The Talkies/Deceptions

...George, who for all his seedy employment history looks down on prostitution, makes it clear to the exotic Simone that he resents having to work for a "tall thin black tart...

...When Stefan speaks of his love for Paula, Julius says, "Why did you fall for her...

...You know what that means...

...At first the two don't get along...

...Julius repUes, "Both...

...Denny puts him to work as chauffeur for a high-priced call girl named Simone (Cathy Tyson...

...Deciding to spend the summer away from home and job—and discovering that Paula's lover, Stefan Lachner (Uwe Ochsenknecht), is in the market for a roommate—^Julius (under the pseudonym of Daniel) applies for the vacancy...

...In its preoccupation with the theme of "male bonding," and its view of men as overgrown boys...

...with the roles men assume, the disguises they wear, to conceal their fear and pain (which explains the gorilla mask that figures prominently in the plot...

...And indeed, for all their differences, deep down both men are essentially the same—they are, in Julius's words, "overgrown kids" whose childish jealousy, criticism, and betrayal of one another should not be taken too seriously...

...Thomas (Robbie Coltrane) is perplexed...

...and Lauterbach and Ochsenknecht, in their characters' mutual devotion, distrust, and derision (as well as their exceptional chemistry), recall a host of American film teams: Abbott and Costello, Hope and Crosby, Martin and Lewis, Newman and Redford, Matthau and Lemmon in The Odd Couple, Curtis and Lemmon in Some Like It Hot...

...Though Cathy Tyson manages to make Simone convincingly ambiguous, she is hardly as mesmerizing or mysterious as Jordan seems to think she is...

...They're antagonists, true enough...

...His wife having slammed the door in his face when he tried to return home, he seeks out Denny Mortwell (Michael Caine), an underworld kingpin who is his former employer (and who is apparently responsible, in some way, for his sevenyear hiatus...

...Soon she is turning to him for help...

...Doris Dorrie's Men (Manner) is an uncommon treat...

...a critique of The System...

...Because she lives in a world you'd like to belong to...

...In this, as in many other ways...

...in a porn-video store, he buys a tape of an X-rated film starring Simone and watches it at his friend Thomas's place...

...Arranging an interview for Stefan with a friend's firm, Julius helps him select a suit, cuts his hair, teaches him how to behave on a job interview, edits his portfolio, and forces him to really work for the first time in his life...

...Eventually it becomes clear to George that this sleazy turf is not as foreign to him as he had thought...

...You're proud of being a loser...

...estranged from his wife, forced to meet his teenaged daughter covertly, and thrust into this world of adolescent girls who sell their bodies, he is—one gathers—simultaneously overcome with sexual excitement, moral revulsion, a tender, instinctive feeling of paternal protectiveness ("Father George," a young hooker calls him), and love for Simone...

...Its protagonist is thirty-eight-year-old JuUus Armbrust (Heiner Lauterbach), the smugly prosperous creative director of a packaging company, who, on the morning of his twelfth anniversary, is devastated to discover that his wife...

...Paula, has for the past three weeks been having an affair with a longhaired bohemian "artist...

...What's happened is that Simone and her fellow prostitutes have gotten to him...

...cries Stefan after fighting him off...

...The film (whose distinctive "look" consists of a cross between naturaUstic grittiness and "Miami Vice'-style glitz) manifestly wishes to be regarded not only as an absorbing entertaimnent—which it is— but as a serious contemplation of love, loneliness, and the ubiquity of evil...

...When she tries to buy him some elegant togs, he i^ insulted, Bruce Bawer is The American Spectator'^ movie reviewer and author of the new book...

...Or so, at least, Mr...

...You used to be my hero, George," he says...

...What's it going to be tomorrow...

...The grubbiness disturbs, obsesses him...

...In the manner of many a romantic thriller, then {Charade, Blindfold, Vertigo, and Obsession come to mind), Mona Lisa is about false appearances, about deception...

...He's had affairs too, but to him this is different: he can't help but feel that Paula's betrayal represents a judgment that he's failed as a man...

...A real killer...

...Jordan would have it...

...JuUus (near the beginning of the film) trails Stefan on his kid's bike...

...Stefan, for instance, continually sports a puerile pout and plays with his toy car (and, when he gets the big job, buys a real car identical to the toy...

...she's the first person who's done something nice for him in a long while...

...like the lady in the song, she may be either warm and real or Oike the painting) unfeeling and artificial...

...Both painting and song, by the way, are worked into the film...

...and Jordan's attempt to pass it off as something more is the film's ultimate deception...

...So George begins to haunt the peep shows and whorehouses...

...there is mounting tension, violence, death...

...when Stefan confides that, in her heart, Paula still "clings to her husband," Julius explains that women like her "dream of glamorous adventure but with no risk...

...Yet if we are more interested in George than in Simone it is less because of Tyson's deficiencies (it would, after all, take a Garbo to give this part everything it calls for) than because of Bob Hoskins's depth and intensity: he's simply so good an actor, so good at making credible both the violence and sweetness submerged beneath George's banal surface, that Tyson seems bland and one-dimensional by comparison...

...The hostility between them begins to evaporate...

...Indeed—despite its taut and witty script, its excellent pacing, and Hoskins's powerful acting—Mona Lisa is itself, in reality, a shallow piece of business...

...Julius asks desperately...

...At first Julius is barely able to conceal his hostility toward Stefan...

...From beginning to end, the film is fresh, acutely observant, and structurally elegant, building to its hilarious conclusion with a precision reminiscent, again, of Some Like It Hot or, more recently, Tootsie...

