L’ennemi Public n°1 (Mesrine : Public Enemy No.1)

When we left Jacques Mesrine (Vincent Cassel) at the end of L’instinct de Mort, he had worn out most of his criminal accomplices and was heading off on his own. At the start of L’ennemi Public n°1 he is – with typical swagger – updating a legal bureaucrat on his story, in preparation for an extended stretch in clink. This, hand-holding haters might grumble, would be to help get people quickly up to speed, but then the concept of being lead carefully back through a reprise of saucy Jacques’s greatest hits seems to be put to rest as we are thrown almost immediately back into the action.

After a couple of audacious bank heists he is back in court and playing the boisterous Braggadocio. In the middle of his boasting he takes the judge hostage, right under the noses of all his accusers, and flees. A mater of weeks later a further arrest sees him arrested again and sent to the infamous La Santé jail, where he writes his brash atrocity-filled autobiography, to the horror of his lawyer. Inevitably, another escape is instigated and he returns to criminal ways with the kidnapping of a millionaire (Henri Lelièvre, played with lugubrious brilliance by the venerable Georges Wilson).

Unsurprisingly, he is termed Public Enemy No.1, and unsurprisingly he adores the title, even if it must clearly accelerate us towards the ending we have all already seen during the opening titles of L’instinct de Mort.

L’ennemi Public n°1 suffers for a while in the attempt to get going. It seems unsure as to whether it should help the audience, or just get going, and consequently stutters, producing an uncertain lack of impetus. After a half hour or so it finds its feet, entirely thanks, as you might expect, from the power of Cassel’s performance. He has no problem picking up the strands of the story and manages also to add further layers to Mesrine’s wildly unwieldy character. He’s fiery, reckless, filled with bravura and self-belief, but what Cassel brings to the table is a deep confusion which Jacques is desperate to cover up by any means necessary including tying his colours to the masts of political causes of several different hues.

We also have moments where Mesrine seems genuinely touched by the presence of his grown daughter, and Cassel shows just what a terrific talent he is by softening his monstrous creation just enough to show that there’s a human behind the eyes.

Ennemi is a longer and more violent film than Instinct, and suffers to some degree because of this; tied in with that bumpy beginning, it is a less satisfactory partner, but when the bar was set so high to begin with that’s not too bad a comparison. Ultimately, these are two parts of a very impressive whole, and they should be seen as close to one another as possible. Mesrine, for those that worry about such things, does not come across as someone to be lauded, but Cassel deserves all the praise that might flow his way; he is simply wonderful.

deadgirl

Just going to throw a couple of words together to see how they fit. I’d like your very first reaction, if that’s possible. Ready? OK.

Zombie rape.

Yeah, I feared as much. And now I’m not sure that I have anywhere else to go with this. Thing is, if you know anything about deadgirl it is the sexual abuse angle and, as a necessary corollary, that the girl involved isn’t actually alive (even if she is rather more animated than a corpse has any right to be). Is there actually any point in me carrying on?

Well, some. The problems that deadgirl has to cope with are that it arrives with not only something of a reputation, especially – one imagines – among those that either haven’t or aren’t going to see it, but also that it has also played on that reputation to a certain extent. A festival tour to gear up that word of mouth thing; those a-woman-walked-out rumours notorious movies kill for; and most shamelessly, a poster featuring a pair of lips, red and a deathly grey, viewed sideways. You know. You know you know.

And that can help among a certain constituency, believe me. I’m not about to defend it.

But, irritatingly, deadgirl has much to commend it. Oh, I don’t mean the exploitation angle, of course, nor am I particularly interested in the calculatingly shock-inducing nature of some of the scenes, all of that can go hang as far as I’m concerned. We’ve been here before, and frankly, if you want shock, watch Antichrist, because this soon loses it’s power after the idea of what’s going to happen has been and gone. Indeed, the lesson you learn here is that the idea of guys raping and beating and mutilating a corpse would have had a bit more currency (and whether it should have any is a debate all its own) had they not shown any of the acts at all but just talked about it…

