SUGAR BLUES
by Chris Dashiell

LA BÛCHE is a French movie with a story set during the Christmas season. With the time it's taken to get across the pond to my theater, there is a mental adjustment to be made. But not much of one. Danièle Thompson's smart and subtle comedy is about the web of secrets within a family, and she uses the season - when families typically get together to celebrate - as ironic backdrop.

The film opens with a funeral, and it takes a little while for the viewer to figure out the relationships of the characters. The grieving widow's three daughters are from a previous marriage, and she wants them to spend the holiday with her instead of with their father. The eldest, Louba (Sabine Azéma), is a singer who hides her pain behind a veneer of amiable high spirits.She has just discovered that she's pregnant with the child of her married lover. The middle daugher Sonia (Emmanuelle Béart), married into wealth, tries to manage and control everything around her, including her family, so that she won't fall apart. The youngest, Milla (Charlotte Gainsbourg), plays the intellectual rebel, fragile and lonely - she is mockingly resentful of the bourgeois Sonia. Things get more complicated when the father (Claude Rich) attempts to reach out to his estranged ex-wife after twenty years and receives some unexpected revelations.

La Bûche derives a lot of its humor from the tangled mysteries of blood relationships in a family where both parents have had affairs. Instead of springing everything on us at the end, Thompson leaves little clues for us to figure out, and they give the surprises a fun quality rather than seeming contrived. The acting and the sharply observed dialogue help make the story believable. We get to know this family gradually, so their secrets and struggles have real poignancy. Although the film is light in tone, it is not a farce - there are issues of intimacy and family bonds that are explored here. It's beautiful how the sisters come to conclusions about family secrets through guesswork and hunches, rather than clear evidence - this is more how it is in real life, I think.

The picture certainly has the Christmas spirit down - in its negative aspects, at least. The simulation of cheerfulness through shopping and cooking and parties, which are ultimately more exhausting than enjoyable, the need to use the season to resolve old family dramas that are repressed during the rest of the year, and the tiresome ubiquity of decorations and holiday songs - all of this is done to a T. (On the evidence of this film, it would seem that the Americans have a monopoly on Christmas music even in France.)

Best among the actors are the moody and sensitive Gainsbourg, the typical "baby" of the family, and the twinkly-eyed Rich, who conveys his character's genuine remorse and desire to make amends for past hurts. Although it may seem unfair to say this, Beart is perhaps too beautiful for her role - she doesn't quite seem to fit, although her performance is certainly not bad.

The title refers to a cake in the shape of a Yule log. The movie itself is like a delicious cake - not a great film, but sweet and satisfying.

As if to demonstrate the difference between the truly sweet and Sweet & Low, and between French and faux French, we come now to the new Lasse Hallstrom vehicle, CHOCOLAT. This is a film that would not, I confess, merit more than a sentence or two except that it is nominated for several Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
There are various reasons why pictures like this get nominated (one of them is named Harvey Weinstein), and they would take an essay to explain thoroughly. The film, however, is not interesting enough to deserve such an essay.

Chocolat has a voice-over narrator who carefully explains the film's meaning, thus sparing us the trouble of employing a single brain cell. The people of the French village where the story takes place are orderly and proper and religious in a strict, conventional way. Enter the mysterious Vianne (Juliette Binoche), single mother with young daughter in tow, who has the temerity to set up a chocolate shop in the village during Lent. The dignified townsfolk, led by their severe mayor (Alfred Molina), are shocked by the new neighbor, but many are secretly enticed. Vianne proceeds to work little miracles with the help of her chocolate. A miserable couple are revitalized in their sexual life. A kleptomaniac (Lena Olin). who it turns out is a battered wife, regains her independence and self-respect. A bitter old woman (Judi Dench) finds joy again, and is reunited with the grandson of her estranged daughter. The arrival of a group of Irish river gypsies (are you following me here?) headed by Johnny Depp, creates new challenges for the town, and a chance of new fulfillment for Vianne herself.

As I was watching, I kept thinking that I had seen all this before. Then I realized. Chocolat is the TV show "Touched by an Angel" transferred to the screen with a big budget. It has the same device of the outsider carefully teaching each character the life lesson he or she needs in order to find true happiness. It has the same cloying, complacent sense of knowing all the answers - knowing what is good, what is bad, and what we all need to do if this is to be a better world. Pleasure good. Repression bad. Open-mindedness good. Intolerance bad. Spirituality good. Punishment-based religion bad. And so on.

