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"Late August, Early September" | page 1, 2
In his starring role in the French film "My Sex Life," Amalric displayed a callowness that shut out the audience. Assayas keys
right in to that quality to uncover the uncertainty and selfishness underneath, and also the dawning of a self-awareness that, in the touching
final scene, suggests he is moving beyond it. Similarly, as Gabriel's new
girlfriend, Anne, Virginie Ledoyen (best known to American filmgoers as
the star of Benoît Jacquot's "A Single Girl") uses the brittle self-absorption
that has characterized her other performances to get at a singular mixture of
arrogance and self-loathing. Without softening Anne, Ledoyen gets at the
pain beneath the surface of someone who, in her social encounters, seems determined not to yield. There's good acting everywhere you look in "Late
August, Early September." Arsinée Khanjian shows up for a few emotionally raw scenes as Adrien's ex-lover; and as Gabriel's sister-in-law, the
wonderful Nathalie Richard (who was the ditzy costume girl in "Irma Vep")
gets the essence of a type I've encountered in real life but never in the
movies: the "enlightened" passive-aggressive version of those '50s women
who congratulated themselves on their ability to raise a family and keep
house. A colleague of mine said you just know she's the type of woman
who claims that everyone is welcome in her house, but only if they obey her
rules. Cluzet conveys not just the physical pain that wracks Adrien
but the larger terror his illness makes him prey to. And as Véra,
the 16-year-old girl Adrien has fallen in love with, Mia Hansen-Lřve has a face that opens completely to
the camera. It would be the easiest temptation for Assayas to sentimentalize
Véra, who has yet to face the disappointments the other characters are going
through, as a symbol of youthful hope. Instead she becomes both an
example of the egalitarian impulse that has always characterized Assayas'
approach to character and the barometer of the tenderness that suffuses the
film. The ability to recognize the freshness of her emotions, even though
they may feel exiled from that immediacy, becomes a measure of the
characters' humanity. "Late August, Early September" opens at New York's Film Forum
Wednesday for a two-week run and will make its way around the country in what are
likely to be limited runs. There's no way this movie will get the publicity
push or the press attention paid to "big-name"
foreign films, but I hope that
people who care about movies will seek it out. At one point, defending
Adrien's novels to a detractor who claims they don't tell stories, Gabriel says,
"He depicts the world he sees." That may be Assayas poking fun at his own
anecdotal, character-driven approach. But movies that manage to be as alive
and rich as "Late August, Early September" can provide different sorts of
satisfactions. Assayas' triumph here is in making sense of confusion and
emotional drift -- bringing his characters gently forward into life, and making
the film feel full and rounded while still resisting easy resolution. It is, in
many ways, a modest film. But a director who offers glimpses of life that are recognizable in both detail and texture isn't so common that we can afford to overlook what he has achieved here.
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