Posts Tagged ‘Thrillers’

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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Friday, December 23rd, 2011

2001 (USA)
Director: David Fincher
Viewed: December 19, 2011
Format: Digital Theatrical Project (Wehrenberg Ronnies 20)

An argument can be made that David Fincher’s adaptation of Steig Larsson’s phenomenally popular pulp whodunit, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, is an exercise in style over substance. Certainly, the film’s opening credit sequence lends credence to this position: Yeah Yeah Yeahs vocalist Karen O growls out a cover of Led Zepellin’s “Immigrant Song” as oily black liquid oozes over human figures that are embraced and penetrated by writhing computer cables. It’s jarringly reminiscent of a James Bond opening, and perhaps a sly inter-textual joke at that, given that leading man Daniel Craig is serving as the current 007. The rest of the film is only moderately less brash.

However, such aggressive styling proves to be a tick-mark in the film’s favor, at least when one considers it alongside both the source material and Niel’s Arden Oplev’s comparatively flat, mirthless 2009 Swedish film adaptation. Under Oplev’s hand, Larsson’s grim tale of buried family secrets and socialist democracy gone freakishly awry was many things—workmanlike, satisfactory, disposable—but stylish it was not. The most valuable card up the sleeve of the 2009 film was Noomi Rapace, who embodied waifish, wounded hacker-sleuth Lisbeth Salander with eerie precision and a curious kind of dark magnetism.

Fincher’s take doesn’t add any appreciable depth to Larsson’s tale, and in this respect it is remarkably similar to the Swedish film. Screenwriter Steve Zallian wisely excises the Scandinavian politics and finance that dominated hefty stretches of the novel. Such components are arguable crucial for understanding the wider context of Larrson’s story, but what is digestible on the page is probably unworkable in a film. Zallian also trims and tweaks the narrative in other ways, mostly to make the story a little smoother and more symmetrical. From a thematic perspective, however, the new film is unsophisticated, offering little beyond the visceral appeal of an unsolved mystery, seat-squirming tension, and a streak of white-hot pseudo-feminist rage.

Insofar as this is the extent of what any version of the The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo could offer, David Fincher’s film is an unquestionably handsome and persuasive realization of the tale. It’s visually striking, crisply conveyed, and blessed with a lucid, seductive aesthetic and mood, which is more than one can say of most murder mysteries. Rooney Mara—slinky and wide-eyed beneath ghostly eyebrows—conveys her own variation of Lisbeth, more shrinking, awkward, and defensive than Rapace’s portrayal, but also more fearsome and razor-edged when provoked. Beyond Mara and Craig the film features a cast of familiar faces—Christopher Plummer, Stellan Skarsgård, and Robin Wright among them—as well as Swedish stars and long-lost character actors (Julian Sands!), all of whom acquit themselves well enough. (Perhaps the film’s only formal blunder is the vaguely accented English dialog, which is distracting given the explicit decision to retain the Swedish setting.)

The real stars here, however, are the craftsmen behind the film, a team of returning Fincher collaborators who manage to render a stomach-churning tale of rape, murder, and revenge as something deliriously attractive. Cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth bestows a familiar yellowish “greasy-gothic” look to most of the interior spaces, but elsewhere a chilly gray dominates, and appropriately so. The adroit editing from Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall—who have now cut the director’s past four films—keeps things humming along with enviable vigor and clarity, a necessary asset in a story so laden with exposition. Just as essential is the score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, which effectively evokes an atmosphere of pure wrongness by layering plucked-out, discordant melodies over ambient droning and buzzing. These various visual and aural elements coalesce (perhaps “curdle” is a better term) into an atmosphere that is oppressive, gnawing, and eminently fitting for the tale. And therein lies the primary appeal of The Girl With a Dragon Tattoo: As a lurid, shallow thriller steeped in hideous beauty.

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Look/Listen: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Friday, December 23rd, 2011

My review of Tomas Alfredson’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is up at Look/Listen. Check it out.

