There's nothing inherently wrong with the fact that Top Floor, Left Wing makes light of a hostage situation involving Muslim terrorists. What's wrong with writer-director Angelo Cianci's half-leaden, half-hysterical (and not in a funny way) farce is the way he takes the wrong things seriously and pokes fun of nothing worth laughing at. Unlike Four Lions, Chris Morris's empathetic and genuinely funny comedy about suicide bombers, Top Floor, Left Wing pivots around the serious notion that there's such a thing as defensible or simply respectable terrorist actions while laughing at the concept that the terrorist you don't know is often more dangerous than the one you do. It's a loud, incoherent, and completely unenlightening film about the way we live now, almost a full decade after 9/11. Continue Reading »
With The Queen of Hearts, autodidact Valerie Donzelli proves that she can make a better Tiny Furniture than Lena Dunham, though that really isn't saying much. Donzelli wrote, directed, and starred in Queen of Hearts, a comedy that wears its love of screwball comedies, Godard, and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg on its sleeve, but never really advances beyond a comfortable narrative of self-defeating self-loathing.
Thankfully, unlike Tiny Furniture, Queen of Hearts is at least somewhat appealing thanks to the amusing way that it recycles actor Jeremie Elkaim in four different roles. Elkaim plays: Jacques, the married man whose infant Adele (Donzelli) babysits; Pierre, a pleasant but mostly banal art student; Paul, a mysterious man Adele meets and feels an instant attraction to; and Mathieu, Adele's ex. Adele's current relationships with the first three aforementioned men are defined by her neuroses: she has cursorily fulfilling sex with Jacques but wants to actively flee from him every time he comes on to her; she doesn't know what to make of Pierre, but he's always there for her; and she loves Paul though she only meets him briefly three times, exchanging endless text messages with him and eventually engaging in kinky sex for the sake of holding onto him. Continue Reading »
The toothlessness of Service Entrance's upstairs-downstairs satire is immediately apparent from its tacky opening sequence: A handful of Spanish cleaning ladies treat the camera like an interviewer, talking about what they're willing to do and what their specialties and their limitations are. This sequence is a reminder that, no matter how much director Phillipe Le Guay tries to reassure his viewer, through the most conservative and strait-jacketed humor imaginable, of how easy it is for rich white French people to stop relying on stereotypes, he's not pushing his characters away from those loaded assumptions with enough force.
Service Entrance's initial scene is meant to be taken as a lampoon of what white people see when they first let domestic help into their lives: women that only know what they know and can do what they can do. One maid complains that she can't manage cooking French food, only Spanish (quel horreur!). But by film's end, Fabrice Luchini's fuddy-duddy protagonist is meant to learn differently, thanks to his hot Spanish housekeeper: Spanish housemaids are people too, with aspirations beyond housekeeping and a culture of their own. How Le Guay didn't get beaten to a pulp by his Spanish cast, including the great Carmen Maura, while making this film is beyond me; perhaps mass hypnosis was employed. Continue Reading »
Série Noire, Alain Corneau's seedy 1979 adaptation of Jim Thompson's A Hell of a Woman, is considered by aficionados of Thompson's work to be one of the best movies based on the bleak novelist's work. Certainly, when compared to something like Michael Winterbottom's recent adaptation of The Killer Inside Me, Corneau's film stands apart, though largely because of its atonal sense of humor. Punch-drunk though Franck Poupart (Patrick Deware), Série Noire's protagonist, may be, especially when compared to The Killer Inside Me's Lou Ford, he's ultimately just as desperate and manic. The key difference is that Lou Ford is almost a two-timing sadist while Franck Poupart is a sadist that thinks of himself as a masochist. Continue Reading »
Deep in the Woods opens with a flurry of coarse, increasingly brutal activity, seemingly as caught up in its own tumbling progression as it expects its audience to be. Here a mean narrative threads its way through sexual violence and bare fresh, souring its lovers-on-the-run tangent with the body-horror sadism of the New French Extremity. It's a bold start, one that flings its blunt psychological ideas to the ground and makes a show of rubbing them in the dirt. But this frenzied pitch is impossible for Benoit Jacquot's film to sustain. Faced with a terminus of both shock and action, it winds down toward a non-climax that, although natural to the story established so far, feels like an admission of its inability to guide its craziness to a satisfying conclusion. Continue Reading »
