Beyond the Multiplex

Beat the heat with an icy-hearted French thriller, a chilling horror flick and a sweet-yet-sad Sundance hit. Plus: The best doc yet about life in Iraq.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, Movies, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews, Beyond the Multiplex

A scene from "My Country, My Country."

Aug. 3, 2006 | Welcome to August. This is no time to sit on that busted lawn chair drinking a Slurpee (TM) and watching a neighbor's dog play in the sprinkler, dammit! We've got a pile of odd little movies to watch!

August is widely understood to be the dead zone of the film calendar, but it's actually more like the low-end casino's buffet table, covered with dreadful pickled things and a few unexpected surprises. Both Hollywood studios and indie distributors unleash movies that wouldn't work at any other time of the year: They won't make enough money to be summer blockbusters, they won't win any awards, and they're not the well-reviewed prestige pictures of the spring or fall seasons. (For these reasons and so many others, the eagerly anticipated and, one suspects, wretched "Snakes on a Plane" is the ultimate August movie.) Sometimes this means they're abominations that should never have been made. Sometimes they're unapologetic trash. Once in a while they're pretty good. Mostly they're just too weird for the 11 months when you're less occupied by beer, suntan lotion, fried food on a stick and unpredictable bouts of unconsciousness.

We've got, count 'em, six films to blast through this week, and if only two of them -- the Sundance award-winner "Quinceañera" and the spelunker horror flick "The Descent" -- have much shot of reaching a large audience, they all come under the heading of "hey, pretty good for a random movie released in the deepest doldrums of summer."

Veteran French director Claude Chabrol checks in with "The Bridesmaid," another of his arch, creepy thrillers; it's got a great cast and an icy heart to cool down your hot August nights. All evidence continues to suggest that the public has zero interest in depressing documentaries about the American occupation of Iraq, but Laura Poitras' "My Country, My Country" is the best one so far. Brett C. Leonard's "Jailbait" is a quiet, ominous little movie, enlivened by some of the filthiest talk I've heard on-screen in a long time. Jay and Mark Duplass' debut feature, "The Puffy Chair," is a crisp, no-budget micro-indie the way they used to make 'em, out of Cassavetes by way of Kevin Smith.

"The Bridesmaid": Proving your love to the crazy girl in the basement
I'm told by reliable sources that Claude Chabrol's "The Bridesmaid" is not a very faithful or straightforward adaptation of the Ruth Rendell mystery novel on which it's based. So maybe it helps to be as poorly read in crime fiction as I am, since I found "The Bridesmaid" to be a prickly, twisted, mean-spirited, borderline crazy and highly seductive picture. You could also apply all those adjectives to the film's smoldering femme fatale (perhaps losing the modifier "borderline"), a woman who calls herself Senta, although her real name is a matter of dispute.

Senta is played by Laura Smet, a young French actress a handful of you may have seen as the "other woman" in Frédéric Fonteyne's terrific film "Gilles' Wife." Smet is the daughter of actress Nathalie Baye and French rock idol Johnny Hallyday, so I guess that makes her the Francophone answer to Liv Tyler. She's not the world's most beautiful woman -- in "Gilles' Wife" she was forced to compete with Emmanuelle Devos, who is the WMBW -- but with her hooded eyes, slightly flattened features and reserved, amused demeanor she's a powerful, sensual presence.

Senta upends the bourgeois existence of a bathroom-fixture salesman named Philippe (Benoît Magimel, who was the costar of Michael Haneke's "The Piano Teacher"). It's not as if Philippe's existence wasn't already kind of odd. He has passionate feelings toward a garden statue named Flora -- who bears a strong resemblance to Senta -- and an affectionate relationship with his vivacious mother (Aurore Clément) that sometimes seems the teensiest bit too intimate.

After the low-rent backyard wedding of Philippe's ultra-square sister Sophie (Solène Bouton), Senta walks through a driving rainstorm in her bridesmaid's dress, which rapidly comes off after she finds Philippe at home alone, working on important contracts. "You're the one I've been waiting for," she tells him, and whisks him off to the basement apartment where she lives, beneath a crumbling, half-abandoned house where her mother (or perhaps stepmother, we're never sure; she's played by Isild Barth) dances the tango with a wordless partner named Pablo.

This is a wacky, almost whimsical take on both the Gothic and doomed-love traditions, but that combination is nothing new for Chabrol. He's now 76 and has been directing films since the late '50s, but in recent decades only "La Cérémonie" in 1995 and his "Madame Bovary" adaptation of 1991 have found any North American audience. If you're already a devotee of the so-called French Hitchcock, you know that he takes a dim view of almost all human relations and can make grim or violent situations seem farcical, or comic situations sinister. "The Bridesmaid" teeters on the edge of black comedy, or David Lynch-style surrealism, without ever quite plunging over the precipice. There's an overcooked soundtrack in the style of '40s melodrama (by Chabrol's son Matthieu), and Philippe seems to suffer from occasional hallucinations out of 19th century French painting.

Senta's name is borrowed from the heroine of Wagner's "Flying Dutchman," and her life history seems (to the steady, staid Philippe) similarly made up or exaggerated. He's not sure how to handle her suggestion that to prove their love they must do four things: Plant a tree, write a poem, sleep with someone of the same sex, and kill a stranger. Philippe's a likable guy, but he's frankly not cut out for any of those four activities, and it takes him far too long to figure out that A) she's serious, B) she may already have all four bases covered and C) humoring her is a bad, bad idea.

"The Bridesmaid" opens Aug. 4 at the Angelika Film Center in New York; Aug. 11 in San Francisco; Aug. 25 in Buffalo, N.Y., Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and Wilmington, Del.; Sept. 1 in Rochester, N.Y.; Sept. 8 in Denver and Los Angeles; Sept. 15 in Philadelphia; Sept. 29 in Chicago and San Diego; Oct. 6 in Santa Fe, N.M.; and Oct. 20 in Dallas, Houston and Salt Lake City, with more cities to follow.

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