Cold War (***)

The Polish writer-director Pawel Pawlikowski has followed up Ida, which won the 2015 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, with another black-and-white film set in the early communist period. It begins in 1949. Zula (Joanna Kulig, who played a singer in Ida) is a singer; Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) singles her out during an audition at the music school that employs him.

The brisk (1:29) film wastes little time in advancing the plot, and when it skips ahead two years, they are lovers, and she is a standout in the school’s choir. In an early scene, government officials lean on the heads of the school to add some patriotism to the folk-oriented repertoire. We next hear what might be the most beautiful Polish-language choral work about Stalin. So it seems like the rest of the movie might become a somewhat familiar story about artistic freedom, or secret resistance, or at least operating in the confines of a totalitarian ideology. But it is a love story.

It’s better not to give away the story, except to say that jazz, not choral music predominates in the second half of the movie, and that parts of it take place outside of Poland. Politics propels the plot and deeply affects the lives of the characters, but is only indirectly the subject of the film. Perhaps it is about how changing the political and cultural environment can change who we are. It seems to change the relationship of Zula and Wiktor in an unpredictable, uncertain way.

Despite skipping ahead nearly two decades, the story isn’t difficult to follow, but I didn’t feel I entirely understood the characters, or at least Zula. At one point, she becomes annoyed when she learns that Wiktor has embellished details of her past. I would have been no more or less surprised had she been amused by the same thing. While I like ambiguity, to me, Pawlikowski has allowed the viewer to fill in a little too much. Besides earning another Foreign Language Film nomination, this film has also been nominated for its direction and cinematography. Pawlikowski creates memorable images without seeming showy. I liked the music, too. However, while I can speculate about why Zula feels the way she does, or the explanation for the definitive ending, I think many viewers will have wanted just a little more information to work with.

IMDB link

viewed 1/26/19 5:10 pm at Ritz East; posted 1/27/19

Le Week-end (***)

At its best, this drama is a bit like Nick Drake’s “Pink Moon,” the lovely tune that plays over the closing credits. It’s kind of quiet, but kind of light, buoyant where its simplicity might elsewhere seem somber. Jim Broadbent, star of every third English movie, and Lindsay Duncan, best known for her UK TV roles, play Nick and Meg, teachers celebrating their 30th wedding anniversary in Paris. Coming from the director-writer team, Roger Michell and Hanif Kureishi, who did Venus, the 2006 Peter O’Toole charmer, it might almost be the next installment in Richard Linklater’s Before series (Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight) for its emphasis on talk over plot, and for the fact that the couple in question have reached the empty-nester stage of life. But where, at least in Before Midnight, the Julie Delpy-Ethan Hawke couple have loud arguments that can boil over, the characters here simmer. What for another couple might lead to an hour of not speaking, or a ruined evening, these two let roll by, though without forgetting. Only Jeff Goldblum, as Nick’s admiring American friend, supplies a lot of volume. (I actually missed some of Nick and Meg’s dialogue for the lack of same.)

Besides Drake’s contribution, a Jeremy Sams’s piano score supplies a light jazz background that seems appropriate for a film that is too serious to be called fun, but that has enough amusing moments not to be ponderous.

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viewed 4/2/14 at Ritz 5 and posted 4/2/14

In Secret (**3/4)

The corrosive effect of guilt and deceit is the eventual theme of this drama that takes half the film’s length to ripen. Based on Émile Zola’s frequently adapted 1867 novel Thérèse Raquin, it’s more specifically adapted from Neal Bell’s English-language play by that title. It nonetheless retains the French setting (and some of the play-like feel). It mostly dispenses with the part of the story in which Thérèse (Elizabeth Olsen), deposited with her aunt (Jessica Lange) by her widowed father, grows up with her country cousin Camille (Tom Felton). Instead, it skips right ahead to where Thérèse, under pressure from her aunt, agrees to marry Camille and move to Paris, which is made to seem dank rather than glamourous.

