Gary Dretzka
Noah Forrest
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Douglas Pratt
Ray Pride

May 9 , 2003

Soul Survivors

Two movies this week about the battle for the soul: the end of childhood as seen in Lukas Moodysson's blunt yet incandescent Lilya 4-Ever and Neil LaBute's blunt and hyper-theatrical endeavor to understand how mining our lives for art can mangle our sometimes-insignificant others. The next week should provide another intriguing contrast: the last screening I'm seeing before Matrix Reloaded on Monday is John Woo's "presentation" of Jean-Pierre Melville's super-stylized 1970 French gangster epic, [Le Cercle Rouge. Keanu or Alain Delon? I'm glad I don't have to decide, only see them back-to-back.

X, Rated

Procrastinating over too many projects while under the weather and seeing twelve movies in five days (probably a non-festival record for me), I've read far too many annoying and hopeless, ineffectual reviews by other writers, but I'm particularly happy to find that [Roger Ebert nicely captured the character of the circular, vignette-ey format of X2: X-Men United that I couldn't find the words for, concluding his review, "X2: X-Men United lacks a beginning, a middle and an end, and exists more as a self-renewing loop. In that it is faithful to comic books themselves, which month after month and year after year seem frozen in the same fictional universe. Yes, there are comics in which the characters age and their worlds change, but the X-Men seem likely to continue forever, demonstrating their superpowers in one showcase scene after another. Perhaps in the next generation a mutant will appear named Scribbler, who can write a better screenplay for them."

Who hates you, baby?

After Neil LaBute's detour into post-Tarantino comic brutality (Nurse Betty) and then tony literary adaptation (Possession), he's back to plumbing his vein of deepest inspiration: theatrically derived misanthropy that masquerades as romping misogyny. Only a few of my colleagues admire this blithe trifle of an allegory, The Shape of Things, most dismissing it as a loathsome, ineptly stylized show of contempt for audiences and even for theater itself. (See Jim Hoberman in the Village Voice or the always musically inclined Armond White  in this week's New York Press .)

But LaBute himself seems not to have a problem with labels or critical disdain. Speaking with him when Possession was released, the prolific playwright-screenwriter referred  to his movies (In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors complete his output) as "a small body of work." He smiled at the thought of his play transferred to film, which he'd already completed. Noting that it would premiere at Sundance 2003, the amiable interviewee said, "People will go, 'Look, you hate women again, what happened? You were doing so good.' That's just the way it goes."

In its theatrical incarnation in London and New York, LaBute, who also directed, used amped-up music by Smashing Pumpkins to drown out audience conversation, loud enough that mentor Harold Pinter quickly bolted. (Elvis Costello takes over for Billy Corgan in the film.) Using music this way is the kind of hyperbole that gives some viewers fits, but Shape's clinical dissection of the urge to make art of one's experiences, regardless of the cost to others, made me smile throughout.

Rachel Weisz plays a oh-so-smart graduate student at the archly named Mercy College, who seems to have devoured the corpus of female-centered, confessional gallery art of the last couple decades, notably British artist and celebrity Tracy Emin, whose 1999 "My Bed"  an installation which captured the grotty site of her dreams, her sex, her indulgences. Some call Emin a con artist. The same's been said of LaBute. Watching the playful callowness of Weisz's Eve(lyn) as she lures bumbling, doofusey museum guard Adam (Paul Rudd) under an emasculated David-like sculpture, I had a different thought: I know that woman. Or, have known at least a couple variations on the genre. The movie is a barely-opened-out play, yet LaBute pencils in a few telling sketches on intellectual poseurs.

Eve's a bully, this enactor of "Pygmalion" in reverse, Medea as a single woman. What do you want with me, Adam says a dozen different ways, always scrunching his nose in play-cute fashion as she urges him to change his hair, lose weight, shed his LaBute-like corduroy jackets. With Weisz's exquisite, round features marked by graveled, textured skin, her coy drawls, her wide-eyed stares, her bluff sexual come-ons, Adam should be asking, what are you doing to to me? He should keep asking even when his friends, a couple played by Frederick Weller and Gretchen Mol, begin to ntice that he's sprightlier, he seems smarter, even "sexier" (at least in the most superficial aspects).

