Ill-Informed Gadfly

(Seen at the 16th annual VCU French Film Festival at the Byrd Theatre in Richmond, Va.)

A successful if soulless Parisian painter relocates to his country house and rediscovers life’s simple pleasures, thanks to the homespun wisdom of his gardener. What a cliché! Except director-screenwriter Jean Becker carries it off with heart and grit. “Dialogue avec mon jardiner,” starring a well-matched Daniel Auteuil and Jean-Pierre Darroussin, was the best of the four movies I saw at the VCU French Film Festival. It’s lively and funny and warm, and Becker — son of the late director Jacques Becker, famous for “Touchez pas au grisbi” among other movies — directs with understated confidence. The movie has very little conflict — the painter and the gardener (they refer to each other by their occupations) hit it off right away, and their bond only deepens. And it’s predictable — we know where it’s going as soon as the gardener complains about mysterious pain in his abdomen. Yet it’s never boring, because Becker packs it with minor-key fissures and delights. He doesn’t ignore the glaring socioeconomic differences between the painter and the gardener, but he doesn’t let them define their relationship, either. And he doesn’t assume that the gardener is a fount of wisdom simply because he’s from the country and works with his hands. (He’s a retired railway employee; gardening is his hobby.) Darroussin is too specific, too believably quirky, to be a mere symbol of the noble working man. The example he sets is to be comfortable in one’s own skin, a quality that the painter is slow to grasp. The painter’s wife wants to divorce him — they’ve been separated for years — and he resists her for reasons he can’t articulate. He has a beautiful girlfriend but is insecure about her affections and needlessly insults a pretentious younger man he sees as a threat. Auteuil, as always, is confident and compulsively watchable, and he defers the laughs to the bearded, big-hearted Darroussin, who finds a distinct, halting rhythm to his actions and speech. Hiam Abbass, currently wowing American arthouse audiences with her beauty and limpid grace in “The Visitor,” has a brief and poignant turn late in the movie as the gardener’s Algerian-born wife. “Dialogue avec mon jardiner” succeeds not because it asserts the value of uncomplicated pleasures, but because it provides them so thoroughly.

Judd Apatow likes his leading ladies stunning and his leading men schlubby. It’s the formula for his guy-centric romantic comedies. “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” the latest effort from the Apatow gang, stretches this concept farther than ever before. The star, Jason Segel, is spectacularly unattractive, and prolonged exposure to his lumpy-dumpy face and body might cause even the most hetero male viewers to yearn for a Brad Pitt movie. Segel also wrote the screenplay, and to his credit, he finds daring comedy in his deficient sex appeal, appearing fully nude in the hilarious breakup scene that opens the movie. “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” had me at goodbye. Segel plays Peter Bretter, who melts down after getting dumped by the title character, a TV star played by Kristen Bell. Embracing his inner stalker, he checks into the Hawaiian resort where Sarah is staying with her new boyfriend, a dim English rock star played by Russell Brand. Luckily for Peter, a fetching hotel employee played by Mila Kunis takes pity on him. The four leads win you over with their flaws, and they gamely take turns being humiliated. Brand even generates a touch of sympathy for his blithely egotistical sex maniac. And Kunis brings impressive subtlety and maturity to her first major adult role. She’s not just an object of desire, she’s a human being – a recurring theme in the brand of Apatow, who produced this movie. “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” has its draggy and sloppy moments, but it generates loud and sustained laughs from people you enjoy spending time with. It’s hard to ask for much more.

LISTEN: Forgetting Sarah Marshall

(Seen at the 16th annual VCU French Film Festival at the Byrd Theatre in Richmond, Va.)

