Merci pour le chocolat

Claude Chabrol's Merci pour le chocolat cleverly wreaks havoc with the underpinnings of the bourgeois family, disrupting its stability at every turn, eating away at its foundations until the family seems to be propped up only by lies, jealousy, suspicion and violence. The film opens with a wedding, as the chocolate heiress Marie-Clarie (Isabelle Huppert) and the virtuoso pianist André (Jacques Dutronc) get married — though they've actually been married before, and are now getting remarried after the death of André's second wife. During the ceremony, Marie-Claire even quips that they're using the same rings as they had the first time around. The gossipy chatter of the guests — with Chabrol's camera, predatory as ever, endlessly circling around them — only further undercuts this institution, this ceremony, that is ordinarily seen as the bedrock of bourgeois respectability. The rest of the film will further disrupt family structures, calling into question the foundations of paternity and inheritance: in this film, parentage is always vague and uncertain, shrouded in multiple deceits.

The plot is built around a long-ago confusion regarding André's child with his second wife, Lisbeth: there had been a momentary switch when André had been shown a baby girl as his own, rather than the son who was, apparently, actually his. Now the girl, Jeanne (Anna Mouglalis), is grown up and coincidentally also training as a pianist, and when she finally hears the story, she decides to visit André. As she ingratiates herself into André's home and begins taking piano lessons from him, she gets tangled up in a strange chamber mystery as she witnesses the odd behavior of Marie-Claire, who's outwardly solicitous and pleasant but seems to be masking a deeper chilliness and some odd behavior involving the hot chocolate she makes every day. Multiple suspicions arise, mostly revolving around the death of André's second wife, who'd died in a car crash, her system full of alcohol and sleeping pills.


It's obvious, of course, what happened, though Chabrol is typically indirect. Even when Marie-Claire thinks back to the night Lisbeth (Lydia Andrei) died — the flashback is triggered by Marie-Claire's expressionless face dissolving into a scene of the family clustered around André's piano — there's no decisive indication of foul play. Instead, Chabrol's camera subtly insinuates by showing Lisbeth by the piano, walking away to go out, passing Marie-Claire, who watches the car pull away out the window and then walks over to the piano, the camera drifting over with her to watch her take the place previously occupied by André's wife.

It's that stalking, insistent camera that makes all of Chabrol's thrillers so distinctive. The camera circles around the characters, probing their relationships with its ever-so-slow turns, its persistent and incremental process of tracking around them, getting closer and closer without quite ever penetrating the surface. At one point, Marie-Claire enters a room in which Lisbeth's photographs are displayed. The camera lags behind her as she walks past it into the room, staring at a point offscreen, and then the camera tracks through the empty space, finding her face again in the blurry blankness, and continues past her to reveal the photo she's staring at, a head-on self-portrait of Lisbeth resting her face in her hands. Downstairs, Chabrol's camera begins circling again, as André and Jeanne listen to a piano recording together, Jeanne resting her face in her hands exactly as Lisbeth had — the girl has seen the photo, and is obviously evoking the dead woman's pose, which suggests that in a way Jeanne is as calculating, as manipulative, as Marie-Claire herself.


But they both hide it so well. Huppert and Mouglalis deliver subtle, subdued performances, each of them presenting a lovely, friendly exterior that perhaps masks something more calculating: in Marie-Claire's case, a truly sociopathic indifference that reveals itself, chillingly, in the final scenes, and in Jeanne's case a perhaps more benign penchant for selfish scheming. After all, as soon as she hears of the mix-up with André, knowing that he's a famous pianist, she seizes the opportunity to sneak into his life, to earn his help. Chabrol, by linking these women, seems to be suggesting that the sinister evil of Marie-Claire is only the most blatant manifestation of this kind of bourgeois self-interest. At root, it's about an insistence that surfaces are all that's important: "keeping up appearances is all that counts," Marie-Claire tells the board of the chocolate company she's inherited. She's talking about chocolate packaging, but she could just as well be talking about a broader bourgeois philosophy of life, a deep-seated belief that appearance is all that matters, even if the truth has little relation to the appearance.

That ties back into all the confusion over parentage: even beyond the baby mix-up, Jeanne eventually learns that she was conceived through a sperm donation from an anonymous man, while Marie-Claire reveals that she was adopted, which means that the chocolate fortune she's inherited is not her biological right after all. Considering how important biology generally is in the ancient roots of inheritance, these biological disconnects muddy the waters, slyly chipping away at the ways in which wealth and prestige are passed down through bourgeois families. Marie-Claire, especially, is an infiltrator, an adoptee who's taken on a bourgeois mantle but is essentially in disguise, a pretender. At the end of the film, she has a startling scene — remarkably honest and direct after all this shiftiness — in which she confesses that the happy homemaker guise she presents to the world is just that, a mask, a façade. "I have a knack for doing wrong," she says mildly, her face blank, when she's finally been caught in her deceits and schemes. "Instead of loving, I say 'I love you,' and people believe me."