While chugging through a lot of story, director Charlie Stratton establishes the characters  by reducing them to their main traits: controlling (Mrs. Raquin), sickly (Camille, coughing a lot), lusty (Thérèse, moaning a lot). The minimal back story hurts; one understands rather than truly feels Thérèse’s discontent with her harmless-seeming spouse. Even before Camille’s virile, artistic friend Laurent (Oscar Isaac) shows up, it’s clear the marriage will not be joyous, and the early Paris scenes are most noteworthy for the opportunity to watch Inside Llewyn Davis’s Isaac with large sideburns and an English accent. (Except for Felton, the main characters are played by Americans, but all employ English accents to portray French people) There are some love scenes, but they’re pretty standard “torrid affair” stuff.

All of the above seems like a wind-up to the far darker second half. Here especially, Lange, as a manipulative woman who suffers perhaps too much for her faults, shines in a supporting role. Or perhaps she just has the most complex character.

IMDB link

viewed 2/26/14 7:10 pm and posted 3/4/14

The Monuments Men (**3/4)

I’ve usually enjoyed George Clooney’s acting roles, but his directorial projects (Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Good Night, and Good Luck., Leatherheads) have mostly seemed more admirable than winsome. So it is with this one, which takes a solid subject, art treasures looted by the Nazis, and renders it more drily than I’d have hoped.

Not surprisingly, the cast is full of big names: Clooney himself plays the leader of a middle-aged band of art experts who don uniforms in order to keep the treasures out of German hands, or get them back before they’re destroyed. His recruits include Matt Damon, Bill Murray, John Goodman, Hugh Bonneville, Jean Dujardin, and Bob Balaban. But the best role is Cate Blanchett’s, an employee of the Nazis in occupied Paris who is happy to betray them, but also suspicious of the motives of the American (Damon) sent to enlist her assistance. Hers is by far the most complex character. Clooney has the biggest role, but his most significant function is to make a few speeches saying that art, the cornerstone of civilization, is what everyone was fighting for, so the mission is worth it. How more meaningful, I thought, it would have been to include a glimpse of the art before the war, rather than first encounter it in warehouses and similar settings, in bulk.

In terms of plot, this is a true-story version of National Treasure. In form, though, it’s mostly an old-fashioned adventure film. Put a bunch of colorful characters together, have them troupe around Europe, let fun ensue. But the tone seemed to me downbeat, yet without being especially emotional. Even when the monuments men come upon a cache of gold teeth removed from people sent to concentration camps, the moment seems perfunctory. Also present are multiple scenes in which the art men confront the enemy, or those who are potentially the enemy. I thought of Inglorious Basterds, in which similar moments crackle with tension. Of course, Clooney is a thoughtful man who is unlikely to make a truly awful movie, or an unintelligent one. Here he works with his longtime writing and producing partner, Grant Heslov, and everything is executed with competence. But little pizzazz.

IMDb link

viewed 2/12/14 7:30 at Roxy; posted 2/12/14

Simon Killer (***)

The edgy title perhaps misrepresents a film that is largely a character drama, though of a dark character. The film is physically dark, too, making its setting, Paris, look much less appealing that in just about any film I’ve seen. American Simon (played by cowriter Brady Corbet) is hanging out there after a bad breakup. Now moping to his mother via Skype, now picking up a prostitute at a sex club, he’s both pathetic and a little creepy. It’s a curious combination; while Simon’s not a villain, I rarely found him sympathetic. This is as much an effect of the film’s style as Simon’s behavior. I was curious as to what would happen, but not sure what I wanted to happen. For similar reasons, the film may not appeal to a broad audience. However, it’s effective, and I did enjoy being surprised when I thought a plot point, such as the encounter with the prostitute, would take the film in one direction, yet would lead in another. The way director Antonio Campos handles the language barrier is also noteworthy. Simon speaks halting French, and so the dialogue switches between English and French in a way that seems realistic but is rarely seen in American films.

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viewed 10/22/12 7:15 pm [Philadelphia Film Festival screening] and reviewed  10/31/2012

Amour (***1/2)

Woody Allen once made a comedy called Love and Death. Michael Haneke has made a film called Love that is about death, and is superficially a tragedy, but only superficially. Beginning with the end, the body of a woman alone in a luxurious Paris apartment, Haneke then takes us through the stages of her decline following a stroke. The woman is played by Emmanuel Riva, the 85-year-old whose earliest starring role was in the similarly titled Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959), her husband by the slightly younger Jean-Louis Trintignant, of ...And God Created Woman, The Conformist, and other European classics. Isabelle Huppert, who plays the couple’s daughter in a few scenes, has starred in two Haneke films, Time of the Wolf and The Piano Teacher. (Here, Riva’s character was once a piano teacher.) We never see these characters at a younger age, but French viewers may feel that they have known them well via earlier roles.

