Well its Father Geek back with CAPONE on Chicago's Southside once again. Man has he been all over the place with his film viewing in the last week... the great kid adventure flick SPY KIDS 3D,the lowbrow remake FREAKY FRIDAY, and the painful HOW TO DEAL, then rounding it off with two real highbrow films like THE HOUSEKEEPER and HOLY LAND. Man, he's a real trooper...
Hey, all. Capone in Chicago here with a couple of extremely memorable (and totally different) films that should be floating into an art house near year end in the next few weeks if you’re lucky.
THE HOUSEKEEPER
THE HOUSEKEEPER
I’m a big, big fan of the works of director Claude Berri (JEAN DE FLORETTE, MANON OF THE SPRINGS, GERMINAL, LUCIE AUBRAC, and URANUS to same a few of his more recent works), and he makes films infrequently enough that I tend to never miss them if they reach Chicago. THE HOUSEKEEPER is a master stroke of simplicity. Don’t believe anyone that tells you THE HOUSEKEEPER is a “love story”; it isn’t. It’s an example of how people sometimes just end up together through circumstance. I know, it sounds like ever dumb-ass romantic comedy under the sun, but the fact is, this film is barely romantic and hardly a comedy. It’s actually a lyrical and sad work that takes its characters and its audience seriously.
The great Jean-Pierre Bacri (SUBWAY, THE TASTE OF OTHERS, PLACE VENDOME) is the middle-aged Jacques, a sound engineer at a recording studio who has recently separated from his wife. This is never actually said explicitly, but like most things in this film, it is revealed to us through choice words and phrases in various conversations. Jacques’ apartment is a mess because he’d been too depressed to clean, so one day at a grocery store, he spots a flyer for a woman looking for housecleaning work. He calls her, the two meet, and after an odd interview, she’s hired to come in once a week to clean. Her name is Laura, played the remarkable Emilie Dequenne, award-winning star of 1999’s ROSETTA. At first the two never even cross paths as he’s at work while she’s at home cleaning. But he allows her to increase her hours, and they end up spending more time maneuvering around each other in the apartment. Not long after she starts working for him, circumstances in her life take a turn for the worse as Laura breaks up with an unseen boyfriend, and is desperate for a place to stay. After resisting the idea of sharing his place with a woman again, Jacque reluctantly agrees to let her stay at his place. Laura is attractive but far from drop-dead gorgeous (a deliberate move on the filmmaker’s part, I believe), and it isn’t really until she moves in that Jacques notices her as a woman. He probably never would have shown an interest in her if she wasn’t there all the time, but the convenience of her living with him allows for a very organic love affair to start up. There isn’t a word spoken between them in their first love scene. She simply approaches him, and they start to kiss. Since communication between them is so poor, there’s even confusion as to whether he regrets the night or not, and it takes them two or three days to realize neither one of them regrets their time together.
Awkward silences are a significant attribute of this film. I don’t think anyone seeing this film believes these too will end up together. She’s very young and sweet; he’s much older and can be a bit of an insensitive bastard at times. A big part of the film focuses on the music these two listen to: he loves quiet jazz piano and classical works; she cranks up French rap music while she’s cleaning. A seaside vacation the two attempt to take together in Brittany (to get away from his wife, who has started hounding him again) feels like a disaster waiting to happen from the minute they get in the car, and it amplifies how little the two have in common. If THE HOUSEKEEPER sounds a little depressing, then you’ve been paying attention. But the believability of the situations and the two great lead performances keep me hanging on every sparingly used word. There are no surprise plot twists, Laura doesn’t turn into a stalking psycho; instead, the film plays out naturally and hopefully for both characters, especially Jacques, since despite all of his efforts to remain cold and distant from the world, Laura opened his heart just enough to let him breathe again. THE HOUSEKEEPER is a special gem of a film that really gets under your skin with its honesty and observations about falling toward someone, rather than falling in love with them. The film is scheduled to open in Chicago on August 1 at the Landmark Century Center Theatre.
THE HOLY LAND
Without putting too find a point on it, THE HOLY LAND (the Grand Jury Prize Winner for Best Feature at the 2002 Slamdance Fest) is a movie about how far some people will go in the name of lust. Not too original a subject matter, but when you place such themes in the fragile context of present-day Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and when the central character is an young Orthodox Jewish man studying to become a rabbi, look out! Mendy (Oren Rehany) is the boy in question whose obsession with sex forces his rabbi to take extreme measures and send him to Tel Aviv, where Mendy is told to find a prostitute and return when he’s gotten these feelings out of his system. At a bordello/strip club, Mendy meets a 19-year-old prostitute from Russia named Sasha (Tchelet Semel), with whom Mendy immediately becomes obsessed. Through Sasha, Mendy also meets a former American war photographer named Mike (Saul Stein), who visits Sasha frequently and also owns a Jerusalem bar where Jews and Arabs drink side by side. At the bar, Mendy is introduced to a parade of seedy types from every nation, and he gets involved in some shady dealings through Mike that may cause him harm later, including smuggling. The entire time, however, his feelings for Sasha intensify and his passage into adulthood is not an easy or pretty one.
THE HOLY LAND is part political commentary, part coming-of-age film, part religious criticism, and part guerrilla-style examination into the lives of some scary and dangerous people. And most of these parts work. The story works best when Mendy and Sasha are together. We know exactly what he’s thinking, but are often unclear where her mind rests. Is she using him because he has an American passport, or does she truly feel affection for the kid? At its core, THE HOLY LAND is an extremely cynical and acidic film that threatens to blow up in your face at any time. The ending of the film stunning the hell out of me, and literally made me forget to take a breath for a minute. The film may not be for everyone, especially those completely unfamiliar with the happens in this part of the world, but its a fascinating examination into the hearts and minds of characters I’ve never seen on screen before. The film opens in Chicago on July 25 at the Landmark Century Center Theatre.
