The descriptive word most often draped around French filmmaker Catherine Breillat, almost like an apologetic bunting, is “provocateur.” Her admirers and her detractors alike must acknowledge that she likes to push the infinitely stretchy skin of the envelope: What other filmmaker has ever shown us a blood-soaked tampon used as a teabag, turning a glass of water into a pinkish elixir that two characters, a man and a woman, drink in order to cement their own holy communion?
That’s the image that almost everyone who sees Breillat’s newest picture, “Anatomy of Hell,” will remember most vividly, perhaps with revulsion, perhaps with puzzlement or admiration — or any combination of the three. But to describe the scene as baldly as I just did negates the wonder and audacity of it: The beauty of the sequence isn’t that it’s so gracefully presented we forget to be queasy; it’s that Breillat treats our queasiness itself with respect, an allowable response that’s as much evidence of our humanity as the bloody tincture in the water is.
Breillat is a provocateur, but she’s the plain brown kind: Her particular brand of provocation is markedly lacking in showmanship. She doesn’t serve up that bloody tampon as an existential shockeroo, left to lie there, limply, at a philosophical dead end: She wouldn’t insult us by being so maddeningly vague.
Perhaps because Breillat is French, she’s often thought of (by Americans, at least) as one of those “wordy” filmmakers obsessed with heady ideas — in short, an arty windbag. But Breillat is the exact opposite of a windbag. Her great distinction as a filmmaker is that she’s so obsessed with specificity that she worries abstractions until she’s made them concrete. When she sets out to make a movie about the mystery of womankind, and the fear, revulsion and confusion it has inspired since the beginning of time, she doesn’t waste time dilly-dallying with metaphorical brushstrokes.
To put it another way: What could be less abstract than a used tampon?
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The vagaries of foreign-film distribution are such that Breillat’s two most recent pictures are being released almost simultaneously in the United States: “Sex Is Comedy” (2002) is a fictional account of the filming of the central sex scene in Breillat’s 2001 “Fat Girl,” and it is, as its title suggests, something of a comedy. In “Anatomy of Hell” (2003), a young woman is brought back from the brink of suicide by a gay man who happens to catch her just as she’s slicing her wrist with a razor. (“Why did you do that?” he asks her with blank incredulity. “Because I’m a woman,” she replies, as if he’d asked her why she’d raised her umbrella in a rainstorm.) Recognizing him as an impartial audience — in other words, a man who has no interest in her sexually — she invites him to spend four nights with her, to “watch me where I’m unwatchable.” She’ll even pay him for it. Her instructions to him are “Just say what you see.”
The two movies are distinctly different in tone and visual style, but the tensile intellectual cabling that connects them is pure Breillat. Breillat wrote the scripts for both films, although it seems as if, for her, writing and filmmaking are so entwined they’re practically inseparable. Although she obviously works through her ideas with discipline and vigor before she steps behind the camera, those ideas are never stiff and bloodless by the time they reach the screen: Somehow, their molecules are still buzzing, having gained life rather than lost it in the transition from page to moving image.
“Sex Is Comedy” offers us a window into the way Breillat works (or at least as much of a window as Breillant wants, or is able, to open). Her alter-ego here is Jeanne (Anne Parillaud), who is making a movie in which a young virgin (Roxane Mequida, who played the same character in “Fat Girl”) is seduced by a loutishly seductive older boy (Grégoire Colin, who did not appear in the earlier film).
At the beginning of “Sex Is Comedy,” Jeanne is shooting a scene in which the soon-to-be lovers are kissing on a beach: She berates the boy (he is known only as “the actor”) for not kissing the girl (“the actress”) properly or believably. She suspects, correctly, as it turns out, that the two of them are stalling, purposely messing up because they’re nervous about the sex scene they’re going to have to shoot soon. Jeanne reveals her doubts about her actors in a series of tail-chasing monologues, some of them delivered to her patient, simpatico assistant director, Léo (Ashley Wanninger), but many of them spun out into the air as if no one were listening at all. Jeanne just needs to get the words out there in order to crystallize her own ideas about what she wants, and needs, to capture in the film.
Jeanne’s relationship with the actor is particularly fraught: He complains that the actress has ridiculed him and doesn’t want to kiss him. He’s not turned on by her, anyway, and would prefer to have nothing to do with her. He’s sullen and sulky and doesn’t seem to think being an actor is all that big a deal, stating that he’d much rather “have greasy hands, work with the soil.” Jeanne doesn’t hide her exasperation with him, confronting him daily with all the ways in which he’s disappointing her (and then wringing her hands some more after-hours with her long-suffering assistant). She and the actor are often physically affectionate — they frequently nestle up to one another in conspiratorial flirtatiousness. But emotionally, they’re both like the hooked side of Vel-Cro: They just can’t connect.
Breillat makes it clear from the beginning that, as difficult as the actor is, Jeanne demands so much from her performers that she sometimes comes close to breaking them. The comments she makes to, and about, them can be monstrous: “The way you look at her, it’s awful.” “They can’t even kiss right.” And, perhaps most harshly: “I’m always in control. They’re my actors.”
