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Cinema
by
Leonard Heldreth
Our films this month include a gentle
comedy, two films about France and two animation films that redefine
that genre of film.
Waitress
When Waitress premiered at Sundance, it was received warmly for reasons
partly beyond the film itself. Reviewers in general, however, were
almost unanimous in their enthusiasm for this small film, both men
and women saying they left the theaters smiling and happy. I completely
agree.
The plot tells the story of Jenna (Keri Russell), a young woman working
as a pie maker and waitress at Joe's Pie Shop. Jenna has a genius
for making pies, relying on the inspiration of the moment for both
ingredients and names for her famous pies. For example, when she finds
out-to her dismay-that she's pregnant, she makes "Bad Baby Pie"
and "I Hate my Husband Pie," both of which are culinary
delights. (I suspect the film's working title once may have been "Waitress
Pie.") Jenna's husband Earl (Jeremy Sisto) is a classic example
of arrested development: when he finds out she's pregnant, he makes
her promise never to love the baby more than she loves him. He also
collects her tips at the end of the day, expects her to anticipate
his needs and refuses to let her have money to enter a national pie-baking
contest. As far as he's concerned, she needs nothing but him.
Jenna's fellow waitresses, Becky (Cheryl Hines) and Dawn (director
Adrienne Shelly), both have problems, but neither would trade places
with Jenna because of her husband. Things begin to change when Jenna
finds her regular doctor replaced by the handsome Dr. Pomatter (Nathan
Fillion of Firefly and Serenity). How all of these characters intertwine,
and how screenwriter Shelly paints the story into a corner and then
manages to extricate her characters, makes an interesting story, one
that's light but with enough realism to undercut the sweetness of
some of these pies.
The acting is solid across the board without being flashy. Hines and
Shelly have the banter and brass of waitresses trying to make the
best of their marital situations, Jenna is sympathetic, Earl is slimy
and Fillion makes a solid romantic comedy lead. Throw in Eddie Jemison
as Ogie, the Pee Wee Herman-style boyfriend of Dawn, and Andy Griffith
as the curmudgeonly deus-ex-machina owner of the diner, and it's a
collection of recognizable, but interesting characters.
The colors are bright, the pies look scrumptious-especially "Lonely
Chicago" pie-and the ordinary settings are exactly right for
this little story about female friendship, food, love and following
your dreams. The movie will not overwhelm you, but it will pull you
in, and you'll smile at the end.
The only down note about the film is that after it was finished but
before it premiered at Sundance, the director, screenwriter and actress
Shelly was murdered in a bizarre incident in the apartment she was
using as an office in New York City. She and a young immigrant construction
worker quarreled over the noise he was making in the apartment below,
and he punched her. Thinking she was dead, he carried her upstairs
and hanged her from the shower rod with a bed sheet, hoping people
would think she committed suicide. Later, as police investigated tracks
in the bathtub, he confessed and was indicted. As an actress, Shelly
had worked with Hal Hartly in The Unbelievable Truth and other films.
As Waitress demonstrates, she was well on her way to becoming a solid
director, and her light tone and humorous writing will be missed in
the independent film world.
La Vie en Rose (La Mome)
Olivier Dahan's film account of French singer Edith Piaf has tended
to polarize critics, from numerous comments about the film being "disjointed"
and "a cliché" to Parade's Walter Scott's belief
that it is "one of the best biopics ever."
The film faces the usual problems of stories about famous people,
especially singers (as in Ray, Walk the Line and even Coal Miner's
Daughter): the narrative pattern is almost completely predictable-early
hardship, struggling years, great success, personal disasters, recovery
and final iconic status.
Dahan tries to subvert the pattern by breaking up the chronology with
flashbacks and interleaved segments as Piaf remembers things, but
the result is very confusing for the typical audience.
One of the opening sequences shows her collapsing during a concert,
but before she collapses, an ambulance and a stretcher are taken into
the theater. Did they anticipate the need? Did she collapse first
(in real life) and then the ambulance came? I don't know her life
well enough to tell.
Further, the director has passed over several events that normally
would be included-her child, her extensive friendship with Cocteau
and Marlene Dietrich (Dietrich makes one brief appearance), her work
with the Resistance during World War II-so it's difficult to understand
what accounts for the repeated temper tantrums, egotism and other
personality problems presented in the film. Dahan has acknowledged
that he is not a fan of Piaf's, but wanted to show how her determination
enabled her to succeed. Unfortunately, he has not attempted to present
a balanced view of the singer, although some reviewers praised him
for showing her, "warts and all."
The problem with trying to understand Piaf and her motivations (why
else would you watch a biopic?) is summed up in an otherwise unremarkable
scene. Fully dressed, Piaf sits alone on a sandy beach, knitting,
and a young reporter meets her there for an interview. The reporter
asks her questions, and Piaf courteously answers them with a smile,
in one of her best-behaved performances. But the questions are of
the most banal type-"What is your favorite color?" "What
is your favorite food?"-and nothing more of the real Piaf has
been revealed when the young reporter walks away.
