THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE (Steven Soderbergh, 2009)

Collaborating again with Ocean’s Thirteen (2007) writers David Levien and Brian Koppelman, Steven Soderbergh has made The Girlfriend Experience using high-definition video, as he did for Bubble (2005). Pornographic film star Sasha Grey plays Chelsea, a $2000-an-hour Manhattan call girl; the rest of the cast consists of nonprofessionals. We see Chelsea at work, mostly conversing with clients in restaurants and hotel rooms, and at home with boyfriend Chris, a fitness trainer. The backdrop, the 2008 presidential election, insinuates the nation’s economic woes and upheavals. The title refers to Chelsea’s profession—its promotional promise to potential clients of more than a bought fuck, indeed, the whole “girlfriend experience” for the duration of the “date.”
     Chelsea seems assured—until she spots a client with a new competitor of hers. Chelsea’s world is glassy and glossy—private and public both. Soderbergh has wrenched chronology; since we cannot quite puzzle this out (at least on a first viewing), we settle into the present moment, where Chelsea resides and reigns. Also, the nonsequential scenes suggest the anxiety and confusion that lurk beneath Chelsea’s polished surface. Like Chris, who is financially strained, she hustles—but elegantly. Her professional dealings revolve around money.
     Chelsea and Chris have a standing agreement: Chelsea won’t rendezvous out of town with a client; but now she does, believing she might be in love with a married man with children. Paralleling this, she objects to Chris’s trip with “connected” guys to Las Vegas. Both scramble.
     Long-shots predominate, even in interiors; in concert with the intricate complexity of the mise-en-scène and the dark patches there, these imply the pretenses, illusions and self-delusions that distance the characters from one another and themselves.
     Soderbergh’s cinematography is hard-edged, exquisite, brilliant; but I hated the film, which is relentless, nasty, self-congratulatory.

AKUMULÁTOR 1 (Jan Svěrák, 1994)

A dazzling comic science-fiction fable, Akumulátor 1 is soul-mate to Gus Van Sant’s frosty satire To Die For (1995), written by Buck Henry. Both are about the destructive nature of television; however, whereas in the U.S. film people are dying—and killing—to be on T.V., in Akumulátor 1, from the Czech Republic, people are dying because they have already been on T.V., for instance, by being caught in an on-the-street interview that is subsequently televised. Both amount to the same thing; T.V. is sucking the life out of people. In the Czech film, this drained energy, leaving corpses in its wake, is redirected to replenishing T.V., while a parallel universe “inside” television-land reflects the drained human lives as doppelgangers of the people in or from the original world. People in the latter are viewing too much T.V. and mistaking its accumulated images for reality—a predicament that seems additionally prophetic since the advent of “reality T.V.” Akumulátor 1 was co-written by father and son Zdenek and Jan Svěrák, along with Jan Slovák, and directed most entertainingly, if a bit unevenly, by the younger Svěrák.
     Rather, the principal cause of the film’s delight is the buoyant lead performance by Petr Forman, son of director Milos Forman. He plays Olda beautifully, a lethargic young man who has had the bad luck of being on a television program, but the good luck of being held back from death when at hospital by the mysterious healer Fisárek (the name of the film’s editor), who trains him in techniques of preserving and expanding his energy level in our modern age. Forman and director Svěrák collaborate on one of the most riotously funny scenes ever: Olda’s first-time jog, in the course of which, as he heavily pants, an elderly woman out for a walk mistakes Olda for either pervert or mugger and tries to escape. This echoes Modern Times (Charles Chaplin, 1936), where Charlie, driven mad by his monotonous labor on a factory assembly line, terrorizes a woman on the street by going after her breasts with a wrench. Olda eventually arms himself with a stash of remote controls in order to counter whatever turned-on television sets might drain his energy. He becomes a warrior!—and Svěrák’s direction of these scenes, with their dramatic music and mock-heroism, are hilarious.
     The film is in color, but flashes of the land of the dead on the other side of the glass housing of the T.V. tube are in black and white. Encountering there the deceased father of the woman he is currently dating, Olda is able to retrieve her missing glove, one of a pair that her father had given her as a gift: a remarkable symbol attesting to television’s capacity to numb pain. (Incidentally, the woman is Olda’s dentist.) Simulated camera forays into the human body connects the too-literal Fantastic Voyage (Richard Fleischer, 1966), from the past, to a visual aspect of current U.S. T.V. melodrama such as the CSI shows, where a simulated point-of-view shot may follow the trajectory of a bullet on its lethal journey. One wonders: Had producer Jerry Bruckheimer seen Svěrák’s film?
     Incidentally, Fisárek is played by the elder Svěrák, whose son took top prize at the Brussels International Festival of Fantasy Film, the critics’ award at Gérardmer Film Festival, and a prize at Venice.

