Suspicion overwhelms a psychiatrist

 

   Speaking fluent French, Jodie Foster plays an American-born psychiatrist embroiled in a mystery set in Paris, the city where she lives and works. Directed by Rebecca Zlotowski, A Private Life strikes many seductively smart notes as it follows Foster's Lilian Steiner, a character whose inner life becomes increasingly apparent to us -- if not always to her.

   Emotionally controlled and guarded, Lilian suspects that one of her patients (Virginie Efira) was murdered by her husband (Mathieu Amalric). Could Lilian's suspicions be a cover for her inability to listen carefully? Did she miss something vital about Efira's Paula, whose death was ruled a suicide?

     As she explores the possibility of foul play, Lilian begins an atypical journey — at least for her: She begins playing detective, eventually enlisting help from her ex-husband (Daniel Auteuil). Maybe the truth can't be discovered on a psychiatrist's couch.

    A well-paired Auteuil and Foster sometimes seem to be playing a farce, revealing themselves to be rank amateurs when it comes to solving crimes.

    It's not always easy to determine what Zlotowski has in mind as she mixes thriller tones, comedy, serious drama, and at times, absurdity. 

    At one point, for example, Lilian -- not a likely person to believe in reincarnation -- spins a wild fantasy about her grown son's former life as a Nazi supporter during World War II, an odd display of imagination considering that Lilian and all the members of her immediate family are Jewish. 

    Lilian's loss of control becomes apparent early. After learning of her patient's death, she begins to shed tears. She visits Auteuil's Gabriel; conveniently, he's an ophthalmologist. Gabriel's ability to help people see (literally) contrasts with Lilian’s ability to apply the same skill -- at least metaphorically.

    An encounter with a hypnotist (Sophie Guillemin) makes for a diverting scene. Lilian tries hypnotism to cure her of the involuntary tears that roll down her face. It’s inaccurate to call it “crying” because Lilian’s tears seem disconnected from any emotional state.

    Lilian learned about the hypnotist from an irate patient (Noam Morgensztern), who insists that he's wasted money on therapy after the hypnotist helped him stop smoking with one visit. So much for eight years of analysis, not the only swipe the movie takes at Freudian psychoanalysis.

    Working from a screenplay she co-wrote with Anne Berest and Gaelle Mace, Zlotowski adds an element that points to Lilian's ability to wall herself off from her patients. She records all her sessions on an outdated mini-disc system, allowing the discs to do the work of note-taking and perhaps dulling her attention.

    It's wonderful to see Auteuil (Manon of the Springs and Jean de Florette) as a devoted former husband who never totally lost his love for his wife. He creates a character who handles himself with wit and intelligence. Foster and Auteuil generate appealing chemistry as they flirt with the idea of renewing their characters' relationship. 

   A Private Life stands as a bit of an oddity, a film that's alternately involving, amusing, and, at times, confounding in its attempts to play in so many different registers. The movie's complexity can become a puzzle that feels unsolved, but Zlotowski, Foster, and a distinctive supporting cast create pieces that amuse, intrigue, and keep the story percolating.

Wes Anderson's grand scheme movie

 I use a notebook during screenings to keep track of specifics -- dates, locations, and colors. Things like that. If my handwriting were better these notes would be more useful, but even as they drift toward indecipherability, they serve as a memory aid.

  During the screening of director Wes Anderson's The Phoenician Scheme, I reached a point where I stopped taking notes. I couldn't keep up with the surfeit of detail that cropped up in Anderson's carefully constructed sets, each of which becomes a kind of destination that can outweigh the importance of where the story might be headed.

    Anderson tends to indulge in detailed design, so much so that it's only a mild overstatement to call his scenes  dioramas with actors. There's world building and then there's world building that feels chiseled; movies such as the Phoenician Scheme flood the screen with their drolly express detailing.

     The Anderson aesthetic is richly displayed in Phoenician Scheme, but the movie also includes dull stretches that take us from episode to episode, some set off by title cards expressing variable amounts of wit.

      So what's The Phonecian Scheme about? A greedy tycoon named Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio Del Toro) aims to control the resources of a fictional region called Modern Greater Independent Phoenicia. Zsa-zsa's ambition sends him to a tour to raise funds for an intricate infrastructure project.

     Kate Winslet's real-life daughter Mia Threapleton plays Korda's daughter Liesl, the character who brings the movie's father/daughter theme into focus. Korda wants Threapleton's Liesl to take over his empire, choosing her over his nine sons, the equivalent of non-player characters in video games.

