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Darkness in high summer
From cold and formal to kinetic and violent, with one stop at
really bad self-abuse
B Y
R I C H A R D
F R A N C I S
^ ^ T
ife is disgusting,” says Monsieur Hire
J L /e a r ly in the film which bears his name.
We know he’s right once we see his world,
although Hire later makes the amazing, and
fatal mistake of forgetting that fact. A young
girl has been accidentally but brutally murdered
in a petty crime near Hire’s home. Because
Monsieur Hire is such a strange little man, all
of the neighbors attempt to blame him. It is not
just the recent death and the neighbors’
reactions which make life so disgusting here;
there is a general atmosphere of unhealthiness
which pervades every scene, beginning with the
opening where the investigating officer takes an
obviously off-kilter interest in the young girl’s
corpse.
.C L*\4*** —
Monsieur Hire is a masterpiece of voyeur
ism; a film of eyes: furtive, haunted, desiring,
distrusting, coy, intense, accusing, prying. But
despite all o f these eyes, peepings, and
invasions of privacy, none is what they seem,
except Monsieur Hire, who is indeed a strange
little man with a previous arrest for indecent
exposure and a current obsession for Alice, the
young woman across the way whose every
move Hire watches through windows of his
perpetually darkened apartment.
The film’s plot has two overt focuses. How
does Hire deal with the ever-tightening circle of
accusations? How does he deal with Alice
when she suddenly becomes aware o f him and
even more forcefully invades his privacy to
return his attentions?
Director Patrice Laconte has given us even
more in this adaptation of Georges Simenon’s
“Les Francailles de Monsieur Hire.” Laconte
moves the story beyond the cruelties of the
neighbors and beyond the ironies of a Peeping
Tom losing his privacy to give a subtle and
sympathetic portrait of a character that most
directors would treat on the same level as a
garden slug. We are drawn into the strange
sexual obsessions of Monsieur Hire to see the
vulnerable and confused little soul inside the
fastidiously-dressed, emotionally-closed, pasty-
faced little man. Laconte even embues Hire’s
fetishism with a sense of delicacy and elegance.
But no punches are pulled; this man is strange
and more than a little sick. Yet his plea that he
doesn’t harm anyone is startingly moral given
the context o f the emotional cruelty of others
around him.
Michel Blanc gives an intense performance
as Monsieur Hire and is beautifully matched by
Sandrine Bonnaire as Alice. The two create
some marvelous scenes where their eyes and
facial tics provide reams of additional material
not written into the script This is the kind of
film which evokes superlatives, so there’s
more. Laconte, working through Denis Lenoir’s
masterfully framed, cool and stylized cinema
tography has created a film which is thoroughly
economic while also evocative and atmos
pheric. This is all underscored beautifully by an
elegant simultaneously insistent and languor
ous musical score by Michael Nyman (not
enough!) known previously by way of Peter
Greenaway’s films.
Michel Blanc is true high art but it is also,
simply, a damned good movie about the way in
which individuals can be cruelly assaulted
because they differ sexually and emotionally
from the mainstream.
Where Monsieur Hire is cold and formal,
Uli Edel’s Last Exit to Brooklyn is wildly
kinetic and violent; but life here is no less
disgusting. Last Exit vs a portrayal of a number
of loosely connected characters in an industrial
ized area of Brooklyn, well into a long,
brutalizing labor strike in the early 1950s. It is
very much like descending to the bottom of a
darkly-lit, overly-crowded rat cage and
watching the inhabitants bite and claw each
other to pieces . . . too powerless to attack the
hands that have locked them into this cage
together.
The real challenge, of course, is to create
some sympathy and understanding in the midst
of the fists, knives and blood. German director
Edel does that and curiously seems to achieve it
with a European sensibility which provides
even more emotional distance from the 1964
novel by Hubert Selby, Jr. There is really no
liking anyone in this film (which is probably
why this film is “soft” . . . film parlance for
unattended . . . and may have been pulled
before you read this), but there are moments
where one can at least find some respect for the
twisted honor that these characters, but
fleetingly, pull from the debris of their lives.
Crawling around at the bottom of this cage
we have Traíala (played by Jennifer Jason
Leigh), a brassy peroxide pseudo-hooker who
seduces military men from a nearby base out
into abandoned lots where her almost-boyfriend
Vinnie and his gang can roll them; Harry Black
(Stephen Lang), the shop steward who
discovers that the newly achieved money and
power of the strike can buy him friends and
who buys himself, accidentally, into the world
of transvestite hookers where he also discovers
that he is gay; and Big Joe (Burt Young), a
family man barely getting by who suddenly
discovers that his daughter Donna (Ricki Lake
of Hairspray) is not fat, but rather eight months
pregnant
Since we are dealing with same-sex
orientation here, it is important to mention that
'despite Lang’s deeply sympathetic portrayal of
Harry Black, we are dealing with the standard
old book and movie stereotype of the homosex
ual who, of course, can come to no good end.
