2 Days in Paris

I was predisposed to like this feature by Julie Delpy.   As Celine, the young Frenchwoman in “Before Sunrise” and “Before Sunset”, she earned a spot in my holy pantheon of film women whose names cannot be uttered without a sigh.   She wrote, directed, edited, scored, co-produced and stars in this unpretentious comedy-drama, and while I don’t feel anywhere nearly as strongly about “2 Days in Paris” as I do about those two magical gems, it’s still an interesting night at the movies for us Delpy-philes.   It’s about a neurotic American (Adam Goldberg) visiting the City of Lights with his French girlfriend, a sweet anger-management case played by Delpy, funny-looking in huge horn-rimmed spectacles.   I’ve seen this film described as “Meet the Parents” for the art-house set, and that’s about right: Delpy’s real-life parents play her parents, a volatile couple who retain flashes of their bohemian youths; her father is particularly memorable as a devilishly sanguine painter and French cultural chauvinist who delights in scandalizing the young American.   Much humor is mined from how relaxed and matter-of-fact the French are about our bestial drives, in contrast to the American’s chagrined uptightness.   “2 Days” isn’t life-changing, but it boasts the offhand charm and wit, bits of philosophy and film references that we enjoy about French film.   What’s more, it gives a sense of Delpy’s touch as a filmmaker: she directs an honest performance from Goldberg, she cuts with an interesting rhythm, and she does the writerly job of elaborating character and theme.  

Rating: ***

Key to ratings:

***** (essential viewing)
**** (excellent)
*** (worth a look)
** (forgettable)
* (rubbish!!)

- Sep 12, 2007 

"Once" and "Away From Her"

These two films were like small miracles to me.   Essential viewing, both of them.

“Once”
We meet “the guy” (Glen Hansard) strumming his axe and singing his heart out in front of the chi-chi storefronts of modern Dublin.   He’s an undiscovered singer-songwriter burning with talent, though not as young as he used to be, with a good heart (albeit a broken one).   “The girl” (Markéta Irglová) emerges from the passersby; she’s a classically-trained pianist, a young immigrant from the Czech Republic.   Each is at a crossroads: he’s leaving for London with a demo tape as his calling card which he’s recruiting musicians to play on; she’s left a husband back home and come to a new land with her mother and her little girl.  

“Once” is a showcase for the music of real-life collaborators Hansard and Irglová.   I’m a sucker for the voices of men and women singing together, the powerhouse roar of Hansard intertwining with the quavering vulnerability of Irglová.   There’s an urgency in the performances, as if through the force of their singing they might exorcize the pain.   I loved watching them watching each other when they play together for the first time in a music store where the proprietor allows the girl to practice her Mendelssohn on a display piano.   On their faces we see surprise and joy, a decision to risk baring the pain, trust in the other not to be careless with what’s been entrusted, a returned gaze as if to say, your risk is respected, and thank you—you honor me.   At times the raw emotion of the music they make together threatens to shake the film off its sprockets.  

Hansard, Irglová and director John Carney have made one of the great music films.   In a pub everyone around the table sings a song, and we get a sense for how, in Irish culture, music and food bonds community, family, generations.   Since seeing it, the faces and the songs in “Once” have never been far from my thoughts.

“Away From Her”

“I never wanted to be away from her—she had the spark of life”.   Spoken by a retired professor over a shot of a lovely young woman—his wife 40 years ago—these words begin this film about a couple coping with the onset of the wife’s Alzheimer’s.   After she begins to wander, they make the agonizing decision to ensconce her in a facility, though the professor assures the staff that his wife won’t be there for long: she’s far too young, too intellectually lively.   “I think I may be beginning to disappear”, she tells him rather offhandedly.    

This is the second profound film about aging I’ve seen this year; “Venus” was the other, and like that film “Away From Her” stars an iconic face of 1960s cinema.   Julie Christie is pitch-perfect as the wife, but Gordon Pinsent is equally good as the flawed, philandering husband who loves her endlessly.   Based on an Alice Munro short story (“The Bear Came Over the Mountain”), “Away From Her” is a deeply knowing film about love and memory, directed with austerity and quiet poetry by young Sarah Polley.

- Jul 6, 2007

Year of the Dog

Here’s a quirky comedy for dog lovers (which is to say, all right-thinking people) starring comedienne Molly Shannon as a middle-aged cube-dwelling singleton, Peggy, who’s never had any luck finding a man nearly as good as her sweet little beagle, Pencil.   When Pencil dies unexpectedly, Peggy is left to look for love amongst her own species.   Things that seem to come naturally to most people, don’t for her.   Though alienated from the human mainstream, she’s not freakish; in this sense she’s a departure from the outlandishly geeky types that I hear Shannon used to play as a cast member of Saturday Night Live (I’m actually not familiar with her SNL work, though I’m told she was a riot).   This is the role she was born to play: much of the film is composed of close shots of her lined face with its huge grin verging on grimace, her eyes registering vague worry, slight desperation.   To play the baffling humans surrounding her (dating prospects, co-workers, siblings), the film enlists ace character actors like Jon C. O’Reilly, Peter Sarsgaard, Laura Dern, Josh Pais and Regina King.            

