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Saturday, Nov 28, 2009
OK, so the gimmicky neo-noir is not my favorite genre, but this diabolical puzzler is about as good as it gets. At first, Guy Pearce's canny star performance seems flat and forced, until you realize that Leonard, the half-amnesiac protagonist, is himself an actor; he remembers who he used to be but has no idea who he is now. It is only the beginning of this film's dazzling construction that writer-director Christopher Nolan tells the story in reverse order, each scene ending where the previous one began. So we begin to see the origins of the desperate clues Leonard leaves for himself in his "investigation" of his wife's murder -- notes, scribbled-on Polaroids, a series of elaborate tattoos -- and to understand that the main manipulator of his disorder may be Leonard himself. Like most noirs, this is a heartless essay in paranoia and cruelty; like the best of them, its precision, its lustrous imagery and its devious tale of love and madness will get under your skin and crawl around like parasites.
This astonishing debut feature from Alejandro González Iñárritu, a former Mexico City rock DJ, combines the vicious energy of Quentin Tarantino, the vivid surrealism of Luis Buñuel and the moral melodramas of Mexican telenovelas in an unforgettable panorama of our continent's largest city. Three stories of love and betrayal, which connect the worlds of the poor, the middle class and the privileged, intersect by way of a hideous car accident and a loyal but murderous dog named Cofi. "Amores Perros" became notorious for its simulated but highly convincing dogfight scenes, but the film's real subject is the emotional violence the director sees underlying all of life in Mexico's gorgeous and terrifying capital. It's a great film, if not an easy one to take, and it serves to remind Americans how little we really know about the diverse and complicated nation on our southern border.
In the Mood for Love
I have strongly mixed feelings about Wong Kar-wai, the artiest of major Hong Kong filmmakers. (His "Chungking Express" is one of my favorite movies, but I found "Fallen Angels" murky and distasteful and "Happy Together" a beautiful snoozefest.) But there's no disputing his talent or the uniqueness of his vision, and "In the Mood for Love," a lustrous period romance set in early-1960s Hong Kong, has finally brought him a wider Western audience. Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Maggie Cheung play neighbors whose discovery that their spouses are having an affair thrusts them into an unexpected intimacy. Wong may well go back to his customary frenzied visual experimentation the next time he tackles contemporary subject matter, but this supernally modulated (and profoundly sad) composition of lights, shadows, colors and fabrics speaks to his tremendous aesthetic flexibility as well as his constant theme of loneliness.
For his first dramatic film, high-priced English commercial director Jonathan Glazer turned to playwrights Louis Mellis and David Scinto, resulting in a crime thriller that looks like MTV, sounds like Harold Pinter and revives the bloody-minded existentialism of the best British flicks of the '60s. For all Glazer's dazzling shotmaking and supersaturated Costa del Sol colors -- and even the memorable performance of Ben Kingsley as an East End crime boss -- the film's heart lies in Gal (Ray Winstone), a flabby, retired gangster who loves his ex-porn-star wife (Amanda Redman) more than life itself. In the neo-noir sweepstakes, "Sexy Beast" may not have the narrative invention or clockwork mechanics of "Memento," but it has just as much visual flash, better line-by-line dialogue and more human warmth.
