The Well Digger's Daughter (Thursday, July 12, 2012) (63)

Perhaps best known for Claude Berri's two 1986 adaptations of his novels, Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring, Marcel Pagnol remains one of the most important romantic writers and filmmakers of the pre-War era in France. Described by Jean Renoir as "an author of genius," Pagnol mostly wrote about early-mid-twentieth century rural France and all the colorful, modest and immodest people who live there.

Daniel Auteuil, who played Ugolin, the stubborn farmer in Jean de Florette, makes his writing and directoral debut with an adaptation of Pagnol's The Well Digger's Daughter, a light story that seems to fall in perfect like with the films of Berri, not to mention the lighter fare of Renoir or Pagnol himself.

Pascal Amoretti (Auteuil) is a very proud well digger in southern France. His devoted daughter, Patricia (the absolutely gorgeous Astrid Berges-Frisbey), takes care of him and his passel of young kids now that the mother is dead. Due to some quick economic figuring, Patricia had been partly raised in Paris by a rich lady and only came back south recently. Because of her brief flirtation with bourgeoisdom, she tilts her head a bit too far up and has a slightly fancy air about her.

She meets Jacques Mazel (Nicolas Duvauchelle), the son of the local grocery store owner and a dandy and a total snob. He woos her and she gives in quickly -- and they have a quick fling in the hay loft. He is then sent off to War (WWI) suddenly and is unable to tell her he loves her, etc. She becomes doubly sad, not just losing her boyfriend, but also because she gets pregnant from their tumble.

Pascal and her go to the Mazel house to ask for help, but they turn them away, seeing them as gold diggers. When news arrives that Jacques has died in battle, Pascal sets himself to raising his grandson with pride in his family and a bitterness for others.

There is a lot of discussion here about classism, sinful pride and snobbery and how it comes in all shapes and sizes from all directions. At first the Amorettis are treated badly by the Mazel's for being poor, but then Pascal responds by treating them with contempt for being out of touch. Jacques and Patricia's relationship, though brief, is filled with each one trying to gain upper-hand through money, body or psychology.

This film plays mostly as a charming chamber piece, light and funny at times and melodramatic at others. It is a very good movie with a seemingly timeless story, although it is not really brilliant and feels ultimately small and sometimes too shallow. Still, it's enjoyable and done in a very clean, naturalistic way.

Stars: 3 of 4

Take this Waltz (Saturday, June 30, 2012) (61)

Canadian dynamo actress/writer/director Sarah Polley's first feature film Away from Her is a very interesting, personal look at love and devotion during Alzheimer's. The film has the decency and carefulness of Atom Egyoan, a director Polley worked with in the past as an actress, and shows a tremendous amount of restraint and talent. In her second film, Take this Waltz, Polley looks again at love and devotion, although this time from a younger point of view. One could see this film as a "prequel" to Away from Her, as an examination of a couple struggling to stay together. 

Margot (Michelle Williams) is a woman in her late-20s/early-30s who lives with her loving husband Lou (Seth Rogan). They lead a rather typical young urban life (in Toronto, natch), where she writes travel guide books and he is a cookbook author. On a visit to a tourist destination she meets a guy to whom she's immediately attracted. Lo and behold, it seems he's her next-door neighbor, Daniel (Luke Kirby). The two flirt for awhile and end up beginning an affair together. 

Margot, who never expected to fall out of love with Lou, is suddenly faced with an existential dilemma about the future of her marriage. We see how happy she is with Daniel and how hum-drum her married life is. 

Polley has a really nice style and a very careful and visually connected presentation. She tells much of the emotional story through simple camera angles and compositional elements. At one point while Margot is struggling with her feelings for the two men, we see a straightforward shot of the married couple on two sides of the kitchen window. She's inside with (diegetic) music playing, while he sits outside on the porch, cut off from her literally and emotionally. 

Later, we see Margot and Daniel on a date in a carnival tilt-a-whirl. Polley shoots the pair from inside the car, so they stay in the shot, while the rest of the world literally spins around them. Both of these shots are very clever and translate volumes of emotional material efficiently. This is the touch of a great director who is able to convey deep feelings in a naturalistic context without the audience noticing. 

A strange recent trend in (Canadian) cinema is not knowing when to end a film -- or ending it a whole scene or section too late (see Heartbeats and Incendies). Polley suffers a similar fate as she adds on an unnecessary coda that shows Margot in the months that follow her decision about the two men. This does serve to tie up the story in a very neat and tidy way, and makes her personal journey a slight bit more complete, but it really just gives more information that doesn't help us understand her psychology more. (There's also a totally silly over-the-top sex montage that is more laughable than powerful.) The film would have been much cleaner and tighter without this postscript. 

Still, this element is mainly a writing issue (the script is also by Polley) and doesn't really take anything away from the very good picture that precedes it. Polley is clearly a very talented director and seems to have an independent vision for filmmaking and story telling. I very much look forward to her next film  -- and hope she knows when to stop it at the right time.

Stars: 3 of 4

You Sister's Sister (Friday, June 15, 2012) (56)

In her last feature, Humpday, Lynn Shelton examined male sexuality and friendship in a very mumblecore way (though it was much more polished that a true mumble). In this film, Your Sister's Sister, she comes back to look at relationships between brothers, sisters and friends and how sexuality might be a silly cultural construct that ignores an emotional human element. Both films suffer from sometimes silly writing decisions, but Shelton is clearly a great director of actors and creates interesting relationships and moments on screen.

At a memorial service for his dead brother, Jack (Mark Duplass), loses his temper at some of the mourners. His best friend and his brother's widow (or was she a girlfriend?), Iris (Emily Blunt), tells him to go to her father's vacation home in the wilderness to cool off for a few weeks. He rides his bike out the place (it's Seattle, so that's normal) and when he gets there he discovers Iris' half-sister, Hannah (Rosemarie DeWitt), is already there, getting over the pain of her long-term lesbian relationship that she just ended. They're awkward at first, but settle in to drinking and talking about their respective issues.

At the end of that long night, they decide to fuck, even though Hannah is gay and Jack is really in love with Iris. The next morning, Iris comes to visit Jack (not knowing Hanna is there) and the three of them proceed to hang out there for a few days or relaxation. Issues of love and sexuality, betrayal and coming to peace with past mistakes all come up and are worked through.

