (or sprawling period pieces in general) the way the upcoming Walk Hard does to Walk the Line or Ray, with the contempt seemingly manifested in Romola Garai's silent-movie gesticulations and a globetrotting sequence that has less aesthetic credibility than Conan O'Brien's wild desk rides betraying the film as a turn-of-the-century Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen. And yet, there's a kind of lazy veneration for stalwart tropes like the shell-shocked veteran, the tragic miscarriage, the mistress in the city, and, my personal favourite, the death-by-heartbreak--all of which serves to undercut the singularity of Angel's protagonist, a woman who writes her way to wealth and privilege in Edwardian society. (Perhaps Ozon's playing it safe because this is his first film entirely in English.) While Garai is very good in the title role, ingratiating even at the character's brattiest, only Sam Neill, as the henpecked publisher of Angel's potboilers, transcends the movie's cumulatively-disengaging tonal fluctuations. PROGRAMME: Special Presentations

Free Zone (2005) + The Secret Life of Words (2005) - DVDs

FREE ZONE
*/**** Image C- Sound B Extras F
starring Natalie Portman, Hanna Laslo, Hiam Abbass
written and directed by Amos Gitai

THE SECRET LIFE OF WORDS
*½/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Sarah Polley, Tim Robbins, Javier Cámara, Julie Christie
written and directed by Isabel Coixet

by Walter Chaw The not-at-all-hamfisted allegory of an Israeli woman and a Palestinian woman trekking across the disputed land to find an American who will settle some non-specific debt, Amos Gitai's tediously strident Free Zone opens with ten minutes, uninterrupted, of Natalie Portman weeping over what we discover to be the end of a love affair. It's showy and about as subtle as a kidney-punch--ditto the conception of Portman's passive Rebecca (Portman), the American on the sidelines, a matinee-beautiful beacon who stands by as impassively as Milton's God. That said, the device of a long, car-bound road trip narrated by flashbacks of the protagonists' separate journeys to this journey is, at least for a while, intoxicating. The problem--and it's a doozy--is that Gitai's picture is so blatant an allegory that nothing any of the characters say comes free of dramatic distance or irony, making it impossible to take the film seriously as anything other than ventriloquism for Gitai's, let's face it, unsurprising politics. Nothing wrong with Wailing Wall lamentations about the state of the world, but watching someone shake a fist at a dead horse, long past the hope of resurrection, for upwards of two hours, is tiring and futile. Is there traction in proposing that the film merely mirrors the hopelessness of the Middle East conflict? I guess, but then how many people--specifically, how many people renting a film called Free Zone directed by Amos Gitai--are going to feel edified by that?

TIFF '06: Black Book

Zwartboek
**/****
starring Carice van Houten, Sebastian Koch, Thom Hoffman, Halina Reijn
screenplay by Gerard Soeteman & Paul Verhoeven
directed by Paul Verhoeven

by Bill Chambers The word on Paul Verhoeven's Black Book (Zwartboek) around the TIFF was that it's "Showgirls meets Schindler's List," which is a cute bit of shorthand but decidedly misleading, not that I can begin to imagine what that movie would be like. All it really means is that we're never going to let Verhoeven live Showgirls down, so who can blame him for going back to Holland, where he's still an object of veneration? Alas, you can take Verhoeven out of Hollywood but you can't take Hollywood out of Verhoeven; Black Book is not so much a return to form--by which I mean a throwback to his subversive early work--as it is a supplement to his American output, the kind of Oscar-baiting wartime saga you just know he'd been aching to make with studio resources but only had the guts to execute in his native tongue. (In the press notes for the film, Verhoeven confesses that he stuck with genre in the U.S. because it better disguised his loose grasp of the English language.) The admittedly well-paced picture follows one Dutch Jewish woman's transformation from Anne Frank into Mata Hari as Rachel-cum-Ellis (Carice van Houten, for whom big things lie ahead) takes a Gestapo general (Jeroen Krabbé doppelgänger Sebastian Koch) for a lover as well as a job at his office, hoping it will all lead to the release of some fellow resistance fighters. Intended as a corrective of sorts to the implicitly anti-Semitic Soldier of Orange, Black Book is no less a sticky wicket in that it distils espionage tropes from the Nazi atrocities; when Rachel's entire family is gunned down on a barge along with other Jewish fugitives, it's a mere catalyst, lacking much in the way of sincerity or historical resonance. With its increasingly glib machinations (at least one late-film contrivance would embarrass the writers of "Three's Company"), the screenplay by Verhoeven and long-time collaborator Gerard Soeteman could, in fact, have just as easily served as the template for a Roland Emmerich/Dean Devlin turkey. Verhoeven the Auteur dutifully mimics Hitchcock here and there (and even Hitchcock heir Brian De Palma in a flagrant Carrie homage), though he's most evident in van Houten's multiple disrobings--which, despite being at odds with Black Book's commercial aspirations, give the film its strongest whiff of artistic integrity by shutting the door to the middlebrow-friendly PG-13 rating. PROGRAMME: Gala Presentations

