Home Cinema
by Leonard Heldreth

French drama with a side order of comedy
Ah, France—the land of existentialism, mistresses, superb food in very small portions and endless debates about everything.
Nobody does downbeat films better than the French, however, and two of our films this month are from France. One traces the activities of a young man with terminal cancer, and one looks at a man who shaves off his moustache and his life begins unraveling, but no one notices.
To end on an upbeat note, we look at a cerebral comedy starring Will Farrell (how’s that for a yoking of opposites?) that examines the interactions between such weighty matters as life, death and the Great American Novel.

 

Time to Leave
(Le temps qui reste)
Sometimes reading the comments of other reviewers can add insights to a film or provide additional information, but sometimes, as in the case of Time to Leave, reading them makes me wonder if I saw the same film that others saw.
While the critical reception to the film was mixed, most reviewers felt the film was one of Francois Ozon’s weaker works, and many disliked the main character and his response to his situation. On the other hand, I felt it was one of his better works, right up there with Under the Sand, somewhat better than The Swimming Pool and significantly better than his last one, 5x2. It was lyrical, often quite moving and nicely acted.
The plot is simple, and the outcome is never in doubt. Romain (Melvil Poupaud), thirty-one, is a successful fashion photographer who collapses one day during a shooting session. The doctor tells him he has cancer that has metastasized, and while chemotherapy might help, the odds are probably less than five percent in his favor. He chooses not to suffer the treatment, and the doctor respects his decision.
He then must decide what to do in the two months that he has left to live. Among his major decisions is that he will tell no one but his grandmother about his impending death.
Romaine is selfish and conceited, and he decides to break off relations with the few people with whom he is involved—his mother (Marie Rivière), his father (Daniel Duval), his sister Sophie (Louise-Anne Hippeau) and his lover Sasha (Christian Sengewald).
At a dinner with his parents, he deliberately insults his sister and asks his father to drive him home. He has a few moments of tenderness with his father as he questions him about life and his marriage and hugs him goodbye. When Romaine enters his apartment, he has passionate sex with Sasha and then tells him he must move out soon (those disturbed by nude gay sex are forewarned).
Later, there is somewhat of a telephone reconciliation with the sister, after she writes him a letter, and he does meet with Sasha again and helps him find a job, but he never sees his parents again.
His major scene of coming to terms with his death occurs when he tells his grandmother Laura (played by the incomparable Jeanne Moreau). They agree that he is much more like her than anyone else in the family, and they eat dinner together, while she tells him of her grief when his grandfather died young. He walks around the farm where she lives and looks at locations involving his childhood. The next morning, she gives him a bouquet of roses, to which he says, “For my funeral?” and she says, “Toss them away if you want. I picked them earlier this morning.” He bids her goodbye and drives away.
The only other major incident in the film before Romaine’s death is his encounter with a young couple at a diner, and that is impossible to discuss without giving away too much of an unexpected plot twist.
In the last scene, two months later, Romaine, now very skinny and pale, goes to the beach and lies on the sand, watching people playing around him. He obviously appreciates the people and life more than ever before. Throughout the film, Romaine remembers himself as a young boy, and in this scene he catches a ball rolled toward him by the young boy who was himself, and then the boy wades out into the water. Evening comes on, and with the setting sun Romaine dies.
Why did reviewers find this film so unsatisfying? Because it tries to avoid sentimentality while dealing with honest emotion? Because the hero is gay and the sexual scenes are graphic? Because Ozon offended others with S&M scenes in the dungeon of a gay bar? Probably any or all of the above.
Nonetheless, Time to Leave is a thoughtful, emotional, sometimes lyrical examination of a young man facing his imminent death, and he handles it with grace and courage. This film is the second in Ozon’s “death” trilogy (Under the Sand was the first), and in the next one he intends to handle an even more difficult subject, the death of children. It will be very interesting to see what he creates. Time to Leave is in French with English subtitles. Top

 