This is a very nice independent movie filled with some really great acting and great interpersonal quiet moments. Shelton clearly knows how to get actors to do what she wants them to do, to act naturally in strange situations. She also has a very interesting, slow touch, letting shots last for a bit longer than you might normally see in other movies, letting moments sink in a bit deeper. Strangely she seems to either be bad at or unconcerned about framing and composition, as almost every shot is either trite or just weirdly random and neither balanced, nor interestingly asymmetric. (I think it's more that she's just bad at composition because there doesn't really seem to be a point to these clumsy shots.)

I'm always a bit weary of liking Emily Blunt too much, because she seems like too big an actor for me to be very interested in ... and yet, most of what she does is small stuff like this, so I'm really being unfair. Still, she wins me over every time and I fall a bit in love with her. She's got great comic timing and seems heartfelt in her more serious speeches. She's a great match for Duplass and DeWitt here, both of whom are natural and warm. This is a very good trio; a group we wish were our friends we could hang out with in an island cabin.

There is an annoying sentimental ending that really doesn't do much to add to the story, but, other than that, this is a very gown-up post-mumble movie that deals with growing up and putting away childish things. Shelton clearly has chops for some things, but she should work on small elements like her writing and composition. I hope she improves those things -- if she does she will make great movies!

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Goodbye First Love (Sunday, April 22, 2012) (42)

There's something about Mia Hansen-Love's films that just don't work and don't connect for me. Her last film, The Father of My Children, never really came together and seemed like a good movie with a bad script and an unpolished concept. It's clear that Hansen-Love is a talented director (although I can't say yet that she's more than just merely "talented"), but I would say that she's a mediocre screenwriter and that her films suffer from garbagey melodrama that connects more to banal ideas of "romance" than to any real-world in which her stories take place.

Such is the problem with her new film, Goodbye First Love. It's the story of a high school girl, Camille (played by the fetching Lola Créton), who has a deep love for her teen boyfriend, Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky). He's a few years older than she is and when he forgoes college for a shapeless trip to South America (the French love Ché!), the two lose touch. She takes this very hard and tries to kill herself (natch) and then comes out of the hospital without the lust for life she previously had.

She then goes to architecture school and begins to work for her professor, Lorenz (Magne-Havard Brekke), who she also starts to sleep with, date and move in with. He's an older Norwegian man with an ex-wife and kid in Berlin who loves Camille's sensibility and reserve. Meanwhile, she struggles with her never-ending love for Sullivan and the constant wanting what she can't have.

I guess this isn't really the kind of movie I would ever relate to. I don't go in for sentimentality much and never really understand stories like this. For me, the concept of "first loves" is trite in the deepest possible way, and something that is more forced on us by gossip magazines and "girl culture" than by anything particularly psychological or human. What the hell is so special about Sullivan for Camille? He seems like a typically nice, distant and youthful boyfriend and their connection is much more suggested (by the fact that she can't ever get over him) than shown to us. When she ends up with Lorenz (as gross and cliche as it is to fuck your professor... seriously), it's maddening that she can't just be happy with him, but longs for Sullivan.

Herein lies an interesting dilemma for me. If film viewing is really an experience of identification and alignment with certain characters, it's impossible for me to connect to this film because I'm supposed to identify with Camille, but I can't because I think she's a fastidious moron. Meanwhile, I understand that many people (most people) would totally align with her because of how they're wired emotionally.

This leads to a bigger problem about the film, buried in the script, which is that Hansen-Love really doesn't do much to link us to Camille other than giving the briefest of outlines of her character. We only see the biggest moving parts of her persona, namely that she's 17 at some point and madly in love with a boy. This shorthand functions as the only information we get about her. For many this is enough to totally understand everything she feels at all moments. For others, like me, this seems under-written and under-developed.

Hansen-Love is truly a good director and is able to show a pretty movie with a nice use of technical factors. She is, however tripped up by her reliance on middlebrow scripts that don't show her skills as well as possible. I hope she continues to grow and make better films in the future.

Stars: 2 of 4

The Deep Blue Sea (Tuesday, April 10, 2012) (36)

Filmmaker Terence Davies makes really beautiful, interesting and eerily personal melodramas and psycho-sexual dramas. He's clearly inspired by masters of the genre, like Douglas Sirk, but also imbues his films with an organic normalcy that you don't find in some of the great 1950s melodramas, which highlighted physical beauty and colorful technical details, functioning almost like fairy tales. Davies' pictures are gritty and bleak, mostly set in post-war England (Davies grew up in 1950s Liverpool, one of the bleakest places ever imagined by industrial-era people), and mostly dealing with impossible love, the burden of memory, and the general sense of dissolution entropy.

The Deep Blue Sea, adapted by Davies from a play by Terrence Rattigan, opens with a few big crane shots of post-war London, its gray rubble and sad honor made lush by such a classic technique. Yes, these grand shots foreshadow the pain and destruction that is to come, but they also invoke some of the more memorable shots of classic high melodramas (think of the romance of The Wind Will Carry Us).

This is the story of Hester Collyer (Rachel Weisz), a woman who marries an older, more-well established man, Sir William Collyer (Simon Russell Beale). She has a young lover on the side, Freddie Page (Rom Hiddleston) whom her husband knows about. Sir Williams lets his wife cheat, because he knows their marriage is already a bit non-traditional (due to their ages), and because he's madly in love with her beauty and mind.

Hester, on the other hand, is uncomfortable with the situation and decides to leave her husband, throwing away his money and status, for the upstart Freddie. The only problem is that, for Freddie, the relationship was perfect when she was a married woman and he was merely her lover; he doesn't really want to be with her all the time, as he deals with his post-war troubles (PTSD, bleak job prospects, poverty). After she throws herself into her lovers arms, she finds that she might have ruined the thing she had going before as well as that which she was trying to create.

The story is mostly told in flashback, after Hester has seemingly ruined her life, and Davies explores the concept and weight of memory in a beautiful formalist fashion. Most of the film is shot, by Florian Hoffmeister, with very low lighting, making most scenes somewhat obscured and muted. This not only translates a sort of warmth and nostalgia, but also suggests that Hester's memories of the events are less than totally clear. Living in each moment, she might not have seen everything clearly at the time, and might have a somewhat overly emotional feeling about them now. There is also an interesting break between moving cameras in the present and static cameras in the past, a suggestion, perhaps, that our memories are very specifically fixed and difficult for us to understand completely.