Catherine Breillat's films tend to examine sex in close quarters, trapping their characters in situations where they're forced to confront otherwise ignorable realities. The film set of Sex Is Comedy, the bare bedroom of Anatomy of Hell, the cloistered vacation communities of 36 Fillette and Fat Girl, all act as proving grounds for the painful exploration of a specific sexual reckoning. This was taken one step further in last year's Bluebeard, which not only ensconced its adolescent protagonist in a menacing castle, forced to confront male sexuality via her monstrous, murderous husband, but cast this as a framing lesson for two preadolescent girls. Continue Reading »
So arch you can practically hear its back breaking, Potiche finds François Ozon following up the psychologically incisive Hideaway by reverting to his campy 8 Women ways. Ozon immediately establishes his mood of lighthearted frivolity via an opening credit sequence in which the screen breaks into round-edged fragments, all of them encapsulating sights of Suzanne (Catherine Deneuve) jogging through a softly lit forest while wearing a candy-red track suit, stopping along her route to watch rabbits screw and write poetry about passing squirrels. That self-satisfied tongue-in-cheek mood doesn't dissipate once Suzanne returns home, where her adulterous, umbrella factory-running husband, Robert (Fabrice Luchini), treats his wife like an empty-headed "trophy housewife" (the film's title refers to a decorative vase that sits on a mantle), scoffing at her advice while explaining that her role is to be merely his most prized piece of domestic ornamentation. Continue Reading »
The 16th Rendez-Vous with French Cinema series, North America's leading showcase for the best in contemporary French film, premieres tonight with a screening of François Ozon's Potiche.
John Pavlus on why David Fincher is the best design thinker in Hollywood.
The reason the Supreme Court ruled for the Westboro Baptist Church.
Will Steven Spielberg directWikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy?
Matt Zoller Seitz explains why NBC should close The Office.
Was a Vanity Fair editor secretly working for the Church of Scientology?
Possibly extra-terrestrial douche gets remixed:
Links for the Day: A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to ed@slantmagazine.com and to converse in the comments section.
Produced after his most indelible noirs (Night and the City, Rififi), 1959's The Law—previously released in the U.S. in 1963 under the title Where the Hot Wind Blows!—finds Jules Dassin still in sharp form, even if his material doesn't quite live up to his direction's high standards. Dassin's 15th feature sets an all-star cast in the Italian fishing town of Porto Manacore, which is ruled from on high by a stern criminal named Don Cesar (Pierre Brasseur) who surrounds himself with women and Greek antiquities. Don Cesar looms over the citizenry like a menacing father figure, his dominance so pervasive that the local men's favorite pastime is a game predicated on hegemony called "The Law." In this diversion, individuals selected as the "boss" and the "deputy" are given free reign to lord over others in whatever nasty or nice way they choose, thereby encapsulating the film's belief that, in all relationships, there is a leader and a follower. Questions of authority stand at the root of the population's every deed and word, as power and romantic struggles abound, be they related to the many illicit affairs carried out behind the backs of cuckolded spouses, the pressures of gender politics placed on women and men to conform to traditional roles, or the efforts of the police to thwart a raft of thieves and swindlers. Continue Reading »
Jean-Pierre Melville's The Army of Shadows may be a revisionist and overly romantic depiction of the French Resistance during WWII, but at least it's a compelling fairy tale, something that cannot be said about Robert Guédiguian's The Army of Crime. Guédiguian attempts to set the record straight about the sect of guerillas—led by Armenian poet Missak Mannouchian (Simon Abkarian)—vilified by French collaborators and the Nazis occupying Paris as traitors to their country and the key instigators of the war. Tepid sequences of interminably rising action painstakingly relate the trepidation and anxiety that led up to terrorist actions that are rarely shown and almost never talked about. Unlike Melville's wrong-headed masterpiece, Guédiguian's film is happy to be lifeless, never putting its heroes in enough danger to keep the Resistance's story engaging enough to be worth following for a second time. Continue Reading »
