"Secrets & Lies" (15) Screen at D'Olier Street, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs Dublin
Deservedly awarded the Palmer d'Or at Cannes last month, Mike Leigh's Secrets & Lies is a consummate achievement which marks the culmination of this gifted improvisational director's achievements in one deeply satisfying whole, as he draws on his familiar preoccupations to create a spellbinding serious comedy. It is also the most tender and optimistic film to date in the canon of a director whose despair and pessimism never raged more force full than in his previous movie.
Secrets & Lies opens on a funeral. We learn very little about the person being buried before the film cuts to the prelude to a wedding, and then shifts the focus from the newly weds to the photographer for whom they are posing. The explicit connection between both occasions gradually becomes clearer as we glean more and more information about the movie's protagonists.
Timothy Spall plays that photographer, a man thriving in his work but unhappy in his marriage to a tense, depressed woman played by Phyllis Logan. The photographer's sister (Brenda Blethyn) is a lonely, unmarried and heavy drinking woman toiling in a cardboard box factory and living with her recalcitrant daughter (Claire Rushbrook), who works as a street cleaner. The film's pivotal character is an assured young black optometrist (Marianne Jean Baptiste), whose adoptive mother was buried in the opening sequence and who is seeking the identity of her biological mother.
As he has demonstrated so often in his cinema and television fictions, Mike Leigh is an acute observer of the human condition and adept at catching the nuances of ordinary lives in meticulous, telling detail the foibles and follies, the neuroses and anxieties, the discomforts and uneasiness. Never before has he developed and dissected inter linked lives with such depth of insight and deceptive simplicity as in Secrets & Lies nor has he treated his central characters so sympathetically and unpatronisingly, and with such emotional engagement.
"We're all in pain, why can't we share our pain?" asks the photographer towards the end of Secrets & Lies, which subtly but unerringly confronts the secrets people keep from each other and the lies we tell ourselves to shut things out of our lives and memories. Laced with a dark sense of humour, this is a deeply touching and unexpectedly warm story for our times, and it proves as riveting as a thriller.
Leigh elicits remarkable performances from an exceptional cast, from the walk on players who make such vivid impressions in the montage sequences of people posing for the photographer, to the wonderfully naturalistic central actors, most of whom have worked with Leigh in the past. Timothy Spall never has been better, while Brenda Bleythn is outstanding in a raw, poignant and unforgettable performance which earned her the best actress prize from the Cannes jury.
"La Ceremonie" (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin
Sandrine Bonnaire and Isabelle Huppert shared the best actress award at the Venice Film Festival last autumn for Claude Chabrol's compelling La Ceremanie, which many believed would take the major prize, the Golden Lion, had France not carried out a nuclear test in the Pacific on the weekend of the jury's deliberations. Certainly Chabrol's film is far superior to Tran Anh Hung's Cyclo which went on to win the Golden Lion.
Scripted by Chabrol and Caroline Eliacheff, La Ceremonie is a skillful adaptation of an early Ruth Rendell novel, A Judgement In Stone, previously filmed in Canada 10 years ago with Rita Tushingham in the leading role. Given the recurring interest shown by Rendell and Chabrol in both crime and the bourgeoisie, it was only a matter of time before the French director adapted the English novelist. In fact, it was Rendell who made the connection first in her book The Bank Closes At Midday, the hero rests after a hold up by going to the cinema and watching a Chabrol movie.
Updating A Judgement In Stone and relocating it to wintry St Malo, Chabrol's La Ceremonie features Sandrine Bonnaire as Sophie, a quiet, enigmatic and hard working young woman hired as a maid by a well to do family who look down on her and are concerned chiefly with how much work they can get out of her. Isabelle Huppert plays Jeanne, the inquisitive local postal clerk who befriends Sophie and encourages her to strike back at her exploitative employers. The extroverted Jeanne and the apparently timid Sophie seem like opposite sides of the same coin, while each has a secret in her past involving the death of a close relative.
Like Rendell, Chabrol is less concerned with a crime and its consequences than with the events which build to it and explain its motivation, and the fusion of their multiple preoccupations shapes La Ceremonie as both a precisely paced drama and a consistently intriguing character study in which the enveloping mood is chillingly tense.
This is a return for Chabrol to the form of his heyday in the Sixties and early Seventies four commendable films from that period are accompanying the release of La Ceremonie at the IFC and it is much the most accomplished film from him since the powerful Story of Women six years ago. Isabelle Huppert, who played an amateur abortionist in that film, is refreshingly cast against type in La Ceremonie and there is a tangible chemistry between her and the haunted looking Sandrine Bonnaire. The fine cast also includes Jacqueline Bisset and Jean Pierre Cassel as the charm less bourgeois couple who hire Sophie.
"Girl 6" (18) Screen at D'Olier Street, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs Dublin
After his recent intense anti drugs drama Clockers, Spike Lee lightens up with Girl 6, which initially suggests a return to the mood and humour of his debut movie, She's Gotta Have It a reference underlined when the aspiring actress at the centre of Girl 6 delivers a monologue from the earlier film as an audition piece. However, the best thing about the surprisingly slight new film is the striking performance by Theresa Randle as a struggling actress who despairs at being forced to take her top off at one audition after another and sutlers further humiliation while working as an extra.
