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Film Reviews

NEW YEAR‘ 07 FILM REVIEW BOUQUET

By Victoria Alexander • Jan 1st, 2007 • Pages: 1 2

THE QUEEN
Miramax Films
Pathe Prods. and Granada present in association with Pathe Renn Prods., BIM Distribuzione, France 3 Cinema and Canal Plus a Granada production

I was bored. Still an enigma, Queen Elizabeth had no character “arc.”

I already lived through every scene of this story. It is seared into my consciousness. The only things I did not know were (a) Prince Charles is visibly terrified of his mother, (b) Prince Philip does not have a British accent, (c) Prime Minister Tony Blair lives a hardscrabble, working-class life at 10 Downing Street, and (c) Cheri Blair is one tough lady.

Queen Elizabeth remains an enigma.

Apparently, everyone still believes the poop that being The Queen is dreadful, miserable service, a thankless duty of birth, and a loathsome job. Queen Elizabeth has sacrificed her life for the British people!

She would rather not be bothered by the perks of privilege and would have preferred to live on the farm raising chickens.

The Queen refused to dignify the mourning of her people after Princess Diana’s death. She was bullied by her boy-toy Prime Minister and forced to make a speech and look at some flowers littered outside her house. She had to attend a state funeral! I felt sorry for Queen Elizabeth.

Is it actually necessary to re-cap the story that rivals the assassination of JFK?

In August 1997, the ex-wife of the future King, Princess Diana, died in a car accident in Paris in the company of her lover. I have this to say about Princess Diana: Did she ever get even! She continues to haunt the Monarchy from the grave.

This is the story of a family held hostage by a myth.

Prince Charles really is redeemed in THE QUEEN. He weeps when he hears the news. “The Scourge” of his life is dead. Long live the future King!

Queen Elizabeth (Helen Mirren) sees the death of Princess Diana as a private matter. She immediately takes her family to Balmoral in Scotland. But when the public demands their Queen – who they financially support – show some grief, she is forced to do so. Isn’t this the true duty of The Monarchy – to represent the people? Or is Queen Elizabeth only interested in raising an army and going to war with France?

As portrayed here, Tony Blair (Michael Sheen) stumbled into being Prime Minister. The British people wanted a more modern government so they voted in a country-bumpkin. Sick of pomp, they get cute Blair and his out-spoken, anti-monarchy wife, Cherie (Helen McCrory). Blair comes across as a gaping, open-mouthed innocent. He does read headlines and thereby tells the Queen to show some American-style emotion.

Blair suggests she throw herself on Diana’s coffin.

THE QUEEN certainly redeems future king Prince Charles (Alex Jennings) who, cringing every time he has to be in the presence of his mother, is the only one who sheds a tear. The Queen Mother (Sylvia Syms) is an ever-presence, and I liked that about her. She is just concerned over her upcoming funeral. How dare Princess Diana upstage her!

Prince Philip (James Cromwell) is shown here as behaving like this is his wife’s mess to deal with. Instead, my impression of Prince Philip is that he is more royal than The Queen. The entire family lives in a modest part of Buckingham Palace. All those tales of Prince Charles having a manservant brushing his teeth for him is not shown.

Mirren does a terrific job as showing Queen Elizabeth’s stoic life as an ordinary woman who doesn’t do much but sign some letters. Prince Philip is furious when a phone call from Blair keeps the Queen from her tea! It goes cold! The problem with THE QUEEN is cinematic. Yes, we joked about it afterwards – The Queen didn’t have the necessary “character arc.”

You can see that the director, Stephen Frears, recognized this flaw. There is an imaginary scene where The Queen does shed a tear – for a deer on her 40,000 acre property.
We are in a culture where confession is heroic and this family is isolated from reality. They are living in the 15th century. If only Queen Elizabeth had said: “Let them grieve alone!” But she didn’t. She saved the Monarchy.

Credits:
Director: Stephen Frears
Screenwriter: Peter Morgan
Producers: Andy Harries, Christine Langan, Tracey Seaward
Executive producers: Francois Ivernel, Cameron McCracken, Scott Rudin
Director of photography: Affonso Beato
Production designer: Alan Macdonald
Music: Alexandre Desplat

Cast:
Queen: Helen Mirren
Prince Philip: James Cromwell
Tony Blair: Michael Sheen
Prince Charles: Alex Jennings
Robin Janvrin: Roger Allam
Queen Mother: Sylvia Syms

THE GOOD GERMAN

The music and story are lousy. I’m calling for a Clooney-Soderbergh divorce.

THE GOOD GERMAN is based on a novel by Joseph Kanon with a script by Paul Attanasio. I’ll try to dope out a bare outline for you: War correspondent Jake Geismer (George Clooney) returns to Berlin right after the end of World War ll. While running a news bureau in Berlin years earlier, he had a lover named Lena Brandt (Cate Blanchett). Returning to cover the victorious Allies’ Potsdam Conference (with Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill and Harry S. Truman meeting to carve up Germany and Poland), he is given an officer’s uniform, a driver Corporal Tully (Tobey Maguire), and a fake car. Is it just a coincidence that Tully is Lena’s pimp?