“Year of the Dog” is another smartly written feature from Mike White (“Chuck & Buck”, “School of Rock”), and his first as director.   Modest and slight, the film is nonetheless quite an emotional experience, showing not only the comfort and companionship that loving a dog can bring, but also the heartbreak.   For a lightly comic piece, it has a surprising tendency to allow real life in.   Peggy’s accumulating disappointments are rendered in quietly aching moments, such as when, while perusing the Christmas cards from family and friends displayed on her sister’s refrigerator door, Peggy discovers her own holiday card—a portrait of herself and Pencil—mixed in with the cards on the side rejected for refrigerator space.   Tellingly, White treats Peggy’s burgeoning veganism and animal-rights zeal in a gently satiric but ultimately sympathetic manner, as a manifestation of her caring nature.   “Year of the Dog” is refreshingly free of mainstream assumptions about what finding one’s place in life might entail.

- May 28, 2007

"The Lives of Others", "An Unreasonable Man" and "Grindhouse"

“The Lives of Others”

A coldly professional Stasi agent (Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler) discovers his humanity when ordered to spy on a noted playwright and his girlfriend, a stage actress.   This absorbing film has a feel for East German society before the wall fell that only a native like director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck could bring.   The Stasi knew the last detail of the private lives of the citizenry, using that information to force people to betray each other as well as the best parts of themselves; our agent, however, does his spying in good faith, not to get his jollies or out of careerism.   After a blacklisted friend kills himself, the playwright anonymously composes an expose of suicide rates in the GDR, prompting an outraged search by the thought police for the piece’s author.   The agent must decide whether to turn him in, but the playwright’s piano playing, a pilfered volume of Brecht—these have awakened something within him.   This testament to the power of art to rescue a lonely man’s soul won the foreign language Oscar.  

“An Unreasonable Man"

When I used to darken doorsteps for Illinois PIRG I’d occasionally be greeted with a cry of “Hey, it’s Nader’s Raiders!”   This fascinating documentary about Ralph Nader’s legacy as scourge of corporate America—laws passed, lives saved, etc.—surveys the damage wreaked on that legacy by his presidential runs of 2000 and 2004, which scandalized longtime allies and Dems while thrilling those of us yearning for independence from the two parties.   (I attended the massive Nader arena rally in Chicago in 2000; wish I could say I stayed “unreasonable” in ‘04 but, reeling from four years of W., I threw in my lot with the Dems).   The audience listened closely as the film chronicled Nader's delving into the dark side of cultural icons such as the car and the hot dog, but as the subject turned to the controversial campaigns the crowd became adversarial, applauding loudly in solidarity with their partisans and heaping scorn upon their foes, whether they be onscreen or in the theatre.   After the screening co-director Steve Skrovan stood and solicited comments, and then Nader himself was among us!   (Not in person.   Via teleconference, his image projected onscreen.)   With a smile a young woman stepped to the mic and asked him a question that she said her dad had been wanting to ask him for some 40 years: was he responsible for killing production of the ’65 Corvair?   Without missing a beat Nader unapologetically tabulated the car’s myriad safety defects as though the battle were only yesterday.

“Grindhouse”

Complete with mock previews, missing reels and distressed film, this double feature is meant to capture the ambience of 70s “grindhouses”, dodgy theaters which screened sleazy horror pictures and the like.   I’m a few years too young to have experienced their heyday, but I know the fun of the double feature nonetheless from the late-night cable TV pizza parties and drive-ins of my teen years.   Robert Rodriguez’s “Planet Terror” is a zombie picture; Quentin Tarantino’s “Death Proof” is a horror/action movie about a killer stuntman, reuniting Rosario Dawson and Tracie Thoms from “Rent” and culminating in an absolutely stomach-churning car chase shot and cut the old-fashioned way (no CGI!).   “Grindhouse” is not for you unless you fancy an evening of exploding heads, pustulating zombies and butt-kickin’ babes, but I had a great time with it.   In a strange way it’s a celebration of innocent pleasures, of the trash the directors loved in their youth before they learned about "quality cinema".

- Apr 18, 2007

Venus

“No matter how old you are the heart goes on cooking, sizzling like shish kebab."   -- Leonard Cohen, interviewed in 2001

This quote from one of my favorite artists makes a perfect statement of the theme of “Venus”, a deeply moving UK comedy/drama starring one of the great stars of the firmament, Peter O’Toole (and I note that O’Toole happens to be of the same generation as Cohen, the former born in 1932, the latter in ‘34).   He plays a venerable actor smitten with a rather crass young working-class nursemaid with an uncanny resemblance to a Venus by Titian or Giorgione (the film’s final shot recreates Velasquez’s “Venus at Her Mirror”).   She’s played by Jodi Whittaker in one of those performances that’s so natural you can miss how good it is.   From a series of oppositions—between her parochialism and her Renaissance beauty, between his infirm body and his heart’s yearning, between eyes grown sad and tired and the smile that still plays about them—from such oppositions flows both the film’s comedy and its uncommonly honest treatment of love, aging and the theme that the heart dies last.      

“So we'll go no more a-roving/So late into the night/Though the heart be still as loving/And the moon be still as bright,” says the poet Byron.   “For the sword outwears its sheath/And the soul outwears the breast/And the heart must pause to breathe/And love itself have rest.”

- Feb 27, 2007