Those summer nights...

Anyone who’s lived in a cold climate knows there are certain rites that seem only to transpire during the summer, and the briefer the summer, the more urgently those rites are conjured. In anticipation of summer, Criterion has released two films on blu-ray that brilliantly examine the sort of bacchanalian follies that accompany the coming season.

Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) was Ingmar Bergman’s first international hit, reuniting Eva Dahlbeck and Gunnar Björnstrand, the nimble, charismatic stars of Bergman’s A Lesson in Love (1954), which like Smiles, is a romantic comedy, a genre Bergman rarely worked in (in the cinema at least) despite his obvious facility. Set in 1901, thus taking just enough historical distance to emphasize how little the nature of romantic entanglements alters with shifts in social mores, the film is indeed very funny. It’s also, more characteristically for Bergman, sexy, poignant, and painful. Smiles on a Summer Night is funny precisely because it’s painful.

Fredrik Egerman (Björnstrand) is an attorney sliding into middle age, attempting to soften the blow by marrying a woman less than half his age. He treasures her more than he desires her. He has photographs taken of her that he admires with the pride of ownership. Or paternity. Fredrik also has a son, roughly the same age as his new bride, who studies theology, broods almost professionally, is agonizingly self-absorbed, and tries to seduce the maid (Harriet Andersson) with lectures on virtue.

Desirée Armfeldt (Dahlbeck) is an actress. Closer in age to Fredrik (Dahlbeck was only 25, but possessed a preternatural, very sensual maturity), she was once his mistress. These days she has a thing going with a married, mustachioed, clownishly egomaniacal military officer, but it seems to have run its course. (One of my favourite lines is spoken in venomous deadpan by the officer’s jealous, deeply tormented wife: “Men are horrible, vain and conceited. And they have hair all over their bodies.”) An unexpected reunion with Fredrik inspires Desirée to hatch a plan that will correct the current flawed romantic geometries. It all goes down in her wealthy mother’s country mansion. Fredrik and his wife and son, the officer and his wife, not to mention their lusty servants, are all invited. The plan involves wine infused with mother’s milk and stallion sperm, a duel, chambers custom designed for facilitating extramarital sex, and at least one attempted suicide. The suicide, incidentally, is a comic highlight.

The characters in Smiles are archetypes of a sort, types that especially recall Chekhov. Like Chekhov, Bergman fills out these types with loving details and idiosyncratic comic exaggerations that his superb cast executes with nuance and efficiency. The result is a film at once delightful and quietly knowing, about age, gender roles, heartache, and the tumult so often left in true passion’s wake.

Fat Girl (2001), perhaps the most perfect work from writer/director/provocateur Catherine Breillat, concerns the sexual initiations experienced by two sisters during summer holiday. The elder, more attractive sister, 15-year-old Elena (Roxanne Mesquida), meets an Italian law student. One night, in a disquieting, transfixing, all-too-recognizable bravura early sequence, he uses his powers of negotiation to shamelessly guilt-trip Elena into anal sex (anal, he promises, doesn’t count). The sisters share a bedroom in the family’s summer cottage, thus the younger, overweight sister, 13-year-old Anaïs (Anaïs Reboux), witnesses the entire transaction. She becomes an absorbing mirror.

Breillat’s camera seems always to be moving, but slowly, not prowling but studying, never intrusive, yet never strictly observational either. Fat Girl, which follows the events of this fateful summer to their abrupt and arresting conclusion, is built upon relatively few episodes, a model of concision, yet every sequence breathes: nothing is rushed. Breillat’s work repeatedly examines female sexual persona in a way that feels almost compulsively subversive, pushing equally against erotic sentimentality, male fantasies and feminist conventions with formal rigour, intellectual confidence and almost always, somehow, a sense of play. There are too many risks being taken in Fat Girl, too much spontaneity and exploration, for it to feel schematic. And I don’t know that Breillat’s ever found anyone who’s embodied her sensibility more acutely than Reboux, who was discovered by Breillat in a McDonald’s. Pretending that two posts in a swimming pool are her fiancé and lover, lifting her nightgown to examine her barely formed breasts and whisper to herself “putain,” letting her sister ostensibly comfort her by shoving a giant toast into her mouth, Reboux gives one of the most remarkable, unaffected and devastating performances of the last decade.

