Past Programs
Arts and Culture - 2008
Before The Devil Knows You're Dead
20/03/2008
'May you be in heaven half an hour,' goes the Irish toast, 'Before the Devil knows you're dead.'
When I think too hard about it, I'm not really sure what this means. I think it means 'may you get away with your sins'. At any rate, as they say in the Gaelic, 'Slainte'.
But Before The Devil Knows You're Dead opens with that glimpse of heaven. A couple, in bed, going at it. Hard. He is Andy Hanson, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, she is Gina, played by Marisa Tomei. She's his wife, and, we discover, they haven't felt like this for quite a while. Not since their honeymoon in Rio. But there's no reason, they decide, in a haze of post coital bliss, that they should not live every day as if they were in Rio.
Then we flash forward, to glimpse a robbery in a suburban jewelry store which goes wrong. Very wrong. There are shots. The stickup man dies, the elderly store owner lies bleeding, and a getaway car, driven by a panicky Ethan Hawke, careers around s suburban carpark and lurches off.
How did a moment of bliss engender such a mess? We track back a few weeks earlier, to meet two brothers. Ethan Hawke plays Hank, a real stuff-up, a stoner endlessly behind with his child support payments, targeted viciously by his ex-wife, living in a pretty crummy apartment, and scrounging. But even this can't raise him the money for his daughter's school excursion. She's joining her mother in the scorn she shows him.
He turns to his big brother: Andy, the successful one -- an accountant with a house, a gorgeous wife, the posh car, the big job in a real estate firm. Andy's not good for another loan. Later we'll find out why. What he is good at is manipulating his drug-fuddled younger brother. It's always been the way.
And this time, he has a doozy of an idea. One robbery, to pay off both their debts and fund a new start for them both. Just one. An easy mark: their own parents' jewellery store. Hit it first thing, while there's just a casual employee there to open up. They know how to disarm the security. The insurance company will pay, right? And no-one gets hurt.
This scene alone between Seymour Hoffman and Hawke is brilliant, worth the price of the ticket. They are such crumbbags, both of them. The sleazy, opportunist big brother, the snivelling, self-pitying younger brother always looking to others to bail him out. This, it is clear, is the pattern of their relationship.
Yet each has secrets from the other, and they are so not pretty either.
This scene in Andy's office is one that director Sidney Lumet will revisit in the course of the film, and we will see it again, informed by hindsight.
The bungled robbery is only the start of a disaster which will crush an entire family. And Sidney Lumet tells the story like the master he is, unfolding it like the tragedy it is. We are watching absolutely classic drama here. It could be Eugene O'Neill -- a playwright Lumet often put on stage and screen. It could be Aeschelus, or Sophocles. Kelly Masterson wrote the screenplay. Sidney Lumet, the man who made Twelve Angry Men, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon and many other great films, has come back with his best film for decades. This stands alongside his other greats.
it was his idea, I've read, to make Hank and Andy brothers. It adds a biting undertone to the film, as we see family relationships unravel in the aftermath of the bungled robbery. Lumet's casting is impeccable: Rosemary Harris is the mother, Albert Finney is magnificent as the gruff father, who rises from his hospital bed and starts asking questions. Too many questions.
This is not a story about crime and justice. It is something much deeper; about the existence of evil, and where it festers, in the poisonous crannies and pockets of family relationships, places never explored until things come apart.
It's a devastating film. And a great one.
Drillbit Taylor
20/03/2008
A comedy about a homeless con man (Owen Wilson) who passes himself off as an ex-soldier-turned-professional-bodyguard to three high school nerds who need protection from bullies. Wilson's made a career out of roles like this since his debut in Bottle Rocket -- the eccentric 'amateur expert': enthusiastic, obsessive, highly organised but, ultimately, a bit of a flake. He is passable in this but far from his best, and the rest of the cast is ordinary.
