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Film Review

Rock rolled

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Rock rolled

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Danny Boyle is a director whose projects seem chosen largely to have nothing in common with anything he’s done before. Mid-career at 54, he’s been good at a lot of things. But what, exactly, is his ideal fit?

Falling in the “good” department are 202’s 28 Days Later, which revivified the zombie flick at the cost of subsequent overexposure, not to mention introducing that whole “fast-moving zombie” conundrum. Children’s fantasy Millions (2004) had real charm almost overwhelmed by ADD; Sunshine (2007) was sci-fi so gorgeous you could almost ignore the black hole its narrative vanished into.

Not so hot were 1997’s A Life Less Ordinary and 2000’s The Beach, the latter from a novel that “couldn’t miss.” Which proved Boyle is capable of seizing on an approach entirely wrong for his material, his confidence unflagging to the bitter end. Shallow Grave (1994) was a cunning debut that owed a lot to John Hodge’s screenplay, yet made sure you couldn’t miss the directorial panache.

Which leaves 1996’s Trainspotting, the one perfect match of gonzo content and hyperactive execution. Plus 2008’s Slumdog Millionaire, of course — a Piccadilly masala of tragedy, coarse humor, melodrama, spectacle, outrageous fortune, grotesquerie, and whipped cream. Did Boyle and company truly fuse those elements, or just smash them haphazardly together? Most people were too dazzled by exoticism to care. But will its brief vogue eventually look like one of those pop anomalies more puzzling than nostalgic?

After that large-scale, Oscar-draped triumph, 127 Hours might seem starkly minimalist — if Boyle weren’t allergic to such terms. Based on Aron Ralston’s memoir Between a Rock and a Hard Place, it’s a tale defined by tight quarters, minimal “action,” and maximum peril: man gets pinned by rock in the middle of nowhere, must somehow free himself or die.

More precisely, in 2003 experienced trekker Ralston biked and hiked into Utah’s Blue John Canyon, falling into a crevasse when a boulder gave way under his feet. He landed unharmed … save a right arm pinioned by a rock too securely wedged, solid, and heavy to budge. He’d told no one where he’d gone for the weekend; dehydration death was far more likely than being found.

For those few who haven’t heard how he escaped this predicament, suffice it to say the solution was uniquely unpleasant enough to make the national news (and launch a motivational-speaking career). Yes, it was way worse than drinking one’s own pee.

Opinions vary about the book. It’s well written, an undeniably amazing story, but some folks just don’t like him. Alternating chapters between the canyon crisis and prior “hair-raising adventures,” Ralston is the life of every party, the apple of every eye. He’s forever leaping gung-ho into avoidable near-catastrophes (risking death by bear attack, drowning, etc.), then marveling at his luck in surviving them. Stuck passing long, possibly final hours in Blue John, he briefly experiences “regrets about not focusing on the people enough” in pursuit of “the essence of experience.” Example: once he lost two good friends by recklessly getting them near-killed in an avalanche. But oh well!

This being a Danny Boyle movie, it has of course has a much cooler soundtrack than Ralston would have mixtaped (it’s a no-Phish zone), albeit one sometimes quirky to a jarring fault. While hardly a pop-culture felon à la Baz Luhrmann, Boyle still easily errs on the side of excess flash. His 127 Hours has passages where the MTV-like cinematic gymnastics performed to keep us interested in a trapped hero are just trivializing and gratuitous.

Still, subject and interpreter match up better than one might expect, mostly because there are lengthy periods when the film simply has to let James Franco command our full attention. This actor, who has reached the verge of major stardom as a chameleon rather than a personality, has no trouble making Ralston’s plight sympathetic, alarming, poignant, and funny by turns. His protagonist is good-natured, self-deprecating, not tangibly deep but incredibly resourceful. Probably just like the real-life Ralston, only a tad more appealing, less legend-in-his-own-mind — a typical movie cheat to be grateful for here.

127 HOURS opens Fri/12 in San Francisco.

The Good Shepard

Andrew Lam
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0
The Good Shepard

arts@sfbg.com

This is doubtless no news to people who have TV reception, but I was disappointed to recently learn Dax Shepard is a regular on the NBC series Parenthood. Which is probably fine. But for a few minutes there it looked like he was going to become a movie star, and now that seems less immediately likely. Shepard is a fine example of talent deserving and getting breaks that boost them to the B list, but no further. (For proof life isn’t fair thataway, observe that just because she lucked into Knocked Up — a movie Shepard cameoed in, probably just for fun — Katherine Heigl now gets movies built around her.)

Shepard is goofy, off-kilter’dly attractive, versatile, capable of being subtle (yet funny) in broad circumstances. He’s shown those qualities in Without a Paddle(2004), Employee of the Month (2006), Baby Mama (2008), and When in Rome. He starred in three barely released to theaters: Mike Judge’s Idiocracy(2006), which has a cult following; Bob “Mr. Show” Odenkirk’s Let’s Go to Prison (2006), which deserves one but has a reputation for world-class suckage instead; and Smother (2008) with Diane Keaton, which nobody defends. You see the problem: this is not a winning resume. Ergo, Shepard is back where he started (as Ashton Kutcher’s Punk’d minion), on TV every week.

Except this week, when he’s also at a theater near you in The Freebie. This is one of those actors-making-work projects that often turn out badly, because creating a movie to act in yourself is seldom an impetus from which greatness springs. Then again, writer-director-star Katie Aselton has spent years grooming for greatness — let us note in 1995 she snagged both Miss Maine Teen and the Jantzen Swimsuit Competition.

And in fact, The Freebie is pretty good. Not as good as Breaking Upwards, the somewhat similar New York City indie earlier this year. But among movies about long-term couples pondering Seeing Other People, it’s up there. Annie (Aselton) and Darren (Shepard) have been married seven years, in Los Angeles yet, and still they hang out and have fun, just the two of them, all the time. (We never learn what either does for a living.) It has not escaped notice, however, that their sex life has receded to the point where there’s no answer to “When did we last … ?” because no one can remember. “I still get major boners for you,” Darren reassures. “They’re just, like, snuggle boners.”

When at a dinner party Darren fervently urges a friend to sow all wild oats lest she meet Mr. Right and be doomed to never have sex with anyone else again, this low ebb becomes an issue. Should they do something about it? Perhaps by choosing a single, specific date on which they are free to (separately) do somebody else? Then return home refreshed, newly appreciative of and horny toward each other? Uh-huh.

This plan is presented so stealthily by Darren — and Shepard is one of those actors whose characters’ thought processes leak haplessly through his googly eyes, rendering fibs and scheming hilarious — that by the time it’s agreed on, Annie thinks it’s her idea. Was there ever a romantic comedy in which mutual cheating turned out a good idea? It doesn’t here, either. But getting to the “We’ve made a terrible, terrible mistake” part proves loose, amusing, credible, and briefly dead serious. (That serious bit proves that the ingratiating Shepard can do mirthless, ugly, and abusive when necessary.)

The Freebie was largely improvised. Aselton is used to such processes, being married to and sometimes cast by mumblecore leader Mark Duplass (2005’sThe Puffy Chair, Cyrus). Like many m-core movies, The Freebie — which otherwise feels too eventful to be classified as such — looks like crap. But Aselton gets a lot of other things right, from the regular-people L.A. milieu to perfect mixtape soundtrack choices by artists you’ve never heard of.

All the performances are excellent, the director herself playing naturalistic straight-woman to Shepard’s toned-down yet still slightly surreal mix of sly, snarky, and spacey. File his career next to that of Steve Zahn, Seann William Scott, or David Arquette, to name other guys who may seldom or never get movies built around them. They should, though. 

THE FREEBIE opens Fri/29 in Bay Area theaters.

 

 

 

 

Wall Street hold ’em

Andrew Lam
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0
Wall Street hold ’em

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Inside Job is director Charles Ferguson’s second investigative documentary after his 2007 analysis of the Iraq War, No End in Sight, but it feels more like the follow-up to Alex Gibney’s Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005). Keeping with the law of sequels, more shit blows up the second time around. As with No End in Sight, Ferguson adeptly packages a broad overview of complex events in two hours, respecting the audience’s intelligence while making sure to explain securities exchanges, derivatives, and leveraging laws in clear English (doubly important when so many Wall Street executives hide behind the intricacy of markets).

The revolving door between banks, government, and academia is the key to Inside Job‘s account of financial deregulation. At times borrowing heist-film conventions (it is called Inside Job, after all), Ferguson keeps the primary players in view throughout his history so that the eventual meltdown seems anything but an accident. Even apparent detours prove narrowly targeted. The subject of Wall Street’s venal appetites for drugs and prostitutes, for instance, is introduced first as farce and second as potential traction for broader criminal investigations. Presumably a junior partner might give up valuable information so as not to be made into another Eliot Spitzer, who, incidentally, comes off quite well in Inside Man.

While the fat cats only show up thanks to the CSPAN archive, several free market economists do sit for interviews with Ferguson. They probably regret doing so now — he reserves special scorn for the academic class of boosters. Frederic Mishkin is a typical case. Formerly a member of the Board of Governors at the Federal Reserve, he quickly becomes a muttering mess under Ferguson’s questioning. Mishkin quit the Treasury in August 2008, at the height of the crisis, to return to Columbia University to finish more pressing work: a textbook. In 2006, Mishkin coauthored a rosy report on Iceland’s doomed markets, pocketing a nice commission from the country’s Chamber of Commerce. Mysteriously, the title of the report changed from “Financial Stability in Iceland” to “Financial Instability in Iceland” on Mishkin’s CV — confronted with the discrepancy, he croaks something about a typo.

