Reviews of recent movies, including Babel, Borat, Old Joy, The Prestige, Shortbus, Tideland and a few words with Sofia Coppola about Marie Antoinette. (Remember that one?)

Babel (2006, ***)

Babel, the third collaboration of director Alejandro González Iñárritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, partakes of the same structure of overlapping lives and fates as their earlier Amores Perros and 21 Grams, and as such, has taken a substantial shellacking by crickets after its New York and Los Angeles openings last weekend. “We’ve seen this before!” goes the cry. Not, “What do you see this time?” The concurrent narratives include Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett as Americans traveling in Morocco, when apparent “terrorism” erupts; Gabriel Garcia Bernal and Monica del Carmen (an emotional marvel) as relatives who travel to a wedding across the border in Mexico with Pitt and Blanchett’s children and the most imaginative and unsettling portion, the one that seems to most trouble the increasing chorus of detractors of Babel, which involves a Japanese businessman (indispensable everyman Yakusho Koji, from Shall We Dance, Charisma and Memoirs of a Geisha, whose gift of a Remington rifle to a Moroccan tribesman set the fates in motion. His teenage daughter Chieko, played by 25-year-old Rinko Kikuchi, is deaf-mute, obsessed with fantasies of her dead mother, and fixated on losing her virginity. Sign language is one more fashion of communication and miscommunication, along with English, Spanish, Arabic and Japanese. Alejandro González Iñárritu does not shy from the oddness of Chieko’s condition and the boldness of her desire, including the attempted seduction of a young policeman. The director seems to regard the naked female form or face as Surrealist painters have: pale, perfect, a canvas blank for fantastications, like a movie screen, yet unapproachable, unattainable, to be feared, and for all that, pure. Seeing someone who can see but not hear: there is an elemental linguistic and perceptual paradox here, but it is no less fascinating for its directness. González Iñárritu’s substantial gifts as a conductor of image and sound (as opposed to The Big Picture) are at their heights in these portions, and the extended final shot, strangely dazzling, suggests a fragment from a parallel version of Blade Runner if the painters Magritte and Balthus were valued collaborators. It is portentous, pretentious (in the best possible fashion) transfixing, and utterly unforgettable. Dali and Buñuel would smirk approvingly.
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006, *** 1/2)

No, it’s funnier, much funnier than you’ve heard, no matter what you’ve heard. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan is a marvel of economy, even in its most excessive moments, with sledgehammer social commentary performed and edited with the most restless of touches. Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat Sagdiyev is ostensibly a correspondent for Kazakh television traveling to America to find what this country has to teach his; racist, anti-Semitic, sex-obsessed, Pamela Anderson-fixated, Borat is not so much a character of a rube from a backward country as performance art of brazen straight-facedness, a walking illustration of the most craven and narrow impulses of the human condition. That is, with jokes like the subtitle, “I still have the taste of your testes in my mustache” or the admission, “She is my sister. She is number four prostitute in whole of Kazakhstan,” just before a big family French kiss. I don’t even want to characterize the situations, let alone the jokes. To describe more is to diminish the power of Baron Cohen’s ability to elicit intimate reactions from his subjects, with jaw-dropping admissions of racism and meanness. Funny. It’s. Just. Funny. Somewhere, Andy Kaufman is making a deep curtsy in Baron Cohen’s direction.

Tideland (2005, ***)

