The Edge of Heaven

The Greatest of These Is Love

2007 // Germany - Turkey - Italy // Fatih Akin // August 30, 2008 // Theatrical Print

A - With The Edge of Heaven, Turkish-German director Fatih Akin offers a mournful, penetrating exhale of affecting cinema, a Shakespearean tragedy for a modern, multi-cultural Europe. Two violent deaths haunt this film, looming calamities that Akin bluntly telegraphs with title cards. (There Will Be Blood, indeed.) Catastrophe awaits us, not to mention the poor souls that populate Akin's Bremen and Istanbul, gritty landscapes of crumbling buildings and fragile humanity. In more ways than the survivors will comprehend, these deaths will emerge as transforming phenomena, their bright and black ripples reaching far-flung shores and lives. With six gently compelling characters and an exultant soundtrack, Akin has crafted a meditation on human connection more profound and emotionally persuasive than any recent convoluted ensemble behemoth. Despite its grim—and at times bitterly amused—sensibility, The Edge of Heaven is far from a morbid work. This is awestruck human spectacle at its most unexpected and redemptive, and one of the best films of 2008.

Ali (Tuncel Kurtiz) is a Turkish widower dwelling in Germany, where he spends his days watering his tomato plants in between drinking too much, gambling too much, and visiting Yeter (Nursel Köse), a prostitute of the same Anatolian origin. Ali and his adult son, Nejat (Baki Davrak), who teaches German at the local university, have an affectionate but taciturn relationship. They enjoy each other's company, but have little to discuss and less in common. Yeter, meanwhile, has a daughter in Turkey that she supports, a student who does not know her mother's real profession. Perhaps wishing to hold the loneliness of his remaining years at bay, Ali offers to pay Yeter the same rate as her brothel if she will live with him as a kept whore. For pragmatic yet proud Yeter, it's a more temping proposition than it sounds, partly due to the menacing Muslim fanatics that have been harassing her of late. Naturally, there are complications and crises, the nature of which you will need to experience for yourself.

After a time, the film departs Ali's tale to rendezvous with Yeter's daughter, Ayten (the gorgeous Nurgül Yesilçay). Pursued by the Turkish police for her participation in a radical communist street protest that turned violent, Ayten travels to Germany with false papers. She has a fiery temper and a longing to see her mother, which contribute to her falling out with her revolutionary comrades. She crashes on a university campus, with its cheap food and abundant spots for a homeless fugitive to sleep. When she begs linguistics student Lotte (Patrycia Ziolkowska) for money, the German woman offers a meal and a kind ear. Intrigued and touched by Ayten's plight, Lotte brings her home to stay in her mother's tidy bungalow. The mother, Susanne (Hanna Schygulla), is a quiet, conservative divorcée whose patience is sorely tested by the arrival of this brash, radical foreigner. Roughly when it becomes apparent that political idealism is not the only thing that attracts Lotte to Ayten, their sketchy ambitions begin to unravel and relationships of all kinds are put to the test.

Three sets of parents and children: two mothers, two daughters, one father, one son. Each set is afflicted with tribulations that rend them apart, some deeply personal and some agonizingly beyond their power to control. How The Edge of Heaven approaches these characters, and the places it eventually takes them, is what makes the film such a marvelously humane achievement. Each of the six principals is conventional in their way, even tiresome. Yet each brims with unexpected and obscured qualities, some deeply touching and others disturbing. Akin's storytelling has a determined gradualism, one that eschews sudden revelatory jolts for an intensifying awareness of each character's motives and essence. This graceful approach ensures that the plot's abundant reversals and serendipities rarely appear dubious. Akin's aims are denser and more sobering than facile "We Are All Connected" platitudes. In a lesser film, the threads that link the film's German and Turkish locales would merely be the components of a gaudy cat's-cradle, a magic trick sans purpose. Here they serve as a means to tenderly convey the echoes and contrasts in the film's entwined storylines.

There are films where the criss-crossing paths of the characters eventually meet in a rush of revelations. This is not that sort of film. Revealingly, Akin denies the viewer the satisfaction of narrative release as well as a sense of cosmic mercy. He offers moments of tingling anticipation capped only with deflating disappointment. He also plays with cruel, agonizing turns of fate. If only Ayten hadn't dropped her cell phone; if only Nejat had left the sign on the bulletin board; if only Lotte had turned left instead of right. If only, if only, if only... Akin warmly but firmly urges us to let go of our instinct to game the past or second-guess what is beyond our control. The thematic currents that coarse through The Edge of Heaven are multitude, but the film-maker's essential message is unambiguous: forgiveness and compassion are the paths to liberation, whether from shame, hatred, or grief.

