"Smoke" (15) Screen at D'Olier Street, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin.
The Hong Kong born and San Francisco based director, Wayne Wang, and the New York author, Paul Auster, bring their individual story telling skills to bear on a highly fruitful first collaborative venture in Smoke, a movie which had its genesis in Auggie Wren's Christmas Story, which Auster wrote for the Christmas Day edition of The New York Times in 1990.
The film, which is set in the same year, takes place in Brooklyn and revolves around the neighbourhood cigar store run by the aforementioned Auggie Wren, and around an assortment of characters whose lives interconnect with dramatic effect. Each of these people is struggling to come to terms with events in his or her past and is suffering from a sense of loss, caused either by death or abandonment.
Played by Havey Keitel, Auggie Wren is a philosophical loner whose store has become his life since his former lover left him 18 years earlier. His days begin with a ritual which involves taking a photograph of the corner outside the store at precisely eight o'clock every morning.
When he shows a selection from his thousands of photographs to Paul Benjamin (William Hurt), a regular customer, he flips through them and remarks that they are all the same. "You'll never get it if you don't slow down," Auggie tells Paul, who, like his creator, Paul Auster, is a writer who smokes cigars and lives in Brooklyn.
However, Paul Benjamin has been suffering from writer's block since his pregnant wife was murdered outside the cigar store several years earlier, and his sorrow is intensified when he sees her in one of Auggie's photographs, on her way to work. A few days later Paul is saved from accidental death when Rashid (Harold Perrineau Jr) pulls him back from absent mindedly walking in front of a bus.
Paul befriends the wayward Rashid, whose mother was killed in a car accident which traumatised his father, Cyrus (Forest Whitaker) so much that he abandoned the boy; seeking out Cyrus, Rashid finds him working in a small town petrol station. Meanwhile, Auggie is visited by his former lover (Stockard Channing in an eye patch) who tells him that he is the father of her teenage daughter (Ashley Judd) and that the girl is pregnant and addicted to crack.
Paul Auster's precise and perceptive screenplay acutely observes all these disparate characters and subtly engineers that their lives and destinies are interlinked, in this tender and thoughtful film. Working with the accomplished lighting cameraman, Adam Holender - whose credits span from Midnight Cowboy to the recent Fresh - Wayne Wang shoots the first half of the film, when the characters don't really know each other, in master shots, and then slowly, as the film becomes more emotional, the camerawork becomes more intimate, moving in closer and intercutting between the characters.
Smoke is firmly compelling narrative cinema, which proves to be as moving as it amusing, while it reflects on the foibles and brittleness of human nature and celebrates the friendship and solidarity of community life. Wang and Auster are very well served by an exemplary cast, especially by Forest Whitaker in a raw, touching performance, and by Harvey Keitel, who rarely has been so understated or charming on screen.
"12 Monkeys" (15) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin.
"I thought we were making a crazy quilt on film," Terry Gilliam said of his new movie, 12 Monkeys, when he introduced it at the Dublin festival last month. Control freaks don't like the way the movie is structured, he said, yet 11 year old children have no problem with it. Well, 11 year olds will have a problem seeing the film here - it's got a 15 certificate - while older audiences, control freaks or otherwise, will find plenty to challenge them in this complex and stimulating movie.
Characteristically for a Terry Gilliam film, 12 Monkeys is teasing and thoroughly unpredictable as it winds and weaves its way through an intricately plotted non linear screenplay by David Peoples, the screenwriter of Blade Runner and Unforgiven, and his documentary maker wife, Janet Peoples. Even though it was not written by Gilliam, the film is suffused with his recurring themes of fear and fantasy, madness and sanity, and reality and illusion. And it continues to pursue his prime preoccupation with time travel.
It features an intense, brooding and unusually vulnerable Bruce Willis, in a strong physical performance as James Cole, a prisoner despatched to be a reluctant volunteer from the year 2035, on a circuitous journey to present day Philadelphia in order to unravel an apocalyptic nightmare before it completely erases humanity from the planet. Initially, Cole just like the film's audience has just two clues to work from a haunting childhood memory which he does not fully understand, even though it replays itself endlessly in his tormented mind and a series of enigmatic symbols used by animal activists known as the Army of the 12 Monkeys.
One of those activists is Jeffrey Goines - played in a wild eyed, manic performance by Brad Pitt - who objects to the treatment of laboratory animals by his scientist father (Christopher Plummer) and who befriends Cole when they meet in a mental institution. Madeleine Stowe is coolly impressive as a psychiatrist and author of The Doomsday Syndrome, who diagnoses Cole as schizophrenic before becoming intrigued by him and his story.
The story of 12 Monkeys was inspired by Chris Marker's 1962 film, La Jetee, essentially a photoroman with one key movement in it. There is nothing static about Gilliam's film, which is made with the breadth of imagination we have come to expect from him, and stylishly filmed on elaborately designed sets. The film is structured like a surreal jigsaw puzzle in which the pieces are gradually revealed, some repeatedly, until they connect and lock into place, as Gilliam propels the picture to its exciting and ultimately satisfying finale.
