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Romance
Language
By
Shawn Stone
Italian
for Beginners
Directed
by Lone Scherfig
 This
Danish film about a group of more-or-less-normal, more-or-less-unhappy
thirtysomething people who bring love, sex and meaning into
their lives through the unusual vehicle of an Italian-language
class is thoroughly charming. In fact, it will be a surprise
if Italian for Beginners doesn’t turn out to be one
of the best two or three films to reach local screens this
year.
There are no opening credits, save a handwritten title card
confirming that the picture is, officially, a Dogme95 film.
Since film ratings are now discreetly tucked away after the
endless end credits, the fact of this “certification” is as
peculiar as an old movie carrying the imprimatur of the Kansas
Board of Film Censors. While the virtuous Kansans of long
ago might have cleansed a film of smoking or drinking references,
the virtuous Danes of the Dogme movement have purified their
cinema of what they consider to be artifice, by, among other
things, using a single handheld camera and eschewing genres.
I suppose this means Italian for Beginners is a romantic
comedy only accidentally.
Set in the cold Copenhagen winter, the story concerns an engaging
cast of characters including a recently widowed, still-mourning
pastor named Andreas (Anders W. Berthelsen); Jorgen Mortensen
(Peter Gantzler), a shy hotel clerk with sexual performance
issues; and Halvfinn (Lars Kaalund), a comically obnoxious
hothead with the misfortune (for his customers) to be in restaurant
business. Giulia (Sara Indrio Jensen) is an Italian waitress
out of place in the pale North; Karen (Ann Eleonora Jørgensen)
is a kind hairdresser with a monstrous mother; Olympia (Anette
Støvelbæk) is a klutz with the misfortune (for her customers)
to work in a bakery. Everyone has his or her own private,
quite real pain, and everyone is related to everyone else
in inventively serendipitous ways. Seeing this all sorted
out is very enjoyable.
One can laugh at the Dogme95 movement for its idealism and
restrictive cinematic rules, but judging by this result, there
is a lot to be said for believing in something and sticking
to your creed. As employed by director Lone Scherfig, the
handheld photography is intimate and immediate without becoming
overbearing, and the fast-paced editing is unobtrusive and
adds immeasurably to the film’s light (not lightweight) tone.
Scherfig also isn’t afraid of wit; when Olympia’s grotesque
father rants that he could have left her on the floor to rot
when she was a baby, Scherfig dutifully pans to a spot on
the floor, as if that forlorn baby were still there. The studied
Dogme95 proscription for cinema proves as liberating as the
film’s trip to Italy.
Also, consider that a story about a group of repressed Northern
Europeans loosening up through contact with Southern
European/Mediterranean culture isn’t exactly a shiny new concept;
dour Scandinavians and stiff-upper-lip Brits have been cavorting
through romantic Italy in search of fun for a couple of centuries.
That the Dogme95 gang can revitalize romantic comedy and create
a film as funny, heartfelt and satisfying as this should be
a lesson to Hollywood. Perhaps Julia Roberts should make her
next film in Copenhagen.
Blood
Runs Cold
Queen
of the Damned
Directed
by Michael Rymer
The vampire Lestat was last seen inhabiting the body of Tom
Cruise in Interview With a Vampire, but he appears
in Queen of the Damned—the feature-length music-video
adaptation of the Anne Rice vampire chronicle—in the form
of Stuart Townsend. Townsend, who looks (and moves) like a
Greek statue, has about as much magnetism as chiseled marble,
and not a drop of the charisma required of a rock star. This
is really bad juju for the film, which posits Lestat as the
latest MTV sensation. The parallels between rock stars and
vampires—waking after dark, decadent attire, fabulous wealth,
slavish acolytes, and the nightly pick of willing victims—are
too obvious to be interesting, except for one point: Both
vocations are isolating.
And underneath all the high-fashion cinematography, homoerotic
posturing, blood-sucking fetishism, techno-metal soundtracking
and orgiastic gore, Queen of the Damned does seem to
be about loneliness. Or at least it’s got a lot of lonely
characters in it. Lestat is abandoned by his “maker,” Marius
(aging French pretty boy Vincent Perez), after he bites into
an ancient statue of Queen Akasha (the late R&B singer
Aaliyah), and gets a transfusion of extra-premium vampire
blood, bringing the homicidal queen back to life in the process.
