New York Film Festival 2011

[Chris Knipp]

SEAN DURKIN: MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE (2011)


ELIZABETH OLSON AND SARAH PAULSON IN MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE

Nowhere to run

This Sundance Institute-assisted film by the very talented young NYU Film School-trained director Sean Durkin begins with its protagonist's dawn escape from the Catskills cult she's been living with for two years. She's followed and approached at a village diner where she's having breakfast by a young cult member called Watts (Brady Corbet) but he lets her leave and she calls her sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) on a pay phone. Corbet, of the Funny Games remake, is naturally creepy here; he plays a key minor role in Von Trier's Melancholia. That call is all we need to see this young woman's desperation and confusion. The title is a spread of names, because typically for a cult, its leader, Patrick (indie vet John Hawkes), gives new arrivals new names. She tells Patrick her name is Martha but he dubs her Marcy May. The skill of Durkin's beautifully shot and well-acted psychological horror movie is in the way it delineates Martha/Marcy May/Marlene's confusion in telling her story. When she is taken to stay with Lucy and her ambitious Brit architect husband Ted (Hugh Dancy) in their big rented lake house in Connecticut, she has no clear sense of space or time, and has lost her awareness of social and sexual boundaries as well.

Durkin conveys Martha's blurry, disturbed sensibility by the seamless, sometimes deliberately confusing way the film slips back and forth between the present and the cult experience, in some parts of which she can't distinguish memories from recalled dreams. The film's sly paradox is that though Patrick's commune had become nightmarish and dangerous enough for Martha to run away from it and it has left her fearful and paranoid, it was also seductive and pleasurable for her. Ironically, because Lucy's and Martha's family history is chilly and Lucy and Ted's judgmental bourgeois sense of boundaries leads them to see her as more in need of disciplining than of love and care, the place she has come to isn't warmer and friendlier than the place she has escaped from. Thus as Martha slips back and forth in her mind from the Catskills cult to the Connecticut household, she not only doesn't know who she is or how she should behave, but also doesn't know where the happy place is. No wonder she spends a lot of her time curled up in the fetal position sleeping.

Martha Marcy May Marlene isn't, therefore, a fun watch and isn't meant to be. The pleasure it gives is in the originality of its vision and its success can be measured in how uncomfortable it keeps you at any given moment. It's disturbing to find in flashbacks that Patrick seems seductive and even nice. He perceives that "Marcy May" wasn't appreciated by her biological family and he and the other cult members promise her a new warmer substitute family where everything, clothing, food, sexual favors, is shared; where she is recognized as "a teacher and a leader." Schedules and habits are new. There is only one meal a day in the evening, shared by women together, after the men, whom they outnumber. They seem radiant and happy despite shabby dresses, which they share indiscriminately. They choose their "roles," what work they will contribute. "Marcy May" becomes a good gardener, as Lucy notes when she has escaped. Patrick has sexual control, but his favors are looked on as an honor and delight. He tells "Marcy May" she is his "favorite." Of course all this is woven in confusedly with the present time where Martha says uneasily with Lucy and Ted.

Martha never tells Lucy where she has been or what has happened, and perhaps surprisingly Lucy never comes close to guessing. This is the viewer's situation in the film's early scenes. We don't know much about Patrick's farm, only that there was a big, shabby house, in the painterly images of the beautiful setting, smiling women, kids playing aimlessly and a little ominously outside. Judicious use is made of sound effects to convey disorder, fear, danger at the commune. But later Patrick's seductiveness appears when, before the others, he sings a folk song he has composed for "Marcy May." Eventually the dark side of the commune appears to us through the flashbacks -- darker and darker. Durkin is astute in portraying Patrick's ways of shaping and converting members subtly, never using shock tactics or exaggerating anything, relying on careful study of actual communes and cults -- but also not spelling too much out for us of the details.

There are climactic elements, underlined by the beautiful images of cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes and the quietly ominous sound design, but somehow the film feels a little too loosely edited in places and a little too open-ended in its finale.

