The world keeps getting smaller and smaller while, paradoxically, our movie-going habits become more and more xenophobic. In case you hadn't noticed, subtitled movies are a tougher sell than ever these days. Sadly, "reading" movies seems to have taken on all the allure of hard labor, with subtitled films showing up less and less frequently even in progressive cities such as New York and L.A. We all know that pattern goes double for markets like our own.
That's why it's particularly gratifying that not one but two foreign imports make their way to the Bay area this week. Both films hail from France, and each offers a welcome mix of the exotic and the comfortably familiar.
The first of them, The Girl from Paris, is the debut feature from a promising new director. The other, The Flower of Evil, is the 50th film (!) from one of the French cinema's old lions, the venerable Claude Chabrol.
People (film critics, mostly, but let's be charitable and call them people, at least for the moment) like to refer to Chabrol as "The French Hitchcock." That's a fair enough description of much of Chabrol's output from the late '60s on, but there are notable exceptions. The director has dabbled in a bit of everything, from New Wave slices of life to comedies to historical dramas, and his chief subject/target of choice has usually been the French bourgeoisie (that's the middle class to you and me). The discrete charm and veiled atrocities of the bourgeoisie are very much at the heart of the director's latest film, The Flower of Evil, but anyone expecting the sort of Hitchcockian suspense-thriller that Chabrol's given us in the past is apt to be disappointed.
the Flower of Evil, to put it bluntly, is not one of Chabrol's better films. But it's still worth seeking out, since even second-rate Chabrol is leagues above almost everything playing in the megaplexes at the moment.
The film introduces us to the Charpin-Vasseurs, yet another of Chabrol's seemingly happy but secretly shady bourgeois families. Young Francois has just returned from an extended stay in America (where he found us Yanks to be "less dumb than they make out"), only to discover his extended family in something of a crisis, brought on by his stepmother's entry into politics. It seems that flyers have appeared all over town denouncing the candidate and all the Charpin-Vasseurs for a scandalous past that includes murder, collaboration with the Nazis and all other manner of vice.
It's all true, of course, but the real problem, as the film puts it, is that "time doesn't exist; life is one perpetual present." In other words, old skeletons in the closet simply point the way to new ones, and the sins of the fathers are very much perpetuated by the family's current members — a smiling brood inclined towards incest, extra-marital affairs and assorted, dubious business practices.
Unfortunately, almost all of this juicy, sinful activity occurs off screen. Chabrol seems almost to be deliberately restricting himself, and his usual stately minimalism transforms too often here into something approaching a stupefying stasis. The characters in the Flower of Evil explain too much, leaving too little to our imaginations, to the director's sly innuendoes, or to the camera's eye. The Charpin-Vasseurs simply talk about their pasts, presents and futures, talking in stylish sitting rooms, in cars, in bedrooms and, mostly, around the dinner table (where Chabrol the avid gourmand treats us to big, loving close-ups of regional delicacies such as fresh oysters, lamprey and pear-almond tart).
The Flower of Evil is elegant, occasionally witty (in a dry, deadpan way), but it's also more than a little dull and — practically a first for a Chabrol film — over-obvious. The notion of a legacy of guilt and corruption is certainly intriguing, but it's never really explored with the sort of subtle, perverse ingenuity typical of Chabrol's best films. The movie opens with a lovely old song by the popular chanteuse Damia, in which the singer gently warns, "A memory comes to you in your dreams/ but it's not what it seems/ And it haunts you for eternity." The double-edged lyrics tell it all, and there's really nothing left for the film to add.
The other French import in town, Christian Carion's The Girl from Paris, is a whole other bag, as open and airy as Chabrol's film is cramped and cloistered. Carion's movie is first and foremost a film about the land and our connections to it, something made immediately clear in an opening shot that winds its way along a mountain road and then breaks free of gravity to sail off IMAX-style over the French countryside in all its glory.The real-life landscape dissolves into a pale representation of itself, a sooty billboard tacked on to the back of a bus, advertising "Get some fresh air; escape to Rhone-Alpes." Directly behind the bus, stuck in a massive traffic jam, is Sandrine (Mathilde Seigner), a computer engineer who's just turned 30 and would like nothing better than to get the hell out of the city and back to the earth.
