ALL THE LONELY PEOPLE
by Chris Dashiell

Concealed within WONDERLAND, a film by Michael Winterbottom, is a feeling of strangeness in the life of a city, a sense that there is something overwhelming and too much to bear in this crowded world, and yet we do bear it somehow, seek for love, and give it, in spite of everything.

It's a story of sisters who live separate lives in London, and how each strand reverberates with meaning in each of the others during a four day period. Nadia (Gina McKee) is a waitress who has put a "lonelyhearts" ad in the paper, and has her hopes continually dashed by the men who answer it. Molly (Molly Parker) is expecting to give birth any day, but goes through a crisis with her boyfriend when he chooses the worst possible time to quit his job. Debbie (Shirley Henderson), a hairdresser and single mother, sleeps around while leaving her young son with his irresponsible father (Ian Hart). Their parents (Kika Markham and Jack Shepherd) are a model of long-term domestic misery, the mother sullen and resentful, the father passive and confused.

Those aren't the only characters. Other storylines mysteriously emerge - a young couple celebrating their love at a hotel, a lonely young black man shutting himself up in his room while his mother berates him. And when the camera follows a character wandering the streets of the city we catch glimpses of other stories in the eyes of strangers, stories we'll never learn - for a moment the camera hesitates and seems to want to follow these stories too.

The film was written by Laurence Coriat, who has an ear for the sort of unadorned, matter-of-fact dialogue that says a lot by what it leaves out. Winterbottom has inspired fine performances from everyone involved - expecially McKee, whose vulnerability and warmth make her the soul of the movie (despite her character's awful hairdo). But the real wonder in Wonderland is the movie's visual style, and how it fits perfectly with a tender emotional tone. The film was shot with hand-held camera (by Sean Bobbitt), and instead of the staged look that one often gets with crowd scenes, we have a very real, populated city caught on film with an immediacy that becomes more and more affecting as the film proceeds. The way Winterbottom shows the faces at a soccer match, or a crowd at a Guy Fawkes celebration, breaks the stories out of the private sphere and makes them resonate with the life buzzing around them. An important element in the tone is the sad, contemplative music of Michael Nyman, which is used occasionally to great effect, notably in two sequences where Winterbottom uses time-lapse photography to create a sense of being lost in a maelstrom of swirling urban life. The music evokes a great loneliness in the midst of all this movement, and that is the dominant mood of Wonderland - not despair, but sadness about the way people seek constantly for love and are so often thwarted in their search.

Ensemble pieces like this, with interlocking stories, are becoming almost a genre unto themselves. The narrative structure of Wonderland is reminiscent of Magnolia, for instance. But that film, for all its feeling, is determined by a nexus of ideas, some inspired and some not so inspired, in the mind of its director, which shapes the narrative in a very overt manner. Winterbottom isn't trying to impose ideas on his fictional world - he is only interested in the emotions inside of people who strive to connect in the midst of so much bustle and distraction. There is no judgment here, or cynicism, only feelings - love or grief or fear or hope. And although it doesn't achieve grandeur or the completeness one expects from a masterpiece, this mixture of low-key observation, of people just getting through the day, with that hidden sense of the strangeness and sadness of it all, is beautiful and very moving.

If Wonderland is a symphony, then Frederic Fonteyne's AN AFFAIR OF LOVE is a chamber piece. The premise is rather contrived - a woman (Nathalie Baye) has a sexual fantasy that she has always wanted to try, so she puts an ad in the personals and meets up with a man (Sergi Lopez) who is willing to fulfill it. Against their initial purpose, they begin to really like each other, and are then faced with the choice of whether to pursue the relationship in a different way. The story has a framing device in which the two characters are interviewed by a person who is not shown. I found this jarring - who on earth would be interviewing these people? To my surprise, however, I found the film as a whole rather interesting and well done.

