Three Films Make A Post: Fight back or die.

Harry Brown (2009): For a time there, Daniel Barber’s film about an elderly ex-marine turning vigilante played by Michael Caine, had me thinking it was trying to say something actually interesting about the rights, wrongs and consequences of vigilantism but in the end, it all turns out to be your usual reactionary fantasy about killing the poor and the supposed inefficiency of the law in doing that, not exactly something I have much of a taste for when it doesn’t go so over the top I can stop taking it seriously. This one doesn’t go over the top, but it is also just not terribly great as a crime thriller. The only truly memorable thing is a performance by Caine that suggests a load of emotions and ideas that don’t actually seem to be in the script, Caine showing a touching vulnerability that doesn’t often ring this true in movies about aging and elderly men of violence.

Gosford Park (2001): Keeping with great old men, this is one of Robert Altman’s final films as a director (and his last truly good one, I believe). Usually, the idea of an American playing with elements of the British country house mystery suggests a bumbling tourist not getting anything about class, but this being Altman, that fear didn’t even come up for me. And rightly so, for Altman uses the form (well, the parts of the form that interest him – this is a film that’s half over before the murder happens, and rightly so) to not just explore the British class system between the wars, or the way it already shows cracks, but is most concerned about the way the lives of people intersect in a society that puts the borders between the rich, the poor, and the working rich particularly high, finding heart-breaking moments that prove a murder to be much less important than basically everything else going on around it. Altman also has time for moments of acerbic whit, nods to popular culture of the age (Ivor Novello is one of the characters, as well as a fictionalized producer of Charlie Chan films), all filled with life by a thoroughly brilliant cast and by his accustomed way with organizing large numbers of characters in an intellectually and emotionally impactful way.


Narc (2002): Joe Carnahan’s neo noirish crime film about a former undercover cop (Jason Patric) who accidentally killed a baby during a wild shoot-out pressed into investigating the murder of another undercover cop, and teaming up with the other undercover’s former friend (Ray Liotta), a man even more damaged and violent – and possibly worse – then himself is certainly not a Robert Altman film in style or thought. Apart from a handful of scenes when Carnahan falls into the worst kind of “hey, look at me! I have a digital editing suite” filmmaking, this is a wonderful film. Heated, grim, and appropriately violent, Narc portrays the characters’ world as a cesspool of cruelty and corruption yet also finds time to give even the most minor drug dealer a human personality, does good by fantastic lead performances and also has a really well-constructed mystery at its heart whose solution plays expertly with the audience expectations of the genre savvy without feeling smug.

Arsène Lupin (2004)

Gentleman thief Arsène Lupin (Romain Duris) steals from the rich, mostly by soulfully/smarmily flirting with women while he steals their jewellery from their throats, though right now he’s wanted for murder because he was a bit too good at ducking during a police chase. There’s a lot of melodramatic hither and yon about the possible return of the mysterious person who killed his (thief and savate master) father, a former childhood friend who grew up into a young Eva Green, and the film’s need to play swelling music at every possible opportunity.

Eventually, Lupin finds himself on the trail of three crosses that somehow disclose the hiding place of the lost French Crown Jewels. Other parties are involved too. A secret society with the goal to bring back the monarchy lead by the Duc D’Orleans (Mathieu Carrière), the sinister Beaumagnan (Pascal Greggory) and finally Joséphine de Cagliostro (Kristin Scott Thomas), professional femme fatale and possible immortal evil, are all searching for the crosses. Lupin naturally teams up with Joséphine but there just may be various twists and turns in his future that suggest this to have been not a very good choice at all.

Jean-Paul Salomé’s rethinking of everyone’s favourite gentleman thief is a truly peculiar film, seeing as it mixes French blockbuster style action and adventure, melodrama turned up to Eleven like in one of those French swashbucklers the nouvelle vague directors loathed so much, with a bit of the style of the French serials a la Feuillade the same nouvelle vague directors adored. The resulting film is certainly individual yet also the sort of thing even someone quite predisposed to its style might just hate when she’s seeing it in the wrong mood, because Arsène Lupin is utterly unrelenting to point of obnoxiousness.

It’s not enough for this film to have loudly scored action scenes in a style as old-fashioned as they are on the technical state of the art, it has to have the loudest, most old-fashioned action scenes; it’s not enough for it to be as melodramatic as a French roman feuilleton, it needs to be the most melodramatic thing possible. More often than not, this rather shrill approach to just about everything turns out to be rather effective, perhaps because the film’s overblown style isn’t a product of irony (though there is a bit of ironic humour in the film) but something it has come by honestly by taking itself seriously to a degree that borders on the absurd. On the other hand, the film’s overblown approach does make it impossible for it to be subtle in any way, shape or form, with everyone and everything in it having larger-than-life dimensions, and nobody and nothing having much to do with actual human beings or the actual world we live in. Fortunately, the film clearly isn’t trying for even the faintest whiff of reality, and more involved with working on a palette based on a pretty, loud surface.

Salomé did hire the right actors to perform here, too. While I’m not particularly excited by Duris’s Lupin, and think Eva Green is rather wasted on the damsel-in-distress-with-excellent-uterus (and yes, that’s kind of a plot point, alas) part of Clarisse - in fact, I’d have cast him as Clarisse and her as Lupin – the rest of the cast is absolutely perfect, with Thomas in particular pulling out all of the stops in textbook examples of controlled uncontrolled over-acting that are a joy to watch.

Unfortunately, Arsène Lupin’s general pomposity also results in a film that by far overstays its welcome, with a film that should have ended when a certain character falls down a cliff (you know, when the film’s actual plot is over) droning on and on and on for twenty-five long further minutes that try and (very loudly) fail to pack a full sequel into half an hour, ending the proceedings on the sourest note possible for no reason I could make out.

Technorati-Markierungen: french movies,adventure,pulp,jean-paul salomé,romain duris,kristin scott thomas,eva green,pascal greggory