Screen
O'Brien, Tom
SCREEN CAMERAS ON THE SLY 'CHARLIE MOPIC & 'LA LECTRICE' Patrick Duncan's 84 Charlie Mopic breathes invigorating and scary life into the Vietnam war film genre. It rivals Platoon in power, but...
...The weaknesses of this film involve not the talk but its premises: why would a special squad accept the lieutenant...
...Duncan's landscapes lack the ominousness of the Philippines, used in Platoon...
...Even more than Oliver Stone in Platoon, Duncan achieves an acute immediacy, placing us, jumpily, right on top of things...
...To end the tale, the last reading must inyolve some dangerous liaison: on cue, a judge invites Marie to read him de Sade...
...Duncan, a combat veteran and the director of 84 Charlie Mopic, has also discarded the mythmaking of Platoon that provided.an explosive charge to the characters...
...84 Charlie Mopic takes the low road of understatment-except with battle death...
...We may not want to get closer to war, but Mopic puts us there...
...his location is California...
...the focus is only on the squad members in front or behind, as "we" jog along in the underbrush...
...While Duncan over-relies on some sentimental military cliches, the talk makes for strong suspense...
...The gawky businessman is played by Patrick Chesnais, winner of a Cesar for "Best Supporting Actor...
...It rivals Platoon in power, but doesn 't have Platoon's scope or its dreamy but realistic texture of sight, sound, and feel of Southeast Asia...
...They exploit these in a sprightly, surprising way, with editing cuts that leave us momentarily but blithely confused about what belongs to art or life, at least "life" on screen...
...TOM O'BRIEN...
...Most of the action is shot from a low angle or over someone's body-in the film's first half, someone still alive...
...Indeed, in the talky first half of 84 Charlie Mopic, you almost get to know the squad too well...
...The film resembles a TV video, a technology that Duncan (who has worked on HBO's "Vietnam War Story" series) knows firsthand, and an apt mode for a war that came to us on the airwaves nightly, like a TV show...
...it's all fake cinema verite...
...Naturally, as Constance reads away, she imagines herself as Marie, whose modest little line of work leads to some daffy, sweetly surreal comedy because of her effect on her customers...
...Richard Brooks as the crackerjack black sergeant whom the group reveres is particularly sympathetic, and also Nicholas Cascone as a wise-guy radioman...
...the squad is a specialized, self-designated elite...
...La Lectrice is a small bright gem with genuine magic...
...Duncan's cameraman becomes our eyes...
...Many of the scenes in the film also turn erotic, often inoffensively, but not always...
...La Lectrice is one of those European films of such charm and grace that it becomes a sensual pleasure merely to look at it...
...Even so, Duncan's film, made on a shoestring budget, works extremely well in other ways, especially because the camera brings us to the down-to-earth level of war...
...The Devilles add a Beethoven score filled with sprightly allegros to complement the mood...
...Here is a bibliographical version of The Perils of Pauline...
...None of this would work without a sly camera style and production design that make you feel an airy vertigo...
...The group is more defined than the larger units featured in Platoon or Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket...
...Miou-Miou plays two intertwined roles: a young woman (Constance) reading Raymond Jean's La Lectrice, a novel about a young woman (Marie) who takes up a career reading books to people...
...As one reminds her, "You never know where reading will lead...
...An example is the dotty raving of the countess's sultry but eccentric maid (the original Bella B., a waif out of Borges) who claims that spiders attack her at night...
...Comedy results both from Miou-Miou's odd blend of erotic allure and deadpan looks and the reactions of her listeners (some from The Comedie Francaise) who sink, swoon, or spring into action as soon as she starts...
...but his strange style of moving by fits and starts takes getting used to...
...one scene is gross...
...First is a paralytic young man, who immediately develops a crush on Marie and faints during one of her readings...
...One wishes for an "Americanized" version...
...The director rarely uses wide or long shots, and only one zoom...
...The effect of the Constance-Marie (or life-art) byplay on us is similarly exhilarating...
...The film's title derives from its premise: "mopic" is slang for an army filmmaker, whose work this film pretends to be...
...Demythologizing" is a fine goal...
...Why let a cameraman tag along...
...But myth does have an apt role in interpreting experience as long as it is not imposed on it...
...Her mature voice in La Lectrice becomes the center of a buoyant, cerebral, and mostly enjoyable hymn to the power of literature...
...Using it may be dramatically apt...
...There are two problems...
...Third is a sex-starved businessman who cannot resist the allure of Marie's honeyed reading...
...The interiors are all quietly but superbly designed and individualized for each customer...
...emotionally and morally, however, it is a challenge hard to endure...
...The visual style of the film also works to breed intimate knowledge of the squad-only five regular soldiers, the cameraman, and new lieutenant, who has imposed himself on the group in search of exploits for quick promotiom...
...TOM O'BRIEN...
...Second is an old, exiled Hungarian countess lost in her memories, who demands that Marie read Marx on metals and tracts by Lenin...
...We rarely see him...
...Mercifully, Deville (and his co-screenwriter and wife Rtfsalinde) only play with literary theories of "deconstruction" of the boundaries between fiction and reality...
...The deaths of the squad members are not easy to take, not merely because of the gruesomely honest realism, but because of the sympathy you feel for each, no matter how driven, angry, violent, or, in the case of the lieutenant (Jonathan Emerson), opportunistic some of them seem...
...Winner of nine Cesar nominations last year, it stars Miou-Miou, the French actress nick-named for the resemblance of her voice to a purring cat's...
...Duncan's hand-held camera will infect you with a bad case of nerves...
...Director Michel Deville has a point to make: books can be both fun and powerful...
...Despite resulting flaws, it attains its own, new and different kind of excellence...
...His narrow lens angle means a lack of scope, not just on political and military issues, but also on the average grunt's experience...
...She ultimately declines-the art-life possibilities concern her-but the film includes one session with his lurid prose...
...Marie's customers are mostly oddballs...
...Miou-Miou (as Marie) jaunts through the medieval nooks and crannies of Aries, which are nearly always empty and ultra-bright...
...Duncan plies the fiction that a cameraman from headquarters is accompanying a special squad on ambush missions in the bush...
Vol. 116 • May 1989 • No. 9
