Gateway Cinephiles

2006 (France)
Director: Guillaume Canet
Viewed: August 10, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

C - Guillaume Canet’s absorbing yet irksome thriller Tell No One engages (for a time) as a puzzle box, and also as a bitter rumination on the costs of secrecy. It twists together computer mischief, frenetic action set pieces, and cops-and-corruption melodrama, and punctuates them with brutally violent exclamation marks. Despite the cloak-and-dagger intensity of its plot, Tell No One rarely grandstands, its themes murmuring rather than screaming. It boasts sufficient moments of originality and sleek cinematic pleasure that its story troubles—evidencing a distressingly amateur tendency—are rendered doubly exasperating. The plot may be convoluted, but this doesn’t justify Tell No One’s garbled cinematic language. When a con succeeds not through misdirection and cunning but because the mark didn’t even understand the rules of the game, something has gone seriously awry.

Tell No One boasts a shameless, pop- and soul-strewn soundtrack that proclaims the film’s earnestly romantic ethos. And wherever romance rears its head in a thriller, tragedy is sure to be lurking nearby. Accordingly, the film presents us with French pediatrician Alexendre Beck (François Cluzet) who had just finished medical school when his wife Margot (Marie-Josée Croze) was murdered, apparently by a notorious serial killer. Eight years later, the good doctor is still numb from the loss of a woman he believed to be his soul mate. Now there are new rumblings in the case, precipitated by freshly unearthed bodies, freshly suspicious policemen, and, most significantly, a mysterious email sent to Beck. He’s baffled and anguished when the email links him to a live surveillance camera that captures—for only a moment—a woman who looks remarkably like Margot. But it can’t be Margot, can it? Are the police tormenting him? Or is it someone else’s sick game?

Beck’s lingering doubts and still-bloody emotional wounds seem to render him ripe for gas-lighting, as his friend and sister’s lover Hélène (Kristin Scott Thomas) suspects. Beck begins to wonder how much he really knows about his wife’s death, or, for that matter, her life. There are more emails, photos he can’t explain, and breadcrumbs that lead in ever-widening spiral out from Margot. Tell No One is most effective when it roils within Beck’s headspace, keeping its focus on this one man’s enduring love for his wife. Never mind that the storybook glow to their relationship seems sketchy, despite the film’s heavy-handed assertion that they were Meant For Each Other. Within the conflicted territory where Beck’s affections and fears swirl, Tell No One finds the room to neatly explore the consequences of keeping secrets. The film is essentially a tragedy, a grim tale where no good deed goes unpunished, and where happy endings tend to brush past in a crowd and vanish, glimpsed but never found.

There’s more than a little of Paul Greengrass’s ADD jitters in Canet’s approach to action sequences, but the director is skillful enough to maintain a brisk aura of authentic danger throughout them. The chases and escapes are never dull, although they at times feel like detours in a work plainly absorbed with perils more abstract than car crashes. Similarly, there’s something disappointing about a film with lofty thematic ambitions that traffics in thriller conventions so clichéd they sting. When Beck aids a gangbanger’s hemophiliac son in an early scene, there’s no doubt that the act will reap a boon later, especially when Beck nobly refuses the thug’s money. The film practically has a genre checklist in hand: the wrongly accused protagonist, the clandestine meeting in a public place, the rot in the halls of power, and an overly-long climactic exposition, complete with clarifying flashbacks. Thank goodness that Tell No One is more interesting than its trappings would suggest. That said, there is the odd flash of bottled lightning. Among the goons hounding Beck’s steps, Mikaela Fisher leaves a lasting impression as a lanky ghoul of an amazon with a knack for pressure-point torture. And Canet pulls off an astonishing coup by employing an overcooked U2 song in a completely appropriate and gratifying manner.

The serious flaw that bedevils Tell No One is its simple failure to effectively communicate its plot points, a problem that reeks distressingly of Z-movie clumsiness. In terms of pure storytelling, the film is a mess. New characters appear without warning and make statements that certainly seem relevant, yet context is perpetually a few paces behind the film-makers (and the viewer). I spent half the film trying to keep up with a proliferation of vaguely sketched relationships and barely hinted plot elements. Yet, if anything, Tell No One is overly long, frittering away its running time on chases and monologues that go on several beats past their purpose. It’s a film sorely in need of a re-write, methinks. The problem may also be one of editing, as there actually appear to be missing scenes at select points. Most maddeningly, vital backstory is revealed only when it is relevant for a “surprising” revelation. (One example of this at the climax is so egregious that I am convinced I missed something earlier in the film. This alleged twist simply couldn’t be as cheap as it seemed.) It’s lamentable to see such fundamental storytelling blunders hobble a thriller that is otherwise so thoughtful and engaging.

