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THE LAST MISTRESS, THE BANQUET, THE 39 STEPS
Catherine Breillat is one of France's most consistently controversial film-makers. However, she reins in her genius for provocation in The Last Mistress, a handsome adaptation of a novel by Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly that ventured into the Dangerous Liaison territory of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. In the vein of Jacques Rivette's recent Don't Touch the Axe, this meticulous picture combines a period aesthetic with a contemporary acuity to provide fascinating insights into both human nature and French society now and in the 1830s.
The aristocratic gossip of Michel Lonsdale and Yolande Moreau sets the scene, as they speculate about whether the dashing Fu'ad Aït Aatou will be able to relinquish Spanish mistress Asia Argento and marry the virginal Roxane Mesquida. However, the bulk of the action concerns Aatou's flashbacking account of his decade-long affair to Mesquida's protective grandmother, Claude Sarraute. There's a penny dreadful feel to this chronicle of spurned advances, reckless duels, domestic tragedies and alienated affections. But the coda more than compensates with its exposure of raw emotion, as Aatou is tempted into abandoning duty for lust.
Sumptuously photographed by Yorgos Arvanitis, this is very much an actors' piece, with Breillat forcing focus on the performances through her judicious use of close-ups and long takes. The angelic Aatou makes a suitably flawed hero, while Sarraute tempers her grandmaternal concern with a wicked taste for tattling. But it's the often wayward Argento who most impresses, as she allows fleeting glimpses of the pious vulnerability that lies beneath the sensual vulgarity that so betwitches her conquests.
Every bit as dramatically compelling, but even more visually striking is Feng Xiaogang's The Banquet. Set in the tenth-century Chinese period of Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms, this rousing epic combines martial arts spectacle with elements of Hamlet and Macbeth to achieve an irresistible hybrid of Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) and Zhang Yimou's Curse of the Golden Flower (2006).
Rather than lose her status as empress on the suspicious death of her husband, Zhang Ziyi hurriedly marries her usurpatious brother-in-law, Ge You. However, her hastiness alienates stepson Daniel Wu, who returns from exile to challenge Ge's legitimacy and test the depths of his feelings for both Zhang and Zhou Xun, the naive daughter of courtier Jingwu Ma, who has eyes on the throne for his son, Xiaoming Huang.
Although never on a par with Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress (1958) or Ran (1985), The Banquet reinvents Shakespeare with a panache that owes much to Timmy Yip's décor and Zhang Li's cinematography. But while Yuen Wo-ping's wirework fight sequences are typically balletic, they feel slotted in and distract from the more intriguing conspiracies and counterplots. Furthermore, the 27-year-old Zhang Ziyi feels too young for the role of the scheming grande dame and, consequently, she comes across as petulant rather than regnant.
Nevertheless, this opulent court opera is well worth checking out for those in London for business or leisure. As is the new print of Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (1935), which is showing as part of the BFI Southbank's tribute to that great British screen actor, Robert Donat.
Adapted from a novel by John Buchan, this was the thriller that secured Hitchcock's international reputation. It's full of trademark tropes and flourishes and contains such classic set-pieces as the escapes from a London crime scene and the Forth Bridge, the handcuffed stay in a Highland hotel and the final showdown with a music-hall memory man. Moreover, Hitch laces the action with plenty of saucy banter between Donat's fugitive (who has been wrongly accused of murder) and Madeleine Carroll, as the cool blonde he meets on a train and who parks her initial misgivings to help him expose Godfrey Tearle's spy ring.
In its own way, Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza's horror outing Rec is just as technically assured. However, it's so pleased with the conceit of recording a zombie attack on a Barcelona tenement through the lens of a TV cameraman that it fails to incorporate any sense of character or suspense, as the residents prey upon themselves and their would-be rescuers after the city authorities seal off the premises to stop the spread of a flesh-eating virus that originated with a little girl's pet dog.
d=3,3,1Manuela Velasco won a Goya (the Spanish Oscar) for her spirited performance as the reporter on a dull reality show who jumps at the chance of a scoop. But the Blair Witchiness of the handheld camerawork and the ultimate (and tired) resort to green night-vision imagery too often render incidents incomprehensible and the climactic explanation, complete with a seemingly inevitable bit of Vatican bashing, is contrived in the extreme.
10:13am Thursday 10th April 2008
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