“It was very … French,” my aunt said after a screening of “Jean de La Fontaine — Le défi.” She’s right in the sense that the movie assumes a working knowledge of, and interest in, a 17th-Century fabulist and the influence of his writings on the court of Louis XIV. While you’ve probably heard of Jean de La Fontaine if you’ve studied French literature — I hadn’t, because I haven’t — this is not a movie made with international audiences in mind. Yet I doubt that even the French were particularly impressed with “Jean de La Fontaine — Le défi.” It’s that old standby, the costume drama that’s more costume than drama, and it’s directed with zero personality by journeyman Daniel Vigne. (He’s best known for “The Return of Martin Guerre,” remade in the United States as “Sommersby,” but he’s spent most of his career in television.)

The movie begins with political intrigue, as Fouquet, the kingdom’s superintendent of finance and a patron of the arts, is arrested by Colbert (Philippe Torreton), an adviser-henchman to Louis XIV, on a cooked-up charge of subversion of the something-or-other. Quelle horreur! I don’t mean to trivialize the plight of poor Fouquet, but the movie takes it on faith that we’ll be as upset by his arrest as our hero is. To show those meanies at court just how evil they are, de La Fontaine takes pen to paper and writes … a series of wickedly satirical fables. Again, I can only assume they were wickedly satirical — the movie takes your knowledge of them for granted. Colbert is outraged, I tell you, outraged! He vows to crush the dissident author, or at the very least to make his life mildly uncomfortable.

The drama never gets hotter than a simmer. The long-awaited confrontation between Colbert and de La Fontaine fizzles. (Colbert is incognito, and de La Fontaine doesn’t know whom he’s speaking to.) There’s little to do but admire the scenery, including the opulent costumes or — even better — the lack thereof. God love the French and their lack of prudishness about bare breasts. Sara Forestier, who plays de La Fontaine’s off-and-on girlfriend, is particularly lovely. I also enjoyed how unapologetic the movie is about the hero’s rakishness — de La Fontaine cruelly abandons his wife and children and sleeps with anything that moves, behavior presented as de riguer. Sadly, the actor who plays him, Lorànt Deutsch, isn’t persuasive as either a ladykiller or a literary bright light. He’s a mild and wan leading man. The supporting cast fares better, particularly the hangdog Jean-Claude Dreyfus as a courtier assigned to spy on de La Fontaine who ends up protecting the writer. Dreyfus oozes knowledge and manipulative skill. The movie, not so much.

(Seen at the 16th annual VCU French Film Festival at the Byrd Theatre in Richmond, Va.)

“On dirait que … ” is a gimmicky and repetitious, if cute and harmless, documentary that asks kids ages 8-12 to act out their impressions of what their parents do for a living. The children of farmers pretend to be farmers; doctors’ kids play doctors; shopkeepers’ kids, shopkeepers; and so on. It’s basically a high-concept French version of “Kids Say the Darndest Things,” and it would play better as a 45-minute special on public television than as an 82-minute feature. The kids are adorable, of course. Unsurprisingly, their perceptions of their parents’ occupations are sometimes oversimplified, sometimes off-base and sometimes strikingly accurate. The movie would benefit from some outside perspective — perhaps a child psychologist who could put into context the way young minds parse adult experience. But it just goes on to the next group of kids acting out the next job, making the same point again and again. I was more intrigued by the offspring of grocers, restaurateurs and, yes, circus performers than by the doctors’ kids — in part because they’re more diverse, in part because they simply need to know more about what their parents do. But if “On dirait que … ” has anything important to say about race and class in France, you’ll have to do what the kids do — figure it out for yourself.

(Seen at the 16th annual VCU French Film Festival at the Byrd Theatre in Richmond, Va.)

“L’Invité,” a modestly entertaining and entirely unimportant comedy of manners starring Daniel Auteuil and Thierry Lhermitte, is a good lesson in the French film industry’s economies of scale. It would be unthinkable in Hollywood. It puts two of France’s most popular and bankable leading men — think Tom Hanks and George Clooney — in a modestly scaled, low-budget comedy with an extended sitcom plot. I have no idea how it did at the box office — there appears to be little enthusiasm for it on IMDB — but it can’t have been too big a loser, because there wasn’t much to spend money on beyond the salaries of the leads. Most of the movie takes place inside an apartment or in the adjacent stairwell, with just a handful of sequences shot elsewhere. What’s remarkable to an American viewer is that Auteuil and Lhermitte agreed to appear in this movie. It’s just such a trifle. It doesn’t stretch their skills in the slightest. Hanks or Clooney could never be bothered.

