DIRECTED BY Anthony Minghella
STARRING Jude Law, Juliette Binoche, Robin Wright Penn
UK/US 2006 118 mins.
SCOOP ***
DIRECTED BY Woody Allen
STARRING Scarlett Johansson, Woody Allen, Hugh Jackman
US/UK 2006 95 mins.
London’s changing, everyone says so. Jude Law in Breaking and Entering is actively involved in the changes, being the landscape architect in charge of a project to gentrify the Kings Cross area – but he also finds the changes hard to handle.
There’s a wild fox in his garden. There are immigrants everywhere; Kings Cross itself is “an area in flux”, with smart public buildings cheek-by-jowl with dingy back-streets where hookers still ply their trade. A cop wryly points out that the canal – which Law plans to use “like calligraphy”, to wind around the new buildings – now runs through the place where he was born. A social worker recalls the days when you could wallop juvenile delinquents. No more. Things have changed.
Breaking and Entering is a film about paralysis, and feeling helpless in the face of radical changes. It’s also rather special in being a film by Anthony Minghella, the British-born director who ‘went Hollywood’ – making expensive spectacles like Cold Mountain (2003) – but has now returned to the low-key character dramas that made his name; Breaking recalls his debut, Truly Madly Deeply (1991), also a film about paralysis. In that one, Juliet Stevenson (who returns for a cameo, as a psychiatrist) was paralysed by the death of her husband, lost in grief and unable to move on with her life; in this one, Law’s paralysis is harder to pinpoint – but he’s mainly paralysed by his own inability to be honest (“Maybe that’s why I like metaphors”) and a sense of social chaos, inadequate solutions to pressing problems. He’s also paralysed because he loves one woman but is married (or ‘married’) to another.
The film is wall-to-wall talk – Minghella started out as a playwright – yet it’s filled with a yearning for silence. “Animals don’t talk. Because they don’t lie,” Jude is told, and later Juliette Binoche (as the Other Woman) asks him for sex, “not talk”. Talk is part of the therapy culture, civilised, inadequate. Law’s dysfunctional family talk all the time, but “god forbid we say what we actually mean”. Part of the paralysis is down to an excess of manners, Middle-Class Britain’s hidden desire for something not so civilised, wilder, more exotic – something real, like a Bosnian refugee who actually had to flee civil war.
That would be Binoche, whose pain goes deep, deeper than Law’s bourgeois neuroses; she’s poor, and she lives on an estate, and her son is a thief. Talk won’t solve her problems – which is partly why he loves her. Her son is also into ‘parkour’, the acrobatic running seen in Casino Royale, just like Jude’s autistic stepdaughter loves doing somersaults; the kids are unabashedly physical, as if in reproach to their paralysed parents. Then there’s the hooker who climbs into Law’s car and says she’ll do anything. He just wants to talk, which is typical.
The film’s climax, when talk finally turns to action, is superbly poignant. What comes before is smart but diffuse, often too explicit – as when someone ‘explains’ the fox in our hero’s garden: “It’s the one wild thing in your life, and it makes you crazy” – and likely to bore the teenage crowd at the multiplex (choose your audience carefully before watching this one). It’s a self-conscious film, but it seems to come from the heart. Minghella uses mirrors, shallow-focus, reflections in car windshields – even shoots through a fishbowl! – to evoke a sense of flux and uncertainty, a sadly recognisable feeling of life slipping out of one’s control. It’s the new multi-cultural London, “and it makes you crazy”.
Unless of course you’re Woody Allen, who’s now made two films in London and seems to find it invigorating. Match Point garnered his best reviews in 15 years, while Scoop – generally seen as a minor work – is undoubtedly his funniest since Deconstructing Harry in 1997. This is fainter praise than it seems, because Woody’s recent films have been pretty bad. Still, fans who like the old-style showbiz feel of Broadway Danny Rose (1984) or Bullets Over Broadway (1994) should enjoy this whimsical new comedy.
Why does London work so well for Woody? Mostly because his idea of London isn’t much like the real thing, more like a caricature gleaned from P.G. Wodehouse and Hollywood films of the 40s. A bum note is struck early on, when a speaker at the funeral of a Fleet Street newspaperman praises him for standing up to “small-time racketeers”, a very New York turn of phrase. The hack’s ghost then finds American-in-London Scarlett Johansson and gives her a scoop on the secret identity of the ‘Tarot Card Killer’, leading her and Woody (as a veteran magician called ‘The Great Splendini’) to investigate the British upper-crust. There are private clubs, country houses, lords and ladies. You half-expect a decrepit butler to waddle into view, bleating “Walk this way, sir”.
It must be said that Scoop is unforgivably sloppy. Not only is the Britishness skin-deep, the plot doesn’t even make sense. It starts with a cuff-link being lost and a secretary being killed, but knowing what we know at the end – which I won’t spoil here – is there any reason why that cuff-link should’ve been lost, and that secretary killed? Plotting is incredibly lazy, though perhaps understandable; it can’t be easy for a 71-year-old man to keep writing and directing one film a year like Woody does, every single year for the past three decades.