John Hawkes has a key supporting role in this as he did in Debra Granik's Winter's Bone, and as he has himself noted both indie film breakthroughs featured young unknown female stars of beauty, assurance, and star quality, Jennifer Lawrence in last year's film and Elizabeth Olson in this one. Olson shines in the way she shifts from glowing to desperate, tentative to stubbornly resistant, vividly strange to Lucy and Ted, a motherly helper to newcomers at Patrick's cult, a shivering wreck at the two years' end. At the Connecticut house, she challenges her sister, and engages her brother-in-law's brittle wrath. There are a lot of modes here, and Olson slides into each of them as the film slides back and forth from present to past. Hawkes has an interesting role here too, gong from warm and welcoming to sleazy to scary and creepy from scene to scene.

Martha Marcy May Marlene debuted at Sundance in January 2011 and has subsequently been shown at Cannes, Toronto, and other festivals including the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center where it was screened for this review. It goes into limited US theatrical release (through Fox Searchlight) October 21, 2011, UK and France releases February 3 and 29, 2012, respectively.

[Chris Knipp]

JEAN-PIERRE AND LUC DARDENNE: THE KID WITH THE BIKE (2011)


THOMAS DORET IN THE KID WITH THE BIKE

Purity of emotion: love and hope (second viewing)

As I noted in the earlier review in my May Paris Movie Report, in The Kid with a Bike/Le gamin au vélo the Dardenne brothers are "on strong familiar ground," "depicting a troubled boy struggling to get attention from his derelict, immature dad and tempted to a life of crime by an older boy who exploits him." And the Dardennes' discovery, 13-year-old Thomas Doret, who plays Cyril, the 11-year-old reject, is "excellent, if quite uncharming and uncute." But what I ought to have noted was not only the incredible drive Doret has but the emotional wallop the film packs. I was more deeply moved this time, viewing the film again at the New York Film Festival.

It's telling that the Dardennes cast Jérémie Renier as Cyril's derelict dad. Renier was a kid of 15 himself in 1996 when he played the son to Olivier Gourmet's reprehensible dad in the Dardennes' breakthrough La Promesse, and Thomas Doret may well go on to have an acting career like Renier. I noted that Cécile de France, who plays Cyril's working class, hairdresser surrogate mother, adds her usual "perky good looks and soul." But I ought to have added that de France's role adds a sweetness and warmth and hope unusual in a Dardenne film up to now. And of course love, the thing Cyril needs and so ardently seeks, sometimes in just the wrong places.

There has been no moment in the 2011 New York Film Festival as heartbreaking as the scene when Cyril's cowardly dad, forced by Samantha (de France) tells the boy he doesn't want to see him any more, ever, and the boy acts out his hurt and anger in Samantha's car. Then Cyril has his period of going bad, falling for the offer of preference and friendship he gets from the gangsterish Wes (Egon Di Mateo), who merely trains him to assault and rob a man carrying money from his newsstand sales, along with his son. Then comes Cyril's apology and Samantha's agreement to pay the damages, and the later fight between Cyril and the man's son.

When all that is over, and he's been even more decisively rejected by his dad, Cyril tells Samantha he wants to live with her full time, and they do.

I wrote in May that "What's so great with the Dardennes is the irresistible force of the chase, the hunt, or whatever is going on in the somewhat dogged narrative at hand, and a use of actors and non-actors so seamless that one never has a chance to stop and think 'this is a movie.'" Cyril goes everywhere at breakneck speed and he may have a more intense drive than any previous Dardennes character. But his dad stops Cyril, and so does his failure with Wes. So Cyril escapes from the group home, gets into his dad's former apartment, finds his dad, gets his bike back every time it's stolen, even carries out Wes' robbery plan, but it's all as nothing, because he has no one and is nothing till he accepts Samantha. Samantha, as I said in May, is "a saintly woman with tough love." And she's willing to deal with Cyril, even though he's such a handful. When her current boyfriend Gilles (Laurent Caron) says "you have to choose him or me," she says, "Him."

The film not only "ends on a note of hope." It is idyllic, when it shows Cyril and Samantha riding bikes together and going for a Sunday picnic. It suggests that they can have a nice life together, if he stays away from people like Wes in future. This isn't the Dardennes' only highly emotional film. Their films are often full of heartbreak and also full of forgiveness. But the level of hope here is unusually high, and I don't think it's a softening, just an affirmation.