The actors all deliver captivating portrayals, particularly Yesilçay and Schygulla, who coax tremendous pathos from characters that are fundamentally unpleasant in some respects. Schygulla, a frequent collaborator with the late German director Werner Fassbinder, claims the film's most stunningly memorable role. Her plump hausfrau journeys through comfort, bitterness, agony, and eventually to a kind of peace, leading us every step of the way. Equally triumphant is the film's music, an energetic score featuring DJ Shantel's Balkan gypsy beats and the late Turkish folk-rock singer Kâzım Koyuncu. The lush vocals and rhythms splendidly evoke the film's aura of Old World heartache and hope. That same mood is embodied in the film's final, iconic image. Nejat sits passively on a Black Sea beach, waiting for his father to return from a fishing trip, savoring the expectation of a reunion that rage and stubbornness have averted for too long. Human drama simply doesn't come much better than this.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Spanish Fly

2008 // USA - Spain // Woody Allen // August 26, 2008 // Theatrical Print

C - I've kept my distance from Woody Allen's output since Mighty Aphrodite, never successfully seduced by the rare acclaimed feature (Match Point), nor by the notorious belly-flops (The Curse of the Jade Scorpion). Therefore I can't comment from an informed place on the praise that Vicky Cristina Barcelona seems to have reaped as some kind of return to form for the venerable Manhattanite. Certainly, VCB is steeped in wistful adoration for the Spanish locale of its title, echoing the lovestruck regard Allen's earlier films evidence for New York City. The new film is self-consciously a Spanish travelogue, stuffed to the gills with breathtaking sights, rarefied culture, and delectable food and drink. If the Condé Nast slideshow feels a touch ludicrous, it also seems a natural fit for the film's amorous story. VCB is unabashedly sexy, in a way that few American films ever manage, and without so much as a glimpse of Scarlett Johannson's assets, or Javier Bardem's for that matter. Allen employs the appeal of sun-dappled locales and the arousal of gorgeous people in the throes of temptation to tug VCB towards a destination that proves oddly ambiguous. The film underlines its themes with relentless desperation in places, favors contemplative melancholy in others, and far too often clunks along on contrivance and wincing dialog. At its most successful, it's a kind of cinematic holiday: an exotic getaway for pleasure and perspective, ephemeral in essence and bittersweet in its conclusion.

Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (Johansson) are ridiculously mismatched best friends—the former uptight, the latter flighty; guess which one is blond?—who embark on the sort of luxurious European summer that only seems possible in the movies. Expatriate family friends have agreed to host the women at their estate in Barcelona, while Vicky allegedly studies Catalan culture. The summer promises a turning point for both women, but for different reasons. Cristina is disillusioned with her nascent film career, having wrote, directed and starred in a short feature that she instantly loathed. Vicky is engaged to a reliable, desperately boring Manhattan money man. Cristina is forthright about her longing for something more in life, artistically and romantically, while Vicky denies her creeping sensation of entrapment.

Into their lives ambles Juan Antonio (Bardem), an abstract painter with a smooth and devilishly confident manner. He approaches the pair one night and proposes that the three of them fly to a city whose sculpture he admires, where they will soak in the sights, drink wine, and make love. Asks a flabbergasted Vicky, "Who's going to make love?" "Hopefully, the three of us," Juan Antonio replies matter-of-factly. The pleasure of this scene and its familiar yet marvelously sensual dynamic—Juan Antonio's frankness, Christina's acquiescence, Vicky's resistance—is almost worth the price of admission all on its own.

It wouldn't be much of a film if the women snubbed Juan Antonio, and they eventually agree to his proposal (at least the sightseeing part). Given that they've already seduced him with their beauty and Yankee brashness, he sets about seducing them, but in differing ways and with varying results. Following their weekend getaway, Antonio eventually ushers Cristina more fully into his world of bohemian culture and zesty pleasure. Vicky is visibly disappointed in his choice, but stays silent. Her confusion about her longings and her plans is heightened when her fiancé joins her in Barcelona for a quickie wedding. Cristina, meanwhile, must negotiate more uncanny emotional obstacles when Juan Antonio's volatile and suicidal ex-wife Maria Elena (Penélope Cruz) appears. Much to Christina's initial disbelief, he extends Maria Elena a sympathetic hand, taking her into his home without question. Juan Antonio asks his lover for patience and his ex-wife for courtesy. (Thinking of Cristina's peace of mind, he pleads with Maria Elena repeatedly: "In this house, you speak English.") Maria Elena is the vision of a nightmare ex: explosive, accusatory, venomous, invasive. Oh, and she stabbed Juan Antonio once. Yet Juan Antonio still loves her, a fact that is obvious to anyone who observes them viciously quarrel. The pair are perfect for each other, and also a catastrophe waiting to happen. Juan Antonio speculates that Cristina may provide the "missing ingredient" that the relationship needs. Is this the sublime love that Cristina imagined for herself: sharing a house as one corner of a triangle?

