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Cinema
by
Leonard Heldreth
Documentary examines WTC acrobatic feat
The films this month present five women trying to deal with the
problems they encounter, and one man trying to keep his balance
a quarter of a mile above the ground.
Frozen River
The title of Frozen River refers to the St. Lawrence in New York
where it forms the boundary between the United States and Canada.
Straddling this boundary line is the Mohawk Reservation, an area
where the lines of legal jurisdiction blur, and smugglers exploit
the racism and legal confusion to move contraband, including humans,
from Canada to the United States.
Courtney Hunt, a first-time director, has set her film here to
reflect the complexity of the situation, not only between the
Mohawks and the whites, but among the subgroups within each culture.
On the U.S. side of the border, Ray Eddy (Melissa Leo) lives with
her fifteen-year-old son T.J. (Charlie McDermott) and her five-year-old
son Ricky (James Reilly) in an aging trailer whose pipes freeze
when the temperature drops substantially, as it often does in
that climate.
Ray’s husband has disappeared a few days before Christmas
to go gambling with the balance of the money due on their new
trailer, and Ray and the boys are getting by on Tang and popcorn
bought with the money she earns as a part-time cashier at the
Yankee One Dollar store. The television is about to be repossessed,
and she will lose the deposit on the trailer if she doesn’t
come up with the balance in a few days; Christmas presents are
out of the question.
On the reservation lives Lila Littlewolf (Misty Upham), a young
Mohawk mother whose daughter has been “kidnapped” by
her mother-in-law. Lila’s eyes are so bad she loses her job
at the casino because she can’t count the money, and she
climbs a tree near her mother-in-law’s house (placating the
watchdog with potato chips) to see her daughter. These two women
meet when Eddy goes to the casino looking for her husband, finds
his car and then sees Lila trying to steal it.
Lila offers her $2,000 for the car, a Dodge Spirit, because it
has a pop-up trunk lid. It turns out that Lila has a side-business
of smuggling aliens across the frozen river, and with a pop-up
trunk, you don’t have to get out of the car to deal with
the aliens or the dealers—you just pop the lid and crack
the window enough to get the cash.
The job, of course, is dangerous. The police, both Mohawk reservation
police and state troopers, patrol the border; if the river is
not frozen solid enough, the transporters could go through; and
if that isn’t enough, they have to deal with the scum who
are smuggling illegal immigrants into the states and think nothing
of shooting someone. The rest of the film tracks how the two women
work together grudgingly to make the necessary runs across the
river to pay for Eddy’s trailer and to let Lila get her son
back.
This is not a “feel good” movie, although it’s
not as downbeat as it could be. It’s gritty, the performances
are realistic and the characters are barely clinging by their
fingernails to even a trailer-park life. Racism is a constant
player in the game. Lila openly hates whites, and the white police
don’t stop a car driven by a white person as often as they
do one driven by a Native.
Ray may be married to a Native American, but in classic racist
mode, she immediately classifies a Pakistani couple as terrorists.
What retribution is taken on the smugglers depends on the race
of both the smugglers and the captors. Most of these social issues
are hung on a thriller plot that alternates between whether the
smugglers will get caught or whether they will crash through the
ice due to a sudden warm spell.
The film was praised by Quentin Tarrantino when he awarded it
the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2008, and Leo, usually cast
in supporting roles, was nominated for an Academy Award for best
actress in 2009, a nomination she richly deserved.
Alert viewers may remember her as the wife of Benicio Del Toro
in 21 Grams or the mistress of Tommy Lee Jones in The Three Burials
of Melquiades Estrada. Like most independent films, Frozen River
received limited distribution originally, but now is available
for a wider audience to enjoy on DVD.
I’ve Loved You So Long
Philippe Claudel, the writer and director of I’ve Loved
You So Long, is a prize-winning novelist and screenwriter. This
is his first film, and his background may account for the dense,
multilayered quality of the film, which, nevertheless, stays firmly
on track from the opening silence to the last line of dialogue.
The title, a line from a French lullaby, “A la claire fontaine,”
refers to the bond of affection between two sisters who have been
separated for fifteen years. Juliette Fountain (Kristin Scott
Thomas) has been in prison for those years, serving time for a
crime whose form and motivation only become apparent gradually
through scattered pieces of dialogue. Her younger sister, Léa
(Elsa Zylberstein), barred by her parents from contact with Juliette,
has grown up, married, secured a university professorship and
adopted two Vietnamese daughters. As the film opens, Léa
picks her sister up in an airport lounge and takes her home to
live with her family until Juliette can be reintegrated into society.
