Beyond the Multiplex

A lunatic and a housewife get it on in 1950s London. Plus: A wall grows around Israel, and William Eggleston refuses to talk.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Aug 25, 2005 | "It's difficult to work out how to be populist," Scottish director David Mackenzie tells me over an early-evening cocktail, "without sacrificing some of the things that make your work interesting."

This maxim ought to be embossed on fake wood-grain plastic plaques and hung over the entrances of every film school, every video store, every downtown movie theater where partisans of the slightly hip gather to drink decent coffee and partake of the cultural fringe. Mackenzie ought to find out more about this in years to come; his 1950s period romance "Asylum" is both dark and sleek, a mixture of rapturous cinematography, hot sex and unforgiving fatalism. It's not really the kind of movie Hollywood wants to make, but it might be exactly the kind of movie that studio executives want to see -- and then pretend, at cocktail parties, that they want to make.

In the so-called golden years of American film, Hollywood thrived on importing foreign directors (from Lang to Lubitsch to Wilder) and enfolding them, more or less, in the studio production system. That system may be long dead, but Hollywood still tries to reanimate itself with periodic infusions of new blood from overseas or from the cultural underground. Subtract Peter Jackson, David Fincher, the Spike Jonze/Charlie Kaufman duo, John Woo, Paul Verhoeven and the entire post-Tarantino indie insurgence, and you've lost most of the watchable American films of the last 15 years.

Based on "Asylum" and his previous film "Young Adam," Mackenzie is a meticulous craftsman with an eye for beauty and a hardened twist to his moral vision. To keep making films, he says, he knows that "one has to deal with economics and one has to deal with the audience," and he'd like to do that without sacrificing moral complexity and individual vision. Maybe he's the right kind of guy to make interesting, big-budget movies -- and maybe he'll get chewed up and disappear (are you out there somewhere, Christopher Nolan?) or gradually morph into a hack endlessly aping his own pseudo-original gestures (telegram for Tim Burton!). Whichever way it flows, his should be a career to watch.

We've got another Hollywood calling-card this week, but this one was so obvious I didn't enjoy it as much. Genre fans should dig Erik Van Looy's thriller "The Memory of a Killer," which is pretty much the movie Ridley Scott or Michael Mann would make if they had one-sixteenth of their normal budget -- and were stuck in Belgium. Two fascinating and frustrating documentaries round out this week's tour of indieville, and both are absolute musts for those willing to wrestle a little. Simone Bitton's "Wall" surveys the boundary fence separating Israeli Jews from Palestinian Arabs with as much dispassion as it can muster, while Michael Almereyda's "William Eggleston in the Real World" does its best to capture the enigmatic cult figure who revolutionized American photography.

"Asylum": Lady Chatterley goes to the loony bin
I've been describing "Asylum" to people as a long-lost Hitchcock film they've never seen before, but I don't mean that director David Mackenzie is one of those Brian De Palma types who just rips off sequences from "Strangers on a Train" and thinks it's cool. If there are moments of homage in Mackenzie's adaptation of Patrick McGrath's mental-hospital Gothic melodrama, the combination of lush, romantic spectacle and moral cruelty never feels forced or phony.

These days, most movies about sexual affairs bounce the two people off each other like particles in a supercollider; we get a hackneyed meaningful glance or two, some stylized neck-smooching and back-arching, and then those awful fuzzy soft-porn montages that pass for eroticism. Mackenzie takes his time getting Stella (the ever-delicious Natasha Richardson) and the obviously dangerous Edgar (Marton Csokas) together. For one thing, Edgar is an inmate in the mental hospital where Stella's plump, lobster-red husband (Hugh Bonneville) is a doctor. In fact, Edgar's in there because he beat his previous wife to death with a hammer -- but he's now sufficiently "cured" that he's been hired to repair Stella's greenhouse.

It's the late '50s in rural England; suffice it to say that it's not OK for a doctor's wife to bonk the nutso-killer hired help, no matter how smolderingly handsome he is and no matter how languorously long-legged and sexually frustrated she happens to be. The on-screen connection between Richardson and Csokas -- a rising star from New Zealand with something of Russell Crowe and something of William Holden about him -- crackles like a summer thunderstorm from the moment they lay eyes on each other, and Mackenzie allows it to play out gradually. Their first breathless coupling in the unfinished greenhouse feels like what it is, a reckless, self-destructive act of compulsion. (The film's sex scenes, by the way, are vigorous, physical and plentiful.)

Their misguided love affair -- and there's no doubt that their connection is spiritual as well as physical -- will destroy almost everything and everyone in their lives. "Asylum" is a rich story, loaded with narrative ironies, that careens from the depressing backwoods asylum to the back alleys of London, where Edgar was a proto-bohemian sculptor before killing his wife. Don't go expecting redemption for either of these characters; you surely won't want any for Peter Cleave (Ian McKellen), the Machiavellian shrink who watches all this from above like an unusually manipulative deity. But if you're tough enough for this lush but hardhearted melodrama, it's one of the year's signature film experiences.

Next Page: Psychiatry, sexual obsession and late-1950s London

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