Daily Archives: Tuesday, January 5, 2016

  • Chloe

    Atom Egoyan (2009)

    The Kinepolis in Leuven is a very nice cinema.  There are clearly indicated seat numbers and lights to see you in and out safely (although I couldn’t, where I was sitting, get them out of my field of vision during the movie).  There are seven screens and it seems to be the town’s main film house.  A number of screens were showing different films at different times of the day so that a total of ten or more pictures were showing at the Kinepolis the week during which I was in Leuven last month.  Except for one Dutch movie, they were all American (including, as well as Chloe, Alice in Wonderland, Avatar, The Hurt Locker, The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, Precious, Valentine’s Day and others I’ve lost my note of).   There were four trailers, all for American films (Dear John, Green Zone, Robin Hood and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps).  Even most of the commercials seemed to be American (although one or two were for local shops – which had a nostalgic charm).  I’m not complaining about this evidence of cultural imperialism but you couldn’t help be struck by it.

    Chloe – strictly speaking, a Canadian-French-American co-production – tells an old story:  a middle-aged wife’s suspicions about her husband bring on problems and trauma which wouldn’t have occurred if she’d kept her doubts to herself.   Atom Egoyan takes ninety-six minutes to cover the ground which Kate Bush covered, dramatically and memorably, in ‘Babooshka’, in about three minutes.   Catherine (Julianne Moore) is a Toronto gynaecologist.  Her husband David (Liam Neeson) is a professor of music.  On his birthday, Catherine throws a surprise party for David.  Awaiting his arrival as the guests assemble, she has a nervy manner that suggests a larger anxiety.  When David phones to tell her he’s missed his flight back from New York, Catherine assumes the worst and, after an apparently chance meeting with an escort called Chloe, hires her to test David’s fidelity.  In a prologue, we’ve seen Chloe dressing and explaining, in a wordy voiceover, that she can be anything a man wants her to be.  The film proceeds to demonstrate she can be anything a woman wants her to be too:  Chloe invents accounts of how she has seduced David and thus confirms Catherine’s fears.  (We can only assume that Catherine believes what Chloe says so readily because part of her wants to believe her husband is cheating on her.)   When Chloe is done with not seducing the husband, she starts seducing the wife.    When that affair founders, Chloe turns her attention to David and Catherine’s teenage son Michael.

    The lesbian sex between Catherine and Chloe is presented as kinky and dangerous – it seems to be an expression of Chloe’s psychopathological possessiveness.  The moral of the story, hardly a progressive one, seems to be:  beware of psychopathic gay call girls.  Yet Atom Egoyan and the writer Erin Cressida Wilson, whose screenplay is based on a 2003 French film Nathalie (written and directed by Anne (Coco Before Chanel) Fontaine), seem to have it in for Catherine too.  She’s a gynaecologist in order that she can be startled out of her scientific, clinical approach to women’s bodies – as if such an approach was tantamount to lack of feeling.  (Responding to a patient who claims never to have had an orgasm, Catherine explains what orgasm is as a physiological event and with a minimum of emotion.)   We also see at an early point that Catherine is furious that Michael is sleeping with his girlfriend in the family home – and it soon becomes clear how badly affected the son is by the widening cracks in his parents’ marriage.  The implication seems to be that Catherine’s attitude, with its emotionally corrosive effect on Michael, is more corrupting than Chloe’s seduction of him.   This all reads like the sort of thing you might get excited about at the age of about nineteen – the storyline and the supporting ideas sound brilliantly neat and penetrating – but Erin Cressida Wilson is actually in her mid-forties.  I haven’t seen Secretary (2002), which appears to have launched Wilson’s screenwriting career, and she certainly did American cinema a good turn in that Secretary also launched Maggie Gyllenhaal.  But Wilson – on the evidence of her previous screenplay Fur and Chloe – seems to be a floridly bad writer.