That's the way I Am Love goes

The folding Paris of Inception is impressive and all, but does it or anything else in cinemas this summer have anything on the rapturous images of spot-lit haute cuisine, lustful bodies entwined in sun-soaked idyll, or the magnificent architectures of Italian cities and Tilda Swinton’s face found in Luca Guadagnino’s I Am Love? Does it say something about the tendencies of grand spectacle in today’s adult fare that the beauty, scale and ecstatic reveries of I Am Love finally feel like a bit of a beard for a story that’s arguably even more ridiculous than that of Inception? Whatever the case, I’m hardly immune to this stuff, so please take my critical reservations with a grain of the finest sea salt gathered from the shores of France.

It opens in wintry Milan, where the snow is virginal and cozily all-enveloping and causes no chill. The family of an aging textiles magnate gathers for his birthday. The house is a labyrinth of luxury. As dinner is served we tour the Recchi family photos, the dusk-lit furniture, the collections of Morandis. After the meal the patriarch rises to speak, the only illumination being the hard light bouncing off the long dining table, an ominously glowing centerpiece around which all are seated for a surprise announcement. The old man declares that he shall promptly retire and leave his empire under the care of not only his son but also his grandson Edoardo (Flavio Parenti)—apparently it takes two normal men to replace this titan of industry. You might presume the younger Recchi was selected to counter the elder with a modern sensibility toward business. In fact, it’s dad who will soon gallop toward globalization—and immediately thereafter to the bank—while the son clings to the past and his probably idealized memories of gramps lunching daily with the sweaty labourers. As I Am Love continues, Edoardo proves to be hopelessly, even tragically, out of step with the events transpiring either openly or clandestinely around him.

The other, more discreet inciting incident in I Am Love’s riveting first act is the late arrival of Edoardo’s new friend Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini), another son of money, another naïve dreamer. He shows up to drop off a little something he prepared—Antonio turns out to be an inspired chef—before slipping away again into the night. Edoardo says he fell in love with Antonio—manly, Italian, platonic love, lest you get any funny ideas—after he tried his cooking. A similar sequence unfolds for Emma (Swinton), Edoardo’s beatific, hyper-organized, elegantly tailored, Russian-born mother, whose life becomes altered by Antonio’s visionary prawns, bathed in warm light, fresh herbs and glistening olive oil. Food is foreplay, followed by spontaneous shoplifting, and I Am Love, charging forward not only on the legs of Guadagnino’s colour-rich, zoom-drunk, almost cubist approach to coverage, but also the heart-pounding rush of the John Adams pastiche score, whisks Emma and the rest of us away to a hidden paradise of earthly delights straight out of Lady Chatterley.

High style locks into step with dizzy romance in I Am Love, and as long as Emma and Antonio’s erotic frolicking remains hidden from the twin forces of judging outsiders and sober storytelling, Guadagnino’s immaculate mise en scène, a glorious throwback to the heights of mid-century Hollywood melodrama—especially the films of Douglas Sirk—and mid-century European art cinema—especially the films of Luchino Visconti—carries us along on operatic waves of alluring symmetry that discourage consideration as to how deeply silly some of this feels. Then the third act starts and that silliness shoots up from below I Am Love’s delicate crust, delivering a combo-plate of familial apocalypse and overwrought wish fulfillment. The joys of I Am Love flutter ravishingly before our senses for a solid 90 minutes or so, but the pains of I Am Love burp upward in the last 30 and continue long after you’ve left the theatre. Should we recklessly throw ourselves into this fatty feast even if it all feels rather flimsy in the afterglow? Of course.

Crossing paths: Revanche on DVD

Revanche (2008) is Austrian writer/director Götz Spielmann’s first film to receive a proper release in North America. Its rhythm is strange and its images striking. It's immediately engaging. We have the story about the ex-con bouncer/thief in love with the Ukrainian dancer/hooker brushing against that of the childless marriage between the country cop and his stay-at-home wife desperate to connect. The parallels between these soon-to-be tangled threads are as fascinating as the obvious differences. There’s a stupid plan to escape that goes bad, a death that shouldn’t have happened, a reunion between a son and his ailing widowed father, and a lot of rage buried within the younger male characters, ready to burst apart and shatter lives. In keeping with its intertwining tales, Revanche boasts an impressive series of balances: street smarts with bucolic serenity, formal austerity with narrative density, noir mechanics with a strange, lingering optimism. Hints of The Postman Always Rings Twice (46) or Criss Cross (49) intermingle with a stoic humanism and somewhat romantic view of nature, making a cocktail that defies genre.