 

Haneke has strongly resisted the conventions of Hollywood (though he remade his own film Funny Games in English) and mainstream cinema, such as tidy endings. In doing so he has made movies that can seem chilly and detached. Films like Funny Games, The Piano Teacher, and The White Ribbon take a nearly clinical look into dark aspects of human behavior. I’m not sure whether he’s doing anything different here. It may be that simply placing his camera in front of these two characters, one witnessing her own decline, the other transitioning from husband to caretaker, is responsible for the deep empathy we feel for both. His approach is at once minimalist and rich in detail. The camera lingers, sometimes to the point where the viewer may become impatient, but allows us to see the evidence of this couple’s life together, including their well-appointed residence, full of books, art, and old furniture.

 

The tragedy embodied in the movie is that with all the ways modernity has made life easier, it has done little to improve the experiences of death and loss. The way in which it is not a tragedy, is hopeful even, is in its depiction of the tenderness shown by the husband. He does not speak the film’s title. No protestations of ardor, no dramatic medical interventions, no grand gestures (well, not more than one), as in a Nicholas Sparks novel, no mad dashes to the airport attest to his feelings. All that does is his willingness to do for his wife, day after day, what she cannot do and would want done. (In contrast is his daughter, who cannot see the situation through the eyes of her parents.) You don’t expect to see that in one of Haneke’s movies, and that makes it all the more moving.

 

IMDb link

 

viewed 1/27/13 4:00 pm at Ritz 5 and reviewed 1/18/13 

Holy Motors (***)

“It’s so weird,” says someone about midway through this movie, observing the main character in one of his many guises. And it might well apply to the movie itself. But it’s easy to make a weird movie. Having it be coherent and worth watching is another. For a weird movie, the story structure is simple. Virtually the entire film follows the exploits of “Monsieur Oscar” (Denis Lavant), as his driver calls him. He at first appears to be a businessman of some importance, judging by his plush limousine. Perhaps he is engaged in a criminal enterprise, judging by the phone call he makes, something about needing guns. When he gets out of the vehicle, he is dressed as an old woman shuffling along with a severely hunched back. But, soon enough, it’s back in the car for the next “appointment.” There, he seems to be doing acrobatics; computer graphics transform his motions into the acts of a mythical creature on a large screen.

And so on, all around Paris, from day into night. Each of the scenes is dramatic and, often, visually arresting on its own. In one, the actress Eva Mendes appears as a photographer’s model. In the most melodramatic segment, the singer and onetime soap-opera star Kylie Minogue plays a woman from Monsieur Oscar’s past. Is there an explanation for all of this? Yes, and I appreciated that, but at the same time, what really ties the vignettes together is the voyeuristic pleasure they provide and that is the province of cinema. That sounds a bit pretentious, but the film, excepting perhaps the part with Minogue, is not, and the ending is outright comedic/whimsical. (Or maybe it is melancholy, depending on how you look at it.) Only briefly is the movie violent. Though I found myself a little less captivated in the second hour, on the whole the movie is likely to amuse those who appreciate the unusual. It must have been a nice acting challenge for Lavant, who had also costarred in director Leo Carax’s The Lovers on the Bridge (1991).

IMDb link

viewed 12/12/12 7:00 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 12/13–15/12

A Cat in Paris (***1/4)

This charming, Oscar-nominated animated film, which I saw in its US version (dubbed with American voices), is about a literal cat burglar. By night, the cat is the non-human partner complicit in a series of thefts. This cat must sleep a lot less than most. By day, he is the companion of a young girl traumatized by the death of her father. She doesn’t speak. (Neither does the cat. It’s not that kind of movie.) The girl’s mother is a police detective responsible for investigating the thefts. And so these worlds must collide.

This film isn’t particularly meant for kids, but some may enjoy it. The touches of film noir and playful homages to Quentin Tarentino, Martin Scorsese, et al will be noted by adults. The band of ruthless but hapless crooks bound up in the story will amuse all, and there’s just enough emotion (as when the detective, alone, weeps over the memory of her murdered husband) to bind it all together.

