Monday, April 28, 2014

Bright Days Ahead

Marion Vernoux’s Bright Days Ahead is a telling change from the French title, Les beaux jours. The original speaks of present joys, the mistranslation — of a promised future.  Both titles share an irony. The English title is the name of the seniors club in which recently retired dentist Caroline (Fanny Ardant) is given a trial membership to sample the joys of pottery, theatre, field trips, computer workshops, etc., with her contemporaries. In their camaraderie and activity they seem bound for brighter days, except that their signs of aging and loss continue to build. The women already make a game of recalling their first signs of the doom of aging. But from the future perspective, the present compromises will seem “the bright days.”
While the others enjoy their activities and each other’s company Caroline slips into an affair with their computer teacher, Julien (Laurent Lafitte), some 20 years her junior. She fills two cavities for him and he fills her larger one — briefly. The commitment is largely on her part and inevitably she loses him to more youthful beauty.That's the way of the whirled.
The affair threatens Caroline’s marriage to Philippe (Patrick Chesnais), who is an extremely positive character, sensitive to her emotional situation, supportive, and clearly broken when he hears of her affair. But the film closes on their reconciliation. They join her friends for a seaside daytrip. While the skinny dip at the end establishes the group’s post-sexuality — they cavort heedless of their dilapidation — Philippe reports “a boner,” which in context we do not read as a faux pas. After an apparent lapse in their intimacy we infer Caroline will now find in her marriage what she sought outside — mutatis mutandis. Her husband won’t have the skills — sexual or technological — that Julien had, though he will continue more devoted. 
And perhaps he will see her newly illuminated by her recent attractiveness to a younger man:
Philippe: Have you looked at yourself?
Caroline: He does the job of looking at me!
Despite the familiar romantic scenes and music — you don’t need the langue to know it's Frrrranch — the age issue gives this film a touching distinction. Caroline’s camel coat has a vulvic slit up the back which may suggest either her turning her back on that aspect of her life or, conversely, her wearing her sexuality as a badge and a need despite her age. We’re more accustomed to seeing the young driven by sex. Here the elegant, sensitive and dignified elderly dentist shows that need can survive.

Sunday, April 27, 2014

Locke

In Locke, writer/director Steven Knight’s compelling tour de force, there are four central metaphors.
(1) Ivan Locke (Tom Hardy), who’s driving through the night to London, is a Construction Manager. Literally, he’s to supervise the pour the next morning for a massive concrete construction. But he has other constructions to manage. He has chosen to skip that job in order to attend the birth of a baby from his one-night stand with Bethan (Olivia Colman), a plain, older woman with whom he once briefly worked. He also has to manage his marriage. His wife Katrina (Ruth Wilson) on news of that infidelity bans him from home. He has to deal with their two sons’ concerns, first with the televised soccer game he was to share, then with their sense of their broken family. Most essentially, he has to manage himself, the son (i.e., construction) of a philandering hippie father who abandoned him before birth. He addresses his dead father through the rear-view mirror.  Ivan’s virtuous choices here prove him nothing like his father. Far from a philanderer, Ivan’s one infidelity was when after two bottles of wine he tried to give the lonely Bethan “her last chance of happiness.”
(2) Ivan creates both in concrete and in flesh. His embittered wife claims he loved his buildings more than his family. Certainly he holds himself in fierce responsibility for both. He is passionate about concrete. “It’s delicate as blood.” Even after Ivan is fired he takes every step to ensure the pour will succeed, delicately handling his colleague Gareth (Ben Daniels) and his substitute, a drunken Donal (Andrew Scott). But if concrete is delicate as blood, the flesh is a bond like concrete. That’s why Ivan abandons everything else to attend the labour of a woman he barely knows. The child is his “fault,” his responsibility. Concrete or flesh, both need to be strong but both can be flawed. While a concrete construction may not survive a fault the flesh can recover. As Ivan’s son describes the spectacular goal, the scorer Crawford, long considered “a donkey,” ran a solo that parallels Ivan’s drive. Perhaps Ivan was an ass with Bethan but on this drive he scores because at great risk he does what he recognizes he should — not to be like his father..
(3) The film’s technical challenge — showing us only the hero — establishes the isolated human. We see Ivan, what he sees, where he is, but everyone else we only hear; we don’t see them. Of course no-one can be isolated. As per John Donne, “No man is an island.” Not even on the motorway. Or the off-ramp to which Ivan ultimately repairs to hear his new child’s wail. The shots of vehicles in the night, their headlights abstracted into lily pads floating on the darkness, establish the society of isolates. As his relationships crumble Ivan feels reduced to just himself and his car. But this dramatically isolated figure is hardly by himself. Far from it, is the point of the narrative strategy. Ivan has all kinds of connections to other people, not least to the thousands who would be endangered if the mammoth concrete building proved imperfectly based. Then there are the people on his phone. 
(4) Those voices represent Ivan’s lifelines, his connections beyond himself. Like the baby’s umbilical cord around its throat “The lifeline is a noose.” His father’s bad example compels Ivan to attend his bastard’s birth at whatever cost. He owes the unknown Bethan what comfort and support he can provide. He owes his family whatever they will allow him to give. He owes the concrete project his care. From each of these lifelines he has drawn life and purpose. Each is now exerting a strangling pressure on him.  
The license on Locke’s Mercedes starts with Adio. It’s an incomplete Spanish goodbye and Portuguese for “I postpone.” Both fit. Ivan gets his surname from John Locke, the 17th Century British empirical philosopher whose best known works dealt with the limits on human understanding and the importance of basing government on a social contract. There are those strangling lifelines again.