Girl 6 takes its title from the number she is allocated when, in desperation, she takes a job as a phone sex operator in Manhattan. She draws heavily on her acting ability to carry out her new job to the point where she gets into character with the conviction of a Method actor and she becomes as addicted to delivering phone sex as her regular callers are for listening to it. She even becomes emotionally drawn to a lonely Arizona client played by Peter Berg.
Working from a screenplay by playwright Suzan Lori Parks, Spike Lee over ambitiously pursues various tangents which render the movie rambling and shapeless and he burdens it further with laboured parodies of black icons in the movies Carmen Jones and Foxy Brown, and the television series The Jeffersons. He rounds up the usual suspects for supporting and cameo roles Madonna, John Turturro, Naomi Campbell, Lee himself (of course) and Quentin Tarantino (perish the thought). The spirited soundtrack is a greatest hits compilation from The Artist Formerly Known As The Artist Formerly Known As Prince.
"Up Close And Personal" (I5s) Savoy, Virgin, UCI, Omniplex
Watching Michelle Pfeiffer climbing the ladder of media stardom in Up Close And Personal, it's impossible not to think of Nicole Kidman's superbly psychotic performance in last year's To Die For. Like Kidman, Pfeiffer plays a young woman intent on making it big in TV as an escape from her mundane life, but there's little of the black satire of Gus Van Sant's comedy evident here. That's not to say, though, that this film isn't without its own guilty pleasures.
Pfeiffer escapes from her trailer trash background by conning her way into a job at a small local by station in Miami, where she is spotted by world weary producer Robert Redford, who sets about grooming her for the big time. As she rises from weather girl (more shades of Kidman) to roving reporter to anchorperson on a major network news show, Pfeiffer, unsurprisingly, becomes romantically entangled with her mentor as their roles become reversed.
It would be easy to criticise Up Close And Personal for its show bizzy depiction of news journalism. Screenwriters Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne take a few very gentle swipes at the tabloidisation of television and the conservative political agendas of station bosses, but they undermine their own points by their depiction of Pfeiffer's character. "She eats the lens," whispers Redford reverently when he sees his young protegee perform on camera for the first time, and at no point in the film does Pfeiffer display more journalistic talent than an ability to look good on screen and an occasional Oprah like empathy with her subjects.
Essentially, though, this reworking of A Star Is Born is about news journalism in the same way that Braveheart is about Scottish history. Director Jon Avnet piles on plenty of lavish production values and big close ups of his two charismatic stars for a confection that recalls weepie blockbusters like Love Story. Redford's performance pointedly recalls his iconic appearances in films like The Way We Were and All The President's Men (Didion and Dunne happily labour the point by giving his character the absurd name of Warren Justice). Pfeiffer is excellent as usual and, if there's a suspicion that these two big stars don't quite click, it's not really much of a problem it's very enjoyable just to see them together. Up Close And Personal is old fashioned goods wrapped up in a slick modern package, and it's rather good fun.
"Vampire in Brooklyn" (15s) Virgin, UCI, Omniplex
Poor old Eddie Murphy everything he touches seems to turn to dust these days. Many may feel that it's no more than he deserves after all the terrible vehicles he's appeared in over the last few years, but at least Vampire In Brooklyn is less self serving than rubbish like Harlem Nights or Beverly Hills Cop III Unfortunately, this comic version of Dracula is never quite sure if it's a comedy, a romance or a horror movie.
Murphy plays a Caribbean vampire the last of his breed, arriving in New York with the intention of mating with a Brooklyn cop (Angela Bassett) who is unaware that she is half vampire herself. Recruiting a local ne'er do well (Kadeem Hardison) as his ghoul, he sets off to wreak havoc on the streets of the Big Apple.
Nightmare On Elm Street director Wes Craven gives the proceedings a polished sheen, and Bassett lights up any screen she appears on (if she were white, she'd be the biggest star in America by now). Even Murphy is quite engaging, but the film is essentially a series of predictable gags glued together with special effects that have been seen a thousand times before. It's surprising it hasn't gone straight to video.
"Now and Then", (PG), Virgin
If the rhythms of These Boots Are Made For Walking, Knock Three Times and Sugar, Sugar fling you back to the early Seventies with a lump in your throat, then this is the film for you. Everyone else should find something else to do. In her debut feature film, Lesli Linka Glatter has attempted to make a girls' version of Stand By Me and the result is mawkish in the extreme. If the summers of our childhood were always long and sunny, they never seemed quite as interminable as this one.
The reunion of four childhood friends (played as adults by Demi Moore, Melanie Griffith, Rosie O'Donnell and Rita Wilson) in fulfilment of a pact, propels us back to a comfortable suburb in Indiana in the summer of 1970, when they were 12 years old, coping with less than idyllic families, boy trouble and a murder mystery.
Smothered in self help manual truisms such as it's only when you embrace your past that you truly move forward", the ponderously earnest script by 1. Marlene King, and pedestrian treatment of this classic rite of passage material dolls the impact of the four vibrant performances from Christina Ricci, Thora Birch, Gaby Hoffmann and Ashleigh Aston Moore as the young friends. Listen out for that soundtrack though.