A French variation of The Station Agent which substitutes that film's off-putting renaissance-of-the-spirit finale for an ineffective air of despondence, Welcome details what happens after former gold medal-winning swimmer Simon (Vincent Lindon) befriends Bilal (Firat Ayverdi), an illegal immigrant from Iraq. After failing to sneak into England by truck, Bilal decides that the best route to the U.K. (where his girlfriend lives) is by swimming the English Channel, a foolhardy endeavor that nonetheless brings him to the pool where Simon gives lessons. Despite strict French laws outlawing citizens from harboring or assisting illegals, Simon slowly develops a humanitarian streak toward Bilal, his work on the boy's behalf—and the reciprocated affection the boy feels for him—filling an emotional void created by his divorce from wife Marion (Audrey Dana), who now works with her new beau at a soup kitchen for illegals. Continue Reading »
When his minor art-house hit Red Lights helped Cedric Kahn finally emerge from the festival ghetto, his next move was to make a family movie...about a man who turns into a plane. Following that puzzling left turn, Regrets—an adultery melodrama that constantly teases you with fatal consequences—seems closer to familiar territory. But it's inexplicably turgid and predictable, the kind of movie in which the only reason someone walking to their parked car is so that they can spot an ex-lover on the street; adultery comes right on schedule.
That's what happens when Mathieu (Yvan Attal) returns home to attend to his dying mother. His ex, Maya (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), on whom he walked out years ago, is now married to terrifying, drunken lout Franck (Philippe Katerine), who shows Mathieu his incomprehensible architectural sketches at dinner and briefly threatens to spark the movie to life: He seems to be aware of more than he lets on. Alas, Franck butts out until it's time for him to show up wielding a chainsaw, which apparently isn't meant to be funny. Continue Reading »
To say that OSS 117: Lost in Rio is a hideously distended continuation of OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies's one-note joke would be unduly kind. Both spy spoofs assume that that the sexism and just flat-out ass-backward conservative thinking inherent in the original OSS 117 pulps and accompanying film adaptations are much more entertaining than the generic spy formula that served as the backbone for those stories. In the late '50s and the '60s, OSS 117 was France's answer to 007, Ian Fleming's inescapable rugged spy-about-town. He treats women like coat racks and minorities like adorable pet sidekicks. He's a fascist with a license to thrill, making him the perfect target for director Michel Hazanavicius's smart-ass takedown. Like Cairo, Nest of Spies, Lost in Rio is so in love with its sloppy jokes and plodding putdowns of modern-day progressivism that it never really takes off. Continue Reading »
Based on a true story whose underlying themes prove too obvious and one-note in translation, In the Beginning creates tension not only from its saga of an unlikely con, but from the nagging sense that more urgency and surprise should be forthcoming from such an amazing tale. After robbing his fence colleague (Gérard Depardieu), two-bit swindler Paul (François Cluzet) continues roaming the northern French countryside perpetrating a profitable scam in which he poses as a construction conglomerate employee. It's a reasonably profitable ruse that leads to unexpected, lucrative opportunities when he winds up in a small community where said conglomerate abandoned a highway construction project two years prior, in the process leaving the area in economic ruin. The arrival of Paul, now going by the alias Philippe, is immediately viewed by the locales as a sign that their asphalt-laying endeavor will resume, an assumption that Paul doesn't immediately refute—in part because of the contractors eager to dole out cash bribes for work—and soon gets swept up in, leading to the commencement of a major enterprise all predicated on a big fat lie. Continue Reading »
Sprinting ahead with an urgency that belies its remarkable attention to detail, writer-director Lucas Belvaux's taut political thriller Rapt is a top-heavy but exceptional action film. Emulating Costa-Gavras's Z, Belvaux relates the emotional impact of the kidnapping and ransoming of wealthy industrialist Stanislas Graff (Yvan Attal) on Graff, his associates, and his family with the loutish grace of a skilled sports commentator. Everything, from the emotional breakdowns his wife and daughters suffer to heated arguments held between the shareholders of Graff's company about whether they should pay his ransom or not, boils down to cold, hard information. Continue Reading »
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