This is a sharp, smart, low-key thriller that revolves around all these mostly unstated tensions about family. It has a typically chilly Chabrolian tone that is periodically broken by bursts of genuine emotion, like the lengthy final shot of a wet-eyed Marie-Claire, or the scene in which André's son Guillaume (Rodolphe Pauly) remembers his mother's death in a sloppy outburst of raw feeling. As usual for Chabrol, the biggest secret here is not anything to do with the plot, but rather a bigger secret, maybe even the biggest secret, which is the essential flimsiness and silliness of bourgeois conventions, which can hide so much.

The Conversations #31: Bamboozled

Jason Bellamy and I have now posted the latest of our Conversations at The House Next Door. In this piece, we discuss Spike Lee's controversial blackface satire Bamboozled. It's a provocative film with a lot to talk about, from its engagement with the history of black entertainment to its consideration of black stereotypes. Join us at The House Next Door for the full conversation, and be sure to add your own thoughts.

Continue reading at The House Next Door

Les destinées

Olivier Assayas is a director with a real sense for how the massed forces — social, religious, political, economic — surrounding an individual can direct and shape that person's life. It's thus not surprising that Les destinées, a period piece that spans several decades from the early 1900s to the years between the World Wars, traces the impact of worldwide seismic shifts in culture and economics in the context of a single family and a single romance. This three-hour historical epic is thus both a departure for Assayas, who is otherwise a thoroughly modern filmmaker and thinker, and a natural fit for his detail-oriented sensibility. The film concerns the wealthy Barnery family, industrialists who run a prosperous porcelain factory that caters to wealthy tastes with extravagant, handcrafted, exquisitely designed china. This factory serves as a barometer for transformations in the world, tracing the progress towards a global economy where specialists like the Barnerys are eclipsed by more modern factories churning out mass-produced products. In the factory, tensions develop between the workers, living in poverty, and their wealthy bosses, who live lives of luxury and ease, totally isolated from the filthy conditions and meager earnings of the working class, whose troubles barely touch the Barnerys and thus barely touch the film. Assayas carefully recreates this world of luxury, allowing hints of outside struggle and outside misery to touch upon these upper-class lives in only the most incidental ways. These people are aware of poverty and aware of real suffering, but they speak of it only very rarely, and it almost never enters the film directly, only by word of mouth, as an abstract concept.

What's interesting about the film, though, is that Assayas does not demonize these prosperous industrialists. Assayas is an assiduously fair filmmaker, and he recognizes that context and culture dictate the choices available to an individual, that all of us are limited in how far we can see outside of our own circumstances. This is the case for the minister Jean Barnery (Charles Berling), who is unhappily married to the severe, intractable Nathalie (Isabelle Huppert), whose idea of marital fidelity and devotion makes marriage into a miserable bond of responsibility and obligation, with little room for love or joy. Barnery responds in kind with jealousy and moralistic preaching, until his growing affection for the young Pauline (Emmanuelle Béart), the niece of his friend Pommerel (Olivier Perrier) precipitates a decision. He divorces Nathalie, resigns from the clergy, and eventually retreats into exile in Switzerland to marry Pauline. This too is an opportunity for Assayas to probe the changing world of the turn of the century, as the stoic, religious traditionalism of the past begins to crack apart in the face of modern values and modern ideas. Late in the film, several representatives of the old school lament Jean's indecisiveness in life, his failure to maintain the façade of respectability and devotion that had been expected of him. A woman says, and her husband sagely agrees, that marriage is meant to be difficult, perhaps even unhappy, and that dissatisfaction is no reason for a divorce. What Jean and Pauline represent, in their youthful love, is the rejection of the old morality, embracing the idea that happiness and pleasure are more important than appearances or tradition.

If Jean sometimes feels twinges of guilt at his choices, Pauline, a thoroughly modern woman of the kind Assayas so obviously admires, is not so encumbered. She is blithely un-religious, unconcerned with what people think of her. She follows her emotions and her ideals, doing what she wants. She enters the film as a mystery, and at her first onscreen encounters with Jean, she seems already to have a rich history with him: the film wisely never clarifies if this is the case, or if their immediate familiarity with one another is simply a result of natural chemistry and attraction. Assayas loves this mystery, and loves actresses who can convey it: Béart, like Maggie Cheung in Irma Vep, is an enigma, a woman with rich depths of feeling behind her sweetly shy smile and big, vulnerable eyes. Assayas, one senses, never quite figures her out, and if the film has a fault it's that Pauline's enduring love for Jean, through everything, is mysterious in less satisfying ways as well. The film is weakest, in general, when it's ruminating on platitudes about love, which is spoken of in abstract terms by the overly analytical Jean and the romantic Pauline alike.

