Adult Education
by
Les Phillips
Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench,
directed by Damien Chazelle, has been called "the first mumblecore
musical," but it's too romantic for mumblecore. True, it's a black
and white post-student film about post-student types, but its heart's
is in another decade--one of those decades where people break into song
in a coffee shop, or when they're walking through the park. Guy
and Madeline even has a production number in an empty restaurant--you
thought it was empty, at least, until all of those extra dancing people
showed up. It's an old-fashioned exhilarating big dance routine, talented
enough to make you forget that you're watching what is surely the lowest-budget
musical in film history.
Guy (Jason Palmer)
is a trumpet player; Madeline (Desiree Garcia) is a shy waitress. They
have an encounter, drift away from each other, and then are somehow
attracted back towards one another. The genius of Guy and Madeline
lies in the tension between its boho diffidence and some intense, expressive
musical interludes. And Chazelle is an ingenious musical director (the
score is by Justin Hurwitz). One sequence, with a bearded dude dancing
all over a crowded party, is particularly brilliant; who knew a first-time
director could manipulate space with such virtuosity? The big dance
number, staged at Jasper White's Summer Shack restaurant, is directed
with flair and precision. As a bonus, Guy and Madeline gives
you lots of wonderful jazz music; in particular, good jazz trumpet from
Palmer ("I like Clifford Brown").
Certainly Guy
and Madeline won't be everyone's cup of tea. The narrative is underwritten
(and underacted), and the ending isn't quite satisfactory. But there
are far more successes than failures here--and such risky successes!
Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench was screened at
the Tribeca Film Festival. It looks like it will open commercially soon.
Catch it if you can. Chazelle is a major new talent.
*
Elegy
(Isabel Coixet, 2008) is the sort of serious little film that does fairly
well if it can get a good review from, say, The New York Times. Manohla
Dargis was not obliging in this instance. She spent several paragraphs
complaining that Elegy the film is not its source material,
Philip Roth's The Dying Animal (of course she warns against
this sort of useless comparison even as she's doing it). Sometimes I
just want to haul off and slap Manohla Dargis.
Elegy is about an aging professor of literature who takes
up with a young student; not for the first time, though perhaps for
the last. This is not new material; but Professor Kepesh is played by
Ben Kingsley, and attention must be paid. (Does Dargis think that Ben
Kingsley performances grow on trees? FEH! to her.)
Kingsley's
professor is sumptuous--a suave and commanding lion of a man confronted
with a loss of command. Penelope Cruz plays the student. Patricia Clarkson,
in one of her very best performances, plays Kepesh's longtime mistress,
a woman at the absolute middle of middle age, poised between her powerful
attraction to her lover and the gravity of her better judgment.
Did I mention
that this is a very sexy film; without much flesh, but a whole lot of
superb flirting, relating, and wonderful verbal foreplay? You
also get Peter Sarsgaard, as Kepesh's son; he's an oncologist, a professional
in the brute details of death; and Dennis Hopper, unexpectedly apt and
fine as an academic poet.
The photography is lovely, dark, and deep. The milieu is New York intellectual,
but there's nothing precious here. Kingsley is too vital for that, and
the pain, longing and trouble are in the foreground, not the decor.
Elegy is one of the best films from last year.
©2009 Les Phillips
CineScene