The point, of course, is that Jeanne can’t control her actors — she can’t even be so arrogant as to shape their performances. But as director, it’s her job to marshal every cast and crew member in the service of her overarching idea. Otherwise, why make a film at all?
Jeanne is a formidable presence on the set. One day she shows up with her foot, inexplicably, in a cast. When a well-meaning crew member asks if she broke it, she retorts, “I put my foot down. It broke itself.”
She has decided that the actor should wear a prosthetic penis for the sex scene, both to make him more comfortable about his near-nudity and to protect him from the anxiety of having to get an erection. Once the actor has been fitted with his bogus boner (the technician who made it is named, appropriately, Willy), she marches up to him to assess the effect. She crouches close to him, as if to caress him. He stands there stiffly. His abrasive personality has temporarily dissipated: Suddenly, he’s nothing but robe, slippers and cock, and in a matter of minutes, he and his faux erection will be called upon to perform.
But Jeanne isn’t out to humiliate him. What she needs to do — and all of “Sex Is Comedy” is about the way she works this out in a caffeinated whirl, first in her head and then with her actors — is to galvanize her actors so they’re able to peel back every last protective layer. At one point, she begs her actress, “Dazzle me on the monitor, so I feel like an intruder.” The actors’ nervousness about the sex scene is natural, but it can’t be allowed: It’s the very thing that could kill the scene’s meaning. “Fear of being obscene makes one obscene,” Jeanne says at one point. “Emotion is never dirty or obscene — it’s grace.”
Parillaud’s performance is sharp on its surface and soft at its core. And if Jeanne truly is Breillat’s alter ego, she is a pitiless self-portrait. Breillat has written this role without a scrap of vanity. We see Jeanne watching a scene on the monitor, demanding that it be redone over and over again. “We didn’t see the cock — it must show and not show,” she hisses in exasperation, while the crew and actors flutter busily but helplessly, understanding exactly what she means but at a loss as to how, precisely, to deliver it.
But when the sex scene finally comes together — it unfolds before us with an emotional intensity we couldn’t have predicted — we understand exactly what Jeanne, or Jeanne/Breillat, was after. And not even Jeanne herself (or, for that matter, Breillat) believes that she did anything so active as to “shape” the resulting scene. Rather, she willed it into a rough approximation of her original conception, as if she were bending a spoon with her mind. But she knows, as we do, that the actors have gone somewhere she can’t follow. She can only watch while they do the bulk of the work — but then, watching was the only reward she was after in the first place.
If “Sex Is Comedy” is an examination of the bond of trust between an actor and a director, “Anatomy of Hell” puts that bond to the test. The woman, the luminous Amira Casar, and the man, Rocco Siffredi (the Italian porn star who was so touching in Breillat’s 1999 “Romance”), spend most of their time in a bedroom, although not necessarily in bed. We never learn their names, although we become intimately familiar with their bodies.
The man shows up at the woman’s house — it’s perched on a cliff overlooking the ocean, the kind of desolate locale that’s more likely to foster desperation than romance. He wears a chic, oyster-colored suit of some casually liquid fabric, a get-up that’s clearly designed more to stoke his own vanity than to incite her admiration. When he arrives, the woman explains, vaguely apologetically, that she hasn’t had time to undress. She eases out of her clothes and extends herself on the bed. He sits in a chair opposite her, annoyed and wooden. He has no interest in her; he doesn’t want to be there.
But what unfolds during that night and the three that follow — each night, the man arrives at the appointed hour in that rippling suit, each time looking slightly less like a spectator and more like a suitor — is a peculiar kind of intimacy that transcends sexual preference. It transcends sex, period. The woman reveals herself to him in ways that she herself can’t even see (at least not without the aid of a mirror). She shows him how she responds to his curious, if unenthusiastic, touch; she shows him how easily she can accommodate, and expel, a large stone dildo; and she shows him how she bleeds. Her purpose is to reveal to him, and to articulate for herself, the revulsion that women’s bodies can incite in men — revulsion founded in the fact that women’s bodies, with all their hidden though penetrable corridors, are the ultimate plumbable-yet-not-knowable mystery.
The man proves her right. The woman reclines on the bed, an all-powerful odalisque, a nude drawn with two parallel hill-and-valley strokes. The man is unmoved by this bride stripped bare, and in fact, goes out of his way to berate her. He lectures her about her own vulnerability. (“The fragility of female skin inspires disgust or brutality. Women depend on one or the other.”) When she apologizes that she hasn’t shaved, he sneers that even removed hairs still exert their presence. Even shaved, her sex would look like “a plucked chicken.” He remarks on “the sloppy, shapeless aspect” of her “hidden lips,” and compares the moistness of her skin to “the skin of frogs.” His zingers intensify to the point of feverish ridiculousness: “Frogs at least have the decency of being green.”
But the more time he spends with her — not just looking at her and touching her, but listening to her — the more deeply he begins to understand her. “Anatomy of Hell” isn’t a meditation on misogyny — that’s its most obvious reading, and, frankly, its laziest. Breillat uses this man and woman on a bed (sometimes only he is clothed, and sometimes the two of them are naked) as a way of exploring the meaning of women’s bodies from social, political and personal angles, instead of purely sensual ones.
