Blue Valentine is the opposite of a feel-good romantic comedy featuring two young romantic leads. For starters, the two main actors, Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams, have form in dramatic roles. Gosling is a young method actor – think Edward Norton but far less irritating – who is best known for playing a teacher with a drug addiction in Half Nelson and a loner who seeks solace in the company of a blow-up doll in Lars and the Real Girl. Williams, who came to fame as Heath Ledger’s long-suffering wife in Brokeback Mountain, plays more introspective young women. She carries her pain on the inside. Here, both are also executive producers of a film that contrasts the end of a relationship – the family dog is killed, an attempt at “couple time” in a sleazy hotel goes horribly wrong – with the beginning, as the pair begin a goofy love affair marred by an abusive ex-boyfriend and an unwanted pregnancy.
Co-writer-director Derek Cianfrance was inspired to make the film by his parents’ divorce. His main achievement is in achieving a balance where neither of the couple is wholly responsible for the break-up.
Gosling is on fine, extrovert form, whether gobbling up his daughter’s oatmeal from the tabletop or “singing stupid” in a shop doorway while Williams dances next to him. His character, removal guy Dean, gains audience sympathy early on when he takes extra time to fix up an elderly ex-serviceman’s room – he sees his job being about people rather than moving things.
Cindy (Williams) is studying medicine, but ends up as a nurse. She gains the attention of a young doctor who wants her to move to his new clinic for reasons unrelated to her skill. Cindy gives herself without love to Dean in the bedroom. The drink-fuelled scenes in the sleazy hotel are appropriately painful. Events are also symmetrical. Cindy indirectly causes Dean to lose his job. Dean’s anger at Cindy at work – and hitting her lecherous boss – results in the loss of her employment.
What do we learn from this well-acted if painful drama? If a relationship is tainted at the beginning, it will work out badly. This is actually the experience of Hollywood types, since show-business people rely on continuous gratification rather than living with compromise. To his credit, Cianfrance suggests that it does not have to be that way – both characters could have made better choices. The point is thrown at the audience at the climax.
Patrick Mulcahy
Reviewing Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977) for Time Out, Scott Meek said: “The movie becomes in effect what horror movies seemed like when you were too young to get in to see them.” It’s a comment that’s entirely appropriate for the experimental Belgian shocker Amer, not least because the picture is primarily a lavishly elaborate and extended homage to the Giallo school of intense, lurid, startlingly violent psychological thrillers – popular in Italy from the late 1960s to the early ’80s – of which Argento (along with Mario Bava and Lucio Fulci) was among the most celebrated exponents.
But whereas Argento and his fellow auteurs gleefully subordinated considerations of plot, characterisation and dialogue as they crafted their absurdist, nightmarishly surreal takes on classic detective and supernatural genres, Amer takes the form a step or two further – becoming, in the process, a hermetic exercise in baroque stylishness for baroque stylishness’s sake.
The results have proved divisive among audiences (there were quite a few walkouts at the screening I attended) and intoxicating for some critics. American commentator Glenn Heath Jr praised the debut from writer-directors Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani as “daring, breathtaking, hypnotic. Extreme stylized horror exists within every breath, glance, touch and whisper of one’s life.”
The life in question is that of Ana, played as a child, adolescent and adult by three different actresses: Cassandra Forêt, Charlotte Eugène Guibbaud and Marie Bos. In three sections, we experience intense, traumatic and sensual episodes from Ana’s perspective: a chilling encounter with an elderly relative, a sexual awakening during a trip to the seaside and a return home to the mansion she grew up in, involving a sinister, leather-clad taxi driver (Harry Cleven). This last section becomes an extended stalk-and-slash affair. But is Ana the predator, the prey or some combination of the two?
Culminating in a protracted homicide sequence that’s stomach-churningly convincing and most definitely not for the faint-hearted, Amer is a decidedly full-blooded and uncompromising affair. With virtually no dialogue, the picture is told via visuals and sounds. It’s a fine showcase for the talents of Manu Dacosse (cinematographer), Bernard Beets (editor), Alina Santos (production designer), Jackye Fauconnier (costumes) and Iannis Héaulme’s sound department.
But all these sterling technical contributions are essentially diversions and distractions from Amer’s essential hollowness. It often feels as though we’re leafing through a highly glossy magazine fashion-shoot. And as with so many avant-garde projects, what might have been stunning and incendiary as a short becomes repetitive and frustrating at feature length, Cattet and Forzani’s self-consciously operatic flourishes are so aggressively over the top that they may inspire giggles rather than the intended frissons of fear.
Miami-born Kyle Patrick Alvarez, now 27, has loosely adapted What Are You Wearing? – an autobiographical article by Davy Rothbart which recounted the author’s experiences with telephone sex – and one notably intense relationship in particular. In the film, Rothbart becomes Davy Mitchell (Brian Geraghty), a 28-year-old writer who – accompanied by his brother Sean (Kel O’Neill) – drives a battered station-wagon around the United States reading from his unpublished novel in a string of shadowy, under-populated bookstores.
During yet another motel stopover, the scruffily handsome but perpetually luckless-in-love Davy answers the phone to an apparently wrong number – only to end up chatting at length to the female voice at the end of the line. This casual acquaintance steadily deepens into something more serious – until, as Davy puts it, his unseen interlocutor becomes “the closest thing to a girlfriend I’ve ever had.”
The structure of Easier With Practice, much of which – especially after the brothers’ road-trip ends just before the halfway point of the running-time – consists of extended scenes in which we simply observe Davy talking on the phone, puts a considerable burden on the slight shoulders of its leading man. Fortunately, Geraghty proves more than up to the task. Indeed, he’s something of a revelation here, bringing an engaging, boyish vulnerability to someone who might easily have come across as seedy, dweeby or desperate.
Shot in crisply limpid digital-video by cinematographer David Rush Morrison, the film is an unfussy evocation of American backwaters – the nation’s borderless vastness emphasising the isolation of sensitive souls such as Davy – as well as an examination of how technology can be both an aid and a bar to communication and intimacy.
Although it’s part of a phone-sex lineage that encompasses films such as Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love and Spike Lee’s Girl 6, there are obvious wider applications in these days of internet chat rooms and social networking. Surprising final act developments, meanwhile, are executed with sufficient tact and conviction to avoid feeling excessively gimmicky.
Executed in the beguilingly, low-fi style familiar from numerous US indie productions treading this tricky line between humour and melancholia, Easier With Practice – complete with a nicely-integrated, guitar soundtrack – is a wry, witty and accomplished example of the genre, maintaining a pleasing consistency of tone throughout. If the title can be applied to film-making, Alvarez’s future development will be well worth following.
Neil Young