Ferguson’s relentless focus on the insiders isn’t foolproof. Tarring Ben Bernanke, Henry Paulson, and Timothy Geithner as “made” guys, for example, isn’t a substitute for evaluating their varied performances over the last two years. Inside Job makes it seem that the entire crisis was caused by the financial sector’s bad behavior, and this too is reductive. To take just one example, China figures into the film only as laborers losing their jobs due to market volatility — part of the story, certainly, but so is that government’s devaluation of its currency.

Furthermore, Ferguson does not come to terms with the politicized nature of the economic fallout. In Inside Job, there are only two kinds of people: those who get it and those who refuse to. The political reality is considerably more contentious. Americans on the right and left may well share disgust at the bailouts, but they’re drawing very different conclusions from the government’s cash infusions. Ferguson builds something of a false consensus between his talking heads, never asking them, for example, whether they think Fannie Mae or Countrywide was a bigger boogeyman (politically, the answer says a lot). In this regard, a general assessment in a recent article by Paul Krugman and Robin Wells holds for Inside Job: “Books on the Great Recession are still pouring off the presses … but they don’t offer much guidance on the most pressing problem at hand, which is how to deal with the continuing consequences of the last [bubble].” 

INSIDE JOB opens Fri/22 in Bay Area theaters.

From here, cinema

Andrew Lam
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0
From here, cinema

I saw my first movie when I was four or five: it was a revival of 101 Dalmations (1961), and I liked it enough to ask my mother if we could sit through it a second time (we did). I saw my second first movie when I was 19: it was a nine-minute short by Bruce Baillie titled Valentin de las Sierras (1967), and after seeing it I knew film history must be full of secrets. It was only after moving to Berkeley a few years later that I began to contextualize Baillie’s tactile daydream of a Mexican village — a singular vision, to be sure, but one emblematic of a regional avant-garde as difficult to survey as San Francisco itself.

Here’s to trying: “Radical Light”‘s ambitious ecology of alternative film and video in the Bay Area encompasses an invaluable anthology of firsthand accounts, secondhand appreciations, and historical overviews; a film series with many artists-in-attendance and restored prints (through the winter at the Pacific Film Archive and various SF Cinematheque affiliates); and a gallery show of ephemera at the Berkeley Art Museum.

To first address the question underlying the whole series: why here? Some of the book’s contributors offer fanciful conjectures: it must be the ghost of Muybridge, an island ecology, a city that won’t hold a straight line, the quality of light, or, more realistically, the influence of the Beats’ vow of poverty. While I’m attracted to environmental speculations like these, it seems important not to let them overshadow the essential evidence of hard work without promise of financial compensation or art world status. This is clearest in the Bay Area’s rich tradition of artist-run, self-reliant screenings: museum takeovers, backyard hoedowns, and basement salons.

It would be difficult to overstate the importance of Frank Stauffacher’s post-World War II “Art in Cinema” series at the San Francisco Museum of Art (before it became “modern”) in establishing this climate of creative investment. Handsome as hell and himself a fine filmmaker, Stauffacher audaciously placed cinema in an art context, colliding European avant-gardes, Hollywood outliers, and homegrown talent in a museum setting a few decades ahead of schedule. In essence, he prepared the audience for what became known as independent filmmaking (before that term was commoditized). Which is more remarkable: that Stauffacher showed Christopher Maclaine’s still incendiary The End (1953), precipitating a chair-clearing uproar, or that he fronted Maclaine (a bagpipe-playing speed freak known as North Beach’s Antonin Artaud when there was plenty of competition) the funds to make this unsellable thing? Most of “Art in Cinema”‘s audience wasn’t ready for The End, but one young spectator found it a revelation: his name was Stan Brakhage.

Less than 10 years later, after Stauffacher’s tragic death in 1955, Baillie and his Canyon Cinema collaborators (notably, Chick Strand and Ernest Callenbach) came down from the hills over Oakland and expanded their bohemian screenings to include public production equipment, a journal, and the distribution co-op that is today run by filmmaker Dominic Angerame. The early Canyon group’s ambitions were local, but nonetheless represented an alternative cinema practice as profoundly liberating as that of their Nouvelle Vague contemporaries — one taken up by the dozen or so major series (e.g. No Nothing Cinema, Total Mobile Home, Other Cinema) and college film departments (especially San Francisco Art Institute and San Francisco State University) detailed in “Radical Light.”

Though wildly eclectic in form and content, the “Radical Light” films cohere around a widespread distrust of moral authority, whether political or aesthetic, as well as an abiding interest in the bending truths of portraiture, documentary, ethnography, and found footage. The anarchic and mystical are preferred modes, though not mutually exclusive ones. There is a long tradition of collaboration between filmmakers and, perhaps more strikingly, with poets, painters, and musicians. To cite but a few examples: Larry Jordan’s Visions of a City (1979, begun 1957) is drawn from material shot to accompany readings by Michael McClure and Philip Lamantia; Bruce Conner did lightshows at the old Avalon Ballroom before making music videos for Devo and documenting the Mabuhay Gardens punk scene; and Brakhage made In Between (1955) while living with Robert Duncan and Jess (and set the film to a John Cage composition). Early “Art in Cinema” habitués like Jordan Belson, Harry Smith, and James Broughton all approached film from different mediums, and later artists like Nathaniel Dorsky, Warren Sonbert, and Konrad Steiner explored the poetic or musical resonances of moving images. It runs the other way too — unsurprisingly, it takes someone like poet Bill Berkson to get Dorsky’s films in a (parenthetical) nutshell: “(Without being stupid about it, Dorsky really seems to put every conscious instant up against the growth chart of Eternity.)”

Indeed, all these films burn brightly as you watch. Witness all the different ways in which the makers seek to alter the cinematic experience, turning it into a Zen monastery (Dorsky), paranoid classroom (Craig Baldwin), troubled innerspace (Gunvor Nelson), innocent grindhouse (George and Mike Kuchar), confessional (Lynn Hershman Leeson), firing squad (Maclaine), astral plain (Belson), cross-examination (Trinh T. Minh-ha), beat street (Dion Vigne), all-night roadhouse (Conner), “unguided playground” (how Ernie Gehr described the images in his 1991 film, Side/Walk/Shuttle, two weeks ago), and on and on. If “Radical Light”‘s chronologically-based film programs serve an informative purpose similar to the well-labeled sectioning of a botanical garden, the thematic programs come off more as a noisy farmers market where the full variety of produce jams a narrow aisle. As always, the fruit tastes best when you know where it came from.

RADICAL LIGHT: ALTERNATIVE FILM AND VIDEO IN THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA

Through April 30, 2011, $5.50–$10

(Book launch Fri/15, 7:30 p.m.)

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft, Berk.

Berkeley Art Museum

2626 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-0808

bampfa.berkeley.edu/visit

Noe thanks

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Noe thanks

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Gaspar Noé wants to share. Yet after three features, it’s still unclear whether what he’s got on his mind is worth sharing, let alone anywhere near as urgent as his need to share it.

I Stand Alone (1998) skyrocketed him to the new Cinema of Misanthropy’s forefront by making us run the A-to-B emotional gamut of a belligerent butcher (Philippe Nahon) who hates everybody but his daughter. He loves her a little too much in the “shocking” finale. Naturally, this horrified a lot of people who expected something provocative but not that nasty. Nonetheless, it was also a movie whose conspicuous straining to frighten the horses could be experienced as pat, pretentious, overgrown adolescent nihilism.

Getting yea further up in yer face, Irreversible (2002) followed a Parisian couple (Vincent Cassel, Monica Bellucci) over the course of one long day that eventually steps off a cliff and leaves them both splattered to pulp beneath. Its reverse chronology stratagem meant the infamous violent episodes — one prolonged murder, one really prolonged rape-beating — came fairly early, leaving us stunned and vulnerable for scenes of ordinary, pre-catastrophe life more resonant than they would have been otherwise. Noé’s characters have no depth (or only as much as actors can themselves provide), but here the structure actually seemed to encourage our caring about people.

It took him seven more years to drop Enter the Void, a “psychedelic melodrama” that has polarized responses (hypnotized vs. narcotized) since it premiered in preliminary form at Cannes last year. This was Noé’s dream project all along, his big meditation on Life, Sex, and Death.

Oscar (first-time actor Nathaniel Brown) is a young American living in Tokyo with kid sister Linda (Paz de la Huerta), dealing (and doing) drugs while she dances at a strip club. Caught delivering goods to a friend (whose mother he’s sleeping with), Oscar is killed by cops. The film’s remaining two hours — set up by blunt nods to The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which our hero was reading — follow Oscar’s spirit as it floats through past, present, and future, eventually “escaping the circle” of this life’s consciousness via reincarnation.

Noé has fingered Kenneth Anger, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and classic 1947 noir Lady in the Lake‘s entirely subjective camera as influences. But you could label rave lighting and black-light posters as equally important. Much of Enter the Void would be absolutely great to go-go dance in front of. (Plus then you’d face away from all the irksome strobing bits.) Like the computerized luminescent jellyfish frequently undulating in Oscar’s visions, it’s a colorful, gelatinous mess some will find trippy, others stuporous. The FX work and stealth editing seldom detectible in Irreversible‘s seemingly unbroken shots are more obvious (not to mention endless) here. Repeated sequences stubbornly refuse to grow more meaningful.

As for the oversharing/underlying psychology … oy. Oscar is a blank we could care less about filling in, while women are objects of mammary desire both lactate and lust-based. Noé doesn’t refrain from such Freudosaurus antiques as the “I saw mommy and daddy fucking!” flashback, or the mawkish cliché of orphans vowing never to be separated, though what the Dickens, they are anyway. This being Noé, sibling proximity naturally equals incestuous longing. What if it didn’t? That would be shocking.

