Koch Lorber is releasing Claude Chabrol’s superb 1991 adaptation of “Madame Bovary” on DVD Nov. 18, which is great news for fans of the French director who is without question the most prolific — and most versatile — of the filmmakers who made up the French New Wave of the early 1960s.
In just the past few years alone, Chanbrol has given us a sharp political satire, “The Comedy of Power,” and the extremely unsettling Ruth Rendell-derived suspense film, “The Bridesmaid.”
The “Madame Bovary” DVD comes with a fantastic documentary — “Playing Life” — a 2001 profile of Isabelle Huppert, the great actress Chabrol has worked with numerous times.
These days, the “extras” on DVDs are often the only way to see film-related documentaries. The recent deluxe version of “How the West Was Won,” for instance, contains a marvelous feature-length documentary on the long-vanished wide-screen process Cinerama. Last month’s Koch Lorber edition of “Ludwig” includes two excellent Italian TV documentaries never before seen in this country — one on director Luchino Visconit and another profiling his frequent star Silvana Mangano.
If you are a fan of Huppert’s — and what serious movie buff isn’t? — the “Madame Bovary” DVD is worth purchasing for “Playing Life” alone.
The 55-year-old actress gave director Serge Toubiana a remarkable degree of access to her working life in 2000, one of the most productive periods of Huppert’s career, when she was doing “Medea” on the stage and working on what is possibly the greatest and most challenging role of her career, the title part in Michael Haneke’s “The Piano Teacher.”
Huppert also squeezed in a memorable Chabrol film during the time covered by Toubiana, “Merci pour le chocolat,” in which the star played an upper class poisoner.
During the course of the documentary, Huppert tells Toubiana that she has always felt like “a formless child given form by roles.”
“Sometimes I feel I am proof that nothing exists,” the actress says of the strange double-life she has lived since she started working in film in 1971.
Huppert believes anyone who acts for a living must juggle “fear” and “pride.”
“I don’t believe one ever plays characters, one plays states of mind,” Huppert once told an interviewer. “A character is completely meaningless to me. One goes through states of mind and tries to link them together.”
The actress is far from humorless in the documentary. During one sequence devoted to her intense work with Haneke on “The Piano Teacher” Huppert talks about her reaction upon learning the director’s goal for the film: “I want the audience to be too embarrassed to watch.”
“(But) it was me on the screen!,” Huppert says of a performance that, fortunately, was seen and admired all over the world (and earned the star her second best actress prize at the Cannes Film Festival).
I don’t think there is a better actress working in movies today, so what a gift it is to have “Playing Life” illuminate Huppert’s attitudes and complex working process.
Joe's View
Archive for October, 2008
Isabelle Huppert’s states of mind
Down these mean (New Jersey suburban) streets
Although the detective story is supposed to be in decline these days — overtaken by thrillers and suspense novels — I’ve read two good examples of the P.I. genre in just the past couple of weeks.
The dean of all P.I. authors, Raymond Chandler, once defined his genre in the sentence, “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.”
Chandler was writing about Los Angeles detective Philip Marlowe in the 1940s, but Chandler’s template has lived on in the work of modern masters such as Michael Connelly and Robert Crais.
I wrote about P.I. genre newcomer Sean Chercover’s terrific “Trigger City” in this blog last week, but I also want to call your attention to a fine New Jersey writer, Dave White, who made his debut last year with “When One Man Dies” (Three Rivers Press), and whose second novel, “The Evil That Men Do,” was published in June.
Both White novels are about a suburban New Jersey P.I. named Jackson Donne, who is seriously considering a career change at the start of “When One Man Dies.”
The 27-year-old Jackson is tired of the work — and the way it stalls and interferes with his private life. He has just been accepted by Rutgers University when a drinking buddy is killed by a hit-and-run driver.
The “accident” takes place right outside Jackson’s favorite bar — the Olde Towne Tavern — and the owner, Artie, is immediately convinced his customer was intentionally hit by the car.
