POTTER, POTTER, EVERYWHERE

There's a common observation that the Alien franchise is something of a director's showcase: take one lead character, one basic concept, one highly memorable monster design, and give it to someone with some very specific ideas for story and visuals, and you end up with four extraordinarily different movies that don't even necessarily belong to the same genre. I am coming around to a similar idea for the Harry Potter series: it's turning into quite the showcase for cinematographers to show of their own personal flair for what to do with the material. Putting it that way probably minimises the work of the film's directors more than I ought to, and yet in six films there have been five different DPs and only four different directors, and at least in the last two instances, one single director, a certain David Yates, has overseen two vastly different visual experiences, one shot by the amazing Slawomir Idziak, the other by the truly brilliant Bruno Delbonnel. Which is not to say that Yates doesn't have plenty to add of his own, and there's a certain undeniable something that marks the two "Yates Potters" as different from the other four.

But all of this is just a roundabout way of saying, How exciting it is that an essentially mercenary tentpole franchise based on a wildly popular series of novels and aimed squarely at a family audience can nevertheless be so extremely well-made that we can even bother talking about things like the personality of the directors vs. their cinematographers! Absent the dreadful first two, the Potter films have become a semi-regular dose of absolutely marvelous blockbuster filmmaking, maybe not "challenging" in any kind of cinephiliac sense, but exquisitely crafted in most senses: and while each of the last three have had any number of wonderful elements to recommend themselves, this sixth film, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, is the best one yet, the peak film in the franchise across nearly every mode of filmmaking you might think of, from the acting (which except for one performer, has never been better), to the writing (unlike most of the others, it can stand up almost entirely without reference to J.K. Rowling's over-praised, slackly-written novels), to the production design (though mostly based on the preceding films, it's a great deal more spare and dusty and isolated), to, yes, the cinematography, which is so unbearably lovely that I can't even quite stand it.

Let me have just one little more bit about the visuals, and I promise I'll move on. The 2007 Order of the Phoenix was already the most beautiful film in the franchise to that point, with a terrifically precise use of color for a big studio movie; the steely greys and blues of the sets clashing mightily with the garish pink associated with the movie's villain. Half-Blood Prince has swapped those greys for yellows and golds and the like, resulting in a movie with a powerfully autumnal palette; and why not, for the movie is very much about things drawing near to their close without ending just quite yet. Autumnal hues for an autumnal story, says I. But that's not the half of it, for there is also a very important recurring motif of travelling into other person's memories, represent by flickering shades of grey-green. And lastly, there is a truly stunning sequence set in a cave late in the film, a triumph of chiaroscuro lighting and minimalist production design that makes for one of the absolutely great creepy scenes in all of children's cinema. Delbonnel has long been one of my favorites, despite a rather limited filmography (including Amélie and Across the Universe), but it's this movie that finally pushes him right into the very upper tier of his craft.

And hey, like I said, the rest of the movie around Delbonnel ain't too shabby, either. Starting up just a few weeks after Order of the Phoenix ended, the film continues the franchise tradition of assuming that at the very least you've seen all of the preceding films, and know who these people are and what's going on. The short version of an extremely convoluted plot that doesn't have a story so much as a stream of incidents is that Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe), now in his 6th year at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, has been shanghaied into taking a class in potion-making, ostensibly because it will further his career, but primarily because the school's headmaster, Albus Dumbledore (Michael Gambon), wants him to weasel his way into the confidences of the new potions professor, Horace Slughorn (Jim Broadbent), who may have some special knowledge of the dark wizard Voldemort, the baddie throughout these movies - though if you didn't already know that fact, this is absolutely not the right time for you to try to get into the Harry Potter films. It's thanks to this potions class that Harry finds a textbook from years ago, inscribed, "Property of the Half-Blood Prince", and the degree to which this Prince had benign intentions remains quite a mystery. While Harry and Dumbledore are busy with their plans to save all of civilisation, Harry also has to contend with the hormonal facts of a 16-year-old's life: his best friends, Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson) aren't speaking anymore, now that Ron has started dating somebody else, in flagrant violation of Hermione's longstanding, unspoken crush; while Harry is increasingly distraught that the girl of his own affections, Ron's sister Ginny (Bonnie Wright), is busy snogging another guy.

