Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
Harry posted the first few days worth of coverage from Harold Hellman the other day, and he’s doing a great job of covering each day of films that he’s seen. I wish our buddy Vern would report in from the Seattle International Film Festival as well, as I’d love to hear his take on it, if only for contrast. For now, though, Harold’s doing a bang-up job. Check this out!
Harold Hellman from Movie Geek Central here, with more reviews from the Seattle International Film Festival, days four and five.
***
HAPPY TIMES - directed by Zhang Yimou, based (very loosely) on a story by Mo Yan
Not one of Zhang Yimou's stronger efforts, "Happy Times" is a pleasant but trifling tale that sort of falls apart at the end. Zhang is incapable of making a bad movie, and "Happy Times" bears his stamp of social and emotional realism, but one wonders what drew him to this ultimately minor project.
Our protagonist, Zhao, is a poor man scratching out a living at the edge of society and growing more and more frantic to finally find a wife before he gets too old. His latest prospect isn't much of a catch; twice divorced, she and her son are selfish and abrasive. Worse, they're awful to her stepdaughter Wu, who came with a previous marriage but who was left behind when her father skipped town.
The main story gets going when Zhao begins babysitting Wu, who's blind, to get her out of her stepmother's hair. Zhao isn't a stickler for truthfulness; after he makes up a hotel career to hide his poverty from his prospective bride, he continues the deception with Wu, fabricating a fantasy reality to shield the unhappy girl from her stepmother's abuse. Despite his good intentions, this casual dishonesty is a little disturbing; but based on how quickly Zhao's friends join in the facade (not to mention the behavior of the stepmother), it seems like Zhang is gently inserting a cutting observation of Chinese life into this otherwise innocuous human comedy.
The story is interesting and amusing, the characters are mostly likeable despite all the lies, and the film in general is charming as we see Zhao work to maintain the charade. But there isn't really a good way to end this kind of story, and Zhang doesn't really try, which makes the last ten minutes awkward and unsatisfying. In place of a real ending, a couple of arbitrary (and cliched) twists are thrown at us, a tearjerking moment is played out, and then Zhang rolls the credits. It isn't really a betrayal of audience expectations, since we weren't really being set up for anything in particular, but the climax, such as it is, is still rather carelessly uninspired and unfulfilling.
Fans of the director will want to see it, of course,
and anyone interested in contemporary Chinese cinema
will probably enjoy it as a document of life in that
country. Viewers should be aware, though, that it's
not especially gripping or moving, feeling almost like
a placeholder for Zhang between more significant
projects. I don't mean to suggest that the lives of
these ordinary people aren't significant, but "Happy
Times" is definitely a secondary effort for the
director.
***
WRITTEN ON THE BODY OF NIGHT - directed by Jaime
Humberto Hermosillo; written by Hermosillo and Emilio
Carballido
There have some very interesting movies coming out of Mexico over the last few years. "Amores Perros," "El Espinazo del Diablo," "La Ley de Herodes," and "Y Tu Mama Tambien" are the ones you've probably heard about, and fully deserve the acclaim they've received. Now, with "Escrito en el Cuerpo de la Noche" ("Written on the Body of Night"), we get another piece of the puzzle -- confirmation that Mexican cinema is progressing well beyond the sexploitation romps and low-budget ultraviolent action flicks that overwhelmed the market in recent decades, while simultaneously an indication that the verite-influenced New Wave hasn't completely taken over, and that soapy melodrama is still a viable form for Mexican audiences. These observations aside, "Body of Night" isn't what you'd call a great movie, but at least it misfires in interesting ways.
The story is simple, a typical coming-of-age story centered on a teenager who dreams of becoming a film director lke his idols Truffaut and Hitchcock. (An unnecessarily long prologue, showing the adult filmmaker at one of his premieres, tells us in advance that he'll succeed.) He lives at home with his mother, who is both irritatingly bossy and charmingly scatterbrained, and her mother, the only halfway calm person in the house despite her obsessive arrangements for financing her own funeral. The wild card in the house is a boarder the mom takes in, an attractive but mysterious and temperamental young woman who immediately fires the young man's hormones.
The film's most noticeable characteristic is its staginess. Virtually all of the action takes place in a single house, to begin with, and both the dialogue and the actors' delivery of it has a distinctly theatrical aroma. If I didn't know better, I would have suspected that this was originally a play, which might have explained a lot. In fact, with its young, artistically ambitious protagonist, gently humorous and autobiographical tone, and lack of gripping dramatic conflict, the story seems like the work of a Mexican Neil Simon -- "Los Memoirs de la Brighton Beach," if you will.