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Troll Hunter

Wednesday, November 23rd, 2011

2010 (Norway)
Director: André Øvredal
Viewed: November 19, 2011
Format: Netflix Instant Queue via Playstation 3

In most respects, the Norwegian horror-fantasy Troll Hunter is a fairly representative “found footage” thriller. It possesses the jittery camerawork, generally unpleasant characters, and old-school matinee-monster teases that are now bedrock elements of that sub-genre. What most distinguishes director André Øvredal’s film is the engaging mythological framework that it constructs for its story, a framework that the film regards with affection and sincerity while also acknowledging its innate absurdity. Absent an intense and detailed viral marketing campaign—as in The Blair Witch Project or Cloverfield—most found footage features do a dreadful job of conveying the broader fantastical universe that rustles outside the audience’s field of view. Too often, every aspect of these films is pitched slavishly to the camera’s eye, with little regard for textured world-building, as though a first-person camera automatically bestows all the necessary verisimilitude. Not so with Troll Hunter, which utilizes expository dialog, creative set design, and four or five thrilling special effects set-pieces to intimate a rich and dryly amusing pagan-fantasy mythos. (In this respect, Troll Hunter plays as a wily, lo-fi cousin to the Nordic-influenced How to Train Your Dragon.)

The conceit: All the footage that the film presents was ostensibly shot by a group of student documentarians—director/interviewer Thomas (Glenn Erland Tosterud), sound woman Johanna (Johanna Mørck), and cameraman Kalle (Tomas Alf Larsen)—who are shadowing a suspected bear poacher in western Norway. Despite being curtly warned off by their subject, Hans (Otto Jespersen), the trio doggedly follows his movements through campgrounds and rugged wilderness areas, going so far as to tail him during a nocturnal expedition into the forest. Eventually, the students stumble upon the outlandish truth: Hans is no poacher, but a government-employed field agent (the only field agent, actually) for the Troll Security Service (TSS). Disillusioned by decades of thankless work under an agency that values secrecy above all else, Hans agrees to allow the students to film his lonely, day-to-day routine, as well as his matter-of-fact explanations of troll biology and behavior. This proves to be the set-up for the real meat of Troll Hunter, which is a succession of fearsome, often funny encounters with different varieties of troll.

The unsuccessful aspects of Troll Hunter are distressingly familiar within the annals of found footage cinema. The only truly compelling character in the film is Hans, a reserved and hard-nosed old salt who doesn’t have a shred of romanticism left about his life’s work, but betrays a streak of wary fondness for trolls. Every other character is either featureless or actively unlikable, which necessarily restrains the tension of the various action-horror sequences. The film drags a bit in spots, and is liberally padded with lingering shots of the admittedly gorgeous winter landscapes of rural Norway, to the point where it seems to have ambitions as a promotional film for Scandinavian tourism. However, fifteen or so minutes of bloat notwithstanding, the story is neatly structured around Hans’ investigation of a recent, unprecedented rise in troll rampages, with each scene revealing new details and flowing smoothly into the next. The whole thing is a bit schematic and predictable at times–when a 500-foot-tall troll species is mentioned in passing, its eventual appearance is virtually guaranteed–but still gratifyingly executed.

Troll Hunter never quite figures out whether it wants to treat its titular monsters as wholly scientific subjects or émigrés from a lost magical era. The film offers some biological gobbledygook to explain why trolls turn to stone when exposed sunlight, but elsewhere ridicules other alleged attributes as fairy-tale nonsense. On the one hand, Hans states flatly and without elaboration that trolls are definitely mammals. On the other, the film doesn’t even attempt to present a pseudo-scientific explanation for trolls’ ability to smell Christian blood, a characteristic that proves to be a crucial plot point. Such contradictions might have been more vexing if Troll Hunter weren’t having so much vintage monster-movie fun with its signature creatures. The sheer spectacle of seeing mythological brutes marauding through a contemporary landscape is half the appeal of the film, which does a marvelous job of conveying the threatening nature of the trolls while also portraying them as faintly ludicrous. Blessedly, the viewer is spared the sight of “darker, edgier” trolls. Instead, the creature designs draw from the works of whimsical contemporary fantasy artists, such as Brian Froud’s witty creations and Rien Poortvliet’s seminal illustrations for Wil Huygen’s gnome books.