Their love for one another — and the film's broader points about finding pleasure in the muddle of life — is communicated more powerfully in Assayas' sensual, lush imagery. The couple's idyll in the Swiss mountains is captured in a lovely collage of brief scenes and sensual moments: swimming in the lake, walking through the forests, running and playing in the nude like children, enjoying the splendor of nature and the pleasure of one another's company. Another moment, later in the film and later in the characters' lives, is even more mysterious in its sensual beauty, suggesting that the moments that mean the most to us, the moments that linger in the memory in the midst of a cluttered and busy life, are sometimes the ones that seem the most prosaic and simple. It's a day when Jean, who has become embroiled in his family porcelain business and consumed by work, unexpectedly comes home from work early and sits in the garden, reading a novel and watching his wife as she picks cherries from a nearby tree. Assayas films Pauline through a screen of out-of-focus branches, as she turns her head and smiles with surprise at seeing her husband home. It's such a simple scene, but Assayas treats it poetically, respecting its emotional impact on the two aging lovers. Still later, Jean remembers this day nostalgically, remembers the voyeuristic pleasure of watching his wife without her knowing, similar to the way that she had once watched him through windows at a ball at the very beginning of the film.


Although the love story between Jean and Pauline — sometimes joyous, sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes quietly bittersweet as the couple ages — remains at the center of the film for the bulk of its length, Assayas touches on many other characters and stories along the way, in the process suggesting the sweep of the grand transformations that shook the early 20th Century. The Barnery family's struggles with its constantly striking workers reflect the battles between workers and bosses that began to tear apart the old ways of doing business around this time. Socialist idealism suggests that the Barnerys, catering only to the richest of the upper classes, are obsolete, but ironically so does the advance of global capitalism. The globalizing world, with the competition for massive foreign markets and speedy ways of mass-producing tremendous amounts of foreign goods, ushers in the collapse of the elitist business model of the Barnerys, built on old ideas about privilege and status as inalienable and unchanging constants. As Pauline tells Jean at one point, after his divorce, he may have lost his fortune, but he is still rich, because he still has his family name and the social status that goes with it. Indeed, he is able to continue living as though he was rich: even with no money, his world is still completely separate from the extreme poverty of his family's factory employees.

Modernity doesn't eliminate this condition, but it does shake things up. Aline, Jean's daughter with Nathalie, grows up under Nathalie's depressive, self-centered oversight, and when she appears as a young woman (played by Mia Hansen-Løve) she's wild and unfettered. She goes out to clubs to drink and be with men, not because it's fun but because it's something to do, some freedom from the oppressive home of her mother. Assayas touches on Aline's story only briefly, but it's poignant nonetheless. She meets and, in a scene that pays visual homage to Ingmar Bergman's Persona, seemingly falls in love with another young woman who's had a hard life, her old school friend Dominique (Sophie Aubry). Assays picks up Aline's story again years later, after more tragedy and more rebirth. The way the minor characters skip in and out of the film, eliding long periods that seem rich with incident and change, reflects the way life itself seems to skip by in cycles of despair and joy, incident and stasis, mistakes and recoveries. The film attempts to capture the pace and the breadth of life, the way years seem to fly by, dramas playing out before the status quo resumes, and all the love, joy, sadness, loss, nostalgia, work, war, and change that fills a life.

In this respect, Bergman seems like a reference point for the opening act of the film as well, particularly the raucous family drama of Fanny and Alexander. Like that film, Assayas' epic early on concerns itself with a bright, vibrant society party. Assayas' lively camera twirls around waltzing dancers, capturing the spinning motion, like human tops, and the shushing rustle of long dresses as they sweep across the dance floor. The partygoers all join hands and form a chain running through the house and around the grounds, just as the family had done in Bergman's film, and just as in Bergman's film, strict religious morality and asceticism serves as a contrast to all this joie de vivre. In this case, though, it's the minister who winds up fleeing the Protestant inflexibility of his moralistic wife, choosing a life in which pleasure and joy, however fleeting they wind up being, matter more than empty principles and joyless responsibility. If Jean, in the end, winds up chained instead to a very different form of responsibility — the capitalist's slavery to profits over morality — he stills lives a full and varied life. Ultimately, he wonders how, in spite of everything, there still seems to be some hope at the core of life; this line, with its implication that happiness lies in a searching, open-minded sensibility, seems like a key to Assayas' rich, ambitious and complex social drama.

Hollow Man

Hollow Man was the last of Paul Verhoeven's run of Hollywood genre films, made following the lackluster reception of his previous two pictures, Showgirls and Starship Troopers. Both of those box office flops were later reappraised by various audiences as trashy cult/camp successes or genuine masterpieces, but that doesn't seem likely to happen for Hollow Man, which similarly flopped upon release but seems to reveal the director reaching the limits of his interest in making this kind of film within Hollywood. That's a shame, because the film's concept is certainly the kind of thing one would expect Verhoeven to eagerly embrace, to transform into the kind of morally ambiguous, pulpy genre deconstruction/celebration that he does best. Instead, while the film is good — even bracingly potent — in isolated stretches, it's sabotaged at every turn by indifferent scripting, disconnected acting, and one of the most absurd action denouements in Verhoeven's career. The film introduces some interesting concepts, some tantalizing hints of the film Verhoeven at his best could make of this material, and then destroys everything in a raging inferno.

