Olivier Assayas takes a very different trip into silent movie nostalgia, with a director’s ill-fated attempt to remake the 1915 serial Les Vampires. Hong Kong action star Maggie Cheung is cast as the erotic rooftop nightcrawler Irma Vep! We see the state of Paris filmmaking in the mid-90s, with a clueless, frustrated director (Jean-Pierre Léaud) out of ideas — what business has Irma Vep in the modern world? Meanwhile, Cheung dons her vinyl catsuit for a personal creepy crawly mission — just to see if it gives her a thrill. Criterion’s special edition contains both a full episode of the silent serial plus a must-see documentary on the life and work of the legendary Musidora, a major sex symbol of the silent era.
Irma Vep
Blu-ray
The Criterion Collection 1074
1996 / Color / 1:66 widescreen / 99 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date April 27, 2021 / 39.95
Starring: Maggie Cheung, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Nathalie Richard, Bernard Nissile,...
Irma Vep
Blu-ray
The Criterion Collection 1074
1996 / Color / 1:66 widescreen / 99 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date April 27, 2021 / 39.95
Starring: Maggie Cheung, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Nathalie Richard, Bernard Nissile,...
- 4/17/2021
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
Wicker Park may have been adapted the 1996 French film L'Appartement, but pretty much all evidence of what was once an engaging psychodrama has been lost in the translation.
A stilted, episodic tale of obsession that grows more ridiculous by the second (with much unintended audience giggling to attest to the fact), the MGM picture has been taken out of long-term storage, dusted off and given a last-gasp-of-summer release, but it will unlikely be requiring anything much bigger than a breadbasket to collect its boxoffice earnings.
Like the original, which won a BAFTA Award for best foreign-language film, the story concerns a young exec (Josh Hartnett) who, despite being engaged to his boss' younger sister, risks throwing it all away when the woman (Diane Kruger) who was once the love of his life before abruptly disappearing resurfaces in a Chicago restaurant.
Or so it would appear.
Nevertheless, that possibility is enough to send the resmitten Matthew on the phantom Lisa's trail, leading to a whole lot of dead ends and wispy flashbacks to those carefree, happier days when he first stalked, uh, met her.
Without revealing any of the film's trick plot twists, it turns out Matthew doesn't have the monopoly on obsession.
While on the subject, it would appear director Paul McGuigan, who was also responsible for this year's much better The Reckoning, has a thing for shots with mirrors in them. That probably has something to say about appearances being deceiving and people's reflections not always being indicative of their actions, but all the fancy camera angles and split-screen effects in the world can't compensate for a script (credited to Brandon Boyce and L'Appartement writer-director Gilles Mimouni) in which characters say things like, "Take my picture. I'll feel beautiful tonight!"
Not that the original was all that original -- there's more than a little Single White Female and a touch of Vertigo in the telling -- but leads Vincent Cassel and Monica Bellucci provided the necessary dark and sultry (respectively) undercurrents.
Here, Hartnett, an actor trained in the Keanu Reeves school of laid-back emoting, and newcomer Kruger just aren't the right people for the job.
Providing some much-needed energy, meanwhile, is the dependable Matthew Lillard as Hartnett's supportive buddy, while Rose Byrne shows up later in the role of Alex -- and let's just say it's probably no accident she shares her name with a certain character played by Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction.
Wicker Park
MGM
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures and Lakeshore Entertainment present
A Lakeshore Entertainment production
A Paul McGuigan film
Credits:
Director: Paul McGuigan
Screenwriter: Brandon Boyce
Based on the motion picture screenplay L'Appartement by: Gilles Mimouni
Executive producers: Georges Benayoun, Gilles Mimouni, Henry Winterstern, Harley Tannebaum
Producers: Andrew Lamal, Marcus Viscidi, Tom Rosenberg, Gary Lucchesi
Director of photography: Peter Sova
Production designer: Richard Bridgland
Editor: Andrew Hulme
Costume designer: Odette Gadoury
Music: Cliff Martinez
Cast:
Matthew: Josh Hartnett
Alex: Rose Byrne
Luke: Matthew Lillard
Lisa: Diane Kruger
Daniel: Christopher Cousins
Rebecca: Jessica Pare
MPAA rating: PG-13
Running time -- 115 minutes...
