Film

Directed by Pierre Salvadori
Starring Gad Elmaleh and Audrey Tautou

Watching Hors de Prix made me feel small and naïve. It made me feel unworldly and inexperienced with film and cinema and actors and writing and stories. It made me feel like I have no idea what the fuck I am talking about. I am still pretty sure I don’t.

Why?

Because I absolutely loved this film. I was charmed, willingly beguiled by Elmaleh’s adorable obedience and modesty. I fell for Taurou’s pouty French lips and impossibly long cigarette. Yes, in yet another failed attempt at reviewing a movie objectively, I have fallen in love with it, characters, actors, and all. I have been sexually involved with Hors de Prix.

But in all seriousness, I have legitimate doubts about my ability to judge something objectively at this point and you should too.

I think this time I was completely taken by the culture the movie seems to take for granted. France is a place where everyone is beautiful or rich, it isn’t a punishable offense to smoke indoors, and wildly improbable things happen on a regular basis. Indeed, the story begins with a situation that could very easily have turned out otherwise: Jean (Gad Elmaleh), a hotel bartender, is asked to work an extra day by his boss, to close the bar on that extra day by his coworker, and to leave his post and smoke a cigar by a resident of the hotel, three requests he could have denied. In any case, he has a wonderful one-night stand with Iréne (Audrey Tautou) in a conveniently vacant presidential suite after wooing her with his skills as a culinary artist. The same thing happens exactly one year later, except this time they are busted by an employee trying to sell the room.

Iréne, we find out, is a golddigger. Her rich, million-year-old husband-to-be realizes she slept with another man and leaves her with nothing. The rest of the movie focuses on her obsessive desire to acquire money and expensive things and Jean’s consistently rejected attempts to impress and eventually win her.

Just to get this out of the way, there is an element of the film that can be seen as a glaring fault. Most of the major plot-motive events happen as a result of random things that would not occur in real life. The French may make me drool with their suave ability to act like film noir archetypes or ride Vespas without looking silly, but France is not Macondo or Yoknapatawpha. Assuming the ritzy hotels that are the setting for most of the movie aren’t Pan’s other labyrinths, the significance of the regular happenstance comes off as kitschy and unbelievable.

That is one of the few things I found wrong with this film, and trust me, I looked hard. Elmaleh’s performance alone easily outweighs the sometimes negligible inconceivability of the plot. Before I betray my feelings about his decidedly believable character, however, I must offer this disclaimer: the only jobs I have had have been in restaurants. It is entirely possible, indeed probably the case that it is for this reason that I found Elmaleh and the entire filmic sketch of Jean to be convincing, believable, and moving.

In short, Elmaleh was great. Much of the film focuses on Jean’s discomfort with life in the wealthy world to which he has so often been the servile appendage. While eating at a restaurant, for instance, he flinches or jumps to attention when someone snaps or calls for a waiter. The first time he dines with his older partner, he literally cannot sit still; his natural impulse is to move constantly, to make sure the customer is happy.

Anyone who has worked in the service industry knows this is no exaggeration. It easily could appear as such if not for Elmaleh’s deftness with Jean, however. He always remains true to the humble discomfort the role demands of him. In one particularly resonant (for some reason, “heartbreaking” and “touching” seem like colloquial oversimplifications) scene, Jean, after having rented a hotel room for what seems to be the first time in his life, picks up a woman’s bags when the clerk calls for a bellhop. The other characters stare at him like he is an alien, but the audience (I was the only person in said audience) wants to start crying.

Gad Elmaleh as Jean, a character in whom I see the same obsessional desire to please the Other and complete absence of fashion sense that I see in myself.

Tautou (of Amélie and The Davinci Code [gag] fame) does a more than good job entrancing the viewer as Jean’s foil, enemy, love interest, and sometime competitor. Her ability to seem at once emotionally invested in someone and disinterested to the point of boredom is remarkable and frighteningly familiar. In one particularly memorable scene, she and Jean show each other the “looks” they use to woo members of the opposite sex. Jean’s expression is just like his character: down to earth, nothing special, and most assuredly not an act. Iréne’s, on the other hand, is so convincing that Jean thinks she has stopped acting.

Audrey Tautou as Iréne, the not-really-femme-fatale. This is actually the most attractive actress in the world. I know, it seems improbable, but she is. Love me, Audrey.