Breillat frequently shows us the woman’s pubis in glistening close-up. The movie’s opening credits explain that a body double was used for these most explicit scenes, but it doesn’t matter whose parts we’re seeing: The intimacy of these close-ups is almost stifling at first, but we learn to relax into them.
Still, that kind of directness is bound to make some people uncomfortable. One gay critic had this to say: “Eeeuw.” I wouldn’t call that a misogynist response — maybe it’s femmephobic at worst. But while I don’t think “Anatomy of Hell” has anything so clumsy as a thesis, I do think that critic’s response proves Breillat’s point exactly — that the sexual essence of women is so foreign to men that revulsion is a part of their response to it. (Actually, that may be the very response she’s hoping for.)
But Breillat is aware that that revulsion is felt by women as well, and not solely because of social conditioning. After all, our parts are mysterious to us, too: We can’t get a good look at them without a mirror. (And I’ll bet there are plenty of us who thought “Eeuw” the first time we saw what we really look like.) Our lovers are often more intimately acquainted with our hidden parts than we are.
Maybe that’s why Siffredi’s performance here is so moving. He and the woman have intercourse on the first night — he’s aroused by her in spite of himself — and afterward, we see her sound asleep, while he weeps quietly at the foot of the bed. We don’t really know what his tears are for. They could be a simple release, or it could be that he feels moved by her vulnerability (or identifies with it) in ways that he couldn’t articulate if he tried.
Even so, his feelings for her and her womanhood are anything but tidy. At one point, his simmering resentment toward her causes him to retrieve a gardening tool from the shed and prop its stubby handle in her vagina as she sleeps — maybe an acknowledgment that, even with all his magnificent manhood, he’s all too easy to replace.
The surprise of “Anatomy of Hell” is that Siffredi’s character is ultimately more vulnerable than the woman, because while she knows exactly what to expect from him, he’s susceptible to her in ways he never could have predicted. Siffredi’s performance is lovely, partly because of the languid expressiveness of his slightly droopy eyes. He’s such a securely masculine presence that he doesn’t need any phony macho affectations. (The performances he delivers for Breillat are the polar opposite of his rough porn persona.) The purity of Siffredi’s sexual confidence hovers far outside any socially proscribed notion of what a man should be. He’s so masculine he’s almost feminine.
Although “Anatomy of Hell” at first seems to present women as aggrieved souls, it ultimately swerves around to assert the certainty of their power. There’s something queenly about the way Casar drapes herself along the length of her bed. Even as she speaks of the vulnerability of womankind, she looks ready to rule the world. Breillat and her camera people (Yorgos Arvanitis, Guillaume Schiffman, Miquel Malherios and Susana Gomes) light Casar as if they’d wanted to paint her instead of commit her to film: Her skin has an unreal lunar glow, a visual metaphor for feminine sexual allure. The ocean that rages practically outside her doorstep may be rushing to get to her, or to escape her — it’s hard to say which.
Catherine Breillat is less a feminist filmmaker than an aggressively feminine one. I’m sure she does want to shock us with that bloody tampon cocktail. But she also reminds us that that blood — which men of many cultures have used as evidence that women are “unclean” — is the source of all human life.
Even though Breillat’s movies can be joltingly distressing — it took me days to recover fully from “Fat Girl” — I always find something jubilant about them. Breillat’s movies are always seriously alive. At the close of “Sex Is Comedy,” as the end credits begin to roll, we see Parillaud-as-Breillat peeling and eating a banana with voracious delicacy. Relieved and delighted that the most difficult scene in her movie is behind her, she announces to the surrounding crew, “I think life’s hilarious!” I don’t doubt for a minute that Breillat does, too.
“Oslo, August 31st” is, as the title suggests, an evocation of one day in the Norwegian capital, as experienced by a troubled young man who’s facing the end of summer and the end of his youth. It’s a marvelously constructed personal journey, both wrenching and bittersweet, whose emotional ripple effects stay with you for days and weeks afterward. While much of international art cinema can seem overly talky or conceptually alien to American viewers, this second feature film from Norwegian director Joachim Trier is a dynamic, even breathtaking visual experience without much dialogue or any philosophical heavy lifting, following the bony, handsome, exceedingly vulnerable Anders (Anders Danielsen Lie) through coffee shops, nightclubs and bodies of water, en route to an ambiguous final destination.
I saw “Oslo, August 31st” last year at Cannes and found it powerfully affecting, but I never would have guessed that this small movie from a small country would have touched an international nerve the way it apparently has. In the wake of a breathless profile of doctor-turned-actor Lie and his supermodel wife, Iselin Steiro, in the New York Times’ style magazine — which made the film sound rather like a fashion accessory, or a handbook to Oslo architecture — I almost feel the need to dial back expectations a little. Yes, there are drugs and dance clubs and traveling shots but, honest to Pete, we’re not talking stylish, scenic, lovable hipster romp here, people. While “Oslo, August 31st” definitely has the dynamism and street-level energy of, say, an early Godard picture, and may indeed leave you eager to visit Norway, it’s first and foremost an intimate tragedy about a likable young man who has wandered off the path of life into some very dark woods, and isn’t necessarily finding his way back.
