When Irish Eyes Aren't Smiling

Kisses (2008)
Director/Writer: Lance Daly
Studios: Fastnet Films
72 min.

The influence of the French New Wave, that mid-twentieth century film movement that stresses long tracking shots, minimal dialog, and nonprofessional actors, can be seen in the Irish indie Kisses, a nominee for Best Foreign Film at this year’s Independent Spirit Awards.  Having been funneled through the languid influence of more recent American directors like Terrence Malick and Sofia Coppola, the New Wave has found its way back across the pond to northern Europe—this ultra-obscure escapist flick was shot in Ireland on a shoestring budget.  Writer/director Lance Daly has crafted the Irish version of Lost in Translation: his camera glides through areas of inner-city Dublin both magical and destitute (much like Coppola’s did through Tokyo) to chronicle one day and night in the life of two ragamuffin kids who run away from their abusive families and savage households for one night of freedom.  Shane Curry and Kelly O’Neill, the two eleven-year-olds Daly discovered to play his leads, have never acted in anything before—meaning their performances are wonderfully devoid of the cutesy sentimental shtick most child actors have been trained to regurgitate for the camera.  A millennial interpretation of the century-old Joycean desire to flee, Daly’s sparse script expertly touches on Irish issues like alcoholism, poverty, and child sex abuse as experienced by his child characters.  What’s amazing is that the inclusion of these hot-button topics doesn’t stop this from being one of those beautifully supine films that just glides along like a hot summer afternoon.  Kisses is low-budget, independent film making at its absolute best. A

Domestic Disturbance

La nana (The Maid) (2009)
Director: Sebastián Silva
Writers: Sebastián Silva, Pedro Peirano
Studios: Forastero, Tiburón Filmes, Punto Guion Punto Producciones
95 min.

You won’t be able to take your eyes off of Chilean actress Catalina Saavedra as Raquel in The Maid.  Her un-showy performance as a nervous, flaky domestic who, after twenty-plus years with the same affluent family, finds herself fighting to retain her position is as ethereal as it is captivating.  Despite the good-natured family’s attempts to consider Raquel a part of their family, writer/director Sebastián Silva’s script is able to convey the constantly-palpable separation between employer and employee with ingenious subtlety: moments like family patriarch Mundo (Alejandro Goic) asking son Lucas (Agustín Silva) to close the door between Raquel working in the kitchen and the family eating in the dining room, or the awkward question of if, when the family sincerely celebrates Raquel’s birthday with a cake, she should clean the dishes when they’re done?  At the heart of the film lies the question of what place, if any, the help has in a family unit.  Yes, the four children—even the headstrong daughter Camila (Andrea García-Huidobro)—adore Raquel because she raised them, but that doesn’t mean they don’t know she’s not really one of them.  Raquel’s disconnectedness from her own family—revealed through rare, curt, and pained phone conversations with her mother—is likely the root of her neuroses: she feels at home neither with her real family nor with the one she’s paid to assist. 

After the the well-meaning missus (Claudia Celedón) suggests hiring an additional maid to help Raquel out, Raquel’s neuroses turn into full-blown paranoia as she fiercely defends her ersatz home first from the demure Mercedes (Mercedes Villanueva) then from the belligerent Sonia (Anita Reeves).  But it’s not until Lucy (Mariana Loyola, in an ebullient and soulful supporting role) comes to stay that Raquel finally realizes what it means for someone to have their own life and a family separate from those she works for, separate from those to whom she can never belong.  The poignant final shot of the film, which echoes that of Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups, indicates that Raquel has left behind her desire to belong and accepted the challenge to form her own identity. A  

When Gothic Swedes Attack!

Män som hatar kvinnor (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) (2009)

Director:  Niels Arden Oplev
Writers: Nikolaj Arcel, Rasmus Heisterberg, Stieg Larsson (novel)
Studios: Yellow Bird, Music Box Films, Alliance Films, Lumiere, GAGA
152 min.