In the past, with films like The Long Day Closes and Distant Voices, Still Lives, Davies used juxtaposition and montage beautifully to tell a story from disparate elements and strong contrasts. The cutting style here is much more naturalistic and human (less artistic), but still beautifully helps to tell the story in a particular way. Davies, more than most other directors working today, uses editing and shot sequence in an efficient and haunting way to tell a story from a narrative point of view, but also from a psychological one. We see jumps from one moment to another, sometimes creating surprisingly strange connections between two elements, only explainable through the character's innermost feelings.

As much as it is a riff on the melodramatic form, the film feels much more set in our world than some of the great works by Sirk and Delmer Daves. It seems to be less dreamy and more tied to our human experience. Those classic films seem to function on pure emotion, even if they have cynical social commentary in them, whereas this one seems connected to our world as a gritty drama. This is really a romantic short story, told in a melodramatic style.

The most evocative question this film leaves me with is whether Hester is a response to the stereotypical trope of women who turn their good lives into bad ones through their sexuality (like Jezebel) or if she is merely a pawn in the bigger societal problem of women necessarily depending on men. Is she pushing back against a system in which she has no rights, or is she a victim of that system? Is it her fault that she got into her complicated relationships or is she just a symbol for the post-war degradation of English (or world) culture.

Stars: 3.5 of 4

Bellflower (2011) (Wednesday, March 8, 2012) (160)

I'm always a bit suspicious of movies that are hailed by the press for being made on a shoestring budgets because that's way too inside-baseball for me and says nothing about how good the film is -- and most of them are terrible. Such was the case when I first heard about and saw trailers for Evan Glodell's Bellflower. It was made for almost no money over the course of a long time while writer/director/producer/editor Glodell and his co-stars Jessie Wiseman and Tyler Dawson helped to scrape money together to get it made. Big freaking deal, I thought.

Then I saw the trailer, which looked like a silly Mad Max, post-apocalyptic story of cars and motorcycles with lots of fire, explosions and blood. Hmm -- doesn't look promising. Then I read a few synopses of the film: Two friends spend all their free time building flame-throwers and weapons of mass destruction in hopes that a global apocalypse will occur and clear the runway for their imaginary gang "Mother Medusa". Every single article or interview said the same thing (so did Netflix). So when I finally watched the movie, I was shocked to find that this summary has almost nothing to do with the actual film (which makes me think that most people who write about movies don't actually watch them but just borrow from press releases ... written by publicists who also don't watch movies).

The only elements that are correct is that it's a movie about two friends, they build a flame thrower and twice mention an imaginary gang called "Mother Medusa". But that's sorta like saying Casablanca is about a drunk American who hates Nazis more than his ex-girlfriend's husband. It really misses the whole point of the film.

Bellflower is named for the street in LA where Woodrow (Glodell) lives. He's a pretty normal hipster with unclear direction, hanging out at bars and building machine stuff with his best friend Aiden (Dawson). They moved to LA for no particular reason, but are a bit obsessed with Mad Max and other motor-themed apocalypse movies. They are trying to build a flame thrower, though it's not clear why, and they love tinkering with cars and motorcycles.

One night they meet Milly (Wiseman) at a bar along with her best friend Courtney (Rebekah Brandes... who might not be able to act but is totally gorgeous). Woodrow and Milly fall madly in love and go on a first date... to Texas. Something about Milly makes Woodrow a tough guy and he starts making crazy decisions and getting in brawls. After a few weeks together they stats to fall apart, and he catches her in bed with another dude, leading him to start sleeping with Courtney. All this time, Woodrow has fantasies about fast cars, blowing shit up and violently getting revenge on Milly.

This is a bit of a post-mumblecore movie (considering the budget and the amount of young people fucking and talking about relationships), with a bit of a fantasy twist. It's a pretty clever pastiche -- the exact kind of movie Woodrow and Aiden would make if they were shooting movies instead of building a flamethrower. Glodell's clever script turns from romantic drama to post-apocalyptic story, but only in Woodrow's mind. This is not an end-of-days story, as the synopses would have you believe, this is a story of love and loss and a dark fantasy that comes out of the contemporary world.

Yes, it was made for almost no money, but it looks great and has a very nice and relatable lost-Generation-Y narrative. It should be seen -- but not for the explosions and flame throwers or Camaros painted matte black (cool), but because it's a pretty good movie and well made.

Stars: 3 of 4

W.E. (Friday, February 3, 2012) (7)

I worked in international auction houses for 12 years of my life, including at Sotheby's, where in 1998 they held the sale of the property from the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Though I was not there at that exact time, I worked with dozens of people who spoke about how amazing the lines were to get into the exhibition and how ridiculous the crowds were to see all their tchockes. I also saw other big and silly exhibitions of crap from famous people and how people went nuts for them. I can promise you that Madonna has no such insight into such things and thinks such auction are romantic and wonderful. They're not. They're sad and boring.

But the framing device for her film W.E. is the 1998 auction, where Mohamed Al-Fayed sold all sorts of stuff owned by Edward and Wallis, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Into this auction exhibition dives Wally Winthrop (Abbie Cornish), a bored Upper East Side housewife who was named after the Duchess and now lives with her ex-pat English shrink husband on Park Avenue. She feels some connection to her namesake, although we don't totally know what it is, aside from "something womanly" and ersatz feminist.

We are thrown back and forth between Wally's World and the lives and romance between Wallis (Andrea Riseborough) and Edward (James D'Arcy... that's Mr. D'Arcy to you, ladies). We see how she had a rough first marriage to an American soldier who beat her, how she was married to another American businessman who moved them to London and how they met as she was climbing up the social ladder of London (and being a rather loose woman along the way). Madonna presents Wallis as a self-confident and smart woman, but also strangely as a foxy one totally aware of what she was doing the whole time.

The royal story is a bit dull, if fairy-tale-romantic, so we spend lots of time in the '90s with Wally, whose husband is a dick and who can't figure out how to pass her time. She ends up going to the Windsor auction exhibition a few dozen times and spending hours there. I can speak from personal experience that this is all but impossible as auction exhibitions are some of the most boring places on Earth.

While spending her time there, she meets Evgeni (Oscar Isaac), a security guard who is also supposedly a Russian immigrant, though he looks more like Guatemalan... because the actor is... Guatemalan (and because Madonna has a thing for Latin dudes). Somehow the Upper East Side princess falls for this blue-collar dude from Bushwick... because that could happen (that has never happened in the quarter-millennium of auction house history, despite years of security-guard efforts).

