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Film REVIEWS
DRAMA BEL AMI (15) 102min ●●●●●
A young man gains social and financial advancement via his irresistibility to women, but has trouble securing professional credibility. And then he gets cast in a film called Bel Ami! Yes, it’s hard to imagine that Robert Pattinson, chiseled star of the Twilight franchise, didn’t feel some common ground with his character, Georges Duroy, whose beauty gains him everything but respect. Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod’s film, adapted by Rachel Bennette from the novel by Guy de Maupassant, uses Pattinson’s preposterously good looks as a running joke: female characters throb knowingly when presented with this drifting, penniless ex-soldier; swiftly, he becomes a commodity, shared, exchanged and sometimes married by the powerful wives of Paris.
Does Duroy appear to enjoy his sexual conquests? Not much, no. Does he use his social sway to loose his talents on the world? No: he’s a bit thick, and really just interested in money. Does this all render the film a little bitter and depressing? Well, yes, if sincere emotions are what you’re after, but perhaps Pattinson has had enough of that, after all that shirtless panting in forest glades that he’s done over the years . . .
The problem with a film about an empty character is that it can end up a little empty. The directors are the founders of the theatre company Cheek by Jowl, and their flair is apparent in prettily-choreographed street and group scenes; they also draw decent performances from Pattinson and his comely co- stars Uma Thurman, Kristin Scott Thomas and Christina Ricci. The gender reversal of having a male character sexually objectified and disempowered by women is also potentially interesting. But the film never contextualises Duroy’s blankness, and can’t quite choose between an angsty or mocking tone. The result is a piece that’s diverting enough to look at, but doesn’t quite seem to know what its own point is. (Hannah McGill) ■ General release from Fri 9 Mar.
FAMILY COMEDY WE BOUGHT A ZOO (PG) 124min ●●●●● DRAMA MICHAEL (18) 96min ●●●●●
NEO-NOIR CARANCHO (15) 107 min ●●●●●
Disappointingly, after Elizabethtown, writer-director Cameron Crowe is just as bogged down in the valley of mediocrity with his new offering. The story of Benjamin Mee (Matt Damon), a recently widowed father-of-two who gives up his successful job and buys and sets about saving a dilapidated zoo (the clue is in the title) is based on a real-life memoir, but it still feels fashioned solely to let the Jerry Maguire director indulge all of his most sentimental tendencies. Worse, the contribution of Crowe’s co- writer, bland rom-com hack Aline Brosh McKenna (27 Dresses, Morning Glory), seems to have been to veto the kind of sharp humour and unique characterisation that have allowed Crowe’s best works (chiefly Almost Famous) to endure. Scenes that aim for broad, family-friendly comedy fall flat, and great support actors Patrick Fugit, Elle Fanning and Thomas Haden Church are wasted in empty roles. Crowe’s sincerity as a filmmaker is both his greatest strength and weakness, and it’s the weaknesses that make the biggest impact in this dishearteningly average movie. (Paul Gallagher) ■ General release from Fri 16 Mar.
Doubtless Austrian writer-director Markus Schleinzer, a former casting director for Michael Haneke, will be pilloried in some quarters for making a film which ‘humanises’ its paedophile protagonist. Yet what makes this absorbing and rigorously observed portrait of a sexual predator so chilling is that it refuses the easy options of turning its central character Michael into a modern-day monster.
Morosely played by newcomer, and namesake, Michael Fuith, Michael is a thirty-something insurance company employee, a brother who remembers his nephew’s birthday, and a man who keeps a 10-year-old boy Wolfgang (David Rauchenberger) in a locked basement. We never learn how Wolfgang was kidnapped or whether the police are looking for an abducted child: the emphasis instead is on the daily household routines shared by captor and prey – the cleaning chores, putting up the Christmas decorations, watching television together. It’s an aesthetically austere film, with controlled camerawork and a muted colour scheme, portraying the true horror of the situation without a hint of sensationalism. (Tom Dawson) ■ Selected release from Fri 2 Mar.
Beginning and ending with visceral images of car crashes, this slice of contemporary neo-noir, from Argentinean writer and director Pablo Trapero, unites two of his country’s finest actors. The titular vulture (‘carancho’) is an ambulance-chasing lawyer Sosa (Ricardo Darín) in suburban Buenos Aires, who is a part of a mafia which perpetrates insurance scams. Falling for a drug-addicted female doctor Luján (Martina Gusman), Sosa begins dreaming of quitting his wretched existence.
The melodrama here is rooted in an appalling reality – namely that 8000 Argentineans die every year in car accidents. Both Darin and Gusman are superb in conveying the desperate efforts of their libidinous characters to escape their nightmarish predicaments, with the camera focusing on their increasingly damaged faces and bodies. It’s a recurrent theme of this versatile filmmaker – known also for claustrophobic human dramas El Bonaerense and Lion’s Den – how does an individual simply survive in such an adverse environment? Carancho, however, represents his bleakest vision of society to date. (Tom Dawson) ■ Selected release from Fri 2 Mar.
1–29 Mar 2012 THE LIST 67