2010 (UK / France)
Director: Sylvain Chomet
Viewed: November 21, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (Hi-Pointe Theater)
Sylvain Chomet’s superb new animated feature, The Illusionist, functions as an affectionate homage to the films, spirit, and persona of French filmmaker Jacques Tati, all within a poignant fairy tale about grace and compassion. Oh, and it’s also flat-out gorgeous–a triumph of design that boasts fresh delights at every turn. Chomet discards the surrealism of The Triplets of Belleville for this more grounded tale of entrances, meetings, and exits in the fading vaudeville community of 1950s Europe. However, the former film’s hallmarks remain: grotesque characters, a reliance on pantomime and mumbled dialog, and a setting realized with breathtaking artistry. Based on an unproduced Tati script, Chomet’s film follows the titular stage magician (a caricature of Tati and his Monsieur Hulot character) through a sequence of humiliating gigs, picking up a guileless country girl along the way. The pair eventually settles for a time in a splendidly rendered Edinburgh, where their tender relationship deepens and evolves. Chomet presents this mellow, tearful story with an appealing blend of uneasy pathos, endearing zaniness, and black humor. The Illusionist is a giddy reminder of the evocative potential of traditional animation, a potential that attains full flower in the hands of a master such as Chomet.
There’s a surfeit of lush sensory pleasures in Peruvian writer-director Claudia Llosa’s arresting new feature, The Milk of Sorrow, enhancing the film’s potency as a bracing portrait of emotional isolation. Born in the era of Shining Path terror, the timid Fausta (Magaly Solier) has surrounded herself with a moat of reticence and vigilance, especially when it comes to men. Most shockingly, she has taken rather… extreme measures to dissuade rapists. However, the death of her elderly mother acts as a catalyst, forcing the girl into the wider world that she has long shuttered herself against. Llosa’s command of the frame is masterful, and she remains resolutely focused on humane details while using the arid Peruvian landscape to fine effect. The film is full of striking images: a demolished piano littered with colored glass; hands plucking scattered pearls from a bathroom floor; a procession of dancing wedding guests with their gifts held aloft. Such remarkable visuals provide a wondrous aesthetic substrate for Llosa’s heartfelt, distressing (and at times comical) tale of a woman’s emergence from her cocoon of fearfulness. The director presents even the story’s most outrageous details with startling conviction and esteem, acknowledging both the terrible power of trauma and the warm, amusing qualities of everyday life.
With the engaging but frustrating Black Swan, Darren Aronofsky again expands the range of his generic dabblings, this time to encompass backstage melodrama, psychological thriller, anatomical horror, and a bit of unexpectedly vicious camp. Thematically, however, the director’s attention remains fixed on obsession and the annihilation of the self. Indeed, Black Swan plays quite unambiguously as a companion to The Wrestler, as shamelessly operatic in its sensibility as Aronofsky’s previous film was tattered and doleful. Ambitious, high-strung ballerina Nina (Natalie Portman) dreams of dancing the lead in Swan Lake (”Done to death, I know,” concedes her impresario), but is haunted by strange visions and a sultry rival (Mila Kunis). Portman is flawlessly cast and delivers one of her finest performances in a challenging, rather unsympathetic role. The fingerprints of Polanski, De Palma, Cronenberg, and many other filmmakers are conspicuous, but where Aronofsky falters is not in amalgamating his myriad influences but in controlling the film’s tone. Black Swan veers from the grave to the ludicrous so fast that it disorients, while Clint Mansell’s Tchaikovsky-indebted score thunders away. The director’s often delicate observation of behavior is backgrounded in favor of creepshow spectacle, and the result is a genuine B-picture (a sort of werewolf picture, specifically). Aronofsky’s style remains seductive, but Black Swan is his least daring work to date.
For his feature film debut, Russian writer-director Andrey Khrzhanovskiy spins an arrhythmic, freewheeling fantasy about Jewish Soviet-American poet Iosif Brodsky, a writer who remains relatively obscure in the popular consciousness of the United States despite a Nobel Prize and stint as our Poet Laureate. Ripe with dewy Old Country nostalgia and yet scornful of Communist rule and the Russian character generally, A Room and a Half looks at snowy Leningrad through the eyes of a self-aware artist who longs for his childhood (while conceding its bleakness). Framed by a fictional homecoming for the exiled Brodsky, Khrzhanovskiy’s approach is amorphous and whimsical, complete with animated digressions, sepia and colorized recollections, and archival footage both real and mock. The film recalls meandering memoirs as diverse as Radio Days, Persepolis, and The Beaches of Agnès, but its most direct antecedent is My Winnipeg. However, A Room and a Half’s at times overplayed heartache and dithering tendencies mark it as a lesser film compared to Guy Maddin’s dreamy, ambivalent marvel. Khrzhanovskiy studs his film with oddly captivating little detours, but the result is a work that feels unfocused and rambling, one never entirely comfortable with the intensity of its own pathos.
