A Girl and a Gun

What's Up Manohla's Dargis?

I understand it when a film reviewer doesn't like a movie, is seized by the impulse to eviscerate it at length, and to slur the reputation of its director and all hands in its making.  These things happen.  Manohla Dargis at the NY Times let us know a few weeks ago what she thinks of Park Chan-Wook's work in an article about a partial retrospective at the BAMcinematek.  Now, in case the invective had begun to wear off, she's at it again, zeroing in on Old Boy (2004), which took the director's prize at Cannes last year, and dishing out a smart slap at Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002) while she's at it.  Nor does she stop there.  She unburdens herself of a sustained rant at people who like Old Boy.  ". . . it's no surprise that Mr. Park's largest fan base may be those cult-film aficionados for whom distinctions between high art and low are unknown, unrecognized and certainly unwelcome." (This from a woman who loved Million Dollar Baby.)  Did you catch that slippery "may" in there?  It allows Dargis to say, in effect, that such deadheads are Park's fan base, but gives her a weasel-word verb to back out if it seriously steams anyone. 

I liked Old Boy a lot, but would never have imagined myself as a c-f afic., or supposed that I failed to know and support the distinctions she mentions.  Not that I think Dargis is out to insult some ancient blogger personally, since she has real fish to fry.  Consider: "The fact that Old Boy is embraced by some cinephiles is symptomatic of a bankrupt, reductive postmodernism: one that promotes a spurious aesthetic relativism (it's all good) and finds its crudest expression in the hermetically sealed world of fan boys.  (At this point, it's perhaps worth pointing out that the head of the jury at Cannes last year was none other that Quentin Tarantino.)"  When in doubt, trash QT.  That sentence is followed immediately by this one:  "In this world, aesthetic and moral judgments--much less philosophical and political inquiries--are rejected in favor of a vague taxonomy of cool that principally involves ever more florid spectacles of violence."

I realize that Dargis is not writing anything like film criticism and so cannot be held to customary critical standards, but even a newspaper reviewer might be expected to provide more information than a couple of bones from the plot skeleton.  Like, for instance, the fact that this film, following on its predecessor, is about the lust for vengeance--how it poisons human decency, distorts the ability to live in the real world, and leads to self-destruction as surely as the retribution it may (or may not) wreak.  Yes, the violence in Old Boy is disturbing and graphic.  No, it's not exploitation.  How do you recognize that distinction?  One way is to watch Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs, after having seen Old Boy.  Dargis cites Peckinpah as a director who handled violence artfully.  In Straw Dogs?  The film that Pauline Kael famously, and accurately, characterized as fascism?  Such explanations and inquiries would require subtlety, care, and setting aside some space Dargis prefers to give over to colorful snark, which is easier to write anyway. 

More Best

On March 17, I tossed out thirteen names of actors who I thought were the best now working, my answer to a ridiculous article in a recent GQ that put Crowe, Depp, Cage, and DiCaprio at the pinnacle.  I did lay down the conditions that the performers had to have a record stretching over some years and not simply be the hunk du jour.  I've received a lot of responses and suggestions, and after greater reflection than I was able to offer at the time would add six names to my list.  They are, in alphabetical order:

Michael Gambon (Ireland, 1940)                    Gene Hackman (USA, 1930)

Dustin Hoffman (USA,  1937)                           Ben Kingsley (UK, 1943)

Jack Nicholson (USA, 1937)                              Christopher Walken (USA, 1943)

I now put forward a list for women as well.  It's not quite as international as I would like, and I'm sure I'm missing significant names from Europe, Asia, and who knows where else.  We simply don't get enough foreign films, even in New York, to see all the talent that's out there, and been out there for some years, although as with the men I'm sure I've missed some obvious ones.  (Anticipating outcry, I mention that Jeanne Moreau is not on the list, for the simple reason that it's been a good ten years, perhaps more, since I've been able to catch a new film of hers.)  Again, I have looked for individuals still producing good work, who have been at it for long enough to make an occasional stinker but not very many, who show range, good judgment in choosing roles, and fit comfortably into their films (i.e. "play well with others").   Here are my candidates:

Joan Allen (USA, 1956)                                     Adrianna Asti (Italy, 1933)

Maggie Cheung (Hong Kong, 1964)                 Judy Dench (UK, 1934)

Catherine Deneuve (France, 1943)                 Catherine Frot (France, 1956)

Isabelle Huppert (France, 1953)                     Nicole Kidman (Australia, 1967)

Laura Linney (USA, 1964)                               Frances McDormand (USA, 1957)

Helen Mirren (UK, 1945)                                 Julianne Moore (USA, 1960)

Charlotte Rampling (UK, 1945)                       Susan Sarandon (USA, 1946)

Meryl Streep (USA, 1949)

More Wong Still

In my continuing effort to stroll at a leisurely pace through the oeuvre of Wong Kar-Wai, I laid hands on Fallen Angels (1995).  Wong's films often tend to come in pairs; 2046 (2004) was a sort of sequel to, or continuation of, or answer to In the Mood for Love (2001), and Angels has a certain kinship with 1994's Chungking Express (on which, my remarks here, from 11/26/04).  Both films feature two sets of characters whose peregrinations we follow, and whose paths occasionally intersect.  In Express, Takeshi Kaneshiro plays a cop who buys cans of pineapple with a certain "consume by" date, and when that date has passed, starts opening and eating them; in Angels, he plays a mute ex-con whose affliction stems from having eaten canned pineapple after its "consume by" date.  Hmm.  The later film also features a somewhat mysterious young woman on the streets of Hong Kong wearing a blonde wig, just the sort of get-up that Lily Wong donned in Express. 

But where Express had, within its two stories, a certain narrative coherence, in Angels Wong couldn't care less for linear story-telling.  He has a hitman, accompanied by a sort of agent (Leon Lai and Michelle Reis, respectively), the mute, a young woman looking for her boyfriend, the wiggy blonde, and they wander about.  It reminded me somewhat of a music video, where classical narrative structure was irrelevant to striking image, of which there are enough to satisfy anyone; Wong and cinematographer Christopher Doyle shot the whole film at night, a sort of symphony to neon and reflections.  As I think about the film, it's those images I see, Hong Kong in the mid-1990s--the one time I visited it was 1994--and I think that was what Wong wanted audiences to retain.  Oh yes, and one amazingly funny scene.  The hitman has just dispatched a roomful of men in a moment violent enough to satisfy the most bloodthirsty fan of HK action films.  He gets on a bus to make an inconspicuous getaway.  The man behind him recognizes him: a classmate from junior high school.  Hey, what ever happened to you?  We ought to get together, talk about old times.  Here's my card. 

A Baker's Dozen of the Best

In a doctor's waiting room yesterday, my eye was caught by a magazine cover which announced an article on something like the ten greatest film actors "of our generation."  I picked up the magazine, GQ, and started thumbing from the front looking for the table of contents.  I found it something like seventy pages later, by which time I was overwhelmed by advertisements for the with-it accoutrements necessary to be a paid-up member of today's jeunesse dorée.  I couldn't choke down the introduction, which was some twaddle about forget De Niro, we need to find and praise the people of our generation, which seemed to have something to do with forty and under, or maybe not.  Why?  Don't ask me.  I turned the page and was immediately assaulted by spreads featuring Russell Crowe, Nicholas Cage, Johnny Depp, and Leonardo DiCaprio.  Reason and judgment were not entirely eclipsed, since John C. Reilly and Gael García Bernal made the list but I was called for my appointment before I got any farther.

Personally, I regard the leading choices as lunacy.  I've seen all Crowe's work since L.A. Confidential (1997) and I find him nothing more than adequate, with the capacity to be embarrassingly bad, as in Gladiator (2000).  Cage is wildly erratic, with Leaving Las Vegas (1995) and Adaptation (2002) peaks amidst a lot of swampy performances.  Depp has talent, I suppose, but it's certainly not for choosing roles and he's wasting whatever he does have on a lot of dogs.  DiCaprio?  Don't ask.

