Gateway Cinephiles

Quick Review: Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinksy

2009 (France)
Director: Jan Kounen
Viewed: April 14, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac)

Jan Kounen’s speculative (and frequently downright fictional) film about an affair between two artistic titans sumptuously affirms that not every tale of erotic craving need address romantic love.  Years after witnessing the notorious 1913 premiere of The Rite of Spring, Coco Chanel (Anna Mouglalis) invites a hard-luck Igor Stravinksy (Mads Mikkelsen) to her chalet, with his wife and kids in tow.  The designer desires to give the composer the freedom to create, but before you can say “kindred spirits,” the pair are engaged in a sweaty, desperate, but oddly chilly affair.  British writer Chris Greenhalgh adapted his own novel for the film, and both he and Kounen emphasize the white-hot obsessive knots–and inevitable implosion–that can occur when two like-minded souls collide.  Both the Rite, which serves as a recurring musical motif, and the dramatization of Chanel No. 5’s creation underline the film’s fascination with mystery, whether that of the artistic mind itself or the process of inspiration.  These themes prove far more compelling than a flimsy notion of fumbled True Love.  In Kounen’s expressive hands, what might have been a slight (albeit sexy) slice of biopic achieves something finer, a more cerebral cousin to Jane Campion’s poetic ruminations on emotional states.

Little House on the Shoulder

Home
2008 (Switzerland / France / Belgium)
Director: Ursula Meier
Viewed: May 19, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (Webster University Moore Auditorium)

[Home was featured in a limited engagement on May 14-19, 2010 at the Webster University Film Series.]

Suffused with both balmy affection and a mounting aura of calamity, Ursula Meier’s Home presents an unnerving portrait of a family floundering on the shoals of modernity.  The director has described her film as a “road movie in reverse,” and that seems as apt a description as any.  While the archetypal road movie entails a journey outward to discover something of value, Home concerns itself with a family that has already found everything it needs, only to have its idyllic state disturbed, fractured, and ultimately pulverized by the movements of others.  The film’s clan—never graced with a surname—dwells in a modest house in the countryside, where an old, unfinished highway runs right through their front yard and has been re-purposed as the family’s personal parking lot and street hockey rink.  One night, asphalt trucks rumble down the road, and steel barriers spring up along the shoulder and the median.  The metaphor is stark: the highway’s abrupt completion sends cracks through the family’s contented existence, disrupting their physical environment, their well-worn routines, and their interpersonal dynamics.  However, Meier steers clear of tussles with central planning bureaucrats, or other Kafkaesque ordeals.  Instead, she vividly explores the results of the family’s perhaps blinkered determination to stick it out and carry on with their lives.  And therein she discovers compelling insights into the fragile nature of domestic happiness and the anxious, bewildering character of contemporary life.

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Quick Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Män som hatar kvinnor)

2009 (Sweden)
Director: Niels Arden Oplev
Viewed: May 1, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac)

The film adaptation of the late Stieg Larsson’s phenomenally popular novel, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, is a nearly flawless Swedish replica of a lurid Hollywood thriller.  Whether that statement represents high praise or a backhand compliment depends on one’s regard for lurid Hollywood thrillers, but director Niels Arden Oplev has created, at minimum, a fierce little whodunit that is unwavering in its crackling regard for its heroine.  That would be Lisbeth Salander, a misfit hacker with anemic social skills and an eidetic memory, embodied with spooky precision by Noomi Rapace.  Oddly alluring and as tightly wound as a feral cat, Rapace is far more compelling than Michael Nyqvist’s doughy journalist or the film’s convoluted story of a vanished teen.  Oplev, to his credit, preserves the novel’s righteous anger at misogynistic violence, and also its flair for lending thrilling significance to the tiniest of clues.  However, the film’s gloomy aesthetic and faux-provocative shocks don’t conceal its fundamentally disposable nature.  Salander may add some texture to the ranks of fictional female sleuths, but Girl is still just crime, peril, and conspiracy recast as entertainment, a movie-of-the-week seen through a Scandinavian, post-Thomas Harris lens.

