'Cake'
Jennifer Aniston roughs up her appearance to star as a woman suffering from chronic pain, both mental and physical, in this low-budget drama
Cast as a cranky, depressed woman suffering from chronic pain, Cake represents Jennifer Aniston’s first low-budget, indie-style film since 2006’s Friends with Money, offering the star her most dramatically challenging part since either the latter movie or The Good Girl (2002).Covered in prosthetic scars and made up to look as dowdy and unglamorous as someone in cashmere sweatpants can look, Aniston submits an honest, sturdy performance. However, the film, directed by Daniel Barnz (Phoebe in Wonderland, Beastly) and written by Patrick Tobin, is less emotionally potent than it wants to be, and feels as if it might have been overmedicated by script doctoring to make it more palatable to Aniston’s fan base. That sizeable audience will drum up box-office support but it’s hardly likely to doWe’re the Millers-sized business.
Set in Los Angeles, which it evokes with a resident’s sensitivity to the area’s social geography, the film opens at a support group for sufferers of chronic pain. It transpires that one regular, Nina (Anna Kendrick), has committed suicide, and facilitator Annette (Felicity Huffman) asks each of the members to share what they feel. When it’s time for Claire Simmons (Aniston) to tell an imaginary Nina what she thinks, she rips into the dead woman, condemning her decision to end her life in such a way as to cause maximum distress to her family. The others are so upset by her honesty they later politely ask her to take her pain elsewhere.
Scenes at Claire’s home gradually reveal the state of the nation for this troubled woman. Addicted to prescription painkillers, she lives alone in a large, tastefully appointment house, her ex-husband (Chris Messina) having moved out some time ago. Occasionally, she has carefully positioned, loveless sex with her gardener Arturo (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo).When she gives him a box of unused children’s toys she no longer needs, it’s an obvious clue that Claire once had a child who’s now dead, probably killed in the same accident that mangled her body.
Her main support, however, is Silvana (Adriana Barraza, easily the movie’s MVP), Claire’s Mexican housekeeper. Silvana maternally clucks over her employer, taking on the chin Claire’s sometimes brusque comments and ferrying her around town when needed, even as far Tijuana to pick up extra Percocets. The fact that Claire always insists on having her passenger seat fully reclined to ease her back pain marks a nicely observed detail, paid off poignantly at the end.
Nina starts making hallucinatory appearances in Claire’s dreams, urging her to kill herself too. Seeking to exorcize this demon, Claire goes to the dead woman’s house and meets Nina’s husband, Roy (Sam Worthington, speaking with his native Australian accent for a change). Like Claire, Roy is a tightly wound ball of fury, filled with rage at his dead wife for leaving him alone to raise their pre-school-age son. He and Claire strike up a non-physical relationship and something romantic looks possible, but it only takes an encounter with someone connected to the tragedy to shatter Claire’s locked-down composure.
The road map the film draws for recovery comes straight out of the atlas of trauma-drama psychotherapy, prescribing that in order to heal any devastated individual in question must have a big hysterical screaming scene, weep a lot in a jump-cut montage sequence, and hit rock bottom before turning to loved ones – in this case Barrazza’s longsuffering Silvana - for redemptive forgiveness and support. Cake follows this narrative trajectory with dogged scrupulousness, which rather drains any sense of surprise or originality from the movie, however well Aniston performs the required maneuvers.
Even more problematic is the way everyone in the film, including the protagonist, describe Claire as a “bitch,” and yet she doesn’t really do anything all that bitchy or mean. Sure, she’s a bit caustic tongued, and not above using lawyerly tricks to get what she wants (it’s mentioned that she was a brief before the accident), but that hardly makes her any kind of harridan. One can’t help wondering if earlier drafts of the script gave the character more opportunity to be venomous but the end result got watered down somewhere along the way.
Ultimately, the film is better at comedy than it is at the tragic stuff, and Aniston’s redoubtable comic timing never fails her. The back and forth between her and Barrazza has substantial fizzle and in the end the movie is more perceptive about the unique, intimate relationships domestics and employers form between them than it is about pain and grief.
DoP Rachel Morrison’s off-center, oddly-angled compositions add an edginess, enhanced by the faint handheld quiver of the camera while heightened colors are deployed sparingly to signal Claire’s breaks with reality.
