Cinema: I Hate Myself for Loving You
She puts her makeup on. He sprays on some perfume. An Italian cover of “Bang Bang” plays on the soundtrack. And it doesn’t feel pretentious for a second.
The lovestruck duo at the center of Xavier Dolan’s Heartbeats should, by all means, make lousy movie subjects. Francis and Marie are vain, self-centered and aggressively trendy. They’re also helpless romantics beneath their fashion-forward façade, and when they fall – hard – for the same guy, it’s all-out war. Credit the precocious wunderkind in front of and behind the camera with turning yet another romantic triangle into a richly textured, audaciously stylized feast for the senses.
Dolan’s sophomore effort, one of four new films I’m reviewing this week, kicks into gear at a party in which Francis (Dolan) and close confidante Marie (Monia Chokri) first lay eyes on Nicolas (Niels Schneider), a friend of a mutual acquaintance who has just moved to Montreal from the country. His cool, laid-back demeanor, coupled with his pre-Raphaelite good looks, prove to be an irresistible draw. “Personally, he’s not my type,” Francis later tells Marie. “Mine either,” she concurs. The steadily escalating game of one-upmanship that follows suggests otherwise.
Nicolas, a literature student, appears to like their company, because suddenly the three of them become inseparable. Is he truly interested in either of them? During a game of hide and seek in the woods, Nicolas sneaks up on Francis, and when he wrestles him to the ground, he lingers on top of him just a little longer than necessary. He also gazes adoringly at Marie, who suddenly begins donning sexy vintage clothes. When Nicolas confesses that Audrey Hepburn is “the love of my life,” it doesn’t take long for Francis to “run” into him outside a coffee shop while happening to have a Hepburn poster with him. Marie starts dressing like Hepburn circa her Breakfast at Tiffany’s period and tries to go see a play with Nicolas just to have him all to herself. Dolan shows that both characters have sex lives of their own, but they find themselves increasingly distracted by this blond, curly-haired Adonis.
Heartbeats wears its influences on its sleeve. The opening title shot, for instance, suggests a candy-colored French New Wave homage. Dolan shoots Francis and Marie from the back as they do dishes side by side while the film’s original French title, Les amours imaginaires (Imaginary Loves, which I vastly prefer to its more generic English-language variation), flashes onscreen in big white letters. It’s also evident Dolan has become familiar with the work of Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-Wai (In the Mood for Love), because so many scenes in Heartbeats consist of following the characters in slow motion while an eclectic piece of classical music or well-chosen pop song plays on the soundtrack. He also separates each of the film’s three acts with interview montages in which twentysomething hipsters share their hangups and tales of heartache.
It should all be insufferable, even more so than Dolan’s debut feature, the engaging but shrill I Killed My Mother, but the spontaneity that the star-writer-director displays here never allows his dazzling technique to undermine his characters’ predicament. He handles all the references to other directors’ work with such skill and fearlessness that I couldn’t help falling under the sway of his virtuoso command of the medium. This is a quantum leap for the 22-year-old filmmaker, and it marks him as a talent to watch. He sure knows how to frame a shot.
Francis and Marie are hardly the only people having relationship issues at the movies this weekend. Passions run deep in the atmospheric gender-bending romance Purple Sea (Viola di mare), which chronicles two women’s forbidden love affair against the backdrop of a 19th Century Sicilian village. Angela (Valeria Solarino) knows she belongs with Sara (Isabella Ragonese). She’s known this ever since they were little. Even when Angela’s abusive father, a quarry foreman, locks her in the basement after she refuses to marry one of his workers, she remains steadfast in her devotion.
The first half of Purple Sea goes through its Harlequin-romance paces perfunctorily. Star-crossed lesbian lovers? Good. Prejudiced, God-fearing villagers? Evil. Director Donatella Maiorca even punctuates some of the sloppy handheld camerawork with an anachronistic rock score. Halfway through, though, something interesting happens. Angela’s father always wanted a male heir to take over him at the quarry when he got older, so he grudgingly agrees to allow his daughter to pass herself off as a man so she can marry Sara. When Angela becomes Angelo, the film becomes less of a love story and more of a portrait of a woman who agrees to renounce her gender only to discover that, even though she can redefine what it means to be a family, she can’t quite escape her DNA. It’s quite provocative for Angela to display some of her father’s less desirable traits, and I wish Purple Sea had more of that ambiguity.