What possible reason, beyond appealing to circulation demographics, could there be for this "our generation" silliness?  I made a little back-of-the-envelope list of the male performers who I thought were doing often very good work right now, age aside.  I don't intend this to be a "favorites" or "best" or anything but my unsystematic thoughts about who's been at or close to the top of his game and stayed there with some consistency.  Thus, Pacino is on it because he continues, amidst this and that poor film, to give outstanding value, and in vehicles like The Merchant of Venice shows he can stand in with anyone.  By the same token, De Niro is not here because he retired years ago (oh, he still makes films, but he retired from acting some ten years back, after Heat [1994]).  In alphabetical order, here it is, with country and year of birth in parentheses :

Daniel Auteuil (Algeria, 1950)    Gael García Bernal (Mexico, 1978)

Tony Leung Chiu-Wai (Hong Kong, 1962)   Morgan Freeman (US, 1937)

Jacques Gamblin (France, 1957)    Bruno Ganz (Switzerland, 1941)

Ed Harris (US, 1950)    Jeremy Irons (UK, 1948)   

William H. Macy (US, 1950)    Bill Murray (US, 1950)   

Liam Neeson (Northern Ireland, UK, 1952)     Al Pacino (US, 1940)   

Sean Penn (US, 1960) 

Many more could be added to a list with these loose criteria, but surely all these belong.  And while I'm at it, let me say: Age be damned. 

Do You Rendez-Vous?

Should Alexandra Leclère's first feature, from her own script, get US distribution, it will undoubtedly be reviewed in some quarters as a "women's film," or even more slightingly as a "chick flick."  I saw Me and My Sister (2004) in the Lincoln Center "Rendez-Vous with French Cinema" and thought that while Leclère had a female audience very much in mind, the film had more dimensions than that. 

It's the story of two sisters, Louise, a provincial beautician and aspiring novelist who comes to Paris to visit her older sister, Martine, who is the sort of pathologically sophisticated woman who eats only two meals a day, both spinach salad, exerts iron control over herself and her environment, and has social antennae that pick up the tiniest off-center vibration.  Louise, on the hand, is effervescent, funny, something of a klutz, loving, smart but unwise in urban ways.  They haven't seen each other in three years, and while Louise is delighted at the opportunity to catch up with her sister, Martine dreads the long weekend together as though she would rather spend the entire time undergoing a root canal.  That's pretty much it.  It's the interplay of the two personalities that creates the comedy.  Indeed, it's clearer in the French title, Les Soeurs fâchées, which doesn't translate easily but means something like "The Sisters Who Rub Each Other the Wrong Way."  Anyway, it's a script that places a lot of the burden on the two actresses; since Laclère was fortunate enough to sign up Catherine Frot (Louise) and Isabelle Huppert (Martine), arguably France's two most talented female performers, she had little to worry about.  They are flawless, funny, touching, and while Huppert's character is the far less sympathetic one, she lets us get to know her well enough that we understand perfectly well why Louise's behavior grates on her nerves.  There is also a lot of knowing satire on the ways of the Parisian bourgeoisie, and some outstanding work in supporting roles, such as François Berléand as Martine's faithless and frustrated husband and Brigitte Catillon as her best friend.  They lead us on a merry chase through Paris, from salon de beauté to disco to high-end department store to sniffy restaurant to art gallery, scenes punctuated by more than one explosion between the sisters.  In the gallery, there is a brief chance meeting between Martine and an old flame which shows anyone not yet convinced why Huppert is one of the most gifted artists cinema has ever been fortunate enough to have. 

The New Tavernier

Bertrand Tavernier is a director less well known in the US than in his home country, but he is one of France's most respected directors.  Here is perhaps best remembered here for 'Round Midnight (1986), his beautiful jazz movie with Dexter Gordon, Coup de Torchon (1981), his dark comedy with Philippe Noiret about colonial Africa, and unfortunately less so for Safe Conduct (2002), his wonderful epic about the French film industry under German occupation.  Holy Lola (2004), his newest, came to the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center yesterday, and Tavernier himself was there to introduce it and take questions after.