A stilted, episodic tale of obsession that grows more ridiculous by the second (with much unintended audience giggling to attest to the fact), the MGM picture has been taken out of long-term storage, dusted off and given a last-gasp-of-summer release, but it will unlikely be requiring anything much bigger than a breadbasket to collect its boxoffice earnings.
Like the original, which won a BAFTA Award for best foreign-language film, the story concerns a young exec (Josh Hartnett) who, despite being engaged to his boss' younger sister, risks throwing it all away when the woman (Diane Kruger) who was once the love of his life before abruptly disappearing resurfaces in a Chicago restaurant.
Or so it would appear.
Nevertheless, that possibility is enough to send the resmitten Matthew on the phantom Lisa's trail, leading to a whole lot of dead ends and wispy flashbacks to those carefree, happier days when he first stalked, uh, met her.
Without revealing any of the film's trick plot twists, it turns out Matthew doesn't have the monopoly on obsession.
While on the subject, it would appear director Paul McGuigan, who was also responsible for this year's much better The Reckoning, has a thing for shots with mirrors in them. That probably has something to say about appearances being deceiving and people's reflections not always being indicative of their actions, but all the fancy camera angles and split-screen effects in the world can't compensate for a script (credited to Brandon Boyce and L'Appartement writer-director Gilles Mimouni) in which characters say things like, "Take my picture. I'll feel beautiful tonight!"
Not that the original was all that original -- there's more than a little Single White Female and a touch of Vertigo in the telling -- but leads Vincent Cassel and Monica Bellucci provided the necessary dark and sultry (respectively) undercurrents.
Here, Hartnett, an actor trained in the Keanu Reeves school of laid-back emoting, and newcomer Kruger just aren't the right people for the job.
Providing some much-needed energy, meanwhile, is the dependable Matthew Lillard as Hartnett's supportive buddy, while Rose Byrne shows up later in the role of Alex -- and let's just say it's probably no accident she shares her name with a certain character played by Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction.
Wicker Park
MGM
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures and Lakeshore Entertainment present
A Lakeshore Entertainment production
A Paul McGuigan film
Credits:
Director: Paul McGuigan
Screenwriter: Brandon Boyce
Based on the motion picture screenplay L'Appartement by: Gilles Mimouni
Executive producers: Georges Benayoun, Gilles Mimouni, Henry Winterstern, Harley Tannebaum
Producers: Andrew Lamal, Marcus Viscidi, Tom Rosenberg, Gary Lucchesi
Director of photography: Peter Sova
Production designer: Richard Bridgland
Editor: Andrew Hulme
Costume designer: Odette Gadoury
Music: Cliff Martinez
Cast:
Matthew: Josh Hartnett
Alex: Rose Byrne
Luke: Matthew Lillard
Lisa: Diane Kruger
Daniel: Christopher Cousins
Rebecca: Jessica Pare
MPAA rating: PG-13
Running time -- 115 minutes...
- 9/14/2004
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
"You're all alone except what goes on inside your body," the stubborn, uncompromising writer Adrien declares in "Late August, Early September", Olivier Assayas' moody, graceful and deeply accomplished French feature on friendship, grief and shifting sexual relationships.
The film's title evokes the works of Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu. Assayas, a 44-year-old former film critic, is drawn to themes of solitude and estrangement, exploring how physical passages of time mirror interior journeys of fate, opportunity, loss and renewal. The New York-based independent Zeitgeist Films, which scored strong returns on Assayas' previous feature, the 1996 "Irma Vep", should elicit a healthy specialized following to this accessible, beautifully made work.