The first thing you should know about The Girl from Paris is that this is not some glossy romance masquerading as an ode to female empowerment and nature a la Under the Tuscan Sun. The Girl from Paris is much closer to the book on which Tuscan Sun was (very) loosely based, a no-frills chronicle of the ups and downs of buying into the rural life. It's often not terribly exciting or even a particularly pretty picture, but for anyone who's dreamed of chucking it all and relocating to a little goat farm in the French alps or Tuscany or wherever, consider The Girl from Paris essential viewing.
Sandrine's journey is recounted in a refreshingly understated, mostly unsentimental and even clinical manner, beginning with her preparatory stint at an agricultural school. The movie's no hippie fantasy either, with the advice given to Sandrine by one of her teachers applying to any of us entertaining a pipe dream of returning to nature. "Anyone who wants to make goat cheese and play the guitar," smiles the girl's instructor, "can go home now."
From there, we're plunged right along with Sandrine into an experience that's less about cute baby animals and more about stalled machinery and huge pigs being hung upside and graphically slaughtered, with pails placed below their dangling heads to collect the gushing blood. There's not a guitar or Joni Mitchell song in sight.
The movie's narrative begins in earnest when Sandrine completes her studies and purchases the remote farm of cranky old Andre Rochas (veteran French thespian Michel Serrault from La Cage aux Folles), a simple and not particularly pleasant peasant. Andre agrees to sell the farm even though he's deeply suspicious of Sandrine, whom he sees as not just a woman (strike one), but also one of the clueless, soulless, yuppie opportunists swarming into the French countryside.
But sell Andre does, with the stipulation that he be allowed to live on the premises for the next 18 months while he's waiting for his new digs to be vacated. The Girl from Paris studiously avoids most of the odd couple cliches you'd expect with material like this, and the relationship between the city girl and the country coot remains fairly interesting right up until the end. For what it's worth, the pair does wind up waltzing around the farm to old French accordion tunes, but it's a moment arrived at honestly.
What lingers are the fully realized characters and, most of all, a sense of place — a living location with a history, where pear trees are planted to commemorate births and cherry trees for weddings. Sandrine is never less than a complex, self-possessed woman who's real enough to freak out while delivering a stillborn goat, and strong enough to be alone by choice. When her ex comes knocking, she indulges in a single night of love and then sends him packing in the morning. "All good things in moderation," says the ever-practical Sandrine. She's clearly in this for the long haul, and so is the movie.
Ichi FingersIt's tempting to think of Japan's Takashi Miike as the hardest working man in show business, but only if your definition of show business encompasses severe psychological traumas, bestiality, scatology and all manner of mind-bending, fetishistic sex and violence. The legendarily excessive Miike turns out as many as five films a year and, against all odds, the vast majority of them are extremely good. Some of them might even be masterpieces, and all of them are well worth seeking out.
Miike's films can be lyrical and even understated too, but Ichi the Killer, his notorious 2001 account of a sadomasochistic murderer, is definitely not one of those films. Ichi is as excessive, iconoclastic and outrageously stylized as anything in Miike's oeuvre, and it takes the director's penchant for button-pushing to new extremes. This is not a film for the faint of heart or for anyone lacking an unhealthy appreciation for gallows humor.
On Saturday, Dec.13, Sleep of Reason cinema series takes it to the limit one more time, presenting Miike's Ichi the Killer in all its shocking, unrated glory. Showtime is 7:30 p.m. at Covivant Gallery & Studios, 4906 N. Florida Ave., Tampa. A $5 membership fee covers admission to Ichi, or you can purchase a season pass for $40 and receive special Sleep of Reason merchandise. For further information & directions go to www.covivant.com or e-mail sleepofreasoncinema@yahoo.com.
Contact Film Critic Lance Goldenberg at lgoldenb@tampabay.rr.com, or 813-248-8888, ext. 157.
This article appears in Dec 11-17, 2003.