DIRECTED BY D.J. Caruso
STARRING Shia LaBoeuf, David Morse, Sarah Roemer
US 2007 105 mins.
LA VIE EN ROSE ***
DIRECTED BY Olivier Dahan
STARRING Marion Cotillard, Sylvie Testud, Gerard Depardieu
France 2007 140 mins.
In French, with Greek subtitles.
Don’t mess with my mobile phone, says our young hero (Shia LaBoeuf) in Disturbia, it’s a “violation of privacy”. This is obviously a joke, since he spends most of the film spying at the neighbours through binoculars (so much for privacy), but it’s funny in a subtler way as well – because mobile phones and all they stand for, the gadgets of the new home technology, have so eroded any concept of privacy, from being ‘available’ 24/7 to being forced to listen in on other people’s conversations. Nor is it just mobile phones. We’re all inter-connected now – especially the under-30s – not just in a high-toned humanistic sense but also in the nuts-and-bolts sense of shared information, social networking, multi-player games and online videos. You can find those at YouTube, which is also (significantly) the last word we hear in the movie.
There’s a very simple way to describe Disturbia: it’s Rear Window with teens. What this means, for those unfamiliar with Hitchcock’s 1954 masterpiece, is that Shia is forced to stay cooped up at home – not through a broken leg, like James Stewart, but through court-mandated house arrest when he punches a teacher – and spies on the neighbours for lack of anything better to do after his Mum unhooks his TV and Xbox. He thinks one neighbour (David Morse) may be up to something fishy, in fact may be a serial killer, and checks him out with the help of the girl-next-door (Sarah Roemer in the Grace Kelly role). He also, like Stewart in Window, starts paying attention to the neighbours’ private lives, which is probably the most intriguing strand – the kid, forced into boredom when they take away his digital distractions, starting to become interested in the actual world around him. Alas, it’s not really pursued, the second half turning into cat-and-mouse thriller and finally (unfortunately) slasher movie.
The second half is slightly disappointing. I won’t dwell on the differences with Rear Window, but the most obvious one is that Hitchcock saved his big conceptual joke for the climax – the villain suddenly looking straight at the camera, implicating the viewer as voyeur. The point was/is that cinema is our own rear window, through which we gaze with impunity at other people’s intimate moments – which is why it’s shocking when the people gaze back. Here, we do get a scene when Morse suddenly returns the camera’s gaze, but it’s halfway through and almost insignificant. All it really does is up the ante, setting up the mayhem of the second half – and it’s very well-done mayhem but it seems a bit inadequate, especially since the film hits all the usual thriller buttons. When will Shia figure out the truth? Obviously at the precise moment when Mum is in the house with the killer, prompting a mad rush to save her. Cue running down corridors, villains leaping out of the shadows, etc.
Clearly, it makes commercial sense for Disturbia to go action-packed; but it’s more than that. How can voyeurism be a big deal when it’s now so prevalent? You’re not a peeping-tom when you browse people’s personal videos on MySpace, but only because they (or their friends) put them up there – and the fact that they did speaks volumes for the change in mores. Being implicated as voyeurs wouldn’t be enough of a shock; we do it every day. Which is why we need running down corridors, villains leaping out of the shadows, etc.
Disturbia never gets bad – but it does get ordinary. Why couldn’t we have stayed in Shia’s room, a place so packed with teenage detritus (posters, screen-savers, T-shirts, energy drinks) it’ll someday work as a time-capsule of Western Youth in 2007? The film is irresistible when he’s getting to grips with his environment – including keeping tabs on half-naked Roemer, till she turns the tables – and a lot of it is down to LaBoeuf, probably the most likeable young actor in Hollywood. He made his name as a kids’-TV comic on Even Stevens (now on CyBC!) and can lend a real snap and crackle to smart-aleck dialogue – but like most comics he also has a dark side, and can play rage superbly (as he proved in A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, a part he almost didn’t get because the director thought him too soft). Disturbia starts with him in smart-aleck mode, but then something terrible happens and director Caruso stays on his horror-stricken face – and LaBoeuf holds the close-up for at least 30 seconds, before we fade-to-black and the title comes up in shimmery white letters. It’s rare to find an actor the camera loves so much.
La Vie En Rose also operates round a monumental lead performance; Marion Cotillard is Edith Piaf – known as “The Little Sparrow” and “La M?me” (The Kid), which is also the film’s French title – her performance already being touted for major end-of-year awards. Piaf’s life is fascinating (and very sad), from unsettled childhood to early death, making for some rich material – especially once you add a collection of songs as evocative of la belle France as a man in a beret clutching a string of garlic.
On one level, the film is exactly as you’d expect it to be: a standard biopic – its back-and-forth structure borrowed from Clint Eastwood’s Bird (1988) – taking us through Piaf’s turbulent life, each new crisis accompanied by a song on the soundtrack (it climaxes, inevitably, with ‘Je ne regrette rien’). On another level, it’s quite strange, especially in the second half. Vital information gets omitted: it’s never clear when Piaf gets married, or even to whom (one of her husbands, Theo Sarapo, is never seen); we don’t even know she had a child – much less that she lost it – till right at the end. Things turn jumbled and dreamlike; the film becomes kaleidoscopic, Piaf herself ever more grotesque, life and theatre indistinguishable – literally so when she staggers through the house after her lover’s death and suddenly finds herself onstage, as if in the same movement. The steady rhythm of biography trembles a little, giving way to all-out emotion.
The film’s true subject isn’t Piaf but her voice. It emerges when she’s still an otherwise silent child, enrapturing a crowd as she sings ‘La Marseillaise’; that’s when she knows her voice can bring her love, the one thing missing in her sad life – and she starts to sing all the time, on the street, in a nightclub. Then she meets a svengali who takes her and moulds her, changes the voice, gives her mannerisms and makes her enunciate. That’s when she becomes “Edith Piaf” – but the film cuts out the voice altogether during the big concert when she first attains stardom, making her more than before (a diva, a legend) but also less. Stardom undoes her, bringing temper tantrums and morphine addictions – till at the end, her body wrecked and ruined, she’s come full circle: she’s nothing but a voice again. That’s why the end is so touching, the Big Voice reduced to a small consolation – and still the voice pronouncing ‘no regrets’, after all else has faded.
La Vie en Rose may not be for everyone: it’s unashamed pathos, clutching at the heart-strings. But it’s gloriously shot, stirringly staged and finally overwhelming, and Cotillard even manages a fair approximation of Piaf herself, the way she looked and sounded when she belted out ‘Milord’ and ‘Pavane’ in the 50s and 60s – tousled and blithe, haggard and inspiring. How do I know? Because I saw her on YouTube.
