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Tuesday, Dec 2, 2008
Kinky sex galore! And much of it French! Plus: A hot British film about two nubile young women, and a Woody Allen-esque comedy of manners starring Glenn Close.
Jun 9, 2005 | Pawel Pawlikowski is on the phone, complaining in his Warsaw-by-way-of-London accent about something that has a lot of filmmakers quietly grumbling -- or at least the ones trying to make unconventional dramas for what sometimes seems, at least in this country, like a vanishing audience. He's complaining about documentary films.
"I love documentaries," he says, "but nowadays what counts as documentary is some guy with a wide-lens camera following people around. There's absolutely no creative or cinematic spirit at all. The ones that are getting all the attention are basically just infotainment with a political edge. You can agree with what they're saying, but cinematically they're zero."
Indeed, Pawlikowski used to make documentaries, before turning to drama with "Last Resort" in 2000, a grim, arresting tale of mother-and-son Russian refugees trapped in a downscale English seaside resort. His hypnotic new chronicle of teenage obsession, "My Summer of Love" (discussed below), is even better, and feels like a sudden eruption of life from the becalmed waters of British cinema. But at the risk of asking the question I ask in this space every couple of weeks, will anybody in reality-obsessed America notice?
Yes, Virginia, people are still making arty, independent, small-scale dramas, despite the way it sometimes seems. In fact, there's a massive wave of them this spring, more of them than I can possibly cover with justice. In honor of Pawlikowski's gripe, then, a special all-drama (and almost all-French) edition of Beyond the Multiplex, loaded with kinky sex. We've got a transsexual involved in a melancholy ménage à trois, some highly inappropriate maternal affection, a hunky fiancé with a secret (or two), possibly the first horror movie in history with a lesbian protagonist, and a rape scene that's no less upsetting because the two people are married (or were until a few minutes earlier).
Most moviegoers, most of the time, are in search of familiarity, not originality, and the two movies I saw last week that feel like potential indie hits are variations on highly familiar themes. Pierre Salvadori's "Après Vous" is a Parisian romantic comedy with enjoyable acting and just enough Gallic acidity not to seem cloying, while Chris Terrio's "Heights" is a talky Manhattan comedy of manners of a certain old-fashioned sort (spelled W-O-O-D-Y).
Neither one of those is likely to make my 10-best list for the year; they're breezy entertainments that come and go pleasantly enough, without rattling your cage or insulting your intelligence. Hey, that's no crime. Not even the most adventurous cinéaste wants to sit through Tarkovsky's "Stalker" while snuggled under a blanket with that special someone on a February night. (Unless the two of you desperately need some shut-eye.)
More challenging films, like "My Summer of Love" or François Ozon's "5x2" or Sébastien Lifshitz's "Wild Side," are destined to find their audiences in this country little by little, trickling from the big cities and college towns down (or rather up) to Netflix and Amazon. As someone in the business patiently explained to me this week, the market for art films is mainly on DVD these days. Many foreign films are released in U.S. theaters almost as a loss leader: Critics review them, they get advertised in the New York Times, a few urban culture-vulture types (ahem) go see them, and you've created, as they say, market awareness.
Is the audience for so-called difficult movies like these just smaller than it used to be, in our God-haunted nation? It sure feels like it, but one should be careful with Cassandra-like pronouncements. Sooner or later the current craze for reality cinema will burn itself out, and sometime later this decade, or in the next, you'll be reading about yet another indie-film renaissance. In the meantime, Pawlikowski and directors like him all over the world need your support. You can watch a real damn movie, or you can turn the page.
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