Rowling's novel was already quite dense - the most plot-filled novel of all seven, I'd say without a second's hesitation. So cutting it down to around two and a half hours must have been quite the hellish task for Steve Kloves, returning for his fifth stab at the series (he skipped out on the last movie). But it's a task that he handles with great skill, turning in a screenplay rivaled only by his own Goblet of Fire for clarity; there are only two points in the whole thing where he steps into the constant trap of these films, allowing the book to explain important details (the one point is that the story of what's happening to Ron is desperately undernourished, the other is the ultimate reveal of the Half-Blood Prince's identity, a horribly tossed-off moment for something referenced in the damn title of the damn movie). Admittedly, die-hard Potterites will have and already have plenty of complaints about what's gone missing, but they can go get fucked.

While the small goal of telling a coherent story is already a highlight for the series, the real special thing is that Kloves takes what's left once he's trimmed off hundreds of pages, and turns it to eleven, making the constant inertia of the movie hide the fact that there's no real conflict or plot arc in any real sense; as a self-contained narrative, Half-Blood Prince is a pretty great first act of the final movie.* And yet it never feels that way, because Kloves and Yates keep the heat on so long that it seems like something must be happening. It's a gamble that works, outstandingly well.

The acting is business as usual for the series: Radcliffe is getting better, Watson is getting worse, a whole truckload of Britain's best and brightest come out for a few scenes and are awesome (including Maggie Smith, Helena Bonham Carter, and above all else, Alan Rickman, who is flat-out perfect in his final scene in this entry), and a Special Guest Star blows everyone out of the water every time he opens his mouth. That would be Broadbent, absolutely tremendous as a twitchy bundle of nerves with a pronounced love of famous people. He's no Imelda Staunton (*sigh*... Imelda... the best thing about a bifurcated Deathly Hallows is that we shall be all the likelier to see you again, my dear darling), but it's perhaps the second-best performance anywhere in the series, outside of maybe Rickman as the oily Professor Snape, who is deepening his performance every single time, although with so many films to work with, it's not fair to compare him to the one-shots. A last word, in praise of Tom Felton, who plays Harry's young nemesis Draco: I've never been wholly sold on his work before, but this film sees him in an exceptional place, proving once again that villains make better characters than heroes, and give him much more interesting things to do as an actor than any of the trio of protagonists.

It is true, perhaps, that unlike the other five movies, there's less of a particular thematic line that Half-Blood Prince hangs on (it was a bit true of the novel, too, but the movie has all but eradicated the book's focus on the Harry/Dumbledore relationship; a disappointment, but a small one). What it has instead is a mood, of things changing and fading. And too, it's a crackling thriller, easily the most entertaining Harry Potter story on film or in print. Which is actually a pretty decent combination. Anyway, the film is just about as good as anything this summer: fun and playful but dark and elegiac, smart and directed with the utmost care (Yates may be slagged for the domesticity of his vision of the material, but tell me he doesn't know how to use every inch of the frame exactly the way it ought to be), and sprawling visual effects that emphasise for the first time, not how amazing this world is, but how deeply comforting to the characters, who have lived here for six years now. It's all part of the film's truly magical depiction of time passing; the perfect movie to introduce your kids to the idea that everyone grows up, everyone dies, everything moves on.

9/10

*Or rather, two movies, which is still the worst goddamn idea ever.

NOT SUCH A GAY OLD TIME

Of the three characters Sacha Baron Cohen created for Da Ali G Show, the homosexual Austrian fashionista Brüno was always the least funny (though, it must be mentioned, the least funny of a very funny batch), so it's not necessarily surprising or disappointing on its face that Brüno, a shock-comedy pseudo-documentary starring featuring that character in his first feature-length role, should be less amusing than 2006's marvelous, game-changing Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. In that film, Cohen played a clueless Eastern European journalist who wandered across the U.S. like an unguided missile, stumbling across regular, everyday Americans, very nice people all, and getting them (without much effort) to reveal the most shockingly racist and xenophobic sentiments. It was a nasty vicious satire of the worst tendencies of American exceptionalism and cultural superiority; it was also one of the funniest movies made in years, if not decades.