The film's most baffling and unsteady stylistic choice is the weirdly jaunty narration by Christopher Evan Welch. Lacking the anecdotal tone of Allen's own wry voice-over work in his previous films, such as Radio Days, Welch's narration is both ridiculously redundant—"They drank wine at a little café": Hey, they're drinking wine at a little café!—and suggestive of lazy cinematic storytelling. Do we really need someone to tell us that Vicky is regretful, when Rebecca Hall can, you know, show us by acting? That said, the move isn't an outright fiasco. The voice-over is appropriate for the film's narrative, which follows the tracings of many a pulp Mediterranean romance, with its supremely functional prose and preference for visualization over poetry. Whatever coy (or is it ironic?) point Allen may have intended, however, the device is ultimately a wash at best. It's exasperating to be pummeled over the head in such a manner, particularly by a veteran film-maker whose thematic ambitions are otherwise relatively gentle.

Indeed, nothing truly momentous actually happens in VCB. Despite the sex, secrets, and threats of violence, its conflicts are essentially personal. The story is not really about who sleeps with whom, but how both Vicky and Cristina stumble towards revelations concerning their needs and wants. Viewers who need more to sink their teeth into may walk away feeling a little cheated. I was befuddled and charmed, despite my misgivings. There is a good-natured emotional voyeurism in Allen's gaze. The film revels, sweetly and humanely, in the slow, bloody process by which people grow to understand themselves and make critical personal decisions. VCB uncontroversially posits that fresh locales permit us to reassess our assumptions about our lives, and it then has a supremely pleasurable time watching two women undertake such a reassessment.

Did I mention that this film is damn sexy? There's a simplicity to its eroticism, despite the distracting detour to admirably, clumsily scorn bourgeois revulsion for casual screwing and polyamory. Allen shies away from crudeness or silly innuendo, keeping the film's sensuality direct and shimmering. The approach is elementary: show beautiful people enjoying themselves in beautiful places, and the rest will take care of itself. There are no sexual twists in VCB that come out of the blue. The possibilities for delight, the film insists, are always clear and tempting, not to mention diverse in quality and kind. Crucially, each of the principals radiate a distinct erotic vibe: Johannson ripe, Hall flip, Bardem pleading, and Cruz a delectable fusion of fearless, wounded, and demented. The way the actors move and look at one another is arguably more stimulating than the dialog. VCB's sensuality lies in gestures, sighs, the flicking of eyes, and the touching of clothing and wine glasses.

It's fortunate that the spaces between the dialog are entrancing, given that the script often hammers its points with stupid abandon. VCB's characters have an odd proclivity for blurting whatever obvious little thoughts pop into their heads, no matter how ridiculous they might sound when given voice. The performers do their best, but their words often sound less like a finished script and more like frank declarations of character motivation and bias. Never mind. No one ever said that pornography had to be well-written. And, fundamentally, that's what Vicky Cristina Barcelona is: luscious, romantic, PG-13 art-house pornography, tamed with a splash of sadness. Just the sort of film to enjoy with someone you love, or at least someone you want to make love to.

Boy A

Some Kind of Monster

2007 // UK // John Crowley // August 23, 2008 // Theatrical Print

B - Equipped with a disarming candor and despairing gaze, Boy A poses a daunting question: Is it just when society prolongs a criminal's punishment beyond his legal sentence? It gives animation to this thorny dilemma in the person of "Jack," a parolee who committed a horrific crime as a boy, a deed barely reconcilable with his shy, eager-to-please manner. With his sheepish, adolescent grin and wounded brown eyes, Jack (Andrew Garfield) initially seems prepackaged to tug at viewer sympathies and highlight the cruel manner in which ex-convicts are shunned and harassed by free society. However, director John Crowley takes a nervy approach with Boy A, gradually revealing contradictions and unsettling currents in Jack's personality and his past, even as he squeezes him between the dooms of public exposure and a violent death. An artistic and thematic inversion of Gus Van Sant's more daring, heady Paranoid Park, Crowley's feature traces a path trod by numerous socially conscious dramas about evil deeds and redemption, but it does so with a persuasive, moving tone of anguish and entropy.

"Jack" is the new alias of Eric, a notorious juvenile murderer who has been released from prison after fourteen years. His only friend is his genial parole officer, Terry (fierce, essential Scotsman Peter Mullan), who sees Jack as a surrogate son and an opportunity to create a success story. Terry shepherds Jack into the waiting jaws of the outside world, renting him a room and securing him a warehouse job, all the while emphasizing the need for secrecy. It's for his own safety. At trial, the prosecution described ten-year-old Jack as the embodiment of evil, and people are still howling for his blood. As he attempts to adjust to a society that reviles him, flashbacks reveal more of Jack's home and school life, his childhood friendship with his co-defendant, Philip, and what exactly the pair did that cast them as Public Enemy Numbers One and Two. Early in the film, we learn that Philip is dead by the time of Jack's release. Suicide, supposedly, but Jack's fears whisper otherwise.