Mol gives the most naturalistic performance of the quartet, with the others bringing a kind of acting to the screen that has its place, a concentrated, speak-to-the-rafters style. (Mol's perky physicality is delicious, fragile and fresh, several adjectives I would never have applied to her in anything I've seen her in before.) The campus-bound turns of the story, indicated for the most part rather than based in any attempt at psychological plausibility, make the four, at moments, seem stuck in "Who's Afraid of Who's Read Virginia Woolf?" LaBute appears to know what he's up to: How smart can books, ideas and intellectualization make you when you're heartless with your heart? (As a neon installation bluntly puts it at film's end--which did not appear in the stage version--"Moralists have no place in an art gallery.")

When the characters visit damage upon one another, is LaBute also investigating his own project? Is he, like Evelyn, a heartless taskmaster, ripping the sex and soul from his ciphers? When the characters move through the deliciously precise production design or the actors juggle several styles of acting at once, LaBute seems to be the Woody Allen that Woody Allen has worked to suppress, someone unafraid of his most atavistic and unforgiving insights. ("Don't you ever have an unexpressed sacrilege?" is a question for the Mormon convert that only just came to me.)

"Oh yeah. I think I'm a regular Philistine," LaBute once told me. Speaking of In the Company of Men, which The Shape of Things, both play and movie, is usually described as a distaff version of, he elaborated, "Quite honestly, it's very Old Testament. It's like, you sin, you pay. That's all I show. There's barely any thought of redemption.... I don't think Company of Men is a Greek sort of tragedy, whimsically flicking these characters around the table, but a dispassionate looking down on them. I think ultimately I feel for these people, but no one's forced them to do what they do." The case is different in Shape, with Rudd's giddy dork and Weisz's despoiling siren, decrying the haunted, hunted, stunted, emotionally skittering male's "fuckin' in-securities!"

Still, with a plot this spring-loaded, stacked, and cantilevered, it's simple to recoil from The Shape of Things. More arch than a shoe factory, some will take it as smug, this talky, stagy seduction, with an outside world indicated only by stray, stylized sound, reducing a city's cry to the Doppler of receding sirens.

Love and pursuit and performance art seem passŽ to some reviewers. Are we all that sophisticated? Are we all that resistant to cruelty in our lives, or in movies? LaBute again: "The whole idea of cruelty, it's sustaining the pain. Shoot a character on screen, it's over in a couple of minutes, but to mete it out slowly, you see how much an audience can take."

Innocence Unprotected

We've failed the future. Me, you, society, every nation on earth: that's what Lukas Moodysson's harrowing, beautiful tragedy Lilya 4-Ever says, with stark empathy and no small embrace of Dickensian melodrama. Moodysson dares to point that out, with love and rage, and the attentive, lyrical gift of the reformed poet that he is. Following the 34-year-old writer-director's brilliant Show Me Love, one of the best films about puppy love, and Together, a tender satire of Swedish communal life in the 1970s, it's an earnest drama that means to change the world.

Lilya is 16. A face filled with sunshine. She lives in a nameless suburb of a faceless satellite of the former Soviet Union. Her mother and her mother's lover are leaving for America. They promise to take her. But they leave her behind, with promises she'll be sent for. Soon, soon. But there are no letters. No money. Lilya's aunt quickly throws her out of the family flat, into a decrepit apartment an old man's just died in. Lilya's only friend is an unkempt 11-year-old, Volodya, despised by his father as a "runt," kicked around, left in the cold. They play at children's games. They sniff glue at a disused Russian naval base. "A golden future awaits you," a teacher tells Lilya, handing her a test. She's done badly, she's confused, her face shows. "I was kidding," the casually cruel instructor says. Meanwhile, her best female friend turns tricks at a nearby disco that she and Lilya dress up for. The friend's father finds a fistful of bills. She tells him that the money is Lilya's. It's simple: Everyone in the housing estate presumes she's a "slut." She meets Andrei. A handsome young man, kind, with promises of a new life in Sweden. She's flown to Malmo (Moodysson's own hometown), dreaming of the West. Within moments of leaving the airport, she knows: she's been sold. Her dreams cannot hold against malign mediocrities, the median atrocity of men who want young flesh.