Brüno, which follows a very similar narrative track, isn't without its charms; but its failings in relation to its older brother are of a more dire nature than simply failing to possess the same novelty and invention, something it of course wouldn't be able to do of its very nature. The greater problem is that Brüno simply isn't all that smart, and it isn't all that funny - and the latter of these points especially seems easy to miss in all the debate surrounding the film, about whether or not it is cruel to its subjects (no more than they've earned), or bad for gay representation (as much as Borat was anti-Semitic). Funny covers a lot of sins; all sins, perhaps. Funny certainly makes up for the wee tiny sin of being offensive, indeed, funny thrives on being offensive. Brüno is at its best when it is also at its most nasty-minded and aggressive, and I have some suspicion that I'll be squarely in the minority when I say that the film's absolute biggest mistake is that it's not aggressive enough.

Brüno is a much plottier thing than I'd expected: after an incident in Milan, Brüno is blacklisted from the European fashion world, abandoned by his Pygmy lover, and fired from his beloved Austrian fashion chat show Funkyzeit mit Brüno. Petrified by his sudden lack of cachet, he hits upon the idea of becoming one of those celebrities who are famous mostly for being famous, and to kick start that process he heads to Los Angeles to find some way of getting his name in the headlines once again, whether it's by solving the Middle East conflict, adopting an Africa baby, or becoming a poster boy for the Ex-Gay movement.

With that much narrative to plow through, it's probably inevitable that Brüno had to devote quite a lot of its running time to staged moments and not so much to scenes where Cohen in disguise shocks, terrifies, or angers some workaday Americans who aren't in on the joke. Which is a shame, because the staging generally speaking doesn't work, and the improvised scenes with normal people (the very same stuff Brüno was invented for back in his Ali G days) generally speaking do, although rarely as well as they did in Borat. I am not, Lord knows, going to go through all the scenes and say, "this is what you ought to find funny, this is what you won't". Broadly speaking, though, I expect that a lot of people, even those who have been fans of Cohen for years, are going to find a lot of restless down moments to muscle through.

Even some of the moments that work tremendously well - such as a scene where Cohen shows a test audience footage of a dancing penis, or his inordinately long encounter with a psychic who is heroically reserved when Brüno starts making out (and then some) with his ghost lover - are a different kind of successful from Borat: there was stilletto-sharp satire in that movie, whereas the funniest bits in most of Brüno are about watching other people becoming hugely embarrassed. There's no insight or satire involved; you don't need to be a homophobe - or even straight! - to find it awkward when a man mimes fellatio in your office for three minutes. It's funny, but it's "stupid" funny.

When, however, the film drifts into intelligence and satire, something it only does sporadically, it finally achieves brilliance. The Paula Abdul scene, gorgeously mocking celebrity cluelessness and robotic commitment to talking points; the hunting scene, in which Cohen seems to be genuinely risking his life to get a cheap laugh; and above all things else, the film's pièce de résistance, in which Cohen manages, without even trying very hard, to get parents to agree to submit their infant children to the most tasteless and dangerous situations if it will give them a professional modelling credit. It's the peak of the movie's satire of celebrity-worship, although even that's a double-edged thing; because if celebrity-worship is the best thing Cohen could think up to mock with this character, he wasn't trying very hard. Brüno looked for all the world like it was going to do to American homophobia what Borat did to American isolationism and condescension to other cultures. I still think a Brüno film like that could be a masterwork, but it only crops up a few times, mostly in the back half, of the Brüno that we were given. A missed opportunity.

So all that said, Brüno is still mostly entertaining; but it's not very memorable, insightful, probing, or revolutionary. If you show people a dick, they will cringe; however amusing that might be, it's hardly a game-changing sociological observation. But at least it's funny, and there are so very few funny comedies these days that it has to at least get a few points for that. Just don't go looking for top-shelf satire, and it should be a fine, painless 82 minutes.

6/10

TEN FOR MONDAY: VEGAS, BABY, VEGAS

So right now, I'm on a (non-film, non-blog) business trip to Las Vegas, NV; which is, incidentally, why the late Summer of Blood entry, the scrapped (delayed?) plans for an especially complex Sunday Classic Movie, and most of all why I won't be reviewing Brüno or any other new release until - if all goes exquisitely well - Tuesday afternoon.

Anyway, it's my first visit to Sin City, and I've gotten to thinking about the storied position it holds in American mythology, and cinematic versions of that mythology especially, which then led to this quick primer on ten movies that have exemplified various facets of Las Vegas, Tawdry Soul of America.

