Another look at 'Bonjour Tristesse'

  In 1958, director Otto Preminger released Bonjour Tristesse, a film starring Jean Seberg, Deborah Kerr, and David Niven. I never saw that movie, but I've read that it received a better reception in France than in the U.S. 

   Now, the Francoise Sagan novel that inspired Preminger's film has attracted the attention of writer/director Durga Chew-Bose, who again travels to the Côte d'Azur for a story that embeds sharp psycho-sexual undercurrents in an atmosphere of soothing summer softness.

    The story centers on Cecile (Lily McInerny), an 18-year-old who seems to be gliding along nicely until she feels the need to meddle in her widowed father's relationships. 

    Claes Bang (The Square) portrays Raymond, a father who's spending the summer with Cecile and his girlfriend (Nailia Harzoune). He allows Cecile to flounder and make mistakes. He prefers not to give advice. 

    The trio’s emotional balance destabilizes when Anne (Chloe Sevigny) turns up. An assertive long-time friend of Raymond's late wife, she tries to manage Cecile, who seems to need guidance.

     The movie's conflicts sharpen when Anne and Raymond abruptly decide to marry. Cecile, who has her first sexual experience with a young law student (Aliocha Schneider), objects and schemes to derail the impending nuptials.

     Although the screenplay builds toward a tragic and provocative conclusion, the movie remains surprisingly placid. A story that may have seemed daring in the 1950s seldom feels charged with the fresh urgency you'd expect from a movie about a vacation stuffed with so much psychological baggage.

      Note: Sagan, who died at the age of 69 in 2004, was 18 when the novel was published. Note: This edition of Bonjour Tristesse isn’t a period piece; it’s set in the present.

Bob's Cinema Diary: 11/20/20 -- 'The Last Vermer' and 'The Sound of Metal'

The Last Vermeer

In The Last Vermeer, Guy Pearce plays Han van Meegeren, a notorious Dutch art forger who famously sold a fake Vermeer to Nazi bigwig Hermann Goring during World War II. Director Dan Friedkin centers his movie on a post-war accusation: Van Meegeren, Dutch authorities argued, betrayed his country by selling a national treasure to Goring. Van Meegeren concocted an unusual defense: He hadn't sold a Vermeer to a Nazi: He sold a forgery that he skillfully had painted. The story focuses on a Dutch Jew (Claes Bang) who, at the end of the war, serves in the Canadian army. His job: to root out those among the Dutch who collaborated with the Nazis. Initially convinced of van Meegeren's guilt, Bang's character comes to understand that the man was a gifted art mimic who had engineered a colossal fraud. Sincere and stalwart, Bang's Capt. Joseph Piller gets crosswise with a Dutch investigator (August Diehl) who's eager to put van Meegeren in front of a firing squad. The movie flirts with issues involving the complex behaviors that emerged as the Dutch tried to survive the Nazis. Piller fled into the underground: His wife (Marie Bach Hansen) made compromises to survive. Though it veers from the real story, The Last Vermeer remains fascinating for Pearce's portrayal of a man of enormous ego and moral flexibility, a character who contrasts mightily with the dour Piller. It's also sobering to know that a gifted forger can fool even those who are recognized as experts.

 Sound of Metal

In Sound of Metal, Riz Ahmed plays a punk-rock drummer who may have lost his hearing as a result of exposure to ear-splitting levels of noise. The movie isn't definitive about what caused Ahmed's Ruben to lose his hearing, but a musician who can't hear obviously finds himself at a great disadvantage. A recovering addict, Ruben is intent on regaining his hearing by way of cochlear implants, which are expensive and beyond his immediate financial reach. Ruben's girlfriend (Olivia Cooke) insists that he check into a facility run by a deaf Vietnam vet (Paul Raci) who trains people to live with their deafness. Raci's Joe doesn't view deafness as a disability but as a gateway to different forms of communication. Director Darius Marder creates a sound design that frequently mirrors Rubin's perspective. Ahmed creates a character whose nervous energies  and anxieties give the story a jittery edge. The movie ultimately leaves it to us to decide whether implants or adjustment to a life of deafness makes the most sense for Ruben. Marder reaches for    metaphor as Joe encourages Ruben to find the still, quiet place in himself, something that clearly has eluded a life marked by addiction, drumming and frantic movement. Whatever you think about Ruben's choice, you find yourself wondering how much of the noise that surrounds us really is worth hearing.

