Recent films

I haven't seen an awful lot of new movies this month - the ones I've seen have tended to be repeat viewings, at that. I have been trying to write a kind of group review of some of them, since a lot of them seem to share a theme (political violence, in fact.), but it's been hard going. So - back to the short capsules, and if I get the inspiration, maybe I'll get something better out. For now though - I guess it's time to bit the bullet.

Cache - ***1/2 - every Michael Haneke film I've seen, I've felt the same - before I see it, I don't really want to. They sound like the worst kind of Euro-art films, Serious and Deep, and worse, hectoring, mean and shocking, but always in a nasty, puritanical way. But then I see them - and every one of them turns out to be, sure, Serious, Deep, and hectoring and mean, and shocking in a nasty way - but also brilliant, genuinely disturbing, and often, very moving. This is no exception. Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche are tortured by anonymous videotapes - he knows more than he lets on.... Issues of racism, surveillance, the personal and the political, chance and intention, the culture industry appear - the story itself proves to be something of a slow motion version of Oldboy, or maybe even Cut (from Three Extremes) - an examination of guilty consciences and the unexpected results of casual, careless cruelty, and just a hint of Duck Amuck...

Good Morning, Night *** - Marco Bellocio's film about the Red Brigade's kidnapping of Aldo Moro 1978. Told from the point of view of the kidnappers, especially a young woman who is their main link to the outside world (she keeps going to her job every day).... Bellochio reimagines the events, adding this woman, and a young screenwriter who tries, rather like Mohsen Makhmalbaf in A Moment of Innocence, to undo the past... It begins fairly straightforward, but grows darker and stranger as it goes - dreams, memories, history and imagination collide with reality, reality and surreality collide and intermingle, as Pink Floyd plays. You'd think it was Zabriskie Point!

Regular Lovers - **** - Philippe Garrel's new film about the aftermath of the 1968 riots in Paris. Garrel starts with the riots - shown as dreamscapes, bunches of kids crouching behind tipped over cars, police aiming mortars, long tracks and pans past the smoking and burning rubble, then everything sort of flashing into action... He cuts from this to the aftermath - the same kids, now mostly hanging around the house of the rich kid they know. He buys them drugs (though they run the risks of getting arrested), subjects them to cynical lectures, and lets them do what they do. There's a numbness in it all, relieved by the love story that develops between the main character (a poet) and the sculptress he falls in love with. Starring Louis Garrel, Philippe's son, who played a very similar role in Bertolucci's The Dreamers (Garrel makes jokes about Bretolucci here). Louis Garrel was by far the best thing about the Bertolucci film, and impresses here - and his father's film is infinitely better than The Dreamers. A beautiful, sad reverie on the past...

The Passenger - **** - When this Antonioni rerelease first came out, I was not sure what to make of it. Seeing it again clarifies things - it is a genuinely outstanding film. It is interesting how the plot works - there is a plot, plenty of plot, with gun-runners and political revolutionaries, and Nicholson's wife and boss trying to track him down across Europe (without knowing they're looking for him). What makes it interesting is how the plot goes on as it does, and Jack Nicholson remains an empty cipher in the foreground. He empties himself of everything - personality, motivation - he follows the plot as laid out in Robertson's notebooks, without caring, even though the story has changed....

The Matador - * - what the hell possessed me to see this? It's not really that bad - Pierce Brosnan plays an aging hit man who runs into Greg Kinnear in Mexico City and they have some good times together; later some plot intervenes. Brosnan is fine, Kinnear isn't bad - but the film itself is a mess. It feels like an outline - no one ever finished the story, so they just filled up the time with lots of jokes and conversation. Amusing in places, but a mess.

The Wild Blue Yonder - *** - Werner Herzog makes a science fiction film from found footage of a space shuttle and exploration beneath the Antarctic ice cap. Gorgeous and strange, with the plot (narrated by Brad Dourif in the person of an alien from beyond the Andromeda galaxy) being used to justify the string of images... and to underscore some of the strangeness of the everyday objects shown in the film. Very odd, but quite lovely.

Mrs. Henderson Presents - * - The problem is this - I have to see something - Transamerica looks okay, but not that good, and was drawing mobs, and I was running a bit late... the other new films out are Match Point and The New World - and frankly, Woody Allen and Terrence Malick are directors I can live very happily without. So I'm casting about for things to see, and though I'd probably have been happier seeing Cache or The Squid and the Whale yet again, this is where I ended up. What do we got? Dame Judi Dench as an old widow who buys a theater to keep busy - Bob Hoskins as a theatrical producer - and a bunch of girls with model perfect tits who look no more like 1940s strippers than I do. All in all it's amusing enough, if hokey, and the odds are it's a more serious and intelligent piece of work than Pocahantas II or I Wish I Could Adopt Scarlett Johanson, so I'm not going to complain too much...