The,Talkies /Binge and Purge
Bowman, James
Binge and Purge by James Bowman / n a generally critical review in the New York Times of David Salle's Search and Destroy, Janet Maslin praises Salle's "clean, minimalist compositions" (he is an...
...it helps me to forget I'm hungry," she says...
...You don't even know my name," he says...
...Part of what used to be, it emerges, is that Mitya was once a protégé and music student of the now dead Boris, who used to own the dacha, and the lover of his daughter Marussya (Ingeborga Dapkunaite), who is now the Colonel's young and pretty wife and the mother of adorable Nadia...
...Mikhalkov himself plays Colonel Kotev, a hero of the Revolution, who is enjoying an idyllic summer's day in 1936 at his dacha with his wife and young daughter and extended family...
...The kind of man I'm talking about, he doesn't talk, he doesn't show," he explains, trying to find the right words to describe the requirements of a killer...
...But manhood eventually reasserts itself in an unexpected way, and Mick's is left utterly shattered—something you have to sit all the way through the closing credits in order to see as it was meant to be seen...
...This is how homicidal maniacs mate...
...I don't know...
...They will be talking or eating or doing other things as they watch it, and will expect no more than a miscellany of arresting images or words to distract them during lulls in the general conversation...
...He fascinates the Kotevs' six-year-old daughter Nadia (played by Mikhalkov's own daughter, Nadia) by claiming to be the Summer Santa, just arrived from the Mahreb...
...Dead...
...The film does not moralize, but it is a deeply moral and humanizing experience...
...There is no drama, no characterization, no acting to speak of—though there is some deliberate mockery of all of these things...
...Binge and Purge by James Bowman / n a generally critical review in the New York Times of David Salle's Search and Destroy, Janet Maslin praises Salle's "clean, minimalist compositions" (he is an artist by trade) which, she thinks, "will look equally at home on the small screen some day...
...Now, it seems, he is quite a decent sort, and she is prepared to bestow her long-preserved 62 The American Spectator 3uly 1995 virginity upon him...
...It is, among too many other things, a satire of self-help gurus and the therapy industry...
...The wife whom he had brutalized (the woman who kicked him hi the opening scene) learns of his amnesia and says: "It doesn't matter...
...As they sit around the table in the comfortable dacha they reflect that "Everything is as it used to be...
...n any other month Bulletproof Heart would have been the Movie of the Month, but even its dark beauty fades next to Burnt by the Sun by Nikita Mikhalkov, winner of the Best Foreign Language Film at this year's Oscars and one of the most moving accounts of the Stalinist era yet to find its way onto film (the MOM for April 1992, The Inner Circle by Mikhalkov's brother, Andrei Konchalovsky, is another...
...He has amnesia...
...Her eyes light up, and she smiles at the arrival of the wonderful machine...
...A man does not confide...
...At one point an unseen dead man sliced in two by a steel cable is carried off by Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson side by side instead of facing each other...
...The woman offers him a sandwich because he only has Dutch money in his pocket and asks him, "Do you smoke...
...When her father finally appears she cries: "Daddy...
...The wonderfully entertaining Mitya (Oleg Menchikov) arrives from Moscow in disguise as a blind man marching in a parade of Pioneers...
...That's got to mean something, right...
...When Archie's nerve, too, fails him, she says with genuine exasperation: "Men...
...The Red Army hero clearly enjoys being able to overawe the young officer in charge with a scolding, but he also shows a likablyhuman side when he apologizes for speaking so harshly to him...
...Even the three goons in it are worth some coquettish glances and a childishly-womanly primping in the reflection from the car's headlight before trying to charm the goons...
...We can also get a kick out of the preposterousness of the ex-Stasi bad guys' evil plot, ostensibly linking everything together, but these things are in-jokes, not for the million...
...Though far more arty and clever, Amateur is in its essentials just like Die Hard With a Vengeance: a series of striking images illustrated by passages of witty dialogue...
...You don't know your name either," she says, very reasonably...
...But where the requirements of cinematic and dramatic art come into conflict, the former wins hands down...
...Actually, Search and Destroy—in which a nebbishy Griffin Dunne decides, "I am a movie producer because that's what I say I am"—does have a point...
...I'm not hungry," she tells him...
...But when he is given the job of killing the beautiful Miss Rogers, his manhood, in this sense, deserts him—even as another kind is restored...
...Whatever I was, this is me now...
...Much more amusing is Amateur by Hal Hartley, which is similarly quite without dramatic coherence but which has everything else that it takes to make a good movie...
...because she is going to get to sit on the driver's lap and steer the car down to the bend in the road...
...Is he sleeping...
...The two of them become embroiled in a fantastical plot involving blackmail and murder and organized crime and arising out of his forgotten past—in which, it develops, he had been a very bad guy indeed...
...When it reaches its natural home on television, its audience will not be trying to make sense of the thing as a whole anyway...
...The guy's dead, but people still have to get where they're going.' " It is a wonderful joke when, after he vainly tries to persuade her that life isworth living, Mick is unable to shoot her...
...This made me stop and think...
...There are so many brilliantly conceived cinematic moments in the film's heartbreaking final passages that it is almost possible to forget that there is a carefully worked out dramatic structure into which they all fit...
...Hartley doesn't know what to do with them...
