Screen Picks

by Sam Adams

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Published: Jan 10, 2007

Innocence/Mary/Edmond (Thu., Jan. 11, 8 p.m., free, The Rotunda, 4014 Walnut St., www.armcinema25.com) The dwindling market for art-house, and especially foreign-language, film has consigned scores of worthy, and sometimes brilliant works to Netflix's ashcan. That is, if they're lucky. For two of the three "Philadelphia premieres" in this month's Video Vault, straight-to-DVD would be a step up.

Perhaps you can't blame distributors for shying away from Lucile Hadzihalilovic's Innocence, which is set entirely at a mysterious, cloistered academy for prepubescent girls. Adapted from an untranslated story by Frank Wedekind (Pandora's Box), the movie envisions female pre-adolescence as a literal training ground for adult object-hood.

Bounded by a high wall, the movie's unnamed institute is both highly regimented and seemingly self-regulating. Authority figures are few and rarely seen, but the girls effectively police themselves. They wear color-coded hair ribbons to indicate their age (red for the youngest, violet for the oldest), and keep to a strict schedule, prompted by the sound of omnipresent clocks.

Hadzihalilovic has called the school "both a paradise and a prison," and indeed, there's something slightly Sadean about the movie's vision of liberation through confinement. Within the walls, the girls inhabit a kind of presexual Eden, splashing half-naked in sun-dappled lakes without a prurient eye in sight. But like the original Eden, this one has its unbreakable rules, although here, would-be escapees are not expelled but conscripted to stay and serve forever. To leave before instruction is complete is a sin, but worse is never to leave at all.

Hadzihalilovic's style is as calculated and precise as her clockwork world, building a sense of purpose into each carefully constructed frame. The movie strikes a magnificent balance between fairy-tale hyperrealism and quotidian detail, crafting a tactile environment studded with dreamlike touches: the secret passage hidden inside a grandfather clock, the wooded path whose trees seem to double as lampposts.

If anything, the movie may be a shade too controlled. By presenting prepubescent girls in various states of undress, Hadzihalilovic is surely aware she is playing with material that will make some viewers uncomfortable (thus, no doubt, accounting for the film's absence from DVD in this country). But she deliberately holds back judgment, effectively presenting the film's title as a challenge, and almost a threat. If the images she shows are not innocent, well, whose fault is that?

Control has never been Abel Ferrara's problem, and Mary is as inspired and unhinged as any movie he has ever made. Mixing documentary, film and metafilm, Ferrara uses the figure Mary Magdalene as the focal point for a feminist critique of modern Christianity. (Imagine The Da Vinci Code if there were actual ideas involved.) Forest Whitaker plays a Charlie Rose type involved in a multi-part series on the life of Jesus, Matthew Modine is a brash and somewhat out-of-control director (modeled, of course, on Ferrara himself) involved in the filming of a low-budget Bible story, and Juliette Binoche is his Magdalene, an actress who becomes so involved in her role that she flees to the Holy Land when filming wraps.

Provocative, incendiary and borderline hysterical, Mary is Ferrara's most explicit exploration of his own tortured Catholicism, and while it's frequently a mess, it's an inspired and sometimes brilliant attempt to address the layers of meaning which have smothered Christianity's central figures like so many coats of shellac. It's also undistributable, or so the 18 months that have elapsed since its 2005 premiere would seem to attest. In an atmosphere where "Christian entertainment" means CSI with priests, there seems to be no place for a real artist sincerely exploring his faith.

The last, and least, of the three features is also the most readily available, having been released on DVD last fall. Go figure. Stuart Gordon's adaptation of David Mamet's early-'80s play Edmond is a ham-handed dark fantasy in which William H. Macy's unfulfilled office worker goes on an evening-long bender during which he knocks out a pimp's teeth and guts a pretty young waitress, letting loose the occasional racist tirade as he does so. Mamet's script occasionally drops hints that the whole exercise is meant to be an extended dialogue on the white obsession with blackness, cued by tendentiously vague lines like, "Every fear hides a wish." But the movie can't stick with any one idea long enough to make something of it, and Gordon's overemphatic direction brings out the most mannered and overwrought in his actors. Ah, well. Two out of three ain't bad.

Blues by the Beach (Mon., Jan. 15, 7 p.m., $10, Gershman Y, Broad and Pine sts, 215-446-3021) With its English-language culture and strict no-politics rule, the Tel Aviv nightclub Mike's Place seemed like the least controversial spot in Israel, a place where natives, émigrés and tourists could steep in the sound of electric blues while shutting out any sorrows but their own. But on April 30, 2003, suicide bombers struck the famed watering hole, killing three and wounding more than 50, including filmmaker Jack Baxter, who was shooting a documentary about the bar that night.

Blues by the Beach is both a memorial and a wake, a testimony to the days before the attack and a chronicle of the victims' attempts to rebuild. Those victims include not just the staff, who bravely re-opened for business a week after the blast, but also the filmmakers: Baxter, who was confined to a hospital bed for days, and his camera and sound crew, Josh Faudem and Pavla Fleischer. The latter's story often threatens to overshadow their ostensible subjects: Perhaps because others were less willing to share their grief, the movie focuses extensively on the pressure the bombing places on Faudem and Fleischer's romantic relationship. They are, of course, victims as much as anyone who was in the bar that night, but considering how much the movie presents Mike's Place as an example of the way Israelis persevere in the face of constant threat, the shift to the filmmakers comes off as a diversion.

(sam@citypaper.net)

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