Troll Hunter takes sardonic aim at a wide variety of targets: romanticism and revisionism regarding Europe’s pagan past; the glib flimsiness of hero myths; government bureaucracy and its aversion to transparency; and the tension between development and environmentalism. It’s not what one could call a vicious work of satire—it is Norwegian, after all—but in the end, the modesty of the film’s cultural commentary proves a wise decision. Troll Hunter functions first and foremost as an old-fashioned creature feature, one that boasts an absurdly deep mythology and abundant moments of giddy, comic terror.

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StLIFF 2011: 23 Minutes to Sunrise

Tuesday, November 15th, 2011

2012 (USA)
Director: Jay Kanzler
Viewed: November 14, 2011
Format: Theatrical DVD (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

The film-makers who were on hand to introduce the StLIFF screening of St. Louis-based mini-indie 23 Minutes to Sunrise cheerfully conceded that the cut about to be shown was still a little rough around the edges. However, the film’s crudity has less to do with its incomplete color and sound than with the more fundamental flaws in its assembly. While Leonard Cohen growls his way through “Everybody Knows” over the opening credits, four couples slowly converge on a greasy spoon during the wee hours of the night. (The musical selection recalls the same song’s prominent use in Exotica, a film with which 23 Minutes shares a forlorn aura and equitable regard for its characters.) The film is, at bottom, a kind of ensemble Dark Night of the Soul story, and the archetypes that gather at the diner are well-worn: a weary husband and wife (Bob Zany and Nia Peeples) who talk in circles about their flailing relationship; an anxious, hot-headed criminal (Tom Sandoval) and his reluctant girlfriend (Kristen Doute); a sweet-as-molasses waitress (Jilanne Klaus) with a ungrateful lout of a husband at home; and a veteran-turned-cook (Dingani Beza) whose rambling voice-over ruminations on life and God mark him as the doubtful hero of this tale. To these players the film adds its wild cards in the form of an eerie young woman (Haley Busch) and her menacing older companion (Eric Roberts), a pair whose elliptical conversations mark them as unquestionably not-from-around-here.

There is no way around that reality that 23 Minutes is amateurish stuff, a fact betrayed by profuse continuity goofs and often confused editing. The soapy dialog and musical cues wander into snicker-worthy territory at times, and the film lacks the pacing and rhythm necessary to keep a single-location story such as this moving along. Most unforgivably for a film that makes significant narrative hay over a deadline, its presentation of time is absurdly slipshod: seconds seem to last minutes, and minutes seem to last seconds, depending on the scene in question. Despite these problems, there is much to commend in the small details of 23 Minutes to Sunrise. The hesitant romance between Beza’s and Klaus’ characters is touching and naturalistic, and admirably disregards the racial and age dimensions without making a show of its disregard. Excepting the Mystery Couple of Busch and Roberts, the characters are well-drawn and all markedly pitiable in differing ways, even if they are not all sympathetic. Most intriguing of all, 23 Minutes is defiantly resistant to generic categorization. Coiled underneath its veneer of stale melodrama, crime-thriller tension, and mild comic business is a kind of feature-length Twilight Zone episode sans a big reveal. The supernatural eventually rears its head, but never in a manner that definitively places the story within a particular family of fictional conventions. The film lacks a verbose Explanation Scene, and never clarifies exactly why Roberts’ sinister stranger seems to be the dark pole star around which the story’s events rotate. Far from being a maddening fatal flaw, this ambiguity is arguably the most innovative thing 23 Minutes to Sunrise has going for it.

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StLIFF 2011: Pig

Monday, November 14th, 2011

2011 (USA)
Director: Henry Barrial
Viewed: November 13, 2011
Format: Theatrical HDCAM (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

The intrinsic grittiness of low-budget independent film-making ultimately contributes to the uncanny mood of the conceptually ambitious thriller Pig. Writer-director Henry Barrial’s script lays out a scenario with echoes of other noir-tinted puzzle-box films such as The Game, Oldboy, and Memento. However, in its cinematic execution, the story discovers a disorienting, dream-like aura that places it in the hinterlands of David Lynch country. A Man (Rudolph Martin) awakens hooded and bound in the desert with no memory of his identity. He carries only a scrap of paper scrawled with a name: “Manny Elder.” After collapsing from exhaustion, he finds himself in the care of a beautiful widow, Isabel (Heather Ankeny), who entices him to stay with her and her young son at their remote desert home. However, the confounding visions that flash through the Man’s mind compel him to search for his identity, leading him into Los Angeles and through a succession of strange encounters. By the end of the first act, the story has undergone a drastic realignment that deepens the narrative mystery even as it narrows the film’s potential. From that moment on, it’s apparent that Pig’s story must necessarily rest on a dream, a science-fiction conceit, or a malevolent conspiracy of epic proportions. (Or all three).