Fast-forward 200 years. Lestat’s biggest fan is Jessie (Marguerite
Moreau), a 20-year-old antiquities scholar and member of a
vampire neighborhood-watch group in London. Jessie is lonely
because her Auntie (Lena Olin) cast her off in childhood.
Disguising herself as a groupie, Jessie pleads to Lestat “Let
me be with you,” with all the forbidden passion of ordering
a textbook on Old London street grids (Moreau would’ve been
more convincing as a zombie). As if this weren’t enough silliness,
Akasha shows up just as Lestat’s band is making its debut
appearance—in Death Valley (and drawing an infinitely larger
crowd than even a double bill of Marilyn Manson and N’Sync
could). It’s bye-bye to Jessie and all the goth-club poseurs
on two continents: Akasha wants Lestat, and she does not like
to share. It’s also bye-bye to about half the population of
California, who supply the queen with her nightly Slurpees.
Akasha is just a walking special effect, but then, so is everybody
else. And for such a ridiculous film, the damned are rather
humorless, despite some pallid attempts at camp (Lestat to
Marius: “How did you get through the ’50s in red velvet?”).
Townsend’s mechanical hauteur casts Cruise’s delectably sardonic
performance (one of his best, as it turns out) in a halo of
fresh appreciation. And though Queen of the Damned
rips off whole tableaux from Interview, it never comes
within hissing range of that film’s creepy intensity. This
chronicle is much closer in mood to The Crow: City
of Angels, another senseless, soundtrack-
marketing gimmick based on nightclubgoer wish-fulfillment
and starring Perez.
Those Who Know tell me that Queen of the Damned is
the least suitable of the vampire chronicles for screen adaptation,
and that Rice fans would have much preferred a movie of The
Vampire Lestat, which serves as a prequel of sorts to
Interview. But then, early baroque can’t compete with
techno metal when it comes to selling soundtracks.
—Ann
Morrow
I
See Dead Spouses
Dragonfly
Directed
by Tom Shadyac
If you see M. Night Shyamalan anytime soon, kick his ass.
For while the writer-director of The Sixth Sense is
hardly the only culprit behind the ongoing boom in nebulously
spiritual entertainment—if anything, Shyamalan simply tapped
into the zeitgeist with his millennial tale of voices from
the great beyond—he absolutely is the person to blame for
current movies about faithless Americans trying to wrap their
heads around new levels of reality. The recent Richard Gere
bomb The Mothman Prophecies was a stylish Shyamalan
rip-off that packed some solid chills, but Dragonfly,
the latest turd from Kevin Costner, takes everything that
was annoying about The Sixth Sense and couples those
attributes with a jaw-droppingly moronic narrative.
Costner, who proved with Thirteen Days that it’s still
conceivable for him to appear in a quality film, plays to
all of his weaknesses in this deadly dull “thriller.” He plays
Chicago doctor Joe Darrow, whose wife died recently in Colombia,
where she gave medical assistance to impoverished folks. (And
let’s not talk about the flashbacks in which the dead doc
flits through the Third World with hair and makeup straight
out of a Vidal Sassoon commercial.) Anyway, Joe is working
himself to death so he doesn’t have to deal with his grief,
and he starts encountering people while they have near-death
experiences. Joe believes his expired missus is using these
people as conduits through which to send messages from the
afterlife.
OK, fine. Dead wife, supernatural voices, near-death experiences
. . . perfectly good ingredients for something creepy or at
least distracting. But when the filmmakers hit us with gobbledygook
about spirits traveling through rainbows and using images
of dragonflies to imply the presence of the dead doctor—she
had a dragonfly tattoo, see, just like the one a relative
of hers had on his ass—the bullshit piles so deep that even
Costner, by all reports a tall and virile individual, can’t
wade through it. The movie also is disrespectful of those
who believe in the spirit world, because Dragonfly
makes the spirit world seem like a brightly colored playland
so noxious even the Teletubbies wouldn’t hang out there.
And, yes, the movie’s got a Sixth Sense-style trick
ending, but the ending of Dragonfly is so ludicrous
and saccharine that it’s more like a slap in the face to people
who trudged through everything that preceded it than a reward
at the end of an interesting journey. Even Costner seems to
lose interest in the movie within the first 10 minutes—he
shuffles through the film with the enthusiasm and emotional
expression of a No. 2 pencil. Hell, sitting through The
Postman again would have been more fun than enduring Dragonfly
for the first time.
—Peter
Hanson
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