The film is the story of government research scientist Sebastian Caine (Kevin Bacon), who's leading a project to discover a way to make people invisible. Naturally, once he's perfected the process, or believes he has, he wants to switch from testing the procedure on apes to, in the grand tradition of movie mad scientists, volunteering himself as the first human test subject. It's a heady concept, and Verhoeven hints right from the beginning that the film's going to be about Sebastian exploring his darkest impulses without moral accountability. Even before he turns invisible, Sebastian is kind of a jerk, a brilliant guy who treats his co-workers with barely disguised contempt, particularly the women, with the one exception of his ex-girlfriend Linda (Elisabeth Shue), who he treats just slightly better because he'd like to sleep with her again. He's also a voyeur, habitually spying on a woman who lives across the street from his apartment; she generously feeds his voyeurism by stripping down to her lingerie every night, tantalizing him, before closing the shades to finish undressing. It's obvious, then, what kinds of things Sebastian will want to do once he's invisible. This is a classic pulp premise, the invisible man who primarily uses his gift so he'll get to see lots of naked women.

To some extent, Verhoeven delivers on this premise, having Sebastian immediately abuse his power for sexual thrills. Tellingly, it's not being invisible per se that gets him off, but the ability to do what he wants without being held accountable. His first sexual assault, walking up to a sleeping girl and unbuttoning her blouse, doesn't necessarily require him to be invisible in order to do it. The invisibility comes in handy only when she wakes up, so he can escape literally unseen. Being invisible doesn't so much open up new things for him to do, it merely allows him to do what he already could've done, except now he can do it assured that he won't get caught. The moral dilemma at the story's core, then, is the question of whether morality disappears with the possibility of punishment and accountability: if a man can do what he wants without anyone ever seeing him do it, what will he do? Unfortunately, Verhoeven seems largely uninterested in these questions, or at least uninterested in the possibility of exploring them in this particular movie. Instead, the film rapidly degenerates into a rather typical, if particularly lousy, horror film.

The second half of the film does have some inventive, tense horror sequences, in which Sebastian stalks his fellow scientists after trapping them in the underground bunker where they work. These sequences revolve around the clever back-and-forth as Sebastian tries to maintain his edge of invisibility, while the other scientists attempt to find ways to track him, from spraying him with various substances to using heat and motion sensors. These scenes have the claustrophobic intensity of something like Howard Hawks' The Thing From Another World, one obvious touchstone among many similar films where a group of potential victims are trapped in an enclosed, inescapable space with a killer. But as good as these scenes sometimes are as slasher/victim duels, it can't help but be disappointing that Verhoeven abandons his premise's moral concepts for such generic fare. Moreover, the final twenty minutes are an absolutely torturous attempt at a big action finale, in which Sebastian seems miraculously unkillable as explosions fill the underground complex. This ridiculous final battle all takes place in an elevator shaft where the last surviving protagonists, Linda and her scientist boyfriend Matt (Josh Brolin) struggle to escape and fight off the half-materialized Sebastian while an elevator literally bounces up and down the shaft, rocketing around crazily amidst the flames. It's a mess, a halfheartedly assembled compendium of action movie clichés that definitively erases any possibility that the film could have redeemed itself with its conclusion.


The film has other problems, too. One of these is that Sebastian is such a jerk to begin with that his gradual transformation into an even bigger jerk isn't really that interesting or morally complex. This should be a Jeckyll and Hyde story, a story about the dark impulses contained in all men, but in this case it's not exactly shocking when we learn that this sexist asshole is capable of rape, sexual assault and murder once he's invisible. The film's subtexts about male sexual voracity are poorly developed to begin with, limited to a handful of throwaway scenes, like the one where Sebastian's fellow scientist Carter (Greg Grunberg) is caught reading a porn magazine and talking dirty to the pictures. If the script, by Air Force One scribe Andrew W. Marlowe, intends this stuff to be a clever way of showing that all men are pigs, let's just say it doesn't work.

In fact, the script is arguably responsible for much of the film's failure, in that it takes a striking premise and then slowly, methodically, wears away anything that might be interesting about it, replacing it with clichés. The dialogue is almost unrelentingly generic, riddled with awkward phrasing and lines of almost astonishing mundanity. It's the kind of script that sabotages any possibility of meaningful acting, and the cast mostly responds by not really bothering to act. Bacon is a sneering cipher, and then he disappears altogether, spending most of the film unseen, acting from behind a rubber mask or various CGI effects. But even then he's not nearly as bad as Shue's sniveling, characterless Linda, who keeps giving in to steamy moments with her former lover Sebastian and then pulling back at the last moment to show she's a good girl after all. She's cheery and empty, while Brolin's Matt is stoic and empty, and most of the rest of the cast are just warm bodies, biding their time in waiting for the slasher finale. Only Kim Dickens, as the veterinarian Sarah, turns in a decent performance, emanating the low-key bitchy resentment that Verhoeven has always seemed to cherish in his female characters.

On the positive side, the film does make interesting use of its special effects. The CGI used here hasn't dated well, as tends to be the case with CGI, and the effects have a blatant unreality that makes them look cartoony. Even so, there's a real sense of wonder to scenes like the one in which an invisible gorilla rematerializes one layer at a time: first its veins become visible, its neural pathways, its muscles and organs, its skeleton, the layers of skin piling on before finally reaching its hairy exterior. Even with effects that today look substandard, the scene amply captures the sense of magic and awe in this scene. Later, when the effect is reversed for the scene where Sebastian disappears, it's equally powerful and unsettling, an image of the human body peeled away layer by layer, revealing what's inside, making us tick, and then obscuring all of those innards as well.