The film is about French couples attempting to adopt children in Cambodia, where barriers to adoption are nominally lower than in France (which has, or had, a waiting period after sign-up and approval of eleven years).  Although Tavernier manages to give some attention to issues such as the travails, and morality, of adoption by well-to-do westerners in a desperately poor country, the removal of land mines left over from the Khmer Rouge days, which also get a nod or two, and to do a cinematic poem to a country and a people he obviously came to love in his several trips and six months in country, Holy Lola is firmly centered upon the emotional tribulations of his central couple, Pierre and Géraldine.  The complications and near endless obstacles thrown in their path, from corruption to bureaucratic indifference, threaten to turn the story into melodrama, but Tavernier makes certain that we know not only how these people feel, but how their feelings change during their months-long ordeal.  It does no harm that they are played by Jacques Gamblin and Isabelle Carré, neither familiar names to US audiences and both gifted performers. 

This focus also keeps the film from becoming an advocacy piece for one side or another of the adoption issue.  Indeed, Tavernier admitted frankly after the screening that he knew nowhere near enough about the different arguments involved to let any kind of advocacy sneak in, and the result is a piece that radiates with his own deep humanity.  He also knows that two hours of emotional stress can be a bit much, and a number of humorous incidents are sprinkled here and there, including a running gag about Jacques and Géraldine's frustrated efforts at making love.  Holy Lola will never find an American following outside of a few big cities where foreign languages and unfamiliar countries with problems we'd prefer to ignore are anathema.  For people not bothered by these characteristics, people, that is, who are afflicted with a temperament open to experience, it's well worth seeing. 

What's Real, Haskell?

In 1968, the celebrated cinematographer Haskell Wexler (so far, two Oscars, three other nominations, but more importantly endlessly honored by the critical and professional community) made a film about the contemporary political ferment in this country, Medium Cool (1969).  It was the story of a news film cameraman who covered all the critical events of that awful summer.  I remember it with affection, not having seen it since its release, but my hunch is that it was so dependent upon the emotions and reference points of 1968 that it wouldn't have the same emotional impact now, even if it is still admired in a somewhat abstract way.

Documentary filmmaker Paul Cronin has made an intelligent, compact documentary I picked up on Sundance called "Watch Out, Haskell: It's Real." The title comes from a line in the film during the (actual) filming of the police attack on the protesters in Grant Park during the Democratic party convention of August.  When a National Guardsman lobbed a tear gas grenade directly at Wexler, who was of course toting a film camera, we heard the line yelled out by a colleague.  It served to underscore one of the central purposes of this film, which toyed with and turned around and around the then just-developing conventions of cinema verite.  But Wexler, a man of great intelligence and now approaching eighty, has the courage in this documentary to tell us that the scene was shot without sound and the line--which occurred at the moment only in his head--was added in the editing room. 

Both the film and the documentary roast the old chestnut about fiction and documentary, whether any film is "truth," and so forth.  Medium Cool included any number of reminders, not confined to its final shot of Wexler manning a big 35-mm camera and turning it directly on the audience, that what we were watching had all the look of a "reality" film and was also a confection.  Wexler has his own take on what this amounts to, but Cronin's film intelligently leaves it open for us to draw conclusions of our own. 

Bonuses: some fabulously narcissistic footage of Warren Beatty at the convention actually commisioned by him, and some present-day interview footage of Chicago political activist, radio personality, and oral history author Studs Terkel, my own personal candidate for the world's greatest living human being. 

Rendez-Vous with French Cinema

Olivier Marchal was in New York today to introduce the US premiere of his second feature, 36 Quai des Orfèvres (that's the address of the Paris police headquarters).  Marchal is himself a former Paris cop who got into acting, writing, and finally directing movies.  At today's session of Lincoln Center's Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, Marchal thanked his producer, at his side, for backing a cop film when the policier was almost a dead genre in France--a debatable point.  He also insisted that about eighty per cent of what we would see in the film had actually happened, some of it to him and the rest before his very eyes, which is only to say that the Paris police are as corrupt and brutal as big city police almost anywhere in the world.

