Archive for the ‘Romance’ Category

The Cranes Are Flying

November 18, 2009

A really dazzling, magnificently made Russian love story, set in the WWII era, about two lovers separated by the war, and the woman vigil as she awaits her man’s return. Technically, this movie had me floored from one scene to the next: check out the mind-blowing circular booms and handheld shots. It is heartfelt, sensitive, and passionate in a Chekovian way: Honest and building in power surely and subtly. Beautifully acted, every man will want to marry the sweet, earthy, sensitive woman in it. The final scene shatters the heart, puts it back together thrillingly on a note of life-affirming hope. Incidentally, Crane’s director, Kalatozishivli, went on to make the legendary I Am Cuba, another groundbreaker, renowned for its technical wizardry.

Grade: A

Directed by: Mikheil Kalatozishivli
Written by: Viktor Rizov
Cast: Tatyana Samojlova, Aleksey Batalov, Vaseli Merkuryev, Aleksandr Shvorin

Cold Mountain

November 10, 2009

A movie of gorgeous moments alternating with many more that feel literate to the point of inducing boredom. It’s a long sit, this one, unless you find yourself swept away on the very thin romance here.

Minghella is an intelligent, cinematically astute filmmaker who never allows his movies to get unruly or obnoxious the way a more pedestrian Hollywood director might in a flailing attempt at seriousness or poetry. As it is, Cold Mountain is a bleak, sometimes brutal evocation of the Old South in the waning days of the Civil War. Inman (Jude Law), disgusted by the war, is desperate to reunite with his true love, Ada. So, he goes AWOL and sets off to do just that. Evoking Homer’s Odyssey (on which Charles Frazier’s novel is based), Cold Mountain follows Inman’s journey through hostile territory, rigged with temptations, but Inman heroically forges ahead, faithful in body and spirit to Ada. Meanwhile, Ada–our Penelope figure–along with her trusty, feisty sidekick, Ruby (Renee Zelwegger), pulls herself up by her bootstraps, and learns to manage her farm. In the course of her hardship, Ada develops a stern resourcefulness–a stark change from the prim-and-corseted minister’s daughter we were introduced to at the movie’s outset.

Across the board, Cold Mountain boasts full-blooded, fiercely committed performances, from the fantastic Jude Law to the astonishingly villainous Ray Winstone (as Teague). In fact, Winstone’s Teague may be the lustiest, most ruthless and repugnant rogue to come around on our screens in a long, long time–he is truly frightening on screen. Kidman, so identified as an icy and elegant beauty, pulls off her Scarlett O’Hara-esque role stunningly well; Zellwegger, doing her “Annie-Get-Your-Gun” shtick, amuses and endears as only she can. The rest of the cast (especially Donald Sutherland as Ada’s father, Reverend Monroe) gives solid support.

Minghella does such a fine job directing this weighty material that I don’t want to quibble, but the fact is Cold Mountain’s adaptation isn’t especially strong. The story moves in fits and starts, and, after it was over, I wondered what the point was in all this pining and pathos. The themes of the Mountain are noble and moving, but Frazier and Mingella want to make a poignantly Homeric parable, and it just doesn’t deliver as that. While perplexingly weak in making its case thematically, the violence and terror in Cold Mountain, pointing to the moral breakdown of a war-torn society–where no woman and child is safe from rape, pillage, murder–were keenly and disturbingly felt.

Grade: B

Directed by: Anthony Minghella
Written by: Anthony Minghella
Cast: Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, Renée Zellweger, Brendan Gleeson, Natalie Portman, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Giovanni Ribisi, Donald Sutherland

Chungking Express

November 9, 2009

Though not as emotionally satisfying as Happy Together, Chungking Express is still a giddy and energetic movie in its own right, telling two distinct stories both of which pivot around a bustling Hong Kong lunch counter. Both stories are about cops, each of whom has been dumped by his respective girlfriend and now wants to forget about her and move on. The first story, in my opinion, follows its whimsical, wistful hero as he slurps through nearly-expired cans of pineapples (his ex-girlfriend’s favorite fruit) in a symbolic effort to forget her. He subsequently falls in love with a mystery woman–presumably a drug trafficker and criminal. The second story involves a spunky and spirited girl who, through her variously eccentric ways, tries to get a gloomy cop to forget about the airline stewardess who’s just dumped him, and make him fall in love with her instead. Though these stories aren’t particularly deep, I love Wong Kar Wai’s cinematic exuberance–it’s clear from just watching his films that the guy loves making them. Not only that, he takes a genuine interest in human beings, in trying to understand them for all their ridiculousness. Kar Wai masterfully commits to celluloid the textures and moods of Chungking Express’ urban milieu. He gives us a pair of not-entirely-successful romantic stories but, fuelled by his cinematic fervor and exuberant use of music (another Wong Kar Wai trademark), it’s irresistible.

