Well, "Asylum" has a very particular aesthetic. It's both bleak and beautiful. Your color palette is very restricted, but the film is a lush visual experience despite that. Are there specific films of the past that inspired you? Or specific works of art?

That's very difficult to answer. I mean, I'm reasonably well educated. I've seen quite a lot of films and I know a reasonable amount about art. But there doesn't seem to be a major target; I don't say, "I want it to look like this." I work very closely with my D.P. [Giles Nuttgens], but the frames in the film are basically my frames. I come from a photography background, so I guess I'm fairly instinctive about beautifying or not beautifying, about trying to find a reflective image. I haven't rationalized a method. It's basically instinctive.

Let's just note that you do have a scene where a beautiful blonde in a '50s gown climbs up a bell tower, possibly with the intention of jumping off.

Well, yeah. It's impossible not to think of the films of that period when you're making a film set in that period. In terms of hair and costume and everything, something like "Vertigo" is always in place. I was worried about that tower sequence being too obvious an homage. It got to a point where we even thought Stella was going to have to go to the cinema and watch "Vertigo," to show the audience we knew our references. I decided against that.

A good decision. Then there's the toughest scene in the whole film. Let's see if we can talk about it without giving it away. Stella does something unforgivable, through her self-absorption, and an innocent person suffers terribly as a result.

That was the scene we talked about the most. It was a scene we could really have turned into melodrama, and I tried my hardest to make it as unmitigated as possible. There's tremendous temptation to subjectify a scene like that -- to show it from her point of view. I shot some footage like that, and then I decided it was better to put the audience in an agonizing situation: "Do something! Do something!" I still don't know whether it works or not -- I don't have any degree of objectivity -- but I feel the integrity of what we did.

"Asylum" is now playing in most major metropolitan areas, with a wider release to follow.

"The Memory of a Killer": "CSI" goes to Antwerp
Belgian film has always been an odd scene. Given the nation's bitterly divided cultural heritage, its films can mostly be divided into the almost-French category and the almost-Dutch category. Abort those angry e-mails, loyal Flemings and Walloons -- I realize that's an oversimplification. (I look forward to seeing Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's "The Child," winner of this year's Palme d'Or at Cannes.) The point is that while Belgium is an affluent European country, it's also a small and unglamorous one that remains culturally and politically overshadowed by its neighbors.

I don't know that Erik Van Looy's thriller "The Memory of a Killer" will do a lot to change that, but it admirably adapts the American neo-noir tradition to the rainy, gritty surroundings of Antwerp, and that's a distinctively Belgian achievement. We've got a brainy, hipster cop (Koen De Bouw) somewhat in the Vincent D'Onofrio "Criminal Intent" tradition, his regular-guy partner (Werner De Smedt), and their worthy adversary, an aging contract killer (Jan Decleir) who's battling an odd affliction.

Actually, the film's Flemish title translates as "The Alzheimer Case." One can imagine why the American distributor didn't care for that, but the current English title leaves us guessing about what's wrong with Decleir's Angelo Ledda, a remorseless but increasingly uncertain hit man who's pursuing a private vendetta against a gang of powerful pedophiles. Ledda leads the two detectives gradually toward the center of corruption, while they think they're just chasing him -- and he keeps losing his own trail, despite the experimental pills he takes and the "Memento"-style hints he scribbles on his own arm.

As lantern-jawed De Bouw and leonine Decleir orbit each other like competing, powerful planets, the story is compelling if predictable. "The Memory of a Killer" is wonderfully acted and energetically filmed, and in fact it partly echoes a real-life pedophilia scandal that rocked Belgian society to its foundations in the '90s. Van Looy certainly proves that you can make police procedurals with plenty of action on minuscule budgets (by American standards). Overall, though, I found the film a puzzling mixture of convincing local atmospherics and pretentious imported grandeur. The next time he shoots neon signs on ruined buildings, or handsome faces upturned in the driving rain, it might be on the back streets of L.A.

"The Memory of a Killer" opens Aug. 26 in New York, with a national release to follow.

"Wall": Finding hope in a symbol of hopelessness
Simone Bitton is a Moroccan-born Jew who spent her teen years in Israel and now lives in Paris. Perhaps this is the perfect background for making a documentary in the Middle East; she crosses borders and melts into populations easily. When someone she approaches in her documentary "Wall" asks, a bit nervously, "Hebrew or Arabic?" she responds, "As you like." Her film about the notorious wall that now separates the Jewish and Arab populations of Israel and the West Bank is an important human and artistic testament -- a calm meditation on something no one can consider calmly.

Actually, Bitton has written and spoken about "Wall" in strident political language, which I almost don't want to mention. I suppose a point of view becomes clear if you stick with this patient, contemplative film, or at least we come to understand that it was born out of pain and anger. But information and commentary are minimal in the footage itself; characteristically, Bitton just plants her camera and lets us watch events unfold in real time, in the middle distance.

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