Balzac And The Little Chinese Seamstress
Essentially a pretty postcard with inspirational quotes from French literature penned on the back, Dai Sijie's adaptation of his own novel is a well-meaning ode to the transformative power of art. An author directing the film based on his work is remarkable enough; even more surprising is the fact that Dai's problems come not from adhering too closely to the source material but from the opposite. Episodic and aimless, Balzac feels more like Cliffs Notes than a fleshed-out novel. Set in an early 1970s Maoist re-education camp tucked away in a remote mountain village, the story involves two city-bred young men, a pilfered case of forbidden novels and the seamstress whom they both come to love. Their passions, both for her and for their contraband lit, fail to translate to the film, which remains as placid as the mountain air even in its most dramatic moments. When the pair revisit their memories in a modern-day epilogue, the depth of their emotions feels unearned. --Shaun Brady (Ritz at the Bourse)
Elevator To The Gallows
Louis Malle's first post-Cousteau feature, re-released in a new print that makes it feel like 1958 all over again, this tense, vaguely theoretical noir is almost sadomasochistic in its hoarding of plot details. Although it only takes five minutes of screen time for a former paratrooper (Maurice Ronet's Tavernier) to murder his war-profiteer boss, it's the better part of an hour before we find out why, or the nature of the connection between the killer, the dead man and Jeanne Moreau's Florence, who wanders the streets wondering exactly where her homicidal boyfriend has got to. So much for his perfect plan: He's stuck in an elevator with the power turned off, while below a leather-jacketed thug (Georges Poujouly) and his florist girlfriend (Yori Bertin) have decided to take Tavernier's car for a ride. What follows is full of cheap (and worse, predictable) irony, which might go down better if Malle didn't adopt such a hepcat pose: Miles Davis' breathy score and Henri Decaë's rubbed-raw images make this essentially the coolest episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents ever made. All praise due, however, to Moreau, whose career in ice-cold longing began right here. --Sam Adams (Ritz Five)
The Fog
Not reviewed. A haiku:
What's that? A thick fog?
Bet it's really the ghosts of
Pissed leper seamen.
(AMC Orleans; UA Grant)
Green Street Hooligans
If you've been wondering where Claire Forlani has been hiding herself, wonder no more. Here she is playing Frodo's sister, transplanted to London and married to a football aficionado (Marc Warren), in a movie directed by former German karate champion Lexi Alexander. She looks lovely, but she's mostly left to the sidelines while Elijah Wood and Charlie Hunnam (who plays Forlani's football hooligan brother-in-law) spend their time drinking, cursing and beating down rival football club members. She does make a preposterous decision near film's end that endangers any number of lives. But that's her function here, to be the girl who occasions male brutality, heroism and martyrdom. The movie is most interested in the moral and emotional consequences of hooliganism, as a means to rowdy boy-bonding and rising self-esteem for Wood, who comes to England after he's kicked out of Harvard (for drugs that actually belonged to his wealthy roommate), where he had been a journalism major. Because his dad is a famous journalist, he feels he's rebelling, but he misses the detail that his new football club friends hate journalists worse than poison. The violence is bloody, the plot contrived, the performances earnest. --Cindy Fuchs (AMC Neshaminy; Loews Cherry Hill)
Innocent Voices
Based on screenwriter Oscar Torres' own childhood, Luis Mandoki's film is an assembly of memory fragments and harrowing history, set in 1980s El Salvador, where thousands of children were conscripted to fight the FMLN rebels backed by the U.S. government. Abandoned by his father, 11-year-old Chava (Carlos Padilla) becomes the "man of the house," taking tickets on a downtown bus while continuing his schoolwork. Luis Mandoki's film tracks the year before Chava's "enlistment" in the military, as he sees his village torn apart by regular gunfire, a young friend transformed into a hard-faced soldier, a priest (Daniel Gimenez Cacho) resisting soldiers' injunctions against radios (whether broadcasting pop music or news), his uncle's (Jose Maria Yazpik) brief return from the rebel camp, and his mother's (Leonor Varela) endless struggle to care for her three children amid poverty and hopelessness. His growing affection for a lovely classmate, Cristina Maria (Xuna Primus), provides brief respite, but even their efforts to steal away to a rooftop beyond soldiers' gazes only affords them a harrowing view of an assault. The film is by turns haunting, angry and appropriately rough (including repeated images of violence against children), effectively maintaining Chava's point of view on what are arguably "adult" subjects. --C.F. (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)
The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio
"There was a time," asserts Evelyn Ryan (Julianne Moore), "when ingenuity and a little bit of luck could feed a family of 12." According to Jane Anderson's doting, adorable adaptation of daughter Terry Ryan's book of the same name, the world of contesting was a matter of survival for '50s housewives. While the usual oppressions are well known, here Evelyn faces the added difficulty of a machinist husband (Woody Harrelson in a bad wig and tummy pillow), a drunk who spends food and mortgage money on liquor. Still, she maintains a sunny outlook, writing jingles for Dr. Pepper, Dial soap and Paper Mate to win prizes (shoes, groceries, a palm tree, a washing machine, a pony, cars and trips she cashes in) that do indeed support her family (and there are too many kids here for you to get a sense of more than one or two). The extraordinary complications of this existence — the rigors of daily life with 10 kids, the limitation of Evelyn's options (she wanted to be a journalist), the intellectual company she finds in other contesters and the commercial culture/appeals she understands and mimics so intuitively — are only touched on here, partly through antic animation (indicating another world beyond the Ryans' back yard) and partly through Moore's performance, which frankly transcends the material. Evelyn's nuances are lost in a shuffle of visual activity, which simultaneously underlines and distracts from the stress of maintaining surfaces. --C.F. (Ritz East)