Lena is bitter, cold, and emotionally a fog. She and Jake might have been lovers, but they never talked. Jake is shocked to find out that Lena has a husband who is wanted by both the U.S. and Soviet governments. Why does Lena keep telling everyone her husband Emil is dead? The U.S. has quickly developed an appetite for sneaking German rocket scientists out of Germany and Lena’s mathematician husband assisted one of their star scientists. Emil and Lena know some dirty secrets about this world-renowned scientist’s experiments.

All Lena wants to do is get out of Berlin. First Tully, then Jake, will do anything to obtain the right papers and the money for this to happen. Is Lena grateful? Not by her attitude. Regardless of her aloofness towards Jake, he gets beat up a few times and badgered bloody trying to help her. He will not give up! Lena is “soul-dead” because of what she had to do to survive in Nazi Germany. Nothing matters to Jake except getting Lena out of Berlin. When Lena finally tells him her dark secret, his parting remark to Lena should have been:

“You bitch.”

So the morality of THE GOOD GERMAN collapses with our hero Jake being duped. What is it about Lena that had poor Jake so besotted? Shouldn’t Lena have been arrested instead of given the golden ticket out of town? Jake never really knew the woman he is risking his life for. As soon as you find out what Lena did to survive, sympathy for Lena evaporates. Jake is a silly romantic who, after helping Lena, goes back to covering the Potsdam Conference.

Clooney and Soderbergh have a strong career-marriage (and a production company). Is this Soderbergh’s valentine to George, who fancies himself a 40s-style movie star? The over-produced score is terrible. The lousy, blurry photography only highlights the weakness of the story. There is no moral center. If Jake is so crazy about Lena, why didn’t he keep tabs on her? The archival footage and studio back lot sets give the film a slapped-together feeling. Some scenes look fake.

Maguire, grateful not to be playing a comic book character, overacts. Instead of being forceful, he screeches. Who believes he could be a bully and a pimp? Does his face telegraph a man who would punch a woman in the stomach? Once again Soderbergh is doing his “experimental” work – when has this ever worked for him? Soderbergh does it all: the cinematography (using actual ‘40s lenses and just one camera!) and the editing, but he should have left those chores to others more skilled in black and white work and concentrated on directing.

The end scene homage to CASABLANCA made people laugh. Could this have been Soderbergh’s intention?

PERFUME: THE STORY OF A MURDERER

A delicious, perverse tale.

Based on the 1985 novel “Perfume” by Patrick Suskind, director and co-writer (with Andrew Birkin and Bernd Eichinger) Tom Tykwer has successfully created a strange, erotic, visual landscape of odors. I’m not going to spoil the story and will only briefly summarize it. PERFUME: THE STORY OF A MURDERER begins in 1738 in Paris with the tragic birth and childhood of Baptiste Grenouille (Ben Whishaw). Deprived of any sensation but misery and the smells of poverty, Baptiste develops the unusual ability to sense and identify every odor. Intoxicated with the narcotic odors of all the scents of life but raised in a brutal orphanage, Baptiste is uncommunicative. He’s strange. He is the product of his tragic environment.

As a laborer in a tannery, he delivers a package to Baldini (Dustin Hoffman), an old perfumer whose business is failing. Realizing that Baldini has a warehouse of exotic ingredients, Baptiste begs to be trained. Seeing that Baptiste does possess a talent for mixing fragrances, Baldini teaches him about the craft of creating perfumes. His business takes a surprising turn and begins to flourish with Baptiste mixing oils and essences.

Following a woman in the street, Baptiste tries to smell her and, when she screams out, kills her. He undresses her and begins to smell her body. He becomes intoxicated by her female odors.

Baldini has told him that there is always a mysterious ingredient that is missing in a perfume. This mystery element has been sought after for ages. Baptiste leaves Paris for the perfume capital of Paris where he works for a perfumer preparing the flowers. Baptiste sets about collecting scents from various women reducing their essence to fragrances.

Seeing the beautiful Laura (Rachel Hurd-Wood), the daughter of prominent Antoine Richis (Alan Rickman), Baptiste decides she is the last ingredient he needs to complete his masterpiece. However, circumstances in the town make Antoine fear for Laura’s safety. Young women are being killed and they have one thing in common – they are all beautiful virgins. Antoine takes Laura to a monastery on an island in the Mediterranean. Baptiste, obsessed and without shoes, follows them. He gets into the fortified monastery and finds Laura. He is soon captured and sentenced to death by public execution.

I’m going to be intentionally vague. What happens next should be a surprise. What transpires is perverse, stunning, and pagan. Tykwer interprets mystical experience as orgy. What it means – I have my own interpretation having to do with the intoxication of purity – is best left to the viewer.

German filmmaker Tykwer is known here for his innovative 1998 film RUN, LOLA, RUN, that has inspired many other directors. I have the soundtrack for RUN,LOLA, RUN on my iPod. With PERFUME: THE STORY OF A MURDERER, Tykwer’s production design brings to life the smells and sights of 18th Century France with an expert’s eye. This is a film that should be seen.

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