The Fantastic Five

A.j. Goldmann, Yinan Fitzpatrick Zhang, Paul Barndt, And Tess Russell — Wed, 07 Sep 2005 23:00:00 -0500

5x2

Francois Ozon’s 5x2 is the story of a marriage’s deterioration, narrated in reverse. Its structure brings to mind Christopher Nolan’s Memento and Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible.

The first of five episodes unfolds in a nondescript hotel room, where the recently separated couple Marion (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) and Gilles (Stéphane Friess) meet in secret, trying to salvage what is left of their failed marriage. When Marion shuns Gilles’ advances, Gilles forces himself on her. From there, the film moves backward to scenes from the couple’s wedded life, including a dinner with friends and the birth of their son. The fifth and final section of the film finds the couple in a resort in Italy, where Gilles and Marion are first drawn to each other.

Ozon designed the film from the final scene and worked backwards. At the time shooting began, he didn’t have a complete script, so the actors were in the dark as to how the relationship had hitherto progressed. This made for some unconventional but effective directing. “The first time they [Tedeschi and Friess] were shooting, they were in bed together. It’s easy to get chemistry that way,” says Ozon.

More than any of Ozon’s previous features, 5x2 shows his debt to other filmmakers. Starting a marital drama after the divorce is a trick borrowed from Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage. “I wanted each section to have its own feel. The film begins like Bergman and ends like Rohmer.” He also cited Michael Cimino (The Deer Hunter) and Jane Campion (Two Friends) as influences.

Water imagery figures centrally in many of Ozon’s films, notably Under the Sand and Swimming Pool. 5x2 ends in Italy, where Marion and Gilles fall for each other. The final shot shows the two walking together into the Mediterranean as a golden sunset illuminates the surrounding beach. “It’s a pleasure to shoot on the beach,” says Ozon, “And it’s the best way to see the actors naked.”

Tropical Malady

Few movies right now are as enthralling and original as those of Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who also goes by Joe. His fourth and most recent feature, Tropical Malady, may have won a Grand Jury Prize at Cannes in 2004, and found ardent defenders in the Times and the Voice at the New York Film Festival last year, but it only stuck around for a few weeks in New York theaters. In a certain way, its fleeting presence seemed suitable for such a UFO, a film out of some alien world.

This “mutant monster” of a movie, to use the film’s Thai title, could be placed under many disparate headings. It’s a gay love story, and also a re-imagined fable of Thai folklore. It’s a mystical legend that unreels in our dreams, but it is also a movie that roots itself in the realities of Thailand’s rural Northeastern province.

Apichatpong has called Malady the “evil twin” of his preceding work, Blissfully Yours (2002), and both offer us something like two films in one, each split in half by an arresting disjuncture. Malady’s first part follows the blossoming love between a soldier-on-leave and a naïve country boy. The tone is serene and playful, the pace unhurried by observational long-takes.

Then comes Joe’s experimental blow: the projected light flickers and the screen goes black. The credits roll for the second part, in which the soldier reappears as a hunter tracking a tiger-spirit through a nocturnal jungle, encountering a talking monkey and the ghost of a cow along the way. This second half plunges the viewer into an absorptive space, a jungle at the threshold of visibility and suffused with a pale phosphorescence.

Set side by side, these two slim narratives conjure a diptych on devouring love. But how do they relate? What exactly is this strange, phantasmic second half? A re-telling? A mirror image? A transformation of the inchoate tale? A dark parable that plays off what came before? Maybe even the hidden film lurking within, one that surfaces from the lovers’ unconscious? Each of these mutations is in play.

Apichatpong’s image-sound inventions are just as great a pleasure for the viewer as his conceptual gamesmanship. He has an abiding attention for surface, for skin, for everyday sensations and, the way he grabs hold of fragmentary perceptions can yield a sense of sweetly becalmed torpor or slowly gathering inquietude. His hybrid work melds documentary patience and dreamy myth, overlays tradition and the present, cutting silent-film title-cards and ancient cave paintings. Duration dilates against a richly textured sound track, contributing to the film’s impression of weight and slow respiration. Take a look at Apichatpong’s interest in the play of neon light and sunlight as it irradiates the space of a room or a passage, and he becomes as much an installation-artist as James Turrell, Bruce Nauman, or Dan Graham. In short, it’s a movie that follows a current of feeling, not action; it refuses to explain and instead undergoes a haunting metamorphosis. Watch for it.

The Constant Gardener

As the Cold War Era quickly becomes a distant memory, filming a John Le Carré novel seems somehow outdated, the snarky and satirical Tailor of Panama notwithstanding. Because Le Carré’s intricate plots often make for meandering, stodgy movies, The Constant Gardener is a real surprise, coming across as a complex and breathtakingly romantic movie.

Credit must go to director Fernando Meirelles and his amazing cinematographer, Cesar Charlone; they tap into the grit and vitality of their previous feature, City of God, and graft it on to a more Eurocentric tale of corporate intrigue.

Ralph Fiennes leaves a characteristically charming imprint as Justin Quayle, a mild-mannered British diplomat in Kenya who is devoted to two passions, gardening and his wife Tessa (Rachel Weisz), a fiery political activist who is determined to uncover a pharmaceutical company’s misdeeds against the African people it claims to aid.

Broken Flowers

Even when the film breaks two hours and begins teetering on the brink of tedium, it manages an astounding climax involving desert raiders and a tender resolution where Fiennes shines. If the plot doesn’t exactly provide ample motivation for its characters’ actions, Meirelles’ impressionistic style and evocative imagery more than make up for the slightly uneven story.

Silence, and its interruption, defines Jim Jarmusch’s films; the stream of chatter cut unexpectedly short by an awkward pause, the disjointed conversation between unwilling participants, the knowing silence within an intimate dialogue. In Broken Flowers, Don Johnston (Bill Murray) engages in all these types of communication. Though Jarmusch’s characters are nearly caricatures, their interactions range from the humorous to the poignant, between which Broken Flowers strikes a delicate balance. For example, while Don’s synth-heavy driving music evokes a supremely carefree mood, his life is a landscape of desolation within the physical emptiness of American suburbia. With a plot that risks implosion like a cheesy soufflé, Jarmusch and his cast produce a crème brulée that one can’t resist cracking and savoring.

Hustle and Flow

Summer sleeper Hustle and Flow’s central message of “everybody needs a dream” is not particularly new or remarkable, but writer/director Craig Brewer breathes new life (and even a dose of reality) into this Sundance Audience Award-winning film about a pimp’s attempts to make it in the cut-throat music business.

Brewer expertly captures a sweltering, crumbling Memphis, while still evoking his genuine affection for his hometown and his unwavering faith in its restless inhabitants—ultimately securing our sympathies.

Although the ensemble cast is universally outstanding, the real standout is the young lead, Terrence Howard. His is a gritty honesty that imparts a sense of realism to otherwise banal scenes. Avoiding the clichés of the pimp role, his characterization assumes a more universal weight—pimping is just another job and he’s bored with it. He makes us root for his escape from the “hustle,” as he chases his dream of making his music, his “flow.”

Author's Posts

The Fantastic Five