While waiting in line (or the nebulous glob of humanity that passes for
a line in France) outside the press office to pick up my invitation to the
French premiere of "Independence Day" my eye is drawn to a familiar
smiling face accompanied by a terrible headline in a French newspaper clipping
mounted on the wall: "Christine Pascal s'est suicidee." (Christine
Pascal Commits Suicide). I'm stunned. Plagued by severe depression, the
Franco-Swiss actress and director apparently threw herself out the window
of a mental clinic on the outskirts of Paris a week ago. She was 42.
She was also pretty, vivacious and gifted. Exactly a year ago I was seated
across from her at a dinner in Geneva during the first edition of a festival
called "Cinema Tout Ecran," an excellent event devoted to showing
fictional work that had been made for television but was good enough to
hold its own on the big screen. Christine Pascal was the head of the jury,
which gave its top award to Atom Egoyan's thoroughly brilliant rendering
of the tragic life of a leading Canadian hockey player, "Gross Misconduct."
She joked in both French and English throughout the meal and generally
came across as a walking advertisement for the expression "not a care
in the world."
Pascal, who started out as an actress ( she appeared in some twenty films
after Bertrand Tavernier gave her a small part in "L'Horloger de Saint-Paul"
in 1972), directed five features starting in 1979 with "Felicite"
which she wrote and starred in. It began with a woman committing suicide.
In 1989 her "Zanzibar" was a black comedy about the manipulative
behavior crucial to making a movie - a sort of low-key cross between "Swimming
with Sharks" and "The Stuntman." Call it "Wading with
Stunt Sharks." "Le Petit Prince a dit" ("And the Little
Prince Said...."), the story of an estranged couple (Richard Berry
and Anemone) who enter a truce bubble when their only daughter is diagnosed
with an inoperable brain tumor, struck an emotional bulls-eye when it was
presented at Cannes in 1992. It won that year's Prix Louis-Delluc.
Pascal's fifth and final film "Adultere, mode d'emploi" (Adultery:
A User's Manual) came out in July of 1995 to mixed response.
Her distinctive, creaky voice and delicate frame will be missed.
The same wall of clippings - with its smiling photos of Deauville attendees
Eddie Murphy, Matt Dillon, Gena Rowlands, Gérard Depardieu - also
features mini-profiles of Charlotte Rampling, the president of this year's
Deauville jury. Rampling, one of the most effortlessly drop-dead gorgeous
women I have ever seen, admitted to reporters that she's been out of circulation
for the last two years due to "debilitating depression." (Rampling
was given a career achievement award this past January at the first Lumière
de Paris ceremony, an initiative designed to resemble the Golden Globes
given by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. She was graciousness
personified. Although she was unquestionably a knock-out as far back as
Richard Lester's "The Knack" or her splendid performance in "The
Night Porter" she appears to be one of those blessed women - Jacqueline
Bisset is another - who grows more beautiful with age.)
Like everyone else, I have a tendency to dismiss the problems of characters
in movies if they're rich or gorgeous or both. The suffering of a character
played by Cary Grant can't possibly compare to that of Quasimodo, I think
- without thinking. For in a world paved with Prozac, one man's minor inconvenience
is another man's crushingly insurmountable obstacle.
--------------------------
"No Way Home" is the next-to-last film in competition. I'm always
eager to see what Tim Roth has to offer (with the possible exception of
his bell boy turn in the execrable "Four Rooms") and here he is
the rock solid anchor in a three-character drama that commanded and held
my interest from start to finish.
Roth plays Joey, a T-shirt clad young man who is released from a 6 year
stretch in prison as the film begins. In a practically wordless sequence
over the opening credits, writer/director Buddy Giovinazzo, does what all
good filmmakers are supposed to do: he establishes a character with images.
By the time Joey walks out the prison gate with $40 in his pocket, we know
a lot about him. As he returns to his childhood home, now inhabited by
his older brother Tommy ( James Russo ) and Tommy's wife of four years Denise
(Deborah Unger in a very different register than her bang-up performance
in David Cronenberg's "Crash") we want to know more. "No
Way Home" never states the obvious as it quietly and powerfully explores
the limits of family ties.
"Blood is thicker than water, right?" Tommy says to Joey.
"I don't know. I ain't drank any recently," Joey replies.
"I have a warm place in my heart for France ever since my first film
"Combat Shock" was so well received," Giovinazzo explained
before the screening. "In fact, France was the only country that liked
it."
Giovinazzo, who shot the film on location in Staten Island, near where
he grew up, added, "I take pride in the fact that "No Way Home"
is the kind of film Hollywood doesn't want to make. They don't want you
to see that side of run-down America. I say to hell with them -- I'll just
keep coming to France."