Whether that’s a good or a bad thing, I can’t be sure. If “L’Invité” were better, it would be easy to for me savage American A-listers for only taking on prestige projects when their French counterparts are happy to appear in lightweight crowd-pleasers. But “L’Invité” is more … pleasant than surprising or uproarious. The screenplay — adapted from a stage play — has little zing, relying on lame devices like a leaky roof to set up jokes. Auteuil plays Gérard, formerly a manager in the plastic-wrap industry, who’s been out of work for three years. Valérie Lemercier (who had a small part in Sydney Pollack’s 1995 “Sabrina” remake but is otherwise little-known on these shores) is Gérard’s dowdy and clueless wife, Colette. And Lhermitte plays Alexandre, the suave image consultant who’s just moved into the apartment beneath them. Gérard interviews for a job overseeing a factory in Indonesia and is manipulated into inviting the company’s human-resources manager over for dinner. Alexandre — motivated by charity, it appears — decides to save the uncultured Gérard and Colette from themselves. (They have little taste in art, food or wine, and Gérard spends his free time playing with model trains.) Alexandre spiffs up their apartment and plans an elegant meal with an eye toward wowing their guest. But of course his plans backfire in ways he couldn’t have imagined. The plot turns on, among other things, appreciation of garish avant-garde art — just in case you forgot these folks are French.

Auteuil is my favorite French actor. He’s entirely ordinary-looking — 5-foot-7, with a craggy face, prominent nose and soft midsection. But he’s equally effective when he’s cast according to type (as in this movie) or against it. He can be dashing or repulsive, charismatic or neurotic, a lover of beautiful women or an awkward, friendless bore. (For Auteuil in romantic-hero mode, check out Patrice Leconte’s ravishing “The Widow of Saint-Pierre.”) He does deft work as Gérard, making him alternately spineless, weaselly and hot-tempered. Lemercier proves a gifted comedienne — her lack of vanity comes in handy as the thick and unstylish Colette. And Lhermitte shows a quick wit beneath his handsome and unruffled persona. The three leads are unfailingly professional as “L’Invité” ambles along its well-trod path. I give director Laurent Bouhnik credit for this much, though — even in an unpretentious formula comedy, he rejects a simplistic happy ending. Instead, “L’Invité” concludes with notes of irony and ambiguity. It’s just unsettling enough to keep your synapses firing for a minute or two after you leave the theater.

“Street Kings” offers up a pudgier and pastier Keanu Reeves than you might remember. It’s a good look for him. I won’t say the famously stolid thespian is suddenly disappearing inside his roles, but now that he’s less handsome, he’s more credible as a regular guy. He can even be charming in a gruff sort of way. And that’s one reason “Street Kings” manages to hold your attention despite its excesses and absurdities. Reeves plays Tom Ludlow, an alcoholic Los Angeles vice detective who does the department’s dirty work with its tacit blessing. He’ll think nothing of shooting first in a gunfight with lowlife kidnappers, then tampering with the scene to make it look like he acted in self-defense. But he’s unschooled in the finer points of corruption. When his turncoat former partner is gunned down, it’s obvious who’s responsible, but not to Tom. As a storytelling tactic, this should be disastrous, and director David Ayer, best known for writing “Training Day,” brings little finesse to the search for truth. But then neither does Tom, and his brutish investigative methods make for solid gutter entertainment. Chris Evans projects sly intelligence as a young homicide detective who’s alternately appalled and awed by his loose-cannon colleague. Sadly, Forest Whitaker goes over the top and back again as the arrogant vice-squad captain who holds Tom’s leash. He and Reeves are forced to act a ludicrous climax that elicits unintentional guffaws. But you’ll only be disappointed if you were taking “Street Kings” seriously, and that’s hard to do.