Las Vegas was created so that mobsters could legally fleece tourists

The Godfather, Part II (Frances Ford Coppola, 1974)


Las Vegas is the swingin'-est place for a cat to be cool

Viva Las Vegas (George Sidney, 1964)


Las Vegas is still the swingin-est place for a cat to be cool - and now it has gorgeous fountains!

Ocean's Eleven (Steven Soderbergh, 2001)


Las Vegas is a playground where anything can happen, and it's awesome

The Hangover (Todd Phillips, 2009)


Las Vegas is a playground where anything can happen, and it's obscene

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Terry Gilliam, 1998)


Las Vegas is where lost souls go to be found

The Cooler (Wayne Kramer, 2003)


Las Vegas is where lost souls go when there's nowhere else

My Blueberry Nights (Wong Kar-Wai, 1997)


Las Vegas is where lost souls go to die

Leaving Las Vegas (Mike Figgis, 1995)


Las Vegas makes it easy to marry people without due consideration or sobreity, and this often leads to perilously un-funny scenarios

What Happens in Vegas (Tom Vaughan, 2008)


Las Vegas is full of whores
Showgirls (Paul Verhoeven, 1995)

SUMMER OF BLOOD: SUCH A FINE LINE BETWEEN STUPID AND CLEVER

As I have posited many times elsewhere on this blog, the First Age of the American slasher film consisted of a period of great ubiquity and popularity, lasting barely less than ten years (from the summer of 1980 to the end of 1989), and a protracted death rattle, that stretched more or less until the release of Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers in 1995, the last stab (ha ha) at giving one of the major franchises a theatrical release for many years, met with stony indifference by a fandom that had finally gotten sick of seeing the same damn teenagers getting chased in the same damn locations by the same damn psycho killers over and over again.

And yet hardly two years later, in 1997, movies about horny kids being stalked and murdered in showy, violent set-pieces were unexpectedly hip again, though they've never achieved the same kind of prominence they enjoyed in the '80s. What happened in between to change things is our subject for the day: Scream, written by a savvy part-time actor named Kevin Williamson, author of an unproduced thriller screenplay titled Killing Mrs. Tingle that had given him quite a reputation in Hollywood, and directed by horror-film legend Wes Craven. It was the kind of busines-sexy pairing that made the film's executive producer Harvey Weinstein and his Miramax Films such a legendary powerhouse back in the '90s: a hot young unproven talent and a man with nothing else to prove in the genre combining their powers. Which, in Craven's case, wasn't just a matter of having made plenty of well-regarded genre films in the past (and plenty more terrible ones); Scream wasn't even the first time he'd used his talents to save the slasher genre from itself. 12 years earlier, just as the first wave of slashers were starting to dry up, he released A Nightmare on Elm Street, and inadvertently gave a new breath of life to the subgenre by inspiring a half-decade's worth of copycats. Prior 1984, virtually no slasher films involved paranormal elements; after 1984, virtually all of them did.

So, too, in 1996. Prior to Scream for good or ill, nearly every slasher movie that came out was at least nominally serious (though a handful of experiments, most notably The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 and Friday the 13th, Part VI: Jason Lives, flirted with outright comedy); post-Scream, virtually every horror movie for years, until the sudden and unwelcome rise of torture porn in the mid-'00s, mined generally the same territory that set Craven and Williamson's film so far apart from the average slasher: its winking, self-referencing and self-parodying tone, a movie about slasher movies as much as (or more than) a legitimate slasher movie. It is only in this period of the horror film's development that the notion of a character making a claim along the lines of, "that couldn't happen except in a bad horror movie" went from a cheap gag to an unavoidable generic trope.

Before digging into that hornet's nest, though, let me just run through the plot a bit, since it will matter later. The film opens with a blonde high school student, Casey (Drew Barrymore), alone in her big house on the outskirts of town, receiving an increasingly threatening series of phone calls from an unknown individual who taunts her by comparing her plight to the cheap scary movies that she knows so well. Before too long he reveals that he's outside watching her, and after just a bit more extremely mean-spirited cat-and-mouse antics, he springs on her dressed in a black robe with a white plastic mask suggesting a ghost and Edvard Munch's The Scream in equal measure, and disembowels her (he's already, at this point, killed her boyfriend; both deaths suffer mightily for the cuts Craven had to make to get the film in with an R-rating).

