Venus in Fur ** 1/2
I'm pro sexuality in art, especially where it undermines perceived identity, so what the H, I had a good shot at enjoying Polanski's romp through domination and submission. And Venus in Fur was a jolly good time for me. Polanski's wife, Emanuelle Seigner, plays sharply off Polanski's brooding alter ego, Matheiu Almaric, who Americans will remember as Bond's Eurotrash nemesis in Quantum of Solace. Since this is a filmed play with one primary location, a theater stage, the acting has to click. So does the writing, which is playful, full of amusing double entendre, but backed by enough power shifts in the relationship to give the piece traction. Venus in Fur whirs along, questioning the balance of power between man and woman, actor and director, lover and object, writer and critic. Lighting, a few props and costumes, direction and judicious camera placement make Venus feel like a spacious film.
Quibble number one, a fairly minor one, is with the plot. Without spoiling the ending, I had a fairly clear idea of what was coming. The other quibble is more subjective and I'm not sure it's even fair. More entertainment than involving drama, Venus in Fur could have possibly been a bit deeper, had more at stake for its characters. It could even have been a bit more erotically charged - this is fairly tame stuff - although Polanski was directing his wife. Then again, that might have made it more Taming of the Shrew and less All's Well That Ends Well. I've ragged on Polanski over the last few decades for his mediocre output (Frantic, The Ghost, Death and the Maiden, The Ninth Gate), but I suspected the maker of Rosemary's Baby, Repulsion and Chinatown had better work in mind.
Ida *, Dance of Reality, The Rover
Shot in crisp black and white, Ida has the feel of a good short story lovingly transferred to the screen. The film deals with the aftershocks of the Holocaust in 1950's Poland when a novice to a convent learns about her heritage. I heard a fellow filmgoer complaining that it wasn't uplifting, but I found the spare, nuanced style and the shabbiness of communist Poland uplifting because there's little of the audience prompting we have in homegrown movies. It's a small film, well acted and beautifully shot.
Alejandro Jodorowsky is famous for a few over-the-top semi-surreal films made since the late 60's. If you've seen the films, you know why there are few of them and how hard it must have been to find the production cash. His latest film, Dance of Reality, is semi-autobiographical in the style of Fellini's Amarcord and there are moments when it achieves that dizzying balance between the mundane and the sublime. "I don't want to live in a world of dressed up dogs," says a dying anti-fascist with his last breath in the midst of the dictator's doggie costume contest. While this film apes Fellini's freak show tendencies, it feels dated and objectionable this late in history. Dance of Reality is chockfull of whores, drag queens and earth mother types that might have had (shock) value back in the day, but now feel as condescending as any other stereotype. I appreciate his attempts at subverting narrative expectations, but I wish he was better at realizing that goal. The documentary about Jodorowsky's attempt to make Dune, Jodorowsky's Dune, is far more entertaining.
Ever since his performances in Memento and LA Confidential, I've been waiting for another great Guy Pearce film. He can act and he's got those razor sharp cheekbones. The Rover is hyped as a dystopian revenge flick that takes place in the bleak outback of Oz. The film costars Robert Pattison of Twilight fame as a slow witted hick bank robber. Unfortunately, the whole exercise feels like a reboot of The Road Warrior sucked dry of fun. It's not a dystopia of excitement, but a dystopia of meaningless angst and violence. Nicely shot, well acted, humorless and empty.
As I watched The Double, stylistic and visual tidbits from other dystopian films hopscotched somewhere between synapses: the famous sign outside a suburban house in A Clockwork Orange that reads 'Home', the ominous televisions in Farenheit 451 and David Lynch's artfully creepy use of closeups. There's also a screaming crib from Rear Window. The references pile up and very soon you realize you're cataloguing and not watching.
That's unfortunate because the film delivers two very good performances by Jesse Eisenberg in the title role and some beautifully realized, steampunk-like interiors. The Double is visually rich and full of nightmarish DOS-style computers with blank keyboards, clanging elevators, dingy apartments and gloomy lighting. The stumbling block is the script, based on a novella by Dostoevsky about doppelgangers, that marches blithely off into Kafka land. Woody Allen, Steven Soderbergh and Orson Welles have trod here before with only Welles turning in a film that might be labelled successful. Richard Ayoade adds zip in the way of fresh insight or any particular suspense to the material, The Double clumps along, an earnest, albeit professionally produced, amateur screenplay.
Jodorowsky's Dune ** subjective stars
If you've seen a Jodorowsky film, there's a strong likelihood, for better or worse, that one of the visuals is tattooed onto your visual cortex. In my case it was dwarf sex in the Spaniard's psilocybin spaghetti western, El Topo, from 1971. Jodorowsky movies are provocative visual spectacles and grotesques from which realism has fled. I'm not a huge fan of his films, but I am an admirer of his chutzpah, his ability stick maniacally to his vision.
In 1975, Jodorowsky obtained the rights to film Dune, Frank Herbert's sci-fi epic. He attacked this project in typical style, hiring some of the best artistic talent to design the film's look and attempting to bring on a bizarre cast of stars including Orson Welles, Dali and Gloria Swanson. He hired Pink Floyd for the soundtrack.
