TWO OF THE YEAR’S BEST FILMS OPEN ON THE SAME WEEKEND
THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM ****
DIRECTED BY Paul Greengrass
STARRING Matt Damon, David Strathairn, Joan Allen, Julia Stiles
US 2007 111 mins.
RATATOUILLE ****
DIRECTED BY Brad Bird
WITH THE VOICES OF Patton Oswalt, Lou Romano, Janeane Garofalo
US 2007 110 mins.
What a wonderful world we live in! For all the jadedness and been-there-done-that, and people watching films on their mobiles while emailing their friends – as if what they’re watching is entirely insignificant – it’s still possible to be surprised, or awed, or convinced you’ve just seen history in the making. ‘I’ve never seen that before!’ you think – or at least ‘never to that extent before’. It’s even more amazing when two such films open on the same weekend, both among the best of the year – though here’s a strange thing: in many ways, the cartoon is the film for grown-ups, and the film for grown-ups is the cartoon.
The film for grown-ups is The Bourne Ultimatum, which even throws a few political snippets in the mix – “This isn’t us,” says a CIA agent sadly, referring to the new post-9/11 legislation – but is really just one long chase movie. It’s also remarkable, a film for the age of Google Earth and super-computers – a cyber-thriller taking place not in real-time but click-time, the Internet rhythm of disparate places joined by the click of a link.
What’s intriguing and dramatic is that super-assassin Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) still seeks to find out his identity, as if to say no amount of technology can help us if we’re alienated from ourselves. The human element stubbornly survives, as in the various agents who jeopardise their lives to help our hero; indeed, though the CIA can now perform complicated cross-checks in a matter of seconds, human rivalry and conflict persist – notably between the black-ops chief (David Strathairn) who wants to kill Bourne and Agent Landy (Joan Allen) who believes he has a right to know the truth about himself.
Allen played the same role in the previous instalment, the much-inferior Bourne Supremacy (2004); you don’t need to have seen the previous Bournes to enjoy this one, though you may be (slightly) confused when Julia Stiles appears and is obviously known to our hero (“I was posted here after Berlin,” she explains). No matter. The film is so breathlessly crafted it leaves little time for plot particulars. Director Paul Greengrass relies on a constantly-moving camera and almost epileptically fast cutting – there probably isn’t a shot over 30 seconds long in the whole movie – to create a hypnotic sense of perpetual motion. Brilliant editor Christopher Rouse does a lot of ‘sympathetic editing’, e.g. Damon looking at files in one location intercut with Allen looking at different files somewhere else, to create the illusion of coherence – but the film often works on a level beyond coherence, making sense visually and rhythmically.
Note, for instance, the bit where Bourne chases a killer through a subway stop, different shots with similar movement layered together to create a seamless physical music. Then there’s ‘Waterloo Station’, an astonishing set-piece weaving together various kinds of surveillance – the CIA watching a reporter, Bourne trying to guide the reporter without being spotted – at breakneck speed, interspersed with lightning-quick moments of violence. Later on, a fight with another assassin may be the most visceral I’ve ever seen – it’s shot so close you feel physically pummelled by the lurching bodies – yet it retains its coherence, unlike (say) the climax of Transformers. It takes tremendous skill to match random shots so the whole thing flows, as opposed to the flashy strobe-effect one often gets in music videos.
Then again, it’s no good describing this stuff; it has to be experienced. And of course some will find it too fast, and too shaky, and claim it makes them nauseous – and others will complain it has no heart, which is true to an extent, despite Bourne’s uncanny sixth sense (he always knows when he’s being watched) and his poignant quest for closure. Say what you like: when it comes to 21st-century techno-thrillers, it doesn’t get any better than this.
And cartoons don’t come any better than Ratatouille, though a word of warning. Don’t take really young kids (say, the under-7s) to this one; they’ll start getting bored, and you’ll be annoyed because their whining will distract from your own enjoyment (I watched a 10 p.m. screening, which is probably the best way to experience it). This has to be the most sophisticated cartoon ever made, at least once you discount avant-garde animation and the sex-cartoons of the 70s. It boggles the mind that a film about haute cuisine, the fine points of food connoisseurship and (above all) the alienation of the true Artist in a world of philistines has been produced by a studio in America – land of corn-dogs and burritos, as the film points out – and marketed, at least nominally, to children. Even by the standards of Pixar, who’ve raised kids’ cartoons to an art form (see Toy Story, The Incredibles, etc), there’s never been anything like Ratatouille.