Artie high pressures Jackson into solving this “crime” and we are off on a case as dark and as dirty as anything in a Chandler era urban noir.
We quickly learn that Jackson is a former cop who left the local force under a cloud and that his old partner — a corrupt Narcotics Department officer named Bill Martin — would love to find a way to eliminate Donne.
While Donne tracks down leads on the hit-and-run, he is hired by a woman who wants proof that her husband is a cheater. This leads to a stakeout where Jackson follows the husband as he disposes of a dead body (not that of the wife).
White grabs the reader in the first few chapters with these two parallel cases and then ratchets up the tension as it becomes clear the cases are related and that Jackson’s old cop partner enemy might be in the middle of the whole nasty business.
White mixes the wonderfully offbeat local color of the Jersey suburbs — where most of Jackson’s movements seem to necessitate MapQuesting his way out of the suburban sprawl around the ever-clogged Rt. 287 — with the rich personal drama of a young detective trying to escape the dangerous messes he keeps finding himself in.
I picked up White’s first novel after hearing him speak with great humor and passion about the P.I. genre at the Bouchercon crime fiction gathering in Baltimore earlier this month. I’m looking forward to reading “The Evil That Men Do.”
I agree with best-selling crime writer Laura Lippman’s assertion that “White manages the neat trick of respecting the genre’s traditions while daring to nudge it toward something new and unexpected.”
No questions/No answers
Robinson Devor’s sort-of-documentary, “Zoo,” was chosen for the prestigious Director’s Fortnight slate at the Cannes Film Festival last year, but it received few theatrical engagements in this country after debuting to mixed reviews in Los Angeles and New York.
The film has been released on DVD by ThinkFilm and is now available through NetFlix.
I watched Devor’s movie the other night and I am still not quite sure what to make of it.
The non-fiction film is done in the self-consciously artistic, pseudo-documentary style pioneered by Errol Morris in films such as “The Thin Blue Line,” which mixed dramatic recreations with hypnotic music by Philip Glass.
Morris used music and fictional cinematic techniques to present the case of a Texas man who was falsely accused of murdering a cop. But,the art film style was combined with actual interviews in which people on both sides of the case had their say.
Devor’s film is ostensibly about the death of a Washington State Boeing executive named Kenneth Pinyan in 2005 after he took part in equine bestiality rituals with a group of people he had met on the Internet.
These “zoos” — they call themselves this because of their practice of zoophilia — claim they have a special affinity with animals that is about more than sex.
Devor and his co-writer Charles Mudede seem to be so afraid of the subject of their film that they spend the whole movie staging beautifully photographed sequences that evade rather than illuminate what happened in the countryside outside Seattle three years ago.
In the director’s commentary on the DVD, Devor brags about the fact that he never resorts to “talking head” footage, but after 15 or 20 minutes of his eerie shots of men gathering in an isolated farmhouse and proceeding to the barn, I began wondering if we would ever hear from one of Pinyan’s non-”zoo” friends or family members or a cop or even one of the politicians who pushed for successful anti-bestiality legislation in the wake of the widespread press coverage of this case.
“Zoo” asks no questions, so we never get any answers.
Devor’s film leaves the viewer with the impression that a straight-on examination of what motivated Pinyan to do what he did would be too pervy. Instead, we get a dreamy, creepy, pointless feature-length introduction to “shocking” material that is never explored.
I’m not suggesting that I would want to see or hear graphic descriptions of “zoo” behavior, but as a journalist I don’t really understand a non-fiction movie that skirts its own subject matter.
Slapstick horror comedy
Chicago theater director Stuart Gordon’s debut film, “Re-Animator,” was an audience-divider in 1985, and chances are good that some of the folks who turn up for a special Halloween screening tomorrow night at the Fairfield Theatre Company will have mixed feelings, too.