This all sounds like a terrible narrative with two unconnected stories? Well, that's about right. This is a totally stupid plot with two ridiculously unrelated threads that shouldn't and don't really meet at any point. I guess there's an idea that Wally is sad that her marriage is not all she hoped it would be and she takes solace in the idea that her namesake was also in such a marriage until she got a divorce and married up... but that's such a banal and superficial link.

Madonna's directing style is so turgid and blunt it ceases to be art and moves into baseball-bat-over-the-head-territory. Do I care that Wally had some sort of fake career at Sotheby's before she got married to her foreign beau? Does that make her more likable? No. It makes her exactly the kind of woman who would get herself into the dumb marriage that she's in and exactly the remote personality that makes for great and terrible melodrama, but totally urelateable.

This could have been a nice historical romance, but the contemporary story feels more like a gilded lily than any sort of necessary frame. I think Madonna has it in her to be a good filmmaker, but she needs to learn when enough is enough and not the entire history of everything in the world (including a bunch of lame excuses for why Wallis and Edward weren't really Nazi lovers). I think a good editor would have done this script and this film a good service. But I guess that would have been less romantic, or something.

Stars: 1.5 of 4

My Piece of the Pie (2011) (Saturday, January 21, 2012) (143)

My Piece of the Pie is Cédric Klapisch's latest film about class and power in France. Middle-class mother of three, France (Karin Viard), lives in Dunkirk when her factory is shut down and she loses her job. Depressed that her life is not what she had hoped it would be, she goes to Paris to get trained to be a maid. She is sent to work for Steve (Gilles Lellouche), a French stock broker who has been working in London for a decade. Now back in Paris, he hopes to settle down and get married.

The problem is that he's a pig with women and doesn't understand that money can't buy happiness or love. He treats all women badly in general, be they girlfriends, Russian prostitutes or fashion models who he whisks off for a weekend in Venice. When his young son is dropped off at his apartment by his ex, he finds himself in desperate need of France's child rearing expertise. The two grow closer as they spend more and more time together, as she looks after his son and mothers him as well.

As with other Klapisch films, this has a generally light and happy tone, even silly at times (and yes, as with all of his films, there are two fun dance sequences in it). Viard and Lellouche are both great and totally relate well as maid-boss, mother-son and maybe more. Unlike a film such as Laurent Cantet's beautiful Time Out, another French film dealing with lay-offs and also featuring Viard, the economic criticism and despair over losing a job is not as seamless. Here, the near-romcom of France and Steve seems rather separate from the bitterness France feels toward Steve's work and money spending. The last 20 minutes turn the story dramatically into what I feel is more of a silly melodrama than it needs to be. Still, this is generally good and well made.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Norwegian Wood (Saturday, January 14, 2012) (2)

Haruki Murakami has an interesting style that is very specific and could be difficult to translate to film. Several years ago Japanese filmmaker Jun Ichikawa adapted a short story Tony Takitani to the screen in a beautiful film. Now Vietnamese director Anh Hung Tran has adapted Murakami's Norwegian Wood, one of the most straightforward and least magical of his novels.

The film (and the book) deal with Watanabe, a man looking back at his days in college in the late 1960s. Back then he was best friends with classmates and couple Naoko and Kizuki. After Kizuki's suicide, Naoko and Watanabe become close and ultimately fall in love as well. Right after the first time they have sex, she leaves and checks into a mental hospital in the mountains. This leaves Watanabe loving her, or the idea of her and the magical aura she represents in his mind, though far away from her. He meets another student, Midori, and the two fall in love, though his thoughts frequently wander to Naoko and the past. In his effort to juggle his love for the two women, he risks losing both of them.

An interesting twist to the adaptation of the script (by Tran) and production of the film is that what was a more down-to-earth romantic drama becomes onscreen a pure melodrama, one that Douglas Sirk himself would appreciate. The feelings and actions of Watanabe become bigger-than-life plot points rather than intimate moments. The different women are somewhat faceless, as their emotional and narrative significance to Watanabe becomes more significant. For me, as a viewer who has never totally connected to melodrama, this is a bit difficult, though I really appreciate what Tran has done. I do feel, however, that the Midori character, in particular, becomes a bit slight and the concept of Watanabe being "torn" between two women, one of whom he 'has' one he does not, is more told to us than really shown (he's not really torn at all).

The technical aspects of the film are absolutely stunning. Ping Bin Lee, who also was the cinematographer on several beautiful films by Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Wong Kar-Wai's masterpiece In the Mood for Love, again shoots one of the most gorgeous and crystal-clear films I've seen in awhile. Almost ever shot is filled with bright, saturated colors, even the grimy interiors. There is a lot of play with near-burning and over-exposure, so sunny days become almost blinding in their clarity and whiteness (particularly effective in a film about nostalgia). Radiohead's Johnny Greenwood gives a beautiful, nostalgic and romantic score that fits into the sociopolitical and musical era of the film. He has developed into a very interesting score composer in recent years.

This film is rather different from the book, but it does follow a similar narrative journey. Much of the political tension that's in the book is eliminated here and forced into the background. Still, there is no mistake that this is a film based on a Murakami novel. It retains his pop culture connections, his cerebral/psychological interest and tone and his appreciation for the beauty not only in nature but also in banal and dirty things.

Stars: 3 of 4

In the Land of Blood and Honey (Saturday, December 24, 2011) (127)

In the Land of Blood and Honey is allegedly the directorial and writing debut of Angelina Jolie. I shouldn't really say allegedly, because there's no evidence that she didn't totally write this on her own and direct it on her own... but it is curious that someone who has only ever acted (and maybe "produced" movies) and has never really been on the creative side of movies has single-handedly written and directed a film about a historical event (in a rather obscure foreign language) that has nothing to do with her own experience. I'm just sayin'...

Anyhow, the film takes place during the Bosnian war in Sarajevo where a Muslim woman, Ajla (Zana Marjanovic), and a Bosnian man, Danijel (Goran Kostic), fall in love. He's the son of one of the Bosnian senior generals and is a big military person himself. As Muslims are rounded up in the city, Danijel is able to save Ajla and keep her in a room in his command station. This causes trouble for both of them as different military people, some of whom resent his nepotistic status, find out about their relationship arrangement.