For half a decade now, prolific Hong Kong director Johnnie To has been quietly establishing a lustrous reputation among Western cinephiles for his vigorous, dazzling works, which regard hoary crime thriller convention as a sandbox rather than a straightjacket. His latest feature, Vengeance, is a Hong Kong / French co-production filmed partly in English, and it proves to be the director’s most unfussy film in years, a straightforward genre exercise pitched in To’s peculiar key and seemingly formulated to lure fresh converts. The story is familiar: restaurateur and retired gangster Costello (weather-beaten French megastar Johnny Hallyday) searches Macau and Hong Kong for the killers who gunned down his daughter’s family, recruiting a trio of Chinese hitmen as his local allies. Characteristically, it’s the enthusiastic, slightly arch manner in which To presents familiar tropes that delights, as does his eye for memorable visuals: a landfill awash in shredded paper, a toy boomerang sailing silently through a picnic area, a flurry of girl scout stickers marking an execution target’s trench coat. The film has its flaws, chiefly an unfortunate scene of mawkish drivel and a weakly conveyed plot device stolen from Memento. On balance, however, it’s another fine illustration of To’s enviable talent for transforming stale formulas into beguiling cinema.
Sebastián Cordero’s desolate, ache-laden thriller Rage accomplishes an uncertain bait-and-switch, gradually revealing a film quite dissimilar from the one its opening gestures suggest. At the outset, it’s evident that seething laborer José María (Gustavo Sánchez Parra) harbors a violent temper that’s going to land him and beatific squeeze Rosa (Martina García) in hot water. And it does, in short order, leading José to hole up in the attic of the mansion where Rosa works as a maid (without her knowledge). What begins as a Hitchcock- and Coen-tinged crime fiasco evolves into something quieter and more melancholy. José’s boiling resentments are an ever-present factor, but the film eventually emerges as a tragic parable about separation, secrets, and shame. Cordero’s stylistic approach, which embraces gangrenous shadow, loopy angles, and prowling camerawork, plainly cribs from the slicker side of recent Spanish-language genre cinema, especially The Orphanage and Timecrimes. While Rage’s allegorical nods prove to be weak tea, it functions remarkably well strictly as a distressing, sorrowful story about damnation (of all stripes). Cordero’s film suggests that our private hells are edifices of both personal and societal flaws, and that the path to liberation is not easy just because it is obvious.
Call it the Gallic answer to the expectant mother melodrama. French writer-director François Ozon’s undemanding Hideaway is a strangely standoffish and vacant object, out of tune with the warm, sun-drenched beaches of its rural setting. Following her trust-fund boyfriend’s heroin overdose, the aimless, prickly Mousse (Isabelle Carré) discovers that she is carrying his child. For the duration of the pregnancy she withdraws to a seaside cottage, where her dead beau’s gay brother Paul (Louis-Ronan Choisy) appears at her puzzling invitation. The anticipated emotional twists ensue, as Mousse grapples with her evolving urges and her ambivalence towards parenthood, while Paul attempts to distract himself from the undeniable allure of his impending niece or nephew. While Ozon dapples his supple, attentive film with appealing moments of visual grace and raw emotion, the story proves to be thin stuff on which to hang a feature-length work. Frustratingly, both Mousse and Paul remain enigmas, and Ozon does little to develop any significant themes from their situation. The simple, swelling fact of the child and the characters’ clashing, conflicted stance towards it (and each other) are not compelling enough in their own right to warrant our attention, beyond the benign human spectacle one can find in any soap opera.
The strange auteurism of Danny Boyle–cosmopolitan, passionate, often stylistically and tonally awkward–is on full display in his new oddity, 127 Hours, a squirm-worthy stress-test with a Successories ethos and heedless, music-video aesthetic. Boyle’s take on the remarkably story of mountain climber Aaron Ralston (James Franco) is at once cruelly straightforward and yet littered with eye-catching detritus. The celebrated self-amputee’s ordeal is presented as a kind of stationary thriller, equally an obligatory celebration of the man’s fortitude and also a blunt retort to the sort of American recklessness that cloaks itself in athlete-cowboy “self-sufficiency”. Franco compels in what is essentially a one-man show, never more so than in the moment of absolute shock and horror when he first appraises his situation (and the title card finally appears, in a marvelous touch). Yet despite the raw, terrifying simplicity of the story, Boyle’s method lacks discipline, and he almost immediately grows bored with Ralston’s dusty surroundings. The director ornaments the film with every visual effect in his arsenal, with little consideration of whether it is warranted; he indulges in flashbacks, hallucinations, flamboyant POV shots, and more in order to expand the film’s boundaries. A more rigorously constrained approach (as in Rodrigo Cortés’ superior, fictional Buried) would have served Ralston’s astonishing story better.