    Chloe plays out as comically melodramatic.  The vast, cold house in which Catherine and David live out their unhappy marriage looks a cross between a laboratory and a deserted art gallery.  The disappointment is that everyone seems to be not just playing it straight – as they should – but taking it seriously (Mychael Danna’s score is an immediate clue to this).  After her welcome, surprising outburst of jazzy vibrancy in A Single Man, Julianne Moore resumes normal service here.  She is a good actress but she nearly always plays miserable characters, and she seems too discreet to make misery entertaining, however extreme and improbable the character’s situation may be.   You never feel in Chloe that Moore’s Catherine is in the grip of an obsession – either with believing her husband is errant or with Chloe.  When things get really ludicrous the film might be more enjoyable if the part of Catherine were played by someone with a greater flair for melodrama.  To make matters worse, this is yet another recent film in which the female lead has lunch with women friends so antipathetic that you can’t believe she ever had anything in common with them.  Julianne Moore’s gloomy aura gives the set-up extra incredibility:  the trio she meets up with are prurient airheads (‘Are you having an affair, Catherine?! …’) who seem to come from another planet.   As Chloe, Amanda Seyfried is competent but she lacks depth and she has to act sexy.  The odd effect of having an actress of this kind in a role like Chloe is to make the character seem more lewd than if the performer had a naturally strong sexual presence (it’s the Natalie Wood syndrome).  Liam Neeson is all right when David is shown as easily charming or unable to understand why Catherine is so angst-ridden; he’s bad in the one scene where he starts yelling.  Max Thieriot wins some sympathy in the thankless role of the son (who’s supposed to be a brilliant music student – he does a solo piano recital at one point).

    The sequence in which David phones to tell Catherine he’ll be later than expected is pretty typical of the lousy script and the exaggerated direction.  The street from which David makes the call is lit to suggest he’s calling from one of the lowest circles of hell rather than New York – it’s not clear why, when Atom Egoyan has already made it obvious there’s an innocent-ish explanation for David’s missing his plane.  (We can see from his performance in a lecture theatre that David is at least a showoff, and probably a flirt, with his students of both sexes.  They adore him and want to take him out for a drink:  he says he can’t because it’s his birthday and his wife is organising something but David is evidently a man who enjoys being adored – it would be easy enough for the students to twist his arm successfully.)   Egoyan and Wilson are, however, evasive about more challenging issues raised by the story – like the question of Catherine’s sexual orientation.   It’s unclear whether the lesbian affair is an aberration or the kind of sex she wanted all along.  (Are we meant to infer that gynaecology is the natural career choice for a repressed gay woman?)  The closing sequence of Michael’s graduation – after Chloe has departed the scene and this life – is opaque too.  We seem to be supposed to think that life will never be the same again as a result of Chloe – but what exactly has Catherine destroyed?  Her marriage seems to have been loveless for years and her son already hated her.  The fact that Liam Neeson ends up looking reasonably jolly and Julianne Moore utterly miserable suggests that not much has changed.

    15 March 2010

  • Chef

    Jon Favreau (2014)

    Carl Casper (Jon Favreau) is the head chef in a successful Los Angeles restaurant.  Carl is driven and passionate about continuing to create new dishes but, although anxious to succeed and firmly in charge of the kitchen, he’s not the martinet-cum-prima donna you might expect a screen chef to be.   However, his work is his life:  his marriage to the glamorous Inez (Sofía Vergara) has ended and, while he regularly sees their ten-year-old son Percy (Emjay Anthony), the boy senses that his father’s heart and mind are otherwise, culinarily engaged.   Ramsey Michel (Oliver Platt), a food critic who strikes fear into chefs and restaurateurs but whose good reviews helped propel Carl’s career, is coming to dinner.  (The critic’s combination of names is nothing if not familiar to viewers of British television food programmes.)  Carl is eager to impress with new dishes but the restaurant owner Riva (Dustin Hoffman) wants him to stick to old favourites to keep the diners happy:  how would Carl feel, Riva asks, if he went to a Rolling Stones concert and they didn’t play ‘Satisfaction’?  Carl is disappointed and uneasy but he galvanises his team into action and, by the end of the evening, has forgotten entirely about his misgivings:  he looks up Michel’s online blog and starts reading the write-up to the others with complete confidence.  Michel’s verdict is damning.

    While Carl used an iphone to find the review, it turns out that he knows nothing about social media or YouTube:  he doesn’t understand the difference between a text and a tweet so that, when he sends an aggrieved, aggressive message to Ramsey Michel through Twitter, Carl doesn’t realise how many people will see it.  He challenges Michel to return to the restaurant – to sample what Carl is really capable of – but, after having the same disagreement with Riva, Carl storms out of the kitchen, leaving the sous-chef Tony (Bobby Cannavale) to prepare for Michel the same food that the critic has already rubbished.  Carl reappears at Michel’s table during dessert and bawls him out for his cruelty; one of the other diners captures the exchange on his phone and the clip goes viral online.  Carl quits his job, can’t get another that he would want, and reluctantly accepts an invitation from Inez to go on a trip with her and Percy to Miami, Carl’s home city.  During their visit, Inez’s first ex-husband (Robert Downey Jr) offers to set Carl up with a food truck.  It’s in a dilapidated state but Carl, with the help of Percy, cleans it up.  When Martin (John Leguizamo), a junior cook from the LA restaurant, hears that Carl intends to start selling cubanos (Cuban sandwiches) from the truck, he leaves his job and arrives in Miami to work with his old boss.