Production companies: A Cinelou Films production in association with Echo Film, We’re Not Brothers Productions
Cast:Jennifer Aniston, Anna Kendrick, William H. Macy, Adriana Barraza, Felicity Huffman, Sam Worthington, Chris Messina, Mamie Gummer
Director: Daniel Barnz
Screenwriter: Patrick Tobin
Producer: Ben Barnz, Mark Canton, Kristin Hahn, Courtney Solomon
Executive producers: Jennifer Aniston, Shyam Madiraju
Director of photography: Rachel Morrison
Production designer: Joseph Garrity
Costume designer: Karyn Wagner
Editors: Kristina Boden, Michelle Harrison
Sales: Conquistador Entertainment
'Mommy': Cannes Review
Competing for the Palme d'Or in Cannes, this explosively emotional portrait of a troubled mother-son relationship is 25-year-old director Xavier Dolan's most substantial work to date.
CANNES – The flamboyantly coiffed Quebecois writer-director who put the auteur into hauteur,Xavier Dolan has enjoyed a sensational career rise over the last five years, going from teenage actor to Cannes Competition contender at the ridiculously young age of 25. Dolan's fondness for operatic, style-saturated histrionics onscreen and tetchy narcissism in person tends to divide critics and juries.
But Dolan's fifth feature feels like a strong step forward, striking his most considered balance yet between style and substance, drama-queen posturing and real heartfelt depth. A lusty character study of a working-class Montreal single mother and her emotionally damaged teenage son, Mommy should have plenty of potential commercial appeal beyond Dolan's hard-core art house fan base. This could be his Blue Is The Warmest Colormoment. The Ego has landed.
CANNES REVIEW: 'Fantasia' ('Huan Xiang Qu')
Mommy is Dolan's fourth Cannes entry. He last came to the festival just two years ago with the visually ravishing polymorphous love story Laurence Anyways, which won the LGBT-themed Queer Palm award. Reportedly miffed at being denied an official Competition slot for that film, he chose Venice for his next -- last year's arty psycho-thriller Tom at the Farm.
But even if the gossip is true, his hissy fit is clearly now over as he is back in Cannes with his first official Competition entry. If Mommy defies the current bookie's odds and takes the Palme d'Or, Dolan will be the youngest ever winner --a year younger than Steven Soderbergh was when in 1989, at age 26, he took the big prize with Sex, Lies and Videotape.
The omens are good, since Mommy is a kind of thematic sequel to Dolan's first feature, I Killed My Mother, which won top honors in the Directors' Fortnight in Cannes five years ago. The same leading lady, Anne Dorval, plays the matriarchal pillar of both films. But this time, sympathy has very much shifted toward the long-suffering mother figure. Even though the dramatic material here is much less autobiographical, this more emotionally generous story could almost be read as an apology for Dolan's sulky, spiky, self-absorbed debut.
Mommy takes place in a lightly fictional near-future Canada following the adoption of new laws that dictate parents must either take responsibility for their emotionally disturbed children or send them to detention centers. While this may sound like the opening to one of David Cronenberg's dystopian sci-fi thrillers, it is actually just Dolan's slightly clumsy setup for the family psychodrama ahead. Everything that follows is a broadly naturalistic contemporary three-hander set in the suburbs of Montreal.
Dorval gives a force-of-nature performance as Diane “Die” Despres, a glamorously trashy middle-aged widow whose teenage son Steve (Antoine-Olivier Pilon) suffers from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, bouncing off the walls as he struggles to contain his explosively violent temper. Pilon is great casting for Steve, charismatic and manipulative, volatile but vulnerable. Imagine a demonically cherubic Macaulay Culkin with the sexually charged swagger of a young Jean-Paul Belmondo.
STORY: Cannes Culinary Showdown--Ranking the Macarons
Diane and Steve are both flawed characters, neither victims nor villains. Their conversations are combative and prickly, full of salty slang and occasional physical contact, with teasing hints of incestuous intimacy that the script never fully explores. Unlike Dolan's typical protagonists, these are not bourgeois bohemian hipsters but damaged blue-collar outsiders, struggling yet ever hopeful, bursting with a vitality and vulgarity that give the film its raw humor.
There are more four-letter words in Mommy than all of Dolan's previous features put together. But thankfully, he avoids kitsch caricature or patronizing sentiment in depicting these impoverished, marginalized characters. "I don't see the point in making films about losers," the director explains in his Cannes press notes.
Mommy becomes a kind of bizarre love triangle when shy, stammering neighbor Kyla (Laurence Anyways alumni Suzanne Clement) takes a shine to Diane and Steve. The trio form their own dysfunctional family unit, which liberates all three from stifling personal limitations, at least temporarily. Kyla has a mysterious past and a controlling husband at home, neither of which Dolan explains fully. A missed opportunity, but not a serious omission.