There’s a streak of faintly dissatisfying conservatism to Pig’s final scenes, but it has less to do with the film’s message or style than with the inherent limitations of genre storytelling. No explanation that the film might offer for its strange events could realistically maintain the narrative’s internal integrity and also preserve the unsettling mood that pervades the bulk of its scenes. A splendidly crafted but radically different style is on display in a particular film-within-the-film sequence, suggesting that the atmosphere that pervades Pig elsewhere represents an adroit utilization of the baseline indie aesthetic. The Los Angeles of the film is kin to the weird, diabolical metropolis of Lynch’s doppelganger triptych (Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and INLAND EMPIRE). It’s a sunny-yet-ominous place full of offhandedly eccentric moments, vaguely sinister spaces, and banal and often anachronistic objects that seem to roil with significance. In the final analysis, the film is more invested in presenting a story that glistens with philosophical relevance for our current age than in exploiting the horrifying potential of its disorienting atmospherics. Still, while it lasts, Pig is disarming stuff, the kind of sly little genre experiment that reveals the parched cinematic imagination that characterizes most studio thrillers.

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Rosemary’s Baby

Monday, October 3rd, 2011

1968 (USA)
Director: Roman Polanski
Viewed: October 2, 2011
Format: DVD - Paramount (2000)

[Spoilers] Roman Polanski’s most thematically absorbing and persuasive works are what I term his Dupe Films: Stories in which sinister forces manipulate and mislead the protagonist, who plays a central but unwitting role in their Machiavellian plots. In the films that comprise this narrative current—Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown, The Tenant, The Ninth Gate, and The Ghost Writer—the hero eventually becomes aware of such exploitation and subsequently challenges their exploiters. However, in each of these films, whatever fleeting successes the protagonist claims are outweighed by the triumph of the puppet-masters in the end. Needless to say, Polanski’s Dupe Films are exceptionally bleak works, especially in aggregate, as they posit a world where the hapless victim of a conspiracy has no realistic hope of outflanking the coldblooded conspirators. The Tenant and The Ghost Writer (and to a lesser extent Rosemary’s Baby) are also secondarily “Dupe” Films in the sense that the hero follows the footsteps of an unfortunate predecessor, down to sleeping in their bed and tracing their route turn-by-turn.

Rosemary’s Baby offers the most uncluttered and successful expression of this narrative framework. It was Polanski’s fourth English-language film in as many years, and yet the script exhibits the kind of straightforward elegance that few native British or American filmmakers ever muster, particularly when it comes to the treacherous realms of supernatural horror. I hesitate to label it the best of the Dupe Films. Chinatown is undoubtedly a more daring and exceptional film overall, and The Tenant’s cracked-mirror reality has a visceral appeal for me, but it’s hard to deny that Rosemary’s Baby is an exemplar of clean-and-simple storytelling when laid alongside the other Dupe Films. No feature with a 136-minute running time can be brisk, but every minute of Rosemary’s Baby feels necessary and proper, like the individual stones in a garden labyrinth spiraling into an ever-tightening circle. Polanski relies on thriller and horror narrative conventions that were familiar even in 1968 (and are now downright mildewy), but somehow the film never seems schematic, even when the viewer can see exactly where it is going.

