Month: May 2014

By Joe Bendel. Think of it as a Sixteenth Century Game of Thrones without the fantasy elements. For first act starters, viewers will meet a queen engaging in truly eyebrow-raising affairs and witness a bloody wedding massacre. France’s religious wars vividly rage in a new 4K restoration of Patrice Chéreau’s Queen Margot director’s cut, which opens this Friday at Film Forum.

Marguerite de Valois is Catholic, but you would hardly know it from her behavior. Notorious for her indiscretions, Margot is less than thrilled with her arranged marriage to the Protestant Henry de Navarre. Supposedly, their union will bring peace in their time, but nobody really believes that—least of all Navarre. Although he has tacitly agrees not to pursue consummation, he visits her on their wedding night anyway, hoping to forge an alliance. Frustrated by the encounter, Margot secretly leaves the palace, seeking a masked distraction. She finds it with La Môle, a destitute young Huguenot with a distant family connection to King Charles IX’s Protestant military advisor.

A mere six days after the ceremony, as Paris sleeps off its revelries, a sudden crisis culminates in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. Ostensibly ordered by the submissive King, the deadly business is planned by Margot’s mother, Catherine de Medici, and executed by her ambitious brothers. More out of defiance than principle, Margot manages to save both her husband and her lover, but becomes a de facto prisoner of the palace as a result. Much intrigue will follow.

Queen Margot is one of the great modern historicals. This is not a polite drawing-room story of men in tights and women in ruffled collars. While boldly operatic in sweep, Chéreau has an eye for grimy naturalistic details. He also serves up generous helpings of blood and sex. Twenty years later, his St. Bartholomew’s Day sequence remains an overwhelming example of bravura filmmaking. As sheer spectacle, it is an orgiastic maelstrom of confusion and violence that has yet to be equaled on-screen.

Although a good twenty years older than the young Margot, Isabelle Adjani still looks the part, rocking the low cut wardrobe and scorching up the screen during her love scenes. Ironically, she has better screen chemistry with Daniel Auteuil as her (mostly) platonic husband Navarre than Vincent Pérez’s La Môle. Similarly, Pérez comes across somewhat boy-toyish when playing opposite her, but his scenes with Claudio Amedola as Coconnas, his sworn Catholic rival, crackle with heat and archetypal significance.

When Queen Margot was originally released, the shockingly serpentine-looking Virna Lisi received the lion’s share of the film’s award attention—and she is rather chilling. Yet, in retrospect, the young Asia Argento often steals the show as Charlotte de Sauve, one of de Medici’s spies, who falls in love with her target: Navarre.

As is sometimes the case, Queen Margot is better cinema than a French history lesson. When adapting Dumas père’s fictionalized novel, Chéreau and co-writer Danièle Thompson frequently chose to print the legend rather than the fact. If you want dry dates and details, google the characters. For those who prefer to sink their teeth into a big, lusty, pungent costume drama, the restored director’s cut of Queen Margot opened today (5/9) in New York at Film Forum.

LFM GRADE: A-

Posted on May 9th, 2014 at 11:59pm.

By Joe Bendel. It was Nabokov’s favorite Dostoevsky work, but he might not have recognized this vaguely British, boldly dystopian adaptation. Simon James is about to meet a new co-worker with a familiar face, who will turn his drab little life upside down in Richard Ayoade’s The Double, which opened today in New York.

James is a mousy Winston Smith toiling away in a soul-deadeningly bureaucratic data processing firm. He works like a mule producing mountains of reports, but the boss, Mr. Papadopoulos, constantly belittles him, never even properly remembering his name. Simon James initially befriends James Simon, his relentlessly confident doppelganger, even completing his paper-pushing assignments in exchange for advice on wooing Hannah, a pale young woman in the copy department. Even though she lives across the courtyard from his Soviet-style apartment building, she has only the barest awareness of James’ existence.

Naturally, Simon soon starts pursuing him for his own satisfaction, while insidiously undermining James’ already tenuous position with the company. As the put upon James’ Orwellian world becomes increasingly Kafkaesque, he starts to act out of desperation.

For those who were less than charmed by Submarine, Ayoade’s sad-eyed moppet coming-of-age tale, The Double will come as a pleasant shock. Even though it often feels like the unauthorized sequel to Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, there is a real vision thing going on here. Specifically, the strategy of recasting Dostoevsky in a dystopian setting is a brilliant way to still connect to the original story’s Russian-ness, while striving for universality. After all, novels like 1984 were conceived as Stalinist critiques, which suddenly seems highly relevant again given Putin’s re-commencement of Russian May Day parades.

Similarly, it is nice to see Jesse Eisenberg step outside his sheepish hipster comfort zone to create two very distinctively pathological personas as Simon and James (or vice versa). His two-handed scenes played single-handedly crackle with tension and bite. Mia Wasikowska’s Hannah is rather drearily demure, but at least she is a convincing blank slate for James to project his yearnings upon. In contrast, Wallace Shawn and Kobna Holdbrook-Smith ham it up something fierce as the company president and security guard, but the effect is much more unsettling than funny-ha-ha.

Ayoade and co-adapter Avi Korine have created a rigorously consistent, dark, and dank vision of an analog future that almost was and maybe will be again. Production designer David Crank and his team did incredible work making it all feel (uncomfortably) lived in. It is an admirably disciplined film that never trafficks in empty surrealism merely to score points with cult movie fanatics. Recommended for devotees of literate urban fantasy, The Double opened today in New York at the Landmark Sunshine.