Enter the Void does tamp down the prior films’ racist and homophobic invective, which discomfited mostly because it felt like the filmmaker’s personal ranting. (Purportedly he edited himself as a masturbating spectator into Irreversible‘s nightmarish gay sex club — the Rectum! — lest he be taken for a homophobe. It says a lot that this was his idea of a conciliatory gesture.) Still, as attempted transcendence of mortal coil, Void ultimately sits and spins on Noé’s terminal literal-mindedness, no matter how many Day-Glo CGI vapors emit from vaginas.

Noé says his next project will be a love story. Very explicit of course: “We have been watching movies for almost a century {note: it’s been well over a century) and not one movie has gotten close to how love is in real life. I know what my sexual life is made of, and I want to see similar things on screen.”

Oh, great.

ENTER THE VOID opens Fri/8 in Bay Area theaters.

 

O victory forget your underwear

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
O victory forget your underwear

marke@sfbg.com

>>CLICK HERE FOR OUR INTERVIEW WITH JAMES FRANCO

Let’s get this out of the way right off the bat: The true “howl” in Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s breezy bio-pic Howl is that of the ghost of Beat poet and queer countercultural icon Allen Ginsberg, patting his Buddha belly in the clouds and roaring at his good fortune to be portrayed by James Franco. Eat Pray Love‘s Elizabeth Gilbert may have scored the chick lit holy grail with Julia Roberts, but on the gay-o-meter, being reincarnated in the delectable body of Franco is pretty much to die for.

And Franco’s performance is a wonder, necessarily conveying all the maddening and inspiring elements of the young poet’s personality through subtle facial expressions, eye twinkles, and head cocks. I say necessarily because another thing Franco nails is Ginsberg’s pancake-flat vocal inflection. (Even at 31, Ginsberg came off like a nursing home resident grumbling over mushy latkes.)

There is the evangelical poeticizing and genius marketing. There is the awkward peacocking and needy perviness. And then there is Howl itself. I guess calling this a biopic is misleading. The movie is an amalgamation of styles — imagined interview, courtroom drama, historical flashback, animated fancy — that zeroes in on one particular slice of Ginsberg’s (and the nation’s) development: the celebrated 1957 obscenity trial over Howl the poem that seared Ginsberg, the Beats, and midcentury San Francisco into mainstream consciousness.

Focusing on that trial — City Lights publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti and bookstore employee Shigeyoshi Murao were busted when Murao sold a copy of the poem to undercover cops — is an excellent strategy, and not just because, historical spoiler alert, Howl‘s victory provides a snappy climax. It also gives the filmmakers a chance to open a window on a particularly tumultuous time.

You get a little Mad Men-type excitement in the spot-on retro set designs and courtroom scenes, which rub old-school 1950s mores against the nascent cultural revolution. (Jon Hamm, Mad Men protagonist, plays the dashing defense lawyer.) You get some freshly presented Beat hagiography, with scenes of strapping young literary princes shaking off their fancy college pedigrees in New York and going, yes, on the road. Jack Kerouac, Neil Cassady, Peter Orlovsky … Beat fetishists will be readjusting their berets with glee.

Unfortunately, you also get long stretches of animated interpretations of the Howl text that seem incongruously imported from the neon-noir ’90s. Which in fact they were — illustrator Eric Drooker collaborated with Ginsberg for 1996’s Illuminated Poems, and he’s the animation designer here. The swirling ayurvedic tornadoes and cosmically copulating bodies, coupled with overly literal imagery (i.e. African American saxophonist during the “Negro streets at dawn” passage) took me back to a lot of bad French Canadian animation festivals.

Mostly though, you get the young Ginsberg. He didn’t attend the obscenity trial, and Howl’s framing device is an imagined interview in his fantastically shabby chic North Beach apartment during the legal proceedings. With Epstein and Friedman (The Times of Harvey Milk) directing, Gus Van Sant (Milk) executive producing, and Franco fresh from Milk himself, the set-up is pretty obvious. Another queer saint is being cinematically canonized. (Ginsberg, of course, was far from Milk on the political scale — his version of gay lib focused on the spiritual journey, not the systematic legal integration. Maybe Howl is meant to be the yang to Milk‘s yin.)

The idea of portraying an openly gay man in the 1950s is juicy — but Howl skews toward sexual yuks, like Neil Cassady’s girlfriend walking in on Ginsberg about to blow him. In this often rushed-feeling film, Ginsberg is allowed only a splash of existential longing before finding some fulfillment with his lifelong companion Orlovsky. But is that really fair, or even brave? After Milk, wouldn’t it be more courageous for this distinguished team to take on a lesbian activist? A transgender groundbreaker? A queer of color? Or even, gasp, the opportunistic, overexposed, NAMBLA-defending, hustler-gorging, radiantly nudist old man that Ginsberg became?

HOWL opens Fri/24 in Bay Area theaters.

Peruvian twist

David Talbot
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0
Peruvian twist

arts@sfbg.com

FILM At first glance Undertow doesn’t really seem a bona fide "great"
movie — time will tell. But it manages so many qualities seldom found together, or pulled off at all, that respect is due. It’s sensuous and erotic without becoming puerile fantasy; renders remote, beach-y locations alluring without pandering postcard exoticism or turning the people who live there peasant-quaint. More impressive still, it seamlessly folds magic realism — that very literary quality — into an already well-in-progress narrative
without losing any of the emotional groundedness already established.

Plus: it takes bisexuality for granted, sans salaciousness or melodrama, even if two gender-differentiated loves here provide primary conflict. But the issue isn’t "Choose your side, fence-sitter." It’s "How to handle being in love with two people at once?" Which is always difficult — particularly when one is a guy and the other your wife.

Even today in San Francisco’s gay community you can find plenty of folks whose imagination can’t quite encompass bisexuality as more than a PC camouflage term for those who resist taking one side or another. They’re self-justifying sluts, or outwardly homophilic but inwardly homophobic types who cling to socially comfortable straight relationships while stringing along gay or lesbian ones they’re actually passionate about. Such are the stereotypes.

A reverse scenario is offered up in The Kids Are All Right, which I love — yet Julianne Moore’s very physical affair with Mark Ruffalo ultimately proves only that her "real" relationship is with Annette Bening. He’s a diversion; she’s not really bisexual, just menopausal-restless.

Like most stereotypes, all of the above are occasionally echoed in real life. But movies seldom illustrate the not-uncommon mindset that might fall in love or lust with a person regardless of gender. Societal judgment being what it is, such sexual egalitarianism is seldom an easy path.

Here, Miguel (Cristian Mercado) and Mariela (Tatiana Astengo) are their humble coastal village’s starriest young married couple, leaders at church and in general the kind of people everyone else just knows will do right. He’s a fisherman (the major industry there), she’s pregnant for the first time. They’re both thrilled about that.

Yet Miguel has a very big secret: a passionate affair with upper-class inlander Santiago (Manolo Cardona), who rented a beach cottage to paint nature but now lingers on out of fervent love. Having his cake and eating it too, Miguel is in anxiety-tinged heaven. He truly loves Santiago. But he also loves his wife, their unborn child, their village status. Imagining a life for them together, Santiago is tormented by Miguel’s absolute unwillingness to compromise his status quo.

At a certain point something occurs offscreen, and the dynamic between the two men changes. Not drastically, though — even as Undertow turns into a ghost story of sorts, its characters’ passions remain stubbornly problematic, just as they were before.

Javier Fuentes-Leon is an exceptionally assured debuting feature writer-director. Undertow might easily have let commercial tides drift it toward routine soft-core fantasy, like so many features traveling the annual gay-fest circuit to eventual DVD-Netflix-download profitability. But its attractive, scruffy male leads aren’t buffed that way, and Mariela isn’t a nag or third wheel but an equally sympathetic, fully dimensionalized player in a painfully awkward triangle.

Undertow won the Sundance World Dramatic Audience Award last January. That was one testimony it can’t be pigeonholed as a gay movie, any more than The Kids Are All Right is a mere chick flick. It challenges strictly gay and straight-identified audiences alike, finessing that so smoothly few who pony up will ultimately realize they’ve been finessed. It’s lovely, lyrical, near-universally romantic, and ends on a quiet grace note that is bittersweet perfection.

UNDERTOW opens Fri/17 in Bay Area theaters.

The break-up artist

David Talbot
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0
The break-up artist

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Most countries crank out commercial features just as pandering as (if less expensively produced than) the majority of mainstream Hollywood product. Even sacrosanct art house supplier France manufactures plentiful dumb-and-dumber hits that attract little interest (unless it’s remake interest) beyond nations where Frog is spoken.

Still, their schlock is often better than our schlock. The new Heartbreaker is a star-driven romantic comedy that underlines how lame and formulaic Hollywood’s current endeavors in that genre almost invariably are. Not that it isn’t formulaic — but you don’t feel nose-led by a committee of script-coarsening hacks, and the usual escapist lifestyle pleasures (pretty people wearing really nice clothes in exotic or upscale locations) don’t come off as a product-placement parade.

The film immediately announces itself an escapist treat as six-packed Goran (Jean-Marie Paris) leers at a bikini’d fellow hard body across a Moroccan hotel pool. That reverie is interrupted by girlfriend Florence (Amandine Dewasmes), a plainer Jane who insists they actually see the country.

When he bails, she hitches a ride to nearby dunes with Doctors Without Borders type Pierre (Romain Duris). Several hours, some humanitarian aid and much mutual clickage later, Florence happily ditches her wandering-eye lout.

