The Screengrab : juliette binoche

Screengrab Review: "Summer Hours"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:00:00 GMT

The French filmmaker Olivier Assayas is probably best known for Irma Vep, a 1996 update of Day for Night, about the efforts of a movie director (Jean-Pierre Léaud) and his squad of technicians and assistants who were all trying to make a modern version of the silent movie serial Les Vampires, with Maggie Cheung, as herself, slinking about the set in a black cat suit. (My favorite detail may have been the lackey whose job was to hang around Maggie with a little squirt bottle to make sure her outfit stayed shiny.) Since then, Assayas has certainly established himself as a man of wide-ranging ambitions. His movies have ranged from the aging-friends ensemble drama Lat August, Early September and Les destinées sentimentales, a three-hour family drama set in the nineteenth century, to Demonlover, which ended with its anti-heroine, Connie Nielson, ensnared in a Videodrome-like S & M website, where she was last seen trussed up in fetish gear and waiting for her fate to be determined by some kid a million miles away who'd logged on using his dad's credit card, and the trash-fest Boarding Gate. Whatever their subject matter, Assayas's films are always intelligent, handsomely mounted, and intriguing; the one thing they generally lack is a pulse. They're not overly predetermined, like the work of some smart guys who make dull movies, but they do seem more thought-out than felt, and this can make the experience of being bored by them more frustrating than it is at sloppier movies. This is especially so in the case of his provocations, like Boarding Gate, which is like a self-conscious attempt to create the ultimate nightmare fantasy of rough sex and paranoid thrills; fighting to keep from falling asleep while Asia Argento is running around in her underwear executing people and being pursued by the agents of Kim Gordon can make you feel awfully jaded. Assayas's new one, Summer Hours, is as boring as anything he's ever done, but the nice thing about it is, it sounds as if it ought to be boring, thus restoring some of your faith in a logical universe.

The movie opens at a family gathering at the country home of the aged but still beautiful matriarch Hélène (played by the veteran actress Edith Scob). It's a beautiful day, and Hélène, her faithful housekeeper (Isabelle Sadoyan), her three adult kids (played by Assayas' favorite leading man, Charles Berling; Juliette Binoche, in a blonde dye job that takes some getting used to; and Jérémie Renier) and their kids sit in the bright sunshine or run around in the fields while Assayas and his cinematographer Eric Gautier (who also shot A Christmas Tale, a family-gathering movie that could eat this one for breakfast) do everything to make you feel wistful about it all short of parade in front of the camera wearing sandwich boards reading "Youth and Beauty Are as Fleeting as Summer Itself!" When the sunblock runs out, everybody can wander into the house and admire mom's vast collection of paintings, antique furniture, and other artworks, which include the sketchbooks of Hélène's uncle, an artist named Paul Berthier. After this long opening section introduces the actors and establishes whatever character traits they're going to have to work with, Hélène dies, and the movie can settle into the real dramatic work at hand: deciding what to do with mom's stash of collectibles.

You might think that the movie is so taken with the idea that a human being's life comes down to the hoarded belongings she's left behind has something to do with how French it is, and you wouldn't entirely be wrong. (It sure sounds classier, coming from Assayas and his characters, than it does from Nick Hornby's boyish men.) Actually, it was the starting point of the movie because the movie was originally commissioned as part of a plan to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Musée d'Orsay. (So was Hou Hsiao-hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon, which included scenes set inside the museum, and which also featured Juliette Binoche being especially lively in dubious-looking hair.) The actors get to express little irritations with those playing their siblings and to cry over the loss of mom and fret over their kids, but the core of the movie is in scenes where curators from the Musée d'Orsay stamp around the house and discuss how badly they want mom's knickknacks (which are in fact pieces on loan to the filmmakers from the museum) and set aside a moment to tear their hair out when they think about those barbarians at Christie's. (Bincohe, who lives in New York, has flirted with the idea of selling the sketchbooks to Christie's, before coming to her senses.) At the end, there's a set piece that's a sort of inverted version of the opening scene, with Berling's teenage daughter taking over grandma's all-but-abandoned house for a weekend party with all her little buddies, who have their whole lives ahead of them and seem very confused by this, maybe because they haven't yet begun to whole-heartedly devote themselves to building their own stockpile of objets d'art and attaching personal memories to them. But Assayas isn't fooling anybody: he's at least as much in his element when the curators are sitting around being huffy about the quality of Art Nouveau furniture they're being offered as when he's trying to stage scenes depicting intimate human behavior. Summer Hours is probably opening about three months too early: who wants to feel wistful about the dying of the light in May? But it is strongly recommended for those who are counting the seconds between episodes of Antiques Roadshow.