LFM GRADE: B+

Posted on May 9th, 2014 at 11:52pm.

By Joe Bendel. Is it the violent video games or just bad parenting? Regardless, a gang of high school boys has no remorse for the violent crimes they commit and post on video-sharing sites. In contrast, it is no secret why Lee Sang-hyeon resorts to killing. The grief-stricken father is determined to punish his daughter’s under-aged murderers in Lee Jung-ho’s Broken, which opens this Friday in Los Angeles.

Frankly, a good part of Lee already died inside following his wife’s slow death from cancer. Subsequently, he was not able to give his daughter Su-jin adequate emotional support, and now he will never be able to make amends. Jo Doo-sik and Kim Cheol-yong were the perpetrators of her rape and murder, but there was a witness—their socially awkward classmate, Kim Min-ki. Uncomfortable with his accomplice status, Kim texts the grieving father Kim Cheol-yong’s name and address. When Lee finds the privileged thug enjoying the video of Su-jin’s murder, his rage takes over. He then starts following the trail of the oblivious Jo Doo-sik.

Broken is fueled by justifiable anger, but it is a far cry from typically exploitative vigilante films. Frankly, it focuses nearly as much on Detective Jang Eok-gwan, the cop in charge of apprehending Lee and Jo. Dogged by Internal Affairs for his rough treatment of another murderous minor from a prior case, Jang understands Lee’s anguish only too well. While he admonishes his openly sympathetic junior to play it by the book, the extent of his internal conflict becomes increasingly clear as the manhunt closes in.

Although Jung Jae-young portrayed a similarly driven protagonist in Confession of Murder, he reaches a far higher level of soul-searing anguish as Lee. When unleashed, his fury is palpable, but it is even more chilling to watch his persona collapse in on itself. Yet, it is Lee Sung-min who gives the film its bitterly acidic heart. It is an uncommonly smart and subtle performance from an actor best known for television dramas and smaller feature supporting roles.

Broken also represents a considerable step up from Lee Jung-ho’s solid but relatively conventional genre outing, Bestseller. There are indeed tight and tense thriller elements at work, but the prevailing vibe is one of high tragedy. Lee’s adaptation of Keigo Higashino’s Japanese novel also pointedly critiques a legal system that too frequently compounds the pain of victims, while protecting the guilty. It is a bracing film that takes viewers to some very dark places. Recommended for those who will appreciate the harrowing ride, Broken opens this Friday (5/9) in Los Angeles at the CGV Cinemas.

LFM GRADE: A-

Posted on May 8th, 2014 at 11:34pm.

By Joe Bendel. For cineastes, the notion of divided cities conjures images of The Third Man’s occupied Vienna. In contrast, there is nothing particularly mysterious about the effective religious-ethnic cleaving of Mostar. The bridge has been rebuilt but the distrust lingers between Muslim Bosniaks and Catholic Croats. Unfortunately, Slavko is not the sort of man to personally span that gap in Bobo Jelčić’s A Stranger, the closing selection of this year’s Bosnian-Herzegovinian Film Festival in New York.

Slavko has surely seen plenty of funerals by now, yet the death of his Muslim friend Đulaga still represents quite a dilemma. Although they had not seen each other since the troubles began, he knows he should pay his last respects. However, if he is seen attending the Muslim service, there could be very real repercussions in the neighborhood and perhaps even with the local bosses. On the other hand, if he does not go, he will completely lose the respect of his wife Milena, as well as his remaining shreds of self-worth.

Evidently, Jelčić’s character-types have deep resonance with the local audience, but they will not be so difficult for Americans to relate with. Frankly, Slavko is not a bad man. He is simply a small man. This often leads to minor everyday tragedies whenever he might find himself tested.

In a way, Slavko demonstrates how divided cities do not just cause divided peoples, but also fractured people. He is the “Stranger,” a title that evokes Camus and Graham Greene more than a painfully self-conscious, late middle-aged protagonist. At the very least, he is prone to profoundly darker Walter Mitty flights of fantasy. Yet, we start to wonder how firm his grasp truly is when his grim reveries start to jarringly intrude upon the on-screen narrative.

Bogdan Diklić, a Croatian born veteran of cinema across the Balkans, is a nervy screen presence, completely pulling viewers into his neurotic inner turmoil. He makes it dashed tricky to pass judgment on Slavko (lest we be judged under similar circumstances), even though Milena and Jelčić clearly have no problem doing so. In fact, Nada Đurevska undercuts him rather powerfully as the increasingly disappointed Milena. At times, her body language is quite the scathing indictment.

Without question, A Stranger represents art cinema at its least compromising, yet its themes still have resonance, particularly for those with roots in Bosnia-Herzegovina, or so we should hope. As the closing feature, it played to an impressively packed house, with overflow forced onto folding chairs in the aisles.

Regardless, it is nice to see the festival slowly but steadily grow year-by-year. Always a major event for the expat community, its general interest film following is also starting to build. While the themes are often heavy, patrons will find the festival itself to be friendlier and more relaxed than the other New York film happening that typically precedes it. Highly recommended as a New York film tradition, the eleventh annual Bosnian-Herzegovinian Film Festival came to a close recently, but watch their social media for news on next year’s edition.

LFM GRADE: B-

Posted on May 8th, 2014 at 11:29pm.