Spielmann is exacting in his compositions and the memorable arrangement of his sequences, such as the brief, single-shot scenes that take us from a character’s entrance to sex in the shower to post-coital naked pizza eating. Our reticent antihero—the bouncer/thief, played with immense presence by Johannes Krisch, looking like a bassist in a Norwegian metal band—has quite a lot of sex actually, and also chops a lot of wood for dad, yet there isn’t a moment here that feels superfluous. Indeed, if it weren’t for the quiet beauty and mystery of the film, and the emotional texture of the performances, Revanche would probably feel almost too carefully calculated. But Spielmann is tracing a process here, allowing grand, difficult, internal decisions to be arrived at and manifested, allowing the gravity and meaning of events to slowly seep in to his characters’ conscious minds, leading up to a truly intriguing variation on the whole idea of the revenge narrative.

Among the supplements here is Spielmann’s first film, the 45-minute Foreign Land (84), which like Revanche investigates the transformative effects of nature. It’s about a kid left at the family farm to learn how to work the land that will one day be his. Cows are milked, pigs are fed, tourists in funny outfits arrive. Not a lot happens, but this is a charming film with a special sensitivity to place and mood that should make viewers curious about what else Spielmann’s been doing in the decades between these two films.

Half-baked: Julie & Julia

We start with two Americans in postwar Paris, Julia (Meryl Streep) and Paul Child (Stanley Tucci), ardent foodies and happy in mid-life love, swooning over the richness of their new culinary and cultural digs while Paul shows his photos and continues his diplomatic career and Julia figures out what to do with her life between mouth-watering meals and afternoon delights—healthy appetites in the kitchen are matched, we learn, in the bedroom. Tucci’s terrific as always while Streep goes beyond deft impersonation, at her comic best and captivatingly sensual in a goofy sort of way. So far, so good. Or at the very least effortlessly diverting. If only it weren’t for the other half of the movie.

Nora Ephron’s Julie & Julia isn’t a bio-pic about Julie Child but rather an attempt to craft a diptych from two separate stories of self-realization, that of Child’s discovery of her finesse with cuisine and charisma with instruction and of Queens-based Julie Powell (Amy Adams) and her discovery that maybe she really is the writer she always dreamed she’d be. To say that the former trajectory overshadows the latter would be a gross understatement. Child is a beloved and singular cultural icon and influential author. Powell started a hit blog based on following Child’s recipes. More to the point, Streep and Tucci’s portrait of marriage is moving, complex and resonant, bursting with unspoken negotiations between lovers who each convey an ample sense of history both separately and as a unit. The sense of togetherness found between Adams and Chris Messina, who pays Julie’s amiably Tony Danza-like husband Eric, is by contrast vacuous, propped up by tedious boilerplate squabbles and cuddling on the couch. It doesn’t help that Julie herself, characterized here as openly self-centered and seemingly without much of anything of her own to say, is basically insufferable. And it takes some pretty lousy writing to make Amy Adams insufferable.

The concept of Julie & Julia is, I think, inherently flawed, and Ephron’s method of connecting Child’s memoir My Life in France with Powell’s book is largely facile and undernourished. Their stories evoke parallels in only the most obvious ways, and Ephron has a tough time sculpting a satisfying movie out of either of them. The imbalance is exacerbated by stereotypical romanticizing of Paris and dismissal of dreary old Queens, which, granted, is hardly the most beautiful of the five boroughs but is not without its appeal either. Julie & Julia seems all too content to stay on the surface of things, to be all glaze and no filling, and it largely comes down to Streep, Tucci and a few other stellar costars to make this at least half of a good movie.

Angels, ages, outliers (and beards): Gopnik and Gladwell seek the hidden histories in the lives of great and famous men

It was just over 200 years ago, on February 12, 1809 to be exact, that Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born to very different families on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Indeed, there are more differences between these two men than there are similarities—though the similarities are striking. It is above all mere history that has aligned them, through the essential randomness of a birth date, and through the synchronized peaks of their influence. Today, with questions of racial destiny and religious tensions reigning so prominently in public discourse, it’s not difficult to make a case for Darwin and Lincoln as the most influential and enduringly controversial figures in the West.

With Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life (Knopf, $27.95), Adam Gopnik has produced a captivating and concise volume that sifts through the myths, biographies and historical powers of both men to flush out the ways in which they speak most directly to the present. The book’s purpose is in one sense pragmatic; given the proliferation of writing on both men, Gopnik successfully offers overwhelmed readers an engaging and informative starting point. But if the book possesses a particular thesis of its own, one that illuminates these disparate lives through a single prism, it is “that literary eloquence is essential to a liberal civilization.” There were others who could’ve unleashed big ideas similar to Darwin’s and Lincoln’s upon the world, but, as Gopnik argues, it’s highly unlikely that anyone could have delivered these ideas in such a persuasive and meaningful way.