As in Trier’s equally wonderful first film, the 2006 “Reprise” — I’m pretty much the president of the cult on that one — the director is interested in exploring the existential dark side of Scandinavian social democracy, with its largely homogeneous character and devotion to equal opportunity. When I talked to Trier about that film, which featured Lie and Espen Klouman-Hoiner as a pair of arrogant, doomed aspiring novelists, he observed that in Norway “there are a lot of people with a lot of choices. It sounds wonderful but there’s a darker side to that. Lots of people are not dealing with those choices very well.” Anders in “Oslo, August 31st” is something like the worst-case outcome for Lie’s character in “Reprise”; he’s a guy from a loving, middle-class family who’s got looks, health, intelligence and education, but for unknowable reasons finds himself on the edge of middle age as a penniless, unemployable, supposedly recovering junkie.
Trier and co-writer Eskil Vogt adapted their central premise from “Le Feu Follet,” a 1930s novella about alcoholism by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, but “Oslo, August 31st” could really be set anywhere at any time. It’s about the painful necessity of adapting to change, every single day that we’re alive, and if we identify with Anders even as we rage against his despair, it’s because every living human has at some point considered the possibility that it’s just too much and the struggle isn’t worth it. Anders is doing well in drug rehab, and has cautiously been granted a one-day leave to visit Oslo friends and apply for a job. But we can tell from the first moments of the film that his agenda is more complicated than that; Anders is in the position of a certain Danish prince, evaluating the reasons for being against the reasons for ceasing to be. (Trier, by the way, is cousin to another famous Dane, “Melancholia” director Lars von Trier, and one could argue their visions of the world are related as well.)
“Oslo, August 31st” runs a lean, mean 95 minutes, and not one second seems unimportant. Anders moves through the streets of Oslo looking for reasons to live and reasons to die, and even though we don’t know those streets as he does, we can tell that they’re haunted with memories and private agonies. The city is dotted with construction cranes and demolition sites, remorselessly regenerating itself while he appears to stand still. Indeed, Anders’ family home will soon be sold, and one of his personal missions is to pay a final visit. (The fluid, poetic cinematography is by Jakob Ihre.) He insults a prospective employer, refuses to make peace with his alienated sister, falls off the wagon — at first tentatively, and then enthusiastically — and leaves increasingly pathetic messages for his lost love, a woman who’s now in New York. (It’s the voice of Steiro, Lie’s real-life spouse.) On the other hand, he flirts with a younger girl who seems affectionate and charming, and who seems to open for him the promise of a new beginning. Their scene together at an Oslo swimming pool that has just closed for the season, so suggestive of both death and rebirth (and, literally, of baptism) is so gorgeous I wanted to cry. OK, I did cry, and that wasn’t the only time.
But none of that, not even the scenes where we feel that Anders is in imminent danger of taking his own life, are quite as painful as his visit with Thomas (Hans Olav Brenner), an old friend and veteran of long literary discussions and booze-and-drug sessions. Thomas has a wife and a kid now, and his vices involve an occasional bottle of beer. In the manner of one-time bohemians who’ve more or less grown up, he’s kind of an ostentatious jerk about it — but then admits to Anders, when they’re alone, that he’s desperately unhappy. Perhaps that’s the “ordinary unhappiness” Freud wrote about, the unhappiness we all have to accept to get from the last day of August into the first day of September, in Oslo or anywhere else. But is that enough? Is that ever enough, for anybody? And can we forgive those who decide that it isn’t?
“Oslo, August 31st” opens this week at the IFC Center in New York, and June 1 at Laemmle’s Playhouse 7 and Laemmle’s NoHo 7 in Los Angeles, with more cities and DVD release to follow.
All the details of Wes Anderson’s rapturous and hilarious mid-1960s New England summer romance “Moonrise Kingdom,” taken one at a time, are plausible. Indeed they are more than plausible; they’re perfect, from the fitted uniforms and yellow canvas tents of the troop of “Khaki Scouts” headed by cigarette-smoking Edward Norton to the achingly picturesque island home where the brood of children belonging to Bill Murray and Frances McDormand sit around listening to the Leonard Bernstein recording of “A Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra.” (I’m not going to bother questioning whether that record existed in 1965; some production intern probably spent half a day tracking down its history.)
Yet, as usual with an Anderson movie, this meticulous and convincing detail does not add up to realism but — depending on your perspective — to something either much less or much more than that. Something that could be described, and has been, in all kinds of ways: As fantasy or fairytale; as a whimsical miniature under glass; as a diorama created by a brilliant, obsessive-compulsive child. All reasonable descriptions, at least up to a point — and I’m on board for all of it. I’ve pretty much been on Anderson’s wavelength from Day One — or at least from “Rushmore,” which isn’t quite Day One. That’s not the same thing as saying that I think all his movies work equally well, or that he doesn’t occasionally lapse into laziness or self-indulgence. (I’ll have to give “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou” another chance one of these days, but I feel pretty confident that was a misstep.)