...CI The American Spectator July 1995 63...
...After the credits the man, blood in his hair and on his collar, staggers into a coffee shop where a beautiful French woman (Isabelle Huppert) is composing pornography out loud on a notebook computer...
...Walter Pater said a hundred years or so ago that "all art aspires to the condition of music...
...Why not...
...Then he takes off his disguise and everyone recognizes an old friend of the family who had disappeared for some ten years and is now back, to everyone's delight...
...I hate him anyway...
...He tells her of his first victim, for example...
...Willis and Jackson play themselves, while McTiernan has fun making the languid, aristocratic Jeremy Irons into a peroxide-blond Teutonic fanatic whose lovemaking with a mute German killer-babe resembles Inspector Clouseau's ju-jitsu lesson...
...It keeps you watching...
...She offers him a cigarette and observes that he seems to know how to smoke it...
...Every other consideration is virtually ignored...
...That was symbolist thinking...
...Hartley raises a number of fascinating questions about identity and memory, about what it means to be whowe are and whether we can change...
...court...
...I just started smoking...
...I'm choosy," she says...
...And you really have to be in the mood for cheesy dialogue like "We figure he's got you fitted out for a toe tag, and he'll do anything to tie the knot...
...We learn that the woman is an ex-nun and self-proclaimed nymphomaniac who never has sex...
...M ore successful is the first-time director Mark Malone in Bulletproof Heart—a noir-ish thriller with quirky characters and dialogue like Search and Destroy and Amateur but with real dramatic coherence and character development...
...There is a sense of energy, of many things going on, confusingly, at once as a detachment of tanks on maneuver arrives in a peasant's wheat-field as a small boy runs around, excitedly announcing their arrival, and Kotov is summoned on horseback to prevent them from destroying the crop...
...At first this scarcely casts a shadow on the happiness and joy to which Mitya is an unquestioned addition...
...Come on...
...The film achieves its remarkable effects by the skill and humor with which it adumbrates warmth and love and happiness with never more than the hint, up until the end, of the unspeakable horrors that menace it...
...This glorious day, and especially the hope for the future represented by Nadia, come to represent every possibility of human happiness that the Revolutionary ideal could have aspired to, and its terrible ending, by the Revolution's own logic, is unbearably poignant...
...For example, the film begins with a shot of a man (Martin Donovan) lying on his back in a cobblestone courtyard in twilight...
...No, thanks...
...All he knows is how to make an unfailingly entertaining film according to the ruling principles of contemporary film-making...
...Look at the blockbuster Die Hard With a Vengeance, for example...
...What else can I do...
...It is just before the first Stalinist purges...
...Most unforgettably of all, when the car from Moscow comes for her father, little Nadia is all excited...
...That is postmodern thinking...
...But it doesn't make its point very well, and Miss Maslin's is that that scarcely matters so long as it looks good and produces some good soundbites...
...Nothing has changed...
...Later he is reduced to saying: "I don't know what I am sorry for, but I am sorry...
...The unbelievability of the film's central premise—a woman (Mimi Rogers) who wants to be killed—is so audacious that it swallows up the subsidiary unbelievability that powers the drama, namely that she manages in the space of a single night to recall from whatever depths to which it had been sunk the humanity of her cold-blooded killer, a mob hit man called Mick (Anthony LaPaglia...
...But such interesting questions are left standing in the landscape of the plot like isolated and mysterious stone monoliths...
...To me it seems boring and monotonous...
...Mick prides himself on his professionalism and his macho cool...
...There are some poignantly dramatic moments in what follows...
...Passed out...
...Maybe only foreigners can still create such magical moments on film, but that they can be created at all is enough of a reason never to resign ourselves to the movies' aspiring to nothing more than the demands of junk TV...
...The director, John McTiernan, concerned himself with nothing at all but dramatically meaningless action sequences—explosions, car chases, acrobatic stunts, etc.—and a reasonably witty dialogue track, full of one-liners, jokes, and insults and occasional sight gags...
...This, I guess, is the throwaway culture's equivalent of art for the ages...
...This is Pulp Fiction as re-written by Harold Pinter...
...And," she adds, "home audiences won't be as inclined to wonder what's the point...
...That's where Search and Destroy comes up with ideas like having Dennis Hopper play the violin, or Christopher Walken do a tap dance and'sing, execrably, "Red River Valley," or John Turturro in a fright wig and an Armani suit getting shot on an antiseptic squash James Bowman, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...
...Hurry up...
...Then she kicks him and goes on her way...
...With images like those, you don't need dramatic continuity...
...Then have some of this," he replies, offering a bit of the sandwich...
...He had killed him at an airport and then watched a plane take off...
...Nowadays, however, all art aspires to the condition of television...
...But gradually the sadness and bitterness of the political past merge with a dawning realization of the horror of the political future...
...Nor is this a particularly artsy phenomenon...
...Men do this work," he tells his chatty but incompetent assistant, Archie (Matt Craven...
...A woman (Elina Lowensohn) comes by and looks at him warily...
...Where the money is is in one sight-bite after another that will keep the phantom TV audience from changing channels...
...It was like God had looked down, lit up a smoke and said: 'Big f--king deal...
...He begins to confide...
Vol. 28 • July 1995 • No. 7