The film comes alive in moments like this. It comes alive, too, in a scene preceding Sebastian's disappearing act, when, in the hallway leading to the lab, Sebastian tells an astonishingly dirty joke. It involves Superman, a nude sunbathing Wonder Woman, and an invisible man, and it neatly encapsulates the film's anxiety about what men will do when granted power and true freedom from responsibility. It's a joke about what happens when someone can do something without anyone ever knowing, and its twist relies on the fact that while Sebastian is telling the joke, the audience suspects that he's implicitly comparing himself to Superman; after all, he's always joking that he's playing God. But it turns out that he doesn't aspire to be Superman, and despite his patter he doesn't really think he's God either. He just wants to be the invisible man. He aspires to be a man shorn of the moral responsibility that comes with having a face, a tangible presence in the world. This lewd, tasteless joke is one of the film's best, most revelatory moments. It's very tempting to attribute it to Verhoeven; it seems impossible that it could be a product of the same script that is everywhere else so lifeless, humorless, and blind to the ideas and possibilities embedded in this material.

The film is undoubtedly a failure, and it's probably no coincidence that after this Verhoeven finally departed from Hollywood, returning to the Netherlands to make his next feature, the creatively rejuvenating Black Book. Hollow Man, though interesting at times, reveals the limits of Verhoeven's ability to play around within Hollywood genre tropes. He seems constrained by his material, prevented from really taking this story to its naturally lurid, morally inquisitive excesses. And a reined-in, neutered Verhoeven is a director who has had his best tools and resources stripped away from him.

TOERIFC: Dancer in the Dark

[This post is prompted by The Oldest Established Really Important Film Club, which will be spotlighting a different blogger-selected film every month. This month's selection is courtesy of Pat from Doodad Kind of Town. Visit the site to see Pat's thoughts on the film and to join the main discussion.]

Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark is a bleak, ugly film, relentlessly grim in its depiction of the rapid downward spiral of the Czech immigrant, struggling single mother, factory worker and would-be musical star Selma Jezkova (Björk). Selma suffers from a rare disease that runs in her family, causing her to go blind at a young age, and she's already in the final stages, losing the last of her sight and descending into blackness. Before she does, she is desperate to work as hard as she can and save up as much money as she can, so that she can pay for the operation that her son Gene (Vladica Kostic) needs, to prevent him from meeting the same fate as his mother. This is a tearjerking premise, and von Trier is intent on milking as much pathos and anguish as he can out of his poor heroine. It's not enough that she's going blind, not enough that she's destitute, living in a trailer and struggling to scrape together the money she needs for her son, not enough that she has a rather pathetic but earnest admirer in Jeff (Peter Stormare), but has no time to foster a relationship with him. On top of all this, she's soon also betrayed by her neighbor and friend Bill (David Morse), a local cop who's despairing because his money has run out and he's no longer able to give his pretty, stylish wife (Cara Seymour) the lifestyle she's accustomed to. This betrayal leads Selma to even lower depths, towards a denouement so tragic it's devastating.

Or, at least, it would be, if von Trier's behind-the-scenes puppetry weren't so blatantly obvious, if the strings he was pulling to set this weepy drama in action weren't so visible. Subtle is not the first word that comes to mind here. If there's anything that von Trier can do to increase his scenario's tragedy, he does it. This isn't a realistic tragedy, and it isn't even a stylized melodrama: after a while, it becomes very nearly a laundry list of the bad things that can befall a person by a combination of bad luck, betrayal and astonishingly terrible decision-making. It's grating, especially when von Trier inserts exaggerated anti-American caricatures, like Selma's co-worker who calls her a "Commie" and tells her, with no provocation, that she shouldn't prefer her homeland to "the US of A." At moments like this, von Trier's hands on the strings slip into the frame, exposing the contrived nature of this whole artifice. The film is an elaborate Rube Goldberg device designed to destroy Selma, and it's an especially cruel trap since it's been set by her own creator, the writer/director who called into being simply because she'd be especially pathetic and easy to tear apart.

Indeed, Selma is a true naif, totally oblivious to the ways of the world, staggering blindly through life — first metaphorically, then literally. She's obsessed with Hollywood musicals, and loves to go to them even after she starts losing her sight; she can still listen to the music, and she has her caring friend Kathy (Catherine Deneuve in a wonderful supporting performance) to explain what's happening or tap out the rhythms of the dances on Selma's palm. She had always imagined America as being very much like the images in the movies, and if reality doesn't always measure up, she daydreams this glamorous Hollywood life into existence. What makes this character so moving, in spite of all von Trier's manipulations, is the sensitive and sweet performance of Björk, who invests this childlike woman with depth and intensity. Von Trier's aesthetics are often distractingly bland and anestheticized; in trying to capture the dull, deadening surfaces of Selma's life, he does it so well that his film looks like a dull, dead TV show, a "reality show." However, he wisely spends much of the film in probing, tight closeups on Selma, and Björk's expressive face, so mobile and unique, conveys the inner complexities of her character.