We are never told what the sexual fantasy is that brings them together, a narrative decision which works because it draws our attention to the idea of an anonymous liaison rather than the particulars.The film deftly avoids pitfalls with its intelligent, naturalistic dialogue (script by Philippe Blasband), portraying the different stages of the affair - nervous and tentative at first, later passionate, conflicted, and humorous - without the coyness or self-conscious quality that would ruin this kind of story. Sex is eventually depicted, but in the context of a growing emotional intimacy, which is actually the film's point.

Both of the actors are good. Lopez has an open, almost innocent quality which is appealing. But it's Nathalie Baye, with her sharpness and engaging intelligence, who makes this movie better than it might have been otherwise. She hits every note just right, filling out the movie's slight ambition with real emotional weight.

The French title - Une Liaison Pornagraphique, is taken from an ironic comment by Baye's character about the beginning of the relationship. The film is anything but pornographic - quite the contrary; its sex scenes are subdued even by American standards. I can't help but think that the title may have been intended to help sell the movie to French audiences. It was retitled An Affair of Love for the U.S. market. This quite neatly summarizes the differences in marketing strategy, and differences in popular culture, between the two countries. I don't care for either title myself, but in its own small way the movie won me over.

More amor fou on the menu, this time from Andre Techine, whose ALICE AND MARTIN continues his preoccupation with the emotional struggles of young people trying to find their way to love. Techine has become a master visual stylist - there is an assurance to his composition and camera placement that can't be denied. It is a measure of this sense of mastery that even though his latest film doesn't quite succeed, it doesn't feel like wasted time either.

The picture's first half has a powerful thrust. The child Martin is sent away by his unwed mother (Carmen Maura, somehow becoming more gorgeous with age) to live with his wealthy father and stepmother. Cut to ten years later when the young man (Alexis Louret) flees the house in a panic. In a wordless and gripping extended sequence, Martin wanders through the countryside living like an animal, tries to drown himself, steals eggs from a henhouse to survive, and is finally arrested for theft, but released through the intercession of his stepmother. He goes to Paris to live with his gay half-brother Benjamin (Mathieu Amalric), then meets and falls in love with Benjamin's best friend, a struggling violinist named Alice (Juliette Binoche).

This is Binoche's first film with Techine since her breakthrough role in Rendez-vous (1985). Her character is tough, with great reserves of strength and passion, but also with that sense of emotional anguish and woundedness that she so often brings to her parts. Amalric almost steals the picture in his most accessible role to date. His Benjamin is a fully realized character - playful, witty, conflicted, with a genuine bond to Alice which is evident in everything he does. I admire the film's emotionalism, the way it lets everything hang out without apology or irony. Techine is not afraid to explore the raw terrain of feeling in the hearts of inexperienced young people, and there are moments in Alice and Martin that hit the mark delicately and poignantly.

The film's weak spot is the character of Martin. After the strong beginning, Louret seems increasingly vapid and inexpressive. But the story is really to blame. The picture devolves into an Oedipal mystery concerning the family trauma Martin is fleeing from, a mystery which turns out to be not very mysterious at all, and which is not explored with any real vigor. I found myself feeling less and less involved with Martin, and wishing that the film could be about Binoche's Alice - her devotion to Martin is both uninteresting and inexplicable.

So a good first half succumbs to a weaker second half, and Alice and Martin loses its way. But there are still worthwhile things to see along that way - a sequence set in a subway train, for example, with Alice fighting her attraction to Martin, attains real poetry.

One final note. The middle of the film contains a long flashback which fills in the events leading up to Martin's flight from his father's house. Several reviewers actually complained that this disoriented them, as if someone had accidentally switched reels. I guess we've really come to the point where these fishwrap film writers need to have their hand held through a simple juggling of time sequence. I mean, it is obvious three seconds into the flashback that we're in the past, and yet these reviewers whine that they're disoriented. What's next - is the moving camera going to make them dizzy?

Honestly, this depressed me almost as much as the bombastic trailer for The Contender, which demonstrates that Hollywood's relationship to American politics is exactly analogous to the freak show's relationship to Barnum & Bailey's Circus. But I should stop now, before I get too riled up.....

CineScene, 2000