This is, actually, the last we see of Florence, Goran, or even Pierre. Because there is no "Pierre" — only Alex, star performer in a biz run with pragmatic sibling Mélanie (Julie Ferrier) and her genially vague husband Marc (François Damiens). They orchestrate breakups with maximum guile but also strict ethical rules ("We open their eyes, not their legs … We only step in if the woman is unhappy"), usually hired by families desperate to wean daughters from bad relationships with "jerks" like Goran.

An amusing montage of Alex essaying various roles — window washer, sushi chef, redeemable criminal — establishes this is an enterprise both elaborately thought-out and costly. Indeed, Alex and Co. are in debt, thanks to his theatrical perfectionism. Ergo they’ve no choice but to violate rules and accept a lucrative new assignment whose target seems far from unhappy.

For whatever reason, a "flower tycoon" (Jacques Frantz) whose fortunes may well have a shadier origin wants semi-estranged only child Juliette (Gallic pop star and Mrs. Johnny Depp Vanessa Paradis) courted from Brit Jonathan (Andrew Lincoln) whom she’s imminently scheduled to marry.

This is problematic. Juliette proves no pushover — defying Alex’s vain boast, "With preparation, no woman can resist me" — and is in mutual love with an utterly admirable fiancé. Posing as a bodyguard hired by dad to protect her, Alex’s flying-wedge act meets steep resistance.

There’s never any doubt where Heartbreaker is headed. Cocky Alex will fall hard, repent his professional Don Juan fakery, almost lose the game, then grovel sufficiently to pull a Graduate as scruffy charmer triumphs over dully respectable Mr. Right. What happens after the fade, when reality dawns? We probably don’t want to know.

Yet Heartbreaker earns that suspension of disbelief, arriving at a unabashedly melodramatic climax just as romantically intoxicating as it aims to be. Director Pascal Chaumeil’s first major feature (after a decade of TV work) is glamorous where appropriate — Monaco looks as high-end as Paradis in frocks evoking Hitchcock-era Princess Grace — and raffishly funny elsewhere. Duris (from several Cédric Klapish films and 2005’s The Beat That My Heart Skipped) seizes his star turn with perfectly judged panache. What can you say about a movie that exploits Wham!’s "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" as a recurrent in-joke without making the viewer’s stomach heave? Kudos, that’s what.

Heartbreaker isn’t great cinema. Yet it gives great escapist burger — In-N-Out, say, compared to the McDonald’s deep fry of gender-flipped similar Hollywood exercise Failure to Launch in 2006. Yeah it’s easy, but you won’t feel cheap the morning after.

HEARTBREAKER opens Fri/17 in Bay Area theaters.

Agony uncle

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Agony uncle

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Alternately slavish and critical, simultaneously buying into and subtly resisting the hype, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector is a bit like the renowned producer himself, who said this to biographer Mick Brown in 2007’s Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: the Rise and Fall of Phil Spector: “I have a bipolar personality … I have devils inside that fight me. And I’m my own worst enemy … I would say I’m probably relatively insane.”

Director Vikram Jayanti coproduced the Oscar-winning When We Were Kings (1996), yet seems to be more interested in American celebrity Babylons of late, à la The Golden Globes: Hollywood’s Dirty Little Secret (2003). You can see why he scored the interview with Spector at the center of Agony, since he gets on board the musicmaker’s bifurcated, multichannel tip. The doc is both fascinating and monotonous, respectful of Spector’s achievements as well as the sensation surrounding his blighted celebrity. The filmmaker stays away from the specifics of the night in 2003 when Lana Clarkson was found dead at Spector’s mansion, while recontextualizing the producer’s words and music with images culled from the murder trial and other footage. The end result is an innuendo-laden pastiche that resembles an echo chamber reverberating with all the doomed dramatics of “He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss).”

Unavoidable, weirdly unblinking, and placed like a crazy diamond in front of John Lennon’s ivory “Imagine” grand piano is the wiggy wonder himself, rambling about such tidbits as his explosive courtroom ‘do (“It was a tribute to Albert Einstein and Beethoven. That day it got a little extreme”). In conversation, Jayanti dwells on the sunnier side of Spector’s checkered history: no mention is made of his alleged pistol-waving at the Ramones during the making of 1980’s End of the Century, or his reputed mistreatment of ex-wife and Ronettes star, Ronnie Spector — likely a condition of the interview. But the director manages to get in a scattershot series of thrusts and parries concerning the man and his guilt or innocence, pairing courtroom scenes — the image of a spent gun beside Clarkson’s twisted feet, a sphinx-like Spector in all his pop-Godfather pin-striped finery — with B&W TV clips of his now-classic, far-from-disposable songs.

The musical roll call is impressive, including the eerie, elegiac “To Know Him Is to Love Him” with Spector himself strumming guitar as part of the Teddy Bears and warbling to his dead father (who, eerily, committed suicide by “blowing his brains out,” as Spector puts it); the truly exquisite “Spanish Harlem”; and such rock ‘n’ roll Rosetta stones as “Then He Kissed Me” and “Be My Baby.” Subtitles by author Brown blow up the historical importance of the music, which could have easily stood on its own, and add to the po-mo swirl of information surrounding the man, the career, and the comedown. Yet we don’t hear from Spector’s crucial vocalists, who, like Darlene Love of the Crystals, struggled to find recognition beyond the producer’s Wall of Sound power, or the artists, who arguably tended to chafe against the producer’s overriding vision.

Still, to the Jayanti’s credit, Agony‘s strange parallels stay with you: Clarkson, in blackface, impersonates Little Richard (in a failed bid to resurrect her comedy career), around the time Lennon is heard on the soundtrack singing “Woman is the Nigger of the World”; Spector rattles on about how he wasn’t surprised when Lennon was shot (“People wanted to become famous by killing him, and if you were neurotic and crazy enough … “) before a prosecutor offers, “Lana Clarkson wasn’t an anonymous nobody who deserved a bullet to her head.” Over it all looms the so-called legend — a victim, yes, as he implies at the start, but one who has fallen prey to his own press, and to his own eternally flaming ego.

THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY OF PHIL SPECTOR opens Wed/10 at the Roxie.

Mellow noir

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Mellow noir

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Every nation’s cinema has its share of memorable contributions to the narrative category of amour fou. But since the French came up with that term in the first place, we might as well grant them a certain supremacy. They definitely tend to arrive at the madness of a self-destructive love with less high melodrama (let alone misogyny) than is the U.S. norm.

Consider such prior Gallic exercises as Duvivier’s 1937 Pépé le Moko, Malle’s 1958 The Lovers, Truffaut’s 1981 The Woman Next Door, or Resnais’ recent Wild Grass (2009) — all strong in incident yet restrained in execution and complex in psychology. Many of these movies might be classified as "noir," the label French critics applied to postwar American thrillers first.

But their country’s films seldom replicated the sharply-defined good vs. evil conflicts between character, circumstance, fate, and gorgeous black and white stylization in those Hollywood B movies that created an eventual transcontinental cult. Instead, they were essentially intimate dramas whose roiling domestic emotions hurtled toward fatalistic, often fatal yet low-key implosions.

Stéphane Brizé’s new Mademoiselle Chambon is like that, a movie whose protagonists lunge toward each other — even though they shouldn’t, for their own sakes and everyone else’s.

Grave-voiced, craggy-faced Jean (Vincent Lindon) is a construction-site laborer; Anne Marie (Aure Atika) his assembly-line worker wife; Jeremy (Arthur Le Hourerou) the eight-year-old offspring who’s already better educated than either of them. One day Anne Marie suffers a temporarily disabling factory accident, leaving Jean to pick up Jeremy from school.

There, Jean first encounters Jeremy’s teacher, Véronique Chambon (Sandrine Kiberlain). She has the willowy body of a veteran ballet dancer and a naturally refined air — at least by his limited experiential standards.

There’s an immediate if unadmitted spark between them, amplified when she asks him to address her fourth-grade class (there’s been a cancellation) on career day. He unexpectedly enthralls them describing how a house or school gets built — then she hires him to repair a drafty apartment window. As payment he asks her to play the violin, something she hasn’t done for anyone else in so long she plays with her back to him. You can imagine where this sequence’s heady repressed emotions are heading.

Yet Mademoiselle Chambon doesn’t get cheap about it. None of these people are more than ordinary, kinda-attractive. Forty-something Jean has working-class-hero brawn but also a beer gut. His wife is a French Talia Shire circa Rocky (1976), and slightly younger Véronique resembles a more starved Agnès Jaoui.

As temptations and related tensions unravel their stability, Brize allows his characters to slip grip gracefully. No one behaves well, but they do behave credibly. This isn’t the outsized universe of Hollywood noirs 60 years ago, where men were men and women were frequently duplicitous, bullet-bra’d Shivas of destruction. Nor does it echo the medium’s occasional role-reversals, in which intoxicated family man turns hapless stalker. Or even the stop-me-please-I’m-having-too-much-good-sex-to-maintain-sanity likes of Last Tango in Paris (1972) or Betty Blue (1986).

Instead, Mademoiselle Chambon sees rational folk with well-organized lives stubbornly resisting a mutual pull whose logical outcome will surely suck for all concerned. It’s a fine, measured drama presented with typical Gallic insouciance — tenderly discreet even when conventional art and commerce shout for something more crudely dramatic.

Indeed, Brizé ultimately aligns over-much with the Brief Encounter (1945) school of thwarted-passion pathos. His refusal to artificially underline such emotions, however, is what elevates this from so many good movies nobody in their right mind would confuse with reality.

MADEMOISELLE CHAMBON opens Fri/10 in Bay Area theaters.

Notes on a scandal

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Notes on a scandal

arts@sfbg.com

FILM To what extent is our government prepared to lie to us? Not just on a policy level, but a personal level, perverting actual instances of heroic self-sacrifice into propagandistic pablum? The answer during our prior White House administration was clearly: as far as possible, until caught.