DVD Digest for October 21, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week, a Japanese master gets the Eclipse treatment, and the first wave of 007 Blu-Rays hits the shelves.

DVD of the Week: To those who are getting acquainted with Japanese cinema, the three biggest names to know have long been Kurosawa, Ozu, and Mizoguchi. But while the first two directors have been getting the DVD treatment for years, only a handful of Mizoguchi’s best-known films (Ugetsu, Sansho the Bailiff) have been released on DVD. This week, Eclipse is taking steps to rectify this, by gathering four of the master’s greatest achievements in a lovely box set. Entitled Eclipse Series 13: Kenji Mizoguchi’s Fallen Women, the box set includes four of Mizoguchi’s finest and most poetic films about the plight of Japanese courtesans and geishas, a subject to which he’d return numerous times throughout his career. Two of the inclusions are pre-war titles- Osaka Elegy and Sisters of the Gion- while the others came after World War II, those being 1948’s Women of the Night and his final feature, Street of Shame. One of the most interesting aspects of the box set is seeing the differences between how he observes his subjects pre-WWII and post-WWII. As for the films’ other (considerable) pleasures, I’ll leave those for you to discover.

This week’s recent releases coming to DVD are headed up by two Universal releases which costar Liv Tyler, The Incredible Hulk (Universal, also Blu-Ray) and The Strangers (Universal, also Blu-Ray). But those more adventurous viewers out there shouldn’t require much persuading to watch Hou Hsiao-hsien’s first feature made outside of Asia, Flight of the Red Ballooni (Genius), starring the ever-enchanting Juliette Binoche. Also of note: Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (Universal), and Anaconda 3: Offspring (Sony).

On the classics front, Warner will be releasing two new DVD sets of Looney Tunes favorites: Looney Tunes Golden Collection Volume 6 and Looney Tunes Spotlight Collection Volume 6. And Criterion will be represented this week with their new DVD pressing of Missing. Finally, James Bond is back with new “Collector’s Editions” of both versions of Casino Royale- both the late-sixties lark (MGM) and the lean, mean 2006 take on the story (Sony, also Blu-Ray).

In TV on DVD news, this week brings the latest box set for the seemingly deathless animated phenomenon, Family Guy Volume 6 (Fox). Or if you’re looking for something less oppressively “hip”, today also brings a handful of old-school series: The Incredible Hulk: The Complete Series (Universal), The Man From U.N.C.L.E.: The Complete Series (Warner), and The Outer Limits: The Complete Series (Fox).

Finally, the big Blu-Ray only news this week is the release of the first six MGM-made James Bond titles in the format. James Bond Blu-Ray Box Set Volume 1 (Fox/MGM) includes Dr. No, Live and Let Die, and Die Another Day, while Volume 2 (Fox/MGM) contains From Russia With Love, Thunderball, and For Your Eyes Only. I suppose we’ll have to wait for volume 3 to get more of Connery’s classics, but it should prove worth the wait. Also this week, the bloody trio of Diary of the Dead (Weinstein), Halloween (2007) (Weinstein), and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (Paramount).

Hathaway Hotness, Rourke Smackdowns Head Venice Comp Lineup

Paul Clark — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Today brought the announcement of the Competition lineup for next month’s 65th annual Venice International Film Festival. Among the highest-profile American titles in the lineup was the upcoming Jonathan Demme film, Rachel Getting Married (starring the lovely Anne Hathaway, pictured at right) and the sorely-missed Debra Winger. Another intriguing title is The Wrestler, directed by Darren Aronofsky and starring Mickey Rourke, no doubt eager to try out a new sport after his abortive boxing career. Of course, if you’re looking for something really great, a solid bet would be the latest film by animation master Hayao Miyazaki, entitled Ponyo on Cliff by the Sea, also in Competition.

