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Mother's Day (2016)
Truly, astonishingly bad
Easily the worst writing of any feature I've ever seen (it was the only non-news English-language programming on Greek TV). I've seen episodes of The Brady Bunch infinitely more witty, complex and true to life. Embarrassing to watch; must have been a constant humiliation on the set.
La fille sur le pont (1999)
Simply, A Pleasure
Every once in a while — too rarely — a film unexpectedly hits you like the burst-in-your-mouth of a fresh, flavorsome tomato. You're left sitting with a grin, thinking simply, "Wow. I really enjoyed that." For me, Patrice Leconte's The Girl on the Bridge (La Fille sur la Pont) was one of those films.
The film opens with 21-year old Adele (Vanessa Paradis) explaining to a roomful of psychology students why she is suicidal: All her life she has been luckless, especially so with men. She cannot resist men (she feels compelled to try them on, Adele says, like other girls her age try on pretty clothes). Yet men treat her abominably.
Cut to a bridge over the Seine. Night. Adele stands on the edge staring down into the water, trying to screw up the courage to jump, the sounds of samba music coming from a passing tourist boat. A man's voice from the dark: "You look like a girl who's about to make a mistake." One of the great pickup lines in film.
The voice belongs to Gabor (Daniel Auteuil), a knife thrower in search of a target. He recruits on bridges, he tells Adele, because the women he meets there have little to lose — so if he hits them, it's no big loss. Adele promptly jumps into the river.
Fortunately, Adele survives, and she and Gabor perform his knife-throwing act to great acclaim across Europe. In a reversal of fortune for them both, they find that together they have astonishing luck in every facet of their lives. But Adele soon ends it, for with her newfound luck, she has met her Mr. Right, and she leaves Gabor behind.
But Gabor and Adele are, as Adele remarks, like the two halves of a torn 50-franc note: Apart, their luck is all bad. Working on a cruise ship, Gabor puts a knife into the thigh of Adele's replacement; he is immediately offloaded in Istanbul, with no means of returning to Paris. Adele is abandoned by her Mr. Right in Athens; she is left lost and destitute.
But just as Gabor has lost all hope and is about to jump off an Istanbul bridge, he hears a woman's voice: "You look like a man who's about to make a mistake."
The film charms throughout, not least because of the charisma of Paradis and Auteuil. Paradis, in particular, is mesmerizing as Adele, a naive waif with a striking, confident beauty buried inside, waiting to emerge. But Leconte balances the film's charm with a certain gravitas, as throughout Gabor and Adele balance on the edges between life and death; fear and ecstasy; happiness and despair; sexual penetration and emotional laceration. The result is, simply, a pleasure to behold.
8 femmes (2002)
Camp, Silly, and Worth the Ride
8 Femmes is a high camp romp that is all about the ensemble cast of three generations of great French actresses, from an 84-year old Danielle Darrieux to a 22-year old Ludivine Sagnier, and that includes world stars Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, and Emmanuelle Beart.
Based on the eponymous 1958 play by Robert Thomas, the story is a familiar derivation of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None. Marcel, the head of a wealthy country household, is murdered. The eight women in his life — his wife (Deneuve), two daughters (Virginie Ledoyan and Sagnier), sister (Fanny Ardant), mother- (Darrieux) and sister-in-law (Huppert), chambermaid (Beart) and cook (Firmine Richard) — are trapped together in the château by sabotage and a snowstorm. Unable to contact the police, they set about trying to deduce which of them is the murderer. Lies are told; secrets are revealed; alliances are made and broken; and in the end there is a surprising double twist.
As a murder mystery, the plot is hardly worthy of, say, Anthony Shaffer. But the plot is not the point, as you realise when the cast first (and entirely unexpectedly) breaks into song. This is not a garden variety country house thriller: This is no-holds-barred family politics, packaged as a tongue-in-cheek imitation of 1950s glam entertainment. Sit back, and enjoy the snappy interaction among the leads, and the gradual revelation of their characters' desires, their petty jealousies, and the gambits they use and have used, against each other and against Marcel, to get what they want. It is occasionally clumsy, always campy, and you might roll your eyes now and then at a particular bit of silliness. But 8 Femmes is worth the ride.
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013)
Fire and Bombast, Cartoonery and Schmaltz
The first face one sees in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug is neither Bilbo's nor Thorin's nor Gandalf's, but director Peter Jackson's, munching a carrot and peeking from the dark streets of Bree directly into the camera. The sight of him jolted me right out of Middle Earth. It was as if the film had started with Jackson cavorting centre screen in jester's guise, bellowing, "Gotcha, sucker!".
And the more I think about this film, the more I feel I've been had. Jackson's Middle Earth cycle has plummeted from the epic high fantasy of The Two Towers to, in Desolation, cartoonery and schmaltz. The action scenes are neither spectacular nor exciting; most are simply silly, flouting the laws of physics and full of the tedious gyrations of Jackson's Indestructible Ninja Elves. (How many consecutive kill shots can you count?) The few attempts at interpersonal communication attempted by the screenplay are drowned by the soundtrack; the musical themes that were apt in Fellowship now seem so overwrought and familiar that they have become parodies of themselves.