The camerawork by Alain Marcoen is not jerky, as some have suggested. As I wrote earlier it is "(for these filmmakers) smoother than usual." What is also different, as was noted by Jean-Pierre and Luc at the New York Film Festival P&I press conference, are moments of music, powerful bursts of classical strings that evoke Italian neorealism. They said this was nearly a first for them, and that it added an element that was lacking in Cyril's life, the "element of love." I was struck this time by how those short bursts of music introduced to celebrate Cyril add a powerful note of humanism and warmth. This is an understated but very strong addition that I failed to note before but was strongly aware of this time. Again I was struck by the fact that the Dardennes' complete control over their medium, simple and single-minded, keeps our attention riveted for every minute of the film. It's a technique that leaves one feeling exhausted but fulfilled. The film seemed more emotional and more positive to me this time. It doesn't really matter that the directors are on more familiar ground than their previous Lorna's Silence. The emotional power, the intensity and speed of the little protagonist, and the positivity are something a little new, and the sense of things being just a little too much manipulated (but with masters' hands) is really no stronger here than it has been in nearly every one of the Dardennes' previous films. I am more impressed than I was in Paris and think this is brilliant work. But I understand why after so many at least superficially similar works the Cannes jury doubled this up with Nuri Bilge Ceylan's film and I very much understand why that film did not get a prize all to itself. I merely question whether it should have won anything.

I first watched The Kid with the Bike May 18, 2011 in Paris, the day of its French theatrical release. I watched it again October 5, 2011, as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center. The directors were present afterward with Richard Peña, Film Society director, for a Q&A. As mentioned before, the film co-won the Grand Prize at Cannes, sharing it with Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. The film has been bought for US distribution by Sundance Selects, to be released in March 2012.

[Chris Knipp]

STEVE MCQUEEN: SHAME (2011)


CAREY MULLIGAN AND MICHAEL FASSBENDER IN SHAME

A cold wall of sex in Manhattan

Steve McQueen is the Turner Prize-winning British artist whose stunning depiction of the imprisonment and death of Bobby Sands in Hunger (NYFF 2008) won the first-time filmmaker Caméra d'Or award at Cannes in 2008. Hungerstarred Michael Fassbender in a physically wrenching performance that put him on the international map as a film actor. Fassbender and McQueen have teamed up a second time for an equally extreme but far different theme in Shame, a film about a handsome but very cold New York corporate employee who is a raging sex addict. Along with Fassbender, whose character is called Brandon, Carey Mulligan ups the acting level further in an excellent performance as Sissy, Brandon's garrulous and needy sister, a cafe singer, who temporarily moves in with him. Nicole Beharie is fine as Marianne, a coworker who tries to have an affair with the intimacy-averse Brandon, and James Badge Dale is good as David, Brandon's fast-talking boss. This shows that for Fassbender, who since Hunger has been increasingly in demand and delivered some brilliant performances for other directors, particularly Quentin Tarantino in Inglourious Basterds and Andrea Arnold in Fish Tank, demonstrates that McQueen may still be the Scorsese to his DeNiro. This is a collaboration that produces outstanding work. But this being a glass-and-steel study of alienation and lack of affect, it doesn't provide the kind of catharsis Hunger did, nor does its style, though elegant, have the rigor and intensity McQueen achieved in his remarkable first feature.

The emotional numbness of the addict and the sense of desperation are evident from the opening sequence, where Brandon prepares for work, ignoring desperate phone calls (they later turn out to have been from Sissy), masturbating hastily in the shower, walking around in a display of casual frontal nudity that shows the necessary equipment is in good order but the face on the man is wary and strained. Again in contrast to Hunger, which shows a precise progression, Brandon's life of wanks, online porno, quickies with pickups and visits from prostitutes without meaningful communication or friendship, produces a sense of narrative as well as emotional chaos. The question gradually arises, How should we care about this man? The answer is that we slowly begin to feel a mixture of pity and disgust, but the caring comes in with the surprise appearance of Carey Mulligan, nude, in Brandon's bath. No information about the siblings, but he says (logically, since it's true of the actor) that he was born in Ireland but they grew up in New Jersey. It's obvious they share some kind of painful family background, and that they are all each other has. Brandon cannot acknowledge need; Sissy can do nothing else. "We're not bad people," Sissy tells her brother. "We just come from a bad place." Sissy is a lost soul, but her despairing warmth saves the film from being as frozen as the deepest bolgia of Dante's Hell.