While it’s true that a lot of characters are
destroyed, the film places its few glimmers of
hope on the heterosexual union of Big Joe (with
his twistedly wholesome family) and on the
marriage of Donna to a man who actually turns
out to be decent. Further, Harry’s troubles,
while somewhat self-generated, don’t bear the
same cause-and-effect quality of Tralala’s self-
created hell and suggest more divine provi
dence. That Harry’s response to unrequited
homosexual love would lead him to attempt to
blow a child really had me scratching my head,
no matter how drunk, and stupid, he was
supposed to be. Harry does go from taking
pleasure (his “love” scene with his wife is
legalized rape) to attempting to give it and we
do finally see him in a Christ-crucified pose,
but. . .
This is not a reason for condemnation (I put
these things in context: a novel from 1964), but
rather a point for contemplation. Edel does
have heterosexuals down cold. In this dark
world, filmed largely at night, each character
finds love in some form and each is trans
formed in a twisted way demanded by the way
their environment has shaped them. This is a
grim film about American life which American
films seem no longer able to portray oddly at a
time when 20 percent of Americans are living
below the poverty line and we need some social
discussion of the ways that our human nature is
warped by poverty and despair.
If the film contains any relief from the deep
despair, it is in the dark, often graveyard humor
that goes with such desperation. Horridly
hysterical is Donnas breaking water as she
stands on a chair while being fitted for her
wedding dress as her parents argue whether
mom’s old wedding dress can be made to fit
and then whether or not Donna can even have
the baby when she isn’t married yet.
This film is frank, brutal, very graphic and
not at all for the timid; but it is not gratuitous
and contains an honesty which is rare these
days. That honesty makes it much more
frightening than any summer horror flick
bloodying its way through our summer theaters.
The script is fine, the acting is superb, and the
direction is good and (with the editing)
jarringly tight. Highly recommended with the
reservations noted.
If you are the sort who is not seduced by, or
is very bored with, the standard summer fare of
gratuitious violence, comic book simplifica
tions of reality, neo-fascist “heros”, and those
so-called comedies where you are lucky to
chuckle, I recommend both Monsieur Hire and
Last Exit to Brooklyn as thoughtful and chal
lenging films which take on more ideas, more
successfully, than ten of your average summer
fare figured together.
And then . . .
Adrienne Shelly (playing a woman obsessed
with apocalypse) looks something like Rosannc
Arquette, Robert Burke (playing a “mass-
murderer” released from prison and constantly
mistaken for a minister) looks something like
John Phillip Law, and The Unbelievable Truth
(about their attempt to find love) looks
something like a satire and something like a
movie. I excuse a great deal in low-budget,
independently-made, first-effort films and also
don’t like to write about films unless I have
something good to say about it. However,
writer/director Hal Hartley needs to learn how
to tell a story; needs to learn how to use
caricature and irony to create satire; needs to
learn that good satire demands (explicitly or
implicitly) a moral center; needs to learn how
to use timing to create humor; needs to learn
what it is he is doing before he docs it; and,
finally, needs to shed his homophobia some
where along the way. One character in this film
thought that he might have been gay (learning
this is something like learning about Roy
Cohn), but he’s been “straightened out by the
marines” (oh, yeah?). And you’ve just been
straightened out by me. There is no reason to
see this film including accident or acts of god,
unless you are into banal self-abuse.
▼
•»
Call m e ...
Lisa Kendall
Home 293-3191 O ffice 626-4600
Ways to say no to bigots
▼ Put up anti-racist stickers.
▼ Talk to your friends and get them to help.
T Stamp out racist graffiti. Cover up swas
tikas and white power slogans with anti
nazi messages.
T Know your local nazis—find out all you
can. Who they are, who they know, where
and when they hang out, what they do.
▼ Make your own anti-racist stickers and
flyers and put them up.
▼ Talk to people where you hang out about
racism, sexism and homophobia.
▼ Speak your mind when you hear
offensive jokes, songs and namecalling.
▼ Talk to the media, call and write newspa
pers, radio and television stations and
especially talk shows.
▼ Talk to musicians. They can write songs
and can speak out on stage.
▼ Support aQti-prejudice musicians, maga
zines and artists.
▼ Boycott establishments that tolerate
bigotry.
— John Brown’s Anti-KIan Committee
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don't keep
it to yourself, say you
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just out!
ju st out ▼ 2 9
T August 1990