1.5 stars

Cosmopolis (2012)

André Crous

David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis is an anti-capitalist snooze fest set in the future, whose sheer incompetence earns its director a firm downgrade.

CosmopolisCanada
1.5*

Director:
David Cronenberg
Screenwriter:
David Cronenberg
Director of Photography:
Peter Suschitzky

Running time: 105 minutes

Though billing itself as an apocalyptic vision of the future resulting from capitalist greed, David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis is a vanity project for him and Twilight star Robert Pattinson. It degrades the director’s brand and contributes diddly-squat to the very topical debate about the battle between the elites of Wall Street and the hoi polloi of Main Street.

The film is recklessly bad. The writing is as vapid as the characters, and the setting – more than two-thirds of the film takes place inside the cork-lined state-of-the-art limousine that transports the main character, 20-something Eric Packer – is not utilised for any purpose other than to alienate us even further. In the process, the film’s potential relevance to our world is completely disregarded.

Whatever possessed Cronenberg to make this film? And to make it in this way? There are so many problems – seemingly a result of total ineptitude, notwithstanding the filmmaker’s résumé – that it is difficult to know where to begin.

The most significant disappointment is probably the time spent with the talking heads inside the youthful Packer’s limousine. Had there been some action or interesting points made by the airheads in the car, or even some tension between them, the viewer might have forgiven the filmmaker for this bland portrayal of the life of a multimillionaire.

The only moment of some interest occurs when Didi (Juliette Binoche), a high-class prostitute, services Packer. Seeing Binoche bob up and down on Pattinson’s crotch is bizarre, but puts a rare smile on our faces. Not just because it is the otherwise classy Binoche doing it, but also because it is one of the few moments in which the characters actually reveal that they might be human after all.

It would be foolish, however, to assume that all the characters are human, as Packer’s wife is very clearly a product in the Stepford line of robotic spouses. Without a sense of humour or even a speck of emotion, she is a complete and utter drone. While it is never clearly stated that she is, in fact, inhuman, this is the only logical conclusion that can be drawn. Perhaps that is a shot in the dark and gives Cosmopolis too much credit, but it deserves to be said that Cronenberg is usually not an idiot.

The film opens with a quotation from Zbigniew Herbert’s poem “Report from the Besieged City”, in which he observes that “the rat has become the unit of currency”. These words very vividly (and pungently) come to life as the city’s 99 percent, the poverty-stricken populace who live on the other side of the financial chasm dividing them from the 1 percent of financiers, walk around throwing rats at the ruling class.

There is no middle ground between the two classes. Cronenberg, who adapted the screenplay from a book by Don DeLillo, likely thought this fact would generate greater tension and present an easier way for him to get his point across about the current trajectory toward class warfare.

Cosmopolis exceeds our wildest expectations of incompetence. It is a self-involved mess: ideologically inscrutable, narratively tedious and visually catatonic. The characters have long dialogues devoid of sound and fury, signifying less than nothing. Consider for a moment one of these characters who speak to Packer in his cork-lined bubble. Played by Samantha Morton, Vija Kinsky is another emotionless android better known as Packer’s “chief of theory”, And yes, she is as boring as her title makes her sound.

The film doesn’t know how – or doesn’t try – to engage the contemporary, pertinent theme of the Occupy movements, though these are clearly the inspiration for the potential for tension, and ends up squandering an opportunity to present them in a coherent and interesting light.

Cosmopolis doesn’t have anything to say and doesn’t even pretend to offer the illusion of saying something of value. Most of the film involves a journey across town to a barbershop, as Packer absolutely insists on a haircut from the barber he has known since childhood, despite the always imminent threat of pernicious barbarians launching an attack on his car. But this long-awaited scene at the barbershop is another in a string of letdowns, as it fails to show a deeper side to Packer and ends way too early. Cronenberg couldn’t recognise the viewer’s need for substance and produces another disappointing scene in an already third-rate film.