…because, with some craft, deadgirl handles the dialogue really rather well, and its main characters, a pair of isolated High School no-marks who discover a seemingly, er, dead girl in a basement and decide to use her as their slave, are swiftly sketched out with no little skill. Indeed, the monstrous JT (Noah Segan), is as perfect a cinematic outsider as you might imagine; so far beyond the mainstream that you can already see the low-paid alcoholic years of bitterness and resentment spreading out before him. His cold stare, his casual hate and misogyny make his grand scheme, to not only keep the girl as a toy but to make more as she wears out, frighteningly real. In fact, the scenes outside the basement, where the guys have to cope with the grimness of their everyday lives, are so good, with such a smartly realised Indie ethic structuring them, that you wonder if this didn’t grow from a more grounded urban-type project. In many ways it reminded me of the terrific Brick, as the bleak High School setting is the same (with my nerd hat on, I discovered today that Segan had a part in Brick, so I am, to some extent, pleased to catch up with him again, albeit without actually trying).

Where deadgirl actually fails is in making the reality of the girl so forcibly. There is a scene near the end where – inevitably, I guess – people outside of the outcasts discover the body, and it is then that the thing starts to crumble. Up until that point you can make a case for the girl not existing at all, that she is just some secret essay in wish-fulfilment, a representation of the psychologically claustraphobic side of the outsiders’ skewed sexuality. Perhaps she’s a masturbation symbol, or a sign that morally, we’re fucked the moment our balls drop.

Whatever. For all the good work that deadgirl puts in, it can’t in the end help itself, decides that it’s just a horror movie after all, and all the effort falls apart because the others arrive and some idiot gets his cock bitten off.

You wish you hadn’t bothered now, don’t you?

And it was all going so well up to that point. I think that’s what they call dropping the ball.

Inglourious Basterds

Hey, if you happen to see the Most Somethingest Director in the World, tell him this.

Inglourious Basterds, the Look-At-Meee! film title for 2009, trumps and burps and waddles its way onto our screens like an overweight prize-fighter relying on past glories. It does this by looking up the ‘what people said was innovative the last few times’ tag, and dressing it up in different clothes; World War 2 clothes (because that is where the film is notionally set).

Wait, don’t go. You get that I didn’t like this, don’t you? Well, OK, not massively, no, but stick around. Go on, over there, just relax for a minute. There’s a lot of qualifying to be done here, and like most gone-to-seed prize-fighters, a real haymaker winning punch might not be too far away. OK, cool.

There’s not a great deal to be said about the plot, which is more than a little ridiculous and also, in places, somewhat taxing (only the most unquestioning moviegoer will fail to raise their eyebrows at some of the liberties taken here, but we are expected to take this on board as part of the fun). So, let it ride, for a while at least. Essentially, The Basterds are a ‘crack’ squad of Jewish-American soldiers sent to Nazi-occuppied France to spread fear by killing and mutilating German troops. Their brief is heightened at the half-way mark when they are asked to assist an operation to kill the majority of the German High Command in a movie theatre in Paris during a propaganda film premiere. I won’t trouble you with that again. But, we start 3 years earlier (“Once Upon A Time…in Nazi-occuppied France” as the Chapter Title – Tarantino likes these stop-and-think ‘flourishes’ – goes) in 1941, and the evil Colonel Landa ( a splendidly hammy Christoph Waltz), is touring his area of administrative interest, Northern France, hunting out Jews. In a tense and atmospheric scene, he taunts and teases a farmer who is clearly hiding a family of Jews. It’s a superbly staged scene, and the two-hander dynamic is spiritedly played, but Hell’s teeth it goes on. And on. And on. There’s cranking up the tension and there’s overstaying your welcome, you know? Chapter Two (“Inglourious Basterds”) introduces us to Brad Pitt (the leader of the group) and his mission statement about nixing the Nazi foot soldier and creating an aura of fear. This. Goes. On. Too. Long.