Grade: B

Directed by: Wong Kar Wai
Written by: Wong Kar Wai
Cast: Brigitte Lin, Tony Leung, Faye Wong, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Valerie Chow

Chloe in the Afternoon

November 9, 2009

The final installment of Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales, Chloe in the Afternoon is a beautiful character study about what it is to love one woman and yet be in love with all women. Frédéric (Verley), a very levelheaded Parisian businessman with a wife and two kids, one day encounters a woman, Chloé, who he used to know years ago. Before long, they’re meeting every afternoon, over drinks or whatever, chatting, divulging intimate details about themselves. Frédéric first thinks of Chloé as an oddball, a neurotic, and brushes her off casually. But when she begins to treat him indifferently, he gets riled up and all the more drawn to her. And you can’t necessarily blame the guy: Chloé’s portrayed as a very exciting, sensual woman who also happens to be an unpredictable head-case; she hops from bed to bed, attaches herself to men who never love her and, before long, moves on. She also can’t keep a job down. Chloé’s the kind of brash, slightly dangerous woman that all men, at some time or another, have fallen for.

Eventually, Frédéric finds himself at the brink at which he must face his lust for Chloé head-on. Contrary to stereotype, his wife, Hélène (Françoise Verley), isn’t some insufferable ball-and-chain but an alluring, free-minded woman: beautiful, smart and a devoted mother. And, to be fair, Frédéric’s no slouch either: he’s a sensitive guy, devoted to his wife but also honest about how Chloé makes him feel. Indeed, he starts out the movie confessing that marriage has made him feel cut off from all the women he sees all around him. He’s attracted to all of them, yet his genuine loyalty to his wife offsets those more primal yearnings. It’s a testament to the honesty with which Rohmer depicts Frédéric’s marriage that his and Hélène’s final scene is such a knockout.

As opposed to Kubrick’s inane Eyes Wide Shut, which crossed similar thematic ground but turned its protagonist’s honest desires into the stuff of psycho-dramatic tripe, Rohmer steers the humanist road to far more poignant effect. Rohmer never resorts to stereotypes: These characters are all vivid, believable, complex creations in whom we see ourselves. Chloé is a superb example of how culturally bound stories, when told simply and delicately, can find universal resonance. As an added bonus, it also offers an intriguing peek into Parisian middle-class life in the early 70s.

Grade: A

Directed by: Eric Rohmer
Written by: Eric Rohmer
Cast: Bernard Verley, Zouzou, Françoise Verley, Daniel Ceccaldi

Changing Times

November 9, 2009

In writer-director André Téchiné’s strangely moving love story, Changing Times, the middle-aged Antoine (Gérard Depardieu) confesses how he longs one day to reunite with his first love, Cécile (Catherine Deneuve). But he wants to wait till she’s grown older, after her children have left the roost. Then, like a gallant knight, Antoine wants to show up at her door and save his beloved Cécile from the impending loneliness of her twilight years, after which they will live happily ever after, together. He describes how that moment of reunion will be like a resurrection for Cécile, a reawakening to the beauties and joys of living. Truly, it is only by burying the past, by shucking off the garb of one’s institutional roles–wife, husband, son, sibling, friend–and reawakening to our own true feelings can we hope to have any happiness in love and life.

Antoine arrives in the port city of Tangiers under the pretext of overseeing the construction of a television facility for a French media company. But his real motive is that Tangiers is where Cécile lives. While Antoine has struggled to get over her, Cécile has succeeded most assiduously in repressing her past with him. She’s now married to a Moroccan doctor, Nathan (Gilbert Melki), a charming, amiable man who makes no qualms about his womanizing.

On the outside, Cécile seems a woman completely content and composed: She has an orderly home life with Nathan, and enjoys her day job as a d.j. playing French pop songs at a Moroccan radio station. Yet her composure is brittle. Deneuve keeps her face taut, her delivery straightforward, matter-of-fact; Cécile is the kind of woman for whom a tragic emotional breakdown is just waiting to happen.

