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Indies & Imports
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A Terrific Trio
As summer turns to fall, Cote d'Azur arrives for some sexy late season laughs amid the shellfish. Plus, a Belgian take on murder in Memory of a Killer and Canadian filmmaker Don McKellar anoints a Childstar.
Thursday, September 8, 2005
By Pam Grady
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Strand Releasing
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Snail lovers Tedeschi, Melki
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Cote d'Azur, which opens this weekend in select cities, began for its makers - Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau - with, of all things, shellfish. The French title of this wicked romantic farce is, in fact, Crustacés et Coquillages, which literally translates to Shellfish and Shells, an inspiration that Ducastel credits to his partner's epicurean appetite.
"It was oysters at the beginning, not because they are so obviously sexually or an aphrodisiac – a little, but it's just because Jacques loves oysters," Ducastel explains during a recent discussion with FilmStew. "If we write a scene with oysters in the film, then we'll have oysters on the set."
The movie begins with Beatrix (5x2's Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) and husband Marc (Gilbert Melki) arriving with their teenage children at the summer home Marc has just inherited on the famed Mediterranean coast. Their daughter disappears immediately to spend her vacation with her boyfriend. Her little brother Charly (Romain Torres) stays behind, all the better to test his parents' unconditional love and professed tolerance by dropping hints about the true nature of his relationship with best friend Martin (Edouard Collin).
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Strand Releasing
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Azur co-stars Collin, Torres
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It is a tense holiday. Beatrix and Marc are at an impasse in their marriage, and among the baggage she's brought to the beach with her is Mathieu (Jacque Bonnaffe), her geeky, balding lover. Poor Marc is left to glower alone, at least until Charly screws up the plumbing and an old friend Didier (Jean-Marc Barr) arrives to fix it.
As strained as Beatrix and Marc's relations are, they still have one thing in common and that is their love of violets – not the flower, but an apparently yummy sea snail native to the region. When circumstances forced Ducastel and Martineau to change their location from Brittany to the Riviera (oh, the suffering of artists forced to compromise their vision – yeah, right), the pair switch the shellfish the couple adores to the local delicacy.
That hardly anyone knows exactly what a ‘violet’ is only adds to the charm. The characters keep trying to explain it (they can never agree on what color it is). Whoever added the English subtitles doesn't even try to translate it. Even in the violets' native country, the gastropod is something of a mystery. Ducastel reveals, "A lot of people in France ask us about that, 'What is this seafood? We haven't heard of that. Is it real?'"
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Sony Pictures Classics
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Killer's Jan Decleir
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Tedeschi and Melki are adorable, but it is the erotic heat put off by Barr that makes the movie something special, and that, insists Martineau, is no accident. "When the character of the plumber appeared in the script, for me, it was just obvious,” he admits. “I think it's because Jean-Marc is iconic. He looks like a gay icon, some kind of California gay icon, like a Village People guy, you know."
"The part is, in a way, ridiculous," he continues. "He's a plumber; he's gay, it's something very clichéd. He's a very hot plumber. I think that's why I thought about him, because he can play the part without being ridiculous or clichéd. It's the way he looks; it's the man he is, there's something very special about him. And he's incredibly attractive; the way he smiles is incredible."
Martineau might have added, Barr can also dance. Cote d'Azur is an amiable sex farce, a flight of fancy, so why not go that extra step and add that unexpected show tune or two? Or maybe not so unexpected, as Martineau explains, "There's a very famous saying in France, 'Everything ends by song.'" It certainly does.
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Hart Sharp Video
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Well worth hunting down on DVD
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Memories are Unmade of This: There is no singing in another European import currently playing in U.S. art houses, The Memory of a Killer. The original title of this Belgian-Dutch co-production was De Zaak Alzheimer, but Sony Classics decided to leave the killer's precise medical condition out of the title. A pity, because The Alzheimer Affair, the original English title, is far more evocative. It is, after all, the condition that plagues the ‘killer’ of the new title.
