A paean to French cuisine, featuring a cast straight out of 19th-century paintings by Fantin-Latour, Manet, Caillebotte, Cezanne, Monet, Toulouse-Lautrec (you get the picture). Unfortunately, it is as devoid of plot as any film I can remember. Identifying ingredients and cooking methods can only go so far, and when another meal starts it’s time to look at your watch.
An artwork by master director Wim Wenders about the unique and overwhelming art of Anselm Kiefer, for my money the greatest living artist. The 3-D projection floats us into the world of Kiefer’s sculpture, architecture and deeply perspective paintings. We see hints of his artmaking technique: slabbing on paint (or tar?), pouring lead, blowtorching vegetal matter. There is little information about how he can produce so much large art: a library of lead books, an acre of leaning towers, enormous paintings that fill the walls of the Doge’s Palace, etc., etc. Through recreations and archival footage we see the younger Kiefer challenging Germany’s WWII amnesia. Best of all, we see Kiefer in the long halls, the stubbled fields and the sunflower patches that become subjects of his art. The camera never moves outside his art. It rests when Kiefer does. This is a definitive, even essential, document.
Suspense builds nicely as a TV star played by Natalie Portman, doing research for an upcoming film, visits the home of a former school teacher, played by Julianne Moore, who after an affair with a 13-year-old student followed by childbirth, incarceration and marriage is living unhappily ever after in their Savannah home. As the teacher-student story is based on a notorious real-life incident, we don’t question its plausibility; we grapple instead with the fissures in the relationships between the three principals: who is using whom? who is comfortable in their own skin? Portman is terrific in her role, and Charles Melton is getting awards for his performance as an adult who missed an adolescence. My only qualm was Moore, who is simply too good and glamorous an actress to convince me of who she was supposed to be.
A sad and bizarre story, told with exquisite delicacy and enough pink to tempt Barbie. I don’t know how accurate the portrayal of Priscilla was (was she really that short?), but since Sofia Coppola’s script was based on Priscilla Presley’s book and Priscilla was an executive producer of the film, I’ll accept it, with some dramatic salt. Jacob Elordi’s Elvis, however, totally met my approval and was worlds better than Austin Butler’s in Elvis, as was the movie itself. Forgoing any Elvis songs, the film rested entirely on the very odd relationship that started when Elvis was 24 and Priscilla only 14. How Cailee Spaeny could play Priscilla convincingly at 14 then all the way to 27 amazed me. Even without Elvis’s songs, the music is very good.
Perhaps Ridley Scott watched The Crown and thought, Hey, I can do this for France. Unfortunately, his swings at royal romance, political intrigue and historical drama were all whiffs. For some reason, Joaquin Phoenix as the lead was made to appear uncharismatic, uncoordinated, a terrible lover, phlegmatic and taciturn – hardly the image of the almost-conqueror of Europe. Vanessa Kirby was at least interesting, while the plethora of courtiers were indistinguishable. As the title proclaimed, the movie was about one person, and he was boring.
I had to take this in in two sittings, it was so long and so loud (as was the audience of young women). It’s hard to find fault with Taylor Swift, and I couldn’t. Some songs were better than others, but it probably helped if you knew them all by heart, as most of the adoring crowd did. What stood out, beyond her looks, her smile, her engagingly coy cuteness, were the clothes, the choreography, the dancers, backup singers and band, the overall production. Edited down from the live show, when presumably there were breaks for the costume and set changes, the 2:48 film was a nonstop powerhouse of visual and aural delight.
A French psycho-drama from Justine Triet and production company “didshedoit.com,” which is the movie’s hook. The director prejudiced the question whether the husband’s fall was a suicide or a murder by making the prosecution witnesses bombastic and the prosecutor smarmy and not good-looking, as against a sympathetic defendant (a measured and marvelous Sandra Huller) and her handsome lawyer with fabulous hair. In the end, one felt the suicide unlikely and the murder impossible. We did feel that the husband’s actions were aimed at his next book, while it was more certain that what transpired would end up in his wife’s. Years of watching Spiral made us comfortable with a trial in which half the “evidence” would not be admissible in a U.S. court. And both 10-year-old Daniel and dog Snoop were used to good effect. Most of all, the film raised questions and begged for discussion afterward, reminding us how rewarding the European (French) cinema can be, without special effects, more than two sets or, presumably, much of a budget.
A small movie, like the best Vermeer paintings, and if not a similar masterpiece, one that told a fun story with clarity and the borrowed beauty of all the Vermeers. Just showing close-ups of the paintings in the Rijksmuseum exhibition would have been worth the admission price, but beyond the final show were two subplots involving two contested paintings. While the Rijksmuseum ultimately accepted both as authentic, in one case over the opinion of the National Gallery in Washington, the film left me with serious doubts about the other, a work owned by Thomas Kaplan, who was among the many participants skillfully shown. The movie increased my appreciation of Vermeer, which is hard to do.
Ladies ruled the stage for our spring visit to New York, with the Tony going to Jodie Comer in Prima Facie, a legal delicacy and one-woman tour de force. Jessica Chastain was formidable in a necessarily smaller but no less affecting role in A Doll’s House. Jessica Hecht and Laura Linney complemented each other in the David Auburn two-hander, Summer, 1976. As much as I love Linney, I could see why Hecht’s performance garnered the Tony nomination instead. Based on pre-play blurbs, I expected Juliet Stevenson to round out this all-star list of female leads, but I was so turned off by her unmodulated harshness and unpleasant character in The Doctor that I left at intermission. As a footnote I should include Lucy Roslyn’s one-woman performance in the off-Broadway Orlando. She was attractive and good at what she was doing, but the play, which she also wrote, didn’t connect.
Then there were the ensemble productions. Fat Ham was the cleverest, with a slew of hilariously winning characters and winking nods to Shakespeare. Thanksgiving Play carried a not-so-subtle post-woke message but was too unsubtle for my taste. New York, New York was our shot at a good old-fashioned musical, but the trite plot, unmemorable songs and dull characters overcame the excellent choreography and drove us out at halftime.
Willem Dafoe couldn’t leave because he was locked inside a billionaire architect’s apartment after an art theft went awry, but what was my excuse? The film’s premise discouraged any hope of a happy or good ending, but surely something interesting would happen? It turned out to be nothing more than a Greek/Belgian/German art-house production that, perhaps for obscure art-house reasons, was set in New York and starred an American actor. Was it a comment on the obscenely rich? the value of Art? the need for human connection? Architecture and Design? Man’s ingenuity? the human body? Where most films leave me wondering, where and when do the characters go to the bathroom?, this movie, unfortunately, spelled it out.
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