The film itself is shot nicely, but in nowhere near the same noticeable and unique fashion as a movie by a director or cinematographer with a distinct style, i.e. Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, or Stanley Kubrick. The people and places the camera captured were beautiful, but this was more a result of brilliant performances, an appropriate script (from what I could tell from the subtitles), and an image-enhancing infatuation with the characters that I projected onto the screen myself.

To be honest, while some may not like my annoying tendency to debase my own opinions and observations with claims of bias and pollutive subjectivity, I think that is the only way to offer a point of view someone will appreciate as having any worth at all. At the end of the day, I know about as much about film as you do, unless you are Helen von Schmidt, Christian Rogowski, or any one of the directors, actors, or cinematographers whose names I am going to delight in dropping in the coming posts. I entered the theater having never heard of anyone involved with Hors de Prix. I am not at all more qualified than you to say something about this film. So take my opinion as just that: at best equal, and probably something worse.

I can tell you with complete certainty that I was charmed by Hors de Prix in the fullest sense of the word. I read the New York Times review of the film shortly before writing this one. It made me angry. Whoever wrote it seemed totally bored. Maybe I just haven’t seen enough movies to recognize a formula when I see one or to write about how bored I am in the country’s most reputable newspaper and get paid for it. Maybe I’m not yet experienced enough to feel that it is OK to watch a film with a disinterested refusal to be impressed.

I don’t know. Perhaps I am too young and inexperienced to watch movies and know what I am talking about when I review them. All I know is Hors de Prix was impossibly charming, totally enjoyable, and $8.50 well spent.

Grade: A-

Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner was released twenty-five years ago. It is based on a novel written forty-four years ago. The author on whose work the film is based is dead. So is the film’s cinematographer. Why, then, am I reviewing this movie? Further, why should you care?

The answer to the latter question is easy. You should care because Harrison Ford is immensely attractive.

In response to the former question, I decided to review this film because it was the only thing playing at Amherst Cinema when I remembered to do this because the opportunity to review the so-called Final Cut of this classic specimen of science fiction cinema was too much to pass up.

Blade Runner is based on one of my all-time favorite science fiction novels, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The movie is set in a dystopian Los Angeles in which organic analogues to humans, called replicants, are being genetically manufactured. The plot revolves around Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), a blade runner- a bounty hunter charged with the task of “retiring,” not executing, stray “skin jobs,” as Gaff (Edward James Olmos) refers to them. The superhuman strength and decidedly human appearance of the replicants makes them especially dangerous to the haggard hangers-on left on the blighted earth.

The dead people I mentioned above are two of the best things about Blade Runner. Not that they are dead, but what they did while they were alive. Philip K. Dick was a truly revolutionary science fiction author responsible for the literature on which the films Minority Report, Total Recall, and A Scanner Darkly, among others, were based. He also wrote the absolutely awesome novel Galactic Pot Healer. Scott succeeds on multiple levels in his attempt to convey the intricacy, compulsion, and frightening relevance of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? But then again, Dick’s vivid and skillful prose lends itself to a filmic interpretation of the text. The entire film exudes an air of literariness and premeditated philosophy. It manages to create a truly stunning, exciting story while wrestling with the same problems Dick addressed in the novel.

Jordan Cronenweth, the second dead person, is the late cinematographer responsible for the beautiful shots that pervade Blade Runner. His capability as an artist is apparent in his contemporary interpretations of the chiaroscuro, heavily contrasted black and white shots that are the trademark of film noir.

Rutger Hauer as the obviously exasperated replicant Roy Batty.

Sean Young as Rachael, the one robot in the world who smokes.

In fact, taken at face value, Blade Runner is not all that unique. At this point in posterity, it has become an unquestioned cultural icon and a standard for “cyberpunk” film. Total Recall is very similar: It is based on a Philip K. Dick story. It explores many of the issues present in Blade Runner. They both are set in the future. They both feature moody male protagonists. They both are replicants.

Just kidding. But they are really similar. The differences lie in that area of a film that oft goes taken for granted; that is, the cinematography. With masterful deftness, Cronenweth feels his way around the smoky, seedy overworld of the future. He extends his lens to every area of this city of squalor, and in doing so, affords us a vivid picture of the modern site of Noah’s flood, a town upon which hubris never ceases to rain its torrential downpour.