LISTEN: Street Kings

One-sentence review: Ben Affleck is an adequate director; Amy Ryan is a dynamite actor. OK, I’ll give you a bit more, even though it’s been a while since I crammed this movie in as part of my pre-Oscar preparation. I was happy Tilda Swinton won Best Supporting Actress for “Michael Clayton” — in part because I predicted it — but Ryan, a New York stage veteran perhaps best known before this movie for “The Wire,” was equally deserving. She’s authentic and harrowing as a South Boston drug addict and petty criminal whose 4-year-old daughter is kidnapped. Ryan’s Helene McCready is an unapologetic monster who refuses to compromise her complete lack of principles. She enjoys being the center of a media firestorm when her girl disappears. Without giving it away, Ryan has a couple of extraordinary, skin-crawling moments at the end of the movie, where she makes clear that Helene is unchanged by her ordeal. “Gone Baby Gone” is uneven, with a plot that strains credulity — maybe it’s easier to swallow in its original form, a novel by Dennis Lehane that I can only presume is dense and sprawling — but it has a killer final scene, one that acknowledges the bewildering murk that separates right from wrong, winners from losers. While Affleck sometimes strains just to get the camera in the right place, he deserves credit for crafting such a rich and unsettling conclusion, and for letting Ryan knock it out of the park. (To be fair, Affleck happens upon some elegant imagery, thanks in part to his shrewd choice of the maestro John Toll as his cinematographer — a decision that suggests he’s at least aware of his shortcomings.)

When the Rolling Stones hit the road in 1989 to support their album “Steel Wheels,” it was derided as the “Steel Wheelchairs tour.” Now, it’s almost 20 years later, and the Stones have outlasted the jeers. They’re more likely to inspire awe. Maybe that’s why Martin Scorsese borrowed the song title “Shine a Light” for his exuberant Stones concert documentary. At this point, you can only bask in their luminescence. Unlike the Band, the subject of Scorsese’s “The Last Waltz,” the Stones aren’t worn down by performing: They’re rejuvenated. The movie was shot over two nights at Manhattan’s Beacon Theatre in the fall of 2006, with a half-dozen brilliant cinematographers working the cameras. From the opening riff of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” the Stones mesmerize with their musicianship and showmanship. Scorsese’s team illuminates the delicate interweaving between Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood, the eloquent backbeats of Charlie Watts and, of course, the irrepressible strutting and shimmying of Mick Jagger. If anything, “Shine a Light” proves through its intimacy that you don’t need front-row seats to enjoy a Stones show. Jagger’s lithe and wiry body exudes so much energy, you could appreciate him from a mile away. Scorsese intercuts bits of archival interview footage, and at one point Dick Cavett asks Jagger if he could see himself performing at age 60. Jagger responds: “Absolutely.” He’ll be 65 this year, but he shows his age only from the neck up. “Shine a Light” could win over even the most calcified Stones-hating hipsters.

LISTEN: Shine a Light

If you ever hear me equivocating about the prospect of seeing a Julie Taymor movie in the theater, please, slap me. I say this even though “Across the Universe” may well be more enjoyable at home. When you can hit pause, its slightness and lack of momentum don’t bother you as much. You can focus on what’s important: the imagery and the music. By the same token, those elements are most impressive on the big screen. Taymor is a ballsy director who’s not afraid to fail, to be savaged, to look ridiculous. I thought her over-the-top imagery and theatrics meshed perfectly with the Shakespearean bloodbath “Titus Andronicus,” which she adapted into “Titus,” her delirious first movie, starring Anthony Hopkins in one of his nerviest performances. (By trade, Taymor is a stage director and choreographer best known for her bold reimagining of “The Lion King.”) I was dismayed by Taymor’s follow-up, “Frida,” a stilted biopic of the hard-knock Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. None of her visual flights of fancy could disguise that movie’s tediousness; if anything, she just made it worse.

