Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train

Ceux Qui M'aiment Prendront le Train is a complex melodrama from Patrice Chéreau that's filled with queer characters. This is one of those gay films from the 1990s that I always intended to watch but for some reason never got around to. It's most notable, I think, for heartthrob Vincent Perez's role as a trans woman, and this role does turn out to be surprising and wonderful. But Those Who Love Me is more interesting for the other characters, I think. They're complex and beautiful and fascinating, especially the ones played by Pascal Greggory and Bruno Todeschini. In any case, this is a very confident ensemble picture from Patrice Chéreau (it also stars Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Charles Berling, Roschdy Zem, and Dominique Blanc), and I liked it very much.

I watched this on DVD, but I think it's streaming on VUDU at least.

Oscar Nominees 2013: Part 9 of 13

A Royal Affair

1 Nomination

• Foreign Language Film: Denmark (In a Better World, After the Wedding, Waltzing Regitze, Pelle the Conqueror, Babette's Feast, Harry and the Butler, Paw, Qivitoq)

Director: Nikolaj Arcel

Cast: Mads Mikkelsen, Alicia Vikander, Mikkel Boe Følsgaard, David Dencik, Trine Dyrholm, Harriet Walter, Cyron Melville, Charlotte Rampling

An intriguing and opulent political thriller involving madness, a ridiculous amount of prostitution, and the writings of Voltaire. This is the kind of movie that Patrice Chéreau or Régis Wargnier used to make – the type of movie that used to do really well in this category and usually starred Isabelle Adjani or Gérard Depardieu and occasionally both of them. A Royal Affair's attractiveness is also due to its excellent acting talent. Its lead actor is international film star Mads Mikkelsen, and the other lead roles are played by Alicia Vikander (who was in Joe Wright's Anna Karenina this year) and Mikkel Boe Følsgaard, whose performance I've praised here and here. The acting is excellent, the plot is fascinating, and the location is sumptuous. All of this is quite a winning combination – not for Oscar, mind you, but you will enjoy the film if you rent it. Competition in this category is way too steep for Denmark to win again so soon.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #24 out of 64

No

1 Nomination

• Foreign Language Film: Chile

Director: Pablo Larraín

Cast: Gabriel García Bernal, Antonia Zegers, Alfredo Castro, Néstor Cantillana, Jaime Vadell, Marcial Tagle, Luis Gnecco

A very funny political thriller about the plebiscite in Chile in 1988, this film also stars an internationally known acting talent, Mexican star Gabriel García Bernal. Pablo Larraín's movie is the first film submitted by Chile ever to be nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. The whole thing is quite a coup. But No is a bit of a difficult film, an artistic experiment in returning to 1980s-style filmmaking that many viewers might find irritating. In any case, Chile, I am sure, is simply happy to be invited to the party. I found this film to be a fascinating perspective on an important historical period in South American history. That it is also quite a funny film is a testament to Larraín's considerable filmmaking skill.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: Not ranked – 2013 Release

War Witch

1 Nomination

• Foreign Language Film: Canada (Monsieur Lazhar, Incendies, Water, The Barbarian Invasions, Jesus of Montreal, The Decline of the American Empire)

Director: Kim Nguyen

Cast: Rachel Mwanza,Serge Kanyinda, Ralph Prosper, Alain Lino Mic Eli Bastien, Mizinga Mwinga, Diana Uwamahoro

This movie is excellent and is also about an important international phenomenon – the use of child soldiers in warfare. War Witch is Canada's third nomination in this category in as many years: they have clearly hit upon a winning formula for choosing films that will be selected by the Academy. And this one is the best of their selections since Deepa Mehta's Water. War Witch is deeply moving, beautifully filmed, and also incredibly theatrical, using storytelling techniques that reminded me of Alejandro González Iñárritu's superb Biutiful. Kim Nguyen's film is not uplifting or about "the indomitable nature of the human spirit" or anything like that. Instead, it's simply good storytelling about inhuman violence. Side note: Rebelle, War Witch's original title in French, is also the title Disney used when it released the cartoon-adventure Brave in France. Du plaisir pour toute la famille!