The Year After (L'année suivante)
13/03/2008
This is story about the effect of the loss of a parent in a young woman's life. Seventeen-year-old Manu (Anais Dumustier) is close to her father, but he is dying. She visits him in hospital, more faithfully in fact than her busy mother (played by the iconic French actress Arianne Ascaride). She is an intelligent, sensible girl, the kind everyone assumes is coping, without actually asking her.
When her father dies, Manu is unable to talk about him. Then she is shocked to discover her mother planning to sell the apartment, and move on to live with a lover.
In the year after, with no-one to notice her loss, we see Manu's life chances slowly slip away, one by one.
First-time director Isabelle Czajka (Zha-ka) has made a perceptive, understated film, reminding us all about the vulnerability of teenagers, and how easy it is for them to lose their way.
Anna M
13/03/2008
This is a disturbing portrait of obsession. A young woman, Anna (Isabelle Carre), is treated in casualty for a suicide attempt. She becomes enamoured of the doctor, played by Gilbert Melki, who treats her; she is convinced he returns her affections, and begins to pursue him, interpreting his every gesture, including brusque rejection, and silence, as a sign of his passion. And the events escalate to near tragedy.
In English we would call her a stalker; but this French drama takes us inside the mind of Anna, so that we understand we are dealing with a special kind of madness, both neurotic and cunning: a case history of full blown erotomania.
Isabelle Carre is brilliant as Anna, holding the screen in almost every scene, while writer-director Michel Spinosa keeps the focus tight and claustrophobic. Only at the end does he open the story to place Anna in green story-book Swiss pastures, leaving us with an ambivalent ending as uneasy as anything by Michael Haneke. A profound, original film.
Water Lilies (Naissance des pieuvres)
13/03/2008
A very accomplished directorial debut from Celine Sciamma, Waterlilies is a study of the dawning sexuality, desires and jealousies among a group of sixteen-year-old schoolgirls. It's summer, and the girls are engrossed with practising in the town swimming pool for a synchronised swimming troupe. Some are chosen, and one is not, but she hangs around. The scenes of the girls in the pool, shot underwater, provide the metaphor of opening female sexuality; the scenes in the dressing rooms, the bedrooms and the teenage parties are an arena for envy, and schoolgirl cruelty as well as passion. Some girls, like Floriane (Adele Haenele), know how to manipulate others with their sexuality. Others, like Marie (Louise Blachere) have no illusions, but are prepared to be manipulated because they have a desperate crush. It's a film which cuts straight to some of the most difficult moments of female adolescence, unromantically, but with a cinematic eye.
The Secret of the Grain (La graine et le mulet)
13/03/2008
Tunisian-born Abdellatif Kechiche grew up in the South of France, where his family settled when he was six. He has made three feature films, each in their way exploring the lives of Franco-Arabic families.
The Secret of the Grain introduces us to various members of a large Franco-Arab family, working out what is important in their lives. The father, Slimane, played by the veteran Tunisian actor Habib Boufares, is about to retire from the French shipyard where he has worked for more than thirty years.
He is estranged from his family but continues to visit his ex-wife, Soud, who every Sunday prepares a huge meal for their grown children, and their grandchildren. He lives in a small hotel near the port run by his lover Latifa (Hatika Karaoui) with her daughter Rym (a vibrant Hasia Herzi).
In contrast to his children, Slimane seems estranged from the life around him. His sons urge him to take his redundancy pay and return to the old house in Tunisia. Instead, he shocks the entire family by investing it in a run-down boat, almost a wreck, in which he plans, with their help, to open a couscous restaurant.
Kechiche takes his time to tell this story, introducing us by turn to various family members in scenes which underline their different attitudes to work, family and French society. Both the professional and first-time actors are seamless in their roles: Habib Boufares is as impressive as Gian-Maria Volonte at his best, while Hafsia Herzi, as Rym, lights up the screen even before the stuning finale.