Saturday, April 26, 2014

Blue Ruin

In Virginia family feuds bleed on and on, a cartoon noir of Family Values run amok. The twist in writer/photographer/director Jeremy Saulnier’s astonishing debut, Blue Ruin, is that this three-generation feud is in the modern now, not some balladeer’s mythic past. There is a theme song, though: “No Regrets.” The singer has no regrets for the life he has led. 
Hero Dwight (Macon Blair) is not without regrets when he kills the ex-con imprisoned for murdering Dwight’s parents, then has to snuff the guy’s four sibs. Dwight wishes the vengeance would just end. But he has to kill the enemy’s brothers and sisters to save his own sister.
Dwight just wants to come clean. We first see him stealing a bath in a stranger’s unattended home. Then after his first kill he cleans up entirely, changing the shaggy homeless look for the nerdiest looking action hero ever. As ‘Dwight’ contains ‘white’ he embodies a driving need for purity. Initially he thinks that means he has to kill the convict who has just been released from jail. That done, he’s driven on by his certainty of that man’s family’s drive for vengeance. 
It doesn’t matter that the feud is based on a lie. The convict didn’t kill Dwight’s parents. His daddy did, because his wife was having an affair with Dwight’s dad. When the original killer’s grandson finishes Dwight off there’s no-one left to extend the feud. Dwight’s enigmatic last words — “The keys are in the car” — are his blessing for the boy to escape and start life free of the family feud.
Early and late the film pauses for a montage of images of domestic stasis. In empty rooms there is a stillness and calm the people will explode. The montages connect to the album of family photos Dwight flips through, as he regretfully waits for his last three victims to come home to him. He may get over his regrets at having to kill them. But he assuredly has no regrets when he finally gets to die in the mortal domestic war he inherited. Then finally the heat’s off. 

