2008 Los Angeles Film Festival: Day 1

2008 Los Angeles Film Festival: Day One

"First Servings of Disappointment"

Elite Squad, The Poker House, A Girl Cut in Two

Summer isn’t the season that one would typically associate with a high-profile film festival, but nonetheless the folks at Film Independent have rolled out the red-carpet for 2008’s Los Angeles FF amidst the blistering June heat of Westwood Village. Judging by the selections that I saw during my first day at the festival, however, perhaps they should’ve kept the carpet rolled up and in the closet. As a first time attendee of this particular gathering, which undoubtedly draws crowds as large as November’s AFI-Fest in nearby Hollywood, I was wholly unimpressed by what I saw on Friday: one mediocre effort that had every reason to be a masterpiece, one absolute embarrassment, and one good-but-not-great outing from a veteran French director. Such is the pain of having an unhealthy obsession with seeing every new movie made.

In 2004, José Padilha made a great first film with the documentary Bus 174, which examined the televised hijacking of a Rio De Janero bus by a man named Sandro do Nascimento in 2000. I’m still haunted to this day by some of the images I saw in that picture, particularly the ones involving the terrifyingly decrepit conditions inside of Brazilian prisons. Bus 174 signaled that Padilha had a great career ahead of him, both as a storyteller and a muckraker who could bring the corruption found within the Brazilian socio-economic system to the mainstream’s attention.

Elite Squad, Padilha’s first theatrical narrative feature, dives headfirst into some of the same issues as Bus 174, but with little of the thoughtful introspection. Understanding the complexities of the Brazilian socio-political sphere takes a hopeless backseat here to crafting an “intense” sensory experience full of loud violence and showy visuals, much like Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund’s criminally-overrated 2002 effort City of God.

Elite Squad is narrated by Captain Nascimento (Wagner Maura), a devoted member of the BOPE (Special Police Operation Battalion), which the movie makes out to be Brazil’s only honest police-organization. The BOPE’s main responsibility is to take down powerful drug-lords in the country’s slums. In this regard, a huge task lays before Nascimento: he has been assigned to take control of a particularly dangerous area near the location in which the Pope will say during his 1997 visit to Brazil. This presents a problem: Nascimento and his wife are having a baby, and she doesn’t like his endless work schedule or the high amount danger he puts himself in on a daily basis. He will have to find a replacement for himself by the time the Pope arrives in order to satisfy her.

The viewer is informed early on that Nascimento’s choice boils down to two candidates: longtime friends Neto (Caio Junqueira)—“the one with heart”—and Matias (André Ramiro)—“the one with brains.” As signaled by the movie’s brooding and doomy tone, however, it becomes clear that the exercise may result in disaster for Nascimiento and/or the two young men.

At its worst, Elite Squad is a loud and thoroughly unnecessary showcase of the violence in Brazil’s slums. I don’t mean to trivialize an important issue by deeming its representation on celluloid to be unimportant, but we’ve seen depictions similar to the one that Padilha presents time and time again in other films: drug-lords and their followers senselessly fire bullets at the police, the police fire back, and often other police and other drug-lords fire at both groups. The film’s opening scene is particularly derivative, introducing the film’s non-linear framing device by showing Neto and Matias in a sticky-situation set to the intertwined sounds of gunshots and rave music. Because of the very familiar nature of the material, its existence is self-defeating: rather than shocking the viewer as they should, all of the horrendous atrocities in Elite Squad just seem passé.

Despite its overall hollowness, Elite Squad does occasionally settle down to dissect its themes in some level of depth. Most of these instances involve Matias who, in addition to training to become a part of the BOPE, has aspirations in the field of law. He’s the odd-man-out in his law-school, which is full of progressive-thinking students who dismiss all police as corrupt killers and harassers. The best scene in the movie, which is far more intense in its claustrophobic intimacy than any of the much more violent ones on display, occurs when Matias involves himself in a debate with his class over the nature of the Brazilian police-force. The scene is written and directed with a pitch-perfect degree of force, and actor Ramiro delivers it with a stunning command over Matias’ inner-conflict.