It must also be said that Scoop is endearingly, delightfully silly. For one thing, it makes Scarlett Johansson Jewish, which no other film has done, or dared to do. In Match Point, director Woody’s avid gaze at his youthful muse was almost embarrassing – but turning her into ‘Sondra Pransky’, who wears glasses and burbles like a bobby-soxer, allows him to join her as a friend, or comrade. Their byplay is often joyous, he with his Borscht Belt schtick – “Sweetheart, you should live long and prosper” – and “sincere” affirmations, she with her Nancy Drew primness and wide-eyed enthusiasm. There’s a wry resignation when he poses as her father (not, alas, her lover) and constantly has to remind himself to stay in character. “And stop telling people I sprang from your loins!”.
Scoop should be taken for what it is, a ramshackle jape set in a tourist’s-eye London. You could do worse than watch it together with Breaking and Entering, starting with Minghella’s tortured tale of middle-class repression, moving on to Woody – who, for all his faults, has never been one to repress himself – and his blithe fantasy of London life. Maybe all Jude Law really needed was someone like ‘The Great Splendini’ to shake his hand, look him in the eye and give him the old vaudeville spiel, delivered in a nasal Noo Yawk stammer: “I say this with all due respect. You’re a beautiful human being, and a credit to your race.” Sincerely.
NEW DVD RELEASES
Here’s our regular look at the more interesting titles released on DVD in the US and UK over the past few weeks. Some may be available to rent from local video clubs, or you can always order over the Internet: dozens of suppliers, but http://www.amazon.com (for US) and http://www.play.com (for UK) are among the most reliable, if not necessarily the cheapest. Prices quoted don’t include shipping. Note that US discs are ‘Region 1’, and require a multi-region player.
NEW FILMS
IDIOCRACY: From the man behind ‘Office Space’ (and, er, ‘Beavis and Butthead’) comes a scabrous and outrageous sci-fi satire, barely released in the US but of
ten hilarious. Extras include 5 deleted scenes. [US]
A SCANNER DARKLY: Drug-addled Philip K. Dick original done as ‘rotoscopic’ cartoon, with Robert Downey Jr at his most hyper. Includes audio commentary. [US/UK]
DIRTY SANCHEZ: THE MOVIE: “Four nutters. Six countries. A world of pain”. A British ‘Jackass’, with similarly gross stunts, including 90 minutes of unseen stunts “deemed too shocking for the cinema”. [UK]
BE WITH ME: Singaporean drama made the Top 10 of both ‘Positif’ and ‘Cahiers du Cin?ma’ (the two French highbrow film bibles), though it’s actually quite maudlin. [US]
WHO’S CAMUS ANYWAY?: Japanese semi-comedy about the making of a film, clever and stimulating by most accounts. Another film (like ‘Be With Me’) from the Film Movement label, so you get an unrelated short along with the main feature. [US]
OLD FILMS
MOUCHETTE (1967): Robert Bresson’s stark fable of abused girl is a great masterpiece, now available in a fine package from the Criterion Collection. Extras include “Au hasard Bresson”, a half-hour documentary about the director. [US]
ROBERT MITCHUM – THE SIGNATURE COLLECTION: A rather odd selection of six films from Mitchum’s long career, ranging from cult classics like ‘Angel Face’ (1952) and ‘The Yakuza’ (1975) to obscurities like ‘The Good Guys and the Bad Guys’ (1969). Best of all is ‘The Sundowners’ (1960), with Mitchum trying a creditable Aussie accent. Commentaries and some featurettes, plus a nice price of $40. [US]
DIRECTED BY DOUGLAS SIRK: More box-set madness! Seven films from a 50s master of melodrama (and occasionally comedy), including his four shining beacons: ‘All That Heaven Allows’ (1955), ‘Written on the Wind’ (1956), ‘The Tarnished Angels’ (1957, my favourite) and ‘Imitation of Life’ (1959). No extras, but priced at a reasonable £70 (bound to be discounted if you wait a couple of months). [UK]
OPERATION CROSSBOW (1965): Terrific WW2 fun, starring George Peppard and Sophia Loren. Extras include trailer and featurette. [US]
THERE WAS A CROOKED MAN (1970): Offbeat semi-classic, a sardonic prison drama; Henry Fonda as liberal warden, Kirk Douglas the prisoner with his mind on hidden treasure. [US]
FILMS OF LUC MOULLET: Lovely Esoterica, Part 1. Two discs of films from a forgotten 60s auteur, Godard-like in his zany sense of humour. One volume has ‘The Smugglers’ (1969) and ‘A Girl is a Gun’ (1971), the other includes ‘Brigitte and Brigitte’ (1966). [US]
THE FILMS OF KENNETH ANGER, VOL. 1: Lovely Esoterica, Part 2. Anger’s experimental, gorgeous-looking, frankly homoerotic shorts include ‘Puce Moment’ (1949) and ‘Rabbit’s Moon’ (1950), here in its original 16-minute version. Obviously not for all tastes, but this kind of rarity is what DVD (and the Internet) were made for. [US]