Perhaps the most egregious such instance was the case of Pat Tillman, who gave up a lucrative NFL contract, becoming a U.S. Army Ranger enlistee in a burst of genuine patriotic fervor post-9/11. He was subsequently killed in Afghanistan — but the “friendly fire” circumstances of that death, and its apparent cover-up, scandalized not only his military superiors but a command chain of deliberate disinformation stretching all the way to the White House.

Amir Bar-Lev’s The Tillman Story is a documentary expose of unusual immediacy, narrative thrust, and outrage, which may partly stem from its being such a Bay Area story. The deceased subject’s South Bay family were diehard liberals dedicated to values that might be considered eccentric anywhere else, prizing honest intellectual adventure above such niceties as “clean” language. (Pat and his two younger brothers, as seen here, were/are cheerfully potty-mouthed.)

The mistake authorities made in casting Tillman’s death as a battlefield martyrdom — a scenario amply undermined by footage and testimony here — lay in underestimating the well-educated skepticism and doggedness of his blood relations, most notably mom, Mary. While other families rendered military ones by virtue of economic hardship and poor educational and career opportunities might have simply accepted an official scenario, the Tillmans found logistical gaps, then pushed, and pushed. It took two Congressional inquiries to prove their suspicions right.

Tillman was a golden boy of rare stripe: a natural athlete who overcame relatively small size (5-feet, 11 inches) to become a star tackle; a team player who turned down a $9 million St. Louis Rams contract out of loyalty to the Arizona Cardinals; a Noam Chomsky fan who abandoned pro sports to serve “freedom” abroad. He then refused to ditch his three-year Army term early (despite under-the-table negotiations between the government and the NFL) though he was already severely disillusioned by what he’d seen in Iraq.

When sent on a second tour of duty to Afghanistan, Tillman was only finishing what he considered a contract of honor. He was no longer at all sure about the righteousness of the cause. He was killed, it seems, senselessly — hardly an unusual casualty-of-war scenario. But his case was defiled by blatant official lies that manipulated this critical free-thinker into sacrificial poster boy for the “war on terror” in its most simplistic terms.

The Tillman Story is a journey toward justice (if not nearly enough). It’s engrossing, appalling, heartrending, and enraging, the nonfiction equivalent to last year’s underseen body bag drama The Messenger. It’s far from a worthy slog — Bar-Lev, who directed the brilliant prior doc My Kid Could Paint That (about a controversial, possibly rigged “child artist” success), retains a firm lock on narrative engagement in this less vérité context. It punches the emotions as hard as the originally intended title: I’m Pat Fucking Tillman, named after the subject’s recorded last words as he desperately tried to identify himself to testosterone over-amped “friendly” shooters who should have been watching his back.

THE TILLMAN STORY opens Fri/3 in Bay Area theaters.

Father knows best?

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Father knows best?

FILM A man, his wife, and their three children live in a country house with a swimming pool and a huge yard enclosed by a high fence. So far, so good. But the kids, who don’t have names, appear to be in their 20s. They’ve never left the property, and they won’t, Dad (Christos Stergioglou) says, until they lose a “dogtooth,” at which time they’ll be mature enough to deal with the terrors of the outside world. In the meantime, they’re trapped in the only world they’ve ever known, carefully constructed by their domineering father.

Dad’s laws shape just about everything, from language (to them, a “phone” is a salt shaker) to entertainment (lots of physical, competitive games); he tosses plastic airplanes into the garden and tells the kids they fell from the sky. He also provides his son (Christos Passalis) with a sex partner (the two daughters get zilch), a security guard (Anna Kalaitzidou) who woodenly services the lad and is paid for her time and her discretion.

Greek writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos, who picked up the Prize Un Certain Regard at Cannes for this slice of disturbing domesticity, offers little explanation for Dad’s motives, or why Mom (Michelle Valley) goes along with his plan. They watch porn, so they’re not religious extremists. Dad isn’t fooling around with the daughters (though incest among the siblings is eventually, creepily encouraged). The only hint comes from one of few scenes set outside the family’s compound, in which Dad goes to check on the progress of the family’s soon-to-be new dog (the plan is, of course, to tell the kids that Mom has given birth to it). “Dogs are like clay, and our job here is to mold them,” the trainer explains. “Every dog is waiting for us to show it how to behave.” Indeed. It’s pretty clear Dad — master of his own private North Korea — is aware of that concept.

Though Dogtooth‘s main themes enfold cruelty and child abuse, it also deploys the kind of black humor and button-pushing that fans of shock-trader Harmony Korine would appreciate. There is casual violence, extreme animal cruelty, full-frontal nudity, several disturbing sex scenes, and maybe the most alarming dance routine ever captured on film. Its performer, the family’s eldest daughter (Aggeliki Papoulia), has been pushed to the brink. Clandestine newness — a coveted sparkly headband, a crash course in cunnilingus, and especially the discovery of the wonderful world of Hollywood (including 1976’s Rocky) — has made her stir-crazy. Though it’s unclear how this half-formed human would fare in the outside world, it’s impossible not to root for a jailbreak.

DOGTOOTH opens Fri/3 at the Sundance Kabuki.

Bunny business

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Bunny business

arts@sfbg.com

FILM The overlapping causes of liberating women and liberating sexuality have long been frenemies. There is no reconciling how the sexual revolution forwarded both women’s independence and their exploitation as sexual objects by industries overwhelmingly focused on male desire and purchasing power.

Nobody figures higher in that saga than Hugh Hefner. Fair to say he probably played as big a role in triggering said revolution (at least for men) as the pill. Yet he also cemented Slim-Waisted Young Blonde With Big Tits (real or factory-ordered) as the prevailing straight-male standard for desirability. An image that, decades later, strangleholds popular imaginations and private insecurities more than ever.

Brigitte Berman’s new Canadian documentary Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist, and Rebel acknowledges that conflict without seriously exploring it. Instead, her focus is on "Hef"’s admittedly under-appreciated role as force for progressive change. Not just in expected arenas like censorship and sex laws, but also in public-spirited concerns from racial equity to film preservation. Hef has put his money where his editorial mouth is, with a passion probably equal to (if for many incongruous with) his need to be surrounded by glossy babes now one-fourth his octogenarian age.

One can fault Berman, as the purported first outsider "granted full access" to peek past Playboy‘s corporate gates, for not being tough enough. Hefner’s personal life (such as it’s been for a lifelong, briefly speed-addicted workaholic) isn’t much touched on. First wife and family simply vanish from the narrative once our protagonist decides to become his publication’s suave, anything-but-monogamous "playboy" archetype.

No ex-wives are heard from, no kids aside from Christie Hefner, who became her absentee father’s empirical second-in-command. No ex-girlfriends either, apart from Playmate-turned-B-movie-regular Shannon Tweed, who admits that being his "No. 1 girl" still wasn’t enough because "I don’t share well."

Casting him as a First Amendment and civil rights champion, the film skimps on the full breadth of artistic-slash-business involvements, from two decades’ worth of softcore video Playmate "portraits" (do I own the 1994 La Toya Jackson one? Does it contain a gauzy music vid implying sexual abuse by Papa Joe? Double yes!) to prior dabblings producing regular movies. (The regular dabblings included Roman Polanski’s 1971 post-Manson Macbeth and Peter Bogandovich’s fine 1979 Saint Jack, not to mention hard-to-find 1973 flop The Naked Ape, a sketch-format riff on Desmond Morris’ pop anthropology tome. Its awkward, touching mix of wink-wink smut and crusading good intentions distill peak-years Playboy.) Nor does it acknowledge the Playboy empire’s latter-day struggles as the Internet has rendered print erotica a quaint antiquity.

Beyond these omissions, Berman still strains to encompass a very colorful life in two full hours. Even if it eventually feels like a very long Wikipedia bio, her film is never boring. And Hefner remains notably articulate, despite all eccentricities. (Natch, he’s interviewed throughout in silk pajamas or velvet bathrobes, currently cohabiting with just three drastically younger blondes — down from a post-second marriage harem of seven.)

Playboy (initially to be called Stag Party) started in 1953 as a direct response to Hefner’s coldly unaffectionate family background and dissatisfaction with his prematurely boring home-career respectability. Raising funds himself, he gained enormous attention with a first issue featuring pre-stardom nude photos of Marilyn Monroe that everyone had heard about but few had seen.

Promoting "a healthier attitude toward sex," not to mention the shocking notion that "nice girls like sex too" — Playboy then sought to pedestal "girls next door" rather than pro models or strippers — swiftly brought a backlash. A successful fight against the U.S. Postal Service was just its first legal battle. As noted in the film, the most morally righteous opponents often proved the most hypocritical, including Charles Keating — who pronounced pornography "part of the Communist conspiracy," then decades later went to prison for 1980s Savings and Loan fraudulence — and fundamentalist Christians like late loon Jerry Falwell.

Meanwhile Hefner used the enormously popular periodical (and syndicated TV variety-show spin-offs Playboy’s Penthouse and Playboy After Dark) to articulate a "Playboy philosophy" stretching way beyond hedonistic libertarianism. He employed Red Scare-blacklisted talent; showcased African Americans in hitherto segregated contexts; and campaigned for abortion and birth control rights and against draconian punishments for sodomy and marijuana. The girly mag gave voice to countercultural and anti-Vietnam War sentiments, deliberately stirring controversy via in-depth interviews such as Roots author Alex Haley’s with American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell.