“A love of the grease and a feel for the gist, the habit of compromise even at the cost of absolute clarity…” such were the attributes of Lincoln’s famously monosyllabic oratory style. Darwin, meanwhile, “was one of the great natural English prose stylists… a man who had learned to cast his thesis in a succession of incidents so that action and argument became one.” Gopnik stresses the importance of Lincoln’s law practice and Darwin’s observational skills. He writes of their tender and yet challenging relationships with their wives, debunking some myths about 19th century sex life while he’s at it, and considers the grief over the loss of a favoured 11-year-old child each of them suffered. (And I love the fact that Gopnik compares Darwin to Colombo.) He draws parallels, addresses some lingering mysteries, and yet avoids over-working history for superfluous sweeping overstatement. “The past is so often unknowable,” Gopnik writes, “not because it is befogged now but because it was befogged then, too, back when it was still the present.”  

If I quote Gopnik a lot in my attempts to convey something of his readings of these two men, it’s only to give you some hint as to how Gopnik himself, a staff writer for The New Yorker, utilizes a special talent for articulating something as difficult to characterize as literary or oratory style, as well as providing a sense of how this style accumulates in complexity and resonates across the ages. And he makes you crave more. If Angels and Ages acquires a large readership, it will surely expand the readership of The Origin of the Species in kind.

“Coincidence,” Gopnik observes, “is the vernacular of history, the slang of memory.” It’s a statement that could slip easily into the foreplay of one of the many intellectual sucker-punches Malcolm Gladwell doles out in Outliers: The Story of Success (Little, Brown, $30.99). Gladwell, author of the best-selling pop provocations The Tipping Point and Blink, has set out to discredit the myth of the self-made man, the heroic figure who conquers adversity through sheer will power, vision and a dazzling array of innate gifts. Circumstances—class, era, race, cultural demeanor, opportunity—matter too, Gladwell reminds us, and if that sounds like common sense, it’s Gladwell’s willingness to actually prove it through one case study after another that forces the reader to reconsider their assumptions. At least for as long as it takes to read Outliers, which is not long at all. The book’s lively, diverse and colourful in subject matter, and so inclusive and methodical in tone you’ll feel like you’re taking a beginner’s business seminar: “Just as we did, then, with Bill Joy and Chris Langan, let’s start over with Joseph Flom, this time putting to use everything we’ve learned from the first four chapters of this book.” Ready, kids?

Gladwell exposes how hockey stardom is fixed from the time children try to get on teams; how Bill Gates lucked out by getting thousands of free hours on a computer back when they filled garages and were difficult to access; how the Beatles honed their craft thanks to landing that early and arduous Hamburg gig; how Robert Oppenheimer clawed his way to science superstardom even after attempting to murder his tutor; how plane crashes proliferate under air crews who come from countries where people typically speak in deference to superiors; how the Chinese rock at math because the way they verbalize numbers just makes more sense. These are all great stories—I was especially intrigued when Gladwell compares Oppenheimer’s career to that of Chris Langan, some freakin’ genius who lives in obscurity because, it would seem, he lacks good communication skills—and in a basic, anecdotal way, every one of them rings true.

The problem arises when Gladwell uses these stories as avatars. So many questions arise when we start to apply these generalizations to all cases. Why do some people fail when they actually have every single one of Gladwell’s ingredients for success? What exactly is success anyway, especially in, for example, the popular arts? Awards are a most dubious measure. Plenty of world famous and enduringly appealing rock bands never had their Hamburg—some of them, strictly speaking, didn’t even know how to play their instruments. And if Gladwell’s “10,000-Hour Rule” of practice is true, how do we apply it to, say, filmmakers? What exactly should they practice doing for 10,000 hours to become masters?

Make no mistake, Outliers is a terrific read. It feels like a carefully edited transcript of a really smart guy effortlessly holding court at a dinner party. It’ll teach you things, and make you think twice. Just be wary of accepting Gladwell’s over-confident conclusions. The promise of universality draws us in, but the success of a good story often lies in part on its singularity.