The film is an abomination. As images wash over you, your mind will be free to boggle at the film’s inclusion in the official selection at Cannes. The pleasant memories of Cronenberg in top form doing reality-based science fiction in eXistenZ or giving Viggo Mortensen an ambitious role as a former criminal in A History of Violence or a hardcore criminal in Eastern Promises quickly fade in the face of such mind-numbing folly.

The Book Thief (2013)

André Crous

The Book Thief, which seems to shift the blame for the atrocities of Nazi Germany to an offscreen character named “Death”, is one of the worst World War II films that have ever seen the light of day.

Book ThiefUSA
1.5*

Director:
Brian Percival
Screenwriter:
Michael Petroni
Director of Photography:
Florian Ballhaus

Running time: 130 minutes

There is something sadistic about the industry inflicting movies on us on a near-annual basis that have to do with Jews hiding from the Nazis. From time to time, these films have undeniable strength and importance – for example, films that are documentaries, like Shoah or The Night and the Fog, or those that veer close to being documentaries, like Schindler’s List or Europa Europa – but just as often, there are movie producers who are interested in the subject more as a moneymaking device than as a historical tragedy.

This is where things usually fall apart. If the subject of fear is used not to teach us about the evil of the past, but merely as a backdrop to a story about a Christian girl who falls in love with a Jewish boy, and who reads him bedtime stories when he is bedridden, it can only be described as abominable. And that is exactly what The Book Thief is.

The Christian girl in question is an orphan named Liesel (Sophie Nélisse). Her brother died recently in the arms of her mother, who has had to flee because she is a communist, leaving Liesel in the care of a parentless couple. Her new “papa” is the kind-hearted, patient and loving Hans Hubermann, played with grace by Geoffrey Rush. Her second “mama,” of course, is the strict and offish Rosa (Emily Watson), who is sharp-tongued, always finds fault with everyone else, and whom we never grow to like.

At her brother’s funeral, Liesel had picked up a book, and with this book her world, which has suddenly shrunk to a small home on a short street in a tiny swastika-emblazoned town in the German countryside, opens up again, and her relationship with her new father blossoms. She falls in love with books, and after the predictable scene of a Nazi-organised book burning in the town square, she can’t help but take one of the books, even as it singes under her coat, making her clothes billow with smoke.

The Book Thief, which is based on a novel by Austrian author Markus Zusak, may have had the best intentions, but when the street on which the girl lives is called Himmelstrasse (Heaven Street), and we constantly have a narration supplied by no one other than Death himself (voiced here by Roger Allam), and everyone speaks as if they’re on the radio, it is truly embarrassing. And the embarrassment is infuriating because of the importance of the historical context.

For a large part of the film, a young Jewish man, Max, hides out in the Hubermanns’ cellar, and Liesel’s fascination with him, mixed with the secret she has to keep – even from her best friend, Rudy, the boy from next door who never leaves her alone and who, from the way he is acting, apparently had decided to fall in love with her even before they met – could have been the source of an interesting story. But because of the terrible acting by almost everyone in the cast and the very one-dimensional characters they all portray, it is difficult to take anything seriously, despite the terrible setting of Nazi Germany.

The only time when the film packs a punch is near the beginning, shortly before the start of the war, when director Brian Percival intercuts the violence of Kristallnacht with a choir of fair-haired German children singing their hearts out, dressed in their Hitlerjugend uniforms with enormous flags of the Nazi Party draped on either side of them. It is a deeply distressing scene for the viewer, which seems to belong to an infinitely more capable film. It is also a scene whose gravity is almost entirely undermined by one a few minutes later in which Liesel and Max make fun of Hitler’s mother.

