POLA X - MIFF 2012

Completing my viewing of Leos Carax films, “Pola X” is a much different beast than all of his other features I had seen.  This is the only feature from Carax that does not have Denis Lavant in a starring role, and his absence is felt.

“Pola X” is an adaptation of Herman Melville’s novel “Pierre; or, the Ambiguities” and is about a guy named Pierre who has it all.  He is living the traditional life of the bourgeois, he lives in a chateau with his mother, is engaged to be married to the gorgeous Lucie, and is a very successful author.  Life is a breeze for the young man as he seems to drift through it with relative ease.  However one day while out with his cousin Thibault, he feels a presence watching him.  He notices a dark haired stranger staring at him and when Pierre motions after her, she takes off.  Pierre goes after her but eventually loses her.  Since then, though, he cannot get this woman out of his head because he is sure that he has seen her before.  One day while riding his motorcycle, by chance he comes across the same girl and this time he stops her to talk.  She tells Pierre an incredible story about how she is actually Pierre’s sister, as the two both have the same father.  This rocks Pierre’s world, as he goes home to try and find some evidence of Isabelle, his sister.  He is disgusted that he has lived the life he has while his sister has had nothing, living on the streets, so he believes that the right thing to do is to look after her and give her the world, and in doing so he turns his back on his own world, and leaves his fiancé.  It isn’t long before Pierre realizes just how tough life is without funds at his disposal and he finds himself spiraling downward in despair.  His appearance changes, things he once cared about he no longer does, and his writing he believes is full of façade.  This is reality, what he was writing about was fantasy.  As Pierre and Isabelle live it rough on the streets the siblings become increasingly close until they actually fall in love.  Pierre continues to fall into a depression as he begins writing once again, expecting to sell his book and be able to look after Isabelle, but when his book is rejected, he spins out of control and head on into the final chapter of his life.

This is a seriously depressing film and not really that much fun to watch either.  Watching the self destruction of an unlikable man is hard work to invest in, but these kinds of stories Carax has been able to pull off before, except with “Pola X” I felt that the charm of his previous films was missing here.  There was no light in the darkness of the story here, and the characters were really hard to identify with.

There is a sad history associated with “Pola X” because both leads are no longer with us.  Guillaume Depardieu (son of Gerard), who plays Pierre, tragically died back in 2008 due to complications with pneumonia, while Russian born Yekaterina Golubeva, who played Isabelle, recently passed away in 2011 of a suspected suicide.  Both performances are fantastic in “Pola X” with Depardieu attacking the role viscerally, it is a full body performance as he changes his look and demeanor throughout the whole film.  He is fantastic and just inhabits Pierre.  I do not know what it is about Carax and the women he casts in his films because they all have that incredibly sad look behind their eyes and Golubeva is no exception.  She appears to be in a permanent state of depression as Isabelle, and she portrays her much more internally, almost the opposite of Pierre.  Isabelle keeps everything in, doesn’t make big grand gestures and has a quiet presence.  Despite the sadness on her eyes, Golubeva is gorgeous in her role here.  Speaking of gorgeous, Delphine Chuillot’s Lucie is the epitome of that.  I must admit that I found Catherine Deneuve’s role and performance as Pierre’s mother a little odd.  She didn’t add a whole lot to the plot and her character just seemed off.

As usual for a Carax film, there are a lot of great camera moves and locations, especially the abandoned factory where all of the homeless seem to live.  Its towering staircases give Carax the opportunity for some grand visual splendor and he does not disappoint.  Another stunning visual moment comes at the end of the film when a character is murdered.  It is such a great shot and I assume the choreography of the moment would have been hard to pull off.  Despite all this, there is one scene that “Pola X” is infamous for and that is its explicit sex scene between Pierre and Isabelle.  The scene features actual penetration and I admit I am not sure why Carax thought this necessary as it adds nothing to the scene.  My only thought is he would prefer the audience by shocked by the image rather than the incestuous love affair that was taking place.

Overall, I found Leos Carax’s “Pola X” a bit of a slog and hard going.  It lacked the charm of his previous films and it is definitely my least favourite Carax film.  That said the film has been well made with some great central performances from Depardieu and Golubeva, and some amazing visual moments.  At the end of the day though I wasn’t really sure what Carax was trying to say with “Pola X”.  I also felt the absence of Denis Lavant too.  While it wasn’t my cup of tea, there is enough good in “Pola X” for Carax fans to get something out of it.

2.5 Stars.

RUBY SPARKS - MIFF 2012

Similar to last year’s “The Future”, I found “Ruby Sparks” to be a very annoying film and far too cute for its own good.  I am a big fan of directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’s previous film “Little Miss Sunshine” but their latest is a total dud.