I understand why Anderson’s films drive some viewers nuts, in fact, and I would simply respond that it should be clear by now that his vision of cinema and the world is idiosyncratic and not to everyone’s taste and that there’s no point sitting around hoping he’ll become more normal. But here’s what I reject completely: The idea that the artificiality or hyperrealism (a better word, I think) of Anderson’s worlds — which is admittedly cranked up pretty high here — is fundamentally pretentious and insincere, or that it reflects some kind of “kidult” refusal of grown-up emotion. Yes, Anderson’s principal subject, and arguably his only subject, is the collision between the emotional lives of adults and children and the paradoxical tragicomedy it can so often produce. But if Anderson’s adults yearn for the comparative simplicity of childhood while his children long for the big, important feelings they believe (wrongly) go with growing up, that in itself is a distinctly adult perspective.
“Moonrise Kingdom” takes place at the tail-end of summer — that season which is more charged with a rueful sense of passage than any other. Its preteen lovers, Sam and Suzy (played by newcomers Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward, respectively), most certainly aspire to the grand passions of Tristan and Isolde or Abelard and Heloise, and it’s entirely possible they’ve heard of them. They first met backstage during a performance of Britten’s “Noye’s Fludde” at the island of New Penzance’s only church, when Sam was in his Khaki Scout uniform and coonskin cap, and Suzy was wearing a bird costume. (The use of Britten, of all possible composers, as this film’s musical muse is wonderfully unlikely, and totally Andersonian.) After a hot and heavy epistolary romance, they conspire to run away together — as it happens (so we are told by on-screen narrator Bob Balaban), just three days before a major hurricane will hit New Penzance.
As irresistible as our young lovers are — Sam with his corncob pipe and camp-tested scouting skills, Suzy in her saddle shoes and with her dangerous pre-Lolita sexuality — this isn’t a movie about kids, and they are Potemkin protagonists. Against the certainty and clarity of the childhood world, we see the real heroes of New Penzance: Norton’s upright Scout Master Ward, who confesses his secret fears to a reel-to-reel tape recorder in the depths of the night; Bruce Willis’s Captain Sharp, the island’s only cop, who’s in love with Kara’s artsy, bespectacled mother, Laura (McDormand); Murray as the gentle, lawyerly Walt (Laura’s husband and Kara’s dad), who knows he is being cuckolded but can’t quite bring himself to do anything about it. All these lonely people are portrayed with wonderful delicacy and sensitivity, right in the middle of an artificial construction that contains plenty of shtick. I honestly don’t think I’ve ever seen Norton and Willis, in particular, be better than they are here.
Sam and Suzy’s tempestuous love affair, along with that looming act of God that’s boiling up out there in the Atlantic, will not merely bring all these people together but will give them an excuse to escape their everyday routine and their ingrained fears. In that sense, and in others too, “Moonrise Kingdom” is a deeply romantic film, perhaps the sweetest and most compassionate Anderson has ever made. What has evidently confused some viewers is the fact that it’s also an obsessively curated re-creation of an era that never quite existed, a meticulous storybook version of 1965 that’s more perfect than the original. In real life, Boy Scout tents of that era were made of canvas but were never yellow, and government social workers never wore Salvation Army-style uniforms, as Tilda Swinton’s officious character (whose only name appears to be “Social Services”) does here. And so on.
I suspect that people conflate the artificiality of Anderson’s movies with inauthenticity or insincerity (different things, to be sure) because his artificiality is obvious and worn on the surface, whereas the highly mannered films of, say, Martin Scorsese masquerade as realism. I’m not picking that example at random, by the way; Scorsese has identified Anderson as his favorite among younger American directors, I suspect because he sees a kindred spirit. The two men have very different aesthetics, but both are visionaries who see the world through a personal lens, and both are technical virtuosi concerned with managing every detail of their created universes. You’re free to prefer one director’s work to the other’s, of course, but “Raging Bull” and “Goodfellas” are every bit as obsessed with style and production design as any Anderson film. (The cinematography in “Moonrise Kingdom” is by Robert D. Yeoman, who has shot all of Anderson’s live-action films. The production designer is Adam Stockhausen, the art director is Gerald Sullivan and the spectacular costumes are by Kasia Walicka-Maimone.)
To the extent that “Moonrise Kingdom” can be described as nostalgia, it isn’t personal nostalgia, since Anderson himself was not born until 1969. Very likely it’s an attempt to create a fantasy version of the lost world of his own parents. I wonder whether Scout Master Ward, when the magical summer of ’65 fades into memory, will get married, move to Texas and have a son. The island cabin of Walt and Laura feels like a creation out of a classic children’s novel, but it is imbued with the sadness of a failing adult marriage. In the third act, it feels like Anderson and co-writer Roman Coppola get a little lost in plot shenanigans, and they introduce several extra characters (Jason Schwartzman, Harvey Keitel and Swinton all show up in small roles) to little effect. But all of “Moonrise Kingdom” — from Sam’s miniature stolen canoe to the Benjamin Britten excerpts to Captain Sharp’s heartbreaking bachelor trailer home — is a labor of love, as pure and sweet as the lovelorn letters of its young runaways. Wes Anderson can fool some people, maybe, but he’s not fooling me.
“Moonrise Kingdom” opens this week in New York and Los Angeles, with wider release to follow.
It’s a general rule of thumb that a grown man doesn’t get a lot of support for knocking out a 10-year-old child’s teeth. But Yong Hyun Kim has won himself a few fans lately for doing just that.