A World Stinking on the Bone and Pecked By Sparrows

Red Riding: 1974, Red Riding: 1980, Red Riding: 1983
2009 (UK)
Directors: Julian Jarrold, James Marsh, Anand Tucker
Viewed: April 15, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

Yorkshire.  Is there a more evocative landscape in all of England?  The word conjures visions of Wuthering Heights and its doomed lovers, of green dales and simple, working-class folk.  Such visions, nurtured on robust helpings of classist romanticism, are nowhere to be found in the Yorkshire of Red Riding.  Turn off the M-1, peer out the rain-spotted windows.  What do you see? Sad, ragged flats and shops; cruel buildings of steel, concrete, and linoleum, seemingly designed to engender malaise; the cooling towers of a nuclear power plant, pumping God-knows-what into the air, water, and bowels; vacant lots inflamed with rubble, weeds, and grubby children, who aren’t so much playing as they are biding their time.  And out there, beyond the drone of Leeds, Sheffield, and Hull and the countless, wretched towns, are the moors.  There are no trees, just the pitched and rolling Pennines (what passes for mountains in England), clad in heather and huddled under eternally gray skies.  The sense of exposure and remoteness is suffocating.  England’s sun-kissed Isle of Wight might as well be in Monaco, or Timbuktu.  The Red Riding film trilogy spends nine years in this miserable dream of Yorkshire, from 1974 to 1983, as the Left’s dreams of a bright British future comes crashing down amid economic stagnation and ruin.  The tale crosses paths with one of the most notorious serial killers in British history, but the film is not really about him.  It’s about the sort of place that could give birth to such a creature.

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Publish or Perish

The Ghost Writer
2010 (France / Germany / UK)
Director: Roman Polanski
Viewed: March 14, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Chase Park Plaza Cinema)

Roman Polanski’s thrillers pulse with their own curious rhythms, conveying a sense that everything—conversations, knowledge, even physical space—is ever so slightly out of sync.  Few directors possess his uncanny facility for pulling together all the elements of cinema, especially the selection of shots and music, to evoke a veiled, relentlessly sinister reality.   Whether he succeeds (Chinatown) or fails (The Ninth Gate), the result is unfailingly sumptuous and moody.  So it is with The Ghost Writer, a potboiler set in the rotten twin worlds of politics and publishing, executed with the auteur’s customary dramatic dexterity and passion for generic trappings.  Polanski makes no effort to conceal his personal fingerprints on the film: its politics are acidly suspicious of American power and yet also vaguely sympathetic to (ahem) public figures hounded by public outrage and the courts.  Yet the film remains relentlessly engaged with the noir-tinged plight of its nameless protagonist (Ewan McGregor), a man who, like Jake Gittes, considers himself a savvy mercenary, and whose pursuit of the truth is rooted not in airy ideals but in his resentment at being played for a fool.

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Innocence and Other Noble Lies

The White Ribbon (Das weisse Band)
2009 (Austria / Germany / France / Italy)
Director: Michael Haneke
Viewed: March 3, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac)

There is a mystery at the core of Michael Haneke’s Palm d’Or-clinching new film, The White Ribbon, but it is not a mystery that requires a solution.  Unlike the director’s brilliant splatter of post-modern mindfuckery, Caché, his latest feature does not wander outside the frame in the pursuit of answers.  The culprit who has committed The White Ribbon’s bizarre misdeeds is hiding in plain sight.  Set in the rigidly Protestant German hamlet of Eichwald just before World War I, the film presents the events of a single year, a year in which a series of peculiar and disturbing misfortunes befall the community.  Someone in the village is clearly responsible for these misfortunes, but sorting out whodunit is, at best, tangential to the film’s striking emotional and intellectual vigor.  Maintaining a mannered, somber tone that swathes the viewer in Old Testament dread, Haneke uses his setting and plot as portals through which he accesses a breathtaking array of themes.  Impeccably constructed and exquisitely shot in black-and-white, The White Ribbon will frustrate viewers seeking dramatic jolts.  This film is all trembling and lip-licking, a work brimming with the sour-gut sensation that something is wrong, just out of sight.

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Hurry Up and Wait

Police, Adjective (Politist, adj.)
2009 (Romania)
Director: Corneliu Porumboiu
Viewed: February 9, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Tivoli)

Corneliu Porumboiu’s willfully staid and yet wholly absorbing new feature, Police, Adjective, operates on two interlocking planes.  On the one hand, it is a police procedural of the driest sort imaginable, an agonizingly attentive study of how people, objects, and information travel through a drug investigation in a small Romanian city.   In this city, the Eastern Bloc bureaucracy (and furniture) is still firmly in place, as are draconian narcotics laws that the rest of the European Union has discarded.  Strictly as a lesson in how dull police work can be, and specifically how dully absurd it can be in a former Communist dictatorship, Police, Adjective is an intriguing work, whose stifling realism serves as a direct refutation to the bombast of the Cop Picture (regardless of nationality).  Porumboiu, however, is far too talented and unruly a director to simply engage in a bit of genre revisionism and call it a day.  Accordingly, there is another, more impressive level to the film, one absorbed with language and the way it shapes, steers, and constrains us.  What truly fascinates about Police, Adjective is how easily Porumboiu grafts what is for all practical purposes an academic treatise on linguistics onto his police procedural, and how the two complement and fortify one another.