Walking after midnight: on Steps, sex, power, identity, and the mystery of Jerzy Kosinski

I first read Steps ten years ago. I knew nothing about the book or its author. I’d picked it up more or less randomly in a bookstore and found I’d gotten a dozen pages in before coming up for air. It was my first Jerzy Kosinski, and looking back now, it seems it must have really hooked me, because I know that by the end of that year I was traveling through Central and Eastern Europe with a stack of books that were at least half Kosinski. It felt appropriate to be reading this body of work, so startling in its exacting perversions and flights of savagery, while moving through a part of the world where people seemed always to be consuming such tremendous amounts of meat, and while I brooded over the end of what felt like an especially bloody century. I was very young and hadn’t yet realized that all centuries are bloody. By pure chance, it was also during this trip that I first saw Being There, the movie adapted by Kosinski from his own novel, which happened to be screening at a Prague cinematheque.

I return to Steps now because I’ve been meaning to and because I’ve long wanted to direct readers to this strange and, it still seems to me, kind of forgotten Polish-American author, one who was not so long ago such a sensation, as well as a source of much controversy, particularly concerning the authorship of his most acclaimed novel The Painted Bird. For many reasons Steps seems an ideal introduction to Kosinski, though it was long after reading it that I realized just how emblematic of Kosinski’s philosophy it was.

When I first read Steps, with its many very brief first-person anecdotes and tales spanning wildly diverse places, milieus, professions and situations, I’d just assumed its narrators were many. Much later I read Passing By, a collection of Kosinski’s essays, and noted that he kept referring to “the protagonist of Steps.” It hadn’t occurred to me that all the scenarios contained within this book could happen to one person. More importantly, it hadn’t occurred to me that one person could perform such a variety of actions, some tender, some cruel, some altruistic, some murderous. Like I said, I was very young. And I wasn’t yet familiar with the novels of Jerzy Kosinski.

The protagonist of Steps begins by recounting a story in which he enters a poor village to have his laundry done. When he goes to pick up his clothes a young seamstress eyes his credit cards as he shuffles his belongings around. She asks what they are and he explains that with these plastic cards one can buy whatever ones wants without using any money. He tells her that if she meets him later in secret he’ll take her away, buy her things, and she’ll no longer be poor. The episode ends with the protagonist simply fulfilling this vaguely sinister promise. The next episode reverses the power dynamic of the first. The protagonist finds himself on a small, impoverished island with no funds. Desperate and starving, he meets some tourists, older, unattractive women, who feed him but in exchange ravish his youthful flesh. These stories set the tone for all that follows.

Steps is about power and identity, about domination and metamorphosis. Nothing is fixed. Sexual desire is most characteristically described in terms of the desire to possess another. The narration itself is rigorously dispassionate, carefully isolating memory from emotion. So if my initial inability to register the novel as being the story of one person seems naïve or unobservant, my only real defense lies in the fact that the protagonist makes no effort whatsoever to unify his memories and experience with any overt sense of self-development or emotional build. And this is what makes the book, along with all of Kosinski’s best work, so fascinating, chilling in its detachment and depiction of oppression, moving in its proposal that a person can do or become anything he or she wants to. (Should I add here that Kosinski took his own life?)

The protagonist shifts consistently between voyeur—tellingly, he was a sniper while in the army—and instigator of action. In another early episode he works as a ski instructor at a resort near a tuberculosis clinic. At night he watches some of the other male instructors tryst with some female patients in the open area between their facilities. He describes their meeting in the moonlit snow: “The silhouettes touched and merged as if they were fragments of a shadow being mended.” The night and the distance renders the people into shadows; contact renders them into a single mass. Later the protagonist conducts his own affair with a particularly ill patient. She makes love to him by touching his image in her mirror; he later makes love to her by touching her photographed image.

Kosinski is not an author who finds sexuality banal. The routes to sexual contact seem infinite under his gaze. These routes are at times abhorrent, with incidents including deception, prostitution, bestiality, incest and rape. In one of the most fully fleshed out episodes, based on a real incident, the protagonist, again traveling in the countryside, discovers a woman whose been held captive in a cage by a farmer and alerts the police. However, before he does so he confesses, “there was something very tempting in this situation, where one could become completely oneself with another human being.”

In the book’s italicized intermediary passages by contrast, conversations between two lovers, the honesty with which sexual contact and romantic love is discussed is disarming, brave and often insightful. “You only know me in a certain way,” one lover explains, imparting upon the other the unavoidable, involuntary ways we tailor our identities for the view of others. This unknowability isn’t meant to invoke despair but rather to acknowledge the ways we enter into each other’s stories, touch each other’s lives and beings, and how we change, relentlessly, in spite of the dictates of memories and people who claim to have us pegged.