Things seem to go well for a while. Jack's endearing Nice Guy vibe overcomes his shyness, and he makes friends among his co-workers. Michelle (Katie Lyons), one of his employer's secretaries, asks him out. In spite of some stumbles, the two begin a relationship that Crowley sketches with uncommon realism and warmth. Eventually, however, the artifice of Jack's new persona begins to fray at the edges. He has blind spots in his understanding of other people, as well as a tendency for outbursts of stammering emotion and disturbing violence. Then an unthinking act of heroism garners Jack a dangerous degree of publicity, and his situation goes from anxious to precarious. Much as his crime races to catch up with him, the flashbacks trespass on his reveries and nightmares with growing frequency and clarity: confrontations with school bullies, secret confessions with Philip, and a bloody eel on a gravel riverbank.

Boy A mines the concept of juvenile accountability with sharper focus and a more personalized sense of panicky free-fall than last year's Atonement. The flashbacks reveal secrets that, while not exactly mitigating, throw Jack's heinous crime into a new light. He and Philip were undoubtedly maladjusted, bloodthirsty little bastards, but were they inhuman monsters? And is Jack still a monster? Should one terrible childhood deed mark him forever, like some modern Cain? Crowley approaches Boy A as a straightforward tale of doom: Jack thinks he can outrun the past, but, alas, he cannot. The film is nicely assembled from this perspective, with a gratifying shot of rattling desperation. Garfield deserves a share of the praise for this tone, for while his early gawkiness seems too deliberate, he soon hits his stride. He lends heft and heartbreak to the portrayal, sharply conveying a man whose life is coming apart at the seams. Just as memorable and pivotal is Lyons, who delivers an unexpectedly engaging and complete character that shatters the confines of the usual conflicted girlfriend role.

Crowley relies on tight close-ups and a drifting, jiggling camera to convey a sense of urgency and disintegration. Such methods serve their purpose well in Boy A, although their prevalence lends an overcooked whiff to the proceedings. Likewise, the non-intuitive editing sometimes overstates the jumbled, jigsaw quality to Jack's post-release tribulations. Thankfully, Crowley weaves enough thematic threads into this gray, grave tale that it soars beyond its simple trajectory and occasionally self-conscious artiness. Boy A examines not only the the nature of accountability, but also the cruelties of sensational journalism, media celebrity, and the surveillance state. It finds time to point a finger at vigilantism, child neglect, classist humiliation, and the shamed silence so often erected around sexual abuse. It's a testament to Crowley's nimble hand that these disparate criticisms never feel affected or shoehorned, even as he maintains the film's focus on its primary theme: Is our civilization one that is even capable of extending genuine second chances? And if, so to who? The timelessness--and vexing persistence--of these questions makes Boy A a worthy endeavor, a post-Crime and Punishment for an era of anxious child psychology, correctional systems at critical mass, and spooky nature-or-nurture ruminations.

No Longer Your Film: The Shadow Hollywood of Mulholland Drive

[This post is a part of the Movies About Movies Blog-a-Thon, hosted by goatdogblog.]

[Note: This essay contains spoilers. It assumes a basic familiarity with interpretive approaches to Mulholland Drive, particularly the "Classical" reading. See the Lost on Mulholland Drive clearinghouse and the vital Salon piece, "Everything You Were Afraid to Ask About Mulholland Drive".]

Although Inland Empire comprises the most direct examination of movie-making (and -watching) in David Lynch's filmography, Mulholland Drive has always struck me as offering a slier, more cutting indictment of Hollywood and the mythology that clings to it. One of the most intriguing demonstrations of this impulse is MD's depiction--via an actress' guilty fever dreams--of the studio film-making apparatus as a rotten entity riddled with conspiratorial forces. Within Diane Selwyn's schizophrenic fantasy, strange men move to quash the ambitions of promising actors and rebellious directors, their motives hazy but always sinister. Wracked with despair over her own professional and personal failings, Diane gives a dread life to our collective paranoia about the film industry. The shadow Hollywood she summons is by all appearances occupied not with high art or even vulgar entertainment, but with control over messages, money, and especially lives.

