There’s nothing humorous about the plight of an ordinary family fleeing a
German-occupied Paris in “Strayed,” a disturbing drama about the dehumanizing
and humiliating effects of war. A mother, Odile (the beauteous Emmanuelle
Beart), loses her husband on the battlefield, leaving her alone to care for a
7-year-old daughter and 13-year-old son.
When Germans bomb the refugees’ route, Odile, with the instincts of a
lioness protecting her cubs, grabs her kids and heads for the woods. Along the
way, she joins forces with a stranger, Yvan (the charismatic Gaspard Ulliel),
just a few years older than her son. Yvan breaks into an opulent abandoned
house and persuades her to move in. Their idyllic stay amidst immense
destruction and loss of life is reminiscent of “The English Patient.” Odile
is alternately attracted and repelled by her odd protector, a wild child who
can neither read nor write but is expert at scavenging food to keep everybody
alive. Yvan’s intense craving for a family to belong to scares her. “Strayed”
appears to stray off course when Odile allows this 17-year-old delinquent, who
has shown hints of a violent temperament, to make love to her. Her behavior
seems contrary to the movie’s portrayal of Odile as practical and emotionally
balanced. But then, wartime is known to necessitate odd entanglements, and
perhaps this is meant to be one of them.
Most of the film is set in a confined space, the house and its immediate
environs. But in the hands of French director Andre Techine (”Les Voleurs,”
“Wild Reeds”), “Strayed” never feels claustrophobic. The kids have free rein
of the place and turn it into their personal playground.
Had “Strayed” been made in Hollywood, Odile surely would have rummaged
through the closets and come up with numerous glamorous changes of clothes.
But Beart wanders through the entire movie in the same simple blouse and skirt,
looking increasingly rumpled as keeping up appearances becomes pointless.
With a face like hers, it hardly matters what she wears.
Beart, a versatile French actress known in this country mostly for her
forgettable role in “Mission: Impossible,” brings an intelligence and
watchfulness to her characterization of Odile. She’s always on the alert for
danger. Ulliel, an up-and-comer last seen in “Brotherhood of the Wolf,” holds
his own opposite Beart. His able portrayal of Yvan suggests why Odile might be
physically attracted to him, even though he’s a suspicious character.
With searing images of distressed families of American soldiers killed in
Iraq on TV almost daily, “Strayed” is another poignant reminder of war’s
innocent victims.
– Advisory: This film contains scenes of violence and sexuality.
– Ruthe Stein
———————————-
‘Since Otar Left’
Drama. Starring Esther Gorintin, Nino Khomassouridze, Dinara Droukarova.
Directed by Julie Bertuccelli. Written by Bertuccelli, Bernard Renucci and
Roger Bohbot. (Not rated. 102 minutes. In French, Russian and Georgian with
English subtitles. At the Opera Plaza, Rafael and Shattuck in Berkeley).
A moving family
drama set in the former Soviet republic of Georgia,
“Since Otar Left” yields emotional truths while exploring an elaborate ruse.
The subterfuge involves the death of a beloved son, a Georgian doctor
forced to work construction in Paris. His sister and niece hide news of his
fatal accident from matriarch Eka (played by the wonderful 90-year-old actress
Esther Gorintin) for fear it would be too much to bear.
If the premise is similar to that of the comedy “Goodbye, Lenin!” the
execution is not. Otar’s death is doubly tragic because of what he represented.
He was the only member of a clan of Francophiles to make it to the City of
Light and away from the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, where the electricity
works about half the time.
Eka’s daughter and granddaughter forge letters from Otar, one explaining
that he no longer has a phone. The lies might be more transparent were Eka not
so accustomed to deception. Defending Stalin, she claims: “(He) never ordered
the death of anyone; I can prove it!” Stooped with age but vivid of
expression, Gorintin keeps us guessing whether the old woman truly believes
the lies. The daughter, rendered as a harried cynic by actress Nino
Khomassouridze, scratches out a living working at the post office and selling
trinkets at a street market. Children who stick around as caretakers rarely
fare as well in parents’ eyes as those who leave, and resentment at her
mother’s esteem for Otar has hardened her. Yet she breaks down at news of his
death, and lies to her mother because she cares so deeply about her.
Director Julie Bertuccelli trains her camera on the actresses’ faces for
long moments, revealing an intense mother-daughter bond beneath the everyday
bickering. A moment where the daughter tickles her mother’s feet bursts with
spontaneity and affection.
Bertuccelli’s admiring shots of Tbilisi’s cobblestone streets and
decaying but magnificent buildings underscore a resilience of hope within a
hardscrabble existence. As the granddaughter, actress Dinara Droukarova
embodies that hope. Intelligent yet sentimental, the young woman resists her
mother’s pragmatism and dreams of a life for herself in Paris. For her, Otar’s
death is less a cautionary tale than a reminder that life is too short for
complacency. Her uncle might have died, but he died in France.
– Advisory: This film contains raw language, sexual situations.
– Carla Meyer
———————————-
‘People I Know’
Drama. Starring Al Pacino, Kim Basinger, Tea Leoni and Ryan O’Neal.
Directed by Dan Algrant. (R. 100 minutes. At the Roxie.)