Back on April 11, the 21-year-old Washington state man settled in with his girlfriend to enjoy “Titanic” in 3D — right in front of a boy known only in police documents as KJJ. What ensued led to a night in jail and a charge of second-degree assault.
According to the Associated Press, the boy, who was at the theater with three friends and his mother, says “they were watching the movie and talking when Kim told them to be quiet.” KJJ maintains that they settled down, but when he later whispered something to a companion, Kim “jumped over the seat, threw an iced drink at them and punched KJJ in the face.” He says Kim told him something like, “You know what, I paid a lot of money to see this movie.”
Kim, however, insists that the boys “were hitting him and his girlfriend with popcorn, running back and forth in the aisle and bumping him with their arms.” He says that when he confronted the group, “they started laughing at him,” provoking him to take a swing at the boy. “I got so mad that it just happened,” he told police, adding that he didn’t realize his tormentors were children. He now faces the possibility of up to nine months in jail. When police arrived at 10:40 p.m., they found the boy in the lobby “bleeding from the nose and missing a tooth.”
What really transpired that night is still under investigation. I do know that, as a parent, I would never take a group of 10 year olds out late on a school night to see Kate Winslet’s boobies. Nor would I, under any circumstances, let them talk through a movie, as KJJ himself admits he and his friends were doing. I’ve suffered through too many other families and that precise brand of self-centered behavior. And that’s why Kim’s assertion that a bunch of kids wouldn’t stop wrecking his movie-going experience has struck a powerful chord of recognition among moviegoers.
Among the online commenters horrified that an adult would physically assault a child instead of just getting a manager, there have been plenty of folks who seem to know exactly where the guy was coming from. On USA Today, commenters have called Kim “a hero” and even offered “to pay for the man’s defense.” The more level-headed commenters suggest he should have hit the parents instead. And on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s site, comments have been flooded by those who admit they’ve “wanted to do that” themselves and “understand the guy’s feeling behind it.”
As ticket prices skyrocket, the movie-going experience continues to deteriorate. If you’ve gone to a film lately – or for that matter, any public entertainment — you’ve likely experienced the astonishingly rude behavior of individuals who seem unaware that they’re not in their own living rooms. Texting. Talking. Kicking seats. It’s exasperating and sometimes outright experience-ruining. And we rarely get the satisfying experience I once had when a row of rowdy teens were talking and texting during the film and a patron with roughly the dimensions of the screen barreled over, leaned down and whispered something to the group. I don’t know what he said, but the kids all got up and left. When they did, there was a palpable exhalation of admiring relief in the theater. And when an Austin, Texas, woman was kicked out the Alamo Drafthouse last year for texting, the theater’s cheeky pride in her outrage promptly went viral.
It’s inexcusable to assault someone for being annoying or disruptive or even for laughing at you. Furthermore, Kim’s assertion that he couldn’t see how young the kids were – when he saw well enough to land a face punch — seems a little shaky. Don’t knock out little boys’ teeth. In fact, don’t knock out anybody’s if you can help it. If you applaud hitting kids, you’re probably a bad person. But the lesson here – whether you’re a child or a grownup — is pretty simple. If you don’t know how to behave in public and you don’t like losing teeth or going to jail, for God’s sake, just stick to Netflix.
Here’s a startling news item: “The Intouchables,” a lively if largely predictable Parisian comedy about a wealthy quadriplegic and his ne’er-do-well immigrant caretaker, has become the biggest international success in the history of French cinema. Indeed, according to some sources — and these things are notoriously difficult to measure on a global and historical scale — “The Intouchables” is now the biggest non-Anglophone film of all time, with a worldwide gross approaching $300 million.
But beyond the business headlines, what’s really fascinating about “The Intouchables” is the way it exposes the gulf in racial attitudes between France and the United States, along with another gulf that’s just as wide, the one that has film critics and cinephiles on one side and popular audiences on the other. Viewers in numerous countries have eagerly devoured this feel-good fable about two men of different races and classes who forge an improbable friendship (dubbed by some wags “Driving Monsieur Daisy”). While the audience for foreign-language film is inherently limited in America, there’s no reason to believe it won’t do well here also. At the same time, heated transatlantic debate has erupted over whether “The Intouchables” traffics in offensive racial stereotypes, with Variety critic Jay Weissberg writing an uncharacteristically angry review that accused the film of “Uncle Tom racism” and compared the Senegalese caretaker character to a “performing monkey.”
When Harvey Weinstein first acquired “The Intouchables” in the wake of its smash success in France, he clearly imagined another dark-horse Oscar contender, in the wake of “The Artist.” The film has racked up audience awards at film festival after film festival, and currently stands at No. 93 on IMDb’s user-generated “Top 250″ list. Omar Sy, the charismatic Afro-French actor who plays Driss, the caretaker, won this year’s César award (the French Oscar equivalent) for best actor, beating out actual Oscar winner Jean Dujardin. But with the looming possibility that “The Intouchables” could spark a divisive, soul-searching racial debate — which was precisely what squelched the Oscar hopes of “The Help” — those expectations have been downplayed. (That isn’t why “The Intouchables” is being released this week, with Weinstein and most of the film-biz aristocracy in Cannes, but the coincidence is oddly useful.)