This is a good movie; there is nothing particularly brilliant about it and nothing really bad about it. In terms of romantic war movies, I'd say this is is above average -- it's not too sentimental or fantastical. Meanwhile, it has basically no style to speak of, but it's effective in telling a story and getting certain emotions across when Jolie wants them. Before I praise her for this work I'd like to see more of what she can do to make sure it's not just an aberration.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 (Friday, November 25, 2011) (107)

What is there to say about Twilight Part 4 Part 1? It's a movie about vampyres who fuck teens, but only after their married in special Mormon ways. Then it's about how those teens get preggers with monster babies (hello, Rosemary!) who eat them from the inside out. Then there are some werewolves who want to kill the vampyre family because they're really a cult (they are!) and broke the hymen of that teeny girl. Then the teen girl gets all rexy and gray-green-toned. Then one of the wolves decides to fight his brother dawgs because he really likes skinny girls, even tho she's a fang-banger.

Somewhere in there there's a lot of really bad acting. I don't know what you call what K-Stew, R-Patz and Tay-Lau are doing onscreen, but it's ain't acting. They each have reach the bottom of their tanks and are just saying words and looking sweaty. I hope none of them is still doing that stuff in ten years.

Bill Condon has a great inside joke in one scene where people are watching the Bride of Frankenstein, which is a film directed by James Whale, a homosexual and the subject of a biopic he made a few years ago. That split-second moment was the best part of this movie.

Stars: 1 of 4

My Week with Marilyn (Friday, November 25, 2011) (106)

My Week with Marilyn is about the 1956 shoot of the film The Prince and the Showgirl with Marilyn Monroe (Michelle Williams) and Lawrence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh). While in London during the shoot she meets the story's narrator Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne) who is an assistant director trying to break into the film industry. The two work on the film for several weeks and develop a friendship as she proves to be a fish out of water in London with actors who are not movie stars. She brings with her an acting coach, her husband Arthur Miller and her manager who try to help her at every moment not freak out.

At some point the stress gets to be too much and she panics. The only person who can help her is Colin, who proceeds to have a week-long romantic interlude with her, despite her husband and management team's wishes.

This is a movie about falling in love with actors and actresses and falling in love with movies. This is a nice little idea - that we fall for celebrities who don't really know us and can't ever love us back and that the relationships they have with us is as fabricated as the characters they play onscreen.

Clearly the biggest performance here is Williams as Marilyn - and she does a very good impersonation of her. The problem that I had is that the character is so annoying that it's hard to like her at all. She's such a moron at all times and totally unable to even pretend to act. It's clear that Marilyn was a movie star because she knew how to play to the camera, but it's infuriating to watch her here barely able to chew gum and walk at the same time. It's impossible to align with her, and I think that hurts the dynamic of the film. If we can't fall in love with this Marilyn the way Colin does, there is no magic. Branagh actually does a great job as the pompous and irritated Olivier, though he's not getting much attention for his performance.

This is an OK movie, but is not brilliant. I love movies about movies (though this one is in London, not Hollywood) and this is a decent one, but not as wonderful as some from the past.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Weekend (Tuesday, November 22, 2011) (103)

Weekend is a wonderful little movie about two guys who meet in a bar and have a weekend of falling in love before one of them has to leave town. It has the romance and sad nostalgia of a Noel Coward story (the bittersweetness of Brief Encounter comes to mind, though neither guy is cheating on anyone) and the freshness, sexual frankness and energy of a mumblecore movie.

This film is written and directed by Andrew Haigh, who has previous worked as an editor on big-budget fare and made one gay documentary, and shows lots of skills in terms of overall look, interesting point-of-view shots and an intense intimacy in the lives of the two guys. I think there are moments when the very slow pace of the film hurts the overall storytelling and perhaps less would be more there. That is, I understand that time, for the two guys, seems to slow down to a standstill because they're so in love, but standstills don't work well for holding audience interest.

The film is really about opposites and unusual juxtapositions. The main guy, Russell, played beautifully by Tom Cullen, is still in the closet and leads a very conservative lifestyle, while Glen, played by Chris New, is out and loves going to clubs and doesn't seem to work. Of course, the biggest "opposite" is that this is a movie that would otherwise be about a man and a woman, but here it's two men. It is a wonderful thing, thematically and theoretically, that this is not really a movie about two gay men being "normal" or "fitting in as a couple in society". This is just a movie about two lovers being lovers, who happen to be men.

This is a good movie and I look forward to other films by Haigh, who clearly knows how to direct.

Stars: 3 of 4

The Artist (Friday, November 18, 2011) (101)

The Artist is a silent movie about silent movies. It's totally charming and has a lot in it for cinefiles who love silent movies. It is set in 1928 Hollywood and follows the fictitious George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), a silent leading man from the era of great silent stars. He finds that once 1929 comes around and studios begin to experiment with talkies, he is not able to make movies anymore because he doesn't translate well to sound pictures. His life is turned upside down as he gets a divorce, has to sell all his belongings and move out of his gorgeous mansion and into a modest flat.

Meanwhile, as his star is falling, that of Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo) is rising. She had a small part in one of Valentin's last silent pictures and fell madly in love with him then. As she climbs the ladder of success in Hollywood in talkies, she never forgets him and always keeps an eye out to make sure he doesn't get into too much trouble.

This is all a very sweet story of romantic love and all that, but the really great thing that I liked is that it's a silent movie about silent movies. It's very clever and very funny - but smart funny, not just silly funny. There's a very clever nightmare scene, where Valentin worries about literally not being able to speak in a sound world. There's a wonderful sequence on a beautiful staircase that feels like it was pulled right out of a Murnau film. There's also a lot of very clever use of music and print color, where some of the reels seem to have a yellow or blue tone to them, just as old reels of silent films sometimes have. There's a very clever use of Bernard Hermann's score for Vertigo, at a particular moment when the idea of image and possession is very important.

Overall this is a very good movie with lots of good stuff in it. It would not surprise me if it gets lots of Oscar nominations and wins (for direction, acting, costumes and picture, just to name a few). Hollywood loves movies about Hollywood and this is a great one for that. My only real issue with it is that it's a bit too sweet at times and relies on our desire to "fall in love", more than any particularly effective storytelling... that said, it is a very good movie.

Stars: 3.5 of 4

Love Crime (Monday, August 22, 2011) (72)

Alain Corneu's Love Crime owes everything that it is to Alfred Hitchcock. It is a noir-murder mystery very much in Hitch's style, down to the blond heroine and brunette villainess. It is, however, nothing close to anything he would have made, because the details that are the hallmark of his films are nowhere to be found here; this is the film Hitch would have made if he had had no imagination.