     The problem: Liesl is on the verge of taking her vows as a nun, an occupation that would limit her ability to play Zsa-zsa's ruthless game. To the extent that it's possible, Liesl adds moral fiber to Zsa-Zsa's project: Unlike her father, she refuses to use slaves to help with any required construction. 

     A scorecard might be needed to keep track of the actors who appear in small roles. Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston turn up in a sequence involving a strange H-O-R-S-E-like game of basketball. Anderson also makes room for appearances by Riz Ahmed, Benedict Cumberbatch, Mathieu Amalric, and Scarlett Johansson. 

     Michael Cera gets more screen time as Bjorn, an insect collector who travels with Korda and Liesl. He serves as Liesl's tutor and Zsa-zsa's "guy Friday."

     The performances fit into the Anderson's deadpan presentation of a playful weirdness that extends to costumes (a striking set of pajamas) or personal appearance (Cumberbatch's graying two-tone beard).  

     Set in the 1950s, Phoenician Scheme seems more subdued than previous Anderson efforts, although it begins with a plane crash that might be read as a commentary on the preposterous inhumanity of contemporary action sequences. Zsa-zsa we learn has survived many plane crashes. He's like man living on perpetual borrowed time. Perhaps that's why he seems a bit bored with himself.

      Anderson's devoted fans who wouldn't miss one of his movies. Should others venture into The Phoenician Scheme they may have to settle for quiet appreciation of the environments Anderson creates and his occasional displays of audacity -- e.g., the basketball sequence. 

       I'm not sure where to rank Phoenician Scheme

in Anderson's extensive catalog. The movie struck me as one more stop on a continuing journey, something like a restaurant with a forgettable main course, but lots of tasty side dishes.

A feverish movie about van Gogh

Yes, there have been many movies about Vincent Van Gogh, but At Eternity's Gate is one made by a painter, Julian Schnabel.

No artist seems to have inspired more filmmakers than Vincent van Gogh, not only because van Gogh survives as a painter of obvious art-historical importance but because his life helped to create the classic portrait of the suffering artist, the unrecognized genius who searches for spiritual exultation but also crashes back to earth. In van Gogh's case that meant cutting off his left ear and serving time in a mental asylum.

Julian Schnabel, a well-known contemporary artist and filmmaker, now joins the van Gogh fray with At Eternity's Gate, a movie focusing mostly on van Gogh's life in Arles, which serves as a kind of preface to his untimely and still somewhat mysterious death. He was shot in the stomach but there's disagreement about whether van Gogh was murdered or killed himself. He was 37 when he died in 1890.

Schnabel uses van Gogh's letters to his brother Theo, invented dialogue and some of the actual locations where van Gogh painted to bolster what amounts to an interpretive plunge into van Gogh's alternately soaring, alternately troubled mind, conveyed with disturbing authenticity by actor Willem Dafoe.

Schnabel, who wrote the screenplay with Louise Kugelberg and Jean-Claude Carriere, presents a view of the artist as a visionary who saw through to the essence of reality in nature but, ironically, began to lose touch with reality in his own life, often failing to remember important events.

The movie's most impressive support comes from Oscar Isaac as Paul Gaugin, a far more self-assured artist than van Gogh whose lack of prominence during his lifetime continually caused him to question his own ability.

Rupert Friend portrays Theo, van Gogh's tender, accepting brother and patron. Mads Mikkelsen plays a priest who's assigned the task of judging van Gogh's mental state before he's released from an asylum and turned back into the world.

Mathieu Amalric, who appeared in Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, portrays Dr. Gachet, the physician who cared for van Gogh and became the subject of one his most famous portraits. Emmanuelle Seigner plays Marie Ginoux, another subject of a van Gogh portrait and owner of a cafe in Arles, the town where van Gogh drank -- often too much. French actor Niels Arestrup has a brief but compelling turn as a fellow patient at the asylum where van Gogh commits himself.

Schnabel spends time showing van Gogh developing his relationship with nature -- at first simply observing, then sketching and finally painting.

Van Gogh heads to Arles for sunlight but arrives at a moment when the land remains under the grip of winter's chill. A desolate image of a field of lifeless sunflowers suggests that moribund nature awaits van Gogh's reviving eye.

At one point, Gaugin tells van Gogh that he paints too fast and overpaints; i.e., he uses so much paint his art tends to look like sculpture, presumably a conversation that Schnabel imagined van Gogh and Gaugin might have had.

I had a roughly similar feeling about cinematographer Benoit Delhomme's hand-held work. At best, Delhomme uses his camera to simulate the rapid strokes of a palette knife or the darting of the painter's eyes. But an unsteady camera also proves disorienting. And some of the visual tricks of focus and non-focus push too hard to give us a view of what van Gogh might have seen during episodes in which he's losing his grip.

