September 10
La Lettre
Directed by Manuel de Oliveira
Cast: Chiara Mastroianni, Pedro Abrunhosa, Antoine Chappey, Leonor Silveira
U.S. Distribution: none as of this writing
** / CComments upcoming ...
[Portugal/France/Spain / 107 minutes / Masters / Uptown 1]
The Personals
Directed by Chen Kuo-fu
Cast: René Liu, Chin Shih-chieh, Chen Chao-jung, Wu Bai, Gu Bai-ming
U.S. Distribution: none as of this writing
*** / B"You're reasonably attractive," conclude many of Wu's would-be suitors after responding to her newspaper advertisement calling for a prospective husband. "Why would you be placing a personal?" The inference, of course, is that only oddballs and undesirables would employ such an unorthodox method to find companionship, and for its first hour, Chen Kuo-fu's deceptively light-hearted picture The Personals takes this position and runs with it.
The bulk of the movie is largely made up of a string of comic encounters in a tea house as Wu interviews the parade of men who have answered her ad. They're mostly the sort of people you'd normally rank pretty low on the dating totem pole -- a crazed foot fetishist that ducks under the table to slip shoes on her feet; a sweaty, grinning porno addict who enthuses with great zeal about S&M; a pimp in the midst of a recruitment drive. The film milks these sequences for broad, goofy humour, mocking these characters as it relishes in Wu's politely aghast reactions. (René Liu, the star of the picture, acquits herself nicely, though hers is largely a reactionary role.)
While it's pretty easy to elicit laughs out of the more out-there candidates, it's a little less comfortable watching the film poke fun at the suitors which are simply hapless or eccentric -- it smacks of elitist condescension. The entire first half of the picture introduces an impossibly complete spectrum of unsuitable candidates -- too young, too old, too homely; a lesbian is even intriguingly presented -- and some of the sequences are more troubling than funny. There's one rendezvous which finds an obviously mentally-disturbed young man dragged in by his worried mother, who desperately implores Wu to "try to be his friend". The blank stare on the man's face in conjunction with the panicked tone in his mother's voice is unsettling.
Even if one consistently finds humour in the strange list of characters brought to the screen as Wu works her way through her list -- I found it intermittently amusing, although the prevailing structure felt rather obvious -- after the sixth or seventh rejected applicant, it all begins to feel redundant. Far more intriguing are the dramatic interludes between the jokey bits which reveal Wu on a more personal scale and gradually exposes the motivations behind her quest.
It's this aspect of the picture which gradually comes to the forefront during its final third, culminating in a lovely bittersweet resolution -- The Personals is far more successful as an emotional voyage than a comic one. Throughout the film, as each new applicant enters the fray, a little onscreen caption appears listing his name, age and occupation; the resonance which accompanies the film's final caption is just about perfect.
[Taiwan / 114 minutes / Contemporary World Cinema / Cumberland 3]
Le Bleu Des Villes
Directed by Stéphane Brizé
Cast: Florence Vignon, Mathilde Seigner, Antoine Chappey, Phillippe Duquesne
U.S. Distribution: none as of this writing
*** / BThe very best moment of Le Bleu Des Villes is its silent opening sequence, which is a fixed shot of the front of a parked rig. Solange, the beleagured meter maid protagonist of the film, enters the frame with ticket in hand and vainly attempts to leap high enough to affix the billet to the windshield. After several failed attempts -- her petite, uniform-clad frame is dwarfed by the gargantuan vehicle -- Solange circles around to the passenger side, somehow vaults herself stomach-first onto the hood of the truck, and crawls on her hands and knees over to the driver side where she snaps the parking ticket beneath the windshield wiper. It's a delightful little sight gag and a near-Sisyphean triumph over adversity.
Adversity comprises the bulk of Solange's daily routine. Unhappily trodding up and down streets with ticket book in hand, she's constantly berated by motorists and pedestrians, and her well-meaning but hapless husband is unable to articulate his affection: he's the kind of guy who gives his wife a coffee maker as a birthday gift. ("Four cups!", he inanely enthuses.) Solange's only escapes from her banal existence are her discreetly-recorded stints on her beloved karaoke machine, and avidly following the meteoric career of her childhood friend Mylène, who's gone on to fame as a TV weatherperson, written a hot-selling book, and escaped her hometown to Paris. Solange secretly dreams of a singing career, and when her path crosses with Mylène's, she begins to reassess her life choices.
A thoroughly cute picture, Le Bleu Des Villes is warm and engaging without being particularly substantial. The follow-your-dreams genre has frankly been done to death, but Brizé's affable film is cheery without feeling overly recycled; it does become increasingly disengaging as it lapses into mechanical clichés. Peppered with (sometimes overly) broad comic bits (a recurring thread addresses Solange's new house-in-progress, which her husband has begun to independently decorate in most garish fashion), the film's major success is its ability to sketch out the shadings within its trio of distinct characters and to draw audience empathy with them.
The best reason to see the movie is for Florence Vignon's performance as Solange. She also co-wrote the screenplay, and her interpretation of the lovably downtrodden character is throughly delightful. On her weary shoulders, the blue meter maid uniform seems positively stifling, and her hangdog expression as she trudges her way through the first half of the movie (she resembles a sad-eyed Maria de Madeiros) conveys Solange's misery with precision without casting a gloomy pall over the proceedings. You don't savour her suffering; indeed, you can't help but root for her sadsack heroine -- when she permitted a tiny smile to spread on her face after pounding an irate motorist into submission, I smiled right along with her.
In attendance: director Stéphane Brizé
[France / 105 minutes / Contemporary World Cinema / Cumberland 3]
Random Notes: While chatting on the street with cinema guru Charles B. François after the screening of Le Bleu Des Villes, we were stopped by actor Bokeem Woodbine, who was in search of a local restaurant. In my dazed stupor, I completely failed to even recognize him until after the fact ... the Q&A session with Stéphane Brizé in Le Bleu Des Villes was a lighthearted, informal one, with the director gamely answering many frankly inane questions -- the best moment: his tongue-in-cheek "I flew across the Atlantic for this?" aside ...
Alex Fung (aw220@freenet.carleton.ca)
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