The film is an outlier in other ways: It is the only feature among the aforementioned five with a screenplay credited solely to Polanski, and also the only to boast a female protagonist. Needless to say, Rosemary Woodhouse’s (Mia Farrow) femininity (and fecundity) are essential to the film’s story and its thematic preoccupations. Perhaps it’s a little hackneyed that the emotional terrain of Polanski’s most prominent female lead is so thoroughly dominated by the twin motives of fear and protectiveness. Consider that Chinatown’s Jake Gittes, The Ninth Gate’s Dean Corso, and The Ghost Writer’s nameless hero react with bristling resentment at being played for fools, and pursue their manipulators more out of offended pride than anything. (The Tenant’s cringing protagonist, Trelkowski, is the exception that proves the rule, as his malevolent neighbors aim to transform him into his female predecessor.) Still, Rosemary’s personality has a willowy realism that matches Farrow’s physical presence. She’s lamentably naive, but also a little unruly, and posseses enough aptitude to ferret out the Satanic conspiracy that has designs for her unborn child. (Although, admittedly, she requires a male character’s posthumous help to point her to a crucial clue.)

Indeed, Rosemary’s Baby may not be a feminist film, but it portrays the social obstacles that women confront with devastating clarity. One quickly loses count of how many times characters patronizingly soothe Rosemary’s fears, or utilize gender-tinted guilt tactics to manipulate her. Ironically, Rosemary isn’t especially threatening to the male-dominated social order (secular or Satanic) that surrounds her. Her rather traditionalist yearning to settle down and have two or three children appears to be genuine, and she exhibits an eager-to-please submission to the demands of her actor husband’s (John Cassavetes) vanity. However, even her tiniest defiances are sins in the eyes of her devil-worshipping tormentors, who ruthlessly quash the influence of the outside world while nudging her in their preferred direction. Polanski tips his hand by having all the male characters react with revulsion to Rosemary’s ultra-short haircut: Stray outside the role assigned to you and you will face scorn.

Such cultural criticisms are consistent with the broader conflict of traditionalism vs. modernism that the film establishes. Following the path of many horror films, Rosemary’s Baby exploits the dichotomy of the old and the new for its thematic ends. However, unlike, say, Night of the Living Dead, the film’s anxieties are directed backwards to the fossilized past rather than forward to an alien future. Fear of aging and the elderly pervades the film, but its terrors are more complex than mere illness and mortality. Rosemary, for all her professions of maternal longing, seems to sense that she will lose something ephemeral (Her freedom? Her hipness?) after she becomes a mother and locks her life into a particular, conformist narrative. The Satanists profess a forward-thinking ideology that rejects Christian moral norms and declares a glorious Year One, but their designs for Rosemary are dreadfully retrograde, a point underlined by the fact that the film’s diabolists are all old enough to be cashing Social Security checks.

Disturbed by all the time her husband is spending with the dotty neighbors forty years his senior, Rosemary at one point proposes a party with their “old” (read: young) friends. It’s telling that once Rosemary’s female peers have a moment to sit down and listen to her miseries, they acknowledge and bolster her fears rather than dismissing them. Neither is it a mistake that Rosemary’s Satanic obstetrician warns her away from the advice of such young women, while urging her to take herbal concoctions rather than modern vitamin pills. The demonic is explicitly connected to the old-fashioned and traditional, down to the the “Anti-Virgin Mary” role that the more pragmatic Satanists have in mind for Rosemary. There’s something gratifyingly audacious about a film in which the gravest threat to a Luciferian cabal is not the Church (which is complicit with Rosemary’s demonic rape in her drug-addled dreams), but a few liberated and levelheaded women.

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Contagion

Monday, September 19th, 2011

2011 (USA)
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Viewed: September 17, 2011
Format: Digital Theatrical Projection (Wehrenberg Galaxy 14 Cine)

Steven Soderbergh has never been a filmmaker who does things in a workmanlike way. Even his most trifling films carry tracings of his signature qualities: the easy conjuration of contemporary chill, the steely confidence in his formal approach, and the shameless infatuation with his subject matter that somehow still seems poised. Contagion exhibits these characteristics, but it just might be his most purely functional film. (My equivocation reflects the fact that I have not seen Full Frontal or Haywire). Bear in mind that this is the director who gave the world not only a fluffy, ecstatically hip remake of Ocean’s Eleven, but two sequels to that film. The Ocean’s films might be disposable, but the cast and crew’s fun-drunk vibe pulses right out of the screen, tugging the viewer along on waves of color, music, and razor-sharp fashion. Not so with Contagion, which has a similar one-note simplicity, but drapes it in such matter-of-fact grimness that it ends up not functioning particularly well as either art or entertainment.