At over two hours, Mommy could benefit from a shorter cut, like all of Dolan's self-edited films. Even so, he keeps this story engrossing, surprising and emotionally pungent for most of its long running time. In another sign of growing maturity, he also resists the lure of tragic melodrama right until the final few scenes, when a heartbreaking daydream sequence showing the successful alternative life that Steve will never lead (Dolan cleverly switches Pilon with another actor here) is followed by a bitter collapse into bleak reality. This downbeat ending does not sit smoothly with the rest of the film, nor does it devalue the good work that has gone before.
PHOTOS: The Party Scene at Cannes 2014
One of Dolan's key selling points has always been his strong visual eye, and he does not disappoint here with balletic slow motion, gorgeous clothes and beautifully lit interiors bathed in lush reds and warm golds. But in a bold departure from his past work, Dolan and cinematographer Andre Turpin chose to shoot Mommy in the square 1:1 aspect ratio. This gimmick initially feels needlessly restrictive but soon creates its own appealing visual grammar of tightly framed close-ups and geometric patterns. Without giving away spoilers, the frame widens during two brief scenes of hope and optimism, an elegant metaphor for the characters literally expanding their narrow horizons. This flashy flourish earned a rare round of mid-movie applause in Cannes.
Another of Dolan's signature touches is his collage soundtracks of vintage pop and classical tracks.Mommy maintains this tradition, using the conceit that the songs all derive from a mixtape CD compiled by Steve's late father. Lana Del Rey, Dido and Beck all feature, but only Celine Dion is honored with her own stand-alone dance routine. "She's our national heroine!" Diane cries.
Dolan may well have read the Canadian music critic Carl Wilson's extraordinary book defending Dion against highbrow snobbery, Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste. If not, he should. Because Mommy feels like a similarly joyous celebration of the raw emotionalism and cultural richness of Quebec's Francophone working class. In any case, it is Dolan's warmest, most humane and least narcissistic film to date.
Production company: Metafilms
Cast: Anne Dorval, Antoine-Olivier Pilon, Suzanne Clement
Director: Xavier Dolan
Screenwriter: Xavier Dolan
Producers: Nancy Grant, Xavier Dolan
Cinematographer: Andre Turpin
Editor: Xavier Dolan
Music: Eduardo Noya
Sales company: Seville International
Black Sea
LOCARNO, Switzerland -- A clash of cultures and generations gives way to understanding and friendship in Federico Bondi's touching "Black Sea" ("Mar Nero") in which a grouchy Italian widow slowly bonds with her young Romanian caregiver. Acclaimed Italian star Ilaria Occhini and Romania's Dorotheea Petre make a lasting impression in a variation on the odd couple theme. Petre was named best actress in the Cannes sidebar Un Certain Regard for "The Way I Spent the End of the World" in 2006.
Full of gentle wisdom and the fresh air of New Europe, the film's fine acting and general warmth will endear it to festival and art house audiences everywhere.
Petre plays Angela, who arrives with very little Italian to take care of the elegant but permanently disgruntled Gemma (Occhini), whose aches and pains are made worse by desperately missing her beloved late husband. Guileless and patient, Angela lets the old woman's unpleasantness bounce off her as she gets on with her job, never losing her temper and sticking up for herself when she needs to. Gradually, she wins not only Gemma's trust but also her affection.
Their relationship deepens the more Gemma learns about life in Romania and sees the young woman's devotion to the man she loves, Adrian (Vlad Ivanov), back in Romania. When Angela learns that Adrian has been fired from his job and has gone missing, Gemma decides they must embark on a trek to find him.
Bondi and co-writer Corso Salani let the pair's relationship flourish slowly with some amusing misunderstandings and observant exchanges. Cinematographer Gigi Martinucci's expertly captures the interplay of the two actresses with Occhini's radiant beauty and intelligence shining through her character's initial truculence and Petre's fresh-faced honesty matching her line for line.
Bondi clearly has great sympathy for the plight of migrants from countries new to the European Union. His scenes showing the Romanian celebrations when joining the EU are as bright and alive as his two accomplished stars.
Production company: Film Kairos. Cast: Ilaria Occhini, Dorotheea Petre, Vlad Ivanov, Maia Morgenstrern, Corso Salani. Director, screenwriter: Federico Bondi. Screenwriter: Ugo Chiti. Producer: Francesco Pamphili. Executive producers: Giorgia Priolo, Marina Spada. Director of photography: Gigi Martinucci. Production designer: Daniele Spisa. Music: Enzo Casucci, Guy Klucevsek. Costume designer: Alessandro Vadala. Editor: Ilaria Fraioli. Sales agent: Intramovies..
No comments:
Post a Comment