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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Fast forward: A French wife wages war for her man; a Colombian neighborhood run by boys with guns
In meticulously re-creating both the style and the subject matter of a bygone era of French cinema, Frédéric Fonteyne's "Gilles' Wife" might be mistaken at first for an exercise in nostalgia. It's the story of a working-class housewife named Elisa (the fabulous Emmanuelle Devos), somewhere on the northern fringes of rural France in the late 1930s, who is forced to do battle with her lithe younger sister, Victorine (Laura Smet), for the love of her own husband, the eponymous Gilles (Clovis Cornillac). You can't imagine a soapier setup, but "Gilles' Wife" taken on its own terms is a spectacular achievement, a heartbreaking cinematic work that finely balances melodrama, family love story and devastating tragedy.
Fonteyne is yet another of the fine French directors with little or no U.S. audience. (His best-known work is the 1999 "Une Liaison Pornographique," which isn't pornographic at all -- its video-store title is "An Affair of Love.") Devos is something else again. After her breathtaking performances in Arnaud Desplechin's "Kings and Queen" and Jacques Audiard's "The Beat That My Heart Skipped," I can't believe she won't be abducted by American filmmakers at some point. Then again, she is actually 41 years old (an amazing and wonderful fact in itself), and her brand of sleepy-eyed, broad-cheekboned, womanly beauty -- halfway between Botticelli and 1920s erotic art -- seems positively decadent by perky, gym-toned American standards.
Sure, I'm smitten. But my incredulity over the role she's asked to play here -- like, what man married to this woman would be a big enough ass to cheat on her with anyone, let alone her own sister -- eventually gave way to total conviction. As in "Kings and Queen," Devos can sometimes look bedraggled and ordinary, and at other moments like the most beautiful opium vision the most heavily stoned pre-Raphaelite ever experienced. And as for the unfortunate Gilles and his desperate jones for the girly-cute Victorine -- well, gentlemen, let's just admit it: There is no male sexual behavior quite so asinine or self-destructive as to be unbelievable.
Fonteyne controls the many moods of this picture expertly, as it moves from a bucolic idyll (Gilles really does love his wife, and their exquisitely adorable children) into a kind of nightmare. To keep Gilles and preserve their family, Elisa proves willing to do literally anything, including spying on Victorine at his behest and giving him advice on how to win her back when she moves on to an actual single man. Don't let the gorgeous cinematography (by Virginie Saint-Martin) fool you: The lovingly depicted world of "Gilles' Wife" is one in which men face few consequences for infidelity and domestic violence, and women are demanded to perform heroic sacrifices that will ultimately destroy them. (Opens Nov. 16 at the IFC Center in New York; other engagements may follow.)
In the amazing documentary "La Sierra," filmmakers Scott Dalton and Margarita Martinez penetrate the world of a group of paramilitary gang members defending a hilltop barrio in the Colombian city of Medellín, one of the most anarchic places in that almost ungovernable nation. Colombia's civil war gives us ample reason to be ashamed -- 35,000 people have died in the last decade, in a conflict the U.S. media has barely noticed -- but Dalton and Martinez provide something bigger and far more important than a current-events lecture.
By capturing the members of Bloque Metro -- essentially an armed street gang affiliated with one of Colombia's right-wing paramilitary groups -- as human beings with ordinary dreams, desires and relationships, "La Sierra" removes these young people from the realm of fear and fantasy they inhabit in our imaginations. Edison, the slender 22-year-old who commands Bloque Metro, turns out to be a sensitive young man who dreams of attending college to learn civil engineering. He sees himself as the de facto mayor or councilman for a neighborhood that the government has abandoned, and that the police never enter unless they're coming to kill people like him. Edison also has six kids by six different mothers, and while the film doesn't ask you to approve of that, it makes clear how irrelevant conventional morality seems in La Sierra.
Cielo, a 17-year-old girl we also meet, was left alone with a baby at age 15 when her first boyfriend was gunned down by "left-wing" guerrillas from a rival gang. (Political affiliations in Medellín seem entirely notional; it's like supporting one soccer team instead of another.) Her current boyfriend, an ugly, angry-looking skinhead who's about 30, is in jail, and boy, does that look like a fun place. Jesús, a 19-year-old lieutenant in Edison's posse, is a handsome boy with an oddly scarred face, a bad cocaine habit and a wandering eye; almost casually he reveals that he was nearly killed when a homemade grenade he was preparing exploded and that he keeps his right sleeve pulled extra long to make it less obvious that he has no hand. He doesn't much like to talk about the future or the past, but when Martinez presses him, asking him whether he thinks he'll die young, he just shrugs: "Claro." (That's clear.)
The story of how La Sierra moves from a seemingly pointless war to an unexpected peace is a thrilling one, although the impact of seeing what becomes of these three kids is devastating. The larger news story is that Colombia is slowly moving through a peace process that may (or may not) integrate former paramilitaries and guerrillas and result in a functioning civil society. But "La Sierra" reminds us that we're all implicated in a big international chess match whose desired end result is simply political and economic stability; it values the lives of Edison, Cielo, Jesús and most of the rest of us at nearly zero. (Opens Thursday at the Pioneer Theater in New York, and will play numerous short engagements in coming months, including Nov. 14 in Huntington, N.Y., Nov. 15 in Grantham's Landing, B.C., Canada, Nov. 16 in Brooklyn, N.Y., Nov. 18-20 in Ithaca, N.Y., Nov. 22 in Pleasantville, N.Y., Dec. 3 in Miami, Dec. 8-11 in Boston, Dec. 19 in Stamford, Conn., and Dec. 21 in Philadelphia.)