--------------------------
I'm enjoying a grilled cheese sandwich (called a "croque monsieur"
which pretty much translates as "munch gentleman") by the tennis
courts. Whenever I order one, I invariably think of the word "croquemort,"
the French term for "undertaker." It means "one who munches
or bites the dead" for the colorful reason that in the olden days,
one way to determine whether or not a dead body was indeed deceased was
to chomp down on the presumed corpse's big toe. If this elicited a response,
the victim was still alive. If not, it was approved for burial.
There are two young men with walkie-talkies at the adjacent table, who are
chatting up the four young ladies to their left.
"Jeez, that was horrible last night!"
"It started out morose and it never improved."
"I mean, I thought it would NEVER end."
It turns out they're talking about Abel Ferrara's "The Funeral"
which just had its world premiere in Venice before coming to Deauville.
It's dark alright. Ferrara's struggles with good and evil and moral choices
in general - according to the pen of his faithful screenwriter Nicholas
St. John - are always interesting, but what I mostly came away with from
this outing were questions about how a wacko lug like Chris Penn ended up
married to the likes of Isabella Rossellini and why a smart gorgeous broad
like Anabella Sciorra would stick with an unsavory character like Christopher
Walken. There's that beauty thing again. Why are these trigger-happy,
revenge bent crooks the best these women can do? Chalk it up to the 1930s.
Ferrara himself is a raspy-voiced character - a vocal cross between William
Hickey and Brando's Don Corleone in a hipster's body, slightly bent toward
an invisible jazz beat. Ferrara is the subject of a retrospective at Deauville
this year, one that lacks perhaps his best film: "King of New York."
Walken's performance in that one is so towering it rivals the World Trade
Center (before and after the bombing). As Ferrara is handed a special medal
struck by the Paris Mint, the announcer calls him "One of the most
unpredictable film artists of his generation."
"I accept," says Ferrara, clasping the mike and looking out at
a capacity crowd of 1500. "You put a lot of energy and effort into
films and it's always small rooms here and there. It's very rare that you
get out front and get that jolt of an audience. You know you're not doing
it for yourself, you're doing it for the people.
"Unfortunately for us, the farther away from home we go, the better
we are. I just found out that the New York Film Festival didn't accept
our film - which I find pretty funny. At the same time, I'm wondering how
I'm gonna get back to Venice if I win.
"Listen, I dig the fanfare. I dig the juice. People ask me why this
film's so dark. We all lose someone who's close to us, people we love and
that's what this film is about. I want to dedicate it to my mother."
My luncheon neighbors may not have appreciated what Mrs. Ferrara's son hath
wrought, but they were enthusiastic about the film that followed, Peter
Jackson's ode to ectoplasm, "The Frighteners."
"I really love presenting my films for a French audience," the
roly-poly New Zealander told the cheering crowd. "I have a soft spot
for you since "Bad Taste" received such a warm reception."
(A week in Deauville teaches me that there are an awful lot of English-speaking
directors out there walking around like bruised fruit with "soft spots"
for the film buffs of France.) "The Frighteners" was made in
the spirit of an amusement park ride," says Jackson, "like a roller
coaster ride through a haunted house. And I hope you'll take it in that
spirit."
The poster slogan for "The Frighteners" in English is "Dead
yet?" In French it translates as "Still alive?" which is
not quite the same thing. Far more interesting on the title front is the
French release title for "A Time to Kill": "Le Droit de tuer?"
That means: The Right to Kill? With a question mark. It's a cross-cultural
truism that whereas American movies strive to be clear-cut, even obvious,
French sensibilities prefer ambiguity.
"The Frighteners" is indeed a roller coaster ride -- one that
flies straight off the rails before the end. But I enjoyed it. It was
especially fun to see R. Lee Ermey as an eternal (literally) drill sergeant
with jurisdiction over the local cemetery. It reminded me (as it was meant
to - and as was played up in "Toy Story" where the actor was in
charge of that brave bucket of green plastic soldiers) of Ermey's stunning
performance in Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket."
Ermey's soul-killing and relentless badgering as he mercilessly whipped
his recruits into shape for Kubrick's lens was so full of inventive invective
that the French left-leaning daily "Liberation" published a line-by-line
translation of his bottomless barking, so French audiences wouldn't miss
a single devastating insult.
That drilling served its purpose, with one notable exception: Private Pyle
played to doughy lumbering perfection by Vincent D'Onofrio. D'Onofrio was
in Deauville earlier in the week to promote Alex Cox's new film "The
Winner."
"I gained 80 lbs for that role," D'Onofrio told Filmscouts. "The
hard part was keeping that extra weight on for 13 months because Kubrick
sort of held us hostage all that time. Thirteen months without exercise.
But that weight was crucial to the role because it was the visual equivalent
of a man becoming a monster, an inflated blubbery monster."
I'll take inflated blubbery monsters for their superior intellectual and
allegorical component most days, but the inventive special effects in "The
Frighteners" are fun, too.
Copyright 1994-2008 Film Scouts LLC
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