Hefner got an eventual NAACP award, among other kudos. But as Dr. Ruth (or is it Bill Maher? Sorry, there are too many celebrities sampled to keep track) says, the "escapist" side that spun Bunny boobs into bazillions overshadowed the earnest intellectual. Veteran feminist Susan Brownmiller is cast as the unsexy scold who loses points for labeling Playboy‘s often extraordinary taste in literary and critical voices (Updike, Mailer, Bradbury, etc.) a mere clever ruse to legitimize its jismy gist. Yet who can argue with her vintage challenge that Hefner demonstrate true gender equality by going public "with a cotton-tail on your rear end"?

It would be nice to hear from more critical voices — not just the odd ludicrous one, like born-again MOR crooner and repentant former Playboy subscriber Pat Boone. Blaming Hefner for "breaking the moral compass" of our nation, he’s the sole interviewee photographed against a wall of vainglorious mementos — apart from KISS’ aviator-shaded Gene Simmons, presumably grumpy because for once he’s discussing someone else’s slutty serial cocksmanship. (These two have more in common than they’ll acknowledge: see Boone’s unforgettable 1997 CD In a Metal Mood.)

By any fair appraisal, Hefner looms large among 20th-century societal game-changers. This undeniably entertaining documentary celebrates his heroism. Yet it can’t help getting across on cheesier snapshots. Who can resist glimpses of Playboy’s Roller-Disco and Pajama Party, a 1979 prime-time network WTF featuring the combined talents of Richard Dawson, Chuck Mangione, the Village People, and Wayland Flowers and Madame? Plus jiggling Playmates on wheels, of course. Now that is a Rorschach of American "liberation" as fucked-up perfect as you’ll never find.

HUGH HEFNER: PLAYBOY, ACTIVIST, AND REBEL opens Fri/20 in Bay Area theaters.

Triad quartet

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Triad quartet

cheryl@sfbg.com

FILM In 2008, the Pacific Film Archive did a retrospective on prolific Hong Kong director Johnnie To, highlighted by his two best films to date: 1999’s The Mission and its sorta-sequel, 2006’s Exiled. Both are about hired killers going about their business — a favored To plot that allows him to explore his fascination with male bonding, particularly amid crooks who fiercely adhere to the underworld’s sticky loyalty codes.

His latest stateside release is 2009’s Vengeance; I had to double-check to make sure this was a new movie, because how could To have not made one called Vengeance already? And a casual fan could be forgiven if he or she found this film familiar. The turf is classic To: hired killers, etc. The Mission and Exiled star Anthony Wong is, of course, the chief assassin; as always, he’s a cool, stone-faced cat of the sunglasses-at-night variety. Taking orders from Simon Yam (as always, buffoonish-homicidal), Wong and his men (fellow To faves Lam Ka Tung and Lam Suet) blow away disloyal minions. There are elegantly staged gun battles, a post-skirmish tending-our-wounds scene, a daring getaway via a series of fire escapes, and lots of slo-mo.

So why not just stay home and rent Exiled instead? Well, there’s one new element here: 60-something Johnny Hallyday, dubbed “the French Elvis” in the 1960s. His Costello is a killer-turned-chef seeking revenge for the death of his Macau-based daughter’s family. He hasn’t been in the game for decades, so he hires Wong and company to help him annihilate the bad guys. Hallyday has a certain glamorous presence, but at times it feels like he’s been grafted onto Vengeance just so it won’t feel like To is repeating himself (again). Costello is losing his memory at a rapid rate, so much time is spent waiting for him to shuffle through his Memento-style sheaf of Polaroids, struggling to recall who he’s with, why he’s there, and finally, “What is revenge?”

Indeed, as another character points out, “What does revenge mean when you can’t remember anything?” Wong’s gunslingers may have just met Costello, but he’s paid for their loyalty — and earned their respect. Plus, his Paris restaurant is called “Frères,” so of course his newfound “brothers” will finish the job. Forgetfulness (for Costello) and déjà vu (for everyone else) aside, when the focus onscreen turns to servin’ up some payback, To fans will be in bullet-ballet heaven.

VENGEANCE opens Fri/13 at the Sundance Kabuki.

 

Geek love

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Geek love

arts@sfbg.com

FILM For fans of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s just-completed comics saga Scott Pilgrim, the announcement that Edgar Wright (2004’s Shaun of the Dead, 2007’s Hot Fuzz) would direct a film version was utterly surreal. Geeks get promises like this all the time, all too often empty (Guillermo del Toro’s Hobbit, anyone?). But miraculously, Wright indeed spent the past five years crafting the winning and astoundingly faithful (if slightly divergent plot-wise) Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. The film follows hapless Toronto 20-something Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera), bassist for crappy band Sex Bob-omb, as he falls for delivery girl Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), only to find he must defeat her seven evil exes — like so many videogame bosses — before he can comfortably date her. As it happens, he’s already dating a high-schooler, Knives (Ellen Wong), who’s not coping well with Scott moving on.

To address a primary concern up front, Cera plays a good feckless twerp. His performance isn’t groundbreaking, but it dodges the Cera-playing-his-precious-self phenomenon so many have lamented. Scott is the protagonist, surely, but he’s not exactly a hero. He’s a puny human, which makes his (mostly) unstoppable fighting technique all the more impressive. He’s battling larger-than-life foes imbued with real-life superpowers like self-confidence and cultural cache. The film’s ensemble cast maintains a sardonic tone, with excellent turns by Alison Pill, Aubrey Plaza, and newcomer Wong. Jason Schwartzman is perfectly cast as the ultimate evil ex-boyfriend, hipster asshole Gideon Graves — there’s really no one slimier, at least under 35.

Some of Pilgrim‘s characters operate on winking stereotypes, most notably the pronouncedly Chinese Knives and Scott’s “totally gay” roommate Wallace (Kieran Culkin). The comics’ light gags can seem a tad tasteless when applied to “real” people. But for all Wallace’s comically exaggerated promiscuity, hetero Scott cheats on his partner in a truly reprehensible manner. Says Wright, speaking over the phone, “We tried, in terms of the gay characters in the film to kind of, in hopefully a progressive way, not make a big deal about it.”

The film brilliantly cops the comics’ visual language, including snarky captions and onomatopoetic sound effects, reminiscent onscreen of 1960s TV Batman. Sometimes this tends toward sensory overload, but it’s all so stylistically distinctive and appropriate that excess is easily forgiven. “It wasn’t a film where we had to strive for absolute realism like [2008’s] The Dark Knight,” Wright explains. “We had a chance to embrace the bubblegum, Pop art nature of the artwork.”

All the action in the movie is videogame-derived, with pixel-drenched effects and 8-bit bleats galore; call it the film’s mise-en-Sega. It’s hard to think of another movie that has hewed this aesthetically close to videogames as a form — maybe Tron (1982) — since game-to-film adaptations often try to mine the source material for other genre signifiers. Besides comics and games, Pilgrim finds a third frame of reference in indie rock. The characters’ bands seem like riffs on certain Canadian acts, but Wright says they’re more “a mélange of bands that [O’Malley] played with when he was in a band himself.” Among the contributors to the diegetic soundtrack are Broken Social Scene, Metric, and Beck, who are, as Wright says, “playing a part rather than playing themselves.”

If Pilgrim is a hit, steel yourself for a whole wave of candy-coated imitators. But for now, revel in the fact that we have a film that so intuitively understands its characters and its audience. It’s a killer action film, a charming rom-com, and a weirdo cult rock movie all rolled into one. As the back cover of the first volume of the comic reads, “This is Scott Pilgrim. This is your life.”

SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD opens Fri/13 in Bay Area theaters.

MORE AT SFBG.COM Pixel Vision blog: Sam Stander’s complete Edgar Wright interview.

 

The kids aren’t alright

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The kids aren’t alright

arts@sfbg.com

FILM The Kids Are Alright isn’t the only film this summer that subtly skewers the suburban upper-middle class by following a seemingly well-adjusted family as they’re thrown into crisis when a shadowy father figure attempts to enter their orbit. Only in the case of Todd Solondz’s Life During Wartime, instead of a sperm donor, Dad is a convicted child molester.

A quasi-sequel to 1998’s Happiness, Life picks up 10 years later to survey the still-damaged Jordan sisters. After discovering that her husband Allen (Michael Kenneth Williams) is still making sexually harassing phone calls, mousy Joy (squeaky-voiced British actress Shirley Henderson) flees to Florida, where her older sister Trish (Allison Janney) has attempted to start a new life for herself and her children. Oldest Billy (Chris Marquette) is now a bitter college student, and youngest son Timmy (Dylan Riley Snyder) still doesn’t know the horrible truth about his father Bill (Ciarán Hinds), who has just been released from prison. Third sister Helen (Ally Sheedy), has had success in Hollywood, but still feels victimized by her family.

Despite the entirely new cast, happiness remains just as elusive as before. Pleasure, when it can be found, is fleeting. Characters’ awkward conversations with each other inevitably sputter and stall, and even the best intentions are no measure against disaster. Solondz may be a scathing observer, but he is not above being sympathetic when its called for. Neither does he gloss over the serious questions — what are the limits of forgiveness? When is forgetting necessary? — Life grabbles with, something that was quite clear when I talked with the affable Solondz in his San Francisco hotel room.

SFBG Why did you decide to return to these characters?

Todd Solondz When I finished Happiness, I never imagined I would. But it just shows that my imagination wasn’t so fertile, because about 10 years later I wrote the first scene of Life During Wartime and I liked what I had written. Also, knowing that I could recast the movie freed me up to have fun and get at things I hadn’t gotten before in quite the same way.

SFBG Diverse casting is another hallmark of yours, and you always get such strong performances from your actors. Do you have specific people in mind once you’ve written the script?