Friday, April 25, 2014

The German Doctor

The original title of The German Doctor (and its source novel) is Wakolda. That’s the name of little Lillith’s (Florencia Bado) favourite doll, with a hole where its heart should be. When she drops the doll it’s picked up and returned by the mysterious stranger, who turns out to be the sadistic Nazi scientist Dr. Josef Mengele (Alex Brendemuhl), operating under an assumed name. From that moment Mengeles insinuates himself into Lillith’s life and on into her parents’. The undersized girl and the empty doll attract Mengele's suspect interest, ostensibly out of compassion but really under cold detachment.
The doll image is central. Lillith’s father Enzo (Diego Peretti) is a meticulous one-of-a-kind doll maker who eventually gives Wakolda a mechanical heart. He also gives Lillith and her two brothers — via mother Eva (Natalia Orero), true — new sibling twins. Over Enzo’s objections Eva lets Mengele treat Lillith’s stunted growth and she takes his pregnancy prescriptions. At the twins’ struggling birth Enzo is torn between wanting to banish the dangerous doctor and needing him to save them. In the end, after Mengele escapes the Mossad to Uraguay, he has branded the twins. One is normal, “the control”; the other struggles in Mengele’s heartless experiment.
When Mengele finances the mass production of Enzo’s beautiful dolls he has several motives. One is to ingratiate himself yet further in the household, so he can continue his furtive and open measurements and experiments. His given excuse is “I love beauty.” But he is fascinated by “the harmony of imperfections.”  The racks of porcelain dolls are more ominous than beautiful. They suggest an army of Aryan uniformity. In the piles of doll parts about to be assembled we are reminded of the images of concentration camp corpses. Both are Mengele's factories.
Like any film set in some “then” the implicit pertinence is the “now.” In 1960 Patagonia the German school remains passionately Nazi. When classmates beat up Lillith’s friend for uncovering a buried cache of Nazi materials, the victim boy is expelled for belligerence. Lillith, born premature, is bullied and tormented for being short for her age. The archivist and photographer Nora (Elena Roger), an undercover agent who calls Mossad to arrest Mengele is reported found dead in the snow the day after his escape. The film points ahead to both Argentina's Dirty War and the contemporary resurgence of anti-Semitism not just in Europe but on North American campuses. 
     And of course, Mengele is only rumoured to have died by drowning. Wherever science proceeds blinded to humanity by a heartless curiosity the spirit of the Angel of Death survives. Those supermen who styled themselves Sonnenman, sun folk, were rather demons of the dark. For medicine, science, any branch of human learning, is like our last sense of those twins: possibly healthy, possibly deadly. The question always is: does the favourite have a heart?

Monday, April 21, 2014

Hateship Loveship

The country and western soundtrack is perfect for Liza Johnson’s Hateship Loveship. It’s a small sensitive film about simple folk with deep losses. Broken people fumble their way to fixing each other.
A silly prank leads through humiliation and possible heartbreak to a family-wide redemption. In Louisiana two high school girls send fake romantic emails to one, Sabitha’s (Hailee Steinfeld) live-in caregiver, Johanna Parry (Kristen Wiig). Since 15 Johanna has been a housebound servant so she’s unprepared for the temptations and tricks of the real world. She falls for the false romance and buses to Chicago, where she plans to marry Sabitha’s misrepresented father Ken (Guy Pearce), an addicted loser. But first Johanna spends $2,500 to ship to Ken the antique furniture his father-in-law McCauley (Nick Nolte) gave his daughter as a wedding present, then took back after she was killed in an accident, with the drunk high Ken driving.
Nick’s surprise at her arrival shows Johanna her mistake. She sticks around, cleaning his apartment compulsively, making him meals, which prompts him to dump his druggie girlfriend Chloe (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Eventually they marry and have a baby, which — after the return of the furniture — thaws old McCauley’s heart, to the point that he gives them back the antiques. He starts a relationship with the town cashier Eileen (Christine Lahti), whose two football playing sons are Sabitha’s classmates.  
Ken’s motel, which Johanna helps resurrect with her money as well as her elbow grease, is called The Oasis. In this arid sterile landscape of selfishness and betrayals the simple Johanna’s warmth and openness prove the oasis that will sustain the life around her. She wins over McCauley, Eileen, of course Ken and even his initially antagonistic daughter Sabitha (whose name suggests she’s not quite a cat or a witch but close). Her friend Edith (Sami Gayle), who authored the deceptive love letters, is too shallow to learn. “What do you want?” she brazenly confronts Johanna at her graduation. “I have what I want,” Johanna replies. Edith wants to become a dermatologist. She still runs skin deep.