There are numerous conspiratorial currents flowing through Diane's fantasy, some explicitly connected to her shadow Hollywood, some connected only through implication and suggestion. The paranoia that suffuses the fantasy rests on the premise that dangerous conspirators seek to harm or hinder Diane's avatar "Betty," her lover Camilla's avatar "Rita," and an incarnation of director Adam Kesher. Oddly, it is Adam that falls victim to the brunt of the conspiracy's wrath rather than Diane's own avatar. In reality, Adam is the man who initiated a relationship with Camilla, "stealing" her from Diane. And yet Diane casts him as a sympathetic victim in her fantasy, albeit one who finally crumbles and acquiesces to the conspiracy's wishes. In this way, Diane revels in the violence done to Adam's career, marriage, and body, while painting him as ultimately weak and beholden to powerful forces. Within her dream, she has her revenge, without placing Adam into the role of the villain. The real villains of her fantasy are the men of shadow Hollywood.

There are numerous acts of violence, enigmatic messages, and strange meetings in MD, but only a handful of these conspiratorial sequences alight directly on film-making. One such event is the meeting between Adam and Luigi and Vincenzo Castigliane, a meeting whose purpose Adam initially does not comprehend. It's an odd scene in a film filled with odd scenes, but its black humor evinces rich layers of meaning. The Brothers' names and Luigi's preference for the finest espresso implies that they are Italian, and the other participants at the meeting seem nervous around them, evoking the specter of organized crime and an attendant threat of violence. (Never mind that not all Italians are gangsters. This is Diane's fantasy, seen through the a haze of her Hollywood daydreams, and in such a world gangsters are always Italian.) More generally, it is not without significance that the Brothers are foreign or at least of foreign extraction. They are an alien influence reaching into Hollywood, that most American of institutions. In envisioning the men of shadow Hollywood, Diane swaps the more traditional slur of conniving Jewish money-men for that of Italian gentlemen-thugs, one of MD's numerous nods to hardboiled or noir traditions. Although, as we will see with the Cowboy, other conspirators are uncannily All-American.

The bifurcation of the Sicilian bogeyman into two separate characters points to two visions of the foreign meddler in Hollywood: Vincenzo, the all-business, agitated little bully; and Luigi, the aloof, contemptuous aesthete who can never be satisfied. Both of these aspects evoke familiar criticisms of the dream factory and the men who run it. Vincenzo is the ruthless shit who cares nothing for art (unlike Luigi, he wants "nuthin'" to drink) or the tastes of the public. Standing in opposition to him, Adam is a proxy not only for the compromised creator, but also for moviegoers. It doesn't matter what the artist or the audience wants; shadow Hollywood has its own schemes. Notice that Vincenzo takes no passion or glee or in imposing his casting demands on Adam; he seems to be a genuinely dour, miserable man. He and Adam are not engaged in an argument over art. Vincenzo is giving an order, an edict that fits into some broader (unseen) plot of the Castiglianes. Why must Camilla Rhodes be cast? Does it really matter? To repay a debt, to place a pawn, to satisfy the whim of some relation or billionaire admirer. Screw art; we're making movies here.

Luigi, meanwhile, is the sensitive neurotic, barely whispering his pained request for a napkin and repeating a blunt mantra (or Hail Mary): "This is the girl." As a European, he naturally regards American-made espresso as disgusting, just as all haughty, refined (read: effete) Europeans regard everything that issues from America as disgusting. Luigi's sin is that of every snob with a high opinion of his own taste, in that he presumes to know better than the masses. It is therefore all the more humiliating that he and his allies have significant power within Hollywood, or at least sufficient power to dictate the casting of Adam's film and to upend his life when he fails to comply. Those shifty Europeans revile us, and yet they secretly control our most beloved of institutions.

Vincenzo's final words to Adam--"It's no longer your film"--are addressed to the audience. In the context of its own paranoid mythology, MD was not made for us. Like all Hollywood films, it was made to satisfy elitist, foreign artistic tastes (Luigi) and to fulfill obscure, Byzantine plots that hinge on fortunes and favors (Vincenzo). Vincenzo could also be speaking to Diane, who is both the writer, director, and audience for the fantasy. The strange paroxysm that seems to overwhelm Vincenzo moments before this line foreshadows the eventual disintegration of Diane's dream. It also echoes Dan's collapse behind the Winky's, and "Betty's" seizure in Club Silencio. As a dream-creature, Vincenzo, like all the characters in MD's early sequences, is arguably a fragment of Diane. Given that Vincenzo is the unfeeling, tyrannical aspect of the Foreign Conspirator, his presence signals that Diane recognizes that she herself is an amoral manipulator, even while immersed in her delusions. Indeed, we eventually learn that she conspired to murder her former lover with the aid of a tow-headed Californian thug far removed from the Italian gangsters of her fantasy. Vincenzo is signaling to Diane in her role as fantasy architect--and to "Betty" waiting off-screen for her next scene--that she is losing control of the dream, that the bloody facts of reality are intruding. It is no coincidence that Diane herself is an interloping foreigner (Canadian) in Hollywood, one who has lost all interest in her art and initiated a sinister conspiracy.