Isabelle (Ludivine Sagnier... God, she's gorgeous) is the hardworking assistant to Christine (Kristin Scott Thomas... who can only make movies in French now) in an international business firm. As the film opens, we see Isa at Christine's house preparing for an upcoming meeting. Christine hits on Isa, who is clearly shocked by the overture, but also interested by it. Just then, Philippe (Patrick Mille) comes in to break up the tension. He's a client of the firm and Christine's lover.

Christine sends Isa to Cairo to present a deal to new clients. Her pitch goes off brilliantly and she celebrates with Philippe (who is there for the presentation) over a fancy dinner and roll in the sheets (French men are sluts). Back at the office, Christine, takes full credit for Isa's success, much to her consternation. Their relationship falls apart from there and culminates with Isa murdering Christine. It's unclear exactly why she does it, and also what her plan is to get away with it.

Whereas Hitch shows the amazing and meticulous detail of murder in a gripping, if mundane, dispassionate, way in Rope or Dial M for Murder, here Corneau takes out all the beauty and interesting minutiae and basically shows us a list of actions. It's an interesting difference that might have a lot to do with camera placement and depth of focus approaches of both directors (and a great lesson on the brilliance of Hitch).

Hitch shoots these expository scenes from far away or with short lenses that expand the frame, sometimes shortening the depth of a shot; Corneau, on the other hand, shoots this long murder and cover-up sequence mostly in close-ups or with longer lenses, isolating Isabelle (not a big problem for me, as I love looking at Sagnier up close) and merely presenting these mundane elements just as mundane elements. It reminds me of the expression that someone "is so interesting you could listen to them read the phone book". Here we have a very boring person just reading a phone book ... and it comes off sounding like a phone book.

The murder itself is weirdly direct and sudden with almost nothing shown to get us to expect it. In an interesting touch, Corneau uses a Pharoah Sanders jazz saxophone score layered over the action, adding a nonchalance to the act. I actually like this and respect the boldness of such a oddly fitting sound from what we are seeing (the conflict of the visual and the aural are wonderful), but it's almost too artistic for the overall tone of the film. It also hard to keep from laughing when you see Sagnier dressed in a white anti-bacterial suit as she does the deed (she really looks like an oompa loompa with a knife... you'll get no commercials).

Corneau uses two visual themes throughout the film, Isa in her bed going to sleep and Isa eating breakfast in her kitchen. They both seem to create a shorthand for showing her as a meticulous person who has a spotless house, who is almost totally isolated from warmth and love, who has few passions in her life but is still not average (as clean as she is shown to be, she might be the worst dish-washer I've ever seen on screen). As with the music choice, I like the strangeness of these scenes and how they break up the flow of action we see. I think they're ultimately unnecessary, or at least there should be fewer of them, but again, I like Corneau's daring to include them.

As much as I like looking at (OK - watching) Sagnier, I have to admit that her performances are wildly inconsistent from one to the next. Here she is actually pretty wonderful as the workaholic woman who clearly cares more about her job than her her physical appearance or dating life. In one scene when Christine comes on to Isa, there is an amazing moment where we see Sagnier's eyes change at the realization that she's being hit on; later we see a similar change in her look when she is given a work assignment. Clearly she is a good actor, perhaps some of the roles she gets are less interesting.

Aside from the overall polished and banal look of the film (why couldn't have been shot like a classic noir?) I really don't like that the narrative here is rather obscure. We never really learn why Isa does what she does. Is it really a crime of passion or is it a complicated way of getting rid of her boss to get promoted? There is almost no look into her psychology - not even through objective correlatives or stylized lighting and mise-en-scene. The murder is almost comically sudden and unprovoked. There are clearly some good elements here, but the overall aroma of the piece is stinky and underdeveloped.

Stars: 1.5 of 4 Stars

Crazy, Stupid, Love. (Tuesday, August 16, 2011) (71)

Omigod - there's so much punctuation in the title of the film Crazy, Stupid, Love.! What's going on there? It's a list with a period at the end? Is it a statement? Is it a description of the three acts of the film? What the eff?! Ugh!

This very sweet movie, written by Dan Fogelman and co-directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, has a very nice story with a wonderful little twist at the end. It's totally unoffensive and a wonderful love story ... or, well, four or five love stories, or something.

Cal (Steve Carell) is a sad-sack forty-something dad who is kicked out of his house by his wife of twenty-some years, Emily (Julianne Moore). He goes to the bar at a mall (naturally) where he meets the lothario Jacob (totally the name of a lady-slayer... in the Old Testament) (Ryan Gosling) who proceeds to update Cal's wardrobe and give him lessons on hitting on women and general gamesmanship.

Meanwhile, Cal has two young kids who have a 17-year-old babysitter, Jessica, who is in love with him, and Jacob is trying to make it with a redhead law student, Hannah (Emma Stone), who thinks she's better than him. (Oh - I love the idea of a hot gentile couple called Jacob and Hannah! Oy vey! The Elders of Zion indeed!) Then Emily's mister, David (Kevin Bacon) is hanging around too, and Cal's son, Robbie, is in love with Jessica... and Marisa Tomei plays a woman who Cal takes home from the bar.

I hate ensemble stories. They're so goddamn overly complicated and unnecessarily redundant.

Suffice it to say that most of the humor in the film is us laughing at Cal and the ridiculous situations he gets himself and his family into. There is a silly quid pro quo, straight out of Beaumarchais and a scuffle that ensues (physical comedy!!). It's all very nice, but really not earth-shattering.

Gosling, as always, is very funny and self-assured. I still have no idea what is up with his affected speech and it wears rather thin, when he's playing a very fashion-forward guy, leaving him sounding like he's some millionaire hood-rat. (Did he learn to speak like that from Eminem? Isn't it really fake for both of them? I still think I'd rather hear Ryan rap than MM.) Carell is very good in a more dramatic role with less goofiness and less "look-at-me-I'm-being-silly" hammy stuff we're used to from him.

This is a very watchable movie, filled with tiresome cliches and only the most polished-down modernist style. It won't upset anyone and will make everyone kiss their loved one. Bo-ring.

Stars: 2 of 4

Friends with Benefits (Tuesday, August 16, 2011) (70)

The magical thing about Hollywood is that movies frequently come in pairs. Sometimes that's a result of silly luck (like how last year had two mall-cop movies open), but sometimes it's because ideas float around and don't get made and then other versions are written and produced that copy from them. That is the case with Friends with Benefits, which was based on a similar screenplay bouncing around Hollywood for awhile, called No Strings Attached. Now we have two movies about "fucking friends" and they're very similar.

