Film Review Catch-Up: Mysteries and Non-Mysteries in Real and Simulated Worlds

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—I am currently working on a video summing up some of the highlights of my trip to Los Angeles. I'm not in a mad dash to finish it—trying to find time to complete it while handling my daily Wall Street Journal duties obviously makes it difficult to churn out a video as quickly as I might like—but I think it's come along nicely; so far, I've covered a little more than half of what I did over there. Once I'm done with it, of course, I'll post it up and link you all to it.

In the meantime...once again, I find myself with a boatload of movies I've seen yet have not written about here at My Life, at 24 Frames Per Second. So, while people are either exulting or cursing the final two-and-a-half hours of "Lost"—which I have seen not a single episode of—here are a few short takes on some of the stuff I've seen recently.

Chloe (2009; Dir.: Atom Egoyan)

I think film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum is right when he suggested at his website a couple months ago that the real subject of Atom Egoyan's latest film, an American remake of a 2003 French film starring Emmanuelle Béart, isn't its titular escort played by Amanda Seyfried—Chloe is conceived more as a sensual-then-threatening presence than a fully fleshed-out character—but on Catherine Stewart, the character played by Julianne Moore, a middle-aged woman who suddenly finds herself thrust into a midlife crisis as she become suspicious of her husband's (Liam Neeson) fidelity. Moore's achingly soulful and beautifully detailed performance is the real star of the show here, to the point that it doesn't bother me all that much that the second half of the film veers dangerously close to campy Fatal Attraction-ish territory. Besides, I don't think it ever quite gets to that level—Egoyan's filmmaking is too measured and intelligent, and his empathy for Catherine's emotional confusion too deep, to be easily laughed at however risible some of the later plot twists become. It's no masterpiece—its ending in particular feels a bit too rushed to be as resonant as it clearly wants to be—but it's more intriguing and affecting than you'd expect.

World on a Wire (1973; Dir.: Rainer Werner Fassbinder)

This two-part TV miniseries by the famous (and famously prolific) German director—an adaptation of Daniel F. Galouye's influential novel Simulacron-3—was first broadcast in Germany in 1973 and maybe screened only once in the U.S. until last month, when it played a widely publicized week-long run at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. That's where I saw the film—at least, after waiting on a rush line for an hour and hoping and praying I wasn't too far back in the line to be turned away. Boy, am I so glad I was not! What an endlessly inventive and intellectually stimulating film this is: the kind of great science fiction that momentarily makes you wonder about the world around you—what's real, what's a simulacrum, and the like—while not shortchanging visual and human interest.

Perhaps even more fascinating than what Fassbinder puts up on the screen are the influences one can sense in sci-fi films that both preceded and followed World on a Wire: Alphaville (1965), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Blade Runner (1982), Total Recall (1990), The Matrix (1999). But could Wong Kar-Wai, of all directors, have picked up something from Fassbinder too? The proliferation of mirror-reflection shots in World on a Wire, to my mind, greatly recall similar ones in Wong's In the Mood for Love (2001) and 2046 (2005). Fassbinder's sensibility, of course, is far cooler than Wong's superheated romanticism—but maybe they're not so far apart after all: At the conclusion of this majestic sci-fi epic, love wins out in the end, in its own way.

(World on a Wire is not yet available on Region 1 DVD, but it is available from the U.K. on Region 2 DVD, if you're equipped with a region-free DVD player.)

Boudu Saved From Drowning (1932; Dir.: Jean Renoir)

It is commonly accepted wisdom by now that French director Jean Renoir was by nature a humanist; Boudu Saved From Drowning—which I saw for the first time, in a less-than-stellar but serviceable print, during Brooklyn Academy of Music's extensive Renoir retrospective—complicates that popular critical wisdom just a bit, so slashing is its attack on societal class divisions. Here, Mr. Lestingois (Charles Granval)—a bookseller who is cheating on his wife (Marcelle Hainia) with the maid (Sévérine Lerczinska)—rescues the extraordinarily rude and unkempt Boudu (Michel Simon) after Boudu attempts to drown himself (in a fit of despair after losing his dog), and he wins acclaim as a good Samaritan for his act of charity. Turns out, though, that Boudu isn't particularly thrilled about being rescued, and he—not intentionally, perhaps, but as a result of his own nature—proceeds to wreak havoc on the already tenuous harmony of his well-meaning host family in anarchic and hilariously wrong ways. Though Renoir doesn't stoop to painting the members of the Lestingois household in broad, stick-figure strokes—that kind of deck-stacking wasn't Renoir's way—it's Michel Simon's uproarious gruffness and the character's utter refusal to conform to middle-class standards of decency that gives the film its potent subversive charge.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of Boudu Saved From Drowning is that Renoir dares to suggest that even a resolutely lower-class tramp like Boudu has a certain amount of dignity; all those critics who go out of their way to praise films like Precious that turn poverty into some kind of undignified horror show—could probably stand to rewatch this masterpiece as a refresher.

