Phoebe and Ursula

I'm only used to making love to one person at a time so I was cautious about going to see Leaving. You see I love Kristin Scott Thomas very much, and I love Yvan Attal even more.


Much hay has been made recently about Frenchman Scott Thomas' decision to stop being Brit cinema's fuck buddy and devote herself to making proper movies. Even more scary for her, however, was being increasingly typecast as the "ice queen." This is what's interesting. It is precisely KST's role-history, her typecasting, which makes this particular performance so energised, so scintillating, so (can I say it?) electric.


Scott Thomas as adulteress Marion, looks frightened, looks cracked, looks mad in this movie. Her crisis, in itself a simple Bovary/Chatterly cliche, takes place underneath a wide eyed, alabaster. Underneath a Kristin Scott Thomas. That makes this film good.


Meanwhile: Yvan Attal, whose best performances are as the loveable villains, forgiveable adulterers of Ma femme est une actrice and Ils se marièrent et eurent beaucoup d'enfants, here plays the adulteree, and he doesn't take it well. Attal's David is a monster, a grotesque, sexual oligarch, fixated with the ownership of his wife to the exclusion of every other emotion. Very un-French. Very un-charming. Very unpleasanct.


It seems to me that actors can never really, like seperate themselves from their previous performances. Serious actors; good, believable actors like Kristin Scott Thomas and Yvan Attal, create grand, complicated, faceted characters, as big and broad as a career. This is not bad. BUT, imaginatively cast, these actors can create special performances, special movies. That is what has happened here.


So this film owes everything to intelligent, imaginative casting and in a roundabout way, who we're complimenting here is Catherine Corsini. Thats why her head is at the top of this review. I'd like to have a passionate and dangerous affair with her, although not one with an explosive twist at the denouement.

Grey Tarmac. Cloud of Dust.

Over breakfast we share some witty banter.
“Why do Marxists drink Green Tea?” my friend asks.
“Because Proper-tea is theft!” say I.
We laugh about it, don Mugabe masks, and go to the cinema to watch Claire Denis’ White Material.

We felt that Mugabe should be there. Or perhaps we felt that he was there, along with a murder of ZANUPF crows, big on the front rows, with tall hats on, so that nobody could see the movie.

I’m not mistakenly thinking that the nameless African country of White Material, is modeled on Zimbabwe. It is,
we assume, based on the Cameroon of Denis’ childhood. Besides, “its neither,” and “its not the point” and all of that. But, equally, it is for everybody watching this movie in our country.

The movie in fact is about a woman who has the power to ignore chaos. She glides like Katherine Hepburn (Isabella Huppert is our Katherine Hepburn) into absolute catastrophe.

This is a stunning movie. I should say that now. The cinematography is clean and stylish and stately as a galleon. The narrative builds and builds with grueling inevitability, like Cuckoo’s Nest, or a Just William story. Its that thing were you can see the hurricane on the horizon for the whole drive. You sit in front of the screen half wanting it all to go away, half not being able to tear your eyes from the screen. Huppert is imperious, but that’s hardly worth mentioning by this stage in her career.

Also, this film deserves to be more than a human interest story, New Internationalist tittle-tattle.

I’m not saying that I wish Denis had been less deliberate or precise about the location of her movie. As I say, perhaps Denis genuinely didn’t know what her film was about. But that’s all basically irrelevant. We sat in that little cinema, with forty-seven other people, all thinking that we were watching Animal Farm, all watching Animal Farm, and none of us watching this very ambitious, and wise and elegant movie.

This evening, I’ll cook pasta for my friends. It’s easy to do, but it still feels special. If you’re in the neighbourhood, don’t be a stranger.

Just Add Sugar and Semen

When tall hats are fashionable for a while, people start wearing small hats. When people stop wearing baggy jeans, they wear skinny jeans. There are fat lapels, then thin lapels. Kipper ties? skinny ties!

I think what I'm trying to get at is that, at some point, painfully unfashionable man Luc Besson, was in fact really super fashionable. But in fact thats bollocks. He has always, ALWAYS been the stoopidest director in the world. However, he has made 5 good movies.

This might not sound very good because Luc Besson has made like fifty movies. But think about this. Bob Rafaelson made two good films, John Cassavetes made three. David Lynch made three good films and Jim Jarmusch made two. Sidney Furie actually only made one good film and then went on to make like Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York and Superman IV, which puts him in minus numbers. I know all this because I spent a whole summer peeling the anaglypta off my walls so that I could write lists on them.

From Paris with Love is numero sept pour Senor Besson. The winning formula, lies in bringng together the stoopidest, funnest director in the world and the stoopidest, funnest actor in the world. The stoopidest, funnest actor in the world is of course Jon Travolta. In this movie he is more stoopidest and funnest than ever. He shouts and bawls and he has a shaved head and a big gun and that big manic smile and is generally like a Travoltary joy to watch.


All of this is against the fact that the love story is silly and boring, that the wildly inconsistent Jonathan Rhys Meyers looks like he has delivered all of his lines by accident and the fact that the film might have been more accurately titled In Bruges: This Time its not a Funny Film. Also, I've never seen a movie that made Paris look so ugly. Like even worse than An American in Paris. Even worse than Rush Hour 3. The exteriors look like interiors, and the interiors look like the interiors of a guy who died. A guy who died of an overdose of sugared almonds.

