Featured Reviews
Christopher Mulrooney
( Los Angeles, California )
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La Demoiselle d'honneur
Dir. Claude Chabrol
First Run Features, 2004
The bust of Flora in the garden resembles the mother, who gives it to her beau, who takes the family out to dinner and fades away. The son fetches it back and keeps it hidden.
At his sister's wedding, he hits it off with the bridesmaid, who resembles the bust of Flora in his closet. Away from her, he caresses and kisses it. She lives in a basement apartment; above her is a tango dancer not her mother, the upper floor is vacant. Outside on the grounds is a middle-aged bum, “the filthiest man in the world.”
The affair is passionate. Four things, she tells him, set the seal on their love. Each must plant a tree, write a poem, make love to a person of the same sex, and kill somebody. He's never done the first two, the rest is impossible. She is intractable; to please her he takes credit for the bum's death reported in the newspaper. In honor of this occasion, she murders his mother's beau.
The son investigates, but finds his mistress has killed a houseguest (the bum isn't dead either, only misidentified). The smell on the upper floor is the rotten corpse of another victim, a rival for the attentions of her previous lover.
The film opens in a very bright overexposure with vague blue shapes shot from a camera car, resolving gradually into a vague industrial landscape and precisely familiar suburbs. A news crew is broadcasting from the sidewalk in front of a house where a girl was last seen. The son and his sisters are watching this at home.
He does sales work for a contractor, Suzanne Flon is a finicky customer. The mother is a hairdresser who makes house calls. The bridesmaid is a sometime actress and model.
The son's investigation makes him a suspect. His punkish other sister is arrested for shoplifting; he's called out of the detective's office for an interview. The Hitchcockism has been prepared with De Palma slowness, to make all the associations plain and generate the unobtrusive surrealism of a daydream, suddenly Chabrol puts the film forward rapidly to a trundling breath of fact. From there it sinks back into the earlier tempo as the son swears never to abandon his mistress, while the police close in.
Desperate Hours
Dir. Michael Cimino
MGM, 1990
There isn’t an English-speaking critic, as far as I’m aware, who has the slightest idea of this film’s significance, and I’m inclined to wonder if the French aren’t bluffing in this instance. Anyway, they’re not letting on if they know, any of them, and for every 9 out of 10 writers who found the film execrable, there’s the one who took it at face value, or tried to.
It’s a satire from first to last of the stilted melodramatics that gradually emerged in the Eighties, played havoc with the cinema and utterly consumed television. Cimino doesn’t merely mock it, he takes it apart utterly by applying it as a stylistic update of Wyler’s masterpiece. It’s as simple as that, really, and the uninformed (because entirely unobservant) critics will prattle on about the classics like wild parrots.
Their salvation, the critics’ I mean, comes from the ordeal Cimino has provided. This is part of the drama, and until the last few minutes swiftly bring the film to a satisfying close, is nowhere relieved except for charming bits like the homage to John Ford (to the tune of “Red River Valley”), which only brought confusion under the circumstances. A certain amount of talk was wasted on Cimino’s camerawork here, which is not important. It actually redounds to the critics’ simple honesty, in a way, that they panned this picture, since they didn’t understand it and disliked it for the very same reason it was made in the first place.
A glimpse of Cimino’s technique may be gleaned from a recent interview given by Anthony Hopkins (who, like everyone else, is perfect in Desperate Hours). Hopkins believes this to be his own worst picture, found the production arduous, but did his best to soldier on. That’s a lesson from Wyler, who taught Audrey Hepburn how to cry, but he may have been misunderstood.
Love Is All There Is
Dirs. Renée Taylor & Joseph Bologna
MGM, 1996
The New York Times hailed this exuberantly as a romantic comedy back from the dead, but note that the tribute offered here in whatever degree to what the English call “yoof” was met with opprobrium by Boxoffice Magazine. “A fitfully pleasant diversion for undemanding senior citizens and the Lawrence Welk crowd”, said B.O.
Taylor & Bologna offer a major analysis of Romeo and Juliet along two significant lines. Snobbery accounts for the conflict (and the great thing about snobbery and reverse snobbery is the ignorance they reveal), then there is the “dying fall” of the Elizabethans, which is understood to make of the tomb scene rather more than a dirge.
The style bears only superficial resemblances to John Cassavetes’ great and greatly overlooked Big Trouble, nevertheless Taylor & Bologna are the first to recognize it, if only as kindred spirits. The long, still take is eschewed for crowded cutting, but it’s the comic frame of mind that matters.
The many and varied jokes include just a soupçon of Cocteau’s Les Parents Terribles, Paul Sorvino’s Florentine pronunciation of “catering hall” as “hole”, and Bologna’s malapropism at the end: “indisposable” for “inconsolable”.
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