Other filmmakers of note in Competition include: Takeshi Kitano (Achilles and the Tortoise), Barbet Schroeder (Inju, la Bete dans l’ombre), Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker), Mamoru Oshii (The Sky Crawlers), Werner Schroeter (Nuit de Chien), and Ferzan Oztepek (Un giorno perfetto). Then there’s the directorial debut of Babel screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, entitled The Burning Plain. Expect a trio of interlocking stores and plenty of tortured, writerly multi-culti coincidence.

Here’s the full Competition slate:

Darren Aronofsky- The Wrestler
Guillermo Arriaga- The Burning Plain
Pupi Avati- Il papà di Giovanna
Marco Bechis- BirdWatchers
Patrick Mario Bernard and Pierre Trividic- L’Autre
Kathryn Bigelow- Hurt Locker
Pappi Corsicato- Il seme della discordia
Jonathan Demme- Rachel Getting Married
Haile Gerima- Teza
Aleksey German Jr.- Bumažnyj soldat (Paper Soldier)
Semih Kaplanoglu- Süt
Takeshi Kitano- Akires to kame (Achilles and the Tortoise)
Hayao Miyazaki- Gake no ue no Ponyo (Ponyo on Cliff by the Sea)
Amir Naderi- Vegas: Based on a True Story
Mamoru Oshii- The Sky Crawlers
Ferzan Özpetek- Un giorno perfetto
Christian Petzold- Jerichow
Barbet Schroeder- Inju, la Bête dans l’ombre
Werner Schroeter- Nuit de chien
Tariq Teguia- Gabbla (Inland)
YU Lik-wai- Dangkou (Plastic City)

Strangely enough, this year’s Out of Competition selections are more impressive-looking overall than the titles that are actually competing. Playing outside of competition are new films from the likes of Abbas Kiarostami (Shirin, starring Juliette Binoche), Claire Denis (35 Rhums), Agnes Varda (Les Plages d’Agnes), a new version of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La Rabbia, and short films by Manoel de Oliveira (Do Visivel ao Invisivel) and Jia Zhang-ke (Cry Me a River). Also, there’s a little movie called Burn After Reading by a pair of filmmaking brothers. Didn’t catch their names, I’m afraid.

The 65th Annual Venice International Film Festival runs from August 27 through September 6. Click here for more information.

Indie Box-Office Roundup: Weekend of April 11-13, 2008

Paul Clark — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Move over, Juliette Binoche, Jude Law and Natalie Portman. There's a new arthouse star in town- Richard Jenkins. The character actor extraordinaire, known to many as the deceased father on Six Feet Under, parlayed a rare leading role in Tom McCarthy's new film The Visitor (Overture Films) into the weekend's top per-screen box office take. The film took in a mighty $22,622 per screen average on four screens this past weekend, which promises a healthy overall gross once the film expands wider in two weeks.

Finishing in second place was Fox Searchlight's crowd-pleasing documentary Young@Heart, raking in a sturdy $12,734 average on four screens. The film, about a chorus of retirees who perform rock'n'roll songs, has received mostly ecstatic reviews thusfar, which leads me to think the awful trailer may simply have been a botch by Fox's marketing department.

Making strong showings in the their second weeks of release were last week's top two, Hou Hsiao-hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon (IFC Films) and Wong Kar-wai's English-language debut My Blueberry Nights (The Weinstein Company). Rounding on the top five was the Vietnam drama Holly (Slowhand Cinema).

Also of note were: First Independent's release Dark Matter, whose sturdy grosses can be mostly attributed to the presence of Meryl Streep in a supporting role; Body of War (The Film Sales Company), an Iraq documentary co-directed by Phil Donahue (last seen puking in the trombone); and the weekend's top-performing wide-ish release, Miramax's Smart People. Less successful was Sony Pictures Classics' new English dub of Persepolis, taking in a mere $561 per screen- little more than the already-on-DVD There Will Be Blood.

Top 10: Weekend of April 11-13:
1. The Visitor [Overture Films] ($22,622 per screen)
2. Young@Heart [Fox Searchlight] ($12,734)
3. The Flight Of The Red Balloon [IFC Films] ($11,959)
4. My Blueberry Nights [The Weinstein Company] ($7,292)
5. Holly [Slowhand Cinema Releasing] ($5,994)
6. Dark Matter [First Independent Pictures] ($4,351)
7. Body of War [The Film Sales Company] ($3,850)
8. The Dhamma Brothers [Balcony Releasing] ($3,710)
9. Smart People [Miramax] ($3,700)
10. Priceless [IDP/Samuel Goldwyn Films] ($3,604)

Source: IndieWire.