Björk also provides the music for Selma's daydreams and fantasies, which frequently burst through the prosaic routine of her life, turning tragic scenes into occasions for weird, robotically choreographed musical numbers. These scenes are indescribably odd and off-kilter, the work of choreographer Vincent Paterson, who conceived of Selma's inner life as a kind of kitschy, stiff take on the Busby Berkeley musical numbers she loves so much. Underpinned by mechanical rhythms and repetitive motions, these pieces really do look like the work of someone who has studied and loved Hollywood musical forms but isn't entirely sure how to put them together for herself. As a result, only Selma moves freely through these dreams, twirling and dancing, her flowing motion offset against the awkward, mechanized movements around her. She finds music everywhere, especially in the rhythms of industrial society — the noise of the machines in the factory where she works, the clank of the trains near her home — and her musical numbers as a result have a pseudo-industrial drive beneath the soaring, saccharine Hollywood strings.

Of course, it's Björk's typically quirky, active music and Paterson's choreography that drive these musical numbers. Von Trier's contributions are mostly negative, particularly in the way that he chops up the mise en scène of these performances, cutting to odd angles at a fast pace. His editing does great damage to the musical numbers, fracturing the internal rhythms of the music and dancing, forcing his own distinct rhythms onto the material. It adds an unnecessary disjunctive layer to all the musical scenes, with von Trier's choices jarring against the choreography and the meaning of these interludes as an escape for Selma. In fact, the most interesting aspect of the film as a musical is how unbearably sad its musical interludes are, infused as they are with the knowledge of Selma's tragic life, with the certainty that these are just ephemeral fantasies, unable to stave off the next inevitable disaster for very long. The film thus vacillates between an appreciation of fantasy as a way of making life bearable, and a rather savage denunciation of the Hollywood dream machine for delivering fantasies with no tangible connection to reality.

But then, von Trier's film has just as few threads connecting it to actual reality. The director has often been accused of fostering anti-American sentiment in his later film Dogville, but those accusations seem misplaced; it's Dancer in the Dark that presents a straw America for von Trier to rant against, while Dogville is a much richer, deeper film. Here, von Trier seems to want it both ways, stylizing intensely while making choices calculated to suggest ordinary reality: the flat aesthetic of the non-musical scenes, the unglamorous portrayal of his lead actress, the barren rural wasteland of the setting, overgrown and desolate. One senses that this is von Trier's idea of presenting unvarnished reality, but his cruel control over this supposed verisimilitude is distracting; the minimalist theatricality of Dogville is more honest and, paradoxically, more real. Dancer in the Dark is propelled by a marvelous central performance, and the beautifully strange music that Björk brings to the film, but this only makes von Trier's wallowing in misery especially hard to take. Both Björk and Selma deserve better than this film is able to give them.

Small Time Crooks

Woody Allen's much-maligned residency at Dreamworks Pictures in the early years of the new millennium is generally viewed now as the nadir of his career, the low point for a once-great director who many critics had long since given up on anyway. However, though the first film of this period, Small Time Crooks, represents a clean break from the work Woody had been making in the preceding years, it's a fine, funny film when taken on its own merits. Certainly, this is the most straightforward the director had been since his "early, funny ones," and that's not necessarily a bad thing. Directly after making a trio of his most pitch-black comedies yet — culminating with Sweet and Lowdown, a faux-documentary biography of a misogynistic, drunkard jazz musician — Woody retreated into the simple good humor of this farce about dumb criminals, a conscious nod to his first directorial feature, Take the Money and Run. This film includes some of Woody's most inspired physical comedy since, probably, Sleeper, or at the very least the great helium-fueled chase sequence in Broadway Danny Rose. In any event, though there's still plenty of fast-paced patter, this is the first time in many years that the comic known for his verbal wit allowed himself to fully indulge in more madcap setups. The result might feel like a bit of a step back, a nostalgic film that fits more comfortably in Woody's past than as a product of his mature career, but it doesn't make it any less funny.

The film's central characters are typical Woody figures in at least one way, however: they're average folks looking to move up in the world. The failed bank robber Ray (Woody) and his manicurist wife Frenchy (Tracey Ullman) are discontented, tired of barely scraping by. So Ray concocts what he thinks is an ingenious plot: they'll buy a closed pizza parlor that's a few stores down from a bank, drill a tunnel beneath the shop's floor, and break into the bank that way. They buy the pizza place and convert it into a cookie shop, with Frenchy doing the baking, while Ray enlists three of his crook friends to help out with the scheme in the basement. Woody proves he hasn't forgotten how to stage physical comedy, and the sequence where the drilling immediately ruptures a water line — literally almost as soon as Ray has touched the drill to the wall — is delirious slapstick. It helps that Woody also surrounds himself with a trio of great comedic actors as his larcenous buddies: Denny (Michael Rapaport), Tommy (Tony Darrow) and Benny (Jon Lovitz). The crooks have a naturally funny rapport, particularly in the manic flood sequence or the mathematically impaired discussion of fractions or the scene where Denny tries to convince Ray that their mining helmets look so much cooler when they're put on backwards. Meanwhile, as the crooks are bungling their way through tunnels that lead anywhere but the actual bank, Frenchy's cookie shop is becoming a surprise success, with lines stretching down the block and news crews coming to document the big sensation. The bank robbery is soon abandoned, and the whole crew winds up forming an accidental cookie empire instead.