It certainly doesn’t hurt to have stunning performances from Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, Daryl Hannah, Edward James Olmos, and William Sanderson, either. The audience gets to watch as Ford’s adolescent delinquency fades into tired faux-humanity against a backdrop of raindrops and cigarette smoke. Hannah plays a mind-bogglingly attractive femme fatale alongside Hauer’s robotic Aryan impeccability. Even though I thought William Sanderson was William H. Macy for half of the film, he was great in the movie too.

I can’t give Blade Runner anything less than an A-. Why would I? I forced myself to watch this film with as few critical biases as possible. That is obviously a pipe dream, however. We can never actually escape the words of others, especially in relation to a film and especially if the “other” in question is my dad when I was five years old. One always formulates an argument in response to another. Our opinions are reactions to the opinions of others: they either over-compensate in a contrary response to a review or agree vehemently with the accepted opinions of reputable critics.

This review, then, is neither. I am agreeing reluctantly with twenty-five years of critical acclaim. I hope by analyzing a few key technical elements of the film, I have convinced you of the legitimacy of my opinion regarding a work so colloquially revered as Blade Runner.

But even if I haven’t, I still win because you read my review and you’ll be forever influenced by what I’ve said.

Grade: A

The Counterfeiters
Directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky
In German with subtitles

I really wanted to love this film. I wished for nothing more than to agree with almost every critic who has reviewed The Counterfeiters, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that awarded it the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, the world community at large that considers this a worthwhile addition to the long tradition of films about the Holocaust.

And most of the film is very well done. Salomon Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics) is about as intriguing as a nonverbal Jew wearing a stone-faced grimace and a fedora can be. He is an internationally famed counterfeit artist who is arrested by Nazi authorities in the middle of an attempt to reproduce the American dollar. His skill and reputation buy him special treatment in a section of a concentration camp that’s about as ritzy as they come. Instead of running forced marches in shrunken shoes or digging his own grave, Sorowitsch and his compatriots work in return for nice beds, better food, and other small luxuries. They labor on Operation Bernhard, the name for the Nazi effort to flood other countries’ economies with forged currency. Sorowitsch and the other prisoners realize that their efforts are aiding the ailing Third Reich and juggle their guilt with their desire to survive.

Markovics portrays Sorowitsch and his inner conflict in a performance that is nothing short of superb. It is a delectably understated interpretation of a man in a delicate, unpredictable situation. The actor’s fascinating ability to maintain essentially the same facial expression while communicating a wide spectrum of emotions makes his character all the more interesting.

Sorowitsch’s interaction with Adolf Burger (August Diehl) is compelling as well, but Diehl’s tendency toward melodrama limited the performance. He kind of looks like Cillian Murphy, but minus that wordless subtlety that pervades Murphy’s time on screen.

I suppose subtlety, then, is the name of the game for this film. Markovics’s minimalism is artful, but it makes the sometimes overly complex plot and less skilled performances from the rest of the cast stick out like a sore thumb. It is admittedly difficult to call the film abstruse when it is based on a true story, but I am pretty sure there has to be a simpler way to tell this tale.

It’s not as if I got lost watching the film; it is not particularly difficult to comprehend. It just seems to be bogged down by historical detail while at the same time giving the audience a fantastical, almost unbelievable portrayal of a concentration camp. At times, dramatic considerations are given precedence over concerns of historical accuracy, and at others the audience is given more information (in a lackluster performance) than it could possibly desire. In particular, Sorowitsch’s periodic meetings with Sturbmahnnführer Friedrich Herzog (Devid Striesow), Sorowitsch’s initial arresting officer and mercurial sometime partner in crime, do nothing but advance the plot. Striesow speaks with that declarative, sort of silly tone one might expect from a second rate actor in a cheap spy film. Though the script may be significantly more compelling if one speaks German, lines like “I’m sorry, I need you to crack the dollar,” especially when spoken by a Nazi SS higher-up to a Jew in a concentration camp during the Holocaust, just sound ridiculous.

The cinematography was jerky and bouncy, an addition that did augment the feeling of panic or alarm that pervaded the film. The cinematographer inexplicably chose to include a bunch of these totally unrealistic rapid zoom shots, however. It’s as if we’re in the shoes of a prisoner in a concentration camp… who at times has a Terminator-esque ability to magnify whatever he sees. It could be interpreted as suggestive of a documentary format, but that doesn’t work with the subject matter either.