L'Enfant (2005) + The Devil and Daniel Johnston (2006)|L'Enfant (2005) - DVD

The Child
**½/****
starring Jérémie Renier, Déborah François, Jérémie Segard, Fabrizio Rongione
written and directed by Jean-Pierre Dardenne & Luc Dardenne

THE DEVIL AND DANIEL JOHNSTON
**/****
directed by Jeff Feuerzeig

by Walter Chaw I believe the title is meant to indicate the arrested protagonist more than it is the baby he tries to sell on the black market, thus The Child (L'Enfant)--another of Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's mild, allegorical subversions of Robert Bresson and incrementally more violent subversions of the French New Wave--takes on Pickpocket via Breathless. In so doing, it conjures up this odd chimera of a stylistically backward-looking, formalist deconstruction, the first film of the Brothers (after La Promesse, Rosetta, and The Son) to feel this much like a knowing satire, to come so perilously close to being smug and post-modern that its style begins to become confused with its message. It could be a product of overfamiliarity with a fine and distinct sensibility (the last thing this kind of innovation can afford is to be outrun and second-guessed), or it could be that the Brothers are getting either bored of their shtick or fond of their reputation.

TIFF '05: Heading South

Vers le sud
***½/****
starring Charlotte Rampling, Karen Young, Louise Portal, Ménothy Cesar
screenplay by Laurent Cantet & Robin Campillo, based on short stories by Dany Laferrière
directed by Laurent Cantet

by Bill Chambers Heading South (Vers le sud) represents such a departure from the milieu of Laurent Cantet's previous film (2001's brilliant psychological thriller Time Out (L'Emploi du temps)) that you can't really say it rounds out a trilogy he started with Human Resources. Nevertheless, it resumes his fascination with people in transience, people who've erected complex façades to avoid the repercussions of personal or professional failure; Cantet's pictures are screwball comedies played straight, and we see ourselves reflected in them like Athene saw herself in the water. Thanks to a chilling, if red herring-laden, prologue wherein a Haitian mother tries to "give" her endangered teenage daughter to a respectable-looking islander, a black cloud looms over the piece--and it's just one of the many ways in which Cantet shrewdly exploits Haiti's mystique without falling back on Serpent and the Rainbow-isms, paving a road to doom down which three middle-aged spinsters defiantly walk. Wellesley professor Ellen (Charlotte Rampling), willowy Midwesterner Brenda (Karen Young, who gets to deliver one of the screen's finest erotic monologues since Persona), and earthy Montréaler Sue (Louise Portal) are returning guests at a kind of sex resort where they take turns patronizing Legba (Ménothy Cesar), a young gigolo who makes them feel not only beautiful but, critically, maternal, too. (When we first meet Legba, he's curled up in a foetal position on the beach, only to be 'awakened' by Brenda's touch.) Unfolding towards the end of Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier's reign of terror, the 1978-set film relies a little too much on a working knowledge of Haiti's political history to sort out its narrative ambiguities, but by the same token, this seems to stave off noble-savage syndrome--of which the characters are guilty but the filmmaker, for a change, is not. PROGRAMME: Special Presentations

