3 Short Reviews

Another week without anything deep to add - a couple good movies, though, which is all we can ask.

The Flight of the Red Balloon gives us Hou Hsiao Hsien in Paris, watching Juliette Binoche as a somewhat harried mother and voice actor/puppeteer, with a new Chinese nanny (a filmmaker in her own right) for her clever son, and a dead beat tenant living downstairs... No, there isn't much plot to it - a series of incidents - Song, the nanny, reporting for duty, then learning her way around the household; the kid taking piano lessons and talking about his sister; Binoche coping with the tenant; some excerpts from puppet shows; Song taking Simon around the city, shooting bits of the city for her own film about The Red Balloon... Much of it is shot in the front room of their apartment - a cramped little room with a table between the door and the kitchen where everyone seems to spend most of their time, with stairs just to the left going up to a Mezzanine... A space that seems as much a character as the people - its utterly realistic clutter (books and puppets and papers and boxes), that everyone lives around. Later in the film, Hou finally turns the camera around for a couple shots - pointing back from the table - so first we see the space where the camera had been: couch and chairs, a TV with video games - and later, the space beyond that - a conventional looking living room that no one ever seems to go into. (We might see it in the flashbacks to Simon and Louis: though it's not identified as this room, and those scenes aren't exactly fixed in time - flashbacks, flashforwards, fiction - it's not certain.) Just this, Hou's leisurely tour of the apartment's rooms, is enough to remind me again what an astonishing filmmaker he is. Getting the way people live in their spaces; making subtle associations between the spaces and their lives - the way he slowly, casually reveals both the fuller layout of the apartment and the fuller history of the characters. What the film lacks in plot, in drama, it supplies, not just in the detail of their lives as they live them, but the quiet consideration of their lives so far (and to come: we are given to imagine where Fang Song will go, as we watch her working on her film throughout this film.) Another reminder - along with Godard and Rivette - this is the world's greatest living filmmaker...

My Blueberry Nights - meanwhile, Wong Kar-wei also strayed far from home for this film - Norah Jones mopes, at first in Jude Law's cafe in NYC, then in Memphis and Nevada. In Memphis, David Straithairn steals the picture playing an alcoholic stalker; in Nevada, Nathalie Portman amuses as a gambler. Then there's a happy ending! It livens up once Jones leaves NY, but still ends up playing like a parody of Wong's 90s films: rehashing all his old tricks... actually, arodying them directly - having Law play with a surveillance camera during a fight scene... All told though - it's pretty disposable. Nothing wrong with it, but...

The Visitor - Tom McCarthy's follow up to the Station Agent. Richard Jenkins stars as a college professor, going through the motions, pretending to write, pretending to teach, pretending to learn piano. He is sent to NYC to present a paper he cosigned, and when he arrives finds a couple living in his apartment in the city. He lets them stay the night - and within a day or so, he's struck up a friendship with the man - a Syrian musician. Who unfortunately does not have a green card - this goes where you fear it will. But it does so with grace and dignity. McCarthy has a nice way of withholding information, not to build false suspense, but to bring you into the story - to make you engage with it: like Jenkins coming to his apartment in NY - or later,when we see why he keeps trying to play piano... Things emerge naturally and in their own time... It is a lot like the Station Agent - the story of a lonely, depressed man, brought out of his shell by an outgoing stranger, brought into a new community where he finds himself at home... little sadder - the story poisoned by politics... A good, solid, film, the kind that justifies the existence of the American Indie film as a type...