But the worst is yet to come. Never mind Liesel effortlessly wading into frigid waters halfway through the film and Rudy diving into the ice-cold river to prove his love/friendship, and neither of them so much as get gooseflesh from the cold: The film ends with almost an exact copy of the final scene of Titanic, in which the memories of a lifetime are exhibited on cabinets for our perusal so that we can all have a nice, warm feeling upon leaving the cinema, knowing that Liesel’s post-Holocaust life was beautiful.

The Book Thief is one of the worst World War II films I have ever seen. It is one thing to try to balance humour with the grotesque events that no man or woman – and certainly no child – should ever have to face, but it is quite another to essentially make light of the events by having a director who doesn’t seem to mind his actors sounding like they are reading from a page just out of reach of the camera, and a story that is incompetently vying for our emotions. Having Death narrate the events is silly, if not appalling, beyond belief, and the whole experience leaves the viewer immensely disappointed, with a desire that someone should have set light to the screenplay.

Cupcakes (2013)

André Crous

CupcakesIsrael
1.5*

Director:
Eytan Fox
Screenwriter:
Eli Bijaoui
Eytan Fox
Director of Photography:
Daniel Schneor

Running time: 90 minutes

One would think the world has moved on past the point where putting a man in a dress is a central source of comedy for a film, especially one directed by Israeli filmmaker Eytan Fox, whose 2002 film Yossi & Jagger established him as the most important director of gay films in the region.

But in Cupcakes, which features “five girls and a homo” as an act taking part in the UniverSong contest (read, “Eurovision,” but even trashier, if that is possible), a flaming queen named Ofer (Ofer Shechter) skirts the surface of transvestism to pop up in every second scene with a song-and-dance number, or just another wig-and-dress combination, to remind us he is as gay as the day is long.

All of this is supposedly in the name of gay liberation, and of “being yourself”, but the message is drowned out completely by the absolutely ridiculous behaviour of the only out gay character. By the way, his boyfriend, Asi (Alon Levi), is famous and closeted, despite his wealthy family’s firm trading on the slogan of authenticity while covering up the sexuality of their handsome heir.  Viewers who know very few gay people may come to the disturbing conclusion Asi is better off staying in the closet.

Of course, we want the boyfriend to be out, but why is there all of this anguish? Does Fox really want us to believe that coming out is such a big deal, when he has a major Jewish character (the country’s bombastic culture minister) openly asking for pork while on a business trip to Paris?

This particular scene in the City of Light has one of the biggest laugh lines of the film, but most of the production reeks with desperately low-budget sets that may or may not be intentionally comical. Even if the director wanted us to revel in a kind of lo-fi musical, the characters are terribly one-dimensional, and the development is exclusively — and predictably — romantic in nature.

But the viewer’s enjoyment of (or repulsion at) the film is rooted almost entirely in the character of Ofer, who all but walks around with a giant spotlight trained on him while he rides a unicorn and has rainbows shooting out of his fingertips. It’s not that his outfits are bad (the only inspired moment is an elegant tuxedo-tutu combination toward the end that shows off his legs), but that there are so many of them we struggle to understand whether this is who he is or whether it is all just a show.

There is something admirable about the message to “be yourself”, but for the purpose of the film, the director has chosen characters who, even if they are being themselves, are only there to make us laugh at their bizarre behaviour. For those on the periphery, like the culture minister in Paris, that is fine, but when characters central to the story are vapid and hollow, the thinking viewer should take offence.

Cupcakes may have a musical’s fluffy intentions of pure entertainment, and if that was all it wanted to be, perhaps it could have been mildly interesting. If we know it is a musical, we are willing to suspend our disbelief when characters start belting out an improvised song without hesitation and in perfect unison. But the film has too few songs, and when the genre is less clear, and the production value is this bad, the product is unbelievable and truly dreadful.

One would like to believe a film cannot be this camp unless it is done on purpose. Many of Pedro Almodóvar’s films have outrageously camp moments or characters, but Almodóvar doesn’t expect us to laugh every time they open their mouths or prance around in drag. He feels for them, and he makes us feel for them, too. Fox has no such desire, and his film is a slap in the face of efforts to present complete homosexual characters that don’t simply conform to limp-wristed stereotypes or angst-ridden closet cases.

