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.

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

Child’s Pose (***3/4)

A tragic accident forms the thread of this drama about a mother and her adult son. As far as I can tell, the film’s star, Luminita Gheorghiu, has been in every Romanian movie I’ve seen — The Death of Mr. Lazarescu…4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days…12:08 East of Bucharest…Beyond the Hills — but here gets a tour de force role playing Cornelia, a married, 60ish architect who tries to fix things when her son (Bogdan Dumitrache) speeds into a teenage boy, killing him. At first, the story suggests a commentary on class — Cornelia is comfortably well off compared to the victim’s family — and corruption, perhaps even a police procedural. Cornelia bullies the officers conducting the investigation and even bullies her own son into changing his statement.

The second half of the movie, though, moves more directly into the personal. We see why her son has been avoiding her, but for a long time he himself barely speaks. The title of the movie is a little oblique; it might refer to the son, who is married but retains a childish passivity at times, or his mother, whose love is the selfish love of a child. (Stylistically, the film is very much of a piece with the films above. Shot with little artifice, the film has no score and features handheld camera work. Many of the scenes are long. Despite this, the pacing is much faster than The Death of Mr. Lazarescu or Beyond the Hills. It’s a fairly short film that ends with an emotionally revelatory (though still ambiguous in terms of plot and interpretation) sequence that makes the heroine, if not exactly likeable (she rarely is), then human, and wonderfully complex.

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viewed 2/19/14 7:30 at Gershman Y (PFS screening) and posted 2/19/14

Fill the Void (***1/4)

This confusingly titled Israeli drama takes place in an Orthodox Jewish community. Unlike most films about such closed societies, including Ushpizin and Holy Rollers, set among Hasidic enclaves in Jerusalem and New York, respectively, this is not about encounters with outsiders or about those challenging tradition. Instead, it is about the normal challenges of life, but as experienced through a particular cultural dynamic.

Shira (Hadas Yaron), the character at the center of the drama, is an 18-year-old kindergarten teacher hoping to wed a young man she has seen but not yet met. However, upon the death of her sister in childbirth, she feels increasing pressure to instead marry her sister’s widower (Yiftach Klein), now a single father, though he is significantly older than she. Although this is not something that would likely happen in secular Israel, Shira’s internal conflict, between desire for self-determination and duty, is not unfamiliar.

The cultural context is one in which a high emphasis is placed on marriage; another character, an older woman, wears a head scarf to suggest widowhood, though she’s never wed, simply to avoid questions. Additionally, there is great weight placed on the rabbi as the center of the community, dispenser of charity, and giver of advice on everything from spiritual matters to ovens. Still, the long beards on the men aside, these characters seem like ordinary people.

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viewed 6/19/13 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 6/19/13

The Silence (***1/2)

A horror-movie gimmick of a plot—nearly identical crimes separated by 23 years—instead makes for a fine German mystery. We know what happened in 1986 — two friends, out for a drive, follow an eleven-year-old girl. One rapes her. The other, though shaken, says nothing. Now a small police force is looking for another girl whose bike was found in the same field as the other girl’s. Despite the premise, there is virtually no violence after the opening sequence, and only a couple of scenes are suspenseful in the manner of a straight thriller. Instead, director Baran bo Odar (adapting a novel by Jan Costin Wagner) holds your attention (and builds a lingering suspense) by following the eclectic troop of officers trying to solve this unusual crime as well as the parents of the missing girl, and the mother of the 1986 victim.

There are too many characters to truly flesh out all of them, but Sebastian Blomberg and  Wotan Wilke Möhring stand out as two haunted men. One is a cop who, grieving for his wife, seems barely able to function; the other is haunted by guilt and disgusted by his own desires. The film is as much about grief and loss as about what happened. A miniseries might better have developed the many briefly explored characters and subplots — like exactly what happened to the cop’s wife, the animosity between the retiring police chief (who still wants to investigate the new crime) and the incoming one, the way the marriage of the girl’s parents strains after she disappears, etc. But Möhring brings an eerieness to the storytelling that makes it mostly riveting.

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viewed 4/3/13 7:00 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 4/3/13

Margaret (****)

I suppose fans of HBO’s True Blood, or at least of Anna Paquin being in it, should be happy this sat on the shelf so long before getting a little-publicized release. The actress had had a few good roles since winning her Oscar in 1993, but not too many leads as a young adult. But I think had this come out around 2005, when it was filmed, it’s easy to imagine she would have been deluged with film roles that might have kept her off the small screen. The film also partly answers the question of what filmmaker Kenneth Lonergan, whose other movie was 2000’s terrific You Can Count on Me, has been up to since Gangs of New York (2002), on which he is one of the credited screenwriters.