After Adam refuses to bend to the Castiglianes' will, he suffers a dire retribution put into motion by the enigmatic Mr. Roque. The apparent control that the Castiglianes exert over the meeting with Adam masks the presence of another, possibly more powerful conspirator. Roque has the ability to "shut down" Adam's film in the middle of the shoot, indicating that his power extends beyond nudging casting decisions. Indeed, he is an almost ludicrously omnipotent figure within shadow Hollywood, able to turn a film production on and off like flicking a switch, although whether this is done by simple edict or through the control of the production's purse strings is not established.

Roque is a grotesque, confined to an archaic wheelchair, influential yet physically impotent. His tiny head in comparison to his body suggests the antithesis of a fetus: as intelligent and malign as a unborn child is stupid and innocent. He dwells behind a glass wall with a speaker box, which permits him to communicate when and how he chooses, highlighting his nature as a Hollywood power-monger and therefore a controller of messages. He is also, of course, one aspect of Dan's man behind the see-through wall, the "one that's doing it." Roque's room is dim ("half-night" as Dan says) and curtained, a visual echo of Lynch's other works in which similarly outfitted chambers often house non-rational forces, usually of a malevolent nature. (Has Diane seen other Lynch films? Do they exist within the MD universe? The mind boggles.) Within Diane's fantasy, Roque is an entity more alien than even the Castiglianes, and perhaps their master. Although a similar vessel for Heartland anxieties about Hollywood, he is no mere ethnic stereotype, but a monstrous monarch at the center of a vast hive, who only has to glare and mutter to enact his will.

It is also implied that Roque is involved in the attempted murder of "Rita". "The girl is still missing," states Roque. Which girl? Well, the amnesiac "Rita," we assume. Yet the daisy-chain of telephone calls initiated by Roque reaches eventually into Diane's (real life) apartment, where the phone rings and ring and rings, another unheeded signal to the dreamer that she cannot maintain this fantasy forever. From beyond his glass cage, Roque's influence reaches out to touch "Betty" in more than one way. If the plot to murder "Rita" is his, then he is the impetus behind the noir-tinged mystery that snakes through the fantasy. Without the car crash on the eponymous road, "Betty" never would have crossed paths with femme fatale "Rita": a knockout brunette with no name, no memory, a purse full of money, and a Key That Opens No Lock. Roque is also the agent that mandates Camilla Rhodes' casting, and punishes Adam when he does not comply. Roque not only has "everyone" associated with the production fired, but he also demolishes Adam's personal finances. A monstrous Hollywood gnome with sweeping control over money? Perhaps anti-Semitic caricatures run through Diane's fantasy after all.

The Cowboy, meanwhile, is a wholly different sort of caricature. His flawless, almost kitschy Roy Rogers regalia represents both the Western myth and Hollywood's conception of that myth. This strange creature--who calls to mind countless other sinister Lynchian entities--dwells in Beachwood Canyon, near the Hollywood Sign. He is a hermit meditating in the wilderness of SoCal suburbia under the shadow of its premier religious monument. Although Adam is at first reluctant to meet with the Cowboy, he relents because "it is that kind of day." His production in shambles, his marriage over, his finances wiped out, he seeks wisdom from an symbol of an older Hollywood, one untainted by cynicism or irony.

However, the Cowboy is no a sage within Diane's fantasy, despite his tendency for holding forth on philosophy and ethics in a folksy manner. His ghostly blond eyebrows (the absence of clear emotional signifiers) and obliquely threatening manner suggest that he is a force as cold and malign as the Castiglianes and Roque. Indeed, he too is a part of shadow Hollywood, perhaps even the herald or mouthpiece for Roque. Certainly, the men seem to be complements. Possessing a weirdly deformed and crippled physical form, Roque is confined to a glass room, hidden from the victims of his schemes. The Cowboy has a familiar appearance, although the incongruity of his presence in modern Los Angeles is unsettling. He resides in an open corral in a dark, suburban neighborhood, where he can easily be approached by invited outsiders. As one of America's most recognizable cultural archetypes, he is the religious icon that shadow Hollywood uses to convey its ultimatums, the whispering idol that warns of doom if the sinner does not repent his wayward behavior. Like Oz speaking through a spectacle of light and sound, Roque is the man behind the (transparent) curtain, employing a cinematic stock character (and thus a creature of light and sound) to impressively convey his demands.

