Le Havre

(2011) director Aki Kaurismäki
viewed: 12/24/2011 at Opera Plaza Cinemas, SF, CA

Quirky Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki’s newest film, Le Havre, reckons quite a bit with the last of his films that I had seen, his 2002 movie, The Man Without a Past.  In The Man Without a Past, we have a mysterious fellow who is beaten up and then loses his memory, winding up living on the outskirts of Helsinki in a shipping container.  In Le Havre, we have a kind shoe shine man, living on the outskirts of Le Havre, making ends meet barely, who meets up with a young boy from Gabon, who has arrived in France via a shipping container.

Similar in style as well, the film plays its politics gently but clearly.  Images of immigrants being rousted up and imprisoned or deported play on the televisions around the world of shoe shine man, Marcel Marx (André Wilms) and his little cafe and neighborhood.  The kind but dutiful inspector, Monet (Jean-Pierre Darroussin), is on the trail of the boy to whom Marx takes “a shine to” (sorry).  Marx’s strange, retiring wife, Arletty (Kati Outinen), takes mysteriously and seemingly terminally ill while much of the drama unfolds.

The thing about the people in Kaurismäki’s films is that they are mostly kind, cool, and well-meaning.  While one of Marx’s neighbors is trying to get the police after him, the rest of them all work together to raise money to send the boy on to his mother in London.  Even the inspector allows for this to happen without bringing on the authorities.  It’s not very realistic.  The racism and nastiness that is part of France (and probably all parts of Europe) in fears of immigrants hardly exists in Kaurismäki’s worlds.

It’s like he’s created these characters and these situations and just doesn’t want to see anything bad happen to them.  So he gives them the happy endings that would not very likely occur in real life, suggesting a cool, kind, progressive world where people actually do sympathize and care for one another.  And they are rewarded with happy endings and “miracles”.  It’s little surprise when Marx’s wife, Arletty, bounces back miraculously from her terminal illness.

The naïveté of Kaurismäki’s world isn’t pure naïveté, but a knowing and hopeful vision.  An off-beat, low-key, but upbeat tale for modern Europe.

Young Adult

(2011) director Jason Reitman
viewed: 12/24/2011 at AMC Loews Metreon 16, SF, CA

Charlize Theron plays an immensely shallow, self-absorbed, misanthropic woman in a life crisis in Young Adult, the new film from the director/writer team that brought us Juno (2007), Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody.  She’s not a “young adult” anymore at 37, though she writes (ghost-writes) for them, a series of books about high school.  Her crisis is triggered by hearing that her small town high school beau, played by Patrick Wilson, has just fathered a child, and she gets it in her mind that she must “rescue” him by rekindling their flame and whisking him away from his married, parental life.

There are aspects of this that have resonance and are funny.  She details her logic to Patton Oswalt, a local shlub who was brutally beaten in high school in a misguided hate crime, by telling him that over time people accept that marriages break down and that people hook up with old flames.  She just wants to accelerate the process.  Her character is so self-deluded that she cannot see any aspect of reality.  Her ex is not unhappy; she is.

Her one moment of cognizance, telling her parents that she thinks she might be an alcoholic, is casually dismissed in bland denial.

The thing about the movie is that it’s a lot less funny than you might hope for or expect.  Perhaps that is “dramedy” for you.  Theron’s character is virtually soulless, a wreck with little redeeming quality.  She is beautiful.  She’s got that going for her.  But she’s loathsome.  And in the end it’s a pretty depressing, though not unrealistic, picture.

One thing that really struck me was the virtual “anti-product placement” in the film.  Small town Minnesota (Anywheresville, USA) is a landscape of mini-malls and fast food joints.   One corporate hotel chain after another.  And Theron’s character, Mavis Gray, is shown gobbling McDonalds, KFC, Taco Bell, Diet Coke ad nauseum (this may be a supermodel-pretty Hollywood star “enjoying” these products but the character she plays is a monster). The food and lifestyle very much represent Mavis’s hollow junk life.  She also consumes television garbage (reality television) non-stop, subsisting entirely on almost every form of corporate junk food.  She has no soul.  She’s a horrible person.

Even the Hampton Inn, which her character stays at, gets a rather inglorious depiction in the receptionist who is clearly going through the motions.

For Reitman, it’s an interesting follow-up to his 2009 film Up in the Air, which depicted a middle America in the throes of a corporate crisis.  Corporate America doesn’t care about people.  It’s ready to downsize them, feed them garbage, take their money.  Middle America is not a pretty place.

Mavis, though, is so self-centered and unlikable that it’s hard to know whether to feel for her or not.  She’s probably more unsympathetic than Theron’s portrayal of serial killer Aileen Wuornos.