Given its novelistic sweep—it has just one main character, Paquin’s, and takes place over only a few months, yet there is a lot of stuff stuffed into the film, which clocks in at 160 minutes—I’d want to ask Lonergan several questions if I could. But if I were to pick one, I’d be tempted to ask about one two-second shot in particular. This is after Paquin’s character—Lisa, not Margaret—a Manhattan high school student, tells a young man who’s called her that she isn’t in the mood to talk. Lonergan then cuts away to the suitor, who’s shown breaking down in tears. He’s a minor character who plays no part in the rest of the story. Maybe it’s only there to show what sort of boy she’s rejected. Or maybe it’s there because quite a lot of the film is about how people react to other people. But I kind of think it’s there because Lonergan wants to show us everything. This may have had something to do with why it took so long to finish the film.

If I were to tell you what the movie is about, I would say it’s about this young woman whose chance flirtation with a bus driver (Mark Ruffalo) leads to a tragic accident. Yet it’s also about her relationship with her divorced parents (she plans to visit her father in California), her classmates (the Jewish Lisa and a Muslim classmate clash over foreign policy in history class), a teacher (Matt Damon), and a woman she encounters as a result of the tragedy. Mired in editing problems for years, the released version has been criticized for being messy, and it is.

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viewed 10/19/11 at Ritz East and reviewed 10/19/11

Mademoiselle Chambon (***1/4)

A married builder (Vincent Lindon) and his son’s schoolteacher (Sandrine Kiberlain, Lindon’s ex-wife) find an unexpected intimacy in this French drama. And it is intimacy, more so than passion, that is the subject. Having hired him to fix her window, she admires his craft; having completed the job, he takes a few moments to look at the artwork in her apartment. Director and cowriter Stéphane Brizé lets the camera linger while the two observe each other, often without dialogue. Some will thus find the movie slow. Others may not care for the sympathetic view of a married man who at least contemplates an affair despite, as far as we can tell, having a happy home life. But it’s exactly this subtle, sympathetic storytelling that drew me in.

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viewed at Ritz 5 and reviewed

Please Give (***1/2)

Nicole Holofcener’s fourth film as writer director might be her best. Like her last one, Friends with Money, it’s also about money, in a way, though not about friends. Kate (Holofcener regular Catherine Keener) and her husband (Oliver Platt) have money; they make it by taking the furnishings of the dead to resell at a profit. She feels guilty about this, and he doesn’t. The other main characters are sisters whose elderly grandmother lives next door. Neither sister particularly likes the grandmother, who can be blunt. But one sister (Rebecca Hall) feels guilty about this, and the other (Amanda Peet) doesn’t. Holofcener’s last two movies were set in Los Angeles, but she returns to a Manhattan setting here. In such dense locations, where wealth and poverty are closer together, it’s harder to avoid noticing the difference. Kate routinely gives $5 bills to homeless people. She seeks out volunteer opportunities that she doesn’t particularly like but feels like she ought to.

The scene I most remember from Lovely & Amazing, Holofcener’s second film, is the one in which Emily Mortimer’s character asks her boyfriend to critique her figure, body part by body part, as she stands naked before him. This film also stands out in the way it looks at women’s relationship to their own looks. This is primarily, but not solely, seen in the character of the teen daughter, who frets over her body too, but particularly her acne. Wondrously, the actress who plays her looks like, or is made to look like, a genuinely pimpled teen girl. Less believable is the primary sexual liaison in the movie, which serves some story functions but seems unlikely.

These themes all mix in the same kind of character-driven story as in Friends with Money. There is, in the aggregate, less self-absorption on display, but some of that, and some unkindness too. It’s not a great movie for people who want the characters to always be likable, though again it’s better than Friends with Money on that score. However, only the sister played by Rebecca Hall is particularly admirable. The story has a natural ending to it, but doesn’t try to resolve all of the issues it brings up. This is an approach I find quite appealing.

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viewed 7/1/10 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 7/1–6/10

Jury Duty (***1/4)

This French adaptation of a 1962 novel begins with a murder, but is more psychological drama than thriller. The killer is a quiet small-town pharmacist who runs a apothecary with his wife. Despite his leaving evidence at the scene of the crime, the police arrest a young Algerian who was sleeping with the deceased. (Algeria gained independence from France in 1962, concluding a violent struggle.) Worries about being caught give way to worries that the druggist himself may wind up on the jury.

Beyond the well-shot courtroom drama, the plot reveals how prejudice can overcome judgment, and convenience can overcome conscience. Surprisingly, the killer is not the one who lacks a conscience.

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viewed at Prince (Philadelphia Film Festival) and reviewed 4/1/09

Brideshead Revisited (***)

Set vaguely in the period between the world wars, this adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s novel not only tackles the usual British period drama themes of class, wealth, and nostalgia, but religion too. Successfully working these into a two-hour feature must have been a daunting task, considering that they provided enough material for the acclaimed 1981 BBC miniseries, which ran eleven hours.