IMDb link

viewed 9/5/12 7:15 pm and reviewed10/10/12

The Intouchables (***)

Americans may see European films as rather arty by nature, but that’s probably because we don’t get to see many of the mainstream ones, and mainstream moviegoers wouldn’t watch them if we did. Which is too bad, in this case, because this is a pretty good mainstream film. Sure, any story about a poor black kid bonding with a rich white dude, a handicapped one yet, is already bordering on cliché, and is ripe for emotional manipulation, even if it’s set in Paris, and even, or especially, if it’s a true story. (Kind of—the actually poor kid was Algerian, although, in the context of France, it doesn’t matter that much.)

 

Driss (Omar Sy) is the poor kid, an ex-con who’s only applying for a job so he’ll be able to collect public assistance. Phillippe (François Cluzet) is the paralyzed aristocrat in need of someone to help dress and bath him. When Driss says his references are Kool and the Gang and Earth, Wind, and Fire, Phillippe misses the joke. When Phillippe refers to the composer Berlioz, Driss only knows it as the name of a housing project. But he likes that Driss won’t treat him like damaged goods. And so, Driss gets to stay, and slowly ingratiates himself into the household, though not into the undergarments of Phillipe’s redheaded assistant. And, of course, becomes a better person.

 

Was the real Driss hired without the barest of background checks or even discussion? I don’t know, but suspect not. Some of the other events seem telegraphed, but the characters seem genuine. The humor does too. It’s a formulaic picture (though not a tearjerker, as one might expect), but one well executed. At least, French audiences, who made it the second most popular domestic release of all time, thought so. Pity it will never play in the multiplexes where, were it in English, it might find a ready audience looking for a feel-good comedy-drama.

IMDb link

viewed 4/26/12 7:30 at Rtiz east [PFS screening] and reviewed 4/27/12 and 6/3/12

Delicacy (***1/4)

It would be misleading to call this romantic comedy, because grief lies between the romantic segments, and about half the movie preceding anything significantly comic. Audrey Tautou, pixyish lead of Amélie, gets to demonstrate a wider range of temperaments as she reassesses her life and romantic possibilities following a tragedy. There is nothing unnatural about the transitions between these moods, or at least nothing more unnatural than it would be to anyone who has experienced such transitions. I didn’t care for the jarring music that marks some of them, but I did appreciate not knowing where the story would lead. In addition to Tautou’s very specific character, the film includes perhaps the best portrayal I’ve seen of someone (Francois Damiens, as the most awkward of her three suitors) who thinks that the woman he desires is out of his league.

IMDb link

viewed 3/25/2012 3:50 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 3/26/12–4/24/12

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  

Hugo (***1/2)

Though best known for violent tales such as Goodfellas, Raging Bull, The Departed, Martin Scorsese has made several movies in other genres, but this is the first one you can take the kids to, and should.

With his Aviator screenwriting collaborator John Logan, he’s adapted Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret into a film whose storytelling mostly equals its considerable visual impact. Unlike some other 3-D releases, the 3-D really does add an extra dimension to the production. Hugo (Asa Butterfield), a 12-year-old boy in 1931, is an orphaned boy who winds the clocks in a cavernous train station in Paris. (But everyone speaks English with an English accent.) Exterior shots of the city and interior shots of gears and wheels, give one a sense of traveling on a monorail. It’s obvious that much of this is created on a computer, but the slightly other worldly quality that provides works fine here.

The mystery relates to an automaton, a mechanical man Hugo’s late father acquired and repaired, but Hugo lacks the literal key that will unlock the mystery. Helping him solve it is the young grand-niece of an older man (Ben Kingsley) who sells toys in the station. Another mystery attaches to the old man and somehow links the girl to the boy. Hugo encapsulates most of what makes a good all-ages story: a resourceful hero (and heroine) with just the right amount of mischieviousness, a mystery, and a touch of the fantastic. Scorsese’s own love of cinema history plays into it as well. Hugo and his friend (Chloë Grace Moretz) sneak into a theater and watch a Harold Lloyd movie. The automaton recalls the robot in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. And an even older part of movie history lies at the center of the mystery, which is based on a true story, though the boy’s is fictional.