The title in French was La graine et le mulet -- literally the grain and the mullet, or fish couscous. Food, its preparation and ritual consumption, is a part of this film, but it is more than a family symbol. And so is the bellydance which is part of the film's stunning conclusion.
It's a rich, absorbing film which provides rare insights into the experiences of first and second generation Arab immigrants in France. Kechiche acheives what he set out to do: restore two Western cliches about Arab culture to the status of art.
Margot At The Wedding
21/02/2008
Somewhere inside the lanky Australian actress with the porcelain doll features is a familiarity with discontent. I say this because I am more and more convinced that Nicole Kidman's best work is unfailingly in those roles in which she is neurotic -- or flaky, driven, or downright unhappy. Think To Die For. Think Dogville, The Hours, Birth, The Others. It's these characters we remember, rather than her romantic roles.
Margot At The Wedding is another lacerating family drama from Noah Baumbach, who wrote that extremely perceptive film The Squid and the Whale, almost a diary of the disintegration of a family as two teenage sons watch their parents divorce.
Now here's a second in Baumbach's Ibsenesque saga of disintegrating families and unhappy women. It's about a sibling rivalry so intense it's as though two sisters, in adult life, can only recognise themselves if one is annoying the other.
Kidman's Margot is a New York writer of short stories whom we meet on a train, with her young teenage son Claude. They are on their way to her sister Pauline's wedding.
'I thought you and Pauline weren't speaking,' asks Claude. 'No.' Margot snaps. 'I wasn't speaking to her. But I am now.'
This is a woman used to having the upper hand. We are forewarned when Margot looks at her son and sighs one of those discontented sighs. 'You used to be so much more graceful when you were younger,' she says.
On arrival, her younger sister Pauline rushes from the house then stops, mid-lawn, bracing herself. How will this reunion go?
It is clear the sisters are very attached. They have a shared past, they're in the family home together, and only they know the territory. And yet, almost from the arrival, Margot begins to undermine those around her. Particularly Pauline, whom she thinks is wasting herself in this marriage. She's met Pauline's fiance, Malcolm, a musician -- or is he a writer -- who has yet to establish himself. He's played, quite straight, by Jack Black, and he has Margot's number. But he's not the type to exert himself. For now, he stands back while the sisters wrestle.
Pauline oscillates between an eager belief that she and her successful big sister can really be friends and outraged backlash. For years, it seems, she's protected herself against Margot's interfering by doing the opposite of whatever her sister suggests. Margot has other agendas.
Recently separated from her husband Jim (John Tutorro), she doesn't want him at the wedding. But she does want to go to a local book signing, and catch up with a fellow writer with whom she has had a fling. Neither of the men in her life exactly oblige her wishes.
Add to the mix a trio of teenagers in the house, and it's set for explosion. The dialogues are lacerating and funny at first, but the mood darkens as old wounds surface. The ending is tragedy on the brink of farce. Or perhaps the other way around.
This is an original, and not always comfortable film. Noah Baumbach and his editor navigate the family conflicts by cutting briskly from drama to drama, sometimes almost in mid sentence. Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jack Black are in top form, and the teenagers behave like real, disconcerted teenagers.
These days American independent cinema serves a constant diet of small films which are homilies on so-called dysfunctional families. This is a term derived from an outmoded social theory called functionalism constructed by the American sociologist Talcott Parsons, which argued that we all occupied roles and statuses in society. It's not much of a theory because it couldn't account for group or social change. Indeed, It's always reminded me of a demented housewife tidying up, chanting 'A place for everything and everything in its place.' But the annoying term has been taken over by popular culture, and by too many screenwriters, and become a kind of smothering blanket for every kind of unhappiness.
Baumbach cuts much deeper, and much more precisely. We know these people. Maybe we recognise parts of ourselves. And Kidman is superb. You can add Margot to her gallery of memorably discontented divas. Afterwards, I ached for her.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Le scaphandre et le papillon)
14/02/2008
Julian Schnabel, a painter who makes movies, has now made three, all about artists. The first was about the graffitist Jean-Michel Basquiat, the second, a much, much better film, starred Javier Bardem as the Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas who defied Castro, escaped to new York and later died of AIDS.