In its sharp casting choices, Lilya 4-Ever is as inhabited as pages of Zola. Forget the chemical despoliation of Soviet-occupied regions like Latvia and Estonia. Forget the euphemism "collateral damage." As Lilya, Oksana Akinshina is the center of the universe. All girlish innocence, with brown-eyed angel radiance, a down-turned, full-lipped mouth, a bump in her upturned nose, she radiates the form of child's charm readily taken for beauty. But her brilliant performance is many, many meters beyond an Amanda Bynes, a Hilary Duff, a stray Olsen twin from the wrong side of the tracks. Her exquisite, fresh, freckle-faced vivacity makes her an anti-Britney, yet Lilya is thrilled when she hears that she shares a birthday with Miss Spears. I don't want to try to describe the wondrous, bright performance Moodysson draws from Akinshina. This is what movies do best when drawn by the best hands: transform the contours of the human face into a map of the world.  (Stanley Kauffmann shows a keen appreciation of Akinshina and Moodysson's collaboration in The New Republic.  Unrelenting but hardly didactic, working with a dreamy particularity, Moodysson's shrewd and skillful construction makes it simple: murder one child, you murder the world. Kill a dream? Forget the future.

A moment. When she realizes her mother is driving away without her, she runs from the apartment where she's been the sullen teen, into the cold and damp. As the car wheels away, she cries out, "Mama!" Your heart stops, your breath stops. Moodysson cuts to an image in slowed motion as the bare-kneed girl slides in the tarry mud, she's splattered, befouled. A dog enters the frame, licks its uncompromising love onto her ear. I've seen Lilya three times and every time, that scene's a killer, over the top and on the nose: even Little Nell would cry at her sorrow. There are predecessors to this simple story, notably two films by Robert Bresson. Mouchette  is another movie that asks, "Why would a child want to die?" and Moodysson nods toward that film with an amusement-park-bumper-car ride in Lilya." More to point may be [Au hasard, Balthasar, the story of a punished donkey who stumbles dumbly toward an escape from a cruel world in that film's final frames.

Working in Russian, a language he doesn't speak, Moodysson remains a daring, pitying filmmaker. The cinematography is luminous, and he continues to work with a fluency of economical editing and fluent handheld camerawork that cuts to an instant's flutter of emotion. He's willing to be as stark a dramatist as James Cameron in Titanic, yet in all three of his features, the father of two has demonstrated an uncommon identification with teenagers. This glowing portrait of guilelessness and naivety turned callow is not a wallow; Moodysson shares none of Harmony Korine esteeming of picturesque squalor. You see the hope on faces. The fear.

He's also attuned to the power of music in dreams of escape. Lilya opens with a roar, a song by the German heavy metal band RSmmstein, the lyrics of which translate as "my heart burns." Throughout, the narcotic strains of techno suggest a kind of unimaginable paradise on the other side of... what? The border? This life? The first time I saw the movie, at the Vancouver International Film Festival, it ended with this credit: "This film is dedicated to the millions of children around the world exploited by the sex trade." It wasn't on the U.S. print I saw last week. Yet it's typical of Moodysson's project. He says he made it to make audiences angry. To realize, in metaphorical terms, how cold the world can be. It's like an outcry of adolescent anger, with the energy and purity of angry pop. When you're young, "Why can't the world be perfect?" is a perfectly good question. We're supposed to be blindered after a certain age. Yet Moodysson won't look away. How fucked up is the world? Lilya 4-Ever is but a furious glimpse.

 

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