Children shouldn’t play with dead things. “Feculent”: You could look it up, or if you have a couple of hours, you could see Terry Gilliam’s Tideland. A madbag of decay and curdled innocence, “trainwreck” would be a word Gilliam would likely endorse, as he saves his most beautiful, most measured, most deliriously wrong directorial touches for a bold, tragic scene. Mr. Gilliam asks Jeff Bridges and young Jodell Ferland to do some things to enact a variation on “Alice in Wonderland” that would terrorize a child, and one hopes that Ferland, the center of this tale of dysfunction of the highest and most Canadian order will come out all right now that she’s out of the dark director’s rabbit hole. (It’s has a similar prairie tang as Jeffrey Erbach’s chilling 2002-shot The Nature of Nicholas.) There’s a matter-of-factness from the start: a child tending to her dad about to go on his “vacation”: that is, slump into a reclining chair and tie off as little Jeliza-Rose holds his spike in her teeth after heating up the junk? (Note the smiley face tattoo on his biceps above his tourniquet.) Jennifer Tilly makes a brief, broad appearance as Jeliza-Rose’s mom, a magnificently malefic channeling of the bad Courtney Love; Tilly’s energy seems to be what sets Gilliam into his compulsive Dutch-angling of his widescreen camera. The look of the film is sumptuous, a refined, toxic take on Tenniel’s Alice illos that must be seen to be disbelieved. Yet most audiences won’t be ready for an arthouse release that goes farther than Texas Chainsaw Massacre: Let’s just say the former Python has no fear of necrophilia—a few scenes verge on Alice in Salo-land. One can decipher Gilliam’s intentions in illustrating a child’s fantasy life, and that when young, there is naïve acceptance that whatever is in front of them is the way of the world. The grandma’s house that much of the story takes place in is rusticated like an etching of weathered wood and Jeliza-Rose rests on a bed that even Tarkovsky’s Stalker would refuse to rest upon. There are walls scoured with obscenities, talking squirrels, doll’s heads come to blinking life and lines like “Dead things are slow. You have to be alive to run” and “Mama needs reading-to ‘fore I kill for you.” Your eyes will go as wide as young Ms. Ferland’s. As the fucked-up neighbors obsessed with bees, sharks and taxidermy, please note Brendan Fletcher, Janet McTeer.
The Prestige (2006, ** ½)

Here’s a word I’d banished from the critical vocabulary: “Burnished.” Yet in The Prestige, the year’s third pageant of prestidigitation (after Scoop and The Illusionist), that cliché is one of the most flattering things to say about Christopher Nolan’s cruel and splendidly furnished, intricately worked, often dazzling, essentially cold-hearted entr’acte between Batman projects. Fierce obsession persists in his pictures, elevated one more to sociopathic strata, with cascades of unreliable narration in the pitting of two turn-of-the-century magicians against one another (Hugh Jackman of Scoop and Christian Bale (Batman Returns). The story’s dense but comprehensible, with the script restlessly suggestive of a bit of abra-cadaver that marshals a whiff of Golem mythos as well. The opening shot is a dreamy delight, and its payoff rich, adumbrating unto even the final shot: a slow glide through a wood twined with fog, with dozens upon dozens of discarded silk top hats scattered about. (It’s a different hat trick than the iconic image from Miller’s Crossing.) This sort of imagistic patterning makes the film admirable even as it keeps a distance from emotions, even as the pair of artistes perform reciprocal disfigurements of body and soul, and battle to the edge of life. Scarlett Johansson (Scoop) goes for magic once more, with calf-baring results. Michael Caine is pleasant as an impresario of magic acts (“Obsession is a young man’s game, I can’t follow you any farther in it”); Ricky Jay turns up onscreen as well as an advisor, and a sometimes-actor of renown makes a pleasing turn as electrified inventor Nikola Tesla. While there’s a traditional score, the end credits run under a single song from Thom Yorke’s new album, and the lyrics are suggestive at the end of the tale.

Old Joy (2006, *** ½)

Old Joy, Kelly Reichardt’s fragile, stellar, melancholy gem is American minimalism at its finest, as two men in their early forties (Daniel London, Will Oldham) leave a glum Portland for a camping trip in Oregon’s Cascade Mountains; memories collide and their faces, patiently observed, are awash with regret and self-willed loneliness, frustration and sublimated rage. This is a film meant as much to be heard as seen, beautifully measured. Almost nothing happens except the uncomfortable silences that time brings to friendship. The verdant, pastoral backdrop could take place anytime in the past century; Air American broadcasts from the lead-up to the 2004 election are the only time marker (although there is “times change” passage mourning the death of a record store). This is heartache, it’s hard to take, but it’s beautifully observed. From a short story by co-writer Jonathan Raymond, with a lovely score by Yo La Tengo.

Shortbus (2006, ***)

John Cameron Mitchell’s tender as well as sexually explicit Shortbus is a sweet follow-up to Hedwig and the Angry Inch, a workshop-derived fable of post-9/11 New York in which many matters of polymorphous sexuality—tending to the gay—are mingled with an unlikely optimism. Raphael Barker, Lindsey Beamish, Paul Dawson, PJ DeBoy and Sook-Yin Lee are the primary actors who doff their kits and make their way to an apocryphal sex salon called Shortbus (based on an actual, now-closed club in Brooklyn’s DUMBO neighborhood). Music-drenched and fuck-filled, Shortbus is wildly democratic in its erotic permutations, including a gay male ménage-a-trois that includes the singing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and a deeply depressed half of a couple videotaping himself in the opening montage attempting autofellatio. (Reportedly, Samuel L. Jackson evacuated the Toronto screening shortly after the very personal money shot.) Lee plays a sex therapist who can’t have an orgasm; the end of her journey has the same climactic glory’—can one female orgasm light an entire city?—as the river-filling joy of Shohei Imamura’s Warm Water Under a Red Bridge. A Yo La Tengo score bridges the many songs; the amount of sex might disappoint the practiced connoisseur of porn.

