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Cinema
by
Leonard Heldreth
Offbeat film salad, with a side of French
Three distinctly offbeat films and two distinctly French films
balance each other this month.
XXY
Director Lucia Puenzo, the daughter of Argentine filmmaker Luis
Puenzo, who won a foreign-language Oscar in 1986 for The Official
Story, has taken what could be a sensational subject and made
a subtle, carefully nuanced story of an adolescent dealing with
her emerging sexuality.
Based on a short story by Sergio Bizzio, the film tells the story
of Alex (Inés Efron), now fifteen years old, who was born
with both male and female genitalia. Previously, Alex has taken
drugs to suppress the masculine side, but now she has stopped,
wanting just to be who she is, although she’s not sure what
that means. Alex’s father, Kraken (Ricardo Darín of
Nine Queens and Aura), a marine biologist, has moved his family
from Argentina to an island off the coast of Uruguay to escape
the medical interest in his daughter.
Alex’s mother, Suli (Valeria Bertuccelli), feels a surgical
solution is the best choice for Alex and, without consulting anyone,
has invited a prominent plastic surgeon and his family for an
ostensibly social visit. The physician’s son, Alvaro (Martín
Piroyansky), an awkward and withdrawn sixteen-year-old, finds
himself attracted to Alex, who, at their first meeting, suggests
they lose their virginity together. The loving and generally supportive
roles of Alex’s parents are contrasted with that of Alvaro’s
successful father, who tells his son that he has no talent and
will probably turn out to be a “fag.” The interactions
of the two couples and their children form the basis of the film,
and those expecting a neat conclusion will be disappointed.
The film’s rainy, windswept coastal scenes convey the moody
quality of the action, and much of the meaning is conveyed through
actions and reactions, rather than through dialogue. Alex never
explains how she feels being an “intersexual” teen (the
politically correct current term for “hermaphrodite”),
and Efron, a twenty-two-year-old woman at the time of the film,
conveys Alex’s alternating fear, vulnerability and aggression
beautifully. Most teens have all they can handle learning to grow
into one sex; imagine the problems if they had both organs and
imbalances.
The dialogue is spare and effective, the photography is original
and striking, and while some nudity and sexual situations occur,
the director thankfully avoids a frontal view of Alex. XXY is
a moving film about a young girl/boy whom society wants either
to study or to ostracize; fortunately, neither occurs in the space
of the film, but through the skill of the director and the actors,
the film conveys a vivid picture of a true outsider. The film
has won several awards at film festivals, such as Cannes, and
is in Spanish with English subtitles. Top
Mister Foe
(Hallam Foe)
Scottish director David Mackenzie’s earlier film, Young Adam,
explored the sexual relationship between a younger man and his
older employer within the framework of possible homicide, and
Mister Foe (Hallam Foe outside the United States) examines the
redemptive sexual relationship between seventeen-year-old Hallam
Foe (Jamie Bell) and the older Kate, his employer, but the underpinnings
are quirky in a different way.
Hallam lives on the rural estate of his father’s mansion
in Scotland, but he lives in a tree house that is both a hideaway
for him and a shrine to his departed mother. Hallam thinks his
mother’s death in a local loch was not the suicide it was
said to be, but a homicide involving his father’s gold-digging
secretary, who marries the widower almost as soon as Hallam’s
mother is buried. The tree house serves as headquarters for his
major activity, spying with binoculars on the neighbors in their
most intimate moments. At times, he sneaks into town and peers
through windows. The departure of his sister for school and an
awkward incident with his stepmother cause Hallam to flee to Edinburgh
with almost no resources.
In the city, he sees a woman, Kate (Sophia Myles), who looks remarkably
like his mother, follows her to the hotel where she works and
persuades her to hire him as a dishwasher. He begins stalking
her, climbing over rooftops to spy into her apartment and watch
her affair with an older man where she exhibits some quirky behavior
of her own. The progress of Hallam’s Oedipal relationship
with Kate and his working out of his relationship with his father
form the narrative of the rest of this dark, compelling movie,
which is seasoned with some moments of humor.
Bell has grown up from his role in Billy Elliot, and matured greatly
as an actor. His biggest challenge in this film is to make an
audience identify with a young man who wears makeup and a badger
skin, is having an affair with someone who looks like his mother,
who climbs the rooftops of Edinburgh with binoculars, and who
may be completely wrong in his assumptions about his father and
stepmother.
Bell, with his smile and charm, manages to accomplish this difficult
task, and to make his scenes believable—even one where he
is stripped nude and forced to tell Kate his history. Myles is
fine, although she exists more as an embodiment of obsession than
a real person. Ciaran Hinds (Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day) is
convincing as Julius Foe, a father unable to see past his own
problems to help his son, and Claire Forlani plays the stepmother
as a variation on Morticia Adams.