La Moustache
Emmanual Carrere is a new director, and the script that he films is based on his own novel. The music is by Philip Glass, and that should tell you all you need to know about the music and whether you will like it or not. There seem to be some parallels between the rhythms of the narrative and that of the music.
In a nutshell, La Moustache is the most baffling film I’ve seen in many years. David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive probably is the closest in confusing narrative, but Lynch does throw the viewer a few scenes that serve as handholds to get a grip on the plot.
Carrere seems to delight in editing out anything that might clarify matters, and in an interview on the DVD, he lists several things that might be going on—e.g., the hero is losing his mind, the wife is deliberately driving him crazy, the hero is the victim of a plot by his friends and wife, various plot lines are occurring in parallel universes and are occasionally intersecting.
Carrere rules them all out; if it is explainable, he isn’t interested in it. Is this deliberately baffling film worth watching? Yes, as long as the viewer doesn’t expect a neat, wrapped-up ending.
The film begins with opening shots of reflections on black water, and then cuts to Marc (Vincent Lindon) shaving in his expensive Paris apartment and asking his wife Agnès (Emmanuelle Devos) what she would think if he shaved off the moustache he has had for many years. She replies she doesn’t know, and perhaps to find out, he shaves it off while she goes shopping for groceries.
When she returns, he waits to see what she thinks, but she says nothing. He thinks she is playing a game, so he pretends to ignore it also, and they go to dinner at a friend’s house. Strangely enough, the couple says nothing about the lack of moustache either, and Marc begins to fume. He and Agnès have a fight on the way home, and she swears he has never had a mustache.
By this point, reality is becoming quite fragile—do we accept his version (we have seen him shaving the mustache) or her version (we have perhaps been a part of his delusion)? He finds a picture showing him with a mustache and leaves it out for her to see, but then the picture disappears before he actually shows it to her.
The next day, when he shows his driver’s license to a police woman, she agrees with him that there is a mustache on the man in the picture, and Marc decides that his wife is having hallucinations. They agree to see a psychiatrist on Monday.
But before the weekend is over, other disturbing developments occur, making us question his version of reality as well as hers, and Marc flees in terror to Hong Kong for the second of the three parts of this film. There he rides the ferries back and forth for days (make of the water imagery what you will, as well as what is meant by the endless rides on boats that go nowhere—don’t forget, this director is a novelist). Then he takes a room in a run-down hotel, grows a beard and settles into a new, solitary life.
One day, however, he returns to the hotel and finds his room key missing, and the old man who runs the desk tells him someone is waiting for him. To say any more would ruin all the stunning, surrealistic fun of the last section of the film, but I was completely baffled by it, although I’m not sure Marc was.
The acting is excellent, especially from the two leads, the photography is great and Glass’s music works for me, although I didn’t argue when a character in the film says, “Turn off the CD player.” Particularly in the Hong Kong ferry scenes, though, when there is no CD player, the redundant music nicely matches the redundant visuals. The film certainly kept my attention, but at the end it remained an enigma. Perhaps there were things in the novel, as well as some scenes shot in the film, that were lost on the cutting room floor—the director and producer imply in the DVD interview that the production is full of “ghost scenes.”
This is the kind of film that lingers in your head, partly because of the unanswered questions, but partly because of the visual power of some of the scenes. At the end, the narrative has reached a kind of stasis, like a night reflection dancing on dark water, but nothing is explained. The journey, however, is quite a ride. La Moustache is in French with English subtitles. Top

 

Stranger than Fiction
Film always has drawn extensively from literature, from its earliest days when it borrowed narrative techniques, through all the novels and short stories that were adapted into film, to today’s symbiosis in which literature has even adapted some of film’s techniques.
Stranger than Fiction offers an unusual kind of interaction between the two media. Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) is brushing his teeth one morning when he hears a voice-over narration of someone describing how he is brushing his teeth. This voice seems to know more about him than he does, and when he challenges it, it ignores him. The voice goes away, but then comes back again at inopportune and inexplicable times until Harold gradually realizes that he is a character in a story that someone is writing, for the voice anticipates what he will do. Or, better, he does what the voice says he will do.
Crick is an obsessively controlled man who works, appropriately, for the Internal Revenue Service as a tax investigator and auditor. One of his subjects for investigation is Ana Pascal (Maggie Gyllenhaal), and as he audits her tax return, he finds himself interacting with her and then falling in love. Thus, we have the required romantic subplot.
Crick also is exploring the implications of his narrative voice, especially when it starts talking about how he will die. For help, he goes to a noted literature expert, Professor Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman). Hilbert discusses the situation from the perspective of literary analysis, which leads to some hilarious points, and tries to determine whether Harold is living in a comedy (in which case he’ll marry and live happily ever after) or a tragedy (in which case he’ll shortly be dead). With Hilbert’s help and the chance viewing of a talk show, Crick discovers that the novelist writing his life is Kay Eiffel (Emma Thompson), a novelist who always kills off her protagonist, and he sets out to find her and try to save his life.
His need to save his life is accentuated when Ana begins to respond to his personal, rather than professional, investigation. An amusing overlay on many of the visuals is the use of GUIs (graphic user interfaces) to point out Harold’s obsession with numbers and neat patterns.
The acting is excellent throughout. Ferrell, like Robin Williams, obviously enjoys playing a serious part, and the obsessive aspects of the role work well in his hands. Of course, the rest of the cast is stellar, with Thompson almost stealing the show with her dry wit and sarcastic comments.
Gyllenhaal manages to breathe some life into what could have been a stereotype, the hippie cookie baker. Add Queen Latifah as the person Thompson’s publisher has sent to help her through writer’s block (“I have never missed a publisher’s deadline”), Linda Hunt as analyst Dr. Mittag-Leffler, Tom Hulce (Amadeus) as the touchy-feely Dr. Cayly, and Kristin Chenoweth as the totally flaky interviewer on “The Book Channel,” and it’s a knock-out cast.
Despite its comic tone—and it is a comedy—the film raises some serious questions: how much is a man’s life worth? Is creating a masterpiece more important than letting someone live? Where do life and art intersect? While the story here may be fictional and funny, writers every day take material from people’s lives and use it without the people’s permission, perhaps affecting those people’s lives. Also, how many other people can a writer sacrifice (family, friends, etc.) to attempt to create a masterpiece?
These questions underlie this witty and often quite funny film. Clearly, some aspects of the film are indebted to Charley Kauffman and his Adaptation or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and those who enjoyed the hi-jinks of those films will certainly like Stranger than Fiction. Be sure to watch the hilarious “deleted” extended scenes of the Chenoweth TV shows on the DVD, and “always begin your day with a wink and a smile.” Top
—Leonard G. Heldreth

Editor’s Note: All films reviewed are available on DVD or VHS from local stores.

 

[ Home | Home Cinema | Top ]