Indie Box-Office Roundup: Weekend of April 4-6, 2008

Paul Clark — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Think of the kinds of movies that are typically called "arthouse hits." I'm guessing that visions of cred-hungry stars working for peanuts, inspiring sports documentaries, and open-faced moppets of all ethnicities are popping into your mind. The last thing you'd imagine would be new films from the festival-feted auteurs of world cinema. Yet that's who topped the box-office charts this past weekend.

Competing for the top spot were the latest films from master filmmakers Hou Hsiao-hsien and Wong Kar-wai. Admittedly, both Hou's Flight of the Red Balloon (IFC Films) and Wong's My Blueberry Nights (Weinstein Company) had their opening weekend grosses bolstered by the presence of name stars- Juliette Binoche in the Hou, Norah Jones, Natalie Portman and Jude Law in the Wong. Still, a $17,611 per-screen average is mighty impressive for any film, especially one from a celebrated but not-exactly-popular auteur like Hou.

In second place, My Blueberry Nights came in with a strong $12,358 average. But even more surprising was the performance of #3 film Alexandra (Cinema Guild), the latest from Russian director Aleksandr Sokurov. Like Hou, Sokurov has long been a festival darling, but to see the film performing so well at the box office ($9,086 on one screen), in its second weekend no less, is quite the pleasant surprise.

Holdovers from last week's list include The Singing Revolution (Abramorama Entertainment), Embrem Entertainment's A Four Letter Word, and the documentary The Unforeseen (Cinema Guild). Jumping into the top ten in its second weekend of release is the Audrey Tautou vehicle Priceless (IDP/Samuel Goldwyn), which even if it's not looking like a hit of Amélie proportions, demonstrates that arthouse-goers still enjoy their frothy foreign comedies as much as they ever did.

Top 10, Weekend of April 4-6:
1. The Flight Of The Red Balloon [IFC Films] ($17,611 per screen)
2. My Blueberry Nights [The Weinstein Company] ($12,358)
3. Alexandra [Cinema Guild] ($9,086)
4. Jellyfish [Zeitgeist] ($6,338)
5. The Singing Revolution [Abramorama Entertainment] ($6,183)
6. A Four Letter Word [Embrem Entertainment] ($6,017)
7. Body of War [The Film Sales Company] ($4,942)
8. The Unforeseen [Cinema Guild] ($4,317)
9. Shelter [Regent Releasing] ($4,073)
10. Priceless [IDP/Samuel Goldwyn Films] ($4,018)

Source: IndieWire.

World Film Beat: "Flight of the Red Balloon"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 14:30:00 GMT

The new Paris-set film The Flight of the Red Balloon has one of the odder background stories of recent films. It's the first movie directed in the West by the revered Taiwan-based filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien, and is the first of a projected series of movies to be funded by the Paris museum, the Musée d’Orsay. It was reportedly the museum's idea that Hsiao-hsien "remake" Albert Lamorisee's 1956 children's classic The Red Balloon, a short (thirty-four minute) film in which the brightly colored title prop magically follows a small boy through the city. It turned out that Hsiao-hsien had never seen it. The movie he wound up making uses the city and the figure of a small boy and the image of a mysterious red balloon as a kind of tribute to Lamorisee, but mostly as a sort of homage to unversally shared memory, and overlapping creative imagination. In a scene towards the end, the boy--Simon, played by Simon Iteanu--is part of a group that visits the Musée d’Orsay and is shown an 1899 painting by Félix Vallotton’s called “Le Ballon,” which shows a child and a bright red ball; it could almost be itself a reference to the movie that Albert Lamorisee would make more than fifty years later.

