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Paris, Quiet City, Crazy Love and Out of Shame
When not teaching cinema, Cédric Klapisch makes engaging ensemble dramas that bear the seemingly incompatible influence of his favourite directors, Woody Allen, Ingmar Bergman, John Cassavetes, Martin Scorsese and Maurice Pialat. Since first making an impact in this country with When the Cats Away (1995), Klapisch has demonstrated a facility for the well-drawn characters, smart dialogue and credible situations that made Un Air de Famille (1996), Pot Luck (2002) and its sequel Russian Dolls (2005) so moreish.
He is on equally good form with Paris, a variation on Woody Allen's Manhattan, that places sapient emphasis on Christophe Beaucarne's widescreen vistas of the City of Light. For once, the action that plays out against Sacre Coeur, Père Lachaise, the Rungis and the Eiffel Tower is not always compelling or wholly convincing. But Klapisch is such a master of manipulating large casts that this arthouse soap could never be accused of lacking incident.
Juliette Binoche particularly shines as the single mother feeling her age, who develops a tentative crush on market stallholder Albert Dupontel, who is himself dealing with his confused feelings for ex-wife Julie Ferrier. However, Romain Duris (pictured) and Fabrice Luchini also show well, respectively as Binoche's dancer brother (who has just been informed that he has a potentially fatal heart condition) and the academic whose fixation with student Melanie Laurent turns him into a stalking, texting voyeur.
On a totally different scale, Aaron Katz's Quiet City is the latest example of the so-called mumblecore melodramas produced by such indie directors as Andrew Bujalski, Joe Swanberg and the Duplass brothers. Nothing much happens. Yet Katz captures the atmosphere of the empty Brooklyn streets and the spontaneity of Erin Fisher and Cris Lankenau's growing affection with an insouciance that makes the entire film seem delightfully eavesdropped.
Fresh from breaking up with her boyfriend, Fisher comes to stay with a notoriously unreliable friend and gratefully accepts Lankenau's subway platform invitation to wait in a nearby coffee shop. Their conversation is awkward, but authentic and romance seems pleasingly possible at the end of a day spent chatting, hanging out with the genially glum Lankenau's offbeat friends and having running races in the park.
Comparisons will lazily be made with Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise. But Katz prefers everyday exchanges to verbal pyrotechnics and if his use of pillow shots between scenes self-consciously recalls Yasujiro Ozu, he can be forgiven for the simple beauty of Andy Reed's images of light on foliage, shifting skyscapes and the unfussy architecture of a New York neighbourhood that feels as relaxed and open to new experiences as Fisher and her new beau.
The affair is hideously less wholesome in Dan Kloves's documentary Crazy Love, which exposes the tabloid truth about an ambulance-chasing lawyer who vowed revenge on the glamorous New York virgin who dumped him because he wouldn't get divorced. Yet not only did 21-year-old Linda Riss forgive Burt Pugach for hiring hitmen to throw acid in her face, but she also married him after he was released from a 16-year prison sentence.
Despite bickering constantly, the couple remain surprisingly devoted and they reminisce about both the incident that left Linda permanently blinded and Burt's second trial for attacking the woman he was stalking with a compelling candour that recalls Andrew Jarecki's deeply disconcerting domestic saga Capturing the Friedmans. However, Kloves's clips and quips approach lacks the same invention and precludes any real psychological analysis of this gruesome twosome.
With the demolished statues of Bamayan providing a dramatic backdrop, Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame is a simple, but affecting story that has been unfairly maligned in some quarters for a lack of sophistication. Twentysomething Iranian director Hana Makhmalbaf consciously adopts the perspective of her protagonist - a six-year-old girl who simply doesn't understand why she's not allowed to join her mischievous male neighbour at the local school - and she's rewarded by a disarming performance by Nikbakht Noruz as the diminutive child whose determination to raise the funds for a notebook and pencil takes her to the market stalls and sidestreets of the bustling nearby town and lands her in trouble with a despicable cadre of tweenage fundamentalists.
Revealing the extent to which the harshness of life has enabled Taliban influence to persist among the newly liberated Afghans, this is a dismaying study of the ease with which children can be persuaded to accept anything as truth.
10:01am Thursday 24th July 2008
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