In this documentary, Jodorowsky and a few of his compatriots recount the process of designing a phantasmagorical 14 hour version of Dune. One of the films co-creators claims that Jodorowsky mesmerized him onto the production, a claim easily reconciled with the inspired raconteur we meet in this film. He's a bit like 'the most interesting man in the world' from Dos Equis beer commercials. The crew eventually compiled a massive tome of intricate storyboards and shopped it around the major studios trying to scrape up some sorely needed cash. They'd already spent two million without shooting a frame. Hollywood wasn't buying, but the grandeur of Jodorowsky's failure make a beautiful testament to the creative power of passion. If you're into art making, film or otherwise, it's an engrossing ninety minutes.
Le Weekend ** subjective stars
"WILL MAKE YOU FALL IN LOVE ALL OVER AGAIN" raves something called Virgin Media.
I didn't fall in love again, sadly, but my fear that Le Weekend might be chillingly sentimental also didn't pan out. I was warmed, and cooled evenly, by a deftly written piece on a 60's-ish couple reassessing their marriage over a weekend in Paris. The script is by Hanif Kureishi, who also authored My Beautiful Laundrette.
Even if Jim Broadbent's name doesn't register, his hang dog look will be familiar from blockbusters - Harry Potter and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - and smaller indies like Topsy Turvy (he plays Gilbert of Gilbert and Sullivan) and The Crying Game. An amazing film actor, Broadbent seems to act almost solely with his eyes and he's a joy to watch. His costar, Lindsay Duncan, is less well known in the US (HBO's Rome), but has also been working steadily for decades and is equal to Broadbent's game. Together they evoke that crazed mix of love and loathing that defines many long lived relationships. Add to that Jeff Goldblum's amusing rendition of a smarmy, successful American. It's not heaviosity, not Bergman's Scenes From A Marriage, but it is well written, funny and superbly acted.
The Wolf of Wall Street
I thought I would give this film a shot on Netflix. It is Martin Scorcese after all.
Let me name the ways this movie disappoints. A film about Wall Street so soon after the great recession might have alluded to the disaster, it might have made some observations about the destructive power of the financial industry, but Scorcese doesn't choose that path. Ok then, we have a light comedy about Wall Street excess. It runs three hours. The main characters are shallow, greedy egotists. The few genuinely funny scenes, such as DiCaprio's drug-addled stockbroker crashing his private helicopter into his back yard, are swallowed whole in a pasty pudding of drugs, hookers and frat boy antics. Relationships don't happen to these cartoon characters, even if it was based on a true story.
I like a good story about excess, but there has to be a story, there has to be some character development. DiCaprio's stockbroker is the same useless schmuck after a three hour recap of his debaucheries. There are moviegoers who are always excited to see a movie star snorting coke off a prostitute's ass, but it's old and it's weak. And it's deeply offensive, circa 2014, to use hookers gratuitously when your film is about nothing. If you're going to perpetuate that stereotype, do it for a reason.
NYMPHOMANIAC Vol. 1 * 1/2 Subjective Stars
Many of the reviews of Nymphomaniac note that the film's sex is clinical, not prurient, as if that somehow makes it more worthy of attention. I would argue that believable prurient sex is harder to achieve on film than clinical sex. Distancing sex from emotion is a kind of European art house cliche, whereby you're allowed to watch gratuitous nudity because the detached sex signifies serious thought. And the emotionless sex in the Nymphomaniac does begin to wear thin. Nor is it particularly shocking, unless those scenes have been saved for Vol. 2. The film is cannily marketed to exploit arty porno, but then delivers the arty clinical. Despite that, it's refreshing to see a film that's genuinely willing to explore, no just exploit, sexuality.
Von Trier obviously appreciates actors and they deliver great performances with the exception of the badly miscast, always smirking Christian Slater. There's also a narrative disconnect in the film between the heroine as an 8-year-old who's curious about her own sexuality, who soon goes on to full blown sex addiction. Her mother is a "cold bitch" we're told, and she joins a (feminist?) high school girl's club that seeks sex, but forbids love. Maybe Von Trier is suggesting that nymphomania is a reaction to male domination, but I wasn't convinced by the character's leap from curious child to serial fornicator. He also indulges in several overtly mystical metaphors, extended references to the Fibonnaci Sequence and trout fishing, that are initially funny, but soon lapse into repetitive tropes.
On the upside is Nymphomaniac's sweetly dark strain of comedy. In one of the films sharpest scenes, Uma Thurman, as a spurned wife, slogs her young children into the nymphomaniac's apartment to show them the "whoring bed" Daddy has chosen over her own. The tone is straight out of 1950's Joan Crawford. And whether or not you like them, there are bits of Wes Anderson-style animated doodles and intricate diagrams layered onto the images. In a film that includes melodrama, very realistic sex, multimedia visuals, intellectual sparring and a deep vein of black comedy, it's hard to fault the director for lack of ambition. I'm always grateful for the chance to watch interesting film. In the end I felt entertained and challenged, but also disgruntled by Nymphomaniac's lack of cohesion. Subverting genre is now it's own full blown genre, but it's not a license to run amok.
Which may answer the question of why, as the credits roll on Vol. 1, we are bombarded with highlights from Vol. 2. You've just sat through a fairly demanding film and you are, in effect, told to stay tuned for the next installment in which all the mysteries/inconsistencies will find explanation. I'll watch Vol. 2, but I'll be doubly disgruntled if it turns out that the best parts of both movies could have, as I'm beginning to suspect, made one succinct film.
