FREEDOM IS JUST ANOTHER WORD
by Chris Dashiell

We first see 13-year-old Hanna underwater, floating as if drowned, suspended in an inner world for as long as she can hold her breath, then emerging finally from the lake. As she steps on shore, drops of blood fall on the stones. Later she asks her grandmother what a period is for. "Nothing right now," is the answer. Thus hesitantly, with little guidance or information, but with the heedless courage of youth, her coming of age story begins, the story of Lea Pool's film SET ME FREE. The French-Canadian girl leaves her grandmother to join her parents and brother in Montreal. Her father is a Holocaust survivor and struggling writer who inflicts his rage and depression on his family. Her mother is a seamstress who once wanted to be a designer - she is worn out with care and worry, subject to suicidal impulses. Hanna adores her mother and desperately wants her to live. Despite the stresses of home life, she has a spirit of joy and playfulness that keeps breaking through. She becomes enraptured with the character played by Anna Karina in Godard's My Life to Live (Hanna's story takes place sometime in the 60s, although it's never precisely stated), and she goes to the movie over and over, adopting the heroine's stance of freedom through claiming responsibility. But try as she might, she can't keep her troubled family from fragmenting....

The story material in Set Me Free could have easily become maudlin or melodramatic with the wrong approach. Writer-director Pool handles everything with understated assurance and genuine feeling. Scenes go on just long enough to have their effect and no longer. The naturalness and sincerity of the style allow feelings to arise of themselves instead of being forced on us. Most of all, she was fortunate in finding the right young actress for the lead role. Karine Vanasse is a marvel, wonderfully expressing a wide range of emotion, from mischievous joy to longing to grief to a kind of lost wandering - and more - all without mannerisms or affectation. And at a time when teenagers in films are usually played by women who look like fashion models, Vanasse's plainness is more real and actually more beautiful. There are many threads in Hanna's life. She has a crush on a teacher who resembles Anna Karina, and a brief romance with another girl. Lea Pool keeps all the elements alive and interesting. Set Me Free is not radical in style, but neither does it rely on formula or cheap moral lessons. It stays true to the heart of its heroine all the way through. At the end I felt saddened by all the loss that this girl goes through at such a young age, and also a sense of gratitude that she - we - did get through it, and came out on the other side.

Word of mouth can work wonders. That's how a clever little indie called CROUPIER gradually worked its way into a major release. And although there are suspense elements that act as a hook, its appeal really stems from an engaging lead performance helped by some good writing. Character, more than plot, has won an audience. Jack (Clive Owen) wants to be a writer, but he also has bills to pay. So he takes a job as a croupier at a casino - something he has done before in South Africa. He never gambles himself, and he takes a perverse pleasure in watching other people throw away their money, while feeling very superior to them. His girlfriend (Gina McKee), a former cop, has mixed feelings about it - she likes the boost in income but not the attitudes that Jack seems to soak up from his work. Meanwhile Jack begins to be fascinated with an enigmatic female gambler (Alex Kingston) who draws him into a web of intrigue.

The tale has some twists and turns, and it doesn't waste time trying to explain everything to you. It actually took me a few hours after seeing it to put the puzzle together. But in the end, it is Owen's supple performance that stays in the memory. He portrays a character who is charming in his honesty, almost to the point of innocence, yet offset by a dark, knowing wit and an unacknowledged propensity for risk. Paul Mayersberg's script gives Owen plenty of amusing things to say, but the actor's eyes and inflections assure us that he is still a young man groping his way in the dark, and I think this saves the movie from being an empty exercise. Not that it's particularly profound either - veteran director Mike Hodges just keeps thing clipping along, with the combination of the gambling theme and the croupier's bemused observations providing all the pleasure of a smartly made short story.

A greater theme, and a broader canvas, is employed in COTTON MARY, directed by Ismail Merchant from a play by Alexandra Viets. The theme is colonialism and its insane results. The canvas is India in the 1950s, less than a decade after independence. An English woman (Greta Scacchi) find herself unable to produce milk for her newborn. A pious and obsequious Anglo-Indian nurse named Mary offers to find milk for the child, which she succeeds in doing, without revealing her method to the depressed, ailing mother. In fact she takes the baby into town and has her sister, a crippled nursemaid, feed the child. The mother's chronically absent journalist husband (James Wilby) shows little interest in her or his family, and so Cotton Mary (she only wears English cotton, thus the nickname) becomes more and more important to her, insinuating herself into the household as a servant, gradually taking control of more and more of her affairs.

Cotton Mary is played by Madhur Jaffrey with alarming skill. This woman, who claims to be the daughter of an English officer, has internalized the attitudes of the English to such a degree that she looks down on everything Indian and thinks of herself as English, while at the same time simmering with resentment against the white people that will never accept her as such. She is a bundle of contradictions - self-hate and the thirst for power over others, absurd fantasy and brutal cynicism. She is thus a complex and interesting symbol for the confused minds of a people born and raised under colonial rule. The other Indians in the story manifest varying degrees of psychic dependence on the English for their sense of self-worth. The English wife, on the other hand, feels helpless and alone, while the husband hides his callousness even from himself by assuming the benign role of civilized provider.