“Ruby Sparks” is about a genius author, Calvin Weir-Fields, who wrote a worldwide best seller when he was just the age of nineteen.  Ten years on and Calvin has yet to follow up with another novel, sure he has written a few short stories, but a full novel hasn’t even been close.  The expectations thrust upon him have crippled his creativity and as such Calvin has writer’s block.  He doesn’t even have a subject to write about.  One day he has an incredibly realistic and vivid dream about a mystery girl and he is suddenly inspired.  He bolts to the typewriter and writes continuously for hours describing this girl from his dreams, coming up with her family life and her history in general.  He names the girl Ruby Sparks and he suddenly worries when he realizes he is falling in love with a figment of his imagination.  The next morning when he wakes up he is shocked to see a girl in his house, let alone the girl from his dreams.  He is terrified that he has lost his mind, he is already seeing a psychiatrist for other issues he is having, and so he tries to tell his brother about it.  His brother is sure that Calvin has lost it, but when strangers start reacting to Ruby’s presence, he suddenly realizes that she is very real.  He doesn’t understand it, but he accepts it.  It isn’t long that he discovers that the more he writes about her, the more he changes her.  Whatever Calvin writes, Ruby will do.  Calvin believes that she is perfect so he stops writing his book, but eventually when the relationship starts to sour, can he resist the urge to change Ruby again.

Right from the start of “Ruby Sparks” it just rubbed me the wrong way.  It failed to resonate with me any sort of reality.  I do not mind films with magic or the absurd in them, but I still have to believe them, and I couldn’t buy in to “Ruby Sparks”.  Paul Dano is an actor I usually really like but his performance as Calvin was terrible.  He was like a giant wet bag, a soppy mess when it came to Ruby and was incredibly selfish too.  He had to be in control of their relationship which is ironic since he is barely in control of his own life.  Similarly Zoe Kazan was equally as infuriating in the title role.  Kazan is actually the screenwriter of “Ruby Sparks” and she and Dano are also a couple in real life.  Maybe the familiarity between the two actors worked against them here because I really didn’t like their chemistry together here.  My main problem is I did not feel a real emotion between the two of them and for the majority of the film.  It was the cute and twee nature of the whole production that drove me up the wall, and it had a level of smugness associated with it, being too clever for its own good.

Towards the end when the relationship takes a turn for the darker, I became a little more interested in “Ruby Sparks” but Dayton and Faris’s handling of the material was far too clumsy and uninspired to bring me back completely.  It was like they wanted to take the film to a darker place, but were afraid of offending their audience.  There is a scene in the second half of the film when Deborah Ann Woll shows up as Calvin’s ex, Lila and it is the best scene in the film because for once there was some real emotion being displayed.  Even though she only has one scene in “Ruby Sparks”, Woll really stood out in her role.

Speaking of bit parts, there are a couple of embarrassing performances by some well known names in “Ruby Sparks” but the worst has to be Annette Bening, who plays Calvin’s reborn as a hippy mother.  She is terrible as she floats around being all airy fairy and has a constantly goofy smile on her face at all times.  Steve Coogan plays a variation on himself as usual, and Antonio Banderas finds himself on a tightrope between not bad and terrible, but at least he appears to be trying here.

Overall, I found “Ruby Sparks” to be far too cute for its own good.  Sadly it also came across as a vanity piece for Zoe Kazan who wrote the screenplay and stars as the title character, and her real-life boyfriend Paul Dano gave a rare bad performance as Calvin.  While the film does have interesting themes, like when does the control of an artist over his work finally end and when does it have a life of its own and the differences between real love and manufactured love for art, but it is dealt with so damn cutely that I just reacted against it.

2 Stars.

MANIAC - MIFF 2012

Back in 1980, William Lustig’s “Maniac” became one of the original and notorious video nasties.  It was a really dirty, scummy and disgusting film with some incredible gore scenes from the master of effects, Tom Savini.  Definitely a product of its time, it has never been one of my real favourites, but it is alright and it succeeds in what it sets out to do.  With the remake craze still going strong these days, I was still surprised by the fact that “Maniac” was going to be remade.  It isn’t as if people were screaming for a new version of the film, but upon thinking about it some more, I think that it is actually a perfect candidate for a remake.  It isn’t a terribly well known film (except amongst horror fans) and it isn’t what you would call a classic, so there is room for improvement here.  When I heard that Alexandre Aja and Gregory Levasseur were involved in writing the screenplay, it piqued my interest a little bit because they have had great success with remakes of both “The Hills Have Eyes” and “Piranha” (both of which Aja directed himself), however once I heard that Franck Khalfoun was tapped to direct the project, my hopes faded for “Maniac”.  Khalfoun’s previous film, “P2”, was a terrible and bland horror film that I did not like at all.  Then the news of Elijah Wood’s casting in the main role of the maniac was announced and I thought that it was a stroke of genius.  Anyone who has seen the original “Maniac” knows that Joe Spinell owned that role, he completely embodied it, and for any actor to try and replicate exactly what Spinell did was destined to fail.  That is why I thought the against-type casting of Wood was perfect because no-one would be expecting it and it would automatically make it a different film from the original.  Ironically, though, it is the casting of Elijah Wood that ultimately hurts the remake of “Maniac”.