When we first see The Basterds (it’s tiring, that, isn’t it?) in proper action, they have all been busy, eradicating a German patrol and are just about to torture all but one of their captives (one will be set free to spread the word). The chosen soldier is asked to point out the location of the next group up the road, or he’ll have his head caved in by the semi-legendary “Bear Jew”. Now, at the same time, for comic effect, because Jews, Hitler and that whole Holocaust thang is essentially crying out for laughs, this scene is intercut with the Führer himself talking to a survivor. The faintly obvious badinage is played as a big joke, and isn’t unfunny, but it swiftly becomes weary and not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, you want them to just get on with it. The arrival of the fabled Bear jew doesn’t help. Heralded by Pitt, we hear him walking up a tunnel. Here he comes, banging his baseball bat against the wall, here he comes.

On his way.

Any minute now. Right with you. Just a bit longer. Right with ya. We’ll come back to him in a minute.

Leaping off to Paris, we meet Shosanna (Mélanie Laurent), the owner of the theatre where the propaganda film is to be shown. She happens to be an escapee from Landa’s terrifying scourges, and therefore no easy collaborator. In fact, she has hatched a deadly plan to blow up her theatre when the Germans arrive. Laurent is quite simply the very best thing on show here, shining like Bruce Willis managed in Pulp Fiction, to give the film a proper sense of depth and, dammit, some fizz and élan.

When we leave her and fly to Blighty to pick up Michael Fassbender as a too too posh Brit spy, I began to think we might be on to something. Fassbender is absolutely brilliant, but he is forced to share his first scene with – oh dear – Mike Myers. Being Mike Myers. Tarantino, unfortunately, is determined to move through the gears and – however much you might hope against it – re-invent World War 2 as a screwball comedy. It is a funny scene, but it doesn’t need two daft British accents. It doesn’t need Mike fucking Myers at all, frankly. Oh, I’m getting all aggravated again now, and it’s been almost a week since I’ve seen it.

Back at the tunnel, the guy is still walking out of the darkness. So, instead, we go to an extended scene where Fassbender and two of the German-speaking Basterds have to meet their double-agent contact in a bar filled with German soldiers. Much has been said of this. It’s ‘bravura’ apparently to have a 15 minute sequence entirely in German. Mmm. I preferred that bit in Where Eagles Dare where Eastwood and Burton get rumbled in the bar and go quietly, meself. And you know why? Because it says what it needs to say and then moves on. Here we’re stuck riffing on the the bloody tipping scene from Reservoir Dogs again, and again, and it never seems to end. Are you getting a theme coming through at all?! The moment after this is set in the movie theatre and, once more, we are in an overextended skit with lots of dialogue all endlessly looping around trying to be, oh I don’t know, cool or funny or something. In fact, by the time we get everyone all together in the same place ready for the climax you may have started to get a) a numb bum, and b) more than significantly irritated. By the time the Marx Brothers stuff has turned any pretence that this isn’t a particularly ill-judged screwball comedy (those Nazis!) on its head, you may – in spirit – be wishing you were well on your way home. Tarantino, certainly, has by the last half hour, exhausted any of the narrative drive that he might have had in the first part of the film, and is just rushing headlong towards the end. Fuck, then, tying up the ends neatly, instead you just get a big bang, lots of bullets, and Pitt gurning into the camera after slicing a swastika into his enemy’s forehead and telling the audience, “this may just be my masterpiece.” Fuck. Off.

The most annoying thing on show here isn’t the bad stuff per se, but the fact that there is some good shit buried underneath it. Laurent’s plotting (one sequence, played out smartly to Bowie’s Cat People (Putting Out Fire) is the high point of the entire shebang) is excellent, the final moments of the bar scene are fiercely exciting if you haven’t drifted off, the opening cat and mouse schtick is wonderful…but all the surrounding gubbins is soul-sapping and extends the Cons column beyond endurance. There is no knockout punch here, just an undignified slugging match with all the good work in and around the body hidden by the flab. Oh, and the guy in the tunnel? Therein lies the problem. If Tarantino’s hubris, in-jokes and motormouth excesses have a soul mate it can be found in the man who emerges from that long walk. Eli Roth, the nerdy horror exploiter du jour, and not a man to tell Quent to put a fucking sock in it. Tarantino is deseperate to fill his stuff with references, homages and steals from D-movie exploitation cinema, perhaps he ought to follow Rule One, first and make something that comes in at about 80 minutes. There is two and half hours of overblown and fatty waste here…if the guy’s still a contender he needs to ditch the entourage and remember that Reservoir Dogs was about an hour and a half, and it was great. Otherwise, throw in the towel.