(Boudu Saved From Drowning is available on Criterion Collection DVD.)

City Island (2009; Dir.: Raymond De Felitta)

Despite the Audience Award it won at Tribeca Film Festival last year, City Island's the alleged charms were lost on me early on with the film's first family-around-the-dining-table scene—a terrible piece of writing that suggested writer-director Raymond De Felitta didn't know how to announce that the Rizzo clan was so majestically dysfunctional unless that dysfunction was dialed all the way past the point of any recognizable human behavior. The film only gets more graceless from there; I didn't expect any movie in the dysfunctional-family-comedy sweepstakes to actually make me think back fondly on Little Miss Sunshine, but that 2006 faux-indie Sundance sensation is a marvel of exquisite subtlety and nuance by comparison, with quirks you could accept and characters you could halfway believe compared to the wearying sitcom antics of City Island.

On the bright side, City Island—a real seaport community in New York—does look like a lovely place to visit; credit cinematographer Vanja Cernjul for some attractive pictorial lensing. And Andy Garcia, playing the patriarch who harbors secret dreams of being an actor, does have one brilliant moment worth witnessing: the scene in which he goes on his first audition and ends up blowing both the judges and himself away with his improvisation. If you can somehow find a way to watch that scene and skip the rest, you'll have seen all you need to see from this dud.

Still to come: the art-house exploitation sensation The Human Centipede (First Sequence), the Argentine Oscar winner The Secret in Their Eyes, the prankish art documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop, and more...including, maybe, a whole days' worth of Matthew Barney (if I can make it through that whole days' worth).

Flames of Cinematic Passion...Or Not

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—

Everyone Else (2009; Dir.: Maren Ade)
La bête humaine (1938; Dir.: Jean Renoir)

There are some movies that I find a lot to admire on an intellectual level, but which nevertheless leave me unmoved on an emotional or visceral level. Alas, for the most part, Everyone Else—German director Maren Ade's dissection of the dissolution of a romance, and a film which has riding a wave of film-festival-circuit acclaim upon its release at the IFC Center earlier this month—is one of those movies.

There's not much I can criticize about Ade's film, really; in many ways, it is as impressive as its many fervent champions claim. Ade has made a film about the highlights and lowlights of a relationship that is well-nigh unassailable in its evenhandedness, humanism and patience in closely observing the joys and agonies of its two central characters, the cautious Chris and the more flighty and impulsive Gitti. The two lead actors, Lars Eidinger (Chris) and Birgit Minichmayr (Gitti), give performances that feel authentic and fully lived-in in just about every single detail, right down to facial expressions. And Everyone Else sets out an intriguing view of relationships that respects the mysteries of what brings people together in romantic union while taking us out of our comfort zones in the way she hones in on these two tenuously lovelorn characters. (Ade's film is rather like that masterful half-hour second act of Godard's Contempt (1963)—that lengthy break-up scene to outdo all lengthy break-up scenes—stretched out to feature length.)

If only this movie were more interesting to look at, then maybe I could be more inspired to fully join in the chorus of praise this film has gradually been gaining in the past year. Alas, Ade's visual sense stays numbingly prosaic much of the time. Everyone Else is set during the central couple's vacation in Sardinia, and, amidst the island's bright sunshine, Ade and cinematographer Bernhard Keller capture a lot of pretty picture-postcard shots with his two main characters in the frame. But there's not even a sliver of poetic expressiveness in any of Ade's images and camera movements; she shoots in the most careful, functional manner possible—and frankly, to my eyes, her filmmaking style doesn't feel all that different from pedestrian TV drama.