...Is he better than me in bed...

...She does not jest at men in order to elevate women...

...On the whole, what makes Men stand out among contemporary German films is not just its humor but its apolitical humanity—it's not a feminist or Marxist treatise, not (thank God...

...Which is, of course, where the film's title comes in...

...she, for her part, doesn't disguise her disdain for this vulgarian who drives a Umo in a brown vinyl jacket, loud Hawaiian shirt, and olive polyester pants...

...as one false identity after another is stripped away, one hidden connection after another exposed, it develops that he, Simone, and Cathy are all pieces of a Kafkaesque puzzle, functionaries in a Pynchonesque empire run by Denny Mortwell...

...This American influence should not come as a surprise, for the thirty-one-year-old Dorrie spent several years in the United States, and claims to have found her sense of humor here...

...she shows him her unprepossessing little flat, opens up to him about her past ("I used to work that street," she confesses after an unnerving drive down a chippie-filled block...

...Men is a surprising—and refreshing—departure from the current norm...

...Robbie Coltrane, for his part, manages in his handful of scenes to turn his ficelle of a character into someone funny and touching, while Michael Caine is wasted as Denny—he isn't on screen very much, and his character is a shallow piece of business, the usual slimily elegant underworld bigshot...

...In Mona Lisa, the English writerdirector Neil Jordan takes a conventional romantic-thriller formula and "classes it up'^—spices the car chases with apocalyptic visions, hints at numerous layers of meaning beneath the absurd plot twists...

...What I realized when I came back [to Germany]," she told New York Times reporter James Markham in a recent interview, "is that we Germans don't have a real feel for humor—or any sense of humor at all...

...yet for all their antagonism, they're closer to each other than they could be to any woman, because they understand each other...

...He has, we are to understand, made the mistake of falling not for Simone but for what he thought she was...

...enraged—then touched...

...I wonder what your disguise is," Stefan says while they're doing laundry together, "the suit or the jeans...

...on the contrary, if anybody in the film comes across less than sympathetically, it is Paula—partly because by the end of the movie she seems fickle and phony and easily manipulated, and partly because we simply spend less time with her than with her two men...

...Julius, for his part, calls Stefan a "sponger," an "overgrown kid . . . lifeless, weak, boring, a failure...

...and yet in the end it becomes clear that, far from striking a blow for innocence, he has, in all ignorance, been crusading on behalf of one sort of sleaziness against another...

...Deranged...

...I'll end up looking like her husband," Stefan objects—and that of course is precisely what Julius, a master of packaging psychology, wants...

...It's a rather clumsy one, referring both to the Da Vinci painting and to the Nat King Cole tune (which, in turn, also refers to the painting...

...Like Mona Lisa, Men is, in its own humorous way, concerned with deception— not only with Julius's deception of Stefan but, in a larger sense...

...They proceed to develop a tense but genuine friendship, their conversation consisting almost entirely of putdowns— and the more they criticize each other the closer they get...

...Her reply: "Sometimes they fall for what they think I am...

...You're dangerous...

...When the film begins, George has just spent seven years in a mental institution and is trying to put his life back together...

...Gradually, "Daniel" persuades Stefan that the only way to get Paula to leave her husband for him is to find a job that pays as well as her husband's...

...Julius throws him to the ground and starts strangling him...

...So it is that he casts aside suit and tie, dons T-shirt and jeans, and becomes the tenement roommate of his wife's lover—who, it turns out, is not really an "artist" but a freelance illustrator of brassiere ads and a counterman at a fast-food place called "Heiss und Gut" (Hot and Good...

...George the dragon killer—a symbol of the capacity for valor and virtue that postwar Britain has largely left behind...

...At bottom, they're not rivals at all but aUies in the battle of the sexes...

...he asks questions: Do her customers ever fall for her...

...Men seems very American...

...when, during a morning jog, he begins to flag and Stefan says, "Come on, can't you take it anymore...

...Dorrie's touch is always light and sportive, her attitude toward Julius and Stefan consistently affectionate and empathetic...

...It's not only a German film comedy—a genre only a bit less obscure than the Mongolian Western—but a wonderfully fimny one...

...Yet—the title to the contrary—it is not the deceiver but the deceived, in this film, who is really at the center of our interest...

...Stefan calls "Daniel" a moralist, accuses him of believing only in "money and power," and makes snide remarks about his credit cards...

...But instead of dividing them, this incident brings them closer...

...Ultimately, George acts heroically, virtuously, taking on a monstrous dragon, as it were, to save a beautiful princess...

...She asks him to find Cathy, a young friend of hers who's somewhere out on those raunchy streets...

...What's happened...

...The Middle Generatioa a study of four twentieth-century American poets (Archon Books...

...for Stefan thinks that "Daniel" (who, according to Julius's fiction, has just been divorced, quit a lucrative job, and changed life-styles) is suffering a crisis of adjustment, and—being a very understanding sort—he sympathizes...

...You live like you're fifteen years younger than you are...

...Like the subject of the painting, Simone is a woman of mystery, a creature with an enigmatic smile...

...In particular, like many another ambitious English film of this decade, Mona Lisa purports to probe the economic and moral decay of today's Britain, and apparently hopes that we will recognize in its pathetic but good-hearted protagonist— a middle-aged man named George, as in St...

...Yet the filmmakers who have most obviously influenced Men, interestingly, are not just Americans but German- and Austrian-Americans— Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder...

...actually, these climactic reversals are more silly than surreal...

...Money...

...Your toy car [Stefan plays with one] or her husband's Maserati...