chuzzlewit-1 Reviews

The Holy Girl (2004)

Girls go wild, quietly

[8/10 · 4 May 2005]

To enjoy "The Holy Girl," you have to watch it in a certain way. Watching for plot will leave you unsatisfied; I'd recommend watching for character instead. Lucrecia Martel attempts to use her impressive technique to nail down the psychology of her characters; this works especially well for her protagonist, Amalia. While freewheeling through the bush near the reputed site of a post-car crash miracle, a fade to silence fills the air with Amalia's desire for transcendence. (Martel's sound is expressive throughout, particularly a theremin solo as weirdly kinky as the scene it illustrates.)

The most interesting relationship is between Amalia and Jose. Shallow but not empty, they're attractive not because of their bone structure but because of their vitality - it shines through even when they're bored, which is most of the time. Their bond isn't as intense as Kate Winslet's and Melanie Lynskey's in "Heavenly Creatures," but it's the same sort of friendship (albeit not consummated), only things spin out of control in a less bloodstained way. Amalia and a mildly perverted doctor also have some amusing scenes, while the character of Amalia's mother fails to add any more than the predictable ironies.

The movie ends where it ends to avoid humiliating the characters any more than is strictly necessary; I like these endings where something is left to the viewers' imaginations, though obviously not everyone would agree. Some of Martel's social themes, like the way the middle class appropriates religion to serve itself, are lost along the way. "The Holy Girl" isn't as lovably wild as "Y tu mamá también," but on the topic of sexual hypocrisy, it's just as smart, and maybe funnier.

The Intruder (2004)

Great director, average movie

[5/10 · 4 May 2005]

It's certainly beautiful, as must be any movie featuring the outstanding cinematographer Agnès Godard and the criminally underacknowledged sound mixer Jean-Louis Ughetto. Most movies don't give us images as warm as Michel Subor drinking with a Pusan local or as vivid as a flashback to a boat's arrival at a French Polynesian island. But from the director of "Friday Night" and "Beau Travail," that's not enough.

Subor's character, Louis, is an intruder; various people are intruders in Louis's life (notably Béatrice Dalle); Louis even has an intruder inside his body - his transplanted heart. The heightening of Louis's condition, at first achieved through long looks at his huge chest scar, becomes absurdly literal when we see a bloody organ lying in the snow. All this is meant to make some vague point about rejection, and how communities and their outsiders relate to each other, but except in the Korean section and parts of the Tahitian one, Denis's use of photogenic isolated locations defeats her theme by not giving Louis enough human life to interact with. Perhaps I'm grading too harshly, but I expect great things from a Denis movie, and I didn't see them here.

Turtles Can Fly (2004)

And life goes on

[10/10 · 4 May 2005]

1. This is not an inspirational movie. Of the main characters, the one who gets off the easiest is the one whose beliefs and hopes are crushed.

2. This is not a realist movie. There are many realist scenes depicting the routine life of the children. But the characters also function as symbols, especially the seer Hengov, representing a traditional way of life and its fatalistic view of the future, and Satellite, representing a Westernized zeal. This introduces elements of mysticism to enter the movie, and means that some playing around with history and chronology is acceptable.

3. This is not an anti-American movie. No Iraqi Kurd was sad to see Saddam go. This does not obligate Ghobadi to become a cheerleader for U.S. policy. He has taken the sane view that the invasion will not magically solve the children's problems. Ghobadi may or may not support Bush's decisions, but he does not directly criticize America.

4. This is not a message movie. You are perfectly welcome, of course, to infer a message. But you should not ignore the aesthetic components. Ghobadi shoots fine landscapes: one particularly memorable image is of the children streaming up a slope, in anticipation of the start of hostilities - "Metropolis" transported to the countryside. All the performances are appropriate, and Soran Ebrahim and Avaz Latif are especially fine. The children shout because in their world, that's what it takes to be heard.

5. This is not a all-time great movie. But it's very close. Perhaps it's sophomoric in its fatalism, but its bleakness finally becomes so enveloping that it overwhelms you. Still, it would be unconvincing if it didn't demonstrate that even when day-to-day life is a struggle, it is possible to delight in living it. The fragility of this joy is the subject of this movie. Literary adaptations aside, this is one of the purest tragedies to ever hit the screen.

Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005)

Back and forth, forever

[9/10 · 3 May 2005]

Miranda July's "Me and You and Everyone We Know" might be the most miraculous first fiction feature by an American in 3 or 4 years; it's rivaled only by Andrew Bujalski's "Funny Ha Ha." Christine (July) stalks the recently separated Richard (John Hawkes), who would try anything to impress his kids, and gets third degree burns for his trouble. His elder son, Peter (Miles Thompson) longs for connections that go beyond instant gratification, while the younger Robby (Brandon Ratcliff) gets all the funniest lines, mostly copied and pasted from cybersex chats.

"Me and You" is about the act of pretending and about performance as life, but first of all it's about extremely likable characters played by likable actors, foremost among them July herself, whose Carole Lombard-meets-Laurie Anderson deep ditz may be a complex stack of masks upon masks, but is more likely just the way she is.

The movie is notable for what isn't in it - both malice and pain are almost absent. Removing malice - July's world is one in which a kid can safely walk alone through some seedy parts of Los Angeles - is unfashionable, brave and, given the gentle tone of the piece, necessary. But the absence of pain isn't intentional: July would like us to feel the loneliness of the characters. But their isolation is more a trait of their personalities than a source of suffering. In this respect, the movie is perhaps too glossy for its own good. There's one excellent exception, revolving around a granddaughter's photo by an elderly woman's bedside, which becomes a substitute for a shared life that dissolved too soon.

The scene that everyone picks out is the walk to Tyrone Street. Richard and Christine decide the walk to the intersection will stand in for the relationship they're not having: first the unrelieved joy of being together, then the getting bored with each other, then the fighting and the split. Only they keep chatting flirtily, about whether the walk represents a year and a half or twenty, until they get to the corner, and then we wonder how they can possibly go their separate ways. Although this is as great as anything in the first 75 minutes of "Before Sunset," its emphasis is much more on romantic comedy than the rest of the movie. There are more typical scenes that approach this quality. A goldfish on the roof of a car. A child running his fingers through a woman's hair. A picture of a bird in a tree, in a tree. And the ending, where it seems human actions are motivating the sunrise.

The scene I consider the finest is a quiet one: Sylvie (Carlie Westerman), a tween spending her childhood preparing for life as a homemaker, gets a gift from Peter: a plush bird. ("It's for your daughter.") It would be unusual merely for depicting a platonic friendship between kids of different genders and different ages. But it's remarkable for crystallizing what it seems every filmmaker is trying to say these days: that there's something to be gained from thinking like a child. Through July's lens, it doesn't seem like a regression: no redundant literalization of fantasy is necessary. The achievement of "Me and You and Everyone We Know" is to show how the mundane moments of our lives can be mundanely transformed by imagination.