Sunday, April 20, 2014

Nymphomaniac I, II

There’s a rare moment of quiet grace late in Lars von Trier’s 5-hour psychological epic, Nymphomaniac. After the dark night of soulful storytelling the sunrise appears in a small patch of light on the brick alley wall behind Seligman’s (Stellan Skarsgard) house. Perhaps caused by a reflection off unseen windows, it’s still magic. It emblematizes a hope, an improbable radiance on earth, perhaps even the prospect of redemption in one of the harshest visions in cinema. 
It seems all the brighter after we’ve learned how Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) came to be abandoned beaten and befouled outside Seligman’s flat. She was betrayed by her one true love Jerome (Shia LaBoeuf) and P (Mia Goth, and she will), the young girl she saved and adopted as ward and successor. But that light is brief. The film ends in a mutual betrayal, unseen in the darkness that has resumed its pervasive hold. 
That final act, heard but not seen, proves profoundly ambivalent because it marks the conversion of both central characters. Throughout the narrative, as Joe recounts her life story of sexual impulses unbridled and destructive, Seligman appears her saintly opposite. He is a man of culture and knowledge. Jewish, he is of the people of the word. The 16-volume OED anchors his shelf as his intellectual hunger does his self.  He explains Joe’s apparently impulsive behaviour by finding abstruse parallels in fishing, science, mathematics,  music. A celibate, he represents the life of the mind. Even more important is his unflagging forgiveness, his finding a positive aspect to Joe’s every humiliating confession. Seligman is literally “the happy man” because he is blessed with humanity. Indeed, for a brilliant reading of the film as a defence of Jewish philosophy see 
But in that last scene the saint proves only human. Having resisted sexuality all his life he is unintentionally seduced by Joe’s revelation of the life he denied. She doesn’t make that life appealing, but she jars him into an awareness of it. Worse, his assault comes hard upon his defence of her entire sexual career as a woman’s assertion of her rights against the dominant male order. Then he practices what he preached against.
In rejecting her samaritan’s unexpected approach Joe shows she has finally transcended her sexuality. Telling her story and receiving Seligman’s understanding have given Joe a new self-respect and the courage to be abstinent. No more is her sexuality a compelling shame: “Mea vulva. Mea maxima vulva.” That she kills him reaffirms the moral and emotional complexity of the human condition. She couldn’t kill her ex-lover for seducing her ward but when she kills Seligman she expresses her despair that even this good man is as hypocritical as the society she has shunned. Shorn of his pretence to detachment, his soul is now as bared as the winter tree. Earlier Joe said her “only sin” was that she “demanded more from the sunset.” The sunrise finds her demanding more from her saint -- but getting abominably, humanly, less. As if to celebrate her character's ascension  Ms Gainsbourg sings a  bluesy "Hey Joe" over the end credits. 
This is the most astonishing and compelling film of the last 10 years. It’s the film John Donne would make if he were alive in the film age. Every scene ripples with the tension between the body and the soul, the flesh and the spirit, the profane and the sacred. “Fill all my holes” speaks to Joe’s spiritual void as much as to her physical cavities. For Joe to transcend  she has to move from her absolute numbness at the intermission through forms of self-flagellation, her assault upon the flesh, through her lay confession to emerge absolved. True to Donne’s spirit, the film has moments of brilliant black comedy. And the crowning glorious punchline: to save herself she has to kill her fallen saint.  
This is also the perfect First Date film. The graphic sex is an ice-breaker. You'll slip into at least conversational intimacy sooner than a dozen candlelight dinners and beachside walks. If the girl is offended by Joe’s activity, hey, remind her of all the penes for once on view too. This is that rare mainstream film with equal opportunity sexual spectacle. Besides, unless you really mess up, Part 2 virtually guarantees a second date, just to find whodunitandhow next?. 

