European Affairs

by Shari L. Rosenblum

As forgettable as a passing flirtation, F. Gary Gray's The Italian Job is also as enjoyable: nice to look at, inoffensively teasing, and superficially exciting with just a touch of suspense, it provides the thrill of escape along with the thrill of the chase.

Not precisely a remake of the 1969 British comic caper flick of the same title, it is more of an "inspired by,"” with heavy borrowings. The updated screenplay by Donna Powers and Wayne Powers shares with Troy Kennedy Martin's original a plot by non-Italian career thieves to steal gold ($4 million transmuting to $35 million in a nod to the Austin Powers time machine) in an Italian city (Turin now Venice), the creation of a traffic jam to help elude pursuers (moved to the already congested streets of L.A.), and a MINI Triple Crown (one might call it) that illustrates the upside of being small, but it has done away with the original’s English-Italian rivalry (and ethnic stereotypes) and the would-be comic fascination with fat women, and has added some layers (a cross, a double cross, a triple cross) to set off the sparks of the action/adventure.

Charlie Croker (Mark Wahlberg, personable and likable if not exactly persuasive, filling the refitted shoes of Michael Caine's heistmeister) has masterminded a plan to get the massive gold take, still in its safe, from a guarded palatial residence over the Venice canals. The physics involved are somewhat questionable, but the strategy is a game player's delight. He has enlisted his just-out-of-prison mentor, John Bridger (Donald Sutherland, standing in for Noel Coward, revised and almost as regal,) for one last shot, to the disapproval of Bridger's daughter, Stella, (Charlize Theron as a good girl safe cracker), as well as "inside man" Steve Frezelli (Edward Norton, mutating into sleaze before the script even calls for it), ladykiller getaway man Handsome Rob (Jason Stathan, living up to his name), explosives expert Left Ear (Mos Def, with deft delivery), and computer whiz Lyle (Seth Green, thankfully, and to greater effect, replacing Benny Hill's Professor Peach as the techno-geek) who scene-stealingly swears Napster was an idea stolen from him while he was napping.

A successful play and betrayal later, a father figure down, a cohort left for dead, their spending dreams usurped, and an inside man turned snidely in a mansion in Bel Air, the group reconvenes for a second heist even sweeter than the first's promise of wealth, this time with a vengeance -- and a lady in a Mini who likes to work in the dark (Stella!).

And so it does go . . . a summer movie. The actors are enticing, the plots unfold in sleek predictability, and the chase scenes exhilarate, though they sometimes extend beyond their welcome, and then when it's over, it's over. Which is not to say that, like that passing flirtation, you wouldn't toy with the idea of seeing it again . . . or even, just for a lark, if you find it waiting for you some months hence, taking it home for another ride.

A different kind of movie, a different kind of theft and escape, a different look from the glitz and glamour of Venice or L.A., Patrice Leconte's The Man On The Train (L'Homme du Train), from a screenplay by Claude Klotz, is a life-sized poem of wistfulness and regret, might-have-beens and if-onlys -- a quirky, quickened ode to the Old West fantasy (a stranger gets off a train in a dusty, deserted town), the drawing room ideal (a gentleman slippers around his comfortable antique-filled estate), and the duality of man in his solitary soul. It is elegant, subtle, and distilled to perfection.

In a rural French one-horse town, at a counter where aspirin is served instead of alcohol, two men, as one might say, both alike in dignity and each of a certain age, strike up what seems an unlikely acquaintance. Pale rider Milan (Johnny Hallyday), just arrived from places unknown (d'où viens tu, Johnny?) with his gruff breviloquent air and a bluesy jazz accompaniment, seems a living contrast to the refined, loquacious Manesquier (Jean Rochefort), long-time town resident still living in the home his mother left him, a classical theme running behind him. Each man just days away from a gravely anticipated event, they are drawn together by circumstance, by fate, and by the relentless nostalgia each has for the choices he never made.

In a manner most matter of fact, Milan becomes Manesquier's houseguest, unpacking his sparse traveler's belongings in the cluttered lived-in house ("you're not saying you like it?" the older man asks the drifter as he looks around approvingly) -- and folding three neatly placed handguns into the timeworn drawers of a bedroom where the rain doesn't come in.

The one a thief, the other a retired teacher of poetry, the two men find a commonality in the shared space of the road not taken, and each becomes the other's gilded looking-glass. Pascal Estève's score mixes and contrasts their rhythms, while as a simple leitmotif, Louis Aragon's autobiographical verse "Sur le Pont-Neuf" traverses the dialogue, putting voice to a man's confrontation with himself in disillusionment and in hope.

A not unfamiliar tale of doubles and complements, The Man On The Train is nonetheless unusual for its piquant wit and its soft-peddled elegiastics. Seeming obvious in the most obvious of ways -- a buddy film face-off à la française, so to speak -- it is to the contrary astutely realized and piercingly smart, not least of all in the incisive performances that give substance to the time-baked hues and dusty golden autumn auras of Jean-Marie Dreujou's cinematography.

Hallyday's wizened and craggy rock-star persona still bristles cool, and it allows him to embody a character who is more icon than flesh, even for those uninitiated in 60s French rock where his image was forged (think "House of the Rising Sun" and "Cathy's Clown" in French). His performance is measured and its evolution meticulous -- a sideways glance, a raised eyebrow, a sigh. Rochefort, a decade older, but more softly aged, conveys a grace of character and movement, as of a man who's tiptoed all his life though he has tried to thud. His every move is filled with nuance, his sympathetic mien always teetering on the wry.

Concretizing the clichés that underlie the simple tale and making them its own, the film has each of the men literally try on the other's cover. Manesquier, tough-guy shootist in Milan's fringed leather jacket, swirls before the mirror with sound effects and one-liners from a thousand cowboy movies ("The name is Earp. Wyatt Earp," he introduces himself to his reflection in heavily accented English), while Milan learns to shuffle literally en pantoufles and to smoke a pipe, albeit with tobacco from his Gitanes. And while Milan, who does not read, takes over a tutorial on Balzac's Eugénie Grandet, Manesquier stuns his barber by asking for a change in style to something "in between fresh-out-of-prison and world class soccer player."

In the meantime, other players -- distractions -- dance around the gunman and the scholar for moments of understated humor, chances at revision and redefinition, and bodings of the future: a pupil, some accomplices, a sister, a mistress, a bakery shop clerk (will that be all?), and a gardener, scythe in hand, always on schedule, but never expected.

Counting down through eternity to the Saturday each man has planned, Leconte takes his time matching adventure to stability, the unknown to the known. When the fateful day arrives, there are no surprises -- just a lingering coda that echoes long after the credits have rolled.

©2003 Shari L. Rosenblum
CineScene