The ending of the movie has some of the same problems-we have seen
and heard Piaf, but we still don't know Piaf, even to the extent we
would expect from a film that runs more than two and a half hours.
Is this deliberate?
On the other hand, by the end of the film, Marion Cotillard has provided
one of the great performances of recent years, and, given Hollywood's
tendency to reward such roles (as in Ray and Coal Miner's Daughter
and many Oscar nominations), she may win the golden statue this spring.
In the role, Cotillard has to age from Piaf's teens to her death at
fifty, but Piaf looked more like eighty at her death, and Cotillard
makes the crippled old woman believable. The makeup, usually the weak
spot in such performances, is truly extraordinary. Even in close-ups,
she always looks the part.
The production is sumptuous, the photography and lighting are right,
and then, of course, there's the music-Piaf's songs, either sung by
her or well-imitated and smoothly lip-synched by Cotillard.
The most striking sequence in the film shows that director Dahan has
talent. Piaf is waiting in her hotel room when the boxer, who is her
current lover, shows up, and she calls for coffee for them to share
in bed. The following scene is cinematically exciting as well as chilling,
and it's unfortunate that the rest of the film isn't up to that standard.
This disjointed, elliptical film which sometimes seems to dislike
its subject, nonetheless has some extraordinary scenes and a powerful
performance by the lead actress. The fact that we cannot help feeling
sympathy for the "little sparrow" indicates that, mostly
thanks to Marion Cotillard, the film succeeds in more areas than it
fails.
Paris Je T'Aime (I Love Paris)
Paris Je T'Aime is a film that parallels Humpty Dumpty's "portmanteau"
words-it's a feature-film that incorporates eighteen shorter films
to provide an overview of Paris. The eighteen segments correspond
to the city's twenty districts (two apparently didn't make the final
cut).
Furthermore, each of the sequences was created by a different famous
director who was supposed to go no longer than five minutes (e.g.,
the Coen brothers, Wes Craven, Alfonso Cuarón, Tom Tykwer,
Gus Van Sant, Alexander Payne). As expected, some of these sequences
are better than others, but the overall quality is especially high.
Each viewer will have individual favorites. Here are a few of mine.
Elijah Wood, in an episode directed by Vicenzo Natali, plays a young
man who encounters a lady vampire in an original, surrealistic episode
where blood runs green. In "Quartier Latin" Ben Gazarra
and Gena Rowlands play a savvy husband and wife who meet to discuss
legal details in a restaurant run by Gerard Depardieu; you can't beat
the acting, and Rowlands wrote the script. Wes Craven's "Père-Lachaise"
follows a young couple through a cemetery as they look for Oscar Wilde's
grave and encounter not only the grave, but his ghost, played by Alexander
Payne. Steve Buscemi plays an American tourist in trouble in the Coen
brothers' "Tuileries," set in a station of the Paris Métro.
Alexander Payne's "14th arrondissement." presents the rotund
Margo Martindale, a postal worker from Denver, writing to her French
class in the United States about her experiences in Paris without
anyone to share them with. And Bob Hoskins and Fanny Ardant play roles
to improve their sex lives in a segment set in Pigalle.
The only segment I disliked was one with mimes, but then I find mimes
in white makeup nearly always intolerable. Fortunately, trite Paris
landmarks, such as the Eiffel Tower are kept to a minimum (except
in the mimes' sequence), and the views of other Paris neighborhoods
should increase the tourist trade substantially. This film is the
perfect prelude to your next visit to the city of lights.
Renaissance: Paris 2054
Also set in Paris but with a visual style as different as possible
is Renaissance: Paris 2054, a black-and-white science fiction film
that openly acknowledges its influences-Blade Runner, Sin City, film
noir, James Ellroy's novels and adult comic books.
The style is a sharp-edged animation in which the grey tones are eliminated
in favor of stark black and white, and although the visuals at first
seem annoying, they quickly become an accepted part of the narrative.
The story's protagonist is Karas, the standard film noir cop who chafes
under the regulations of his superiors, but is so effective at his
job that they put up with him, at least for a while. The villain is
this case is Avalon Corporation and its management, and the plot concerns
research carried out fifty years before on children suffering from
premature aging. The film includes the usual misguided scientist,
the corrupt CEO, the femme fatale (in this case wearing a lab gown)
and the usual supporting characters-the loyal sidekick, the compromised
family member, etc. Such predictability is not necessarily bad, for
part of the fun of genre films is to see what new changes the director
can ring out of these old bells. Christian Volckman, Alexandre de
la Patellière, Matthieu Delaporte and Marc Miance (who respectively
directed, co-wrote the script and created the visual concepts) succeed,
through their original artistry, in making an exciting film totally
unlike any you have seen before.