Novelistically conceived with chapter headings (such as "Gabriel's Got Real Estate Problems"), its fragmented, impressionistic scenes punctuated by haunting fade-outs, the film is an elliptical consideration of the advancement and retreat of contemporary relationships. Assayas brilliantly binds the interrelated actions of four distinct individuals. Gabriel (Mathieu Almaric), a writer and editor, is gripped by doubt and uncertainty. His inchoate feelings are further aggravated by his compacted professional friendship with Adrien (Fran‚ois Cluzet), an admired though commercially negligible author. Gabriel has left the steady, faithful, compulsive Jenny (Jeanne Balibar) for the beautiful and brazenly self-possessed Anne (Virginie Ledoyen), a young fashion designer.
From there Assayas daringly expands his scope rather than narrow his concerns. The offhanded, practically nonlinear expositional style yields a loose faction of friends, lovers and relatives that Assayas ruefully plays off and comments on. So the confident, refreshingly direct young high school girl (Mia Hansen-Love) that Adrien is secretly involved with is placed in counterpoint with the bruising experiences of the traumatized, emotionally scarred older woman left behind (played by Arsinee Khanjian, the wife of Canadian auteur Atom Egoyan). This is a film more about questions than answers, a work that remains closed to easy interpretations, although it's bracingly attuned to nuance and observation.
All of its characters are concerned with the loss of stability and the urge for reinvention. In the last act, the death of one of the principals mediates a deeper examination of recovery and possibility, the consequences of loving unconditionally and the awakening of true feeling. The beauty is that Assayas achieves this through a concentrated and sophisticated visual design, eschewing sustained dramatic sequences in favor of shots, or fragments, of lives caught nakedly, vulnerable and open.
"Late August, Early September" is an explicitly sensual and deeply sensory film, alert to action and movement, consciousness and desire. Assayas has an astonishing facility for illustrating the emotional fluctuations of motion and feeling. Working with his excellent cinematographer Denis Lenoir, Assayas constantly frames his characters in stride, their arms, hands, faces, bodies moving in flow with their physical environment. Perspective and point of view remain constantly in flux, so shots begin inside cars, the interior of a train or other restricted spaces. Shot in Super 16mm, the film is visually somber, unfolding in a Paris drained of vibrancy or primary colors (with some striking exceptions, such as the red sweater Ledoyen appears in late in the film).
The acting is uniformly sensational, bracketing the camerawork that is so incisive and free in capturing inflection and the subtleties of expression. Almaric, who played the confused academic of Arnaud Desplechin's "My Sex Life ...", superbly embodies Gabriel's suspension between responsibility and selfishness. Playing in effect a variation of Christine, her breakthrough part in Assayas' 1994 "Cold Water", the incredible Ledoyen projects a feral sexual intensity that she credibly balances with self-loathing and risk-taking. Balibar and Cluzet are equally fine, low-key and taciturn, like the balance of the film, masters at withholding and concealment. Ali Sarka Toure's plaintive, spare guitar work is a suitably trenchant aural corollary to the film's formal elegance.
LATE AUGUST, EARLY SEPTEMBER
Zeitgeist Films
A Polygram Film Distribution release
A Dacia Films/Cinea production
Credits: Director-screenwriter: Olivier Assayas; Producers: Georges Benayoun, Philippe Carcassonne; Executive producer: Francoise Guglielmi; Director of photography: Denis Lenoir; Production designer: Francois Renaud Labarthe; Editor: Luc Barnier; Costume designer: Francoise Clavel; Music: Ali Sarka Toure; Casting: Antoinette Boulat. Cast: Gabriel: Mathieu Almaric; Anne: Virginie Ledoyen; Jenny: Jeanne Balibar; Adrien: Francois Cluzet; Jeremie: Alex Descas; Vera: Mia Hansen-Love; Lucie: Arsinee Khanjian; Maryelle: Nathalie Richard. No MPAA rating. Color/stereo. Running time --112 minutes.
The film's title evokes the works of Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu. Assayas, a 44-year-old former film critic, is drawn to themes of solitude and estrangement, exploring how physical passages of time mirror interior journeys of fate, opportunity, loss and renewal. The New York-based independent Zeitgeist Films, which scored strong returns on Assayas' previous feature, the 1996 "Irma Vep", should elicit a healthy specialized following to this accessible, beautifully made work.