Sanguine properties: The Last Mistress

It says a lot about the almost singular subversion of The Last Mistress, not to mention the progress of Catherine Breillat as a filmmaker honing very particular themes, that for no less than half of the movie’s duration, we have the young, delicately handsome Ryno de Marigny (Fu’ad Ait Aattou) divulging the breadth of his impressive sexual biography to the Marquise de Flers (Claude Sarraute), an elderly woman and protective grandmother of Hermangarde (Roxanne Mesquida), the virginal and rather unhappy looking young beauty who’s to be Ryno’s bride. Alternating between Ryno’s measured recount and flashbacks to his tempestuous ten-year affair with La Vellini (Asia Argento), a sort of verbal seduction unfolds in precisely the context that would seem to forbid it most. But the Marquise assures us that she is still a woman of the 18th century, which is to say, a woman of the Age of Reason, now biding the end of her life in the Age of Romance. She’s worldly, and she’s game. She listens exquisitely. The year is 1835, the city Paris.

This also says something about how much the movies can still learn from the novel. Based on Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly’s 1851 novel Une vieille maîtresse, or The Old Mistress—the English-language title being a dopey compromise that deletes the dreaded term “old” from the promotional materials—Breillat’s eleventh and by far most expensive and glamorous feature possesses an unusual, bisecting structural elegance that compliments the intricacy of its narrative, one rife with erotic struggle, surrender and self-realization. It begins with Ryno entering Vellini’s boudoir for one last premarital fuck, which of course will not be the last by far. As we’re ushered back into the development of their affair, we see how deeply it’s rooted in the ecstasy of antagonism, with Ryno only winning the venomous Vellini’s affections after he’s been shot by her elderly husband in a duel. Once the bullet is extracted from his chest, Vellini rushes to his weakened figure to suckle the fresh blood. She feeds upon Ryno, as he, in his way, will upon her in turn. Her erupted lust is, you know, kinda repulsive. And totally hot.

The illegitimate daughter of a Spanish matador and an Italian princess, la Vellini is a social outlaw, undeterred by the local consensus that a 36-year-old, ostensibly homely woman leading a life of sexual abandon is deeply unseemly. As mapped out by Breillat and Argento, arguably the two most notorious bad girls of contemporary European cinema, Vellini’s trajectory is marked by aggression and orgasms—and, let me tell you, Argento makes the movie orgasm into some sort of new art form here. Vellini, with her defiant, devastatingly hard stares—the way she licks an ice cream cone makes the promise of fellatio at once enticing and scary—is the devouring one and thus, in a sense, the masculine half of the pairing, while Ryno, with his full lips and pale features, pursues more gently, playing the feminine. The overturning of traditional gender roles is itself a part of what makes their collision dynamic, and, as the Romantics would have it, destined for misadventure and courting peril.

Breillat’s shrewdest tactic comes in her balancing of formalities with recklessness, containment with the carnal. The production design is immaculate and softly hued, the costumes artful but largely understated, with the few flourishes counting for a lot in terms of character, and the camerawork, courtesy of Giorgios Arvanitis, who also photographed Breillat’s Anatomy of Hell and her masterful Fat Girl, is painterly—the painter, mind you, would have to be Goya—and presentational, with speakers frequently gazing squarely toward us as though posing for a portrait—which, of course, they are. The brazen qualities, the rawness of the movie, is kept largely within the confines of the narrative itself, while the directorial style is largely clean and only coolly confrontational. It’s a marriage made in the heaven preserved for shameless provocateurs, some sublimely seedy place where Breillat and Argento can recline with their feet on the table, while the rest of us watch, in shock, here and there, but in this case, more often in awe. The Last Mistress is pretty delicious.

Righteous Kill: cop buddies bugger the better sex subplot

Righteous Kill was written by Russell Gewirtz, the same guy who wrote Inside Man. Like the earlier movie, this serial killer thriller and rabidly macho buddy cop caper bristles with conflicted ambitions toward making something that’s both smart and base, a genre work for the sleaze hungry and the beard-strokers alike. It’s a tough gambit, especially without a director of Spike Lee’s shrewd audacity and style to help pull it off, but I’m actually impressed how relatively well it works, even if it all inevitably evaporates under the heat of its own sketchy conceit.