Lots of people want their horror movies straight, but I’ve always liked pictures that mix thrills and laughs.
Deadly serious horror pics like John Carpenter’s early 1980s remake of “The Thing” or more recent gore-fests like “The Ruins” (2007) tend to leave me cold because they never acknowledge the basic silliness of a movie that goes, “Boo!”
The thing that makes “Psycho” (1960) so much fun to watch the second or third time around is all of the little jokes Alfred Hitchcock and screenwriter Joseph Stefano planted especially for the repeat viewers, lines such as Norman Bates’s, “Mother isn’t quite herself tonight.”
When the low-budget “Re-Animator” debuted in 1985, it played the dumpy theaters that usually showed straight-on slasher movies, but word quickly spread that Gordon had mixed gross-outs and slapstick comedy in a unique manner. The result was one of the very last pre-video cult movies.
The movie got a big boost when The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael saw it and raved: “The picture is close to being a silly ghoulie classic — the bloodier it gets, the funnier it is.”
Gordon based the film on a story by H.P. Lovecraft about a demented medical student named Herbert West who becomes convinced he has found a serum that can re-animate dead animals.
The Chicago director rounded up theater actors who knew exactly how to play this borderline material. Kael was right to compare the results with the work of Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company in New York during the early 1980s.
Gordon continued to work in film, but he never found the same mix of over-the-top violence and laughs. Most of his follow-ups to “Re-Animator” have seemed forced.
What’s nice about the FTC decision to include “Re-Animator” in its ongoing “Martini and a Movie” series is that this is one film that most definitely shouldn’t be watched alone at home. As Kael wrote 23 years ago, “Stuart Gordon’s debut film carries something intangible from live theatre. The mockery here is the kind that needs a crowd to complete it; ideally you ought to see it with a gang of friends.”
If you’re in the mood for something wild and silly, join me and Fairfield writer and home video maven Drew Taylor for tomorrow night’s 8 p.m. showing.
(The Fairfield Theatre Company is at 70 Sanford St. in Fairfield Center. For more information check out the non-profit group’s Website at www.fairfieldtheatre.org)
The book as art
The traditional commercial book might be under assault by the Internet and Amazon’s Kindle reading device, but the idea of books and small magazines as pieces of art in themselves proved to be an incredible draw over the weekend at the third annual New York Art Book Fair, held at the huge Phillips de Pury and Company auction space on far west 15th Street.
Dozens of book dealers and artists set up shop for three days and business was brisk according to some of the people I talked with on Sunday — both for the inexpensive, hand-made books by young unknown New York artists and the very costly collectible books signed by artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Jeff Koons.
It was fun to wander through the maze-like space, not knowing what you might find around the next corner.
Radical borderline pornographers were selling outrageous magazines like “Butt” and “Straight to Hell,” alongside rather posh book dealers from East Hampton and London.
One booth had ultra-expensive rock art books and other pop music memorabilia — including a copy of the original LP version of The Rolling Stones’s “Sticky Fingers” signed by designer Andy Warhol — just down the way from silk screeners recruited by the j. morrison gallery, who were making very reasonably priced limited edition “man purses” (above) to commemorate the fair.
The art/fashion magazine, Visionaire, had a booth with copies of the quarterly magazine that changes form and content with each new “issue.” A recent Visionaire was in the form of a collection of toy robots in a case, another looked like a neatly folded denim jacket (inside were photos by Terry Richardson, the fashion-portrait photographer who makes all of his subjects look like adult film actors). Some of the early numbers of Visionaire sell for thousands of dollars now.
The annual book fair is the brainchild of Printed Matter, Inc. which describes itself as “the world’s largest non-profit organization dedicated to the promotion of publications made by artists.”
Founded as a for-profit alternative arts space in 1976 by artists and art workers, Printed Matter reincorporated in 1978 as a non-profit organization, moving from Tribeca to SoHo to its current storefront location in Chelsea’s gallery district.