DIFF '04: Imaginary Crimes

**/****
starring Sigourney Weaver, Emile Hirsch, Jeff Daniels, Michelle Williams
written and directed by Dan Harris

by Walter Chaw Another installment in the ongoing Ice Storm chronicles, screenwriter-turned-hyphenate Dan Harris's Imaginary Heroes also incorporates elements of stuff like A Home at the End of the World and Moonlight Mile. The picture shows its hand early and often, with a star swimmer (Kip Pardue) killing himself before the main titles have finished, thus leaving his already-dysfunctional family to pick up the suburban, Ordinary People pieces. Mom is Sigourney Weaver, sis is Michelle Williams, Pa is Jeff Daniels, and the star of the show is likeable Emile Hirsch; the early scenes where Hirsch goes back to school to a slo-mo parade of kids doing their best to be sympathetic (see: Donnie Darko) demonstrate a sort of comfortable indie familiarity with the material. Dad drinks too much and doesn't go to work anymore, Mom discovers the joys of joints and the humiliation of being arrested (a reaction extreme that doesn't ring true), sis falls in love with an emotionally shattered but affable young lad (Jay Paulson), and the "other" son decides to kiss his best friend (Suzanne Santo) one night whilst standing under a plastic snake that acts as an ersatz Freudian mistletoe. (To its credit, the picture resists the Judd Hirsch-ian (no relation) shrink, though given the situation, one does wonder why none of these people are in therapy.) So, if you're sick of this master plot and these stock characters, rest easy that you know all there is to know without needing to suffer through it. But if you miss Sigourney Weaver and wouldn't mind seeing her transfer over to the Joan Allen role in another white-collar blues bit, hell, Imaginary Heroes is just the ticket.

Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003) - DVD

**/**** Image B- Sound A Extras B-
starring Scarlett Johansson, Colin Firth, Tom Wilkinson, Judy Parfitt
screenplay by Olivia Hetreed, based on the novel by Tracy Chevalier
directed by Peter Webber

by Bill Chambers It's a tad perverse to shoot a film about the world of Johannes Vermeer in 'scope, considering the artist's own cramped reflection of that world on portable canvasses. A shut-in, if we interpret his life through his surviving pictures, Vermeer didn't just paint in a lambent room on the upper level of his mother-in-law's house in Delft, he painted the room itself--the begrimed walls, the half-stained furniture, the Gingerbread-house windows that caught his human subjects (often, it appears, members of the servant class) in a tractor beam of light.

Love Me If You Dare (2003) + Valentin (2002)

Jeux d'enfants
ZERO STARS/****
starring Guillaume Canet, Marion Cotillard, Thibault Verhaeghe, Joséphine Lebas-Joly
screenplay by Jacky Cukier & Yann Samuell
directed by Yann Samuell

VALENTIN
**/****
starring Julieta Cardinali, Carmen Maura, Jean Pierre Noher, Mex Urtizberea
written and directed by Alejandro Agresti

by Walter Chaw Former animator Yann Samuell's Love Me If You Dare (Jeux d'enfants) is painfully, dedicatedly unwatchable. It's vile and perverse in a puerile way that bears no discernable fruit. For a romantic comedy, it's conspicuously lacking in romance and comedy, and for a dark, satirical look at the Hobbesian baseness of human love and nature, it's astonishingly childish. The picture is the equivalent of a little boy eating a worm to impress the little girl he has a crush on: a tireless series of schoolyard transgressions portrayed in the whip-pan jack-in-the-box way of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amélie that shares with that film a strong thread of misanthropic mischief, but reveals itself the classless poseur in its constant keening for attention. Love Me If You Dare is so awful that its constant "hip" references to George Lucas films not only somehow make Kevin Smith seem current again, but also suggest of all things a rom-com directed by the clown-prince of Skywalker Ranch himself. There's an idea gnawing in my head that the reason this picture was so popular in France has something to do with a failure to translate the satirical dimensions of a film that succeeds so spectacularly in alienating its audience, yet, like Roberto Benigni's Pinocchio (the Italian version of which Jonathan Rosenbaum proclaimed one of the best films of 2002), whatever's happened in transit has handily transformed any rewarding subtext into a rising din.

