Beyond the Multiplex

"Private Fears in Public Places": Stuck indoors through a Parisian winter, with a one-time art-film god
What the H-E-double-toothpicks is the deal with Alain Resnais? No, I'm actually asking. The former enfant terrible of international art cinema, who made such semi-watchable masterpieces of self-absorption as "Hiroshima Mon Amour" and "Last Year in Marienbad," is now 84, and has spent the latter portion of his career directing increasingly odd film adaptations of stage plays. What you can say, I guess, is that his arty avant-garde films and his stagy, talky films share a kind of severity, a vinegary temperament that I'm not sure I love but is distinctly Resnais' own.

His latest is a French-language version of English playwright Alan Ayckbourn's "Private Fears in Public Places," which is one of those ensemble scripts in which six people collide, all in varying states of romantic or existential discontent. (To make matters more confusing, the French title of Resnais' film is simply "Coeurs," or "Hearts.") Resnais embraces the limitations of theater; all the scenes in "Private Fears in Public Places" are shot on indoor sets, and the only optical effects are little interstitial scenes of snowfall as we move from one place to another.

It's supposed to be a cold winter in Paris, and not just outside. Charlotte (Sabine Azéma, who is Resnais' real-life companion) is a chirpy, giggly Christian real estate agent who may have had a colorful past revealed on certain videotapes, and her aging-bachelor boss Thierry (the fine French actor André Dussollier) is perhaps too interested. His sad-sack sister Gaëlle (Isabelle Carré is rather too pretty for the role) makes Internet dates with random guys and thereby meets Dan (Lambert Wilson), a studly but depressed military vet whose long relationship with Nicole (Laura Morante) is on the rocks. Let's see, what else? Nicole and Dan are clients of Thierry's (unbeknownst to Gaëlle), and Dan's only confidant is a bartender named Lionel (Pierre Arditi), whose aging, abusive father is being cared for by Charlotte.

I found the interlocking bitterness of Ayckbourn's play (adapted by Jean-Michel Ribes) irritating and overly neat, and these people don't seem to belong to Paris or London or anywhere else, at least not anytime in the last 20 years. But something about Resnais' rigorous attention to the tiniest detail, his infinitesimal flourishes of surrealism and the metrical precision of Eric Gautier's camerawork -- not to mention the terrific cast of French cinema veterans -- finally sucked me in, and for a while the patent artificiality of "Private Fears in Public Places" seemed real, and the real world a dream.

"Private Fears in Public Places" opens April 13 at the IFC Center and Lincoln Plaza in New York, with a national rollout to follow.

Fast forward: A hip-hop dreamer flourishes in "Rock the Bells"; avant-garde heroes Jack Smith and Alejandro Jodorowsky, still bewildering after all these years

I can't quite say enough for the tense, hilarious and totally serendipitous "Rock the Bells," a backstage documentary about hip-hop promoter Chang Weisberg's attempt to reunite the Wu-Tang Clan, the legendary (and famously unreliable) superstar rap group, for his 2003 Rock the Bells festival in San Bernardino, Calif. Weisberg actually pulled this off by booking all nine or 10 Wu-Tang members as solo artists, and then suggesting, what the heck, since they were all there, why not?

You don't have to know anything about hip-hop (and I basically don't) to enjoy this picture; anybody with an appetite for learning about how pop culture works at a granular level will get a kick out of Weisberg's increasingly unlikely tightrope act en route to fulfilling an impossible dream. When Wu-Tang member Method Man is cruising around San Bernardino in his limo, getting outrageously baked, and his bandmate Ol' Dirty Bastard (sadly since deceased) is "cracked out" in his hotel room, and nearly 10,000 fans are getting ugly inside the arena, you've got a level of high drama attained by few fiction films. Directed, produced and edited by music-documentary vets Casey Suchan and Denis Henry Hennelly, "Rock the Bells" is a must-see for music buffs. (Now playing at the Pioneer Theater in New York; opens May 4 in Los Angeles; May 18 in Seattle and June 8 in San Francisco, with more cities to follow.)

Mary Jordan's documentary "Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis" offers an intriguing, and profoundly frustrating, view of the New York underground hero whose 1962 erotic fantasy "Flaming Creatures" paved the way for Andy Warhol, John Waters, the "queer cinema" explosion and pretty much anybody who's ever made a movie starring his friends in weird Salvation Army outfits. Smith died of AIDS in 1989, and in the intervening years has been lionized by a tiny cadre of admirers and forgotten by everyone else. Jordan does everything you could ask to rehabilitate Smith, but this passionate, paranoid, prodigiously committed artist -- like the vanished downtown art scene he helped launch -- remains a fading enigma, his legacy ambivalent and his work just beyond our grasp. (Now playing at Film Forum in New York; other engagements will follow.)

Certainly one of Smith's more noteworthy acolytes (although I don't know if they ever met) is the Chilean-born surrealist Alejandro Jodorowsky. His 1973 Technicolor acid-trip experiment "The Holy Mountain" is returning to the big screen after a lengthy disappearance, and then finally appearing on DVD along with his midnight-movie hit "El Topo" and several other films. (The copyright owner, one-time Rolling Stones manager Allen Klein, has finally grasped that there's cash in psychedelic nostalgia.)

If anything, this almost wordless parable about a Christ-like apparition who becomes apprenticed to a diabolical figure in Puritan garb (played by Jodorowsky himself), whose apostles include the world's leading industrial figures, is even less comprehensible today than in the lysergic tide of the early '70s. Jodorowsky has no gift for narrative whatsoever, and "The Holy Mountain" has more in common with experimental photography, the Fluxus movement and the dawn of conceptual art than with cinema in the usual sense. Still, this is an extraordinary visual concoction, loaded with stunning primary colors, anti-religious caricatures drawn from Diego Rivera and a succession of dreamlike, grotesque vistas worthy of Dalí at his most deranged. (Opens April 18 at the IFC Center in New York; other engagements will follow.)

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