If I had any quibble with the movie it’s in the very self-conscious way it peddles nostalgia and braininess. Or maybe it’s trying too hard to be a “magical,” like The Polar Express. For example, it’s not enough that Hugo’s friend is a book lover, or uses fancy vocabulary, but you can almost see the ten-cent words underlined; when Hugo manages one himself, she actually says, “good one” to him. Yes, a quibble. Aside from making little kids fidget a bit—it’s better for those old enough to follow a scene in which the kids do some library research—the mildly highfalutin’ aspects of the film are overwhelmed by plain wonderful ones.

IMDB link

viewed 11/22/11 at Franklin Institute [PFS screening] and reviewed 11/28/11

The Hedgehog (***1/4)

When someone asked me, before I saw this, what it was about, I said something like that it was about a middle-aged woman who blossoms. To which the reply was, isn’t that what every independent movie is about. Actually, this is a French movie, and while I have definitely seen French variations on that theme, in no case was the story told from the point of a precocious eleven-year-old who plans to commit suicide on her twelfth birthday.

This suicide plot point is lifted right from the Muriel Barbery novel the film is based on, and of course gives the story some measure of suspense. It’s something about how the girl (who’s a year older in the book) is disgusted by the banality of the adult world around her, specifically that of her parents, and sees their elite lifestyle as a trap best avoided by dying. Still, her apparent contempt for the bourgeousie who inhabit her posh Paris apartment building is tempered by the fact that she also seems intensely curious about them.

The building’s newest resident is of the same class as the others, yet that is tempered either by the fact that he is Japanese, or cultured rather than crass. And somehow, the girl, the Japanese man, and the middle-aged woman, who is the building superintendent, form a mutual bond. This is the sort of movie in which the superintendent happens to have seen a 50-year-old Japanese film but never eaten Japanese food and the pre-teen happens to be a knowledgeable player of Go, the chess-like Japanese game that she insists is nothing like chess, nor Japanese.

Even so, the idea that the girl really plans to kill herself is easily the least believable aspect of the story. Insofar as the rest of the plot hinges in some way on the planned demise, the story suffers, but not so much as you’d think. As elegantly told by the director, Mona Achache, the story is almost a fairy tale Where in Barbery’s novel the youngest character can merely seem like a snob, Achache emphasizes the kindness behind the diffident exterior. In embodying both, actress Garance Le Guillermic is a real find.


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viewed 9/14/11 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 9/15/11–10/11/11

The Names of Love (***1/4)

This is one of those romantic comedies where a free-spirited woman gets paired with an uptight dude and converts him to her side. Think Something Wild, or My Sassy Girl, or What’s Up Doc, or at least three Ben Stiller comedies.* But tons of good movies are novel variations on a familiar theme, and this one does that with a nice French twist. Jacques Gamblin is uptight Arthur Martin ( the running joke being, that’s also the name of a well-known appliance brand), a 50ish bird expert, who having agreed to coffee with free-spirited Baya, politely refuses her offer of sex (she always sleeps with a guy on the first date, she explains) because he has to perform a necropsy (animal autopsy). Sara Forestier, with memorably wide eyes and slightly crooked smile, is twentysomething Baya, the product of a hippie’s marriage to an Algerian and a self-decribed political whore, though one with the proverbial heart of gold. It’s more than a metaphor, as she seeks to convert France’s “fascists” to her more left-leaning ways by sleeping with them. Arthur looks like a right-winger to her, but isn’t. She just likes him, she says.

The charm of this comedy is that it’s both quite frivolous and also about something, in particular the need to escape the baggage of one’s past and family background.

*Thanks to tv.tropes.org for a couple of those suggestions

IMDB link

viewed 8/25/11 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 8/25/11

 

Point Blank (***1/2)

This has everything you want in a thriller and nothing more. It’s a classic wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time story. There’s a nurse’s aide in Paris (Gilles Lellouche). He’s a nice guy. His wife is pregnant. That’s all you need to know, and all the story tells us about him. No sappy drama here. There’s another guy (Roschdy Zem), a criminal, who winds up, sort of, in the same mess as our nice nurse’s aide. And then there’s some other cops and criminals, but it’s awhile before we learn who the good guys and who the bad guys are. (I say “guys,” but the cops are male and female.) Anyway, this movie doesn’t even last an hour and a half, but excepting a few minutes at the start and a few at the end, it never lets up. You get enough plot to propel the story—through the streets, metro stations, etc., of Paris—but not so much it becomes convoluted or ridiculous.