Ray and Frenchy are like so many Woody characters in that they have a desire to do better, to rise above the lowly hand they've been dealt in life. In this case, they are literal social climbers, nouveau riche pretenders who want to be able to fit in with "high society" — at least, Frenchy does; Ray just wants to be able to get a good cheeseburger and watch a ballgame on TV. Woody mines Frenchy's outrageous taste for some rather mean-spirited jokes about lower-class junk taste, similar to the mockery directed at Mira Sorvino's gauche stripper in Mighty Aphrodite. As in the earlier film, however, the jokes about the tackiness of the decor are tempered by the overall sympathy and affection the film has for the character of Frenchy. Despite the cheap shots at people whose taste runs to leopard-skin-pattern chairs and gold-plated, well, everything, Woody evinces a genuine understanding for both Ray's desire for simple pleasures and Frenchy's perhaps misplaced but no less earnest urge to make herself into a better, more sophisticated person. To that end, she begins hanging around the debonair art dealer David (Hugh Grant), who agrees to educate her in the finer things while making a play for her newfound wealth. Woody's allegiances become clear at this point: he may mock Frenchy's tacky interior design, but he saves his really brutal satire for the portrayal of an avant-garde dance performance where Ray, with ample justification, falls soundly asleep.

Woody's sharp-tongued dialogue propels the film through the sometimes creaky structure of its second half: the drastic shifts and time-jumps in the narrative make it seem like an epic even at a trim hour and a half. The film especially shines, however, whenever Woody is paired off with the great comedienne Elaine May, who plays Frenchy's daft cousin. The chemistry between Woody and May is electric, and their scenes together are alive with the thrill of watching two fantastic comics bounce off one another. May, playing an unbelievably stupid woman, gets some of Woody's choicest dialogue: "he said he reminded me of his wife, who's dead, but I assume he meant when she was still alive." During a late scene where the duo attends a fancy party together, she gets some equally great moments solo — like the way she too-literally takes Ray's advice not to talk too much, to stick to "the weather or something," instructions she follows precisely by intoning a verbatim TV weather forecast to everyone she meets. The film's pacing sometimes goes a little slack in its second half, but it is usually quickly buoyed back up by the great performances from May, Ullman and Woody himself. This lightweight, frankly disposable comedy isn't one of Woody's best, but it's fun and funny, an enjoyable diversion that harkens back to the director's earliest joke-packed episodic comedies.

Comédie de l'innocence

With the eerie, unsettling Comédie de l'innocence, Chilean-born director Raoul Ruiz approaches a Hitchockian psychological thriller with his light surrealist touch, infusing a narrative mystery with additional, even more inscrutable layers of metaphysical mystery. It's typical of Ruiz's surrealism that it often doesn't seem surreal at all — his surfaces are placid, realist, even mundane, and yet his characters seem to be acting at right angles not only to one another, but to the fabric of reality itself. It's a skewed view on the world, one in which nobody is behaving normally even when they're pretending that everything is going as usual. It is a favorite Ruiz theme for a "normal" person to fall into an absurd situation and then simply, stoically accept it, and in many ways that's exactly what happens here.

Ariane (Isabelle Huppert) is an ordinary bourgeoisie wife, a theater designer, painter, and sculptor who pours herself into her art even as she raises her precocious nine year old son, Camille (Nils Hugon). But when Camille, on his ninth birthday, suddenly begins referring to her by her first name and demanding that she take him to see his "real" mom, Ariane reacts with only moderate concern, and decides to endulge the whim. Furthermore, when they arrive at a destination dictated by her curiously changed son, they eventually encounter a woman named Isabella (Jeanne Balibar), who calls the boy Paul and is vigorously embraced as "mommy" in return. Even then, Ariane does not react with fear or anger or even — as she doubtless would if this wasn't a surrealist film — by calling the police. Rather, she invites Isabella to stay in her home while the three of them figure out what's going on. This stoicism somewhat dulls the otherwise intense suspense of the film, since it's difficult for an audience to get too perturbed by Camille's strange behavior and the possibility of his disappearance when even his mother is oddly sedate about the whole thing. But Ruiz doesn't necessarily even want his audience to get caught up in the suspense. The film's weird, detached tone is a conscious choice, and the effect is to highlight the psychological dissonance thrown up around the ideas of family, motherhood, and childhood by the film's central triangle.