As with NSA, Friends with Benefits is a surprisingly watchable film. This is not to say that it's deep or interesting, or particularly good, but it is silly and fun and generally holds together storywise. Dylan (Justin Timberlake) is a magazine designer who is recruited from LA for a big job at GQ in New York. Jamie (Mila Kunis) is a headhunter in NYC who brings him to the position. After he accepts the job, the two become fast friends and commiserate over their mutual dislike of dating and their love for sappy rom-coms (OMG - so meta!).

They decide they'll start having sex all the time, but only remain friends and not consider themselves "dating". This of course goes terribly wrong at a certain point when it becomes clear that they have different expectations from their arrangement and that "friends with benefits" is really a sloppy situation.

As with most young rom-coms these days, this is an extremely foul-mouthed film with tons of frank details about sex and sexual desires. There's something strange about a guy (JT) saying he sneezes after he cums - because it's both shocking and banal at the same time. We never hear guys talking so directly about sex, but, of course, talking about it in a studio film like this, makes it tremendously less risque, more bubble-gum. Eh.

Timberlake shows himself (again) to be a true "triple-threat" talent. He's handsome as shit, funny with great timing and very good at conveying his point. Kunis is very good here (I'm not as familiar with her work, aside from Black Swine), though her role here is more regular than his. (I have to admit, in my ideal world, I would take JT from this one and NatPort from NSA to make the perfect film... but then you'd have Kutcher and Kunis - which might make a good movie poster, but would die onscreen.)

It's funny that kids who are so happy to be fluid about what "making out" and "hooking up" is, are so concerned about titles of relationships ("dating", "friends with benefits"). I guess I don't really related to these stories in some weird way - maybe I'm too old for them? They really feel like a younger generation's idea of sex projected onto characters around my age. Interesting.

Then again, I don't know why people as perfect-looking as Kunis and JT would ever get frustrated dating and having sex with as many people as possible (you could call it "pretty people's burden"). (This goes back to the Jennifer Aniston politique, where she is not a convincing sad-sack girl who can't get a date.)

And then, of course, one has to ask what the difference is between "friendship" that involves emotional support and unlimited sex and "dating". I guess I'm old-fashioned.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Mysteries of Lisbon (Friday, August 5, 2011) (64)

Filmmakers, perhaps more than any other artists, have always been fascinated by point-of-view and the internal narrative structure of a story. There are probably many reasons for this, but it has a lot to do with the fact that film is a multi-media, multi-sensory format where things like the camera's angle, what is seen and what is unseen, who the narrator is and at what point in the story is he or she sitting all affect the audience's view of something. In literature there are certainly issues of a narrator's voice (first person, third person) and if any of the characters in the story are telling the tale, but I don't think this element is as interesting or as deep.

Raoul Ruiz's Mysteries of Lisbon is a long movie to be sure, at a staggering 272-minutes, but it's rich and filled with an interesting investigation of point-of-view and of stories within stories. He takes cues from Kubrick, Sokurov and Bergman and turns out one of the best films of the year.

The gigantic tale, adapted by Carlos Saboga from a book by Camilo Castelo Branco, mostly revolves around Pedro da Silva, a boy who lives in a Church school when the film opens in mid-19th-century Lisbon. He does not know who is parents are and is ostracized by the other kids because of this. It is soon revealed that he is the out-of-wedlock child of a noblewoman and her lover and was protected by the head priest, Padre Dinis (Adriano Luz), when he was born. Now his mother is back in his life and Padre Dinis is going to give him the story of his birth and his parents' romance.

From this point forward we see a tremendous story along the lines of Dickens, Hugo or Thackeray that investigates the histories of every person in Pedro da Silva's family, and many of his family members' associates. This is a story of discovery for the boy, for Padre Dinis and for us as they delve into the baroque complexity of his parentage and his life.

In one of the first scenes, Pedro's mother gives him a cardboard proscenium frame for cut-out puppets - a clear homage to the toy that Alexander played with in the opening shot of Bergman's Fanny and Alexander. Our first thought is of all the themes from that film: the questioning of faith, the loss of faith, death, humiliation, anger at parents, reconciliation, magic and imagination. This is a powerful symbol and an efficient way of bringing up these ideas that we come back to later in the story.

This proscenium also serves to show us that the story is just a story and that we will be experiencing it through the eyes of several characters; the frame of the cardboard stage lets us know that we will be seeing a story from many different frames of reference told by many different people. Throughout the film we see sequences set up by having the characters appear in cardboard cut-out-form inside that proscenium, underlining the fictional, manufactured elements of the story. Right away there is an idea that there is no absolute truth that exists in this world, but that all history is relative, complicate to understand and somehow unnatural or fake.

From here we see and hear stories told by different characters, like Padre Dinis, some of whom tell stories within stories (and some stories within stories, within stories) about different characters and their backgrounds. We find out that basically everyone has a complicated past where they had a different identity (and some will have different identities in the future). We see how small decisions at one point will affect many points down the road, but then when you go back to retrace the steps, understanding becomes difficult.

This richness we find is not only visible in the storytelling, but also in the amazing direction by Ruiz and his brilliant composition of the frame and choreography of movements within it. He brilliantly uses short and long lenses to gain depth of field or focus on small elements, he frequently stages gorgeous static moments when characters are seen in the frame in beautiful correspondence with the others. Scenes where there is movement, like the requisite dance scenes in period pictures (there's always got to be at least one, doesn't there?), are full of people and textures, decorations and objects - a total delight for the eyes (an very reminiscent of Sukurov's Russian Ark).

Big productions are always complicated to make and open their directors to tremendous criticism (James Cameron for Avatar) or praise (Olivier Assayas for Carlos), much of which stems from the sheer size of the work (they're too long, too complicated, hard to follow, amazing in their detail, such a big and wonderful story). This film, originally made for Portuguese television where it played as a six-part miniseries, is just about the grandest thing you'll see this year, but it is also an incredibly dynamic story with a gripping plot filled with intrigue and masterful visual artistry. It's rare to see a movie of this length where the artistic elements are as compelling as the story (Assayas, for instance, didn't use much style or creativity in his presentation of Carlos - the story was really the most important element for him).

Despite its length, I strongly recommend sitting through the whole picture (it's shown in two parts and one could easily see each part on a different sitting). The scope of the story from beginning to end is amazing and beautiful and it's wonderful to see how each character deals with his or her own story, considering they are each living in their own subjective worlds seeing life through their own prosceniums.