The offer that the Cowboy poses to Adam suggests the deal that the Devil offered to Jesus in the wilderness. Just bow before me and the world is yours. Or: Just cast this actress, and the film is yours to make as you see fit. He offers nearly limitless artistic freedom in exchange for small concessions, his manner rendering the deal eminently reasonable. The Cowboy poses Adam's troubles as being rooted in "attitude," implying that the director's resistance to shadow Hollywood's edicts are not born of artistic credibility or ego, but an inability to go with the flow. Legitimate concerns about the independence of art are re-cast as trifling personal failings on the part of the objector, failings easily overcome by minor corrections in attitude. Critics who object to the influence of the outsider (the Castiglianes / Roque) on the artistic process are in need of personal adjustment. The question of the complaint's legitimacy is neatly diverted. This dynamic implies a critique of Hollywood's New Age public relations ethics, which reduces all conflicts to empty platitudes and matters of "negative energy." This in turn calls to mind the buzzwords of Scientology, and its success in constructing a genuine Hollywood conspiracy, or at least a sophisticated system for channeling influence and money.

When Adam and "Betty" (almost) cross paths on the set of The Sylvia North Story, there is a moment when Diane's fantasy brushes past a alternate, less tragic resolution. "Betty" has been escorted from her outstanding audition to the set of a more worthy film, perhaps to be introduced to the director. From across the set, Adam sees something in "Betty" that attracts him, at least artistically, and she senses his intrigue. The moment is an echo of the anecdote that Diane relates at Adam and Camilla's engagement party, wherein she was considered for a role in the real The Sylvia North Story. However, this is also the precise moment in the fantasy when Adam must make a decision about whether to assent to the Castiglianes' / Roque's / the Cowboy's wishes and cast Camilla Rhodes in his film. He bows to the demands of shadow Hollywood, and repeats Luigi's incantation: "This is the girl." The choice distracts him from "Betty," and shortly thereafter she must quickly leave the set to meet "Rita." The pair are meeting, of course, to investigate the apartment of Diane Selwyn, wherein a terrible secret lurks.

Within Diane's fantasy, nearly every misfortune that has befallen her traces back to the agents of the shadow Hollywood. Their machinations to ensure that Adam casts the "right" actress prevents the fated meeting that might have landed "Betty" the part. Shadow Hollywood is responsible for Diane's stymied career and therefore for every subsequent hard-luck pitfall. (It certainly can't be her lack of acting talent, for as we see in the audition, "Betty" is spectacular!) That the undeserving "Camilla Rhodes"--a blond ingenue representing the commodified aspect of real Camilla--landed the part is further humiliation. In reality, Camilla's talent drew her closer to Adam and a life of glamor, leading to resentment in Diane that soured into rage. According to Diane's twisted logic, framed by a life of glittering cinematic clichés and the disillusion of recent failures, all calamities originate from the shadow Hollywood conspirators. Diane's obsession with the outsized influence of Hollywood on her life evokes Middle America's buck-passing preoccupation with the industry's allegedly corrupting effect on the public. They, not Adam, split the lovers up. They scuttled Diane's career. They made Diane kill Camilla. It's never us, always Them: those conniving, soulless others that secretly run the dream-factory.

Elegy

2008 // USA // Isabel Coixet // August 19, 2008 // Theatrical Print

C - For approximately its first half, Elegy at least succeeds in being an engaging portrait of a relationship, banal in its details but oddly seductive in its execution. Forget that Ben Kingsley often seems to be acting in his own movie, or that his chemistry with Penélope Cruz is middling at best. It's hard not to thrill as the veteran works his witchcraft when he actually seems to be enjoying himself. With a creased Dennis Hopper lurking around to provide masculine wisdom, Elegy seems to arrive at a comfortable place, where skillful performers luxuriate in giving us a simple human story done well. The problem arrives when the admittedly juicy melodrama of an asshole libertine sabotaging his own happiness becomes insufficient grist for novelist Philip Roth and screenwriter Nicholas Meyer. At the point when the film started layering on the (sigh) terminal illnesses, I started to check my watch. Coixet's unconventional editing and genuinely inspired bits of sound design don't elevate Elegy above such movie-of-the-week turns, or alleviate the tedium of its lingering conclusion. The literate May-December romance was more heartfelt last year, when it was called Starting Out in the Evening.

The Last Mistress

2007 // France - Italy // Catherine Breillat // August 18, 2008 // Theatrical Print

B - If the mannered dullness of The Duchess of Langeais was a wincing blow to the fortunes of period erotic drama this year, The Last Mistress just might be its salvation, or at least a pleasurable redemption. Director Catherine Breillat meticulously assembles this tragedy of curdled love and molten lust with the obligatory production design opulence, but also with a clear command of the bitter-sour notes lurking within the material. Although The Last Mistress works within familiar genre conventions, it upends expectations with smoldering shocks and quiet gestures. Its most conspicuous flaw is the thin characterization that afflicts the French aristocrats populating its salons, opera boxes, and seaside castles. Thankfully, Asia Argento lends The Last Mistress the forbidden heat, wicked bite, and mysterious allure that it longs for. Breillat understands her star's centrality, and wields her like an assassin's dagger.