Marie Antoinette (2006, ***)
SEVEN MONTHS PREGNANT, WEARING A BLACK KNEE-LENGTH MATERNITY DRESS, substituting ballet flats for her customary flip-flops, Sofia Coppola is unapologetic about the style of her third feature, Marie Antoinette, based on a biography by Antonia Fraser (whose husband, Harold Pinter, is said to approve.)

While some reviewers have rehearsed their chops as scholars of French history since the movie’s Cannes debut, the 35-year-old Coppola confesses she applied a “very girlie, feminine sensibility” toward a “silk and cake” world. Fittingly, when jokingly asked who made her dress, she shrugs and turns the label out for display. In an Observer profile, Sean O’Hagan described the affect well, playing “a day-dreamy, slightly disconnected but immaculately stylish waif.”
In similar fashion, Jersey girl Kirsten Dunst plays the Austrian 14-year-old who was stripped at the French border of nationality, pug and clothing, to become Marie Antoinette, and wife in an arranged marriage to Dauphin Louis, eventually to be King Louis XVI (a bulked-up Jason Schwartzman). Versailles ensues: Marie Antoinette was given extensive access to the royal grounds (only on Mondays, when it’s closed to tourists), and when the marriage remains unconsummated for seven years, Marie becomes increasingly indiscreet, more of a party girl, drenched in the decadence of gowns, wigs, shoes, champagne, and all manner of cookies and cake.
Coppola seems incredibly self-aware: as a child of privilege American movie royalty with many friends in fashion, the film is as “personal” as The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation. There is a moment when a torch-bearing mob has surrounded Versailles and Marie tentatively approaches, emerging from darkness to watch them wide-eyed. There is a hush. She curtsies quietly, deeply. Then the crowd begins to boo again. It’s hard not to be reminded of the death of Coppola’s character as Michael Corleone’s daughter at the opera that ends the ill-fated Godfather III. And for me, a magnificent shot at the very end of the picture that counts as a true, very knowing coup de theatre. Then again, the pictures’ palette is drawn from pastel macaroons she found Paris’ Laduree bakery.

The soundtrack bursts with anachronisms. Who, dancing away at clubs in the early 1980s, would imagine the first musical to use the melodies that era would be this one? Opening to the fierce chords of Gang of Four’s “Natural’s Not In It” (a bit of a hint?), and including songs by the cure, Marie Antoinette also boasts a masked ball scored to Siouxsie and the Banshees’ “Hong Kong Garden.” “The New Romantic music I listened to when I was a kid had this playfulness in the way bands like Bow Wow Wow and Adam Ant referenced the eighteenth century. It was a film about teenagers and that mischievous, vital, youthful period. We had a little bit of a punk attitude to say that we were going to do history from this young girl’s point of view. I wanted to have a real contrast between the world of the adults in court and the kids.”

Coppola is a contrarian, after a fashion. “When I read Antonia Fraser’s biography, what was interesting to me was to read about the real human behind all the myths and the icon that we all heard about, the frivolous, evil French Queen. So I wanted to present a portrait of a real person, based on the research and the letters, and do more of an intimate portrait of this woman. I never set out to make an historical epic.”

Of this brightly colored world, she says, “I mean, it’s not a documentary or a history lesson, I wanted it to be impressionistic and as close to what it might have felt like to be there at that time. When I saw ‘Amadeus’ and they were just speaking in their regular accents, they felt like real people to me, as opposed to someone living in some other era that I couldn’t relate to.” (Everyone, including Rip Torn, Steve Coogan and Marianne Faithful, play their own accent except for a couple lines from a little girl.)

“For me it was a challenge to try to make a period film because it was difficult for me: ‘How do you make a film in that period but also do it in my style and make it personal to me?’ The biggest challenge to me was to work on that scale and still stay focused, not get lost in all that. To me, it was important to keep the focus on the main characters, and the acting and the emotion, and not just get carried away with all the grandeur around.” [Ray Pride]

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