THE NIGHT OF THE FOLLOWING DAY (Hubert Cornfield, 1968)

“[D]own and out in Paris,” as he put it, Hubert Cornfield activated an option he owned and filmed Lionel White’s novel The Snatchers. To accommodate an industry nervousness regarding kidnapping, he borrowed the narrative framing tack of the 1945 British film Dead of Night and presented the kidnapping-for-ransom of a British girl in Paris as a disturbing premonition. Cornfield ended up with a riveting and terrifying thriller—but a film far less interesting than the one he had in mind when he wrote the initial script. (Robert Phippeny is credited as co-author.)
     There, one of the kidnappers, Bud, falls in love with the kidnapped girl, while the girl goes along with their affair to secure his protection against another one of the kidnappers, a sexual sadist, as well as the possibility that the kidnapping plot will go awry. Jealous that this might give the actress playing the girl the film’s most interesting role, the actor and weight-throwing star playing Bud, Marlon Brando, nixed this aspect of the plot, consigning the film to conventionality. Pamela Franklin, the child in Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (1961) and Our Mother’s House (1967), ended up playing a pure victim, although a highly resourceful and intelligent one.
     Brando, blond here and fit, gives a striking performance. However, in a protracted scene, the only one directed by co-star Richard Boone rather than Cornfield, Brando, overindulged, performs outside the character he plays in the rest of the film; in this scene, Bud insists that the kidnapping plan is already unraveling but unconvincingly capitulates to its continuation anyhow. Boone’s performance as Leer, the psychotic sadist, is grisly and urbane.
     As the group walks up to their coastal hideaway, their shoes sink in wet sand: a premonition of the plan’s collapse.

RESERVATION ROAD (Terry George, 2007)

This tepid, soapy adaptation of John Burnham Schwartz’s novel is triggered by a roadside hit-and-run at a gas station on Reservation Road. Ethan and Grace Learner lose their ten-year-old boy, Josh; as the police investigation to find the driver falters, Ethan, a college professor teaching media analysis, tries tracking down the “murderer” himself in order to secure justice for his son, which he is convinced “the system” will deny him, and to appease his own raging anger. The theme is a slight one: that such anger is easier to deal with than grief over irrevocable loss, which it in fact delays. In the meantime, Ethan is too angry to comfort Grace in her attempt to grieve and cope with guilt.
     One wonders why the premise did not inspire filmmaker Terry George to a more thoughtful and interesting result than this melodrama achieves. (George’s earlier Hotel Rwanda trivialized a national rather than a familial tragedy, reducing it to the dimensions of trite melodrama.) It hardly helps that the attorney Ethan hires in his pursuit of justice, the father of an eleven-year-old boy, just happens to be the driver who ran down his son and that the lawyer’s ex-wife just happens to be Ethan and Grace’s daughter’s music tutor. There is an interlocking plot involving the lawyer’s immaturity, his longstanding inability to face up to responsibility. That doesn’t help either.
     Moreover, most of the acting—mere emoting—sucks. This includes that of Mark Ruffalo and Jennifer Connelly as the attorney and Grace.
     Is there any reason then to see this film? Yes. Joaquin Phoenix gives a tremendously persuasive and moving performance as Ethan Learner, a sensitive, mild-mannered young man who ends up with a gun in his hand.

LUST, CAUTION (Ang Lee, 2007)

What is a director to do after setting the screen ablaze with gay cowboys? Why, turn to cunnilingus, of course. Ang Lee takes another shot at soulful, combustible romance, this time between a man and a woman, with Se, jie. From Taiwan, China, the U.S. and Hong Kong, this World War II tale of espionage, set during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, won the best film prize at Venice. It is excellent.
     From Eileen Chang’s short story, the plot involves Hong Kong University students who begin in 1938 to move their theater group into the dangerous realm of resistance. They devise a play, to be played out in reality, whose aim is the assassination of a quisling, the head of China’s secret police who is collaborating with the Japanese. Their target is Yee (Tony Leung Chiu Wai, superb). Yee, who is married, is to be seduced by one of their members (in her bravura film debut, Tang Wei); as his mistress, she is to set up Yee. Twice the plan goes awry; the second attempt, in 1942 Shanghai, ends with exposure and mass executions.
     Lee’s film echoes Wong Kar-Wai-ish moody sensuality, which Leung’s presence also abets. There is a single passage of stunning brutality—not to mention the versatile sex, some of which borders on rape. Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946) are both reflected in facets of the plot.
     Evoking the Japanese occupation, the mise-en-scène in Shanghai mesmerizes; city streets, in long-shots, are full of activity yet curiously bloodless, as though the ongoing bustle conceals a drainage of the spark of life. Rodrigo Prieto’s muted cinematography favors pale green and subdued light.
     To lure U.S. patrons, Lee’s film should have been titled Crouching Tongue, Hidden Clitoris.