Filipski's Foreign Film Roundup
By: Kevin Filipski |
Tuesday January 18, 2005 |
| Outside major cities, most foreign films are seen only on DVD. Here's a roundup of some notable (and not-so-notable) recent releases. |
| Grand Ecole (Wellspring)
This French drama is utterly straight-faced about its characters' sexual roundelays, but this is no La Ronde, not by a long shot. Director-cowriter Robert Salis has assembled an attractive cast of relative unknowns and puts them through their romantic paces efficiently enough, but by the time Grand Ecole ends, we're no closer to discovering anything interesting about these students of higher learning than we knew going in. That may be Salis' point, but I hope not. The DVD includes several choice extras, including interviews, deleted scenes and a behind-the-scenes feature. Secret Things (First Run) Jean-Claude Brisseau recently had a retrospective of his films at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York. I had seen his gritty actioner Sound and Fury, but missed his other work until his latest, Secret Things. An utterly ludicrous and ponderous sexual melodrama - ah, those French! - Secret Things follows two shapely young women who climb the corporate ladder as they screw everyone in sight...until they meet their male counterpart. If it weren't so shoddily written, ineptly acted and pretentiously directed, Secret Things might have gone further than Eyes Wide Shut in delving into a clandestine erotic underworld. As it is, the movie is so risible that its final orgy scene - where we catch glimpses of actual hardcore doings, unlike in Kubrick's film - comes as a relief, followed only by an even funnier murderous act and an even more gutbusting coda. Ah, those French, indeed! Hero (Buena Vista) Zhang Yimou made this color-coded martial-arts epic in 2002, and Miramax sat on it for no good reason until this past summer, whereupon it made a respectable $50 million at the box office. On DVD, Hero has been treated unkindly once again. The transfer of the movie is too soft, blunting the harder edges of the color scheme that Zhang and cinematographer Christopher Doyle created; it's too bad, for otherwise this is a magnificent disc, with DTS sound thundering through the speakers and making-of featurettes that at least touch on the remarkable technical skills utilized for this awesome display of visual frission. But most unnecessary is a fawning interview by Quentin Tarantino of star Jet Li. Facing Windows (Columbia/TriStar) Actress Giovanna Mezzogiorno is not an unfamiliar face to fans of Italian films - her remarkable portrayal of a jealous and vindictive girlfriend in The Last Kiss is a performance to cherish - and in Facing Windows she shows off her talent and striking screen presence. Mezzogiorno plays Giovanna, an unhappy wife and mother who falls for the handsome hunk in the next apartment when they find themselves digging up the past of an amnesiac old man who may have been a concentration camp survivor. It's melodramatic and schematic, but director Ferzan Ozpetek has a sure hand with his actors. And with Mezzogiorno, he knows he's got his ace in the hole: she's the beating heart of the movie, and Ozpetek smartly focuses on her piercing blue eyes for the movie's evocative final shot. Carandiru (Columbia/TriStar) Hector Babenco makes a remarkable comeback with this hard-hitting drama based on the true story of a Brazilian prison massacre by police upon mostly defenseless inmates. At nearly 2-1/2 hours, Carandiru is nothing if not thorough in its depiction of prison life in all shapes and sizes (romantic relationships, platonic friendships, vengeful fights and confrontations) - everything, that is, until the fateful moment when several dunderheaded decisions led to police storming the prison and killing dozens in cold blood. The informative special features include Babenco's audio commentary, deleted scenes, and a making-of feature that includes a valuable background look at the real event; also included is footage of the actual prison being dynamited to the ground just a few years ago. Goodbye, Lenin! (Columbia/TriStar) A good-natured study of an East German family thrown into turmoil by the fall of the Berlin Wall, Goodbye Lenin! is yet another good example of why European films are able to deal with political matters so much more effortlessly than American ones. Most American political films are either polemical documentaries like Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 or fact-based dramas about an earthshattering event like Watergate in All the President's Men. Rarely is there an everyday drama about real people caught up in believable political situations. But Goodbye Lenin! matter-of-factly shows how a young man, upon his mother's reawakening from a coma, tries to keep her from discovering that her beloved Communist East Germany is no more and that a new, united Germany has replaced it. The movie is funny, touching, and pointed in its glimpses at the absurdities of both Communism and capitalism. The DVD's bonuses include behind-the-scenes features, deleted scenes, and commentary from the cast and director Wolfgang Becker. The Return (Kino) Unsettling from the outset, Andrei Zvyagintsev's intense psychological drama about two young brothers who have a reunion with a man they've never known who calls himself their long-absent father shows an uncommon command of the medium that strengthens until the expected - but still shocking - climax. Exquisitely photographed and acted with utter conviction by an extraordinary cast, The Return is serious cinema at its best. The most important extra on Kino's DVD is the making-of documentary, The Return: a Film about the Film; an hour long, it's an exhaustive chronicle of how The Return got to the screen. One sad note: the precocious teenage actor, Vladimir Garin, who played the older son, drowned in the lake where much of the film was shot. To Be and To Have (New Yorker) Documentaries don't come much more truthful and artfully simple than Nicholas Philibert's extraordinary glimpse into a rural French schoolhouse. Philibert follows teacher George Lopez, whose charges are all from 3 to 11 years of age; the one-room schoolhouse seems like a quaint throwback, but by showing the vital, energized teaching of Lopez - truly one of humanity's great souls - Philibert has created a compelling portrait of goodness, selflessness and the importance of great teachers. The kids are unforgettable as well, for which we can thank director and teacher. New Yorker's DVD includes an interview with the director and additional footage of the children reciting poetry. Love Me if You Dare (Paramount) Another of those oh-so-precious French romantic comedies - like Amelie and Ma vie en Rose - that assume they are more clever than they really are, the arch, overstylized Love Me if You Dare follows two youngsters who grow up and apart after spending their childhoods nearly inseparably. Of course, they are meant for each other - or are they? The title comes from their often dangerous game of "dare" that they continue playing throughout their lives: after she marries a famous soccer player, he pines for her absurdly and interminably. Saturated with overbearing colors and only fitfully redeemed by its four appealing lead performers(as children and as adults), Love Me if You Dare clocks in at a theoretically short but truly endless 90 minutes. Zhou Yu's Train (Columbia/TriStar) Now that there are other claims to her title as East Asia's reigning screen goddess (Ziyi Zhang of House of Flying daggers and, my own preference, Shu Qi of Millennium Mambo immediately come to mind), Gong Li must feel footsteps behind her. But her engaging presence and perfect beauty are the strongest pluses of Zhou Yu's Train, a meandering melodrama that attempts to look more substantive by merely crosscutting among different characters and time periods. This visually splendid but dramatically inert drama at least looks terrific on DVD. |