The central characters besides Simon are his mother (Juliette Binoche), who works with a puppet theater and lives with her son in a cramped apartment overflowing with books and photos and a piano that needs tuning, and Son (Song Fang), Simon's nanny, a Chinese film student who is working on her own video tribute to Lamorisse, or at least to his city and subject matter. Five years ago, Hsiao-hsien made Café Lumière, another feature-length tribute to an earlier filmmaker, Yasujiro Ozu. Flight of the Red Balloon seems to me to be a much better movie, partly because it's less studied and freer but also because it takes the director farther out of his comfort zone. Hsiao-hsien likes a measured pace, and his films always suggest more than they show. Here, Simon and Song create a still, quiet pool at the center of the film that's pure Hsiao-hsien, but there's a storm forming at the edges in the unexpected form of Juliette Binoche. The delicate-featured Binoche has made her image and her career playing waifs, but she clearly saw this single-mother role as her chance to play, for lack of a better word, a broad, and she runs with it. (She's said that she took inspiration for the role from Gena Rowlands, and in tribute to that actress, she appears her with her dark hair dyed a frowzy-looking blond.) UNsure how to write dialogue or coach the performers in a language in which he isn't fluent, Hsiao-hsien worked in close collaboration with the actors on this picture, setting up the perimeters of scenes and then letting them improvise their way through, and Binoche turns out to thrive in this kind of working environment. She gets to show a new capacity for ferocity here, especially in her telephone monologues, which fill in some contextual back story about as fully and lucidly as it ever gets filled in during a Hsiao-hsien movie. Binoche looks as if she's having more fun than she's ever had in a movie before when she's rampaging around the apartment warring with the neighbors or providing funny voices backstage at the puppet shows. Her softer side is reserved for her son, whose unspoken adoration of her is fully believable. It's still early in the year, but Flight of the Red Balloon makes Juliette Binoche a prime contender for the Movie Mother of the Year award.

DVD Digest for March 11, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week finds the recently-anointed Best Picture Oscar winner coming to DVD, as well as some long-overlooked genre offerings, adrift of sea of junk both old and new. In other words, sort of like every week here at DVD Digest.

DVD of the week: What else could it be but No Country for Old Men (Buena Vista, also Blu-Ray)? The film's DVD contains some interesting-looking featurette, including a making-of with the Coens, but the primary reason I'm including it here is because when a legitimately great film is honored with the Best Picture Oscar, it's a cause for celebration. Say what you will about the falling fortunes of the Academy Awards, but the Oscar name still means something to people, and the award should bring No Country a bigger home-viewing audience than it would have had otherwise. Yes, I realize there will almost certainly be a super-deluxe edition of the film in six months or so, one which will hopefully include an Easter egg of Henry Kissinger: Man on the Go. But especially in a relatively slow week for DVD (no major box sets, no Criterions), I'd say the arrival of No Country in home-viewing form constitutes an event.

In other new releases, this week brings Paramount's tiresomely overhyped Bee Movie; Steve Carell and Juliette Binoche in Dan in Real Life (Buena Vista, also Blu-Ray); the John Woo-wannabe Hitman (Fox, also Blu-Ray); August Rush (Warner, also Blu-Ray); the misbegotten Caine/Law/Branagh remake of Sleuth; last summer's largely forgotten updating of Nancy Drew (Warner); and the anime DVD Appleseed Ex Machina (Warner, also Blu-Ray).

On the classics front, the week's big news is the three new titles in Fox's ever-growing selection of film noir on DVD: Ginger Rogers in Black Widow, Jeanne Crain in Dangerous Passage, and Joan Crawford and Henry Fonda in Otto Preminger's Daisy Kenyon. Daisy Kenyon in particular has enjoyed a critical resurgence during the past year, and I'm eager to check it out now that it's finally available again. Other titles of note include the Al Pacino double feature of ...And Justice For All and Bobby Deerfield (both Sony), and a new special edition of Gattaca (Sony, also Blu-Ray). The week's Blu-Ray-only releases include Dogma (Sony), I, Robot (Fox), and Independence Day (Fox).

Finally, David Huddleston offers his condolences to the following HD-DVD releases:

Bee Movie (Paramount)
In the Valley of Elah (Warner)
Michael Clayton (Warner)
Fletch (Universal)

I don't know about you, but $20 seems a lot to pay for what will likely be used as a Fletch drink coaster in a few months' time. Although if you use it to hold your Bloody Mary while you eat a steak sandwich and a steak sandwich, perhaps it'll be worth it to you.