There are several memorable sequences. In one, Sissy performs the slowest ever version of "New York, New York" in a stylish cafe watched by David and Brandon. Brandon can't seem to muster even mild enthusiasm for Sissy's performance, and perhaps to compensate, she has sex with David later in her brother's apartment, where she's now staying. Further along, Brandon's date with Marianne begins with awkwardness and a silly waiter in a restaurant and ends without a kiss or a hug. The next day Brandon hits on Marianne heavily at work and they end up in a showy room at the Standard Hotel at the High Line but the fact that she really cares for him makes him impotent. He asks her to leave and calls in a prostitute whom he showily screws up against the big plate glass window. Finally, Brandon goes into a downward spiral into the wild side that includes a gay rough trade bar and a seedy dive where his obscene come-on to a woman in front of her husband gets him beaten up. Meanwhile once again he is ignoring Sissy's increasingly desperate calls, with a dire result that somehow may be positive.

At the New York Film Festival Q&A McQueen and Fassbender showed a camaraderie that was quite the opposite of the film's chilly anomie. McQueen's answers showed his purpose was indeed to make a movie about sex addiction, and Shame was set in New York because true-life informants about the subject were available there and unwilling to talk in London. The director alluded to Days of Wine and Roses but here the addict never acknowledges his problem or seems aware of his downward spiral -- except in the gesture of throwing out his porn collection. The film seems to adopt a detached, aestheticized, almost glamorizing view of addiction, though this may not have been at all intended. New York becomes a hell of sterility and coldness that the two talented collaborators may not have understood as well as London -- a place a little too like Steven Soderbergh's affectless call girl's surroundings in his chilly digital The Girlfriend Experience, though this is clearly a richer and, despite the protagonist's isolation, a warmer film. Cinematographer Sean Bobbitt and editor Joe Walker, who worked on Hunger too, continue their style of powerful long takes, but the familiarly cold Manhattan setting and dislocated sensibility make this more like other films than McQueen's distinctive debut. A hero's struggle for national liberation must inevitably engage more than the conundrum of a dysfunctional modern urban man's inaccessibility even to himself. I would rather that Bach's keyboard music (even the immortal Glenn Gould recordings) were not elicited as a theme. Bach has not been so debased since Silence of the Lambs.

Shame debuted at Venice and was shown also at Toronto; and New York, where it was screened for this review. Fox Searchlight bought the film for US release, planned for December 2, 2011. The French release is to be December 7; UK, January 13, 2012. In the US it has received an NC-17 rating.

[Chris Knipp]

WIM WENDERS: PINA (2011)


PINA IN "CAFÉ MÜLLER"

Modern dance from Germany in 3D

Wenders' appropriately austere, stylized documentary about the German modern dance master Pina will appeal to her fans and students of her work. Philippina "Pina" Bausch, who was born in 1940, was a German performer of modern dance, choreographer, dance teacher and ballet director. She died in 2009, suddenly after a cancer diagnosis, having collaborated on this film. Wenders' film which is in 3D, presents a continuum of Pina's work, usually ensemble dance pieces in a stylized modern urban setting. As the film progresses a succession of Pina's dancers are seen facing the camera in front of the stage of dancers as a voiceover of that person reminisces or speaks of Pina's influence on him or her. The style of the film is as pared down as the style of the dances.

Featured in the film are two of Pina's most noted dances, both originally from the Seventies, first, a version of Igpr Stravinsky's Rite of Spring in which the stage is covered with soil and the ensemble, in loose robes, make energetic, sweeping arm movements; next the lengthy and complex Café Müller, wherein dancers move sometimes haltingly around the stage crashing into tables and chairs arranged as in a cafe that themselves are moved about.

The Pina style is highly surrealistic. Pina Bausch's company Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch acquired a global reputation and influence while touring the world, and debuted in the US at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in the mid-Eighties. The work makes use of elaborate sets and multiple media. The gestures of the dancers often have a mime quality. One of the pieces is featured in Almodóvar's film Talk to Her, in which it helps to establish that film's strange, surreal feeling.