Her husband, daughters and husband’s father, who lives with
them, are at first uncertain about and a little frightened of
this obviously damaged person, but Léa stands up for her
sister even though she also does not understand why Juliette committed
the murder. The rest of the film explores three major areas—Juliette’s
attempt to become a functioning member of society again, the growing
affection and bond between the two sisters, and Juliette’s
reason for her actions fifteen years before. Gradually, all is
revealed, and when Juliette, at the end, calls to a friend, “I’m
here,” she is referring to more than just her physical presence—she
has come back into the world.
Although the plot likely will keep anyone’s interest, the
film’s outstanding quality is the acting. Thomas (The English
Patient, Mansfield Park), speaking flawless French, gives a quiet,
subtle performance that gradually pulls the audience into her
perspective, and, at the same time, gradually reveals her coming
back to life. In the opening shot, she sits like a mannequin,
smoking, her face detached, her emotions dead, but near the end
of the film she is able to smile at her nieces, enjoy a swim with
her sister and walk through a museum with a friend. She speaks
little, for she had given up small talk in prison, and she has
to learn social behavior again.
Her encounter with her mother at a nursing home is an exercise
in frustration. It’s a riveting performance, partly because,
like the plot, it’s low key, and its surprises often come
unannounced, as when, during a job interview, she matter-of-factly
answers a question about the nature of her crime and horrifies
the interviewer.
Zylberstein is excellent as the sister, who balances her affection,
curiosity and concern for her family; she doesn’t understand
her sister, but has never given up on her. Frédéric
Pierrot creates a quirky, moving individual in the minor role
of Captain Fauré, Juliette’s police contact; Serge
Hazanavicius is Luc, Léa’s husband; and all of the
supporting actors give solid, individualized performances, even
the little girls playing the daughters.
The film is set in the university city of Nancy, and the beautiful
French vistas add to the film’s attraction, as does the quiet
soundtrack.
I’ve Loved You So Long is a powerful, superbly acted film
whose details—such as the poem written on the back of a medical
printout—will linger in your mind. The film is in French
with English subtitles and, on DVD, English dialogue with Thomas
dubbing her own lines.
Man on Wire
The documentary Man on Wire is an attempt to recreate, using
old films, still photographs, interviews and dramatic reenactments,
an event that took place on August 7, 1974.
On that morning, Philippe Petit, a twenty-four-year-old Frenchman,
grasped his balancing pole and stepped out onto a three-quarter-inch
steel cable strung across the 140 feet separating the twin towers
of the World Trade Center. No harness or safety net protected
him from the void that stretched 1,350 feet (a quarter of a mile)
to the concrete below.
For forty-five minutes, Petit crossed and re-crossed the wire
between the towers a total of eight times, pausing to sit down
on the wire and look down at the streets below, dancing on the
wire, lying down on the wire, and finally laughing and walking
into the waiting grasp of the police after they threatened to
take him off with a helicopter.
James Marsh, the director, whose previous films include the documentary,
Wisconsin Death Trip, and the fiction film, The King, has organized
his material to emphasize the careful planning, skill and luck
that went into Petit’s achievement. His success is demonstrated
by the number of awards that Man on Wire has won, including the
documentary award at Sundance (2008) and the Academy Award for
Best Documentary (2009).
Anyone who watched the Academy Awards saw the elfin Petit, now
fifty-nine, but still an athletic wire-walker, bound onstage and
walk off balancing the Oscar on his chin. His success also is
demonstrated by the curious mixture of awe, admiration and incredulity
that any viewer will feel watching Petit step onto that wire.
Even though you know he will succeed, his audacity makes you gasp.
Petit first conceived of his feat as a teenager in the 1960s while
sitting in a dentist’s office and seeing a sketch of the
proposed skyscrapers. He immediately drew a line connecting the
tops of the towers and imagined himself on that wire. More than
seven years passed from that first idea to the achievement of
his “coup,” the last eight months of which were spent
in New York with a cadre of friends and helpers, solving logistical
problems complicated by the illegal nature of his plan.
During this time, he perfected the skills he would need, stringing
a replica of the WTC wire above the ground in France and urging
his friends to jiggle the wire to simulate the winds he might
encounter. He also did practice runs walking across wires fastened
between the towers of Notre Dame Cathedral and between the towers
of the Sidney Bridge (all illegal, of course).