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: Not ranked – 2013 Release

Telluride at Dartmouth #2

Last night's film was Nikolaj Arcel's A Royal Affair (in Danish – En Kongelig Affære) which stars Mads Mikkelsen (who you might recognize as the villain Le Chiffre from the Bond-movie Casino Royale, but who is much more important as the brother Jacob in Susanne Bier's After the Wedding).

A Royal Affair also stars Alicia Vikander and (in an amazing performance) Mikkel Boe Følsgaard as Denmark's King Christian VII. Arcel's film is a beautiful costume-piece, a historical epic about 18th-century Denmark and the country's movement towards the Enlightenment, greater freedoms for its citizenry, and the end of serfdom.

The film's main character is the Christian's queen Caroline, who was an English royal, sent to Denmark as the King's bride. The King, as it turns out, is either insane or incredibly moody, and the Queen's life is decidedly unhappy.

Mikkelsen plays an avid reader of Voltaire and Rousseau who is also a surgeon. He becomes, through a series of intrigues, Christian's personal physician, and comes to the palace in Copenhagen to live. Drama ensues as the Queen and the doctor begin to fall in love and the King becomes more and more ill. The Enlightenment, of course, also has its enemies, and even if the two were not in love, they would have been targeted by other forces among the nobility and the church. The stakes are quite high, indeed.

Arcel films this story like one of the French historical epics from the 1980s – something like Bruno Nuytten's Camille Claudel or Patrice Chéreau's La Reine Margot or one of the Jean-Paul Rappeneau historical epics (films like The Horseman on the Roof or Cyrano de Bergerac). A Royal Affair is much better made than a film like Jean-Marc Vallée's The Young Victoria.

Denmark has not, of late, selected films like this as its submission for the Foreign Language Film Oscar, but this may be the year, depending on how good this year's Susanne Bier movie is. (We find out tomorrow, September 18th, in any case.)

I found A Royal Affair quite moving. Its subjects are fascinating, its costumes are gorgeous (I cannot imagine it not getting an Oscar nomination for this. I mean, if Anonymous can get one...), and the acting is wonderful. I was a fan.

Formal Exercises

Last night I saw Little Children, the new film from In the Bedroom director Todd Field. I loved In the Bedroom, as you might recall, but Little Children I found difficult, distanced, overly formal, and nowhere near as good as John Curran's We Don't Live Here Anymore. The actors are wonderful, particularly Jackie Earle Haley, Patrick Wilson and Phyllis Somerville. Actually, I loved the entire cast, with the exception of Mary B. McCann's ridiculously played one-note performance as a suburban mother. The film exercises a formal device, namely voice over intended (I assume) to distance the film's viewers from the action of the film, as though the entire thing were an elaborate case study—some kind of microcosm of Americana. The device works if this is the intended effect, but it also put me off the film entirely. I felt far removed from the characters, their petty, suburban problems, and I felt ridicule rise in my gut whenever they expressed any kind of pain. The voice over, by distancing me from the characters' lives, made me think their lives ridiculous. When the final horrifying reveal occurred at the end (a Caché moment like nothing else this year) the whole thing seemed even clearer to me: how dare these happy, gorgeous suburbanites complain about anything when there are people with real problems, real pain, living just next door.

Patrice Chéreau's Gabrielle uses an even larger number of formal devices in its exploration of marital unhappiness at the turn of the twentieth century, but this film I responded positively to. Chéreau (whose work I almost always admire) uses black-and-white as well as color photography throughout the picture as well as the astonishing convention of title cards in key emotional moments. It's an incredibly intriguing choice with the resulting creation of very real intimacy with the characters. The film, which is based on The Return, a short story by Joseph Conrad, mines the depths of a relationship's failure after a woman leaves her husband and then returns, incapable of her act, four hours later. Isabelle Huppert (always brilliant) and Pascal Greggory are fantastic as the couple in question and the film is painful, beautiful and, at times, truly disturbing. The score, by Fabio Vacchi, which sounds more than anything like Igor Stravinsky, is passionate, enormous and unquestionably modern. It's a fascinating film.

François Ozon's Latest

I find François Ozon totally intriguing, of course. He has a stagey quality to his work which I find challenging, encouraging and exciting. His films (the ones I've seen, naturally) also have this air of mystery about them always, as though I am, perhaps, missing something.