Marchal's work, a huge box office hit in France, opens well: a send-off for a beloved older cop about to retire (a tip-off in cop films that the character won't last very long) runs in parallel with a heist by a gang that has been terrorizing armored trucks transporting cash.  This is their seventh job, during which they've racked up nine murders, and the police brass decides it's war; everything will be devoted to catching this bunch.  Snitches are worked over, some names gathered, and one of the two protagonists, senior cop Léo Vrinks, gets a major break at great cost. A trap is set, but Vrinks's old pal and now competitor, Denis Klein, screws things up, costing the retiring officer his life.  So far so good--tightly written and well paced--but that's the end of the good. First, a betrayal plot line comes traipsing through the action, followed by a score that has turned from reasonably restrained into clamorously distracting.  Marchal starts to show signs of an inexperienced director who doesn't know what to do next, even though he wrote the script, and so just creates more noise, more blood, pointless incidents, and finally a gigantic, clunky deus ex machina to resolve the things for the few characters still around from the beginning who haven't been slaughtered.

Much of the burden therefore falls on the cast, and Marchal is fortunate to have a couple of heady pros, France's leading actors in their generation (i.e. men in their fifties), Daniel Auteuil as Vrinks and Gérard Depardieu as Klein. Although I think Auteuil has much greater range, Depardieu is the revelation here; he underplays effectively and lets a craggy (and much thinner than usual) face do a lot of his work.  If bloody, noisy thrillers with some decent action and pretty good acting are your thing, the Columbia logo opened the credits and suggests a US release at some point.

Samurai Film with a Difference

Harakiri (1962--also released as Seppuku) is a long, slow, not especially rousing film with only one burst of the sort of action western audiences associate with samurai films.  Perhaps that is because director Masaki Kobayashi had other fish to fry.  His interest is not so much in swordplay and blood (he demonstrates that he can handle both skillfully, but sparingly), but in social structures and the codes that hold them together.  His story is set in early seventeenth century Tokugawa Japan, where the shogunate was trying to reassert central authority, and the central issue here is the ritual suicide afforded samurai: after disembowelling themselves with a  swift horizontal and then vertical stroke, their "second," which is to say the man who would instantly behead them, went to work.  The ritual seems to be eroding in the 1630s, though, losing its severity and unforgiving rules: people who didn't perform the disembowelling but gave themselves a perfunctory slice were getting immediately beheaded and saved the pain, and the people in authority decided that would never do, since the relaxation of rules on this question could easily lead people to believe other laxities were in order.

Kobayashi makes his points about social stratification and rigid protocols of deference with some gorgeous compositions, especially in long shots, and we can feel the constriction of the system on the characters.  The enforcement of seppuku rules here leads to senseless bloodshed and reveals the ultimate destructiveness of a petrified code of "honor."  Since the film was made barely fifteen years after the end of World War II, when many in the Japanese warrior class still adhered strictly to bushido, and was blown to smithereens as a result, it's hard not to see Harakiri as a commentary upon the foolish, wasteful decisions to pursue expansion and war.  That this message is entirely implicit, wrapped with a story-within-a-larger-revenge-story structure that is harrowing, but moves at its own stately pace, makes it all the more forceful.  Authority wins in the end, although in the process revealing--at least to us--its moral bankruptcy.  Tatsuya Nakadai, a vaguely familiar face but one I couldn't place until I checked up some of his credits, is forceful as the samurai with an issue.  There's a DVD, apparently not for sale or rental in the US but playable on American systems.  I checked Netflix for it and got nothing but a message asking, "Did you mean Harry Carey Sr. or Harry Carey Jr.?"  Sigh.

Chris Doyle Interview

For  those who have seen Zhang Yimou's Hero and Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love, the name of Christopher Doyle, cinematographer extraordinaire, will be familiar; both of those films bear his imprint as plainly as their directors', although disputes that came up in the making of 2046 have apparently resulted in a breach with Wong.  In any event, Doyle, Australian but now full-time Chinese, is shooting a film for Merchant and Ivory (exclamation mark in italics--he doesn't seem their sort of chap, and he agrees) and was interviewed by the London Financial Times chief China correspondent.  The interview is here.