Not being a fan of modern dance or previously acquainted with Pina I found this film intriguing in some ways, off-putting in others. The dancers seemed often very gaunt and sad looking. Some ensemble movements even suggested a crowd of concentration camp survivors. Personally I rather missed the earlier much warmer Carlos Saura music and dance films, the 1995 Flamenco and the 1998 Tango and his Fados (NYRR 2007), which are all enormously entertaining. It seemed to me that relatively speaking this film worked less as musical and dance entertainment and more as a record and homage. However, given Wenders' many fans and Pina's iconic status, this film will have an audience. The 3D here was, arguably, smoother than its use in the NCM Fathom "event" last summer of "Giselle" presented by the Mariinsky Ballet in St. Petersburg. Nonetheless it seemed again that dancers appeared Photoshopped onto backgrounds at times and the value of onscreen-with-tinted-glasses 3D to cover performance events still eludes me. But other viewers at the screening were already admirers and enthusiastic about the film. They urged me to try a second look. .

Pina has been shown at a number of international festivals, starting with Berlin in February 2011 and interspersed with releases in a number of countries. It is included in the New York Film Festival in October 2011, where it was screened for this review.

[Chris Knipp]

NADAV LAPID: POLICEMAN (2011)


YAAL PELZIG AND MICHAEL ALONI IN POLICEMAN

Cops meet kids in the new Israel

Young Israeli director Nadav Lapid's Policeman/Ha-shoter (in Hebrew, with English subtitles) is a first feature that boldly takes on two timely and controversial subjects in Israel: police brutality and social unrest. After two segments devoted separately to these elements, the film brings them together in a violent confrontation in which anti-terrorist special police sent in to stop the kidnapping of billionaires at a wedding party emerge as essentially terrorists themselves. Explosive material, and an exciting finale. Lapid knows how to bring scenes to life. But he still needs to improve in the writing and editing departments because the three segments do not interrelate smoothly and tellingly. In fact they barely go together at all.

The character we meet first and get closest to is Yaron (Yiftach Klein), the most macho of a macho unit of elite antiterrorist Israeli police. We see him at length exercising, then massaging his pregnant wife, then hanging out with his team. Their targets are usually Palestinians and there's some sort of legal case in which they're being held liable for collateral killings of Arab family members. One of the team members appears to have cancer, and Yaron asks him to take the rap, on the assumption that his treatments will exempt him from going on trial. Is it possible there's the further assumption he may die and therefore is expendable?

The antiterrorist cops engage in an exaggerated machismo that's homoerotic and slightly juvenile, hugging and high-fiving all the time, caressing their pistols in front of cute girls and calling each other "warrior." Yaron's pride in fatherhood -- another proof of virility besides his muscles and dangerous job -- is underlined by the way he boasts of his wife's being about to give birth, even posing in front of a mirror holding somebody else's baby to see how he'll look as a dad. The men show off their support of their emaciated, ill member, cutting short a cycling ride to stay within his capacity, promising to take him to the hospital for an important test, and all playfully throwing him into the sea when they go for a swim. Lapid adopts an intense physicality in these early sequences.

When he moves on to the angry young bourgeois revolutionaries the concern is less macho and physical and more esthetic. They are led by Natanel (Michael Aloni), who's as beautiful and blond (and slightly sickly) as Yaron is brutish and ordinary. His co-leader is a small poetess, Shira (Yaara Pelzig), who's all attitude. In fact she spends most of her time pouting and putting down the other guys (Shira, she hints, is the one they "all love") and repeating lines from a revolutionary declaration she is planning on reading to the media at the height of their operation.

This segment is introduced with a bridging scene in which Shira passively watches a group of leather punks totally demolish a small car, which turns out to be hers. She may applaud this gesture because the car is paid for by her parents, whom she despises, but the scene makes no particular sense and underlines the film's lack of good links.

ven the billionaire wedding is a bit awkward because it is staged and shot to look quite rinky-dink (perhaps it's meant satirically?). But once Natanel, Shira, and their little band emerge from their disguises and start terrorizing the party and seizing its main members as prisoners, things become compelling and energetic. When the kidnappers are all together with their prisoners in what looks like a parking garage and notify the press, Yaron and his team are called upon to intervene, following an advance guard of two fake press photographers who take photos of the kidnappers for the cops to use to identify them when they break in. In the event that's hardly useful. The killings are pretty indiscriminate. Before that one of the young terrorists impulsively kills one of the billionaires. This act further highlights the relationship between the killer and his father, a veteran leftist who has come along for one last revolutionary tango but has second thoughts, as do others.