Now we have The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a much bigger project because the late Jean-Dominique Bauby's memoir was a huge bestseller. Ronald Harwood wrote the screenplay. Johnny Depp was supposed to star in it, but went off to play a pirate.
But with Schnabel at the helm it became a far better film than it may otherwise have been. He made the right casting choices. He filmed it in the right language -- French. Anything else would have been a compromise.
And he brought an artist's eye, creating a visual language to place us inside the experience of Jean-Dominique, known as Jean-Do. He was, at 43, a man flying high. The well-known editor of Elle magazine, he had position, status, power, and a beautiful woman on his arm.
The film opens in a blur. We are seeing through the eyes of a man immobilised in a hospital room. Gradually we can make out turquoise walls, a curtain flapping in the breeze. Faces loom out of the blur, leaning over him speaking down to him. A doctor tells him briskly he has had a severe stroke. And that one eye is so damaged it will have to be occluded, surgically closed. But the other eye...can he move it? Blink once for yes, twice for no. 'Good,' says the doctor, briskly. 'Then there are things we can do.'
For almost the first half of the film we do not see the paralysed Jean-Do directly. We see him as he was, in brief flashbacks, fragments of memory, moments of poetic fantasy. But in the present, in that hospital room we are with him and he is locked in, unable to communicate with those around, as he imagines a man imprisoned in a diving bell plunging to the depths, unable to make himself heard.
So we see only what he sees in his little hospital room, we hear what he hears, and we hear his frank, often exasperated, sometimes cruel comments as others faces come and go, as he is handled, toileted, washed, fed, manipulated. They've brought him back to life, he's told. 'This is life?' he comments.
With screenwriter Ronald Harwood, and the great cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, Schnabel has the camera become Jean-Do's one, rolling eye, usually focused in close-up. Seldom has a single point of view been deployed more effectively in cinema. And we stay with Jean-Do's point of view for almost half the film, interspersed with his memories of his life before, and with his fantasies.
Into his life in that room come two helpers: a physiotherapist, and a speech therapist, Henriette, played by Marie-Josee Croze. It is she who will devise a way for Jean-Do to communicate, by chanting the French alphabet to him, in order of the most frequently used letters, while he blinks: one blink for yes, two for no. There is much drama in this situation, because Jean-Do is not a patient man. Only later does he realise that his imagination is still free.
It's extremely difficult to make drama around an immobilised man. Hitchcock did it in Rear Window, many since have failed. But by combining this rigorous point of view shots in the hospital with wild poetic metaphors as Jean-Do's imagination kicks in, the film becomes much more than a weepy saga of rehabilitation.
For a start, Jean-Do is not a very nice, empathetic man. He is (or was) a man of vigorous libido, and there is conflict between the women in his life: his devoted ex-wife, played by Emmanuelle Seigneur, whose visits irritate him and his lover, who lets him down...and the devotion of his therapists, particularly Henriette, a devotion mixed with religion and a barely repressed sexuality.
As Jean-Do himself, Mathieu Amalric is exceptional. This sexy ugly French actor, who looks incredibly like Roman Polanski in mid life, is magnetic in flashback, then emerges finally midway through the film as the imprisoned Jean-Do, head slipping sideways, one eye rolling behind giant magnifying glasses, like a drowned Cyclops. But by then we know the man so well we are not repelled. And we are ready for the final stages of this journey.
This is by no means a melancholy film, nor one about 'how I became a better person through suffering'. Probably he didn't. While it expands Jean-Do's memoir, it also cherishes every ironic line. Finally what it leaves one with is a profound respect for each human consciousness, and for language. The one creates the other.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly tells us this in a way which is pure cinema.