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Late to the Game: Five Minutes of Heaven

2009 (UK)
Director: Oliver Hirschbiegel
Viewed: December 24, 2009
Format: DVD - IFC (2009)

Just as Oliver Hirschbiegel’s uncommonly penetrating Nazi epic Downfall pivoted on Bruno Ganz’ portrayal of Adolf Hitler, so too does his tale of the Irish Troubles’ aftermath rests on the shoulders of an actor.  However, Five Minutes of Heaven’s most riveting performance isn’t delivered by its most familiar face, Liam Neeson, whose repentant Loyalist now works in conflict resolution.  Leonine and haunted, Neeson suits the material well, but the film’s locus is unequivocally James Nesbitt, as the brother of a Catholic man a seventeen-year-old Neeson gunned down.  Goaded into confronting his brother’s murderer by a company that engineers reconciliations for television, Nesbitt is wholly mesmerizing as a frayed man who is utterly unapologetic about his hatred and his lust for revenge.  Hirschbiegel and writer Guy Hibbert never lose sight of the story’s essential theme of the futility of blood-for-blood, but they are unafraid of exploring other avenues, such as the insidious nature of indoctrination, the toxic effects of grief on families, and, most damningly, the manner in which the media exploits human tragedy and treats peacemaking as just another bit of niche programming.  It’s primarily some third act wheel-spinning and narrative goofiness that prevents the film from feeling like an unqualified success.

Quick Review: The Baader-Meinhof Complex (Der Baader Meinhof Komplex)

2008 (Germany)
Director: Uli Edel
Viewed: September 29, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

Uli Edel’s blood-spattered marathon retelling of the Red Army Faction’s rise and fall succeeds at establishing a fitting mood of social disintegration and open intra-cultural warfare.  Feverishly tearing through two decades of history while piling on endless, brutal setpieces, The Baader-Meinhof Complex foregrounds thrills and atmosphere, while neglecting character and context.  Writer Bernd Eichinger, who scribed the captivating Downfall, at least acknowledges the notion that the RAF was the ugly endpoint of the post-Nazi generation’s recoil from fascism.  The violent radicals depicted in Complex, however, are caricatures of unquenchable rage, not the best proxies for psychological delvings or an exploration of the origins of revolutionary zeal in affluent societies.  What Edel delivers is a relentless film that works primarily as grim entertainment, albeit one that non-Germans may have difficult absorbing, as the historical arcana come fast and furious.  Yet even as a depiction of revolution as process, Complex falls far short of last year’s mesmerizing Che, which was both more artistically daring and more coherent.  While Edel is adept at conjuring the madhouse spirit of the RAF’s murderous glory days, Complex is undemanding globetrotting drama at bottom, a grueling thriller with a dash of chilly Teutonic style.

In the Very Temple of Delight

Bright Star
2009 (UK / Australia / France)
Director: Jane Campion
Viewed: September 27, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

Jane Campion’s new film, Bright Star, is positively swollen with exquisite sorrow.  Unabashed and yet sober in her embrace of the romantic, Campion exhibits a shrewd talent for blending personal and cultural understandings of love, and Bright Star is further, devastating proof of her instincts.  In presenting the tale of the relationship between seamstress Fanny Brawne and the English poet John Keats, Bright Star relies on the viewer’s own romantic reference points as well as their understanding of generic tropes.  The film slathers on the components of a textbook romantic tragedy: a soul in creative torment, attraction concealed behind bickering, social barriers that suffocate the lovers, a meddlesome third party, emotions that quickly veer from ecstatic to distraught, and a world that seems almost malevolent to love.  Campion assembles these well-worn elements into a whole that is not only deeply affecting, but also visually and aurally compelling.  Bright Star does not ask for our indulgence.  It earns it, by sweeping us along into a world where poetry expresses what blunt declarations, and even physical intimacies, cannot.  It operates much like poetry itself.  To borrow a phrase from Campion’s masterpiece, The Piano, it is not so much an account of a chaste love affair as it is a mood that passes through you.

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