Even as pared down, director Julian Jarrold (Becoming Jane) has kept the major plot points. Callow Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode) and fey, drunk, wealthy Sebastian (Ben Whishaw) meet cute at Oxford, and soon Charles finds himself involved with the entire clan, including sister Julia, a self-proclaimed hedonist, and their prim mother (Emma Thompson). Whishaw seems diffident, not attractive as he is apparently supposed to be, but the other performances are very good. There is too much here; though it’s never confusing in terms of plot, the switch in thematic focus can be jarring. Ryder transitions from being the audience surrogate to the ultimate subject of the piece, and Catholicism, touched on earlier, comes to the fore in a surprising way.

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viewed 8/1/08 at Ritz 5

The Life Before Her Eyes (***1/2)

Watching a movie is like time traveling. You sit for a couple of hours and watch someone’s life go by. Fifteen years can seem to evaporate in an instant. All of the possible plot developments are alternate realities for the characters we meet at the start of a film. Usually you don’t think of it this way, but you might when watching this melancholy drama in which Evan Rachael Wood and Uma Thurman play the same character, Diana, one as a high school student, one as a a troubled wife, parent, and teacher, living in the same small town the younger Diana speaks of leaving. The central event that divides these two selves is a horrific school shooting. The young gunman confronts Diana and her best friend in the opening sequence, but the movie cuts back and forth in time before we learn exactly what happens.

The adult-Diana scenes reveal an emotionally scarred woman, once who has lost the carefree air of the young one. Wood’s performance captures the restlessness and slight smugness of a girl who knows she is pretty, yet in adulthood this confidence is gone. Later on, though, you see the seeds of this self-doubt. Does tragedy change people, or merely bring out different aspects of their personalities? Director Vadim Perelman (The House of Sand and Fog), saturating the screen with dreamy close-up shots and recurring dialogue and images, gives the film a dreamy quality in which past and present seem to merge.

I wavered about the ending of the movie. Is it brilliant, or just a gimmick? Ultimately, the extreme cleverness in the way Perelman and screenwriter Emil Stern (who adapted a novel by Laura Kasischke) structured the story won me over. Parts of the movie that seemed unclear, or anachronistic, suddenly made sense at the end. I noticed some of the hints it drops about this beforehand, but didn’t quite figure it out. However, the quality of the movie, especially its depiction of the relationship between Diana and her good-girl best friend, would have won me over even had the ending been the more predictable one I’d imagined.

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viewed 5/8/08 at Ritz 5; reviewed 5/9/08

In Bruges (***)

I’ve never understood why people like seeing the same old locations over and over again. Playwright-cum-filmmaker Martin McDonagh must have thought that too. Inspired by a trip to what’s referred to here as the “best-preserved medieval town in he whole of Belgium,” he decided to set a comedy-thriller about a couple of Irish hit men there. Brendan Gleeson is the older and wiser of the two, an old pro who relishes the opportunity to do a little sightseeing, while Colin Farrell is the neophyte, whose interest in Belgian culture extends only to the beer and the women. (“If I’d grown up on a farm and was retarded, Bruges might impress me, but I didn’t, so it doesn’t.”)

As the two partners in crime await the call from their boss (Ralph Fiennes), who’s sent them to the Flemish city to hide out after a botched job, they bicker, sightsee, drink, and somehow pick a fight with a dwarf who’s in town filming a movie. While edging toward buddy comedy on the one hand, it has a serious side also, and it is this that drives the climax, which moves into thriller territory. The one thing missing is anything about Belgium. Entirely in English, the movie merely uses the locale for scenery.

There’s something contrived about the plotting, especially the too-perfect, almost Shakespearean ending, and these guys seem a bit too nice to be hit men, but it’s undeniably clever, and the comedy comes naturally off the interplay of the two principals. Offering a little something for every taste, this is a good movie for people disagreeing about what to see.

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viewed 2/7/08; reviewed 2/14/08

Cassandra’s Dream (**3/4)

Woody Allen completes his London trilogy with this family saga in which Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell play brothers. But perhaps “social-climbing/murder” trilogy would better describe what the films have in common. Farrell is the gambler whose early run of luck propels the story’s beginning, but McGregor is the player, hoping to trade his working-class girlfriend and job, working in his dad’s restaurant, in for a sultry actress (Hayley Atwell) and a hotel investment in California.

Like Match Point, Cassandra’s Dream is a straight thriller rather than a comedy, and the director does not appear on screen. In fact, there are no American characters. Atwell’s well-cast as the female lead but has less to do than Scarlett Johannson in either Match Point or Scoop. Likewise Tom Wilkinson as the wealthy uncle whose generosity helps sustain the family’s finances but also sparks resentment and greed, and turns out to have strings.

The class and family issues could have sustained even more of the drama had Allen chosen to tell that tale. As it is, the success of the movie must rest with how the plot goes. In the superior Match Point, a coincidence is used to show how chance can alter fate. Here, a coincidence seems to be used because Allen didn’t have a better ending. Mind, the average Hollywood thriller has half a dozen bits that are more ridiculous than anything here. But the realistic story Allen is trying to tell comes off as slightly forced, making this less-essential Woody.

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viewed and reviewed 1/30/08