The damage Antoine weathers, meanwhile, is largely physical, beginning with a nose-first smash into a glass wall as he tries to flee a busy supermarket where he’s just spotted Cécile. Nathan, the dutiful doctor, comes to his aid, and, just like that, Antoine has entered Cécile’s domestic fold. In their awkward first meetings, during with the precipitously frank Antoine sets forth his feelings for Cécile , Téchiné is sure to reap both humor and a bittersweet pathos as the woman pulls away from him with a businesslike insistence.

When Cécile’s son Sami (Malik Zidi), his Moroccan-born girlfriend Madia (Lubna Azabal), and their 9-year-old son drop in from Paris, all sorts of cats are let out of the bag. Madia’s in Tangiers to reconcile with her long-estranged twin sister Aicha (also played by Azabal) who’s stayed behind in their family village looking after their aging, ailing parents. Sami’s agenda involves reviving an old love affair with a young Morroccan man. His closeted homosexuality dovetails nicely with the rest of Téchiné’s framework built around disconnected interpersonal ties–a gallery of people who, out of guilt, shame or the fear of loneliness can’t face the truth about themselves, let alone admit it to each other.

If Cécile’s supposed to be uptight, she’s got nothing on Madia’s sister, Aicha–a woman not so much devout as insistent about her Muslim orthodoxy. Aicha refuses to see Nadia, for whom she obviously still bears anger for unspoken past grievances, and fears she’d contaminate her religious purity by consorting with a Westernized Muslim woman. While Nadia slips into a drug-induced stupor, It’s like that in the world Téchiné’s creates in Changing Times: No one is willing to put down their self-ordained guards for reasons of self-preservation.

I realize all of this sounds like heavy melodrama, an entanglement of pretentious gestures, but Changing Times is surprisingly sweet, simple, straightforward. Whatever thematic high-handedness Téchiné can be charged with (he’s French after all; they can’t help it), you can’t fault him on the purity of his storytelling nor his admirably expressive cinematic style. Antoine’s emotional conundrum finds a perfect parallel in the nervy, touch-and-go shooting and editing rhythms, which are offset by the quieter, more measured rhythms found in Cécile’s scenes. Finally, the performances are uniformly excellent, but this is Deneuve and Depardieu’s show all the way. The screen legends turn in gorgeous, guileless performances here, and it’s a pleasure to be party to their often lovely scenes together. Buriel and resurrection, literal and figurative, are inevitable for Antoine and Cécile. Both pay their separate price, but, once the debris is cleared, the resurrection that Antoine speaks of is, nonetheless, sweet reward.

Grade: B+

Directed by: André Téchiné
Written by: André Téchiné, Laurent Guyot, Pascal Bonitzer
Cast: Catherine Deneuve, Gérard Depardieu, Gilbert Melki, Lubna Azabal, Malik Zidi, Tanya Lopert, Jabir Elomri, Nabila Baraka, Nadem Rachati

(500) Days of Summer

September 20, 2009

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There’s nothing in Marc Webb’s (500) Days of Summerthat we didn’t get in more substantial form in better romantic, anti-romantic dramedies. It’s note of romantic pining bears echoes of Say Anything but it’s treatment of the therapeutic powers of love in an otherwise miserable, doubt-fraught existence was far more richly examined in Greg Mottola’s Adventureland. Granted Adventureland was a more serious-minded fare, and (500) Days is lighter and more fanciful venture, pepped up with tunes that comprise what could be the hipster-pop soundtrack of the year. Yet, for all its heart-on-its-sleeve good intentions, the script by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber simply doesn’t offer up a deep, searching treatment of sexual infatuation, the fickleness of romance, and the mysteries of love with anything like compelling, lasting impact.

Webb’s movie is a goofy send-up on said themes while meaning to be, off-handedly, something much more as it follows Tom Hansen (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), an aspiring architect who’s now slumming as a greeting-card writer, and his efforts to woo and win the love of his co-worker, the ethereally pretty Summer (Zooey Deschanel). Brooding, serious and sincere, Tom is the temperamental opposite to the easy-breezy Summer, who’s allergic to commitment and enamored of whimsy and the spontaneous romantic impulse. This makes Summer an easy person to get intrigued by, but a hard person to care about in the long run. As a character, she’s as light and wispy as, well, a summer breeze, and aptly fits Film Critic Nathan Rubin’s template of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl; Summer exists solely to light Tom’s fire, excite his soul, redeem his believe in love and himself, but, as someone independent of those functions, she’s a cipher, an exasperating blank — a woman who says she doesn’t care for commitment until the script requires her to do so.