Waves of confusion roil this 'Bay'

Director Paula Van Der Oest brings as much confusion as intrigue to a big-screen adaptation of a 1986 novel by Lisa St. Aubin De Teran. The story kicks off in Liguria, Italy, where Will (Claes Bang) proposes to Rosalind (Olga Kurylenko). After a romantic prologue, the story leaps ahead 11 months. Will and Rosalind have settled into their London home with a new baby and with Rosalind’s twin daughters from a previous marriage. Things should be going well, but Rosalind is slipping off the deep end, peeling wallpaper off the walls and vibing more and more craziness. Suddenly,  Rosalind and the nanny (Shalisha James-Davis) disappear, along with the children. Will tracks them down in Normandy — only to learn that the baby has died. From that point on, little about the way the characters behave makes sense. We also have a strong idea that Rosalind’s former stepfather (Brian Cox) might have something to do with what’s gone wrong. It’s obvious that a mysterious fellow (Assaad Bouab) who lives in Normandy will figure into the dimly lit proceedings. Alice Krige turns up as Rosalind’s mother, but despite a game cast, the movie induces more head-scratching than suspense or mystery.

A caustic look at the art world

Sweden's The Square takes us into a world where art and basic human values seem constantly to clash.

You could spend a couple of hours unwinding the many subjects addressed in Swedish director Ruben Ostlund's The Square. Ostlund, who shook up the art-house world in 2014 with Force Majeure, takes on the pretensions of the art world and the split between purported cultural values and simple expressions of humanity. He also tackles class divisions and the way a hopelessly elitist art world pushes itself toward weird extremes.

The Square of the title refers to an art space created outside of a museum of modern art in Stockholm. Inside the space, which actually is quite small, the atmosphere is supposed to be one of helpfulness and toleration, a tiny retreat devoted to trust and caring. Not surprisingly, the world outside the square turns out to be ridiculously corrupt.

Ostlund builds his story around the museum's curator. Claes Bang portrays Christian, a museum executive whose hypocrisy will be exposed as the movie unveils a series of episodes that sometimes amuse, sometimes confound and sometimes seem a little too on the nose to be as provocative as Ostlund may have intended.

If you're the sort of person who believes the art world is hopelessly out of touch with anything that concerns "normal" experience, you'll probably side with Ostlund as he poses a series of arty jokes. The main exhibit at the museum consists of piles of gravel assembled in the shape of small pyramids across a gallery floor. It's silly, of course, but just plausible enough to make us see why visitors to the museum might spend hours trying to tease possible meanings from these piles of rocks.

You may do the same with The Square. The movie is ambitious, scattered, funny, flawed and disjointed.

Say this, though, as the curator of the museum, Bang proves an able ringmaster as he presides over Ostlund's circus of a movie. American audiences also will recognize Elisabeth Moss, who turns up as a TV reporter doing a story on the new exhibit. Later, she climbs into bed with Bang's character.

Post sex discussion between the two characters hardly leans toward sweet talk, degenerating, instead, into an argument about who's going to throw away the condom the couple used. Perhaps a suspicious Christian thinks that Moss's character wants to set him up for a Lewinski-like dress moment. Who knows?

Did I mention that before the reporter and her subject have sex, a chimp wanders through Moss's character's apartment, creating both laughs and consternation? It’s one of the film's several WTF moments.

During the interview with Moss's character, Christian reveals that his major (and possibly only) concern centers on raising money for the museum.

That's not the only money-oriented moment in The Square. At a fund-raising dinner, a performance artist pretends to be a gorilla and winds up terrorizing the guests. This bizarre twist presumably is meant to show how much abuse viewers will tolerate if they believe they’re looking at art. The scene also exposes the ruthlessness that afflicts the art crowd. Under those tuxedos, monsters lurk. The whole scene would have made a spectacularly unnerving short.

Earlier, a couple of hip marketing geniuses persuade the museum’s staff that tolerance and compassion never will draw attention to The Square. To spice things up, they create a promotional video in which a girl is blown up. They wanted to give the project an edge.

Perhaps to knock Christian out of his protected cocoon, Ostlund includes a mugging in which Christian loses his wallet, his phone, and a pair of prized cufflinks. The resultant developments expose his silliness, as well as his inability to get beyond his own preoccupations.

So what to make of all this? Clearly, Ostlund has skills. He's a filmmaker who's interested in morality and responsibility, subjects that need plenty of attention at the moment. But in The Square, he's got so much on his plate that it takes him all of 2 1/2 sometimes taxing hours to unravel the movie's many threads.

As a result, The Square stands as a triumph of ambition that results in a wildly mixed achievement, water balloons dropped by a prankish director on the art world's many targets of opportunity.