Padilha also manages to provoke quite a bit of moral-intrigue in Matias’ befriending of a group of students who participate in a drug-cartel of their own. Unfortunately, like much of the rest of the movie, this falls victim to ineffective external-plotting in the end. (Padilha routinely makes the mistake of assuming that the movie’s action is more complex than it is, while at the same time never realizing just how nuanced his character-development could be.)

Ultimately, Elite Squad comes across simply as the latest entry into the recent wave of ultra-violent Brazilian pictures. Padilha undoubtedly still has a lot to say about the issues facing his country—Bus 174 was only the tip of the iceberg that will become his oeuvre—but he’ll need to readjust his focus and refine his vision if he wants to further chisel away at these from a narrative-perspective. As it is, Elite Squad is a failed attempt at message-making.

Then again, festival attendees can do a lot worse than Elite Squad this year by catching Lori Petty’s The Poker House, an inept effort to craft an effective melodrama by a first-time director. For all intensive purposes, I should not be reviewing the movie. It will not receive a theatrical release if there is any wisdom left in Hollywood; the film has no selling potential. Instead, it will appear on cable’s Lifetime Network one evening in the future, only to function as perfect background noise for housewives making dinner and older women nodding off while knitting. And last time I checked, not even I, an unpaid Internet film critic, was desperate enough to review a Lifetime release.

But I digress. The Poker House is part of this year’s Narrative Competition and packed at least 475 of the Mann Festival’s 560 seats at the premiere screening I attended. And it was co-written (though you couldn’t tell it by watching the movie) by supporting actor David Alan Grier, a performer of seemingly limitless talents. I suppose that those two facts alone represent reason enough to write up a formal review, a courtesy I am extending to every film I see.

But I don’t have that much to say about The Poker House, really. The movie goes in every direction that you’d expect it to—just as a Lifetime movie should—and as a result, it’s kind of hard to dissect it without merely throwing around adjectives to describe how formulaic and conventional it is. Protagonist Agnes (Jennifer Lawrence) is a strong teenage girl living through Hollywood’s version of hell: her mother (Selma Blair) is a drug addict and a prostitute, she lives in the company of a pimp (Bokeem Woodbine), and she and her sisters regularly go hungry for lack of anything to eat. In the first act, Agnes and her middle sister Bee (Sophia Bairley) speak of making macaroni and cheese out of pasta, water, and crushed Nacho Cheese Doritos. The conversation takes place while their younger sister Cammie (Chloe Moretz) is staying at a friend’s house—one who has her own alcoholic father and stressed-out mother to boot, mind you—where she can mooch some food. Boo-hoo. Oh, and did I mention that this all of this leads up to a climactic sex crime in the film’s third act? Brutally authentic, I know.

The irony herein is the fact that The Poker House, as the viewer is informed just before the credits roll, is supposedly based on co-writer/director Lori Petty’s life. Look: I don’t have a problem with movies that expect the viewer to believe in narrative-embellishments with the intent of enhancing their “factual” elements. Such is the nature of just about all contemporary “Inspired by a True Story” melodramas released today. But The Poker House loses its soul somewhere within this process: the exercise feels so hammy, so unbelievable that it’s hard to be emotionally-affected by it. And when a melodrama doesn’t offer a poignant experience—whatever liberties it may take with obscuring reality—its chances of success are very slim. Twenty minutes into The Poker House, viewers will be more likely to laugh at the movie’s implausibility—both in terms of external-plot and characterization—than they are to be captivated by the broad, emotional brushstrokes painted by Petty.

Where exactly The Poker House becomes so utterly unbelievable I’m not exactly sure. There’s nothing glaringly unconvincing about Petty and Grier’s dialogue. No one member of the cast gives a terrible performance by textbook definition. Alas, I’m convinced that the film’s miserable failure has something to do with its structure’s strange adherence to and defiance of conventions. On one hand, it contains a downright laughably pedestrian score by Michael Lloyd, which signals from the get-go that viewers are in for something artificial and unimpressive. On the other, its third-act chain of events is so unlike its genre’s typical years-long concept of character-healing—emotional-transformations within the protagonist occur in a matter of hours—that it seems foolish when its very unconventionality doesn’t pay off. To say that I intensely disliked any particular aspect of the film’s existence would be an overstatement, but as I left the festival screening, I knew for certain that I had just seen a complete misfire. I know a Lifetime Movie when I see one, and The Poker House is a Lifetime Movie.

