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Fargo
Shanghai Star. 2004-01-08
Director: Joel Coen
Starring: Frances McDormand, William H. Macy, Steve Buscemi, Peter
Stormare, Harve Presnell
The Coen brothers, in their 20-year movie-making career, have managed to
continue walking the thin line between mainstream and art house. They
collaborate closely on every aspect of each movie they are making: one
brother (usually Ethan) directs, both write the screenplay and both do the
film-editing (they're film editor "Roderick Jaynes" in the credits).
Their gimmick has been to take a standard movie genre and turn it on its
head. They've done this in a dozen low-budget films and they (mostly) don't
use big stars. Their first effort was "Blood Simple" in 1984 - a movie that
starts out looking like classic film noir and suddenly goes really weird.
While the Coens now have a large following of fans, the cinema-going
masses still approach each of their offerings cautiously. Some have bombed
("The Hudsucker Proxy"), some have done not too badly ("Miller's Crossing",
"Barton Fink") and some have done moderately well ("Raising Arizona", "Oh
Brother, Where Art Thou", "The Big Lebowski").
But their biggest success has been "Fargo" (1996). Joel Coen cast his wife,
Frances McDormand, in the main role as the heavily pregnant, perpetually
eating police chief of Brainerd, Minnesota (allegedly the hometown of
legendary axeman, Paul Bunyan).
McDormand won an Academy Award for her playing of Police Chief Marge
Gunderson and the Coen brothers won another for the screenplay.
There's one slight problem with the screenplay - at the outset of the movie we
are told that the story is based on real events in Minnesota in 1987. However,
the brothers later admitted this was untrue and that they had made up the
whole storyline.
This had a strange sequel: a Japanese woman who saw "Fargo" and
believed it was all for real, came to Minnesota and died of exposure when
trying to find a suitcase full of money supposedly buried in the snow.
The film also annoyed the residents of Minnesota who thought the brothers themselves from the state - were sending Minnesota up. In fact, the brothers
were celebrating the decency and high morality of today's descendants of the
original Scandinavian settlers. The contented, if quirky, lives of ordinary
Minnesotans are contrasted with the greed and brutality of the murderous
interlopers summoned to Brainerd by local car salesman Jerry Lundegaard
(the excellent William H. Macy).
Jerry needs money fast and he decides to get it by arranging for his wife to
be kidnapped so he can force his father-in-law to pay a huge ransom. The
scheme starts to fall apart right from the start and Jerry's life begins its
inexorable and inevitable spiral into an out-of-control nightmare.
The kidnappers are played by Steve Buscemi (a member of the Coen
brothers stock company) and Peter Stormare, wonderfully menacing as a
nearly mute, cold-eyed psychopath.
The supporting cast is equally good: Harve Presnell is the selfish and rich
father of the kidnapped wife (Kristin Rudrud) and John Carroll Lynch is great
as Norm, the slow-talking, duck-painting husband of Marge Gunderson.
There's a strange scene towards the end of the movie which at first seems to
have nothing to do with the plot. It's when Marge meets up with a former
schoolmate, Mike Yanagita (Steve Park) whom she later finds out is seriously
disturbed and living in a fantasy world. However, maybe this is why Marge
decides to take another look at Jerry Lundegaard and his life of desperate
despair and ruined fantasies.
Because it's by the Coen brothers, "Fargo" has managed to make two top100 movie lists - as a comedy and as a drama.
(Barry Porter)
Swimming Pool
Director: Francois Ozon
Starring: Charlotte Rampling, Ludivine Sagnier, Charles Dance, Jean-Marie
Lamour, Marc Fayolle
Swimming Pool is a movie by Europe's most daring and inventive
writer/director, Francois Ozon. It is his first movie in English.
Sarah Morton (Charlotte Rampling) is a famous British author who has
written several best-selling detective novels. Tired of London and seeking
inspiration for her new detective novel, she accepts an offer from her
publisher and close friend John Bosload (Charles Dance) to stay at his
country home in Luberon in the south of France.
It is the off-season, and Sarah finds that the beautiful country locale and
unhurried pace is just the tonic for her - until late one night, when John's
indolent and insouciant French daughter Julie (Ludivine Sagnier)
unexpectedly arrives. Sarah's prim and steely English reserve is jarred by
Julie's reckless, sexually charged lifestyle.
She has to spend restless nights listening to Julie having sex with different
men. Their interactions set off an increasingly unsettling series of events, as
Sarah's creative process and a possible real-life murder begin to blend
dangerously together. Sarah finally helps Julie bury the man she has killed.
If you have watched too many Hollywood movies, the nude scenes in this
French movie may strike you as the most different aspect, so put this disc out
of the reach of children. American movies seem to be far more conservative
in regard to nude scenes, although very open in terms of violent content. The
actresses play very well in the simple plot, with the psychological wars
between the two women being very well depicted.
(Xing Bao)
Elephant
Director: Gus van Sant
Starring: Eric Deulen, Alex Frost, Elias McConnell, John Robinson
Based upon the 1999 Columbine high school massacre, van Sant's
"Elephant" (2003) avoids easy moral polemics and trite sociology to present a
strangely hypnotic portrait of mundane teenage life shattered by a radically
extraordinary event.
With prolonged trailing shots following the cast of real Portland high school
pupils on long inconsequential journeys through the school's corridors, class
rooms and recreation grounds, linear narrative disintegrates into a series of
chance encounters and intersections. Audience expectations of dramatic
linkages and explanatory motivations are subtly unraveled into a web of
understated everyday interactions between ordinary students, pursuing banal
social objectives.
The effect is so mesmerizing that by the time alienated youngsters Alex and
Eric (Alex Frost and Eric Deulen) arrive at the school, weighed down with
weaponry, and begin cooly mowing down staff and fellow students alike, the
entire process has acquired the quality of a haunting dreamlike flow. The
killers are shown earlier - also in long soporific scenes - playing the piano and
violent video games, as if to establish an order of sequential connections
attuned to fluid adolescent emotionality rather than the structured rational
causality of the adult world.
With its themes of randomness, senseless flow, the dangerous absurdity of
adolescence and homo-erotic social disconnection (several scenes introduce
this topic, without labouring it), "Elephant" proves both an entrancing and
frustrating movie, substituting atmosphere and identification for dramatic
logic, coherence and resolution. Its strengths seem to have persuaded the
critics, however, and it won both the Palme d'Or and the Best Director prizes
at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival.
(Nick Land)
Copyright by Shanghai Star.