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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
1. "Kings and Queen"
A gripping melodrama of love and madness and murder and family turmoil, the most beautiful actress in France (Emmanuelle Devos), and a passionate filmmaking style redolent of both Ingmar Bergman and Alfred Hitchcock. You couldn't have gotten better reviews if you'd bribed every critic in America with a bottomless table of hors d'oeuvres. So what went wrong?
According to Ryan Werner, who helped acquire "Kings and Queen" when he worked at Wellspring, nothing did. "When we bought the movie, we projected that it would make about $350,000 [in the U.S.], and it pretty much hit that," he says. Of course that's what Hollywood movies spend on decaf lattes and wig glue, but "Kings and Queen" is two and a half hours long, has an unknown director (Desplechin) and an unknown star, and a significant number of art-house proprietors saw it as a money-loser.
So "Kings and Queen" never played on more than nine screens at the same time, where even a modest indie success might hit 40 to 60. The New York Times review -- still the single most important indicator, by far, for indie film -- was positive but not a rave. Given all that, $350,000 starts to sound OK. Except that this was one of the best movies of the entire decade so far, dammit! "I have realistic expectations," says Werner. "But it's very depressing."
2. "Innocence"
No mystery here: Lucile Hadzihalilovic's debut feature creeped people out. A brooding allegory about a group of young girls being "educated" for unknown purposes in a Gothic, park-like compound, it's a memorable accomplishment that -- to my taste, anyway -- never crossed the line into prurience or manipulation. Does it challenge viewers, force them to acknowledge their own dark fantasies and confront their ambivalence about questions of girlhood, puberty and adolescent sexuality? You bet your ass. But I found it a haunting, effective and highly cathartic experience. As for the film's commercial prospects, well, they weren't many to begin with. Then Manohla Dargis of the New York Times wrote a mixed-to-negative review, suggesting that raincoat-clad men might draw the wrong sorts of gratification from "Innocence," and that was that. One weekend at the Cinema Village in New York followed, but whatever insulting sum of money resulted has not even been reported on IMDB. "When films fail in the marketplace these days, they fail abjectly," says Eamonn Bowles. "They don't make any money at all." Despite glowing European reviews, that's what happened here.
3. "My Summer of Love"
In a vain effort to convince you I'm not an unbearable snob, here's a movie in English. With this strange exploration of the glowing Yorkshire landscape, and the intense and unlikely bond that blossoms there between two bored teenage girls, Pawel Pawlikowski leaps to the front of the class of British filmmakers. And, hey, this one was a hit! At least in relative terms. "My Summer of Love" got great reviews and played for several months, garnering around $1.3 million in U.S. box office. Mel Gibson probably coughs that much money into his morning Kleenex, but together with its British and European releases and what should be decent DVD sales, this one will surely end up in the black.
4. "The Power of Nightmares"
This isn't really a theatrical film, or was never intended as one (although it's played as such in New York and a few other places). What it is, though, is a BBC television miniseries that essentially serves as the most provocative and visually memorable political documentary of the post-9/11 era. Director Adam Curtis (who also made "The Century of the Self") essentially argues that the whole "war on terror" is a game of smoke and mirrors, perpetrated by a neocon elite in pursuit of its largely imaginary nemesis, the many-tentacled terrorist network called al-Qaida. (The word, Curtis says, was never used by Osama bin Laden until after the FBI stuck it on him.) Whether you buy Curtis' total package or not, this is a devastating critique of contemporary political reality and a feat of cinematic derring-do. It has no distributor and will probably never appear on U.S. television or be released here on DVD, but I've been told that Curtis is making no effort to discourage gray-market downloaders. So, wink-wink, nudge-nudge, you know what to do.
5. "Saraband"
In what is presumably his last film, 87-year-old Ingmar Bergman shows the rest of the movie world how it's done. A lovely, gripping and compact family drama -- actually, a sequel of sorts to "Scenes From a Marriage" -- that wastes no time, crackles with distinctly ungeriatric vigor and refers discreetly to many of the master's themes. Of course the cast, which includes Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson as a divorced couple still hopelessly entangled in each others' consciousnesses, is magnificent. Of course there are moments of ravishing beauty. It's also a masterpiece of concision and precision, and one of the most magnificent films yet made on digital video. None of that should be surprising, really. Nor was it surprising that Sony Classics didn't quite know what to do with "Saraband" and pretty much dumped it in midsummer. I mean, hey, this dude is really old! Given that, I think returns of almost $650,000, from a maximum of 27 screens, is highly respectable. And it'll keep making them money on DVD long after Bergman is making movies for God (and the rest of us, if there is indeed a heaven, are watching them).