TS I like to shake it up and try out different people. For this film, I knew I wanted Ally Sheedy but I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to get her. Almost everybody has read everything for my movies because I don’t have much in the way of rehearsal. Usually the audition is the rehearsal since we usually can’t afford anything more.

SFBG Your films elicit this queasy response. The audience’s laughter always seems nervous. How do you find a balance between humor and sadness?

TS It’s a moral challenge. As an audience member, you’re highly attuned to the laughter you like and the laughter you don’t like, and it becomes a moral decision — laughing or not laughing. My movies are comedies, but terribly sad comedies.

SFBG Life During Wartime interrogates the possibility of “forgiving and forgetting.” Yet you’re always careful not to condemn your characters too harshly, no matter how antisocial or appalling their behavior.

TS Yes, but you have to be careful. I have no sympathy for [Hinds’ character] Bill Maplewood or someone who could commit those crimes, but he is tragic since he also loved his son. People want to embrace humanity or love mankind, but those are abstractions so they don’t really mean anything. Rather, to what extent can you allow someone like Bill Maplewood into that embrace of humanity? To me pedophilia has no inherent interest. It’s how it serves as a metaphor for that which is most demonized, ostracized, and feared that interests me. I think in this country more people would rather have dinner with Osama bin Laden than with Bill Maplewood.

SFBG Can you divulge anything about the film you’re working on now?

TS The title is Dark Horse, and all I can say is that there is no child molestation, rape, or masturbation in it, so I know what’s left. But we’ll see how marketable it is.

LIFE DURING WARTIME opens Fri/6 in Bay Area theaters.

Close-up

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Close-up

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Everybody’s a curator, providing one or more terrain maps of their personality. What’s more telling, or potentially damning, than looking over someone’s iPod playlist or CD collection? My Detroit best-friend freshman roommates were first encountered pawing through my LP crate, diagnosing just what sort of hick they’d been stuck with. (Between the Sex Pistols and Dan Fogelberg, they were highly confused.)

Sussing taste in movies isn’t always as easy as perusing a shelf — not everyone necessarily cares to watch repeatedly even the films they esteem most. (Of course 1941’s Citizen Kane is brilliant, but do I own that? Nix. But 2000’s Dude, Where’s My Car? Yup.) Thus Angela Ismailos’ new documentary Great Directors is as interesting for what it reveals about the curator as for insights from "great" filmmakers themselves.

Of course "greatness" is ever-subjective, ever-more idly applied. Christopher Nolan is "the best director in the world" (according to imdb.com threads), if being good among blockbuster-franchise mediocrities measures the depth of your purview (though after the overcomplicated nonsense of Inception, even that status is questionable. Bring it on, haters!)

Ismailos has tonier taste. Good if idiosyncratic, the kind you can respect yet argue with. She’s a real cineaste. And a narcissist, falling into that realm of filmmakers who make movies about other people yet incessantly insert themselves into the frame. (Over 86 minutes, we get to see how many hairdos she can subject her dyed blonde locks to.) Still, there have been far worse offenders in the realm of Gratuitous Me: The Documentary, and Ismailos chooses her subjects — plus filmic excerpts — with beguiling intelligence.

The interviewees are very articulate. Are all "great"? Well, it’s hard to argue against Bernardo Bertolucci and David Lynch. Richard Linklater and Todd Haynes are inspired next-generation American choices. With John Sayles we enter the land of good intentions. Likewise Ken Loach and Stephen Frears, liberal 1960s-1970s BBC Two beneficiaries later orphaned by Margaret Thatcher funding cuts, subsequently taking disparate big-screen paths; Ismailos is attracted primarily by their frequent social-undercaste advocacy.

The jury’s still out on Catherine Breillat, while one truly odd choice is Liliana Cavani. Including that mostly undistinguished veteran Italian director most famous for 1974’s S–M Nazi romance The Night Porter suggests Ismailos has a thing for women directing women being sexually punished. (She also draws attention to the famous scene in 1972’s Last Tango in Paris where buttered-up Marlon Brando anally rapes Maria Schneider, while barely referencing Bertolucci’s later achievements.) Offering contrast is Agnès Varda, whose puckish cinema is hobbit-like in its denial of sex.

Ismailos deserves props for achieving 40 percent female representation in a field where careers like that of The Kids Are All Right‘s Lisa Cholodenko — three features in 12 years — are considered gender-triumphant. Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker (2009) director Kathryn Bigelow made even fewer over a longer span, and you know it’s not for lack of trying. (Neither of those women are in Great Directors, however.)

Several participants cite meaningful mentors, whether actually met or loved from a celluloid distance: Pasolini (Bertolucci), Fassbinder (Haynes), etc. More interesting still are their tales of production travails, whether it’s Breillat on the censorious loathing exercised toward her many portraits of abused female sexuality, or Lynch claiming "It’s beautiful to have a great
failure" (i.e., 1984’s Dune) since it freed him to make smaller, more personal projects like next-stop Blue Velvet (1986).

Great Directors has myriad such behind-scenes revelations. Preening and adoring these idols in camera view, Ismailos flashes her
good taste around. This would be more annoying if her taste wasn’t, in fact, pretty choice.

GREAT DIRECTORS opens Fri/23 in Bay Area theaters.

666-ZOMB

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
666-ZOMB

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Yes, vampires and werewolves are getting pretty dang tired lately.

Yet even they haven’t risked getting so overexposed as our shuffling undead friends.

George Romero’s last couple Dead films felt tapped out — if you were Romero, wouldn’t you be bored with zombies by now too? We’ve had remakes of Romero sequels, fer chrissakes. Plus we’ve had so many zombie comedies (2004’s Shaun of the Dead being the gold standard) that parodying the genre has itself become a cliché. There’ve been Zombie Strippers (2004), Nazi zombies (last year’s Dead Snow pretty much completed that concept), gay zombies (Bruce La Bruce’s oddly poignant 2008 Otto), a zombie feature made by an 11-year-old girl (Emily Hagins’ 2006 Pathogen), a documentary about that (2009’s Zombie Girl) … yada, yada. Of course there’s still fun to be had on occasion. But mainstream hit Zombieland (2009) worked not ‘cuz of zombies per se, but because Woody Harrelson and Jesse Eisenberg were funnier than their routine spoofy material.

Let’s face it: zombies are a limited concept. You can make them go slow or fast (pausing naturally to debate whether “fast zombies” betray all things sacred). They can be silent, grunty, or banshee-screamy. That’s about it. Vary the formula much farther and you’re outta zombie territory.

[Rec] 2 does fudge matters somewhat. This sequel to the successful 2007 Spanish original (decently Hollywood-remade in 2008 as Quarantine) elaborates its hints that what’s going on here is not just some bite-driven viral thingie but a supernatural evil. It’s home-lab “contagious enzyme” germ warfare — meets Satan. The zombies are, indeed, recently-munched living beings who can be perma-killed with the traditional headshot. Yet they are also Exorcist-y “possessed” who speak in many voices, including the classic Mercedes McCambridge-through-Linda-Blair obscene croak. Whatever.

Explication wasn’t the first film’s strong suit. It isn’t for this superior follow-up, either, which starts with [Rec]‘s memorable final shot (which Quarantine shamelessly surrendered in trailers): last survivor Ángela Vidal (Manuela Velasco) dragged from first-person camera range by something that surely ended her career as both glam TV reporter and living human.

Picking up moments later, [Rec] 2 then switches to the camcording POV of special-forces cops speeding to a Barcelona apartment building whose residents, responding firefighters, and fluff-story-pursuing TV news guests are now presumed undead. No one is allowed in or out save the SWAT-equivalent team whose imposed outside leader (Jonathan Mellor) turns out to be no Ministry of Health official, but a priest.

After various really bad things happen, their camera dies. [Rec] 2 cleverly then restarts the narrative from other live-video viewpoints, first wielded by three neighboring bourgeois teens who elude site barriers in search of “something really cool.” Once they realize what they’ve gotten themselves into, they do what comes naturally: panic and demand adults save them. But mummy and daddy can’t help you now.

Returning writing-directing duo Juame Balagueró and Paco Plaza know the slow build won’t work a second time, so [Rec] 2 quickly turns headlong. That it works pays testament to their screenplay — which cleverly develops original tropes rather than simply reprising them — and ability to invest the exhausted mockumentary form with visceral potency. (A couple deaths here are truly memorable despite the usually obfuscating shaky-cam format.)

There are silly ideas — otherwise invisible ephemera can be seen by night-vision cameras? Satan hasn’t covered his Radio Shack ass yet? — but [Rec] 2 proves there’s still imaginative life in zombie cinema, even if it requires bending the rules. [Rec] 3 and 4 are reportedly moving forward. This might become the rare film series — living or undead — that steadily improves.

[REC] 2 opens Fri/16 in Bay Area theaters.

 

Riot awakening

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Riot awakening

arts@sfbg.com

FILM On the night of June 28, 1969, police embarked on what they thought would be a routine raid on a gay bar in New York’s Greenwich Village, the sleazy, Mafia-run Stonewall Inn. The ensuing three days of rioting — during which mostly young men and drag queens accustomed to being marginalized and hauled off to jail stood their ground and fought back — became what historian Lillian Faderman has called “the shot heard round the world” for LGBT activism: a spontaneous expression of street-level outrage that fueled the birth of a movement.

Kate Davis and David Heilbroner’s solid documentary Stonewall Uprising takes a “just the facts, ma’am” approach to this historic flashpoint that makes for an information-packed, if at times dry, 80 minutes. Working around the paucity of photographic documentation of the actual riots (itself a testament to the marginalization of homosexuality in the late 1960s), Davis and Heilbroner make extensive use of period news footage and photography, reenactments, and most important, the first-person testimonies of who those who witnessed and participated in what one interviewee terms “our Rosa Parks moment.”