Structurally, the film is more-or-less a Disaster Film, right down to the ensemble cast and procession of micro-narratives. In this instance, the disaster is a flu-like viral epidemic, which begins in Hong Kong and rapidly spreads across the world, killing infected individuals in a matter of days. Soderbergh and writer Scott Z. Burns commendably maintain the focus on the scientists and medical doctors who are scrambling to understand the virus, contain its spread, and devise a cure. The film’s approach celebrates the thankless work and unwavering dedication of its scientific protagonists: a CDC administrator (Laurence Fishburn), his field investigation ace (Kate Winslet), an experimental virologist (Jennifer Ehle), and a WHO epidemiologist (Marion Cotillard), among many others. The jargon comes fast and furious, but the film mostly refrains from glamorizing the practice of science with ludicrous, art-designed laboratory settings or laughably improbable technology. Nor does it paint the scientists as faultless superheroes, as it makes pains to show them succumbing to fear, arrogance, and selfishness in their weaker moments.

Matt Damon supplies the Everyman perspective as a suburbanite father whose wife (Gwenyth Paltrow) is one of the epidemic’s first victims. He subsequently hunkers down with his daughter to hopefully outlast the plague and the resulting food shortages and violence. Inasmuch as the film has an antagonist other than the virus itself, it is Jude Law’s conspiracy-preoccupied public health blogger, who rails against the evils of Big Pharma and government inefficacy, all while secretly profiting from his testimonials about a homeopathic “cure”. (The blogger in me finds it unfortunate that Law’s character is such a conniving asshole, but the scientist in me takes satisfaction in seeing homeopathic quackery so deservedly denigrated.)

The rigorously realistic, almost wonky way in which Contagion approaches its subject matter is admirable, and suitably fascinating for the 99.99% of filmgoers who don’t live and breath epidemiology every day of their professional lives. Unfortunately, this commedable approach is employed solely to present a Cassandra-like message: Human civilization is vastly unprepared for the inevitable global epidemic that we know is coming, and if it survives it will mostly be by pure luck. That dire but clear-eyed declaration is the beginning and end of Contagion’s purpose, effectively reducing the film to a work of slick agitprop on the behalf of the global public health infrastructure.

And more power to it in that respect. However, as a work of cinema there’s just not much to Contagion other than what is presented on screen. Soderbergh has tackled sprawling ensemble works before with Traffic, but that film–for all its flaws–conveyed a profound appreciation for the complexities of human virtue and vice in an interconnected world. Contagion is thematically parched by comparison, and its stabs at humanizing pathos are weak. Soderbergh can be emotionally warm when appropriate (King of the Hill, Erin Brockovich), just as he can employ his more aloof style to find an oblique route under the skin of a character (The Limey, The Girlfriend Experience). However, neither of these approaches stands a chance of succeeding in Contagion, which spreads its story too thinly across multiple continents and characters, and is too fixated on justifiably frightening scientific fact.

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The Vanishing

Wednesday, September 7th, 2011

1988 (Netherlands / France)
Director: George Sluizer
Viewed: September 6, 2011
Format: Hulu Plus via Playstation 3

[Vague Spoilers] George Sluizer’s disturbing 1988 thriller is a kind of “daylight nightmare,” wherein a sunny holiday trip changes into something abnormal and terrifying, all in plain view of scores of witnesses. It doesn’t end there, however: The film’s protagonist Rex (Gene Bervoets) spends three years thrashing about in this nightmare, where even charming little cafes and quiet country roads take on a fractured and ominous aspect. Thematically, the film zeroes in on the nature of obsession and the destabilizing character of an unresolved mystery, and in this respect it is kin to works as diverse as Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Sweet Hereafter, Zodiac, and The White Ribbon. Unlike those films, which generally assume a more sociological or philosophical approach to the aforementioned themes, The Vanishing is an intensely psychological film. Sluizer approaches the story as two distinct journeys through personal conflict and catharsis. The first concerns Rex, whose anguish over his girlfriend’s inexplicable disappearance demands an answer that may not be forthcoming. The second journey is that of Raymond Lemorne (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu), a sociopath in the guise of a mild-mannered chemistry teacher and family man, who feels that he must act on his homicidal impulses in order to prove something to himself or the cosmos. Eventually, the two men meet and confront one another, but they don’t so much interact as ricochet off another, fatefully altering each man’s ultimate destination.

