Identity
Theft
by Chris Dashiell

The Hong Kong crime film tradition seemed in a bit of a doldrums lately, but then came Infernal Affairs, directed by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak. It's turned into a huge hit, and has already spawned two sequels.

Here's the set-up. A crime boss recruits a young tough, played by Andy Lau, to infiltrate the police department as a mole so that the mob can always stay one step ahead of the cops. At the same time, the police train their own spy, played by Tony Leung, who works his way through the crime syndicate to become the boss's right hand man. So we have a gangster pretending to be a cop, and a cop pretending to be a gangster. Then a botched drug deal alerts both sides that they have traitors in their midst, so each side assigns its mole to find out who the mole for the other side is. At the same time, the task of rooting out their own organization's mole happens to fall to the same two people -- in other words, they're assigned to expose both themselves and each other. This clever idea is exploited to the utmost, with numerous complications and double-dealings.

Leung brings his familiar soulfulness to the role of the cop-as-criminal. Lau (no relation to the co-director) is suitably cryptic, even sinister, but attractive enough that you root for him just the same. Both the crook and the cop have been pretending to be someone else for so long that they've lost touch with who they really are, and this theme of dark and shifting identity permeates the film.

Unlike some of the more famous Hong Kong crime pictures, there's not a lot of violence in Infernal Affairs. The drama is in the relentless build-up of suspicion and paranoia. There is great use of reflected imagery and a sort of smudgy visual style, and I've never seen cell phones used to such dizzying effect in a plot before. Sometimes the movie will shift suddenly into a melodramatic sentimentality, complete with cheesy romantic music, which I find rather strange -- yet this is by no means atypical of Hong Kong films, which have always emphasized emotions, even in police movies.

Although the overall dramatic effect can be uneven, the movie's dense web of intrigue kept me interested throughout. I felt a sense of standing (and sometimes teetering) on the very edge of sanity, where right and wrong are hazy distinctions at best, and I found this compelling and even a little scary. Infernal Affairs is, to say the least, an entertaining way to spend a couple of hours. Upon later reflection, it's a good deal more than that -- a crime film for contemplatives.

Theater actors spend their lives trying to making illusions seem real. Being Julia, the latest film from director István Szabó, is about an actress whose success at doing that has resulted in her real life turning into an illusion. Based on a novel by Somerset Maugham, the story takes place in England in the 1930s. Julia Lambert (Annette Bening) is a wildly popular stage actress in her 40s and at the peak of her career, who finds herself feeling bored with the long-running hit play she stars in, and with her vain husband (Jeremy Irons), who is also her manager and director. A chance meeting with a worshipful young American (Shaun Evans), leads to an affair. Julia feels young again, no longer bored, but her fling with the young man turns into a serious attachment, and when he inevitably starts to pull away, she panics.

The screenplay by Ronald Harwood is witty and elegant. The 1930s period detail -- with the cars and costumes and so on -- is lovely, and Szabo directs, for the most part, with confidence. Just when you think the story is going in a certain direction -- a predictable one -- it surprises you and takes you to a completely different place, and that's refreshing. But the best thing about the film is Annette Bening, who brings both comic energy and vulnerability to her role as a self-centered diva who has lost the ability to distinguish her life from her acting, but is still lovable despite it all. I've never seen Bening do better work than here. Although she can't quite hit a few high dramatic notes required by the script, she captures the role's broad middle range of self-satisfied vanity with admirable verve. Her scenes with Bruce Greenwood (playing a close friend and confidant) are close to perfection.

It's also fun to watch Jeremy Irons, smoothly professional as always, and Michael Gambon, who shows up from time to time as the ghost of Julia's original acting mentor, or perhaps just the idea of him that still lives in her head. This is a clever device and quite effective in providing some background motivation for Julia's need to always immerse herself in a part. At the end of the story, when we are presented with a pleasantly surprising reversal of expectations, Szabó piles the exuberance on a bit too thick, as if he felt the need to make this amusing slice of theatrical life into something more important than it is. That's a pity, but Being Julia -- and Bening -- still offers enough modest pleasures to make it worth our while.

There's a new film in theaters by Alexander Payne called Sideways. It's being extravagantly praised, but for the life of me I can't figure out why. Paul Giamatti plays a morose aspiring writer and wine aficionado, recently divorced, who takes a soon-to-be-married friend (Thomas Haden Church) on a trip through the California wine country for a week of fun prior to the wedding. Church's character is a womanizer, and the two of them hook up with a pair of attractive friends, played by Virginia Madsen and Sandra Oh, and this leads to morally compromising situations.

I kept waiting for this one to get better, to reach some kind of subversive turning point. It never does. I felt disconnected from the story of Giamatti's lonely and self-pitying writer. Church is sometimes quite funny -- he steals the movie, to be sure, but there's not much to steal. An atmosphere of affluent complacency hangs over the picture like a fog. Feelings are telegraphed to us by means of an annoying and insistent light jazz score by Rolfe Kent. We're not really discovering anything about the characters, or the American male, or whatever else Payne and the writers may think they have on their minds.

Why, then, does such an expression of insular feelings and mediocre ambition receive such glowing reviews? There is more cutting edge drama on an average night on HBO than here. Perhaps the world is so scary right now that the stuffed shirts of criticism wish to take refuge in a cocoon of innocuous narcissism. Or maybe anything small -- anything about remotely life-like people -- seems like a masterpiece in the face of the adolescent and increasingly inane Hollywood blockbuster and genre film. I guess all I can do in a case like this is shrug my shoulders and say, "Whatever..."

©2005 Chris Dashiell
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