Last night I watched his latest, a film called Time to Leave (Le Temps Qui Reste). The title's translation doesn't look accurate to me, but what do I know about French? At any rate, the film is beautiful. It's a poetic end-of-life piece about a young photographer who finds out he has only a few months to live. Once given the information, he proceeds to hurt everyone in his life, telling none of them that he is dying.

In a sane world, the lead actor, Melvil Popaud, would be the first real frontrunner for 2006's Best Actor Oscar. Popaud is outstanding: cruel, difficult, sensitive and fragile all rolled into a face that vaguely resembles Casey Affleck's if Casey Affleck were really, really hot (which, for the record, I don't think he is.) The film also features—drumroll, please—film legend Jeanne Moreau as our photographer's grandmother. It's a wonderful performance filled with regret and anger and blood.

Time to Leave, for me, has a lot of similarities to Patrice Chéreau's Son Frère, mostly because it, too, is an end of life film featuring a prominent gay character. The two films, both rather short (Time to Leave clocks in at around 80 minutes—typical for Ozon) would probably make for a nice double-feature evening, albeit a somber one.

This is an excellent film, full of interesting character work and poetic beauty. Ozon is to be commended, though I think this film is more of a departure from his usual work than anything else.

Recommended, but only if you're a gay man or don't get weirded out by gay sex. There is one rather graphic scene that I know most of my straight friends would rather never see... so don't say I recommended this film to you if you're a breeder.

My Weekend Died.

I did see my minimum two movies this weekend: this morning's screening was Saw Wood's Kitty Foyle and yesterday I caught Patrice Chéreau's Son Frère. But most of the weekend was spent plumbing. A shame, too, because there are a lot of movies in the theatre that I want to see right about now. So many. It's a little frustrating, but, I am the one who has chosen this rehearsal schedule (i.e. Sunday-Wednesday) and I am the one who fills the non-rehearsal time with non-cinematic things like doing people's tax returns and attending the theatre.

I saw iWitness at the Taper on Thursday night, by the way. It's really just a World War II A Man for All Seasons, but way less compelling and more boring than anything else. It's nicely directed, but mostly the material just isn't revelatory in any way. Three things about the show, though. First, the floor of the set was made up of this metallic grid on which the actors walked bare-footed for a good deal of the time. I was so uncomfortable with this and so worried for the safety of the performers that at times I couldn't pay attention to the show itself, so rapt with attention was I on the possibility of their feet turning into hamburger. Second, Seamus Dever gives a really wonderful supporting performance. It's award-worthy stuff: wonderfully comic, and always fascinating. I saw (and loved) Dever in a play called Pera Palas at the Boston Court Theatre some months ago. He's also a member of the Antaeus Company. He's really a fabulous actor. Be on the lookout for his work. Third, I'm happy that directors and playwrights are feeling more and more comfortable with the lengthy one-act form. I know we as audiences are trained to prepare ourselves for the intermission, but I think it's fine to announce that there will be no intermission at the beginning and then proceed with the story. We sit at the movies for two hours. We can all stand two hours of uninterrupted theatre. (My real point here is that I'm glad that not all dramatists are feeling the constraints of the two-act form. It's very nice to see some theatre practitioners deviate from it.

Sam Wood's Kitty Foyle was mostly dumb. It's told in flashbacks (almost always a lame storytelling device, in my opinion.) Ginger Rogers is good enough, I guess (she won an Academy Award for it.) The men in the film are both gorgeous, but the central dilemma in the film (which man will she choose: the impoverished, idealist doctor or the fun-loving, wealthy playboy whom she's loved for ten years?) is a boring one. I mean, who cares which man this woman picks, you know? If the film had something to say about men and women's roles in society or was a good romantic comedy or had some semblance of plot, I would be more forgiving, but it's mostly just banality.

Patrice Chéreau's Son Frère (His Brother) is a very well-made meditation on brotherhood, illness and death. I've been thinking about this topic recently because of the Albee I've been reading. Something Albee says in one of his plays is that there's no such thing as death; there's only dying. I own my life and I own my dying, but I'll never own my death, you know what I mean? Son Frère is about a very sick man who places all of the responsibility of his dying on his estranged brother. And the healthy one steps right in and takes responsibility for his brother. It's not a film about sacrificing things for those you love, but more about the price of becoming a caretaker and actually dealing with dying. It's an excellent film, a unique character study and a moving portrait of human frailty.