Cache

The latest from Michael Haneke (“Hour of the Wolf”), this French film tells the story of Georges (Daniel Auteuil), a rather disingenuous host of a TV talk show for intellectuals (its highly-lit set is lined with shelves of prop “books”, an image whose obvious artifice is given its obverse by the wall of books rising over his family’s dinner table).   He lives with his wife (Juliette Binoche, ah!) and son in a Paris flat; the boy is increasingly bitter and troubled, much to the bafflement of concerned parent Binoche.  

The couple discovers they are under surveillance when videotapes of the exterior of their building began turning up in their mail, accompanied by childlike drawings of stick figures with scarlet geysers spurting from their necks.   Disconcerting, to say the least.   Georges suspects the perpetrator to be a man whom he hasn’t seen since they were children together when the other boy’s family, Algerian refugees, lived on Georges’ parents’ country estate.   Back then Georges got the Algerian boy booted from the estate for supposedly threatening Georges with an axe.   All these years later, the Algerian, like Georges, has a son.   Could the younger generation have had a hand in the tapes?   The film seems to ask us to contemplate an anger and angst of youth that is not the garden variety sort, but rather a manifestation of something approaching actual evil.  

Haneke’s a Brechtian and thus steeps his work in distancing mechanisms to stop us getting swept away emotionally, to engage our intellects.   He wants us to see the familiar in a new light, to the point that he often shoots his people with their backs to us.   Not a note of music graces the soundtrack, and thus there’s no cue as to what you’re meant to feel.   This approach heightens the role of sound in defining place and tracking the narrative: in one shot the action moves off frame and it’s by listening that we follow the story.   Further, Haneke holds his shots for so long that you begin to investigate the image on your own, looking where you will rather than where you’ve been forced by manipulative montage.   His use of theory contributes in practice to an unsettling, disturbing experience.   We’re not used to ambiguity in film, and it’s disorienting.    

At times we’re unsure whether we’re seeing an image from the stalker’s camera or our director’s until “rewind” squiggles suddenly disrupt the screen.   There’s no graininess to cue us.   In one late scene the angle of the director’s camera is identical to that we know to have been used earlier by the stalker.   Haneke thus imparts freshness to the rather familiar metaphor of the film audience as voyeurs by implying that the metaphor could just as easily apply to himself.    

“Cache” satisfied my jones for some challenging fare.   It’s the most uncompromising film I’ve seen in some time.   Word of warning: there’s a startlingly jarring shot that elicited the loudest gasp I’ve ever heard in a movie theatre not showing a “Friday the 13th” picture.

“I don’t get it,” I heard one audience member exclaim as the credits rolled.   “You’re not supposed to get it,” a voice replied.   I had to laugh as a chap announced as he filed out, “I get it, but I’m not telling anybody.”  

- Feb 26, 2006

Imagine Me & You

A recent weekend found me attending a screening of this mainstream romantic comedy, a genre that I usually bar.   However, when I tell you that not only is the film British, but also that it concerns a newlywed who discovers that she’s in love with another woman, you will understand why to say that my curiosity was whetted would be to state the facts accurately.   Luce (Lena Headey), a florist in London, is hired to do the flowers for Rachel’s (Piper Perabo) wedding to Heck (Matthew Goode).   It’s while walking down the aisle that from the corner of her eye Rachel catches a glimpse of Luce; it’s a case of the proverbial “love at first sight”.   Luckily, Luce turns out to be gay.    

What ensues is all quite predictable and harmless; all loose ends are neatly tied up; and as if by fiat the programmatic music tells us what we’re meant to feel.   About now I can hear my readership begin to scoff.   Come come, you may say to me--a tough, dour critic like yourself would usually chafe volubly at such fare.   Why, it sounds as though it skirts perilously close to TV territory!  