Elsewhere that night, we meet our actual protagonist, Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), and her her boyfriend Billy (Skeet Ulrich); what matters for right now is that her dad is leaving on business, and Billy is growing ever-more impatient that they're not having sex. The next day, we meet the rest of the gang: Sidney's best friend Tatum (Rose McGowan); Tatum's boyfriend Stuart (Matthew Lillard); and Randy (Jamie Kennedy), who works at the local video store and knows everything there is to know about horror movies. It seems - by "it seems", I of course mean, "heavy-handed dialogue establishes in no uncertain terms" - that Sidney has a dark tragedy in her past; because a good Final Girl needs something dark hiding under the surface, since being terrified of a ghostface killah with a knife isn't dramatically compelling enough.

Long story short, the small town where everyone lives is gripped by fear of more teen deaths, and at the end of the day classes are indefinitely cancelled by Principal Himbry (and uncredited Henry Winkler), leading to a celebratory party where many teens will drink and watch movies and fool around, Sidney (her secret long since revealed: her mom was raped and murdered almost exactly one year ago) is hounded by a tabloid journalist Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox-Arquette, in the role that introduced her to the "Arquette" half of that hyphenate), while the standard-issue worst cop in the world bumbles around and is comickal; that would be Tatum's brother, Dewey, played by an unusually restrained David Arquette (see?). Oh, and most importantly of all, Randy(who has been noticing for all of the film's running time that it feels an awful lot like a cheap slasher film) declares The Rules governing the killing - don't have sex, don't drink, don't say "I'll be right back" - during a screening of Halloween in which a roomful of teens grow disinterested by the 17-year-old film's slow pace and lack of female nudity, and this is easily Scream's most believable, if depressing, reflection of actual human behavior.

Back in the day, Scream drew impressive hosannas from movie critics who wouldn't ordinarily give a slasher film two seconds, made Williamson a superstar screenwriter (briefly, but unfortunately long enough that he was able to perpetrate Dawson's Creek), and as I've mentioned, reinvigorated the dead teenager film more than anything had in over a decade. All of this was for the same reason: it was Smart and Hip. This wasn't just a slasher film, it was a meta-commentary, explaining the rules of the genre while also playfully indulging them; the perfect horror movie to come out the same year as Alanis Morissette's "Ironic". So you - you, the hipster, or you, the critic, either one - got to appreciate that the film was reinforcing what you already knew: man, those slasher movies are so trashy! Isn't it awesome how trashy they are? Isn't even more awesome that we, Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson, know how trashy slashers are, and yet here we are making a slasher? Isn't that hilariously post-modern?

I bet you're able to figure out my answer to those rhetorical questions, but I honestly don't hate Scream nearly as much as I feel like I should. Here's the biggest problem I have with the film: any movie (and there have been many of them since 1996) that forwards the argument, "Because the filmmakers are aware of their film's badness, and since they alert the viewer to that self-awareness of that badness, it obviates said badness - OR INDEED even turns it into a strength" gets exactly zero traction with me. Self-knowing badness is in fact badness; it might actually be worse than just regular old badness because it is, in addition to everything else, smug.

At the same time, movies that are explicitly about the experience of watching themselves get a whole lot of traction with me indeed. Craven had already mined this territory masterfully with Wes Craven's New Nightmare, a mere two years earlier; and there are points where Scream's turn to self-reference is nothing shy of brilliant. I am thinking, for example, of a scene in which Randy shouts warnings to Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween, unaware that he's being stalked by the murderer - in fact, he's on camera at the time, and the people watching the feed are shouting warnings at him. It's funny and suspenseful at the same time, and not the only example of the film's self-analysis working rather well, although it is the best example.

It's a very narrow line that Scream straddles, this attempt to be smart about itself being stupid, without being so stupid that it's obnoxious. It ultimately fails to keep balance, I think, because Williamson and Craven aren't necessarily aware that they're on that line, assuming perhaps that the mere fact of saying "We know how bad this is ha ha aren't we grand ironists?" really is all the more argument they need to make. Williamson, particularly - even more than its constant stream of moments in which a character says "this is the stuff that happens in a slasher movie" right before or after that exact stuff happens, Scream is full of references, explicit or implied, to other horror movies. And by "full", I mean, hardly a page of the screenplay must have been absent such a reference. I mean, just a list of all the movies I counted being referenced would take up most of the remainder of this review, and some of those movies - notably the Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, and Halloween franchises - get referenced a dozen or more times each.

