The Pornographer (Bertrand Bonello, 2001)

It's almost always disconcerting to see one's favorite actors growing old. As any regular reader of this blog should know, I am a huge Francois Truffaut fan, especially of his films with Jean-Pierre Leaud. I have seen Leaud in other director's works, including Pasolini, Bertolucci, and, most recently chronologically, Catherine Breillat's 36 Fillette, but hadn't seen Leaud onscreen in a movie made less than almost twenty years ago. The Pornographers gave me that chance, as Leaud plays pornographic director Jacques Laurent, who was hugely innovative in the 1970s, and has come back to his old work after 20 years away, and has troubles reconciling his artistic temperament with the culture of hardcore porn, and the moneymaking aspects of it as well. It was almost as if Laurent's predicament, coming back to the work he loves after years away, was Leaud's as well, if only in my mind. Leaud, with his long hair and aged face, is a great choice for Laurent, as he is someone the audience is almost certain to remember from years ago, much like a porn fan would have Laurent. Outside of the movie set where he becomes increasingly frustrated, Laurent has to deal with a failing relationship with his wife and a reconciliation with his son, a young idealist who seemingly wants to recapture the revolution his father lived through in 1968. While Laurent is the common thread in all the stories, more or less, the movie is not very cohesive, and scenes of Joseph (the son, played by Jeremie Renier of L'Enfant) with his new girlfriend only echo those of his father and, presumably, his mother. The Pornographer, while containing some explicit sex, is more of a stereotypical French film: moody, talky, and very slow. It is worth the watch, if only to see Leaud still as a master of his game, but the story is not particularly compelling or well-structured, with the exception of the beautiful scenes where Laurent lives in the country by himself, trying to build a house. Laurent, possibly like Leaud, is trying to build his own place in the present he is no longer really a part of. 6/10

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Intimacy (Patrice Chereau, 2001)

Patrice Chereau, director of Queen Margot, which I thought was beautiful, if not a little confusing, made his English-language directorial debut with Intimacy, which could not be more different than the previous film. While Margot was filled with gorgeous, lavish sets, radiantly beautiful Isabelle Adjani, and a pair of devoted, star-crossed lovers, Intimacy features a realistic (read: relatively grimey) modern-day London, the more realistic looking Kerry Fox and Mark Rylance, and a pair of lovers who don't even know each other's names. And they like it that way, for a while at least. Fox, as Claire, shows up at Rylance's Jay's apartment every Wednesday at 2pm for intense, wordless sex. That is fine for a while, but Jay eventually wants more, so he follows Claire to find out more about her life. This changes their entire relationship. I really loved just about everything about this movie. Rylance as Jay is so amazing, one of my top twenty performances ever. He is seemingly passive, but with this intense past of a lost wife and kids, and a failed career as a musician. He resents the bartenders at the bar where he works as the barman because they have their whole lives ahead of them, and see greater things for themselves. He lives in a rented house, with not many friends, and really has no future past what we see in the film. He tries to deny his age with his lifestyle, but, in one really revealing scene, has sex with a much-younger woman and is disgusted by her chattiness and overall optimism that is pretty characteristic of the young. Claire, again played impressively by Kerry Fox (whom I really liked in Jane Campion's An Angel at My Table), is a small-time actress with a husband (whom Jay befriends, in one of the film's more interesting sequences) and son who also teaches an acting class. She takes her frustration and rage at Jay out on her class several times, with painful consequences. These characters are so rooted in reality that it's very easy to lose yourself in the movie. Not only that, but the neediness in the relationship is based with Jay, a very interesting and welcome change from the needy, obsessive woman stereotype. Rylance (whom I have come to love after Angels and Insects, and recently found out he grew up in my city, which makes me appreciate him more - do more films, Mark!) and Fox are incredibly brave in their dedication to the explicit sexuality of the film, which includes much full nudity and even unsimulated oral sex (Chloe Sevigny wasn't that groudbreaking after all). The performances, above everything else, make this a depressing trip away from real life, but some of the dialogue falls a little short to make me love it without reservations. One of the truest films you'll ever see, there's no doubt about it. 8/10 RIYL: The Brown Bunny (although this is light years better), Battle in Heaven (a movie I loved equally, and deals with sexuality in the same realistic vein)

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Millenium Mambo (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2001)

On the surface, Millenium Mambo bears little in common with Three Times, the Hsiao-hsien film I reviewed recently. While Three Times was about quiet worlds and lives, Millenium Mambo represents the lives of Taiwanese 20-somethings, filled with drugs, clubs, and loud music. But beyond those superficial differences, both films share the same core interests: young people and the loneliness and sadness contained therein. Millenium Mambo is the story of Vicky (played perfectly by Qi Shu, whom I was also very impressed with in Three Times), a 20-something Taiwanese girl who lives with her boyfriend Hao-Hao. Hao-Hao is physically, mentally, and emotionally abusive to Vicky, and it shows in her growing alcoholism (she is almost constantly drinking in the film) and feelings that she is not a memebr of the "normal world." At the hostess club where she eventually works, she meets and falls in love with Jack, a gangster-type character who neverthless treats Vicky with love and respect. Vicky shuttles between not only these two men, but other men and situations that give her life momentary meaning, but nothing beyond that. The film is narrated in third-person from the year 2011 (ten years after the action takes place), showing the meaninglessness of most of our day-to-day actions. In ten years, none of the things that seem so pressing to Vicky in the film are probably even remembered by her. The tragic, yet undefined, end of the film seems as if these moments are already fading away from her. The movie is not plot-based; instead, it is image- and emotion-based, with long periods of silences between characters. In this movie, actions truly do speak volumes louder than words. The anticipation that 20-somethings have of life truly "beginning" spoke to me, and in the movie, that anticipation is equated to the world's anticipation of the new millenium. Neither is as meaningful as was hoped, and that is Hsiao-hsien's impression of the world, it seems. Pessimistic, maybe, but most certainly beautiful. Hsiao-hsien is now officially on the list of directors I need to see more of. 8/10

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