Dessay you can see
The audience for regular movies has been down this fall, but the theaters that have booked the Metropolitan Opera’s live transmissions in HD have been doing very brisk business.
Thanks to the vision of the Met’s general manager, Peter Gelb, audiences around the world had a chance to see “Salome” with Deborah Voigt on Oct. 11 and the company’s premiere staging of John Adams’s much talked-about “Doctor Atomic” will be transmitted in HD on Nov. 8 at 1 p.m.
Some opera elitists scoffed when the Met launched the HD program in December, 2006 — implying that the “great unwashed” out in multiplex-land wouldn’t be interested in seeing opera at their local theaters.
Arts businessmen worried that by offering transmissions in hundreds of movie theaters — including several in New York City — ticket sales might decline for live performances at Lincoln Center.
Well, both of those groups were wrong — theaters have been doing sell-out business all over the country and ticket sales at The Met are way up.
Just as TV sports fans know there is nothing quite like seeing a game in person, the Met’s HD performances are building new audiences for live opera all over the country.
A good friend from Philadelphia who was turned on to the Met by the HD showings in King of Prussia — and who started coming to New York for live performances last year — has noticed that prime seats are not as easy to get this season.
It was through her new addiction that I started going to the Met last season and soon found myself hooked by the spectacular drama, the gorgeous music, and tremendously charismatic and talented new stars like Natalie Dessay (above) and Diana Damrau.
Dessay blew me away in “La Fille du Regiment” last season so I am very happy to report that there will be an HD showing of one of her Met performances in “La Sonnambula” on March 21 at 1 p.m. Trust me, she is someone worth planning five months in advance for!
In our area, Fairfield University began presenting the Met in HD in September. Tickets are $22 ($20 for seniors and $15 for children and students) and there are discounts if you buy a package of shows. For more information, call 1-877-ARTs-396.
If you are reading this elsewhere in the United States, you can find all of your local info by going to the Met’s site: www.metopera.org.
Crime fiction’s rising star
Advance readers have compared Sean Chercover’s thrilling and just-published crime novel, “Trigger City” (William Morrow), with the books of everyone from Robert Crais to Michael Connelly, but I would throw two other personal favorites — James Lee Burke and Lee Child — into the pot as well.
Chercover has found a way to connect the humanistic and politically-charged world view of Burke’s Dave Robicheaux books with the adrenaline-fueled storytelling of Child’s Jack Reacher adventures.
The result is terrific entertainment that comments on the real world around us in a very disquieting manner.
“Trigger City” is the second novel Chercover has written about a Chicago private investigator named Ray Dudgeon, who went up against the Second City’s mafia in the debut book, “Big City, Bad Blood.”
Dudgeon faces a much larger foe in the new book — the shadow world of “Homeland Security” and private contracters like Halliburton who are able to do the dirtiest work of our government with no real oversight.
The detective is plunged into a very scary realm of total paranoia that is reminiscent of those great 1970s Hollywood thrillers such as “Three Days of the Condor” and “The Parallax View” where the heroes were taught tragic lessons about our government’s complicity in violent cover-ups.
The book begins with Dudgeon being asked to look into a murder that the Chicago police have already ruled an open-and-shut case. Joan Richmond, the head of payroll for a department store chain, is shot and killed by a freelance IT consultant, Steven Zhang, who returned to his home and killed himself. Zhang had been showing signs of increasing mental distress at work and left a written description Dudgeon tells us sounded “all kinds of crazy.”
Joan’s retired military man father, Isaac, wants Ray to find out the real reason his daughter died — the old man is racked with guilt about his distant relationship with Joan.
Ray needs money for a serious shoulder operation (an injury sustained in the first novel) and decides to take the case.
He quickly learns that both Joan and Steven worked together at a Halliburton-like private contractor before they arrived at the department store offices — it becomes apparent that they might have obtained information about a covert intelligence operation and it got them both killed.
