"Gazon Maudit/French Twist"
(15)Screen at D'Olier Street, Dublin
Acclaimed in her native France as one of the country's most formidable and versatile talents in cinema and theatre, Josiane Balasko has worked prodigiously on stage and screen as an actress writer and director, and she fills all three functions in Gazon Maudit, the fourth film she has directed and one of the biggest hits in France last year, where it sold over four million tickets' not surprisingly, the US remake rights already have been snapped up.
None of Balasko's previous films as a director has been released in Ireland, and of the 20 features she acted in prior to Gazon Maudit, the only one to open here was Bertrand Blier's 1989 film, Trope Belle Pour Toi in which she memorably played the stocky secretary whose employer (Gerard Depardieu) embarks on a sensual affair with her.
In a recent interview, Josiane Balasko complained that there are few opportunities for comedy exports from France. "The image of French cinema abroad is boring intellectual," she believes. Balasko bemoans the lack of roles today for French actresses over 40, as compared to the plum parts played by Simone Signoret, Romy Schneider and Annie Girardot in the past. "Parts are always written for young women today," she says. "Once you are over 40 it is essential that you write your own parts, or else you are reduced to nothing."
Josiane Balasko and Telsche Boorman collaborated on the screenplay adaptation of Gazon Maudit, and their work was voted best screenplay in the Cesar awards in Paris last month sadly, Telsche Boorman had died in February at the age of 37. She and her sister Katrine Boorman their father is director John take cameo roles in Gazon Maudit as a pair of promiscuous English sisters, Dorothy and Emily Crumble.
The film features Balasko as Marijo, a former musician and club DJ whose chance visit to the Avignon home of a petit bourgeois couple has far reaching implications for all three characters. The husband, Laurent played by the established French television comic, Alain Chabat is a philandering estate agent who is constantly inventing business commitments to embark on adulterous liaisons and is too tired to have sex with his wife when he gets home. Loli, his wife played by the sparkling Victoria Abril is a Spaniard who gave up her career as a dancer when she married Laurent and spends her time taking care of their two young sons.
When the short haired, cigar smoking Marijo first calls, one of the sons tells Loli that a monsieur is at the door. Marijo casually reveals her lesbianism to Loli and the close bond that develops between the two women eventually turns sexual. In a restaurant, Laurent is outraged when he spots Marijo fondling Loli's knee under the table. And his friend and business partner, Antoine (Ticky Holgado), whose wife has left him, is even more crude and sexist in dealing with women, regardless of their sexuality.
The stage is set for a smart and spirited variation on the classic menage a trois farce format, and under Balasko's briskly paced direction, the screenplay cleverly engineers a path of unexpected twists and turns that is sustained all the way to the movie's amusing coda. This is serious comedy with a keen edge as it tackles hypocrisy, double standards, infidelity, jealousy, sexual attraction, sexism and stereotyping, and Balasko allows the comic mask to slip just once, in a strong and abruptly dark sequence involving Antoine.
Otherwise Gazon Maudit is a consistently funny movie, as refreshing as it is adventurous, played with impeccable panache by its four leading actors. Incidentally, the French title literally means "cursed lawn" and is a slang term used by the two women to describe female genitalia. The film has been released in Britain in both subtitled and dubbed versions the version showing here is the sub titled one.
"Broken Arrow" (15) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin
What? A John Woo movie with a 15 certificate Is the Hong Kong action movie virtuoso selling out to Hollywood? Certainly Broken Arrow, his second American film, is sanitised, a word which never would have been applied to Woo's work in Hong Kong, and like his previous US outing, Hard Target, it pales by comparison with Woo's finest earlier work, especially the sublime, multi layered Bullet In The Head.
Happily, what's not lost are Woo's flair for orchestrating physical action and his dry sense of humour, which help paper over the yawning illogical cracks in the Broken Arrow' screenplay by Graham Yost, who wrote a much tighter, more keenly plotted action thriller in Speed. The opening scene a boxing match in which every punch and thud is amplified on the soundtrack sets up the picture's protagonists, ace military pilots played by John Travolta and Christian Slater.
The running battle between the older man and his portage continues outside the ring in verbal jousting. It suddenly takes on a serious tone when they're flying a sleek stealth bomber on a test run and the Travolta character a Gulf War veteran bitter at being passed over for promotion steals its cargo of two nuclear warheads. The film's title is not a reference to the 1950 Delmer Daves western of the same name but to the military parlance for missing nuclear devices.
John Woo fills his wide screen canvas with action in the air, on the ground, at sea and on a train in the relentless chase that follows through the Arizona desert and he rarely misses an opportunity for an explosion, or for the actors and their stunt doubles to make precarious leaps. The movie's token woman is a park ranger played by erring ability for turning up without any explanation wherever the action is. The cast also includes Frank Whaley, Delroy Lindo and Jack Thompson.
In his first action outing, Christian Slater in regulation T shirt and tight haircut a la Keanu is aptly deadpan, while Travolta obviously relishes playing an all out villain for a change, even if he's so indisguisably charming that he resorts to chain smoking as a prop to establish how low and nasty he is. The action is accompanied by a pounding Hans Zimmer score that's indebted to Ennio Morricone and features the rich, legendary twang of Duane Eddy on baritone guitar.
"City Hall" (15) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin
A drama of blunted ambitions, police and political corruption and the hard realities of public life, Harold Becker's City Hall features Al Pacino in a flamboyant performance as John Pappas, a shrewd, confident and loquacious Democratic politician whose tenure as mayor of New York has earned him the cover of Time and the caption, "A Man for All Cities", and has fuelled his presidential ambitions.
However, when a Manhattan shoot out between a police officer and a drug dealer who is on probation results in the death of both men and of an innocent bystander, a black six year old boy, the mayor's career comes undone in the subsequent spiral of revelations. The chain of events is viewed through the gradually more disillusioned eyes of the movie's narrator, the idealistic deputy mayor played by a jowly John Cusack.
City Hall is commendably strong on detailing the daily life of city politics, which it ought to be, given that the original story was written by Ken Lipper, a former deputy mayor himself in the Ed Koch administration Koch himself turns up in the film in his present role as a TV pundit. The screenplay is credited not just to Lipper but to three accomplished writers in Paul Schrader, Nicholas Pileggi and Bo Goldman, and as happens when too many cooks are involved, this particular broth is spoiled by the draining of the picture's purpose and direction while so much of the screenplay was rewritten or removed entirely. It could have been far more interesting had Schrader been allowed to control the material as the film's director, which was the original plan before he was replaced by Becker.
Pacino is off screen for much of the film's second and weaker half. The film seriously loses its way when he turns up at the dead boy's funeral and delivers a speech full of glib platitudes which, we are asked to swallow, moves the mourners to tears and cheers. From there on it's downhill all the way as the film turns more and more implausible and it regularly lets down a more than capable cast which also features Danny Aiello Martin Landau David Paymer Tony Franciosa and in another "token woman" role, Bridget Fonda.