From the start we’re encouraged to see verge-of-retirement hard-ass homicide detectives Cowan (Robert De Niro) and Fisk (Al Pacino) as platonic lovers of unyielding fidelity. They literally shoot their loads side by each at the firing range, cheer each other on during cop baseball games, sing each other’s praises to anyone who’ll listen, even parrot each other’s deflective one-liners when separately grilled by the NYPD shrink. When early on the corny looking faux-CCTV video footage of Cowan confessing to going on an extended vigilante killing spree begins its piecemeal interjections into the drama proper we know that these old pals will follow each other to the precipice of destruction. It’s only a question of whether one will follow the other right over the edge.

The economy of characters in Gewirtz’s script is itself a source of dynamicism, keeping his leads surrounded by numerous closely-watching potential adversaries nearly all of the time: the younger detectives Riley (Donnie Wahlberg) and Perez (John Leguizamo), who begin to suspect that the “poetry killer” of various local scumbags must be a cop; the amiable but stern Lieutenant Hingus (Brain Dennehy, a highly welcome face, and one that’s aged into an uncannily resemblance to Milan Kundera), who has a good poker face but seems all too aware he’s got a loose cannon on his hands; and crime scene investigator Karen (Carla Gugino, a highly welcome everything), a girl who likes her sex extremely rough and is currently being obliged by Cowan, their proximity giving her access to his private life if not quite his inner life.

Director Jon Avnet, whose long resume includes jobs as, um, diverse as Fried Green Tomatoes and 88 Minutes, gets down to the grunt work from the get-go, keeping the camera whizzing around and the cuts a-flying like Tony Scott on auto-pilot. He’s hardly the most sensitive filmmaker, but he keeps things moving—whether they want to move or not. With this fidgety style, he can’t quite perform the subtle slight-of-hand Gewirtz’s script is crying out for, and to be fair I’m not sure anyone could. The big reversal is telegraphed pretty far in advance and once you catch on to what’s really happening in Righteous Kill you may or may not want to bother sticking with it—the movie slowly becomes about the clever reversal itself instead of the meatier themes of loyalty and justice it lays claims to.

More disappointing for me is the neglect of the Karen character. The most interesting thing in The Score was Robert De Niro’s girlfriend, played by the sorrowfully underused Angela Bassett. Likewise, the most interesting thing in Righteous Kill is easily De Niro’s relationship with Gugino, an enormously delicate negotiation of trust, sex and maybe, just maybe, love, or something like it. Gugino brings tremendous texture, sass and dignity to a character that, far from being a conventional love interest, could have been difficult or impossible for the audience to identify with. This being De Niro’s movie, it’s just as important that her character has the potential to tell us a lot about Cowan. It’s a shame then that her Karen gets more or less brushed aside as the film hurtles toward its big, sloppy, scenery-chewing climax.

Lust, Caution: Wei Tang goes undercover, Ang Lee makes worthy entry into the realm of sexually-charged cinema

One of the enduring deficiencies in movies centers around their use of sex. Signifiers of sex are of course everywhere in movies, yet nothing could be more rare than the genuine evocation of sexual experience, its breath and heat and smell and fumbling, or than genuine sexiness, whether conveyed subtly or audaciously. But above all, movies frequently fail to utilize sex as a way to help tell a story, to flesh-out a character, to add texture or specificity to the atmosphere—all the things that any significant aspect of any movie should be doing, which is to say actually adding to a movie’s richness instead of just filling it with empty activity.

Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution (Se, jie), based on a short story by Eileen Chang, has endeavoured to remedy this chronic deficiency. A Mata Hari tale set in Hong Kong and Shanghai between 1938 and 1942, Lee’s Golden Lion-winner, its title reading as some sort of warning road sign, is a broodingly paced and at moments heartsick evocation of youthful ideology up against virtually absolute power, with poorly organized thespians-turned-resistance fighters convincing a smart and rather fetching young actress (Wei Tang) to seduce and liquidate a high ranking government official (Wong Kar-Wai regular Tony Leung) guilty of collaborating with the occupying Japanese. One of the primary themes of Lust, Caution is that sex is never just a means to an end, and this goes not only for the movie’s protagonists but the filmmakers as well.

Usually when we declare a movie’s highlight to be its sex scenes we mean it as a slight, yet in the case of Lust, Caution the sex is so arresting, so powerfully rendered, and so deeply revealing of the duplicitous nature of the complex central characters that its something of a triumph for cinematic subtlety and animalistic spectacle both. A common complaint lobbed at Lee’s Brokeback Mountain is that its sex was somehow too subdued, too framed by a fussy, prettified mise en scène that’s managed to detach itself from the sexual immediacy. I’ve seen it only once, but it seemed to me that the sex in Brokeback simply stayed true to the nature of the basically old-fashioned nature vs. society tragic love story it wanted to tell, and I’d argue exactly the same thing in this new movie’s favour: the sex here is raw, cruel, intense, emotionally blurry and always uneasy, as it should be.