Novelistically conceived with chapter headings (such as "Gabriel's Got Real Estate Problems"), its fragmented, impressionistic scenes punctuated by haunting fade-outs, the film is an elliptical consideration of the advancement and retreat of contemporary relationships. Assayas brilliantly binds the interrelated actions of four distinct individuals. Gabriel (Mathieu Almaric), a writer and editor, is gripped by doubt and uncertainty. His inchoate feelings are further aggravated by his compacted professional friendship with Adrien (Fran‚ois Cluzet), an admired though commercially negligible author. Gabriel has left the steady, faithful, compulsive Jenny (Jeanne Balibar) for the beautiful and brazenly self-possessed Anne (Virginie Ledoyen), a young fashion designer.
From there Assayas daringly expands his scope rather than narrow his concerns. The offhanded, practically nonlinear expositional style yields a loose faction of friends, lovers and relatives that Assayas ruefully plays off and comments on. So the confident, refreshingly direct young high school girl (Mia Hansen-Love) that Adrien is secretly involved with is placed in counterpoint with the bruising experiences of the traumatized, emotionally scarred older woman left behind (played by Arsinee Khanjian, the wife of Canadian auteur Atom Egoyan). This is a film more about questions than answers, a work that remains closed to easy interpretations, although it's bracingly attuned to nuance and observation.
All of its characters are concerned with the loss of stability and the urge for reinvention. In the last act, the death of one of the principals mediates a deeper examination of recovery and possibility, the consequences of loving unconditionally and the awakening of true feeling. The beauty is that Assayas achieves this through a concentrated and sophisticated visual design, eschewing sustained dramatic sequences in favor of shots, or fragments, of lives caught nakedly, vulnerable and open.
"Late August, Early September" is an explicitly sensual and deeply sensory film, alert to action and movement, consciousness and desire. Assayas has an astonishing facility for illustrating the emotional fluctuations of motion and feeling. Working with his excellent cinematographer Denis Lenoir, Assayas constantly frames his characters in stride, their arms, hands, faces, bodies moving in flow with their physical environment. Perspective and point of view remain constantly in flux, so shots begin inside cars, the interior of a train or other restricted spaces. Shot in Super 16mm, the film is visually somber, unfolding in a Paris drained of vibrancy or primary colors (with some striking exceptions, such as the red sweater Ledoyen appears in late in the film).
The acting is uniformly sensational, bracketing the camerawork that is so incisive and free in capturing inflection and the subtleties of expression. Almaric, who played the confused academic of Arnaud Desplechin's "My Sex Life ...", superbly embodies Gabriel's suspension between responsibility and selfishness. Playing in effect a variation of Christine, her breakthrough part in Assayas' 1994 "Cold Water", the incredible Ledoyen projects a feral sexual intensity that she credibly balances with self-loathing and risk-taking. Balibar and Cluzet are equally fine, low-key and taciturn, like the balance of the film, masters at withholding and concealment. Ali Sarka Toure's plaintive, spare guitar work is a suitably trenchant aural corollary to the film's formal elegance.
LATE AUGUST, EARLY SEPTEMBER
Zeitgeist Films
A Polygram Film Distribution release
A Dacia Films/Cinea production
Credits: Director-screenwriter: Olivier Assayas; Producers: Georges Benayoun, Philippe Carcassonne; Executive producer: Francoise Guglielmi; Director of photography: Denis Lenoir; Production designer: Francois Renaud Labarthe; Editor: Luc Barnier; Costume designer: Francoise Clavel; Music: Ali Sarka Toure; Casting: Antoinette Boulat. Cast: Gabriel: Mathieu Almaric; Anne: Virginie Ledoyen; Jenny: Jeanne Balibar; Adrien: Francois Cluzet; Jeremie: Alex Descas; Vera: Mia Hansen-Love; Lucie: Arsinee Khanjian; Maryelle: Nathalie Richard. No MPAA rating. Color/stereo. Running time --112 minutes.