There's an interesting story here. Unfortunately Cotton Mary turns out to be an object lesson in how an interesting story is simply not enough without able direction. The art of the film director, the way he or she frames the images, moves the camera, constructs a sequence with a certain pace, a rhythm, which builds to some result - dramatic or ironic or meditative or whatever - is often so integral to a film that it is difficult to explain or even notice. It is much easier to notice such things when they are missing. Ismail Merchant's direction is missing. Instead of building to anything, his scenes play like just one thing after another. The rhythm is slack and plodding. He fails to adequately emphasize his themes, so that each detail seems just as important as every other, and therefore all are equally dull. Jaffrey is good, even quite disturbing and scary at times, and most of the other actors are capable. Nothing can overcome the torpor of a style which is no style at all. The moral: take the best material in the world, give it lackluster direction, and you've got a snoozefest. Cotton Mary does have its moments. But in between them I was looking at my watch.

I've never been fond of Shakespeare productions that use modern props to "update" the material. You know, Richard III giving the fascist salute, Lady Macbeth hopping in on a pogo stick, that sort of thing. The idiotic idea is that a Shakespeare play needs to be made relevant to our times - as if relevance depended on gimmicky historical references and not on the inherent meaningfulness of the text. But I decided to give the new HAMLET a chance, since I really liked Michael Almereyda's Nadja and I'd heard good things. Well, Almereyda has taken the opposite approach to the one I derided - instead of trying to make the play relevant to our times, he makes our times relevant to the play. It's a very inventive, visually exciting and stimulating personal adaptation, and although I don't consider it a complete success, I like it enough to recommend it.

New York becomes a major character in Hamlet, or rather the idea of New York as a dark and confining arena of power. Almereyda uses the forbidding night-time imagery of the city, which dwarfs the human figure, to apt poetic effect - the Denmark of Hamlet's fevered nightmare. Elsinore as a corporation with Claudius as sinister CEO - it works not as a transposition but as an exact translation of the play's sense of corrupted power. This evil is not something in the distant, kingly past but the very same thing we live with now. And the director's use of media tools and effects - video imagery, recordings, and Hamlet's interaction with them, is effective more often than not in conveying the sense of dislocation which is such a strong element in the play.

It helps immensely that he has cast good actors. I can find little fault with either Kyle MacLachlan or Diane Venora as King and Queen. Bill Murray is touchingly fatuous, just as Polonius should be. Liev Schreiber is simply the best Laertes I've ever seen. And even though to me Julia Stiles seems mostly a pouting, pretty face, she's never bad, and she's close to being quite good in her big fourth act scene. That leaves Ethan Hawke. In my opinion he really lacks the range for a great Hamlet. In this film I didn't feel the fascination with Hamlet as a man, the character's thrilling intelligence and depth. But I have to say that Hawke, by staying within his limits, never embarrasses himself here. And there have been quite a few good actors who have stumbled over this difficult role.

Almereyda succumbs to jokiness at times. (The one groaner is trotting out Robert MacNeil at the end to read Fortinbras' speech like a news anchor.) He cuts at least half of the play's text, a wise and inevitable decision, since the style attempts a parity between the visual and verbal. And he doesn't change what's left - the language is the same, and the effect is, oddly, not anachronistic at all, but stirring. He even pulls off an interpretive innovation - Hamlet's "nunnery" scene with Ophelia changes its tone when he discovers that she's carrying an electronic bugging device. With resort to modern technology, an old textual controversy is resolved! What's missing, besides Hamlet the man, is the terrible tragedy of it all. This version doesn't strike to the depths, but it has enough on its mind to make it one of the more interesting Shakespeare films. I like Michael Almereyda. I think his sort of daring, his thoughtfulness and vigorous style, is what movies need right now.

From the sublime to the ridiculous - a brief postscript about CHICKEN RUN. I was only recently turned on to Nick Park's series of "Wallace & Gromit" animated shorts. I find them utterly hilarious as well as ingenious. Chicken Run displays the same amazing craft - with big effects like the journey through the pie machine and the glorious final sequence, as well as with beautiful little comic touches such as Mr. Tweedy just quietly shutting the door on his wife instead of trying to rescue her. And what could be sillier than the very idea of telling an adventure story about chickens? Having said that, however - and recommending that you read other reviewers' previous raves to get a fuller idea of the film - I have some minor cavils to share. The picture doesn't have the same droll, understated humor of the shorts. Perhaps that was unavoidable in a feature. More troubling for me was that, in an apparent bid for a bigger American audience (and perhaps at the behest of Dreamworks), Mel Gibson plays a leading role in the film, as an American rooster. Leaving aside the question of what was thought necessary to get the plot from here to there, the fact is that whenever Gibson's voice intruded, it broke the spell for me. Suddenly I'm in some Disnefied movie, with all the accompanying cliches, instead of in a Nick Park film. Mel Gibson, whether as a rooster or a patriot, has become nothing but a self-important Hollywood celebrity, and as such I find him uninteresting.

Oh well. Cluck it.

 

CineScene, 2001