Big Weekend at the Movies

Last weekend was one of those weekends I live for, as a film geek. Three films out in the theater that I absolutely must see - Altman, Park Chan-wook and Olivier Assayas directing Maggie Cheung and Nick Nolte - life is good. It would have been better if the US hadn't choked in that soccer game (I hope they choked - if they choked, they might come back in the next couple. If they're really that bad - anyway - no one asked for soccer posts...)

Sympathy for Lady Vengeance - Of the three, I have to admit, this is the one I was most eager to see. The third of Park Chan-wook's vengeance films, this one concerns Lee Geum-ja ("kind hearted Ms. Geum-ja" is the literal title) - a woman serving 13 years in prison for murdering a child. She gets out, and sets out to get her vengeance on the one who put her behind bars. She does - there's no point denying it - though getting there Park gets a lot of things done. He uses a complicated time structure - as Geum-ja goes about carrying out her plan, we flash back to her stay in jail - to the crime - to how her crime played in the media, for it did - a hack director wanted to make a Lee Geum-ja movie! we are told - and we see her reenacting her crime for the cameras... It's a beautiful film, and very dense - it's not so hard to follow, but hard to get a grip on all the threads with just one viewing - harder still to talk about them without giving away the whole story. Park's style, the story structure, helps develop his themes - the way vengeance runs alongside other stories - her relationships to other people, her relationship to her daughter especially - these things become as important as the revenge plot. On first viewing, I confess that I still think Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance might be better - the harsh twists of that film, the horrible results of mere bad ideas, resonates - but this is superb itself, and stands to deepen with time.

Clean - this has been out there a couple years and finally made it stateside. I have been waiting for it - Assayas directing Cheung and Nolte promises much - it delivers. On first viewing, at least, the best film of the week - I don't know if I'll feel that way in a year, or even a week, but it's still a powerful movie. Maggie Cheung plays the junkie lover of a junkie rock star; when the rock star dies, she is cast out on her own. Nolte plays the rock star's father, who has been caring for their son. He shows up in the film after his son's death, and from the beginning, confounds our expectations. He and Assayas play off his hard-ass side - we expect trouble - but don't get it - yet - they extend this through the whole film. He proves a mountain of decency and strength, made more remarkable by the way they suggest the potential for destruction. It is Maggie's film - she is on camera most of the time, forced to perform a kind of stunningly beautiful woman who has made utter hash of her life, and now has to unhash it. Without losing herself.... it's a tightrope, and she pulls it off - making the character seem both worth saving, and worth not turning into just another dutiful mom. (It occurs to me, in fact, that this is almost exactly the same story as Sympathy for Lady Vengeance - a bad mother trying to connect to her lost child, and shed the demons that are destroying her - heroin, vengeance, as the case may be. That's simplistic, but it's not far off....) But one of the things that makes it work - makes it possible for her to become a decent person and not become a boring person is Nolte's character (which is utterly dependent on Nolte's performance. A lesser son of a bitch could not do what he does.) It's good stuff. The film itself, meanwhile, is reminiscent of Assayas' earlier films - the odd rhythms, the aestheticism and humanism. He has a habit of fading out after the key line in a scene - and a way of taking scenes in strange directions, shifting the attention between different characters, making new story points appear over the sequence. There is one sequence - Maggie Chueng meets a former boss and lover played by Jeanne Baliban - they talk, Baliban is catty, Maggie is desperate - then they go to Baliban's house, where she has locked her current assistant and lover in the bathroom. They turn her loose, and the assistant and Maggie leave, talking about Baliban - they go to the assistant's house, have a couple drinks and then Maggie is digging through her file cabinets looking for dope. She passes out. Cut, to some time later, Maggie out looking for a job... That style reminds me of Arnaud Desplechins - where they picked it up - Rivette maybe? Assayas probably got some of it from Asian films - those odd swerves, and the mixture of extended scenes and truncated scenes seems more common there...

Prairie Home Companion - And finally, Altman. Made with Garrison Keillor, purporting to be the last show of a live radio show - we see the stage, we see backstage (we don't see the audience much though). It looks like vintage Altman, with its cluttered sets and mirrors and frames and zooms and drifting camera, sounds like Altman, with all the chatter and noise going on all around... Has that sense of probing an invented world he offers, and the way he has of trying to get a world from inside and outside. (It's an animating principal, isn't it? His proclaimed love of actors, improvisation and so on, combined with his less proclaimed, but unmistakable, control of the way his films look can be seen that way - characters free inside the films, but yet seen from outside, almost pinned in place. He allows them their freedom, but puts them in their place, as well. Almost like shifting frames of reference - as they see it - as the universe sees it.) Anyway - it is a great joy to behold, funny, packed with outstanding actors chewing scenery like no tomorrow - it offers some reflection on mortality and the like - life and death and all that. It has a valedictory feel. Enjoyable as it is - it seems a bit soft. The sarcasm of Nashville, say, works both to mock the conventions of country music, and to give a kind of rhetorical flourish to its "real" music - "I'm Easy" cuts a little more after the buffoonery - and Barbara Jean's songs are heartbreaking. This film - is okay, but a little too likeable. It's strange - even The Company seems more inventive, though not as good, probably. But its complete abandonment of the plot (while maintaining most of the plot devices of classic backstage musicals) gave it a kind of structural interest the new one doesn't have. But that's a pointless complaint for something this entertaining and generous.