  

It’s And Then There Were None with incest!  Actually, the original Swedish title of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (and the 2005 posthumous Stieg Larsson novel it’s based upon) is Män som hatar kvinnor which translates literally to Men Who Hate Women.  And they do indeed, as Swedish actress Noomi Rapace’s BAFTA-nominated performance as the brutalized and morose yet unbreakable professional hacker Lisbeth Salander is Larsson’s embodiment of his male guilt—he admits to having witnessed the gang rape of a girl at age fifteen and doing nothing to stop it, an instance which haunted him for the rest of his life.  This is why, in the film’s most cathartic scene, for Lisbeth and the audience collectively, our heroine exacts violent revenge on her sadistic parole officer Nils Bjurman (Peter Andersson).  Having beaten and raped her on multiple occasions, she Tases him, ties him up, anally violates him with one of his own sex toys, and tattoos ’RAPIST’ (amongst other things) across his quivering thorax.  (If Tarantino had directed this, that scene would have been scored to Ennio Morricone music, Lisbeth’s weapon of choice would have been a samurai sword, and Michael Madsen would’ve been involved.  Actually, I’d like to see this film!)  The scene is a graphic feminist role-reversal of the phallic penetration and subsequent naming that never tries to be anything more than a moment of desperation for Lisbeth; it's something she had to do.       

And therein lies Dragon Tattoo’s best dramtic choice: we aren’t shown Lisbeth’s brutal rape and her rebutal as some kind of Lifetime Original Movie-esque construct to suggest everything is solved by this very masculine form of power assertion or, at the other end of the spectrum, to stand up and cheer when she eviscerates her rapist (as I’ll admit to doing).  Director Oplev doesn’t include rape scenes for their value as an instance of the disturbingly in vogue torture-porn that lately masequerades as ”gritty”—a word that’s been hijacked by people who like bad movies.  Instead, Lisbeth’s experiences serve as a framing device for the film’s real plot: Lisbeth has been hired by exposé journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) to help solve the mysterious disappearance of the neice of Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube) off the family’s island compund forty years ago—a disappearance that, obviously, involves lots of other instances of "men who hate women."  Lisbeth utilizes her penchant for dolling out deserved retribution (oh, did I forgot to mention, she also immolated her father after he abused her mother as a child!) to support her axiom that everyone is responsible for their own actions regardless of their upbringing, a belief her partner-in-crime-and-in-bed Blomkvist doesn’t initially share.  But at its heart, Dragon Tattoo is an old-fashioned mystery/thriller with brilliant pacing and is refreshingly devoid of the obnoxious, eleventh hour Shyamalanian twist that every thriller of the past decade feels the need to utilize—you know, that twist that renders the entire first two hours of the movie worthless by revealing that the detective is actually the killer or the victim is actually a ghost who imagines the detective in his head while sitting in a Dunkin' Donuts parking lot.

 

 

Still riding high from The Social Network, David Fincher’s English version of Dragon Tattoo for Columbia, with Nyqvist doppelganger Daniel Craig and unknown Rooney Mara in the lead roles, hits theaters this Christmas.  While Hollywood’s remakes of foreign films are famously inferior, I’m optimistic: Fincher handled Biblically-based ritual serial killings a decade and a half ago with Se7en and astrologically-based ritual serial killings more recently with 2007’s Zodiac—both films triumphs of the genre.  As for the amazing Noomi Rapace, her Hollywoodization doesn’t seem so promising: she’s stuck in the next ”add a girl” role in this December’s Sherlock Holmes 2.  Lisbeth would not approve. A-

Second opinions:
Entertainment Weekly: "The film makes excellent use of the cold Scandinavian landscape to emphasize the story's gloomy loneliness."
Roger Ebert: "This is a movie about characters who have more important things to do than be characters in an action thriller."
Variety: "[A]s a whodunit rather than a noir, Girl ranks as a more-than-workmanlike Nordic crimer."