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Offside
• by Chris Hewitt,
a movie critic for the St. Paul Pioneer Press
There are no suicide blondes and no one gets pecked to death by
crows in Offside, but its elegant construction
is definitely Hitchcockian. The deceptively simple tale of young Iranian
women who attempt to get into a crucial soccer match by disguising themselves
as boys, Offside makes you ache to see the match, even if you
don’t care about soccer.
Director Jafar Panahi (Crimson Gold) accomplishes that by keeping
us out, too. As the women are corralled into a holding pen, they (and
we) hear tantalizing snippets of the match and listen to descriptions
of the action from soldiers who can see it. One of the women even gets
a glimpse of the match.
Offside, of course, isn’t about soccer, any more than
the Iranian films about children butting up against mean teachers were
about recess. Panahi’s graceful, moving film shows the constricted
world Iranian women live in, one where a forbidden soccer match stands
in for any number of human rights that are denied (“It’s
more important than food to me,” says one young woman of the match).
But Panahi is such a disciplined filmmaker that Offside never
overreaches, least of all in the suspenseful conclusion of the match.
The excited women have been crammed into a bus where a sympathetic soldier,
with a busted radio, becomes a human antenna so they can share in the
crazed celebration of Iran’s victory. But we know nothing has
changed and the joy will be short-lived. As one of them says, simply
and without self-pity, “My problem is that I was born in Iran.”
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Belle
Toujours •
by N.P. Thompson, a freelance
writer for Willamette Week (Portland) and editor of MoviesIntoFilm.com
The 98-year-old director Manoel de Oliveira traces a
chance re-encounter between the rakish Henri Husson (Michel Piccoli) and
the reformed Séverine Serizy (Bulle Ogier, bravely going where
Catherine Deneuve would not) four decades after Belle de Jour.
Less a sequel than a sumptuous homage to Buñuel’s classic,
Belle Toujours sets up, in its first half, a pantomime cat and
mouse game of Husson pursuing and Séverine eluding, scored either
to traffic noise or the sublime scurrying of woodwinds and strings in
Dvorak’s Eighth Symphony; in the second half, Oliveira beguiles
us with confident long takes of the two adversaries dining in a suite
lit mainly by ebbing candles and the fog-blanketed light that seeps through
a bay window.
Cinematographer Sabine Lancelin achieves exquisite visual effects, not
the least of which is a shot of that window splitting the frame into eight
rectangles, with the top middle panes dividing in two the reflection of
a chandelier, whose lights do nothing to illumine the night sky. Oliveira
makes rapturous yet pointed use of Paris locales—Husson twice lingers
portentously before Frémiet’s gold statue of Joan of Arc
riding into battle.
The movie understands that betrayals committed in the imagination
are more tantalizing than sins of the flesh. “My role is to observe,
even to provoke,” Husson confides to a bartender, in between rounds
of seeking Séverine. Piccoli clearly adores playing this unrepentant
old dandy; it’s a masterful performance in an unexpected, irresistibly
fin de siècle treasure. |
Stephanie
Daley •
by S.T. VanAirsdale, editor of
the New York City cinema site TheReeler.com
At Stephanie Daley’s Sundance Film Festival
premiere ast January, actress Tilda Swinton offered her typically cool
insight as to why she chose to work on the tiny indie: “I wanted
to see it.” Didn’t we all: Swinton portrays a pregnant psychologist
assigned to judge the mental state of the title character (played by Joan
of Arcadia’s Amber Tamblyn), a teenager accused of killing
her newborn baby after hiding her pregnancy. Heavy stuff, no doubt, but
in a good way, with a bulletproof cast also boasting Timothy Hutton and
a talented writer/director in Hilary Brougher.
And the film packs some wallop indeed, dramatically contrasting Stephanie’s
quiet moral ambiguity against her interviewer’s concern about her
own impending motherhood. Tamblyn is all mood and manner, shuffling into
denial with the benefit of the doubt in her back pocket but somehow never
defying your sympathy. Meanwhile, Swinton observes her patient with the
coiled curiosity of a woman still mourning her own losses; as her marriage
to Hutton frays and she hints at identifying with the girl’s abject
fear of maternity, Stephanie Daley becomes less of a power play
and more of a dynamic study into—dare I say it?—the dark side
of pregnancy.
Brougher, spinning 180 degrees from her trippy 1997 debut The Sticky
Fingers of Time, establishes a modesty and maturity in which any
cast would flourish. But in the capable, sensitive hands of Swinton and
Tamblyn, in particular, her script (which won last year’s screenwriting
prize at Sundance) acquires an elegance that one must attribute in no
small part to pure chemistry. Paraphrasing Swinton—and likely discriminating
film viewers everywhere—I want to see that. |