Why is this bad? Because it's pointless. All that the references add up to is demonstrating that both the writer and the idealised viewer have seen, or heard of, a great many horror picture stretching back into the 1930s and James Whale's Frankenstein. A joke like "Wes Carpenter", or Craven cameoing as a janitor in Freddy Krueger's sweater, or tens of little things like that might prove that I am capable of decoding Williamson's mental puzzles, but they don't do anything for me, for my appreciation of the slasher genre, or for the entertainment I receive from Scream. And heaven help the poor viewer who lacks an encyclopedic knowledge of the genre.

To be perfectly honest, though, that's not my biggest problem with Scream - a real and thorny problem it is, but not the biggest. I simply don't care for its attitude. "Oh, man, slasher films are stupid" it declares, while indulging in all the stupid behavior of every slasher film of all time, chortling as it does. And sure, slasher films are stupid, but the best of them, or whatever imprecise synonym for "best" I was looking for, have a hardscrabble honesty to their cheapness and meanness and exploitative missions. In other words, I might hate Friday the 13th, and when I watch it, I do indeed think "this is completely stupid", but I kind of love with an absolute lack of irony. It's like saying that a dog that runs square into a wall is stupid - yeah, but then you have to give it a hug and ruffle its doggy ears, because its stupidness is so, well, endearing. Or you buy the Blu-Ray for a reason that still doesn't quite make sense, but you can't bring yourself to regret doing it.

Slasher films, in other words, are awful in a lot of ways, but there is one huge point in their favor: they are manifestly honest about their intentions. Scream is not honest: it is a certain thing and tries its damnedest to hide that fact under a cloud of sarcasm. The hell of it is, it's even a pretty great slasher film, at heart - after all, Craven is a pretty fine filmmaker when he wants to be, and he got a nice budget to work with - so in better circumstances, it might have been my friend. But I can't stand self-loathing, and I can't stand hipster douchebaggery, and Scream is guilty of both.

Body Count: 8, none of them terribly violent, but one of them takes about four tries, and that is pleasant and amusing.

1939 IN MOVIES: JULY

Traditionally, 1939 is held up as a particularly great year for American movies, maybe even Hollywood's best-ever. But this month, I'm going to break away just once to take a look at a particular European film to premier 70 years ago this summer, on the grounds that I can't in good faith talk about all the great cinema of 1939 without so much as glancing at the film from that year that might just possibly be the most absolutely flawless motion picture ever made.

I'm talking of course about Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game. The review - though I expect it to be more of a 1300-word blowjob for a man and a film that I couldn't possibly hold in any higher esteem - goes up on 7/26.

AUGUST DIRECTOR POLL - WEEK 1

The first week of voting for the director to be given a month-long retrospective this week is behind us (vote now! poll in the sidebar), and the results are a little surprising. Miyazaki Hayao has been running away with it pretty much since voting opened, but Alan Pakula has managed to scrape by with a one-point lead. Meanwhile, Spike Lee has overcome a very shocking slow start to come within swiping distance of first, as Ang Lee has begun to stall out. And I'm still at a loss to explain how the crazy stylistic genius Pedro Almodóvar is staying trapped in a very firm and very distant fifth place.

But there are still weeks to go! So go out there and vote for your favorite - find a bunch of unused computers if you want, cheat the poll as much as possible; it's America, dammit.

THE PAINTER'S TALE

Mentions of the Césars in print or in advertisements usually refer to them as "the French Oscars" or "the French Academy Awards," which is denotatively accurate, since they are the most prestigious film award given in France, and awarded by the Académie des Arts et Techniques du Cinéma, which is parlous similar to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. But I think we all have a certain idea in mind when we hear the phrase "Best Picture Oscar winner": something comfortably middlebrow and artsy only in comparison to the kinds of movies that tend to do well at the U.S. box office. And if you up the ante to call it an Oscar-winning biopic, well, now we have a pretty securely mediocre type of movie altogether.

The 2008 César-winning biopic Séraphine is not anything like that kind of movie. It's the sort of tremendously subtle and quiet drama that wouldn't have a prayer in hell of getting any kind of awards traction or box office recognition in America; much too slow and demanding for that. Yet for the viewer willing to put in the work, it's more than rewarding; it is a real gift of a motion picture, the kind of thing that comes along just often enough to give an intelligent adult filmgoer a newly refreshed faith in the cinema.