Angelo Ledda (Jan DeCleir) is a hit man who reluctantly returns to his hometown, Antwerp, to fulfill a contract. Like Leonard Shelby, the former insurance investigator played by Guy Pearce in Memento, Ledda has a serious problem with his memory and his arms have become a repository of notes as he attempts to hold onto what he must remember. Unlike Leonard, it is not short-term memory loss that plagues him; instead Ledda's is rapidly losing ground to Alzheimer's.
When he discovers that one of his contracted victims is a little girl, he refuses to complete the job; and when someone else kills her anyway, he becomes her avenging angel. Ledda is not the only one determined to see justice done. The case is of particular interest to detective Eric Vincke (Koen De Bouw), who met the child prostitute during a vice investigation and who comes across Ledda as a witness to another crime.
Vincke soon realizes his mistake, but he also understands that not only is Ledda on some kind of mission, he is leaving clues for the police that lead ever higher into the city's political and business elite. The two men form a symbiotic but dangerous relationship – Ledda needs Vincke to complete his business in case his memory should fail completely. Vincke knows he should concentrate on bringing Ledda in; he's simply too dangerous to be left outside a prison cell. But like the old man, Vincke's instincts are to go after the people on top and Ledda is in a much better position to engineer such an endeavor.
The Memory of a Killer is a great, old-fashioned suspense thriller - or maybe not so old, as there are shades of both Steven Soderbergh's The Limey and Michael Mann's Heat in Erik van Looy's tale of cops and killers. But it could just as easily have been made over half a century ago at the height of the film noir era. It is based on an old novel by Jef Geeraerts, one of a series featuring Vincke and his partner Freddy Verstuyft (Werner de Smedt), and it is one tight, suspenseful ride, leavened by flashes of sardonic humor and surprisingly empathetic.
| Enfant Terrible: You'll forgive Taylor Brandon Burns (Mark Rendall) if he thinks the world actually does revolve around him. After all, he is the biggest preteen phenom around and not just because his pushy stage mother Suzanne (Jennifer Jason Leigh) says so. Thanks to his starring role on the sitcom Family Differences, he is the idol of millions and now he is heading far north to Toronto to play the president's son in a major action movie. He is also the titular character in a devilish show-biz satire coming soon to DVD, the Canadian import Childstar.
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In this hilarious and scathing look at a corrupt American film industry as seen through the eyes of experimental filmmaker and chauffer Rick Schiller (Don McKellar), Taylor is spoiled rotten, his every capricious whim catered to. He's also one lonely little kid, someone who is tolerated rather than liked. His father Fresno Birnbaum (Eric Stoltz) only speaks to him by appointment; Suzanne reinforces his worst impulses and tends to disappear when he needs her to just be Mom; and his agent Isaac (Gil Bellow) looks at him as a cash machine.
| No wonder he gloms onto the ethically challenged Rick, who signs on, at Suzanne's insistence, as Taylor's legal guardian. At least Rick delivers the occasional hard truth to the little brat and seems to care about what happens to him, even if he is completely irresponsible. He also horrifies his young charge when he sticks a Super 8 camera in his face to teach him filmmaking. "No responsible adult would encourage a child to make movies," Taylor sneers.
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Childstar, which hits DVD next Tuesday (September 13th), is McKellar's baby. He co-wrote it and directed it as his first film since 1998's Last Night, perhaps the most romantic and optimistic movie ever made about the end of the world. He is perhaps more familiar to American audiences for his appearances in movies like Atom Egoyan's Exotica and Tom Fitzgerald's The Event, but it is McKellar's writing that have made him one of Canada's national treasures. 32 Short Films about Glenn Gould, The Red Violin, Highway 61 and the brilliant TV series Twitch City are among his projects.
It is a crying shame (if not an outright crime) that a terrific movie like Childstar never saw a U.S. theatrical release, but then McKellar gleefully makes fun of the American way of manufacturing entertainment and some people are touchy. At least the Sundance Channel and Hart Sharp Video have made it available for home use.
| So pop some corn and pop in the disc and start the debate: just who is Taylor supposed to be, anyway? Haley Joel Osment? Little Ronnie Howard? Frankie Muniz? Joey Lawrence? Leonardo di Caprio back in the day? Hint: Alan Thicke plays his TV dad. Enough said. | |
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