Bookending the film are scenes with the Vicomte de Mareuil (Michael Lonsdale) and Comtesse de Mendoze (Yolande Moreau), who serve as windows into the mentality of the Parisian nobility. The pair is preoccupied with one topic: the imminent marriage of angelic heiress Hermangarde (Roxane Mesquida) and rakish wanderer Ryno de Marigny (Fu'ad Ait Aattou). That Ryno is a notorious womanizer, socially unworthy of Hermangarde, fills the scandalized Vicomte and Comtesse with sanctimony and glee. Specifically, Ryno seems unable to give up his tempestuous, ten-year affair with a Spanish-Italian courtesan, Vellini (Argento). Much of the film takes place in flashback, as Ryno, desperate to win the approval of Hermangarde's sly, sweet grandmother, the Marquise de Flers, confesses the details of this forbidden relationship.

The film's characters—smooth young dandies and silver grande dames alike—are undeniably beautiful in their way, but often disappointingly one-dimensional. It's not an unforgivable sin (this is period costume drama, after all,) save perhaps in the context of Ryno. Too often, the witty devil that Ryno should be slips to reveal a dunderheaded victim of Vellini's curious charms, or merely a bland, pampered narcissist. The former might be intentional, as the film in part examines the way that addiction to illicit sex makes fools of people. The latter, however, is evidence of misplaced emphasis. Ryno just doesn't have the strength of character to serve as an engaging protagonist. It may be a casting issue: Aattou's porcelain androgyny doesn't really suit a worldly libertine. At any rate, Breillat compensates by relying on Argento to evoke the cruel, damaged, sex-hungry tone that makes the film thrive. Her Vellini is not the hero, or even the anti-hero, but she is the film's heart.

Indeed, it is Argento that makes The Last Mistress worthwhile, even dazzling at times. Vellini is far from the most beautiful woman in Paris—Ryno describes her as an "ugly mutt" when he first glimpses her—but there's a fire in her breast that everyone can sense and Ryno covets. Argento's rounded, boyish, mean features and strange, curved teeth suggest a woman brimming with contempt for social standards and the opinions of others. This makes Vellini all the more desirable, and it grants a primal intensity to her lovemaking. She is a riddle that Ryno savors but has no hope of resolving.

Agento walks a fine line by embarking on a full-throated, even frenzied performance. At times she veers past pained and collides into outright silliness. (One disturbing sex scene has her shrieking in such orgasmic anguish that it's a little hard not to giggle.) Still, there's a hypnotic completeness to the portrayal, a wholesale commitment to render Vellini as a physically and emotionally unified character, even as she bubbles with conflicting urges. She is a strange woman, but her behavior never seems strange in the moment. Consider a scene where Ryno lays wounded from a pistol duel. Vellini, previously venomously dismissive of Ryno's advances, suddenly lunges past the surgeon and hungrily licks the man's wound. Breillat and Argento make the gesture marvelously unexpected, but not confusing. The meaning is as clear as the moment is bizarre: Ryno's infatuation is now requited.

The lazy adjective "brave" gets tossed around whenever an actress of any talent bares her breasts on screen, even for a moment. What Argento does in The Last Mistress is a whole different ballgame: scenes of torrid sex that are only a shade removed from soft-core pornography. That this requires confidence on the actress' part goes without saying, but it also demands good judgment from both performer and film-maker. Is the scene merely prurient or does it serve to illustrate something significant about the character? (Can a scene be simultaneously prurient and utilitarian? I think so, and I think The Last Mistress has such scenes.) Breillat is engaging in voyeurism, to be sure, but her gaze is directed into the heart and mind. We are embarrassed at the sight of naked, rutting Vellini, not because we are ashamed of her carnal sins, but because Argento gives such a rattling performance that it offers glimpses of ugly, broken places in the noblewoman's inner world. It's no coincidence that Argento projects the most discomfiting, realistic sensuality in the most defeated, ruinous sex scene in the film. Ryno is, by comparison, merely a blank (albeit well-sculpted) prop.

While Breillat equates Ryno's sexual obsession with Vellini to a drug addiction, she also offers an assessment of sexual behavior that is more challenging than a mere depiction of human weakness. Through Ryno's confession to the Maquise, we eventually learn how such ferocious desire and bad blood blossomed between the couple. The tortuous path of their affair indicates that The Last Mistress is not the typical indictment of wealthy society its genre trappings might suggest. Rather, Breillat offers a more sobering and personal examination of the dynamics of lust. How does desire appear, so often unbidden and inconvenient? Can it evolve into genuine love? And if love vanishes, will desire survive, growing irresistible and cancerous in its absence? Breillat conducts these inquiries with such intensity, and with such a captivating instrument in Argento, that the film's narrative troubles--chiefly some confused storytelling in the final half hour--seem trifling.