The Conical Glass: Summer of Subtitles, Part 1

Sunday, May 27, 2007

Summer of Subtitles, Part 1

Not all of us want to see the trio of big-budget Parts Three now playing in theaters: "Shrek the Third," "Spiderman 3" and "Pirates of the Caribbean 3." Luckily, there's counterprogramming in the form of a bevy of foreign films now playing in an arrondissement near you.

It just so happened that my parents and brother were all in Paris, a city I've never visited, at the exact moment that "Paris, Je T'aime" opened in Berkeley. So naturellement, I had to go see it; a $7.50 matinee is cheaper than a trip overseas, non? "Paris" is an anthology, made up of 18 five-minute films shot by different directors, ranging from Americans (Joel and Ethan Coen, Alexander Payne, Gus Van Sant) to Indian-English Gurinder Chadha ("Bend It Like Beckham"), Germany's Tom Tykwer ("Run Lola Run"), Mexico's Alfonso Cuaron ("Children of Men"), and the Frenchiest French guy of them all, Gerard Depardieu. Unsurprisingly, not all of the films succeed, but even with the lesser efforts, you can still enjoy the Parisian atmosphere and scenery. I particularly enjoyed the two films focused on lonely American tourists, by the Coen brothers and Payne; Chadha's beautiful and touching tale of an encounter between a Muslim woman and a young Frenchman; and Sylvain Chomet's ("The Triplets of Belleville") loopy story about how two mimes meet and fall in love. The shorts veer from comedy to tragedy to horror to pathos; the characters we meet are young and old, native French and immigrants, realistic and fanciful. If you can't afford a trip to Paris this summer, enjoy a two-hour vacation with "Paris, Je T'aime."

We also went to see "After the Wedding," the Oscar-nominated Danish film. Mads Mikkelsen, best known in the U.S. for playing the Bond villain in "Casino Royale," stars as a Dane who's spent almost his entire adult life away from his home country, most recently running an orphanage in India. He is summoned back to Denmark by a rich businessman who wants to check him out personally before writing a big check to help fund the orphanage. It turns out that there are some interesting connections between the two men that come to the surface as the film progresses. I found the whole thing a little overwrought, verging on soap opera, and what the heck was the deal with all the close-ups of eyes? Director Susanne Bier keeps coming back to them -- giant eyes, filling up the screen. A good 10 minutes could probably have been shaved off the 2-hour running time without all those eyes. I'm sure it all Means Something (some of the close-ups are of the eyes of taxidermied animal heads), but by the end, I didn't really care.

posted by 125records @ 5:35 PM

1 Comments:

At 7:55 PM, yellojkt said…

My wife "forced" me to go see the Paris movie as payment for dragging her to a science fiction convention. We loved a bunch of the little stories. The postmistress speaking French cracks me up.