Deschanel, with her dreamy eyes and lilting delivery, makes for the perfect MPDG muse for the lovelorn, tortured artist, enjoyably played by the hotly talented Gordon-Levitt, who’s now spent almost a decade developing impeccable cred in the American indie and non-mainstream circuit. Gordon-Levitt is the sole reason this sweet but feathery affair assumes any gravity at all — he lends a soulful credibility to a film generally populated by cut-outs and cliches. Among the latter are Tom’s two longtime sidekicks, McKenzie (Geoffrey Arend) and Paul (Matthew Gray Gubler) — who stand in, respectively, for the Sad Sack Who’s Never Had a Girlfriend and for The Lifer with the Same Girlfriend Since Forever. They stand at the polar ends of the “modern love” spectrum on which Tom slides tenuously back an d forth. But, like Summer, they’re simply functionaries in a story built like a music box: pretty and pleasing to listen to, but all cogs and gears within.

Another of (500) Days’ good intentions is to vindicate the aesthetic reputation of Los Angeles, a city that gets short-shrift as an eyesore too often in popular culture. By way of Tom’s love of downtown L.A. (where he lives, in a spacious loft), Webb wants to fashion a tender valentine to the architectural splendors of his city. For L.A. lovers like myself, this is a noble and much-needed gesture, and the scenes in which Tom fills Summer (and the rest of us) in on the history and design of the city’s heritage skyscrapers are genuinely sweet. But the city fails to become an organic part of this story; it rather remains an entity separate and apart from the central action, something characters have to remember to stare at, acknowledge and adore. As a result, Webb’s Los Angeles setting becomes simply the gilt framing for a lovely postcard picture of what is a nicely played but all-too-preciously eccentric romance.

Grade: C+

Directed by: Marc Webb
Written by: Scott Neustadter, Michael H. Weber
Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Zooey Deschanel, Geoffrey Arend, Matthew Gray Gubler, Clark Gregg, Chloe Moretz

Slumdog Millionaire

December 25, 2008

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Manic energy, above all, powers Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, a deliriously Dickensian romance set in modern Mumbai, written by Simon Beaufoy. Jamal Malik’s (Dev Patel) a teenager from the slums who becomes an unlikely contestant on the Indian version of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?. He does so well on the show that on the eve of his run for the million-dollar question, he’s hauled in by the police on suspicion of cheating. How could a lowly slumdog, after all, know the answers to every question on the game show? The host — played by Bollywood star Anil Kapoor with hammy swagger — is rightly flummoxed and so is the police detective (Irfan Khan, who essentially reprises his solid turn from Michael Winterbottom’s first-rate kidnapping drama A Mighty Heart).

Slumdog Millionaire is structured as an inquiry, told largely through Jamal’s flashbacks, into how he knew the game-show answers and, more importantly, why he knew them: the boy’s in love, and every answer he knows is a consequence, one way or another, of his friendship with the gorgeous Latika (Freida Pinto). His appearing on the show is his bid to attract Latika’s attentions, and finally to win her over. It’s a tough road, though, because Latika, whose life has been no less difficult than Jamal’s, is now ensconced in the plush world of a well-known Mumbai don.

Jaman and Latika grew up together amid’s Mumbai’s squallor. Then, after the Hindu-Muslim riots of the early 90’s, their lives spiralled into an abyss of misfortune that would make Oliver Twist shudder. Their worlds eventually separate into parallel but perilous lives. Along with his cunning companion Salim (Madhur Mittal), Jamal falls in with a troupe of professional child-beggers overseen by a scurrilous, Fagin-esque leader. They escape and manage to make a living through petty theft and fleecing tourists. All the while, though, Jamal dreams of Latika. They do reunite, but the occasion is brief, laced with heartbreak and, worse, betrayal at the hands of Salim.

