Clouds of Sils Maria (***1/4)

The entertainment business fascinates many people, and entertainment business fascinates entertainers, so there are plenty of films about it. But there aren’t so many films about the creative process, the implicit subject of this film. Olivier Assayas has made one with Juliette Binoche, star of Summer Hours, his best-known film. She plays an actress, Maria Enders, presented with an opportunity to star in a revival of a play she did when she was 18. Only this time, rather than playing a teen vixen, she is to play a businesswoman seduced by her personal assistant. Yet still she identifies more with the younger character.

Maria discusses this primarily, but not solely with Valentine, her own, younger assistant (Kristen Stewart), who runs lines with her, sets appointments, and so on. The two relationships —the one in the play and the one between Maria and Valentine, run in parallel, but are different. Neither Maria nor Valentine are lesbians, for one thing. And while Maria finds the businesswoman she is supposed to play to be pathetic and foolish, Valentine sees it differently. They also clash, humorously, over a sci-fi film they see together. Valentine likes it, but Maria finds the women in spacesuits ridiculous.
 
The film is smart without being pretentious, though it’s talky. But if you get a worn out by all the talk, and you may, there are also some lovely scenes of the Swiss Alps, where a good part of the film is set.

IMDb link

viewed 10/19/14 2:20 p.m. and posted 10/21/14

Particle Fever (***)

It takes the world’s largest machine to study the world’s smallest things. As large as a five-story building, the Large Hadron Collider was constructed in an underground tunnel over a 20-year period near the Geneva headquarters of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). (A similar project in Texas had been defunded midway through construction.) The idea was to smash subatomic particles together in a simulation of conditions present in the first moments after the Big Bang, with the hope that doing so would produce the long-hypothesized Higgs boson, which in turn would confirm scientific theories that had been coalescing since the early 1960s.

Make sense? Not to worry, this documentary leaves the hardest science in background shots of equations on chalkboards, focusing instead on the “particle fever” of the scientists who have, in many cases, waited decades for their ideas to be confirmed (or shot down). To be sure, there is some talk about the Higgs particle and what it means, but more about the “fever” of the scientists. Director Mark Levinson picks half a dozen of them to follow, most prominently Americans David Kaplan and Monica Dunford. Representing the theoretical side of physics, Kaplan provides, among other things, a really clear explanation of the multiverse, the still-speculative idea that our universe is one of many, each with a different set of fundamental properties. Dunford is a super-enthusiastic graduate student who’s more involved with the practical side of things.

Of course, “practical” is meant in a relative sense here. The most amazing thing about the giant Collider may be that billions of dollars were spent on it without the certainty that it would produce anything other than knowledge for its own sake, though also proof that thousands of people from dozens of countries could cooperate to figure out answers to the most fundamental scientific questions.

IMDb link

viewed 3/29/14 1:05 pm at Ritz Bourse and posted 3/30/14

Sister (***3/4)

Making a movie about from a child’s perspective that’s not aimed at kids must be a labor of love, since it’s not exactly the path to riches. Possibly that’s why so many of the ones I’ve seen have been so good. The recent Japanese film I Wish comes to mind. It may be worth mentioning that hardly any of them of are American. This Swiss drama, set in the mountains of the French-speaking west (and partly in English), is told from the perspective of Simon, who’s not yet a teen but already the primary breadwinner, sort of, in a household of two. Louise (Léa Seydoux), several years his senior, is inconsistently employed, and so Simon spends his spare time at the local ski lodge, nicking skis and related gear for resale to classmates, tourists, and anyone else with the amazingly colorful Swiss Francs.

Even without the surprise twist in the middle of the film, the relationship at the heart of the story is genuine and original. Louise should be a mother figure to Simon, yet he is, despite being a thief, arguably the more responsible one, and certainly the more resourceful. Yet when he sees a boy about his own age with his mother (Gillian Anderson), you can see that he longs for a more ordinary childhood. Yet there is a deep bond between Louise and Simon that would be unusual in ordinary siblings living with two parents. The writer-director, Ursula Meier, carefully avoids injecting melodrama into the story, and the ending may therefore come off as meandering or anticlimactic. Simon is still not a teen when the movie ends, so we don’t know his future, but this beautifully shot and well-acted film made me wonder about it.


IMDb link

viewed 11/8/12 7:30 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 11/8/12

On the Line (***) [2009 Oscar-nominated shorts program]

A store detective’s act of moral cowardice has tragic consequences in this Swiss short. An interesting central character and plot provides a good start, and I wouldn’t mind seeing a feature film begin with this half hour, but the last half doesn’t go anywhere that surprising.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 2/11/09

That Day (**3/4)

One day, a radio newscaster, driving, hits something, or someone, after cheating on his wife. The wife readies their son for school as usual, but the rest of her day is unexpected. The boy, indirectly and directly affected by the issues in his parents’ marriage, nurses a crush on his classmate. In turn we follow each character, just like in the movie Vantage Point, but this is a deliberately paced Swiss drama, not a ludicrous Hollywood thriller. There is a jigsaw-puzzle aspect to the way the stories fit together, but also a preciosity to the writing, in particular as to the boy’s strange behavior.

IMDB link

viewed 4/9/08; reviewed 4/11/08; screened at Philadelphia Film Festival

Vitus (***3/4)

Like Searching for Bobby Fischer, Little Man Tate, and Shine, this is movie about a child prodigy. Fictional Vitus plays the piano, like the real-life subject of Shine, but doesn’t suffer a nervous breakdown. He plays chess, like the subject of Searching, but he’s more of an all-around genius. He has a doting mother, like Fred Tate, but also a doting father, and a loving grandfather who seems to be the only one whose affection transcends Vitus’s gifts. The Swiss import has something in common with all of these movies, but seems different nonetheless. Searching for Bobby Fischer was most concerned with how hard to push a gifted child, and that’s part of the story here. The parents here are good people, but they can’t help but see their son as an extension of themselves, and so they would like to shape his talents. When it seems as though he may not turn out to be as special as they thought, there is a palpable sense of loss. Having a son who is merely intelligent no longer seems like enough.

Little Man Tate focused primarily on the contrast between the intellectual and the emotional. There’s some of that here too. Vitus’s arrogance alienates him from others his own age. At the same time, he’s naive enough at age 12 to hope to woo a college-age girl. Yet even though he makes mistakes like that, he’s also able to have an insight into the adult world that most children lack, leading to a couple of surprising plot turns. Intelligence, like money (which intelligence can be turned into), gives you a kind of power. Already, Vitus has realized that, and the second half of the movie is more about his own desires rather than how his parents feel about him. In this the movie is somewhat distinguished from the others I’ve mentioned (excepting Shine, a full-fledged biography). It’s a warmer movie as well. On the whole, the movie views genius as a more of a gift than a problem, certainly compared to Shine or the forthcoming Joshua. If anything is lacking in the movie, it’s probably a consideration of the moral aspects of this gift.

Teo Gheorghiu, a real-life piano prodigy, plays Vitus. Also of note is Bruno Ganz, who played Adolf Hitler in Downfall, as the much more appealing grandfather. This movie only played one week here in Philadelphia, but it would make an excellent rental. When it ended, I was sorry that I wouldn’t get to see what Vitus would do as an adult.

IMDB link

reviewed 8/5/07