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BRIGHT STAR (Jane Campion, 2009)

For three years beginning in 1818 poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne, his landlady’s daughter, loved one another; his tubercular death at 25 ended their relationship “on earth.” According to the film, that relationship was chaste, and filled with romantic and sexual longing. Two things curbed it: Keats’s poverty and, later, sickness. Because it had no future, their relationship was denied a full present; and this social reality was antithetical to the Romanticism that Keats, and the feminist self-determination that Brawne, embodied. It assaulted them on all levels, including the personal, intellectual and political.
     New Zealand-born writer-director Jane Campion, inspired by a biography of Keats by Andrew Motion that is in the mode of André Maurois’s Ariel, about Shelley, has made an intimate, raw, emotional film. Signaling this is something that Fanny witnesses: John Keats’s overwhelming tenderness toward his brother Tom, who before John falls ill is also dying of tuberculosis. There is something else: mirroring Campion’s love of children is John’s love of Fanny’s young siblings, which adds poignancy to his predicament, at least for us, as it constantly reminds us of the loving father that fate denies Keats’s becoming. The Brawnes’s pet cat, which is freely and lovingly passed around, demonstrates the pure affections that Fanny, her family and John Keats share.
     Thematically, this heartrending film dovetails two ideas: the “holiness of the heart’s affections,” which John chides roommate Charles Brown for not appreciating; the unexpected nature of such growing ties. Charles, who had devotedly attended to John, perhaps more possessively than unselfishly lovingly, expresses surprise after John’s death how deeply affected by his friend he now realizes he had been: a stunning revelation.
     While certain characters are more or less confined indoors, Campion situates John, Fanny and her siblings in gorgeous rural Nature—powerful images; because Fanny is the protagonist, when John is visiting London on business the camera does not follow him there, and, so, we feel something of the absence of him that is being impressed on Fanny, but we also have especial cause to identify John still with the Nature in which we have seen him. John, moreover, is identified with naturalness, not only by his gracious tolerance, but also by his preference for poetry that is inspired rather than labored upon. It should come as naturally to the author, he tells Fanny, “as leaves to trees.” (I do not feel that this accurately reflects Keats’s own poetry, but he may have indeed seen his relationship to his poetry in that way.) In a wonderful, fleeting passage, without using the term for this, in what is meant after all to be conversation, John explains negative capability to Fanny, which fuses in-the-momentness and openness to experience—something else that identifies John with Nature. And the dresses, including the ones that Fanny designs and sews,* also seem slyly suited to the theme, for they actually look like clothes that the characters we are watching might wear—not an experience we often have at the movies (Janet Patterson designed them and also the production), and one that (in concert with a host of other elements) divests Campion’s film of a “period” description. We come as close as possible to experiencing the action of this film as the present in which the early nineteenth-century characters are living. Campion’s film is that immediate.
     The film opens with a closeup of Fanny’s hands at work at her stitching—an activity that the camera will record again. One scene yields to another with the sound carrying over from the preceding scene: cinematic “stitching”! It is a visual “in”-joke that is nonetheless accessible to everyone watching—what a Romantic “joke,” if there were such a thing, would have to be.
     Like all Campion’s films, this one is uneven—and perhaps has to be, because something that would sustain the emotional intensity of the best scenes here might be intolerable. The acting is excellent. Perhaps best are Abbie Cornish as Fanny and especially Paul Schneider as Charles, who must navigate a largely unpleasant, infuriating role. Edie Martin is adorable as Fanny’s little sister, Margaret (“Toots”), and Kerry Fox, admirably playing their mother, relates this marvelous movie to Campion’s best piece of work, An Angel at the Table (1989), in which Fox brilliantly plays New Zealand writer Janet Frame.
     Ben Whishaw sweetly plays John Keats. Over the closing credits we hear him read Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale. So successful has Whishaw been throughout the film that you think you’re listening to Keats read the poem.
     And you are right.