With “Across the Universe,” she takes a daring concept — a late-60s-set musical romance, to the tune of Beatles songs sung by the cast — and carries it off just short of brilliantly. When she’s on, she meshes sound and image with feverish invention. At times “Across the Universe” is little more than a series of music videos, but Taymor drives the plot forward with brief and shrewd cutaways. Characters get introduced through song. One wonders what Taymor is up to when she abandons the two leads to allow a lesbian cheerleader (T.V. Carpio) to reinterpret “I Want to Hold Your Hand” as a wrenching anthem of unrequited love. But trust me, just go with it: It’s the best and most surprising vocal performance in the movie, and the sequence stands alone. (Later, the girl joins the leads at their Bohemian East Village digs. Her name is Prudence, for no other reason than to give Taymor an excuse to use the song “Dear Prudence.” She eventually finds love with a contortionist — awww — then fades into the background. But what a first impression!)

At the center of “Across the Universe” is the romance between Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood), a blond and privileged American whose high school sweetheart is killed in Vietnam, and Jude (Jim Sturgess), a doe-eyed Liverpudlian dockworker who sails to the States to find his father. At Princeton University, Jude discovers his father is not a professor but a maintenance worker, and he meets Max (Joe Anderson), Lucy’s ne’er-do-well brother. (”With a Little Help From My Friends” cements the bond between Jude and Max.) We know Lucy’s first boyfriend is a goner, but to Taymor’s credit she captures the emotion behind his death inventively, with “Let It Be” as the expression of grief both for Lucy and for an African-American family in Detroit that loses a child during the 1967 riots. A gospel choir allows the Lennon-McCartney melody to soar, and Taymor avoids implying that the 60s were only turbulent for white folks in nice neighborhoods.

Lucy moves to New York and takes up with Jude, who loved her at first sight. Wood gently massages “If I Fell” as Lucy asks herself whether she can love again. Of course she can — love is resilient in the Beatles’ oeuvre. That’s why I couldn’t quite buy the fragility of Lucy and Jude’s affair. He’s an artist and she’s an anti-war activist, and they’re supposed to be driven apart by their divergent ideals. The fact that he’s English and can’t get drafted ought to come as a relief to Lucy, particularly after Max’s number comes up. Taymor stages her best set piece to the tune of “I Want You” — Uncle Sam steps out of a poster to grab Max, who’s stripped of his individuality and remade into a soldier by a stomping, soulless clay army. It’s “Full Metal Jacket” remade as three minutes of dynamic music and choreography.

Before Max ships out, there’s the de riguer psychedelic interlude, with Bono as a mystic named Dr. Robert. He nails “I Am the Walrus.” (All the character names come from Beatles songs, if you hadn’t figured that out by now.) The pace begins to slow; Taymor’s doodling veers close to indulgent. She’s better off when she keeps things simple and leans on the resourceful pipes of Dana Fuchs, who looks and sounds a bit like Joan Osborne. Fuchs plays a nightclub singer named Sadie who lives with Jude and Max; Martin Luther is JoJo, her guitarist and off-and-on lover. Their love story has even less complexity than the main one, but musically, Fuchs and Luther don’t disappoint.

Preternaturally talented from a young age, Wood has always managed to find the roiling emotion beneath her pristinely beautiful exterior. She sometimes mistakes soft-spokenness for subtlety; she has a frustrating tendency to fade out the ends of her lines. But she can also be quietly heartbreaking. She’s smart and sensual and alive — an intellectual dream girl. I’m not as sold on Sturgess. I can’t blame Taymor for casting him — he’s English, he can sing, and he looks like he could have been a Beatle. But there’s not much urgency to his acting or his singing; he’s a puppy. In its final act, “Across the Universe” begins to feel both rushed and inevitable; Taymor steamrolls through song after song, and the connective tissue stops holding your interest. Lucy and Jude’s story needs another twist; their personalities, more grit. A tragic ending would be unthinkable — they’re not interesting or specific enough. For the same reason, their happy conclusion won’t leave you overwhelmed with joy. I felt like looking ahead 20 years and finding one of those ex-hippie couples that marriage, kids and careers have turned complacent and conventional. If Jude ever gets his citizenship, I could see him voting for Reagan, to Lucy’s mild consternation.