Orphan

I have no doubt that Orphan was audience tested. It’s the way of things. Audience tested until the pips squeaked, most likely.

Is that good? My instinct says no, but what do I know? It might go against the grain for the purist cinephile, but it’s a fact to be sucked up that these things happen. I imagine there’s a website you can find, probably, available to the nerdiest screenwatchers, via some Freedom of Information agreement, that allows you to check what was looked for, expected, altered, gleaned and dropped after each screening. And all in the most excruciating detail. I’m not going to go looking for this assumed nit-pick palace of the anally retentive, I just bet it’s out there somewhere.

Anyway, documented or not, Orphan, I feel certain, will have suffered the process at some or several stages of its in-production life. And it seems to have done pretty well, considering. Checking them out this morning, I see that those old sticks Ebert and the Guardian’s very own Philip French were impressed: myself, having pretty much zero foreknowledge, I went along last night to see what was what.

‘You’ll Never Guess Her Secret’ goads the poster, the tagline slung beneath a creepy portrait of a straitlaced freak-child. Hmm. And, Uggh. Telling us there’s a twist, or a revelation, tends to slew a movie’s balance in my opinion, so much that you’re sat there just waiting for it to come along. It also coaxes the audience in to some sort of battle of the witless that no-one will really benefit from. And that’s exactly what happened.

Orphan tells the story of, you guessed it, an orphan, planted cuckoo-like into an existing family. Stuff happens and then a dreadful secret is revealed.

I don’t mean to be dismissive, I really don’t, because I think it’s a movie that deserves an audience and has something to offer. It has good people in it (Peter Sarsgaard, Vera Farmiga, Karel Roden), all of whom have done excellent work in the past; it has an eye-popping attention-grabbing central performance by the unknown (to me) Isabelle Fuhrman; and, endearingly, it tries hard, although not always with success, to ape a certain verisimilitude that you might find in a great deal of Indie cinema, coming across with the occasional sense that this is oddly European in flavour. All the better for that, of course, as with it’s wintry setting and infant-centric casting you might with some confidence hope you’re back in Låt Den Rätte Komma In territory, or perhaps even knocking on the door of El Orfanato. Well, let’s not carried away. The director, Jaume Collet-Serra, may be Spanish but his back catalogue stretches as far as Goal II and the Paris Hilton starrer, House of Wax. He’s upping his game, admittedly, but I’m not about to claim, nor would I want anyone to think, that his is a brave new voice of cinema. He does a good job, but his actors do a better one, let’s leave it at that.

But it wasn’t good enough for some people, if not pretty much everyone in the theatre. Was I the only person in the fifty-strong crowd who wasn’t talking or commenting or, at several points, laughing heartily? Actually, maybe I do my peers a disservice there, as the staff seemed aware of the disruption and appeared three or four times. Silly in places, and rather too challenging in others, perhaps, but I have seen a lot lot worse (Prom Night springs to mind, seen from pretty much the same seat) lapped up more readily than Orphan managed last night. I guess there are rather too many dynamics to corral with regards to crowd reactions, too many confounding variables to take into account, to get a decent answer to that one. The rowdiest group all appeared to know one another (they left en masse), and so I wondered if they had all just decided – flocking style – to hate the film, and that this had affected most everyone else.

Maybe. Who knows. But I do believe that taunting a bunch of 16 year olds with ‘You’ll Never Guess Her Secret’ and then producing a slightly wordy, slightly issue-y (alcoholism, child sexuality, still-birth) movie that doesn’t dispatch half-naked cheerleaders at regular intervals, to be chewed over with a modicum of thought whilst also being perhaps darker than expected, is going to make people jump one of two ways. That happened last night.

As an audience test, then, as a test by this audience, Orphan failed, but I don’t believe the movie can be held entirely to blame.