Leung, playing the most chillingly nefarious character I’ve ever seen him embody, is brilliantly menacing and totally compelling, at one moment possessing the charisma of an angst-ridden Bogart, at another, possessed by a brute urgency to crush his helpless desire for his immaculately seductive mistress. In the end however the story –and the movie as a whole– belongs to Tang, who proves to be every bit up to this exceedingly difficult role and generates much of the erotic charge purely through her relationship to Lee’s consistently carefully placed camera. She somehow manages to begin shaping her character from a place of absolute moral conviction and end in a place of dizzying compromise and moral ambiguity, her sense of self and purpose cracking apart.

Sure, Lee’s lighting can be excessively tasteful at times, and his pacing perhaps takes our willingness to let tension build of its own volition for granted –but I don’t think there are many other directors of his stature who could have brought such a combination of elegance and rapture to this story. He takes a lot of flack from some very good critics, but mainstream movies would do good to let a few more filmmakers of his flexibility, ambition and craft onto the studio lot.

Lady Chatterly: corporeal and class liberation, this time nice and slow

Based on John Thomas and Lady Jane, an earlier draft of D.H. Lawrence’s scandalous 1928 novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover –a draft most notable for being less didactic than its successor– French wrier/director Pascale Ferran’s Lady Chatterley certainly trumps all earlier attempts at adapting Lawrence’s tale of corporeal and class liberation. Pleasurably languorous in its unraveling, Ferran’s approach accounts for a broad spectrum of the sensuality and natural atonement Lawrence was championing. Landscape, seasons, weather and time; phallic, intricate flora; measured sexual exploration; a careful recognition of how closely environmental and spiritual disintegration are linked: all of these elements are woven into the mix here in what is a surprisingly absorbing two-and-a-half-hours of period adultery and unadulterated splendour in the grass.

“The body behaves in strange ways” is a conspicuous snippet from a conversation between several men near the start of Lady Chatterley, a film as much about the mutilation and emasculation of men by war and exploitive labour as it is about the oppression of social mores upon our erotic impulses. Clifford (Hippolyte Girardot) survived the trenches but lost the use of the lower half of his body. His impotence is poorly concealed by his authority over a mine and its underpaid workers. His wife Constance (the extraordinary Marina Hands) is, strictly speaking, surviving bourgeois wifedom, but is morbidly losing her sense of self-knowledge and vivacity. Thus its something of a miracle that she’s accidentally granted a glimpse of the gamekeeper Parkin (Jean-Louis Coulloc’h) as he bathes his naked, muscular torso out near his cabin in an isolated clearing on the couple’s property. One look was all it took –from here onward, it’s a seductively gradual progression toward a chain of secret consummation.

Broad-cheeked and freckled, Hands’ Constance conveys her awakening in graceful moments of distraction, curious private examinations of her own naked body, and a captivatingly lucid series of exchanges with Coulloc’h’s touchingly vulnerable Parkin, who resembles something of a more hawkish, work-hardened Brando. Whether it’s a simple cradling of a breast through crimson velvet, the gentle stroking of cotton-covered cock with the back of a hand, a vast palm spreading over a thigh quivering in stark white stockings, some frantic thrusting against the base of a tree, or the utter abandon of the lovers running naked and finally collapsing into sex in the warm summer rain, director and actors alike have conspired here to express freedom with an immediacy that binds raw experience with philosophical nuance. It’s also, needlessly to say, pretty sexy stuff.

Through the basic story here is of course the outline of 400,000 impossibly banal porn and soft-core Euro-skin-flicks –not to mention the era-spanning trilogy of forbidden love masterpieces composed of All That Heaven Allows (1955), Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (74) and Far From Heaven (2002)– Ferran manages to imbue it with thoughtful complications without burdening her film with too much polemic. Constance’s carnal desire is complicated by an equal desire to get pregnant. Parkin’s romantic needs are complicated by the irresistible call of his own solitude. Clifford’s role as the repressed master figure is complicated by his own tragedy. The viewer is able to find sympathy for each of these characters and still become swept up in the thrust of Lawrence’s argument for a balance between the dictates of the body and the mind, an accomplishment to be applauded.