A WORLD OF HURT
by Chris Dashiell

The worst movie I have seen this year was not directed by Robert Zemeckis, and it did not feature Robin Williams, Meg Ryan, or any of my other pet hates. In fact, it won the Jury Prize for Best Director at Cannes, as well as Best Actor and Actress.

Bruno Dumont's L'HUMANITE is supposedly about a small town police inspector named Pharaon DeWinter who is assisting in the investigation of the rape-murder of an eleven-year-old girl. I say "supposedly," because the story - such as it is - makes no sense whatsoever. Pharaon (Emmanuel Schotte) is an infantile, bug-eyed, stooping creature with a little squeaky voice. He has a habit of staring off into space for long periods. Actually that's most of what he does throughout the two and a half hour running time of the film. It's hard for me to imagine such a person holding a job as a cashier, much less a police inspector. But that's one minor absurdity in a film so ridiculously overblown that it boggles the mind.

Pharaon's neighbor is a sullen, perpetually wounded-looking woman named Domino (Severine Caneele). He seems to be obsessed with her, and she encourages his attentions for god knows what reason. Meanwhile the film shows her (three different times) having sex with her bus driver boyfriend, once while Pharaon stares from the hallway. The film's attitude towards sex, and the female body, is one of horror and disgust. Is this meaningful? I guess it's meant to be. But I just found it offensive.

A typical scene has Pharaon walking down the street. Domino is standing outside of her apartment. He stops. She looks at him. He stares. Five seconds pass. "Bonjour, Pharaon." He stares some more. Another five seconds. "Bonjour, Domino." And so it goes. Or we have shots of Pharaon and his boss the police chief driving up to a house. They stop the car. They get out. They walk slowly down the driveway. Hey, something is going to happen, right? No, nothing happens. And I'm not making any of this up. You will forgive me if, after hours of watching Schotte stare into space with a stupid expression, and people walking around like zombies to no purpose, I was tempted to leave the theater more than once. Several people did, and I commend them for it. I stayed, in my duty as a film critic, and in the slim hope that something would come of all this. Nothing did.

Normally I wouldn't write so much about this kind of experience. But I find it strangely fascinating to read the positive reviews garnered by L'Humanite. Ebert seems to think it is a deeply meaningful meditation on the complicity of all of us in crime. The reviewer for The Nation compares Dumont's method to Robert Bresson. No, sir, this is Ed Wood trying to be Bresson. There is a difference.

It's a weird feeling to be the kid pointing out that the Emperor has no clothes, when so many intelligent people are praising the quality of the cloth and the design. How can it be that these writers fool themselves into thinking that such a vapid, poorly acted, stupidly written, pretentious piece of rot is a great film that deserves comparison with the likes of Bresson? I am not one who normally gets too impatient with an experimental work. I praised Beau Travail, for instance. I admire Herzog's Heart of Glass, which uses hypnotized actors. The difference is that these films have a vision, they have something to say, they are provocative in the best sense of the word. But Dumont, as far as I can tell, is a charlatan who has pulled one over on a lot of critics who seem to have trouble telling diamonds from paste.

To turn from this stifling film to Karyn Kusama's GIRLFIGHT was a great relief. This independent feature, an audience favorite at Sundance, has style, emotional honesty, and a mature, woman-centered point of view. I came to it expecting a rough, low-budget quality, but instead I saw a deftly directed and edited work that flows better than most Hollywood flicks.

The story concerns a girl from the Bronx, who doesn't relate to the femme role she's expected to play in life, and decides to pursue a career in boxing. The picture is really good at portraying the amateur boxing milieu without trying to pump up the dramatic quotient Rocky-style. The boxing scenes are excellent, with a fine sense of the tense, confined atmosphere of the ring. The acting, however, is varied in quality, with some of the supporting roles little better than TV-movie level, although Jaime Tirelli does creditable work as the trainer. But there's one performer who takes Girlfight to a higher plane entirely - I'm referring, of course, to Michelle Rodriguez, who plays the lead role, Diana. Here is a complete newcomer, with no boxing experience and virtually no experience as an actress, and she is sensational. Her naturalness before the camera is something that cannot be taught in any school. Her character is tough, angry, conflicted, sexy, competitive, smart - and Rodriguez gives us all that and makes it real. Wow.

Without giving anything away, I have to say that I think Kusama develops the premise in some ways that are too schematic and hardly believable. I understand that she wanted her drama to make connections between the fight in the ring and the struggle between lovers, but there are less obvious methods of doing that. Don't let that discourage you from seeing Girlfight, though. It's a thoughtful, well-wrought little film anchored by an amazing lead performance.