In one of the film's most telling scenes, Camille is confronted with questions by Ariane's psychologist brother, Serge (Charles Berling), and the boy reacts with fear and confusion. He's simultaneously hugged by both of his mother figures, who attach themselves to him from either side, forming a bizarre tableau of motherly smothering. And yet throughout the rest of the film, Camille's real problem is not too much mothering, but too little. The film is a broad and scathing critique of the bourgeoisie family structure and the child-rearing practices of the modern privileged classes. There is no sense of true family ties here. Not only is Camille's disciplinarian father (Denis Podalydès) all but absent throughout the narrative, away on unnamed business, but Ariane is utterly detached from her son's life. Even his birthday celebration is drained of fun or joy, and immediately after the cake she sends Camille off on a walk with the nanny, Hélène (Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre), promising to catch up soon, and only eventually arriving much later than she promised. Even Hélène, whose relationship to the family is ambiguous — it's hinted that she might be related to them, and yet she's also sleeping with Serge on the sly — sometimes passes off the task of watching Camille to an unnamed friend. Paternal responsibility has been almost completely abdicated, by the absent father (whose sole words of advice for his son are, "sometimes you have to do what you don't want to") and the inattentive, self-absorbed mother, and even by the nanny forced to stand in for these proper parental figures.

In this atmosphere of uncaring laissez-faire childcare, the other "mother," Isabella, becomes something of a balancing figure, lavishing Camille with motherly attention and forcing Ariane to compensate by at least attempting her own displays of affection and warmth. But the relationship between the real mother and her son is sometimes tainted by a hint of Oedipal feelings, as when Serge finds them cuddling on the staircase and says they look like a pair of "lovebirds." This isn't the only suggestion of incest in the film. Besides the ambiguous relationship between Serge and Hélène (are they related?), the family has an incestual relationship in its past, part of the historical lore passed down through the massive house that Ariane inherited from the generations before her. And this undercurrent finally surfaces in the deeply unsettling ending, in which, after everything has been restored to "normality" and Ariane learns that her husband is returning, she poses for her son's ubiquitous video camera, fluttering her hands seductively through her hair. She's vamping for the camera, and for her husband, and of course for her son as well, and this weird Hollywood starlet moment ends with Ariane staring directly, unnervingly, into the camera.

Ruiz delves into this kind of psychological complexity throughout the film, always leaving things just ambiguous enough to allow for multiple routes through the film's thematic maze. Huppert and Balibar are perfectly cast, the former radiating her usual cool, subdued intensity, and the latter communicating a faintly sinister, manipulative vibe through her all-to-sweet smiles and warm voice. It's a brilliant combination, and the sparks never fail to ignite whenever these two women are on-screen together, even if the overall tone always remains calm and contemplative. There are no fireworks, no histrionics, but the emotion comes across anyway. Their struggle is metaphorically realized within the film by the strategic placement of a drawing of the biblical story of Solomon's judgment, in which the ancient king had to decide which of two competing women was a contested child's true mother. Ruiz takes the time to study the picture, as he does with much of the art strewn throughout the family's mansion, cutting to each of its crucial elements in turn, emphasizing the way the picture echoes the situation within the house.

This drawing remains in the background, and even becomes the subject of a circumspect conversation, during a moody candlelit dinner scene at which Ariane, Isabella, Camille, and Serge form a strange, fractured pseudo-family. This point is underscored by the way Ruiz films the scene, starting at the base of the table with Ariane and Camille to the left and Isabella and Serge to the right, the camera sweeping back and forth so that it angles behind one pair and then the other. This motion calls to mind a scene from earlier in the film, the dinner for Camille's birthday, where Ruiz moved his camera around the dinner table in much the same way (and it's a motion he would repeat around a much more macabre dinner table in his recent masterpiece Ce jour-là). In contrast to the later scene, the birthday party takes place during the day, lit by sunlight rather than candles, and the family pictured is a more conventional one — father, mother, son, and late-arriving uncle — but not necessarily a happier one. The film is not making, as one would think it might be, the conservative argument that the family unit is broken and traditional families are preferable. It's more like Ruiz is saying that families are broken, period, traditional ones just as much as their more unconventional counterparts. The birthday party, when the family is together, is a miserable scene and not much of a model for a happy childhood. In contrast, the relationship between Isabella and Camille provides more of a model for what familial love might be, but even that turns out to be not quite what it seemed.

Such deceptive surfaces are the true core and nature of Comédie de l'innocence, so much so that Ruiz even explicitly makes the truthful/deceptive dialectical nature of filmic images themselves a subject of the film. Camille is constantly walking around with a video camera, using it to document everything he sees. His filming habit at times elicits very different reactions from his mother, who is in one scene driven to tears as he spirals impassively around her with the camera in hand, and in another scene flirts and primps for the camera's steady gaze. The cinema, for Ruiz, is an impassive filter for emotions, equally capable of delighting or upsetting, and often in his films doing both at once. Camille later edits the footage he captures into expressive montages which heavily filter, distort, and process the imagery into a near-abstract blur of sensations, colors, and fragmented images. But these abstract video works later prove to reveal some essential truths about Camille and Isabella. For Ruiz, film tells the essential truth even when it lies by distorting, warping, or exaggerating reality, a maxim that certainly applies to his own films.