Before he was inspirational Abraham Lincoln, before he was ruthless Daniel Plainview, before he was terrifying Bill the Butcher, Daniel Day-Lewis licked a guy’s neck.
And not just a quick and gentle flick, but a slurp, a sexy and transgressive slurp so iconic that it’s the image that appears on the cover of the new Criterion Collection edition of Stephen Frears’ “My Beautiful Laundrette.”
Advice to romantic couples: I know it seems romantic and exciting to pull a “Before Sunrise” and agree to meet that new flame at a prearranged time and place, but play it safe and exchange numbers. Get their email address. Share Google Calendars.
Otherwise it can lead to a lot of misunderstanding and confusion, and romantic melodrama in the case of “3 Hearts,” the well-acted but overwrought French film by director Benoit Jacquot (“Farewell My Queen”). The film, now out on Blu-ray from Cohen Media, throws a mountain of complications (some self-inflicted) between its couple, and amps up the stakes with enough ominous music and narration to make us wonder not only if they’ll stay together, but if they’ll survive. It’s like a soap opera as directed by Christopher Nolan.
Sylvie (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and Marc (Benoit Poolevorde) have both missed their train back to Paris. Meeting in a cafe, they end up walking and talking around town till dawn. It’s a strong scene, both actors suggesting the nervous thrill of making a connection when they least expect it to happen.
They make a plan to meet back in Paris, but are thwarted by circumstances. Plus, Sylvie is unhappily married, and decides to go with her husband to his new job in Minneapolis, which is depicted in the film as a sort of frozen purgatory. (Guys, it’s a really nice city!) Unsure what went wrong, Marc moves on, eventually starting a gentle courtship of one of his clients, Sophie (Chiara Mastroianni). They get married.
And it turns out Sophie is Sylvie’s sister.
For the first hour of “3 Hearts,” Marc is unaware of the connection, but we are, and Jacquot builds tension as he just misses seeing evidence here and there. In the second hour, Sylvie comes back to France, and the suspense comes from wondering whether Sophie will find out, and what Marc and Sylvie will do.
Jacquot squeezes every drop of melodrama out of his preposterous story, shooting “3 Hearts” as if it were a thriller, full of meaningful glances and sudden stings of music, the nervous Marc seeming less like the fulcrum of a love triangle than a guilty man trapped in a film noir.
The overhyped tone feels at odds with the relatively grounded performances, especially Gainsbourg as the cool but soulful Sylvie, and Mastroianni as the kind, devoted Sophie. The great Catherine Deneuve is also in there as their mother, but is given surprisingly little to do. I think we could have become invested in their stories without the histrionics.
Why isn’t “Zero Motivation” a TV show? I don’t intend that as a diss, although I wasn’t that taken with Israeli writer-director Tayla Lavie’s debut film. But the movie clearly yearns to be a workplace comedy dramedy like “The Office” or “Orange Is the New Black.” It’s even chopped up into three discrete 40-minute episodes — um, “stories.”
Last night on Twitter, Vulture film critic Bilge Ebiri posed the question: “What film would you like to live in?”
I don’t know if I have a good answer, other than “Whatever the opposite of ‘Hard to Be a God’ is.”
“We’d had a revelation. This is the direction American movies should take.”
That was the late Roger Ebert, tweeting about the rapturous audience reaction to Bob Rafelson’s “Five Easy Pieces.” And he was right — the 1970 film did point the way for a lot of American independent film to come.
The Criterion Collection first released the film on laserdisc 25 years ago, and again as part of a great 2010 boxed set of films by BBS, the independent company started by Rafelson and Bert Schneider that produced “Pieces,” “The Last Picture Show,” “Easy Rider” and more — all quintessentially, almost self-consciously American stories. Now it’s finally out on its own this week in a lovely Blu-ray edition.
***FILM STILL DO NOT PURGE*** Camp X-Ray 2014 Kristen Stewart
“This is a war zone.”
At one point in Peter Sattler’s drama “Camp X-Ray,” a commanding officer (Lane Garrison) says that to a group of new recruits who have arrived at Guantanamo Bay to become guards for the “detainees” held indefinitely there. He intends it to remind the soldiers that, though their duties consist of cleaning floors, serving meals and watching prisoners day after mind-numbing day, they should consider themselves on a black-and-white battlefield, and the detainees their enemies.
But the statement comes true in another way, as Sattler shows how life in Guantanamo mirrors the uncertain gray of the War on Terror. “Camp X-Ray,” now out on DVD from IFC Films, could have been a political polemic, of course. But writer-director Sattler keeps the drama small and intimate, between two people, focusing on the minutiae of daily life inside the prison and letting us draw the moral implications.
Some have criticized Mauritanian filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako’s Oscar-nominated film “Timbuktu” for, amazingly, going too easy on jihadists.
The achingly beautiful film, out on DVD this week from Cohen Media, looks at life under jihadist rule in a small community in northern Mali. The Muslim extremists who rule the town with AK-47s and arbitrary rules are indeed presented as complex human beings, not cartoon villains.
But it’s those glimmers of humanity, of normalcy, that make the cruelty and brutality of life under jihad so piercing for the viewer. Sissako could have made a polemic, but instead the film feels like a window on how life is lived halfway around the world.
In 1994, Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn made an acclaimed movie out of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” called “Vanya on 42nd Street.” Over 20 years later, they’ve made their next movie together.
Someone familiar with their process might ask, “Why so soon?”
“Governments may change. But the police remain.”
That line seems chilling, a blood-curdlingly neat summation of the politics of repression and control in regimes everywhere. But what’s unsettling about how the line is delivered in Costa-Gavras’ “State of Siege” is that the speaker doesn’t mean to be sinister. A “consultant” for Latin American police departments working on behalf of the CIA, he’s merely describing his business, and how business is always good.
MAGICIAN – 2014 FILM STILL – Orson Welles – Photo Credit: Cohen Media Group
Comedian Todd Barry uploaded a video to YouTube recently. It was a 1982 clip of David Letterman calling an 18-year-old Barry as part of a “Viewer Mail” segment. What’s fascinating about the clip is that, as a teenager, Barry acts and sounds pretty much exactly like the extraordinarily dry, sarcastic stand-up comedian he is now. It was all already there, in a teenage boy living outside Fort Lauderdale, waiting to be developed and discovered.
Chuck Workman’s Orson Welles’ documentary “Magician” isn’t a great film – I’m tempted to call it “Workman-like” for its dutiful arrangement of film clips and talking heads interviews. The film played at the Wisconsin Film Festival and is now out on Blu-ray from Cohen Media. But it’s fascinating to see that Welles was Welles well before “War of the Worlds” and “Citizen Kane.” And he was Welles long after the world wanted Welles.
Madison Movie 