Afterthoughts

Neil Jordan’s Ondine (2010, MC-65) was an afterthought with critics and audiences, but I found it among the better, if not the best, films of the year.  The selkie-based story is reminiscent of John Sayles’ Secret of Roan Inish, though it takes off in a different direction.  The beauty of the Irish seacoast as filmed by Christopher Doyle is almost a sufficient recommendation, but Colin Farrell is excellent in his own right as the fisherman who happens to pull up in his nets a mysterious young woman.  She’s played by Alicja Bachleda, Farrell’s squeeze at the time, and the chemistry between them is palpable.  He’s trying to cope with a history of alcoholism and a young daughter in a motorized wheelchair; she’s on the run from – what?  A nice edge of mystery is maintained, but the thriller denouement seems somewhat misplaced in what is actually an effective character study of a few people and a place.

After referencing it in a review of Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist, I decided to take another look at Scorsese’s After Hours (1985) and confirmed the delights of its passage through downtown in the dead of night.  It was really Griffin Dunne’s project, and he is charming as the horny uptown computer specialist, who is lured downtown by the enticements of Rosanna Arquette, only to run through a nightmarish maze of crazy women, on a long night’s journey back to day.  As Marty relates in an interview on the DVD, his beloved long-term project, The Last Temptation of Christ, had fallen through, and out of that disappointment this quick and dirty production reawakened his appetite for making films.  Its edgy off-kilter humor recalls but does not quite come up to The King of Comedy.

After being so impressed with Winter’s Bone, I looked into Debra Granik’s first feature, Down to the Bone (2005, MC-76), and it proved promising but less than fully satisfying.  Vera Farmiga performs well in the central role, of a recovering junkie trying to normalize her life as single mom supermarket checkout clerk in upstate New York.  Apparently the film grew out of a longtime documentary project, and the milieu is well described (how many films are set in a Price Chopper?), but the story seems familiar and unsurprising, with a whiff of nostalgia for the mud.  You get a sense of slumming that you don’t in Winter’s Bone, or for another example, Wendy and Lucy.

Cedric Klapisch strikes me as a middling sort of director, hardly an auteur, but when I saw his Paris (2009, MC-68) showing on Sundance and noticed Juliette Binoche and Fabrice Luchini starring, I decided to record it, and eventually got around to watching in bits and pieces over several nights, not the ideal way to take in a film but not inappropriate for the fragmented style of this Altmanesque ensemble of intersecting types.  Juliette and Fabrice were indeed the best things in the film, she a single mother of three caring for a sick brother, and he a distinguished history professor turned tv-documentary host, who falls for one of his students.  A swirl of characters surrounds them in ways that did not really connect for me, though I never minded watching.