Beyond the Multiplex

Terry Gilliam's "Tideland" marks the final, ugly implosion of a one-time maverick's career. Plus: Three ambitious, fascinating New York Film Festival premieres.

By Andrew O'Hehir

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

Jeliza-Rose (Jodelle Ferland) in "Tideland"

Oct. 12, 2006 | This is one of those crazy, overcrowded weeks that film distributors want to avoid, because there are too many new films. (I guess this is the same problem once identified by Yogi Berra: Nobody goes to that restaurant anymore; it's too crowded.) The New York Film Festival is premiering "Marie Antoinette" and "Pan's Labyrinth," two of the fall-winter season's likely hits. Full Salon reviews are forthcoming, and I've had my say on both at Cannes: Blah to the former, big old yay to the latter.

Stephen Frears' "The Queen" and John Cameron Mitchell's "Shortbus," based on sensational first-week returns, look like ironclad Indiewood smashes that may play well in many corners of our happy land through the Christmas season. These results may surprise some folks, but never underestimate the American public's abiding interest in the British royal family. And in rampant, randy sex. Now, if someone would only make a movie where -- no, never mind.

It's also the season for upscale Hollywood movies like Todd Field's "Little Children" and Martin Scorsese's much-praised "The Departed" (apparently the biggest hit of the director's career), which bring the indie audiences back to the malls. So it just isn't a good time to release some delectable little morsel that needs special care and feeding. Hence, perhaps, the under-the-radar release this week of Terry Gilliam's "Tideland," a film that marks the final, ugly implosion of a one-time maverick's career.

We'll get back to that one, unfortunately. There is happier stuff to cover this week. Three ambitious, fascinating and flawed foreign flicks premiere at the NYFF before (eventually) moving on to theatrical engagements, a lovely immigration saga rises from the plains of the Gopher State, and a Japanese documentary about Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said tries to capture the entire Middle East conflict within one film.

NYFF update: The passionate life of the mind makes "Poison Friends," love decays into sadness in "Climates," Hong Kong's crime lords face a new era in "Triad Election"
I'm not sure anybody has quite captured the overheated intellectual intensity that can arise between college friends who all believe they're about to change the world the way Emmanuel Bourdieu does in his new film "Poison Friends." Maybe it takes a Frenchman. (The original title, "Les Amitiés Maléfiques," conveys a certain pretentious, poetic quality the English title lacks.) Bourdieu is himself a former philosophy professor, and also the son of eminent sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, so his intimate knowledge of the academic world is one no outsider could possess.

Still, there's nothing dry about "Poison Friends"; it's a brainy but twisty psychological thriller with a distinct debt to Hitchcock, as well as to more recent friendship-gone-wrong films such as Dominik Moll's "With a Friend Like Harry..." Bourdieu has written scripts for Arnaud Desplechin, the current critics' darling among French directors, and if "Poison Friends" is arguably more formulaic than Desplechin's work, it has much of the same vividness and passion.

The film's core lies in the relationship between the shy but idealistic Eloi (Malik Zidi) and his charismatic pal André (Thibault Vinçon), a manipulative rogue who banishes friends and girlfriends from their circle for the heinous crime of trying to write poetry or stories. Eloi's mother is a slightly batty famous writer (marvelously played by Dominique Blanc), and he aspires to follow in her footsteps. André is full of reasons why it's arrogant and stupid to try to write before one has lived enough, and read enough. He's not entirely wrong about that, which is one of the movie's tricks, but like all obsessive manias, this one becomes destructive.

Bourdieu's cast is terrific throughout. Any fellow academic brats out there will especially appreciate Jacques Bonnaffé, one of the greatest French comic actors, in an imperious turn as the severe, guru-like professor Eloi and André must duel to impress. As in most thrillers, there are plausibility issues and a conventional resolution, but the whole ride is expertly conducted. (The movie has been acquired by Strand Releasing, but no U.S. release date has been announced.)

Next page: A meticulous study of a crumbling relationship