Director and cowriter Fred Cavayé previously made a movie called Anything for Her that was remade as The Next Three Days with Russell Crowe. As Hollywood thrillers increasingly rely on spectacle and superheroics, the slightly lower budgets of television (think 24) and overseas allow the story to shine. You like that, you’ll like this.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz 5 and reviewed 8/14/11

Sarah’s Key (***)

Movies that go back and forth between now and long ago tend, in my experience, to feel a little artificial. They might just as well be straight period pieces; the modern-day parts can seem like just a crap device to make the old story more obviously relevant to modern-day audiences. But see what you think of the one here, which tells a small piece of a somewhat forgotten part of the Holocaust, the French part. Kristin Scott Thomas plays an American journalist working in Paris who a) happens to have earlier written a piece on the role of collaborators rounding up Jews and is writing another one; b) learns just then that she has a family connection with the awful history. She is also just then learning she is pregnant, fifteen years after she and her husband had their only child, a daughter.

Sarah is a young girl who, in the flashback sequences, hides her little brother in a cupboard when the Jews of Paris are rounded up in July 1942. Even though I’ve seen lots of scenes like this on film, they still have a lot of power. The film then embodies two mysteries to be uncovered by the journalist. First, what happened to the boy, locked away as his family was sent first to an overcrowed arena (“like the Superdome, only a million times worse” says one character), then to more distant places that were pit stops on the way to death camps. Second, what happens to Sarah, which takes our reporter across the ocean and back. A third mystery, but less involving, involves Sarah, her husband, and the child she carries.

The connection to the present is integral to the plot and does have some cleverness, but I did find it more clever than authentic. If I hadn’t known already that the story was taken from a novel (by Tatiana de Rosnay), I think I’d have placed odds against it being a true story. There is too much melodrama, and the way it explores moral ambiguity too obvious. When, for example, Sarah’s family and the other Jews of her neighborhood are taken, a neighbor shouts “They had it coming.” Another yells in reply, “You fool! It’ll be our turn” next. The one thing it’s not is sappy. Or dull. A little more 1940s and less 2000s would have improved the balance, though.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz 5 and reviewed 8/3/11

Midnight in Paris (***)

Peripatetic in old age, Woody Allen has made a romantic comedy Europe’s most fabled romantic city. But it’s the past, specifically the 1920s, that Gil (Owen Wilson) romanticizes. Engaged to a modern girl (Rachel McAdams), he’s writing a novel about a nostalgia shop, hoping to wean himself from his lucrative Hollywood screenwriting career. But his vacation becomes a very literal nostalgia trip when he’s transported, again literally, to the era of Cole Porter, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein. Porter’s performance (or that of the actor playing Porter) of his own composition “Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall in Love” and other clues suggest that it is 1929.

Despite the highbrow trappings, what this is really like is Woody’s version of all of those body-switching comedies that appear every so often. Gil stays in the same body, but experiences a different time. He learns, more or less, the same lessons, though. Of course, it helps to enjoy the movie if you have any affinity for the famous figures of old, and particularly if you can remember such slightly lesser lights as the filmmaker Luis Buñuel. Woody doesn’t work hard to set up the premise, and I have no idea how authentic the portrayals are. It doesn’t matter; they’re just there to be amusing celebrities, like all of the folks Tom Hanks runs into in Forrest Gump.

Forrest Gump had an emotional arc to it too, though, whereas this stays strictly on the light side. It is far less deep than Hanks’s own body-switching comedy, Big. It succeeds by virtue of a cute premise, not the paint-by-numbers execution of the premise. Even before Gil meets a sweet 1920s artist “groupie” played by Marion Cotillard—Gil’s use of the term “groupie” confuses her— it’s obvious that he and the fiancée are a lousy couple. Gil himself is an amalgamation of the ornery characters Allen used to play and the boyish ones Wilson usually does. Otherwise Allen sticks with the sort of upper-middle-class and wealthy, sometimes pompous, intellectual characters who populate most of his recent films. Allen does do one clever thing with the time-travel premise. He nicely indulges his love of early jazz in the soundtrack. And he lovingly depicts the city of Paris, especially lovely, as Gil would argue, in the rain, notably in a long, loving montage that sets the mood during the opening credits. Classy fluff, this one.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz 5 and reviewed 6/22/11