I found Maiorca’s torrent of overheated emotions, however, much more palatable than the overwrought theatrics in The Trick in the Sheet (L’imbroglio nel lenzuolo), another period piece which, like Purple Sea, will be screening this weekend as part of the Sixth Sicilian Film Festival. It’s understandable why festival founder and president Emanuele Viscuso and artistic director Salvo Bitonti chose this nostalgic ode to moviemaking, which is based on the novel by Francesco Costa, as their opening night film. It not only marks the return of Like Water for Chocolate director Alfonso Arau, but also a comeback for legendary cinematographer Vittorio Storaro (Reds, The Last Emperor). Add to that an international cast headed by Maria Grazia Cucinotta (Il Postino), Anne Parillaud (La Femme Nikita) and Geraldine Chaplin, and it must have seemed like a no-brainer to program it.
The pedigree involved in The Trick in the Sheet actually makes it even more embarrassing how much of an unwieldy mess it turns out to be. The title refers to projected celluloid, and in this case, the image literally appears on a sheet. The year is 1905. Federico Bory (Primo Reggiani) is studying to be a doctor but can’t stand the sight of blood. Instead, the Neapolitan lad is transfixed by these visions of light that have just arrived to Southern Italy. His mother Alma (Chaplin, badly dubbed and pretty much wasted here) frowns on this obsession, even though she plays the piano to accompany the silent clips shown on a nightly basis to well-to-do townsfolk. Federico thinks he can shoot better footage. “I want to see boobies,” says his employer, greedy producer Gennarino Pecoraro. When he spies on local soothsayer Marianna (Cuccinota, who also co-wrote and produced the film) as she bathes in the nude, he knows he’s found his (unwitting) leading lady, who happens to wash clothes for recent transplant Beatrice (Parillaud), a progressive-thinking journalist.
Arau careens back and forth between forced pathos and comedy, and it feels like he’s trying to pull the viewer in several directions all at once. Continuity-wise, The Trick in the Sheet tries to juggle too many storylines, and thus the film feels like it was slapped together in the editing room. It ultimately plays like a half-hearted argument in favor of actors’ rights, but there was a poignant exploration of film’s ability to reshape reality that lamentably got lost in the shuffle.
Suspension of disbelief is essential to appreciating cinema, and the lean and mean thriller Hanna gives us a doozy of a premise: Saoirse Ronan, Atonement‘s deceitful little girl, as a trained assassin. Out in the Finnish tundra, Johanna (Ronan) is being home-schooled by her father, ex-CIA agent Erik (Eric Bana) When we first see her, she expertly blends into the wintry landscape, the better to hunt a deer. “I just missed your heart,” she tells the wounded creature after shooting it with an arrow. Back home in Erik’s cabin, she reads Grimm’s Fairy Tales in German, one of many such references director Joe Wright and screenwriters Seth Lochhead and David Farr make throughout the film.
But what would a good bedtime story be without a villain? Hanna obliges, giving us Marissa, a cold-blooded government operative who has been hunting down Erik and his daughter for well over a decade. Played with relish, and a Southern accent, by Cate Blanchett, the role is quite a change of pace for the actress. Not only does she get to play the bad guy, but she gets to play one with a chronic shoe fetish. As for Wright, he brings an elemental rush to this material after a handful of literary adaptations (the Keira Knightley Pride & Prejudice as well as Atonement).
Okay, the story’s more than a tad schematic, but Wright keeps the pace tight even when the narrative can’t quite keep up with the visuals. Following her capture and escape by forces determined to kill her, Hanna finds herself adrift in the civilized world, which is every bit as frightening and disorienting for her as the wild would be to anyone raised within spitting distance of civilization. It all leads up to a final showdown in East Berlin’s Spree Park, an abandoned amusement park effectively used by Wright as the ultimate test of his protagonist’s deadly skills. The cherry on top is The Chemical Brothers’ pulsating techno score, which features a main theme so catchy that I was whistling it for days after I saw the film. It’s not perfect, but Hanna delivers a decent amount of butt-kicking and a pretty high body count. That’s as close to “happily ever after” that this moviegoer can ask for these days.
Hanna opens Friday in wide release. Xavier Dolan’s Heartbeats begins a limited engagement at the Coral Gables Art Cinema (gablescinema.com) on Friday. It will also screen next weekend at the new Miami Beach Cinematheque (mbcinema.com) This will also be the venue for the Sixth Sicilian Film Festival (sicilianfilmfestival.com). The Trick in the Sheet kicks off festival screenings on Thursday night and Purple Sea screens Friday.