2008 (UK / USA)
Director: James Marsh
Viewed: August 5, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

B - James Marsh’s Man on Wire succeeds gratifyingly in one crucial respect, despite its questionable structural choices: It ascends to become more than a mere cinematic description of an event. That counts for a lot in documentary film-making. Marsh strives mightily to convey (and largely accomplishes) a sense of the transcendent in this story of French acrobat Philippe Petit and the outrageous artistic stunt he improbably pulled off. In 1974, Petit and several accomplices entered the World Trade Center and strung a high-wire between the Two Towers, setting the stage for a 45-minute tightrope performance at 1,400 feet with no net.

That’s pretty much the story, but as with most effective documentaries, Man on Wire—which takes its title from the Port Authority’s description of Petit’s “disorderly conduct”—is compelling because of the unexpected themes it discovers. If the film falters a bit in its presentation, it’s due to to the clumsy, scrambled structure it employs, and the way it hedges its bets by dwelling for far too long on the drama of its story’s heist aspects. Still, Man on Wire pinpoints the same sublime wonder that Petit evoked when he created such a baffling, beautiful work of performance art.

Man on Wire begins on the day of the “coup,” as Petit’s team termed their act of trespassing-slash-performance. The tale of the coup unfolds gradually in stylized black-and-white recreations, and Marsh presents the act as a good-natured caper. It’s not an untenable approach per se, but the film’s fractured tone in these sequences—simultaneously anxious and clownish—always seems somewhat awkward. In this respect, Man on Wire compares unfavorably to last year’s Deep Water, another film about human limits and foolish risks that marvelously evoked tense drama from historical events. Ultimately, Man on Wire’s aims soar higher, so its odd tone is a minor sin.

The film’s more vexing problem is that it intercuts the lengthy coup sequence with flashbacks that examine Petit’s youth, his previous tightrope stunts, and the team’s elaborate planning and preparations. This repeatedly deflates the tension that the film is attempting to evoke, and for no discernible reason. (Contrast this with Into the Wild, a flawed film that nonetheless shrewdly used a entwined, twin narrative structure to prevent a glum mood from settling over its latter half.) The chopped and rearranged story just doesn’t add anything to Man on Wire, which would have been much more compelling as a chronological narrative.

Despite these problems, however, the giddy thrill of Petit’s stunt—of his whole persona and worldview, actually—exhibits an undeniable pull on the film and the viewer. Man on Wire’s stylistic nods to the heist genre work best when they convey a certain Naughty Boy glee, such as in the perpetrators’ clichéd nicknames (”The Australian,” “The Inside Man”, etc.) While some of Petit’s accomplices assisted in his previous stunts, they all seem to have been taken unawares by the Frenchman’s commitment to the “WTC Project”. Their remembrances all strike a similar note: The reality of the danger (and the lunacy of it all) didn’t hit them until they realized that Petit actually intended to step onto that wire.

The acrobat’s passion and Zen focus burn through every frame of Man on Wire. It’s fair to say that the documentary is Petit’s film as much as Marsh’s. Occasionally the filmmaker errs on the side of credulity in his mythologizing of the man. There’s something a little too neat about Petit’s alleged resolve as a teenager to wirewalk between the Twin Towers, before the structures were even completed, and Marsh seems to accept this ancedote without question. At other times Marsh pulls back from more fascinating territory, such as his tantalizing and maddening dance around the disintegration of Petit’s relationships in the wake of the WTC Project.

Where these more humanistic elements are present, they paradoxically serve to highlight Man on Wire’s obvious fascination with the sublime aspects of performance. Petit is joyously unapologetic about his stunt, and an enthusiastic witness for its transformative power, both for himself and everyone who looked up that August morning in 1974. He glibly asserts, “There is no ‘Why’” when asked about the rationale for the WTC Project, but the why is obvious: To give the world a taste of something magical. Indeed, his accomplices echo this sentiment, speaking in reverent tones about the effect of the spectacle, struggling to find words. Some of them are moved to tears, because of the beauty in the remembered feat, or the pain of their falling out with Petit after such a triumph, or both.

At the documentary’s inarguable climax, when Petit finally steps onto the wire, Marsh hushes the Michael Nyman score for a delicate Satie piano tune and takes us through a stunning selection of photos that captured the stunt. It’s a beautiful sequence, a moving counterpoint to the film’s previously harried, veering path. For days and weeks thereafter, the world buzzed about this man who danced a quarter mile above the earth for less than an hour, becoming like a god. For all of Petit’s self-aggrandizing talk of rebellion and “pushing himself,” this is Man on Wire’s most striking thesis, one that Marsh recognizes and communicates with boundless sincerity and awe. Petit’s former girlfriend, Annie, recalls vainly attempting to point him out to spectators beneath the Twin Towers: You can’t see him, but he’s up there. Like a god, indeed.