Part of the film's fascination derives from the urban landscapes through
which the characters move. This Paris, filmed in lovely black and
white animation, is less a futuristic city than a dreamscape in which
the familiar terrain is overlaid with mammoth apartment buildings,
massive wrought iron structures that echo the Eiffel Tower, and deep
architectural canyons that mimic the sets of Blade Runner. With its
etched appearance, Paris looks like a cross between Dickens' Victorian
London and Fritz Lang's vision of Metropolis. Falling rain, swirling
snowflakes and sprouting cyber-plants take on a surreal beauty, as
do the long rows of information files in the office buildings, gigantic
moving billboards, and even the beams of flashlights. It's really
quite stunning.
The plot, about which some critics complained, is no worse than that
of the average film and better than many. As in Blade Runner the film
is suffused with melancholy, not surprising since both deal with the
inevitability of death, and the themes are reinforced by the excellent
musical score.
The film was made using live actors wearing suits with markers that
computers could track, and then the animators created figures that
followed these movements, perhaps giving more realism to the animation.
The film was written and shot to be released in English, and although
some of the supplementary material is in French, the film itself is
in English. The chief cop is voiced by Daniel Craig, the new James
Bond, and Ian Holm and Jonathan Pryce play supporting roles.
I started this film with some trepidation but quickly became absorbed
in its artistry and visual originality. Anyone interested in the cutting
edge of film production (as well as fans of Blade Runner and the other
films that influenced it) will want to see Rensaissance: Paris 2054.
Paprika
About as far from Renaissance as it's possible to be and still be
animation is Satoshi Kon's anime film, Paprika. Before Sin City, 300
and A Scanner Darkly were leading animation in one direction away
from Disney's little woodland creatures and fairy tales, Japanese
directors such as Hayao Miyazaki (Swept Away, Princess Mononoke) and
Mamoru Oshii (Ghost in the Shell) were leading it in another. More
surrealistic and often more adult (including "R" ratings)
than the typical Disney product of the past, these films were themselves
influencing and raising the bar for Disney directors such as Brad
Bird (Ratatouille, The Incredibles). Kon's Millennium Actress, Perfect
Blue and Tokyo Godfathers established him in the genre, and the current
film seems to be a kind of watershed of his work. The plot was adapted
by Kon and Seishi Minakami from an avant garde 1993 novel by the highly
regarded Japanese author, Yasutaka Tsutsui, who then retired from
writing (he appears in the DVD supplements). Tsutsui selected Kon
to make the film and accepted that the novel had be changed and modified.
The plot concerns a number of scientists involved in psychology and
dream research. Dr. Tokita, an overweight genius who gets stuck in
elevators, has invented a device called the DC-Mini, which enables
psychoanalysts to enter the dreams of their patients and better understand
their problems. Working with him are Dr. Chiba, whose persona in the
dream world is Paprika, and Dr. Shima, an older researcher. Some of
the DC-Minis are stolen and used to enter dreams without people's
consent, and then the perpetrators start combining dreams, a process
which leads to chaos. Brought on board to recover the devices is detective
Konakawa Toshimi, whose flat-top haircut and line-backer shoulders
render him almost a stereotype. He brings psychological problems and
dreams of his own into the mix (in another parallel with Rensaissance).
The pursuit of the DC-Minis takes the characters into and out of various
dreams and realities that shift and segue into each other. In the
opening sequence, the detective finds himself in a circus, and as
he watches, the spotlight suddenly focuses on him, and he is transported
to the center ring. Then people from the audience, all wearing his
face, run toward him, until he drops through a chute in the floor
into a different scenario.
As in dreams, the audience is best advised to give up on logic and
go with the stream-of-conscious flow of the patterns. The images are
stunning and riotous, often sinister as in dreams, and sometimes amusing-as
when Paprika appears dressed in a blue outfit and wings that came
from Disney's Tinkerbell. The most impressive image, and one that
occurs several times in the film, is the parade of everyday objects
down a main street of the city. Toasters and other kitchen appliances,
frogs with drums, puppets, umbrellas, waving cats, Japanese dolls
and even marching red Shinto gates go dancing past to the sound of
raucous band music. Everyday objects take on a frightening quality
in this parody of celebration as seen in a collective dream.
Paprika, like Renaissance, has been criticized for putting style over
substance, and the climax of the Japanese film seems less successful
than that of the French one, but Kon's film wraps up in a light, humorous
touch at the very end. The detective, having been passed over by Dr.
Chiba in favor of someone else, retreats to a city block of dream
theaters where several of Mr. Kon's films, such as Tokyo Godfathers,
are playing, and buys two tickets. What better escape from the world
than into your own animated dreams?
-Leonard G. Heldreth
Editor's Note: All films reviewed are available on DVD or VHS from
local stores. Reviews of earlier films cited can be found at www.mmnow.com.
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