Part of the attraction of the film is the photography of Edinburgh,
as Hallam scales its drain pipes and clambers across its roofs.
Anyone with vertigo will be unnerved. At one point, he lives in
a clock tower that overlooks the city, giving spectacular views.
Contrasting with the cityscape is the gloomy, rainy scenery of
his father’s estate, with a white swan gliding across the
dark waters of the loch.
Mackenzie balances the boy’s psychological problems and kinky
habits against those of the other characters until Hallam begins
to realize he’s not so bad. The acting, settings and original
aspects of the story overcome some darker currents, and the resolution,
what there is of one, brings this original film to an acceptable
close. Top
Sukiyaki Western
Django
In 1961, the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa revolutionized
samurai genre films with Yojimbo (The Bodyguard) and its sequel,
Sanjuro (1962). Kurosawa took his plot inspiration from Dashiell
Hammett’s Red Harvest and his characters from Hollywood,
turning the western gunfighter into a scruffy samurai swordsman.
Then the Italian director Sergio Leone remade Kurosawa’s
films starring a young Clint Eastwood in a serape as a lethal
gunfighter called “the man with no name.” In addition
to completing a trilogy of “spaghetti” westerns—A
Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad,
and the Ugly—Leone created his epic Once Upon a Time in the
West, starring Henry Fonda as one of the nastiest villains in
the genre. These westerns usually were filmed in Spain, and the
actors spoke English or were dubbed into English.
Now, to come full circle, Japanese director Takashi Miike has
taken parts of the Leone and other Italian westerns and made his
version of the myth of the gunfighter and warring clans. When
you adapt a “spaghetti” western to the Far East, what
do you end up with? A sukiyaki western! Sukiyaki Western Django
also refers to Sergio Corbucci’s Django, and at the end of
Miike’s film, we are told the boy will go to Italy where
he will be known as Django.
The title of the film should indicate how seriously the audience
should take it, but let’s be specific. This is a Western
starring Japanese actors set in a town called Nevada; the actors
use guns, samurai swords and even a Gatling gun; the dialogue
is full of cowboy cliches spoken in barely understandable phonetic
English by Japanese actors who don’t speak English. (I turned
on the subtitles for the hearing-challenged to understand it).
In another layer, references are made to Shakespeare’s plays
about the Wars of the Roses, red and white roses grow out of graves,
and one clan leader demands to be called Henry. For a dollop of
pop culture on this cinematic meal, Quentin Tarantino plays an
ex-gunfighter confined to a wheelchair who, in a flashback, tells
how he taught one of the gunfighters to shoot. Tarantino also
opens the film with a grisly demonstration of how to make sukiyaki
with an egg taken from a snake. The curious part is Tarantino’s
dialogue is as trite and garbled as that of the Japanese actors,
and his acting leaves much to be desired.
The plot is familiar to anyone who has seen the previous films.
Two clans are fighting over a treasure that neither of them can
locate, and the townspeople are caught in the middle. A gunfighter
rides into town, and both sides try to recruit him. He is betrayed
and beaten nearly to death, but he recovers and comes back for
revenge on both gangs. He rides off at the end. Sound familiar?
Takashi Miike is a prolific cult director in Japan with a limited
theatrical distribution in the United States. His horror film,
Audition, probably is his best known previous work (see my review
at www.mmnow.com). Miike knows that his western is totally artificial,
and he shoots with over-saturated colors that are almost as over-the-top
as the acting, costumes and plot. He is both laughing at and paying
homage to the western as it has passed through its various incarnations.
The film has several memorable scenes, e.g., a shoot-out in the
snow, a young boy tending the roses at his father’s grave,
and a sheriff with a split personality arguing with himself.
The soundtrack is nicely done, often echoing the Leone westerns.
Bullets fly (often ricocheting in amusing ways in the back speakers),
blood flows freely, violence is everywhere, and some of the holes
blown in people literally are big enough to see through. Anyone
who is a fan of Tarantino, Miike or even of Leone’s westerns
probably will find Sukiyaki Western Django interesting and funny;
anyone walking into it cold may find it completely incomprehensible.
The film is in partially understandable English that probably
requires use of subtitles. Top
Priceless
Pierre Salvadori’s French comedy is a light, predictable
bit of French fluff, full of mistaken identities, beautiful women,
expensive things and luxurious hotels. Its cynicism and Gallic
pragmatism will charm those who love all things French, and a
leisurely pace permits the viewer to savor its visual splendors.