This, of course, might seem like small potatoes in light of what the film does right—which, don't get me wrong, is plenty. Chalk it up to personal taste, then: I respect Ade's intentions in Everyone Else, I sympathize with what she's trying to get at about the agonies and mysteries of romance, and I admire the hell out of her emotionally naked lead performers. But the filmmaking feels too staid to me to feel much excitement about.

That is why, later that day, I turned with great relief to Jean Renoir's 1938 feature La bête humaine—not one of the French master's greatest films, perhaps, but certainly shot with far more passion and freedom than anything in Everyone Else. Renoir had me right from the opening shot, with a camera set atop of a moving train as it makes its rounds through the French countryside (tangentially related side note: I wondered briefly if Claire Denis had these shots in mind when she pulled off similar ones in her recent 35 Shots of Rum—which finally came out on DVD last week, by the way). But there are plenty of instances of expressive framing and lighting to be savored throughout the film, most memorably at its dark climax; Renoir's mastery of the medium may be "invisible," as Pauline Kael once noted, but it's an invisible mastery that becomes even more impressive when one does notice it.

The story, based on an Émile Zola potboiler, is pure film-noir-ish melodrama—and indeed, Fritz Lang turned the same material into his 1954 film Human Desire; I haven't seen that (it doesn't seem to available on Region 1 DVD), but, as Dave Kehr notes in his Chicago Reader capsule review of the Renoir, it certainly seems like the amorality at the heart of Zola's plot might play more potently with Lang's chillier hand. Still, Renoir's take on the material plays pretty well as a fairly schematic noir-ish storyline transformed into something unexpectedly more empathetic in tone, for all the darkness at its heart. So Séverine (Simone Simon) may outwardly play the role of a classic femme fatale, but Renoir adds layers of nuance to the part, so that she emerges as a fully rounded, emotionally complex individual. Her husband (Fernand Ledoux), who orders a reluctant Séverine to help him murder the Grandmorin—one of the directors of a major railway company—for his money, refreshingly becomes increasingly distraught over the action he has taken. And train engineer Jacques Lantier, who witnessed the murder but keeps quiet about it when he falls for Séverine, is conceived by Renoir and played by Jean Gabin neither as the usual passive victim of others' machinations or as a devious scheming dreamer, but simply as a normal, warm-hearted guy at prey to both his emotions and to a trait passed down through the generations that has given him an intermittent mania for killing women.

In short, the psychological depths in the characterizations of La bête humaine are what keep you compelled in spite of Zola's deterministic bent. And, of course, Renoir's subtly exquisite visual sense keeps your eye engaged as well as your mind. That's more than I can say for Everyone Else. Sorry, Maren Ade, but you haven't inflamed any flames of passion in me for your movie.

(Everyone Else is still playing at the IFC Center and in limited release elsewhere. La bête humaine played on April 10 as part of BAMcinématek's Jean Renoir retrospective, ongoing until May 11; details here.)

How to Train Your Dragon (2010; Dir.: Dean DeBlois & Chris Sanders)

 More flames...literally. As of this writing, Dreamworks' latest animated picture looks to have beat out the likes of The Losers and the Jennifer Lopez-led rom-com The Back-up Plan this weekend at the box office; last weekend, it looked, for a few hours, as if it had also topped the heavily hyped Kick-Ass. (That piece of faux-genre subversion eventually did win out, though by all accounts its box-office take was less than its distributing studio, Lionsgate, had hoped.)

It's nice to see that this colorful, heartfelt, funny and thrilling Viking-era family adventure still seems to be finding a sizable audience even as its bigger-budgeted Hollywood brethren try to make their usual bombastic claims at multiplexes. I don't have a whole lot to say about the film beyond that, really; it gets my enthusiastic thumbs up. One thing I would suggest about the film going into it, though, would be to not take it too seriously as a social allegory of any kind. Like Avatar (and, er, Dances With Wolves before it), How to Train Your Dragon eventually hinges on the rift that develops between an entire culture that collectively demonizes a whole group—dragons, in this case—and one lone wolf (voiced by Jay Baruchel) who befriends a dragon and finds that one can coexist with them after all. This allegory of tolerance, thankfully, is handled with a light touch—but if the film is sincerely trying to put across a message of nonviolent understanding, then isn't it rather undercut by the decision to end the film with a standard violent action climax? Granted, the climax involves humans and dragons coming together to bring down a Big Bad (Dragon)...but still...if you think hard about it, it does feel a bit like the pot calling the kettle black.