"Persuasion" (Gen), Light House, Dublin.
Yes, there has been a lot of Jane Austen recently, with even more to come, and yes, of course our heroine gets the glow back into her complexion and sails off with her man, but before you start muttering about insipid costume drama, be assured that it is difficult to imagine a more engaging and intelligent film version of Austen's last novel than Roger Michell's, first screened on BBC last year and now getting a cinema release.
Avoiding the kind of politically correct interpolations that Emma Thompson thought Sense and Sensibility needed, or the obsession with upholstery and silver, that careful, history of interiors approach that turns period films into a series of barely animated tableaux, here is a social realist Persuasion without wigs or make up, which, in addition to giving us acutely observed, sensitively portrayed characters, is a subtly comic study of snobbery, and a portrait of a society in transition, at the end of the Napoleonic wars.
John Daly's mobile camera pulls back from candlelit windows to show the surrounding estates with their servants and tenants, while everywhere the rise of the new, naval wealth is causing ripples in the social order, bringing increased mobility and individualism - which finds one form of expression in romantic love. This is a Cinderella story, of sorts, which charts the survival of a sensitive, perceptive person, Anne Elliot (Amanda Root), in a world of stifling mediocrity and conformity. We see the price Anne has paid for her youthful mistake of yielding to the influence of an older mother figure, who convinced her not to marry the man she loved, because of his lack of wealth or family connections. Eight years later, Captain Wentworth (Ciaran Hinds) reappears on the scene, wealthy, confident, eager to marry, but bitterly unforgiving of Anne's past rejection. In the meantime Anne, at 27, has lost her bloom" and has endured her appalling family with fortitude.
Of course, we miss the wit of Jane Austen's authorial voice, at its most acerbic when describing Anne's father, Sir Walter Eliot, and her sisters Mary and Elizabeth, and we have to infer a great deal about Anne from expression and nuance, since having an utterly passive role, she barely speaks until half way through the film. But the performances of Corin Redgrave as Sir Walter and Sophie Thompson as Mary, in particular, are a joy, while Amanda Root conveys Anne's emotional turmoil, the pain of loss and the reawakening of her love, with great intensity. And to anyone who objects to the final, anachronistic kiss on the streets of Bath, I can only suggest that it might be time to loosen those stays.
"Unzipped", IFC, Dublin. Members and guests only.
He's got a point: bit's almost impossible to have style nowadays without the right dogs", pronounces Isaac Mizrahi, the subject of this affectionate, stylish documentary. Fashion photographer Douglas Keeve has created a vivid portrait of the young, awardwinning New York designer and prominent AIDS activist, following Mizrahi through intensive preparations for his 1994 autumn collection, capturing the highs and the angst behind the scenes with humour and exuberance.
Director of photography Ellen brings great flair to the piece, using a variety of formats, including super 8 and super 16 mm, in black and white, with splashes of colour for the finale. She is helped by the fact that Mizrahi is a born performer, utterly at home with the camera as he keeps up his flow of witty one liners and has histrionic crises of confidence - "I'm just feeling really vulnerable today, you know?"
With his eclectic breadth of references, from Nanook of the North - the inspiration for the Eskimo look of his new collection - to the Bach that he plays in the evenings, his sense of humour that enables him to send himself up, his warmth and his talent for impersonation, Mizrahi steals the show, so anyone expecting some glimpse of "the real women" behind the supermodels on the catwalk will be disappointed. Little is actually unzipped here, in fact; it's all a beguiling bit of promotion for Mizrahi's work, his ego, and everyone involved in the fashion world. And it's great fun.
"Before and After" (15) Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin.
One of those movies which, on paper, must have seemed an attractive proposition, Before and After features Meryl Streep and Liam Neeson in the leading roles with Edward Furlong, Alfred Molina and John Heard in support. It is directed by Barbet Schroeder, whose recent credits include Reversal of Fortune and Kiss of Death. The screenplay - based on a 1992 bestselling novel by Rosellen Brown - is by Ted Tally, who won an Oscar for his work on The Silence of the Lambs. Howard Shore, one of the finest composers in cinema today, wrote the score, and the lighting cameraman is the veteran Italian, Luciano Tovoli, who lit films for, among others, Antonioni, Scola and Tarkovsky, before working on four consecutive movies for Schroeder.
The resulting film, however, falls very far short of the sum of its talents, and much of the blame lies with Tally's bland and groaningly predictable screenplay. It follows the unlikely consequences when a New England couple - Meryl Streep as a small town pediatrician and Liam Neeson as her sculptor husband - learn to their amazement that their teenage son (Edward Furlong) is suspected of murdering his pregnant girlfriend.
What ensues is a chain reaction of irrational behaviour, as the movie lurches from one implausibility to another and its sheer emptiness is emphasised by the banal and utterly superfluous narration supplied by the family's daughter (Julia Weldon). This rambling, turgid and flatly directed yarn plays like a TV movie with an A list cast: Streep struggles unsuccessfully with her underwritten role, Neeson has little to do beyond scowling and looking perplexed, and the mannered Furlong, in those rare moments when he actually speaks, sounds eerily like Michael Jackson.