Directed by the obscure and otherwise not noteworthy Martin Provost, the movie is about Séraphine Louis (Yolande Moreau), better known as Séraphine de Senlis, a woman who created many paintings, mostly depicting flowers and trees and other flora, in the first half of the 20th Century, inspired by what she believed to be messages given by her guardian angel. For a long time, Séraphine toiled in obscurity, keeping herself alive by cleaning houses and washing laundry; she briefly achieved financial stability thanks to a generous art critic and patron, Wilhelm Udhe (Ulrick Tukur); and at finally she spent the last several years of her life in an insane asylum, dying before Uhde was able to arrange an exhibition of her works shortly after the end of World War II. Nowadays, we'd use the phrase "outsider art" to describe Séraphine's work; at the time, she was called a Naïve by some, though Uhde preferred "Modern Primitivist" (according to the movie, at least).

Imagine the least sensational, least melodramatic way you could possibly present that material; you have just visualised Séraphine. Though very much a story about the mind of an insane artist, the film entirely lacks the chest-beating theatrics of most Hollywood attempts - hell, most attempts by any movie in any national cinema - to address similar material. This is chiefly true of the depiction of Séraphine herself; at no point does she get a Crazy Lady awards show clip moment, nor is her condition or status exploited for maximum tearjerking emotioneyness.* Instead, the movie just presents her as a simple person with one desire and talent that had the good fortune to overlap. Séraphine is not glamorously messed-up; for most of the film we are given no reason to doubt the sincerity of her religious conviction whether or not we believe in its plausibility, and up until her first taste of major success, she is in all ways a completely appealing figure; not young and not beautiful, but friendly, open, and honest. When Séraphine starts to crack at the end, it is genuinely heart-rending that such a damn nice character has to suffer so; it feels like a friend is being taken away. Such is the pitfall of fact-based cinema.

Some credit for this must be given to Provost, whose direction is extremely precise and even a bit fussy at times, but he keeps the film clean and controlled. Especially in the opening third or so, when we are mostly just watching Séraphine go on about the business of her day, the film is in possession of a certain elegance, full of details and none of them spurious, all adding in tiny measure to our sense of who this woman is and what world she comes from. Séraphine's pace is measured and stately - decide for yourself if that is naught but a euphemism for "boring" - but we are thus able to dig into it slowly and steadily. The rhythms of the film are langurous, self-assured, and tremendously comfortable after a while. This makes the disruption of those rhytms all the more genuinely upsetting.

A great deal of the film's effect is also due entirely to Moreau, herself the recipient of a César for the performance. She's not terribly familiar at least in America, though you might recognise her from small parts in the odd film here or there, and perhaps it is the case that this lack of celebrity is part of what makes her so unnaturally good for the part; we have no "script" to read into the actress. Thus she's freed up to go about the simple business of living in Séraphine's flesh and teasing out what that must be like for the rest of us. Oh, how it is a sensitive and generous performance; the easiest thing to do would be to start tearing up the sets and act every bit the mad artist, but that is not how the character ought to be and thus not how she is played. In Moreaus's hands, Séraphine is a shy woman with a pleasant, welcoming face, a woman whose timorous Catholicism is the sole comfort in her rough life, being constantly pushed and bossed and ignored by virtually everyone in her world. She takes joy when it is offered, and is not angry when it is not.

Séraphine is no tragedy, and even less an inspiring tale; it is a depiction of a way of moving through life, being at peace with the universe - even in the asylum, Séraphine ultimately finds that calmness that has defined most of her existence. That's a hard thing to dramatise, when you get right down to it, and that's pretty much what makes the film such an uncommonly moving and wonderful experience: it is a cinematic depiction of a mindset, and a quiet and especially internal mindset at that. This is no small achievement, and it's certainly enough to secure the film a place as a tiny miracle, one of the better films to come out in America so far this year.

9/10

*A most inelegant and visually unappealing neologism, for which I forthrightly apologise.

L'AMOUR FOU

"So there's this this French defense attorney, played by Fabrice Luchini, who goes to Monaco to argue on behalf of a woman who killed her lover, a man with connections to the Russian mafia. He's assigned a bodyguard by the woman's family - the bodyguard is played by Roschdy Zem - and the lawyer is stunned by how easily his bodyguard falls in and out of quick, meaningless sexual relationships, and asks for advice. It just so happens that the bubbly weather girl he tries out his new tricks on (Louise Bourgoin, plucked from obscurity not unlike that of her character) had a past sexual relationship with the bodyguard, and he instantly distrusts her; he suspects that she might be trying to deliberately distract the lawyer from his case, because Lord knows that's what happens, especially once he falls in love and discovers that she's Monaco's village bicycle."