On leaving, a young lad in front of me was decrying the film to his pals as the most ridiculous thing he’d ever seen. As he did so he was struggling with his jeans. They’d clearly ridden up over the last two hours and he needed to baggy them down to show off just the right amount of underpant and arse crack. I’m a silly old fart: perhaps I shouldn’t try to understand and explain what’s ridiculous and what’s not.

L’instinct de mort (Mesrine : Killer Instinct)

It’s been thirty years but I can remember, just about I think, the news story; famous French gangster shot to death in busy Paris street. To invade the consciousness of a hormonally distracted 15-year-old English school kid, you had to be famous, right?

Well, that’s what Jacques Mesrine was. A fifteen year crime spree, resulting in him being very much Public Enemy No.1, Mesrine flew around the world, taunting the police with his many disguises and bizarrely extravagant criminal posturing.

Perfect fodder for the villain as lovable rogue thang, you may think, and so it proves with French director Jean-François Richet turning the audacious and violent adventures into something of a romp with L’instinct de mort (Mesrine: Killer Instinct), followed soon by L’ennemi public n°1 (Mesrine: Public Enemy No.1). The French, probably even more than the Americans, have a tendency to laude their desperadoes, imbuing them with a sense of rebellion and mystique, and Mesrine was at the very zenith of this process, even being considered – for hitting so many banks – as the Gallic Robin Hood, hitting big business for the sake of the little guy. Hmm. We may want to ignore his 40 or so murders possibly, before setting him on too high a pedestal, that and the fact that at one point in the telling of this tale he puts a gun in his wife’s mouth while being watched by his infant son.

Instinct starts with Mesrine’s bloody baptism in the army, killing tortured suspects in Algiers. On his return to France, he slips into criminal ways with old friends and is soon working within Paris’s neon nightmare underworld, for local kingpin, Guido (Gérard Depardieu), a corpulent and terrifying man who harbours undefined links to the rightwing OAS. Following a prison spell, Mesrine (a brilliant Vincent Cassel) decides to go straight. He has a wife and young child and a talent for architectural work, but the lure of the swift centime draws him back to his illegal ways and soon he is blagging his way around the casinos and bars, threatening all and sundry with his sawn-off, throwing francs around with nonchalance. After a near-fatal contretemps with one of Guido’s rivals, he is advised to take a hike to Canada (Montréal, of course), and it’s there that his reputation really begins to take off.

Kidnapping, capture, extradition, escapes and more heists up the ante quite considerably: it’s certainly a life lived on the edge, even if – the attempt to return to a high security prison he’s just escaped from and bust out the mates he left behind being a perfect example – it occasionally seems to have been thrown together with sheer optimism and not a great deal of planning. Choosing the wrong guy to kill, or allowing his captives to get away, doesn’t seem to have got in the way of Mesrine’s enthusiasm, and you can’t deny that the man (if that’s the way you roll) probably had a shit load of fun doing what he did.

By the end of Instinct, weary from the many deaths, gunshot wounds and heads being cracked, you may wonder what the human cost of all this is. Certainly, Mesrine is left alone to contemplate his fate, but essentially this is only half time. It’s the mid-70s, and the Public Enemy is about to head back home.

There are doubts then, to my mind, as to what L’instinct de mort is actually for. Is it a properly re-enacted biopic of a genuinely important figure, or a cinematic hagiography of a thug for some reason beloved by the media chatterers? I guess until the second part arrives we will have to suspend our opinions. But what we most definitely have here is a perfectly paced machine of a movie, with a brilliant tuned engine at its core. Cassel is utterly convincing in the central role and deserves all the ‘Formidable!’ plaudits you’ll see in the press. As in La Haine, he seems almost too good, beyond what might be expected of him, too subtle, too nuanced, too French. There is a quality of brash charm on display here that it wouldn’t be ridiculous to claim, no one else would be able to pull off. It’s a good job that he is in almost every scene, because he really is that wonderful to watch. Even with my cynical hat on, and not wanting to lionize a financially motivated killer (OK, OK), I have to confess he’s a complete joy to watch.

Bring on part 2…