On paper, “People I Know” is the kind of movie that makes discriminating
filmgoers — people I know, for instance — salivate in anticipation. The
story sounds like a contemporary “Sweet Smell of Success” with Al Pacino in
the Tony Curtis role of a Manhattan publicist who sinks to the lowest depths
to placate his celebrity clients. Sophisticated playwright Jon Robin Baitz
(”The Substance of Fire,” “Three Hotels”) wrote the script, holding out the
promise of literate dialogue rarely heard onscreen anymore.
Eli (Pacino) does talk incessantly, often lamenting how he’s sold out, as
do the people he encounters, including a movie star (Ryan O’Neal) given the
name Cary (presumably to recall that other Cary) and his drug-addict lover
Jilli (Tea Leoni). But the lines never lift off the page to convey anything
resembling real emotions.
Ultimately, their chatter becomes tiresome and you want to yell, like
Eliza in “My Fair Lady,” “Words, words, words — I’m so sick of words!”
The movie is weighted down with an excess of plot points that fail to
coalesce. Cary, who has political aspirations (shades of Arnold), hires Eli to
make Jilli go away. The publicist feeds her anti-anxiety pills, an array of
which he partakes of himself. In a scene reminiscent of the eerie party in
“Eyes Wide Shut” without the masks, Jilli takes him to a den of iniquity
frequented by every big shot Eli has invited to attend a civil rights dinner
the next night.
Shortly afterward, Eli witnesses a murder, but he is in such a stupor
that the whole thing becomes a blur, and he continues his arm-twisting to get
the right people to his fund-raiser as if nothing had happened. His hustling
is limited by fading health and the fact that Eli, with his preference for
living in the past, refuses to carry a cell phone.
Pacino is magnetic, as always, and the film’s strength is his poignant
portrayal of an embittered man caught up in self-loathing, yet still clinging
to the only life he knows. However, it’s distracting to hear him talk with a
Southern accent. An explanation is belatedly provided — this supposedly
quintessential New Yorker grew up in Georgia.
O’Neal, Leoni and Kim Basinger, as Eli’s widowed sister-in-law who offers
him the possibility of another kind of existence, acquit themselves well in
small roles.
Fine acting can’t bring “People I Know” to life. The movie, hardly an
audience pleaser, was more or less dumped by its distributor, Miramax, after a
brief run in New York and Los Angeles. That’s why it’s playing at the Roxie,
which rarely gets a first crack at anything starring Pacino.
– Advisory: This film contains sexual content and drug use.
– Ruthe Stein
———————————-
‘Imelda’
Documentary. Directed by Ramona S. Diaz. (Not rated. 103 minutes. At the
Lumiere and Shattuck in Berkeley.)
Imelda Marcos claims Gen. Douglas MacArthur as her talent scout, and
given the extraordinary access she had to power and powerful men, who’s to
dispute her? As she tells it in the fascinating and
impressively balanced
documentary “Imelda,” she met the military hero, as flamboyant in his way as
she is in hers, when he reclaimed the Philippines from the Japanese during
World War II. Upon hearing her sing — something she does quite a bit of in
the film, demonstrating a sweet voice in sharp contrast to her shrill image –
MacArthur insisted she perform for Irving Berlin.
“I sang ‘God Bless the Philippines,’ ” Marcos relates, smiling into the
camera. When the songwriter told her she got the lyrics wrong, “I said, ‘But
Mr. Berlin, what’s the difference between America and the Philippines?’ ”
The irony of that question seems lost on the documentary’s subject, her
country’s first lady during the years the U.S. government propped up Ferdinand
Marcos’ dictatorial regime. Imelda still doesn’t seem to get why their
influential friends deserted them after her husband was forced out by a
popular uprising in 1986 and the couple was accused of human rights abuses and
of absconding with hundreds of millions of dollars in government funds.
Her naivete is part of what makes “Imelda,” directed by award-winning
documentary filmmaker Ramona S. Diaz, so spellbinding. Can anybody really be
as out of it as Marcos appears? She babbles on about the wonderful things she
did for the people in the provinces, such as spending twice as long dressing
for them as for dignitaries “because these poor people needed a model.”
Meanwhile the havoc wrought by the Marcoses is related in on-screen
interviews with witnesses such as former U.S. ambassador to the Philippines
Stephen Bosworth and former foreign correspondent Phil Bronstein (now editor
of The Chronicle).
Marcos, who held several posts, including governor of Manila, was no
innocent bystander. She was blamed for the deaths of at least 20 construction
workers when the scaffolding collapsed on a film festival center she had
ordered built in record time, believing that a Manila International Film
Festival would rival Cannes.
Either Marcos still suffers from delusions or she’s an actress of such
extraordinary skill she could win a festival prize. To this day, she sees her
shoe collection, estimated at 3,000 pairs, as a source of pride. She’s heard
in the film bragging about a poster that says “There’s a Little Imelda in All
of Us,” which she claims hangs in some of the best closets.
In a scene that belongs on “Six Feet Under,” she sits by her husband’s
embalmed body, explaining how she ordered the gray removed from his hair so he
would look younger than he did in life. She professes her love for this man,
whose philandering embarrassed her in the early years of their marriage, but
who provided a glamorous life for which she remains nostalgic. The couple was
narcissistic enough to have documented their lavish parties, footage from
which is shown in “Imelda.” So, we have the sight of George Hamilton aboard
the Marcoses’ yacht, serenading his hostess, attired in one of her hundreds of
chiffon gowns resembling prom dresses and, of course, matching shoes. “I can’t
give you anything but love, Imelda,” the perennially tan actor croons. Irving
Berlin couldn’t have put it better.
– Ruthe Stein