The film contains just enough oddness to keep the viewer ever so slightly off-balance about what they are witnessing. Events occur which may or may not be “real,” but are presented in such a way that they hint at deeper truths rustling just out of sight. Henny Vrienten’s score recalls Howard Shore’s early work with David Cronenberg in its reliance on synthesizers that moan and squeal with sinister import. For a film that is essentially bloodless, there is a palpable aura of unsettling sexual and physical peril lurking in nearly every crevice. The fact that Rex is carelessly misogynistic and Lemorne malevolently so subtly colors the film’s events, and only adds to the viewer’s sense of discomfort. Sluizer cunningly uses his performers and his frame, establishing an uneasiness that silently shrieks a symphony of warning. The much-discussed conclusion, while hardly a “twist ending,” is the sort of confounding anti-resolution that adds to the film’s pitiless aura of authentic mortal and moral despair.

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Diabolique

Wednesday, September 7th, 2011

1955 (France)
Director: Henri-Georges Clouzot
Viewed: September 6, 2011
Format: Hulu Plus via Playstation 3

[Spoilers] There’s a specific kind of thrill to be had in re-discovering a classical-era film one has seen before, but only remembers vaguely, an enjoyment that is somehow distinct from that of a genuine first-time encounter. So it is with Henri-Georges Clouzot’s masterpiece, Les diaboliques, which I had seen many years ago, and had become unfortunately entangled in my memory with the 1996 American remake. The remarkable thing about Clouzot’s film is how efficient it is in setting up its premise, and then ratcheting up the tension with one uncanny twist and perilous development after another. What’s more, Nicole and Christina’s scheme is already unfolding when the film opens, and Clouzot does a commendable job of conveying exactly what the women have in mind for the monstrous Michel, all without resorting to stilted dialog. I adore the way that every character in the film save the three principals is presented as vaguely comedic, from the crotchety tenants to the school’s faculty, from the drunken soldier to Charles Vanel’s oddly insistent retired police detective. Far from being a distraction, the tone of light absurdity serves to heighten the sensation that the women’s murderous plot is unraveling and slipping through their hands. Of course, the film’s hidden, second-tier story—the gaslighting of a vulnerable woman in order to kill her—is hardly original stuff, but I’m hard-pressed to think of another example that is presented with such lean, nasty potency.

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Point Blank

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011

2010 (France)
Director: Fred Cavayé
Viewed: August 2, 2011
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Theaters Tivoli Theater)

It’s challenging to find anything to actively dislike about a work as functional and ably presented as Fred Cavayé’s breathless crime thriller, Point Blank. The film blends a noir-tinted story with the sort of frenetic Continental chases and standoffs that will likely have viewers searching in vain for Liam Neeson’s stern visage. In his absence, we have Gilles Lolouche portraying stanch Everyman Samuel, a nurse ensnared by pure happenstance into a world of violent fugitives, murdered millionaires, and corrupt officials. Clocking in at an agreeably brisk 84 minutes, the film boasts a trim unfussiness that expunges unnecessary scenes and dialogue. That said, Point Blank is so rigorously unadventurous in its narrative that one can’t help but feel a touch dissatisfied. Almost every set piece and plot twist that Cavayé and co-writer Guillaume Lemans employ has been presented elsewhere with far more verve and style, and the script’s hackneyed tendencies have a troublesome habit of short-circuiting tension. Case in point: The opening scenes of domestic contentment between Samuel and his pregnant wife Nadia (Elena Anaya) virtually guarantee that she will soon be placed in mortal peril, and will eventually emerge unscathed. Capable action sequences can’t elevate a film this formulaic above mere utilitarian genre escapism. Fortunately, even within this context, there are modest pleasures, such as an enticing turn from Roschdy Zem as an unruffled safe-cracker, or a nerve-jangling climactic scene in a bustling police station.

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