Not that the screenplay needed much help to, well, suck. I do not care whether Jackson alters or pads Tolkein's source material. But I do care (at least £25 worth, which is what I paid to see this movie in Odeon's over-hyped "iSense" high-frame rate 3D), that Jackson's liberties are so frequently implausible. I just do not buy, for example, that the wary elves of Mirkwood allowed platoons of orcs (judging by the number of them dispatched by the aforementioned Ninja Elves during the fatuous barrel-riding sequence) to pass within spitting distance of their front door, then cross the forest undetected to launch a surprise attack on the elves' river gate.
And a "morgul shaft"? Really, Peter? Used by an orc? It's bad enough that you're repeating yourself with the whole back-lit she-elf morgul-healer thing. But at least come up with a reason for it that makes sense, instead of simply parroting Tolkeinisms from Fellowship that, apparently, you never really understood. Orcs are the donkey's asses of the evil army. I presume you know this, Peter, as the orcs in Desolation (with, perhaps, two exceptions) exist only to commit gleeful and pointless suicide upon the weapon of any available adversary. Orcs do not casually spray about any sort of rare and powerful magic arrow, let alone anything "morgul". The Witch King, so degraded, must be mad as hell.
There are some good things. The moment when Smaug's hoard slides away from beneath Bilbo's feet to reveal the dragon's eye is the best in the movie, and Smaug is easily the best movie dragon to date. But flaws infect even these good things. Smaug's hoard is suspiciously homogeneous, as if it were not accumulated but instead manifested whole from piles of digitally cloned gold coins. (Ahem.) And Smaug proves to be totally combat ineffective: The dragon goes nuclear on Thorin and company, yet fails to so much as singe a single dwarven beard.
Perhaps Smaug's martial impotence reflects the film as a whole. For all its frenzy, bombast and fire, one can only roll one's eyes, and hope they do better next time.
Insutanto numa (2009)
A Bizarre But Delicious Japanese Confection
Satoshi Miki's Instant Swamp (Insutanto Numa) is a bizarre but delicious little Japanese confection. Haname Jinchoge, a twenty-something woman, is trying to make her way in the world, but everything goes wrong; her life is "eroding" from beneath her. The magazine she works for fails; the photographer she fancies moves to Milan; she loses her pet rabbit; she is trapped in the humdrum when all she wants to do is run and scream (as they sometimes do, she observes, in independent films, but real life doesn't work that way). Haname is, as her mother scolds, five seconds late for everything. Haname's only consistent pleasure is her morning cup of (prefigurative) chocolate sludge, made from a precise recipe of too much chocolate powder and too little milk.
Although she claims to be a skeptic, Haname attributes her bad fortune to the curse of a cat talisman that she threw into a swamp on her eighth birthday (she so disposed of everything her father had given her, because he chose that day to leave the family for a rich woman and the easy life). And it is this tension between the mundane and the fantastic that drives the story frenetically forward, through surprising and sometimes silly twists involving water sprites, sunken post boxes, a comatose mother, an itinerant lost father, a punk rocker, a dragon, and, yes, even an instant swamp. But the film is always engaging and consistently amusing, from its rocket-paced opening montage until Haname announces the moral of the story (as if we didn't know) at the end.
Maîtresse (1976)
Now Less Controversial, But a Better Film?
In Maitresse, a petty criminal, Olivier (Gerard Depardieu), and his accomplice break into and attempt to rob a flat. The flat is, in fact, an S&M dungeon, and Olivier and friend are apprehended by the mistress, Ariane (Bulle Ogier), and her vicious-looking Doberman pinscher. Olivier and Ariane are immediately intrigued by one another and embark on a love affair. As the story progresses, Olivier comes to terms with Ariane's profession, and she occasionally incorporates him into her work. But Olivier cannot abide that there is a mysterious other man in Ariane's life called Gautier, whom Ariane refuses to discuss. Olivier resolves to find Gautier and confront him, with disastrous consequences.
Maitresse was controversial in its day; originally, it was banned in Britain and given an X rating in the U.S. for its graphic depiction of, among other sado-masochistic activities, Ariane nailing a client's penis to a board (an act that, according to reports, was not simulated). The film's depiction of sexual activity is less shocking in an age of ubiquitous internet pornography[1], and that probably is to the film's benefit. At its core, this is a relationship story, and it is a good one. Depardieu's Olivier is restlessly searching for someone or something to give meaning and direction to his life; Ogier's Ariane, so imposing in her role as dominatrix, seems much smaller and more fragile once she removes her wig, and is equally ready to find someone to love on her own terms, to fulfill her own emotional and sexual needs. Schroeder skilfully portrays the process through which they negotiate — in fits and starts, and not always successfully — the power structure of their relationship.
 [1] Although many viewers may find scenes of horses being slaughtered in an abattoir difficult to watch.