Let me come clean right now and tell you that I enjoyed “The Intouchables” quite a bit. If you’re looking for a lightweight summer change of pace, with just a smidgen of Continental flair, here it is. Both Sy and co-star François Cluzet (of the hit thriller “Tell No One”) are marvelous, the former playing a guy who’s constantly in motion, both physically and psychologically, and the latter playing a depressed and repressed guy who literally can’t move, but whose real imprisonment has more to do with his spirit than his spinal cord. Don’t go expecting serious French art cinema, please; those who have described this movie as something like a mid-’80s Eddie Murphy comedy dressed up with classy Parisian settings are correct. But here’s the question, and I can’t answer it for you: Is that such a bad thing, in itself?
Once is not enough for a movie that’s made this much money, of course, and Weinstein already has an American remake in the works, possibly to star Colin Firth as stick-up-butt wheelchair dude. The real Eddie Murphy has gotten too old to play the loosey-goosey, pot-smoking sidekick, but there’s no shortage of guys who could do it: Jamie Foxx is the default setting these days, but I’d go for the suddenly hot Kevin Hart from “Think Like a Man.” I’m not claiming it’s aesthetically or sociologically valid to remake a French movie that already feels like a reheated Hollywood throwback, by the way. I’m saying it’s a cruel reality, like Dutch elm disease or Adam Sandler, and there’s no way to stop it.
To get back to the case at hand, I do understand what the haters find so offensive about “The Intouchables.” (The infelicitous English title, by the way, reflects the fact that they couldn’t really get away with calling it “The Untouchables,” could they?) I was pretty taken aback by Weissberg’s vituperative review, and I tend to believe that “Uncle Tom” is one of those expressions that white people should pretty much never use. On the other hand, I can only applaud him for abandoning the balanced, analytical mode of trade-magazine criticism and saying exactly what he damn well thinks. (As for comparing a black man to a monkey — well, I understand what Weissberg was getting at, but it’s an error of rhetoric, the sort of comment that makes nuance and context disappear.) And I know for sure, from hearing friends and acquaintances in and around the movie business complain about this film, that Weissberg is not alone.
I believe that Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano, the writing-directing duo who made “The Intouchables,” are innocent of any bad intentions. In fact, “innocent” isn’t a bad word overall, for this movie and the worldview it represents. The French may pride themselves on being the most worldly and sophisticated of all people, but the debate in France about race and immigration and multiculturalism — which ramped up sharply after the suburban riots of 2005 — can sometimes sound strikingly naive to American ears. Until very recently, mainstream French opinion has resisted thinking about the nation in anything except homogeneous terms, despite growing Arab and black minorities (both immigrant and native-born) and evident social problems with segregation and discrimination. (The French census, for instance, is prohibited from collecting data on race or religion, so no one really knows how many French people are black or Islamic.)
There can be no question that the characters in “The Intouchables” are stereotypes, in the broad sense. Cluzet’s character, Philippe, is an aristocratic zillionaire who lives in an astonishingly luxurious flat in central Paris. Since being injured in a paragliding accident, he’s lived inside a cocoon of money and privilege, surrounded by antiques and modern art and a bevy of assistants. Sy’s character, Driss, is easygoing, good-hearted, lustful and uncultured, and his passions run toward pretty girls, getting high and vintage American R&B. Philippe hires Driss specifically because Driss doesn’t particularly want the job — he only shows up to get a signature for his benefits card — and feels no pity for Philippe.
Which is actually a pretty good reason. You get where this is going, most likely: Driss is a pretty inept caretaker, at least at first, but is the only person Philippe knows who will relate to him man to man. There’s a bit of borderline-homophobic humor about their enforced intimacy; there are interludes with hookers and fast cars and late-night conversations fueled by booze and marijuana. Driss learns to like Mozart and modern art; Philippe learns to get down with Earth Wind & Fire and gets some valuable tips about chicks. It’s probably fair to summarize this movie as being the story of a paralyzed white man who needs the help of a younger, stronger, more virile black man to reconnect with his own masculinity, and if you want to say that narrative reflects an underlying latticework of racist attitudes, I won’t argue with you. Then there’s the complicating factor that in the real-life story on which “The Intouchables” is based, the caretaker was of Algerian origin, and hence Arab rather than black. (The filmmakers have said they wanted to cast Sy, and built the story around him, but it’s certainly possible to render other interpretations.)
But one can concede all of that while still agreeing with French historian and multicultural activist François Durpaire, who has responded to Weissberg by arguing that the huge success of “The Intouchables” is likely to have positive effects in Europe’s emerging discussion of race and culture, even if the movie relies on crude generalizations. (Durpaire adds that if “The Intouchables” is offensive, so were the “Beverly Hills Cop” movies.) Movies are not meant to be seminars in sociology, after all, and most viewers will receive “The Intouchables” as an upbeat story about two guys from vastly different circumstances who turn out to have a lot in common and help each other, etc., rather than a lesson in racial semiotics.
Perhaps the strongest endorsement for “The Intouchables” has come from aging French ultra-nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen, who has described it as an allegory about how the future of his nation depends on disenfranchised young immigrants from the suburbs. He thinks that’s a “dreadful” vision, mind you — but, seriously, who knew that guy was so smart?
