SALON

Thursday, Aug 2, 2012 12:00 AM UTC

“360″: A globetrotting quest for bad sex

In the rootless thriller "360," a chain of smokin' strangers is united by painful, "Crash"-style coincidence

By

Topics: Movies, Thrillers, Jude Law,

Rachel Weisz in "360"

It’s easy to hate movies that are abundantly terrible or immoral or stupid, but I almost feel like a jerk telling you that Fernando Meirelles’ globetrotting drama “360” is a mistake from beginning to end. What kind of person could dislike a film made with such abundant craftsmanship in such a range of locations, with a talented international cast and a truckload of good intentions? Well, all those things are precisely the problem: “360” is a mid-level example of the enduring and mostly terrible genre whose classics include Paul Haggis’ Oscar-sweeping “Crash” and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Babel,” in which lustrous photography, impeccable production design, attractive actors and an excruciating chain of coincidence are meant to signal profundity and meaningfulness. We’re all connected, you see, as long as what you mean by “we” is good-looking people who hang out in hotel bars.

Within the first minute of “360,” we’ve watched the teenage hooker from Bratislava take off her shirt for the slimy, ponytailed Vienna pimp who promises to do something for her if she’ll do something for him – catch his drift, Schatzie? – in a scene that will either make you feel like a perv or a prude, or else like you don’t want to care about any of these people and you might as well go home and play dominoes with your cat. We’ll meet those two again toward the end of the movie, as the chain of stereotypical characters in sexual crisis comes full circle. Like a lot of the people in “360,” the scumbag pimp and the heart-of-gold prostitute could be serviceable drama or thriller characters, if Peter Morgan’s screenplay (borrowed from Arthur Schnitzler’s play “La Ronde,” like about 30 other movies) were ever willing to settle itself in space or time. Instead we have to have a Parisian Muslim dentist who’s in love with a Russian woman whose husband is a mob apparatchik who gets ensnared by the aforementioned hooker after she’s been stood up by an English businessman whose wife is sleeping with a Brazilian boy-toy whose other girlfriend gets blasted and tries to rip the clothes off a freshly released sex offender in a snowbound airport after standing up a different Englishman who’s on his way to Arizona, perhaps to ID the body of his missing daughter, where I think (but am not sure) that the Russian woman from the Parisian dentist’s office shows up again.

This particular trend in star-studded Zen-tourist cinema pretty much demands a director with a solid track record, and almost never results in a decent movie. Let’s take a moment to acknowledge that ice-blooded Steven Soderbergh, in the international disease thriller “Contagion,” is one of the few to have pulled it off. Because he’s really mean! And he’s more interested in systems than in people! (You can also make an argument for Soderbergh’s more celebrated “Traffic,” though I don’t think it’s half as good.) Maybe Meirelles’ enormous success with “City of God,” which earned multiple Oscar nominations and remains among the cinematic landmarks of this young century, taught him precisely the wrong lessons. Sure, “City of God” is a big-canvas production with high narrative ambitions, but it’s entirely about the web of relationships within one city and even one neighborhood.

There are exceptions to any rule about movies you might try to make, but most of the time, unless you’re making a Bond film or a “Mission: Impossible” sequel, the physical and cultural geography of a film are crucial elements. A director must understand the real or fictional spaces his characters inhabit, and there’s nothing to understand when we’re hopping from Vienna to Bratislava to Paris to London to Denver to Phoenix to wherever the hell else. Any time an individual scene, or even a moment within a scene, begins to acquire narrative momentum, we’re on to the next alcohol-fueled couple in the next anonymous setting. As a kind of corollary to this dislocation, every big-name actor is only in “360” for a few minutes, and only Jude Law and Rachel Weisz, as the adulterous, conflicted London couple, seem capable of restraining themselves from eating the scenery.

Arab-French actor Jamel Debbouze, as the Muslim dentist, and Ben Foster, as the child molester, are the hammiest offenders – and they’re both really talented! – but special mention also goes to Anthony Hopkins (playing the bereaved Englishman) in another of his 21st-century performances apparently transmitted by iPhone from the beach condo, in which he self-evidently could not care less. I’ve spent the last several years believing that Hopkins has become a terrible actor in his post-Hannibal Lecter years, but maybe he’s actually pursued his tremendous technique to a new level, embodying the Al Pacino principle that just because they turn the camera on and yell “Action” doesn’t mean you have to do anything.

As for the goofy New Age consciousness-raising stuff about how we’re all connected by love and lust and heartbreak and how a ladybug’s sneeze in downstate Illinois makes Vladimir Putin cry, sure, I’m willing to go there. But, first of all, you’re better off demonstrating that stuff in a less linear and literal way (and with fewer hot Brazilian chicks trying to gal-rape skinhead sex offenders). Second of all, that isn’t what Schnitzler’s “La Ronde,” primarily a commentary on the hypocrisy of sexual morality and class divisions, is about at all. This kind of movie claims to be questing for something essential about human nature, but its scattershot, speed-dating quality means that what it actually captures are the most superficial things. We’re all connected, dude – mostly because we’re all so damn hot.

Andrew O

More Andrew O'Hehir.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 7 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

vote
Loaded terminology like "entitlements" and "welfare" skews the debate and alters America. How right-wingers use semantic tricks to kill government.
261 points262 points | 56 comments
vote
New Yorker launches tool by Aaron Swartz to protect leaks: Strongbox, co-created by the late technologist, is an open-source drop box for leaked documents
242 points243 points | 10 comments
vote
New Yorker launches tool by Aaron Swartz to protect leaks: Strongbox, co-created by the persecuted late technologist, is an open-source drop box for leaked documents
190 points191 points | 1 comment
vote
Today in How Did I Miss This: Iowa GOP is pushing to cut the pay of the remaining Supreme Court Justices that voted for legalization of gay marriage.
75 points76 points | 7 comments
vote
Obstruction will ruin the GOP: Playing politics and abusing the system can excite the extremes, but it's a recipe for long-term political disaster
54 points55 points | 8 comments

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations