Movie Review: Resistance (2020)

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Although his grandmother survived the Holocaust and four of his relatives were saved from the Nazis by Oskar Schindler, four hundred members of writer-director Jonathan Jakubowicz's family were killed during the second world war. To Jakubowicz, World War II movies are more than just a genre, they're also incredibly personal.

Repulsed by the rise of antisemitism in Venezuela with the election of Hugo Chavez, Jakubowicz journeyed to the United States in 2006 where he continued his work as a filmmaker. Soon however, he started seeing the same wave of hate — the kind that had always been there just under the surface — begin to make its way around the globe. Citing an increase in hate crimes as well as openly antisemitic speech from political figures whom he described as using Jews like a football, Jakubowicz knew the time was right to document the response to the atrocities of World War II by what would become the French Resistance in order to inspire us all . . . before history repeats itself again.

A handsomely crafted labor of love, Resistance is a World War II movie that chronicles the plight of members of the French Resistance who risked everything to transport hundreds of Jewish children orphaned by the war from Nazi controlled France to neutral Switzerland. The fact that the man at the film's center is none other than the struggling theater performer Marcel Mangel (Jesse Eisenberg) who would go on to become the world's most famous mime (and "master of silence") Marcel Marceau is beside the point.

Remarkably brought to life by Jesse Eisenberg — who, regrettably, is the main reason to watch the otherwise narratively by-the-numbers Resistance — the decision to paint Marcel as an artistically gifted yet everyday Joe both helps and hurts Jakubowicz's film. Based on years of research on the resistance, the Vichy government, France under Nazi control, and Marcel Marceau (all of which sounds far more fascinating than Jakubowicz's script overall) despite his best intentions, Resistance falls prey to the trappings and cliches of war flicks and biopics.

Often salvaged by its superb cast, including the always compelling Clémence Poésy who, much like Eisenberg, who never fails to dazzle, Édgar Ramírez's gentle presence elevates the film's emotional yet prosaic opening sequence where a child asks why the Nazis hate us just minutes before —  as if on cue — they show up at the door. Likewise, it's unnecessarily bookended by a flag-waving speech from General Patton (Ed Harris) at Nuremberg in an overused technique that we've seen in countless biopics over the years, including Walk the Line and Bohemian Rhapsody.

The formulaic film only livens up once Marcel puts his mime skills to use to ease the anxiety of a newly arrived group of war orphans. Like vibrant rays of sunshine peeking through after days of gray skies and rain, when Eisenberg goes into performance mode to the delight of everyone in sight and lets himself be imaginatively blown across the room like candles on a cake, we find ourselves immediately captivated. Sadly, however, the feeling is short-lived. Sharing his tools as an actor with the kids so that they can learn not only how to blend into the scenery and hide but also (more importantly) to survive during wartime, the film should be far more engrossing than it actually is.

Augmented by the score of Jakubowicz's frequent composer Angelo Milli and the crisp cinematography by M.I. Littin-Menz, who also lensed the moving Machuca, the film's rich technical specs keep us invested in the goings-on when the storyline falls flat. Co-edited, produced, as well as written and directed by Jakubowicz, although this is clearly a passion project for the Hands of Stone helmer, Resistance gives us the impression that the filmmaker was either much too close to this project or wore one too many hats on it overall.

Of special interest to film fans and history buffs as it introduces us to the little known backstory of the legendary Marcel Marceau (whose wartime lifesaving accomplishments will always outweigh any cinematic accolades), in the end, it's an average yet still intriguing work on par with a movie made for HBO. And while I can't fully recommend the film — fueled by great ideas and correctly driven by the need to show the world that compassion and love will always trump hate — Jakubowicz's message remains as timely in 2020 as it was in 1938.

Text ©2020, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. https://www.filmintuition.com  Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Also, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made off my site through ad links. FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Movie Review: The Warrior Queen of Jhansi (2019)

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It's all fun and filmmaking until someone almost loses an eye.

After years of building up her comfort level on horseback and getting in fighting shape to portray The Warrior Queen of Jhansi in the script she wrote alongside her filmmaker mother Swati Bhise and Olivia Emden, dancer-actress Devika Bhise knew it was time to get even more serious about her training. Studying Kalaripayattu, the world’s oldest martial art form with Jackie Chan’s instructor Gopakumar Gurukkal, Devika Bhise dove headfirst into her lessons so literally that she required emergency surgery after a shard of metal weaponry flew into her eye.

While most people would've jumped ship at this point, Bhise didn't let the injury sideline her for long. Latching onto another weapon — the long, thin, whip-like sword urumi — Bhise got right back on the horse in a move that no doubt would've impressed Rani Lakshmibai, the real life heroine she brings to life in Warrior Queen.

A headstrong commoner turned wife, queen, and widow of the maharajah by the time she’s in her early twenties, Rani finds a new calling when the royally aligned, corrupt mercantile trading corporation the British East India Company tries to steal back the land they'd given to India and claim Jhansi as their own following her husband's death.

Going from widowed queen to warrior general when diplomatic measures fail, Rani Lakshmibai begins training the women of Jhansi to fight in order to stand up to British tyranny and assert their independence, ultimately leading her countrywomen (and men) into war in producer turned first time feature filmmaker Swati Bhise's exciting if overwrought biopic.

Cramming hundreds of years of backstory into the film's slightly confusing first act, Warrior Queen is ready for action from the very first frame. In fact, hindered by a weak narrative throughline, Bhise’s film is so eager to get to the battlefield that — prioritizing conflict over character — it forgoes the vital step of endearing us to Rani, which is a major problem since she's the one at the heart of the picture marching us into the fray.

While chronicling Rani's efforts to unite her people as Jhansi's revolutionary war against the British gets underway in the 1850s makes the film seem like a natural fit for American audiences from an academic perspective, Queen suffers from the same affliction that most war movies do in that it's hard to care about characters that we don't know know very well.

Though her early actions, such as her bold refusal to shave her head (as is the archaic custom for women in mourning), speak volumes, the film doesn't trust itself enough to rely on more small acts of rebellion to help define our leading lady throughout.

Preferring instead to have Rani constantly voice her thoughts and goals aloud in anachronistic twenty-first century platitudes, while the undeniably well-intentioned feminist passion project wears its heart in its shots, the push-and-pull it faces between the film’s setting in the past and the script written in the present proves to be an even bigger battle than the one onscreen against the British.

Uncertain of precisely which tone it is that Bhise wishes to strike, the film opens like an epic from the 1950s (and indeed the last Rani Lakshmibai biopic, The Tiger and the Flame was made in 1953), but then veers into modern Wonder Woman territory as soon as our queen becomes a warrior. Collaborating with the stunt coordinators who worked on the Patty Jenkins helmed superhero film, Marcus Shakesheff and Glenn Marks turn Devika Bhise's Indian Joan of Arc into a wonder woman on horseback for the film's impressive battle sequences.

Veering away from the frenetic urgency of war shot in a breathless contemporary style to a classically framed walk-and-talk as we see Rani’s royal side, just when Bhise's film starts to draw us in, Warrior Queen loses its momentum by drifting back and forth unevenly between the two modes of filmmaking.

Giving Rani an ally and potential love interest in the form of Robert Ellis (Ben Lamb), a sympathetic British envoy who's inspired by the beautiful royal, as well as linking her plight as queen to that of Queen Victoria in England (played by Jodhi May), the screenwriters attempt to augment their one-note heroine in a study of compare and contrast. At this point, however, it's too little too late.

A handsomely photographed, thematically appealing tale of an underdog heroine standing up to injustice (as well as any man who crosses her path), while it's fine on the surface, the awkwardly paced and clunkily scripted film fails to find the rhythm it needs to work as well as it should.

With little in the way of staying power, thanks to the lack of a real connection to its titular heroine, although it's entertaining enough for a casual viewing, once the final credits roll, The Warrior Queen of Jhansi vanishes quickly from our minds. And unfortunately in this case, unlike the impressively skilled Devika Bhise, we’re unable to blame our filmic amnesia on something as cool as learning to fight and taking a shard of metal to the eye.

Text ©2019, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. https://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Also, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made off my site through ad links. FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Movie Review: Wild Nights with Emily (2018)

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A freewheeling, revisionist look at the life of Emily Dickinson, Wild Nights with Emily boldly contradicts the popular narrative of the author as a virginal, reclusive spinster by using her poems and private correspondence to instead focus on the as yet untold story of the poet's romantic relationship with her girlhood friend turned sister-in-law Susan.

With the leads brought wondrously to life by Molly Shannon in the titular role and Susan Ziegler as Dickinson's near-lifelong muse and lover, although playwright turned filmmaker Madeleine Olnek's ambitious third feature struggles to find a consistent tone and rhythm throughout, when Wild Nights trusts in the richness of its biographical storyline, it never fails to weave a fascinating spell.

Initially purporting to be a comedy, the film opts for satirical humor as a counterpoint to its sudden change in point-of-view. Moving freely back-and-forth in time, Wild Nights contrasts Dickinson's actual day-to-day life as a prolific lesbian artist struggling against the small-minded (mostly male) literary gatekeepers of the era with the revised, "sanitized," and sensationalized version of her life put forth by Mabel Loomis Todd (played by Amy Seimetz) twenty years later.

The woman who would posthumously edit and publish Dickinson's work and create the Bronte-esque spinster persona the world would come to know, Todd — whom we discover was the mistress of Emily's brother and Susan's husband — serves as a kind of unreliable narrator throughout the film as well as its overall villain.

Frequently contrasting Todd's false narrative with Dickinson's actions to make a comedic point, Olnek inadvertently undercuts her own vital research. Shortchanging the film's emotional impact for the sake of the script's jokes — save for a few memorable exceptions — when an unfunny exchange goes on for too long or a sightgag doesn't land, the film's wavering, half-serious tone threatens to make us care less about Dickinson's otherwise engrossing life story than Wild's filmic approach.

Winning us over with its romantic arc which culminates in a heartbreaking split-screen image, from its flashbacks to Emily's younger years discovering romantic love through Shakespeare's words to her struggle to see the object of her affection marry her brother Austin (Kevin Seal), contrary to its earliest intentions as a broad comedy, Nights is vastly more successful as a drama infused with situational humor overall.

At times reminiscent of a college thesis project (and indeed, a packet filled with eye-opening articles and supporting material to back up Olnek's claims was made available to press), though bursting with knowledge and passion for the subject, Wild Nights serves up an academically intriguing if ultimately uneven chronicle of Emily Dickinson's life.

While nowhere near as sumptuous or polished as the recent big screen Dickinson biopic A Quiet Passion from Terence Davies and starring Cynthia Nixon (regardless of how much it might adhere to Todd's legend), I applaud Olnek's decision to take a fresh, mothball free approach to the genre and especially her pursuit of Dickinson's true identity.

Obviously, a person's sexuality is no one's business but their own. However, given how many of Dickinson's nearly two thousand poems were dedicated to or inspired by Susan, it's vital to read them with that perspective in mind, and doubly so to ascertain just how much damage can be done when someone decides to "erase" a person's past in order to better fit their own prejudicial beliefs as well as their preferred vision for the future.

Needless to say, even if the message is better than the movie, more than one hundred years later, we must thank Olnek (and company) for refusing to be content to let the woman who wrote "I'm Nobody! Who are you?" be anybody except her wild, complex, and wholly original self.

Text ©2019, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Film Movement DVD Review: Un Traductor (2018)

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"Are you a doctor already?"

Having quit medical school after one semester to become a professor of Russian language and literature, the last place that Cuban academic Malin (Rodrigo Santoro) thought he’d end up was a hospital.

"I’m working on a doctorate," he tells his young son Javier (Jorge Carlos Perez Herrera) who's just as confused as he is when Malin's classes are suddenly canceled by the government. "I'm not a doctor."

Assigned to work as a translator for the Soviet patients and families of the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster who've been sent to Cuba for treatment, to say that Malin is out of his depth is an understatement, especially after he learns that he's been assigned the children's ward.

Forced to explain to a mother that nothing more can be done for her daughter his first night on the job, Malin initially walks away from his assignment working alongside Gladys (beautifully played by Maricel Álvarez).

A nurse who's a fellow outsider simply because she's from Argentina, after Malin learns that Gladys has covered for him when his absence is reported to the ministry, he returns to the hospital and gradually begins to apply the same tactics he uses as a professor and a father to his work with the children.

Bringing in some of Javier's favorite books for story time to give them an escape from the gloomily lit green-gray hospital, Malin also provides the children with an outlet for their feelings by inviting them to-write or draw on the back of what we gather are the pages of his long in process thesis.

Refusing to either play up the tragedy of the heartbreaking situation or paint Malin as a Patch Adams style saint, which is quite a feat considering that the film was directed by the real life Malin's sons – Rodrigo and Sebastián Barriuso in their feature filmmaking debut – the multilayered award-winning Cuban-Canadian feature is filled with complexity.

Exacerbated by his schedule as he works all night and sleeps all day, Malin starts to see the world with the same life or death urgency of the hospital while going through an existential crisis of his own. Shutting out the world which, with the fall of the Berlin wall has brought hunger and a gas shortage to Cuba, Malin's pregnant wife Isona (Yoandra Suárez) is forced to juggle all of the duties of the household and try to take on the role of both parents to Javier.

While everything comes crashing down on the characters all at once in a predictable third act dramatic conflict, screenwriter Lindsay Gossling gets credit for not only expanding Un Traductor's point of view but also reminding the viewer that the myth that we can have it all isn't gender specific, as the formerly devoted husband and father starts neglecting his wife and son.

Belittling his wife's work as an art curator by contrasting it with the hospital – somehow forgetting his own background in the humanities as well – the filmmakers foreshadow some of the drama to come onscreen and off for Malin and Isona.

An involving chronicle of an ordinary man trying to make a difference on the most basic human level, although Un Traductor's ambition gets the best of the film at times by touching on socioeconomic and historical subplots that it never fully explores, it's still an impressive achievement, not to mention an all-around terrific feature filmmaking debut.

Though universal in its appeal overall, Rodrigo and Sebastián Barriuso's film is nonetheless hindered by the fact that its success is dependent upon how much you know about that era in history.

Relying on big historical events like the fall of the wall to deduce the year the film takes place, while the absence of specifics only strengthens the hospital arc by highlighting the way so many strangers work side-by-side to save a life, at the same time its lack of context in framing it for today's audiences does lessen its reach.

Instantly transporting the viewer to Cuba, M.I. Littin-Menz's stellar cinematography effectively illustrates the contrast of life for Malin in and outside the hospital at the end of the cold war.

Featuring a tender, moving performance by Santoro alongside a strong supporting cast (including a memorable Nikita Semenov as one of the young patients), Un Traductor is newly available on DVD and digital from Film Movement and will be premiering on Film Movement Plus in the future.

Text ©2019, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Blu-ray Review - Gauguin: Voyage to Tahiti (2017)

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Artists have an overwhelming need to express themselves, to let pain or pleasure flow out of them like water, sublimating it until it becomes something new.

Yet as hard as it is for an artist to find the time, courage, and opportunity – financial or otherwise – to create, it's even harder to be the person whose job it is to stifle their own needs and individuality in order to support the artist and inspire their work.

For once artists apply their own meaning to the life of another, soon their support system become less a subject than a stepping stone used to reach a creative destination.

From the Mona Lisa to Zelda Fitzgerald to Hitchcock's cool blondes to Clapton's "Layla," muses have always been the most enigmatic and compelling figures in art, sadly because we seldom know who they really are as people outside the perspective of their "creator."

And this is the case in Edouard Deluc's Gauguin: Voyage to Tahiti with Tehura (Tuheï Adams), who inspires penniless French painter Paul Gauguin (Vincent Cassel) after he leaves behind his wife and children – whom we imagine played the role of muse before – and moves to Tahiti in 1891 in order to follow his inner calling of life as a true artist.

Not bothering to give us much in the way of information about Paul Gauguin or his family before he sets off on his journey, even though the picture – credited to five writers – is based on Gauguin's controversial memoirs, I went into Deluc's film knowing very little about the artist and came out knowing roughly the same amount.

Uninterested in crafting a traditional biopic, Gauguin serves up a snapshot of the painter's time spent on the island during his first, alternately perilous and prolific voyage where, following an impromptu proposition made in a single conversation, he agrees to "wed" the beautiful Tehura who would become the subject of some of his most famous paintings.

Exceedingly well played by talented newcomer Adams, Tehura's role as the optimistic, good hearted, exotic young native who inspires a white man is reminiscent of Q'orianka Kilcher's Pocahontas in Terrence Malick's 2005 masterpiece, The New World. Yet although Malick's movie seems to have influenced Deluc's in terms of its overall approach, unfortunately Kilcher's heroine is far more three dimensional than Gauguin's poorly penned Tehura.

Having collapsed following a heart attack with complications from diabetes, after Gauguin (portrayed by charismatic character actor Vincent Cassel) takes Tehura as his bride, his health woes seem to subside. Invigorated, Gauguin begins painting the young woman so often that he is forced to improvise when he can no longer afford or find any remaining canvas on the island.

Inspiring his doctor with his newfound vitality, just as Tehura's smiling, supportive presence starts to turn everything around for Gauguin (at least temporarily), the film starts to go wrong.

Little more than a highlight reel of island life, as the co-writer and director flirts with but fails to explore the way that Europeans would exploit or idealize the exoticism of islanders – especially Gauguin who turned his relationship with a teenage girl into currency – it becomes apparent that Deluc had many ideas he wasn't quite sure how to bring to life.

Glossing over or romanticizing Gauguin's flaws as quirks, such as the demands placed on Tehura where the lack of food or rest (as he keeps her posing for hours on end) are the means used to justify his artistic ends, the film misses the opportunity to examine the imbalance of power between artist and muse as well as husband and wife.

Vacuous but beautifully shot by cinematographer Pierre Cottereau, although the gifted actors do their best to make the silence count, Voyage loses its hold on the audience by failing to delve deeper into Tehura and Gauguin's past or present to reveal what this time together in Tahiti really meant to them both on a personal level.

Trying to remedy this late into the picture, since the film is imbued with a largely romantic arc, Deluc delves into the jealousy and paranoia Gauguin has regarding the handsome, more age-appropriate neighbor who bonds with Tehura over time. But even though he dares to show us a darker side to the artist as he locks his bride indoors to keep her from leaving once her formerly infectious smile starts to fade, Deluc also locks up the point-of-view that matters most when it comes to Tehura.

Unfolding like a leisurely paced Malick movie, while those looking for any substantive information about Paul Gauguin will have to spend some time actually researching him as I did, the film will still appeal thanks to the always reliable Cassel and an enigmatic, largely silent, Mona Lisa-like performance by Adams who speaks volumes with a single glance.

And as our eponymous lead’s personality begins to change, we watch as she does, still wishing in vain for the painter to open up yet knowing that he won't, not because he doesn't want to but perhaps because he fears that if he does he'll have nothing left to express – about either of them – through his art.

Text ©2018, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Blu-ray Review: Godard Mon Amour (2017)

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Responsible for turning a silent black-and-white movie set in 1920s Tinseltown called The Artist –which featured a trained dog and complex dance choreography – into perhaps the unlikeliest Best Picture winner in modern history, Academy Award winning director Michel Hazanavicius returns to the backdrop of cinema once again for his latest effort which zeroes in on one artist in particular.

Less a straightforward biopic than a portrait of French New Wave auteur Jean-Luc Godard as a middle aged man, Godard Mon Amour's success depends upon not only how much you know about the director – who along with his contemporaries helped usher in a whole new style of filmmaking – but his films themselves.

Paying homage to his subject throughout, unlike the way that Hazanavicius was able to consistently weave references to classic cinema into The Artist's narrative (which has become the director's signature), Godard's sequences all too frequently deviate from rather than enhance the film's overall storyline, which is centered on the thirty-seven year old filmmaker’s relationship with his nineteen-year-old wife, Anne Wiazemsky.

While some moments are undoubtedly amusing, far too often the unnatural segues feel like signposting and – by calling too much attention to themselves – feel more like a spoof reminiscent of Hazanavicius's breakthrough, zany box office smash OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies. Thus while the experimental Godard Mon Amour will appeal to Godard buffs, chances are it'll be lost on everyone else.

Skipping past his most iconic period helming such New Wave classics as Breathless and A Woman is a Woman (starring first muse and wife Anna Karina), Hazanavicius's film – based on second muse and wife Wiazemsky's novel Un an après – opens in 1967 on the set of Godard's politically charged La Chinoise where the couple fell in love.

A flop in its era (and perhaps a bad omen for the couple's inevitably doomed relationship), the film, which focused on a group of revolutionaries and was loosely based on Fyodor Dostoyevsky's book The Possessed, was banned in China and panned in most reviews save for those penned by Godard's friends.

Signalling – along with the now revered Weekend – a major change of pace, tone, and subject in Godard's filmography, Hazanavicius's Mon Amour picks up where La Chinoise left off.

Set in the filmmaker's most controversial period wherein he embraced New Left and Radical Maoist ideology, publicly disowned his earlier work, and – speaking in slogans as his wont – stated that "Godard is dead," Hazanavicius opts to lighten the mood in his adaptation of Wiazemsky's novel.

Knowing that spending more than twenty minutes in the company of the director at his most insufferable would be the cinematic equivalent of a root canal, Hazanavicius keeps things moving, vacillating in tone between mischievous slapstick (as in a recurring bit where Godard keeps breaking his glasses in street protests) to sardonic yet self aware drama.

Yet although understandably it'd be a mistake to play the entire thing straight, by diving in after both the start of their relationship and once the director's style of filmmaking and beliefs became more radicalized, Mon Amour suffers from a lack of a strong foundation or jumping off point into the period of major political unrest in France that immediately follows.

Repeatedly we find ourselves looking at Godard more as a privileged, out-of-touch jerk and less as someone whose life we feel invested in… except for wanting Wiazemsky to get the hell away from him and for Godard to wake up and smell his hypocrisy.

While obviously a film isn't required to have a likable main character, we shouldn’t have to be a film buff to understand our leading man on more than a surface level.

And unfortunately, as hard as it is to connect to Mon Amour's Godard, even though it's her story and point-of-view, it's ten times harder in the case of Wiazemsky because we know so little about her, aside from the fact that she's expected to be the sycophantic supportive wife and mirror him instead of having her own opinions about the world.

Gamely played by Stacy Martin who generates empathy and understanding with a knowing look – particularly when shared with the wife of a couple who used to socialize with the two before it became impossible to share a meal with Godard for fear he might start screaming obscenities at an elderly war veteran – the actress's performance helps bring the film back to Earth as needed.

Also anchoring Godard when possible, versatile actor Louis Garrel – whose breakthrough ironically came in Bernardo Bertolucci's New Wave and Godard inspired, Parisian 1968 set sexy coming-of-age picture The Dreamers – brings the filmmaker to life through a variety of moods from romantic to insecure to argumentative.

Before he became an Academy Award winning filmmaker, Michel Hazanavicius was an art school grad turned TV adman and that training as well as his passion for cinematic homage shines through, not only when he spoofs A Woman is a Woman's famous book title fight scene, for example but also in his commitment to the era, which he captures as if through the lens of a Godard film.

Featuring pops of red, stellar production design, and clever use of montage, the film never fails to compel us on an aesthetic level, even if its script and pacing leave much to be desired as – like a desperately long car ride from Cannes to Paris wherein Godard can't help but insult everyone – Mon Amour's 107 minute running time feels much longer.

With a target audience largely limited to New Wave enthusiasts and Godard aficionados (and even then the latter is likely to be divided in their reaction), although it feels like a missed opportunity to chronicle the artist's life in a more three dimensional manner, Mon Amour is still worth exploring as an ambitious, if ultimately unsuccessful Godardian cinematic experiment.

Text ©2018, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Blu-ray Review: Rodin (2017)

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Illustrating a change in the way he illustrates before working with clay, towards the end of writer/director Jacques Doillon's Rodin, the famous titular sculptor Auguste Rodin (played by Vincent Lindon) notes that he used to suggest poses for his models to take during sessions but he no longer makes that mistake.

Letting the two young, beautiful women that stand before him just organically move, bend, and rotate together, Rodin notes that he can't look down even for a second at what his hands have been drawing or else the connection between what he feels and what he sees will be broken.

A fascinating description of Rodin's creative process in a film overflowing with them, the delicate connection between life and art (and more often than not love and art) is a recurring theme of Doillon's Rodin which – much like their subject – struggles to find a balance between the two right from the start.

Opening in 1880, the film begins as forty-year-old Auguste Rodin earns his first state commission to sculpt "The Gates of Hell" based on Dante's "Divine Comedy." Yet despite having spent a year sketching his plans for such a massive undertaking, he prefers to rely on intellect and instinct, debating every point in a form of brainy foreplay with his student Camille Claudel (Izïa Higelin), the fiercely talented sculptor in her own right who would go onto become his lover, assistant, and muse.

And much like the way he confesses later on that he learned how to sculpt by watching clouds form, as a lover of movement who needs to feel what he sees – even with the foundation of his drawings – Rodin confesses that figures come to the most when he works with clay.

Trying to capture this feeling in the medium of film, Doillon and Coco Before Chanel cinematographer Christophe Beaucarne – who shot most of the film in the historic locations in which the events take place – rely on framing to emphasize Rodin's sensuous approach, vacillating between frenzied movement as Rodin chases his lovers to suddenly statuesque composition throughout.

Whether lounging on a bed before changing to another in a series of poses in quick succession or dangling her foot off the edge of a boat rowed by Rodin, the scenes with Claudel feel like living reflections of art we imagine he would've been eager to capture on the page, canvas, or clay.

Likewise depicting the imbalance of power that exists between the two – perhaps best epitomized by a gorgeous off-balance sculpture of her own entitled "The Waltz" – while in his letters Rodin frequently tells Claudel that he can't work without her, early on in their relationship we see her as dominating her older, more famous lover easily.

Escaping to England for months at a time, when she returns she pressures Rodin to make good on his promises to legitimize their relationship by signing a contract to make her his only student, introduce her to everyone, and marry her someday, which would force him to leave his decades-long partner, Rose (Séverine Caneele), his veritable housekeeper and trusted friend.

However, things change as the film goes on and we see how much the scales have tipped as she suffers by contrast. A brilliant artist ahead of her time, not only will the world never accept a nude sculpture made by a woman (even if most of the nudes are of and modeled by women), Claudel also discovers that they won’t accept one they believe was made in the Rodin style, despite the fact that they'd worked side-by-side and inspired one another for years.

And as the disappointments in her personal and professional life mount, it leads to the offscreen mental breakdown we've seen depicted over the years in other biopics – most famously by Isabelle Adjani in Bruno Nuytten's 1988 contemporary classic Camille Claudel.

Tired of seeing women used up and thrown away for the sake of an older man's career and reputation, especially when (unlike Lindon's far more benevolent and in fact almost feminist Rodin) the one played by Gerard Depardieu had been an arrogant ass, after I saw Nuytten's Claudel over fifteen years ago, it made me so angry that I had an immediate creative response.

Crafting a modern day gender flipped spin on the characters, Claudel became my own muse as well as I wrote my very first award-winning play, which understandably made me curious to see how I'd react to another telling of her life story in 2017.

However by switching the point of view to a surprisingly even-tempered Rodin and moving a majority of Claudel's downfall offscreen, this time from a feminist perspective you feel an even greater sadness for Rose who, just like the sculptress she resents, gets sidelined by love for an artist.

And while the main cast is excellent (especially Lindon who's been doing some of his best work over the past ten years in a variety of films including Mademoiselle Chambon and Welcome), Rodin's emphasis is less on its people than the art itself.

For as the film continues we realize that, aside from some scenes of domestic fireworks here and there, there's so much we don't know about them personally, which is evidenced by sudden lines of dialogue referencing characters and subplots that are never explored beyond that one moment of screen time.

Similar in spirit to the vastly superior La Belle Noiseuse, Rodin fascinates most when focusing on the creative process itself, including an outstanding sequence where – not wanting to see a pencil – Victor Hugo refuses to pose in a traditional way, necessitating Rodin to run back and forth in between rooms in order to capture Hugo's angles and features on paper before he forgets them.

With its ode to creativity culminating in a gorgeous coda as he helps stage a moonlight photo of his beloved masterpiece Balzac (which was never appreciated in his lifetime), Rodin walks a fine line between inspiring us with its detail and taking things much too far such as when it unnaturally tries to work in Monet, Cezanne, Rilke, and company into the film.

Stagey from the get-go given the way its characters wax poetically throughout by speaking in platitudes and quotable quotes, far too often it seems as if Doillon's extensive research and love for the period gets in the way of an organic plotline as Rodin plays as though he's trying to squeeze a four hour film like Noiseuse into a two hour one.

Considering the disconnect between life and art, in the end, it's a shame that the film didn't take a cue from its subject more often and – in place of too much detail from voice-overs to famous French figure cameos – just let things take shape naturally Rodin-style and form like clouds in the sky, a pencil on the page, or hands in clay.

Ultimately worth seeing since Rodin's passionate celebration of creativity outweighs the problems with its narrative reality, with its emphasis on framing and intriguing composition, perhaps its greatest takeaway is that it'll leave you looking at the world through an artist's eyes, at least for a little while.

Text ©2018, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Movie Review: Loving Pablo (2018)

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Greeted by the sight of armed men waiting for her as soon as she lands at Pablo Escobar's estate for a private party in 1981, when Colombian journalist Virginia Vallejo (Penélope Cruz) first meets her host (played by Javier Bardem), not only does she not recognize him, she fears that he's going to kidnap her for ransom.

Explaining the guns away by saying that they're meant to protect guests from the exotic animals he has on his property, even though he doesn't abduct her outright, very soon it becomes clear that the married son of a poor farmer turned successful businessman has stolen Vallejo's heart.

Though at the top of the list of Colombia's nouveau riche, we discover that at the time of their first meeting, very few people – outside of the Medellín Cartel, that is – knew precisely how Escobar and his associates acquired so much wealth so quickly.

