Foreign Film Roundup

By: Kevin Filipski

Wednesday April 06, 2005

Resident writer Kevin Filipski rounds up some of the new foreign film DVDs available.
Touchez pas au Grisbi, Casque d'Or (Criterion) - French director Jacques Becker's most memorable films finally arrive on DVD in pristine condition from Criterion (where else?). Touchez features Jean Gabin in one of his best late-career roles, while Casque d'Or stars Simone Signoret as she was just beginning to blossom. Becker is at his peak in both films, providing many moments of unnerving drama and revealing character study. Like his very last film, Le Trou - which Criterion also did a bang-up job with - these releases are manna for Becker lovers, with excellent restorations showcasing crisp B&W photography, and plentiful extras.

Dos Tros Duros, Cleopatra, Vidas Privadas (Fox) - Fox begins a Latin Cinema Collection with a minor trio of obscure films from Argentina. Dos Tros Duros and Cleopatra are strictly routine efforts, enlivened only by decent acting (especially Norma Aleandro in Cleopatra), but Vidas Privadas (Private Lives) is marginally better.

Dramatically, it's a convoluted and even unremarkable story of a woman returning home to her dying father after 20 years in Spain: she had fled after being tortured by Argentina's fascist regime, and can only have sexual pleasure without physical contact.

Whenever writer-director-composer Fito Paez's hand goes astray - which is often - his actors continually bail him out. Gail Garcia Bernel, known from Bad Education and The Motorcycle Diaries, is splendid as the stud with a secret connection to our heroine, played by the always-superb Cecilia Roth; simply divine in a challenging role, Roth's fierce, fearless performance makes Private Lives more substantive than it deserves.

Strayed (Wellspring) - Andre Techine's no fool: casting the still-stunning Emmanuelle Beart as a mother forced to live by her wits with two children in tow during Germany's WWII occupation of France is a coup, since Strayed is in so many other ways strictly mediocre. Pairing the luminous Beart with Gaspard Ulliel, who shines as the hooligan who befriends the on-the-run family, smartly builds subtle sexual tension, which grows throughout the film until the inevitable physical consummation.

Techine gets the details right - you literally feel that you are trying to survive day-by-day - but it's the bigger picture of the psychological and emotional makeup of these characters that he glosses over. The DVD includes interviews with Techine and Ulliel.

Rosenstrasse (CTHV) - Rosenstrasse explores an episode in Nazi history through the eyes of an elderly survivor living in New York. As long as Marguerite von Trotta, a humane and intelligent filmmaker, remains in the Berlin of 1943 - the title refers to the street where the Aryan wives of imprisoned Jewish men gathered in a rare display of public dissent until their husbands were finally released - Rosenstrasse is compelling viewing. The weakest scenes occur in contemporary New York, as characters stand on soapboxes discussing past atrocities.

Still, Rosenstrasse is an emotional exploration of the risks people take to survive, helped immeasurably by lead actress Katya Reimann. A former actress herself, von Trotta has unsurprisingly made yet another film that concentrates on strong female protagonists. But its value lies in what it adds to history, particularly in the director's native Germany, where the Nazi era continues to be a touchy subject.

Intimate Strangers (Paramount) - French director Patrice Leconte usually dramatizes the tension - sexual and otherwise - between alluring (and available) women and unattractive men. His erratic output - highlighted by his black-comic Tango and erotic The Scent of Yvonne, with the dreary Girl on the Bridge and The Widow of St Pierre at the opposite end - continues with the well-made but dramatically inert Intimate Strangers, whose storyline is specious and implausible.

Fabrice Luchini plays an accountant mistaken for a psychiatrist by an obviously confused Sandrine Bonnaire; of course, he reveals nothing and she keeps returning for sessions on his couch. Before she finds out and everything disintegrates, they become intimately tied to each other.

Leconte scores points with a handful of shrewd observations on the absurdity of relationships, but with an easier-to-swallow premise, Intimate Strangers might have achieved a truer emotional hold.

Shall We Dance? (Buena Vista) - Unlike the fitfully entertaining American remake with Richard Gere and (gasp!) Jennifer Lopez, the original Japanese film is charming in every way, with a fascinating social context completely lost wrenched out of Tokyo and dropped into Chicago.

Ballroom dancing is frowned upon in Japan's reticent culture because it's too shockingly intimate for so public a spectacle...so when the midlife-crisis husband decides to take lessons, of course he won't tell his family. The slowly-simmering relationship between the man and his dance instructor is given the necessary room to breathe, and by film's end two hours later, you feel you've spent a lifetime with these characters, caring about their every (mis)step.

Believe it or not, neither director Masayuki Suo nor lead actress Tamiyo Kusakari - his wife - have made another movie since.

Zelary (CTHV) - A long wartime epic doubling as a star-crossed romance, Ondrej Trojan's drama opens with short, staccato scenes set in Prague as a Czech WWII resistance fighter gains a new identity, which includes marrying the simple farmer who shelters her, then waxes lyrical once it reaches the countryside. There's a method in juxtaposing the heroine's frantic, dangerous undercover life with the placid pastoral existence on the farm - but Trojan errs by meandering on for 2-1/2 hours.

Still, Zelary is intelligently made and well-acted by a capable cast; it was nominated for the Best Foreign Film Oscar last year - it lost - which is humorously recalled in one of the bonus features; also included are a 20-minute making-of and five minutes of deleted scenes (actually, another 30 minutes could have been shorn by Trojan without harming the film).