Not only LGBT cinema but the world at large deserves much better than this silly little film.

The Beloved (2011)

André Crous

Les Bien-AimesFrance
1.5*

Director:
Christophe Honoré
Screenwriter:
Christophe Honoré
Director of Photography:
Rémy Chevrin

Running time: 140 minutes

Original title: Les Bien-aimés

Just because it’s French doesn’t mean it’s any good.

The Beloved (Les Bien-aimés) tries to be everything and nothing at once, incorporating some terribly dramatic events into a film that shrieks with ostentation yet encourages us to forgive its sins because it is set to the melody of so-called love. Over a period of more than four decades, in a globe-trotting tale played out in locales from Paris to Prague to Montreal, we get a look at the world’s oldest profession with many songs that are somehow supposed to lift the mood but only make the viewer roll her eyes at the exasperating ordeal.

In a very promising opening scene that takes place in Paris during the early 1960s and pays homage to François Truffaut, we see plenty of women parading their legs onscreen. These legs are clearly meant to seduce, and they work their charms a little too well: A Frenchman mistakes Madeleine, a young demoiselle leisurely lingering on the sidewalk, for a prostitute. But she has nothing better to do and, seizing the day for a quick buck, unexpectedly finds her calling.

News travels fast, and before long, Madeleine is approached by every Tom, Dick and Harry for a good time. One day, she meets a young Czech doctor called Jaromil — for some confounding reason played by Raša Bukvić, a Franco-Serb actor who speaks Czech with an accent — and elopes with him to Czechoslovakia, shortly before 1968.

Love can make the world turn round, but it makes this film fall flat on its face, and we know things are going pear-shaped when the actors soon start belting out dreadfully dull songs on the street. The songs are too long, too numerous and too boring to make us care about the characters, and while (or, perhaps, because) director Christophe Honoré tries to jazz up his sets by using bright colours or, on one occasion, lighting his characters with an enormous spotlight, the action has a consistently phoney feel to it.

As the young Madeleine, Ludivine Seignier does bring a certain shine to the boggy waters of the plot, but once she disappears, any interest disappears along with her. As an adult, she is played by the grand dame of French acting, Catherine Deneuve, and Madeleine’s daughter Vera is also Deneuve’s real-life daughter, Chiara Mastroianni. Perhaps the casting of these two actresses as the film’s mother-daughter duo of nymphos could have provided some wonderful moments of chemistry, but in this event, it brings nothing of note to the production and appears as gratuitous as much else onscreen.

Vera quickly takes centre stage and has an interesting face but fails to be a force strong enough to join the rambling series of plot developments. At one point, it seems we should believe she has magical powers of seduction since she more or less turns a gay man straight, but even this ridiculous development has no pay-off since there are merely hints at complex human emotions without any real engagement of the questions raised.

Furthermore, we get scenes built around narrative threads no less bleak than Prague Spring, AIDS and 9/11, without any attempt to integrate such topics in a less than flippant fashion. Honoré tries to be both courageous and playful but ends up with a very cowardly treatment of his material.

By the time the very Czech Miloš Forman (taking over as the elderly Jaromil from the youthful Bukvić) appears as a bumbling fool halfway through the film, serving as a kind of comic relief, it is with a sense of dread that we realize this is as good as it will get.

At 2 hours and 20 minutes, The Beloved is grossly overweight, and despite the 40 years covered in the script, one has the sense we’ve spent half the time looking at senseless close-ups of the mole on Mastroianni’s face and listening to an excessive amount of second-tier songs. The sight of people like Deneuve prostituting her talents for an awful film like this one makes the viewer plunge into despair. There is nothing to love here, so move along.

This is a slightly modified version of the writer’s review that first appeared in The Prague Post.