The Well-Digger’s Daughter (***1/4)

This World War II melodrama comes by its old-fashioned quality in part because it’s a remake of a 1940 Marcel Pagnol film. Getting the period look isn’t so hard, but the movie’s strength is to remind us that it is values and culture, more than style and technology, that truly separates us from the past. The title character (Astrid Bergès-Frisbey) is turning 18 as the story begins. She is “as kind as she is pretty” as her widower father and his younger friend agree. But, though she has spent time in Paris, unlike her four younger sisters, she is rather innocent. Her father (Daniel Auteuil) has only lived in the rural south and is rather traditional.

The story, which involves the debonair son of a prosperous shopkeeper, is not wildly original, but  the characters make a a strong impression. The showiest role is the well-digger himself, whose sudden changes of heart bring a measure of humor even as tragedy threatens. A lovely score by Alexandre Desplat captures the overall bittersweet tone. Auteuil, whose breakout role was as the star of Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring, adaptations of a Pagnol novel, here makes a strong directorial debut. With lush color missing from the original film, he brings out the bucolic qualities of the setting. Moreover, he allows the characters to emerge, especially in the crucial early scenes. Much of the tale hinges on the meaningfulness of two brief meetings of the girl and her young man. In lesser hands, this might seem corny. Mostly, it doesn’t.

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viewed 8/5/12 4:15 pm at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 8/9/12

Lebanon, PA (***1/4)

Ben Hickernell made a pretty good suspense drama called Cellar that never got shown outside of a few film festivals. But at least he got to make a second movie, and it’s also pretty good. Here, a Philadelphia yuppie with pro-whale and pro-choice stickers on his VW finds himself in a conservative small town following his father’s death. It’s a chance to get away from a marketing job he’s tired of and a girlfriend who’s dumped him. Charmed by a local schoolteacher (Samantha Mathis), he thinks of staying. But different values, and not just saying grace at supper, come along with the change of scenery.

The pro-choice message isn’t just a bumper-sticker slogan, as one of the two main plotlines involves the pregnancy of a high school senior who lives across from the father’s house. The other involves the charming teacher, who’s married. The screenplay is solid, though not penetrating. It’s a movie about a small town, but clearly from the perspective of the outsider. Yet the duel plotlines were enjoyable, and I wasn’t sure how either would end. Rachel Kitson makes a credible debut as the pregnant girl, whose dream of going to college at Drexel may be jeopardized.

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viewed 10/15/10 at Prince Music Theater [Philadelphia Film Festival] and reviewed 10/15–16/10

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (***3/4)

Last year’s trio of unwed-mother comedies—Knocked Up, Waitress, Juno—may have obscured the fact that, in the United States, more than 20% of pregnancies, unwed or otherwise, are not carried to term. Thus Juno’s real-life counterparts may be as likely as not to seek abortions, but one must venture overseas to see the topic explored on film. (Tony Kaye’s well-regarded documentary on the subject, Lake of Fire, has not received a theatrical release.) Fortunately, by virtue of its grand prize win at Cannes, Christian Mungiu’s tense Romanian drama has earned an American release. Equally fortunately, the film is worthwhile even for those not particularly interested in Romania, abortion, or life under late-period communism.

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viewed 2/12/08; reviewed 2/14/08

Eastern Promises (***1/2)

Viggo Mortensen reunites with History of Violence director David Cronenberg for another story in which ordinary people get mixed up in the criminal underworld. Naomi Watts plays the London nurse whose attempts to find a home for a baby whose teen mother died in childbirth lead her to a restaurant that turns out to be a front for Russian mobsters. Mortensen’s character is merely the driver for the family of the boss (Armin Mueller-Stahl), but he’s clearly smarter and more competent than the heir apparent (Vincent Cassel). We can see this as he calmly snips off the fingers of a recent murder victim so that the corpse can’t be easily identified. The nurse’s earnest attempts to do the right thing figure into the internecine conflicts.

Working from a script by Steven Knight (Amazing Grace, Dirty Pretty Things), Cronenberg uses the nurse as a audience proxy to draw us into a dangerous world. This isn’t a Russian Godfather, emphasizing brutality rather than myth in its Mafia tale, but it does bring in particulars of the Russian criminal culture, notably the elaborate role of tattoos in establishing heirarchy. The brutality doesn’t translate into frequent violence, but the violent scenes that do exist remove any sense that there is honor among thieves. I won’t describe the incredible fight scene in which the film climaxes except to say it’s original, utterly realistic, and extremely memorable.

There’s something detached about Cronenberg’s cinematic approach, yet this only emphasizes the ugliness of what’s being depicted and draws us into the story, which offers a couple of shocks of its own.

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reviewed 10/21/07

The Child (***1/2)

The two primary characters in this drama are a teenage girl (Déborah François) who’s just given birth, and her boyfriend (Jérémie Renier), who was not around for the event, but has managed to rent out her flat, without telling her, during her hospital stay. A petty criminal, he makes a living, but not a good one, stealing and fencing small electronics and the like. For him, everything is a commodity; the cruel decision he makes is without intention. He has not disregarded his girlfriend’s feelings, but simply not thought of them. The consequences of the decision play out in Seraing, a decaying industrial town in the French-speaking part of Belgium.

Seraing is also the hometown of the brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, the writing-directing team who seem to be a Belgian counterpart to the British Ken Loach, known for his social realism. The characters in this movie, unsophisticated and seemingly without ambition, are the type of people left behind in cities like Seraing. The barren (yet striking) settings the Dardennes utilize—a key sequence is set on abandoned property below a highway—are suggestive of their lives.

What’s most unusual about the film, and different from Loach’s approach, is its detached point of view. It’s as if the Dardennes simply trained their camera on these people and watched them behave. The viewer is allowed to make his own judgments, and to imagine what will happen to them after the story ends.

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viewed on DVD 6/30/10 and reviewed 6/30/10 and 8/7/10