Lapid has Shira underline the link between the elite police and the young extremists by repeatedly yelling in a megaphone "Policemen, you are oppressed too!" But this is mocked by Yaron, whose new problem is dealing with the unheard-of fact that their enemy targets this time are not Arabs but Jews.

In a statement by the director published when the film was shown at the Workshop section of this year's Cannes Festival, he declared that Israel was "socialist, basically egalitarian" in the Sixties and Seventies when "political terrorism rose in western Europe," but now despite the way it's masked by facing the Palestinians as a "common enemy," Israel today "has the widest economical gaps in the Western world" and "below the surface, boils a rage and a feeling of abuse." Policeman, he suggested, is meant to bring this below-the-surface rage to a head in its dramatic finale.

Policeman is more interesting as a timely artifact than as a finished film. Its awkward construction and imbalance in characters -- Yaron is far more fully explored than the young revolutionaries -- keep it from working structurally or artistically. Alissa Simon of Variety views the film as smashing together "two types of tribalism" and suggests that the punks who trash Shira's car and the lesbians and artists she meets at the nightclub the night before the operation are other tribes. Simon comments that Policeman "has a conceptual rigor that doesn't always translate into compelling viewing or even a smooth narrative whole." I think Policeman is drawing attention for its current and provocative subject matter rather than for its execution. "Conceptual rigor" is a slightly misleading term since the film is not so well conceived as a film, despite its bold thinking about national issues.

Several writers have described the acting as stylized, at least on the part of the revolutionaries. This is probably true, and it ill fits with the intimacy of Yaron's scenes at home. There are some good images outdoors and during the violent finale, helped by the cinematography of Shai Goldman, who shot The Band's Visit.

Lapid wrote the script of Policeman at an earlier Festival de Cannes Residence, and the film debuted in 2011 at Locarno (where it won a special jury prize) and was shown at the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center in October, where is was screened for this review.

[Chris Knipp]

SIMON CURTIS: MY WEEK WITH MARILYN (2011)


MICHELLE WILLIAMS AND EDDIE REDMAYNE IN MY WEEK WITH MARILYN

Chaperone, hand-holder, and would-be lover

In this lightweight but star-studded, touching, and richly produced British entertainment from a memoir (adapted by Adrian Hodges), Eddie Redmayne plays Colin Clark, a patrician young third assistant director (and the memoirist), son of the renowned art historian Sir Kenneth Clark, who has a brief romance with Marilyn Monroe (Michelle Williams, again showing her range and skill). This happens during the 1957 Pinewood Studios shooting of The Prince and the Showgirl, which co-stars Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh), who also directs, and is embarrassed to have had to bring in Marilyn to replace his wife, Vivien Leigh (Julia Ormond) -- who played the role with great success on stage, but is too old, at 43, to reenact it on screen. The cast includes Dame Sybil Thorndyke -- played here by another Dame, Judy Dench -- who, having absolutely nothing to lose, is one of Marilyn's warmest supporters. Also on hand for this film is Derek Jacobi, and a bevy of good younger English actors, including Toby Jones, Dominic Cooper, and even Harry Potter's Emma Watson, as Lucy, a wardrobe girl Colin briefly dates until Marilyn sweeps him away.

Marilyn, of course, requires a great deal of attention, and that's where Colin comes in. She drives Olivier nuts by always showing up very late on set, repeatedly blowing even simple lines, and rushing off the set in a tizzy. To reassure her, she has her very own Method coach, the master Lee Strasberg's wife Paula (Zoë Wanamaker) on duty 24/7 to "coach" her. Olivier thinks little of Method acting. In his opinion, if Marilyn doesn't "feel" her part, she should just buckle down and pretend. Paula's coaching mainly means telling Marilyn over and over what a great actress she is. But that's not enough. The blonde star's brand new husband, the playright Arthur Miller (Dugray Scott), decides she's "devouring" him and returns to New York, leaving her alone -- a state she cannot stand to be in.