Also, John Powell's thunderous score could perhaps stand to have just a touch less thunder. Otherwise, though, an enjoyable flick—even in 2-D, which is the format I saw it in, after a friend of mine, for some reason, decided in this particular instance he didn't want to see it in 3-D. Did I miss anything special by not seeing it in 3-D, readers?

Adventures in Filmmaking: Is God—or The Auteur—Really in the Details?

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—

There's not much new to report on the filmmaking front other than the fact that I started working on the script on-and-off last week—and I'm glad I wrote out a treatment before jumping into writing the script, because having a screen story right in front of you, I discovered, really helps you focus while writing a screenplay. I've already written one major scene and a couple of smaller establishing ones, and it only took me a couple of hours to accomplish. If I hadn't planned it out beforehand, I might have spent a lot more time as I tried to figure things out on the fly.

Another thing that has cut down on scriptwriting time? Getting used to the realization that, in a script, you're not directing the film...yet. I started out this project not only with a story idea, but also with images in my head and possible camera angles mapped out; in other words, I embarked on this venture with the hope that I would eventually get to direct it myself. But, as both online screenwriting guides and a friend who is currently working on a script of his own have advised, when it comes to the script itself, it's best to try to take a hands-off approach and not overwhelm the script with detailed camera and actor directions. Eventually, whether you're directing or not, you'll be working with a group of collaborators that may well trump whatever ideas you may have initially had for, say, casting, shot selection or line readings. So it's good for a script to provide that kind of room for interpretation.

That's a bit of a relief for me; it means there is a lot of detail I can leave out for now, and thus less words to put on paper. But it also helps me realize that, as much as some critics might like to romanticize the auteur theory—roughly speaking, the idea that a director's vision and personality will come out no matter the cinematic context—the filmmaking process itself is as much about the people a director works with, and their dueling egos, as it is about the director him- or herself. And I think that I, by nature, am all about inclusiveness and hearing other people's ideas.

I still hope to direct this short film myself...but if/when I do, I will certainly be exploring and collaborating as much as I am trying to put a personal vision on the screen. Adventures indeed!

***

Speaking of a sense of discovery: Who knew that Jean Renoir had already staked out emotional territory that I was interested in exploring in my short film?

On Saturday night, I went to Brooklyn Academy of Music to catch a double feature of the legendary French filmmaker's 40-minute 1936 short A Day in the Country and his 1932 classic feature Boudu Saved from Drowning. I had seen neither film before, but I was especially stoked for the former film, which I had heard much great things about, but which isn't available on Region 1 DVD (though it is available on a Region 2 disc from BFI). Both turned out to be as terrific as I had heard, but I was especially stunned by the tantalizing final moments of A Day in the Country, which, in its deeply felt evocation of missed opportunity and regret—coming as it does at the end of a film that celebrates the pastoral, Pierre-Auguste Renoir-inspired beauty and sense of freedom offered by the countryside—very much reflects the kind of rueful mood I'm hoping to capture with my short film.

In my more angst-ridden younger days, I might have been disappointed by this discovery the way, say, the main character in this weekend's major new theatrical release Kick-Ass feels devastated by the sense of inferiority he experiences in witnessing Hit Girl's ruthless demolition of bad guys. (Wait, Renoir already did this? Why bother doing it myself then, if it's already been done?) But I guess you could say I'm older, wiser (?) and just generally more tired of feeling inferior about everything the way I used to. As a therapist I used to see during a stretch of time in my undergrad years told me: There will always be people better than you at even the things you're most passionate about. Better to find inspiration from your betters rather than merely regretting the fact that you're not on their level.

In that sense, then, I'd say: For that, at least, thank you, Jean Renoir, for making A Day in the Country. Perhaps you and your sublime little film have inspired me to raise my own game in some way.

I will have more to say, by the way, about Boudu and Kick-Ass in a future post (especially the latter, which I think is a good try at a smart genre deconstruction, if not quite as smart as it thinks it is).