In New York, he and his volunteer helpers, disguised as tradesmen,
journalists, and others, examined the tops of the towers, determining
where to fasten the wire, how to anchor it and how to get the
half-ton of necessary equipment past the guards, watchmen and
other security people. Interviews with the remaining people who
were involved are interesting, but this is Petit’s act, and
his comments, stunts and recreations dominate the film, as they
should.
Marsh wisely makes no mention of the destruction of the WTC, but
it’s impossible for anyone looking at the film to forget
the subsequent history of these towers.
Petit did not intend his act to be a stunt but to be “street
theater,” a show for the people of New York City who looked
up that morning and saw what appeared to be a man walking in the
air. However much our rational minds may disparage such a dangerous
and perhaps crazy act, our emotional selves cannot help but cheer
for such bravery, for the sheer exuberance and art of this thing
that we cannot imagine anyone doing.
For those of us not in New York City at that time (the day before
Nixon resigned), this is as close as we’ll come to seeing
Petit’s inspiring accomplishment. Don’t miss it.
A Girl Cut in Two
The director of A Girl Cut in Two is Claude Chabrol, sometimes
described as the French Hitchcock; one of the few surviving members
of the French “New Wave,” Chanrol is nearly eighty,
and A Girl is his fifty-first film, this one written in collaboration
with his daughter and scored by one son while another plays a
minor role. While not among his greatest films, it’s a solid,
semi-thriller that casts a cold eye on class and social relations
in France.
For so French a film, the inspiration for the plot was an American
murder. In 1906, Harry K. Thaw, whose wealth came from the family’s
railroad business, shot and killed architect Stanford White in
the roof garden of the old Madison Square Garden on East 26th
Street during the opening night of Mamzelle Champagne.
White, himself an older playboy whose firm had designed Madison
Square Garden, had been the lover of former showgirl Evelyn Nesbitt,
who was married to Thaw. The murder was recreated for film in
the opening of Ragtime (with Norman Mailer as White), and Nesbitt’s
story is told in the film The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing, as
well as other films and plays.
Chabrol’s adaptation works well, and knowing the source adds
little to the film, except that Nesbitt seems to have had less
native intelligence than her French counterpart.
In Chabrol’s film, Charles Saint-Denis (Francois Berleand)
is a well-known author in his sixties who meets Gabrielle Denige
(Ludivine Sagnier, who decorated the The Swimming Pool, sometimes
in her bikini and sometimes out of it), a local TV weather person.
He is attracted to her beauty, and she is attracted to him for
less apparent reasons—she says his “experience.”
They spend steamy afternoons in his apartment in Lyon while his
wife of twenty-five years (“a saint,” he calls her)
remains at the expensive new house in the country.
In the meantime, Gabrielle is pursued by Paul Gaudens (Benoit
Magimel), irresponsible heir to a chemical fortune, but a person
of her own age. Eventually Charles persuades Gabrielle to participate
in an orgy at his men’s club, and then, having seen her debauched,
he dumps her.
Paul consoles the abandoned Gabrielle and eventually marries her
before he finds out the depths of her relationship with Charles.
Throughout most of this film, people tend to treat each other
as badly as they can, and the conclusion offers no different view
of human conduct. Paul’s mother, a triumph of maternal aloofness
and icy aristocracy, is matched by her son’s casual use of
people and childish lack of interest in anything but his own pleasure.
Charles’s sainted wife seems only about half there most of
the time, and his agent, nicely played by Mathilda May, seems
to know what’s going on (she drops in for a drink at the
orgy club), but can’t really be bothered to do anything about
it.
The film’s fascination lies in the interaction of these quirky,
unpredictable characters (and it did hold my attention, although
apparently that wasn’t true for all viewers). The acting
is solid throughout, even from the minor characters, although
some of the motivations were unconvincing.
Fortunately, except for Gabrielle, most of the characters were
not people you care much about, and even her innocence got a bit
annoying after a while. Nonetheless, Chabrol moves his actors
smoothly along the inevitable plot lines and turns what could
have been a routine thriller into a complex psychological portrait
of class relations in France; the film is in French with English
subtitles.
—Leonard G. Heldreth
Editor’s Note: All films reviewed are available on DVD or
VHS from local stores. Reviews of earlier films cited may be found
at www.mmnow.com
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