- 8/31/1999
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
MONTREAL -- There is something appropriate about the opening film of a Canadian film festival being a chilling experience, and the French-Canadian co-production ''Kabloonak, '' which opened the 18th Montreal World Film Festival, quickly had the audience shivering.
Set in the Canadian Arctic, the movie deals with the experience of director Robert Flaherty (Charles Dance), considered the father of documentary, as he filmed his epic work ''Nanook of the North'' in the 1920s.
Claude Massot's film is skimpy on biographical information and dramatic motivation, but it does present its own documentary-like view of the arduous task Flaherty set for himself. The film details these harrowing conditions with evocativeness, and its stunning visuals re-create the landscape in all its harshness.
The heart of the film is in the depiction of the relationship that develops between Flaherty and his principal subject, Nanook. The men, from obviously different social and societal universes, develop a bond in their mutual adventures that is actually quite touching. Dance, in his second turn as an historical filmmaker (he earlier played D.W. Griffith), brings his usual intensity to the sketchily written role, and he is ably matched by Adamie Inukpuk, who brings warmth and humor to the role of Nanook.
The film carefully mines the primitive ways of the Eskimos for their inherent humor for modern audiences, but it also makes clear their essential dignity. The ending will produce more than a few audience sniffles.
The film will have a tough commercial road because it neither fully succeeds as an adventure story nor as an insightful portrait of Flaherty's obsession.
KABLOONAK
Presented by Ima Prods. and Bloom Films
CFP Canadian Distribution
Producers Georges Benayoun, Paul Rozenberg, Pierre Gendron
Direction Claude Massot
Screenplay Claude Massot, Sebastien Regnier
Director of photography Jacques Loiseleux, Francois Protat
Art direction Valodia Aronine, Gilles Aird
Editing Joelle Hache
Cast:
Robert Flaherty Charles Dance
Nanook Adamie Inukpuk
Nyla Seporah Q. Ungalaq
Mukpullu Natar Ungalaq
Aviuk Matthew Jaw Saviakjuk
Running time -- 105 minutes
No MPAA rating
(c) The Hollywood Reporter...
Set in the Canadian Arctic, the movie deals with the experience of director Robert Flaherty (Charles Dance), considered the father of documentary, as he filmed his epic work ''Nanook of the North'' in the 1920s.
Claude Massot's film is skimpy on biographical information and dramatic motivation, but it does present its own documentary-like view of the arduous task Flaherty set for himself. The film details these harrowing conditions with evocativeness, and its stunning visuals re-create the landscape in all its harshness.
The heart of the film is in the depiction of the relationship that develops between Flaherty and his principal subject, Nanook. The men, from obviously different social and societal universes, develop a bond in their mutual adventures that is actually quite touching. Dance, in his second turn as an historical filmmaker (he earlier played D.W. Griffith), brings his usual intensity to the sketchily written role, and he is ably matched by Adamie Inukpuk, who brings warmth and humor to the role of Nanook.
The film carefully mines the primitive ways of the Eskimos for their inherent humor for modern audiences, but it also makes clear their essential dignity. The ending will produce more than a few audience sniffles.
The film will have a tough commercial road because it neither fully succeeds as an adventure story nor as an insightful portrait of Flaherty's obsession.
KABLOONAK
Presented by Ima Prods. and Bloom Films
CFP Canadian Distribution
Producers Georges Benayoun, Paul Rozenberg, Pierre Gendron
Direction Claude Massot
Screenplay Claude Massot, Sebastien Regnier
Director of photography Jacques Loiseleux, Francois Protat
Art direction Valodia Aronine, Gilles Aird
Editing Joelle Hache
Cast:
Robert Flaherty Charles Dance
Nanook Adamie Inukpuk
Nyla Seporah Q. Ungalaq
Mukpullu Natar Ungalaq
Aviuk Matthew Jaw Saviakjuk
Running time -- 105 minutes
No MPAA rating
(c) The Hollywood Reporter...
- 8/29/1994
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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