Who Wants To Be a Millionaire is Jamal’s Hail-Mary effort not only to put his own poverty and criminality behind him, but Latika’s too. It’s his ultimate act of love and rebellion. Love is the great motivator all through Slumdog — Jamal’s love for Latika informs every scene, every sacrifice and act of courage — but what Boyle and Beaufoy forget to supply as they fashioned their picaresque is any tangible chemistry between their lovers: There is none. Jamal’s is but a schoolboy crush taken to extremes, and Latika’s interest in him feels incidental. If it weren’t for her misery and peril, living essentially as an indentured sex slave to a mafia don, there would no reason for her to seek out Jamal, her sole savior.

In the course of their tale, we’re never convinced that these two are soulmates; they’re brought together more by the exigencies of plot than anything else. In his review of the film in The New Yorker, Anthony Lane hit the problem on the head (and, in the process, described Boyle’s cinema as a whole) when he said his “characters lunge at experience, although the films themselves hardly dare to ask how much, or how little, that experience has been worth.” Slumdog Millionaire, in other words, in an exercise in expert style and mechanics, but little soul or feeling. Those are deep, evasive things for a storyteller to get his hands around. But without them, there is no story, only kinetic imagery.

The other major flaw is that of extreme contrivance. It’s not that lowly Jamal, against immense odds, finds himself a guest on a nationwide hit game-show, but the tenuous — even ridiculous — circumstances under which he learned the answers. This critic greatly doubts that a blind Indian beggerboy, no matter how intelligent, would know that Benjamin Franklin is on the U.S. hundred dollar bill — knowledge that Jamal uses to answer one of his questions. In another instance, Jamal tracks down Salim by quickly running his name through a call-center database. And that’s only a smidgeon of the far-fetched nature of Slumdog’s narrative conceits. I would have no trouble swallowing any of it if Boyle and Beaufoy had delivered on their love story. If Jamal and Latika’s aching need to be with each other had been convincingly presented, it would’ve smoothed over every bump and hole in their plotting.

But Boyle is less interested in human chemistry and more in technical chemistry. He’s a terrific filmmaker (Trainspotting and 28 Days Later bear that out), but he’s taken on something here that he can’t quite live up to: Capturing the soul of a complex Indian metropolis, while telling a deeply human story. But to Boyle, Mumbai is just a playground of poverty, filth, and deprivation. There is nothing distinctly Mumbai here, everything seems filtered through stereotypes, even Latika’s mafia don sugar-daddy, who’s just a raffish, foul-mouthed cad seems lifted from any bad Bollywood melodrama. Boyle’s Mumbai could just as well be Mexico City or Rio de Janeiro or Lagos. A sea of miserable faces, churning and scurrying, ekeing out a meager living. And it bothered me that, yet again, a Western filmmaker has brought his camera to exploit Indian poverty (Louis Malle’s horrid Calcutta was an early offender and Susanne Bier’s After the Wedding a more recent one), without capturing the spirit of its people and culture. Slumdog is merely India as Westernized thrill ride.

Not that a galvanized portrait of India is a bad thing. Watch Ram Gopal Varma’s Company for a jolt of Mumbai criminality from a filmmaker who knows it first hand. What Slumdog needed was a Mumbai filmmaker like Varma — an Indian equivalent of Mexico’s Alfonso Cuaron (Y Tu Mama Tambien) or Brazil’s Fernando Meirelles (City of God) — to tell this story. At least then we would’ve had an indigenous voice, melding style and detail in nuanced, authentic ways, letting Mumbai truly come alive on screen. It’s about time we come up with a name for how India — or maybe all Third World cultures — are exploited by Western filmmakers. Thirdploitation, anyone? I think it’s got a nice ring to it.

Still, there’s plenty in Slumdog to be charmed by. Freida Pinto as the object of Jamal’s love is a sight for sore eyes; she’s definitely the world-cinema beauty of 2008. And Boyle’s style, for all its flaws, is compulsively watchable, propelled by a joyous, hip-hop-meets-bangra score by A.R. Rahman, whose work here above anyone else’s is world class. Rahman’s score is the Slumdog’s true winner, what I’ll keep coming back to long after Boyle’s circus-tent of a movie packs up and fades from my memory.
Grade: B-

Directed: Danny Boyle
Written by: Simon Beaufoy
Cast: Dev Patel, Anil Kapoor, Freida Pinto, Irfan Khan, Mahesh Manjreker, Uday Chopra, Sharib Hashmi
Rated: R
Runtime: 120 min.