    This describes the first half of Chef.  There are signs from an early stage that the material is thin, with too many filler shots of food in preparation that are meant to express mood and feeling – an aphrodisiac pasta that Carl prepares for Molly (Scarlett Johansson), the hostess at Riva, and so on.  After less than an hour, it’s clear the film isn’t going to be about anything except Carl’s comeback as a chef and development as a father.  I couldn’t see how Jon Favreau could keep things going for another hour.  Once Carl’s ‘El Jefe’ food truck starts on the road from Miami back to LA, with several ports of call en route, Chef more or less comes to a halt.  The Cuban-inspired street food is great; Percy is keen and clued up enough to devise sustained online publicity for the food truck; and the journey is a virtually uninterrupted success story, uneventful in terms of incident and with no ups and downs in the relationships between characters.   You know the bonding of father and son is going to be a main feature of this road movie element but I wasn’t prepared for the falling-back-in-love of Carl and his ex-wife or for the revelation that Ramsey Michel is as nice as everyone else – to say the least:  once he’s sampled the food on sale from El Jefe, Michel offers to set up Carl up in a restaurant in Los Angeles and the film ends, some months later, with Carl and Inez’s remarriage taking place in this new restaurant.  (The only thing that prevents the rapprochement between Carl and Inez being completely ridiculous is that you’ve never believed how they got together in the first place.)  Chef ends happily for all concerned except Riva, Tony and Molly, who simply disappear.  It’s because Dustin Hoffman, Bobby Cannavale and Scarlett Johansson are all strong, and you want more of the characters they create, that their absence exposes more fully the weakness of the story.

    Jon Favreau has got together a high-powered cast and supplied them with good naturalistic dialogue that’s often amusing, and which the actors make engaging, but the screenplay is full of holes.  It seems unlikely that a big-name restaurant critic would be on the receiving end of a set three-course menu but that’s what happens to Ramsey Michel on his return visit to Riva’s place – a set menu, that is, of the three dishes he loathed the first time.  The boy Percy (Emjay Anthony gives him a nice blend of sweetness and eccentricity) loves helping on the food truck and Carl thinks his son may be a cook in the making.  Percy wants to carry on working with his father once he goes back to his mother and to school in Los Angeles; in a short-lived downbeat scene near the end of the trip, Carl tells Percy that won’t be possible.  Once they’ve parted company, however, Carl watches the one-second-a-day video diary that his son has made of the El Jefe experience (as if he wouldn’t have watched it when Percy first completed the video) and changes his mind.  He phones and tells (the inexplicably friendless) Percy that he can continue to work at weekends and after school, once his homework’s done – and provided Inez agrees.  She does so instantly.  It’s possible the writer-director-star means to convince the audience of Chef that, with a bit of thought and goodwill, most everyone in the human race can get along fine but I think it’s more likely that the screenplay is lazy and egotistical.  The film has been favourably received and several reviews I’ve read suggest a parallel between Carl’s back-to-basics rebirth and Jon Favreau’s return, from directing things like the first two Iron Man movies, to his indie roots.  In order for this to resonate with the viewer, you obviously need to know who Favreau is.  The fact that I didn’t clearly made a difference but it seems arrogant for a film-maker to rely on this kind of background knowledge to give substance to his work.

    One of the few sequences in Chef with any charge is Carl’s verbal assault on Ramsey Michel – and not just because it briefly threatens to become a physical one.  When Carl yells his outrage that Michel can, with a few, well-chosen vitriolic words, annihilate the chef’s tremendous efforts to design and deliver great food, he’s expressing the creative talent’s frustration and fury with the professional critic in any medium (even if there’s something peculiarly alienating about food critics – they’re consumers in a particularly literal sense and can therefore be seen as spewing their unkind words).   But even this bit of the film is weakened in retrospect – both by Michel’s turning out all right in the end and by the suspicion that Jon Favreau means you to see his own story in Carl Casper’s.    One further whinge:  this is the third American film I’ve seen in the space of a few weeks (after Fruitvale Station and The Fault in Our Stars) to show texts and/or tweets on screen as a narrative device.  This is going to be a stylistic cliché even sooner than I expected.

    16 July 2014

     

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