The remake stays pretty close to the original and is about a guy named Frank Zito (Wood) who works in the restoration of vintage mannequins.  Frank also has a bad habit of murdering and scalping beautiful young women in his time off, and then attaching their removed hair to his mannequins in his bedroom.  Obviously Frank is a very sick boy and has a lot of mummy issues he is dealing with which started when he was just a kid and had to witness his mother’s constant sexual exploits.  The girls he stalks and kills all remind him of his mother in one way or another.  Frank appears unable to control his murderous urges at all, so when a young woman named Anna (Nora Arnezeder) comes into his store to photograph his mannequins and the two end up becoming friends, will he be able to stop himself from delivering the same fate all of the women that enter his life suffer?

I was so surprised by just how great “Maniac” turned out to be, I seriously liked this film.  Right from the opening frame, the grimy and dirty atmosphere that Khalfoun created just seemed perfect.  The entire story is demented, but in a good way, and I especially loved all the images of the bloody mannequins that come to life (in Frank’s mind) once he places the scalped hair on to them.  Just seeing Frodo lying in a room full of bloodied mannequins all around him, complete with flies buzzing around the scalps, was something pretty special.

The practical gore effects (with some minor CGI tweaking) from KNB were probably the best I had seen in a horror film all year.  The scalpings all look incredibly real and painful, not to mention bloody, and there is an absolutely brutal Achilles tendon slash that takes place in a car park that could be the film’s highlight.  Another moment of full on gore that made us horror fans cheer was a butcher’s cleaver being violently pounded into a poor guy’s open mouth.  The suspense that is coupled with these gore scenes is actually really well done which makes the violent payoffs all the more satisfying.  In fact the inaugural murder of “Maniac” is so good that it rivals some of Dario Argento’s work back when he was still in his prime.

Contributing to the 1980’s atmosphere of the film (even though “Maniac” is set in the present) is a truly fantastic electronic score by somebody or some band credited as just “Rob” that is reminiscent of those great John Carpenter scores of that era.  As soon as the music kicked in for the first time, my heart started pumping, I was just with “Maniac” and I knew that the filmmakers got the film.

However for a film that I love so much, “Maniac” has one of the biggest flaws in it that had the potential to destroy the whole film. The giant miscalculation is from director Franck Khalfoun who decided to shoot the entirety of the film from Frank’s eyes.  Therefore every camera movement is meant to represent the eyes of a killer.  The problem with this visual gimmick is that it is actually very hard to pull off properly and make it interesting, as well as make it feel real.  My main problem with it isn’t actually the camera work, as this is done pretty well, it is the other decisions it forces onto the film that causes it some problems.  Because of the fact they have hired a name actor in Elijah Wood in the role of Franck, there is a need to show him on screen regularly which is a problem if the film is meant to be seen through his eyes.  To rectify this, Frank is forever passing by and looking into mirrors and any reflective surface he can find, just so we get glimpses of Wood, however it always feels forced and never organic to the scene.  It also reeks of showing off on behalf of the filmmakers too.  A couple of times Khalfoun also cheats with the style by slowly zooming in on objects which is something the human eye does not do, and even a couple of the murder scenes he abandons the point of view style altogether so we witness Elijah Wood actually performing the brutal crime (however because I assume it is as if he is having an outer body experience when he kills, I didn’t mind these cheats as much).  The other problem that the point of view style causes is that all of Wood’s line readings are done off camera and it has definitely affected his performance because he sounds terrible.  It just isn’t a natural performance at all, his delivery sounds stilted and forced.

It is amazing how much I still loved “Maniac” even with this (in my opinion) massive flaw.  It was mean, bloody, nasty, politically incorrect and it had a creepy atmosphere to it all.  I keep thinking that it could’ve been a horror classic if Khalfoun had just done a normal or straight adaptation, although as it is, it is already a bloody good film.  I must reiterate that “Maniac” is incredibly bloody and gory, so buyer beware.  My lovely wife, who unfortunately for her saw “Maniac” with me, watched the majority of the film with her hands over her eyes and she says it has scarred her for life.  For me though, it was like horror candy, and was a rare horror remake that actually worked.

4 Stars.