Fernando Meirelles (2011)
A film directed by Fernando Meirelles and scripted by Peter Morgan wouldn’t usually be an attractive prospect but 360, a ‘loose adaptation’ of Schnitzler’s Reigen, opened in cinemas in the same week that we were already booked to see Max Ophuls’ La Ronde at BFI. The new film was worth seeing at least for purposes of comparison. The prime circular mover in 360 isn’t the sex-that-makes-the-world-go-round but the globe itself. In a nod to the original, the action begins in Vienna but the intervening action moves sluggishly from one location to another (you might call it travelogy) rather than as a relay of sexual pairings: Bratislava (very briefly), Paris and London (both repeatedly), Denver, Phoenix, Vienna again and Berlin all feature. Given the international movement of people today, it’s reasonable enough to update the setting from the society of a particular metropolis to a global village. It would be easy to have sexual partners changing as characters crossed from one country to the next so it’s odd that 360 doesn’t consistently retain the structure of the Schnitzler play. It’s more about a group of people each of whom is having a relationship with another person in the group, who is often someone of a different nationality. This isn’t always an active sexual relationship or even a hoped for one – for example, there’s a behavioural therapist whose feelings about a sex offender recently released from prison are those of a compassionate professional. Morgan’s screenplay verges on being about different types of love rather than different people who are unified through sex. In this respect, his inspiration is not so much La Ronde as Love Actually.
Morgan and Meirelles make easy, obvious ‘political’ points about nouveau super-riche men of Eastern Europe and women from the same part of the world who earn money as prostitutes servicing international businessmen. Whereas Schnitzler considers using other people for sex as a common human trait the makers of 360 seem to have a morally censorious attitude towards these men. Meirelles makes a good deal of use of tired devices like split-screen images and the whole thing is pretty feeble. Keeping you in your seat and awake depends entirely on the quality of the actors and some of them are worth watching. Anthony Hopkins seems to get better and better as the films he appears in get worse (see You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger). As an elderly man in search of his disappeared daughter (and a replacement), Hopkins’s largely suppressed urgency is beautifully expressed in his head and snout, always thrusting forward. He’s an alchemist in his monologue to a self-help group. Jamel Debbouze is good as a Muslim dentist who’s more or less stalking his receptionist (Dinara Drukarova). I also liked Vladimir Vdovichenkov (he seemed familiar but I’m not sure from where) – he plays the receptionist’s husband, the essentially decent chauffeur-majordomo of a nasty Russian plutocrat. Meirelles and Morgan mete out judgment in a way that seems quite alien to the original material: the chauffeur sees the light while his boss comes to a bad end. Other characters are too thin for the actors to avoid coming across as overemphatic. Ben Foster has considerable intensity as the man just out of jail but he might as well have ‘convicted sex offender’ printed in large letters on his baseball cap. It was nice to see Marianne Jean-Baptiste again (as Foster’s counsellor). The cast also includes, among others, Jude Law, Rachel Weisz, Moritz Bleibtreu and Maria Flor.
14 August 2012