"It's a sex farce, then."

"No. I mean, no and yes. The situations are farcical, but we never really laugh at them, and given how contrived most of the movie is, there's not any sense that we're supposed to take anything except on face value. If it's melodrama, it's melodrama we're not meant to view ironically."

"Hm. Well, is it a drama about sexual psychology?"

"God, know. It's as shiny and easily-popped as a soap bubble."

"Does it have any gravitas, then, or not?"

"I don't know. If it were American, it would be a twee little indie that might make a small hit at Sundance, but mostly everyone else would ignore it. But it's French, and there's a certain ineffable Frenchness to it that makes it seem like it's all very serious even when it's plainly all very silly."

"Okay, then does it say anything about the human condition at all?"

"I'm... not sure. It's awfully nice to look at, though, and it flies right on past."

This is more or less the conversation that's been playing in my brain on a loop since I saw The Girl from Monaco a 2008 import directed by Anne Fontaine. Here's what I know: I'm glad I saw it. I just can't quite set my finger down on why that is the case. It's certainly not at all the movie that the ad campaign promised, a fluffy sex comedy about an old man and a girl a third his age getting it on under the watchful eye of an unspeaking bodyguard. It is, when all is said and done, a French movie, which means that however fluffy it might be, it also has a healthy dose of "what a fool the human animal can be in matters of love and lust." Since it is French, love and lust are not easily distinguished, nor is there much value in the attempt to do so.

On one level, the film's pleasures are wholly ephemeral: the lovely Monaco scenery, Bourgoin in skimpy, revealing costumes. Something of a cinematic beach read, you might say. But after a time, the movie twists into darker waters, and I hesitate to use the word "twist" at all, because it's all eminently predictable what's going to happen. Which is what keeps the movie from being just a standard-issue sex thriller; because we know what thrilling things are coming before they come, what we're thinking about is not the events depicted in the film but the light they cast on the characters.

And it is upon the characters that I ultimately descend, three perfectly-cast actors breathing life into a singularly odd love triangle that is thus granted a certain emotional impact it might not inherently possess. Each of the three people in The Girl from Monaco represents an essentially different way of looking at romance; not that they combine to form every possibility, of course, but they are three extremes, basically. And while Fontaine might be generally content to set them on their courses and let them collide with each other and shoot off in all directions like pinballs, Luchini, Zem, and Bourgoin - the first two more than the last - give a certain weight and solidity to the people they play, making it seem like they are in fact actual players in a game that's a bit larger than they can see (Zem), want to see (Luchini) or have the insight to think about in the first place (Bourgoin). It is a story about being carried up in the heat of the moment and not realising until too late what that means; and in this respect it is fitting, I suppose, that the film is so given over to the sensual pleasures of making a movie in Monaco, with its winding mountain roads and azure water.

At the same time, Fontaine doesn't just cut the movie adrift; even if she is only casually guiding it to where it ends up, there's still the sense of a strong overriding principal behind the rhythmic editing that drives the movie forward, almost too quickly at times. Fontaine (who has made numerous films, some well-regarded, though I am only now seeing her work for the first time) has an uncanny knack for putting together all of the beats of the story so that they're clearly all part of a whole; she then does not quite entirely manage to execute that complete whole in the most compelling or coherent way. The Girl from Monaco hangs together in a most perilously loose manner, shall we say.

Maybe that's the point. This is a film about the individual moment: living in it, seizing it, regretting the ramifications of doing so. So perhaps it makes sense that it feels more like a collection of moments than a perfectly smooth narrative. Or perhaps I'm doing the movie's work for it. I can't tell. All I know is that for 95 minutes I was captivated, and at the end I was satisfied that there hadn't been a better place to cut off the action, nor would a still better place likely have appeared anywhere in the offing. Sometimes, I think it is enough to let a movie plant its seed and let you know that parts of it haven't quite revealed themselves to you; and while The Girl from Monaco does not have the texture of a masterpiece, it's not at all as disposable as it seems at first glance.

7/10