“The Intouchables” opens this week in New York and Los Angeles, with wider national release to follow.
American men are bewildered about their place in the cosmos, or so we have been told repeatedly over the last 20 years. They don’t know whether to thread their eyebrows or wield a welding torch, and end up trying to do both at once (which is inadvisable). As comedian Adam Carolla laments in a scene from Morgan Spurlock’s documentary “Mansome,” the old-time certainties of gender identity have melted away: Women are flying fighter jets and men work at the hair salon; there are no longer “chick jobs and guy jobs.”
I get that Carolla is just cracking wise, from inside the bubble of his own lame version of post-rockabilly guy-shtick — he is interviewed inside a garage, with what looks like an orange Camaro behind him in the middle distance — and that if you brought up the fact that those old-time “chick jobs” paid 40 to 80 percent less than “guy jobs,” he’d get all irritated with you for being a drag. He’s still an idiot, though, even if he’s an idiot in quotation marks. That’s kind of the problem with “Mansome,” which tries to tackle the enormous subject of contemporary male vanity as an assemblage of whimsical anecdotes, which are often entertaining in themselves but studiously avoid any semblance of intelligent analysis or historical understanding.
It’s pointless to come down too hard on a film like “Mansome,” because like all Spurlock’s work (including “Super Size Me” and “Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?”) it’s driven by a good-hearted frat-boy humor that seems fundamentally sincere. It’s more first-person journal and travelogue than it is cultural archaeology, and as such it’s basically OK. Spurlock gets to interview some of his celebrity pals about their attitudes toward masculinity and grooming: Paul Rudd is slightly ill at ease, Judd Apatow is charming, and Zach Galifianiakis steals the show, of course. (When asked to rate his looks on a scale of 1 to 10, Galifianakis responds confidently that some people find him “a strong 2.”)
Spurlock documents his own decision to shave off his trademark porn-star ‘stache, thereby reducing his 5-year-old son to torrents of tears. (It was definitely a mistake, Morgan.) He meets various kooky characters who have some tangential relationship to his theme, including a California suburbanite named Jack Passion who describes himself as a professional “beardsman,” meaning he travels the world exhibiting his Hagar-the-Horrible facial thatch in competitions. (Anthrax rhythm guitarist Scott Ian responds: “Beard and mustache competitions, for want of a better word, are kind of gay.” I laughed, and I know that’s wrong.) Then there’s the elegantly coiffed and tailored Manhattan clothing buyer who describes himself as the “dictionary definition of a metrosexual,” perhaps making up for his teen years as a Sikh immigrant outcast in middle America. And the entrepreneur who has introduced a lotion-y product called Fresh Balls: The Solution for Men. (Yes, it is what you think it is.)
In fairness, Spurlock is at least half aware that all the jokes and episodes of “Mansome” never add up to anything, except perhaps the conclusion that neither male narcissism nor male grooming is anything new, but that they have been coded in different ways at different times. Masculinity is no less a troubled construction than is femininity, and it’s just as easily whipped about by the tides of commerce and fashion. The aristocratic dandies of the 18th century make Spurlock’s New York Sikh metrosexual look like a shoeless Dust Bowl farmhand, and every Important Man of the 19th century, regardless of background or affiliation — King Leopold II! Karl Marx! The pioneering Ambrose Burnside! — had his own tonsorial signature that required extensive maintenance.
Now, I’m not denying that there’s something specific and contemporary about the version of male narcissism wrought by consumer capitalism, with its tendency to turn things once seen as immutable, such as gender or sexual identity, into fluid and exchangeable commodities with no fixed meaning. (Speaking of Karl Marx, it was he who wrote that, under capitalism, “all fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away … All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.”) It was to address that question on a pop-sociological level that the term “metrosexual,” first introduced to America a decade ago in this Salon article by Mark Simpson, was originally invented. (Simpson’s coinage was instantly stolen by marketers, of course, and turned into a pretty-boy Frankenstein monster who was, in turn, burned by the resentful villagers.)
Some of that big-picture stuff comes up almost by accident in “Mansome,” but Spurlock doesn’t even pretend to pay attention. He’s just a guy! He’s confused like the rest of us! He makes his little boy cry and watches pro wrestler Shawn Daivari (a Minnesota native who plays the anti-American “heel” called Sheik Abdul Bashir) shave his back all the way down to his butt crack. He sticks for far too long with an embarrassing framing device in which Jason Bateman and Will Arnett go to a spa and engage in uneasy homoerotic banter. He chops up the movie into irrelevant chapters about beards, mustaches, hair and so on, as if those things were unrelated. When he goes to get his own hair cut, it’s at some pseudo-old-fashioned place in downtown Manhattan where the wood fixtures are way too polished and the barbers are conspicuously overdressed. It’s kind of endearing and kind of asinine.
“Mansome” is now playing in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, Portland, Ore., San Francisco, Seattle and Austin, Texas, with more cities to follow.
Tilda Swinton, Bruce Willis and Edward Norton in "Moonrise Kingdom" 
(Credit: iStockphoto/IBushuev) 
A still from "The Intouchables" 
Jack Passion in "Mansome" 