The plot is simple enough. Irène (Audrey Tautou) is staying
at a Riveria hotel with her wealthy middle-aged consort, but he
falls asleep early. Bored, she wanders down to the bar where she
encounters Jean (Gad Elmaleh of The Valet). She thinks Jean, a
bartender who has fallen asleep on a couch in the empty bar, is
a millionaire, and eventually the two retire to an expensive suite
to which Jean happens to have the key. The next morning, she departs
with her sugar daddy, never finding out the truth about Jean.
A year later at the same hotel, Irène, with a different
middle-aged provider, encounters Jean again and spends the night
with him. This time, however, they are found out, the provider
drops Irène, and she is dismayed to realize she has been
left with a nearly impoverished bartender. In order to pursue
Irène, Jean takes up with a wealthy woman, and much of
the film is devoted to Irène teaching Jean the finer points
of living off of others in return for sexual favors. All is done
cleverly with relatively good taste, and the conclusion is as
predictable as it is unbelievable.
Tautou expands her acting range from Amelie and A Very Long Engagement,
and is quite convincing in the role of the kept woman. Elmaleh
is believable as the love-smitten Jean, and Marie-Christine Adam
and Vernon Dobtcheff, as Madeleine and Jacques, manage to avoid
being stereotypes as the wealthy consorts.
Much of the film’s charm lies in the views of the Riveria,
its beaches and expensive hotels. Women will be quite taken with
Irène’s gowns, jewelry and other accouterments, while
men inevitably will wonder how she keeps such low-cut dresses
in place with so little underpinning, as she bounces across ballrooms
and down long marble corridors.
The film simply ran out of steam at the end, and there is a rather
abrupt switch from “anything for diamonds” to “oh
dear, I’m in love.” However, as the French say, that’s
love, and if French froth foams nicely on your cup of tea, this
may be for you. The film is in French with English subtitles.
Top
Flight of the Red Balloon
Although the language is French and the setting is Paris, Hou
Hsiao Hsien, the director of Flight of the Red Balloon, is Taiwanese.
His film pays overt homage to Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 classic
children’s film, The Red Balloon. Hsiao Hsien is not a director
who will appeal to most mainstream audiences, but reviewers and
critics hold him, justifiably, in very high regard. His Three
Times, reviewed in these pages, was a fascinating study of love
in different situations with the same actors, and the current
film exhibits his trademark qualities—a matter-of-fact style
that conceals great subtlety, long shots that extend across several
speeches and actions, refusal to let traditional plot and character
expectations dictate narrative progress, and an interest in film
as an art form.
The film opens with Simon (Simon Iteanu), a cute child with a
mop of curly hair, standing atop the railing of a Metro stop at
the Place de la Bastille, trying to coax down, with the offer
of “a million pieces of candy,” a red balloon that drifts
above him. The balloon refuses and drifts away as Simon gives
up and descends the steps to the subway.
Simon lives with his mother, Suzanne (Juliette Binoche), in a
cluttered upstairs apartment in Paris. Suzanne, who provides the
voices for a puppet show, has just hired Song (Song Fang), a young
film student from Beijing, to live with them and take care of
Simon. Other characters are Marc (Hippolyte Girardot) and his
girlfriend who live in the downstairs apartment; a piano tuner;
and a puppetmaster from China.
Suzanne’s life is complicated by her husband’s two-year
stay in Montreal, her daughter’s pending return from Brussels
and the fact that Marc is months behind in the rent. These factors
and people move in and out of the film, and the audience gets
to know the characters and their daily problems. That’s about
it, for plot.
The balloon is much less prominent and has less supernatural quality
in this film than it has in Lamorisse’s; it peeks in windows,
drifts above houses and frequently does not appear for extended
times.
The film’s conclusion shows Simon with his class at the Musée
d’Orsay discussing Félix Vallotton’s 1899 painting
of a child chasing a red ball, “Le Ballon.” The children
discuss how the painting is partly sad and partly happy, and make
other comments that may or may not be accurate (most of the film’s
dialogue, according to Binoche, was improvised).
Vallotton was part of a group of painters who called themselves
“the Nabis,” who created bright, abstract patterns of
ordinary life, much as Hsiao Hsien does in his film. Song, the
student, acknowledges that she is making a film about red balloons,
sometimes using Simon as a character, and twice in the film the
camera focuses on a painted image of a red balloon on a wall.
As the children discuss the painting, Simon looks up and sees
the red balloon drifting above the glass dome of the museum. For
this reviewer to speculate on the symbolic meaning of the red
balloon might be as confusing and as inaccurate as the children’s
discussion of the painting, but the film itself, for those willing
to go with it, is completely charming. Perhaps, like the painting,
it stands for nothing beyond what it is. Perhaps that is enough.
The film is in French with English subtitles. Top
—Leonard G. Heldreth
Editor’s Note: All films reviewed are available on DVD or
VHS from local stores. Reviews of earlier films cited can be found
at www.mmnow.com
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