Speaking of little films, Myles Connell's heist flick THE OPPORTUNISTS demonstrates that a small scale can produce worthy entertainment. It's about Vic, a former safecracker (Christopher Walken) who has done his time and is now trying to maintain a straight life running a garage in New York. He's in big trouble financially, but he rejects a scheme put forth by an acquaintance (Donal Logue) to rob a payroll company, only to be sucked into it anyway when a trouble-seeking young Irish cousin (Peter McDonald) arrives on his doorstep. The film also features Cyndi Lauper, quite charming in a role that should have been bigger, as his bar owner girlfriend.

I've always liked Walken, an actor who has devoted most of his energy to the stage, and who has generally been relegated to oddball or villain roles in films. Here his air of weariness and deadpan frustration serves the movie well. The picture has a very dry sense of humor. Connell has captured a certain kind of New York character and milieu. The scenes where the plotters are preparing for the heist are interesting - low-key yet suspenseful, with a nice turn by Tom Noonan as an eccentric lock expert who brings Vic back up to speed.

Connell's script tends to stack the deck a little too obviously in favor of Vic - he supports an ailing aunt and an attractive, sensible daughter, so of course we root for him to succeed. The Opportunists didn't knock me out of my seat, but I enjoyed its modest, understated style, and I recommend it to anyone seeking a satisfying diversion.

After seeing DANCER IN THE DARK, I found myself wondering once again why Danish director Lars von Trier seems to inspire so much hatred from some critics. This anti-musical has received plenty of raves as well as jeers, and I certainly get why the film would be controversial - but I really don't understand some of the vitriol that's been spilled over it.

First, the film itself. In shorthand, I would describe it as a musical version of von Trier's Breaking the Waves. Once again, a saintly female innocent endures total affliction in a fallen world. But the story of Dancer in the Dark is not as interesting as the former film, nor is the lead performance of Bjork quite up to the level of Emily Watson. Still, I found the picture compelling and fascinating - weird as all hell, but memorable and worthwhile.

The story is pure melodrama. It's about a Czech immigrant factory worker named Selma living in Washington state in '64, who is going blind from a congenital disease that she has passed on to her young son. She desperately wants to save enough money to get an operation to prevent her son from going blind. Meanwhile she escapes from her hard life into fantasies in which she is a dancer and singer in musical numbers.

The whole going blind and trying to get an operation routine is so musty (I thought of City Lights and Dark Victory - you can probably come up with dozens of other examples) that I have to think von Trier is being satiric here. What he is really good at is creating a feeling of almost unbearable tension. The use of hand-held camera and jump-cut editing, combined with the ever-constricting sense of disaster in the story line, creates a doom-laden mood that is very sad and disturbing and ultimately moving. Contrary to what I was expecting from reviews, I was most impressed with the musical numbers, executed in a style deliberately contrary to the smooth Hollywood method, and haunting in their evocation of loss and emotional devastation. There is one number involving a freight train that is very beautiful indeed.

Bjork, the singer from Iceland, is an affecting performer, and it is largely due to her that the film's pathos works to the extent it does. She is extremely intense and vulnerable. With the exception of some numbers from Rodgers and Hammerstein's The Sound of Music, she wrote the score for the film, and I suppose one's appreciation of Dancer in the Dark will depend in some degree on what one thinks of Bjork's music. I confess that I had never heard her before - I found the songs rather bizarre at first, but eventually they got under my skin.

I don't count the film as a masterpiece. Some of the aspects, like Catherine Deneuve as a factory worker (von Trier's mocking sense of humor again, I suppose) don't work for me. But I certainly count it as one of the more interesting efforts of the year. This brings me to a few of the critical reactions I have read. Some reviewers have recoiled in horror from the film, denouncing von Trier as a misogynist, a fake, a show-off, an incompetent director, and worse. "Apparently von Trier wants to be considered a genius," sniffs Stanley Kauffman. Well, what of it? He is trying new things, and stirring the waters up a bit. I don't see why that should provoke such anger, when flaccid studio product provokes nothing but complacency. Perhaps Kauffman's words provide a clue. Some folks may resent von Trier's sense of his own importance as a director. You're supposed to be humble and self-effacing in this business, and von Trier (right down to the "von" he stuck in his name, shades of Stroheim and Sternberg) is an obnoxiously self-regarding man.

My view is that regardless of what you feel about the director, his films are interesting and even daring, and I respect him for it. Nevertheless, the eye of the beholder is a tricky thing. I myself just called Bruno Dumont a charlatan in my review of L'Humanite above, and I'm sure some would hotly contest that judgment. So there's always another side, and I guess that's part of what makes film writing so challenging.

CineScene, 2000