Chercover does a masterful job of building tension around the case, making it clear fairly early on that Ray might have stepped into a nightmarish cover-up trap that he will never be able to get out of (and, worse than that, it might cost the lives of friends and associates).
Ray is a wonderful character because his cynicism is leavened with compassion and humor. He is carrying a torch for the nurse who broke off her relationship with him in “Big City, Bad Blood” and has assigned his partner, Vinnie, to follow his ex’s new beau to make sure he’s an OK guy. At least, that’s what Ray tells himself — but we know (and he knows too) that he is really keeping tabs on his ex-lover, hoping he can figure out a way to win her back.
Throughout the novel, Ray struggles with the physical and mental scars of the terrible beating he survived at the end of his last case. Unlike some of the absurdly indestructible P.I.s in other novels, Dudgeon is seriously hurting months after the beating — and he is suffering from stress nightmares that keep taking him back to the day he almost died.
“Trigger City” continues Chercover’s acerbic examination of the ways in which his beloved Chicago has been gentrifying and losing the colorful locally-owned bars and restaurants he loves.
The neighborhoods are changing too:
“The week before, I’d gotten another letter from my landlord — just a friendly reminder that time was running out. The building was going condo. After renovations it would be called the Burnham Park Lofts. Which was funny because it was about fifteen blocks south of Burnham Park, and funnier still because Burnham Park was a fake name given by developers to the neighborhood properly known as the South Loop.”
I love the two Ray Dudgeon books and can’t wait for Chercover to produce a third.
Satire or flattery?
I knew there was something wrong with the current state of political satire when Sarah Palin agreed to appear on last weekend’s “Saturday Night Live.”
Satire is supposed to scald its targets not flatter them or boost their Q ratings with TV watchers.
The political send-ups on “SNL” are cut from the same cloth as the pop culture spoofing on the show — talented but shallow comedians who imitate celebrities rather than comment on what’s happening to our country.
Tina Fey’s much praised guest shots as Palin on this fall’s “SNL” episodes have added to the fame and charisma of the supposed target of the comic actress’s work.
If Fey had actually satirized Palin — rather than merely aped her — the V.P. candidate wouldn’t have come anywhere near the NBC studios in New York last Saturday night.
Oliver Stone’s highly touted “W.” inspired similar feelings when I caught up with the movie on Sunday afternoon.
Although the writer-director has said in interviews that “Dr. Strangelove” (1964) and “Network” (1976) were two of the models for “W.,” the movie isn’t a very tough look at a politican or his society.
Obvious targets for satire — the missing Bush brother, Neal, who was at the center of the Savings and Loan scandals of the 1980s and who is nowhere to be seen or heard from today; father Bush’s enemy-turned-running-mate Ronald Reagan; W.’s dirty campaign against Texas governor Ann Richards — are scarcely mentioned in Stone’s movie.
The blessing and the curse of “W.” is Josh Brolin’s amazing performance in the title role — he has the look and sound of our sitting president down pat but he also digs under the surface of the Yale party boy (above) who became the Leader of the Free World.
Stone and Brolin don’t appear to have decided if they were working on a comedy or a traditional bio-pic. The lead actor gets a few moments of sly humor in some of the White House meetings with Condie Rice and Dick Cheney et al, but the romantic interludes with Laura look like something conceived for the Hallmark cable channel.
It’s hard to construct a biting satire around real historical characters and a biographical narrative style that tends to leave us empathizing with the people on the screen.
When Stanley Kubrick made “Dr. Strangelove” he used stand-ins for American politicians and foreign nuclear strategists to make his points about the insanity of nuclear brinksmanship between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Sidney Lumet and Paddy Chayefsky’s “Network” took apart the notion of news as entertainment through their fictional UBS network.
“W.” is a movie that George and Laura Bush could watch with a considerable degree of pride.