The Triplets of Belleville (2003) - DVD

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
written and directed by Sylvain Chomet

by Walter Chaw An extraordinary, melancholy ode to the endless, mercurial peculiarity of life, Sylvain Chomet's The Triplets of Belleville (Les Triplettes de Belleville) finds as its existential constant the persistence of art, the familial ties that bind, and the echoing green of synchronicity. It is the finest film of its kind since Babe: Pig in the City, Gallic in the best implications of the term: self-conscious, intelligent, envelope-pushing. Its scope is immense both literally and philosophically, a series of dog dreams within providing a bit of core disquiet that work at you like the best poetry can. It's easy to forget the power of metaphor when it's bandied about like so much corrupt currency in sub-par product aching for subtext--in fact, The Triplets of Belleville is so close to poetry, something by William Carlos Williams, perhaps, that it touches something pure in art and archetype, reminding in the process of what symbolic language can do when wielded with a skilled, steady hand.

DIFF '03: Resist!: To Be with the Living

****/****
directed by Dirk Szuszies

by Walter Chaw I have long been sustained by the belief that film can change the world, and that the most interesting dialogues I have ever had about the medium (the idea that it is the logical child of the oral storytelling tradition--Lord Byron's seed and wind, both) are connectable some way to the larger issues of my, or any, day. Dirk Szuszies and Karin Kaper's Resist!: To Be with the Living draws a line of crystal purity from the cycles of Greek tragedy (the eternal fight for individuality, moral objection, and freedom of "Antigone") and the primal power of public theatre to the possibilities of the film medium to be a vehicle of change and revolution. A document of 50 years of New York's "The Living Theater," a collection of the ideological children of the impossibly tumultuous summer of '68, the picture is a refutation that everything is lost to apathy in a modern age that seeks to sanitize and market atrocity and crusade into patriotism and some perverse version of manifest destiny. Resist! follows this group of idealist performers, engaged in a ministry of outraged pacifism, capturing them and their performances in the cell of film that, in its own way, is as invasive and jarring as any Living Theater guerrilla performance. With this film, Paul Cronin's Amos Vogel documentary, Sam Green & Bill Siegel's The Weather Underground, and Errol Morris's The Fog of War, there seems a pointedly renewed interest in issues of sociopolitical unrest, of the arts in crisis, of youth in revolt, and of the importance of civil disobedience as the most patriotic form of expression. It's not for hatred of the country but rather for mistrust of the government, and at its core, Resist! is about the joy of passionate communication and that kernel of sublimity in art that represents the meaning of living.

TIFF '03: The Five Obstructions

De Fem Benspænd
***½/****
a film by Jørgen Leth & Lars von Trier

by Bill Chambers Jørgen Leth struck a self-described "Faustian" deal with half-insane auteur Lars von Trier to remake his own experimental short film The Perfect Human five times according to "ruinous" changes mandated by von Trier. But the mouse repeatedly outwitted the cat with an incapacity for anything but quality product: The first four of the titular "obstructions" are up there with, well, early Leth, and the venture teaches von Trier--who thrives on unforeseen obstacles and how they lead to personal dissatisfaction with his work--that you can't make crap on purpose. In the film's best sequence (though it doesn't involve the best obstruction, a version set in Cuba with shots that last twelve frames apiece), Leth and von Trier express their mutual loathing for cartoons, prompting the latter to send Leth to the Austin-based workshop of Waking Life co-director Bob Sabiston, where the pair concoct an animated rendition of The Perfect Human that only bears out Leth's artistic integrity. (No matter the medium, a true filmmaker won't begrudge his or her vision so long as reputations are at stake.) It'd be imprudent to spoil the nature of the fifth and final obstruction, but suffice it to say the final minutes of this fascinating, if specialized pseudo-documentary are as unexpectedly affecting as most von Trier productions, even if they confirm one's preconceived notion that von Trier is a terribly malicious softie. Programme: Real to Reel

Man on the Train (2002); Chaos (2001); And Now... Ladies and Gentlemen... (2002); The Son (2002)