This quality is both the film's strength and its glaring weakness. The actors rip into their juicy roles, creating indelible characters and filling the movie with humor (e.g., the mother's highly mixed reaction to her new multicolored hairdo). The dialogue is fast-paced, clever, and clearly *written,* which I haven't seen very often in Mexican cinema. But at the same time, director and co-writer Jaime Humberto Hermosillo, an old hand in Mexican film, is unable to make this seem like anything but a filmed play. The opening scenes are apparently designed to emphasize the cinema, and provide what will eventually turn out to be insights into the lead character, but they're initially confusing and go on far too long. And once we're into the meat of the movie, we're unquestionably stuck in the one set; the uniform lighting and occasionally arbitrary and distractingly self-conscious camera moves underline the stagy quality.
Worse, the highly theatrical characters don't really work on screen. The worst of these is the female boarder, who seems almost bipolar in her unpredictable whipsaw histrionics, especially during the first half. She also seems oddly receptive to the teenage boy's romantic advances, which is totally unconvincing and unmotivated, causing several scenes to feel awkward and embarrassing. Eventually, some of her character's background is explained, and her behavior made more plausible, but it's too little, too late.
Still, there's enough warmth and humor to make this a
reasonably pleasant diversion, despite its rather
serious flaws. The determinedly rose-colored tone
makes the film hard to dislike, even though there's a
lot of it that doesn't work in a big way. If you're
interested in what's going on in Mexican cinema, you
could do worse than this.
***
LOVE IN THE TIME OF MONEY - written and directed by
Peter Mattei
Arthur Schnitzler's "La Ronde," aka "Reigen," is one of the most plumbed pieces of literature of the last hundred years. Its novel structure, linking a series of characters through their mutual associations, and overtly sexual theme made it quite a provocative work when it appeared at the turn of the century. (Schnitzler was subjected to an obscenity trial, but eventually acquitted.) Since then, it's been the subject of countless revivals and reinterpretations -- including a 1950 film directed by Max Ophuls -- in service to all sorts of social and political ends.
Peter Mattei's new film "Love in the Time of Money" is yet another take on Schnitzler's structural idea, bringing the story forward to modern New York and tweaking the string of relationships for today's sensibilities. In the first scene, a melancholy man in a knit cap has an unfulfilling encounter with a prostitute; we then accompany him on a service call to a rich couple's apartment, where the unhappy wife comes on to him. Later, she argues with her husband; then we follow him into an awkwardly flirtatious meeting with an artist. And so on through the movie, meeting new people and leaving the ones we know behind, going up and down the ladders of New York society.
Writer-director Mattei has a good eye for behavior, and guides his talented cast -- including Steve Buscemi, Rosario Dawson, Jill Hennessy, and others -- to a series of sensitive, subtle performances. He wisely undercuts the formal structure of the story with loose, open dialogue and fractured, impressionistic photography (or, more accurately, videography) and editing, thereby softening the hard, artificial edges of the storytelling conceit. With well-drawn characters and a good sense of pacing, the film is never boring, which is especially impressive given that this is Mattei's directorial debut.
The only nagging question, in fact, is what the point of the film might be. It's not like the world was crying out for another Schnitzler adaptation, after all -- David Hare's recent play "The Blue Room," for example, is another look at the same material -- and one can be forgiven for wondering why any of this should matter. To his credit, Mattei seems to have grasped the heart of his source, understanding it as essentially a social game, an examination of the emptiness that follows casual coupling, all viewed specifically through the lens of class. But the moral observations of turn-of-the-century Vienna only weakly resonate today; yes, Schnitzler got there first, but it's still a cliche for modern writers to observe how New York is basically seven million tightly-packed people who don't care to know each other.
Based on the title, it seems that Mattei is departing from (or reacting to) Schnitzler by asserting that the status-by-birth relationships of the original have given way to financial classes. And in much of the movie, this is the theme that's explored. Some of the best moments in the film center on a financial-industry type played by Michael Imperioli (from "The Sopranos"), who has landed himself in serious legal trouble; his fixation on monetary issues, and his naive belief that he can simply pay somebody to kill him so he doesn't have to face the consequences of his actions, provides the basis for a plausibly disturbing scene toward the end. But this angle isn't consistent throughout -- see, for example, the inexplicable connection between a mid-50's phone psychic (Carol Kane) and a much younger urban type (Adrian Grenier) -- and a lot of the movie seems disconnected and unfocused as a result.
And while the film is cleanly written and acted, its subtle departures from Schnitzler's play demand that viewers be familiar with the original in order to understand what Mattei is getting at (in much the same way that knowledge of Schnitzler's "Traumnovelle" is helpful for understanding Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut"). Audiences who don't have this context, who don't know what Mattei is reacting to and against in the original, may find themselves especially perplexed about the point of the film.
I enjoyed "Love in the Time of Money" for what it was,
but with its literary source -- and its own feeling of
being more literature than cinema -- it's definitely
not a film for everybody.
MOVIE GEEK CENTRAL