All of these things may very well be true. In fact, I agree with them to some degree. But truly moral fiction requires an honest attempt to portray character in a way that respects the ambiguities and complexities of life, as well as the limitations of our knowledge and abilities as human beings. The characters in Chocolat are not people, they are puppets for the screenplay's didactic purposes. The old dictum of "show, don't tell" comes to mind here. Even when Hallstrom is showing, he's really telling. Every aspect - the wife-beater (a villain who will not challenge the audience's moral self-satisfaction), the old man with the dog, the wandering witch herself - is shorthand for a New Age homily. Even the poor Mayans are dragged in, during a bit of exposition which involves a brief glimpse of sex (needed for a PG-13 rating?) as part of an ostensible bedtime story for a child. Eventually, in case we were too stupid to get the point, the simple, wide-eyed priest explains the moral of the story for us quite neatly, in a sermon.

I'm sure there are many who enjoy this sort of experience. There is, I suppose, an enjoyment in being flattered in our enlightened beliefs by a film that at the same time never implicates us in any difficulties. But it is an inferior sort of enjoyment, I think. It is not the kind of enjoyment one gets from seeing fully realized characters grapple with problems in ways that are imperfect and which reflect the obstacles we would actually encounter within ourselves. More and more films choose instead to be false like Chocolat, because it is easier. As I said, it is only remarkable in this case because of the Oscars.

The photography and the production design are very pretty in a picture postcard kind of way. But prettiness for its own sake, like a postcard, is ultimately disposable. Binoche seems rather apathetic here, even lifeless at times. She's been in good movies before. Maybe she knows this isn't one of them. She is dolled up and made to look like a ripe earth mother, and she does just enough, it seems to me, to collect a paycheck. Despite a stage Irish accent, Johnny Depp is the only adult performer in the film displaying any real charm. I'm afraid his charisma is not enough to justify the ticket price. I was sorry to see Leslie Caron wasted in a miniscule, virtually speechless role. Why?

In all fairness to the Oscars, it should be said that there
are always at least a few nominees who deserve the honor. This year the Academy has had the good sense to nominate the Spanish actor Javier Bardem for his work in Before Night Falls.. It really is a great performance. What surprised me, though, is how marvelous the film itself really is.

Before Night Falls tells the life story of the Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas. This brilliant lyrical novelist and poet, born in poverty, was persecuted by the Castro government for his writing and his homosexuality. After suffering imprisonment and torture, he came to the U.S. in the 1980 Mariel boat-lift. He died of AIDS in New York in 1990.

The director, Julian Schnabel, has an excellent sense for the way a poet like Arenas views the world. He knows how to combine music with a single evocative scene (such as Arenas laughing with a lover as they ride through N.Y. after his escape) to portray the passage of time, or tell us things about the character, without resorting to plodding exposition or narrative devices. He knows how to glide the camera in scenes that convey emotional expansion or change, and how to keep still in scenes of suffering or confinement. The film's visual texture and sense of place is gorgeous. The depiction of Havana in the 60s makes you feel like you're really there.

The strikingly handsome Bardem creates a portrait of great depth and range. Here is a man of passion and wit, proud and angry yet vulnerable, with a complex sexuality, and a defiant attitude towards all authority. Bardem has all this, and a moving tenderness as well, in his dynamic performance as Arenas. Although Schnabel is said to have soft-pedaled some of the poet's more controversial sexual experiences and beliefs, I found the movie's emphasis on Arenas' sexual identity to be well done, and for the most part refreshingly direct. Cuba's vicious campaign against gays is a story that needed to be told. Before Night Falls exposes this tragedy and injustice in all its ugliness, and it deserves praise for that alone.

I wish that Schnabel would resist the impulse to cast big stars in cameo roles. Sean Penn turns up briefly as a peasant. And Johnny Depp (yes, him again) has dual roles as a transvestite and a macho prison official. It's not that the performances are bad, but they are disorienting and they tend to distract one's attention from the narrative. Yet although Schnabel's style is not always as even as I might wish, it is a personal style. By that I mean to say that Before Night Falls has the feeling of a work of art created through the vision of a single artist - not a committee or a marketing board. A film about an artist, made by an artist - that's a rarity, and I hope the Oscar nomination causes this wonderful picture to be seen by a wider audience.

Trailer talk. The preview for Original Sin, that new Angelina Jolie / Antonio Banderas movie, gives away too much story (nothing new there), and something tells me that the film is probably "same ol', same ol'" - yet I have to admit that the trailer is pretty good. (Yow - I've never seen Jolie look so beautiful before.)

They've unveiled the preview for The Lord of the Rings, directed by Peter Jackson, whom I admire. It seems like he would be the perfect choice for this material. Quite ambitious - a three part epic to be released in three successive years. The visuals from the trailer, as brief as it was, were truly eye-popping. I predict a huge hit. (Disclaimer: The film features Cate Blanchett, so my usual scepticism may be impaired.)

CineScene, 2001