Declaration of War (**3/4)

Misleading titled, this French import nearly begins misleadingly too, with a montage scene straight from a romantic comedy. Actually, though, we first see a boy of five or so in a MRI machine. And then we see his parents, who are named Roméo and Juliette, meet. They have a boy, Adam. Not yet two, Adam gets sick. (Rarely does a toddler get so much screen time.) Relatives are informed. There are tears, but this is less of a tearjerker, all things considered, that one might have expected. The most notable segments are not the obvious ones—the diagnosis, the treatment decisions, and so on—but the ones in between, where the couple must go on living their lives.

The drama, cowritten by the two leads, Valérie Donzelli and Jérémie Elkaïm, and directed by Donzelli, is at its best in these small moments. (Donzelli and Elkaïm have played romantic partners in other films and have some chemistry.) Roméo and Juliette try to make each other laugh about their worrying too much. They try to understand each other’s different reactions to their situation. They smoke a lot. (It was the degree of smoking that made me suspect, correctly, that the movie was based on a true story.) Except for the smoking, I’d have liked the movie to be even more about these small moments. I don’t really trust those montage scenes in romantic comedies because they seem to be a substitute for actually showing why a couple are together, and I felt like that was true here. Without giving away what happens to either Adam or his parents, it also seemed odd that the story simply skips ahead and dispenses with both questions in a quick epilogue that is not necessarily implied by what has happened before. Additionally, the soundtrack music, which ranges from Vivaldi to Laurie Anderson, is jarring when it should have been intimate.

IMDb link

viewed 2/5/12 3:40 pm at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 2/5/12  

The Pig (***1/4) [2009 Oscar-nominated shorts program]

An older man’s fixation on a painting of a pig (it comforts him during a hospital stay) turns from quasi-comic to philosophical in 20 minutes. The Danish film winds up asking what it means to be considerate, and tolerant.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 2/11/09

Epitaph (**1/4)

A World War II hospital is the setting for this South Korean psychological horror film. The story confusingly shifts from a squeamish young morgue intern to another doctor trying to aid a young girl whose parents died in a car accident, and then to another doctor who suspects his wife of being a ghost. Some of the confusion is deliberate; we are meant to wonder who is a ghost and who is alive. By the end, I understood some of what happened. But, despite some creepy imagery and sounds, and a few genuine scares, I found the film too incoherent to enjoy.

IMDB link

viewed 4/10/08; reviewed 4/11/08; screened at Philadelphia Film Festival

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (***)

Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric) was a successful journalist, the editor of the fashion magazine Elle, when he suffered a severe stroke. He was left with something called “locked-in syndrome” that left him able to move nothing but one eyelid. This is a film made by an artist, Julian Schnabel (Before Night Falls), so insistent on his vision that he made this story of a French man in French, which is notable because he’s American. It’s a notably artistic film, aimed at presented the experience of its subject, not his life.

The first third of the movie is shot entirely from Bauby’s point of view. We hear his thoughts, we see his at-first blurred vision, and so on. Confusion, annoyance, and frustration, along with sometimes wry observation, predominate, not sadness or self-pity. In other words, it’s not nearly as depressing as you’d think. It’s about the taking stock of one’s life, not death. Bauby reacts to visits from his doting ex-wife (Emmanuelle Seigner), his attractive (he notices) therapists, and his former business associates, with a mind as sharp as in health. When we see him, eventually, it’s a shock. This is an impressionistic movie, not plot-driven, and so may not be to everyone’s taste. At the same time, it’s unique and beautiful, with camera work that exquisitely conveys Bauby’s point of view.


IMDB link