Then, there's the question of age. Dafoe is 63 years old. Amazingly, casting him as van Gogh in his 30s doesn't prove distracting because we're witnessing an intensely subjective account of van Gogh's final years. Think of Dafoe as the embodiment of van Gogh's old soul.

For the most part, Schnabel tries to keep his work contemporaneous with van Gogh's exploratory intellect. In an early picture episode, van Gogh approaches a young woman who's herding sheep.

"Look at me," he implores, saying he wants to sketch her.

Van Gogh yearned to be seen -- not as an act of an unsatisfied ego but as the fulfillment of what he saw as a calling. Van Gogh's desire to share his vision underlies nearly everything that happens as Schnabel moves from one part of the story to the next, allowing the screen to sink into blackness between each of the movie's vignettes.

Not one for creative timidity, Schnabel even begins the movie daringly. We see a darkened screen and hear van Gogh talking about his very simple desire for acceptance and comfort. There aren't many directors who'd begin a movie about one of the world's most famous artist with words rather than with an image.

At Eternity's Gate marks the second film Schnabel has made about a painter. His first feature -- 1996's Basquiat -- looked at another painter whose life ended early. Jean-Michel Basquiat was 28 when a heroin overdose cut his life short.

If you're interested in understanding the mood Schnabel creates in his second movie about someone who can be viewed as an art-world casualty, you might want to take a look at the painting for which the movie is named. That painting was made by van Gogh in 1890, the year of his death. It shows a balding man sitting on a wooden chair in front of a sketchily drawn fire. The man's elbows rest on his thighs. His head is buried in his clenched fists. Presumably, he's thinking about his death, which may be imminent.

Can van Gogh's subject find something redeeming in this moment of sorrowful apprehension? You may want to think about that question as you watch Dafoe become van Gogh in Schnabel's boldly conceived, if somewhat jagged, interpretation.*

My favorite movie about artist Vincent van Gogh remains director Paul Cox's Vincent, a documentary that made its way into theaters in 1987. To make his movie, Cox used van Gogh's paintings, the locations in which the painter worked and excerpts from letters van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo. The combination allowed Cox to capture van Gogh's search for transcendence, a spiritual journey anchored in the earthy realities of the landscapes that compelled him.

When ghosts have yet to die

Mathieu Amalric, Marion Cotillard and Charlotte Gainsbourg star in Ismael's Ghosts.

By most measures, French director Arnaud Desplechin’s Ismael’s Ghosts should be dismissed as hopelessly muddled, slightly pretentious and loaded with self-conscious time shifts that can confuse more than they clarify. But Desplechin’s movie, I think, deserves more nuanced consideration, particularly if you think of it as a rambling meditation about a filmmaker who’s battling ghosts of his past, one of which turns up in the form of a real person.

Desplechin begins his film as if it were a thriller about a spy named Ivan Dedalus, a film-within-a-film ploy that suggests Desplechin’s desire to turn Ismael's Ghosts into a kind of cinematic playground. Don’t become overly involved in this thriller because you’ll soon learn that you've entered the imagination of writer/director Ismael Vuillard (Mathieu Amalric), a director who's working on the screenplay for the movie we’ve been watching.

A second rank filmmaker, Vuillard never seems to have matched the work of his former father-in-law Henri Bloom (Laszlo Szabo), a director who’s not afraid to allow his ego to spill over into rudeness while insisting that his behavior constitutes an essential form of rebellion.

We also learn that Vuillard's former wife (Marion Cotillard) disappeared 21 years ago. She since has been declared dead but Vuillard can't abandon her memory.

The movie's set-up creates many boats for Desplechin to rock. Vuillard is the midst of a new relationship with Sylvia (Charlotte Gainsbourg) when a woman turns up claiming to be the long-lost Carlotta, the wife he can’t forget.

To add to the film’s already challenging density, we also learn that the spy in Vuillard’s movie is based on the life of his real brother, a man who has little respect for Vuillard.

All of this information slides into view without much concern for either chronological or even logical coherence.

But Desplechin isn’t attacking the formal conventions of cinema so much as he’s recreating Vuillard’s fevered world, rendered in rendered in alternating strokes of joy and desperation by Amalric, whose portrayal of Vuillard does little to glorify the role of the film director. In Amalric’s hands, Vuillard becomes a mess, a man who can annoy, amuse and even plunge — a little too willingly perhaps — into moments of existential despair.