Saturday, April 19, 2014

Fading Gigolo

Fading Gigolo is a funny, touching parable about loneliness and our need to connect. It seems to grow out of Tennessee Williams’ great line, “We’re all born into solitary confinement within our own skins.” That skin, our flesh, becomes the medium for us to connect to another, whatever the terms. Such urgent communion precludes a reflex moral judgment.
There’s a backstory. Murray (Woody Allen) met young Floravante (director John Turturro) when the lad broke into the third-generation rare book store to rob him.  Instead of having him packed off to reform school Murray befriended the fatherless kid and guided him into a mature, sensitive manhood. 
Now times are tough. In the movie as in our Republican-paralyzed economy. Murray has to close his bookstore because rare book buyers are rarer than rare books. How can he support the black woman and children he's living with? Floravente works part-time in a florists, where he makes delicate arrangements, tending his blossoms carefully so as not to bruise or break them. 
     Murray’s dermatologist (Sharon Stone), in her need for a beauty and connection beneath the perfect skin and beyond her hubby Claude’s resources, gives Murray an idea for a new career for both men. He will arrange a gigolo for her.
So Floravante tends to wealthy and needy women with the sensitivity and care he gives fragile flowers. (Writer Turturro eschews any pun on bloomers in this film — a good thing.) As pimp Murray will recommend and sell time with an imaginative visit to an imagined relationship, the fiction reading experience is made flesh. Murray adopts the trade name Danny Bongo — apt for drumming up business. Because he will be serving as the women’s guide, Floravante becomes Virgil, which seems close to virgin but is closer to Dante’s Inferno.
Floravante is a bit of a poet himself. “The rose comes before the thorn; the thorn comes before the rose.” i.e., Life teems in ambivalence. A brilliant jazz score, based on Gene Ammons, amplifies the soulfulness. So, too, scenes where silences stretch out so long we have nothing to focus on but the characters’ inner being.
Our glimpses of Floravante’s clientele suggest the wide spectrum of women who suffer from loneliness and disregard. Some are old, some large, some as lovely as Sharon Stone and her buoyant BF Sofia Vergara, who nurse the desire for a threesome. The tyro gigolo Floravente treats them all with gentleness, respect and sexual effectiveness. Not the conventional pretty boy, he wins them with understanding. He actually listens for signs of their needs. Presumably a man doesn’t have to be a gigolo to treat women with such generosity and respect — but it helps. Murray talks up his clients with a clumsy parody of Floravante’s care.
But this gigolo is Fading. What threatens to drive the Italian hero out of his generous profession is his encounter with an orthodox Jewish sect. Nothing like an orthodox religion, any orthodox religion, to drive people apart and away from their life source. 
The rabbi’s widow Avigal (Vanessa Paradis) has had six children but has never been touched. Instead of the Immaculate this sect has the Peremptory Conception. Her longtime admirer, the community security officer Dovi (Liev Schreiber, armed with squadcar, badge, payess and tzitzis) is alarmed at her sudden happiness. He drags Murray off to a tribal judges hearing.
The film’s highpoint is the discreet development of the feeling between Avigal and Floravante. It begins on a radical note — from a man she can’t shake hands with, a bare back rub. That addresses her sense of loneliness so directly she bursts into tears. Their relationship teeters between the gigolo’s customized service and the strictures of her sect. His climactic baring is not her dress but her wig. Floravante realizes he is in love with her when he fails to perform in that long-planned threesome. He can’t manage a trois because he can no longer manage seul. The Italian florist/gigolo needs his ultra orthodox rebbetzin.
Of course, it cannot to be. Awakened to life by her gigolo, Avigal is ready to resume life in her own world. She accepts Dovi and with him comes to bid farewell to her emancipating, soul-discovering gigolo. This film renders “Just a Gigolo” obsolete.
And the heartbroken Floravante? He announces his plan to go away. The gigolo won’t ho’ mo’. But then this beauty comes into the coffee shop and Murray starts flirting and gets his card to her so who knows? People have needs that must find providers.The flesh will trump the prohibitors.

Friday, April 18, 2014

Only Lovers Left Alive

There are two readings In Jim Jarmush’s title. (i) Only lovers are still alive. To the centuries-old passionate vampire couple everyone else is a zombie. Or “an illiterate philistine zombie” like Shakespeare, according to vampire Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt), the true author of the canon and the first immortal we see die. Not to be able to love is a form of death. (ii) Our vampire couple are the only lovers left alive. The creeping impurity of blood gives even their immortality a shelf life. Adam (Tom Hiddleston) and Eve (Tilda Swinton) evoke the first humans but embody the last. Their last drink, that closes the film, is only a temporary respite, before the contamination dooms them as it did Marlowe.
The pallid palette and the ruined ghastly Detroit and crumbling Tangiers cityscapes suggest this film is an elegy to a dying — if not already dead — humanity. To cite two of Eve's books, our vampire couple are the Quixoitic dreamers struggling against civilization’s Endgame. (The third, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, links infinity and suicide.) As Adam observes, we’re so obsessed with our dwindling and contaminating oil that we’re unaware of the greater imminent lack of our most pervasive element, water. There the human and the global merge. This is the first vampire film coloured green.
Eve’s equally palindromic sister Ava (Mia Wasikowska) personifies another kind of contamination, an unthinking, destructive selfishness that places everything around her as well as herself at mortal risk. She casually destroys the Gibson guitar that Adam prizes with religious as well as antiquarian and artistic devotion. He values so much, she nothing. Adam and Eve appear to have lived so long they have learned everything, to wit, their Latinate flora and fauna. Lacking their dedication to their world, Ava lives only to indulge her moment. She can't love her Ian, only mortally drink him. A palindrome can be either complete self-absorption (Ava) or a continuous loop (Eve).
     Adam’s purity extends to refusing to publish his music. But somehow it slips out against his wishes, against his protectiveness. That prefigures the futility of the lovers’ attempts to survive, the last purity in a growingly contaminated world. Adam too “is too good to be famous.” But as the corruption in science and humanity spreads Adam finds his summary metaphor in a technology even older than his antique stethoscope: “I just feel like all the sand is at the bottom of the hour glass or something.” The lovers’ longevity as well as their love makes their passing all the more tragic — and symptomatic.