You can’t fault Taymor for trying, though. “Across the Universe” is a work of visual and sonic passion and a marvelous outlet for her weird and fervid talent. If it doesn’t leave you singing, I’m not sure you’re human.

This acclaimed Thai movie, from writer-director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, is difficult and borderline impenetrable, but never unpleasant to watch. It moves to a rhythm all its own and boasts gorgeous imagery and delicate, authentic human interaction. Weerasethakul has said he based “Syndromes and a Century” upon the courtship of his parents, both doctors, and his memories of growing up in a hospital environment. It’s an adequate explanation, but you’d never know it unless you’d read about the movie before you saw it. Nevertheless, “Syndromes” grips you. It begins with a cryptic job interview at a rural military hospital. A female psychatrist asks a series of odd questions (”Do you prefer circles, squares or triangles?”) to an eager, unflappable male physician. During this exchange, another man waits for the long-limbed and elegant psychiatrist. Later, he spies on her in the cafeteria of the hospital — the campus is surrounded by edenic wilderness — and when he sees her walking down a hallway by herself, he asks her to marry him. She demurs and leads him to a secluded picnic table, where she describes her previous romantic entanglement with a botanist. Their story, however, doesn’t conclude; Weerasethakul detours to the tender, burgeoning friendship between a singing dentist (he favors Thai country music) and a young Buddhist monk. An evening performance by the dentist produces indescribable pleasure from the weaving of sound and image. The deep black of the night sky radiates around the electric green of the singer’s shirt as he croons a simple love song, accompanied by an acoustic guitar. After the show, the monk tells the dentist he thinks the dentist may be the reincarnation of his brother, who died young. I can’t really describe how intriguing and emotionally resonant these scenes are, but as they play out they enrapture you. Earlier, the psychiatrist has an uncomfortable exchange with a man who owes her money, which Weerasethakul observes, as is his wont, at a distance and in a single take; despite the camera’s remove, you feel the ragged humanity of the participants, and they are framed seductively by tropical vegetation that sways in the breeze.

The second half of the movie, set at a cold and intimidating urban hospital, is odder and more dissonant, even as several scenes — including the job interview — are more or less repeated, with subtle changes in the dialogue. Weerasethakul reverses the camera angle when he plays out these exchanges a second time. While earlier he was looking out the window, this time the camera is hemmed in by spotless white walls; the effect is claustrophobic. Amputees roam the halls of this hospital, sometimes trying out new artificial limbs. A young man who suffered carbon monoxide poisoning ruefully looks forward to his next life; the CO has left his brain a step slow but not so slow that he doesn’t understand his sad situation. The building’s ductwork groans and creaks, and the camera follows the sounds. The movie’s second half has a haunted, wounded feeling, as if the participants are struggling to make sense of their surroundings. The viewer aches for the beauty and relative simplicity of the rural setting. There is one startlingly intimate scene, between the same male doctor who’s subjected to the interview and his girlfriend. They make out tenderly, and she urges him to consider moving with her to the grim suburban outpost where her company will soon be sending her to work. He’s not thrilled with the idea. They kiss some more, and he gets a boner.

These odd scenes create inchoate sensations, but the movie instills in you a hunger to know more, to unlock its mysteries. If you’re like me, you’ll want to go back and watch it again immediately after it’s over. (I did watch it twice, but, regrettably, I’m writing this review several weeks later.) Weerasethakul’s concept of time is elastic; the movie seems to exist on a loop. I could recommend “Syndromes and a Century” just for the novelty of the viewing experience, but it’s more than just a curiosity; it’s rich, sweet and strangely resonant.