Stars: 4 of 4

The Myth of the American Sleepover (Sunday, July 24, 2011) (57)

Summer nights are really long in Southeast Michigan. At least that's what we learn from David Robert Mitchell's The Myth of the American Sleepover. We certainly never know what exactly the myth is, though it seems to have something to do with kids hooking up or making out or something. Somehow the kids are able to fit a year's worth of searching for love into several hours of darkness. Oh, and also, there are no adults and no black people in suburban Detroit.

The story follows four teenagers (well, three teenagers and a kid who's probably about 21 or so) as they drive, walk and bike around their pristine mid-'90s suburban town looking for very specific people to hook up or make friends with. The first is Maggie (Claire Sloma) who is a bit of an alterna-chick (with a few piercings on her face) going into her freshman year of high school (actually, she might be a rising sophomore... It's confusing which kids are in what year because they all do the same things). She lusts after a guy she sees at the public pool as well as another guy who cuts grass around town.

Then there's Rob (Marlon Morton), also a freshman, who sees some blond girl at the supermarket and spends the rest of the night searching for her at the two slumber parties and several other house parties there are. Then there's Claudia (the very fetching Amanda Bauer) who is new to the school, but somehow already hooked up with the high school stud guy (I guess it doesn't hurt that she's cute, blond and skinny... ah, high school). She's invited to one of the parties, not knowing her new beau and the hostess have a history.

Finally there's Scott (Brett Jacobsen), who is going to be a senior in college, but unsure of his direction (The Not-Yet-Graduate, I guess) and decides it would be a great idea to track down twin sisters he had a thing for (four years earlier) in high school who are that night at a freshman orientation "sleepover" at the University of Michigan.

Many of these stories crisscross, where one guy will go to a girls' sleepover to look for someone and then leave to go to another party where he'll bump into another one of the characters. This seems to be set in the 1990s, so they don't have fancy things like mobile phones, let alone Facebook or iPhones. There's actually an interesting sweetness to the analogue nature of the evening, where the kids actually have to meet and talk to people and go to find others if they want to... although, this is all possibly a bit precious and a bit too soon for such nostalgia.

I feel like Mitchell spends so much time setting up his suburbia uber alles that he ignores the fact that we still need to connect to these characters on levels beyond just that we might have had similar experiences in high school. I like that most of the kids are looking to just "hook up" or "kiss" others (and not have sex with them) because that's all you really want when you're 14 or 15. But those desires aren't very deep or very interesting. I feel like every character is just a bunch of nerves and a list of personality traits, but not really fully developed. When Claudia discovers the true story of her boyfriend's past, she move fast to avenge the past, but we never really see very far inside her, what her own history is with guys, what she's thinking about starting at a new school or how she found her boyfriend over the summer.

Scott is more a comic book kid than any naturalistic character. His trek from the suburbs to Ann Arbor to seek out the twin cuties feels rash and unrealistic. Its banal romanticism should have more motivation than it does, and we're left saying, "what the hell is he doing? This would never work." (There is a clever, if shallow, homage to Godard's Band of Outsiders running in an upper floor of UM's Angell Hall... Go Blue!)

This film is a first work and it does show some promise in small moments. There is some very clever, snappy dialogue ("menage a twins") and a few wonderful moments (such as the scene in slow-mo of the kids filing into their respective parties like ants as a song by Beirut plays on the sound track), but the film really only ever rises to a be a collection of short stories that are all a bit too emotionally simplistic and rely too much on our nostalgia for our own childhoods. Sentimentality has never really worked for me, and neither have the lily white suburbs.

Stars: 2 of 4

Certified Copy (Tuesday, March 15, 2011) (15)

Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy is a very unusual film, despite seeming like a very natural one on the surface. It begins with an English man, James (Richard Shimmel), giving a lecture in Italy on his new book about the history and value of art fakes. As he speaks, a woman, Ellie (Juliette Binoche), stumbles into the room with her teenage son in tow. At the end of the talk she asks him to sign several copies of the book for her so she can give them to family and friends. She's an antiques dealer, and a Frenchwoman, and is aware of the value and market for fakes in her line of work. The two agree to meet the following day.

When the meet the next day they agree to get in the car and take a drive to no particular place - just go. Over the course of the day together we see that they are not actually strangers, but are a married couple rather at the end of their relationship rope (well, maybe... it's rather unclear). It seems they've been married for 15 years, live apart much of the time and fight often.

For the rest of the movie the two work over a fight they recently had and discuss who was wrong and when. The audience then has to go backwards and figure out what the game was they were playing at the beginning where they seemed to not know one another.

I have to admit that this really doesn't feel to me like a typical Kiarostami film, because it's very heavy on dialogue and very light on visual style and beauty - most of it is shot inside with cuts back and forth as a couple are talking - but it's a really interesting one (and is beautiful as anything that comes out of Kiarostami's brain would be). I think it's a clever trick from a writing point of view that the film we watch in the first act is very different from the one in the second two acts. Midway through the picture, the story changes dramatically.

I'm fascinated by the idea that this couple has a strained relationship, which manifests itself by them pretending to be strangers with one another, even when there are no witnesses around. I can't stop wondering though if they are actually somehow a pair of strangers who are playing that they are married rather than the inverse (which would help to explain problematic characters like the son who also seems to know know James). Perhaps everything up to the point of the revelation that they're married (in a cafe about two-thirds of the way through) is real and what follows is the farce.

In any event, I'm interested in the idea of copies and the deconstructed and formalist elements of the film as a copy for real life. The characters here are living their lives, but jump into a copy-life where they don't know one another (or they don't know one another and then go into a copy-life where they do). They go to a town where they were apparently married, almost a copy of their wedding day/night. They speak to each other in French or English, meaning two different things (she'll speak to him in French and he'll reply in English). Where is the reality? Where is the ground? It's really interesting.

This is a very interesting and mysterious film. Kiarostami could be saying that we are never who we really are in a relationship (even a casual flirtatious one) or that people can never be trusted, but considering nobody can be trusted, we can all agree on the relative value and importance of the relationships that are based on lies - just like how copies of great works of art have value as art themselves. It is a very post-modern concept and I appreciate that it's presented in such a standard format. Just as with a great copy, at first glance this does not seem to be such an interesting ontological examination - but it's only when you dig a bit deeper that the real nature of the piece comes out.

Stars: 3.5 of 4