Monday, April 14, 2014

Draft Day

Forget about the football. This film is about the importance of restoring humanity to the cold machinery of capitalism. It’s about how someone with power should deal with people. In the calculation of a company’s need, amid all the quantifiable criteria the overriding importance lies in character. Know your people, know their value, know their weakness, and give them the chance to realize themselves. Then it doesn’t matter whether you win or lose. You’ve made life as good as you can for your team.
That’s the strength of Sonny Weaver Jr (Kevin Costner, touching and superb as a good man in a brute job). He carries his genius coach father’s name so he feels an extra onus, especially since as GM he fired his dad (who has just died). But he’s Sonny so even as a son he’s upbeat, sunny. The weaver can weave dreams (like those of his NFL draft prospects, his team, the losing Cleveland Browned-off fans) or an entrapping, debilitating web (same list, plus his girlfriend, his own ambitions) or a harmonious creation (as at film’s end the Browns seem poised to become).
This sensitivity is all the more important in a traditionally male industry — like politics and, yeah, I suppose to some extent like the NFL. As Sonny’s team accountant/lawyer Ali (Jennifer Garner) observes, it’s ironic that the top award in this ultra-macho sport is a piece of jewelry. That rings true, especially as Ali is also GM Sonny’s main squeeze and is carrying his kid. Against the tradition, this woman is one of the grid-savviest characters in the film. She proposes the special teams Seahawk to complete the penultimate deal. And Sonny fired his dad at his mother’s (Ellen Burstyn) request, to save the old guy’s heart. Women make key decisions here. Sonny’s human instincts are definitely from his feminine side. Still, he’s a guy in a guy’s world (capitalism or its apogee, NFL) so he needs feminine sensitivity but not any indulgent sentimentality. That keeps him reticent when the women want him to talk.
Hence Sonny’s maneuvering in the snakey plot. He’s tempted to make the deal his macho team owner (Frank Langella) demands but balks when he gets an insight into the prize prospect’s character. The guy lies. So he doesn’t really command his teammates' respect. As there is less to this star quarterback than meets the eye on the win-loss column, so there’s more to the passionate linebacker whom Sonny prefers. The QB racks up the gals but the LB was ejected for giving his TD football to a woman in the stands — his dying sister. Sonny opts for character. He even forgives the good man's indiscreet tweeting, given his fuller sense of the man. He keeps his coach despite his betrayal and opposition. And the GM is man enough to apologize to the intern, lowest on the totem pole.
  The team owner is a showboat without the understanding his GM marshalls. He’ll never know why Sonny made the decisions he did but he’s happy here because he thinks they’ll win for him. The bust QB’s total commitment to winning disqualifies that value.
This is as good a film as Canadian director Ivan Reitman has made. The script is tense, concise, witty, suspenseful, full of interesting characters with a range of strength/weakness, equally valuable.  
     Reitman plays an interesting trick here. Phone conversations are often presented in split screens. That’s conventional. Reitman’s trick is to have a character in one screen lap over into the other. The characters are physically in different spaces, but that overlap reminds us of the essential unity of people across whatever divides them. That twist on the device enforces the central theme of the community and sensitivity that should bind the separate, even conflicting components in any enterprise, especially business and --especially today -- politics.
     I’m looking forward to the sequel. Sonny and Ali have their kid. With both parents so passionately steeped in football, the kid grows up — to espouse cricket. For more see www.yacowar.blogspot.com.
     