* Mindy Aloff has written me the following:

You know, there’s a detail that none of the reviews I’ve seen have mentioned. Most of them speak of Fanny Brawne as a “fashionista,” but if you look at her clothes for herself, they evolve—from the first one, where the red and white are dramatically sequestered from one another and the cut of the dress is rather fancy, ornamental, to the last, valedictory gown, where the red and white have been beautifully integrated into a lustrous garnet, and the cut of the dress is like something by Worth of Paris. Just a tiny detail, but it made me think of Keats’s own evolution as a poet.

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BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S (Blake Edwards, 1961)

Audrey Hepburn’s best performances would remain those she gave in Roman Holiday (William Wyler, 1953) and Sabrina (Billy Wilder, 1954), but I suspect that her most widely and warmly remembered one is as Holly Golightly (best actress, David di Donatello Award, Film Daily’s poll of U.S. critics nationwide), an expensive Manhattan call girl—though formerly the unsophisticated Lulamae Barnes from Tulip, Texas—in Blake Edwards’s bowdlerized, prettified version of Truman Capote’s 1958 novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s. (The character’s earlier name sounds suspiciously like that of Capote’s mother: Lillie Mae Persons.) Holly can seem carefree only because she is so well connected, but even so she is plainly disturbed beneath her party-girl brilliance, beseiged by nightmares and in conspicuous denial of the film’s complacent (and phony) message that people belong to each other. The star of Green Mansions (Mel Ferrer, 1959) is once again playing, despite the city surrounding Holly, a “wild thing”—and an impossibly naive and innocent one. The party sequence in Holly’s apartment is so memorable, perhaps, because Edwards there is able to get at what he is after without the impediment of George Axelrod’s preachy script: the obliviousness of these people—an application of the attitude of Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulot. (One guest ignites another with her cigarette in a ridiculously long cigarette holder without either realizing it; without concern, another guest drowns the potential disaster.) Holly Golightly lives so much inside her own head because she is too afraid to live anywhere else. She may appear to be on top of things, but she must always “go lightly.”
     George Peppard is very good as the Capote-character, Paul Varjak, a struggling writer whose apartment in the same East Side brownstone as Holly’s is being subsidized by his older married lover, “2E” (Patricia Neal)—his “lady bountiful,” as Macaulay Connor might say. (Holly calls him Fred, the name of her younger brother, whom she adores.) The poignancy of his and Holly’s impossible relationship, despite the happy ending, is keyed to the fortunes of Holly’s cat, named Cat, the object of considerable abuse from Holly that breaks our heart.
     As does Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer’s wistful “Moon River,” sung here for the first time, by Holly, who is taking a break from cleaning the apartment, as she sits on the fire escape and plaintively aches for the Lulamae she left behind.

99 (Raj Nidimoru, Krishna D.K., 2009)

A madcap comedy from India, in Hindi and English, 99 revolves around Sachin and Zaramud, who, indebted to a bookie, are impressed into becoming his collectors, in which capacity they have a series of misadventures in Delhi and Mumbai. The title refers to a 1999 scandal involving the fixing of a cricket match. This event figures into the plot.
     I gave up after an hour. (Another 1¼ hours remained.) Pointlessly in color, ineptly acted all-around, sophomoric from start to finish, soulless, this dreadful film relies on a lot of barking and shouting, dumb gags, verbal insults, and a clipped pace to generate what it regards as hilarity. In the first hour at least, there isn’t even a single laugh and everything seems terribly forced.
     Co-directors Raj Nidimoru and Krishna D.K. haven’t between them a scrap of either a sense of humor or visual flair.