If one was to find the polar-opposite film of The Poker House is, then A Girl Cut in Two wouldn’t be a bad selection. And frankly, there couldn’t be a greater compliment paid to veteran French director Claude Chabrol than this. With the picture, Chabrol has fashioned a genuinely engrossing semi-thriller/black comedy that, while self-indulgent at times, proves compulsively watchable. And no matter how farfetched it may become at times, the movie always feels authentic, something that Petty’s effort never understands how to go about.

But A Girl Cut in Two isn’t the picture that it is because of Chabrol, ironic as this may seem given his status as one of the pioneers of the French New Wave and its accompanying auteur theory. Instead, the movie marks is radiant actress Ludivine Sagnier’s time to shine. As stunning to look at in every frame as her performance is nuanced and engrossing, Sagnier owns A Girl Cut in Two in the role of the protagonist. She’s everything a Chabrol leading-lady should be in her performance: vulnerable and erotic, but also intelligent and darkly funny.

Sagnier plays Gabrielle Deneige, a local weathergirl who finds herself in two wild relationships. (I wish I could come up with a better adjective to describe these, but I can’t – part of the point of the movie is to make Gabrielle’s persona obscured.) She becomes transfixed by popular fifty-plus-year-old author Charles Saint-Denis (François Berléand) when he appears on TV, only to later find herself convinced that she would like to pursue a relationship with him when she formally meets him at a book-signing. He’s already married, but has long lost sexual affinity with his wife despite still deeply caring for her. As Gabrielle and Charles begin to engage in romance or something like it, Gabrielle also dabbles in a relationship with Paul Gaudens (Benoit Magimel), a rich young heir to a pharmaceutical fortune who she also meets at the book signing. Initially unbeknownst to Gabrielle, Paul and François share rather nasty feelings for each other—and Paul develops especially-strong malice towards François as Gabrielle becomes progressively enraptured in the older man—creating, as the blood-red-tinted opening shots of the film would reflect, a recipe for disaster.

Reading back over that synopsis, I realize how glib and unlike the film it really sounds. But the truth of the matter is: to confine A Girl Cut in Two into a mere mold of words is unfair. This isn’t so much a work of plot as it is a piece of expressionism provided the convenience of a plot – not unlike the early films Chabrol made in the 1960s and ‘70s. The way that the movie juggles tone and emotion and abstraction is genuinely masterful, much thanks to Chabrol no doubt. But again I return to the work of Sagnier, who is every bit as responsible for the aforementioned seamless juggling as her director. Just like the film, she captures the essences of both lofty melodrama and gritty naturalism all in one package. The results are stirring.

But there’s also a point at which my praise for the film must come to an end. A Girl Cut in Two is, no doubt, much too long for its own good. Running for 115 minutes, Chabrol’s work ultimately tends to exhaust all emotional-angles when it comes to its supporting characters—Sagnier could never tire in the lead role, of course—and as a result it tends to wrap itself up into too complete a package. As I left the film, I felt that the third act was not rough enough around the edges, mostly because it went on for too long. Chabrol, in essence, had ruined a lot of the fun mystery associated with his supporting characters by allowing them to stay on the screen for too long. There are two moments—one following a murder and one following a magic trick that explains the film’s title—in which the movie could’ve ended with the aforementioned sense of mystery intact, rife with unspoken emotional complexities. The current conclusion, while logically conceived, isn’t nearly as intriguing as it should’ve been.

Regardless of its final small mishap, A Girl Cut in Two was by far the best film I saw on Day One of the festival. If all of the movies I saw over the course of the next six days of screenings were equally as good, I’d be a happy moviegoer.

-Danny Baldwin, Bucket Reviews (post date: 6.25.2008)