Saturday, April 5, 2014

Le Week-end: CALL Discussion Notes


The Brits Nick (Jim Broadbent) and Meg (Lindsay Duncan) Burrows splurge on a 30th wedding anniversary weekend in Paris. Both enjoyed long careers as teachers, but Nick’s has ended on a sour note of political incorrectness. Their married pothead son with rats in the home they bought him wants to move back with them, but first Meg, then Nick, refuses.The couple can barely afford this trip yet impulsively splurge. At Meg’s initiative they walk out on a restaurant bill. Later they’re imperilled by their unpayable hotel bill. 
      The marriage has some apparent tensions. Nick suspects Meg is unfaithful, while Meg can't forget -- not to say forgive -- his fling several years ago with a young student. Now she sometimes avoids his touch and sometimes solicits it. They play games, often based on Nick's having cultivated his feminine side and Meg her masculine.
A chance meeting with Morgan (Jeff Goldblum), Nick’s old Cambridge friend, leads to the couple’s invitation to his dinner party. There we might contrast the value in Nick’s apparent failure to the emptiness of Morgan’s apparent success. Before dinner Meg accepts another man’s invitation out, while Nick gets stoned with Morgan’s alienated son, over for the weekend from New York. At the dinner Morgan’s pregnant new wife toasts him, Morgan generously salutes his mentor Nick and Nick unloads a speech of excoriating self-awareness and candour. It embarrasses everyone but Morgan’s son, who is delighted by the rare honesty (“Awesome”). In the last scene Morgan arrives to bail his old friend out. The three break into the dance that we earlier saw in a TV clip from Bande a Part, the 1964 film by the icon of the revolutionary 60s, Jean-Luc Godard. 


You might like to consider the following questions.
  1. In the title, does the French modify the English, the English the French, or both, and what’s the point?
  2. A second honeymoon in Paris promises romance. Does this deliver? (Be careful.)
  3. Why are the central couple called Burrows?
  4. On the train Meg is reading Elegance of the Hedgehog. How is the title relevant? In Muriel Barbery's novel an apparently stereotypical concierge and an apparently shallow preteen hide their complex true natures from an insensitive world. So?
  5. How does the film use our characters’ — and our assumed — Francophilia? (i.e., the love of France, not frankness.)
  6. Are the old radicals still freedom fighters? How so?
  7. How do the allusions to and clip from Godard’s Bande a Part (The Outsiders) resonate?”
  8. Ditto Dylan’s “How does it feel to be on your own?” (Like a Rolling Stone)
  9. What’s the point of Nick’s hotel room collage? Art a Part.
  10. How is our sense of the couple altered by the shifting tone of their bickering? 
  11. What’s the significance of the last shot? The first? (High shot of railroads tracks approaching Paris). How are the train passengers there characterized? 
  12. In a British film set in Paris why make Morgan an American?
  13. How does the film relate to director Roger Michell’s earlier Notting Hill, Changing Lanes, Venus and Hyde Park on Hudson?
  14. And how to screenwriter Hanif Kareshi’s My Beautiful Launderette, Sammie and Rosie Get Laid, London Kills Me, Venus?
  15. Why is Nick presented as “an anarchist on the left”?
  16. “Like Noah, this is a film less about plot than character.” Discuss.
  17. The British couple are not from London but from the dreary industrial midlands, Birmingham. Oui? 
  18. How does the film draw on Goldblum’s persona, i.e., smooth ‘60s Hippie. In the West Coast party scene in Annie Hall (1977) he’s on the phone to his guru: “I forgot again. What’s my mantra?” Does his character's name suggest anything? 'Morgen' is German for 'tomorrow.'
  19. How does the new film contrast Morgan’s and Nick’s respective honesty?
  20. Morgan's Rivoli apartment has the Hitchcock vertigo staircase. Why?
  21. How do these lines of dialogue resonate:
“You can’t not love and hate the same person.”
“I’ve become a phobic object to you.”
“How great is that! To be so finely tuned to your unhappiness.”
“I want more of myself.”
“Even his emails are loud.”
“I finally found a psychiatrist who told me what I wanted to hear.”
   Morgan's "I love you."