Living on Love Alone (***1/2)

Julie (Anaïs Demoustier), age 23 and just beginning her first grown-up at a Paris PR agency, is the subject of this drama. Although her looks attract men to her, in most ways she’s kind of an ordinary young woman, which I liked about the story. Probably had the job, or the people there, been a little different, it might have gone better. Perhaps in another life she’d have become the mistress of the 41-year-old guy she picks up in a club. Instead, there is another job and another man, one who provides an alluring and possibly dangerous alternative to the dull existence she sees before her.

The English title seems unsatisfactory, more suggestive of a romantic film, although the original French title, which translates as Of Love and Fresh Water, isn’t that helpful either. But what it suggests after seeing the film relates to the weight of reality and that adulthood is a series of choices, compromises, and consequences.

IMDB link

viewed 4/10/11 at Ritz East [Cinefest 2011 screening] and reviewed 4/10/11 and 4/17/11

Outside the Law (***)

Three Algerian brothers (Jamel Debbouze, Roschdy Zem and Sami Bouajila) emigrate to France but get caught up in their native country’s fight for independence. Though the story begins with colonization in 1925, the bulk of the film takes place between 1956, after France’s defeat in Vietnam, and 1962, when Algeria became independent.

Writer-director Rachid Bouchared previously made a film called Days of Glory that followed North African soldiers who join the French Resistance. (The film starred all three of this film’s stars as characters with the same names as here, yet this is not a sequel.) Pointedly, one brother, talking with a French police officer, tells him that while during World War II he was a resistance fighter, now he is on the wrong side of justice.

Though it weaves in questions about whether terrorism is acceptable in fighting for a just cause, in other ways the movie is the functional equivalent of a gangster film. Certainly, the violence to punish traitors is similar. The eldest brother is something like a solemn Malcolm X figure, eschewing alcohol and tobacco so as to avoid paying taxes to the hated French government, and women because, well, there’s no time. The youngest is the one who just wants to make money and disappoints his mother by becoming a bandit. The middle brother joins his brother in the movement, but regrets not seeing his wife and child, and has qualms about killing.

Nothing about how this Oscar nominee (foreign-language film) plays out should surprise, whether you know about French colonialism or not. Still, the brutality employed by the seat of Enlightenment culture is somehow shocking, though it shouldn’t be.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 2/22/11

The Father of My Children (***1/2)

One thing I like about certain (usually) foreign films is the way you don’t immediately know what they’re going to be about. For a would-be blockbuster, this is no good because that doesn’t lend itself to a very exciting description. For example, this can be described as the story of a French film producer (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing), his money troubles, and his family. (There are a lot of films about actors, a fair number about writers and directors, but not too many about producers; The Aviator, the Howard Hughes biography, would be one.) What’s pleasing about it is all in the characters and their relationships. That’s not to say nothing happens—plenty does—but that the story isn’t entirely driven by what happens in the first ten minutes, which is the usual case.

After ten minutes, I assumed the movie was going to be about a workaholic who can’t stay off his cell phone as he tries to placate a free-spending Swedish auteur, a group of Koreans coming to shoot in Paris, and his impatient creditors. He is a workaholic—“human spam” to one of his daughters—but also an adored father and husband, and the proud creator of dozens of non-blockbuster films. He cherishes the freedom of being his own boss, but the freedom is threatened by the bank’s threat to pull the plug on his credit. The most significant plot point happens past the halfway point. The emphasis also surprisingly shifts from the filmmaker to his Italian-born wife (hinted at by the title) and his three daughters, the eldest of which is played by de Lencquesaing’s real-life daughter, Alice. A young adult, she has the most complicated relationship with her father.

The second film of the still-under-30 Mia Hansen-Love is a film that is sometimes sad, but isn’t sappy. The lack of melodrama is one reason why such a film doesn’t feel heavy or depressing. The other is that the characters are enjoyable to be around; after 110 minutes, I wasn’t ready for the movie to end.

IMDB link

viewed 8/5/10 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 8/6/10