As a woman who refuses to explain herself, Cotillard adds an aura of mystery and intrigue. Can Carlotta reinsert herself into Vuillard’s life? Will her sudden reappearance cause her father to die of shock? What to make of what Carlotta's claims that she was in a loveless marriage in India during the years in which she vanished from Paris?

Gainsbourg’s Sylvia, an astrophysicist by trade, might be the only character who isn’t overcome by waves of personal confusion.

Did I mention that the spy in Vuillard's movie (Louis Garrel) keeps turning up; snippets of thriller that Vuillard is making punctuate the blurry narrative.

I wouldn’t argue with those who find Ismael’s Ghosts stuffed to the point where it bursts any attempt at significance.

You also could tie yourself in knots trying to make something of Desplechin’s literary references, saddling characters with names that recall James Joyce — Bloom and Dedalus, for example. I took all this rarified name-dropping as little more than wry gamesmanship on Desplechin's part.

It helps not to take Ismael’s Ghosts too seriously. Desplechin may be poking fun at us, as well as at characters who get lost in the maze he creates. Of course, the movie frustrates but its confusions push Desplechin toward something vital, the way his characters respond to the disjointed absurdities with which he confronts them.

Polanski and the battle of the sexes

Roman Polanski tries his hand at another stage play in Venus in Fur, a mini-movie that represents a definite improvement over 2011's Carnage, a movie also based on a play. This time, Polanski translates David Ives's Broadway production into French, turning it into a claustrophobic power struggle between a playwright/director (Mathieu Amalric) and a mysterious actress (Emmanuelle Seigner) who's trying out for a part in the director's adaptation of a novel by real-life, 19th-century author Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Polanski's remarkably fluid opening and closing shots are enough to justify the price of admission. Better yet, the performances are intriguing, perhaps because they totally embody the movie's deeper meanings. Seigner's character wheedles her way into an audition. Amazingly, she already knows her lines, and she's quite good. Amalric's character reads with her, playing the part of an aristocrat. As the story unfolds, director and actress begin jockeying for position. Seigner's character becomes increasingly bold, often taking aim at the director's judgment. In Seigner's capable hands, the play becomes a sharply observed study of acting, pretense and sudden shifts in direction. Polanski's two-character drama is limited only by the material itself: It can seem more tricky than profound, but Polanski knows how to stage a battle between the sexes with the advantage, in this case, tipping toward Seigner's wily, alluring and seldom predictable chara

A heartbreaking Iranian fable

Is it an art object or a movie? Chicken with Plums takes its time creating sad beauty.

Nasser Ali-Khan is a world-class violinist. But when his wife -- in a fit of rage -- breaks his violin, he stops playing. Nasser finds a replacement violin, but he can't find the spirit required to resume his brilliant career.

As the Iranian movie -- Chicken With Plums -- unfolds, we learn that Nasser's problems extend back to the days before he was unhappily married with children. You see, Nasser loved a young woman like he'd never loved anyone before or since. And she loved him back.

But -- as cruel fate would have it -- the young woman's father refused to let his daughter squander her life with a musician who might not be able to support her. Nasser moved on, but he left his heart behind.

So goes the story told by directors Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi, who previously directed the brilliant animated film Persepolis. This time, the directing duo mixes live action and animation for a story that's at once sad and invigorating.

The sadness stems from Nasser Ali-Khan's slow march toward death. The invigoration derives from the intoxicating mixture of realism and artifice that makes Chicken with Plums special, a sobering look at the many consequences resulting from the day that Nasser was denied the love of his life, a woman named Iran (Golshifteh Farahani).

As played by Mathieu Amalric, Nasser comes across as a deeply embittered soul who battles with his wife (Maria de Medeiros), the woman he married when he knew he couldn't have Iran. His wife tries to please him, even cooking his favorite dish, the chicken with plums of the movie's title.

But there's no pleasing Nasser, who eventually takes to his bed, vowing to languish there until he expires.

The ingredients of this fanciful fable are deeply melodramatic, but the movie ripples with humor, and it's so obviously creative that it sweeps you away with a story that involves flashbacks and flashbacks within flashbacks.

Based on a graphic novel by Satrapi, the movie makes a place for the Angel of Death (Edward Baer), a character that eventually catches up with Nasser, not a terribly difficult task because Nasser is not trying to outrun his end.

Spread over eight days, the story takes us through the pivotal events in Nasser's life, including his relationship with his mother (Isabella Rossellini), a woman who pushes him toward marriage.

Because of its exaggerated stylistic flourishes, Chicken with Plums sometimes feels as if it's easier to appreciate than to fully embrace, but when the movie draws to a close, it leaves you with a sweet sadness, honey laced with tears.