Yes, our hero is a rat (named Remy). But he’s a rat with a gift for cookery, savouring the flavours of rosemary and garlic and oregano; we see them as undulating nebulae, paroxysms of pleasure in his imagination – and we also see them, faded and sickly, when his boorish brother Emil tries the same flavours. Clearly, some rats (or people) can taste these things, and some cannot. That’s because some rats (or people) are artists and some are not – a point made explicitly and repeatedly, as you might expect from director Brad Bird who also made The Incredibles (2004). Bird believes in exceptionalism, which is rare in our democratic age; the superheroes in Incredibles couldn’t be ordinary people – it was wrong to try and force them – and Remy can’t just give up and join the rat-race, much as he’d like to.
The film has comedy in the character of Linguini, a young would-be chef who actually has no cooking talent but teams up with Remy (the rat pulls the strings while the human moves his arms and “looks human”); he’s a great creation, given to jerky movements and stammering confusion followed by desperate eruptions, like the young Gene Wilder. The film has suspense, in a letter that proves Linguini is the rightful owner of the restaurant but has been locked away by a spiteful chef (will they discover it in time?). The film has romance, in a fellow chef named Colette who hides a tender heart beneath a ferocious surface. Above all the film has profundity – though maybe it takes a fellow critic to appreciate Anton Ego (delectably voiced by Peter O’Toole), the greatest and most supercilious food critic in Paris, transported back to his first childhood stirrings by Remy’s miraculous ratatouille.
How unlikely is it that a kids’ cartoon would express a basic truth about Art, how it enters (some of) our lives at a tender age and how we then spend a lifetime debating and dissecting, trying to recapture that first magical feeling? About as unlikely as a rat being a master chef. About as unlikely as Brad Bird – clearly an exceptional director, like the superheroes in The Incredibles – turning into an ordinary person, making the cute talking-animal cartoons with fart jokes and musical numbers that parents habitually use to babysit their children. “The key, my friend, is not to be picky,” Remy is informed by Emil as he (Emil) stuffs his face with rubbish – but this rat is paid to be picky, which is why I can still applaud when a film reaches higher, and deeper, than the likes of Shrek the Third. And when two of them suddenly arrive on the same weekend? My cup runneth over.
FRIEND
S OF THE CINEMA: INDIAN FILM FESTIVAL
Not just talking about the Indian Film Festival (which runs from tonight till next Sunday at the Cine Studio in Nicosia) but the autumn schedule of the Friends of the Cinema Society – which presents it in collaboration with the Indian High Commission, and continues to impress with its commitment to quality cinema. Not that Hollywood doesn’t also produce good films [see main article] but, with a new five-screen multiplex now appearing at the Mall of Cyprus, it’s useful to remember that we have alternatives to the usual fodder.
The Indian Film Festival is a wonderful alternative, the six films comprised of two recent releases and four classics. The only slight quibble is that the classics are all on the serious side – it would’ve been nice to show some big Bollywood hits from the 70s like ‘Sholay’ and ‘Amar Akbar Anthony’ – though ‘Pather Panchali’ (1955) is indispensable. This was the film that introduced Indian cinema to the West, a child’s-eye drama of a poor family in West Bengal; it won a special award at Cannes, and remains beautifully lyrical and sensitive (those who like it should check out the other two parts of the Apu Trilogy, ‘Aparajito’ and ‘The World of Apu’).
Also on the bill is ‘The Cloud-Capped Star’ (1960), another much-acclaimed drama – this one set in Calcutta – made by critical favourite Ritwik Ghatak, while ‘Pakeezah’ (1972) is rip-roaring melodrama, and also won plaudits in its day. That leaves Raj Kapoor’s Awara (1951), another glorious melodrama usually counted among Bollywood’s greatest achievements – and the two new films, ‘Dil Se’ (1998) and ‘Koi … Mil Gaya’ (2003), neither of which I’ve seen, though I’ve heard good things about ‘Dil Se’ at least.
All these films are showing at 9 p.m. with English subtitles, and plot synopses may be found at the Friends’ snazzy new website at www.ofk.org.cy – though it sometimes crashes (as is often the case with snazzy websites) and in fact it’s down as I write this so I can’t access the rest of their autumn schedule. I do know they’re showing various films already screened at the Pantheon in Nicosia – notably ‘The Lives of Others’ and ‘La Vie en Rose’ – plus a German Film Festival later on this month, a couple of screenings of ‘The Seventh Seal’ (1957) to mark the recent death of Ingmar Bergman, and the new Lars Von Trier comedy ‘The Boss of It All’.
Good luck to the Friends, long may they continue; we could hardly survive without them. Details at www.ofk.org.cy, or call 96-420491.