For me, I guess I’m still contemplating it.  Oswalt is very good (he’s got the most interesting character to play).  And I guess that I’m coming around to Jason Reitman.  Gotta love the way he bitch-slapped his corporate sponsors.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

(2011) director David Fincher
viewed: 12/23/2011 at CineArts @ the Empire Theater, SF, CA

I was pretty tired of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009) as an entity by the time that I watched The Girl Who Played with Fire (2009) and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest (2009).  Those would be the original Swedish adaptations of Stieg Larsson’s “girl” trilogy, of which I had also read the first two of the three books.  I pooped out on the books and just watched the final movie of the series to complete the narrative.

In the hands of almost any other director, I would probably have had zero interest in the American re-makes.  But David Fincher (The Social Network (2010)) is not only one of the more interesting active Hollywood directors, but the initial trailer for the movie was pretty damn slick, cut to highlight the goth kinkiness of the film and the main character, set to a Trent Reznor-produced cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song”.  It successfully teased its subject.  I was in.

The film actually opens to that same track, with vocals by Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.  Unfortunately, the opening sequence is a strange oily black digital series of morphing images of the two leads, with snake-like tentacles and S&M underpinnings.  It’s just a lot less effective than the trailer.

The film stars Daniel Craig as the righteous journalist Mikael Blomkvist and Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander, the “girl” of the titles of all the books/films.  The prior film trilogy was pretty good.  Noomi Rapace was pretty spot-on as Salander and Michael Nyqvist was pretty good as Blomkvist.  These are Swedish books after all, set in Sweden.  Outside of the obvious desire to capitalize on the American market (who along with much of the world has gone on to make best-sellers of the books), there seems no reason, no real need to re-make the films.  But Fincher found something.  And Mara was more than game.

It’s a little weird watching the film.  I only read the books like 2 years ago or something and then have seen the movies very recently.  There is no drama, no surprises left in the mystery.

The most compelling thing about the stories is the character of Salander, the troubled, antisocial, genius goth girl hacker with the life of abuse who finds her calling as a detective/researcher.  I’ve read some criticisms of Larsson’s stories that posit his anti-misogynist tales still titillate with great detail on the rape and abuse of women and that Blomkvist, an obvious stand-in for Larsson, is quite the ladies man, bedding Salander despite the fact that she mostly seems interested in women.

There is most definitely this voyeuristic sensibility, this attraction to this goth-punk girl, whose look is a combination of aesthetic and anti-aesthetic (the bleached eyebrows do indeed give Mara a weirdly haunted look).  She is sexualized, brutalized, coveted, objectified.  Many might say that she’s empowered to an extent.

Frankly, Fincher’s film is a better film, hands down.  He’s a more auteur-ish director and he certainly takes ownership of the material, or at least identifies with it or its characters.  Ultimately it’s a murder mystery.  A potboiler.  With a riveting female lead whether it’s Rapace or Mara.  I’d personally rather look at Craig than Nyqvist.

The Skin I Live In

(2011) director Pedro Almodóvar
viewed: 12/17/2011 at Regal Gainesville 14, Gainesville, FL

The latest film from Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, The Skin I Live In, is a great film.  If you think you might be interested in it, I say, read no further and go see it.

If you hazard to read forward, I will spoil some of the plot twists which will diminish your potential enjoyment, so just go see the damn movie and if you’re still interested in what I have to say about it, come back and read what goes below.

I find it a little hard to talk about the film without disclosing some of its plot twists and I feel lucky that despite having read about the film, much of those twists were intact for me, which allowed for me to have the narrative work its magic, for the film to unveil its objects.

From the film poster alone, the movie seems to invoke Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (1960).  And like Eyes Without a Face, the film starts with a doctor/scientist who is grafting skin onto a damaged woman to restore her beauty.  In fact, as the film begins, that mad doctor, played by Antonio Banderas, is working on a new synthetic skin, impervious to flame and his beautiful concubine, played by Elena Anaya, wears a strange flesh-colored body suit, suggesting that she’s had more than her face worked upon.  Bio-engineering is one thing, but what Banderas’s mad doctor has on the table is something much more extreme and not at all altruistic.

From the decor of his home, images of female beauty and idealized femininity abound.  Banderas has a giant television screen on which he can view his captive beauty as if framed by a master.  It’s not just surface beauty that interests Almodóvar.  As the mystery of who the captive woman is evolves, the melodramatic narrative of sex and violence and betrayal booms to life.  I won’t spell out the whole of the story (there is a lot there), but what comes out is that this is a story of revenge, emasculation, total control, and obsession.  The surface beauties that were pondered earlier are revealed to be entirely misleading.  This beautiful woman, crafted to resemble in great detail, the doctor’s late wife, is really the rapist of the doctor’s daughter who has undergone an unwilling sex change operation.

Whatever ideas the audience holds about the beautiful captive who is a human guinea pig for the doctor’s experiments with artificial skin, the truth is more complicated and surprising than could be imagined.  Identity is revealed, but identity is also more complicated than the surfaces suggest.

I don’t know if it’s a masterpiece, but it’s a damn good film.  Evocative of other classic thrillers, this film is pure Almodóvar, one of the best film-makers working and one who continues to expand the breadth and depth of his work.