L'Homme du train
***/****
starring Jean Rochefort, Johnny Hallyday, Jean-François Stévenin, Charlie Nelson
screenplay by Claude Klotz
directed by Patrice Leconte

CHAOS
*/****
starring Catherine Frot, Vincent Lindon, Rachida Brakni, Line Renaud
written and directed by Coline Serreau

AND NOW... LADIES AND GENTLEMEN...
***½/****
starring Jeremy Irons, Patricia Kaas, Thierry Lhermitte, Alessandra Martines
screenplay by Claude Lelouch, Pierre Leroux & Pierre Uytterhoeven
directed by Claude Lelouch

Le fils
****/****
starring Olivier Gourmet, Morgan Marinne, Isabella Soupart, Nassim Hassaïni
written and directed by Jean-Pierre Dardenne & Luc Dardenne

by Walter Chaw After a brief period where French cinema seemed exclusively interested in the ugliness and violence festering in its anti-Semitic margins, what with pictures as variegated as Baise-moi, Trouble Every Day, My Wife is an Actress, and indeed, Gasper Noé's sensationalistic Irréversible (which demonstrates a continuing fascination with a tumultuous French cinema in extremis), the old guard begins to reassert itself with its own tales of the underbelly of life displacing the façade of the comfortable upper class. Patrice Leconte's new film Man on the Train (L'Homme du train) is reserved and slight while Chaos by Coline Serreau (who was born the same year as Leconte, as it happens) tries to soften the cruelty of much of modern French cinema by overlaying it with a patina of feminist uplift and misplaced social satire. Films like Rohmer's The Lady and the Duke and Godard's In Praise of Love attempt to draw a line between the nouvelle and the digital age (and Chaos is shot in ugly DV), and pictures like Rivette's wonderful Va Savoir and now Claude Lelouch's And Now... Ladies and Gentlemen... act as surveys and auto-critique of the medium itself. With these three pictures, the meta-critical instinct--something of a hallmark of French culture in general and cinema in particular--finds a new voice in, ironically, its older generation of directors. Somewhat apart from all of that is the Dardenne Brothers' The Son (Le Fils), which is on its own stylistically but looks thematically for common ground in its own tale of obsession and reconciliation.

The Scorpion King (2002)

*/****
starring The Rock, Steven Brand, Kelly Hu, Michael Clarke Duncan
screenplay by David Hayter and Wil Osborne and Stephen Sommers
directed by Chuck Russell

by Walter Chaw I stopped marking the rip-offs perpetrated in The Scorpion King once Kelly Hu's jiggle priestess recreated a scene entire from Mike Hodges's legendary craptavaganza Flash Gordon. Sadly, The Scorpion King doesn't have the benefit of a Queen soundtrack to push the "just bad" into campy. It steals the rolling gong gag from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the cave murders and human bow-hunting of Rambo III, the feral kid of The Road Warrior, and its overriding ethos, apparently unintentionally, from Sergio Aragonés's comic book barbarian "Groo." If you manage to stifle a chuckle when Dwayne Johnson (a.k.a. The Rock) suffers all manner of horrendous falls and physical mortifications with a confused expression that all but screams "did I err?"...well, you're a better man than I.

No Man's Land (2001)

**½/****
starring Branko Djuric, Rene Bitorajac, Filip Sovagovic, Georges Siatidis
written and directed by Danis Tanovic

by Walter Chaw Chiki (Branko Djuric) is one of two surviving members of a front-line relief party that was decimated after their guide got them lost in a fog. (From the first, the visual metaphors fly as thick as pea soup.) His companion Cera (Filip Sovagovic), thought dead by the enemy, has been placed on a pressure-sensitive mine; his antagonist, Nino (Rene Bitorajac), has been disarmed and wounded. The three of them (four if you consider the mine a character) decry their causes while overlooking their similarities. No Man's Land is at its best when it tantalizes with the possibility for resolution--and at its worst when it explodes the claustrophobia of its first hour to include the UN, the press, and a newsreel montage lending background to a conflict the movie's only ostensibly about in the first place.