And yet a film about a woman who finds that she has fallen in love with another woman will be inherently political regardless of how light its touch.   I don’t mean to burden the picture with more than its slight frame will bear, but there is food for thought here on the nature of friendship, sacrifice, identity, happiness, and the ties that bind.   Plus, its clever writing and good actors generate that storied “dry wit” that renders British comedy so enjoyable, and the players impart an effortlessness to the material as well as a few moments of genuine poignancy.   It’s a pleasure to catch up with Anthony Head (whom “Buffy” fans will remember as Giles) in a funny turn as Rachel’s out-of-it dad.        

In short, this movie is like a pudding to be enjoyed after a season spent dining on the main courses served up by proper film.   It keeps reality pleasingly from darkening our doorsteps for the nonce.   And while this feel-good film is not itself world-altering, its very existence in the mainstream is perhaps itself evidence of a changing world.  

Written and directed by a bloke called Ol Parker.    

- Feb 12, 2006

Brokeback Mountain

I suppose everyone knows by now that this film tells of two young cowboy-hatted blokes, Ennis (Heath Ledger) and Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal), who fall in love atop Wyoming’s Brokeback Mountain one summer in 1963 while left alone to herd sheep; and that it’s a tale of doomed love.   I’d expected it to yank sharply on the heartstrings but among its surprises is that it’s actually quite a quiet, restrained piece.    

After that summer, years pass in which Jack and Ennis are obliged to accumulate wives and kids.   But they reunite, rekindling their romance and establishing a tradition of an annual reunion up on Brokeback.   Peripherally, we see Ennis’ daughters grow into young women.   We watch as the high-spirited, glowing rodeo cowgirl (Anne Hathaway) whom Jack marries becomes a staid businesswoman, sedately accepting a passionless marriage.  

Perhaps the most salient aspect of Ennis’ character, even more than his sexual preference, is his inability ever to forsake his shell.   He’s distant, non-verbal, can’t commit; in other words, every inch a typical guy.   The most moving scene for me was the final one, in which Ennis, now leading a solitary existence in a trailer, is visited by his sweet daughter, now 19.   She tells him that she’s to be married.   He asks her a question about her fiancé, whom he has never met.   It’s a simple one but it gets to the heart of the matter: does he love you?   Yes, comes the answer; and Ledger makes us feel by the pursing of his lips that, were he verbal, Ennis might tell her that that’s good; that to be loved is all he could possibly want for her.  

Ennis and Jack throw off all stereotypes of gay men; there’s nothing remotely effeminate or prissy about them.   They have wives and kids, showing that one's sexuality isn’t really a matter of what one does so much as it is of what one prefers.   Cowboys of course are icons of American manhood; these many, many years into the gay liberation movement, it shouldn’t be regarded as subversive to show that such men can be gay.   However, the film’s critique remains pertinent of a culture which, though it famously enshrines the pursuit of happiness, can be profoundly conformist.   To be different -- to break the culture's rules for masculinity -- is still too often to court hatred and even violence.   (Graphic violence in the film is limited to but the briefest of flashes.)

A word should be said about Gyllenhaal’s Jack, with his shy, lopsided grin and kind eyes.   And that this film is best seen on a big screen to experience the full impact of an American beauty lovingly captured by director Ang Lee, of green mountainsides which the flock of sheep stream down like a mighty river.   Based on a short story by Annie Proulx originally published in the New Yorker.   Essential viewing.    

- Jan 30, 2006

Match Point

It’s a shocker, this latest film from Woody Allen.   Even though we know going in that it has something to do with murder, and though said murder is telegraphed, still the picture startles.   It elicits gasps and groans from the audience without a drop of blood being shown.    

The film traces the trajectory of Chris (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), a young tennis instructor at a club catering to London’s wealthy elite, who’s fresh off the pro circuit where he wasn’t quite able to hack it.   He’s from a poor Irish background, a literate chap whose love for high culture may be in part to distance him from that background.   Chris loves opera for the way it speaks to his conception of life as essentially tragic, and he offhandedly expresses his interest to Tom, a client who happens to be the son of a wealthy businessman.   Tom invites Chris to attend the opera with Tom’s family and soon enough Chris is engaged to Tom’s sister (a winsome Emily Mortimer) and their dad has ensconced Chris in the high towers of big business.  