Okay, maybe I'm being like a little facetious, or maybe I didn't enjoy it as much as I made out. But that's only because I know so much about art films. It is stoopid and fun though. I'm starting to think that that isn't such an easy film to make.

Hey, you think I should get a top hat? I'd only wear it to see Luc Besson films. Or, that wasn't the point was it. Okay I'll wear it to Lumiere brothers movies. LOL.

(I'll actually just wear it around the house.)

That Kitchen-Sinking Feeling

Some girls are bigger than others, some girls mothers are bigger than other girls mothers, and some nationalisms are bigger than bastards.


I am no champion of British cinema. I think its mainstream is a sewer of cliches and stammers, while its "art" scene is equally trapped in the Hacknicon of "gritty realism." In Italy, it is a different story. Italy is the cradle of cinema, the cradle of imagination and innovation, right? Wrong.


How did it come to this. In the forties, Blasetti, Rosselini, and the great De Sicca kindled the neo-Realist revolution. As the fifties turned into the sixties, the golden generation of Italian film makers created a sort of westward expansion of the imagination. The names speak for themselves, its like fucking Vasari: Visconti, Antonioni, and the greatest film-maker of all time Federico Fellini. The seventies and eighties are seen as a desert of Italian cinema because they only spawned such triumphs of "high" and "low" cinema as, C'era una volta il West; the best films of Bertollucci; the truly special, Albergo degli Zoccoli.


And suddenly you look around and realise that this nation which has proudly looked out to sea for year after year, decade after decade, has become the most introverted cinema industry in the world. Italian film-makers now, make films about Italy. Often they are perfectly enjoyable, commendable movies. Gommora stands out, as does Sorrentino's il Divo. But often, too often, the most profitable of Italian exports are arduous, saccharine portraits of the political turmoil of post-War Italy and its impact on small town Italians. If I'm being a sentimental fogie, its only because I miss Italian cinema, when Italian was a synonym for imaginative.


All this is bringing me round to Giusseppe Tornatore. We all love Nuovo Cinema Paradiso. We really do, and it kills me to do this. His latest offering Baaria is a bad film and a symptom of something worse. It drawls on for two and half hours. This an empty film. One that we've seen a thousand times. One that constitutes a crushing, but by this stage familiar dissapointment.


I may sound hysterical in saying this. This development, I can only see as a twisted Fascism, in classically Italian mode. This is a young nation, turned in on itself. Triumphalist or ciritical, it constitutes a obsessive, nationalist, onanism. Even less forgivable, the movies it puts out are repetitive, masturbatory, dull. It makes me sad.

What if we gave you a dog instead of a guitar?

If I was Ross I wouldn't marry Rachel. I'm like one of those people who doesn't like doing what's expected of me. Perhaps that's why I live such a Rock 'n' Roll lifestyle.

The anxiety of not sticking to the plan is the subject of Noah Baumbach's Greenberg. The movie follows Roger Greenberg on his return to his native LA, released from hospital after a breakdown. Roger Greenberg should have been a rockstar and instead he's a lonely, harassed Ben Stiller character.

It is an uncomfortable film. Which is an achievement in itself. There are lots of really nice touches: the loneliness of being carless in LA, being swimless in a swimming pool and being middle aged at a teenagers party. There is also a heady and depressing love story, a reprise of those classic stories where misery and middle age gets a boner for youth and hope, with not so hilarious consequences.

In the end though, the warnings are in the same tepid gulf stream of Hollywood claptrap. This is a movie about not following your dreams. That's the first thing. This is still a deeply American (shorthand for lots of mean things that people say about cinema) movie. If Disney supplies the carrot, this kind of stuff is the stick which drives the American dream.
If you don't go to the ball, if you don't collect the golden ticket, you might end up being a social spastic, housesitting for your successful brother and fucking his dog-walker.

BUT:

This is a sad film, but I'm not sure this is really a legitimate thing to make people sad about.

The second thing is that I just don't know if this Ben Stiller thing is really a reliable or conscientious portrait of a breakdown. He's like a bit miserable, a bit sociopathic, a bit sarcastic. In fact, this image of crushing depression, in another context, might be described as being English. Not long before watching this movie I watched Cassavetes' masterpiece, A Woman Under the Influence. C'est very wunderbar. Films like that make me think about the real danger and anger and nightmare of a nervous breakdown. I just don't know about Roger Greenberg.

I don't know if you've noticed, that I've started doing that thing were I tell you a better movie to watch than this one. Maybe that's what I'll do from now on.

The upshot of all thiis that Roger Greenberg is just a twat. I know that Baumbachs big trick is to present you with nightmare human beings and make you feel sorry for them. It works so well in the Squid and the Whale, but in this there isn't really that many moments were pity and twattishness couch up together. Its a bit more sloppy maybe?

Also, you can't help feeling that if this was a Michael Haneke film, there'd be a bit more motherfuck. Roger Greenberg might get a bit of punishment, like a knife in the face or something. That would be more satisfying.

In my reviews, do I talk about Haneke too much? Did that question make me sound like a Ben Stiller character?