And so it is that young Colin, who's already proven himself a first-rate gofer and fixer, gets his moment to be the essential man. Marilyn must have company, and warmth, and a little romance. Despite initial restraint, and loyalty to Lucy, he soon relents and falls madly in love with her. He spends a couple of days with her, taking her on a private tour of Windsor Castle -- his godfather Sir Owen Morshead (Derek Jacobi) happens to be the librarian -- and to his old school, Eton (where Ms. Willliams is surrounded by a flurry of real Eton schoolboys and impulsively kisses one), and to a park where the pair go skinny dipping, and kiss. Colin actually spends a night in Marilyn's bed. This happens when she has taken too many pills and can't be reached, and the production staff send Colin up a ladder into her bedroom window. Later she apparently has a miscarriage.

This is a euphoric memoir, not so much about events as about a young man's starry-eyed feelings. It reminded me of Richard Linklater's 2008 Me and Orson Welles, another story of a young man's brief encounter with thespian greatness, Mr. Welles and his revolutionary Mercury Theater production of Julius Caesar. The young man, played by Zac Efron, isn't an Old Etonian with impeccable manners, just a high schooler from New Jersey. But he's romanced too, and dropped, and he too has a backstage girlfriend who becomes disappointed in him. Me and Orson Weles doesn't have the same glitter, but it has good impersonations too, and recreates a moment in acting and stage history and a young man's disillusion.

Eddie Redmayne acts out the enchantment and the disillusion beautifully, but the larger pleasure of My Week with Marilyn is its evocation of the moment. The film was shot in the very Pinewood Studios where The Prince and the Showgirl was filmed in 1957; Michelle Williams acts in the house where Marilyn stayed during the shoot. One is meant to savor the impersonations. Michelle's of Marilyn holds the spotlight as did Marilyn herself during her short life as a star. But this is a traditional English film and hence very much an ensemble work -- a collective celebration of the arts of acting and filmmaking; and the production values, cinematography, sets, music, are golden. It's conveyed to us that despite her monumental insecurities and hopeless background, Marilyn Monroe was screen magic. She had trouble getting her lines right, but when she did, they were zingers. Branagh's serio-comic turn as Olivier is one of his better recent roles; Julia Ormond's Vivian Leigh is tasty and elegant; Dame Judy's Dame Sybil is warm and charming. Dominic Cooper is memorably aggressive as Marilyn's partner and photographer, Milton H. Greene; Toby Jones, appropriately annoying as some American toady.

As Marilyn, Michelle Williams shivers and glows. She can't look quite like Marilyn or be as beautiful. But her hard work pays off in her song and dance numbers; in the way she moves when she wiggles and walks; in the way she fills a dress; and she goes through a wealth of facial expressions. Eddie Redmayne, who recently won two awards, in London and New York, for his performance in the play Red, happens to have actually gone to Eton himself, then Cambridge (Colin went to Oxford, close enough). He is a tasteful, understated actor, and has the fresh face to convey the blushing young man, an amalgam of good manners and eagerness who, as the jealous Lucy puts it, needed to get his heart broken, and happily did. This may not be a great film, but it's impeccable and fun, and it looks likely to draw some attention at Oscar time.

My Week with Marilyn had its world premiere October 9, 2011 at the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, where it was screened for this review. Harvey Weinstein produced, and theatrical release is scheduled for November 4, 2011 in the US, November 8 in the UK.

[Chris Knipp]

PEDRO ALMODÓVAR: THE SKIN I LIVE IN (2011)


ELENA ANAYA IN THE SKIN I LIVE IN

Beautiful surfaces

[w a r n i n g: . . .p o s s i b l e ... s p o i l e r s]

"Austere" is how Almodóvar describes the style he strove for in his new film, The Skin I Live In (La piel que habito) whose story of an unscrupulous plastic surgeon who creates a forced sex change to simultaneously "replace" his lost wife and avenge the rape of his daughter evokes B-horror. "Austere" may sound pretty ironic given the lush beauty of the images, the intensity of the music, the rich, beautifully lit sets, and the handsome actors elegantly dressed by Paco Delgado, working with Jean Paul Gaultier. But in this film, whose screenplay is adapted from Mygale, a noir novel by the French writer Thierry Jonquet, Almodóvar does hold back a measure of his usual humor, jaunty color, and over-the-top campiness. Although there are moments, as when a husky man in a cat suit bares his ass for a surveillance camera so his mother will recognize him, that are absurd and funny. Antonio Banderas, who starred in the director's earliest films, is back, at 51, looking every inch the glossy but slightly over-the-hill B-picture leading man and exercising impeccable restraint as the evil co-protagonist.