Thus, Woody quickly sets in motion the film’s theme: that where one goes in life may have something to do with the interplay of will, talent, class and personal choices, but in the end it’s mostly down to pure luck.   For example, Chris’ casual mentioning of his opera-love to Tom ends up changing the direction of his entire life.   He finds himself enjoying perquisites of the sons and daughters of the wealthy –  i.e., a “good life” that is a function more of luck than of personal initiative.   For his new crowd this life was a lucky accident of birth; for him it was the luck of falling in with them.  

The sole representative of us Yanks on this junket across the pond for Woody is Scarlett Johansson as Nola, Tom’s fiancée, an aspiring but not particularly talented actress.   Her introductory scene gives us a young woman slyly aware of her allure, and we peg her immediately as a femme fatale.   Chris and Nola are both outsiders in this world of the British upper class, he by virtue of his class, she by her Americanism, and while we know that a torrid affair is in the offing, what surprises is that Nola never encourages his lust.   Johansson’s intelligence as an actress shines as she undercuts our first impression of Nola at every turn.  

The film takes its time to progressively whittle away Chris’ options.   This is necessary since the foundations laid for his psychology, such as showing him early on reading “Crime and Punishment” and a bio of Dostoyevsky, seem a bit pat and facile.   Aside from brief voiceovers at beginning and end we stay outside of Chris’ head, relying on the expressive acting of Rhys-Meyers to evoke his interior life.   For all the setup, what happens still shocks because we never quite believe it will; Woody’s contrapuntal use of opera as the narrative takes the turn from which there’s no going back is bravura filmmaking.        

If “Match Point” is not quite as rich as 1989’s “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” Woody’s previous film about crime and punishment in a universe in which what people get has very little to do with what they deserve (and a film I still point to as an example of where film approaches the richness of a great novel), it is nonetheless engrossing, riveting, highly recommended viewing.  

- Jan 16, 2006  

The Ice Harvest

This grimly comic crime thriller/gangster movie is the least-P.C. Christmas film since “Bad Santa”.   It’s Christmastime in Wichita Falls and human venality can’t be said to have missed a beat in observation of the holidays.   The town’s seedy strip joint milieu is reminiscent of an updated version of the Pottersville of George Bailey’s nightmarish vision; it’s presided over by nasty boss Bill Guerrard (Randy Quaid) whose mouthpiece is mob lawyer Charlie (Jon Cusack).  

The action takes place over the course of a night which turns out to be one of those long, dark and of-the-soul types.   Charlie and co-conspirator Vic (Billy Bob Thornton) are trying to get away with having embezzled a huge sum from Guerrard earlier in the day.   Vic’s the guy with the stomach for crime, Charlie being of a decidedly non-thuggish bent.  
Meanwhile Charlie’s best buddy (Oliver Platt, the go-to guy to play dissolute lawyers) is having a drunken “I can’t do my life anymore” crisis/awakening.  

“The Ice Harvest” isn’t much darker than most crime films, really; it just appears so against the snowy holiday backdrop.   Though we’re rather used to this sort of irony by now, the conjoining of Christmas with murder, blackmail, greed and betrayal still retains bite.    

Interesting to see how director Harold Ramis has matured.   This is the man who wrote and/or directed such late-‘70s, early-80’s comic guy-movie fare as “Animal House,” “Caddyshack,” “Stripes” and “Vacation”.   Their nothing-is-sacred aesthetic informs this project; but whereas those films often seemed to be as much an expression of shallowness as a parody of it, here he offers what a “vulgar Marxist” might even say amounts to a cogent comment on the culture of consumer society.  

- Dec 17, 2005