However, once he shows her one of his philanthropic endeavors to build housing for the poor and sees the children of the slums running through garbage just to get a glimpse of him, Vallejo decides that it's less important how he's made his money than how the man dubbed "The Colombian Robin Hood" uses it.

Building up his profile on her television network to acquire enough fame and power to get elected to political office a year later, by now the source of Escobar's outrageous revenue has become increasingly obvious as, instead of "Robin Hood," the businessman from Medellín has become internationally known as "The King of Cocaine." And as Vallejo soon discovers, if anyone gets in his way, he either buys them off or has them killed.

Based on Vallejo's bestselling 2007 memoir Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar which chronicled not only their romantic relationship but also corruption at the highest levels of the government of her country which, thanks to Escobar, became known as "the murder capital of the world," the film, written and directed by Spanish helmer Fernando León de Aranoa, takes some liberties for dramatic effect.

And dramatic, as it turns out, is the key word for Loving Pablo, which is so over-the-top in places that – in the aforementioned scene wherein Vallejo lands on Escobar's property – before I discovered that Vallejo was a reporter, I simply assumed Cruz was playing a soap opera star who'd wandered over from the set of the latest film by Pedro Almodóvar.

Speeding through more than a decade of complicated history, including international drug smuggling and corruption as well as the personal lives of Vallejo and Escobar, although Pablo uses subtitles to translate Spanish to English, I found myself wishing it also would've served up a timeline or a secondary documentary style voice-over to tell us where we are in the scheme of things.

A longtime passion project of Javier Bardem, the Academy Award winning star (who also produced the film made by his Mondays in the Son director) shared in the film's production notes that he turned down the role of Escobar in a number of productions over the past twenty years because "they didn't invoke any feeling beyond a stereotype."

Though it's Vallejo's story overall, in Aranoa's adaptation of her memoir, we do indeed see several different sides to the figure as Escobar goes from a greedy up-and-comer climbing up the power ladder to a paranoid madman who barely reacts while his men use a chainsaw to remove someone's limbs in a private prison under his control.

Yet while it's his real life wife, fellow Oscar winner Penelope Cruz, who steals the movie from start to finish, Bardem is predictably excellent in the role, in spite of his tendency in the first act to – like Marlon Brando in The Godfather – mumble so much as Escobar that we wish we had subtitles for him even when he's speaking English.

Though fortunately we either become accustomed to the rhythms of Bardem's Escobarian mumbles to understand enough of his dialogue (or he learns to enunciate more clearly as Colombia's Robin Hood becomes a country conquering cocaine king), unfortunately the film's rushed storytelling and lack of cohesion damage the overall character arc.

While most viewers with Netflix are more than familiar with Escobar via their acclaimed albeit gritty series Narcos, there's no denying Bardem's star power, especially in the final sequence leading up to Escobar's death, which is so compelling that you wish the rest of the movie had worked nearly as well.

Fans of the two stars will enjoy watching the couple act opposite one another onscreen as Cruz manages to distract us from the film's hundred mile an hour pacing – elevating every scene she's in to the level of a high class soap – and practically winking at the audience alongside the always terrific Peter Sarsgaard's DEA Agent as if to say, "I've got this."

Criminally under-utilized, Sarsgaard might as well be playing a man named DEA Agent for all we actually know about what surely must be a composite character.

Despite that, Aranoa manages to show us just what he's capable of as a director in a truly thrilling sequence early on in Pablo as a semi truck jackknifes across a Florida highway before a cartel plane lands right behind it and people in waiting vehicles hurriedly load its contents into vans and trucks nearby all to the tune of "Let it Snow."

While the dark humor is right out of Scorsese, the scene itself is reminiscent of Doug Liman's underrated American Made, and once again illustrates just how good Pablo could've been with the right script and tone.

Trying to tell a story that is far too massive and complex to be compressed into a 125 minute running time, although it's made with superior ingredients, including not only Cruz and Bardem but also a standout score by The Secret In Their Eyes composer Federico Jusid, in the end Loving's recipe never quite comes together as a whole.

And while Aranoa's latest work isn't one I'd recommend rushing out to the theater to see, given its irresistible combination of sudsy drama and campy excess, Loving Pablo is sure to reach more viewers in its run on cable – holding those staying in on a Saturday night hostage with entertainment so over-the-top that you'll feel as though you've just gotten off the plane with Vallejo.

Text ©2018, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.