That said, the film was not particularly bad, per se. Rather, limiting factors that at this point may be inherent in the genre of Holocaust films kept The Counterfeiters from achieving a truly convincing portrayal of the struggles Jews faced during the Third Reich. Markovics is stunning, his fellow actors, less so, and the film as a whole is alright. It seemed unbelievable at times, but this could just be my unconscious erecting a wall of incredulity to combat a truly moving film.

Probably not.

Grade: B-

“Whatcha got ain’t nothin new. This country’s hard on people, you can’t stop what’s coming, it ain’t all waiting on you. That’s vanity.”

This addition to the growing and already gratuitous body of secondary literature surrounding the film “No Country for Old Men,” directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, will no doubt disappoint readers looking for a review. I will not tell you whether this film was “good” or not. Everything I say henceforth is based on the initial and essential presupposition that “No Country” is an almost unparalleled cinematic achievement. Which it is.

That said, I would also like to use this opportunity to say hello to all of you readers. We’ll hopefully be seeing each other relatively often from now onward. I invite you all to keep me humble and write me nasty e-mails about how wrong I am. I write like such a self-righteous clown that I think I deserve it.

Back to “No Country.” What should we make of this film? The first time I saw it, I left borderline baffled beyond any hope of recognition. Convinced that I was just too stupid to appreciate what I felt was surely greatness, I went and sat through the film another four times in the theater.

The first facet of the film that struck me was the violence. Interspersed with placid scenes of dialogue were cuts of gunshots, spattering blood, and car crashes. This is importantly distinct from those classic westerns to which “No Country” is often compared. Anton Chigurh isn’t Old Shatterhand and Llewellyn Moss isn’t Dirty Harry. Bad guys aren’t punched across rooms and a bullet from a magnum doesn’t carry that magical momentum that it does in those old movies, that velocity of fantasy that can throw the worst through a window.

No, everything in “No Country” carries that distinct metallic aftertaste of the super-real. At times, cinematographer Roger Deakins (acclaimed for his work on, among other films, the oft underappreciated “1984,” “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” “Fargo,” and “Jarhead,” about which one of the only good things was that series of heart-wrenching shots of flaming oil fountains) seems to relish the sight of an open wound. Extended cuts in which the camera pans up and down skin flayed by shotgun buckshot show the audience an experience that can not be so easily classified. Is it gratuitous? Is it disturbing?

Is it beautiful? It is. The cinematographer’s use of his tool is nothing short of majestic. The sight of a nude Anton Chigurh picking shotgun pellets out of his open wounds evokes an archetypal image of those impossibly perfect Renaissance sculptures, those Greek Gods. The characters’ injuries and subsequent sequences of reflective wound-licking seem so real as to force the audience to ask itself: am I disgusted or obsessed?

Perhaps it is a mixture of both. It takes a tough stomach to watch some of the things depicted in “No Country” without cringing. But what are we left with after having sat through the movie? Not a queasy feeling of disgust. Instead we find, after having seen and felt the painful gravity of Anton Chigurh’s violence, a deeper and richer appreciation of what is arguably the film’s central topic: chance and randomness. The film upsets our comfortably deceptive notions of stability and a universe that is at its most basic level calm and measured by setting Chigurh’s killing spree in an idealized, “typical American” setting. Every time a good ole’ boy or a southern belle is senselessly murdered, our baseless faith in the inherent sensibility of the world is chipped away, bit by bit.

We can see now why the Coen brothers included painfully, entrancingly long cuts of wounds and injuries, pieces of film that are odes to humanity and animality alike. It is not so we sit and marvel at how good a Boy Scout Llewellyn or Anton would be, even though that’s exactly what I did. It is so that, when the directors finally reveal their message in a startling, viciously ironic happenstance, the audience internalizes it until they brim with its gravity. The virtues of the film as medium are readily apparent: what a philosophical text cannot convey is captured in “No Country” by the camera lens. Words cannot evoke the primal and instinctual reactions that an exceptionally graphic image can.

So, in conclusion, watch movies. Love the good films and hate the bad, but kind of love the bad too, because at least they tried. Read my column, write your own responses, and we’ll have a conversation that is sure to be more interesting than the four hour long screening of “The Seven Samurai” you have to go to for your film class. Hey, with the addition of a Film and Media Studies major on the horizon, this might just be the next cool thing to do.