And what damning facts they are. Stonewall Uprising is most effective in its first half, when it vividly conveys the demonization and oppression queers regularly faced at a time when homosexuality was illegal in every state except Illinois. In one excerpted clip from a 1966 CBS investigative report that I’m sure Mike Wallace would just as soon have stricken from the record, the news anchor states matter-of-factly: “The average homosexual, if there be such, is promiscuous.” In another clip, a Florida detective sternly warns a gym full of middle school students that should any of them act on their same-sex desires, “you will be caught.”

Davis and Heilbroner’s contextual groundwork is as impressive for its archival research as it is repetitive in its message: pre-Stonewall life was hell. The documentary becomes more nuanced as it zeros in on reconstructing the first night of rioting via eyewitness accounts. Howard Smith and Lucian Truscott IV, journalists for the Village Voice whose offices were nearby, remember fearing for their lives when they found themselves barricaded inside the bar with the police. But it is former police deputy Seymour Pine who emerges as the night’s unofficial antihero, having ordered his officers to hold their fire to prevent unnecessary bloodshed. Pine’s interview — as much a mea culpa as a performance of self-assurance by an elderly man that he is on the right side of history — is Stonewall Uprising‘s true revelation. 

STONEWALL UPRISING opens Fri/9 in Bay Area theaters.

We are family

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
We are family

arts@sfbg.com

>>Read Louis Peitzman’s complete interview with director Lisa Chodolenko here

FILM In many ways, The Kids Are All Right is a straightforward family dramedy: it’s about parents trying to do what’s best for their children and struggling to keep their relationship together. But it’s also a film in which Jules (Julianne Moore) goes down on Nic (Annette Bening) while they’re watching gay porn.

“I think we tried and I think we were somewhat successful in making it so that you don’t realize exactly what you’re watching, the subversiveness of what you’re seeing,” says writer-director Lisa Cholodenko (1998’s High Art). “I think we figured out a way for people to enter it, and that was really important for us.”

That blend between mainstream and queer is part of what makes The Kids Are All Right such an important — not to mention enjoyable — film. Despite presenting issues that might be contentious to large portions of the country, the movie maintains an approachability that’s often lacking in queer cinema.

“I thought it was a very classic story,” Bening says, “other than that the women are gay.”

Cholodenko and Bening were both on hand in San Francisco to promote and speak about the film. Of course, being in the gay mecca of the Bay Area skews things significantly — most locals wouldn’t bat an eye at The Kids Are All Right, which has Nic and Jules’ children inviting their biological father (“the sperm donor”) into their lives. But for those outside the liberal bubble, the idea of a nontraditional family might be more problematic. Combine that with the film’s semiexplicit sexual content and a darkly comic, matter-of-fact script, and you’ve got a tougher sell.

“There were questions about the gay porn and about how much sexuality we were showing, but we felt like this is the fun of the film,” Cholodenko reflects. “It’s not going to be a multiplex film. But we hope it’s not going to be super-rarefied art house film.”

The fun Cholodenko mentions is the real strength of The Kids Are All Right, a movie that refuses to take itself too seriously. At its best, the film is laugh-out-loud funny, handling the heaviest of issues with grace and humor.

“To me, [the humor] is so important — and it’s harder,” Bening says. “That’s why more movies don’t have it. It’s because it’s harder. It’s much easier to write in an earnest way.”

That’s not to say that the film is insincere. Much of the humor is derived from the fact that it’s grounded in reality. The characters respond to their situation as real people do — and that’s far funnier than the broad, over-the-top reactions that often plague more mainstream comedies.

“We were really passionate about making it not politically correct and not sanctimonious,” Cholodenko explains. “As we went deeper into the drafts and moved along in the evolution of getting the film done, I really, really, really pushed for us to take whatever was potentially funny in there and just kick it up a notch.”

Besides — as Bening puts it — “I think if you’re trying to make an earnest movie about a lesbian couple with teenagers, whoa, what a nightmare that would be.” It’s not a message movie, but The Kids Are All Right may still change minds. And even if it doesn’t, the film is a success that works chiefly because it isn’t heavy-handed.

“It doesn’t ever have to go out and carry the banner, which is what great movies and great stories can do,” Bening notes. “You take an individual group of people, a specific little pod of people, and you try to tell their own personal stories as specifically as possible. Hopefully you get at something true and universal by doing that.”

THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT opens Fri/9 in San Francisco.

Madam majesty

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Madam majesty

“Who do you think you are, the queen of fucking England?”

That’s Joe Pesci to Helen Mirren in Love Ranch, a film that takes Mirren about as far as possible from her titular role in 2006’s The Queen. She stars as Grace Botempo, co-owner of Nevada’s first legal brothel alongside her husband, Pesci’s Charlie. The fact that the regal British dame is entirely convincing as an American madam speaks to her impressive versatility.

In fact, Love Ranch is more of a showcase for Mirren than anything else. While the movie as a whole is engaging — insofar as it’s a 1970s period piece about legalized prostitution — the plot is mostly predictable. Grace finds herself drawn to the Argentinean prize fighter her husband forces her to manage. In Bruza (Sergio Peris-Mencheta), she gets the attention and appreciation Charlie can no longer offer. In Grace, Bruza gets a woman who looks damn good at 64.

The unlikely relationship between the two is actually Love Ranch‘s weakest element. It’s clear why they’re drawn to each other, despite the age and cultural gaps between them, but the affair plays out like an indie flick cliché. From the moment Grace and Bruza meet, you sense where things are going — and that takes away most of the excitement from the eventual consummation.

Still, there’s a lot to like about Love Ranch, which should be taken as more of a character piece anyway. Aside from Mirren, who carries most of the weight, Pesci returns to form as the violent and volatile Charlie. Then there are the prostitutes, a veritable who’s who of sexy, seedy actors: Bai Ling, Taryn Manning, and Gina Gershon, who turns in her finest work since 1995’s Showgirls.

Obviously Love Ranch is in a different class than Showgirls, but there is something charmingly trashy about it regardless. Part of what makes it so enjoyable is seeing Mirren in this context, watching her get ravaged by a much younger man, break up girl-on-girl fights, and say things like, “I’ve got 25 psychotic whores to manage. That’s a full dance card.” It’s doubtful the film would be worthwhile without Mirren’s efforts. We care about Grace because of her sympathetic portrayal, but also because she’s Helen effing Mirren. And though there’s something disingenuous, perhaps even gimmicky about that, it works despite itself. We’re drawn to Grace, even when Love Ranch‘s third act proves disappointing, and that’s enough to keep watching.

LOVE RANCH opens Wed/30 in San Francisco.

Nobody but you

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Nobody but you

arts@sfbg.com

FILM The couple on holiday is one of modern cinema’s quintessential sites of anxiety: Voyage to Italy (1954), Bonjour Tristesse (1958), Weekend (1967), and L’avventura (1960) all chart its precipitous course. The merely inexorable ennui of the vacationing lovers is the existential flipside of the couple bound by oblivion, like so many Bonnie and Clydes. That may be heady company with which to introduce Maren Ade’s pairing in Everyone Else, her second feature, but in so laying bare the behavioral excesses of characters struggling for authentic expression, she’s made a distinctly modernist romantic comedy — one without air.

Gitti (Birgit Minichmayr) and Chris (Lars Eidinger) are failing miserably at basic communication. This happens on vacation. Without the steadying rails of vocation, moods and unintended remarks are pursued further than they would be otherwise. Everyone Else figures holiday as a stage, in which the principles grasp for their roles in relationship to the other. Acting is brought up early and often. After a dangerous conversation about Chris’s masculinity, Gitti laughs at his "bad acting" when he casually throws his arm around her. "I didn’t know I was acting," he mutters.

They are a young, bourgeoisie German couple staying at his parents’ villa in Sardinia. He is a disappointed architect, she a music publicist. Already, though, this capsule betrays the film’s methodical mode of exposition, whereby facts like "his parents’ villa" and "in Sardinia" are realized in conversation, later than we expect. Before then, we’re privy to inner jokes, private nonsense, and gestural rapport. Rather than using such minutiae to ingratiate us into Chris and Gitti’s quirks, Ade is embedding us in the relationship’s interior.

We realize how deeply during the course of two dinners with an architect acquaintance and his wife, the first at the new couple’s house and the second at the villa. The other pair stands in for the "everybody else" of the title, and, in their outsized performance as a couple, acts as a convenient cipher for Chris and Gitti’s bottomless insecurities. As an afternoon champagne toast for the other’s couple’s pregnancy (one of many reminders in the film that Chris and Gitti are not expecting — a baby or anything else) gives way to sour bickering, Chris and Gitti’s conventional appearance cracks under the stress of false pretenses; just sitting on the same side of the table seems like a lie.

Both characters trail inconstant emotions without having resolved their meaning beforehand, but there’s a far greater dynamic range in their body language. Ade’s staging of Minichmayr and Eidinger’s bodies forms a vividly choreographed counterpoint to the many doublings in her script. Twice, Chris roughly embraces Gitti after she’s told him that she loves him: a false show of decisiveness masking indifference. Gitti wraps herself around Chris’ body when she’s most insecure of his love: hardly subtle, and, tragically, with an effect precisely contrary to her desire for comfort.

In screwball comedies, a couple’s disliking each other is a sure sign of their chemistry — it looks like fun, especially when the plot throws obstacles in the way of the inevitable consummation. Chris and Gitti are not cold fish — their passion is intense, if swollen by doubt — but the fact that their relationship’s obstacles are self-imposed leads to a certain captive mentality, in which staying together means being marooned from the outside world.

EVERYONE ELSE opens Fri/2 in Bay Area theaters.

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