"Strange," "twisted," and "surreal" are words that have been applied to Jonquet's novel. Almodóvar has beautifully elaborated and elucidated that original and removed some of the rougher and more poignant elements. As he retells it, the tale gradually reveals its secrets so the revelations are satisfying rather than surprising and odd rather than moving, though the film's images themselves at times provide an exquisite pleasure. Jonquet's very short novel is ingeniously plotted. At the heart of it, as retold here, is a beautiful woman who is kept prisoner and who hates her victimizer but somehow cannot break away from him. It's a gender-bending sado-masochistic tale. A plastic surgeon loses his wife in a car accident in which she is terribly burned. She lives a while, but as her doctor husband is trying to save her, sees her charred, mutilated skin in a mirror and is so horrified she throws herself out the window. A daughter, psychologically delicate, is raped by a young man at a party where they are both high on drugs, hers medicinal, his recreational. She subsequently goes mad and throws herself out the window too. The young rapist works with puppets and with women's dresses and has a feminine side. The doctor kidnaps him and over a six-year period, transforms him into a beautiful woman who resembles his lost wife -- and has a skin that is impervious to fire. Needless to say, the relationship between doctor and imprisoned patient is uncomfortable, and it becomes strangely ambivalent.

The theme is one in which personality is seen as not tied to gender. Nor, evidently, is film quality tied to genre, since Almodóvar is evoking trashy Hollywood film but adding a high-art gloss. As Amy Taubin has written in Art Forum, Skin "effortlessly synthesizes the mad-scientist horror flick; a contemporary resetting of a nineteenth-century grand opera narrative (motored by the desire for revenge and filled with dark family secrets); and the most perverse strain of the Hollywood 'Woman's Picture,' where the heroines are wrongly imprisoned in insane asylums or hospitals and treated as sadistically as lab rats."

The director may see himself as a kind of Dr. Frankenstein himself, and also as a Pygmalion: he has played Henry Higgins to stars like Banderas and Penélope Cruz. His "victims" in this film are Vicente (Jan Cornet), the rapest, and Vera (Elena Anaya). The evil doctor is Robert Ledgard (Banderas), whose ambiguity is perfect: he never seems anything but bland and impeccable. And his victims embrace him, and their new identity. Essential to Robert's elaborate house/clinic fortress is his housekeeper, Marilia (Marisa Paredes), who also seems to be everybody's mother. The prisoner is Vera, forced to wear a skin-colored body suit, sometimes masked, often operated upon, alternately trying to escape, commit suicide, kill Robert, or seduce him and make him her life partner. After an outsider's intrusion, a series of flashbacks describe Robert's daughter (Blanca Suarez) and Vicente (Jan Cornet), and tell us how they met and Vera came to be under Robert's care/control.

I find this film much more fascinating than Almodóvar's last two films, Volver and Broken Embraces, and his most haunting since Talk to Her. However I agree with the opinion Justin Chang expresses in his Variety review , that the director held back from fully embracing the darkness and perversity of his subject and, caught up in making something enchantingly beautiful, fails to get under our skin where we live as much as he should. The images shot by José Luis Alcaine are gorgeous. The interiors designed by Antxon Gomez are so original and handsome I wished I could linger over them longer. Alberto Iglesias' sweeping, pumped-up score is almost overwhelming, intoxicating. There are overt homages to Louise Bourgeois's sexually taunting sculptures, which are related somehow to the handicraft of Vicente: despite his relative "austerity" this time, as usual, Almodóvar provides more material than we can easily absorb. And on the other hand, according to Chang, he has elided some of the novel's "most emotionally rich passages." So once again it seems despite ample evidence of intelligence and rich cinematic talent and more power than other recent efforts, Almodóvar has allowed style to overwhelm substance. The fascinating gender (and genre) themes would haunt us more if there were more feeling.

La piel que habito debuted at Cannes in May 2011, followed by international film festivals and theatrical releases since the spring in various countries. Sony Pictures begins limited US release October 14, 2011. French and UK releases were August 17 and 26, respectively. Shown as one of the gala events of the main slate of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, where it was screened for this review.